Monday Morning Update 4/27/15

Top News

HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell, testifying on the department’s $84 billion 2016 budget request, is challenged by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) who stated that half of doctors don’t like their EHRs to the point that they’ll accept Medicare penalties rather than deal with workflow disruption, adding that the AMA found that 70 percent of doctors say their EHRs weren’t worth the cost and that EHRs are the leading cause of physician dissatisfaction. Burwell responded that HHS will work with Congress on a list of administrative action items related to EHRs, which seems to refer to the work of the HELP committee that most recently talked about interoperability and interviewed Epic’s Peter DeVault. What worries me most about the entire exchange is that nobody questioned whether HHS or Congress have any business involving themselves with how doctors use EHRs, where Burwell’s response might have logically been, “Respectfully, our job is making taxpayer payments to providers who choose to participate in Medicare and HITECH, but otherwise the EHRs that providers buy, use, and complain about really aren’t under the government’s purview. We should be monitoring the outcomes, not prescribing the process, which is how government works with all other industries.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents grade the HIMSS conference with somewhere in the C-plus range. A consulting company vendor says it was successful in meeting with clients and networking with peers, while a CIO observes that the HIMSS conference is all sizzle and no steak as it keeps growing and ratio of vendors to providers seems to be going up as well. New poll to your right or here: what do you think about the fact that most health IT vendor executives are white men? (“I’m not thinking about it at all” is a poll option as well). Add a comment to support your position if you like.

We were signing up for our microscopic booth for HIMSS in Las Vegas and were surprised to find that nearly all of the exhibit spaces have already been taken in the booth signup frenzy that occurs even before the previous conference is over. I don’t have the money or HIMSS points to play with the big boys, but even the 10×10 spaces in weird locations were mostly booked up. The tiniest parcels run around $5,500 and I declined the $2,500 extra HIMSS wanted for a corner space (they didn’t charge extra for our corner spot the past two years). We’ll be in #5069, with our presence probably annoying our next door neighbors Varian Medical Systems and Patient Prompt even though we’ll keep their area busier than it would be otherwise as we have a fun cast of characters running around. At least we don’t have much stuff to stick in there – we brought everything we used in our McCormick Place booth in one large duffel bag and set it up in maybe 20 minutes. There’s no ROI since we don’t have anything to sell, but we like just saying hello and giving our boothless friends a place to hang out.

Speaking of our McCormick Place booth, patient advocate Regina Holliday wrote a nice summary of the time she spent there and her HIMSS experience in general.

I forgot to mention an unpleasant encounter Lorre had with the “HIMSS police,” who were a little bit snippy in confronting her at our booth and demanding that we stop using the name “HIMSS Bingo” in referring to a contest that we had nothing to do with other than allowing winners to pick up their prizes there. The HIMSS person was too busy scolding to hear that she had the wrong scoldee.

Most people think of Epic first on the list of Madison-connected companies. Here’s another that just came to me: John Holton, who graduated from UW in 1975, founded Atwork in 1983 and then Scheduling.com (now SCI Solutions) in 1999, although both operated out of California rather than Wisconsin.

DonorsChoose Project Updates

Feel free to skip this section if you aren’t following our project as it winds down – the normal stuff follows.

Thanks to new participant The Breakaway Group, who donated $500 to get on Centura SVP/CIO Dana Moore’s dance card. I’ve funded $10,478.21 in projects, including these new ones, including some I chose in Colorado since that’s where Dana lives:

• A printer, tablet supplies, and early literacy books for an elementary school teacher’s graduate courses in education, Los Angeles, CA.
• A camera and photo printing equipment for creating a time capsule for a high school in Atlanta, GA.
• Math games and learning activities for a second grade class in Garland, TX.
• An iPad case and AV adapter for English language learners at an elementary school in Las Vegas, NV.
• A TV and flash drive to promote newly arrived books in the library of a high school in Walden, CO.
• Drums for rhythm and movement activities for special needs students at an elementary school in Centennial, CO.
• Six iPad keyboard cases for a fourth grade class in Lone Tree, CO.
• Globes, maps, and books for a K-2 class in Denver, CO.
• A tablet with keyboard for English as a second language students at an elementary school in Fort Lupton, CO.
• A Chromebook for an earth sciences class at a high school that can’t be accredited due to lack of hands-on learning tools in Norfolk, VA.
• A complete library of high-interest, low-readability books for a class of severely intellectually disabled students at a middle school in Conway, SC.
• Four boom boxes and 12 sets of headphones to create a literature listening station in the reading area of an elementary school in Seattle, WA.
• A library of classic books for a third grade class in Clarksdale, MS.
• Hand sanitizer and tissues for profoundly mentally disabled K-5 classroom in North Charleston, SC.
• Baby wipes, diapers, a food blender, wheelchair supplies, and insect repellent for a handicapped K-2 students at an elementary school in North Charleston, SC.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre for information about webinar services.

Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• Infor signs an agreement to distribute its hospital data integration products in Cuba.
• A RWJF study of personal health records finds that consumers value their own subjective narrative entries more than anything else, while doctors rarely even look at them.
• Seven disabled veterans sue the VA for failing to deliver copies of their disability-related medical records for up to 25 months after their requests.
• LabCorp announces a direct-to-consumer testing program.
• Kaiser Permanente announces plans to open a 900-job healthcare IT campus in Atlanta.
• A judge orders MyMedicalRecords to pay the legal defense costs of Allscripts and WebMD after those companies prevailed in two of a nearly endless number of questionable MMR patent infringement lawsuits.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Business Insider runs the first skeptical article I’ve seen about Silicon Valley lab darling Theranos and its $4.5 billion net worth, 31-year-old founder Elizabeth Holmes. Experts say they have no idea how the company’s technology works because Theranos won’t publish peer-reviewed studies about its tests, won’t let independent experts review its labs, and doesn’t acknowledge whether it’s actually using the same analytical machines as other labs in addition to its small-sample size equipment that other labs use as well. The article also questions whether can scale given its plans to perform 1 million tests in 2016, less than 0.2 percent of the number performed by Quest. Quest and other competitors are questioning whether tests performed by Theranos using capillary blood (microfluidics) are accurate.   

Sales

Children’s Hospital Association chooses Clinical Architecture’s Symedical for global terminology management for analyzing comparative data.

Avera Health System (SD) selects Meditech 6.1 Web EHR for 33 hospitals and 208 clinics. The press release isn’t clear as to whether this is an all-new product and Googling the term “Meditech Web EHR” brings up a non-specific mention on the company’s website, which used to be a no-nonsense list of information but is now maddeningly glossy and detail-free, with artsy scrolling pages and oversized type crying for Internet attention without providing much value in return. Click “EHR Solutions” and you won’t see a list of them. I don’t fully understand how a product can be “groundbreaking” if it’s in version 6.1 or whether this is just a new Web front end for the same old products.

People

Mark Young (StayWell Health Management) joins PatientSafe Solutions as COO.

Announcements and Implementations

Phynd Technologies will analyze the cost to Nebraska hospitals of managing their provider information manually vs. using its provider information management platform in a project funded by the state.

Government and Politics

The VA forms an 11-member medical advisory group to advise it on healthcare delivery issues.

Here’s a pretty funny tweet from CMS Chief Data Officer Niall Brennan.

Technology

Healthcare is always a lagging chaser of consumer technologies, so I’m not quite sure what to make of the just-announced Amazon Dash, a WiFi-connected, product-specific stick-on electronic button that lets users restock a particular product with a single press. It’s either a brilliant time-saver that creates even more loyalty to Amazon and the products it sells or, as The New Yorker opines, “an uneasy image of our homes as giant Skinner boxes, and of us as rats pressing pleasure levers until we pass out from exhaustion” that bypasses the brief thinking moment of “Why am I using all this stuff?” while driving to the store. I didn’t realize that Amazon already offers a speech recognition and barcode scanning version of Dash for users of its expensive AmazonFresh grocery delivery service in Seattle, California, and New York metro areas.

Other

USA Today profiles the involvement of patients in the EHR selection of Partners HealthCare (MA), which invited a patient who sits on its advisory board to help choose its $700 million system. I like the approach, although I can’t help but think of the economic strong-arming and brand name-brandishing Partners does to squeeze out competitors and force insurers to pay its exorbitant rates, which isn’t really in the best interests of patients or the healthcare economy in general.

An investigation has been underway in Texas to review the state’s issuance of a no-bid Medicaid anti-fraud system contract to a local bidder with zero experience. The Houston newspaper points out that the state was already using a similar system that had recovered $56 million against its original cost of $16 million, while the new $20 million system (with a pending $90 million extension) has recovered zero dollars. Nearly all of the funds came from all of us who pay federal taxes. State government was asleep at the wheel, with a prime example being that the contractor (21CT) billed it the full price of a $452,000 project the day after the purchase order was signed and the state paid it immediately. A few state employees have been fired and a criminal investigation is underway. The state’s HHS inspector general who arranged the deal lied to CMS by claiming that a competitive bidding process had been conducted and then resigned after local newspapers exposed the scandal.

Sponsor Updates

• Nordic offers a recap of #HIMSS15 through its Twitter feed.
• PatientKeeper offers thoughts on “HIMSS and hEHRs.”
• MBA HealthGroup offers “Skin in the Game: Keys to Success in a Private Dermatology Practice”
• MedData breaks down the 2015 PQRS payment adjustment statistics.
• Wellsoft will exhibit at the EDPMA Solutions Summit April 26-29 in Amelia Island, FL.
• Sandlot Solutions will exhibit at the Big Data in Healthcare Summit April 28-30 in Boston.
• Netsmart’s e-prescribing solution attains certification for controlled substances.
• TeleTracking asks, “Who’s Looking Out For Nurses?”
• PDS offers “Five Tips for a Trend-Setting Healthcare IT Strategy.”
• NTT Data offers “Wearables in the Enterprise – What are Industries Saying?”
• Patientco adds 2.4 million patients to its patient revenue cycle platform.
• PeriGen recaps last fiscal year in “Another 48,611 births powered by PeriGen.”
• PMD offers “Keeping Priorities Straight and Scaling Support.”
• QPID Health CMO Michael Zalis, MD is featured in “Diagnosing Imaging: Maximizing Appropriate Use with Smart Decision Support.”
• Sagacious Consultants offers “ICD-10 Training for Providers, Coders, and CDI Specialists.”
• New York eHealth Collaborative offers “The Healing Power of Your Own Medical Records and SHIN-NY.”
• Stella Technology offers “HIMSS15 Conference Highlights and Takeaways.”
• Summit Healthcare declares that “HIMSS 2015 Did Not Disappoint!”
• T-System will exhibit at the UCAOA National Urgent Care Spring Convention April 27-30 in Chicago.
• Truven Health Analytics offers “Appealing the CMS Risk Adjustment and Reinsurance Calculations: Making Sense of the Discrepancy Regulations.”
• Versus Technology publishes “Reflections on the Oklahoma City Bombing, from a Nurse Who Was There.”
• Huron Consulting Group is named one of America’s best employers by Forbes.
• Winthrop Resources will exhibit at Interop Las Vegas 2015 April 27-May 1.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us online.

News 4/24/15

Top News

Two New York-based, healthcare-related organizations strike deals that will make them some of the first US firms to conduct business in Cuba now that sanctions have been relaxed. Roswell Park Cancer Institute (cancer research) and Infor (hospital data integration) announced their plans following a trade delegation visit this week led by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I decided to follow through on looking at female representation on vendor executive teams as listed on company webpages since it came up on HIStalk last week. Companies have the incentive to hire the most qualified people regardless of demographics, but just in case you’re interested for whatever reason, here’s the percentage of females they’ve chosen.

Percentage of Females on Leadership Team (highest to lowest)
Wolters Kluwer Health 50
Meditech 41
Merge 33
TriZetto 25
Advisory Board 25
Optum 23
Athenahealth 22
Quality Systems 22
InterSystems 22
Cerner 19
Nuance 18
Greenway Health 18
Leidos Health 17
GE Healthcare 15
Premier 15
Surescripts 12
Philips North America 11
MModal 10
Emdeon 8
Allscripts 0
McKesson Technology Solutions 0

Some other percentages:  Facebook (20), Microsoft (19), Google (15), and IBM (27). HIMSS comes in at 17 percent.

I was reading a tweet that referred to pilot turned safety expert (and 2010 HIMSS keynoter) Sully Sullenberger as a “national hero.” The cynic in me (which has a significant presence) cringes at how we’ve devalued the term “hero” to label anyone who experiences adversity (including the randomly applied kind) rather than reserving the term for those who exhibit bravery or noble deeds in intentionally sacrificing themselves on behalf of others. Sully landed his plane safely in the Hudson River, but he was saving himself as well as his passengers. He was cool under pressure, humble, and performed the job he was being paid to do better than most would have done, but “hero” might be a stretch, just as it is when referring to athletes, victims of violence, someone who calls police to report a crime in progress, or groups that may well contain some but not all heroes (firefighters, service members, or even clinicians, for instance).

This week on HIStalk Practice: interoperability melancholia sets in after HIMSS. Matter Chicago CEO previews AMA physician office of the future. Radiology practices select new rev cycle technology. Azalea Health takes on telemedicine. Physicians’ Alliance of America looks for PCP feedback on EHR charting productivity. New study finds that online physician reviews don’t have much to do with clinical expertise. Modernizing Medicine CEO Dan Cane dives into the company’s relationship with IBM Watson. StatDoctor CEO Alan Roga, MD outlines the benefits of video in telemedicine.

This week on HIStalk Connect: Tech-savvy health insurance newcomer Oscar Health raises a $145 million funding round on a $1.5 billion valuation in just its second year in business. Ernst & Young creates a digital maturity index focused on quantifying the sophistication of telehealth programs. Color Genomics unveils a $259 genetic screening test that looks for 19 key mutations, such as BRCA1 and BRCA2, that are known risk factors for developing breast or ovarian cancers. Gravie, a private health insurance exchange startup, raises a $12.5 million Series B to expand its presence into Texas and Illinois.

DonorsChoose Fundraising Project Update

Our total now stands at $10,000 thanks to new participation from ZirMed, TransUnion Healthcare, BlueTree Network, and Orchestrate Healthcare. BlueTree Network was notable in donating $1,000 instead of the requested $500, while TransUnion Healthcare VP Patrick Gilmore missed the chance to meet with Centura SVP/CIO Dana Moore at the HIMSS conference but said he wanted to donate anyway. Dana will provide a summary of his conversations with these companies later. I’ve funded $6,656 in projects and will get the remaining $3,344 out to classrooms by this weekend.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Navicure announces a 32 increase in year-over-year sales of its billing and payment solutions.

India-based Wipro expects its healthcare business to hit $2 billion in annual revenue by 2018, double its 2015 expectations, mostly due to increased technology spending triggered by US healthcare reform. The company will target acquisitions in the $100-$200 million range, saying it passed on acquiring TriZetto (acquired by Cognizant for $2.7 billion) because of the price.

The Illinois Hospital Association will merge with the Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council effective January 1, meaning the state hospital association will be running an HIE (MetroChicago HIE) and insurance company.

A federal judge orders the legally prolific MyMedicalRecords to pay the defense fees of WebMD and Allscripts, which beat some of MMR’s bottomless patent infringement lawsuits after refusing to pay “licensing fees” for ubiquitous technologies.

Jeff Bezos discloses the financial performance of Amazon Web Services for the first time in the unit’s nine-year history, stating that it’s a $5 billion business that’s growing fast.

A Wall Street Journal article finds that universities (Vanderbilt, Emory, and University of Arizona) are cutting ties with their cash cow academic medical centers as their high costs threaten to exclude them from exchange-based insurance networks.

Sales

Swedish Cancer Institute (WA) chooses the Synapse Precision Medicine Platform to provide oncology clinical decision support using patient genomic information.

Mount Sinai Health System (NY) selects the InterSystems HealthShare interoperability platform.

CareWell Urgent Care chooses Athenahealth’s EHR and practice management system for its 49 providers.

LTPAC EHR vendor SigmaCare chooses Liaison EMR-Link hub to connect with lab and imaging vendors.

Augusta Health will use Meditech performance monitoring tools from Goliath Technologies. The company’s press release doesn’t bother to mention where its new client is located (who writes this stuff, anyway?), so I’ll take a Google-inspired guess and say Virginia.

People

Davide Zaccagnini, MD (Nuance) joins SyTrue as CMIO.

Dominick Bizzarro (Value Informatics) joins insurer MVP Health Care as EVP of business development and informatics.

Cerner co-founder and Chief of Innovation Paul Gorup is retiring, insiders tell me. He helped develop PathNet in the 1980s, left Cerner in 1987 to run a radio station monitoring company, then returned to Cerner in 1999 to develop its hosting business. Gorup said in a 2013 interview, when asked why Cerner succeeded in healthcare while IBM and GE fizzled, “That’s easy. What does the head of IBM get up and think about every morning? I guarantee you it’s not healthcare. Same with the head of GE. He might think about energy or finance, but not healthcare. You have to think about it 24 hours a day. It’s not a part-time business. If healthcare becomes a part of something else, you’ve lost your focus.”

Announcements and Implementations

Referral software vendor EHealth Technologies announces a partnership with Box to support PDF viewing, medical image display, and structured document viewing.

Craneware announces enhancements to its Chargemaster Corporate Toolkit that include a single consolidated view, corporate chargemaster change distribution, and advanced workflow integration.

Capsule releases its Early Warning Scoring System for its SmartLinx Chart Express charting solution to alert clinicians of patient deterioration based on real-time vital signs analysis.

Zynx Health enhances the secure text messaging capabilities of its ZynxCarebook mobile coordination platform.

A TransUnion Healthcare analysis finds that increasing healthcare expenses and lower consumer credit lines have left consumers less able to pay their medical bills than last year. A big driver of the increased patient cost involves joint replacement procedures, which are 20 percent more expensive than they were a year ago.

