News 5/17/13

Top News

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

Reader Comments

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

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

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

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

Sales

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

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

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

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

People

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

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

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

Innovation and Research

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

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

Other

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

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

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

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

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

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

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 5/15/13

Top News

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

Reader Comments

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

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

Sales

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

Innovation and Research

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

Technology

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

Other

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Monday Morning Update 5/13/13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 5/10/13

Top News

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

Reader Comments

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

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

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

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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

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

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

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

Sales

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

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

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

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

People

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Vandiver (SecureWorks) joins Ingenious Med as CFO.

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

Announcements and Implementations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Government and Politics

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

Innovation and Research

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

Technology

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

Other

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsor Updates

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

EPtalk  by Dr. Jayne

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

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

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

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

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

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 5/8/13

Top News

McKesson reports Q4 results: revenue down 3.4 percent, adjusted EPS $1.45 vs. $2.09, missing expectations on both. In the earnings call, John Hammergren mentions that the company will exit its international technology and hospital automation business. I don’t know which product lines hospital automation includes, for instance whether that means the medication packaging and distribution systems business (ROBOT-Rx, AcuDose-RX, etc.) Technology solutions revenues were up 3 percent, but profit was down 16 percent, “well below our expectations.”

Reader Comments

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Windows 8. The unfriendly start menu for Windows 8 has Microsoft scrambling to fix the problem.” The company admits that its flagship product has a steep learning curve as it forced users to use its touchscreen-friendly tile-based graphical system instead of giving them the familiar Start button.

From Kaye: “Re: HIStalk sponsorship. This remains the best value we get for the money in advertising!” Thanks – that’s a nice comment and we appreciate it, especially coming from a company that has sponsored multiple HIStalk sites since 2009.

From Anesthesiologist: “Re: Google Glass. How can I partner with companies to develop applications that might be useful in the perioperative setting?” If you’re interested in working with this doc, e-mail me and I’ll forward to him.

From Arcane: “Re: Epic implementation. Do you know of a source for rollout and post-live support staffing numbers?” I have many readers and consulting firms that have implemented Epic, so please add a comment with your thoughts.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Greenway reports Q3 results: revenue up 3 percent, adjusted EPS $0.01 vs. $0.08, beating earnings estimates of –$0.02  but falling well short of revenue expectations. The company blames a faster-than-expected shift to subscription-based pricing. Shares are near their 52-week low. President and CEO Tee Green also said in the earnings call that with HITECH in the rear-view mirror, buyer fatigue has set in over the past several quarters. Training revenue was also impacted, he said, by customers choosing train-the-trainer and pushing training back to after the quarter’s close.  He also said that Greenway’s participation in CommonWell hasn’t resulted in any sales (without expressing puzzlement at the analyst who apparently thought it might) but said more companies are signing on.

InstaMed raises $3.5 million in an internal round of funding.

Healthcare transaction processing firm MediSwipe signs a term sheet with a Chicago-based PE fund to receive up to $600,000 over the next nine months.

Vocera Communications reports Q1 numbers: revenue down 3.1 percent, EPS –$0.14 vs. -$0.08. CEO and Chairman Bob Zollars says the company saw an increase in new customer signings but did not complete several significant hospital deals.

Siemens Healthcare posts a 4.9 percent increase in Q1 profits, although revenues fell 2 percent.

Qualcomm Life acquires HealthyCircles, a startup that supports the secure sharing of patient data.

WebMD CEO Cavan Redmond, who has been on the job less than a year, will leave the company, along with CFO Anthony Vuolo.

Perceptive Software blames recent acquisitions for its decision to lay off about 40 employees, or three percent of its workforce.

Sales

Massachusetts General Hospital selects eHealth Connect Referral Portal from eHealth Technologies to support two-way communication between the hospital and its referring doctors.

East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust chooses Harris Corporation’s Clinical Integration Platform to integrate data from six clinical systems across five sites. East Kent will also use Imprivata’s OneSign single sign- on technology.

Upper Peninsula Home Health, Hospice and Private Duty (MI) will implement the Procura for Hospice solution.

SCL Health System (CO) selects Leap-10 from Wolters Kluwer Health to streamline its conversion to ICD-10.

Amarillo Legacy Medical ACO (TX) selects eClinicalWorks Care Coordination Medical Record to advance its ACO objectives and coordinate care among its 100+ provider members.

Physical Rehabilitation Network will deploy NextGen Healthcare’s EHR, PM, PatientPortal, and NextPen products across its 100+ locations and use NextGenRCM Services for revenue cycle management.

Virtual Radiologic signs a five-year deal with Visage Imaging to implement Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform for its 400 radiologists in a read-anywhere environment.

People

Ernst & Young names Intellect Resources President and CEO Tiffany Crenshaw a finalist for Entrepreneur of the Year 2013 in the Southeast region.

Former Cerner VP Ian Chuang, MD joins Netsmart Technology as CMO/VP of healthcare informatics.

Former National Coordinator Robert M. Kolodner, MD joins telehealth provider ViTel Net as VP/CMO.

Care Team Connect names Richard Popiel, MD (Regence BCBS) to its board.

Healthcare software solution provider MedicaSoft, LLC appoints Mike O’Neill (VA Center for Innovation) CEO.

Beebe Medical Center (DE) names Michael J. Maksymow, Jr. (Continuum Health Alliance) VP/CIO.

QPID hires Gary Zakon (ModelLogic) as VP of engineering and Caroline Smyth (Smyth Consulting) as VP of sales.

Eric J. Topol, MD is named editor-in-chief of Medscape. What’s most interesting to me is that his ongoing full-time employer Scripps Clinic apparently Photoshopped his black suit jacket to look like a white lab coat in the pictures above from their site.

Announcements and Implementations

Access is named as a Meditech Collaborative Solutions vendor, offering Meditech customers an integrated solution to capture and upload electronic signatures and data collected from clinical systems and medical devices.

Johns Hopkins Medicine integrates Epic with Hyland Software’s OnBase enterprise content management solution in its ambulatory and inpatient departments.

Philips launches Healthcare Transformation Services, a global business unit to provide consulting services to hospitals and health systems.

Trustwave introduces a mobile security practice to help enterprises with their BYOD strategies.

HCA MidAmerica Division equips seven hospitals and multiple physician offices in its Midwest region with Accelarad’s medical imaging solution.

Lifespan (RI) completes its rollout of the the TeamNotes electronic documentation system from Salar.

PerfectServe launches DocLink, a secure communications network for physician-to-physician communication.

Government and Politics

ONC publishes a governance framework for trusted health information exchange to help HIEs and other healthcare organizations understand ONC’s priorities and how to align with “national priorities.”

CHIME recommends in a letter to six Republican senators a one-year extension for Stage 2 MU before progressing to Stage 3. CHIME contends the extra year will give providers the opportunity to maximize their EHR technology to achieve the benefits of Stage 1 and 2 and give vendors time to “prepare, develop and deliver needed technology to correspond with Stage 3.”

Deputy National Coordinator Judy Murphy, RN kicks off National Nurses Week with a blog post on the role of nurses in healthcare IT and an invitation for nurses to share their stories.

Innovation and Research

UCSF creates the Center for Digital Health Information. It will be led by UCSF Medical Center CMIO Michael Blum, MD, who will assume the newly created position of associate vice chancellor for informatics and who will continue to lead its Epic implementation (physician leaders of the project are pictured above, with Blum on the left). Current projects include a team-based communications platform, an open source diabetes management system, a Web-based collaboration tool for virtual tumor boards, and a social media-based cardiovascular study.

Kaiser Permanente Center for Total Health will hold a Google Glass event in Washington, DC the evening of June 18.

South Carolina-based Iron Yard launches the Digital Health Program accelerator and incubator in the Spartanburg area.

Technology

Bloomberg TV covers the technology used by Palomar Medical Center (CA) and the "hospital of the future.” Palomar Health Chief Innovation Officer Orlando Portale is featured.

Other

An Imprivata-sponsored study finds that clinicians waste 45 minutes per day in using inefficient communication systems such as pagers.

Hospital IT leaders are focused on accommodating greater mobile and wireless connectivity to their networks and with ensuring the security of patient data in BYOD environments, according to a HIMSS Analytics study.

A Raleigh, NC clinic warns patients that it was scammed by a company that claimed it would digitize the practice’s old X-rays, but instead harvested their silver content and then destroyed the films.

University of Rochester Medical Center warns 537 patients that their PHI may have been compromised when a resident lost a USB drive containing quality improvement information. The hospital thinks it went to the laundry and was destroyed.

John Halamka reports on new Meditech 6.1 development after mixed response to Version 6: a cloud-hosted system based on standards, Web-centric and mobile-enabled, with both inpatient and outpatient capabilities, complete with analytics, a PHR, and care management tools. He says it will ship in 2014.

Drug chain CVS shuts down its drug company-sponsored refill reminder program because of limitations imposed by the new HIPAA Omnibus Rule on using patient information for marketing.

Weird News Andy refers to this story as “brain drain.” A man who thought his year-round runny nose was caused by allergies finds that it’s actually brain fluid leaking from a tiny hole. It’s been fixed and he’s fine. WNA also likes this story, in which researchers claim to have found the cause of graying hair (hydrogen peroxide buildup in the hair follicle) and a cure for both gray hair and vitiligo (a proprietary treatment involving a UV-activated enzyme).

Sponsor Updates

• API Healthcare and The DAISY Foundation offer The Nurses Week Story Contest, with submissions from nurses due May 12.
• McKesson releases version 13.0 of its Homecare solution.
• Orion posts a video featuring Orion clients that have solved interoperability challenges.
• More than 200 hospitals using CareWorks content management system from CareTech Solutions have received 32 Website awards in the past year.
• Truven Health Analytics finds that healthcare spending is 20 percent higher for public sector employees than for the private employee population.
• Passport Health Communications names Texas Health Resources, Trinity Medical Center (AL), and Kadlec Regional Medical Center (VA) winners of its Leaders at the Forefront of the Healthcare Experience contest for best healthcare access management practices.
• Gwinnett Medical Center (GA) discusses how using RelayHealth services helped the hospital remove patient billing obstacles.
• iHT2 hosts a May 29 Webinar on security, privacy, and compliance risks in a post-reform era.
• Greenway Medical President and CEO Tee Green discusses the compatibility of innovation and other topics with PGA tour partner Jason Dufner.
• Red Herring names Kony Solutions a finalist for its Top 100 North America award, which honors the year’s most promising private technology ventures.
• EBSCO announces its intent to collaborate with the American College of Physicians to give ACP access to its DynaMed evidence-based clinical summary resources and literature surveillance.
• Gartner names Health Catalyst to its list of Cool Vendors in Healthcare Providers 2013 and profiles Shareable Ink in its update on 2011 winners.
• Greenway Medical releases agenda details for its PrimeLEADER 2013 user conference in Washington, DC August 22-25.
• CommVault launches a customer education services program that includes customized user training and access to online training courses for its Simpana software.
• ADP launches a Website to help clients and other employers plan for and comply with the Affordable Care Act.
• Nuance names seven healthcare organizations winners of its Voice of the Customer award for improving quality of care, reducing costs, and accelerating EMR adoption using speech recognition and clinical language technology.
• CCHIT extends EHR Module certification to the latest version of the Medseek Empower patient portal.
• TELUS Health and McGill University enter a three-year joint venture to conduct research on how best to use technology to improve health and healthcare delivery for Canadians.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Monday Morning Update 5/6/13

From MaineMan: “Re: MaineHealth / Maine Medical Center. Names interim CIO.” According to the March 25 employee newsletter, Andy Crowder (JC Solutions Group and Florida Hospital before that) is serving as interim CIO.

From The PACS Designer: “R: Intel’s Haswell. We are about to enter a much faster PC user experience with architecture from Intel called Haswell. One of the key features is Haswell provides is a nine-hour battery life through the use of more efficient chips. You can expect to see Haswell powered PC’s in the fourth quarter.” The article says the chip may revive the rapidly dying PC business by making them more competitive with tablets. Of course, that’s what Intel said about the Ultrabook, which hasn’t made Intel-powered laptops a bit more attractive vs. a Macbook Air or an iPad.

Three-quarters of respondents don’t think it makes sense for innovation conferences to exclude hospitals and physicians under the assumption that they helped cause the problems that seen to require more innovative approaches. New poll to your right: several hospitals have reported financial losses that occurred as they were implementing an EHR. Who is to blame?

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

Two NHS trusts running NPfIT’s Cerner implementation issue tenders for replacement systems.

Centegra (IL) will go live on McKesson Paragon on May 6.

Some quotes from Jonathan Bush during the athenahealth earnings call Friday:

• The company that started as an ill-fated birthing clinic and used to hold all-hands meetings from the tailgate of the Jeep Wagoneer is entering the big show. We have done well at the land war that is selling back office services doctor-to-doctor and hospital-to-hospital, but for the first time, we have a crack at the hearts and minds campaign.
• Take athenaCoordinator. It is a really easy way for any health caregiver to connect to every other one without the complexity of an organ transplant. It is a two-week sales cycle and a two-hour implementation process.
• We’ve already just announced today Epocrates EDU, which is a whole version of Epocrates to help educators, medical schools, the texting that we are going to be rolling out, secure HIPAA-compliant, patient-related texting between doctors. We’ll be able to attach links to athenaClinicals next year so that doctors who aren’t clients of athenaClinicals will be able to take a quick look at a patient face sheet in athenaClinicals.
• I think we are seeing — particularly the folks who got pregnant with Epic, sort of they’re going to this sort of desperate burn-bright tactics. We heard where Yale-New Haven has told all the doctors that have privileges that they will either this piece of shit Epic that none of them want or do you have their privileges revoked. So there’s that kind of tactic going on. "Oh, we can’t interface." I’m like, "What you mean? Epic interfaces all the time. They actually do it really well." … The folks that have gone off and laid down more money than they have on Epic have, in the back of their mind, that they are going to make a real impact on referral patterns by getting doctors on to Epic that don’t want to be on it. And it’s — really, Epic is the only one. Cerner builds interfaces, no problem.

TriZetto announces that CEO Trace Devanny will leave the company immediately after two years on the job “to pursue other opportunities” as a search is undertaken for his replacement. EVP/COO Jude Dieterman is promoted to president, a newly created role. Board member Vicky Gregg will assume the role of non-executive chair.

