News 3/22/13

Top News

Athenahealth announces a partnership with mHealth app vendor iTriage to connect the app’s consumer users with providers in athenahealth’s network.

Reader Comments

From HITcontractor: “Re: ProMedica Health. Halts install of McKesson Horizon Emergency care in its facilities, reverts to its previous vendor Picis due to failed adoption and hesitation by providers.” Unverified.  

From Interested: “Re: Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights, IL. Chatter is they’re going up on Epic, although the chatter doesn’t include which consulting firm has been awarded the contract.” Unverified.

From FormerMCKIC: “Re: McKesson. Ending contracts with all non-essential Horizon Clinicals contractors including IC and project managers, CPM. Their contracts will end 3/31/13.” Unverified, but reported by multiple readers.

From Proudly Pink: “Re: Voalte pink pants. What’s with people hatin’ on our pink pants? Here’s our response to the pink pants bashing.”  Dodge Communications awarded Voalte the winners of the Most Unfortunate Booth Attire award in its annual list of the HIMSS exhibit hall’s best and worst. Apparently the Voalte crowd love their pink pants, which employees must earn the right to wear.

From Boutros Ghali: “Re:  HIMMS. It’s just embarrassing.” Indeed it is. This e-mail blast from a healthcare marketing company VP is filled with misspellings, punctuation errors, and odd wording. I can’t imagine recipients rushing to turn their brand identity over to this company. I’ll be charitable in omitting the individual and company names, but I’ll hold on to this e-mail in case they annoy me in the future.

HIStalk Announcements

Some highlights from HIStalk Practice this week include: Practice Wise CEO Julie McGovern offers some thoughts on electronic file management and protecting PHI. CMS says that between five and 10 percent of EPs attesting for MU will be selected for prepayment audits. Hospitals continue to consider practice acquisitions. Physicians with e-prescribing tools are more likely to prescribe less expensive drugs. Thanks for reading!

On the Jobs Page: VP of Sales and Channel Development, Healthcare Technology Project Manager, C-Level Healthcare Technology Sales Executive.

Here are the last of the HIStalkapalooza photos from Medicomp.

Seth Halvorson accepting the HIStalk Lifetime Achievement Award on behalf of his father, George C. Halvorson of Kaiser Permanente.

CIO Unplugged Ed Marx and friends.

Team Orion.

Team Vitera.

Bowling tournament winners.

Jonathan Bush of athenahealth and James Aita of Medicomp.

Medicomp calls this the “Where is Mr. H?” picture.

Medicomp CEO Dave Lareau (in the “I Could be Mr. H” sash) and friends.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

EHR data search technology startup QPID raises $4 million in its initial financing round from investors Matrix Partners, Partners Innovation Fund, Massachusetts General Physicians Organization, and Cardinal Partners.

South Carolina-based Benefitfocus, which offers employee self-service benefits enrollment systems, plans to file an IPO later this year.

Sales

New York-Presbyterian Hospital selects the PatientTouch point-of-care mobile platform from PatientSafe Solutions.

India-based outsourcer Wipro wins a $200 million infrastructure maintenance outsourcing contract from Catholic Health Initiatives.

People

Sara Teppema (Society of Actuaries) joins Valence Health as director of actuarial services.

Virginia Hospital Center appoints Russell McWey, MD, the hospital’s chief of medical imaging, to VP/CIO.

Peter Henderson (PatientKeeper) is named COO of social wellness platform ShapeUp.

Steve Everest (Prognosis HIS) is named CIO of Oklahoma Surgical Hospital (OK).

Announcements and Implementations

Overlake Medical Center (WA) migrates various HIS systems to Epic with integration assistance from Summit Healthcare.

Baptist Health Richmond (KY) says that the Accelero Connect integration platform from Accent on Integration has allowed the hospital to integrate its Philips IntelliVue patient monitors and Meditech HIS, resulting in streamlined clinician workflow and a reduced risk of documentation errors.

Lehigh Valley Health Network (PA) goes live with iMDsoft’s MetaVision in its PICU.

McKesson launches two free mobile apps for the iPad and iPhone. Lytec Mobile is for use with the Lytec 2013 practice management system, while Medisoft Mobile is available for Medisoft V18.

Meditech certifies NetApp FAS storage for its systems.

PatientKeeper adds infusion billing workflow co-developed with Partners HealthCare to its charge capture solution.

Xerox announces a cloud-based Mobile Device Management service.

Government and Politics

Representatives Sam Graves (R-MO) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) reintroduce the Medicare Audit Improvement Act, which would limit the number of document requests during Medicare audits to two percent of a hospital’s claims, with a maximum of 500 per 45 days.

I wouldn’t want his job. National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari, facing Congressional hearings on mHealth, is asked by Congressman Michael Burgess, MD (R-TX), “Hospital systems in the same city that have the same operating system aren’t talking to each other. You’re the head, why don’t you fix that? Why don’t you just make that happen?”

Technology

The US Patent Office issues EarlySense a patent for the respiratory trend analysis component of its patient safety monitoring system.

Other

The cash-strapped city of Pittsburgh files suit against the $10 billion in revenue UPMC, demanding payment of six years of payroll taxes and elimination of UPMC’s tax-exempt status. The mayor says UPMC donates less than 2 percent of its revenue to charity care, pays several executives annual salaries of more than $1 million, and has closed hospitals in poor areas while opening them in more affluent ones, all while avoiding $20 million in annual tax payments that it would otherwise owe the city.

The Institute for Health Technology Transformation outlines strategies for health organizations that are implementing big data solutions, including ways to use data to improve patient care and the types of data that can be analyzed for healthcare purposes.

Improved medical device interoperability could save the healthcare industry $30 billion a year and improve patient care and safety, according to analysis presented to a House subcommittee by West Health Institute.

In the UK, Leeds Hospital halts its $2.5 million speech recognition and digital dictation rollout due to “performance problems” that one official says was “very much affecting patient care and safety and putting patients at risk.”

Also in the UK, two NHS trusts, one of them a Cerner Millennium user, issue a tender worth up to $53 million for a shared inpatient EHR system.

Patient Privacy Rights Founder Deborah Peel, MD calls a new CVS employee policy that charges employees who decline obesity checks $50 per month “incredibly coercive and invasive.” CVS covers the cost of an assessment of height, weight, body fat, blood pressure, and serum glucose and lipid levels, but also reserves the right to send the results to a health management firm even though CVS management won’t have access to the results directly. Peel says a lack of chain of custody requirements means that CVS could review the information and use it to make personnel decisions.

A Russian gynecologist and former City of Moscow chief obstetrician who declares, “I am a doctor first” becomes a billionaire after shares in his Cyprus-based women and children’s healthcare services company rise more than 40 percent in five months. His company, which offers the only alternative to state-run maternity hospitals,  charges $10,000 per delivery, more than the annual salary of the average Russian.

Eye yi yi. A Texas woman uses her fingers to dig the eyeball out of another woman’s eye socket. The two were fighting when one of the women grabbed the other’s eye and “dug her fingers up there.” The victim was taken to the hospital and the eyeball was re-inserted. The gouger, who suffered a couple of broken fingernails, was arrested and charged with aggravated assault.

Sponsor Updates

• Health Catalyst Chairman David Burton, MD discusses how value-based purchasing is driving demand for data warehousing solutions.
• The Institute of Customer Service names Bottomline Technologies the winner of its Customer Service Leadership award. 
• CareTech Solutions donates $550 to The American Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, and The American Cancer Society as part of its HIMSS booth activity.
• CSI Healthcare IT spotlights Jan Turner, VP of professional services.
• Aprima releases a case study on the practice of Lauranne Harris, MD, which converted from Allscripts MyWay to Aprima in four days.
• Harris VP of Government Health Solutions Don Mestas discusses the federal procurement process and how his company supports the government with its healthcare offerings.
• iSirona names UC Irvine Health (CA) the winner of its 2012 Innovator of the Year Award for leveraging connectivity technology to improve hospital processes and patient care.
• Surgical Information Systems CEO Ed Daihl recaps the HIMSS conference and discusses how intelligent integration can drive financial results.
• Michael Nutter, director of firm culture and associate satisfaction for Impact Advisors, offers advice on how to tell if employees are really happy.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

Glassdoor names its highest-rated CEOs, quite a few of them running companies many of us interact with regularly.

The AMA sounds the alert on a “demoralized health care work force” citing a “toxic blend” of forces including verbal abuse, physical assault, and a drive to provide more care in less time with fewer resources.

From Iconic Reader: “Re: icons. Our ED recently deployed visual indicators for suicide risk based on our screening questions. Is it me, or is that a sad-appearing basset hound? It reminds me of something I’ve seen in my kids’ Webkinz account.” Personally I find those icons a little bit disturbing, but I’m sure coming up with an icon that’s politically correct was a challenge.

CMS launches a new eHealth website. Hot topics on the site’s blog include Administrative Simplification, Privacy and Security, and Aligning Quality Measurement at CMS.

Millions of Americans admit to reading or sending texts while driving in percentages higher than those found in European countries. Cell phone use while driving was also significantly higher in the US. As someone who has almost met her maker several times recently due to distracted drivers, I implore you to hang up and drive.

Physicians with e-prescribing systems have a greater awareness of prescription costs, according to a recent survey. This led to drug choices with lower costs or better insurance coverage among the endocrinologists and primary care physicians who participated.

From History Fan: “Re: shoes. I was on spring break in Chicago and saw these shoes on display. Of course, I thought immediately of Jayne and Inga! Be grateful you don’t have bound feet.” I definitely enjoyed the pictures. My personal favorite is the classic red pump.

From Heavyweight: “Re: wheelchairs. With all the attention on high-tech doctor’s offices, it’s remarkable that some are missing some low-tech solutions.” The Boston Globe reports on practices that turned away wheelchair-using patients due to lack of powered exam tables or other strategies to transfer and position patients.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 3/20/13

Top News

Cerner acquires Labotix Automation Inc., which offers specimen handling and transport systems for clinical labs.

EHR Incentive Payments are Taxable Income

Physicians should have received an IRS Form 1099 from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for the incentive payments. The forms had to be postmarked by Jan. 31 and were mailed to  addresses on file with Medicare. If you did not receive your Form 1099, you may request a duplicate copy by calling (888) 734-6433, which will take you through a series of prompts (1-1-1-1-2). You will be asked for your National Provider Identifier.   Physicians in the Medicaid EHR incentive program should have received a Form 1099 from their state Medicaid office.  The Internal Revenue Service issued guidance on the EHR incentive payments that may help in tax preparation, especially if payments were assigned to your group or hospital. 

From Don: “Re: San Diego. Here’s hoping we can bring HIMSS back to San Diego where it belongs! Once the pompous mayor here concedes defeat of his push to renegotiate the hotel room tax, construction can begin. Maybe see you all back in The Gaslamp District in 2016 or 2017. Bring your finest shoe-wear and cut some rug at the grand ball room at The Hotel del Coronado.” San Diego gets the green light for a $520 million expansion of its convention center, which will take about three years. Now it’s up to HIMSS. San Diego, Seattle, and San Francisco are my favorite cities of those I’ve visited because they are on the water, have interesting terrain, enjoy mostly pleasant weather, and are walkable.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It’s last call to fill out my quick reader survey. I do it just once a year right after the HIMSS conference. Pretty much every change you’ve seen over my 10 years (hopefully more good than bad) came from survey comments. Inga gets nervous this time of year because after I’ve digested the hundreds of responses, I make our to-do list.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Sutherland Global Services completes its acquisition of Apollo Health Street, the technology subsidiary of India-based hospital operator Apollo Hospitals Group.

Emdeon reports Q4 revenues of $300.7 million, up six percent from a year ago, and a net loss of $10 million vs. $70 million.

Tenet subsidiary Conifer Health Solutions, which offers revenue cycle solutions, breaks ground on its new headquarters construction in Frisco, TX. The company acquired Dell’s revenue cycle business in November 2012, increasing the annual patient revenue it manages to $21 billion.

Sales

Maricopa Integrated Health System (AZ) selects HP Data Protector and HP StoreOnce for data protection and disaster recovery.

Providence Health & Service will deploy Health Catalyst’s data warehouse and analytic accelerators across its 32-hospital system.

Canopy Partners (NC) chooses the MModal Catalyst for Radiology platform for reporting and analytics.

People

PatientSafe Solutions names Tim Needham (Rubbermaid Health) VP of its western region.

Long-term care provider CenterLight Health System (NY) hires William C. Pelzar (Health Dialog) as its first CIO.

Anita Samarth, Clinovations president and co-founder, is named by the Washington Business Journals as one of the top 25 Minority Business Leaders of 2013.

Announcements and Implementations

Delaware HIN and Kansas HIN validate interoperability by exchange of patient records via Direct messaging using solutions from the Allied HIE Company and ICA’s Direct Messaging and Exchange products.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (MA) deploys CommVault Simpana for data backup and security.

Beloit Health System (WI) goes live this week on Cerner.

Clinithink releases an online version of CliX, its natural language processing engine.

Lifespan (RI) announces its plans to redesign its delivery model that includes implementing Epic at a cost of $90 million.

AHIMA calls for nominations for its Grace Award that recognizes outstanding achievement in health information management. Evaluation criteria include how organizations contribute to a patient-centered model of care, advance the use of electronic health records, and integrate HIM throughout the workplace.

Government and Politics

ONC launches Web pages to support its goal of having 1,000 critical access and rural hospitals achieve MU by the end of 2014.

Technology

Healthcare IT research funded by AHRQ has helped Partners in Health and the Regenstrief Institute develop an open EMR that supports healthcare initiatives in developing countries.

