Morning Headlines 9/25/14

New report projects a $5.7 billion drop in hospitals’ uncompensated care costs because of the Affordable Care Act

HHS claims in a report that hospitals will see a $5.7 billion drop in uncompensated care in 2014 due to the ACA, “based on an estimated 10.3 million decrease in the total number of uninsured and an estimated 8 million increase in the number covered by Medicaid.”

DMH may be on the hook to repay $900K: Government audit uncovers failures of compliance for year 2011-12

Drew Memorial Hospital of Monticello, AK will likely have to pay $900,000 of its Stage 1 MU incentive money back to the government after failing to pass an MU attestation audit.

Hospitals Cut Costs by Getting Doctors to Stick to Guidelines

Researchers from Christiana Care Health System (DE) found that they were able to cut costs associated with non-recommended use of cardiac monitors by 70 percent after embedding American Heart Association protocol reminders in their EHR.

A Health Care Success Story

Farzad Mostashari, MD and his investment partner Bob Kocher, MD co-author an op-ed in the New York Times highlighting the cost savings and improved outcomes seen in the small community of McAllen, TX, once famously pinpointed as the most expensive place in the US to receive healthcare, since its physician practices formed an ACO.

Morning Headlines 9/24/14

HCA to Purchase PatientKeeper

164-hospital health system HCA acquires PatientKeeper, which it will roll out as an overlay for physicians using its legacy Meditech system.

ACO bill expands telemedicine use

Diane Black (R-TN) and Peter Welch (D-VT) introduce bipartisan bill H.R. 5558, the ACO Improvement Act, which would enable ACOs to expand remote patient monitoring platforms, and allow them to use “share-and-forward” technologies that improve medical image sharing.

Philips Plans Breakup to Focus on Health, Consumer Goods

Royal Philips will split itself into two companies, one focused on lighting, which generates $9 billion in sales annually, and the other on consumer goods and healthcare, which generates $19 billion.

Morning Headlines 9/23/14

Billing dispute leads to blocked patient data in Maine

A small practice in upstate Maine is fighting back after its EHR vendor suspends access to its hosted EHR for falling 10 months behind on its $2,000 monthly maintenance payments.

AMIA welcomes Douglas B. Fridsma, MD, PhD, as New President and CEO

Douglas Fridsma, MD, PhD, and Chief Science Officer with the ONC will leave his position to become the CEO of the American Medical Informatics Association.

W.H.’s Steve VanRoekel to take tech to Ebola fight

White House CIO Steve VanRoekel resigns to join the USAID, where he will work as a senior adviser in the fight to halt the Ebola outbreak.

Morning Headlines 9/19/14

Bug in Apple’s HealthKit hits iOS 8 launch

Apple discovers a bug in its HealthKit service that prompted it to pull all HealthKit-connected apps from the app store prior to the launch of iOS 8. 

Geneinsight Strategic Partnership

Sunquest and Partners (MA) create a strategic alliance to create a genomics software system that will support advanced personalized medicine initiatives.

Resurrecting Healthcare.gov Meant Dealing With Bureaucracy, Incompetence, Politics

Mickey Dickerson, the ex-Google engineer responsible for rescuing Healthcare.gov, discusses federal IT work and calls on his peers to engage with government IT projects.

Medical Records For Sale in Underground Stolen From Texas Life Insurance Firm

Medical records stolen from a Texas life insurance company have turned up for sale on a black market website, some going for as little as $6 per record.

Morning Headlines 9/18/14

Bill Would Cut 2015 Meaningful Use Reporting Period To 90 Days

A bipartisan bill introduced by representative Renee Elmers (R- NC) will reduce the 2015 attestation period from 365 days to 90 days if passed. Elmers explains the intent behind the bill, saying “By adjusting the timeline, providers would have the option to choose any three-month quarter for the EHR reporting period in 2015 to qualify for Meaningful Use. The additional time and flexibility afforded by these modifications will help hundreds of thousands of providers meet Stage 2 requirements in an effective and safe manner.”

