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Monday Morning Update 2/20/12

February 18, 2012 News 9 Comments

From Just One CIO: “Re: ICD-10 delay. Is it just for physicians or for any covered entity (including hospitals, in other words?)” I assume for everybody, but the fact that you’re asking the question may mean that I’m missing some nuance of the announcement. Readers, feel free to chime in.

From Zac Jiwa: “Re: HIMSS presentations. Long-time listener, first-time caller. I always enjoy your cynical commentary. Just in case you want to meet at HIMSS, I’m closing keynote at the HIE Symposium on Monday and then on the HIMSS State Leaders Panel on Tuesday morning.” I told Zac I’d pitch his presentations a little even though he didn’t ask. I know presenters always worry about being short on audience members. Zac is CTO of Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. He’s got more recommendations and connections than just about anybody I’ve ever seen on LinkedIn, so I’m sure he’s good. If your schedule allows, swing by and tell him you saw his picture in HIStalk.

From Monty Hall Watcher: “Re: Northside Hospital, Atlanta. Corporate suits are roaming the halls, suggesting an acquisition. My bets are either HCA or Ardent, but perhaps NGHS or Emory.”

From Deborah Kohn: “Re: ICD-10. I’m one of those scheduled to speak on ICD-10 at HIMSS! However, my topic is more about understanding the plethora of HIT tools that can used not only for the next round of compliance dates, but even if ICD-10 gets bumped off the US landscape. So I don’t bore the audience with OS upgrade analogies, I was going to promenade in and flaunt my cute shoes. Now I have to think about how to inspire a session room of one or two souls since Mr. HIStalk predicts it will be seriously empty.” I’ll try to help out by pitching the cute shoes, which always gets the attention of a loyal core of readers.

Listening: new from Heartless Bastards, female-led bluesy roots rock from Austin, TX that can sound like everything from The Pretenders to a restrained, better voiced, and sultrier Janis Joplin. It’s basically all about Erika Wennestrom, who sings, plays, and writes with aplomb. I mentioned them in August, but I feel justified in doing it again since I’ll predict that the new album will make them stars. They actually play real music. I’m with Dave Grohl – learn to play an instrument, sing from the heart, and forget the computers.

Inga, Dr. Jayne, and I will be posting daily from HIMSS, so this is my attempt to clear out my inbox before then. Expect lengthy posts, lots of pictures, and quite a few reader comments for most of next week as we try to grasp and convey the enormity that is the HIMSS conference. If you want to help, we can use more eyes and ears since we can’t be everywhere at once.

My timely Time Capsule editorial this week from five years ago: Despite Your Resolutions, I Know What You’ll Be Doing at HIMSS. Example: “Thrust your chest out proudly, knowing that booth people will pretend to be impressed with your title, your employer, and your town, even though they are silently sniggering at all three and looking over your shoulder for a better prospect or an incognito competitor who might hire them.”

We rolled over the 5 millionth HIStalk visitor Friday morning at 6:54 a.m. Eastern time, which Inga and I both happened to see live by pure coincidence. A reader on an iPad from Boise, ID put us over the hump. There were almost 100 readers on at that odd time of day, from places like New York City; Atlanta; Washington DC; England; Ottawa; Pittsburgh; Madison; and Kirchheim, Germany. Thanks for contributing to that number, which I still can’t quite comprehend given that my view HIStalk is just an ever-hungry blank screen in my computer / exercise room.

Thanks and welcome to CTG Health Solutions, a new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor. They’re one of the largest providers of healthcare IT support in the country, helping hospitals of all kinds as well as physician organizations. Their delivery model offers deliverables-based pricing with adherence to quality standards, using a combination of on-site and off-site consulting, replicable processes, 24×7 support from their National Solution Centers, and a readily available pool of skilled resources that can be brought in as needed to assure speed to value. They provide services such as implementation builds, integration, application management, report writing, and testing. The company is ISO 9001 certified and uses the ITIL Framework for its work with advanced technologies. If your needs involve ambulatory EMR work, CTG has helped over 2,000 practices make the transition, all the way from vendor selection to benefits realization. The list goes on: strategic and operations consulting, information security, accountable care management, and compliance solutions. Thanks to CTG Health Solutions for supporting HIStalk. Or, if you’re going to HIMSS, you can stop by Booth # 2070 and thank them in person.

Santa Rosa Consulting is supporting HIStalk as a Platinum Sponsor, which I appreciate. The company is led by Rich Helppie, former founder and CEO of Superior Consultant (sold to ACS in 2005) and Tom Watford, former CFO/COO of First Consulting Group (sold to CSC in 2007.) These guys obviously have a track record in running well-regarded healthcare consultancies and have used that reputation to assemble a team of industry heavyweights (example: EVP Doug Hires, who has 25 years of healthcare experience, just wrote a timely piece on how providers can use the ICD-10 delay to their advantage.) Santa Rosa Consulting offers advisory and consulting services as well as help with implementation and integration of vendor systems (Epic, Cerner, Siemens, Meditech, Lawson, Oracle, NextGen, etc.) Areas of specialization include point-of care technology and workflow, patient safety and quality, and staffing and recruiting. You can’t be a good consulting company without excelling at managing consultants and I was impressed with their Core Values list (“We have fun and we get our work done. Common sense beats bureaucracy.”) If you’ve been in the industry for awhile, drop by their HIMSS booth (MP27, MP37) and you’ll probably see some familiar faces. Thanks to Santa Rosa Consulting for supporting HIStalk.

One more sponsor announcement. Thanks to long-time HIStalk supporter iSirona for upgrading their sponsorship to the Platinum level. The company can integrate medical devices to any EMR (Epic, Allscripts, Meditech, etc.) with their DeviceConX software, with the capability to connect to devices like ventilators that are not network-enabled. Their AlertManager manages device alerts, routing clinically descriptive messages to any nurse call system, smart phone, or e-mail address. Recent big announcements include being selected by Children’s Omaha, passing all interoperability testing at the IHE Connectathon, appointing a chief nursing officer, and of course being named Best in KLAS for 2011 in medical device integration (I’m pretty sure they’re sitting on a big client announcement for HIMSS or shortly afterward because I know people who know people at the hospital in question, so I’m watching for that.) Thanks to Founder/CEO Dave Dyell, President/Chief Sales Officer Peter Witonsky, and the rest of the folks at iSirona for their loyal support of HIStalk over several years and now taking it to the next level. They’re in Booth # 12414 at HIMSS and a stop on the Booth Crawl, so say howdy.

Speaking of the Booth Crawl, here’s one last reminder to download and print your form before you head out (feel free to print extra copies to recruit more players in the exhibit hall.) You’re eligible to play if you work for a provider organization (hospital, practice, clinic, etc.) or a not-for-profit (university, association, etc.) It’s grown into a pretty big deal – I just Googled it and hits are everywhere. And why not? Playing gives you a really good chance of winning one of 55 iPads that sponsors have graciously donated, just for swinging by some booths. Our sponsors are amazing – when Inga and I threw it together on a whim at the last minute, I was doubtful we’d get the minimum of six or eight companies needed to make it worth doing, but we had 55 who jumped all over it, overwhelming us a bit with their desire to put iPads into the hands of readers. Thanks for playing on behalf of the Booth Crawl sponsors — we’re rooting for you to be one of the 55 winners.

I don’t know why I haven’t done this already, other than I’ve had no time to think it through and it’s probably really expensive. I should rent a tiny booth way off in a corner somewhere at HIMSS next year, staff it with perky attendees, and have them hand out sponsor-provided freebies, Booth Crawl forms, and anything else that would be fun for reader-attendees. Maybe just stick a couch there have friends of HIStalk hang out just to say hello. People keep asking if I’ll have a booth at HIMSS and I always think, “For what purpose?” but maybe just for fun, although I bet the logistics are daunting and I doubt HIMSS would encourage me.

Oopsie: the HealthIT.gov folks might want to add HIMSS to the old spellchecker. Given no announcement on Meaningful Use Stage 2, I’m wondering if HHS will put out a press release Monday or Tuesday, then let Farzad Mostashari spell it out in his Thursday morning keynote? That’s strictly conjecture on my part, but I still get the feeling it’s imminent and ONC’s getting pretty good at public relations, so I have to think something will happen next week. I’m not a fan of the idea since everybody’s going to be too swamped at HIMSS to sequester themselves for in-depth analysis of complex Notice of Proposed Rulemaking documents. The week after would be much better for all involved if you ask me.

Kudos to HIMSS for calling out the feds for their bizarre decision to delay implementation of ICD-10. HIMSS rarely takes a stand on issues unless they threaten the bottom line of their Diamond Members (although some of those do offer ICD-10 services, I suppose) so this is a surprise. HIMSS says most of the industry is ready, and given the more than 1.5 years that remain until the original implementation date, there’s no reason to extend the date now (or for those reading between the HHS lines, just canning the ICD-10 idea entirely since they didn’t give a new date or explain why the delay needed to be implemented so early.) HIMSS says it’s going to be expensive for providers to maintain two systems and to bring the consultants back for a refresher round later, not to mention that ICD-10 is built into Meaningful Use and has the potential to improve care, payment, evidence-based medicine, and quality monitoring. I wouldn’t hold my breath that HHS will change its mind since they’re going to look stupid either way, so I think whatever hidden agenda made them extend it in the first place (campaign dollars and re-election support, I’d bet) will prevail over common sense.

In the meantime, the AMA is positively beaming over the decision, which came just four weeks after they wrote the Speaker of the House to get him to put the ICD-10 brakes on. They look forward to having a “productive dialogue,” obviously feeling empowered to influence federal policy directly. I do give them credit for using the word “hassles” in the announcement attributed to AMA President Peter Carmel, MD, who doesn’t look like the kind of guy who would actually say that. Medicine has been very good to him: he’s a pediatric neurosurgeon, his wife is a neuroradiologist, his son and daughter-in-law are doctors, and his other two kids run his asset management company.

Vitera Healthcare Solutions names Lara Stout as VP of professional services. She was previously with McKesson. The company also appoints Mark Janiszewski, also previously with McKesson, as SVP of product management.

GE Healthcare responds to a recent comment from MJOG regarding the retirement of Centricity Advance, in which he mentioned a price of $1,500 per month. I appreciate their taking time to clarify.

GE recognizes the inconvenience to these small practices that relied upon Advance, which is why GE guarantees a competitive price of $650 per provider per month for the first two years of the agreement. True, after that period, pricing is set at the discretion of the VARs but we’ve spoken with them all and have consensus that MJOG’s cited $1500 is remarkably high and well above what the going rate would settle at.

Former US CTO Aneesh Chopra rejoins his previous employer, The Advisory Board Company, as senior advisor for healthcare technology strategy. He will consult with member hospitals and contribute to the company’s strategic initiatives.

HCA will expand its use of technology from AirStrip and has taken a financial position in the company. Most HCA hospitals have been using AirStrip OB since 2007 and the hospital company will broaden its rollout of AirStrip CARDIOLOGY.

It’s a funny coincidence that we just mentioned some history of the HIMSS conference the other day (courtesy of History Buffy) and now Vince is taking a HIS-torical look back at the good old days when you could’ve fit the entire conference in a Starbucks. For some reason, I’m totally drawn to the beach photo even though I don’t know any of the people in it – something about the lighting or the composition is compelling.

The Allscripts earnings call transcript is here. They tout Sunrise’s ability to connect with affiliated physicians and its “open platform,” talk about the contract with SA Health in South Australia, and talk about EMR demand, which they say won’t peak any time soon (“we’re in the third inning”) but will shift to smaller practices.

Slightly more respondents think that big IT shops will improve patient outcomes of little hospitals they take over than believe they will make things worse. New poll to your right: was delaying ICD-10 a good thing or a bad thing overall?

CSC, stung by huge financial losses and investor lawsuits from its participation in the UK’s failed NPfIT, will lay off up to 500 employees who are assigned to its NHS projects.

Dr. Jayne mentioned some of the good and bad pieces of HIMSS-related bulk mail she has received. I toss all of mine without opening, but Friday I got a giant cardboard tube that weighed nothing and had no return address, a sure sign of some kind of HIMSS promotion gone mad that I knew I’d want to criticize. After finally getting it open, inside was one skinny detailed-crammed poster from Lumeris, if I’m remembering correctly (obviously their attempt to make an impression failed). Mrs. HIStalk was appalled at the cost, the inconvenience to the post office, and having to stuff it in a trashcan. Here’s what I would do if I were HIMSS as an alternative to all the tree-slaying that happens every year (I’m stealing the idea from the cruise lines, which do something like this now):

Automatically set up a Conference Personalizer membership-type site for every registered attendee, where you can log on with your conference confirmation number.
Allow vendors to target their announcements and invitations to be sent to the individual member’s site. Like e-mail, the attendee can simply delete them to make them go away.
Provide the capability for events to be accepted and turned into a printable / downloadable conference calendar, also RSVP’ing automatically to the sponsor of the events.
Allow attendees to connect with each other to whatever degree they choose in a LinkedIn-type closed message model.

Sponsor Updates

First Databank will announce Monday the release a new alert management solution, FDB AlertSpace, that addresses alert fatigue. It allows users to customize CPOE alerts, the great majority of which are overridden during order entry, and to share common alert settings with other facilities. They will be demonstrating it at the HIMSS conference.
Healthcare Clinical Informatics is offering a free Webinar, Making Molehills out of Mountains: EMR Optimization and Clinical Adoption, on Wednesday, March 7.

Las Vegas weather: very pleasant and sunny all week after a slightly cooler Sunday and Monday, with highs in the 60s to low 70s, lows in the mid 40s. If you are headed out, safe travels. If not, we’ll tell you what’s happening there.

E-mail Mr. H.

Dr. Sam 2/17/12

February 17, 2012 News 1 Comment

Confusion and Clarifications on Practicing Medicine in "Real Time"

It has often been said, and oft written ( by people like me) that we have entered the age of the practice of medicine in "real time." In fact, I think I may have coined the term "Real Time Medicine" about 10 years ago. At least I registered a domain name using the term about six or seven years ago, which must mean something.

The term seemed to me at the time to mean some super form of "now." Not the "now" of today, or this morning, or in the next ten minutes, but rather the instant of simultaneity – when data appeared at its point of generation and simultaneously arrived at whatever device I use to receive it.

Being inherently paranoid with respect to all matters even remotely in the domain of influence of anyone who belongs to a state or national bar association (and having experienced more than one brush with the legal system,) I immediately began to ponder the medical legal consequences of medical decision-making in the super-now. Just how quickly was I supposed to advise Mrs. Epstein that she should alter her insulin dose when I just saw that she had a markedly elevated fasting blood glucose level?

A reasonable response would seem to include such factors as the likelihood of anything happening to Mrs. Epstein between the time I learned of her hyperglycemia and when I was able to call her, the severity of importance of my current activities (such as being in
the middle of conducting a cardiac resuscitation,) and my ability to actually reach her.

A malpractice attorney however, may be more likely to view the parameters of reasonability around a perceived degree of danger to Mrs. Epstein with each passing moment, my clear irresponsibility in delaying contacting her for any reason (certainly I could have yelled out for someone to have my office call Mrs. Epstein as I was injecting intracardiac epinephrine,) and the potential impact of my irresponsibility on the attorney’s ability to pay off the condo in Park City.*

Ergo: Einstein was right. Time is relative. QED.

"How relative?" you may ask.

This is another subject that keeps me up at night.

Since I may have coined a term involving, by implication, the super-now, I should at least know what "now" is. Considering that today’s speediest transistors can switch faster than one thousandth of a billionth of a second, that the second has been physically divided by laser strobe technology into increments of 250 billionths of a billionth of a second, and that one meter is now measured as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second, I have no idea at all of what "now" actually means. Whatever "now" is, it’s already gone.

If we ever have peco-lawyers, we are all in a lot of trouble.

If I am ever sued on an issue of how long I took to respond to a digital message, my plan is to call in a theoretical physicist, like Paul Davies from Arizona State University, or philosopher Craig Callender from the University of California-San Diego, and others who are capable of articulating a very strong argument that time does not exist at all – an argument which is particularly appealing since it would mean that a lot of lawyers would owe a lot of people a lot of money in refunds.

To add to my personal confusion on these matters, we are getting our information in something called cyberspace. This is apparently someplace in which we all spend time without ever actually being in it. I think it’s someplace where time has no past or future. This may explain why many teenagers emerge from it effectively brain dead.

I can’t help but wonder what the eminent diagnosticians of the past would think of the practice of medicine in cyberspace. I remember studying the writings of Sir Zachary Cope who, it seemed to me, would have been able to determine more about an acute abdomen from across the room than I could at the bedside. I remember actually tapping on someone’s chest to try to gauge the level of any fluid that might be present in the chest cavity. Today, I would remotely place an electronic order for a chest X-ray and receive an answer from New Delhi. So much for the laying on of hands.

I have been giving myself credit for coming up with the term "Real Time Medicine" for close to a decade, but honesty dictates that I cannot claim in good conscious to understand what I meant – or even claim to understand what I though I was describing. Even if someone else came up with the term at the same instant I did, it would apparently depend upon how far apart we were physically at the time and the speed at which we were each moving relative to each other to know who had the original thought. If anyone reading this thinks they came up with the concept before me, please contact me and we’ll go to an astrophysicist together to get it worked out.

* (Possible moment of cynicism suggesting a need to apologize – but my heart would just not be in it)

Samuel R. Bierstock, MD, BSEE is the founder and president of Champions in Healthcare, LLC, a strategic consulting firm specializing in clinical information system implementation and healthcare IT business strategies.

News 2/17/12

February 16, 2012 News 3 Comments

Top News

HHS announces that the October 1, 2013 compliance date for provider use of ICD-10 diagnosis codes will be pushed back to an unspecified date.

Reader Comments

From Imelda: “Re: Soles4Souls. Your shoe drive inspired me to clean out my closet. I promise to bring at least three pairs to donate. Where do I need to take them?” Awesome! You can bring your donation of any style of gently used shoes to the exhibit floor and drop them off at ESD (booth 4616), HealthPort (252), DrFirst (5456), or Gnax Health (2875). We’ll also have a drop-off box at HIStalkapalooza for those who received an invitation for it.

From Fred Gailey: “Re: your interview. I enjoyed the interview with you in the Dodge Communications blog. You were so articulate. You and the HIStalk gang are the most famous anonymous people I know.” Thanks. I like that Fred feels he knows me.

From Tom: “Re: ICD-10 delay. I thought you might get a chuckle from this web page announcing the delay today.” Bowing to AMA pressure and exhibiting typical federal government indecisiveness (and possibly keeping a close eye on the re-electability of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s boss in the White House) HHS decides yet again to delay ICD-10 like it did HIPAA and just about every other piece of legislation that big-donor provider groups might squawk about, using patients as their human shield of excuses. It wasn’t even due to kick in until almost 20 months from now, meaning it will probably be ICD-12 or 13 if and when the feds ever pull the trigger. We don’t want to rush into ICD-10, though – it’s only been out for 20 years. ICD-10 is cumbersome, but it won’t get less so with a delay, so if it sucks, let’s just say we’re never going to do it and move on to something else. As is often the case with federal programs these days, the responsible people (those who prepared for the change instead of ignoring it) get the shaft.

From RJ: “Re: ICD-10 delay. It should be noted that HHS posted an announcement last evening with an emphasis on its commitment to the rulemaking process. They reissued the release this morning, but removed all references to the rulemaking process. Here are the versions.” I put the two versions sent over by RJ into Word and kicked out the changes. HHS removed everything referencing rulemaking and took Sebelius’s name out of the headline. Interesting.

From Bob: “Re: Booth Crawl. I can’t make it to HIMSS this year. Can I participate virtually by reviewing the vendor web sites and submitting an entry form online?” Inga and I didn’t write many rules since we made the whole thing up in about 15 minutes, so checking the rather slim rulebook finds no requirement that you actually visit the booths – you only have to answer the questions. I would be surprised if the participating companies chose questions with answers that can be easily found online, but I also admit that I haven’t actually looked. Since you do not need to be present to win, we would have no way to check anyway, so good luck!

From Dave: “Re: shoes. Saw these, thought of Inga.” Now you’ve got Shirley Temple’s At the Codfish Ball stuck in my head: “Come along and follow me, to the bottom of the sea …”

From Mark: “Re: NIST. Isn’t this a few years late?” The National Institute of Standards and Technology asks EHR vendors to provide their products to help it develop usability standards, a process it estimates will take a year to complete. Vendors can sign up through March 15. My first thought was that it would not be in a vendor’s best interest to participate, but I reconsidered … it’s probably not a bad idea to connect with the NIST folks (and ONC indirectly) and make sure they understand your particular point of view.

From Curmudgeon: “Re: ICD-10 spleen-venting. What timing. Clarification best come before the flock gathers in Las Vegas or confusion will reign. The review process better not be a Meaningful Use-esque five-act drama. CIOs know this will happen and progress must continue, but now there’s a reason for organization management to pull the old ‘well wait and see’ attitude, shorting funding, staff and time. Dr. Madara’s ‘find another method!’ has to be the mindblower of the century. I hear he wants to appear at HIMSS, but is uncertain if his horse and buggy will be there in time. There are quality reasons, information reasons and better care reasons to do ICD-10. The excuse that the rest of the world doing it is shouldn’t be the reason for the US to do it. The reason should be that the rest of the world found it smart to do it! Unless we know something they don’t. Safe travel to all going to the Strip and thanks to all who stay behind keeping the home chips and bytes burning.”

From History Buffy: “Re: previous HIMSS conferences. I ran across this 2007 document by the HIMSS Legacy Workgroup (never heard of them) that attempted to document the history of HIMSS. It has the location, number of attendees, exhibitors, etc. for all the conferences.” Pretty cool. The first conference was in 1962 in Baltimore, when the precursor of HIMSS (Hospital Management Systems Society) had all of 53 members. Conference attendance didn’t crack 10,000 until San Antonio in 1995, when HIMSS had 5,534 members.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Got HIStalk Practice? If not, here is what you missed over the last week: HIT adoption by US physicians is higher than in other advanced nations. CMS launches a Web page dedicated to clinical quality measures. HHS introduces a $9.1 million loan repayment program to encourage medical students to practice primary care in underserved areas. AAFP’s TransforMED publishes a toolkit for PCMH implementations. Culbert Healthcare’s Brad Boyd offers advice for extending IT to community practices. Readership on HIStalk Practice continues to climb – thank you, readers. For you non-readers, that means your colleagues and competitors are staying one step ahead of you, so you had best get on the HIStalk Practice bandwagon.

The fun folks at World Wide Technology are hosting a party in Las Vegas Saturday night and that’s where you’ll find me. They are so proud of their HIStalk sponsorship that they created a special banner to display at the event. How cool is that? Party pics to follow.

Charles Babbage posted a comment this week regarding my Dodge Communications interview, which included my confession that I was often star-struck by big-name CIOs and vendor CEOs. From Charles’ original comment:

This Inga quote illustrates how we have moved the focus of HIT from benefiting patients to selling products and glorifying salesmen and their leaders. The people Inga calls the ‘Rock Stars’ of HIT should be the CMIOs and clinicians who make the systems work to help patients and improve healthcare.

Charles added that he adores me, so my delicate ego was not too terribly crushed. In a follow-up e-mail exchange, Charles added:

Thanks also for understanding that the comment is NOT directed at you, but at the unfortunate values that HIMSS perpetuates by idolizing people who sell software that has balkanized health IT services, requires four or more years to implement, achieves usability standards of the early-to-mid 1990s, connects only to itself, and too often obscures information rather than presenting it in ways that help clinicians. And it does not help either clinicians or patient safety that the software too often takes 15 clicks to find information that should be contiguous on the same screen. Now, that does not make the vendors evil, and most do want to help healthcare if they can make money by selling their goods — and there ain’t nothing wrong with that. BTW, after today’s post, I got a slew of invites to meetings, breakfasts, etc. for only $89 each.

The DrFirst folks are offering another way for HIStalk readers to win an iPad. Stop by their booth (#5456) on Tuesday, mention their HIStalk contest, and get your picture taken with their HIT super hero Doctor Defender while doing something funny, creative, or otherwise noteworthy. The winning picture will be displayed and announced at HIStalkapalooza Tuesday night.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Healthcare Clinical Informatics (HCI.) The Jacksonville, FL company provides EMR implementation talent, helping healthcare organizations with all phases of the implementation lifecycle, making sure that workflow is integrated and ROI is delivered. The company is growing like gangbusters, having hired 70 employees in 2011 and on track to bring on another 150 this year. HCI also supports the growing UK healthcare IT market from its offices in South Wales, partnering with a number of NHS Trusts. Its clients include Adventist Health System, Parkland, and Tenet. They can help whether you need consulting help or permanent placements. I always like to check out the executive roster and I found a couple of highly experienced folks I know: CIO Sean O’Rourke (he used to be CIO at UPMC) and VP of Optimization and Clinical Adoption Marcy Stoots (she ran Baycare’s implementation.) The HCI folks are excited about being connected with HIStalk and I appreciate their support. Thanks to Healthcare Clinical Informatics.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

HIMSS buys the mHealth Summit conference and exhibition after helping produce it this past December. The conference was formerly run by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health. HIMSS also hires the conference director, Richard Scarfo, as a VP of vendor events. This year’s event will be held December 3-5 in Washington DC.

athenahealth announces Q4 numbers: revenue up 33%, EPS $0.15 vs. $0.21. Excluding special items, the company’s earnings of $0.26 exceed analysts’ expectations of $0.24, sending shares up 3% early in after-hours trading Thursday.

Merge Healthcare announces Q4 numbers: revenue up 39%, adjusted EPS of $0.19 vs. $0.10, beating estimates of $0.13. Revenue fell short of expectations.

Allscripts announces Q4 numbers: revenue up 15%, adjusted EPS $0.25 vs. –$0.03, meeting estimates. Shares are down 6% in early Thursday after-hours trading as its full-year profit forecast fell short of expectations. The company also announces an expansion of its operations in India, with more than 300 positions to be filled there by the end of the year.

Sales

Family HealthCare Center (ND) contracts with Intelligent InSites to provide RTLS solutions for tracking, managing, and displaying the real-time location and status of patients, staff, and equipment.

PeaceHealth’s Sacred Heart Medical Center at Riverbend (OR) expands its utilization of the Versus Technology RTLS platform.

Health Management Associates signs an exclusive three-year technology agreement for McKesson’s pharmacy automation suite.

People

Medical scribe services vendor ProScribe hires Suzy Wier Thorby as SVP of corporate development. The former ED nurse co-founded T-System along with two physicians in 1996.

First Choice Professionals names Carol Selvey as VP of strategy and business development. She was previously with Iatric Systems.

Announcements and Implementations

Johns Hopkins Health System becomes the 100th organization to integrate Hyland Software’s OnBase ECM with Epic’s EMR. On an unrelated note, I wonder if OnBase is sticking with their sports bar-themed booth again this year or going for something new?

GetWellNetwork announces the availability of its interactive patient care solution for the iPad.

Aventura introduces the ability to auto-populate patient records on the screen as providers move from room to room.

Awarepoint’s RTLS solution is rolled out by The Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust in the UK in what the company says is the largest implementation of its kind in the world.

The Premier healthcare alliance will use data mapping from Clinical Architecture to standardize and normalize performance measurement across its 2,500 hospitals.

Government and Politics

CDC announces a new national system for tracking the use of antibiotics in hospitals, allowing hospitals to compare themselves with others. CDC says there’s not much work for hospitals as long as their pharmacy system supports the AU (Antimicrobial Use) Initiative. I finally tracked down a list of that software here and the only major inpatient pharmacy system on it is Epic’s.

Technology

A group convened by the West Wireless Health Institute to advocate cheaper, better wireless network infrastructure in hospitals completes its first milestone in creating a medical-grade wireless open framework. The architecture, which the group says can be incorporated in the same manner as electricity and plumbing, has been rolled out in several hospitals, including El Camino Hospital (CA) and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CA).

Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, annoyed after his surgery to find that providers expected him to carry his own diagnostic images on CD, launches CareZone, a private space for families to store reference and contact information and to communicate via a Facebook-type application. The first year is free for signups before March 17, then it’s $180 per year.

Other

If you are traveling to HIMSS this week, you will likely rely heavily on your smart phone to stay connected, either to family and co-workers back home or perhaps to schedule an important post-exhibitor floor “meeting” at one of the many Venetian bars. As you keep a firm hand on your phone, it could be a good time to ask yourself if you suffer from nomophobia, the fear of being out of mobile phone contact. This study suggests that two-thirds of adults suffer from the condition, and though it is generally worse for women and younger adults, one-third of all adults over the age of 55 are also afflicted.

Epic employee Rachel Brown and her husband Dave are competing this week in The Amazing Race TV show. He’s a military science instructor recently back from deployment in Iraq, where he was an intelligence officer and a Black Hawk helicopter pilot.

Queen of the Valley Medical Center (CA) is the latest of several hospitals forced to admit that its patient records were freely available to any search engine-savvy Internet user due to incorrect server security settings.

There’s a rumor that Meaningful Use Stage 2 requirements may be issued Friday, just in time for high-fiving and hastily convened strategy discussions at HIMSS.

And speaking of HIMSS, imagine the disappointment of all those companies who built much of their exhibit hall presence around pitching ICD-10 services and products, only to have HHS rain on their parade by putting ICD-10 in limbo. Or maybe worst of all is if you’re scheduled to speak on ICD-10 at HIMSS, with the usual urgency of how providers need to take it seriously and move quickly starting yesterday to comply with the 2013 date (like that $89 breakfast I was fussing about.) Those session rooms are going to be seriously empty.

