News 11/22/13

Top News

HIMSS names Children’s Medical Center (TX) its 2013 Enterprise HIMSS Davies Award of Excellence winner.

From Ricky Roma: “To shag or not to shag… Please weigh in to help with our HIMSS 2014 booth decision, as our team is split along gender lines this year. Do we go with the high shag, ‘flooring equivalent of a peacock’s tail’; or the low shag, ‘it’s apparently easier to endure if you’re in heels’ booth carpet? What’s a sales leader to do?” I will solicit the collective knowledge of the HIStalk readership to answer this very important question.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A few HIStalk Practice highlights from the last week include: AMA continues to push for an ICD-10 delay. I share my recent experience with physician rating websites. The majority of physicians express dissatisfied with their ambulatory EHRs. A reader offers a music review from the NextGen UGM. A New Jersey practice manager shares details of her office’s EMR selection and implementation and discusses how the EMR has help improve the quality of care for patients. Thanks for reading.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Catalyze.io, which offers a platform to accelerate the development of mobile health apps, secures a Series A financing round. The CEO of Catalyze.io is HIStalk Connect’s own Travis Good, MD.

Experian completes its acquisition of Passport Health.

Sales

Healthconnect HIE (TX) selects Surescripts services to make prescription and medication fill data available to hospitals.

Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin will implement Health Catalyst’s Late-Binding Data Warehouse and Analytics platform.

Inland Imaging (WA) will expand its use of MModal products to include MModal Fluency for Imaging and MModal Catalyst for Radiology.

Christiana Care Health (DE) selects grants management software from Huron Consulting Group.

Texas Health Resources will implement patient engagement technology from Emmi Solutions.

People

Huron Consulting Group names William T. Foley (Vanguard Health Systems) managing director of its healthcare practice focused on public healthcare systems and academic medical centers.

Randy Fusco (Microsoft Health & Life Sciences) joins Emdeon as SVP/CIO for revenue cycle services.

St. Luke’s Health System (ID) promotes CMIO Marc Chasin, MD to VP/CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Clinovations launches the Clinovations Center for Population Health Management to help stakeholders design and implement infrastructures and operating models to support population management and value-based care delivery systems.

Children’s Hospital & Research Center Oakland (CA) completes the first phase of its $89 million Epic implementation.

Michigan Health Connect delivers diagnostic-quality images to its HIE member hospitals using the eHealth Connect Image Exchange platform from eHealth Technologies.

Visage Imaging implements its Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform as part of vRad’s RG2 radiology operational management solution.

Roskilde Sygehus in Denmark goes live with iMDsoft’s MetaVision in its ICU, NICU, OR, and PACU.

Technology

The US Patent and Trademark Office issues SCI Solutions a patent for its method and systems used for secure online patient referral and ordering.

Other

I’m thrilled to have found the perfect Christmas or Hanukah gift for all my favorite  clinicians (you know who you are, so just skip down to the next item if you don’t want to ruin the surprise.) Struck by Orca includes dozens of illustrations that depict artists’ visual interpretations of their favorite ICD-10 codes. I’m impressed that many of the illustrators are healthcare professionals and I thought the $20 price tag sounded reasonable. One of my favorites (because I’ve had this injury numerous times) is the above work by Sarah Bottjen, an Epic project manager.

Forbes profiles Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s (CA) implementation of Voalte One technology combined with Epic.

Weird News Andy titles this article “Unconventional Therapy.” A Florida doctor uses whips and blindfolds to perform sadomasochistic acts in attempt to cure a female patient of depression. He wasn’t charged because the relationship was consensual, but he may lose license.