EHR giant Epic explains how it will bring Apple HealthKit data to doctors

An Epic spokesman comments on Apple HealthKit integration points, saying “If the patient has given permission for the MyChart app on their phone to know about that data, HealthKit “wakes up” the MyChart app and tells it there’s new data.”

 What the new uninsured numbers don’t tell us about Obamacare

Several new polls indicate that the US uninsured rate is dropping, presumably due to the introduction of the Affordable Care Act.

2014 Survey of America’s Physicians Practice Patterns and Perspectives

The Physician Foundation publishes survey results representing 20,000 physician respondents. The report finds that 46 percent of physicians feel that EHRs have detracted from their efficiency, 47 percent feel that EHRs have detracted from patient interaction, and 24 percent report that EHRs have detracted from quality of care.

Morning Headlines 9/17/14

HIMSS, CHIME, AHA, AMA, and others urge HHS to reduce 2015 attestation period to 90 days.

Several industry advocacy groups write a co-signed letter to HHS secretary Sylvia Burwell calling for the 2015 Meaningful Use attestation period to be reduced from 365 days to just 90 days.

Outsourcing Firm Cognizant to Buy TriZetto for $2.7 Billion

IT outsourcing firm Cognizant Technology Solutions will buy health IT vendor TriZetto for $2.7 billion in an effort to bolster its health IT portfolio.

Federal Health Care Website Faces Security Risks, Watchdog Finds

The GAO publishes a report on the security of Healthcare.gov, concluding that despite increased security efforts "weaknesses remained in the security and privacy protections applied to HealthCare.gov and its supporting systems."

AMA Calls for Design Overhaul of Electronic Health Records to Improve Usability

The American Medical Association publishes a framework with eight recommended changes for improving EHR usability.

Morning Headlines 9/16/14

 Factors Affecting Physician Professional Satisfaction and Their Implications for Patient Care, Health Systems, and Health Policy

A new RAND report conducted with the American Medical Association finds that EHR use is a direct contributor to physician burnout. Physician survey respondents  cite poor clinical notes, interruption of face-to-face time with patients, time consuming data entry, and less fulfilling work as EHR-related drivers of their dissatisfaction.

Apple HealthKit Trials Spearheaded By Duke And Stanford University Hospitals: Report

Stanford University and Duke Medicine announce plans to use Apple’s HealthKit to streamline data capture in support of their population health initiatives. Stanford Children’s Hospital will track blood sugar levels in its type 1 diabetes population, while Duke will capture weight, blood pressure, and other values to monitor heart disease and cancer patients.

Glitch in health care law allows employers to offer substandard insurance

A known bug in the validation tool that Healthcare.gov uses to ensure each plan listed on the market meets the minimum requirements outlined in the Affordable Care Act has resulted in employers flooding the site with cheap substandard insurance plans that do not offer basic protections, like hospitalization coverage.

AIG Raises Profile for Technology With Creation of CIO Job

Former Kaiser Permanente CIO Philip Fasano has been hired to a newly created CIO position with insurance giant American International Group.

Morning Headlines 9/15/2014

Advocate, NorthShore merger means 16 hospitals, 3 million patients

In Illinois, Advocate Health Care and NorthShore University Health System announce merger plans that will result in a 16 hospital, 45,000 employee organization with a $6.5 billion combined revenue.

State abandons search for new health exchange company

Nevada abandons its search for a new health insurance exchange contractor, after firing Xerox in May, and announces that it will join Healthcare.gov instead.

Docs frustrated with transition to electronic medical records

A local paper covers the frustrations that clinicians at Community Health of Central Washington are experiencing as they transition to a new EHR that has fallen short of their expectations. CMO Michael Schaffrinna is quoted saying “It reads like a translated Russian novel. It doesn’t flow, and that means it takes a lot longer for people to find the information they’re looking for to care for the patient.”

Morning Headlines 9/12/14

Allscripts Ex-CEO Glen Tullman Launches Livongo Health At Disrupt, Backed By General Catalyst

Glen Tullman launches a digital health startup called Livongo Health, backed by a $10 million investment from General Catalyst. The company is building chronic disease management platforms that use technology to connect patients, care providers, and family members.

