Weekender 4/17/20

Weekly News Recap

• The FCC starts accepting applications for its $200 million telehealth expense reimbursement program and issues the first set of grants.
• The American Medical Association and American Hospital Association publish a cybersecurity guide for working from home.
• Meadville Medical Center (PA) recovers from its second malware-caused downtime of 2020.
• Apple and Google announce plans to work together to develop Bluetooth-powered COVID-19 contract tracing on mobile phones.
• Alphabet’s Verily defends its decision to limit access to its COVID-19 screening website to users who have created Google accounts.
• Allscripts subsidiary CarePort Health publishes an analysis of COVID-19 using the inpatient EHR data it stores.
• Democratic lawmakers express privacy concerns about a White House discussion of using hospital information for coronavirus surveillance, with Politico reporting that health HIT vendors Collective Medical, PatientPing, and Juvare have responded to White House inquiries.

Best Reader Comments

If you are simply extending an EMR that is already built, the short timeline [to configure a pop-up hospital] is reasonable. For ease, it’s basically a new nursing unit and you can leverage the order catalog and documentation that has already been built. You are utilizing the same make and model of devices that you use in the inpatient setting and you have the same pharmacy formularies. At its core, its a lot of copying and rerouting of printing / orders. Also keep in mind that these pop-up hospitals are not full service, so a lot of the custom build for the ancillary areas doesn’t need to be replicated. (Modern CIO)

Hospitals have always been a bit of a chimera: ERs and ICUs as public health infrastructure, sliding through surgery suites, labs, imaging and office buildings for physician practices that were more commercial, into outright profit-maximizing activities of many kinds, all under a not-for-profit umbrella in most cases. Throw in medical schools and huge research efforts and it is a mess. Pandemic has laid it bare. Our politics don’t exactly promise to sort out society’s needs here. Step out one level and it gets more perverse, as commercial health up the funding stream in the current situation are banking billions in payments for needed and unneeded care that isn’t happening. (Randy Bak)

The presence or absence of universal healthcare is not the determining factor in what is going on right now; the determining factors are the complete absence of a scientifically-informed Federal response, and an economy that relies on hourly wage labor in service industries, and minimal to no infrastructure to support us when those industries evaporate overnight. People’s ability (or inability) to pay for the treatment they receive if they become infected is a separate factor, and is significant in its own right, but is not the reason our economy just cratered. (HIT Girl)

With provider revenue dropping across the country and major expense reductions announced, it is time for our vendor community to step up and give us a break on those ongoing expenses. I’d like to see a 25-50% reduction for the duration of the crisis – a minimum three months. How about it, Partners? (Bill Spooner)

I agree that it would be nice it for the IT vendors (and others) to give the provider community a break on the provider expenses. I see most respectable, financially secure vendors working with the providers over the next few months until things normalize. However, vendors that are experiencing their own financial issues may have a hard time doing that. Bottom line, you can’t get blood from a turnip. We are going to have to all work together to move beyond this catastrophe. It is going to take much longer to recover than it did for us to get into this mess. CEOs and other top level executives from all business sectors are going to have to take a financial hit. Everyone is going to have to tighten their belt. This will be a true test of the survival of the fittest. Will be interesting to see which hospital groups, providers and provider groups, as well as IT vendors will come out on the other end of this event. (Not All In)

Watercooler Talk Tidbits

Readers funded the Donors Choose teacher grant request of Mr. H in California, who requested components for his high school’s robotics team. He reported a few weeks ago, “I want to personally thank you for your generous gift of the pneumatic supplies needed for the Robotics team. The kids will use the pneumatic cylinders to manipulate game pieces for our competitions. Without these devices the robot would not be able to compete against more well-funded teams. So far, the students have started building our 2020 robot using the supplies that were graciously donated.”

Providence St. John’s Medical Center (CA) suspends 10 nurses after they refuse to work in its coronavirus unit without N95 masks. One of the suspended nurses has since tested positive for COVID-19. An insider says the hospital ordered the nurses to work with only surgical masks and threatened to report them to the state nursing board for patient abandonment if they didn’t get to work. The hospital was giving N95 masks to doctors, who told the nurses they shouldn’t be working without them. The hospital declined to comment, citing labor laws and HIPAA, but has said it will now issue reprocessed N95 masks to all caregivers who care for COVID-19 patients. It has not reinstated the 10 nurses pending an HR investigation.

A cybersecurity firm finds 500,000 sets of login credentials for the Zoom teleconferencing service for sale on the dark web for use by Zoombombers, complete with emails, passwords, meeting URLs, and host keys.

In Sweden, Princess Sofia completes a training program and begins working as a volunteer at Sophiahemmet Hospital, where she will disinfect equipment and work in the kitchen. 

A pregnant COVID-19 patient who spent 11 days in a medically induced coma on a ventilator in a New York hospital awakens to meet her new son, who was delivered by emergency C-section right after she was admitted to the ICU. She was discharged Wednesday and her son Walter has tested negative for COVID-19.

In Case You Missed It

• News 4/17/20
• EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 4/16/20
• News 4/15/20
• Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 4/13/20
• Monday Morning Update 4/13/20

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