Monday Morning Update 6/17/13

Three-quarters of poll respondents don’t believe EHR vendors should sell the de-identified data of patients who haven’t approved that practice. New (reader-suggested) poll to your right: what will be the effect(s) of the EHR Developer Code of Conduct? You may choose more than one answer and add your comments after voting.

Fans of the smoking doc HIStalk logo will like the old-new mash-up done by the folks at Billian’s HealthDATA. Inga and I think it’s pretty cool.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor O’Reilly Strata Rx Conference, which runs September 25-27 at Boston Marriott Copley Place. It focuses on improving healthcare by acquiring, analyzing, and applying big data (the conference tagline is “Data Makes a Difference.”) Presenters include Jonathan Bush of athenahealth; James M. Maisel, MD of ZyDoc;  Richard Elmore of Allscripts; Jordan Shlain of Healthloop; Dale Sanders of Health Catalyst; and Michael Weintraub of Humedica. Fun events include speed networking, a startup showcase, and a five-minute presentation track. Use code HIST by August 15 and you’ll get 20 percent off on your registration, which ranges from $645 for Wednesday only to $1,925 for a three-day, all-access pass. Thanks to O’Reilly Strata Rx Conference for supporting HIStalk. I’m looking for interesting fall and winter conferences to attend if I can find the time and this one looks like a contender.

Speaking of HIMSS EHRA’s Developer Code of Conduct, its website doesn’t indicate which vendors have signed it, but Epic has, according to its site.

Mediware will announce Monday that it has acquired Fastrack Healthcare Systems, which will add home medical equipment systems to Mediware’s Alternate Care Solutions business.

Another acquisition will be announced Monday afternoon involving two physician practice system vendors, but I’m non-disclosed on that one.

Here’s a pretty funny video of athenahealth’s Jonathan Bush in a fake screen test (aka an athenahealth pitch) for Health Datapalooza.

From an AAFP interview with Farzad Mostashari: “I think that [physician EHR dissatisfaction] number may grow, because as we expand beyond the early adopters, the expectations for usable and intuitive technology are higher. I sure hope that the EHR vendors are hearing the same levels of dissatisfaction from their customers and their prospective customers that I’m hearing. I hope vendors are focusing on user-centered design in the next iterations of their software instead of adding more bells and whistles.”

Passport announces CareCertainty and PatientSync, which provide real-time notifications  of care transitions for population health management.

An article in the Madison newspaper provides a factoid about the brick building at 2020 Old University Road in Madison: it was the birthplace of both Epic and American Girl.

David LeClair, one of 140 athenahealth employees bicycling an 180-mile route from Maine to Massachusetts in the Trek Across Maine fundraiser for the American Lung Association, was killed Friday by a passing tractor trailer. He was 23.

Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford notifies 12,900 patients that their information was present on a broken, unencrypted laptop that was stolen in May.

Among the 11 medical schools earning a $1 million AMA grant for education innovation are New York University and Indiana University, which will develop a virtual EHR using de-identified patient data to each students how to manage population health.

Winner of ONC’s Family Caregivers Video Challenge is “Grandma Safe and Sound,” in which Rachel Rust describes using Independa Angela, a tablet- and TV-based system that gives users video chat, e-mail, health information, schedules, reminders, and photo sharing, to help care for her 91-year-old grandmother. The announcement was six months ago, but I hadn’t seen it until ONC tweeted it.

AMIA launches a Student Design Challenge to re-invent electronic clinical documentation to reduce clinician burden, improve decision-making, encourage teamwork, and support reuse of the captured data. Graduate student team entries are due July 31.

An interesting blog post by Barbara Bronson Gray, RN wonders why we someone doesn’t offer a Genius Bar for everyday health issues. The obvious answer: Apple charges a premium for its products and can therefore afford to spend money improving user satisfaction at no charge, while in healthcare someone would have to be paid to provide services for free. It would be nice for hospital EDs, though.

A Harvard Law symposium contribution on the re-identification of genomic data sets cautions hype-happy newspapers and blogs to understand and accurately portray what they’re writing about, concluding, “… while this recent re-identification demonstration provided some important warning signals for future potential health privacy concerns, it was not likely to have been implemented by anyone other than an academic re-identification scientist; nor would it have been nearly so successful if it had not carefully selected targets who were particularly susceptible for re-identification.” It doesn’t mention similar recent articles describing re-identification of health information for accident victims by matching their records to newspaper accounts, but the conclusion might be similar.

Surgeon and mHealth innovator Rafael Grossman, MD, FACS describes his experience with Google Glass and his ideas for developing medical applications for it. Examples: sharing live OR video, distance education, telemedicine, surgical back-up, and viewing EMR data without being distracted. He calls on the American College of Surgeons to lead the way in using Glass to improve healthcare.

A Dallas newspaper article profiles Vivify Health (mobile apps for patient engagement and population health management) and Axxess (home health agency software.)

England’s National Audit Office finds that the now-defunct NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) cost a lot more than the benefits it delivered, and it’s doubtful it will ever pay for itself although estimation is difficult because of uncertainty. Three significant programs (Summary Care Record and the South and London programs) have delivered only two percent of the expected benefits.

Here’s Part 2 of Vince’s HIS-tory of Epic.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 6/14/13

Top News

The FDA urges medical device makers to protect their products against hackers and malware and offers guidance for developing security controls that would protect the confidentiality and integrity of data and limit malfunctions in the event of computer viruses.

Reader Comments

From Biker Dude: “Re: HIStalk Practice. What do I win if I am your 500,000th visit?” Thanks for noticing that HIStalk Practice is about to hit a milestone in the next couple of weeks. No prize for making the visit counter hit 500,000, though every reader has my undying gratitude for the support.

From Mojo: “Allscripts. I heard they are scheduling a conference call Friday to announce another reorg. Have you heard anything like this?” No, although another reader shared news that Allscripts had sold off its forms division (who knew they still had a forms division?) Unverified but neither piece of news would not be surprising given that CEO Paul Black has now had six months to get a lay of the land and the company reported a loss in Q1.

From Zee: “Re: inbox. I want to do a prototype on how we could improve the old-style physician inbox so that read-only information can be delivered in a meaningful way on a tablet. Replicating the current functionality as is isn’t innovation.” Sounds like a fun challenge to visualize how an improved inbox might work. Send me your ideas and I’ll run them here.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

 HIStalk Practice highlights from the last week include: CMS pays out $547 million in PQRS and e-prescribing incentives in 2011.  Physician compensation is increasingly tied to measures of quality and patient satisfaction. AHRQ offers a guide for primary care physicians connecting to RHIOs. As of the end of April, one out of two Medicare EPs were meaningful users of EHRs. MyMedicalRecords ends a lawsuit with Emdeon but initiates a new one with Jardogs. Emdeon CEO George Lazenby discusses his company, the industry, and potential opportunities. Rob Drewniak of Hayes Management Consulting looks at healthcare data governance and data stewardship. Thanks for reading.

On the Jobs Board: Compliance Program Manager, Software Engineer, Territory Sales Manager – South Eastern US.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Sagacious Consultants of Lenexa, KS. Sagacious means smart and having good judgment (I had to look it up), and the company applies those qualities to its singular focus: Epic. A full 97 percent of its employees came from Epic, collectively holding every Epic certification. The company has worked with 40 Epic hospitals and physician practices on full implementations, big bang installs, upgrades, and rollouts. It can provide build analysts, team leads, project managers, trainers, and go-live support. KLAS ranks it #1 in satisfaction for staffing and implementation support, with 100 percent of clients saying it keeps its promises and 100 percent saying they would hire the company again. Consultants work from their homes nationally, reducing travel billing and making them happier besides. Thanks to Sagacious Consultants for supporting my work.

The next HIStalk Webinar will be “Using Clinical Language Understanding & Infrastructure Planning as Key Strategies to Ensure Clinical Revenue Integrity with ICD-10” on Tuesday, June 25, 2013 from 1:00 – 1:45 Eastern time. It is sponsored by Nuance Healthcare and will be presented by Mel Tully MSN, CCDS, CDIP, senior vice president at J. A. Thomas and Associates. Register now.

A reader provides this photographic evidence of a pop-up HIStalk presence in Paris, as evidenced by a “I Could Be Mr H” banner in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Snap a picture with something HIStalk showing HIStalk in an interesting location and I’ll run it here.

Listening: new Black Sabbath, with “13” being the first new studio album since 1995 and the first with Ozzy in 35 years. I’ve listened to it at least 10 times and it’s a perfect 1970s sludge metal sound. It’s magnificent.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Allscripts prices a private offering of $300 million aggregate principal amount of its cash convertible senior notes due 2020. The conversion price represents a 30 percent premium to June 12’s closing price of $13.22 per share.

Emdeon acquires Goold Health Systems, a provider of pharmacy benefits and related services to state Medicaid agencies.

Sales

Christus Health selects McKesson’s suite of documentation management solutions for integration with the health system’s existing HIS.

Swedish Covenant Hospital (IL) selects eClinicalWorks EHR and RCM solutions for its 150 employed physicians.

The DoD awards PSI and partners TechWerks and Mediware a $9.2 million follow-on task order to sustain and maintain the DoD’s enterprise blood management system.

People

Aneesh Chopra,  former US CTO and one of technology’s most beautiful men, loses his bid to be Virginia’s Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor.

Quantros names Dmitri Daveynis (HP) SVP of engineering.

US Surgeon General Regina Benjamin announces her resignation after four years in the post. Benjamin does not provide specific details on her future plans, but Democratic Party officials have identified her as a potential candidate for a Congressional seat being vacated in her home state of Alabama.

Announcements and Implementations

Healthix and the Brooklyn Health Information Exchange will merge into a single RHIO and retain the name Healthix. A new board of directors will govern the entity and leadership and staff from both RHIOs will continue to support the organization.

Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust implements Allscripts Sunrise Clinical Manager three months ahead of schedule and on budget.

KershawHealth (SC) implements a paperless clinical data bridge solution from Access to transfer EKG traces and other clinical data into its EHR.

Marshfield Clinic (WI) will form Marshfield Clinic Information Services, a  separate for-profit subsidiary that will support the clinic and technology and services to other customers. The clinic’s 350 IS employees will join the new entity.

IBM, the Premier healthcare alliance, and four healthcare systems launch the Data Alliance Cooperative, which will allow members to share experiences and co-develop solutions that integrate data across the care continuum. Initial focus will be on reducing medication non-compliance and readmissions through predictive modeling.

Innovation and Research

Interested in Google Glass? Kyle, who writes for HIStalk Connect, is part of Pristine, a startup that’s developing Glass apps for physicians. He has received his pair and invites readers to give them a try at a party in New York City on Thursday, June 20 from 6 to 9 p.m. at Galway Pub. E-mail Kyle to RSVP and bring friends if  you like.

Technology

Nuance releases a new version of Dragon Medical Practice designed for smaller practices that includes voice shortcuts to aid searches for medical information and more than 90 specialized medical vocabularies.

Other

Care Logistics sues Ohio-based Catholic Health Partners of Cincinnati and Mercy Health Systems of Toledo, claiming it has lost $50 million after the health systems reneged on a 2008 deal to serve as reference sites for the company’s bed management software in return for royalties. 

Inga is so proud of beating Weird News Andy to this story. A trucker sues a urologist for what he claims was a botched penile implant that caused him to have an erection for eight months. The doctor says the man should have told him when his scrotum swelled to volleyball size, but the man says he was told to expect swelling. The patient, who changed his wardrobe to baggy sweatpants and long shirts, made his case to the jury: “I could hardly dance, with an erection poking my partner … It’s not something you want to bring out at parties and show to friends.”

Sponsor Updates

• CollaborateMD will add educational content from Elsevier into its ClaimGear solution for medical billing and coding education.
• NoMoreClipboard will integrate ICA’s HIE offerings with its PHR and patient portal.
• Vitera Healthcare releases Vitera Medical Manager EHR, a Web-based EHR, analytics, and transaction platform for its customers.
• Ingenious Med integrates Wolters Kluwer Health’s Health Language code search engine into its point-of-care charge capture solution.
• Impact Advisors Principal John Stanley discusses analytics as it relates to HIE.
• Emdat publishes a case study highlighting Illinois Bone and Joint Institute, which reduced its documentation costs by 50 percent after implementing Emdat’s medical documentation platform.
• Porter Research discusses the role of NLP technology in healthcare transformation with Nuance CMIO Nick van Terheyden.
• Perceptive Software CTO Brian Anderson offers five predictions for business process management, enterprise content management, and capture and search.
• The office manager for Summersville Pediatrics (SC) shares her practice’s experience migrating from MyWay to Aprima.
• PeriGen publishes a case study featuring Summit Healthcare’s (AZ) experience of implementing advanced perinatal technology.
• David Laureau, CEO of Medicomp Systems, discusses the importance of giving providers the data required to better manage the health of individual patients in real time and at the point of care.
• VitalWare’s VP of Compliance Jill Wolf will discuss the benefits and limitations of predictive modeling at next week’s HIMSS ICD-10 Forum Washington, DC.
• Wolters Kluwer Health’s customer advisory board says that improving clinical outcomes through expanded integration of clinical decision support is a top priority.
• iSirona will remain in Panama City, FL after the county and state promise $1.8 million in incentives. The company will 300 new jobs in the next three years.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

The United States Supreme Court ruled this week on Oxford Health Plans v. Sutter. Essentially this paves the way for physicians to use class arbitration to resolve issues with payers. Dr. Sutter, a pediatrician, alleged that Oxford systematically bundled, downcoded, and delayed patients for more than 20,000 network physicians but Oxford claimed physicians had to participate in arbitration as individuals. The case has been in the courts for more than a decade. I like to see the little guy stick it to the payer at least once in a while.

Medicare will be issuing a redesigned Medical Summary Notice to beneficiaries. Aimed at preventing fraud and abuse, it will show the services and supplies billed to Medicare during the past three months, the amount paid, and the patient responsible portion.

I’d like to see all payers take this approach. I’m still getting Explanation of Benefits statements from a procedure last year that the practice erroneously billed yet keeps trying to hit me up for the insurance balance. Guess what, not paying it. And to my orthopedic surgeon – guess what, you’re going to be refunding me all the co-pays you’re making me pay for follow-ups in the global period. Dr. Jayne has her summary plan description and knows how to read it. And if you cross me, I might just demand an electronic copy of my record, which I know will cause much consternation in your office. Welcome to the era of patient empowerment.

Athenahealth offers an ICD-10 Guarantee for practices that are live by June 30, 2014. Additionally, practices experiencing cash flow disruptions may be eligible for cash advances against outstanding claims. There’s a fair amount of fine print involved, but I like the idea.

Apple announced this week that the next generation of its mobile operating system will contain a virtual “kill switch,” or activation lock to allow stolen devices to be deactivated.

A couple of my friends convinced me to sit for the Clinical Informatics subspecialty certification from the American Board of Preventive Medicine. In reading through the various requirements I have one major concern (other than the cost of the exam, which is substantial). The criteria require current certification by one of the other ABMS specialty boards. This is problematic for informaticists who have let their clinical certifications lapse. I understand why they’re doing it, but the thought of maintaining two certifications isn’t a happy one. I’d be interested to hear from others who are planning to take the exam.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 6/12/13

Top News

The HIMSS EHR Association announces the EHR Developer Code of Conduct, which is available for companies that develop complete EHRs. Principles include (a) communicating product information accurately; (b) designing products with patient safety in mind; (c) participating in a Patient Safety Organization for reporting and reviewing patient safety problems; (d) sharing product-related best practices with customers; (e) notifying customers of software bugs that could impact patient safety; (f) excluding contract language that prohibits customers from speaking up about safety concerns; (g) supporting interoperability through use of standards; (h) giving customers their data if they switch vendors; and (i) documenting how the product handles coding and quality measurement. It’s nicely done, and while I’d rather see these items in my contract instead of in a voluntary set of principles issued by a trade association, I like the idea of laying them out publicly.

Reader Comments

From Nick Carraway: “Re: TeraRecon changes. Longtime president Robert Taylor is gone. CFO Lakshmi Lakshminarayan is serving as interim CEO.” We requested confirmation from TeraRecon and haven’t heard back. Lakshminarayan is listed as interim CEO on the company’s Website.

From Georgia Peach: “Marketing gimmick. I got a HFMA ANI postcard from an exhibitor in the mail that made me laugh out loud, especially because I’m a parent.” Now that’s a genius marketing promotion. Any parent who has felt the pressure to return from a trip with goodies for the kids will appreciate this giveaway, which includes two iPad minis so the winner can keep one for himself and give the other to a spouse or “favorite child.”

 From Becky Badger: “In case it’s not on your radar, the Digital Health Conference is here in Madison this week and Judy Faulkner is a speaker this year. That’s notable because she rarely strays from the standard circuit.” Judy will participate in a panel discussion Wednesday morning on interoperability and information exchange. The other panelists are both Epic customers (Kaiser and St. Mary’s Hospital), so don’t be surprised if third-party EHRs fail to get much airtime in the interoperability discussion. Epic is also sponsoring the event.

From SNOMED Junkie: “Re: resignations. Both the CEO and chief technical architect of IHTSDO resigned today. That’s the non-profit that manages SNOMED content and distribution.” The announcements suggest that the Denmark-based organization made the change as part of a review of its long-term direction.

From Chas Incharge: “Re: McKesson Provider Technologies. They have lost market share but haven’t downsized marketing. Now it appears they want the marketing and sales team that oversaw the huge market share loss to do marketing for all technology business units. I’m a long-timer worried about my stock value. Harumph!” Unverified.

From Big Datty: “Re: Atlantic article. BKA in the EHR repeatedly, but the patient had both legs. Doesn’t anyone examine the patient any more?” “The Drawbacks of Data-Driven Medicine” mentions an intern presenting a patient on rounds as having a below-the-knee amputation that had been noted on three previous discharge summaries. When the rounding team actually looked at the patient instead of the computer screen, both legs were intact. The incorrect information had been caused by speech recognition, which misunderstand DKA (diabetic ketoacidosis) as BKA (below the knee amputation) and nobody noticed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Great Point Partners makes a $10 million growth recapitalization investment in iVantage Health Analytics, a provider of healthcare informatics and business analytics solutions.

Parallon Business Solutions, a provider of business and operational services for the healthcare industry, will acquire The Outsource Group, a healthcare RCM company.

Ivo Nelson (IBM/Healthlink, Encore Health Resources) launches Next Wave Health, which will provide management advice, operational support, and capital to healthcare IT startups. Working with him will be Mike Davis, formerly of HIMSS Analytics and The Advisory Board Company.

Sales

Centra Health (VA) selects HealthMEDX Vision and the Exchange platform to manage post-acute patient care and facilitate patient data exchange.

Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare (TN) will deploy McKesson’s enterprise medical imaging products.

