Sounds reasonable, until you look at the Silicon Valley experience. Silicon Valley grew like a weed precisely because employees could…
News 4/17/20
Top News
Meadville Medical Center (PA) recovers from its second breach of the year as it brings its systems back online after a March 26 malware attack.
Its Meditech software was back up and running March 31.
The hospital suffered a payroll system breach in late January.
Reader Comments
From Doctor Who: “Re: specialists covering COVID units. Would you want to be one of those patients?” I would not want to be (for multiple reasons), but my takeaway is that we don’t have many doctors left who can treat an entire human rather than just their singular body part niche or who can do more than crank out repetitive, high-paying procedures. We’re putting medical students and residents on the front lines in assuming they have useful skills to offer despite their inexperience, yet many of their counterparts in practice who already have completed an MD degree, broad training, and then residency in ophthalmology, dermatology, pathology, etc. have been away from general patient care for so long that they are often not much good for anything beyond performing nurse aide work. The percentage of medical school graduates from the past 40 years who are still practicing and can confidently perform basic patient triage, stabilization, diagnosis, and management must be tiny. I would trade those COVID-draftee specialists for a good nurse who can monitor vital signs, keep the pumps and ventilators going, administer drugs and start IVs with skill, and keep me comfortable and feeling cared for.
From Afternoon Delight: “Re: favorite albums. Someone on Twitter asked for favorites. What are yours? I need new quarantine music.” It’s hard to pick just a few, but these are ones that were groundbreaking, have stood the test of time (meaning most are old), and that have enough beginning-to-end brilliance that I find myself listening all the way through. I included two live albums that show the musicianship of the band better than their studio originals.
- Close to the Edge (Yes)
- The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (David Bowie)
- Master of Reality (Black Sabbath)
- A Hard Day’s Night (The Beatles)
- Forever Changes (Love)
- 2112 (Rush)
- Dark Side of the Moon (Pink Floyd)
- The Doors (The Doors)
- Life’s Rich Pageant (R.E.M.)
- Doolittle (Pixies)
- Live at Leeds (The Who)
- Are You Experienced (The Jimi Hendrix Experience)
- One Night Only (Bee Gees)
- Odessey and Oracle (The Zombies)
- Selling England by the Pound (Genesis)
Webinars
April 28 (Tuesday) 1 ET: “COVID-19: Managing an evolving patient population with health information systems.”Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO; Reeti Chauhan, senior product manager, IMO. IMO recently released new novel coronavirus descriptors to help clinicians accurately record diagnoses and also created free IMO Precision COVID-19 Sets to help identify and analyze patients with potential or documented infection. The presenters will discuss these new tools and describe how to use them optimally.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Sales
- The California Department of Veterans Affairs will implement Netsmart’s MyUnity EHR to care for residents in its eight Veterans Homes.
- Carle Health (IL) signs a five-year deal with Health Catalyst for its data and analytics software and services.
- UK HealthCare (KY) selects virtual ICU software from Philips.
- St. Elizabeth Healthcare will install radiology and breast imaging software from Sectra across its five hospitals and outpatient facilities in Kentucky and Ohio.
People
Goliath Technologies names Karen Armor (5Nine) SVP of worldwide sales.
Matt Williams (Loop Returns) joins Healthfinch as CTO.
Announcements and Implementations
GE Healthcare and Microsoft retool software that was originally intended to debut at HIMSS into cloud-based monitoring software for COVID-19 patients in ICUs. The companies are offering the software for free, minus installation costs, through January.
Mayo Clinic (MN) develops a contact-tracing tool using EHR data that alerts staff if they come into contact with patients or staff members who have been diagnosed with COVID-19.
COVID-19
ProPublica finds that at-home deaths are skyrocketing in some cities, with the most likely causes being either COVID-19 or serious conditions that people didn’t report because of infection fears. New York City’s deaths outside of hospitals and nursing homes is running six times average. Detroit authorities responded to 150 “dead person observed” calls in the first 10 days of April versus the average of 40, almost all of those occurring in low-income neighborhoods. Some coroners are not listing COVID-19 as a contributing factor in the absence of a positive test even though CDC allows doing so, while some states are falling behind on death reporting due to low staffing and outdated computer systems. As with many aspects of coronavirus, we just don’t know.
Verily assures senators that its COVID-19 screening website for California residents adheres to data protection standards, and adds that, despite criticism, it has no plans to open up the full platform to people who don’t have Google accounts.
UnitedHealth Group reports Q1 earnings of $5 billion on revenue of $64 billion, postulating that any higher costs of diagnosis and treating COVID-19 were more than offset by people who are cancelling their routine appointments and elective surgeries.
UCSF Health develops a campus-wide COVID-19 dashboard that updates in near real time. I’m slightly surprised that it doesn’t include non-patient data such as availability of PPE, ventilators, drugs, and staff (including the number or percentage of staff infected or quarantined), but I’m guessing those metrics are monitored from a different dashboard.
The Washington Post highlights the approaches that health systems are taking to notify their employees of exposure to patients or staff with COVID-19. Mayo Clinic’s internal contact-tracing app seems to be unique, as most organizations mentioned in the article rely on ad hoc screening and testing methods with little to no transparency about cases, capacity, and PPE across their facilities. Meanwhile, CDC data suggest that at least 9,200 healthcare workers across the country have tested positive for COVID-19, 723 have been hospitalized, and 27 have died as of April 2.
Wake Forest Baptist Health partners with Scanwell Health to launch an at-home antibody testing kit study in North Carolina that it hopes will give officials a better understanding of how prevalent the virus is in the community. The study will also incorporate syndromic surveillance technology from Oracle that will help to identify virus hot spots in nearly real time.