Government and Politics

In Australia, the Victoria medical association calls on the state to spend $39 million to improve connectivity between hospitals and practices, hoping to at least enable delivery of discharge summaries and lab results after several expensive IT projects failed to deliver that capability.

Minnesota’s health commissioner says he’s concerned about pushback on the state’s 2008 requirement that all providers use EHRs by the end of this year. He debunks four privacy myths that are apparently the crux of the unstated opposition’s campaign.

A New York Times investigative report finds that the VA’s wait times scandal cost only three jobs vs. the 60 firings the VA claimed. One VA employee was fired for accepting gifts not directly related to wait times, one retired to avoid being fired, one is awaiting termination, and five employees were reprimanded. The VA often transfers problem employees and those who appeal their terminations can collect their paychecks for up to two years while awaiting a decision. 

 Innovation and Research

HHS will support three projects via its Ventures Fund: a website that allows providers to crowdsource possible new uses for existing drugs, an evaluation system for funding disaster preparedness, and a smart phone based diagnostic tool for malaria.

A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation study of personal health records finds that while consumers believe the most important information contained in PHRs is their own recorded daily observations (diet, exercise, mood, medication response), physicians usually don’t even look at them, instead turfing such review off to nurses and health coaches. The study also found that consumers think their information is valuable enough to outweigh any privacy concerns. It also concludes that demand for PHRs is surprisingly low because nobody is sure what problems they’re supposed to solve. I’ll extend my own musing: technology-powered lusting for discrete data capture and big data analysis cannot overwhelm the essential nature of the encounter, which is to listen to what the patient (and not necessarily their data points) is saying. Not everything that’s health related can be described by passively collected data dropped into convenient little buckets, and not everything that’s important will come up without skilled engagement of the “tell me how things are going” variety. My takeaway is that we need to make sure that technology enhances rather than limits the use of the patient’s own voice in the participatory guiding of their health.

 Technology

Heal releases a house call app for the Apple Watch that allows users to request a doctor visit with a single touch. Doctors equipped with mobile diagnostic apps such as the AliveCor ECG and CellScope otoscope arrive at the desired location within an hour and spend as much time as needed for a fixed fee of $99. One of Heal’s investors is Lionel Richie.

Other

Hospitals are moving inner city hospitals to suburbs where better-paying patients live, a Kaiser Health News article reprinted in Newsweek points out. Hospitals defend the practice by saying it’s cheaper to build a new suburban hospital than to renovate a old, land-locked downtown facility, but city officials say their core areas are being medically abandoned as hospitals chase patients who have better insurance.

Oxycodone-related deaths dropped 25 percent following Introduction of Florida’s doctor-shopping database of controlled substance prescriptions, a University of Florida study finds. However, deaths were already decreasing after the state shut down hundreds of pill mills posing as pain management clinics.

A study finds that 28 percent of Americans did not perform even one physical activity in 2014, increasing the “totally sedentary” number to the highest it’s been since 2007. Experts blame reduced physical education time in school and the competitive nature of school sports that leaves most students on the sidelines.

HealthLoop founder Jordan Shlain, MD says he started the company when he realized as a doctor that his mental model was wrong – inviting a patient to contact him when in need is not the same as proactively checking up on them, which he summarizes as invalidation of the “no news is good news” attitude since that means the same as “no data is good data.” He also says hospitals dehumanize their treatment failures by giving them the blame-free, dumbed-down label of “readmission.” He warns that probability-challenged people often make bad decisions in using data and algorithms as a blunt instrument without paying attention to what it means for individual patients.

An Australian blogger who built a business (including a wellness app) by claiming she cured her terminal brain cancer by diet and lifestyle alone admits that she was lying – she never had cancer. She was caught when she failed to donate $300,000 in app sales to charity as promised.

Weird News Andy titles this article as “A Rocky Experience in the OR.” A professor and facial surgeon in England loses his license after punching an anesthetized patient in the face 10 times to correct a broken cheekbone. The doctor admits that he “manually reduced the fracture” because the patient wasn’t fit for surgery, adding that doctors punch patients all the time while doing CPR. The patient is fine, while the surgeon is now offering his services in Dubai.

Sponsor Updates

• Valence Health is convening its second annual Pediatric Collaborative for Value-Based Care forum in Chicago this week.
• DocuSign is named among Silicon Valley’s “Best Places to Work 2015” for the fourth consecutive year.
• E-MDs will exhibit at the MGMA regional meeting April 29 in Galveston, TX.
• Galen Healthcare recaps the “Top 5 Themes from the Super Bowl of HIT.”
• Hayes Management Consulting offers “Planning for the Unexpected EHR Downtime: 4 Key Steps.”
• HCS will exhibit at the National Association of Long Term Hospitals 2015 Annual Meeting April 30-May 1 in Washington, DC.
• HCI group offers “7 Essential Items Every McKesson Horizon Customer Should be Considering.”
• Healthfinch’s Karen Hitchcock offers “A First-Timer’s First Impressions.”
• Healthwise will exhibit at the Annual NPSF Patient Safety Congress April 29 in Houston.
• Holon Solutions offers “RightFax End of Life Support Dates: Are You Ready?”
• Impact Advisors offers its top 10 takeaways (and HISsies Award coverage and predictions) from HIMSS15.
• The Atlanta Business Chronicle recognizes Ingenious Med as one of the city’s top 100 fastest-growing privately held companies.
• PDR will exhibit at the National Association of Chain Drug Stores Annual meeting April 25-28 in Palm Beach, FL.
• LifeImage celebrates five years in business and 1 billion images exchanged.
• LifePoint Informatics offers a new white paper explaining “Why Access to Lab & Diagnostic Data is Important to Providers, Payers, and Patients.”
• Logicworks explains why it sells managed cloud services rather than consulting services.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us online.

Morning Headlines 4/23/15

FDA grant to determine drug safety through EHRs

The FDA is offering a grant worth up to $1 million to fund research focused on mining EHRs for data that will support post-market drug safety assessments.

Comparative Effectiveness of Childhood Obesity Interventions in Pediatric Primary Care

A study published in JAMA Pediatrics finds that the use of clinical decision support prompts in the pediatric primary care setting had a positive effect on reducing BMI in obese children. The CDS alerts presented clinicians with obesity screening guidelines and links to relevant weight management programs.

Senate hearing examines telehealth benefits, barriers to expansion

More than a dozen bi-partisan senators attended yesterday’s Senate Commerce Subcommittee meeting on telehealth to lobby for expanded access to telehealth services for Medicare beneficiaries and for infrastructure investments that would expand internet access in rural areas.  Kristi Henderson, chief telehealth and innovation officer at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, explains ‘Right now, the greatest challenges lie in winning the federal level reimbursement parity that will make telehealth attractive in the marketplace and securing the reliable, high quality connectivity that telehealth requires.”

News 4/22/15

Top News

Seven disabled veterans sue the VA, claiming that they’ve waited 10 to 25 months for copies of their medical records, delaying their eligibility for benefits.

Reader Comments

From CIO: “Re: patient engagement survey. Do CIOs really think they own it?” A HIMSS-sponsored poll finds that nearly half of health system CIOs believe they own patient engagement in their organizations, but I think there’s a definitional issue here. CIOs often mislabel the tools vs. the program when it comes to analytics, population health management, and patient engagement. The software is just one part of the initiative even though Meaningful Use muddies the picture with its purely technical requirements for patient engagement. I’m fairly certain CIOs don’t really believe they’re in charge of the entire program, but if they do, either they or their employer have a big problem. Non-clinicians (especially IT and marketing people) should not be trying to engage patients.

From Nasty Parts: “Re: Allscripts. What’s going on? Lots of recent senior departures: Diane Bradley, John Dragovits, Peter Mcclennen, Perry Sweet, and Chad Baugh, to name a few.” Unverified. The LinkedIn profiles of all of these folks still list Allscripts as their current employer, although I’ve found that in general people don’t update their profile until they get another job.

From Little Suzie: “Re: [publicly trade vendor name omitted]. I’ve heard from a not-necessarily-reliable source that they may be acquiring [publicly trade vendor name omitted]. True?” Lips are typically and justifiably sealed when publicly traded companies are involved in M&A talks. This one would be huge. I don’t see the synergy, but the first vendor is on a roll and the second is wheezing, so it’s possible that a fire sale is being discussed.

From Pirate Wench: “Re: interesting sexual harassment lawsuit against a healthcare IT executive.” It’s juicy, but keep in mind you’re reading only one of the inevitable two sides of the story. The lawsuit, filed by a demoted employee, says Quality Systems, Inc. (parent of NextGen) protects its male employees who harass female employees. The real story will be how the lawsuit is disposed of, which I strongly suspect will be by a sealed settlement since a trial would be unpleasant for both sides.

From Candid Cameron: “Re: females at HIMSS. I saw a big drop in booth babes, which I think is due to pressure from publications such as HIStalk. I’d like to see recognition of companies with at least 40 percent female executives or 40 percent female speakers at the conference.” I’m wary of assuming intentional bias (gender, age, nationality, etc.) in observing executive team demographic composition, but it would be interesting to see the percentage of VP-and-up females in each company.

DonorsChoose Project Updates

This isn’t directly related to healthcare IT, so feel free to skip on down to the next section if it’s not your thing.

Our DonorsChoose project donations have jumped as another company offered a $500 donation in return for 20 minutes of Dana Moore’s time by telephone and our anonymous matching vendor agreed to match this donation as well. That brings our total to $8,000. I’ll be funding new projects as a result. Meanwhile, above is another of the many teacher thank you emails I received, this one from a kindergarten classroom for which we donated a projector. I was so moved that when I saw that Mrs. Henry had an open grant request for an AV cart to house their new projector that I funded that as well.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of student-written thank you notes from an earlier project we funded. DonorsChoose defaults the option to receive student notes to “yes” when you fund a project, but I unchecked it this last time because it’s a fair amount of work for the students and we funded so many projects I would be overwhelmed by all their notes anyway. Still, it’s gratifying to hear from the students who are actually benefitting from the donations.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

One of the more disturbing things I saw at the HIMSS conference was people running around wearing giant red noses, courtesy of a Walgreens fundraiser for children’s poverty. I like the cause but not the noses, which make me think of Stephen King’s evil clown in “It.”

Webinars

April 22 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Microsoft: The Waking Giant in Healthcare Analytics and Big Data.” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Dale Sanders, SVP of strategy, Health Catalyst. Microsoft has been quietly reengineering its culture and products to offer the best value and most visionary platform for cloud services, big data, and analytics in healthcare. This webinar will cover the Healthcare Analytics Adoption Model, the ongoing transition from relational databases, the role of new Microsoft products such as Azure and Analytic Platform System, the PowerX product line, and geospatial and machine learning visualization tools. Attendees will learn how to incorporate cloud-based analytics services into their healthcare analytics strategies.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Israel-based drug maker Teva will pay $512 million to settle charges that it paid competitors $200 million to delay rollout of a generic version of its sleep disorder drug Provigil. The company  also an unsolicited $40 billion bid to acquire generic competitor Mylan, which recently moved its headquarters to the Netherlands to avoid US corporate taxes and to take advantage of anti-takeover laws.

Sales

St. Luke’s University Health Network (PA) chooses Strata Decision’s StrataJazz Continuous Cost Improvement.

University of Florida Health (FL) chooses Visage Imaging’s Visage 7 Enterprising Imaging Platform for both Shands and UF Jacksonville.

Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital-Plymouth (MA) selects Voalte for caregiver communication and secure texting on personal smartphones.

IntegraMed Fertility chooses the Patient Pulse portal from Anthelio Healthcare Solutions.

University of Vermont Medical Center chooses ReadyDock’s disinfecting device docking station for its NICU.

Erlanger Health System (TN) will implement an unnamed $100 million EHR, replacing the current system that the CEO says is the #1 source of hospital dissatisfaction. I found their RFI online, which says they are running Siemens Invision in the hospital and GE Centricity in most of the practices, but I didn’t run across anything that says which system they’ve bought.

Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital (CA) chooses Summit Healthcare’s Provider Alert solution for ambulatory information sharing.

People

Awarepoint names Thomas Warlan (Medlee) as SVP of software engineering.

Besler Consulting hires John Slaby (Siemens Healthcare) as VP of product strategy and Heather Swanson (Wolters Kluwer) as regional VP.

Ahmed Haque, ONC’s director of the office of programs and engagement, will join former National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari’s Aledade.

Source Medical names a new leadership team that includes former executives of Dell, Allscripts, and NextGen.

Announcements and Implementations

Extension Healthcare announces upgrades to its alarm management solution that include enhanced voice-annunciated alarms, enhanced RTLS-enabled care team availability, extended iOS and Android device support, and a way for physicians to view their patient’s care team members and contact them securely from outside the hospital.

LabCorp will launch a direct-to-consumer lab testing business to compete with drug chains and other competitors that have offered those services for years, many of which were using LabCorp to draw and process their samples. Patients won’t need a physician’s order if their state permits them to request their own lab tests. LabCorp hasn’t said which tests it will offer or how they will be priced. Sounds great for patient empowerment, but then again, so did the idea that drug companies should be allowed to advertise directly to potential patients.

Netsmart enhances its vendor-agnostic HIT Value Model that helps providers develop IT adoption strategies and benchmark progress.

Government and Politics

Congress finally acts on a 2004 GAO recommendation to remove Social Security numbers from Medicare cards to prevent identity theft despite CMS complaints about the effort involved. The mandate was included in the SGR doc fix bill.

Technology

Software vendors always state that you legally don’t own their software – you’re just licensing it. Tractor maker John Deere takes it to the next level, telling the Copyright Office that farmers aren’t actually buying their tractors, they are instead purchasing an implied lifetime license to the John Deere software that runs them. It’s an important argument as companies try to favorably position their products as being software that end users or potential competitors can’t tinker with under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Color Genomics announces a $249 saliva test kit that detects 19 genetic markers for breast and ovarian cancer. The company, sensitive to the limited population for which screening is indicated and the potential patient concerns about the results, requires that one of its designated physicians order the test and then provides a board-certified genetic counselor to explain what the results mean. Similar tests were priced at up to $4,000 until the US Supreme Court denied a competitor’s assertion that nobody else should be able to perform such testing since it held a patent for naturally occurring genetic sequences such as the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.

Other

Emails exposed in the Sony Pictures breach show TV huckster-physician Dr. Oz trying to get Sony to sign him up as a pitchman for its wearables line, although his interest seems entirely commercial rather than medical.

Health Catalyst SVP David Burton, MD provides six predictions in an HFM Magazine article: (a) health systems and payers will address at-risk contracting as strategic thinkers, bet-hedgers, or ostriches with their heads in the sand; (b) population risk evaluation will shift from reviewing actuarial buckets to being driven by delivery systems that focus on improving specific clinical areas where they can perform optimally; (c) virtual shared accountability networks will form as ACOs and clinically integrated networks realize the cost of out-of-network services; (d) the emphasis on quality and safety improvement will spur development of analytic software and best practices starter sets; (e) providers will focus cost reduction efforts on the 80 percent of patients for whom evidence-based guidelines apply; and (f) sponsors will seek more flexible analytics systems that can respond more quickly to external changes.

Reporter Joe Goedert shares my disdain for turning marketing and PR people loose to make illogical decisions, specifically as related to the HIMSS conference: (a) CPSI not only changing its name questionably, but providing a confounding buzzword-heavy and thoroughly unconvincing explanation of the need to do so; (b) an unnamed analytics vendor that bussed reporters offsite for a roundtable discussion but then informed them that the discussion was off the record and nobody could leave until it was over, which means it was a complete waste of their work time; and (c) President Bush and HIMSS telling reporters 90 minutes before his keynote that his remarks and the softball questions asked by HIMSS CEO Steve Lieber (the guy who wrote him a huge check – his speaking fee is around $150,000) were off the record.

A vendor friend gave me a $200 Microsoft Band smart watch at the HIMSS conference. I gave it a try yesterday but put it back in the box after an hour or so. It is huge, bulky, and rigid (since it has a touch screen) to the point I couldn’t even get it under the cuff of my long-sleeved shirt and it barely fit around my wrist besides. It has a continuous pulse monitor, which is interesting but of marginal value for most people, and it pops up calendar and message alerts provided you’re willing to leave your phone’s Bluetooth turned on at all times. I gave it to an initially enthusiastic friend for a second opinion and got the same feedback: it’s cool, but not cool enough to be worth permanently hanging a heavy handcuff on your wrist even though it packs the heart sensor, GPS, light sensor, skin temperature sensor, and galvanic skin response measurement. I think my friend may end up reconsidering, though, after using it for a workout and seeing the results in Microsoft Health.

A judge issues a temporary restraining order that prevents Texas Health Resources from filing a worker’s compensation claim on behalf of Nina Pham, the Ebola nurse who is suing the health system. THR says such a claim should settle her issues and that Pham’s claims against it are unjustified since she’s an employee of one of its hospitals, not the corporation itself, and she’s not suing the hospital.

Weird News Andy says “Some day my prints will come – you can bank on it.” A NEJM case study profiles a woman whose chemotherapy treatments caused her fingerprints to disappear, which she discovered when her bank’s biometric ID system rejected her transaction.

I’m sure WNA would have caught this story: an Irish bank presses charges against customers who discovered that a temporary bug in the bank’s ATM software allowed them to withdraw more cash than they had in their accounts, inspiring one woman to make 115 ATM withdrawals totaling $60,000 in one afternoon to pay a Nigerian man to donate a kidney to her father.

