From HIMSS 3/3/13

The day started out very cold and windy, but it turned reasonably nice Sunday afternoon and will be much warmer on Monday. Thank goodness – many attendees (me being one) didn’t bring the heavy coats that were needed, both outside and in the exhibit hall today (I slipped by a security guard to roam around).

I’m beginning to be annoyed by the hotel that HIMSS foisted on me after they cancelled my reservation for the hotel I actually wanted. I nearly froze last night, and today I made sure the thermostat was set to heat and 70 degrees when I left for the convention center. Right now, it’s 56 degrees in the room and the air that’s blowing is cold. The hotel has no restaurant and needs maintenance – I’ve never until now seen a toilet whose bowl is actually peeling apart below the water line, and there’s rust on almost everything in the bathroom. For about the same money, I could have had a very nice hotel within a couple of blocks of the convention center with an actual restaurant, bar, and lobby.  I didn’t even get the swag bag that Inga mentioned in her post. I feel like a stepchild.

We’re on a boil water advisory in New Orleans supposedly until at least Monday morning, so the nice hotels dropped off bottles of water in each room, while mine left a note on the bed to traipse down to the front desk if I needed bottled water. Given that the note says you’re not supposed to even brush your teeth with water from the tap, exactly who isn’t going to need a bottle? Since that’s the case, why make every guest visit the front desk?

 
The water problem forced Starbucks to stop selling coffee early Sunday morning. It’s going to be an ugly scene if they don’t figure out a caffeine junkie workaround for Monday morning.

I guess you can’t blame HIMSS for the boil water advisory, but the same problem occurred here a few months ago due to the city’s crumbling infrastructure, which includes 100-year-old water processing plants and old pipes. As much as I like the restaurants and the local character, there’s no doubt in my mind that New Orleans is not capable of handling a major convention in a professional manner. The airport is small and outdated, there aren’t enough cabs to get people the long way to downtown, and I’m hearing that hotels are oversold and people are being assigned rooms out in the sticks. It feels like a backward country where nobody really cares about the small details. The only positive I can muster is that the convention center is OK and the restaurants are good.

I’ll assume this was the work of a prankster and not an inattentive convention center worker. Maybe the one sitting behind me near the food court, who was reminding everyone within earshot about the awful conditions and deaths that occurred inside the very same convention center during Katrina.

The HIMSS printed materials seem less well organized this year. I’ve overheard people who, like me, can’t find sessions they know are taking place. There is no mobile app – it’s all printed.

I haven’t heard much in the way of news and rumors so far. Most of what I’ve seen posted elsewhere appeared here last week. Monday should be the big day of announcements, including the much-awaited Cerner-McKesson interoperability one at 11 a.m. Central time. I’m not including the webcast link or physical location since the invitation was only for the press.

Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, and I had what Inga called our HIStalk board meeting this afternoon (meaning we had a drink at a bar). We headed over to the opening reception, which was OK as opening receptions go (a huge bare room, decent food, and some local options like Abita amber beer and jambalaya). The band was OK. We saw some folks we know either individually or collectively before I headed off to dinner with a friend at Red Fish Grill, which was as good as when I ate there at the previous New Orleans conference.

I feel like Jim Cantore on the Weather Channel, describing how conditions are changing as a storm moves close, the storm in this case being the rumored 35,000 people who are attending the conference. Monday morning will be the usual madhouse, with the added complication of being unable to use tap water. We’ll have more detailed reports and a quick HIStalkapalooza recap if I have the energy to stay up late to write it. We can’t see or know it all, so your contributions are welcome.

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Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

From HIMSS 3/3/13 – Inga’s Update

Greetings from chilly New Orleans! Okay, “chilly” is relative, but I was expecting a little bit warmer weather, as were many others who shelled out $30 or more for a Bourbon Street-logoed sweatshirt. Fortunately there is lots of sunshine, so walking outside during the day was not too bad.

I arrived Saturday afternoon and spent 30 minutes waiting for a cab. The line moved rather fast, but it was still quite a wait. After quickly settling in at my hotel (which is fine) I headed to Bourbon Street for a yummy dinner with friends. I wisely opted to be in bed by 10:30 rather than hit all the fun bars.

Sunday was mostly pre-sessions that cost additional fees, but I was able to poke my head into a couple. Nothing too exciting to report and I learned more talking to other attendees. A number of people mentioned they were looking at tools for mobile devices (such as how to keep them secure and applications that can improve communication.) Others mentioned the need for storage and for analytics tools now that they have more data than ever before.

I also went into the exhibit hall, which was chaos. Amazing to think of the transformation that will happen in just 24 hours. The loading dock doors were all open, making the hall breezy and quite chilly, so I was feeling sorry for the under-dressed vendors.

When I returned to my hotel room, I found a swag bag of goodies. I already ate all the gummy bears from Covisint and played a few notes on the harmonica from MediQuant. The bag mostly contained information on various vendors and giveaways, including:

• Certify (booth 717) is donating $10 to the Greater New Orleans YMCA for every “number bib” attendees bring to their booth.
• Iatric’s slap band will get you discounts at a number of New Orleans restaurants, bars, and clothing stores. If you wear the band to their booth (6613) you can enter a drawing for a Bose Headset.
• You can register to win a iPod Nano a the MediQuant booth (5649)
• Covisint (7628) is giving away a 3D TV.
• Nuance (4025)offers a “special gift” if you sit in on a demo.
• HealthPort (6841) is offering beignets and coffee Monday from 1:00-4:00, Tuesday 3:00-6:00, and Wednesday 10:00-1:00.
• Fulcrum Methods (477) is offering an iPad mini or a wireless Logitech keyboard and mouse if you have a winning code from the marketing card in swag bag (providers only)
• Alego Health (141) is giving away an iPad Mini.
• Carestream (2727) is offering fresh-baked cookies.
• Versus (3463) is  having a reception Monday and Tuesday from 4:00-5:00.
• InterSystems (2817) included a 4GB USB key (thanks!) and is giving away a book by Eric J. Topol, MD.
• Health Catalyst (7721) is giving away one iPad a day.
• If you take the Mardi Gras coin from InteliChart to their booth (4159) you can be entered to participate in their giveaways which include a Visa card and an iPad a day.

Off to meet Mr. H, Dr. Jayne, and Dr. Gregg for our annual HIStalk board meeting. Have fun everyone!

E-mail Inga.

From HIMSS 3/2/13

From AlohaSally: “Re: acquisition. Word on the Street is that Epic consulting company [company name omitted] just sold for $40M. Not shocking as I’ve heard stories owners were focused on building to cash in. Will they maintain culture under new identity?” We asked the company, which said they would provide a response but haven’t so far. The wording of their reply and the timing of the rumor give me the feeling that something is indeed afoot. A transaction in that price range would probably warrant a Monday morning announcement, especially assuming that companies with $40 million to spend know how to publicize themselves. As to your question, I don’t know if I’ve seen an example yet where an acquired company’s culture isn’t replaced almost immediately with that of the acquirer, sending some of the consultants and sometimes the clients themselves fleeing depending on the degree of change. It’s like a software vendor forcing clients to migrate from a retired product to another company offering – it may be perfectly fine, but it’s not what you signed up for.

Perhaps I should title this “From New Orleans” since the conference hasn’t started yet as I write this Saturday. In any case, I arrived with no problems. The airports were teeming with spring breakers headed to Mexico and other warm climes. The New Orleans airport, which seemed to me to be small and old, was already overwhelmed even though most of the ingress will be Sunday. Taxi lines were running 30-45 minutes, so who knows how bad it will get Sunday since the number of cabs is finite. 

The cab fare to downtown is a fixed $33 for 1-2 passengers, and don’t even be tempted to save a few dollars by taking the shared shuttle, which earns nearly universally negative reviews. Single travelers, which I would guess make up the majority, would be better off to self-organize the line into groups of two or three folks going to the same or close-by hotels, thus not only saving time and money, but freeing up a cab for someone else. Thank goodness a new law (which the taxi companies threatened to strike over) requires cabs to accept credit cards, which any city hoping to lure visitors should do.  

My impressions of the ride from the airport to my hotel, courtesy of the billboards lining the rather unattractive route: people come to New Orleans to eat, buy hot sauce, and visit strip clubs.

I mentioned that HIMSS dumped me off to a hotel I didn’t reserve when mine became oversold even though I made my reservation in September (how did that happen?) Note the fine craftsmanship on the bathroom door that $200 a night gets you (yes, that’s a half-inch of nothingness between the knob and the closest available wood). The “we care about the environment, so don’t make us wash your towels” sign is adjacent to a faucet that leaks in a constant stream and the full-length mirror threatens to fall off the door since two of its six holders have broken off. At least the Internet speed is good (until everybody else checks in Sunday), the bed and TV are huge, and the location is excellent.

Weather wise, it’s around 50 and mostly cloudy (downright gloomy at the moment) with a freeze warning in effect for tonight, with similar weather predicted for Sunday before a big warm-up Monday. It’s slightly springy with green grass and early leaves.

I’m patting myself on the back for my wise decision after suffering through too many HIMSS conferences trying to write voluminous HIStalk posts using the Chiclet-style keyboard of my intentionally small laptop. This time I prepared by buying a USB-powered trackball and full-size keyboard, having realized that the screen size isn’t the main challenge, it’s the input devices, and they take up almost no luggage room. 

Sunday is open for me since I didn’t sign up for any of the paid workshops, so I’ll just stroll around a bit, drop by the convention center to pick up by badge, and stop by the opening reception. It’s not only cheaper to fly in on Saturday, it makes Sunday a relaxing day.

I see on Twitter that bunches of HIMSS attendees are limbering up their fingers preparing to unleash a non-stop barrage of tweets about everything they see and hear all week. The online noise will be deafening, so I would guess that nobody’s going to read most of what’s being indiscriminately spewed.

Inga, Dr. Jayne, and I will be posting all week. Send us anything we should include – photos, rumors heard, and insightful observations. We never seem to get enough HIStalkapalooza pictures to satisfy everyone, so snap some shots there Monday evening. Help us figure out the prevalent themes of the conference since attendees often miss the forest for the trees (and the social distractions.) News and rumors will abound and we like hearing reader reactions.

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Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Monday Morning Update 3/4/13

From HyWay: “Re: Costco. They sent an e-mail to customers who purchased Allscripts MyWay through Costco’s program saying they are working with Allscripts to ‘offer solutions for members who do not feel the move to Pro is right for them.’ In the mean time, Costco has initiated arbitration proceedings against Allscripts to make sure its users get the service they expected when they bought MyWay.” Unverified, but the forwarded e-mail appears to be authentic. Its tone was amicable.

From The PACS Designer: “re: iWatch. While we wait for the anticipated Apple iTV later this year, there’s something else to look forward to and that’s an Apple iWatch. TPD posted about the Pebble watch, and speculation is that the so called iWatch will be much more innovative and unique in its style and features. Apple has a patent requesting pending on a Amoled flexible wristband device to consider as the possible final product launch, or it could still be a traditional watch similar to the Pebble.”

I’m actually writing this Friday night since I’ll be traveling to New Orleans on Saturday, so don’t be confused when I also post on Saturday and/or Sunday and the days look goofy. Inga, Dr. Jayne, and I will be writing profusely from the HIMSS conference, and to avoid giving you inbox fatigue, I’ll collect the individual links into a single e-mail blast each day.

People of Groupon, after four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding – I was fired today. If you’re wondering why… you haven’t been paying attention … As CEO, I am accountable. You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I’m getting in the way of that. A fresh CEO earns you that chance … For those who are concerned about me, please don’t be – I love Groupon, and I’m terribly proud of what we’ve created. I’m OK with having failed at this part of the journey … If there’s one piece of wisdom that this simple pilgrim would like to impart upon you: have the courage to start with the customer. My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what’s best for our customers. This leadership change gives you some breathing room to break bad habits and deliver sustainable customer happiness – don’t waste the opportunity! I will miss you terribly. Love, Andrew.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Making The Transition: What the iEHR Failure Means for Veterans

This article was written by Lt. Dan,who writes for HIStalk Connect and provides daily headlines on HIStalk.

After eight years of service — during which I traversed seven countries across three continents, lived in three states, and had the privilege of working alongside the very best, brightest, most dedicated, honest, and sincere men and women I have ever known — the time finally came in November 2009 for me to walk away. I signed my discharge papers on November 11 (Veterans Day), got in my car, and drove off base for the last time. I was sad, scared, and very excited.

Fast forward three months. I am sitting in a doctor’s office, about to have a physical from my new PCP. The office was clean; the staff was polite. This was nothing like sick call, where all ailments were treated universally with a prescription for Motrin 800 and a return-to-work slip. During the appointment. my doctor told me to send him my medical records from the Army.

I tracked down the clinic on the base I’d been assigned to and asked for my medical record. They told me it had been forwarded to the US Army Human Resources Command. I called them. They said that they didn’t have my records, didn’t know where my records were, were not responsible for processing requests to access said records, and suggested that I call the VA.

Undaunted, I did call the VA. They told me that US Army HRC was probably misinformed because they should have my records, but to be certain, I would need to fill out some forms, mail them in, and wait for an estimated 90+ days.

At this point, it was beginning to sound like my medical records were having a far worse go of it in civilian life than I was. I told them never mind, the whole thing seemed pointless since I knew everything that was in them and could just tell my PCP the history myself the next time I saw him.

When I went for my first civilian dental exam and was asked if I had a dental record, I was smart enough to just say no. To date, I still don’t have my military medical records and probably never will.

Transitioning out of the military is not easy. It’s moving long distance back to your home town and finding a new job. It’s changing the way you talk so you don’t accidently swear in a business meeting, or call a 22-year-old co-worker “ma’am.” It’s learning to make friends with people you don’t have something intimately in common with. It’s a good bit of doubting yourself and whether you are going to be good at this very different new life.

This stress is exacerbated by an estimated 35 percent prevalence of PTSD in returning veterans, and an estimated 20 percent prevalence of traumatic brain injury, which along with more traditional disabilities, has resulted in nearly 50 percent of departing veterans requiring disability services from the VA.

When that 50 percent of discharged veterans leave the military, their healthcare is transitioned from DoD facilities to VA facilities. The hope is that this will one day be seamless. For now, before the VA will provide services, soldiers submit a disability claim to receive approval to start receiving benefits.

Herein lies the problem. It takes an average of 277 days from the time a claim is submitted until the time a decision is made, much higher than the VA’s stated goal of 125 days. During this waiting period, veterans are left in limbo without access to services or entitlements. There is new policy in place that will allow a departing soldier to submit a disability claim with the VA prior to exiting the military, but currently they can only submit 180 days prior to their discharge date. Helpful, but another example of the needs of the veterans getting lost in translation with the policy makers.

The enormous disability claims backlog has made national news for more than a year now because it is larger than it has ever been in our nation’s history, approaching 1 million claims. Veterans who are leaving the service are usually dealing with a new job, a long distance move, and basic emotional transitions and simply do not have the energy to tackle another exhausting problem in their lives. But the VA’s disability claims process has become exactly that, an exhausting problem in the life of veterans who need services.

Over the last several years, the VA has put in place a plan to correct the disability claims backlog. It was a two-tiered technology implementation plan that involved developing iEHR, which would reduce the time it takes for veterans’ medical records to make their way to disability claims processors. A new disability claims automation system was expected to reduce the time and resources required to process a claim. These two projects were expected to solve the backlog, and so they were heavily funded and highly prioritized.

The disability claims system, called the Veterans Benefits Management System or VBMS, was a $500 million system that began its implementation this past summer. It hit the ground with a loud thud despite the fact that a significant portion of its allocated funding was spent.  The implementation has been mired in delays and functional issues that have repeatedly sent engineers back to the drawing board.

In June 2012, VA CIO Roger Baker acknowledged the issues in an interview, saying, “In mid-December, the volume of VBMS usage grew rapidly as users from the 18 [regional offices] were added. VBMS began to experience dramatic slowdowns in response time for some users, especially during peak usage hours. A root cause analysis determined that the issues were due to the way data is being read from disk storage. Since the impact was considerably more read/write work for each transaction, it had a greater impact as more users attempted to perform work on VBMS.” The initial recommendation was to halt any non-critical tasks, but the permanent fix will require a significant redesign.

VBMS was initially scheduled to complete its implementation across all VA processing centers by the end of 2012. At the close of 2012, just 5 percent of claims processors were using the new system. The implementation timeline has now been pushed out until the end of 2013.

iEHR was also conceived as a way of tackling the benefits backlog. The overriding goal of iEHR was to bring all stakeholders in the transition of veterans’ healthcare under one system to allow for a fundamentally more streamlined process for both soldiers and benefits processing for the VA. Summarized best by California House Representative Jeff Dunham during a recent hearing, “Those who have volunteered at a time of war … if they come home tomorrow, they ought to be in the (electronic-record) system tomorrow, knowing what benefits they will receive … and that it doesn’t take a 5-day or a 50-day system.”

iEHR was halted on February 5 after officials within DoD and the VA realized that the total cost to develop the system had grown to more than $12 billion, more than double the original $4-$6 billion estimate CIO Baker quoted at the onset of the program. Following the announcement, the VA and DoD went back and forth over whether it would be feasible for DoD to implement the VA’s VistA EHR as a Plan B that would allow both organizations to operate within one EHR and maintain the overall goal of a unified system that could streamline the transition process for veterans.

In response to this idea, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs said “The current VistA system is a generation 1-plus-2, in terms of how we look at electronic health records. Industry is already at a generation 3 and moving to a generation 4. We would need to assess what’s required for us to bring VistA over, modernize it, and (calculate) what the total cost of ownership would be over time." On February 8, DoD announced that it was launching a vendor search, ending any hope that iEHR would be revived.

Within the past 30 days, CIO Baker along with VA CTO Peter Levin have been called before the Veterans House Services Committee multiple times to answer to outraged representatives over delays, cost overages, and systematic failures within both programs. For four years, the disability claims backlog grew with no improvement in the pace at which the VA processed new claims. Baker and Levin were the project owners for the two projects that were targeted to address the disability backlog issue. They drafted their plans, spent the money, the projects failed, and all that was left for them to do was resign, which is ultimately what they both did.

Now we have a growing disability claims backlog weighing down the VA. The proposed solutions have failed and the money is spent. Further complicating matters, the government is staring down the barrel of a federal budget sequester that is going to further limit the VA’s options to fix the disability claims backlog.

Meanwhile, a veteran population dealing with almost 10 percent unemployment and an unprecedented 22 suicides a day is going without disability benefits because the system that was designed to support them is fundamentally broken and programs intended to fix these problems are back to square one.

News 3/1/13

Top News

A House panel, obviously fed up by the DoD’s cavalier attitude toward the VA’s VistA system compared to its own AHLTA EHR, demands to know why DoD won’t adopt the highly successful VistA. DoD says it’s looking at VistA yet again, but says it will evaluate it against commercial systems in attempting to “skate where the puck will be” and is concerned about multiple VistA versions and lack of conversion documentation. Congressman Jeff Miller (R-FL), as puzzled as the rest of us about whether VA-DoD will adopt a single EHR or try to cobble their respective systems to merely look like one, summarized as, “It sounds to me like we’re doing a U-turn and going back to the exact same thing again.” Outgoing VA CIO Roger Baker says estimates to develop the integrated system had doubled to $12 billion. One might assume that given Epic’s previous rumored involvement, its Coast Guard EHR experience, and its track record in large and diverse organizations, it might enter the picture in some fashion as the words “commercial systems” are uttered in polite company.

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Reader Comments

From Jardone: “Re: Jardogs. A sale to Allscripts is imminent. Layoffs began yesterday, which appear to be across the board. Since Jardogs is owned by Springfield Clinic, no severance will be paid. Today is the last day for many, including myself.” Unverified. I e-mailed our contact at Jardogs inviting a response, but haven’t heard back. Jardogs, which offers patient engagement and health management solutions, is an Allscripts partner.

From Looking Deeper: “Re: MU Stage 2 requirements. Do your readers have tips for getting clarification for questions that aren’t resolved in the documentation? We would like to contact CMS. It’s a shame they don’t have an e-mail address or form.” A reader reports having successfully used this form, selecting “EHR Incentive Program” as the topic. She got a response in three weeks.

From Festus: “Re: coding issues. Jail time?” A 63-year-old cardiothoracic and vascular surgeon is serving a 10-month sentence for Medicare fraud, convicted for upcoding his cases. The US Attorney says his case sends a message to doctors, while professional organizations say that message is that doctors shouldn’t accept Medicare payment because nobody can comply with its complex requirements and now they could be imprisoned for making mistakes. According to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, “This precedent criminalizes false statements in a private setting without any proof of billing fraud and a greater interference with the day to day practice of medicine is difficult to imagine.” The doctor’s dictated reports from 10 years ago were found to have specified the wrong kind of graft in two of 2,400 operative reports. He says he was too busy to keep up with the reports and had been told to use a code that was similar if he couldn’t find the right one. AAPS says the irony is that he could have justifiably billed a lot more than he actually did even with the mistake. The charges say the surgeon did more than just choose the wrong CPT code – they say he also falsified his progress notes. It would be interesting to see if those were generated with computer assistance since that’s the only reasonable excuse.

From CEO: “Re: HIStalk. I start every day by catching up and reading HIStalk. It really is a wonderful source of content that helps me keep a good pulse on the industry. Thank you for serving so many of us!!!” Inga was happy to read this CEO’s e-mail in response to receiving his HIStalkapalooza invitation as one of few positive comments we’ve received lately, as most of our recent e-mails are from people complaining about not being invited to HIStalkapalooza because they didn’t register. I suppose I should be flattered that people care that much about attending.

From CatsEyes: “Re: three tidbits. Did you mention that Dr. Tonya Hongsermeier (above) left Partners CIRD to become CMIO of Lahey? Lovely and very smart person. And with Partners, Boston Medical Center, Lahey, and Lifespan all going to Epic. From New Haven to Mid coast Maine – Epic rules.” I left out Tidbit #1 since it involved a sales VP whose new job I couldn’t immediately confirm. I’m dating myself by admitting that when I hear Tonya’s name I still think of her being at Cerner, which she hasn’t been forever.

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HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I took an unplanned three-hour field trip to the ER on Wednesday. Of course I asked the staff all sorts of questions about what technology they had in place (and why they were using so much paper.) Turns out I am just fine and my stress over selecting the perfect pair of shoes for HIStalkapalooza does not seem to be a contributing factor. Mr. H, however, thinks all the e-mails begging for last-minute HIStalkapalooza invites may have put me over the edge.

Have you stayed current with HIStalk Practice? If not, some of this week’s highlights include: only 60 percent of physicians are interested in participating in ACOs. ISALUS Healthcare introduces a new version of its OfficeEMR. Memphis Obstetrics & Gynecology Association goes live on MED3OOO’s InteGreat EHR. Practices have an increased need for population patient health tools. I love new e-mail subscribers, so take a moment to register for updates when checking out these stories. Thanks for reading.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Forward Health Group, located on Capitol Square in Madison, WI. The orange above looks juicy and that’s no coincidence – the company’s PopulationManager tool serves up QI and outcomes data to health systems that’s fresh, never frozen, squeezing it from your current systems, claims data, or administrative data. It’s accurate, actionable, complete, and timely, not to mention physician accepted at the individual patient level. The founders started out working in public health reporting back in 2004, meaning they had to figure out early on how to extract and aggregate data from a veritable science fair of disparate IT systems to create apple-to-apples measurements (that’s my second fruit analogy if you’re scoring at home.) It’s a fruit punch (fruit reference #3) of advanced informatics, population health best practices, and elegant visual explanations. They’ll set up a meeting or come to you at HIMSS or at HIStalkapalooza to tell you more – just e-mail them. Thanks to Forward Health Group for their berry (#4) much appreciated support of HIStalk. I have a feeling they’re a lot of fun, so you might be on the lookout for CEO Michael Barbouche or docs John Studebaker, MD and Sean Thomas, MD Monday night at Rock ‘n’ Bowl.

I found this Forward Health Group video that talks more about Fresh Data.

Thanks to Levi, Ray & Shoup, which not only issued a press release calling out my recent interview with SVP John Howerter, but used most of it to say nice things about HIStalk. I enjoyed talking with John because I consider myself something of an expert on print spooling-related problems in hospitals (having gotten myself hopelessly stuck in the middle of those problems many times over the years, unfortunately) so I was asking questions from my own experience.

Verisk Health is supporting HIStalk as a Platinum Sponsor. The company builds solutions for every payer type, including medical cost management, government reporting, payment accuracy, and revenue compliance. They can help identify risk, save money, and improve care. Providers interested in accountable care programs need tools for cost control, quality improvement, and population health management, and that also means you would probably benefit from getting a free copy of Verisk’s provider toolkit. Edward Hospital (IL), for example, is using PopulationAdvisor (through Premier) to monitor its clinical and financial performance, combining Premier’s comparative provider database with Verisk Health’s risk-based payer analytics to gain a better understanding of outcomes and cost of care provided both inside and outside the hospital. Verisk Health President Joel Portice has been around the industry for a long time, holding executive roles with Intelimedix, HCI, Enclarity, and Fair Isaac (not to mention that he’s also a novelist). Thanks to Verisk Health for its support of HIStalk.

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HIMSS Conference and Social Events

Wen Dombrowski, MD, who tweets under @healthcareWenF, forwarded me this list she compiled of socials, Tweetups, and physician exec events. She is doing a Segway tour Saturday afternoon that sounds particularly fun.

I’m posting this shoe porn for Inga and Dr. Jayne, sent in by the (male) president of a new sponsor who clearly understands their fixation. Very hot.

The weather forecast for New Orleans looks pretty darned good. The mild temperatures suggest open-toed shoes as a viable option. Heavy coats can remain at home, or at least in the hotel room.

HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS13
HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS13 Meet-Ups
HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS13 Exhibitor Giveaways

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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Practice Fusion buys 100Plus, a startup co-founded by Practice Fusion CEO Ryan Howard that provides analytics-drive personalized health predictions.

Health Catalyst increases its Series B round by $8 million with participation from Kaiser Permanente Ventures and CHV Capital.

Revenue cycle solutions vendor Cymetrix Corp. acquires analytics vendor CareClarity.

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Sales

Resolute Health (TX) selects Allscripts Sunrise Clinical Manager EHR and Allscripts Community Record for HIE and analytics.

Physician-hospital organization St. Vincent’s Health Partners (CT) chooses McKesson Population Manager and McKesson Risk Manager to manage the health of high-risk populations.

PeaceHealth will integrate Streamline Health’s AccessAnyWare enterprise content management solution with Epic ambulatory.

Evolution Health will deploy Greenway Medical’s PrimeSUITE across its national network of house call providers.

Northeast Georgia Health System (GA) will implement McKesson Paragon.

Daughters of Charity Health System will implement CliniComp’s Essentris Fetal mobile EMR in all of its hospitals.

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People

API Healthcare names Daryl Joslin (Defran Systems) chief marketing officer.

WorldOne, the parent company of Sermo, names Kerry Hicks (HealthGrades) chairman.

Press Ganey Associates adds Ralph Snyderman, MD (Duke University Health) to its board.

Beverly Bell (CSC) joins Health Care DataWorks as chief nursing officer and VP of implementation services and business performance management.

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Announcements and Implementations

City of Hope (CA) implements Harris Corporation’s BI Practice Variation dashboards to identify opportunities for improving clinical outcomes, safety, and documentation.

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Other

Athenahealth will invest up to $10 million and lease up to 60,000 square feet of office space in Midtown Atlanta for more than 700 employees.

A CHIME survey finds that the average base salary for healthcare CIOs in 2012 was $208,417, with respondents holding the EVP/CIO title averaging 50 percent more. More than half held a master’s degree, earning 10 percent more than those with a bachelor’s degree. Three-quarters of the CIOs reported receiving a raise of less than five percent in 2012.

The Nashville business paper profiles Shareable Ink President and CEO Stephen Hau. The 50-employee, 82-hospital software company relocated there from Boston in 2010.

Security researchers using CyberCity, a military-developed model city used to study cyberattacks, find that the city’s electronic medical records system is full of security holes. “OpenEMR from a security perspective is a disaster,” overlooking the fact that few if any US hospitals use that particular open source system.

I’ve gotten wind of an upcoming announcement from Michelle Obama’s Partnership for a Healthier America in which several EHR vendors that I won’t name (mostly the usual suspects, with some surprises) will pledge to add five anti-obesity features to their products at the March 6-8 PHA summit in Washington, DC. The features are BMI and weight classification percentiles, activity and dietary assessments, weight goal monitoring, referral to providers and community resources, and the ability to create a Healthy Weight Plan.

In Australia, Canberra Hospital will upgrade its ED system security after several employees were found to be altering patient data to make wait time statistics look more favorable. Most of the employees could not be identified because the EDIS was set up with generic user IDs like “nurse” and “doctor,” with managers claiming that the department could not function if users had to sign on and off individually. The upgrade will include quick logon/logoff. A server crash of the same EDIS caused the hospital to go on diversion Wednesday as the ED went back to paper.

In Canada, doctors in Nova Scotia complain of system crashes and response time problems with their $4 million Nightingale Informatix EMR, for which they were paid $10,000 each in government incentives to use. The company acknowledges software problems.

Cerner is among four dozen medical device and supply vendors that will pass along the new PPACA-mandated 2.3 percent medical device excise tax directly to their hospital customers.

Weird News Andy wonders if Meaningful Use statistics could be similarly fudged. The acting CEO of an English hospital resigns after an investigation finds that Royal Bolton Hospital coded its patient deaths due to septicemia at quadruple the expected rate, with interim findings indicating “cause for concern.” Hospitals get paid more for treating septicemia.

Researchers find that drinking red wine may protect against noise-induced hearing loss. When not drinking Hurricane Ingas, I will make a point of sticking to red wine when club hopping in the Big Easy.

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Sponsor Updates

• PatientKeeper will feature a number of hospital executives in Booth #2210 at HIMSS.
• Wellcentive will join the Accountable Care Community of Practice.
• Santa Rosa Consulting will feature The Honorable Tommy Thompson and Fred L. Brown at its customer and industry appreciation event at HIMSS next Tuesday.
• Gates Hospitalists (MO) secures Medicare reimbursement using Ingenious Med’s PQRS Registry.
• Nuance leases an additional 28,000 square fee of office space in Cambridge, MA to accommodate about 175 employees.
• A local paper profiles Lyster Army Health Clinic (AL) and its use of RelayHealth’s secure messaging solution.
• Iatric Systems adds CynergisTek as a reseller of its Security Audit Manager and Medical Records Release Manager solutions.
• Lifepoint Informatics will sponsor the G2 Pathology Institute Conference February 28 – March 1 in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
• CSI Healthcare IT spotlights Evan Ritter, its top sales performer of 2012.
• University Health System (TX) reports a cost savings of over $13 million within a year of contracting with MedAssets for consulting, analytics, and process improvement services.
• Covisint will integrate Milliman’s opportunity-based population analytics capabilities into its healthcare platform.
• AT&T lists six questions to ask healthcare cloud vendors to ensure data security.
• eClinicalWorks  shares details of how Coastal Medical (RI) achieved a 200 percent return on its original investment and improved care coordination utilizing the company’s EHR.
• A Nuance Communications’ survey finds that 80 percent of US doctors believe virtual assistants will change how they interact and use EHRs and will benefit patients by making them more engaged in their own healthcare.
• McKesson names the Bread of Healing Clinic (WI) the company’s first recipient of its Practice Choice EHR software as part of the McKesson Give Back initiative.
• Impact Advisors Principal Rob Faix is featured in a podcast discussing PHI data breaches.
• St. Luke’s Cornwall Medical Group (NY) shares how it increased cash collections by 17 percent utilizing Greenway’s PrimeRCM.
• Mitochon Systems will integrate drug safety information from PDR Network into its Electronic Medical Office platform.
• Merge Healthcare will bundle MModal Fluency for Imaging and MModal Catalyst for Radiology with its Merge PACS portfolio.
• Signature Sleep Services, dba Sleep360, will market and integrate ZirMed’s RCM solutions with its platform of sleep medicine tools.
• Georgia-Pacific Professional introduces the SafeHaven monitoring system, which combines Versus RTLS technology with Georgia-Pacific’s dispensers and skin care products.