Seven Tennessee school systems receive $3 million in HRSA grants to implement telemedicine programs so that school nurses can connect with doctors to diagnose student problems, but the Franklin County school board delays its approval to start the program, citing liability concerns.

Other

Boulder Community Hospital (CO) reports that its Meditech system has been down since last week and is not expected to be operational until the end of this week. Officials say the hospital has “detailed plans” for going back to manual operations. The outage has caused delays in scheduling non-critical diagnostic tests and distributing routine test results, but essential services are still being provided. The hospital offered no explanation of the problem. An anonymous physician said the backup response is “not an organized plan,” while a patient told the local newspaper, “If they can’t keep their computer system running, how can we trust them to perform surgery?”

A KLAS report finds that no acute care EMR vendor excels at usability, though Epic and Cerner are best poised to support deep clinical usage. Providers assume the bulk of responsibility for making EMRs usable and 86 percent say that configuring their EMR solution required moderate to extensive effort. Stage 2 MU, with its increased requirements for physician documentation, medication reconciliation, and problem lists, will magnify current EMR challenges.

EMR vendor Lawrence Melrose Medical Record, Inc. notifies the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office of a data breach that has potentially compromised the PHI of two state residents.

A small study of healthcare professionals finds that 75 percent of organizations are 25 percent or less complete with the ICD-10 transition process. Coding education and implementation are the biggest conversion gaps. Almost half the respondents express some concern about being ready in time to meet the October 1, 2014 deadline.

Weird News Andy finds this “more than an inkling.” Electronic sensors printed directly on the skin, aka “electronic tattoos,” can monitor health signs such as temperature and hydration status. One potential medical use would be to stream surgical wound information wirelessly to providers.

Strange: a nurse from India working in an Australian hospital just a month after finishing nursing school is fired and banned from practice after giving a 79-year-old patient the contents of a bottle marked as containing heart pills that actually held liquid detergent the patient had been using to clean his dentures. The nurse, who argued that he followed four of five medication administration rules, was ordered by the nursing board to take an English competency test, which he failed in six attempts.

Sponsor Updates

• Glenn Focht, MD of Boston Children’s Hospital spoke at a private reception during the AMGA conference in Orlando hosted by Ingenious Med.
• An EDCO Health Information Solutions Webinar profiles two McKesson Patient Folder facilities that enhanced their scanning processes using EDCO technology.
• Industrial Alliance Insurance and Financial Services signs an agreement with TELUS Health to allow certain healthcare providers to use TELUS Health’s eClaims Web portal service.
• ThedaCare (WI) selects Wolters Kluwer ProVation MD Cardiology for its catheterization labs at Appleton Medical Center and Theda Clark Medical Center.
• Ping Identity opens registration for its Cloud Identity Summit 2013 July 8-12 in Napa, CA.
• Emdeon releases details on its upcoming Webinars.
• Prognosis offers a four-part series on strategies for MU success.
• Hayes Management Consulting commemorates its 20th anniversary with an updated website.
• Nuesoft hosts a March 27 Webinar on best practices for medical billing.
• Jason Fortin, a senior advisor with Impact Advisors, discusses the need for smaller practices to select an EHR vendor that is capable of achieving Stage 2 MU certification.
• The Tampa Bay Business Journal names MedHOK the winner of its 2013 BizTech Innovation of the Year Award.
• Surgical Information Systems CTO Eric Nilsson offers a primer on how to set up a clinical quality reporting program.  
• Merge Healthcare announces that more than 650 orthopedic surgeons at over 50 practices already have or are in the process of implementing Merge OrthoPACS.
• ChartWise:CDI posts its 2013 conference schedule.
• SiliconMesa partners with DrFirst to provide Rcopia e-prescribing functionality to customers running the SiliconMesa EHR and PM system.
• Craneware announces its support of the Alzheimer’s Association and Alzheimer Scotland as part of its 2013 Craneware Cares corporate responsibility program.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Monday Morning Update 3/18/13

From E2M: “Re: enterprise to mobile. To make CPOE, portal, or other EHR component mobile, you either build it from scratch or build a new set of apps on top of the existing infrastructure. Capriza allows anyone without any programming skill to transfer an existing Web-based enterprise app to mobile in minutes.” Maybe someone will give it a try and report back. It seems pretty cool – you create what looks like a screen scrape type mobile front end to an existing web app by just dragging and adjusting.

From Spinnaker: “Re: Epic. I heard a rumor at HIMSS that they’ve signed some international deals, two more hospitals in the UK and one in Australia. Heard anything?” I haven’t heard anything recently, but someone can probably confirm. Usually someone attending an Epic class in Verona can verify that the new customers had people there.

From Pointy Ears: “Re: another athenahealth executive headed to CareCloud? Tom Cady, VP of professional services, has left.” Unverified, but reported by a couple of readers.

It’s time for my annual reader survey. I use it to plan the next year of HIStalk, so it would help me a lot if you could answer 10 questions.  

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

Fewer than one in five poll respondents think CommonWell was formed with the primary purpose of benefiting patients. New poll to your right: how has your perception of Allscripts changed since Paul Black took over?

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum sponsor Quantros. The company offers SaaS-based healthcare quality and safety performance improvement systems with over 2,000 healthcare facilities as customers (Kaiser, NYU Langone, Ochsner, Scott & White, Exempla, etc.)Products include SRM safety and risk management (safety events, feedback, disruptive events, claims, MEDMARX ADE date repository, PSO submission); IRIS Executive (enterprise-wide patient safety system); ACE (continuous compliance readiness); and RRM regulatory reporting (Meaningful Use reporting, core measures, CM reporting). Quantros helps providers improve quality and safety by empowering all levels with actionable intelligence to improve outcomes and reduce risk. Thanks to Quantros for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a new Quantros video featuring CEO Keith Hagen honoring National Patient Safety Week, which ironically was overshadowed by the overlapping HIMSS conference.

Suzanne Bledsoe and Wes Scruggs purchase oncology IT consulting firm Aptium Oncology from AstraZeneca PLC.

Here’s a nice shot of Dr. Gregg playing Quipstar at the Medicomp booth at the HIMSS conference.

Dodge Communications posts its much-awaited snarky review of the HIMSS exhibit hall and surrounding areas (like why so many of you were buying sushi from that sketchy kiosk out in the hall).

I like the Meaningful Use attestation reports created by Wells Fargo Securities. Jamie Stockton, who is in Wells Fargo’s HIT equity research group and creates the report,  e-mailed to say he’ll add any interested provider or vendor to his distribution list if you send him an e-mail.

Speaking of attestation data, Social Health Insights, which did the MappyHealth Twitter health term trend monitoring system,  did a visualization of Medicare hospitals that have attested to Meaningful Use that also includes their HCAHPS scores. Make sure to scroll down since a lot of information about individual hospitals has been mashed up.

A House committee will ask the FDA in hearings this week about any plans it has to regulate  or tax mobile health apps.

Microsoft lists software products supporting Windows 8 that were shown at the HIMSS conference.

Epocrates shareholder Goldman Sachs sells its remaining stake in the company for $32.5 million following its acquisition by athenahealth. Goldman bought $40 million worth of shares in 2007 and sold them for a total of $36.5 million after its plan to create an institutional investor research firm failed.

Weird News Andy has a solution for this problem: move to Australia. A Serbian woman sees images upside down due to a rare brain condition.

Vince’s HIS-tory this week begins the tale of Meditech. He would appreciate your nuggets and ephemera if you lived the company’s history.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 3/15/13

Top News

Wells Fargo Securities slices and dices CMS Meaningful Use data to arrive at the 2012 year-end table for EPs above. It finds that 65 percent of physicians have registered and 25 percent have attested.

Reader Comments

From TechTalk: “HIStalkapalooza. Are there video or stills of HIStalkapalooza expected?” In case you missed this last week in the midst of HIMSS craziness, here is the link to the video. We also have a few pictures on our HIStalk Facebook page. We appreciate Medicomp Systems for sponsoring the event, with the help of a production team from Patrice Geraghty (bzzz productions), Cindy Wright and Shannon Snodgrass (Thomas Wright Partners), and Anthony Istrico (Istrico Productions).

From Close but Not Inside: “Re: Voalte. What happened to Rob Campbell, CEO and founder? Erased from the site.” Voalte just announced that Trey Lauderdale has been moved to president and four new VPs have been hired: Phil Fibiger, engineering (Canonical, Ltd.); Bob Porterfield, product and alliance management (Capsule Tech); Frank Watts, sales and marketing (F. Watts & Associates); and Don Fletcher, chief architect (Google). No word on Rob.

From Carly: “Re: Howard University Hospital. Brought its first unit live on Soarian CPOE earlier this month. Rollout to general medicine coming later in the month. Physician participation has been strong and enthusiastic.”

From Natalee: “Re: Nordic Consulting. We have not been sold. We’ve enjoyed a recent surge in growth, and continue to be focused on helping our clients successfully install and support their Epic system. Perhaps your readers are referencing an investment partnership Nordic made last October.” Natalee is from Nordic Consulting and responded to a reader’s rumor report from right before HIMSS. Here’s a statement from CEO Mark Bakken about the October investment:

We’re thrilled to have partnered with three IT investment groups who share our vision and commitment to excellent customer service. One of the most exciting things we’re doing with the help of their resources is developing new strategic lines of business, branded Nordic’s SUMMIT Series of Epic Solutions. These new services, focused on Optimization, Upgrades, Remote Services, and Reporting/Analytics, provide strategy and execution expertise to clients enabling them to achieve peak performance from their Epic system and realize the business value and patient care benefits that are now within reach.

From Moe Betta: “Re: New Orleans airport delays caused by TSA cutbacks. BS. After over a dozen visits to New Orleans, they can’t do anything efficiently. Aside from the sometimes intriguing and tasty cuisine, the city operates in a third-world atmosphere. It was that way long before Katrina and will be forever. Sunday in and Thursday out has always been a HIMSS disaster at the airport. Yet, that is part of its ‘charm,’ a trip outside – but inside – the US.” Most interesting to me was that the long security line was divided into two lines, but once you got around the corner, they merged back into one line. Queuing theory experts and Disney fans would have been horrified. Seth Frank, VP of investor relations for Allscripts, agreed in an investor presentation: “Last week at HIMSS conference, the big healthcare IT annual powwow, which was in New Orleans, hopefully, never to go back there again — I love New Orleans, great town, just not for 35,000 people.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

This week’s HIStalk Practice highlights include:  over 13,000 pharmacies now accept e-prescriptions for controlled substances. A survey of 2,600 primary care physicians reveals that 87 percent of doctors believe they receive too many EHR-based alerts. Emdeon begins working with CMS to map new HIPAA 6020 standards. HHS wants 50 percent of doctors online with EHRs by the end of the year. The average physician could lose over $43,000 over five years with EHR adoption. Culbert Healthcare Solutions’ Brad Boyd offers suggestions for the best ways for organizations to incorporate external data into their BI efforts. Dr. Gregg imagines the future of healthcare. It’s all good stuff so pop over and catch up on the latest ambulatory HIT news, check out a few of our sponsors’ offerings, and sign up for the e-mail updates. Thanks for reading.

On the Jobs Board: SCRUM Master, Healthcare Technology Project Manager, Practice Management/EMR Sales Executive, C-Level Healthcare Technology Sales Executive.

Sales

Integris Health (OK) will implement Phytel’s population health and care management tools at its physician practices.

South Jersey Healthcare (NJ) selects Surgical Information Systems Perioperative Management to work with its Soarian Clinicals.

People

Arcadia Solutions names Sean Carroll (Nuance) CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

The NHS invites Humetrix to present its iBlueButton platform at the NHS Innovations Expo 2013 in London.

iMDsoft releases MVpanorama for actionable cross-patient information and allocation of nursing resources.

Hawai’i Pacific Health goes live at its first of four locations with iSirona’s medical device integration solution.

NTT DATA is recognized by Canada’s Top 100 Employers program.

SuccessEHS goes live with a production connection to the South Carolina HIE (SCHIEx) as one of the first ambulatory EHR vendors to do so. 

Cerner will add symptom-specific patient questionnaires from Primetime Medical Software to its patient portal.

St. Joseph Mercy Oakland (MI) implements the latest version of Voalte’s iPhone for clinical communication.

Other

Fired Allscripts executives Glen Tullman and Lee Shapiro say they will be starting a mobile healthcare company.

WellStar Health System (GA) leases 21,000 square feet of an off-campus data center to handle its Epic implementation.

Strange: authorities say a homeless man was able to live in a Louisville hospital because he always wore scrubs, a lab coat, and a surgical mask. He was caught after using a restricted computer system, which a helpful doctor helped him access by logging in under his own password.

Weird News Andy christens this story “Fickle Finger of Fake.” Five doctors in a hospital in Brazil are suspended for using fabricated silicone fingers to clock in their colleagues on fingerprint-reading time clock readers. One TV network says the ringleader was the head of the ED, whose daughter was paid for three years despite never actually showing up. Authorities say up to 300 paid employees may exist only in silicon finger form.