Sponsor Updates

• Medicity Network 5.6x earns Healtheway Vendor Validation.
• CenterX Co-Founder and CEO Joe Reinardy will moderate a session on real-time benefit verification and electronic prior authorization at this week’s CBI conference in Philadelphia, PA.
• Kareo announces a new version of its outsourced billing solution.
• SyTrue publishes a story  about how healthcare organizations are unlocking the value of unstructured data.
• Accreon’s work on the NB Cancer Network project is nominated for a 2015 Kira Award.
• ADP AdvancedMD offers “Recent enhancements to the EHR charge slip.”
• CommVault posts the second part of its series on “Disaster Recovery: Past, Present, and Future.”
• Aventura posts a brief explanatory video on awareness computing.
• Caradigm staff offer reviews of HIMSS, one featuring a great pic of HIStalk friend Regina Holliday.
• CareSync offers “The Top 6 Reasons Why CareSync is For You.”
• CitiusTech exhibits at Bio-IT World 2015 through April 23 in Boston.
• ZeOmega releases its annual content update of best practices in evidence-based medicine care management.
• Columbus CEO ranks CoverMyMeds as a Top Small Employer Workplace in Central Ohio.
• Culbert Healthcare Solutions offers  “A Consultant’s Perspective: Teach ‘Em How to Fish.”
• HIMSS15 attendees help Divurgent raise $5,000 for Lurie Children’s Hospital.
• Peer60 offers a new report on mobile health and patient engagement.
• Burwood Group is named to The Channel Company’s CRN Tech Elite 250.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us online.

HIMSS15 Patient Advocate Recap – Carly Medosch

This year was my first time attending the HIMSS conference. I definitely like to be prepared, so I took advantage of the pre-conference materials such as guidebooks, maps, and an hour-long webinar orientation in the week before the event.

I knew McCormick Place was a large venue and I knew HIMSS would have a lot of attendees, but when I walked in Sunday afternoon, I felt like yokel in the big city for the first time “Golly gee, this sure is a big building!” And that was just the lobby of the North Building – one of four (plus a hotel) that make up McCormick Place.

I spent most of Sunday on the hunt for a suit jacket that would become my very first Walking Gallery jacket. In fact, Regina Holliday would be painting it in the HIStalk booth during HIMSS! The jacket had to be perfect because I plan to treasure it for years to come, but it also had to be stylish since I intend to wear it every chance I get. As a patient suffering from a variety of symptoms that include pain, fatigue, and brain fog, it’s important to me to look my best as a way to compensate.

Although I have an undergraduate degree in design and a masters in business, my symptoms often cause me to feel inadequate. In a crowd of healthcare professionals, I still often struggle to be taken seriously as “just the patient.”Never mind the fact that my 21 years of daily on-the-job experience often exceeds that of other healthcare professionals.

Garment bag in hand, I arrived for the first party of HIMSS — the speakeasy-themed opening reception. It was impossible to spot anyone I might know in the huge, dark ballroom. Eventually I met Vincent McGee, a healthcare IT executive from Atlanta. He later emailed me to say that one of the highlights of HIMSS was the conversation we had. Later, I found Colin Hung, someone I have known online for years but never met. In fact, earlier this year, Colin volunteered to call my mom and walk her through the live stream set up so that she could watch me in a keynote panel at Stanford. These types of friendships exemplify social media and the online health community for me.

At the end of the party, I finally met up with Regina. Of course she had been held up on the way to meet us, recording an impromptu interview calling for everyone in America to request their medical records on July 4!

Next, I was on to a glitzy party at the top of Wit hotel, where I met up with friends and basically ate my weight in cheese and bread. This event was notable as a place where I finally met #HITsm maven Mandi Bishop. I was warned that these parties have a reputation for people drinking too much and getting a little “handsy.” I am grateful to my friends for allowing me to tag along to some parties, never making me feel out of place for not being an HIT insider and, of course, not getting handsy! I only had one drink and turned in early because I had a long, busy Monday ahead of me.

In Chicago, I used the city bus and the subway system to get around. Monday morning I walked a block, picked up a dozen Dunkin’ Donuts, and caught the city bus for the mile ride to McCormick. I didn’t know anybody at the Walgreens / Alex Gourlay keynote, but I made friends with the gentleman sitting next to me, who had attended all the way from England. We discussed the pros and cons of the NHS vs. the American healthcare system. After the keynote, I offered donuts to the people sitting near me. Then it was off for the exhibit hall.

I ended up spending most of Monday and Tuesday in the exhibit halls, and even then I was not able to walk past every section, let alone visit even a fraction of the booths. In fact, there was allegedly an entire disaster response section with a tractor-trailer that I never even saw.

The exhibit halls, occupying the North and South Buildings of McCormick Place, totally blew my mind for a number of reasons. In a past life as a graphic designer, some of my work involved designing exhibit booths—of course these were the standard backdrops and pop-ups. The booths at HIMSS ran the gamut from these small, standard types to truly massive structures, many of which had two levels and included large conference tables or enclosed rooms for discussing business deals.

In the weeks prior to the conference, I was surprised at the volume of direct mail I received, each full-color glossy postcard extoling the virtues of one booth or another and describing the fabulous prizes I could enter to win when I visited. This all seemed extremely lavish to me, especially since I know many people dealing with chronic illness who are unable to work and struggle every month covering basic expenses such as $4 prescriptions. The Walgreens keynote mentioned their program to donate a vaccine to an underprivileged person in a third-world country for each customer who purchased their vaccine at Walgreens. I wonder how many vaccines could be provided with the money spent at HIMSS?

In fairness, I should say that once I experienced the exhibit floor, the lavish giveaways seemed more practical. I certainly made sure I attended my pre-booked appointment at the Mirth booth. How did I decide to book this 30-minute demo? They promised a Fitbit fitness tracker to every person who completed their demo. I am happy to report that they treated me fairly, explaining their products to me and giving me the Fitbit without complaint.

The really neat thing about demos like Mirth’s was that it afforded me a rare opportunity to experience HIT tools from the provider side, something I’m not likely to see an my next checkup. I’m sure that for many vendors, offering prizes and giveaway offers better ROI than large, flashy booths. As a consumer and a patient, I want vendors to keep their costs as low as possible. I am not convinced that a gigantic booth at HIMSS actually pays off.

I was definitely concerned about how vendors would react my presence. I was “just a patient” and I definitely did not have thousands or millions of dollars to spend on their products. Thankfully, Mr. HIStalk reassured me prior to the conference that he would happily call out any vendor who treated us especially poorly. It’s not that I wanted to get people in trouble, but fear of reenacting the shopping scene from the movie “Pretty Woman” kept playing through my head.

Luckily the vendors I visited at HIMSS pleasantly surprised me. I did have one vendor tell me not unkindly that they didn’t have anything that I would be interested in seeing.

Only two unpleasant experiences stand out in my mind. One day I was behind two very unsavory sales dudes as they discussed their annoyance at having their time wasted talking with someone who obviously was not going to make a purchase. Luckily for those guys, I did not see what company they represented. Another instance was when I tried to enter a prize drawing and was met with a bit of a sneer from the woman working there. It might have just been a matter of luck, however, because fellow HIStalk patient advocate scholarship winner Amanda told me that she did not have very pleasant interactions with many of the vendors.

I was relieved that the most common reaction to my presence was a little confusion and then mostly excitement. On Wednesday I had several hours of demos booked with people interested in my opinion and expertise as a patient. I was also lucky to know a handful of people from previous events or from Twitter who were happy to introduce me to other vendors. Some positive reactions that stand out in my mind are those from the Dell booth, the Panasonic booth, and of course the CTG booth who provided the registration badges for the patient advocates.

It was such an honor for me to be interviewed by Joe Lavelle and Rayanne Thorn at the CTG booth. I laughed when they thanked me for taking the time to tell my story. As I explained, it’s easy to talk, but the real honor is when someone is willing to listen. We came up with the idea to have a patient for every booth at HIMSS16. Will your organization step up and sponsor a patient?

There were two cool things about the Dell booth. Instead of the usual swag (most of which probably ends up in the trash), Dell had glue guns and flower petals so visitors could make colorful, sparkly flowers which would then be donated to Brooke’s Blossoming Hope for Childhood Cancer Foundation which provides fun headbands to children who’ve lost their hair from chemo. The Dell employees were also really excited to hear that HIStalk had sponsored patients to attend HIMSS. They enthusiastically told me about programs where Dell used feedback from actual patients.

While checking out products on the outside of the Panasonic booth, I got called over by an acquaintance to try out their Connected Patient Room Solution. They had a display with information, education, and entertainment for the patient and their caregiver. The system also featured audio technology that could be used to isolate sounds for patients sharing a room (or just those with alarm fatigue). I have no idea how it works, but if you are directly under the speaker, you can hear music (or other audio), but as soon as you shift a bit, you can’t hear anything. The sound also has the effect of drowning out the other noises in the room.

The Sonifi Health booth had similar types of displays for patient education and entertainment. They had modules with specifics on medications, and the program could also utilize videos as part of the discharge process. I appreciated that they had an RN on staff to help with education and engagement. From my months in the hospital, I know that nurses interact far more with patients than anyone else, although they often don’t get the respect they deserve within healthcare.

The most creative swag was from Nick Adkins, who (lacking a booth) wandered HIMSS wearing a kilt and handing out pink socks with mustache designs to promote his HIPAA-compliant video service Reel Dx. I was happy to trade donuts for socks with Nick and his business partner.

I was pleased that HIMSS had a Connected Patient Gallery, but the actual experience left me disappointed. At one point, they were using the theater to run a trivia game about Walgreens. On another visit, I tried to find someone from Patients Like Me, but only found a video, no actual humans. I spotted some devices to record blood glucose, weight, blood pressure, etc. but the vendor (who admitted their products weren’t capturing the older, less techie demographic) got agitated when I persisted in asking why something like a scale needed to use a smart phone anyway. My older, less techie relatives barely leave their house, and I’m sure transmitting the data via dial up would suffice, if necessary. This strikes me as a prime example of a business not really understanding or caring about their customers. It’s worth noting that I did not see any patients in the Connected Patient Gallery on any of my visits.

Overall, I’d give HIMSS a B rating. The event was way too big. I’m concerned about the professionals there to make important business deals for their organizations. There’s no way to keep everything straight and the pace and atmosphere is exhausting and confusing. The keynotes were mostly overly optimistic, glossy commercials presented by rich white men. We need to see more patients on stage. The options for food were so expensive and the lines so long that at one point my favorite booth giveaway was cucumber water. I’m not sure why the transportation was such a problem — Chicago has a train, a subway, and city buses, along with shuttles to nearly every hotel, taxis, and Uber cars. I’m concerned that health IT purchases are being made by people willing to wait an hour for a taxi or pay 4.5x surge pricing for an Uber rather than walk to the curb to catch a bus for $2.

The best parts of HIMSS for me all involved people. My favorite thing was meeting up with old friends and making new ones. I loved vendors who were genuinely excited to talk to a patient. It was an honor to be able to tell my story and to represent patients who could not attend. I had a lot of fun live tweeting and was especially happy when my “normal” followers (non-HIT) thanked me for the coverage. The best swag I brought home was the stack of business cards and new connections for future advocacy opportunities.

The buzzword for HIMSS seemed to be interoperability. I also heard a lot about engagement and compliance. Hopefully the campaign to bring more patients next year takes off. I think many vendors want to involve patients, but are genuinely baffled about how to do so. I hope that with the presence of more patient advocates at HIMSS, vendors will begin to understand that they must learn how to engage with patients and that we need them to comply with their oaths to serve us.

DonorsChoose Fundraising Project at the HIMSS15 Conference

Dana Moore, SVP/CIO at Centura Health, offered to give vendors 20 minutes of his full attention during the HIMSS conference in return for a $500 donation to support classroom projects via DonorsChoose. Seven companies signed up, plus another company that wishes to remain anonymous offered to match the money pledged. Dana said it was the best hours he spent at the conference.

The project made $7,000 available to help teachers. The grant requests I funded with the money (some of which I announced previously) are as follows, some of them made possible because of available matching funds from other donors such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:

• Two Fire HD devices for a middle school reading program in San Diego, CA.
• A projector for a kindergarten class in Erie, PA.
• Professional development books for kindergarten teachers in Charlotte, NC.
• A Chromebook for an elementary school class in Toppenish, WA.
• Algebra calculators for a high school class in Auburn, WA.
• A sand and water table for K-2 children, all with multiple disabilities, in Rosamond, CA.
• Headphones for K-2 classes in Portland, OR.
• A drawing tablet for the iPad for grades 3-5 in Lockhart, TX.
• Three iPad Minis for a sixth grade class in Oklahoma City, OK.
• A television and wall mount for presenting Spanish learning materials for a middle school in Magna, UT.
• Speech therapy learning tools for a speech pathologist for an elementary school in Hawkinsville, GA.
• Two Chromebooks for web-based reading and writing programs for an elementary school in Springfield, OR.
• A science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) bundle for an elementary school in Herminie, PA.
• Studio furniture for a TV show news set for a high school in Atlanta, GA
• An iPad Air 2 and strategy workbooks for an elementary school in Phoenix, AZ.
• A Chromebook for a high school in Gilroy, CA.
• An iPad Air 2 with classroom management tools for a high school in Conway, MO.
• A microphone and recording equipment for creating video documentaries for an elementary school in Pea Ridge, AR.
• Teacher lodging expenses for attending a national educator’s conference for an elementary school in Greenville, SC.
• Math learning centers for an elementary school in Wilder, ID.
• Math learning centers for a kindergarten in Chicago, IL.
• An iPad Mini for teacher professional development for an elementary school in Memphis, TN.
• A STEM bundle for a second grade class in East Islip, NY.
• A Surface Pro 3 for math practice for deaf students in Grades 4-5-6 in Seatac, WA.
• Seven laptops with robotics programming tools for an elementary school in Tukwila, WA.
• A Surface Pro 3 and iPad Mini for math exercises for an elementary school in Seatac, WA.
• Six iPad Minis for math practice for an elementary school in Auburn, WA.
• Math problem solving centers for an elementary school in Fort Walton Beach, FL.

Dana Moore’s Recap

I wanted to give a report on my experience at HIMSS meeting with companies who each generously donated $500 to DonorsChoose.org.

In order to give some perspective, it is important to note that Centura is in the early stages of replacing our current EHR with Epic. Two areas of focus for me related to the Epic implementation were supplementing our training and go-live support and helping us jumpstart our Connect program.

With that background, here is a brief synopsis of each of the companies I met with at HIMSS. Please remember that I had 20 minutes with each firm, so these are impressions and not endorsements.

Leidos

Full disclosure: we currently are working with Leidos.

Scott and team were checking in on the team in place at Centura and then we discussed our potential needs on training support and Connect. We had a very casual conversation due to the current working relationship.

QPID Health

Early Wednesday, I ran into a colleague from Colorado and we were discussing our never-ending pursuit of analytics. We both commented how great it would be if our HIE could find a company that could jump start such efforts. Enter QPID. Their platform seems to be an answer to the problems I had been discussing earlier and they are currently working with two HIEs as well as numerous health systems.

Nordic

Drew and the team at Nordic were very informative on their experience supporting health systems implementing Epic. We discussed our challenges and will be having further discussions with Nordic on the areas where we may need assistance.

TeraRecon

Full disclosure: we currently are working with TeraRecon. 

This was a reminder that every organization needs to have regular meetings with all of their current partners to ensure they fully understand the solutions offered. Paul and his team quickly outlined a way we could potentially leverage our current solution to reduce our interface costs with Epic as well as bring outside images into the organization in a more efficient manner than is happening today. Follow up meetings are being scheduled.

Serra Health Consulting

Loyal readers will remember Mr. H writing that one donor was planning to teach me how to make balloon animals. Serra generously wanted to make a donation and also donated their time since I was behind schedule.

EDCO

One of the issues we have at Centura is indexing of scanned documents, especially with our clinics. While we will be dramatically reducing the number of scanned documents with the implementation of Epic, it will never go to zero. EDCO appears to be a solution to help. They offer several solutions from total outsourcing of scanning to outsourcing the indexing of the documents. EDCO does not sell a document management system and we are not in the market for one. Their solution seems to be a good fit to solve an issue for us so further meetings are being scheduled.

Physician Network Advantage

PNA was on my list of people to talk to at HIMSS so I was excited to see them on my calendar. My interest was on their Connect offering and how they might help Centura jumpstart our efforts. If you are an Epic client and considering offering Connect, ask John to show you their eight-foot long Visio on the Connect process. It is impressive and sobering at the same time.

I had a lot of fun meeting with everyone and came away with follow up for the team at Centura. I want to apologize to all of the people who patiently waited for me when I fell behind schedule due to travel time between booths.

The most exciting part of this experience is that we raised $7.000! Thank you to the companies listed above and to the anonymous donor who matched everyone’s contributions. I would also like to thank Mr. H and Lorre for all of their work to make this happen.

Monday Morning Update 4/20/15

Top News

Kaiser Permanente chooses midtown Atlanta for a $20 million IT campus that will create 900 jobs.

Reader Comments

From Justa CIO: “Re: HIMSS. Do you think it’s becoming irrelevant for people in HIT leadership roles? I find it much less compelling since I can find product information or call someone who has experience with something without being away for a week and spending thousands of dollars of my employer’s hard-earned money while plugging away at real issues. I would like to know what you and others think. Your coverage is excellent – it was enough to make me post this question as I realized that the only things I miss was networking and your choice party.” I’m mixed on the value of attending the conference. Networking can be overrated if you aren’t a vendor selling something – I sometimes think CIOs should stop talking to each other entirely (except to check vendor references) and do creative rather than imitative things since healthcare IT sometimes looks like lemmings following each other off the cliff. HIMSS is efficient in bringing people together so they can schedule time together, but otherwise it’s a horribly inefficient mess of social events, glitzy exhibits, job seeking, and glad-handing and you might be better off just buying the education session recordings (which are included free with conference registration). I’m not convinced that the non-profit health systems that spend fortunes to send people there (often more as a personal reward than a business necessity) show measurable ROI or demonstrate care improvement as a result. Here’s a challenge to health system CIOs that I will report anonymously if you respond: list the immediately actionable items you took away from the conference that you couldn’t have done without attending. Or, the actions you took in the past year that were driven entirely by your 2014 HIMSS attendance. Our HISsies “best CIO” winner John Halamka keeps BIDMC running despite his non-attendance this year.