Intermountain Healthcare is working with Blue Cirrus Consulting to develop a homegrown tele-ICU solution.

UCSF lauches MeForYou.org at the OME Precision Medicine Summit. The precision medicine project will link people with genetically similar others via their genomic information, environmental factors, and their EHR information to help guide clinicians. They differentiate it from personalized medicine in that in precision medicine, the information used goes beyond genomic data and scientists can tap into that information directly to guide research and treatment.

Team Break Fix won the $25,000 grand prize at the Cajun Codefest 2.0 in Lafayette, LA last week.

Weird News Andy says this gives heart attacks the finger. The EndoPat test predicts heart problems by checking blood flow in the fingers.

Vince has a Part 3 installment on GE Healthcare in this week’s HIS-tory.

Sponsor Updates

• Cynthia Davis, RN, co-founder and principal of CIC Advisory, is named Entrepreneur Woman of the Year by the St. Petersburg (FL) Area Chamber of Commerce Women’s Leadership Council.
• Allscripts posts the agenda for its ACE conference, to be held August 20-23 in Chicago.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 5/3/13

Top News

A selectman and software developer from Edgecomb, ME blames MaineHealth’s decision to close a local ER on the health system’s $150 million Epic implementation. The selectman’s letter to the editor to the local newspaper notes that MaineHealth has charged “millions of dollars” to member hospitals, but has had “a real failure in its implementation,” resulting in unplanned operational costs with minimal benefit to the state. Meanwhile, in a memo to employees last week, Maine Medical Center’s CEO listed several causes for its $13.4 million loss in the first half of the fiscal year, including “unintended financial consequences” of its Epic rollout as well as incorrect charging. The organization has placed further Epic implementations on hold as teams from Epic and the hospital try to fix problems.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A few HIStalk Practice highlights from the last week: patients say the most bothersome aspect of doctor visits is unclear or incomplete explanations of problems. Health Texas Provider Network partners with MediMobile for its mobile charge capture solution. The number of physician office jobs for billers and medical record clerks has declined sharply over the last two years. Epocrates is the most popular mobile app among US physician app users. Athenahealth names St. Boniface Haiti Foundation the winner of its 2013 Vision Award. Physicians are generally making more money this year than last, but are also spending more time on paperwork. Most news items on HIStalk Practice are not mentioned HIStalk, so peruse HIStalk Practice regularly to stay current on the ambulatory HIT world. Thanks for reading.

On the sponsor-only Jobs Page: Regional Sales Director, Senior Director of Business Development, Senior Manager Engineering Development, Open Positions in Development.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Merge Healthcare reports Q1 results: revenue up 4.3 percent, EPS –$0.07 vs. –$0.02, missing earnings estimates.

API Healthcare announces the signing of over 25 contracts in Q1 and bookings that were 25 percent higher than the same period in  2012.

MedAssets announces Q1 numbers: revenue up 15.3 percent, adjusted EPS $0.41 vs. $0.24, beating expectations on both.

Athenahealth announces Q1 results: revenue up 30 percent, adjusted EPS $0.38 vs. $0.17, beating on both but adjusting fiscal year EPS guidance to below consensus.

Sales

University of Nevada School of Medicine chooses GE Healthcare’s Centricity Business, Centricity Practice Solution, and Centricity PACS-IW.

Filmore County Hospital (NE) selects NextGen Healthcare’s Inpatient Clinicals and Inpatient Financials.

Baylor Quality Alliance (TX) chooses Humedica MinedShare from Optum to analyze administrative and clinical data from payers, various EHRs, and the Baylor Health Care System HIE.

Louisiana Specialty Hospital will implement ONE-Electronic Health Record from RazorInsights. 

MD Anderson Cancer Center (TX) chooses Epic as its vendor of choice, according to an internal memo forwarded by a reader. Other readers had reported that same rumor late last week, saying that Epic had beaten Cerner as VOC.

People

UNC Health Care (NC) interim CIO Tracy Parham, RN is named permanent CIO, where she will lead its Epic project.

Parallon Business Solutions names John Guevara (Allscripts ) as CIO.

Patient Privacy Rights names Adrian Gropper, MD (HealthURL Consulting) as CTO.

Stephen Collins (Allscripts) is named president of Austin-based behavioral charting system vendor ChartAssist.

The Advisory Board Company CEO Robert Musslewhite is named by Washingtonian as one of its 100 Tech Titans and is also profiled in a feature in The New York Times.

Galen Healthcare Solutions appoints Joel Splan (Northwestern Memorial Healthcare) as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Rockdale Medical Center (GA) implements Nuance’s PowerScribe 360 voice recognition software for the dictation of imaging reports.

PointClear will move its corporate headquarters from Huntsville, AL to Dunwoody, GA.

McKesson recognizes Peninsula Regional Medical Center (MD) as the 2013 winner of its Distinguished Achievement Award for Clinical Excellence for effectively using McKesson technology along with Modified Early Warning Scores to proactively identify patients at risk for a code blue.

Aprima Medical Software will interface its EHR/PM system with the Homecare Homebase platform.

LHP Hospital Group implements McKesson’s Paragon HIS at Portneuf Medical Center (ID), Seton Medical Center Harker Heights (TX), and Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital WNJ (TX).

Elsevier launches its third annual “Superheroes of Nursing” contest and is accepting nominations for applicants in the categories of Achiever, Protector, Educator, Validator, and Connector.

SCI Solutions adds text appointment reminders to its Schedule Maximizer scheduling solution.

Modern Healthcare has corrected its article about the State of West Virginia’s payments to Medsphere for implementing OpenVista. The originally reported figure was $8.4 million per year, but that was actually the total amount spent since the contract was signed in 2005. Current payments are just under $1 million per year.

Mount Sinai Medical Center (NY) announces that it has enrolled 25,000 patients in its BioMe program, which links DNA samples to its Epic EMR information to support targeted medical care and to provide de-identified data for research. 

First Databank announces ICD-10 for Saudi Arabia at the HIMSS Middle East conference.

Government and Politics

HHS names Lyfechannel the winner of its healthfinder.gov Mobile App Challenge for its myfamily app, which helps individuals manage their family’s health through customized prevention information for each family member.

Healthcare modeling and analytics company Archimedes collaborates with CMS to give users easier access to public payer claims data.

CMS announces that hospitals and EPs have been paid $13.7 billion through the end of March, with $8.5 billion going to 8,558 hospitals and $5.2 billion to 255,722 EPs.

FDA launches the redesigned FDA Patient Network, which will educate patients and their advocates about FDA and will invite them to attend and present at FDA meetings.

Farzad Mostashari was a panelist in a discussion of technology in healthcare put on by Politico last week. The 77-minute video is of very high quality and it’s an interesting mix of people and topics.

CMS gets criticism for removing information on hospital-acquired conditions from its Hospital Compare site. CMS says the information is flawed and is redundant, but patient groups say CMS is buckling to the complaints of low-performing, high-profile hospitals.

Innovation and Research

Vanderbilt University launches the Health App Challenge to transform clinical summaries into a more patient-friendly form. Entries are due August 1, with the winner receiving $10,000 and up to five finalists being awarded $2,000 or more each.

Technology

Former Google Health product manager Missy Krasner, now involved in startups and an advisor to Box, says Google Health was a good idea in theory, but “It was a very bumpy user experience for even the most super-charged, IT savvy consumer.” She says Box will take over where Google Health left off for storing personal health records that it supports HIPAA requirements. She concludes, “So here is my hope for the future. If most EHRs can currently export a Continuity of Care Document (CCD) via the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), why couldn’t Box grab that clinical care summary format and stylize it in a way that made sense to other doctors or patients via its documenting previewing technology? This would help the interoperability and file transfer juggernaut get a whole lot easier.”

FastCompany profiles companies started by founders who were frustrated with existing products, among them Amazing Charts.

Other

KLAS reports on the post-acute care market, which is critical for managing outcomes and costs. HealthMEDX was named the top performer among long-term care vendors with 100 percent of its customers saying the company keeps its promises and that they would buy HealthMEDX Vision again.

Weird News Andy summarizes this article as “coming clean.” Piedmont Healthcare (GA) admits that for two years it improperly cleaned colonoscopy requirement at one of its ambulatory surgery centers, requiring it to notify 456 patients that they should be tested for hepatitis and HIV. Employees cleaned the equipment with soap, but missed the disinfectant step.

Sponsor Updates

• T-System posts a photo gallery from its linkED 2013 Emergency Care Conference held in Dallas April 22-25.
• Emdat posts a case study from Illinois Bone and Joint Institute, which reduced documentation costs by 50 percent by implementing Emdat’s transcription software and the company’s mobile documentation tool.
• The Nashville Business Journal names Passport CEO Scott MacKenzie one of the most influential business executives in Middle Tennessee.
• First Databank hosts a May 14 Webinar on the use of RxNorm within information exchange and clinical quality measures.
• Kareo offers a May 16 Webinar that considers five activities to prevent a government audit.
• Executives from Yale-New Haven Health System, Hartford HealthCare, and North Shore-LIJ Health System will share strategies to reduce readmissions at the iHT2 Summit in New York City on September 17-18.
• Porter Research posts a presentation that provides insight into the trends, challenges, and benefits of engaging consumers in every stage of healthcare.
• Capsule Tech will exhibit at the annual MUSE conference May 28-31 in Washington, DC.
• Truven Health Analytics receives a five-year accreditation from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence for its Micromedex Medication Management solution.
• The National Committee for Quality Assurance certifies Verisk Health’s Quality Intelligence solution to support quality reporting for commercial and Medicare Advantage populations in the California P4P program.
• As part of this week’s Medical Library Association Annual Meeting and Exhibition in Boston, Elsevier pledges to donate $1 to One Laptop Per Child for every ClinicalKey search made at Elsevier’s booth.
• Allscripts releases details on its annual ACE client conference in Chicago August 21-23.
• Liaison Healthcare launches its EHR Partner Program, which give participants access to orders and results connectivity to over 100 major lab and radiology service providers.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

HIMSS opens the call for proposals for the 2014 conference in Orlando with 24 topic categories. If you’re like many of us in the non-profit trenches, being selected as a presenter may be the only way to go to a meeting, so good luck!

The hot topic in the physician lounge this week was HR 1701, the “Cutting Costly Codes Act of 2013.” Introduced by Representative Poe of Texas last week, it aims to block ICD-10 implementation. What surprises me most was the number of physicians who think the mere introduction of a bill will support their lack of preparation for ICD-10. News flash – if you haven’t started preparing, you’re already behind, and I certainly wouldn’t wait around to see if this becomes law before I get started.

It’s not health IT, but it’s my favorite story this week: “untethered microgrippers.” Engineers at Johns Hopkins are working on miniature devices to retrieve biopsy specimens. Although they’re not quite ready for human testing, they look cool and are promising as a mechanism to take multiple biopsies in hard-to-reach areas.

I almost missed this little tidbit in the Federal Register that would allow use of eight CMS record systems for emergency preparedness. The change would allow CMS to disclose individually identifiable records to “public health authorities and entities acting under a delegation of authority of a public health authority” for the purpose of providing health assistance in an emergency or disaster.

CMS issues a Call for Measures for potential Quality Reporting System items to be used in future rule-making years. CMS is focusing on measures that cover clinical outcomes, patient-reported outcomes, care coordination, safety, appropriateness, efficiency, patient experience, and patient engagement. Submissions must have strong scientific evidence, so I guess my “number of patients seen on time because they weren’t yakking on their phone when I entered the room” measure won’t make the cut.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 5/1/13

Top News

Greenway Medical announces that it will swing to a loss for the current fiscal year because of declining sales and deferred revenue. The company’s fiscal year earnings estimate of $0.10 to $0.17 on $145-$150 million in revenue was revised to a loss of $0.11 to $0.13 on revenue of $132-$134 million. The fiscal year ends June 30. Shares dropped from Friday’s $16.05 close to just above $12 by Tuesday morning, but had rebounded to $13.47 by Tuesday’s close. Above is the one-year GWAY share price (blue) vs. the S&P 500 (red).

Reader Comments

From Big Tex: “Re: Epic deals. St. David’s Healthcare in Austin and Methodist in Houston are both heading to Epic, though I don’t think either has officially announced yet.” Unverified.

From John: “Re: interesting comment from an FBR analyst covering Nuance’s poor earnings announcement. ‘While several industry/external (smart phone consolidation, transcription transition, EMEA weakness) factors have put pressure on mobile and healthcare growth, we believe the blame lies squarely around Nuance’s execution in the field, coupled with management’s feverish acquisition strategy over the last year, which has put onerous integration risks back into the Nuance story. While we believe potential activism could put a floor on Nuance shares and ultimately enhance shareholder value over time (e.g., management changes, split-up of the company, M&A path), we find it hard to remain positive on the Nuance story as the company goes through a challenging transition process in its business over the next six to nine months.’” Carl Icahn just announced that he’s loaded up on more shares, so the surprisingly poor results for both revenue and earnings help make his eventual argument that the company should be broken up or sold outright.

From Mr. Eko: “Re: HIMSS Middle East. Started Monday. Some American-based companies there are Cerner, GE, and Medicity. Judy Faulkner, CEO of Epic, was spotted yesterday morning eating breakfast in the Four Seasons hotel. Rumor has it they are pitching to the Ministry of Health for Saudi Arabia.”