The FDA authorizes emergency use of a saliva test for diagnosing COVID-19 patients, which healthcare workers say will enable them to exponentially increase testing, save PPE, and limit staff exposure to the virus.
A Florida nursing home trade group asks Governor Ron DeSantis to give them immunity from negligence lawsuits that are related to COVID-19. The governor is already blocking media efforts to name facilities where residents have tested positive or to force nursing homes to disclose their resident deaths.
The pandemic is causing financial problems for safety net hospitals that were already struggling with low-paying Medicaid patients. They are losing money from surgeries, losing employees to hospitals that are paying more to deal with the COVID-19 surge, and receiving little from the federal government’s stimulus plan whose payments are based on Medicare revenue rather than COVID-19 patient volume or extra costs.
Other
The American Medical Association and American Hospital Association create a cybersecurity guide for working from home.
Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory develop a router-like box that can be used to passively monitor COVID-19 patients at home. Ideal for seniors in assisted living facilities, the wall-mounted device is capable of monitoring movements, sleeping patterns, and breathing.
Weird News Andy says this story isn’t as edgy after 26 years. A 76-year-old man in China who experienced lost vision in one eye and chronic headaches after being mugged 26 years ago is cured when surgeons remove a rusty 4-inch knife blade from his brain.
Sponsor Updates
- The local paper profiles HCTec’s efforts to equip providers with telemedicine and optimized EHRs.
- Gartner includes Imat Solutions in its “Healthcare Payer CIOs, Leverage Vendor Partners to Succeed at Clinical Data Integration Report.”
- InterSystems releases a new episode of its PulseCast podcast, “Jeff Fried: A Deep Dive on Data Operationalization.”
- Kyruus publishes a “Guide to Enabling Access During & After the COVID-19 Crisis.”
- MerlinWave adds AxiaMed’s patient payment technology to its MWTherapy software for physical therapy practices.
- Netsmart becomes a founding company of the Telewound Coalition.
- HCTec creates HITComm, a LinkedIn group for healthcare stakeholders that focuses on sharing COVID-19 health IT solutions.
- Zen Healthcare IT helps EHealth Exchange integrate AdVault’s digital advance care planning software with its health information network.
Blog Posts
- A view of COVID-19 from the frontlines and the importance of ventilator surveillance (Capsule)
- How Dallas Renal Group is Providing Care While Social Distancing (EClinicalWorks)
- Infection Control Resources for Post-Acute Care Providers (Ensocare)
- Preparedness, PPE, Pediatrics: On the Front Lines of COVID-19 (Glytec)
- Working From Home: 5 Tips to Promote Health and Wellness (Optimum Healthcare IT)
- How Google Cloud is helping COVID-19 academic research (Google Cloud)
- Standing Up a Virtual Business Office (Nordic)
- EHR integrations for COVID-19: resources and solutions from our Marketplace Partners (Greenway Health)
- Call to Action for Compliance and Revenue Integrity Teams: Address COVID-19 Impact Proactively (Hayes Management Consulting)
- Patient Education and Telehealth: Finding Opportunity Amid COVID-19 (Healthwise)
- How ‘we’ built our crisis management tracking app in 24 hours (hint: magic) (Hyland)
- Imat Virtual Health Record Offers a 360-Degree View of Patients Across the Full Continuum of Care (Imat Solutions)
- The New Normal: Tips on Working from Home (Impact Advisors)
- Imprivata GroundControl: Facilitating increased demand for telehealth and virtual care, on-site (Imprivata)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.
Album: silk degrees. Boz Scaggs. Maybe a little poppy for ur taste! Ur list was excellent. The Who live st leeds could be top 5 all time!
Your healthcare IT insight is rivaled by your musical tastes. Life’s Rich Pageant – wow – I was 16 when it was released and talked my parents into letting me drive from Pensacola, FL to New Orleans with two buddies for the concert (Sept 12, 1986 at the Saenger Theatre) … just little more fun than the Friday night high school game.
… Gotta add Hotel California. If I was on a deserted island and had only one album, that would be it.
Woodstock Generation agrees with all the above (i.e., Mr.H’s Favorite Albums, including Hotel California and Silk Degrees) and adds Days of Future Passed (Moody Blues). In fact, it’s just about time to spin some vinyl.
I don’t really understand what the hostile vibes are about regarding med students, residents and older subspecialty physicians who are stepping up to provide care in hospitals that are overwhelmed by The COVID pandemic. Having excellent nursing care is crucial but nurses are similarly in short supply and older docs who trained before IV and phlebotomy teams can draw blood, put in IVs, draw blood gases and do other needed tasks quite well. (It’s like riding a bike. You pick it back up really quickly.)
It’s true that there aren’t enough emergency physicians, internal medicine specialists and critical care physicians to deal with the current surge of COVID patients, but one such person can have their skills extended exponentially by supervising multiple fully trained physicians or residents who can rapidly get brought up to speed, consult on atypical scenarios and take care of all of the other things that require a physician to do such as placing orders or giving particular IV push medications. Our medical student volunteers are doing things like helping bring iPads into patient rooms so that needed consultants can see patients via Telehealth without using up lots of precious PPE. And they are responding to patient requests in other ways so that the patients aren’t as isolated and the limited numbers of nurses can focus on crucial nursing tasks. All of these individuals are literally putting their lives on the line and don’t deserve this level of snarkiness.
That superior and snarky attitude is par for the course here nowadays.
Unfortunately sitting anonymously pecking at his keyboard for all these years
has somehow caused the author to think highly of himself.
Thank you for explaining exaggerated egos, “El Jefe.”
So you came here to snark anonymously as a complaint about snarking anonymously?