Morning Headlines 10/13/15

Dell buys EMC in largest tech deal ever

As rumored on HIStalk over the weekend, Dell will acquire EMC for $67 billion, paying EMC shareholders with cash and stock worth a combined $33.15 per share, a 28-percent premium over EMC’s closing stock price Friday.

Cerner conference will focus on health care information technology

A local paper covers Cerner’s annual conference, which will draw an estimated 14,000 visitors to the Kansas City area this week.

HealthCare.gov to Get Major Changes to Ease Shopping for Coverage

Healthcare.gov will get new enhancements ahead of this years open enrollment period that will let users search for plans that include their primary care doctor, preferred hospital, and coverage for their prescription medications. Security enhancements include a “Do Not Track” option and other data exchange enhancements that will help safeguard personal information.

Technical Evaluation, Testing, and Validation of the Usability of Electronic Health Records

The National Institute of Standards and Technology publishes recommended guidelines on EHR design based on a patient safety-focused usability study.

Morning Headlines 10/9/15

Cerner Clients Test SMART on FHIR Apps Within EHR

Cerner unveils an HL7 FHIR-based API that will provide its customers a way to integrate EHR data with third-party apps and other health IT applications.

Project One transition ongoing at Phoebe Putney Health System

A local paper covers the October 1 go-live of Meditech at  640-bed Phoebe Putney Health System (GA). CIO Jesse Diaz reports that the switch over generated upwards of 1,000 calls a day in the command center initially, but that in the week since going live the system has stabilized and morale in the hospital is good.

FDA Launches Pilot to Standardize REMS Information for Easier Systems Integration

The FDA is launching a four-month pilot program aimed at integrating Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies into EHR systems.

Social Security Administration joins CommonWell Health Alliance

The Social Security Administration partners with CommonWell to expedite access to medical records and improve disability claims processing wait times.

Morning Headlines 10/8/15

Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: A Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap

ONC publishes the final draft of its 10-year interoperability roadmap, which calls on vendors to expand API support, asks providers to migrate to value-based reimbursement models faster, and encourages government agencies to clarify privacy and security policies that impact data sharing.

MU 3 is out: 5 reactions from industry leaders

Executives from CHIME, HIMSS, AHA, AMA, and Athenahealth weigh in on the MU3 final rule.

Allscripts Solidifies Management Team, Enhances Organizational Structure

Allscripts CFO Rick Poulton will be the next company president, assuming the role from current CEO Paul Black who has held dual positions as president and CEO since joining the company in December 2012. The company also announces that Black’s contract, which was set to expire at the end of 2015, has been extended through December 2018.

With E.U. striking down data-sharing pact, U.S. healthcare firms face challenges

An EU court has struck down the Safe Harbor Framework, a data sharing agreement that allows US-based companies to store the sensitive information of European citizens on US-based servers, a decision that could impact US health IT vendor operating in Europe.

Morning Headlines 10/7/15

Medicare and Medicaid Programs; Electronic Health Record Incentive Program—Stage 3 and Modifications to Meaningful Use in 2015 through 2017

CMS publishes an update addressing both MU3 and its proposed modification to Meaningful Use in 2015 through 2017. The updated rules set the 2015 MU reporting period at 90-days, and makes MU3 optional in 2017, but mandatory in 2018.

The Joint HIT Standards and Policy Committee meeting

John Halamka, MD and CIO of BIDMC, reports that every major EHR vendor CEO met in Salt Lake City last week, where they discussed data sharing and agreed to  “objective measures we can use to quantify interoperability.” Halamka says that details of the meeting and the agreement will follow in the coming weeks.

Transparent Ratings on Usability and Security to Transform 8 Information Technology (TRUST IT) Act of 2015

HELP committee members Senators Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduce legislation that would establish an EHR 5-star rating system and also require that EHR vendors file an attestation stating that they do not engage in information blocking.

Orion Health Awarded Defense Healthcare Management System Modernization Program Subcontract

Orion Health is added to the Leidos-Cerner DoD contract. Orion’s Rhapsody integration engine will be used to connect Cerner Millennium with civilian facilities.

