Morning Headlines 5/2/14

ManTech Announces Acquisition of 7Delta, Inc.

ManTech International Corporation acquires 7Delta after the Maryland-based IT services firm won a 5-year contract with the VA through its Transformation Twenty-One Total Technology procurement program. Through the acquisition, ManTech will be in position to support the VA’s transition to newer IT systems.

Medicare Program: Hospital Prospective Payment Systems

CMS confirms, buried within a 1700-page document, that the new ICD-10 transition date will be October 1, 2015.

Sovereign Wealth Fund KIA Invests $100 Million in NantHealth, a NantWorks Company

The Kuwait Investment Authority invests $100 million in  healthcare billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong’s newest venture NantHealth.

athenahealth Names Karl Stubelis Acting Chief Financial Officer

athenaHealth announces that CFO Tim Adams has stepped down to pursue other opportunities, and that current vice president and corporate controller Karl Stubelis will take his place.

Morning Headlines 5/1/14

Merge Reports First Quarter Financial Results

Merge reports Q1 results: revenue dropped to $50.9 million from $63.6 million during the same period last year, but lowered costs drove a net income increase of 47 percent. EPS of $0.00 vs -$0.07, stock prices ended trading five percent down on the day.

Boston Medical Center fires vendor after data breach

Boston Medical Center fires its transcription service vendor after it was discovered that 15,000 patient records were posted on the vendor’s website without password protection.

VA Eyes Cash Prizes To Generate Ideas For New Health Record

According to a notice posted on a federal contracting website, the VA will launch a series of design challenges to help generate innovative solutions for its next-generation VistA platform.

March 2014: EHR Incentive Program

CMS has now paid out $22.9 billion since the start of the EHR Incentive Program.

Morning Headlines 4/30/14

M*Modal Files Chapter 11 Plan Backed By Creditors

MModal files its disclosure statement and reorganization plan, detailing the company’s strategy to exit Chapter 11 bankruptcy by August 15.

UPMC Selling Analytics to Curb Health Care Costs

UPMC will begin licensing its homegrown clinical analytics system to other healthcare organizations. The platform identifies the lowest cost treatment plans that consistently lead to the highest quality outcomes and then benchmarks individual physician performance against this data. In the ED, the system is used to predict which patients were more likely to be readmitted, helping UPMC staff reduce readmission rates by 37 percent.

Medfusion’s Relationship with Allscripts Comes to an End

Medfusion will no longer offer its patient portal through Allscripts "due to unresolved payment disputes," according to a statement released Monday.

Nuance CEO Paul Ricci tops in pay among Massachusetts executives

The Boston Globe calls Nuance CEO Paul Ricci the most overpaid executive in Massachusetts. Ricci earned $87 million over the past three years, during which time his company’s stock fell 16 percent.

Morning Headlines 4/29/14

Merck Teams With Electronic Health Record Provider Practice Fusion To Improve Patient Health

Merck partners with Practice Fusion to bring EHR-based immunization reminder tools into physician practices. The partnership will provide physicians with the added ability to track immunization rates at the population level, and automatically send immunization reminders to patients.

What Do Physicians Read (and Ignore) in Electronic Progress Notes?

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst studying the eye movements of physicians as they read electronic notes find that the clinical narrative within the impression and plan section of the note was nearly always carefully read, but that the remainder of the note was only quickly scanned.

Reading Pain in a Human Face

Researchers with the Institute for Neural Computation have created software tool that can outperform humans at differentiating real pain from faked pain by analyzing facial expressions. In the study, participants were asked to watch a video showing subjects expressing either real pain or  faked pain. The participants were only able to correctly identify real pain 55 percent of the time, but the computer program could accurately identify real pain 85 percent of the time.

Morning Headlines 4/28/14

Cover Oregon: $248 million state exchange to be jettisoned in favor of federal system

Oregon’s health insurance exchange program will be dissolved and replaced by the now functional Healthcare.gov site. Oregon spent $248 million trying to bring its exchange live, but failed to enroll a single person.

It’s Insanely Easy to Hack Hospital Equipment

Fargo, ND-based health system Essentia Health asks its head if IT security to thoroughly evaluate its network for security vulnerabilities. Two years later, the team reports that they were able to hack into the hospital’s EHR system and its imaging system. In addition, they were able to hack into and change the settings on drug infusion pumps, wireless defibrillators, and refrigerators that store blood products. 

