Allscripts announced this morning that it will acquire Eclipsys for $1.3 billion in an all-stock transaction. Misys PLC, the 55% owner of Allscripts, also announced that it will sell most of its interest in the company to allow the acquisition to proceed, reducing its holdings to less than 10% of the merged companies.
The proposed transaction values Eclipsys at $1.3 billion, a 19% premium to Tuesday’s closing share price.
Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman will serve as CEO of the new company, while Eclipsys CEO Phil Pead was named as its chairman.
Tullman was quoted in the announcement as saying,
We are at the beginning of what we believe will be the single fastest transformation of any industry in US history,and the combination of the Allscripts Electronic Health Record portfolio in the physician office and leadership in the post-acute care market, with Eclipsys’s market-leading hospital enterprise solution creates the one company uniquely positioned to execute on this significant opportunity. Our vision and the vision behind ARRA is to leverage information technology to create collaboration between providers in all care settings, helping to improve the quality and lower the cost of care. The merger of Allscripts and Eclipsys creates one company with the scale, breadth of applications and client footprint to bring that vision to life by connecting providers in hospitals, physician practices and post-acute organizations across the country.
The deal is expected to close in 4-6 months.
The companies will hold a webcast at 8:00 this morning Eastern time, open to all here or by telephone at (877) 666-7021.
Rumor of the merger was reported on HIStalk on April 12 by Thad.
Update: the company has created a new site about the merger that includes a FAQ, merger benefits, and facts about the combined companies (warning: PDF).
From Mandy Manilow: “Re: HIEs. I am trying to determine whether HIEs are eligible for Meaningful Use reimbursement from ARRA.” I don’t think so, but comments are welcome. HITECH funds HIEs through (a) money for individual states to distribute as HIE grants, and (b) the Beacon Community program. Neither are specifically related to Meaningful Use as far as I know since that’s for providers. Some of the presumptive MU requirements for those providers involve sharing data via HIEs, but that’s to qualify for their own ARRA money.
From The PACS Designer: “Re: iPhone 4 arrives. The iPhone 4 is announced, with dual cameras which Apple calls FaceTime video calling. Also in the new iPhone 4 you’ll find 960-by-640 resolution, multitasking, and HD video recording. The case is a new ultra-durable glass, scratch-resistant and virtually unbreakable.” Steve Jobs repeatedly urged the 570 audience members using WiFi during his demo to get off since he couldn’t connect (video above). All the Apple fanboys have to breathlessly Tweet the conference in real time to their home-bound peers, of course.
From MaxPayneUK: “Re: iSoft apologizes. The question is whether iSoft’s shareholders are being served well by its UK division’s management.” iSoft formally apologizes for blaming its revenue shortfall on the UK’s political climate, which the company originally said had hurt its revenue by slowing down NPfIT. Shares are down to $0.28, even after a successful, much-delayed go live at Morecambe Bay, dropping the market cap to $290 million (I assume that’s in Australian dollars, each worth about 83 cents US). If it wasn’t for the company’s UK exposure, you’d think a US company would grab it.
Listening: reader-recommended Paper Tongues from Charlotte, NC, an amalgam of positive hip-hop and rock that’s hard to characterize, but eminently listenable (to me, it’s Flo Rida meets Muse with a soupcon of Beastie Boys, an admittedly odd admixture). They’re at Bonnaroo this weekend, then touring all over the place.
The local paper writes up the Epic implementation at Methodist Hospitals of Gary, Indiana (or Gary Methodist as we used to call it when I worked for a vendor).
Cedars-Sinai CIO Darren Dworkin is quoted in a USA Today article about the iPad:
It won’t magically solve all our issues, because medical data-entry will still require a computer (and keyboard), but the iPad could be the next evolution in sharing information with patients. We’re eager to make the evolutionary step from doctors entering information with their backs to patients to holding a screen that they can then turn around and share. It’s early stages yet, but there’s great potential.
This just in from the Weird News Andy breaking news center … hundreds of patients in Australia in need of surgery, some for painful conditions or cancer, are ignored for up to a year after a hiring freeze prevents assigning someone to re-key information from their paper forms into the computer. WNA also notes that 11,000 unionized University of California nurses plan to walk off the job Thursday in sympathy with their colleagues from Minnesota who are protesting what they claim are unsafe hospital staffing levels. If a judge denies UC’s request to stop the strike, it will be the largest medical strike in US history.
Our super-CIO blogger Ed Marx has updated his Office Without Walls piece with answers to reader questions and added some pictures.
Webahn announces that its Capzule PHR is available for the iPad for $5.99.
St. Francis Hospital & Health Centers (IN) names David Mandelbaum, MD as physician champion for its Epic implementation.
In Canada, Saint Elizabeth Health Care rolls out the CellTrak GPS-powered homecare system on BlackBerry devices.
GE Healthcare previews Centricity Dashboard at the SIIM conference that just ended in Minneapolis.
Anesthesiologists at New York Presbyterian Hospital report positive study findings in their use of an electronic system to hand off patients from the cardiothoracic OR to the ICU. It lets ICU employees monitor the patient’s surgical progress, reducing the time from closure to transfer.
Varian announces that its Aria oncology EMR has received Surescripts e-prescribing certification.
A former computer tech at North General Hospital (NY) is arrested for hacking into the hospital’s network after he was fired, when he allegedly logged in as a doctor and e-mailed employees that CIO Michele Prisco was a racist for firing him.
One of these days, I hope to make it to an AHIP conference, which runs this week in Las Vegas. I’m sorry that I’ll miss MEDecision’s big bash on Wednesday, which features Natasha Bedingfield and adult beverages. My kind of party.
In addition to (or perhaps in spite of) throwing big parties, MEDecision apparently does a good job of keeping its employees healthy. The Philadelphia Business Journal awards the company a Healthy Workplace Award for encouraging physical activity and positive health choices among its staff.
Enterprise Software Deployment becomes a certified consulting partner of Eclipsys to provide implementation services for Sunrise Enterprise.
HIE provider Halfpenny Technologies acquires Laboratory Management Services, which specializes in clinical data acquisition and reporting for health plans and clinical labs.
UCSF CEO Mark Laret joins the Nuance Communications board of directors.
Tri-City Medical Center (CA) will fire five employees who discussed patients on Facebook. Thee hospital did not provide details about the posts, but the CEO says the information did not include patient names, photographs, or similarly identifying information. Regardless of any potential wrongdoing on the part of the nurses, look for health systems to tighten up their social media policies.
Not that social media and healthcare can’t co-exist.The CIO of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles claims his hospital’s social networking presence has helped steer patients to its online portal, which is responsible for $3 million in revenue since 2008. Other CIOs claim social media has helped with patient recruitment and retention, as well as enhanced patient satisfaction.
West Georgia Health goes live on Hospital BPM, a analytics solution from Integrated Revenue Management.
NaviNet and MEDecision align to provide MEDecision’s Patient Clinical Summaries to any provider enrolled in the NaviNet Network.
Maimonides Medical Center (NY) implements Allscripts Care Management Solution, following up on its deployment of the Allscripts ED solution earlier this year.
Speaking of Allscripts, the company selects RemitDATA to broaden its revenue cycle solution offering for physician groups.
Soccer fans are notoriously rowdy, but New Jersey’s new Red Bull Arena will be ready to address medical emergencies. The soccer stadium signs up Clara Maass Medical Center to provide EMS services at its event. The EMS staff will connect remotely to the medical center ED and its EDIMS system.
If you missed yesterday’s HIStalk Practice, then you won’t be able to steal my brilliant idea for an iPhone app. Not to mention you missed my musings on consultants and ambulatory EMR vendors and the latest recommendations from an HHS advisory workgroup.
Cook Children’s Medical Center (TX) selects Patient Care Technology Systems’ Amelior Tracker to track medical equipment.
Which reminds me: just this morning a friend was sharing that her teenage son got a summer job as a security specialist with a hospital. Turns out he is not some sort of patient bouncer, but will actually be helping perform inventory tracking.
Orlando Health will implement Accelarad’s SeeMyRadiology.com to exchange diagnostic imaging information, giving clinicians the ability to review medical image information via the Web or with mobile devices.
The University of South Alabama Health System engages MEDSEEK to develop a consumer Web site.
Streamline Health announces a first quarter loss of $1.2 million, compared to last year’s net earnings of $16,000. Revenues fell from $3.8 million to $3.5 million while expenses grew from $3.7 million to $4.7 million. Not the prettiest results, to say the least.
Susan Steele joins Precyse Solutions as director of marketing communications. She was previously with Siemens Health Services.
SCIOinspire introduces Just InTime Wellness, which uses predictive modeling tools and clinical algorithms from health claims to provide patients with targeted health messages. Health plans or hospitals can use the system to send patient-specific messages about gaps in care or the need for prevention services. From a patient standpoint, it sort of sounds like Big Brother is watching over your medical record. On the other hand, who doesn’t appreciate a reminder every now and then?
Delta Air Lines will be the first US company to use OptumHealth NowClinic, a virtual clinic option offered through UnitedHealth Group. For $10, a patient can spend 10 minutes with a physician using a webcam and live computer chat.
Edward Hospital & Health Services (IL) goes live on CPM Marketing Group’s Instant CRM system, which uses behavioral targeting technology much like when Amazon recommends books based on your searching and purchasing habits. CPM’s president and CEO says the tools allow hospitals to create “up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.” Something like, “Would you like a rhinoplasty with that septoplasty?”
From Aldous Snow: “Re: possible Twin Cities nurses’ strike. If it happens, it will be interesting to see how the out-of-state nurses being hired will deal with the EMRs.” The nurses’ union threatens a one-day walkout Thursday over staffing concerns and benefit cuts, news of which flooded the Board of Nursing with out-of-state applicants willing to replace them temporarily. You are right — how do you get thousands of one-day replacement nurses trained on software? If the strike really happens, someone should document how many help desk calls result, how many patient incidents occur, how much information is recorded on paper until the A-team comes back the next day, etc. Since we’re talking a lot about software usability lately, this might be the ultimate test of it.
From Dr. Daneeka: “Re: Nuance’s physician-only weekend. I went last year as the lead for my employer and found the experience worthwhile. I think it would be good for those who support doctors as well. I think early reg was extended to July. Disclosure: I own a few hundred shares of Nuance stock, but it’s because I like the product.” Nuance’s healthcare user group meeting will be held in Boston November 7-10, with the physician-only part starting the Saturday afternoon before. Thinking ahead, if the Red Sox were to win the World Series that could end the week before, you’d be right in the middle of a big party like I was one year when I went there for recreational purposes. This wasn’t an anonymous post, by the way – it’s from a real doctor and friend of HIStalk (not a Nuance PR plant, in other words).
From The PACS Designer: “Re: 4G wireless. We’re going to be seeing and reading more about fourth-generation (4G) wireless in the near future. As a refresher, it all started in 1981 with analog wireless (1G), then advanced to digital wireless (2G) in 1992, and finally in 2002 we got spread spectrum transmission wireless with multi-media support (3G). Some early 4G wireless applications over the last few years where mobile WiMAX and long-term evolution (LTE). The new 4G wireless brings all-IP packet-switched networks, mobile ultra-broadband (gigabit speed) access, and multi-carrier transmission. A 4G system will provide for a secure all-IP (Internet Protocol) based solution that features IP telephony, ultra-broadband Internet access, gaming services, and streamed multimedia for users.”
From Parker Selfridge: “Re: HIT purchasing decisions. Who makes them in private practices and in hospitals? I can’t find anything that says specifically. Is it doctors and nurses?” I don’t have any physician practice experience, but in all the hospitals I’ve worked in, doctor and nurse selection team members had little say beyond expressing a preference that was overridden in every case. The clinician demo score sheets, site visit notes, and architecture reviews were weighted minimally compared to CIO/CFO gut feeling about non-clinical vendor factors such as business performance, industry word of mouth, alleged product integration, perceived risk, and an anecdotal review of what other hospitals (of the “informal benchmark” category) were buying at that moment. There was also strong resistance to buying what the cross-town competitor used because that would appear imitative (interoperability advantages notwithstanding). Certain vendors relied on the urge of C-levelers to override the white coats, knowing their poorly designed products would play better in PowerPoint in a plush conference room instead of in the uncarpeted hospital areas. Predictably, the clinicians resented the time they had wasted in providing ignored guidance and were therefore lukewarm in their adoption of the also-ran.
From V.B. Shadow: “Re: e-mail update. I read most of my e-mail by iPhone and prefer content that is viewable directly instead of sent as a link.” My experience with HTML e-mail isn’t so good – spam filters kick them out a lot and readers get a huge file instead of a text link. But I’m sensitive to vox populi – who would rather see the full post in the e-mail instead of just the link?
From Stanford Blatch: “Re: usability. I agree that usability is a goal, that some systems are more usable than others, and that you can make measurements that are objective. I think the BlackBerry is more usable than the iPhone, but others think the opposite. You can’t ignore the subjective user in usability.” See below – usability does not imply an overarching summary of all possible user preferences, only that they can efficiently complete a set of defined tasks, i.e. order a lab or review active meds. Products with identical usability ratings aren’t necessarily interchangeable to individual users, and the entire user experience includes more than the specific task definition. And even then, I might prefer a lower-usability product for logical reasons.
From DrLyle: “Re: usability. Thanks for pointing out the very real science of Usability. I too thought that ‘usability’ was too subjective to actually be used in evaluation, but have since gotten involved with the HIMSS EMR Usability Task Force and learned how very real the study and reporting of Usability can be. This task force put out a great white paper on this subject of Defining and Testing EMR Usability (warning: PDF) last year.” Also check DrLyle’s blog post and his podcast interview with a usability expert (Episode #17). This is a really good overview paper, with content that’s fresh, concise, and doesn’t kiss up to vendors. Some of its conclusions:
Usability may be the key reason that EMRs haven’t been more widely adopted.
Usability is directly related to clinical productivity, errors, user fatigue, and user satisfaction.
EMR usability is important because clinicians are mobile, doing distractive cognitive work while using the application, and not following a predictably linear progression of system use.
Usability principles include simplicity, naturalness, consistency, minimizing cognitive load, efficient interactions, forgiveness and feedback, effective use of language, effective information presentation (density, color, readability), and preservation of context.
Methods of evaluating usability of completed products include expert review, performance testing, risk assessment, and one-on-one testing.
That a good segue to the results of my last poll, which are far from conclusive. You said the best way to encourage usability (but only by a microscopic margin) is to publish independent usability reviews. CCHIT has promised (warning: PDF) to do this at some point, but in a manner that’s pretty much worthless (asking a panel of usability experts to rate product usability after watching a vendor’s remote Webex demo, all without clinician involvement). Also, will their standards be absolute or relative? i.e., if all products are bad, does the best of the bad ones get a perfect score?
New poll to your right: from Parker Selfridge’s question, which group carries the most weight when hospitals buy clinical systems? Note that I’ve opened up an “add your own answer” field in case I missed one.
Thanks to Inga for capably covering for me while I took a little break. It’s nice having someone I trust to keep HIStalk going so I don’t have to worry about it. Before my break, I noticed that HIStalk was coming up a bit slowly on weekday mornings when hundred of readers hit the site at once, so I had it moved to a bigger server. Hopefully you’ll notice a positive difference. For my fellow nerds, it’s now running on a virtualized server with dual Xeon processors, 1.5GB of dedicated RAM, and hot-swap RAID-10 drives.
If you know mobile healthcare computing, are an excellent writer (a geeky medical resident would be cool!), and are interested in paid gig (part-time, permanent, fun, flexible) let me know.
Listening: Silversun Pickups, fresh, LA-based alternative rock. I’d call them Breeders meets Nirvana with some Red Hot Chili Peppers thrown in. Like it lots.
A Fort Worth ambulance service is testing a service called Invisible Bracelet, in which people carry a uniquely numbered ID card or driver’s license sticker that allows paramedics to access their health history and emergency contacts. Enrollees pay $5 per year and complete an online questionnaire with the needed information. It’s a registry service of the American Ambulance Association.
Sponsor news:
New York eHealth Collaborative, a Regional Extension Center, chooses Sage Intergy EHR as a preferred product
Picis has chosen Clinical Architecture’s Symedical product, a terminology mapping system, to enable new medication decision support capabilities for the Picis CareSuite high-acuity product line.