From Giles: “Re: healthcare IT decision making. Interesting reader comments. What’s your opinion?” I agree with some of the comments that healthcare organizations are quicker to promote and retain executives who wouldn’t qualify for comparable jobs in most other industries based on their education and experience. However, healthcare is a different world, trying to balance the demands of an increasingly interventionist government, regulators, special interests, politicians, clinicians, community leaders, and giant insurance companies with the patients and families who are hardly typical customers. I’ve seen cases where hotshot IT people from allegedly more progressive sectors were brought in with near disastrous results, even though the IT shop looked like a showcase on paper. Some healthcare CIOs are not very good at strategic planning, management, and customer engagement, but they have a small domain with minimal clout and high operating and capital expenses due to decisions almost always made by someone else with more influence. Healthcare CIOs also aren’t given a lot of unilateral decision-making over anything other than infrastructure – everybody likes to suggest and approve massive change management projects that get incorrectly tagged as IT initiatives, but those folks disappear when their own lack of leadership ability starts sending the project down the drain due to poor user acceptance, lack of resources, and poor project decisions. My opinion, therefore, is that healthcare IT leaders aren’t empowered to make a lot of decisions on their own, are struggling to deal with the mess foisted upon them by their fellow executives and third parties, and are trying to deal with the squeeze of ever-increasing demand with an ever-decreasing budget. I’m fairly certain that swapping them out with fat-resume private sector CIOs wouldn’t make much difference on the plus side of the ledger, but would cause all kinds of unintended consequences to patient care. It’s easy to shoot the messenger, and with regard to many high-profile projects, that’s all the CIO is allowed to be. If nothing else, consider the high degree of CIO turnover – if all it took was new people in the chair, you’d be seeing wide swings in success from that alone and that’s not the case.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The global reach of @histalk here at #himssME at the Faisalea Tower in Riyadh #HealthIT twitter.com/drnic1/status/…

— Nick van Terheyden (@drnic1) April 30, 2013

Nick van Terheyden, MBBS, CMIO of Nuance, posted the cool photo above on Twitter. If you’re traveling anywhere interesting, send a fun local photo with something that identifies HIStalk and I’ll run it here.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Porter Research, A Billian Company. The company provides its clients with customized market intelligence and research insight that includes go-to-market strategy, focus groups, win-loss analysis, prospect profiling and lead generation, competitive analysis, customer and market analysis, and M&A research. Don Graham (GM of both Porter Research and Billian’s HealthDATA) and Cynthia Porter (president) have many years of industry experience with major healthcare IT firms. The company offers a brochure, case studies, a newsletter, and white papers that illustrate its expertise. Thanks to Porter Research for supporting HIStalk.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Emdeon completes re-pricing of its existing senior secured credit facilities, securing lower interest rates on its term and revolving loans.

Nuance reports Q2 results: revenue up 15.9 percent, EPS $0.34 vs. $0.43, missing estimates on both and sending shares down 18 percent and increasing speculation that activist investor Carl Icahn will use his recently acquired 10.7 percent of the company’s shares to force a breakup.

USARAD.com launches SecondOpinions.com, which offers same-day medical second opinions. Radiology-related reports range from $29 for an X-ray to $99 for an MRI. The company also offers second opinions for primary care, surgery, dermatology, and other services.

Forms automation vendor FormFast opens a UK-based subsidiary.

Sales

Trinity Health (MI) signs a multi-year agreement with Explorys for data analytics solutions.

Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center (NV), Renown Health (NV), and Chandler Regional Medical Center (AZ) select MRO Corp.’s ROI Online platform to manage release of information.

West Florida ACO will deploy Sandlot Connect, Dimensions, and Metrix from Sandlot Solutions for patient health information management.

Methodist Health System (NE) selects Wolters Kluwer ProVation Medical software for its gastroenterology procedure documentation and coding.

Amerinet contracts with Cornerstone Advisors Group to provide HIT advisory and implementation services to its group purchasing members.

Tri-State Orthopaedics (IN) selects SRS EHR for its 24 providers.

Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd University Hospital will implement Nuance Healthcare Dragon Medical 360 | Network Edition hospital-wide.

The Cleveland Clinic’s MyPractice Healthcare Solutions will provide project management and implementation assistance to Glens Falls Hospital (NY) as it deploys Epic at its physician and specialty practices.

People

MedMatica Consulting Associates appoints Jerry Howell (KPMG) CEO and a member of the company’s board of directors.

Thomas H. Lee, MD (Partners HealthCare) joins Press Ganey as chief medical officer.

CSI Healthcare IT hires Martin O’Neil (Charts In Time) as health information management practice director.

Meditab Software appoints Adele Nasr (WebMetro) VP of marketing.

A. John Blair III, MD, CEO of EMR consulting firm MedAllies, is elected chair of independent Direct community DirectTrust.org.

Christopher Mansueti, former VP of client services for RelWare, died Friday, April 26 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He was 53.

Announcements and Implementations

VHA, Inc. adds physician dashboards to enhance its VHA IMPERATIV Advantage performance improvement solution, which leverages transactional-level data through Truven Health Analytics and UHC.

MDI Achieve, provider of the MatrixCare EHR for long-term acute care, will integrate with Homecare Homebase, a provider of homecare and hospice technology solutions.

Heywood Hospital (MA) streamlines clinician workflow following its implementation of Accent On Integration’s Accelero Connect integration platform.

Samaritan Albany General Hospital (OR) moves from Meditech to Epic this week.

Transylvania Regional Hospital (NC) goes live on Cerner.

Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota implements wireless data transmission between Cerner’s EMR and CareFusion’s infusion pumps.

PeriGen recognizes its client Banner Health (AZ) for reducing unnecessary early-term deliveries by 22 percent, earning the health system a Showcase in Excellence Award from the Arizona Quality Alliance.

Florida Hospital Tampa implements the EarlySense bedside patient monitoring system.

A Modern Healthcare article covers the State of West Virginia’s VistA implementation. It’s paying Medsphere $8.4 million per year for support and an unspecified amount to InterSystems for Cache’ licenses. The state also added financial systems from NTT DATA to replace VistA’s minimal capabilities. Update: Modern Healthcare issued a correction to this article – Medsphere has been paid $8.4 million over the life of the contract (since 2005), around $940,000 per year.

The Pittsburgh paper profiles Omnyx, a five-year-old digital pathology systems vendor formed as a joint venture between UPMC and GE Healthcare.

Government and Politics

Arizona lawmakers pass legislation that will require health insurers to pay for telemedicine treatment for certain specific conditions for patients living in 13 rural counties.

Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) introduces a bill that would prohibit HHS from mandating providers to switch to ICD-10 code sets, which Poe contends would cost about $80,000 for individual doctors and $250,000 for practices with five to 10 physicians.

A bipartisan group of 67 senators sends President Obama a letter calling for him to be more directly involved in the VA’s disability claims backlog situation. The senators note that the average wait time for first-time disability claims is around 316 days, with a delay of up to 681 days in certain parts of the country. Of 900,000 pending claims, more than 600,000 are over 125 days old.

Innovation and Research

A peer-reviewed article published by the CDC finds that the interface technology of Intelligent Medical Objects is superior to population classification techniques as a disease surveillance tool. The findings are based on a study that showed IMO terminology service was 32 to 42 percent more accurate in identifying coronary heart disease compared to algorithms using reimbursement coding and classification techniques in identifying coronary heart disease.

Technology

AirStrip Technologies settles its patent dispute with MVisum, Inc., a competitor it accused of infringing on its patent for real-time viewing of patient data on mobile devices. MVisum agreed not to offer infringing products that include “streaming or displaying real time or near real-time patient physiological data.”

NextGen Healthcare launches Comparison Utility, a proprietary ICD-9/ICD-10 comparison tool that is available a no charge to its customers.

Healthcare Holdings Group acquires the exclusive rights to 3D-Practice’s patient education graphics technology, which it will embed in its ChartZoneMD EHR.

Other

Athenahealth and MIT’s H@cking Medicine host a May 4-5 Hack-a-Thon aimed at at bringing about disruptive and meaningful solutions to healthcare challenges.

Anthony Weiner, the former Congressman who resigned after admitting to sending sexually suggestive text messages and photos to several women, is making big money as a corporate consultant. One of his clients is EMR vendor CureMD.

Here’s Imprivata’s latest HIT cartoon.

Sponsor Updates

• DrFirst publishes a white paper highlighting the 428 percent growth in e-prescribing for controlled substances.
• Medseek holds the inaugural meeting of its Clinical Advisory Council , formed to enhance patient engagement.
• MedAptus highlights three customers and their seamless integrations between the MedAptus charge capture solution and their EHRs.
• GetWellNetwork recognizes 12 hospitals and individuals for improving clinical care and outcomes through the use of IPC technology.
• Inland Northwest Health Services releases its 2012 Community Report.
• Martin’s Point Health Care (ME) discusses how its use of PopulationManager by ForwardHealth Group has improved its ability to respond to patient needs, identify gaps in care, and make systemic changes based on performance.
• Imprivata hosts May 9 Webinar introducing the benefits of OneSign for healthcare.
• Nuesoft hosts a May 8 Webinar on  using technology to improve revenue cycle.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Monday Morning Update 4/29/13

From Healthcare Outsider: “Re: making decisions. I’m in corporate IT, but a recurring theme appears where healthcare IT leadership seems unable or unwilling to take meaningful actions that would benefit their organizations. They can’t seem to make decisions, and in a corporate world, leaders who don’t act on revenue opportunities or cost savings don’t last long. Is it asking too much for healthcare IT to make responsible decisions to avoid wasting money?” An interesting question that I will pose to readers – leave a comment with your thoughts about whether hospital IT leaders really are missing bottom-line opportunities simply because they can’t make a decision.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: iPad cancer app. UBM Medica LTD has just released Version 1.5 of their Cancer Management Handbook for the iPad. Now clinicians can get all of the great content from this popular reference tool as well as the latest care updates on their iPad. TPD will add this app to TPD’s List upon the next update release.”

More than two-thirds of poll respondents don’t like the idea of ONC charging vendors a fee to support its certification programs. New poll to your right, triggered by Bill Rieger’s recent Collective Action post about TEDMED: Should conferences focusing on health IT innovation de-emphasize the involvement of hospitals and physicians because they are part of the problem? There’s a “comments’ link on the poll once you have voted, so feel free to defend your argument.

Rural and community hospital systems vendor CPSI announces Q1 results: revenue up 11 percent, EPS $0.63 vs. $0.51. Chairman David Dye said in the earnings call that, “Several of our competitors are clearly struggling with failed EHR system implementations. As a result, the number of new prospects and contracts that our competitor replacement is increasing.” The company also says that it has been writing contracts that allow customers to defer paying maintenance and support until they achieve Meaningful Use and that is impacting revenue.

Texas Health Resources is featured in a subscription-only Wall Street Journal article about “exercise meeting rooms”  where employees can meet while using stationary bikes or treadmills. CIO Ed Marx is quoted. He tells me that they also have a meditation room as well as a stand-only meeting room that encourages ending on time.

New Mexico State Senator Tim Keller urges UNM Hospital to reconsider its decision to eliminate 57 transcriptionist jobs in outsourcing the transcription function to Nuance at an annual savings of $500,000. Nuance has offered jobs to the transcriptionists, but at what the employees claim is a 20 percent pay cut, reduced benefits, and a requirement of an unrealistic 99 percent accuracy rate. Keller says shipping the jobs out of New Mexico will reduce state income tax collections.

Hackers break into the Automated Clearing House account of seven-bed Cascade Medical Center (WA), diverting more than $1 million to 96 banks. The hospital, whose operating budget is $13 million, recently announced plans to seek affiliation, saying that the Affordable Care Act will require deliver care to more patients without increasing funding and that three of ACA’s cost-savings programs (results-based payments, EHRs, and ACOs) all require major investments.

Providence Health & Services announces plans to lay off 150 billing and medical records employees whose jobs it says will no longer be necessary when it moves to Epic. The system originally notified 687 employees in 2011 that their jobs would be secure for only 18 months, but most of those employees have already transferred to other jobs or quit.

A former patient registrar sues Integris Grove Hospital for violating her religious beliefs by requiring her to register patients using the identity-confirming PatientSecure palm vein biometric system. She told her supervisor the hospital is lying about the information it collects and that the system resembles Bible’s “mark of the beast” because only the right hands of patients are scanned. Integris says using the system is a job requirement but offered her a transfer to another facility, which she declined saying it wasn’t worth the one-hour commute.

Members of a Congressional panel hear testimony about physician misinterpretation of HIPAA requirements. Rep. Phil Gingrey, MD (R-GA) and others said they wonder if doctors don’t hide behind HIPAA to avoid answering awkward family questions or in their urgency to move on to the next patient,  whole Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) said doctors aren’t HIPAA experts and simply remember colleagues “who have been grabbed by the law and not let loose until every one of their personal resources have been exhausted.” Also testifying was the widow of an Iowa high school football coach who was killed by a mentally ill man with a recent history of violence and animosity toward the victim who had been released from a hospital without notification to his parents or law enforcement officials because of HIPAA requirements. OCR later clarified that providers can disclose mental health information to families and law enforcement officials if such disclosure might be expected to prevent harm.

Weird News Andy says this woman was taking us for a ride. A TV investigative report finds that a 51-year-old South Carolina woman summoned EMS ambulances at least 100 times in the past seven years with vague 911 medical complaints just to get a free ride to downtown Charleston, where she would sign out AMA and then run errands. Upon being arrested, the woman said the rides, billed at $425 plus mileage, were part of her Medicaid benefits. Taxpayers are on the hook for at least $400,000.

A woman who failed a pre-employment drug screen sues her would-be employer, the hospital that administered the test, under the Americans With Disabilities Act. She says her “shy bladder” syndrome leaves her unable to urinate in public restrooms unless she runs the faucet, but the hospital forced her to provide her sample in a sink-less room.

Vince continues this week with his HIS-tory of GE Healthcare.

Sponsor Updates

• Sunquest Laboratory version 7.0.1003 earns 2014 ONC HIT certification as an EHR module.
• Mount States Health Alliance (TN) completes implementation of Perioperative Management by Surgical Information Systems.
• Aventura is named one of the “Top 10 Coolest Startups” by startup group Built In Denver.
• Mercy Four Rivers Division selects Forward Health Group’s PopulationManager for a population health initiative with The Guideline Advantage.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 4/26/13

Top News

Cerner posts Q1 results: revenue up 6.1 percent, EPS $0.62 vs. $0.51, beating adjusted earnings estimates but falling short on revenue. A 12 percent decline in system sales was balanced by a 16 percent increase in support, maintenance, and service revenues. From the conference call, the company announced one win over Epic in the quarter, talked up its international business, and touted its population health management efforts. Neal Patterson participated, finishing up with, “You can see from the CommonWell Alliance that we use our leadership position in the industry for the greater good, but also to basically highlight where basically we have bad actors around subjects such as interoperability.”

