News 8/21/13

Top News

From Left Tackle: “Re: Intuit Health Group. Was bought back Monday by Stephen Malik, who founded Medfusion and sold it to Intuit in the first place.” Verified. He was saying just a few weeks ago that he had no interest in buying back the Cary, NC-based company he sold to Intuit for $91 million in 2010. That probably means the asking price and/or the number of interested suitors dropped since then.

Reader Comments

From MoJo: “Re: Allscripts reorg. Allscripts made an internal announcement of (yet another) reorganize to ‘further improve accountability, performance.’” Some of the changes noted in a company memo: the addition of new business units (international, Sunrise, and enterprise); the hiring of Greg White (Cerner) and Ricker Berner (Caradigm) to head the enterprise and international segments, respectively; the addition of new client sales regions and changes to leadership; and the realignment of the client advocate and solutions management teams.

From Partner: “ACE. Dozens of companies are spending big marketing dollars to exhibit at ACE.” The Allscripts annual conference kicked off Tuesday in Chicago. Attendance hasn’t been announced, but the exhibitor directory includes at least 50 vendors.

From Broadway Joe: “Re: North Shore LIJ. Buying a stake in Allscripts.” Unverified.

From Turk: “Re: Rose Harr. Interesting news about the CEO of BlueWare, a small imaging system that claims to be an EHR.” The former Brevard County, Florida Clerk of Court is arrested on a variety of corruption charges that include approving $8.52 million in county scanning contracts with BlueWare for personal financial gain. State law enforcement agents say that BlueWare didn’t own any scanning equipment at the time and 75 percent of the records they were paid to scan could have been discarded without scanning. BlueWare CEO Harr turned herself in was arrested for bribery and bid tampering, but is out on bond. She has an interesting LinkedIn profile that includes running companies that are flipping properties, making a cartoon about Boston Terriers, and selling big imaging deals to NHS hospitals in England.

From I’m Not Creative: “Re: Siemens Soarian customers. Only getting six weeks to upgrade from version 3.3 to 3.4 due to the number of clients who need to get upgraded to meet MU2 requirements. Talk about feeling the burn.” Unverified.

From TexasHeart: “Re: ONC Blue Button announcements. Is this smoke and mirrors because state HIEs are failing and most docs, include a fourth of them in Epic, don’t want to trade? Why would people use Blue Button as a portal? Will docs even accept records sent by a patient?”

From Escapade: “Re: CIOs. You should do some CIO interviews and leave them anonymous so they can be brutally honest and vent. “ That’s a brilliant idea. I would happily do that, as well as running anonymous blog posts (either one-time or ongoing) by CIOs who want provide uncensored opinion without fear of reprisal.  Contact me if you’re a CIO who likes the idea as much as I do.  The anonymous interview would be a super easy and great fun.

HIStalk Webinars

 

Beacon Partners will present “The Transition to ICD-10: Building the Bridge as You Walk on It” on Thursday, September 12 at 2:00 Eastern. With the transition to ICD-10 only 15 months away, healthcare organizations will have to find inventive ways to create their roadmap and execute on their plans. Rather than taking valuable time to complete a gap analysis and then create the plan, leaders and project managers should consider how to do these tasks concurrently. Examples from healthcare organizations will provide ideas for choosing the right partners, defining program strategies, and incorporating ICD-10 work into already existing teams. Even if you assemble the plane as you fly it – or build the bridge as you walk on it – it’s time to move forward and make the ICD-10 transition a reality. The target audience for this presentation is mid-senior level financial, clinical and IT, CFO, COO, CIO, ICD-10 program manager, and ICD-10 team leads. The speaker will be Chris Kalish, national practice director in the Strategic Advisory Group. One of my reviewers summarized, “With approximately only one year to go and a lot of work still to be done, this Webinar provides hospitals with strategies to prepare for ICD-10 if the hospitals are late starters.”

Speaking of Webinars, there’s a list of those upcoming in the column to your right. Clicking on one brings up the full calendar.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Summit Partners invests $14 million in specialty EMR provider Modernizing Medicine.

Champion Medical Technologies, which sells tracking software for implanted medical devices, receives an unspecified investment from Jump Capital.

The SSI Group acquires Medtelligence, dba Medibis, a provider of analytic, dashboard, and mobile applications.

Greenway reports Q4 earnings: revenue down 2.34 percent, adjusted EPS -$0.08 vs. $0.10, missing analysts’ estimates of -$0.02. Shares rose 3 percent Tuesday after Monday’s announcement. CEO Tee Green notes that the results reflect the company’s continued transition from a one-time system sales and training model to a recurring revenue model. From the earnings call:

• Greenway is live with CCD exchange at Epic and Cerner sites
• Up to 80 percent of new customers are choosing cloud solutions paid for via the subscription model, which is driving training revenue down
• Only 10 percent of users are using the company’s mobile EHR access app
• The company’s growth is expected to be driven by EDI and services
• Greenway says it expects to lose $5-6 million in FY14, with system sales down 50-60 percent

Above is the one-year GWAY stock chart, with Greenway in blue, Allscripts in red, athenahealth in green, and the Nasdaq composite index in brown.

Teleheath software provider SnapMD raises $600,000 in a seed round led by Shea Venture and Whittier Trust.

First Databank acquires medication reconciliation software vendor Design Clinicals. More information and thoughts from Design Clinicals CEO Dewey Howell, MD, PhD are available in the Tuesday morning announcement on HIStalk.

Sales

Wahiawa General Hospital (HI) will implement MEDHOST’s EDIS.