I should have noticed this sooner: the Web site of healthcare IT consulting firm Quality IT Partners linked to HIStalk and included these nice comments: “Keeping up to date on healthcare news is key for all of us here at Quality, and we are very impressed with the content, contributions, and delivery of the information HIStalk provides.” Thanks!
MedMatica Consulting Associates has posted a series of one-page MedMatica Minutes that contain concise overviews of individual topics, with the latest one being on recruiting candidates.
EDCO Group is offering a June 29 Webinar on reducing the cost of scanning and indexing documents, which it says averages 20 cents per page.
Red Hat announces availability of Fedora 13, the latest upgrade to its free operating system. The company will have a significant presence at the 2010 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in Boston on June 22-25.
asquaredm offers its assessment services with a typical completion timeframe of 30 days.
3M Health Information Systems releases a breach notification tool as part of its ChartRelease and DisclosureTrac applications. It automates the process of notifying patients about data breaches.
Stratus Technologies announces (warning: PDF) its Avance 2.0 software, which configures itself to perform hardware and host-level software monitoring, perform fault detection, and resolve 150 critical operating system situations.
Philips has demonstrated a prototype of its pathology slide scanner and image management system for digital pathology.
Intellect Resources is posting some of it hot jobs on Facebook.
The city of Cincinnati, whose declining sales tax revenue leaves it unable to make payments on the two riverfront stadiums it built in the 1990s to prevent the horror of having its pro sports teams bolt for greener artificial pastures, gets an out-of-the-box solution proposal from a county commissioner: chop by nearly 50% the funds the city pays to its big hospitals, University Hospital and Cincinnati Children’s, for trauma and safety net services to the indigent.
Motorola spinoff Freescale announces Intelligent Hospital, a kiosk for homes or public areas that allows sending a variety of instrument-captured vital signs to a doctor or hospital: height, weight, temp, BP, pulse, a one-lead EKG, pulse ox, blood glucose, and spirometry. It was developed in Mexico.
Surgeons in Japan are using the iPad as a display during surgery.
Houskeeping: put your e-mail in the Subscribe to Updates box to your right to get instant updates. The new Search box digs through seven years’ of HIStalk plus HIStalk Mobile and HIStalk Practice, so feel free to see what we’ve said about companies and people. Sponsors post jobs free on the jobs page. If you find Inga and me likeable, feel free to say so by clicking the Like option on our Facebook widget to your right (the one with reader pics, each of them extremely attractive, if I may say). The HIStalk Calendar has many cool events listed and you can add your event for free. I’m always on the prowl for Readers Write articles (500 words, no commercial pitches, provider submissions preferred). Lastly, please take a moment to scour and click the sponsor ads to your left since those companies took the ultimate leap of faith in sponsoring an anonymous, caustic blogger who might take a swipe at them every now and then if they deserve it. Thanks to every reader and sponsor — you have no idea how important you are to me.
A Weird News Andy find: a Sydney, Australia hospital runs out of food, so the nurses tell an inpatient with a staph infection and IV line to try nearby restaurants for something to eat. He heads out in the rain without an umbrella and walks nearly a half mile to a kebab shop, then returns to the hospital drenched. The hospital says staff didn’t follow policies on obtaining after-hours meals for patients.
ONCHIT announces a new enrollment subcommittee of the HIT Policy Committee that will recommend standards for electronic enrollment of patients in federal and state insurance programs.
A Florida Board of Medicine member wants the board to issue a statewide warning about EMRs, following an incident in which an OB-GYN missed an abnormal Pap smear and blamed the EMR. The OB-GYN punished the EMR by replacing it, while the Board of Medicine punished the OB-GYN with a $20,000 fine, a risk management review, and 100 hours of community service. The board member, a dermatologist, said “"I think the Department of Health needs to put out a warning to physicians that they need to look at their programs’ default settings. This year we have seen as many if not more medical records violations from electronic medical records as we saw from hand-written records violations.”
More executive turnover at athenahealth: COO David Robinson and corporate development SVP Nancy Brown will leave the company, replaced by CTO Ed Park and SVP Derek Hedges, respectively. Market reaction was negative, with shares dropping nearly 9% and closing barely above their 52-week low. Stock price has retreated nearly 50% in five months.
Regenstrief will release its new version of the LOINC medical vocabulary today (Monday). The free download page is here.
Everybody who’s worked in a academic medical center will be surprised that this is newsworthy: the worst month to be hospitalized is July, when the fresh crop of medical residents starts making their newbie mistakes. At our place, it’s full alert month as residents starting ordering non-existent drugs and tests, make major diagnostic errors, and fumble their way through their first cases. No wonder the attendings have gray hair.
Free EMR vendor Practice Fusion will partner with Dell to offer hardware, software, and services to physician practices. A package for 3-4 users (PCs, scanners, printers, and connectivity hardware) will cost around $3,000. The press release notes that the company has doubled headcount to 41 since fall.
Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra writes a Huffington Post editorial, talking up the Community Health Data Initiative and a competition for apps that encourage children to eat healthily. The CHDI work page has downloadable data sets in case you want to build something yourself. I really like that idea, especially after reading this result: “Recently a retired telecom employee in rural New Hampshire won $30,000 by proposing a new, scientific approach to helping forecast solar activity – solving the problem faster than NASA could have by itself and with a novel approach the agency had not considered.”
iSoft says its expected 2010 profit will fall short by half because its UK payments have been delayed over its missed go-live dates and political uncertainty.
Strange: Cannabis Medical Solutions announces its medical marijuana prepaid card, which includes a loyalty reward system.
I’m flying solo today as Mr. H takes a well-deserved long weekend. However, before he headed out, he forwarded this note regarding AT&T’s just introduced data plans, which aim to make mobile Internet use more affordable for the masses.
Here’s my opinion – I don’t use an iPhone, but with a $15 data plan that would probably be plenty for me, I may well get one. That’s the same price as the old MediaNet subscription from AT&T.
Why I think it’s smart: few users will pay more, but AT&T will grab more subscribers like me who will create a nice revenue stream of $15 per month for consuming minimal bandwidth (and get those folks sending more of the high-profit text messages).
I think the headlines are wrong — the news isn’t the end of all-you-can-eat data plans, it’s the beginning of an inexpensive way for average users to get the benefits of an iPhone for half the price. And if Apple does offer Verizon as an option, Verizon will have to decide whether to market to the heavy users at the $30 price or match AT&T’s pricing to attract average users.
On the downside, this change doesn’t help the issue of overall system capacity for all that bandwidth. It may even make it worse since the power users probably won’t change their habits and the newcomers will create a new demand.
And here’s my two cents. Remember the old days, before unlimited voice minutes and unlimited text messaging? I recall once thinking I would never exceed 60 minutes of airtime a month, especially since extra minutes were $.25 each. Or that I’d never use 200 text messages a month (extra messages cost $.10 each.) Today I have unlimited everything because I’ve become dependent on these tools, as have the people I communicate with. I predict that a lot of newbie smartphone users will quickly discover that 200MB doesn’t go too far if you are using e-mail, trading photos, and uploading Youtube videos.
A US District Court judge throws out the securities fraud convictions of two former Medical Manager execs, saying the case exceed the five-year statute of limitations. In March, former president John Kang and former VP and COO John Sessions were found guilty of conspiracy to commit mail, wire, and securities fraud for fraudulently inflating and reporting WebMD’s earnings and revenues by $16.8 million over a six year period. The judge also criticized the government’s prosecution of what he called “probably the most expensive case in the history of the world.”
AHRQ introduces free software designed to make it easier and faster for a state, hospital, or other healthcare organization analyze and post healthcare quality data. The new “My Own Network powered by AHRQ” or MONAHRQ can be downloaded here.
Streamline Health and MRO Corp. sign a mutual referral marketing agreement. Both will market their integrated solution that facilitates document workflow and provides release-of-information processing.
Five critical access hospitals sign on to implement NextGen Inpatient Clinicals (the old Opus Healthcare product.) Several of the clients already use NextGen Inpatient Financials (developed by the former Sphere Health Systems.)_ In other words, NextGen seems to be getting traction from its two recent acquisitions.
Hilo Medical Center (HI) goes live with Phase I of its MEDITECH 6.0 EMR implementation. Healthcare Informatics Associates provided technical assistance to the 264-bed facility.
Healthcare consulting firm ChangeScape forms ChangeScape Technologies, a new subsidiary focused on helping physicians and hospitals implement EMRs.
The State of Minnesota awards a contract to MEDecision to provide PHR technology to the state’s employees and their dependents.
HIMSS says that 10 regional extension centers have joined the organization since launching HIMSS’s complimentary affiliate program for RECs. HIMSS also announces six finalists for the 2010 HIMSS Davies Ambulatory Care and Public Health Awards of Excellence. Winners to be named in September.
McKesson releases its 7.1 version of Connect-Rx software, which includes improved functionality for AcuDose-Rx medication dispensing cabinets and Anesthesia-Rx medication carts.
Contra Costa Regional Medical Center (CA) converts from Mediware to Unibased ForSite2020 Surgery Management software. Contra Costa will interface the new application to its Keane and MEDITECH systems.
HHS awards another $83.9 million in grants to help networks of health centers adopt EHR and other HIT systems. The 45 grants target safety-net providers serving low-income and uninsured patients.
IBM joins the Eastern versus Western Medicine debate, introducing a new tool to analyze medical records at South China’s largest traditional hospital. IBM’s Healthcare Information Warehouse system will be used to investigate the effectiveness of Eastern and Western approaches for treating chronic kidney disease. The warehousing system will store and synthesize EMR data that may ultimately determine if particular combinations of Eastern and Western treatments are most effective.
Eight pediatric hospitals top US News Media Group’s rankings of Best Children’s Hospitals. The rankings were based on reputation, medical outcomes, and care-related indicators of quality.
Orion Health and Vangent form a partnership to offer a combined HIE solution. The companies will leverage Orion’s HIE architecture with Vangent’s HIT services expertise.
What you missed if you didn’t read yesterday’s HIStalk Practice: highlights from a profile on MED3OOO founder Pat Hampson; Ohio’s plan to pay a big chunk of HIT costs for practices willing to serve as training centers for patient-medical homes; and, Manatt Health Solutions exams the status of HITECH (they conclude it’s going to be tough for a lot of small practices to qualify for MU and RECs may find it challenging to maintain long-term sustainability.)
Harris Corp. wins a $10.9 million, eight-month contract to help the VA migrate its HIPAA 4010 standards to HIPAA 5010 standards.
I realize a lot of readers don’t feel their weekend is complete until they see Mr. H’s Monday Morning Update. I really don’t know if Mrs. H is going to allow Mr. H to get on the computer this weekend, so I’m hoping you die-hards will be able to figure out an alternative form of entertainment.
From Rebecca Bloomwood: “Re: New Jersey hospitals. Big bucks coming and going for EMRs.” A New Jersey paper runs some interesting hospital EMR numbers. Saint Peter’s University Hospital spent $50 million for McKesson Horizon Clinicals, but expects to get $40 million back in ARRA money. Hunterdon Medical Center went with NextGen (for a practice-based EMR, I assume) and expects to get $30 million from federal taxpayers.
From Donna Reed: “Re: consulting. I was a consultant, but took an FTE position due to family circumstances. I want to get back into consulting, but am running into a brick wall with Epic’s partners. Should clients sign these contracts? Should this type of partnership even be entertained?” I’ve never understood Epic’s firm stance on who partners and customers can hire (not to mention which companies former employees can work for). I doubt any of the agreements would be enforceable if legally challenged, but Judy’s got a lot more lawyer money than the average job seeker.
Monday’s post drew a lot of reader comments, some of them heavier on emotion than facts. I’ll be quicker to delete those comments in the future since they just waste everybody’s time. I doubt that will be necessary since I know some/most of the commenters from their previous posts and they have always been passionate, but with sound reasoning and respectful demeanor. I’ll write this one off as a post-holiday, back-to-work-dammit aberration.
A clarification about “usability” – it is not a feel-good, generic term for just asking users how they like an application. It’s an objective science that measures everything from eye movements to keystroke times as users interact with software in a lab setting, also including tests of how well and how quickly users perform specific task assignments. I’m no expert, but I’ve attended a couple of workshops offered by a usability professional organization, so I would differ with anyone who says software usability is subjective, lacks rigor, or favors one application over another. I was hoping to get a usability expert to write an article on that very topic, but I haven’t worked that out yet.
Listening: Sonata Arctica, more of that sweeping, operatic Finnish progressive metal that I love. It might be time for me to visit Helsinki again.
University of Missouri gets a $6.8 million ONCHIT grant to fund the Missouri Health Information Technology Assistance Center, but stresses that despite overlaps with its Tiger Institute partnership with Cerner, the Regional Extension Center won’t favor Cerner when it recommends EMR vendors to physician practices.
Speaking of MU Health Care, its former CIO George Carr (above) is named CIO of BryanLGH Health System (NE). Hospital operator HMA names Ken Chatfield as CIO. And in Abu Dhabi, former Karmanos Cancer Institute (MI) CIO George Yacoub is named CIO of Hopkins-managed Corniche Hospital.
Point-of-care communications technology vendor Voalté is named as an Up and Coming healthcare IT company by Healthcare Informatics.
For the reader obsessively charting HIStalk’s stats: the summer slowdown always starts in May, so the numbers dropped a little with 79,537 visits and 110,111 page views. That’s still 16% higher than May 2009. The verified e-mail subscriber list is at 5,574. Thanks for being one of the readers who made those numbers possible – I really appreciate it.
Speaking in Japan, GE CEO Jeff Immelt urges that country to “dominate healthcare information technology and home healthcare devices.” You’d think their taxpayers had bailed out GE Capital instead of us. He was also unusually frank in saying that “more money has been wasted on [healthcare] information technology than has been saved by using it.” He didn’t say, but much of that waste no doubt involved the elephant’s graveyard of once-good HIT applications that have withered under GE’s smothering bureaucracy. ADDENDUM: per a GE spokesperson, the company did not take TARP funding, although some of its debt was guaranteed by the federal government. I always refer to this Washington Post article, How a Loophole Benefits GE in Bank Rescue, which describes the special treatment GE received using what the article calls a loophole in the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program.
MEDecision will launch its Alineo 3.0 care management platform, which includes a new behavioral health utilization model, at AHIP next week.
Our friends at ONCHIT are looking for someone who’s smart, creative, and knows HIT (especially emerging technologies) to lead its innovation programs. I’m encouraged by all the folks who have taken pay cuts to work in federal service, so if you’ve ever thought about it, this sounds like a pretty cool job.
UPMC paid its CEO more than $5 million last year, but CIO Dan Drawbaugh did OK too, taking home $1.335 million. Surely that’s an all-time record for any non-profit’s CIO, not just in healthcare.
Australia’s Medicare program, one month away from mandatory implementation of a national patient identifier, has yet to sign a contract with a vendor to create connectivity between EMRs and the identifier service. They have a pretty good excuse: the bill hasn’t been passed yet and debate doesn’t even start for two weeks.
Emdeon announces a free Emdeon Office solution that allows providers to electronically submit workers’ compensation and related attachments.
Just the kind of headlines Harlem Hospital didn’t need after its “unread echocardiograms” fiasco: a unconscious woman being treated in its ED after being slipped a date rape drug claims she awakened to find a medical intern groping her. She confronts him afterward, at which time he admits pawing her but then asks her out on a date, not realizing that she is secretly recording their conversation. He’s been suspended with pay while awaiting sex abuse charges.
From Evelyn Castle: “Re: eHealth Nigeria. I read the short article you posted about me and eHealth Nigeria. I wanted to thank you for the publicity. If you wish to keep updated on the project, you can sign up for our mailing list on our Web site. We will also be blogging throughout the trip. Thanks for your interest.” Evelyn is a UC Santa Cruz college student who helped create Nigeria’s first EMR and is heading back to the county later this year automate several hospitals and clinics. As Mr. H pointed out, she’s my new hero even if she did shame me with her selfless accomplishments.
Emdeon submits formal comments to the DEA to support e-prescribing of controlled substances, but cautions that it will take the industry time to make the necessary software modifications.
US Oncology announces its new iKnowMed platform for community oncologists. US Oncology purchased the company iKnowMed in 2004, developers of an oncology-specific EHR, and has added RCM and inventory management components.
