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April 28, 2019 News 4 Comments

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HHS announces that it will use its discretion to set maximum annual HIPAA fines based on level of culpability, reducing the amount for those with no knowledge from $1.5 million to $25,000.

Above are the old vs. new penalty tiers.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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Nearly 40% of a large number of poll respondents don’t see Epic, Cerner, and Meditech getting new EHR competition in the next 10 years, although 25% of respondents think Silicon Valley firms could potentially enter that market. Holly says EHRs are a dying breed with the only hope being third-party add-ons to make it all work, while Bitbot foresees data science-driven workflows that will overshadow outdated databases and processes. DrLyle takes the long view that the future entails a lot more home care, virtualization, and at-risk entities setting up clinics whose needs could be met by a slimmed-down EHR for care tasks. Matthew Holt agrees that hospitals have tied themselves to Epic and Cerner and sees the threat being that chronic care will move to the home and hospitals see their business cut back to performing procedures and attending to dying patients.

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New poll to your right or here, as suggested by a reader who is COO of a health system that is making an EHR decision and looking at vendor interoperability capabilities and federal initiatives: When will every provider in every care setting be able to reliably exchange all clinically relevant patient information? (continuity of care document, consultation notes, discharge summary, imaging integration, DICOM diagnostic imaging reports, history and physical, operative note, progress note, procedure note, and unstructured document).

I’m interested in interviewing insightful, non-vendor people who are doing work that would inspire my readers. Let me know who you recommend. Many of those I reach out to don’t have the interest, time, or organizational approval to speak frankly (and some don’t have the courage to undergo an unscripted conversation), so I’m casting the net.


Webinars

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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From the Cerner earnings call following release of quarterly results that met Wall Street expectations:

  • Chairman and CEO Brent Shafer says the involvement of activist investor Starboard Value was consistent with the company’s existing efforts to improve company financial performance.
  • Cerner has engaged turnaround consulting firm AlixPartners to look for efficiency and cost-saving opportunities that won’t negatively impact Cerner clients.
  • Key projects include looking at management structure and costs, reviewing the company’s product portfolio, rationalizing its facilities, and reviewing non-personnel costs.
  • The company will be more selective in evaluating low-margin deals.
  • Cerner will go at-risk with providers to generate higher-margin business.
  • The company notes that while the EHR market is mature, it can cross-sell revenue cycle and ambulatory products to that client base.
  • Cerner admits that companies will likely issue “competitive messaging” to Cerner’s clients about its focus on increasing margins, but says those clients needs the company to be more efficient and to bring products to market faster.
  • Asked by an analyst about the apparent de-emphasizing of the RevWorks revenue cycle management business, the company says it contributes about $200 million in annual revenue but isn’t growing, suggesting that other opportunities are more promising. It also notes that Cerner uses its Works offerings “to more tightly align the client to Cerner” for additional software and services sales and it reviews the profitability of individual clients.
  • CFO Marc Naughton notes that Cerner’s $4.5 billion Innovation Campus was completely paid for by Missouri and Kansas City tax incentives.

Meanwhile, Cerner implements a hiring freeze, telling employees that “we can do better if we target our attention on areas that represent the largest and most profitable growth opportunities and drive client satisfaction and retention.”

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The New York Times notes the sometimes clinically sloppy practices of online birth control seller Nurx, which has used unlicensed personnel to dispense medications that had sometimes been returned by other customers, told its doctors to prescribe birth control to at-risk women as long as the patient agreed, and followed the Silicon Valley mantra of asking forgiveness rather than permission. The company responded to the article by saying that those practices ended a year ago with executive replacements.

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The FBI raids the San Francisco office of UBiome, which sells questionably useful AI-powered microbiome test kits for gut health and women’s health that are ordered by its own telemedicine doctors. Reports suggest that insurers complained about being overbilled by the company, while individual customers had previously filed Better Business Bureau complaints saying that their insurance was billed thousands of dollars for tests they thought they were buying in full for less than $100. The FBI is also apparently interested in how the company pays its doctors for referrals. In an interesting twist noted by CNBC’s Chrissy Farr, UBiome’s former product VP is now CEO at Nurx (see the item above).

Tampa-based, Hearst-owned MHK (formerly known as MedHOK) moves to a new 30,000-square-foot office at Harborview Plaza this week. The company has 250 employees.

