From HIMSS 3/5/13 –Inga’s Update

Tuesday morning came particularly early today after a long night of HIStalkapalooza fun. The Medicomp crew did an outstanding job, as did our emcees Lindsay Miller from RelayHealth, James Aita and Dave Lareau from Medicomp, and Jennifer Lyle from Software Testing Solutions. Thanks also to our shoe and fashion judges Timur Tugberk (DrFirst), Matt Holt (Health 2.0), and Jennifer Dennard (Billians). The attire was a fun mix of bowling chic, serious chic, and a few vendor-logoed t-shirts. And plenty of fun shoes!

I tried the Typhoon Jayne and Hurricane Inga, but quickly decided both would be a bad choice for a long evening. The food was yummy, especially the jambalaya. I haven’t heard who won the bowling tournament but everyone seemed to having fun. The Medicomp team will need to advise us on the final number of attendees but I am sure it was north of 700. And, the music was definitely hopping. I didn’t take too many pictures but I have seen a few on Twitter (#histalkaplooza if you want to check them out). I will find a few good ones to share.

Jonathan Bush and Farzard Mostashari had what appeared to be a serious discussion.

I have noticed several Regina Holliday jackets, both at HIStalkapalooza and at the convention center. She was in attendance and had many admirers saying hello.

The ESD folks collectively won best bowling shoes, which included a sparkly version of their logo on the toes.

More than a few fabulous shoes were removed from tired feet late into the evening.

I went to the ONC Town Hall Monday afternoon, which was just OK. I was hoping for breaking news, but it was more of an introduction to some of the ONC leadership team. I spent the afternoon walking the exhibit hall before watching my BFF do a fabulous job playing Quipstar at the Medicomp booth.

Thanks QlikView for having your HIStalk sign out. Many other sponsors found a spot for a sign as well, which we appreciate. Be sure to tell these folks thanks for supporting HIStalk.

I noticed several overflowing trashcans, leading me to believe the convention center may have a shortage of workers.

Hot shoes outside the athenahealth booth.

Another hot look, though I can’t imagine how her whole body felt by the end of the day.

Really? Hmm.

I did more cruising than I actually taking time for demos, though I did see a quick run-through of CareCloud’s newest EHR version.

I got a pedometer from the Optum booth. I only had about 2,500 steps by the time I left the exhibit floor, but I only wore it a couple of hours. Optum is donating money to charity for every step logged.

Generally most booths seemed quite busy throughout the afternoon. I didn’t pick up too much swag, but the OnBase chocolate was super yummy. HealthPort was giving out beignets but told me they could not give me one since I am not a provider. Did I mention it was a beignet and not an iPad???

Attendees had multiple transportation options after a long day.

I’m out the door to hit the opening session, then will spend some time digger deeper at the exhibit hall. Dr. Jayne has us all lined up for parties tonight, but I may need extra caffeine to survive.

E-mail Inga.

From HIMSS 3/4/13

There’s no way I can catch up on the whole day since I’m starting at nearly 11 p.m. post-HIStalkapalooza time and the hotel Internet isn’t exactly screaming, so I will follow up later. Thanks to Medicomp Systems and their crew for putting together a great event; to our hosts, judges, contestants, and other participants; to Ross and Kym Martin for a great musical opening; for Jonathan Bush for another memorable HISsies presentation; and to everyone who came out to Rock ‘n’ Bowl. Lots of people were involved in arranging transportation, running the registration and coat check areas, setting up for the band, and working together to make sure everyone had the best time possible. We had some interesting attire, amazing shoes, and some truly lovely ladies and gentlemen both on the stage and off.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold sponsor Strata Decision Technology. The company offers cloud-based financial analytics, business intelligence, and decision support, having integrated with EHRs (Cerner, Epic) and ERP (Lawson) systems. They do the integration and hosting, meaning the only IT time required is a couple of hours to coordinate. Customers get a single database and an integrated platform for operational budgeting, capital planning, financial forecasting, strategic planning, service line planning, cost accounting, contract analytics, and performance management. Provider organizations need to understand and manage true cost of care and margins that span episodes of care, service likes, and patient populations and Strata’s tools provide that capability. They’re not a recent addition to the analytics/BI landscape – they’ve been around 15 years. Customers include Cleveland Clinic, Hopkins, Yale, Allina, Duke, Legacy, Spectrum, and Intermountain. and they announced Mission Health (NC) as a new customer today from HIMSS. Thanks to Strata Decision Technology for supporting HIStalk.