TELUS announces that its health space is now available for licensing by healthcare organizations. I didn’t understand the term “health space”, so I did a bit of surfing on the TELUS site (they are a sponsor, so I figured I really should understand what they do). TELUS Health Solutions is a Canadian company that offers a number of software applications, including EHR, claims management, and scheduling, plus the health space PHR.
Healthcare South (MA) selects Allscripts EHR/PM for its nine pediatric and family practice offices.
Trinity Muscatine (IA) takes its ED live on electronic medical records as part of the hospital’s $4.7 million EMR initiative.
In an article that calls Dell the “biggest player” in HIT, industry analysts and Dell execs discuss the company’s market approach to the industry. After acquiring Perot, Dell leaned on Perot’s expertise to develop ways to reduce HIE costs and to sell its technology to a broader segment of the market. Dell is now seeing increased success marketing to small and mid-size hospitals and their network of affiliated doctors implementing EMRs.
Apple says it has sold a whopping 2 million iPads since its launch two months ago. Impressive, especially when you consider that just last week it began selling the units in Canada, Japan, Europe, and Australia. In January, analysts estimated Apple would sell between 178,000 and 778,000 iPads monthly.
Emerging Healthcare Solutions is developing a new iPhone app that will automatically call users at the precise time they need to take medications, targeting seniors. I love the idea and think it could be a big hit, but, I suspect many seniors will need help from a tech-savvy friend or relative to set it up. And if the patient is not interested in using the iPhone for any of its other sexy apps, the $10 a month on top of AT&T’s monthly data fee ($30?) may be a bit too steep for the fixed income crowd.
A jury rules in favor of NYU Langone Medical Center in the case involving the male transplant patient who died of uterine cancer after a kidney transplant. During the medical malpractice trial, it was revealed that the donor’s cancer was not detected until after her autopsy. Furthermore, the hospital argued that their male patient actually developed a form of immune-system cancer as a result of the transplant, and did not die of uterine cancer.
A study finds that a telehealth system combining remote patient monitoring with education support tools reduced hospitalization time and improved the quality of life of patients with severe heart failure.
Here’s a lawsuit that’s right up that with McDonalds serving its coffee hot. A California woman sues Google for giving her poor walking directions from Google Maps. The woman pulled up the directions on her BlackBerry and was directed to walk on a route without sidewalks and with cars moving at high speeds. She was hit by a car and is suing Google for over $100,000 in medical expenses for its “careless, reckless and negligent providing of unsafe directions.”
From Tabula Rosa: “Re: EMR usability. At one of the ONC Policy Committee meetings, Judy Faulkner of Epic supposedly declared that ‘usability would be part of certification over her dead body.’ I wonder if she has similar sentiments about making software accessible to people with disabilities?” Unverified. This inspired my new poll question – keep reading below.
From ExXeroid: “Re: The Hospital of Central Connecticut. The Cerner staff is down to a skeleton crew. The IT people are leaving in droves. Cerner KC is the ACS takeover, but there’s hardly anyone left to support internally after the ACS disaster.” Unverified.
From The PACS Designer: “Re: Apple’s OS 4.0. Apple’s iPhone OS 4.0 will be available for the iPhone this summer and for the iPad this fall. While we are waiting, we get the opportunity to see some of the features that are coming. Also, Apple has a developer’s Web site to aid those who want to venture into application development for the OS 4.0.”
HIStalk readers donated generously to Sumter Regional Hospital (GA) after it was destroyed by a tornado in March 2007 (we collectively donated $11,264). The hospital, now Phoebe Sumter Medical Center and still being rebuilt, later received what appeared to be the highest vote total in a Siemens-sponsored contest to win an $800K Magneton Essenza MRI scanner, but somehow lost to another facility. Siemens decided to donate a machine to Sumter anyway. It has arrived and is already being used, with the picture above being one of the hospital’s first patients to benefit from it last week. The ribbon cutting will be this Friday, June 4 at 10 a.m. Former President Jimmy Carter, a Sumter County resident, may attend.
A whopping 79% of HIStalk readers say they would worry about the confidentiality of their electronic information if they had a psychiatric illness and their providers were sharing information electronically. That’s not to say that they are specifically concerned about electronic security, only that they would worry about having their information exposed in some unspecified way. New poll to your right: what’s the best way to raise the level of EHR usability in the marketplace?
I figured it was time to cruise around the sites of some of HIStalk’s sponsors and see what’s new with them.
Rockingham Memorial Hospital (VA) says its use of Nuance’s Dragon Medical and eScription speech recognition products will save it $600K this year alone.
A BridgeHead Software survey (warning: PDF) finds that hospital data storage needs are increasing dramatically, primarily because of PACS images, electronic medical records files, and scanned documents.
Virtelligence will be exhibiting at MUSE this week.
Lakeridge Health Network (ON) selects Access Intelligence Forms Suite to get forms into Meditech scanning and archiving without manual indexing. Access will exhibit at MUSE this week.
Registration for the e-MDs user conference in Austin July 22-24 is open. It sells out every year.
Ingenix Consulting SVP Joel Hoffman is named a “Top 25 Consultant” by Consulting magazine for his work in assessing financial outcomes of care management.
Renaissance Resource Consulting has open positions for Epic installers and IDX/GE application and technical consultants.
A native iPad version of PatientKeeper Mobile Clinical Results is now available.
Going to AHIP Institute in Las Vegas next week? MEDecision is hosting a party at PURE in Caesar’s Palace. You know from HIMSS that they throw a good one.
O’Toole Law Group is offering (warning: PDF) contract assistance for Meditech 6.0 upgrades.
Universal American Corp., a provider of Medicare Advantage and Part D prescription drug plans, chooses (warning: PDF) MedVentive’s care collaboration tools for members and providers, including real-time care and drug substitution recommendations.
Charge capture automation vendor MedAptus will exhibit at HFMA’s Annual National Institute later this month in Nashville.
Surgical Information Systems will exhibit at MUSE and HFMA this month.
ACHE will publish a book on how consumer behavior is changing medicine by Lindsey Jarrell and Colin Konschak, partners of DIVURGENT Healthcare Advisors.
Dentrix Enterprise is offering a free Webinar on the features and benefits of its Electronic Dental Record solution, the leading EDR in community health centers.
Sunquest will exhibit this month at G2 Lab Outreach in Baltimore and Smart Health in London.
Sentry Data Systems releases two case studies on using its Sentinel RCM 340B solutions, one from Alegent Health and the other from Saint Barnabas. They’ll be at HFMA and ASHP this month.
Software Testing Solutions introduces its automated testing solution for Eclipsys Sunrise order entry that saves staff time and documents testing of procedure ordering, billing, interfaces, and validation of new releases.
EHRScope has gone live with its EMR review site, where EMR users can read and write reviews and rate their product.
Vitalize Consulting Solutions is #2 on the KLAS list of consulting firms that providers are considering.
Ed Meagher, former VA deputy CIO, CTO, and chair of the committee that prepared the VistA report that I mentioned last week, took exception to my comments about those committee members with ties to federal contractors. He said, “The [HIStalk] level of cynicism is almost toxic. I can tell you that the personnel who participated in the report did so as IT industry experts, veterans, and citizens and not as representatives of their companies.” I wasn’t doubting their integrity or lack of good intentions, but rather the inevitable and often subconscious world view that any company’s employee would bring to the table. He’s right that the real to-do is to review the report and suggest improvements. Feel free to e-mail your comments and I’ll publish them. Assume that the VA is correct in its assessment that VistA has become technologically obsolete, hard to enhance, and hard to support — do the committee’s recommendations make sense? (although we’re missing a big piece of the puzzle – the inevitably large price tag. The VA is huge, although I can’t readily find its total inpatient bed count.)
I also got some feedback on the AHRQ report on practice EMR usability that I mentioned. I said it was nice work, just limited in applicability because only eight EMR vendors were interviewed and most of the big ones weren’t on the list. From my source, apparently many more EMR vendors were asked to participate, but declined.
HHS CTO and athenahealth co-founder Todd Park is named as one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People. He was recognized for making public health data more readily available. “It’s insufficient to just put data out there. We want to market them to people who can turn them into supercool apps.” Maybe he earned bonus points for correctly using “data” as plural. Cleveland Clinic CIO Martin Harris was #12. Both lost out to #1, Lady Gaga, but I’m sure she’ll sell more magazine copies, at least outside of healthcare.
Sevocity offers regional extension centers and educational organizations free access to its Internet-based EHR, set up as a demo clinic for up to 20 users and requiring them to have nothing more than PC with Internet access.
Inga has the latest in her series of questions for vendor executives: what advice do they have for David Blumenthal? She got some surprisingly frank and diverse answers, ranging from “start an EMR Lemon Law” to “stay the course.”
TELUS Health Solutions will announce this week that it is offering pre-built interface tools from Iatric Systems for quicker, cheaper interfacing of its Oacis EHR to Meditech. Offerings from TELUS include the Oacis Unified Patient Record (a Web-based clinical portal with longitudinal information), Oacis CDR, Oacis HIE, a data warehouse, and capabilities such as CPOE, clinical documentation, and ED tracking. TELUS will exhibit at MUSE this week. Frank Clark, CIO of Medical University of South Carolina, has told me several times that TELUS Oacis is a key part of his organization’s clinical systems strategy, particularly its physician portal.
I did some cleanup of the HIStalk e-mail update mailing list. Spam blockers (not on my end) were keeping some users from receiving their updates, so if you aren’t getting yours, you should now be able to sign up again at the upper right of the page.
I’ve been working on an HIStalk Toolbar for Firefox and IE (not for Chrome since it doesn’t support toolbars, unfortunately). I included some cool features: a search box that allows searching the Web as usual or HIStalk specifically (click the dropdown beside the Go button to choose); a Links dropdown with one-click access to all HIStalk sites; RSS feeds; an e-mail checker that will notify you when new mail comes to your online account (Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.); a really cool radio player that I preloaded with some indie rock stations (you can choose any others easily); and a local weather widget. You can customize any or all of this easily. I’ve been using it at work and it’s really handy, especially the e-mail checker and radio player. It uninstalls easily in case you change your mind. I’m listening to the Indie Rock station on it right now and sounds super.
Cerner’s Neal Patterson still wants insurance companies to die (go, Neal!) but also says Cerner will become a healthcare company, not just a healthcare IT company.
Dell announces its Healthcare Print Station, which offers one-touch options to route orders from hospital nursing stations to the pharmacy, a “Scan to EMR” button, a forms-on-demand option, and card copy for scanning both sides of patient ID cards to a single sheet of paper. The $599 add-on is available for Dell’s Java-capable multifunction printers (3333dn, 3335dn, and 5535dn).
NextGen parent Quality Systems reports Q4 numbers: revenue up 19%, EPS $0.45 vs. $0.40, falling short of consensus earnings expectations of $0.49.
Happy Memorial Day! Except for you non-US readers, who I confess I wasn’t thinking about when I talked about the holiday last week. Thanks to the reader from Canada who reminded me. According to my stats, the leading countries for HIStalk readers other than the US are Canada, Australia, UK, and India, with a significant drop-off before the next group from Ukraine, China, Israel, and France. As the programmers say, Hello World.
From Uncle Arnold: “Re: Cal eConnect. The state-sponsored HIE is interviewing CEO candidates this week. They are on a tight timeline and want to make an announcement within two weeks. The usual suspects are finalists: Roberts at HIMSS, Portale at Palomar, etc.” Unverified.
From Ms. Jones: “Re: Presbyterian Albuquerque. VMware installation caused two major network outages within 48 hours. The clinical system (McKesson) is still trying to recover: interfaces and prod down, pharmacy handhelds all needed hard booting, runaway processes triggered, unable to pull PACS studies, etc. Affected all eight facilities across the state.” Unverified. I also note that I still can’t spell Albuquerque in fewer than three attempts.
From Alan: “Re: hospital and TV reporter. A reporter is repeatedly touched by a hospital communications director. Hilarity ensues.” Bizarre. A TV talking head tries nicely to interview a Laguna Honda Hospital (CA) official about a reported misuse of patient gift funds. She’s on her way to a meeting, so she politely declines. The hospital’s creepy communications director gets in the reporter’s face and starts touching and patting him repeatedly, introducing himself about a hundred times (“Hello, my name is Mark Slavin”) as the TV guy warns him he’ll call the police if the guy doesn’t get his hands off him. Be glad they didn’t actually fight since I think it might have been embarrassing to humans everywhere.
A reader asked me to share the VA committee’s recommendations on the future of VistA. Nothing on it says its private, so I’ve posted it here. Your analysis is welcome. I notice that the working group included employees of companies that stand to benefit from an expensive rewrite (Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Deloitte, Northrop Grumman, etc.) so I might take their recommendations with a grain of salt. I also noticed one tiny recommendation that the VA shouldn’t build any software it can buy, provided the application meets standards.
A reader sent over the graphic above now that we’re all on Facebook. He thought it was funny. I agree, but Inga and I still love it when you friend us or click our “Like” button because we are insecure.
Weird News Andy notes that in the UK, lots of people can’t get the surgery they want, but at least one patient is getting surgery against their wishes. A judge’s ruling grants doctors permission to forcibly sedate a woman with uterine cancer and bring her to the hospital for a hysterectomy, claiming she is of unsound mind and the surgery is “plainly in her interests to have.” They’d better hope it goes well.
Allana Cummings, former SVP/CIO of Children’s Omaha, is named CIO at Northeast Georgia Health System. I think we probably mentioned that before, but now we’ve got a pic.
Listening: Fastball, one of my favorite guitar-and-harmonies indie pop bands.
A UCSD trend study says healthcare IT is the “hottest career option” for new grads.
Three Midwest hospitals that run McKesson’s Paragon sign up for its Practice Partner PM/EHR.
Allscripts will integrate IntelliDose chemo dosing into its products.
AHRQ releases a report on practice-based EMR usability, although only eight vendors were interviewed and big players like Epic, eClinicalWorks, Sage, Allscripts, etc. were not among them. Nice work, just a bit limited in scope to draw meaningful conclusions. Key points:
All vendors interview claimed a “deep commitment” to making their products usable.
Despite that, few (none?) of them said they do formal usability testing, follow user-centered design principles, or get real usability experts involved in their design.
Vendor processes to address reported usability-related patient safety issues are inconsistent.
Most vendors do not publicly share known usability-related incidents or enhancement requests.
No vendor admitted to contractually prohibiting users from disclosing product-related patient safety incidents.
“Many” vendors expressed interest in having an independent body develop EMR usability standards (great idea, since they also said that competitive pressure keeps them from collaborating on usability standards).
McKesson raises its quarterly share dividend from $0.12 to $0.18.
NPR reports on an interesting use of clinical decision support: analyzing the potential value of each individual outpatient radiology order based on patient condition and requiring the doctor to personally sign off on questionable ones. The iffy orders dropped from 5.4% of the total to 1.9%.
Drug company Wyeth, worried about being caught pitching drugs to doctors for unapproved indications, apparently modified its Salesworks software to prevent its sales reps from documenting their conversations with doctors, preventing future legal discovery. The company is also alleged to have dressed up salespeople in white coats, sending them on doctor rounds and into the OR during transplant surgeries.
The market cap of Microsoft at today’s market close: $227.9 billion. Of Apple: $230.5 billion. The five-year stock price chart is above (Apple is the green high-flyer, Microsoft is the blue dead money). The torch has been passed.
Speaking of Apple, the Chinese company that makes parts of the iPad, iPhone, and other consumer electronic devices urges workers not to kill themselves after 11 employees leap off buildings so far this year, with nine of them dying. The latest death was an employee who had been grilled over a missing iPhone prototype. Employees are now required to agree to let the company send them to a mental hospital if their behavior is “abnormal.” Safety nets have been installed around employee dormitories. Note to self: don’t take a job with a company that provides a dormitory or otherwise makes it obvious that you won’t have any free time.
Harlem Hospital (NY) admits that it allowed 4,000 echocardiograms to be read by techs instead of doctors. Cardiologists are reviewing them and have found several patients with undiagnosed cardiac problems.
Here’s a nasty anti-business surprise buried in the healthcare reform bill, slipped in by Democratic politicians to help pay for it: every business must report on 1099 forms payments to any company that total more than $600 in one year. Right now, that’s required only for payments to non-incorporated entities. So if you buy Dell computers, Sam’s Club paper towels, or Fedex shipments, you’ll have to get a W9 form from them (for their particular in-state business identity) and send them a 1099 every year. That’s an estimated 12x increase in paperwork. Who is John Galt?
