Monday Morning Update 7/8/13

From Utopic: “Re: Notice of Privacy Practices. HIPAA 2013 regulations require that the NPP and breach notices be written in plain language. That didn’t happen in the original HIPAA notices and probably won’t happen in this version either. Communicating in plain language doesn’t seem to be an issue for any of your survey respondents. I have a three-page summary if anyone is interested.”

HIStalk Webinar July 17

The next HIStalk Webinar will be “Five Steps to an Enterprising Imaging Strategy” on Wednesday, July 17 from 1:00 to 1:45 p.m. Eastern, sponsored by Merge Healthcare and presented by Steve Tolle, senior VP of solutions management. The US performs 800 million studies annually and industry experts predict steady growth over the next three years. How do you plan to share this information across your organization and your referral network and to securely store it? Implementing an enterprise imaging strategy and archiving data in either the world’s largest VNA or the cloud is your ticket to true interoperability.

C-level HIStalk readers have provided presenter feedback and the session will be moderated by HIStalk. According to one of the CIO reviewers who reviewed the rehearsal session, “I have to be honest, I wasn’t sure if a presentation on enterprise imaging would grab me. The presenter did a great job in covering why an enterprise imaging solution is needed in today’s world and what it could do to alleviate issues in hospitals.” Register here.

The vast majority of respondents think McKesson’s customers should care that John Hammergren will get a pension of at least $159 million, although the comments are equally passionate for both sides. New poll to your right: now that implementation of the ACA employer mandate has been pushed back, should healthcare organizations proceed plans to buy software to meet ACA-driven needs?

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor CoverMyMeds. The Columbus, OH-based company has put the Prior Authorization process for prescriptions into modern decision support workflow. Over 100,000 providers use its service for free with health plans, PBMs, and drug companies footing the bill because CoverMyMeds makes them more efficient. Providers access the service through their EHR or from the company’s all-payer portal and get real-time determination. It’s not just about efficiency – when Prior Authorization takes too long, 30 percent of patients to just give up and abandon their prescriptions, causing all kinds of clinical and cost issues. The average doctor spends six hours per week filling out PA forms. If your company sells a pharmacy or EHR system, you can add the “Best Feature Ever” with APIs that can manage PAs either before they are submitted or after they are rejected. Thanks to CoverMyMeds for supporting HIStalk.

I found this YouTube video on how CoverMyMeds works.

Constantine Davides has updated his popular HCIT Consolidation Chart for HIStalk readers. It lists all of the healthcare IT acquisitions by company. Take a look if you (a) wonder why your vendor’s allegedly integrated products aren’t because they were simply bought and relabeled; or (b) you are creating a healthcare IT trivia contest and need hard questions like, “What was the name of the event notification software vendor that Philips acquired?” (answer: Emergin.)

NHS England publishes “Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards: Achieving an Integrated Digital Care Record” that describes its all-digital goal for 2018 and the $387 million in available grants for NHS Trusts. NHS says it will consider the use of the VA’s VistA, summarizing, “One of the significant products we have investigated is VistA and for reasons described in more detail below we are looking to adopt some of the ethos behind its creation and potentially part, or all, of the technical product, in combination with others to generate NHS VistA. NHS VistA as a concept will focus on bringing together the best of breed capability of Open Source solutions and will be driven by NHS organisations with the support of NHS England and others. The US Veterans Health Administration VistA system was created in the 1980s by clinicians and software engineers from the ground up. It has become renowned across the world as the first truly integrated, clinically owned system. It has been in operation long enough to be able to demonstrate real clinical outcome benefits.”

VistA expert Tom Munnecke’s “Open Letter to Chuck Hagel: DoD Still Doesn’t Know What the Hell They Are Doing” says “DoD is trying to get out of a hole by digging it deeper.” A snip:

Rather than lifting up the VA eligibility problem to a shiny new common information system, you are on the verge of dragging health IT into the same bureaucratic vortex that has already done so much damage in the past. AHLTA was declared “intolerable” in a Congressional hearing four years ago. Yet, not only is it still around (and absorbing $600m/yr operations and maintenance costs), but it is also serving as a template for the next generation of the IEHR – a top down, mega-centralized administrative system far removed from the clinical needs of health care professionals and patients. DoD continues to focus on the organization chart, not the patient, closely coupling their software designs to their bureaucratic stovepipes.  Indeed, it is rare for me to even find the word “patient” in any DoD health IT documents.

Christopher Assad, MD develops a prototype CPR app for Google Glass that walks laypeople through the process of performing CPR effectively following the beat of “Staying Alive,” which coincidentally sets a pace of 100 compressions per minute.  

Thanks to the following sponsors, new and renewing, that recently supported HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, and HIStalk Connect. Click a logo for more information.

Outsourced UPMC transcriptionists hold a rally outside the health system’s headquarters in the US Steel building in Pittsburgh to protest the transfer of their jobs to Nuance. Their union wants them to receive severance pay, health insurance through Nuance, uncontested unemployment claims, and an apology from UPMC CEO Jeffrey Romoff. All were offered jobs by Nuance, but at $8 per hour instead of their previous $12-15.

ONC will hold a Webinar on its just-released patient safety plan on Wednesday, July 10 from 3:45 to 5:30 p.m. Eastern.

Vince covers the death the death last week of computer mouse designed Douglas Engelbart.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.