From Texas Rules: “Re: Next Wave Connect healthcare-specific social collaboration solution. It continues to purge staffers – Drex DeFord and most of the Seattle team are gone.” Drex’s LinkedIn profile indicates that he left the company in February. I asked Chairman Ivo Nelson, who replied,“ It’s pretty common for startups to go through some turnover in the first few years. As you know, I’ve been through this before and getting the right team in place is a sign of health, not illness. Next Wave Connect has steadily grown its staff and will continue to grow this year. We have a good team in place under the leadership of Jim Jacobs and I’ve been very pleased with our progress. Just our March To HIMSS campaign garnered over 15K hits and MyCHIME is has been a huge success.”

From Concerned Tester: “Re: [health system name omitted]. An IT director is under investigation for accepting an Aruba vacation from their [vendor name omitted] rep. That director and his former boss hid a problem with orders that didn’t match after an EHR upgrade. He also pushed out an update that broke the connection to the HIE that caused slowdowns and lost data. The good news that the vendor is being kicked out and Epic will happen in 10 months, but the bad news is that the director was successful in getting them to switch to the previous vendor’s HIE.” I’ve omitted names since I couldn’t verify, but I’m interested in who’s doing the investigation.

From Magnum PI: “Re: Meaningful Use data from Jamie Stockton at Wells Fargo Securities. The numbers don’t seem to match what CMS provides. I also thought CMS stopped including vendor names in their numbers due to ongoing inaccuracies.” Jamie provided this response: “The only hospitals that needed to attest for Stage 2 in 2014 were the ones that originally entered the program in 2011-12. That cohort of hospitals is 2,600 facilities (vs. the 4,800 that have registered for the program through today). If we look at net attestations (adjusting for the fact that sometimes more than one vendor is listed by a hospital when they attest and therefore one hospital occupies multiple rows for the same attestation year in the CMS spreadsheet), then we calculate that 1,800 hospitals have attested for Stage 2, which roughly matches the number your reader quoted. If you just took 1,800 and divided it by 2,600, then you would get about 70 percent of hospitals having successfully attested for Stage 2. I probably need to make that 70 percent number much more clear in the future and we also need to add a line to the bottom of our Stage 2 table that adjusts the gross number of attestations (which was 2,900) down to the 1,800 net. When we look at vendor success rate, we are excluding the hospitals that have switched vendors since 2011-12. If we didn’t, Epic would have a 130 percent success rate because many McKesson, Meditech, and Siemens hospitals that first showed up in 2011-12 with those vendors have subsequently switched to Epic and would not be in the denominator of the calculation for Epic. Excluding all 400 hospitals that have switched vendors, we get to an average vendor success rate of 55 percent. Obviously that penalizes vendors in their success rate if they have lost market share, but I think that is OK. There is a reason that the hospitals moved away from them. At least with the February data set that powered our most recent analysis, CMS continued to publish the vendor names associated with each attestation.”

From The PACS Designer: “Re: medical 3D printing. At the Washington University School of Medicine, cardiothoracic surgeons are using 3D printing to prepare for heart operations. Recently they used the 3D method to prepare for a difficult heart repair for a 20-month-old toddler at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I feel sorry for the housekeeping people who had to discard all the junk HIMSS conference attendees left in the overflowing trash cans of their hotel rooms at checkout. Every year most of the booth swag and handouts that seemed worth grabbing in the exhibit hall fail to earn their luggage space back in the hotel, so rather than pack it and haul it home, it’s easier to just chuck it. Somewhere in Chicago there’s a landfill full of Caradigm-provided HIMSS backpacks, although I actually brought mine home since it’s a nice one. I also brought back the pair of insulated coffee mugs that First Databank cheerfully provided.

Arcadia Healthcare Solutions provided the most useful handout ever, a conference essentials pack that included a bottle of water, a coozie, breath mints, ibuprofen, foot bandages, antacid tablets, and vitamin C fizzy drink powder.

The conference reminded me of an observation I had years ago after sitting in on a variety of VC and executive meetings. Mid-level executives and startup CEOs always wear impeccable suits and frown at everything to make sure people take them seriously, while the folks with real money and power wear casual clothes and joke around because they’ve earned the ability to do whatever they want and don’t care what the suited second string thinks. I like that a lot. Big-time VC guy Peter Thiel famously says that his fund will never invest in a technology company whose CEO wears a suit.

Speaking of the conference, I didn’t hear any comments or see any tweets quoting something interesting that was said by the keynote speakers. Did I miss anything by not attending any of them? I’m also interested in more definitive comments about what you liked and didn’t like. Did you go to any educational sessions? Did you meet anyone who was particularly impressive or obnoxious? What vendors raised your interest?

Here’s an odd expression I’ve heard quite a few times over the years: “a piece of software.”

Phrases that need to be expunged from the healthcare vocabulary: mobile health, population health, and patient-centered. All of those be assumed when talking about health. They don’t require being defined as a separate novelty category as they once might have been.

I was annoyed at a video interview with Karen DeSalvo conducted by a young HIMSS Media person with unstated credentials (she includes nothing about education or background in her LinkedIn profile) who repeatedly referred to the national coordinator (and acting assistant secretary for health)  as “Karen.” Even if she’s your BFF, she should be referred to as “Dr. DeSalvo” when interviewing her on video – that shows basic respect for her education, role, and age. 

Thursday beat Wednesday’s HIStalk readership record with 14,658 page views from nearly 11,000 unique visits.

The folks who didn’t attend HIMSS expected their workload to be about the same last week, although a fourth of them admitted that it’s easier when their bosses aren’t around. New poll to your right or here: if you attended the HIMSS conference, how would you grade it?

Lorre has posted some of the interviews DrFirst did at the conference. Here’s one with our HIStalkapalooza host, Forward Health Group’s Barry Wightman.

Here’s another DrFirst HIMSS conference interview, this one with DrFirst CEO Cam Deemer on the one year delay of mandatory electronic prescribing in New York.

For those who attended HIStalkapalooza: what would you do differently? How would you make it more attractive to potential sponsors for a 2016 version? I haven’t decided if I’ll do it again next year, but Lorre has confidently placed a hold on a Las Vegas venue thinking I’ll re-up.

Listening: The Suffers, big-horns Gulf Coast melting pot soul from Houston. This is your chance to tell people about a great band they’ve never heard, but will almost certainly like once they do.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor xG Health Solutions of Columbia, MD. The clinician-led company brings to the national market healthcare transformation tools and knowledge developed by Geisinger Health System. The company offers care management services (including population health analytics) and offers help with transition to a fee-for-value environment. XG Health solutions announced at the HIMSS conference EnrG, a suite of advanced interoperability software modules that use Geisinger-developed care models to improve acute and chronic care management, connecting via SMART on FHIR to work seamlessly with any FHIR-enabled EHR (the initial partners are Athenahealth, Cerner, and Epic). The evidence-based care modules address procedures and conditions such as CABG, hip fracture, COPD, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease. EnrGRheum, which addresses rheumatologic diseases, will be released in Q3 2015 with six additional apps following. Thanks to xG Health Solutions for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

April 22 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Microsoft: The Waking Giant in Healthcare Analytics and Big Data.” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Dale Sanders, SVP of strategy, Health Catalyst. Microsoft has been quietly reengineering its culture and products to offer the best value and most visionary platform for cloud services, big data, and analytics in healthcare. This webinar will cover the Healthcare Analytics Adoption Model, the ongoing transition from relational databases, the role of new Microsoft products such as Azure and Analytic Platform System, the PowerX product line, and geospatial and machine learning visualization tools. Attendees will learn how to incorporate cloud-based analytics services into their healthcare analytics strategies.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

CPSI renames its EHR business line Evident. or at least that’s what the verbose yet uninformative press release suggests. It will continue to run its services business under the TruBridge name. The Evident name seems rather generic, not particularly relevant, and likely to get lost in Google searches. Apparently the CPSI name survives as the parent and in the company’s Nasdaq listing. Vince Ciotti tipped me off with the photo above that he took in the HIMSS exhibit hall.

Streamline Health reports Q4 results: revenue up 1.2 percent, adjusted EPS –$0.04 vs. –$0.13. Shares dropped almost 7 percent Friday on the news. Above is the one-year price chart of STRM (blue, down 49 percent) vs. the Nasdaq (red, up 20 percent).

Announcements and Implementations

Tallksoft launches its Survey+ patient survey app that allows medical practices to benchmark their patient experience and practice performance.

Cerner will offer Healthwise health education content to Millennium users and via its HealthLife Engagement module.

Ernst and Young announces development of its Telemedicine Adoption Model.

Government and Politics

The estimated cost of opening the new Denver VA hospital rises to over $2 billion vs. the original VA estimate of $630 million. It’s also two years behind schedule.

The Atlantic says hospitals are chasing CMS patient satisfaction scores that focus on making people happy rather than making them well, encouraging hospitals (even those with low clinical ratings) to redirect funds toward putting in valet parking, live music, and VIP loyalty lounges. They’re also scripting nurse interactions to troll for higher survey scores and tying clinician pay to the results even though everybody knows that the patient isn’t always right. A previous version of the survey allowed comments, where patients complained that their dying roommate was making too much noise and that their sandwich didn’t contain enough pastrami. Experts worry that hospitals trying to appease patients might avoid talking to them about unpleasant topics such as losing weight, seeking mental health treatment, or stopping smoking. Most amazing is that patients with the highest reported satisfaction had higher hospitalization rates, higher costs, and a higher mortality rate.

Other

Here’s the final installment of Vince Ciotti’s vendor revenue review for 2014, this time covering small-hospital vendors.

I missed that Athenahealth’s Jonathan Bush tweeted this last Tuesday, including a HIStalkapalooza photo taken back stage at the House of Blues.

The latest drug of abuse: amphetamine-based ADHD drugs such as Adderall (aka “mommy crack” or “productivity in a pill”), which mostly young career go-getters are using to increase career competitiveness through short-term improvement in focus and attention. Interestingly, the anonymous executive profiled in the New York Times article is a health IT startup CEO, who says she has no choice but to take the drug because it is “necessary for the survival of the best and the smartest and the highest-achieving people.”

Sponsor Updates

• HCS sponsored the “Arc of Monmouth Walk and 5K” on the Asbury Park Boardwalk in New Jersey last week and raised more money than all other teams for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
• Strata Decision Technology will add Yale-New Haven Health’s quality indicators into its StrataJazz platform to help providers understand the high cost of quality variation.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

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From HIMSS 4/16/15

My headline isn’t exactly accurate – I’m still in Chicago, but I didn’t wend my way back to McCormick Place this morning since I just wasn’t interested enough to bother. Instead, I caught up on some work, bought some clothes at Macy’s on State Street (my favorite store anywhere), and had dim sum in Chinatown.

Interesting: HIMSS scratches Atlanta and New Orleans off the cities list for future conferences, saying they can’t handle the growing attendance. That leaves only Orlando and Las Vegas as HIMSS conference locations since HIMSS had already expunged Chicago permanently (for the second time, in fact, as a result of two different tiffs – once over nasty exhibit hall workers and the second because RSNA got better Chicago hotel room rates). Exhibitors won’t be thrilled since both Orlando and Las Vegas have ample distractions that keep attendees doing something fun instead of trudging the exhibit halls like swag-seeking zombies. I really dislike Las Vegas, but there’s nothing like being handed stripper cards on your way to an educational session. If HIMSS were a stock, it would be split – other than vanity and economy of scale, it would be a lot more interesting and manageable as two separate conferences.

I thought of another company that is growing quickly based on announcements and appearance: Validic.

This week on HIStalk Connect: A number of enterprise health IT Apple Watch apps are unveiled during this week’s HIMSS conference. CMS publishes data suggesting that up to 66 percent of rural US hospitals failed to generate a single patient portal visitor during MU1 attestation. Partners Healthcare joins forces with Samsung to develop a series of remote patient monitoring solutions. Researchers at Vanderbilt University develop genetically engineered microbiome capable of tricking mice into thinking they are not hungry. 

I was surprised to see this photo tweeted by Athenahealth showing Jonathan Bush returning to his company’s Monday night party with the shaving cream from his HIStalkapalooza-applied pie still on his face. We provided him with cleanup facilities, so I can only assume he wore the foam as badge of honor.

The final HIStalkapalooza count from House of Blues was 788. We invited 1,465, meaning that 46 percent of them didn’t attend. That’s a frustrating part of trying to plan an expensive per-person event, which I fortunately anticipated in assuming a no-show rate of 40 percent in signing the House of Blues guarantee. I’ll try not to think about the fact that the incremental cost of having more than 100 extra folks would have been zero since I was charged for them anyway. At least it’s not like last year when each of those no-shows prevented someone else from coming, although we would have let some walk-ins enter had we known about the no-shows ahead of time.

HIStalk had 13,500 page views on Wednesday, which I believe is a record.

Jenn reported an encounter with the “Epic police” this week. Epic was demonstrating in the Interoperability Showcase and Jenn (who had a HIMSS conference press pass) snapped a photo of what Epic was publicly displaying. Someone from Epic came up, said nobody’s allowed to take pictures of Epic’s screens, and then demanded that the photo be deleted from the camera while they stood there to verify. That sounds like Soviet-style overstepping big time, especially since Jenn was attending as a journalist – if you are showing your product on the big screen, if HIMSS doesn’t prohibit picture-taking in the exhibit hall (which they don’t any more as far as I can after reviewing the attendee agreement), and if the person taking the photo doesn’t work for an organization that has signed a confidentiality agreement with Epic, then I don’t believe Epic people have any legal basis for detaining attendees and demanding that they delete photos. Claims of friendly and open interoperability just don’t jibe with clearly evidenced paranoia and legal muscle-flexing. I think there’s enough Epic out there that whatever national secrets are contained on their screens have already been exposed.

Nordic did some live interviews during the HIMSS conference. Here’s one with Lorre.

Here’s Nordic’s interview with one of our patient advocate scholarship winners, Carly Medosch. We’ll have a writeup from each of them next week. Carly had a flare-up of her condition on Wednesday that required her to visit the ED, so I’ve suggested she write up that experience as part of her narrative as a HIMSS conference patient advocate.

I’m not sure what my HIMSS takeaways are. The focus seemed more on “doing” rather than “buying.” The first glimmer of patients turning into consumers showed itself. Big health systems have gotten bigger and are dealing with electronically absorbing their acquisitions. Every vendor has figured out interoperability according to themselves, yet every provider struggles to get the patient information they need that resides elsewhere. Everybody seems sick of Meaningful Use. What’s your answer to “HIMSS15 was the year of the …”?

I took some of the photos DrFirst took at HIStalkapalooza and turned them into a video (with marginally cheesy royalty-free music that I bought for the occasion for $18 just to stay legal). I’ll probably post more later and I have video from the event coming as well.

Dana Moore had a great time meeting with folks who donated to DonorsChoose. He’ll be writing up what he learned and liked for next week’s HIStalk.

I’ll be back to normal HIStalk writing this weekend for the Monday Morning Update after traveling back Friday. I’m interested to hear your thoughts about the conference this week.

Jenn’s HIMSS Day 4 4/15/15

The end of my fifth HIMSS marked the first time I’ve ever had a flight cancelled. My unexpected stay in a Howard Johnson 20 minutes from O’Hare with just the clothes on my back and the electronics in my HIMSS book bag gave me extra time to mull over the rest of my HIMSS experience.

The fourth and final day of the conference for me was a bit more scheduled, with a few media briefings and a good chunk of time spent walking around the exhibit hall in one last attempt to get a flavor for what this year’s product offerings were all about. Buzzwords seen on booths and heard in show-floor conversations included value-based care, population health management, interoperability … the usual. Not much has changed in that area from an exhibit hall perspective, with the exception of EHRs no longer being the big-ticket item. They have turned into the backbone for everything else.

I chatted with the folks from Health Care DataWorks, which spent the bulk of its HIMSS promoting a variety of knowledge packs, pre-built dashboards build into its enterprise data warehouse that address 16 hospital areas including ER, OR, and patient-related analyses. HIStalk contributing author and Cedars-Sinai CIO Darren Dworkin made an appearance at a HCD roundtable early in the week to discuss how the health system used HCD business intelligence and analytics to achieve HIMSS Analytics Stage 7 status..

The folks at biometric identification company M2sys caught up with me to show me their first foray into mobile health. The RightPatient platform includes a mobile health app and wearable integration server that caters to both consumers and providers. The server takes data from consumer wearable devices and delivers it to the appropriate EHR, while the accompanying mobile app is the first I’ve seen that combines many most of us already have on our phones – personal health record, appointment scheduling, activity tracking, medication reminders, alerts, mood and health monitoring, and health games, to name a few. It can even be configured to accommodate the health data of multiple family members, with all data seamlessly transferred to their provider’s EHR.

I’ve been fairly vocal about the problem of having too many patient portals to log into, so it’s interesting to see the similar problem of having too many apps figured out via the aggregation of many into the distillation of one. President Michael Trader tells me that the platform will launch in July, with a mental health version already in the works.