Sponsor Updates

• Alesco Medical becomes a channel distributor of e-MDs.
• Thousand Oaks Radiology Group (CA) chooses McKesson Revenue Management Solutions.
• KBQuest will showcase the Kony Solutions mobile platform at the Microsoft Tech Days conference in Hong Kong.
• The British National Formulary offers direct access to the DynaMed evidence-based clinical information resource to its subscribers.
• Commonwealth Orthopaedic Centers (KY) selects SRS EHR/PM for its 17 physicians, 10 physician extenders and 2 PT locations.
• Ping Identity is showcasing PingOne Single Sign-On at the Ultimate Connections Conference in Las Vegas this week.
• Cancer Treatment Centers of America expands its MedAssets relationship to include Capital and Construction solutions to drive construction costs down.
• GetWellNetwork CEO Michael O’Neil shared his personal experience as a cancer patient and how patient engagement improves outcomes and satisfaction at The Thirteenth Population Health and Care Coordination Colloquium in Philadelphia this week.
• Aycan, GE Healthcare, Siemens Healthcare, TeraRecon, and Vital Images participate in the European Society of Radiology’s Face-off.
• Ingenious Med releases a white paper on the breakdowns in communication during patient handoffs and offers best practices.
• Emdeon begins mapping HIPAA 6020 standards for CMS.
• Informatica adds support services to its MySupport portal including eService apps Call Me, simple online escalation and online bug tracking.

EPtalk  by Dr. Jayne

The National Rural Health Resource Center offers an HIE tool kit that includes guide to Direct connectivity standards and an ROI calculator.

Through the retrospectoscope: CT scans on mummies from various parts of the world reveal evidence of heart disease. The presence of vascular disease was independent of the presumed diet consumed in the socioeconomic groups represented by the mummies. Several media outlets are using this to counter the theory that fatty diets and our modern lifestyle cause atherosclerosis. Bring on the curly fries!

Death by smart phone: researchers from West Virginia University are proposing that cell phones be rendered inoperable in moving cars. Drivers using cell phones cause more than 330,000 injuries per year including 2,600 deaths. Texting may account for more than 16,000 deaths between 2001 and 2007. I shudder every time I am cut off by a chatty driver who has no idea I’m in the lane. Of course blocking phone use in a moving car would also impact passengers. This may be responsible for a sharp uptick in teenagers forced to carry on a conversation with their parents which I definitely support.

A recent survey published in Health Affairs suggests that the majority of practices will lose money when adopting electronic health records. Major drivers of positive return on investment included the degree to which providers used the EHR to increase revenue and ceasing use of paper records. I continue to be amazed each time I step into a practice that professes to use EHR yet continues to either document on paper and scan, or document on paper and then key in the findings. Usually the providers are lamenting that they’re slower since they are on EHR and I wind up giving them a free informatics consult.

Speaking of EHR practices that still use paper, I had a patient appointment earlier this week at a rival academic medical center. Following the visit, I was given the opportunity to sign up for the patient portal. I was impressed by the ease of signing in using the combination of my Yahoo credentials and a token code given at the office. I was unimpressed that my chart has my name spelled wrong and a work phone number that I don’t recognize. Since my demographics were correct at the office, I sent a secure message to ask for a revision. The office again confirmed the accuracy of the outpatient chart and responded back that they had no idea who to contact or how to get it fixed. Since the Terms of Use included the vendor’s information, I know it’s a solid and highly regarded one. Just goes to show how a poor implementation can wreak havoc for patients.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 3/13/13

Top News

Healthcare data vendor IMS acquires six-year-old, 60-employee Seattle startup Appature, which sells software for tracking drug company marketing activities to physicians. Rumored price was more than $100 million.

Reader Comments

From IT Dad: “Re: porno nurse. The company was Onyx. I’m a 50-year-old male and I was shocked when I saw it and shocked that someone thought this would be a good idea. I just kept on walking. I was insulted that they would treat women that way and immediately though of my daughter and my female co-workers. I would not even consider stopping at their booth as I did not want to be seen there.” I e-mailed an Onyx contact for a comment and received no response. I was torn whether to run the reader-submitted photo above (taken by a real nurse, I might add) since that might seem equally chauvinistic, but decided readers need to see at least a small-scale version to understand what the fuss is about. The China-based Onyx sells medical displays, of which the scantily clad phony nurse appears to be one.

From Odla: “Re: Neal Patterson. Funny that Neal was seen at several booths at HIMSS. He was at the Optum booth for a bit until an exec recognized him and politely suggested he might want to return to the Cerner booth.”

From The PACS Designer: “Re: ECM. TPD will be posting interesting apps that address Big Data concerns in our path to enterprise content management (ECM). As a lover of what Hadoop can bring to healthcare, there’s an app that employs Hadoop called Platfora.”

From Captain Ron: “Re: HIMSS. I witnessed a classic moment at HIMSS last week that I had to share. I visited the QlikView booth to watch CHOP present on self-service analytics. Very impressive stuff and they’ve integrated QlikView in Radar. So the funny part … multiple folks there from Epic and one guy in particular decided he should interrupt and share how Epic can help solve this problem. I wonder how Epic would feel if QlikView came and interrupted their customer presentation? #BOUniversesarenottheanswer.”

From PartyReviews: “Re: HIMSS parties. Hit a few parties at HIMSS. Yours was the best of the bunch. Funny how a blog is out partying the big vendors. Consulting firms all had more of a reception format. Deloitte was kinda stiff as you’d expect, Impact Advisors and a few others were OK. Encore had their traditional and apparently popular Pub Night which I hit two times during the week. Each night there were over 300 people there. Guess people really like the free beer, wine, and mixed drinks. No vendors were over the top as has been normal in the past. I got into bed Mon-Wed at 2 a.m., 1 a.m., and 3 a.m. respectively. Only in New Orleans. And we wonder why HIMSS is a burn out?”

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Athenahealth completes its acquisition of Epocrates.

TeleTracking Technologies reports a 42 percent increased in booked revenue in the 2012 fiscal year.

ISirona announces revenue growth of 172 percent for 2012.
 
A proxy advisor firm urges HP shareholders to give the boot to two of the company’s directors at its upcoming annual meeting for their role in the disastrous acquisition of Autonomy in 2011, one of them being McKesson Chairman, President, and CEO John Hammergren. A group of New York City pension funds also urges voting against the re-election of Hammergren and G. Kennedy Thompson for their involvement in acquisitions that caused HP to lose $17 billion in the past year and for the quick hiring of CEO Leo Apotheker, who was then fired less than a year later.

Ireland-based bedside computing vendor Lincor Solutions receives a $9.5 million investment from Edison Ventures, which it will use to relaunch the company in the US by moving its headquarters to Nashville, TN and creating 30 jobs. The MediVista platform offers access to clinical applications, bed status management, patient entertainment and education, and communications.

Medical supply vendor Becton Dickinson & Company acquires Austria-based Cato Software Solutions, which offers oncology planning, monitoring, and drug preparation software.

Lexmark acquires two companies that will be rolled into its Perceptive Software unit. AccessVia sells software that allows stores to print electronic shelf tags, while Twistage provides media management software that its CEO says could be used to distribute medical images and attach video to a patient’s EMR.

Sales

East Texas Regional Healthcare System selects Siemens MobileMD HIE to coordinate care among its 15 facilities.

The Salisbury, Wight and South Hampshire Domain NHS Trust  Consortium (UK) awards its VNA and data migration contract to Acuo Technologies.

Coastal Medical (RI) adds the eClinicalWorks Care Coordination Medical Record to advance its ACO-related objectives.

Iowa Health System will implement a suite of Infor applications, including Infor Lawson Supply Chain Management and Enterprise Financial Management.

The Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Development Services selects Siemens Healthcare’s Soarian clinicals and financials and the MobileMD HIE platform.

People

Suzanne Cogan (Shareable Ink) joins Orion Health as VP of sales.

Conifer Health Solutions names Allen Hobbs (MedAssets) chief client officer.

The AAFP’s TransforMED subsidiary names Russell Kohl, MD (OU School of Community Medicine / Oklahoma College of Medicine) medical director.

Infor names Barry P. Chaiken, MD (DocsNetwork) CMIO.

Ping Identity hires Michael J. Sullivan (IHS) as CFO.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius names new and continuing members to the US Technology Standards Committee including Jeremy Delinsky (athenahealth) and Eric Rose, MD (Intelligent Medical Objects).

Announcements and Implementations

CareCloud opens a Boston office, where it expects to house 35 to 40 employees by the end of the year.

Johnson County Healthcare (WY) goes live this week with CPSI.

PatientKeeper deployed its CPOE solution at 19 community hospitals during the first 60 days of 2013.

Eight vendors participated in the inaugural IHE 2013 North American Connectathon, which performed testing to specified requirements for the IHE USA Certification pilot conducted by ICSA Labs.

Final HIMSS conference stats: 34,696 total attendees, 13,985 professional attendees, 1,158 exhibiting companies.

The New Orleans airport warned travelers last Wednesday of expected delays on Thursday due to the conclusion of the HIMSS conference and sequester-driven TSA staffing reductions.

e-MDs launches a cloud-based EHR/PM solution and introduces Solution Series 7.2.2, an updated version of its client-server suite of EHR/PM products.

Government and Politics

Hello Twitterverse. I’m looking forward to reaching out to you and talking about the great work happening at @hhsgov twitter.com/Sebelius/statu…

— Kathleen Sebelius (@Sebelius) March 11, 2013

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius fires up her Twitter.

Lt. Dan called this perfectly. Internal VA documents reveal that the agency is taking much longer than it reported to process service-related benefit claims by veterans, with delays averaging more than 1.5 years in major cities. The number of veterans waiting for more than a year for their benefits jumped from 11,000 in 2009 to 245,000 by the end of 2012. Despite spending $537 million on a new computer system, the VA still process 97 percent of claims on paper.

Other

Billian’s HealthDATA finds that medical records-related costs of hospitals typically account for less than three percent of total general-service operating expenses and almost seven percent of total general-service salary expenses.

The University of Mississippi Medical Center will expand its telehealth program to improve access for smaller hospitals and clinics and will create 201 new jobs over the next three years.

Sponsor Updates

• Divurgent’s Signature Drive at HIMSS raises $5,000 for the Children’s Hospital of New Orleans.
• Aspen Valley Hospital (CO) increases front office payments and reduces payment processing administrative time by 65 percent after deploying InstaMed’s healthcare payment network.
• Hyland Software and Merge Healthcare expand their partnership to include an integrated image viewing and storage solution.
• CareTech Solutions introduces CareTech Solutions Pulse, an integrated IT monitoring service that integrates monitoring of hospital clinical, business, and ancillary applications, as well as the infrastructure on which they run.
• The Virtual Influence Planning group, Medseek’s independent consulting firm, expands its services to include patient portal adoption and marketing plans for healthcare organizations. Medseek also introduces its Influence platform, which will provide hospitals with a comprehensive view of individual patients.
• Orion Health and NexJ Systems will distribute joint capabilities and technologies, such as NexJ Connected Wellness and the Rhapsody Integration Engine.
• CCHIT certifies NextGen Ambulatory EHR version 5.8 compliant with the ONC 2014 Edition criteria and certified as a Complete EHR.
• The Advisory Board Company announces the agenda and keynote speakers for its Crimson Clinical Advantage Summit May 20-22 in Scottsdale, AZ.
• Picis announces that is annual Exchange conference will be consolidated with the Optum Provider Exchange Conference September 23 in Orlando, FL.
• Philips Healthcare introduces its IntelliSpace eCareManager 3.9 patient management software, which includes the ability for staff to get a patient population level view of data.
• The NCQA awards SuccessEHS client Scenic Bluffs Community Health Centers (WI) the highest level of recognition for its PCMH program
• CAP Professional Services and the Lab Interoperability Collaborative look at the top 10 challenges facing hospitals seeking to report lab results electronically.
• GetWellNetwork debuts myGetWellNetwork, a digital platform to help patients and providers manage recovery, chronic conditions, and preventative care online. 
• Ephraim McDowell Regional Medical Center (KY) shares how Accent on Integration helped the organization integrate its Philips OBTraceVue platform with its Meditech HIS.
• Surgical Information Systems announces the availability of SIS Com Version 3.3, which includes enhanced functionality and a more streamlined look.
• Imprivata launches Cortext 2.0, its free HIPAA-compliant texting solution.
• St. Barnabas Medical Center is using Access’s e-forms and wristband bar-coding solution alongside Cerner Millenium and Siemens Invision to enhance its EMAR process.
• Visage Imaging will exhibit at the SIIM Philadelphia Regional Meeting on March 18 in Philadelphia, with Director of Solutions Architecture and Customer Experience Director Bobby Roe co-leading a roundtable session entitled “Cool Technologies in Imaging Informatics.”
• Vitera Healthcare releases a hosted version of its Medical Manager practice management platform.
• McKesson Canada’s RelayHealth aligns with QHR Technologies to integrate QHR’s Accuro EMR System with RelayHealth’s services.
• SC Magazine names Trustwave the Best Network Access Control product.
• The HealthLogix HIE platform from Certify Data Systems passes numerous Integrating the HIE profile tests at the 2013 IHE North America Connectathon.
• Nuance launches Clintegrity 360, a computer-assisted system for clinical documentation improvement and coding.
• RazorInsights integrates Patientco’s patient financial engagement billing software into its HIS system.
• MetroHealth Medical Center, an affiliate of Case Western Reserve (OH), will deploy Wolters Kluwer Health’s ProVation Order Sets as its evidence-based order set solution.
• Kareo lists the top six EHR features that small practices need.
• Ingenious Med reports a 380 percent increase in the usage of its impower mobile applications in 2012. Twenty-one percent of its licensed impower clinicians now use mobile devices.
• Deloitte interviews 12 CIOs in major health systems about the challenges of managing their IT departments.
• InstaMed projects triple-digit growth in the wake of healthcare reform and reports having processed more than $60 billion in healthcare payments as of March 2013.
• GE Healthcare is developing Guided Analytics and AutoBed applications for the Caradigm Intelligence Platform.
• AT&T CMIO Geeta Nayyar discusses mobile health and how it can provide care where needed.
• Cerner will integrate Nuance’s clinical documentation improvement technology into its Millennium EHR and RCM solutions.
• Advanced Orthopedic Center (FL) selects SRS EHR for its nine physicians.
• Access extends its relationship with Inpact LLC, a provider of online and social media communities for HIT, to include sponsorship of Siemens Healthcare Social.
• As part of its $80 million healthcare integration contract, Harris Healthcare receives authorization to deploy a solution that enables the VA and DoD to share EHRs.
• Johns Hopkins Hospital shares how LRS helped the organization simplify document management in a March 14 Webinar.
• Capario announces a three-part Webinar series called Mastering the Art of Getting Paid starting March 20.
• Covisint will feature Andras Cser with Forrester Research in a March 13 Webinar detailing the benefits of cloud-based identity and access management.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

HISsies 2013 Winners

HIMSS Wrap-up 3/8/13–Dr. Gregg’s Update

Walking Tale #HIMSS2013

You look upon a road, a long road down which you must travel. You can see the end, but it’s distant. You realize that you’d better get started because, even though it isn’t “a journey of a thousand miles,” it still will only be accomplished by taking the first step.

