News 12/30/11

Top News

CSC says it will have to write off almost the entire $1.5 billion it spent trying to install iSoft’s Lorenzo in the defunct NPfIT project in England. The government has apparently declined to give CSC the new scope of work the company had requested. CSC has also withdrawn its financial forecast and stepped up plans to replace its CEO. It posted a loss of almost $3 billion in its Q2 report filed September 30, mostly due to a write-down of goodwill. The company’s market cap is $3.7 billion. Shares are at $23.68, off more than half since the beginning of the year.

Reader Comments

From Zafirex: “Re: hardship exemption for e-prescribing. Looks like so many providers are claiming it that CMS is having difficulties. Wonder how many are truly hardships? I doubt CMS could ever verify since it looks like they’re having trouble even producing a list.” Exemption categories include a practice area with no broadband coverage or that has too few participating pharmacies, practices that applied for Meaningful Use before requesting an exemption, practices that prescribe mostly narcotics that are not eligible for e-prescribing, practices that don’t prescribe regularly, or practices that e-prescribe but not for qualifying visits.

From Search Boy: “Re: searching HIStalk. Thanks for the explanation to King Salmon. Is there a way for retrieved searches to be indexed chronologically rather than as a percentage of keyword match?” I haven’t figured out how to do that. Since the pages are stored in a database, I don’t think the search function can determine the original publish date even though it’s in the title.

From Lilies: “Re: Epic. They’re #17 on the list of 25 oddball job interview questions, with ‘You have a bouquet of flowers. All but two are roses, all but two are daisies, and all but two are tulips. How many flowers do you have?’ There are two distinct valid answers.” Three is the obvious answer (one of each flower) that took me about two seconds to get. I assume the second answer depends on the question not stating explicitly that there are no other kinds of flowers in the bouquet (i.e., you could have two Venus fly traps only, making two a correct answer.)

From Stats Fan: “Re: readership stats. You haven’t given your readership stats lately for me to track.” Good timing since I realized a couple of weeks ago that I’ve been undercounting all along. I had forgotten to add the hit-counting Javascript to the mobile display that you see on iPhones and iPads. That hit me a couple of weeks ago, so I dug around the code and figured out how to fix it, also noticing that a surprising 30-50% of readers use Safari, most of them presumably on iPhones and iPads, which is a lot more mobile readers than I would have guessed. So far for December, it’s 96,250 visits, 148,218 page views, and 22,029 unique people reading (but that’s lower than the real number since I didn’t make the change until the middle of the month.) January and February will be good indicators since the HIMSS conference really pegs the needle on readership. Inga pays a lot more attention to the numbers than I do, so I will await her analysis. Above is where the visitors are from, just in case you are interested. Among cities, it’s Madison, Stone Mountain, Atlanta, New York, and Chicago making up the top five, but the major metro area is Boston with 8.41% of visitors. It’s a 62% male audience, so ladies, tell your friends.

From HIMSS Envy: “Re: HIMSS points. Got me wondering – it would be nice of HIMSS published an annual report for public review. It might not change a thing, but transparency is a powerful motivator. Come to think about it, Mr. H, how about you, too?” I thought HIMSS did a report, but I couldn’t find one. You can get their Form 990 from GuideStar, which always has interesting factoids (like that HIMSS FY 2009 revenue was $44 million and CEO Steve Lieber’s total compensation was $711K). I don’t know what I’d put in an annual report that isn’t already on the About page or contained in the list of sponsors … other than my hospital job, I don’t have any ownership in anything, I have no other income, and I don’t shill stuff like speaking or consulting under the delusion that I have value beyond what you’re reading right here.

From Peds Envy: “Re: tired of writing only good things about Epic. Private practice peds are the worst type of users for Epic. No surprise there. Someone who knows Brown & Toland told me the reaction is 100% unanimous – they hate it.”

From Anonymous Epic Fan: “Re: tired of writing only good things about Epic. Here are a few issues with their implementation methodology and support that even the Kool-Aid drinkers would have a hard time disputing.” Here’s the list from AEF:

• Epic’s implementation planning materials are weak. They have to be re-worked for each new application / scope mix, and after that is done, little to no effort is made by Epic to customize them based on organization specifics. If you want the project plan to be useful and to have sufficient detail, expect to spend a lot of time and effort re-working what gets initially delivered.
• Epic suggests you go live on Model workflows as quick as possible. As painful as it may be, it is definitely better from a cost perspective. Then, you plan to do the bulk of the ‘real’ implementation after getting live. This can/may work if the bulk of the existing documentation / orders workflows are paper based and you are implementing all of Epic’s applications, but this approach is suicide if the existing system being replaced has been customized for the end-users and they are happy with them or if you have to rely on the timelines of other vendors to build/test/implement interfaces and data conversions.
• The Epic Model does not work well for any hospital or outpatient units that are more complicated  then the most typical med/surg units and general practice specialties. Specifically, hospital outpatient departments that bridge the inpatient and outpatient void.
• The Epic Model completely breaks down if you are not implementing all of Epic’s applications and workflows rely on interfaces to/from legacy systems.
• With Epic’s implementation team constantly turning over, being spread across more and more customers, and the increasing pressure to implement faster, attention to detail is lacking. In my experience, they are over promising and under delivering more than they did years ago.
• Time estimates are always low. Everything takes much longer than anyone anticipates. Medication build, consolidating charge masters, cleaning up supply/pick lists, mapping lab components, consolidating multiple sources of payor/plans, cleaning up the provider / credentialing information, getting physicians to agree and sign-off on order set/documentation template content, and working down duplicate patients in your EMPI or mapping data elements for conversions etc.
• Epic implementation tools / deliverables are often shared just before an upcoming trip for when they are to be used. Though effort is made to customize them based on application mix/scope, they never really get updated to reflect the actual workflows discussed and validated early in the process – especially if they differ in any amount from the ‘model’ workflow. The delivered product if very inconsistent from application team to application team and integrated areas/workflows often get overlooked. So just like the implementation planning materials, expect to spend a lot of time re-working these deliverables to make them useful.
• All application teams involved in the implementation are siloed, and in addition, the Epic implementation teams, technical support teams, and development teams are also siloed. This causes issues for organizations live on one set of applications, rolling out another set, and implementing a third set.
• The silos mean that there are application experts, but very few Epic staff have cross-application experience / knowledge and if workflows are interface-dependent, very few have true integration experience.
• Epic’s training only scratches the surface. The true training is the implementation process and go-live. The shorter the implementation timeline, the more unprepared the customer IT staff is to support the applications when they go live – thus the demand for lots of consultants.
• The system documentation is very inconsistent and virtually impossible to search on the UserWeb. Unless you know where to find what you are looking for, you often have to e-mail Epic to ask if documentation exists. I is not uncommon to be sent an ‘unofficial’ document created by a frustrated Implementer not being able to rely on the system administration guides themselves. In fact, all of the implementation documentation / guides were historically written and maintained by implementers, but due to the inconsistency between applications and un-sustainability of keeping it up to date. no implementation documentation/guides exist today.
• Epic’s end-user training materials are great if you are implementing all of Epic’s applications and you are using all Epic model workflows. If anything changes, these are not so great – expect to have to overhaul them.
• Same goes for the testing scripts. An OK start, but definitely not something that can be used out of the box.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

How Apple wins customers for life: I had a five-year-old, first-generation, 1 GB Nano that I only used for the gym. I heard Apple was recalling a few of them because of some explosion-prone batteries, so I put in the serial number on their Web page and darned if mine wasn’t on the list. They sent a postage-paid Fedex box to return it. Today I got back a brand new sixth-generation, 8 GB Nano, which now comes with a color display, gestures, FM radio with live pause, pedometer/accelerometer, and a bunch of other features, all in a package barely bigger than a watch face (in fact, you can buy a watchband that holds it, turning it into a watch.) It’s super cool, and so is Apple. You did good, Steve Jobs – RIP.

It’s time to wrap up the HISsies nominations soon, so contribute yours now to the blank slate that will be distilled into a handful of choices for the real voting that starts shortly. I’m particularly happy with one nomination for Smartest Vendor Action Taken: “HIStalk sponsors that replaced blinking ads before the deadline.” Well done, and a good observation. My sponsors really are the best – as much as I hated to spring the change on them since it requires work and expense on their end, they’ve been great about it. I’ve enjoyed the nominees for the Beer and Pie categories, as always, and there are some good nominees for the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Speaking of the HISsies, full details and signups will go up next week for HIStalkapalooza in Las Vegas. And also speaking of the HISsies, if you plan to vote (and I hope you do), sign up for the e-mail updates since I e-mail the voting link out to prevent ballot box stuffing that was as rampant as in a third-world dictatorship until I took that step. For that reason, if you aren’t on the list, you can’t vote.

Listening: new from The Roots, which even though I’ve only sampled it so far due to limited time, is just blowing me away. It’s extraordinarily music in the form of a concept album, making it impossible to label as rap, soul, or hip hop even though it includes strong elements of all of those. The accompanying short film is here. Their talent is mind-boggling. Down it goes to the new Nano, which contains only my latest favorites since I intentionally started from scratch: Genesis And Then There Were Three, two albums from Gooder, one from Metric, and Luminiferous Ether by the never-gets-old Zip Tang.

It’s just Dr. Jayne and me tonight as Inga is sojourning in the mythical Land Without Broadband. She will return soon. But in the mean time, Dr. Jayne is doing her usual fabulous job. I’m pretty darned lucky to have two smart, funny, hard-working, and undeniably cute ladies with whom to share the page, don’t you think? I will raise a glass in their honor for New Year’s (probably of Duvel beer since I got some for Christmas and I like it a lot.)

I’m not telling you Happy New Year yet because I’ll be posting a Monday Morning Update this weekend as usual, even if nobody’s around Monday to read it.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Board members and executives of document management vendor Streamline Health Solutions will buy $400K worth of the company’s stock, news of which sent shares up 9% on Wednesday.

Healthcare alerting system vendor Extension, Inc. announces what it says is record quarterly growth, adding 17 new hospitals in the third quarter and quadrupling its headcount to 40 over the past two years. They might want to budget for a public relations or media person next since this is easily one of the worst-written press releases ever, starting off with a clumsy opening sentence that sounds as though someone whose native tongue was not English (or at least not good English) sweated over it until nothing interesting remained. It doesn’t get better as you read on.

Announcements and Implementations

Tampa General Hospital (FL) goes live on its $120 million Epic system, which works out to $118K per bed. The hospital says $40 million of that was for hardware and software, with the rest going for staffing and training.

Other

Weird News Andy sounds like a fortune cookie in summarizing this story as, “Foot in mouth results in mouth in foot.” A man shows up in the ED with a swollen, infected foot, claiming he stepped on a piece of glass on the beach a couple of weeks before. The beach and timeline part of his story were accurate, but not the glass part: doctors removed a tooth embedded between his toes, lodged there during a beach fight when he kicked his opponent in the jaw while wearing flip flops.

Several readers were interested in John Halamka’s post about his wife Kathy’s newly diagnosed breast cancer. The first of regular updates, posted Thursday, is here. Reading his thoughts and analysis of their situation makes you realize that HIT stuff aside, he’s probably a fine doctor as well, not to mention the kind of supportive partner we would all want if faced with a life-changing diagnosis and gearing up to fight it.

A big health-related software sale you probably didn’t hear about: General Cannabis, which operates the medical marijuana dispensary finder WeedMaps, acquires MMJMenu, whose software for marijuana growers and dispensaries tracks inventory “from seed to sale,” basically an ERP for pot growers. General Cannabis had revenue of $10.4 million in the first nine months of the year and paid $4.2 million last month to buy the Marijuana.com domain.

John Newman, MD PhD, a UCSF physician and legal scholar, worries that medical copyrights will threaten patient care, citing a recent case in which a company offering a licensed cognitive screening tool threatened legal action against a similar but free online tool. The implication is that tools based on published research, which could be anything from a pain scale to a hip fracture risk predictor, could be claimed as proprietary by a fast-moving company. The author speculates that without new forms of copyrights, “… as physicians walk down the hallway interviewing patients, they’re tallying up the licensing fees they need to pay for doing their day’s work, and hospitals are suing each other or making cross-licensing arrangements to manage each other’s intellectual property.”

A power surge caused by monthly back-up generator tests at Aspirus Wausau Hospital (WI) takes all communication and computer systems down for five hours, forcing the hospital to go on ambulance diversion. As is always the case, the hospital says patient safety was never at risk, which you might interpret as meaning that those systems contribute nothing to patient safety. They’re on Epic, I believe, not that the hospital’s Wisconsin location didn’t already make that fairly likely.

GE Healthcare agrees to pay $30 million to CMS to settle a False Claims Act charge that it encouraged hospital and cardiology laboratories to overbill Medicare for Myoview, its form of technetium 99 that shows areas of decreased blood flow in the heart.

Sponsor Updates

• Rockford Orthopedic (IL) announces that 21 providers have successfully attested for Meaningful Use using eClinicalWorks EHR suite.
• Baptist Health Line (KY) receives its third ICARE award from RelayHealth for work with Western Baptist Hospital’s transfer center.
• Paul Rooke, CEO of Lexmark, discusses how the company’s acquisition of Perceptive Software and Pallas Athena puts them in a unique position in his interview with All Things D.
• Health Choice Arizona, achieves a 44% improvement in its completion rate for preventive services pilot program using MyHealthDIRECT.
• AmkaiSolutions will offer revenue cycle solutions from ZirMed to its outpatient surgery provider software customers.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

Where have all the drug reps gone? With significant cuts in the budgets for Big Pharma, many reps have been “made available to the workforce,” as they say. It seems hospitals and health systems are hiring former drug and device reps to sell their facilities to physicians. A recent article discusses how they’re using infection data and patient satisfaction scores to drive business rather than the drug pricing and formulary data of yore. In my book, this is just another thing that sucks up valuable time that we need to care for patients, not to mention sucking up budget dollars that could be better spent on those patients.

I wonder how many physicians who refuse to see drug reps also refuse to see these new “physician liaisons?” And how many health systems place rules around having these reps in the office? At some large integrated health systems, policies ban providers from seeing reps or liaisons from any facility or service provider that competes with a system-operated service line. This includes home health agencies, remote cardiac testing providers, reference labs, and the like. Other health systems restrict the hospital privileges of their employees (prohibiting credentialing at competitor hospitals,) so I’m not sure how big of a target pool these new reps have.

Weird News from one of my favorite places: South Carolina sports a giant mound of tires that can be seen from space. At least it’s not burning like the one in my favorite fictional town. But kudos to Lee Tire Company, Inc. of Jacksonville, Florida for waiving the usual fees to shred and recycle the tires in an attempt to clear the 50-acre mess.

Inga and I are well into our pre-HIMSS preparations. As you’re thinking about traveling to fabulous Las Vegas, consider this recent article that discusses continued concerns about backscatter scanners at the airport. Until I read this piece, I didn’t know they had been banned in Europe. As someone who has to wear a badge to track my exposure to radiation in the hospital, I do worry about frequent flyers. Many of my friends who work for vendors fly two to four times a week. There’s enough radiation from just being in a plane, let alone adding to it with scanners. I’d love to see the cumulative dose numbers for some of those flyers. Maybe frequent flyer programs should start issuing radiation monitoring badges with their airlines’ logos as a promotional item.

Each time I sit to write for HIStalk, I’m still amazed to be part of this team. It’s particularly amusing when I’m just reading through my “normal” e-mail and find a mention of us – most recently a blurb from MED3000 regarding Mr. H’s recent piece asking vendor leadership about the biggest HIT-related news items of 2011. I hope I don’t have facial leakage when I see these blurbs (yes, I have a bad habit of multitasking during meetings) because I know I feel like smiling.

Speaking of multitasking, one of my Facebook friends shared another article on docs multitasking during critical procedures. Medical schools are apparently having to actually instruct students to focus on the patient instead of the smart phone. Looking at some of the examples given in the article, it sounds like some IT teams need to revisit the websites they allow users to access. I can’t think of too many medically legitimate reasons to be on Facebook, Amazon, or eBay in the operating room or in the ICU.

I mentioned earlier this month about my inability to keep up with Inga where shoes are concerned. I think I win this round though – I seriously doubt that Santa left a glass slipper filled with Cosmopolitans at her house.

Have a question about managing pesky sales reps, maintaining the perfect poker face, or the best way to garnish a Cosmopolitan? E-mail me.

Contacts

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

News 12/28/11

Top News

UPMC’s Cerner systems go down for 14 hours at most campuses last Thursday and Friday, forcing them to go back to paper. The PR person blamed “a database bug,” which makes the above Oracle press release from this past summer a particularly fun read. Cerner and UPMC have an atypical vendor-customer relationship since they’ve invested big money together in innovation projects and UPMC runs a Cerner implementation business overseas.

Reader Comments

From King Salmon: “Re: search. Is here a way to search HIStalk by keyword?” You can use the search box that’s in the right column. It’s not visible on mobile devices, though, in which case you can do a Google search by keyword, then click the gears icon at the upper right of the results screen (that’s where Google has moved the advanced search options, which used to come up on the main search screen.) Then, qualify your search down to the specific HIStalk site as shown above.

From Booth Boy: “Re: MEDITECH and Cerner. As I predicted, see the attached Las Vegas floor plan. Since they lost their HIMSS points by sitting out a few years, they are way back in the corner by the freight doors. If it’s cold on setup day, they’re going to freeze their butts off because the doors never close.” Just about every year I run the link to the rules of how HIMSS awards its much-coveted Exhibitor Priority Points, which rewards vendors who spend a lot with HIMSS by allowing them to buy bigger and better located booth space. Points can also be earned by buying sponsorships, booking hotel space through their housing company, signing up for corporate membership and paying your dues early, and buying services from HIMSS Analytics. Because they didn’t exhibit, MEDITECH is way down the list in the #727 spot (behind mostly companies you’ve never heard of and even some universities) and Cerner is at #429 (two notches below University of Alabama at Birmingham.) Needless to say, prime exhibit real estate isn’t happening for them this year, so you’ll need to seek them out.  

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Inga’s taking a short break, so it’s just me (Mr. H) this time around.

Sales

The board of 125-bed Powell Valley Healthcare (WY) approves the purchase of NextGen EHR to replace its “dysfunctional” and old Healthland system, saying the hospital is getting a bargain because the company offered to drop $400K from the $2.65 million cost if the hospital signed by December 31. The hospital plans to collect $1.5 million in Meaningful Use incentives, which it says it could not have done with Healthland because, according to the IT manager, “The system we have now is not good. It’s terrible. It crashes. I can’t imagine being a nurse or a physician and working with it every day.” The money-losing hospital says buying a new clinical system probably means that other projects, such as needed renovations in surgery and the ED, may not get done, but a board member says the new system is even more important. “This is a have-to. We have to do this. I remember going into the lab a few years ago, and the lab girls were crying, and it was over Healthland (the current system). It needs to be replaced,”

People

Saint Francis Care (CT) names Linda Shanley as VP/CIO. She was previously with Stony Brook University Hospital.

Announcements and Implementations

Pikeville Medical Center (KY) goes live on Wellsoft’s EDIS, which is integrated with its McKesson applications.

Innovation and Research

An Ohio ED doctor develops NARx Check, which calculates a drug abuse “credit score” using Ohio’s prescription monitoring program data and alerts ED staff of patients likely to be abusing drugs. The application has generated positive comments from the state pharmacy board and local hospital association.

West Wireless Health Institute says that less than 1% of hospitals have deployed fully functional tablets, mostly because clinical systems vendors haven’t developed iPad-native apps, but also because wireless connectivity is spotty, iPads don’t fit into the pockets of standard-issue lab coats, and typing on an iPad is a pain when PCs are always close by anyway.

Other

The western regional chapters of HIMSS are putting on the one-day Women in Healthcare Information Technology Conference in San Francisco on Friday, January 20.

An insurance company sues the former COO of Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center (NM), trying to recoup the $3 million it reimbursed the hospital for fraud losses. The COO allegedly funneled hospital IT payments through corporations that were run by a woman with whom he was having a relationship. He supposedly even paid a part-time student to impersonate an engineer with the phony company when the hospital got suspicious. The hospital fired the COO for cause in early 2008 and says it’s still waiting for authorities to charge him with a crime.

Jacob Goldman, the former chief scientist of Xerox who created the famous Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1970, died last week at 90. Xerox was happy making money from copy machines and didn’t commercialize PARC’s research, but those discoveries, such as the graphical user interface and ethernet, created the personal computer industry when further developed by Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Adobe, Sun, and other fledgling Silicon Valley companies.

A new KLAS report says that while only 10-15% of hospitals use real-time location systems, 95% of those that do say they increased operational efficiency.

Several readers sent over a link to this article, in which another conservative publication takes some unfocused political shots at Epic’s Judy Faulkner using healthcare IT as its weapon of choice (actually, they aren’t new shots, just the same old ones recycled yet again for a new audience.) Her oft-recited transgressions:

• She donates to Democratic political candidates.
• She represents vendors on the Health IT Policy Committee.
• She’s anti-competition and anti-innovation, at least according to the unbiased opinion of Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman, an Epic competitor, quoted from an interview we did with him on HIStalk Practice (being a conservative publication, they had to be grasping to quote a long-time supporter and friend of President Obama who had a lot more influence than Judy Faulkner in getting billions in HITECH money included in the stimulus package.)
• She could have benefitted from politician meddling in which a group urged the VA to buy instead of build systems, mentioning as their argument successful clients that happen to be all Epic users. That’s true, but perhaps a fact worthy of inclusion is that the VA ignored the unsolicited advice and is sticking with its original plan to develop an open source replacement for VistA, so the net benefit to Epic was zero.
• Epic clients (Geisinger and Cleveland Clinic) were named by President Obama as being good technology users.
• Epic clients, like those of all vendors, have had some unrelated IT incidents that were listed.

The article concludes, predictably and with no facts whatsoever to back it up, that Epic is preventing patients from getting good care because of “partisan politics” (meaning beliefs that differ from the ones held by the authors.) You would think instead of just Googling up some old articles they could have turned up an actual expert in a hospital somewhere instead of just quoting a competitor’s CEO and a reporter. I’m a conservative more or less (fiscally, anyway) but this is just lazy political editorializing pretending to be reporting, indiscriminately throwing out loads of unrelated mud in the hopes it will stick to someone of a different political persuasion.

Surely someone could build a better case against Epic, although it’s probably hard to write around the inconvenient facts (its customers are among the best hospitals, they are voluntarily buying Epic given the other available options, and Epic tops every industry statistic by a mile, such as big-hospital sales, KLAS rankings, and hospital customers that have been awarded HIMSS EMRAM Stage 7.) Or maybe they can’t. The anonymous anti-Epic comments I get are almost always long on emotion and opinions and short on facts and first-hand knowledge (and they often come from the same handful of posters using different names, which makes me suspect that they are unhappy former Epic employees, spurned job-seekers, or employees of struggling competitors.) I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a negative comment about Epic from someone who actually uses it in a provider role, and I don’t recall hearing remorse from any of those users about losing the systems that Epic replaced. I get tired of writing positive things about Epic and keep hoping someone who’s actually in the game and not on the sidelines will provide an intelligent and convincing counterpoint to why they aren’t as great as the Kool-Aid drinkers say. I’m still waiting.

Sponsor Updates

• Weed Army Community Hospital (CA) chooses T-System for paper-based ED documentation.
• Salar suggests three New Year’s resolution in a blog posting.
• Nuance releases a case study on Emerson Hospital’s (MA) use of Nuance Transcription Services powered by eScription.
• Digital Prospectors Corp., which offers embedded systems engineering and healthcare information systems consulting services, is featured in Bloomberg Businessweek.
• Jeff Wasserman, VP of Culbert Healthcare Solutions, discusses physician employment opportunities, job culture, and interview skills in an American Medical News article.

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/26/11

From Hospital IT Guy: “Re: HIStalk. I don’t know how you produce such insightful and well-written news and comment as a part-time gig. Your posts give me a reality check and enhance my position as an HIT expert charged with leading us into a very uncertain future. Thanks for the body of work you produced this past year and for the work you hopefully will continue to produce in the year to come.” Thanks for those nice comments – they made my day. I have the luxury of being subsidized by hospital day job, which allows me to do whatever I want without pandering for a buck. New Year’s Day is a good time to take stock of where you are, so if you have ideas of how I could provide a better service to the industry (especially providers and patients), send them my way. I’m constrained by time (not to mention by being rather lazy and risk-averse) but I’m fairly creative in getting help and other resources when I need them. I don’t want to be sadly reflecting back from a nursing home bed, “I could have done so much more” and having only my bank account to produce as evidence that I wasn’t a total waste.

One of the first to-dos of the yet-unnamed HIT spawn of Microsoft and GE Healthcare should be to communicate to a skeptical market audience, with only 12% of poll respondents finding the announcement positive. New poll to your right, inspired by John Gomez’s article: if there’s a healthcare IT bubble, when will it burst?

My Time Capsule editorial from five years ago: 2006 Product Rankings – Pay Some Attention, But Not Too Much. It inadvertently highlights just how much Epic has changed the industry with its lengthening roster of top-ranked applications: “The most discouraging point is that no vendor does everything well, if you believe the scores. If you look at KLAS’s 15 main general solutions categories, you’d find 13 top-ranked vendors. If you’re a best-of-breed shop, you’ll end up with a lot of interfaced systems if you chase the winners. If you’re a single-vendor organization, some of your departments are going to be stuck with systems far short of being the best. And of course, in the next survey, they may all shuffle around anyway. ”

Weird News Andy wonders how much the patient was charged for the tape. Two ICU nurses at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center (UT) are fired for telling a moaning patient to shut up, then taping her mouth and laughing about it.

Listening: new from Phoenix-based Gooder, a cross between the infectious power pop of Gin Blossoms with hard-driving guitar and drums (Rush? Van Halen?) They have a really big, well-produced sound for a three-piece. The reader who recommended them has a relative in the band and didn’t really talk them up much (“I’m obliged to like them”) but I really like their sound.

Here’s the latest from Vince, who takes a break from profiling long-gone companies (and sadly, sometimes long-gone people who worked for them) and addresses how HIT vendors throw down at holiday party time. I like Slide 3, in which Vince, one of his company buds, and their wives are dressed to the nines in their hideous 1960s party fashions ready for a big night on the town. If you’re a 20-something industry noob, you will in 20 years or so look back with an equal mix of nostalgia and a little tinge of sadness when faced with images from your long-gone youth, which involved fewer wrinkles and pounds and visually obvious humble surroundings, yet beaming with both delight and surprise to have found a place in productive society and brimming with optimism about the endless future that lies ahead. You’ll know you’ve done well if looking back now is just as satisfying as looking ahead was then.

BIDMC CIO John Halamka announces on his blog that his wife Kathy has been diagnosed with breast cancer. He’s approaching it as you would expect for someone who’s both an engineer and a physician: he is reviewing her medical information, he has assembled a team of renowned experts, and he will be documenting the process with a weekly blog post. I had two immediate reactions: (a) I was surprised that I was affected by the news since I don’t know either John or his wife. I used to assume he was a self-promoting gasbag since he kept popping up everywhere, but the couple of times I’ve met him for a few seconds (as myself, not Mr. H) and interviewed him, he seemed to be a nice guy without much ego. Hearing about his wife was a bit of a blow. (b) as much as I’m happy that he has limitless resources available to him as a Harvard physician with a vast industry network, I kept thinking – what if it was my wife or mother? Why does his wife get better odds because of where he works and where they live?