I didn’t turn up any Strata videos on YouTube, but here’s one of CEO Dan Michelson (formerly of Allscripts) talking about a non-profit he started that hosts an annual benefit concert to send children who have been abused and neglected to overnight camp. The organization just received the “Innovation in Philanthropy Award” from the Make it Better Foundation.

Opening Session

There didn’t seem to be as much of the self-congratulatory HIMSS hoopla this time and I kind of missed that, to be honest. No looping slides listing committee members, fellows, etc. The brought in a high school marching band that seemed pretty good, but the airplane hangar acoustics make it hard to say for sure since all I heard were drums.

In an ironic moment, the teleprompter died while Willa Fields was speaking, forcing her to go back to paper.

The mayor gave a good speech. I don’t know what he’s like as mayor and he didn’t mention the fact that we were still under a boil water advisory (lifted soon after), but he was an engaging speaker and city cheerleader. He represented well. He mentioned that the city is investing $3 billion in a health complex for the VA, university hospitals, and some other players that I didn’t write down. It seemed confusing to be talking about spending all that money in the attempt to create healthcare jobs, but at the same time to be urging that we bend the cost curve (unless he meant up instead of down). Healthcare may create jobs, but it’s a drain on the economy, not a sustainable economic engine, and I found his message confusing. Healthcare can be maddening in that way as an odd mix of community pride, employment, comfort, and yet a crippling cost that someone has to pay.

The CEO of Ochsner was up next. He was pretty good, saying that only insurance companies have all the patient data from all locations, meaning we don’t really know our patients as well as they do. He pitched the idea that vendors need to not only cut their costs, but be on the hook to get paid only when their systems improve productivity. I think I would have put Bill Clinton in the opening keynote slot, but there’s a big HIMSS announcement coming Tuesday about their partnership with his foundation so they have him on Wednesday’s agenda.

Educational Sessions

Maybe it’s just me, but the educational component of the conference seems to be getting less and less interesting. I automatically don’t go to sessions that involve a vendor presenter, only because that always seems too much like a living white paper. Some sessions didn’t appeal to me, and one I attended didn’t appear to have any rigor at all behind it.  I’ve served on the Annual Conference Education Committee in years past and I have to assume that they just don’t get that many submissions, leaving them no choice but to accept some iffy ones. It doesn’t help that they’ll be soliciting presentations in just a few days for next year’s conference, with the ridiculous year-long lead time. No wonder there’s nothing innovative being discussed – everything is at least a year old by definition.

I went to a VA-DoD session on iEHR, but it was more of an overview than anything newsworthy. Theresa Cullen, MD, MS of the VA was an engaging and personable speaker and I found her really likeable. She talked about the VA’s informatics programs, their role as the government’s living lab, and mentioned some of their research work, including in human factors. She described the Janus legacy viewer that will straddle the VA and DoD systems, which sounds almost like an HIE. They are still working through identity management problems.

The ONC Town Hall was fun because the ONC folks introduced themselves and their backgrounds and showed a more human side than you might typically picture.

There were a lot of bow ties being worked everywhere. It’s Farzad’s brand and it’s catching on.

Exhibits

Liaison Technologies was distributing fun add-on badge ribbons, as demonstrated by a reader’s photo.

An de-identified Dr. Jayne playing Quipstar in the Medicomp booth with her security detail. She didn’t win, but she was sassy and fun and she answered some tough questions. Everybody loves Dr. Jayne. Medicomp donated money to the charities designated by the players.

Here’s the Kaiser Permanente press release announcing the HISsies win of George Halvorson for the HIStalk Healthcare IT Lifetime Achievement award and Kaiser’s repeat win as best provider user. George’s son Seth and daughter-in-law accepted the award at HIStalkapalooza on his behalf. It’s nice recognition of both George and KP.

