Morning Headlines 2/5/15

Health Insurer Anthem Hit by Hackers

Anthem, the country’s second-largest health insurer, is reporting that hackers broke into a database containing personal information for 80 million customers. Investigators are still assessing the damage, but early reports suggest that “tens of millions” of records were stolen.

AMA, MATTER Partner to Create Transformative Health Care Innovation and Technology-enabled “Physician Office of the Future”

AMA is partnering with a Chicago incubator to create a health IT lab focused on growing startups that will drive efficiencies and improve care delivery for physician offices.

Under Armour Just Bought 100 Million Users Worth of Fitness Data

Under Armour acquires calorie counter app MyFitnessPal for $475 million and fitness app Endomondo for $85 million, growing its digital health ecosystem to 100 million active users.

Morning Headlines 2/4/15

athenahealth Collaborates with BIDMC on Inpatient Cloud-based EHR

Athenahealth acquires Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s home grown inpatient EHR. Athena will scrap the code, but will use the system as a model to build its own inpatient EHR over the coming months.

Fiscal Year 2016 Budget of the US Government

ONC requests $92 million in the 2016 federal budget, of which $5 million will be used to establish a Health IT Safety Center.

HHS and ONC invest $28 Million in Health Information Exchange Grants

HHS announces $28 million in new grant money available to support the adoption of HIEs.

Morning Headlines 2/3/15

Cerner Completes Acquisition of Siemens Health Services

Cerner announces the completion of its acquisition of Siemens Health Services. The new merged organization has a combined customer base of 21,000 facilities and an annual R&D budget of $650 million.

Community Health Systems Professional Services Corporation and Three Affiliated New Mexico Hospitals to Pay $75 Million to Settle False Claims Act Allegations

For-profit hospital chain Community Health Systems will pay $75 million to settle False Claims Act charges with the DOJ. Three New Mexico hospitals are accused of making illegal donations to county governments. The funds were used to pay the state’s share of Medicaid payments to the accused hospitals, in an effort to drive up local spending and take advantage of a federal program that reimbursed New Mexico $0.75 for ever dollar spent on rural Medicaid services.

ONC Annual Meeting, February 2 – 3

ONC’s Annual Meeting kicked off in Washington DC today. Tomorrow morning Karen DeSalvo, MD will join the former National Coordinators for an hour long round table on the state of the HIT nation.

Cost Comparison Between Home Telemonitoring and Usual Care of Older Adults: A Randomized Trial

Researcher compare the total cost of care for 205 patients over the age of 60 and find that, over the course of a 12-month period, traditional care costs the same as care supplemented with remote patient monitoring services.

Morning Headlines 2/2/15

Interoperability Roadmap

ONC publishes a draft version of its 10-year interoperability roadmap. The 166-page document outlines a plan for deploying and maintaining an API-based interoperability framework over the next 10 years.

White House Details ‘Precision Medicine’ Initiative

President Obama’s recently announced Precision Medicine Initiative will send $5 million to ONC to develop an interoperability framework and data exchange standards.

CPSI Announces Fourth Quarter and Year-End 2014 Results and 2015 Guidance

CPSI announces Q4 and year-end results: revenue down 10 percent to $46.3 for the quarter and $204 million for the year, EPS $0.60 vs. $0.90. Share prices dropped 16 percent on the news.

Some Maine hospitals can predict your next trip to the ER: Here’s how

A local paper covers the population health analytics tool that Maine’s HIE HealthInfoNet is using to predict which patients are trending toward a stroke, heart attack, hospital admission, or ED visit.

Morning Headlines 1/30/15

CMS intends to modify requirements for Meaningful Use

Following months of growing pressure from industry groups, CMS announces that it will reduce the 2015 Meaningful Use reporting period for from 365-days to 90-days.

Best in KLAS & Category Leaders 2014

KLAS publishes its annual “Best in KLAS” awards, with Epic winning top spot for: Acute Care EMR, Ambulatory care for practices over 10 providers, HIE, LIS, Billing, Surgery Management, and Patient Portal. MEDITECH 6.0 wins Best in KLAS for community hospital EHRs, and Wellsoft wins best stand-alone EDIS.