That’s not a criticism of him at all, but rather an observation about how US healthcare works – it unfortunately helps to go to renowned facilities, to have enough time and money to demand the best when nobody’s offering it to you, and to challenge physicians for the best, personalized answers since healthcare is a cottage industry that is primitive if not indifferent with regard to standardized processes, best practices, and outcomes. Those of us who work in the system know that, while the majority of Americans get their care in undistinguished hospitals from undistinguished doctors whose treatment choices are often anything but evidence-based. I say that having worked in small-town hospitals that had the most incompetent physicians you could possibly imagine with a handful of pretty good ones thrown in, but all of them running thriving practices with patients who lived and died never knowing the difference. To this day, if I were to keel over in the waiting room of a small-town, for-profit hospital, the only medical instrument I want touching me is an ambulance gurney that’s taking me somewhere else in a hurry.

Update: John replied to me Christmas morning. I don’t know if I was clear in my brief writeup above, but he’s been very cool in my brief dealings with him, never too busy despite a superhuman scheduled to drop a few words of encouragement or deflect credit for some HIT development to someone else, which I think is the ultimate mark of a leader – he’s more than happy to let someone else have the limelight. He took the time (as did his wife Kathy) to respond to my comments above. Think about what must be going through their minds if you think this is trivial. There’s never a good time to receive sobering medical news, but imagine having it delivered just a few days before Christmas, with the expectation of being cheery around friends and family.

John writes:

At the same time I’m focused on Kathy’s care, I’m also deeply committed to quality, safety, efficiency, and equity in healthcare across the country.  In the upcoming weeks, I’ll describe how the electronic records that coordinate Kathy’s treatment provide the same protocols to every BIDMC patient, regardless of insurance status, profession, or income. My goal is the "right care" – not too much nor too little – that follows best practices from evidence. Decision support driven "right care" is the only way we can hope to improve outcomes while bending the cost curve of healthcare spending that threatens the US economy. Universal healthcare supported by universal adoption of electronic  and personal health records must be our guiding vision.

Kathy writes:

My life with John has been entwined for 32 years, so to say "we have cancer" cannot be more completely and utterly correct. True that physically, only one of use has the obvious organic symptoms, but our close partnership has been irrevocably changed by the diagnosis. Whatever lies ahead, it is impossible to go back to that innocent moment before hearing the word cancer.

I am luckier than most – I have health insurance, and access to a major urban medical center that is also a teaching and research hospital. But, in encouraging John to follow our progress publicly in his blog, I am keeping the memory of a friend close to my heart. She did not have health insurance (as a part time adjunct instructor of art). With this financial barrier, she unwittingly waited until the cancer had spread before seeking medical care, and although she fought bravely, she lost her battle with breast cancer.

Throughout my life, I have not needed medical care beyond occasional primary care visits and the birth of one child.  My first weeks negotiating the barrage of new terminology, new tests, new doctors has been significantly eased by my access to a complete electronic medical record. Even more important to me, my doctors can work as a team with open access to all the same instant information to help me make the best decisions for my health. As I think about my lost friend, I also am thinking of all others with a breast cancer diagnosis, or other serious illnesses, and about how they manage to work toward their cure if they worry about health insurance, or have no access to an electronic medical record.

Health Information Partnership for Tennessee releases some well made HIE videos that anybody who needs to talk up the HIE concept can use. CEO Keith Cox sent over the link.

One more update about sponsor charity work. Iatric Systems can’t bring its dispersed workforce together for a company party, so it allows employees to payroll deduct charitable contributions that the company then percentage matches. More than $19,000 was donated this year to Save-a-Limb, Relay for Live Japan Earthquake, Alzheimer’s Association, and London Marathon (since they have UK employees.) |

The 21-year-old who posed as a surgeon while counseling patients in the public areas of two Oregon hospitals is sentenced three years in prison. He also claimed to be a Microsoft employee, porn producer, and credit counselor.

A point I’ve been pondering for years, fanned back to life by a reader’s comment. Hospitals enjoy quite modest (if not negative) revenue increases each year, almost wholly driven by what the federal government decides it’s willing to pay them. The country is insolvent and there’s no political will to fix that, so it’s a certainty that the government will be paying less. How, then, can hospitals afford to lock themselves into IT contracts, especially maintenance ones, whose percentage cost increase each year exceeds the revenue increase the hospital expects? That’s especially true of IT systems (most of them) that generate minimal return on investment. I guess that’s why someone had to invent the “IT is like plumbing” argument to justify buying technology without questioning return on investment, but I’m wondering how that rationalization will stand as the going gets tougher. IT departments have the same challenge – how do you justify a 10% IT budget increase when the organization is only expecting a 2% revenue increase, or why does IT keep growing when front-line employees are having their hours flexed or their jobs eliminated? The folks at the top who approve IT purchases and budgets often forget that there’s an ongoing cost to the systems they want to buy.

The pending absorption of Alamance Regional Medical Center (NC) by Cone Health raises IT questions: what will happen with Alamance’s Allscripts Sunrise system given that Cone and the other big systems nearby (Wake Forest Baptist, Novant) are on Epic? The respective CEOs say they’ll probably just try to connect the systems in some way since it’s too expensive to implement Epic at Alamance.

Both MEDITECH and Cerner announced that they will be returning as HIMSS conference exhibitors after an absence of several years. I asked both companies about that decision, with responses from Paul Berthiaume (public relations manager of MEDITECH) and Zane Burke (EVP of Cerner’s client organization.)

Cerner and MEDITECH stopped exhibiting at HIMSS at about the same time and announced their return at about the same time. Were the companies expecting competitors to follow their lead and are coming back now because they didn’t?

MEDITECH
MEDITECH’s decisions regarding HIMSS participation were and are influenced solely by our needs and the needs of our customers. We don’t concern ourselves with our competitors, and we’re not trying to set nor follow any "vendor trends." We’re doing what works for us. This year, we have a particularly compelling story to tell as a leading EHR vendor. We want to share our customers’ successes reaching Stages 6 and 7 as well as achieving Meaningful Use Attestation, and we want to congratulate another Baldrige Award winner. Best of all, we’re going to debut an exciting new Web-based ambulatory product.

Cerner
When we made the decision to not exhibit at HIMSS, we shifted to other strategies to engage with our clients and the marketplace. Since then, one consistent request across our client base was to have a presence at HIMSS for a more personal interaction with our executives, IT support staff, and other clients. Over the years, we continued our HIMSS engagement across the Interoperability Showcase, demos with our industry partners and by supporting the educational components of HIMSS. This year, we will participate in these activities again, and we are excited to be able to meet our clients’ request and have a presence on the exhibit floor.

What will the company’s exhibit hall presence be? Do you have enough HIMSS points for the big, prime location booth, or do you have to work your way back up?

MEDITECH
We’ll be unveiling a new 40×40 booth at HIMSS, which we are excited about, and we’ll have members of our physician team in the booth meeting with customers. We encourage everyone to visit us at Booth #774.

Cerner
We have confirmed a sizable amount of floor space. We’d be happy to share additional details closer to the event.

Both companies say their customers wanted the company to return to the exhibit hall. If that’s the case, was it a mistake to pull out in the first place? What influence did a tough, competitive market and the peaking of HITECH-related system decisions have?

MEDITECH
I believe you’re referring to an earlier interview I gave, where the emphasis of our return was placed on customer demand. The focus is truly more on the timing being right for us; it’s the right time for us to allocate these resources and dollars. Our customers did miss us, and we certainly paid attention to that. In particular, our return to HIMSS gives our customers an opportunity to see our new products and to meet our team of physicians.

Cerner
Cerner and our clients have made significant advancements over the last few years and we are looking forward to participating at HIMSS to showcase these advancements with our clients more broadly. Our decision to come back to the HIMSS tradeshow floor is driven by many factors, including what we all can acknowledge is a strong health care industry making huge strides to improve quality and reduce cost. The diverse HIMSS audience gives us a chance to reconnect with our current clients and showcase to the broader health care community some of the exciting advances we’ve made in recent years.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and a belated Happy Festivus to all. Thanks for everybody who reads, sponsors, or otherwise supports HIStalk. I hope your holidays are amazing and that 2012 is your best year ever.

E-mail Mr. H.

John Gomez 12/23/11

Since establishing JGo Labs, I have had the opportunity to speak with many of the key decision makers in the world of HIT. It has been a rather eye-opening experience, one that has created a new understanding and appreciation for the challenges this industry faces long term. My discussions have involved hospital leadership, physicians, nurses, employees, leaders of HIT companies, and industry analysts.

One of the consistent things I hear from everyone I speak to is, "You know John, we just aren’t sure about this market. When we talk to the vendors and industry analysts, they all paint this awesome picture of their companies with strong financial performance and huge upside. Yet when we talk to the clients and ask about their future plans, they don’t match up with the vendors’ and analysts’ views. What do you think?"

This polar view of HIT, specifically in the EMR sector, may seem typical of the client / vendor perspective. But when you dig deeper, you find that it is all but typical. Vendors will paint rosy pictures and clients are going to be cautious of vendor claims. That is normal.

What isn’t normal is that when you probe clients (IDN, academics, community and physician groups) you quickly learn that their hope is to get through Meaningful Use certification as fast as possible and then get back to what they know best. That often means not investing in EMR products.

Most clients I speak with state that the biggest issue they have with HIT products is that they don’t deliver on the promises. They may improve patient safety to some extent and help streamline some processes, but clients aren’t seeing those products as a means to cut their operating costs or improve their revenue. Why this is the case would make great content for another article, but what is important here is that there is a general feeling among clients that the EMR is a distraction, not something they want to continue evolving over time. Simply stated, they want to meet the guidelines and focus on the things in their business which drive real revenue and change.

In speaking with the vendor leadership side of the HIT world, what I typically find is a world of fear, with many leaders confidentially stating that, “I am not sure how we survive the long term.” Keep in mind that my discussions are with middle and senior managers, not the executives. My experience is that speaking to those on the ground gives you a much more realistic view of what is happening in a company than what you learn from executives, boards of directors, and financial filings.

The last area of input is the sector analysts. Although they typically focus on public companies in the HIT sector, many of them will evaluate all companies as means to gauge opportunity and test the claims of those companies in which they are considering investing. More and more analysts are finding that over the long term, the return on investment for HIT companies is not as promising as hoped. There are some shining stars and if you use diligent tactics you will make a return, but if you compare HIT ROI for public companies versus other industries, the return is not glowing.

As you can see, this doesn’t paint a really exciting picture of the market. Although I believe we are seeing a mini financial bubble, I do think there is hope, and I’ll address that shortly. Right now, I want to continue to flush out why a bubble may exist and provide some insight into the dynamics of this market and how it affects vendors, which ultimately affects healthcare institutions and their decisions.

Most healthcare vendors operate in a US market, or at least their portfolio is dominated by US clients. The US healthcare market, from an HIT perspective, does not grow each year as do other industry sectors. There are more patients every year, but unless the vendor’s licensing model increases their payment for each patient visit or transaction, the majority of HIT vendors don’t see this upside.  

The market size for the vendors is typically the number of beds in the US.  If we want to translate this to a math formula, it would be

Total US Hospital Beds – Already Committed Beds

That is your market. Committed beds are those where the institution has already selected an HIT vendor for that line of business offering.

Most hospitals have made a commitment to, say, an EMR vendor (with Epic and Meditech having the lion’s share) and are facing sheer difficulty in successfully implementing the systems. This is not a very transient market — clients will stick with their choices for years or decades. This makes vendor growth difficult and impedes new vendors from entering the market.  

Secondly, not many new hospitals are being added each year. Not only is it a limited market opportunity, it is also a limited market in terms of its organic expansion.

Those two points alone are cause for concern. We have companies struggling to make their way in a rather limited market. Just like in the real world, if you put a few predators in a pond that exhaust the food supply, they either turn on each other (merger) or they die off (stalled growth, no innovation, go on life support.) These foundational characteristics  establish the foundation for our bubble. Lots of excitement, sudden infusion of growth, tons of market hype, very limited market.

The next challenge is that many of the companies in HIT are experiencing extremely rapid growth. You might be thinking, “Wait, John. Isn’t rapid growth a good thing?” It is if the growth is balanced.  

If a company is growing its top side (new profitable sales) while slowly expanding its costs (people, infrastructure) then growth is great. But if you pay attention to the vendors in HIT, they are growing their costs at a rate that outpaces their top line.They are adding tons of people for services and support, yet you don’t see a tremendous number of net new sales. They are offering this expanded capacity as proof that they are in demand, but without net new sales, it is probably because they misjudged their products’ quality and capabilities, not because the company is gaining market share.

Secondly, if you aren’t seeing a company hire an incremental number of engineers and product people, then they aren’t adding new products to fuel the future. Healthy companies have a long-term focus, which is critical for surviving a bubble — growing and investing in their future products.

The concern here is that eventually, given a limited market (pond), vendors will eventually need to slash costs to continue operations ( the first pin prick in the bubble).

Slashing costs can be termed many different things: optimization, efficiencies, consolidation, synergy, and reorganization. Fancy terms aside, it is simply good old fashioned cost-cutting in hopes of making a financial plan  People lose their jobs and the company is in the first throes of trouble.  

As an industry, we have seen a few companies begin to take this tack and go into maintenance mode. Others will not cut costs so as not to signal the market that they are having challenges, but their margins will dwindle or their stocks will stagnate. No matter how you slice it, these are the outcomes of a limited market and companies with limited innovation.

So what does this mean to you? What should you be thinking or asking?

As a client, investor, or employee of an HIT vendor, you need to make long-term bets and evaluate whether a particular vendor is truly positioned for the long term. Now more then ever, you need to verify that your vendor is transparent about their finances, operating plans, and roadmaps.  

A vendor shouldn’t just talk about their history. It’s more important to know how they are financed and structured for the future. Be careful of fancy talk regarding reorganization, the use of external consultants, or restructuring. This is often the first sign that a company is in flux, either poorly positioned for growth or unable to understand their own market.

(Also, as important as cash reserves are to any company, if any company continues to point to their cash reserves as part of their long-term survival strategy, I would be concerned, but that’s just me.)

If the company is publicly traded, look at how Wall Street has rewarded their stock over several years. A stock that doesn’t have a history of long-term incremental and sustained growth reflects a company that hasn’t earned Wall Street confidence, but rather is a company that most analysts use to do short sales. This is not a company whose products you want to own for the next decade. 

Consider also that many companies put a lot of time and thought into their analyst calls — to the point of scripting them, hiring PR firms, and using other tactics to paint a glowing picture of poor performance. Don’t get fooled by fancy words and great presentations. Look at the long-term stock performance and discount what you hear on analysts calls. They are like first dates — everyone is on their best behavior and most analysts don’t ask hard questions. Your time is better spent elsewhere.

Simple math can give you clues to your vendor’s position for the future. Ask how many new new sales they have made in the past three years. 

I am defining net new sales as those that bring completely new clients to the table — clients with which the vendor has no preexisting relationship. Many vendors will classify a new sale as any new item bought by an existing client. If you listen to the analyst calls or sit in a vendor presentation, you might hear them say, “We had 50 new sales last year.” You think, “Wow, these guys and gals are on fire. Let me get some of that!” 

In actuality, they may not mean “net new sales,” they mean, “We sold stuff to the clients we already have.” This is important. You want existing clients to buy from their vendors. But if a vendor isn’t breaking out sales between net new clients and existing clients, it’s sleight of hand, often used to hide that the vendor isn’t expanding their market. That isn’t good.

Vendors love to talk about their sales pipeline and product roadmaps. This is good, but in a market with limited number of clients, a vendor needs to really talk in detail about their product pipeline. What products are they bringing to market? Who will buy them? If they are just offering the same products they have for the past several years or decades, be wary. If they are talking about new products in the pipeline but aren’t hiring tons of engineers and domain experts, be wary.

Look for details about when, how and why. Does their pipeline make sense? How much are they investing? Is it a committed investment? What do they need to do keep investing in the pipeline?  I bet it is linked to net new sales. If new sales stop rolling in, the company will either cut their costs or cut the product. Neither is good for you.

Why do cuts matter to you? If a vendor is cutting people, you may be in for a bumpy ride when it comes to service levels, which affect you the client directly. It also may mean that the vendor couldn’t predict accurately how to manage their business through the economic challenges of the industry.  

Look behind the marketing and get a clear understanding of why the vendor is cutting costs. Cost-cutting because of a new process may make sense. Adding robots to an assembly line would provide the same level of service with a need for less humans and less costs over time, but just cutting people or taking a quarterly write-off are not signs of a healthy company.

Listen closely to your vendor for signs of cannibalization. Be wary if they plan to grow their business by going after the business of stagnant companies that are closing, downsizing, or freezing their products. What the vendor is saying is, "Thank God those other guys screwed up, because without that, we would be in trouble."

Again, look for the totally net new sale. If clients are buying the vendor’s products without a sentient event — such as other companies going into maintenance mode — chances are the vendor is doing great. If a vendor is relying on the failure of others to keep growing, that’s a big warning signal.

Look over there and ignore the man behind the curtain. The industry relies on KLAS, Gartner, and others to evaluate vendor performance, client satisfaction, and overall product quality. I don’t believe any of these organizations is perfect. They should not be the ultimate voice of your decision. Still, when any vendor asks you to ignore these reports, you should have serious concerns.

No consumer or vendor reporting agency is perfect, but you can make it close to perfect. Take the report cards offered by these agencies and do your own analysis. Ask your vendor to answer the questions in the report. Randomly sample their client base, employees, and partners. It’s just like buying an appliance or car — if you bring the Consumer Reports article with you and ask about the report on your own, you will get better facts to help you make a decision.

So what’s the net?

I believe that we are in the early formation of a bubble. Whether it bursts or not, I don’t know. As an industry, we need to be wary and proactive. At the end of the day, the companies with strong product pipelines, net new clients being added to the roster, and growing conservatively will be the ones left standing. 

We will see consolidation, experimental business models, and some vendors fading away as the market settles and government funding levels. Don’t get taken in by mergers and consolidations. Most vendors don’t have the ability to successfully pull them off, although some have succeeded.

I have been wrong about more things in my life then right. I hope I am wrong about the future of HIT and the landscape of companies. There are real people that walk the halls of those companies, with families and dreams. My hope is that the leadership of those companies think long term, put aside vanity and ego, and do the right things to weather the storms.

Is there hope?

Yes. I don’t believe that this industry is doomed. I do believe there are going to be some serious growing pains, some flushing out of the industry (which has already started – Google, Microsoft, etc.) and unfortunately, many people losing their jobs as Meaningful Use levels out.

Once the industry works through that, I think we will be left with a really strong base of companies that are highly innovative, financially stable, nimble, and led by really smart professional leaders who truly understand the needs of the client and have a long-term focus. There is tremendous opportunity in this industry. We just need to separate fact from fiction.

John Gomez is CEO of JGo Labs.

News 12/23/11

Top News

It was announced Thursday evening that the 27% Medicare physician pay cut that was scheduled to take place January 1 will be delayed for at least two months.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Mr. H and I are already working on our HIMSS-related details, including our Must-See Vendor listing, our sponsors-only luncheon (where Mr. H, Dr. Jayne, and I will make personal but disguised appearances if we get brave,) our first-ever HIStalk Booth Crawl, and HIStalkapalooza. And then there is the charity shoe drive, which I hope results in hundreds of pairs of donated shoes. Mr. H says he also wants to schedule a HIStalk flash mob doing The Wobble, but who knows if he is serious. If you are a sponsor, look for my name in your inbox so you don’t miss any important details. And if you enjoy dressing to the nines and winning fabulous prizes, keep reading here for HIStalkapalooza details. In the mean time, shop those after-Christmas sales to find some hot new shoes and your party attire.

Looking for last minute gift ideas? You won’t find them on HIStalk Practice, but you will find plenty of other goodies to stimulate your mind as you nourish your body with fruitcake and other treats of the season. Some highlights: Canadian EMR Nightingale Informatix purchases US-based PM company Medrium. A troubling headline. A CIO seeks recommendations for EHRs suitable for surgery-based practice (send your recs my way.) ARHQ releases a guide for EHR implementations. Still on the naughty list? If you sign up for e-mail updates on HIStalk Practice, I promise to put in a good word for you with the jolly guy in red. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, or best wishes for whatever holiday you may be celebrating!

You may have noticed considerably less visual assault when reading HIStalk lately, as sponsors are busily swapping out their animated ads by the January 1 target date. We appreciate their support of the new policy and hope you do as well.

We need your HISsies nominations. It’s like a primary election: those with the most votes get on the final ballot to run for Most Influential, Most Effective, Worst Vendor, etc.

On the Jobs Board: Clinical Systems Analyst, Cerner and Epic Resources. On Healthcare IT Jobs: Pharmacy Business System Analyst/SME, McKesson STAR Analyst / Consultant, Cerner PathNet Consultant.

Online life is not a cabaret, old chum. What good is sitting alone in your room in front of an HIStalk keyboard if you can’t hear the music play, in the form of the pathetic metrics that Inga, Dr. Jayne, and I focus on in the absence of any other source of validation of our questionable societal worth? Right this way, your table’s waiting: (a) subscribe to the e-mail updates; (b) Friend and Like us in the appropriate places (on the Internet I mean, not our actual bodily places); (c) send us news and rumors; (d) give the Resource Center and Consulting RFI Blaster a look if you are in need of products or services; (e) admire and occasionally click the decreasingly animated sponsor ads to your left, marveling along with us that real companies with suit-wearing employees working in fancy offices support pajama-clad, crotch-scratching spare bedroom bloggers not only financially, but personally as we toil deep into the night after working hospital day jobs. We’re not naïve or full of ourselves , though – we fully understand that we’re just the convenient conduit for our desirable readership, so thanks for being included in that number.

Listening: jangle rockers The Connells, which flamed brightly but briefly over the 1980s global skies from Raleigh, NC. Even less appreciated than the band is Bandwagon, the tune-filled 1996 movie they had a hand in. I strayed on it and loved it this week on Netflix. Its total gross was $22,000, so it’s a safe bet you haven’t seen it. 

I will be working as usual this weekend, so there will indeed be a Monday Morning Update even though few folks will be reading it Monday. My handful of readers and I will be huddled like weary travelers making small talk in an out-of-the-way diner during a Christmas Day snowstorm. I don’t expect much news to report, but you never know. Regardless, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, or a joyous whatever it is you celebrate this weekend. If you’re out next week, Happy New Year as well (not to offend those who follow the Chinese calendar, who won’t be celebrating until January 23.)

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Citing challenging economic conditions, Thomas Reuters announces that it has changed its mind about selling its healthcare business.

Nuance Communications signs an agreement to acquire rival Vlingo, a Siri alternative for Android smart phones that offers better social networking capabilities. That company was found not guilty of infringing on a Nuance patent earlier this year and later sued Nuance for unfair business practices, alleging that Nuance’s CEO offered three Vlingo executives $5 million each to persuade their boards to approve an earlier acquisition offer. All pending lawsuits are now “stayed.”

PatientKeeper raises $6 million in growth capital from existing investors to support product development. Chip Hazard of Flybridge Capital Partners has been named chairman of the company’s board.

The company behind MyMedicalRecords.com announced a $30 million sale of its patents last week, but the newly filed 8K indicates that the transaction is not quite that straightforward (not surprising given that the company’s market cap is only $16 million and its products don’t seem particularly innovative.) Expert interpretation welcome.

Sales

Biggs Gridley Memorial Hospital (CA) selects the Prognosis Health Information Systems ChartAccess EHR and HIE.

INTEGRIS Health (OK) selects MedVentive Population Manager and Risk Manager to manage risks and quality performance.

People

Charles Anastos, Jr. joins PwC US as a principal in PwC’s Health Industries Group and co-leader of the firm’s EHR/HIE practice.

The Indiana HIE appoints Josh Nelson, MD as CMO. He was a physician executive fellow at WellPoint.

Announcements and Implementations

Bayada Nurses completes implementation of Homecare Homebase across its 50 home health service offices.

---

Government and Politics

The VA announces that it has established Facebook pages for all 152 of its medical centers. It has also created 64 Twitter feeds, a YouTube channel, a Flickr page, and the VAntage Point blog.

CMS warns that its computer systems could crash under to a backlog of claims unless Congress stops the scheduled Medicare pay cut at the end of the year. The agency is advising contractors to hold physician claims for the first 10 business days of 2012.

ONC will build an online database to measure the effectiveness of grants given for a variety of HIT purposes, including those to individual physicians and hospitals, RECs, state HIEs, community colleges for HIT training, and vendors tracking HIT adoption.

The government project to develop a single EMR system for the VA and Department of Defense gets a $100 million appropriation even though the agencies’ request came in after the deadline. The VA gets $3.11 billion to spend for IT in FY2012, of which $580 million is for software development that includes a benefits management system ($107 million), veterans relationship management ($70 million), Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record ($50 million), and miscellaneous applications ($48 million.)

FDA goes on record in suggesting that it’s not really a good idea to buy another mother’s breast milk for your baby, even though Web sites offer it and some mothers make up to $2,000 per month selling their excess supplies. Breast milk is theoretically healthier for babies, but only if it doesn’t come from HIV and hepatitis-infected crack addicts anxious to feed their habit by selling whatever body product commands street value. Hospitals get sued regularly for mixing up breast milk, to the point that several vendors offer bar code scanning solutions to match milk to baby.

Other

athenahealth’s Jonathan Bush takes some direct swings at Allscripts and CEO Glen Tullman, calling him a symbol of “atrophy” and likening Allscripts to an “Orwellian bureaucracy.” In an article in the online investor publication Minyanville, Bush positions athenahealth as nimble and cutting edge, compared to the behind-the-times Allscripts. I’d say it’s pretty safe to assume that Tullman will not be sending Bush a Christmas ham this year.

The local paper writes up the self-implementation of the VA’s VistA by Oroville Hospital (CA), which earned it a $2 million Meaningful Use payout. We wrote earlier about that project, citing Roger Maduro’s Open Health News, which said Oroville spent $10 million on the project (which included hardware, replacement lab and medical equipment, and iPads) and $500K to have VistA enhanced to meet its needs.

Lee Memorial Health System (FL) gets a story in its local paper for implementing Epic’s bedside barcoding.

A network switch outage at Upstate University Hospital (NY) forces a several-hour return to paper systems and hand-rung patient bells.

An article says Cleveland Clinic’s fifth-highest-paid employee made over $1 million in each of the last two years despite having left the organization under “cloudy circumstances” in 2009. The Clinic declined to answer questions about David Strand’s severance or whether he’s still on the payroll. He and his also-resigned wife founded patient satisfaction and quality consulting firm ExperiaHealth (sold to Vocera) and he’s now CEO of LifeNexus, which sells consumer PHR smart cards.

KLAS says more providers are taking advantage of application hosting services to reduce capital expenditures and to tap into a higher level of technology. At the same time, more hosting providers are providing hosting services to applications other than their own.

All 69 IT workers in Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals are notified they will lose their jobs early next year. The University of New Orleans and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette have been contracted to provide IT services for the state agency and may hire 50 of the displaced workers.

The sale of the Chicago Sun-Times to an investment group led my Merge Healthcare chairman Michael Ferro, Jr. has been completed.