The big news of the day and maybe the whole conference was the formation of the Commonwell Health Alliance trade association by EHR rivals Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, Greenway, and McKesson (and its RelayHealth unit). They say they’ll promote data exchange among their systems and invite other vendors to join them. Notably missing from the list is Epic, whose commercial success surely had a role in bringing together its competitors.

Valence Health had a cool exhibit featuring a full-size school bus along with miniatures to give away. They had our booth sign out – thanks!

A very cool stuffed dragon giveaway by Workbeast. I got one, although I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do with it.

The Aprima folks were sporting red vests. That’s our booth sign on the tabletop in green, signed by Inga, Dr. Jayne, and me.

Ladies from HITEKS giving out Mardi Gras beads. They were nice to pose for a picture.

Plantronics was giving out (and wearing) fun hats.

Booth observations:

• Teletracking had our HIStalk sign out and gave me a bendy stress reliever thing.
• Awarepoint was giving out cool water bottles. They had our sign out too, along with a decent crowd.
• Ascendian was mixing real margaritas (or so they said, anyway) but you had to get a coupon from a rep.
• iMDsoft had cookies and coffee. They gave me a demo of their anesthesia management system on an iPad and it was impressive. Best demo I’ve seen so far this week.
• Health Catalyst had a brilliant idea in giving reps iPad Minis preloaded with slides explaining the company. That allowed them to do a personal overview from anywhere one on one. That was quite effective.
• HyTrust had cookies.
• CPSI’s magician was wickedly funny, giving some competition to his always excellent Hyland OnBase counterpart outside their sports bar exhibit.
• Merge Healthcare had fresh fruit out, so I had an apple. That was a nice touch.
• Vitera had our sign out – thanks. Friendly folks there.
• MediQuant also had a good magician.
• Ingenious Med gave me a good, quick overview of their charge capture system.
• Greythorn had our sign out.
• Cerner had a big crowd.
• Beacon Partners had our sign out and the folks were deep in discussions with several groups.
• McKesson employees had their “Commonwell – we’re in” right after the announcement.
• First Databank had fancy coffee with flavorings. I don’t drink coffee, but it looked good.
• QuadraMed’s booth was set up nicely, with a living room setup on one side.
• A sign on Epic’s booth indicated that 66 percent of Stage 7 hospitals are on Epic, along with 100 percent of Stage 6 clinics. Judy was working the booth as usual.
• Passport Health did a nice job engaging me as I passed by and I noticed they had our sign out.
• The Allscripts boot was large and right across from Epic’s. Nice job. I like the green.
• MMRGlobal had a reasonable sized booth in a good location. I saw Bob Lorsch there.
• Healthagen had a two-story booth, one of not too many of those.
• Novell had someone making a variety of those hot cinnamon nuts you see at ball games. If your booth is near theirs, you no doubt got tired of the smell.
• SSI Group had their ladies dressed “Simply Irresistible” style, with pulled-back hair and bright red lipstick.
• Sandlot Solutions had our sign out and was using a projector to shine images on a large piece of clear glass. It’s hard to explain, but it was interesting.
• Rich Garcia from NextGate gave me a nice pitch when I feigned ignorance of their EMPI product. He played it perfectly based on my expressed interest.
• Alert and their folks in red striped white pants were there again, which always surprises me since I assume their EHR isn’t doing much here despite its European presence.
• Certify Data Systems had our sign out and was offering to donate $10 to the YMCA of New Orleans to each person who signed  runner’s bib.
• Orchestrate Healthcare had our sign out. Lots of people were meeting in their booth.
• Quest/Care360 was offering pretzels with cheese sauce. They had our sign out.
• Wellsoft had our sign out – thanks.

Announcements

• API Healthcare announces The Healthcare Workforce Information Exchange, which allows health systems with multiple venues to share employee information across facilities.
• Texas Children’s Hospital announces a 15 percent reduction in unnecessary x-rays for pediatric asthma patients following implementation of Health Catalyst.
• Dell, Red Hat, Intel, and VMware announce the opening of the Wisconsin-based testing center for hospitals running Epic on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Epic and McKesson settle their patent litigation over MyChart, with McKesson granting Epic a license for its technology.
• Allscripts announces the winners of its Open App Challenge.

Dr. Gregg’s bowling shirt.

Farzad accepting his “When ___ Talks, People Listen” HISsies award.

