Healthcare IT from the Investor’s Chair 1/8/10

Ask the Chair

All these HCIT companies have been issuing press releases lately informing us that they are going to present at the 28th annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. What is that and should I even care?

The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference is the biggest healthcare-focused investor conference of the year.

Now, almost all the large and middle market banks have conferences for their institutional investing clients to meet with public companies, hear their pitches, chat with management, and hobnob in general. While most of them are sector-specific (be it healthcare, gambling — which is probably a fun conference, energy, consumer goods, etc). J.P. Morgan is truly the mother of all healthcare investing conferences.

Formerly known as the H&Q Conference until JPM acquired Hambrecht and Quist, the conference is held every January in San Francisco (home of H&Q), by tradition at the Westin St. Francis in Union Square. All next week, CEOs and other officers of healthcare companies and their hangers-on will converge on the City by the Bay.

It’s important to know that HCIT is just a small part of the fun and often lost in the excitement of pharma, biotech, managed care, medical device, and healthcare service companies all showing up to tell their stories. I’ve often thought that if the next big San Francisco Earthquake occurs during this week, healthcare costs would drop by a meaningful percentage!

But why the flurry of press releases? Under SEC Rule FD (for Fair Disclosure), because the companies participating might say something material to their stock price, the fact that they’re presenting needs to be disclosed in advance, and presentations are usually Web-cast, too. Note that back before this rule was adopted, companies would often disclose information only in this type of setting (i.e., only for institutional investors to act on).

Making the conference even more interesting (and widely attended), in addition to the public company presentations, banks invite up and coming private companies to present in a separate track. This allows both private (i.e., venture or PE) investors to look for investment opportunities for their portfolios and public investors to have access to private companies that might not be on their radar yet – giving them a chance to check out what’s coming down the IPO path someday, likely to compete with a public company they hold in their portfolio, or increase their knowledge of the industry as a whole. More importantly, it allows the bankers to show some love to prospective clients by giving them a forum and an audience.

What’s particularly interesting about the JPM conference (and H&Q before it) is the size of the crowd it draws. Because so many companies and investors are in one place, others follow (Metcalf’s Law in action, perhaps). Not only are J.P. Morgan bankers on hand, healthcare investment bankers from its competitors can be found in the vicinity of Union Square as well, in addition to a bevy of others who service the industry (including me), a practice commonly known as “poaching”. The city fills up with not only the companies and investors invited, but companies, investors, and assorted others who weren’t invited and won’t be attending anything official.

As a result, the week becomes a mammoth series of meetings, receptions, and the like hosted by PE and venture funds and even competing banks. It’s like the joke about why the atheist goes to temple: “Meltzer goes to talk to God, I go to talk to Meltzer”. To me, the H&Q Conference (as many still call it) is second only to HIMSS as a time to have 3+ days worth of consecutive meetings with clients, prospects, and old friends. Just like at HIMSS, you can be at a coffee shop or street corner waiting for a meeting to start and run into people you’ve known for years.

Does the non-investing HIStalk reader need to care? Well, unless you’re wondering where everyone went, but truly, not a whit. However, since the question was asked, and Mr. HIStalk has asked for the “insider view”, I thought this might provide some interesting color on explaining the recent press release action.

My next post (coming soon), will discuss the hows and whys of QuadraMed and Amicas’ announcements last month that they were escaping the slings and arrows of the public equity markets into the waiting and eager arms of private investors. In the meantime, please keep those interesting questions coming.

Ben Rooks
The Chair

Ben Rooks is the founder of ST Advisors, a strategic consultancy offering long-term and project-relationships to companies and financial sponsors. He earned an MBA in healthcare management from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has done healthcare IT equity research, and has worked as an investment banker in over 25 successfully closed healthcare and medical technology transactions valued from $40 to $365 million.

News 1/8/10

From Nurse Carol: “Re:  meaningful use. Will you provide links and document numbers for commenting on the proposed rules?” I e-mailed ONCHIT just to make sure I understood the process and they kindly verified: the 60-day comment period starts with the date the rules are published in the Federal Register, which is scheduled for next Wednesday, 1/13. Comments can be left on regulations.gov. I’ll run the exact link once it’s available.