Reader Comments

From Med Student: “Re: Meaningful Use Stage 3. If you could change anything in Stage 3, what would you include or cut out?” I’m curious about that myself, so please leave a comment with your thoughts.

From Herky: “Re: warm-blooded. Spotted at TEDMED last week, riding the bus together from the Kennedy Center to GWU for Great Challenges Day: Allscripts CEO Paul Black and former CEO Glen Tullman. I guess all those rumors about bad blood between the two were ill founded.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Some hot news you may have missed this week on HIStalk Practice: compensation for medical directors is increasingly tied to quality metrics, as are job responsibilities. Advice for physicians engaging in Web-based messaging services. Details on athenahealth’s emergency response process, which was activated during last week’s manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. EMR adoption by primary care physicians in Canada has doubled from 23 percent in 2006 to 56 percent in 2012. Rather than sell out to hospitals, practice management consultants offer alternate alignment models for consideration. Dr. Gregg puts his spin on the phrase that pays and playing in the healthcare sandbox. Take or moment or three to catch up on the latest ambulatory HIT news and sign up for e-mail updates while you are there. Thanks for reading.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Hill-Rom Holdings reports Q2 results: revenue up three percent,  EPS $0.37 vs. $0.43.

Streamline Health’s Q4 numbers: revenue up 49 percent, EPS –$0.63 vs. $0.00.

Lexmark subsidiary Perceptive grew Q1 revenue 47 percent to $44 million.

Informatica reports Q1 results: revenue up 9 percent, EPS $0.16 vs. $0.24.

Qlik Technologies announces Q1 results: revenue up 22 percent, adjusted EPS –$0.09 vs. –$0.03, beating expectations on both.

Nuance seeks the advice of Goldman Sachs following the acquisition by activist investor Carl Ican of 9.3 percent of the company’s shares.

Sales

The Michigan Health Information Network partners with Surescripts to allow users of Surescripts’ Clinical Interoperability network to send electronic health information to the State of Michigan’s public health reporting system through the HIN and the Michigan Department of Community Health.

Presence Health (IL) awards Harris Corp. a three-year contract to create a private HIE.

The University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center purchases MDaudit Professional billing compliance software from Hayes Management Consulting.

Syracuse Community Health Center (NY) selects NextGen Healthcare’s Ambulatory EHR, PM, and Electronic Dental Record solutions for its 16-location FQHC.

MModal signs seven new hospitals and imaging centers for its Fluency for Imaging radiology workflow technology.

Fisher-Titus Medical Center (OH) selects Wolters Kluwer’s ProVation Order Sets.

UC Davis Medical Center (CA) selects TriZetto’s ClaimLogic as its claims processing solution, where it will integrate with Epic.

People

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute hires Bryan Luce (United BioSource Corporation) as chief science officer.

Interactive patient care system provider Skylight Healthcare Systems names Lisa Romano (TeleTracking Technologies) chief clinical officer.

Cleveland Clinic Innovations names its current GM of IT Commercialization Gary Fingerhut as the organization’s interim director, taking over for founding executive director Chris Coburn, who is heading to Partners HealthCare to lead innovation efforts.

Announcements and Implementations

Atlantic General Hospital (MD) implements Allscripts Sunrise.

Physicians’ Alliance of America launches iMedicor SocialHIE, giving its 34,000 physician members the ability to electronically exchange clinical information.

Athenahealth announces its marketplace for third-party solutions.

HCS, which offers the Interactant suite, launches a new logo and website.

UMass Memorial Health Care deploys MedAptus Technical Charge Capture.

Patient Logic launches its physician documentation system at three small hospitals. Its sister HealthTech companies are HMS and Medhost.

Children’s Specialized Hospital (NJ) launches GetWellNetwork’s GetWell Town interactive patient system, funded by a grant from L‘Oreal USA.

The physician informaticist who heads up MedAppLab in Germany says diagnostic or prescriptive smartphone apps present too many possible sources of error to be recommended for use, including the quality of peripherals such as headphones.

Online storage vendor Box says its product is now HIPAA compliant, also announcing 10 partner applications that include the drchrono EHR, in which Box has taken an undisclosed equity position.

Lott QA Group and HRS announce an ICD-10 testbed for coding and clinical documentation.

John Halamka says in his blog that Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center will go live on its homegrown electronic medication administration record in June. He says it’s Web-based, mobile-friendly, and integrated into existing systems. It will support the use of iPhones for viewing, iPads to verify orders at the Omnicell cabinets, and wall-mounted computers with bar code readers for verification.

Government and Politics

CMS proposes raising the maximum reward for reporting Medicare fraud from $1,000 to $9.9 million; denying Medicare enrollment to providers affiliated with an entity that has unpaid Medicare debt; and denying or revoking billing privileges to individuals with felony convictions.

The fact that two EHRs lost their certification is evidence that certification is an expensive, useless, bureaucratic failure.

— Will Weider (@CandidCIO) April 25, 2013

ONC revokes EHR certification on EHRMagic-Ambulatory and EHRMagic-Inpatient following notification that the products did not meet the required functionality and should not have passed certification. InfoGard Laboratories, which certified the products originally, retested them after reviewing additional information and gave them a failing score. Above is the reaction of Candid CIO Will Weider.

AHA tells CMS not to add additional HIE requirements for providers, but instead focus more on implementing current HIT initiatives.

Meanwhile, the founding members of the CommonWell Health Alliance tell CMS they are committed to collaboration with HIT suppliers, adding that they will use existing standards and supplement them only when needed. Members also emphasized the importance of creating an open forum for secure patient data exchange and removing data access barriers.

A North Carolina Senate panel approves a bill that would require hospitals to create easily understood bills that include definitions for any medical terminology. State Senator Jeff Tarte, a former hospital CIO via a stint with Ernst & Young, says transparency is tough to solve and just creating nicer bills isn’t going to fix the problem.

A federal grand jury convicts the former medical records director of a Florida-based partial hospitalization program for leading a scheme that submitted $63 million in fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid claims. The therapy provided to the severely mentally ill patients involved watching Disney movies and playing bingo.

Other

A new KLAS report says that patient accounting systems are the next hot thing in 200+ bed hospitals because of accountable care needs, the tapering off of Meaningful Use system selections, and the impending transition to ICD-10. Integration is a priority, leaving Epic and Cerner as the only inpatient billing systems that also cover ambulatory billing, with Cerner still scoring low but trending up. Update: KLAS says my summary is misleading, so here is their exact wording: “Epic and Cerner are the only vendors whose inpatient billing systems are integrated with both their inpatient EMR and ambulatory billing systems.”

A solo family physician in rural Colorado says he “gave up on healthcare in America,” sold his practice to a hospital, and moved to Australia because of the 2 percent Medicare penalty he would have been charged in 2015 for not adopting an EHR that he couldn’t afford anyway. He says in Australia people love his American accent, he gets a lot of time off, and he makes $250,000 a year for a light schedule vs. the $100,000 he was making for being overworked in Colorado. “Primary care is highly respected here. That’s not the case any more in America. In the United States, health care has become more about the business of making money. The personal side of medicine is going away.”

.@terrybeq Yes. #CommonWell invites all HIT developers to join the Alliance to work toward #interop

— CommonWell (@CommonWell) April 26, 2013

CommonWell, challenged directly on Twitter by Terry Bequette, state HIT coordinator for the State of Vermont, says “all HIT developers” are welcome to join.  

WakeMed (NC) creates a video celebrating its 52 years and touting its new $100 million Epic system, which it is implementing along with nearby Triangle-area academic medical centers Duke University Hospital and UNC Health Care.

Truven Health Analytics reports that 71 percent of ER visits made by patients with employer-sponsored insurance coverage are for conditions that did not require immediate attention or could have been prevented with outpatient care.

Medhost files a lawsuit against Health Management Associates, claiming the hospital operator continues to use its ED software despite not having paid the third installment of $4.5 million last year.

Henry Ford Health System (MI) reports a 15 percent decrease in net income, primarily due to an increase in uncompensated care and the $36 million it spent to implement Epic. According to the CEO, “We knew that 2012 and 2013 would not be easy years for the system because of the Epic costs.”

A court orders UPMC to allow employees to use its computers and e-mail system for union-organizing activities.

Weird News Andy says this is like a reality show for doctors. Utah pediatricians trying to relate better to their teen patients hire acting students to simulate clinic visits and act out medical scenarios. The students are enjoying it so much that they have volunteered to continue after school is out.

WNA also likes this story, in which Seattle police are investigating reports that a nurse imposter entered patient rooms at Swedish Medical Center and cut the IV lines of patients to steal what sounds like narcotic-containing PCA cartridges.

In patient fashion news, Henry Ford Health System introduces a new double-breasted hospital gown that closes in the back, uses snaps instead of ties, and is made of thicker fabric than traditional gowns. One of the gown designers notes that, “By creating a hospital gown that is safe, stylish, and comfortable, we’ve made the patient feel more at home, like they’re wearing their own garments." Kind of makes me want to schedule some elective surgery just to try one out.

Sponsor Updates

• Aprima Medical Software, Greenway Medical Technologies, and Allscripts forego interface fees as preferred partners for Greater Houston Healthconnect’s regional HIE.
• Elsevier issues a brief that identifies the need for and potential impact of evidence-based medicine.
• Wellsoft will participate in next month’s 2013 Emergency Medicine Update conference in Toronto and the e-Health 2013 conference in Ottawa.
• Barb White, director of healthcare solutions for AT&T, discusses cyber attacks and security breaches in healthcare. 
• MedAssets’ Sandy Hoffman co-hosts the Fifth Annual Mouse Races for MS in Cape Girardeau, MO on April 27.
• Laura Kreofsky, principal advisor with Impact Advisors, discusses how EPs are spending their Meaningful Use incentives.
• Prognosis suggests topics to discuss with current or potential vendors to avoid EHR dissatisfaction.
• Penn State makes the DynaMed clinical reference database available to all students and staff. 
• Boston Children’s Hospital Chief Innovation Office Naomi Fried and Carnegie Mellon University professor Alan Russell will provide the keynote addresses at the iHT2’s Health IT Summit in Boston May 7-8.
• ADP AdvancedMD hosts a May 8 Webinar on engaging patients in their healthcare. 
• NextGen Healthcare hosts a May 1 Webinar on effective claims processing.
• Stuart Long, Capsule’s chief marketing and sales officer, discusses the benefits of medical device integration and how it works in a hospital.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

ONC issues the Apps4TotsHealth Challenge to encourage integration of the TXT4Tots message library into new or existing platforms. The library includes evidence-based messages focusing on nutrition and physical activity and is targeted to parents and caregivers of children 1-5 years old.

The National Institutes of Health is using IT to boost energy savings. Maneuvers that would benefit healthcare entities include forcing computers to go on standby at the end of the day and software to aggressively manage environmental systems.

Children’s National Medical Center is using video games as a way to measure and manage chronic pain. Applications are used for physical therapy as well.

Overheard in the physician lounge: two of my colleagues were discussing slick new carts that have appeared on the floors. I’m happy to note that they are from HIStalk sponsor Enovate.

I received a HIMSS e-mail regarding the annual conference experience and asking me to take a brand survey on my “emotional connection” to HIMSS. I was asked to select images that fit attributes for the HIMSS brand on “touch, taste, scent, sight, and sound.” Maybe I’m too much of a literal person, but I found the concept odd. It also didn’t fit my screen without scrolling, making it a non-starter.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 4/24/13

Top News

Nextgov uncovers a scathing internal Pentagon memo that says DoD’s plans to acquired commercial off-the-shelf software fly directly in the face of the President’s call for a joint DoD-VA EHR based on open standards.

Reader Comments

From Wesley: “Re: Encore Health Resources. They have laid off multiple people in recent weeks.” I asked Encore CEO Dana Sellers, who provided this reply:

Encore continues to experience strong, healthy growth thanks to wonderful clients and the best consultants in the industry. As a result, we’ve done some realignment of our Client Services organization over the past few weeks to better position Encore to execute our strategy: the delivery of a full life cycle of consulting solutions with a focus on business intelligence and performance improvement. In fact, to meet our increasing business demands, we are actively recruiting for Client Services Executives in Nashville, Florida, Colorado, and California. Send some great folks our way, would you?

From John Porta: “Re: Advisory Panel CIOs not finding value in the HIMSS conference. Who does find value, the marketing VPs? Sales employees think it’s the biggest waste of their time in the pipeline, which is why they spent their days on their phones while ignoring the giveaway seekers and non-buyer IT staff. Why do vendors spend an average of probably $250K to be there preaching to the choir? Maybe just  companies trying to justify their marketing existence. I believe the HIMSS conference is an ongoing, self-perpetuating, ad-selling, marketing come-on. Few companies have the balls to pull out.”

From Iggy: “Re: MModal. Debtwire said that on April 3, executives told their debt holders that they fell out of compliance in the period ending March 31 and One Equity will ‘cure’ this. Is this routine?” I asked Ben Rooks, who writes HIStalk’s “Healthcare IT from the Investor’s Chair,” who with help from his friends at investment bank Houlihan Lokey provides this explanation:

Loans such as the one that allowed One Equity to borrow money to purchase MModal (the Leverage in the term LBO, or Leveraged Buy Out) have certain ongoing requirements with which the company must comply (known as “covenants”). In this case, there was actually only one such covenant, but it allowed for a maximum amount of net leverage (how much debt each dollar of EBITDA — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — must support). This metric rose since the deal closed, reaching 6.43x at the end of last year in contrast to the 5.35 that was projected. Interestingly, it was set at 6.5 in Q1, then drops sequentially by .25 until it reaches 5.75 in Q1 2014 (presumably as the company both pays down its debt and grows its revenues and EBITDA). According to Standard & Poor (the debt rater in this case), “MModal has seen its revenue weaken as a result of a slower-than-expected transition to its new products strategy and competitive pricing pressures” and it downgraded the debt a notch. Realizing that these things can happen, however, the loan agreement allows the sponsor (One Equity) to cure the problem, typically by adding more equity dollars or else guarantying part of the loan. Incidentally, M*Modal might not be public, but its debt is, so this was, in fact, disclosed publicly, just not as loudly as in the case of public companies.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

LifeIMAGE closes a $15 million Series C round of financing.

