News 12/28/22

Top News

The Spokane VA is losing clinical staff over its Oracle Cerner implementation, the local paper finds. The hospital is projecting a budget deficit of $30 million in the fiscal year that ends in September 2023, with $10.5 million of the shortfall being caused by adding jobs to offset the loss of productivity with Oracle Cerner.

Employees complain that Oracle Cerner requires extra steps and irrelevant drop-down entries because it shares the DoD’s design, such as a lab prompt that requires selecting the patient’s species (since DoD documents the care of service animals).

The hospital’s decreased capacity has led more veterans to seek care in the private sector, which involves longer waits and higher cost to taxpayers.

Nearly three-fourths of the employees of Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center said in a September survey that their morale had decreased because of Oracle Cerner, with the vast majority complaining about less-efficient work processes, increased documentation time, and concerns about patient safety. More than 80% of respondents said they have seen little or no improvement in the system went live.

An OB-GYN  resigned “mainly because of the Cerner EMR,” saying that she is “mystified by and beyond disappointed in the Cerner product.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Two-thirds of poll respondents say that the kind of healthcare that most of us want can’t be delivered in the US because of our free market health system. AT says that individuals prefer to be healthy, but that is a worst-case scenario for providers who are paid under a sick care model. Cosmos says healthcare should be regulated like a utility. Adam Smith (probably not the one who comes to mind since he’s been dead for a couple of centuries) notes that people don’t actually want healthcare, they want to feel and look better, so a true free-market system would focus on services that consumers will pay for, such as Lasik and cosmetic surgery, at the expense of public health and emergency services that support the common good.

New poll to your right or here: Is it acceptable for a non-profit health system to provide donors and VIPs with a higher level of non-clinical service than everybody else gets? I’ve mentioned before that I worked right out of school for a dump of a for-profit hospital, and when the mother of the eye surgeon who was our biggest revenue generator was scheduled to be admitted, it was like the President had collapsed on the sidewalk outside. I still maintain that we weren’t doing her any favors on the clinical side – nurses and other staff were forced to work outside their usual routines to cater to her in her room in a mostly isolated hallway (because our fawning administrators had her neighbors transferred further away) and the last thing you want as a patient is for clinicians to be winging it.

Webinars

January 19 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Supercharge Your Clinical Data Searches.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenter: Paul Robbins, MSMBA, VP of product, Particle. Particle’s team will preview the exciting results of Specialty Search, a new condition-specific record locator service. This webinar will review how to collect patient records from top Centers of Excellence across the entire country; how healthcare organizations of all types are benefiting from Specialty Search capabilities, using Particle’s simple API; and why a focused search of chronic condition data — in oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, orthopedics, and more — has an outsized impact on care outcomes.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A private equity firm acquires clinical research technology vendor Calyx, which it will fold into its GLO Healthcare.

Oracle Cerner has offered 4.1 million square feet of Kansas City-area office space for sale in the past 22 months.

Sales

• Luminis Health will replace its legacy PACS with Visage 7 from Visage Imaging in a transactional licensing model for the cloud-engineered system.

People

Medecision hires Jana Barbuto (FluidEdge Consulting) as SVP of business development.

Hunter Bradley (Finvi) joins Atlas Health as VP of implementation.

Privacy and Security

An Associated Press report finds that governments are using COVID-19 contact tracing apps for mass surveillance, to stifle dissent, and to provide police with suspect tracking information. In the US, HHS signed contracts for collecting identifiable patient data and CDC bought the cellphone tracking data of 20 million people for COVID-related purposes.

Other

An op-ed piece in BMJ says that  NHS England needs to move ahead with giving patient access to their own records, both to empower them and to support the self-reliance that is necessary as access to care in the UK has slid to among the worst countries in Europe.

An advocacy group finds that employees at Washington, DC’s public psychiatric hospital didn’t notice one patient killing another earlier this year because they were staring at their phones, chatting, or away from their assigned posts.

An Ontario breast cancer survivor says that a speech recognition program’s omission of the leading word “if” in the second sentence above led her to believe that her cancer had returned.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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