Morning Headlines 2/28/13

House committee worried DoD, VA ‘moving the goal posts’ on e-health records

VA CIO Roger Baker made his final appearance before the Veterans House Services Committee Wednesday to answer for the cancellation of the iEHR project. He reported that the program was large, complex, and difficult to control. He also acknowledged that both the VA and DoD, could have done a better job communicating changes across the departments. Baker, along with VA CTO Peter Levin, resigned their positions last week.

M*Modal and Merge Healthcare Bring Speech Understanding to Imaging Solutions for Improved Workflow and Reporting

Merge and MModal announce a strategic partnership that will allow Merge to sell MModal’s natural language understanding tools baked into Merge’s imaging and radiology PACS solutions.

Predicting out of intensive care unit cardiopulmonary arrest or death using electronic medical record data

A recent study measuring the ability of EHR-backed predictive surveillance tools to predict cardiac events concludes that the automated model outperformed both manual risk assessments and human judgment-driven risk response teams. The automated model predicted cardiac events 15.9 hours before they occurred and 5.7 hours earlier than rapid response team activation.

Why Telemedicine Is Finally Ready to Take Off

CIO.com points to advances in technology, pressure to reduce costs, and bipartisan political support to substantiate its prediction that 2013 will be a flash point for telehealth adoption.

Morning Headlines 2/27/13

TELUS Health to become Canada’s largest electronic medical record provider

Telus Health announces the acquisition of EMR vendor MD Practice Software, which will expand its reach to more than 9,000 Canadian physicians and make Telus the largest EMR provider in Canada. This is the third EMR vendor Telus has acquired, spending more than $1 billion on acquisitions over the past 10 years.

Accretive Health Postpones Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2012 Earnings Release

Revenue cycle optimization vendor Accretive Health announces that it will delay the release of fourth quarter and full year financial statements. The company says it is concerned with its own revenue recognition policies and needs to evaluate the process before releasing financial statements. Share price dropped 20 percent in after hours trading Tuesday following the announcement.

Craneware H1 Profit Rises

Craneware reports a half-year profit of $4.5 million, up from $3.8 million in the same period last year. EPS was $0.12 and revenue grew seven percent.

Kansas Health Information Network and ICA Launch Pilot to Share Immunization Data with State Registry

Kansas Health Information Network has successfully transmitted immunization information through its ICA CareAlign HIE to the Kansas Immunization Registry.

Morning Headlines 2/26/13

Cerner To Buy PureWellness

Cerner announced this morning that it will acquire PureWellness, which offers an online health and wellness platform. Cerner said in a blog post, “We think the combination of our Millennium solutions and Healthe Intent platform with PureWellness’ engagement platform creates the most comprehensive set of capabilities on the market to support an individual’s health and care needs. Individual engagement is an important piece of a comprehensive approach to population health management, a concept we see playing a vital role in the evolution of health care.”

CIOs say lack of security pros leads to more breaches

In a survey released this week, CIOs report that a shortage of qualified IT security professionals is directly impacting network security within healthcare.

Rural Health Information Technology (HIT) Workforce Program Funding Announcement

HHS announces a $4.5 million grant that will be awarded in $300,000 increments to rural health networks engaged in recruitment, education, training, or retention activities aimed at developing and sustaining a population of health IT professionals in rural areas.

HealthEdge adds Arik Hill as Vice President of Customer Support

HealthEdge, a software vendor which provides an integrated financial, administrative, and clinical platform for healthcare payers, announces that Arik Hill (CIO, FirstCare Health Plans) has joined the company as vice president of customer support.

SAIC Announces Names For Planned New Companies

SAIC announces the names for the businesses that will be created later this year following its planned split into two independent companies. The national security, health and engineering business – to which acquired health IT consulting firms maxIT and Vitalize will belong — will be named Leidos, a coined word clipped from “kaleidoscope.” The technical services and enterprise information technology business will continue to carry the SAIC name.

