The poem: Well, it's not it's not the usual doggerel you see with this sort of thing. It's a quatrain…
News 5/17/24
Top News
The House and Senate Veterans’ Affairs committees introduce legislation related to the VA’s implementation of Oracle Health:
- Rollouts will be paused until the facilities that are live on the system “have recovered to return to normal operational levels.”
- The project and the VA’s Oracle Health contract will be cancelled two years after the bill is passed unless the VA can show metrics that prove overall improvement.
- The metrics that the VA reports to Congress would be expanded to include user adoption, employee satisfaction, and employee retention.
- The VA will be required to provide an additional report to Congress that provides the cost and module-by-module status of its legacy VistA system.
Reader Comments
From Slow Green: “Re: Greenway Health. Tiffani Misencik, chief revenue officer, has departed.” I compared the company’s executive page to the year-ago version and note these changes:
- No longer listed: Tiffani Misencik, chief revenue officer; Terri Gonzalez, chief HR officer.
- Newly added: Frank Piraino, chief of staff; Mark Goodwin, SVP of Greenway Revenue Services; Brandi Kline, VP of marketing; Nallajerla Murthy. GM of Greenway Health India.
From Sprinter: “Re: Vince Ciotti’s HIS-tory series. Do you have a link to the file?” The 1,400-page file that the late Vince wrote for HIStalk over the years covering the industry from the 1960s to the 1990s is here. I ask him in a 2019 conversation what his epitaph would say, to which he replied, “If I could be remembered for anything, it would probably be my HIS-tory files, which I thank you for posting over such a long time, two and a half years. I hope some of the future CIOs read them and learn from them. I hope that’s what they remember me by, the guy that warned them about not repeating these mistakes of the past.”
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
The Wall Street Journal notes that hospitals raised prices 7.7% in April, the largest increase in 13 years.
Sales
- Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin will offer 24×7 virtual urgent care visits via MyChart from KeyCare.
Announcements and Implementations
Epic will roll out a “patients like this one” type tool to its users in Indiana this summer. It will compare the active patient’s chart to Epic’s Cosmos database to help doctors make decisions about treatment options.
Meditech reports that its clients took three of the top five top digital maturity scores among NHS trusts and Integrated Care Systems.
Get-to-Market Health announces Commercial Health Check, a fixed-price review of a client’s go-to-market efforts that details areas of strength and potential improvement. The company’s principals are Steve Shihadeh and MP Brock Zimmerman, who have spent their entire careers in digital health.
MassDevelopment issues $400 million in tax-exempt bonds to fund Beth Israel Lahey Health’s real estate needs and its upgrades to Epic.
Transcarent adds AI-powered patient navigation to its system, which provides a single app and log-in for members to access their benefits, obtain medical advice, and initiate virtual care.
Athenahealth announces GA of AthenaOne modules for women’s health and urgent care.
Epic announces that two of its hospitals in the Netherlands are the first to use its AI-powered patient summaries, presumably in the Dutch language.
Privacy and Security
Ascension has posted no news on its Cybersecurity Event Update. Regional updates indicate that pharmacies still can’t fill prescriptions, patient care may be delayed, and results from imaging and tests may take longer. From press reports:
- One patient whose doctor hadn’t seen her pulled out her own IV and left.
- Another said they can’t get their scheduled chemotherapy.
- A post-surgery patient couldn’t get pain meds because there’s no record of the procedure.
- Patient class action lawsuits have been filed.
- A family member of a patient who died at an Ascension hospitals says they can’t proceed with cremation because the hospital can’t access her cause of death.
- An ultrasound tech says that some areas have working fax machines, while others don’t, adding, “We don’t really have a lot of direction from anyone in upper admin or management.”
- A nurse at an Ascension hospital in Nashville describes the situation as “pure and utter chaos from the second you walk in the door.”
- Ascension Via Christi sent several ICU nurses home after they raised concerns about inadequate staffing.
- Some nurses worry that a mistake made due to the lack of electronic patient safety checks, such as those offered by drug dispensing cabinets and bedside barcoding, could jeopardize their licenses.
- The local paper reports that Ascension Seton medical offices in the Highland Lakes area of Texas have had their systems restored.
