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April 16, 2019 News 6 Comments

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The New York Times reviews the use of an IPhone-powered whole-body ultrasound scanner in Uganda and other developing nations. The $2,000, US-made device addresses the issue that two-thirds of the world’s population gets no imaging at all due to cost, geography, and machine availability.

The sign that the device is real – it has earned FDA’s marketing clearance. The sign that it works disruptively for public health – one of the company’s backers is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which unerringly funds projects that deliver the biggest bang for the global buck.

It’s a beautifully written and photographed article.

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The tap-and-swipe Butterfly IQ device offers 18 presets for images such as cardiac and deep abdomen. It stores data in Butterfly Cloud to offer HIPAA-compliant image sharing with patients and peers.

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The inventor is DNA sequencing pioneer and Yale School of Medicine genetics professor Jonathan Rothberg, PhD, who I hereby elevate to the top of my “most interesting people in health IT” list (and that’s a short list).


Reader Comments

From OOB?: “Re: Epic and Cerner. This article says they’ll be out of business within 10 years because their EHR technology is outdated.” That’s just attention-seeking silliness since surely nobody who has any connection to health IT could be that uninformed. I’ll offer just three of the many dozens of counterpoints that come immediately to mind:

  • Seeing Epic and Cerner as offering just “EHRs” – which is an awful and misleading term in the first place – is marking yourself as a clueless technology fanboy who has never worked a day in hospital IT. Their systems run every hospital department and service, including non-clinical ones, and then roll the vast amount of information up into a single database for operational management, reporting, patient access, etc. With what, exactly, would they replace all those systems, which are integrated with every kind of clinical device made?
  • It would take even a tech giant probably five years and $1 billion to develop a competing system assuming they could recruit the right subject matter experts, and given the maze of governmental, regulatory, financial, and clinical minefields to be navigated, no publicly traded company would devote the resources to get Version 0.1 into testing, much less find buyers among conservative health systems who have little interest in bearing the beta testing pain. Even Microsoft and Google couldn’t give away their crappy consumer-targeted personal health records and ended up shutting them down, so don’t expect them run off and responsibly build a laboratory information system or IV barcode scanning.
  • No tech company is working on anything at this scale. They might try to cherry-pick a few seemingly easy targets, but they aren’t hiring armies of people who know how healthcare works to help them design a system that would actually function beyond offering sexy screens. You cannot build healthcare software with 23-year-olds sitting in a Silicon Valley and slinging rad code in between company-provided foosball and beer pong.

From Dignity Defined: “Re: Cerner. Do you you see them cutting back?” All vendors whose sales were goosed by Meaningful Use (note to self – that would be a fun song title) are already cutting back in various ways and will continue to do so. I asked the question publicly when Meaningful Use first came into play of how vendors who geared up for a competitive battle of a fixed duration would gracefully downsize once the feed trough had been licked dry. Nobody could look past the boom years. Hospitals and practices will continue to buy products that provide ROI (why wouldn’t they?) but now that government’s contribution to the equation has been eliminated, software and services will have to pay their own way, which will likely involve lower prices, more tangible short-term benefits, and recurring costs that align with the benefits delivered. Cerner, Epic, and Meditech have won the hospital core IT system wars and the independent ambulatory market seems to be consolidating pretty quickly, so the ripple effects will be seen every aspect of health IT, especially consulting. Cerner is particularly vulnerable because it is publicly traded and has underperformed despite winning billions in federal government business, so in the absence of a fiery, singularly-focused co-founder at the helm, it must now redirect its attention to Wall Street type (although it’s been doing that for years, just to a lesser degree). Note that Cerner Millennium and maybe Cerner itself would not exist today if Neal Patterson hadn’t told 1990s investors that it would take a lot of years and money to create a new hospital IT architecture and they would just have to suck it up until it was done.

From Pistolero: Re: clinical decision support to detect questionably beneficial orders. Why isn’t it more widely used?” I would say:

  • Some and maybe most doctors don’t necessarily think minimum-necessary when ordering – they think more along the lines of, it can’t hurt to get more information while we’re drawing blood anyway
  • But it can hurt – the descent into the medical misadventure maelstrom often starts with a pointless test whose value must be conformed to normal range by aggressive therapy that is unlikely to improve and may in fact worsen a patient’s outcomes as armies of uncoordinated niche experts ply their trade aggressively
  • Doctors are trained around the paradigm of every patient being unique, and given that they see only their own small number of patients, they don’t always see the big health picture in which their patient is one data point in a see of historical information that, along with the N-of-one experience, will determine likely outcomes
  • Even questionably beneficial orders are profitable as long as insurers continue paying for them

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I use AP Stylebook standards about 99% of the time when writing HIStalk (big exceptions – I always use an Oxford comma and I use post office state abbreviations, in both cases feeling as though AP is way off base in mandating a less-readable form). You probably didn’t notice that I started writing “99%” this week instead of “99 percent” because they just changed their standard. Today I learned from them that “farther” refers to physical distance, while “further” is an extension of time, so now I can obsess about that. Thank goodness they don’t use “everyday” incorrectly (as “I brush my teeth everyday,” which drives me crazy) or incorrectly capitalize a noun that isn’t used as a title (“I sent my Mom a present,” which is wrong). I admit that I’m sadly out of touch in believing that you show respect to those who listen or read what you have to say by following the grammatical rules of the road as best you can, although I’m offended only by obvious indifference usually encouraged by text messaging and posting Facebook nonsense.


Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Interoperability platform vendor Bridge Connector raises $10 million, increasing its total to $20 million.

HM Health Solutions, a 3,200-employee insurance-focused IT vendor owned by Pennsylvania-based insurer Highmark, lays off 239 employees. 

London-based Medbelle raises $7 million to create what it calls a “digital hospital” that sounds more like an online marketplace for cosmetic and weight loss surgery practices that also includes a care coordination platform.


Sales

  • Jefferson Health chooses Prepared Health as its digital technology partner for connecting its 14 hospitals to post-acute, home care, and social determinants of health providers for coordination of hospital-to-home care transitions.
  • Fullerton Health, which owns 500 medical facilities in the Asia Pacific region, hires Health Catalyst to assess its data analytics potential. 

People

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Denis Zerr (Catholic Health Initiatives) joins Radiology Partners as CIO.

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Change Healthcare promotes Dan Mowery to VP of channel partner and customer marketing.


Announcements and Implementations

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PMD adds video chat capability to PMD Secure Messaging application, extending support for telehealth charge codes for interprofessional teleconsults and virtual check-ins.

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InterSystems adds HealthShare Provider Directory to the 2019.1 release of HealthShare, providing a single source of truth for provider demographics and relationships. The release also includes a renaming of HealthShare Information Exchange to HealthShare Unified Care Record.

NPR observes that rural areas whose local hospital closes take an economic hit — retirees move out or look elsewhere, heavy industry bails because there’s no ED, and medical practices close because doctors don’t want to drive 30 minutes to see their hospitalized patients.

Meditech announces Expanse Labor and Delivery, which includes status boards, mother-baby recall, flowsheets, and fetal monitoring integration.

A Solutionreach survey of healthcare providers finds that patient relationship software that includes text messaging improves outcomes through reminders, reduces no-shows, and decreases phone time while increasing revenue.


Government and Politics

Vermont politicians struggle with the privacy and legal issues over changing patient participation in the HIE operated by Vermont Information Technology Leaders from opt-in to opt-out, which VITL says is needed because low participation has caused low HIE usage. Only in maple syrup-producing areas (Vermont contributes half the US total) would a politician describe the maturation of a policy “as it sugars off.”

The VA issues a $1.5 million, no-bid contract to Minburn Technology Group for HPE Synergy server modules and frames that will be used to convert 131 instances of VistA data to Cerner.


Privacy and Security

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India-based IT outsourcing giant Wipro admits that its systems have been breached in a phishing campaign, with hackers using the company’s own systems to attack its customers. Wipro, which sells cybersecurity services, has hired another firm to investigate. Wipro has 170,000 employees and annual revenue of $8 billion.

Facebook actively planned to provide user data to companies willing to buy it or to advertise with Facebook while denying the data to companies that it saw as competitive, all while putting on a public face of protecting user data, an NBC News investigative report finds. Reporters found few examples where Facebook executives expressed any interest in user privacy except as a PR strategy or in profitably selling data access to app vendors.


Other

The DC business paper confirms Dudevorce’s reader rumor that I ran Monday – Inova Health System will stop offering its MediMap genetic testing for medication response after FDA warns it that the test is being marketing illegally. Inova says it was told it by someone unstated that didn’t need FDA’s approval, but FDA made it clear that patients were potentially being put at risk because the unproven tests could lead to bad medical decisions. 

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Clinicians at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan are trialing a trauma digital documentation system from T6 Health Systems, which the company says can integrate with Epic, Cerner, Meditech, and Allscripts. USAF trauma surgeon Lt. Col.Valerie Sams, MD  of the 455th Expeditionary Medical Group (on the right above) is leading the trial.

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Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital changes its billing policy to eliminate balance billing and to set an income-adjusted maximum on patient payments, courtesy of some fine investigative reporting by Sarah Kliff at Vox. Let’s give her the credit instead of the hospital – until the expose ran, they were perfectly happy picking the pockets of patients by intentionally remaining out of network with EVERY private insurer so they could tap ED patients – many of whom didn’t have a choice because it’s San Francisco’s only a trauma center – with high bills that were quickly sent to collectors. One might reasonably expect that hospital heads should roll for creating and enforcing this policy in the first place, but that won’t happen. The hospital recently toyed with the idea of ditching the Zuckerberg part of its name (bought with a $75 million donation) over Facebook privacy shame, but at this point they’ve soiled their own name worse than Facebook.