Horizon Health Center (NJ) expands its relationship with eClinicalWorks to include its  Care Coordination Medical Record.

Piedmont Eye Center (VA) selects SRS EHR.

The Veterans Benefit Administration awards Harris Corp. a four-year, $37 million contract to provide technical services for the agency’s enterprise data warehouse.

Partners HealthCare (MA) will implement the Health Catalyst Late-Binding Data Warehouse across its two academic medical centers and community and specialty hospitals. Partners and Health Catalyst will also co-develop new clinical applications for the warehouse platform.

Hospital for Special Surgery (NY) contracts with SCI Solutions for its rules-based referral management system.

CAQH selects Passport Health to develop a national COB solution to improve the sharing of patient coverage data between healthcare providers and payers.

People

iSALUS Healthcare promotes Kimberly Poland to VP of client engagement.

Delta Health Technologies hires Lorraine Lodigiani (MedAct Software) as VP of marketing.

Zachary Landman, MD (Massachusetts General Hospital) joins DoctorBase as CMO.

Intellect Resources names Susan Williams (High Point University) VP of recruiting services.

Shareable Ink will on Wednesday name former Allscripts Chief Customer Officer Laurie McGraw as CEO, taking over for company co-founder Stephen Hau, who will transition to CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

VitalWare and Panacea Healthcare Solutions will co-market their CDM and pricing systems.

King’s Ridge Christian School (GA) becomes the first student health clinic to implement simplifyMD’s EHR software.

Yale New Haven Saint Raphael Campus and 63 practices and clinics went live on Epic on June 1, which followed the February 1 go-live of Yale New Haven Health System and the Yale School of Medicine, Epic’s third-largest go-live ever. CIO Daniel Barchi credits the Epic teams of the hospital and medical school and the clinician preparation at YNHHS Saint Raphael Campus for the smooth transition. The two remaining go-lives are Bridgeport Hospital and Yale Health, with the $293 million project targeted to finish ahead of schedule and under budget.

Urgent care provider CareSpot implements the PatientPoint Care Coordination Platform, including PatientPoint electronic check-in tablets, in 40 locations.

LifeNexus announces iChip, an insurance card chip that retrieves a patient’s personal health record.

San Joaquin General Hospital (CA) implements the Logical Ink mobile data capture solution from Bottomline Technologies to automate patient registration and identify trends in population health.

Het Oogziekenhuis Rotterdam (Netherlands) goes live with iMDsoft’s MetaVision in its OR, holding unit, and PACU.

AirStrip’s applications earn DIACAP certification from the US Air Force, indicating that their use of authentication and encryption meets Department of Defense security requirements.

Lake of the Woods Hospital (Ontario) goes live on Meditech.

GE Healthcare will invest $2 billion over the next five years to develop software for hospital operations, clinical effectiveness, and care optimization.

Salem Community Hospital (OH) implements the PatientSecure biometric patient ID system.

HIMSS will release a healthcare IT value model on July 15 that will incorporate user satisfaction, care delivery, user education, prevention, and financial return.

Government and Politics

The Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission, investigating a suspicious surge in insurance company stock prices, find that hundreds of HHS employees had early knowledge of an impending Medicare change and could have tipped off investors.

Innovation and Research

The Boston newspaper covers startups working on healthcare application for Google Glass, including an app for hospital rapid response teams and another for patients and families.

Technology

Verizon launches the Blackerry Q10, which it claims is tailored for the healthcare market. It will use the BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 Regulated Service to help providers remain HIPAA compliant.

Other

Six of the eight women allegedly sexually assaulted by former Epic project manager Brian Stowe are identified as his Epic co-workers, according to the criminal complaint. He’s accused of drugging them and filming the assaults. He was charged with 62 counts of felony and posted $500,000 in bail within 90 minutes of his May 31 arrest, but was re-arrested Monday on federal charges of sexual exploitation of a child. He has lost his job with Epic.

An Alameda County (CA) drug bust uncovers drugs along with personal information on about 4,500 Sutter Health patients. Officials are unclear about how the information got there, but say the data may contain patient demographics, including financial details and Social Security numbers.

Cerner paid $193,759 last year to a company controlled by its vice chairman Clifford Illig for use of its aircraft, also paying $184,579 to a second company owned by an Illig-controlled trust for fuel. Meanwhile, CEO Neal Patterson’s employment agreement promises him up to $110,000 for personal flights on aircraft that Cerner owns or leases and cash for any unused portion.

Weird News Andy says, “Soy vey!” A case study in NEJM describes a 19-year-old who drank a quart of soy sauce on a dare, leading to a hypernatremia-induced coma that lasted three days.

Sponsor Updates

• ICA donates $6,000 to Pryor Ministry Center in the name of Lisa Lyon, clinical informatics coordinator at Cherokee Nation and recipient of ICA’s HIMSS13 booth giveaway. ICA partners HealthCare Anytime and CSC also contributed to the donation.
• Ping Identity announces PingFederate7, an upgrade to its identity bridge software and cloud identity management platform that provides standards-based user provisioning, authentication, and authorization with support for cross-domain identity management and OpenID Connect identity standards.
• Midas+ names 24 hospital customers as winners of its Midas+ Platinum Award based on a data analysis of utilization efficiency and outcomes.
• PatientKeeper offers a June 27 Webinar on voluntary physician adoption of CPOE featuring the IS director and chief hospitalist of Community Memorial Health System (CA.)
• VitalWare introduces VitalSigns, a claims auditing and ICD-10 financial risk assessment tool.
• Ingenious Med reports that clients using its PQRS registry had a 100 percent reimbursement rate in 2012.
• Medicity publishes a white paper on engaging patients within an ACO.
• TELUS Health Solutions releases a white paper on the value of using and approaches for implementing home health monitoring solutions.
• Frank Grella, director of patient financial services for T-System customer Conway Medical Center (SC), will discuss how his organization increased collections using a specialized ED billing solution during next week’s HMFA13 conference in Orlando.
• Direct Consulting Associates interviews Michael Elley, CIO/VP of support services for Cox Medical Center (MO), who shares his thoughts on HIT leadership and management challenges.
• iMDsoft and Anesthesia Business Consultants (ABC) partner to offer iMDsoft’s mobile solution for electronic documentation with ABC’s F1RSTUse EHR platform.
• The Philadelphia newspaper interviews InstaMed Founder, President, and CEO Bill Marvin, who shares details of his company’s business model and history.
• Park Place International joins the Citrix Solution Advisor program, allowing the company to offer Meditech-approved Citrix solutions to hospitals for three-tier connectivity.
• SIS offers suggestions on choosing the right mobile device for OR use.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Monday Morning Update 6/10/13

From CIO Reader: “Re: Webinars. I am thrilled you have put this type of process in place. I need to attend many of these Webinars to stay abreast of industry trends, yet many of them are sales pitches or poorly presented. Nothing is worse than having the presenter read slide after slide. A topic I’d like to see covered see is data governance, with real-life examples from hospitals that have developed a structure.” If you are a CIO who has implemented an effective data governance program, why not present your experience as an HIStalk Webinar? It’s just as gratifying as speaking at a conference without the logistical headaches and it makes a nice resume addition besides. Contact me if you are interested.

The vast majority of poll respondents, 82 percent, would avoid using a hospital whose clinicians are complaining publicly that its clinical systems are compromising patient safety. New poll to your right: should an EHR vendor be allowed to sell a patient’s de-identified data without their permission?

We’re doing an expansion of IT pay bands/job descriptions at my hospital, which caused me to recall how many times I’ve overseen that process at other hospitals I’ve worked in. The cycle involves: (a) deciding that IT has way too many job descriptions that don’t make sense and it would be better to collapse them into generic pay bands such as Analyst I/II/III; (b) everybody gets slotted with a lot of complaints, and the smart employees realize that the lower the band the better since their salary won’t decrease but they have more opportunity to move up; (c) the good IT people start leaving for greener pastures because there’s not much future upside if you’re already at the top of the grade with nowhere to go except into soul-sucking IT management, causing (d) HR and IT to agree that more job descriptions and pay flexibility would be just the ticket and it’s time to add a bunch of new job descriptions. This entire cycle gets repeated every 4-5 years, providing the illusion of effectiveness to IT and HR management.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Alere Accountable Care Solutions. The company was formed in January 2013, made possible by Alere’s 2011 acquisition of Wellogic and integrating Alere’s offerings to help ACOs and provider groups improve outcomes and reduce costs. It offers interoperable HIE and EHR solutions developed with an emphasis on the physician-patient connection, physician usability, and innovation. Specific products include an HIE platform, EHR, PHR, connected biometric and diagnostic devices, decision support, real-time analytics, population analytics, wellness and health coaching, and evidence-based care management. Recently announced customers include Virtua, Triad HealthCare, and the MedVirginia HIE. Thanks to Alere Accountable Care Solutions for supporting HIStalk.

Supporting HIStalk at the Platinum level is Vital Images, part of Toshiba Medical Systems, which offers next-generation advanced visualization software that’s #1 ranked by KLAS and used by 5,000 customers in 83 countries. The software enables visualization and analysis by radiologists, cardiologists, and oncologists of 2D, 3D, and 4D images using CT and MR scan data. Its vendor-neutral Vitrea Enterprise Suite allows enterprise-wide sharing of images and functionality, providing consistent user interfaces and tools that that improve adoption and reduce support requests. The VitreaView universal viewer gives physicians fast access to DICOM and non-DICOM images from any archive via a zero-footprint browser or tablet, while VitreaAdvanced offers a wide range of best-in-class clinical applications such as stent planning, colon analysis, EP planning, and liver analysis. Check out their on-demand Webinar that explains how to image-enable the EMR using a universal viewer. Thanks to Vital Images for supporting my work.

Analysis of March-April MU attestation data by Wells Fargo Securities finds that Cerner has pulled slightly ahead of Epic in the percentage of clients achieving MU while McKesson has improved a lot. Meditech still leads the overall attestation count, while Epic is so far ahead in physician attestations that the analysis concludes, “… no vendor looks above average other than Epic.”

A newspaper editorial written by the manager of a North Carolina solo medical practice says the practice’s EMR implementation hurt its efficiency without improving patient safety. It also calls out state programs that chose the mothballed Allscripts MyWay as their foundation, the big financial losses experienced by Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and Cone Health during their Epic implementations, and the failure of the state’s $484 million Medicaid system. She says that implementation of ICD-10 “would be the tsunami that derails our healthcare system.” Obviously she isn’t a fan of healthcare IT.

Here’s a video on the Blue Button Design Challenge from Health Datapalooza IV.

I take a mild blood pressure med that my doctor says I don’t really need but he likes me on it anyway. There was some screw-up with Express Scripts, so I decided to refill my 30-day supply at Walgreens. I thought I’d give their iPhone app a try and it was amazing. It located the pharmacy since it was nearest to me, then had me scan the prescription label’s barcode using the phone’s camera. A message said when it would be ready for pickup and I was done. You could literally request a refill in 10 seconds. The app also provides pill reminders, prescription transfer by taking a picture of another pharmacy’s label, loyalty card points tracking, the aisle layout of the store, and online shopping and weekly ads. I’m impressed. It makes “find our nearest hospital” apps seem pretty lame in comparison.

Perhaps ONC will learn the how hard it is to design usable software by introducing its “Health IT State Summaries” widget. States are arbitrarily divided into geographic regions that each have their own dropdown with resulting wasted space, words are misspelled (“state’s,” “South Caronlina”), and it’s an awfully big widget to embed on a website.

Researchers at the Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation, part of Parkland Memorial Hospital (TX), get a write-up in the Dallas paper for their work in developing a model called PIECES that analyzes EMR data to flag patients at risk for cardiac arrest. A randomized controlled study of the software’s effectiveness will start later in the summer. The Center has 35 employees and a $6.7 million annual budget. PIECES use information that includes monitoring data, lab results, MEWS, unit assignment, and orders to predict clinical deterioration 16 hours in advance on average. The original article in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, published in February 2013, is here.

Hello Doctor introduces an iPad app that allows patients with complex medical conditions to organize their medical records for conversations with their physicians. 

New York City’s 911 operators are forced to use handwritten notes delivered by runners when the city’s new $88 million emergency dispatch system goes down for several minutes on at least three occasions.

A patient at the Bronx (NY) VA hospital dies when a gamma camera collapses on him during a radiology procedure.

Sue Fischer, a nurse who works in the Cerner practice of Encore Health Resources, recently saved the life of a man who had gone down in cardiac arrest in a Phoenix airport jetway by giving him CPR.

John Alexander (Optimum Healthcare IT) joins ESD as Epic practice director.

Glenn Cole (The Ghafari Companies) joins Nordic Consulting as CFO.

An Ohio medical practice’s letter to the editor of the local newspaper requests the understanding of patients as it transitions to an EMR, saying, “For the most part we are not computer savvy so this has been a real challenge. While we struggle with this change we are just not able to see the number of patients we had previously.”

Vince Ciotti has been a longstanding critic of what he sees as Epic’s cult of Kool-Aid drinkers, so did a personal audience with Judy Faulkner change his tune? Find out in this week’s HIS-tory.

Sponsor Updates

• HCA will present its experience implementing identity and access management solutions in a Monday, June 17 Webinar sponsored by Caradigm.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 6/7/13

Top News

The former chief information security officer of the VA says the department’s networks and databases were hacked by at least eight foreign governments, including Russia and China. Jerry Davis, who was CISO from 2010 until February 2013, testified that the VA didn’t encrypt databases containing patient information, employed weak user authentication, and failed to address a backlog of 13,000 security-related corrective actions. A VA auditor says her group has identified 4,000 current security vulnerabilities, and when asked who was responsible, she blamed recently resigned former VA CIO Roger Baker.

Reader Comments

From Digital Bean Counter: “Re: Robert Wood Johnson / CMS data article on LinkedIn. I added a comment stating why I thought the CMS study is misleading and referenced Data Nerd’s recent Reader’s Write post on HIStalk. My comment was deleted. How are we to have a transparent industry if the organizations we work with are not willing to be transparent themselves?” RWJF issued a challenge for developing an app that would somehow make the useless CMS information valuable, to which I would issue a challenge of my own: explain exactly what a consumer would do with this information to save the healthcare system money.

From Another Epic Go-Live: ”Re: Plains Regional Medical Center, Clovis, NM. On June 1, the 106-bed hospital became the first of Presbyterian Healthcare Services’ (NM) eight hospitals to go live with Epic. The rest will be rolled out over the next year.”

From Sad Day in Madison: “Re: accused predator. Many are shaken since he is one of the ‘fast crowd’ of young Madison professionals who fly out every week, make a lot of money, and hit the bars on the weekend.” Brian Stowe, a 28-year-old Epic project manager, is charged with sexual assault after prosecutors say he drugged at least nine women and filmed himself with them. Police recovered videos and pictures as evidence. They also retrieved the Epic-issued laptop that was visible in them with the help of Epic’s HR people. The court commissioner set bail at $500,000 because Stowe has wealthy parents and access to savings from his job.

From Small World: “Re: Duncan James (above left) replacing Vern Davenport (above right) at MModal. Isn’t this the second time? Vern was CEO of Misys Healthcare when they owned what is now QCPR.” QuadraMed acquired Misys CPR in the fall of 2007, but Vern stayed with Misys until a few months later when Misys and Allscripts merged. He stayed with Allscripts for almost three years, then went to Quintiles for a short stay, and then to Medquist, which eventually acquired MModal.

From Ed Marx: “Re: European shoes. Saw these shoes and thought of you.” Ed is touring Europe and has been kind enough to send me a few photos to satisfy my shoe obsession. Always good to have options for next year’s HIStalkapalooza!

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Some of this week’s highlights from HIStalk Practice include: eClinicalWorks, Allscripts, and NextGen are the dominant EHR providers for freestanding practices while Epic, Allscripts, and Cerner dominate hospital-owned practices, according to a HIMSS Analytics/CapSite report. CIMRO, the REC for Nebraska, sells off its HIT consulting division, ensuring the continuation of the consultant practice after CIMRO’s grant funding runs out. Athenahealth extends a guarantee that it will waive customer service fees if not ready for the ICD-10 transition by the October 2014 deadline. Children are more likely to be fully vaccinated for influenza when a popup alert is added to the EMR. A nasty storm could be brewing in Massachusetts as officials determine how to interpret and implement a state law requiring the meaningful use of EHR in order to obtain licensure. iPads and iPhones are physicians’ favorite devices for interacting with EHRs and staff. Dr. Gregg offers some clever humor for those rough HIT days. Join the fun and sign up for the e-mail updates when you checking out these stories. Thanks for reading.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor CliniComp. The company’s Essentris EMR suite lineup includes solutions for CPOE, critical care, perinatal and fetal, ED, acute care, data repository, and real-time clinical surveillance. CliniComp takes full contractual responsibility for their systems, eliminating the need for IT resources for configuration, testing, training, and servicing and allowing customers to focus on patient care. It’s a provider of EMRs for the Department of Defense. Thanks to ClinicComp for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a CliniComp video on the Essentris clinical workflow suite.

On the Job Board: Senior Product Manager, Compliance Program Manager, Systems Implementation Engineer, Dental Imaging Specialist. HIStalk sponsors get free job postings.

The new Webinar program is going gangbusters with a bunch of them upcoming. I recruit at least two experts to review a recorded practice session with me, and the Webinar doesn’t get the green light until we think it’s of suitable quality for the HIStalk audience. If you are a provider executive willing to help me as an occasional reviewer, let me know. It takes about an hour to watch the video and jot down your recommendations, and you can do it whenever it’s convenient. I’ll send you a nice Amazon gift certificate for your time. I can use IT executives (CIOs and IT directors) and CMIOs or other informatics clinicians. My most pressing need is for a couple of HIM and clinical documentation improvement experts for the next scheduled Webinar.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Endo Health Solutions says it will consider options for its HealthTronics urology business, will eliminate 15 percent of positions, and reduce annual spending by $325 million. The company reduced earnings estimates by two-thirds.

Ascension Health Ventures makes a strategic investment in GetWellNework.

Xerox acquires Tallahassee, FL-based LearnSomething, whose employee e-learning solutions are used by 85 percent of US retail pharmacy chains to educate staff about new products.

Sales

Dignity Health, Legacy Health, and Catholic Health Initiatives will use Blackbaud CRM for fundraising.

Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals (PA) selects ICD-10 Intelligence and Compliance and Revenue and Integrity solutions from MedAnalytics.

Neosho Memorial Regional Medical Center (KS) chooses Access to provide bar-coded wristbands and face sheets.

AMEOS Group will implement Cerner Millennium and Lighthouse at two of its German facilities.

People

QPID hires Janine Powell (Encore Health Resources) as VP of client services.

PatientsLikeMe names Marcia Nizzari (Good Start Genetics) VP of engineering.

