Morning Headlines 5/29/15

I’m the New CTO of HHS

Patient advocate and former associate director at the Pew Research Center Susannah Fox is named the next CTO of HHS. Fox will be the third person to hold the position, following Bryan Sivak and Todd Park, and will be the first female CTO.

The Wealthiest Female Techies In America

Judy Faulkner is named the richest woman in technology, with a net worth of $2.6 billion.

Allscripts to build 12-story tower at North Hills

Allscripts will move its 1,000 Raleigh, NC-based employees into a new 12-story, 250,000 square foot office tower, scheduled to open in early 2017.

Cambia Health Solutions Leads New Round of Investment in lifeIMAGE

LifeImage, a medical image exchange platform vendor, closes a $17.5 million funding round led by investor Cambria Health Solutions. The company will use the new funding to grow its support staff and further develop its functional capabilities.

Morning Headlines 5/28/15

Medicaid rule could extend health IT support to behavioral health, long-term care

A newly proposed CMS rule governing Medicaid managed-care plans has implications on health IT. The rule authorizes state Medicaid programs to offer incentive payments for organizations that do not qualify to participate in the Meaningful Use program, like behavioral health providers and long-term care providers, to purchase and implement EHRs. The new rule also authorizes states to mandate participation in health information exchanges as part of their contracts with Medicaid managed care organizations.

Telemedicine exams result in antibiotics as often as regular exams, study finds

A new RAND corporation study published in JAMA Internal Medicine finds that antibiotic prescribing rates are comparable between office-based visits and telehealth visits, but notes that virtually-treated patients were more likely to be prescribed a broad-spectrum antibiotic, which is concerning because use of these drugs drives up costs and contributes to antibiotic resistance.

Antitrust Lawsuits Target Blue Cross and Blue Shield

Two antitrust lawsuits filed independently by health care providers and employers is advancing in federal court in Alabama. The suits charge Blue Cross and Blue Shield with acting as a single, illegal cartel, rather than as 37 independently owned companies to minimize competition. BCBS currently covers one-third of all Americans.

Early Marketplace Enrollees Were Older And Used More Medication Than Later Enrollees; Marketplaces Pooled Risk

Researchers assessed the medication needs of the 7.3 million Americans that signed up for health insurance through the 2014 Affordable Care Act marketplaces and found that marketplace enrollees had a lower average drug spending and were less likely to use most medication classes than an employer-sponsored comparison group.

Morning Headlines 5/27/15

Chronic Care and Population Health Company Persivia Acquires Alere Analytics to Help Healthcare Organizations Manage Clinical and Financial Outcomes Risk

Chronic care management vendor Persivia buys back Alere Analytics, the population analytics solution that it sold to Alere in 2014 for $600 million, for an undisclosed sum.

Varian Medical Systems and Flatiron Health to Develop Next Generation of Cloud-based Oncology Software

Varian Medical Systems is partnering with Flatiron Health to develop a cloud-based oncology EHR.

The Triple Aimers have missed the mark

Former Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CEO Paul Levy writes an article claiming that the Triple Aim has been hijacked by ACOs and, more specifically, by the academic medical institutions that tend to be the dominant player in them.

Drugmakers funnel payments to high-prescribing doctors

Modern Healthcare publishes an article claiming that nearly one-quarter of Medicare’s top-prescribing physicians received non-research related payments from the manufacturers of the drugs they prescribed in 2013.

Morning Headlines 5/26/15

EHRA Recommends Changes To ONC’s Standards Advisory Proposal

The HIMSS EHR Association responds to ONC’s Standards Advisory Proposal, citing concerns that the newly established standards, and their intended uses, could be unintentionally misinterpreted without explicit clarifications.

America’s Health Rankings Senior Report

The United Health Foundation publishes a report on senior’s health, finding that preventable hospitalizations within this sub-group have dropped 6.8 percent since 2014, and 11 percent since 2013.

Why We Need Design Thinking In Healthcare

Deonard D’Avolio, PhD and Director of Informatics at Airadne Labs, a joint venture between Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, authors a piece in InformationWeek calling for better design in healthcare, rather than a re-engineering of systems and processes. He uses the recent debacle at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas in which an ER doctor missed the travel history of a patient with Ebola and sent him home, and argues that the systems being implemented work as designed, but the design is not always inline with clinical workflows or expectations.