This Medical Supercomputer Isn’t a Pacemaker, IBM Tells Congress

IBM has been lobbying Congress to push the newly introduced 21st Century Cures bill through to ensure that its Watson supercomputer is protected from FDA oversight.

Morning Headlines 1/29/15

Major Health Care Players Unite to Accelerate Transformation of US Health Care System

A large group of private health care systems and payers have formed a coalition with a goal of migrating 75 percent of their business to value-based arrangements by 2020. Called “The Health Care Transformation Task Force,” the new organization is comprised of 16 health systems, including: Ascension Health, Dignity Health, and Partners Healthcare.

Internet of Things: Privacy & Security in a Connected World

The FTC is taking flack over recommendations made in a new data security report that addresses the coming “Internet of Things.” The report calls for updates to HIPAA that would expand its consumer protection standards to apply to any consumer-facing products that capture patient health data. The report also champions the notion of data minimization, the idea that businesses should redesign their processes with the goal of capturing and retaining less data, an idea with few fans in healthcare.

Data Analytics Update: Health IT Standards Committee Meeting

During yesterday’s HIT Standards Committee meeting, ONC reported that only 15 percent of eligible professionals scheduled to attest for Stage 2 MU have done so. Further, nearly half counted among the 15 percent that have successfully attested did so by securing a hardship exemption.

Committee releases to-do list to help medical industry

A group of bipartisan lawmakers introduced a 400-page draft proposal titled  “21st Century Cures” which would cut red tape from FDA approval processes, increase access to telemedicine, and invest in research to improve the security of medical devices.

Morning Headlines 1/28/15

Huron Consulting To Buy Studer Group For $325 Million

Huron Consulting acquires healthcare leadership consulting firm Studer Group for $325 million, and anticipates that the deal will close by the end of February.

Biogen hires former Children’s executive as first VP of innovation

Cambridge, MA-based Biogen Idec, the leading manufacturer of multiple sclerosis drugs, hires former Boston Children’s Hospital CIO Naomi Fried as its next VP of medical information.

$1 Billion a Year in Redundant Obamacare Programs

An OIG report investigates quality improvement initiatives undertaken by CMS and finds that there are multiple, overlapping programs currently in place which results in unnecessary costs and increased complexity. CMS spent $1.6 billion on its quality improvement efforts between 2011 and 2014.

C-Lab Engineers Developing Wearable Health Sensor for Stroke Detection

Samsung has developed a prototype headset that analyzes brainwave activity to detect early signs of stroke. The device, called the Early Detection Sensor & Algorithm Package, is still under development and will soon be upgraded to monitor cardiac data as well.

Morning Headlines 1/27/15

Progress Towards Achieving Better Care, Smarter Spending, Healthier People

HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell unveils a new plan, and timeline, for moving the nations healthcare providers from fee-for-service model to a value-based reimbursement model. Burwell says that by 2018, 50 percent of all Medicare payments will be made through alternative payment models.

AMA’s letter to ONC

Former ONC Deputy National Coordinator for Health IT Jacob Reider, MD pens an open response to a letter drafted by AMA last week lobbying for renewed emphasis on EHR usability and interoperability. Former National Coordinator for health IT Farzad Mostashari, MD adds his two cents in the comments section.

Revised SOFTWARE Act ‘a huge step forward’

Marsha Blackburn (R- TN) has introduced a revised draft of the SOFTWARE Act, that has received broad support thus far. The bill would limit the FDA’s authority to regulate health IT products by establishing a narrow definition for both medical software and medical device accessories.

New simplified map for Veterans Affairs

The VA unveils plans to consolidate its reporting structure so that all divisions, including the Veterans Health Administration, will report through the same channels. The new five-region structure will be in place by June and is being called “the biggest organizational change in VA history.”

Morning Headlines 1/26/15

VSS exits Strata Decision Technology

Roper Industries has acquired Strata Decision Technology, a cloud-based analytics platform used by 1,000 hospitals for financial planning and reporting. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

New Technology May Save Patients an Additional Visit to a Specialist

The University of Virginia Health System will pilot a remote consultation system that connects primary care providers with specialists for quick questions or second opinions on cases that otherwise would have resulted in an unnecessary referral.