Henry Schein, Inc. secures $300 million of committed financing with The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Ltd. based on the securitization of its A/R.

CTG reports Q1 results: revenue up five percent, EPS $0.24 vs. $0.20. CTG attributes its growth on increased demand for EMR and other health information technologies.

Healthcare learning platform vendor HealthStream announces Q1 results: revenue up 25 percent, EPS $0.07 vs. $0.05, beating earnings expectations and sending shares up 16 percent Tuesday.

Israel-based medical social data mining vendor Treato raises $14.5 million in funding. The company’s platform extracts patient comments from blogs and discussion forums, applies natural language processing and other analytics, and provides an overview of patient comments about drugs and conditions. According to the company’s CEO, “Until now, everyone wanted to hear the doctor’s voice. Now, because of social changes and even legislation, everyone wants to hear the patient’s opinion. Regulation no longer pays for the doctor to treat, but for the patient to heal.”

Sales

Nightingale Preventive Care, a provider of healthcare services in Kmart stores, selects HealthFusion’s MediTouch EHR.

Riverside Health System (VA) chooses HealthMEDX Vision for EMR and billing for its Lifelong Health and Aging Related Services division.

Orange Accountable Care (FL) selects Halfpenny Technologies to provide a lab data interface for referring physicians using risk management services from Orange Health Solutions.

Scott & White Healthcare (TX) contracts with KPMG LLP to assist with its Oracle PeopleSoft v0.2 Human Capital Management reimplementation project.

Ardent Healthcare will expand its use of Infor’s human resources and financial management suites.

People

Huron Consulting Group hires Todd Christiansen (IBM Global Business Services) and Joseph Gaetano (Siemens Medical) as managing directors in its healthcare practice.

Anthony Caponi (Maxim Healthcare Services) joins Direct Consulting Associates as VP of sales.

MediRevv hires Randy Blue (Resource Corporation of America) as director of sales.

VC firm Polaris Partners names Tim Kilgallon as CEO in residence, focusing on consumer-directed digital health opportunities. His healthcare IT experience includes stints with Pointshare Corporation and Medaphis.

Health program and population health management software vendor Aegis Health Group promotes Bill Walker to CTO.

Mobile applications platform developer Kony Solutions, announcing 90 percent year-over-year growth, names Abhay Parasnis (Oracle) as president and COO.

Gary Peat (Council Capital) joins eDoc4u as SVP of corporate and business development.

Announcements and Implementations

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute will fund up to $68 million to support organizations focused on the advancement of comparative clinical effectiveness research.

Hamad Medical Corporation in Qatar will implement Cerner Millennium across its primary care centers and eight hospitals.

Allscripts releases Allscripts Care Director to enable care coordination across all care settings.

Emmi Solutions wins a communication award from The Center for Plain Language for its Heart Failure Transition multimedia series.

Gwinnett Hospital System (GA) adopts the ChartWise:CDI clinical documentation system.

Government and Politics

HHS considers amending the HIPAA Privacy Rule to allow states to report information on potentially dangerous mental health patients to the National Criminal Background Check System, the database that houses information on individuals prohibited by law from possessing firearms.

CHIME calls on HHS to extend certification requirements to include the HIE market.

CMS and ONC will convene a May 3 meeting on appropriate coding using EHRs from 9:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. in Baltimore. The session will also be streamed online.

A bipartisan group of senators unveils a discussion draft of a bill to create a nationwide electronic system for tracking the distribution of prescription drugs. The proposed measure would require every entity in the prescription drug supply chain to provide electronic transaction information when there is a change of ownership, plus shift the country from a lot-level drug tracing system to a unit-level tracing system.

CMS and ONC post a joint fact sheet that breaks down the progress made since the passage of the HITECH Act that also includes the latest numbers on EHR adoption, e-prescribing rates, and the increased emphasis on interoperability and exchange.

Technology

Medical device company Smiths Medical will develop connectivity between its infusion systems and Epic using IHE standard profiles to establish communication between the systems.

Other

A small-scale Johns Hopkins study finds that first-year residents in academic medical centers spend just 12 percent of their time interacting with patients, while computer duties take up 40 percent of their hours. Patient time has been significantly reduced since a similar 2003 study, suggesting that mandatory reduced hours may have caused an undesirable balance of work duties. The researchers say better EMR systems would reduce some of the computer time required. The study’s senior author, a hospitalist, concludes, “All of us think that interns spend too much time behind the computer. Maybe that’s time well spent because of all of the important information found there, but I think we can do better.”

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment will officially take over the Kansas HIE effective July 1. The HIE board acknowledged in September that it financially unsustainable and voted to relinquish its functions to the state.

John Halamka reflects on hospital lessons learned from last week’s Boston Marathon bombings in his “Life as a Healthcare CIO” blog. Among them: making sure systems can support working from home, limiting data center access, increasing on-screen warnings to staff about looking up patient information, and improving HIE capabilities.

A review of CEO salaries of non-profit Chicago hospitals finds 20 who made at least $1 million in total compensation in 2011, with the CEO of Northwestern Memorial HealthCare leading the pack at $4.6 million.

Two former patients of Glens Falls Hospital (NY) file a class action lawsuit against the hospital and its contractor Portal Healthcare Solutions after the medical records of 2,300 patients are left on an unprotected computer network for four months.

Microsoft will sponsor an April 25 panel discussion on Unintended Consequences: Patient Perspectives on the HIPAA Omnibus Rule at the Microsoft Innovation & Policy Center in Washington, DC. Panels will include Iliana Peters (OCR), Corinne Cary (New York Civil Liberties Union), Deborah C. Peel, MD (Patient Privacy Rights), and Hemant Pathak (Microsoft).

Baltimore-based Healthify, a new startup led by Johns Hopkins University graduates and students, develops a free electronic waiting room questionnaire that can screen for health determinants such as psychosocial risks, nutritional status, housing, education, and substance abuse, all of which significantly increase the odds of an individual requiring hospitalization.

No-frills clinics in India say they can offer heart surgery for $800 by operating in prefabricated buildings that have air conditioning only in the OR suites and that require family members of patients to help care for them. The company’s founder, a noted heart surgeon, says that while Stanford Hospital is spending $600 million to build a 200-300 bed hospital and a new London hospital will cost $1.5 billion, the clinic can build and equip a hospital for $6 million and have it up and running within six months.

Weird News Andy says this might make sense. In England, NHS is considering sending recovering elderly patients to “hospital hotels” run by private hotel chains. It’s modeled after a similar program in Scandinavia and would relieve “bed blocking,” where local councils have cut funding for home health and residential services, leaving patients stuck in expensive hospital beds they don’t really need.

WNA also likes a story that he titles “A different kind of Brazilian close shave.” A Brazilian fisherman accidentally fires a foot-long harpoon into his skull, then decides to go home to sleep it off. His aunt calls the fire department 10 hours later. He’s in ICU and has permanently lost sight in one eye.

Sponsor Updates

• Infor will donate $5 to charity for each attendee of Monday night’s Infor Healthcare party, held in conjunction with Inforum in 2013 in Orlando.
• Greenway Medical will add RemitDATA’s comparative analytics solution into its PrimeDATACLOUD Remittance Intelligence service, giving practices reimbursement and productivity insights and performance benchmarking.
• Jill Farnsworth and Mike Grisaffee from Encore Health Resources  will participate in educational sessions at the HIMSS Texas Regional Conference May 14-15 in San Antonio.
• Healthcare Anytime offers a June 4 Webinar on surviving the avalanche of patient data.
• Bottomline Technologies donates $2,500 to a memorial fund for Joshua Krantz, a recently deceased employee.
• The Denver Post names Ping Identity Top Workplace for the second consecutive year.
• InstaMed launches the InstaMed Healthcare Payments Account, which helps providers get paid faster and through more channels.
• Visage Imaging releases version 7.1.3 of the Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform, which incorporates over 1,000 enhancements and product fixes.
• T-System will deploy the NextGen PM solution for its RevCycle+ solution clients.
• Craneware showcases enhancements to its Bill Analyzer and InSight Audit solution during this week’s HCCA 17th Annual Compliance Institute in National Harbor, MD.
• eClinicalWorks offers a series of Webinars in April and May on its upcoming eBO Version 6 release.
• Henry Johnson, MD, VP and medical director for Midas+, a Xerox company, discusses value-driven analytics and the best big data trends for healthcare.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Monday Morning Update 4/22/13

From The PACS Designer: “Re: iPen rumors. As we approach the middle of 2013, the focus will be on the next innovation from Apple. iPen talk is not new since there’s been a Cregle iPen 1 that’s available today for writing and and drawing on the iPad. Apple wants to enhance their version by adding a small LED that can record writing and drawing for later viewing. The other possible features of the upcoming Apple pen are the ability to plug into an iPad docking station, adding a tiny SIM card for communications, and a camera device which would make it function as an iWatch, iPod and and iPhone – all in one device.”

From Bostonian: “Re: Boston. The main activity happened about two miles from my house, unfolding directly (and I mean directly) in front of athenahealth’s headquarters and main offices in Watertown. It was the long brick building with the big windows if you watched on TV.” Jonathan Bush of athenahealth posted this letter to the company’s website, saying that the company remained “wide open for business. WIDE open” as the company told its 1,000 Watertown employees to work from home. The letter added that athenahealth believes terrorism should not be able to generate widespread fear and panic that stops society from functioning.

From Marianne: “Re: Boston. This is such a good article by Atul Gawande. As we sit in our locked homes here in the Boston area waiting for this nightmare to end, it is nice to read about how our hospitals responded so well to this attack.” The New Yorker article gives credit to the hospital incident command system for allowing a quick and effective response to the treatment needs of the victims. Many of us have gone through the yearly drills of pretending to be logistics officer and making fun of wearing our yellow vests or writing down messages on paper to communicate with our pretend incident teams. The thing is, incident command systems work when they need to – it all comes back in the crisis.

From Blue: “Re: HIMSS scammer. A company solicited vendors to pay $5,000 to advertise in a publication that was to feature articles by Farzad Mostashari and Kathleen Sebelius and would be distributed at the HIMSS conference. Companies that paid got no further response, no printed version, and the online version has ‘lifted’ articles and ads from companies that never heard of the company. All was reported to HIMSS, which is looking into the false claim that the journal would be distributed at the conference. Vendors beware!” I notice that the welcome message from Kathleen Sebelius was stolen directly from the HHS site from comments she made at a public event, while Farzad’s alleged interview was lifted uncredited from Kaiser Health News. The companies appearing to have been ripped off in the issue I saw are Practice Fusion, iCharts MD, Availity, ChartLogic, and Accenture.  

When it comes to offering systems that are “open” in the eye of the beholder, the big winner is “none of the above,” followed by Allscripts, Epic, and basically nobody else. New poll to your right: should ONC assess an EHR vendor fee to help fund its certification programs? You can click the Comments link on the poll after voting to be more explanatory than your yes/no vote.

The first-ever HIStalk Webinar, Vendor Software Training: What Providers Should Demand, will be offered on Tuesday, May 14 from 1:00 to 1:45 PM EDT, presented by Health Technology Training Solutions. See my Webinars page for information on how HIStalk Webinars are moderated and pre-reviewed by CIOs (and me personally) for education value and presentation style. I hope to not only produce vendor Webinars that are a lot better than some of the clunkers I’ve sat through, but also to give folks who work for non-profits a way to offer their presentation to the HIStalk audience at no cost to themselves since I’m paying for the infrastructure and would like to see it used.

The Nashville business paper profiles Applied Health Analytics, a Vanderbilt partner that offers population health management tools, with special emphasis on hospitals that form relationships with big employers.

Cerner and Ciber will offer application management and hosting services to Infor’s healthcare customers.

Indiana’s HIE will spin off a for-profit company to market its HIE platform that was developed by Regenstrief.

UPMC files suit against Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, claiming that his challenge of the health system’s non-profit status is “a campaign to target and damage UPMC.” The city’s attorney replied, “It is unclear to me how asking a court to make a determination whether UPMC is or is not an institution of purely public charity is a violation of its constitutional rights. The painfully obvious bottom line is that the last thing UPMC wants is judicial scrutiny of its non-charitable agenda.”

Weird News Andy wonders how this hospital’s health marketing campaign was approved. A North Carolina hospital pulls the plug on its campaign intended to create community health awareness, purely because of its tag line, “Cheat Death.” The hospital said the phrase worked to generate discussion and awareness, but thinks it can do better in sending a message of community unity.

Vince covers the HIS-tory of GE Healthcare in Part 1 this week.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 4/19/13

Top News

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel says his office has taken direct control of the DoD-VA EHR integration project as he acknowledges to a House subcommittee that “we’re way behind.” Hagel told the committee that he has personally blocked the DoD’s EHR request for proposal because “I didn’t think we knew what the hell we were doing.” He added, “Until I get some understanding of this and get some control over it, we’re not going to spend any money on it.” Hagel, whose experience includes tours as an infantry squad leader in Vietnam and serving as a VA deputy administrator as its VistA system was being developed, says the DoD will have its marching orders within a month.

Reader Comments

From Mr. Horizon: “Re: Bayhealth – Kent General Hospital, Dover, DE. Went live on McKesson Expert Orders whole house with physicians with minimal problems this week.”

By Anonymous: “Re: MyChart. I gave it another chance and ordered a prescription refill. This morning, I was thinking I never received order confirmation from Caremark. It was a busy morning, so I didn’t get around to calling my doctor to see what was up. This afternoon, I received my trusty Caremark communication that the week-old order was received today. Who knows when the physician practice checks messages or Rx refill requests coming through MyChart? A bigger question: why the heck are you promoting this to your patients if it essentially has no functionality due to no real implementation and weekly checking of messages and notifications, even if weekly? Score:  MyChart zip, Caremark slam dunk. And Mayo had 5 percent portal engagement with what was hopefully a functional portal.” Anonymous wrote the Readers Write article on her MyChart impressions a couple of weeks ago that generated quite a few comments.