Weird News Andy opines that “ya gets what ya pays for” in this Las Vegas story. We’ve mentioned before the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas, whose motto is “Taste Worth Dying For” as nurse-uniformed waitresses (above) serve mammoth burgers with calorie counts up to 8,000 (free if you weigh over 350 pounds, and every customer must wear a hospital gown). A patron has a heart attack while eating a modest 6,000 calorie version, wheeled out sweating and shaking by ambulance workers as giggling tourists snap photos. The restaurant’s menu is a hoot, offering lard-cooked fries, no-filter cigarettes, pure cream milkshakes with optional vodka, and for those who “like it in the can,” 24-ounce cans of PBR and Miller. Book your HIMSS executive dinners now since after this news (I immediately suspected publicity stunt, but the hospital verified) the place is probably packed.

Sponsor Updates

Health Language announces a proof of concept collaboration project with Clinithink Ltd, a NLP specialist organization.
Tanner Health System (GA), South County Hospital Healthcare System (RI), and Cottage Health System (CA) select Greenway’s PrimeSUITE EHR.
Ministry Health Care (MN) teams with Thomas Reuters to develop a Meaningful Use quality manager solution.
Ingenious Med introduces Imagine, a custom business intelligence and data analysis solution.
ICA launches ICAetc, a free and open forum for software vendors to test the interoperability of their programs.
ICA augments its ICA CareAlign solution with Emdeon Clinician for lab order and results distribution and electronic prescribing.
MEDSEEK says that more than 100 hospitals selected its strategic patient engagement software suite in 2011.
Wolters Kluwer Health introduces Facts & Comparisons eAnswers Mobile, allowing smart phone users find answers to drug information questions.
DuPage Medical Group (IL) adds Merge Healthcare’s iConnect Access and Merge Eye Care suite to create an enterprise-wide imaging platform for its 330 physicians.
Humana signs an agreement with NextGen to participate in its Medical Home EHR Rewards Program, which provides financial assistance to physicians purchasing EMRs.
Ridgeview Medical Center selects Allscripts EHR/PM and the Allscripts Community Record powered by dbMotion.
Vocera Communications introduces Vocera Connect for Cisco wireless IP phones and smart phones.
T-System announces its plans for the HIMSS conference, including its participation in the HIStalk Booth Crawl.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

Mr. H mentioned last week that he doesn’t pay much attention to pre-HIMSS marketing mailings. I, on the other hand, am a sucker for advertising. Those of you not registered for HIMSS may or may not be receiving some of these – apparently advertisers are using both this year’s mailing list as well as last year’s.

Having changed both mailing and e-mail addresses during the last 12 months, I’m receiving all sorts of marketing materials in all four locations. The funny thing, though, is there’s no overlap. I’m not receiving the same e-mails at both addresses or the same snail mail either. I don’t know if HIMSS makes exhibitors pay for attendee mailing lists, but I’m guessing that either some are too cheap to get the updated list or too slacker-ish to update their mailing software.

For those of you not attending, I hope this brings a little bit of HIMSS to your doorstep so you don’t feel quite so left out. As you can guess, most of the next week’s posts will be about the big show. With that in mind, I bring you Dr. Jayne’s Marketing Hall of Fame / Hall of Shame. I’ll tell you what ads (of the literally eight-inch tall stack) caught my eye and which burned my retinas.

I liked Allied Telesis and their “Untold Stories of the EMR” headline with its steely-eyed surgeon and episode titles like “The Constipated Network,” “My Network is on Life Support,” and “Blame it on the Machine.” I’d give you a link to their site, but – oh yeah – they didn’t include a web address on the postcard. Seems like a pretty big oversight for a technology player advocating virtualized data storage in the cloud. And no, I’m not going to Google it for you.

Jeers to HealthPort and their bizarre comic book hero, AudaPro. With his bald pate and little glasses, he reminds me a bit of Benjamin Franklin on the cover picture. The internal picture, however, can only be described as highly creepy. What’s with the yellow trunks? Although someone certainly thinks a limited edition HealthPort comic book will entice visitors to the booth, I’d have gone with the IngaTinis.

Wolters Kluwer Health is apparently giving away a Rolex. Caught my eye, but I’d be more excited if they were giving away a pair of size 8 ½ Manolos. I doubt it’s this cool girly one I found on the website anyway. Probably some gigantic man-watch.

InteliChart sent a poker chip that can be exchanged for a Venetian casino chip (potentially worth up to $1,000,) so I might have to check that out.

Catching my eye (but in a bad way) was Healthcare Informatics Associates, who mailed a stiff plastic marketing piece that can’t be recycled. Good try with the playing card and poker chip theme, but your colors (white with light yellow outline on baby blue) made the text hard to read. I’m totally puzzled by the instruction to “peel away outer area” as I’m not sure why I’d want to turn an annoying plastic rectangle into an annoying jaggedly shaped piece of plastic.

Winning the “what am I thinking” category is Capsule with the vaguest wording ever: “See how our workflow focused solution features a patient-centered design that works with existing technologies and infrastructures and delivers a flexible and scalable solution that fits the way the nurse works.” Maybe I lost it somewhere in the run-on sentence, but from that text, I have no idea what they do or whether they’re selling hardware or software.

The most unusual piece I received was from TEKsystems, who sent this “pieceless puzzle” that was a nice spot of fun after spending the entire day completing staff performance evaluations. It’s a mouse pad cut with a seemingly unending incision, turning it into a puzzle with only one piece. It probably would have come together more quickly if I wasn’t trying to assemble it while watching a hilarious episode of Top Gear on Netflix where I couldn’t stop laughing as they inadvertently lit an RV on fire.

The last ad that caught my eye wasn’t even a HIMSS mailing but a one-page piece in the February issue of Health Data Management. NextGate carries the day with their headline, “When you exchange healthcare information, don’t gamble” and their excellent selection of sample patient names.

I hope to see all of you at HIMSS. For the rest of you keeping the home fires burning, thank you for all that you do to keep the systems up and the users happy. There’s always New Orleans in 2013.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Mobile.

Sebelius Announces ICD-10 Implementation Delay

February 16, 2012 News 13 Comments

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has announced that the October 1, 2013 date for covered entities to implement the ICD-10 disease classification system will be pushed back to an unspecified date.

She was quoted in the HHS news release as saying,

ICD-10 codes are important to many positive improvements in our health care system. We have heard from many in the provider community who have concerns about the administrative burdens they face in the years ahead. We are committing to work through the rulemaking process, with the provider community, to reexamine the pace at which HHS and the nation implement these important improvements to our health care system.

ICD-10 was adopted by the World Health Organization in 1992 and is used by every industrialized nation other than the United States for morbidity reporting, limiting the ability of the US to use and contribute to global health studies and surveillance. The rule setting the October 1, 2013 implementation data was originally published in January 2009.

HHS says a new compliance date will be announced in future rules.

Update: HHS has pulled the announcement page down.

Update 2: HHS changed the date of the announcement to today’s date, which gave the page a new link here. We thought it was odd that an apparently new major announcement had yesterday’s date and wasn’t appearing on HHS’s home page. They have fixed that.

News 2/15/12

February 14, 2012 News 2 Comments

Top News

Acting CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner tells an AMA audience that she is committed to re-examining the pace at which ICD-10 is implemented in order to give providers more time to make the transition. She says her office will make a formal announcement about regulation changes within the next few days.

Reader Comments

From Don Pablo: “Re: data breaches. I saw where you are not relaying the stolen laptop breaches since they have become commonplace. I used to work in financial services and watched for reports of breaches. This was my favorite site to check a couple of times a week. I bring it to your attention as not every breach is easily found.”Great site to check out, unless you are obsessively worried about your personal data getting into the wrong hands, because lots of organizations seem to be losing our data.

From WellHeeled: “HIStalkapalooza. I just want to be sure it is as black tie and glamorous as last year (so I pack the appropriate Red Carpet attire)…is that the case?” There may not be a red carpet this year, but readers have assured me they are packing their sequins, high heels, and more than one black tie. SmyrnaGirl, for example, tweeted that she is bringing her A game with these hot shoes.

From Lucky Jackson: “Best dressed at HIStalkapalooza. Tell me what I have to do to win one of Mr. H’s big prizes.” In the fashion categories, we have HIStalk King (best-dressed man), HIStalk Queen (best-dressed woman), Best Elvis Impersonator (based solely on attire, so choose your favorite young or old Elvis outfit and don’t worry about the singing), and Best Left-in-Vegas Attire (think showgirl or over-the-top glitz; Mr. H is hoping for a lot of showgirls.) If you want to be in the running for the fashion or the shoe contests, arrive early because our judges will be selecting finalists between 6:30 and 7:30 pm.

From Former CIO: “Re: booth crawl. I hope the sponsors will have the answers readily available in the booths. With 50+ answers to get in around 11 hours of booth time, there won’t be much time for sales pitches.” We’ve asked the sponsors to have their booth crew prepared with the answers. I expect some will just post the answer on their wall. As a refresher to the detailed instructions: (a) download the form here and print it off, (b) get your answers from the booths and Web pages listed; (c) post them to the online entry form by Wednesday evening at 7:00, and (d) watch HIStalk Wednesday evening to see if you won. At minimum, you get good exercise and flaunt a confident, purposeful stride as you move from one booth to the next on a Apple-seeking mission instead of just meandering around following the scent of some vendor’s freshly baked cookies. With luck (and the odds should be decent), you’ll pack home one of 55 iPads. And as I mentioned last time, I’m the one grading the entries, and if you miss a question or two, I’ll most likely be lenient because I really want you to have an iPad. I was indifferent to the device when I won mine at HIMSS last year, but it has totally replaced my iPod Touch for around-the-house stuff: checking the weather, looking at e-mail, doing a quick order on Amazon, and reading Kindle books.

From Elaine: “Re: HIMSS. Any word on a McKesson event? It would be fun to let loose a bit after hours.” I’ll be honest in saying that I don’t even open any of the HIMSS-related mail I get (sorry, companies who pay big bucks to send it) so I don’t know anything about their event. The only ones that have risen above the noise for me were from companies that contacted me directly: a cool-sounding Cerner event at the Bellagio (called me at work), a great-sounding Iatric Systems lunch (e-mailed), and and SCI Solutions get-together (sent to my Mr. HIStalk e-mail). I’ll make this offer: for companies throwing an event that’s open to anyone (and that includes vendor people, just to be clear) let me know and I’ll mention it here, as long as you’re OK with the possibility that gregarious HIStalk readers will overwhelm you with interest, which we have to re-learn every year with HIStalkapalooza. Everybody ought to have a party invitation or two, don’t you think?

From MJOG: “Re: GE Centricity Advance. Discontinued with no warning and very little time to transition. They are offering Centricity CPS, but at $1,500 it is too pricey for the small practices that used Advance. Even their own VARs can’t guarantee a transition within GE’s timeframe. Practices that went live with Advance in January 2012 have to pay in full for implementation of dead software. GE is really out of touch.” I think what you are seeing is what lots of people predicted: when EMR certification turned out to be too easy to achieve and everybody earned it, that left it up to the market to weed out those products and companies that have a less than a fully competitive position in the face of disruptive companies that are happy to sell hosted, easily implemented systems for a few hundred dollars per month. The MU carrot is forcing practices to choose their dance partners nearly simultaneously, so the consolidation writing is on the wall as the rich get richer. It’s painful for existing customers, but is both desirable and inevitable over the longer term. Maybe we should have a mandatory Y2K every 10 years to thin the herd.

From All Hat No Cattle: “Re: electronic problem lists. What do you think of this idea?” Reported in a JAMIA article, Brigham and Women’s sets up EHR alerts to prompt the physician to review the problem list if patient data in the EHR suggests that any of 17 specific conditions (asthma, hypertension, diabetes, etc.) might be present but undocumented. The alerts were accepted 41% of the time, more problems were documented, and interventions and quality improvement work could presumably be more specifically targeted. I like the idea only because it has the potential (although modest, I expect) to improve the care of individual patients, unlike the similar adverse drug event triggers that have always seemed to me to be a complete waste of time except as a learning tool that nobody ever seems to learn from. On the other hand, pestering docs with alerts that are not helpful almost 60% of the time indicates a need for algorithm refinement. That’s where these projects end a lot of the time – the available information just isn’t good enough to improve the hit rate.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Thanks to Streamline Health, supporting HIStalk as a Platinum Sponsor. The Cincinnati, OH-based company offers the AccessAnyWare document management system, which supports hybrid document-electronic hospitals (which is the vast majority) by organizing their information to streamline processes and improve patient care. Its OpportunityAnyWare business analytics solution aggregates information from disparate systems so that users can perform data mining and collaboration using dashboards that can include an unlimited number of key performance indicators, metrics, and alerts. Its Patient Access solutions integrate document workflow related to referrals, pre-op documentation, and financial forms to eliminate delays and process barriers, accelerating the billing process and increasing employee productivity. They even have a solution (CharityWare) to manage the need-based financial assistance screening process. Before and after stats for several clients are here. The executive team has a ton of healthcare experience and the company’s chairman of the board is our old HIStalk friend Jon Phillips of Healthcare Growth Partners, who I interview once a year or so because his healthcare IT business predictions are uncanny (and it’s about time to do that again.) Thanks to Streamline Health for helping us do what we do.

I realized today that I have listed the exotic recipe for the IngaTinis to be served at next week’s event, but forgot to mention the other custom-created specialty cocktails that will be served (the bartenders at First are seriously legendary craftspeople of the alcoholic arts.) The Mr. H Incognito is a rum punch with ingredients that are, like its namesake, best left undisclosed. For you root beer fans – and you know who you are – the ESD Activation Sensation is a mixture of IBC root beer with whipped cream vodka (who knew?) with a brandied cherry garnish. And while I’m on the topic, I should repeat that we are ecstatic to host those lucky folks who received an invitation, but we regretfully cannot accommodate anyone who didn’t (guests, co-workers, hastily propositioned showgirls, etc.) You are welcome to swing by at 8:00 p.m. to see if no-shows have freed up space, but otherwise we’re packed to the rafters.

Thanks and welcome to HealthMEDX as a new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor. The Ozark, MO company offers an integrated clinical and financial system that covers all post-acute care settings: long-term care, home health, hospital, rehab, and Continuing Care Retirement Communities (if you’re a hospital person and think this doesn’t pertain to your organization, it definitely does – the comfortable lines between acute care hospitals and all these other important venues of care are getting blurrier by the minute.) When ACO-type arrangements put you on the hook to coordinate care with these other providers, solutions from HealthMEDX ensure that best practices are followed to meet regulatory requirements, reduce cost, reduce errors, and (pay attention here) reduce those hospital readmissions that come right out of your pocket. Every one of HHS’s favorite programs requires unheard-of levels of data-sharing and coordination to give patients coordinated care at the most cost-effective location. HealthMEDX has solutions running in more than 3,000 facilities and has earned CCHIT certification for Home Health and SNF in addition to ONC-ATCB modular certification for both hospitals and EPs. And lastly, if you’re thinking, “I know I’ve heard of HealthMEDX somewhere,” it’s the company that former McKesson Technology Solutions President Pam Pure joined as CEO right before Christmas. Thanks to HealthMEDX for supporting HIStalk.

Inga is interviewed by the folks from Dodge Communications, in which she downplays her role in HIStalk and makes me seem way more interesting and virtuous than I really am. Feeling uncharacteristically affectionate after reading it because she was so sweet in her comments, I wanted to have Valentine’s Day flowers delivered to her, but the florist reacted with a combination of a contemptuous laugh and and annoyed snort when I called up Tuesday morning and cheerfully asked if they could deliver that same day (I may offer her and Dr. Jayne a spa day at HIMSS instead.) Anyway, here’s a quote, which I can verify as accurate because I’ve hung out with her at HIMSS:

I have met quite a few people in HIT over the years and I love the opportunity to catch up with former co-workers and meet new people. I’m always on the look-out for HIT rock stars and always get excited when I see a big-name CIO or certain vendor CEOs. It’s totally a nerdy reaction and I have to remind myself to act cool and not like a 14-year-old who catches a glimpse of Justin Bieber. I also enjoy the exhibits. It’s fun to see what the buzz is and what new things vendors are promoting. I like seeing which vendors are over-the-top in terms of their marketing efforts and enjoy chatting with the smaller vendors assigned to small booths on the outer edges of the show floor. It’s a circus but I wouldn’t miss it.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Imprivata announces that it added 160 healthcare customers in 2011 and increased its healthcare revenue by 103%.

Lexmark’s Perceptive Software unit posts an operating loss of $4 million for 2011, although Q4 revenue grew 41% from a year ago to $31 million. Lexmark CEO Paul Rooke says the company acquired Perceptive for growth and is pleased with the numbers.

Lumeris, Highmark, Horizon BCBS NJ, and Independence BC sign an agreement to acquire NaviNet, which offers a real-time communication network for physicians, hospitals, and health insurers.

Medicity will announce Wednesday that 2011 was its busiest year ever, with 43 contracts signed (22 by new customers, 21 by existing customers expanding their use.)

GE Healthcare and Microsoft announce the name of their new joint venture as Caradigm, also announcing company executives and a board of directors comprised of company insiders. We cited a Geekwire article on February 3 speculating that Caradigm would be the name. The companies confirm that they’re working with the CenCal Regional Health Authority in Santa Barbara, CA to obtain permission to use the Caradigm name, which that organization trademarked years ago (their website still comes up at caradigm.com.) GE and Microsoft admit that they invested a lot more due diligence in choosing the Caradigm name than did CenCal RHA, which picked it in an employee “pick a name for our new company” contest 2002. The employee who came up with it got $50 and a pizza party.

A New York Times piece says that Essence Healthcare, financially backed by legendary Silicon Valley investor John Doerr, is finally bearing fruit. Two of its holdings are ClearPractice (EMRs) and Lumeris (analytic software.) Lumeris was just announced as one of the purchasers of healthcare communication network provider NaviNet, where Lumeris software will help physicians answer administrative questions sent via NaviNet.

Meditech kills its contested $65 million project to build an office complex in Freetown, MA, moving on to other location possibilities after a protracted archaeological fight with the state’s historical commission. Freetown gets to keep an empty lot that may or may not contain Native American remains, while somewhere else gets 800 high tech jobs.

Sales

Humility of Mary Health Partners (OH) signs an agreement with Care Logistics to implement the Care Logistics Hospital Operating System at three of its hospitals.

RegionalCare Hospital Partners (OH) selects MediClick’s supply chain and accounts payable solutions.

Community Health Alliance (VA) partners with MEDfx to create a statewide HIE.

Hawaii selects Medicity to provide the infrastructure for its statewide HIE.

Children’s Hospital and Medical Center (NE) selects iSirona’s device connectivity solution in conjunction with the launch of its Epic EMR.

People

Diversinet Corp. appoints interim CEO Hon Pak, MD as CEO.

NexJ Systems appoints Eric Gombrich as SVP and GM of its Health Sciences Group.

Elsevier promotes Jay Katzen to managing director of its Clinical Decision Support group within Elsevier Health Sciences.

Randy Drawas joins M*Modal as chief marketing officer.

PerfectServe names Optum Accountable Care Solutions CEO Todd Cozzens to its board.

William G. Bithoney, MD joins the healthcare business of Thomson Reuters as the national provider business medical leader. He was previously interim president, CEO, COO, and CMO at Sisters of Providence Health System (MA).

Healthcare consulting firm WPC names Ray Guzman (Microsoft) as SVP of sales and business development and Brad Hutson as chief security officer.

Fletcher Allen Health Care (VT) hires Healther Roszkowski as chief information security officer.

MedHOK appoints David Butterworth (Emdeon) as SVP of business development.

Glenn Yarbrough joins the Health Information Partnership for Tennessee as director. He was previously with Ardent Health Services and was the CTO of the State of Tennessee.

Announcements and Implementations

Saratoga Hospital (NY) deploys DigitalPersona Pro and U.are.U Fingerprint Readers for identity authentication.

Norma Tirado, VP of HR and HIT for Lakeland Healthcare (MI), discusses her organization’s implementation of Epic, which goes live this month.

HIMSS and the nonprofit trade association Open Health Tools announce a collaboration to promote the use of open source tools in healthcare.

Optum launches a cloud-based healthcare environment and Optum Care Suite, a set of applications that provide detailed health intelligence on patient, system, and population health. We interviewed Optum SVP Ted Hoy about the announcements this week.

VistA provider DSS launches a mental health kiosk for behavioral health hospitals.

Government and Politics

Federal authorities say they recovered $4.1 billion in healthcare fraud judgments last year, up about 50% from 2009.

President Obama’s fiscal year 2013 budget proposal includes $66 million for ONC, an 8% increase over FY2012. That includes $12 million for standards and interoperability work for data exchange, $7.8 million to support EHR adoption, and $5 million for health privacy and security efforts. The proposed budget also includes a 5% cut for the Office for Civil Rights.

The VA wants a 7% increase in its FY 2013 IT budget, looking for $3.37 billion. It wants $169 million to continue development of a shared EMR with the Department of Defense, $53 million to develop a Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record, and $1.45 billion for hardware maintenance. The VA seems to be less optimistic that it seemed previously about turning over its VistA data centers to DoD, saying that unless DoD carves out specific space within its data centers to allow VA personnel to run its own systems, they will pursue setting up interim data centers. Nice digging by the folks at Nextgov.

In Canada, the illegally accessed medical records of a high-ranking member of the country’s Veterans Review and Appeal Board are used in a smear campaign by fellow agency members who disagreed with his review decisions. Up to 40 officials accessed the files of the decorated veteran in order to use his service-related disabilities to discredit him.

Technology

The US Patent and Trademark Office awards DR Systems a patent related to methods of matching medical images according to user-defined matching rules.

Other

KLAS examines medical device integration systems, focusing on Capsule’s DataCaptor, Cerner’s iBus, and iSirona’s DeviceConX.

CapSite’s 2012 US Smart Infusion Pump Study finds that 34% of hospitals are in the market for new infusion pumps.

The Tulsa newspaper profiles a BCBS Oklahoma project in which physicians at University of Oklahoma in Tulsa who offer a patient-centered medical home can review the medical claims data of covered patients to get a better picture of their health status.

A Bloomberg article says that TV cable carriers are building up their broadband revenue from hospitals and practices, offsetting declining residential cable subscriber counts by charging medical users higher prices for using their networks. Cox says telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon have 80% of the healthcare business, which it estimates at $460 million in the areas it serves. Comcast says healthcare represents a big chunk of the business services market that it estimates is worth $10-15 billion per year. Cable companies can offer lower prices through bundling, but they are less competitive in the areas of data security and wireless communications. AT&T says its healthcare revenue is $5 billion per year.

In the UK, an orthopedic surgeon criticizes thieves who steal live communications cable, which in repeated incidents has taken hospital systems offline, caused surgeries to be postponed, and forced hospitals to deal with downtime of telephone systems and PACS.

Rice Memorial Hospital (MN), preparing for a computer system conversion, offers patients a 25% amnesty discount to pay old bills so the hospital can shut down its retired billing system earlier.

This isn’t really healthcare related, but it’s too funny not to mention. A Marshall University student files suit against a fraternity and one of its members after a party at the fraternity house, in which the allegedly intoxicated fraternity brother tried to shoot a bottle rocket out of his rear. The plaintiff says the bottle rocket exploded in the brother’s rectum, which according to the suit, “startled the plaintiff and caused him to jump back” and fall off the deck, with the resulting injuries costing him playing time with the baseball team.

Sponsor Updates

WellPoint (CO) selects Health Language Inc’s LEAP I-10 to transition to full ICD-10 compliance.
SRS releases an enhanced version of its certified EHR.
Heritage Valley Health System (PA) enhances its mobile iPad app using the dbMotion platform.
Fletcher Allen Health Care (VT) will deploy MEDSEEK’s patient portal and optimization services.
Wellsoft launches its redesigned website.
Orion customer Inland Empire HIE launches its pilot running six hospitals, seven practices and a health plan.
CareTech Solutions releases an interactive brochure explaining the capabilities of a hospital-specific help desk.
A Vitera Healthcare survey finds that 25% of practices are not aware of the required transition to ICD-10, though larger organizations appear more aware and have a greater sense of urgency.
Beacon Partners’ Ben Tobin provides tips for managing revenue cycle and cash flows in the midst of health reform.
The Advisory Board Company announces a webinar highlighting its Crimson Critical Advantage platform.
Trustwave partners with John Gomez’s JGo Labs to enhance and evolve Trustwave’s healthcare product line.
Tri-River Family Health Center discusses its use of RelayHealth to communicate and reduce non-emergency phone calls.
Caremore (CA) purchases PatientKeeper’s Charge Capture software.
UMass Memorial (MA) standardizes on Informatica’s data integration platform for integrated views of patients, providers, and encounters.
Intelligent InSites announces that its RTLS solution supports ThingMagic Astra passive RFID readers.
Emdeon joins the Interoperability Showcase at HIMSS.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Mobile.

Monday Morning Update 2/13/12

February 11, 2012 News 16 Comments

From Nasty Parts: “Re: Vitera. I hear the total headcount was 337. Word is that they’re dumping Intergy and putting all their efforts behind the MedAppz SaaS product they bought. People who have seen it were unimpressed.” CEO Matt Hawkins covers that ground in the interview I just did with him.

From Vitera Product Vixen: “Re: Vitera. I heard the number was closer to 75, and based on the people I know that were selected, they definitely got it right. Time to cut out the people who weren’t pulling their weight and recognize those of us that have been doing great work. CEO held an all-hands meeting in the afternoon, and gave us a preview of what’s to come – $25 million investment in R&D and new internal systems, new product launches, an iPad app, a Tampa center of excellence, etc. I’m psyched!”

From Carumba: “Re: Epic. I hear their sales folks are telling people that they are live in Abu Dhabi and the Netherlands to sound globally successful. Here’s the Cleveland Clinic hospital in which they are ‘live.’”

From Chayote: “Re: Scott & White. I’m hearing from both inside and outside that they may be merging with Baylor.”

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Hadoop. There’s a new search technique developed by the Apache Software Foundation called Hadoop that may draw some interest from healthcare institutions. While it is currently only being used as a web search tool, the possibility of using it as a tool for searching unstructured patient data files and their related image files presents a golden opportunity to get consolidated information in front of caregivers. InformationWeek has a more detailed description of Hadoop for those interested in this new concept.“ I actually had Hadoop on my interview question list for Richard Cramer of Informatica, but ran out of time to ask him. They offer Hadoop connectivity and I was going to ask how that might be used in healthcare.

From Nick Barkley: “Re: sponsorship. Our company has been acquired, to be announced February 20. Having a sponsorship with your site has been enormously helpful in initially getting our name out there and gaining (and maintaining) credibility. HIStalk put us on the map and helped make this happen.” Nice, thanks. I don’t know that companies sponsor HIStalk with the hopes of being acquired, but I know it happens pretty often (Inga keeps a list.) That Monday of HIMSS week (the “sort of” first day of the HIMSS conference — it’s actually like the Sunday of previous conferences since the opening sessions are Tuesday) is going to be press release heavy, judging from the announcements I know about and the multiples of those that I don’t. As a vendor public service, I’ll repeat the unsolicited advice I dispense every year: if your announcement doesn’t affect your HIMSS participation, save it until 1-2 weeks after the conference. Unless yours is a big acquisition or new product announcement, it will get lost in the madhouse during the conference, but will run nearly unopposed afterward because your competitors will have shot their PR wad trying to build conference excitement.

My Time Capsule editorial from 2007 for this week: Why You Should Root for Cerner, Even if you Hate Them, where I say, “I want Neal Patterson to keep right on being Neal Patterson, a pig farmer turned Wall Street darling SOB who bootstrapped Cerner out of nothingness and runs it however he damned well pleases, the antithesis of button-down interchangeable bankers-turned-CEOs who manage companies they don’t own as dispassionately as a mutual fund.”

Listening: new Van Halen, which sounds darned good for guys in their late 50s who spent most of the decades since their last big splash fighting with each other and rehabbing. Check out their tour, but I’d be cautious about buying tickets for anything after the Boston show since tours seem to bring out the squabbling between the Van Halen brothers and whoever their lead singer is at the moment (Roth, Hagar, Cherone, lather, rinse, repeat) and the whole thing could go down in flames (think The Eagles without the concert-dollar greed that makes them pretend to get along.) Eddie may not still be gazing romantically over Jenny Craig meals at the still-adorable Valerie Bertinelli, but he plays seriously smoking guitar (live dress rehearsal video here.)

Here’s Vince’s latest HIS-tory, with some fun history of the first bedside terminal, the PNUT.

We should hit the 5 millionth visitor to HIStalk somewhere around Friday of this week. I can’t give a prize since I don’t have any way to know who that reader is, but it will still be fun to watch the counter roll over. That’s a lot of visits even after almost nine years, especially since early on I was thrilled to see a few hundred in a month.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Certify. The San Jose, CA company says it’s the leading and fastest-growing enterprise HIE vendor (71 health systems, 258 hospitals) because it has solved the “last mile” problem for health systems that need to connect to the EMRs of community-based medical practices quickly to deliver immediate value. Setup is a snap: (a) Certify ships the practice a HealthDock edge server; (b) Certify’s Physician Services team walks the practice manager through the 30-minute setup by phone; (c) HealthDock connects to the health system’s Gateway server; (d) the interface is activated and tested; and (e) the practice is up and running with results distribution, order processing, and patient summaries. Physicians get value, hospitals meet Meaningful Use requirements, and the the Certify community eMPI is builds a master patient index in the background for more sophisticated data sharing and analytics projects down the road. For the technologists, Certify supports IHE standards PIX, PDQ, and XDS queries, with HealthDock service as an XDS.b repository and registry, with an end-to-end audit trail, alerts and messaging, failsafe encrypted delivery, and community analytics reporting cubes. One SVP/CIO is quoted on their site as saying, “This is the easiest IT implementation I have ever done,” while hospitals also like the minimal support requirements (less than 0.5 FTE) and all-inclusive fees. They’ll be in Booth #5934 at HIMSS. Thanks to Certify for supporting HIStalk.

