News 11/19/14

Top News

HIMSS, IHE, and the EHR/HIE Interoperability Workgroup (created and led by the New York eHealth Collaborative) announce their combined efforts to streamline connectivity between EHRs and HIEs. IWG, formed in 2011 to improve that connectivity, will use ICSA Labs to test and certify products beginning in early 2015. It will continue its focus on standards and certification of query-based exchange and the use of Direct. The organization includes several HIEs and a large number of EHR vendors, including Cerner, Epic, and McKesson. 

Webinars

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.

Vince Ciotti and Frank Poggio delivered an HIStalk webinar Tuesday that held my rapt attention all the way through: “Cerner Takeover of Siemens, Are You Ready?” These guys have 90 years of healthcare IT expertise between them, including living through more than a dozen acquisitions as insiders, and both of them are cynical, snarky, and highly knowledgeable. Both also contribute regularly to HIStalk. Thanks to them for doing a great job. We had something like 280 attendees online and I’m sure the YouTube video recording will get a bunch of views — the record is held by Dim-Sum’s DHMSM 101 DoD one, which has been viewed 1,300 times in addition to the views it got directly from HIStalk and during the live session.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Analytics technology vendor MedeAnalytics acquires OnFocus Healthcare, which sells performance management systems.  

Online wellness coaching vendor Fruit Street Health offers free shares in the company to those who lost their investment in CEO Laurence Girard’s previous failed venture. I wouldn’t bet my money on those shares either since it charges $300 per month for four weekly video calls with a fitness coach and dietitian, at least not before reviewing this site whose entire mission is “to protect investors from Laurence Girard” that claims he has said repeatedly that Prevently was a Ponzi scheme and that he’s not disclosing several other failed ventures.

CVS Health will open a 100-employee technology development center in Boston for “building customer-centric experiences in healthcare” and to connect with health-related startups. The company — which operates drugstores, pharmacy benefits management, specialty pharmacies, and MinuteClinic retail clinics — will also open three drugstores that will be used for live testing of new digital technologies. Its Digital Health group is headquartered in Woonsocket, RI, where it recently opened a Digital Experience Center.

Kaiser Permanente will open retail clinics inside four California Target stores. Insurance competitor Blue Shield of Competitor says it will contract to have its members covered in the KP locations, which will also accept Medicare and Medi-Cal in offering services for minor illness, checkups, and chronic disease monitoring.  

UPMC sells its 51 percent interest in the procurement systems vendor it created — Prodigo Solutions — to a private equity firm, realizing a $9 million gain.

Zipnosis, which offers consumers a $25 televisit using an automated interview and clinician review, receives an undisclosed seed round investment.

North Bridge Growth Equity secures a majority stake in Atlanta-based Ingenious Med.

Sales

Chicago-area FQHC Mile Square Health Center chooses Forward Health Group’s PopulationManager and The Guideline Advantage.

Memorial Healthcare (MI) and King’s Daughters Medical Centers (MS) engage Iatric Systems to perform EHR-neutral integration with Apple Health.

Orlando Health (FL) chooses Ingenious Med’s charge capture system.

Ob Hospitalist Group (SC) chooses PatientKeeper Charge Capture for its physicians that provide services to 75 hospitals.

Arnot Health (NY) selects eClinicalWorks for EHR and health exchange for its 160 providers.

Virtual Radiologic chooses SyTrue’s natural language processing systems to extract information from its radiology reports, with plans to use the company’s Semantic Search to present teleradiologists with exams similar to the one being reviewed to drive clinical performance and efficiency.

St. Elizabeth Healthcare (KY) selects Strata Decision’s StrataJazz for cost accounting, budgeting, capital planning, and financial planning.

Rio Grande Valley HIE and University of Texas Health Science Center choose Wellcentive’s population health management solutions to help manage the care of people with diabetes.

People

CTG promotes Ted Reynolds to SVP with responsibility over CTG Health Solutions.

George Evans (Singing River Health System) joins Sagacious Consultants as principal consultant.

The HCI Group names John McDaniel (NetApp) as VP of innovation and technology solutions.

AMC Health hires Bruce Matter (GE Healthcare) as SVP of sales and client development.

Afik Gal, MD, MBA (PwC Consulting) joins QPID Health as VP of product innovation.

Siemens Health Services CEO John Glaser will join Cerner after its acquisition of SHS is complete. He says, “I’ll join as a senior vice president, focused on driving technology and product strategies, interoperability, and government policy development.” Leaders of acquired companies don’t usually last long, so we’ll see. As Vince and Frank said in Tuesday’s webinar, Siemens customers should get any promises in writing from Cerner, not from Siemens.

Cal INDEX HIE hires Greg LeClaire (Aetna) as CFO; John Lee (Oracle) as CTO;  and Doug Hart (ConvergeHealth) as VP of marketing and corporate communications. Also hired but with no photo available anywhere I could find on the web: Andrea Leeb, RN, Esq. (LA Care Health Plan) as chief privacy officer. I’m amazed at technology people who don’t keep their LinkedIn profile current or who don’t include a photo of reasonable quality. Mistake #1 (second only to not including a photo at all): shrinking down the head shot to horrible quality, missing the point that LinkedIn thumbnails it automatically while still displaying the full-sized original when clicked. Mistake #2: using an informal snapshot that adds distracting features such as the shoulders of other people from the cropped group photo or a Hawaiian lei. Of course this advice comes from someone whose own profile doesn’t have a photo, but I have an excuse: LinkedIn shut mine down until I removed the “Caddyshack” image of Carl Spackler.

