Morning Headlines 12/20/13

DeSalvo Named National Coordinator

Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MsC will be the next National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. She will take over on January 13, relieving Jacob Reider, MD, who has served as interim national coordinator since Farzad Mostashari, MD stepped down in October.

Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange ICD-10 Survey Results

Vendors, hospitals, practices, and payers are all behind in preparing for the ICD-10 conversion, according to a new report.

Reps Matsui (CA) and Johnson (OH) Introduce Bipartisan Legislation Creating a Federal Definition of Telehealth

Representatives Doris Matsui (D-CA) and Bill Johnson (R-OH) have introduced the Telehealth Modernization Act of 2013, which would help standardize telehealth reimbursement policies amid inconsistent state legislation.

Kansas’ online medical records networks to connect, starting Thursday

On Tuesday, the Kansas Health Information Exchange will connect with the Lewis and Clark Information Exchange. The HIEs are for-profit competitors and initially fought the state’s mandate that they share records, going so far at one point as to threaten to charge each other transaction fees for each shared record.

Morning Headlines 12/19/13

How mandated reporting set infection rates on the decline 

Six years after New York’s Department of Health started publishing hospital-acquired infection data, the rates of most infections are trending downward.

GAO report says CMS’ rule on quality reporting system may be too vague

A GAO report finds that new CMS rules designed to boost participation in PQRS reporting are too vague to have a meaningful impact on participation. The report’s authors suggest that one solution could be to require EHR vendors to develop reporting tools that make it easier to extract the data that the PQRS registry needs.

Saint Francis debt: $50 million

Poughkeepsie, NY-based St.Francis Hospital files bankruptcy after billing issues associated with its recent Meditech implementation leads to millions in unrecoverable lost revenue. CEO Art Nizza took ownership of the problem, saying that the clinical systems worked well because proper attention was paid to their implementation, and that had the same attention been given to the revenue cycle implementation, the problems might not have grown to the point that bankruptcy was necessary.

Ryan Donovan Departs Visa For Late Stage Start-Up

Ryan Donovan will leave his position as head of global PR for Visa to join Practice Fusion as the VP of corporate communications.

Morning Headlines 12/18/13

Former Microsoft Executive Kurt DelBene To Replace Jeff Zients

CMS taps recently retired Microsoft VP Kurt DelBene to take over Healthcare.gov. DelBene was formerly in charge of the Microsoft Office division. He will take over for Jeff Zients, who stepped in to oversee the immediate fixes needed just after the October 1 launch.

HealthTech Unifies Brands as MEDHOST, Names Herrod as President

HealthTech, the parent company of MEDHOST, HMS, and Patient Logic, consolidates all of its businesses under the MEDHOST brand name and names Craig Herrod president of the new organization. Herrod was formerly the president and CEO of MEDHOST.

Paulsen Introduces Legislation to Streamline and Enhance U.S. Healthcare Delivery

Congressman Erik Paulsen introduces a bill that would require the use of clinical decision support tools by physicians when ordering imaging studies on Medicare patients.

New Approaches for Delivering Primary Care Could Reduce Predicted Physician Shortage

A RAND study looks at alternative models for delivering primary care services that would help alleviate the growing physician shortage. Researchers focused on the patient-centered medical home (PCMH) and the nurse-managed health center (NMHC) models and found that projected PCP shortages could be substantially reduced by increasing the use of these models.

Morning Headlines 12/17/13

athenahealth, Merge Healthcare Partner for Data Exchange

athenahealth and Merge Healthcare announce a strategic partnership that will connect Merge’s iConnect Network with athenahealth’s ambulatory EHR. The partnership will enable athena customers to view high-resolution images and exam results coming from Merge within their EHR.

Congress demands no more iEHR delays

Next year’s National Defense Authorization Act has language in it that requires the DoD and VA to develop an acceptable iEHR plan by the end of January 2014. The bill further stipulates that “Not later than October 1, 2014, all health care information contained in the Department of Defense AHLTA and the Department of Veterans Affairs VistA systems shall be available and actionable in real-time to health care providers in each Department through shared technology.”

HHS seeks an innovator to attack patient matching

HHS CTO Bryan Sivak says that the departments next innovator-in-residence will lead the search for better patient matching technologies to help HIEs return the correct patient chart in the absence of a national patient ID system.