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Vocera announces Q1 results: revenue down 12%, adjusted EPS -$0.17 vs. $0.04, beating Wall Street expectations for both. From the earnings call:

  • The company had its strongest non-healthcare bookings ever in Q1, including a multi-million dollar deal with retailer Nordstrom that was triggered by a former IT person at a hospital customer site who joined Nordstrom’s IT group and suggested Vocera as a solution.
  • Provider consolidation is leading to larger deal sizes, which adds complexity to the sales and approval process, but benefits Vocera as a unified platform vendor.
  • The company is winning 70-80% of the deals it is involved with, with little competitive impact from Cerner CareAware and no effect so far from Hill-Rom’s pending acquisition of Voalte.
  • The company was awarded authority to operate with the Navy and Air Force.
  • Market acceptance of the company’s new Smartbadge has exceeded expectations.

Sales

  • SacValley MedShare HIE chooses Zen Healthcare IT as its data integration platform in the “integration as a service” model.

Announcements and Implementations

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InterSystems founder Terry Ragon and his wife Susan donate $200 million to Massachusetts General Hospital to endow a vaccine research center, piggybacking onto their $100 million donation 10 years ago to fund AIDS vaccine research. The couple, whose net worth has been estimated at $2.5 billion, has signed the Giving Pledge, in which they will give most of their assets to philanthropic causes. Terry Ragon founded InterSystems in 1978 as a vendor of the MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) that was invented by two eventual Meditech pioneers (Neil Pappalardo and Curt Marble) and MD/PhD student Robert Greenes (now a biomedical informatics professor at Arizona State University). MUMPS powers systems sold by Epic, Meditech, and many other health IT vendors as well as the VA’s VistA. Privately held InterSystems has since added sophisticated database, integration, HIE, and clinical systems to its portfolio for both healthcare and non-healthcare sectors.


Other

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Arizona State University and Mayo Clinic break ground in Phoenix on the 150,000-square-foot Health Futures center, which will house a medical technology accelerator, research labs for biomedical engineering and informatics, and nursing programs. The facility, which will open in 2020, will be connected to Mayo Clinic


Sponsor Updates

  • Lightbeam Health Solutions will exhibit at the BCBS 2019 National Summit April 29- in Grapevine, TX.
  • Qventus will present at the 2019 EDPMA Solutions Summit April 28-May 1 in Scottsdale, AZ.
  • Mobile Heartbeat will exhibit at the Trauma Center Association of America’s Annual Conference April 28-May 3 in Las Vegas.
  • Netsmart Director of Post-Acute Community Strategist Teresa Craig will speak at the 2019 Association for Home and Hospice Care of NC Expo April 29 in Raleigh.
  • Nordic will host receptions during Epic XGM on April 30 and May 7 in Madison, WI.
  • Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, will exhibit at the AWHONN Michigan Section Conference May 3 in Frankenmuth.
  • T-System will exhibit at the 2019 EDPMA Solutions Summit April 28-May 1 in Scottsdale, AZ.
  • Redox will exhibit at Epic XGM April 29-May 10 in Verona, WI.
  • The SSI Group will exhibit at the Louisiana HFMA Annual Institute May 5-7 in Lafayette, LA.
  • Surescripts will exhibit at the AMIA 2019 Clinical Informatics Conference April 30-May 2 in Atlanta.
  • The Healthcare Rap podcast features SymphonyRM Director of Client AI Chris Hemphill.
  • Wolters Kluwer Health will present at the AMIA 2019 Clinical Informatics Conference April 30-May 2 in Atlanta.

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Currently there are "4 comments" on this Article:

  1. Re: InterSystems & MUMPS. MUMPS is an amazing language, and Meditech used a variant of it (MIIS) long ago, but it hasn’t been used by Meditech for several decades. Don’t know about Epic or the others.

    • Ah, this is not correct, or at least it is more wrong than right.

      Both Meditech & Epic use offshoots of MUMPS. In Meditech’s case it is called Magic and Epic uses InterSystems variant. Even MUMPS isn’t supposed to be MUMPS anymore, the cognoscenti call it M-language now.

      However I tend to call them all MUMPS variants. Although there are several mutually incompatible branches to the language, they all share essential features and are more alike than not. Understanding the common root technology explains the design patterns and conceptual similarities better than any other way I have tried.

      • I coded in MIIS and Magic. Yes, Magic is also an integrated language and database, but the language is closer to C++. Calling it a variant of MUMPS is a stretch. And Meditech moved on from Magic for new development quite some time ago. The current language is quite different.

  2. “HHS announces that it will use its discretion to set maximum annual HIPAA fines based on level of culpability”

    They just made it cheaper to ignore security issues as long as you don’t know about it. Don’t ask, don’t tell, and don’t spend the necessary money on security.







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