Inga has put together our HIMSS Guide, which contains information about what our sponsors are doing their (booth and/or contact information, what they do, etc.) I put a PDF version here. You can help us out by supporting our supporters, as it were, by dropping by their booths and saying you read about them on HIStalk, even if only to say hello and see if they have any cool free stuff.

For you provider-employed folks (hospital, medical practice, etc.) attending the HIMSS conference, let me explain this Booth Crawl thing we’ve been talking about, because it will give you an excellent chance of bringing home a shiny new iPad (your family will be much more impressed than if you return with the usual assortment of note pads and stress balls.) We made the whole thing up at the last minute with the idea of putting iPads in the hands of readers, so forgive any lack of polish on the idea or its execution. Here’s what you do:

Download the player form, print it off, and take it along to the conference.
Visit the booths and Web pages listed by Wednesday evening, February 22, to get the answers to the questions on the form (the exhibits are open Tuesday from 1:00 to 6:00 and Wednesday from 9:30 until 1:00, then 2:30 until 6:00).
Transfer your answers to the online form by Wednesday evening at 7:00 Las Vegas time.
Later Wednesday evening, while everybody else is out having a good time, I’ll be holed up in my hotel room doing a manual draw of the winners, making sure you got the answers correct (OK, I may cut you some slack if you miss a couple of questions because I’m just that kind of guy and because I’ll be woozy from working like a dog and eating bad room service food so I can do the drawing and entry-checking, which I’m not looking forward to, but do your best.)
I’ll post the names of the winners on HIStalk Wednesday evening and include the name of the sponsor that has your iPad. You swing by during exhibit hall hours Thursday (9:30 to 1:00, 2:30 to 6:00) to caress the iPad’s supple curves and inhale its bewitching scent for the first time, then take it away to its new home for your happy life together. Unlike those lame paper-based contests, you don’t have to be present to win (what’s that all about, anyway?) – the sponsor will ship the iPad to you if you can’t make it Thursday.

Being an objective sort, I asked myself why you should play in our Booth Crawl:

Because we look kind of stupid to the companies sponsoring it if nobody plays. We’re not charging them, but it would still be encouraging to them as sponsors of HIStalk to see some folks drop by so they don’t think I’m just making up readership numbers.
Because we have 55 iPads to give away, which is good odds for players, maybe the best at the entire conference.
Because you’re going to visit booths anyway, so you might as well visit those of the Booth Crawl sponsors and make a fun game out of it that you might win.
Because some of the Booth Crawl sponsors are doing other unsanctioned fun stuff for players that you’ll like and that we pretend not to know about.

Baptist Health System (AL) names Chris Davis MD as CMIO to lead its Epic implementation. He was previously with Sisters of Mercy Health System.

A good point to note from my most recent poll: don’t blame your EHR vendor for the clutter of worthless information contained in their product. You can get rid of it at any time, provided you stop dealing with the federal government, insurance companies, and litigious patients. New poll to your right, inspired by NervousIT’s question to me last week: when a big hospital takes over the IT operation of a small one, what’s the impact on the IT influence on patient outcomes?

An article in the local business journal says Cerner brought on 1,700 new employees in 2011 and will hire almost that many in 2012. That must be keeping the parking lots full and the pizza delivery guy busy.

I keep getting cheery HIMSS breakfast invitation e-mails from one of the other sites. I feel kind of honored thinking I’m on some kind of exclusive list until I click the registration link for details, then click again for the registration page, then scroll down to the very, very bottom in small print where I see that I’m to be charged $89 for my presence. Above is what I would get (one or the other, not both) after traipsing to the hotel by 7:00 a.m. and listening to a panel discussion, which is a format that I don’t like at all. I also don’t like being “invited” to something that I have to pay for.

I’ve mostly stopped running “lost laptop” breach articles since they are common and no longer all that interesting, but here’s an exception: a laptop containing information on 500 patients is stolen from the car of nurse who works for Lakeview Medical Center (WI). Why is that newsworthy? Because the laptop’s hard drive was encrypted. Nice going, 40-bed Lakeview Medical Center.

E-mail Mr. H.

HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS12

February 11, 2012 News 2 Comments

Download a PDF version of this document here.

3M Health Information Systems

Booth 3334

Contact: Jolie Gordon, Marketing Communication Specialist
jegordon@mmm.com 801-560-4788

Best known for our market-leading coding system and ICD-10 expertise, 3M Health Information Systems delivers innovative software and consulting services designed to raise the bar for clinical documentation improvement, computer-assisted coding, mobile physician applications, case mix and quality outcomes reporting, and document management. Our robust healthcare data dictionary and terminology services also support the expansion and accuracy of your electronic health record (EHR) system. With nearly 30 years of healthcare industry experience and the know-how of more than 100 credentialed 3M coding experts, 3M is the go-to choice for 5,000+ hospitals worldwide that want to improve quality and financial performance.

Access

Booth 860

Contact: Cody Strate, Director of Sales
cody.strate@accessefm.com
303.257.3183

Access is the world’s leading electronic forms (e-forms) management, automation and workflow software provider. Our solutions transform any paper-intensive forms process into a paperless, collaborative one. Stop by HIMSS Booth 860 to see how Access can help you achieve paperless:

Registration and consent forms on demand with electronic signatures & barcodes
Human resources, financials and clinical processes, including new employee onboarding, capital requests, and physician referrals
Clinical data bridge to your enterprise content management system

Learn more at www.accessefm.com.

Advisory Board Company

Booth 7310

Contact: Leah Bruch, Senior Manager Strategic Marketing
bruchl@advisory.com
202.266.6775

The Advisory Board Company is a global research, consulting, and technology firm partnering with 125,000 leaders in 3,200 organizations across health care and higher education. Through our innovative membership model, we collaborate with executives and their teams to elevate performance and solve their most pressing challenges. We provide strategic guidance, actionable insights, web-based software solutions, and comprehensive implementation and management services.

Learn more at www.advisory.com.

AirStrip Technologies, Inc.

Booth 870

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

Native applications from AirStrip Technologies securely send critical patient information from hospital monitoring systems, bedside devices, electronic health records and home devices to a clinician’s smartphone or tablet. FDA cleared, CE Mark certified and designed to meet HIPAA security requirements, AirStrip applications are powered over wired and wireless networks, delivering live patient data anytime, anywhere.

ANX

Booth 13429

Contact: Mike Nunez, Director, Healthcare Business Development
nunezm@anx.com
806.797.2923

ANXeBusiness provides innovative solutions that transform the exchange of data throughout the entire healthcare community. This solution set creates an easy, reproducible, cost efficient and secure exchange between hospitals and laboratories. This allows the hospital and laboratory to focus on what they do best; the complete patient continuum of care. To learn more about ANXeBusiness, please visit us at www.anx.com.

API Healthcare

Booth 2617

Contact: Kenny Amburgey, Vice President of Client Strategies
kenny.amburgey@apihealthcare.com
262.385.7732

Solutions designed for the unique demands of the healthcare industry. API Healthcare solutions create the crucial link that allows you to effectively balance the financial realities of healthcare with the delivery of high quality patient care. Robust integration and data driven staffing tools are what make API Healthcare workforce management solutions powerful:

Fully integrated, single platform technology
Complete multi-dimensional insight into all areas of an organization allow for intuitive, cost effective decisions
Data driven staffing tools ensure the right patient and the right caregiver match, every time
Streamlines processes, increases efficiency and optimizes every aspect of your workforce

Aspen Advisors

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Daniel Herman, Managing Principal and Founder
info@aspenadvisors.net
800-697-4350

Aspen Advisors is a professional services firm with a rich mix of respected industry veterans and rising stars who are united by a commitment to excellence and ongoing dedication to healthcare. Our experienced team is highly skilled in all aspects of healthcare technology. We understand the complexities of healthcare operational processes, the vendor landscape, the political realities, and the importance of projects that are executed successfully – the first time. Every client is important to us, and every project is critical to our reputation. Established in 2006, we’ve grown significantly year-over-year and have earned accolades for our culture and growth.

We were named an “Up and Comer” by Healthcare Informatics in 2010 and ranked #20 in Modern Healthcare’s list of the top 100 “Best Places to Work in Healthcare” in 2011. Our hallmarks are top quality service and satisfied clients; we’re proud of our KLAS rankings and that each of our clients is 100% referenceable. For the last four consecutive years, Aspen has ranked in the Top 5 in KLAS’ “Best in KLAS Awards” report in the Planning and Assessment category and were included in the Top 20 in the Clinical Implementation Supportive market segment. Interested in learning more about how Aspen Advisors can help you address the issues on your top priority list? Or looking to join a firm where healthcare IT consultants aren’t commodities, communication isn’t curbed, and potential never gets stuck in a pigeon hole?

To learn more about Aspen Advisors – either as a prospective client or prospective associate, please consider scheduling an in-person meeting at HIMSS or visit us at http://www.aspenadvisors.net.

AT&T

Booth 3829

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

AT&T ForHealth℠ is committed to serving the technology needs across the continuum of care — from hospitals to physicians to patients. Our suite of innovative wireless, cloud-based and networking services and applications empower clinicians by placing vital patient health information at their fingertips. Learn how to rethink healthcare delivery by visiting AT&T ForHealth in Booth #3829 at HIMSS12 in Las Vegas. Also, be sure to visit and hear AT&T speakers in the HIMSS Knowledge Centers for Mobile Health (#12928, Hall G, Kiosk 14 ), Cloud Computing (#13624, Hall G, Kiosk 5) and Accountable Care Organizations/Value-Based Purchasing (#6466, Hall D, Kiosk 8)

Aventura

Booth 8300

Contact: Brian Stern, VP of Sales
info@aventurahq.com
888.484.4643

Aventura improves the current workflow of doctors and nurses. We give clinicians the information they need, when and where they need it. Our context aware computing intelligence orchestrates technologies already in place making them responsive to the user. The result is improved clinician satisfaction, increased EMR use at the point of care, and an increased focus on the quality of care.

Awarepoint Corporation

Booth 3412

Contact: Merrie Wallace, Executive Vice President, Product Solutions and Marketing
marketing@awarepoint.com
888.860.3463

Awarepoint’s aware360Suite provides intelligent workflow solutions that meet departmental and enterprise-wide patient tracking needs. The solution visualizes patient flow without requiring personnel to manually update care status information. Patient location, movement and interactions with tagged personnel and clinical equipment trigger updates to the web-based software, which employs workflow rules to recognize patient care milestones. By improving patient visibility throughout the enterprise, Awarepoint helps administrators and clinicians to advance the QUALITY of care, the EFFICIENCY of care, the EXPERIENCE of care, and the ECONOMICS of care.

Beacon Partners

Booth 3926

Contact: Katelyn MacKay, Business Development Coordinator
kmackay@beaconpartners.com
781.681.7407

As one of the largest healthcare management consulting firms, Beacon Partners is chosen by organizations in the healthcare community to provide advisory services to improve overall operational, clinical and financial performance with the adoption of information technology. With our strategic approach and depth of experience, Beacon Partners is qualified to help organizations navigate the challenges in healthcare and optimize their potential to deliver the highest possible level of patient care.

BESLER Consulting

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jim Hoffman, Chief Technology Officer
jhoffman@besler.com
732.392.8214
Available at HIMSS Tuesday or Wednesday

BESLER develops software tools and provides consulting services that help acute care hospitals get paid everything they deserve. Our BVerified ™ online solutions allow our customers to manage underpayment recoveries that have traditionally been accomplished via a consulting engagement, providing typical saving of 50%. We’ve just launched our two newest products and we’re the only company with an end-user technology solution to address the Medicare IME and Transfer DRG underpayment issues.

Billian’s HealthDATA

Booth 7707

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

Billian’s HealthDATA is the leading provider of comprehensive market intelligence on the healthcare industry, covering facilities across the continuum of care – from Hospitals and Hospital-Affiliated Physicians to Long Term Care. Billian’s dedication to providing high-quality data via products like the Portal, coupled with partner company Porter Research’s custom market research services, provides customers with healthcare business intelligence about multiple markets in scaleable formats

Bottomline Technologies

Booth 12928 (Mobile Health Knowledge Center, Hall G)

Contact: Sarah Stevenson, Healthcare Marketing Manager
sstevenson@bottomline.com
603.380.8577

For more than 20 years, Bottomline has been focused on software applications that optimize document-driven processes. As a result, Bottomline possesses both the proven solutions and the tested domain expertise to deliver consistent customer value and significant return on investment. Bottomline’s medical forms solutions are used by 900+ hospitals to reduce costs, increase productivity & improve patient safety. Our goal is to help hospitals, clinics and practices adopt electronic medical records – from registration and consents to clinical documentation – an evolution that has been plagued by counter-intuitive approaches that aren’t as flexible and fast as paper.

CAP Professional Services

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Chip Perkins, Managing Director
cperkins@cap.org
847.832.7280

CAP Professional Services, a division of the College of American Pathologists, works to align health care information and technology to drive performance and quality. We are advancing health information excellence by focusing on services such as: Health Information Strategies and Management, Clinical Data and Terminology Services, and Laboratory Services. For more information, call 847-832-7700 or email capsts@cap.org.

CapSite

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Bryan Fiekers, Director of Business Development
bryan.fiekers@capsite.com
802.383.8205

CapSite is a healthcare technology research and advisory firm. Our mission is to help healthcare providers and vendors make more informed strategic decisions.The CapSite Database is the trusted, easy to use online database, providing critical knowledge and evidence based information on healthcare technology purchases. CapSite™ data provides detailed transparency on healthcare technology pricing, packaging and positioning.When it all comes to healthcare technology research, it helps to see all the details. Those details are now available with CapSite™

Capsule Tech, Inc

Main Booth 6141
HIMSS Intelligent Hospital Pavilion Booth 12442
Interoperability Showcase Booth 11000
Medical Devices Integration Knowledge Center Booth 14647

Contact: Heather Hitchcock, Vice President of Global Marketing
marketing@capsuletech.com
978.482.2337

Capsule is the leading provider of medical device integration. Capsule’s Device Connectivity Solution is the most proven, vendor neutral solution available for device connectivity. It features a patient-centric design that is completely flexible and scalable and integrates with existing technologies and clinical workflows. Stop by our booth 6141 to see why over 1000 hospitals have chosen Capsule for device integration.

Care360

Booth 2813

Contact: Joel Williams, Associate Director-Sales Support and Operations
Info@Care360.com
www.Care360.com
888.835.3409

Racing to Expand Your Physician Community? Accelerate your competitive advantage by joining our existing Care360 network of more than 200,000 physicians in 80,000 physician offices. Care360® EHR is a certified EHR solution that can be up and running in as little as 30 days, allowing physicians to transition workflow from paper to electronic management in a modular approach. Care360 EHR with Data Exchange connects hospitals to physician practices with a web-based platform to share information. ChartMaxx® DMI/ECM enables healthcare organizations to see immediate improvements through electronic document and content management, eForms and automated workflows that cross existing sytems. To learn more, visit Care360.com

Certify Data Systems, Inc.

Booth 5934

Contact: David Caldwell, Executive Vice President
sales@certifydatasystems.com
713.446.3376

Certify Data Systems, Inc., is a pioneer in health information exchange (HIE) technology. The company’s Enterprise HIE Platform has been adopted by the nation’s leading hospitals and health systems. The bi-directional HIE platform, provides true interoperability between disparate Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, enabling hospitals and health systems, their affiliated physician practices and laboratories to exchange essential health information in real-time without changing workflow. Moreover, Certify’s “network approach” is easy to deploy, scale, manage and support. For more information, please visit http://www.certifydatasystems.com. Follow us on Twitter at @CertifyData.

Command Health

To schedule a meeting:

Contact:
Evan Frankel, Director of Product Management
evan.frankel@commandhealth.com
303.301.0430

Command Health is the leader of narrative note technology, focusing on unifying clinical documentation from disparate sources across the continuum of care. Combining verbal interaction with visual integration, Command Health enables the efficient and accurate capture of patient data that is easy to find, use, share and search by converting locked, inaccessible data into actionable, meaningful information. Using proprietary natural language processing (NLP) technology combined with human intelligence, Command Health delivers the most comprehensive clinical data available, helping providers reduce costs, assess risk and manage outcomes.

CTG Health Solutions

Booth 2070

Contact: Carl Ferguson, Jr., Managing Director
carl.ferguson@ctghs.com
214.695.4227

CTG Health Solutions is a leading healthcare IT consulting firm providing strategic, clinical, financial, operational, and technology solutions. Offering advisory services, strategic/tactical planning, vendor selection, implementation, legacy system support, program/project management and advance technology services, CTG helps healthcare organizations address regulatory mandates of meaningful use, 5010, ICD-10, HIE, electronic medical records, accountable care and evolving health reform. CTG Health Solutions is a business unit of CTG (NASDAQ: CTGX) a publicly owned IT services and solutions company founded in 1966 that generated revenue of $331 million in 2010. More information is available at www.ctghs.com.

Experience matters. Over the last 25 years, CTG Health Solutions has provided healthcare IT, and operational and strategic consulting support to over 600 healthcare organizations. Since 2008, CTG has continuously been named to Healthcare Informatics top 100 healthcare IT providers and the Modern Healthcare lists of the largest healthcare management consulting firms. CTG was also cited in the March 25, 2010, issue of Information Week as one of the top three firms for healthcare organizations looking for help in implementing EMRs and other health IT investments.

Cumberland Consulting Group

Booth 5147

Contact: Jim Lewis, Managing Partner
jim.lewis@cumberlandcg.com
615.373.4470

Cumberland Consulting Group is a national technology implementation and project management firm serving ambulatory, acute, and post-acute healthcare providers. Through the implementation of new technologies, Cumberland works with providers to advance the quality of care delivered, and improve business performance. Cumberland Consulting Group offers an invigorating, positive work environment and a commitment to superior talent acquisition, development and retention.Cumberland was named Best in KLAS for IT Planning & Assessment in the 2011 Best in KLAS Awards: Software & Services report, finishing in a first-place tie.

Cumberland Consulting Group Says: Stop by and meet some of our top implementation consultants and learn about Cumberland’s excellent delivery record, straightforward implementation methods and lean operating model that delivers big company results at a very attractive price. Be sure to catch Cumberland’s Erik Howell presenting Physician-to-Physician: Driving Inpatient CPOE Clinical Transformation, Session 184,Thursday Feb. 23 at 2:15pm.

CynergisTek

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Stephanie Crabb, VP of Client Services
stephanie.crabb@cynergistek.com
512.402.8550 or 954.298.4702

CynergisTek is an authority in healthcare information security management services and solutions. We assist hospitals, payers, vendors and other valued business partners to the healthcare industry with the development and management of standards-based, industry-appropriate, business-driven and compliance-aware information security programs. CynergisTek is a full-service firm offering solutions in the areas of strategy and governance, compliance and risk, technical security management, managed security solutions and partner technology resales and implementation. CynergisTek was chosen to provide advisory and consulting services throughout the organization’s audit experience by one of the first 20 entities targeted by OCR for its HIPAA Audit Program. CynergisTek has led dozens of risk assessment projects for organizations attesting for Meaningful Use. CynergisTek has established its Surveyor program to provide critical third-party review of business associate compliance with HIPAA and to support organizations with independent review of IT security performance as part of their M&A due diligence activities. CynergisTek has led dozens of data discovery and data loss breach risk assessments to help organizations identify where PHI/PII reside in their organizations and how that data is being handled.
CynergisTek is working on the front lines, side-by-side, with our clients to address the most pressing IT security, privacy and data governance challenges. We are visionary. We are practical. We make our clients better.

DrFirst, Inc.

Booth 5456

Contact: Timur Tugberk, Events, Brand, and Media Coordinator
ttugberk@drfirst.com
301.231.9510 ex. 2835

Founded in 2000, DrFirst is the nation’s leading e-prescribing and solutions platform provider to physician practices, major health plans, health systems, hospitals, and EHR vendors. Through its Open Borders Program, DrFirst solutions integrate with over 200 EHR, practice management and HIT systems. A Surescripts Gold Certified solution provider for four consecutive years with its award-winning Rcopia electronic prescription management system, DrFirst utilizes the Surescripts network for pharmacy connectivity, health plan information, and patient medication history. For more information, visit www.drfirst.com.

eClinicalWorks

Booth 531

Contact: Heather Caouette, Marketing
heather.c@eclinicalworks.com
508.836.2700

eClinicalWorks offers ambulatory clinical solutions consisting of EMR/PM software, patient portals and a community health records application. With more than 180,000 providers and 370,000 healthcare professionals across all 50 states using its solutions, customers include physician practices, out-patient departments of hospitals, health centers, departments of health and convenient care clinics. At HIMSS, please visit the eClinicalWorks booth to see the latest in iPad and patient applications, community analytics and ACO capabilities.

Elumin Healthcare Solutions

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Mark Williams, CEO & President
mwilliams@eluminhs.com
425.369.8211

Elumin works with healthcare organizations across the country to improve quality, efficiency and their bottom line through the use of information technology throughout the continuum of care. Our work ultimately leads to greater clinician, physician, staff and patient satisfaction. Many of Elumin’s consultants are clinicians, and many have worked in hospitals and physician practices as business and clinical leaders. Many are certified and experienced in premier technologies such as Allscripts, Epic, Cerner, NextGen and Siemens. On average, our consultants have more than 15 years of experience. We strive to achieve 100% referenceability among our clients. Elumin is 100% focused on healthcare.

Elumins services include: advisory services, system implementations, data conversions, clinical optimization, revenue cycle management, legacy platform support, ICD-10, 5010 migration, and interim staffing. Our team of experienced healthcare professionals thrives on implementing best practices, optimizing technology and guiding clients through the change management process.

Elumin representatives will be attending the 2012 HIMSS conference Monday Feb. 20 – Friday, Feb. 24. They look forward to meeting new healthcare industry leaders and sharing insight on trending topics. Let us help you bring light to the best of healthcare technologies’ promise.

Encore Health Resources

Booth 123

Contact: Randi Fiedler, Director, Sales Operations
rfiedler@encorehealthresources.com
832.289.0923

Encore Health Resources helps implement and optimize EHRs and complex clinical systems to get value from the data. We do this through our tools, knowledge base and proprietary approach, and by employing healthcare IT professionals with deep operational experience.

Encore was formed by healthcare IT veterans Dana Sellers and Ivo Nelson. We are one of the fastest growing independent consulting firms in the history of our industry. That rapid growth is attributed to our principles’ sterling reputation, our staff’s depth of experience, and our commitment to remaining 100% referenceable with each and every one of our clients. Encore has consistently been named one of the “Best Places to Work in Healthcare” by Modern Healthcare magazine.

ESD

Booth 4616

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

ESD is a leading healthcare IT consulting firm that assists organizations implement new or updated heathcare information technology. Experienced clinical consultants provided by ESD work closely with hospitals, clinics and health systems to evaluate current capabilities, establish clinical transformation strategies and assist clinicians in the transition to new or updated solutions, with the end goal being a successful transition to new technology. ESD’s headquarters is located in Toledo, Ohio and has five satellite offices located in Atlanta, Detroit, Cincinnati, New York and Houston.

Whether it’s time to implement a whole new system throughout your organization or just a component to one department, we have the experience and resources to both complement your team, and meet your goals.

Etransmedia Technology, Inc

Booth 13635

Contact: Craig Cane,VP, Business Development
craig@etransmedia.com
845.594.7247

Etransmedia Technology, Inc is a premier provider of information solutions to the healthcare industry, delivering comprehensive integrated software, service and connectivity solutions to simplify critical functions in the healthcare community. Etransmedia is committed to providing the right solutions to build an effective community of care, driving revenues and efficiencies for ambulatory, acute and diagnostic facilities, and increasing the availability of information to providers making critical care decisions.

First Databank (FDB)

Booth 2338

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

First Databank (FDB) provides drug knowledge that helps healthcare professionals make precise medication-related decisions. With thousands of customers worldwide, FDB enables our information system developer partners to deliver a wide range of valuable, useful, and differentiated solutions. As the company that virtually launched the medication decision support category, we offer more than three decades of experience in transforming drug knowledge into actionable, targeted, and effective solutions that improve patient safety and healthcare outcomes. For a complete look at our solutions and services please visit fdbhealth.com

Fulcrum Methods

Booth 13247 Kiosk 6

Contact: Rick Beberman, Corporate Programs
rbeberman@fulcrummethods.com
510.287.3927

Fulcrum Methods has developed toolkits to assist hospitals and health systems with project management and meaningful use. We deliver work plans, guidebooks, libraries of deliverables, and online assessment tools to help organizations with vendor selection, systems implementation, long-range planning, establishing a program management office, managing organizational change, and meeting meaningful use requirements.

We have a great client list – Stanford University Hospital & Clinics, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, University Hospitals, MaineHealth, University of Kentucky HealthCare, John Muir Health, Community Medical Centers, and NorthBay Healthcare, among others. Our tools are encyclopedias of best practices and designed to develop core competencies, reduce execution risk, accelerate project rollout, and keep organization knowledge in-house.

GetWellNetwork

Booth 7910

Contact: Tony Cook, Vice President Marketing
tcook@getwellnetwork.com
202-321-9396

GetWellNetwork entertains, educates, and empowers patients throughout the patient journey using the bedside TV in the hospital, mobile devices, Web or Cable TV at home. Our patient-centered approach improves both satisfaction and outcomes for patients and hospitals. Additionally, the company extends the value of existing IT investments by integrating seamlessly to leading HIT systems including Cerner, McKesson, Epic, Meditech, GE and Siemens.

GetWellNetwork is recognized by KLAS® as the leader in Interactive Patient Systems and is exclusively endorsed by the American Hospital Association. More information about GetWellNetwork can be found at www.GetWellNetwork.com.

Harris Corporation

Booth 834

Contact: Amy Ferretti, Vice President, Marketing
amy.ferretti@harris.com
925.518.9895

Harris is advancing healthcare for more than 300,000 users at over 2,000 provider organizations delivering care to nearly 13,000,000 patients – by delivering proven solutions that enable healthcare organizations to constantly improve quality of care while containing costs, increasing revenue, and addressing the new world of accountability and value. We provide a portfolio of solutions that promote interoperability, streamlined workflow, and analytics; all of which are adaptable to our customer’s specific care delivery setting and the unique requirements of their physical, technical, and user environments.

Health Information Exchange
Patient Portal
Provider Portal
Business Intelligence
Workflow Management
Image Management
Managed Services
Systems Integration Communications

Hayes Management Consulting

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Bill Gannon, Director
bgannon@hayesmanagement.com
541.647.0825

Hayes Management Consulting is currently helping clients prepare for Meaningful Use, ICD-10 migration, and other initiatives by providing strategic guidance and hands-on expertise in EHR system implementation and optimization, project management, project resources and more.

Healthwise

Booth 4627

Contact: Dave Mink, Account Executive
dmink@healthwise.org
208.331.6971

Healthwise leads the way with ONC–ATCB-certified patient education that contributes to improved care quality. Helping hospitals meet Meaningful Use criteria today, and tomorrow’s ACO goals, the Healthwise Patient Education Solution seamlessly integrates into EMRs, PHRs, and websites. Ask about our new shared decision-making tools and patient response. www.healthwise.org.

Holon Solutions

Booth 12214

Contact: Sandra Schafer, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
sschafer@holonsolutions.com
678.324.2039

At Holon we believe that collaboration improves lives. Holon’s CollaborNet™ facilitates collaboration among healthcare providers by creating secure networks that manage the assembly, packaging, routing and delivery of vital health information. Holon’s CollaborNet connects providers regardless of their level of technological sophistication, using the systems in place and with or without standard communication protocols. CollaborNet is flexible and adaptable and can support changes to communication standards and methods as they develop. CollaborNet builds value from the bottom up by delivering information WHEN, WHERE and HOW you need it. For more information please visit us at www.HolonSolutions.com.

Iatric Systems, Inc.

Booth 7905

Contact: Judy Volker
Judy.Volker@iatric.com
978.805.3191

If you’re attending HIMSS12 to find ways to get the most out of your HIS, be sure to visit Iatric Systems booth. There you’ll learn about solutions that can be integrated with your HIS in order to help you achieve interoperability, meet Meaningful Use objectives and support your ACO initiatives.

Recognized by Inc. 5000 as one of the fastest growing privately held companies for the past four years, Iatric Systems helps hospitals and health systems leverage their HIS investment with software, interfaces and reporting services. Since 1990, more than 1,000 hospitals worldwide have implemented Iatric Systems solutions; optimizing patient care and staff workflow in clinical, financial and administrative areas. Iatric Systems was acknowledged on the Healthcare Informatics Top 100 Healthcare IT Revenue list in 2009/2010/2011 and the Modern Healthcare Top 100 Best Places to Work in Healthcare IT in 2009/2010/2011.

Get your chance to win an iPad 2 during the HIStalk Booth Crawl: Be sure to stop at the Iatric Systems booth for the chance to win the perfect, portable tool for checking e-mail, surfing the Web, playing games, reading books and visiting important Websites like Iatric.com.