You begin, taking that first step, and then another, and then another. But before you’ve traveled even one thousandth of your beckoning road, you’re sidetracked by a road sign that calls to you. A way station along your path has already halted your progress and you spend the next twenty minutes partaking of the fare they offer.

Back out on the road and five more steps down the path before yet another beacon beckons your eye and begs you to stay and see. Another quarter hour passes before you rejoin your sojourn.

Each time you attempt to complete your travels, you find yourself halted after a mere few paces. Your goal of reaching the end of the road seems nearly unattainable. Still, each wayside stay brings interesting information that would be hard to otherwise glean. Each halting advance along the path adds something new to your mental arsenal.

Still, you have your goal. The end of the road seems as distant as when you started, yet on you travel.

Every few steps you notice a passerby who’s noticing your gleaming white tennis shoes. Some simply look, others grin, and more than a few pass with commentary which runs typically along the lines of, “You’re smart.”

“I’m not as slow as I look,” you reply (referring to your sagaciousness in choosing footwear suited to the trek you take, not to the speed with which you progress.)

You stride on, rarely feeling as if the snail’s pace of your excursion will ever bring the end within sight. Way station after way station, chit after chat…you always seem to be gaining something, but never seem to gaining ground.

Some of the way stations bring insights that you can use; others bring insights into things you know you’ll never use. Some show coolness and prescience; others show staleness and “catch-up-manship.” Some of the way station attendants are kind and courteous; others are neglectful and rude. (Most seem to wish they could have your footwear.)

Traveling on, you see mountains of the mundane. Many way station aides appear more interested in each other or in their digital social networks than in entertaining passersby. It worsens as the day drags on; their lassitude and languor grows driving your desire to try to disengage their disinterest down. Yet on you slog.

Occasionally, you see flashes of brilliance interspersed amongst the merely repetitive. This helps to keep you going, helps to keep you moving along toward your destination. It’s hard to know which way station will spark your imagination, but there are enough moments and methods of intrigue to keep you seeking the next. You look past the boastful, the bored, and the blatantly bland; you keep searching for the next truly bright idea or engaging way station assistant.

Finally, just when you think your feet can’t stand one more step, you realize you’ve reached the end! You’ve traveled the entire trail, meeting the brilliant and the meek-minded, seeing products superb and those barely-breathing, finding wise counsel and fulsome folly. You’ve seen it all and now you can rest…

…until, that is, you turn to walk down the next aisle.

From the trenches…

“The only exercise I take is walking behind the coffins of friends who took exercise.” – Peter O’Toole

Dr. Gregg Alexander, a grunt in the trenches pediatrician at Madison Pediatrics, is Chief Medical Officer for Health Nuts Media, an HIT and marketing consultant, and sits on the board of directors of the Ohio Health Information Partnership (OHIP).

Monday Morning Update 3/11/13

From Beth: “Re: athenahealth. My little brother just got a job at athenahealth in Boston. Should I congratulate him, or give him stolid advice on keeping a work-life balance? What are the differences between Epic and athenahealth for an implementer?” Good question, which I will defer to readers since I have no first-hand employee knowledge of either company having spent my working life in non-profit hospitals.

From Cat’s Eye: “Re: Neal Patterson. Let’s start a game of Where’s Waldo? with him. Here he is in the UpToDate booth.” I have to admit that I like Neal’s look.

From Boy George: “Re: HIStalk. HIStalk has not been a HIMSS booster and I know as a fact that HIMSS is acutely aware (and envious) of your sponsorship exposure and HIStalkapalooza.” I would hope HIMSS has other HIT worlds to conquer without worrying about my microscopic corner of it. I’ve been writing HIStalk for 10 years while working in a non-profit hospital, so I work pretty hard for whatever success I get, and that success wasn’t (and isn’t) my motivation anyway. As for HIStalkapalooza, I’ll give credit to the companies that sponsor it and the folks who spend the evening with us each year. I do greatly admire the companies that sponsor HIStalk since for most of them, it’s not just a traditional ad buy but rather their interest in truly supporting what I do. I had none for the first few years of HIStalk and I don’t take any of them for granted. I seem to vaguely remember AMIA or CHIME or some group wanting to work with me years ago, but they realized that I’m a loose cannon.

From HIMSSed Out: “Re: booth experiences. Jeff at eClinicalWorks gave a very concise perfectly targeted presentation of their software doing a sore throat visit. No excess, no droning on, just answered my questions in a timely manner. Well done. Lyndsey at athenahealth did a very nice sore throat demo showing me what I needed and answering questions expertly. AND she blew me away when escorting me to be scanned and then handed me a KINDLE to read their material on. Put me down as impressed by the demo, low key attitude, and rocking gift!” I criticize the folks who use the booth as their employee lounge without naming names, but I like calling out those people who do a good job. There is no reason reps need to use their phones during booth duty – assign someone to monitor and return their calls and e-mail if need be, but if you give anyone under 40 a smartphone they’re going to be screwing around with it nearly constantly because that’s what they do off the job and they can’t resist its lure.

From Frank Poggio: “Re: MU. Farzad Mostashari recently said the MU Incentive bonus was safe. So much for political promises. The sequester cuts include an across-the-board reduction in Medicare payments of 2 percent effective April 1 and include cuts to MU bonus money. In my opinion, this will be just the beginning. Big deficits usually mean big cuts for providers. The Obama administration sold the HITECH act to Congress based on a projected savings of $800 billion per the original Rand study, which just a few months ago Rand said was full of errors.” Government doesn’t have “get smaller” in its vocabulary, so I’m pretty sure agencies will apply their sequester reductions in the most publicly visible way possible, i.e. shutting down national parks and closing offices early in the hopes of creating public outrage. There is no way that the government is so efficient that a 2 percent cut should even be noticeable, but they will make it so in protest.

From Guy with the Funny Accent: “Re: HIStalkapalooza. No longer talking to Bonny Roberts as she wouldn’t let me wear the Mr. HISTalk ‘Secret Crush’ sash on the final day of the exhibition.” I like that my secret crush is protective of her regalia. I think I may have blushed a bit as she read her poem on stage and I’m not so sure Bonny didn’t as well since she wasn’t planning to recite her work in front of a bunch of people. She figured out who I am when I lauded her demo style in the Aventura booth a couple of years ago, and with minimal provocation, recited my comments verbatim as we were entering Rock ‘n’ Bowl. She is, as they say, a trip.

From A. Vendor: “Re: HIMSS. It was a wonderful experience for a first-time vendor. HIMSS staff were absolutely wonderful in making preparations and taking care of our needs during the show. It couldn’t have been more effortless. Other than a modest case of booth envy, things went very well and exceeded my expectations. People who were looking found us. We met many interesting colleagues and a number of old friends. In addition to a few good leads, we stumbled into some unexpected opportunities we hadn’t expected. I’m definitely up for 2014, and maybe a little wiser.” I think part of being happy with the exhibitor experience is setting reasonable expectations, like having a central location to meet with clients and prospects, maybe picking up some foot traffic even in the hinterlands, and having access to other vendors in the hall during off hours. Non-vendor HIMSS attendees miss the point that many deals are struck between vendors during the show – marketing agreements, signing up to help with consulting and staffing needs, and perhaps finding an investor if that’s on the agenda. One vendor told me that the VC folks were rapid-firing from one booth to another without regard to what company occupied it, barking out a series of questions about their business in hopes of finding companies to invest in.

From Data Sharing Optimist: “Re: CommonWell. Started six months ago when Arien Malec (now Relayhealth/McKesson, but remember he did a stint with ONC and developed Direct) connected with Dr. David McCallie (VP, medical informatics at Cerner) – they are both very good guys and they decided to create some standards for this type of data sharing. They just finished the standards a few weeks ago. Neal and John H. loved the concept, because even though it might have some competitive issues, they both truly want to see the healthcare system improved, as do all the major CEOs. They went to a small group of folks they believed would hop right on board so they could get a press release out by HIMSS. They did not ask everyone, including Epic, but are talking to them now. From what I heard, they didn’t mean it to sound like Epic refused. That was not their intent, but with two weeks to pull things together, they had to limit things. I talked to Carl about it and got the sense that Epic needs to learn more and see if it is real, but would likely join eventually. Use cases will involve a specialist being able to view and even accept data from an outside hospital on a shared patient, as well as pharmacists being able to bi-directionally communicate with doctors.” Someone who knows all the players told me the same thing – it had to be Malec and McCallie since those are the guys smart enough to make it happen and sell the idea to the suits. I think it was a mistake to rush the announcement and play up the participants without having even invited major vendors like Epic and eClinicalWorks, but apparently the PR urge was strong. So far its accomplishments involve press releases and a Web site. One might logically ask questions like: (a) who pays for the service since infrastructure is required? (b) does the EMR user have to buy or install anything? (c) what are the queries running against? and (d) how is this better than companies like Epic and others that already allow sharing information outside their systems? I like the idea of a standard way of doing things without having a particular vendor owning the platform, so we’ll see if it happens or gets smothered in the bureaucracy of these not-always-nimble big companies.

From Ole: “Re: We are in discussions with EmergeMD regarding telemedicine and would like your unbiased opinion.” I don’t know anything about the company, but perhaps readers who do will weigh in. I would have kicked tires on your behalf at HIMSS but I ran out of time. Actually I didn’t run out of time, but I was so tired of traipsing the exhibit hall by early Wednesday afternoon that I went back to the hotel well before the exhibits closed, had a very early dinner, and finally took my shoes off to write HIStalk. I was really tired, although I now know that I was coming down with a bug at the time.

Here’s to you, IT foot soldiers who will be wide awake at 2:00 a.m. Sunday to make sure systems don’t choke when their clocks spring forward. I’ve been there.

Two-thirds of poll respondents say we’re experiencing and EHR backlash. New poll to your right: why do you think several vendors formed CommonWell Health Alliance?

Speaking of CommonWell, I noticed that they’ve populated the FAQ section of their site. They say the organization won’t actually be established until a 12-18 month proof of concept is completed, making you wonder why it was necessary to announce so early other than to put a stake in the ground.

I hope everybody got out of New Orleans OK. I left Thursday afternoon and the airport was an absolute zoo, so I can only imagine what it must have been like Wednesday evening. Security and check-in lines wound throughout the terminal, the concession vendors ran out of pretty much everything (including cream for the coffee), and the little airport didn’t have enough seats so people were sitting on the floor. It is clear that New Orleans, for all of its virtues, just can’t handle a conference the size of HIMSS without a lot of snafus.

I got home only to be hit with a respiratory infection that sent my temperature soaring and kept me up hacking all night, so I’ll just clean up some loose ends and get back to my Tylenol and Halls cough drops.

UPMC goes to paper for three hours when its patient care systems go down due to human error.

Ernest Health will work with NTT Data to create new post-acute care capabilities in its Optimum product suite.

Heritage Groups makes an unspecified investment in coding services and software vendor Aviacode.

I mentioned several days ago that I received advance word that several EHR vendors would be announced as working with Michelle Obama’s Partnership for a Healthier America in adding obesity-related features to their products. “Several” turned out to be “three”: Cerner, GE, and Physician’s Computer Company. I like the idea and I’m not sure why other vendors didn’t sign on, except maybe because they’re already diverting much of their development budget into complying with federal requirements instead of delivering user-requested enhancements.

Just to clarify a reader’s comment last week: GE Healthcare sold its outsourced physician billing service, not software products like its EMR.

Another MyWay-related lawsuit is filed against Allscripts. Cardinal Health pre-paid $5 million for 1,250 MyWay licenses for resale in April 2009 and is stuck with the 994 of those licenses that it hasn’t sold and are now valueless since MyWay won’t be made ICD-10 and MU compliant. Cardinal looked at Allscripts Professional and passed because of cost, complexity, and the fact that Allscripts sells it directly and they don’t want any part of that as a substitute. Cardinal is suing for beach of contract and wants the $4 million back for its unsold MyWay licenses.

KLAS releases a very small study (100 providers) of cloud computing perception. It says vendors are sloppy with their terminology, calling products cloud-based that are really just hosted and using Citrix or other emulation services instead of true Web services. I like the graphic above.

TeraRecon introduces iNtuition Review, which I’ll describe in the company’s words since it’s a little over my head: “iNtuition has always complemented PACS with advanced functionality to resolve specialized use cases and workflow challenges not adequately addressed by existing PACS solutions. This role is now expanded and enhanced with the new, powerful iNtuitionREVIEW client, designed to complement PACS with multi-monitor display of multi-modality data, in specialized use-cases such as cardiac (CT, MR, Cath, Echo, EKG) or breast (MR, Mammo, Ultrasound). iNtuitionREVIEW is also designed with co-operation and collaboration in mind, with specialized features for the preparation and execution of physician conferences, demos, and multi-disciplinary team meetings.”

