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Monday Morning Update 10/19/15
Top News
What seems like fall out from the Wall Street Journal’s exposé continues: Theranos ceases its trademark practice of collecting blood samples from finger pricks after the FDA raised questions about its “nanotainer,” the blood-sample tube company founder Elizabeth Holmes is so often depicted holding. The agency is looking into whether the container needs approval as a medical device, and the company has, as a result, stopped using it for most tests while it waits for approval.
Last Week’s Most Interesting News
- Dell will acquire EMC for $67 billion.
- 23andMe raises $115 million in Series E financing.
- Verisk Analytics is rumored to have retained Morgan Stanley to sell its Verisk Health business in what should be a billion-dollar deal.
- Accenture predicts that the five-year cost of cyber attacks on US healthcare system will be $305 billion.
Webinars
None in the next few days. Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Sentara Healthcare (VA) enters into an investment partnership with informatics vendor Medstreaming via the 12-hospital system and health plan’s Third Core investment group. Medstreaming will use the financing to ramp up its clinical data management system. Sentara Healthcare SVP Kenneth Krakaur and CFO Robert Broermann will join the Medstreaming board.
Announcements and Implementations
Geisinger Health System (PA) implements Cerner’s HealtheIntent population health management platform.
BluePrint Healthcare IT launches two mobile Care Navigator patient engagement packages for pediatric hospitals.
Billian’s HealthData expands its public data offering to include over 875,000 profiles of provider organizations.
Noble Health Alliance – a collaboration between Pennsylvania-based Aria Health System, Crozer-Keystone Health System, and the Einstein Healthcare Network – joins the HealthShare Exchange of Southeastern Pennsylvania HIE.
Urgent care software and services business Practice Velocity announces that all customer ICD-10 claims have been successfully processed.
Talksoft offers a mobile survey tool to benchmark patient experience and practice performance.
Security and Privacy
North Carolina’s Dept. of Health and Human Services notifies over 1,600 Medicaid patients of an August 19 security breach – an email sent without proper encryption – that may have exposed private health information. Thus far, there has been no sign of nefarious third-party interception.
An Alberta Privacy Commission spokesperson compares the province’s spate of EHR breaches to an “epidemic” after 48 employees at South Health Campus in Calgary inappropriately access a patient’s information. The incident, in which all of the staffers took a look at data on a mother taken into medical custody after the suspicious death of her daughter, follows numerous breach investigations including a conviction for improper access, two charges for the same crime, and the firing of an Alberta Children’s Hospital employee who inappropriately accessed the EHR to snoop into the PHI of nearly 250 people.
Technology
EClinicalWorks launches 10e, a cloud services platform incorporating EHR functionality with population health and patient engagement tools. In addition, the company offers all hospital system clients free interoperability of CDA data using a query-based exchange with Cerner, Epic, McKesson, Meditech, and Siemens.
Healow, an EClinicalWorks subsidiary, launches an IoT cloud, enabling third-party hardware and app developers to collect, store, and analyze patient-shared data through its API.
Other
SAP CEO Bill McDermott addresses the need for more mobile and personalized health data analytics at a company event in Palo Alto, emphasizing the lack of both during his treatment for loss of an eye as the result of an in-home accident:
“In every single meeting, you have to repeat the entire story all over again, because there’s no one electronic medical record that comes before you — or follows you — throughout a case. In my case, I had serious eye injury as probably the primary challenge. And when you work with somebody who’s the retina specialist and something goes wrong with the cornea, you don’t even realize it as a patient, but that’s a whole new medical professional now that has to come into the equation. And then, if something goes wrong with the iris, that’s another medical professional. And then we can go to the lens, so before you’re too far along the process now, you’ve met with five different teams on one eye. It’s not that it’s too many, it’s just that the choreography and the collaboration between individuals is just not there. The system is not organized that way. [I] do think that it’s time for a new architecture, a new approach to managing not just the structured, but also the unstructured information.”