How Are We Today? Study Lets Patients Help Write Medical Notes, Google Doc Style

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center will pilot a new program called OurNotes that will expand on the OpenNotes concept by allowing patients to access and contribute to physician notes in their EHR.

ONC Annual Meeting, February 2 – 3, 2015

ONC will host its annual meeting on February 2-3 in Washington DC. Karen DeSalvo, MD, now both the National Coordinator for health IT and the acting assistant secretary of health, will deliver the opening remarks and lead a session on ONC’s nationwide interoperability roadmap.

Morning Headlines 1/23/15

 EHR Certification Improvements

A large cohort of medical associations lobby to ONC to focus MU3 certification on usability, interoperability, and safety.

NHS disregards patient requests to opt out of sharing medical records

The NHS confirms that it has disregarded tens of thousands of requests by patients to opt out of a new national medical record sharing program, citing concerns that patients did not understand what they were opting out of.

Pew Submits Letter to Health and Human Services Regarding Unique Device Identifier Capture in Electronic Health Records

Geisinger Health Systems, Intermountain Healthcare, and a number of industry groups send a letter to ONC asking that implant medical device tracking be included as a required feature for EHR certification.

ONC adds chief health information officer position

ONC hires Michael McCoy, MD, to its newly created position of chief health information officer. 

Morning Headlines 1/22/15

Precision Medicine: Improving Health and Treating Disease

The White House releases details on the new precision medicine program President Obama announced during his State of the Union Address. The program will work to individualize treatment plans through advances in genetic research, medical imaging, and health information technology.

Survey finds physicians being forced to switch EHRs

The American Academy of Family Physicians releases survey results from physicians who have recently switched EHRs. The majority reported that the switch was an organizational choice and not their own. 61 percent of those that had a say in which EHR was selected reported being happy with the new system, versus a paltry 19 percent approval rating from new EHR users that were not involved in the selection process.

Doctors Choose the Best Health Apps of 2014

HealthTap, an online Q&A site where doctors respond to anonymous medical questions, publishes a list of the top 100 mHealth apps based on voting by its contributing doctors. The top three were all calorie counter apps, and there were no medication reminder or chronic disease management apps within the top 10.

Cerner Collaborates With VFW to Help Improve Lives of Service Members During and After Their Service

Cerner announces a virtual veterans job fair that it will co-host with the VFW on February 18, and a new conversion tool on its recruitment page that will convert a military job code to an ideal job at Cerner.

Morning Headlines 1/21/15

Mayo Clinic Selects Epic as Strategic Partner for Electronic Health Record and Revenue Cycle Management System

Mayo Clinic announces that it has chosen Epic to replace its incumbent Cerner and GE Centricity EHR and revenue cycle systems.

Federal Marketplace: Inadequacies in Contract Planning and Procurement

A report from the HHS Office of the Inspector General finds that CMS failed to oversee Healthcare.gov development work adequately, failed to review past performances of vendors selected for key Healthcare.gov contracts, and structured vendor contracts so that the risk of unanticipated cost increases were absorbed solely by the government, rather than shared among the selected contractors.

Geographic Clusters in Underimmunization and Vaccine Refusal

Kaiser Permanente uses its EHR data to pinpoint areas in California with low rates of childhood vaccination,  finding in one school that 50 percent of the children were unvaccinated due to “personal belief exemption.”

MMRGlobal Proceeds With $30 Million Patent Licensing Case and Files Three New Federal Appeals

MMRGlobal announces that it will appeal decisions made by the California district court to throw out its patent infringement lawsuit against Allscripts and WebMD.

Morning Headlines 1/20/15

The Role of Health Information Technology in Care Coordination in the United States

A study evaluating the role that health IT systems play in coordinating care finds that a higher percentage of physicians using HIT received patient information necessary for care coordination than those who did not use HIT

ACOs make progress in using big data to improve care

Modern Healthcare takes a look at the slow progress being made as ACOs work to roll out effective data analytics systems.

2015 Top 10 Hospital C-Suite Watch List

ECRI names 3D printing, Google Glass, telehealth, and alert fatigue to its 2015 hospital c-suite watch list.

