Morning Headlines 7/8/13

Outsourced UPMC workers protest cuts

Transcriptionists at Pittsburgh’s UPMC protest the decision to outsource their jobs to Nuance. The workers were offered remote positions with Nuance, but at a significant pay cut.

ONC Patient Safety Webinar

ONC will hold a meeting on its recently announced patient safety plan this Wednesday, July 10, at 3:45pm EDT.

Low sign-up for Australian eHealth records

In Australia, the highly publicized national patient portal is criticized after the one-year anniversary of its launch passes with only two percent of the Australian population having created accounts.

Open Letter to Chuck Hagel: DoD still doesn’t know what the hell they are doing

VistA expert Tom Munnecke publishes an open letter to Chuck Hagel in which he explains why implementing VistA would be a logical choice for the DoD and why a commercial solution would be an expensive mistake. He uses England’s NPfIT failure as an example of what can go wrong when a national strategy is centered around integrating multiple systems and points to the NHS’s recent decision to evaluate the use of VistA as a single, integrated solution as validation of that approach.

Morning Headlines 7/5/13

May 2013: EHR Incentive Program

May marks the slowest growth in eligible professional attestation since June 2011, netting just 892 new EPs and moving total attestation rates from 55.3 percent to 55.4 percent.

Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards: Achieving an Integrated Digital Care Record

In England, the NHS issues a report which confirms that it is evaluating the implementation of VistA to meet its health IT goals in an open source environment.

Lawmakers release comments on call for ‘reboot’ of Meaningful Use program

Six Republican senators have released the public comments they solicited in April regarding a request to HHS to publish a written plan for how it is implementing the HITECH Act.

Indiana FSSA notifying clients of potential information breach

A computer glitch that caused medical records to be erroneously printed and mailed to the wrong patients is being blamed for a massive personal data breach in Indiana that has impacted as many as 187,000 patients.

Morning Headlines 7/3/13

Health IT Patient Safety Action and Surveillance Plan

ONC releases its much-anticipated patient safety and surveillance plan that tackles a number of issues, such as how patient safety problems will be reported and tracked. EHR certification bodies will be required to confirm functionality and usability not only through testing, but through field observation. The Joint Commission has also been contracted to help identify and address safety issues.

Intuit Announces Next Phase of Structural Moves; Organizational Foundation Now in Place

Intuit will sell its Intuit Health Group, reporting that it had initially evaluated healthcare as a growth opportunity, but that it had come to realize that its health group would be better off with an organization that has a stronger focus on the healthcare industry.

Judge orders Affinity to bargain with union

A judge in Ohio has sided with a nurses’ union at Affinity Medical Center after they filed a unfair labor charge over a rushed Cerner implementation. Nurses claimed that the go-live date was too aggressive and a lack of training compromised patient safety. The judge ruled that Affinity leadership violated labor laws a number of times, first by refusing to negotiate with the nurses’ union, but other less-than-honorable examples cited by the judge included managers reducing the number of nurses in the ICU as retaliation and managers scrutinizing the charts of nurses who were outspoken union supporters in an effort to initiate disciplinary actions.

Washington Hospital "goes live" with $86 million electronic medical records system

In Freemont, CA, 339-bed Washington Hospital goes live on Epic across all inpatient and outpatient departments.

Morning Headlines 7/2/13

Halamka: IT Must Plan For Disparate EHRs

InformationWeek picks up a blog post by John Halamka, MD, CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in which he suggests that the "rip and replace" approach to integrating large health systems will not be possible much longer as ICD-10 and Meaningful Use Stage 2 continue to consume capital and IT resources. He advocates a form of affiliation planning in which critical workflows are targeted and automated rather than integrating all care areas.

El Camino Hospital Cuts Readmissions 25% With Health IT

The 433-bed El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, CA reduces readmissions by 25 percent by identifying patients who are likely to be readmitted and taking aggressive action to correct the problems. One solution that shows promise is a tele-transfer planning program that requires clinicians working at long-term facilities to begin participating remotely in discharge planning meetings early in their patient’s stay at the hospital.

