News 7/25/18

Top News

The Department of Defense will increase its EHR contract ceiling by $1.1 billion in expanding MHS Genesis to cover implementation of Cerner by the Coast Guard. The extra cost will also cover items included in the VA’s contract that were not present in the DoD’s agreement, according to Defense Healthcare Management Systems Program Executive Officer Stacy Cummings.

Cummings added, “A standard electronic health record baseline for the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, and US Coast Guard will enable more efficient, highly reliable, safe, and quality care.”

The DoD’s original contract ceiling with lead contractor Leidos was valued at $4.3 billion and a total of $9 billion if all options were exercised.

The Coast Guard gave up on its attempt to implement Epic in 2015 after running $46 million over budget with no sites live. A GAO investigation blamed poor project management, insufficient governance, inadequate project documentation, lack of testing, and internal staff turnover. The Coast Guard began searching for an alternative to Epic in February 2016, reverting to paper and, according to the GAO, endangering members with convoluted processes.

Cummings said the Pentagon will publish a second evaluation report by the end of the year, following a scathing internal review from May that concluded that MHS Genesis “is neither operationally effective or operationally suitable” and not capable of managing care delivery.

The DoD also announced that the next four MHS Genesis rollout locations will be Naval Air Station Lemoore, Travis Air Force Base, US Army Health Clinic Presidio of Monterey, and Mountain Home Air Force Base.

Reader Comments

From FlyOnTheWall: “Re: Allscripts. The company’s investor page proudly boasts in a press release from last year that Rothman Ortho selected Allscripts PM to replace its ‘legacy system.’ Was not that system Allscripts Vision? Nice to see Allscripts getting into the rip-and-replace frenzy of Allscripts solutions, even though they did an RnR of one of their own products.” Unverified, but I believe Rothman was using the old Vision product of Medic / Misys, acquired by Allscripts in 2008. If that’s indeed the case, then I would categorize the announcement as misleading since it’s just swapping one Allscripts product for another, not a brag-worthy displacement of a competitor’s system.

Webinars

July 26 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “The Patient’s Power in Improving Health and Care.” Sponsor: Health Catalyst. Presenter: Maureen Bisognano, president emerita and senior fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Patients, even those with chronic diseases, only spend a few hours each year with a doctor or a nurse, while they spend thousands of hours making personal choices around eating, exercise, and other activities that impact their health. How can we get patients to be more engaged in their care, and help physicians, nurses, and healthcare providers transition from a paradigm of “what’s the matter” to “what matters to you?” This webinar will present stories of patients and healthcare organizations that are partnering together with tools, processes, data, and systems of accountability to move from dis-ease to health-ease.

July 31 (Tuesday) 12:30 ET. “How to Proactively Troubleshoot End User Experience Issues in Healthcare IT.” Sponsor: Goliath Technologies. Presenter: Goliath Technologies engineering staff. An early warning system for EHR access problems helps prevent downtime and user access problems before they impacts patients and collects objective technical evidence of the issue’s root cause. This webinar will describe how hospitals protect their investment in Allscripts, Cerner, Epic, and Meditech EHRs by anticipating, troubleshooting, and preventing end user experience issues and collecting the technical data needed to collaborate with their vendors on a solution.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Identity and access management technology vendor Identity Automation acquires HealthCast, which offers single sign-on and virtual desktop systems for healthcare.

Former employees of the shuttered CareSync describe the company’s final days to the Hardee County (FL) Board of County Commissioners, saying they were pressured to keep patients of its chronic care management business on the telephone line for at least 20 minutes to qualify them for their monthly Medicare billing. CareSync co-founder and State Rep. Jamie Grant — who served as senior solutions architect and was cleared of ethics violations after charges that he funded the company’s startup by misusing Hardee County development grants – says he hasn’t ruled out suing unnamed parties. Co-founder Travis Bond, who employees said was removed by the board because of poor financial management, says he does not plan to pursue litigation.

Cerner has added half of the 600 Kansas City-based employees it needs for an expansion of its RevWorks and ITWorks outsourcing businesses.

University of Minnesota hopes to license an algorithm created by its medical school researchers that predicts a patient’s one-year mortality risk using EHR data.

People

DirectTrust hires Scott Stuewe (DataFile Technologies) as president and CEO. He worked for Cerner for 20 years through December 2016.

Methodist Health System (NE) promotes Kent Sona to VP/CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

A Reaction Data survey of 250 physicians finds that EHRs, regulatory compliance, and internal bureaucracy contribute most to their burnout, with patients named as the problem only 2 percent of the time. The top wished-for EHR improvements are improved user friendliness, additional dictation or scribe capabilities, and reduced time required.