Medicomp CEO Dave Lareau and Software Testing Solutions CEO Jennifer Lyle interview Bonny Roberts of Aventura on the red carpet.

Bonny with her “Mr. H’s Secret Crush” sash.

James Harris sent this pic of the Orion bowling team: David Leach, Tanya Niemeyer, and Paul deBazio.

A James Harris shot of Tom Visotsky, winner of Inga’s Secret Crush.

Food. I liked the jambalaya and etoufee.

That’s it for now since I’m tired and it’s late.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

From HIMSS 3/4/13 — Inga’s Update (and Dr. Jayne’s)

It was a rough start this Monday morning after a busy night of HIMSS social events with my BFF Dr. Jayne. Because of the water issue, the hotel had to brew coffee the old fashion way, which was not nearly fast enough for the caffeine-dependent masses. As I waited 15 minutes for the staff to bring more coffee, I watched person after person attempt to get a drop of caffeine out of the empty urns.

Dr. Jayne and I started our Sunday evening at the opening reception. The band was fun and the guitar player earned bonus points for his red shoes.

His nametag said “Old Buffalo,” hence the horns. I couldn’t hear the full explanation for his nickname, but I am sure he is fun to party with. Old Buffalo works for McKesson.

Mr. H liked the under-couch lighting and glowing side tables.  Who knew he was such a party guy?

Of course I was on the look out for hot shoes, including these sporty loafers.

Dr. Jayne and I moved from the reception to athenahealth’s soiree and spent a few moments chatting with the dapper Jonathan Bush.

Not surprisingly, Jonathan got happier as the night progressed.

Definitely one of my favorite looks for the evening.

Our next stop was the CommVault party, where Dr. Jayne and I hung out on the balcony. Our biggest disappointment was the lack of beads to throw to the folks on Bourbon Street.

On the way to the Divurgent event Dr. Jayne and I did a little window shopping. These were a few of tamer PG-13 items.

I am out the door early for a big day at the convention center and a bigger night at HIStalkapalooza. Can’t wait.

HIMSS Update from Dr. Jayne

I’m not as fast as Mr. H and Inga in getting my HIMSS write ups done, so this is my catch-up from Sunday’s events. It’s Day Two of the water supply problem and subsequent boil order and one of my staff back home decided to send me an article about how bathing is not recommended in New Orleans. Having just been out for a run, this was not welcome news, but some quick Googling revealed that it’s not recommended for infants to bathe in water that hasn’t been sterilized first.

My trip in was uneventful except for the plane being at least two-thirds full with HIMSS attendees. Those of us in the coveted exit row seats decided we should just exchange cards and hear the various pitches on the plane and make our work more efficient – kind of like speed dating for vendors. Alas it was not to be, but I did make a new friend who hopefully can help me with some analytics initiatives.

Last night’s opening reception was nicely done, with minimal lines at the bars and reasonably good food. My only complaint was the dimness of the room, which although great for cozying up to your colleagues, it made it hard to read name tags. At least that’s the excuse I’m using for randomly accosting a poor unsuspecting physician who I thought was a friend of mine. After he recovered from the unexpected hug and I figured out he was not the CMIO I was looking for, we had a nice chat and exchanged cards. I appreciated his good humor about the whole thing.

Our next social event was an athenahealth reception at the House of Blues, where we were treated to a jazz funeral procession (complete with mourners and a mock coffin) and bid farewell to Software. The food was good, although I was a little puzzled by the sliders that had pickles and cucumbers rather than pickles and catsup. Fried okra balls were definitely the highlight.

After that we joined our friends from CommVault at Bourbon Vieux and enjoyed the balcony over Bourbon Street. It was still early in the evening so the debauchery wasn’t quite to the level I’ve seen it on previous trips. The party was low key and the band was good, with their breaks allowing a bit of quiet to talk to other attendees. I added a couple of stops to my “must see” booth list based on the networking, so hopefully I can knock out some equipment purchase decisions tomorrow.