A new non-profit, Patients for Fair Compensation, proposes a worker’s compensation-like system that would replace lawyer-enriching malpractice lawsuits with an administrative process by which patients would receive reasonable compensation quickly without turning most of the money over to attorneys.

Weird News Andy says he had a friend with an experience similar to that of this story, in which a man partying hard with two hookers at a Knights Inn motel in Orlando takes an AK-47 round to the chest. Doctors treating his wound find a large mass, removing part of his lung but likely saving his life.

WNA calls this story “Crack Cocaine.” Police car video records the back seat conversation of two handcuffed brothers as the older one implores the younger one to eat the one-ounce cocaine stash hidden in the older one’s rectum, telling him, “I can’t get no more strikes. Eat that sh*t so I can get out.” The younger brother eats the cocaine, tells the older brother he loves him, and dies of cocaine intoxication.

A Chicago malpractice law firm, cheered by the recent article suggesting that doctors are screwing around on their smart phones during critical medical procedures, says anyone who suspects they were injured by “distracted doctoring” should give them a call (probably while driving.)

Sponsor Updates

• Healthwise offers a white paper entitled Patient Response: Giving Voice to the Patients.
• Tom Stephenson, president and CEO of HMS, discusses healthcare technology as a tool for better patient care in a blog post.
• Passport Health Communications will participate in next month’s MEGA and HFMA MA-RI conferences.
• eClinicalWorks and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) announce a three-year initiative to provide eCW’s products to ASPS members.
• HealthStream and GE Healthcare announce a partnership to offer Centricity University, a subscription-based service for online and classroom training on Centricity products.
• Microsoft will participate in the 2012 Military Health System Conference January 30 – February 2 in National Harbor, MD.
• Brian Woods MD, chief medical officer of NorthStar Anesthesia, wins a magazine’s award for implementing Shareable Ink in the hospitals that his group serves. Prognosis CEO Ramsey Evans was also named for his work creating the Prognosis HIS.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

The hot news around the doctor’s lounge the past few days (other than the fountain soda machines that were recently purchased to feed the habits of those non-coffee drinkers on the medical staff) is the Medicare pay rate debacle. As most of you know, the House of Representatives rejected a Senate bill this week that would have avoided the pending 27% cut in Medicare rates. As a result, pay rates are in limbo and CMS responded by saying it would suspend claims processing for the first 10 business days in 2012 to avoid having to deal with retroactive reprocessing should Congress remedy the situation.

Make sure you don’t use it as an excuse to slack on your charges, though, because come January 17t, CMS will start processing those claims (at the reduced pay rate if Congress doesn’t act) on a first-come, first-served basis.

And for the curious, they installed both Coke and Pepsi dispensers, but my southern sensibilities are highly outraged by the lack of respect shown to my esteemed colleague, Dr. Pepper.

Interestingly, one of the stories I read that covered this issue was right next to an article titled Physicians Must Make Any Changes to Medicare Participation by December 31. That means if you’re tired of all the shenanigans, you have the opportunity to opt out of Medicare if you wish. The AMA offers a Medicare Participation Kit that offers more information on the various options.

I love it when Inga sends me snarky comments about stories she’s reading, and this week she didn’t disappoint with this one. To Get Meaningful Use Payments, Urologists Must Address Workflow. I wholly agree with her that the words “flow” and “urologist” should never go in the same headline.

Sending more happiness our way, CMS also released a proposal for rules around the Physician Payment Sunshine Act. The rules require that gifts, consulting fees, travel reimbursements, payments, grants, and pretty much anything worth more than $10 that is given to physicians or teaching hospitals be disclosed by manufacturers annually. For those of you who may not know, this is part of the Affordable Care Act, which really does seem to be the gift that keeps on giving. CMS also announced a comment period open through February 17, 2012, so be sure to weigh in. HIMSS has also released a fact sheet and plans to convene a working group to formally respond.

NCQA releases a “save the date” for the 2012 Health Quality Awards to be held March 27, 2012 at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. Nothing on their website yet that I can find, but I did get a nice e-mail soliciting sponsors.

The Wall Street Journal runs a nice piece on researchers who are using “virtual patients” to leverage technology to test medical devices and procedures when real patient testing isn’t practical. Computerized modeling can help with estimates of radiation exposure to a fetus or with technologies which may perform differently in children (who aren’t typically the subjects of very many research protocols) as compared to adults.

Sometimes low-tech is best: Archives of Dermatology publishes a study that shows that maggots debride non-healing wounds “significantly faster” than traditional scalpel-based techniques. Additionally, there were no differences in pain or crawling sensations between the two treatment groups. Maggots have been approved for medical therapy since 2004, but availability of so-called “bagged larvae” varies. Out of curiosity, I checked with our pharmacy and am happy to report that yes, we’ve got maggots in our arsenal.

I’ve enjoyed seeing the pictures of holiday giving and charity activities submitted by our readers. I recently heard about WorldScopes, a philanthropic project of the AMA Foundation that distributes new and gently used stethoscopes to clinics and hospitals world-wide. If you donate more than 20, the AMA covers your shipping costs. My package is already on its way. If you decide to participate, put HIStalk on the shipping label since we’re a lot more fun than the other choices for identifying where you heard about the project.

That’s it for me tonight. I’m off to bake some holiday cookies with my main man. Have a question about automated patient recalls, why baking soda and baking powder aren’t interchangeable, or what those little silver metallic balls are on holiday cookies? E-mail me.

Contacts

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

HIT Vendor Executives – Part One of Two

We asked several HIT vendor executives the following question: What was the biggest HIT-related news or event in 2011 and why?

Ray Dyer, CEO, Acusis

The industry has experienced continued mergers in 2011 (Allscripts/Eclipsys and Medquist/M*Modal, to mention a couple), the federal government has come to a ruling on how ACOs should work, MU payments were issued, and we have seen a rise in the use of and demand for mobile devices in healthcare, including new medical students being issued iPads.

I don’t think a singular event could be identified as the biggest moment in HIT in 2011. However if mapped across a timeline, we could certainly mark these as significant highlights during this past year.

Dan Herman, Founder and Managing Principal, Aspen Advisors

McKesson Provider Technology (MPT) division’s Better Health 2020 strategy announced on 12/9/11. MPT has publicly announced what has been rumored for some time – that it will curtail further development of its Horizon software product line and invest heavily in its Paragon product. This decision affects hundreds of hospitals throughout the country. Some long-term McKesson customers have already seen the writing on the wall and have made strategic and financially significant decisions to move away from McKesson’s non-integrated Horizon clinical platform. However, many other customers (medium-sized community hospitals and multi-entity integrated delivery networks) are faced with a critical decision: do we stay the course with McKesson or rethink our EMR strategy and pursue an alternative course?

Reading between the lines, this change in direction will have a huge financial impact on current McKesson Horizon customers, and it brings McKesson’s credibility in the EMR market into question. Although the market for EMR technologies has grown, the Horizon product line has experienced decline in market share, system development delays, poor product integration, and significant customer dissatisfaction.

On one hand, I laud MPT for coming clean on the challenges it has had with the development and support of the Horizon product. However, it appears that MPT’s go forward strategy is “déjà vu” – a poorly thought out approach to integrate disparate platforms, enhance a product that has experienced success in a focused market place (Paragon), and promise customers that MPT is committed to delivering “a fully integrated core clinical and revenue cycle IT system.”

Regardless of McKesson’s direction, healthcare providers need to evaluate their needs against the software available to support them and make decisions that are in their best interests.

Jay Deady, CEO, Awarepoint Corporation

The biggest HIT-related news of 2011 is that 1,211 eligible hospitals and 21,425 eligible professionals (EPs) have successfully attested and collected $1.84 billion from Medicare and Medicaid through the end of November for meeting Stage 1 meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs).

The news, disclosed at the December 7, 2011 meeting of the Health IT Policy Committee, is significant for several reasons. First, it indicates the transformation of the health system and national commitment to improve access, quality, coordination, and efficiency of care through information technology have begun in earnest.

Second, it ensures providers adhere to baseline quality standards that can be measured and compared, including: using CPOE for medication orders, implementing decision support rules, exchanging key clinical information, and protecting electronic health information.

Third, attesting hospitals and EPs had to meet reporting requirements that some providers have characterized as challenging, onerous and time-consuming. Those that haven’t attested or plan to attest to Stage 1 in 2012 will benefit from lessons learned by early attesters.

Fourth, the payments demonstrate the meaningful use program is real, which will motivate providers to automate sooner rather than later in order to subsidize or recoup the cost of an EHR. As they automate, however, providers must remember that EHRs alone won’t address every problem afflicting healthcare. To accomplish that and aid throughput, they must complement EHRs with other technologies such as real-time location systems.

Don Graham, General Manager, Billian’s HealthDATA

I would have to say it’s been the extreme focus providers seem to be putting now on enterprise healthcare analytics and business intelligence, especially when coupled with the recent release of final ACO regulations. They realize that healthcare transformation requires more than the implementation of an EMR. As providers move more towards the coordinated care model (PCMH, ACOs and beyond), the challenge will be to meet the analytical needs to support this model. It will be critical to deliver an integrated view of clinical, financial and operational data not only across the enterprise, but across the community as well. Access to this data will enable providers to move into new areas of care.

In acknowledgement of the importance of analytics and its role in healthcare transformation, Billian’s HealthDATA and affiliate Porter Research have decided to focus one of our Provider Perception studies on Enterprise Analytics early next year. It’s something that our healthcare vendor customers are in turn paying more and more attention to, and appreciate the insight into.

Stuart Long, President, Capsule

I think the biggest HIT-related news this year is ARRA. It seems that all hospitals are just looking at how they are going to meet the criteria and qualify for the stimulus dollars. They are looking for any and all news on the topic. They are looking for help in sorting through and interpreting the legislation and what they specifically need to do to qualify. They are setting up cross-functional teams within the hospital to sort through it all. And they are looking to their vendor partners to prove how their technology and solutions fit within ARRA and therefore whether or not they will make it to the hospitals short list or not.

In fact, it’s one of the biggest areas we’ve been working on at Capsule and with our EMR partners — to help define where device integration fits within meaningful use and CPOE. I believe that ARRA and CPOE have hit all areas of the HIT space, from hospitals, to vendors, to system integrators, and to the publishing community at large – whether that be new publications, journals, trade shows, blogs, and even social media.

I just believe that the entire healthcare IT world has been turned upside down with ARRA. And of course it’s not over. We will all continue to be focused on it as Phases 2 and 3 roll out in the years to come. It might be a bumpy ride, but all we can do is hold on tight and keep on moving forward.

Mac McMillan, CEO, CynergisTek

I’m sure from an overall HIT perspective the answers will be quite different, but from a privacy and security perspective, it had to be one of two announcements from the federal government.

The first is OCR announcing it will finally initiate its regular audit program to conduct routine, random compliance audits of organizations accountable to HIPAA. The initiation of the audit program completed OCR’s menu of compliance and enforcement-related activities by adding to its existing practices: investigation of breaches and response to complaints. The OCR will likely disclose more information about these audits and their outcomes next year.

The second candidate for the biggest HIT-related event is the ONC announcing a delay in Meaningful Use Stage 2 in order to give organizations more time to meet Stage 1 requirements and to further support adoption of EHR technologies.

Both of these have a direct impact on the industry and its move to privacy and security readiness. We at CynergisTek are working with a lot of healthcare organizations to achieve compliance goals and improve their overall security posture. We’ve seen Meaningful Use increase attention to security and work to provide the support covered entities need to accomplish their risk analysis and implement the security features of their EHR/EMR effectively. This approach is consistent with OCR’s guidance on risk analysis and produces a step-by-step action plan that guides remediation efforts. In addition to that, we understand the partnership model desired in healthcare and we provide ongoing advice and assistance throughout the remediation process and beyond.

Michael O’Neil, CEO, GetWellNetwork

2011 was the year that the healthcare industry fully recognized patient engagement as a business imperative. Driven generally by the reality of a shift to a value-based US health system — and specifically by the requirements for patient engagement in Stage 2 Meaningful Use and the push by ONC to support consumer health IT adoption — leading providers moved aggressively to develop strategies, find partners, and adopt solutions to help.

Due to the confluence of regulatory, business, and technology transformation underway, patient engagement emerged as a core strategy for performance improvement for providers. Leveraging HIT, patient engagement solutions can take the form of Web-based portals and interactive patient care (IPC) education and communication solutions, or as simple as an online patient guide or patient bill of rights. It’s education. It’s entertainment. It’s empowerment. In fact, it’s all aspects of being involved in care.

One thing is sure: providers must work to ensure that the principle of patient engagement permeates clinical and business workflow and every aspect of care delivery. In 2012, there is no doubt that a focus on patient engagement will take greater hold throughout the continuum of care.

Peter J. Butler, President and CEO, Hayes Management Consulting

Attempting to identify the biggest HIT-related news item is difficult. However, based on research from the Ponemon Institute, which  conducted detailed interviews with executives at 72 healthcare organizations, the economic impact of information breaches can be far reaching and should be considered one of the top news items. Consider the following breach survey results:

• On average, organizations surveyed have had four data breach incidents in the past two years, up from three in last year’s study.
• The average number of lost or stolen records per breach is 2,575, up from 1,769 in the previous study.
• The top three causes for a data breach are lost or stolen computing devices, third-party mistakes, and unintentional employee action.
• Insufficient budgets and inadequate risk assessments are cited as the two greatest breach prevention weaknesses.
• Some 81% of those surveyed use mobile devices to collect, store, or transmit patient information, but 49% say they’re doing nothing to protect these devices.

There hasn’t been a slow news day in healthcare this year, but the topic of breaches is the alarm bell for the industry. With the onslaught of new technology, the most important data – patient health information – is not safely secured. It reflects the cracks in the frantic attempt to catch up with all the unintended byproducts of the industry changes.

For example, just when the industry secured all its laptops, mobile technology took off. Now, smart phones, mobile carts, tablets, and thumb drives need to be monitored and secured. Not a day goes by where a laptop has been lost or stolen. HIPAA’s reporting policy means that the clock is ticking when the breach happens, organizations are responsible for business associates’ breaches, and the fines pale in comparison to the impact on reputation.

Healthcare organizations must put privacy and security at the top of their 2012 priority list. They must develop policies and procedures for reporting in a timely manner on breaches. Further assessments need to be conducted on a timely basis – annually at least.  This protocol must be understood by every employee and monitored to ensure compliance across the enterprise. Training and communication of HIPAA regulations need to incorporated within each healthcare organization and monitored. Micky Tripathi’s blog post on this topic gives a stunning insider view to what it’s like to have a breach happen in your organization. No one is immune – and it takes a village to rectify it.

Tiffany Crenshaw, President and CEO, Intellect Resources

Meaningful Use and ICD-10 are what everyone is talking about, but surprisingly, no one is talking about what Meaningful Use and ICD-10 mean from a human resources standpoint.  Incentive deadlines have created an industry-wide shortage of experienced healthcare IT professionals, specifically those with Epic experience. Think about it — everyone in the industry is working towards the exact same deadline!

Countless planning hours are put forth to ensure a successful go-live and meet incentive deadlines. Technology, equipment, infrastructure, training and other task related functions are all meticulously planned in advance with the intention of those tasks being carried out by future experienced healthcare IT hires. But what if you can’t find those future hires? What happens to your plan then?

Meaningful Use and ICD-10 have created a huge demand for experienced healthcare IT professionals and there simply aren’t enough experienced individuals to fill these much-needed positions. Now is the time to think creatively about hiring solutions and start planning.

Doug Burgum, President and CEO, Intelligent InSites

The biggest healthcare IT event in 2011 was the Department of Veterans Affairs’ decision to improve healthcare efficiency with a national investment in Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS.)

The VA has the nation’s largest integrated healthcare system: over 150 medical centers, almost 1,400 community outpatient clinics, and 53,000 independent licensed healthcare practitioners, serving more than 8.3 million Veterans every year. Eric K. Shinseki, Secretary of the VA, has identified 16 transformational initiatives for the VA. One of these initiatives, Health Care Efficiency, directly includes RTLS to improve care while lowering costs.

The Government Executive reports that the VA views a planned $550 million National RTLS implementation as a way to improve efficiency, track equipment, and properly sterilize medical instruments.

We are thrilled that our industry has the opportunity to contribute to this groundbreaking effort. Intelligent InSites’ customers have improved patient satisfaction and patient safety, while decreasing hard-dollar expenses, through their use of RTLS solutions for asset management and patient flow. They do this by automatically collecting real-time data from throughout the hospital, processing that data, then using actionable intelligence to make fundamental improvements to how they run their hospitals. By using RTLS, they can process the location and status of every critical piece of medical equipment, patient, and staff in a healthcare facility, then use this data and intelligent workflow automation to improve their healthcare processes.

The next few years are going to be amazing—not just the RTLS industry, but also for the transformational benefits to the delivery of care.

Mike Sweeney, President and CEO, maxIT Healthcare

This was such a busy year in the HIT industry, it would be difficult to name just one event, so I will limit myself to three.

First, Epic’s continued dominance in new account sales along with the recent trend of their customers’ rolling the Epic applications out to their affiliate networks (acute and ambulatory) has had a major impact this year. Second, McKesson’s announcement of their product direction with Horizon and Paragon will have a significant ripple effect in the market as we get into 2012. Finally, the government mandates and programs surrounding Meaningful Use, ICD-10 and ACOs are driving so much demand and activity in the market, those can’t be left out of top events for 2011.

It’s definitely an exciting time to be in our industry, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store next year.

Tom Carson, CEO and President, MD-IT

The clear emergence of physician preferences for mobile applications to interface with their HIT systems has huge implications for systems criteria and future workflow demands. Most legacy HIT systems were developed with the idea that physicians would sit in front of desktop computers for their documentation and care-planning tasks. After years of physician reluctance to adapt to these defined work processes, the relatively rapid increase in popularity of applications for smart phones and tablets suggest that doctors are beginning to participate on their terms in EMR adoption and use, and that HIT vendors are due for a re-think in their approach to product solution design and delivery.

This is significant because it marks a maturing of the EMR industry in that products will have to be more customer-driven going forward, as opposed to regulatory-driven to succeed.

Patrick Hampson, Chairman and CEO, MED3OOO

The biggest news related event was just recently announced by the Kathleen Sebelius, the HHS secretary. By relaxing the time frame for meeting Meaningful Use Stage 2 requirements, physicians, EHR vendors, HIE projects, and most all operators of healthcare will all get more time to adapt to the rapid expansion of electronic health care delivery.

Changing healthcare to a more seamless, interconnected health system in the US is absolutely critical. Doing it right and not just doing it fast is even more critical. Why have providers go from a paper mess to an electronic mess? Why just add technologies without the strategy, knowledge, and planning needed and the provider level knowledge necessary to actually get a return on your investment? How about a return in care for your patient?

Physicians and hospitals were forced to scramble to adopt new work flows, new processes of care delivery, and at the same time, implement new technologies (EHR systems) and install patient portals to meet the requirements for Stage 1. If these same providers want to stay viable, they have to maintain productivity, fight competitive forces in their markets and pre-pay, for most of this while the government gives them an IOU. Throw in the current economic conditions of our depressed economy and it is all too much for providers. Great for vendors, not so great for providers.

Relaxation of the Stage 2 requirements deadline is less about not wanting to get somewhere, but it is more about getting there efficiently. A pet peeve of mine is why have financial penalties should you not do it fast? Why not financial incentives for doing it right?

Hopefully we will all take this delay as a continued opportunity to improve the designs of technology, not just to process a bill or serve as expensive transcription, but provide technology that can really support providers and the coordination of care across the populations they serve. While Accountable Care is touted as the next big step for many, MED3OOO as a healthcare management and technology company has provided technologies and operations for physicians and hospitals and communities are already accountable for care and for managing risk and been doing it successfully for more than 15 years.

For those that haven’t, the learning curve and the costs are steep. These organizations will require more than just production systems like accounting systems, practice management systems, and electronic health records. Organizations will require and we will provide strategies, systems, and operations economically. Organizations will need to have capabilities that include integration of disparate systems and disparate centers of data. Organizations will need the ability and systems to disseminate population data and then distribute that same data efficiently back to the point of care for its best use.

MED3OOO is uniquely position to partner with providers and provide our existing packages of system, software, and knowledge infrastructure to make this next journey a successful one for new Accountable Care providers. In doing this, we will continue our mission and make absolutely sure that the patient has a better outcome. We do believe that outcomes matter!

Peter Kuhn, CEO, MEDSEEK

With Microsoft partnering with GE, Google exiting the PHR market, and more payers entering the provider market, the events of 2011 have significantly changed the healthcare industry. How patients respond to payers acquiring providers depends on whether they perceive an improvement in care coordination or feel that quality of care is mitigated by payers influencing physicians. With access to both risk models and clinical information, how well these acquisitions work also depends upon the ability to analyze that data to create effective business strategies.

Analytics, particularly predictive analytics, has been in the healthcare news this year. At MEDSEEK, we understand that analyzing data and creating actionable strategic plans will help our clients set themselves apart. That’s why we made the decision to acquire Third Wave Research, Ltd. We’ve subsequently integrated what we believe to be the most advanced predictive analytics technology into our strategic patient engagement and management solutions.  With the commoditization of patient portals and patient outcomes and wellness driving revenues, the major market differentiator will be how well hospitals engage new and existing patients, manage costs, and coordinate care.

Hospitals’ success will increasingly hinge on using predictive analytics to match high-value patients with appropriate, profitable services when and where they need them and make informed investment decisions based on population health propensities. Combined with factors such as demographic, financial, and insurance data, predictive analytics will play a larger role in executing cost-effective, personalized marketing campaigns that influence patient behavior and improve population health.

Jeff Surges, CEO, Merge Healthcare

With new federal policies to reduce reimbursement and foster information sharing, the question is not if, but when a healthcare system should implement an enterprise imaging strategy that focuses on providing electronic access to medical images. Hospital CEOs, CIOs and physicians can no longer ignore:

• Patient safety issues around radiation exposure
• Competition to attract and retain the best physicians
• Compliance with Meaningful Use guidelines
• Support for an ACO strategy
• The push for interoperability in EHRs across healthcare systems and HIEs

These issues are driving the need for a new paradigm of image sharing and enterprise-wide imaging strategies.

An enterprise imaging strategy must focus on image storage, the ability to ingest images from outside of the enterprise, and provide accessibility to any type of medical image, anywhere across the continuum of care, anytime, by anyone. It should include three components:

• Storage. A vendor-neutral archive (VNA) to create a patient-centric record of images across all sites and modalities.
• Gateway. An intelligent DICOM gateway, capable of receiving and morphing studies from outside the enterprise.
• Viewer. A universal viewer that can be used in any environment on any device and is accessed via the browser, thus requiring no software to be downloaded.

There really is no wrong way to proceed with an enterprise imaging strategy as long as decision-makers fully understand the capabilities of each technology component, relate the capabilities to meeting their top business challenges, and look at the enterprise imaging strategy as a solution that can grow and evolve over time.

Jay Mason, CEO, My Health DIRECT

I see the roll-out and clarification for Accountable Care Organizations this year as being a significant event or turning point. While there is yet to be much to determined in how they will play a role in reimbursement and delivery, it has forced organizations — both payers and providers — to rethink how they function and how they look at themselves. Infrastructure, resources, and relationships will be reshaped.

This means they must commit to new ways to work together as providers, as well as how they are engaging, informing, managing, and directing patients. The silos that have been built up over the past decades will soon come crashing down.

Janet Dillione, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Nuance Healthcare

ICD-10 came onto the scene in 2011 in a big way. It received enormous attention throughout the year and has even been compared to Y2K. In short, it’s a monumental shift from what is documented, coded, and billed against today in healthcare and what level of specificity will be expected to be documented, coded, and billed against come 2013.

As a result of this major transition in medical coding, the reimbursement process will get more complicated and will expand. At Nuance, we believe that ICD-10 success begins with the physician at the point of documentation. In turn, over the past year we’ve allocated resources to develop, in partnership with 3M, next generation ICD-10-ready clinical documentation and coding solutions. In 2012, we’ll bring to market Computer-Assisted Physician Documentation, a new category of solutions that will interact with physicians at the point of documentation to review and prompt for the level of specificity required to achieve reimbursement in correlation with ICD-10 standards. Simply put, it turns clinical language (doctor’s spoken words) into codable language.

By combining Nuance’s speech recognition and Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) capabilities with 3M’s experience in developing and implementing coding products and services around the world, we’re well positioned to deliver solutions that will substantially improve physician workflow and will facilitate more precise, complete coding, and more accurate claims.

Todd Cozzens, CEO, Accountable Care Solutions, Optum

This past year has been filled with game-changers – from Meaningful Use to ICD-10 – but the biggest milestone in healthcare IT had to be the CMS final rule on the Medicare Shared Savings Program, which I believe will be looked back at one day as the event that spawned a whole new generation of health information technology.

Notice that I’ve not include the “care” ending to health. This next generation of IT solutions will focus not just on patients currently seeing doctors and being admitted to hospitals. It will cover a much broader spectrum of wellness and prevention products to comprehensive management of patient populations. The final regs set the tone for the industry and made a statement: accountable care is here to stay.

When I talk about accountable care these days, I am quick to point out I’m talking about the general idea of healthcare providers taking on some form of risk – i.e. being responsible for the outcome AND the cost of that outcome. McKinsey thinks there will be around 750 MSSP ACOs within five years. That sounds about right. But when we at Optum talk about the broader concept of sustainable health communities, we believe that every health system in the country will adopt some form of risk taking – whether it be bundled payments or new risk-sharing health plans with payors, all the way up to fully capitated networks.

Healthcare reform was the catalyst that started the dialogue. The budget deficit, with its inevitable cuts in entitlements, created the sense of urgency. The Medicare MSSP program signaled that CMS is 100% behind the effort. We all know that when CMS coughs, the US healthcare industry has a cold, and that’s why this final rule is such a game changer.

Paul Brient, President and CEO, PatientKeeper Inc.

One of the biggest HIT-related news stories in 2011 was the extension in the effective date of Stage 2 Meaningful Use. At some levels, this was a non-event. ONC’s decision to push back the Stage 2 start date for Stage 1 “early attesters” by a year (to Oct. 1, 2013) corrected a flaw in the original plan that effectively penalized hospitals for being on the ball and attesting for Stage 1 early. Yet the move created a fair amount of confusion in the market and headlines in industry media, and paused some Meaningful Use activity.

That is largely behind us now. The Stage 2 proposed rule will be published in the next month or so, and many hospitals are beginning to focus on the challenge of getting widespread physician adoption of CPOE and documentation software that will be required by Stage 2 and 3 objectives.

Todd Johnson, President, Salar

In a conference this past summer with chief medical information officers and physician informaticists, a physician’s panel was convened to consider the next big challenge for their hospitals. Without question, the conversion to ICD-10 topped the list. As discussed in that conference in Ojai, California, and paraphrased here: “ICD-10 is entirely a physician documentation issue.” While this statement does not to suggest a minimized importance for consultative services, back-end billing systems, or payer reform, it does call to light the critical nature of a physician’s clinical note. All coding starts from the note. Indeed, the note itself justifies all other pieces in this puzzle.