Digital health funding is up, but growth slows, says Rock Health

San Francisco-based health IT incubator Rock Health releases a report detailing venture capital investment activity in the health IT startup sector. The report concludes that investments are up 12 percent from last year, with nearly $900 million invested in startups thus far in 2013, but that the pace of growth has slowed as compared to last year.

Facebook grapples with rules for patients seeking organ donors

Facebook is working on implementing a communication platform that will help match patients seeking organ donors with those that may be in a position to respond. This is the second major announcement from Facebook on the subject. The company recently implemented a program that allows users to declare themselves organ donors on their Facebook profiles, an action that automatically launches an official donor registration website where users can register, then posts a message about being an organ donor on the users profile. That initiative has been credited with significantly increasing organ donor registration rates since its deployment.

Morning Headlines 7/1/13

Jackson plans $830 million overhaul

Jackson Health System, a six-hospital network based in Miami, FL, is asking local taxpayers to foot the bill for an $830 million overhaul. The money would come from a proposed increase in property tax on Miami-Dade residents and would pay for building repairs, new elevators, room renovations, and $130 million in new software for the health system.

Hopkins, Walgreens partner on East Baltimore pharmacy

Walgreens is opening a new location in East Baltimore in partnership with Johns Hopkins Medicine that will be used to pilot new health products and services, including in-store clinics capable of providing urgent, non-emergency care.

Lost piece of thumb drive contained thousands of patient records

A practice in Nebraska is notifying more than 2,000 patients that their medical records may have been exposed after a physician loses an unencrypted thumb drive.

Pa. hospital sued over uninsured man’s 2011 death

In Pittsburgh, UPMC-Mercy is sued along with four doctors for failing to operate on a patient with diverticulitis over 15 months of treatment, allegedly because he did not have insurance, a fact that was noted in his medical record.

Morning Headlines 6/28/13

Update On the Adoption Of Health Information Technology and Related Efforts To Facilitate the Electronic Use and Exchange Of Health Information

ONC publishes its annual report to Congress on health IT adoption as required by the HITECH act. The report addresses EHR adoption, health information exchange adoption, and the general state of the nation as it pertains to health IT.

Created in the Corridor: Geonetric

Geonetric, a Web developer specialized in creating patient portals for hospitals and health systems, is profiled in the local Cedar Rapids, IA media for its unusual HR policies. None of its 70 employees have managers; instead, work is done collaboratively. Dress is casual, Fridays are bring your own meat for the office barbecue, and the company CEO calls its staff "probably one of the most advanced software teams in Iowa." The company’s own website is notably underwhelming considering that description, but the product must be top notch because it has plans to add 130 employees over the next year.

Sprint Launches Secure Messaging Solutions to Enable HIPAA Compliance

Sprint announces the availability of two HIPAA-compliant text messaging platforms, a functionally rich solution called TigerText and a less expensive, stripped down option that still delivers person-to-person HIPAA-compliant texting.

Cerner supports Blue Button + to engage individuals for better health

Cerner announces that it will support the Blue Button + initiative, which means that Cerner clients can now securely deliver information to any personal health record participating in Blue Button +.

Morning Headlines 6/27/13

VA envisions an app-based future for health IT

Kathleen Frisbee, director of web and mobile solutions at the VA, hinted that an iEHR compromise is in the works that will result in the collaborative development of integrated mobile apps for clinicians rather than a full integrated EHR. It’s an interesting concept, but one that’s sure to leave a lot of the problems that initially inspired the iEHR program unsolved. One benefit of approaching integration through a series of small projects, like apps, is that the likelihood of failure is lower, and the capital investment at risk is similarly lower. Also, developers should be able to zero in on effective integration points because smaller projects will allow them to be more responsive to early adopter feedback.

New CEO Signals Growth at Healthland

Healthland, a Minneapolis-based EHR vendor focused on the rural and critical access market, announces the appointment of Chris Bauleke as CEO effective July 8. He will replace Angie Franks, who will now serve as Healthland’s president and lead the company’s strategy and market development efforts.

