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April 29, 2014 News 6 Comments

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MModal files its plan to exit Chapter 11 bankruptcy by August 15. The company provided a statement: “MModal is pleased to have reached this important milestone in our financial restructuring process. The proposed Plan of Reorganization reflects the previously announced agreement the company reached with the controlling majority of its lenders and bondholders that will dramatically reduce the company’s debt, strengthen its balance sheet, and provide it with significant financial flexibility.”


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

ICD

Bonny from Aventura provides an Charles Schulz-powered illustration of the ICD-10 situation that will resonate with many people.

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I noticed these signs in a doctor’s office today. It seems that all forms of customer-insulting emphasis are represented: capitalization, bolding, underlining, and massive deployment of exclamation points (always five except for the laptop message, which ends with an unprecedented six exclamation points for those undeterred by inferior numbers.)


Upcoming Webinars

May 1 (Thursday) 1:00 p.m. ET. Think Beyond EDW: Using Your Data to Transform, Part 2 – Build-Measure-Learn to Get Value from Healthcare Data. Sponsored by Premier. Presenters: Alejandro Reti, MD, senior director of population health, Premier; and Alex Easton, senior director of enterprise solutions, Premier. Once you deploy an enterprise data warehouse, you need to arrive at value as quickly as possible. Learn ways to be operationally and technically agile with integrated data, including strategies for improving population health.

May 7 (Wednesday) 1:00 p.m. ET. Demystifying Healthcare Data Governance. Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Dale Sanders, SVP, Health Catalyst. Challenged with governing data? This vendor-neutral discussion will cover the need to develop a data governance strategy, including general concepts, layers and roles, and the Triple Aim of data governance (quality, literacy, and exploitation.)


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

4-29-2014 7-29-41 AM

Physician networking site Doximity closes a $54 million Series C fundraising round, planning to expand into Canada and to add other healthcare professionals, such as nurses.

4-29-2014 1-47-30 PM 

Truven Health Analytics acquires Fortel Analytics’ predictive healthcare fraud technology, which will be integrated into Truven’s payment integrity solutions.

4-29-2014 11-29-53 AM

General Atlantic commits $125 million to Alignment Healthcare, which offers a care coordination solution.

4-29-2014 1-49-40 PM

Alere reports Q1 results: revenue down three percent, adjusted EPS $0.55 vs. $0.53, missing revenue expectations. The company also reported that its Health Information Solutions segment experienced a decline in net product and services revenue from $134.2 million a year ago to $123.7 million.

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Press Ganey acquires Dynamic Clinical Systems, a patient-reported outcomes services and solutions provider.

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Infor completes its acquisition of substantially all the assets of GRASP Systems International, a provider of automated patient acuity, workload management, patient assignment, and consulting services.

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Consumer engagement provider Accolade acquires konciergeMD, which offers a platform for care plan adherence.

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For-profit hospital operator HCA discloses in its earnings call that it took in $30 million in EHR incentive money in Q1 vs. $39 million in 2013, incurring EHR-related expenses of $43 million and $26 million, respectively, meaning it spent exactly the same as it made in the two years. Seems like quite a coincidence.

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Roper Industries says in its earnings call that its Sunquest operation experienced “double-digit revenue growth” due to improvements in its implementation process and expects to have a “quite an exceptional year in 2014.”

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A German business magazine predicts that Siemens will announce on May 7  the elimination of 5,000 to 10,000 jobs and the merging of its four main divisions (industry, energy, healthcare, and infrastructure/cities) to create a flatter hierarchy.


Sales

Craneware wins a seven-year, $3.8 million contract with an unnamed US hospital group for its Chargemaster Corporate Toolkit.

Southern Illinois Healthcare, MBB Radiology (FL), Radiology Imaging Associates (CO), Southwest Diagnostic Imaging Center (TX), St. Paul Radiology (MN), and Washington Radiology Associates (VA) and 13 other organizations select Merge Healthcare’s iConnect Network interoperability platform for clinical data exchange.

CHE Trinity Health will implement Verisk Health’s Provider Intelligence solution and DxCG platform to manage its national population health management initiatives.

4-29-2014 9-48-17 AM

The board of trustees of Cumberland River Hospital (TN) approves $156,644 in upgrade costs to allow the hospital to update its CPSI software to meet Stage 2 MU requirements.