Going into 2011, we believed (as did many others) that Meaningful Use would continue to dominate all discussions. In retrospect, we’ve been surprised to see how quickly ICD-10 has become a front-burner issue though so poorly addressed by the healthcare market. Both hospitals and the vendor community alike seem woefully ill-prepared to address this issue which simply fuels the anxiety and paranoia of this “great unknown.” Just as Meaningful Use taglines blanketed the banners at HIMSS this year and MS-DRG coding dominated the banners in years before, you won’t be able to walk 10 paces without seeing ICD-10 lingo at HIMSS 2012.

Stephen Hau, CEO, Shareable Ink

The growing acceptance of enterprise cloud computing in healthcare has been a persistent and recurring theme of 2011. We are excited by this development because it will help accelerate much needed innovation in healthcare IT.

Hugely successful IT projects in our industry are relatively rare. Some may feel that this reputation is unfair and not deserved. However, who can deny that the industry has a track record of protracted implementation projects, lengthy development / release cycles, and expensive hardware investments that can quickly become obsolete?

Enterprise cloud computing represents an approach that is compelling for small physician practices (with no in-house IT support), large health systems (that require scalability, minimal administrative burden, and stringent uptime commitments), and organizations in between. We have observed shorter deployments, transparent and non-disruptive updates, and removal of hardware obligations from the customer. A cloud-based distribution model allows software providers to respond to market demands more nimbly – and healthcare organizations to take advantage of rapid innovation.

Taken together, enterprise cloud computing has the power to provide a very positive IT experience, allowing healthcare organizations to focus on the benefits of technology and creating a better environment for innovation.

Ed Daihl, CEO, Surgical Information Systems

Hospitals and anesthesia providers are facing reimbursement changes, shifting payment models, increased regulatory reporting, and Meaningful Use. We believe that hospitals will continue to focus on achieving ARRA funding to help combat these challenges.

It is important to us at SIS to ensure that we help our clients respond and prepare for these changes. We were the first perioperative healthcare software provider to achieve ONC Meaningful Use certification in 2010, and more recently, our Anesthesia Information Management System (AIMS) achieved Meaningful Use certification as well.

Evan Steele, CEO, SRS

One of the biggest HIT-related events was the recent announcement by HHS that it was postponing the implementation of Meaningful Use Stage 2. It was important, not because it will directly and significantly impact very many providers, but rather because of what it acknowledges and the positive message it sends.

All that the delay does is to reward early adopters by giving them access to three years’ of incentives under the easier rules of Stage 1 and to remove one of the reasons that might have discouraged some of them from attesting in 2011. Contrary to Secretary Sebelius’s contention, it can do nothing to speed adoption since the announcement came too late to impact any providers who have not already implemented—and been successfully using—a certified EHR.

What the delay does accomplish, however, is to send a heretofore unheard message—one of flexibility and of an acknowledgment of the significant challenges that Stage 1 is posing for many providers and vendors. By delaying the schedule for Stage 2, the government has let them know that the rules are not set in stone, that some things are negotiable, and that it is willing to work with providers and vendors in the interest of accelerating EHR adoption. If this same message is conveyed in the release of the actual rules for Stage 2, the likelihood of the program’s ultimate success will be greatly enhanced.

Rick Stockell, President, Stockell Healthcare Systems

As we have seen and experienced with our customers, the impact of prepping for and addressing Meaningful Use and ICD-10/5010 compliance on the healthcare industry was certainly significant in 2011, and it will continue to be a major factor into 2012 and beyond.

Richard Atkin, President and CEO, Sunquest

Over the past several years, structured reporting of laboratory results has been promoted as a public health priority. Its inclusion as a Meaningful Use objective is helping to drive the accelerated adoption of EMRs.

This past January, Sunquest Information Systems became the first and only dedicated laboratory information system vendor to achieve 2011/2012 Meaningful Use compliance and certification as an EHR Module by the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT.)

Sunquest continues to lead the industry with regard to the HITECH Act and Meaningful Use regulations. Meeting with government officials and continuously monitoring client preparedness are just two of the ways that Sunquest helps its clients complete the three steps for earning incentives: adopt certified electronic health record (EHR) technologies, achieve Meaningful Use objectives, and apply for incentive payments.

In addition to meeting many of the Meaningful Use modules, Sunquest solutions provide the capability to improve the overall safety, quality, and efficiency of healthcare. Our comprehensive Meaningful Use plan includes expanding the use and management of LOINC and SNOMED-CT codes. This initiative is a critical priority for our clients as they plan their LOINC strategy.

Sunny Sanyal, CEO, T-System

The recent decision by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to delay by one year the start date of Stage 2 Meaningful Use of certified electronic health records (EHRs) is by far the biggest HIT-related development of 2011.

By pushing the compliance deadline from Oct. 1, 2013 to Oct. 1, 2014, HHS recognized that the original timetable was too aggressive. Many hospitals planning to be ready for Stage 1 in 2011 or 2012 would have faced little lead time to prepare for Stage 2 requirements, which will not be finalized until July 2012. This deadline would have made it extremely difficult for both facilities and vendors to upgrade and install Stage 2-compliant EHRs by October 2013.

Prior to the delay announcement, we were beginning to hear rumblings from hospitals about potentially abandoning efforts to qualify for Meaningful Use incentives, instead waiting to attest until 2015 to avoid Medicare reimbursement cuts. The one-year grace period will enable providers who attest to Stage 1 Meaningful Use in 2011 to qualify for three payment years and those attesting in 2012 two payment years. It will give them and their EHR vendor partners additional time to develop a plan for Stage 2 compliance and design and implement optimal software. More importantly, it buys hospitals time to drive adoption of EHRs intended to improve the quality, safety and cost-effectiveness of care.

News 12/21/11

Top News

HHS names the 32 healthcare organizations selected to participate in the Pioneer Accountable Care Organization model. The Pioneer ACOs will test the effectiveness of several payment models to support better care and outcomes at a lower cost.

Reader Comments

From Unicorn Hunter: “Re: IT resources. I need people or a company who can extract, transform, and load data from popular ambulatory EMRs to EpicCare, with skill in Oracle programming and Epic Bridges.” We don’t usually get involved with recruiting, but leave a comment if you have suggestions.

From Curious Reader: “Re: Medicomp. Interesting interview with Dave Lareau. Which vendors are using Medicomp?” I checked with Dave, who unfortunately can’t help. “Because of the proliferation of patent trolls in the marketplace and their ‘bulk litigation’ approach, Medicomp does not publish its customer list.” But if you go to HIMSS, I bet he will tell you, and if it’s like last year, several vendors will be bragging on their use of MEDCIN and Quippe.

From Music Man: “Re: your frenetic schedule. Know that your efforts are appreciated by me, my team, and many others. You’ve liberated us from the pay-for-play, outdated, and hopelessly out of touch hegemony of the publications put out by HIMSS and others.” Not only was that a nice comment from a sponsor, it uses a word not often heard. I had to check the pronunciation and definition: hee JEM uh nee, meaning dominance. I’m pretty sure the old guard is still dominant, but we’re happy heel-nippers.

From Harold the Barrel: “Re: [vendor name omitted]. The head of its demo team resigned today. Also, rumor has it that [name omitted], a well-liked executive from before the acquisition, has resigned. Also, [name omitted], who was responsible for driving new acute care sales, has parted ways.” I’m leaving out specifics since I know from experience that the company doesn’t confirm personnel issues and I’m uncomfortable running the names of people without verification.

From Big Sigh: “Re: Cleveland Clinic. Despite its health technology savviness, it still orders tests without regard to best evidence.” The top five tests ordered there are of questionable value, says this article.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Withings. Since it’s the holiday season, TPD thought it would be nice to highlight a potential gift for someone you know. If that recipient has health issues, the gift of Withings may help start the improvement process. Withings is Wi-Fi enabled, can monitor blood pressures and other body parameters, and also has a baby monitor application.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I keep mentioning the Resource Center and Consulting RFI functions, so I finally got around to having banners made that link to them (to your left, below the Founding Sponsor ads). I decided to make it confusing by calling the Resource Center “Vendor Catalog” (actually, even though it’s inconsistent, I thought that label was more immediately understandable.) The Resource Center lets you find HIStalk sponsors by category, which is pretty cool, or you can look them up by name or do a full-text search. The Consulting RFI Blaster lets you fill out a really simple form and send it with a click to one, some, or all HIStalk sponsors who offer consulting services. CIO readers came up with the idea for both of these functions, asking for a way to make it easy for them to give sponsors a chance to earn their business.

It’s that time again: HISsies nominations are open. Name the best and worst vendors, choose the Industry Figure of the Year, and of course give thoughtful consideration of your nominee for Industry Figure in Whose Face You’d Most Like to Throw a Pie. The most-nominated winners advance to the final ballot in a couple of weeks, so don’t assume someone else will nominate your candidate. The winners (who, paradoxically, are losers in some categories) will be announced grandly at HIStalkapalooza in Lost Wages on Tuesday, February 21, amidst an embarrassment of jollity, eating, drinking, and edgy entertainment (by healthcare IT standards, anyway, where the 30-year-old third cousin of a former roadie for The Temptations with questionably legal rights to their name can cause near-pandemonium by covering their modest hits that charted decades before he was born). Even if you’re a button-down stiff who doesn’t find The Pie award funny, give some thought to the Lifetime Achievement and Industry Figure of the Year awards, which are serious. That’s athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush above doing his one-man HISSies awards show at HIMSS 2011 in Orlando, decked out in the beauty queen sash we provided that read, “I’m In the Cloud.”

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

VeriTeQ Acquisition Corp. signs a non-binding letter of intent to buy the non-core assets of PositiveID Corporation, including the company’s VeriChip and Health Link businesses that PositiveID has not marketed  for over two years.

Intel’s investment arm makes an investment in Pixeon, a Brazil-based PACS vendor.

Chicago healthcare technology accelerator Healthbox names its inaugural class of 10 startups that will receive seed capital, work space, and mentoring:

• CareHubs (healthcare enterprise social platform)
• CareWire (patient text message for appointments)
• Corengi (matches patients to clinical trials)
• The Coupon Doc (drug discounts)
• DermLink (teledermatology)
• Iconic Data (cloud-based patient list manager for physicians)
• PaJR (identifies readmission risk by self-reported patient status)
• PUSH Wellness (wellness incentives)
• SwipeSense (hand hygiene)
• UnitedPreference (prepaid preventative health cards)

Sales

Silverton Health (OR) contracts with Summit Healthcare for interface and connection tools to facilitate its migration to the Meditech 6.0 platform.

Adena Health Systems (OH) awards a five year contract to Precyse for transcription services and various aspects of HIM administration.

Crescent City Beacon Community (LA) selects Mirth Corporation’s interoperability products.

The Delaware HIN chooses ABILITY Network’s DIRECT Messaging tool for the secure exchange of health information between providers.

Baystate Health (MA) selects ATLAS to provide outreach and connectivity services to manage Baystate’s lab, radiology, and other ancillary orders and results requirements.

East Tennessee Health Information Network will use the Axolotl HIE platform from OptumInsight to connect regional providers, hospitals, labs, and pharmacies.

St. Vincent’s HealthCare (FL) selects Orion Health HIE and Clinical Portal.

Shannon Health (TX) chooses the Rothman Index for patient surveillance.

People

Harrington HealthCare System (MA) names Harry Lemieux as CIO. He was previously with Morton Hospital and Medical Center.

Craig Joseph MD, is named CMIO of Agnesian HealthCare (WI). He was previously with Epic.

Jim Milligan, previously with Antek Healthware, has joined Baltimore-based PM/EMR vendor Software Unlimited, Inc. as CEO.  Readers voted him as “Best Non-CEO Executive” in the 2006 HISsies when he was with QuadraMed.  

New Zealand businessman Andrew Ferrier, formerly CEO of the country’s dairy co-operative, invests in Orion Health and takes a seat on the company’s board.

Announcements and Implementations

Hoboken University Medical Center (NJ) gets a Meaningful Use check for its use of Medsphere’s OpenVista.

Ohio-based HealthSpot will market its Care4 Station primary care telemedicine kiosk to military facilities. It includes software for scheduling appointments and managing health records.

Government and Politics

MGMA calls for HHS to immediately issue an expanded six-month contingency plan for the Version 5010 transaction standards. MGMA reports that less than a third of its members have completed all the upgrades and testing required for the 5010 transition and is encouraging HHS to allow physician practices to continue submitting Version 4010 transactions

Technology

Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute will provide clinical expertise to WellPoint as the insurance company develops a commercial application using IBM’s Watson technology.

Other

The Apple App Store names AirStrip CARDIOLOGY the best US medical application for the iPhone.

A just-published article in Annals of Internal Medicine finds that users of the VA’s My HealthVet are overwhelmingly interested in sharing their PHR information with family members or other providers. Another article finds that primary care providers are mixed about sharing electronic progress notes, with a significant number expressing concern that increased patient worry might outweigh the benefit of improved communication and education. An editorial discusses the two articles, but mostly just asks a lot of cautious questions about what patients might do with the information in their records. 

Rumors say The Chicago Sun-Times will be sold to an investment group led by Michael Ferro, CEO of Merrick Ventures and chairman of Merge Healthcare.

A hospital CEO alerts colleagues that his Facebook friend requests are actually coming from an imposter who set up a Facebook page using his name and photos. The scammer has friended several hospital employees, with at least one of the requests saying, “I love you.” The CEO e-mailed Facebook for help and got the usual prompt, personal service: they changed something so that he can’t see the fake profile, even though everybody else still can.

The laptop of a terminally ill woman in Canada is stolen from her apartment, and along with it the only copies of the farewell message videos she had recorded for her five children under 18 to remember her by.

The New York Times runs an article taken from Micky Tripathi’s HIStalk Practice post describing the experience of his Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative in dealing with a lost laptop. In his own blog, he mentions his annoyance that the paper didn’t credit HIStalk Practice (since corrected, and notice that he still had preemptively slipped it into the photo they asked him for), the article implied that an increasing number of breach reports must mean that more breaches are occurring, and it suggests that electronic records are more susceptible to inappropriate exposure. Most importantly:

Finally, I found it a little ironic, that while the NYT article itself is an important step toward educating the public about the real issues surrounding the loss of electronic patient information, it glossed over the steps we’ve taken to educate the industry – like writing the post that lead the Times to the story in the first place. I think it was a bit of a missed opportunity to encourage organizations that have similar experiences to follow the path of full disclosure that we did.

Weird News Andy is doing his own end-of-year retrospective, targeting this “high-caliber story” from Italy. A man hit in the head by a bullet fired by a New Year’s reveler is lucky when it lodges in his nasal passage without causing serious damage. His luck got even better as he waited to see a doctor in the hospital: he sneezed the bullet out of his nostril, requiring only eye surgery before being discharged.

---

Sponsor Updates

• Providence Holy Family Hospital (WA) uses the Access e-Forms Repository to standardize surgery documentation.
• CBSMedTech joins MD-IT as a Medical Transcription Service Organization associate.
• Practice Fusion releases an infographic to share its record growth and accomplishments for 2011.
• API Healthcare offers a case study on MemorialCare Medical Centers’ (CA) successful integration of staffing, time and attendance, and payroll software.
• Concerro hosts a free January 24 Webcast  on how to avoid burnout in the healthcare management workplace.
• Vermont Information Technology Leaders partners with CapSite to assist its physician practices in adopting EHRs.
• Joel French, CEO of SCI Solutions, discusses four proven methods to improve hospital revenue in 2012.
• Gateway EDI releases a free webinar on how to effectively build a revenue management strategy.
• T-System publishes a white paper on the advantages and disadvantages of ICD-10 and the effects on EDs and hospitals.
• The American Hospital Association exclusively endorses Imprivata OneSign single sign-on.
• Orthopaedic Center of Southern Illinois selects SRS EHR for its nine providers.
• TeleTracking Technologies announces that its Capacity Management Suite is now iPad compatible.

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/19/11

From EpicNews: “Re: HCA. Any rumors about HCA signing with Epic?” I’ve mentioned here several times that HCA is putting up an Epic pilot as they choose between that option and upgrading Meditech. I haven’t heard anything more than that, although a couple of less well-placed rumors seem to think Epic is the likely choice (I’m guessing that’s due to Epic’s track record rather than any real insider knowledge.)

From CIO Lookin’: “Re: company that has a contracts database. One of your sponsors offers a database of vendor contracts with full details about pricing and terms. I don’t remember the company’s name. Can you help?” It’s CapSite. Very useful. It’s cool looking at the actual scan of the contracts but also having all the numbers broken out into a worksheet for easier review.

Aetna reveals at an investor conference Thursday that it acquired mobile app developer Healthagen “about a month and a half ago.” Aetna says it will add cost estimation functions for patients to its iTriage app. Aetna’s chairman, president, and CEO also told investors that the company will make the software development kit for the Medicity iNexx platform available free so that anyone can write apps for it.

Micky Tripathi’s breach article on HIStalk Practice has raised the interest of The New York Times, which will apparently be running a story about his experience in Monday’s business section.

My Time Capsule editorial from 2006 for this week: Embrace FDA Oversight If You Want Clinical — not Clerical — Systems.  A snippet:

It’s like Lucy working on that candy assembly line – reams of often irrelevant information are unceremoniously dumped faster and faster into the laps of physicians and nurses, who are expected to manually figure out what’s useful and then “process” it, often by entering even more on-screen information. Eventually, the administrivia buries someone who ought to be making patient care decisions instead of romancing a keyboard.

TPD has updated his list of iPhone apps.

A reminder for McKesson folks whose jobs will be eliminated in February: check the comments left on the past few posts since I invited companies who might have jobs for you to leave their contact information.

Another newspaper picks up on Newt Gingrich’s dichotomy on stimulus money, which he called a “pork-laden bill” that should be stopped even as he cheered the $19 billion it contained to pay providers to use EHRs sold by clients of his consulting firm, Center for Health Transformation. It mentions his participation in 2009’s EHR Stimulus Tour, where his company helped its clients Microsoft and Allscripts encourage providers to use federal incentives to buy their products. Gingrich also pressed his former House colleagues to block efforts to dismantle Stage Children’s Health Insurance Program while being paid by drug companies and insurers that would have lost profits, as well as urging them to support the expansion of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit, which benefited his center’s $200K per year founding member, drug maker Novo Nordisk. Novo listed their payment as a lobbying expense, although Gingrich says that’s not the case.

In related news, the former CEO and VP of the Center for Health Transformation and Gingrich Group join Leavitt Partners to create Health Intelligence Partners, a membership organization that will offer advice to healthcare executives. The founder and chairman of Leavitt Partners is Mike Leavitt, former HHS secretary and Utah governor. The president and CEO is his former HHS chief of staff and the managing director is Leavitt’s former HHS senior executive advisor.

Some readers are getting their HIStalk e-mail blasts long after I’ve sent them out. It’s a worsening problem, primarily affecting users of free e-mail services (Hotmail, Google, Yahoo) since those are apparently ramping up their inspection of incoming e-mails for spam. Those services are also slowing down my sending speed since my server has to wait on theirs and they have throttled back their connection rates. My web host has taken a couple of steps to hopefully reduce the scrutiny and therefore increase the delivery speed, but it’s somewhat out of my hands.

Here’s my latest pet peeve (I know you were anxiously awaiting it): publications that refer to doctorate holders as “Dr. John Smith.” It’s perfectly legitimate (but damned obnoxious) to introduce yourself socially as Dr. John Smith, but that form should not be used in a publication of any kind since it provides no clue to exactly what kind of doctorate is held (MD, non-research based EdD, mail order fake PhD, etc.) Honorary doctorate holders should never be addressed either as (a) Doctor, or (b) listing their unearned PhD. If you see a professional advertising their white-coated services as Dr. John Smith instead of stating their actual degree (it’s usually chiropractors who do that) or using bookended vanity titles on both ends of their names (such as Dr. John Smith, MD) run fast and far since at least in my experience, these folks are often seriously incompetent, insecure, ill-informed, or all of the above.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Macadamian, a global firm headquartered in Quebec that provides user interface design and software innovation services for clients that include HP, Cisco, and Adobe. They help product management executives turn ideas into market-ready products, including working with mobile apps. The company offers design services, usability consulting and testing, and user services (focus groups, task analysis, and field research). Healthcare IT vendors they’ve worked with include Sage (updated Intergy’s encounter note function), Cardinal Health (designed a touch-screen interface for a bedside patient information system), and Elsevier (developed a fresh user interface for the online Mosby’s Nursing Consult). The company offers a one-day EHR Usability Workshop to help vendors understand the implications of NIST’s usability draft and to develop a usability plan. Thanks to Macadamian for supporting HIStalk.

I’m getting an increasing number of requests from companies and organizations that want to get me involved in their projects in some way (conferences, education, contests, etc.) I almost always turn those down, and just to save future time all around, here are my standards, which I don’t think I’ve explicitly stated until now:

1. I have almost no time between work and HIStalk and I have no employees, so I will always turn down anything that would require much of my time.
2. I won’t do anything to compromise my ethics (endorse products, further a hidden agenda, or write anything that I don’t believe.)
3. The only item I offer is sponsorships. I don’t rent my e-mail list, run paid article placements, or shill my services for speaking or consulting (easy since I don’t do those things anyway).
4. I don’t entrust HIStalk’s reputation to anyone else, so I don’t get involved with activities unless I’m offered control over them (HIStalkpalooza being a good example.)
5. I’m not very motivated by money, so it’s easier to raise my interest for projects that will benefit HIStalk’s readers or that involve undeniably good deeds, education, industry enlightenment, or something offbeat and fun.

Only 22% of respondents reacted positively to Mckesson’s Better Health 2020 product realignment plan. New poll to your right: it’s the same as this one, only regarding Microsoft and GE forming a new HIT company.

Here are some products from HIStalk sponsors that topped out their respective category in the Best in KLAS report that just came out:

• 3M Codefinder (medical records coding)
• 3M APCfinder (medical records other)
• Allscripts Sunrise EPSi Decision Support (decision support – business)
• API Healthcare Time and Attendance (time and attendance)
• CareTech Solutions (IT outsourcing – extensive)
• Cerner CoPathPlus (anatomic pathology)
• Cerner Millennium PharmNet (pharmacy – community)
• Cerner (application hosting CIS/ERP/HIS)
• Clairvia (staff/nurse scheduling)
• Cumberland Consulting Group (planning and assessment)
• eClinicalWorks Electronic Health eXchange (private HIE)
• GE Healthcare Centricity Perioperative Anesthesia (anesthesia)
• GetWellNetwork PatientLife System (interactive patient system)
• Greenway Medical PrimeSuite Practice (practice management 1-10 physicians)
• Greenway Medical PrimeSuite Practice (practice management 11-75 physicians)
• Hayes Management Consulting (staff augmentation)
• Iatric Systems MobiLab (specimen collection barcoding)
• Impact Advisors (clinical implementation principal)
• iSirona DeviceConX (medical device integration system)
• McKesson Paragon (community HIS)
• McKesson Paragon Clinicals (acute care EMR – community)
• McKesson Paragon Financials (patient accounting and patient management – community)
• MedAptus Professional Intelligent Charge Capture (mobile data systems)
• MedAssets Contract Manager (revenue cycle – contract management)
• MedPlus ChartMaxx (document management and imaging)
• Merge Healthcare Hemo (cardiology hemodynamics)
• Nuance eScription (speech recognition)
• Nuance EXText (dictation and transcription)
• Orchestrate Healthcare (technical services)
• Passport BatchSource (patient access – eligibility checking)
• RelayHealth ePREMIS (revenue cycle – claims management)
• TeleTracking Capacity Management Suite (patient flow)
• Wolters Kluwer ProVatation MD (clinical procedure documentation)
• ZirMed (claims and clearinghouse services)

Ignis Systems releases EMR-Link ResultsAnywhere, which works with the company’s lab outreach solution to create patient-friendly lab results. It meets the new guidelines under which patients can access their own lab reports. Video here.

Weird News Andy says he has a nose for news with this article: Louisiana’s state health department warns consumers about the use of neti pots, a pitcher-like container (aka “nose bidet”) used to flush the sinuses with salty water to relieve nasal congestion. Two people have died from amoeba infection of the brain after apparently using tap water instead of the manufacturer-recommended distilled water. WNA also finds this Grinch-like story: a UK hospital cancels more than 80 surgeries, some of them involving cancer patients who had waited for months to get on the schedule, after the broad daylight theft of the copper cabling from the hospital’s backup electrical generator.

An interesting item came up at athenahealth’s stock analyst day this past Thursday. The company is trying to turn its athenaCoordinator product (from its acquisition of Proxsys in July 2011)  into a private HIE so that practices in a given geographic area can manage referrals through it, something that was hinted at in this request from an unnamed (but easily identified) vendor for an HHS ruling that was rendered on December 7. Athena would charge fees for use of its network, with a somewhat complex set of rules deciding which practice (referring or receiving) gets the bill. Athenahealth would reduce the monthly subscription cost of athenaClinicals, using the new referral transaction fees to offset its reduced revenue.

Meanwhile, it was a wild ride for ATHN shares this week, with guidance below expectations sending shares down 15%, but conflicting investment opinion pushing it partly back up (Leerink Swann and Oppenheimer upgraded, Piper Jaffray cut its price target, Morgan Stanley stuck with its Underweight rating.)  

Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), an orthopedic surgeon, says paper medical records are insane and practices should be using technology to communicate and to give patients access to their own records. He’s not a fan of HITECH, though:

Instead, what does the federal government do and think it’s getting high tech? It is defining every little thing, every box that the physician or nurse has to check every time you see a patient, in order to get an extra 1.5% of reimbursement from the government. Or, not getting dinged for an extra 1.5 or 2%. These are the Meaningful Use things.  Washington always has these great lines, right, these wonderful Meaningful Use standards. They’re neither meaningful nor useful and they’re so ridiculous that they actually incentivize pathologists to have to ask on every single patient that they care for how old they are, how many allergies they have, what medications they’re on, when was the last time they saw their primary care physician, on and on and on, including of a slide of a patient … the pathologist never actually sees that patient … or a corpse for an autopsy. This is no lie. The federal government wants the pathologist to determine whether or not a corpse has any allergies. How you feeling today, right? This is nonsense.

So what do you do with technology to make it so it actually works for healthcare? I think the proper role of government in the area of technology in healthcare is to say, OK, this is the platform we will use. This is the highway upon which we will ride. Everybody needs to have a system that allows it to speak to another system within these parameters. And not dictate what the docs are doing on a day-to-day basis for a given patient, because it doesn’t make any sense. It’s a waste of time. They can never, ever put in place the right standards for a bureaucrat to determine whether or not the doctor’s doing the right thing.

An MSNBC article says aides of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney arranged to buy the hard drives of their office computers for $65 as his term ended, thus eliminating the only record of official e-mails and details about his health insurance mandate since they had also had the servers replaced. Romney says the hard drives might have contained personal information, such as medical records and job applications, but reporters noted that government officials could use that excuse to keep every paper record from the public eye by just writing their Social Security number on the bottom of every page.

Here’s the latest HIS-tory from Vince, which contains the answer to this trivia question: what hospital programmer started a one-person consulting practice that eventually grew into a company of over 1,400 employees?