ICA

Booth 4831

Contact: John Tempesco, CMO
john.tempesco@icainformatics.com
615.866.1465

ICA’s CareAlign® care management solutions connect the healthcare community with proven interoperability technologies enabling health information exchange and improved care delivery. This patient-centered modular approach offers immediate value and return-on-investment to communities, IDNs, hospitals and physicians through the delivery of clinical information to the point-of-care improving quality while reducing costs. Visit booth #4831 for a demonstration of the CareAlign solution suite.

iMDsoft

Booth 4215

Contact: Steve Sperrazza, Vice President, North America Sales
sales@imd-soft.com
866.4 iMDsoft, 781.449.5567

iMDsoft is a leading provider of Clinical Information Systems for critical and perioperative care. The company’s flagship family of solutions, the MetaVision Suite, was first implemented in 1999. It captures, documents, analyzes, reports and stores the vast amount of patient-related data generated in a hospital. Over 125 hospitals worldwide use MetaVision to support their workflow, and arm their healthcare professionals with timely, accurate, and actionable information. iMDsoft products demonstrate 100% implementation success rate and a 100% customer retention rate.

Come visit our booth to find out why 4 of the top 10 US hospitals have decided that MetaVision is the best choice for improving care quality and financial performance. Providing an integrated edge where it matters most, MetaVision delivers high-impact results such as 30% fewer mortalities, 100% billable anesthesia records, total elimination of prescription errors, 99% compliance with PQRS measures and doubled protocol compliance.

Learn more about how MetaVision interoperates with the latest technologies and seamlessly integrates with hospital systems at the HIMSS12 Interoperability Showcase held in collaboration with Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), from 21-23 February.

Imprivata

Booth 3160

Contact: Jim Whelan, VP of NA Healthcare Sales
jwhelan@imprivata.com
508.395.2235

Learn directly from hospital CIOs on how they saved their clinicians more than 15 minutes per day and improved workflows with Imprivata OneSign. Hospital CIOs and Directors using Epic, McKesson, Siemens, Meditech and Healthland will be available to answer your questions. After the presentations, you can try a hands-on demo of No Click AccessTM to applications and roaming virtual desktops throughout the Imprivata booth. Imprivata is also raffling off 30 Kindle Fires, which will be raffled off after each theater presentation!

Informatica

Booth 9107

Contact: Jonathan Shafer, Senior Customer Marketing Campaign Manager
jshafer@informatica.com
650.385.5000

Informatica Corporation is the leading independent provider of enterprise data integration software and services. Using Informatica solutions, healthcare organizations can access, discover, cleanse, integrate, and deliver all enterprise data to improve health outcomes, meet compliance mandates, streamline operations, increase agility, and refocus energy on the consumer. More than 4,100 companies worldwide and hundreds of healthcare companies rely on Informatica for their end-to-end enterprise data integration needs.

Ingenious Med

Booth 4663

Contact: Laura DePeters,Marketing Manager
laura.depeters@ingeniousmed.com
404.786.2340

Ingenious Med’s Inpatient Physician Management Platform is the leading charge capture and physician performance solution in the health care industry today. Our cloud-based, charge capture and analytics platform provides real-time data that helps hospital systems and physician groups maximize revenue, improve physician productivity, enhance quality of care, and increase diagnosis and billing accuracy and compliance.

Intelligent Medical Objects Inc.

Booth 1256

Contact: Dennis Carson, Director, Marketing & Tradeshows
dcarson@imo-online.com
636.477.8710

Interoperability For Healthcare Institutions IMO® Vocabulary products provide a common linkage across all electronic patient records, regardless of the standard needed for that particular data set (ICD9-CM, SNOMED® CT, HCPCS, RxNorm, ICD-10-CM). Most code mappings are updated several times per year, including regulatory updates. IMO® removes the burden of managing updates for you. Terminology Mapping For EMR Software Vendors IMO® Vocabulary products let you focus on what you do best: provide great software to the healthcare industry. We furnish up-to-date code and terminology mappings, with expanded search capabilities, across standards needed for EMRs, EHRs and PHRs (ICD9-CM, ICD10-CM, SNOMED® CT, HCPCS, RxNorm). Get ready for ICD-10 now!

Intellect Resources

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Stowe Blankenship,Business Development Executive
336.790.8724 x 303
sblankenship@intellectresources.com
http://www.facebook.com/IntellectResourcesFan@wespeakHIT

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

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

Intelligent InSites

Booths 12217, 12442-18

Contact: George Sun, VP of Sales
george.sun@intelligentinsites.com
972.567.2114

Intelligent InSites helps hospitals improve care and reduce costs by transforming automatically-collected data into actionable insights.Through its interoperable, hardware-agnostic, healthcare real-time location system (RTLS) software platform, Intelligent InSites gathers data from real-time location, condition sensing, and other systems; then delivers meaningful information to the right person, at the right time, on the right device.

By leveraging this real-time data and InSites’ applications, such as asset management, patient flow, temperature monitoring, and business intelligence, healthcare organizations are able to achieve meaningful and measurable hard-dollar cost savings while improving patient satisfaction and patient care. The InSites RTLS solution for Patient Flow enables hospitals to improve capacity management and key metrics such as Left Without Treatment (LWOT) and Length of Stay (LOS). It also improves rounding management, along with ED and OR workflow. With the InSites solution, hospitals can monitor patient flow and progress from admission to discharge, analyze throughput and proactively react to potential bottlenecks – all in real-time. The InSites RTLS solution for Asset Management enables hospitals to optimize equipment inventories and equipment procurement, as well as reduce rental expenses. By eliminating time needed to find available equipment, hospitals can increase value-added time for nursing staff, clinical engineering, and facilities management, leading to improved patient and staff satisfaction.The InSites Business Intelligence (BI) solution enables easy-to-use data mining of vast quantities of contextual data stored in the InSites Business Intelligence database, allowing healthcare users to analyze trends, identify process improvement opportunities, and report on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This enables hospitals and healthcare systems to achieve powerful and flexible enterprise-wide visibility into their processes and make transformational impacts on their organization’s performance.

iSirona

Booth 12414

Contact: Peter Witonsky,President & CSO
peter.witonsky@isirona.com
610.772.7648

iSirona helps clinicians make more informed decisions about patients by providing an easy to use approach to medical device integration. Using iSirona’s software solution, hospitals can connect virtually any medical device to their CIS, providing clinicians with faster access to more accurate patient information. In 2011, iSirona was ranked #1 by KLAS for medical device integration systems.

Levi, Ray and Shoup, Inc.

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: John Runions, Director, Worldwide Business Development / Alliances
john.runions@lrs.com
217-725-4017. John Runions

Does your hospital struggle with printing issues? For more than three decades, LRS has been helping hospitals meet the need for reliable document delivery of critical healthcare documents. LRS works directly with leading Electronic Medical Records (EMR) software providers to provide a seamless platform for assured delivery of any document from any system — to any destination in your environment. This all managed from a secure central point of control designed to save effort, money and time when seconds count.

Lifepoint Informatics

Booth 153

Contact: Lee Barnard, Chief Business Development Officer
lbarnard@lifepoint.com
201.560.3802

Lifepoint Informatics is a leader in health IT focusing on laboratory outreach connectivity, health information exchange and clinical data interoperability to deliver on its mission to help healthcare providers improve patient care and lower costs through the use of information technology. Since 1999, Lifepoint Informatics has enabled over 200 hospitals, clinical labs and anatomic pathology groups to grow their market share and extend their outreach programs through the deployment of its ONC-ATCB certified Web Provider Portal and its comprehensive portfolio of ready-to-go EMR/EHR interfaces.
For more Information please visit www.lifepoint.com.

Macadamian

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Didier Thizy, Director of Healthcare IT
didier@macadamian.com
613.219.5708

Macadamian is a global UI design and software innovation studio with significant sector expertise in healthcare and life sciences. We work with Healthcare and medical device companies to create visually stunning, intuitive, and commercially-successful software products. We can help you transform your ideas into market-ready products that will stand out from your competition.

MED3OOO

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Nicole Contardo, Corporate Marketing Director
Nicole_Contardo@MED3000.com
919.794.5881

Since its founding in 1995, MED3OOO has grown to become a leading provider of healthcare management, operations, and information technology services across the United States. With over 2,100 employees, MED3OOO provides sophisticated management services and innovative technology products which differentiate its physician, hospital, employer, government, and payer clients. The company provides a complete platform of clinical and business performance solutions, including PM, EHR, RCM, population health management, and smart communication systems, along with management, knowledge and operations, and affiliation strategies which help its clients improve clinical and financial outcomes. MED3OOO partners with organizations across the healthcare spectrum who truly understand that Outcomes Matter.

MedAptus

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jennifer Crowley, Marketing Director
jcrowley@medaptus.com
617.896.4099

MedAptus is the Gold Standard in the healthcare revenue cycle for achieving effective charge management, compliance and workflow efficiency. With our powerful and easy-to-use Intelligent Charge Capture, many of the nation’s most prestigious healthcare organizations rely on MedAptus for financial optimization. Our solutions increase revenue, enhance EMR investments, re-engineer manual processes and yield substantially improved productivity. For more information about how MedAptus can help you improve your financial performance while helping you prepare for ICD-10, visit www.medaptus.com.

Medicomp Systems

Booth 855

Contact: James Aita, Sr. Product Manager
jaita@medicomp.com
703.803.8080×221

Medicomp Systems innovates and continuously improves medical information technologies that provide clinicians with the power and freedom to focus on the patient. Medicomp’s EHR tools are dynamic and easy to use, based on the way clinicians think and work, and provide immediate access to the total patient picture. At the heart of every product is the powerful MEDCIN® Engine, a robust clinical data engine used by clinicians and hospitals throughout the world.

MEDSEEK

Booth 1345

Contact: Mandi Coker, Director, Corporate Marketing
mandi.coker@medseek.com
205.982.5821

MEDSEEK’s digital health solutions help healthcare organizations predict patient health requirements, plan capital investments, influence patient behavior, activate patients, expand business and manage patients across the continuum of care to find new cost savings and revenue streams. Find out how to strategically engage and manage your patients today – 888.MEDSEEK or sales@medseek.com.

MedVentive

Booth 6466-1, ACO Knowledge Center

Contact: Nancy Brown, Chief Growth Officer
nbrown@medventive.com
781.290.2511

MedVentive provides the tools and experience you need for two key issues faced in evolving into an ACO: understanding patient populations and being financially at risk for the quality and cost of care. MedVentive Population Manager provides the IT infrastructure needed to support FTC required Clinical Integration and overall population management. MedVentive Risk Manager provides the analytic platform to manage your multi-payer risk contracts.

Merge Healthcare

Booth 1023

Contact: Brenda Stewart, Director, Marketing Communications
brenda.stewart@merge.com
773.726.8901

Merge Healthcare is a leading provider of enterprise imaging and interoperability solutions. Merge solutions facilitate the sharing of images to create a more effective and efficient electronic healthcare experience for patients and physicians. Merge provides enterprise imaging solutions for radiology, cardiology, orthopaedics and eye care; a suite of products for clinical trials; software for financial and pre-surgical management, and applications that fuel the largest modality vendors in the world. Merge’s products have been used by healthcare providers, vendors and researchers worldwide to improve patient care for more than 20 years. This year, we are thrilled to showcase our comprehensive enterprise imaging solutions that allow you to image enable your EHR. You will also have the opportunity to register for FREE image sharing via our new cloud platform, Merge Honeycomb™, and learn how to earn Meaningful Use incentives with our specialty EHR solutions. Additional information can be found at www.merge.com.

MyHealthDIRECT

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Zac Fritz, SVP of Sales and Marketing
zfritz@myhealthdirect.com
262.309.2090

MyHealthDIRECT provides the nation’s only ‘healthcare scheduling exchange’ (HSE) for health plans, hospitals, health systems, ACOs and HIEs.Their SaaS-platform is proven “commercial-grade” and “enterprise-ready” and is scalable, flexible, and secure. The MyHealthDIRECT HSE-platform is the industry’s only technology with proven application across the entire care continuum: from care coordination efforts and call centers to mHealth initiatives or Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) strategies and ACO referral management. MyHealthDIRECT: The nation’s only ‘healthcare scheduling exchange’.

NextGate

Booth 7000

Contact: Richard Garcia, VP Marketing
richard.garcia@nextgate.com
626.262.4010

Information is good. Knowledge is better! The NextGate® Registry Suite for Healthcare goes beyond standard integration to satisfy today’s intricate, multi-entity healthcare data exchange requirements. HIEs, ACOs, IDNs and similar organizations need a dynamic, sophisticated framework to coordinate information from diverse sources to support coherent and meaningful data exchange. The registry suite uses the leading MatchMetrix® data integration platform to analyze and integrate the different data elements of a complex activity, promoting greater efficiency and insight. The suite includes an EMPI, Provider Registry and Directory, Location Registry, Activity Registry, Code Set Registry, Enterprise Transaction Registry, and a Relation service to define associations between objects. With over 75 million unique identities managed by MatchMetrix and hundreds of registry implementations, NextGate offers unequalled expertise in deploying master index and data integration solutions. Be certain about the data you exchange!

Nordic Consulting Partners, Inc.

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Drew Madden, President
drew.madden@nordicwi.com
608.268.6900

Nordic was founded by former Epic consultants, and is the largest Epic-only implementation firm in the country.We focus exclusively on Epic software implementations. We’re located in Madison, WI, home to Epic Systems, Inc., which gives us access to some of the top EMR experts in the industry. Our team of senior consultants average 6-year of Epic implementation experience; 80% are former Epic employees with an average of four certifications each. They’re seasoned professionals who have worked with hundreds of hospitals and clinics nationwide. Whether you need help with a short-term project, or a team of consultants to oversee implementation from start to finish, our staff will be valuable members of your team.Nordic works with healthcare organizations in 14 states, with clients that include Children’s hospitals, University hospitals and community healthcare providers of all sizes. We understand their dedication to patient care and the high standards their EMR projects must meet. Nordic will help you build the right team for your organization.

NTT DATA Healthcare Technologies (formerly Keane)

Booth 3064

Contact: Larry Kaiser, Senior Marketing Manager
lkaiser@keane.com
631.824.5318

In business since 1975 and based in the United States, NTT Data Healthcare Technologies offers complete IT solutions to hospitals and long-term care facilities throughout the country. NTT DATA’s proprietary software and services help health organizations increase efficiency, reduce medical errors, meet regulatory requirements, and enhance the revenue cycle. An electronic health record (EHR) solution, the Optimum suite of fully integrated certified clinical applications helps hospitals and healthcare facilities reduce medical errors, increase efficiency, and improve the delivery of care.

Stop by for a cup of cappuccino and find out how NTT DATA Healthcare Technologies can help you today.

Nuance Communications, Inc.

Booth 3523

Contact: Mark Erwich, Senior Director, Marketing
mark.erwich@nuance.com
781.565.5000

Nuance Healthcare, a division of Nuance Communications, is a market leader in providing clinical understanding solutions that accurately capture and transform the patient story into meaningful, actionable information. Thousands of hospitals, providers and payers worldwide trust Nuance voice-enabled clinical documentation and analytics solutions to facilitate smarter, more efficient decisions across the healthcare enterprise. These solutions are proven to increase clinician satisfaction and HIT adoption, supporting organizations to achieve Meaningful Use of EHR systems and transform to the accountable care model. Recognized as “Best-in-KLAS” 2004-2011 for Voice Recognition we invite you to learn more at booth #3523.

Orchestrate Healthcare

Booth 4269

Contact: Charlie Cook, President
charlie@orchestratehealthcare.com
970.963.0251

Orchestrate Healthcare won the 2011 Best in KLAS – Technical Services award. Come speak with us about why our KLAS score keeps rising every year and why we continue to win Best in KLAS awards. Orchestrate Healthcare was founded on the principals of: honesty, integrity and hard work.These key principals have lead to triple-digit growth since day one. Orchestrate Healthcare has also had tremendous success with our client feedback to KLAS Research. Orchestrate Healthcare won Best in KLAS – Technical Services in 2008. In 2009, we improved our KLAS score by a full point over our 2008 score, and placed 2nd in the 2009 Best in KLAS – Technical Services category. In 2010, Orchestrate Healthcare again increased our KLAS score to 94.2, but took 2nd place by 1/10th of a point. In 2011, we increased our score to 96.4 and won Best in KLAS – Technical Services for the 2nd time in the last 4 years. Out of 19 companies in the KLAS Technical Services category, Orchestrate Healthcare is the ONLY company to have 100% positive client commentary for the past 24 months. Orchestrate Healthcare has a philosophy of “do what’s right for the client” every day, and the management of the company stands behind you to do whatever it takes to exceed the client’s expectations.The KLAS scores and all the positive client commentary reflect that commitment to quality.

PatientKeeper Inc.

Booth 1045
Mobile Health Knowledge Center booth 12928

Contact: Cristina Christy,Senior Events Manager
cchristy@patientkeeper.com
781.373.6378

PatientKeeper® Inc., the leading provider of physician healthcare information systems, offers hospitals and practice groups highly intuitive software that streamlines physician workflow to improve productivity and patient care. PatientKeeper’s CPOE, physician documentation, electronic charge capture and other applications are used by over 40,000 physicians nationwide, and run on desktop and laptop computers and popular handheld devices and tablets. PatientKeeper’s software integrates with existing healthcare information systems at hospitals and practice groups to create the most effective solution for driving physician adoption of technology, meeting Meaningful Use and transitioning to ICD-10. (www.patientkeeper.com; Twitter: @patientkeeper)

Practice Fusion

Booth 4074

Contact: Kimberly Okazaki, Marketing Coordinator
kokazaki@practicefusion.com
415.992.6462

Practice Fusion provides a free, web-based Electronic Health Record (EHR) system to physicians.With charting, scheduling, e-prescribing (eRx), lab integrations, referral letters, Meaningful Use certification, unlimited support and a Personal Health Record for patients, Practice Fusion’s EHR addresses the complex needs of today’s healthcare providers and disrupts the health IT status quo. Practice Fusion is the fastest growing EHR community in the country with more than 130,000 users serving 30 million patients. The company closed a $23 million Series B round of financing led by Founders Fund in 2011. For more information about Practice Fusion, please visit www.practicefusion.com.

Quality IT Partners, Inc.

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Donna Eversole, MBA, BSN, RN, CPHIMS, Director Healthcare Practice
deversole@qitp.com
904.610.7933

Quality is a hands-on, technology-driven consulting company. We assist healthcare organizations with complete end-to-end systems planning, acquisition, customization, implementation and maintenance including technical and operational support. We specialize in assisting clients in transitioning from dated, expensive legacy technologies to modern, cost-effective solutions using leading-edge implementation practices. Our implementation professionals are experienced clinicians and financial consultants and have experience with all major HIS vendors. We view each assignment as an opportunity to transfer our knowledge and experiences to our clients’ staff.

Shareable Ink

Booth 7100

Contact: Suzanne Cogan, Vice President, Sales and Marketing
scogan@shareableink.com
877.572.7423 x802

Shareable Ink is the enterprise cloud-based platform that incorporates natural input tools, including iPads and digital pen and paper technology. Clinicians can continue documenting in the fastest, most efficient manner. The resulting structured and clinically-encoded output populates the EHR with discrete data, as if typed in directly. Built-in analytics give hospitals and practices insight into their operations – from a clinical, quality, and efficiency standpoint.

Information Week recently named Shareable Ink one of 12 EHR vendors that “stand out” – out of 1,300 Meaningful Use-certified systems. Visit us at HIMSS for an interactive demo featuring our Physician Progress Notes with Charge Capture and Patient History & Signature Capture solutions. We’ll also have a special unveiling of our iPad App – you won’t want to miss it! For everyone who mentions ‘DOCTOR’ at our booth, we’ll be making a donation to one of our favorite charities, Doctors without Borders.

SRSsoft

Booth 12721

Contact: Evan Steele, CEO
esteele@srssoft.com
800.288.8369

SRS is the leading provider of productivity-enhancing EHR technology and services for high-performance physicians—with a successful adoption rate unparalleled in the industry. Offered via the Unified Desktop™, the robust EHR, SRS CareTracker PM, SRS PACS, and SRS Patient Portal increase speed, boost revenue, free physicians’ time, and heighten patient care and satisfaction. For more information on SRS, visit www.srssoft.com, e-mail info@srssoft.com, fax 201.802.1301, or call 800.288.8369.

Software Testing Solutions

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Maegan Scarlett, Marketing Specialist
himss@sts-healthcare.com
877.765.0100 ext. 1

You’re not still running those old terminal based legacy applications in your institution for CPOE, lab, blood bank and anatomic pathology – so why are you still testing them the same way? Now you can achieve a predictable time, cost and quality for your upgrades. Software Testing Solutions’ (STS) innovative automated testing & validation products for hospital software systems including Epic, Sunquest and SCC Soft, deliver exhaustive testing quickly and efficiently, saving time & money while reducing risk, increasing patient safety and ensuring regulatory compliance. Contact us today for more information.

Streamline Health

Booth 2058

Contact: Rick Leach, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
rick.leach@streamlinehealth.net
513.794.7112

Streamline Health provides healthcare information technology solutions that help hospitals and physician groups improve efficiencies and business processes across the enterprise to enhance and protect the revenues. Our enterprise content management solutions transform unstructured data into digital assets that seamlessly integrate with disparate clinical, administrative, and financial information systems. Our business analytics solutions provide real-time access to key performance metrics that enable healthcare organizations to identify and manage opportunities to maximize their financial performance. Our integrated workflow systems automate and manage critical business activities to improve organizational accountability to drive both operational and financial performance. For more information visit www.streamlinehealth.net.

Sunquest Information Systems, Inc.

Booth 423

Contact: Kymberly Calvo,Marketing Communications Specialist
kymberly.calvo@sunquestinfo.com
408.702.1151

Sunquest Information Systems is committed to patient safety, workflow excellence, predictive medicine, and physician & patient affinity. Utilizing this dedication, Sunquest proudly offers global diagnostic IT solutions that transform the delivery of healthcare for more than 1,400 organizations and 380,000 users worldwide. Come by Booth 423 and discover the value Sunquest’s products deliver to our clients every day. Experience Sunquest’s community-based outreach tour featuring our fully integrated suite of products built on technology that enables and supports business growth and operational efficiency. Sunquest’s closed-loop collection and transfusion management tour will highlight solutions designed to virtually eliminate patient identification, labeling and transfusion errors at the bedside, in the ED or in the surgical suite. Sunquest is your path to the heart of healthcare.

Surgical Information Systems

Booth 1339
Allscripts Booth 3016
Siemens Booth 2423
Interoperability Showcase Booth 11000, Hall G

Contact: Emmy Weber, VP of Marketing
weber@sisfirst.com
678.507.1706

Surgical Information Systems (“SIS”) provides software solutions that are uniquely designed to add value at every point of the perioperative process. Developed specifically for the complex surgical environment, all SIS solutions – including anesthesia – are architected on a single database and integrate easily with other hospital systems. SIS offers the only surgical scheduling system and the only anesthesia information management system endorsed by the American Hospital Association (AHA), and both a rules-based charging system and analytics module that has been granted Peer Reviewed status by the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA). Visit SIS at HIMSS12 to see the latest in perioperative IT including anesthesia, patient tracking and analytics modules.

Transcend Services and Salar

Booth 4674

Contact: Donna Rhines, Director of Marketing
donna.rhines@trcr.com
678.808.0680

Transcend/Salar delivers clinical documentation solutions that are flexible to fit the needs of our clients. We offer the industry’s only physician-centric, single-source solution for advanced electronic clinical documentation. Our full spectrum of services and products include: full- to partial-outsourced transcription services, a world-class transcription platform, dynamic clinical documentation templates and physician charge capture.

Transcend/Salar products have highly-customizable physician interfaces that integrate easily with existing electronic medical record systems. Clients that utilize Transcend experience increased physician adoption through flexible solutions that fit the physician workflow. With Transcend/Salar, physicians and hospitals alike achieve notable productivity, financial and patient safety improvements. Encore™, Transcend’s powerful backend speech recognition transcription platform and Salar’s transformational, physician-centric, inpatient documentation and billing products (TeamNotes™, TeamRelay™, TeamQuery™ and TAP Charge Capture™). Experience a demo or a presentation and see how you can benefit.

Substantial cost savings
Improved efficiency and significant productivity increases
Expedited physician workflow and optimized physician billing
Real-time physician query and concurrent documentation review + Increased inpatient revenue
Meaningful Use Stage 1 certification

Trustwave

Booth: 8805

Contact: Dan Kunkel, Healthcare Solutions
jvickery@trustwave.com
312.873.7659

Trustwave is a leading provider of information security and compliance management solutions to businesses and government entities throughout the world. Trustwave provides a unique approach with comprehensive solutions such as the award-winning TrustKeeper® and other proprietary security solutions including SIEM, WAF, EV SSL certificates and secure digital certificates. Specifically for hospitals, IDNs, insurers and physicians, Trustwave Healthcare Solutions offer customizable data protection, and help safeguard PHI and address HIPAA requirements. For more information, visit www.trustwave.com/healthcare.

T-System

Booth 4012

Contact: Ann Baty,Senior Marketing Coordinator
abaty@tsystem.com
469.791.2445

T-System, Inc. sets the industry standard for clinical, business and IT solutions for emergency medicine, with approximately 40 percent of the nation’s emergency departments using T-System solutions.To meet the individual needs of hospitals, T-System offers both paper and electronic systems. These tools help clinicians provide better patient care, while improving efficiency and the bottom line. Today, more than 1,700 emergency departments rely on T-System’s gold-standard content and workflow solutions. For more information, visit www.tsystem.com. Follow T-System on Twitter (@TSystem) and like T-System on Facebook.

Stop by our “virtual” emergency department at Booth 4012 to see and try our solutions in action. Find out how The T SystemEV has helped more than 42 hospitals attest to Stage 1 Meaningful Use. Learn about how our new revenue cycle management services can boost your bottom line. Document a patient encounter with DigitalShare and T Sheets or try T-System clinical decision support. Answer a question about Continuity, our new ACO solution, for a chance to win an iPad 2.

We will also be demonstrating at the Interoperability Showcase (Hall G, Booth #11000) how the emergency department might contribute information that would enable a smoother transition of care. T-System Vice President of Solution Development Bill Hall will give a presentation, “Interoperability and the ED: Replacing Care Transactions with Transitions,” at the Showcase on Tuesday at 1:15 p.m. Additionally, two T-System clients will be presenting the senior executive session, “Emergency Medicine EHR Helps Drive Meaningful Use Readiness” on Tuesday at 11 a.m. in Marcello 4506. To learn more about these presentations and our industry leading ED solutions, visit us at Booth 4012.

Versus Technology

Booth 5852

Contact: Stephanie Bertschy, Director of Marketing
skb@versustech.com
231-946-5868

Versus gives healthcare institutions the power to locate patients, staff and equipment in real-time, and automate a multitude of clinical tasks. The result: optimized workflow, improved patient care and streamlined processes that set a higher standard in healthcare. Since 1988, hundreds of hospitals have strengthened performance with Versus locating advantages.

Virtelligence Consulting

Booth 720

Contact: JoAnn Simon, Vice President
jsimon@virtelligence.com
952.548.6611

Founded in 1998, Virtelligence is a privately held premier Healthcare IT consulting firm that offers solution advisory and Healthcare IT consulting services to payers, providers, and life science organizations nationwide. In today’s competitive Healthcare IT marketplace Virtelligence stands as one of the most trusted Consulting partners in the industry. Our success comes from a solid understanding of our client’s business and access to the best Healthcare IT resources available. Our personalized approach has given us the competitive edge in providing innovative advice and world-class service to our clients.

Vitalize Consulting Solutions, an SAIC company

Booth 3338

Contact: Cyndi Cahill, SVP Marketing and Sales Support
ccahill@getvitalized.com
610.444.1233

Vitalize Consulting Solutions, an SAIC company (VCS) provides diversified clinical, business, and IT solutions for healthcare enterprises nationwide and in Canada. VCS’ comprehensive programs and services lineup includes system implementation, integration, optimization, project management, custom reporting, education, and knowledge transfer expertise. To facilitate clients’ strategic IT initiatives, our consultants first listen to, then advise, and ultimately strengthen their customers’ IT team. Primarily engaged with Allscripts™, Cerner, Epic, McKesson, MEDITECH and Siemens users, and the Ambulatory and Practice Management arenas, VCS cultivates enduring relationships by supplying experienced professionals who consistently exceed clients’ expectations. Since being acquired by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in August 2011, VCS is now able to provide expanded service lines to its current and future clients, ultimately strengthening our solutions. Please visit us at www.getvitalized.com for more information.

Vocera Communications, Inc.

Booth 2245
HIMSS Interoperability Showcase

Contact: Diana Cropley, Marketing
info@vocera.com
800.331.6356

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

Winthrop Resources

To schedule a meeting:

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

Winthrop provides custom technology leasing solutions allowing hospitals to remain independent of technology providers, to refresh technology when needed, and to preserve cash. We believe that spending cash or bank financing to buy technology assets doesn’t make sense since those assets lose value quickly, require increasing expense to keep running, and need to be upgraded and changed to support organizational goals and regulatory requirements.

ZirMed

Booth 3638

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

We’re ZirMed, a leading provider of healthcare revenue cycle technology and information solutions. Serving 113,000 healthcare providers across all care settings who in turn provide services to more than 1 in every 10 Americans, we are a nationally recognized leader in understanding the flow of money and information in healthcare. Addressing the entire revenue cycle, our offerings include eligibility verification, claims management, patient payment estimation, patient payment processing, online bill pay, online and offline statement delivery, innovative lockbox services, analytics, coding compliance, and more. Delivered via a SaaS model, our solutions are compatible with any industry standard Healthcare Information or Practice Management System, and can be used directly within the ZirMed domain or embedded within partner software applications. ZirMed received a “Best in KLAS” ranking for 2011 from independent healthcare IT research firm KLAS, and ranked #1 in overall satisfaction three years in a row. For more information about how our solutions simplify the complexities of payments for providers and patients visit www.zirmed.com.