Passport Health Chairman Jim Lackey joins NextGxDx’s board.

iHT2 CEO Waco Hoover is selected to co-chair the 2013 WEDI Report Initiative.

J. C. Lundquist, Jeff Nestor, and Linda Jackson join Lucca Consulting Group as regional VPs.

Announcements and Implementations

HealtheConnections, the RHIO for Central New York, goes live on eHealth Connect Image Exchange integrated with its Mirth HIE platform.

Cleveland Clinic announces that it will give patients access to physician notes, pathology reports, and health issues via its Epic MyChart patient portal.

The State of Georgia launches the first phase of GeorgiaDirect, a secure e-mail system based on the Medicity platform.

HealthBridge and the Ohio Information Partnership, which manages the CliniSync HIE, launch connectivity using Direct.

GE Healthcare kicks off its Centricity Imaging IT Tour 2013 with stops this week in Texas. The 60-hospital road show runs through early October.

Innovation and Research

More than 70 medical, research, and advocacy groups in 41 countries will create a research database of their genetic and clinical data. Among them are NIH, Dana-Farber, Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford. The organizations will develop ways to standardize the data and to implement privacy controls that respect patient choice.

Technology

Miami Children’s Hospital (FL) rolls out the Fit4Kids Care iPhone app that provides indoor campus way-finding, wait times, a physician directory, and the ability to purchase gift shop items and order room service.

All Facebook employees will by the end of 2013 use hGraph, an open source visual representation of health status. It can use EHR information to create many of its views.

Other

Seattle Children’s Hospital reports that queries that took five minutes to run now finish in under four seconds after moving to IBM Big Data technology.

Greenway Medical Technologies opens its new corporate headquarters in Carrollton, GA.

Athenahealth scores highest in ambulatory EMR usability according to a new KLAS report. Success in achieving high usability in different EHRs ranged from 55 percent (McKesson) to 85 percent (athenahealth).

States are selling de-identified patient hospitalization information, but privacy expert Latanya Sweeney says the de-identification method isn’t hard to crack when you match the information against other databases. She paid $50 for records and was able to connect them to newspaper stories about accidents and crimes, thereby re-identifying the detailed medical records of 35 patients. An executive of a hospital performance data company says his employer immediately removes the ZIP codes provided by the states, saying they provide an easy link to other databases such that, “You might as well have the patient’s electronic medical record number.”

A Forbes opinion piece says electronic medical records are making doctors unhappy, saying (a) they turn doctors into box-checkers; (b) 75 percent of their capability does nothing except meet government mandates; (c) there’s no proof that government-mandated data collection improves care; and (d) conversion to ICD-10 will be expensive and will benefit mostly data miners.

The HIMSS EHR Association will announce creation of an EHR Developer Code of Conduct next week in Washington, DC.

The three doctors in Canada whose former employer refused to provide them with electronic copies of their patient files will get the information after all. Midway Walk-In Healthcare Centre followed the legal guidelines in sending paper medical records for a $35 fee, but pointed out that the law doesn’t require it to provide copies of electronic records even though a significant amount of  patient information is stored only in electronic form. The Ministry of Health intervened, convincing the owner of the walk-in clinic to obtain an electronic copy of the information from the clinic’s EMR vendor and send it to the departed doctors within 24 hours. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan couldn’t help negotiate because the owner of the walk-in clinic isn’t a doctor.

Weird News Andy observes that migraines suck, but so does the cure. A writer in England says her migraine headaches were cured by hirudotherapy, applying leeches to her skin to remove blood.

Sponsor Updates

• Billian’s HealthDATA and Porter Research employees participated in the Women in Healthcare Luncheon sponsored by the Georgia Association of Healthcare Executives.
• Caradigm announces that one million caregivers are now users of its Identity and Access Management solutions.
• Emdeon will present a series of educational sessions during AHIP Institute 2013.
• HIMSS Analytics publishes the 5th annual US Ambulatory Electronic Health Record and Practice Management Study (previously published by HIMSS acquisition CapSite) which includes information on HIStalk sponsors ADP AdvancedMD, Aprima, eClinicalWorks e-MDs, GE, Greenway, McKesson, MedPlus MED3OOO, NextGen, OptumInsight, and Vitera.
• Research and advisory firm Aite Group names PatientPay as the only new online bill pay provider working through PM software for maximum workflow efficiency. 
• eHealth Technologies enhances its eHealthViewer ZF viewer to include real-time medical imaging collaboration and interaction.
• T-System offers tips for earning optimal reimbursement for observation status.
• Financial Post profiles TELUS Health, which has grown to be Canada’s largest EMR provider.
• CCHIT certifies NextGen Electronic Dental Record version 4.3 with ONC 2014 Edition criteria as a Complete EHR.
• Orion Health will participate in next month’s HIC 2013, Australia’s longest-running and largest HIT event.
• Informatica introduces Vibe, an embeddable virtual data machine that provides a single simple virtualized data infrastructure.
• Allscripts and its recent acquisition dbMotion host over 200 attendees at its dbU population health forum, which included a discussion of how Allscripts is driving care coordination, population health management, and consumer engagement. 
• Frost & Sullivan recognizes Acuo Technologies with the 2012 North American Award for Market Share Leadership for its vendor-neutral archiving and enterprise imaging technologies. 

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

Despite our voluminous coverage of Meaningful Use, CMS, and the ONC, HIStalk isn’t just about the US healthcare scene. Reports from across the pond note that an air ambulance had to abort its landing because off-duty “junior doctors” were hosting a BBQ near their lodging, which is close to the pad. For those of you who wonder where Oban is, it’s not far from Loch Lomond in Scotland.

Three physician Senators (Tom Coburn, John Barrasso, and Rand Paul) join Senator John Boozman in trying to block the implementation of ICD-10. The Cutting Costly Codes Act was introduced in the House in April. In addition to halting ICD-10, it calls for a study on preventing disruption during the migration from ICD-9.

The Senate has been busy in other ways, with Chuck Grassley and Ron Wyden calling for increased transparency in Medicare claims data. They plan to reintroduce the Medicare Data Access for Transparency and Accountability Act. The aptly acronym-bearing Medicare DATA Act as initially introduced  would create a publicly searchable Medicare payment database as well as ensuring that data on payments to physicians do not fall under an exemption for Freedom of Information Act requests.

Since I’ve apparently got a DC vibe going on this week, I’m interested to see what readers think about the Safeguarding America’s Pharmaceuticals Act. It’s aimed at creating a national system to make it easier to trace drugs from synthesis to market, which in theory should help fight drug counterfeiting. I’m counting on all of you because my knowledge of pharmacy IT systems is limited to calling retail chains in my area to see when they will be ready to accept electronic prescriptions for controlled substances and asking them not to send multiple refill requests before adequate time has elapsed for a physician response. What vendors do you think would jump into this space?

Here’s your opportunity to test your EHR’s ability to generate drug recall reports and your staff’s skill at documenting over-the-counter and herbal remedies. After years of us thinking Ginkgo Biloba was good to support memory, the National Institutes of Health releases a study indicating it might actually be a carcinogen.

One of my staff shared this piece about medical directors who search social media looking for “worrisome” issues during the hiring process. The article coaches would-be Facebook stalkers on what is appropriate to consider when determining if candidates match the office culture. It also reminds readers to steer clear of information that doesn’t belong in the hiring process including race and ethnicity, disability, religion, and pregnancy. It recommends considering using a third-party screening firm that is familiar with appropriate state laws.

I talked earlier this week about smart phones making us dumber. A regular reader sent me the link to this Northwestern University study on parenting on the digital age. Nearly 40 percent of families fell into the heaviest media use category with 11 hours of screen media per day. A New York Times blog notes that this time may have been double counted with parents using multiple screens, such using a computer while watching TV.

Researchers were surprised that parents were introducing their children to technology rather than simply responding to requests. Based on the behavior I see at the hospital (where the iPhone is the most popular childcare provider, at least in the ER) I’m not that surprised. There are ways to distract a hurt child that don’t involve Angry Birds. How about a book? Or telling them a story? I know my dad reads HIStalk regularly, so here’s a shout-out in thanks for all those retellings of Herkimer the Helicopter.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 6/5/13

Top News

Constellation Software acquires QuadraMed through its subsidiary, N. Harris Computer Corporation. According to Constellation, the purchase of QuadraMed “provides Harris with a platform to support its entry in the US healthcare information technology market.” Financial terms were not disclosed, though Francisco Partners has to be pleased to divest QuadraMed from its portfolio given QuadraMed’s fairly tired product line. FP sold off the company’s most valuable asset, the Quantim HIM product division, to Nuance in September 2012. We ran a reader rumor Sunday (in the Monday Morning Update) that something was going on with QuadraMed courtesy of Misys-Ex, who reported that managers were clearing out their offices and employees would be told how long they had left to work for the company. Meanwhile, President and CEO Duncan W. James leaves QuadraMed to serve as CEO of MModal.

Reader Comments

From Ritchie Valens: “Re:MModal. Shakeup at the top. One Equity Partners is calling the shots now that they are private. They are bringing in their own people since the company has been losing money.” MModal names Duncan W. James, former president and CEO of QuadraMed, as its new CEO, replacing Vern Davenport. The company also promotes David Woodworth from VP of finance to COO, replacing Amy Amick, and names Graham King (McKesson/HBOC) as chairman of the board. The official press release says Davenport and Amick have “chosen” to leave the company.

From GreenJoy: “Re: font.  I wonder if you can make the HIStalk font darker? As my eyes age, the font seems to blend into the gray background.” Here’s good way to make it more contrasty and also printable: click the “View/Print Text Only” link at the bottom of the post.

From FDASIA Attendee: “Re: FDASIA. On Friday morning after @farzad_onc gave his rousing inspiring presentation to the workgroup and us attendees, the Chair asked for exemplars of HIT situations from the workgroup. Notably Dr. Paul Tang of Palo Alto Health Foundation spoke of three incidents, the third being most interesting. He reported a death due to a double dosing of potassium ordered by a doctor via CPOE.  The point was that the CDS (decision support) failed to warn of the excess.”

From FindingSanity: “Re: CompuGroup. CompuGroup Medical AG removed its last US CEO, Henrik Cruger, in May. The new CEO, Norbert Fischer, has replaced him, but not publicly. This is the sixth CEO change in the five years since the German company opened up US operations. Layoffs and office closures preceded the changeover. Poor sales, poor product performance, and a never-ending trail of unhappy customers has been unfixed with each sudden regime change. Germany continues to struggle not only with the US healthcare market, but with understanding how to run an American company with American customers who all quit believing the company years ago.” Unverified.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

SimplifyMD raises $1.3 million of a planned $1.8 million round of funding.

Patient engagement platform vendor Seamless Medical Systems closes $2 million in early stage funding.

Sales

Baptist Memorial Health Care will implement Omnicell’s G4 Unity medication management solutions across its 14 affiliated hospitals.

MedCentral Health System (OH) selects Wolters Kluwer Health’s ProVation Order Sets.

Boone Memorial Hospital (WV) selects Medhost’s EDIS.

Practice management service provider MyHealthNetwork (GA) will use Valence Health’s population health management and clinical integration solutions to identify customized patient populations.

Twenty-five bed Memorial Medical Center (WI) selects CPSI as its EMR vendor of choice after finding that NextGen, according to the local newspaper, “was not equipped to meet MMC’s needs as a facility.”

Ocean Beach Hospital (WA) chooses Healthland Centriq EHR.

The University of Arizona Health Network selects Capsule’s medical device integration solutions for its ED, OR, and ICU.

The DoD awards Philips Healthcare Informatics an $88.5 million medical imaging contract.

People

Vocera Communications promotes Brent D. Lang from president/COO to president/CEO, replacing Robert Zollars, who will remain as executive chairman of the board.

Rick Gilfillan, MD, head of CMS’s Innovation Center, will leave his post at the end of June.

Jeffrey Ferranti, MD, MS is promoted to CIO/VP of medical informatics at Duke Medicine (NC).

Diane Adams (Allscripts) is named chief people officer of QlikTech.

Announcements and Implementations

Cerner names Abu Dhabi Health Services Company, King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre (Saudi Arabia), and the UAE Ministry of Health winners of its Cerner Achievement & Innovation Awards 2013, which recognize excellence in adopting HIT in the Middle East.

The SSI Group and ICA will combine EHR and claims data to give payers and clinicians insight into patient populations.

Covenant Medical Group (TX) implements PerfectServe’s secure clinical communication platform.

Australia’s NSW and Queensland Public Hospitals will begin implementing Cerner Millennium late 2013.

Sanford Bemidji (MN) goes live on Epic.

Wolters Kluwer Health releases a Controlled Substances File for its Medi-Span drug database solution to help providers, pharmacies, payers, and EHR vendors adhere to controlled substance prescribing and reporting requirements.

PatientCo will integrate Streamline Health’s business analytics solution into its patient financial engagement platform.

Government and Politics

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announces the release of hospital outpatient charge data and details about which  EHRs are being used by EPs for MU attestation, saying that, “a more data driven and transparent healthcare market can help consumers and their families make important decisions about their care.” If that’s the case, why doesn’t Big Data CMS address possible concerns about privacy and security and then release much, much more data from its vast stores?

Innovation and Research

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launches a developer competition that will award $120,000 in prizes for creating technology components that turn the recently released CMS hospital pricing data into “intuitive, actionable tools.” Developers who can do this will earn their prize given that the CMS information is close to worthless, even to those few consumers who are willing and able to try to make sense of bizarre hospital Medicare and Medicaid pricing practices (from that same CMS, ironically enough) that probably don’t pertain to them.

Healthcare crowdfunding site Health Tech Hatch runs a Blue Button CoDesign Challenge to accept idea submissions that complete the sentence, “Build me a Blue Button-enabled tool that …” and then letting the community vote (through June 11) for the developers that will be chosen to build Blue Button prototypes for judging in August. Above is National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari describing the contest from Health Datapalooza on Monday.

The White House proposes patent troll legislation that would require companies threatening patent lawsuits to disclose who actually owns the patent, to initiate protection of end users of technology that is the subject of a patent claim, and to review policies and increase education. A commissioned study finds that patent trolls file 62 percent of infringement lawsuits vs. 29 percent just two years ago. The study specifically quoted health IT examples, including (a) the difficulty in separating function vs. means of delivering the function in medical imaging software, and (b) a healthcare technology vendor that had to cease research on a particular technology while being sued by a patent troll, causing its sales to drop by a third.

An NIH-funded study at Partners HealthCare finds that EHR information can complement evidence-based clinical decision support by identifying physician “group intelligence,” with the example being a better way to identify ordering of excessive lab tests by looking at patient subpopulations and concurrent medical situations instead of just lab data alone.

Kaiser Permanente announces the launch of its first application programming interface, which will allow developers to build apps using a database of Kaiser’s hospital and medical office locations. Hopefully their experience will encourage them to eventually open up access to something more useful. Travis has already played with the API and has thoughts on HIStalk Connect.

Other

Palomar Medical Center blames declining reimbursements, state budget cuts, and sequestration for its decision to lay off 84 employees, or about two percent of its workforce, as of July 26. It opened a billion-dollar new hospital in August 2012.

Heritage Provider Network awards $500,000 to POWERDOT.HPN, whose team is leading in a challenge to create an algorithm that predicts how many days a patient will stay in the hospital.

Practice Fusion launches Insight, a real-time analytics service that sells the patient information stored in its free EHR database to drug companies, including “real-time data covering diagnoses, prescribing behaviors, patient demographics and more.”

The Annals of Internal Medicine publishes a report finding that less than 10 percent of physicians have EHRs that meet Meaningful Use criteria, leading the authors to remark that the results “should be of concern to policy makers.” What should be of concern to just about everyone reading the report (including the publisher) is that the findings are based on data collected from late 2011 to early 2012. Perhaps none of the Annals of Internal Medicine editors have noticed recent reports that more than 50 percent of EPs have demonstrated MU, and EHR adoption has grown dramatically in the last 18 months.

The Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority finds that using a hybrid mix of paper and electronic records for clinical documentation, either during an EHR transition or as a workaround, causes errors, mostly because of faulty handoff processes.

Boston Children’s Hospital (MA) is piloting MyPassport, an iPad app that helps patients identify their caregivers and understand their care better.

Three doctors in Canada change practices only to find that their former employer refuses to provide the electronic medical records of their patients, offering only the partial information kept on paper. The law requires only that paper records be made available.

Weird News Andy wants to know whether it’s cider or balsamic. A cheap vinegar test, serving as a replacement for unaffordable Pap smears in India, reduced cervical cancer deaths by one-third in a study of 150,000 women living in India’s slums. Minimally trained locals simply swab the cervix with diluted vinegar and check for a color change that indicates the presence of abnormal cells. Despite the benefits, the challenges in India are substantial: most women give birth at home having never visited a physician, the culture doesn’t allow them to make decisions for themselves without the approval of a man, and one health worker was beaten by a local mob when women found they had to take their clothes off for the screening.

Sponsor Updates

• HealthMEDX announces the general availability of a bi-directional pharmacy interface between its Vision product and Omnicare.
• Crain’s Chicago Business names Impact Advisors and Allscripts to its list of the 50 fastest-growing public and private companies in the Chicago area based on five-year revenue growth.
• Craneware showcases its Pharmacy ChargeLink technology at this week’s American Society for Health-System Pharmacists 2013 Summer Meeting and Exposition in Minneapolis.
• Lifepoint Informatics will serve as a gold sponsor at next week’s MDx NEXT conference on molecular diagnostic testing and genomic medicine. Also at the MDx NEXT Conference: Halfpenny Technology will demonstrate its clinical data exchange solution for molecular laboratories.
• Besler Consulting and TeleTracking Technologies are awarded “Peer Reviewed by HFMA” designation.
• John Fangman, MD and Michael Barbouche of Forward Health Group spoke at HealthDatapalooza IV this week in Washington DC, presenting with the Aids Resource Center of Wisconsin on managing high-risk HIV/AIDS populations.
• ZirMed will launch a new brand and demonstrate its RCM, clinical communications, and analytics solutions at the HMFA 2013 Annual Institute conference June 16-18 in Orlando.
• Info-Tech Research Group recognizes CommVault as an industry “champion” in virtual backup software, e-mail archiving, and backup software for heterogeneous environments in its “Vendor Landscape” report.
• The Advisory Board Company launches the National Population Health Symposium September 13 in Washington, DC to give provider thought leaders the opportunity to collaborate on managing risk and migrating to a population health delivery system.
• MediGain and ADP AdvancedMD post a video of their co-hosted Webinar on helping physicians prepare for healthcare reform.
• Billians HealthDATA adds the latest AHRQ data to its online hospital database line-up.
• Alere Analytics launches its clinical surveillance solution for infection control and medication management.
• CareTech Solutions will participate in this month’s Ohio Hospital Association Annual Meeting and the Michigan Association Annual Meeting.
• Ryan Tracy, MD of Diablo Valley Pediatrics and his staff discuss how their use of ADP AdvancedMD EHR eliminated manual process inefficiencies.
• Care Team Connect hosts a July 10 Webinar on preventing readmissions.
• Versus client Western Maryland Health System is featured in a June 20 AHA webinar on staff safety.
• Informatica kicks off its Informatica World 2013 user conference and will make keynote sessions available via live Webcast.
• EMDs highlights its support of the University of Texas Health IT program.
• Hayes Management Consulting expands its clinical and revenue cycle optimization service lines to include increased focus on measuring outcomes and outcome-driven operational improvement services.
• In a June 20 Imprivata-sponsored Webinar, Larry Ponemon reviews the findings of Ponemon Institute’s study entitled, “The Economic & Productivity Impact of IT Security on Healthcare.”
• Beacon Partners hosts a June 7 Webinar with executive consultant Cindy Friend discussing how the PCMH model supports ACOs.
• Nuesoft looks at the need of specialists for customized EHRs.
• The Huntzinger Management Group launches Huntzinger Staffing Solutions, which will HIT implementation resources.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Monday Morning Update 6/3/13

From Misys-Ex: “Re: QuadraMed. Something is taking place. Employees will learn Monday how much longer their employment will last. Some members of management have already packed their offices.” Unverified.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: absence. TPD will be taking a leave of absence from HIStalk to pursue a new development partnership in the healthcare area of expertise. While I will miss the interaction with my fellow HIStalk contributors, I will still read HIStalk regularly and contribute comments on postings when appropriate to do so for my fellow HIStalkers. In the mean time, you’ll be seeing guest bloggers contributing in my absence.”

