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Monday Morning Update 11/29/21
Top News
Best Buy discloses in its quarterly earnings call that its cost to acquire remote patient monitoring technology vendor Current Health in October was $400 million in cash.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Most poll respondents feel pretty good about how their employers will fare in 2022.To what degree will resignations and hiring challenges affect your employer’s prospects in the next few years?
New poll to your right or here: To what degree will resignations and hiring challenges affect your employer’s prospects over the next few years? This in response to a comment on last week’s poll in which a reader predicted significant long-term impact of organizations losing experienced health IT employees.
Webinars
December 8 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “What Lies Ahead for the EHR’s Problem List.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: James Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; Deepak Pillai, MD, MBA, physician informaticist, IMO; Jonathan Gold, MD, MHA, MSc, physician informaticist, IMO. The EHR problem list can be cluttered with redundant, missing, and outdated diagnoses, and displays don’t always help clinicians process the available data correctly. The presenters will discuss how improvements in creating, maintaining, and displaying problems could reduce errors and decrease the cognitive load of clinicians while continuing to optimize reimbursement.
December 9 (Thursday) 1:30 ET. “Cone Health: Creating Extreme Efficiencies in Surgical Services.” Sponsor: RelayOne. Presenters: Wayne McFatter, RN, MSN and Sharon McCarter, RN co-directors of perioperative services, Cone Health. The presenters will discuss how they have empowered the entire surgical care team, including vendor representatives, to get real-time access to surgery schedules and case requirements in the palms of their hand. RelayOne CEO Cam Sexton will also present the findings of a recent study of 100 hospital leaders regarding their operating room optimization plans for 2022.
December 14 (Tuesday) 1 ET. “Using Cloud to Boost AI and Enterprise Imaging.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Larry Sitka, MS, VP/CSIO of enterprise applications, Canon Medical Informatics; Jacob Wheeler, MBA, senior product manager, CloudWave. Enterprise imaging has remained a holdout of data center complexity despite the benefits the cloud offers. The presenters will discuss innovative ways to reduce complexity and lead with disruptive technology using AI, enterprise imaging, and the cloud.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
People
Alexander Scarlat, MD (Codixim) joins Mitre as principal data scientist of its health IT group. He wrote the “Machine Learning Primer for Clinicians” series for HIStalk a while back.
Matt Lungren, MD, MPH (Stanford Center for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare) joins Amazon Web Services as principal for clinical AI and machine learning for worldwide public health.
Announcements and Implementations
Konica Minolta adds Appropriate Use Criteria for advanced diagnostic imaging to its Exa Platform, in which orders placed through its physician portal will be validated electronically against CMS criteria using logic from LogicNets.
Government and Politics
The MIT Catalyst program announces a new group of VHA Innovation Ecosystem Fellows, who will work to improve veteran care through need-driven biomedical research and innovation.
Medical University of South Carolina sues six of its oncologists and HCA Healthcare, alleging that the doctors – who will leave MUSC on December 1 to take jobs at HCA-owned Trident Medical Center — stole confidential information such as case logs and patient lists to help their new employer create a competing head and neck oncology program. MUSC said the doctors used its email servers to send confidential preference card information to Trident officials.
Other
Several NFL and college football teams are collecting impact data from sensor-embedded player mouthpieces, pairing the force, speed, direction, and location information with video to test helmet effectiveness and to influence future rule-making to reduce concussions.
In Canada, Peterborough Regional Health Centre lays off 84 employees as part of its Epic implementation. The hospital says it is eliminating a “limited number of clerical roles.” The hospital is one of seven Central East Ontario health systems, representing 14 hospitals, that will go live on Epic on December 3.
A Wall Street Journal article titled “It’s Time to Get Rid of the IT Department” says that the typical IT department is a bureaucratic island that hinders innovation, digital transformation, and customer focus, making these points:
- Separating the IT department – both organizationally and physically – from the core business doesn’t make sense, even if the group is given a sexy new name like “global digital solutions.” Technology is no longer optional.
- Treating IT as a partner to the business encourages it to be judged using metrics that are often irrelevant to long-term business outcomes, such as budget, uptime, and project completion. “Meeting specs” doesn’t correlate with success, and businesses isn’t driven by owning, building, and managing IT systems.