Morning Headlines 10/6/15

Why Teladoc Needs Medical Attention

Teladoc stock dropped more than 20 percent on Friday after news broke that one of its largest customers, insurance provider Highmark Inc., would not renew its contract. Losses continued on Monday as its stock price shed another four percent.

Q3 update: 2015 digital health funding exceeds 2014

Rock Health publishes its quarterly digital health investment report, concluding that, with $3.3 billion in investment activity, 2015 is outpacing 2014’s record-breaking year by a narrow margin.

Harnessing Consumer Engagement for Better Health, Better Care and Lower Cost

An ONC blog post published by National Coordinator for health IT Karen DeSalvo, MD  highlighting the latest patient engagement findings, claims that in 2014, “over half of individuals who were offered online access to their medical record viewed their record at least once.” DeSalvo goes on to say that ONC is developing a policy framework that outlines best practices for using patient-generated health data in research and care delivery.

Harvard Pilgrim forms population health venture with New Hampshire systems

New Hampshire-based hospitals Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Elliot Health System, and Frisbie Memorial Hospital partner with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care in a joint venture called Benevera Health that will provide care and share financial risk for 80,000 local residents.

Morning Headlines 10/5/15

Mercy debuts new $54 million virtual care center

Mercy Health goes live with its $54 million telehealth command center, where 290 clinicians are monitoring 2,400 beds spread across 33 hospitals, providing a wide range of services including telestroke, teleICU, and remote specialist consultations.

UT Southwestern, Texas Health Resources form huge health care network

Texas Health Resources and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center agree to merge EHRs and coordinate patient care across 27 hospitals throughout North Texas.

Quarter of doctors’ appointments wasted – report

A study in the UK finds that 27 percent of primary care visits could have been avoided with better use of technology and care coordination. The report found that PCPs spent the time equivalent of 15 million appointments rearranging hospital schedules and chasing test results.

Morning Headlines 10/2/15

Alexander to Administration: 5 Reasons to Take More Time Before Making Final the Stage 3 Rule for the Electronic Health Records Program

Senator Lamar Alexander (R- TN), chairman of the Senate’s HELP Committee, continues with his efforts to delay the implementation of MU3 by publishing a list of five key reasons for the proposed delay, adding “there is broad and bipartisan interest in seeing the administration take its time to get this done right.”

Profit Heaven: UNC Hospitals quadruple operating income in 2015

UNC Hospitals (NC) reports an operating income of $115 million, quadrupling its 2014 figure. The system credits added beds and its Epic implementation for the financial turnaround.

Medical software boom: eClinicalWorks buys third Westboro building for $21.1M

Massachusetts-based practice management vendor eClinicalWorks buys a 192,000 square-foot office building as it makes plans to add 1,000 employees to its workforce.

Morning Headlines 9/29/15

Patients file lawsuit against two D.C. hospitals alleging excessive fees to obtain medical records

Georgetown University Hospital and George Washington University Hospital are named in a class action lawsuit for failing to provide electronic copies of medical records when requested and instead charging patients $1,000 or more in processing fees for paper copies of their records.

A better way to treat cancer

Brian Druker, MD, director of the Knight Cancer Institute at OHSU and 2009 recipient of the Lasker Award, publishes a piece on the impact that genetic sequencing and precision medicine is having on cancer treatments.

Census Estimates Show Progress Toward ACA Coverage Goals — But There Is More To Be Done

Health Affairs analyzes a recent Census Bureau report confirming an 8.5 percent drop in the USuninsured population, concluding that the gains were driven largely by subsidies and Medicaid expansions introduces within the Affordable Care Act.

Dow Industrials Sink 313 Points

The DJIA falls 1.9 percent Monday, due partly to healthcare and biotechnology stocks dropping as Congress and presidential hopefuls discuss Valeant Pharmaceuticals and controlling drug price gouging. The Nasdaq Biotechnology Index dropped six percent, erasing gains for the year.   