Australia’s federal government investigates a ransomware attack of Melbourne-based MediSecure, which offers an e-prescribing system. The company says that it has been affected by a cybersecurity incident. Its website and phone lines are down. It suspects that the incident originated at one of its vendors.
Sponsor Updates
- Five9 employees volunteer in their local communities as part of Five9 Day.
- First Databank expands its Meducation Solution medication instructions to include translations of Hindi and Punjabi.
- Health Data Movers publishes a new episode of its “QuickHITs” podcast titled “Advancing Health Equity through Technology: A Conversation with Dr. Julia Skapik.”
- FinThrive releases a new Health Rethink Podcast, “Health Equity is Earned, and Learned!”
- Healthcare IT Leaders releases a new Leader to Leader Podcast, “Building a Purpose-Driven IT Organization.”
- Inovalon publishes a new case study, “Guardian Angels Senior Services Sees Overtime Drop with Smart Scheduling.”
- The HITea with Grace Podcast features KeyCare Chief Medical Officer Carrie Nelson, MD, “Dr. Carrie Nelson Spills the Tea on Telehealth Patient Safety & Quality.”
Blog Posts
- Transforming Health Plan Operations with Digitized Claim Appeals (Availity)
- Evidence-based information in the EHR supports teamwork and an improved clinician experience (Wolters Kluwer Health)
- 2024 Connect Summit Recap: Building a Better Social Safety Net (Findhelp)
- From Legacy Systems to Workday: Managing Scope, Integrations, and Team Dynamics (Health Data Movers)
- How to Protect Your Healthcare Organization Against Social Engineering (Fortified Health Security)
- Embracing the Digital Transformation: Navigating the Ethical Frontiers of AI in Healthcare (InterSystems)
- The Critical Role of Early Detection of Stroke Risk: A Guide (Lucem Health)
- Denial Management in Healthcare: Benefits, Strategies & Key Trends (Medhost)
- Spotting medical provider burnout: A call to action (Meditech)
- What is a SOAP Note? (Net Health)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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The Ascension incident shows the gap of the AHA statement indicting third parties. Hospital/healthcare organizations need to step up their cybersecurity programs. All need to have the essential cyber protection programs in place, within their own strategic priorities and busgets. The Feds, on the other hand, rather than financially supporting healthsystems cyber readiness, need to aggesssively go after the cyber bad actors attacking everyone.
“Epic will roll out a “patients like this one” type tool to its users in Indiana this summer. It will compare the active patient’s chart to Epic’s Cosmos database to help doctors make decisions about treatment options.”
Can someone explain to my smooth brain how this will not entrench bias in patient care? We know — we KNOW — that there is already significant bias in patient care along race and sex lines, the intersection of which is a multiplier, that leads directly to bad outcomes for women, for Black people, and especially for Black women. If your training or comparison set is biased and contains bad treatment plans (or no treatment plans), how does this not inject that bias into the physician’s workflow?
I share your concerns about a lot of similar projects, but I think this one’s an outcomes comparison thing, not a recommendations-using-trained-AI-or-others’-biases thing. You select some pertinent details about your patient – comorbidities and yes, demographics – and it’ll show how patients actually did on x meds. It’s not saying “here’s what most other people did so you should do it too.” (Granted, if there isn’t enough data on y treatment because no one ever prescribed it, due to bias, then that could have effects.)
I think we’d have to swallow hard to walk away from a potentially useful pattern-matching technology, that might have a lot of clinical benefits.
Regarding the possibilities of continuing racial bias? There might be several ways to address this (just my initial reaction, view as an alpha-stage analysis):
– Perhaps turn off the pattern matching entirely, when the patient is an identifiable minority?
– Go at this in the reverse direction. Only activate the pattern matching when clinical diagnosis is resisting ordinary processes. Maybe the physician has to push an optional button?
Unfortunately, these are extra steps and I don’t feel comfortable that the average health system would implement them. We’re dealing with human behaviour here and that can be difficult to correct.
Liked for “smooth brain”!
Thank you for sharing the full HIStory file. What a great tribute to Mr. Ciotti.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana
“Ascension Via Christi sent several ICU nurses home after they raised concerns about inadequate staffing.”
Nice. That’ll show em.