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Internist and health polity researcher Dhruv Khullar, MD, MPP writes a brilliant Stat editorial titled “Healthcare needs less #innovation,” making these points:

  • The US healthcare system can’t even provide basic care safely and consistently, performing worse than almost all peer nations.
  • As others have suggested, we need more “chief imitation officers” who bring home best practices from elsewhere rather than chief innovation officers.
  • We have “a dissemination and implementation problem” in failing to consistently use medical developments for an average of 17 years after they have been proven.
  • It’s nice to be in a swanky single hospital room hooked up to monitoring and Alexa-powered nurse call systems, but even nicer to know you won’t die of a catheter infection because someone failed to follow a checklist or use antiseptics improperly.
  • Today’s culture favors using the latest shiny technical object as a solution instead of addressing problems the best way.
  • Today’s tech startups follow the Theranos model of making grand claims while studiously avoiding publishing peer-reviewed studies.

A randomized clinical trial finds no evidence that workplace wellness programs work, as a large US company’s employees who participated said they they exercised more and watched their weight, but data analysis found no measurable improvement in their health, their healthcare expenditures, or their employment outcomes in the following 18 months.

In England, NHS Director of Digital Development Sam Shah says that hot technologies from other industries such as AI, virtual reality, and quantum computing should be placed on healthcare’s back burner in favor of building the less-exciting but vital underpinnings that can give consumers easier access, incorporate technology into care delivery, and to integrate data across IT systems and hospitals.

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An India-based paper says that the number of India-based doctors serving as scribes for US hospitals is growing quickly, noting that US-based, $6 billion IKS Health employs 450 doctors in Mumbai and Hyderabad to support customers such as Massachusetts General Hospital and plans to increase doctor headcount to more than 1,000 this year. One doctor says it’s a good deal for young doctors who not only earn money, but prepare to advance their careers by learning medical best practices and documenting care in sophisticated EHRs.

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InstaMed publishes its ninth annual report on healthcare payment trends, noting:

  • 90% of providers still bill and collect using manual, paper-based processes
  • 77% of providers say they rarely get payments within the first month of billing
  • 91% of providers get paid by paper check by at least one payer even though almost all of them would rather have money sent by EFT

Sponsor Updates

  • Mumms Software adds DrFirst’s e-prescribing and medication management capabilities to its hospice EHR.
  • CarePort will exhibit at the NAACOS Spring Conference April 24-26 in Baltimore.
  • The Texas Hospital Association features Collective Medical in its latest podcast.
  • CoverMyMeds will host a block party instead of a groundbreaking as construction starts on its $240 million headquarters.

Blog Posts


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Currently there are "6 comments" on this Article:

  1. Re: Butterfly IQ and the Gates Foundation. Next time you’re in Seattle, take a walk through the Gates Foundation Discovery Center. It’s a short walk from the Space Needle and admission is free. It has a stunning display of brilliant, low cost, innovative solutions to important problems. Some creators have traditional engineering backgrounds, while others are just folks who put cool ideas into action.

  2. “It would take even a tech giant probably five years and $1 billion to develop a competing system assuming they could recruit the right subject matter experts”

    Interesting thought experiment, take Epic or Cerner with their current workforce, give them 5 years and a billion dollars (starting from scratch, no existing code or documentation, they could build a new system or try to replicate their current system from their own memory), could they build a competing system? My answer would be very unlikely.

    • Of course they can, and for much much cheaper. But why would they do it? Existing arrangement works for everyone in the industry, except patients and doctors.

    • You are right AC. The cost is seriously underestimated here.

      Just looking at the numbers – $1 B for 5 years = $200 M per year. Getting number of employees from Glassdoor:

      Epic has about 10K employees = you will be paying an average salary of 20K per year

      Cerner has about 25K employees = you will be paying an average salary of 8K per year

      This is not counting any other overheads either.

  3. re: the 17 year time lag in innovation. HIstalk should do an investigation into the origin and reality of that number in the internet era. It’s from a “classic” paper from 2000 (Balas EA et al) and is based on even older studies. I expect the number has gone down signficantly.

  4. I applaud your attention to grammar and style. In high school, I worked for the local newspaper in the sports department, pulling down wire copy and doing agate work (that section with smaller print with all the standings, box scores, transactions, etc.). To this day it bothers me to see schools abbreviated as Ohio St or Penn St. St as an abbreviation is for street or saint. Unless you’re referring to one of those two things, spell it out. The extra three letters won’t hurt you.

    Somewhat related, I encourage you to check out https://www.elevateapp.com. It’s a mobile “game” that takes you through three different exercises each day around grammar, spelling, vocabulary, math, etc. It’s free and a fun way to kill 5-10 minutes each day and engage your brain.







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