From Poor Richard: “Re: patient portals. New York is allowing citizens to gauge ‘likeability’ of patient portals by voting. I didn’t recognize many of the vendors on the ballot. Some presentations were very professional while others appeared to have been completed in the basement of a programmer. Some of the presentations I considered unimpressive had massive vote appeal, so of course now I am wondering about voter fraud (especially considering I am not a New York resident and they let me vote!) Personally, I preferred ChARM EHR, not for their goofy upper case/lower case naming, but because they were the only vendor in this entire group who addressed maintaining membership through incentives. In ChARM’s (damn, I hate typing that) model, they included a rewards system for using the portal, which is a feature sorely lacking in every patient portal I have seen.“

From Dan: “Re: GNU Health. I’ve been involved with installing and supporting cumbersome and incredibly expensive EHRs like Horizon and Epic at hospitals and wondered what options are available for organizations with little funding. This one seems to have potential. I’m interested to hear your thoughts.” It’s free, seems to have several basic modules, and already supports ICD-10. No US customers are listed, which is typical of free EHRs that work well in countries that don’t care about billing and other non-patient related capabilities that are unfortunately very important here. Readers are welcome to jump in.

From Lance: “Re: $1 million ONC EHR vendor tax. I work for a vendor and think that ONC could have spent a lot less to achieve the same MU attestation results. Many of the RECs did not earn their M1 and M2 milestones, simply piggybacking on the EHR vendor’s installed base. Many of our clients that we introduced to RECs said they didn’t add anything and all they needed was the free MU resources we provided.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Recent highlights from HIStalk Practice include: OIG publishes protocols for providers who wish to voluntarily self-disclose evidence of potential fraud. Jonathan Bush dishes with the Wall Street Journal. Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics in Kansas City offers Wichita allergy patients an option for telehealth visits. Professional organizations give tips for physicians participating in social media. NorthShore University Health System’s ambulatory clinics achieve Stage 7 on the HIMSS Ambulatory EMR Adoption Model. Culbert Healthcare Solutions’ Brad Boyd discusses patient access issues. Finally, 91 percent of readers participating in our recent HIStalk Practice Reader survey say that reading HIStalk Practice has helped them perform their jobs better over the last year. If you have room for self improvement, it’s likely worth your while to mosey over to HIStalk Practice. Thanks for reading.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Predixion Software. The San Juan Capistrano, CA-based company offers self-service predictive analytics that are fully integrated with the Microsoft stack, allowing modelers to work with Predixion’s workbench and modeling tools from within Microsoft Excel. The company’s predictable admissions module scores patients at admission and throughout their stay using a hospital-specific model to predict readmission risk with up to 86 percent accuracy. If you’re curious how that works, read up on Practical Predictive Analytics for Healthcare 101. The company won a Microsoft HUG award last month for the use by one of its major healthcare customers of Predixion Readmission Insight. Thanks to Predixion Software for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a video interview of Chad Eckes, CIO of Cancer Treatment Centers of America and Predixion advisory board member, talking about predictive analytics.

It’s time for that post-HIMSS planning of which conferences to attend this year. If you have suggestions, let me know. I had a nice invitation to attend TEDMED as the guest of a generous company, but couldn’t make it because of work conflicts at the hospital.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Roper Industries, which acquired Sunquest Information Systems in August 2012, will buy New Jersey-based Managed Healthcare Associates for $1 billion in cash. MHA offers alternate site services, software, and analytics.

Sales

CareONE LTACH (NJ) long-term acute care hospital selects NTT DATA’s Optimum EHR.

University of Colorado Health will incorporate Medseek’s predictive analytics and hospital website solutions into its patient engagement initiatives.

Australia’s Ballarat Health Services deploys the Rhapsody Integration Engine from Orion Health as its connectivity program for message exchange.

People

Quest Diagnostics names Jim Davis (GE, InSightec) SVP of diagnostic solutions.

Long-time friend of HIStalk Justen Deal of Vieu Health is named BlackBerry Business Fan of the Month, dropping a much-appreciated plug by saying in his profile piece, “And in my field, HIStalk is where you go when you really want to know what’s really happening; it’s sometimes a bit irreverent, but it’s always smart, insightful, and to-the-point.”

Andy Flanagan (SAP) is appointed SVP, Health Services Sales & Business Management of Siemens Healthcare.

Beacon Partners appoints Michael Whalen (GE Healthcare)  VP of professional services and promotes Chris Kondrat to VP of business integration.

Announcements and Implementations

The Premier healthcare alliance will offer its members access to Phytel’s population health intelligence suite.

Massachusetts General Hospital joins the PathCentral Pathology Network, an online information exchange and digital consultation forum that enables physicians to upload digital images for pathologists to review and render diagnoses.

Indiana University Health implements Health Catalyst Late-Binding Data Warehouse in 90 days to create a centralized repository of clinical, financial, and patient satisfaction data.

Lumeris releases its Accountable Primary Care Model called the Nine Cs that addresses reducing costs, improving quality, and improving patient and physician satisfaction.

Government and Politics

A JAMIA article describes interviews with VA leadership on their vision for a next-generation EHR. Identified needs include designing better user interfaces to present decision support messages more effectively, creating smaller applications to allow fine tuning workflows, developing a recommendation engine to guide practice as it learns preferences and presents peer practices, using back-end documentation tools such as natural language processing, creating support for teamwork, developing interoperability with the DoD and other care settings, and improving data governance and stewardship.

HHS and the FCC name members of the new Food and Drug Administration Safety Innovation Act (FDASIA) Workgroup, which will report to the HIT Policy Committee on improving patient safety and innovation in healthcare IT. The new members are from health systems, technology companies, healthcare software vendors, and venture capital firms. The group’s chair will be David Bates, MD, MsC (above), SVP for quality and safety and chief quality officer of Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Technology

Experts say new WiFi standards 802.11ac and 802.11ad could drive improved hospital wireless connectivity, such as iPhones supporting EHR lookups at 450 Mbps. 802.11ac will replace 802.11n as the WiFi standard, while the short-range 802.11ad technology can support data rates of up to 7 Gbps in potentially replacing cables for connecting computer peripherals or medical equipment.

Other

EHR adoption in children’s hospitals grew from 21 percent in 2008 to 59 percent in 2011, which was significantly higher than adoption rates for adult hospitals.

The Health Technology Forum Innovation Conference: Platforms for the Underserved will be held Friday, April 19 at the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, CA. Speakers include Gavin Newsom (lieutenant governor of California); Justin Graham, MD (CMIO, North Bay Healthcare); Kate Bennett, ND (CMIO, John Muir Health); and Darren Schulte, MD (president, Apixio).

Another health technology accelerator makes its debut as Dallas-based Health Wildcatters offers the usual package of mentoring services and seed money in return for equity.

In Canada, Nova Scotia’s largest health district says its computer systems experienced 1 million security threats in the past year, none of which led to lost data. Most were malware and spyware attacks.

Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, speaking at the Stanford Graduate School of Business 2012 Healthcare Innovation Summit on Wednesday, says the insurance company is evolving into a health IT company through its acquisitions that include Medicity, iTriage, and Active Health.

In Canada, Regina General Hospital says 15 patients were mistakenly given clindamycin to treat clindamycin-resistant infections due to an unspecified computer error in creating sensitivity reports.

Former Roxy Music member and music producer Brian Eno designs light and sound installations to create healing environments in two British hospitals.

AlertWatch, which offers surgical patient monitoring software developed at the University of Michigan’s Venture Accelerator, is profiled in a technology publication. A real-time demo (above) is available online. The company’s patient safety advisor is former astronaut Jim Bagian, MD, who I’ve seen speak – he’s excellent.

A University of Vermont medical student and a partner are working on software that will allow pharmacies to communicate with patients via simple HIPAA-compliant text messages to help them understand their medications. Luke Neill and Sam Mayer were congratulated by actor Matthew Perry at Clinton Global Initiative University earlier this month.

Weird News Andy wonders how in the world this happens. Workers at a commercial laundry processing a load of linen from Regions Hospital St. Paul, MN are startled when a baby’s body falls out. The hospital apologized, explaining that the stillborn infant’s body had been wrapped in linens in the morgue and was mistaken for laundry.

Sponsor Updates

• Surgical Information Systems CEO Ed Daihl explains the importance of perioperative analytics and the competitive edge it gives hospitals. The company also announces the winners of its SIS Perioperative Leadership Awards.
• Awarepoint highlights its first quarter 2013 achievements, which include installation of 4.1 million net new square foot of RTLS coverage across 10 clinical sites, the addition of numerous new clients, and renewed commitments from five organizations.
• Availity and Greenway Medical Technologies join insurer Florida Blue to enable the sharing of clinical data and patient summaries.
• Trustwave offers an infographic highlighting the high cost of BYOD.
• Optum opens a free emotional support line staffed with mental health specialists for those affected by the recent Boston explosions.
• Lisa Bielamowicz, MD, SVP with The Advisory Board Company, reviews three key elements for successful population health management.
• iHT2 hosts an April 24 Webinar on healthcare cyber first responders.
• Medseek announces the winners of its eHealth Excellence Awards during this week’s 2013 Client Congress in Austin.
• Imprivata hosts an April 23 Webinar on streamlining clinical communication with Imprivata Cortext.
• Good Morning Texas profiles Key-Whitman Eye Center and how its implementation of RTLS technology from Versus is reducing wait times.
• CAQH recognizes several organizations that have earned voluntary CAQH CORE Phase I or Phase II Operating Rules certification, including NextGen (NextGen PM), OptumInsight (Optum Netwerkes 2.2.0), and RelayHealth (RelayExchange.)

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

First of all, I want to send my thoughts and prayers to the people of Boston as well as the marathon participants, their families, and the first responders and health care teams who assisted. One of my shoe-shopping pals was running and I was tracking her as the horrifying event unfolded. This was her first Boston Marathon and she slowed down around mile 17, for which I am grateful. Her previous projected finish time would have put her in the thick of it. Hopefully she (and all the other runners who didn’t finish) can qualify again next year.

A recent study shows that physicians may benefit from seeing cost information when ordering laboratory tests. We see plenty of EHRs with medication formularies, but not too many with lab cost data. In my experience, the Advance Beneficiary Notice functionality of many EHRs is sorely lacking, so maybe this will spur vendors to spend some attention in that area. I’d be interested in not just seeing cost information but seeing data on whether tests are really helpful in diagnosing or confirming a particular condition. Of course order sets are helpful, but this would be a twist on the concept for docs who don’t think order sets apply to them.

Weird news: scientists are looking at how intestinal parasites attach to develop better ways to attach skin grafts. Here’s to the spiny-headed worm as the newest member of the healthcare team.

From Tom T: “Re: your piece about the ACP/FSMB online professionalism policy. You are right on the money again and again. The self-righteousness and patronizing tone of those guys is getting to be nauseating. The latest blow is the decision coming from Walgreens to get involved in chronic illness management. How sad that they have no idea of what we do and how bad that will be for healthcare. I for one will refuse to see patients who are going to Walgreens for anything.”

Thanks for writing. I’m interested to see the details on how Walgreens plans to pull this off, specifically how they plan to communicate with other members of the patient care team. When I’m wearing my PCP hat, I refuse to refer to other physicians that don’t communicate in an adequate or timely fashion, and I won’t hesitate to refer patients away from pharmacies or other businesses that don’t have the patients’ best interests at heart. The best service in my community (which is heavily saturated with all kinds of chain pharmacies) actually comes from a mom-and-pop shop and their prices are competitive.

I wonder if Inga has a pair of these in her closet? I can’t imagine they’d be comfortable, but they’re certainly unique.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 4/17/13

Top News

Six Republican senators release a report criticizing the HITECH EMR push, saying EMRs are increasing healthcare spending instead of reducing it and that Medicare doesn’t have a plan to ensure interoperability, increasing the chances that $35 billion in taxpayer money will be wasted. It accuses the administration of using money spent as a benchmark of success rather than specific goals, says that Meaningful Use self-attestation means providers may not be using technology as intended, and accuses CMS and ONC as having lax security policies and procedures that jeopardize the security of patient data. It also concludes that post-HITECH penalties will affect small providers disproportionately and that reporting requirements are creating provider compliance burdens.

Reader Comments

From Katherine the PCP: “Re: athenahealth. I’ve been live for two weeks now as part of a health system rollout and I am happy as a clam. The folks from athena were wonderful and worked very well with Clinovations, who were there for the extra help. Athenahealth is everything I expected and more. I did not have to make even one call to their call center. Happy to be paperless!” This was from long-time HIStalk physician reader who I know, so this was not a questionable anonymous comment.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

An international HIStalk sighting: an unidentified reader sent over this photo wearing an “I Could Be Mr. H” beauty queen sash taken in London. We’ll be getting more photos from other cities as the sash’s owner enjoys global travel, I’m told. If you’re heading to interesting places this summer, snap your own picture featuring a recognizable location and something HIStalk related (an iPad image of the web page, a printed logo, etc.) and I’ll run it here.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Care Team Connect. The Chicago-area company was launched in 2008 to help chronically ill patients receive better and less expensive care, offering a technology platform that coordinates care among hospitals, community providers, and patients and their families. CTC Gateway is a Web-based platform that makes it easier to distribute patient data to support shared risk payment models via payment reconciliation, file management, attribution list delivery, outcomes reporting, population stratification, and communication and transparent reporting among provider partners. CTC Navigator provides a rules-engine driven checklist process to ensure that target patient populations receive the right care with efficient use of resources. Clients include Integrated Health Partners, Vanguard Health Systems, Ellis Medicine, and MemorialCare Health System, along with its integration into the Michigan Health Information Network to provide real-time updates and alerts for 25,000 patients. Thanks to Care Team Connect for supporting HIStalk.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Baltimore-based care coordination platform vendor Ankota raises $2 million to increase headcount. The CTO is a former GE Healthcare CIO and the chief medical office is a Hopkins population health specialist.

CrowdMed, which uses the wisdom of crowds (“Medical Detectives”) to help patients determine their diagnosis, raises $1.1 million in funding.

Sales

Fulton County Hospital (AR) selects Healthland Centriq EHR for its 25-bed critical access facility.

INTEGRIS Health (OK) signs with TeraMedica for its Evercore Clinical Enterprise Suite.

The iHealthTrust HIE (TX) selects iMedicor to provide secure communication services via the iMedicor SocialHIE platform.

Blue Shield of California hires Kony Solutions to develop mobile apps on the KonyOne platform. Meanwhile, Kony is considering an IPO later this year.

