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June 16, 2016 News 1 Comment

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Apple’s iOS 10 will allow users to request copies of their medical records from their smartphones, provided their provider’s EHR can export a Continuity of Care Document. Users can also import records from Safari and Mail. The translated medical summary can be stored directly in Health.

Reader Comments

From Meltoots: “Re: CMS and EHR vendor snake oil. MU was an unmitigated disaster for safety, security, usability, efficiency, and physician burden, yet it continues with a new name. Everyone wants to move away from fee-for-service, yet we have no idea how to attribute quality care from multiple doctors to a single patient. This is a not-so-secret CMS push to put providers into large practices so they can crank down on payments. Providers have had enough.” The other concept at work is that hospitals, which have performed so pitifully and indifferently in coordinating patient care and managing populations, are figuring out how to reap the lion’s share of the money that will be spent to improve it. It’s also interest that just as it’s hard to detect Medicare fraud because providers work under the NPI of other providers in group settings, it’s equally hard to determine using billing data which of them is individually responsible for wise or unwise care decisions.

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From Gray Sky: “Re: Medhost. Has had outages for the past two weeks for all hosted applications. Inside information points to a storage information where customer data has been erased. The company continues to investigate options to restore the data to a reasonable point in time.” I ran this rumor Tuesday with the vendor name omitted pending the company’s response, which Medhost has provided:

Medhost supports software applications in over 1,100 facilities across the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Over the past several weeks we have experienced system outages impacting a total of three hosted facilities. In one instance, the outage was extended for several days. Medhost utilized both system vendors and consultants as well as its internal resources to determine the cause of these outages and to act to prevent any future outages. The extended outage was due to failure of the operating system. Medhost applications were not a contributing factor to this system outage and no customer data was lost. All customer systems have been restored and are working as designed. While we view any outage as unacceptable, we will use this as an opportunity to improve availability and resiliency of the Medhost systems. Medhost Direct historical uptime availability exceeds 99.99 percent, and no hosted facility has experienced an outage of more than 14 hours in over two years.

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From  Credenza Cowboy: “Re: Martha Jefferson’s errant EHR click that mistakenly labeled the patient as deceased. They aren’t live on Epic yet.” I didn’t realize that, although I attended a years-ago Cerner user meeting at which their IT director was present, so maybe they are on Cerner. Either way, it’s an interesting tip-of-the-iceberg type user error that fortunately, in this case anyway, had no clinical impact. Sentara bought the Charlottesville, VA hospital in 2010.

From Pensive Moment: “Re: digital snake oil. Do  you agree with the AMA?” Mostly no. The AMA’s solution to all problems is to put doctors in charge of everything despite their poor track record of following evidence-based guidelines, delivering whole-person health, and serving as patient advocates without bias toward their personal incomes. They have also demonstrated their own snake-oil gullibility in letting drug and medical device companies dictate their clinical behavior via shady but effective sales tactics that sometimes result in sub-optimal or even dangerous medical decisions. You will notice minimal reference to care teams in the AMA’s impassioned stand that, as usual, assumes the “Doctor as God” position in excluding all other clinicians and in pushing AMA’s commercial interests. The AMA is right that many apps (especially the consumer-facing ones) are of questionable value and that doctors have been shafted in being expected to document everything for the benefit of bureaucrats. They’re also correct that much of what doctors don’t like was handed down to them from insurance companies and the government (whose checks they don’t mind cashing, however, as evidenced by their continued participation). The AMA’s bloviating is what you get when each clinical profession has its own membership organization looking out for the interests of its dues payers while claiming to represent patients who are – along with the 80 percent or so of US doctors who aren’t AMA members, including a bunch who quit after AMA endorsed passage of the Affordable Care Act — invariably absent from its proceedings. All of the solutions offered by the AMA for “digital dystophia” involve AMA-led products and services, so from now on, let’s blame them.