I’ll probably do the usual Monday Morning Update this weekend even though it’s a holiday and few of you will read it Monday (but I might slip in some really good stuff to reward the loyalists). Have a wonderful holiday, flying that flag if you’re so inclined.
ONC announces that another $30.3 million in awards is available to fund two additional Beacon Communities. Letters of intent are due June 9 and we’ll find out the lucky winners in mid-August.
The tiny Guadalupe County Hospital in Santa Rosa, NM plans to add Medsphere Systems’ OpenVista EHR. Phoenix Health Systems will provide implementation and support expertise for the 10-bed hospital.
RCM service provider Zotec Partners aligns with Medical Business Services (MBS) to offer RCM tools to MBS’s hospital-based physician clients.
Zix Corporation launches ZixGateway Inbound, a new tool to help provider organizations identify unsecured PHI in incoming email.
EMRs cut the average treatment time for sexually transmitted infections from 11.5 days to 3.5 days, according to a UK study. The percentage of patients getting treatment within two weeks of diagnosis jumped from 38% to 94%. Doctors attribute the difference to faster patient notification of positive test results. Add that stat to your sales tool bag.
Surescripts bestows Gold certification status to eight physician software vendors.
HCA appoints Dr. Thomas L. Garthwaite to COO of the Clinical Services Group, charged with improving quality of care, patient safety, and clinical performance. He’s a former EVP and CMO for Catholic Health East and spent eight years with the VA, including a stint as Under Secretary for Health where he helped with the VA’s transition to EHR.
Humana and BCBS-RI top the 2010 PayerView Rankings, an annual report that examines how well health insurers are paying physicians. Insurance companies as a whole seem to be paying an average of seven days faster than last year and are denying 12-18% fewer claims.Full list here. Or if you prefer, watch athenahealth’s Jonathan Bush and Humana’s Bruce Perkins discussing the rankings with CNBC.
Some generally positive Cerner news out of the UK, at least from one NHS Trust administrator. Kate Grimes, the chief executive of Kingston Hospital NHS Trust says its implementation of Millennium has gone remarkably well after a big-bang go-live. She acknowledges the platform will help improve quality of care, but also notes that Millennium needs further work to be more intuitive and forgiving of mistakes.
A couple of weeks ago, Mr. H shared the story about Brigid O’Gorman, a college junior who is working to implement EMR in rural Uganda. Here’s the story of Evelyn Castle, a college junior from UC Santa Cruz and clearly another extraordinary young lady. She received a $10,000 scholarship to support her efforts to improve health care in Nigeria. She leads eHealth Nigeria, an organization focused on improving maternal and child health through the implementation of reliable health information systems. Last year, she helped create the country’s first EMR system. This year, she’s going back to Nigeria to set up seven hospitals and five primary care clinics with eHealth Nigeria’s “Instant EMR” program. I wouldn’t say I was ignoring the world and its needs while I was in college, but I think I was more focused on creating sexy togas for frat parties then I was impacting the quality of life for millions. I’m humbled and inspired.
From The PACS Designer: “Re: Microsoft’s CDSA. The Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator (CDSA) for Microsoft Office helps you create clinical document workflow by using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2010. CDSA is good for linking EMRs to other systems and also populating PHRs and CCRs.”
From Alan: “Re: Vermont Information Technology Leaders. It announces four more preferred partners.” They are athenahealth for revenue cycle, Concordant for consulting, MBA HealthGroup for implementation, and the University of Vermont’s Technical Services Partnership for services.
From LeBron Kydis: “Re: stats. I was charting the number of HIStalk visitors from day to day (I know, it’s a little neurotic) and realized the number of subscribers could be more interesting to watch as it climbs. Any chance you might include that number with the number of visitors?” Wow, that is compulsive. Bad news on the subscriber list, though: unlike the visitor count, there’s no widget to display it automatically. This will get you started: the confirmed count as of this minute is 5,565.
From FLgal: “Re: Epic. Tampa General (affiliated with USF) is implementing Epic. Shands (affiliated with UF) is also implementing Epic. Supposedly those two are collaborating with University of Alabama (not sure of the hospital name) to create a southeastern arc of Epic hospitals. Combine that with all the hospitals in Atlanta that are implementing (or thinking of doing so) Epic, and you’re got quite a nice chunk of the US covered by Epic.”
From A Family Affair: “Re: UPMC. A highly wired hospital with a highly connected leadership family.” UPMC paid $10 million last year to companies with ties to its directors and executive management. Relatives of the CEO, who himself made $5.16 million in 2009, received more than $3 million in payments, including his $265K daughter who was a contractor and is now executive director of UPMC’s technology development center. The CEO’s former son-in-law made $260K (until his wife divorced him and thus went his job) and his brother raked in $2.48 million for advertising. They didn’t ‘fess up until hearings convened by my hero, Senator Chuck Grassley.
Fletcher Allen Health Care lays off 23 transcriptionists who were rendered obsolete by technology such as EMRs and speech recognition. I feel bad for them, but that’s a nice plug for the cost saving potential of Nuance’s eScription, which I believe FAHC uses.
It was just over a year ago when Compuware inexplicably hired disgraced former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to sell healthcare software, giving him a cushy six-figure job barely a week out of prison (what the hell were they thinking?) Well, today they got to fire him: he’s going back to the slammer for violating the terms of his probation. He tried the sorrowful apology route yet again, but the judge wasn’t buying it this time: he’s going away for at least 18 months and possibly up to five years. You can read up on his checkered background, but get comfy first because it will take awhile. Please hold for a job offer on Line 2, Mr. Blagojevich.
Michael from Bitwork offered an explanation of the article I mentioned that said a Hawaii clinic was saving 55 hours a month through some unspecified change. They were manually assembling quality measure information using standard reports offered by their EMR, he says. The change was to implement Bitwork’s solution, which collects the information in the background and presents it as a scorecard.
Stung by the defection of HIMSS and other conferences because of absurd costs, the governor of Illinois is considering signing a bill that would limit union shenanigans at McCormick Place. Naturally being Illinois there’s all kinds of dirty politics, union wheeling and dealing, and favoritism involved, not to mention that attendees will get stuck with newly increased bus and taxi fees to generate funds for marketing the convention center.
Weird News Andy labels this story as, “I’ve heard of dropping a transmission in a car before, but not a baby.” A Minnesota woman who is feeling labor pains drives off for the hospital, stopping to pick up the baby’s father, who can’t drive because he has epilepsy. Her water breaks while driving, she yells for him to take the wheel, and she shucks off her pants and delivers an eight-pound baby boy right in the driver’s seat. She summarizes, “I was just sitting on the seat and he just slid out.”
Some Epic youth filmed a video of the famous on-campus treehouse. I’m beginning to think I need one of those for philosophical reflection or something like that since I’ve always wanted one.
Inga and I have jumped on the Facebook bandwagon because so many of HIStalk’s readers are active there. I’ve made a site change that puts a little blue Facebook icon at the top right of every post. Click it and you can easily and quickly publish the article link with your comment to your Facebook feed.
Connecticut Attorney General and US Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal apologizes for not being “clear and precise” in claiming Marines service in Vietnam that he really spent stateside. That’s newsworthy here only because he’s the brother of national coordinator David Blumenthal, which I happened to see in one of the newspaper articles after thinking they sure look alike. You would think serving honorably in the Marines in any location would be enough without having to embellish, which hopefully he’s realizing.
Speaking of David Blumenthal, he was the commencement speaker at the University of Florida College of Medicine’s graduation this past Saturday. He told them most of what they had learned would be obsolete shortly, a sad but true fact and another reason to use technology to support pushing current best practices to the bedside.
The Raleigh, NC newspaper takes heat from UNC Health System employees after publishing the organization’s salary database online, including employee names and ages.
Tri-City Medical Center (CA) looks into alleged privacy disclosures involving employees and Facebook, denying a rumor that 26 employees have been disciplined. One conclusion is that hospitals need a social networking policy. Policies don’t usually work, of course, but at least you have grounds to fire violators.
Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra, speaking at the American Telemedicine Association conference, calls for great healthcare technology ideas and recites some examples: Voxiva’s Text4Baby (I interviewed head guy Paul Meyer in November), a Case Western Reserve telehealth project, American Well (which I just mentioned), and Project Echo (I interviewed Director Sanjeev Arora in October).
Speaking of innovation, I’ve had some conversations about scouting out more of those in HIStalk (I’m non-disclosed to say who those conversations were with, but you would probably be impressed) It could be as simple as doing interviews like those above, or it could be evaluating products with potential to benefit the healthcare system as a whole (not necessarily for their business potential, which others are doing already). If you have ideas of how to do this or want to help in some way, let me know. I was thinking of offering companies or developers the chance to pitch their wares and have them evaluated by a panel of expert HIStalk readers, but I always have high-falutin’ ideas that I don’t have time to execute properly because I’m working two full-time jobs already. In any case, if you know of cool, innovative technology that’s delivering results but not getting much attention (preferably as a user and not a company pitch person), let me know.
Monday is Memorial Day, set aside to honor men and women who have lost their lives in military service involving conflicts both popular and not. Flags are cheap, easy to find, and fun to hang (and I’m reminding you way ahead of time). And unfortunately, they stand out nicely in most neighborhoods since everybody’s too wrapped up in picnics and car races to think about dead service members and their families on the one day per year set aside to pay those respects. So if you’d like to be a rebellious contrarian like me, hoist Old Glory on Monday. End of good-natured soapboxing.
The VA’s VistA Modernization Report
A reader sent over a copy of “VistA Modernization Report”, the work product of a committee that was convened to advise the VA about modernizing VistA. Its recommendations:
Stabilize VistA by freezing the code to some degree, releasing only enhancements needed for patient safety or mandates.
Contract with a research group to develop tech specs for a new open source VistA replacement.
Contract creation of a prototype.
Contract development of a foundation to manage the new, open source VistA.
Get more widespread VistA deployment outside of the VA by creating an easier delivery model.
Replace VistA’s functionality screen by screen.
“Harvest everything of value” from VistA.
Use commercial software where needed to complement VistA’s core functionality.
My reaction: big government contractors are wetting themselves at the prospect of getting a chunk of what is sure to be a massive cost. Remember VistA’s history: it was mostly developed by skunkworks programmers defying management orders and working directly with end users. It was not developed under an open source model and wasn’t cheap to build – it just happens to be free because taxpayers paid for it, which makes it available under the Freedom of Information act.
Software rewrites have ruined even nimble organizations who didn’t have to deal with bureaucrats and fat cat contractors. And let us not forget the $450 million taxpayer-raping by BearingPoint’s CoreFLS ERP system, overseen by an apparently napping VA IT management and mercy-killed during its beta testing when it nearly shut down Bay Pines Hospital in Florida.
All of this sounds like the usual feel-good consultantese, soothing and logical in a perfect world, dangerous when you’re dealing with the federal government and its cadre of trough-lappers. And who cares if VistA adoption is minimal outside of the VA? That wasn’t the point of writing it.
Software rewrites are usually a really, really bad idea, advocated by techies and mid-level managers who see the fun of working on something new instead of the gaping black strategic hole beneath them. The VA was lucky that VistA turned out as well as it did, but it’s a one-trick pony not likely to be repeated.
Open source or not, wanna bet this will be a billion-dollar project if it gets approved? Heck, HP got $784 million back in 2004 just to support VistA going for ten years, so imagine a stimulus-happy administration getting to announce this grand vision in front of veterans and former civil servants turned contractor lobbyists. Most vendors (including the ones that would provide commercial systems to the VA where needed) are selling systems that are just as clunky and outdated as VistA. Most of the time, they work just fine, especially if the whole package was built by the same company instead of being acquired from failing vendors anxious to sell out.
Maybe the VA should just do what everybody else seems to be doing if they really think VistA is on its last legs — buy Epic and install it using the Kaiser model. I wouldn’t want VistA replaced for the wrong reasons, but if it’s really necessary, then I’d rather see them writing Judy a huge check for a known quantity instead of a series of never-ending ones to the usual government contractors who have stars (and stripes) in their eyes.
That’s my uninformed opinion. What’s yours?
HERtalk by Inga
Baptist Health System (AL) selects Compuware’s EHR Service Delivery Solution to monitor performance and availability of its EHR.
All Children’s Hospital (FL) expands its relationship with Mediware, adding BloodSafe Tx for patient and blood verification.
The 107-bed Pioneers Memorial Healthcare District (CA) will replace its QuadraMed Affinity Clinicals with QuadraMedCPR.
Walmart cuts the price of the iPhone to $97, AT&T raises its early termination fee from $175 to $325, and rumors swirl that Verizon will soon offer service for the iPhone. Must be almost time for Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. June 7th is the date we’ll likely hear more about Apple’s 4G version (with video-chat, perhaps?) plus maybe news of a Verizon deal.
Maybe one of our marketing genius readers could explain why a company would even bother to create and distribute a press release like this? Mr. H puts it on the short list for stupidest press release ever written. The company is obviously trying to raise money for programmers and designers. If they are successful, I suggest they put a few dollars aside for marketing.
If you are an HIT purist, mosey on to the next news item. A woman is denied entrance to Yankee Stadium because she is carrying an iPad. Seems the Yankees have a “no laptop” policy and a security guard placed the iPad in that category. Not be deterred, the woman put the iPad under her jacket and went in another gate. I gotta say I like this lady because she likes her technology, likes her baseball, and is willing to be a bit sneaky to get her way. Anyone who has ever scored a baseball game has to love the the idea of using an iPad to run the cool-looking iScore app.
A former University of Washington Medical Center patient complains to the local press when a hospital representative called his unlisted number to solicit donations. Turns out that HIPAA specifically allows medical centers to use patient information for fundraising activities. UWMC offers an opt-out alternative, but it requires patients write a letter to the hospital’s privacy office. I’m all for fundraising, but shame on any hospital using such tactics. At least make it easier to opt out on the front end.
Forty private equity firms form the non-profit Healthcare Private Equity Association to support the healthcare PE community. The association’s members represent about 500 healthcare portfolio companies and combined revenues of $200 billion.
Speaking of private equity investments, Phreesia announces the close of $16 million in Series D funding, led by Ascension Health Ventures. Phreesia’s technology platform automates patient check-in in physician offices and urgent care centers.
Coming soon to HIStalk Practice: a new question in our HIT Vendor Executive series (sign up for e-mail updates so you don’t miss it!) This month’s question is, “If you could give David Blumenthal one piece of advice, what would it be?”
A few quick updates:
MEDecision names Eric Demers as SVP of life sciences.
Three new hospitals select McKesson’s Practice Partner EHR and PM for their employed and affiliated physicians.
Wolters Kluwer Health promotes Susan Driscoll from EVP to president and CEO of the company’s Health’s Professional & Education Business Unit. She takes over for Gordon Macomber.
Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center (CA) implements the Access e-Forms Repository, providing direct access to users from its Siemens Soarian portal.
The Johns Hopkins Hospital goes live with iMDsoft’s MetaVision AIMS in 39 operating rooms.
St. Elizabeth Regional Health (IN) contracts with TeleHealth Services for interactive patient education systems.
Healthcare Management Systems names F. Bradley Meyers its director of integration and Interoperability and Neal Reizer as chief architect.
MEDSEEK awards Spectrum Health (MI) its 2010 eHealth Excellence Award for its use of eHealth technology.
Halfpenny Technologies’ ITF-GoDoc solution now includes a new critical value alerting feature that allows hospitals or labs to send results to physicians’ smartphones.
Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise International names the College of American Pathologists as the primary sponsoring organization of the IHE Laboratory Domain.
From Healthcare Idiot Savant: “Re: Allscripts. They are supposedly near to announcing their acquisition of the Centricity software, the old IDX suite, from GE. Timing?” I’ll guess June 1.
From Lady of Spain: “Re: editorial. Tell me what you think about this editorial. Incredibly uninformed, right?” Too many wordsmiths claim to be HIT pundits just because they’ve churned out a few articles or interviewed people from the sidelines instead of actually working in healthcare or IT. All in all, this one isn’t the worst I’ve seen, though, just not very insightful.