Morning Headlines 9/28/15

‘Trust but verify’ – five approaches to ensure safe medical apps

Researchers at the Imperial College London find that mobile health apps consistently fail to deliver evidence-based clinical recommendations, while most also fail to meet basic data security standards, such as encrypting personal health information that is being transmitted over the Internet.

A Medical Detective Story: Why Doctors Make Diagnostic Errors

In a Wall Street Journal interview, Hardeep Singh, MD and chief of health policy, quality, and informatics at the Houston VA Medical Center, discusses diagnostic errors and the potential roles and roadblocks that electronic diagnostic tools will face in care delivery.

Iowa’s mental health bed-tracking database ‘not useful’ so far, hospitals say

In Iowa, a $15,000 bed-tracking system implemented to help rural hospitals find available inpatient mental health beds across the state is not working out as planned because the 29 facilities with psychiatric beds are not updating the system with availability information.

WEDI and National Association for Trusted Exchange (NATE) Announce Partnership

The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI) will partner with the National Association for Trusted Exchange to continue work on WEDI’s Virtual Clipboard initiative, a project aimed at establishing industry standards for automating the patient check-in process.

Morning Headlines 9/25/15

CMS Has Updated Systems and Supported Stakeholders’ Efforts to Use New Codes

The CMS GAO publishes a report on its investigation of the preparations made by CMS ahead of the ICD-10 transition, concluding that the agency will not truly know how prepared it is until it starts processing claims.

The breakdown of costs of Addenbrooke’s Hospital’s £200m Epic IT system

The Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been put on special measures “after over-spending an average of £1.2m a week, in part due to its new online patient-record system, which has been fraught with problems.”

OPM says 5.6 million fingerprints stolen in cyberattack, five times as many as previously thought

The Office of Personnel Management reports that 5.6 million fingerprints were stolen in its recent data breach, updating its original estimate of 1.1 million by more than five times.

Morning Headlines 9/24/15

Accenture Adds Distinctive Electronic Health Record Consulting Capabilities with Acquisition of Sagacious Consultants

As reported by HIStalk readers yesterday, Accenture acquires Sagacious Consultants for an undisclosed sum.

GE Healthcare Announces $300 Million Commitment to Support Emerging Market Health

GE Healthcare, the $18 billion healthcare technology division of GE, announces the creation of a new business unit that will focus on bringing low cost, high impact health technology solutions to Africa and parts of Asia.

Interoperability Tops ‘To-Do’ List According to Medical Students

Athenahealth publishes findings from its annual Epocrates Future Physicians of America survey, which finds that 96 percent of medical students believe that improving EHR interoperability is important to patient care, while 87 percent support the creation of a universal patient record.

Why Cleveland Clinic Shares Its Outcomes Data with the World

Michael Kattan, PhD and the chair of the quantitative health sciences department at the Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute, writes a Harvard Business Review article explaining how the Cleveland Clinic captures and analyzes its outcomes data and why it publically reports all of its findings.

Morning Headlines 9/23/15

Addenbrooke’s and Rosie hospitals’ patients ‘put at risk’

In England, the Care Quality Commission inspects Cambridge University Hospitals Trust, Epic’s sole UK customer, and finds that the implementation negatively affected the hospitals “ability to report, highlight, and take action on data” and caused medications to be incorrectly prescribed.

The Future of Emergency Department Information Systems

Peer60 publishes a report on the EDIS market, finding that 32 percent of respondents plan to switch ED vendors, with Meditech leading in market share and Epic leading in replacement vendor mind share.

FDA Announces First-ever Patient Engagement Advisory Committee

The FDA launches a new patient engagement advisory committee made up of nine voting members who are experts in clinical research, primary care patient experience, and the health care needs of patient groups.

Adventist Health System to pay $118 mln to settle fraud claims

Adventist Health System (FL) will pay $118 million to settle a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that it paid kickbacks to providers in exchange for referrals.

Morning Headlines 9/22/15

Federal Health IT Strategic Plan: 2015 – 2020

ONC publishes its five-year strategic plan which proposes shifting the national focus from EHR implementations to improving patient engagement, supporting the transition to value-based reimbursement models, expanding the use of EHR data mining in research, and improving the nation’s health IT infrastructure.