Weird News Andy titles this story “An Arresting Development.” A Florida OB-GYN e-mails a patient, threatening to have her arrested if she doesn’t come in for an emergency C-section for her week-overdue delivery. WNA also says he’s not surprised by this 30/70 rule: a third of VA primary practitioners say they’ve missed critical lab results in the EHR due to being overwhelmed with alerts. PCPs said they received an average of 63 alerts per day, with 87 percent saying that’s too many and 70 percent say they can’t manage them all.

Arcadia Software will expand the use of ICU patient monitoring software it developed for Boston Children’s Hospital by collecting data from a network of hospitals to develop insights into treatment decisions and outcomes.

Vince covers the origins of HIMSS in this week’s HIStory.

Final HIMSS Conference Thoughts

Inga liked this: the Vonlay folks prepared a welcome package for newly anointed HIStalk Queen Sarah, who works there (note the labeled cupcakes). Some companies were planning to frame the sashes their employees wore and some folks were supposedly going to wear their sashes to the conference on Tuesday although I didn’t see any first hand.

A low-key announcement during the HIMSS conference involves the formation of the HIMSS-backed accelerator Avia, which is supposed to help provider organizations implement innovative technologies. I don’t really understand what they’re trying to do even after reading the information on their site. Nor do I understand why HIMSS is involved. HIMSS might as well bite the bullet and just buy some vendors and peddle their products directly since they’ve encroached into almost every other aspect of the market.

Brian Ahier got Karl Rove to talk about healthcare IT on camera at the conference.

Vendors have told me that it’s so expensive to dismantle, ship, and store components of their HIMSS booth that a lot of the glitz you see in the exhibit hall goes right to the trash afterward. Good idea by Orchestrate Healthcare, which bought furniture for its new two-story booth and donated it after the show to the New Orleans chapters of Habitat for Humanity and Ronald McDonald House. There’s even a patient aspect: Ronald McDonald House was planning to convert part of its dining room into a conference room where and families can meet with caregivers and Orchestrate’s donation of tables and chairs made that room immediately available for its intended purpose since they had no furniture otherwise.

This reader-supplied HIStalkapalooza photo appears – by virtue of an optical illusion — to have captured Jonathan Bush ticking the chin of an unamused Farzad Mostashari.

The majority of people who left the conference Wednesday missed the most electrifying and informative presentation I’ve seen at a HIMSS conference. I was walking over Thursday morning and a fellow attendee warned me that Farzad Mostashari is a dry presenter because he’s a data guy. I could not disagree more – he is a really good speaker who uses data to support his statements. ONC posted his 2012 keynote on YouTube and I hope they do it again for the 2013 version since everybody needs to hear what he had to say.

Inga and Dr. Jayne are still swooning that the PatientPay folks sent them each a chocolate high heel, thus combining two of their most cherished vices into a single package.

HIStalk traffic was heavy during the conference as it usually is, with visits and page views peaking on Tuesday at 11,000 and 19,000 respectively. Inga, Dr. Jayne, and I were posting and occasionally tweeting from New Orleans, of course, while Lt. Dan kept the home fires burning with daily HIStalk headlines and HIStalk Connect posts. It’s a bit of a potpourri during HIMSS week since we cover whatever is interesting to us, which is almost everything.

More HIStalkapalooza pictures by Istrico Productions. Lots of smiles. I always feel strange seeing my logo (the new one in this case) put on buses, shirts, signage, and electric lights.
 

HIMSS Takeaways

Attending the HIMSS conference is like trying to simultaneously watch every channel on satellite TV. You choose what looks good in the guide, but invariably there’s a lot of crap among the good finds in both the education rooms and the exhibit hall. Even then you’ll see maybe 5 percent of what was offered. At any tableful of people, the only shared experiences may well be the keynotes and perhaps a large social event (looking at you, HIStalkapalooza).

That makes it really risky to summarize the experience and draw relevant inferences from it. Here are my thoughts, which may differ wildly from yours.

• The CommonWell Health Alliance announcement delivered the burst of fireworks that everyone expected, but whether it’s a new commitment to patients or simply an expedient anti-Epic marketing strategy developed by marginally committed members remains to be seen. We don’t really know what will be delivered, whether it will work as described, and how hard it will be for providers to connect to whatever communications infrastructure is developed. If it succeeds, will it put yet another nail in the HIE coffin? Can it be successful without the participation of vendors like Epic, eClinicalWorks, and others? Can vendors really deliver the needed technology along with their ICD-10 and Meaningful Use enhancements, and if so, how will they prioritize the work? It’s easy to get wrapped up in the feel-good, patient-friendly marketing prose and characterize non-participants as patient haters, but let’s see what they can deliver and which companies dominate the process before waving the CommonWell flag.
• Analytics doesn’t make good booth demos, so it’s hard to have a solid takeaway. Everyone knows they need better data, but approaches range from technical toolkits to turnkey systems complete with algorithms and reports for common requirements. We’re past the multi-year, big-expense data warehouses of just a few years ago, but it would still be easy to make a misstep in the zeal of preparing for ACOs and other delivery changes for which the data requirements are still fuzzy. This may be yet another area where providers will wish they had measured twice and sawed once.
• New Allscripts CEO Paul Black has wasted no time in trying to erase the painful memory of a series of Keystone Cops-like corporate gaffes that left the company as a punch line. Remarkably, some recent Sunrise sales and the acquisition of Jardogs and dbMotion provides validity to their claims as a serious player, although it’s early in the recovery.
• The industry is quickly transitioning from the traditional hospital and practice system model, which emphasizes transaction entry and charging, toward a public health focused emphasis that requires heavy consideration of non-episodic patient activity and cost management. This will require yet another round of vendor technology investment on top of ICD-10 and Meaningful Use requirements, polarizing the market even more into those vendors positioned for the future vs. those just trying to milk what market is left selling old-school systems.
• HIMSS finally recognized the role of patients in the healthcare system, at least superficially. You’ll know the movement is real when real patients and their advocates lead significant sessions, hold non-token HIMSS roles, and are actively represented on vendor advisory groups and even company boards.
• More and more of the healthcare IT market direction is driven by the government in general and ONC in particular. Vendors and customers aren’t talking a lot about incremental enhancements or product tweaks. It’s all about analytics, transparency, interoperability, and outcomes. It will be a challenge to turn these somewhat vague concepts into concrete development plans.
• The audience for usability seems to be selective. Lots of people are talking about it, but nobody’s doing much despite government report emphasizing the need to make systems safer and easier to use.
• The market for consulting services is going to be very strong, but it will shift from system selection and implementation to system optimization. That will drive consulting firms to further specialize into specific practices, most notably for Epic and Cerner. IT systems are necessary but not sufficient to drive the needed changes, and that will favor CIOs who have a good working relationships and reputation outside of IT.
• mHealth has a decent chance of improving health in nations where the problem is lack of basic health needs and medical services. It doesn’t seem to have the required impact in countries challenged by prosperity-fueled problems like obesity, lack of exercise, and time-challenged citizens who don’t put their health first.
• The HIMSS conference keeps getting bigger, but nobody knows if the proportion of actual practicing caregivers (rather than former caregivers turned IT cheerleaders) is increasing or decreasing. It’s easier to be irrationally exuberant when the front-line naysayers aren’t in the building.
• My assessment of the educational program and the CE submission process is that it continues to go downhill, making it almost an afterthought to the cash cow, the exhibit hall.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

HIMSS Wrap-up 3/8/13 – Inga’s Update

From Brian Ahier: “Re: HIMSS.  Aside from HIStalkpalooza (which was awesome and thank you very much for inviting me!) where I got to spend over a half hour having a fascinating and detailed conversation with Judy Faulkner. A couple of other highlights were the interviews I got with Jeb Bush and Karl Rove. They are not your usual HIMSS attendees. I even got Rove to make a statement on health IT for YouTube.” Love the picture of Judy holding her HISsie award for Best Leader of a Healthcare IT Vendor or Consulting Firm. Mr. H doesn’t want to run the photo because he knows Judy doesn’t enjoy having her picture published, but she looks happy holding her HISsies award. Thanks for sharing the YouTube of Rove, who claims he is a big fan of HIT.

From Fashion Conscious: “Re: porno nurse. I’d like to contact the vendor who had the nurse in the porno get-up. Do you know or can you find out who that was? The picture has gone viral and nurses are not amused and want to let them know. I’m less prudish than anyone you know and a good sport but if they had an MD in a G-string or CEO in his undies people would be aghast. It amazes me that this Neanderthal thinking continues. It plays out in disrespect to nurses by IT.” I am totally with Fashion Conscious on this one. It’s not only offensive to nurses, but to women in general. And while some marketing type (male, I am sure) thought it would be a great way to attract all those male CIOs, I am certain plenty of men agree that the look works far better at Hooters than HIMSS. I am not certain of the vendor because someone sent me the picture. If you can identify the vendor, please share.

From H2O Lover: “Re: New Orleans. We should never have HIMSS in NOLA again. The city can’t support this many people!” Sadly I have to agree. I was one of the lucky ones with a hotel room two blocks away and didn’t have to mess with overfull buses or long taxi lines. I know Jazzfest and Mardi Gras bring bigger crowds than HIMSS, though more I assume more folks are local and don’t need hotel rooms. Still, I love New Orleans (even though I didn’t see much of it this visit) and found the convention center much easier to navigate than the Sands in Las Vegas.

Through Thursday morning, total HIMSS attendance was 34,696, which included 13,985 professional attendees. At the same point in 2012, registration was 36,586 with 15,262 professional attendees.

HIMSS annual leadership survey finds that nearly two-thirds of HIT professionals in provider organizations surveyed have already qualified for MU Stage 1 and three-fourths expect to qualify for Stage 2 in 2014. Eighty-seven percent of respondents expect to complete their conversion to ICD-10 by the October 2014 deadline.

I loved the final keynote featuring James Carville and Karl Rove. I don’t think they figured out the answers for the economy, healthcare, or any other issues, but the two were entertaining. Rove was witty and supported his arguments with a lot of data. Carville supported his views with a different set of data, of course, and also sometimes rambled, but had a number of laugh-out-loud one-liners, including:

This ain’t Fox News. You can’t just make stuff up.

Prices on a hospital bill mean as much as a price tag on a rug in Istanbul.

I may not be from Wisconsin, but I am going to milk this thing pretty good.

Wednesday I waited about 30 minutes in the Starbucks line (it was more about catching up with a friend than the coffee.) As we neared the front, a representative from Iatric (Judy, I believe) handed out $2 off coupons for the next 12 people in line if we agreed to wear an Iatric slap band. It was a brilliant and effective marketing idea and I bet I wasn’t the only one who stopped by the Iatric booth to say thanks.

I primarily work out of my house, ,and during the work day, I rarely talk to anyone in person or on the phone. However, I can be a Chatty Cathy and enjoyed bantering in the Starbucks line with Julie from RF Ideas, who happens to wear the same perfume as me and likes the same brand of flats that I was wearing.

Sometimes I forget that not everyone goes to HIMSS to check out the bleeding edge stuff. I talked with the purchasing manager for a large health system who said her primary mission was to find a good source for batteries and power supplies for her COWs. I guess that is why fax vendors still shell out money to exhibit.

I was disappointed that so many of the exhibitors were packing up their booths two hours before the floor closed. I was with a physician friend who was interested in an EHR solution for a niche specialty and had identified the exact vendor he wanted to see. When we got to the booth, everything was boxed up, though the rep did open his laptop and show us a few things. The same guy told us that you can’t “clone” previous chart notes and insert them into new notes because it was a violation of HIPAA. My friend quickly advised him that whether or not cloning was an acceptable practice had nothing to do with HIPAA.

I love to ask other people their impression of the convention and what people were talking about. I was surprised that no one I asked mentioned ICD-10 as a big issue. I am not sure if that’s because organizations already have identified their ICD-10 solution or because ICD-10 is simply not their area of concern. I didn’t find anyone overly impressed with the CommonWell announcement, though I somewhat disagree. The only other big announcement was the Allscripts acquisitions of dbMotion and Jardogs, which wasn’t exactly earth-shattering news.

After five days of HIMSS, I am left with the impression that the industry is moving past the emphasis on core EMR and HIS systems and looking for solutions that make existing systems work better. The exhibit hall was full of vendors offering integration and interoperability solutions. Even more vendors were promoting data analytics and population management tools. Other smaller vendors were demonstrating niche solutions that bolted on or worked behind the scenes with core applications to improve the user experience (such as a more user-friendly user interface) or to add functionality (e.g., clinical decision support tools.) Patient engagement tools were also hot.

I think Farzad had it right in his keynote speech when he noted that the transformation process is far from complete. Organizations have implemented many of the basic EMR functions, but now providers are just beginning to take the collected data and consider ways to use it to improve the care process. Usability is still hindering adoption, so providers mush push vendors to improve usability. At the same time, providers need to develop and embrace more efficient and effective workflows.

E-mail Inga.

From HIMSS 3/7/13–Dr. Jayne’s Update

Wrap-Up

Although I had to leave early and missed today’s keynotes, I unfortunately didn’t miss some major hassles trying to depart. Let this serve as a warning for those of you who haven’t checked out yet. And I mean checked out of your hotels – there are certainly plenty of people who have checked out already and we saw lots of them working the booths.