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EPtalk  by Dr. Jayne

Several readers have asked Inga and me for HIStalkapalooza fashion advice. DO wear sassy bowling shoes or a cool retro bowling shirt. DON’T wear anything from MSN’s list of ugliest shoes of all time.

With HIMSS starting in a few days, my inbox is really filling up. If you’re exhibiting, that means you are a technology company of some kind or at least peripherally in the technology sphere. Up your game (and the chances that your message will actually be read) by proofreading your content and removing tags like that in the e-mail above prior to sending.

Even with a relatively full inbox, it’s a slow news week as everyone saves up their big news to announce at the show. You don’t have to make a big splash at HIMSS to be a success. Vendors are quietly certifying their products for Meaningful Use 2014 and I salute them.

I’ve had a lot of questions about what I’ll be looking at during the show. Rest assured I’m making my list and checking it twice. I plan to spend plenty of time in the far reaches of the exhibit hall looking for the next big thing, so stay sharp because you never know when we might come by your booth.

I’m off to the Crescent City tomorrow and will bring you the news and happenings of HIMSS. For those of you unable to attend, thank you for keeping the availability high, the loads balanced, and the issue resolution times low. We’ll raise a glass in your honor at HIStalkapalooza. Laissez les bons temps rouler!

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Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 2/27/13

Top News

Telus Health will acquire MD Practice Software, which will make Telus the largest EMR vendor in Canada. The deal is scheduled to close Monday.

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Reader Comments

From Spell Checkeroff: “Re: HIPAA. The Miami Herald did something you don’t see often – spelled out the law’s name correctly, then derived an incorrect acronym!” I’ve noticed that as newspapers continue their slow swirl down the toilet, they keep losing their better people who might be able to actually investigate a story, proof read, or write editorials that express original thoughts. About all they’re good for now is sports scores, Hollywood gossip, and funny stories with zero news value. On the other hand, that’s about all their declining audience wants to read anyway.

From NoPhone: “Re: Booth etiquette. Last year you ran an article about HIMSS booth etiquette and we would love to share it with our sales team.” The Readers Write by Rosemarie Nelson offers tips for vendors on the trade show floor.

From Moe Money: “Re: PQRS submissions. See forwarded e-mail.” Above.

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HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Ping Identity, also known as “The Identity Security Company.” Its identity and access management platform provides one-click access to any application from any device, with over 900 enterprise customers including 45 of the Fortune 100. The company’s health solutions make it easier to run cloud-based applications and to meet compliance requirements, offering single sign-on to improve user satisfaction. They also provide a seamless, secure platform for internal and external collaboration and customer engagement. Ping Identity’s solutions help protect PHI and allow users of federated applications to be quickly disabled in the event of a breach. A free trial of PingFederate is available for download. Pay them a visit at HIMSS Booth #2470 and tell them you read about them on HIStalk. Thanks to Ping Identity for supporting my work.

My YouTube hunt was successful, turning up this educational Ping Identity video on Identity Management 101. It’s a really good and easily understood overview.

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HIMSS Conference and Social Events

I have been hunting for a HIMSS mobile app that includes the schedule and meeting rooms. Has anyone seen one?

If you signed up to attend HIStalkapalooza before registration closed on Monday, February 11 and did not receive an invitation by e-mail, drop me a note by Thursday and I’ll check your status. Otherwise, we are totally full even though Medicomp doubled capacity to 1,000 this year, which means we unfortunately can’t invite you even if you’re one of the folks who are pleading that your HIMSS experience might be a bust if you are unable to participate in the “Inga Loves My Shoes” contest, drink Hurricane IngaTinis and Typhoon Janes, and hobnob with the coolest folks in HIT.

For those who received HIStalkapalooza invitations, here is transportation information:

• The good folks at Medicomp have put together a pocket-sized card with transportation details. You can pick it up from their Booth #3068 on Monday or get one from one of the human directionals that will be in the main hallway of the convention center starting at 5:30 PM on Monday. Look for the HIStalk/MEDCIN Engine tee shirts and signs.
• Buses will leave convention center for HIStalkapalooza from 6:15 p.m. through 7:00 p.m.
• If you are driving, Rock ‘n’ Bowl is located at 3000 S. Carrollton Avenue and has plenty of free surface parking.
• Return bus service to specific downtown hotels starts at 9:00 p.m.
• Bus service is complimentary, as is coat and bag check at the venue.
• A Transportation Concierge will be located at the front of Rock ‘n’ Bowl to answer any questions. They can help you get a taxi if you’re in a hurry to leave and don’t mind paying.

Inga, Dr. Jayne, and I (Mr. H) will be covering HIMSS in great detail starting this weekend. Let us know if there’s anything you would like is to report on beyond the obvious (booth snark, making fun of people who deserve it, spilling the dirt we overhear in coffee lines and restrooms, and our jaded assessment of what’s important and what clearly isn’t). We intentionally avoid one-on-one appointments and demos since those are usually a waste of time, preferring to do our reporting from the ground as regular, anonymous attendees. Contact us from there if you run across anything interesting.

HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS13
HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS13 Meet-Ups
HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS13 Exhibitor Giveaways

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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shares in Accretive Health drop 20 percent in after-hours trading Tuesday after the company announces that it will delay reporting Q4 and FY2012 results while it evaluates its revenue recognition policies for its revenue cycle management agreements. Any change might require restating prior-period financial statements, management added.

Cerner announces that it will acquire PureWellness, which offers a health and wellness platform for corporate wellness programs and insurers, strengthening its position in the population management market.

Craneware reports half-year profit of $0.12/share compared to $0.10/share a year ago. Revenues were up seven percent.

OCHIN, which operates Oregon’s REC, acquires the Oregon Health Network, a non-profit focused on improving quality and access of healthcare through HIT and other initiatives.

Informatica acquires process automation company Active Endpoints.

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Sales

Graham Hospital (IL) selects Merge Healthcare’s iConnect Enterprise Clinical Platform and Honeycomb Archive solution.

Summit Healthcare Regional Medical Center (AZ) chooses Ingenious Med’s impower charge capture solution to improve documentation and communication.

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People

Vocera Communications appoints Sandra Miley (Juniper Networks) VP of corporate marketing.

Elsevier names Jim Nolin, MD (Ascension Health) editor-in-chief of InOrder,  an Elsevier order set solution that’s scheduled to launch in March.

Beacon Partners promotes Kevin McKittrick (above) and Scott Freeman to principal.

Cornerstone Advisors Group names Kristi Lane (Stage 7 Consulting) VP of talent management.

Charles C. Corogenes (Toshiba) joins ChartWise Medical Systems as VP of sales and marketing.

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Announcements and Implementations

Kansas HIN transmits immunization data from the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas to the Kansas Immunization Registry through the ICA CareAlign HIE platform.

Rockcastle Regional Hospital (KY) goes live as the first user of Patient Logic’s physician documentation system.

You might think managed services vendor ClientFit would spell the name of its new partner athenahealth correctly in its press release announcing that relationship. You would be wrong, although I might be inclined to side with them because their version is at least properly broken out into separate words and capitalized correctly. I grit my teeth and follow The Associated Press Stylebook, which says to use the company’s made-up lower case version except when athenahealth begins a sentence, in which case capitalize it even if they wish you wouldn’t.

Albany Medical Center will become the first healthcare provider in New York to utilize Direct Messaging through the Healthcare Xchange of NY.

QuadraMed announces that Avita Health System (OH) attested for Stage 1 Meaningful Use through its use of the company’s QCPR EHR that the health system implemented last year.

Winona Health (MN) says its implementation of Cerner’s revenue cycle solutions for acute and ambulatory services fueled a 25 percent decrease in clinic coding turnaround time and consolidation of hospital and clinic billing.

Legacy Data Access introduces LegacyCompleteClinicalView and LegacyRemitBank to enhance clinical and revenue cycle functionality for retired healthcare applications.

Jardogs releases version 1.5 of its FollowMyHealth universal health record.

CommVault launches Simpana 10, which offers an open, scalable platform and advances in data and information management.

LDM Group’s ConnectSys 3.0 achieves 2014 Edition Ambulatory and Inpatient EHR Module Certifications by ICSA Labs.

McKesson announces that more than 90 percent of physician users of its iKnowMed oncology EHR have successfully attested for Meaningful Use.

McKesson and Cerner will announce their unspecified collaboration (presumably related to cooperative interoperability in trying to derail the Epic juggernaut) from HIMSS on Monday, March 4 at 11 a.m. Central.

Microsoft-GE joint venture Caradigm will announce next week its selection by Continuum Health Partners (NY) to provide tools that will support the health system’s care coordination and population health strategy. Caradigm’s products include the Caradigm Intelligence Platform (the new version of Amalga), applications from both Caradigm and third parties for population health management, Caradigm Health Information Exchange, and identity and access management solutions.

MMRGlobal, featured in my interview with CEO Bob Lorsch, will launch a health and wellness app at the HIMSS conference that will work with its MyMedicalRecords PHR. The company also says it has started notifying mobile healthcare app vendors that their products appear to infringe on its patents.

MModal and 3M Health Information Systems collaborate to link MModal’s voice-enabled clinical documentation platform with the 3M 360 Encompass computer-assisted coding system.

VitalWare files a provisional patent for Sherpa, a physician documentation ontology engine that automatically presents physicians with clinical concepts and their related categories at the point of care.

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Technology

An India-based startup announces Uchek, a urinalysis app for smartphones. You pee in a cup, not on the phone, and then take photos of dipped chemical strips to monitor diabetes, UTIs, and kidney and bladder problems. I might be concerned that its display shows “keytone” since I get nervous when medical software contains misspellings.

I mentioned the Android-only Swiftkey on-screen keyboard and medical dictionary ($3.99) that gets rave reviews for clinical documentation. The company announced Tuesday that it will launch a healthcare-focused typing app for the iPad. Apparently the new BlackBerry 10’s all-touch keyboard runs Swiftkey, although neither company will confirm.

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Other

Massachusetts General Hospitals offers its 22,000 employees a $250 bonus for watching an 11-minute video on customer service. About 98 percent of the employees thought it was worth $22 per minute to score some cash, meaning the hospital shelled out more than $5 million to teach them how to be nice. 

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation awards PatientsLikeMe a $1.9 million grant to create the first open-participation research platform for the development of patient-centered health outcome measures.

I mentioned in introducing new sponsor MediQuant in the Monday Morning Update that I was enjoying the Legacy System Blues song on its site. Apparently I caught it early — a new press release just announced it, also mentioning that the band is led by MediQuant Founder and President Tony Paparella, who has had the track pressed on vinyl 45 RPM records.

Security volunteers who find an unnamed hospital’s data exposed on the Web are perplexed when their phone calls, service desk ticket, and e-mail to the hospital’s CEO are all ignored and nobody has taken the data down. A technician at the hospital’s outsourced help desk told them he doesn’t have an e-mail address. The group suggests that hospitals include a dedicated, monitored e-mail address and telephone number on their home page so they can be notified quickly of security problems.

Weird News Andy says he bet the surgeon was heard to say, “Awww, nuts” in this story of a patient suing a British hospital after surgeons removed the wrong testicle. Surgeons performing the cancer surgery realized their mistake 40 minutes in and “tried to correct the mistake in an emergency procedure,” but it was too late.

Strange: police in India arrest the son of a hospital CEO after he threatens to post to the Internet a homemade sex video featuring himself and his wife unless she agrees to pay for the hospital’s new trauma center. Also in India, 35 specialty physicians protest their hospital salaries by threatening to kill themselves.

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Sponsor Updates

• The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Levi, Ray & Shoup discuss the simplification of document management processing in Webinars March 12 and 14.
• Hyland Software validates integration between its OnBase enterprise content management and Nuance Communications’ eCopy ShareScan scanning and workflow solutions.
• The AMA and McKesson agree to a licensing arrangement that allows for the mapping of molecular diagnostic testing codes in McKesson’s Diagnostic Exchange software to the AMA’s CPT code set.
• Greenway Medical Technologies achieves PCMH 2011 Prevalidation status from NCQA for its PrimeSUITE EHR platform.
• Wolters Kluwer Health adds a Patient Safety Programs File to its Medi-Span solution.
• MedAssets CEO and President John Bardis will ring the NASDAQ closing bell February 27.
• Bottomline Technologies announces the GA of Logical Ink 4.6 and MedEx 4.0.
• Marion McCall of Surgical Information Systems reviews considerations when selecting perioperative analytics solutions.
• Santa Rosa Consulting adds Clearwater Compliance’s HIPAA-HITECH compliance tools to its portfolio of services.
• Truven Health Analytics releases its annual list of 100 Top Hospitals based overall organizational performance.
• CTG Health Solutions announces that it increased revenues 18 percent from 2011 to 2012 and expanded its IT consulting team.
• Direct Recruiters, Inc. offers an interview called “Hiring Game Changers.”

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Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Cerner To Acquire PureWellness

Cerner announced this morning that it will acquire PureWellness, which offers a health and wellness platform for corporate wellness programs and insurers, strengthening its position in the population management market. The company will rename the offering to Cerner Wellness.

Cerner SVP Matthew Swindells said in a company blog posting that the combination of Millennium solutions, Healthe Intent, and the PureWellness platform will provide comprehensive support to population health management and to allow individuals to manage their chronic conditions and reduce their health risks.

In this post-EHR world, where sophisticated organizations have already made the major step of removing most of the paper from their processes, the new challenge is how you realize benefits for your organization, patients and membership. Population health management has become an imperative for health care organizations driven by extreme market pressures to achieve better outcomes with less overall spend. This story is unfolding around the world, thanks to a series of common market pressures.

PureWellness is located in South Burlington, VT. Co-founder and CEO Ken Kaufman is a veteran of several healthcare IT companies, including IDX, Allscripts, A-Life Medical, and McKesson. Co-founder Ron Keen has worked for Allscripts, GE Healthcare, and IDX.

The company’s offerings include tools for health assessment, risk advisor, nutrition, team challenges, incentive programs, health coaching, condition management,

Monday Morning Update 2/25/13

From Grizzled Veteran: “Re: Stark Act/Anti-Kickback Relief. It’s scheduled to expire on 12/31/13. What are the thoughts on it being extended or not? What happens to hospitals and practices if it isn’t?” The floor is now open. Feel free to leave a comment stating and perhaps defending your opinion.

From CPAhole: “Re: CMS. Has anyone raised the issue of the CMS PQRS site being down for days at a time just when everyone is trying to submit and there is a 72-hour turn on submissions? CMS is trying to come up with a Plan B to fix their system.” Unverified.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: mobile ECG Monitor. TPD is intrigued by AliveCor’s FDA-cleared Heart Monitor & AliveECG app for the iPhone. An iPhone app that can benefit both the patient and the physician brings health monitoring to a new level of care. This app will be added to TPD’s List of iPhone Apps with the next update.”

From Marrioutta Here: “Re: HIMSS hotel. Just got a call from Marriott. There was an error in their website and they are overbooked. Moving folks 35 miles away and paying for the rooms.” At least when HIMSS e-mailed this week to tell me I was bumped out of the hotel I had booked in September they put me in another one that’s a little bit closer, a little bit cheaper, and newly added to the shuttle route. I don’t like the rooms as much from the description, but it’s walkable to the convention center and closer to restaurants. Some hospitals force employee groups traveling together to share rooms or pay the different for a single room themselves, which would probably greatly reduce the number of rooms required since it’s like a commuter highway – single occupancy is the rule.

The majority of poll respondents say they’re getting too much HIMSS-related vendor contact, although a solid 36 percent are happy with the volume and a disappointed 12 folks wish they’d get more. New poll to your right: what city would be your choice for holding the HIMSS conference?

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor MediQuant of Brecksville, OH. MediQuant offers Data Transition Management Solutions. Almost every healthcare organization keeps orphaned systems running just because someone might need access to the data they contain at some point. MediQuant’s DataArk active archiving solution allows those systems to be decommissioned with savings of up to 80 percent (using their data center or yours), providing ongoing easy access to clinical, financial, or ERP data. It’s always a pain to work down patient accounts after a system conversion and balance-forward conversions are notoriously risky (why junk up your new system with iffy data?), but DataArk customers can still bill those accounts, post payments, add notes, defend audits, and produce itemized statements with even easier access than the retired system offered. Clinical systems conversions are equally tricky with legacy data and chances are you’re not living in a “no lawsuits after discharge” bubble that allows walking away from years’ worth of patient data, so DataArk allows moving that historical information to its clinical repository module. Turn off the old system and the cash drain required for its upkeep. Other MediQuant products include FirstComply and AccuRules for medical necessity/ABN compliance. The company’s client base includes more than 700 facilities (examples: UPMC, Baptist Louisville, Dignity Health, Kettering Health Network, and West Virginia University Healthcare.) I’m rocking out to their Legacy System Blues by The DeCommissioners on their home page. Drop by Booth #5649 at HIMSS and say hello and thanks to MediQuant for supporting HIStalk.

On the Jobs Page: Demand Generation Specialist, Sales Effectiveness Consultant, Healthcare ECM Sales Executive, Account Manager – Government.

Listening: new from Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, lush and powerful brooding from one of music’s most tortured geniuses. New live concert video here.

Want to win a $25 Amazon gift card and be sashed on stage at HIStalkapalooza? Tell us why you have a crush on Inga, Dr. Jayne, or Mr. H. We’ll pick the best entry for each crushee and recognize them on stage with an Inga’s Secret Crush, Dr. Jayne’s Secret Crush, or Mr. H’s Secret Crush beauty queen sash as a token of our mutual affection. Speaking of “crushed,” Inga is exactly that so far because all of the entries have been for me (Mr. H). I’m on standby to pledge my affection for her and Dr. Jayne if need be. Mrs. HIStalk assembled and packaged the sashes when they came in the mail last week and was less than thrilled when she got to the “Mr. H’s Secret Crush” one. I told her it was Inga’s idea.

Encore Health Resources will announce this week its Value-based Performance Improvement (VPI), an analytics software and services program developed with Catholic Health Initiatives that includes Meaningful Use reporting, population analysis, clinical analytics for care coordination, and financial analytics. The company says the program will transform EHR data to help organizations focus on quality and performance data at a low cost of entry. Components that can be implemented individually or fully include an analytics engine, an ETL tool, and dashboards.

Georgia Regents Medical Center (recently renamed from Georgia Health Sciences Medical Center) selects Besler Consulting’s BVerified – Transfer DRG tool to identify and recover transfer DRG underpayments. It automates the required review of the Medicare Common Working File and creates workflow tasks that guide the provider through follow-up steps.

Yavapai County, AZ admits that its printing of death certificates was delayed by more than a week due to computer problems following a software upgrade.

The longest article ever published in Time magazine is this week’s cover story on high healthcare prices, Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us. The basic conclusion is that the US needs to set healthcare rates in a Medicare-type national system instead of letting the so-called free market do so. Most of the criticism is aimed at hospitals, so it’s worth a read even for those of us who working in them even though we were numbed long ago to $2 Tylenol tablets and $300 chest x-rays. The fact that the author couldn’t come up with recommendations less invasive or more likely to succeed than simply letting the government run all healthcare as it does the wasteful, political, and fraud-riddled Medicare program is a bit of a letdown.

Medical practice plaintiffs who filed a class action lawsuit against Allscripts for its decision to not enable the MyWay EHR for future MU stages or ICD-10  will learn Tuesday whether they can continue with their suit or will instead be forced to accept binding arbitration. If the complaint is certified as a class action, Allscripts will be required to provide the names of all MyWay customers to the plaintiff’s attorneys, who say all 5,000 MyWay physician users would then be automatically included in the suit. Attorneys for Allscripts have filed a motion to block the suit, arguing that the doctors signed a contract requiring their differences to be settled by binding arbitration. Some of the specific complaints, remembering of course that they represent only one side of the argument:

• ”Our EHR is a piece of crap,” said an anesthesiologist and “buggy” according to others involved with the lawsuit, each of which paid up to $40,000 per physician to implement what they claim is a defective system.
• Anesthesiologists claim they were promised a pain management module that was never developed.
• A client who bought MyWay in June 2012 was assured by their Allscripts sales rep that the product would be enhanced to meet MU Stage 2 and ICD-10 requirements, with the company announcing otherwise four months later.
• Users say MyWay, originally developed by iMedica as a client-server product, was sold by Allscripts as a cloud-based offering that performed poorly.
• The lawsuit says that a “free upgrade” to the Allscripts Professional EHR isn’t an upgrade at all since it’s a different product and requires a complicated and costly conversion.

Facebook apologizes to a 104-year-old woman who found that she could not enter her real date of birth on her page. The company changed its date edits to allow birth years before 1910.

Robert Lorsch, chairman and CEO of PHR vendor MMRGlobal, briefs members of a congressional subcommittee on HITECH payouts and what he says is its failure to ensure standardization, interoperability, and PHR access. He demonstrated his company’s PHR product, telling the audience that it could be made available to all Americans for less than the money one large hospital would spend on an EMR. MMRGlobal has sent infringement letters to healthcare IT vendors and hospitals in the US and elsewhere claiming that they are violating the company’s patents that cover a variety of online services.

Vermont’s smallest hospital will lay off 15 employees, 10 percent of its work force, blaming cost pressures created by the Affordable Care Act and its new ACO relationship with OneCare Vermont. Officials with the 19-bed Grace Cottage Hospital defended spending $2 million on an EMR, saying ARRA money paid for it and it needed the system to participate in the ACO.

MedSnap releases an iPhone app for medication reconciliation that allows the provider to place a patient’s pills on a tray and use the phone’s camera to take a photo, which the app then analyzes to display the name and strength of each drug along with drug-drug interactions, drug-disease contraindications, and allergies based on the patient’s medical records. I would characterize this as brilliant. Future offerings include medication reminders and caregiver monitoring. The company is looking for volunteers for its Pill Mapping Project, whose submissions will improve its recognition database. Co-founders Patrick Hymel, MD and Stephen Brossette, MD, PhD founded MedMined, the infection surveillance software company acquired by Cardinal Health in 2006.

MModal and Intermountain Healthcare will jointly develop a speech-powered CPOE app for iOS devices. The app’s vocabulary will recognize terms related to the ordering of meds, labs, imaging, and nursing. They say it will be completed by fall.

 

Supporting HIStalk at the Gold level is ReadyDock. Everybody’s walking around hospitals carrying tablets these days, which means they’re also giving a free ride to microorganisms to spread from one patient to another. ReadyDock:UV is the world’s first solution for one-step disinfecting, charging, and securing of tablet PCs and iPads. It’s UV powered, which means no messy wiping down with disinfectant (and no voiding the manufacturer’s warranty by fluid contact). Tablets are often part of normal workflows and charging and disinfecting them needs to be equally user friendly. The device takes up a lot less space than a standard docking station, frees up power outlets, and eliminates a tangle of wires. You can see it yourself at HIMSS in Booth #3879. Thanks to ReadyDock for supporting my work.

I found this brand new ReadyDock video on YouTube featuring Louise-Marie Dembry, MD, MS, MBA, infectious disease professor from Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Thanks to a rumor report from reader Smarty Marty, we reported on February 13 that Aetna was rebranding its health and technology unit (ActiveHealth Management, iTriage, and Medicity) as Healthagen. The official announcement went out Friday.

 

First Databank promotes Bob Katter and Charles Tuchinda, MD to EVP following the recent promotion of Gregory Dorn to EVP/deputy group head of Hearst Business Media.

Wired profiles stealth startup Smart Scheduling, which identifies patients who are likely to be no-shows for their appointments based on past behavior. The company went through Healthbox’s accelerator program and connected with athenahealth to fine tune its algorithms. The application is being piloted by Steward Health, which uses athenahealth’s scheduling system. The software suggests the optimal time slot for a given patient based on the likelihood they won’t show up. Steward says the program is 95 percent accurate, allowing them to schedule around possible no-shows to hit their overall patient targets.

A mini-study in a Letter to the Editor in NEJM finds that about 12 percent of US physicians have attested to Meaningful Use under the Medicare program, making it likely that many practices will face financial penalties starting in 2015. Specialists have about half the adoption rate of primary care providers. Physicians working with Regional Extension Centers have only a slightly higher attestation rate at 16 percent.

The e-mail system of Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center was down for 42 hours through Friday morning, with “replaced infrastructure” identified as the culprit.

UCLA’s medical school is the subject of a snarky Los Angeles Times article that criticizes its cozy relationship with nutritional supplement manufacturer (and accused scam multi-level marketer) Herbalife, which donates a lot of money to the school and drops the school’s name at every opportunity to give its products the scientific credibility that nutritionals sorely lack. UCLA’s cellular and molecular nutrition lab is named for the company’s founder, or as the article says, “The lab is named after Herbalife’s founder, who died in 2000 after a four-day drinking binge — not the greatest advertisement for healthful, active living.” Several medical school faculty members serve on the company’s board, with one of them being paid $17.8 million over 10 years through his consulting firm in return for product endorsements that include his signature on the label. Both he and the company can make almost any exaggerated claim they want since nutritional products escape FDA oversight. The article concludes, “When torrents of cash fall upon people like Heber and Ignarro — especially when the payments promote interests fundamentally in conflict with their responsibilities for thorough, objective research — it’s proper to ask whether the recipients should be viewed primarily as university professors with an income source on the side, or as agents of industry exploiting their academic titles for show.”

Vince wraps up NextGen’s HIStory this week. He starts the long history of Meditech next time and welcomes your contributions.

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HIMSS Conference

HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS13
HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS13 Meet-Ups
HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS13 Exhibitor Giveaways

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Sponsor Updates

• At the HIMSS conference, HITPC member Gayle Harrell will present a session titled “Leading Change through Health Information Technology” on Monday, March 4 at 2:00 p.m. at Sunquest’s Booth # 911.
• Edward Fotsch, MD (CEO, PDR Network) and Douglas Gentile, MD, MBA (CMO, Allscripts) will present “Turning Patient Portals into Major EHR Assets” on Wednesday, March 6 at 8:30 a.m. in Room 288 of convention center. The session will also be streamed live.
• PatientPay is named by PYMNTS.com as a finalist for a 2013 Innovator Award in the Best Debit category.

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Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 2/22/13

Top News

An article in The New York Times called “A Digital Shift on Health Data Swells Profits an an Industry” takes direct shots at the HITECH act, particularly emphasizing the “behind the scenes lobbying” that Allscripts, former CEO Glen Tullman, and other unnamed vendors employed to get it passed. It points out that Tullman was health technology advisor to the Obama campaign, a personal donor of $225,000 to Democratic political candidates, and a seven-time White House visitor after Obama took office. Cerner doubled its lobbying dollars to $400,000, with almost all of it going to Republicans.

Athenahealth’s Jonathan Bush weighed on “the Sunny von Bülow bill” that he says kept his stagnant competitors “alive for another few years.” In a seemingly random quote, the ED chair at UCSF Medical Center said Epic is “mediocre” on a good day but “lousy” most of the time, while a counterpoint from UCSF’s CMIO saying that most doctors there like it receives less-sensationalized coverage. The article also points out that Neal Patterson’s stake in Cerner is worth $1 billion and mentions that a letter from Steve Lieber of HIMSS urged President-elect Obama to set aside at least $25 billion to increase EHR adoption.

In other words, the article is all over the place. The only new material appears to be a handful of quotes that were allowed to run unchallenged, with everything else looking more like a set of Google search results than a thoughtful and balanced piece. Its conclusion is hardly startling: the federal government wastes enormous amounts of taxpayer dollars in scratching special interest backs and a few people get really rich as a result (fun fact: Glen Tullman is now running his solar energy company, reaping the benefit of another big federal spending program.) Far more interesting than the article itself are the reader comments:

• My impressions of the vendors can be described in two words: Welfare Queens. The systems are glorified billing and scheduling systems. Vendors were “certified” before they actually created the upgrades that supposedly met MU criteria.
• Regardless of how much customization you do to the form and how many drop-boxes there are for entering data, the result is medical records which look very similar from patient to patient, and omit nuances and details which are specific for individuals.
• It is interesting that so many commenters complain about a lack of privacy (signing my life away on consent forms!!), while others complain because not all providers in the country have easy, fast access to their medical records.
  You must realize that these things are at odds, and affected more by HIPAA than limitations of technology.
• EMR 1.0 = islands of information, designed for billing and documentation. EMR 2.0 = system of engagement – Key information summarized and shared. Saves time for the users. It’s coming!
• Try telling countries like Canada, New Zealand, Netherlands and Japan that they should give up all of the EMR systems that are unusable despite the fact that the majority of their docs are using EMR systems today. Just because a few people in an article determined a system to be unusable doesn’t make it so.
• The EHR has become the patient. It is sicker than you and more complicated, taking more time. You, the real patient, can just lay there waiting in a state of abject neglect.
• There is a lot more to this movement than this article suggests — and it is good. “The clear winners are big companies” — yes, in some ways, but the even bigger winners are patients and the doctors who care for them. In my family, this record-keeping already has resulted in a life-saving developments.
• In our office we have had three over 50 early retirements due to the EPIC system.
• Think if America had as many electric outlet types as Europe (free markets!) This mishmash of EMR will take a generation to unravel and cries out for a centralized system & format.
• I’m a primary care physician working at Kaiser Permanente. We’ve been using the Epic system for years. While it isn’t perfect, I’d never go back to paper … the real reason this system works for us is because we are an integrated system. If we weren’t, it wouldn’t work well at all. The real problem is lack of integration in US medicine.
• Banks and many other industries already embrace efficient and effective computerized systems. Where your life is at stake, wouldn’t you want your doctor to have the same advantages as your bank?
• This is a very one-sided article, and almost reads like a smear in some places.

For a counterpoint, see DrLyle’s post, The HIT Productivity Paradox — It’s Gonna Be OK.

 

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Reader Comments

From Ms. HIM: “Re: X-Rays. Inga, did you report to someone at the facility that you were able to see the patient data in the hallway?” Ms. HIM is referring to my recent visit to a radiology practice that had patient data prominently displayed on several monitors in common areas. I did e-mail the CIO and included my stealthily-taken pictures. No response yet.

From Disappointed: “Re: HIStalkapalooza. I want to give kudos to Shannon at Thomas Wright Partners. I am unable to attend HIMSS due to a family thing, but she promptly and cheerfully changed my confirmation to my boss who had neglected to sign up (what can I say?) She also said if things changed and I was able to attend, she personally would ensure I would get in and gave me her cell phone number. What great service!!!” Medicomp is working with the same team (Thomas Wright Partners, Bzzz Productions, Istrico Productions) that brought you HIStalkapalooza 2011 in Orlando. They are indeed efficient and responsive. I had no qualms about putting my name on the event and leaving the details to them.