Morning Headlines 5/25/15

Patterson: No intersection has ‘more potential than what we’re at’ — health care, IT

Cerner booked $4.25 billion in new sales in 2014, beating its previous record of $3.8 billion. The company also reports that it expects its Siemens acquisition to return $1 billion in revenue in 2015.

Thompson and Rangel Introduce Veterans E-Health & Telemedicine Support Act of 2015

Representatives Glenn Thompson (R- PA) and Charles Rangel (D-NY) introduce H.R. 2516, the Veterans E-Health and Telemedicine Support Act of 2015, which would expand access to telehealth services for veterans by authorizing VA clinicians to practice medicine across state lines without running afoul of state or local regulations.

Connecticut Senate adopts major health care changes

Connecticut’s state Senate has passed a bipartisan bill that funds the development of a health information exchange for the state, replacing its failed $4.3 million first attempt.

eQHealth Solutions Selected by Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing to Provide Medical Management Services

Colorado selects non-profit population health vendor eQHealth Solutions to provide solutions for Colorado’s Medicaid program.

Morning Headlines 5/22/15

Cures Act heads to House floor

The House Energy and Commerce Committee approved the 21st Century Cures Act with a unanimous 51-0 vote, sending the legislation to the House floor for a vote. The new law would require EHR vendors to meet yet to be defined interoperability standards by 2018 or risk being decertified.

“I will not stop until we have the right to see our own information” – Part 2 –2015

Regina Holiday and a group of fellow patient advocates held a “paint-in” protest in front of HHS to protest the decision to reduce the MU2 view/download/transmit requirement from from five percent of discharged patients to just a single patient, calling the deprioritization a “slap in the face to patient rights.”

Lahey Health exec sheds light on reasons for layoffs

Lahey Health (MA) announces that it has laid off 130 people, or one percent of its workforce due to both the unusually brutal winter in New England this year, and also the $160 million Epic implementation, which together resulted in a $21 million operating loss for the first six months of 2015.

Morning Headlines 5/21/15

CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield has been the target of a cyberattack

CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, which provides insurance to residents in Maryland and Washington DC, is the latest victim of a targeted cyberattack. The attack was carried out in June 2014 but was only just discovered during a system-wide security audit.  Hackers gained access to a total of 1.1 million patient records.

AHA recommends changes to 21st Century Cures interoperability provisions

In a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, AHA Executive Vice President Rick Pollack expresses concerns over interoperability requirements outlined in the 21st Century Cures Act currently being debated in Congress, suggesting that instead of establishing information blocking penalties that could be applied to providers, which he calls duplicative, the bill simply funds the FTC to investigate and address anti-competitive information blocking practices among EHR vendors.

Health IT Standards Committee and Task Forces

ONC announces that it will sunset the Health IT Standards Committee’s permanent workgroups, replacing them with a series of time-limited task forces that will study and make recommendations on specific issues. The intent is to create a more agile HITSC and to increase public engagement by offering an opportunity to participate in smaller, less time-intensive projects.   

Morning Headlines 5/20/15

Allscripts layoffs to impact Raleigh headcount

Allscripts lays off 250 employees across its service, support, solutions management, sales, and G&A departments as part of a wider “rebalancing” effort. The layoffs were alluded to during the company’s Q1 earnings call and were reported via reader tips on HIStalk earlier in the month.

Welltok Acquires Leading Healthcare Analytics Company Predilytics

Population health vendor Welltok acquires Predilytics, an analytics company that uses machine learning to segment patients based on risk. Financial details were not disclosed.

Detecting Unplanned Care From Clinician Notes in Electronic Health Records

Researchers at Stanford University use natural language processing to analyze free-text clinical notes to detect patients with reported unplanned episodes of care at outside locations, increasing identification of patients with one or more unplanned care visits by 32 percent.

Morning Headlines 5/19/15

Interoperability Roadmap Public Comments

ONC publishes all of the public comments it received on its interoperability roadmap (PDF).

ICD-10 Transition Testing Proposed

Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) introduces the ICD-TEN Act, a bill that would introduce an 18-month period during which providers could submit claims in either ICD-9 or ICD-10 format, and during which CMS would be barred from denying claims due to inaccurate ICD-10 sub-coding.

