Monday Morning Update 12/2/13

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Splunk for data. Splunk has an app library for developers of data solutions and uses Hadoop and XML to easily craft viewing platforms for various data solutions. By using basic Simple XML concepts you can experiment and find a data viewing solution for critiquing by your user groups.”

Two-thirds of respondents say they’re OK with entertaining new job possibilities at the HIMSS conferences. New poll to your right: should the FDA regulate clinical software in any way? Vote and then use the poll’s comment link to elaborate.

Listening: Feeder, somewhat obscure (in the US anyway) radio-friendly British rockers who’ve been around for 20 years.

News is slow as it always is over Thanksgiving weekend. I hope your holiday (for those celebrating) was memorable in positive ways. It’s barely more than three weeks until Christmas, believe it or not.

I’ll be writing daily from the mHealth Summit in the Washington, DC area next week. If you’re going, drop by the our first-ever HIStalk booth (#1305) and say hello. Ours will be the nearly bare one because it’s really expensive to furnish a booth. My impression from the last time I attended was that not many hospital folks attend, but the event has grown to 5,000 attendees since HIMSS bought it and may have outgrown its governmental and public health roots.

In Canada, Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario announces that it will implement Epic in its hospital and 80 clinics. The budget was reported at $7.7 million, which is surely incorrect except possibly for the clinics only.

MetroChicago HIE will be announced this week and launched early next year, reports say, with 34 area hospitals (listed here) participating initially. The HIE was originally planned in 2009 and announced in April 2011 but stalled when hospitals balked at paying to participate.

Palomar Health (CA) releases a mobile app built with Extension Healthcare that locates patients and lets caregivers communicate.

Speaking  of Palomar Health, here’s a video from the November 5 SoCal HIMSS CIO Forum featuring Chief Innovation Officer Orlando Portale speaking about hospital innovation. He says that only 5 percent of hospitals are innovative; the rest are followers.

University of Washington Medicine (WA) says that information on 90,000 patients was accessed in October 2013 when an employee opened a email attachment that contained malware.

Weird News Andy extends his Thanksgiving best wishes with a story about what he calls “a chip that makes you lose weight.” It’s genetic rather than potato, nacho, or chocolate — an arm-implanted computer chip releases a hormone that sends an “I’m not hungry” message when the implantee has eaten enough.

Vince continues to put a personal face on the confusing string of McKesson acquisitions in this week’s HIS-tory, which covers CyCare.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.