Our last stop was the SummHIT mingle sponsored by DIVURGENT, which was held at The Swamp, which happened to be directly across the street from Bourbon Vieux. The lower level of The Swamp has a mechanical bull-type “Thing” that could be ridden although I didn’t see any takers. Inga and I did get some beads, however, and didn’t even have to work for them. Although we were feeling the Mardi Gras vibe by this point, we knew we needed to get our beauty rest for the long day ahead so headed back to our hotels.

I’m off to the exhibit hall (and to compete in Quipstar at the Medicomp Systems booth) then of course to HIStalkapalooza. See you there!

From HIMSS 3/3/13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

From HIMSS 3/3/13 – Inga’s Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

E-mail Inga.

From HIMSS 3/2/13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Monday Morning Update 3/4/13

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

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

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

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

Secure Threads introduces bring-your-own hospital gowns intended to prevent medical errors by having the patient’s name, blood type, allergies, age, medical conditions, and emergency contacts embroidered into the fabric.

Safe travels and an enjoyable and productive week for all those traveling to New Orleans. For those who aren’t attending, feel free to goof off all week while your boss is away.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Making The Transition: What the iEHR Failure Means for Veterans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

News 3/1/13

Top News

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

Reader Comments

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

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

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

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

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

HIMSS Conference and Social Events

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

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

Sales

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

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

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

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

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

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

People

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

Other

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

EPtalk  by Dr. Jayne

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

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

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

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

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

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 2/27/13

Top News

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

Reader Comments

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

HIMSS Conference and Social Events

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

Informatica acquires process automation company Active Endpoints.

Sales

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

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

People

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

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jardogs releases version 1.5 of its FollowMyHealth universal health record.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technology

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

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

Other

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Cerner To Acquire PureWellness

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

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

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

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

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

Monday Morning Update 2/25/13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HIMSS Conference

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 2/22/13

Top News

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

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

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

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

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

Reader Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

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

HIMSS Conference Social Events

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

Sales

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

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

Innovation and Research

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

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

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

Other

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

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

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

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

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

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

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 2/20/13

Top News

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

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

Reader Comments

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

HIMSS Conference Social Events

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

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

Sales

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

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

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

People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

Government and Politics

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

CDC releases Solve the Outbreak, a free iPad game.

Technology

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

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

Other

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Monday Morning Update 2/18/13

From Man Show: “Re: VA CIO Roger Baker. Resigning, just heard it on a conference call.” Verified, although not by the VA, which didn’t respond to my inquiries Friday. An internal memo says he’s resigning for unspecified reasons at an unnamed date. We could take bets on which government contractor will end up hiring him, like his previous employers Dataline and General Dynamics. He’s done a good job and will be hard to replace.

From Friend of ONC: “Re: RECs. Innovative shift from government seed capital to sustainable operating models. ONC is starting to work with the 62 RECs to co-develop sustainability models, business plans, and new service lines for the post grant-funded era and the 140,000 providers they work with.” Weaning organizations (and citizens, for that matter) off free taxpayer money has been a challenge, most notably with HIEs. It will be interesting to see if the same problem arises with HITECH-motivated medical practices since everybody assumes that once you’re on an EMR, you won’t go back to paper, although the Medicare penalty stick may provide the necessary motivation after the MU carrot has been consumed.

From Joshajust: “Re: [vendor name omitted]. In contract disputes with multiple hospitals in South Carolina over the failure of their computer-assisted coding module, which doesn’t appear to work.” It wouldn’t be fair to run the company’s name without some kind of proof of the specific disputes. If you have any, please send it over.  

From LinkedIn Stalker: “Re: premium membership. I was grandfathered in with a lower-cost premium membership which allows me to see who’s viewed my profile, as well as an expanded range of searches. As a sales and marketing executive, I find it invaluable as a means of research and connecting to people of interest, although I am always sure to personalize my connection request.” LinkedIn has had more luck than most freemium sites in getting users to pony up for optional services. Facebook seems to be losing the attention of its users to some degree, so while it waits to be marginalized by a trendier newcomer like MySpace before it, it could always use LinkedIn’s model of charging people to see who’s checking out their Facebook, which might be a lot more lucrative given its higher population of psychotic former lovers, stalkers, and narcissists.

