Giving a patient medications in the ER, having them pop positive on a test, and then withholding further medications because…
Monday Morning Update 10/10/22
Top News
Virginia Mason Franciscan Health (WA), part of the CommonSpirit Health system, updates patients on the ongoing, unspecified IT incident that last week forced many CommonSpirit facilities to revert to downtime procedures, divert ambulances, and reschedule appointments.
CommonSpirit has yet to issue a statement.
Patients, meanwhile, are growing frustrated by the lack of digital access, which has turned online appointment scheduling and record retrieval into processes more laborious than usual. Prescription refills have also been impacted.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
The majority of poll respondents are in favor of the HHS decision to hold firm on the October 6 deadline for information sharing.
New poll to your right or here: Which of the following items did you earn after age 35 that has been most valuable in your career? If you’ve done something on the list that turned out to be a great career booster in your 30s or after, others would no doubt be interested. I’m sure I didn’t think of every possible item, so add a poll comment if you earned some other credential that paid off big time.
An Olive rep clarified some points from Thursday’s news post regarding the company’s decision to divest its population health and 340b products: Those offerings make up less than 3% of the company’s revenue and no longer align with Olive’s product strategy. Two of its customers gave notice in August and September, in contrast to the number in the original article.
Webinars
October 12 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “In Praise of the Problem-Oriented Medical Record (POMR).” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, KeyCare; Amber Sieja, MD, senior medical director of informatics, UCHealth and Ambulatory Services; Jim Thompson, MD, physician informaticist, IMO. The problem-oriented medical record – initially developed in the 1960s by Lawrence Weed, MD – brought important structure to paper charting, and in particular, the problem list. Yet, today, the tool that was once the gold standard for organizing and making sense of patient history is often cluttered and unmanageable. Fortunately, tools and strategies exist to help make the problem list more meaningful, helping to synthesize patient data, highlight insights, and support patient care. The expert panel will share their experiences with POMR, including documentation practices and tools to improve workflows and efficiency, the impact of POMR and charting on the overall health of a patient, and the challenges and obstacles clinicians face when practicing POMR and charting and how they can be overcome.
October 18 (Tuesday) 2 ET. “Patient Payment Trends 2022: Learn All The Secrets.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Mend. Many industries offer frictionless payments, but healthcare still sends paper bills to patients who are demanding modern conveniences. This webinar will review consumer sentiment on healthcare payments, recent changes to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act that create opportunities for new patient financial engagement, and new tactics to collect more payments faster from patients.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Sales
- The VA selects Coforma to assist it in developing clinical decision support apps and EHR integrations.
- A Northeastern health system selects VisiQuate’s denials management, revenue management, and reserve analytics.
Announcements and Implementations
Image-sharing vendor Send Mammogram implements ClearData’s CyberHealth cybersecurity technology.
Box Butte General Hospital (NE) postpones its roll out of Meditech Expanse as it takes into account lessons learned from a mock live event held in late September.
EClinicalWorks announces the addition of sign, patient survey, and chatbot capabilities to its family Healow patient engagement apps at its annual user conference, where it also launched the latest version of its EHR. CFO Mark Speyer noted that the company has increased its staff count by 10% in 2022, and will continue to hire in the next year.
Government and Politics
Oracle Cerner engineers resolve an application package coding issue that caused the VA’s EHR pharmacy module to go down for 11 hours last week. In a separate incident, certain patients were unable to access the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System, a database of US military members, family members, veterans, and others eligible for military benefits. That issue resolved without technical intervention.
Other
The Nebraska Hospital Association and the University of Nebraska Medical Center prepare to launch an initiative that will give researchers access to the hospital’s de-identified claims data. The association hopes to partner with additional hospitals willing to give researchers access to similar data sets.
Intermountain Healthcare (UT) begins offering delivery of specialty pharmaceuticals and certain over-the-counter medications by drone to eligible patients in the Salt Lake Valley area. The health system, which first announced its drone delivery plans in 2018, has partnered with San Francisco-based company Zipline to offer the service.
Sponsor Updates
- Clearwater sponsors the Nashville Health Care Council Golf Tournament.
- Meditech and Forward Advantage develop the PxMobile healthcare system-branded app.
- Methodist Health System extends its 25-year relationship with Oracle Cerner with a 10-year contract extension.
- Optimum Healthcare IT names Shane Kuppler (Health Care District of Palm Beach County) Epic revenue cycle analyst.
- Relatient releases a new episode of Dash Talk Podcast, “How Better Access Gives OrthoSC a ‘Leg Up’ on Care Delivery.”
- Talkdesk receives two Frost & Sullivan 2022 Customer Value Leadership Awards for vertical market excellence.
- Tegria will present at the HFMA Region 2 Annual Fall Institute October 13 in Verona, NY.
- Volpara Health receives a 2022 Good Design Award for Volpara Analytics in the digital design category.
Blog Posts
- Key Takeaways: Evolution of Healthcare Systems (Pivot Point Consulting)
- Nurses of Note Awards 2022: The Clinical Practice Specialist (PerfectServe)
- Top 3 Takeaways from the AHIP Consumer Experience & Digital Health Forum (Redox)
- In-house vs. Outsourcing: The Benefits of a Chart Abstraction Service (ReMedi Health Solutions)
- What is call center routing and how does it improve customer experience? (Talkdesk)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.
CommonSpirit: This mess must be detangled. and then we’ll all watch Northern Exposure episode “Burning Down the House”
We’ll need a Trebuchet.
Where is the “LOVE” button? One of my favorite shows.
Interesting that Common Spirit has 5 or 6 IT execs leave running up to and during this event. There may be more to this story.
Their CIO was fired over 6 months ago. She kept banking on the name brand for a while, looking for a new job this entire time. Until this latest fiasco happened. Then CSH had to put their IT leaders in the spotlight and make it known that their CIO was no longer there. Still gave her a respectable June departure date for her CV.
One of the major issues with CSH is that after the merger of Dignity and CHI, they never really had an IT integration plan for the two organizations. They basically worked independantly and were only 1 health system in name only.
If I am allowed to be very blunt, the recently terminated CIO (again just being blunt and honest) should have never been the CIO. To ask someone from outside of Healthcare, one of the most regulated industries in existence, to be the CIO during one of the largest mergers we have seen in a while, was just a poor decision.
There is lot more to this story. You really need to look at the organizations before the merger to see the true level of dysfunction. The post merger decisions (and turnover) just compounded what was already a broken ‘system’
I’ll take the complaints about EHR outages over complaints about the EHR itself.
The human condition destines us to complaints about something! And resistance to the very idea of the EHR was existential in nature; it led to years worth of resistance over modernization itself.
Now consider that the EHR might be down. This is a solvable problem. It’s much smaller overall, than the decision to spend big bux on the EHR.
Honestly, adopting EHR systems in Medicine? It was something of an act of faith. Yet I am a Doubting Thomas, I most definitely want confirmation that we are doing the right thing. There were solid reasons to believe in computerization. Remember, all other industrial sectors did this and benefited from it.
What would be a sign that EHRs were a bad initiative? It would look something like this: “The EHR system is down. Thank goodness! That system has has only been a source of frustration and extra work.”