Morning Headlines 12/16/13

Cerner Corporation : Cerner Announces Stock Repurchase Program

Cerner announces a stock repurchase of $217 million, which at current stock prices would allow it to buy back 1.2 percent of the company’s outstanding shares.

Virginia Man Pleads Guilty to Mail Fraud in Scheme That Cost His Employer More Than $100,000

A former employee of The Advisory Board Company pleads guilty to fraud after cheating the company out of more than $100,000.

How Long Will Athenahealth Investors Keep the Faith?

According to Barron’s, athenahealth stock dropped last week because the company lowered its 2014 expectations and Jonathan Bush announced that he would be taking a two-month sabbatical. The company also announced that it will sell hospital clinical software to compete with Epic and Cerner.

Morning Headlines 12/13/13

AthenaHealth shares plunge on disappointing 2014 earnings outlook

AthenaHealth shares dropped 14 percent in after hours trading Wednesday on weak earnings forecasts ($0.98-$1.10 EPS) for 2014, that missed analysts estimates of $1.38 EPS.

Health Information Exchange Improves Identification Of Frequent Emergency Department Users

A study published in Health Affairs finds that using community-wide data from a HIE improves the ability to identify frequent emergency department users because visit history can be measured across unaffiliated hospitals. When analyzing HIE-wide data instead of site-specific data, 20.3 percent more frequent ED users were identified.

Cerner to take charge against earnings after arbitration ruling

Trinity Medical Center (ND) will receive an undisclosed settlement nearly two years after suing Cerner over accounting software purchased in 2008 that it claimed was "defective and did not deliver the promised benefits." Trinity was seeking $240 million in damages, while Cerner argued that damages should not have been higher than $4 million. The two agreed to arbitration hearings in October and a final settlement amount has now been reached. Cerner will take a $0.19 charge against its anticipated Q4 EPS of $0.35 to cover the loss.

Health Insurance Marketplace: December Enrollment Report

Healthcare.gov enrolled 258,497 in November, bringing the State and Federal total since launch to 365,000.

Morning Headlines 12/12/13

Kathleen Sebelius calls for HealthCare.gov contracting, management investigation

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has asked the HHS Inspector General’s office to investigate the failed rollout of Healthcare.gov.

Open-source community helps with emergency VistA patch

A Georgia Tech graduate student working on his master’s degree thesis uncovers a security vulnerability in VistA that could impact patient’s medical treatments and compromise patient data. He brought the problem to the VA, but received no response. Next, he brought his findings to OSEHRA, a nonprofit open-source EHR developers forum. OSEHRA coordinated efforts fix the issue and, in partnership with VA, ensured that the patch was installed across all VA facilities.

CommonWell Announces Launch Geographies and Participants

CommonWell announces the first geographic areas that will be included in its vendor-backed HIE effort: Chicago, Illinois; Elkin and Henderson, North Carolina; and Columbia, South Carolina.

Data Helps Drive Lower Mortality Rate at Kaiser

John Mattison, MD, CMIO of Kaiser Permanente says that a large part of Kaiser’s lower than average mortality rates are "directly related to how we use data and integrate data.” He predicts that by 2020 ten times more medical research will be generated by by big data analytics than by conventional models of clinical research.

Morning Headlines 12/11/13

Timeline Changes for Meaningful Use

Brian Ahier publishes a revised Meaningful Use Attestation table that helps clarify the impact ONC’s stage 2 extension will have.

Separating EMR Fact from Fiction: Are Technology Platforms Predictors of Clinical Success?

A recent KLAS report finds that healthcare providers do not believe that the underlying technology an EHR is built on is a true predictor of its capability or clinical success.

Gov’t Health IT Report Expected in Early 2014

The FDA, ONC, and FCC will issue a joint report early next year outlining the federal government’s strategy for promoting innovation in health information technology.

OIG: OCR Needs to Improve Compliance

A report from the Office of the Inspector General says that HHS’s Office for Civil Rights, which is responsible for enforcing HIPAA, has failed to comply with a number of federal cyber security requirements.

Morning Headlines 12/10/13

Practice Fusion Grabs Another $15M for Electronic Health

Free cloud-based ambulatory EHR vendor Practice Fusion raises another $15 million on its series D round, bringing the round total to $85 million and its lifetime fundraising to nearly $150 million.

Royal Berks suspends Cerner contracts

In England, Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust has suspended two contracts it has with Cerner worth $10 million. The contracts were awarded in 2012 for 10 years of customer support for the Trust’s Cerner Millennium EHR. The contracts were cancelled due to due to higher than anticipated operating costs associated with the project. To bring costs back in line, the Trust cancelled the support contracts and plans to train internal staff to fill the support roles instead.