News 2/10/12

February 9, 2012 News 15 Comments

Top News

The State of New Jersey will hand out $40 million in federal Medicaid money for first-round EHR incentive payouts this week. The largest payouts for hospitals and practices were $2.96 million and $403,750, respectively.

Reader Comments

From Truth Seeker: “Re: attestations. Each time I try to download the CMS attestation stats via your link, I get a 37,500 line spreadsheet that lists all of the vendors and products by state. I cannot find a column that lists the number of successful attestations (which, of course, is what I want to see)! Am I doing something wrong? Maybe this is why there are only 120 downloads.” I have downloaded the same data into Excel and then done various manipulations with groups and subtotals. If anyone has figured out an easier way to analyze the data, please share.

From Dr. Denominator: “Re: attestation data. The information someone sent you was inaccurate on the inpatient side. I don’t blame them since the data is very messy. The mistake most people make is attributing Epic physicians to Epic hospital numbers, because a couple of large, multi-specialty Epic clinics attested on the inpatient platform even though they are EPs. There are also some hospitals that reference multiple Meditech systems and show up on multiple rows, even though it is a single provider. And HCA needs to be folded into the Meditech numbers, because it is Meditech software after all.” And has been stated, none of this includes Medicaid attestation data either, so it’s probably dangerous to draw too many conclusions from it.

From Zen: “Re: animated ads. When are you getting rid of the rest of the animated ads?” With all the HIMSS prepping over the last few weeks, I have not made the time to pester the last few sponsors that have yet to provide us with non-animated ads. I admit I love the change and look forward to the day when there is total stillness on the left side of the page.

From HITandTiaras: “Re: judges. Who are the judges for the shoe and fashion contests at HIStalkapalooza?” For the “Inga Loves My Shoes” contest, RelayHealth’s Lindsay Miller will be returning and will be joined by Timur Tugberk from DrFirst. Our fashion judges will be Health 2.0’s Matthew Holt, the glamorous Rebecca Armato of Huntington Hospital, and last year’s red carpet lovely Jennifer Lyle of Software Testing Solutions. Matt wanted me to let contestants know that due to his poor sense of fashion, he is willing to accept all bribes.

From Carla Tortelli: “Re: HIStalkapalooza. I understand there will be IngaTinis. What exactly is that?” As far as I am concerned, it is any yummy martini-ish cocktail. However, the ESD folks told me that this year’s version is a mix of green tea vodka, orchard pear liqueur, elderflower blossom, fresh pear juice, and vanilla bean-infused honey. My consulting physician Dr. Jayne has advised me of the benefits of green tea and has assured me it increases calorie burning and stamina. I’ll thus be drinking a few.

From Cold in Tampa: “Re: Vitera update. Police were called to the Tampa, Alachua, and Scottsdale offices to ensure the quiet exit of over 300 laid-off employees.”

From SageYouLater: “Re: Vitera layoff. I count 33 gone in my area. Boxes were dropped off and an armed police officer was on site to make sure nobody caused trouble. Some we’d have voted off the island ourselves, but some were really good. Vitera’s parent private equity company made it clear that their goals are to increase revenue 30% in three years, requiring them to make acquisitions (AKA buy growth if you can’t grow it). Freeing up cash to acquire companies is how they’ll get that growth, probably via LBOs since it’s easier and there is no profitability target in their objectives. These guys are not product people, they are finance people.”

From NervousIT: “Re: our little hospital. News of a potential affiliation with a much larger organization broke out last week. Should I be nervous? How do these things typically go?” I’ve been through the process a couple of times from the big hospital IT side of the table, so here’s my experience in a nutshell, which may or may not be representative (OK, it might be a little bit tongue in cheek):

The big hospital sends its mid-level managers, who make twice as much as your highest paid person, to snoop around and try unsuccessfully to hide their contempt of your comparatively simple but more effective operation.
They say they are there to learn and assist, but in reality they are thinking, “How fast can we rip out their stuff and replace it with products that we already know and therefore are less of a pain for us to support, no matter what users prefer?”
The systems they want to put in your hospital are more complicated, partly because big hospitals like big, complicated products, but also because big hospitals have big egos and manage to make everything 10 times harder than it needs to be because all kinds of job-paranoid mid-level IT managers are always trying to justify their existence by increasing the level of specialization and complexity wherever possible.
Every decision is made on the basis of which option presents the least risk to the IT organization. Risk means anything that could require more employees, increase help desk calls, or put the bonuses of the top IT executives in jeopardy.
Any semblance of being a friendly, well-respected IT operation goes down the tubes as the new suits insist that nobody can talk to anybody without a help desk ticket, IT employees aren’t allowed to solve problems or make changes without reams of documentation, and vigorously enforced PC policies ensure that everybody except executives in IT and Finance are using the same hardware and software that has been dumbed down and locked down so that the lowest level employee in dietary or facilities maintenance can’t do anything that might require a help desk call. Think of this as computer socialism.
Endless meetings will be held in which nobody in the room has the authority to make a decision, but everybody is empowered to veto someone else’s recommendation or insist that the issue be studied further with even more people invited to the table. The chairs in conference rooms never have time to get cold before the next set of IT posteriors land on them.
You will for the first time see ambitious, back-stabbing IT managers trying to distance themselves from their humble programmer or networking origins by wearing a suit at all times and riding herd on their tiny fiefdoms like they are Steve Jobs, except without the charm, vision, passion, and brains.
On the other hand, you will probably get better benefits and possibly a raise, at least as long as your job isn’t too closely identified with one of the systems that will be unceremoniously dumped, in which case you may find yourself attached to it. You may not be able to look users in the eye, but your career prospects may improve because of better training, exposure to systems for which experts are needed, and a more recognizable employer name on your resume. If you are lucky, you may even get to stay on the periphery and avoid the soul-sucking part of the IT organization entirely. You’ll also realize that it’s not just IT described above – pretty much all big-hospital departments stack up to their small-hospital counterparts in exactly the same way.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

From the HIStalk Practice world this week: Epic, Allscripts, and eClinicalworks represent over half of all EP attestations to date. I share the names of a few ambulatory EMR vendors I intend to visit at HIMSS. Proposed legislation would make it easier for providers to practice telemedicine in multiple states. Questions that practices should not send to technical support. Dr. Gregg overviews CareCloud’s EMR. Hayes Management Consulting’s Rob Drewniak shares tips for preparing for data breaches. Thanks for signing up for e-mail updates while you’re checking out the news. And thanks for reading!

Speaking of IngaTinis, Medicomp will be serving up a few when I participate in their Quipstar live game show Wednesday, February 22. The game is designed to demonstrate how quickly providers can be trained on Quippe and how easy it is to use. If you are interested in winning an iPad2 or some other nifty prize, you can register to participate. Before I agreed to play, the Medicomp folks had to meet a list of my diva demands that included IngaTinis for everyone and green M&Ms for my dressing room. I couldn’t refuse when they also agreed to make a hefty donation to my favorite charity. I’ll be playing to win.

I have to hand it to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Nordic Consulting for choosing one of the most memorable names I’ve heard, especially considering that they are located in Madison, WI. Nordic is the largest Epic-only consulting firm in the US, with 100+ consultants averaging four Epic certifications each and six EHR projects under their belt. Every Nordic consultant is Epic certified and 80% of them are former Epic employees (being in Madison obviously gives them an advantage in attracting top talent.) They’re prepared to help you run validation sessions, complete your Epic builds, perform system testing, create training materials, and provide go-live support. Eighty percent of the company’s engagements last more than a year and 90% of its placements are renewed at least once. Whether you need one Epic-certified consultant or an entire implementation team, and whether it’s clinical, financial, or interface applications you need help with, Nordic Consulting can help. I appreciate their support of HIStalk.

Supporting HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, and HIStalk Mobile at the Platinum sponsorship level is White Plume Technologies of Birmingham, AL. Their name is memorable as well, referencing the last line in the play Cyrano de Bergerac (“and that is … my white plume”) that symbolizes courage, integrity, and honor. White Plume helps 7,800 physician customers improve their PM/EMR systems (covering “the stuff they left out,” as they say), capturing charges better and faster to the tune of an average net savings of $0.83 per encounter. The company is so confident in its low-risk solution that it will happily sign daily contract commitments, letting its value stand on its own legs. Specific modules in its ePass (Electronic Practice Acceleration Solution Suite) include AccelaCAPTURE (an intelligent superbill on a tablet PC,) AccelaMOBILE (charge capture, rounding lists, and appointments on mobile devices,) AccelaSMART (rules-based management and workflow engine,) AccelaPASS (charge passing and validation,) and AccelaSCAN (a paper superbill with quick-scan processing, up to 1,200 encounter forms per hour.) Some of the vendor systems they work with: McKesson, NextGen, GE Healthcare, athenahealth, Allscripts, Vitera, and LSS. I found a YouTube video called Waiting on the EMR of the Future that provides some background, and they have a Top 5 Things to Know and slideshow on their site. Thanks to White Plume for its support of HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, and HIStalk Mobile.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

McKesson acquires peerVue, Inc., a provider of radiology workflow solutions.

Qualcomm makes a strategic investment in AirStrip Technologies via its Qualcomm Life Fund investment group.

Access signs a partnership agreement with pen tablet vendor Wacom to create a new e-Signature solution that will work with the Access Intelligent Forms Suite.

Revenue cycle management outsourcer Avadyne Health merges with revenue cycle workflow provider Benchmark Revenue Management. The combined companies will operate as Avadyne Health.

Nuance announces Q2 results: revenue up 19%, EPS 0.03 vs. $0.00, falling short of expectations after complicated acquisition costs. Shares dropped over 13% in Thursday after-hours trading.

Shares in CSC, which just announced the hiring of Misy PLC CEO Mike Lawrie as its new CEO, delays its fiscal year forecast and writes down $1.5 billion related to its disputed NPfIT contract in the UK.

Sales

The Arkansas State Health Alliance for Records Exchange selects OPTUMInsight’s Axolotl HIE for its statewide health record exchange.

WellStar Health System (GA) selects Merge Healthcare’s cardiology solution and Advanced Radiology of Columbia (MO) contracts with Merge for its radiology suite.

King’s Daughters Medical Center (KY) selects ProVation MD for its cardiology procedure documentation and coding.

People

Ken Edwards, formerly of GE and IDX, joins ZirMed as VP of operations.

Henry Schein names Gerard K. Meuchner (Eastman Kodak) VP and chief global communications officer.

Former Eclipsys CEO Andrew Eckert, now CEO of CRC Health Corp., joins Awarepoint’s board. The company also also names Carlene Anteau MS, RN (McKesson) VP of product marketing and Erica Davidson (Breg, Inc.) as VP of human resources.

Announcements and Implementations

Physicians at St. Mary-Corwin Medical (CO) begin electronic order entry in advance of the hospital’s May 8 Meditech go-live.

Government and Politics

The VA starts implementation of patient Wi-Fi systems in all of its hospitals.

Other

Weird News Andy rebrands himself as Wow News Andy in apparently excitement over this story. NASA’s implantable Biocapsule can diagnose and treat astronauts on long space journeys, using carbon nanotubes to secrete therapeutic molecules created by cellular metabolism.

A pretty good Forbes article by the CEO of healthcare consumer software vendor Avado says hospital CEOs should avoid the mistakes made by their newspaper industry counterparts. He had this to say about IT:

Just as newspapers were implementing multimillion dollar IT systems while nimble competitors were using low and no cost software to disrupt the local media landscape, health systems are similarly implementing complex systems to automate the complexity necessary in a multi-faceted system. Meanwhile, disruptive innovators are implementing new models at a fraction of the cost and time. For example, it’s well understood that a healthy primary care system is the key to increasing the health of a population. Imagine if a fraction of the billions being spent by mission-driven, non-profit health systems on automating complexity was redirected towards the reinvigoration of primary care. They’d further their mission and lower their costs. Of course, they’d likely see revenues drop but presumably maximizing revenues isn’t the mission of a non-profit.

Healthcare billionaire and healthcare IT dabbler/investor Patrick Soon-Shiong is reported to be interested in buying the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Sponsor Updates

eClinicalWorks provides details of its April 28-29 user group meeting in Chicago.
PatientKeeper announces that Ashe Memorial Hospital (NC) successfully attested for Stage 1 MU using PatientKeeper’s CPOE solution.
EHRScope announces its appointment as the Nuance distributor for Dragon Medical Spanish, v11.
PeaceHealth’s Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend (OR) expands its use of Versus Technology’s RTLS into the labor and delivery area.
Compuware announces a live customer Webcast featuring CHRISTUS Health SVP and CIO George Conklin.
T-System releases a demo of its new ACO solution, T-System Performance Care Continuity.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

Medicomp Systems announces their Quipstar game show promotion for HIMSS12. You heard all of us gush about it last year, so be sure to experience it yourself. Those selected will have a chance to compete for cash and prizes. Topics include ICD-10, Meaningful Use, and “other industry challenges.” I wonder if they’ll include such questions as: what clothing item is Inga HIStalk obsessed with? Does Dr. Jayne prefer diamonds or pearls? What medical specialty shares Mr. H’s affinity for the forehead-mounted reflector?

Clinical decision support fans take note: an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week discusses “The Harms of Screening.” It highlights the varied (and often conflicting) recommendations that providers are faced with daily. If providers can’t agree among themselves what is the best course of action, how can we expect vendors to know what to build? The answer, in case you’re curious: build all of the various recommendations and let your clients turn off the ones they don’t want, rather than asking them to customize in the ones they do want.

Another piece in the same issue titled “Integrating Technology Into Health Care: What Will It Take?” tackles low uptake rates for electronic health records and personal health records. The authors note that “to fit into the lives of patients, technology must help patients do the jobs that they perceive as high priority in their lives.” Unfortunately “many patients perceive financial health and other concerns as more pressing jobs to be done than physical health.” Judging from the patients I’ve seen this week, those more pressing concerns include whether to get a new iPhone or just replace the case that’s losing its little crystal decorations; whether the new Kate Spade purses are really that cute; and whether or not the Super Bowl is overrated.

Early last year, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) wanted to study why physicians opt out of Medicare. Now they’re ending the investigation, citing a lack of centralized data. Additionally, the poor quality of the data it did receive from Medicare Administrative Contractors and legacy carriers made them unable to “determine the characteristics of physicians who opt out of Medicare, the trend in the number of opted-out physicians, and why physicians choose to opt out of Medicare.” Two thoughts strike me here. First, if I gave bad data to Medicare, I’d be fined with penalties (just an idea? Maybe, maybe not). The second: have they heard of SurveyMonkey?

It’s been a while since I’ve been in the operating room, but unfortunately I’ve seen what happens when something is left in the body. Most surgical sponges have a portion of the weave that is visible on x-ray if the situation arises where one can’t be found. To help prevent lost sponges in the first place though, the University of Michigan is using barcoding technology to scan sponges when they’re used and again when they’re removed.

Only a few weeks left to get your Meaningful Use on for 2011. Have you attested yet? I’m still looking for some understanding of why some of those attestations have been unsuccessful. If you’re one of the unlucky few and are now working through the appeals process, we’d love to hear your story.

Score one for software developers working late nights. The Centers for Disease Control reveals that salty snacks such as potato chips are not the chief source of sodium in the American diet. The culprits include bread and rolls, cold cuts and cured meats, pizza, poultry, soups, sandwiches, and cheese. I didn’t see dark chocolate on there either, so I guess I’m good to go.

Have a question about Meaningful Use, the ideal percentage of cacao in chocolate, or which shoes are less cute (and thus more easily donated to Souls4Soles?) E-mail me.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Mobile.

API Healthcare Acquires Concerro

February 8, 2012 News Comments Off

Workforce management systems vendor API Healthcare announced this afternoon that it has acquired Concerro, which provides hospital staffing and scheduling solutions.

J.P. Fingado, API Healthcare’s president and CEO, said in a statement, “Concerro’s products and client base are the perfect complement to API Healthcare’s existing solutions and markets. Working together we will reinforce our mutual commitment to innovation and dedication to the healthcare industry. This strategic move allows us to leverage a larger number of talented, diverse and clinically-based staff to deliver the high quality of service that separates API Healthcare from our competitors.”

San Diego-based Concerro offers SaaS solutions that include RES-Q (staffing and scheduling), ShiftSelect (shift bidding), ShiftPredict (predictive scheduling), CommandAware (emergency preparedness), and CareConnect (patient acuity). The company is on the Inc. 5000 list.

News 2/8/12

February 7, 2012 News 6 Comments

Top News

Cerner reports Q4 numbers: revenue up 23%, EPS $0.52 vs. $0.41, with adjusted earnings of $0.55 beating expectations of $0.53.

Reader Comments

From MU Jackie: “Re: latest CMS attestation data. It’s incredible that the CMS data has been downloaded only 120 times – it’s out there on a silver platter for vendors, consultants, press, etc. I did some quick and dirty pivot tables. For inpatient, if you add Meditech and HCA’s customized version of their product, they are the clear winner, with almost twice Epic’s numbers. For ambulatory, Epic has 2.5 times more than #2 and 10 times Cerner, probably because hospitals do ambulatory first to replace a mixed bag of junk. Coming in at #12 of 250+ vendors with at least one attestation, Practice Fusion shows that it’s real. It would be interesting to do a study of one-doc practices of how little you would have to change your paper ways to ethically attest.”

From Jon: “Re: eHealth Nigeria. Good for this audience.” A couple of young Americans, one a technologist and the other a medical student, form eHealth Nigeria, working in that country (which has a population of 150 million and 50,000 women die from childbirth complications each year) to digitize healthcare records using the free OpenMRS. They’ve added SMS capabilities for both patients and caregivers since low-end cell phones are the ubiquitous technology rather than broadband-connected PCs. Their poster from the recently concluded mHealth Summit is here.

From Maren: “Re: question. We’re choosing a new HIS vendor and my boss keeps asking how many screens a nurse would use for her daily operations. Any way you can help me? I’ve never seen that statistic.” Neither have I, and I’d have to question its relevance to choosing a system. If it were me, I’d look at how long it takes to document the same activity on each system, then spend time walking with nurses and write down every single time they need a piece of information and where they were at that time. That will give you some idea of how much navigation they will have to do, which may be what your boss is really asking. Perhaps readers can help.

From 143: “Re: digital checklists. Electronic medical records are mentioned.” A detailed article on patient safety checklists mentions Holy Cross Hospital (MD), which has seven employees who review electronic patient records to see if doctors and nurses are following safety standards, which one doctor calls an “in your face” checklist that works even when she is tired or busy.

From SCCM Nurse: “Re: Cerner. Epic must be hurting sales – they just had Domino’s pizza delivered to a high-end Houston steakhouse. They were promptly asked to remove it. How do I know it was Cerner? A very large group of them were wearing their Cerner shirts.” Unverified and hard to believe, but I’ve learned not to argue with someone seeing something first hand (no pun intended.)

From Guillaume-Robert Montagne: “Re: Quebec EMR. Québec is set to expand its Dossier de santé du Québec EMR project to Montréal. The project, almost $1 billion over budget and ‘on track’ to be six years late, was called a ‘failure’ by the province’s auditor general in a report last year. The expansion will create a basic digital record for about 40% of the regional population, and will initially allow for electronic prescribing and the exchange of lab results and radiology data.” I notice they use the tired “unconscious patient in the ED” story to make it sound attractive.

From Woz: You Are Not in Cupertino Any More: “Re: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s visit to Perceptive Software. He talked for about 15 minutes at an all-employee meeting where the software engineers especially just ate it up. He told the engineers that ‘to be a software engineer, have passion … repetition is always helpful to be better than anyone else … and you should mix pleasure and entertainment with your work.’ Having lured away a number of what Perceptive Software believes are some of Cerner’s best and brightest, and a very different culture that includes having a dodge ball court on-site (he autographed one of their dodge balls), it was not surprising that someone quipped ‘we really appreciate his insight, but that advice would have been especially helpful 20 miles to the southeast (the Cerner software engineering center)’.” I should mention that this comment came from an old friend of HIStalk who has no connections to Perceptive Software or Cerner other than having a family member who was there for the visit. Woz’s talk to the employees was captured on a YouTube video.

Speaking of Apple, this newly published Steve Jobs photo comes from the collection of original Mac team member Andy Hertzfeld. If you’re reading this on one of Steve’s smaller-screen devices, I’ll provide a hint as to why the picture is fun: he’s not pointing at the IBM logo, at least not in a polite way.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Your HIMSS prep to-do list:

Gather up shoes to donate for the Souls4Soles shoe drive.
Mentally and physically prepare yourself for the HIStalk Booth Crawl, where you have a good shot to win one of 55 iPads. You will need to schedule a couple of hours in the exhibit hall Tuesday or Wednesday to gather up the details, so make room on your calendar.
Find the perfect outfit that will put you in the running for HIStalk King, HIStalk Queen, Best Elvis Impersonator, and Best Left-in-Vegas attire. Fabulous prizes for the winners!
Pack your suitcase with shoes that will make you a winner in the Inga Loves My Shoes contest. Categories include the Poker Face (you can’t tell this one works in healthcare); the Russian Roulette (you won’t wanna mess with this shoe); Off to the Races (best boot in town); What Happens in Vegas… (this shoe should stay in Vegas); and the High Roller (this shoe always wins BIG.) The generous Mr. H is throwing in great prizes for shoe fashionistas as well. Dr. Jayne, by the way, tells me she is a shoe-in for one of these five categories.

Welcome to DrFirst, sponsoring HIStalk and HIStalk Practice at the Platinum level. The 12-year-old Rockville, MD company is an e-prescribing pioneer, offering Rcopia-MU, the ONC-ATCB certified modular EHR for practices that aren’t ready to commit to an EMR, who need to attest, or who need basic technology that doesn’t require a lot of implementation headaches or workflow changes in order to qualify for HITECH incentives. The company also offers solutions for hospitals, such as an acute care medication management system that gives hospital EDs the ability to create an immediate 12-month patient medication history by collecting e-prescribing data, along with a discharge module that performs clinical and eligibility / formulary checking of discharge prescriptions before sending them via Surescripts to retail and mail order pharmacies. A brand new offering is its EHR Advisor tool for choosing solutions from among its 200+ EHR vendor partners. Thanks to DrFirst for supporting HIStalk and HIStalk practice.

I checked YouTube for DrFirst videos that describe the company and ran across this one, which we’ve mentioned before. If you’re a “what’s in it for me” type and are going to the HIMSS conference, the company is free offering foot massages and a grand prize for commenting on the video over on YouTube.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Health Data Specialists, LLC. The company offers competitively priced consulting services to hospitals that use Cerner, Epic, Meditech, and Siemens, as well as offering assistance with project management, ICD-10, and Meaningful Use. Their consultants are highly experienced, with its Cerner consultants, for example, averaging 10 years of experience with Cerner applications and 21 in healthcare (even its Epic consultants average eight years of Epic experience and 23 in healthcare.) Their long list of clients includes Spectrum, VCU, Carolinas, and North Broward (Cerner); Children’s Omaha, Driscoll, Cleveland Clinic, and Sentara (Epic); and Alegent, KUMED, BayCare, and Yakima Valley (Siemens.) You may know CEO Bob Hayden since he’s been in the industry for 38 years, including serving as a large health system CIO and founding and running First Choice Consulting. Thanks to Health Data Specialists, LLC for supporting HIStalk.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Revenue cycle solutions vendor Recondo Technology acquires Trilogi, Inc., a revenue recovery firm.

Health Evolution Partners and Verizon Enterprise Solutions form a relationship to encourage companies to develop technologies related to mobile health, telemedicine, and health data management. Health Evolution partners chairman David Brailer is quoted in the announcement as saying:

The next generation of health IT will not be anchored to a desk. Clinicians and patients will expect technologies that support mobility and virtual care. Advanced broadband, video-based technologies and wireless devices that incorporate geo-location capabilities and sensors will change the landscape of health care from development to delivery. Our relationship with Verizon demonstrates the importance of bringing these innovations to market.

Radiology center operator Foundation Radiology closes on a $2 million offering led by Chrysalis Ventures. The healthcare IT connection is that the company’s CEO is former Misys Healthcare CEO Tom Skelton and one of its directors comes from David Brailer’s Health Evolution Partners.

Mediware reports flat Q2 earnings of $0.21 per share, despite an 18% increase in revenues to $15.6 million.

As part of its Q4 earnings report, HCA reveals that it received $306 million in EHR incentives for 2011 and spent $77 million in EHR-related expenses.

University of Washington spins off TransformativeMed, which uses Cerner’s MPages mobile data access technology to create add-ons to Cerner PowerChart. Modules include a rounding application and a quality dashboard.

Sales

Advocate Christ Medical Center (IL) selects PerfectServe’s clinical communication and information delivery platform.

Memorial Hospital of Converse County (WY) chooses Summit Healthcare’s Express Connect interface engine technology to connect Meditech with Avera Health’s eICU solution.

Southern California Hospitalist Network purchases PatientKeeper Charge Capture solutions for its network of physicians.

Radiology Ltd. (AZ) selects Merge Healthcare’s suite of radiology solutions for its nine imaging centers. Also, Southern Illinois Healthcare will implement Merge Healthcare’s cardiology suite across its six hospitals and clinics.

People

HIMSS honors Carol Bickford PhD, RN-BC, CPHIMS and Kathleen Smith MScEd, RN-BC, RHIMSS with its Nursing Informatics Leadership awards. Russell Leftwich MD is awarded its Physician IT Leadership award.

John Calabro joins Cognosante as managing director of HIT offerings for state and federal clients. He most recently served as HIT coordinator for the State of Oklahoma.

CSC names Misys PLC CEO Mike Lawrie as president and CEO.

Don Bauman (Isabel Healthcare), Andre duPlessis (Tulane Medical Center), and Gary Ferguson (TIBCO) join VoiceHIT’s board of directors.

Announcements and Implementations

Presbyterian Healthcare Services (NM) implements MRO Corp.’s release of information and audit tracking software and services.

Geisinger Community Medical Center (PA) will move to Epic as part of a five-year, $159 million capital improvement project funded by its new owner, Geisinger Medical Center.

T-System introduces T-System Performance eRX, an e-prescribing solution for EDs and urgent care clinics.

CarePartners Plus announces Wellby, a kiosk that collects patient perceptions immediately after their encounter to allow timely intervention and education.

Government and Politics

AHRQ announces a new Questions are the Answer public education initiative that encourages patients to talk to their healthcare providers. Practices can get free materials, including a video, brochure, and notepads. Above is a fun public service announcement that got me wiggling in my chair in time with the music.

A USA Today article says that Newt Gingrich’s Center for Health Transformation hired lobbyists and some of its employees used their experience there to land lobbying jobs, although Gingrich insists the organization performed no lobbying for its clients.

The British Government releases a mobile app to help citizens find hospitals and clinics.

Other

Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative president and CEO Micky Tripathi is featured in a Bloomberg Businessweek segment on healthcare data security. He first discussed the data breach on HIStalk Practice.

Alpha Financial Solutions files a $1.6 million breach of contract lawsuit against Wheeling Hospital (WV), claiming the hospital’s termination notice for the company’s billing services contract was not delivered in writing as required. The company also claims that the hospital made copies of its intellectual property, locked out its managers, and improperly hired 20 of its 24 on-site employees. It also says that he hospital “seized” its servers that contained the PHI of other customers.

Hospitals are using patients’ clinical and financial information stored in their systems, along with databases sold by consumer marketing firms, to selectively pitch profitable services to patients with private insurance. St. Anthony’s Medical Center (MO) spent $25K on targeted mailings for mammograms, personalizing each piece with a photo of a person of similar age and gender to increase response rates, and brought in 1,000 patients and $530K in revenue.

Sponsor Updates

Kern Medical Center (CA) selects McKesson Revenue Management Solutions to interface with its existing Horizon Practice Plus.
Healthcare IT professionals say that disaster recovery is their top priority for investment, according to a BridgeHead Software survey.
Elsevier releases SimChart, a simulated EHR designed for nursing students.
CareTech Solutions added 22 hospital service desk clients in 2011 and grew its revenues 22%.
iSirona announces its successful interoperability testing at the IHE 2012 North America Connectathon. iSirona will also participate in the HIMSS12 interoperability showcase.
Practice Fusion earns a nomination for “Biggest Social Impact” in the fifth annual Crunchies Awards.
Campbell Clinic (TN) selects SR for its 43 orthopedic physicians.
Mac McMillan, CEO of CynergisTek, will serve on the faculty of the inaugural Canada-United States Healthcare IT Summit.
Barbara McNeil MD, PhD of Harvard Medical School joins Humedica’s Scientific Advisory Board.
A Billian’s HealthDATA and Porter Research Webinar on healthcare business intelligence and analytics is now available for on-demand viewing.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Mobile.

Monday Morning Update 2/6/12

February 4, 2012 News 5 Comments

From Kit Carson: “Re: Fletcher Flora. I’m interested in knowing what’s going on with shareholders. The final distribution statement was supposed to go out in November 2011.” We broke the news in November 2010 that Merge Healthcare had acquired the LIS vendor (I forget how I found out, but it must have been sneaky since I worded it as “HIStalk has learned,” which means I was snooping.) I don’t know anything about its shares, but I’ll run an update if anybody has one.

From Adele: “Re: HIStalk. As a sponsor, thanks for all of your hard work toward making HIMSS as productive as possible for your subscribers and for your sponsors. We are grateful that you all actually make the time to track our news and offer your suggestions to us when there are so many larger ‘fish to fry’ in your universe. HIStalk is one of the only places that provides for an equal voice for all of its sponsors, regardless of size, revenues, or politics. As a smaller company, we just can’t write a fat check simply to pay to play in some other channels. Moreover, we wouldn’t. For us, that is just not responsible stewardship of our clients’ resources.” Sometimes Inga and I need a little boost and this gave us one. Thanks.

