Monday Morning Update 11/10/14

Top News

Allscripts shares dropped 15 percent Friday after turning in underwhelming revenue, earnings, and sales numbers after the market’s close Thursday. From the earnings call:

• CEO Paul Black admitted that “we would have liked to have delivered a stronger performance.”
• The company says it’s making big investments in remote hosting capabilities, but that effort has hurt short-term profitability.
• CFO Richard Poulton said, “It’s not lost on us that the stock has gotten beaten up a little bit. It’s something we’re talking about.”
• Black says Q4 is always a strong quarter and expects that to continue.
• Of the DoD EHR bid, Black said, “They’ve made some very specific requirements in the RFP response that you have an innovative and interoperable platform with world-class content, workflows, and an open systems architecture. So we feel very good about where we are.”
• Black said the hospital EHR business is all replacement sales now, adding, “The folks that are looking at the next 10 years are looking at organizations who have thought through and have invested in a long-term strategy and approach to having an open systems approach to and a very robust set of offerings for the multitude of caregivers that exist in a total population health-centric environment as compared to a traditional environment from the past years.”
• Black said reduced sales don’t mean things have stalled, but rather that Q3 is always slower except for last year.
• Black said the company won’t break out population health management sales as an overall percentage even though that’s the greatest demand area, saying, “We wanted to make sure our client base did not think that we are abandoning our foothold of being a core systems provider of EHR and rev cycle management solutions.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It’s a fairly even split among a large number of poll respondents as to whether CommonWell will have a significant impact on interoperability. It’s also interesting to see which IP addresses brought out the vote, with the big ones being CommonWell members McKesson and athenahealth as well as non-member Epic. New poll to your right or here: have you ever withheld information from a provider because of medical record privacy concerns?

Tuesday is Veterans Day, set aside to honor every person who has served in the US Armed Forces. If you served, thank you. If not, this is a good day (like every day) to thank someone who did. Military members don’t get to choose the locations or causes for which they are asked to put their existence on the line, which makes their service even more selfless. I observed the upcoming holiday by reading and enjoying “The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten War,” in which the author interviewed the last World War I veterans before they all died shortly after, being 100 or more years of age. It’s not just a recap of World War I (which like the Korean War, tends to get lost in the shadows of World War II and even Vietnam), but rather a reminder of what it’s like to be on front lines that are full of confusion, irrational leadership, and the horrors of war.

Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• Cerner and Epic exchange barbs about Epic’s interoperability capabilities and what CommonWell’s interoperability contribution will be.
• The 2015 work plan of HHS’s Office of Inspector General indicates that it plans to extend its audits to include cloud-based EHR services and vendors as well as hospital downtime readiness.
• Allscripts is hit with several negative news items: poor quarterly results that send its share price south, a $9.7 million judgment against it in a lawsuit brought by Etransmedia for deceptive trade practices, and public reports of Sunrise system problems at South Australia Health.
• The Medicare physician fee schedule for 2015 adds several telehealth payment items and relaxes the EHR requirements for earning Chronic Care Management monthly checks.
• The HIT Policy Committee reports that total Meaningful Use payments have reached $25 billion.

Webinars

November 12 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. Three Ways to Improve Care Transitions Using an HIE Encounter Notification Service. Sponsored by Audacious Inquiry. Presenters: Steven Kravet, MD, MBA, FACP, president, Johns Hopkins Community Physicians; Jennifer Bailey, senior director of quality and transformation, Johns Hopkins Community Physicians; Robert Horst, principal, Audacious Inquiry. Johns Hopkins Community Physicians reduced readmissions and improved quality by implementing a real-time, ADT-based encounter notification service (ENS) to keep the member’s healthcare team informed during transitions in care. Johns Hopkins presenters will describe the clinical, operational, and financial value of the ENS for care coordination along with its technology underpinnings.

November 18 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. Cerner Takeover of Siemens, Are You Ready? Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Frank L. Poggio, president and CEO, The Kelzon Group; Vince Ciotti, principal, HIS Professionals. The Cerner acquisition of Siemens impacts 1,000 hospitals that could be forced into a “take it or leave it” situation based on lessons learned from similar takeovers. This webinar will review the possible fate of each Siemens HIS product, the impact of the acquisition on ongoing R&D, available market alternatives, and steps Siemens clients should take to prepare.