Interstate telehealth licensing compact set to become reality

A compact drafted by the Federation of State Medical Boards that would allow providers to practice medicine across state lines looks likely to be enacted. The compact was written in an effort to ease regulatory barriers to broader telemedicine adoption. The compact required that seven states formally adopt it before it would become active.  Alabama has just passed legislation adopting the compact and as soon as the Alabama governor signs the bill into law, the compact will have met its seven-state requirement and will be enacted nationally.

Morning Headlines 5/18/15

AMA Letter To Representative Ted Poe

The AMA sends a letter to Representative Ted Poe (R-TX) supporting his bill, Cutting Costly Codes Act of 2015, which would cancel the migration to ICD-10 completely, and instead instruct CMS to wait for the international adoption of ICD-11 in a few years. 

HealthCare.gov Contractor Optum Declares Its Job Done

Optum, the contractor tapped to rescue the failing Healthcare.gov site just after its troubled launch, announces that it will not bid to continue on in its role as senior administrator once its current contract expires. 

Can the state build a better system to get your medical records to your doctors?

Connecticut will reportedly scrap its state health information exchange after spending $4 million but failing to achieve its interoperability goals.

Population Health Management Weekly Wrap Up 5/15/15

Jenn publishes the third installment in her comprehensive weekly recap of the emerging population health management market.

Morning Headlines 5/15/15

vRad to be acquired by MEDNAX

vRad, an outsourced radiology and telemedicine services company, will be acquired by MEDNAX, Inc for $500 million. MEDNAX is a national medical group specializing in anesthesia, maternal, neonatal and pediatric specialties.

McKesson (MCK) John H. Hammergren on Q4 2015 Results – Earnings Call Transcript

In its 2015 year end earnings call, McKesson CEO John Hammergren reports that the company’s Technology Solutions business revenue was down eight percent, to $3.8 billion, driven by anticipated declines in hospital software sales.

Here’s A Radical Approach To Big Hospital Bills: Set Your Own Price

NPR Shots covers ELAP Services, a benefits consulting firm that helps employers negotiate lower hospital bills by calculating the actual cost of services provided and then adding a reasonable profit margin.

New Company Announces Revolutionary Approach to Scribe Services in Healthcare, Finalist Spot on TiE50 Top Start-Up List

Skywriter MD launches to provide physician practices with remote scribes that listen in on exams through a microphone and navigate the physicians EHR through a remote connection. The scribes also document the encounter and enter any orders or prescriptions referenced during the visit. At the end of the session, the physician reviews the work and signs off on the chart.

Morning Headlines 5/14/15

Stiff Interoperability penalties in new 21st Century Cures Act

The revised 21st Century Cures Act was introduced in Congress today, and the new changes included funding to develop metrics to quantify and report on the exact state of interoperability available between EHR systems today, and then report on whether each EHR vendor was in compliance with new interoperability certification criteria that would go into effect in 2018.

Meaningful Use Stage 3 NPRM Comments

At Tuesday’s Health IT Policy Committee meeting, four workgroups shared comments on the Stage 3 MU proposed rule, with three of the four expressing some form of concern over the increases to the view, download, or transmit requirement.

Patients six to ten times more likely to get HPV vaccine after electronic health record prompts

Researchers with the University of Michigan find that pediatric patients are three times more likely to start the three-dose series of HPV vaccinations, and are 10 times more likely to complete them, if their pediatrician receives EHR alerts reminding them to start or continue the regimen.

Morning Headlines 5/13/15

Health Information Companies HealthPort and IOD Incorporated to Merge

HealthPort and IOD, both health information management vendors, will merge, creating a single company with a combined revenue of $450 million and a customer base of 18,000 health care facilities in the US.

McKesson Reports Fiscal 2015 Fourth-Quarter and Full-Year Results

McKesson reports Q4 and FY2015 year end results: full-year revenue up 30 percent  to $179 billion. Q4 revenue up 19 percent to $4 billion, adjusted Q4EPS $2.94 vs. $2.71, beating expectation on both.

New machine could one day replace anesthesiologists

The Washington Post reports on an FDA-approved anesthesia machine that can automate sedation and could one day replace the need for an anesthesiologist when performing routine procedures.  An Anesthesiologists’ fee for sedation during a colonoscopy averages $2,000, but the machine can perform the same task for just $200.

An end-to-end hybrid algorithm for automated medication discrepancy detection

A study evaluating the use of natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to support medication reconciliation processes found that by analyzing notes and prior prescription lists within the patient chart, the algorithms were able to increase accuracy and reduce manual labor.