A Black Book survey finds that two-thirds of hospitals are reconsidering whether the ED information system supplied by their EHR vendor can handle efficient ED workflows and meet consumer expectations, with outsourced ED doctors being the least satisfied due to EHR training gaps, excessive clicking, and difficulty in obtaining outside patient data. ED doctors who were forced to move from a best-of-breed EDIS to an EHR’s ED module say their new system hurts their productivity (90 percent), impedes patient workflows (75 percent), and contributes to medical staff burnout (90 percent). CIOs are mostly at odds with those beliefs, favoring a single source EHR solution. The top-rated best-of-breed EDIS vendor is T-System, followed by Optum Picis and Wellsoft. Cerner, Meditech, and Allscripts were also highly rated by users. The most-desired features of both types of EDIS in order are better mobile deployment, interoperability, and patient satisfaction tools.

Government and Politics

The Senate confirms Robert Wilkie as VA secretary in a 86-9 vote.

The National Institutes of Health launches its Google Cloud-powered STRIDES Initiative to allow researchers to analyze large biomedical data sets. Meanwhile, a Google Cloud blog post says that former Cleveland Clinic President and CEO Toby Cosgrove, MD has signed on as an advisor.

Privacy and Security

A Kaiser Health News report recommends that consumers pay cash for alcohol and cigarettes while bragging about gym memberships on social media since insurers and other groups are using personal information from credit cards and other sources to create individual profiles that are then sold to companies. Buyers include drug manufacturers – which might want to buy a list of men over 50 who are experiencing erectile dysfunction – and insurers that may use the profile to predict lifespan or medication adherence. Even employers can use the information to check for a job candidate’s potential work-affecting and expensive chronic illnesses before hiring them. The article quotes Harvard fellow Adam Tanner, who wrote “Our Bodies, Our Date: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records.”

Other

A small JAMA-published study finds that back-end speech recognition (specifically Nuance’s former EScription product) has a 7 percent error rate when creating dictated notes (operative notes, office notes, and discharge summaries), with some of those errors such as “grown mass” instead of “groin mass” remaining on the chart for weeks or sometimes indefinitely as clinicians either don’t review them promptly or sign them without double checking. The authors recommend that speech recognition errors be submitted for calculating error rates and for creating automated error detection systems.

Banner Health posts a job for CEO of its Tucson campuses just after its corporate VP/CIO announced plans to leave and the local paper published documents from a state investigation into problems with patient care, provider satisfaction, and billing from its Epic-to-Cerner conversion at the former University of Arizona Health Network hospitals in Tucson.

Google’s Nest home automation division is approaching eldercare facilities to use its products for monitoring the wellbeing of residents.

A Stanford University scientist invents a patch that measures cortisol in sweat to detect disease, measure stress, and evaluate sports performance.

Columbia University’s new Center for Precision Dental Medicine offers RFID tracking of patients and equipment, biofeedback-measured stress levels for quantifying pain, video recording of procedures, and all-digital dental chairs whose six instruments are RFID-enabled for tracking usage and sterilization. They hope to use the resulting data not only to make patients more comfortable, but to analyze provider technique to identify best practices. They also hope to to integrate their systems with EHRs to remove the silos between professions.

Sponsor Updates

• Ellkay will exhibit at AACC’s Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo next week in Chicago.
• Iatric Systems will exhibit at the SHIEC Annual Conference August 19-22.
• In Ohio, the MetroHealth System and Medical Mutual become the first provider and payer organizations to digitally exchange data and documents with Hyland’s OnBase Mackinac solution.
• AdvancedMD publishes a new eGuide, “Best Practices to Improve Patient Payments.”
• Nordic posts a podcast titled “Developing a strategy for your Epic Community Connect program.”
• Audacious Inquiry names Roxanne Johanning health IT product manager.
• Arcadia will host a career open house at its Pittsburgh office July 25.
• CompuGroup Medical will exhibit at AACC July 29-August 2 in Chicago.
• Divurgent publishes a new white paper, “Medjacking: A Life or Death Issue for Leaders in Connected Healthcare.”

Blog Posts

• Is Your Practice HIPAA Compliant? (ChartLogic)
• How to Deliver On-Time, On-Budget, and On-Value Health IT Projects (Spok)
• Enhancing the Hospital Experience: Building a smart patient room (part 1 of 3) (GetWellNetwork)
• Have a new hire? This is the first meeting you should schedule. (Advisory Board)
• What can radiology learn from the hotel industry? A lot, apparently (Agfa Healthcare)
• 5 ways to transform ambulatory workflow (Bluetree)
• Is Your Practice HIPAA Compliant? (ChartLogic)
• A ‘Women in HIT’ Partner: Paving the Way for Better Patient Care (CoverMyMeds)
• CTG Exec: Managing Data Vital During Health Care Mergers (CTG)
• Effective Clinical Data Normalization Multiply Use Cases for Clinical Data (Diameter Health)
• Overcoming Data Zombies with Analytics (Dimensional Insight)
• How Urgent Care Startups Can Compete in the Land of Giants (DocuTap)

Contacts

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