Weekender 2/2/18

Weekly News Recap

• Advocate Health Care announces that it will replace Cerner and Allscripts with Epic as part of its merger with Epic-using Aurora Health Care.
• A Nextgov review finds that the VA wasted $2 billion on three failed EHR projects from 2011-2016, adding the cost of the abandoned HealthVet effort to the GAO’s estimate of $1.1 billion.
• Epic issues a rare press release to tout “One Virtual System Worldwide,” which allow Epic-using sites to communicate electronically, perform patient data searches, and schedule patient appointments with other Epic sites.
• Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase create an independent company to reduce their employee healthcare costs in unspecified ways.
• A GAO report urges the Coast Guard to make an EHR decision following its failed $60 million attempt to go live on Epic that left it working with paper records, with some members of Congress questioning why the USCG doesn’t follow the lead of the DoD and VA and implement Cerner.
• Digital advertising vendor Outcome Health announces that its two co-founders will leave their executive roles and will take board positions as part of the company’s settlement with investors who say they were defrauded by inflated advertising performance claims .
• Allscripts restores access to its hosted systems more than a week after a ransomware attack.
• The Best in KLAS 2018 report is released.

Best Reader Comments

Syntactic structure and semantic context: MHS Genesis has both. They also have the  largest HIT project budget in history and the full attention of the world’s largest HIT vendor. And yet, they have no connection to any of that vendor’s other sites. No connection to CommonWell. No connection to Carequality. What they do have – after coming a year late out of the gate – is a read-only viewer connection to the VA that you have to open in a separate app. Why does every five-doc clinic on Athena go live connected to Carequality, but the $5b flagship goes live with NOTHING? Vaporware. (Vaporware?)

Does Epic get to define the word “Interoperability?” It seems like the only thing they have an interest in doing is “INTRA-operability,” which is why they were passed over by DoD. It seems to be a roadblock ahead in innovation for them and I think some folks are really starting to notice. (Cheez Whiz Liz)

Would you rather but all those rolls of digital duct tape and the people to string it together, or have it done for you with no special effort? They [Epic] have been working on this stuff for years, since before I left. I don’t think any other vendor has put in that effort. Back then, it was also free. Not sure whether that’s still true. (Ex Epic)

Sequoia: passing CCDAs in a point-to-point manner does not seem to me to very disruptive approach. (Bobby)

Touting same-vender interoperability seems spectacularly uninteresting … We already have the complete syntactic structure for healthcare data and we have the full range of semantic context determined to give it appropriate meaning. What we need are the vendors to stop making the use of these well thought out and excellent protocols too costly to utilize, which they only do to continue to enforce their monopoly over patient and other clinical and revenue cycle data. (Bill)

Epic doing all of this work to connect between Epic customers is a lot more easy to accomplish since you can build in the functionality, control requirements, and control the message process / processing. If they were to try to do this for the industry, it’d be damn near impossible without buy in from all of the EMR vendors, let alone take multiple times longer. Epic communicating with Epic is a great first start and certainly leads the way in actually accomplishing something. Someone needs to pull the Band-Aid. (Johnny B)

I’ll take leadership by DOING SOMETHING over leadership-by-PowerPoint any day (I’m looking at you, CommonWell). My observation is that industries advance by someone going first and executing better, not by everybody agreeing on a lowest common denominator. (Vaporware?)

Watercooler Talk Tidbits

Readers funded the DonorsChoose teacher grant request of Mrs. A in Texas, who is rebuilding her relocated classroom following Hurricane Harvey and asked for lap desks for her fifth graders. She reports, “Now students can choose where they work, and they become more interested and invested in the learning happening in our classroom. I firmly believe my students have a greater impact of learning when they feel in control and have a voice in how they learn.”

Nashville Public Radio profiles the open source HIV care app developed for the Kenyan Ministry of Health by Martin C. Were, MD, MS, assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University. Were, who is originally from Kenya, says there’s lessons learned there that make sense for the US, which like Kenya has areas that are isolated or that have low educational levels.

In England, a group led by physicist Stephen Hawkings wins a judicial review of Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s proposal to reform NHS by putting all of an area’s NHS bodies under an ACO with a single budget, which Hawkings calls “back-door privatization.”

India’s government announces a plan to offer free healthcare to half a billion of its poorest residents. The government, which made the announcement in advance of next year’s elections, says the program will create hundreds of thousands of jobs. The coverage would allow patients to seek care in private hospitals instead of in poorly-run government ones. Public health experts question spending so much on hospitals instead of preventive care, noting that poor people are mostly dying of conditions caused by water and air pollution, malnutrition, poor sanitation, and substandard housing.

The Onion weighs in on Amazon’s healthcare ambitions.

In Case You Missed It

• News 2/2/18
• EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 2/1/18
• Readers Write: How IT Professionals Can Work More Effectively with Physicians
• CIO Unplugged 1/31/18
• HIStalk Interviews Niki Buchanan, PHM Business Leader, Philips Wellcentive
• News 1/31/18
• Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 1/29/18
• HIStalk Interviews Jonathan Baran, CEO, Healthfinch
• Monday Morning Update 1/29/18
• Tips for HIMSS Exhibitors
• What I Wish I’d Known Before … Implementing a Vendor’s Cloud-Based System

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