The Healthcare Access San Antonio HIE will offer consumers access to a portal developed by Intellica Corp.

The Defense Logistics Agency awards McKesson a $29.9 million medical imaging technology contract.

Community Health Information Collaborative (MN) selects Orion Health to power its statewide HIE.

Arcadia Solutions selects the Compuware Application Performance Management platform for EHR infrastructure performance optimization.

People

AHRQ names Richard Kronick (HHS) director, replacing the retiring Carolyn Clancy, MD.

Lisa Stump is promoted to VP/associate CIO of Yale-New Haven Health System.

EBSCO Information Services hires Elizabeth Jones (American Medical News) as VP of medical product management and chief content officer.

Announcements and Implementations

UnitedHealthcare adds online electronic bill payment services to its plan participant portal via the InstaMed payment network.

The Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital (UK) and Robinson Memorial Hospital (OH) go live with integrated OnBase ECM and Allscripts EMR solutions.

Qstream announces new clients for its mobile healthcare education platform that include Boston Children’s Hospital, Partners HealthCare, Mayo Clinic, and Baylor College of Medicine.

Vivature EHR chooses Liaison Healthcare for connecting its Oracle-based EHR to more than 120 labs and imaging departments via Liaison’s EMR-Link hub.

HCA says in an entrepreneur workshop that it likes doing business with Boston-area companies that have an MIT or other academic connection, including Meditech, PatientKeeper, eClinicalWorks, and EMC.

Government and Politics

Florida Senator Arthenia Joyner introduces a bill that would force insurers to pay for telehealth visits. Critics say the bill is flawed because the state’s Board of Medicine allows telemedicine consultations only when a patient relationship has already been established and it also would require insurers to pay the same amount for a telemedicine visit as an in-office visit. Similar bills have failed previously.

Innovation and Research

Via @cascadia:  Intermountain Healthcare looks at the “Personalized Patient Room,” including an in-room camera; a server to support teleconsultations by pharmacists and interpreters; and video chat for bringing in remote family members to participate in the patient’s care. They’re also considering using touchscreens instead of pillow speakers for pushing educational content, entertainment, and information in languages other than English.

Three entrepreneurs form Oscar, a technology-powered insurance company that hopes to reform healthcare via the PPACA-mandated health insurance exchanges. Users of its application can enter their symptoms and click a button that will let them find nearby providers or speak live to a doctor through a partnership with TeleDoc. Patients can request prescription refills through a Twitter-like timeline. The company is analyzing large data sets to guide patients through rational medical decisions. They’ve raised $40 million in funding and will launch in 2014.

Technology

Greenway Medical launches PrimePATIENT, a patient portal integrated with PrimeSUITE.

Allscripts introduces Population Health Analytics, a real-time chronic disease management solution that provides comparative analytics at the point of care. Allscripts also announces the GA of its native iPad app Wand 2.0 for Enterprise EHR.

Other

Virtual Radiologic and its NightHawk Radiology subsidiary file a lawsuit claiming patent infringement by Tandem Radiology related to its teleradiology and order creation technologies.

Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation offers $89 Web stream access to its Rochester, MN-based Transform 2013 conference September 8-10.

An Oracle survey finds that 84 percent of CFOs are working more closely with their CIO peers as technology becomes their second-highest focus area, placing behind only industry knowledge.

A Nebraska woman lands in the ER after a post-baby shower brawl in which another woman stabs her in the face with her own six-inch stiletto heel. Police said the altercation resulted from the stabber’s “relationship with the father of the victim’s child.” Once again I am reminded how mundane my life is.

Weird News Andy urges, “EMT, heal thyself.” A Detroit EMT performing in-transit CPR on a patient has a heart attack himself, ending up recovering three hospital beds over from his patient after both receive identical stents.

Sponsor Updates

• iHT2 releases details of its August 21-22 Health IT Summit in Seattle.
• A Triple Tree report, ACOs: The Accountable Care Opportunity, says the organization was impressed by population management and clinical analytics solutions from Forward Health Group.
• Jennifer Dennard of Billian is appointed to the board of the Technology Association of Georgia.
• The Massachusetts eHealth Institute awards eClinicalWorks a $150,000 grant to advance the use of EHRs with the state’s HIE.
• Helix Health Solutions will distribute Wolters Kluwer Health’s Provation Medical software to healthcare organizations outside of North America.
• Greenway Medical adds Seamless Medical Systems to its online Marketplace as a value-added partner.
• The Truven Health Advantage Suite healthcare data and analytics platform version 5 achieves Oracle Exadata Ready status through Oracle PartnerNetwork.
• Laura Kreofsky, principal advisor with Impact Advisors, discusses Stage 2 MU challenges.
• HIStalk sponsors named to the 2013 Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies in America include Beacon Partners, Clinovations, Cornerstone Advisors, CoverMyMeds, CSI, Culbert Healthcare Solutions, Cumberland Consulting Group, DIVURGENT, eClinicalWorks, Enovate, ESD, eTransmedia Technology, Forward Health, Iatric Systems, Impact Advisors, iSirona, Intellect Resources, Kareo, Kony, Santa Rosa Consulting, SRSsoft, Strata Decision Technology, and Virtelligence.
• Clinical Architecture introduces Symedical Content Portal, which acquires and maintains clinical and administrative vocabulary files.
• PatientKeeper hosts a September 24 webinar explaining how to make the ICD-10 transition a non-event for physicians. (sent to us)
• T-System CMO Tom Ward, MD discusses ICD-10 compliance in the ED.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.