States Graded on Telemedicine Policy

The American Telemedicine Association publishes two reports analyzing the telemedicine policies of all 50 states, focusing on coverage, reimbursement, practice standards, and licensure requirements.

Medicine’s Manhattan Project: Can The World’s Richest Doctor Fix Health Care?

Forbes profiles healthcare billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong and his startup NantHealth, which he promises will revolutionize healthcare. Forbes calls him a blowhard and quotes John Halamka, MD saying “The marketing is three years ahead of the engineering.”

Epic Systems again ranked as No. 1 Dane County employer

Just ahead of its annual user conference, Epic is named the largest employer in Dane County.

Morning Headlines 9/11/14

2014 Edition Release 2 Electronic Health Record (EHR) Certification Criteria and the ONC HIT Certification Program

ONC scraps its voluntary 2015 Edition EHR certification criteria, providing some flexibility for EHR vendors, but doing little for providers that are not yet ready for the start of the MU 2 attestation period.

Epic retains lobbyist to improve image on Capitol Hill

Epic hires lobbying firm Card & Associates to help address its reputation on Capitol Hill as an opportunistic EHR vendor selling closed systems that are unable to exchange data with other vendors.

Watchdog Says V.A. Officials Lied

Richard J. Griffin, the VA’s acting  inspector general, said in testimony to the Senate Veterans’ Affairs committee on Tuesday that during its investigation on scheduling improprieties, 42 VA health care facilities were found to be altering appointment wait times. Additionally, 13 VA administrators are accused of lying to IG staff during the investigation.

Homeland Security picks Mass company for electronic health record system

eClinicalWorks wins a $5 million contract to provide EHRs for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention facilities.

Morning Headlines 9/10/14

Apple Watch

Apple unveils its newest device, a smartwatch that will monitor caloric burn, daily activity levels, heart rate, and exercise intensity.

New dean reviews Dell Medical School

Clay Johnson, dean of the University of Texas’s new Dell Medical School, says in an interview that one of his goals for the school is to embrace healthcare IT as a means of solving some of the fundamental problems he sees in care delivery.

A Comparison Of Hospital Administrative Costs In Eight Nations: US Costs Exceed All Others By Far

A recent study finds that hospital administrative costs in the US account for 25 percent of all hospital expenditures, far more than any other nation included in the study.

Morning Headlines 9/9/14

Interstate Medical Licensure Compact Ready for Consideration by States

The Federation of State Medical Boards announces that its Interstate Medical Licensure Compact is complete and ready for adoption by individual state medical boards. The compact simplifies the process of transferring licenses from state to state, and was written to help make it easier for physicians to provide telehealth services to patients that live out of state.

Chinese engineer accused of stealing trade secrets from GE unit

A Chinese engineer is being charged with stealing trade secrets from GE Healthcare after downloading 2.4 million confidential records from his office in Wisconsin, and shipping them back to China.

Mayo Clinic and IBM Task Watson to Improve Clinical Trial Research

Mayo Clinic will begin using IBM’s Watson supercomputer to improve clinical trial recruitment. The program will automate the now manual process of analyzing patient charts and matching them with clinical trials that are searching for participants. To start, the project will focus on cancer patients.

Morning Headlines 9/8/14

PwC to Propose Open Source EHR System to the Department of Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization Program

PwC enters the DoD EHR vendor search, proposing VistA and partnering with General Dynamics as a system integrator, and MedSphere and DSS as commercial resellers of VistA.

Nine Ways Hospitals Can Use Electronic Health Records to Reduce Readmissions

The Society of Hospital Medicine’s Health Information Technology committee publishes a list of nine strategies that hospitals can deploy within their EHRs to reduce all-cause readmissions.

Propeller Health Raises $14.5 Million Series B Financing Led by Safeguard Scientifics

Madison, WI-based Propeller Health raises a $14.5 million Series B and hires Practice Fusion VP Chris Hogg as its COO. The company helps health systems manage their asthma and COPD populations through a rescue inhaler sensor that tracks medication usage, pushing the captured data to both a smartphone app for patients, and a population health dashboard for health systems.