Morning Headlines 2/25/13

Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us

Time magazine’s special edition report on rising healthcare costs is the longest article the magazine has ever run, but it is short on offering meaningful solutions.

Grace Cottage blames federal law for job cuts

19-bed Grace Cottage, of Townshend, VT, defends its $2.5 million Cerner implementation, as well as other major capital expenses, after firing 10 percent of its workforce which officials say was necessary due to steadily declining reimbursements and increased expenses. In perhaps related news, the only job opening posted on the hospital’s career page is for a new CEO.

Huge Decision Coming for Doctors Who Sued EHR Company

A group of doctors suing Allscripts over the discontinued MyWay EHR platform will find out Tuesday whether they the lawsuit will be allowed to continue or whether they will be forced to honor the binding arbitration clauses in their contracts.

MModal and Intermountain Healthcare Collaborate on Industry’s First Speech-Enabled Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) App for iPhone and iPad

MModal will partner with Intermountain Healthcare to develop a speech-enabled CPOE app for iOS devices. The app is expected in the fall of 2013 and will be integrated within EHR systems not yet named.

Morning Headlines 2/22/13

A Digital Shift on Health Data Swells Profits in an Industry

The New York Times runs an article criticizing the HITECH act as government waste lining the pockets of special interest groups. It goes on to villainize vendor executives, specifically Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman, suggesting that lobbyists for the industry pushed the legislature through Congress.

GetWellNetwork Achieves Record Growth for Third Consecutive Year

GetWellNetwork announces 30 percent growth in revenue, 50 percent growth in employees, and a 57 percent increase in new beds during 2012.

Sunrise Portfolio’s Open Architecture to Help Enhance Patient Care in an Integrated Environment

465-bed Phoenix Children’s Hospital adds Sunrise Ambulatory, Sunrise Financial Manager, and Allscripts Community Record to its existing Allscripts platform.

Reduction in medication errors in hospitals due to adoption of computerized provider order entry systems

A systematic literature review of the effect of CPOE on medication errors finds that processing a medication through a CPOE system decreases the likelihood of an error occurring by 48 percent.

Morning Headlines 2/21/13

Top Hospital Electronic Health Records Vendors Rated by Client Satisfaction, Black Book Rankings Announce 2013 Inpatient EHR Leaders

Black Book Rankings, which provides vendor satisfaction reports, gives CPSI the under 100-bed market, Cerner wins in the 100-249 bed range, and Epic takes the 250+ bed market. Unlike KLAS, Black Book’s methodology includes an external audit of data by independent statisticians.

VA CTO Peter Levin to leave agency

VA CTO Peter Levin announces his resignation just days after VA CIO Roger Baker made his own announcement. Levin led the Blue Button initiative and was a key advisor to the iEHR program. Both Levin and Baker were scheduled to appear before the House Veterans Affairs Committee next week to answer for the abrupt halt of the iEHR program.

Express Scripts accuses Ernst & Young of stealing trade secrets

Express Scripts sues Ernst & Young after discovering that an E&Y health information technology partner stole confidential documents related to pricing information, business projections, and strategy while working on the Express Scripts and Medco Health Solutions merger. Express Scripts claims the E&Y employee emailed more than 20,000 confidential documents to his personal e-mail account with the intention of using the information to secure future business with both Express Scripts and its competitors.

Health System Chief Information Officers: Juggling responsibilities, managing expectations, building the future

Deloitte releases a whitepaper on future challenges within health IT according to hospital CIOs. Respondents largely report being comfortable with their ability to handle MU and ICD-10 requirements. Goals moving forward included integrating independent medical practice IT systems, protection of PHI in a quickly growing digital environment, and transitions from fee-for-service to value-based models.

Morning Headlines 2/20/13

Allscripts Healthcare swings to loss

Allscripts reports Q4 results: revenue was down 10 percent, EPS –$0.14 vs. $0.14. CEO Paul Black said that both the quarterly and annual results "did not meet our expectations." The company plans to close 12 offices and take other measures to reduce product development costs.