From Letter of the Law: “Re: Allscripts Meaningful Use Guarantee. Doesn’t sound like MyWay will meet Stage 2 MU or get 2014 ONC certified as a Complete EHR. Does this mean MyWay clients get a 12-month support credit or refund? Seems like the guarantee was written to be purposefully vague and has now mysteriously disappeared from the Allscripts site (convenient) except in the Investor area.” Allscripts told us they would respond, but they haven’t so far.

From Tom: “Re: Epic. An electrophysiologist wrote a satirical post about Epic and used screenshots to convey the problems he experienced. He says Epic contacted his hospital administrators and asked him to take the screenshots down. He is now concerned about legal ramifications.” It should be noted that the doctor sells software on the side, although it costs only a few dollars and is specific to electrophysiology. Still, Epic has made it clear in the past that it won’t tolerate posting screen shots, documentation text, or almost anything else publicly. I’m thinking I remember (but could be wrong) that they warn UGM presenters not to post their slides publicly if they contain anything that Epic might deem proprietary. Says the doc (with some of his preachy indignation removed):

I’m just a physician who uses their software … No software is perfect however and I think the Epic bosses should be more interested in using feedback and criticism from health care professionals to improve the program rather than spending their time worrying that a screenshot of their user interface is available on the web … these massive companies who have benefited enormously from our tax dollars have the nerve to threaten those who criticize their software and publish a few bland screenshots. Unfortunately though, with their cash reserves and cadres of lawyers, there is little that EP Studios (cash reserves = $0) can do to stop their bullying.

From Say What?: “Re: HIMSS in Cleveland. Surely you jest. What is moving 345 miles from its Chicago base going to do for HIMSS? At least Nashville made sense from a different geographic, cultural, and transportation point of view, as would Phoenix, San Francisco, or Seattle.”

From Richard: “Re: HIStalk. Thanks for one of the most concise, relevant online healthcare IT publications out there. Your work is an excellent balance of current news, pertinent insight, and subtle (or sometimes hot so subtle) humor. Please pass on my compliments to the entire HIStalk crew for their excellent contributions. P.S. I admire your team’s ability to present a meaningful contribution and at the same time party like college freshman at HIMSS.” I did indeed pass along your much-appreciated comments to the crew, which got me trapped in the e-mail crossfire as Inga and Dr. Jayne tried to one-up each other with their claimed partying capacity beyond freshman level. I stopped reading once they escalated to grad school.

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HIStalk Announcements and Requests

This week on HIStalk Practice: MGMA introduces a Web-based tool that allows organizations to benchmark themselves against peers using national MGMA data. The RI REC offers EHR adoption assistance to specialists. Researchers devise an AI tool that may outperform physicians in making cost-effective clinical decisions. Michigan lawmakers consider legislation requiring a single universal prior authorization form for prescriptions. PCMHs deliver slightly better patient satisfaction and preventative care but may not result in cost savings. Dr. Gregg shares details of the meeting between Focus and Byproduct … heck, it’s a great story, so give it a read. Greenway Medical CEO Tee Green discusses the company and industry and makes some predictions for the future. Thanks for reading.

Maybe I’m the only one who didn’t know: Word, going back to the 2007 version apparently, has a “Save as PDF” option that’s easier than PDF print driver products like CutePDF or PDF995. And in another Andy Rooney meets Larry King kind of non sequitur, I heard programmers repeatedly pronounce two words oddly in a meeting today: DISplay and REfresh. I am monitoring further accent-switching occurrences.

I got an e-mail today that HIMSS has kicked me out of my reserved hotel and put me in a lower-rated one because of “an oversold situation,” adding that they “wanted to inform you before you arrived in New Orleans.” How thoughtful, especially considering that I booked in September.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Greythorn, whose healthcare IT practice places candidates in the specific high-demand market segments of Epic, Cerner, and ICD-10. Greythorn has offered specialty IT staffing solutions for more than 30 years. Check out their LinkedIn Epic and EHR Professionals group, or seek their folks out at HIStalkapalooza since they told me they’re going and I sense they’re a fun bunch. For clients, expect nice people, a big pipeline of candidates including international ones, and a zeal for understanding your business and your needs. Job candidates should read their Resume and Interview Tips document (“Questions to Be Prepared For” contains just about all of the HR-mandated behavioral interviewing questions I’ve ever asked). Stop by Booth #5358 at the HIMSS conference and pass along my thanks to Greythorn for supporting my work.

Here’s a “Working at Greythorn” video I found on YouTube.

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HIMSS Conference Social Events

If you registered in advance, your official HIStalkapalooza invite should have hit your inbox Wednesday (check those spam folders!) Make sure you’ve arranged your schedule to be there in time for the Inga Loves My Shoes contest and the crowning of the HIStalk King and Queen. The highly coveted beauty queen sashes and prizes will return.

Speaking of sashes, we decided to give readers a chance to win one, along with stage recognition and a $25 Amazon gift card. All you have to do is declare Inga, Dr. Jayne, or Mr. H as your secret crush and explain why. We’ll choose the most convincing entries, so feel to free to lay it on thick and shamelessly in an obvious appeal to our vanity. Winners (who must be at HIStalkapalooza) will be sashed on stage with “Inga’s Secret Crush,” “Dr. Jayne’s Secret Crush,” or “Mr. H’s Secret Crush” as a token of our reciprocation.

Aventura is participating in a booth block party at the conference on Tuesday from 4:00 until 6:00 p.m., with beer and margaritas.

Speaking of Aventura, they’ve sent the best e-mail promotion so far with their serious-sounding “HIT Survival Handbook” that includes some dry humor. I forwarded the e-mail home from work just to run it here.

I always scan down the HIStalkapalooza attendee list to see who’s coming and what titles they hold. Eyeballing it, it looks like over 100 presidents/CEOs, 200 VPs, 24 CIOs, 13 CMIOs, and eight financial and equities people. That’s a fraction of the total invitations, so obviously many other titles were represented.

Here’s a list of our HIMSS-related pages and their downloadable/printable PDF equivalents that will tell you what our sponsors are doing at the conference:

HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS13
HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS13 Meet-Ups
HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS13 Exhibitor Giveaways

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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shareholders of PSS World Medical approve the company’s agreement to merge with McKesson, clearing the way for a Q1 closing.

GetWellNetwork reports 30 percent growth in revenues and a 90 percent increase in orders from 2011 to 2012.

MedAssets reports Q4 results: revenue up 4.5 percent, adjusted EPS $0.27 vs. $0.32.

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Sales

The New Hampshire Health Information Organization selects the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative to provide executive director management services for the implementation of its statewide HIE, which will utilize Orion Health’s technology backbone.

NYU Langone Medical Center contracts with Accenture to support its ICD-10 implementation process.

Intelligent InSites wins a $543 million contract to implement to RTLS at 152 medical centers, as reported here previously. We interviewed President and CEO Margaret Laub last week.

Numera selects AT&T to be the wireless network and location services provider for Numera Libris, a mobile home health management and personal emergency response system.

Banner Health expands its portfolio of 3M products to include the 3M 360 Encompass System for computer-assisted coding and clinical documentation improvement.

Memorial Sloan-Kettering (NY) chooses Orion Health’s Rhapsody Integration Engine for communication and data sharing between the hospital’s different IT applications.

Phoenix Children’s Hospital (AZ) selects Allscripts Sunrise Financial Manager, Sunrise Ambulatory, and Allscripts Community Record.

Mid-Valley Hospital (WA) selects e-forms and electronic electronic patient signature solutions from Access to use with its Meditech Scanning and Archiving system.

Fairview Health Services (MN) will implement Strata Decision Technology’s StrataJazz for decision support, operating budgeting, strategic planning, and capital planning.

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People

Avere Systems appoints Michael McMahon (CommVault) as VP of business development.

Tom Giannulli, MD (Epocrates) joins Kareo as CMIO.

VA CTO Peter Levin, who led the Blue Button initiative, announces his resignation.

As reported here last week. Health Catalyst names Brent Dover (Medicity/Aetna) as president.

Wolters Kluwer promotes Kevin Entricken from CFO of the Wolters Kluwer Health division to CFO of the parent company.

Harris Interactive names Matt Knoeck (TNS North America) SVP of healthcare and Sharon Albert (TJ Sacks) VP of marketing for its healthcare group.

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Announcements and Implementations

The Rochester RHIO partners with area ambulance companies to allow physicians to see critical patient information gathered in the field during ambulance calls.

Medical equipment provider Skytron upgrades six of its customers to CenTrak’s clinical-grade RTLS technology.

SuccessEHS connects with MyHealth Access Network HIE (OK) to send clinical care documents from its EHR.

Aker Eye/Vision Source (FL) implements RTLS from Versus Technology.

The Joint Commission begins offering a PCMH certification for accredited hospitals and critical access hospitals.

SCI Solutions launches Readmission Minimizer to track and monitor post-discharge processes.

The Utah Health Information Network offers Direct secure messaging labeled as cHIE Direct, using technology from Secure Exchange Solutions.

Enovate announces two new products, the e5000 telemedicine cart and colorful peds-oriented Emagination Stations.

Humetrix introduces cross-platform capability for its iBlueButton app that allows consumers and patients to exchange clinical information at the point of care regardless of which smartphone they use.

Kareo launches a free cloud-based EHR that can be used as a standalone application or integrated with the company’s PM and billing services. It was developed using technology acquired from Epocrates, which exited the EHR business a year ago. Kareo notes that the EHR is “advertisement free” and says it will provide support and updates at no charge. The company hopes that the free EHR offering will attract more clients for its PM and billing service products.

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Government and Politics

ONC is accepting applications from those interested in serving on a new workgroup, the HITPC Food and Drug Administration Safety Innovation Act Workgroup,  that will provide recommendations for a risk-based HIT and mobile device regulatory framework.

Worth a read: The Advisory Board Company publishes “How Stage 2 Raises the Bar on Stage 1 Organizations.” Like everything Advisory Board, it’s fluff-free and to the point.

 

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Innovation and Research

Researchers from the University of Cincinnati find that physicians using an EMR are more likely to order routine screening tests for women.

Processing a prescription drug order through a CPOE system decreases the likelihood of error with that order by 48 percent according to a study supported by AHRQ. Researchers say the findings suggest CPOE can substantially reduce the frequency of medication errors in the inpatient setting, but it is unclear whether that translates into reduced harm for patients.

Christiana Care Health System is awarded a $10 million grant from CMS’s innovation grant program for its Bridging the Divides program that uses predictive analytics to target patients who would benefit from intervention. CMIO Terri Steinberg, MD, MBA (above) tells me that analytics can be run against the patient’s entire data set even if it originates from a different health system. I may follow up for more information.

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Other

Healthgrades says Dayton, OH, Phoenix, AZ, and Milwaukee, WI have the lowest risk-adjusted hospital mortality rates in its list of America’s Best Hospitals 2013.

Express Scripts sues Ernest & Young and one of its former partners for stealing trade secrets and corporate data to boost E&Y’s healthcare business. The lawsuit claims Donald Gravlin, who was working on the Express Scripts-Medco merger, entered an Express Scripts facility several times  to forward confidential company e-mails to his personal account.

Black Book Rankings releases the results of a survey to identify the top hospital EHR vendors based on client satisfaction. Winners include:

• CPSI (under 100 beds)
• Cerner (100-249 beds)
• Epic (academic teaching hospitals and major medical centers)
• Cerner (healthcare systems, hospital chains, integrated delivery networks)
• Picis (ED)

UnitedHealth Group announces the creation of 1,000 new jobs in North Carolina by its UnitedHealthcare and Optum businesses.

Weird News Andy waxes poetic on the news that Cornell researchers have created a realistic 3-D printed human ear. WNA says, “Poems are make by this fool right here, but only Cornell can make an ear.”

WNA finds this item both odd and sad: a suspended Johns Hopkins gynecologist accused of secretly taking photos of hundreds of his patients using a pen camera commits suicide.

 

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Sponsor Updates

• Aspen Valley Hospital (CO) shares how it increased front office payments and cash on hand and reduced administrative time and costs by using InstaMed solutions in a case study.
• Covisint extends its cloud identity services to include small and medium-sized organizations.
• US Secret Service Special Agent Erik Rasmussen and Trustwave SVP Nicholas Percoco will lead a keynote address on cybercrime at next week’s RSA conference.
• Halfpenny Technologies adds Altosoft’s BI dashboard to its ITF-Hub solution for clinical laboratories.
• API Healthcare offers a Webinar series focused on effective employee recruitment and retention.
• HealthMEDX expands its support of LeadingAge, a non-profit committed to providing care and services to the aging.
• eHealth Technologies releases a zero-footprint, Web-based image viewer that uses the eUnity platform of Client Outlook.
• Informatica releases Cloud Spring 2013, the latest release of its integration and data management applications, and will hosts a February 25 Webinar to introduce its features.

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EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

Clinicians can now diagnose leprosy (Hansen’s disease) more than a year before patients are symptomatic. The new test uses a smart phone, a test strip reader, and a single drop of blood. Each determination will cost $1 or less.

This week President Obama announced an initiative to map the human brain, citing the Human Genome Project as a precedent. The brain is a fascinating thing and I’m excited about the role that information technology will play in making it a reality. Even better was the adrenaline rush I got since I read the announcement while I was hopped up on cold medicine watching “The Bourne Legacy.” Hopefully the CIA isn’t waiting in the wings to create neurologically engineered killers with the resulting data.

I’ve enjoyed the reader comments about travel arrangements for HIMSS. I apparently waited too long to book my hotel room (silly me for thinking three months in advance was enough) so I am arriving a day later and leaving a day earlier than I’d have liked. The idea of having to split between two different hotels to cover the entire stay was not very appealing. The comments about venues for future HIMSS meetings are spot on as well. I mentioned the HIMSS rotation to a dental colleague today and learned that there IS something worse than HIMSS returning to Chicago: The Chicago Dental Society Midwinter Meeting, which is held every February in the Windy City. The schedule of events lists a Fashion Show Luncheon. I wonder if they feature parkas, boots, and mittens?

Twitter served up an item from @ONC_HealthIT celebrating a physician who built his own EHR in response to budget cuts. A read of the actual article reveals that “eventually he turned to Cerner.” Unfortunately Meaningful Use has stifled grassroots innovation like building a custom EHR for your practice. I also like the line about practice administrators scanning paper test results into the EHR. If they actually have practice administrators feeding the scanner, I can recommend some additional overhead cost cutting for them.

In addition to the paper mail and tchotchkes enticing me to various booths at HIMSS, I’ve started receiving e-mail invitations to focus groups. Today’s gem promised to “present 4 innovative clinical strategies that leverage technology to reduce cost and improve all quality metrics.” Wow! They improve all quality metrics? That’s impressive. Even more impressive is the honorarium offered: a “Personalized tour of Walgreens Flagship Location – TBD.” Sheesh.

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Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 2/20/13

Top News

Allscripts reports Q4 numbers: revenue down 10 percent, EPS –$0.14 vs. $0.14. The company’s reported revenue of $350.9 million fell short of expectations of $368 million on weaker sales and a deferred revenue provision, while the loss of $0.14 per share missed expectations of a positive $0.20 per share. President and CEO Paul Black says both the quarterly and annual results “did not meet our expectations.” Shares are up 6 percent in after-hours trading due to higher-than-expected bookings. From the conference call:

• Reception to the MyWay to Professional program “has been strong.”
• Two Sunrise acute care agreements have been signed so far this year, one of them with an existing client.
• The four key areas of focus are client alignment, unlocking competitive advantage, reducing costs, and reporting consistent financial results.
• Two-thirds of developers will be located in either Raleigh, NC or Boston after office consolidation.
• The company plans to expand its hosting business.

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Reader Comments

From UAHN Rocks: “Thanks for all the great work you to.  I am writing to share a video made by patients, clinicians, and executives from The University of Arizona Health Network’s Diamond Children’s hospital to celebrate the amazing work that they do to improve the lives of children in the community. UAHN is in the midst of an enterprise implementation of Epic, covering Diamond Children’s as well as all of our adult and outpatient facilities, with a go-live later this summer.” The video contains a medley of music, so keep playing, including a big finish with the magnificent Electric Light Orchestra at 3:00.

From HIMSS Bound and Gagged: “Re: flights to New Orleans. Costs are out of control, causing us to scale back our attendees. Have you heard anything?” According to Travelocity, the round-trip cheapest flights are $1,767 (Chicago), $1,142 (Atlanta), $1,582 (Los Angeles), and $1,687 (New York). Those include some really crappy connections as well, like going through Denver from New York. I seem to recall that the HIMSS post-Katrina booking of New Orleans in 2007 had similar problems, where flights were not sufficient to get people in and out. HIMSS was supposed to have narrowed down its conference cities to just three – Orlando, Atlanta, and Las Vegas – if I’m remembering right from a few years ago. All three are easy to get to, cheap, and have endlessly available hotels, restaurants, cabs, service workers, etc. Then came the charitable addition of New Orleans (whose infrastructure clearly wasn’t up to the challenge despite the HIMSS pitch) and the hometown reach-around to Chicago (where everything, especially union member surliness, cost twice what it would have in those other three cities and it was cold and snowy besides). Both were HIMSS low points in my opinion, yet here we are going back to New Orleans this year and Chicago in 2015. The best city (San Diego) and the cheapest (Dallas) were dropped from the rotation years ago. I’m pretty sure that if HIMSS actually listened to its members, or even asked them for that matter, they would not favor returning to New Orleans or Chicago even though those cities are perfectly fine for personal travel. I booked my flight on January 23 and was griping about paying $300 and now it’s over $1,300. If you don’t already have a flight, aren’t within driving distance, and aren’t a fan of Amtrak or Greyhound, you’re screwed.

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HIStalk Announcements and Requests

In case you missed it we published the HIStalk Guide to HIMSS13 over the weekend. More than 130 vendors (all of whom happen to be HIStalk sponsors) provide details on the products and services they will be featuring this year. We also created HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS13 Meetups, which includes contact information on about 30 vendors that are not exhibiting but happy to schedule meetings with interested folks. Finally we developed HIStalk’s Guide to Exhibitor Giveaways to help you find the best swag.  When you chat with these vendors, please tell them thanks for supporting HIStalk.

 

I accompanied a family member to get X-rays yesterday and stood outside in the hallway during the actual scan. While waiting, I was able to read all sorts of patient-specific information on two different monitors, as well as on the computed radiography reader (Mr. H tells me that’s the name of the thingy on the left.) Why worry about privacy, right?

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum sponsor Legacy Data Access of Marietta, GA. It’s refreshing that the company’s mission is not only easy to describe, but is even contained in its name. Legacy Data Access provides customers with access to all of that data that’s locked away in their retired legacy applications. The company eliminates the hassle and cost of keeping the old app running solely for occasional lookups or reports. Clients don’t need to pay apps vendors for support, maintain aging servers, chew up big chunks of their disaster recovery plan, and tie up high-level talent keeping an abandoned system running after Legacy has moved data from that old system to a shiny new database and given users a slick Web-based front end and extemporaneous reporting tool for their inquiries. Think of LDA as a retirement home for apps, which might include revenue cycle systems (clients still get receivables functionality), PM/EHR, nursing documentation, and ancillaries. LDA can even provide a Legal Medical Record. Some of the company’s customers are UCSF, Parkland, Stanford, Trinity Health, and others that are so recognizable that it would be just name-dropping on my part to continue reciting them. If your IT stroll down memory lane includes Carecast, Invision, STAR, MedSeries4, Series 2000, ESI, Premis, EMstat, Midas, or others whether they’re on LDA’s list or not, they can help. Once an app is ready for full retirement, LDA will move everything to its LegacyVault, where information will be available indefinitely (like in the case of a lawsuit). Move on to your new-system life by letting LDA help you move gracefully away from the old one. Thanks to Legacy Data Access for supporting HIStalk.

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HIMSS Conference Social Events

At least in my mind THE social event of HIMSS is HIStalkapalooza. Here are a few vital details for those attending:

• Invitations will go out starting Wednesday. Make sure to check your spam filters. We’re inviting twice the usual number of folks, so the odds of getting an invitation are favorable.
• Medicomp is once again sponsoring HIStalkapalooza and they know how to throw a party, as those of you who attended the 2011 event at BB King’s in Orlando can attest. Guests will be greeted on the red carpet and handed a Hurricane Inga or Typhoon Jane. How’s that for hospitality?
• The Inga Loves My Shoes contest is back by popular demand, so pack your best zapatos. Since HIStalkapalooza is at the Rock ‘N’ Bowl, we will have a category for Best Bowling Shoes, as well as Hottest Men’s and Women’s Shoes.
• We will again crown a HIStalk King and Queen for the best-dressed guests, so bring your bling. We’ll also recognize the Best Bowling Attire for those opting for the ten pin look. If you haven’t figured out what to wear, here is a tip: nothing says sexy like a bowling shirt, except maybe sequins and a tux. I expect to see plenty of stilettos and Farzad-inspired bow ties. Feel free to leave your company-logoed shirt in the hotel room.
• The party starts at 6:30 and the contests (followed by the HISsies) will begin about 7:30. Our esteemed judges will begin selecting contest finalists as soon as the doors open, so don’t be late.
• After the HISsies, the Zydeco band and the fast-paced bowling tournament get going. Bowling teams currently include keglers from athenahealth, Bumrungrad International Hospital, CareCloud, Clinical Architecture, Northrop Grumman, Orion, SuccessEHS, and Vitera.
• The party goes on until 11:30, so join us late after your fancy dinner at Emeril’s.

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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Liaison Technologies acquires Ignis Systems, a provider of clinical data integration solutions for lab and radiology orders and results.

Allscripts discloses in a regulatory filing its plans to close 12 offices and implement other changes to reduce costs associated with product development. The company estimates that it will spend $10 million for employee severance, $16 million for relocation costs , and $3 million for lease exit costs.

Merge reports Q4 results: revenue up 1 percent, adjusted EPS –$0.13 vs. $0.04, missing consensus earnings estimates. The company also announced that its board has unanimously rejected the valuation placed on the company in strategic alternatives proposals and will instead continue to execute its own plan. In the conference call, the company pointed out strongly increased bookings, increasing subscription revenue, increased acceptance of its iConnect enterprise archive, and growth in specialty areas such as cardiology and orthopedics.

Social network platform vendor iMedicor acquires HITS Consulting Group (HITS CG) and the data mining firm ClarDIS. The company also appointed HITS CG CEO Henry Denis president and ClariDIS Founder and President Joshua Brimdyr as COO.

Clinical research services vendor Quintiles announces plans for a $600 million IPO. The company was taken private by Bain and TPG in 2008 for $3.8 billion and is $2.4 billion in debt. The founder, Bain, and TPG each own shares worth around $500 million.

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Sales

Triad Healthcare Network (NC) will implement Alere Accountable Care Solutions for its HIE.

Cardiovascular Care Group selects McKesson’s Paragon HIS for use at its Bakersfield Heart Hospital (CA) facility.

Pioneers Memorial Healthcare District (CA) will deploy Medseek’s self-service portal tools.

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People

Kimberly Labow (NaviNet) joins ZirMed as VP of marketing.

Clinithink appoints Russ Anderson (Availity) VP of product management.

Roland L. Surprenant (Allscripts) joins Patient Safe as a regional VP.

Hal Andrews (Mainland Morgan & Co.) joins nTelagent as CEO, replacing founder Earl Winter, who remains on the board.

The SSI Group names Terry Pefanis (Healthtech Holdings) as CFO and promotes Mary Hyland to VP of regulatory affairs/chief privacy officer.

Brian Graves (Picis) joins Connance, Inc. as VP of marketing and communications.

HCA Gulf Coast Division (TX) names Carl Vartian, MD to the additional role of CMIO. He will continue as chief medical officer of Bayshore Medical Center (TX).

Alan Huffman (Healthcare Management Systems) joins Shareable Ink as VP of engineering.

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Announcements and Implementations

Benjamin Russell Hospital for Children (AL) goes live on the Versus Advantages Asset Tracking solution, which includes two-way HL7 integration to Four Rivers Total Maintenance System.

Data analytics and natural language processing vendor Health Fidelity is awarded a National Science Foundation grant to develop technology to identify patient cohorts using EHR data. 

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Government and Politics

HHS names Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation the winner of its Million Hearts Risk Check Challenge for its Heart Health Mobile app and awards the Foundation $100,000 for maintenance and updates.

CDC releases Solve the Outbreak, a free iPad game.

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Technology

Palomar Health will announce this week that it’s the first customer of a new wireless vital signs monitor for tablets and smartphones. The phone-sized, wrist-attached ViSi Mobile by Sotera Wireless will send continuous information on heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen levels directly to the electronic medical record, allowing non-invasive monitoring from any hospital location.

Bayada Home Health Care issues 4,000 Samsung Galaxy Tab tablets to its professionals following a 20-person pilot project. They’re using SwiftKey Healthcare ($3.99), which speeds up documentation with an on-screen keyboard, terminology dictionary, and auto-fill capability. More than two-thirds of Bayada’s nurses who use SwiftKey said they would rather document on the tablet instead of on the laptop or on paper. It doesn’t work on iOS devices, though, since Apple doesn’t permit third-party keyboards.

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Other

HIMSS will lease 25,000 square feet in Cleveland’s Global Center for Health Innovation (just renamed from Medical Mart at the request of its tenants) to be used for exhibition, education, and demonstration as well as the HIMSS Innovation Center, presumably replacing its planned presence at the defunct Nashville Medical Trade Center project.

I think I remember a reader’s earlier question about Epic’s Meaningful Use Stage 2 certification status (it involved a claim that they wouldn’t be ready, as I recall). Both EpicCare Inpatient and Ambulatory are now listed on CCHIT’s site as being certified for the 2014 criteria.

A bomb scare-triggered lockdown this week at Natividad Medical Center (CA) proves the value of its electronic medical record in an emergency. According to the hospital assistant administrator, “We have an electronic medical record, so we are able to see where the patients are and what kind of service they need.”

A Black Book Rankings provider poll finds that up to 17 percent of physician practices may be planning to change EHRs in the next year, which it blames on vendors who are too busy selling and implementing their products to address unmet client needs. Of those practices contemplating a change, more than half said they would prefer a hosted solution. Specialists expressed strong dissatisfaction with their current systems, with more than 70 percent of ENT, immunology, orthopedics, gastroenterology, ophthalmology, urology, and nephrology practices saying their current EHR doesn’t meet their needs.

A trauma center in India implements a new system that eliminates readability issues with physician documentation and reduces the time required to document 30,000 accident cases per year. The self-developed, template-based new system is solely for “medico-legal cases,” i.e. it’s not for patient care, but rather to document cases that may eventually initiate a lawsuit.

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Sponsor Updates

• SCI Solutions adds 93 hospitals in 2012, achieves sequential sales growth of 37 percent, and maintains an attrition rate below two percent.
• Ping Identity showcases its next-generation cloud and mobile identity management solution during next week’s RSA conference in San Francisco.
• Greenway’s PrimeSUITE (V17.0) receives 2014 ONC HIT certification as a complete EHR. The company will also integrate the Physicians Interactive eCoupon voucher and coupon distribution system into  the system.
• Covisint releases its Direct solution that provides secure, scalable point-to-point email-like messaging. 
• ICA selects Health Language from Wolters Kluwer Health to support its HIE platform.
• MedAptus VP of Client Services Rick Little shares details of MD Anderson Cancer Center’s use of MedAptus for charge capture.
• NIH experts validate PeriGen’s fetal heart rate interpretation, which was presented this week at the Society of Maternal Fetal Medicine in San Francisco.
• Aspen Advisors becomes a Premier CHIME Foundation member.
• iSirona will be featured in the Interoperability Showcase at the HIMSS conference after passing the interoperability requirements at IHE North America Connectathon.
• Beacon Partners will offer a session entitled “Habits of Highly Meaningful Users” at the HIMSS conference on March 6.
• Healthpac will embed PatientPay’s online bill management services into its practice management system.
• ICA and Futurix Health partner to offer payers, ACOs, and providers enhanced data analytics and benchmarking tools coupled with ICA’s interoperability and informatics platform.
• DynaMed and Isabel Healthcare partner to allow mutual customers linkage from Isabel’s differential diagnosis tool to DynaMed’s evidence-based clinical information resources.
• An Iatric Systems video describes the company’s vision for comprehensive healthcare IT integration.

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Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Monday Morning Update 2/18/13

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HIMSS Conference Social Events

Omnicell will offer beer and wine in Booth # 8141 Monday and Tuesday from 4:00 to 6:00. Betsy told me she can’t comment on the quality of the beer, but she says the price is right.

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Three-quarters of poll respondents say the government should issue a national patient identifier, although few of those respondents have ever sought the votes of wary constituents. New poll to your right: is the amount of HIMSS-related vendor contact you’re getting too little, about right, or too much?

For the HIMSS vendor contact, I’m going to go with “about right” since it’s easy for me to toss mail-out cards without even looking at them, which I’ve done with every one of them that have arrived. I always toy with the idea of choosing some vendor at random from the HIMSS list who’s exiled to a tiny booth in the Siberia part of the exhibit hall and then imploring my readers to show up there at a designated time just to give them hope. Every year I purposely walk those seldom-trod paths and chat with the untouchables, although in many cases they’ve already given up and either left their booth unattended or repurposed it as a place for their reps to sprawl back and play with their phones. Inga, Dr. Jayne, and I are good mystery shoppers, telling you the good and the bad booth behaviors we observe during the conference.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum sponsor InstaMed. The Philadelphia-based company’s integrated healthcare and payments network has been chosen by 400 hospitals and 60,000 practices who wanted to collect more patient payments, get paid faster, and reduce the time and complexity involved in collecting what’s owed to them. Everything from eligibility to claims can be managed on the company’s cloud-based portal, while patients get their own portal for receiving electronic statements, making payments, and setting up payment plans. Other tools include eligibility, a patient payment estimator, converting scanned checks to eChecks, claims management, remittance management, and electronic remittance. A just-issued case study describes the experience of Aspen Valley Hospital (CO), which used InstaMed to increase front office payments by 124 percent over five years and reduce payment processing administrative time by 65 percent. Good Samaritan Hospital (IN) cut statement costs by 25 percent and reduced administrative time in handling credit card payments by 90 percent. Lots of testimonials, including names, are here. Thanks to InstaMed for supporting my work.

England’s Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust halts new go-lives of Meditech, citing “persistent serious issues” that include “clinician and staff acceptance and usability.” Overseers say The Rotherham is falling short on financials because the system can’t book appointments effectively, also saying they can’t trust Meditech’s coding, case mix, and activity data. The trust went live last year two years behind schedule, expecting to spend $62 million over 10 years on Meditech as one of the first trusts to bypass NPfIT-provided systems in choosing their own. Excellent reporting by eHealthInsider.

Also in England, Royal Berkshire Hospital is reported to be close to shutting down Cerner Millennium because of higher-than-expected ongoing cost and productivity losses that have frustrated staff and bottlenecked patients. The hospital expected ongoing costs of $2.5 million per year, but the actual annual run rate of the $46 million system is $8.5 million. Patient delays have been so extensive that the hospital offers them parking discounts, free refreshments, and quizzes with which to amuse themselves while waiting.