- Business units can’t predict their technology needs months or years in advance as required by IT budgeting, making it impossible for siloed IT departments to meet expectations for being faster and more flexible.
- Most IT employees work there because they love technology rather than the company’s core business, creating a culture gap that ignores the fact that the business is the technology and vice versa.
- Some companies are moving toward focusing on realizing value from IT within business units instead of rewarding the IT department for centrally managing it. This makes more sense as cloud computing relieves IT from managing physical assets such as data centers and servers and low-code software development reduces the need for programming talent.
- Companies are organizing their missions around groups that include embedded technical experts, which encourages innovative thinking, deeper subject matter expertise, and fewer handoffs.
- IT decentralization comes with “freedom within a framework,” such as requiring use of standardized development tools, architecture, and security protocols.
RSNA expects 19,000 attendees to attend this week’s in-person conference at Chicago’s McCormick Place, with another 4,000 participating virtually. The exhibit hall will showcase 500 vendors. The last in-person meeting, RSNA 2019, drew 52,000 registrants, with exhibitor personnel making up nearly half of the total.
Sponsor Updates
- In England, North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust implements TrakCare electronic prescribing and medication administration technology from InterSystems.
- CHIME honors HCA Healthcare and Meditech with its Collaboration Award.
- OptimizeRx wins two Digital Health Awards.
Blog Posts
- Why a security component is as critical to your FHIR ecosystem (Infor)
- Is Your Digital Front Door Strategy Welcoming to All? (InterSystems)
- FHIR 101: Solving healthcare’s interoperability problem (Intelligent Medical Objects)
- Infographic: Key Patient Access Journey Insights (Kyruus)
- The Evolution of SDOH and Health Data Exchange (LexisNexis)
- Is Staffing in Perioperative Care at a Crisis Point? (Lumeon)
- The unspoken courage of modern nursing (Meditech)
- How to Perform an Analysis on Competitor PT Practices (MWTherapy)
- RSNA 2021: Reconnecting, redefining, and recognizing the challenges and opportunities ahead (Nuance)
- These technologies stand to change healthcare forever, and they already exist (Olive)
- Understanding Psychographics: AJMC (PatientBond)
- Using Analytics to Unlock the Value of Social Determinants of Health Data (Pivot Point Consulting)
- How Nurse Leaders Drive Change and Affect Strategic Goals (Symplr)
- Physician burnout: a history of the not-so-recent phenomenon plaguing clinicians (Spok)
- Amazon and Vocera Elevate the Power of the Patient Voice (Vocera)
- 23 Patient Stories That Show Just How Amazing PTs Are (WebPT)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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About that WSJ article. I take EXTREME exception to the author’s assertion about the type of people that work in healthcare IT. I can tell you most, if not all that I have worked with do so because of the greater good and being part of something that matters. There are other points that reveal the author being a typical academic and not talking to the people in the trenches. I will most likely contact this person directly and expect they will not respond. That single point made me set aside everything else in the article as he lost me. And I hope all of my sisters and brothers in healthcare IT.
Re: WSJ article.
I’ve often said that I believe that either centralized or distributed IT can work. However a distributed IT model requires broad support within the organization and should be accompanied by multiple other distributed services, practices, and even businesses. In particular, there still needs to be a mechanism (or mechanisms) to get common standards and services, where those are justified.
My first-hand experience? If you implemented distributed IT at my employers, the result would be an unsatisfactory mess. Some few departments would be organized and effective. The majority would be rather distracted and neglectful (IT is neither their interest nor their core competency). A few would do the absolute minimum, which might mean they do nothing at all.
Most companies wind up with a central IT department. I don’t think that’s an accident. Truly distributed businesses are a rarity; trying to shoe-horn in IT as distributed, when everything else is centralized? It’s a culture clash and a recipe for big problems.
It’s one thing to identify a problem, WSJ. It’s quite another to recommend a solution which will be helpful.
No more IT Dept? Just as easy as Defund the Police.
Fast Forward 10 years…new WSJ.com Headline – “Decentralized IT Departments are Dead – Centralized IT Could Solve Fragmentation and Interoperability Issues”
… “and Save Millions!”