Merge Reports Subscription Backlog Up 82%

Merge reports Q4 results: revenue up 1 percent, adjusted EPS –$0.13 vs. $0.04 on sales of $65.1 million. The board rejected valuations placed on strategic alternatives and reiterates 2013 guidance of sales range of $265 – $275 million.

iMedicor Announces Two Acquisitions, Four Corporate Appointments

iMedicor announces the acquisition of HITS Consulting Group and the appointment of HITS CEO Henry Denis to president.The company also acquired data mining firm ClarDIS and founder Joshua Brimdyr was appointed as COO.

Bayada prescribes 4,000 Samsung Galaxy Tabs for homecare nurses

Bayada issues Galaxy tablets outfitted with the SwiftKey Healthcare dictionary to home health nurses for use with clinical documentation. A pilot program found that a typical nurse reduced documentation time by 30 minutes every day by using a tablet rather than a laptop or pen and paper.

Morning Headlines 2/19/13

Speech Recognition Tools Look to Play a Crucial Role within EMR

KLAS reviews front-end and back-end speech recognition systems including Nuance, Agfa, Dolbey, and MModal. The latter saw a significant increase in satisfaction with its back-end solution, but a significant decrease in satisfaction of with its front-end solution.

Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

The Obama administration is planning to announce plans for a decade-long scientific effort to build a comprehensive map of the human brain, seeking to do for the brain what the human genome project did for genetics.

A sensational breakthrough: the first bionic hand that can feel

Researchers announce a prosthetic hand that will receive command instructions from the brain and send back tactile information about the environment in what will be the first prosthetic capable of bi-directional communication with the brain.

Morning Headlines 2/18/13

Veterans Affairs CIO Roger Baker Plans to Resign

VA CIO Roger Baker announces his resignation in an internal VA memo, leaving as his legacy a reputation for accountability and oversight. However, as he walks away, he leaves behind a faltering VA/DoD iEHR program, a $260 million GI Bill claims processing project which has grown to double its original budget and has yet to achieve its desired result, and a separate $500 million disability claims process automation project that has slowed the approval process for disability claims to a rate slower than when the work was done manually on paper, pushing an already ballooning backlog of disability claims to historic levels.

Monitor blasts Rotherham’s EPR programme

Rotherham General Hospital halts its Meditech 6.0 implementation due to issues with coding, patient booking, staff acceptance, and usability. Rotherham, one of the first NHS sites to select an EHR system outside of the National Programme for Information Technology, went live on the system last summer, two years behind schedule.

Hospital ready to ditch £30m computer system

The Royal Berkshire Hospital is preparing to walk away from its $46 million Cerner Millennium install due to a higher than anticipated TCO after budgeting $2.5 million per year but spending closer to $8.5 million. CEO Edward Donald has announced plans to meet other NHS trusts using Millennium to form a united front.

Bellevue Hospital Reopens Trauma Service After Brief Computer Outage

Two weeks after reopening from damage sustained during Hurricane Sandy, Bellevue Hospital was again forced to close its doors and divert trauma patients due to an electrical problem that briefly shut down its computer systems.

Morning Headlines 2/15/13

QPID Launches EHR Search Engine

QPID, an EHR search engine, analytics, and real-time reporting tool for EHRs, launches appropriately enough on Valentine’s Day. The venture is a Massachusetts General Hospital spinoff and will be led by CEO Mike Doyle, formerly of Medsphere.

North Memorial Health Care Reduces Unnecessary Early-term Deliveries by 75 Percent with Adaptive Data Warehouse from Health Catalyst

North Memorial’s use of Health Catalyst technology reduces its rate of elective pre-39 week deliveries by 75 percent in just six months, from 1.2 percent to 0.3 percent of all births.

TeraMedica Signs Agreement with Vanderbilt University Medical Center for its Evercore Vendor Neutral Architecture

Vanderbilt University Medical Center will implement TeraMedica’s Evercore Clinical Enterprise Suite to archive radiology and cardiology images across the health system.