Our Investor’s Chair guru Ben Rooks weighs in on why companies adopt a majority voting policy for their directors as Allscripts did last week:

This is actually quite shareholder friendly and has become much more common in corporate governance. In contrast to the way boards typically were retained (plurality voting), this says that if most shareholders don’t actively want the director to serve, they need to resign. In effect, inertia and indifference cease to become as powerful forces in retaining directors. I’d view both this step and the expiration of the shareholder rights plan as positive for MDRX shareholders.

The recently reopened Bellevue Hospital Center (NY) diverted trauma patients for 90 minutes Thursday evening when an electrical problem shut down its computer systems for several hours.

Covisint will announce next week an out-of-the-box solution to connect with the Direct Project, which will include Web services APIs to manage message routing, administration, and a secure inbox. Covisint Direct will be market to hospitals, states, RECs, and EMR vendors as a quick way to create a Direct solution for sending CCDs, care gaps, and alerts.

The newly appointed president of the Allegheny County Medical Society (PA) says doctors are spending too much time completing electronic medical records, also noting that her own plastic surgery practice has been forced to change EHRs three times. 

A Zimbabwe family’s home remedy of treating wounds with sugar is being tested in British hospitals with some degree of success. Weird News Andy says they use the same sugar on both left and right limbs … because it’s ambidextrose (I won’t rain on WNA’s pun parade by pointing out that table sugar is sucrose rather than dextrose). It’s also not a new practice – hospitals I’ve worked in have used sugar on wounds on rare occasion, sometimes in conjunction with Maalox. Unlike most treatments, at least these are cheap and cause no harm even when they don’t work.

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Sponsor Updates

• Intermountain Healthcare will feature TeleTracking’s RTLS solutions in an interactive hospital patient room display in HIMSS Booth #1810.
• HFMA member Dan Mandy of Winthrop Resources is featured in a peer-reviewed HFMA article that describes funding options for IT capital expense.
• Philips Healthcare CMIO/CTO Joseph Frassica, MD will speak at the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase on Tuesday, March 5 at 11 a.m. I interviewed him last August.
• Intelligent InSites is chosen by en-Gauge as the locating solution for its fire extinguisher and medical oxygen monitors.
   

News 2/15/13

Top News

Massachusetts General Hospital spinoff and EHR query platform vendor QPID chooses a timely Valentine’s Day launch. I interviewed President and CEO Mike Doyle earlier this week about the company.

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Reader Comments

From DrLyle: “Re: LinkedIn. Looks like I have more stalkers than you.” DrLyle and a few other folks sent me notes saying they were among the millions in the top five or even one percent of LinkedIn users with the most viewed profiles in 2012. DrLyle, by the way, posed an interesting question: is there value in paying LinkedIn for one of the professional versions? I defer to readers since I have no interest in paying $20 to $75 a month for premium options.

From Geographically Challenged: “Re: HIMSS13. Will you be attending this year’s HIMSS13 Annual Conference in Las Vegas from March 3-7?” Note to vendors and PR firms pitching for media time: messaging is far more effective when you get the name of the city correct. Not to mention that we already suspected that HIMSS13 would be held this year. Maybe it was a trick question.

From Skunk Baxter: “Re: Stanford Hospital CIO. She is out.” Carolyn Byerly’s LinkedIn profile shows that she just started a new job as managing partner with Platinum Advisory Services, LLC.

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HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A few highlights from HIStalk Practice over the last week: CMS provides guidelines for EPs for avoiding the 1.5 percent PQRS penalty in 2015. CVS dominates the retail medical clinic market. Athenahealth earns a spot on FastCompany’s list of the World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Healthcare. SRS CEO Evan Steele discusses Thoma Bravo, EHR usability, and Meaningful Use. Thanks for reading.

Coming soon: HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS 2013, which includes essential details on over 100 vendors, all of which in a remarkable coincidence happen to be our lovely sponsors. You won’t want to miss it if you need the scoop on who to contact to schedule meetings or where to find the best booth giveaways.

The always-creative folks at Vonlay steered me to a humorous Dear Abby-type blog post they’re running in honor of Valentine’s Day, but I was more amused by the graphic on their main page.

I’ve been getting several calls at the hospital each day from vendors pitching their HIMSS presence, more than I remember in previous years. They’re easy to spot on Caller ID, so I just let them go to voicemail and delete them later. Today a company (I’ll be nice and not name them) left a lengthy voice mail, with the rep (badly) reading a canned script that ended with, “we’re scheduling meetings with people” (nothing like making a prospect feel special). Worst of all, she was reading it over her speakerphone. I pictured her as a bored phone sex operator.

 

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Halfpenny Technologies. The Blue Bell, PA company specializes in data interoperability, such as laboratory information systems communicating with EHRs, health plans, or each other (reverse reference labs). Point-to-point interfaces push data around inefficiently and without normalization, making them a sitting duck for Halfpenny’s ITF-Hub, which serves as air traffic controller to manage the flow of orders and results among all participants (hospitals, independent labs, HIEs, health plans, practices, and public health). Everybody knows you can’t do much of anything for a patient without lab results. The company has been around since 2000, having worked with more than 200 EHR vendors since then and embedded its technology into some of their products as well. They offer portal and mobile access, which of course makes docs happy, especially the ones who aren’t using EHRs. Their CMIO will tell you how Meaningful Use Stage 2 affects the clinical lab. Drop by HIMSS Booth #5223, tell the folks you read about them here, and drop subtle hints about signing you up for some swell prizes. Thanks to Halfpenny Technologies for supporting HIStalk.

On the Jobs Board: Project Manager – Government, Business Intelligence Architect, Software Product Development Manager, Requirements Engineer.

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HIMSS Conference Social Events

Send us your event details if it’s a good one (i.e, free food and drinks at minimum) and you promise that all HIStalk readers are welcome to attend, even if they work for your most hated competitor as a given reader might well do. Don’t blame us if throngs eat you out of cocktail weenies and tortilla roll-ups. I would be especially interested in companies serving really good beer as I ran across a couple of conferences ago.

Jardogs will host a happy hour on Monday, March 4 and Tuesday, March 5 from 5:00 to 6:00 pm in Booth 4659. Dr. Jayne and Inga have noted this in their schedules.

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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Allscripts adopts a majority voting policy for directors and announces that its annual stockholder meeting is set for May 21. We’re not astute financial analysts who actually know what that accomplishes, so Ben Rooks of the Investor’s Chair has promised to render his opinion.

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Sales

Vanderbilt University Medical Center (TN) will implement TeraMedica’s Evercore Clinical Enterprise Suite for vendor neutral archiving. 

SCL Health System selects the technology platform of Lumeris for its accountable care initiatives.

Community Memorial Hospital (CA) contracts with Cymetrix for revenue cycle services.

DeKalb Health (IN) selects e-MDs Solution Series for its 19 providers.

Bali Royal Hospital in Indonesia selects Wolters Kluwer Health’s UpToDate as its evidence-based clinical decisions support system.

Mee Memorial Hospital (CA) will use Access-eforms on demand and e-Signature technology with its Meditech Magic Scanning & Archiving system .

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People

PeriGen names Thomas J. Garite, MD (American Journal of OB/Gyn) chief clinical officer.

Nancy Ham (McKesson / MedVentive) is named CEO of Aetna’s Medicity subsidiary. She replaces Brent Dover.

Brent Dover (Aetna / Medicity) is named president of Health Catalyst, which will announce his hiring on February 19. Brent says the irony isn’t lost on him that he left an HIE company to lead an analytics vendor, while Nancy Ham left an analytics vendor to replace him at the HIE company.

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Announcements and Implementations

Baylor University Medical Center (TX) goes live on Allscripts Sunrise Clinical Manager.

North Memorial Health Care (MN) reports a 75 percent reduction in unnecessary early-term deliveries using Health Catalyst’s Adaptive Data Warehouse technology.

Integration and data management services provider Liaison Technologies announces that its healthcare division grew 83 percent and its headcount more than doubled in 2012.

The CalHIPSO Regional Extension Center launches service offerings that include Meaningful Use tracking, EHR readiness, and eligibility registration attestation.

Cleveland Clinic (OH) signs up for the CliniSync HIE, joining the previously announced University Hospitals Health System.

Perceptive Software announces an upgrade to its Perceptive Search applications, the first since it acquired the technology last year. It searches documents, e-mail, websites, intranets, databases, social networking sites, and local computers.

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Government and Politics

President Obama calls out patent trolls in a Thursday afternoon Google Hangout session dubbed Fireside Hangout. “They don’t actually produce anything themselves. They’re just trying to essentially leverage and hijack somebody else’s idea and see if they can extort some money out of them.”

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Innovation and Research

NeuroCare Tech launches BrainAttack, a $5.99 decision support app for evaluating ED stroke patients as candidates for tPA.

The free Qpid.me service allows potential romantic partners to share their sexually transmitted disease status directly from the medical records of their doctors. Concerns about the site are that practices won’t have the time to send patient records if it really takes off, not to mention that once those records arrive at the company’s servers, patients are no longer protected by HIPAA.

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Technology

Four Rivers Total Maintenance Systems integrates Versus Technology’s RTLS within its asset management software.

A study’s questionable conclusion claims that Microsoft’s Kinect videogame controller could reduce healthcare expenses by $30 billion by replacing expensive telemedicine systems (which of course Skype and other video chat tools can do for free). Kinect’s advantage is that it can be used hands-free in a sterile field, but I haven’t seen a lot of telemedicine originating in the OR. One of the study’s two authors works for Microsoft.

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Other

Patient Privacy Rights provided links to its federal Form 990 for 2010 and 2011 in response to the inquiry from Alert Reader. They’ve been there all along on the “Why Donate” page. UPDATE: my mistake, they apparently were just added from the reader’s inquiry. I didn’t see any smoking guns if that was the expectation – the organization took in around $105K in donations in 2011 (half what it received in 2007-2009), spent a small amount on its one FTE, and the rest went to professional fees and office and travel expense. Deb Peel was paid nothing.

Froedtert Health (WI) warns that a virus that penetrated an employee’s computer may have exposed the information of 43,000 patients to unknown parties.

A San Diego publication profiles Chris Van Gorder of Scripps Health, a former beat cop turned hospital security guard and now CEO who is determined to reduce unnecessary variation to cut costs. According to the article, “Van Gorder trusts that sharing financial information, especially on costs, along with data on treatment and outcomes, will usually lead doctors to the best-outcome-at-lowest-cost decisions.”

People always send me funny stuff because they know I’m a sucker for it, and the video above from customer engagement and total cost of ownership services vendor PeerIntel is good one, with the smarmy doc playing it straight all the way. I notice the hospital name is actually that of the company’s R&D VP, described on its site as a “scruffy Armenian.” The other bios are pretty funny, too, with the marketing guy’s saying that he came to the company due to “a series of (now-broken) promises” by the top guys. The company used to be called Katalus Advisors. I interviewed Chairman Jeremy Bikman in October 2011.

A laid off MedQuist director shares her experience in “losing my job to technology” as speech recognition technology replaces transcriptionists.

The second spokesperson for Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas dies of, you guessed it, a heart attack. He weighed only 180 pounds, a wisp compared to his 575-pound predecessor. The restaurant fries in pure lard, sells beer and cigarettes, offers a 10,000 calorie burger, and  provides free meals to patrons weighing over 350 pounds. Their employees are scantily clad “nurses” that critics say places it in the Hooters-created category known in the trade as “breastaurants.”

I see that passengers on the Carnival Triumph are suffering bad food, long lines, and rude fellow passengers. Sounds about like our experience on a week-long cruise on Triumph a few years back, except ours was just a normal cruise. Everybody’s fretting about underfed passengers, but nobody seems worried about the 1,000 foreign crew members working around the clock in miserable conditions trying to keep passengers safe, comfortable, and norovirus-free for their princely wages of maybe $150 per week, not to mention that tips will be few this time. As the ambulance chasers and sensationalistic news reporters line up to prod the vacationers into a state of righteous indignation (even though they’re already receiving a nice package of reparations from Carnival), someone should raise some money to help the crew, who will probably get nothing for what they’ve been through.

Scotland’s NHS hospital employees, like ours, share passwords, post questionable information in Facebook, curse in e-mails, and install unauthorized software on their hospital devices, according to disciplinary records.

Weird News Andy says this woman really did have a HERnia, in the form of a baby girl. A 44-year-old woman complaining of bloating is X-rayed by hospital doctors, who are startled to find a full-term baby in her womb. They did a C-section and she’s now a first-time mom.

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Sponsor Updates

• NextGen Healthcare adds ITelagen as a VAR.
• VersaSuite participates in this week’s Rural Health Care Leadership Conference in Phoenix.
• TrustHCS representatives will speak on ICD-10 readiness during the April AHIMA ICD-10 CMS/PCS and CAC Summit in Baltimore.
• SuccessEHS sponsors a February 28 Webinar on the patient-centered EHR and quality improvement.
• CIC Advisory offers suggestions on implementing and adopting a health IT safety program.
• CardioNet and AirStrip partner to develop and co-market an integrated solution for mobile patient monitoring.
• Agilum Healthcare Intelligence publishes a case study on business intelligence strategies for small and mid-sized hospitals.
• AdvancedMD offers a guide to improve patient experience with EHRs.
• Intellect Resources posts a  Gotye parody video about recruiters.
• Imprivata adds Aura Healthcare as a VAR to resell its single sign-on solution.
• Best of Staffing recognizes CSI Healthcare for its outstanding reviews from clients and job-seekers.
• Data Trade Solutions will offer nVoq’s SayIt speech recognition technology to its physician clients.
• NorthWise Services (UK) partners with Merge to offer clinical trial services.
• Wellcentive participated in the 2013 IHE North America Connectathon earlier this month.

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EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange survey remains open through next Wednesday. Any individual associated with health care organizations (vendors, health plans, providers, etc.) may participate. I’m a little offended that they listed providers last and even after health plans, but I took the survey anyway.

Speaking of surveys, a senior at Washington University in St. Louis conducted one on hip replacement prices. As part of a research project on healthcare costs, Jaime Rosenthal called 100 hospitals (two in every state) and asked for cash prices for a hip replacement surgery for her fictional grandmother. Despite pushes for transparency, only half the hospitals could provide an estimate and those that did ranged from $11,000 to $125,000.

A related commentary discusses the disparities in “sticker price” of health care and tells the story of the automobile window sticker, stating, “A 2013 hip replacement looks a lot like a 1954 Buick.”

Just when I thought I had seen it all, Dr. Mostashari’s bow tie opened its own Twitter account yesterday. You can follow its exploits @FarzadsBowtie while “Putting the Bow-Tie in Health IT.” I’ve had crushes on some famous people, but never on one whose apparel had its own social life. What’s next: @IngaHistalksShoes?

Speaking of shoes, Inga beat me to the punch with the chocolate shoes, but they’re too good not to mention here as well. My favorite is the red stiletto with the dark chocolate filigree, although the pink with white polka dots is cute too. Maybe a certain someone will take the hint.

If not the shoes, I’m definitely liking this lovely ring from MF Jewelry, created from your own EKG tracing. 

Considering my recent piece on handwritten thank you notes at the hospital, Inga sent over this ER doctor’s note that’s been circling the Internet. Now this is meaningful use of a handwritten note. Kudos to New York Presbyterian’s fine and caring staff member.

I’m starting to put together my serious (i.e. “non-cocktail party”) agenda for HIMSS. I was a little bitter to see that Inga and I were not invited to the #HITchicks Tweetup event on Monday. I can’t think of more fun #HITchicks than us. I’m hoping to see some new and innovative things rather than more of the same. Have something that I shouldn’t miss? E-mail me.

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Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

QPID Launches EHR Search Engine

QPID, a startup that will commercialize technology developed by Massachusetts General Hospital (MA), announced its launch today. We spoke to President and CEO Michael Doyle, formerly of Medsphere, ahead of the announcement.

Doyle says that QPID, which stands for Queriable Patient Inference Dossier, was created five years ago by a Mass General interventional radiologist working with a computer scientist. The radiologist found the time required to manually look up patient information on the EMR was prohibitive. The pair automated the process using natural language processing that can search both structured and unstructured data.

Doyle says that the demand from other Mass General radiologists and then gastroenterologists pushed QPID’s usage to an eventual 15 hospital departments. Gastroenterologists, for example, perform a search on all patients scheduled for colonoscopies 30 days before the procedure to look for problems such as active anticoagulant orders or sleep apnea that would require the patient to bring their CPAP machine for use during the procedure.

“Twenty percent of the colonoscopy procedures at Mass General were identified by QPID as patients needing additional pre-procedure preparation,” Doyle told us. “The system crawls the medical record looking at both structured and unstructured data. Conceptual queries have been built around it and it searches for relevant things in the patient history that will make a difference in the procedure that’s being done.”

According to Doyle, “We’ve got 5,000 physicians using this at Mass General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Newton-Wellesley Hospital. We touch 7,000 patients per day and do 50 million searches each month. It creates meaning from EHRs, which are really a data repository that is extremely difficult to get information out of in a form factor that’s timely for the physician to make a clinical decision.” 

Doyle says the NLP engine was developed internally and can handle misspelling and inconsistent terminology, providing the user with user confidence intervals along with its findings. He says Mass General physicians call it “Google for the EHR,” but Doyle emphasizes that QPID’s results are derived from clinical relevance rather than simple popularity. QPID can operate with any EHR, requiring a read-only connection via HL7 feeds or Web services.

QPID will be targeted to academic medical centers, initially to radiologists. “If we go into the CIO’s door, they’re inundated with Meaningful Use and everything else. We’ll go to department chairs in radiology, gastroenterology, or surgery. They will get it immediately,” Doyle told us.

Doyle says QPID will eventually help health systems position themselves in a market shifting away from transactional systems and fee-for-service reimbursement. “Mass General is never going to compete on cost,” he says. “But they can compete on the most appropriate care for the patient. Let’s say we know, based on the type of procedure, there’s national data that says there’s a 15 percent mortality rate. QPID can look at the current state of that patient, compare their index to national numbers, and allow surgeons to recommend a different procedure that’s less invasive.” That, Doyle says, will allow hospitals to justify their treatment plan to patients and insurance companies based on the condition of individual patients.  

QPID is backed by Boston-based Matrix Ventures as its first healthcare investment, with additional investment from the Partners Innovation Fund and the Massachusetts General Physicians Organization.

HIStalk Guide to HIMSS13

Download a printable PDF of the guide here.

Accent on Integration® (AOI®)

Booth: Interoperability Showcase, Use Case #8

Contact: Marc C. Andiel, Co-founder, President and CEO
MAndiel@AOI.biz
972.422.8609, 214.417.3618

Accent on Integration® (AOI®) enables data sharing by interconnecting disparate technology systems and patient care devices for hospitals and healthcare systems of all sizes to improve patient care by enhancing clinical workflows, eliminating error-prone processes and removing data silos. AOI’s Accelero Connect® integration platform is vendor, manufacturer and modality neutral and used to openly communicate clinical data between a multitude of systems and devices.

AOI was selected to participate in the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase and demonstrate live how Accelero Connect can integrate vital signs monitors, smart infusion pumps and telemetry beds with an HIS. At the show, AOI can be found in the demo area for Use Case No.8, which will illustrate the role integration plays as a patient moves through a hospital from the ED to ICU and then discharge.

AOI’s team of seasoned professionals is dedicated to uniting people, process and technology, and they look forward to meeting with you at HIMSS to discuss your integration goals.

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Acuo Technologies

Booth 2859

Contact: Mike Dolan, Vice President of Sales
mdolan@acuotech.com
952.905.3448

Acuo Technologies® is the world leader in clinical content management and data migration technology. Our Universal Clinical Platform (UCP) is an enterprise solution built on a next-generation vendor neutral archive (VNA). UCP helps healthcare organizations achieve full interoperability across multiple disparate systems by consolidating long-term data management. UCP unlocks clinical content held captive in departmental systems, providing extreme data liquidity that eliminates migration headaches and accelerates patient data to the point of need. With VNA implementation experience that spans all major PACS vendors and storage providers, Acuo is focused on making all components of a healthcare ecosystem work better together.

In January 2013, Acuo became part of Perceptive Software from Lexmark. The combination of Perceptive’s content management capabilities and Acuo’s VNA platform provides the ability to capture, manage and access all unstructured content to clinicians exactly where and when they need it. The combined offerings provide capabilities to quickly search and extract relevant information from this captured content, and deliver it in the context of the clinical applications. It allows Acuo and Perceptive to bring “high definition” to the EMR and is unique in the healthcare space.

Acuo brings clinical content into the context of the patient record in the EMR, just as Perceptive Software brings unstructured content into the context of the EMR or other enterprise application. Together Perceptive Software’s rich process and content solutions, combined with Acuo’s Universal Clinical Platform, gives users an enterprise-wide view of all patient medical information from within the EMR system. This gives physicians immediate and convenient access to all patient information—from x-rays, ultrasounds, CT scans and more, regardless of the department in which it was conducted or the proprietary technology used to create and store it.

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Access

Booth 1023

Contact: Lindsey Eaton, Senior Inside Sales Representative
lindsey.eaton@accessefm.com
913.752.9938

Hundreds of hospitals worldwide use Access solutions to integrate e-forms, electronic patient signatures and clinical data into EHRs without paper or user effort. See Access solutions in action at HIMSS Booth 1023. Oh, and we’ll have free Starbucks coffee, so that’s a win, win for you and your caffeine habit. Watch our customers’ video testimonials here: http://www.youtube.com/accesseforms. And check out our website to learn how we can help your hospital improve patient care and safety while saving you time, money and paper: www.accessefm.com.

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Advisory Board Company

Booth 4669

Contact: Meghan Fassl, Manager
FasslM@advisory.com
202.266.6528

The Advisory Board Company is a global research, technology, and consulting firm partnering with 150,000 leaders in 3,700+ organizations across health care. Stop by booth #4669 to meet our team of IT experts, schedule a one on one session with analyst on your topic of choice, pick up our newly released research, attend an education session, and learn more about our Health Care IT Suite memberships.

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Allscripts

Booth 3441

Contact: Ariana Nikitas, Director of External Relations
ariana.nikitas@allscripts.com
312.506.1236

The changes underway in healthcare require provider organizations to be Open. Open to change. Open to collaboration. Open to innovation. And Open to the information and insights that lead to improved outcomes. Allscripts Open architecture connects both clinical and financial data across every setting – whether you’re interested in care coordination, revenue cycle, performance management or mobility improvements. This openness brings us closer to our vision of a Connected Community of Health. Join us in booth #3441 to learn more how being Open is driving amazing outcomes across the healthcare industry.

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AirStrip

Booth 1721

Contact: Kimberly Kuzawa, Executive Assistant
kimberlykuzawa@airstriptech.com
832.330.4419

AirStrip is guided by a bold vision: harness the power of mobile communications to change the way healthcare is practiced. The AirStrip™ ONE™ mobility solution can improve the quality and timeliness of care, can increase patient and clinician satisfaction, can enhance financial performance, and reduce risk. Headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, AirStrip is empowering the nation’s leading health systems to compete and succeed in today’s rapidly changing environment.

Sign up for a demo or meeting with us at HIMSS – visit www.airstriptech.com for more information. Also make sure to stop by the AirStrip booth and enter our drawing to win a free iPad.

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Aprima Medical Software

Booth 6323

Contact: salesinfo@aprima.com
866.960.6890

Aprima Offers a Lifeline to Customers of Allscripts MyWay ™, including Community settings. If your organization is currently using Allscripts MyWay ™ for individual practices, or across an entire Community, you’ll want to stop by Aprima Booth 6323 at HIMSS and learn about the Aprima Rescue Program for customers of Allscripts MyWay™. With this program, you’ll be able to take advantage of free Aprima licenses – up to an $8,500 savings per provider! Plus, Aprima can easily handle your interfaces and interoperability needs. The Allscripts MyWay™ product was originally based on source code that Allscripts licensed from Aprima in 2008, so Aprima EHR and PM have the same look and feel with nearly 1,000 enhancements since 2008. When you upgrade to Aprima, you’ll enjoy a minimal learning curve and minimal to no downtime. For more information, please visit www.aprima.com/rescue or email salesinfo@aprima.com.

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Aspen Advisors

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Daniel Herman, Founder and Managing Principal
dherman@aspenadvisors.net
412.370.4900

We know that technology is a means to an end and have a razor-sharp focus on helping you make progress toward the IHI’s Triple Aim of better health, better healthcare, and lower per capita costs. From strategy to execution to optimization, we can help you:

• Develop your technology roadmap to support the shift from volume-based to value-based care
• Evaluate EMR vendors and plan for implementation
• Streamline governance and decision making
• Plan for mergers, acquisitions and other outreach strategies
• Implement clinical systems, drive adoption and achieve Meaningful Use
• Complete ICD-10 implementation and audit compliance
• Make real progress on teleHealth, eHealth and mHealth initiatives
• Implement infrastructure changes to your technology roadmap
• Leverage information and big data to create a data-driven culture
• Realize value from EHR and other systems investments
• Lead change and support performance improvement initiatives
• Optimize IT service delivery
• Plan for long-range IT workforce needs

Visit www.aspenadvisors.net to learn more.

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AT&T

Booth 3727

Contact: Deborah Sunday, Marketing Director
ds823e@att.com
678.230.3440

Join the AT&T ForHealth team in Booth #3727 at HIMSS13 in New Orleans, March 3 -7. AT&T ForHealth is committed to serving the technology needs across the continuum of care – from hospitals to physicians to patients. Our suite of innovative wireless, cloud-based and networking services and applications empower clinicians by placing vital patient health information at their fingertips. Medical images are stored and shared through the cloud, across multiple care settings, highly-secure and on demand. With telehealth, patients get greater access to specialty care and physicians and specialists reach more patients. And with mobile health solutions, patients become more engaged in their own care.

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Aventura

Booth 4011

Contact: Jon Cooper, VP of Strategic Initiatives, Co-Founder
jon.cooper@aventurahq.com
303.912.7623

For clinicians, technology can be a real pain in the distal orifice of the alimentary canal.And the more information clinicians need at the point of care, the worse the pain is going to get. Stop by booth #4011 and Suite #202 to see how this pain can be treated.

We know a thing or two about giving caregivers the mobility they need. It’s all about context! Who you are, where you are, and what you need. Aventura’s context- and location-aware intelligence improves the workflow of doctors and nurses by delivering the right information instantly based on clinician location and credentials.

Aventura improves clinician satisfaction, increases EMR use at the point of care, and allows focus on the quality of care. We make your EMR live up to the promises in the owner’s manual.

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Awarepoint

Booth 6918

Contact: Carlene Anteau VP, Product Marketing
canteau@awarepoint.com
858.345.5000 x742

Awarepoint optimizes healthcare workflow by offering the industry’s only cloud-based, RTLS solution including software, technology, and managed services. Awarepoint’s experience, reliability and proven solutions drive positive clinical and financial outcomes. Organizations leverage current IT investments to improve communication, enhance coordination, streamline workflow, improve staff efficiency, optimize patient throughput and increase patient and staff satisfaction. Attendees should visit Awarepoint’s booth to learn how RTLS can improve patient flow in a variety of ways ranging from simple automation, such as documenting activities and time stamps based on caregiver, patient and equipment location, to complex milestone management that relates the interactions between caregivers, patients and equipment, to care ordered in the electronic medical record (EMR). The ability to interpret activities and anticipate roadblocks in the patient’s care plan supports proactive communication to drive action.

New product alert: Awarepoint will be demonstrating a new "Bed and Bay Sensor" that enables precise tracking of mobile equipment and patient and caregiver interactions in locations with tight-bed spacing, such as the emergency department (ED) and pre- and post-anesthesia care.

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Beacon Partners

Booth 4729

Contact: Jeannette Pforr, Marketing Associate
jpforr@beaconpartners.com
781.681.7493

Beacon Partners is one of the largest healthcare management consulting firms in North America. We focus on helping organizations enhance operational performance to deliver the highest level of patient care. For more than two decades, healthcare leaders have chosen Beacon Partners to optimize clinical productivity and financial performance, ultimately leading to improved quality, safety and patient outcomes. Our team of industry executives, physicians, nurses, administrators, allied healthcare professionals and analysts brings a unique, multi-disciplinary approach to the challenges you face. We are healthcare professionals just like you. That’s the Beacon Partners difference. Be sure to stop by our booth to find out how Beacon Partners can help your organization.

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BESLER Consulting

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jim Hoffman, Chief Operating Officer
jhoffman@besler.com
732.233.5008

For over 25 years, BESLER has helped hospitals recover otherwise lost revenue, increase reimbursement, ensure compliance, improve efficiency and reduce costs. BESLER’s deep domain experience in revenue cycle, reimbursement, compliance and unmatched software solutions has resulted in more than one billion dollars in additional revenue for our clients. If you’d like to discuss our products or partnership opportunities at HIMMS, please contact Jim Hoffman at 732-233-5008 or jhoffman@besler.com.

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Billian’s HealthDATA / Porter Research

Booth 2317

Contact: Jennifer Dennard, Social Marketing Director
jdennard@billian.com
678.569.4872

Billian’s HealthDATA and Porter Research offer a broad spectrum of market intelligence solutions at HIMSS13:

• Provider Solutions
• ID referral partner opportunities
• Compare peer performance
• Review patient market share
• Vendor Solutions
• Broadest lead & email coverage
• Integrated health market coverage
• In-depth data in flexible formats

Need help with your go-to-market strategy? Let actionable feedback from target C-suite buyers guide you with custom market research programs from Porter Research. Schedule your show-floor demo or consultation and get a Starbucks gift card at the booth: http://ow.ly/hjHqw,

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Bottomline Technologies

Booth 2619, Hall D

Contact: Michael Kortan VP, Healthcare
mkortan@bottomline.com
603.501.5185

Bottomline’s intuitive, data-driven solutions for patient access and financial process automation are used by 900+ U.S. hospitals. Customers apply our products for patient registration, mobile data and e-signature capture, and cash management to deliver positive patient experiences, improve data and operational efficiencies, and enhance organizational health. Stop by HALL D Booth 2619 for your free Data DNA test and enter to win one of our daily prizes.

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CAP Professional Services
 

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Bruce R. Cattie, Senior Managing Director
CAPSTS@cap.org
847.832.7700

CAP Professional Services provides best practice health IT strategies, clinical informatics, and terminology services for clients striving to achieve semantic interoperability and high-quality, robust electronic medical records (EMR).

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CapSite

Booth 4929 and across from registration in Lobby D

Contact: Gino Johnson, VP, Business Development & Consulting, HIMSS Analytics; Founder, CapSite
Gino.Johnson@himssanalytics.org
802.922.9971

CapSite, now part of HIMSS Analytics, provides detailed health IT data via the CapSite Database, as well as strategic and tactical consulting services. Visit the HIMSS Analytics – CapSite booths in Lobby D and on the exhibit floor (#4929) for a CapSite Database demo to see how our pricing, packaging and positioning information can help with your capital planning and procurement processes or competitor analysis.

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Capsule Tech, Inc.

Booths 3711, 3185, and 8711

Contact: Brianna Roy, Marketing and Events Coordinator
briannar@capsuletech.com
978.482.2339

Capsule is the leading global provider of medical device connectivity solutions for hospitals and healthcare organizations. Capsule enables hospitals using electronic medical records and other information systems to reduce costs, increase efficiency and improve patient care through the direct capture and delivery of patient vitals at the point-of-care. Capsule’s solutions are flexible and scalable, offering a variety of deployment options to meet the needs of any healthcare delivery organization. Founded in 1997, the Company has established strong partnerships with leading medical device manufacturers and installed enterprise-wide solutions in over 1200 hospitals in 36 countries.

