I hear, and personally experience instances where the insurance company does not understand (or at least can explain to us…
Monday Morning Update 7/5/21
Top News
Three University of Texas organizations – University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, The University of Texas at Arlington, and The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center – form the Texas Health Informatics Alliance.
THIA will hold its first conference virtually on September 9.
Reader Comments
From Censored: “Re: HIMSS21 podcasts and video. The conference guidelines say that audio and video recording are mostly banned. Attendee interviews must be scheduled in advance and recorded in an enclosed location outside the aisles. Perhaps that applies to press only.” I’m one of few people who have been threatened (years ago) with expulsion by the HIMSS police for daring to snap a photo of a booth I was walking by. Despite that, I expect it’s mostly a complaint-based system designed to protect exhibitors from competitive espionage. According to the HIMSS21 guidelines:
- Video recording, audio recording, and photography is prohibited during keynote sessions. HIMSS warns attendees that its staff will immediately escort anyone out who takes photos (good luck with that).
- In the exhibit hall, photos and videos can be taken only in the exhibitor’s booth, with cameras or other equipment facing into that booth. Recording another exhibitor’s booth may result in termination of future exhibiting privileges. Media members must have HIMSS media credentials to take video or photos in a booth.
- Attendees may not record interviews by walking up to people – interviews must be scheduled ahead of time and done in a booth or enclosed location away from the exhibit hall aisles and hallways outside keynote presentations.
Bottom line, as the reader is suggesting, anyone who is recording or taking pictures other than in an individual exhibitor’s booth is breaking conference rules. I swear last conference you could barely walk around without constantly running into someone who was recording an interview that the world cared nothing about.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Most poll respondents don’t believe that the compensation of remote workers should be adjusted based on their local cost of living, with comments reflecting a “just pay people what the are worth” belief.
New poll to your right or here: How much impact has the information technology used by your providers and insurers had on your overall health and happiness?
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I’m fascinated by the sad situation at the collapsed Champlain Towers South in Florida, mostly because it is unfolding nearly exactly as laid out by John D. McDonald’s 1977 novel “Condominium.” The book weaves a tale of Florida condo builder greed, the misery of living under HOA oversight, volunteer condo board members who are personally attacked by their neighbors over the necessary but potentially unaffordable cost of maintaining their shared homes, construction shortcuts that builders get away with, and Florida’s draw of newcomers who treat every day as a responsibility-free vacation. I got my copy in a “fill a bag with books for $5” library sale years ago and I’ve read it at least 10 times since, although I’ve misplaced that copy and am balking at paying $12 for its Kindle replacement. It’s a great read at nearly 600 pages, so I’ll probably pull the trigger even though I would be happier if Amazon allowed me to lend or gift the Kindle copy after I’ve read it for the 11th time as I did its $0.25 predecessor.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Sales
- Virtual care vendor Orb Health chooses Redox to enable access to provider EHRs.
People
TransformativeMed hires industry long-timer Shawn DeWane (Hayes MDaudit) as president and CEO.
Mon Health (WV) promotes Mon Health Medical Center Chief Administrative Officer Mark Gilliam to SVP of the health system (he was the health system’s first CIO through June 2021) and promotes Associate CIO Mark Combs, MBA to CIO.
The city celebrates retiring Huntsville Hospital CEO David Spillers, MBA, who started his healthcare in the 1980s as an IT analyst and then became CIO of Mission Hospitals (NC).
Announcements and Implementations
Belma Andric, MD, MPH, chief medical officer at Health Care District of Palm Beach County, celebrates its Epic go-live with a team photo.
Other
Providence St. Joseph Health Senior Clinical Data Engineer Angelique Russell, MPH lists reasons that sepsis predictive models – like the one offered by Epic – fail:
- Hospitals don’t equip many of their beds with continuous monitoring technology, so manual vital sign measurement and entry is delayed.
- Hospitals upcode to maximize revenue, as coders are prodded to find enough sepsis criteria in “rule out sepsis” orders to justify higher bills that may not meet a strict clinical definition of sepsis. Systems that use bill codes for clinical purposes are likely to be unsuccessful.
- Models developed elsewhere may not be generalizable depending on the other facility’s clinical definition of sepsis and the at-risk populations it treats.
- No evidence exists to guide sepsis treatment that is predicted hours in advance.