2015 Edition EHR Standards and Certification Criteria Proposed Rule

The HIMSS EHR association publishes its comments to ONC’s proposed 2015 EHR certification criteria. EHRA’s primary concern is that there is not enough time left after final rules are published for vendors to properly code and test enhancements. The association is requesting an 18-month window be built into the timeline for coding and testing to take place before customers are expected to be live with the new features.

Hacker group Anonymous targets Children’s Hospital

Hacker group Anonymous is suspected of recent hacking attempts on Boston Children’s Hospital’s networks. Anonymous threatened to initiate attacks after a doctor from the hospital brought medical child-abuse charges against the parents of a patient, leading to the child being removed from the parent’s custody.

Morning Headlines 4/25/14

Cerner Reports First Quarter 2014 Results

Cerner reports Q1 results: Revenue is up 15 percent, to $784 million, driven by all-time high bookings of $910 million. Adjusted EPS $0.37 vs. $0.33, meeting analyst’s forecasts.

A fatal wait: Veterans languish and die on a VA hospital’s secret list

The Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system, unable to keep up with the VA’s mandated 15 to 30 day appointment turn-around time, starts maintaining a secret "off the books" wait list where some veterans end up waiting for more than a year. As a result, an estimated 40 veterans died while waiting for care they otherwise would have received. The House Veterans Affairs Committee has ordered all records from Phoenix to be preserved while an investigation is launched.

Congress unhappy with DoD, VA health records progress

House lawmakers will withhold 75 percent of the VA/DoD’s 2015 budget request for their joint EHR project until they demonstrate that progress is being made.

Medical Records and Health Information Technicians

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is predicting a 22 percent increase in jobs for medical records and health IT workers over the next 10 years.

Morning Headlines 4/24/14

Fed privacy enforcers sock health org with $1.7M penalty

The HHS Office for Civil Rights hits Concentra Health Services(TX) with a $1.7 million fine over a data breach that stems from an unencrypted stolen laptop. Within the announcement, OCR states, "Our message to these organizations is simple: Encryption is your best defense against these incidents."

Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for Healthcare Organizations

ECRI publishes a list of the top 10 patient safety concerns healthcare organizations have reported, according to its database of 300,000 patient safety event reports. Topping the list is "Data integrity failures with health information technology systems."

UMass Memorial to Integrate End-Of-Life Care Directives Into EHR

UMass Memorial Health Care will partner with Luminat, an end-of-life technology solutions provider, to help doctors document each patient’s end-of-life wishes and then incorporating the document into the health system’s EHR.

Morning Headlines 4/23/14

The Personal Connected Health Alliance Launches with Goal to Improve Health and Wellness through Connected Technologies

The Continua Health Alliance, mHealth Summit, and HIMSS launch a new non-profit called the Personal Connected Health Alliance that will represent the consumer voice in the growing connected health industry.

Care Everywhere, a Point-to-Point HIE Tool

An Applied Clinical Informatics study says that using Epic’s Care Everywhere module in four Allina Health ER’s resulted in fewer duplicate diagnostic tests and procedures, and more drug seeking behaviors being identified.

athenahealth Announces 2013 Meaningful Use Attestation Rate and Early Stage 2 Performance Data

athenaHealth announces that 95.4 percent of the company’s participating providers successfully attested for Meaningful Use Stage 1 in 2013.

Medicare chief Jonathan Blum leaving Obama administration

CMS Principal Deputy Administrator Jonathan Blum will resign effective May 16, according to an internal email sent by CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner.

Morning Headlines 4/21/14

Heading off the alarms at Boston Children’s Hospital

Boston Children’s Hospital is piloting a predictive analytics tool in its cardiac ICU that it hopes will help combat alarm fatigue by predicting changes in patient condition before alarms sound, and then creating a real-time "heat map" of the unit that tells staff where resources should be directed next.

Scribes Are Back, Helping Doctors Tackle Electronic Medical Records

NPR reports on the medical scribe industry in the US, which is booming in parallel with EHRs.

Wikipedia Usage Estimates Prevalence of Influenza-Like Illness in the United States in Near Real-Time

Researchers at Harvard Medical School find that flu outbreaks can be predicted by monitoring spikes in traffic to Wikipedia pages about the flu and flu-like symptoms. The resulting annual figures were in line with CDC reports, and far outperformed Google Flu Trends, which predicts outbreak numbers based on Google search terms.