For more information, visit www.capsuletech.com or call +1 978-482-2337 (US), or +33 1 5334 1400 (France). Over 1,100 hospitals have chosen Capsule for device integration because our solutions are:

• RELIED ON by nurses
• Capsule’s solution was designed with nurses, for nurses to fit current workflows and eliminate charting duplication
• WANTED by I.T. teams
• Capsule works with existing devices, systems and infrastructures
• NEEDED by patients – Capsule reduces nurse charting time allowing for greater focus on direct patient care.

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Caradigm

Booth 1323

Contact: Debbie Wolti
info@caradigm.com

Formed by GE Healthcare and Microsoft Corp. in June 2012, Caradigm is a joint venture focused on enabling health systems and payers to drive continuous improvements in care. Caradigm software helps healthcare professionals across care settings to use data to gain critical insights, collaborate with each other and with patients, and to develop and implement innovative care solutions to address some of healthcare’s biggest challenges.

Come by booth #1323 to see:

• EXCITING DEMOS – Check out new Caradigm and partner offerings.
• ENLIGHTENING CUSTOMER PRESENTATIONS – Come hear theater presentations about industry trends and best practices from your peers.
• INFORMATIVE CARADIGM PRESENTATIONS – Learn about Caradigm’s vision, new products we’re delivering and plans for the future.
• CARADIGM PERSONNEL – Stop by the booth to chat with our team, get your questions answered and learn more about new Caradigm.

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CareTech Solutions

Booth 1911

Contact: Colleen Hanley, Vice President, Marketing
colleen.hanley@caretech.com
248.823.0950

CareTech Solutions is a healthcare IT services company providing 24x7x365 IT support for more than 200 hospitals/health systems in the U.S.

HIMSS13 attendees should visit CareTech’s booth (1911) to experience, first-hand, the company’s Clinical Help Desk and how it resolves clinical IT issues fast – getting doctors and nurses back to what matters most, providing quality patient care. From iPad video stations, attendees can watch and listen to CareTech analysts resolving EMR application issues in a matter of seconds, not minutes.

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Certify Data Systems

Booth 717

Contact: David Caldwell, Chief Marketing and Sales
sales@certifydatasystems.com
408.236.7494

Certify Data Systems, Inc., is a pioneer in health information exchange (HIE) technology. The company’s HealthLogix™ Enterprise HIE platform has been adopted by the nation’s leading hospitals, physicians and laboratories. Certify’s HIE platform provides bi-directional community-wide semantic interoperability between disparate Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, enabling all healthcare providers to exchange essential health information in real-time. In addition to processing electronic orders and results, the HealthLogix HIE platform delivers Continuity of Care Documents and Clinical Document Architecture seamlessly across a healthcare ecosystem. Certify’s industry leading “network approach” is easy to deploy, scale, manage and support.

Visit us at HIMSS13 in booth 717. Certify is partnering with the local New Orleans YMCA chapter to support their Strong Communities Campaign. Stop by our booth to learn how you can help promote their goal of living a healthier lifestyle. For more information, please visit http://www.certifydatasystems.com. Follow us on Twitter at @CertifyData.

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ChartWise Medical Systems, Inc.

Booth 1961

Contact: Michael Backus, Director of Sales
mbackus@chartwisemed.com
317.774.4414

Visit us at HIMSS to see the first and best computer-assisted clinical documentation improvement application on the market.

ChartWise:CDI brings clinical documentation intelligence to your documentation improvement program. A comprehensive web-based software solution, it utilizes innovative built-in expertise to streamline the documentation improvement process by translating clinical terms, labs, and medications into the diagnostic terms needed for coding.

Featuring electronic queries, a flexible workflow, workflow management, help screens and videos, and reference materials from Coding Clinics and DRG Desk Reference, ChartWise:CDI has all the tools a clinical documentation specialist requires. Role-based functionality, robust on-demand multi-level reporting (from the hospital system down to the nursing unit), and optional Advanced Reporting utilizing business intelligence provide the tools an administrator requires. HL7 interfacing, rigorous data security, and no software to install help ease the burden on the IT department.

ChartWise:CDI changes the world of clinical documentation improvement like no other product or service on the market today.

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CIC Advisory

To schedule a meeting:

Contacts: Cynthia Davis, Marcy Stoots, or Robert Johns
cynthiadavis@cicadvisory.com
727.772.3340

CIC Advisory helps hospitals use technology to provide more effective, efficient and safer patient care. Founders Cynthia Davis and Marcy Stoots are former critical care nurses with decades of experience leading fast-track clinical EHR projects. Our methodologies result in high rates of physician and clinician satisfaction and adoption, coordinated patient care processes and improved clinical outcomes.

Call us at 1.727.772.3340 or email cynthiadavis@cicadvisory.com for your invitation to the CIC Advisory hospitality suite at HIMSS13.

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Clinithink

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Nathan Skorick, Business Development
nathan.skorick@clinithink.com
978.296.5282
Robert Miller, VP Sales and Marketing
robert.miller@clinithink.com
978.296.5282

Find out how to turn data into information…

Clinithink was founded in 2009 by two clinicians with 20 years of combined healthcare IT and EHR experience who understood what was possible if you could unlock the unstructured clinical data within an patient records and return it as structured, usable clinical information. The result of their pioneering work is CLiX, Clinithink’s Clinical Natural Language Processing (CNLP) solution.

CLiX intelligently unlocks unstructured data, while preserving its original meaning, to help healthcare organizations access the information they need to improve financial management, improve quality measures and enhance clinical and operational processes.

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Cornerstone Advisors Group LLC

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Mary Berchtold, Vice President
mberchtold@cornerstone-advisors.com
781.254.4013

Cornerstone will have experienced senior level representatives from the EPIC, MEDITECH and Advisory/Strategies consulting service lines at HIMSS. They will be available to meet and discuss services during the conference. Meeting times may be scheduled by contacting Mary Berchtold (mberchtold@cornerstone-advisors.com).

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Craneware

To schedule a meeting:

Ann Marie Brown, Executive Vice President of Marketing
a.brown@craneware.com
913.548.2810
Craneware will not be exhibiting at HIMSS but will have several senior executives available to discuss the company, our products, and the role we play in helping hospitals achieve revenue integrity though data normalization.

Craneware is the leader in automated revenue integrity solutions that improve financial performance for healthcare organizations. Craneware’s market-driven, SaaS solutions help hospitals and other healthcare providers more effectively price, charge, code and retain earned revenue for patient care services and supplies. This optimizes reimbursement, increases operational efficiency and minimizes compliance risk. By partnering with Craneware, clients achieve the visibility required to identify, address and prevent revenue leakage.

Founded in 1999, Craneware’s mission is to stop the loss of legitimate revenue owed to healthcare organizations by establishing a culture of revenue integrity within these organizations. Our vision is to be the partner that can be relied on to improve and sustain our customers’ strong financial performance.

Over our history we have come a long way towards achieving this. Today, Craneware has a total of nine core products, spanning four product families: Revenue Cycle, Access Management & Strategic Pricing, Supply Management and Audit & Revenue Recovery. One in four registered U.S. hospitals has chosen Craneware products to help them optimize reimbursement, improve operational efficiency, and minimize compliance risk. To support this growing client base and the company’s future growth prospects, Craneware now employs more than 200 professionals across the US and UK.

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CSI Healthcare IT

To schedule a meeting:

Kate Mays, Vice President of Sales
kmays@thecsicompanies.com
904.716.1209

CSI Healthcare IT will be hosting a cocktail reception and dinner at Broussards on Tuesday night March 5 starting at 6:00 pm. Please contact Kate Mays to join.

CSI Healthcare IT is committed to providing the highest standard of consultants and consulting services in the Industry. Our track record speaks for itself. We have a long record of supporting the Project Management, Training, Build, Report Writing, Go Live Support and Interface functions of Health systems nationwide. Today, CSI Healthcare IT has more than 500 permanent and contract staff of experienced, knowledge-based professionals. CSI has been recognized by Inc. Magazine and Staffing Industry Analysts as one of fastest growing privately held companies in the nation. Being privately held enables creativity and flexibility to meet the specific consulting needs of our clients. CSI has the ability to enact quick adjustments to accommodate the ebb and flow of our clients’ staffing and project needs.

Join us for live music and networking Tuesday night at Broussards.

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CTG Health Solutions

Booth 3663

Contact: Amanda LeBlanc, Managing Director, Marketing & Communications
amanda.leblanc@ctghs.com
225.772.8865

Computer Task Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTGX) is an international IT solutions and services company with over 3,800 employees in North America and Western Europe. Its healthcare division, CTG Health Solutions (CTG), is a leading IT consulting firm dedicated solely to helping provider and payer clients achieve strategic, clinical, financial, and operational objectives by more effectively leveraging IT.

CTG’s comprehensive solution suite includes advisory, implementation, IT and strategic sourcing services— including planning and assessments, vendor selection, EMR implementation and optimization, clinical/business analytics, physician adoption, integration/technology solutions, revenue cycle strategies, legacy and production application management, support and upgrades, and solutions addressing regulatory requirements of ICD-10, meaningful use, and accountable care. CTG has provided technology and business solutions to more than 600 healthcare clients for over 25 years.

Visit CTG at HIMSS booth 3663 for conversations on “getting health IT right.”

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dbMotion

Booth 5229

Contact: Kate Kolbrener, Director of Marketing
katek@dbmotion.com
412.802.2248

The dbMotion™ Solution is a proven, connected healthcare, SOA-based interoperability platform that enables healthcare organizations and health information exchanges (HIEs) to meaningfully integrate and leverage their information assets, driving improvements in the quality, safety and efficiency of patient care. dbMotion transforms care through the creation of a virtual patient record that integrates patient information to connect care providers and settings.This robust solution is field-proven, having been implemented in some of the world’s most demanding healthcare IT environments since 2001.

Our dbMotion™ Solution is helping clients:

• Access HIE within the Physician Workflow
• Connect the Ambulatory Environment
• Link the Affiliate Community
• Prepare for MU2 and Build an ACO
• Harmonize Clinical Data for Analytics

Come see us at Booth 5229 for a demo! www.dbmotion.com

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Dearborn Advisors, LLC

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Mary Kiley, Revenue Development Coordinator
MKiley@DearbornAdvisors.com
773.255.0749.

Dearborn Advisors would like to chat with you about what’s going on in your organization regarding physician adoption of technology. Although we have no booth, we’ll spring for Starbucks coffee and have hundreds of chocolate bars to give away. Email Mary Kiley (mkiley@dearbornadvisors.com) or call 773-255-0749.

 

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Deloitte

Booth 1863

Contact: Samantha Gordon, National Life Sciences & Health Care Marketing Leader
smgordon@deloitte.com
212.436.4987

By imagining the possible, we help you innovate and seize opportunities. Deloitte can help you in your efforts to define a vision for your organization in the constantly changing world of health care. Through the use of analytics, we can help you in your efforts to make decisions about the future. To do things differently – or make a new way forward.

While you are at HIMSS13, stop by our booth to interact with our analytics products, including Recombinant by Deloitte, the newest addition to our portfolio. Our solution specialists will be available to discuss your pressing issues: Accountable Care, Health Outcomes Management, ICD-10 implementation, Security & Privacy, Meaningful Use, Revenue Cycle, Mobile Health and more.

Visualize clarity through analytics and innovation. For more information visit us at www.deloitte.com/us/himss13.

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Direct Consulting Associates

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Frank Myeroff, Managing Partner
fmyeroff@dc-associates.com
440.996.0051

Direct Consulting Associates (DCA) provides a broad range of IT Consulting and Staffing solutions including staff augmentation, temp-to-perm, and permanent placement for healthcare IT initiatives. Whether you’re an IT professional searching for that perfect opportunity or a client company looking for the very best IT talent, we would like to meet you at HIMSS 2013!

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Direct Recruiters, Inc.

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Mike Silverstein, Director of Healthcare IT
mike@directrecruiters.com
440.996.0594
440.667.8334

Direct Recruiters specializes in recruiting, staffing, search, placement and consulting solutions for the Healthcare Information Technology (IT) Industry.

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Divurgent

Booth 5948

Contact: Keri DeSalvo, Marketing Coordinator
keri.desalvo@divurgent.com
757.213.6875

Visit booth #5948 and help Divurgent raise $5,000 to donate to a local New Orleans Children’s Hospital. All we need is your signature!

Divurgent is not the typical healthcare IT consulting firm. As a nationally recognized company, we strive to be different, to think outside of the box for innovative healthcare solutions. Our goal is simple. To transform healthcare to our clients and the communities they serve. Focused on the business of hospitals, health systems and affiliated providers, Divurgent believes successful outcomes are derived from powerful partnerships. Recognizing the unique culture that every organization offers, we leverage the depth of our experienced consulting team to create customized solutions that best meet our client’s goals. Utilizing best practices and methodologies we help improve our client’s operational effectiveness, financial performance and quality of patient care.

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Elsevier Clinical Decision Support

Booth 6129

Contact: Che Dildy, Sr. Manager, Product Marketing
c.dildy@elsevier.com
215.239.3795

By integrating insight and action, Elsevier Clinical Decision Support empowers meaningful care through our world-class healthcare information technology solutions, providing a patient-centered approach for organizations to achieve the triple aim.

 

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Emdeon

Booth 5027

Contact: Brian C. Young, Director of Marketing
bcyoung@emdeon.com
404.432.9419

Emdeon provides interoperable information exchange uniting healthcare communities to help improve business and clinical outcomes. Come by booth 5027 to discover how Emdeon can help you achieve your business goals through Emdeon Universal Exchange, and also learn how you can win one of eight iPad minis that will be given out during the show.

Emdeon is the single largest clinical, financial and administrative health information network in the nation. In 2012, we processed nearly 7 billion health information exchanges. Our network moves information between physicians, hospitals, labs, pharmacies and payers through our interoperable connectivity to their software systems. This creates opportunities for access to big data, making it possible to apply intelligent analytics which help drive key programs like care collaboration, accountable care, medical home and pay for performance – all to help you achieve improved quality of care and lower costs with less capital expense.

Emdeon will have 4 in-booth speaking sessions this year, and two iPad minis will be given away at each session!

Session 1: Epic Orders Through Emdeon: Removing the Barriers to Clean Electronic Orders Monday March 4th, 3:00PM – 3:30PM Eric Reynolds, Vice President, Sales and Strategy, Emdeon
Session 2: The Future of Coding is NOW: Maximizing Coding Efficiency and Accuracy Using Big Data and Analytics Tuesday March 5th, 11:00AM – 11:30AM Manjula Iyer, Director of Product Management, Atigeo
Session 3: Breaking the Cycle: How Big Data and Real-Time Analytics Can Help You Intelligently Manage Readmissions Tuesday March 5th, 3:00PM – 3:30PM Gene Boerger, Vice President, Product Innovation, Emdeon
Session 4: Interoperability: The Key to ePrescribing Success Wednesday, March 6th, 11:00AM – 11:30AM Lathe Bigler, Sr. Director, Clinical Services, Emdeon

 

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e-MDs

Booth 6413

Contact: James Foster, Client Data Operations Manager
jfoster@e-mds.com
512.623.6960

Stop By e-MDs Booth Daily for a Chance to Win an iPad Mini!!!

Let e-MDs help you Master Healthcare Strategies. As a consistently top-ranked vendor, clients count on e-MDs to give them the edge they need in meeting tomorrow’s challenges. e-MDs is well-known for our award-winning integrated EHR/PM solutions and services for ambulatory healthcare providers.

We’re introducing exciting new products and initiatives at HIMSS®13 to help you make the right moves to meet the challenging healthcare landscape. Join us at HIMSS®13 where our executive management team will be available to share our vision with you. Learn more about the innovative technology and services we’re delivering that help clients achieve clinical excellence, attain interoperability, drive improvements in patient engagement, and deliver stronger quality measures that support value-based performance, PQRS and MU criteria.

We welcome existing clients, prospects, business partners and other healthcare leaders to visit with us and discuss our latest innovations.

 

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EMRConsultant.com

 

 

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Donna Flynn, Director of Healthcare Technology Solutions
DonnaF@EHRScope.com
888.519.3100 ext. 114

Some things in life truly are FREE! In this case, its receiving the BEST QUALIFIED EHR, PM, Billing and/or Voice Recognition recommendations for your practice, absolutely FREE. How? Use the Comparison Chart, Select Individual Consultant on EHRScope.com, or contact us today with any questions!

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Enovate

Booth 7429

Contact: Kevin Dougherty, Marketing and Events Manager
kdougherty@enovateit.com
248.655.0548 ext.154

Enovate is an international manufacturer of mobile and wall mounted computer workstations for the healthcare environment. We provide multiple vehicles for medication delivery, computerized physician order entry, and the implementation for clinical documentation.

We understand that caregivers have enough to worry about. That’s why we work hard to build products that are worry-free—so that caregivers can focus on what really matters, the patient. With comfortable ergonomics, infection control and sustainable materials, Enovate’s products are setting a new standard in the Health Information Technology industry. Light weight, soft corners, and manufactured with antimicrobial materials — these are just a few of the many reasons hospitals choose Enovate products.

Enovate – advancing health information technology For more information, please contact Enovate at (877)258-8030 or visit www.enovateusa.com.

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ESD

Booth 5213

Contact: Jessica St. John, Business Development Director
jstjohn@contactesd.com
419.841.3179

ESD is dedicated to assisting healthcare organizations successfully implement health information technology. Experienced, clinical professionals help make that happen thorough full-scale implementation services that assist organizations before, during and after the go-live process to ensure a successful transition to a new or upgraded software. We work with all major systems, such as Allscripts, Cerner, Epic, McKesson, Meditech, NextGen and Siemens.

Stop by and see how we can help make your system work for you!

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Etransmedia Technology, Inc

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Connie Smith, Sales and Marketing
Connie.Smith@etransmedia.com
518.283.5418 ext. 2262

Etransmedia provides comprehensive RCM platform service solutions, including an integration EHR/PM solution, patient identity tools, discrete clinical data repository, provider portal, community patient portal, analytics tools supporting financial, clinical, and quality of care reporting. Delivering RCM and Revenue Analytics services to health systems nationwide, serving 12,000+ providers and 40,000+ users.

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FDB (First Databank)

Booth 4241

Contact: Denise Apcar, Brand Communications Manager
dapcar@fdbhealth.com
800.633.3453

First Databank (FDB) provides drug knowledge that helps healthcare professionals make precise medication-related decisions. Come to our booth 4241 at HIMSS13, have a cup of gourmet coffee with us, and meet with FDB specialists to learn more about:

• Achieving Meaningful Use Stage 1/ 2 criteria for medications; get our tip sheet at www.fdbhealth.com/MU2
• AlertSpace®, our latest innovation for better managing alerts within your HIS system – now includes dosage range checking capabilities (in addition to drug allergy, drug-disease, drug-drug interaction and duplicate therapy alert customization capabilities)
• Our State and Federal Controlled Substances Module to simplify compliance with regulations related to controlled substances prescribing and more
• Our High Risk Medication Module™ to identify medications with Box Warnings and/or Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS)

With thousands of customers worldwide, FDB enables our information system developer partners to deliver a wide range of valuable, useful, and differentiated solutions. For a complete look at our solutions and services please visit www.fdbhealth.com.

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Forward Health Group

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Michael Barbouche, Founder/CEO
FHGtalk@forwardhealthgroup.com
608.729.7530

Let the good times and Fresh Data roll in the Big Easy! Forward Health Group, the Health Care Measurement Company, is intentionally booth-less at HIMSS13 so we can get down, roll up our sleeves and make rich, brainstorming music with health systems, payors and all you newly-minted ACOs. If your focus is population health, you’re going to need tools and help with all that messy data – call us at 608 729 7530 or email us at FHGtalk@forwardhealthgroup.com. We’re on the HIMSS13 show floor – we’ll be right back to you. Let’s have a cafe au lait, spiced with Fresh Data.

With FHG, your data is as fine as the Duck and Andouille Gumbo at Galatoire’s. No, really.

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GetWellNetwork, Inc.

Booth 2363

Contact: Tony Cook, Vice President, Marketing
tcook@getwellnetwork.com
240.482.4212

GetWellNetwork provides patient engagement solutions that help health care providers engage, educate and empower patients along the care continuum. Our patient-centered platform, delivered across multiple technology platforms including mobile devices, computers and televisions, enables providers to implement a revolutionary care delivery model called Interactive Patient Care™ to improve performance and patient outcomes. The company further extends the value of existing IT investments by integrating seamlessly with electronic medical record and patient portal applications.

For the third consecutive year GetWellNetwork is recognized by KLAS® as the leader in the Interactive Patient Systems category and exclusively endorsed by the American Hospital Association.Today GetWellNetwork solutions facilitate over 7 million patient interactions.

GetWellNetwork will be showcasing it’s newest solutions – myGetWellNetwork, Interactive Patient Whiteboard and GetWellNetwork for VA Medical Centers. Giveaway – iPads!

Learn more at www.GetWellNetwork.com.

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Greenway Medical Technologies

Booth 3941

Contact: Leeann Fleming, National Trade Show Manager
leeannfleming@greenwaymedical.com
866.242.3805

Visit Booth 3941 to learn about the market’s first Cerner-certified interoperability solution for health system alignment and data exchange, and the first EHR to achieve Stage 2 certification. Learn about our high-scoring PCMH service as recognized by the National Committee for Quality Assurance, and our advanced, clinically-driven RCM solutions, all part of the PrimeSUITE platform.

Please visit one of our kiosks located in the Interoperability Showcase, Meaningful Use Pavilion – booth 149/Kiosk C13, or GA HIMSS booth 5500 to receive a key and code that will be taken to our main booth for an opportunity to unlock our safe. Prize value up to $2,000.

About Greenway and PrimeSUITE Greenway Medical Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: GWAY) delivers smarter solutions for smarter healthcare™. PrimeSUITE® — Greenway’s certified and fully integrated electronic health record, practice management and interoperability solution — helps improve care coordination, quality and cost-efficiency as part of a smarter, sustainable healthcare system. Thousands of providers across more than 30 specialties and sub-specialties use on-premise or cloud-based Greenway® solutions in healthcare enterprises, physician practices, clinics and ambulatory clinics nationwide. To learn more, go to www.greenwaymedical.com, Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.

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Greythorn

Booth: 5358

Contact: Mary Beth Seaman, Director, Healthcare IT Practice
marybeth.seaman@greythorn.com
425.387.8848

Greythorn is a market leading technology recruitment specialist. Founded in 1976, it has established an excellent reputation for the authoritative and personable service it provides to both its clients and candidates. Since our inception, we have grown globally to provide expertise in Asia, Australia, Ireland, North America, South America and the UK.

With demand in the Healthcare IT sector continually increasing, our commitment to providing an expert and ethical service remains strong, ensuring we remain your ‘consultancy of choice’. Greythorn is part of the global multi-brand recruitment family, FiveTen Group, one of the world’s fastest-growing specialist recruitment consultancies. Visit booth #5358 to discuss industry data gathered from Greythorn’s annual Healthcare IT Market Report, learn about our staffing expertise with various types and volumes of projects and take a moment off of your feet. We look forward to meeting you!

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Halfpenny Technologies

Booth 5223

Contact: Brian Muck, Sr. VP of Sales and Marketing
bmuck@halfpenny.com
855.277.9100

Are you using CPOE for lab, diagnostic imaging, pathology, cardiology and other ancillary services? Are your results delivered separately or as one cohesive bundle? Are you able to make business and clinical decisions based on referral patterns and clinical data?

Visit Halfpenny Technologies in booth #5223 at HIMSS13. Learn how your referral base can submit orders and receive customized bundled results with Halfpenny’s ITF-HUB solution. You will gain an additional benefit from the built in business intelligence! You can leverage "true interoperability" with the multi-vendor systems you already have in place, and quickly extract key data allowing you to turn it into actionable intelligence to deliver higher-quality healthcare and gain a competitive edge.

Halfpenny offers solutions for hospitals, health plans, physicians, independent laboratories, diagnostic imaging centers, ancillary healthcare services, HIEs, ACOs and physicians. Stop by to play our “True Interoperability” game, meet our team and win prizes.

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Hayes Management Consulting

To schedule a meeting:

Pete Butler, President and CEO
pbutler@hayesmanagement.com
781.414.6099

Hayes Management Consulting is a leading, national healthcare consulting firm focused on healthcare operations. This includes strategic planning, interim leadership, revenue cycle optimization, clinical optimization, project management, IT consulting, and preparation for federal initiatives such as ICD-10, Meaningful Use, and HIPAA compliance. We also provide software such as MDaudit and other proprietary tools to ensure our clients are operationally efficient.

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HCI Group

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Cherity PIerce, Marketing Coordinator
cherity.pierce@thehcigroup.com
904-224-9388

HCI is a leading provider of IT personnel and solutions to healthcare enterprises across the United States, United Kingdom, and Middle East. Our specialties include:

• EHR Planning, Implementation, & Training
• Sustaining Support Models
• Optimization & Clinical Adoption
• Go-Live Support
• Health System/Hospital Community IT Offerings

What makes HCI the best choice for your HIT project? Everything from our collaborative solutions to our rates that translate into real cost savings for your institution. Here’s how we deliver our comprehensive services and expertise:

• Strategic thinking across the entire spectrum of project engagement
• Clinical Leadership and an experienced engagement team to meet your needs in an efficient and timely manner
• Knowledge of industry best practices
• A fully dedicated recruitment team, exclusively focused on Healthcare IT to secure for you the very best resources to make your project a success

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HealthCare Anytime

Booth 3869 (ICA)

Contact: Jesse Klick, Vice President – Operations
jesse.klick@healthcareanytime.com
619.243.8333

HealthCare Anytime’s cloud-based enterprise patient portal helps healthcare organizations achieve meaningful patient engagement. Our robust patient portal is delivered in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, which means we handle hosting, implementation, training, and support, thus reducing the demand on your IT resources.

HealthCare Anytime – Powering Patient Engagement Through the Cloud.

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Healthcare Growth Partners

Booth 3845

Contact: Christopher McCord, Managing Director
chris@hgp.com
312.445.8750

Healthcare Growth Partners provides investment banking and strategic advisory services to small and mid-size, high-growth companies with an exclusive focus on healthcare technology and healthcare services. HGP was founded in 2005 with the goal of providing top tier strategic consulting and investment banking services to companies outside of typical middle-market investment bank parameters. Services include mergers and acquisitions, capital formation, strategy, and valuation.Since inception, HGP has closed over 50 transactions. With this focus, the firm leverages its experienced management team, strong execution capabilities, and deep network of contacts within the industry to provide efficient and high value processes for clients, all with the objective of growing companies, realizing value.

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Health Catalyst

Booth 7721

Contact: Chris Keller, Marketing Director
chris.keller@healthcatalyst.com
801.230.9223

Health Catalyst (formerly Healthcare Quality Catalyst) delivers a proven, agile data warehouse platform that actually works in today’s transforming healthcare environment.

Currently 81 hospitals caring for 20 million patients utilize Health Catalyst’s Adaptive Data Warehousing platform and solutions. Founded by healthcare veterans who developed their solution after struggling for years to try to make non-healthcare data warehousing solutions work, the Health Catalyst data warehouse utilizes an adaptive approach designed specifically to address the complex nature of healthcare data.Health Catalyst’s platform combines technology solutions and clinical expertise borne out of repeated successful implementations that significantly improved quality of care and reduced healthcare costs.

Health Catalyst’s proven solutions are deployed at leading health systems including Allina Health, Indiana University Health, MultiCare Health System, North Memorial Health Care, Providence Health & Services, Stanford Hospital and Clinics, and Texas Children’s Hospital.

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Health Language

Booth 4559

Contact: Marc Horowitz, Senior Vice President, Business Development
Marc.Horowitz@healthlanguage.com
720.320.6663

Health Language, Inc. (HLI) provides software for managing and updating standard and localized healthcare terminology. Health Language also offers clinical content and professional services to enable interoperability, ICD-10 conversion, web-based terminology mapping, and Meaningful Use compliance. Come visit us at booth 4559 to learn more about our robust, innovative solutions for payers, providers, government payers, and healthcare IT and EMR vendors. The HLI solution can assist with your ICD-10 conversion, analytics, and clinical research needs, as well as with pharmaceutical and international applications.

Stop by and see us to learn more, watch one of our informative demos and register to win one of our daily giveaways.

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HealthMEDX

Booth 1075

Contact: Denise Johnson, Marketing Coordinator
Denise.Johnson@Healthmedx.com
417.799.6703

The HealthMEDX Vision solution provides an integrated, person-centric CRM, clinical and financial EMR, across the entire LTPAC care continuum including: Long Term Care (SNF, Assisted Living, and Independent Living), Rehab, Homecare, and Hospice. The SaaS based architecture supports interoperability with hospitals, physicians and payers to address readmission management and care coordination challenges across the continuum.

Come see how we embedded the AHRQ On-Time Readmission Prevention program into our solution! HealthMEDX Vision is both CCHIT and ONC-ATCB Certified.

 

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Healthwise

Booth 3885

Contact: Michael Lauber, Account Executive
mlauber@healthwise.org
208.331.6995

Experience the Healthwise Difference. Get an insider’s perspective on what makes the Healthwise® Patient Engagement Solution your best choice for clinicians and their patients. Meet the people behind the Healthwise mission. Experience:

• Trusted information
• Tested interaction
• True innovation

Visit Healthwise at booth 3885. Since 1975, our singular mission has been to help people make better health decisions. Healthwise leads the way with patient-friendly education and ONC-ATCB–certified technology. With Healthwise as your single source for patient education, you meet the criteria for Meaningful Use now, and you’re well positioned for whatever changes the future brings. The Healthwise Patient Engagement Solution.

 

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Henry Elliott & Company Inc.

Booth 3217

Contact: Ken Wagner, President
kwagner@henrye.com
781.820.6697

Henry Elliott & Company, Inc., for over 20 years, has specialized exclusively in the provision of Caché and Healthcare I.T. Professionals for staff augmentation and direct hire nationally. We are a long standing partner of InterSystems and several of our Consultants are Caché Certified Experts who represent an elite level of knowledge of InterSystems products. Our professionals are experienced with Caché based third party software. This includes Epic, Veterans Affairs VistA, Indian Health RPMS, Antrim/Sunquest, IDX(GE) & InterSystems Ensemble, CSP, Zen and others.

We also partner with large-scale Professional Services and Systems Integration Organizations in support of Healthcare I.T. and Caché based technology development and implementation efforts. Our partners provide the project management while we provide the highly skilled professionals. We have grown to 50+ technical resources and 8 Account Management and Operational personnel. Our aim is to match the skills, experience and interests of our professionals with our clients’ specifications.

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Holon Solutions

Booth 4020

Contact: Worth Roberts, Vice President Business Solutions
wroberts@holonsolutions.com
678.324.2060

At Holon, we believe that a patient’s experience is improved when their care team can seamlessly collaborate on their care. We understand that information in the right hands, at the right time and place, is key to providing it. We focus on facilitating a collaborative care environment by providing access to information at the point of care – without forcing anyone in the care team to change their current systems or processes.

Visit Holon and our partners in booth 4020 at HIMSS to learn more about how we can help you build a collaborative care environment from the bottom up. Remember when the focus was on patient care? It can be again with Holon!