Google’s NIH steal Tom Insel on the ‘major paradigm shift’ of digitizing mental health care

Tom Insel, MD and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, discusses his decision to move to Google and the work he plans to do there.

In Unit Stalked by Suicide, Veterans Try to Save One Another

The New York Times profiles the 2/7th Marine Regiment, whose veterans have a suicide rate 14 times higher than the average American, and the homegrown tracking systems that former members of the unit have created to help coordinate emergency response efforts at a national level.

Maintaining PCMHs Will Cost $105,000 per Physician per Year

Researchers calculate the number of hours it would take a primary care physician to complete the tasks outlined in the National Committee for Quality Assurance’s standards for maintaining patient-centered medical homes, and conclude that it would cost $105,000 per year in additional time spent.  

Morning Headlines 9/21/15

Oops! Error by Systema Software exposes millions of records with insurance claims data and internal notes

A data security hobbyist searching through public Amazon Web Services sub-domains finds exposed databases containing personal information from more than a million Kansas State Self Insurance Fund customers, as well as claims documents from cloud-based claims management vendor Systema Software.

Health Information Technology in the United States, 2015: Transition to a Post-HITECH World

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation publishes its 2015 review of health IT, focusing on HIEs, payment reform, big data, and evaluating HITECH’s success.

The Changing Role of the CIO

John Halamka, MD is promoted to CIO of the BIDMC System, while his second in command Manu Tandon will take over as CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

How Playing the Long Game Made Elizabeth Holmes a Billionaire

Inc. profiles Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, calling her the next Steve Jobs and quoting Stanford University dean of engineering and Theranos advisor Channing Robertson as saying, “Just one or two of these people come forward every generation, and she’s one of them.”

Morning Headlines 9/18/15

HP spinoff to cut up to 30K jobs

HP announces that it will layoff 30,000 employees later this year as part of a restructuring plan that will split the company into two separate entities, HP Enterprise which will run the company’s enterprise business, and HP Inc, which will focus on hardware.

Health IT Complaint Form

ONC fixes early access problems with its health IT complaint form.

Why It’s Hard to Measure Improved Population Health

A Harvard Business Review article argues that organizations engaging in population health management are more likely to put efforts into improving care for easier or more cooperative patients, resulting in a further marginalized community.

Morning Headlines 9/17/15

HELP Committee chairman calls for flexibility in implementation of Stage 3 EHR rules

Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, calls for a phased in approach to the creation and implementation of MU3.

Hilo Medical Center Selected as 2015 HIMSS Enterprise Davies Award Recipient

Hilo Medical Center (HI) receives the HIMSS Davies Award, being recognized for using its EHR (Meditech) to drive $35 million in cost reductions and a $4 million overall ROI while reducing hospital acquired infections and the mortality rates of patients admitted with pneumonia.

Mayo Clinic and AVIA Announce Finalists Competing for $100,000 THINK BIG Challenge

Mayo Clinic announces the finalists of its Think Big Challenge, a design competition challenging engineers to build tools that promote health lifestyles or help people living with chronic diseases.

Morning Headlines 9/16/15

Cambridge chief exec resigns

The CEO and finance director of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Epic’s first UK customer, resigns following a growing financial deficit and “significant performance and quality concerns” related to IT.

CMS Did Not Always Manage and Oversee Contractor Performance for the Federal Marketplace as Required by Federal Requirements and Contract Terms

An HHS OIG report on the rollout of Healthcare.gov finds that CMS failed to “provide adequate contract management and oversight for Federal marketplace contracts,” which resulted in delays, performance issues, and unauthorized costs.

Google Bets on Insurance Startup Oscar Health

Two-year old tech-savvy insurance startup Oscar Health raises a $32.5 million funding round from Google Capital, bringing its total raised to $325 million and its valuation to $1.75 billion.

Identifying preventable readmissions: an achievable goal or waiting for Godot?

Researchers question the accuracy of readmission risk metrics, arguing that future research efforts should be shifted away from hospital care and toward “developing quality care measures of complex disease management across a patient’s continuum of care.”