My hotel bill this morning didn’t show the deposit I paid last September and they wouldn’t believe the printout I had with me. The staff tried to use a calculator to figure out what I would pay but couldn’t get it to add up, so they adjusted the bill manually and charged it through (after they also adjusted off the bag of Fritos that I certainly didn’t pay $5 for on the day I checked in). While I was at the desk trying to resolve the issue, at least five other people tried to check out and the hotel didn’t have them on record as leaving until tomorrow, which was causing problems.

At least I got good story material – while waiting I witnessed what had to be the winning performance in the “Worst Behavior by an Exhibitor” category. A woman (again trying to check out early according to the hotel computers) was trying to settle her bill to two different credit cards, one of which did not belong to her. The very patient clerk split it exactly as she asked, then she turned around and asked to have it split a different way and went into a very long diatribe about her company’s expense policies and how they fired a VP last year for expensing something that wasn’t real, even dropping the company’s name in front of the 20-odd people who were now in line trying to check out while the two available clerks were dealing with increasingly aggravated customers.

Folks in line were grumbling about the hotel staff generally not knowing there was a convention in town and not staffing accordingly. I had been having a pretty pleasant stay until now, but I returned to the room and checked my credit card online, finding they had charged all kinds of different amounts that made no sense, including the $5 Fritos as a separate line item. I was tired of dealing with the desk and will call their accounting department and On Peak tomorrow to get it resolved. I’m sure I’ll also be dealing with our internal expense auditors who will no doubt see the excessive charges coming through the corporate credit card and flag me for interrogation.

I headed for the airport with a smile because a very sweet vendor friend offered me a ride, for which I am grateful. Thanks for taking pity on a non-profit hospital staffer and sharing your car service. Flights were being delayed due to the snow in the north east, so be sure to check your status before you leave. At least with the computers thinking everyone is staying a day longer than they actually are, you shouldn’t have a problem getting a room if your flight is canceled.

The airport was packed with people trying to depart and the limited restaurants in our terminal couldn’t keep up. Seating was at a premium and the empty gate area with no seats whatsoever was a nice touch. I returned home safely (and with my magnificent chocolate shoe unscathed) despite the weather. I know that the rest of HIMSS is in good hands with Inga and Mr. H covering the remaining events.

In honor of all the Shoe Divas out there, I offer a picture from my home town airport. She’s definitely working it with the sneakers complimenting her full-length mink.

From HIMSS 3/7/13 — Inga’s Update

It’s Thursday morning and I am still in New Orleans and excited to see James Carville and Karl Rove. Dr. Mostashari was the keynote this morning and discussed the “why” of Meaningful Use (basically we need to capture the data, share the data, change processes…which in time will result in better outcomes) and strongly emphasized that MU is making impact and there is data to prove it. He knocked the media and “bloggers” a bit, as well as other naysayers who promote the “man bites dog” stories instead of the celebrating the evidence that adoption continues to climb. A couple other notes:

• He expressed shock that so many vendors and providers don’t understand the final 2014 EHR standards
• This year’s interoperability showcase was the “best ever” and involved “real exchange” and not just PowerPoints
• Patients must be more involved in their care and providers must provide patients with their data
• No one should make a profit holding patient data hostage

Mostashari is not only a terrific cheerleader for MU and its success to date, but he also clearly believes in the potential of HIT. I noticed Mr. H tweeted that hearing Farzad brings home the point that like it or not, we’re all in the public health business. He had a great message and it’s unfortunate his keynote was scheduled the day after most people had already left for home.

The crowd for Bill Clinton on Wednesday was insane. I walked in 30 minutes early, just as they were closing the doors and pushing everyone to the overflow section. I was able to stand fairly close to the front, but my body still aches from standing in one spot for two hours. Clinton was as smart and charming as I expected and his overall message was that we’ve got to fix healthcare in order to reign in costs; healthcare needs to be accessible to everyone;  pricing must be transparent; and, everyone needs to become engaged in his own health.

I spent most of the rest of the day Wednesday on the exhibit floor. I probably won’t have time to share all my impressions until tomorrow but I will mention a few things.

I asked someone very familiar with GE why GE was not part of the the CommonWell Alliance. Her impression: GE is traditionally very slow to move on anything, including getting their own products and software to talk.

Several vendors noted the heavy presence of venture capital folks looking at companies.

Loved the green tennis shoes at the Emdeon booth.

Iatric had quite a crowd of people watching their pool shark make a fancy shot while sharing a few details about the company’s data integration products and services. They had a monitor on the opposite side of the booth that was attracting almost as many people as the live view.

I noticed a big crowd of people watching demos of athenacollector.

Practice Fusion’s booth was quite sparse and they had a monitor displaying the number of patients seen using Practice Fusion’s EHR during HIMSS (436,000 and counting) and in 2013 (6.6+ million.)

The woman manning the CHADIS booth stopped me long enough to give me a concise description of their offering: a Web-based screening, diagnostic, and management system for pediatrics that offers online questionnaires for parents. Clinicians use the collected data to manage the care process more efficiently.

Lifepoint Informatics had two engaging guys standing on the edge of the booth (without phones) and greeting people as they walked by. I chatted with them a bit and they handed me two Starbucks cards. Just because. The Lifepoint guys mentioned they had more vendors stopping by and pitching their offerings than prospects asking about the company’s integration services.

I was intrigued by the artist in the Covisint booth and her mural. I wanted to hear what it was all about, but I couldn’t get anyone’s attention.

I took a stroll through the Mobile Health Knowledge Center, which was hopping. There seemed to be a mix of big name vendors as well as some I have never heard of.

There was a long line to tour the Intelligent Hospital, which included an OR, ER, and data center. If you didn’t need to get up close, you could view the set-up through the glass walls.

I chatted with the eClinicalWorks folks for a little bit and asked them why they were not part of the CommonWell announcement. The executive I spoke to didn’t know if they had been asked to participate, but he felt sure they would be willing to look at it if asked, even though they already connect to a variety of other systems. eClinicalWorks always has a modest booth compared to many of their competitors, but they seem to hold their own in terms of traffic.

As Mr. H has noted, way too many exhibitors were busy on their iPhones and iPads. However, I didn’t notice any phone use in a number of booths, including Hospira, Merge, Epic (except for a guy in a Hill-Rom shirt who apparently had walked across the aisle take his call in Epic’s booth rather than Hill-Rom’s), Caradigm, Microsoft, and dbtech.

About the only booth really busy the last couple hours Wednesday was OnBase, which was serving beer. Do these folks look tired or what?

I’ll have one last summary report tomorrow, as well as my impressions on the Carville/Rove session.

E-mail Inga.

From HIMSS 3/6/13

From BD: “Re: finds from the show. Warm and fuzzies all around us.” Funny, I noticed those exact items too. I was picturing a criminal lifer in the back seat of a cab fingering his .45 nervously, but then being scared off upon learning the news that blasting the cab driver might lead to punishment. Apparently New Orleans has a target audience of literate and easily influenced would-be cabbie killers.

From IVANS to Tell You…: “Re: IVANS. ABILITY Network to acquire IVANS. Press release out tomorrow.” Unverified. Both companies are involved with Medicare/Medicaid connectivity.

From Tweeter and the Monkey Man: “Re: Jardogs acquisition by Allscripts. That effectively eliminates Jardogs from 80 percent of all deals as their portal is no longer agnostic. Will a Cerner community buy an Allscripts product? Doubtful. Watch for a rebrand.”  

Wednesday of HIMSS week is always kind of a letdown. Everybody’s tired, sluggish from too much food and drink, and many (or most) of them head out for home later in the day. You could feel the energy sucked out of the exhibit hall, which I left early because my feet were tired (I think I’m coming down with a cold) and I had pretty much seen everything (four trips back and forth the length of the hall today alone.) Above is a typical booth view, with everybody heads-down on their phones.

[ANNOUNCEMENT] We are declaring tomorrow the official bow tie day of #HIMSS13! Let’s give @farzadsbowtie some company!

— HIMSS (@HIMSS) March 7, 2013

I attended an early ONC session that wasn’t interesting enough to hold my admittedly short attention span. At the end, some douchebag PHR vendor CEO charged the microphone in pretending to ask a question by orating endlessly at the ONC panel, then went off in a long, pedantic description of how wonderful his thumb drive PHR product is (including histrionics like waving it around in the air) and claiming it could replace HIEs. If there was one of those bank teller panic buttons, I’m sure one of the ONC people would have pressed it to have him forcibly removed, but without it they could only smile through gritted teeth hoping he would accidentally come up for air so they could interrupt his infomercial. I was afraid I’d get trampled as most of the theater joined me in fleeing for the exits. I wish I had noted the company’s name to award them the appropriate level of public ridicule.

I hate it when people ask their long-winded questions after a presentation. I’d much rather let them use index cards or tweets so I don’t have to listen to their life story instead of the speaker I came to hear. Why are they encouraged to introduce themselves since nobody cares? Why doesn’t someone hold the microphone and yank it away when they refuse to shut up? When I see the self-important folks sprint over top of each other to line up salivating for their turn at the microphone, I make an equally speedy beeline for the door knowing that the interesting part of the session is officially over.

I say it every year, but the best asset of any vendor is the Hyland magician outside their sports bar exhibit. Not only is his magician’s patter amazing (“Wanna see something cool?” which is probably equally good as a pickup line) but he then works the crowd and talks knowledgably about how the OnBase product connects to Epic or Cerner or whatever. There’s no way he could memorize all that, so he must be an employee who just happens to be a magician. Whatever they pay him isn’t enough.

People keep asking me whether Epic should join its competitors in CommonWell. My answer: I wouldn’t, at least not yet. My understanding is that the participants signed a non-binding letter of intent and kicked in up to $2 million each to perform vaguely described interoperability work on an undefined timeline. Set an Outlook reminder for a year from now and let’s see if these large publicly traded companies can actually accomplish anything that benefits patients in ways that existing interoperability and HIEs haven’t. By apparently not inviting Epic initially, at least part of their agenda is pretty clear. The HIMSS timing raises the possibility that it’s more of a marketing program than it seems, to the point that I heard that Allscripts didn’t even sign up until Sunday night (Paul Black wasn’t present at the announcement, maybe for that reason). If they can actually make progress quickly, then Epic can always join at that time since they claim membership will be open to everyone. Being in favor of patient-benefiting interoperability doesn’t necessarily mean signing up for CommonWell, and if the market demands such participation, more companies will get on board.

I heard many people today complaining about having eaten too much very rich food this week. Nobody even wanted the beignets vendors were handing out from their booths today. I was glad that I had a delightful river view tapas dinner with a new friend Tuesday night since I was overloaded with gumbo, etouffee, jambalaya, andouille sausage, fried oysters, and bread pudding. My serum Tabasco levels are off the chart.

A pet peeve: sales guys wearing white lab coats. I don’t think they realize how offensive it is to clinicians (me included) who worked hard to earn the right to wear them in appropriate situations. Maybe next HIMSS I’ll don priest vestments to listen to their pitch.

Bill Clinton drew the largest keynote crowd I’ve seen at a HIMSS conference, totally filling the main hall and darned near overwhelming the huge lobby that served as an overflow area (above). It was like Billstock. I heard that people were so packed inside the hall that they had to clear some of them out because all the blocked aisles were a fire code violation. I guess he was OK in a big picture kind of way, and it’s always fun to get a little bit of inside baseball knowledge from a former president. There were snickers when one of his stories involved “walking down the street with my young intern,” but he clarified that it’s a guy.

Live from the HIStalk Executive Lounge(that’s how Medicomp labeled it) at HIStalkapalooza – attendees issue their predictions for 2013.

Impact Advisors sent over some pictures from their Monday night event at the Grand Isle Restaurant.

Exhibit Hall

Someone from Microsoft apologized here for their employees texting and ignoring booth attendees, so I figured I’d give them another chance. I walked up to the very same station, stood still and made eye contact, and a MSFT guy who was texting walked very slowly away from me, like he wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere except away from me. I was then intercepted and engaged professionally and cordially by Sarah, but then again she’s the healthcare marketing executive and you would expect her to be excellent (and she was.) Still, it was a much better experience.

I assume the Microsofties and others who have minimal booth personality are technical people and you can forgive them for that. At the opposite end of the spectrum was the utterly delightful young lady at the Tellennium booth. I told her there’s no way she’s a real employee since she was just too upbeat and magnetic and she proudly said that she’s a “brand ambassador.” I liked her instantly.

Here’s a shout out to Chelsey from Radianse, who had the best engagement style I’ve seen so far this week. She wasn’t arrogant, forceful, or overly rehearsed, but she also wasn’t scared to go shoulder to shoulder into the details of their product. Nice job. She pulled me in off the aisle I was walking down and actually taught me a few things that were good to know.

Spectralink had a pretty cool “man down” phone that automatically opens a call to hospital security if the wearer either drops it or starts running. The call is initiated in speakerphone mode, so if there’s something going on or the wearer is unable to reach the phone, the person on the other end will hear it.

Salar’s booth was in a terrible location behind the menacing adjacent booth that loomed up into the rafters, but Greg Wilson did a nice job engaging me, probably just happy to see an actual person in the HIMSS no-man’s land the company assigned the company since it started over on HIMSS points after being acquired a couple of times. Our sign was out there, which is what caught my eye in the first place.

I saw our signs out at the booths of PDR Network, VitalWare, Divurgent, and SuccessEHS. Thanks to those sponsors.

Here’s a rare HIMSS sighting of Cerner’s Neal Patterson, who I noticed as he entered the Motion Computing booth this afternoon right after the Bill Clinton break.

Here’s a video of Dr. Jayne playing Quipstar in Medicomp Stadium.