Zach Mortensen of CareFusion picks up on Barry’s comment on HIStalk about a possible change in Epic’s sales strategy, speculating that Epic may be willing to sign ambulatory-only contracts because they’ve hit capacity, run out of new customers, or fear low-cost ambulatory competitors. I’m not convinced Epic is changing strategy at all just because a couple of unnamed consultants speculated as such (Epic has always sold ambulatory-only deals), but if they are, I’d infer the opposite. Epic has not hit the predicted wall on scalability, customers keep giving its products industry-leading KLAS scores, nobody is de-installing or grumbling about value, and prospects keep signing up in droves despite high project costs. Each time Epic sells an ambulatory-only deal, it (a) deprives a competitor of a new sale, and (b) plants a flag that has a decent percentage chance of yielding an easy inpatient sale down the road. If anything, I suspect Epic is gaining confidence given the near absence of significant competition and is willing to ramp up sales, which by definition means they will be selling to smaller hospitals and practices. The company’s favorite statistics involve not the number of hospital customers it has, but rather the percentage of physicians and patients using its systems. I think they want that number to keep rising for reasons beyond financial, and any change in strategy can be attributed to unchallenged dominance rather than newfound desperation.

Analysts speculate that Research in Motion (BlackBerry) may be on its last legs, with bad earnings, grim forecasts, delayed new products, and a continue share price slide (down 77% year to date).

Allina Hospitals & Clinics is involved in an unusual but minor patient privacy breach. It sends an e-mail blast to 250,000 patients promoting Epic’s MyChart, but eight of those e-mails bounce back as undeliverable. Its mail software then tries to re-send the message to those eight recipients, but mistakenly blasts it back out to the 250,000 original recipients, only this time including the name, employer, and e-mail address of the eight patients (whited out above).

A California patient opens up her medical records to an investigative reporting agency to show how medical upcoding happened at Shasta Regional Medical Center (CA), which claimed that almost 20% of its patients suffered from the mostly third-world nutritional disease kwashiorkor. A DRG coding firm analyzed the records, which mentioned nothing about nutritional issues, and found that the correct payment was $4,708. Adding the kwashiorkor diagnosis raised the payment for the same stay to $11,463. Irrelevant but interesting: the patient’s daughter reviewed her mother’s bill and noticed charges that included $273 for a cloth sling and $22 for a 4×4 gauze.

Texas Health Resources is holding a Nursing Informatics Boot Camp April 28-29 in Arlington, TX to prepare nurses to take the ANCC certification exam.

The Alaska State Medical Association is providing DocBookMD to all physicians in the state to allow them to share information, including referrals, using mobile devices.

A jazz singer unhappy with her new nose job creates a Web site criticizing the work and credentials of her plastic surgeon, files complaints with the state medical board, and posts negative reviews on several Web sites. The doctor says his practice went from $4.5 million to two patients a week. He files a defamation lawsuit against the patient and is awarded $12 million. That’s a lot of jazz.

Every year about this time (when we remember it, anyway) we like to get in the Christmas spirit by asking our sponsors what holiday and charitable activities they’re involved with, preferably with photos since the usual half-hearted hospital door decorating contest just doesn’t stir up much Christmas spirit.  Here are a few.

DIVURGENT sponsored a Winter Wonderland event at Children’s Medical Center at Legacy (TX) last week for children hospitalized there. Every child got a teddy bear, shown being delivered above.

Hayes Management Consulting donated $1,000 worth of toys to Toys for Tots and sent an equal amount of money to the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

Surgical Information Systems held its Coins for Kids fundraiser contest, where each of its departments decorated a piggy bank to collect money (the above entry from sales and marketing was branded as Miss Barbie-Q). It has raised $6,000 so far for The Giving Tree, EduNations, and the Westlake Estate Home for Girls. Employees also donated time and supplies to stuff 50 stockings for the troops and collecting DVDs for Children’s Hospital of Atlanta. Employees also held coat and winter weather drives and continued their support for Cool Girls, Inc.

maxIT sponsored the Beads of Courage Beads in Space Tour to honor Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. It’s a non-profit that works with children experiencing serious illnesses to use beads to tell the story of challenges they have overcome during their treatment, such as spending a night in the hospital or undergoing chemotherapy treatments. The organization took its program on the road, stopping at 10 hospitals to show a display of beads that few on the space shuttle, with one design from each being incorporated into a real bead and the top ten to be featured in a book.

Software Testing Solutions donated $10,000 to Heifer International, a non-profit that focuses on long-term sustainability and self-reliance by purchasing llamas, sheep, goats, chickens, and honeybees and providing agricultural education for poverty-stricken communities around the world.

The business development team of World Wide Technology volunteered at Kingdom House, a neighborhood community center in downtown St. Louis, where they repaired tables and chairs, cleaned the food pantry, and reorganized the thrift store.

Aspen Advisors held a fun walk/run at its annual all-associate retreat in Fort Lauderdale, FL and raised $1,500 for Broward Health.

Quality IT Partners supported Habitat for Humanity, the American Heart Association, Special Olympics, the Scott Hamilton CARES Initiative, the American Cancer Society, the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, and local schools and food banks.

Sunquest held its annual fundraising barbeque this month, this time supporting Tucson-based Aviva Children’s Services, which provides support services to children under the care of Child Protective Services after experiencing abuse, neglect, or poverty. Employees received lunch in return for their donations of toys, gift cards, and money, raising $3,500 for Aviva’s Christmas giving program.

Cynergis Tek supported OPERATION Hug-A-Hero and its Holiday Hugs program. It provides children with dolls that contain an image of their deployed service member parent or other relative, providing a tangible, comforting connection with their loved one.

E-mail Mr. H.

News 12/16/11

Top News

KLAS publishes its 2011 Best in KLAS Awards for software and professional services. A few highlights:

• Epic is named the top overall software vendor and takes the #1 spot in seven categories, including acute care EMR and ambulatory EMR over 75 providers. Epic’s winning margins in these categories were significant. In acute care, Epic earned 90.3% satisfaction score compared to second place Cerner PowerChart at 78.5%. In the ambulatory EMR75+ provider segment, Epic scored 89.8% compared to eClinicalWorks’ 76.1%.
• If you compete against Epic on inpatient core clinicals and ancillaries, you’ve got your work cut out for you. Epic tops every application category except lab, including EMR (orders, results, documentation), pharmacy, radiology, and surgery, not to mention that Epic also is #1 in patient accounting and patient management. And, all of those products run on a single database and are fully integrated. It’s not shocking, then, that vendors are trying to beat Epic on price since that’s about the only competitive point that’s up for grabs.
• McKesson Paragon beat Cerner PowerChart by 10 percentage points in the community acute care EMR segment. Interestingly, Paragon was not ranked in the acute care segment because that’s not Paragon’s primary market (according to KLAS.) Paragon’s scores in the acute care segment would have been good enough for a fourth-place ranking, beating out Horizon and others.
• It’s pretty impressive to have 100% of your users (those participating in the survey, anyway) say they would buy your product again. Among those achieving that distinction: Epic (multiple categories), SCI Solutions (enterprise scheduling), Sunquest (community laboratory), Allscripts (patient accounting/patient management), Nuance (speech recognition), iMDsoft (anesthesia), GetWellNetwork (interactive patient systems), athenahealth and SRSsoft (ambulatory EMR), athenahealth and OptumInsight (practice management), and ZirMed (clearinghouse services.) Interestingly (to us, anyway), all but two of these companies are HIStalk sponsors.
• maxIT was ranked the top overall services firm, edging Hayes Management Consulting by 0.2 points.

Reader Comments

From DtwlnLax: “Re: iPhone users. Check this out – 25 GB of free cloud storage for iPhone users.” Sign up for Microsoft SkyDrive and its yours.

From Non Sequitur: “Re: holiday greetings! HIStalk provides a great service and somehow ties us all together into one common community in some way that I don’t entirely understand, but it works. You should enjoy knowing how common an occurrence it is around this setting (and in my former life as a vendor) to walk in on a conversation where someone is saying, ‘Did you read such and such in HIStalk this morning?’ or counters an argument in a meeting with, “There was an article on HIStalk recently where they addressed this, and the gist of it was…’ I really appreciate the news, the good articles, the inside story, and of course the delicious pithy comments! An e-mail from HIStalk or HIStalk Practice is like getting a little gift from my Secret Santa. Your industry insight amazes me and those of us in the trenches really, truly appreciate the effort and commitment! Happy Holidays to Mr. HIStalk, the long-suffering Mrs. H, and to the Intrepid Inga! My hero!” That was maybe the best e-mail anybody has ever sent us. Inga wanted me to run it unedited, but I argued that it was indeed great, but it seemed distastefully self-promoting to run it publicly instead of just basking in it privately. We compromised: I edited it to the version above to reduce the volume of the shameless tooting of our own horn (from 11 to 10, at least). Non Sequitur, who works for the hospital of one of the finest public universities in the country, made our day, needless to say. She’s sweet.

From All Hat No Cattle!: “Re: Partners Healthcare. Sent an internal memo stating they have decided to buy a new EHR for their facilities. Wanna bet whether it will be Epic or Siemens?” Glaser connection or not, Siemens wouldn’t seem to be a great choice given Soarian’s limited (non-existent?) track record with facilities their size and complexity, although they’ll surely get lots of promises of extra-special hand-holding that might sway their opinion from the obvious choice.

From Patti: “Re: ACO training in four hours. Check out this Craigslist ad for the Prognosis ACO. The ACO sales rep would get four hours of education on ACOs and ‘the sales pitch’ and would then be ready to recruit physicians to sign up, pushing their EHR as well. Reps get the equivalent of $30K per year plus $500 per enrolled doc, but their contract ends in March.” The big spiff for reps is that the company provides business cards. The Craigslist ad is here. There’s not much listed about who is behind the hard-selling ACO, but domain registrations seem to point to an Illinois oncologist.

From Larry: “Re: McKesson. They wanted to get rid of Paragon years ago, but worried about the viability of old products like Series and HealthQuest with ICD-10 coming and let Jim Pesce talk them into Paragon as a clinical solution. About the same time, Michael Simpson, now running the GE-Microsoft thing, swore he could get HERM done if they let him take it offshore like he had with his previous employers (check out Unisys and Novell to see how well that worked out.) Paragon was to be the hedge bet, to be killed off if Simpson was successful. Obviously he wasn’t.”

From Wet Willy: “Re: the new company of former Allscripts CTO John Gomez. I hear they are working on a search and analytics platform for healthcare, a hybrid of Google and Amalga done right with a huge emphasis on usability for outcomes-focused analytics. I also heard they are introducing an Allscripts-to-Epic migration tool and service that will allow a hospital to migrate Sunrise facilities, printer locations, patient records, medical history, formulary and other data and map it to Epic’s schema with 80% accuracy.” I asked John. His answer for #1: “It is true, we are working on that.” For #2: “We really can’t comment.” Above are his company’s guiding principles.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

This week on HIStalk Practice: athenahealth’s Jonathan Bush calls for greater transparency and accountability in the Meaningful Use program. The White House says the government has recovered more than $2.9 billion in healthcare fraud this year. HHS issues an advisory opinion that concludes a vendor would not be violating anti-kickback statutes if it facilitated payments between providers for the exchange of EHR data in a patient referral situation. The Chicago and Maine RECs say they’ve met their enrollment targets. If you can’t send me a pair of Christian Louboutins for Christmas (size 8), then the next best thing would be to faithfully read HIStalk Practice and sign up for e-mail updates.

A reader from a large hospital system in Shanghai, China is looking for a vendor to provide an outpatient PM/EMR/dental system that can then be expanded to the inpatient hospital. I don’t know of any US-based vendors that offer these capabilities with support for customers in China, but if yours can, I can forward your contact information. I was just happy to brag to Inga that one of our readers needed our help, and oh by the way, she’s in China.

Say hello to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Ingenious Med of Atlanta, GA, whose company name is one of my favorites. The physician-founded company has been around for more than 10 years, offering workflow-intelligent physician solutions for charge and data capture, coding and documentation, quality, reporting, and inter-staff communication. “Physician-friendly” means “mobile” these days, and Ingenious Med just this week won its third consecutive Mobile Star Award. The company has 9,000 users in 800 facilities that include Emory Healthcare, WakeMed, Kaiser Permanente, Texas Health Resources, Sentara, Geisinger, BJC, and a bunch of other high-profile providers. So why would a hospital be interested in solutions like these? Simple: hospitals spend tons of money subsidizing the P&L of their docs, eating the loss with the hopes of offsetting it via increased hospital business, while the company’s tools soften the blow by increasing collections by $30-40K per doc per year just by capturing information accurately (they’ll put it in writing, and show you their 97% customer renewal rate). Hospitals also like reduced exposure to RAC audits and insight into whether individual physicians seem to be over- or under-coding based on industry standards. Thanks to Ingenious Med for supporting HIStalk.

On Healthcare IT Jobs: McKesson STAR Analyst/Consultant, Cerner PathNet Consultant, EMR Application Specialist.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

athenahealth reaffirms its existing guidance for fiscal 2011, predicting earnings of $0.78 to 0.85 per share and revenue of $320-$325 million. Analysts had predicted $0.86 per share. The company also projected 2012 revenue of $410-430 million, in line with expectations, but non-GAAP net income of $0.85 to $0.97 per share vs. the Street’s anticipated $1.16 per share. The share price slipped over 15% Thursday to $49.04.

Spectrum Equity Investors and Trident Capital  take a majority position in HealthMEDX, LLC, a provider of long term and post-acute care technology. Former McKesson Technology Solutions President Pam Pure joins the company as CEO. Former Visicu SVP/CFO Vince Estrada was also named EVP of business development and CFO.

People

Orion Health appoints Andrew Ferrier, former CEO of Fonterra, to its board of directors.

CHIME elects Melinda Costin (VP, Baylor Health Care) and Randy McCleese (VP/CIO, St. Claire Regional Medical Center) as board trustees.

Diversinet Corp. names Hon Pak, MD as interim CEO, succeeding the retiring Albert Wahbe. Pak recently retired as CIO of the US Army Medical Department and had served as president of the American Telemedicine Association.

The New England chapter of HIMSS names Daniel J. Nigrin MD, MS as Clinician of the Year. He’s SVP/CIO and a pediatric endocrinologist at Children’s Hospital in Boston, not to mention a faithful HIStalk reader.

National eHealth Collaborative announces new officers: Kevin Hutchinson (My-Villages), Holt Anderson (NCHICA), Tom Fritz (Inland Northwest Health Services), Paul Uhrig (Surescripts), and Janet Corrigan (National Quality Forum).

Announcements and Implementations

Catholic Healthcare West’s north state division will deploy MobileMD to connect its hospitals to physician offices, clinics, and other hospitals.

St. Rita’s Medical Center (OH) goes live on Ohio’s statewide HIE with the transmission of clinical data to Greenway EHR customer Health Partners for Western Ohio.

Emerus Emergency Hospital (TX) goes live on the InsightCS revenue cycle solution of Stockell Healthcare Systems at six Texas locations.

Birmingham VA Medical Center (AL) implements GetWellNetwork’s interactive patient care solution in its tertiary care facility.

Government and Politics

A healthcare blog post in The Hill observes that Republican presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich isn’t talking about electronic medical records like he used to, possibly because conservative voters weren’t thrilled with his support for spending taxpayer money on technology for private businesses (some of which were his consulting firm’s customers.)

CMS will announce the first Medicare accountable care organizations on Monday, rumor has it.

North Carolina legislators criticize the state’s Department of Health and Human Services for allowing cost overruns for building a new Medicaid claims system. The final tally for the state’s $265 million contract with CSC is now pegged at $495 million. It will also take 22 months longer to complete the system and will cost $91 million more to keep the old system running in the mean time. One state representative called the project a “money pit” and added that if it were a private sector project, heads would have rolled, but when the agency’s IT head was asked to give herself a grade, she said she deserves an A. CSC originally got the bid when a 2004 contract with ACS was cancelled, costing the state $10 million to settle the resulting ACS lawsuit. When the CSC contract was signed in 2009, the current DHHS secretary was a lobbyist for CSC.

In the UK, vocal NPfIT critic MP Richard Bacon says BT and CSC are charging NHS trusts triple the market price for Cerner Millennium and iSoft Lorenzo.

Innovation and Research

Mount Sinai Medical Center (NY) will start a pilot project in January that will link the genomic sequence of patients to their electronic medical records, allowing physicians to incorporate the patient’s genetic characteristics when choosing drugs and dosages.

The safety institute of Johns Hopkins Medicine, led by Peter Pronovost MD, PhD, will collaborate with Lockheed Martin to create a new generation of hospital ICU. An example given of its potential work is a patient alarm prioritization system. According to Pronovost, “A hospital ICU contains 50 to 100 pieces of electronic equipment that may not communicate to one another nor work together effectively. When an airline needs a new plane, they don’t individually select the controls systems, seats and other components, and then try to build it themselves.”

Technology

Fujifilm Medical Systems announces the availability of Synapse Financials, a billing solution that integrates with Fujifilm’s Synapse RIS platform.

Axial’s Care Transition Suite wins first place in the "Ensuring Safe Transitions from Hospital to Home" initiative, sponsored by Health 2.0 and HHS’s Partnership for Patients Initiative.

Other

Wes Wright, CTO of Seattle Children’s Hospital (WA) says its deployment of 2,600 Wyse zero client devices for Citrix will save $400,000 per year in power consumption.

MoneyWatch reports the top-compensated US CEOs for 2010, with McKesson’s John Hammergren in the #1 spot with $145 million (5,370 times the median US income.) Two other healthcare CEOs made the Top 10: Joel Gemunder of Omnicare ($98 million) and Ronald Williams of Aetna ($58 million.) Another site says Hammergren’s payday will get a lot bigger if McKesson changes ownership at some point — his contract calls for him to be paid $469 million.

Making sure to place this item for maximal ironic effect, soon-to-be-displaced McKesson employees can check the comments left on my earlier post, where some vendors who are looking for Horizon or other talent have posted their contact information (I entered a few myself from information e-mailed to me).

An interesting article in The New York Times ponders whether clinicians are becoming distracted by their growing arsenal of smart phones, tablets, and other gadgetry. It cites a research article that asked technicians who monitor heart bypass machines during surgery whether they used their electronic devices right in the OR, with 55% saying they had talked on their cell phone and 50% admitting they had texted. Funny: a Stanford doctor and author calls the attention-demanding screens “the iPatient,” and says the iPatient is getting wonderful care. In a sobering example, a patient was left partly paralyzed after surgery, with evidence presented in the ensuing malpractice lawsuit documenting that the neurosurgeon had made at least 10 personal calls from a wireless headset during the surgery.

A Boston Globe article covering a visit by the head of HHS’s HIPAA enforcement organization, Office for Civil Rights (which it mislabels as Office of Civil Rights), cites Micky Tripathi’s breach article on HIStalk Practice. It’s also being reprinted in a Canadian information security journal after they requested his permission and he graciously deferred to us.

Sponsor Updates

• Jeffrey DiLisi MD, associate VP of medical affairs at Virginia Hospital Center (VA), will discuss motivating physicians to improve documentation during The Advisory Board Company’s December 16 web conference.
• MD-IT releases a case study on the ability of neurologist Gordon M. White, MD (TX) to maintain productivity while qualifying for the EMR incentive program.
• Nuance joins 11 other organizations as a strategic partner with the Center for Connected Medicine.
• Billian’s HealthDATA announces an alliance with  HealthLink Dimensions to add hospital-affiliated physician data to Billian’s existing offerings.
• Nuance releases findings of a managing paper records in a medical practice.
• Ignis Systems releases its EMR-Link Maintenance Training webinar schedule.
• Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board (EU) announces that over 15,500 active patients have adopted its Orion Health clinical portal.
• Practice Fusion shares its top seven healthcare IT predictions for 2012.
• The Micromedex mobile drug information app from Thomson Reuters earns a spot on the WIRED App Guide to 400 Essential Apps.
• Covisint works with Intermountain Healthcare (UT) to earn nearly $1 million in PQRS incentives.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

Medicare announces that starting in January, recovery audit contractors (the dreaded RAC auditors) will offer a new service to amuse and delight physicians: prepayment reviews. The audits will be piloted in states with a relatively high percentage of fraudulent and inaccurate submissions, as well as states with a high percentage of short hospital stays. Another demonstration project will require prepayment review for motorized wheelchairs and scooters, with a goal of requiring prior authorization within the next year.

It is unclear why Medicare chose to use the RACs to do this instead of the Medicare Administrative Contractors that actually process the claims. I do like the idea of looking at the process for payments covering powered mobility devices. A couple of vendors are entirely too pushy and work very hard to convince patients that every Medicare beneficiary deserves a scooter “at absolutely no out of pocket cost” because they’re not cheap and all of us are paying for them.

CMS plans to offer up to $1 billion in grants for healthcare innovations. The Health Care Innovation Challenge program targets public-private partnerships, multi-payer groups, and groups caring for patients with complex health care needs. Administered by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI – ooh, a new acronym!), the grants stem from $10 billion in funding from recent health reform legislation. Proposed projects have to be rapidly deployable (less than six months) and able to be replicated, expanded, and sustained. I’m interested to hear from anyone who is considering an application. Letters of intent are due Monday and applications are due January 27, so if you want to wait until after the deadline so no one steals your ideas, I understand. The minimum award is $1 million, so get those keyboards moving.

Based on the content so far, I might as well make this the “all CMS, all the time” column this week. The House of Representatives passes a bill this week to postpone the scheduled 27% pay cut for Medicare physicians that is only a few days away. However, it is not expected that the Senate will follow, and even if they do, President Obama is expected to veto it.

HIMSS will open the process to solicit volunteers for its 2013-14 committees on January 2. Individual members and corporate members who are not already in HIMSS leadership positions are eligible as long as they have maintained membership for the past 12 consecutive months. Watch the Committees home page for more information.

We talked about flu vaccines recently, but right now there’s an outbreak of pertussis (whooping cough) in Chicago and surrounding counties. Vaccines are effective and are now recommended for adults as well as for children.

I mentioned last week that I had something big planned. Since our last get-together was at HIMSS11, I thought it was time that I paid my BFF Inga a visit. Although I frantically searched the racks at Nordstrom looking for something appropriate to wear, I suspected my efforts would be fruitless because I could never keep up with Inga. Seeing her walk through the door having paired these with jeans for a casual dinner, I knew I was right.

So what do the sassy ladies of HIStalk discuss over drinks? The enigma that is Mr. H, recent events at McKesson, who has the best date for HIStalkapalooza, and potential beauty queen sashes. We also discussed our no-longer-secret project. As Inga mentioned, you’ll want to make sure you include a pair of new or gently used shoes for our charity event when you make your packing list. (Sorry, no stiletto dash for those of you who suspected that’s what we were up to. I don’t want to be called upon to treat any orthopedic injuries while I’m enjoying the evening.)

It was nice to actually get together since we typically connect via e-mail and the occasional text message. I usually have at least one good physician war story for Inga, and this time she topped me with the writeup of a new book: Stuck Up! You’ll have to read for yourself what it’s about. Let me just say that it’s wackier than anything even Weird News Andy would send.

Contacts

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

News 12/14/11

Top News

Continuous vital signs monitoring vendor Sotera Wireless receives investment funds and a commercial agreement from Cerner as part of its just-completed $12.2 million Series D financing round.

Reader Comments

From Insider: “ONC appointment. The ONC names Baylor Health Care System CIO David Muntz as principal deputy.” Insider forwarded us an e-mail from Farzad Mostashari announcing Muntz’s new role, which includes the handling of ONC’s day-to-day operations, staff management, and the overseeing of four offices within the ONC (Programs and Policy; Operations; Economic Analysis, Evaluation, and Modeling; and Chief Scientist.) He’s presumably taking a admirably large pay cut from the $680K Baylor reported paying him in its most recent federal filings.

From Jarritos: “Re: HIStalk. I got hooked a year ago after my VP suggested I read it. I work for a McKesson Horizon shop and read your items first thing last Friday morning and let my manager know. The CIO sent an update later saying we would be getting more information and you guys would be running an interview later that afternoon. I think it’s extremely impressive that in your spare time you’ve managed to get this kind of clout. I’m not aware of another interview anywhere else and I appreciate the information.” Thanks. It was a lost Friday evening as I rushed home from the hospital to do the interview, transcribe it, and post it. I knew readers were looking for answers and McKesson had contacted me to help get them out via the interview, so I didn’t want to dawdle. HIStalk received 13,718 visits from Friday through Monday, which is maybe 40% higher than the week before, so I assume the interview was the draw. I don’t really care about clout (if there’s such thing as anonymous clout), but having quite a few readers does give me some leverage to obtain information on their behalf. I appreciate McKesson and Dave Souerwine for reaching out.

With regard to the interviews, Mrs. HIStalk has gotten to the point that when I tell her I have to delay dinner to chat with a high-profile executive, she just rolls her eyes a little and buries herself in the newspaper as I head off upstairs with freshly dashed self-importance. Somehow I think I live a bit lower on the totem pole than the folks I interview, though, given that I took Mrs. H out Friday evening after I’d finished with Dave to the sit-down restaurant we frequent most often (Mexican) and spent considerably less than $20 for two entrees, a couple of margaritas, and a shared dessert. You can have Ruth’s Chris or expensive sushi places –  I love sitting under an inflated Corona palm tree, watching soccer on the TV, slathering the El Yucateco habanero hot sauce onto my favorite carnitas, and admiring the shy cuteness and solid work ethic of the non-English speaking waitresses. 

From Ukelele: “Re: McKesson. The corporate web site still has done nothing to update itself with all the ‘news,’ Paragon’s page still reflects a ‘community hospital’ solution, and the HERM page still sits out there advertised as the be-all, end-all revenue management system. Another sign, perhaps, of the corporation’s complete lack of interest or confidence in this business? I was surprised so few readers commented on the interview, but perhaps that’s a sign that there’s few who care any more. It will be interesting to see how the board of InSight reacts to the news.”

From DCHealth: “Re: EMRs. How many providers have adopted other than Kaiser and those docs getting help from the RECs? Has growth really increased after HITECH? Seems about the same to me.” The adoption numbers are going up slowly, but I’m interested to see what happens to the trend as HITECH realities hit. Will adoption keep climbing to 100% because EMRs are the new standard, or will they go back down the slope as providers give up and accept a little less money in order to keep their productivity?

From Disappointed Techie: “RE: FDA recall.” Draeger Medical issues a Class I recall of its Infinity M540 system used to monitor vital signs, manage patient alarms, review diagnostic images, and access patient records. A bug in its drug calculation programming can cause it to suggest a tenfold overdose, with a conclusion that, “This product may cause serious adverse health consequences, including death.” The only good news is that the only customer was Rush University Medical Center (IL) and they used it for only three months.

From Barry: “Re: Epic. A market research report suggests that Epic is backing off its push for inpatient installations and going with an ambulatory-only sales approach to plant the seed for future inpatient sales.” That was reported by two consultants quoted in the report, with an additional consultant saying that Epic is getting some pushback from customers who question whether they’re getting their money’s worth. Leave a comment with your thoughts.

From Yolanda: “Re: commercial hospital IT databases used by HIT vendors. There are two, both expensive and swimming in self-reported hospital information, but so poorly designed that it’s a wonder customers don’t demand a refund. They are as unintuitive as EMR interfaces, both of them supported by product managers who will provide training and do user searches themselves for those who can’t figure it out. They are shockingly poor at how they deliver otherwise good information. A Seattle organization called DiscoverOrg has researchers who personally call IT organizations to understand their structure and contact information, but they cover only about 1,000 US hospitals.”