From Telluride Tom: “Re: your day job. Why don’t you quit? You’ve done it long enough. Sponsors and consulting could offset.” I like working for an academic medical center and I really believe that patient outcomes would be at least a zillionth of a percentage point less positive if I left. I would also be loath to leave the playing field to join the healthcare-inexperienced commentators blabbing endlessly from the safety of the announcer’s booth. I don’t know that I could make HIStalk better by devoting even more time to it since I already have people who help me, but I would if I needed to. I’ve been doing what I enjoy doing for 10 years without regard to workload, money, etc. and it’s mostly working OK except it doesn’t make very interesting obituary material.

From LabRat: “Re: University of Iowa. Rumor is their Epic Beaker LIS install isn’t going well so far. Beaker needs a big win in a complex academic environment for market credibility.” Unverified. Epic seems to have been forthright in identifying appropriate candidates for Beaker, which if it follows the trajectory of all previous Epic modules, will quickly move up the food chain from barely usable to top rated as Epic sends in its cadre of youthful ground troops to earnestly learn from early adopters. Lab is probably the toughest market to crack given well-established workflows, FDA oversight of instrument interfaces, and the department’s full use and utter dependence on its technology, all of which have been well served for decades by best-of-breed LIS vendors and long-perfected interfaces. Lab also covers broader territory than outsiders appreciate, including microbiology, anatomic pathology, molecular diagnostics, cytology, blood bank, outreach, transfusion, and a host of activities that I don’t claim to understand. Folks frustrated with sketchy usage and questionable benefits of other hospital systems should visit the lab to see what can happen when you combine a small group of motivated, analytical, and focused employees performing repetitive tasks using purpose-built technology that achieves both increased task efficiency and improved patient care. When it comes to improving patient care with technology, the showcase hospital departments are always lab, pharmacy, and radiology. Those areas are small in number, focused in mission, and are not only accepting of technology but fans of it.

UPDATE: UI Health Care CIO Lee Carmen provided a response:

Regarding the reported rumor of issues with Epic Beaker install at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. I am the CIO for UI Health Care, and I can report the project is proceeding as planned. There are a few aspects of this project that Epic has not dealt with at other Beaker sites, but we have a positive, constructive dialogue underway and I am confident we will find a way to meet the needs of our laboratory operations and have a successful Beaker install.

From HIMSSGoer: “Re: HIMSS vendor propaganda. Today HP sent me 45 M&Ms in a large Fedex box.” Funny you mention that — the same box was dropped on my doorstep, and before I read your e-mail, I also took a photo and counted the M&Ms. My photo above hardly does justice to HP’s massive waste of packaging and carbon. Inside the large Fedex box was an expensive-looking inner box, shrink wrapped and packed with air pillows. Inside that was a pill bottle, and inside that was a tiny bag of HP-imprinted M&Ms that was so resistant to opening that I had to use the same knife I needed to hack through the shrink wrap. Mrs. H did a double-take at the kitchen table full of junk as though I had just opened a package containing a human ear. I bet the whole matryoshka doll-type package cost HP at least $30 to send out, which is a lot for a small bag of M&Ms that bled blue ink over my fingers since imprinted M&Ms don’t have the usual “melts in your mouth, not in your hand” waxy coating. The subject of the pitch was the new ElitePad, an alternative to the iPad that (a) costs more; (b) runs Windows 8; and (c) is made by a famously struggling company that yanked its consumer tablet off the market six weeks after its launch in 2011. All three factors will probably reduce consumer interest to near zero, but maybe HP will sell a few to Apple-phobic IT shops willing to support Windows 8. If so, I don’t think it will be because of the M&Ms.

I’ve been too busy to do a music playlist lately, so I’ll recommend just one band this time: The Thermals, highly listenable and tight indie punk from Portland, OR. Kudos to the three-member band for recording live straight to tape and directly mastering from it instead of screwing around with computers and overdubs. My legs are doing faux kick pedal drumming as I listen to their excellent KEXP videos on YouTube and every one of their 60 or so tracks on Spotify. Best music I’ve heard in some time.

HIMSS Conference Social Events

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

News 2/15/13

Top News

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

Reader Comments

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

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

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

HIMSS Conference Social Events

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

Sales

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

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

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

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

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

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

People

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

Innovation and Research

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

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

Technology

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

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

Other

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

QPID Launches EHR Search Engine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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