November 19 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. Improving Trial Accrual by Engaging the Digital Healthcare Consumer. Sponsored by DocuSign. Presenters: B. J. Rimel, MD, gynecologic oncologist, Cedars-Sinai Medial Center; Jennifer Royer, product marketing, DocuSign. The Women’s Cancer Program increased trial accrual five-fold by implementing an online registry that links participants to research studies, digitizing and simplifying a cumbersome, paper-based process. This webinar will describe the use of e-consents and social marketing to engage a broader population and advance research while saving time and reducing costs.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

MedAssets reports Q3 results: revenue up 5.5 percent, adjusted EPS 0.34 vs. $0.31, beating expectations for both.

The Advisory Board Company announces Q2 results: revenue up 12 percent, adjusted EPS $0.43 vs. $0.31, beating earnings expectations but falling short on revenue. Shares dropped 11 percent Friday on the news. Above is the one-year share price chart for ABCO (blue, down 22 percent) vs. the Nasdaq (up 18 percent).

CompuGroup Medical US will move its headquarters from Boston to Phoenix on January 1.

Orion Health chooses Scottsdale, AZ as the North American and UK headquarters of its population health management division, expecting to hire 100 people within a year and up to 400 over the next three years. Incentives pushed Scottsdale past Nashville, Atlanta, and Raleigh.   

Truven Health Analytics will acquire life sciences stakeholder management software vendor Heartbeart Experts. I spent several unsuccessful minutes perusing the company’s website to try to figure out what they do, which led me to conclude that it would probably be clear if I needed its services. 

Sales

Envision Medical Group (MI) chooses Aprima’s RCM services.

Rite Aid will pilot the use of HealthSpot’s telemedicine kiosks in some of its Ohio markets.

People 

Rick McCarthy, CIO of St. Vincent’s Health Services (CT) and a retired US Navy commander who served as a CIO and ran a medical unit in Afghanistan for a year, will deliver the keynote Veterans Day address in Trumbull, CT on Tuesday.

Jay Deady (Awarepoint) joins Recondo Technology as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

The 2014 Midwest Fall Technology Conference will be held November 12-14 in Chicago, organized by six Midwest HIMSS chapters. It’s offering a hefty provider registration discount in order to hit its desired 50-50 ratio of providers to vendors.

Georgia Health Connect launches as a regional HIE using technology from Liaison Technologies. It plans to connect to the Georgia Health Information Network.

Government and Politics

The Massachusetts medical board makes its final recommendations for a law going into effect in January 2015 that will require all physicians to demonstrate EHR proficiency and Meaningful Use skills. The final wording hasn’t been approved, but proposed regulations would require physicians to meet one of the following:

• Participate as an EP in Meaningful Use Stage 1.
• Be employed, contracted, or credentialed by a hospital that is participating in Meaningful Use Stage 1.
• Complete a three-hour accredited CME program on EHRs.
• Sign up for Massachusetts Health information Highway.

Innovation and Research

A study finds that EHR information paired with human resources system data can be used to measure the value added by individual nurses, finding that individual nurse performance explained 7.9 percent of the variance in patient clinical condition changes. It concluded, not surprisingly, that a nurse’s educational level and work experience correlated positively.

Technology

Iodine releases a Google Chrome browser extension that displays the definition of a medical term when the user hovers over the word on any web page.

Other

A New York Times article describes the difficulty that a featured patient had in getting his own medical records from the hospital, as it turned into a six-week ordeal of snail mail, phone calls, $100 in copying fees, and an eventual physical trip to the hospital to wait for a stack of paper documents to be handed over. A Harvard professor blames competition, saying that medical records are held hostage to prevent patients from going elsewhere. Former National Coordinator David Blumenthal, MD, weighs in: “When hospitals talk about HIPAA or charge for releasing records, what they’re really saying is, ‘I don’t want to do this and I have to find an excuse.’”

In the UK, a survey finds that 71 percent of citizens aren’t aware that they’ll be able to review their own medical records online by April as promised by the Patient Online initiative spearheaded by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt. Only 3 percent of practices offer online access at the moment, but all are supposed to be ready by April. Doctors are worried about the time they’ll spend explaining medical records to patients given that 75 percent of patients want records written in plain while only 21 percent of doctors agree. The survey found that percent of doctors say the medical record is a reference tool for their use, not something intended for patients.

The widow of IDX co-founder Robert Hoehl donates $5 million to a variety of Burlington, VT non-profits.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

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