Sponsor Updates
- Experian Health will exhibit at HFMA Eastern Michigan October 19-20 in Plymouth.
- Impact Advisors publishes a new white paper, “Summary and Analysis of the MU Final Rule: Modifications in 2015-17 and Stage 3 Requirements.”
- PatientKeeper will exhibit at HFMA’s Revenue Cycle Conference/MAP Event October 25-27 in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
- PDS celebrates the official reopening of its new corporate headquarters.
- PerfectServe will exhibit at the Western Section AUA Annual Meeting October 25-29 in Indian Wells, CA.
- Sagacious Consultants will exhibit at the Central & Southern Ohio Chapter of HIMSS 2015 Fall Conference October 23 in Dayton.
- The SSI Group will exhibit at the 11th Annual National Association of Healthcare Access Management October 19-20 in Mahwah, NJ.
- Surescripts will exhibit at the Healthcare Innovation Expo 2015 October 22 in Washington, DC.
- TeleTracking will exhibit at the Pennsylvania Organization of Nurse Leaders Conference October 21-22 in Gettysburg, PA.
- Valence Health will exhibit at the AMGA Institute for Quality Leadership October 20-23 in National Harbor, MD.
- Verisk Health staff participate in the second annual Verisk Community Service Week.
- Kalispell Regional Health shares its ICD-10 success story using VitalWare’s VitalAuditor.
- Huron Consulting Group will host Case Management: Navigating the Current Healthcare System Conference October 25-29 in New Orleans.
- Wellsoft will exhibit at ACEP 15 October 26-28 in Boston.
- XG Health Chair Glen Steele, MD will speak at the 6th Annual Galien Forum October 27 in New York City.
Blog Posts
- Top 10 Hospitals Where Patients Prosper (Billian’s HealthData)
- Designing Clinical Communications – Part 1 (PatientSafe Solutions)
- After ICD-10: Plotting Your Department’s Next Big Win (Patientco)
- At This Pivotal Moment in Healthcare (Lexmark)
- Better Communications Between Physicians and Healthcare Organizations can Improve Outcomes (Phynd Technologies)
- The Worm in the Apple (PMD)
- “It Turned us Into Data Entry Clerks!” (Qpid Health)
- Using Non-Clinical Data Can Increase Impact of Analytics (Streamline Health)
- Cerner Domain Compare: Summit Team Brings InSync Awareness to Kansas City (Summit Healthcare)
- Sunquest Value of the Month: Flawless Execution (Sunquest Information Systems)
- RTLS – The ‘Chocolate’ that Energizes Your EMR (Versus)
- Introducing Voalte Platform! (Voalte)
- Traditional Healthcare BPO Sourcing Will be Tested as Never Before (Xerox)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.
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RE SAP CEO’s eye injury: What’s his basis for comparison? Is he saying that in Germany eye trauma is handled by seamlessly integrated teams? I expect they have the same supersubspecialization we have here, and I doubt if they all see you at once. And when they do, they probably want to hear the story directly from the patient again, because that’s what we’re trained to do. Note that ophthalmology is unusual in that a patient is rarely hospitalized despite a serious problem–there would be a lot more useful cross-talk in a hospital environment if he’d, say, ruptured his spleen then, say, had a pulmonary embolism followed by heparin induced thrombocytopenia. Admittedly the fault for poor handoffs is on the docs, but there had to have been unexpected developments in this case leading to the need for all the opinions in the first place. But no matter the technology a complex situation like this needs old fashioned phone calls or face-to-face communication.
Having worked with ophthalmologists, I can tell you first hand that there is much less desire for them to automate seeing as the incentive money is minimal and the EMR products geared toward oph workflows are less than seamless or intuitive.
#blind His is a typical IT rhetoric and is convincing to the lawmakers; but, many previously unsolved medical problems are solved because of the nuances of conversation that revisits the same old problems. Mr. CEO, medical care is simply not as you envision. So sorry.