Morning Headlines 5/12/15

Core Functionality in Pediatric Electronic Health Records

AHRQ publishes a report calling for pediatric-specific functionality to be included in EHRs, including more advanced medication ordering tools, immunization tracking systems, and data sharing between family member records.

IBM’s Watson to guide cancer therapies at 14 centers

14 cancer institutes across the US and Canada will use IBM’s Watson computer to help oncologists create cancer treatment plans based on a  tumors genetic.

US attorney subpoenas records related to Health Connector

The federal government has subpoenaed records related to the Massachusetts health insurance exchange following a failed go-live that resulted in the site being scrapped and a new site being built. Federal investigators have not yet disclosed why the records were requested or whether an investigation is underway.

Experts Criticize World Health Organization’s ‘Slow’ Ebola Outbreak Response

An independent report criticizes the WHOs response to the Ebola outbreak, saying the organization failed to seek outside support in a timely manner and claiming that there is “strong, if not complete, consensus that WHO does not have a robust emergency operations capacity or culture.”

Morning Headlines 5/11/15

The revolution will be digitized

The Washington Post analyzes the emerging wearables market, the data-tracking consumers driving the increased demand, and the critics that say the “worried well generation” is collecting data that is not necessarily useful or accurate, and that over-monitoring introduces a host of new problems.

Cerner (CERN) Q1 2015 Results – Earnings Call Transcript

Cerner shares drop 4.5 percent on Friday after reporting lower than forecasted Q1 earnings and reducing Q2 expectations. On its earnings call, Cerner CFO Marc Naughton explains that the $50 million shortfall on projected revenue was a result of missed targets within both the Cerner and Siemens business lines.

Allscripts Healthcare Solutions (MDRX) Paul M. Black on Q1 2015 Results – Earnings Call Transcript

Allscripts hosts its Q1 earnings call, in which CFO Richard Poulton explains that the company missed both revenue and EPS projections for the quarter in part because its professional services bookings were down and client service margins were down because anticipated work to support New York’s eRx initiative never materialized.

Morning Headlines 5/8/15

Cerner Reports First Quarter 2015 Results

Cerner reports Q1 results: revenue climbed 27 percent to $784 million, adjusted EPS $0.45 vs. $0.37. Revenue came in below Cerner’s Q1 forecast, due to lower than expected revenue across both its existing business and its new Siemens business.

Allscripts Announces First Quarter 2015 Results

Allscripts reports Q1 results: revenue was down two percent, at $335 million, adjusted EPS $0.08 vs. $0.07, missing expectations on both.

Are bungled VA claims systemic? Senators want agency review

The VA’s notorious claims processing system is back in the headlines. The VA reports that the claims backlog currently stands at 161,00, down from its peak of 611,000 in March 2013, but a VA inspector general review uncovered doctored data at five of the 10 worst performing claims processing centers. Now, a bipartisan group of senators is calling for a wide-scale, GAO-led review of all 56 regional VA claims processing offices.

Meaningful Use Stage 2 E-Prescribing Threshold and Adverse Drug Events in the Medicare Part D Population with Diabetes

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association compares medication error rates between handwritten and electronically generated prescriptions and finds that e-prescribing was associated with fewer adverse drug events. The study also found that e-prescribing increased the number of prescriptions that make it to the pharmacy by 12%, and increased the number of prescriptions picked up by the patients by 10%.

Morning Headlines 5/7/15

Dr. Karen DeSalvo to leave ONC if confirmed for new HHS post

Karen DeSalvo has been nominated for the permanent position of assistant secretary for health, a role she has held as interim along with her National Coordinator position since October 2014.

Dramatic results for Banner Health’s telehealth pilot

Banner Health announces that it has reduced its hospitalizations by 45 percent, and its cost of care by 27 percent through its new telehealth pilot with Intensive Ambulatory Care pilot program.

Lack of Impact of Electronic Health Records on Quality of Care and Outcomes for Ischemic Stroke

A study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology designed to measure any correlation between improved ischemic stroke outcomes and the use of EHRs finds no such correlation.

FDA launches UDI database website

Three years after Congress called for medical devices to be tracked with unique identifiers, the FDA has launched a website where consumers can look up information on devices sold in the US by its unique ID.