Announcements and Implementations

Faith Community Hospital (TX) successfully attests for Meaningful Use Stage 2 shortly after choosing and implementing the RazorInsights EHR and using its Meaningful Use Dashboard.

Memorial Healthcare System (FL) is sending referral information from its ED to Henderson Behavioral Health (FL) to integrate medical and behavioral services. The health system sends HL7 C-CDAs from Epic to Henderson’s Netsmart CareRecord EHR that include completed labs, demographics, medical summary, meds list, and vital signs.

The Greenville, SC paper profiles ChartSpan Medical Technologies, which has developed a new PHR app for iOS.

Government and Politics

A Federal Trade Commission investigation into website privacy certification company TRUSTe results in a $200,000 settlement. TRUSTe didn’t perform some of the the annual website privacy audits it promised. It also failed to require certified sites to display an updated seal indicating TRUSTe’s conversion to a for-profit company in 2008. 

Michigan’s top-earning doctors in CMS’s Open Payments database of drug and device company payments explain their income as follow, a good example of just how complicated the issues are around medical payments:

• A diagnostic radiologist who was paid $688,000 by a medical device manufacturer says he doesn’t use the needle biopsy and software he developed because he no longer does biopsies. He says he supports Open Payments to expose doctors who are paid to use products on their patients.
• A GP who was listed as earning $571,000 from a drug company is actually the medical director of a clinic that was paid for conducting three studies. The doctor does research work only and is paid a salary by the clinic, while the drug company payments were made to the clinic itself and he received nothing.
• A plastic surgeon who earned $341,000 in drug company money for training doctors to use an Allergan breast implant says he doesn’t promote the product and loses money when consulting for up to $5,000 per day since that’s a tenth of what he would make otherwise.
• A University of Michigan Medical School orthopedic surgeon who was paid $201,000 in royalties for a knee replacement device says he follows his employer’s conflict of interest guidelines and doesn’t receive royalties when the device is used by anyone within UM.
• An orthopedic surgeon who made $196,000 from device companies says he holds 55 patents and he tells patients if he’ll get paid for using a particular one.

Innovation and Research

A study finds that use of EMR-triggered, telephone-based prescription refill reminders for heart-related drugs was associated with very slightly improved medication compliance and outcomes.

A small, short-term study finds that smartphone-based weight loss apps (specifically MyFitnessPal) don’t really help users lose weight.

A Penn Medicine study finds that ambulatory clinic doctors prescribed generic drugs as a higher percentage when the EHR was modified to require an extra click to show the brand name item.

The Washington Post profiles the Swasthya Slate, an inexpensive device that connects to Android-powered phones and tablets to perform 33 diagnostic tests. The device has been tested in India, where it excelled at detecting preeclampsia, increasing the rate of needed testing, and reducing administrative time for healthcare workers from 54 percent of their day to 8 percent. They expect the cost of the device to be around $150 at full production and see potential for its use with telemedicine.  

Walgreens will offer inexpensive, minimally painful blood tests from startup Theranos, with the service already launched in the Phoenix area.

Technology

Statistical software vendor SAS co-founder and CEO Jim Goodnight, PhD, a North Carolina programmer turned multi-billionaire,  tells a banking technology magazine that the data warehouse is not obsolete:

Fraud, customer intelligence, compliance — if you have the right set of data all together, you can use that set of data, you don’t have to keep go looking for data every time you need something. That’s one thing Hadoop provides. It’s a great place to store data. Also, you’re buying these 1.2 terabyte disks at about $300 apiece, you can hang 20 of these on a server and it’s local, so you can read the data straight on the machine … We’re seeing a shift away from that kind of hardware [IBM mainframes] to commodity. People are dropping AIX boxes and going to Linux x86 boxes and Intel chips. The chipsets are incredible. Dell has a machine we really like, it’s called an R920 and it has four slots, you could put four chips each with 16 cores, you end up with a server with 64 processors, you can put three terabytes of memory in that machine, and it’s about $100,000.

Other

Brigham and Women’s Hospital (MA) announces that the information of 1,000 patients was exposed in September when a robber held up a doctor at gunpoint, tied him to a tree, and forced him to give up his cell phone and laptop passwords. 

The bonds of Duke University Health System (NC) remain at an ‘AA’ rating despite a $65 million reserve adjustment due to a collections slowdown caused by its Epic implementation and problems with new IT systems at both North Carolina Medicaid and Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina.

In Ireland, the health service is reviewing why a five-hospital group invited only one vendor to respond to a clinical information system RFP. Auditors also want to know whether the former CEO of the hospital group disclosed that he previously worked as a consultant for the company, Northgate Public Services.

The provider folks behind “Just Epic Salary” make their survey results available for free Excel download. Some of the highest average salaries were for permanent hire physicians ($348,000), permanent hire management ($243,000), and contracted application management ($187,000), although even with 753 responses some of the categories had a small sample size.

Sponsor Updates

• CIO Review names secure communications vendor PerfectServe as one of the “20 Most Promising Healthcare Tech Solutions Providers in 2014.”
• Versus Technology announces that Amerinet members will receive discounts on its RTLS products.

Contacts

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

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