I’m running an old (legal) copy of Office XP at home since I don’t use it much, but I figured it was time to upgrade. I’ve been running the Office 2010 beta and I like it just fine, so I’ve been watching for deals on the licensed version, due out this summer. Here’s one that I just bought this morning: Amazon has Office Home and Student 2007 for $99.99, free shipping, and a free upgrade to Office 2010 when it comes out. Plus, that package includes three licenses that can be used by members of the same immediate family, so you’re down to as little as $33 per user. If you don’t need Access or Outlook, this is a great way to get the 2010 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the underappreciated OneNote cheap. It’s a strong clue as to why Microsoft is struggling — remember when Office cost something like $400?
Speaking of Microsoft, who can resist watching an overweight, red-faced Steve Ballmer nearly stroking out on stage as he hysterically professes his undying love for everything Microsoft? I feel cheated that he didn’t freak out equally at HIMSS a couple of years ago.
According to my last poll, around 58% of HIStalk readers think a single-vendor strategy is a good idea for hospitals, primarily because integration and support are theoretically better. Those who like a best-of-breed strategy instead most often cite weaknesses in individual applications as a good reason not to give one vendor all the business. New poll to your right: if you were diagnosed with a psychiatric illness and your doctor or hospital shared your electronic information with other providers, would you be comfortable that it would remain private or would you worry about that?
Dell spent $760K lobbying the federal government in Q1, with an unnamed but apparently significant part of that amount going toward influencing decisions about HITECH money. Microsoft spent $1.72 million during the same period, also hitting HITECH.
A retired Cincinnati cardiologist will get $23.5 million for his role as whistleblower in a DOJ lawsuit against the Health Alliance of Greater Cincinnati and Christ Hospital, accused of preferentially scheduling cardiologists based on the number of referrals they generated.
Doctors at a Minnesota hospital are beta testing technology from American Well that allows them to communicate with patients via videoconferencing, IM, and VoIP. I think I’d love that, either as a patient or a doctor. The problem has always been that few people using desktop PCs had webcams or microphones, but now that most PC sales involve laptops, those are usually standard. That’s a significant yet seldom observed development when it comes to online collaboration.
I ran a reader’s question about whether Jefferson Regional Medical Center of Pine Bluff, AR could really have upgraded Eclipsys Sunrise to 5.5 in 30 days. JRMC CIO Patrick Neece was nice to provide this summary:
JRMC and Eclipsys finalized the implementation plans at the end of March 2010. The upgrade steps began the first of April 2010 and took approximately 30 days. The implementation encompassed all of the Sunrise Clinical Manager components we have implemented in the hospital including house-wide clinical documentation and core functionality for med/surg and sub-acute areas, critical care, 12 ambulatory clinics, emergency department, labor and delivery, Sunrise Pharmacy, Knowledge-Based Medication Administration, Device Integration and other related components. It also included installation of additional hardware, Microsoft software upgrades, configuration changes, report changes, testing, and training for the technical staff and end users. As with any upgrade, there were problems that had to be worked through, but we were highly confident in the JRMC and Eclipsys team who preformed the upgrade and that we would have a successful implementation.
Former HIMSS Analytics CEO Dave Garets, now with The Advisory Board Company, joins the board of Health Care Data Works, a Ohio State spinoff led by former OSUMC CIO Herb Smaltz that sells a data warehouse solution. The company offers a pre-built Meaningful Use dashboard (above).
A Hawaii clinic’s inconsistent and time-consuming EMR data reporting process is improved after a local technology company’s change. The article doesn’t name the EMR vendor or describe the change that was made, but it says one report that took 55 hours to run now takes less than a minute. It sounds to me like they added database indexes.
Listening: brand new (actually not even released yet) Stone Temple Pilots. Billboard has the entire album up for free streaming. Sounds pretty good. Also, The Rural Alberta Advantage, Canadian indie-electrofolk.
Some Indiana hospitals divulge what their electronic medical records projects will cost: Community Health of Munster, $40 million for three hospitals and doctors. Porter Health System, $11 million for upgrades. Methodist Hospitals, $30 million for Epic. Sisters of St. Francis Health Services, $125 million.
The University of Florida Health Science Center and Shands HealthCare announce a $580 million, five-year collaboration that includes implementing Epic across the system.
Now that I’ve got a Facebook page, I see that I should wish my new FB friend John Halamka a happy birthday this Sunday, with John Glaser’s coming up on June 2. Thanks to all who have friended me and who have clicked “like” on the HIStalk widget to your right. Social networking is exactly like high school, including the competitive aspects, so public displays of even virtual-only camaraderie are important to one’s standing.
From Skinny Little B: “Re: Advance for Health Information Executives. It’s officially dead, even though the staff were told not to tell readers or advertisers that the May issue was the last one.” Former editor Bob Mitchell is a good guy; his last day there was a couple of weeks ago. Maybe not admitting defeat is like hanging a “remodeling” sign on an obviously closed restaurant — a Hail Mary that somebody will buy it before word gets around that it’s defunct (like among the advertisers). They may try to salvage the non-print parts of the business like they did for the HIM magazine. I can only imagine what a disaster it would have been if I’d been running it, considering that I use a $5 invoicing program, I refuse to do anything to encourage prospective sponsors except e-mail a crude information sheet if they ask, and I keep turning down all kinds of brilliant money-making ideas because I don’t really care about money all that much and I’m lazy. So I give them credit for hanging in there for what must be at least a dozen years. I used to read it and like it.
From Hans Solo: “Re: Colorado RHIO. A big win for Medicity, beating out incumbent Axolotl.” Colorado RHIO chooses Medicity’s platform for its statewide HIE. The organization plans to cover 85% of the state’s providers and hospitals within five years.
From Nancy: “Re: Jefferson Regional Medical Center. The press release on Eclipsys 5.5 says they did the upgrade in 30 days. Is that really possible?” The headline also claims that unnamed users declared it “blazing fast and fun to use,” but doesn’t provide details anywhere in the actual writeup. Maybe a reader from JRMC will chime in with details.
From Limber Lob: “Re: MUMPS and Cache’. MUMPS takes hits because it’s still around after 30 years and many of the ancient MUMPSters are coding the way they did 30 years ago. Old COBOL, RPG, and Pascal programmers have all passed on instead.” I like that analysis and will extend it: companies like Epic and Meditech hire trainloads of noobs and train them on a language they’ve surely never heard of even if they majored in computer science. Since it’s more of an apprenticeship, they can also train them to follow their own internal programming standards and utilities, which are arguably more important than the choice of programming language anyway. It may be true that only in healthcare would a robust market still exist for applications written in something that quirky and old (or “industry-specific” and “time-tested” if you’re a glass-half-full type). Bottom line: it works, the vendors can support it, and customers shouldn’t (and apparently don’t) care about the invisible underpinnings.
From Epic Cleans Up: “Re: Atlanta. Epic will own the Atlanta market, having won the business at CHOA, Grady, and Emory (soon to be announced). It’s not surprising given the superior software, services, and support of Judy and her team. However, it should be a wake-up call to local companies that failed, including Eclipsys, McKesson, and Philips.” Unverified, but I will say that being local isn’t really much of an advantage. And, that those companies you mentioned are surely wide awake and well aware of exactly what they’re up against. I’ve been a customer of all three of those local outfits (well, Philips is from the Netherlands, but I’ll allow it). One of them was excellent, one was very good, and one I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
The health minister of Saudi Arabia is visiting Children’s Hospital of Michigan to check out its Cerner electronic medical records system. I’m not sure why since they’re already running Cerner in Saudi Arabia, but maybe they need fresh ideas.
Dell’s Q1 numbers: revenue up 21%, EPS $0.22 vs. $0.15. The former Perot was a bright spot, while PC margins weren’t.
I decided I needed a Facebook page so I won’t have to keep using Inga’s login to add to the HIStalk page (man, that’s confusing). Anyway, if you want to friend me, just search for HIStalk and I’ll pop up in all my smoking doc glory. I’m helping that obnoxious kid who started Facebook add to his several billion dollars so he doesn’t have to lifeguard this summer.
Weird News Andy and I agree: this story is sad. An admittedly inebriated woman in England falls in a bathroom, embedding a six-inch toilet brush handle in her pelvis. She tells doctors what happened, she shows them the bleeding wound, they take an x-ray, and they still can’t find the problem, so they send her home on pain meds. After two years of constant pain, she finally convinces them, but dies of massive blood loss in a 10-hour surgery to remove it, the hospital’s third attempt. Her husband summarizes, “I think it was probably down to the hospitals trying to save money and doing things as cheaply as possible … I’m sure she would have got better treatment in foreign countries.”
Miss Russia 1998, who was a physician back in the Motherland, is charged in New York with forging a Vicodin prescription using a prescription pad stolen from her psychiatrist’s office. She was already on trial for a nearly identical case. I will make a flimsy argument about illustrating the benefits of e-prescribing in order to justify running her picture.
Listening: reader-recommended Jonathan Tyler and the Northern Lights, bluesy straight-ahead rock. From the look and sound, I thought I’d traveled back in time to see Grand Funk Railroad, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Inga and I appreciate our new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor, Navicure of Duluth, GA. They’re a medical claims clearinghouse, meaning they help their 20,000 physician customers get paid (eligibility, claims, remittance, recovery, productivity). The company is on several “fastest growing” lists and – get this – they GUARANTEE that every call is picked up in three rings or fewer, which as they say, is because their client services area is “purposefully overstaffed.” They also have a 90%-plus “would recommend” rating from clients (video testimonials are here). Check out their blog, The Daily Practice. You may also remember that CEO Jim Denny wrote a Readers Write piece in October the value of clearinghouses. Thanks much to the folks at Navicure for supporting HIStalk.
Nurses in Australia picket a local hospital over incorrect pay caused by a new payroll system, a problem still unresolved after five pay cycles.
The CEO of Bend Medical Clinic (OR) writes a good blog post that explains to patients what an electronic medical record is and why they use them.
A group of Florida hospitals is using a BCBS grant to track employee reports related to infections and and surgical outcomes, rather than the usual billing data. They hope to convince CMS that billing data is worthless in trying to monitor clinical results.
Greenway’s PrimeSuite EHR for the iPhone and iPad.
Baptist Health cranks up Philips VISICU eICU in its five San Antonio hospitals, where a critical care team monitors their 134 ICU beds from an office building.
Yet another sobering malpractice verdict: a six months pregnant woman is turned away by the local trauma center, whose NICU doc says his facility can’t handle a preemie that small. They call an ambulance to take her to another hospital an hour away. She delivers in the ambulance, but the baby suffers brain damage and cerebral palsy. The malpractice jury returns a $10 million verdict against the county’s non-profit ambulance service. The hospitals had already settled for $1.4 million.
North Adams Regional Hospital (MA) fights with its nursing union, with ergonomics being a key union bargaining issue. Said a union rep, “We’ve had two instances where a computer station on wheels has fallen on a nurse.”
maxIT Healthcare and Ingenuity Solutions Group enter into an agreement to combine as maxIT Healthcare. The merger expands maxIT’s expertise with Lawson ERP solutions. Ingenuity President and CEO Phil Summer will now be maxIT’s National Practice Director.
PatientKeeper announces the availability of Mobile Clinical Results on the iPad.
Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian selects Patient Care Technology Systems’ Amelior EDTracker solution for its new emergency department opening in Irving, CA later this year.
DigitalPersona, the provider of U.are.U fingerprint biometrics, will integrate its product into ScriptRX’s products. ScriptRX provides touchscreen EMR and discharge systems for ERs and urgent care centers.
For all our readers who are 7th grade boys (or 7th grade boys at heart), here’s an opportunity to come up with all sorts of tasteless jokes. HP Labs calculates that a hypothetical farm of 10,000 dairy cows could produce enough energy to power 1,000 servers.
Greenville Hospital Systems (SC) selects MedAssets for revenue cycle software and services.
RCM provider Accretive Health offers 10 million shares in an IPO that raised $120 million. The $12 per share price was well below the proposed $14 to $16/share.
From Epic Watcher: “Re: USF. Heard that GE did not go well, Epic has been chosen, and the docs are signed. Just what I heard and I am looking to triangulate. Kinda what you do sometimes, Mr. H, if that IS your real name!” Unverified on both counts, but I’ll always answer to Mr. H since Inga started calling me that way back when and I’ve warmed up to it.
From MaxPayneUK: “Re: value probe. Is iSoft/CSC the prime target after missing ‘must meet’ delivery targets? Or BT/Cerner CCN3 because of value?” The British government will review all spending commitments made since January 1, with IT contracts a key focus of cost-saving initiatives.
From The PACS Designer: “Re: Office Live Workspace. Since Windows Office 2010 is now released for businesses, the next step is the release next month for consumers. TPD has been testing Office Live Workspace for use with Windows Office 2010 to compare it to Google Documents. Also, Microsoft just announced that Office Live Workspace is becoming Windows Live SkyDrive soon.” Sounds a lot like Google Docs except you need a licensed copy of Office on your desktop (Microsoft will imitate Google in nearly every way except when it comes to giving stuff away).
Government healthcare IT contractor Quality Software Services will hire up to 70 people for its new South Carolina office.
Physician Michael Westcott, CMIO of Alegent Health, and pharmacist Jeannell Mansur, medication safety practice leader for Joint Commission Resources, will present a Webinar on medication reconciliation next Thursday, May 27 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern. Design Clinicals is sponsoring.
Strange: up to 55 people getting free blood glucose screenings offered by physician assistant students are exposed to blood-borne diseases when the students fail to change out the glucometer’s lancets between patients.
Indiana appoints Andrew VanZee, a former Logansport Memorial Hospital VP, as the state’s healthcare IT coordinator.
Cleveland Clinic grants Carefx an exclusive license to sell its business intelligence dashboard, developed by the clinic’s startup subsidiary IntellisEPM.
Listening: I’m still enjoying old and new stuff from Hole, but a reader recommended Neon Trees, a Provo, Utah pop/rock band that sounds to me like Muse meets The Cure. I like it.
Weird News Andy notices a blog’s rant against a MEDSEEK ad campaign in which a Facebook page was created for a mythical patient named Sara Baker who updates her wall with chatty descriptions of her healthcare interactions that often involve electronic services like those offered by MEDSEEK. Perhaps the page has been changed, but from what’s there now, it’s hard to believe someone would mistake Sara for a real patient, although obviously the folks leaving heartfelt congratulations for Sara’s new twins must have been gullible (or maybe they were enlisted to help add realism). My opinion: it’s brilliant! The only thing worse than bad publicity is no publicity. Whoever wrote Sara’s postings (probably a young marketing intern somewhere) did a nice job in making it realistic. It’s giving me all kinds of ideas for various stunts a la Fake Steve Jobs (check out the Ballmer Reviews iPad video – “No Flash, no Farmville, no porn, no sports – now I know why Steve calls it Safari – ‘cause it’s a hunt to find a Web site that works on this thing.”)
The Care Collaborative (Ascension Health, Adventist Health System, and Catholic Healthcare West) licenses its collective order sets to Zynx Health. HCA has already signed up.
Doctor Dalai describes big PACS problems in all hospitals in Western Australia, where a new version of Agfa IMPAX is apparently behaving so erratically that one hospital called a Code Yellow (a disaster that prevents accepting new patients). Dalai also says that previous versions were so flaky that radiologists were bringing in their own non-Agfa image reading software on USB sticks so they could continue to provide patient care, only to have the IT department delete the software and threaten them with disciplinary action. Another article confirms the problems with a hospital source, adding a fun tidbit in which the Department of Health apparently has blocked internet Web access to Dalai’s site.
A Texas hospital runs Doc Shop, a speed dating type event that connects doctors looking for patients with patients looking for doctors.
United Arab Emirates hospitals are using government-issued ID cards to check patients in faster.
PEPID announces the availability of its medical and drug content tools for Google Android devices.
Demand for skilled consultants is high, according to a new KLAS survey of healthcare providers. Thirteen firms enjoy significant mindshare, up from just five in 2007. CSC tops the list, followed by Vitalize, Dell, and maxIT Healthcare. Providers striving to achieve Meaningful Use guidelines are leading the demand for skilled consultants, though another key driver is the migration of Meditech clients to the 6.0 platform.
Health Management Associates (FL) will add enterprise-wide CPOE functionality to its PatientKeeper solution.
The federal government won back or negotiated approximately $1.63 billion of your money last year and sent 77 people to prison for Medicare fraud.