From Nosy me: “Re: GE. GE has put their Centricity EMR implementation on hold at UMDNJ School of Osteopathic Medicine due to lack of payment. UMDNJ, the health university of New Jersey, contends that they have gotten nothing for their investment so far except extended timelines and escalating bills.” Unverified.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Thoma Bravo LLC. PACS vendor AMICAS has decided to accept an offer from Thoma Bravo LLC to buy their shares at $5.35/share. TPD is very familiar with AMICAS and their acquisition of Emageon. While the AMICAS PACS is a great product, the Emageon PACS is just the opposite and the reason AMICAS may want to go private is to keep their shareholders from finding how bad things really are with the Emageon product line. Having Thoma Bravo LLC is just what the patient (AMICAS) needs to get better!”

From IKnowPlenty: “Re: things that make you go ‘hmmm’. The keynote address for AHA’s annual leadership meeting is disgraced climatologist Al Gore. I fail to understand what he has to do with healthcare or hospitals, other than wanting to sell them carbon credits.” He finally got his big house LEED certified once word got out on the Internet he invented that his electricity usage was more than a dozen times the average. He’s about as relevant as the other speakers, though: Freakonomics guy Steven Levitt, former White House secretary and Vanity Fair editor Dee Dee Myers, and film maker Ken Burns. You know it’s a stretch when the guy with the most relevant healthcare credentials is talking head Sanjay Gupta. These folks don’t speak free, so your hospitals (meaning patients and taxpayers) are footing their bill. According to tax records, AHA took in $120 million last year, of which $22 million was pure profit (in a non-profit way). Three of its executives made more than $1 million, the CEO made $2 million, and all are appalled that anyone would suggest that healthcare reform is needed.

From FinSoft: “Re: QuadraMed. Steven Russell gets 86’d as collateral damage from the Dunn hiring.” The 8K also gives Tom Dunn’s hiring details.

From Nasty Parts: “Re: Sage. I hear they will announce a new president shortly and Lindy Benton will stay on as SVP of sales.” Unverified, although Nasty Parts has a pretty good track record.

From CongestiveITFailure: “Re: CCIM. Community Care Information Management, another Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care eHealth agency, is currently being run by the partners from Blue Pebble, a consulting firm. There is a serious conflict of interest, as Blue Pebble hires their own eHealth subcontractor consultants and places them (on a contract basis) within CCIM. They take a percentage of their subcontractors’ daily rate and pay them via a third-party vendor so as to skirt current provincial salary disclosure rules. The partners from Blue Pebble consulting were put together by the current Ontario MOHLTC Associate Deputy Minister John McKinlay. Another scandal is imminent with such a conflict of interest.” Unverified, but I found this October article that says the same thing. Three of the project’s senior managers set up Blue Pebble and then got 30% of the project’s consulting business. CBC says Blue Pebble also did work for the disgraced eHealth Ontario and its predecessor, Smart Systems for Health Agency. An anonymous informant said Blue Pebble was using the government’s people and technology and charging them for it.

From MalaysiaHITFan: “Re: HIT vendors. Surprised no announcement out of HIT vendors on what are presumably sizeable contracts. Focus on openness must be why Epic missed the cut.” I saw the article, but couldn’t decide whether I was interested in it. Malaysia awards contracts to Microsoft, Eclipsys, Cerner, and IBA Health for new systems, although the date of those contracts isn’t mentioned, so I’m thinking its old news. Still, the projects are interesting: teleconsultations, personalized education, CME, smart cards, and a Lifetime Health Plan for every citizen (which the article candidly says “became the biggest failure of the Ministry” when the business model turned out to be shaky and the managing company went bust). Now they’re doing an HIE instead.

Cardinal Health announces a bar code-powered inventory and ordering system called Connect System (catchy name) for laboratories.

Wait … what’s that sound? Someone crying out for help? Why, it’s my HISsies nominations, pining for some Web-based intimacy with all those knowledgeable HIStalk readers who would be the first people I would ask to name the Industry Figure of the Year, the Best and Worst Vendors, the CIO of the Year, and of course the happy winner of The Pie. The upcoming voting won’t be all that interesting if the only nominations I get are from vendors nominating themselves for the good awards and their most hated competitor for the bad ones. I’ll close the nominations out this weekend, so vote now or forever hold your peace.