Obamacare enrollees urged to change passwords over Heartbleed bug

Healthcare.gov posted a message on Saturday informing users that all passwords had been automatically reset in response to the Heartbleed computer virus.

Morning Headlines 4/21/14

UPMC data breach may affect as many as 27,000 employees

UPMC (PA) reports that hackers have stolen the personal information of 27,000 of its employees. 788 are reporting that their tax returns were stolen when the information was used to file fraudulent tax returns, while others are reporting that unauthorized bank accounts are being opened in their names.

A Robust Health Data Infrastructure

HHS publishes a JASON report on health information interoperability which concludes that without a sophisticated data exchange framework, health IT will continue to struggle to improve care quality or reduce costs. The report recommends that Stage 3 Meaningful Use be used "as an opportunity to break free from the status quo and embark upon the creation of a truly interoperable health data infrastructure."

T.J. Samson Community Hospital announces job, salary cuts Nearly 50 employees losing positions

49 employees at T.J. Samson Community Hospital (KY) will lose their jobs, while most remaining employees will face salary cuts as part of a new plan designed save $3.6 million between now and October. CEO Henry Royse says the cuts were needed due to problems with a Siemens install which he summaries by explaining "One year after going live, the product’s inoperability is still costing the hospital tens of millions of dollars in unrecoverable bad debt, consultant fees, and lost productivity.”

Even After Doctors Are Sanctioned or Arrested, Medicare Keeps Paying

In 2012, Medicare paid at least $6 million, but likely much more, to physicians that were actively suspended or terminated from state Medicaid programs for committing fraud, according to a ProPublica report.

Morning Headlines 4/18/14

Nuance PowerShare Network Unveiled for Cloud-Based Medical Imaging and Report Exchange

Nuance announces that it has acquired image sharing vendor Accelarad and will immediately begin marketing a cloud-based document and image sharing platform called the Nuance PowerShare Network. Financial details were not disclosed.

Athenahealth Posts Loss, Misses Street; Stock Down 10% – Quick Facts

Athenahealth reports Q1 earnings: revenue was up 30 percent at $163 million, but missed analyst estimates of $170 million, EPS $0.12 vs. $0.38.

Epic Wins Tender For Royal Children’s EMR

In Australia, Epic wins a $48 million deal at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital, concluding a vendor search that reportedly included all major US vendors as well as representation from local Australian vendors.

One Medical Group Raises $40M To Help Reinvent The Doctor’s Office

San Francisco, Calif.-based One Medical Group, a startup building technology-laden primary care offices across the nation, raises a $40 million investment round to continue its expansion.

Morning Headlines 4/17/14

Scientists embark on unprecedented effort to connect millions of patient medical records

PCORI will invest $100 million to build a nationwide database containing 26 to 30 million EHR records in an effort to begin supporting retrospective clinical research.

Telehealth Medical Treatment Coming to all 50 States, Brought to You by MeMD

MeMD announces that its subscription-based telemedicine service has expanded to include licensed providers in all 50 states.

Budget Office Lowers Estimate for the Cost of Expanding Health Coverage

The Congressional Budget Office expects that expanding insurance under the ACA will cost $100 billion less than previously forecast over the next 10 years, according to a report published Monday that cites an increase in non-elderly coverage and a decrease in the forecasted cost of insurance subsidies.

Morning Headlines 4/16/14

Public Workshop – Proposed Risk-Based Regulatory Framework and Strategy for Health Information Technology, May 13-15, 2014

The FDA, ONC, and FCC will co-host a free three-day public workshop at NIST’s campus in Gaithersburg, MD from May 13-15. The event will provide experts and stakeholders an opportunity to provide input on the recently published FDASIA health IT report.

ICD-10

CMS finally acknowledges the ICD-10 delay in a new post on its ICD-10 readiness website that says, "CMS is examining the implications of the ICD-10 provision and will provide guidance to providers and stakeholders soon."

Meaningful Use Not Correlated With Quality in Study

A study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (MA) that compared the quality scores of 540 physicians who achieved MU with those of 318 physicians who did not finds that adoption of Meaningful Use does not correlate with improved quality.