Cloud could save health industry $11B, study says

In a survey of 109 CHIME members, respondents estimate that they could reduce IT costs by nine percent, or $11 billion, over the next three years by switching to a cloud-based service model.

Morning Headlines 6/26/13

For McKesson’s CEO, A Pension of $159 Million

The record-breaking pension owed to John Hammergren, chief executive of McKesson, is discussed in a Wall Street Journal article. Had he left on March 31 this year, Hammergren would have walked away with $159 million, the largest pension in corporate American history.

Hawaii Health Systems revises upward its estimate of electronic conversion of medical records

Hawaii Health Systems Corp revises the estimate for its EHR conversion. The health system originally budgeted $58 million to implement Siemens across 14 hospitals, but is now saying that the cost will likely fall north of $100 million.

1,900 new jobs, $9.5m tax break for Athenahealth

Athenahealth has pledged to hire an additional 1,900 employees to its Watertown campus by 2022 in exchange for $9.5 million in state tax credits under a tentative deal worked out with Massachusetts economic development officials.

Quality and Safety Implications of Emergency Department Information Systems

Contributors from the American College of Emergency Physicians published an article in the Annals of Emergency Medicine that discusses the patient safety related benefits and dangers associated with the use of emergency department information systems. The article concludes with seven recommendations for patient safety.

Morning Headlines 6/25/13

The Impact of Electronic Health Records on Ambulatory Costs Among Medicaid Beneficiaries

A study published in the Medicare and Medicaid Research Review followed the implementation of ambulatory EHRs in three communities, concluding that the adoption of EHRs in community practices does not consistently impact Medicaid costs either positively or negatively.

Vanguard deal would bolster Tenet in key markets

Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp. will acquire Vanguard Health Systems in an all-cash $1.8 billion deal. The acquisition also requires that Tenet assume $2.5 billion of Vanguard’s debt, bringing the true price to $4.3 billion. The new health network will include 79 hospitals across 30 markets. The deal also brings ACO expertise to Tenet as the organization prepares to move toward a value-base purchasing reimbursement model.

Disruptions: Medicine That Monitors You

The New York Times covers the rise of ingestible "smart pills" after a recent FDA decision to ease their regulatory requirements. The pills contain sensors that monitor a variety of conditions, powered by electrical current within the human body. They can send an alert to the patient and their physician should they detect an abnormality.

Today at DIA: Deloitte, Intermountain Launch OutcomesMiner Solution

Just four months after embarking on a collaborative big data partnership, Deloitte and Intermountain unveil the first tangible result of their efforts. This week at Drug Information Association’s 2013 Annual Meeting, the organizations unveiled OutcomesMiner, an analytics tool that help researchers evaluate treatment options and predict likely outcomes specific to unique sub-populations.

Morning Headlines 6/24/13

Experts tout Blue Button as enabling information exchange between medical provider and patient

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette covers the federal government’s Blue Button initiative, calling for its expansion into the private sector and citing it as a key concept to moving forward in an EHR-enabled healthcare system.

Creative Skills For Life – Creative England Competition Fund

In England, the NHS and Creative Skills for Life announce a $154,000 contest that challenges developers to create apps that will help young people with life-threatening or debilitating medical conditions explore their creative potential.

Optometry EHR Breached in Florida, 9,000 Notified

An optometrist’s office in Gulf Breeze, FL is notifying 9,000 patients that their personal health information has been compromised after hackers break into the practice’s EHR and copy the medical records data.

Morning Headlines 6/21/13

Cone Health to lay off 150 workers

Greensboro, NC-based Cone Health will lay off 150 workers, or about three percent of its workforce, to help cut $30 million from its annual budget. Terry Akin, Cone Health president and COO, said that its Epic implementation has been a big short-term expense.

Cerner Launches Pilot Program To Offer Personalized, Quality Care Aligned For Better Health 

Cerner launches a Kansas City area pilot program to test new health delivery model in which retail locations serve as patient access points. Nurses will perform wellness screenings and provide tailored patient education and recommendations.