From Post Toasty: “Re: hosted EHRs. A company with tools that map practice EHR data to create a limited data research set is running into problems with certain vendors. The company has signed business associate and data use agreements with its physician practices, but some vendors won’t allow the practices to access their own EHR data. My take: check your contract, but only an ultra-lame vendor (i.e. most of them) would get in the way.” If you have examples of a contract or company communication that prohibits a practice from getting at its own data, send it over so we can collectively appreciate it.

From 143: “Re: Epic. Considering a full ban of cell phone use by employees who are driving while on the clock.” Unverified, but even making the practice illegal doesn’t seem to make much of a difference where idiots do everything from shaving to eating a plate of spaghetti while rocketing down the highway with minimal attentiveness. Banning would provide only one benefit that I can see given the difficulty in enforcement: if an Epic employee rear-ends someone while yakking on their cell phone, the company might avoid legal liability by whipping out the policy.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Dr. Jayne and I had a chance to share a cocktail recently. The conversation covered a wide variety of topics, including of course HIT, Mr. H, and shoes. I can’t share our insights on Mr. H, but I can say that we are hoping to sponsor a shoe-related charity event during HIMSS. If all works out as planned, you’ll want to leave room in your suitcase to bring a pair of gently used shoes to Vegas. Stay tuned.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Telemonitoring IT provider MedAdherence secures a $150,000 pre-seed financing commitment from Connecticut Innovations, a quasi-public Connecticut state authority responsible for technology-based economic development.

Valant Medical Solutions, a Seattle-based startup that offers a web-based EMR for psychiatrists, raises $940K, increasing its total to almost $2 million. The company has 23 employees and 800 provider users.

Quality Systems announces that it has acquired EDI vendor ViaTrack, reported here on November 28.

Sales

Tidewell Hospice (FL) selects Allscripts Homecare and EPSi financial management solutions for its 8,000+ patients.

SA Health, the public health system of South Australia, will deploy Allscripts Sunrise Enterprise.

People

Brigham and Women’s Hospital (MA) CIO Sue Schade wins CIO of the Year honors from the New England chapter of HIMSS.

Announcements and Implementations

Dossia announces that six Fortune 500 employers have implemented its Dossia Health Management System.

Brookhaven Memorial Hospital Medical Center (NY) completes its integration of Micromedex CareNotes into its Siemens Soarian Clinicals platform.

St. Francis Hospital and Health Services in Maryville (MO) will go live on Epic on March 31, 2012.

Medicity launches its first iNexx payer app, Aetna Connect, for managing provider communications with Aetna.

HHS and Emdeon announce an initiative to donate EHR software and services to physicians in small practices in underserved communities in New Jersey. 

Eight New Jersey hospitals will go live on the Health-e-cITi-NJ HIE later this month, one of four HIEs in the state that received federal funding.

A private company, HIE Networks, announces the creation of the statewide Florida Health Data Network, with endorsements from the Florida Hospital Association and Florida Medical Association. The company was created after the involvement of its founders in developing the Big Bend RHIO.

An Ohio newspaper covers what local hospitals are spending on their clinical systems and/or how much HITECH money they hope to reap as a result. Summa spent $33 million and its Akron City and St. Thomas hospitals received $5.1 million in incentives. Akron General is spending $16.8 million and hoping to get $13-14 million. Aultman Hospital expects to receive $900,000.

Innovation and Research

Early results from a three-year, 6,200 patient study finds that telehealth monitoring reduced mortality rates 45%. The NHS-sponsored demonstration project also found that telehealth interventions reduced ER visits, admissions, and patient days.

A Florida doctor develops an iPad app that can program implanted cardiac devices, such as pacemakers and defibrillators, remotely and in real time, eliminating the need to have a manufacturer’s representative and a programmer on site.

Technology

CPSI announces that the CPSI System has migrated to a new system platform featuring a Linux operating system, an open source SQL-compliant database, Java, and a cross-platform user interface. The company also introduces a new logo that “is a reflection of both the continual advancement in system technology reflective of the CPSI EMR system and the Company’s broadened identity as a leading services provider to rural and community hospitals.” All that from a little logo.

Analysts speculate that the next generation of Apple’s iPad will reach the market sometime between February and April, raising the likelihood that for the second year in a row, you could win one at HIMSS that’s obsolete almost before you get home with it.

Kony Solutions launches KonyOne, a mobile platform developer solution that can create native and mobile web applications for all seven smart phone operating systems, tablets, kiosks, and desktops from a single application definition.

Other

Open Health Tools partners with Georgia Institute of Technology on an initiative to accelerate the use of HIT to benefit benefits and providers. Former National Coordinator Robert Kolodner MD, chief informatics officer at Open Health Tools, will serve as senior strategic advisor.

BCBS of Rhode Island reports that in a three-year pilot program, the use of EHRs reduced health costs 17-33% and improved quality outcomes.

Revenue cycle vendor SPi Healthcare expands its Greensboro, NC facility and says it will create 75 new jobs in the region over the next two years.

The Ohio Health Information Partnership announces that Ohio is the first state in the nation to send and receive health information across state lines using the Direct system. Physicians in Lima, OH and Biloxi, MS  shared the data across CliniSync, Ohio’s statewide HIE. Not to be picky, but why does Ohio get bragging rights for being first and not Mississippi?

John Bardis, chairman, president, and CEO of MedAssets and founder of Hire Heroes USA, writes an editorial urging his fellow CEOS to develop hiring programs for veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq:

As a private sector CEO, I come from and owe my opportunities to two generations of Americans who served proudly; one as a naturalized citizen. They sacrificed greatly for the freedoms that we enjoy – as have so many service members – leaving me with the enduring belief that our veterans deserve to return home to fewer challenges than the ones they faced on the battlefield. As CEOs and corporate executives, it’s our responsibility to do all we can to support those brave men and women when they return home by helping them transition into jobs where they can support themselves and their families, enjoying this country’s freedoms like the rest of us.

Eight former executives of Siemens are charged by the US government with conspiring to bribe Argentine officials with $100 million to secure a $1 billion national identity card program that was later scrapped. One of those charged was a former member of the central executive committee of Munich-based Siemens AG, marking the first time a board member of a Fortune Global 50 company has been charged under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The SEC also filed a civil case against seven of the defendants. Siemens previously paid $1.6 billion to resolve earlier bribery charges. 

McKesson’s WARN act filing for its Horizon-related layoffs of 174 Alpharetta-based employees says the effective date for 158 employees is Friday, February 10, 2012. Jobs affected: software architect, business systems analyst, clinical healthcare content analyst, database administrator, project manager, QA analyst, software engineer, systems manager, and technical writer. I will temporarily waive my ban against leaving comments containing company information for those in a position to hire some of these folks, preferably located in the Atlanta area. Leave a comment with what kind of jobs you have and how they can get in touch.

A Boston Globe report finds that ventilator warning alarms have been responsible for 119 deaths nationally in both hospitals and patient homes since 2005, with patients dying because alarms were not functioning, unheard, or ignored.

Patients and friends of an Ohio doctor who still sees patients and makes house calls at age 100 celebrate his birthday in his “computer-free” office.

A CNN report covers the use by a California hospital of NICVIEW, a password-protected webcam system that lets parents see their NICU babies in real-time streaming from any desktop or mobile device.

The CEO of Mercy Health System of Janesville, WI defends his most recent annual compensation of $3.6 million, well off the $14.4 million the system paid him in 2002. “My salary isn’t going to affect your healthcare cost,” he told reporters.

Sponsor Updates

• The Orthopaedic Group (AL) selects the SRS EHR for its 36 providers.
• Ingenious Med wins its third straight Mobile Star Award in the healthcare category for outstanding mobile services and applications.
• Wolters Kluwer Health announces that its UpToDate Mobile for iPhone clinical knowledge system is a finalist for the Software & Industry Information Association’s 2012 CODiE Awards for excellence in the software and digital content industries.
• For the third consecutive year, MEDecision is named as one of the 100 Best Places to Work in Pennsylvania.
• Passport Health Communications selects MagneSafe Security Architecture and MagnePrint to enhance its eCashiering patient processing solution.
• e-MDs announces that two providers with Southwest Family Physicians are among the first to attest for Meaningful Use in Nebraska.
• ICA Informatics announces plans to participate in the Direct Project’s December 2011 Virtual Connect-A-Thon. The company also  releases a white paper discussing how technology can enable transitions of care.
• Navix and UltraLinq Healthcare Solutions partner to offer UtraLinq’s exam management solutions to clients using Navix lab services.
• Derby NHS Foundation Trust (UK) selects the Carefx solution suite as its patient portal solution.
• MedAssets assists the Texas Purchasing Coalition in generating $54 million in sustainable supply spend costs.
• Aspen Advisors releases a case study covering the Cardiovascular Information System readiness assessment it performed for Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/12/11

From Dr. Boogie: “Re: Gwinnett Medical Center (GA). Goes on total patient diversion due to a computer virus. Physician portals impacted, hospital systems shut down. News media says no patients were impacted. Using old fashioned paper until systems can be resurrected.” Verified. They’re using paper and runners, with campuses in Lawrenceville and Duluth still on trauma diversion this weekend after the virus was discovered Wednesday, meaning ambulances are being sent elsewhere. They hope to have the problem fixed by Monday. For the nerds among us, they were hit with SillyFDC, a worm that spreads on removable or mapped drives that have Autorun turned on. It supposedly spreads without doing harm, but having seen similar worms take down hospitals myself, I’d bet it generated so much TCP/IP traffic that the network bogged down, requiring field support techs to touch every PC with network nodes isolated to prevent the virus from propagating right back from another unfixed PC. One thing you learn: antivirus software on individual PCs can tell you if they are infected, but they don’t tell you at a network level which PCs are spreading it, so you end up looking for network traffic patterns and isolating devices one at a time. Thus, A/V tools are of limited benefit, especially if users just ignore their messages like they usually do.

From CC: “Re: Validus handheld e-prescribing tool. Has been acquired, but they won’t say by whom. An employee told me and said it was hoped the news would not appear in HIStalk, but loyalty to HIStalk got the better of me.” I assume that’s Validus Medical Systems, quietly acquired by Imprivata in July 2011. They offered a mobile order entry app for hospital physicians that Imprivata either isn’t marketing or hasn’t repackaged yet since I see no mention on Imprivata’s site. We can take joint responsibility for disappointing the folks who hoped not to see the news here.

From Petaler Dan: “Re: Quebec’s medical error registry. Here’s news on how hospital mortality rates have fallen, although it doesn’t cover Quebec. And here’s Montreal coverage on the report and how mortality rates have decreased significantly — scroll toward the end for quotes on surgical checklist implementation, which is reassuring.”

From McKesson Horizon Client CIO: “Re: McKesson. To employees affected by this latest turn of events, you worked very hard over the last several years and your dedication to the customer base did not go unnoticed. You are collateral damage from mismanagement and lack of a principled leadership. For the patients you helped me and my team serve, thank you and best of luck.”

From Uggams: “Re: GE and Microsoft. This is a Microsoft healthcare surrender flag. Somehow they convinced GE to help them bury the bodies. Michael Simpson’s only relevant experience was running Horizon Clinicals for McKesson, ironically mercy-killed the same day he was announced as CEO of the new GE-Microsoft home for dying products. Sentillion had solid, well accepted products, but was especially aggrieved by the meddling of its Microsoft masters, and now they are cast aside with products and vague ideas that nobody cares about.” That’s the biggest disappointment to me. Microsoft had insinuated that Sentillion’s products would find mainstream Microsoft use. Now it’s relegated to the group that includes some GE-Intermountain screwing around that never seems to provide any real, marketable products (are those Intermountain-led Carecast enhancements just about done?) and some GE products that, to be honest, I’ve barely heard of. I don’t think anybody really believes that Microsoft is growing its healthcare business rather than retreating from it, so that leaves GE’s track record as a nimble innovator to make something happen. But I’m going to stop being cynical and give them six months to show some progress, with my hopes that they really can do it. We need some new stuff to talk about since Epic and Meaningful Use are getting repetitive.

From Ex-Tele: “Re: TeleTracking. Anthony Sanzo, former CEO of AHERF, has stepped down as CEO of TeleTracking.” Verified by a company spokesperson. A search is underway for his replacement. The interim CEO is Michael Zamagias (above), board chair of the company.

From Booth Monkey: “Re: Meditech exhibiting at HIMSS. Something must have happened to get them back in. As a silver corporate HIMSS sponsor with mega-sponsor points, those of us who worked our way to the top of the exhibit booth selection process would start over by dropping out, so look for them back on the corner wall by the bathrooms. So it is with those who dare to thumb their nose at HIMSS, as it was in the beginning, is now, and forever shall be, HIMSS without end.”

Listening: I was in the mood for some slow-dance kind of doo-wop, one of my favorite musical forms even though it was popular only before my time and most of the original performers are dead now. Among my favorites: The Passions, Earl Lewis & The Channels, The Schoolboys, The Skyliners, The Excellents, and The Shields. I always plan to listen to just one song and end up playing them all afternoon. It’s a triumphant and truly American form of vocalizing, drawing from gospel and rhythm and blues and performed by untrained, uneducated, largely forgotten blue-collar part-timers crossing every ethnic and racial line who were working for nothing because record companies were robbing them blind (for many of the records, the performers are anonymous because nobody at the studio cared enough to even write down their names.) I defy you to listen to The Closer You Are, Just to Be With You, or  My True Story without joining in with your own background harmonies.

Thanks to the following sponsors (new and renewing) that supported HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, and HIStalk Mobile in November. Click a logo for more information.

We can learn two two facts from my last poll:  (a) around half of respondents went to the most recent HIMSS conference, and (b) about the same percentage will attend the next one. Not exactly earth-shattering news. New poll to your right: what do you think about McKesson’s Better Health 2020 plan as described by MPT President Dave Souerwine in my Friday interview? The great thing about having a lot of well-informed readers is that companies can get immediate and broad feedback that’s not available anywhere other than HIStalk, so here’s your chance to provide it (and feel free to leave comments on either the interview or the poll if you’d care to elaborate).

I don’t want to get into the placement business for displaced McKessonites who are among the announced 174 employees who may lose their jobs, but another company has already e-mailed me looking for high-level marketing people from there. E-mail me.

Speaking of HIMSS, HIStalkapalooza is on: Tuesday, February 21 at FIRST Food & Bar at The Palazzo in Las Vegas. I’ll have more later, including opening up of the invitation list sometime after New Year’s. Our soon-to-be-named sponsor is doing a great job with the planning and has bought the place out. We’re going for a fun but networking-friendly vibe. The stage show will include our King and Queen contests with Lindsay and Greg again; people running around in beauty queen sashes for no apparent reason; some kind of contest or charity fundraiser that Inga and Dr. Jayne are cooking up to which I’m not really privy (I suspect shoe-related activities, which is great for the guys since the ladies come dressed to kill); and of course the HISsies awards. Put it on your calendar and watch for the announcement in a few weeks.

My Time Capsule editorial this week from five years ago: Sounds Like Somebody’s Industry Has a Case of the Mondays. “Nobody seems to be innovating anything. Everybody claims big R&D spending, but the products are starting to all look alike, kind of a no-nonsense 1980s Soviet Union version of software by committee. Or it could be their customers, blaming everyone except themselves for poor ROI.”

Here’s a scoop from our official friends at Cerner: the company (like Meditech) will be exhibiting at the upcoming HIMSS conference after sitting out for a few years. I’ll be talking more with them soon to get the story. They said customers wanted to see them there, which doesn’t surprise me.

Quest’s Care360 EHR is named the top standalone e-prescribing platform by Black Book Rankings. Above is a demo of its iPad version, just because I happened to see it on YouTube and it’s new.

Some of my favorite “why doesn’t every vendor offer this” tools are plain old Google-like EMR search tools that physicians can use to get quick answers from electronic medical records. Mass General goes one step further with QPID, a semantically driven variant that can perform searches by concept and not just keyword.

Here’s an example of why you don’t want your company to go public: analysts warn Scottish CDM software vendor Craneware that if it doesn’t want to see its stock price drop, it needs to announce a big sale in the next three weeks. So is the message to give whatever ridiculous discount is required to convince a hesitant prospect to sign on the line which is dotted? Is that end-of-period timing so important that signing a money-losing contract quickly is still a good idea?

Here’s Vince’s latest HIS-tory, this time on boutique consulting firms. Dorenfest, Kennedy, Johnson, Weil, Levine … fascinating stuff. He names some 1985-era individual consultants and admits to never having heard of any of them – have you? It puts your own legacy and mortality in perspective when looking at names from just 25 years ago and wondering how their lives turned out, where they are today, and how their work fits against the backdrop of history.

Weird News Andy urges Hollywood to pay particular attention to this article since both smoking and breast enhancements are common there, fearing that the result during a strong wind could be “a nip in the air.” A plastic surgeon warns breast augmentation surgery patients to avoid smoking afterward since nicotine and carbon dioxide can disrupt blood flow and can “cause her nipples to turn black and fall off.” WNA also likes this story, even though he worries that patients might be admitted as brunettes and discharged as blondes: a new and promising method of room disinfection involves pumping ozone and hydrogen peroxide into a room to sterilize everything in it.

Inga asked our sponsors to share any charitable works, celebrations, or other notable holiday-related events going on at their places. Here’s one to get us started: BridgeHead Software and its 25 US employees donated $1,000 to Youth Villages Holiday Heroes, which matches the wish lists of disadvantaged children with sponsors who provide them. Kudos to them.

Employees of chiropractor PM/EMR vendor Redpine Healthcare Technology of Panama City, FL ask county commissioners to help them get overdue paychecks. The company’s CEO says he’s trying to find an investor, but employees were last seen packing up their cubes and nobody’s answering the phones. The county says it’s going after the $350K it gave the company to relocate there, which came with a guarantee the company would add at least 150 jobs over three years. The county has a lien on the software.

Struggling New River Behavioral HealthCare (NC), behind on payments to the guy who wrote some Meaningful Use enhancements for its eNotes mental health records system, faces loss of access to all of its records if it can’t pay up quickly.

Here’s one of the dumber articles that attempts to explain the Microsoft-GE JV. The article itself is obviously a typical no-value-added rewriting of the press release to make it sound like authoritative reporting, but how about that headline?

E-mail Mr. H.

News 12/9/11

Top News

Microsoft and GE announce the formation of a joint venture company that will take over most of the people and assets of the Microsoft Health Solutions Group along with specific GE Healthcare products. See the HIStalk story from early Thursday, which includes insights from interviews with the key executives involved.

Reader Comments

From Curious Reader: “Re: Black Book Rankings. I am confused about Black Book’s results. Do they break out their ratings by hospital size? CPSI usually sells to community hospitals, not the same ones Epic sells to. I don’t know how those are comparable. How is Black Book even defining and EMR? Picis is a surgery and anesthesia vendor — they don’t really have an EMR system.” This report includes multiple categories including under 100-bed hospitals, community hospitals, large hospitals, health systems, and EDs. Per Black Book’s website, the rankings are based on survey results that cover 18 performance areas. To make the Top 20 list, vendors must have at least 10 unique clients participate. Results for these ratings were based on 12,075 validated responses. There is no mention on how an EMR is defined, though it may be included in the full report. In you need to further satisfy your curiosity, you can purchase a report for $3,250, but note it will only include details on a single category and not all the inpatient EHR categories.

From EMR Wannabe: “Re: GE and Microsoft. From trying to work with it, I know that Amalga UIS is an overly complicated hairball. I wasn’t sure about Qualibria, although last year when I asked a GE team how the knowledge project with Intermountain Health was going, they just broke into laughter and said, ‘depends who you ask.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m asking you,’ to which they took the Fifth (amendment, not bottle). Now with this announcement, we can see that Microsoft and GE decided to combine, and then bury, their respective dead or dying.” Amalga seems cool, but I don’t hear much from its customers once they’ve signed contracts, so NewCo should work to get the word out. I hope the companies really are planning to do something innovative like the announcement says. However, those with long memories will find it hard to forget (or forgive) historical examples of big, unfocused vendors who brashly stormed the HIT gates and then slunk off quietly shortly thereafter, unceremoniously dumping the charred remains of once-proud companies they had burned through and hoping the smell of utter failure would wash out of their Teflon-coated corporate suits. Recall when Baxter and IBM formed IBAX and quickly sold it off to HBOC, relieved to put distance between themselves and the albatross they had spawned from their passionate but short-lived union by creating a new company and not really caring whether it succeeded or failed.

From SmallMe: “RE: Microsoft HSG. Major RIF and re-org in advance of the HSG/GE joint venture announcement.” According to our Microsoft contact that I asked to confirm, “Like all companies, Microsoft evaluates our business priorities regularly. As we evolve HSG’s strategy, we’re concentrating more on building a compelling platform and have eliminated a small number of positions to align with current priorities.”  

From EthicsInHealthcareBusiness: “Re: RSNA. I’m surprised there isn’t more stringent hiring vetting by big vendors. Take the example of [vendor VP name omitted], who while at [vendor name omitted] was named in a federal lawsuit (CIVIL NO. 2004-116) accusing him of fraudulent pricing in dealings with government purchasing agents. The lawsuit was dismissed on a technicality, but it drove a parallel criminal investigation by the Defense Department and the US attorney’s office in Philadelphia. Why would a company risk this potential liability?” I omitted the specifics since, as you said, the lawsuit was dismissed and his innocence must be presumed. If he’s found guilty by the Feds, I’ll name names. His previous employer was known both globally and historically for shameful bribery. I blurred their name only a little above, but enough to say I didn’t unfairly name the company specifically.

From Erik: “Re: McKesson. Halting all development of Horizon Clinicals 10.3 and deployment of Horizon Enterprise Revenue Manager.” Unverified. I got several e-mails from MCK employees Thursday morning that a company call was in progress (our readers are so loyal I’m surprised they didn’t conference us in.) Inga asked what was up and I told her if I had to guess, I would say MCK is either killing off Horizon or moving its revenue cycle efforts from HERM to Paragon since both had been rumored previously. I’ll be crowing to her endlessly if both guesses are correct, although I must credit readers who reported those possibilities to me in the first place starting many months ago. I’ll know more Friday, as McKesson Provider Technologies President Dave Souerwine asked to brief me. Unfortunately it will be late in the afternoon since I have to get home after work from the hospital to do it (darned day job!), but I’ll recap in the Monday Morning Update if not before.

From MCKWorker: “Re: McKesson. All HERM staff essentially laid off. New direction for development, to combine with Paragon. HERM employees will have 60 days to interview for positions with that new strategy.” Unverified. It’s funny that Inga pinged a couple of her MCK sources and they told her company bigwigs had warned them that HIStalk would be probing for information. They were correct. Inga and I were flattered, even though the compliment was almost certainly unintentional. Apparently they weren’t too worried about anyone but us being on top of the breaking news and caring enough to dig beyond any official announcement.

 From Must Remain Anonymous: “Re: McKesson. It has finally happened! The call came today that McKesson will cease development of its Horizon product. All support will stop in seven years. Product development will now focus on the Paragon application instead. To be announced to their physician advisory council tomorrow morning. It is about time that McKesson drops the dead weight.” Unverified, until Friday anyway. If true, that would be truly remarkable given that Paragon has been close to being killed off several times, as Vince has explained in his HIS-tory lessons. Horizon has ample problems, but to think of Paragon as MPT’s flagship product is a mind-bender. If true, kudos to that little engine that could for hanging in there, excelling over and over, and giving the company an overachieving understudy for when its star couldn’t make curtain call.

And lest we forget among the corporate announcements from the several companies mentioned here, there are people behind these decisions, grunts like you and me who leave their families every day to do the best job they can, competently even though their expertise is related to products no longer in favor, who are torn with worry about their future livelihoods that are being manipulated invisibly by factors entirely beyond their control as corporate drones judge them unfairly on what they do today rather than their ability to contribute in a different way tomorrow (I hate that about corporate BS more than anything). Right now, they’re putting on a game face to try to make a nice Christmas or Hanukkah for their kids and families without seeming too preoccupied by work stuff that shouldn’t be intruding on their celebrations and religious observations, but at night when the lights go out, they are sleepless in contemplating what could change for them and those who depend on them. Join me in beaming some positive thoughts their way because I’m guessing they could use them right about now. I’ve been there and it sucks, but it eventually gets better.

From Kurt: “Re: McKesson. I’m hearing they announced that they are spending $1 billion in healthcare IT. Is this correct? If so, this is more than most other vendors combined.” I’ll let you know soon. That sounds like an awfully large number even for a company of McKesson’s size, but I’m not ruling anything out. If they asked me for advice (not likely), I’d say they should show some leadership (meaning spend money) in building innovative solutions that will make their HIT presence respectable (i.e., high KLAS scores and a growing customer base), unlike their fellow conglomerate vendors that seem to be happy milking the wrinkled, desiccated udders of their thinning herds of malnourished and badly aging cash cows. In McKesson’s defense, they did make a huge investment (and later write-down, unfortunately) in developing HERM, so give them some credit for taking action, even if the result wasn’t what they had hoped. Corporate management has changed since then (and probably for that reason), so perhaps the environment is more conducive to nimble innovation now. I’d have to see that to believe it since it’s a rarity in a huge, publicly traded company.

From Leotardo: “Re: Epic in the UK. Old news?” Two big-name English hospital trusts name their short list of potential post-NPfIT EMR vendors: Cerner, Epic, and Allscripts. The report says that “Epic is known to have invested heavily in the Cambridge procurement.” The Brits had better price out flights from London to Madison before finalizing a budget since they would be creating a massive carbon footprint for the endless mandatory training visits. Britain was one of few places where Cerner could pursue business knowing that Epic wouldn’t be sitting across the table, so news of an Epic win would not be celebrated in KCMO. And if Epic loses, that would be even bigger news since they usually don’t.

From Wildcat Well: “Re: Costco selling Allscripts MyWay. Isn’t that an insult to every EHR sales rep out there? What exactly will Allscripts sales reps do now? The EMR adoption bubble is developing a very short shelf life.”

From JB: “Re: Epic. I think this job would be humorous to highlight.” Epic hires only fresh-from-college greenhorns, so if you are experienced in healthcare IT, informatics, consulting, or process re-engineering, this is your one chance to get your foot in the Star Trek-themed door. I wonder how many Epic dishwashers have passed the company’s notorious MUMPS programming test?

From Poutine: “Re: Quebec’s medical error registry. Finally done after being promised in 2002, but not getting provider data.” Provider error reporting is mandatory, but a third of them submitted incomplete information, while nine hospitals claimed “technical difficulties” that prevented them from filing even one report.