PeriGen, Inc. Names American Journal of OBGYN Editor-In-Chief Thomas J. Garite MD, Chief Clinical Officer

Perinatal clinical decision support vendor PeriGen appoints Thomas J. Garite, MD as chief clinical officer. He is editor-in-chief of the American Journal of OBGYN.

Morning Headlines 2/14/13

Kaiser Permanente Wins Prestigious Eisenberg Award for Patient Safety and Quality Efforts

The National Quality Forum and The Joint Commission present Kaiser Permanente with the Eisenberg Award for work Kaiser did integrating implant registry databases and trending implant-specific outcomes across more than 300,000 patients.

Baylor University Medical Center activates Allscripts electronic health record system

Baylor University Medical Center goes live on Allscripts Sunrise Clinical Manager at its 1,065-bed Dallas campus.

Breach Report 2012: Protected Health Information

Redspin publishes its annual PHI breach report, which shows a 21 percent increase in number of large breaches but a 77 percent decrease in total number of patients impacted. Sixty-three percent of the records compromised were a result of the top five events of the year.

HIEs top hiring need: IT pros

A recent analysis of HIE staffing shortages shows that there is strong demand for health IT professionals, specifically in the areas of data integrity, software support, reporting, security, and technical project management.

Morning Headlines 2/13/13

Greenway Reports Fiscal 2013 Second-Quarter Results, Revises Outlook for Fiscal 2013

Greenway announces Q2 results: revenue up 12 percent, EPS $0.00 far short of analyst estimates of $0.05.  Greenway has adjusted FY13 earnings guidance to $0.21-$0.28 EPS, with analysts predicting $0.27. Shares were down eight percent in Tuesday’s after-hours trading.

RazorInsights Secures $11 Million from Bluff Point Associates

Following a strong reception into the critical access and community hospital EHR market, RazorInsight closes an $11 Million in Series A funding round.

Branzell named CEO of CHIME

Russell Branzell, CEO of the Colorado Health Medical Group, has been named president and CEO of CHIME.

Electronic Medical Records at The Mount Sinai Medical Center Shown to Greatly Improve Quality of Care

Mount Sinai’s ongoing $120 million Epic implementation is credited with improved core measure performance and a reduction of readmissions by 56 percent.

Morning Headlines 2/12/13

National Association of ACOs (NAACOS) is founded in Washington, DC.

Out of the 258 accountable care organizations recognized by CMS, 60 of them across more than 15 states have joined together to form the Washington, DC-based National Association of ACOs.

IBM supercomputer takes on new role in health arena

After a year spent internalizing 600,000 pieces of medical evidence, 1.5 million patient records, 2 million pages of texts from medical journals, and 1,500 lung-cancer cases, IBM’s Watson will be implemented at the Maine Center for Cancer Medicine and WestMed in Westchester County, NY, where it will analyze patient data and recommend care plans for lung cancer patients. Watson will sort treatment options based on what is most likely to succeed and which are covered by the patient’s insurance.

Is iEHR really dead?

The Department of Veterans Affairs CIO Roger Baker responds to last week’s widespread reports that the iEHR project has been shut down. Mr. Baker, along with other C-level executives within the VA, clarify that the project is not defunct and that reports suggesting otherwise have been greatly exaggerated.

Launch of Connect 4.0 – An HIE Advancement Driven by Federal Collaboration

ONC’s Federal Health Architecture announces the release of CONNECT 4.0, an open source data-sharing system built on NHIN standards that enables secure electronic exchange of information to support related Meaningful Use Stage 2 objectives.

Morning Headlines 2/11/13

Paragon, Horizon Clinicals, Revenue Cycle, and Managed Services to combine in a new organization called Enterprise Information Services

McKesson Technology Solutions EVP/Group President Pat Blake says Paragon, Horizon Clinicals, Revenue Cycle, and Managed Services will be combined in a new organization called Enterprise Information Services, with Jim Pesce from the Paragon business serving as president.

athenahealth’s CEO Discusses Q4 2012 Results – Earnings Call Transcript

athenahealth holds its Q4 earnings call, during which CEO Jonathan Bush reports a reduction in physician documentation time to less than five minutes per encounter and hints at a possible venture into the inpatient EMR business.