IMS Health Announces Acquisition of Pygargus

IMS Health, a big-data firm that aggregates and sells large databases of de-identified healthcare data, acquires Pygargus, a Swedish health analytics firm.

You’re Getting Too Much Healthcare

The Atlantic discusses overconsumption of healthcare services in America. According to a recent Institute of Medicine report, 30 percent of total healthcare expenditures in the US are for unneeded care. 42 percent of doctors surveyed in a 2011 Archives of Internal Medicine study reported thinking that their patients were getting more care than necessary.

Morning Headlines 12/9/13

Progress on Adoption of Electronic Health Records

CMS proposes a one-year extension to the attestation period for Stage 2 Meaningful Use. Eligible providers who have completed two years of Stage 2 would begin Stage 3 in January 2017.

Epic hit with class-action lawsuit on overtime wages

A former Epic employee files a class-action lawsuit against Epic alleging that Epic employees are not paid overtime wages that they are entitled to.

Identity information of 1,300 Methodist Hospital transplant patients stolen

Houston Methodist Hospital is reporting that the data from 1,300 transplant patients was compromised when an encrypted laptop was stolen.

Russian diplomats accused of $1.5M Medicaid fraud

Dozens of Russian diplomats and family members are being charged with Medicare fraud after lying about their income so that the government would pay their healthcare bills.

Morning Headlines 12/6/13

To Make Hospitals Less Deadly, a Dose of Data

Tina Rosenberg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, writes an op-ed in the New York Times calling for more transparency within hospital quality reporting data. She cites as her reason for concern a recent report published in the Journal of Patient Safety that attributes 440,000 US deaths per year to preventable medical errors. That’s one-sixth of all deaths nationally and the third leading cause of death in the United States.

Boston Children’s Hospital study shows significant reduction in hospital medical errors with improved handoff communication

A Boston Children’s Hospital study published in JAMA finds that by implementing a formal communication protocol for conducting patient handoffs and supporting the process with a structured, pre-populating, handoff tool within an EHR, substantial drops in medical errors were realized. Researchers noted a 46 percent drop in overall medical errors after the changes were implemented. Medical errors decreased from 33.8 to 18.3 per 100 admissions and preventable adverse events decreased from 3.3 to 1.5 per 100 admissions.

Carl Icahn buys up more Nuance shares

Active investor Carl Icahn ups his stake in Nuance to nearly 19 percent after the company’s unexpectedly low Q1 forecasts sends stock prices down 15 percent.

Largest Study of Critical Care Telehealth Reveals Improvements in Patient Outcomes and Reductions in Health Care Costs

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School publish a  study that measures the effectiveness of tele-ICU programs implemented across 56 intensive care units over a five-year period. The study found that with telehealth support in the ICU,  patients leave the ICU 20 percent faster and are 16 percent more likely to survive hospitalization and be discharged.

Morning Headlines 12/5/13

Meaningful use incentive payments soar toward $17B

The EHR incentive program has paid out $17 billion, with 85 percent of eligible hospitals attesting to Stage 1 MU.

CMS boosts telehealth coverage for 2014

Within Medicare’s 2014 physician fee schedule, CMS expands reimbursable telehealth services to include most rural communities up to “the fringes of metropolitan areas.”

Texting While Doctoring: A Patient Safety Hazard

In a recent Annals of Internal Medicine op-ed, the overlooked danger of charting in an EHR while interviewing a patient is equated to texting while driving. The authors argue that "using a cell phone while driving reduces the amount of brain activity devoted to driving by 37 percent. Multitasking is dangerous – cognitive scientists have shown that engaging in a secondary task disrupts primary task performance."

Class Action Law Suit Filed Against 23andMe

23andMe, a genome testing service provider that markets direct-to-consumer genetic tests, is hit with a class action lawsuit just a week after the FDA ordered the company to pull its  tests from the market until its submits evidence that the tests are scientifically valid.

Morning Headlines 12/4/13

Hearst Corporation Agrees to Acquire an 85% Stake in Homecare Homebase, LLC

Hearst Corporation acquires an 85 percent stake in Homecare Homebase, the #1 KLAS rated home health and hospice software vendor.