My last show-floor one-on-one was with the Xerox and HealthSpot team. I have been interested in the HealthSpot remote-consultation kiosk for some time, and was happy to get a personal tour. My big question for CEO Steve Cashman was, “How is this a better option than picking up my phone while at home for care via a telemedicine app?” He confidently told me that going to a kiosk location offers benefits that a telemedicine app can’t match: reimbursement; a pipeline of HealthSpot physicians who also work for local hospitals and health systems; better quality of care; regulatory benefits (he kept bringing up the fact HealthSpot can operate in Texas); and automatic integration of health data via Xerox back-end technology into the patient’s EHR. The company is looking to launch its kiosks in 25 Rite-Aid stores in June. I’d definitely like to give it a try if they ever come to Georgia.

My inaugural visit to the Interoperability Showcase was an interesting one. The area was divided into a number of different “vignettes,” scenarios of patient care featuring family members going through different medical events. After a brief introduction by a healthcare IT magician in a central seating area, audience members dispersed to one of the vignettes, where we listened to three different docents run through the technologies involved in that particular family member’s diagnosis and treatment.

I decided to visit the oncology/clinical trials visit of 38 year-old patient Isabel, which involved technologies from Epic, InterSystems, and the CDC. As any hard-working member of the press would do, I whipped out my camera phone to document my experience, only to have the Epic rep immediately tell me that no pictures were allowed. He even followed me out of the presentation afterwards to ask that I delete any screenshots I may have taken. The one above is the only one I managed to get.

I walked over to a different vignette to see if they were as strict with their photography restrictions, only to find out they had no problem with photography. I snapped a few shots, but did notice that the rep working the video screen logged out of whatever application he was demoing as I snapped away. The whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth. Isn’t interoperability at its core about sharing data?

A few other random observations as I attempt to wrap up my coverage:

Interviews with Dana Moore: I heard from Lorre that it was his most worthwhile HIMSS experience, and it was certainly in demand. I love knowing that money raised from Mr. Moore’s time and expertise is going to a good cause like Donors Choose. It’s great to work for an employer that places importance on helping others. I saw several other companies highlighting their charitable efforts, including Dell and QuadraMed. HIMSS attendees also got the chance to spin Divurgent’s vibrantly colored Trivia Charity Wheel. Their spins helped the company raise $5,000 for Lurie’s Children’s Hospital of Chicago.

Customer service in the Windy City: It was fantastic, especially at McCormick Place. Everyone had smiles on their faces, and one security guard even chased after to me to ensure I went the right way to the West Hall.

Size and scope of the conference: I found the exhibit hall strangely confining despite its expansiveness. The press room was too far away from the exhibit hall to warrant my making the trek once or twice a day for a free meal, reliable WiFi, and quiet workspace to gather my thoughts and plan my show reviews. I’m not sure who thought putting zero restrooms in the exhibit hall would be a good idea – it certainly wasn’t for me. Like Mr. H and 35,000+ of our closest friends, I probably spent more time walking from point A to point B than in meetings, talking with vendors, or attending keynotes combined. For the record, I went through 10 Band-Aids on my poor blistered feet over my four days there.

Exhibitors: I managed to run into HIStalkapalooza sponsors Divurgent and Sagacious Consultants during my exhibit hall trek. Both teams kindly squeezed together for group shots. I can’t wrap up conference coverage without mention our gracious neighbors in the exhibit hall – Medisas and Oxford Healthcare IT. The Medisas team put up with a variety of shenanigans in and around the HIStalk booth, while the Oxford team kept us well fed with their daily buffet of Chicago-style hot dogs and Garrett’s popcorn.

Overall, I felt like I barely scratched the surface of what the show had to offer. I didn’t make it to any educational sessions other than Monday’s keynote, a similar experience to many of the providers I spoke to. It seems most people prefer to spend their time at HIMSS connecting with colleagues, and visiting vendors they otherwise wouldn’t be able to get to throughout the year. Perhaps next year I’ll take a different approach and spend most of my time in sessions rather than on the show floor. Given that it’s in Las Vegas, I can only hope the House of Blues there will be happy to host our next HIStalkapalooza. I hear Lorre is already entertaining sponsorship requests.

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

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From HIMSS 4/15/15

From Canuck: “Re: British Columbia EMR. Big implementation gone sour with a reported $125 million spent so far with nothing to show. This story barely touches upon the issues encountered thus far, issues we’ve all seen in other similar projects.” British Columbia parts ways with IBM two years into a 10-year, $700 million project that remains 85 percent incomplete. The health minister still expects to get the project done on time and budget, which is ridiculously optimistic given government IT performance worldwide even when it doesn’t involve dumping the prime vendor. Perhaps the US Department of Defense should notice that its big EHR bidders haven’t performed well in comparable but much smaller projects outside the US, although fault is often hard to assign to either government or prime bidder incompetence. I can’t name a single big government IT project that was delivered on time and on budget, but I can name a bunch that were abandoned with no benefit whatsoever.

From Due North: “Re: NantHealth. Cancelled their HIMSS conference presence at the last minute, eating the huge deposit. Everyone I knew there is gone.” Unverified, but new President Bob Watson was available only in the private meeting rooms over by HIMSS Bistro, which I happened to see while having a lakefront lunch there today. 

Here’s an interesting rumor I heard today from a fairly good source: Karen DeSalvo will reportedly leave her HHS position in a couple of weeks. I hope it’s not true because she’s a credit to public service and has in her short tenure done a very good job in walking the ONC tightrope that tries to balance innovation, public health, and Meaningful Use. The source suggested that Micky Tripathi turned down an offer to serve as interim, which would be a surprising offer given that he’s brilliant but not an MD like all of the National Coordinators so far. I’m almost always a cynical sourpuss when it comes to industry leadership and yet I find myself hoping she not only continues as National Coordinator,  but is given more federal responsibility despite serving within a lame duck administration. The rumor wasn’t clear, so perhaps there’s a bigger role for her within HHS, such as with CDC or NIH. Or maybe it’s not true at all. Feel free to ask her after her Thursday morning HIMSS keynote if you’re still in Chicago. She gets my vote for whatever she wants to do, as does her predecessor Farzad.

Here’s Regina Holliday’s latest artwork, which she painted right in the HIStalk booth this week. It’s in honor of HIStalkapalooza, with the pie representing the one Judy Faulkner presented to Jonathan Bush and the beauty queen sash indicating, “We are your biggest fans,” which Regina said she heard repeatedly from folks at the event in reference to HIStalk.

I met one of our HIStalking scholarship winners today when Lorre introduced me to Mélanie Péron, our representative from Paris. She cried, hugged, and expressed endless appreciation for the opportunity to attend the conference representing patients. She triggered instant insight on what it takes to be successful as a patient advocate. We healthcare people are used to geeks calmly presenting reams of worksheets, but we are justifiably easily moved by people who can tell a heartbreaking or inspirational story, who get fighting mad at injustice or incompetence, or who tug at our hearts with sadness when the industry in which we work in caused harm to their loved ones or failed to prevent it. We all know it could have been us our our family members on the wrong end of a bad but unfortunately not uncommon healthcare experience. Maybe that handful of people we brought to Chicago are dwarfed by the 43,000 others here who are more interested in finding expensive dinners or selling systems, but their activism keeps us all honest and pushes our faces to the mirror of what’s wrong with healthcare that only we can fix. It’s brilliant. I’m glad they were in Chicago this week and I’m anxious to hear their thoughts about the big business aspects of a sometimes indifferent care delivery system that they’ve now witnessed firsthand.

Our HIStalk friend Marty Mercer says HIStalkapalooza is the best party he’s ever attended, possibly because he was being fawned over by two members of Party on the Moon.

Today’s Conference Notes

I started my day with a visit with HealthLoop. They were handing out badge ribbons indicating “Empathologist” because they create electronic connections to patients that make them feel connected and engaged in a high-touch way, including scripted electronic check-in. The messaging extends the patient experience before and after the planned encounter, such as sending pre-surgical patients a daily reminder by phone or email to get up and walk around or otherwise prepare for their procedure or to recover from it afterward. It boosts patient satisfaction while delivering patient education. It can even route patients automatically to doctor rating sites and collect survey information for patient-reported outcomes. It was a quick but positive look.

I then stopped by Medfusion, which offers a free “portal of portals” in aggregating multiple portals into its vendor-agnostic one. It was pretty cool in that it can tie together multiple portals to look like a single one to the patient, displaying everything via a slick app. Vendor- and provider-specific portals are really ridiculous in this day and age where every patient would have to manage 10 of them to keep up (and instead never bother to log on at all), so combining them all visually is about the best we can hope for at present.

Next I visited Influence Health, whose EHR-agnostic product brilliantly combines patient engagement, provider marketing, and a patient portal. Consumer choice means providers need to selectively market their services and it’s interesting how Influence Health does it with a consumer user interface that is as familiar as Facebook and Outlook. The company seems to get the connection between clinical patient engagement and provider marketing better than anyone. I only saw a short demo, but it looked solid and smart to me.

A reader asked me to check out Patient Route, way back on the no-man’s land of the HX360 pavilion (which was maddeningly difficult to navigate even with booth number in hand – it literally took 20 minutes to find them even though I was within 100 feet of their little stand). They do some kind of predictive throughput and staff modeling based on historical and real-time information, although I have to say the pitch I was given was not particularly well thought out or informative. About all I heard is that the Brigham is using it to push more surgeries to their suburban hospitals where they get paid more for the same work and don’t have capacity limitations. They didn’t give me enough information to form an opinion.

I checked out MedCPU and was guardedly impressed. The company’s clinical decision support product brings in the usual HL-7 data but also decomposes the free text information that forms most of the available patient data, using natural language processing, text extraction, and a clinical context engine. It turns all of that text into discrete information that is used to provide EHR warnings via a Citrix DLL, so that it sits in the EHR window but separate from it and thus requires no integration effort. It gives clinicians warnings of conditions that are far too subtle for normal field-based CDS to detect. My “guardedly” adjective refers only to the fact that I want to talk to a live site, which the company is arranging. If it works as billed, it’s really well beyond the rather primitive CDS such as drug-drug interaction warnings and drug-lab contraindications. Eyal Ephrat, MD has a track record that instills trust, having founded E&C Medical Intelligence (now PeriGen, which does great work). He and I got a bit deep into the bowels of their patented technology and I want to learn more from actual users.

A reader suggested I look at Innovatient, which offers in-room entertainment, patient assignment, and some nurse call system overlap. I can’t say it struck me as offering anything not already readily available from Oneview, GetWellNetwork, and other vendors, but they have 10 live sites and maybe there’s more than I noticed.

Another reader wanted me to look over Patientco. I can’t get too excited about patient bills and payment options, but if I did, I would love it. They print easily understood bills (designed using sound psychological principles right down to the colors used) and make it easy for patients to settle up online. Patientco is about as cool as billing can get and customers are seeing higher collections and patient satisfaction from using it.

Yet another reader asked me to check out Healow, part of eClinicalWorks. I don’t have much of a reaction – it seemed to be a basic phone-powered portal into a provider’s eCW system with some wearables connectivity built in.

NextGen had this cool, computer-controlled waterfall that actually spelled out words and presented pictures using only water patterns. It was bizarre but fascinating.

Today’s MedData scones: banana-maple and pumpkin. My Fitbit can’t count enough steps to offset the calories I took in enjoying them.

HIMSS requires exhibitors to refrain from heading out before Wednesday’s 4:00 exhibit hall close time, but plenty of them (HIStalk included) were boxing up well before then.

Some strange Epic booth art.

Epic’s KLAS results posted on their booth walls shows Cerner second with no green at all, Allscripts flailing around in the middle spot, and Meditech dropping precipitously toward the all-red CPSI bottom feeder level.

This is pretty amazing. Centura SVP/CIO Dana Moore met with interested vendors today at a price of a $500 donation to DonorsChoose in return for 20 minutes of his uninterrupted time (which was matched by a generous, anonymous vendor so that we raised $6,000 for needy classrooms today). I expected Dana to nod politely and check his watch constantly from boredom, but instead he told Lorre that it was the best two hours he’s ever spent at a HIMSS conference. Every one of the six vendors had a solution to one of his current problems and one of them had a solution that he didn’t even know existed. His positive experience makes me think we should replicate it on a larger scale at some point, carefully matching provider executives with vendors based on needed, available solutions.  

HIStalkapalooza Photos from DrFirst

Thanks to DrFirst for providing photography and videography at the event. I’ll probably turn some of the many great photos into a video slideshow or something since it’s great for folks to see themselves having fun. As much as I fussed for many months about the effort and personal cost exposure of running the party, it felt worth it to see the crowd responding so positively to the HISsies and the band.

I’ll get back to a more regular posting schedule since I’ll pass on returning to the conference Thursday. It’s been a long week.

Jenn’s HIMSS Day 3 4/14/15

My third day at HIMSS started off with the #HITchicks tweetup at the HIMSSpot in between the exhibit halls. A group of about 50, including a smattering of men, attended to talk and tweet about the role of women as patient advocates and the highlights of HIMSS15 thus far. It didn’t take long for the “booth babe” conversation to take off, with one audience member shouting out HIStalk for bringing attention to the unfortunate trend a few years ago, and consistently calling out those companies that choose to hire pretty faces in tight-fitting spandex to shill their products. I thought it was especially fitting that me, Lorre, and friends of HIStalk added the badges below to our HIMSS15 wardrobes. Kudos to HIStalker Steve Blumenthal, business and corporate law attorney at Waller Lansden, for supplying them. He’s got a pretty sharp sense of humor for a lawyer.

The tweetup had not one but three highlights for me: University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers CIO Sue Schade – CHIME’s CIO of the Year – stopped by the voice her support for the group. Kym Martin, a four-time breast cancer survivor and patient advocate (not to mention the lovely wife of HIStalk Blues Brother Ross Martin, MD), shared her story of patient advocacy and journey as a four-time breast cancer survivor. Last but not least, ONC National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD stopped by to share her experience as a woman who has worked in academia, public health, and now on the national political stage.

My next stop was the ONC press briefing, where staff gave a run down of the office’s accomplishments over the last year. Interoperability and partnerships were definitely the overarching theme. DeSalvo took the briefing as an opportunity to announce the availability of $1 million in grant funds to support health IT projects for the Community Interoperability Health Information Exchange Program. The program will award funds to 10 organizations, including those that are not eligible for MU incentives. Applications for the program are due June 16.

We didn’t get too far into the Q&A before someone brought up the patient engagement crowd’s (including Farzad Mostashari, MD’s) uproar over the decision by CMS to change the Stage 2 requirement so that providers now have to show that one patient, rather than 5 percent of their patients, accessed their information online. DeSalvo calmly stressed that ONC is absolutely committed to ensuring that patients have access to their health data, adding that she is encouraged that a dialogue is taking place on the issue. She also reminded reporters that this is a proposed rule, and that formal comments on the rule are encouraged. I understand why some might call this a step backward for the MU program, but I can’t help but think many providers are breathing sighs of relief. You can’t force people to use the Internet, especially those that don’t have access to a computer or reliable WiFi. As DeSalvo reiterated throughout her response to this question, the true challenge will be a cultural one, not necessarily one solved by technology, which is why it’s so important for the ONC to partner with other federal agencies as they attempt to evolve their focus beyond EHRs.

My next stop after a quick lunch in the press room as at the Emdeon booth, where I moderated a panel discussion with Emdeon’s Gene Boerger and CareCloud’s Albert Santalo on fueling product innovation with big data. I was slightly jealous of the stylish and super-comfy shoes the Emdeon staff were sporting, not to mention the cushioned carpet in their booth. I enjoyed wandering around both sides of the exhibit hall afterwards, snapping pictures of those that had unique designs, catchy marketing gimmicks, and bustling crowds.

My remaining time at the conference was spent at our booth, where I got the chance to witness The Walking Gallery converge, courtesy of HIStalk’s good friend Regina Holliday. I especially loved the vibrant color of Farzad Mostashari, MD’s jacket. Let the data flow ….

My day concluded with a quick stop by the Patientco party, where I ran into Caroline Wood and Sherry Farrugia of Georgia Tech. Talk soon turned to a company called Evidation Health, launched last month by GE Ventures and Stanford Health Care to improve health outcomes with evidence-based digital health tools. Their excitement about the startup was palpable, so I may have to crash the road trip they’ve got planned to go out there later this year.

After that it was on to the Edifecs #HIMSSandHers meetup, where I happily talked shop with Politico’s Ashley Gold. I left with a T-shirt and a selfie stick, my favorite piece of HIMSS swag so far. Despite being thoroughly exhausted, I’m already looking forward to seeing what my final day of HIMSS will bring.

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.
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From HIMSS 4/14/15

From Thinking Ahead: “Re: HIStalkapalooza. How can we sponsor next year’s event?” Contact Lorre. I think this year’s sponsors feel they got their money’s worth since it let them have a “party within a party” that offered cool exposure that impressed prospects, but didn’t cost them much since the fixed costs were spread over several sponsors. I question my sanity in assuming so much work and financial risk just to throw a free party where I don’t know all of the attendees, but for at least one evening per year, it almost seems worth it. I haven’t fully decided about doing it again next year.

From Donnie Brasco: “Re: Epic. Announced that Care Everywhere is free until 2020. The $2.35 per patient per year Epic to non-Epic exchange fee was eliminated. Haven’t heard start date or other details.” Epic was taking in only a tiny bit of revenue anyway, and given the negative (and often inaccurate) press as well as the occasional Congressional scorn, it’s a smart move to just waive the small fee rather than defending it.

From GE Hellcare: “Re: Centricity Enterprise. Announced as retired during HIMSS. No more inpatient EHR. They haven’t decided whether to sell it to another company or retire it.” I hadn’t heard that, but then again it’s not exactly a force to be reckoned with either way.