From Limelight Seeker: “Re: our event. Please promote the upcoming tweetchat, webinar, or video I’m involved with.” I will say only this: quite a few overexposed pontificators — especially social media self-gratifiers and cheap-seats observers — are short on credentials to be educating the rest of us. My accomplishment-driven twit filter is powered by LinkedIn.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Catalyst Healthcare Advisors. The eight-year-old company offers consulting services in strategy, finance, operations, and technology (IT strategy, system selection, contract negotiation, and system implementation, optimization, and integration). The company led Yale-New Haven’s expense reduction project in helping the health system save $350 million annually. Among its other 200 clients are Baylor, Indiana University Health, Community Health Network, and Good Samaritan Hospital. You may know founder and CEO Steve Furry, who has been in healthcare consulting for 35 years, and senior advisor Parker Hinshaw, who founded maxIT. The company just announced the hiring of two new sales executives covering the West and Midwest. Thanks to Catalyst Healthcare Advisors for supporting HIStalk.

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Ms. Marlowe says her North Carolina kindergarten class is benefitting greatly from the Chromebook we provided in funding her DonorsChoose grant request, with the students specifically enjoying listening to stories online.

Listening: reader-recommended Richmond-based singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus, an up-and-comer who sings thoughtful and warm indie folk music that reminders the reader of the magnificent Cowboy Junkies and me of Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses. 

This week on HIStalk Practice: CMS announces $10 million in grants to help practices transition to new payment models. Midwest Orthopaedic Consultants goes with care coordination tech from PinpointCare. AMA adopts long-awaited ethical guidelines for telemedicine practice. CureMD adds Izenda business intelligence tool to its PM software. Emergency Care Specialists launches joint venture with Answer Health Telemedicine. Facebook develops suicide prevention tools and protocols. Culbert Healthcare Solutions VP Randy Jones equates revenue cycle KPIs to “the ritual of the snipe hunt.”

Webinars

June 28 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Your Call Is Very Important.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Cyndy Orrys, contact center director, Henry Ford Health System; Brian Cooper, SVP, West Interactive. The contact center is a key hub of patient engagement and a strategic lever for driving competitive advantage. Cyndy will share how her organization’s call center is using technologies and approaches that create effortless patient experiences in connecting them to the right information or resource. Brian will describe five key characteristics of a modern call center and suggest how to get started.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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As I mentioned in an update to Monday night’s post following a response to my inquiry to Navicure, Bain Capital Private Equity makes an unstated strategic investment (presumably taking a majority interest that meets the definition of an acquisition) in the company. Among the sellers is JMI Equity, which took a minority position in Navicure in 2009. JMI bears the initials of John Moores Inc., whose other accomplishments (beyond being an IBM programmer) include founding BMC Software, serving as lead financier of Peregrine Systems and ServiceNow, and formerly owning of the San Diego Padres.

Sales

The soon-to-open Sacred Oak Medical Center (TX) chooses Medsphere’s OpenVista EHR.

In Scotland, NHS Fife chooses InterSystems TrakCare, the twelfth Scottish Health Board to do so. 

People

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Clinical rules modeling vendor Applied Pathways hires Steve Lefar (Sg2) as CEO. Founder and CEO John Feldman will continue as board chair.

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Madhu Sasidhar, MD (Cleveland Clinic) joins consumer engagement platform vendor Envera Health as CMIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Congratulations to the HIStalk sponsors who took 40 spots in the 2016 HCI 100:

The local paper notes that FHN Memorial Hospital (IL) is testing Meditech 6.1 in its $8 million OurFHN project, expecting an October go-live.

Government and Politics

The American Medical Association approves a policy supporting the creating of an ONC-administered National Health IT Safety Center. The policy proposal was submitted by Matt Murray, MD, chair of the Texas Medical Association’s IT committee, driven in part by work done by Texas-based health IT researchers Dean Sittig, PhD and Hardeep Singh, MD, MPH.

The US Supreme Court rules that the VA must always give exclusive preference to veteran-owned small businesses when issuing contracts, overriding the VA’s argument that it is only required to meet specific annual contracting goals. The court says the VA must show preference to veteran-owned bidders as long as the competition meets the Rule of Two (at least two bidders are expected to submit offers and the amount of those bids is expected to be reasonable).