Lest the government hold onto your money too long, the HHS says it will conduct two surveys to learn more about patient perceptions and preferences related to HIT. ONC will collect data on patients’ opinions of EHRs, while the HHS Office’s Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation will determine user satisfaction with personal health record programs.
Thirty-six hospitals conducted mass layoffs in the first three months of 2010, just one fewer than the same period last year. The number of affected employees, however, dropped from 3,003 to 2,516. The figures do not include a couple of key layoffs in April, including 1,000 from St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers (NY) and 511 from Jackson Health System (FL).
CMS selects Northrop Grumman to develop a National Level Repository to process HITECH payments to providers meeting Meaningful Use objectives. The order is valued at $34 million over one year with five and one–half year option periods.
Providence Equity Partners pays $17.25 per share to buy Virtual Radiologic Corp. That’s about $294 million, which represents a 42% premium of the three-month average stock price.
A widow sues her husband’s doctors after he dies of uterine cancer. No, he never had a uterus, but he did receive a transplanted kidney from a woman who died of uterine cancer. His NYU doctors said that even though the transplanted kidney was covered in tumors, they felt he had a less than 1% chance of contracting uterine cancer. Sadly, the 37-year-old died just seven months after the transplant.
I finally made it to the Apple store this weekend and checked out the iPad. It was love at first touch. Must. Have. One. Don’t exactly know why, but I’m sure that I can’t live without one.
Centegra Health System (IL) is partnering with Dell to launch Centegra Physician Network, a newly created HIE. The HIE will be built on Axolotl’s Elysium Exchange platform.
The 471-bed Jefferson Regional Medical Center (AR) becomes the first hospital to activate Eclipsys Sunrise Enterprise 5.5.
Kudos to United Health Foundation for extending a three-year, $3.3 million grant to Daughters of Charity Services of New Orleans. The funds will be used to support and expand the new Daughters of Charity Health Center-St. Cecilia in the city’s 9th Ward.
Universal Health Services (PA) will purchase behavioral health provider Psychiatric Solutions in a $3.1 billion deal. Together the companies will have 196 behavioral health facilities and over 19,000 licensed beds, plus 25 acute care facilities with 5,500 beds. UHS expects to realize $35-$45 million in annual cost synergies; 35-40% of those synergies will come from the elimination of PSI’s senior management.
Mount Auburn Cambridge IPA (MA) extends its 10-year relationship with MedVentive.
The Dallas Morning News takes a look at the region’s larger health systems and how they (and their EHR vendors) may be putting patient privacy at risk. Cerner, used by Tenet Healthcare, is mentioned for its practice of sharing patient data with drug companies. athenahealth, which provides Cook Children’s Health Care System its physician EHR, is cited for its plan to offer discounts to providers willing to share patient data. The announcement by three other large health systems that they will share patient information between their separate Epic systems also raises privacy concerns. Patient privacy advocate Dr. Deborah Peel is quoted in the piece, using an analogy that Paris Hilton surely appreciates and that likely makes Mr. H chuckle:
“Once your information is released, it’s like a sex tape that lives in perpetuity in cyberspace. You can never get it back.”
From Skyline Pollution: “Re: non-profit UPMC. They may be paperless, but can’t do without their $1.7 million skyscraper signs, according to the spokesperson for the multi-million dollar CEO. More help desk support and nurses could be had for that chump change.” CEO Jeffrey Romoff, who took a 25% pay cut this year to $3.6 million, admits that UPMC is being sued by a local sign company for an unpaid balance, but says the company’s work was substandard because high winds delayed hanging the 20-foot-tall “M” in “UPMC” atop the 64-story US Steel Tower.
From Larry’s Pizza Guy: “Re: Oracle. With the buyout of Sun completed, Oracle is reworking the contracts for EGATE/JCAPS Integration Engine clients to be based on the number of cores of a system instead of the actual number of interfaces being used. The clients’ only option is to invest time and money to replace the engine(1+ year process) or paying the outrageous increased fees (200,000+ more) to continue using the EGATE/JCAPS.” I hadn’t heard that, but I’m not a bit surprised since a lot of CEO Larry Ellison’s $30 billion in net worth came from charging licensees for theoretical usage capability rather than usage itself. Or, perish the thought, just selling the product for a fixed price. Imagine how much more money Bill Gates would have been worth if Word was licensed by CPU power or by the number of words typed. I’m still a market forces guy, so if Oracle is taking advantage of customers, those customers should bolt for a better option.
From Better Late: “Who do I call when my Monday Morning Update isn’t delivered on time?” Funny. I usually publish Saturday evening, but a pretty wonderful getaway with Mrs. HIStalk took me offline until Sunday afternoon. If it’s any consolation, you’ll get that late-breaking Sunday morning HIT news that you would have missed otherwise (irony meets irony). Thanks to those who expressed concern, best wishes, or consternation – it’s nice to be noticed.
A Wall Street Journal article called Smart Money: Is Your Favorite Charity Spying on You? highlights Sharp HealthCare, which uses data mining software to identify patients who might be financially capable of becoming hospital donors. The article points out that hospitals are even training doctors to identify prospects, and once a VIP has been tagged, hospitals may give them perks such as free visitor parking passes, direct access to staff, and priority appointments with specialists. The president of a philanthropy group admits that such targeting is kept quiet by nonprofits because it “creeps a lot of people out.”
I’ve been involved in a couple of CPOE implementations and they went well, so I’m a little surprised that 33% of respondents to my poll believe that CPOE makes outcomes worse. Maybe theirs didn’t go so well, or maybe CPOE sounds more dangerous theoretically than it really is to those without first-hand experience. Anyway, in the new poll to your right: is a best-of-breed application strategy a good or a bad idea? The poll accepts comments, so feel free to add yours along with your vote. Ed Marx stirred up a lot of commentary from his post that touched on that topic, so let’s see the consensus.
Speaking of Ed, thanks to him again for his inaugural HIStalk post, which drew a lot of thoughtful discussion. I posted his response at the end of the original article, so it’s worth a re-read.
The 150-bed Robinson Memorial Hospital (OH) recently chose Eclipsys Sunrise. The local paper discloses the overall cost of its EMR project: $39 million, or what seems to be $260K per bed.
A rare Weird News Andy weekend factoid, which he calls “Oh, the irony”. Financial organizations consider bailing out Greece’s debt-ridden economy want it to privatize its expensive government-run healthcare system, a leftover from the country’s previous Socialist Party rule.
A group of Baltimore hospitals, including Johns Hopkins, donates technology to the city’s fire department that allows EKGs to be transmitted from ambulances to hospitals, allowing faster diagnosis and treatment of heart attacks in progress.
In Ireland, a hospital requests an urgent review of its 20-year-old IT system because it poses “consequential risks to patient safety.”
Ohio State University Medical Center will operate retail clinics inside Giant Eagle grocery stores.
A local newspaper article covers the use of AirStrip OB monitoring software at Somerset Hospital (PA), paid for by us federal taxpayers.
Alpharetta-based healthcare data solutions vendor MDdatacor raises $2.6 million in funding.
Meditech says it will add 300 employees this year to its current 3,000 to keep up with customer demand.
A night shift security guard at a Texas clinic who spent his last scheduled night on the job hacking into 14 of his employer’s computer systems pleads guilty to two charges of “transmitting a malicious code” and faces 10 years in prison for each count. He hacked the clinic’s HVAC system (apparently feeling a need to mess up the air conditioning) and another that contained patient data. He’s not the brightest bulb in the circuit: the self-styled “GhostExodus” posted a dry run of his adventure on YouTube (above – some language is PG13) which led to his arrest. This isn’t an entirely original observation on my part, but the line between known criminals and security guards (especially those of the rent-a-cop variety, which GhostExodus was) is often blurry.
Vidyo introduces its telepresence system for healthcare that uses a standard broadband connection instead of a dedicated network. The system, which the company says costs around $1,000 per user or 85% less than competitive offerings, is being used by North Region Health Alliance in Minnesota and North Dakota.
A Delaware state congressman, chair of an “obscure” committee that recommends which government programs to end, subpoenas a state auditor for information on the Delaware Health Information Network. He says he wants to know where DHIN has spent $20 million in taxpayer money. The auditor calls the subpoena “a joke”, adding that “All you need to know is they sent out the subpoena and a press release at the same” and that the audit would have been completed earlier without having to deal with the surprise subpoena.
Anyone who likes to make fun of healthcare’s reliance on MUMPS and the Cache’ database: the European Space Agency chooses Cache’ to support the Gaia space mission that will map the Milky Way. Now who’s the rocket scientist?
From The PACS Designer: “Re: an iPad challenger arrives. While the iPad gets all the press briefings, there’s a similar device called the Notion Ink Adam, brought to TPD’s attention courtesy of a posting by Michelle W. on HIStalk. It looks pretty cool, operates using the Tegra-Android platform, and best of all, it only weighs 1.35 pounds.” The company says they won’t release it until Flash works, which is probably a big mistake since the iPad doesn’t support Flash either and they’re letting Apple saturate the market in the meantime. It’s supposedly coming out in June for around $300, which would be an attractive price point if it works as advertised.
From Ex-Cerner Guy: “Re: Millennium and FDA’s MAUDE database. Not a huge surprise. Orders in Clinicals and FirstNet were designed and written by non-clinicians, with implementation done by non-clinicians. Try to find a Cerner Physician Executive in the field with more than two years under his or her belt. The referenced problem was evident at the Children’s Boston roll-out of FirstNet. From a sales standpoint, we used WYSIWYG-YBLI: what you see is what you get, you better like it.” Unverified.
From NorwichSammy: “Re: William Backus Hospital. Their attempt at digital cardiac access using GE’s Muse has been a big flop. It seems that paper trails are more effective for the clinicians.” Unverified.
From NoSleep: “Re: Hackensack University Medical Center (NJ). They successfully went live with Epic on May 1. It was a big bang cutover of all inpatient units, ED, radiology and several outpatient departments including nursing documentation, mandated CPOE, and medical device integration. Epic Ambulatory EMR and Practice Management will go live starting July 1, including both hospital and private practices in the rollout schedule. Rather than hire additional FTEs or engage consultants to implement Epic, HUMC recruited clinical and operational staff from within the organization, consolidated them within IT, and sent them to be trained and certified by Epic. As a result, the project was implemented on schedule and under budget. HUMC will retain its own in-house staff with expertise to support Epic.”
From the desk of Weird News Andy: a guy in Austria missing both arms passes his driving test by using a mind-controlled robotic arm. In England, a transsexual challenges NHS’s decision not to pay for her breast enlargement operation, claiming her female social life isn’t that great and that local street kids are calling her names because she doesn’t look like a woman. WNA editorializes a bit: “So, how many cancer patients won’t get the drugs they need to live so she can feel good about her appearance? How about, oh, I don’t know, paying for it yourself?” Lastly, WNA notices that NHS is using fear to convince patients to opt in to its Summary Care Record, warning them that its propensity to lose paperwork may expose them to NHS errors if they don’t sign up.
SAP will buy Sybase for $5.8 billion. I hadn’t thought about Sybase for years since its healthcare dabblings have been infrequent and uninspired, but maybe I missed something.
Inga and I are a little behind, as evidenced by folks who are re-sending us e-mails when we don’t respond immediately (connected world expectations are sometimes unreasonable, I’ve noticed). We will catch up, I promise, but it may take a couple of days. Darned day jobs.
Abu Dhabi Health Services Company extends its Cerner deal to cover all applications for all of its areas, including its Lighthouse quality improvement solution.
Housekeeping: check out the Jobs Page. Drop your e-mail address in the Subscribe to Updates box to your upper right to get immediate notification when I write something new. The search box to your right now uses the new search engine I installed, so it covers all HIStalk sites (HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, and HIStalk Mobile.) The “Find us on Facebook” box to your right has adorable pictures of HIStalk readers, but also a link to our Facebook page (which Inga and I are using more often) and the thumb-up icon that gives us a Like when you click (thus temporarily soothing our raging insecurities). And as always, please support our sponsors by perusing and clicking their ads to your left, since they in turn will be motivated to continue supporting HIStalk. Thank you.
How to tell you’re a hospital fanboy: when on vacation, you can’t resist following the blue signs to check out hospitals you’ve not seen. I knew a hospital executive who carried an AHA guide in his car and would choose routes that would let him check out all the hospitals along the way. He’s probably still doing it, only now with a GPS.
McKesson shares hit a 52-week high after analyst upgrades, although still below their 1998 (pre-HBOC scandal) prices. Thursday’s closing price was $68.99.
Amcom’s messaging platform now supports Android smartphones.
Genesis HealthCare System (OH) will spend $40 million on an unnamed EMR (it’s Epic, of course, which should be obvious given the price and the fact that nearly every major sale is theirs these days).
Long term care operator Advocat names its IT consultant David Houghton as permanent CIO.
I see that Ed Marx’s first column here generated many comments about HIT vendor relationships. I thought both those who agreed and those who didn’t made their points quite well. Inga is sending out Ed’s PowerPoint as promised to all who commented and provided an e-mail address.
Integrated Document Solutions says it has implemented a cloud-based, RIS-less teleradiology system driven entirely by speech recognition and templates, all within 30 days.
A now-fired hospital employee of Perry Hospital (TX) is being investigated by police after allegedly using a doctor’s password to sign off on mammograms. The hospital has contacted 900 patients to have theirs redone.
A Forbes editorial by PatientKeeper CEO Paul Brient notes that all three technologies covered by Meaningful Use have been around for two decades, failed to hit double-digit adoption, and were avoided because they couldn’t pay their own way.
Odd: several dozen New Mexico residents are surprised to find themselves named as plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the local hospital. Most of them signed what they thought was a petition because a local guy asked them to.
Henry Schein promotes Keith Slater to VP and GM of Henry Schein Medical Systems.
Northeast Georgia Health System says QuadraMed’s AcuityPlus nurse staffing management system generated $901,000 in first-year benefits. A 60% improvement in nursing productivity goals saved $659,000 in overtime and contract work and another $241,000 in incentive pay.
Diagnostic imaging provider InSight Services Holdings selects MobileMD’s HIE solution to provide electronic orders and results exchange for physicians.
A CIO involved in an HIS search shared with me his observation that the vendors that spent more time in due diligence gave better demos that met the hospital’s needs. A good reminder that cutting corners in the sales process can cut you right out of a deal.
St. Vincent Health (IN) deploys ZynxOrder to standardize evidence-based order sets. The 19-facility health system built over 350 order sets.
Grinnell Regional Medical Center (IA), Providence Kodiak Island Medical Center (AK), and Union Hospital (IN) are implementing eICU tele-health services from Philips Visicu.
Faith Regional Health Services (NE) anticipates a June 20th go-live on Siemens Soarian.
Medical transcription provider MedQuist releases its Q1 financials, which included a 6.3% decline in revenues to $74 million. Net income, however, grew from last year’s $6.8 million to $7.3 million. The company blames the revenue decline on poor February weather, which it says negatively impacted its transcription volume.
South Nassau Community Hospital (NY) selects the Capacity Management Suite from TeleTracking Technologies to manage its patient flow.
University Physicians Hospital (AZ) will use EmergisoftED for ED patient tracking and nursing and physician documentation.
Richmond Memorial Hospital (NC) is live on Wellsoft’s EDIS.
Here’s an interesting project to watch. SunCoast Health Partners is a joint venture between the SunCoast RHIO (FL) and for-profit partners. Using MedLink’s RHIO Financial Stability Model, SunCoast plans to offer products and services to over 500 practices in the RHIO, betting that providers will need clinical data to support their EHR investment. They expect to generate sales of over $4 million year in the first year and more than $7 million in the next four years.
And from a few of our much-appreciated sponsors, here are some quick updates:
IntrinsiQ and eClinicalWork partner to integrate IntelliDose with eCW’s EMR/PM solution. eCW will offer the IntelliDose chemotherapy management solution to its oncology practice customers.
ICA aggregates data from all core clinical systems within the HIE of Montana, which includes seven hospitals and more than a dozen clinics.
Community & Dental Care, an FQHC in Monsey, NY, selects Allscripts Health Center Solution for its 30 multispecialty physicians.
maxIT Healthcare announces plans to become an Eclipsys Certified Consulting Partner with Eclipsys, providing installation services for Sunrise Enterprise release 5.5.