Sixty percent of respondents think the Meaningful Use program should be ended after Stage 3. New poll to your right: would you choose a hospital for elective admission whose clinicians have complained publicly about the safety of its EHR?

Thanks to the following sponsors, new and renewing, that have recently supported HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, and HIStalk Connect. Click a logo for more information.

Weird News Andy says “Sick Ambulance Kills.” A Washington, DC ambulance transporting a gunshot patient breaks down in the middle of I-295 when its EPA-mandated emissions device shuts the engine down for mandatory cleaning. The patient died during the 5-7 minute delay required to dispatch a backup ambulance. The EPA says it offers an exemption for emergency vehicles.

Montefiore Medical Center (NY) will buy Sound Shore Health System (NY), which filed bankruptcy on May 14 due to indigent care costs, a drop in patient volume, and a 2011 attempt to install clinical and financial systems, apparently from Allscripts, that continue to cause billing problems even now.

An article in the magazine of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health describes the use of EMR information by care managers at Johns Hopkins HealthCare to identify women at risk for premature births and offer them specific interventions. Maryland’s Secretary of Health and Mental Hygiene hopes to use the information to dig deeper into population health, saying, “If you have a map, you might say, ‘All these different doctors are seeing what looks to them like a one-on-one phenomenon.’ But you can see actually it’s a certain community where there are very high rates of asthma. And maybe there’s something going on here… If there’s an anti-smoking effort, maybe the goal today is to hit the whole county. But if you knew that there was a very high concentration of smokers in a particular area and they were having very poor health outcomes, you might target particular buildings.”

Maryland-based Parallax Enterprises begins development of a pilot-like heads-up display system for the OR that will display EMR information, a patient-individualized surgical checklist, and the patient’s health literacy score so that the OR team can communicate at the right level. I mentioned the company in February when it raised $1 million in funding, also noting the military pilot background of CEO Jeff Woolford, MD. Surgeons will use the  CHaRM heads-up display to interact with the system while remaining sterile. Surgeons can use the system by moving their hands above the sterile field thanks to gesture-sensitive cameras.

Interesting thoughts from Brandon Hull, co-founder of VC firm Capital Partners, at Internet Week New York: “Every other company presenting at Internet Week operates in a clearly defined market economy where we can easily identify buyers and sellers. Healthcare, by contrast, much more closely resembles a command economy full of price fixers and adjusters, oversight and bureaucracy. Stalin-era Soviet Union would be proud … [hospitals] have terrible business practice patterns, aren’t particularly well managed, and soak the federal government for vast subsidies to keep maintaining their existing behaviors. They’re going to be disintermediated.” He says the Affordable Care Act gives hospitals a cheap way to remake themselves into insurance companies in the form of ACOs, while insurance companies that fear being regulated like public utilities are rushing to become providers.

The New York Times looks at the $10 billion spent annually in the US on colonoscopies, observing, “Largely an office procedure when widespread screening was first recommended, colonoscopies have moved into surgery centers — which were created as a step down from costly hospital care but are now often a lucrative step up from doctors’ examining rooms — where they are billed like a quasi operation.” This is the first in a series of articles that will explain that US healthcare is disproportionally expensive compared to the rest of the world not because of heroic technical interventions, but rather the high prices charged for routine services in the only industrialized nation that allows providers to charge whatever they want without oversight except for Medicare and Medicaid patients.

I should hear from @histalk that my letter to @nytimes was published? #healthit as part of larger innovation strategy nyti.ms/136AwSU

— Farzad Mostashari (@Farzad_ONC) May 31, 2013

@farzad_onc @histalk is where I go for all the news.@nytimes lags even when it’s in their own newspaper!;-)

— Ross D. Martin (@RossMartin) May 31, 2013

@farzad_onc your letter @nytimes #healthit part of larger innovation strategy histalk2.com/2013/05/30/new…^ @histalk always 1st to know

— Sherry R (@Cascadia) May 31, 2013

It happened purely by accident that I was staying up late Thursday night as usual writing HIStalk when I ran across Farzad Mostashari’s just-published letter to the editor of The New York Times, earning the unwarranted but appreciated accolades of some of my favorite tweeple who must have been up late with me to read the new post so quickly.

An Atlanta-area newspaper profiles practice systems vendor Nuesoft, which says its partnership with Practice Fusion could double the company’s 140-employee headcount in the next two years and require  a $20 million capital infusion.

England’s Department of Health issues tenders worth up to almost $2 billion for physician office systems to replace the limited choices offered by the defunct NPfIT.

Vince finishes up the HIS-tory of Allscripts this week.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 5/31/13

Top News

A letter to the editor in The New York Times by National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari says public policy is making the healthcare system smarter, citing the recently announced figures that half of practicing physicians and 80 percent of hospitals are using EHRs.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Some HIStalk Practice highlights from the last week or so: WNA makes a rare HIStalk Practice appearance to comment on a physician who has quit taking insurance. Physician satisfaction with their EHR vendors has declined over the last year. Almost one-third of physicians buying EHRs today are replacing legacy EHRs. Physicians fear that declining reimbursements, rising costs, and ACA-related requirements will threaten practice profitability. Athenahealth recognizes Midland Orthopaedics with its athenaVision award. Most nurse practitioners believe a practice led by an NP should be certified as a PCMH, but most physicians disagree. Dr. Gregg posts a letter to Allscripts. Thanks for reading.

We’ve had some interesting posts on HIStalk Connect lately, so you might want to sign up for e-mail updates if you follow mHealth, innovative technology, and startups. Lt. Dan also does a Friday weekly news recap there that provides a great summary. Some recent articles:

Tim Cook Discusses Wearables, Acquisitions, and Executive Changes at D11 Conference
The Third Screen Revolution in Healthcare Is Before Us
How Consumers Enter the System
EHRs Propagate “Best” Practices
Healthcare Q&A
VentureHealth Launches Equity Backed Crowd Funding Site
Texting for Health Revisited

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shareable Ink raises an additional $3 million, bringing its total funding in the last three years to over $14 million.

Sales

Bon Secours Health System Center for Clinical Excellence and Innovation selects Quantros to advise on performance improvements to advance ED quality and safety.

Southpoint Surgery Center (FL) selects Wolters Kluwer Health’s ProVation MD and ProVation MultiCaregiver.

The Pennsylvania eHealth Partnership Authority signs a five-year agreement with Truven Health Analytics for its HIE solution.

Clyo Internal Medicine (OH) selects simplifyMD as its EHR provider.

The University of Miami and the University of Miami Health System will deploy Hyland Software’s OnBase enterprise content management solution across 60 academic departments, 30 outpatient facilities, and three hospitals.

John C. Lincoln Health Network (AZ) selects Besler Consulting to assist in the identification of Medicare Transfer DRG underpayments.

People

AirStrip names OptumInsight CEO Bill Miller to its board.

Verisk Health EVP Brian Smith joins the advisory board for telemedicine provider SnapMD.

Explorys appoints Cleveland Clinic CFO Steve Glass to its board.

Announcements and Implementations

Advocate Physician Partners (IL), a care management collaboration with Advocate Health Care, implements its 500th independent physician on SynAPPs, Advocate’s cloud-based version of eClinicalWorks EHR.

Practice Fusion announces preferred billing partnerships with ADP AdvancedMD, CollaborateMD, and NueMD.

The Idaho Health Data Exchange and St. Luke’s Health System launch Image Exchange viewing capabilities by eHealth Technologies.

Malcom Randall VA Medical Center (FL) installs Welch Allyn’s Connex Electronics Vitals Documentation System.

Edward Hospital & Health Services (IL) deploys Levi, Ray & Shoup’s VPSX print management and document delivery system its Epic system.

PDR Network will distribute drug company patient support coupons from OPTIMIZERx via EHRs.

SCI Solutions releases Order Facilitator v10, which includes mobile ordering, expanded messaging, and enhanced capabilities for lab order requisitioning, collection, and labeling.

Nuance publicly confirms for the first time that its speech recognition technology powers Apple’s Siri, with CEO Paul Ricci stating at a conference, “We are the fundamental provider of voice recognition for Apple.”

In England,NHS chooses BJSS and Valtech as finalists to develop an electronic referrals service to replace Cerner’s system.

The MUSE conference is underway this week in National Harbor, MD, wrapping up Friday. The photo above of Farzad Mostashari delivering the keynote was posted to Twitter by Dan McQueen.

CureMD will demonstrate a new chemotherapy administration module of its oncology EHR that it says took five years to develop next week at the American Society of Clinical Oncologists conference in Chicago.

Government and Politics

CMS advises practices on the role of clearinghouses in the ICD-10 transition, noting that, “While clearinghouses can help, they cannot provide the same level of support for the ICD-10 transition as they did for the Version 5010 upgrade.”

The HHS Office of Inspector General finds that healthcare provider information maintained in the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES) and Provider Enrollment, Chain and Ownership System (PECOS) was often inaccurate, occasionally incomplete, and generally inconsistent between the two databases. In NPPES, 48 percent of records contained inaccurate data; 58 percent of PECOS records contained inaccuracies. 

HHS launches the “Information is Powerful Medicine” campaign that targets HIV/AIDS sufferers.

A group of Senate Republicans calls for an independent investigation of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, claiming that her fundraising efforts for Enroll America, a non-profit that promotes the Affordable Care Act, is inappropriate and possibly illegal in appearing to solicit donations from industries she is responsible for regulating.

Other

The Health Information Trust Alliance, which promotes data security among healthcare providers, experiences a cyber attack of a non-critical, standalone public Web server. HITRUST a test database with fictitious data was compromised.

Bon Secours Hampton Roads Health System notifies 5,000 patients of a potential EHR security breach after discovering that two clinicians had accessed patients’ medical records “in a manner that was inconsistent with their job functions and hospital procedures.” The hospital has terminated the pair and is offering affected patients free credit monitoring services.

In England, Royal Berkshire Hospital says its problem-plagued Cerner Millennium EPR forced it to write down $23 million. According to the hospital’s CEO, “Unfortunately, implementing the EPR system has at times been a difficult process and we acknowledge that we did not fully appreciate the challenges and resources required in a number of areas.”

Australian researchers review the use of CSC and Cerner CPOE systems in a small-scale study that suggests systems with more drop-down menus may increase error risk.

EMR reminders driven by a connection to New York City’s vaccine registry increased children’s flu vaccine rates by 9 percent, and when physicians chose not to order the vaccine, they documented the reason 98 percent of the time. The results were presented at a pediatrics conference earlier this month.

Despite performance challenges with Meditech 6.0, 95 percent of the company’s customers surveyed by KLAS say Meditech is part of their long-term plans, citing affordability and usability.

A New York Times article says Beth Israel Medical Center (NY) allowed an elderly heiress worth $300 million to occupy one of its rooms for the last 20 years of her life, but launched “an all-out fundraising campaign” in having executives hang around her room to hit her up for donations and drop hints about making a will. The CEO’s mother even watched a Smurfs video with her hoping to get on her good side.  

Weird News Andy titles this story Step 1: Insert Pencil. A German man complaining of headaches and a runny nose is found to have a four-inch pencil embedded in his head, lodged there 15 years previously in a childhood accident.

Sponsor Updates

• SIIM and Brad Levin of Visage Imaging have developed a three-minute survey for IT imaging leaders to bring visibility to imaging challenges before next week’s SIIM13 conference in Dallas.
• Dorland Health names Vocera subsidiary ExperiaHealth the winner of its Case in Point Platinum Award for Discharge Planning Program for its use at Cullman Regional Medical Center (AL).
• RazorInsights exhibits its ONE Enterprise EHR at next week’s Alabama-Georgia Rural Health Clinic Conference in Opelika, AL.
• SuccessEHS client ARCare (KY/AR) achieves Stage 6 on the HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model.
• Imprivata announces that it has the highest market share of any SSO solution among US Meditech EHR hospitals (36 percent) and that the number of hospitals using Imprivata OneSign has increased about 57 percent in the last year.
• e-MDs posts a Webinar that includes advice for physician practices on health information exchange and Stage 2 MU.
• Impact Advisors principal Laura Kreofsky and senior advisor Jason Fortin discuss why achieving Stage 2 MU could be challenging.
• Awarepoint is named a Red Herring Top 100 North America Tech Startup.

ICA achieves EHNAC Accreditation as a Direct Trusted Agent. Other vendors recognized include Cerner, Max.MD, and Surescripts. All four were accredited for Registration Authority, Certificate Authority, and Health Information Service Provider criteria.

The HIMSS14 Call for Proposals ends next week. It’s hard to submit timely topics nearly a year in advance, but if you’re like those of us in the nonprofit trenches, it may be the only way to have a trip to HIMSS approved. You wouldn’t want to miss an opportunity to attend HIStalkapalooza, would you?

Speaking of educational opportunities, CMS offers a National Provider Call on June 5 to help providers get started with PQRS and the Value-Based Payment Modifier programs. CMS experts will also be available after the presentation to answer questions.

The University of Illinois at Chicago creates an ICD-9 to ICD-10 website. Maybe I have a warped sense of fun, but I enjoyed fiddling with it, and the results make for some frightening diagrams to spice up ICD-10 presentations.

A friend of mine e-mailed this blog by Reid Blackwelder MD, president-elect of the American Academy of Family Physicians. He tells the tale of a neighbor who fell and was taken to the ER where he was possibly misdiagnosed and discharged, then had to return for more extensive testing and a final diagnosis. Along the way, key clinical signs (like his inability to walk) were missed. Treating the numbers (test/lab/film) rather than the patient has become epidemic in the US. Is it defensive medicine, time pressure, the influence of Big Data, or simple lack of caring? I don’t know the answer, but we have to figure out a way to do better.

The article came at the same time that I was having a heated e-mail exchange with an IT colleague about whether we should push our vendor to incorporate genomics content in the EHR. I find it difficult to think that the average physician is going to be able to understand and act on genomic data when our healthcare delivery system so stressed that stories like Dr. Blackwelder’s exist. Of course that’s assuming we figure out a way to pay for gene sequencing and the subsequent treatments suggested by the data, which was the source of the original heated exchange.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 5/29/13

Top News

Iatric Systems will announce Wednesday that it has acquired the business assets of Accent on Integration. Iatric will continue to market the Accelero Connect integration platform, as well as AOI’s consulting and professional services. AOI President and CEO Mark C. Andiel will transition to Iatric as SVP of professional services and VP/CTO Jeff McGreath will serve as VP of patient care device integration.

Reader Comments

From Irene: “Re: Twitter. Did you see this?” MedCity News names 10 healthcare IT professionals to follow on Twitter. It’s actually nine since one of those listed is not a healthcare IT professional, but the rest of us are working CIOs, CMIOs, and clinical informatics professionals. HIStalk is described nicely as, “the pseudonym for a man who describes himself as ‘an informatics guy’ and is also the name of his long-running news and opinion blog on all things healthcare IT. It strikes a nice balance between health IT vendor news and perspectives from hospitals as well as industry trends.” I don’t really do a lot on Twitter since I don’t have much time, but I do appreciate the 5,600 people who follow me.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cerner announces a 2-for-1 stock split for shareholders of record as of June 17, 2013. Had you invested $10,000 in CERN shares at the beginning of 2000, they would be worth $191,000 today.

Sales

Bon Secours Health System (MD) renews its contract with MedAssets for revenue cycle technology and consulting services.

John Muir Health (CA) selects ZirMed’s RCM, clinical communications, and analytics tools.

People

Cumberland Consulting Group hires Taylor Ramsey (Surgical Information Systems) as director of business development.

Paul Uhrig, chief administrative and legal officer and chief privacy office of Surescripts, is named to the board of DirectTrust.

Explorys appoints Objective Health CEO Russell Richmond, MD to its board.

Valence Health names Scott J. Cullen, MD (Kaufman Hall) executive director of consulting services.

Leland Babitch, DO (University Pediatricians, Wayne State University School of Medicine) is named senior medical director of Clinovations.

Children’s Hospital and Clinics of Minnesota promotes Dave Overman from COO to president/COO. He joined the organization as CIO in 2005 and led its EMR implementation (Cerner, I believe.)

Announcements and Implementations

Alego Health becomes the first organization to join the HIMSS Innovation Center as Founding Collaborator, which requires a $100,000 “investment.”

ADP AdvancedMD launches MyICD-10, a Website to help practices prepare for the ICD-10 transition.

The Georgia Health Information Exchange changes its name to the Georgia Health Information Network to more accurately reflect its mission of creating network of existing health information networks.

Medhost begins marketing the Vanderbilt-developed perioperative management system its parent company bought with its acquisition of Acuitec, calling it Advanced Perioperative Information Management System.

Government and Politics

The ONC releases updated guidelines for Direct HIE implementations to enable the easy and secure exchange of patient health information under Stage 2 MU.

Canada’s Minister of Health announces that the government will fund 16 new eHealth projects with $100,000 grants, choosing potential innovations that empower patients, create a new generation of decision support tools, and monitor population health. Among the funded projects, all of which are led by an academically affiliated principal investigator: diabetes self-management, depression screening, self-management of cardiovascular disease risk factors, diabetes interventions, anticoagulation therapy management, mental health screening of pregnant women, depression telemetry, a rheumatoid arthritis decision aid, pediatric weight management, ICU discharge planning, and collaborative care for adolescent cancer.