New Technology in Place for Electronic Submission of Veterans’ Disability Claims

The VA has launched a new Web portal that will allow veterans to submit disability claims electronically. The system is integrated with the VA’s paperless claims processing system VBMS, creating a nearly paperless end-to-end process. Medical records are one of the few claims elements that will still need to be scanned or mailed on paper.

The Regional Extension Center Program in Texas Met the Scope of Services in Their Cooperative Agreements With the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology

The Office of the Inspector General audits four Texas Regional Extension Centers that were cumulatively awarded more than $30 million in federal funds. The goal of the inspections was to verify that the RECs had meet the requirements outlined in their cooperative agreements with ONC. OIG auditors concluded that the REC programs had meet all requirements and were successful in supporting health IT adoption across their territories.

Morning Headlines 6/20/13

Atul Gawande, Renowned Surgeon And Writer, Launches Innovation Lab

Surgeon Atul Gawande, MD, once named by Time magazine as one of the world’s most influential thinkers and author of The Checklist Manifesto, launches the Adriane Labs health innovation center. It will conduct research focusing on childbirth and death.

Health Law Won’t Bring Prices Down For Patients

At a Capitol Hill hearing Tuesday, Time magazine journalist Steven Brill told Senate Finance Committee members that President Obama’s healthcare law will do little to lower prices for consumers. Brill covered health care costs in a heavily circulated recent Time article titled, "Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us."

Healtheway Announces Founding Members for Groundbreaking Public/Private Health IT Exchange

Healtheway, the nonprofit organization that supports the eHealth Exchange, today announced its nine founding organizations, of which Epic is the only EHR vendor and Kaiser Permanente is the only health system.

Affinity nurses seek delay on electronic records 

Unionized nurses at Massillon, OH-based Affinity Medical Center call for a delay in its Cerner implementation scheduled for this weekend, citing insufficient training and patient safety concerns. The nurse’s union is using the issue to demand contract negotiations.

Morning Headlines 6/19/13

Robert M. Wah, MD, Elected President-Elect of AMA

Retired Navy medical officer Robert Wah, MD has been elected as the next president of the AMA. Wah is a reproductive endocrinologist and OB-GYN in Washington, DC and serves as chief medical officer of Computer Sciences Corporation. He is also a healthcare IT expert, having previously served as ONC’s first deputy national coordinator.

CareCloud Raises $20 Million to Support Continued Record Growth of Company’s Cloud-Based Clinical and Financial Platform for Physician Practices

CareCloud, a cloud-based EHR vendor, raises $20 million in a Series B funding round which it will use to enhance its EHR platform and to increase pressure on competitors like athenaHealth and Practice Fusion. CareCloud has been competing with athenaHealth on all fronts lately, fighting off a patient infringement lawsuits filed by them one day and then head hunting their executives the next.

Computer problems force docs back to paper charts at Memorial Hospital

Computer problems have forced Belleville, IN-based Memorial Hospital into downtime procedures after its Meditech EHR went down late on Tuesday, June 11. It is not expected to be fully restored until at least Monday, June 24.

First of 4,000 Cerner employees move into new KCK offices

Cerner employees begin moving into the first of two new towers being built at the company’s Kansas City, KS campus. The towers will eventually hold 4,000 employees.

Morning Headlines 6/18/13

Vitera Healthcare Solutions Announces Acquisition of SuccessEHS

Vitera announces the acquisition of Birmingham, AL-based SuccessEHS. Both vendors operate in the ambulatory EHR space. The acquisition expand Vitera’s user base to 10,500 organizations, 415,000 medical professionals, and 85,000 physicians. Financial details were not disclosed.

Mostashari asserts no more ICD-10 delays

Farzad Mostashari, MD gave the keynote address at the HIMSS Media ICD-10 Forum this week, during which he reiterated that there would be no additional deadline extensions for the ICD-10 switchover on October 1, 2014.

Apollo to scale up IT’s role in services 

Apollo Hospital is the first in India to be named a HIMSS (Asia Pacific) Stage 6 hospital, going live with CPOE and physician documentation on its Med-Mantra EHR.