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The University of Arizona Medical Center will use services from Besler Consulting to identify Medicare Transfer DRG underpayments.

Kettering Health Network (OH) selects Wolters Kluwer Health’s ProVation Order Sets.

University of New Mexico Medical Group chooses StrataJazz from Strata Decision Technology for budgeting and planning.


People

4-29-2014 1-53-45 PM

Castlight Health appoints Ed Park (athenahealth), brother of co-founder and US CTO Todd Park, to its board.

4-29-2014 1-55-41 PM

Symphony Technology Group promotes Al Vega to president/CEO of Symphony Performance Health.

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Jonathan Perlin, MD, CMO will step down as chair of ONC’s HIT Standards Committee. He will be replaced by Jacob Reider, MD of ONC.

MEA|NEA appoints Scott Hefner (Jopari Solutions) VP of sales.


Announcements and Implementations

4-28-2014 3-24-39 PM

Practice Fusion launches a population health management offering in collaboration with drug manufacturer Merck, giving practices a real-time dashboard that compares a provider’s patient vaccination rate with the rates of other Practice Fusion providers.

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Regional Medical Center Orangeburg (SC) goes live on Cerner’s patient portal.

Central Illinois Health Information Exchange, Lincoln Land Health Information Exchange, Illinois Health Exchange Partners, and MetroChicago Health Information Exchange connect their health information exchanges, which collectively serve 63 hospitals.


Government and Politics

4-29-2014 1-17-28 PM

CMS releases an interactive search tool to streamline access to Medicare provider payment data.

The GAO appoints three members to the Health Information Technology Policy Committee: Christop U. Lehmann, MD, American Academy of Pediatrics (representing vulnerable populations); Neal Patterson, Cerner (representing vendors); and Kim Schofield, Lupus Foundation of America’s Georgia chapter (representing consumers and patients.) Paul Tang, MD of Palo Alto Medical Foundation was reappointed as physician representative.


Innovation and Research

Physicians reviewing EHRs carefully read the impression and plan section, but only quickly scan details on medications, vitals, and lab results, according to a study published in Applied Clinical Informatics. Researchers recommend optimizing the design of electronic notes to include “rethinking the amount and format of imported patient data as this data appears to largely be ignored.”

Brigham and Women’s Hospital chooses four companies in its “shark tank” competition for pilot projects: Twine Health (collaborative chronic disease management), MySafeCare (patient and family reporting of safety concerns), Healo (remote monitoring of wound healing), and Tenacity Health (peer health coaching.) 


Other

The Federation of State Medical Boards approves telemedicine guidelines that include a policy to apply the same standards of care for remote medical encounters as for in-person encounters. The guidelines also call for physicians to care for only those patients located in their licensure coverage areas, establish a credible patient-physician relationship; and adhere to safety and privacy principles.

A Boston Globe columnist names Nuance Communications CEO Paul Ricci as the most overpaid executive in Massachusetts based on his compensation of $87 million over the past three years, during which time the company’s share price dropped 16 percent.

4-28-2014 9-44-15 AM

Medfusion ends its relationship with Allscripts “due to unresolved payment disputes” and gives the 30,000 Allscripts users of its patient portal until May 31, 2014 to sign a contract directly with Medfusion. The termination is hardly a surprise given Allscripts acquisition of the competing Jardogs product last year.

Boston Medical Center (MA) terminates its transcription contract with MDF Transcription Services after discovering that the records of 15,000 of its patients are visible on the company’s Internet server.

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St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center (NY) discloses in a prospectus offering to sell $68 million worth of junk-quality bonds to pay for a new power plant and EHR system that it will probably be sued over claims that a disruptive surgeon slapped and verbally abused anesthetized patients going back to early 2012.

Rural hospitals are considering EHR implementation assistance as one reason to affiliate with a larger organization, hoping to earn financial incentives or avoid penalties.

University of Mississippi Medical Center (MS) CIO David Chou recounts what it’s like when a hospital loses Internet connectivity and access to cloud-based applications. The article mentions that low adoption rates prevented using Twitter and Facebook for communication during the outage, which I assume means by smartphone cellular since nobody could get to those sites otherwise (although they could use self-hosted Yammer instead if Microsoft still offers that.)

