News 1/11/13

Top News

The VA launches a Medical Appointment Scheduling System challenge to replace its VistA scheduling module. Up to three entrants will win up to $3 million each.

Reader Comments

From TV’s Frank: “Re: Intermountain Healthcare. Finally dumping GE Healthcare.” An e-mail from Intermountain CIO Marc Probst to IT employees says the still-incomplete system it’s been building with GE is deficient in clinical documentation, CPOE, and integration with coding and billing. As a result, Intermountain has evaluated GE’s future EMR strategies and decided not to renew their contract, instead considering three options: (a) keep building their homegrown EMR without GE’s involvement; (b) buy Epic, Cerner, or Siemens; or (c) buy best-of-breed and try to integrate. I’ve panned the GE-Intermountain deal since it was announced in 2005, skeptical that dumping a few hundred million dollars and GE’s questionable expertise was going to ever yield anything tangible, which apparently is exactly the case seven-plus years into the 10-year deal. Or as I described it in 2011, “GE-Intermountain screwing around that never seems to provide any real, marketable products (are those Intermountain-led Carecast enhancements just about done?)”

From Jerry Aldini: “Re: Geisinger Health System (PA). I contacted you a while back with the rumor that they were developing a commercial solution for accountable care enablement. It was announced at JPMorgan last week. Announcement attached.” I haven’t seen announcement hit the wires, but it says that Geisinger is launching xG Health Solutions, a for-profit spinoff that will commercialize its intellectual property. On the list: consulting services, population health analytics, care management, healthcare IT optimization, and third-party administration services. Geisinger EVP Earl Steinberg, MD, MPP (above) is named CEO and former Alere Chief Innovation Officer Gordon Norman, MD will be chief medical officer.

From PolishingMyResume: “Re: Allscripts. Preparing for relocations and layoffs in the software development organization for development people who work remotely or outside the seven core offices of Boston, Bangalore, Burlington, Chicago, Raleigh, Pune, and Vancouver.” Unverified. Seems like a smart strategy to me. The problem with indiscriminate acquisitions is that you have people strung out all over the place who understandably don’t want to move, limiting your opportunity for the synergy or culture management that Allscripts could use quite a bit of right about now (not to mention expense reduction, ditto). One of quite a few bad decisions by Eclipsys before Allscripts overpaid to buy the company was hiring CEOs who refused to relocate and instead occasionally jetted a few time zones over when the troops needed demoralizing, so I assume that lesson was learned and Paul Black will work out of the Chicago office.

From Joan Hovhanesian: “Re: Howard University Hospital. Went live on Soarian clinical documentation on January 7.” Congratulations to the folks there. That’s a gutsy move going live immediately after the holidays. I still think of Joan as being with FCG and later VP/CIO of Shands Healthcare, so I’m out of touch – she’s with Program Advisors now.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIStalk Practice highlights from the last week include: only 16 percent of providers met PQRS requirements in 2010. Primary care physicians are more likely to demonstrate improvement on measures of care when they have had sustained and extensive technical assistance. A billing service and four pathology groups agree to pay $140,000 to settle allegations that they improperly disposed of thousands of medical records found in a public dump. Job opportunities for physicians will continue to rise in 2013. The AMA and other professional medical organizations urge CMS to stop the implementation of the ICD-10 code set for outpatient diagnosis coding. Galen Healthcare releases a plug-in for Allscripts Enterprise EHR that sends providers EHR task updates to their PC or smartphone. It’s a new year and I hope your 2013 resolutions include not only a commitment to good health, but also a vow to expand your HIT ambulatory knowledge by faithfully perusing HIStalk Practice. Thanks for reading.

On the Job Board: Marketing Manager, Senior Applications Engineer – EMR.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor HTTS (Health Technology Training Solutions). For you vendors out there, this is my theory: customers often slam your product on KLAS surveys when their problem is really inadequate user training, not your software. The last thing you want customers to experience before go-live is a hastily thrown together set of PowerPoints and talking head demos put together by someone who knows the application but has no knowledge of instructional design and adult learning theory. You’ll hear an earful afterward, but not just on your training evaluation forms – users will under-use your systems, overload your help desk, and badmouth your product on reference calls. The HTTS team of healthcare IT and instructional design experts can help eliminate those problems by reviewing your training strategy, conducting a training needs analysis for new products or releases, and developing your training content using state-of-the-art learning techniques. Check out the testimonials of vendors who have engaged HTTS to optimize their training experience. If you’ve experienced professionally designed software training (both online and instructor-led), it’s easy to distinguish it from the more typical variety assembled by well-meaning amateurs. Now’s a good time to arrange a HIMSS conference connection to learn more. Thanks to HTTS for supporting HIStalk.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

7 Medical Systems closes on its acquisition of HealthLink Minnesota Management Group, a provider of administrative and IT services to clinics.