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Booth 7459

Contact: Patricia Kellicker, Director of Marketing
patricia.kellicker@humedica.com
617.475.3800

Humedica is the foremost clinical intelligence company that provides private cloud-based solutions to the health care industry. Humedica’s sophisticated analytics platform transforms disparate data into actionable, real-world insights. Powered by the largest and most comprehensive clinical database, Humedica empowers its partners and customers to make confident, value-based decisions about patient care in a rapidly changing health care market.

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Iatric Systems, Inc.

Booth 6613

Contact: John Danahey, Sr. Vice President, Sales and Marketing
john.danahey@iatric.com
978.805.4153

Join Iatric Systems in Booth #6613 at HIMSS 2013. Iatric Systems helps healthcare providers achieve success by delivering the most comprehensive healthcare IT integration. You’ll see how more than 1,000 hospitals are using our data integration, systems integration, and process integration solutions to…

• Achieve a scalable and affordable Enterprise HIE
• Meet ACO objectives
• Support Meaningful Use initiatives

Booth #6613 is going to be entertaining as well as educational, with Chef Anton – the two-time National Pool Trick-Shot Champion – lining up one amazing shot after another and giving out great prizes like Visa gift cards and Apple iPod shuffles after each show.

Make sure you visit us in the HIMSS 2013 Meaningful Use Experience booth #149 / Kiosk #6 and #21. Each day, the first 150 people to visit our kiosks can receive a coupon for $2 off at Starbucks.

Finally, we have teamed up with more than 25 New Orleans retailers to enhance your HIMSS experience by offering special offers and discounts in the area. Stop by booth #6613 to receive your slap band and discount card.

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ICA

Booth 3869

Contact: John Tempesco, Chief Marketing Officer
john.tempesco@icainformatics.com
615.866.1465

ICA’s CareAlign® interoperability and informatics platform solves data and communication challenges for healthcare entities, including IDNs, hospitals, IPAs, HIEs, and payers. CareAlign delivers a flexible architecture to connect, collect, consume and intelligently distribute data through Direct, IHE, HL7, and custom methods for use in EHRs, third party applications, and ICA’s applications. Our solution and booth partners are CSC, Healthcare Anytime and Futrix Health. Visit booth #3869 for product demonstrations, and to participate in our food bank raffle. Learn more at www.icainformatics.com, and follow us on Twitter, ICA HITme Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.

 

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ICSA Labs

Booths: 5613 (Verizon); 149 (HIMSS13 Meaningful Use Experience); Interoperability Showcase (IHE USA Certification)

Contact: Amit Trivedi, Healthcare Program Manger
amit.trivedi@icsalabs.com
312.882.1558

ICSA Labs, an independent division of Verizon, offers third-party testing and certification of security and health IT products, as well as network-connected devices, to measure product compliance, reliability and performance for many of the world’s top security vendors. ICSA Labs is an ISO/IEC 17025:2005 accredited and 9001:2008 registered organization. ICSA Labs is NVLAP accredited as a Health IT Test Lab and is also an ONC-Authorized Certification Body (ONC-ACB) accredited by ANSI to ISO/IEC Guide 65. Visit http://www.icsalabs.com for more.

ICSA Labs will the following presentations at the MU Experience Welcome Theater:

• March 5th @ 1:10 pm: Are You Experienced? 2014 Edition Testing – Your Questions Answered
  Join Michelle Knighton, Healthcare Testing Manager for ICSA Labs for an interactive Q&A-style discussion focusing on the meaningful use testing process, guidance and tips on how to have a successful test to help your system achieve certification in the ONC 2014 Edition Health IT Certification Program.
• March 6th @ 11:15 am: Are You Experienced? Looking Beyond Meaningful Use and Incentives
  Join Amit Trivedi, Healthcare Program Manager for ICSA Labs for an informative discussion focusing on helpful tips and guidance on system selection, implementation, and training to get the most out of your certified EHR technology.

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iMDsoft

Booth 7729

Contact: Steve Sperrazza, VP Sales
steve.sperrazza@imd-soft.com
781.449.5567

iMDsoft is a leading provider of Clinical Information Systems for critical, perioperative, and acute care environments. The company’s flagship family of solutions, the MetaVision Suite, was first implemented in 1999. It captures, documents, analyzes, reports and stores the vast amount of patient-related data generated in a hospital. Hospitals worldwide – including 4 of the top 10 US hospitals and 13 of the top 50 European hospitals – use MetaVision to improve care quality, enhance financial results, support research and promote compliance with government, payor, and hospital protocols.

Visit us at Booth #7729 and discover myAnesthesia, our new cloud-based mobile solution for anesthesia documentation featuring a native iPad user interface. Find out about high-impact results reported by MetaVision clients, including:

• 30% reduction in mortality rate
• 100% billable anesthesia procedures
• $1.5M in financial benefits
• 100% elimination of prescription errors

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Imprivata

Booth 3717

Contact: Ed Gaudet, Chief Marketing Officer
edgaudet@imprivata.com

Imprivata, the leader in healthcare IT security, enables secure access and collaboration for over two million care providers in more than 1300 healthcare organizations worldwide. Imprivata is the #1 rated SSO Vendor in the 2012 Best in KLAS and Category Leaders Report and SSO market share leader according to HIMSS Analytics. Imprivata Cortext™ is the fastest growing free, HIPAA compliant text messaging solution in healthcare.

Take #MeaningfulSteps with Imprivata at #HIMSS2013

Take #MeaningfulSteps to Imprivata’s booth (#3717) to pick up your free pedometer and enter to win a Jawbone UP every hour. At any time during HIMSS, tweet how many #MeaningfulSteps you’ve taken towards a healthcare IT initiative and you will automatically be entered to win a Jawbone UP. For example, “I’ve taken 3,433 #MeaningfulSteps towards CPOE #HIMSS13”. In addition, Imprivata will be giving away one Kindle every 30 minutes after its booth theatre presentations.

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Infor

Booth 2525

Contact: Becky Adams, Director, Global Healthcare Marketing
Becky.Adams@infor.com
651.767,4257

You’ve known us as Lawson. Now, get to know us as Infor. The Infor Healthcare suite of solutions is backed by more than 25 years’ experience creating healthcare-specific technology solutions – as well as major new investments in cloud and mobile technologies that are changing the way healthcare IT works.

Visit us in Booth 2525 at HIMSS and let us show you the solutions that will set your organization on the right path, move your IT strategy forward, and prepare you for wherever tomorrow takes you. While you’re there, enjoy free custom-made espresso drinks and popcorn, and enter to win one of four iPad Minis. If you’d like to learn more about your organization’s path forward for Financials, Supply Chain, HCM, Analytics, and Integration & HIEs, visit go.infor.com/himssdemo to schedule one-on-one time with an Infor representative. When you preschedule and attend a HIMSS demo, you’ll receive a $25 Amazon.com gift card as our thanks.

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Informatica Corporation

Booth 5005

Contact: Jonathan Shafer, Healthcare Field Marketing Manager
jshafer@informatica.com
650.385.4434

Stop by Informatica booth 5005 and meet Jonathan Stevenson, Director of Analytics at Ochsner Health System based in New Orleans. Jonathan will be on-site sharing how Oschner has enhanced care coordination through an investment in data. Through their use of Informatica, Ochsner is one of the very first healthcare delivery systems to migrate and integrate large volumes of historical data from a homegrown, legacy EMR into Epic, resulting in a single real-time source for complete patient records, improved visibility for providers, enhanced interactions between patients and providers and rapid and successful migration of clinical data from 38 systems into Epic.

Stop by our booth 5005 and learn why over 4,500 customers, including 84 of the Fortune 100 and hundreds of healthcare organizations have turned to Informatica to help manage their data needs.

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Innovative Healthcare Solutions

Booth 3059

Contact: Laura Hudman, VP, Marketing and Sales
Lhudman@ihsconsulting.com
863.602.1787

Innovative Healthcare Solutions (IHS) provides a cost-effective, proven approach to guide and assist healthcare organizations in transitional support, implementation and management of information systems and services. Our expertise includes Planning, Implementation, Project Management, Support and Interim Transitional Services as well as System Assessment, Process & Workflow Design and Optimization for Financial and Clinical systems.

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Intellect Resources

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Tiffany Crenshaw, President and CEO
tcrenshaw@intellectresources.com
336.420.1178

Intellect Resources would love to meet with you!

Intellect Resources is proud to offer comprehensive consulting, recruiting and hiring solutions within the healthcare IT market.Our talent offerings include recruiting, project management, implementation, upgrading and optimization of EMR systems, training and go-live support and the revolutionary Big Break hiring process.Big Break is patented American Idol style audition process where candidates compete to become a healthcare IT trainer. Big Break offers hospitals systems a unique and innovative talent pool at a fraction of the cost of traditional hiring solutions.

In 2012 Intellect Resources was named to The Triad Business Journal’s Fast 50, which adds to a growing list of industry awards Intellect Resources has received including Modern Healthcare Magazine’s Best Places to Work in Healthcare, HITconsultant.net naming Intellect Resources’ President and CEO Tiffany Crenshaw as one of the Top 12 Women to Know in Healthcare IT and the London Times recognizing Intellect Resources’ Big BreakTM as the solution to the healthcare IT talent shortage. A unique approach to standard service offerings sets Intellect Resources apart and allows us to constantly find new and experienced talent.Through relationship-driven, hands-on services, Intellect Resources connects employers and healthcare IT professionals.

For more information visit www.intellectresources.com or www.irbigbreak.com.

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Intelligent InSites

Booth 8025, Kiosk #10 in the Intelligent Hospital Pavilion

Contact: Marcus Ruark, Vice President
Marcus.Ruark@intelligentinsites.com
512.541.0737

If you would like to learn how we help healthcare organizations transform their operations with real-time operational intelligence—please come visit us at HIMSS13!

Stop by to experience how our enterprise healthcare software platform will be used across 152 VA Medical Centers to help improve operational efficiency, quality, satisfaction, and compliance—decreasing operational costs, reducing delays in patient care, and increasing clinical efficiencies and staff productivity.

Who we are: Intelligent InSites helps transform healthcare with real-time operational intelligence that improves care, enhances the human experience, and increases efficiency. Through its open, real-time, healthcare platform, Intelligent InSites automatically collects and processes data from multiple data sources such as EHRs, financial systems, building systems, sensory and real-time location systems (RTLS), mobility solutions, and other healthcare IT solutions—then provides actionable intelligence to achieve cost savings, operational excellence, and better care. By utilizing the enterprise-wide architecture of the InSites platform, healthcare systems can leverage all legacy, current, and future data sources to optimize their technology investments across the entire organization, then have the flexibility to meet changing organizational, regulatory, and compliance needs.

For more information, please visit http://www.intelligentinsites.com.

 

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IMO – Intelligent Medical Objects Inc.

Booth 6223

Contact: Dennis Carson, Director, Marketing/Tradeshows
dcarson@e-imo.com
847.272.1242

IMO® – Intelligent Medical Objects will show you how to ‘Work Smarter with IMO’ through the latest developments in interface terminologies that allow clinicians to better capture and preserve true clinical intent and achieve Meaningful Use. Visit us at Booth 6223 at HIMSS13 for our presentations then enter our daily drawings for one of several Bose® QuietComfort® 3 Acoustic Noise Cancelling® headphones.

Presentation topics are:

• Working Smarter with IMO
• All About IMO® Problem (IT)®
• All about IMO® Procedure (IT)®
• Achieving Meaningful Use with IMO
• ICD-10 – How Do I Get There?
• Harnessing the Power of the Semantic Highway

Click to reserve your spot: http://www.e-imo.com/imohimss13.aspx www.e-imo.com

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iSirona

Booth 6549 and the Interoperability Showcase

Contact: Peter Witonsky, President & Chief Sales Officer
peter.witonsky@isirona.com
610.772.7648

Visitors to the iSirona booth can register to win one of several Nike+ FuelBands! Stop by to learn about how we’ve been helping clients connect devices to their EMR for several years. It’s their satisfaction that has made our software solution Best in KLAS in device integration for two years running. Don’t forget to hear The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center on Monday at 9:45! They’ll be sharing their success with medical device integration.

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Kareo

Mobile Health Knowledge Center

Contact: Terry Douglas, Director of Brand Marketing
terry.douglas@kareo.com
949.856.7269

If you believe small practices power healthcare and want to see the only company at HIMSS committed to the success and health of small medical practices, then Kareo is the right stop for you! From A/R to mHealth and everything in between, Kareo is the medical office platform of the future.

Check us out in the Mobile Health Knowledge Center, online at www.kareo.com or tweet-out at us @GoKareo.

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LDM Group

Booth 5022

Contact: Todd Helmink, VP of Business Development
thelmink@ldmgrp.com
312.391.4233

LDM Group, LLC (LDM), is a leading provider of behavior based prescription management programs. As a targeted healthcare communication company, LDM connects prescribers, pharmacists, and patients. LDM’s network is made up of e-prescribing, electronic medical record (EMR), and electronic health record (EHR) applications, chain and independent pharmacies, and sponsors of healthcare related educational materials. LDM provides timely and clinically relevant healthcare messaging through its patented process which serves to improve patient compliance, persistence and outcomes, while preserving privacy. For more information, please visit www.ldmgrp.com.

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Legacy Data Access, LLC

Booths 4611 and 1621

Contact: John Hanggi, Director, Customer Services
jhanggi@legacydataaccess.com
678-232-7922 (cell)

With a singular focus on the healthcare industry, Legacy Data Access stores data from applications – Clinical, Revenue Cycle, ERP, Ancillary, Practice Management and EMR – that are being retired and provides secure, web-based access to the information. Our solutions support financial and clinical processes and strategies by maintaining all detail, minimizing costs, improving productivity, and maximizing ROI.

As a vendor-neutral archive provider, LDA has extensive experience in retiring numerous clinical applications including orders/results, nursing documentation, ancillary applications and in many cases provides a Legal Medical Record for the stored data.  Revenue Cycle solutions include receivables functionality so that those systems may be retired earlier.  In addition, LDA has retired various PM / EMR systems as well as many ERP applications.

We look forward to seeing you at our booth (4611) and our Partners collaboration booth (1621).

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Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. (LRS)

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Ron Peel, Technical Advisor
913.948.3646
ron.peel@lrs.com
Laurie Eldridge, HP Global Alliance Representative
610.850.1237
laurie.eldridge@lrs.com

Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. (LRS) is a leader in software for managing care-related documents and other business critical information. Some of the largest healthcare providers in the U.S. use LRS output management solutions. LRS provides documented and supported interfaces to integrate our proven output management software with best-of-breed EMR applications. Contact LRS to learn how we can improve your downtime reporting capabilities and streamline document-related processes to provide better patient care.

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Lifepoint Informatics

Booth 7623

Contact: Vincent Gryscavage, Senior Vice President of Sales
vgryscavage@lifepoint.com
201.447.9991 x730

Lifepoint Informatics is a leader in health IT focusing on laboratory outreach connectivity, health information exchange and clinical data interoperability. Since 1999, Lifepoint has enabled over 200 hospitals, clinical labs and anatomic pathology groups to grow their market share and extend their outreach programs through the deployment of its ONC-ATCB certified Web Provider Portal and its comprehensive portfolio of ready-to-go EHR interfaces. For more information visit www.lifepoint.com.

Please Note: Hourly drawings will be made during exhibit hours with a chance to win an Odyssey Golf Putter.

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maxIT-VCS

Booth 3027

Contact: Cyndi Vely Cahill, Senior Vice President
Ccahill@getvitalized.com
610.444.1233

maxIT Healthcare and VCS, wholly owned subsidiaries of SAIC, provide a wide variety of clinical, business, and IT solutions for healthcare enterprises across the United States and Canada. With nearly 3,000 consultants, we provide implementation expertise for the Allscripts™, Cerner, Epic, McKesson, MEDITECH, NextGen®, and Siemens systems. We also provide Project Management Professionals (PMP® Certified) and management consulting to assist our clients with their strategic planning and governance needs, tactical project planning, and assistance with their MU, ACO, Revenue Cycle, and ICD-10 project needs.

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McKesson

Booth: 4341, Exhibit Hall F

Contact: Erin McNealy, Lead Management
Erin.McNealy2@mckesson.com
404.338.3910

At McKesson, we’re committed to better health for patients, our customers, and the nation’s healthcare system. We’re committed to helping create a new future in which the business of health is better, and the outcomes improved for all. McKesson’s Paragon® “Best in KLAS” hospital information system is an intuitive, single-database system featuring fully integrated clinical and financial applications. Learn more by visiting our HIMSS booth (#4341) or at www.mynewHIS.com.

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MED3OOO – Now Part of McKesson

Booth 3068 (Medicomp)

Contact: Nicole Contardo, Corporate Marketing Director
marketing@MED3000.com
888.811.2411

MED3OOO – Now a Part of McKesson, is a leading provider of healthcare management and technology services that improve outcomes for providers, health plans, and the patients and employees they serve. The Company provides a broad array of proprietary solutions for physician groups, hospitals, health systems, health risk organizations, and state and local municipalities, enabling them to reach their maximum potential with respect to operational, financial, and clinical results. Through the integrated application of systems, operations, analytics and domain expertise, MED3OOO serves as the premier strategic operations partner for the healthcare community.

The Company’s depth of knowledge across its services, economies of scale, infrastructure, and ability to offer and manage disparate information systems provide MED3OOO with a distinct competitive advantage in the rapidly evolving healthcare industry. Each of the components of MED3OOO’s product and services suite is a critical competency for moving toward the delivery of accountable care.

MED3OOO will be giving demos of our InteGreat EHR with Quippe in the Medicomp booth (3068).

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MedAptus

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jennifer Crowley, Marketing Director
jcrowley@medaptus.com
617.896.4030

MedAptus is the Gold Standard in the healthcare revenue cycle for achieving effective charge management, compliance and workflow efficiency. With offerings that include powerful and easy-to-use charge capture and management technologies, it is no wonder that many of the nation’s most prestigious healthcare organizations rely on MedAptus for financial optimization. Our full-scale Professional, Facility and Infusion applications increase revenue, enhance EMR investments, re-engineer manual processes and yield substantially improved productivity.

For more information, visit www.medaptus.com or call 617.896.4000.

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MedAssets

To schedule a meeting:

Contact:
solutions@medassets.com
888.883.6332

MedAssets (NASDAQ: MDAS) partners with healthcare providers to improve their financial strength by implementing revenue cycle, spend and clinical resource management solutions that help capture revenue, control cost, improve margins and cash flow, increase regulatory compliance, and optimize operational efficiency. MedAssets serves more than 4,200 hospitals and 100,000 non-acute healthcare providers. The company currently manages $48 billion in supply spend and touches over $340 billion in gross patient revenue annually through its revenue cycle solutions. For more information, go to www.medassets.com.

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Medicomp Systems

Booth 3068

Contact: James Aita, Product Manager
jaita@medicomp.com
703.945.2482

Back by popular demand, Medicomp Systems will once again host Quipstar, World’s Favorite HIT Quiz Show, live at Exhibit 3068. Contestants and those seated in the studio audience will have a chance to win one of fifty iPads and other prizes. Best of all, you’ll see how Quippe, backed by the powerful MEDCIN Engine, takes care documentation requirements without burdening the clinician. You can also experience the MEDCIN Engine, Using Medicomp’s new interactive MEDCIN Engine touchscreen you can also experience the MEDCIN Engine to see how MEDCIN can successfully manage the data tsunami and even make SNOWMED easy to use. Register for an opportunity to attend and play Quipstar at www.medicomp.com/quipstar-registration.

Medicomp is also the proud sponsor of HIStalkapalooza, which will be held at the iconic Rock n’ Bowl. Register at www.histalkapalooza.com.

Medicomp Systems is the inventor of clinical content, technologies, and mappings that improve EHR usability at the point of care while taking care of all documentation requirements including Meaningful Use stages 2, 3 and beyond as well as ICD-10.

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MediQuant

Booth 5649

Contact: Mindy Morris
mindym@mediquant.com   
440.746.2300 x245                                                                                            

MediQuant provides Data Transition Management Solutions that embrace healthcare’s transitory nature. Simplify your IT world and reduce the cost of system conversions with DataArk®, an Active Archiving solution that allows you to decommission old systems, maintain interoperable access to old data, and realize up to 80% cost savings. As the retirement home for the legacy data from retired systems,  DataArk® allows users to easily access and view clinical, patient financial, ERP and other data that had been left orphaned in legacy systems. For patient accounting records, users may still bill accounts, post payments and produce itemized statements among other functions.

MediQuant serves a large client base across the nation, including large multi-facility IDN’s (40+ hospitals, 100+ ambulatory practices), academic healthcare organizations and community facilities. FirstComply™ and AccuRules™ are software and content solutions for medical necessity/ABN compliance.

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Merge Healthcare

Booth 5725

Contact: Jennifer Jawor, Director, Segment Marketing
jen.jawor@merge.com
312.565.6825

Merge Healthcare is a leading provider of clinical systems and innovations that seek to transform healthcare. Managing over 13,000 billion images, Merge was named the world’s largest vendor-neutral archive (VNA) market leader in a recent InMedica study. As the industry’s first true standalone vendor-neutral archive, iConnect(r) Enterprise Archive has been successfully integrated with over seventy-five PACS vendors and specialty workstations at over 350 sites across the United States. And with MU2 requirements, mandating images available to the referring physician through a certified EHR, Merge’s iConnect Enterprise Clinical Platform can help organizations image-enable the EHR while improving operational efficiencies, reducing costs and increasing revenue potential.

So are you ready for the next level of interoperability? Learn more about enterprise imaging at merge.com or visit us at HIMSS in Booth #5725.

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M*Modal

Booth 6647

Contact: Lisa McCormick, Corporate Events Planner
lisa.mccormick@mmodal.com
267.535.7222

Expect More. More from your EHR.

• Maximize physician adoption More time for your physicians.
• Easily capture the complete patient story More meaningful, higher quality patient care.
• Drive more intelligent, effective actions

Surprise Your Favorite Children‘s Charity. Visit M*Modal at HIMSS13, Booth #6647, and enter for a chance to win $800 in toys for the children‘s charity of your choice.

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Nordic Consulting Partners

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Natalee Cruse, Director of Technical Marketing
natalee.cruse@nordicwi.com
608.334.2998

Nordic is ranked #1 in KLAS for Epic services. We’re the largest consulting firm in the country focused exclusively on Epic. Our team of more than 225 elite consultants, two thirds of whom are former Epic, average nine years of industry experience and four certifications. We partner with over 50 clients across the country.

We pride ourselves on having high standards and a partnership-oriented philosophy with our clients and consultants, which has created great rapport and allowed us to attract the best and brightest to Nordic. We take pride in providing the right resource for a given opportunity.

Need help installing? Upgrading? Optimizing? Rolling out to affiliates? We do it all. We’re also an Epic-credentialed provider of Community Connect implementation and support. There will be a fleet of our green-shirted folks at HIMSS – come chat with us about how your Epic project is going!

For more info, go to www.nordicwi.com

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nVoq Incorporated

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Debbi Gillotti, Vice President and General Manager
deborah.gillotti@nvoq.com
720.562.4507 or 206.465.1765

SayIt(TM) from nVoq is a secure cloud-based voice recognition service that’s easy to use, easy to deploy, and has been endorsed by the American Hospital Association. SayIt works directly with your EMR to convert speech to text within seconds – no integration required. Access your SayIt voice profile whenever and wherever you need to work – no software to install on each device.

nVoq is a Boulder, CO based provider of cloud-based voice recognition solutions for the Healthcare and Customer Care industries. In business since 2000, nVoq supports a wide variety of enterprise and health system organizations through a growing channel partner network. We’re building this network daily in support of real-time (front end) dictation and embedded (back end) voice processing for mobile forms or other applications. A well-documented SDK is available for both Windows and iOS platforms.

While attending HIMSS, we welcome the opportunity to meet with organizations who buy, build or implement applications platforms for Healthcare users, and are interested in cloud-based, voice-enabled workflow at an affordable price point. Our primary focus is North America, but we welcome inquiries from other venues.

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NTT DATA Healthcare Technologies

Booth 1041

Contact: Larry Kaiser, Senior Marketing Manager
lawrence.kaiser@nttdata.com
631.824.5318

NTT DATA Healthcare Technologies offers healthcare organizations a complete IT solution with applications that increase efficiency, reduce medical errors, and enhance the revenue cycle. NTT DATA’s solutions include ONC-ATCB certified Optimum, featuring one of the industry’s leading RCM solutions, comprehensive clinicals, EHR, general financials, and post-acute solutions. Healthcare Technologies that:

• Empower the Patient
• Improve Care
• Drive Outcomes

Stop by the booth for a chance to win an iPad Mini.

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Nuance Communications, Inc

Booth 4025

Contact: Mark Erwich
mark.erwich@nuance.com
781.565.5000

At HIMSS 2013 Nuance will show how to improve the entire clinical documentation process, from the capture of the complete patient record to clinical documentation improvement, coding, compliance and appropriate reimbursement. Nuance will share latest information on how to prepare to transition to ICD-10, how we support Meaningful Use, how we support Mobile health and the transition to Accountable Care.

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Optum

Booth 7041

Contact: Steven Loewy, Associate Director, Marketing
steven.loewy@optum.com
801.982.3468

Optum innovations, analytics and expertise help health care organizations navigate the journey from providing care to managing health. Our solutions and services are used at nearly every point in the health care system, from patient access to diagnosis and treatment; from coding and clinical documentation improvement to reimbursement; and from quality measurement and performance benchmarking to network management, administration and payment.

Every day, Optum solutions help shape how health care is managed, and how information and technology drives improvements in the system. Optum works with our clients and partners to improve the delivery, quality and cost effectiveness of health care in ways that support and empower more patient-centered, value-driven care. Visit us at HIMSS13, booth #7041 to learn how Optum can help you reduce costs, while increasing patient care quality and satisfaction.

Make your steps count at HIMSS13! For every mile you walk, Optum will donate $1 to charities that improve health and wellbeing in the City of New Orleans. Stop by the Optum exhibit for a free pedometer and more information.

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Orchestrate Healthcare

Booth 529

Contact: Charlie Cook, President
charlie@orchestratehealthcare.com
877.303.3377

We focus on four core competencies: EMR Clinical Implementation, HIE Consulting, Integration and Staff Augmentation. Why? Because QUALITY is our mantra.

We listen to our clients, and our 15+ year experienced consultants are make-it-happen, kind of people that deliver on-time, on-schedule and on-budget. Without errors or excuses. Our client referrals and three Best In KLAS awards in the last five years affirm this. Come see us at booth 529 to learn more about how we can help you. While you’re visiting, check out our new pad and register to win a pair of really cool Beats by Dr. Dre. Listening has never been so much fun!

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Orion Health

Booth 3161

Contact: Kristin O’Neill, Senior Marketing Manager
kristin.oneill@orionhealth.com
857.488.4740

Visit booth 3161 at HIMSS 2013 and see for yourself why clinicians, hospitals, health systems, public health organizations and OEM partners in more than 30 countries worldwide rely on Orion Health to provide solutions to their biggest health information exchange (HIE) and data integration challenges. Be sure to mark your calendar for all the Orion Health activities while at the show, including: – Joining us for morning coffee or a sweet afternoon treat at the booth. – Meeting our clients and learning how they are using our solutions. – Entering our raffle to win an iPad mini 4G. – Attending a “Lunch and Learn” session with Shahid Shah, The Healthcare IT Guy, on Data Integration and Analytics: The Future of Healthcare Information Management. – Networking with Orion Health executives over breakfast in our hospitality room.

Orion Health™ HIE facilitates data exchange between hospitals, health systems, regional HIEs, and affiliated providers, resulting in improved care coordination, increased cost savings and efficiencies, and enhanced quality of care. Orion Health™ Rhapsody® Integration Engine provides seamless connectivity between legacy and next-generation health systems, rapidly enabling organizations to deliver high-quality patient care and population health. Rhapsody provides a comprehensive set of tools to simplify healthcare integration and is easily extensible to meet the requirements of each unique healthcare environment.

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Ormed Information Systems Inc.

Booth 1041 (with NTT Data Health Solutions)

Contact: Bill Hockstedler, VP Sales and Marketing
bill.hockstedler@ormed.com
512.971.2885

Ormed’s software and services are designed exclusively to continuously improve on the business processes of hospitals in the areas of supply chain management, finance, cost accounting, human capital management, decision support and systems management.

Saving time, reducing waste, cutting expenses, understanding costs, creating a positive experience and peace of mind. In the world of accountable care and new regulations, wouldn’t it be nice to have a set of tools in your hands that were always designed around expense management and accountablility. A powerful Cost Accounting system alone can make all the difference for you!

Come and see what we have to offer to make the changes ahead less stressful!

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Park Place International

Booth 2674

Contact: Christine Mellyn, Manager of Product Marketing
christine.mellyn@parkplaceintl.com
508.970.8704

Park Place International provides technology integration, technical consulting, and OpSus|Cloud Services designed to help customers achieve operational sustainability with their MEDITECH Electronic Health Record. Park Place is an approved provider of technology solutions for all versions of the MEDITECH HCIS and offers the full selection of MEDITECH-certified server and storage platforms. The Park Place team has extensive MEDITECH experience and technology expertise, and is uniquely qualified to architect, deliver and support MEDITECH solutions.

Stop by booth #2674 to learn more about Park Place International and enter our raffle for a chance to win an Amazon.com gift card!

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Passport Health Communications, Inc.

Booth 3310

Contact: Scott Bagwell, Senior VP, Sales & Marketing
Scott.Bagwell@passporthealth.com
888.661.5657

Founded in 1996, Passport now serves more than 2,400 hospitals in addition to more than 8,900 physicians, clinics and ancillary offices across all 50 states. The company processes more than 300 million transactions annually through its Passport eCare™ brand of patient access and payment certainty solutions. Recently ranked the nation’s third largest revenue cycle management company by Modern Healthcare, Passport was honored as the “Technology Company of the Year” by the Nashville Technology Council in October 2012. Passport’s patient access & payment certainty solutions are delivered through Passport eCare NEXT; an integrated, SaaS-based platform that can be seamlessly integrated into existing work flow. Accountable Care solutions, including ACO MemberMatchTM, can be used to manage patients’ entire course of care, from initial diagnosis through full recovery and can be seamlessly integrated into existing workflow through the Passport eCare NEXT platform.

Visit Passport at Booth #3310 to see a product demonstration and speak to a Passport representative.

 

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PatientKeeper Inc.

Booth 2210

Contact: Kathy Ruggiero, Senior Director, Corporate Marketing
kruggiero@patientkeeper.com
781.373.6433

PatientKeeper is the leading provider of healthcare applications for physicians, with over 50,000 users across North America and the UK. At HIMSS13, visitors can see PatientKeeper software in action and speak with customers who are actively using our CPOE, mobile CPOE, physician documentation, electronic charge capture and other applications that streamline physicians’ workflow. PatientKeeper runs as a native app on popular smartphones and tablets, as well as on desktop and laptop computers. While you are at our HIMSS13 booth (#2210), enter our daily drawing for an Apple iPad mini.