From Vendor_Neutral: “Re: Epic. Wondering if you came across the online discussion spurred by the NYT piece?” I did see it, but like a lot of Internet discussion, I found it to be mostly hot air pontificating by industry sideliners and self-referencing, self-appointed experts who have never used Epic, aren’t clinicians, and don’t even work in healthcare IT (if you’re going to criticize a restaurant, at least eat there a couple of times.) Some of the least-informed comments drone on about Epic’s outdated technology, a clear signal that the authors have no experience in a business software environment, where customers value applications that are solid, scalable, and expertly managed over the latest iPad app or cool Web site. To dismiss the business and software savvy of hospitals that are buying Epic in droves is ludicrous, even if you (as I) doubt that most of them have the organizational fortitude to get the rosy ROI and patient benefits they expect when they fork over mega-millions. Somehow I doubt that Judy is losing sleep worrying that all the armchair quarterbacks will redirect their expertise into building a better mousetrap that will renders hers as obsolete as the company’s persistent detractors claim it already is.

From CDS Observer: “Re: FDA regulation of clinical decision support. This could be serious since it could involve a wider range of systems to be regulated, such as EMRs and simple apps. This would be a big blow to many smaller companies. Our company has joined CDS Coalition to make our voice heard and to keep members informed in case their product ends up getting included in the regulatory net.” I found the CDS Coalition’s Web page here. Companies pay $1,200 to $30,000 per year to join.

From Ambergris: “Re: KLAS scores of publicly traded companies. Didn’t you post something at one time?” That was actually Evan Steele of SRS, who made the point in October that five of the six top-rated EHR products are offered by privately held vendors, while eight of the nine lowest-ranked products are offered by publicly traded companies. To be fair, he’s only looking at customer support rankings of a specific ambulatory EHR category. However, I will add from experience, having had a few incumbent vendors go public or be acquired by publicly traded companies, that every one of them got worse afterward (I’ve written many times on the KLAS “first to worst” product phenomenon.) Investors replaced me as the company’s most important customer. I’d like to say it doesn’t have to be that way, but I can’t think of many exceptions. On the other hand, if you buy from the company after they’re public, at least you know what you’re getting and have less reason to be disappointed compared to the folks who knew them before.

From Jess: “Re: fast track clinic model for expediting medical services to patients coming to the hospital. I was hoping I could tap into your vast knowledge base to see what you know about this model.” I think you are overestimating the vastness of my knowledge base since it’s coming up empty on this topic (although come to think of it, “vast” usually means big but empty.) I will call in the assistance of expert readers to fill my void.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Jobs biography. The biography Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson has some interesting comments. Jobs said of Microsoft’s Bill Gates, ‘Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology.’ Isaacson said this about Steve: ‘He was not the world’s greatest manager. In fact, he could have been one of the world’s worst managers. He could be very, very mean to people at times.’" I think that’s what I enjoyed most about the book – trying to figure out how someone so narcissistic, uncaring, and downright nasty could not only create arguably the world’s greatest company, but run it as a publicly traded company CEO almost until the day he died despite seemingly lacking all the important skills for the job. The only other example I could think of was Neal Patterson of Cerner. And Bill Gates. I guess the bottom line is that if you’re a visionary who started the company (see: Mark Zuckerberg), you can mold it to your bizarre personality, unlike the typical gunslinger, committee-vetted musical chair CEO that big corporations love who are loaded with MBA school bean-counting competency but short on anything resembling risk-taking, innovation, and vision.

The good news about offshore programming is that half of responding readers don’t automatically assume it means shoddy work. The bad news is that the other half do. New poll to your right, and this should be fun: who is most responsible for the glut of clinically useless EMR information?

Inga and I forget ever year just how busy we get in January and February in the HIMSS build-up period: interviewing, plowing through increasing numbers of pointless press releases to find the occasional newsworthy tidbit, adding new sponsors, and planning HIStalkapalooza. If we’re slow to respond, that’s why. I came home from a nine-hour day at the hospital Friday, chowed down the Wendy’s salad and baked potato helpfully provided by Mrs. HIStalk on her way home from work since she knew I was overwhelmed and had approximately 15 minutes of free time to eat, and worked eight straight hours on HIStalk stuff without even leaving my chair. Six hours later, I was back up and at it for another long day Saturday, where emerged like Punxsutawney Phil only long enough to see my own shadow during a brief lunch with Mrs. H, then get back to work. That grind won’t end for us until the conference is over. I will need (and am taking) a vacation afterward, assuming I survive until then, and Inga will be away the week after. The worst thing is that, like a crack user, I enjoy it and can’t see cutting back even though it’s probably unhealthy. While I’m away, I’ll plan my self-improvement for the rest of the year, so if you have ideas of books I should read, conferences I should attend, or things I should do, let me know.

Speaking of HIStalkapalooza, thanks again to ESD for putting together an outstanding event. It’s a big effort to have planners visit potential sites, work out food and entertainment details, handle logistics like registration and decorations, and of course write a huge check when it’s all over. They have been outstanding to work with, and since they get what HIStalk is about, they suggested some fun surprises that I heartily approved. If you need consulting help with your clinical systems projects (training, implementation, support, optimization, Meaningful Use, etc.) I’m sure they wouldn’t be opposed to taking your call. If you got an HIStalkapalooza invitation, please thank them when you get there. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do another event this year, but I think it’s going to be cool.

Also fun: Medsphere is bringing over its 1971 VW open source bus, which Chairman Mike Doyle tells me will be available “to shuttle HIStalk groupies to your event on Tuesday.” I don’t know what they’ve planned for routes and all that, so maybe just flag it down if you see it if you need a ride to the Palazzo.

I’ll put in just a brief placeholder for our Booth Crawl, which will offer provider attendees of HIMSS what I would guess is their best chance to impress the fam by bringing home an iPad 2. Think of it as a scavenger hunt where you visit the designated booths to get the answers to secret questions (you’re visiting booths anyway, so you might as well hit these and get in the running for a swell prize.) You enter those answers online by Wednesday evening and watch HIStalk to see if you are one of the randomly drawn winners. You don’t have to get stickers or stamps on a card, you don’t have to drop your entry into a hopper, and you don’t have to be present to win. We have 55 iPads to give away, so the odds should be pretty good, plus you’re supporting our sponsors just by playing (not to mention that I noticed that a couple of sponsors have added prizes of their own.) I’ll be posting the form shortly. Nobody’s making money off this since we’re doing the work on our end for free and the sponsors happily donated the prizes, so for everybody involved it’s all about putting iPads into the hands of readers.

One last HIMSS note: if you aren’t attending, we will try our best not to make you feel left behind even though we have to write a lot about it. I think I speak for most readers in saying that the more years you go, the less you enjoy it and the more it becomes work instead of fun. I stay up until all hours each night at the conference writing everything up so you won’t miss anything important. The educational sessions are always iffy if you don’t research the presenter’s credentials in advance – I should hire someone to help me put on independent Webinars that would provide similar education without the travel and time off expense, which I’ve been talking about doing for years.

I verified that RelWare has closed its office and let half the staff go, having lost the client for which it developed its EXR EHR, Henry Ford Health System. HFHS went live on the $100 million system, then decided less than a year later to have a $350 million fling with Epic instead (note to self: don’t ask HFHS for long-term IT strategic planning help.) RelWare is sitting on a certified EHR (Inpatient and Modular Ambulatory) that is running in six hospitals and 100 clinics that will soon be homeless, so they’ll consider licensing arrangements or outright sale of the source code to interested organizations. My RelWare contact is somewhat informal, so I guess you can e-mail me if you’re interested and I’ll forward.

Travis has been writing some really good stuff on HIStalk Mobile lately. The fun mixture of pieces includes, in the three most recent posts, (a) a hands-on review of the Zeo Sleep Manager; (b) a new post that contains a lot of items that I hadn’t seen elsewhere; and (c) his take on mobile strategies for pharma. He’s a doctor and an mHealth startup guy, so while I’ve seen splashier sites covering similar ground, I haven’t seen any doing it better.

Thanks to the following new and renewing sponsors that supported HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, and HIStalk Mobile in January (click a logo for more information). You have to admire them for mailing off a check to a post office box to an anonymous, smart mouth blogger without so much as a phone call to sooth any concerns they might have. They either sign up after reading the information sheet or they don’t, and we appreciate those who do.

Epocrates earns Ambulatory Complete EHR certification for its EHR v2. I had forgotten they had one, to be honest. They acquired the iChart mobile app a couple of years ago and rebuilt it into a full product, announcing GA in July 2011.

TrustHCS names Dianne Haas PhD, RN as executive director of its consulting services division.

Morton Meyerson joins the board of Encore Health Resources. He’s the former CEO of Perot Systems and runs Dallas investment firm 2M Companies, Inc.

Office for Civil Rights has cranked up their HITECH-mandated spot-check HIPAA audits, with the first 20 lucky organizations being notified in December that they had been chosen (with 130 more planned for 2012.) CynergisTek and ZixCorp are running a free Webinar next week featuring former HHS HIPAA enforcer and attorney Adam Greene and some folks who participated in those first 20 audits. If anybody has time to sit in, let me know the gist.

Vince’s HIS-tory lesson this week gets a bit more personal, honoring former SMS VP Jim Carter. Vince’s stuff isn’t just for the long-timers – whippersnappers can learn from the HIT history books, too.

McKesson acquires the oncology clinical decision support tools of Proventys.

Lawson announces that its Cloverleaf integration technologies have met the highest industry standards at the IHE Connecthon.

Joint Commission investigates a complaint against University of Michigan Health System that says it waited six months before telling police that child pornography had been found on a medical resident’s flash drive in the ED. Joint Commission is considering whether the delay qualifies as a sentinel event.

Revenue cycle vendor Accretive Health, already being sued by the State of Minnesota over a lost laptop, has its debt collections license suspended by the state until it provides information about how it was using patient information for collections and how its collectors interacted with patients.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, showing more support for charitable activities than his predecessor, says the company has donated $50 million to Stanford’s hospital, most of it for new building construction. Maybe he should have looked for charities that don’t run a hugely successful business already given that Stanford Hospitals and Clinics reported a profit of $186 million in its most recent government reports, paying its president almost $2 million and the CIO $680K. I’ll say this: when I donate to charity, it’s never to a hospital, including the several I’ve worked for. They are making plenty of money already, wasting significant amounts of it, and not really helping improve health as much as just providing more episodic healthcare encounters. I’d rather support public health causes that keep people from becoming their customers, such as those addressing obesity, disease management, and preventive care.

HIE vendor Sandlot Solutions names Joseph Casper, formerly of MedPlus, as CEO.

We asked readers to let us know if they were presenting at HIMSS after one expressed concern that as a first-time presenter, she might be standing in a nearly empty room. Here are those who submitted their information.

Session # 55: Tale of Two Health Systems: Implementing an Enterprise Data Warehouse

Two major health systems (Orlando Health and Essentia Health) present their lessons learned and benefits achieved via an enterprise data warehouse initiative.
Rick Schooler, Orlando Health Ken Gilles, Essentia Health
Tuesday, February 21, 12:15 PM – 1:15 PM

Session #31: Marketing the Healthcare IT Project

Effective marketing is a crucial part of any IT project- We will discuss innovative ways you can market to end-users and provide real examples from premier health systems to amp up the marketing initiatives within your organization.
Chuck Christian, CIO Good Samaritan Hospital Steve Bennett, VP Kirby Partners
Tuesday, February 21 @ 11:00-12:00 Murano 3303

Session # 42: EHRs: The New Drug Safety, Liability and Efficacy Battleground

The rapid adoption of EHRs by U.S. providers creates a new and powerful platform to improve patient safety, professional liability protection, drug efficacy and regulatory compliance.
Edward Fotsch, MD, Chief Executive Officer, PDR Network David Troxel, MD, Medical Director, The Doctors Company
Tuesday, February 21, 12:15 PM-1:15 PM (Marco Polo 803)

Session # 110: A Community HIE that Makes Cents while Improving Health Location

MyHealth Access Network, a Beacon Community in Tulsa, is focused on improving health with a community-wide infrastructure for healthcare IT learn their approach and associated ROI evaluations.
David Kendrick MD, MPH, CEO MyHealth Access Network, a Beacon Community
Wednesday, February 22, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM

Session# 211: Increasing Nurse Leaders’ Informatics Skills: Building from the TIGER Competencies

Provides a discussion of the application of TIGER competencies to create institutional education programs to increase nurse leaders’ informatics skills.
Melissa Barthold, MSN, RN-BC, CPHIMS, FHIMSS IT Senior Clinical Solutions Consultant University of Mississippi Medical Center Jackson, Mississippi
Friday, Feb. 24th, 2012 10-11 AM

Session #66: Extreme Makeover – ICD-10 Code Edition: Demystifying the Conversion Toolkit

ICD-10 translation engine tools, code mapping tools, crosswalks, GEMs, code simulation tools, medical language/content management tools, computer-assisted coding software, and more — what’s a healthcare organization to use?
Deborah Kohn, MPH, RHIA, FACHE, CPHIMS Principal Dak Systems Consulting
Wednesday, February 22; 8:30 – 9:30 am

Session #153: How to Create a Care Coordination Team Using Spare Parts

Learn about a primary care group’s innovative model of care coordination which combines standard EMR functionality + clinical checklists + low cost staff to make life easier for physicians and patients, while improving quality and saving time and money for everyone!
Lyle Berkowitz, MD, FACP, FHIMSS Medical Director of IT & Innovation, Northwestern Memorial Physicians Group (NMPG) Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University.
Thursday, Feb 23: 9:45 AM – 10:45 AM (Marcello 4502)

Session #32: The New Millennium of Enterprise Patient Centric Care across the Revenue Cycle

This presentation will review how the Cleveland Clinic is transforming traditional revenue cycle management by implementing an enterprise patient administrative management system, aligned to their Patients First Initiative.
Lyman Sornberger, Executive Director Revenue Cycle Management, at Cleveland Clinic Health System, and Dawn Mitchell, Principal, Aspen Advisors
Tuesday, 2/21 – 11:00am – 12:00pm

Session #406: IT Governance for Hospitals and Health Systems

Learn how to create an IT governance process that increases the number of projects that support your organizational strategy and are completed on-time and on-budget.
Roger Kropf, PhD, Professor at New York University, Wagner Graduate School, and Guy Scalzi, Principal at Aspen Advisors
1 of only 12 HIMSS eSessions

Session #9: The People of Clinical Decision Support

I’ll present results of a qualitative study I conducted along with OHSU’s POET research team at seven hospitals and health systems across the US focused on the types of people needed to carry out a clinical decision support program.
Adam Wright from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston
Tuesday, February 21 @ 9:45 AM in Veronese 2503

Session #163: Applying Lean Principles to Ensure Clinician Productivity while Securing PHI

In this session we will explore the process and results of applying Lean principles at Mahaska Health Partnership to measure clinician productivity and minimize waste when implementing security technologies.
Kristi R. Roose Information Technology Director, Mahaska Health Partnership Dan Nikkel Continuous Improvement Director, Mahaska Health Partnership
Thursday, February 23, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM in Lido 3103

E-mail Mr. H.

News 2/3/12

February 2, 2012 News 6 Comments

Top News

Shares of EHR vendor Greenway Medical Technologies rise 30% on its Thursday IPO, making GWAY the day’s biggest gainer on the New York Stock Exchange. Shares closed at $13, valuing the company at $358 million on revenue of $90 million. The company had revised its IPO price downward from $13 to $10 at the last minute, obviously leaving money on the table in hindsight.

Reader Comments

From Mr. Hospitality: “Re: HIMSS schedule. Do you know if there is a way to drop the HIMSS schedule into Outlook? Didn’t there used to be a way to do that?” I don’t use Outlook, but I couldn’t figure out an easy way to create a schedule in general from the HIMSS website. However, the HIMSS folks say an app is coming next week. I actually found it here, though it looks like it’s not quite complete since some sessions still lack specific details. The HIMSS12 Mobile Guide does allow you to select favorites and thus create a personalized schedule, though it’s not integrated with Outlook or other calendars.

From IT Guy: “Re: Reliance Software Systems. RelWare. the company that was developing the EMR for Henry Ford Health System, is no more. HFHS announced that it would implement Epic and sunset RelWare’s EXR product, leaving the company with no clients other than Ford. They have closed their doors and let their staff go.” Unverified. I e-mailed the company and received no response. Henry Ford went live less than a year ago on EXR.

From Randy Lugano: “Re: EMR character limit on assessments. Is this a common feature in popular EMRs?” A physician’s article in The New York Times in December bemoans her EMR’s 1,000-character limit as she tries to compose a usable assessment of a complicated patient.

I nip and tuck my descriptions of his diabetes, his hypertension, his aortic valve stenosis, trying to placate the demands of our nit-picky computer system. Nevertheless, I am still unable to fit a complete assessment into the box. In desperation, I call the help desk and voice my concerns. “Well, we can’t have the doctors rambling on forever,” the tech replies … Nobody, for example, leafs through a chart anymore, strolling back in time to see what has happened to the patient over many years. In the computer, all visits look the same from the outside, so it is impossible to tell which were thorough visits with extensive evaluation and which were only brief visits for medication refills. In practice, most doctors end up opening only the last two or three visits; everything before that is effectively consigned to the electronic dust heap. Most importantly, the electronic medical record affects how we think. The system encourages fragmented documentation, with different aspects of a patient’s condition secreted in unconnected fields, so it’s much harder to keep a global synthesis of the patient in mind. Now I’ve learned that file-size restrictions will limit the extent and depth of analysis. What will happen to the tradition of thorough clinical reasoning?

From CDMer: “Re: HIT testing. Another can of worms along the path of standardization.” NIST solicits bids for a Health Information Technology Testing Infrastructure that will “harmonize the efforts of healthcare standards test development and delivery to meet the demands for conformance and interoperability within the healthcare domain.”

From NYizMee: “Re: McKesson’s huge profits. I can’t understand how this company keeps making money. They do nearly everything so badly.” Healthcare has been very good to the company and its customers chose it willingly, so they must be doing something right.

From David Chou: “Re: Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi. Would love to share a Forbes piece on what we are doing.” David is the senior director of IT operations there. The 2.3 million square foot, 364-bed facility will open at the end of this year.

From Looking Out for the Little Man: “Re: CPSI. The little guy down in Mobile seems to be helping smaller hospitals meet MU, right behind Epic in the number of hospitals to attest.” The company’s fact sheet says 134 of its hospital clients have attested, giving it 22% of all attested hospitals, second only to Epic’s 164 hospitals.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Here’s a few things you might already know if you are a faithful HIStalk Practice reader: first-fill medication adherence improves when physicians e-prescribe. Doctors still prefer desktop PCs over other devices for accessing patient data in the office or at home. Some common problems causing 5010 rejections. CareCloud CEO Albert Santalo gives the low-down on his company in our interview. Dr. Gregg shares the inside scoop on the startup Health Care DataWorks. If you haven’t been a faithful HIStalk Practice reader, it’s not too late to change your ways and see the light of the ambulatory HIT work. Thanks for stopping by.

Listening: reader-recommended Rodrigo y Gabriela, a duo of former itinerant street musicians who play amazing guitar that includes everything from classics to heavy metal (one YouTube commenter called it “thrash metal flamenco.”) Check out Gabriela using her acoustic guitar like a drum kit.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Clinical communications vendor PerfectServe closes on $10.9 million in Series C financing, led by PJC Capital.

Staff scheduling systems vendor OnShift closes on $3 million in Series B financing led by a client of West Capital Advisors.

TELUS Health Solutions announces the acquisition of Wolf Medical Systems, Canada’s largest cloud-based EMR vendor, and the creation of a new business line, TELUS Physician Solutions.

Trademark filings suggest that a possible name of the GE Healthcare-Microsoft joint venture is Caradigm. That trademark was held by Santa Barbara Regional Health Authority, but appears to have expired.

Canon Europe acquires Netherlands-based PACS vendor Delft Diagnostic Imaging, saying it plans to focus on medical imaging for future growth.

Medical payment processor MediSwipe acquires the assets of ReachMeDaily.com, a private social media platform that connects senior citizens in residential centers with their families.

California startup TigerText, which offers HIPAA-compliant text messaging for hospitals, raises $8.2 million in a second round of funding.

Telehealth vendor InTouch Health, which claims 400 hospital customers of its FDA-approved remote presence devices, gets a $6 million investment from iRobot Corp., best known for its Roomba vacuum cleaner.

The Advisory Board Company reports Q3 results: revenue up 33%, EPS $0.46 vs. $0.24.

Sales

MedLabs Diagnostics (NJ) chooses the Ignis Systems EMR-Link lab outreach solution to provide area practices with lab ordering and reporting capabilities.

The Danish health system selects InterSystems to develop and support its national HIE.

Upper Chesapeake Health (MD) picks Forerun’s FlexChart physician documentation software for its emergency departments.

Rush-Copley Medical Center (IL) selects Medicity’s HIE technology to facilitate affiliated physicians’ access to clinical results and reports.

NorthCrest Medical Center (TN) chooses Allscripts Sunrise Clinical Manager, adding to its previous deployments of the company’s ED and ambulatory EHR solutions.

Merge Healthcare signs 10 new Merge RIS customers, raising to 30 the number of radiology practices using it as a Complete EHR.

Scripps Health (CA) selects MEDSEEK’s enterprise software suite.

St. Mark’s Medical Center (TX) selects McKesson Horizon Medical Imaging for use with its Paragon HIS.

The Nebraska Medical Center expands its use of products from Streamline Health Solutions, adding its Epic integration suite to the content management and HIM workflow solutions it was already using.

People

Greater Houston HIE changes its name to Greater Houston Healthconnect and names James Langabeer PhD, formerly of the University of Texas Health Science Center, as president and CEO. He replaces Kay Carr, who became CEO last March.

API Healthcare appoints Peter Goepfrich (Vital Images, PwC) as CFO.

Brad Swenson rejoins technology financing company Winthrop Resources Corporation as SVP, chief product strategy and business development officer. He was previously with Surescripts. We interviewed him in May 2011.

Announcements and Implementations

Awarepoint signs 191 contracts for its aware360Suite in 2011, increasing its client base to 123 healthcare systems and 186 hospital sites.

Telehealth and remote monitoring solution provider Cardiocom and Delta Health Technologies, a provider of IT systems for homecare and hospice agencies, announce completion of a bi-directional telehealth interface between their systems.

St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center (AZ) announces its deployment of MobileMD for the exchange and communication of clinical information.

Government and Politics

MGMA sends a letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius outlining problems that practices are having with the 5010 transition and urging an additional delay in enforcing the change. MGMA warns that unless the government takes the necessary steps to resolve issues, many practices will face significant cash flow disruptions for practices and operational difficulties, a reduced ability to treat patients, staff layoffs, and even practice closure.

Other

Anthelio partners with Healthland to provide migration and implementation services for Healthland clients migrating to Healthland Centriq EHR.

The defunct St. Vincent’s Hospital – Manhattan (NY), obligated by state law to maintain medical records for six years after discharge, petitions the bankruptcy court to force Allscripts to help the hospital transfer its data from its own servers to a less-expensive system. The former hospital says Sunrise Clinical Manager is costing it $17K per month and another company offered to extract its store it for $1,200 per month, but Allscripts won’t help unless the hospital keeps paying the monthly tab.

UMass Memorial Healthcare announces plans to lay off 700 to 900 employees, under the gun to trim $50 million from its budget to avoid a loss for the year.

Sponsor Updates

Billian’s HealthDATA reports that 35-45% of doctors are affiliated with hospitals in 10 states, with internal medicine ranked as the top specialty.
CapSite’s SVP and GM Gino Johnson will present an overview of the HIE market at this month’s ZirMed’s Thrive User Conference.
T-System announces that 42 hospitals have attested to Stage 1 MU using its T SystemEV emergency department information system.
GE Healthcare introduces the latest version of its Centricity Patient Online portal.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

CMIO magazine publishes its 2012 Compensation Survey. No surprise: 87% of CMIOs are men, although women are increasing in the field – up from 8% to 13% this year. Apparently I fall into their target demographic since the majority of those surveyed work at multi-hospital organizations in the south.

For those of you who may be just a teensy bit behind in your ICD-10 implementations, my favorite Geek Doctor John Halamka offers the request for consulting assistance that his organization used. Also included is a letter to stakeholders to identify which applications use ICD-9 and need to use ICD-10. He promises to share as much as he can as their project plans and timelines unfold, so stay tuned.

I wonder if ICD-10 has a code for this? Physicians report an increase in cyberchondria. Patients reading online information are increasingly displaying unfounded anxiety about their health. To combat the increased worry, physicians report spending more time in office visits to discuss why patients think they have particular diseases and convincing them that it may be unlikely.

Some websites have recently caught my eye. AdverseEvents has gathered information from the FDA’s database. Users can search over 4,500 medication records. Clarimed is similar, but has information on medical devices as well as drugs and procedures. I’m sure the cyberchondriacs found them long before I did.

I just have to laugh. Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services published new standards for electronic funds transfers (EFT) in healthcare as required by the Affordable Care Act. This is supposed to result in billions of dollars of administrative savings for physicians, hospitals, insurers, and states over the next decade. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius is quoted as saying, “Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, healthcare professionals will spend less time filling out paperwork and more time focusing on delivering the best care for patients.” Unfortunately, the recent federal initiatives have actually increased burdensome busywork for me, as I am forced to review mind-bogglingly annoying reports about how many times I’m checking or not checking a particular box required for Meaningful Use calculations. Additionally, any reduction in paperwork due to EFT changes will likely be offset with increased mounds of insurer paperwork trying to deny care for sick patients.

A new study reports that “the majority of U.S. physicians are moderately to severely stressed or burned out on an average day.” That’s not good news for the people caring for you and your loved ones. Only 15% of physicians feel their organizations are helping them deal with the situation. Burnout has been shown to increase the risk of medical errors. Physicians cite their top stressors as the economy, healthcare reform, Medicare/Medicaid policies, and unemployed and uninsured patients. No surprises there. Executives, take note: show your docs some love and get those severely impacted staffers some help before it’s too late.

Medical Economics publishes its must-have gadget guide. One of my favorites is the MobiUS SP1 hand-held ultrasound unit which can transmit images via cell phone or Wi-Fi. Another favorite is the SleepView Monitor, which allows home testing for sleep apnea. If I would have had one in my little black doctor bag during a recent trip, I’d have slapped it on the gentleman near me on the plane. I seriously thought I was going to have to resuscitate him.

Hints on the Microsoft/GE venture’s name from Weird News Andy: “So, a portal-like product that allows information to flow between logical entities. Drawbridge is a little too intimidating. Hatch is too nautical. Aperture is too esoteric. Gates. That’s the ticket.”

Speaking of little black doctor bags, I’m still looking for the perfect little black dress to go with mine (and with the shoes!) for HIStalkapalooza. I thought I had my date squared away, but in a surprise last-minute showing, one of my secret crushes has agreed to attend (sorry, Farzad, I waited as long as I could – but if you decide to attend, I’m sure we’d be accommodating.)

Have a question about home monitoring devices, Las Vegas bail bondsmen, or why the soles of Christian Louboutin shoes are red? E-mail me.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Mobile.

News 2/1/12

January 31, 2012 News 6 Comments

Top News

McKesson reports Q3 numbers: revenue up 9% to $31 billion, EPS $1.20 vs. $0.60, beating estimates. The company announced that it will buy back an additional $650 million worth of its stock. Shares rose 4% on Tuesday, making MCK the third-best performing S&P 500 stock of the day. Technology Solutions revenue was up 4% with an operating profit of $69 million, although the company took a $42 million pre-tax charge against the termination of development on Horizon Enterprise Revenue Management and the move to Paragon as its go-forward platform. From the conference call:

The company reiterated that it has no plans to sunset Horizon Clinicals, but also made it clear that customers will probably either choose to move to Paragon at some point or switch vendors.
McKesson paid $6 million in severance related to the shutdown of HERM.
The company talked up its payer and transaction businesses (like RelayHealth) in a manner that suggests it likes the steady, predictable revenue they generate compared to the sales-driven revenue swings of the software business.
The company admitted that “as you know, we’ve had some challenges with the Horizon Clinical implementations.”
My overall impression is that the company is being fairly open in describing its challenges with HERM and Horizon Clinicals, although in the last couple of quarterly calls they were quite upbeat about both. Publicly traded companies aren’t very good about warning investors of potential bumps in the road.

Reader Comments

From Baystatehockey: “Re: Mark Gorrell, VP/CIO of Baystate Health. Gone and replaced by Heather Nelson as interim CIO.” I think I can safely call this rumor verified based on Mark’s exuberant and obviously recently updated LinkedIn job title, which is darned cool. Here’s his blog with sailing photos and some really interesting thoughts about pursuing something he and his family always wanted to do, even though he says he’s risk-averse and prone to motion sickness.

From Duxelles: “Re: IBM. To acquire [publicly traded vendor name omitted] – any truth to this?” I haven’t heard anything and it doesn’t seem likely. Then again, neither did the rumor at HIMSS time awhile back about this company that turned out to be true, which made me glad that I at least mentioned so I didn’t look clueless. It is likely that quite a few big announcements of various flavors are being embargoed by several companies until the HIMSS conference, so I’m sure we’ll have lots to talk about in three weeks.

From Amish Boy: “Re: Epic’s support teams. At my previous hospital, I got to know our application’s assigned support person very well. I’ve worked with Cerner for years and they don’t have the same personal attachment. We used to joke that Cerner’s Immediate Response Center number was busy because the middle school bus hadn’t dropped the IRC employees off at Cerner HQ yet.”