From Skeptic: “Re: Micky Tripathi’s breach article. Part of me says. ‘Well done for a conscientious job.’ It’s not as if the folks involved had much of a choice in how to respond if they wanted to be law-abiding and careful stewards of the cards handed them by our system. The rest of me says. ‘This is insane.’ A street thief  steals a laptop and there is ‘an infinitesimally small chance’ the information would be accessed and/or abused. We spend $300K direct dollars and another large chunk of internal time — not to mention hours spent on the government regulatory side — addressing it, after which the thug still has the laptop and the exposure is still infinitesimally small. How much will we spend when the risk is real? And the lesson learned is that we all need to behave even more carefully and institute even more policies. This is great news for security companies, government agencies, and regulators. It’s horrible news for patients. Every dollar we spend on this kind of craziness is a dollar not available for patient care. At present, we’ve managed to construct a ridiculously expensive system relative to actual care delivered. This is an index case of how we’ve done it. (a) lesson one: no amount of anything is going to prevent this sort of thing. That’s not an excuse to be careless, but we need to use some common sense when applying blame. This blame falls on the thief. Period. (b) lesson two: the most sensitive data the healthcare system owns is financial. Identity theft is worth cash; PHI is close to worthless despite the paranoia surrounding it. We need to find ways to universally encrypt ADT/financial information and to not bind it so tightly to PHI. (c) lesson three: if we want to deliver better healthcare, there are better places to spend our patients’ money.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Thanks to Micky Tripathi’s outstanding contribution on his organization’s patient data security breach, traffic on HIStalk Practice has been especially heavy this week. We’ve posted a number of other great items over the last week including Brad Boyd’s discussion on the need for clinically integrated organizations. Other news bits of note: CMS releases a well done MU toolkit for providers. Physicians are fairly unaware of ACOs and don’t know if they should join one. Only 4% of all eligible providers have been paid incentives for meaningful EMR use. Physician wait times are shortest in Wisconsin and longest in Mississippi. Requests: (a) read HIStalk Practice regularly because it thrills me to know that my father is not the only one tuning in; (b) next time you need to purchase something HIT-related, consider the offerings of our sponsors; and (c) sign up for HIStalk Practice e-mail updates because I love knowing that I am not the only one with an overflowing inbox. Thanks for reading.

On the Jobs Board: Manager of Professional Services, Senior Trainer, Senior Software Engineer. On Healthcare IT Jobs: NextGen Workflow Process Consultants, EMR Application Specialist, Technical Services Manager.

Inga, Dr. Jayne, and I take risks writing HIStalk. We could get fired from our real jobs if unhappy companies figure out who we are and complain to our bosses about something we’ve said about them. We could lose sponsors for reporting news objectively and stating our opinions honestly (GE, Microsoft, and McKesson are all HIStalk sponsors, for a current example, but we still have to say what we think or else we’d be just another rag that uncritically spews vendor-friendly non-news). We could lose long- or short-term significant others because we sit in front of computers way too much, or risk letting life pass us by as we fixate on the relatively tiny topic of healthcare IT after spending already-long days at work (tonight’s HIStalk took me 5.5 hours, so my total non-work time in the past 24 hours, including sleep, was about six hours.) If you want to provide some reward to offset that risk, (a) sign up for e-mail updates for HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, and HIStalk Mobile; (b) connect with us on Facebook and LinkedIn; (c) support our sponsors, especially those we have to occasionally say negative things about, by clicking their ads, checking them out in the searchable, indexed Resource Center, and sending them consulting RFIs; (d) send us rumors, news we might have missed, and updates on what’s going on where you work; and (e) help us find the good news of IT helping patients, IT people doing commendable work, and IT companies innovating and making a difference. Thanks for being part of what we do, which means you’re actually part of who we are.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A day after we (and thus you) were tipped off by HIStalk reader Elroy, Streamline Health Solutions announces that it has signed a definitive asset purchase agreement to acquire Interpoint Partners for $5 million. We like to think they had to fast-track the announcement because of Elroy’s rumor report.

Humana acquires healthcare analytics company Anvita Health.

Sales

The federal government awards McKesson Provider Technologies its DIN PACS III contract, allowing it to sell PACS and related sub-systems to all branches of the US armed forces and civilian defense department agency facilities. The two-year contract has a potential value of $30 million.

Morehead Memorial Hospital (NC) selects Unidesk for desktop provisioning and application delivery for its VMware-based Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

Meridian Health (NJ) to ICA’s CareAlign 3.0 for its 95 locations.

Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin and Group Health Cooperative of Eau Claire (WI) select McKesson Analytics Advisor.

Tidewell Hospice (FL) chooses Allscripts Homecare and EPSi financial management.

China-based diagnostic testing vendor Kindstar Globagene Technology chooses PathCentral’s anatomic pathology system for its 2,000 hospital customers in China.

Personal health record vendor MMRGlobal, which runs the MyMedicalRecords.com site, says Surgery Center Management has offered $30 million to license its patents for the PHR, patient video site, and document management system for providers.

CSC says it expects its NPfIT contract will be extended by an extra year through 2017, despite the company’s past problems delivering implementations on schedule that contributed to the cancellation of the $19 billion project. CSC expects to earn up to $3 billion for the 12-month extension. The former CIO said CSC would probably sue if its contract was cancelled, concluding that it might be cheaper just to pay them.

People

Medical documentation software provider Emdat hires Michael Grayson (Eclipsys, Sentillion, IDX) as VP of strategic partnerships.

HIMSS adds four members to its board of directors: Dana Alexander, RN, MSN, MBA, FHIMSS (GE Healthcare); Brian R. Jacobs, MD, MS, FHIMSS (Children’s National Medical Center, DC); Kenneth R. Ong, MD, MPH, FACP, FIDSA, FHIMSS (New York Hospital Queens); and Fred D. Rachman, MD, FHIMSS (Alliance of Chicago Community Health Services.)

Encore Health Resources expands its client services leadership team with the hiring of Greg Bluth, Ken Frantz, Jason Griffin, and Jim Kearns.

MED3OOO’s board of directors promotes Carl Smollinger from executive VP of ACO and employer services to COO.

Announcements and Implementations

NYU Langone Medical Center implements IOD’s release of information solution.

Wolters Kluwer Health releases its expanded IPhone app, UpToDate MobileComplete.

University Behavioral HealthCare (NJ) goes live on Stockell Healthcare Systems’ InsightCS Revenue Cycle Information Management platform.

DrFirst partners with Atlas Medical to offer physicians the ability to place lab/rad orders and review results via DrFirst’s Rcopia e-prescribing solution.

Government and Politics

Medicare and Medicaid have paid 2,868 hospitals and 21,425 EPs approximately $1.8 million for the Meaningful Use of EHRs through the end of November.

Dr. Jayne mentions below, but here’s a list of all Medicare EPs who have received HITECH money through September 30.

The State Department and the US Coast Guard sign an interagency agreement to share Epic’s EHR and access to VLER, the EHR used by the US Armed Forces EHR for its current and retired members.

Other

VA employee unions raise concerns that a plan to add RTLS technology will lead to staff monitoring. The VA is issuing a $550 million draft request for proposals for RTLS to interface with cleaning and sterilization equipment. The department claims it has no official plans to tag and track employees. One union representative views any plans to use RTLS to track employees as “the beginning of Big Brother” and “and invasion of privacy.”

Meditech announces it will return to the HIMSS conference this year as an exhibitor. In looking at the HIMSS conference site, it does not appear that Cerner will be following Meditech’s lead in coming back.

Programmers world-wide celebrated last weekend with Random Hacks of Kindness, where self-proclaimed hackers developed programs for humanitarian purposes. Among them were an emergency response system for the Samoan Islands, a real-time disease tracking system, and an app that can scan a photo of water-borne bacteria to determine if it’s safe to drink.

The FBI subpoenas several businesses in its investigation into the financial dealings of Wayne County, MI. Among the companies whose contracts are being reviewed is Strategic Business Partners, a Detroit IT company that has billed the county for $22 million over several years, some of that for developing EMR software for the county jail.

A hospital in Canada being sued for malpractice by a patient who suffered a stroke during surgery tries to convince a judge to give it access to the patient’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, her computer, and her iPhone. The hospital’s argument was that since the patient claims her health and enjoyment of life had been harmed, they should be able to look for evidence to the contrary. The judge said no, calling it “ a classic fishing expedition without the appropriate bait.”

Sponsor Updates

• The Advisory Board Company’s Crimson business unit wins the Best Booth award at the IHI forum in Orlando, with recognition of its employees for their knowledge and demonstration skills.
• GE Healthcare releases a white paper that highlights the use of Centricity Practice Solution to achieve Meaningful Use requirements.
• Healthwise launches Healthwise Spanish Knowledgebase, which includes evidence-based health information.
• Symantec Health and DrFirst will present at April’s EPCS Leadership Symposium.
• Blanton Godfrey, co-founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, keynotes at TeleTracking Technologies’ 2011 Client Conference and predicts that better workflow choices will determine winners and losers after health reform.
• DIVURGENT releases a white paper on the selection of the right IT infrastructure for ACOs.
• The Irish Health Service Executive announces that four of its 35 hospitals are live on McKesson’s Horizon Medical Imaging PACS, with the remainder coming up within 20 months.
• T-System’s CMIO Robert Hitchcock MD and CFO Steve Armond CFO discuss how to use IT to make an emergency department profitable.
• Lawson Software introduces Infor10 Lawson S3, which includes integration between Lawson technology and products and applications from its newly acquired company Infor.
• e-MDs customer James F. Holsinger, MD, PC wins the 2011 HIMSS Ambulatory Davies Award of Excellence for the quality of patient care through practice’s Meaningful Use of EHR.
• MedVentive was selected to participate in last month’s Mid-West BluePrint Health IT Innovation Exchange Summit.
• Intelligent InSites posts congratulations to President and CEO Doug Burgum, who is also chairman of the board of the SuccessFactors, just acquired by SAP for $3.4 billion. He was also an early investor and leader of Great Plains Software, which Microsoft acquired for $1.1 billion in 2001.

Contacts

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

Microsoft, GE Form Healthcare Joint Venture

Microsoft and GE Healthcare announced this morning that the companies will form a joint venture, creating a new company that will offer software tools for managing population health to improve outcomes and cost.

Microsoft will move its Health Solutions Group employees and assets to the new company, effectively ending its direct involvement in provider healthcare technology. Corporate Vice President Peter Neupert announced his retirement from Microsoft.

The new company, which has yet to be named, will be launched in the first half of 2012. Microsoft will contribute its Amalga health intelligence platform, the Vergence context management and single sign-on solution, and the expreSSO enterprise single sign-on product to the joint venture. Those products had been acquired from MedStar Health (Azyxxi) in 2006 and Sentillion (Vergence, expreSSO) in 2009.

Microsoft HSG’s hospital systems product line that was acquired from Thailand-based Global Care Solutions in 2007 had already been retired, but was sold to Orion Health in October 2011.

GE Healthcare will provide its eHealth HIE and the Qualibria clinical knowledge application that it is developing with Intermountain Healthcare. 

In an interview with HIStalk, Neupert said the bulk of HSG employees will be transferred to the new company, joining those GE Healthcare employees who are assigned to the eHealth and Qualibria projects for an initial headcount of 700. The company’s headquarters will be in Redmond, WA.

Microsoft’s HealthVault will not be part of the joint venture, Neupert told us, explaining that HealthVault needs to remain “independent and consumer-facing.”

The announcement states that the new company will deliver “a distinctive, open platform that will give healthcare providers and independent software vendors the ability to develop a new generation of clinical applications.”

Neupert explained that Microsoft Amalga will be the base layer of the new offering, bringing in data from other systems and adding metadata. GE Healthcare Qualibria will provide advanced data descriptors such as clinical vocabulary and context (such as where a patient’s blood pressure was taken and whether the patient was sitting or lying down at the time.) External applications can then retrieve data, data meaning, and workflow context from the new system. “Provider and payor will become intermixed,” Neupert said. “Our customers already do cohort management. How do we get really good at making cohort groups discoverable and manageable in an interesting way?”

Neupert said the platform will have open APIs for developer access. Amalga’s services can manage healthcare-specific requirements such as access controls and auditability, allowing third-party developers to build solutions around large enterprise databases.  “In a patient-centric world, you want the data to be separate from the app,” he told HIStalk. “You want competition to be based on user interface and functionality, not a vendor’s ability to lock up the data. Customers want choice.”

The announcement indicates that the new company will market its products globally. Neupert said that there’s always a difference between ambulatory and inpatient care and that all governments want to tie in home care. He expects the new products to assist in those efforts, acknowledging that countries will evolve differently.

Michael J. Simpson, general manager of GE Healthcare’s Healthcare Knowledge & Connectivity Solutions practice, has been named CEO of the new company. He joined GE Healthcare in 2010 after a few months as SVP of product strategy for QuadraMed. Before that, he spent 5 1/2 years as general manager and chief technology officer of McKesson’s Horizon Clinicals business unit.

Simpson told HIStalk that he plans to enable customers to be amazed, opening up the user experience to caregivers and bringing the cultures of software development and customer relationship management to the patient. “Connectivity across inpatient and outpatient will require new platforms,” he said.

News 12/7/11

Top News

Costco announces its entry into the PM/EHR software and services business through its partners, Etransmedia Technology, Inc. and Allscripts, moving from a test phase to full launch after experiencing high demand. Costco will offer the Allscripts MyWay PM/EHR along with hosting maintenance, support, training, implementation services, and unlimited claims processing for $499 per month. The company will have a booth at HIMSS.

Reader Comments

From Unibroue: “Re: Kaiser MU-payment mishap. The doctor who did not receive her MU incentive because Kaiser mistakenly claimed it is now making progress towards collecting her money. After a couple of attempts, she connected with the right person at Kaiser, they have corrected the registration issue, and the doctor should now be able to have her payment processed correctly.” Many thanks to our great readers who offered advice and contact names to help this doctor straighten things out.

From Fancy Schneider: “Re: HIStalk’s reputation. I was recently in a meeting at a hospital and HIStalk came up. Someone commented that it was the only place where they could get real information in an industry that is swamped with vaporware.”

From Bob Coli, MD: "Micky Tripathi’s First-Hand Experience with Patient Data Security Breach. This is the best overview of a PHI security incident that I have seen to date. Every word is valuable to consumers, healthcare professionals, and everyone else in America striving to achieve maximally secure and efficient data portability and fully interoperable HIE.” Other readers concur with Dr. Coli, with some urging that Micky’s post be “mandatory” reading and naming it HIStalk’s “Post of the Year.” Even Mr. H, who is parsimonious with his praise, called Micky’s piece “outstanding” and suggested that if there were Academy Awards for blog posts, that this one would be a shoo-in. The cost of the breach (above) should get your attention, after which you can read the article here.

From Dave Miller: “Re: University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Some news for HIStalk. Our RFP scoring committee has recommended Epic. We still have to nail down funding and get the contract done, but the die is cast.” Dave, who is vice chancellor and CIO at UAMS (cool license plate) says they will replace Eclipsys Sunrise and Medipac on the inpatient side and Logician and Signature for ambulatory, plus a bunch of miscellaneous systems. Dave’s an old friend of HIStalk who has kept in touch since his days at University of Chicago Medical Center.

From Benzyl: “Re: PQRS. Do you see the number of submitting practices increasing or decreasing this year? What about hospitals? It seems that submissions slowed down after the incentive was reduced from 2% to 1% this year, or maybe other programs are getting the attention of practices.” Readers, chime in with your comment if you like.

From Long-Time Reader: “Re: HIT spending. I was wondering if you know what percentage of total healthcare spending HIT represents? Awesome site!” I’ll again go to readers who might a data source since I don’t know that I’ve seen an HIT-specific number that’s more precise than the typical “technology” that covers medical equipment.

From Gladys Kravitz: “Re: Cape Coral Hospital (FL). I was told by someone who works there that their Epic go-live didn’t go well, taking two hospitals down for several days. The person said administration was responsible since they didn’t go for the ‘deluxe’ Epic package from Epic and tried to manage the implementation on their own.” Unverified.

From Dadudadu: “Re: HIStalk. I hate to draw the comparison, but your statement about doing what you love and the money will follow sounds a lot like the philosophy of Epic. That intangible sense of purpose, unadulterated by the naked self-interest introduced by the pursuit of money or power or fame is, of course, what makes this website so great. And results, paradoxically, in more Money, Power, and Fame than you want. Be honest, what pays more at this point: HIStalk or your day job? Regardless, kudos to you for finding what you love, and doing it well so we all can benefit from it. Thanks.” One thing I should have added to my statement is that you almost have to work for yourself to either (a) do what you really love in the way you want to do it, and (b) reap money, power, and fame, since by definition, corporate employers fully expect to arbitrage the difference in what you’re worth vs. what they pay you, laying claim the great majority of that difference by rebating tiny raises and bonuses to encourage your occupational inertia for their continued benefit. I admire Epic for at least appearing to have something other than their corporate bottom line front and foremost, although it’s rare that good-sized companies can create and maintain a “we just want to do good work” philosophy, especially after the founders step aside (no different than when humbly wealthy self-made parents leave their fortunes to bratty, entitled children.) It’s probably empowering to have a lot of money, but I’m just as empowered by not needing much of it. If I ever quit my day job, which I admit contemplating on occasion, my questionably achievable goal would be to work for myself instead of someone else for a change.

From Elroy: “Re: Streamline Health. Acquiring Interpoint Partners, to be announced next week.” Unverified. Streamline does document management, while the Atlanta-based Interpoint Partners offers business intelligence and analytics. Streamhealth’s President and CEO Robert Watson, who took the job in February 2011, was previously a director of Interpoint. That adds credibility to the rumor.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: NPfIT Roundable. The UK’s NPfIT has had its ups and downs, but they are still looking to the future and have assembled a group to talk about it.”

From LanMan: “Re: Cerner. Buying IP blocks from now-defunct Borders? What for? And I heard this from a Brit publication?” Actually you could have heard it here since I mentioned it on December 2. At $786K, it was supposedly the second largest transfer of IPv4 addresses after Microsoft bought $7.5 million worth from also-defunct Nortel. IP addresses are about to become harder to obtain and more expensive with the advent of IPv6, which is replacing the current IPv4 as it runs out of available addresses. Cerner could be buying the addresses for resale, but I would speculate that it’s just ensuring that it will have enough for its own use for the foreseeable future, or perhaps to avoid expensive network infrastructure upgrades that IPv6 addresses will require.

From Lyssa Neel: “Re: native EMR apps for the iPad. Our app, VitalHub Chart, sits on top of Cerner PowerChart and makes data available to clinicians in a native iOS interface. Please take a look and let me know what you think.” Lyssa, whom I notice sports an impressive PhD in computer science from MIT, is CTO for VitalHub. Their product was developed at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Cerner users, what do you think?

From Early Girl: “Re: Microsoft Health Solutions Group. Some kind of announcement involving GE Healthcare will be made this week, either GEHC acquiring HealthVault and/or other MSFT products or some kind of marketing agreement.” Unverified.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Travis Good is on the ground at the mHealth Summit, so you can check out his reports on HIStalk Mobile. He says attendance is an impressive 3,500.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare quality improvement firm Avatar International acquires HR Solutions, a human capital management consulting firm that specializes in clinical engagement.

Streamline Health posts a Q3 profit of $296,000, up 212% from a year ago. Revenue fell 4% to $4.3 million.

Health Tap raises $11.5 million in Series A funding, raising its total to $14 million. It provides an online community where anyone can ask questions to US-based physicians at no charge. The company says that 6,000 physicians are participating so far, attracted by the “gamification” of earning reputation points for answering questions or agreeing with answers provided by other doctors. Big-name investors in the 12-employee company include Eric Schmidt (Google) and Ester Dyson.

SAIC reports Q3 numbers: revenue flat, EPS –$0.27 vs. $0.46, but exceeding analyst earnings expectations by a penny after excluding one-time items. The company said it paid $190 million in cash to acquire Vitalize Consulting Solutions in July 2011.

Sales

QuadraMed RCM client Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County (WY) chooses QuadraMed’s Computerized Patient Record and Quantim Electronic Document Management.

The San Diego Beacon Community selects Santech’s SanText SMS platform to send text messages to parents for appointment reminders and to inform them of their children’s immunization needs.

Lehigh Valley Health Network (PA) selects Orion Health’s HIE for its 50+ hospitals, clinics and health centers.

Association of Ontario Health Centres signs a 10-year contract with Canada-based EMR vendor Nightingale Informatix, which says it will earn $9 million in revenue in the first three years.

Mary Crouch joins Orchestrate Healthcare as its Meditech Practice Manager. She was previously with Laughlin Memorial Hospital (TN).

Tad Jacobs, DO, CMIO of Avera Medical Group (SD), is promoted to chief medical officer.

TriZetto names Pierre Samec, formerly of Expedia, as EVP/CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

The Greater Houston HIE announces the formation of its collaborative HIE network, which includes representation from over 60 hospitals across 14 counties.

St. Francis Hospital & Health Services (MO) announces plans to launch its Epic EHR on March 31, 2012.

Aintree University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust implements CCube Solutions’ electronic document management system, powered by Kodak production scanners and Kodak Capture Pro Network Edition imaging software.

gloStream will integrate clinical decision support from DiagnosisOne into its EMR.

Trustwave announces MyIdentity, a cloud-based two-factor authentication solution that supports five mechanisms (digital certificates, one-time SMS message passcodes, voice call-back, pushed login alert to mobile, and a mobile app that generates a one-time password.)

Caristix launches Cloak, which strips patient-identifiable messages from HL7 data for creating sample messages or clinically valid data for testing. The company, which was featured in HIStalk Innovator Showcase in November, offers a seven-day free trial.

Innovation and Research

Microsoft Research is applying spam-fighting techniques to the analysis of HIV cells, finding similarities in how viruses mutate as they attack the immune system and spammers who fine-tune their payloads to bypass spam filters.

mHealth Alliance announces its Top 11 in 2001 Innovators Challenge. Winning apps include pregnancy surveillance, voice-powered information retrieval, diagnostic tools for telemedicine, counterfeit drug detection, patient teaching, physician collaboration, patient communication, baby tracking, and care reminders. Above is a demo of an smart phone-based EMR developed by Martin Were MD, MS of Regenstrief Institute for HIV treatment and control in Kenya.

IRobot, the company behind the Roomba vacuum cleaner, applies for a patent for AVA, a five-foot-tall robot with a “head agonistic design” that can accommodate tablets or smart phones.

Other

The board chair for Maryland eCare says that mortality rates have fallen 30% across hospitals that have implemented its telehealth systems that supplement ICU coverage at rural hospitals.

CPSI pays $9.5 million for its new Mobile, AL corporate headquarters, which includes 16.5 acres and 135,500 square feet of office and warehouse space. The company had been leasing 13 buildings in the same office park.

EHRrtv publishes its MGMA interview with the always entertaining (and interestingly-attired) Jonathan Bush of athenahealth. He’s like no other CEO out there.

Aetna and ProHealth Physicians (CT) say that their four year Provider Collaboration program has resulted in 37% fewer inpatient hospital days on a risk-adjusted basis and 35% few hospital readmissions.

CPSI, Cerner, GE Healthcare, and Picis earn top client satisfaction scores in Black Book’s ranking of inpatient EHR vendors, obviously reaching vastly different conclusions than KLAS.

The Leapfrog Group includes 65 hospitals (including 18 Kaiser facilities) on its list of Top Hospitals, based on the delivery of quality care.

An article in Wired magazine called Apple’s Secret Plan to Steal Your Doctor’s Heart is not particularly focused or convincing, but a fun read. I couldn’t figure out its conclusion other than (a) doctors like using an iPad because it saves them time; (b) hospitals seem to be warming up to them; and (c) Steve Jobs had a small interest in healthcare after trying unsuccessfully to develop a Pixar CT imaging system. Like many articles these days, it seems  highly analytical and fresh until you think about precisely what you learned and realize that it wasn’t much.

Sponsor Updates

• Elsevier introduces Procedures Consult App for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch.
• Adler Hey Children’s Hospital and Liverpool Women’s Hospital (UK) select Perceptive Software’s ImageNow electronic document management system.
• Wolters Kluwer Health announces its acquisition of Medknow PVT Ltd, expanding its open access publishing business.
• Capital Health (NJ) goes live on Wellsoft EDIS in its four emergency departments.
• dbMotion announces the 2012 schedule for its Insights into HIE seminar series.
• Michael O’Neil, founder and CEO of GetWellNework, moderates a discussion on mHealth and the role of patient education and monitoring medical compliance at this week’s mHealth Summit.
• Qualcomm Life Inc. and AirStrip Technologies collaborate to offer mobile monitoring to home health providers and patients.
• Capario launches a streamlined payer enrollment process.
• Teradici combines Imprivata OneSign Virtual Desktop Access with its PCoIP Firmware release 3.5.0 to offer virtual desktop access via access cards and ID badges.
• A Practice Fusion press release discusses five top trends and surprises in HIT for 2011.
• In a December 12 Webinar, South Jersey Health System CIO Thomas Pacek  will share how MobileMD is helping his organization’s physician network to grow and coordinate patient care.
• Nebraska Health Information Initiative announces that physicians are now sharing patient immunization information with NESIIS through the HIE’s Axoloti-powered platform from OptumInsight.
• San Diego Business Journal profiles Awarepoint and its four new RTLS patents.
• Vibra Healthcare (PA) selects PatientKeeper Physician Portal and Mobile Clinical Results for its long term acute care hospitals nationwide.
• Forst & Sullivan awards AT&T its Competitive Strategy Leadership Award for its approach to mHealth.

Contacts

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

Bottomline Technologies Acquires Logical Progression

Financial software vendor Bottomline Technologies announced today that it has acquired the assets of Logical Progression of Cary, NC, which sells the Logical Ink mobile provider documentation solution for hospitals and large clinics. Terms were not disclosed.

Logical Ink is an interactive paperless forms platform that the company markets as an intuitive, workflow-based alternative to traditional computer documentation. Bottomline Technologies will offer that product as part of its healthcare product portfolio.

Logical Progression was featured in the HIStalk Innovator Showcase in June 2011.

Monday Morning Update 12/5/11

From It’s All Good: “Re: [vendor name omitted]. In post-acquisition happenings, staffers have been required to sign a highly restrictive non-compete agreement or face termination, with a number of 10+ year veterans opting not to sign and accepting termination instead. Next up, aptitude tests for those who remain. Pushing out seasoned veterans without having ready replacements is not a best practice.” At least it’s a free country, where the employment commitment works both ways. I admire those who took their walking papers instead of sticking around if they were really that unhappy. Complaining about your job while staying in it is like telling everybody how your spouse mistreats you – if you truly feel demeaned or endangered, stop talking and get out of the situation immediately. The bad thing about company belt-tightening is that you first lose the people with marketable skills and experience, leaving you stuck with those who don’t have anywhere else to go. Update: I concur with a reader’s comment that my “spouse” comment sounded insensitive, so I reworded to be clearer what I meant.

From Farina: “Re: being anonymous. It’s a shame you’re anonymous as you know more than pretty much all of the people that I talk to at vendors, VCs, or healthcare orgs. You’d also make a great advisor for a lot of companies.” I’m happy keeping a low profile, which also keeps me as focused and honest as a monk in a locked-down monastery. Not to mention that “knowing” is different from “doing,” obvious since I still toil in the salt mines of a non-profit hospital. Sometimes I’m envious of those with greater ambition and different skills who create and run large organizations and make names for themselves, but this is still the best “job” I’ve ever had (and the longest held at 8.5 years and counting.) I’m not motivated by money, power, or fame, so I’m fine. I firmly believe that if you do something you really enjoy for reasons other than making money, the money will find you anyway.

It surely cannot be possible that Christmas is just three weeks away and the HIMSS conference is just eight weeks after that. I get slammed every year in January and February doing the HISsies, gearing up for HIStalkapalooza, setting up our little HIMSS sponsor appreciation lunch, handling a big surge of e-mails of all kinds, and running around the conference anonymously and telling you about what I’m seeing (and trying to keep up with my real job at the hospital, of course.) If you need anything from me, this is a great time to let me know since I’ll be heads-down from New Year’s until March.