Some of my favorite people are the ESD crew, who not only sported a fun and beautifully green booth that coordinated with our sign, but who were a blast at HIStalkapalooza this week, sponsored last year’s event in Las Vegas, and might reprise that role in the future. They dutifully posed for a picture. The company really is a great supporter of our work, going way beyond just mailing in a check.

This company always makes interesting shirts.

A reader sent this photo of the cool (but kind of creepy) Greenway smart-alecky avatar. The reader says its name is Christo.

I admire this ingenuity and dedication. Strata Decision Technology is a brand new sponsor and came on board too late for us to make them a booth sign. They e-mailed to say they took a picture of someone else’s, added in their own name, made their own sign, and proudly displayed it in their booth. That is just cool and it honestly moved me, like a lot of things our sponsors do to support our work. I dropped by and chatted anonymously with the folks there, who pleasantly explained what they do when I asked (a single financial platform for capital and operational budgeting, financial decision support, performance reporting, etc.) They didn’t mention it, but I see they announced a new StrataJazz customer today, St. Luke’s University Health Network (PA).

Charlie from Orchestrate Healthcare sent over this picture of our front-and-center sign. Nice.

Announcements

• Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center (NY) chooses Allscripts Financial Manager.
• We already stated that the VA’s big $543 million RTLS project involves CenTrak and Intelligent InSites, but CenTrak makes it official.

Mr. H’s Ten Commandments for Booth People

1. I will either turn my phone off and leave it off or, better still, put it away out of easy reach before commencing booth duty. If I can’t stay focused on doing the job I’m well paid to do for a handful of hours without screwing around with my phone, I should quit and let someone more motivated take my place.
2. I will stand at all times, sitting only if accompanying a booth visitor.
3. I will maintain a distance of at least 10 feet from the nearest fellow booth person to avoid the temptation of making co-worker small talk that will discourage visitors from initiating contact.
4. I will not interrupt my fellow booth person who is speaking to a visitor, even though I might be tempted to help them complete a thought or help out with a demo. Trying to follow two people talking over each other is fatiguing.
5. I will suggest that the most engaging of our people work the perimeter, with the assignment of quickly engaging passersby and then quickly handing them off to less-gregarious experts who can take it from there. Only the most personable people should serve in this prospect picket role.
6. I will start conversations with pleasant chit-chat and not an overly rehearsed set of facts or questions no matter how many times I’ve delivered the spiel. Nobody likes to be bombarded immediately.
7. I will approach every person who pauses, looks at anything in the booth, or appears lost. People of various personality types may signal their potential interest in a variety of ways.
8. I will have a 10-second answer ready for the inevitable “what does your company do” question.
9. I will not discriminate how I engage with visitors on the basis of job title or organization except perhaps in the case of a direct competitor. You never know who will be an influencer, either in their current role or down the road, and my time isn’t so valuable that I shouldn’t speak at least briefly to anyone who is interested.
10. I will remember that visitors have walked miles and are probably carrying several pounds worth of vendor giveaways, so if I convince them to watch a demo, I will personally make sure they have a seat and a place to lay down their bag.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

From HIMSS 3/6/13–Dr. Jayne’s Update

HIMSS Update

Day 3 at HIMSS and this morning’s run revealed the Harrah’s Employee Health Center. I wonder what platform they use? The weather started to warm up today and it was downright muggy by noon. I spent most of the morning catching up with old friends. It still feels a little strange to have friends that you are very close to and talk with daily but only see once a year at HIMSS or some other meeting. I’m grateful for the opportunity for actual face-to-face interaction especially when beignets are involved.

I spent a good chunk of time on the show floor today, looking for the next big thing. I was happy to see several vendors with their HIStalk sponsor signs prominently placed. It’s always fun to see my avatar smiling back at me and I hope everyone appreciates the hand cramps from all the signing. Thanks to Surgical Information Systems, Orchestrate Healthcare, and Billian’s HealthDATA for sponsoring us and for displaying your signs with pride. I saw a lot of ladies in flip flops today and can only assume they were dancing the night away at HIStalkapalooza and are therefore recovering.

I attended a great lunch and learn session dealing with interoperability and data exchange. I was glad to see a speaker who was even more gloom and doom than I sometimes am about interface and exchange projects. His summary: however difficult you think this is going to be, without the right kind of planning it’s going to be way more difficult and complicated. I’ll be sharing his presentation with several of our internal customers as I try to explain why moving patient data isn’t the same as driving a wheelbarrow of mulch from the hospital’s front landscaping to the back entrance.

One of the cooler things I saw today was PatientTouch. Their “Mobile Care Orchestration” solution looks as good as it sounds. Their iPhone-based solution allows real-time access to care plans, patient lists, medication administration, alerts, and a whole host of other data. They’re partnering with some big folks (including my emergency department vendor) and our nurses would love to get their hands on something like that soon.

I also enjoyed visiting with the folks at Apixio, who knew how to handle a prospect and have a slick-looking solution to extract data from clinical narratives. I’m looking forward to getting it in front of my care managers to see what they think.

Not surprisingly, Judy Faulkner responded to yesterday’s CommonWell Health Alliance announcement by stating it’s a thinly-veiled attempt to attack Epic. I didn’t hear much speculation about it today, but then again I was pretty busy trying to visit 8,000 booths in just a few hours.

I was supposed to meet up with a group of brilliant physician informaticists tonight, but was sidetracked by a crisis at the hospital. Instead of exchanging ideas with great minds, I was sitting on a conference call providing leadership support while the team brought a critical system back up. Not that I added much to the team’s efforts, but I wanted to be there for any escalation requests that needed to be carried up the chain. I hope Inga was able to make it to some gatherings without me.

I’m flying home today to make a board meeting early tomorrow morning, so this will be my last post from HIMSS13. It’s been real, it’s been fun, and most of all, it’s been the Big Easy.

From HIMSS 3/6/13–Inga’s Update

I started my Tuesday morning at the keynote session with Eric Topol, who I found to be a great speaker. He discussed the potential of new technologies, many of which are available directly to consumers, and which have the potential to transform healthcare and save money.  I’ve been a little skeptical in the past that consumers will actually embrace technology to monitor their own health, but Topol showed some options that are extremely simple to use and allow patients to track and monitor their health in the comfort of their homes instead of the doctor’s office, the hospital, or a sleep lab.

I think that by the third day of HIMSS, flip flops are totally acceptable.

I hit the exhibit floor next and began looking for caffeine. Thank you Perceptive for the coffee and the beignet.

HIMSS has a number of theaters and kiosks set up in different areas of the exhibit floor. The Meaningful Use Experience section was at the far end of the hall and didn’t seem to be getting too much traffic.

Many, many sponsors, including Access, were displaying their HIStalk signs, which we appreciate.

I noticed that Caradigm, which was displaying a sponsor sign, was strategically located across from GE and next to Microsoft.

GE was attracting a crowd by giving attendees a chance to simulate a flight over New York City. It’s fun to watch.

I know I mentioned this last year but I like the Caretech booth, which uses black and white photos on its outer walls. Definitely stands out amongst the flash and colors of almost every other booth.

I have tried to limit the number of trinkets I’ve picked up this year but I figured I had enough room for this key ring with dangling clogs from Forcare, a Dutch company that offers interoperability solutions.

Kudos to Matt with Yseop, who stepped in the aisle to draw me into his small booth and delivered a nice pitch. Pronounced, “easy-op,” the company has rules engines that take data from a variety of formats and converts it into a narrative. They are just entering healthcare so they couldn’t show me much clinical content, but I liked what I saw.

Thank you to Level 3, who handed me the cookie I am now eating for breakfast and gave me a chance to register for an iPad Mini.

The Meditech booth is somewhat off to the side, but was reasonably busy as I passed by.

One of the ladies from Siemens stopped me long enough to take a swipe of my badge as part of their effort to raise money for Hope for the Warriors. Siemens will be donating up to $10,000 to the charity, whose mission is to enhance the quality of life for post 9/11 service members and their families.

The caramelized pecans from Novell are worth stopping for.

I found the outside wall of the InterSystems booth pretty eye-catching.

I was unable to get a good picture, but Suzanne in the Orion booth was sporting some pretty hot patent leather pumps.

I enjoyed chatting with Ken Harvey of TerraWi, which helps organization secure their mobile devices. Ken is a former professional football player who spent time with the Redskins and Cardinals and delivered a great elevator pitch on the company and its services.

I loved these fun ribbons that Liason Technologies was offering.

I think the ladies at Onyx are vying for the Hottest Booth Babe award.

I checked out PatientSafe Solutions, which has an all-in-one mobile platform that supports communication, med administration, care interventions, alerts and more. It uses either an iPhone 5 or iPod Touch and works with a hospital’s existing EHR.  I thought it was so slick that I made Dr. Jayne check it out as well. She, too, gave it a thumbs up.

This display at the Panasonic booth tells a great story in a simple way.

Both Allscripts and dbMotion were displaying signs saying they were pleased to have joined the Allscripts family.

I may need to make time for the Bantec booth today, which is offering chair massages.

In general there seem to be fewer gimmicks this year to draw in crowds. While there are a few magicians, I haven’t noticed any famous chefs whipping up fabulous appetizers or people dressed in ridiculous costumes. I definitely don’t miss that creepy knight from years past. That being said, there were a few roulette wheels and I won half a pound of chocolate playing Wheel of Fortune at the Pepid booth. Seth at Pepid did a good job asking my friend and me our backgrounds prior to delivering his succinct elevator pitch.

I saw several Regina Holliday jackets, including this one that Amy Gleason was wearing. I love the individualized messages.

I strolled through the very busy Epic booth, primarily to check out the art. It was heavy on animal themes this year.

The crowd at the CommonWell Health Alliance booth was deep with people trying to get a handle on what the new organization is all about.

Philips was hosting a crowd of folks, presumably all from the same country, who required an interpreter during the demonstration. It’s fascinating to walk through the exhibit hall and hear so many different languages.

Today’s agenda includes Bill Clinton (!), more exhibits (I don’t think I got past the 6000’s yesterday), the Interoperability Showcase, and possibly one other session. Off to seize the day!

E-mail Inga.

From HIMSS 3/5/13

From Strange Bedfellows: “Re: Allscripts acquisition of Jardogs. Healthland is now effectively partnered with Allscripts to provide its Stage 2 MU patient portal. Must be the era of friendlier inpatient HIS vendors.”

From GE Going Gone: “Re: GE. I am sure you have your hands full at HIMSS but I didn’t see this news reported in your roundup. GE sold its EMR business (GE Strategic Sourcing) to Gores Group. Gores Group is a private equity firm known for buying assets in need of turnaround at low prices; they specialize in corporate carveouts.” GE has sold its strategic sourcing operation, which sounds from the announcement like outsourced EMR and revenue cycle management services.

Here’s the Medicomp video of HIStalkapalooza. Everybody looks good. Not to be repetitive, but thanks to everyone involved, especially Dave Lareau and Medicomp for making it happen. I met Medicomp founder and MEDCIN engine inventor Peter Goltra the other day and I was like a teenager meeting Justin Bieber.

Thanks to Judy and Carl for dropping by HIStalkaplooza. Judy even graciously posed with her trophy (I’ll list all the awards when I get time). Also among the folks I saw there were Farzad Mostashari, former National Coordinator Rob Kolodner MD, someone I haven’t met but need to Regina Holliday, and many other industry luminaries and really nice people, especially those who either already knew me by sight or who I shyly introduced myself to during the event who made me feel less nervous.

A nice moment captured by @Sphere3CEO.

Our reigning HIStalk Queen Sarah Van Dyke outside her palace.

Here’s a video of the CommonWell announcement. Inga and I spent some time with Jonathan Bush on the show floor Monday afternoon and he said he was surprised that John Hammergren and Neal Patterson were pretty funny on the stage, at least for billionaires.

Congrats to Tim and Inga: Social analytics reveal @histalk as a favorite among hospital CIOs bit.ly/XUyjoO

— Rob Cronin (@robcroninNY) March 5, 2013

Thanks to Rob Cronin at WCG, which performed a study of social media activity. HIStalk was the most popular healthcare IT source among health system CIOs, trailing only The New York Times and NPR. Very cool – thanks for doing this and for letting me know the result.

I was talking to a guy in the hall today who was in a Hampton Inn about 20 minutes out of town because it’s all he could get. He said the cab line was two hours long at 8:30 a.m. He jogged over to the adjoining highway and flagged down a cab, only to be chased by several line-waiters angry that he got a cab before them even though the cab wasn’t going to stop at the hotel anyway. It’s getting real Lord of the Flies out there.

In another example of New Orleans workforce motivation, nobody had bothered to remove the “do not drink” signs from the water fountains in the restroom even though the boil water alert had been lifted 24 hours previously.

No thanks to Allscripts, an HIStalk sponsor who took out two others today with their acquisition of dbMotion and Jardogs. Just kidding – acquisitions are a natural step as companies progress, as I’ve seen first hand by watching the remarkable number of sponsors who have been acquired, very often by other sponsors. We don’t lost many sponsors and acquisitions are by far the #1 reason. We enjoy the result of their accomplishments and like to think we had a tiny, tiny part in them.

Speaking of Allscripts, a Florida judge denies the company’s request to force a class action lawsuit brought against it by unhappy MyWay customers to arbitration, a ruling that allows the lawsuit to continue. The law firm representing the Florida medical practice that claims a forced switch from MyWay to the Allscripts Pro EHR will cost it a lot of money and that the company’s promise of Meaningful Use and ICD-10 capabilities were broken.

Epic says that despite the claims made by the co-opetition members of the CommonWell Health Alliance, nobody asked Epic to join the group that’s made up of the publicly traded companies losing business to the privately held Epic. Epic President Carl Dvorak says the group is attempting to make its members look like leaders instead of the followers they are and for that reason, he doubts Epic will join.