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PatientPay

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: David Bond, EVP, Sales & Marketing
db@patientpay.com
919.830.2798

PatientPay is a patented innovative solution that makes healthcare billing, payment and reconciliation faster, easier and less costly. PatientPay is a simple way for practice management software vendors to allow their physicians to bill patients while reducing costs, increasing productivity and patient satisfaction. PatientPay eliminates the costly and complicated paper-based billing method used by the overwhelming majority of healthcare providers. It drives down the expense and drives up the productivity associated with this activity by at least a factor of two. Since PatientPay reduces the time to payment in half, healthcare professionals realize improved cash flow and reduced accounts receivables.

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PDR Network

Booth 7740

Contact: Amy Lombardi, Senior Director, Marketing
Amy.Lombardi@pdr.net
201.358.7200

PDR Network® has developed innovations to deliver critical drug information to providers within workflow that are easily integrated into partner EHR systems and deliver a better end user experience. PDR interactive drug information services allow providers to have their PDR in their EHR with services provided at no cost to partner EHRs and their providers, enhancing the overall EHR experience while supporting Meaningful Use (MU) requirements.

• PDR® BRIEF: Supporting providers by delivering the key information needed at the point of prescribing. Instead of accessing multiple sources outside of workflow, providers have access to the information they need within workflow when they need it.
• PDR® Search: This on-demand resource provides access to a host of medication-specific resources covering regulatory, provider and patient information tools, as well as aggregated manufacturer resources. Before providers would leave your environment for these tools, NOW they have integrated access to the information they need.
• RxEvent: PDR offers a quick and easy digital reporting tool that can be easily integrated into any EHR or ePrescribing system.

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Ping Identity

Booth 2470

Contact: Linda Bowers, Healthcare Market Leader
lbowers@pingidentity.com
978.844.4105

Ping Identity is The Identity Security Company. Our identity and access management platform gives enterprise customers and employees one-click access to any application from any device. Over 900 companies, including 45 of the Fortune 100, rely on our award-winning products to make the digital world a better experience.

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Prognosis HIS

Booth 7423

Contact: Melanie Thompson,Director of Marketing
mthompson@prognosishis.com
713.469.1501

Prognosis Health Information Systems provides an enterprise solution, including EHR and financial systems, to rural and community hospitals. At HIMSS, Prognosis is launching a new version of its highly ranked ChartAccess® EHR and unveiling our ED and ambulatory solutions. We’re introducing the new era of EHRs. Our system allows for configurability at both the organization and user level, helping every person interact with the system in the way that works best for him or her. We invite you to stop by our booth and see an EHR like you’ve never seen before.

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Qlik Technologies

Booth 8121

Contact: Kerry Talbot, Event Marketing Senior Manager
kerry.talbot@qlikview.com
617.331.5284

QlikTech (NASDAQ: QLIK) is a leader in Business Discovery—user-driven Business Intelligence (BI). Its QlikView Business Discovery solution bridges the gap between traditional BI solutions and inadequate spreadsheet applications. The in-memory associative search technology QlikTech pioneered created the self-service BI category, allowing users to explore information freely rather than being confined to a predefined path of questions. Appropriate from SMB to the largest global enterprise, QlikView’s self-service analysis can be deployed with data governance in days or weeks. The QlikView Business Discovery platform’s app-driven model works with existing BI solutions, offering an immersive mobile and social, collaborative experience. Headquartered in Radnor, Pennsylvania, QlikTech has offices around the world serving approximately 26,000 customers in over 100 countries.

We will have multiple demos, videos and customer presentations in our large booth amphitheater with solutions experts on hand to answer all of your questions. Registerhere for a personalized VIP Booth Tour and be entered for a chance to win an iPad Mini!

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Quantros

Booth 7940

Contact: Amy Lee, Director of Marketing and Sales Operation
info@quantros.com
408.957.3300

Quantros helps healthcare providers improve quality and patient safety by empowering organizations, at every level, with the actionable intelligence they need to improve outcomes and reduce risk. Quantros provides cloud based tools and resources for the healthcare industry in the areas of safety and risk management, quality and performance improvement, accreditation and compliance, and centralized decision support. Today more than 2,000 healthcare facilities use Quantros solutions to capture meaningful data to effectively drive the decisions that improve the safety and quality of care.

Visit our booth to learn more about IRIS and enter to win an iPad. IRIS is a leading-edge clinical quality and patient safety dashboard that leverages data from the Quantros Safety and Risk Management (SRM) solution, the Regulatory Reporting Management (RRM) solution, and your organization’s billing data. IRIS Executive presents this data via a highly configurable, role-based dashboard. The result is real-time visibility into safety and quality events and trends in your facility. This enables you to chart improvement with an authoritative source of truth.

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Quest Diagnostics (Care360 Healthcare IT Suite of Solutions)

Booth 3927

Contact: Rohit Nayak,Vice President, Physician Technology Solutions
RNayak@MedPlus.com
800.444.6235

A special 2013 HIMSS invitation to all HIStalk readers: Visit the Quest Diagnostics Healthcare IT Theatre – Booth 3927.

Quest Diagnostics team members will be featuring educational presentations and industry insights from key opinion leaders on technology topics including:

• Interoperability
• Top Strategies for Accelerating Your ACO and Care Collaboration Strategy
• Mobile Health – featuring Travis Good, MD, MBNA, MS, HIStalk Mobile Health contributor
• Industry Standards/HL7
• Elevating Your Enterprise Content Management (ECM) with a SOA Platform
• Enhancing business processes/streamlining registration programs
• Our Health IT Quality Solutions Program to ensure quality Lab-EHR interoperability

ChartMaxx and Care360 with Data Exchange, part of the Care360 Suite of Healthcare IT Solutions from Quest Diagnostics, are exhibiting together to showcase the strengths of the company’s entire HCIT portfolio. EHR vendors can learn how our Health IT Quality Solutions Program benefits them through streamlined interfacing and promotion of their quality EHR solutions by us.

We are focused on “Empowering Better Health: Quest Diagnostics Healthcare IT Solutions.”

Quest Diagnostics booth representatives will be holding drawings for iPads and other exciting giveaways following each 20-minute presentation.

For more information and a schedule of the presentations, visit Care360.com.

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RazorInsights

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Reed Liggin, President & CEO
rliggin@razorinsights.com
404.578.1362

Based in Kennesaw, Georgia, RazorInsights is a dynamic healthcare information technology company. In keeping with the principle of Occam’s Razor, they have created a simplified HIS solution for Rural, Critical Access and Community hospitals. Introducing ONE (ONC-ATCB 2011/2012) — a single-database, cloud solution offering a simple user experience with cutting-edge clinical tools and industry-standardized data. Hospitals can expect to improve their performance and bottom line with ONE from RazorInsights. To register for a live product demo or for more information, visit www.razorinsights.com or call 770-308-4111.

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RelayHealth

Booth 4640

Contact: Lynette Corte, Lead Qualification Manager
lynette.cortez@relayhealth.com
888.743.8735

RelayHealth is proud to be a featured exhibitor at HIMSS13 March 3-7 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. If you plan to attend this important annual industry event, we’d like the opportunity to learn more about your goals and challenges for the upcoming year, and explore how RelayHealth can help you succeed in 2013 and beyond with the Right Connections for Better Health.

RelayHealth provides solutions that can help you satisfy requirements for Meaningful Use Stage 2, and meet your objectives for providing accountable care. As the healthcare industry continues to experience substantial change, RelayHealth is also at the forefront of developments in areas such as health information exchange, patient engagement, and readmission management. Check out the exhibition hall floor map and make plans to stop by for a visit with us in Booth #4640. We look forward to meeting with you in New Orleans.

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Salar, Inc.

Booth 6754

Contact: Greg D. Wilson, Director of Sales
gwilson@salarinc.com
860.294.9877

Salar offers physician clinical documentation and charge capture solutions to hospitals and health systems nationwide. Our flagship product, TeamNotes, has recently been entirely rewritten allowing our customers to deploy the solution faster, easier, and to a wider array of devices than ever before. At HIMSS, Salar will showcase this latest release, TeamNotes v6, and within that demonstration special attention will be focused on front end computer assisted coding for ICD-10 compliant documentation, physician charges as derived by the notes themselves, care team collaboration of notes, physician hand off, and related CDI workflows.

In lieu of yet another iPad giveaway or a similar free gizmo, at this time Salar is planning to offer a charitable donation in the name of one visitor to the booth. Details are forthcoming.

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Sandlot Solutions

Booth 2063

Contact: Derek Plansky, Senior Director, Client Solutions
dplansky@sandlotsolutions.com
202.747.4502

Sandlot Solutions has a proven, deployed system managing more than 2.8 million lives. Sandlot manages risk, drives clinical management and provides business analytics. All of the things that are required by MU2, and beyond and all the things an Accountable Care Organization (ACO) must do. Sandlot provides all the tools to manage against risk-based payment systems. Most application systems only use claims data for analysis – Sandlot merges clinical and claim data to manage care and manage risk. Sandlot using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS or cloud computing platform) is very fast, built on reliable technology – system changes for your information systems and changes for any of your affiliated entities are not required . . . also connects to non-affiliated trading partners in your trading area. The combination of Healthcare Information Exchange (HIE), Care Management and Analytics makes Sandlot the Fourth Generation Technology.

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Santa Rosa Consulting

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Doug Hires, Executive Vice President, Strategic Advisory and Sales & Marketing
doughires@santarosaconsulting.com
214.546.0895

Santa Rosa Consulting is a national provider of management consulting and information technology services to the healthcare industry. Through our unique blend of strategic advisory services and technical consulting expertise across the full range of healthcare IT vendor products and systems, we deliver solutions specifically designed to address your business needs.

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Seamless Medical Systems

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Frank Grant, Vice President, Sales
frank@seamlessmedical.com
760.533.1520

Seamless Medical is solely focused on improving the patient’s experience in medical practices at the point of care. Our mission is to leverage technology in patients’ hands to simplify the front end of the practice workflow, engage the patient in the registration process, and provide the patient with educational content relevant to his/her scheduled appointment and medical conditions. Our team’s decades of combined experience in the medical, healthcare administration, and business arenas has led to the formation of the company and dedication to our solution.

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Shareable Ink

Booth 3568

Contact: Suzanne Cogan, Vice President, Sales and Marketing
scogan@shareableink.com
877.572.7423 x 802

Shareable Ink is the enterprise cloud-based platform that transforms point-of-care clinical documentation to structured data and analytics. By incorporating natural input tools, such as iPads and digital pen and paper technology, clinicians can continue documenting in the fastest, most efficient manner. The resulting structured and clinically-rich output populates the EHR with discrete data, as if typed in directly. Predictive analytics give hospitals and practices unprecedented insight into their operations – from a clinical, quality, and efficiency standpoint.

Visit us at HIMSS – # 3568 – for an interactive demo of our applications that automate areas where electronic documentation has traditionally been challenging – from anesthesia to patient-generated history to ambulatory sites. We’ll also have a special unveiling of our iPad App – you won’t want to miss it! For everyone who mentions ‘LIBERATE’ at our booth, we’ll be making a donation to one of our favorite NOLA charities.

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Siemens Healthcare

Booths 2640 and 2641

Contact: Roger May, Senior Director, Marketing
roger.may@siemens.com
610.219.1874

Join us to learn how a growing number of healthcare organizations—both large and small—are using Soarian® to connect top-of-the-line patient care with the bottom line. Hear the story of how Soarian unites the revenue cycle for seamless financial performance using contract-driven processing. See how Soarian helps foster collaboration by connecting clinicians to patient data and to one another with integrated clinical workflow.Learn how more people in more places can connect… with Soarian. See the new Soarian Ambulatory offering in our main booth and our MobileMD HIE in our adjoining booth.

Stop by the Siemens booth and we will make a contribution to Hope For The Warriors® whose mission is to enhance the quality of life for post-9/11 service members, their families, and families of the fallen who have sustained physical and psychological wounds in the line of duty. www.hopeforthewarriors.org

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SpeechRecognition.com

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: William Holliman, Dragon Medical Adviser
William.Holliman@1450.com
888.848.1450 ext. 210

Is your EHR doing all of the dictating? Take back control, and the ability to dictate your notes, with the most accurate speech recognition software yet, Dragon Medical Practice Edition. Visit SpeechRecognition.com to schedule a free demo today!

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Streamline Health Solutions, Inc.

Booth 1821

Contact: Michael Schiller, Senior Vice President, Sales, Marketing & Account Management
solutions@streamlinehealth.net
303.316.0696

Streamline Health offers specialized solutions that will:

• Get you closer to Meaningful Use with EHR-integrated enterprise content management solutions
• Provide actionable insight into your organization’s true financial performance with Business Intelligence solutions
• Help facilitate the transition to ICD-10 with our suite of integrated computer assisted coding (CAC) and CDI solutions

Stop by booth 1821 at HIMSS to view a live demonstration of AccessAnyWare™, OpportunityAnyWare™ and/or Collabra™ and learn how Streamline Health Solutions, Inc., can help your healthcare organization successfully face today’s challenges.

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SuccessEHS

Booth 4411

Contact: Dante Rankart, Vice President of Sales
marketing@successehs.com
888.879.7302

SuccessEHS is a nationally acclaimed vendor providing Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Practice Management solutions with Integrated Medical Billing Services. SuccessEHS also provides Electronic Dental Record (EDR) and Dental Imaging solutions. Founded in 1995, SuccessEHS established itself as a leader in the emerging practice management applications market by delivering an innovative blend of clinical, operational and financial software paired with a suite of specialized integrated success services. SuccessEHS, entirely in-house developed and supported, has achieved multiple certifications from CCHIT.

Visit us at booth #4411 to learn how SuccessEHS can help practices improve care, increase revenue, successfully manage the ICD-10 transition and earn incentives through Meaningful Use and the Physician Quality Reporting System. While you’re there, spin our wheel to win fun prizes, including cash! We look forward to seeing you in the Big Easy!

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Sunquest Information Systems, Inc.

Booth 911 and MU Booth 149, Kiosk 85

Contact: Tracey Eddy, Marketing Event Planner
tracey.eddy@sunquestinfo.com
520.570.2333

Sunquest delivers market-leading diagnostic information technology and outreach solutions, designed and implemented to fulfill the business objectives of today’s healthcare leaders. Sunquest Laboratory is the leader in the market, enabling labs to operate with optimized performance and deliver quality diagnoses, while meeting regulatory and interoperability standards. Our solutions demonstrate a commitment to patient safety, workflow excellence, predictive and personalized medicine, and physician and patient affinity, serving users worldwide. Through outreach, we extend the lab to the community and provide the tools that turn information into intelligence.

At Booth 911:

Monday March 4th @ 2:00 pm
Guest Speaker Representative Gayle B. Harrell, President and CEO of Health IT Strategies, LLC ONC HIT Committee Member, Florida House of Representatives
Subject: Meaningful Use

Tuesday March 5th @ 10:30 AM and 3:00 pm
Guest Speaker Patty Sollman, Blood Bank Supervisor/LIS System Manager, Deaconess Health System
Title: In the age of the Integrated EHR, why SUNQUEST is the RIGHT choice as your Laboratory/Pathology System…..a user perspective

To request a meeting with a member of the Sunquest team at HIMSS please complete a request form: http://info.sunquestinfo.com/HIMSS2013_HIMSS2013v1.html.

Our give away this year will be a miniature plush toy – Sunquest Lab.

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Surgical Information Systems (SIS)

Booth 6429, Intelligent Hospital Kiosk 8711-33

Contact: Emmy Weber, VP of Marketing
info@sisfirst.com
678.507.1727

Surgical Information Systems (SIS) provides software solutions that are uniquely designed to add value at every point of the perioperative process. SIS’ singular focus in the OR helps hospitals drive both greater efficiency and better patient outcomes while integrating with your information systems environment. Visit SIS at Booth #6429 to learn how the fast, mobile, connected SIS Solution can help you achieve a "Slam Dunk" in your OR. Rapidly achieve remarkable outcomes with a proven implementation approach by the perioperative experts. Speed user adoption with mobile documentation and analytics that simplify OR management. Seamlessly connect to the enterprise, enabling providers to share information, prevent duplicate documentation, and analyze performance.

SIS is proud to be the only perioperative information management system vendor to participate in the HIMSS Intelligent Hospital Showcase. We will demonstrate our comprehensive perioperative software solution, showcasing interoperability between medical devices, hardware, and software.

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TeleTracking Technologies, Inc.

Booth 6619

Contact: Amie Podolak, Director, Marketing
amie-podolak@teletracking.com
412.391.6395

TeleTracking, Booth #6619, will preview its Real-Time Capacity Management™ (RTCM) platform, which removes wasted time in hospitals much more efficiently by combining advanced patient flow, business intelligence, and real-time location technologies. The platform integrates the just-released Capacity Management Suite™ system version 3.0 and TeleTracking’s Real-Time Locating System, with the goal of progressively removing delays to the management and execution of critical business processes. Also, enter for a chance to win a Tag Heuer watch (valued at $2,500)!

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TeraRecon

Booth 341

Stop by TeraRecon’s booth to learn all about the new iNtuition Enterprise Medical Viewer (iEMV), iNtuition SHARE and iNtuition Cloud. While there, enter a drawing to win a new iPad Mini!

iEMV provides a simple, intuitive, browser-based client which requires no download, no installation, and no plugin. A completely zero-footprint viewer, which supports a wide range of browsers dating back to IE7.

iNtuition SHARE makes possible CD-free transport and distribution of images between medical facilities and peers, or patients. When a healthcare facility deploys an iNtuition SHARE server, it is able to offer free access to network upload of images to institutions that need to send images into the facility, while removing the need to burn CDs for outgoing images.

iNtuition CLOUD is a self-contained solution which allows the full capability of iNtuition to be deployed via a web browser, either as an externally-hosted managed service, or as an in-house Private Cloud.

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The McHenry Group

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Lisa Gatto, Director of Client Development
lisag@mvp4u.biz
815.923.2500

Celebrating nearly 22 years in business, The McHenry Group (TMG) has become the most successful and most experienced International Executive Search Firm solely dedicated to serving the healthcare software vendor market. How successful? Since 1991, TMG has successfully placed over 2,000 candidates within the healthcare technology vendor industry.How experienced? Our Team of ten (10) search consultants has an average tenure with our firm that exceeds 11 years!

One of our Clients put it best: “Even though I was expecting great things from The McHenry Group, I was surprised by the extra effort TMG expended to understand our company, its corporate goals and our goals for our open position.I will definitely seek your help whenever our needs mesh with your services.”

TMG’s recruiting efforts focus on healthcare software vendors in the Provider and Payor (Payer) spaces. We identify superb talent for the C-level, VP Sales, regional sales, territory sales, channel marketing, client account executives, client services and implementation, sales support, consulting, marketing, product management, product development, clinical informatics, physician executives, clinical liaisons, nursing (RN) informatics and more! TMG is equipped to quickly tap into the hidden candidate market and recruit Top Talent that are not active on the market. Additionally, we can delve into our extensive proprietary database of candidates, coded by specific title, areas of expertise, etc.

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TrustHCS

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jeff Johnston, Executive Director, Business Development, President
jeff.johnston@trusthcs.com
760.277.1190

TrustHCS provides consulting and services to address Clinical Documentation Improvement (CDI) programs, ICD-10 preparation, revenue cycle improvement, coding services, auditing and cancer registry. Visit www.trusthcs.com for more information!

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T-System, Inc

Booth 2219, MU Experience booth 149/kiosk 42

Contact: Corinne Tso, Vice President, Marketing
ctso@tsystem.com
469.791.5540

This year at HIMSS, T-System will highlight solutions proven to help hospitals across the country achieve Meaningful Use and reduce avoidable readmissions through better patient transition management. In the T-System main exhibit booth #2219, leadership from Baptist Health of Kentucky and Cox Medical Center Branson in Missouri will discuss their experiences. In the HIMSS13 Meaningful Use Experience, a new special demonstration area for certified EHRs, T-System will demonstrate how an emergency department information system can help hospitals attest to Meaningful Use specifically highlighting the workflow for capturing patient history and documentation.

T-System, Inc. advances the practice of emergency medicine with solutions proven to solve clinical, financial, operational and regulatory challenges for hospitals and urgent care clinics. More than 40 percent of the nation’s emergency departments rely on T-System for gold-standard documentation, revenue cycle management, and performance-enhancing solutions.

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Valence Health

Booth 772

Contact: Kevin Weinstein, Chief Marketing Officer
kweinstein@valencehealth.com
312.771.7883

If you’re an executive overseeing a Medicare ACO, interested in population health, or pursuing value-based reimbursement opportunities, Valence Health would like to help. Valence Health is among the nation’s leading companies in helping healthcare providers better manage their patient populations and accept financial responsibility for the quality of the care they provide. With unique data collection and analysis tools, Valence Health has emerged as a leader in population management, serving dozens of clients from small physician groups to the Cleveland Clinic.

At the same time, in-depth actuarial analysis combined with operational excellence allows Valence to not only advise but also provide ongoing services to provider organizations operating under various value-based reimbursement models. From risk-based contracting to accountable care organizations (ACOs) to administering provider-sponsored health plans, Valence has been helping providers appropriately accept and manage financial responsibility while improving clinical quality since 1996.

With headquarters in Chicago, and three other office locations, Valence Health’s 300 employees help support the health of more than 13 million patients nationwide.

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Velocity Data Centers

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Steve Jacobs, President
steve.jacobs@velocitydatacenters.com
734.323.3075

We enable healthcare IT organizations to achieve their strategic goals through our innovative solution to deliver cloud computing infrastructure. This innovative approach delivers incredible benefits at reduced cost. Allowing healthcare organizations to grow revenue, reduce operating costs and leverage current and future technology trends.

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VersaSuite

Booth 3121

Contact: Tushar Jain, Regional Sales Manager
tj@versasuite.com
718.316.2254

VersaSuite is an innovative HIS and EHR solution designed to adapt to your hospital’s and clinic’s needs, no matter how complex. We offer a single database solution designed with identical and intuitive user interfaces for inpatient, outpatient and emergency department environments.

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Versus Technology

Booth 3463

Contact: Stephanie Bertschy, Director of Marketing
info@versustech.com
231.946.5868

If you’re looking for awesome IT, we’ve got it at booth #3463. Our Real-time Locating System (RTLS) powers multiple time- and money-saving applications, from Asset Tracking to Patient Flow—and even, Hand Hygiene. We’re unveiling the first of its kind, RTLS-integrated dispenser, part of an overall hand hygiene safety program that will help your facility improve compliance by creating a culture of safety and accountability.

Added bonus — we’ll be conducting in-booth RTLS sessions, where you can learn directly from Versus clients, patient flow experts, and our own executives. Delve into implementation, integration and technology-related questions about patient flow, analytics, asset tracking, hand hygiene and more. Space is limited, so learn more and sign up now at http://versustech.com/himss13.

Don’t be led down the path of promises, get experience and proven results with Versus Advantages™ — visit with us at Booth #3463.

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Virtelligence Consulting

Booth 3320

Contact: Akhtar Chaudhri, CEO
akhtar@virtelligence.com
952.548.6601

Virtelligence is a privately held premier Healthcare IT consulting firm that offers solution advisory and Healthcare IT consulting services to payors and providers organizations nationwide. Vi Through our unique consulting model providing an implementation-oriented partnership with clients, we offer consulting expertise across the full range of Healthcare IT vendor products and we deliver solutions specifically tailored to address the business needs of the healthcare IT industry.

• Project Management & Strategic Guidance
• Meaningful Use and ICD-10 Projects
• System Implementation & Upgrades
• Clinical Workflow & Process Optimization
• Revenue Cycle Improvement
• Business Intelligence & Data Analytics
• Health Information Exchange Adoption

PLEASE STOP BY OUR BOOTH #3320 TO WIN LATEST IPAD.

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VitalWare, LLC.

Booth 6654

Contact: Kelly Jorgensen, VP Business Development
kellyjorgensen@vitalware.com
855.464.2310

Visit booth #6654 and enter to win a free iPad including a license to our new application, Doc Sherpa! A complementary ICD-10 financial risk assessment will also be available for those who sign up!

VitalWare leads the market in transforming healthcare intelligence into useful and actionable information so our clients can focus their time and resources on core business. VitalWare will be launching two new products to assist in provider ICD-10 implementation and beyond:

• DocSherpa, an innovative iPad app designed to guide physicians through documentiation requirements utilizing an easy to understand user interface. By helping physicians document missing concepts, DocSherpa alleviates physician productivity constraints today and well beyond the ICD-10 implementation.
• VitalSigns, the claims analytics solution and retrospective coding & auditing tool using TrueShift analytics over predictive modeling to identify actual ICD-10 risk.

Whether you ten-code your claims in VitalSigns, or opt to take advantage of our Quick Start offering to begin building your repository of claims, the TrueShift identified is critical in understanding true financial risk, documentation deficiency risk and payer contracting opportunities.

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Vitera Healthcare Solutions

Booth 6113

Contact:
events@viterahealthcare.com

Vitera Healthcare Solutions provides end-to-end clinical and financial technology solutions so physicians and medical professionals can work with patients instead of paperwork. Serving more than 400,000 healthcare professionals including 80,000 physicians, Vitera Healthcare Solutions provides electronic health records and practice management systems, processes 33 million transactions and 1.8 million e-prescriptions monthly, and serves several specialties including primary care, OB/GYN, pediatrics, cardiology and orthopedics in all sized practices and Community Health Centers. Don’t miss seeing Vitera Healthcare up close and personal! Stop by our booth # 6113 to say "hello" and learn more about our industry leading healthcare software solutions.

 

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VMWare

Booth 851

Contact: Tisa Murdock
tmurdock@vmware.com
831.818.6095

VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and provider of vCloud for Healthcare; the healthcare industry’s first end-to-end  cloud computing platform, is proud to sponsor HIStalk.

VMware vCloud for Healthcare is the first comprehensive framework and partner ecosystem supporting the entire health IT environment – from point of care to the most critical patient care systems.  Helping to safely accelerate healthcare reform and the transition to truly connected care, this new innovative platform enables organizations to exchange information and deliver secure, agile, and reliable patient care products and services.  A private cloud platform with  hybrid cloud capability, VMware vCloud for Healthcare meets the growing needs of healthcare both today and tomorrow.

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Vocera Communications, Inc.

Booth 6329, Intelligent Hospital Pavillian Booth 8711

Contact: Mauricio Cornejo, Sales Support
MCornejo@vocera.com
877.790.4190

Vocera provides mobile communication solutions focused on addressing critical communication challenges facing hospitals today. We help our customers improve patient safety and satisfaction, and increase hospital efficiency and productivity through our Voice Communication, Secure Messaging, and Care Transition solutions. Exclusively endorsed by the American Hospital Association, the Vocera solutions are installed in more than 800 hospitals and healthcare facilities worldwide.

Join Vocera in our booth for a Beignet Break on Wednesday morning.

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Wellcentive, Inc.

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Rich Walsh, Vice President of Corporate Strategy
rhwalsh@wellcentive.com
678.367.8187

Senior Management will be located at the Hilton Riverside in an Executive Suite conducting presentations and open discussions! We look forward to seeing you there!

Wellcentive delivers population health management solutions that enable quality improvement throughout the continuum of care. Wellcentive’s Advance™ platform transforms disparate data into actionable insights that facilitate coordinated preventive care and chronic disease management, physician alignment, clinical integration, and success with value-based reimbursement and incentive programs. Wellcentive empowers healthcare organizations to improve both clinical and financial outcomes.

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Wellsoft Corporation

Booth 3158

Contact: Denise Helfand, VP, Sales & Marketing
dhelfand@wellsoft.com
800.597.9909

Consistently ranked #1 Emergency Department Information System (EDIS) by KLAS, (most recently awarded Best in KLAS 2012) Wellsoft EDIS offers an exceptional combination of experience, extensive workflow analysis and award winning customer support. Wellsoft EDIS is certified for Meaningful Use. Software features include Patient Tracking, Clinical Documentation, CPOE/Results, Charge Capture including Infusion Charge Capture, Risk Management and CCD Document exchange. Wellsoft is EDIS at its BEST!

Visit Wellsoft at Booth #3158 to have a brief demonstration and discuss how Wellsoft EDIS fully integrates with HIS and ancillary systems AND can help with your roadmap to Meaningful Use attestation.

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Winthrop Resources

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Dan Mandy, Director of Business of Development
dmandy@winthropresources.com
952.656.7687

Winthrop specializes in healthcare technology finance.The realities of today’s healthcare market demand a finance solution that can change with you as your strategic direction dictates.Please reach out to Winthrop to learn more on how we can partner with you to deliver a future of efficient care/systems and improved patient outcomes.

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Wolters Kluwer Health

Booth 1740

Contact: Alyssa Downing, Marketing Coordinator
Alyssa.Downing@wolterskluwer.com
612.313.1500

A leader in point of care information, Wolters Kluwer Health Clinical Solutions provide best of breed offerings focused on improving the quality of care & driving clinical productivity. Hospitals, ASCs, physicians offices, payers, labs & retail pharmacies turn to us as their trusted partner for the content & tools they rely on every day. From Clinical Documentation, to Clinical Drug Information, to Clinical Informatics & Surveillance, to Clinical Decision Support, our products deliver meaningful solutions clinicians value. Facts & Comparisons, Lexicomp, Medi-Span, ProVation Medical, ProVation Order Sets, Sentri7, Health Language & UpToDate. Visit our booth for a chance to win one of five iPad minis.

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ZirMed

 

Booth 4469

Contact: Kent Rowe, VP of Sales
sales@zirmed.com
877.494.1032

We’re ZirMed and we’re one of the nation’s leading providers of revenue management solutions for healthcare providers. Offering claims management, eligibility verification, electronic remittances, patient statements, payment processing, and business analytics, our solution suite simplifies the complexities of payments for providers and their patients. We resolve many problems with one simple solution – and one great relationship.

News 2/13/13

Top News

Greenway announces Q2 results: revenue up 12 percent, EPS $0.00, missing both revenue and earnings estimates substantially, guiding fiscal year earnings to the low end of the range on lower revenue. Shares were down eight percent in Tuesday’s after-hours trading. From the earnings call:

• The company is moving rapidly to a recurring revenue model, with revenue recognition changes hurting short-term results
• 750 providers were added in the quarter, up 30 percent year over year
• Training and consulting revenue dropped 35 percent because large accounts pushed training out into January
• The company’s new RCM platform is in its early stages, but has over 300 customers

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Reader Comments

From Judy: “Re: our HIMSS promo.  I thought about you. We’ve secured 25 New Orleans merchants to offer discounts to HIMSS attendees wearing our Iatric Systems branded slap bands. Merchants range from restaurants to spas  to jewelry to clothing and to two stores specializing in shoes and boots. You can wine, dine, shop, tour, and spa in between all the HIMSS activities.” Judy had me at shoes and discount, but wine and spa, too?  Look for the bands in the LeSack hotel drop Sunday night or at the Iatric booth.

From Alberta Gator: “Re: HIStalkapalooza. I am assuming I did not make the cut for HIStalkapalooza since I didn’t get an invite. It’s OK. I’ll still bring sexy shoes in your honor.” Don’t fear: the invites have not yet been sent even though the registration has closed! The official HIStalkapalooza invitations will be e-mailed to several hundred of our BFFs around February 18. And I can’t wait to see all the sexy shoes. If you didn’t sign up, sorry, but we’re full.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Selective Disturbance App. Our fellow HIStalker Inga has helped a developer name a new mobile app by calling it ‘Selective Disturbance.’ It will be on TPD’s List of iPhone Apps with the next update.” I asked Inga what this was about and it turns out she helped choose the rather brilliant name attached to the app, which lets you selectively set a “Do Not Disturb” status by groups of individual contacts, so maybe you let your child get through 24×7 but block casual acquaintances during work hours.