Morning Headlines 9/5/14

After quitting tobacco, CVS makes its next health-care moves

CVS pulls tobacco from its shelves a month ahead of its published goal, cutting $2 billion in annual revenue in the process. The company will expand its Minute Clinics and pursue new payer and health system partnerships to compensate for the loss.

President Obama Names Megan Smith U.S. CTO, Alexander Macgillivray Deputy U.S. CTO

Megan Smith, former Google VP of new business development, replaces Todd Park as the new US CTO, while Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s former lead council, will assume the role of Deputy US CTO.

Cover Oregon needs Oracle’s help to avoid delays in federal health exchange transition

After Oracle and the state of Oregon sue each other over the failed Cover Oregon health insurance exchange, Oracle puts the brakes on efforts to move on by refusing to provide access to the servers and source code for the site. The impasse will likely compromise Oregon’s ability to launch a functional exchange before the start of the next open enrollment period on November 1.

Morning Headlines 9/4/14

Task force taps the brakes on interoperability

During Wednesday’s Health IT Policy Committee meeting, members decide that a JASON report on health data interoperability that had been created to guide future policymaking is inadequate and overlooks the pressures on EHR vendors.

Google’s Calico, AbbVie forge deal against diseases of aging

Google’s Calico initiative to extend human life enters into a $500 million research agreement with US drugmaker AbbVie to help create life sciences research facilities in Silicon Valley, and then collaborate on drug development projects. Each business will contribute $250 million initially, with the option of adding an additional $500 million over the lifetime of the partnership. The team will share both costs and profits equally as new drugs are developed and marketed.

Groups press FDA to encourage medical-device registries

Pew Charitable Trusts, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, and the Science Infrastructure Center run by Weill Cornell Medical College are collectively calling on the FDA to create a medical device registry that would be tasked with post-market surveillance and capturing data for long-term research initiatives.

CMS finalizes auto-enrollment process for current Marketplace consumers

CMS publishes a final rule that will provide consumers who purchased their health insurance over an insurance exchange with a simple way of to renewing the plan.

Morning Headlines 9/3/14

‘Find My iPhone’ exploit may be to blame for celebrity photo hacks

A long-known vulnerability within Apple’s Find My iPhone portal allowed hackers to gain access to the login details of dozens of celebrities’ iCloud accounts, ultimately leading to the exposure of hundreds of nude photos. The embarrassing security lapse comes just ahead of Apple’s planned roll out of HealthKit, a service that Apple will use to store and share personal health data.

U.S. Digital Services Playbook

The newly created US Digital Services group publishes its Digital Services Playbook for public comments. The playbook outlines 13 best practices borrowed from private industry that will become the standard operating procedure for future government IT projects.

Failure to join up medical records ‘is a health risk’, says GP chief inspector

In England, the chief inspector for primary care doctors calls the country’s lack of integration between primary and acute care EHR systems a health risk. He proposes giving patients unrestricted access to their own primary care EHRs as a potential solution.

Morning Headlines 9/2/14

CHIME Statement on Finalization of Meaningful Use ‘Modifications’ Rule

CHIME publishes a statement calling the decision to mandate a 365-day reporting period for 2015 attestations deeply disappointing, going on to say that as a result “the very future of Meaningful Use is in question.”

Providers see little enthusiasm to join Pioneer ACOs

While federal officials debate expanding recruitment efforts for Medicare’s Pioneer ACO model, existing Pioneer ACO executives are speaking out over the logic of such a decision, explaining that “Organizations are not gravitating toward the Pioneer ACO model because the downside risk is not outweighed by the opportunity for economic gain—the business case is not compelling.”

Doctors Use Canadian Technology to Tackle Prescription Drug Crisis

In Canada, physicians are using a government-funded opioid management toolkit made by CognisantMD to help combat the increased prevalence of prescription drug abuse and opioid overdoses.

Taking the pulse of Beaumont Health hospital merger

Crain’s covers the formation of Beaumont Health, an eight-hospital health system that will finalize its formation this week. While the merger is imminent, key strategic decisions are still unresolved. One consultant explains “The new organization officially goes online Sept. 1, and none of the executives know what their jobs will be”