I don’t usually get involved with open positions, but Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas in Pittsburg, KS is recruiting a CIO. I figured they could use some pro bono help and I’ve got little to write about this holiday weekend, so there you go. Pittsburg is a two-hour drive from Kansas City or Tulsa and you can get a lot of house for the money – a richly detailed 4,000 square foot two-story from the early 1900s is less than $300K. I’ve heard of the town because it has two fried chicken restaurants next door to each other, Chicken Mary’s and Chicken Annie’s (their curious existence spawned a well-received fictional novel called “The Chicken Sisters.”) Anyway, I’ve worked in rural health systems and the opportunity and quality of life can be excellent, so consider your career objectives and whether a CIO job might help you attain them.
Sponsor Updates
- Intrado’s HouseCalls Pro digital patient engagement platform earns a score of 88.3 out of 100 in a new First Look report from KLAS.
- Protenus Chief of Staff Sherrod Davis wins a Baltimore Business 2021 Best in Tech Award.
- Talkdesk launches Talkdesk for Service Cloud Voice on Salesforce AppExchange.
- Business First Louisville names Waystar CFO Steve Oreskovich to its Best in Finance list.
Blog Posts
- 3 Practical Applications of Psychographic Segmentation (PatientBond)
- The Future of Mobility in Healthcare (PatientKeeper)
- Operating Room Management: Scheduling and OR Efficiency (PerfectServe)
- Charge Lag & Reconciliation: The Bottom Line! (PMD)
- Indiana Health System Boosts Bottom Line by $7 Million with HCC Alerts (Premier)
- Partnering with the Mental Health Center of Denver to Support Our Community (RxRevu)
- Survey says: How to ask better patient feedback questions (Sonifi Health)
- How to Meet Your Compliance Obligations with Data Protection (Spirion)
- Our most popular clinical communication blog posts of 2021 (so far!) (Spok)
- SCRIPT Migration Success Story: Henry Schein MicroMD (Surescripts)
- 3 ways the contact center has become the hub of health plan member experience (Talkdesk)
- Why Using Word Templates for Your PT Documentation is a Terrible Idea (WebPT)
- 5 takeaways from our CEO Panel: Driving Transformation Amid Uncertainty (West Monroe)
- Acronyms, Audits and Automation – Oh My! (Vyne Medical)
- Three Essential Strategies for Keeping Your Data Flowing (Zen Healthcare IT)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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I love reading HIStalk. I saw your reference to the book Condominium. Since I retired from Memorial Sloan Kettering as SVP and CIO and moving to Littleton Colorado, I have enjoyed acquainting myself with my local library. I just requested a copy of Condominium – it is being ordered through inter library loan and will be available for me to pick up at my local library. The local library is a great resource for books, ebooks, audio books, videos and streaming media.
Pat
Love the public library…. when I sat for the first Clinical Informatics board certification exam, I used interlibrary loan for all the textbooks I read to prepare. Mine has a summer reading program where even adults can win prizes – not just for the kiddos anymore!
Maybe I’m out to lunch here… but somehow I doubt it.
The only way out of the condominium trap (shoddily built units that later require expensive, and frequently unaffordable repairs and renovation)? It’s to make the condos true long-term cost up front, apparent. And the only way I see to do that? The dreaded “government regulation”.
I mean, in theory, you could do it other ways. You could simply have a responsible contractor culture that refuses to do shoddy work. You could create a real-estate value culture that promotes ‘quality’ and ‘safety’. You could have Building Inspections that weren’t a joke. You could have Municipal Building Permits that refuses to issue permits on substandard plans.
The problem with all those other ways is that ship has sailed. If they worked, we’d see their effects everywhere in Florida. Instead we see cheap as a key selling point, and focus on the climate, the beaches and the lifestyle.
But hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Florida has experienced a wake-up call that will change their entire culture. Sure. And pigs might fly too!
I have to say that I find it funny that slews of provider organizations are coming out saying sepsis AI doesn’t work because they’ve all upcoded sepsis diagnoses. Seems like some great candidates for a Medicare audit. Maybe they can use the sepsis predictor to predict overpayment!
Thank you for the shout-out. Let us know if you’re ever in the area for some fried chicken.
Ha. Last time I was in Pittsburgh, KS I got food poisoning. It wasn’t the chicken though. I was bicycling across the US and let’s say my memories of Pittsburgh are vivid but not fond.