From Bill Rieger: “Re: Flagler Hospital, St. Augustine, FL. Kicked off its Meditech to Allscripts SCM transition at a well-attended campus event. The IS department broke out in flash mob just before the CIO spoke about how hard it would be to tear down the walls of poor processes that have been built up over the years. We are engaged and involved and want to be dancing when we go live in June 2013.” Bill is CIO at Flagler Hospital. Nice video.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: FuelBand. A new mobile application from Nike that is worn on the wrist and can track your daily activity with an accelerometer. It tracks calories expended, steps taken, and the time of day, as well as your NikeFuel score viewable on an LED display. Your score is based on an algorithm that assigns points to various movements.”

From BuffaloWings: “Re: Sandlot and Santa Rosa Consulting. To merge?” Santa Rosa already was a partial owner of the HIE technology vendor Sandlot (the other owner is a Texas physician group). I haven’t heard if they are taking that relationship further.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Mr. H and I were commiserating last night about our pre-HIMSS overwhelmed-ness. The last few days I have been working on the HIStalk Guide to HIMSS12, which includes an overview of what our sponsors will be featuring this year. We are also including contact information for at least a dozen sponsors who are not exhibiting, but that are available for one-on-one meetings with attendees. Look for the Guide to be published the week before HIMSS. Sponsors, make sure to send your information.

If you are attending HIMSS, you only have about 20 more days to prep. It’s not too soon to go through your old shoes (including your kids’ old shoes) to bring for our Soles4Souls shoe drive. We will have drop-off boxes on the exhibit floor at the DrFirst booth (5456) and possibly one other location. We’ll also accept donations at HIStalkapalooza for those who received invitations (with a free IngaTini for every pair you donate.)

We like highlighting cool vendor events at HIMSS since readers are always looking for fun stuff to do there. Here’s one: CSI Healthcare IT is offering cocktails and dinner at the Canaletto Ristorante at the Venetian on Wednesday evening (February 22) from 6:30 until 9:30. It’s invitation-only and you can RSVP by e-mail.

Speaking of HIMSS events, ours is full. We have a lot of friends and loyal readers, and if we had endless space and money, we would happily invite every one of them to the ESD-powered HIStalkpalooza. Since we don’t, we have no choice but to turn down requests, even for invitees who want to bring a guest (I’d estimate that we have close to 1,000 people who want to come that we don’t have room for.) Maybe next time I should also run a secondary event that’s cheaper to produce so that lots and lots of folks could come as a backup event, like renting some big New Orleans field, hiring a band, setting out pallets full of beer and wine, and passing out hot dogs and marshmallows to roast over a bonfire. That’s my kind of networking event.

Your honey-do list from Inga: (a) search our sponsors in the Resource Center; (b) take five minutes to get your consulting RFI request in front of several companies at once with the RFI Blaster; (c) click on some sponsor ads just to see where you end up; and (d) send us rumors and cool stuff. And while Inga, Dr. Jayne, and I don’t want you to feel like a number, you are, in a good way that we appreciate: one of almost 5 million HIStalk visitors since 2003 and over 110,000 this month; one of 7,861 subscribers to our e-mail updates; one of the 2,165 members of the HIStalk Fan Club that Dann started; or one of our LinkedIn connections or Facebook friends. Unlike HIStalkapalooza, those numbers can scale infinitely, so feel free to increase them. Sometimes we screw up in running an erroneous rumor or being slow in responding to e-mails, but one thing we never do is take readers and sponsors for granted, so thank you for being part of what we do.

On the sponsor-only Job Board: NextGen Training Coordinator, Epic Go-Live Support, Cerner Go-Live Support. On Healthcare IT Jobs: Senior Technical Advisory Consultant, Epic Certified Clinical Analysts, Epic Hospital Billing.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Lifepoint Informatics, which offers vendor-neutral data integration solutions, with an emphasis on lab outreach. Its EMRHub provides fast, easy LIS-to-EMR connectivity (Web-based middleware with only one LIS interface required) for hospitals and any type of labs interested in strengthening physician relationships, developing new revenue streams, and earning Meaningful Use incentives. Its LPI CPOE ensures clean, valid CPOE lab/rad orders that meet medical necessity and ABN requirements. Its LPI Web Provider Portal is a cost-effective way to deliver a complete patient picture to providers, providing a unified clinical inbox, flowcharts, and reports using information from systems such as clinical labs, pathology, micro, AP, cyto, and cardiology via any Web browser, helping hospitals, labs, and groups meet the IT needs of their clients. The company just landed a big deal in providing Sparrow Laboratories, one of the country’s top outreach labs with 15 labs in Michigan, with solutions to extend its reach to current and potential customers. Other customers include Indiana University Health, Continuum Health Partners, Memorial Hermann, and New York-Presbyterian. Drop by Booth 153 at HIMSS for two reasons: (a) to see their tools in action, and (b) to get one step closer to bringing home an iPad 2 in the soon-to-be-announced HIStalk Booth Crawl, of which the company is a sponsor. Thanks to Lifepoint Informatics for supporting HIStalk.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

IT professional services firm NTT DATA Americas announces that its Keane, Intelligroup, MISI Company, The Revere Group, Vertex, and Agile Net organizations will start doing business under the NTT DATA brand.

ADP acquires small-practice revenue cycle management company PhyLogic Healthcare of Springfield, MA and will offer its outsourced billing services to its ADP AdvancedMD customers.

Greenway Medical goes public Thursday, with its $80 million IPO providing a market cap of $330 million.

Sales

BCBS of Kansas City selects InterComponentWare to implement a master patient index to address demands for aggregated patient data in the HIE environment.

Shriners Hospitals for Children selects the MedeAnalytics Clinical Performance Manager solution.

Oswego Hospital (NY) contracts for Wolters Kluwer Health’s ProVation Order Sets.

Acadia Healthcare (TN) selects Healthcare Management Systems Inc.’s (HMS) financial applications for its 25+ facilities.

Banner Health contracts with MEDSEEK solution to deploy its patient, physician, consumer, and employee engagement platform.

Riverside Medical Group (VA) licenses Streamline Health’s physician workflow management solution to manage A/R and denials.

People

PwC US hires Andrew Kemmeling, formerly with Phoenix Health Systems, as a partner in its enterprise resource planning and business transformation practice.

Providence Health & Services, Southern California promotes Elizabeth Petrich-Kennedy to chief nursing informatics officer.

Former CSC and First Consulting CMO David Classen joins patient safety solutions vendor Pascal Metrics as CMIO. Former TheraDoc CEO Stanley Pestotnik also joins the company as a senior advisor.

PerfectServe hires former Krames Healthcare sales executive Michelle Piel as a VP of sales.

iSirona promotes Mary Carr, RN, BSN, CPN to Chief Nursing Officer.

Quantros promotes Gerard Livaudais MD, MPH to chief medical officer and SVP of content and product management.

Alerting vendor Extension hires Tom Berger RN as chief nursing officer. He was previously with Vocera.

Announcements and Implementations

Resource Anesthesia deploys the Shareable Ink Anesthesia Suite across multiple states and facilities.

KishHealth System (IL) implements the Pharmacy Xpert clinical surveillance and intervention solution from Thomson Reuters.

CynergisTek releases Surveyor for Business Associates, a risk management solution for demonstrating HIPAA/HITECH compliance.

The US Patent and Trademark office awards Medicity a patent for locating, indexing, matching, and sharing patient records among healthcare organizations. It’s the company’s third patent issued in two years.

Macadamian will launch its Usability Maturity self-assessment checklist at the HIMSS conference, building on previous work that found that easier-to-use EHRs increase productivity, decrease errors, and provide cognitive support to users.

DrFirst launches its EHR Advisor online tool to help physicians find a solution from those offered by the company’s partners.

HealthStream and Laerdal Medical, through their SimVentures collaboration, offer SimManager, a SaaS-based system for managing simulation-based healthcare training.

Government and Politics

In a Congressional subcommittee hearing, a VA official says its new paperless claims processing system will help reduce the department’s claims backlog and take out months of processing. The current number of pending VA claims is over 854,000, which is 100,000 more than a year ago and 500,000 more than three years ago.

A Congressional Budget Office report predicts that the cost of government healthcare programs will more than double over the next 10 years to $1.8 trillion, or about 7% of the nation’s economy. It predicts that Medicare spending will increase by 90%.

The COO of the West Virginia Health Network is named by a legislative auditor as being one of several retired public employees who are exploiting a loophole that allows them to collect both a pension and paycheck at the same time.

Conservative group Judicial Watch calls on Newt Gingrich to release the full client list of his Center for Health Transformation.

Innovation and Research

Oracle Health Sciences Institute announces its first group of research projects, including a Brigham and Women’s/Harvard study that will use EMR and claims data to analyze treatment alternatives and a University of Maryland project to visualize longitudinal EMR and claims data to detect adverse events.

Other

The Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland announces the “Innovate 4 Healthcare Challenge,” a nationwide contest for college students to develop HIT tools to improve patient engagement with healthcare providers. The challenge is supported by ONC and includes $30,000 in prize money.

I was amused to read that people lie more when texting than when communicating by other methods, including video chat. I wonder if that carries over to clinical interactions, since I’ve only had one text conversation with a physician and I think we were both pretty honest. However, I’m now wondering about the text from an old boyfriend who said he couldn’t meet for dinner because he was moving to South America.

The 2012 CMIO Compensation survey finds that the typical CMIO is male, works at a multi-hospital organization, earns between $200,000 and $250,000, and spends only 24% of his time on CMIO duties.

Eric Van De Graaf MD, a cardiologist who wrote an EMR critique on the official blog of Alegent Health awhile back, follows it up with An Open Letter About Electronic Medical Records, in which he is even more critical in a tongue-in-cheek way. It leads off with, “Dear computer programmers and EMR developers. Your product stinks. The whole world of medical communication took a great big nosedive the moment you and your binary code inserted yourself into the business of medicine.” That was just an attention-getter, I suspect. He says the purpose of doctors’ notes (electronic or paper) is not to get paid or to comply with regulations, but to communicate, and EMRs diminish that capability by inserting boilerplate text and other junk needed for non-communication purposes (billing, malpractice avoidance, and government requirements, which is really more of an indictment of today’s medical practice than the tools that support it). He has a big finish:

Someday there will be a Steve Jobs of the EMR world who will come along and produce a system that listens in on my office visit with the patient, uses voice recognition and AI to produce an extremely accurate summary of the discussion, and schedules all necessary tests and medications based on what I explain to the patient—all without me having to even interact with a computer keyboard. The note will be instantly dispersed to the patient and all other caregivers. The program will suggest any useful therapies that I may have missed and provide educational resources to the patient based on the subjects discussed. And, of course, it’ll hit all the high points needed by the coders and Medicare overlords. When this happens it’ll put every other EMR out of business; because, finally, we’ll have a system that actually helps us rather than hampers us.

A California hospital is fined $100K after a nurse in its long-term care unit replaces a comatose woman’s breathing tube, but forgets to remove the cap, suffocating the 81-year-old woman.

Six employees of the Food and Drug Administration who tipped off Congress about what they claim was the agency’s corrupt push to approve unsafe medical devices file a complaint against their employer, saying that FDA violated whistleblower protections by intercepting their personal e-mails and installing spyware on their PCs.

Sponsor Updates

Kareo announces the opening of its Indianapolis office and its plans to add 50 new sales and customer service positions.
Practice Fusion hires Jonathan Malek as SVP of technology and John Hluboky as VP of technical operations.
OptumInsight announces that its HIE and computer-assisted coding solutions achieved the highest industry standards for interoperability at the IHE North American Connectathon.
T-System launches Care Continuity, a Web-based patient referrals tool.
The 37-provider Mendelson/Kornblum Orthopedic and Spine Surgeons (MI) selects the SRS EHR.
Concerro hosts a webinar on disaster preparedness and emergency management.
Hayes Management Consulting offers an EMR optimization webinar.
A PatientKeeper survey finds that preparation for the ICD-10 transition is the highest priority of finance professionals in healthcare provider organizations.
Allscripts facilitates a meeting with Surgeon General Regina Benjamin MD and 20 North Carolina business leaders.
Altoona Regional Health System (PA) selects Access Intelligent Forms Suite for its three locations.
Merge Healthcare adds six practices to its Merge OrthoEMR client base.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Mobile.

Monday Morning Update 1/30/12

January 28, 2012 News 13 Comments

From You Know Who: “Re: RelayHealth. Jim Bodenbender out, announced abruptly on phone call. Jeff Felton, who ran the RelayHealth Pharmacy group and was a transplant from McKesson San Francisco, is taking over the entire division.” That appears to be true from the company’s management team page, on which Jeff Felton (above) is now listed as president.

From RAC Frustration: “Re: electronic RAC responses. I see that Medical Electronic Attachment (MEA) has become the latest company to be certified by CMS. I am curious how many HIStalk readers will use the esMD (electronic submission of medical documentation) for RAC and MAC responses?” MEA’s progam uses an NHIN gateway to send electronic responses to CMS’s post-payment audit requests of several flavors (RAC, MAC, CERT, PERM, and ZPIC.) I’m interested in how much transaction volume the average hospital will experience to keep CMS happy once esMD Phase 2 goes live in October and all documentation requests will be sent electronically. Comments welcome.

Surely the calendar is playing a cruel joke: it can’t be just three weeks until the HIMSS conference, can it?

My Time Capsule editorial this week from five years ago: Want Physicians to Use Systems? Standardize Screens Like You Do Back-End Databases. A free sample: “Hospitals never seem to get how illogical it is to physicians that every hospital buys a different system, but expects community-based doctors who cruise in for an hour a day to master all of them without burning up more hours of their self-employed day. They seem puzzled when doctors jeer at their zealous requests to bone up on Cerner when he or she is fuming at Eclipsys across town and McKesson at the university hospital.”

Listening: reader-recommend James, which I would characterize as jangly Britpop with strong vocals. They (it’s a band, not a guy) remind me of the Smiths. They aren’t totally obscure, having sold 25 million albums in their 30 years. They probably would sell more if they had a more search engine friendly name, although come to think of it, that’s another similarity between them and the Smiths.

A lot of money and effort is spent putting on the exhibit and educational tracks of HIMSS, but that’s just to provide the backdrop for the real reason people attend: to connect with folks for business and pleasure, two-thirds of respondents said. New poll to your right, as suggested by a reader: what reaction do you have when you hear that a vendor uses offshore programming resources?

Thanks to CSI Healthcare IT, supporting HIStalk as a Platinum Sponsor. The company is a leading national provider of IT and training professionals, both contract and permanent. The company’s team of 75 recruiters can often find local qualified resources, minimizing billable travel expenses to the client. Its pricing model has saved health system customers such as Sutter, Baylor, Texas Health, Clarian, and Sentara up to 60%. The company is vendor neutral, providing resources for projects involving McKesson, GE Healthcare, Allscripts, Epic, Cerner, Meditech, NextGen, and others. It can handle work ranging from providing a single resource to managing the projects of large health systems, also offering a specific package called Epic Community Connect that helps health systems provide Epic’s ambulatory systems to community practices (marketing, contracting, readiness assessments, implementation, and support.) Thanks to CSI Healthcare IT for supporting HIStalk.

Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra resigns and is expected to run for lieutenant governor of Virginia. You aren’t surprised if you read HIStalk on January 13, when my non-anonymous, well-placed informant chose the fantastic phony name of DeepThrowIT to tell us that Chopra was heading out. I think that might have been my first non-healthcare IT big scoop rumor.

I recently quoted some Epic facts provided by Chief Administration Officer Steve Dickmann in a recent talk he gave to a Madison group. The full video is here, from which I pulled a few more:

The company started in a basement in 1979 doing UW psych department work.
Epic went from 2.5 employees in 1979 to 30-40 employees in 1994, but then changed direction to focus on the electronic medical record.
The product was changed from text-based to a graphical GUI in 1994, the same year when the database was scaled up for large enterprises.
Epic Web came out in 1997; MyChart in 2000.
The company gained competitive advantage from Y2K because it had minimal remediation to accomplish while its competitors had to redirect resources to work on that problem.
Epic also gained competitive advantage from being in Wisconsin, which was an early adopter of large integrated delivery systems.
Epic does not subcontract or acquire software; everything was developed in Wisconsin.
The original motto was “Do good, have fun.” The “make money” part was added later.
Epic focuses on large hospitals and clinics, children’s hospitals, and academic hospitals and turns away other prospects. The only exception they will make is for hospitals located in Wisconsin.
Epic doesn’t do acquisitions because they would have to rewrite the code anyway to keep a truly integrated product.
Competitors have 20-30% of their employees doing sales and marketing, while Epic has 1%.
Epic’s culinary team has 70 employees and it also staffs its own horticultural team. It does not contract those functions out.
All of Epic’s implementers fly out Monday afternoon, which ties up a good bit of the Madison airport’s capacity with 600-700 people all leaving at about the same time.
Each customer has an assigned tech support team that knows the customer’s people and systems. The team is available 24×7.
91% of the HIMSS EMRAM Stage 7 hospitals use Epic.

Supporting HIStalk as a Platinum Sponsor is Versus, which offers real-time location systems for patients, staff, and equipment. Hospitals use that information to automate workflow, improve efficiency, increase patient safety, boost patient satisfaction, and increase revenue. The company provides interesting examples: (a) advancing patients to the next level of care based on events, such as completed labs or EKGs; (b) locating telemetry patients in distress wherever they are; (c) alerting the physician when patients are ready to be seen; (d) reminding staff to wash hands; and (e) alerting housekeeping to clean the room when the patient’s badge is dropped into the discharge bin. The Traverse City, MI company has been around for over 20 years, with its combined infrared/radio frequency system being endorsed by the American Hospital Association. Hospital customers have documented improvements such as cutting equipment losses from $1.5 million to $40,000 year, eliminating the need for clinic waiting rooms, reducing telephone calls by 75%, and increasing bed capacity by 25% with no construction. Interesting stats: the company has over 600 facilities using 500,000 of its components to track more than 1 million patients per year. The big announcement a few weeks back was that The Johns Hopkins Hospital chose Versus to manage staff and assets in real time for some locations after a three-year pilot of several RTLS systems, with additional deployments scheduled. Thanks to Versus for supporting HIStalk.

The Peace Corps has an RFI out for an EMR product, just in case you’d like to sell them one. They’re actually looking to have OpenEMR customized, along with Microsoft Dynamics 2011 and BizTalk for reporting.

In England, Homerton University Hospital allows its original NPfIT contract for Cerner and BT expire and signs its own seven-year extension directly with Cerner, declining to open the opportunity to other vendors because of its working relationship with the company.

The Bipartisan Policy Center releases its recommendations for using healthcare IT to improve care and reduce costs. Quite a few industry names served on the task force and provided their input. Some of its observations and recommendations:

Even with new delivery models, the healthcare system continues to financially reward procedure and patient volume rather than better care. Recommendations: purchasers and plans should reward care that is higher quality and lower cost, incorporate those models into Medicare physician payments, expand pilots of new care models, and share lessons learned with private sector pilot projects.
Despite a lot of HIE activity, not much patient information is actually being exchanged. Recommendations: improve the HIE business case by adding more stringent information exchange requirements to Stage 2/3 of Meaningful Use, develop long-term standards that make sense for healthcare delivery, assess the level of information exchange that is occurring, do more work related to two-way data exchange, and clarify the role of health information exchange in the several programs funded by HITECH.
Consumer engagement with electronic tools is minimal. Recommendations: raise public awareness, help providers engage their patients to use technology, improve the usability of consumer tools and provide easy data import/export for consumer-facing applications, launch an awards program for consumer tools outcomes, share lessons learned, ramp up Meaningful Use requirements to include more consumer tools, and offer incentives to chronic disease patients to use electronic tools to manage their health.
EHR and Meaningful use adoption is still low. Recommendations: raise awareness of incentive programs and expand RECs and similar programs, clarify Meaningful Use requirements, roll out lessons learned form federal programs to the whole industry and not just government contractors, encourage sharing of best practices, and improve EHR usability.
Consumers are worried about privacy and security. Recommendations: require all entities that use PHI to comply with policies at least as stringent as HIPAA, clarify government guidance across agencies, development a national strategy for patient identification (a national ID was not specifically mentioned), and issue common sense security practices to providers.

I’ve previously mentioned the MIAA EHR mobile viewer app developed by a three-person Palomar Pomerado Health development team for its own use with its Cerner systems. A preview at a Toronto mobile healthcare conference generates interest, with the app going to pilot in March. The hospital hopes to commercialize it. Said a Canadian hospital IT director at the conference, “We need to look seriously at how a publicly-funded hospital in the States has been able to advance their technology like this when we seem to stumble on things like policy and rules.”

The Pennsylvania Health Department finds that nurses at St. Luke’s Hospital overdosed three patients in the past two years by incorrectly programming their PCA pumps. Hospital employees said the hospital did not require training on the devices.

An article covering successful businesses that did not use outside financing provides an example in eClinicalWorks CEO and co-founder Girish Kumar Navani, quoting him:

I don’t foresee leaving the company for at least 10 years. I would like to leave it a private company with no external investors and absolutely no thoughts whatsoever about Wall Street. I am having fun and take great pride in my freedom. There is no reason I would give that up. We are a cash flow positive company. We have recurring revenues and no debt. We have a large customer base that is growing exponentially.

Compuware says it will take its Covisint subsidiary public in its next fiscal year, which starts in April. Covisint, which has $74 million in annual revenue, offers an exchange platform that connects hospitals and practices, including services for identity management, collaboration, master patient index, and record location.

Vince’s latest HIS-tory: Part 2 of Health Micro Data Systems.

A column in The Atlantic revisits a 1995 article it published about Newt Gingrich, saying that some of his goofy, overly dramatic “we are at a crossroads” ideas (like colonizing the moon) prove that he can’t separate something that sounds cool if given little thought from pushing the government into spending huge amounts of money just to find out how cool it is or isn’t, even though the free market is better equipped to make that call. Healthcare technology was mentioned in that 1995 article:

Gingrich also thinks health care technology is cool. Serious students of this subject worry that insurance insulates patients from the cost of technology, thus yielding lots of high-cost, low-benefit use and in turn steering too much of society’s resources to the further development of such machinery. But Gingrich wants more. In 1984 he wanted more cat-scan machines, and he wanted the government to provide a $100 million incentive for the development of user-friendly dialysis machines–even though "there are already companies and researchers interested in this problem." The point here isn’t that Gingrich will now waste tons on technology. The current political climate will restrain this tendency. The point is that–in case you hadn’t noticed–there is little careful thought underpinning his enthusiasms, nothing solid beneath his unshakable self-assurance and his intense disdain for disagreement.

E-mail Mr. H.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Mobile.

News 1/27/12

January 26, 2012 News 2 Comments

Top News

CPSI announces Q4 numbers: revenue down 2%, EPS $0.59 vs. $0.61, raising questions about the state of the hospital clinical systems market.

Reader Comments

From Vegas Question: “Re: HIStalkapalooza invitations. Will the e-mail come from your usual address or a new one? My spam folder is pretty large and I don’t want to miss it.” Invitations and regrets will be sent from histalkapalooza@contactESD.com this week. The walk-up plan will be described for those we couldn’t invite because of capacity. Check at the registration table at 8:00 and if we have room due to no-shows, we’ll let more folks in.

From Rick: “Re: GE Healthcare. Restructuring of its IT division continued Tuesday with an announcement that it will terminate the Centricity Advance hosted EMR/PM solution immediately. Customers will have to make arrangements to move their data out of the cloud before the system is taken offline. All development in its Hospital and Large Practice division has been halted and products placed in maintenance-only mode, including Centricity Business revenue cycle solution. The Centricity EMR product will be sunset with no Version 10 release, replaced by the Centricity Practice Solutions combined EMR/PM system.” I asked GE Healthcare for a response Tuesday evening and agreed not to run the rumor then since the spokesperson indicated that it contained inaccuracies. Here are the main points from GE Healthcare:

The company will shut down its hosted PM/EMR solution Centricity Advance (the former MedPlexus product that GE Healthcare acquired in March 2010) on June 30, 2012.
The decision was made because of market overlap between the Centricity Advance product and Centricity Practice Solution.
Customers can retrieve their data in read-only form until December 31, 2012.
Customers will be offered an upgrade to the Centricity Practice Solution PM/EMR, with data migration, training, and implementation costs covered by GE.
The company will eliminate an unspecified number of jobs related to the announcement.
The Centricity Business revenue cycle product is unaffected by the announcement.

From Expat Consultant: “Re: Dubai Health Authority embezzlement. These people own the company representing Epic in the current bid for DHA business.” Two men are charged with embezzling $250K from a company providing services to the DHA.

From Rebecca: “Re: HIMSS presenters. Have you thought about listing sessions that will be presented by HIStalk’s loyal followers and contributors? You have so many followers attending and it would be nice to encourage them to attend educational sessions.” I’m a sucker for doing good deeds even though I’m already overwhelmed, so if you’re speaking at a session that’s on the regular HIMSS educational track (not in the exhibitor’s theater, on the show floor, etc.) you can enter your information here and I’ll try to put out a list.

From Ileus: “Re: links to HIStalk Practice and HIStalk Mobile. I can never find them. Why not put them at the top of the page?” That’s a good idea that we’ll take one step further by placing tiny links at the bottom of each news post, starting today. That way, readers using mobile devices and RSS feeds can click them. I hadn’t thought about the ease of finding the links, to be honest.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Highlights from this week’s HIStalk Practice: eClinicalWorks CEO Girish Navani highlights his company’s 2011 achievements and 2012 goals. SBA loans to doctors have surged in the last 10 years. Seven states have still not initiated Medicaid EHR incentive programs. Julie McGovern of Practice Wise discusses New Year’s resolutions, vendor relationships, and setting realistic and appropriate expectations. The ever-irreverent Dr. Joel Diamond explains the history of ICD-10 (it’s a must read.) Actually, I think everything on HIStalk Practice is a must read, so make sure you are signed up for e-mail updates.

On the Jobs Board: Senior Product Manager of Healthcare Solutions, SCM Go-Live Support, Epic Credentialed Trainers. On Healthcare IT Jobs: Director of Technical Operations, Allscripts Application Analyst, IT Director and IT Leader.

Inga, Dr. Jayne, and I do our HIStalk work in a bubble of lonely anonymity, so we always enjoy connecting with readers, even if only by electronic means. We enjoy seeing the names of the 2,128 folks who have signed up for Dann’s LinkedIn-based HIStalk Fan Club, which is almost four years old now (hello to the new folks there from Citizens Memorial Healthcare, American College of Cardiology, McKesson, Cornerstone Advisors, Vitera Healthcare, DrFirst, Medibis, Medicity, GE Healthcare, and Lehigh University). We accept all friend/connection requests from Facebook and LinkedIn, connecting you to a pretty big web of people that might come in handy someday. We like it when you send us news and rumors, subscribe to the e-mail list, click the ads of our sponsors, and use the Resource Guide and Consulting RFI Blaster. And of course thanks for reading, and thank goodness you do since we would be wasting our time here otherwise.

I forgot to give a proper introduction and welcome to Dr. Rick, whose first EHR Design Talk has earned a great response from the Twitterverse and from reader comments. He chose where to start his series, but you get to decide where it goes from there through your interaction with him. You will no doubt appreciate his active (and sometimes almost immediate) response to your comments, indicating his keen interest in usability and your thoughts on what it means to EHR users. It takes a lot of effort to research and write posts like his, so thanks to Dr. Rick for sharing his time and expertise with us.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

drchrono closes a $2.8 million funding round. The company says 15,000 users have registered.

EHR and PM provider Image MD (formerly eHealth Made EASY) announces it has increased its invested capital from $15 million to $25 million over the last year.

Quality Systems, the parent company of NextGen, reports Q3 earnings: revenue up 23% to $112.8 million; net income up 20% to $21.1 million. The company’s $0.36 EPS missed analysts’ estimates by $0.02.

Sales

Masonicare (CT) selects the Summit Express Connect interface engine to provide interface integration between Masonicare’s MEDITECH HIS and ancillary systems.

People

Former Clinecta President Jeffrey A. Pfund joins JEMS Technology as COO.|

Brian Mitchell, formerly of GE Healthcare, joins ClearDATA Networks as vice president of sales.

M*Modal (MedQuist) promotes Michael Clark to EVP of global sales.

University of Chicago Medical Center promotes Sameer Badlani, MD from associate CMIO to CMIO.

Healthcare data analytics and consulting firm Sg2 appoints Eric Louie MD, MBA as chief medical officer.

Former Microsoft Health Solutions Group VP Peter Neupert joins venture capital firm Health Evolution Partners as an operating partner, joining former ONC head David Brailer MD.

Healthcare Data Solutions, a provider of healthcare databases and intelligence services, names Scott Thompson (InfoGroup) its CTO.

Drexel DeFord, VP/CIO of Seattle Children’s Hospital, will serve as 2012 chair of CHIME’s board of trustees.

Rick Schooler, VP/CIO of Orlando Health (FL) is named CHIME-HIMSS John E. Gall Jr. CIO of the Year.

Leigh Ann Myers RN joins PerfectServe as VP and chief clinical officer. She was previously with PatientSafe Solutions.

Announcements and Implementations

Virtua (NJ) goes live with the first phase of its enterprise-wide device infrastructure using Nuvon’s VEGA System to connect to its Picis perioperative solution.

Upstate University Hospital (NY) introduces Upstate MyChart, giving patients online access to their medical records. The hospital is part of SUNY Upstate Medical University, which is in the midst of $40 million Epic implementation.

API Healthcare announces that 20 hospitals have recently gone live with its workforce management solutions.