IT landscape changing for sharing Oklahoma patient medical records

A local paper covers the launch of two competing health information exchanges in Oklahoma and discusses the impact the competition will have on the overall sustainability of the project.

Morning Headlines 4/15/14

DeSalvo calls for big data use over next decade

In a speech on Capitol Hill last Thursday, Karen DeSalvo, MD, said that one of the ONC’s goals for the next decade would be bringing about the benefits of big data, which she says will require that “the underpinnings of EHRs” be reconfigured to support the free flow of information.

Lawyers start mining the Medicare data for clues to fraud

Lawyers specializing in healthcare fraud cases begin analyzing the recently published Medicare payment data, looking for potential signs of fraud.

Dutton "Committed" To Electronic Health Record

In Australia, Health Minister Peter Dutton expresses support for the country’s EHR program, leading to speculation that while the federal government will not keep the program in its present form, it does not plan to cancel the $700 million project outright.

New York’s electronic medical record plan gets $55 million boost

New York approves an additional $55 million in funding to support its health IT goals, including a $4.5 million investment in the state-run Healthcare Information Exchange of New York.

Morning Headlines 4/14/14

Sebelius’s Slow-Motion Resignation From the Cabinet

The New York Times reports that the writing was on the wall for Kathleen Sebelius after her "wooden" performance on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show in October left the administration questioning whether she was the right person to fix the healthcare.gov debacle.

Image sharing gets to early majority. Nuance’s rumored move validates.

Nuance will reportedly move into the image sharing business and on Monday will announce the acquisition of a small Atlanta-based company working in this space.

What you won’t see in the raw Medicare claims data

The American Medical Association publishes a piece addressing the recent release of Medicare payment data, explaining that the numbers are sometimes inaccurate, and do not represent an individual physician’s take home pay because it does not account for the overhead of running a practice.

‘Heartbleed’ Bug Coder: ‘It was a simple programming error’

The programmer responsible for introducing the OpenSSL bug in 2012 addresses accusations that he introduced the bug intentionally, explaining that it was "a simple programming error in a new feature, which unfortunately occurred in a security relevant area."

Morning Headlines 4/11/14

Health Secretary Resigns After Woes of HealthCare.gov

Kathleen Sebelius has resigned following a five-year span as secretary of HHS. Her term was marred by the failed rollout of Healthcare.gov, despite a late surge that helped it meet its original enrollment goals. On Friday, she will nominate Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to replace her.

Laptops ‘could save doctors’ time’

Researchers at the Birmingham Women’s Hospital in the UK find that physicians in its neonatal unit who use laptops or tablets spend an hour-per-day less on paperwork, compared to those that still document on paper.

WelVU Wins Dignity Health and Box Developer Challenge

Patient engagement platform WelVU takes first place and a $100,000 prize in a Dignity Health and Box sponsored developer challenged which called for "innovative health applications that will revolutionize the way physicians and hospitals educate patients."

Capturing Social and Behavioral Domains in Electronic Health Records: Phase 1

A new Institute of Medicine report recommends expanding the use of EHRs to capture social and behavioral data on patients, saying that EHRs are currently limited in what they can capture, and concluding that this information would be helpful to physicians and public health researchers alike.

Morning Headlines 4/10/14

DeSalvo proposes new direction for ONC

Speaking at a Health Information Policy Committee on Tuesday, Karen DeSalvo, MD, proposed dismantling the ONC’s existing HIT workgroups and forming new ones that would address: HIT strategic planning; Advanced health models and meaningful use; HIT implementation, usability and safety; and Interoperability and health information exchange. Paul Tang, vice-chair of the HITPC said, "This is a nice step-back point. Now that we’ve finished wrapping up our comments and advice on Stage 3, we will begin to look a lot toward how are we getting the value from meaningful use.”

Final Notice of Termination of OIG Advisory Opinion No. 11-18

The HHS’s Office of Inspector General has reversed its 2011 decision on the Federal anti-kickback statute as it applies to transmitting patient referrals through an unnamed ambulatory EHR vendor’s "trading partner" network. The OIG originally approved of the network, but has since decided that it creates a situation in which transaction fees may be financially influencing referral decisions.

Lincoln Health Center request gives county pause

In North Carolina, Lincoln Community Health Center is looking to local county commissioners to pick up half of the $2 million it will cost to implement Duke University’s Epic system. The county thinks that Duke, which is paying the other half, should be on the hook for more.