A San Francisco Examiner opinion piece by an orthopedic surgeon complains about his hospital’s use of the “all-pervasive Epic” system, which he says has caused doctors to focus on the computer instead of the patient and has sterilized the medical record to the point of uselessness. He seems to blame the system for the behavior of its users, saying it only improves care “from the point of view who want to watch data from across the room” while he prefers to “talk to the patient” and be a “hands-on doctor,” neither of which as far as I know is prohibited among Epic users.

UPMC (PA) will partner with one of three unnamed companies to sell analytics software it developed to benchmark costs per individual physician. UPMC says it spent $5-12 million to develop the system, which it claims has reduced its readmissions by 37 percent.

4-29-2014 1-06-39 PM

A state audit reveals that a former IT consultant with the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics illegally sold $57,000 worth of hospital computers to staffers and friends between 2005 and 2013. A woman tipped off the IT department after trying to get technical support from Dell for a laptop the consultant gave her, only to be told that it was registered to the hospital.

Weird News Andy (“Weird News You Can Use”) finds this ironic: hundreds of attendees of the national Food Safety Summit in Baltimore get food poisoning. WNA is also transported by this story, in which doctors trigger vivid memories of a patient’s childhood as they stimulate areas of his brain with electrodes in trying to determine the cause of his epilepsy.


Sponsor Updates

  • McKesson launches Managed Mobile Services to simplify mobile device management.
  • iHS2 releases a research report entitled “Healthcare Security: 10 Steps to Maintaining Data Privacy in a Changing Mobile World.”
  • Craneware and its customer Southeastern Ohio Regional Medical Center will discuss the future of patient access at the National Association of Healthcare Access Management 40th Annual Education Conference May 16 in Hollywood, FL.
  • Independent auditor LBMC confirms that PerfectServe has achieved Service Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type II of its security and privacy controls.
  • Allscripts recognizes its customer Carson Tahoe Health (NV) for attesting for MU Stage 2 using Allscripts Sunrise.
  • Medhost adds high-availability disaster recovery and remote monitoring and management to its managed IT service offerings.
  • Shake IT Baby is the theme for Impact Advisors’ annual Impact Palooza April 30-May 2 in Scottsdale, AZ.
  • William J. Leander, SVP for Santa Rosa Consulting, will discuss value-based healthcare at next month’s MUSE 2014 International Conference in Dallas.
  • Allscripts profiles Unity Health System (NY) in a blog post and discusses how dbMotion’s HIE technology helped Unity achieve better outcomes.
  • Liaison Healthcare partners with AOD Software to connect its long-term provider customers with lab and imaging vendors on the Liaison EMR-Link hub.

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 are "6 comments" on this Article:

  1. Crank up the Follow My health (Formerly Jardogs) order forms. Vern’s email will qualify a few more Allscripts Portal Sales reps on the Sales Awards Trip this year. Best Quote’s from Vern’s online meeting. We hope to gain some Mojo from the former A4 Healthsystems building. We will give you to Midnight Hawaii time on May 31st to use the Medfusion portal for “Free”. Who knew there we so many Medfusion clients in Hawaii?

  2. One wonders whether CIO Chou should spend more time fixing potential problems on campus rather than worrying about his social media presence…Chou’s discoveries following a 4-hour internet downtime:
    1. UMMC did not have a backup Internet circuit on campus in case of a hosting partner failure.
    2. UMMC departments had been moving to the cloud, making Internet access more important for providing patient treatment. For example, one hosted application enables the medical staff to check on diagnoses and certain complications, but cannot do so without Internet access.

  3. RE: No, not shaken baby Says:
    April 29th, 2014 at 8:56 pm
    Shake IT Baby, really? Where was marketing on that one.

    I had the same thought. Not cool. Although I’m sure we all know what they meant. Still…. Too close for comfort.

  4. Not sure what the “payment dispute” is between Medfusion and Allscripts, but clients pay twice as much for Medfusion as Follow My Health. And MedFusion posted its list rates on its FAQ document linked in that email above. How they will survive after this debacle is anyone’s guess, clients just love being held hostage.

    Agree with Portal Chaos – Allscripts reps will continue to rake it in on this mess.

  5. Attending the athenaHealth user conference this week. Decent show, but every athena-staff-led session was superficial and bland, while the customer-led sessions were tangible and productive.

    Wish they would acknowledge that the treasured network is really smarter than their rank-and-file staff and sunset the “manifest destiny” lectures for more customer-led presentations.







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