Cleveland Clinic joins 5 Ohio health systems to form statewide healthcare collaborative

The Cleveland Clinic, along with five other Ohio health systems, have formed the Midwest Health Collaborative, which will share information in an effort to improve quality and reduce costs within the state.

Morning Headlines 1/19/15

Official Who Led Medicare Through Insurance Shakeup Is Resigning

CMS administrator Marilyn Tavenner resigns, telling staffers in an email that February will be her last month. Tavenner joined CMS in February 2010, just before President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, and went on to oversee the troubled rollout of Healthcare.gov in October 2013.

Electronic Medical Record Provides Dartmouth-Hitchcock Pathologists Powerful Tool to Push Best Practices in Transfusions

A new EHR alert implemented at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (NH) has significantly reduced the improper use of two-unit blood transfusions for non-bleeding patients.

ER visits still rising despite ACA

At ERs with traditionally high patient volumes, annual visits have only gone up since the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, with one physician speculating that “More people have insurance, but the cultural norm has been to wait until they’re sick to seek care. As they get educated, ER use will go down over a period of years.”

New Department of Biomedical Informatics

Harvard opens a new Department of Biomedical Informatics that will work to leverage new biomedical data streams to develop new methods for research and clinical care. The new department’s advisory board includes digital health pioneer, and Rock Health founder, Halle Tecco.

Morning Headlines 1/16/15

Google joins PwC’s Vista-based bid for military health records

Google will join PwC, General Dynamics, Medsphere, and DSS in their bid to install VistA as the DoD’s next EHR.

Whistleblower Lawsuit Calls Billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Healthcare Startup ‘Fraudulent’ And Dangerous

Two ex-employees of physician billionaire Patrick Soon Shiong’s startup NantHealth file a whistleblower suit alleging that the company is “engaged in a multitude of fraudulent activities.”

The new 10-year standard: Find a more accurate EHR total cost ownership

Becker’s Hospital Review calls for a change to the way total cost of ownership is calculated during EHR procurements, saying that five or seven year timelines are not long enough when in reality a successfully installed EHR won’t be replaced for ten years or longer.

Philips and MIT investigators collaborate to give researchers unprecedented access to critical care patient data

Philips is collaborating with MIT to provide researchers access to the de-identified medical records of 100,000 ICU patients that received care in one of Philips’s eICU centers.

Morning Headlines 1/15/15

Athenahealth Acquires RazorInsights

Athenahealth acquires RazorInsights, an inpatient EHR vendor that has been selling its cloud-based system in the critical access and community hospital market since its 2010 launch.

BT to Offer Medsphere’s OpenVista Electronic Health Record

Medsphere announces that it will partner with BT to begin offering hosted OpenVista systems.

GAO kicks off review of HIE performance

Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Richard Burr (R-NC), and Mike Enzi (R-WY) have asked the General Accounting Office to evaluate the effectiveness of state health information exchanges as the federal government’s $600 million effort to support their implementation winds down.

Morning Headlines 1/14/15

Data Analytics Update: Health IT Policy Committee Meeting

At this week’s Health IT Policy Committee meeting, ONC reports that 77 percent of eligible hospitals and 56 percent of eligible providers scheduled to attest to Stage 2 Meaningful Use have done so. Hospitals still have a month left to attest, while providers have three months left.

Ellmers Reintroduces the Flex-IT Act

Congresswoman Renee Elmres (R- NC) reintroduce HR 270, the Flexibility in Health IT Reporting Act of 2015, a two-page bill that would reduce the Meaningful Use reporting period from 365 days to 90 days.

Clinical Documentation in the 21st Century: Executive Summary of a Policy Position Paper From the American College of Physicians

The Annals of Internal Medicine publishes a paper investigating the effect EHRs have had on the structure and usefulness of clinical notes, concluding that EHRs have real room for improvement, but that the primary driver of change in clinical notes has been the documentation requirements imposed to support an increasingly complex billing process.

Why We’re Picking Walmart And CVS Over Doctors’ Offices

The Huffington Post covers the rise of retail clinics, whose numbers have seen a sevenfold increase since 2007, driven largely by CVS and Walgreens.