Computer chaos costs RBH £3.7m

Royal Berkshire Hospital reports implementation overages of $5.8 million (USD) in conjunction with a Cerner implementation that was originally budgeted at $47 million.

Meningitis outbreak prompted State Health Department to gain electronic access

After struggling with federal privacy requirements and other barriers to data collection during last year’s national meningitis outbreak, the Tennessee State Health Department considers proposing legislation that would provide its workers with quicker access to EHRs during a medical emergency.

Morning Headlines 2/1/13

McKesson Q3 Profit Misses Estimate; Cuts FY13 Adj. EPS View

McKesson reports Q3 results: EPS $1.41 compared to last year’s $1.40, missing analyst estimates of $1.63. Revenue was up one percent, ending the quarter at $31.2 billion. The company lowered its guidance for FY 2013 by 20 cents, to $7.10-$7.30. The stock closed down 0.4 percent on the day.

Computer Programs and Systems, Inc. Announces Fourth Quarter and Year-End 2012 Results

CPSI reports year-end results, with revenue up five percent at $183 million. Net income increased 16 percent to $30 million, but EPS missed the $0.88 analyst estimate by $0.05 and shares dropped nearly nine percent in after-hours trading.

Clancy stepping down as AHRQ director

After 10 years on the job, Carolyn Clancy, MD, is stepping down as the director of AHRQ.

Piedmont Newnan transitioning to electronic medical record system

136-bed Piedmont Newnan Hospital goes live on Epic this Friday, the first within the five-hospital Piedmont Healthcare system’s network-wide implementation.

Morning Headlines 1/31/13

Enhancing patient safety and quality of care by improving the usability of electronic health record systems: recommendations from AMIA

JAMIA publishes the recommendations of a year-long EHR usability task force that included representatives from academic settings and EHR design analysts.

Huron Valley Physicians Association IPA Selects eClinicalWorks

Huron Valley Physicians Association of Ann Arbor, Michigan, has selected eClinicalWorks as an ambulatory EHR solution for its 600 providers.

HIT 2012 Annual and Q4 Funding and M&A Report

A 2012 HIT market analysis shows significantly increased venture capital funding, with $1.2B in funding spread over 163 individual deals.

EHI and KLAS Partner to Improve NHS IT Measures

KLAS has partnered with EHealth Insider, a UK-based health IT news and research firm, to bring performance measures to the UK health technology market.

Morning Headlines 1/30/13

Medecision Completes Acquisition of Cerecons

Medecision announces the acquisition of California-based Cerecons, a software provider specializing in population management and quality outcomes tools. The acquisition will result in a care management entity that supports more than 90 healthcare organizations nationally.

University of Virginia Health System Selects MModal’s Speech Understanding Solutions

The University of Virginia (UVA) Health System will implement MModal’s speech recognition and natural language processing solutions to speech-enable its EHR across UVA’s 604-bed hospital, level I trauma center, cancer and heart centers, and primary and specialty clinics throughout Central Virginia.

HealthTech Names Tom Mitchell Vice President of Marketing

HealthTech Holdings, parent company of Healthcare Management Systems (HMS), MEDHOST and PatientLogic, hires Tom Mitchell (MModal) as vice president of marketing.

HL7 Names Two New Advisory Council Members

HL7’s Board of Directors names Joyce Sensmeier, RN-BC, Vice President of Informatics for HIMSS, and Walter Suarez, M.D., PhD, Director of Health IT Strategy of Kaiser Permanente, to serve a two-year term on HL7’s Advisory Council.

6 ways AHRQ will explore EHRs and workflow redesign

AHRQ will interview focus groups with clinical, non-clinical, and management staff about their experiences with electronic health records, stemming from a groundswell of complaints that EHRs create more work, new work, excessive system demands, and inefficient workflow.