From Tom Terrific: “Re: MedCity News referring to HIStalk as ‘the National Enquirer of health IT.’ I may never read that site again!” I was peeved that a snarky report that recapped HIStalkapalooza made it sound like HIStalk is some kind of tabloid journalism site that isn’t respected or trustworthy, which seems a bit ungrateful given that the writer enjoyed their evening at my expense and filled some of their news space recapping the Jonathan-Judy portion of it (which, now that I think of it, sounds a lot more like ‘National Enquirer’ celebrity gossip masquerading as news than anything I write). I’ll compare experience, issues analysis, news relevancy, and rumor accuracy with anyone.

From Lincoln: “Re: Allscripts. I heard UCI is dropping Sunrise for Epic, the last of the UCs to do move there.”

Centura Health SVP/CIO Dana Moore’s dance card is filled for his 10 until noon time slot in our booth Wednesday, but if you’re willing to donate $500 to DonorsChoose to get 20 minutes of his undivided attention, Dana says he’s willing to stick around later. Remember that we also have an anonymous vendor that is matching that amount, so each 20-minute taker sends $1,000 to underserved classroom projects. One vendor’s executive says she doesn’t really have anything to pitch to Dana, so she’ll use her time to teach him how to make balloon animals. See Lorre in the booth Wednesday morning.

News: the Senate passed the SGR doc fix bill late Tuesday without ICD-10 additions, requiring only the President’s signature to avoid cutting doctor payments (at the expense of adding another $141 billion to the deficit).

Announcements That Are Kind of Interesting

• Arcadia Healthcare Solutions announces $13 million in new funding.
• InstaMed offers its payment network customers the ability to charge patients using Apple Pay.
• Identity management vendor CrossChx raises $15 million.

Today’s Conference Notes

We had The Walking Gallery in our booth this afternoon. Each painted jacket tells a story of suffering and loss amidst a struggle with a sometimes uncaring, bureaucratic, paternalistic, or inefficient medical establishment. You should care because it’s about patients and we’re all a patient at one time or another – working in healthcare doesn’t protect you or your family from its problems.

Our favorite attorney Steve Blumenthal (on the right) hung out in the booth today and handed out swag. He tried to get approval to give away little bottles of whiskey since his company is in Nashville, but being lawyers, they scotched the idea (no pun intended) fearing mass litigation from conference attendees who might injure themselves in an alcoholic stupor. He made himself a badge labeled “HIStalk Booth Babe” that featured a silhouette of a reclining obese male (he’s pointing at it in the photo). He says he’s pretty funny for a lawyer but it’s not exactly a high bar, so I’m not sure if the “bar” part was an intentional pun.  

I still haven’t received any of the HIStalkapalooza photos or video folks were taking for us, but here’s a great band shot from Nordic. Guys loved those red dresses. I should have Lorre check the band’s rider and production details to see if they intentionally installed a hair-blowing fan to make the angelic-sounding ladies look more model-like – I noticed their tresses were undulating fetchingly in the apparently intentional stage breeze.

Want to see the big HIMSS conference keynoters? Plan on sticking around longer than you should since HIMSS backloads the big guns – George Bush is at 4:30 Wednesday and Karen DeSalvo isn’t until 8:30 Thursday morning after everybody who has real work to do is already back doing it.

I remember when vendors weren’t allowed to offer food from the exhibit hall, not even packaged candy. Now you can get just about everything – I’ve had margaritas, mini hot dogs (the sauerkraut was smelling up the adjacent booths), and of course the amazing scones from MedData – my favorite was on tap today, peach with passion fruit icing. Seriously good. I would have had a second one with my HCI-provided beer except they ran out. MedData even delivered some scones to our booth. I’ve heard a scary rumor that Las Vegas doesn’t allow ovens in the exhibit hall and that’s a problem for next year’s scone supply.

Tip: if you want to take UberX back to your hotel, they can’t pull into the taxi loop at the door and the app won’t let you call a car – instead, walk a block or two to the right and then place your Uber request. Even with surge pricing I was able to get back to Bridgeport for $13 this afternoon.

I meant to check out NantHealth since last year I couldn’t figure out what they do even after the booth people tried to explain it to me (clearly they didn’t really know either). I haven’t found their booth so far.

The companies that seem to be on a growth rocket ride, at least from their conference presence, include Access and CoverMyMeds. I’m sure there are others, but those made my radar.

Speaking of growth, here’s a project for all you analytics people. Get copies of the HIMSS exhibitor guide from the previous couple of years. Assign weighting factors to each vendor in the exhibit hall that are both positive (bigger booth, more desirable location, consecutive years of exhibiting) and negative (dropping out of exhibiting or taking a smaller booth). Who is trending up or down? Who stopped showing up at all? How many first-timers returned? How many companies shot their financial wad on one big HIMSS presence and then sank without a trace?

I took a look at Medhost’s YourCareEverywhere, which is sort of a patient portal for hospitals that run its systems. It looked pretty good.

I thought Marshfield Clinic had given up trying to turn its CattailsMD ambulatory EHR into a commercial product, but they’re back with a new cloud-based version. I watch part of a demo and it looked OK but nothing special. I don’t know why with all the EHR vendors out there someone would buy from a provider, but Farzad was checking it out, so maybe it’s cooler than I thought. They only ever sold 34 Cattails systems and now those users have to move to the new one.

PeraHealth says it has grown a lot and they list a bunch of big-name academic medical centers as customers for its Rothman Index patient early warning system.

The Anthelio folks say they’ve grown a lot. I liked them.

I got a quick look of PerfectServe’s slick Synchrony secure communication app. They’re planning to expand it to cover nurses.

I sat through part of a demo of Oneview Healthcare, which offers a cool tablet-controlled in-room patient display where patients can order meals within their prescribed dietary restrictions, input questions that employees are prompted to answer, view educational material (which can be prescribed by clinicians), and a lot more that I couldn’t stay to see. It’s worth a look.

It was bad enough that the exhibit hall is divided into two wildly non-linear sets of booths, but today I found that way down on one side is a real no-man’s land housing the cybersecurity, disaster recovery, and HX360 tracks. You go through some depressing loading dock type doors into what looks like a truck garage and there are a bunch of nondescript booths, mostly free of people, energy, and buzz (although the Leidos cybersecurity speaker had a pretty good crowd). I felt bad and strolled through all the aisles trying to raise spirits by just having a visitor poking around, but the reps had mostly already flatlined their interest and were counting down the minutes until quitting time. I figure some of the products back there surely have a chance to be eventually successful, but the HIMSS setup as so awful that it was creepy just hanging around back there, so I bailed. Here’s how remote it was: there were a ton of empty soft couches, tables, and chairs with no takers. Haul that messy barbeque sandwich there at tomorrow’s lunch and you’ll have a place to eat it instead of spilling it on your shirt and shoes.

I saw a display that offered, in large letters, a “Wellenss Kiosk.” I didn’t have the heart to snap a photo to run here.

Speaking of food, we had a great CMIO lunch today in Bistro HIMSS in the Lakeside building near the exhibit hall. The buffet was really good, the lake view was nice, and it was comfortable and reasonably quiet. Anybody can stroll up and buy lunch for $24. Thursday’s menu sounds excellent and we have a handful of leftover tickets, so maybe I’ll buy someone lunch if I’m in the mood. The CMIOs seemed to enjoy getting together today with Lorre.

Cerner takes direct aim at Epic on one of its booth signs.

This prize must have had the nerds salivating.

Clever badge ribbons.

I thought I might learn something about the just-announced IBM Watson Health, but this guy was way over my head with P53 genetic variants.

HISsies 2015 Winners

The winners are here.

More Wednesday. I’m taking a look at products claiming to be innovative for patients and families. Let me know if there’s anything else I shouldn’t miss.

From HIMSS 4/14/15

HIStalkapalooza took up a lot of my time yesterday, so I didn’t even have time to post. This will be a dribs-and-drabs version – I’ll have more time the rest of the week to get organized. Let me know if there’s something I should make sure to see since I’m just flailing around for the most part.

From Anonymous Vendor President: “Re: Dana Moore and DonorsChoose donations. We will anonymously match whatever total you raise up to $5k. Let’s make this thing really work! Many of my family and countless within our company have ties and heartstrings attached to the cause.” Centura SVP/CIO Dana Moore will be in our booth Wednesday, meeting with vendors for 20 minutes each in return for their $500 donation to DonorsChoose. I’ve scheduled six sessions with him so far, meaning with with the very generous anonymous matching funds, we’ll be donating $6,000 for individual classroom projects via DonorsChoose. I have a bunch of teacher thank-you emails to get through from the projects already funded. Next up is the fun of funding new projects. Thanks to everyone involved.

From Kaboodle: “Re: MedStar in Maryland. You failed to mention their GE Centricity EHR crash, where all clinics were down and back to paper. But, but mind you, care was not affected!” Unverified. I haven’t heard anything about it.

HIStalkapalooza

I haven’t had much time to do the post-mortem on HIStalkapalooza since I didn’t get back until well after midnight. House of Blues was perfect and ran things with great skill, the food and bar service was really good, and the band was as outstanding as I remember them from last year. I was backstage the whole time so I didn’t experience the event as an attendee this time around, which I sort of regret, but I could feel the energy and excitement. Some notes:

• Lorre Wisham worked on the event for many months going back to last spring. She arranged everything you saw or did as an attendee, wrangling an enormous list of to-do items (contracts, menus, sponsors, band details, banners and signs, etc.) The many hundreds of hours were in addition to her doing her “real” HIStalk work.
• I would have gone seriously broke without the financial help of the event sponsors since we had to sign band and venue contracts almost a year ago, putting me at complete financial risk if sponsors hadn’t participated. Thanks to Elsevier, Santa Rosa Holdings, Divurgent, Sagacious Consultants, Aventura, CommVault, Falcon Consulting Group, Greenway Health, PatientSafe Solutions, Sunquest, Thrasys, and Validic for making it happen. Those who had opera boxes seemed to be enjoying themselves as Lorre checked in with them several times through the evening.
• Sagacious did a superb job checking people in (and apparently, according to their report, keeping quite a few people out who showed up but weren’t supposed to be there). HOB says we had close to 1,000 people in the house (of 1,500 invited), meaning their folks got everybody in professionally and cheerfully. Elsevier ran the red carpet and I heard people enjoyed that.
• The House of Blues staff was super professional and treated us like the big-name acts they host there.
• Rocking doctor Ross Martin kicked it off in style despite a technical snafu that prevented us from enjoying the big finish of his freshly updated Interoperetta. I’ll try to get something on audio or video from Ross so we can hear the full version.
• Barry Wightman and Jennifer Lyle were great hosts on stage. It’s harder than it looks to engage a huge room full of partygoers and managing the people and equipment on stage.
• Special thanks to Judy Faulkner and Jonathan Bush for presenting each other awards on stage in a funny but classy manner.
• I can’t really say anything about Party on the Moon because if you were there, you already know how electrifying they were, and if you weren’t, words alone can’t describe it. Lorre had vendors coming up to her wanting to know how to book them for their own events. The 13 band members came all the way from Atlanta on their tour bus to spend the evening with us. You know a band is killing it when, as one attendee pointed out, you have nerdy IT guys so anxious to participate that they dance with each other. There were some great moments out there in the audience. According to one attendee, “Easily the best party I have ever been to, as good or better than any fraternity party.”
• We have photos and video coming from several sources that I haven’t had time to review yet. Stay tuned and we can all relive the evening all over again.

Neil Versel took some good pictures of the Judy and JB show, even though he annoyed me by dismissively referring to HIStalk as the “National Enquirer of health IT.”

A nice HOB exterior shot by Rudy Flores. The stencil over the light that shines the logo — I now know having ordered three of them for this event — is called a “gobo,” just in case you want to increase your vocabulary.

Somewhat Interesting News Announcements

• IBM creates Watson Health with the announced acquisition of Explorys (analytics and population health management) and Phytel (population health management). The company also announced health partnerships with Apple, J&J, and Medtronic.
• Surescripts creates a National Record Locator Service along with EClinicalWorks, Greenway, and Epic that will allow providers to locate and exchange patient health records using the Carequality trust framework.
• InterSystems announces a vendor-neutral, interoperable patient portal.
• HIMSS turns the work of its interoperability workgroup into a certification program for EHRs, HIEs, and HISPs, run by ICSA under the name “ConCert by HIMSS.” I don’t think of HIMSS as the group that should be certifying products, but apparently their opinion differs from mine.
• KPMG acquires Beacon Partners, as was predicted in an HIStalk rumor report a couple of weeks ago.
• Peer60 publishes a free report titled “Will mhealth Drive Patient Engagement?” that questions whether EHRs provide adequate mobile support to meet consumer expectations.

Today in our booth (# 5371)

All day (I think): Regina Holliday will be painting
11:00 Funny lawyer Steve Blumenthal will be handing out swag and dry humor.
2:00 NVoq will hand out Garrett Popcorn (it’s the great Chicago kind that costs a fortune in the airport).
3:00 Your HIStalkapalooza host Barry Wightman will be autographing copies of his book “Pepperland” (which I enjoyed a lot).
4:30 The Walking Gallery will meet.

I forgot that we intended to auction off Regina’s HIStalking original painting from which we made the scholarship winner tee shirts. Make Lorre an offer if you are interested. Maybe she can post the highest current bid on an index card underneath it or something.

My Fitbit shows that I walked 12 miles Monday. It felt like I wasted a lot of time just walking around, but that’s par for the course on the first day of the conference.

The folks at XG Health Solutions (a new HIStalk sponsor that I haven’t announced yet) invited me to a breakfast briefing covering their new apps. It’s a Geisinger spinoff that will sell software based on work done there to present clinicians with a better view of EHR data and collect additional information to make it easier to quickly understand patient problems and concerns and to document additional specialty-specific findings (rheumatology is the first one). Partnerships were announced with Epic, Cerner, and Athenahealth, whose EHRs will exchange information with the XG apps using SMART on FHIR. They have four apps going to beta testing by summer and plan to roll out six over the next 18 months.

From the hallway conversations I heard and my own opinions, here are the positives: Geisinger has developed a lot of expertise and content that’s less ivory tower than most big academic medical centers, they put some thought into involving the patient in the use of their apps, and the SaaS-based subscription means new best practices can be put into place quickly. Negatives: the company has significant venture capital ownership (they aren’t Geisinger, in other words), you might suspect that Geisinger applied soft pressure to the newly named EHR vendor partners to get on board with uncertain future commitments, and so far they’re a company that hasn’t done much to dent the market other than to do Geisinger stuff and make announcements. Success in commercializing hospital software is elusive, and while Version 1.0 is easy, it’s Version 2.0 that gets ugly with upgrades, design decisions, and testing. The first non-Geisinger betas will be important.  

Some notes from my circuits around the exhibit hall (actually both of them – it’s a split hall that ensures confusion and uneven booth traffic). My badge is intentionally unimpressive to vendors, so I get the same treatment as everybody else.

• Trying to find a given booth even when you know its number is maddening given the gerrymandered aisles. The printed floor layout is laughable – you would need a high-powered microscope to read any part of it except the anchor booth companies (which may be the intention, come to think of it).
• Booth reps were screwing around with their phones literally from the moment the exhibits opened. It was depressingly easy to find booths where every single person was staring in rapt attention at their phones while prospects passed by without even being acknowledged. Vendors are really stupid in not coaching and policing their people.
• Even the fake patient in the hospital bed was surreptitiously killing time with her phone while waiting for her next scene. Check her out in the photo above – I wasn’t quite sure what was going on under those sheets until I came around to the head of the bed.
• I have three mandatory HIMSS kickoff rituals – I have to stroke the sultry curves of the latest Enovate cart; I have to have amazing scones from MedData (the orange chocolate chip were great, but I swung by later for one that had ham, cheese, and what looked like chives); and I have to see the magic guy in Hyland’s booth (above), who is simply amazing not only magically, but in snarky humor and getting people to come closer. I don’t usually like that kind of stuff, but he has been my favorite part of HIMSS for a bunch of years.
• Amazon Web Services had a little booth, which was interesting.
• A guy from Network Detective for Healthcare pitched their product that analyzes the network looking for HIPAA-related problems. It seemed pretty cool, especially the report showing the results in plain English with cross-references to HIPAA sections.
• Scotland-based Nugensis had guys in kilts and bottles of Scotch on the shelf.
• I tried to use the HIMSS app, but it locked up, spammed me with some guy’s endless and boring motivational quotes, and then started pushing ads as notifications. Big waste of time. The conference is basically just one giant advertising platform already.
• The NextGen booth was very cool with clear walls and a waterfall.
• Elsevier demoed their Tonic iPad app that collects information from patients. One of the cool aspects is that it can steer patients to automatically log on to the patient portal without their even realizing that it’s a separate app, which is nice for Meaningful Use. I didn’t see many products Monday, but this one was my favorite. That’s my bad iPhone picture of it above with the beer mug.
• The nice folks at zCover gave me a new iPhone case to replace the one they gave me a couple of HIMSS conferences ago. Stop by and they’ll even put it on for you.
• The FHIR puns were plentifully irritating. IT geek humor doesn’t usually work.
• Kforce was giving out pretty decent pizza way back in a low-density corner of the hall.
• Sagacious had their fun HIStalkapalooza posters out.
• InterSystems had a huge audience for one of their presenters. Their presence was significant.
• I stopped by the Microsoft booth and, as happens every single year, the reps were too busy yapping at each other to even look at all those prospects invading their space. As also happens every year, I stood patiently in front of a display (mobile devices and Surface this time) and the nearest Microserf stormed by scowling while nearly pushing me out of his way. Perhaps that’s why, unlike years past, their booth didn’t have much traffic.
• The Georgia display featured the sign I had made for them a few months ago following Atlanta’s HIStalk poll win.
• Bathroom capacity and seating space were ridiculously inadequate. I hiked forever down a long hall following the restroom sign, only to be met with the dreaded “pardon our dust” sign that said to find another restroom without actually saying where one might be. Another one had a grand-looking entrance, but inside was just one stall and one urinal. I’m thinking of one of those parking space type apps where I hire people to sit in the very few actual seats where people can relax or eat, then providing an app for attendees to find and buy their seats. It makes me uneasy to watch guys in crisp white shirts slopping down a wildly overpriced commissary barbeque sandwich while standing in front of a trash can.