Twin County Regional Hospital (VA) expands its McKesson Paragon implementation to include Practice Partner. It’s in Galax, a town I like although I’ve been only a couple of times (the Rex Theater for live bluegrass, Aunt Bea’s for barbeque, and a bounty of fiddle players).

The College of American Pathologists releases its updated XML version of the CAP Cancer Checklists, used for cancer description and reporting.

Many thanks to Wellsoft, new on board as a Platinum Sponsor of HIStalk. What you should know about the company: (a) it offers a highly awarded emergency department information system; (b) Version 11 has some cutting edge new features (anatomical diagrams, clinical decision support, medication reconciliation, and a patient entry kiosk), and (c) the Wellsoft EDIS has some powerful technology behind it, such as Oracle, interfaces to all hospital information systems, remote updating, guaranteed 15-minute support response time, and custom reporting. Get on their mailing list here and check out the video. They will be in Booth 7005 at HIMSS, FYI, which reminds me that a couple of years ago at HIMSS, I went to some super-geeky, small-room session on clinical decision support architecture or something like that and I noticed a casually dressed, deeply immersed guy sitting a couple of seats over. I checked his badge and it was John Santmann, MD, founder of Wellsoft. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a CEO in a real HIMSS session and a hardcore one at that, so I admired him immediately. End of pointless anecdote.

Hocking Valley Community Hospital (OH) will implement Keane Optimum iMed and migrate to Optimum Patcom.

I’m all for free speech, but the same people posting the same comments about EMR safety and FDA regulation under multiple phony names (yes, I can tell) is wearing a bit thin. I sometimes agree with the argument, but I don’t need it jammed down my throat several times a day. Would I be wrong to delete those comments?

Listening: a recommendation from Tom in Verona, WI (gee, wonder where he works?): Nothington, polished and pop-tinged punk that immediately motivated me to attempt a frowning-faced, intense desk drum solo that nearly slung the watch off my arm. An excellent choice. I was going to listen to part of just one song to be nice to Tom, but I keep playing them over and over.

Vanderbilt opens BioVU for internal research projects with IRB approval. It’s a DNA data bank with 75,000 samples linked to the de-identified EMR records of their owners. One of the first studies will look for a relationship between DNA and drug response.

I got some info on the contract between Universal Health Services and Cerner. It’s a pretty big rollout: ED, clin doc, orders, CDR, meds, biomedical device integration, LIS, pharmacy, and OR. Not ADT or accounting, which are notoriously weak links of Cerner (heard much about ProFit lately? Exactly.)

Practice management vendor AdvancedMD acquires EHR vendor PracticeOne, hoping to roll the products together into a SaaS solution.

This might make a good remote hosted EMR commercial: thieves break into a medical practice and steal its Fujitsu Lifebooks, but as the CEO tells the reporter, “None of the electronic medical records reside on the computers or on our property” since they use a hosted service.

Capital Regional Medical Center (FL) publishes its ED wait time to the iPhone via iTriage.

Several former executives of iSoft, including the former chairman and CEO, face criminal charges in Britain for making false and misleading statements.

AT&T will launch five Android-powered mobile phones in the next few months, one made by Dell and another rumored to be a version of Google’s just-announced Nexus One.

At the International Consumer Electronics Show, Cisco demonstrates a home version of its TelePresence videoconferencing system, showing how it could be linked to medical devices to pass voice, video, and data from patient to physician. At the same show, Skype announced that its application is now capable of making high definition video calls and will be incorporated into HDTVs (as a newfound Skype Video user not even using HD, video calls via Skype are still one of the coolest things ever, just like being in the room with the person on the other end of your free call).

Two Regenstrief informatics fellows win AMIA student awards, one for a graphical tool to examine drug interactions, the other for a system that proposes drug and lab suggestions based on physician ordering habits. I’m thinking I should cover more of this research-based informatics stuff since it interests me and it’s innovative.

eClinicalWorks will offer patient education from Krames, including 1,300 aftercare instructions in several languages that are suggested to physicians based on EMR information as well as for direct patient access through eCW’s patient portal.

Odd lawsuit: an MRI clinic’s car injury claim is fully paid by its insurance company, receiving the state-allowed maximum $10,000 in PIP benefits. Their attorney sues the insurer for $2.59. For once, an insurance company gets to accuse someone else of being a scumbag. “Who has the greater motivation to sue in this case, the MRI clinic that’s seeking $2.59 or an attorney who charges about $375 an hour for his services?”