Martin Health System Adopts RightPatient™ Iris Biometrics for Patient Identification

Martin Health System (FL) will deploy a new biometric patient identification solution from RightPatient that uses iris scanning to positively identify patients. MHS executives expect that the new system will help stop patient identity fraud, eliminate the creation of duplicate medical records, and reduce billing errors.

KLAS Investing in the Future of Medical Imaging

KLAS forms an imaging advisory board to lead a new project focused on imaging-based research.

Adventist to launch updated system

Adventist (CA) will go live with Cerner across 50 clinics this week, completing a network-wide install.

Morning Headlines 12/3/13

Ontario hospital learns that bandaging IT doesn’t work

After ignoring IT department recommendations to upgrade aging infrastructure components, Bryant Community Healthcare in Ontario is paying the price. A power surge that resulted in a system-wide network crash and three days of unplanned downtime prompted hospital leadership to green light a new virtualized server environment that has eliminated unplanned downtime.

HealthCare.gov: Progress and Performance Report

CMS releases a Healthcare.gov progress report outlining the improvements made. A new analytics platform has been installed that is allowing developers to monitor site performance in real time from a centralized war room where decisions are being made on which improvements to tackle next.

Forsyth Tech to offer free job-training program

In North Carolina, Forsyth Technical Community College is launching a free "back-to-work" program that will build up a local supply of hard-to-find talent by training unemployed residents on key skills. One of the three career options students can chose from is an electronic health records specialist. The program will pay for registration fees, books and other incurred costs.

Morning Headlines 12/2/13

UW Medicine Notice of Computer Security Breach

University of Washington Medicine (WA) reports a data breach after a worker inadvertently opened an email that contained malware. A computer forensics investigation found that the virus accessed the data files of 90,000 patients.

Taking health care down a digital path

Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario goes live on Epic in the laboratory and across a portion of its outpatient clinics. Over the next three years, Epic will be rolled out across all acute units, the emergency department, and its ambulatory clinics.

"Patient portals" to soon allow online access to medical data

An upstate New York regional HIE is profiled by the local news as it prepares to launch a region-wide patient portal for residents.

34 Chicago-area hospitals to join health information exchange

MetroChicago HIE, a health information exchange that will service 34 Chicago-based hospitals, will be announced this week and will launch early in 2014.

Morning Headlines 11/27/13

Nuance Announces Fiscal 2013 and Fourth Quarter Results

Nuance reports Q4 results: $0.30 EPS on a total revenue of $472 million, missing analyst estimates of $489 million, but surpassing the $0.29 EPS estimate. Stock price fell 18 percent Tuesday due to lower than expected Q1 guidance.

7 Democrats Seek Long-Term HealthCare.gov CEO

A group of seven Democratic senators, led by Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, is calling for President Obama to appoint a CEO over Healthcare.gov  following the expected departure of Jeffrey Zients. Zenits was tapped to fix healthcare.gov shortly after it became apparent that the site had major technical issues, but at the time, he had already accepted a position as director of the National Economic Council which will start in January.

Telemedicine May Reduce Doctor Errors for Kids in Rural EDs‏

The use of telemedicine for pediatric consults in rural emergency departments led to fewer physician-related medication errors according to a report published in this month’s issue of Pediatrics.

Two Kansas health information exchanges to link, improving access

After more than a year of heated disagreements, two competing for-profit health information exchanges from Kansas have agreed to connect and share medical records statewide.

Morning Headlines 11/26/13

Analysis of huge data sets will reshape health care

USAToday covers the rise of big data in healthcare, imagining that, " Insurers will soon reassess how they predict costs; patients will let doctors know what medications won’t work with their particular genomes; and researchers will look at hospital records in real time to determine the cheapest, most effective ways to treat patients."

ProHealth adds Epic Systems’ ‘population management’ tool

ProHealth Care, a Wisconsin-based health system and ACO, becomes the first Epic customer to use Cogito, Epic’s population health data miner.

Congress Pushed for Stage 3 Criteria for Telehealth

The American Telemedicine Association, Association for Competitive Technology, Continua Health Alliance, and the Telecommunications Industry Association send a letter to Congressional leaders asking that they ensure that Meaningful Use Stage 3 includes interoperability requirements that address not only data within EHRs, but also data captured via remote patient monitoring systems.

FDA tells 23andMe to halt sales of genetic test

The FDA has ordered personal genome testing vendor 23andMe to pull its services from the market until it proves to the FDA that its tests are scientifically valid.