Innovation and Research

Australian researchers find that using an electronic medication management system did not take time away from providers who were providing direct care.

Startups can apply for a one-minute showcase introduction and networking with a Madison, WI-area audience at Start Me Up in Madison on June 10.

Technology

The US Patent Office issues two patents to Greenway Medical Technologies that cover the receipt and transmission of data from multiple EHRs for the purpose of certifications, accreditations, and monetary incentives and for the tracking clinical events.

Other

Sonoma Valley Hospital (CA) notifies 1,350 patients that their information was mistakenly uploaded to the hospital’s public website, making it accessible to Google searches.

A blog post by anesthesiologist Shirie Leng, MD laments the impending end of informal “curbside consults” between physicians due to malpractice concerns. “Lawyers have taken an intrinsic part of human decision-making and interaction and made it, well, dangerous … The minute your doctor thinks better of asking an expert informally what he thinks about my condition or if he thinks you need a formal consultation, the quality of your healthcare goes down.”

Weird News Andy is interested in research that concludes that “sitting is the new smoking” given that he has the equivalent of a three-packs-per-day sitting habit. Researchers say “the chair is out to kill us” in finding that one hour of seated TV-watching cuts lifespan by 22 minutes, while smoking one cigarette shaves off only 11 minutes. Bars must be the most dangerous place on the planet given that patrons are sitting, drinking, smoking (although usually outside) and eating lethal foods like wings and nachos.

Police arrest a man driving 80 miles per hour and using emergency lights and a siren after he initially tells them he’s rushing a friend to the hospital. He finally admits to  playing a police siren app from his Android phone through his car’s speakers.

Sponsor Updates

• Orion Health will incorporate its Rhapsody Integration Engine into Novari’s Access to Care solution, which integrates physician offices with hospital IT systems for online appointment scheduling and automated reporting of wait times.
• Impact Advisors principal Laura Kreofsky discusses the use of social media to drive patient engagement.
• Beacon Partners is conducting a survey on ACO experience.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Monday Morning Update 5/27/13

From HIPAA Faxing: “Re: HIPAA rules. Our esteemed EMR vendor wants $20,000 to connect each lab. The lab wants $19,990 to connect their side (funny how they charge the same). That’s $40,000 per lab connection and we use 17 labs and can’t afford that, so we use a fax server. What are the HIPAA rules around faxing? What do we need to do?” Experts, here’s your chance to contribute.

From Delta Don: “Re: Philips iSite. I’ve never seen anything like the disaster of the iSite 3.6 to Intellispace 4.4 upgrade. System and functional instability have pushed the go-live date back three times. It’s now six months late with new issues every day, but Philips personnel are enjoying their extra-long Memorial Day weekend. With vendor-neutral archives making migration among PACS vendors more feasible, you’d think there would be more effort. I won’t even start on the product name when we still have users calling it Stentor.”

Respondents weren’t overly impressed by the value to the public of the Medicare pricing information released by CMS. New poll to your right, as suggested by a reader: should Meaningful Use be ended after Stage 3 or continued? You’ll get a link to add your comments after voting, so you might as well expound on your position.

Photo: Pete Marovich/EPA

Monday is Memorial Day, set aside to honor those one million US Armed Forces members who died while serving. Their sacrifice allows you the luxury to decline to fly the flag, visit a military cemetery, or think about those who made the ultimate sacrifice on your behalf. That’s not to say it wouldn’t be nice to do it voluntarily. 

I impulsively bought Mrs. HIStalk a Google Nexus 7 tablet when I went to the office supply store to get several packs of the index cards I like to write on since she’s computer-averse and always gets my hand-me-down laptops. My initial assessment of the $199 device is that it’s very nice, in some ways better (sharper display) and some not as good (fewer apps) as the iPad mini, but at just 60 percent of the mini’s price, it’s a much better deal. Don’t buy it yet, though – an upgrade is imminent that will add greatly enhanced video.

From the Cerner shareholder/analyst call:

• Neal Patterson was not only on the call, which is rare, but he actually chaired it and reminisced a bit with good humor about the company’s origins. Fellow founder Cliff Illig was on, which I don’t recall ever happening.
• The company says the number of physicians using its ambulatory products doubled to 45,000 in the past two years.
• EVP Zane Burke says Cerner’s competitors are no longer other EMR vendors, but rather companies involved in insurance and big data.
• Responding to an shareholder’s question about Epic, Neal Patterson said, “They like to say they don’t have shareholders. I’d like to point out to the reality that they do actually have shareholders, it’s basically almost a single individual. And they also point out the fact that in this country, you can’t pass on an ongoing operation … our plans are to take away their advantages and make our strengths stronger and make their strengths weaker on a relative basis … we’re the most innovative company in this industry, we have always been.”

Jamie Stockton with Wells Fargo Securities sliced and diced CMS’s hospital EHR attestation database to find that 7 percent of hospitals that qualified for Year 1 incentives didn’t attest with the same vendor in Year 2. The interpretation was that the Year 2 incentives, which required participation for a full year, were too difficult for some hospitals to meet. The worst-performing vendor was McKesson, which saw its attestations drop off from 10.5 in Year 1 to 6.5 in Year 2, a 38 percent washout rate of an awfully low starting number.

Allscripts adds two board members that include former Epic CFO Anita Pramoda, who left Epic in 2012 and founded senior PHR vendor TangramCare.

Allscripts files a lawsuit against its landlord, Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, claiming its lease was violated by allowing excessive noise in renovating five floors just below the Allscripts offices for new (and largest) tenant Google. Allscripts is demanding that the Merchandise Mart stop using nail guns and pneumatic hammers during business hours.

Ed Marx posted an update to his most recent CIO Unplugged about a salesperson who hijacked Ed’s presentation with an overwrought sales pitch disguised as a post-presentation question. I’ll side with Ed. As much as salespeople have been educated (or brainwashed) to believe that their particular hammer is appropriate for any nail, I don’t think it’s acceptable to harass a speaker and audience just because they perceive that nobody’s returning their cold calls. Whatever happened to respecting the prospect enough to let them decide what products and services they want to consider and how they would like to evaluate them?

A New York Times piece by Tom Friedman says that Obamacare, the HITECH program, and HHS’s release of its databases has created a healthcare Silicone Valley that may improve care and lower costs because of the availability of information. Friedman spoke to a family doctor who thought she was giving appropriate colorectal cancer screening recommendations until her EHR showed only 43 percent of her patients had actually received the screening. Adding EHR alerts raised the number to 90 percent, leading to early cancer detection in three patients, which was obviously good for the patients but also for healthcare spending since early-stage treatment costs less. White House CTO Todd Park bragged on entrepreneurs who developed apps around HHS’s databases and kicked off a health data industry. Friedman met with Eviti, Teladoc, Humedica, and Lumeris.

The White House Blog brags on EHR adoption, crediting the President who spent the money rather than the taxpayers who provided it.

Two people with no transportation experience are named finalists for the position of interim director of the Capital Area Transit System (LA.) One of them is Bob Mirabito, former CIO of Baton Rouge Radiology Group, who says his position was eliminated last year and he needs a job.

The Canadian government revokes the passport of a Quebec doctor who is of defrauding US Medicare of $375 million by submitting phony claims for homeless patients when he was practicing in Texas.

Weird News Andy says he has printing on the brain after reading that 3D printing allows replacing 75 percent of a person’s missing skull.

Vince continues with the very interesting HIS-tory of Allscripts.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 5/24/13

Top News

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel tells the DoD that he supports the use of commercial software to replace the department’s AHLTA EHR rather than switching to the VA’s VistA platform as he previously hinted was his preference. The DoD says it has identified 20 commercial software vendors capable of meeting its EHR needs. You’d have to bet on Epic given that it’s outselling everybody in big hospitals, they were allegedly the DoD frontrunner in 2010, and the Wisconsin Congressional delegation was squeezing the federal government to choose Epic awhile back (and not to mention that there are nowhere near 20 serious players to choose from.) On the other hand, DoD loves throwing billions at the fat cat contractors and Epic might not want to work through them.

Reader Comments

From Lil Wayne: “Re: Practice Fusion. Does anyone buy into their claim of having 30 percent of the primary care market? Seems beyond ludicrous.” I’m always curious about their methodology for counting actual users vs. someone who signs up with minimal usage. I would also be interested in seeing audited user statistics. Practice Fusion isn’t in the top five vendors by Meaningful Use attestation as I recall, in the low single digit percentages of all attesting providers.

From Stephanie: “Re: certification. If I already have a certified completed EHR and use another vendor’s patient portal within the HIE, does my patient portal also need to be certified? I’m just placing patient documents out in the portal for patients to view.” I know Frank Poggio will answer if nobody else does.

From Sleepless Fax Server Administrator: “Re: HITECH modifications to HIPAA. Will add risk to faxing or mailing results. There is a 100 percent chance of a violation when a provider changes practices since no healthcare IT system can determine the right address or fax number based on the date the patient was seen – they always use the current information. Even if you solved that problem, how would any system know if the patient followed the provider to the new practice? Also, critical radiology results are required by regulation to be faxed within 24 hours.”

From Major Tom: “Re: conference. Thought you would enjoy this e-mail.” A promoter pitches their conference as offering “peer-to-beer” knowledge exchange, creating mental images of sullen, bar-perched attendees mumbling into their mugs.

From Non-Sequitur: “Re: RAC recoveries hit $1.37 billion. Forwarding a synopsis from Wolters Kluwer. You are still the brightest spot in many of my mornings!” Thanks, milady, that’s sweet of you to say. The article says RACs collected $1.371 billion in Medicare overpayments and returned $65.4 million in underpayments in the first six months of FY2013 (obviously like with the IRS, your odds of an unexpected refund aren’t so good when the RACs come knocking). The current major issue is documentation for cardiovascular procedures.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: Superchunk, possibly the best and most prolific indie band in history. I’ve played all 15 of their albums on Spotify and it’s a stunning body of influential work spanning almost 25 years. A new album will be out in August and a tour follows.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Online medical consult provider ConsultingMD secures $10 million in funding from Venrock.

Quality Systems reports Q4 results: revenue up 2 percent, EPS –$0.07 vs. $0.25, missing on both.

From the Quality Systems earnings call:

• Poor performance in the company’s Hospital Solutions Division (a $4.2 million loss on $4.5 million revenue) will require investments in development, implementation,and support.
• Steve Puckett will be moved from Hospital Solutions to CTO and COO/EVP Daniel J. Morefield will take over Hospital Solutions.
• In a “what were they doing before?” moment, the company said it has “aligned our marketing team with our overall revenue objectives and shift and focus to increasing product demand and lead creation,”
• To an analyst’s question about implementation margins of zero percent, the CFO’s response was, “There’s a number of factors, but I think hospital certainly is. I think we’ve already been talking about the — some of the challenges that we’ve been — that we’ve had there and that certainly impacted the profitability on that particular revenue category. I think — so it gets a little hard to generalize. On the ambulatory side, we’ve got — but I’ll let you — you ought to know, though, that certainly it’s not something — we are paying attention to it and we do intend to drive higher margin there in that space. We have — we are in some — having some transition in the ambulatory world … the full expectation is, for us, it’s going — going forward is to drive a higher level of profitability on that revenue category.”
• The company declined to give dates for a SaaS product, saying it will focus on the current product.
• The company expects a move back to larger EMR vendors as the small ones fail trying to keep up with Meaningful Use and ICD-10.
• They expect more government programs to follow the DoD’s apparent lead in moving to commercial software, with vendors scrambling to get their GSA status.

Sales

East Lansing Orthopedic Association (MI) selects SRS EHR.

Conway Medical Center (SC) chooses StrataJazz from Strata Decision Technology for decision support, budgeting, and capital planning.

People

The New Jersey chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization and the Star-Ledger/NJ.com name SRS CEO Evan Steele the winner of the Garden State Entrepreneur Excellence Award in the $10M+ category.

TeleTracking Technologies hires Nanne Finis (Joint Commission Resources) as VP of consulting services.

Yousuf Ahmad, who will take over as CEO of Mercy Hospital (OH), is profiled in the local business paper because of an earlier position as CIO of Mercy Health Partners. Interestingly, he attended University of London on a cricket scholarship, graduated at 19, and is ranked among the world’s 400 best Scrabble players.

Announcements and Implementations

Cerner’s PowerChart Touch mobile solution earns a bronze award for Best Clinical Health Care Experience at the 2013 International User Experience Awards.

All of Maine’s 38 acute-care hospitals and 376 ambulatory provider sites have agreed to participate in the state’s HIE, operated by HealthInfoNet.

Holy Family Memorial Health Network (WI), Johnson Memorial Hospital (IN), and United General Hospital (WA) implement Hyland Software’s OnBase enterprise content management platform integrated with their Meditech systems.

Government and Politics

Idaho State University will pay $400,000 to settle alleged HIPAA violations stemming from a breach of unsecured data on 17,500 patients from an ISU family medicine clinic. The university notified HHS of the breach upon realizing that a disabled firewall had left patient data unsecured for at least 10 months.

HHS reports that 55 percent of all EPs and and 80 percent of eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals have been paid MU incentives through the end of April. HHS had established a goal for 50 percent of EPs and 80 percent of hospitals to have EHRs by the end of 2013.

North Carolina’s state auditor finds that the state’s DHHS hasn’t overseen the implementation of its new $484 million Medicaid claims system properly, making it likely it will not be ready by the scheduled go-live in 40 days. CSC developed the system, which was written in COBOL by programmers from India copying code the company developed for a similar system in New York, and previous audits found poor documentation and unauthorized changes. DHHS allowed CSC to develop the acceptance criteria for its own project. The system was supposed to go live in August 2011 at a cost of $265 million. The state had already cancelled a 2003 contract with ACS saying their system wasn’t working before hiring CSC. Residents of other states are on the hook since the federal government is covering  90 percent of the development costs and at least 50 percent of the ongoing operational costs. Nothing good has ever come from combining state and federal governments, taxpayer money, contractors, and ambitious computer system plans.

Innovation and Research

Intermountain Healthcare announces a system that will track cumulative radiation exposure from higher-dose imaging exams and report it via the EMR.

Other

The County of Monroe Industrial Development Agency (NY) approves $369,359 in tax exemptions for eHealth Technologies, which is building a $4 million, 36,000 square-foot facility and is planning to add 60 jobs over the next three years.

Via Christi Health (KS) blames lower than anticipated revenues for its decision to lay off up to 400 staff members — about four percent of its workforce — across the state by the end of June.

Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, known for writing screamingly partisan books such as Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies sets her sights for the second time on Epic’s Judy Faulkner in an article titled “The Obama crony in charge of your medical records.” She also weighs in that HITECH is “government malpractice at work;” calls out Epic and not its competitors for having “enhanced power to consolidate and control Americans’ private health information” (missing the point that only Cerner runs a profitable business unit that sells de-identified data from the hospital systems it hosts); and accuses the President of choosing Faulkner as the vendor representative on the HIT Policy Committee because of partisan politics (“the foxes are guarding the Obamacare henhouse.”) It’s a safe bet due to partisanship on both ends of the political spectrum that anyone who follows her faithfully believes every word, and anyone who doesn’t wouldn’t believe even one.

In Detroit, Henry Ford and Beaumont call off their merger plans, with the unstated sticking points apparently being cultural differences, disagreements over keeping both academic medical centers, and the unwillingness of Beaumont’s independent physicians to work with Henry Ford’s management.  

All you need to know about the inevitable demise of most HIEs once the government grant trough has been lapped dry is contained in this story. The squabbling CEOs of two Kansas HIEs  force the state’s lame duck HIE regulatory body to pass a resolution preventing them from trying to charge each other connection fees. KHIN and LACIE are required to connect their networks by July, but KHIN demanded that LACIE pay it a fee. The date has been moved back to December, and meanwhile the regulatory board – KHIE – will turn over its responsibilities to the state’s Department of Health and Environment on July 1 in a cost-cutting move. The dialog from the May 9 meeting:

[KHIN CEO] "If we give that data to another (network) they will have a competitive advantage, if we give it to them for free. We know that LACIE knows this — they’ve been out talking to providers all across the state of Kansas saying ‘If you join LACIE you can join at a lower fee, and you’ll get all of KHIN’s data for free.”

[LACIE CEO] That’s untrue, Laura. That’s absolutely untrue and we’ve told you it’s untrue. I’m sorry, Mr. Chair but that is an absolute lie.”

A University of Florida study finds that ED employees spend 12 minutes per hour on Facebook, and strangely enough their usage increases with ED patient volume and severity. On the other hand, it was a one-hospital study covering a 15-day period in late 2009 covering mostly the time between Christmas and New Year’s, so the method isn’t convincing.

A Pennsylvania judge orders the hiring of a forensic examiner to review the Facebook page of a woman who claims she slipped and fell due to a puddle of liquid on the floor of Lancaster Regional Medical Center. The woman claims she suffered serious injuries and can’t afford the surgery; the hospital found Facebook pictures and videos from up to 17 days after the accident after showing her frolicking in the snow.

Sponsor Updates

• Greenway Medical announces the availability of its PrimeMOBILE mobile access solution for Windows 8.
• Biilian’s HealthDATA posts a list of the 10 hospitals claiming the most in outpatient charges, according to expense report data published by CMS.
• Liaison Healthcare launches Healthcare Terminology Manager and Healthcare Terminology Translation to facilitate the management of diverse controlled medical vocabularies for simplified data exchange.
• Park Place International will market Interbit Data’s disaster recovery and business continuance software solutions to its customers implementing Meditech.
• Levi, Ray & Shoup introduces MFPsecure, a line of hardware and software aimed at the pull printing and secure document delivery markets.
• Ping Identity announces details of the workshops at its Cloud Identity Summit 2013, which takes place July 8-12 in Napa, CA.
• The Boston Globe names Keane, Inc., now part of NTT Data, to its Globe 100 Hall of Fame in recognition of the company’s 25 years as a top-performing company in Massachusetts.
• Visage Imaging releases Visage Ease version 1.3.0, which gives authorized healthcare providers mobile access to imaging results on iOS devices.
• Care Team Connect hosts a July 10 Webinar on readmission prevention.
• EClinicalWorks CEO Girish Kumar Navani discusses the company’s latest projects and offers his perspective on where healthcare is headed and IT’s role in healthcare transformation.  
• Greenway Medical customer Texas Orthopedics shares how its use of PrimeMOBILE has improved patient care and increased efficiency, productivity, and profitability.
• INHS highlights the SHMC Pediatric Oncology clinic and its use of online status boards to cut patient wait times.
• Encore Health Resources posts a YouTube video featuring CEO Dana Sellers participating in a discussion on EHRs and analytics.
• Emdeon CEO George Lazenby shares his secrets to innovation and growth.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

From Anotherdrgregg: “Re: your recent piece on gimmicks. Preparing for our EMR, we looked at all our diets, some 30 in all, including the oddly named ‘anti-atherogenic diet.’ We reduced the number of diets to four, not including bariatric diets. The reasoning was that if you could hold it down, you were probably going to be discharged home. Administration nodded sagely, then went ahead with diet on demand complete with special breakfasts and a chef in a toque. Now they want to know why utilization is not high.” Any reader who can use the word “toque” gets my vote. He went on to list other frivolous hospital expenditures: flat screen TVs, real oak moldings on the doors, and carpets so thick that you can’t roll a gurney on them. He closed with this thought: “The finest hospital I ever worked at had painted cinderblock walls. it was a forward operating base.”