From Ralph Samuelson: “Re: Allscripts. I am not sure how it is for everyone, but the company is allowing everyone in my group (programming for one of the legacy products) to stay on until August 1. We have until then to relocate or find another job outside the company. I probably can’t move, but I am grateful I have some time to consider my options.”

From Alert Reader: “Re: revisiting old announcements. How about Deborah Peel saying they would post Form 990 on the Patient Privacy Rights website, which was in HIStalk on January 3, 2011?” I’ve invited her to respond.

From Code Monkey: “Re: old systems vs. new. The experience haven’t changed since the early 2000s. Example: our hospital got reports that several patients weren’t seen within several hours after admission. That’s the responsibility of residents, who are entered as consulting physicians. The chief resident opened 10 tickets with no response from the application team saying that patients were disappearing from our portal lists. We had just applied a McKesson Horizon patch, so we checked the new Perl audit feature, which showed a new routine called ChopConsult, which started with: ‘Temp fix to remove [root@hcilink perl]# cat ChopConsult #Temp fix to remove consulting physicians beyond 8 from ADT.’ If you have more than eight consulting physicians, sorry, you now have zero. I use this as an example that many of these systems are hacked together and stability is an issue, without even looking into the database design. Pay no attention to what’s behind the curtain (or cloud).”

From Smarty Marty: “Re: Aetna. Will brand its Accountable Care Solutions assets (Medicity, iTriage, ActiveHealth, PracticeiQ) under the Healthagen name, possibly to separate these solutions from their core commercial insurance business. I found this when I went looking for the Medicity booth on the HIMSS website and could not find anything. Medicity’s website has brief information about it in the Events section.” Aetna quietly acquired Healthagen, which developed the iTriage consumer health app, in December 2011. Above is what is apparently the placeholder web page for the new Healthagen organization, with the four company names listed at the bottom. The Healthagen HIMSS exhibitor listing has three of the company names, omitting PracticeiQ.

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HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I wonder how many other people got this same e-mail from LinkedIn? I felt incredibly special for about 30 seconds until Mr. H told me he got the same notification. I knew it had to be bogus / a marketing ploy / a waste of my time when LinkedIn sent me the same notice for my personal LinkedIn account.

We acknowledge and appreciate the support of Deloitte, a brand new Platinum sponsor of HIStalk. The company is, of course, a premiere, worldwide professional services firm headquartered right here in the USA (New York) with a strong healthcare IT presence and a list of awards to prove it. Deloitte’s provider practice supports organizations working on tough problems:  quality improvement, ICD-10, business intelligence and analytics, system implementation and optimization, disease management, and HIEs. You can keep up with big-picture developments by reading updates from Paul Keckley, PhD, executive director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. A bunch of us who’ve been around awhile know Mitch Morris, MD, who leads the company’s health IT practice, and I’ll be talking to him soon about industry trends. Thanks to Deloitte for supporting HIStalk.

I always hit YouTube to see what I can find out about a new sponsor and my search for Deloitte turned up a winner: a brand new report on the 2013 health outlook.

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HIMSS Conference Social Events

Going to HIMSS? We’ll post social events that are (a) interesting, and (b) open to all HIStalk readers who care to attend. Send yours to be listed.

Alego Health will host a cocktail reception on Tuesday, March 5 from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. at their booth (#141). They’ll have hurricanes, beer, wine, an infused hydration station (what the heck is that? sounds like an IV), and some nice food that includes mini po’ boys.

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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Enterprise HIS vendor RazorInsights announces $11 million in Series A funding from Bluff Point Associates. One of its customers was announced in the press release – Alliance HealthCare System (MS). CEO Reed Liggin mentioned the upcoming investment in my February 8 interview.

Teleheath company INRange Systems raises $1.6 million for its remote medication management device that administers single doses of meds to patients and transmits adherence data to physicians and pharmacists.

Employees of the Barcelona, Spain office of Picis (Optum / UnitedHealth Group) say they will go on strike beginning Thursday to protest the amount of severance they’ll receive as the company moves most of their jobs to India. According to the employee spokesperson who contacted us, “First, the UHG negotiators don’t have a firm plan to transition Picis development and support to India and we’ve asked them to let us help sort out how to successfully do it. Second, the compensation package is drastically lower than what we could win in court.” Spain’s legally-mandated employee benefits are extensive, but the employees say most companies that move jobs to India provide more than the minimum separation benefits. UPDATE: the response from Optum: “Picis Spain is engaged in good faith negotiations with employees at its Barcelona office, as it evolves its local workforce to better align with changing customer needs. We don’t anticipate any business disruption and hope this issue can be resolved fairly and quickly.”

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Sales

Greater Baltimore Medical (MD) will implement Amcom Software’s Mobile Connect smartphone texting solution with their existing Amcom communications system.

The Michigan Department of Community Health Medical Services Administration awards Cognosante the Medicaid IT Architecture State Self-Assessment contract.

Tanner Health System (GA) selects Besler Consulting to conduct a transfer DRG underpayment recovery audit.

Arnot Ogden Medical Center (NY) will implement Merge Healthcare’s cardiology solution suite to capture, manage, and display multi-modality cardiac images, along with hemodynamics and ECG data.

Southeastern Health (NC) expands its relationship with eClinicalWorks to include the company’s Care Coordination Medical Record.

Dignity Health Medical Foundation (CA) chooses MediRevv for A/R management services.

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People

Trinity Health CEO Joseph Swedish is named CEO of WellPoint, the country’s second-largest insurer, replacing former CEO Angela Braly.

Russell Branzell (Colorado Health Medical Group) is named president and CEO of CHIME.

Athenahealth COO Ed Park joins the board of directors of analytics vendor Kyruus.

Vitera Healthcare Solutions hires Kermit Randa (Surgical Information Systems) as EVP of sales and marketing.

TransforMED, the AAFP subsidiary that supports practices transitioning to PCMHs, announces the retirement of president and CEO Terry McGeeney, MD.

   

MedeAnalytics promotes Steve Lerch to SVP/GM of the provider business unit, Scott Paddock to SVP/GM of the payer business unit, and Sal DeTrane to CFO.

Hello Health names Barry Holleman (Cardinal Health) COO and VP.

Aspen Advisors promotes Jody Cervenak to principal.

CVS Caremark appoints Brian Tilzer (Staples) SVP/chief digital officer.

 

Health Care DataWorks promotes CFO Jeffrey Wilkins (left) to CEO, replacing founder Herb Smaltz (right), who will continue to serve as board chair.

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Announcements and Implementations

Over 60 ACOs from 15 states form the National Association of ACOs, which will focus on helping organizations to increase the quality of care and improve health in their communities.

 

The Mount Sinai Medical Center (NY) reports that its Epic EMR has resulted in improved quality of care for patients, including a 56 percent reduction in Medicare readmissions and improvements in quality measures such as discharge instructions for patients and antibiotic administration prior to surgery.

The Huntzinger Management Group assists Hanover Hospital (PA) in its successful Stage 1 MU attestation.

API Healthcare introduces its Talent Management Solution to improve employee engagement while addressing the industry challenges of healthcare reform and an aging workforce.

SimplifyMD launches its simpleStart program that will allow practices to move from EHR demo to live clinical use on the same day.

Mobile platform application development provider Kony Solutions announces support for the BlackBerry Z10 and Q10 smartphones.

Stilwell Memorial Hospital (OK) goes live on Medsphere OpenVista.

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Government and Politics

The government’s healthcare fraud prevention and enforcement efforts recovered $4.2 billion in FY2012, up from last year’s $4.1 billion. Over the last three years, fraud and abuse investigations recovered $7.90 for every dollar spent.

President Obama re-nominates Marilyn Tavenner as permanent administrator for CMS.

Anybody who follows the VA/DoD EHR saga knows that the story changes weekly, flip-flopping on whether they’ll write new separate systems, write one new system, buy off-the-shelf applications, or just patch together what they have. Sometimes DoD has one story and the VA another, illustrative of just how vast the gulf is that separates their philosophies. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta spoke of the “one EHR" project in the past tense a week ago, saying definitively that the departments were giving up on that idea in favor of just getting their respective systems to talk to each other. Not so fast, says VA CIO Roger Baker, now clarifying that the integration project is a stopgap toward the original goal that will continue. All I know is that whatever they do will be horrifically expensive and behind schedule, especially on the DoD side that has paid contractors billions to develop AHLTA,  and all the conflicting announcements have made me lose interest yet again. The OSEHRA community is talking if you can understand what they’re saying, meaning you’d better speak VA geek talk and appreciate decades-old VistA history, which I do on occasion. Some of those pontificating speculate that DoD will end up buying Epic, looking back to 2011 when five Wisconsin Congressmen (including eventual Republican VP nominee Paul Ryan) lobbied for the home team.

ONC’s Doug Fridsma participates in a Google + Hangout.

Federal Health Architecture releases version 4.0 of its open source Connect HIE-enabling platform. It supports higher message throughput, larger files, newly support server environments, and improved logging.

HIMSS urges HHS to stick to the October 1, 2014 implementation date of ICD-10, saying it will reduce the cost of prior authorization, enable Meaningful use, improve population health, reduce waste, and save money.

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Technology

UC Irvine says medical students given free iPads with digital textbooks are scoring 23 percent higher on exams than students in previous classes, also noting that the students have formed their own technology group and developed 19 healthcare-related iPad apps in a 10-day Med App Jam. The iMedEd program was named a 2012-2013 Apple Distinguished Program this week.

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Other

Cerner, Epic, and Siemens earn the highest ratings in ICD-10 preparedness according to KLAS, while Allscripts and Meditech score lowest. Among firms providing ICD-10 consulting, The Advisory Board earns top marks for high-quality roadmaps and best-practice sharing among firms providing ICD-10 consulting, while Deloitte has the most engagements. The majority of the market is looking to 3M and computer-assisted coding technology to aid in the transition.

Here’s the latest cartoon from Imprivata. 

A local medical center in Rhode Island pitches a move to the Amazing Charts EMR to earn Meaningful Use money, adding that health services board members with medical backgrounds could help with the conversion. Several audience members objected, saying they don’t want board members seeing their medical information. The board deferred the EMR decision until its next meeting.

New Jersey Economic Development Authority approves creation of a life sciences and healthcare IT accelerator that will offer the usual seed money, boot camp, mentorship, and pitch showcase.

In Canada, Saskatchewan’s privacy commissioner is investigating three cases in which health authority employees inappropriately accessed the electronic medical records of their co-workers, including one where an employee found that her name had been replaced with a vulgarity and “RIP” at the end.

A Houston medical student files suit against his school, claiming it illegally viewed his hospital medical records and expelled him based on a physician’s speculation that he had tried to commit suicide.

Weird News Andy speculates that perhaps not all things go better with Coke. Like cardiac arrhythmia, for example, in a 30-year-old mother of eight in New Zealand whose death was ruled by the coroner as being partially caused by her 2.2 gallon per day Coca-Cola habit. The sugar water liver had damaged her liver, caused all her teeth to rot out, and addicted her to the point that she experienced withdrawal symptoms when her supply ran out. Her family says they thought Coke was OK because the bottle carries no warnings, while the company complains that the coroner himself wasn’t really sure that Coke killed her.

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Sponsor Updates

• Emdat posts its spring trade show and conference schedule.
• Hayes Management Consulting posts case studies of some of its projects.
• HealthCare Anytime and ICA partner to leverage ICA’s interoperability technology with HealthCare Anytime’s patient portal.
• Informatica’s Chief Product Officer Girish Pancha participates in this week’s Pacific Crest Emerging Technology Summit in San Francisco.
• Truven Health Analytics adds enhanced reporting functionality and flexibility to the latest versions of its pharmacy intervention and infection prevention products.
• Unity Health System (NY) executives will share details of how they leveraged public and private HIEs to enable a community diabetes collaborative during a March 21 Webinar hosted by dbMotion. 
• Capario realizes double-digit revenue growth from its provider base in 2012 and increased adoption of its portal application.

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Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS13 Meet-Ups

 

 

Download a printable PDF of the meet-up guide here.

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Aspen Advisors

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Daniel Herman, Founder and Managing Principal
dherman@aspenadvisors.net
412.370.4900

We know that technology is a means to an end and have a razor-sharp focus on helping you make progress toward the IHI’s Triple Aim of better health, better healthcare, and lower per capita costs. From strategy to execution to optimization, we can help you:

• Develop your technology roadmap to support the shift from volume-based to value-based care
• Evaluate EMR vendors and plan for implementation
• Streamline governance and decision making
• Plan for mergers, acquisitions and other outreach strategies
• Implement clinical systems, drive adoption and achieve Meaningful Use
• Complete ICD-10 implementation and audit compliance
• Make real progress on teleHealth, eHealth, and mHealth initiatives
• Implement infrastructure changes to your technology roadmap
• Leverage information and big data to create a data-driven culture
• Realize value from EHR and other systems investments
• Lead change and support performance improvement initiatives
• Optimize IT service delivery
• Plan for long-range IT workforce needs

Visit www.aspenadvisors.net to learn more.

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BESLER Consulting

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jim Hoffman, Chief Operating Officer
jhoffman@besler.com
732.233.5008

For over 25 years, BESLER has helped hospitals recover otherwise lost revenue, increase reimbursement, ensure compliance, improve efficiency, and reduce costs. BESLER’s deep domain experience in revenue cycle, reimbursement, compliance, and unmatched software solutions has resulted in more than one billion dollars in additional revenue for our clients. If you’d like to discuss our products or partnership opportunities at HIMMS, please contact Jim Hoffman at 732-233-5008 or jhoffman@besler.com.

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CAP Professional Services

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Bruce R. Cattie, Senior Managing Director
CAPSTS@cap.org
847.832.7700

CAP Professional Services provides best practice health IT strategies, clinical informatics, and terminology services for clients striving to achieve semantic interoperability and high-quality, robust electronic medical records (EMR).

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CIC Advisory

To schedule a meeting:

Contacts: Cynthia Davis, Marcy Stoots, or Robert Johns
cynthiadavis@cicadvisory.com
727.772.3340

CIC Advisory helps hospitals use technology to provide more effective, efficient and safer patient care. Founders Cynthia Davis and Marcy Stoots are former critical care nurses with decades of experience leading fast-track clinical EHR projects. Our methodologies result in high rates of physician and clinician satisfaction and adoption, coordinated patient care processes and improved clinical outcomes.

Call us at 1.727.772.3340 or e-mail for your invitation to the CIC Advisory hospitality suite at HIMSS13.

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Clinithink

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Nathan Skorick, Business Development
nathan.skorick@clinithink.com
978.296.5282
Robert Miller, VP Sales and Marketing
robert.miller@clinithink.com
978.296.5282

Find out how to turn data into information.

Clinithink was founded in 2009 by two clinicians with 20 years of combined healthcare IT and EHR experience who understood what was possible if you could unlock the unstructured clinical data within an patient records and return it as structured, usable clinical information. The result of their pioneering work is CLiX, Clinithink’s Clinical Natural Language Processing (CNLP) solution.

CLiX intelligently unlocks unstructured data, while preserving its original meaning, to help healthcare organizations access the information they need to improve financial management, improve quality measures and enhance clinical and operational processes.

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Cornerstone Advisors Group LLC   

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Mary Berchtold, Vice President
mberchtold@cornerstone-advisors.com
781.254.4013

Cornerstone will have experienced senior level representatives from the Epic, Meditech, and advisory/strategies consulting service lines at HIMSS. They will be available to meet and discuss services during the conference. Meeting times may be scheduled by contacting Mary Berchtold.

 

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Craneware

To schedule a meeting:

Ann Marie Brown, Executive Vice President of Marketing
a.brown@craneware.com
913.548.2810
Craneware will not be exhibiting at HIMSS but will have several senior executives available to discuss the company, our products, and the role we play in helping hospitals achieve revenue integrity though data normalization.

Craneware is the leader in automated revenue integrity solutions that improve financial performance for healthcare organizations. Craneware’s market-driven, SaaS solutions help hospitals and other healthcare providers more effectively price, charge, code and retain earned revenue for patient care services and supplies. This optimizes reimbursement, increases operational efficiency and minimizes compliance risk. By partnering with Craneware, clients achieve the visibility required to identify, address, and prevent revenue leakage.

Founded in 1999, Craneware’s mission is to stop the loss of legitimate revenue owed to healthcare organizations by establishing a culture of revenue integrity within these organizations. Our vision is to be the partner that can be relied on to improve and sustain our customers’ strong financial performance.

Over our history we have come a long way towards achieving this. Today, Craneware has nine core products spanning four product families: revenue cycle, access management and strategic pricing, supply management and audit and revenue recovery. One in four registered US hospitals has chosen Craneware products to help them optimize reimbursement, improve operational efficiency, and minimize compliance risk. To support this growing client base and the company’s future growth prospects, Craneware now employs more than 200 professionals across the US and UK.

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CSI Healthcare IT

To schedule a meeting:

Kate Mays, Vice President of Sales
kmays@thecsicompanies.com
904.716.1209

CSI Healthcare IT will be hosting a cocktail reception and dinner at Broussards on Tuesday night March 5 starting at 6:00 pm. Please contact Kate Mays to join.

CSI Healthcare IT is committed to providing the highest standard of consultants and consulting services in the industry. Our track record speaks for itself. We have a long record of supporting the project management, training, build, report writing, go-live support, and interface functions of health systems nationwide. Today, CSI Healthcare IT has more than 500 permanent and contract staff of experienced, knowledge-based professionals. CSI has been recognized by Inc. magazine and Staffing Industry Analysts as one of the fastest growing privately held companies in the nation. Being privately held enables creativity and flexibility to meet the specific consulting needs of our clients. CSI has the ability to enact quick adjustments to accommodate the ebb and flow of our clients’ staffing and project needs.

Join us for live music and networking Tuesday night at Broussards.

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Dearborn Advisors, LLC

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Mary Kiley, Revenue Development Coordinator
MKiley@DearbornAdvisors.com
773.255.0749.

Dearborn Advisors would like to chat with you about what’s going on in your organization regarding physician adoption of technology. Although we have no booth, we’ll spring for Starbucks coffee and have hundreds of chocolate bars to give away. E-mail Mary Kiley or call 773.255.0749.

 

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DIrect Consulting Associates

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Frank Myeroff, Managing Partner
fmyeroff@dc-associates.com
440.996.0051

Direct Consulting Associates (DCA) provides a broad range of IT consulting and staffing solutions including staff augmentation, temp-to-perm, and permanent placement for healthcare IT initiatives. Whether you’re an IT professional searching for that perfect opportunity or a client company looking for the very best IT talent, we would like to meet you at HIMSS13.

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Direct Recruiters, Inc.

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Mike Silverstein, Director of Healthcare IT
mike@directrecruiters.com
440.996.0594
440.667.8334

Direct Recruiters specializes in recruiting, staffing, search, placement, and consulting solutions for the healthcare information technology (IT) industry.

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EMRConsultant.com

 

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Donna Flynn, Director of Healthcare Technology Solutions
DonnaF@EHRScope.com
888.519.3100 ext. 114

Some things in life truly are fre. In this case, it’s receiving the best qualified EHR, PM, billing, and/or voice recognition recommendations for your practice, absolutely free. How? Use the comparison chart, select individual consultant on EHRScope.com, or contact us today with any questions.

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Etransmedia Technology, Inc

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Connie Smith, Sales and Marketing
Connie.Smith@etransmedia.com
518.283.5418 ext. 2262

Etransmedia provides comprehensive RCM platform service solutions, including an integration EHR/PM solution, patient identity tools, discrete clinical data repository, provider portal, community patient portal, analytics tools supporting financial, clinical, and quality of care reporting. Delivering RCM and revenue analytics services to health systems nationwide, serving 12,000+ providers and 40,000+ users.

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Forward Health Group

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Michael Barbouche, Founder/CEO
FHGtalk@forwardhealthgroup.com
608.729.7530

Let the good times and Fresh Data roll in the Big Easy. Forward Health Group, the Health Care Measurement Company, is intentionally booth-less at HIMSS13 so we can get down, roll up our sleeves, and make rich, brainstorming music with health systems, payors, and all you newly-minted ACOs. If your focus is population health, you’re going to need tools and help with all that messy data. Call us at 608.729.7530 or e-mail us at. We’re on the HIMSS13 show floor – we’ll be right back to you. Let’s have a cafe au lait, spiced with Fresh Data.

With FHG, your data is as fine as the duck and andouille gumbo at Galatoire’s. No, really.

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Hayes Management Consulting

To schedule a meeting:

Pete Butler, President and CEO
pbutler@hayesmanagement.com
781.414.6099

Hayes Management Consulting is a leading, national healthcare consulting firm focused on healthcare operations. This includes strategic planning, interim leadership, revenue cycle optimization, clinical optimization, project management, IT consulting, and preparation for federal initiatives such as ICD-10, Meaningful Use, and HIPAA compliance. We also provide software such as MDaudit and other proprietary tools to ensure our clients are operationally efficient.

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HCI Group

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Cherity PIerce, Marketing Coordinator
cherity.pierce@thehcigroup.com
904-224-9388

HCI is a leading provider of IT personnel and solutions to healthcare enterprises across the United States, United Kingdom, and Middle East. Our specialties include:

• EHR planning, implementation, and training
• Sustaining support models
• Optimization and clinical adoption
• Go-live support
• Health system/hospital community IT offerings

What makes HCI the best choice for your HIT project? Everything from our collaborative solutions to our rates that translate into real cost savings for your institution. Here’s how we deliver our comprehensive services and expertise:

• Strategic thinking across the entire spectrum of project engagement
• Clinical leadership and an experienced engagement team to meet your needs in an efficient and timely manner
• Knowledge of industry best practices
• A fully dedicated recruitment team, exclusively focused on healthcare IT to secure for you the very best resources to make your project a success

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Intellect Resources

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Tiffany Crenshaw, President and CEO
tcrenshaw@intellectresources.com
336.420.1178

Intellect Resources would love to meet with you.

Intellect Resources is proud to offer comprehensive consulting, recruiting, and hiring solutions within the healthcare IT market.Our talent offerings include recruiting, project management, implementation, upgrading and optimization of EMR systems, training and go-live support, and the revolutionary Big Break hiring process.Big Break is patented “American Idol”- style audition process where candidates compete to become a healthcare IT trainer. Big Break offers hospitals systems a unique and innovative talent pool at a fraction of the cost of traditional hiring solutions.

In 2012, Intellect Resources was named to The Triad Business Journal’s Fast 50, which adds to a growing list of industry awards Intellect Resources has received including Modern Healthcare‘s Best Places to Work in Healthcare, HITconsultant.net naming Intellect Resources’ president and CEO Tiffany Crenshaw as one of the Top 12 Women to Know in Healthcare IT and the London Times recognizing Intellect Resources’ Big Break as the solution to the healthcare IT talent shortage. A unique approach to standard service offerings sets Intellect Resources apart and allows us to constantly find new and experienced talent.Through relationship-driven, hands-on services, Intellect Resources connects employers and healthcare IT professionals.

For more information visit www.intellectresources.com or www.irbigbreak.com.

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Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. (LRS)

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Ron Peel, Technical Advisor
913.948.3646
ron.peel@lrs.com
Laurie Eldridge, HP Global Alliance Representative
610.850.1237
laurie.eldridge@lrs.com

Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. (LRS) is a leader in software for managing care-related documents and other business critical information. Some of the largest healthcare providers in the US use LRS output management solutions. LRS provides documented and supported interfaces to integrate our proven output management software with best-of-breed EMR applications. Contact LRS to learn how we can improve your downtime reporting capabilities and streamline document-related processes to provide better patient care.

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MedAptus   

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jennifer Crowley, Marketing Director
jcrowley@medaptus.com
617.896.4030

MedAptus is the gold standard in the healthcare revenue cycle for achieving effective charge management, compliance, and workflow efficiency. With offerings that include powerful and easy-to-use charge capture and management technologies, it is no wonder that many of the nation’s most prestigious healthcare organizations rely on MedAptus for financial optimization. Our full-scale Professional, Facility and Infusion applications increase revenue, enhance EMR investments, re-engineer manual processes, and yield substantially improved productivity.

For more information, visit www.medaptus.com or call 617.896.4000.

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MedAssets

To schedule a meeting:

Contact:
solutions@medassets.com
888.883.6332

MedAssets (NASDAQ: MDAS) partners with healthcare providers to improve their financial strength by implementing revenue cycle, spend, and clinical resource management solutions that help capture revenue, control cost, improve margins and cash flow, increase regulatory compliance, and optimize operational efficiency. MedAssets serves more than 4,200 hospitals and 100,000 non-acute healthcare providers. The company currently manages $48 billion in supply spend and touches over $340 billion in gross patient revenue annually through its revenue cycle solutions. For more information, go to www.medassets.com.

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nVoq Incorporated

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Debbi Gillotti, Vice President and General Manager
deborah.gillotti@nvoq.com
720.562.4507 or 206.465.1765

SayIt from nVoq is a secure cloud-based voice recognition service that’s easy to use, easy to deploy, and has been endorsed by the American Hospital Association. SayIt works directly with your EMR to convert speech to text within seconds – no integration required. Access your SayIt voice profile whenever and wherever you need to work – no software to install on each device.

nVoq is a Boulder, CO based provider of cloud-based voice recognition solutions for the healthcare and customer care industries. In business since 2000, nVoq supports a wide variety of enterprise and health system organizations through a growing channel partner network. We’re building this network daily in support of real-time (front end) dictation and embedded (back end) voice processing for mobile forms or other applications. A well-documented SDK is available for both Windows and iOS platforms.

While attending HIMSS, we welcome the opportunity to meet with organizations who buy, buildc or implement applications platforms for healthcare users and are interested in cloud-based, voice-enabled workflow at an affordable price point. Our primary focus is North America, but we welcome inquiries from other venues.

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PatientPay

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: David Bond, EVP, Sales & Marketing
db@patientpay.com
919.830.2798

PatientPay is a patented innovative solution that makes healthcare billing, payment and reconciliation faster, easier, and less costly. PatientPay is a simple way for practice management software vendors to allow their physicians to bill patients while reducing costs, increasing productivity and patient satisfaction. PatientPay eliminates the costly and complicated paper-based billing method used by the overwhelming majority of healthcare providers. It drives down the expense and drives up the productivity associated with this activity by at least a factor of two. Since PatientPay reduces the time to payment in half, healthcare professionals realize improved cash flow and reduced accounts receivables.

 

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RazorInsights

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Reed Liggin, President & CEO
rliggin@razorinsights.com
404.578.1362

Based in Kennesaw, Georgia, RazorInsights is a dynamic healthcare information technology company. In keeping with the principle of Occam’s Razor, they have created a simplified HIS solution for rural, critical access, and community hospitals. Introducing ONE (ONC-ATCB 2011/2012) — a single-database, cloud solution offering a simple user experience with cutting-edge clinical tools and industry-standardized data. Hospitals can expect to improve their performance and bottom line with ONE from RazorInsights. To register for a live product demo or for more information, visit www.razorinsights.com or call 770.308.4111.

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Santa Rosa Consulting

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Doug Hires, Executive Vice President, Strategic Advisory and Sales & Marketing
doughires@santarosaconsulting.com
214.546.0895

Santa Rosa Consulting is a national provider of management consulting and information technology services to the healthcare industry. Through our unique blend of strategic advisory services and technical consulting expertise across the full range of healthcare IT vendor products and systems, we deliver solutions specifically designed to address your business needs.

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Seamless Medical Systems   

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Frank Grant, Vice President, Sales
frank@seamlessmedical.com
760.533.1520

Seamless Medical is solely focused on improving the patient’s experience in medical practices at the point of care. Our mission is to leverage technology in patients’ hands to simplify the front end of the practice workflow, engage the patient in the registration process, and provide the patient with educational content relevant to his/her scheduled appointment and medical conditions. Our team’s decades of combined experience in the medical, healthcare administration, and business arenas has led to the formation of the company and dedication to our solution.

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SpeechRecognition.com

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: William Holliman, Dragon Medical Adviser
William.Holliman@1450.com
888.848.1450 ext. 210

Is your EHR doing all of the dictating? Take back control, and the ability to dictate your notes, with the most accurate speech recognition software yet, Dragon Medical Practice Edition. Visit SpeechRecognition.com to schedule a free demo today!

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The McHenry Group

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Lisa Gatto, Director of Client Development
lisag@mvp4u.biz
815.923.2500

Celebrating nearly 22 years in business, The McHenry Group (TMG) has become the most successful and most experienced international executive search firm solely dedicated to serving the healthcare software vendor market. How successful? Since 1991, TMG has successfully placed over 2,000 candidates within the healthcare technology vendor industry. How experienced? Our team of 10 search consultants has an average tenure with our firm that exceeds 11 years.

One of our clients put it best: “Even though I was expecting great things from The McHenry Group, I was surprised by the extra effort TMG expended to understand our company, its corporate goals and our goals for our open position. I will definitely seek your help whenever our needs mesh with your services.”

TMG’s recruiting efforts focus on healthcare software vendors in the provider and payor spaces. We identify superb talent for the C-level, VP sales, regional sales, territory sales, channel marketing, client account executives, client services and implementation, sales support, consulting, marketing, product management, product development, clinical informatics, physician executives, clinical liaisons, nursing (RN) informatics, and more. TMG is equipped to quickly tap into the hidden candidate market and recruit top talent that are not active on the market. Additionally, we can delve into our extensive proprietary database of candidates, coded by specific title, areas of expertise, etc.

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TrustHCS

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jeff Johnston, Executive Director, Business Development, President
jeff.johnston@trusthcs.com
760.277.1190

TrustHCS provides consulting and services to address clinical documentation improvement (CDI) programs, ICD-10 preparation, revenue cycle improvement, coding services, auditing, and cancer registry. Visit www.trusthcs.com for more information.

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Velocity Data Centers

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Steve Jacobs, President
steve.jacobs@velocitydatacenters.com
734.323.3075

We enable healthcare IT organizations to achieve their strategic goals through our innovative solution to deliver cloud computing infrastructure. This innovative approach delivers incredible benefits at reduced cost. Allowing healthcare organizations to grow revenue, reduce operating costs, and leverage current and future technology trends.

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Wellcentive, Inc.

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Rich Walsh, Vice President of Corporate Strategy
rhwalsh@wellcentive.com
678.367.8187

Senior management will be located at the Hilton Riverside in an executive suite conducting presentations and open discussions. We look forward to seeing you there.

Wellcentive delivers population health management solutions that enable quality improvement throughout the continuum of care. Wellcentive’s Advance platform transforms disparate data into actionable insights that facilitate coordinated preventive care and chronic disease management, physician alignment, clinical integration, and success with value-based reimbursement and incentive programs. Wellcentive empowers healthcare organizations to improve both clinical and financial outcomes.

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Winthrop Resources

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Dan Mandy, Director of Business of Development
dmandy@winthropresources.com
952.656.7687

Winthrop specializes in healthcare technology finance.The realities of today’s healthcare market demand a finance solution that can change with you as your strategic direction dictates.Please reach out to Winthrop to learn more on how we can partner with you to deliver a future of efficient care/systems and improved patient outcomes.