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

From Father Time: “Re: meaningful use timeline. It is my belief that the MU clock will start ticking 10/1/2010 as that is the start of the government’s 2011 fiscal year. I am certainly no authority on the subject, but it would seem the government would use their year vs. calendar or any other for the time period used  to verify meaningful use of hospitals and providers.  If you consider that time period and use the HMS/CMS 90-day model, a hospital would have to begin to prove meaningful use BEFORE July 1, 2011. In hospital years, that is REALLY soon!” I agree with Father Time that the MU clock could start as early a 10/1/2010 for hospitals (in fact my graphic indicated that). HIMSS also said 10/1/2010 in their webinar this week. However, the committee’s “recommendation” is that the Secretary choose the calendar year (starting 1/1/2011) for meeting the definition, which would give both hospitals and vendors more time to ramp up.

From CPOE Guy: “Re: EMR and girl talk. Maybe I don’t understand girl talk, but those of us providers using Epic (Kaiser for example) are doing at least 99% order entry; in my case it’s 100%. The only exceptions in our organization is for super emergency verbal orders during codes where the doc can’t get to a computer, and even there it is frowned upon. Our prescribing is 100% electronic for normal Kaiser patient prescriptions not requiring written (the former ‘triplicates’  such as morphine, Ritalin). I write handwritten prescriptions only for non-Kaiser patients who wish to fill their meds elsewhere and even then, I enter these electronically into the EMR to keep our record complete.”

From Outta Touch: “Re: Latest meaningful use guidelines. In the last few days, I’ve asked a few doctor acquaintances about their impressions on the latest proposed meaningful use definitions and certification guidelines. Most have simply given me a blank stare, asking what I was talking about. Am I running with the wrong crowd or is the average doctor just not interested?” My guess is both. Who wants to hang out with doctors that can’t talk techie? Give me a Dr. Alexander or Dr. Diamond any day. And, I suspect that most doctors are more concerned with practicing medicine and getting paid then they are with dealing with the minutiae. Most practices have at least one doctor or an administrator who is more interested in following the specifics. Plenty of doctors are happy to defer to the “experts” until they are handed a tablet and told to enter a prescription.

From Jabez William Clay: “Re: draft rules on the EHR incentive plan. Have you guys seen this?” The CSC study that indicates US hospitals are only halfway ready to qualifying ARRA payments. In fact, only two-third of hospitals have identified gaps in their current systems. A quarter of the 58 hospitals think they meet at least 70% of the readiness criteria.  

From Felice Fontanta” “Re: ARRA questions. Thanks for your analysis! Very helpful. A few questions I haven’t seen answers to yet: How and when are the funds going to be disbursed? Say you demonstrate MU in the 1/1/2011 – 3/31/2011 time period, when and how will you be paid your $18k? And,  In terms of qualifying docs, is the Medicare program restricted to Medicare providers? So a pediatrician would not be eligible for any funds unless they have a significant Medicaid panel?” The legislation says that incentive payments be disbursed in a single consolidated payment or in periodic installments, as the Secretary may specify. However, the recommendation is for a single lump payment “as soon as we ascertain” meaningful use for the applicable reporting period. Regarding participation in the Medicare incentive program, it is restricted to Medicare providers. Pediatricians can participate in the Medicaid program if at least 20% of their patient volume is Medicaid.

Mr. H and I have had multiple questions posed to us regarding the latest certification and meaningful use recommendations. We don’t claim to be experts, but we are happy to try to get clarification on certain points if we can. Here are a few FAQs that we have gathered from readers, this week’s HIMSS webinar, and the CMS website:

Q: To count as CPOE, must the provider personally (hands on keyboard) enter the order, or may physical entry of the order, under the provider’s direction, be done by other staff?

A:  The reg states “directly”.

Q: Our pathologists are employed by a clinic and physically work in a clinic. Do they qualify as eligible Medicare outpatient providers?

A: Depends on whether the clinic or the hospital provides the facilities or the equipment.

Q: Is an eligible hospital is only an acute care facility or does it include other types of facilities, such as rehabilitation facilities?