EDIMS and Medit Corporation form a strategic relationship to combine the EDIMS ED system with Medit’s MiRapidAccess registration tools.
IntraNexus appoints Tom S. Visotsky VP of sales and marketing.
Medicity announces that its iNexx platform will be generally available August, 2010. It will be free for physicians, allowing them to automate referrals to providers on the platform.
EHRScope releases the beta version of EHRScope Reviews. End users and consultants can add information to their (free) database, so offer your opinions here.
From Snoop John B: “Re: Cattails MD. Heard its implementation at Ministry Health has been suspended because of poor upgrade quality.” I asked Ministry CIO Will Weider, who says the implementation has not stopped. Three clinics are live and planning is underway for the remainder. They are reviewing their plans and figuring out how to incorporate Meaningful Use. Will was nice enough to provide a summary:
There have been the usual surprises and unanticipated occurrences. So, this won’t be my first flawless large clinical project. In March the system (it is hosted by Marshfield Clinic) had some stability problems. That may be the source of frustration from your source. It was frustrating for us too, but Marshfield Clinic, led by their CIO, has taken ownership of their problems. We at Ministry are also working through our issues. The situation has improved and Marshfield Clinic has bent over backwards to provide us reports to monitor stability. They are also quickly updating their systems to prevent recurrence of the problems. They have been very transparent in their efforts. I have lots of different clinical system vendors, so I can put Marshfield Clinic’s support in perspective. They are better than most, but admittedly, the bar is not as high as I would like. As you can see, I am not afraid to share the good and the bad (hence the blog name candidcio.com). Our contract doesn’t contain a gag clause like many vendors. So, I will email you directly if our plans change.
From 153 Anecdotes: “Re: FDA’s MAUDE database. Updated with additional anecdotes.” MAUDE is FDA’s database of voluntary reports of adverse events caused by medical devices. There are quite a few reports related to Cerner Millennium, although there’s no way to tell if they were filed by one disgruntled practitioner or several concerned facilities. Some (most?) of the reports involve design complaints rather than actual examples of patient harm, such as: “This cpoe product allows doses to be ordered that are not a multiple-s- of the pill size.”
From Nolo Contendere: “Re: does anyone do background checks? [Name omitted] was recently hired as VP of sales for [vendor name omitted]. Here are links to public records. People are sending this all around, making the vendor a laughingstock.” I’m omitting the names and the links since I don’t want to get threatened, sued, or notified that the guy killed himself or something because I mentioned his crimes (theft, drug possession, driving violations, etc. with some jail time and house arrest). Or for that matter, notified that it’s someone with his name but not the same guy. If it is, he’s bounced around quite a few EMR vendors and has also been accused of stealing leads from competitors a la Glengarry Glen Ross.
From The PACS Designer: “Re: Google search enhancements. Google has made over 500 changes to its search capabilities over the last year. TPD likes one of the new search options that now appears on the left when you first begin your search effort.” I noticed the 3D logo, the left column that allows subsetting the results by source, and some minor redesign. I like it.
Listening: She and Him, musically marginal, but I’m crazy enough about about Zooey Deschanel in movies that I’ll listen to her sing.
Weird News Andy runs across PriceDoc, which he calls “Priceline for doctors” where prospective patients can name their own cash price for specific dental, medical, and vision procedures.
I got a really nice handwritten card from Brittanie Good, marketing director of Enterprise Software Deployment, who thanked Inga and me on behalf of Team ESD for mentioning their new sponsor ad. “We are very excited about our growth and refreshed changes, and we are proud to be a sponsor of HIStalk. We love what you do – keep up the great work!” I’m always amazed and moved that I have such supportive sponsors. I’ve stood the card proudly right beside my monitor.
A New York Times article titled The Agenda Behind Electronic Health Records pits athenahealth’s Jonathan Bush against ONCHIT’s David Blumenthal over the issue of whether HITECH is a cash-for-clunkers program for old-line vendors at the expense of upstarts or the logical way to goose EMR usage among reluctant providers. According to Bush, “Established technology is being given a federally funded new lease on life … Traditional health software now is on Medicare, being kept alive like grandma.” Blumenthal’s comment was that the government had to intervene to correct a market failure, saying, “The market doesn’t reward performance.”
Speaking of athenahealth, the company responds to Dr. Deborah Peel’s HIStalk editorial on athenaCommunity and patient privacy.
Jeff Surges, sales president for Allscripts, is appointed to the board of Merge Healthcare.
Voalté releases a white paper covering the use of smartphones at the point of care.
A medical group that provides services to correctional facilities in 25 California counties chooses eClinicalWorks.
Mac McMillan, CEO of IT security consulting firm CynergisTek, is serving (warning: PDF) as a panelist at a HIPAA conference sponsored by the Office of Civil Rights and National Institute of Standards and Technology that started Tuesday. His session involves OCR’s enforcement of privacy regulations.
Evidence-based protocol platform vendor Order Optimizer forms a strategic alliance with EHR vendor Prognosis Health Information Systems. Prognosis will make Order Optimizer’s protocols and orders available to its customers, along with its SaaS-powered merging engine.
Intuit will buy (warning: PDF) Cary, NC-based patient portal vendor Medfusion for $91 million in cash. Intuit (QuickBooks, Quicken, TurboTax, and Quicken Health) says it will use the Medfusion’s technology to enable patients to communicate with providers, review their health information, and track their healthcare expenses. They also mention the Meaningful Use requirement to give patients access to their records. Medfusion founder and CEO Stephen Malik will become an Intuit SVP and general manager. Allscripts announced a deal to distribute its patient portal a year or so ago.
Vanderbilt chooses Allscripts Care Management for discharge planning.
Nuance announces Q2 results: revenue up 19.2%, EPS –$0.05 vs. $0.02 due to the cost of its acquisition of SpinVox, which converts voice mails into text and e-mail messages.
Cottage Health System (CA) expands its use of Eclipsys applications by choosing the PeakPractice PM/EMR and Eclipsys HealthXchange to link community physicians with its inpatient Sunrise Enterprise system. The HIE product is powered by Medicity.
Northwestern Lake Forest Hospital (IL) says it saved $3.4 million in nurse labor costs through its use of the Kronos workforce management system to reduce overtime and agency use.
Hunterdon Healthcare (NJ) uses InterSystems Ensemble to connect its QuadraMed Affinity HIS to the NextGen PM/EMR of its physician groups.
Twelve hospitals in Australia sign contracts for the Emendo CapPlan capacity planning software. The company plans to enter the US market next year.
Apollo Hospitals, a private hospital operator in India, signs a deal with Cisco to deploy desktop-based telemedicine applications to rural parts of the country.
All Children’s Hospital (FL) will expand its use of GetWellNetwork’s education and entertainment system, courtesy of a donation from a local entrepreneur.
From MeHere: “Re: Millennium Medical. I used to work for them. I hope there’s a full-scale investigation into their unsavory activities. The IS guy would write up employees for forgetting to encrypt inter-office e-mail.” An unencrypted portable hard drive is stolen from the Chicago offices of the medical billing company in February, exposing the information of 180,000 people. Patients are complaining that they weren’t notified promptly and that the company is not offering the usual free credit monitoring.
From Nothing More: “Re: UPMC. DOH and CMS found ‘easily resolved differences over paperwork.’ I thought that hospital was paperless.” Inspectors find that UPMC did indeed match transplant donor and recipient blood types, but didn’t document properly because the paper form has only one signature line. Doh! And in other UPMC news, it’s on pace to hit $8 billion in annual revenue this year.
From MaxPayneUK: “Re: HC2010 conference. McKesson and Eclipsys were noticed there. Both will focus on the customer base of legacy supplier iSOFT and NPfIT programme player BT/Cerner.”
The Texas Board of Pharmacy hits Parkland Hospital with one of its largest-ever fines ($20,000) for allowing five outpatient pharmacy technicians to steal 370,000 oral doses of drugs in a one-year period. Cases against three supervising pharmacists are pending. The lesson learned is that Parkland did what most hospital pharmacies do — they took drug inventory only occasionally, estimated counts, and didn’t reconcile purchasing records to dispensing records. Parkland says it’s running a perpetual inventory now, always tough to do in pharmacies and ORs.
Meditech’s Q1 results: revenue up 10%, EPS $0.60 vs. $0.48. Very good numbers. I’ve confirmed that Howard Messing will be given both the president and CEO titles, subject to routine shareholder approval in the next few weeks. The company also announces that students at Northeastern University’s health sciences school will use Meditech’s clinical systems as part of their training.
You would expect clinical systems to be a top priority for providers, but I wouldn’t have guessed that portals would score so high. New poll to your right: based on experience, what impact do you think CPOE has on patient outcomes?
Congratulations to the Georgia Tech Flatliners, a team of graduate students that finished first, second, and third at the NHIN CONNECT Code-a-Thon Challenge held last week at Florida International University. The challenge was to create an online format for a Continuity of Care Document that a primary care doctor could use to take calls after hours. Medicity sponsored the team, which as a condition of its participation was required to donate the resulting style sheets to the CONNECT Open Source Community.
An MIT medical engineering student creates print management software and lands his own university as a paying customer for his new startup. The software is Web-based, does not require installation on print servers or desktops, and encourages “community engagement” by matching user groups as rivals to reduce their printing costs.
I appreciate the several companies that have asked about sponsoring the HIStalk reception at HIMSS in Orlando next year. It’s cool to have people thinking about it this early! Anyway, I’ve chosen the sponsor and we’ve already got the venue, entertainment, and menu locked down, just in case you want to mark your calendar now for February 21, 2011 for what will be a memorable blowout. I truly appreciate the companies who support what I do, not to mention the readers who make it worth doing.
Inga and I are writing up the results of the HIStalk Practice reader survey, which I’ll probably run this weekend. My favorite reader comment: “I just absolutely adore Inga.” Who doesn’t? She is entirely adorable.
I forgot to mention that with the rumored but unannounced demise of ADVANCE for Health Information Executives, Texas Health Resources CIO Ed Marx temporarily became a blogger without a home for his CIO Unplugged writings. He’ll be moving to HIStalk this month and I’ve posted all of his previous writings. I’ve tagged them all in their own category, viewable here.
Thanks to everybody who has clicked “like”on the HIStalk Facebook widget in the right column. I’m posting to the Facebook page that Inga created each time there’s a new posting and I’m seeing inbound clicks from it, so I think readers are finding it handy. Click the HIStalk logo or link to go to the FB page.
The VA’s VistA Modernization Working Group recommends modernizing the VistA system by moving it to open source and dumping MUMPS as its programming language. The group’s chair says VistA is “outdated and difficult to maintain” and that “we don’t think MUMPS is the answer.” That’s an interesting conclusion given that Epic, Meditech, and other systems are written in MUMPS, a programming language that is almost certainly involved in more US healthcare encounters than any other.
And as I like to do occasionally, allow me to acknowledge Meditech’s Neil Pappalardo, who with colleagues created the MUMPS language and thus the HIT industry in 1966. He’s still my #1 choice of someone to interview, although Judy Faulkner runs a close second (both are MUMPS-made centimillionaires, I should note).
The non-profit Kaiser Permanente’s net income for Q1 was $706 million on operating revenue of $11 billion.
Here’s the danger of announcing one of those sketchy correlation-causation EMR studies: an overambitious headline writer summarizes as, “Doctors: Boot Up a Computer to Save a Life.”
From Sea Pea Oui Couvert: “Re: say it’s not true. This is not supposed to happen when the entire hospital is wired. Millions spent on EMRs, yet they forget informed consent and then cover up the adverse events.” UPMC’s transplant program is cited by state health department inspectors for violating federal regulations, including failing to document organ and blood matches before transplant procedures were started. The state got suspicious when UPMC reported only one adverse even in a year.
From A Tax’ing Employee: “Re: our CEO at Sunquest. He just moved to Tennessee for what I heard were ‘tax reasons’.’ He has never lived in Tucson for the same reason. Is that fair that he is allowed to live anywhere to dodge taxes and we are not?” Unverified. If it’s my money as a customer or shareholder, I’m cynical about work-from-home CEOs unwilling to relocate to the home office. It’s their call, though, and I’m probably more old school in that regard given today’s virtual organizations.
From The PACS Designer: “Re: iPad’s booming sales. Apple has sold one million iPad’s since the recent launch, the fastest sales results ever for Apple. As we head toward the middle of this year, it will be interesting to see if there will be any waning in the monthly sales figures for the iPad Wi-Fi version now that the iPad 3G version is available for sale.”
Several dozen provider organizations, including AHA and AMA, offer HHS their comments (warning: PDF) on Meaningful Use. They and I agree on the parts we don’t like:
The all-or-nothing approach, where you either meet all the criteria or get nothing (actually, I’m OK with that part as a taxpayer footing the bill).
The aggressive timetable for complex applications such as CPOE and medication reconciliation that aren’t usually front-loaded in implementation projects.
The overall short timeline.
The underrepresentation of small practices on the HIT Policy Advisory Committee.
The two EDI-related non-clinical requirements for eligibility and claims.
The definition of a hospital using Medicare provider numbers.
The parts I immediately pounced on when the proposed criteria were published — manual chart pulls are required to arrive at a denominator for electronic performance metrics, such as the percentage of orders placed via CPOE.
Weird News Andy uncovers a gem: two employees of Olive View-UCLA Medical Center are placed on leave after complaints to Joint Commission that they are running a beauty salon out of the hospital’s NICU. They were giving manicures and eyebrow waxes to co-workers, with one complaint alleging that a doctor “had a French manicure right on the high-frequency ventilator.” WNA also likes this research finding: dark chocolate can protect the brain in stroke patients, which means I’m set in an emergency because I like to keep some of the good stuff (more than 50% cacao) around.
Listening: the new CD from just-reunited Hole. Courtney Love doesn’t do it for me and I was hoping to hate the new music, but the band kicks it even though they’re all suing each other and membership changes hourly. I’ll be playing this quite a few times, I suspect.
McKesson signs an exclusive deal to eventually manufacture, implement, and support the i.v.STATION Robot and i.v.SOFT Workflow Engine from Italy-based Health Robotics. It’s pretty hot stuff.
If you are a nurse, happy National Nurses Week, which started Thursday (happy birthday, Florence Nightingale!) I love nurses (literally, since I married one), so here’s a shout-out to the one group of professionals (both male and female) that hospitals can’t run without. I wrote this in 2003 in their honor, obviously from a community hospital perspective since I was working at one of those instead of an academic medical center at the time:
The only critical people involved in patient care are nurses … My experience is that 80% of patient care is directly influenced by nurses, often via skillfully planted recommendations that allow doctors to believe they thought of it themselves. Your patient satisfaction surveys are almost purely driven by the quality and compassion of your nurses. So is your level of patient safety. Nurses clean up the vomit, hug the babies, keep doctors from killing patients, give the drugs, do the Code Blues, and comfort the families. All the rest of us are hangers-on who look like deer in the headlights on the rare occasions when we stray into an actual patient care area where human triumph or tragedy is unfolding with a nurse at its center … Not too long ago, a hospital was basically a clean building in a peaceful setting (!) where patients could rest and mend. That and nurses were about all anyone needed. Hospital work was charity. No MBAs, no arrogant doctors, no government red tape, no formulary of 5,000 drugs, and no cadre of specialists making large salaries to do small tasks. Oh, and by the way, no computers either. You know what? Life expectancy wasn’t that much different (if you exclude the benefits of vaccinations and reduced infant mortality.) Costs were a lot lower. No one got rich in healthcare. Without all the research, the computerization, the fancy architecture, and the lack of John Wayne "I will not let this patient die" heroics, things weren’t really all that much worse when it came to living and dying. If I’m sick, keep the CEO, CIO, PFS manager, and risk manager out of my room and give me the best nurses you have. When you get right down to it, a hospital is still a clean building with nurses. Everyone else is supporting cast, even if their salaries make them believe differently.
Business Week frowns at hospitals that use technology to determine whether patients can afford to pay their bills. Apparently the business publication does not like the idea that customers may actually be expected to pay for the services they consume. I clicked its Subscribe Now link and, given that philosophy, was shocked to find that their subscriptions are neither free nor payable at the reader’s discretion.