Sponsor Updates

• Wolters Kluwer Health launches an enhanced web application within ProVation Order Sets.
• Awarepoint is named the seventh fastest growing medical device company in North America in Deloitte’s 2013 Technology Fast 500.
• RelayHealth Financial announces that all its financial connectivity solutions meet the current ICD-10 standards and that ICD-10 testing is available at no cost to its customers.
• Troy Group and LRS install tamper-proof prescription printing capabilities at a North Carolina hospital.
• Ping Identity introduces PingAccess, an identity gateway that combines web access management with mobile and API access management.
• The Huntzinger Management Group reports that this year the company has increased its managed and advisory services and launched Huntzinger Staffing Solutions, a healthcare staffing company.
• Perceptive Software’s Records Manager product is certified against Chapters 2 and 5 of the DoD 5015.2 standards for records management.
• Intelligent Medical Objects highlights the integration of IMO’s Problem and Procedure solutions with Aprima EHR, which gives users on-demand access to over 180,000 medical terms from within the Aprima application.
• MedDirect releases its upcoming conference schedule.
• iHT2 interviews Wesley Valdes, DO, the medical director for telehealth services at  Intermountain Healthcare.
• Vital Images will participate in the Image Sharing demonstration at next week’s RSNA meeting in Chicago.
• UnitedHealth Group and Optum offer a free emotional support help line for people affected by recent tornados in the Midwest.
• Liaison Healthcare wins four Gold, three Silver, and three Bronze awards at the Golden Bridge Awards ceremony. 
• WisBusiness.com discusses the growth of HIT in Wisconsin with Nordic Consulting CEO Mark Bakken.
• Bonnie Cassidy, Nuance’s senior director of HIM innovation, offers some key questions to consider when evaluating the efficacy of an ICD-10 coding program.
• A Washington neurologist explains the benefits of the Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record, which uses technology and services from INHS.
• The Business Application Research Center ranks QlikView first in collaboration and performance satisfaction among large international vendors offering BI software products.
• HIMSS Analytics and The International Institute for Analytics launch DELTA Powered Analytics Assessment to allow healthcare provider organizations to evaluate and benchmark their analytical maturity relative to their peers.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

Readers who follow me on Twitter @JayneHIStalkMD may have seen me kvetching about problems with the HIMSS registration sit. I tried it multiple times on Firefox over a multi-hour period and even tried Internet Explorer. Previously it just said “something went wrong” but now it’s displaying a specific error. HIMSS did respond and offer to help me get squared away. If it’s not working in the next few days I might have to call. It’s expensive enough without missing the early bird registration and particularly so since my hospital no longer pays for anyone to attend.

Speaking of HIMSS, I was looking at last year’s “HIStalk Ladies Social Schedule” and it’s not too early to ensure your party makes it onto the Inga and Jayne must-see list. Email Inga inga@histalk.com or me drjayne@histalk.com and let us know why your event should make the cut. I’ll be arriving a little early to relax before the exhaustion of sessions, the exhibit hall, and of course HIStalkapalooza. I should probably take a few days off on the tail end of the meeting however my boss (probably assuming no one would actually pay his or her own way to HIMSS) scheduled a leadership retreat for Thursday and Friday so that’s not going to happen. Let’s hope it gets canceled or bumped.

I’m looking forward to HIMSS as a time to meet up with old friends and perhaps to explore some new opportunities. I’m starting to become a little leery of how our hospital is planning to tackle MU2 and various other initiatives. Several key members of our leadership have fallen victim to vulture-like consultants that have been circling. (Incidentally, did you know a group of vultures is called a committee? Makes perfect sense to me.) After dozens of hours of assessments the consultants have determined that our fairly conservative approach to Meaningful Use is overly strict and that we need to relax a little bit.

I know for a fact that I don’t look good in either black and white stripes or prison orange so some of the things they have suggested we do are downright frightening. They’re fairly cavalier in their interpretation of some of the rules and I’ve already made enemies by printing out specific CMS FAQ items and bringing them to meetings. I know the consultants think they’re impressing us by showing how much money we could be collecting (since we already ruled out a good chunk of providers as likely to not be able to attest) but it seems to be a shell game to me. Given the all-or-none nature of the Meaningful Use program it doesn’t seem like cooking the books even a little bit is a good idea.

They’re also pushing hard that we reorganize our employed medical group so we can start doing provider-based billing. I find it a fundamentally offensive approach to charge patients more a) just because you can, and b) just because everyone is doing it. We dabbled in this a couple of years ago with laboratory billing and the backlash from patients was overwhelming. It seems we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Watching this happen is just one symptom of the growing dysfunction within the organization. It’s not easy to admit that you’re working at a place that is allowing its values to slip away in pursuit of profit (despite being a non-profit entity). I’m all for efficiency and streamlining, but there is a difference between that and cutting corners. We had a pretty significant layoff earlier this year and people genuinely fear for their jobs so what used to be a fairly transparent team-oriented workplace is rapidly becoming factious and paranoid. Many of the most talented analysts and team leads have already left with a fair amount of them going to work for either competing hospital systems or for vendors.

I’m not sure what I think about working for a vendor having been in non-profit health care for so long but sometimes it looks pretty good. On the other hand, I’ve seen how our CIO behaves towards some of our vendors and I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that kind of treatment. I’m watching him pit two vendors against each other for a large rip-and-replace project and it reminds me of the movie “Gladiator.” It’s unpleasant yet I am still tugged by loyalty to an organization that I’ve been with a long time. Regardless, I’ll be dusting off my curriculum vitae (why can’t physicians just call it a resume?) and seeing what’s out there. What do you think about job hunting at HIMSS? Email me.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.