A: CMS uses the "CCN" – the CMS certification number assigned to each hospital – to assess whether or not a hospital is eligible.

Q: If a hospital ER is using CPOE for all orders, does it qualify for the 10% of CPOE for a hospital?

A: The ER is counted as outpatient, so no, it will not fulfill the 10% CPOE requirement for an inpatient facility. (HIMSS waffled a bit on this during their webinar but finally came to this conclusion.)

Q: On the hospital side, must the physician enter the CPOE order directly? Or may they have their MA do the entry under their authority?

A: The reg states "directly".

Q: If only 10% of the hospital’s staff is using the certified system, and the rest are still paper-based, would this satisfy the CPOE requirement?

A: The requirement is that 10% of all orders be entered by CPOE.

Q: Do State Mental Health Hospitals qualify for incentive payment? What about long term care providers such as nursing homes?

A:  No. The following types of institutional providers are eligible for incentive payments under Medicare and/or Medicaid provided they meet the applicable criteria. Under Medicare, institutional providers eligible for the EHR incentive payments include “hospitals" as defined under section 1886(d) of the Social Security Act and critical access hospitals. Under Medicaid, these institutional providers are acute care hospitals and children’s hospitals.

Q: If you are a provider or hospital and not a meaningful EHR user, when do the penalties kick in?

A: Starting in calendar year 2015 for physicians and FY2015 for hospitals. At that time, CMS will begin to reduce Medicare Market Basket adjustments. There are no payment adjustments associated with the Medicaid provisions.

Q: How will the public know who has received incentive payments under the Recovery Act?

A: CMS will post the names of those receiving Medicare incentives online. The list will include the elements identified in the Recovery Act: name, business addresses, and business phone number of all Medicare eligible professionals and hospitals who received incentive payments under the Recovery Act. There is no such requirement for CMS to publish the names of those receiving Medicaid incentive payments,though States may opt do so.

That last fun fact was Mr. H’s favorite, by the way. Surely it will be a boon to telemarketers who will have all the information required to pounce on the nouveau riche doctors.

SCI Solutions launches Schedule Maximizer (v32) which includes e-mail appointment reminders, expanded portal functionality, and several new revenue cycle reports.

An Arkansas doctor is indicted for planting a bomb that critically injured the chairman of the Arkansas Medical Board last February. Dr. Randeep Singh Mann, who had been previously penalized by the Arkansas Medical Board for overprescribing medication, was charged with planting a car bomb that left the board chairman with blindness on one eye, damaged hearing, and several broken bones. Mann was already facing federal weapons charges for possessing unregistered machine guns and explosives that are permitted only for military use.

Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center (NC) selects QuadraMed’s Enterprise Scheduling for scheduling hospital ancillary procedures.

Allscripts strikes a deal with CVS Caremark to migrate thousands of users from the proprietary CVS iScribe e-prescribing tool to Allscripts e-prescribing.

Surgical Information Systems picks up an endorsement from the American Hospital Association for its surgery scheduling system.

Our favorite pink pants-wearing friends at Voalte say their Voalte One iPhone application is now generally available, following a successful pilot program at Sarasota Memorial Hospital (FL).

CHIME raises some concerns about the newly released meaningful use regulations, particularly with the short timeline for hospitals to implement EHRs. They believe that the 2014 deadline for hospitals and EPs to meet Stage 3 criteria is too soon. CHIME also says the extensive reporting requirements will be burdensome for hospitals. And, CHIME points out that since hospital-based physicians aren’t eligible to receive stimulus funds, it may create a disincentive for health systems to invest in ambulatory EMRs. To that last point, I don’t quite agree, since hospitals will need the physicians to have EMRs to meet interoperability requirements.

E-mail Inga.

Lawson Software To Acquire Healthvision for $160 Million

Lawson Software announced this afternoon that it will acquire integration vendor Healthvision and its parent company, Quovadx Holdings, Inc. for $160 million. The all-cash transaction is expected to close later this month.

Lawson said it expects to use Healthvision’s Cloverleaf technology, used in 33% of North American hospitals, to connect multiple source systems and help providers comply with interoperability requirements. Healthvision also offers a Health Information Exchange platform and MediSuite, a clinical applications suite marketed in Canada.

HIStalk contact Thomas Servo reported on December 11 that Healthvision’s owner, Battery Ventures, would announce a sale of the company around New Year’s.