People

Amy Garcia (American Nurses Association) joins Cerner Clairvia as chief nursing officer for the company’s workforce and capacity management business unit.

Healthcare VC firm Aberdare Ventures hires Mohit Kaushal (West Health) as a partner.

AliveCor, the developer of a mobile-based ECG monitor for the iPhone, names Daniel J. Sullivan (SuperDimension, Inc.) president and CEO.

James Muir is promoted to VP of revenue cycle management sales at NextGen.

Harvard Vanguard internist Alan Brush, MD, who joined the organization in 1975 and has headed its internal medicine EMR design committee since 2000, wins the Harvard Vanguard Lifetime Achievement Award.

Lester Wold, MD (Mayo Clinic) joins VitalHealth Software as CMO.

Health Evolution Partners appoints Kevin McNamara (McNamara Family Ventures) as an operating partner.

DataMotion, a health information service provider, hires Andrew Nieto (Allscripts) to oversee the company’s DataMotion Direct secure e-mail service.

Announcements and Implementations

Pioneer Community Hospital (GA) implements McKesson EMR as part of the $27 million EHR initiative of Pioneer Health Services.

Saint Joseph Hospital (IL) uses polling software and interactive keypads as part of its EMR training program, embedding questions for audience feedback into its PowerPoint presentations.

The Cherry County Hospital (NE) goes live this month on Meditech’s nursing and therapy documentation and will implement CPOE and eMAR in June.

Mount Sinai announces the go-live of Epic at Mount Sinai Queens, which marks the second major phase of the health system’s $120 million rollout.

Rogue Regional Medical Center (OR) went live on Epic last last week, while Providence Medical Center (OR) makes the switch April 27.

Home health services provider AccentCare begins a phased implementation of the Homecare Homebase solution.

GE Healthcare announces several new customer-focused initiatives including recognition of facilities using GE HIT products to boost productivity in significant ways; road shows featuring Centricity Imaging Solutions; and, an expanded channel partner program to support ambulatory practices.

Palomar Health (CA) pilots a clinical messaging infrastructure to enable secure HIE using the Direct Project’s secure messaging protocols and the HPDPlus specifications for online physician directories.

CajunCodeFest 2.0 will be held April 24-26 at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, with teams of self-organization participants building healthcare prototypes over a 27-hour period in competing for a $25,000 grand prize. Social activities include a crawfish boil, a Cajun band, and the concurrent Festival International de Louisiane.

GetWellNetwork’s GetConnected 2013 meeting is underway in San Diego, with more than 500 patient engagement leaders in attendance.

Government and Politics

Not surprisingly, the HIMSS EHR Association issues a statement indicating it does not support the EHR user fee included in the President’s proposed 2014 budget.

Innovation and Research

A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine finds that physicians ordered 8.6 percent fewer tests when shown test costs during order entry. Cost per patient day fell 9.6 percent.

Sponsor Updates

• Captain Stephen Harden, chairman and CEO of LifeWings Partners, shares how aviation uses technology to avoid fatal errors at this week’s Surgical Information Systems National Conference in Atlanta.
• Illene Moore, MD of Dearborn Advisors lists the traps to avoid when optimizing EHR use.
• SuccessEHS integrates its EHR/PM solution with four Welch Allyn medical diagnostic devices.
• Sunquest Information Systems President Richard Atkin keynotes at the MedTech Nordic Investing & Partnering 2013 event September 3 in Helsinki, Finland. SIS CTO Eric Nilson posts the second of his three-part series on quality reporting for anesthesia.
• Brian Hodges, Informatica’s SVP of worldwide professional services, discusses risk-sharing and its impact on buying decisions.
• Kennedy Consulting Research & Advisory includes Aspen Advisors, Beacon Partners, Cumberland Consulting, Deloitte, GE Healthcare, and Impact Advisors in a report on firms in the healthcare payer, provider, and government consulting sectors.
• The Advisory Board Company, Heritage Provider Network, and the Bipartisan Policy Center launch the Care Transformation Prize Series, a national contest to encourage healthcare organizations to identify roadblocks to implementing new care models.
• Truven Health Analytics announces its report on the 15 top health systems, which were selected based on highest survival rates and fewest complications.
• QlikView offers a series of BI technology summits in several cities in coming months.
• EDCO Health Information Solutions and HealthPort collaborate to provide improved and expedited management of PHI.
• MedHOK’s 360Measures V 2.55 earns P4P software certification based on testing on the Integrated Healthcare Association’s California P4P measures, NCQA, and HEDIS.
• The Indianapolis Star names First Databank as a Top Workplace in 2013 based on employee feedback.
• GE Healthcare hosts its 2013 Centricity Live USER Conference this week in Washington, DC and announces GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt as one of the keynote speakers.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Monday Morning Update 4/15/13

From The PACS Designer: “Re: iRing. As we wait for the Apple iTV later this year, it has been rumored that this new device will have an iRing as a control device. So while you munch your snacks and watch your favorite programs on an iTV, you’ll be able to flip channels, adjust the sound, or also switch to an Internet browser with this new innovation.“

From Low Rider: “Re: barcoding. Saw this – looks pretty cool.“ A Hospira solution scans IV bags to verify them, scans the smart pump to check its settings, and then sends the settings and start time to the EHR.

Internal slides from Optum sent by an anonymous reader suggest that the company will sell its 60-consultant OptumInsight implementation and support business to Accenture effective May 9.

Half of respondents think that the CommonWell members that offer hospital systems haven’t integrated their own products very well. New poll to your right: which of the listed hospital system vendors offer “open” systems, based on how you interpret that word’s meaning? You can choose one, several, or “none of the above” and you can leave a comment as well.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Institute for Health Technology Transformation, or iHT². The company offers events, research, Webinars, and resources, all described in its newsletter (sign up for a free subscription here.) Upcoming Health IT Summits are in Atlanta, Boston, Ford Lauderdale, Denver, Seattle, New York, Beverly Hills, and Austin. Speaker lineups are good enough that I may attend one myself. Research projects include healthcare analytics, big data, and process improvement. Their Webinar schedule is here. Thanks to iHT² for supporting HIStalk.

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

Ken Mackley (St. Joseph’s Area Health Services) joins Cuyuna Regional Medical Center (MN) as director of IT.

ED system downtime forced Memorial Hospital of South Bend (IN) to go on diversion for several hours on Thursday.

University of New Mexico Hospital (NM) will lay off 57 transcriptionists in outsourcing their work to Nuance.

In Australia, the government’s $1 billion eHealth system holds only 414 patient records nine months after its launch, with fewer than 1 percent of doctors being able to view records on it because they refuse to sign up for a new healthcare ID. The government is sending out teams to recruit patients to sign up, which requires patients to provide their insurance cards and driver’s license. Critics say the government is trying to boost the registration numbers to hide the project’s failure.

In England, an NHS trust admits that it not only accidentally overpaid 791 workers, but also hired debt collectors to try to get the money back from its own employees.

#ONC Budget2006-2008: $61M/yr (slow progress)2009-2012: $61M/yr + HITECH (massive progress)2013: $58M + final HITECH2014: $78M request

— Farzad Mostashari (@Farzad_ONC) April 12, 2013

A class action lawsuit is filed against Florida-based Adventist Health System/Sunbelt alleging that the hospital operator’s failure to protect patient information allowed its ED employees to sell patient information to lawyers and chiropractors.

Google acquires Behavio, whose software harvests anonymous information from smart phone sensors such as location, speed, and the presence of nearby devices. Medical and disaster recovery applications are among its potential uses.

Weird News Andy suggests this weighty problem is waisting patients’ time. A survey finds that both patients and physicians trust the other less if they are overweight, with patients less likely to take advice from a fat doctor.

It’s more on the HIS-tory of Meditech this week from Vince.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 4/12/13

Top News

ONC’s proposed 2014 budget calls for $78 million in spending, up from $61 million in 2013. Staffing will increase from 89 to 109 FTEs. Also in the budget is $1 million in user fees that would be paid by EHR vendors.

Reader Comments

From The PACS Designer: “Re: MyChart. It’s nice to see that TPD’s post on MyChart signup generated a Readers Write from Anonymous along with a large number of reader comments. TPD’s view is MyChart is a good start for an online medical record, but much more needs to be done to add to maximum value for each patient using this option. For MyChart to be used, the patient must request a printed copy of the provider’s existing record. At the very end of the printed record you’ll find a unique starting code, which you will enter once you logon to MyChart. As for lab results, you’ll only get those on your record that the provider has interface installed for those other lab systems. What’s likeable is each medication listed on your record has a link to the National Institutes of Health’s NIH MedlinePlus site, which gives you access to the prescriptions purpose and side effects along with much more information you can’t find on your pharmacist’s prescription fact sheet.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Inga is taking the day off, so I’m sure we all wish her well in whatever interesting activities she has arranged. She mentioned earlier that her sixth anniversary with HIStalk is this week, so perhaps she is celebrating. Here’s to her.

We will be presenting some Webinars shortly and I need three hospital CIOs to provide presenter feedback for the first one. Real-time viewing isn’t required since we will have a recorded practice run of the Webinar to review. It will probably run around 40 minutes. Let me know if you can help. I’ll send an Amazon gift card as my thanks.

On the Jobs Board: Solution Sales Executive, Senior Program Manager, Senior Client Representative.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor QPID Health Record Intelligence. QPID (Queriable Patient Inference Dossier) aggregates EHR data to support real-time clinician-directed queries, analytics, and reporting capabilities at the point of care. Fast queries are supported by caching and indexing the patient record, with structured and unstructured information parsed and tagged. Any number of rule sets (apps) can be used, with examples that include an EHR search portal, an ED patient summary dashboard, a GI conscious sedation intake system, coding optimization, bronchitis screening, OR diabetes alert, and automated determination of smoking status. I interviewed President and CEO Michael Doyle on the day of the company’s February 14 launch. Thanks to QPID for supporting HIStalk.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cerner shares hit a 52-week high Thursday, closing at $95.54, up 30 percent in the past year. Above is the one-year share price chart of CERN (blue) vs. the Nasdaq (red).

Athenahealth files a patent infringement lawsuit against PM/EHR competitor CareCloud, claiming that the company violated athenahealth’s 2001 patent for claims processing rules. Several former employees of athenahealth now work for CareCloud. Athenahealth declined to comment on the lawsuit, but CareCloud CEO Albert Santalo provided us with this statement:“ To the best of our knowledge Carecloud is not infringing on Athenahealth’s 13-year-old outdated method and we won’t be making any additional comment at this time.”

Sales

Piedmont Healthcare (GA) will deploy Perceptive Software solutions to integrate data directly into its Epic EHR throughout five hospitals and 45 physician offices.

Hennepin County Medical Center (MN) continues its population health drive for HIV care with Forward Health Group’s PopulationManager.

People

Chris Coburn, executive director at Cleveland Clinic Innovations, will leave that organization to take an unnamed position with Partners HealthCare.

Michael Thompson (Mindray) joins Medstreaming as COO.

Announcements and Implementations

Vocera ships its 500,000th communication badge.

Tennessee-based Parental Health, which offers a care management platform for seniors, will raise $3 million via a Series B fundraising round, with the proceeds going toward the addition of up to 12 full-time employees in sales and marketing.

The Bipartisan Policy Center’s Health Innovation Initiative, Heritage Provider Network, and The Advisory Board company will hold an April 16 discussion on the the use of data by providers, health plans, and states to address healthcare challenges. A big data challenge will be announced. Speakers include Janet Marchibroda (BPC); Senator Bill Frist, MD; Aneesh Chopra (The Advisory Board Company); Karen Ignani (AHIP); and James Weinstein, MD (Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health System). The event will be streamed live.

Intuit Health announces that the seven millionth patient has registered for its health portal.

Practice Fusion launches Patient Fusion, which allows patients to schedule online appointments via the Web with any of the free EHR company’s 27,000 physician users and access their health records online. Mobile versions will follow.

Impact Advisors expands its mergers and acquisitions services for the healthcare IT market.

MMRGlobal files a patent infringement complaint against Quest Diagnostics and its Gazelle personal health records system.

Western Maryland Health System expands its use of Versus RTLS to include a mobile, location-aware call button for caregivers.

Government and Politics

ONC announces internally the hiring of Joe Bormel, MD, MPH (QuadraMed) as Director of Health Outcomes. He will focus on usability, clinical decision, support, and Meaningful Use and certification policy. We reported his hiring as a rumor as ONC medical officer on Tuesday, but did not list his title (“medical officer” in ONC is any physician employee). Bormel will report to Chief Medical Officer Jacob Reider, MD.

The VA requests $3.7 billion for its 2014 IT budget, a 10 percent increase. It includes $252 million for projects related to the VA-DoD shared EHR.

Technology

Athenahealth will provide third-party developer access to its physician network by rolling out an programmer API, allowing creation of an ecosystem of apps that can use its anonymized medical histories, appointments, and billing information through its More Disruption Please program. 

Other

In the UK, a hospital suspends its children’s heart surgery program because of high mortality rates, only to find that poorly produced data that had been fed to its new computer system had produced a false alarm.

Weird News Andy calls this “clear thinking for fatheads.” Stanford researchers develop a method of rendering harvested brain tissue transparent by removing the fat in its cells, allowing them to view structures down to the individual cell and molecule level.