Nearly half of respondents say they have a problem buying into healthcare-related ideas that are presented by someone who’s overweight. New poll to your right: did you go to HIMSS last time and will you be going in February? I registered and made travel arrangements last week. This past year on February 20, Las Vegas was sunny with a high of 46 degrees compared to the normal high of 64. Exhibitors are going to hate the location since they’ll be competing for attendee attention with casinos and showgirls.

Our own Travis Good MD of HIStalk Mobile will be reporting from the mHealth Summit in the DC area starting Monday. Here’s his preview and links for following along with him this week (sign up for updates and you won’t miss anything). HIStalk Mobile is a media partner, meaning Dr. Travis gets to play intrepid reporter and prowl around areas that are off limits to regular attendees (OK, I’m not sure there really are any of those, but that makes it sound more exclusive than just taking notes along with everybody else.) Big-name keynoters include the Surgeon General, the chairman of the FCC, Kathleen Sebelius of HHS, and some notables from Qualcomm, Apollo Hospitals Group, Verizon, and West Wireless Health Institute.

I’ve just posted on HIStalk Practice Micky Tripathi’s gripping, highly educational account of having his organization’s patient data breached. It’s long, detailed, full of documentation and like nothing you’ve ever read since nobody has ever talked so openly about their own organizational mistakes. We all know data breaches are potentially embarrassing, but you’ll be surprised (unless you’ve lived through a breach yourself) at the gray regulatory areas, the “who’s really responsible” question (shocker: legally, it wasn’t Micky’s organization, Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative), and just how much money and effort is required to go through the required steps. I’ve preached for years about encrypting mobile devices, so if budget is your barrier, send a copy of the article to your CEO and I bet the project will be quickly funded. I always enjoy Micky’s regular HIStalk Practice columns since he’s not only an expert, he’s also one of the most engaging writers I know. In this case, has served the entire industry, for which we should all be grateful. I consider this piece to be mandatory reading for just about everybody.

Listening: Odessey and Oracle from The Zombies (and yes, I spelled it correctly). This is the innocence, psychedelia, and British Invasion fascination of the 1960s captured permanently on vinyl like a prehistoric bug in amber. By the time this album came out in 1968 the band was broke and disbanded (they could barely afford studio time and had to record it in mono.) Time of the Season climbed the charts and the group still declined to tour, so fake groups gave concerts using their name, with one even grabbing the band name’s trademark that had expired. For my money, I’d take this album over Sgt. Pepper’s and Pet Sounds as the best of the decade (right up their with Love’s Forever Changes and either The Doors or Strange Days from The Doors).

I had some major upgrade work done on the site over the weekend. Most of it is behind the scenes, but if you read HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, or HIStalk Mobile on a smart phone or iPad, you may see some improvements. I noticed that the iPad display was sometimes fuzzy for reasons I could never figure out and that seems to be fixed, plus there’s new support for Apple’s Retina display.

My Time Capsule editorial this week from five years ago: HBOC 1, Everybody Else 0, in which I opine, “Among those involved were certainly some crooks and some fools, but let’s not forget those who suffered most, those McKesson lifers who had stashed away years’ worth of shares of their unexciting company’s stock instead of risking their future on flaky fads like Microsoft and Dell. When lonely old conservative widower Dad McKesson brought home a sexy young step-mom named HBOC, she stole the kids’ piggybank.”

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Etransmedia Technology. You may recall that the Troy, NY company facilitated the offering of Allscripts MyWay nationally through Costco, but they’ve created quite a few products of their own related to PM/EHR, patient connectivity, physician mobile, revenue cycle, and clinical documentation. The SaaS-delivered EtransConnect ACO product suite has tools for connectivity, patient identity management, a clinical data repository, and an orders report portal for providers, rounding those solutions out with a community patient portal and back-end analytics tools. The company’s ambulatory EHR toolkit provides a full-function patient portal (appointments, health histories, messaging, refills, consents, online statements, and structured data exchange such as by CCD). Also offered is custom reporting modules and a mobile charge capture app that lets physicians document their hospital rounding activities to send charges back to their own EHRs for billing. The company just announced that it’s  #155 on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 with a 647% revenue growth over the past five years. Thanks to Etransmedia Technology for supporting HIStalk and its readers.

Thanks to Intelligent InSites for supporting HIStalk as a Platinum Sponsor. The Fargo, ND company’s tagline is Enabling the Real-Time Enterprise, which it does with an extensive list of RTLS-powered solutions (asset management, patient flow, bed management, infection control, patient and staff safety, environmental monitoring, and mobile information access.) The company just announced its enterprise Big Data analytics solution that uses the wealth of information it captures to identify trends, track key performance indicators, and call out process improvement opportunities. Also just announced is a consulting service that helps hospitals identify specific areas (and hard-dollar impact) in which RTLS-powered solutions can improve outcomes, patient satisfaction, and cost. I was intrigued that the company’s largest investor and interim CEO is Doug Burgum, who bootstrapped and ran fellow Fargo company Great Plains Software until Microsoft bought it for $1.1 billion in 2001. Thanks to Intelligent InSites for helping me do what I do.

I like to get the big-picture view of a company by checking out an introductory video (I’m lazy and have a short attention span), so I found the one above for Intelligent  InSites on YouTube.

The new Plano, TX office of MedAssets will consolidate over 1,000 employees in a building covering 225,000 square feet. The company’s corporate headquarters is in Alpharetta, GA, which I note has a population around 60,000 and about the same number of HIT-related company offices (slight exaggeration.)

The IT team behind the US Army’s MC4 battlefield EMR wins the top IT team award from the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States. Receiving the award above is Lt. Col. William Geesey, project manager (on the right.)

Vince Ciotti takes a slight detour from his ongoing HIS-tory of HIT software vendors, this time leading off a series on consulting firms. Vince is looking for your first-hand stories, so if ampersanded names like Coopers & Lybrand and Ernst & Whinney cause one of those TV dream bubbles to appear over your upraised head as you dreamily recall the glory days of dark-suited Big Six accountants descending on your hospital with their weapons of choice (legal pads, expense accounts, and blank RFPs for selling add-on work), then feel free to reminisce with him for future installments.

An ED doctor in Canada admits that he looked up medical information on his girlfriend’s former husband during a child custody dispute. The hospital’s computers have a 10-minute logout period, so the doctor would go behind users who left their PCs logged on to look up records under their user ID. The hospital’s SVP of medicine says it hopes to implement a card-based computer system that automatically logs users off, so there’s a sales opportunity if your company offers those.

Ed Marx has a big go-live at Texas Health Resources and found this signage amusing.

A fascinating Forbes article called The Bomb Buried In Obamacare Explodes Today – Hallelujah! says the only truly important part of the Affordable Care Act took effect on Friday. That’s when the medical loss ratio part of the law kicks in, requiring insurance companies to spend 80% of the premium dollars they collect on medical care (if they underspend, they have to write customers a check.) The author says this marks the slow but sure death of for-profit insurance companies because they know they can’t do that and still make a profit, so they are already moving to more profitable businesses (but read the comments at the end for some interesting counterpoints, with a notable one being that insurance companies make most of their profit from investing the money until it’s spent anyway and that’s not changing.) A snip from the article:

So, can private health insurance companies manage to make a profit when they actually have to spend premium receipts taking care of their customers’ health needs as promised? Not a chance – and they know it. Indeed, we are already seeing the parent companies who own these insurance operations fleeing into other types of investments. They know what we should all know – we are now on an inescapable path to a single-payer system for most Americans and thank goodness for it. Whether you are a believer in the benefits of single-payer health coverage or an opponent, mark this day down on your calendar because this is the day seismic shifts in our health care system finally get under way. If you thought that the Obama Administration chickened out on pushing the nation in the direction of universal health care for everyone, today is the day you begin to understand that the reality is quite the contrary.

Raul Recarey, president and CEO of the Missouri Health Connection HIE, quits after eight months on the job.

HCI’s USA-built Android-powered RoomMate Healthcare TV for hospitals includes a patient and visitor whiteboard, a web browser, video and music options, a pillow speaker, an an optional hard drive for video streaming. It comes in screen sizes from 22 to 42 inches and includes just about every kind of connectivity available. It integrates with the company’s MediaCare2 product, which allows hospitals to send “information prescriptions” to specific patient TVs, such as educational videos, images, and announcements. It also allows hospital staff to control patient TVs from a central location.

Stupid lawsuit: a prisoner sues his former hostages, a newlywed couple whose home he broke into while evading police on suspicion of murder. The couple agreed at knifepoint to hide him, but called police when he fell asleep. He brandished the knife again and was shot by a SWAT team officer. He’s suing the couple for $235,000 worth of medical costs and emotional distress, saying they breach breached  an oral contract by turning him in.

E-mail Mr. H.

News 12/2/11

Top News

EDIS vendor Forerun will acquire substantially all the assets of competitor Emergisoft, including customer contracts, product rights, software, and services. Emergisoft President Jordan Davis will be the new VP of sales and CTO Godson Menezes takes over as director of operations. Forerun was formed in 2006 to commercialize ED software developed at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. John Halamka is on the company’s advisory board.

Reader Comments

From Ralph Hinckley: “Re: Pat Cline of Quality Systems. Has officially left.” He announced in July that he would be retiring this year.

From The Tom: “Re: Carrier IQ. PC World has an article about Android devices that should raise concerns for folks using them in healthcare. I would think this has HIPAA implications.” A security researcher finds that performance monitoring software vendor Carrier IQ, which says its product is running on 150 million phones, is apparently installing virus-like software on Android, BlackBerry, and Nokia smart phones that logs every keystroke, screen touch, and Web search. The company got nasty with a quick denial and a cease-and-desist letter to the researcher, but after he put out a video showing what he had found, Carrier IQ suddenly gritted out an apology. Maybe their software can log how many times cell phone users call the dozens of law firms that are no doubt filing class action suits as we speak.

From Giselle: “Re: Medical Justice. Have you heard about the questionable agreements they sell to private practice physicians? The Center for Democracy and Technology has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission arguing that the company itself was engaged in ‘deceptive and unfair business practices.’” Medical Justice is mostly known for applying a heavy legal hand to anyone (especially patients) who posts less-than-stellar comments about physicians on public sites, especially those of physician rating services (some of those sites claim Medical Justice also plants fake glowing reviews of its own.) Medical Justice also files counterclaims against expert witnesses with their state licensing boards and encourage physicians to make their patients sign contracts (a “Mutual Agreement to Maintain Privacy”) promising they won’t say anything negative about them. Every one of these services is of question legality (or at least questionable enforceability), but I can’t say that I don’t agree at least a little with what they do given absurd malpractice lawsuits.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Here’s what we have been up to at HIStalk Practice over the last week: Dr. Gregg preps for his audience with HIT’s Queen and King, aka Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari. MU attestation figures from Greenway, athenahealth, and meridianEMR. AMA intros My Medications, a consumer app to track meds and allergies. CDC reports on ambulatory EMR adoption rates. Coming soon: the best “best practice” article you may ever read on how to handle a security breach, courtesy of Micky Tripathi of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative. If you aren’t yet a HIStalk Practice subscriber, this is the time to do it because Micky has some great stuff coming our way.

Thanks to Cindy for her nice post covering the various flavors of post-acute care (and thanks to the classy readers who posted their appreciation in comments on her article – she’s new at this, so she can probably use the encouragement.) Cindy will be following up shortly in a post about the IT systems used in those organizations. She and others have offered to keep HIStalk readers informed about developments in the post-acute areas, which I guarantee will soon be hitting the radar of CIOs as their hospitals start getting penalized for readmissions that might have been preventable by better care coordination and use of technology. It’s one of those things that the tea leaves (and experts) are telling me we should be talking about now rather than later.

On the Jobs Board: Java developer, IS Director – Hospital, Solutions Marketing Manager, Expert Communications Consultant. On Healthcare IT Jobs: SQL/EHR Programmer, Epic Certified ASAP Builders, Technical Services Manager.

I keep forgetting to mention these: the Resource Center lets you search for vendors or navigate through a rather slick index of product and service categories, with a nice description and contact information for each one you find. Brand new is the RFI Blaster (a working name), where you can enter just a few details about the consulting help you need, attach a document if you want, and then shoot the result off immediately to one, some, or all of HIStalk’s sponsors that provide consulting services, putting yourself in the catbird’s seat to sit back and wait for responses. We’re always trying to do cool stuff for sponsors, and cooler still is that both of these ideas came from provider readers who like giving business to those who support us.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Aventura. The Denver-based company’s technology provides doctors and nurses with near-instant access to the information they need at the place they need it, allowing them to spend more time with patients instead of pounding their keyboards in frustration and griping to the CIO about poor response time and convoluted logons. We found each other through my Innovation Showcase when my panel of reviewers voted them in (there’s a ton of information at that link, including videos, interviews, etc. that were part of their application.) CEO Howard Diamond has been really supportive in sending nice notes every now and then after our initial interview, also letting me know that he has hired three HIStalk readers recently. I was surprised and pleased to have the company support HIStalk as a sponsor, which I appreciate. Thanks to Howard Diamond and the Aventura folks (including those HIStalk readers who have just joined them) for supporting my work.

Here’s Alegent Health’s testimonial about Aventura, just in case you don’t feel like clicking over to the Innovator’s Showcase post.

We all have success metrics in our personal lives: the number of people who call us on our birthdays, how often our kids come home, and how many former flames turned just-friends still seem to harbor a bit of smoldering passion in remembrance of what once was. Out here in Internet-land, it’s a cold and inhospitable environment, so all Inga, Dr. Jayne, and I have as our feel-good accomplishment measures are numbers: (a) e-mail signups; (b) reader comments and rumor reports (c) shallow expressions of like via Face and LinkedIn;  and (d) clicks on the ads of sponsors who beam us into your living rooms. On the other hand, like a Pavlovian experiment, you can boost our mood using nothing more than your keyboard and mouse to increment those numbers by which we pitifully measure our self worth. And for that, we thank you.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Tele-ICU program provider Advanced ICU Care closes on a new round of equity funding led by Trident Capital.

Hospital systems vendor eCareSoft will acquire Expert Sistemas Computacionales, a Mexico-based software developer. It’s an odd transaction given that eCareSoft is the US affiliate of the company it plans to acquire. Its SaaS-based, certified inpatient system was launched in January. The company signed Central Texas Hospital (TX) as a customer in April, claiming small hospitals can go live in as little as 120 days.

Sales

HealthBridge (OH) selects Clinical Architecture’s Symedical Server for its HIE infrastructure.

The Louisiana Health Care Quality Forum chooses Arcadia Solutions to help define its statewide quality improvement and measurement objectives and the HIT tools required to implement them.

The VA and DoD  award Harris Corporation two multi-year contracts worth $17.1 million to help their doctors operate an eye injury and vision registry.

Florida Memorial Hospital and Medical Center of Manchester (TN) select RazorInsights’ ONE-EHR.

Oakwood Healthcare System (MI) will expand its use of Streamline Health Solutions’ document management program through a direct licensing agreement and the purchase of additional Streamline Health solutions.

People

Myca Health, developers of Hello Health, promotes Steven Ferguson from VP of product management to patient management officer.

Health Revenue Assurance Associates appoints former Medical Learning manager Peggy Harper as its director of ambulatory services.

Cognosante adds Davis Foster (Evolvent, Vangent) as chief business development officer and SVP.

Healthcare robot maker Aethon names Peter Seiff as SVP of business development and product strategy. He was previously with McKesson Pharmacy Systems.

Nephrologist Thomas Stokes MD, medical informatics director at East Alabama Medical Center (AL), is recognized by the state hospital association for his involvement with the organization’s EMR implementation. The hospital says he donated money for employee education and also programmed a problem list that helped it qualify for $4 million in MU money.

Announcements and Implementations

The Kansas Health Information Network and ICA announce that KHIN has signed up its 1,000th provider to its statewide HIE that uses ICA’s CareAlign CareExchange and CareConnect technology.

Gateway Regional Medical Center (IL) goes live on Concerro’s ShiftSelect solution.

Nason Hospital (PA) implements the Access Intelligent Forms Suite to generate forms, wristbands, and medication barcodes for patients in its Siemens MS4 system.

McKesson will introduce RightStock, a usage tracking system for its AcuDose-Rx medication cabinets that helps prevent drug stock-outs, at the ASHP Midyear in New Orleans.

Nazareth Hospital (PA), part of Mercy Health System and Catholic Healthcare East, went live Thursday on CPOE with Meditech Client Server version 5.65. The reader-provided announcement from its internal Web site is above..

Government and Politics

The New York Times takes another look at Newt Gingrich’s Center for Health Transformation, which he insists isn’t a lobbying firm even though it works similarly (the difference, he says, is that he takes money only from clients whose positions align with his own). The newspaper found an unsecured backup of the members-only section of CHT’s site and turned up minutes of a conference call in which Gingrich had arranged joint meetings between his members and top-ranking federal officials on the topic of electronic medical records. Clients paid up to $200K annually for memberships, with CHT taking in $55 million over 10 years. One of the companies he pitched was HealthTrio, which he said could deliver a UK-type EHR for every US citizen for 10 cents per person per month (the company just named Gingrich to its advisory board this past June – above.) A Congressional staff member said off the record that Newt talked a lot about members of his center without disclosing that they were paying him: “It was a year before I even realized that the Center for Health Transformation was even a for-profit company because it didn’t sound like one.”

Former Massachusetts House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi starts his eight-year stint in federal prison after being convicted in June of taking kickbacks for steering state contracts to Cognos (IBM). He claims to be innocent and outraged.

Other

 CRN, a publication whose target audience is VARs and resellers, profiles Dell and its EMR VAR program. Dell has shifted its EMR sales approach away from direct to the customer after discovering that implementing a system from vendors like Allscripts or NextGen requires more integration than Dell initially realized. Of course, anyone who has been in HIT for some time could probably have advised Dell that implementing an EMR is not like installing Quicken. Dell is now partnering with local VARs that can provide onsite support and with application providers that offer solutions certified to run on Dell technology.

If you think you have mother-in-law issues, consider what it might be like to have Lisa Dawn Mack as your family matriarch. The former Valley View Hospital employee is arrested for stealing $178,000 from the hospital and another $47,000 from her daughter-in-law. She allegedly stole a portion of the money in a relatively mundane fashion by filing unauthorized mileage reimbursements. However, she also hired her daughter-in-law at the hospital, overpaid her for her consulting work, then had the daughter-in-law reimburse the overpayments  directly to Mack for the purpose of repaying the hospital. She also had the daughter-in-law give her a portion of her check to pay the IRS, but just kept the money for herself.

Cindy our post-acute care expert turned up this interesting article: an Irish hospital sends out male nurses in bicycles to the homes of senior citizens who are seeking to be admitted. The nurse approves the admission or is empowered to deliver the needed care directly in the patient’s home if they determine admission is not necessary. The patient avoids the stress of a hospital stay and society avoids the cost of it.

Cerner wants to buy all 65,536 IP addresses held by defunct Borders Books for $12 each.

Weird News Andy is showing a fondness for a 50-year-old cartoon in labeling this story, “Flying squirrel in the ER, no big deal. Now if they had a moose …” This particular version of Rocket J. Squirrel was found in an ED trauma room of Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (NJ), where it repeatedly flew into a glass wall trying to escape. The fire department gently escorted it off property and released it in a nearby wooded area, possibly eliciting fan mail from some flounder.

Here’s a Medical Justice-type news item, although that organization isn’t named as being involved: an 83-year-old man fresh out of ICU after having a stroke is greeted by his neurologist, who breaks the ice by saying he “had to spend time to find out if you were transferred or died.” The family is appalled and the patient’s son posts negative comments about the doctor’s bedside manner on several websites, quoting one of the neurologist’s colleagues who called the doctor “a real tool.” The doctor files a defamation suit against the man, but the judge dismisses the case, saying “a real tool” is too vague to be considered defamatory.

Sponsor Updates

• Mountainside Hospital (NJ) achieves Meaningful Use using its clinical system from Healthcare Management Systems.
• Passport Health offers a white paper discussing the increased importance of patient payments in the healthcare revenue cycle.  
• Rita Russell, senior director of program management for RelayHealth, will present at NCPDP’s Education Summit in February.
• Melinda Noonan DNP, RN, NEA-BC, director of nursing operations for Rush University Medical Center, is quoted about how her organization uses data from TeleTracking Technologies to predict staffing needs, patient volumes, and other trends.
• Forbes names Shareable Ink to its list of America’s Most Promising Companies.
• The Greater Houston HIE appoints Encore Health Resources founder Ivo Nelson to its board.
• Sentry Data Systems offers a white paper on HRSA’s 340B drug billing audits that start in February.
• NetApp awards World Wide Technology Inc. two Partner Excellent Awards.
• CynergisTek and Diebold will host a December 13 webinar entitled Managing and Monitoring Healthcare Data.
• MEDSEEK announces that 1,000 hospitals are using its eHealth solution.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

Social media is increasingly used to gauge public health, according to American Medical News. It cites a study that appeared in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine that looked at Facebook posts to identify college students who may have drinking problems. I’d like to take this opportunity to remind everyone of the perils of friending co-workers and (gasp) your boss. And to my employees who are my Facebook friends, feel free to filter your drinking exploits from my news feed (unless there is a good martini recipe involved.)

In CMS news, the deadline for all Medicare providers to re-enroll has been pushed back to 2015. That’s an additional two years to try to ensure smooth processing without significant backlogs or other unintended consequences. Additional changes to the enrollment system including electronic signatures, document upload, “seamless” password resets, and other features are slated to be online by the end of 2012.

With physicians facing a 27% cut in Medicare reimbursement effective January 1, many are reconsidering their participation options. Although we’ve seen these threatened pay cuts several times over the last decade, this is the first time I recall seeing the AMA advertise a Medicare Participation Kit to guide physicians as they consider becoming non-participating providers. It includes sample letters to patients for providers choosing to opt out or limit their Medicare panels as well as informational downloads.

I mentioned recently a study that showed that physicians who own nuclear and stress testing equipment are more likely to order those tests. Presented this week at RSNA was a study looking at MRI imaging. Physicians who owned MRI machines had more than twice the number of normal results as physicians who had no ownership ties.

A study from the Department of Veterans Affairs looked at Internet-delivered provider education as a way to reduce cardiovascular risk in patients who have had heart attacks. Providers received educational modules, practice guidelines, literature summaries, and e-mail reminders for more than two years. Looking at seven clinical indicators, there was minimal difference in outcomes.

In non-technology news, Pfizer’s blockbuster drug Lipitor went generic Tuesday night. I wonder if patients were lined up outside the pharmacies at midnight like readers waiting for a Harry Potter installment?

For those of you who are probably like me and work in front of the TV, this article about infertility and laptop use was of interest. It seems that use of Wi-Fi connected laptops has been shown to decrease sperm quality. For the curious, the sperm were randomized and exposed to laptops after reaching the lab. Investigators conclude that actual human studies are needed.

A friend sent me this news item for Inga. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Las Vegas Stiletto Dash is set for this weekend at the Palazzo. Competitors must wear at least a 3” heel for the 50-yard dash, which ends (fittingly) at a champagne bar. Heels cannot be taped, tied, or adhered to the foot. I think Inga and I may have to do our own Stiletto Dash at HIMSS – I’ve already started looking for the perfect shoes for HIStalkapalooza.

WANTED: S&M Show Seeks Mosh Pit
By Dr. Gregg

Certainly you heard the word of the deadline pushback to ease the pressure on folks trying to decide whether or not to hit the Stage 1 starting blocks. Madam Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that little gem Wednesday at a meeting held in the Unified Technologies Center of Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland. Along with this, she and Dr. Mostashari announced the new findings of a doubling of EHR adoption in just the past two years.

However, this was yesterday’s news, and I’m fairly sure you’ve already read enough diversity of opinion via tweets or blasts or blogs on it. So instead of yet another “what does this really mean” rehashing, I’d like to share a few thoughts I thunk while sitting in the crowd at the aforementioned Sebelius & Mostashari Show in Cleveland.

First off, Kathleen Sebelius moved up this year from 57th to 13th on the Forbes list of “The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.” You can see why: she has a countenance that shows the ferocity acquired from uncounted political battles and the seemingly stern “hide” that comes from learning to slough off the daily barrage of slings and arrows that inevitably fly in that eternal battleground.

Yet, as I hear from folks who know her well, she is also approachable in public and attentive to the opinions and presence of those around her. Plus, according to Wikipedia, she’s a huge jazz fan and has an untarnished record going of attending thirty (30!) consecutive New Orleans Jazz Fests. Now, I don’t care how stern you may appear on a panel or in a board meeting: anybody who has ever been to NOLA’s Jazz Fest knows a little something about how to have fun and what some really, really good music is all about.

So, following the main act by Sebelius and Friends (i.e., the panel discussion,) up steps “The Mostashari.” I wanted to say that he was the opening act for Sebelius given her position, power, and the fact that she was the headliner. However, since his act followed hers — and especially because of the supreme “choreography” of his act — I’m not sure this is true. To say he stole the show would be absolutely true.

Even before the “show” had begun, Farzad was working it. He came into this roomful of some 100+ folks and glad-handed all around before the show started, grinning that infectious grin of his almost non-stop. He was engaging, but at all times obviously a man on a mission.

During the opening panel’s time on stage, Farzad would be very attentive-appearing, but with an almost unobtrusive manner and with an almost a rhythmic beat, he’d be checking e-mails or texts. (Both he and the Secretary would text or check e-mails off and on continually throughout the performance, of course. Even Ms. Sebelius was pretty discrete about it, I must admit.)

But, when the panel was done and break time was over, it was time for the real show to begin: “Farzad: The Champion Physician Champion.”

Originally, the “intimate discussion period” was supposed to be with Farzad and about 12 of us. But, some 50 or so folks were still hanging around after the break, apparently thinking they might be a part of this session. We had already started out into a hallway to head toward a smaller room for the chat when it became clear that there was some confusion as to just who was invited. With barely a skipped beat, Farzad says, “That’s great! Let’s just make it an intimate meeting with 50.” So, about face, back to big room we went.

Now, as many of you may have read here, I used to do sound engineering in the “big time” rock-n-roll world. I gotta tell ya’, I’ve never seen an act by any band or performer – especially by ANY geek, even the inimitable Steve Jobs – that had more true “rock star” quality than did Dr. Mostashari.

He steps down off the stage onto the floor to be at the same level as the crowd. He bounces from one side of the room to the opposite. He is charged with energy. He starts off the show with the requisite rock star proclamation: “Ohio, you’re my new favorite state!” (Hello, Cleveland!) He bounds back and forth. He actively engages the crowd. He applauds audience contributions at every opportunity. He sits on the dais, takes off his suit jacket, and rolls up his shirt sleeves, ready to get to work. He challenges the crowd. He unflinchingly accepts challenges from the crowd. He throws in a last “Ohio, I love ya!” before the show ends. He sticks around a good amount of time afterwards to talk to the masses.

Dr. Mostashari, you are, sir, without question, a rock star. You are the head cheerleader for all HIT physician champions and you are superb in the role. Thanks for the great show.

The only thing missing was the Mostashari Mosh Pit.

Contacts

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