Hard to believe it’s almost June. In CMS terms, that means barely more than a month before Eligible Hospitals in the first year of Meaningful Use run out of time to begin the reporting period for Fiscal Year 2013. If you don’t start your reporting period by July 3, you’re out of luck as the federal fiscal year ends September 30.

Reuters Health reports that many health Web sites are too complicated and full of jargon, leading to confusion for patients. Instead of the fourth to sixth grade reading level recommended by the American Medical Association and the Department of Health and Human Services, the average reading level of online materials studied ranged from high school to college. Reviewers also found information that was oversimplified to the point of inaccuracy and large numbers of clichés at some specialty sites.

Scientists have often debated whether white coats and neckties spread germs. Unfortunately for fashionistas like Inga, handbags are now under scrutiny. Twenty percent of handbags studied had levels of bacteria high enough to cross-contaminate other surfaces. I wonder if the findings would also apply to brief cases or laptop bags?

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 5/22/13

Top News

Healthland acquires post-acute care software vendor American HealthTech of Jackson, MS.

Reader Comments

From Dortlund: “Re: GE Healthcare. Charging a premium on top of annual maintenance for MU Stage 2 and ICD-10.” Not to mention spelling “after hours” as “afterhours” for some reason.

From CMIO: “Re: clinical informatics exam. I applied, paid, and took a board prep course and plan to take the practice test this summer. I did not do a fellowship, but I want to be on the inaugural class of the new board based on three years as CMIO. It is worth it for me, as this is my career and this is my credential.”

From NoLongerPhamis: “I LOVED the last Slideshare about GEHC/IDX. Almost fell out of my chair laughing. The part about seamless integration of marketing materials was spot on. I was there.” This was in a recent episode of Vince Ciotti’s HIS-tory.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare consulting firm Information Resources Associates, Inc. merges with ESD.

Virtual visit technology vendor ConsultingMD raises $10 million in funding from Venrock.

Pittsburgh-based wound care EHR vendor Net Health acquires Integritas, which offers EMR/PM solutions for urgent care, occupational health, and hospital employee health. 

Quality Systems, Inc. investor and board member Ahmed Hussein, mostly known for criticizing his fellow board members and launching proxy fights in an attempt to take control of the company, resigns. He owns more than $100 million in QSII shares.

Sales

Orange Accountable Care, a subsidiary of Orange Health Solutions, will deploy Sandlot Care Manager, Sandlot Dimensions, and Sandlot Metrix.

Wellmont Health System (TN) expands its relationship with MModal to include MModal Fluency Direct and Fluency for Imaging as its clinical documentation platforms.

St. Joseph’s Imaging (NY) selects Merge Healthcare’s Outpatient Radiology Suite.

The ERx Group, a staffing provider for rural acute care and critical access facilities, will use T-System’s clinical, financial, and operational technology and services.

Southeast Alabama Medical Center selects Besler Consulting to assist in the identification of Medicare Transfer DRG underpayments.

Western Maryland Health System (MD) will use Dimensional Insight’s business intelligence solution, The Diver Solution.

People

Long-term care EHR provider MatrixCare names Denise Wassenaar (Alliance Pharmacy Services) chief clinical officer.

Imprivata, expecting to go public within two years according to its CEO, names John Halamka, MD (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) and former Phase Forward CFO Rodger Weismann to its board.

Stoltenberg Consulting appoints Douglas Herr (maxIT Healthcare) VP of Epic practice and client relations.

Announcements and Implementations

Peak Health Solutions partners with ChartWise to offer a solution that includes Peak’s clinical document improvement consulting and education program and ChartWise’s CDI software.

Stillwater Medical Center (OK) integrates its Philips IntelliVue patient monitors and Meditech ED management solution using the Accelero Connect healthcare integration platform from Accent on Integration.

North Shore-LIJ Health System adds cameras in operating rooms at its Forest Hills Hospital (NY) to remotely audit surgical teams for performing timeouts prior to procedures and to alert hospital cleaning crews when a surgery is nearing completion.

Fox Business News is running a week-long series called “How Private are Your Medical Records?” on “The Willis Report.” Monday’s episode featured Deborah Peel, MD of Patient Privacy Rights and Mark Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Covenant Health (TX) and MemorialCare Health System (CA) are named winners of the 2013 Crimson Physician Partnership Awards presented by The Advisory Board Company, saving a combined $20 million by presenting comparative performance information to their physicians.

CampDoc.com releases an electronic medication administration record module for its summer camp EHR.

Government and Politics

The Consumer Partnership for eHealth and the Campaign for Better Care submit a letter to the six Republican senators who last month questioned whether the implementation of the HITECH Act was money well spent. The consumer groups argue that MU is working and that delaying Stage 2 implementation and Stage 3 rulemaking will be detrimental to patients, will stifle innovation, and will delay progress towards interoperability.

CMS posts the 2014 ICD-10-PCS files, including code tables, index, and coding guidelines. CMS notes that the FY 2014 ICD-9-CM diagnosis codes will not be updated.

ONC posts positions (1, 2) for medical officer reporting to the Office of the Chief Medical Officer.

Twila Brase, RN, president and co-founder of Citizen’s Council for Health Freedom, says EHRs are burdensome and inaccurate, adding that they are turning doctors into data clerks. She adds, “Documenting a full clinical encounter in an EHR from scratch can be pure torment. The full chart doesn’t fit on the computer screen. Each element is selected by a series of clicks, double-clicks, or even triple-clicks of a mouse button. Hunting, clicking, and scrolling just to complete a simple history and physical exam is a tedious and time-wasting experience."

A Health Innovation Council commentary article says HITECH is causing, “A massive disruption of providers’ patient care focus as they chase Meaningful Use dollars; increased burdens on physicians, nurses and clinicians since EHRs as currently designed require more, not less, of their time and effort; and an unprecedentedly huge expenditure by providers on EHR hardware and software at a time when providers are under severe financial pressures.” The group recommends that the HITECH program either be redesigned to emphasize patient care, safety, and efficiency or be shut down completely and spend what’s left of the money on rewarding provider care improvement by whatever means they choose.  What is minimally noted in the press release is that the Health Innovation Council was formed and is run by Anthelio Healthcare, the former PHNS, a healthcare IT consulting services vendor.

In the UK, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt announces creation of a $400 million fund to help hospitals with the cost of replacing paper-based clinical documentation and prescribing with electronic systems.

Other

MyMedicalRecords.com files another patent lawsuit, this time against the recent Allscripts acquisition Jardogs. The complaint states that the FollowMyHealth Universal Health Record infringes on MMR’s personal health record patents.

LSU Health Shreveport (LA) and Siemens Healthcare inform 8,330 patients of an unintentional disclosure of PHI  stemming from an error in a computer data entry field. LSU and Siemens, which prints and mails bills on behalf of LSU Health physicians, have now identified and corrected the error that caused the names and treatment information for one patient to incorrectly align with another patient’s mailing address.

Palomar Pomerado Health CMIO Ben Kanter, MD presented A Darwinian View of the Electronic Medical Record at a HIMSS SoCal meeting.

UPMC will outsource its transcription services to its development partner Nuance at the end of June, laying off 100 transcriptionists who have been offered jobs by Nuance.

Moore Medical Center (OK) is destroyed by a 200 mph tornado, but the 30 patients housed in the 46-bed hospital all survived, as did all of the hospital’s employees.

A Silicon Valley newspaper editorial lauds the $220 million Epic implementation at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center (CA), saying it will improve billing efficiency and quality of care, also avoiding the 1 percent Medicare penalty and instead reaping $11 million in HITECH funds.  

Weird News Andy says he’ll take one today if it can help find his car keys. A New York Times article says helper robots will be used to help care for the elderly.

Sponsor Updates

• ISirona employees participate in the Emerald Coast Mud Run benefiting Heart of the Bride, which supports orphans around the world.
• Valence Health offers a May 29 Webinar in its monthly series called Care Coordination and Patient Outcomes: Utilize Innovative Automated Population Health Solutions.
• DocuTrac, a provider of EMR technology for behavioral health, will add DrFirst’s e-prescribing technology into its QuicDoc EMR Professional and Enterprise edition software.
• An Imprivata-commissioned survey of Canadian HIT executives reveals key barriers for clinicians when accessing patient data, including a lack of systems integration, privacy and security concerns, and slow access.
• McKesson’s Horizon Lab 13.5 becomes for the first LIS to receive EHR Module certification for MU Stage 2.
• Ingenious Med updates its impowermobile charge capture software to include the ability to create a virtual superbill at the point of care.
• Greenway Medical adds ClientTell’s ReminderManager patient communications solution to its Online Marketplace as a certified API solution for the PrimeSUITE platform.
• DirectTrust.org and EHNAC extend accreditation to ICA under its Direct Trusted Agent Accreditation Program.
• IHT2 hosts Health IT Summit Denver July 24-25.
• In a GetWellNetwork-sponsored Webinar May 29, administrators from Hasbro Children’s Hospital (RI) share details of how it improved patient satisfaction and workflow by joining patient-centered care technology with a meal ordering system at the bedside.
• Kareo posts a Webinar that answers the top six Stage 2 MU questions and offers three reasons to check out CMS eHealth.
• Several HIStalk sponsors earn a spot on the Informatics 2013 Top HCI 100 list, including 3M, ADP AdvancedMD, Allscripts, API Healthcare, Beacon Partners, Capario, CareTech Solutions, Covisint, Craneware, CTG, Cumberland Consulting Group, eClinicalWorks, Elsevier, Emdeon, ESD, GE Healthcare, Greenway, Iatric Systems, Impact Advisors, Infor, Intellect Resources, MModal, McKesson, MedAssets, Medseek, Merge, NextGen, NTT DATA, Nuance, Optum, Orion, Passport Health, Philips Healthcare, Siemens Healthcare, Sunquest Information Systems, Surgical Information Systems, T-System, TeleTracking Technologies, TELUS Health Solutions, The Advisory Board Company, The SSI Group, Vitera Healthcare Solutions, Vocera Communications, Wolters Kluwer Health, and ZirMed. Porter Research submitted, compiled, and reviewed sales figures to create the list.
• The Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies recognizes InstaMed  as its Technology Growth Company winner and Halfpenny Technologies a Life Science Growth Company finalist at the Alliance’s 2013 Enterprise Awards.
• Imprivata launches a migration program that enables customers using the Citrix SSO feature to migrate to Imprivata OneSign SSO. Also, Imprivata participates in a breakout session on desktop virtualization and SSO at this week’s Citrix Synergy conference in California.
• Emdat profiles Illinois Bone and Joint Institute, which realized a 50 percent year-over-year cost savings in documentation and correspondence costs using Emdat alongside its EMR.
• Beacon Partners hosts a May 31 Webinar integrating business intelligence and analytics through the healthcare enterprise and offers a white paper on why risk assessments help reduce an organization’s risk of a data breach.
• Awarepoint’s RTLS platform will be featured in an industry-wide interoperability demonstration at the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation 2013 Conference and Expo June 1-3 in Long Beach, CA.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Monday Morning Update 5/20/13

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Microsoft’s updated BAA. Microsoft has released an update for its Business Associate Agreement to encompass more secure communications tools for HIPAA compliance. The changes provide for healthcare organizations to leverage cloud solutions to improve clinician productivity, care team communication, and care transition coordination while maintaining compliance with the recently updated Omnibus HIPAA Final Rules.”

From Laboratorian: “Re: University of Michigan. Goes live June 1 with a massive IT rollout. This includes a new Epic (Denali) implementation and a completely new LIS, an experimental version of SCC-Soft being used at U-M for the first time. The LIS rollout, in particular, is particularly audacious in scope, being the culmination of a seven-year implementation cycle. Barcode-based tracking of both tubes and surgical pathology specimens will be on par with the level of automation seen at BML labs in Japan. The spatial location of every asset in lab space will be tracked in real time. The project benefitted from co-development of code with support from U-M’s own software engineering teams. Nearly 2.5 million lines of new code above base SCC product will drive this new version.” SCC is often forgotten as maybe the leading LIS vendor for big health systems, and writing 2.5 million lines of new code is just crazy. Obviously Beaker wasn’t going to do the job for UM, although it’s improving to the point that some larger Epic customers are cautiously committing to it.

More than two-thirds of respondents think that Meaningful Use Stage 2 should be extended for a year before starting Stage 3. New poll to your right: CMS released hospital Medicare pricing information for the top 100 DRGs. How valuable is that information to the public?

Jamie Stockton of Wells Fargo Advisors sent over his monthly summary of hospital EHR attestations by vendor. Customers of the big multi-national corporations whose business is mostly not healthcare IT (McKesson, Siemens, and GE) are the clear laggards.

Just in case you are wondering what it would be like to have HIMSS darling and cardiologist Eric Topol, MD as your doctor, ponder this quote from an NBC fluff piece from January that I just ran across: “These days I’m actually prescribing a lot more apps than I am medications.” He claims that up to 80 percent of the 20 million echocardiograms performed each year could be replaced by in-office smart phone tests, saving the healthcare system $13 billion per year. In a stunning piece of investigative journalism, the on-camera talking head (also a doctor) who has clearly performed her research convinces him to eat tortilla chips and goads him into saying positive things about his own books and devices.

EHR vendor Mitochon Systems notifies its customers that it will shut down its free cloud-based EHR service in mid-June. The company isn’t sure how doctors will retrieve the data they’ve entered on patients before the system is turned off, but says it will come up with something.

Data visualization software vendor Tableau Software, whose product is popular in healthcare, raised $254 million in its Friday IPO as shares soared 64 percent. I’ve played around with it a couple of times and it’s pretty cool – there’s a free trial download on the site.

Sheila Sanders, VP/CIO of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center (NC), will step down effective May 31. The hospital says she’s leaving the $465K job for personal reasons that are unrelated to its struggles with Epic.

CareWire names advisors Ken Saitow and Phil Hotchkiss as president/CEO and EVP/chief product officer, respectively.

Encore Health Resources CEO Dana Sellers was recognized Friday, May 17 as a Distinguished Engineering Alumna by the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. She was also named Friday as a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the second consecutive year.

James Holtzman is promoted from CFO to CEO of Prognosis Health Information Systems.

Terry Boch (JET Health Solutions) joins Wellcentive as SVP of sales and marketing.

Susan K. Newbold PhD, RN-BC, director of Nursing Informatics Boot Camp, is selected as one of the 2013 “Women to Watch” by the Nashville Medical News.

MD Anderson, which just announced Epic as vendor of choice, will freeze wages, cut back on hiring, and postpone construction projects, hoping to offset an anticipated 2014 financial shortfall that it blames on the federal government (the Affordable Care Act, the budget sequester, and federal deficits) even though its rapidly increasing operating expenses seem to be its primary problem.

A controversial decision by Britain’s NHS allows life sciences and insurance companies to buy access NHS’s patient-identifiable data (“bespoke patient-level abstracts), even providing companies with an Excel worksheet to calculate their cost.

Partners HealthCare System (MA) made a $133 million profit in the latest quarter even after it took a $110 million accounting charge to write off computer systems slated for replacement. Most of that came from investment income, as operating income dropped from $41 million last year to $5 million.

Vince covers Part 1 of the HIS-tory of Allscripts this week (more specifically, TDS, which passed through many hands before landing in the Allscripts lap via its acquisition of Eclipsys.) Vince also scored a major coup for upcoming episodes – he e-mailed Judy Faulkner at Epic and asked if could talk with her about the company and she invited him to meet with her in Verona, which he did last week and is still gushing about. Those are going to be some great HIS-tory installments.

Sponsor Updates

• Carl Fleming of Impact Advisors raised $6,000 for St. Baldrick’s Foundation by having his head shaved at Impact Palooza 2013.
• Sunquest Laboratory v 7.0.1003 is certified as an EHR module by CCHIT.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 5/17/13

Top News

The House Appropriations Committee approves $344 million in development funds for an integrated EHR for the VA and DoD, but mandates that no funds be expended on any EHR unless it is an open architecture system that serves both agencies.

Reader Comments

From Stifler’s Mom: “Re: Marin General Hospital. Nurses warn that the new computer system is causing errors.” A dozen unionized Marin General nurses attend the healthcare district’s board meeting to ask hospital administration to put the McKesson Paragon implementation on hold, claiming orders are being entered on the wrong patients, patients have been given meds to which they are allergic, and discharges and surgical prep are taking two hours.

From Carolyn: “Re: first HIStalk Webinar with HTTS. Will the recording be made available for those of us who could not attend the live session?” The recorded Webinar, “Vendor Software Training: What Providers Should Demand” is available for anyone to view here and a PDF of the slides is here. Everyone who registered will get an e-mail with these links, along with those to the HTTS-developed forms mentioned in the presentation (the Software Vendor Training Checklist and Sample Evaluation Form.)

From Horizon Consultant: “Re: Bayhealth – Milford Memorial Hospital. Went live on Horizon Expert Orders full house with physicians this week, with few problems.”

From Acorn: “Re: Maine Medical problems. Their Epic project is over budget by some unidentified amount, but will be high 8-9 digits, more than member hospital boards signed up for. Rollouts that were expected to conclude in 2013 are on hold until Maine Medical Center is stabilized – 2015 maybe? MaineHealth’s mouthpiece said training was not an issue, but I respectfully disagree. Insufficient engagement at all levels and all phases has been at the root of problems.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

This week’s highlights from HIStalk Practice include: the AMA looks at how patient-physician communication is affected by the use of computers in the exam room. INTEGRIS Health (OK) contracts with athenahealth for athenacollector and other products. Doctor office visits fell in 2012 while patients’ out-of-pocket costs jumped 30 percent. Primary care providers beat specialists in generating money for hospitals. The AMA does not recommend jumping directly from ICD-9 to ICD-11.  Make the world a happier place (at least my world) and sign up for e-mail updates when you check out the HIStalk Practice news. Thanks for reading.