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New York’s attorney general forces legal website Law360 to stop requiring employees to sign non-compete agreements unless the employee has insider knowledge of trade secrets. Law360’s terms required all employees, even those fresh out of college, to sit out a year before taking another job in the same industry. The attorney general of Illinois is also upset that the non-compete clause in the employment agreement of sandwich chain Jimmy John’s prohibits employees from taking a job with another sub sandwich company for two years after quitting.

Privacy and Security

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A former IT employee sues Aspen Valley Hospital (CO) and its privacy officer, claiming that the hospital’s HR director/privacy officer disclosed the employee’s HIV status over cocktails with the hospital’s HR recruiter at a conference after noting a large medical claim for his antiviral medications. The employee filed a complaint with the hospital and then HHS as a HIPAA violation, after which he says he was disciplined, demoted, and then fired after 11 years at the hospital.

Other

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The Australian Medical Association calls for the capability of patients to manage their own medical records to be removed, saying that doctors don’t participate in the national My Health Record data-sharing program because they can’t rely on patient-provided information. The AMA wants patients locked out of making changes to core set of database elements that includes the meds list, allergies, discharge summaries, pathology and imaging results, weight, height, blood pressure, and advance directives. They also want eventual restriction of patient changes to ECG results, blood type, vaccination history, infectious disease status, surgery history, and even the patient’s chosen emergency contact. The AMA says the changes will increase trust and therefore physician usage of the system, which is nearly non-existent.

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A Nielsen survey finds that 89 percent of PCPs claim they often remind patients about preventive screenings, but only 14 percent of patients say they receive them. Only 5 percent of the two-thirds of Americans who are overweight say their doctors suggested a weight loss program. Half of patients aren’t seeing doctors who can view their history via an EHR. Only one in four patients can contact their doctor by email or patient portal question submission, with older people more likely to avoid use of available technology.

This has a small amount of health IT relevance: the mold-breaking YouTube teen vlog series “lonelygirl15” is being re-launched after 10 years by its creators, which include Miles Beckett, MD, CEO of electronic credentialing vendor Silversheet. I interviewed him in April 2016.

Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes will present at the American Association for Clinical Chemistry’s annual conference in August, with her submitted abstract suggesting that her talk will be long on defensive self-promotion and short on offering the definitive clinical validation data that scientists long to see. I’m not clear about why a college dropout should be presenting at a clinical conference or why the education committee would accept a presentation titled “Theranos Science & Technology: the miniaturization of lab testing,” but it will probably be an overflow session. I will be disappointed if the attendees don’t boo her off the stage.

In China, a hospital janitor is arrested hiring friends to direct out-of-towners looking for the hospital to a specific room he had rented inside it, where he delivered ineffective but expensive treatments. The health department has closed the hospital as a result. That type of scam is common in China, where hospitals routinely rent out rooms to anyone willing to pay.

Sponsor Updates

  • InstaMed releases its annual report on trends in healthcare payments.
  • InterSystems, Intelligent Medical Objects, and Meditech will exhibit at AMDIS 2016 June 21-24 in Ojai, CA.
  • Liaison Technologies wins a Stevie Award for Favorite New Product from the American Business Awards.
  • Visage Imaging validates the interoperability capabilities of its Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform at the IHE Connectathon 2016 held in Bochum, Germany.
  • MedData will host a job fair June 22 in Grand Rapids, MI.
  • The HIMSS SIIM Enterprise Imagine Workgroup publishes its second white paper.
  • Validic and Omnicom Health Group will partner to counsel healthcare companies on connected health.
  • Netsmart will exhibit at the Washington Behavioral Health Conference June 22 in Yakima, WA.
  • Nordic receives RightSourcing’s Gold Supplier Award.
  • Qpid Health and Streamline Health will exhibit at AMDIS 2016 June 21-24 in Ojai, CA.
  • The latest KLAS report ranks Sagacious Consultants as the highest-rated firm for revenue-cycle optimization.

Blog Posts

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Lt. Dan.
More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.
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Currently there is "1 comment" on this Article:

  1. Re: Apple’s iOS 10 will allow users to request copies of their medical records from their smartphones, provided their provider’s EHR can export an HL7 Continuity of Care Document (CCD). Good luck! While I commend the effort in creating the CCD to meet the critical needs of clinical document exchange, it’s a bear to implement, reconcile, push, and/or pull.

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