M*Modal Inc and Merge Healthcare partner to integrate M*Modal’s speech and natural language understanding technology into Merge solutions.

Siemens HSB CEO John Glaser and Texas Health Resources SVP/CIO Ed Marx are among the presenters of a January 31 webinar, Can Healthcare Providers Afford to Ignore Social Media?

MedAssets announces general availability of its Access Integrity suite for front-end RCM processes.

Greenville Hospital System University Medical Center (SC) goes live on Holon’s CPOE Medication Order Management solution at all of its facilities.

Government and Politics

ONC head Farzad Mostahari MD predicts that at least 100,000 providers will receive EHR incentive payments by the end of 2012. In a blog posting that discusses his forecast for HIT in the coming year, he says:

I see 2012 as the year in which health IT truly comes of age. While much work still needs to be done, the groundwork is firmly in place for what promises to be a breakthrough year in the adoption and widespread use of health IT in ways that improve care for individuals, improve health outcomes for populations, and increase the value we get from our health care dollars.

A just-published article in The Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News covers the special interest advocacy activities (or political influence peddling, according to rival Mitt Romney) of Newt Gingrich’s for-profit Center for Health Transformation. It lists some examples of Gingrich pitching his clients in various government hearings for projects requiring major government expenditures, among them GE Healthcare, Siemens, Allscripts, and HealthTrio. The center’s project director is mentioned as testifying that the Department of Labor should require healthcare providers to use electronic medical records, which it implies morphed into HITECH. Gingrich also appeared at a press conference in the Senate Office Building to promote a bill requiring e-prescribing, in which at least 20 of his paying clients had a financial interest.

The government says that an upgrade to Symantec’s Veritas Storage Foundation caused the significant downtime experienced by the Military Health System’s AHLTA clinical system last week.

ONC’s Office of the Chief Privacy Officer announces a project to identify best practices for mobile device privacy and security. They will convene a public roundtable in the spring.

Other

Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) officially adopts the Xerox name, two years after its acquisition by that company.

Server problems at a clinic in Canada cause month-long issues, including the inability to access patient records and the complete shutdown of the telephone system for a day.

Healthcare Growth Partners releases its latest healthcare IT industry review, covering Q4 and reviewing 2011’s activities. It’s a very well done review of macroeconomic and healthcare IT industry factors that will affect merger and acquisition activities and share performance of publicly traded companies. I really liked the chart above that describes why some companies command high revenue multiples when acquired, while others don’t. What it’s showing is that recent acquisitions aren’t following the typical trend, with more premium-priced acquisitions than usual. I would attribute to the fifth factor listed in the rightmost section – deep-pockets outsider companies are making it rain to snap up available players so they can scratch their itch to get into healthcare quickly, even if irresponsibly. Whether they’ll stay in is another question (most don’t.)

Weird News Andy declares that bacon is the new duct tape, noting a report from Michigan doctors who stopped a four-year-old girl’s platelet-related nosebleed by shoving raw bacon up her nose. One of the doctors said he got the idea from his military days, when pork was recommended as an antihemorrhagic. WNA postulates that the story was sponsored by the ThinkGeek product above.

An Oklahoma hospital that took a $500K donation from country singer Garth Brooks to build a women’s center to be named after his mother but then used the money for other projects is ordered to give Brooks his money back plus another $500K as punitive damages. The hospital argued that the gift from Brooks was originally made anonymously and without restrictions and that he was fuzzy on details about the meeting when asked later.

Sponsor Updates

Fulcrum Methods launches its ICD-10 assessment, remediation, and program management tools.
T-System’s T SystemEV EDIS successfully completes the highest level of interoperability tests at IHE’s Connectathon.
Sunrise Health System (NV) becomes the first health system in Nevada to use AirStrip CARDIOLOGY.
MEDecision’s January 31 Webinar will feature a discussion on the use of coordination solutions and EHRs to lower costs and improve care.
Concerro announces the keynote speakers for its April 2012 Concerro Client Conference.
Southeast Alabama Medical Center selects PatientKeeper Mobile CPOE to compliment its McKesson HIS.
MedAptus announces that its Professional Intelligent Charge Capture solution was named Mobile Data Systems Category Leader in KLAS’s annual report.
Medicity validates its interoperability capabilities at the IHE North American Connectathon 2012.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

The media have been all over reports about physicians distracted by their electronic devices. I laughed out loud at this headline, though: Paperwork causes unintended distractions for physicians and nurses. This quick little piece on KevinMD.com is worth the read. I think sometimes we’re so aggravated by our technology that we forget what it was like before.

As a physician, I’m annoyed by lawmakers’ attempts to control how I practice or how patients care for self-limited illnesses. The recent spike in state and municipal laws that restrict purchasing of over-the-counter cold remedies is an example. Communities typically decide (often in patchwork fashion) that these will now be available only by prescription. This drives me crazy, because although I can purchase it over the counter without a prescription, if I prescribe it for a patient it is considered a controlled substance and requires the use of my DEA number and the use of special prescription paper as it cannot be electronically prescribed (at least not now in the state where I practice.)

In turn, this causes patients to spend a co-pay to come see me, plus the insurance company to fund the rest of the cost for an office visit, all so that the patient can purchase a drug that should have cost $4.99 at the local discount store. An article I recently ran across lets us know that not only have the meth makers outsmarted the restrictions on pseudoephedrine purchase, they’re also driving up healthcare costs in unintended ways. Users have turned to small-batch techniques (the “one pot” or “shake and bake” approach) to make their own meth rather than relying on the large batches typically produced by dealers. This has caused a spike in burn patients when the experiment literally blows up in the user’s face. An Associated Press survey reports that up to a third of burn patients were injured making meth. These patients are often uninsured and their care is more costly than that of other burn patients. The ultimate cost could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Definitely something to think about.

Insurers are moving into the mobile health game. Aetna, WellPoint, and UnitedHealth Group are among payers who have jumped into the fray in a big way. I enjoy following HIStalk Mobile and am supportive of things that help patients get more in tune with their health care and personal wellness. I’m a bit skeptical, though, about in-car health. I’d rather encourage people to get out of their cars instead of convincing them that time sitting in them is terribly worthwhile.|

Speaking of personal fitness: for some, obesity continues to cause issues even in death. Due to the potential for decreased learning when working with obese cadavers as well as the difficulties in preparing and storing them, some medical schools are rejecting donations based on size. Scientific donation of a body is a true gift and I am grateful to those individuals and families who choose this route. I’m sad for those who want to make this gift but are unable to do so.

One of my closest friends is gridlocked with his employer over the use of the CMIO title. He’s been doing the job for years but they refuse to recognize him. It may be just a name, but to bolster his spirits I want to share some unusual executive titles. Hang in there, and remember that in your head, you can have whatever title you want. Personally, I think I’ll choose Imperatrix. Now I just need to figure out something equally important-sounding for Inga.

I’ve been trying to get into Twitter, but it seems to be conspiring against me. Since I haven’t been wasting any time tweeting, I’ve been able to continue my pre-HIMSS shoe shopping. Although I’m not eligible for the “Inga Loves My Shoes” contest, I don’t want her to think I’m a slouch, so I’ve been texting her with my finds. So far I seem to be meeting her standards, but I’m not convinced I have the perfect pair just yet.

In response to Monday’s Curbside Consult, readers are continuing to send some great suggestions. I’m looking forward to hitting some of them soon. Please keep them coming!

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Mobile.

News 1/25/12

January 24, 2012 News 4 Comments

Top News

MedQuist Holdings changes its name to M*Modal, which is the business MedQuist acquired last year for $130 million in cash. CEO Vern Davenport rang the Nasdaq opening bell to commemorate the company’s rebranding and new MODL trading symbol. The company also confirms that most of its executives will work from an office to be opened in Raleigh, NC while company headquarters will remain in Franklin, TN.

Reader Comments

From Lourde: “Re: Party attire. I finally found my shoes for the party last night. Super excited that that is off my plate!! Choosing the perfect shoe – so ‘stressful.’” I feel your pain. I will admit to no one how many pairs of shoes I have bought in the last month because I keep finding what I think are the “perfect” pair. Since we are talking shoes, it’s a good time to mention that this year’s Inga Loves My Shoes contest during HIStalkapalooza will include special shoe categories. Our judges (Lindsay Miller of RelayHealth and Timur Tugberk of DrFirst) have not yet revealed the categories, but I promise to share more soon. Meanwhile, if you are seeking fame in the overall best dressed contest, keep in mind you’ll have an opportunity to be crowned HIStalk King and HIStalk Queen, as well as Best Elvis Impersonator and Best Attire Left in Vegas. Ladies and gentleman, start your shopping.

From Party Central: “Re: invite from DIVURGENT. We are hosting our Kingpin Bowling Social event Monday night during HIMSS. It’s at 8:00 pm at the Palms Casino and Resort Kingpin Suite and we’d love HIStalk readers to join us.” Sounds fun and gives me an excuse to wear my bowling shoes! Here’s the invite and RSVP information.

From Number Cruncher: “Re: Practice Fusion. Their latest press release indicates 130,000 users. Are those all doctors?” The Practice Fusion folks tell me that about 40% (about 52,000) are physicians. I asked for clarification to understand if the 52,000 physicians were all considered “active” users, but not yet received a reply. Regardless, assuming the US has 600,000 office-based physicians, the 52,000 figure would give Practice Fusion about 8.5% of the market.

From GilaMonster: “Re: Awarepoint. Has laid off 10% of its workforce.” We asked the company, with this response from Merrie Wallace, EVP of product solutions and marketing:

Awarepoint has seen a record-setting year for sales contracts and hospital implementations in 2011. Along with its steady growth last year, Awarepoint strategically acquired Patient Care Technology Systems (PCTS) in order to become the only complete RTLS solution optimizing healthcare workflow. After the acquisition, an analysis of the workforce revealed duplicate positions and a decision was made to restructure the workforce. Around 10 positions have been consolidated, though Awarepoint continues to hire strategic positions to support growth and customer support.

From RS: “Re: Catholic Healthcare West. Just changed their name to Dignity Health.” The 40-hospital CHW also drops its Catholic Church affiliation and opens up its governing board to non-Catholics, although its 25 Catholic hospitals will retain the sponsorship of local congregations. The press release mentions the $1.8 billion it is investing in electronic health records. The organization announced plans to triple its revenue, so the change allows it to acquire and partner with hospitals without running afoul of church policies.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Our own Travis Good MD of HIStalk Mobile will serve as a guest speaker of a January 31 Kony Solutions webinar, Mobile Strategy for Pharma – Opportunities and Challenges.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Advisory Board expects to realize a $3.5 million gain on its recent sale of its OptiLink business to Kronos. Also, Texas Governor Rick Perry announces that his state will invest $500,000 in The Advisory Board, which plans to create more than 200 jobs and invest $8.1 million to expand its Texas operations.

Sales

Rockingham Memorial Hospital (VA) selects Amcom Software’s messaging and communications solutions.

The VA contracts with Decision Simulation’s virtual patient platform for its simulated training and education program for healthcare providers and educators.

Montrose Memorial Hospital (CO) selects PatientKeeper’s application suite.

Unity Health System (NY) chooses dbMotion’s interoperability platform for its 70 locations.

CentraCare Health System (MN) picks iSirona’s device connectivity technology to deliver patient data from its ventilators into its Epic EMR.

Cooley Dickinson Physician Hospital Organization (MA) signs a contract for MedVentive Risk Manager, which it will use to manage its new Alternative Quality Contract with BCBS.

Intermountain Healthcare chooses the mobile application development platform from Kony Solutions to develop its own apps.

The State of New York chooses First Databank and Ernst & Young to survey drug average acquisition costs, a Medicaid reimbursement benchmark authorized by the legislature in 2011.

People

GE Healthcare IT appoints Michael Jackman VP and GM of its specialty solutions business. He was previously with iSoft, Carestream Health, and Kodak.

The Huntzinger Management Group names William C. Reed VP of business development. He’s the former president and CEO of AllOne Health and CIO of Geisinger Health System and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

Rubbermaid Medical Solutions names Cheryl D. Parker, PhD, RN-BC, FHIMSS as its chief nursing informatics officer. She was previously with Motion Computing.

Noel Williams, CIO of HCA, announces her retirement, effective at the end of May.

M*Modal names Amy Amick as COO. She was previously GM of worldwide services for Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group.

Mediware promotes VP and Controller Robert W. Watkins to CFO.

Announcements and Implementations

Kaiser Permanente announces that its 9 million patients can access their medical information on a new, free Android app, with an iPhone version to follow in a few months. It offers appointments, secure e-mail, lab results, refills, and a facility locator, all available to both patients and their families acting on their behalf.

UPMC moves all its electronic transactions with suppliers to Toreion’s EDI exchange solution.

Isabel Healthcare and BMJ Group partner to offer Best Practice, which combines Isabel’s diagnostic tools with BMJ’s clinical content. BMJ publishes the British Medical Journal and is a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Medical Association.

Cerner chooses TrustHCS to provide its clients with ICD-10 education.

Innovation and Research

Children’s Hospital Boston offers a $25,000 prize to the researcher who develops the winning best practices for communicating the information found in a patient’s genome to physicians and patients to improve outcomes. The prize carries one of the most contrived and awkward names ever – CLARITY, which they explain stands for “Children’s Leadership Award for the Reliable Interpretation and appropriate Transmission of Your genomic information.” One of the three project leaders is Isaac Kohane MD, PhD of the Children’s Hospital Informatics program. Applications are due March 12.

Technology

Tanking BlackBerry maker Research in Motion continues its unbroken streak of questionable decisions, naming one of its two low-visibility COOs (the one in charge of the RIM’s Playbook tablet, whose sales were so bad even at $99 fire sale prices that the company had to write down $485 million) to replace its two recently department co-CEOs. The new boss says he will mostly follow the path set by his predecessors, except he will hire a chief marketing officer. Shares have dropped 80% from their February 2011 price and took another 4% hit on the CEO announcement.

Apple’s Q1 numbers: revenue up 73%, EPS $13.87 vs. $6.43, crushing estimates with the its highest-ever revenue and profit. In the quarter, the company sold 37 million iPhones (up 128%), 16 million iPads (up 111%), 5.2 million Macs (up 26%), and in the only negative news, 15.4 million iPods (down 21%). The company has $98 billion of cash in the bank. Your $10,000 investment three years ago would be worth more than $50,000 today.

Other

Medical records scanning and document management company EDCO Group will increase the number of employees in its Sioux Falls, SD facility from 40 to 70, helped out with development money from the state’s workforce commission.

Weird News Andy says this isn’t weird, just cool, even though he’ll pass on a spot on the camera recovery team. Researchers in Israel take the “pill cam” intestinal camera system to the next level by developing a version that can be steered by the magnet of an MRI machine.

In a rare public appearance by an Epic executive, COO Steve Dickman provides some company facts to a local technology group:

2011 sales exceeded $1.2 billion, up 45% from 2010
The company expects to add 30 large customers this year
Construction continues on a new 11,000 seat on-campus auditorium
38% of US patients are covered by an Epic product
The company hires 1,500 new employees a year from 150,000 submitted resumes
Only five employees work in sales, while 55% do implementation and support
The average employee age is 29
The company says it has no interest in buying competitors or being acquired itself

The Wall Street Journal runs a point-counterpoint article on whether the US should implement a national patient identifier. Arguing for: Michael Collins MD, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Arguing against: Deborah Peel MD, psychiatrist and founder of Patient Privacy Rights. Reader votes are running 59% no, 41% yes.

An Ohio hospital’s transparency policy regarding medical errors blows up in its face when the chief medical officer tells the family of a deceased knee surgery patient that his death was caused by malfunctioning lab equipment, which delayed reporting of the high serum potassium level that contributed to his heart attack. Unbeknownst to the hospital, the family had smuggled a tape recorder into the meeting and used the chief medical officer’s recorded admission as evidence in its wrongful death lawsuit against the hospital.

A Florida jury finds that an HCA-owned hospital allowed an uncredentialed surgeon to perform gastric bypass surgery on a patient who suffered brain damage. They award the patient $178 million.

Stanford University researchers find that women report feeling about 20% more pain than men for unknown reasons. Previous studies found that women are more likely to tell doctors about their pain and to delay seeking treatment for it. Here is my theory: men like to be perceived as macho, especially if they happen to be under the care of a cute nurse of the opposite sex. Meanwhile, women feel more cumulative pain between the experience of childbirth and the subsequent carrying of infants, toddlers, kids, and 40-pound bags of dog food. All that, of course, while wearing four-inch heels.

Sponsor Updates

Humedica and West Health Policy Center announce their collaboration to identify healthcare cost drivers that can be lowered through the use of technology.
Premier Healthcare Alliance Inc announces a group purchasing agreement with UltraLinq Healthcare Solutions.
Ingenious Med extends its mobile offerings to Android mobile devices.
Sparrow Laboratories uses EMRHub from Lifepoint Informatics to send lab results to provider EMRs.
MEDecision achieves full pass certification for its interoperability tests at the 2012 IHE Connectathon.
NextGate announces its successful testing of MatchMetrix EMPI at the IHE Connectathon 2012.
Commonwealth Orthopaedics (VA) selects SRS for its 91 providers.
McKesson announces an ICD-10 transition service.
Aspen Advisors publishes a case study on its ICD-10 readiness assessment for East Jefferson General Hospital (LA).
Jon Phillips of Healthcare Growth Partners discusses his firm’s trade show strategy for HIMSS.
CHRISTUS Health (TX) selects Compuware’s Gomez Platform to optimize the performance and availability of its EHR.
AT&T announces communication and infrastructure tools to allow providers to use tablets and messaging more securely.
Over 10,000 New York State healthcare providers had enrolled in either the NYC Health Department’s NYC REACH program or the NY eHealth Collaborative by the end of 2011.
Intelligent InSites offers a January 25 Webinar on applying RTLS visibility and lean production principles to healthcare.
MEDSEEK announces support for the ONC’s “Putting the I in HealthIT” program, which seeks to empower patients to become partners in their own health.
DrFirst releases a Healthcare Hero video, also offering a HIMSS conference night on the town (limo, dinner, and show) as a prize to one selected person who leaves a comment on the video’s YouTube page.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg.

Monday Morning Update 1/23/12

January 21, 2012 News 8 Comments

From KC HIT BootsOnGround: “Re: Missouri’s statewide health information network. A rumor no more … Cerner will not serve as the technical service provider. Statement attached.” Above are last April’s announcement that negotiations had commenced and Thursday’s announcement that they have ended.

From Al Faretta: “Re: Baptist Montgomery. Just wanted to let you know that our clinical system is not McKesson – it’s Cerner. Thanks for all you do – I start my morning with you!” Thanks. That eliminates McKesson’s sole entry in the Thomson Reuters Top 15 Hospitals list and boost’s Cerner’s presence there.

From Karen Thomas: “Re: Main Line Health. I wanted to clarify the systems used at Jefferson Health System, JHS. JHS is comprised of Main Line Health and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. TJUH uses GE as their EMR. The Main Line Health System uses Siemens Soarian in four of our hospitals and Cerner in one of our hospitals. I understand that this does not change the point of the author, George, but I thought I should point out that GE is not the EMR for JHS. Also, all the Main Line Health hospitals have recently achieved HIMSS analytics Stage 6 designation.” Thanks for the clarification. Karen is VP/CIO of Main Line Health.

From PharmGuy: “Re: Prognosis Health Information Systems. The CTO, who was the brains behind the company and a co-founder, is gone.” I asked Prognosis President and CEO Ramsey Evans about Isaac Shi. He responded as follows:

Isaac is a co-founder of Prognosis and remains a significant shareholder. He has the gift to see the “big picture” and introduce innovative solutions to the marketplace. His leadership of our ChartAccess EHR has been the foundation of our rapidly growing company. As you realize, our marketplace demands a fully integrated clinical and financial solution. As a result, we’ve broadened our focus and Isaac’s responsibilities changed as our strategy has evolved. With the 2006 vision now becoming a reality and confidence in our path forward, Isaac made a decision to look at some other opportunities to expand on his vision. He remains in good standing with Prognosis and is very supportive of our company’s direction.

From Alzado: “Re: separated at birth? Being an HIT guy and a music connoisseur, I figured you would recognize the resemblance.” I do, but I’ll leave it up to readers to figure out how those categories fit this photo. Hint: two first names, both starting with J.

From Pippy: “Re: HIStalkapalooza. Have the invitations gone out yet?” Everybody who signed up will get a response by the end of the week, hopefully – either an invitation or an apology that we couldn’t invite everyone (it’s about 50-50 since we had over 1,000 requests). As much as I like hearing from readers, I respectfully request (based on experience from previous years) that folks don’t e-mail Inga or me to ask (a) what happened to their e-mail, since we can’t control your spam filters, or (b) if we can slip them an invitation even though they didn’t get one or didn’t register in the first place. I’m already overwhelmed. But here’s some good news – next year’s HIStalkapalooza in New Orleans is already somewhat underway, with a sponsor and venue secured. I’m really lucky that companies volunteer to underwrite not only the cost of putting on the event, but to manage the surprisingly complex logistics required to do it right for readers.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Blue Button initiative. TPD was first introduced to healthcare blogging by Shahid Shah, a fellow blogger, who started HITSphere to power this whole healthcare phenomenon by highlighting HIStalk and other websites. Now, he has blogged about the VA’s Blue Button Initiative and what he sees as its key benefits. Since it is on the NHIN Watch website, you’ll have to create an account there to read his seven key positives of the project. ”

The level of HITECH payouts is about what most readers expected, although a significant minority thought it would be more. New poll to your right: what do you like best about the HIMSS conference?

My Time Capsule editorial from 2007: Crossing the Cliché Chasm: Banished HIT Words for 2007. It obviously wasn’t effective since most of 2007’s overused words are still being repeated endlessly. A snip: “Thought leaders – people smarter than you and me, at least in their own minds. Companies often present their high-ranking employees as thought leaders when they want to sell you something. Thought leaders don’t have real jobs –they just think and cling to HIMSS podia. Picture that Rodin statue wearing a suit or black turtleneck and bringing Dilbert-laced PowerPoints.”

I just noticed that with increasing readership, we’ll be close to hitting the 5 millionth HIStalk visit right around when the HIMSS conference starts. That’s since I started it, way back in June 2003. I sometimes question whether it’s worth the effort, but I still have a blast doing it every single day, as much or more than I did 8.5 years ago.

Listening: I got several outstanding recommendations from reader Cody, including one I posted here way back in 2007 that deserves a revisit: The Hives, a hard-working Swedish garage rock band that doesn’t take itself too seriously (they wear matching but ever-changing black and white costumes and use old-school corded instruments) playing real, raw rock music with a stage presence and energy that makes them probably the best live band in the world. Proof: the live versions of Tick Tick Boom or Hate to Say I Told You So, which is like a 40-years-ago Mick Jagger without the scowling. They’re playing Coachella in April and my MP3 player starting today. When it comes to music, it’s not about their look, their audience demographic, or their age – it’s about how their music makes you feel. If you can sit immobile while The Hives are playing, then we differ.

Vince’s HIS-tory this week pays tribute to Bill Corum, who passed away earlier this month. Vince will have some fun stuff upcoming – I got an e-mail from Elaine Heusing, whose enjoyed seeing a cover of the magazine her father produced, Healthcare Computing and Communications, on one of Vince’s slides. I suggested to Vince that he cover some of those publications of yesteryear and the people who put them out. Back in the day, you waited anxiously for your mail copy of the magazines (even thought most of them were 70% ads, with mostly harmless and vendor-friendly prose intended to not threaten that ratio) and even faxed copies of newsletters like H.I.S. Insider. The folks who published those magazines and newsletters were highly respected, many of them with healthcare IT experience that went above just writing about it.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor First Databank. The company requires minimal introduction since its electronic drug databases power a great number of the clinical IT systems out there, but here’s a recap. The San Francisco-based FDB’s team of pharmacists, physicians, and technologists, working with its system developer customers, turn drug information into tools that reduce medication errors by empowering clinicians as they make medication-related decisions: drug information, drug selection, clinical decision support, clinical alerts, and patient education. FDB has developed the first physician-friendly CPOE drug database, the OrderView Med Knowledge Base, that gets clinicians quickly (two clicks, in many cases) to the desired medication without bogging them down with needless details related to dispensing or billing (making prescribers choose a warfarin 5 mg and a warfarin 2 mg to get the desired dose of 7 mg is lame – that’s a dispensing decision that prescribers shouldn’t have to worry about.) The company offers case studies of how developer customers have used its products: Design Clinicals (medication reconciliation), athenahealth (meet Meaningful Use requirements), DMD America (drug pricing analysis), and Personal Caregiver (consumer drug information for mobile devices). FDB, whose vision is “A World Free of Medication Errors,” has been delivering drug knowledge solutions for over 30 years and it was recently ranked #1 among drug database vendors in nearly all key indicators in the just-published KLAS report on clinical decision support. Thanks to First Databank for supporting HIStalk.

The Virgin Islands Health Department conducts an EMR and HIE town meeting with mixed results. An interventional cardiologist talks up how much he likes the EMR, but loses his computer connection while demoing it, leading another doctor in the audience to comment that lost connections are typical in her practice and that the infrastructure may not be up to the challenge. Another doc said computerization slowed them down so much that patients were waiting 2-3 hours to see a doctor and she was thinking about finding a different career purely because of the EMR.

Robert Schwab MD, chief quality officer at a couple of Texas Health hospitals, warbles The Ballad of Go-Live in recounting their Epic go-live week by week.

In England, reliably anti-NPfIT MP Richard Bacon calls for the Cerner Millennium patient scheduling system to be shut down after problems are reported by two NHS trusts. Surgeons complained that their surgery schedules listed incorrect procedures and cases that were not within their specialties. Another trust had so many problems with long call wait times and delayed appointments that they had to stop charging patients for parking.

The VA, fulfilling its data center consolidation plan, will move VistA hosting to Defense Information Systems Agency facilities operated by Verizon subsidiary Terremark Worldwide. In a related story that I missed while taking a break last weekend, the military’s AHLTA system goes down for 10 hours after an upgrade-related problem with its commercial data storage software. An unidentified source says the outage highlights the lack of Military Health System contingency plans for AHLTA, such as a failover data center.

Kronos acquires the OptiLink acuity-based staffing solution from The Advisory Board Company. Kronos will use the system to enhance its healthcare workforce management solutions, saying it will support collaborative cost management efforts between hospital finance and nursing departments.

I like this week’s e-mail from Kaiser’s George Halvorson. He’s throwing down the gauntlet on HIV treatment next week and the CMS Health Care Innovation Summit, challenging organizations to meet KP’s HIV death rate that’s less than half the national average and even 20% better than the VA. KP will also share its tools and strategies. Most interestingly, KP has eliminated HIV treatment disparities, with no outcome differences by race, with a goal of eliminating race-related differences in 16 NCQA HEDIS categories. Well done.

A belated holiday-related charity update: HEI Consulting offered a matching donation challenge to benefit Community Services League, raising $15,000 for the Jackson County, Missouri self-sufficiency organization.

Paul Beckwith, former assistant controller of clinical intelligence vendor TheraDoc (acquired by Hospira in December 2009 for $63 million,) is sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for moving $1.3 million of the company’s money to his stock trading accounts. He initially profited from trading and moved the money back monthly, but like many gamblers and speculators, started losing and got desperate to recoup his losses by betting even more. The company got almost all of its money back.

The Secretary of State of Massachusetts goes public with his spat with Meditech over a proposed construction site, saying of Founder and CEO Neil Pappalardo, “Mr. Pappalardo wants the right to do whatever he wants and not be responsible for anything — including the rights to dispose of skeletal remains if they find them.” A public hearing is scheduled for Tuesday on the construction project, which pits jobs against archaeology.

GE reports Q4 numbers: revenue down 8%, EPS $0.35 vs. $0.42. GE Healthcare reported a revenue increase of 1% to $5.16 billion, but operating income dropped by 5% to $953 million.

GE Healthcare lays off an undisclosed number of employees (“less than 50”) at its South Burlington, VT office, citing “changing market demand and technology needs” in healthcare IT.

Police in Russia investigate whether frequent power outages were responsible for the deaths of eight newborns in 10 days, all of whom were on respirators that apparently had no back-up power source.

Clinical documentation vendor MD-IT names Bard Betz as CEO, replacing former President and CEO Tom Carson. Kevin Shaughnessy is promoted to president.

A baby born 16 weeks prematurely at 9.5 ounces (considerably less than a can of soda) is discharged after a five-month stay at LA County-USC Medical Center. The hospital declined to state who is paying the estimated $500-700K cost.They’re still not sure if the baby, now at 4 pounds 11 ounces, has permanent neurological damage.

Reader James thought maybe Weird News Andy preempted him on this story, but he nailed it. A man building a shed thinks he cut himself with his nail gun, at least until he has X-rays, when doctors told him he had actually shot a nail into his brain. His response: “Did you get that out of the doctor’s joke file?” The response: “No, man, that’s in your head.” While being transported by ambulance to another hospital for surgery, he cheerfully posts his X-ray on Facebook. After surgeons successfully removed the nail and replaced a chunk of the man’s skull with titanium mesh, he said, “We need to get the Discovery Channel up here to tape this. I’m one of those medical miracles.”

E-mail Mr. H.

Think about how bad Amwell leadership must be. They were handed such an opportunity and they fumbled so hard.

Regarding the 99% drop in AmWell stock -- True fact--I mad a profit buying AmWell on a dip once, and…

The Shkreli Awards, celebrating excellence in quackery! Be the Best at being the Worst! Innovate your way to prison and…

'The "do your own research" mantra often overlooks the necessity of specialized knowledge in complex fields, potentially leading to misguided…

I'm just amazed the Lown Institute could get it down to a Top 10!

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