Nuance CMIO Nick Terheyden tweets out another fun photo as he carries the HIStalk logo on his travels, this time with HIMSS President and CEO Steve Lieber from the stage of the Arkansas HIMSS Chapter meeting. Take along a printed logo or your iPad and snap and e-mail a photo from somewhere fun and I’ll run it here. We’ve seen photos from London and Dubai previously, so it’s your turn.

I’m behind on almost everything, so be patient if you are expecting something from me. I was so exhausted Wednesday night after work that I literally fell asleep in the middle of typing HIStalk, so I’m struggling to keep up.

On the Jobs Board: Clinical Analyst, Marketing Communication Specialist. Sponsors post their jobs for free.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor, HCS (Health Care Software, Inc.) of Wall, NJ. Everybody likes stable vendors who aren’t just dabbling temporarily in healthcare, and HCS has been doing provider-only healthcare IT since 1969 (!!) The company’s INTERACTANT platform, an integrated suite of clinical and financial applications (revenue cycle, financials, EMR, mobile, and analysis) is meeting and exceeding the needs of all kinds of provider organizations (inpatient, outpatient, long term acute care, behavioral, and rehab). Check out their white papers (the best title: “Meaningful Use: Why Should Ineligible Providers Still Care?”) and case studies.  Thanks to HCS for supporting HIStalk.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The AMA reports a four percent decline in 2012 revenues from 2011, largely due to an 86 percent drop in advertising revenues and lower sales for printed coding books.  Membership was up over three percent, but net  operating profit fell 33 percent.

Sales

Port Huron Hospital (MI) signs a three-year contract with CareTech Solutions to use the iDoc Archive solution for storage of patient data as the hospital transitions to a new EHR.

Wilson Memorial Hospital (OH) chooses Access to integrate electronic patient signatures into Meditech and register patients electronically during downtime.

Trinitas Regional Medical Center (NJ) selects Dell’s Unified Clinical Archive solution to manage its clinical image archive.

The VA extends its contract with Authentidate for its Electronic House Call vital signs monitoring device and service and for the Interactive Voice Response System for remote patient monitoring.

People

MedeAnalytics names Andrew Hurd (Epocrates/Carefx) CEO, taking over for Mike Gallagher who will serve as executive chairman.

Jerry Baker (Halfpenny Technologies) joins HIT Application Solutions as president and CEO.

URAC appoints Kylanne Green (Inova Health System) president and CEO.

Streamline Health Solutions promotes Nicholas Meeks from VP of financial planning to SVP/CFO, taking over for the resigning Steve Murdock. Carolyn Zelnio (Aderant) also joins the company as VP/chief accounting officer.

Announcements and Implementations

HealthTech, parent company of HMS, MEDHOST, and Patient Logic, held a ribbon-cutting ceremony this past Wednesday to celebrate the opening of its new, larger headquarters in Franklin, TN. Participating were Allen Borden (assistant commissioner, Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development); Rogers Anderson (Williamson County mayor); Ken Moore, MD (City of Franklin mayor); Matt Largen (president and CEO, Williamson County Chamber of Commerce); Bill Anderson (president and CEO, HealthTech); Steve Starkey (president, HMS); and Craig Herrod (president, MEDHOST).

Encore Health Resources launches its health analytics consulting practice, which follows the company’s preference of "Smart Skinny Data” (using information from specific sources to focus on specific analysis needed) over “Big Data.” The practice will offer analytics strategy, tools selection, implementation, performance improvement, and data governance help.

New York eHealth Collaborative issues an RFP to develop a statewide health portal, just after declaring Mana Health’s design to be the winner earlier this week.

Patient Updater releases a new version of its HIPAA-compliant messaging platform that allows hospitals to keep the families of surgery patients informed.

Government and Politics

The Senate confirms Marilyn Tavenner as CMS administrator, making her the first CMS leader to be confirmed in over nine years.

CMS will spend up to $1 billion for the second round of the Health Care Innovation Awards to promote projects that test new payment models in support of better care and lower costs.

Eleven top government officials will speak at the 2013 Health Privacy Summit, June 5-6 in Washington, DC, including Todd Park (White House), Joy Pritts (ONC), Leon Rodriguez (OCR/HHS), and David Muntz (ONC).

Innovation and Research

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick visits a digital health summit in Ireland to discuss collaboration between startup companies in their respective areas.

The wireless pill reminder bottle from AdhereTech wins the Healthcare Innovation World Cup.

Other

CareTech Solutions takes the top spot in a KLAS survey on IT outsourcing. Though many providers are pulling back on extensive IT outsourcing (EITO) in favor of partial IT outsourcing (PITO), EITO remains the most popular option for smaller hospitals.

The city government of Juneau, AK, which owns 57-bed Bartlett Regional Hospital, votes down an $8.5 million appropriation for a Cerner implementation the hospital has already signed for. The hospital CEO says the contract was signed before Quorum Health Resources left as facility managers and he’s not comfortable with the $1.155 million in annual maintenance costs on the $7.37 million capital purchase (15.7 percent per year). The hospital is hoping its contract has enough out clauses to convince Cerner to allow it to walk away as it seeks a less expensive system.

The deadline to submit proposals for educational content for HIMSS14 is June 3, or about 7 1/2 months before the actual conference. Interestingly, HIMSS suggests that proposed topics be “timely.” Interested speakers should consult their crystal balls before applying.

The federal government charges 89 people — including about 22 doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals in eight cities — with Medicare fraud schemes that totaled $223 million in false billings.

A New York medical practice exposes the personal information of thousands of its patients when a clerk mistakenly attaches an Excel worksheet to an e-mail being sent to 200 patients.

Weird News Andy offers a pithy headline for this story, “Time to eat cookies whilst on the rack,” but you’ll have to think to get it. British researchers find that body mass index (BMI) is a poorer predictor of life expectancy than the ratio of waist size to height. People with a ratio of 0.8, which would be 56-inch waist for a 5’10” man or woman, lived 17 years less on average, while keeping the ratio at 0.5 or less (a 35-inch waist in this example) was associated with reduced incidence of stroke, heart disease, and diabetes. The ratio works on children as young as five, the researchers say.

Sponsor Updates

• OB leaders at MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center (MD) describe PeriGen’s EHR, surveillance, and decision support system that supports healthier babies and mothers on “Today in America.”
• T-System posts a video explaining how its system benefits ED patients and clinicians.
• e-MDs will offer analytics and dashboards to its customers via an agreement with dashboardMD.
• ReadyDock adds Complete Tablet Solutions as a reseller of its tablet management products.
• This week’s 2013 Truven Health Advantage Conference in Scottsdale, AZ featured keynote addresses by Gov. Howard Dean, MD; Sen. Bill Frist, MD; and David Newman, MD.
• Prognosis Health Information Systems discusses key considerations when changing EHRs. 
• SuccessEHS hosts a CEU-approved Webinar May 29 on ICD-10 changeover planning.
• The Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce recognizes Heathwise with its Healthcare Industry Excellence Award.
• Kareo posts a Webinar on the ins and outs of Stage 2 MU.
• Verisk Health hosts a May 29 Webinar featuring Bob Kay, senior data analyst with New Hampshire’s Granite Healthcare Network, who will discuss analytics for ACOs.
• Craneware offers Webinars May 22 and May 30 on best practices for improving financial performance.
• ChartWise Medical Systems CEO Jon Elion, MD discusses ethical practices in clinical documentation improvement on May 21 during the ACDIS Conference in Nashville.
• MedAssets customer Oconee Medical Center will share how it used the company’s technology and services to improve point-of-service collections at this week’s NAHAM conference in Atlanta.
• Finalists for Impact awards from the Technology Association of Georgia Southeastern Software Association include Billian’s HealthDATA (emerging mega trend and technology solutions provider) , McKesson (technology solutions provider), and NextGen (independent software vendor).

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

From Big G: “Re: sick or not sick. I have a story to mirror yours. There I was, a medical student rotating at a large, urban children’s hospital’s ER. I was getting my duties from the charge nurse (‘Don’t touch anything.’) Without breaking stride, looking out at the vast, screaming waiting room, surely my vision of Hell, she pointed to one kid, and said, ‘He’s next.’ 30 years on, that display of sick/not sick sticks with me. Meningitis. Thanks for sharing. We’ve all had those semi-scary moments where we’re amazed by someone’s psychic abilities. Thank goodness for seasoned warriors in the trenches.”

During a recent “listening session” with CMS officials, the AMA offered testimony on the issue of cloned documentation. Comments on usability and reconsideration of Stage 2 MU were also hot topics in the discussion.

What is it with endorsements on LinkedIn lately? In recent weeks I’ve been “endorsed” for skill sets that I don’t remotely possess. If nothing else, it’s good for some entertainment, and some of it makes me sound just the slightest bit cool.

The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) publishes the names of 112 people newly certified as Patient Centered Medical Home experts. Those certification is aimed to help providers assess the quality of those offering to assist practices through the PCMH process. I hope they were all aware that their e-mail and snail mail addresses were going to be published to the world.

Speaking of certifications, I’m interested to hear who plans to sit for the American Board of Preventive Medicine subspecialty board exam in clinical informatics. The online application for initial certification is live and late fees apply to any application submitted after June 1. The exam is already fairly pricey and the Board will offer a non-fellowship pathway for the first few years. It will be interesting to see how presence or absence of certification impacts the job market for physician informaticists. Have you registered? What did you think? E-mail me.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 5/15/13

Top News

Compuware subsidiary Covisint, whose healthcare business offers an HIE platform, files for a $100 million IPO.

Reader Comments

From Olga: “Re: identifying patients by driver’s in Texas. I think it’s a bit naïve to think that one can simply attach a card swipe solution to a provider’s registration system and everything will be good to go. Card swiping is only the first step of the registration process. The data captured from the card still need to be bounced up against the provider’s EMPI so that this service can determine if this is a new registration or if that individual already exists within the patient index that matches the demographic details on the ID card. The card swipe is really only part of the solution. It doesn’t solve issues around identity theft. That can be addressed only through two-factor authentication, maybe through the use of biometric devices like fingerprint or palm vein scans. I commend Texas with a step in the right direction, but this shouldn’t be classified as, ‘Whew! Solved that problem!’” I agree – lots of people get services under false pretenses by presenting someone else’s insurance card, and the link needs to be made to the hospital’s records in the absence of a national patient identifier. The only sensible solution would be that identifier plus biometrics, but you couldn’t get elected dogcatcher having your political opponent pounce on that perfectly sensible and fraud-detecting idea as government meddling.

From Passionate Radiologist: “Re: American College of Radiology. Launches Imaging 3.0 – Beyond Image Interpretation to keep rads in the forefront of patient care.” Imagine 3.0 is described as, “It includes a set of technology tools that equip 21st-century radiologists to ensure their key role in evolving health care delivery and payment models—and quality patient care. Imaging 3.0 is a call to action to all radiologists to take a leadership role in shaping America’s future health care system.” I would be interested in the opinions of radiologists about this initiative.

From KJ!: “Re: eHealth in Canada. Interesting article about funding cuts.” The federal government says Canada Health Infoway won’t be shut down despite the surprise decision not to give it new funding in 2013. The organization has already earmarked the $900 million it has received, the last of which was in 2010. The government says it needs to cut back on spending.

From Dr. Gregg: “Re: athenahealth. Have you guys seen CodeView?” I hadn’t seen it. Athenahealth’s CodeView is a billing code lookup that shows average reimbursement per per procedure for all insurance types as pulled from the company’s network.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Thanks to everyone involved in today’s first-ever HIStalk Webinar. We had good attendance and a nicely done presentation by Lorre and Shauna from Health Technology Training Solutions. Thanks to our moderator Jim and the CIOs who pre-screened the run-through with me and provided feedback that the presenters then incorporated into the final version. That’s how we’ll run Webinars going forward.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Printing management system vendor Levi Ray & Shoup will acquire Capella Technologies, which offers products for HP printers.

Sales

Ephraim McDowell Health (KY) expands its contract with HealthCare Anytime to include its entire patient portal suite.

Northeast Georgia Health System selects Isabel Healthcare to provide diagnosis decision support and patient engagement tools.

The Department of Defense will implement Mediware’s blood donor and transfusion software validation services in partnership with Planned Systems International.

Continuum HealthPartners (NY) selects Wellsoft’s EDIS for its four NYC-area EDs.

Griffin Hospital (CT) will implement Vree Health’s TransitionAdvantage service to help patients adhere to the hospital’s recommended post-discharge care plans and reduce preventable 30-day patient readmissions.

Texas State University selects eClinicalWorks EHR and Patient Portal and the Health & Online Wellness PHR smartphone app for its student health service.

Hartford HealthCare Corporation (CT) will implement the AccessAnyWay content management enterprise solution from Streamline Health Solutions.

Lehigh Valley Health Network (PA), White Plains Hospital (NY), and Laurens County Health Care System (SC) select the Good to Go discharge communication solution from ExperiaHealth, a subsidiary of Vocera Communications.

Bay Area Hospital (OR) will use Besler Consulting’s BVerified Screening and Verification solution to address CMS sanctions screening requirements.

Hanover Hospital (PA) choose Capsule’s DataCaptor for medical device integration with Meditech.

People

nTelagent names Lloyd Baker (Passport Health) regional VP of sales.

BizTimes Milwaukee names API Healthcare President and CEO J. P. Fingado winner of its 2013 Bravo! Entrepreneur Award.

Polycom CEO Andrew M. Miller joins Informatica’s board.

Telehealth provider Teladoc names Henry DePhillips, MD (Audax Health) CMO.

Convergent Revenue Cycle Management, Inc. appoints Greg Rassier (Rassier Consulting/Conifer Health Solutions) COO.

Intellect Resources names Dan Stoke (Allscripts) VP of client sales and service.

SeniorCare, a provider of analytics-driven prospective care solutions, appoints Joell Keim (Outcomes Health information Systems) president.

HealthMEDX hires Craig Frazier (Intuitive Medical Software/McKesson) as COO.

Matt Ebaugh (Kaiser Permanente) is named VP/CIO of Kings Daughters Health System (KY).

Announcements and Implementations

Strategic Health Intelligence of Pensacola and Atlantic Coast HIE of Miramar become the first providers to exchange patient information with the Florida HIE Patient Look-up Service developed by Harris Corporation.

NextGen Healthcare will integrate PDR Network’s drug information technology with the NextGen Ambulatory EHR platform.

St. Francis Memorial Hospital (NE) goes live on McKesson Paragon June 17.

LDM Group will provide its healthcare messaging solutions PhysicianCare and ScriptGuide to providers through DrFirst’s Rcopia e-prescribing solution and Patient Advisor patient education solution.

Community Memorial Health System (CA) begins deployment of PatientKeeper CPOE for more than 500 physicians.

Healthwise will offer National eHealth Collaborative’s Consumer eHealth Readiness Tool to its clients.

Mountain States Health Alliance reports significant improvements in glycemic control within 60 days of implementing Glytec’s inpatient glucose control platform Glucommander.

Athenahealth completes its $168.5 million purchase of the 760,000 square foot Arsenal on the Charles complex in Watertown, MA from Harvard University, in which the company’s headquarters has been located since 2005.

Government and Politics

Proposed legislation in Texas would allow licensed healthcare providers to collect or verify patient information with a swipe of a patient’s driver’s license.

Innovation and Research

An project seeking crowdfunding via Indigogo is a placebo mobile app, which is a lot more interesting and scientific than the title would suggest.

Technology

Student journalists from Virginia Commonwealth University  interview Colin Banas, MD, CMIO of VCU Medical Center (VA). He talks up the hospital’s PatientKeeper system, which they are running with Cerner.

Other

MaineHealth President and CEO Jim Donovan tells patients of its St. Andrews Hospital that the hospital’s future direction wasn’t set by the decision to replace Meditech with Epic.

New York eHealth Collaborative names the winners of its Design Challenge for the Patient Portal for New Yorkers. Mana Health took first place.

In a Techonomy guest article, Jonathan Bush of athenahealth says VC funding of healthcare IT companies is “tragic” if you exclude HITECH, with the reason being (a) healthcare is not a shopper’s market; (b) the federal government stifles innovation and instead rewards risk aversion that he calls “the scenario of maximum regret” – audit, lawsuit, and death; (c) doctors are paid for volume instead of service, quality, and competitive pricing. His solutions aren’t nearly as decisive, but he naturally likes his own company’s innovation program.

An Arizona nurse sues her former physician business partner for blocking her access to their clinic’s computer systems, which she says prevented her from treating her patients.

Weird News Andy hopes his turn signals were working. A man accidentally amputates his arm while cleaning equipment, then puts it in the car and drives nine miles to the hospital, where he parks calmly in the parking lot, walks in, places the arm on the receptionist’s desk, and asks to have it reattached.

St. Luke’s Hospital (AZ) finds a 19-year-old student passed out in a wheelchair in its ED lobby, left there by his friends after 20 shots of tequila with a 0.47 percent blood alcohol level and a Post-It note stuck to him explaining that he had been involved in a drinking contest.

Sponsor Updates

• Ping Identity CEO Andre Durand discusses how creating the right circumstances can lead to “eureka moments.”
• Informatica introduces Informatica Cloud Summer 2013, the latest release of its integration and data management software which delivers native SAP connectivity, process automation, and MDM advances.
• Caradigm signs an OEM agreement for BIO-key International’s fingerprint biometric technology for identity and access management.
• McKesson expands its McKesson Gives Back Program nationwide and will provide up to 100 selected physicians with the McKesson Practice Choice EHR/PM program.
• Impact Advisors principal Laura Kreofsky predicts that most organizations will experience Meaningful Use fatigue by 2015.
• Winthrop Resources will participate in the International MUSE 2013 event May 28-31 in National Harbor, MD.
• NTT Data will participate in the Open Data Center Alliance’s Forecast 2013 event in San Francisco June 17-18.
• MedAssets calls for exhibitors for the 2013 Technology & Innovation Forum October 1 in Orlando. Deadline for submissions is June 3.
• Bruce Eckert, national practice director for Beacon Partners, discusses habits of meaningful EHR users at the Arkansas HIMSS conference May 16.
• Vitera Healthcare Solutions sponsored this week’s MediFuture 2023 that promoted disruptive innovation in healthcare in the Tampa Bay region.
• Beacon Partners releases a white paper on the seven steps to know and do now to reach Meaningful Use Stage 2.
• Intelligent InSites offers a white paper with tips for enterprise RTLS success and hosts a May 23 Webinar on the operational aspects of an intelligent hospital. 