Tahoe Forest Hospital (CA) names CIO Jake Dorst as interim CEO. He’ll also continue as CIO.

The outcome of dueling lawsuits between Allscripts and Medfusion may hinge on interpretation of the use of an Oxford comma in their agreement, which is pretty fascinating.

A reader wants to know if anyone else thinks that having costumed female entertainers at the HIMSS opening reception crossed the border into sexism territory. I wasn’t there, but if they didn’t have any men, that might at least make me think about it. I noticed fewer obvious booth babes in the hall this year, so maybe the “skin to win” sales approach is finally and deservedly dying off. It would seem especially inappropriate to have a provocatively clad model pretending to be a company rep in trying to get the attention of a female CEO, CIO, or CMIO.

A terribly written and insight-free Forbes article click-baitingly titled “Two Dirty Little Secrets About Electronic Health Records” says EHRs are “a threat to freedom of speech and academic freedom” in claiming that EHR vendors (and Epic specifically) requires customers to sign non-disparagement clauses. The author works up righteous indignation for Bob Wachter, MD, who the author says had to get Epic’s permission to write about a UCSF medication error and to use Epic’s screenshots to illustrate it. The problem is the author just made stuff up rather than asking anyone involved and Bob had to correct him – Epic doesn’t include non-disparagement language in its contracts, although the screenshot part is true and Bob’s not thrilled about that (he emailed me to clarify that the author was wrong on the first point and has since changed the story). The second big secret is that EHRs are designed to help with billing and management. The author magnanimously proclaims that, “I’m not against EHRs,” which would be comforting except nobody’s ever heard of him and his mastery of the subject is clearly minimal.

That’s all for now. I’m headed over to McCormick Place later than I’d like.

Jenn’s HIMSS Day 2 4/13/15

I can’t even begin to break down my second day at HIMSS without first mentioning the highlight: the now-epic pie-throwing incident at HIStalkapalooza involving Judy Faulkner and Jonathan Bush. Both were good sports, and both had only gracious things to say to one another as they accepted their respective HISsie Awards. More on the party towards the end of the post.

My second day at HIMSS started off with a quick trek in the rain to the shuttle stop, followed by a pleasant conversation with Intelligent Medical Objects President and CTO Regis Charlot. (Note to HIMSS newbies: Shuttle rides, elevator rides, and lines can be great opportunities to strike up a conversation with your next client. A simple “Good morning. How are you enjoying the show?” typically kicks off great conversation.) Charlot waxed poetic about the challenges providers are facing when it comes to transitioning to ICD-10, though he did reiterate that IMO’s clients (and the general populace) are in good shape. Providers have accepted their fate and seem to be working diligently to prepare for the October 1 switch. His crystal-ball predictions for healthcare involves Intel’s Edison platform, a “[h]igh performance, dual-core CPU and single core micro-controller that supports complex data collection,” and that seems like it will help drive super-computing in the wearables space. Seems like it might have a unique play in telemedicine and the quantified self movement.

My next stop was the morning keynote, which included a rousing performance by a local gospel choir and a not-quite-so rousing introduction from HIMSS Paul Kleeberg. “This sounds like an infomercial,” was one audience member’s description of Kleeberg’s contribution. The real meat of the keynote was given by Alex Gourlay, executive vice president of Walgreens Boots Alliance and president of Walgreens . It was engaging, as keynotes go. He emphasized the role of retail clinics and pharmacists in achieving the Triple Aim, outlining the many partnerships Walgreens has entered into (WebMD, PatientsLikeMe, Qualcomm Life, MDLive) in an effort to take e-prescribing, telemedicine, medication compliance, and better outcomes to the next level. Gourlay also announced that the company will be launching a medication reminder app for Apple Watch next month.

I had the pleasure of sitting next to two women from MultiCare Health System (WA), both of whom seemed very excited by what Walgreens is doing in the mobile space. Debbie Embree, director of applications, and Brenda Bowles, RN director of clinical informatics, told me they were going to spend their time at the conference looking for ways to push their patient engagement strategy beyond their Epic MyChart portal and out into the retail space. Personal device integration via mobile apps is likely their next step.

After a mind-numbingly slow exodus from the keynote with 3,000 of my closest friends, I made it to the HIStalk booth. I spent a great five hours in the exhibit hall meeting and greeting loyal readers and attendees who had never heard of us but just couldn’t resist picking up a bag of Garrett’s Popcorn, courtesy of our friends at nVoq. I finally got the chance to spend time with The Walking Gallery Founder Regina Holliday and our HIStalking patient advocate scholarship winners, who, despite a few hiccups with registration, seemed very excited to be at HIMSS. Regina’s live painting was definitely a crowd-pleaser, and I appreciated the opportunity it gave us to talk with attendees about the importance of patient advocacy in the world of healthcare IT.

Several hot topics bubbled up in my booth conversations with providers: The majority of them seemed to be wandering the exhibit halls looking for solutions and strategies around security and privacy, patient engagement, and ICD-10. Not a one had anything positive to say about the education sessions. As Dr. Jayne explained to me, the sessions suffer from the fact that they had to be submitted nearly a year ago, and have likely lost their luster in the preceding 10 months or so.

Other booth drive-bys included a chat with AJ Montpetit from the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation, looking quite dapper in bowtie and pink mustachioed socks.

I also had a chance to meet Modernizing Medicine CEO Dan Cane and his colleagues. The company, which made headlines a few weeks ago for its partnership with IBM Watson, is busy expanding office space and hiring new staff. You can read my interview with Cane about the Watson partnership here.

I managed to do a quick walk-about, and ran into the #IHeartHIT meetup at the HIMSSpot. It was great to see patients and HIMSS15 social media ambassadors like Linda Stotsky share their healthcare IT stories. There definitely seems to be a stronger patient presence at this year’s conference. I’m really looking forward to reading about the HIMSS15 experiences of our HIStalking team.

It was great to see the Georgia Dept. of Economic Development and the Metro Atlanta Chamber, sponsors of the morning keynote, proudly displaying the sign we awarded them earlier this year for being nominated as “the Nation’s Capital of Health I.T.”

After my jaunt through .05 percent of the exhibit hall, I spent a final hour at our booth then rushed back to my hotel to change into HIStalkapalooza-worthy attire. As I mentioned above, the party was amazing. (Check out the #HIStalkapalooza hashtag on Twitter for great pictures and recap.) Our sponsors did a tremendous job of making sure everyone got in, got fed and watered, and got on the dance floor. Party on the Moon was phenomenal. I must have danced for an hour-and-a-half straight, which does not bode well for my feet during the rest of my time in Chicago!

I even managed to snag a few dances with “Jenn’s Secret Crush” Cynthia Porter, who, despite holding the stuffy title of president of Porter Research, really knows how to have a good time.

Lorre and I were not the only ones decked out. This year’s HIStalk King and Queen were definitely worthy of their titles, and displayed just as much dancing prowess as they did fashion savvy. All in all, my second day at HIMSS was a blast. I appreciated the opportunity to chat with readers at our booth, dance with sponsors at our party, and finally rest my swollen feet at the end of the night.

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

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Jenn’s HIMSS Day 1 4/12/15

Ah, HIMSS. This year marks my fifth, and like the previous four, I doubt it will disappoint. There’s just no other event that can offer up such a unique mix of nonstop networking, educational sessions catering to every HIT acronym under the sun, exhibit hall #HIMSSanity, sleep deprivation, and over-the-top caffeine consumption. I genuinely enjoy it every year, mainly for the relationships made and fostered. HIMSS 2010 in Atlanta was, in fact, where I first heard about HIStalk and Mr. H’s predilection for walking around with a paper bag over his head to keep his anonymity in tact.

Speaking of Atlanta, my day started well before the sun rose on an overbooked Delta flight full of folks en route to HIMSS. Honeywell, Oneview Healthcare, Patientco, McKesson, and Gozio Health were all represented. I didn’t even attempt to enter the always notoriously long taxi queue at Midway in Chicago, instead opting to reach my hotel via a 20 minute subway ride that cost all of $3. I found myself further impressed with Chicago when the clerk at my hotel allowed me to check in at 10:30 a.m. A 30-minute lie-down after a 4:45 a.m. rise wound up being essential to staving off the aforementioned #HIIMSSanity.

Refreshed, and with a few hours to spare, I spent time wandering around Chicago’s Museum campus and nearby lakefront. The weather was slightly warm and sunny, with just a hint of the city’s famous wind. I had a thoroughly enjoyable time eating my first “Chicago-style” hot dog while people-watching on a park bench. It’s not often that I get to while away an hour and a half doing not much of anything. The lure of the convention center came soon after lunch, and I found myself walking three short blocks to grab the shuttle to McCormick Place. (Is it just me, or does the shuttle drop off in the dark bowels of the trade center remind anyone else of the Lonely Mountain?)

After grabbing my press pass, I ran into Sara Zellner at Health Data Consortium giving away “I Love Health Data” buttons. (I’m a sucker for fun “pieces of flair.”) She reminded me that HDC’s annual Health Datapalooza is coming up at the end of May in Washington, D.C., with HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell and Acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt scheduled to speak.

From there, it was a quick quarter mile (kidding, it was probably only a fifth) to the Venture+ Forum, a day-long event featuring startups pitching in three-minute lightning rounds to a panel of devil’s advocates. I came in at the tail end of the forum, only getting to see full pitches from Heal, Medivizor, Sensentia, and Open Health Networks. Heal’s app for on-demand house calls caught my eye, as did the realization that anyone thinking of speaking in public should avoid saying “um” at the end of every sentence and remember there is a slide deck to scroll through at the beginning of the presentation, rather than halfway through. It seemed like the Forum was at capacity of around 150 or so, which probably means it will warrant a bigger space next year.

A number of other pre-conference symposia took place on Sunday, including the inaugural Revenue Cycle Solutions Summit. Patientco’s Josh Byrd sent me this report:

The Revenue Cycle Solutions Summit provided over 200 attendees with thought-leading presentations from providers who are paving the way for what the revenue cycle of the future will look like. The common thread weaved throughout was a focus on patient-centered care after the episode of care. Highlights included:

• Mike Simms, VP of revenue cycle at Cone Health talking about how to choose vendors who align with your key revenue strategy;
• Leigh Williams, director of revenue cycle at University of Mississippi, who shared how they engaged physicians in using HIT to achieve financial success;
• Andrew Ray, manager of physician revenue cycle operations at Stanford Children’s Hospital, who talked about how to centralize and automate the revenue cycle to increase reimbursement and decrease denials; and
• Key members of the HIMSS Revenue Cycle Improvement Task Force, who shared insights on how they are working together to bridge the gaps between payers, vendors, banks, providers, and other key stakeholders to create a better patient financial experience.

Josh told me that the attendee mix was mostly CEOs and CIOs, so it will be interesting to see how many CFOs attend next year’s event. Could HIMSS be looking to give the HFMA ANI conference a run for its money?

After a quick change into Roaring 20s-inspired flapper garb, I put in an appearance at the opening reception, which I found surprisingly well attended given the amount of smaller HIMSS symposia receptions taking place at the same time. The jazz band was great, and definitely got me excited about performances by Ross Martin, MD and Party on the Moon at HIStalkapalooza.

My next and final stop of the evening was the HIStalk Sponsor’s Reception, which was a great opportunity to meet and greet the people behind the companies whose support makes HIStalk happen. I can’t thank them enough. Special thanks to the lovely folks at Aventura who gifted me with these classic kicks, which I may have to put on tomorrow once the HIStalkapalooza red carpet shoe-judging festivities have concluded and the dancing is ready to begin.

Stay tuned for more updates. I’m off to get some shut-eye, still debating whether or not to start my morning off with some YogaEspresso. Down dog and healthcare IT seem like a natural combination, don’t you think?

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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From HIMSS 4/12/15

Top News

HHS proposes to shorten the Meaningful Use attestation period to 90 days for 2015 in an announcement released, as always, late on a Friday (they also seem to like to put out big news right before the HIMSS conference). It also proposes removing requirements that are duplicative or no longer needed. Interestingly, HHS wants to reduce the five percent threshold for view/download/transmit to just a single patient – if even one patient retrieves their information, then the capability has been proven and the requirement is met. That addresses the argument that providers can’t force patients to access their data who are unwilling or technically unprepared to do so.

Reader Comments

From Hermanically Sealed: “Re: Evan Nordgren lawsuit against Epic for not paying overtime. Stories reported that the employees were encouraged to donate their settlement money to the health center where Judy Faulkner’s husband works as a physician.“ Unverified. I haven’t seen anything about donation requests. Sounds unlikely to me and easy enough to prove if you’ve received such suggestions.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’ll be posting differently this week, with less emphasis on the clutter of questionably interesting announcements and more on the conference. I may post more than once daily and Jenn will post separately, but I’ll probably send just one email blast daily to avoid overloading inboxes.

I VRBO’ed a little apartment  in Bridgeport, south of downtown within a few blocks of US Cellular Field (the unfortunately and opportunistically renamed Comiskey Park, which was a replacement for Old Comiskey Park). It costs less than a boxy hotel room, is in a cool neighborhood with interesting restaurants within walking distance, and is a short Uber ride to downtown or McCormick place. It’s much better having a kitchen, plenty of room to spread out, and a bay window looking out at White Sox fans heading down the sidewalk to the game than sitting in an airless room in a sterile building packed to the gills with lost, badge-wearing geeky HIMSS peers clogging up slow elevators and chattering way too loudly from being jacked up on exhibit hall adrenaline.

Saturday was stunningly beautiful in Chicago, with temperatures in the mid-60s with blue skies and sunshine. The trees are still denuded, but the grass has greened up and daffodils are poking up. I did some site checking of the House of Blues (looking great there), walked around the river, took a boat ride, and went to the Bulls game courtesy of a reader who invited me. I even Uber’ed back after the game, got picked up quickly near United Center, and didn’t even get hit with the dreaded surge pricing.

I downloaded the HIMSS15 mobile app and found it to be pretty buggy, requiring a bunch of iPhone restarts and confusing password prompts that didn’t make it clear whether it was the HIMSS website password or a new one (I’m still not sure since I had to do a password reset just to get it going). It has pretty good information, although I’m not sure the educational session list will replace the need for the little spiral-bound book that I always carry, assuming they’re still printing them. I used to study the agenda carefully and plan which educational sessions to attend weeks ahead, but they’ve been disappointing in the past few years (too much vendor involvement, boring presenters, too much reliance on PowerPoint, etc.) and I’m going to fewer and fewer of them.

Response has been brisk to the gracious offer of Dana Moore, CIO of Centura, to meet in the HIStalk booth with anyone willing to donate $500 to DonorsChoose.org in return for 20 minutes of his uninterrupted attention. Six companies have donated and I’ve funded the first wave of classroom projects that their $3,000 is supporting. The donations paid for the full cost of these projects, all of which are for classrooms in high-poverty areas, most of which involve Teach for America teachers, and many of which include matching funds from other charitable organizations:

• Two Fire HD devices for a middle school reading program in San Diego, CA
• A projector for a kindergarten class in Erie, PA
• Professional development books for kindergarten teachers in Charlotte, NC
• A Chromebook for an elementary school class in Toppenish, WA
• Algebra calculators for a high school class in Auburn, WA
• A sand and water table for K-2 children, all with multiple disabilities, in Rosamond, CA
• Headphones for K-2 classes in Portland, OR
• A drawing tablet for the iPad for grades 3-5 in Lockhart, TX
• Three iPad Minis for a sixth grade class in Oklahoma City, OK

I’ve already received appreciative emails from most of the teachers (it seems to be a pattern that good teachers work through the weekend) and I’ll follow up with photos, teacher comments, and student thank you notes once they put the materials to use. I also have quite a few more projects to fund given the generous response. A couple of companies have taken the “top spot” banners at the top of the page in the next week and most of that money will go to DonorsChoose as well.

Poll respondents favor disbanding ONC’s certification program after Stage 3, although a few folks wouldn’t mind seeing ONC keep the program alive but with more input from previously attesting users. New poll to your right or here, for those who aren’t attending the HIMSS conference: will you be working more, less, or about the same this week?

I’m puzzled at companies (HIMSS Analytics, among them most recently) that proudly boast via a grandiose press release of having redesigned their websites. People who already follow the company will see for themselves, while those who don’t aren’t likely to rush to the nearest browser to gaze in wonderment. More self-congratulatory marketing run amok.

Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• The Texas Medical Board, protecting the interests of its members, prohibits prescribing medications for patients who have been examined only by telemedicine.
• Health IT issues once again make ECRI Institute’s list of top patient safety concerns.
• Allscripts agrees to pay $10 million to settle a shareholder class action lawsuit claiming the company’s executives misled investors with overly positive comments following its 2010 acquisition of Eclipsys.
• FTC warns ONC about unintentionally limiting consumer choices in setting or approving interoperability standards.

Webinars

April 22 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Microsoft: The Waking Giant in Healthcare Analytics and Big Data.” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Dale Sanders, SVP of strategy, Health Catalyst. Microsoft has been quietly reengineering its culture and products to offer the best value and most visionary platform for cloud services, big data, and analytics in healthcare. This webinar will cover the Healthcare Analytics Adoption Model, the ongoing transition from relational databases, the role of new Microsoft products such as Azure and Analytic Platform System, the PowerX product line, and geospatial and machine learning visualization tools. Attendees will learn how to incorporate cloud-based analytics services into their healthcare analytics strategies.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Patient engagement solutions vendor PatientBond acquires consumer profiling company C2b Horizons.