Smooth move to electronic records in PT

Jefferson Healthcare, a Port Townsend, WA-based 25-bed critical access hospital and nine supporting clinics, goes live with Epic on Saturday morning at 2 a.m. The project was reportedly on time and on budget. Jefferson Healthcare is part of the Swedish Health Network.

Morning Headlines 6/17/13

Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT Tackles Pressing EHR Issues

Farzad Mostashari, MD is interviewed by AAFP News, the news outlet representing the American Academy of Family Physicians. The discussion broached a number of topics including EHR usability, return on investment, the recent copy/paste debate and resulting Medicare audits, the future plan and timeline for national interoperability, and the future of the HITECH act beyond 2015.

Review of the final benefits statement for programmes previously managed under the National Programme for IT in the NHS

In England, a final cost-benefit analysis of the now dismantled National Programme for IT shows that the program ended up costing more than twice the value it had delivered at the time it was shut down. Analysts hesitantly forecast a 2024 break even point, but warn that long-range future benefits are nearly impossible to predict with any real accuracy.

11 medical schools earn AMA grants for education innovation

The American Medical Association announces that 11 medical schools have each won $1 million, five-year grants to reshape medical education by implementing innovative programs. NYU and Indiana University plan to create virtual EHRs using de-identified patient data to train students on EHR and population health systems that are becoming the norm in practice.

“OK Glass”: Improve Health Care. Now!

New Google Glass owner Rafael Grossmann, MD discusses the ways the technology might influence his approach to rounds, surgeries, and teaching.

Morning Headlines 6/14/13

Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital notifying 12,900 after laptop stolen from secured badge-access area

Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford is reporting a stolen laptop with unencrypted personal health information affecting nearly 13,000 patients. This is Stanford’s fifth data breach since 2010. In 2011, Stanford was sued over a data breach in a suit that sought $20 million in damages. In 2010, they were fined $250,000 for failing to report a breach.

‘Jeopardy’-winning supercomputer helping Maine doctors in cancer research

IBM’s Watson supercomputer has completed its installation at The Maine Center for Cancer Medicine and is now helping doctors create individualized care plans for lung cancer patients. Watson is being beta tested while engineers continue to enhance its ability to interpret clinical information and weigh treatment options.

Indian Health Service sets ambitious plan to upgrade health record system

The Indian Health Service is spending $10 million upgrading its EHR system to one integrated platform. Indian Health Services EHR was the first federal agency to have its EHR certified for Meaningful Use and received more than $50 million in EHR incentive payments thus far. They are first focusing on integrating across their network, and then will tackle larger interoperability projects with the VA and CMS.

Sonora Regional Medical Center Embarking on Major Technology Upgrade

Calif-based Sonora Regional Medical Center, an Adventist Health System hospital, has been selected as the pilot site for Adventist’s system-wide Cerner implementation. Sonora will go live September 4th, with Adventist’s remaining 18 hospitals scheduled to go live by the summer of 2014.

Morning Headlines 6/13/13

GE Healthcare To Spend $2 Billion On Data Analytics And Other Tools

GE Healthcare has announced that over the next five years, it will spend $2 billion creating data analytics and patient population tools that will enable hospitals to effectively shift to a performance-based payment system.

Mostashari: Slow but steady interoperability progress

National coordinator for health IT Farzad Mostashari, MD discussed interoperability and the path moving forward at the HIMSS 2013 Government Health IT Conference this week where he summarized the current state of interoperability in saying, "Today, my last visit doesn’t contribute to my next visit in healthcare. Most discharge summaries don’t get to the primary care provider; most referral summaries don’t get back to the provider who ordered them.”

Marshfield Clinic to launch new information services company

Wisconsin-based Marshfield Clinic, a two-hospital health system, announces that it will begin offering health IT support services through a wholly-owned spinoff business, Marshfield Information Technology Services .

Maine Medical Center moves closer to $40M expansion

Maine Medical Center has won approval to move forward with a $40 million expansion project that will add five new operating suites, in addition to preparation and recovery areas. The news comes just a month after MMC announced a hiring and travel freeze in an effort to plug a $13.4 million deficit in the hospital’s operating budget.