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Monday Morning Update 5/13/13

From The PACS Designer: “Re: PACS advice. TPD worked with Herman Oosterwijk at a previous employment and benefited from his knowledge of DICOM and its attributes. He just published an Aunt Minnie article on the top 10 things to consider when replacing your PACS. It’s well written and can help lead the migration to more robust PACS/RIS/Archive solutions. ”

From Leverage: “Re: MModal. For your expert to further reflect on, from S&P’s ‘Leveraged Commentary & Data,’ May 10, 2013.” I fear my excellent MBA finance grade may have been a sham given that I understood very little of the writeup, which was summarized as, “MModal is seeking roughly two years of covenant relief via a loan amendment package that launched yesterday afternoon. The deal is on a tight time frame, with responses due on Monday, sources said.” One Equity Partners, which acquired the company last year, will instead of executing an “equity cure” add $20 million in new equity.

From Quietly Working: “Re: McKesson. Has concluded that a shareholder relationship with Automation isn’t required to enable clinical and technological integration with healthcare software and pharmacy distribution providers. As such, McKesson has made the decision to divest the Automation business. Their intent to sell was announced earlier this week.” I did mention that along with the company’s decision to sell its international technology business in summarizing the earnings call last week.  

EHRs aren’t the problem when hospitals experience financial setbacks during or after their implementation, with 40 percent of respondents saying it’s more that hospitals have unrelated issues that they don’t address. New poll to your right: should Meaningful Use Stage 2 be delayed a year as recommended by CHIME?

Welcome to PerfectServe, sponsoring HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, and HIStalk Connect at the Platinum level. PerfectServe’s cloud-based, HIPAA-compliant platform helps hospitals improve efficiency and care by providing reliable and secure clinical communications (voice, online, and mobile.) It’s used by more than 30,000 physicians to communicate more easily, representing more than 10,000 practices and 60 hospitals that include Advocate Health Care, MemorialCare, Hoag, WellStar, and Orlando Health. PerfectServe connects every clinician, whether on campus or off, allowing them to use voice-powered lookup by name or service and incorporating on-call schedules and physician preferences with every transaction documented and analyzable. Patient-endangering communications breakdowns caused by complicated coverage and communications rules are eliminated, while the average customer saves 12,000 hours each year in wasted nurse time. Just announced last week was DocLink, a private and secure HIPAA-compliant texting, voice messaging, and real-time call routing system for doctor-to-doctor communication. The company offers case studies (the one I read randomly involved reducing time to treatment of stroke patients by simultaneously notifying both the neurologist and neuroendovascular specialist with escalation or backup for non-response), white papers, and studies. Thanks to PerfectServe for supporting HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, and HIStalk Connect.

Here’s a YouTube video illustrating how nurses contact physicians using PerfectServe by telephone.

UPMC made an $18 million profit on its $35 million investment in Israel-based interoperability technology vendor dbMotion when the company was sold to Allscripts for $235 million in March 2013. 

CIC Advisory names Liz McNamara, MHA (ECG Management Consultants) as business intelligence service line leader and Eric Zuhlke, RN, BSN, PMP (Abrazo Health Care) as IT strategy and planning service line leader.

Aventura will announced Monday that it has promoted VP of Sales and Marketing John Gobron to acting CEO, replacing the retiring Howard Diamond.

Eric Novack, MD, PhD (Valley Orthopaedic Consultants) joins Intelligent InSites as senior medical advisor.

Bobbie Byrne, MD, MBA, VP/CIO of Edward Hospital (IL), tells me they went live on Epic big bang at both hospitals on April 28, on time and on budget. They’ve hit CPOE numbers in the 75 percent range since go-live day, impressive given that it’s a community hospital with few in-house physicians. I interviewed her in December 2011 (she had some very interesting thoughts, having been an Eclipsys SVP and CCHIT clinical director) and I have proposed that we do an update.

MModal’s Catalyst for Quality wins the top healthcare IT innovation award from the North Carolina Health Information and Communications Alliance and Intel.

A Brandeis professor of health policy says CMS’s release of hospital charge master data for common Medicare DRGs is “useless and misleading” because nobody pays list prices for services, hospitals tune their individual charges based on payor mix and desired margin, and the public has no idea what any of this means. A Harvard public health professor says the information offers one benefit: “It helps people understand how ridiculous and complex our system has become.”

Vince Ciotti offers a tip for frequent travelers: spend the $100 for a five-year registration for TSA’s Pre-Check program. He used it for the first time at LAX last week and skipped the mile-long security lines, only needing to have his boarding pass scanned at the empty pre-check security lane, a standard X-ray with shoes and belt on instead of the full-body scan, and then a standard bag X-ray except that laptops and liquids don’t require removal. I also noticed that the program was expanded to some international flights last week.

Forbes contributor, Avada CEO Dave Chase, says Tampa, FL is throwing out the marketing and tax breaks approaches to get corporations to locate there and instead will pitch its lower healthcare costs, second only to payroll expense as a cost of running a white collar business. The city’s May 13 MediFuture 2023 event features Harvard professor author Clay Christensen talking about disruptive healthcare innovation. Chase, who is also speaking at the event, says hospitals are making the same mistakes newspaper publishers made in the 1990s in worry about competition from each other instead of from outsiders. Examples of the “shadow” healthcare system are workplace clinics, national primary care providers, retail clinics, domestic medical tourism, and Medicare Advantage programs.

District Medical Group (AZ) implements a medical scribe program at two Phoenix children’s clinics as doctors learn to use their new EMR. An orthopedic surgeon says the scribes eliminated transcription costs and improved the revenue cycle, adding that, “Scribes may have very well saved the clinic by helping with the implementation of the new EMR. Having EMSS [the scribe service] here definitely allowed the clinic to get back up to its running speed in less than the anticipated amount of time."

In the UK, debt-ridden Rotherham Hospital Trust is criticized for paying a US consultant almost $40,000 per month to try to save its struggling $60 million Meditech implementation that has caused lost appointments and financial problems.  

Allscripts (one-year share price in blue vs. the Nasdaq above) reported all-around bad quarterly numbers last week. From Thursday afternoon’s conference call:

• CEO Paul Black stated that the lawsuit against New York City Health and Hospitals Corp., filed when Glen Tullman was running the company, was dropped because, “This management team does not believe it is in the company’s long-term interest to pursue such litigation.” You may recall that the lawsuit won the attention of HIStalk readers, who proclaimed it the “Stupidest Vendor Move” of 2012 in the HISsies awards voting.
• Black predicts that rip-and-replace projects will wane.
• The company’s focus seems to be moving toward integrating disparate systems, or as Black described it, “Innovation to accelerate our leadership in ensuring multivendor interoperability through open community architecture.” That led to the acquisition of dbMotion and Jardogs (now Follow My Health) as well as the GA of Allscripts Community Care Director, which hospitals use to manage post-hospital care.
• Black said, “Sunrise Financial Manager is one factor impacting our ability to capture larger mind share within our client base.”
• The consolidation of offices was mentioned as one cost-cutting move, with the hopes of saving $50 million per year by 2014.
• Company revenue was down because of the shift to subscription-based contracts (apparently that excuse was part of the Eclipsys acquisition since that company used it every quarter for years). Allscripts reported revenue drops in both system sales and maintenance for the quarter.
• Less than 25 percent of Sunrise clients are running 6.0, with many of them planning to skip that release and jump to 6.1 instead.
• When asked how Allscripts pitches against competitors, Black mentioned revenue cycle management, hosting, total outsourcing, and population health management.

Also notable from the Allscripts earnings call is the highest and most annoying concentration of the phrase “kind of like,” this impressive demonstration of a verbal crutch firepower coming from the Morgan Stanley analyst’s question: “So can you just kind of like give us a little bit more color about kind of like your clients? Are they making kind of like long-term retention commitments? Or are clients more kind of like taking it — taking more of a wait-and-see approach and kind of like taking it kind of like one step at a time?”

ESD celebrated Mother’s Day by providing surprise Mother’s Day gifts for each of the women at Mom’s House of Toledo, which helps low-income single mothers earn an education that will allow them to break the cycle of poverty and welfare.

Vince finishes up his HIS-tory of GE Healthcare, covering its very early entry into healthcare in the 1960s, its exit in the 1970s, its re-entry in the 1990s, and what Vince says could be the company’s fall back down the healthcare IT revenue chart. He brings up an item that I may have missed: GEHC sold its Centricity Pharmacy product to Canada-based BDM IT Solutions in March 2013, which is interesting because GE bought BDM Information Systems and its RxTFC system in 2002 and renamed it Centricity Pharmacy.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 5/10/13

Top News

Allscripts reports Q1 results: revenue down 4.8 percent, EPS –$0.07 vs. $0.03, missing estimates on both.

Reader Comments

From IT Exec: “Re: HIStalk. Thanks for everything you do. My day wouldn’t be complete without spending a few hours on there.” Thanks. Mine either.

From PCP Doc: “Re: athenahealth. Just got back from their user conference. Jonathan Bush did not mince words on stage, just like in their earnings call, when talking about ‘companies of Epic proportions.’ Athena going to Haiti to install an EMR in a rural clinic that treats spinal injury patients was a noble touch.”

From Green Lantern: “Re: CMIO searches. I am aware of a couple of hospital systems that restarted their search rather than make an offer to an existing applicant. Does that happen often with CMIO searches vs. other C-level corporate officers? Are there enough applicants, or are hospitals being unreasonable?” Your thoughts are welcome.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Highlights from HIStalk Practice this week: the AMA’s board of trustees chair criticizes the federal government for mandating the use of EHRs under threat of monetary penalty while simultaneously accusing providers of cloning documentation. Frederica Krueger responds to the AMA’s complaints in a “Nightmare on EHR Street” Readers Write post. DigiChart changes its name to Artemis. American Medical News reviews the status of various lawsuits against Allscripts since the company announced plans to stop regulatory development of its MyWay product. CMS creates a timeline for aligning quality measurement and reporting for multiple initiatives. Dr. Gregg considers patient engagement and patient empowerment from both the provider and consumer points of view. Get your fix of ambulatory HIT news and sign up for the email updates while you are there. Thanks for reading.

On the Jobs Page: Open Positions in Development, Senior Manager Engineering Development, Clinical Analyst.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

HealthTap raises $24 million in series B funding led by Khosla Ventures.

Alere reports Q1 results: revenue up 10 percent, EPS $0.09 vs. –$0.05, beating expectations on both. The company also acknowledged that an investment firm that is a major shareholder will launch a proxy fight.

The Advisory Board Company reports Q4 results: revenue up 19.1 percent, adjusted EPS $0.33 vs. $0.31, beating analyst expectations for both.

Canada-based vertical software vendor Constellation Software acquires Quantitative Medical Systems of Emeryville, CA, which offers dialysis-specific revenue cycle and EMR software.

Sales

The Mount Sinai Medical Center signs a multi-year agreement for Cureatr, a mobile app designed by one of its residents that offers HIPAA-secure group text messaging for care coordination.

Chicago Health System ACO (Vanguard Health Systems) selects Care Team Connect’s integrated care management platform.

SSM Health Care – St. Louis (MO) selects the EDCO Health Information Solutions day forward medical record scanning services for use at its seven area facilities.

Quality Health Solutions, formed to support the virtual network of seven healthcare systems and Medical College of Wisconsin, chooses population health management and clinical integration solutions from Valence Health.

People

     
Culbert Healthcare Solutions adds Jason Faaborg (Dell), Tom Gurdak (CSC), and David Howe (Public Consulting Group) as VPs of sales.

Forbes profiles Imprivata CEO Omar Hussain in an article on leadership.

Adventist Midwest Health names Thomas Schoenig (Wyoming Medical Center) as regional CIO.

Care collaboration platform vendor CareInSync names Steve Curd president and CEO. The company also announced a follow-on investment from California HealthCare Foundation’s Health Innovation Fund.

NCPDP names First Databank’s VP of Health Policy and Industry Relations Tom Bizzaro to its board of trustees.

Mike Vandiver (SecureWorks) joins Ingenious Med as CFO.

Charlie Ditkoff (Bank of America Merrill Lynch) joins Cumberland Consulting Group’s board.

Announcements and Implementations

Royal Philips and Al Faisaliah Medical Systems open Philips Healthcare Saudi Arabia, a 50-50 joint venture to market and sell Philips solutions and services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Geisinger Health System (PA) will give patients access to their doctors’ notes in its RWJF-funded OpenNotes program, in which 82 percent of participating patients opened up at least one EMR note.

Martin’s Point Health Care will present at the AQA meeting in Washington, DC on May 13. They use Forward Health Group’s PopulationManager at all nine sites and 70 provider panels for micro and macro reporting.

API Healthcare and TeleTracking Technologies enter into a strategic partnership to offer API’s workforce optimization solutions and TeleTracking’s workflow automation offerings.

Project MIST takes first place in an athenahealth and MIT H@cking Medicine-sponsored hack-a-thon for its glaucoma eyedrop spray canister.

Lake Tahoe Regional Hospitalists (NV) and Shasta County Hospitalists (CA) deploy MedAptus for inpatient charge capture.

Rochester General Hospital (NY) implements EDCO Health Information Solutions’ point of care batch medical record scanning solution.

Government and Politics

HHS releases data on inpatient charges that shows significant variations in pricing, such as joint replacement that ranges from $5,300 to $223,000.

Innovation and Research

Healthfundr launches its equity-based crowdfunding platform for health startups, open to accredited investors only and working with more established companies.

Technology

Epic gives VMware Horizon View “Target Platform” status for EMR delivery through a virtual clinical desktop, quoting Metro Health CIO William Lewkowski as saying the move is saving his organization $1.6 million per year.

Other

Fletcher Allen Health Care (VT) will lay off 40 staff members and outsource its transcription services to Nuance Communications, which will offer jobs to 35 affected transcriptionists.

The Leapfrog Group finds in its spring update that hospitals have made only incremental progress in addressing errors, accidents, injuries, and infections that kill or hurt patients. Sixteen hospitals received an “F” grade.

Gila Regional Medical Center (NM), struggling with uninsured patient volumes, downgrades employees, halts an expansion project, and postpones implementation of a new hospital information system.

Keynote speakers at the MUSE conference May 28-31 in Washington, DC will be Farzad Mostashari and George Will.

A Surescripts report finds that 69 percent of office-based physicians actively e-prescribed last year and nearly half of patient visits generated an electronically-delivered medication history, 31 percent more than in 2011.

Allscripts will add 350 new jobs over the next five years in Raleigh, NC as it consolidates its US engineering centers. State officials will extend up to $5.35 million in incentives if Allscripts meets investment and hiring goals and maintains its 1,266 jobs in Raleigh.

An eight-country survey of physicians finds that 93 percent of US physicians report using an EMR. E-prescribing rates were highest (65 percent) among US providers, as were rates for entering patient notes into EMRs (78 percent.) While the majority of doctors in all countries report EMR and HIE have had a positive impact on their practice, US doctors were the least likely to report that their use reduced organizational costs.

Ken Roberts, MD and Jim Granfortuna, MD sing about EHRs in “Our Song of Epic Proportions.”

Weird News Andy wonders, “What is it with Brazilians and harpoons lately?” A couple of weeks ago a Brazilian guy accidentally shot a harpoon into his own head. Now a Brazilian man cleaning his spear gun in the living room accidentally shoots off a spear that goes through the mouth of his wife, who was in the kitchen at the time. She’ll recover fully. And in another incident, a Brazilian teen fishing in the Amazon River mistakes his brother for a fish, shooting a harpoon into his face and then paddling 195 miles in a canoe to take him to the hospital.

WNA also ponders this story, in which a South Florida plastic surgeon is arrested for using waterboarding-type torture on his girlfriend for 16 hours after being angered by her Facebook post.

Sponsor Updates

• Consulting firm Virtelligence and its client Cone Health (NC) donated 400 tree seedlings via the Arbor Day Foundation to the Guilford County School System, whose students planted the trees around the Triad. The company tracked the number of pages printed during the Epic implementation and used an online program to estimate the number of trees required (361) to manufacture it.
• NTT Data moves its North American corporate headquarters to Plano, TX.
• EClinicalWorks releases agenda details for its 2013 National Users Conference October 11-14 in San Antonio.
• Holon Solutions hosts a May 15 Webinar introducing the value of building an HIE.
• Sandlot Solutions Director Rosalind Bell discusses how recent emergencies highlight the need for HIEs.
• Billian’s HealthDATA releases its Provider Portal benchmarking database, which gives hospitals and health systems data for competitive analysis.
• In a company blog post, Patientco addresses the growing patient payment problem.
• Red Herring names Awarepoint, InstaMed, and Kony Solutions finalists for its 2013 Top 100 North American Award, which honors private technology ventures.
• Aspen Advisors consultants will co-present at two sessions during next week’s Texas HIMSS Conference in San Antonio. Aspen’s Director of Clinical Informatics Mark Van Kooy, MD will participate in a panel discussion during an executive summit in San Francisco May 15-17.
• Kathy LePar, VP of strategic services for Beacon Partners, offers recommendations for healthcare organizations for creating an integrated, holistic approach to strategic enterprise initiatives.

EPtalk  by Dr. Jayne

Georgia Governor Nathan Deal signs the State Physician Shield Act, which is aimed at preventing use of Affordable Care Act provisions to establish standard of care in liability cases. Supporters want to ensure that payment guidelines aren’t used to define care standards to the exclusion of individual patient factors or other clinical standards.

CMS releases Medicare provider charge data for the top 100 most frequently billed discharges across 3,000 hospitals. The variation across some procedures is as much as tenfold.

CNBC recently ran a piece on bad habits demonstrated by younger job-seekers. There are certainly a lot of relatively young workers in IT departments, but I’ve found that regardless of age, behavior is becoming more boorish. I may not be Emily Post, but I’d like to offer some etiquette tips for the age of social media:

• Learn how to put your phone on silent. Practice this skill often.
• Texting or checking e-mail on your phone while in face-to-face meetings is just rude.
• Choosing “Darth Vader’s Theme” as your supervisor’s ringtone is not a career-advancing move, especially if you haven’t learned to put your phone on silent.
• If you’re hosting a Web-based meeting and sharing your desktop, turn your instant messenger and e-mail notifiers off. I’m tired of seeing embarrassing, unprofessional, and distracting messages come across while I’m trying to work with you.
• If you’re attending a meeting by conference call, don’t multitask unless you have the skills to pull it off. Asking, “Can you repeat that? I was on mute.” makes no sense and brands you as inattentive and illogical.
• If you join a meeting late, don’t waste the group’s time with excuses. Say “I’m sorry” then sit down and get to work.
• Lock your Facebook page down like Fort Knox unless you can keep your mouth shut. Do you really think it’s smart to advertise to your co-workers that you accepted prime hockey tickets from a vendor and thereby violated corporate policy?
• Learn how to use Scheduling Assistant, Busy Search, or whatever tools your company uses when inviting people to meetings. If an attendee is already booked and you make them “required,” have the courtesy to discuss it and obtain approval first.

Speaking of meeting etiquette, it’s been a rough week, so I was happy to see a tweet for The Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary. I think I’m going to try “acluistic” in a meeting I have scheduled for tomorrow and see if anyone figures it out.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

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