Sponsor Updates

• Good Samaritan Hospital chooses Access and Perceptive Software to create electronic forms on demand.
• Vicki Lucas, RNC, PhD, chief nursing officer of PeriGen, covered strategies to increase OB revenue at the World Congress Leadership Summit on The Business of Women’s Health Washington, DC on April 10.
• UMC Health System (TX) goes live on Cerner CPOE with the assistance of HCI Group.
• GetWellNetwork will serve as a patient engagement sponsor for The Academy Huron Institute’s 2013 program “Developing Innovative Value-Based Delivery and Payment Models.”
• T-System signs an exclusive agreement with X32 Healthcare to offer Lean methodology for analytics and services with the ED.
• Hurley Medical Center (MI) selects Ciber to implement its Infor Healthcare Suite.
• Michele Hilton, GM of medical billing services for ADP AdvancedMD shares the top five challenges for hospitals to get paid.
• Merge adds endpoint and adjudication management to its eClinical OS platform for end-to-end study support in a single platform.
• Aprima Medical Software partners with ClearDATA for cloud hosting of its EHR/PM/RCM software and services.
• e-MDs announces the free Kansas City User Group roadshow on May 2.
• MedAssets honors veterans and humanitarians during the 2013 MedAssets Healthcare Business Summit in Las Vegas.
• DrFirst receives the Surescripts 2012 White Coat of Quality Award for the third consecutive year.
• Ingenious Med reaches the milestone of 25,000 charge capture users.
• Levi, Ray & Shoup hosts a webinar April 16 and 18 on improving performance in an SAP environment.
• CTO Charles Halfpenny of Halfpenny Technologies will present a master level session at the 18th Annual Executive War College on the value of lab data to health plans.
• Walsh College (MI) renews its IT outsourcing contract with CareTech Solutions.
• Confirmit awards McKesson its third ACE Award.
• Beacon Partners is hosting a webinar April 19 focusing on five key issues between Stage 1 and Stage 2 of Meaningful Use.
• HealthCare Anytime CEO Brady Klick served on a patient engagement panel at an April 11 program sponsored by the Northern California HIMSS chapter.
• Orion Health celebrates its 20-year anniversary, having surpassed $100 million in annual revenue, raised headcount my three to more than 750, and implement its solutions in more than 30 countries.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

Red Raider Alert: Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center notifies patients of an information breach as a result of a billing error. Apparently patient statements were mailed to the wrong addresses.

Mr. H posted a reader question about job recommendations for new graduates to better understand the HIT environment. Depending on your degree and experience, I’d consider looking for a position as an implementation specialist for a hospital, health system, or large medical group. It’s a great way to learn what the industry looks like outside of the vendor space and once you’ve done a couple tours of duty with complicated practices or hospital departments, you’ll be extremely valuable in the job market. At least in my area, teams are often composed of people that are new to healthcare – one is managed by an engineer and includes not only healthcare veterans, but also a minister and several former retirees.

A recent article in American Medical News notes that volume, not quality, still determines most doctor pay. I would love to see payment reform that rewards not only quality, but customer service, personality, and the time spent with patients. Despite the hard edge sometimes portrayed in my writing, when it comes to actual patient care I tend to be much more empathetic than my peers. When I was in community practice, my patients appreciated my listening skills as well as my ability to partner with them and negotiate long-term outcomes rather than simply lecture. Why shouldn’t I be paid more for that level of service? You want to see true physician engagement? Figure out a way to pay primary care physicians so that they can afford to see 20-25 patients a day rather than 30-35. And figure out a fair way to measure Meaningful Use that isn’t “all or nothing.”

Physician social media site Doximity gets my jeer of the week for its unreadable e-mail. It was so bad that I almost outed myself trying to screen shot it – the white rectangle is covering the black-on-black “insert recipient name here” field that I didn’t see until I pasted it over to send to Mr. H. Seriously, folks, do you really think anyone can read black on black or dark gray on black?

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

News 4/10/13

Top News

The HHS inspector general and CMS propose rules that would update and extend existing safe harbor exceptions and allow hospitals to continue subsidizing EMRs for affiliated physicians.

Reader Comments

From Wildcat Well: “Re: HIE. ONC announces an interest in a nationwide interoperable HIE. Is this not the same initiative as the CommonWell Health Alliance pilot? CommonWell will be a 501(C)(6), but regardless. Looks like a race of private vs. the government. Thoughts?”  

From Shodan the Barbarian MD: "Re: Shodan search engine. Guess you could easily find the IP address of a monitor, anesthesia machine, ventilator, or IV pump and change the settings. Scary with the virtually non-existent security of these devices.” A CNN article covers the Shodan search engine, a Google-like service that finds any device connected to the Internet such printers, webcams, routers, servers, security cameras, and even medical equipment. Many of those devices have no security protection at all, and many more have the manufacturer’s original password or an easily guessed replacement like “password1” or “1234”. An independent security consultant was able to run a car wash, turn off the cooling system of a hockey rink in Denmark, and access the control system of a French hydroelectric plant.

From Bob Loblow: “Re: QuadraMed. CMIO Joe Bormel, MD has left after 10 years and is now with ONC.” His LinkedIn profile still shows him as an independent consultant, having left QuadraMed in January 2013. Update: readers confirmed that Joe started as ONC’s medical officer on Monday, April 8.

From JM: “Re: healthcare IT resources. What would you recommend a recent graduate do to better understand the HIT environment? Are there specific resources, entry-level positions, or education to seek out?” This question comes up every few months and I always invite readers to provide advice.

From Marie: “Re: at-risk contracts. I am doing research for a master’s program. We hear about at-risk contracts between payers and providers, but why haven’t we seen a similar movement between HIT vendors and providers? Why aren’t providers demanding that vendors go at risk for the cost and quality results they promise? Why aren’t vendors offering it to create competitive advantage?” I can only say that you’d be crazy as a vendor to make a hospital your partner knowing they don’t have the focus and capability to deliver the 80 percent of an HIT project’s value that comes from how a system is used rather than the system itself. That would be like a hammer manufacturer going at risk that you’ll build something nice with their product and pay them if so. I’ve had experience writing at-risk contracts as a customer and either party could get royally screwed just because some idealistic metric (readmissions, medication errors, cost per case, etc.) went up or down over several years because of factors entirely unrelated to the new system. Perhaps you could look at more specific measures such as orders originating from an order set, accepted clinical warnings, or decreased turnaround time, but it’s hard to assign a dollar value to those. But I’ll let readers chime in and help Marie with her project.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

This week marks my sixth anniversary at HIStalk. Happily I still think it’s the best job in HIT. In fact, every once in awhile I have to pinch myself to make sure I am not dreaming and that I am not about to wake up in the middle of the night to catch a 6:00 a.m. flight for an EHR demo to a bunch of doctors and their transcriptionists(!) Thanks Mr. H for keeping it fun.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Xerox, and specifically its Healthcare Solutions business. The company’s provider offerings include system selection and implementation (Meaningful Use, EHR, ERP, revenue cycle, ICD-10), optimization (technology and infrastructure, extended business office, collections, compliance), and analytics (clinical surveillance, decision support, care management, case management, and benchmarking). The company has been serving providers for 25 years, has 1,500 hospital clients, works in 31 states, and does work for 19 of the top 20 health plans. Some of the major vendors supported are Epic, Cerner, GEHC, Siemens, Meditech, McKesson, Allscripts, Infor Lawson, and Kronos. Thanks to Xerox for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a video I found on YouTube that provides an overview of Xerox in healthcare.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A Wisconsin newspaper’s article called “Life After Epic: From Epic ‘Grad’ to Entrepreneur” covers companies started by still-young former Epic employees, some of them working from a railroad car converted to co-working space. A local entrepreneur networking group estimates that 50 former Epic employees are working startups in the Madison area, most of them not healthcare related. A new entrepreneur says Epic’s one-year non-compete clause provides a good time to start a company.

Allscripts CEO Paul Black was paid $9 million in his first 12 days on the job, according to the Chicago business paper. Most of that was in stock and bonuses. Glen Tullman, his fired predecessor, made $7.1 million in 2012.

iMDsoft opens a new office in Dusseldorf, Germany that will provide around-the-clock support to its customers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Sales

Presence Health (IL) will deploy the Medseek Predict CRM solution.

Mississippi Medicaid selects the MedeAnalytics Accountable Care Solution to warehouse claims and clinical data collected from various HIEs.

The Ocean Beach Hospital (WA) board of commissions approves the purchase of Healthland’s EHR.

Planned Systems International and its partner Mediware win a $5 million DoD contract to provide validation services for the Enterprise Blood Management System.

People

Versus promotes Kevin Jackson to VP of technology.

Terry McGeeney, MD (TransforMED) joins healthcare consulting firm BDC Advisors.

MedeAnalytics hires Ping Zhang (Epocrates) SVP of product innovation and CTO.

Paula Sanders is promoted to chair of Post & Schell’s national Health Care Practice Group of 30 attorneys, representing clients on health facility regulation including RAC audits, HIPAA, and fraud and abuse.

Announcements and Implementations

The Joint Commission issues a Sentinel Event Alert after 80 deaths between 2009-2012 are found to be related to medical device alarm fatigue.

Massachusetts General Hospital and American Well announce a telehealth pilot program that will initially focus on child and adolescent psychiatry, heart failure, and neurology.

Christus Health Systems and Legacy Community become the first providers in Houston to share patient data via the Medicity-powered Greater Houston Healthconnect HIE.

Western Maryland Health System implements the Visibility Staff Assist solution from Versus Technology.

The local paper profiles St. Luke’s Regional Medical Center (IA) and its recent transition to EHR. The paper notes that, “The Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare, requires health care providers to move to electronic medical records by 2014” and that, “Epic is not interoperable with hospitals and clinics that use other forms of electronic medical record.”

CIC Advisory announces a Meaningful Use Stage 2 benchmarking tool that includes on-site interviews and reviews followed by a detailed scorecard for a flat fee of $2,500.

Technology recruiter Greythorn offers its first Healthcare IT Market Report. It covers salaries, benefits, consulting , bonuses, and part-time employment.

Spain’s first telemedicine service launches as La Palma and Tenerife Islands offer virtual consultations via Cisco HealthPresence.

MMRGlobal launches a service that will allow providers to offer and bill for telemedicine services via its personal health records system. It has also adding a genomics module. Both will integrate with the 4medica EHR beginning April 15.

Government and Politics

Nextgov reports a rumor that the DoD may be ditching its plans to upgrade its AHLTA EHR system and instead reconsider using the VA’s VistA, with two potential reasons cited by sources: (a) the rise of former VA deputy director Chuck Hagel to Secretary of Defense; and (b) the satirical comments on incompatible DoD-VA EHRs by Jon Stewart in his March 27 “Daily Show,” in which he blamed the DoD for stubbornly following its expensive AHTLA agenda to avoid giving up ground to the VA.

Technology

Johns Hopkins surgeon and patient safety expert Martin Makary, MD, MPH says in a JAMA editorial that hospitals should use the video equipment they already have in the OR to record every procedure to support quality improvement efforts. Patients overwhelmingly support having their procedures recorded, surveys have found, and the recordings could be used for training and for inclusion in the EHR to support less-detailed operative notes.

The Apache Software Foundation moves the Apache cTAKES  project to a Top-Level Project. The open source NLP system, originally developed by a Mayo Clinic team, extracts information from free-text EMR documentation.

Google announces that its Google Fiber gigabit-speed Internet service, originally rolled out in Kansas City with 100 times normal broadband speed, will be live in Austin, TX by the middle of next year.

Other

The big data revolution could reduce healthcare spending by an estimated $300 to $450 billion according to a McKinsey & Company report.

Paul Black blogs about his first 100 days as CEO of Allscripts and reflects on emerging themes, including the need to work closely with customers and patients to transform the industry; the need for population health management across venues for care; and the importance of coordination care tools.

The Wall Street Journal looks at the use of cloud-based storage for medical images, noting that more than half of the country’s health systems are expected to embrace cloud-based image storage over the next three years.

GE Healthcare, which cut 10 percent of its South Burlington, VT staff last year, lists 120,000 square feet of its office building there for lease. The company has 436 employees occupying 142,000 square feet.

Here’s the latest cartoon from Imprivata.

The New York Times covers “a parallel world of pseudo-academia” in which conferences and journals with prestigious-sounding names offer presenters and authors resume-padding exposure in return for cash. It says that universities need to be careful in reviewing resumes and predicts that people will be misled by poorly research publications that appear in credible-sounding online-only journals. A research librarian estimates that 4,000 “predatory open-access journals” are being published because it is “easy money, very little work, a low barrier to start-up.” One physician sent two articles in response to an e-mail from The Journal of Clinical Case Reports and was billed $2,900, with the journal running his articles even after he requested they be withdrawn. A Duke University School of Medicine professor agreed to serve on the board of one such publication and was surprised it solicited him to recruit authors and publish his own papers; when he asked to be removed from the board, the journal just left his name on its masthead anyway.

Jamie Stockton of Wells Fargo Securities provides updated MU attestation information for hospitals. Leading in EP attestations were Epic, Allscripts, eClinicalWorks, NextGen, GE Healthcare, McKesson, Cerner, Practice Fusion, Greenway, and athenahealth, which
as the top 10 vendors accounted for two-thirds of all attesting EPs.

Weird News Andy uncovers this case of texting while flying: the National Transportation Safety Board finds that a contributing factor in a 2011 medical helicopter accident was the pilot’s texting before and during the flight. The helicopter crashed into a field after running out of fuel, with NTSB’s conclusion being that the distracted pilot thought he had more fuel than was actually available. The pilot, a flight nurse, a paramedic, and a patient were killed in the crash. The pilot had sent or received 240 text messages during his shift the day the helicopter crashed, including seven during the flight itself as he made arrangements to have dinner with a co-worker.

Sponsor Updates

• Billian’s HealthDATA offers a white paper on the top integrated marketing priorities in the age of healthcare reform.
• AT&T generated $5.6 billion in revenue in 2012 from healthcare industry businesses implementing one of the company’s cloud and mobility-based solutions.
• AirStrip ONE beats 15 competitors in a mobile health app contest. 
• Brad Levin, GM of Visage Imaging, will participate in a SIIM 2013 session titled “Who do you turn to for help in developing solutions?” in the Dallas area June 6-9.
• Wellsoft will participate in the 2013 Emergency Medicine Update and the e-Health 2013 conferences in Canada during the month of May.
• Emdeon highlights the benefits of e-prescribing and discusses why providers need to embrace the technology.
• Merge Healthcare and Integrated Data Storage will create a hosted private cloud offering for the Merge Honeycomb platform.
• Cassie Sturdevant, a senior recruiter with Impact Advisors, joins a panel of other healthcare recruiting experts to discuss the healthcare job market.
• Surgical Information Systems CTO Eric Nilsson shares his impressions on interoperability and the Intelligent Hospital Pavilion at last month’s HIMSS conference.
• HealthEdge partners with CTG Health Solutions to deliver integration services for customers using the HealthRules Answers BI suite.
• Cornerstone Advisors Group launches its new website.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.