Exhibit Hall

I’ll make a small confession: when we cruise the exhibit hall finding interesting things to write about, we like to check in with our sponsors, especially those who displaying the autographed HIStalk sign that we offer them for free (we really, truly appreciate that level of support – thank you). Sunquest is among those who put theirs front and center in Booth #911 (congratulations to whoever wisely snagged that easily remembered number). They’ve had some fine speakers in their booth, and if you’re interested in Meaningful Use for the lab, they’ll be presenting in Booth 149, Meaningful Use Kiosk 85, at 9:45 a.m. Wednesday.

I’m like those Notre Dame football players that have to touch the overhead wall as they head out the tunnel onto the field – I can’t leave a HIMSS conference without caressing the cool carts from Enovate. This one sports a peds theme, but it still has the smooth, supple curves that I can’t keep my hands off of.

QlikView has a cool booth with a giant eye floating above it. Thanks for putting out the HIStalk sign. I’ve received a few raves from users of that product. They’re a new sponsor that I’ll talk more about later.

Good looking booth, Infor, and thanks for putting out your HIStalk sign.

I got only an over-the-shoulder look at GetWellNetwork’s platform, but I liked what I saw.

Partners Consulting, a Caradigm partner, gave me a good demo of a product they’ve built on top of what’s now called Caradigm Intelligence Platform (formerly Amalga).

Our own CIO Unplugged Ed Marx played Medicomp’s Quipstar on the show floor to benefit his charity of choice. I wasn’t able to stay to see if he won, but he was looking good up there. I met Ed in person for the first time last night at HIStalkapalooza and he’s the real deal.

Thanks, HealthMEDX, for putting our sign front and center. We appreciate it.

Do you suppose it was coincidence that this vendor person just happened to stroll down the main aisle wearing next to nothing? Do you care?

One of my favorite people to visit during the HIMSS conference is Mark Johnston of forms management software vendor Access. Once we’re finished talking healthcare IT, we move to a more serious topic: barbeque. Mark’s a on a prize-winning barbeque team, and every year we try to devise ways to work around policies prohibiting him from cranking out brisket and ribs from the smoker at or near the convention center. We branched out in a different direction today, discussing the variants of jambalaya, which his team also makes on the circuit. Green is my favorite color and his team’s shirts are a nice shade of it.

My third-favorite product of the day was the MioCARE Android-powered, semi-ruggedized tablet with a built-in 2D barcode reader. Not only was it very cool (bright green, highly ergonomic) it can run a wide range of apps using SAP’s EMR Unwired middleware (which I admit I know nothing about). They told me it costs $879, but given that you can wipe it down and drop it, it’s probably worth the difference for patient care use.

My second-favorite product of the day was ReadyDock’s tablet sterilizing system (it also charges and syncs). You’ll notice a hand on the device because everybody within arm’s reach was caressing it like an adorable child, including at one point when I was trying to slyly take a photo, THREE sets of hands, one of them belonging to a prospect and the other two attached to the loving company people. This bad boy will disinfect an iPad in 60 seconds. ReadyDock just released the CleanMe app (right) that reminds users to clean their iPad, includes a training video on cleaning, and keeps stats on the process.  I think this is brilliant.

My favorite product of the day, although I admit I saw only a 15-minute overview and demo, was BluePrint HealthCare IT’s Microsoft CRM-based Care Navigator tool that provides full visibility by both caregivers and family. It keeps all caregivers up to date with alerts, like “just registered in ED.” Users can do a lot of the patient management right from Outlook. I’ll take a second opinion if someone with more expertise than me wants to evaluate it.

Winner of the Most Fun Booth People is SynaptiCore, which does EHR implementation and support work. I heard their people hooting an hollering down the aisle and they are a ton of fun. They have a slot machine, beads, and a great sense of humor.

• Microsoft people are usually jerks in the exhibit hall and today was no exception. I strode up in front of a couple of Windows 8 devices and patiently waited while one employee directly in front of me was texting madly. His adjacent co-worker looked up long enough to glare, then walked a few feet away and started texting himself. Vendors, I’m telling you to confiscate mobile devices because I swear at least 20 percent of reps in the hall were totally absorbed in their smartphones and ignoring passers-by. If your people are under 50, they can’t go more than 30 seconds without doing something pointless on your dime.
• Hitach had a coffee bar and charging station.
• One vendor gave me very cool booth swag, an Apple TV, but made me promise not to tell where I got it since it was supposed to be for elite customers. Very cool.
• Philips Enterprise Imaging had a big crowd.
• Streamline Health had our sign out – thanks.
• I stopped by one booth that had five employees on duty, one of them an SVP. I stood looking at monitors for three minutes hinting that I was interested and none of them came up for air from their intra-company conversation to pay me the slightest attention. A sign said “Ask for a demo,” so I guess they took that as literal. HIMSS has the most expensive employee lounges anywhere out there on the show floor.
• An imaging vendor had six employees in the booth and zero customers. Two were screwing around with their phones and the other four had set up shop at a table and were in deep conversation, oblivious to anyone who might intrude, like a prospect.
• 3M’s booth has the deepest carpet I’ve ever seen. It was like walking on a very soft beach.
• ICA – had our sign out. Thanks. I recommended them as being worth checking out to someone asking for potential HIE vendors, along with some other HIE sponsors.
• Liberty Solutions is giving away USB-powered bladeless fans. Cool (no pun intended).
• I asked someone at patient content vendor Healthwise to explain what they do, which he did quite nicely. They’re one of few non-profits on the floor and that’s reason enough to drop by and say hello (and an HIStalk sponsor at that).
• CareCloud looked good on the monitor, but nobody took the cue that I’d like a look so I moved on.
• Greenway had a big crowd looking at PrimeSUITE. They had a live avatar working the crowd that was kind of cool.
• I saw Bob Lorsch from MMRGlobal in RelayHealth’s booth talking to one of their employees. Not sure what that was about.
• Hannah from Halfpenny drew me in and gave a perfect answer to the “what do you do” question. They had our sign out, too.
• Healthspot had an interesting looking consumer virtual visit portal, but I couldn’t get their attention.
• Joshua from Ping Identity gave a nice overview of cloud-based security when I asked.
• Infor had an interesting coffee machine and popcorn.
• Meditech’s booth was well off the beaten track and nothing much was going on there.
• Siemens had a blinding white booth and a big coffee bar.
• Innovative Healthcare Solutions had our sign out and I chatted with Pat Stewart a bit.
• API Healthcare gave an overview of Healthcare Workforce Information Exchange, which allows facilities to collect information about each employee on a single screen. It looked cool and customers are apparently saving money with it.
• VersaSuite had our sign out and gave a good elevator pitch on their full, Microsoft-based hospital information system for smaller facilities. The guy said they’re doing well and picking up business from hospitals that regret their first EMR decision.
• Virtelligence had a long list of available Epic expertise they offer.
• Liaison Healthcare Informatics gave me an overview of their cloud-based data transformation and exchange tools.
• Versus did a demo of their RFID-powered handwashing station that monitors compliance and allows following up with low-performing units or individuals.
• Epic’s sign on the opposite side of the booth I saw yesterday says they have 80 million patients “covered on the Care Everywhere network” and that a third of the 3.4 million monthly exchange transactions it manages are with non-Epic systems. (in other words, they are already exchanging data outside Epic even though competitors claim otherwise).
• Imprivata’s HIPAA compliant messaging tool  Cortext looked cool, but I couldn’t get anyone’s attention to show it to me.
• Lifepoint Informatics had our sign out, gave a great elevator pitch, and handed me a $5 Starbucks gift card, which I may confer on someone else since I don’t drink coffee.
• CHADIS, a questionnaire app that I’m too tired to look up at the moment but its something to do with special needs peds, was well presented by its MD founder in the booth.
• MModal’s booth was super busy. They had our sign out.
• SIS had our sign out as well, although I couldn’t steer the rep into showing me anything. He seemed puzzled why a non-surgery hospital employee should care, a point that is valid but that also kept them from letting me tell you about their product.
• Vocera had a lot of people visiting.
• I get the Aprima red vests now – there’s a poker table on the side of the booth I didn’t see.
• e-MDs had our sign out – thanks.

Announcements

• Iowa Health System chooses Security Audit Manager from Iatric Systems.
• Epic and other EHR vendors will use Nuance’s Clinical Language Understanding.
• TeraRecon is demoing its iNtuition enterprise image management solution to support enterprise-wide vendor-neutral viewing of medical images at HIMSS this week. The company also announced that it will provide its expertise to Fujifilm.
• Adventist Health will turn over its revenue management services to Cerner.
• PatientPoint and Miami Children’s Hospital are named winners of the Microsoft Health Users Group 2013 Innovation Awards.
• Orion Health announces Version 2.0 of its Direct Messaging product suite, also announcing mobile apps for remotely managing its Rhapsody integration engine.
• DrFirst announces that e-prescribing of controlled substances rose over 400 percent in 2012.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Allscripts Acquires dbMotion, Jardogs

Allscripts announced this morning that it has acquired HIE technology vendor dbMotion and patient engagement solutions vendor Jardogs to extend its reach across the healthcare continuum. Details were not announced, although a financial publication from dbMotion’s home base of Israel placed that transaction’s value at $235 million.

We ran a reader’s rumor report of the Jardogs transaction on HIStalk last week.

From HIMSS 3/4/13–Dr. Jayne’s Update

HIMSS Update

Day 2 at HIMSS and there has been a lot going on. I was able to enjoy the still-sleeping city on my early morning jog although there were still some folks out from the night before, which is a little sad. There’s something about New Orleans that creates an “IT Staffers Gone Wild” atmosphere even above and beyond that created by Las Vegas. Maybe it’s the free-flowing liquor or maybe it’s the Bourbon Street establishments offering a variety of services that you probably can’t buy in other cities. I did find a potential breakfast venue for Inga, however.

While Mr. H and Inga covered the ONC Town Hall, I decided to brave the exhibit hall when it opened. I was able to enjoy this jazz combo while I waited, although they took a break right when I decided to take a photo. Note that the trumpet player is using the bottom of a plunger as a mute. The security team was quite vigilant about making sure no one other than exhibitors was admitted until right at 1 p.m. As I watched the last-minute race of vendors trying to make it to their booths on time, I was glad they at least had to weave through the throngs of attendees as punishment. Punctuality is apparently dead as there were scores of reps coming in at the last minute.

Logistics are still an issue. I was surprised by the full trash cans even with the hall just opening. Some areas had stacks of packing boxes out in the main aisle. The water was still suspect this morning, but I had grabbed some extra bottles from my hotel rather than wait in long lines for expensive water at the convention center. I’m always sensitive to the amount of trash that a meeting like this produces and am disappointed that there are no recycling bins in the exhibit hall, at least not that I could find. I did see clearly marked bins upstairs, however.

The hall was packed and I spent a couple of hours getting the lay of the land and plotting my strategy for the rest of the week. I liked the pediatric-designed computer carts at Enovate and the booth staff was not only engaging but well informed. There were big crowds at the Cerner booth and also at Healthagen (although I learned that most of the people at the latter were employees who were joking about having to do introductions to each other to fill their time). There were a couple of magicians, but no contortionists or splash painters like we’ve seen in the past. The overall tone is pretty calm and I only saw a handful of booths handing out Mardi Gras beads, which I would have thought would be everywhere given the venue.

I was excited by what Tellenium has to offer (management of telecom services for large organizations) but disappointed that they launched right into their pitch without finding out who I was or why I was stopping by. They did have a claw grabber machine where you could try to win prizes, but I was unable to score the pink t-shirt that called to me.

One highlight of the afternoon was competing in Medicomp’s Quipstar game show, although I finished last due to a tricky “double or nothing” question where I buzzed in too early. As a result, I now have the ICD-10 code for trauma sustained while parachuting burned into my brain. Too bad I don’t see much of that in the emergency department.

The other significant highlight of the afternoon was a lovely gift from sponsor PatientPay. They’re clearly reading (and not just skimming) because they delivered the beautiful chocolate shoe I was wishing for on Valentine’s Day. The picture does not do it justice and I’m pretty sure I clapped my hands with glee and squealed like a little girl when I opened it. It is magnificent and I do really appreciate the gift. Thank you!

Monday night of course was HIStalkapalooza, and thanks again to Medicomp for sponsoring. I was pleased with the number of attendees who jumped on the bowling shirt bandwagon. Full credit goes to the team from ESD who not only had matching Converse All Star shoes and bowling shirts but also the shoes had the ESD logo created in crystals on the toes. I didn’t get a pic but I think Inga did so, hopefully she’ll post. My favorite attendee outfit was the pink poodle skirt with saddle shoes. I especially enjoyed the details, including the poodle on your sock.

My heart went pitter patter when my bowtie-wearing crush appeared in person to collect his HISsies award. He’s sporting the “Blue Button: Sequester Edition” lapel pin.

Speaking of HISsies, Jonathan Bush did his usual hilarious job of presenting the awards and stripped off his athenahealth bowling shirt to reveal something truly psychedelic. I felt sorry for the youngsters who stood right in front of our anonymous selves during the shoe contest and announced that they were leaving to attend the Impact Advisors party. They missed the whole thing. They also missed the appearance of Judy Faulkner and Carl Dvorak – Judy looked amazing and was very gracious to an admirer trying to take her picture.

After the awards, the bowling tournament switched into high gear as did the Zydeco band. I knew, however, when the hula hoops appeared on the dance floor that it was time for me to go so I could rest up for the long day tomorrow. A note at the hotel revealed the boil order is no more, for which I’m grateful.