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January 7, 2014 News 1 Comment

Top News

1-8-2014 6-34-26 AM

Two healthcare-focused private equity firms will invest $77.5 million to take minority positions in MedHOK, which offers care, quality, and compliance software.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

1-8-2014 5-29-05 AM

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Coastal Healthcare Consulting. The Mountlake Terrace, WA-based company has completed 850 engagements and won numerous KLAS clinical implementation awards since its founding in 1995. Most of its consultants have been with the company for at least 10 years. Offerings include Catalyst (SWAT team project crisis response), Convergence (reducing denied claims), Fusion (linking technology to clinical processes), and Wave (application support, workflow analysis, system build, and activation). Product expertise includes Allscripts, Cerner, Epic, GE Healthcare, and Meditech. Industry long-timer Amy Noel, RN is CEO of the company. Thanks to Coastal Healthcare Consulting for supporting HIStalk.


Upcoming Webinars

January 9 (Thursday), 2:00 p.m. Beyond the Summits. Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Ed Marx, SVP/CIO, Texas Health Resources, and Elizabeth Ransom, MD, FACS, EVP/clinical leader North Zone, Texas Health Resources. Everyday healthcare executives share leadership and teamwork principles they learned from climbing some of the world’s highest peaks over the last four years.

January 16 (Thursday), 1:00 p.m. Advanced Efforts to Identify and Eliminate Waste from Healthcare. Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: David Burton, MD, executive chairman, Health Catalyst. Based on a breakthrough analyses using several large healthcare data sets as representative samples, Dr. Burton and team will present insights designed to help executives struggling to identify, quantify, and extract waste from their systems.


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

1-7-2014 11-51-07 AM

Press Ganey acquires On The Spot Systems, developer of a real-time data capture system for patient feedback, and launches Point of Care, a solution that allows providers to capture patient feedback via tablets and mobile devices.


Sales

Mount Sinai Health System (NY) selects MU Assistant from SA Ignite to automate its MU attestation process.

The Guam Regional Medical City hospital will deploy Allscripts Sunrise EHR and Financial Manager platforms when it opens in late 2014.

The Department of Defense awards Carestream Health a  one-year, $70.2 million contract for medical imaging technology.


People

1-7-2014 7-32-21 PM

McKesson Specialty Health and the US Oncology Network appoint Jeffrey Kao (Coventry Health Care) CIO/SVP of information and technology services.

1-7-2014 7-33-36 PM 1-7-2014 7-34-26 PM

T-System promotes Mark Horner from VP of client services to SVP/GM of RevCycle+ and  expands CFO Steve Armond’s duties to include leading the company’s documentation solutions.

1-7-2014 8-07-10 AM

Jacob Nguyen (Craneware) joins VitalWare as EVP of business development and operations.

1-7-2014 7-35-30 PM 1-7-2014 7-36-55 PM

Vocera names Rhonda Collins (Fresenius Kabi, USA) chief nursing officer and promotes Steve Jackson from COO of its ExperiaHealth division to chief strategy officer.

1-8-2014 7-34-58 AM

David Cerino (Zynx Health) is named CEO of WiserCare.


Announcements and Implementations

1-8-2014 7-02-06 AM

Fairfield Medical Center (OH) goes live this month with a fingerprint ID system from CrossChx.

Harrison Medical Center (WA), which affiliated with Franciscan Health System last year, will switch to Epic this summer.

Riverside Medical Center (IL) implements the DebMed electronic hand hygiene compliance monitoring system.

Wesley Medical Center (KS), Cypress Surgery Center (KS), and Surgery Center of Kansas go live on Anesthesia Touch from Plexus Information Systems.

inga thumb McKesson announces the general availability of its Paragon Ambulatory Care Practice Management solution, which is an extension of its single database HIS for inpatient facilities and designed for hospital-owned practices. I understand the PM module was developed internally, as opposed to a bolt-on of one of McKesson’s acquired products, and that an EHR module is also in the works. Sounds like McKesson is positioning itself to compete with Epic and Cerner in the IDN market.


Government and Politics

The Office for Civil Rights proposes an amendment to the HIPAA privacy rule to allow certain entities to disclose the identities of individuals with mental health “prohibitor” status to the gun background check system. The change would apply to individuals who have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution; found incompetent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity; or otherwise deemed by a lawful authority to be in danger of themselves.

CMS reports that more than 30,000 hospitals, physicians, and medical equipment providers are using its online esMD documentation system instead of mail or faxes for auditor medical record requests and prior authorizations requests for power mobility devices.

1-8-2014 6-01-46 AM

A new OIG report says CMS and its contractors haven’t done enough to address Medicare fraud related to EHRs. It recommends that CMS provide guidance to its contractors on detecting fraud and suggests they review provider EHR audit logs. The report identifies inappropriate EHR copy-pasting and creating of false documentation to support higher charges as key fraud issues. CMS responded by saying it will develop copy-paste guidance and identify best practices for its contractors to detect fraud associated with EHRs.