ManTech International completes its acquisition of CMS contractor ALTA Systems.

EBSCO Publishing expands its evidence-based pediatric content with the acquisition of PEMSoft, a pediatric point-of-care clinical information library and multimedia decision support system.

Sales

Saint Luke’s Health System (MO/KS) expands its use of Perceptive Software solutions to include integration with Epic.

CalHIPSO contracts with ClearDATA Network to offer cloud hosting, offsite backup, and disaster recovery services to CalHIPSO provider members.

Emergency Medicine Physicians selects athenaCollector and athenaCommunicator for its 800-physician group. athenahealth also announces that Prospira PainCare with deploy athenaClinicals, athenaCollector, and athenaCommunicator.

Children’s Mercy Hospitals & Clinics (MO) selects GE Healthcare’s Centricity Business as its enterprise-wide RCM solution.

Straith Hospital for Special Surgery (MI) chooses the ONE EHR from RazorInsights.

Flagler Hospital (FL) contracts with Surgical Information Systems for Sunrise Surgery.

Doylestown Hospital (PA/NJ) subscribes to the CapSite Database to assist with the capital planning and purchasing processes.

Lincoln Orthopaedic Center (NE) selects SRS EHR for its 14 providers.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center will use event-driven software from Tibco to support its clinical decision support capabilities.

Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital (OH) will encourage non-emergent ED patients to instead use HealthSpot telemedicine kiosks staffed by medical assistants and equipped with monitoring instruments. Also announced: telehealth provider Teladoc will offer HealthSpot’s kiosks.

People

MedSys Group names Steven Heck (First Consulting Group) president and Luther Nussbaum (First Consulting Group) chairman of the board.

URAC President and CEO Alan P. Spielman announces his resignation.

Announcements and Implementations

Sentara Healthcare (VA) begins implementation of Morrisey Associate’s Concurrent Care Manager software across its 10 hospitals and 100 medical facilities.

The dbMotion-powered ClinicalConnect HIE (PA) expands its reach to 1.3 million patients.

South West Medical (KS) and Rems Murr Kliniken in Germany go live on iMDsoft’s MetaVision platform.

Hospital messaging services vendor Critical Alert Systems partners with Mobile Heartbeat, which provides hand-held messaging and alarms, to create an enhanced nurse call solution.

3M Health Information Systems opens an innovation center in Silver Spring, MD that will showcase its offerings.

Meta Healthcare IT Solutions announces customized versions of its clinical documentation, CPOE, pharmacy, and medication administration software that meet the requirements of Canada-based customers.

Government and Politics

The FCC announces it will make available up to $400 million in annual funding to healthcare providers to spur development of broadband networks for telemedicine.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announces the formation of 106 new Medicare ACOs.

Former CMS administrator Don Berwick, MD says he is strongly considering running for Massachusetts governor in 2014. He says healthcare experience gives him sensitivity to issues, adding, “I get more and more excited about the idea of Massachusetts as a model.”

Technology

Panasonic announces an expanded line of Toughpad enterprise-grade tablets that include a 10-inch model running Windows 8 Pro ($2,899) and 7-inch ($1,199) and 10-inch ($1,299) Android versions.

HL7 releases a CCD to Blue Button Transform Tool that allows organizations using the CCD format to allow patients to download information as ASCII text.

Other

A heavily recruited professor couple at University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, one of them director of the ONC-funded University Partnership for Health Informatics (UP-HI), quit amidst charges they were double-dipping by simultaneously being paid by another university employer. The State of Georgia handed down felony indictments against Julie Jacko in 2011 after finding that she and Francois Sainfort were collecting full-time paychecks from both UM and Georgia Tech, but dropped charges in return for a plea agreement, restitution payments, and probation by Sainfort. Jacko ran the UP-HI project, funded by a $5.1 million ONC grant.

A California judge refuses to grant Kaiser Permanente access to the PCs and e-mail accounts of a couple whose small document storage business it hired to manage paper patient records. The state health department found last month that Kaiser put medical records at risk by turning them over to the small company without a signed contract. Kaiser claims it picked up the paper records, but the couple didn’t return everything.