ONCHIT announces $220 million in grants to establish 15 Beacon Communities that will prove the value of HIT. I don’t exactly get that since the message is that they wouldn’t have bothered without the $15 million taxpayer gift (which doesn’t make a strong case for proving value at all), but I gave up long ago trying to dissect the particular pallets on which taxpayer money is being parachuted down over the countryside into greedily outstretched provider and vendor arms. Even the City of Tulsa gets $12 million in federal money to screw around with electronic medical records and see if anything good happens.
I see that Google now has the Google Apps Marketplace that offers third-party add-ins to Google Docs and relate apps. One I noticed contains administrator tools for rolling out Google Apps to the enterprise.
Maybe the doc-in-the-box trend died and I never noticed: Florida Hospital’s Centra Care walk-in clinics now take online appointments, saying it will significantly cut down on wait times. Meaning that if you just show up, which was the whole point, you’ll sit around like you would in the ED except instead of a seriously injured trauma patient holding you up, it’s somebody healthy enough to have made an advance appointment. That and posting ED wait times to troll for non-urgent patients makes me wonder what the heck providers are thinking out there.
Inspectors from the VA find lots of problems with the brachytherapy program at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center, among them a VariSeed radiation treatment planning PC that was unplugged for over a year despite regular clinician reports that it wasn’t working. It also wasn’t running on the hospital’s secure network and was used by employees to get on the Internet.
Merge Healthcare’s Q1 numbers: revenue up up slightly, EPS -$0.04 vs. $0.05. Now they’ve got a couple of hundred million dollars worth of AMICAS acquisition debt to service on top of that.
From Celtic Fan: “Re: athenahealth. Don’t know if you saw this article about athena wanting to increase its profile to compete better with the HIT Big Boys. Buried in the end of the article is some information on a new product called ‘athenaCommunity.’ Bet the privacy rights folks won’t think much of it.” athenaCommunity is slated to launch later this year, with discounts for providers willing to share patient data with other providers. Hospitals will pay athena a small fee to access patient insurance and medical information. I asked privacy guru Dr. Deborah Peel what she thinks about the idea. Celtic Fan predicted correctly:
This is an ABSOLUTE nightmare—it TOTALLY violates medical ethics and the patients’ rights to privacy — not to speak of Americans’ well-known constitutional rights to privacy. Physicians who go along with that could well violate state licensing laws which often require adherence to the AMA’s principles of Medical Ethics, as well as violate many state laws that REQUIRE informed consent for disclosures of many kinds of information, from genetic tests, to mental health information, to STDs, to addiction treatment information. athena and all the many vendors who coerce doctors to disclose patient health information without consent will have NO liability. Who do you think the patients will sue for violating their privacy? Their doctor, of course, who chose to use an illegal, unethical EHR system. athena will not pay for this massive privacy disaster —their doctor/users will.
British Columbia’s Interior Health Authority begins its Meditech 6.1 migration with technical assistance from Summit Healthcare.
IBM’s Integrated Health Services division launches a multi-year research project to determine how different actions may affect health. Big Blue will combine and analyze data from a wide variety of sources, looking for cause-and-effect relationships. The project will initially focus on childhood obesity.
Kronos reports second quarter revenues of $177.9 million, a 10% increase over last year. EBITA increased 28% to $41.3 million.
Data storage company Iron Mountain urges CMS to consider expanding Meaningful Use guidelines to include subsidies for digitizing paper records. Iron Mountain’s efforts remind me of similar pleas from the transcriptionist organizations, who think digitized transcription records should be recognized in the final Meaningful Use equation.
I’ve yet to venture to the Apple store to actually touch an iPad, though a field trip does seem to be in order. This HIT writer observed a in-store demo, of sorts, where a Genius was educating a group of healthcare providers on a variety of healthcare-specific applications. Sounds like Apple wants to assure a piece of the healthcare pie.
Clarian Health is changing its name to Indiana University Health next spring, in part to reinforce its partnership with Indiana University and the IU School of Medicine. Clarian owns or is affiliated with more than 20 hospitals and health centers in Indiana.
PatientKeeper presents Oakwood Healthcare System (MI) with its customer innovation award, recognizing the more than 1,000 users (600 of them physicians) who are using the company’s patient portal since its December introduction.
Hospital CIOs rank EMRs and CPOE as their top IT priorities for the next two years. Other high priorities include database initiatives, bar-coded eMARs, and hospital expansion. Among hospital IT managers and directors, EMR was ranked a mere 7th, far below PC refreshing, security initiatives, and CPOE. Another interest data point: the majority of hospitals were either developing telemedicine programs or already had something in place.
Albert Santalo, founder and CEO of the Web-based practice management company CareCloud, is named the Best Up and Coming Technology Innovator by the Great Miami Chamber of Commerce.
York Memorial Hospital (PA) selects Recondo Technology’s SurePayHealth solution for revenue cycle management.
The Texas Health Services Authority hires CTG to help plan the implementation of statewide HIEs.
Here’s a fun fact to share at your next cocktail hour. By 2020, the amount of digital information created within a year will reach 35 zettabytes. If you put that amount of data onto DVDs, they could be stacked halfway to Mars, making them quite inconvenient to access from your couch.
Gartner reports that Dell has gained the largest market share in HIT, making it the world’s largest provider of HIT services in the world. The ranking is based on 2009 revenues generated by both Dell and Perot Systems.
The 130-provider Jackson Clinic (TN) plans to move from its Misys EMR to Allscripts EHR, integrating it with its Allscripts Vision PM.
Siemens Healthcare appoints former Quest Diagnostics VP John Nosenzo to the newly created role of VP of Zone Customer Relations. Nosenzo will manage the company’s national accounts team and all zone general managers.
Odd: a GE Healthcare employee, having dinner with co-workers, is hit by a stray bullet. The 17-weeks-pregnant woman was sitting outdoors when she felt something hit her in the side. When she stood up, a bullet fell out. It came from a handgun fired from a shooting range that was about a quarter of a mile away. Fortunately, she was only bruised and scratched on her abdomen and both she and the baby are fine. An attorney for the shooting club says a member was at fault for shooting at an unapproved target (clearly).
Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital find that using bar-code technology with an eMAR substantially reduces transcription and medication administration errors, as well as potential drug-related adverse events. The hospital documented a 41% reduction in non-timing admin errors and a 51% decrease in potential drug-related adverse events. Naysayers, feel free to send in your comments pointing out that just because A and B happened together, it in no way implies that A caused B or B caused A — as Mr. H always cautions. I’m just glad someone is taking the time and energy to try to figure out if all this technology really does save lives.
From Take the Time: “Re: Neal Patterson. The latest kudos.” Neal makes the Forbes list of best-performing bosses and rightly so: quibbles aside, there aren’t many executives who have transitioned successfully from scrappy startup founder to big-company CEO and kept investors financially happy most of that time. He’s a HISsies pie-in-the-face regular, but if I was investing my money in healthcare IT, he’s the guy I’d trust it with. That’s CERN (blue) vs. the Nasdaq (green) above, just in case you’re a hater.
Eclipsys announces Q1 numbers after Tuesday’s market close: revenue down slightly, EPS $0.09 vs. -$0.02. Shares are up a little in after-hours trading. In other Eclipsys news, E-Health insider reports that the company will take Sunrise Clinical Manager to the UK, offering it to trusts looking for an alternative to NPfIT’s systems.
Dr. Dalai and anonymous contributors document what they say is the end of AMICAS as Merge Healthcare does its best to screw it up after buying it. I’m linking to his main page since he’s running new pieces, so read back a couple of articles for the whole story. It’s big business as usual: layoffs of all the people that made the acquired company successful, forced relocations resulting in resignations, and apparent mothballing of previously sound products. He summarizes with a plea to Merge executives:
Bottom line is this: your actions are destroying AMICAS. If you don’t reverse what you are doing, you have just flushed $250 million down the toilet. Don’t do it to yourselves, don’t do it to the AMICAS people, and don’t do it to me and the other AMICAS customers.
I see that some new jobs have been posted on the HIStalk Job Board, so feel free to cruise over and see if any of them look interesting. Each job lists the number of times it has been viewed at the bottom of the page, so you can see which ones are hottest. I should mention, since a couple of folks have asked, that while everybody can view available jobs, only sponsors can post them.
Small-practice SaaS EMR vendor ClearPractice names pharmacist and former NotifyMD CEO Gary Ferguson as CEO. The company offers its entire suite for $425 per month, including revenue cycle management, help with stimulus funding paperwork, and CMS approval as a preferred provider for patient registry. I don’t know much about the company, so that’s just me reading the press release to you in an authoritative, yet know-nothing voice like a clueless TV news anchor.
A couple of readers e-mailed me noting quotes from both Steve Lieber of HIMSS and David Blumenthal of ONCHIT in which they discounted EHR safety issue reports. Blumenthal called such reports “fragmented” and “anecdotal”, not surprising given the lack of a central, well-publicized reporting mechanism for such problems. One reader also noted that problem reporters are often seen as troublemaking whistleblowers rather than staunch patient advocates, not to mention that some vendors prohibit such disclosure in their contractual language. My response to one e-mail was that we need this industry’s equivalent of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices to take up the banner of centralizing problem reporting and disseminating those reports out for everyone’s benefit. After all, the FDA’s medication safety track record wasn’t very impressive until ISMP got involved. Plus, you would think vendors would prefer that to FDA oversight.
Thanks to new Platinum Sponsor FormFast of St. Louis, MO. The company’s healthcare solutions include forms automation, document management, and workflow automation that help eliminate the paper chase. Specific solution examples include RAC tracking and response, admissions, bar coding, positive patient ID, cancer staging, patient self-service portals, e-signature, on-demand document printing, and importing documents into the EMR and saving the cost of preprinted forms, imprinters, embossers, and labels on the way to becoming paperless. The company is offering a free Webinar on May 25 at 11 a.m. Central, a Forrester Research update on Microsoft’s healthcare strategy called SharePoint 2010: What Value Does It Bring to Hospitals? Three attendees will win an iPad, just in case you’re interested. Thanks for FormFast for supporting HIStalk.
Revenue cycle services vendor Accretive Health sets its IPO price at between $14-16 per share for 13.33 million common shares for a market cap of $1.44 billion. The company had $510 million in revenue last year, which you’d never guess given its crude Web site and the fact that you’ve probably never heard of it except maybe when I mentioned their IPO plans back in the fall.
McKesson’s Q4 numbers: revenue up 2%, EPS $1.26 vs. $1.01, but falling short of analysts’ expectations on both revenue and earnings.
athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush has told me that he started his internal company blog using HIStalk as a model, so now he’s got a customer-facing version as well. Unlike most CEO blogs, it’s actually interesting and sounds like someone other than a marketing department committee talking.
Smartphone application developer Voalté announces seven new hires.
I’m streaming Netflix like a madman using my new Roku box as a defensive move to Mrs. HIStalk’s usual BBC and dancing shows, so a couple of old movies inspired this week’s guest editorial in Inside Healthcare Computing, an opus I called Healthcare IT Leadership Lessons Learned from R. Lee Ermey. Spoiler: I make a convincing argument that Neal Patterson’s famous “tick, tock” e-mail was cribbed from one of R. Lee’s profanity-laden monologues in Full Metal Jacket. I don’t think a Pulitzer is in my future, but at least I snickered while I was writing it.
All the big hospitals in Madison, WI run systems from next door neighbor Epic, so now they’ve decided to share ED records in a pilot project that runs through July.
Brigid O’Gorman, a Connecticut College pre-med junior and captain of the women’s hockey team, wins a $10,000 grant from Davis Projects for Peace to implement electronic medical records in Uganda. The money will go towards four computers, solar panels to run them, two printers, software, a laminating machine, and an external hard drive. The college will contribute $3,000 to allow her to spend eight weeks there to set it up and help transfer information from the paper notebooks carried by patients into the computers. I like her spirit: “I’m not a wiz at the computer, but I figured I could get a system and teach myself how to input the data before I go.”
Mississippi Baptist Health Systems says it has saved more than $4 million by switching to Symantec for storage, backup, and archiving of its 130 terabytes of data.
This was probably embarrassing: Canadian EMR vendor Medworxx issues a corrected press release about year-end earnings when it notices that the date was given as December 31, 2010 instead of 2009.
A couple of recent journal articles try to peg CPOE and EMRs to mortality and cost, at least in the minds of the headline writers. As I always caution, just because A and B happened together in no way implies that A caused B or B caused A, even though folks looking for someone to agree with their anecdotal beliefs will always drag those articles out as evidence.
Surgeons at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh are using a video-over-IP system to monitor progress of cardiac transplant procedures from any VPN-connected PC using a zero-footprint software video player. The Haivision Furnace system lets surgeons know when it’s time for them to jump in to do their part.
From Sean Fitzpatrick: “Re: Paul Levy’s lapses of judgment. I’m with you on your observation. It’s too easy to write off the little lapses, which typically reveal underlying bigger ones.” I was glad to see a number of readers agreed with me. Apparently the BIDMC board did as well, fining Levy $50,000 for his “poor judgment” and saying it will also consider his “serious lapse” when determining his next pay package (which is over $1 million now). Board member Patrick Ryan is apparently not pleased with the outcome (not harsh, enough I suppose?) and announces his resignation.
From Madrigal: “Re: Meditech. Thought you’d like to know that Howard Messing has been promoted to CEO (his new title is president and CEO). His previous title was president and COO. Neil Pappalardo’s title is now chairman (it was chairman and CEO)” Unverified, though we heard this report from a couple of readers. The company’s Web site still lists Pappalardo as chair and CEO and Messing as president. One in-the-know person suggests the change means little in the short term and is more of a symbolic shift of official responsibilities.
Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital (CA) reports a 20% drop in mortality rates since introducing CPOE, giving it the lowest rate ever observed in a children’s hospital. Until Packard published its findings, no hospital has been able to show reductions in medical errors and mortality from using CPOE. The hospital, which spent $50 million on its EHR project, attributes its success to a careful and well-planned implementation.
Peninsula Regional Medical Center (MD) selects eClinicalWorks EMR for its employed physicians at the Peninsula Regional Medical Group. The Medical Center will also promote eCW adoption with affiliated community physicians and implement eCW’s Electronic Health eXchange as its interoperability tool.
Pantain Holdings Berhad, a 1,500-bed, 10-hospital network in Malaysia, selects Eclipsys Sunrise Enterprise. John T. Mather Memorial Hospital (NY) also plans to add multiple Eclipsys Sunrise products to create a single EHR across multiple venues of care.
Washington County Hospital (MD) replaces 40 interfaces with Corepoint Integration Engine. The hospital runs Meditech and connects to referring physician offices.
Doctors from Catholic Healthcare West will serve as medical directors for 10 CVS Caremark MinuteClinics in the Phoenix area. The new CVS/Catholic Healthcare West alliance includes plans to eventually integrate EMRs.
The 54 providers at Syracuse Orthopedics Specialists (NY) and New York Spine & Wellness Center choose Allscripts to provide EHR and PM across their 11 locations.
Chatham County Safety Net Planning Council (GA) goes live on its HIE, leveraging technology from Orion Health and Initiate Catalyst Patient Registry.
Mark R. Briggs, the former COO of Carefx, takes over as CEO of HIE vendor VisionShare. He was previously with NaviNet, QuadraMed, and LinkSoft Technologies.
Fort Healthcare (WI) will partner with Cerner to create a connected health community through the use of Cerner Millennium solutions. The hospital, ambulatory surgery center, and specialty clinics will implement more than 20 Millennium products and use Cerner for IT management services.
Senior Lifestyle Corporation selects the selection and hiring solution of Kronos to manage the end-to-end hiring process.
MedLink partners with iMedicor to integrate iMedicor’s information exchange portal with the MedLink TotalOffice program. The combined solution will facilitate secure messaging and clinical data exchange. TotalOffice users will also have access to iMedicor’s ClearLobby drug and medical device information platform.
Healthcare analytics vendor Outcomes Health Information Solutions appoints Gary Velasquez CEO. Former Ingenix CIO Jim Egan is also hired to serve as the company’s CIO.
Ingenix and Health Language, Inc. launch Ingenix Global Code Manager to translate between ICD-9 and ICD-10 coding systems.
Mediware releases Q3 numbers: revenue of $12.8 million compared to $10.2 million last year, net income $891,000 vs. $483,000.
On Sam's Club vs Costco - I'll add that, unlike Sam's Club, Costco, in addition to offering value pricing, has…