SSI Group will announce Monday that it has acquired patient access management software vendor Provider Advantage. Readers who reported the rumor earlier almost got it right – the only part they missed is that SSI Group was the acquirer rather than the acquiree (and SSI’s response to my inquiry was truthful – they weren’t going to be acquired). I call that a win all around.

People

Parallon promotes Curtis Watkins to CEO of its technology business unit.

Truven Health Analytics hires former CMS Healthcare.gov official Kirk Grothe as VP of its federal government business.

Announcements and Implementations

MedEvolve, Salar, and Net Health choose VitalWare’s ICD Sherpa as their ICD-10 partner.

Aprima announces a mobile app for its products.

ARC Devices and Orchestrate Healthcare launch ARC VitalConnect, which transmits readings from ARC’s non-touch digital thermometer to EHRs.

Senior care software vendor PointClickCare joins the Surescripts network.

Government and Politics

ONC delivers its congressionally mandated report on information blocking, defining the term as when “persons or entities knowingly and unreasonably interfere with the exchange or use of electronic health information.” I’m not quite sure how a company could “reasonably” interfere with information exchange, although ONC later mentions possible patient safety concerns that I would take to mean mental health information. ONC admits that it doesn’t really know how extensive information blocking is since stories are anecdotal or how that practice could be assessed other than by in-the-field product reviews. ONC is clear on practices it considers detrimental to information exchange, including contractual restrictions, charging for information exchange, developing or implementing systems in non-standard ways that increase interoperability difficulty or cost, and practices that lock users in with regard to a particular technology (from  vendor’s standpoint, good business practices, in other words). ONC’s recommended actions: start in-the-field testing as part of certification, tighten technical standards, increase product and vendor transparency (although ONC admits it can’t do much in that regard), mandate sharing, clarify to providers what information sharing is allowed under HIPAA, and refer obvious cases for review under anti-kickback statutes or even to law enforcement agencies where appropriate.

The problem with provider information blocking is that only patients could report it and they’re not likely to call up ONC to complain. Vendor practices, whether contractual or technical, are easier, so it seems to me the most effective way to move the market is to call them out publicly (800.ONC.BLOK, anyone?) It would also be nice for ONC to provide suggested contract boilerplate language for providers, especially medical practices that seem inclined to sign everything shoved in front of them by a exuberant salesperson without even reading it, much less altering it favorably. That’s assuming that providers even care about sharing information, which is the biggest unknown of all. I’d like my local paint store to electronically exchange information on textures and shades with their competitors so I have more freedom of choice, but I doubt they share my enthusiasm.

Sponsor Updates

• Medicity CEO Nancy Ham pens a blog for HFMA entitled, “Do You Know Where Your Patients Are?”
• MedData launches major upgrades to its client reporting portal and iPhone app.
• Navicure releases an upgrade to its billing and payments platform.
• NVoq offers “The Link Between the Simple Checklist and Improved Patient Safety.”
• Experian Health/Passport launches a video contest to show how its solutions have helped improve client organization’s patient access processes.
• PatientPay produces a video detailing its new solution that enables practices to get real-time pricing for patients who call to request estimated visit costs.
• A PDS blog, “When I Was Your Age: The Challenge of Generational Patient Engagement,” is featured in the HIMSS15 blog carnival.
• PMD offers “Apple’s Most Important iOS Security Update.”
• Talksoft’s Hamilton, NJ office is featured in the local paper in a piece about recycled office spaces.
• TeleTracking asks, “Are U.S. Hospital Operations in Need of an Operation?”

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us online.

News 4/10/15

Top News

The Federal Trade Commission likes ONC’s interoperability roadmap for the most part, but observes that interoperability will continue to be hampered by the competitive interests of providers and vendors. It also gently warns ONC that its strategy of using policy and funding levers to create interoperability demand might encourage less innovation than if the government instead created market forces as a payer (i.e., Medicare). FTC says that its experience shows that vendor participation in creating standards and certifying products causes anti-competitive behavior, such as withholding certification from a competitor, excluding new products from meeting prior standards, rigging the standards-setting organization with vendor-friendly members, and not paying enough attention to patient rights. FTC is also worried that vendor-recommended standards will lock consumers onto a platform that may have been created with the intention of stifling competition. Lastly, FTC is concerned that any standards ONC chooses will be treated as law, so if they really want to get into the standards-setting business, they had better choose carefully.

Reader Comments

From Pulpit Bully: “Re: Georgia Medicaid Fair. Here’s a free training event for those who want to get some insight into why our industry is hopelessly complex. I hate to sound like a curmudgeon, but this is an ENTIRE DAY of sessions about how insurance companies and the government make it difficult for people to manage their health.” It doesn’t sound like a target-rich environment for booth swag.

From Nasty Parts: “Re: CPSI. Heard there is an ‘all hands on deck’ meeting on Monday and they have rented a large facility. Wonder why would they do this during the HIMSS conference?” Unverified. At least some of their hands won’t be on deck in Mobile unless they vacate their HIMSS exhibit. It’s probably their user group meeting in Sandestin, which is also next week.

From Beaker: “Re: self-ordered lab tests. This should end well.” A just-signed Arizona law that will take effect in July will allow people to order their own lab tests without a doctor’s involvement. It was pushed by Silicon Valley lab high-flyer Theranos. I like the patient-centered aspect, although certainly Theranos has executed a smart business coup in removing physicians as its sales bottleneck. The obvious unknown is how consumers will react to receiving abnormal results – treat themselves inappropriately, pester their doctors, or demand that their insurance pay for tests of questionable medical usefulness. Doctors serve both as clinical and utilization gatekeepers and it’s a brave new world when those roles are removed and consumers are turned loose with minimal knowledge.

From Epic Doesnt Market: “Re: Epic marketing. Not sure if you’d consider the $2 million that Epic pays KLAS as marketing, but I do.” I would. Every company does marketing. Epic is different only in that it’s a bit lower key about it and it doesn’t place actual ads most of the time. Marketing isn’t the same as advertising, as everybody who has taken an MBA marketing class knows, and while Epic does little or none of the latter, it does quite a bit of the former under the label of “events.” It milks its KLAS results hard, as anyone who has seen the giant displays plastered on its HIMSS booth knows, and those billboards didn’t just jump up on the wall without help.

From Epic Does Too Market:  “Re: Epic marketing. If they don’t market, someone forgot to tell their employees, or maybe they don’t control the ones who have left. At least eight former Epic employees identify themselves as marketing people on LinkedIn and one career marketer (who has since moved to another vendor) says she reported directly to Epic’s CEO. They’ve had several spokespeople quoted. I see the work Epic produces on their website, fact sheets, slide presentations, dance numbers, etc. Whether they call it marketing or not, they must have full-time people engaged in producing it all.” 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Recondo Technology. The Denver-based revenue cycle technology company’s patented, no-touch ReconBots find and assemble critical payer information to speed up eligibility, authorization, and claim status transactions. Its business office products cover claim data integrity, claim adjudication status, and payer follow-up, while the company’s patient access solutions include eligibility, registration quality assurance, point-of-service patient financial responsibility statements, prior authorization, and a real-time dashboard for reporting KPIs. Recondo’s rules, legacy integration, and data mining are used by 900 hospitals and 500 payers to ensure proper payments and financial clarity. You probably know industry long-timers CEO Jay Deady and Chief Growth Officer Ralph Keiser. The just-released Gartner report “Cool Vendors in Healthcare Providers 2015” notes Recondo as providing health systems with innovative technologies to help solve their evolving problems. Thanks to Recondo for supporting HIStalk.

Also supporting HIStalk as a Platinum Sponsor is Practice Unite, which offers a customizable, HIPAA-compliant mobile platform for delivering real-time care (secure communications, clinical data display, and customized workflow). Clinician-friendly communication and collaboration tools include consults, secure text, lab results, patients, on-call and hospital directory, news, events, and several others. Customers have reported six-times-faster inpatient-related communication, a 20 percent ED wait time reduction, easier MU Stage 2 compliance, and reduced network leakage. Check out the case studies. Thanks to Practice Unite for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s an overview video of Practice Unite that I found on YouTube.

Every year I tell vendors how stupid they are in listening to clueless marketing people who advise them to hold their big announcements until HIMSS conference week, which ensures they’ll sink without a trace in all of the confusion and real news happening there. Finally they’re seeing the light and making significant announcements this week instead. Reporters are too busy partying excessively or wasting time doing cookie cutter executive interviews to pay attention to self-serving HIMSS week announcements.

This week on HIStalk Practice: PointNurse partners with Swarm Fund to offer clinicians new telehealth business model. New York’s physician profile website stays alive. Montana Primary Care Association taps eCW for HEDIS help. AMA makes no bones about who it won’t support in the presidential election. Maryland creates a new accelerator for healthcare IT startups. Aledade CEO Farzad Mostashari, MD hints at the EHR features he’ll be looking for at HIMSS15. Thanks for reading.

This week on HIStalk Connect: ONC launches a resource center for states interested in incorporating digital health tools into care delivery. Rock Health releases its quarterly funding report on the digital health industry, noting a slight decline in funding this quarter compared to Q1 2014, but still generating $600 million in new investments. An MIT student is building the Stack Overflow for mental health in his new startup Koko. Weight Watchers acquires fitness social media platform Weilos for an undisclosed sum.

Dana Moore, SVP/CIO of Denver-based Centura Health, has generously offered to collaborate with me on a purely charitable HIMSS conference project. He’ll be in our booth (#5371) Wednesday morning 10 until noon. Vendors (or anyone else, for that matter) can have 20 minutes of uninterrupted one-on-one time with Dana in return for a $500 donation (I chose that value) to DonorsChoose.org since Dana and I both like funding education projects. Then, he and/or I will recap his impressions about your pitch right here on HIStalk to a pretty big audience. Contact me if your company is interested and we’ll book a time. It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than trying to get his attention and then flying to Denver to meet there, you’ll be benefitting a classroom, you’ll get prime HIStalk real estate, and Dana just might be interested enough in your pitch to want to speak further (startups take note).

Webinars

April 22 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Microsoft: The Waking Giant in Healthcare Analytics and Big Data.” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Dale Sanders, SVP of strategy, Health Catalyst. Microsoft has been quietly reengineering its culture and products to offer the best value and most visionary platform for cloud services, big data, and analytics in healthcare. This webinar will cover the Healthcare Analytics Adoption Model, the ongoing transition from relational databases, the role of new Microsoft products such as Azure and Analytic Platform System, the PowerX product line, and geospatial and machine learning visualization tools. Attendees will learn how to incorporate cloud-based analytics services into their healthcare analytics strategies.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Specialty EHR vendor Modernizing Medicine signs a lease for new office space in Roseville, CA to expand headcount from 24 to up to 70 for the former Aesyntix Health, which it acquired in December.

NextGen parent Quality Systems, Inc. acquires healthcare analytics vendor Gennius.

UnitedHealth Group will pay $12 million in damages after a federal jury finds that its OptumInsight subsidiary infringed on physician efficiency calculation patents held by Cave Consulting Group, which offers several products including the CCGroup EfficiencyCare physician efficiency measurement module.

Sales

YourCareUniverse chooses VisionWare for master data management.

EvergreenHealth Partners (WA) selects Wellcentive to coordinate care of 400,000 residents served by the 500 physicians of the clinically integrated network.

Announcements and Implementations

McKesson announces Conserus, a vendor-neutral diagnostic imaging interoperability lineup that includes workflow, work lists, image repository, and data exchange.  

Cerner will integrate visual analytics from Tableau Software into its enterprise data warehouse and analytics products.

Validic announces that it integrated with 27 additional digital health devices in Q1 and is beta testing its connectivity with Apple HealthKit. The company has also released a developer platform that provides API access to its marketplace.

MEA-NEA adds HIPAA-compliant email encryption from Virtru to its information exchange, storage, and attachment solutions.

ZeOmega adds a medication management module to its Jiva population health management system.

Awarepoint announces a Bluetooth Low Energy RTLS platform.

Caradigm’s latest release includes new modules for condition management and utilization management.

Greenway Health announces a new patient portal.  

Aventura will offer biometric authentication for electronic prescribing of controlled substances.

Lifepoint Informatics offers free trial of an API toolbox for medical necessity validation and ICD-9 to ICD-10 crosswalk.

The non-profit, hospital-focused Center for Medical Interoperability, funded by a $10 million grant from the Gary and Mary West Foundation, names its initial board of directors.

Government and Politics

The Texas Medical Board is considering barring doctors from generating prescriptions for patients they haven’t met in a face-to-face visit, although the wording seems vague on whether “face-to-face” excludes video consultations. Dallas-based telemedicine provided Teladoc says the state is moving backward in prohibiting use of a technology that can help solve access and cost problems, but others think it’s the state’s job to avoid creating a double standard that devalues the traditional office visit and relies on new technology.  

Privacy and Security

A painfully long and overwrought Wired article with the obligatory “click me please” headline (“Drug Pump’s Security Flaw Lets Hackers Raise Dose Limits”) prattles at length about the purely theoretical possibility that hackers could alter the drug libraries of smart IV pumps, meaning they couldn’t do much of anything other than altering the minimum and maximum allowed doses (not a given patient’s actual dose). Sometimes security analysts find real, previously undocumented security holes of major importance, but sometimes their announcements are more boastful than useful.

Innovation and Research

NPR covers the use of telemedicine by Houston firefighters, who instead of driving people with non-emergent needs to the ED, can instead connect them with a doctor using iPad video. They can assess the patient and connect with a doctor in real time to decide whether an ED visit is warranted, and if not, schedule them for a regular doctor’s appointment (including a free cab ride). The project addresses the fact that 40 percent of Houston ED visits are for non-emergent primary care issues.

Technology

Surescripts and Accenture join HL7’s Argonaut Project.

Box integrates with Carebox to support EHR integration and patient portals.

Doximity announces a secure clinician communication app for the Apple Watch that sends the user to their iPhone for more detailed information (since Watch does nothing without being connected to an iPhone). In a bizarre “only in healthcare” intermingling of old and new technologies, it will alert doctors when they receive a fax.

Cerner will release an Apple Watch version of its HealtheLife that will offer consumers push notification health reminders and data tracking while collecting biometric data to send to Millennium.

Other

In an HIStalk Practice interview, former National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari, MD (now CEO of Aledade) says he’s surprised that the certified EHRs he now has to deal with personally “can’t perform in a real clinical setting” and he’s happy that ONC is considering field testing and a mechanism to deal with EHR customer complaints. He says he’ll be cruising the HIMSS exhibit hall to look for systems for his participating practices that create “practice happiness,” meet MU requirements in a workflow-friendly manner, and are sold by vendors who are willing to work with third-party health applications. He adds that EHR vendor interfacing charges are “outrageous” and that every public and private HIE should offer ADT notifications. On fuzzy, buzzwordy topics like patient engagement, population health management and precision medicine, Mostashari says vendors should have embraced Meaningful Use enthusiastically as a roadmap that would have gotten them there, but instead took a compliance-only approach that frustrated their users.

Here’s a smart idea from HCS since HIMSS badges don’t make it clear what kind of organization an attendee works for: they’re offering badge ribbons that denote long-term care, behavioral health, and long-term care acute hospitals so that attendees with similar interests can find each other. Not to take away from HCS’s efforts, I had a similarly great idea for identifying attendees by their personal characteristics, but I’m hampered by limited attendee demand for badge ribbons that indicate “Self-Important Douchebag,” “Incompetent Despite Appearances,” “Obliviously Intellectually Challenged,” and “No, This Isn’t the First Sales Job I’ve Lied In.” Perhaps I should instead have them manufactured in the “Kick Me” back-attached variant that could be applied by observers who are more situationally objective than the wearer.

A New York Times article examines the trend of insurance companies trying to boost lagging life insurance sales by offering premium discounts to customers willing to share electronic data that includes real-time tracking of gym utilization and overall physical activity via a monitored Fitbit. A privacy expert questions how all of that consumer data will be used, while a law professor ponders whether the program is just a way for life insurance companies to weed out less-healthy customers: “The people who have the time to devote to jumping through all the hoops are likely to be better off than average, and those healthy enough to do wellness activities may be unrepresentative of the chronically ill. I believe that is one reason why there is empirical research severely questioning the value of wellness programs.”

A jury awards $1.38 million to a former billing supervisor of Harrison Medical Center (WA) who was fired after filing a whistleblower lawsuit in which she questioned why she was told to run a monthly Medicare billing program daily instead.

Sponsor Updates

• VitalWare earns Service Organization Controls Reports (SOC) 2 Type 1 certification of its revenue cycle private cloud. It also announces that Epic consulting firm E-Volve Health will offer VitalWare’s revenue cycle solutions.
• Medhost posts a video describing how its physician advisory board impacts product development.
• Logicworks achieves Amazon Web Services partner network healthcare competency.
• Extension Healthcare offers “Knowing is Half the Battle – Measuring clinical interruptions with advanced alarm management middleware.”
• Impact Advisors posts “mHealth — The Newest Front Door to Your Organization.”
• Galen Healthcare asks, “How does Mirth Connect stack up as an HIT Interface Engine?”
• LifeImage writes “Medical Image Sharing for Trauma Care.”
• Hayes Management Consulting offers “Making the Case for Physicians as Part of the EHR Project Team.”
• The HCI Group offers “Technology Partnerships and Data Mergers: Challenges for Small and Medium-sized Hospitals.”
• HDS CEO Bill Horne takes a pie in the face to raise money for the American Heart Association.
• Healthwise earns certified status for data security and protection of health information.
• Holon Solutions offers “Health IT Interoperability Must Be Built From The Bottom Up.”
• Liaison Technologies offers “The Right Way to Address Today’s Data Challenges.”

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us online.