Vermont’s Department of Financial Regulation scolds Porter Hospital for overrunning the $4.3 million budget of its Meditech-MedHost EMR project by 63 percent. The hospital undertook the project to earn HITECH money and to participate in Vermont Blueprint for Health. The hospital’s VP of public relations said, “The Meditech folks would hand you a box and say, ‘Good luck, do you have any questions?’” The hospital admits that during the physician practice rollout, all of its practices stopped accepting new patients for an unstated period, with the article ironically concluding, “Porter found that the productivity of doctors took a big hit each time the software was rolled out at a new practice … Officials said it has not been unusual for a doctor who normally saw 20 patients an hour to be able to see only 10 or 12 once the productivity-enhancing software was introduced.”

Weird News Andy finds this story a HIPAA stretch. Police confiscate the cell phone of a man filming an arrest on a public street, with a deputy telling him, “If I end up on YouTube, I’m gonna be upset.” The man was charged with obstruction and disorderly conduct, with the deputy claiming it was a HIPAA violation. A Stanford law expert opines the obvious: “There’s nothing in HIPAA that prevents someone who’s not subject to HIPAA from taking photographs on the public streets. HIPAA has absolutely nothing to say about that.”

It’s not an April 1 gag: the iPad-ready children’s iPotty debuts at CES. My only surprise is that the adult model wasn’t rolled out first.

Sponsor Updates

• Jim Stilley, director of clinical workflow consulting for Versus, will discuss the use of RTLS to improve patient flow and efficiency at the 2013 Patient Flow Management Congress January 28-29 in Las Vegas.
• The Advisory Board Company offers a February 14 Web conference on the inpatient value-based purchasing program.
• MedHOK earns full 2013 NCQA HEDIS software certification for its 360Measures v2.56.
• Bill Bithoney, MD of Truven Health Solutions discusses innovative and targeted approaches for reducing costs by improving care quality for better patient outcomes in a blog posting.
• Medicity publishes a white paper discussing how to build patient centeredness into the ACO model.
• iMDsoft highlights some of its 2012 milestones, including successful implementations in Canada and the Czech Republic, 60 critical care and anesthesia projects, and go-lives of MetaVision in 17 countries.
• Prognosis HIS doubles its client base for the second consecutive year and announces that all of its eligible clients exceeded baseline requirements to complete Stage 1 MU attestation using ChartAccess EHR.
• Beacon Partners defines population health management and its relation to ACOs in a January 18 Webinar.

EPtalk with Dr. Jayne

CMS is seeking comments from hospitals, EHR vendors, and “other interested parties” on its electronic quality reporting. Starting in 2014, the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) program requires use of the Quality Reporting Document Architecture (QRDA) standard. According to the e-mail, “CMS wants to increase efficiency and reduce the burden for providers…” If that’s true, I have some other suggestions for them as well. The comment period closes January 22, so sharpen those pencils and fire up those keyboards.

Speaking of CMS, don’t forget that if you completed your 2012 reporting period on time, you only have until February 28 to attest for Medicare. Those attesting with Medicaid should check for their specific state deadlines.

One more CMS deadline-related item and then I’ll quit, I promise. The comment period for ONC’s Health IT Patient Safety Action & Surveillance Plan is open until February 4. Goals of the plan include making it easier for clinicians to report patient safety events, engaging vendors to “embrace their shared responsibility for patient safety,” and incorporating health IT safety in post-market surveillance of certified EHRs. It’s only 40 pages, considerably shorter than most ONC reads.

From Follow Up Fred: “Re: sticky workplace problems. Good topics for discussion! One solution I’ve successfully employed for years is this. If I need a prompt response to a question or request communicated by voicemail or e-mail, I always end the message by asking for a response by a certain date and time. Typically, “Hey Jane, I’d appreciate it if you’d get back to me by close of business Thursday, January 10.” I then flag the e-mail or voicemail follow-up date on phone in the event the requested deadline is missed. I’ve found it very effective for myself but also the recipient, who in turn can prioritize the return response.” An excellent point, especially in a workplace where people won’t do anything until they’re absolutely up against a deadline.

The AMA continues to play Chicken Little with their ongoing pleas for CMS to halt implementation of ICD-10. Citing the cost and administrative burden, they ask that it not simply be delayed again, but to call on “appropriate stakeholders to assess an appropriate replacement for ICD-9.” There has already been significant expense to prepare for implementation and I know many people will be aggravated at the lost time, money, and effort if they’re successful. Do I sense an HIStalk poll in the making?

Inga and I are hard at work designing the beauty queen sashes for HIStalkapalooza. Thanks to some virtual BFF shoe shopping (via camera phone and text message), I’m ready for HIMSS. Do you have your shoes picked out and your accessories coordinated? E-mail me.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.