Innovation and Research

South Dakota philanthropist T. Denny Sanford donates $125 million to Sanford Health (SD) to support the incorporation of genomics into the health system’s primary care programs, including added genetic testing information to the EHR to allow clinicians to personalize drug therapies. Sanford has donated $1 billion to the health system that bears his name.


Other

1-7-2014 9-42-35 AM

QlikTech’s QlikView earns the top spot among business intelligence products in a KLAS report on the healthcare analytics market.

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inga thumb According to a JAMA-published study, not too many physicians are joining Mr. H’s smoking doc for smoke breaks. Only about two percent of physicians admit to smoking, compared to 16 percent of the general population and 25 percent of licensed practical nurses.

1-7-2014 8-31-06 PM

A local paper profiles Whidbey General Hospital (WA), which experienced critical cash flow issues during its transition to Meditech. The hospital claims its billing process was abnormally slow after the system went live in May and caused A/R levels to climb and cash on hand to decline. The hospital, which expects to spend $7.5 million on its Meditech installation, is recovering. The paper incorrectly blames the ACA rather than than HITECH for requiring the use of EMR to avoid financial penalties.

A federal judge dismisses a patient’s lawsuit that charged a healthcare provider violated HIPAA laws when an employee’s laptop was stolen. The judge ruled that only HHS can enforce HIPAA and individuals do not have the right to bring lawsuits for its enforcement.

1-7-2014 8-50-30 PM

The Pittsburgh paper profiles hospital pharmacy automation vendor Aesynt, the former McKesson Automation / Automated Healthcare that was sold to Francisco Partners in November. It says the company has developed new hospital drug management software being tested by UPMC and Intermountain. President and CEO Kraig McEwen says the company has introduced more products in the past 12 months than in the past five years. He also says the company is looking for acquisitions  that will help it expand its offerings for reducing hospital drug costs.  

IBM’s “Jeopardy”-winning Watson computer is falling far short on the company’s revenue targets. Healthcare is its most promising market, but a $15 million M.D Anderson cancer genomics project is “in a ditch” according to the IBM executive in charge. A Watson oncology regimen project at Memorial-Sloan Kettering could go live later this year. IBM’s business plan calls for Watson to contribute $1 billion in annual revenue by 2018, but it has only generated $100 million in its three-year existence. The main problem is the effort required for engineers to program Watson for each business case so that it can learn from available information.

1-8-2014 6-53-33 AM

Massachusetts will launch the second phase of the Mass HIway HIE Wednesday at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The HIE  has received $55 million in federal funding.

E-Health Ontario, the provincial agency tasked with creating EHRs for all Ontarians, will share $2.3 million in performance bonuses across its 704 staff members. The payout follows a court settlement that restored payouts that were cancelled in 2011 as part of a controversial wage freeze.

John Lynn of EMR and HIPAA is producing an April 7-8 Las Vegas conference covering healthcare IT marketing and PR.

James Parks, former COO/CIO of Box Butte General Hospital (NE), is indicted on seven counts of child pornography after the hospital reports finding explicit content on his computer.

The governor of Minnesota blames IBM for problems with its state-run health insurance exchange that launched October 1. Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton sent a highly critical letter to CEO Ginny Rometty last month that blamed the company for a laundry list of items:

Your product has not delivered promised functionality and has seriously hindered Minnesotans’ abilities to purchase health insurance or apply for public health care programs through MNsure…. your product has significant defects, which have seriously harmed Minnesota consumers.


Sponsor Updates

  • CCHIT certifies that the Arcadia Analytics Meaningful Use Calculation Engine v1.0 is compliant with the ONC 2014 Edition criteria as an EHR module.
  • PeriGen recognizes Barbara LaBranche, senior director of clinical informatics design and usability, for being named an EHR Game Changer.
  • Muhammad Chebli, interoperability product manager for NextGen Healthcare, discusses the importance of interoperability in achieving MU2 objectives, particularly summary of care.
  • Liaison Technologies reveals its top predictions for 2014, including the dramatic growth of data integration complexity and the normalization of mass customization.
  • Nuance Communications demonstrates wearable devices with Dragon Mobile Assistant and Swype keyboard for smartwatches at this week’s CES 2014 in Las Vegas.
  • Prominence Advisors is named one of the 50 top Chicago employers of Generation Y employees (those aged under 33).
  • Visage Imaging releases a demo video shot at RSNA of its Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

 

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Currently there is "1 comment" on this Article:

  1. RE: Whidbey: I’ve been out of the industry for quite a few years now but I was an implementation guy for many years and continue to read up on the industry with interest. Not a lot of details are given in this specific case, but I’m always a little astounded by customer claims that “the glitch caused by the new system…” and things got better only “once the billing process started working.”; appearing to lay all of the blame for these failures at the hands of the vendor. There are always plenty of ways to cut the blame pie (vendor included) but, more often than not, it is made to sound like this system was dropped in their lap and the live switch was flipped the next morning. Most of these implementations take months of training, building, testing, (& usually re-training, re-building, re-testing), parallel runs, etc before the customer (and the vendor) decide that they can go live. What were people doing during all of that time? Was everything completely foreign to them on live day? Was this completely unexpected?







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