News 1/6/10

From HIPPAcrates: “Re: notice of proposed rule-making. The summary spreadsheet is very useful, thanks. I just found this error in the government document and hope it’s not an omen.” Even the feds can’t spell HIPAA with the full wording right in front of them. Surely I’m not the only one who knows how to modify Word’s dictionary to catch gaffes like this.

From Dean: “Re: MU. Was just reviewing your summary of the meaningful use doc. Very nice work, even better than Halamka’s at geekdoctor, of course you probably don’t have a Kevlar suit or a handy folding bike! I think a great reader poll would be to ask whether people with CPOE installed have implemented drug-drug or drug-allergy interactions. My bet is that most people who have tried this have turned it off. I think this is a terrible requirement. Current drug-drug interaction checkers are way too sensitive and generate way too many false positives. I’ve reviewed some papers that reported over 25% of medication orders generated alerts. That is unacceptable in my book.” Maybe he needs the Kevlar suit because of bike-induced thigh chafing. The problems with clinical warnings are:

• Practitioners universally believe they don’t personally need them, but they think they should be turned on for their less-capable peers.
• Duplicate drug checking throws out a ton of false alarms and is useless 99% of the time.
• Allergies are often entered without the type, severity, and onset of the reaction, meaning that everybody’s “makes my stomach hurt” allergies trigger the Cry Wolf syndrome and allergy warnings are overridden 95% of the time.
• Users aren’t always given the tools to modify the warnings to suit their needs, such as expanding the by-the-book dose ranges and setting their own ranges based on experience.
• The few vendors of clinical data rigidly adhere to conservative manufacturer data and the advice of their overly cautious lawyers in overweighting accuracy at the expense of usefulness.
• Systems don’t allow personalizing the alerts, so while the family doc might benefit from a renal warning for a particular drug, it’s a sure bet that the nephrologist who gets the exact same warning surely won’t.
• Of all these, the last one could be easily implemented, other than the fact that data vendors, hospitals, and IT people don’t trust their docs to turn off warnings that they don’t value (a rather condescending “computer knows best” outlook).

From Crumbgirl: “Re: GE Centricity Enterprise. You will hear big news out of Indiana if you have not already!” I haven’t heard anything so far.

From Infodoc: “Re: your MU summary. Thought you’d like to know that the Advisory Board referenced your Meaningful Use summary in their Meaningful Use briefing published Monday. HIStalk is becoming a good example of a disruptive technology.” Honestly, all it took was a couple of hours of skimming the documents to pick out the relevant parts. I think the trick is that, as a nerd, I was the only pseudo-journalist sitting home with nothing better to do right before New Year’s. I do appreciate the nice comments about it, though. And I do like to disrupt whenever possible.

From Bob in Accounting: “Re: Epic’s newsletter list for customers to prepare for meaningful use.” My 99% condensed summary of what it said: (a) upgrade; (b) finish rollouts; (c) implement e-prescribing; (d) install MyChart; and (e) install Care Everywhere for data sharing.

From Chris: “Re: EHR. First off, I really appreciate your ongoing coverage of all things health IT related. As I’ve been reading your site and others, I’m failing to identify a distinction between EMR and EHR in terms of the ARRA/HITECH legislation, ‘meaningful use’ and certification criteria. Is there a true distinction between the two? I feel as though I see them used almost interchangeably. Thank you for your insights and clarification!” Theoretically, HITECH applies only to EHRs since the products must be certified and, by definition, all certified EMRs are actually EHRs since they are interoperable. I have a philosophical disagreement with that loose terminology, however, probably because vendors have latched onto it for marketing purposes for the same old products that pre-dated the EHR term. EMRs are used to treat patients. EHRs are used to manage health and community wellness, including collecting data from a much wider net than just doctors and hospitals. I’ll stand by my crotchety proclamation: I don’t care what vendors say, none of them have an EHR. That’s why I always call them EMRs unless I’m quoting someone else.

From Lacey Underall: “Re: Humana. A dermatologist takes them to small claims court. Way to go!” I love this. A dermatologist, tired of Humana not paying his claims for years ($120K total) but unwilling to pay a lawyer 40% to go after them, takes the insurer to small claims court by bundling the claims into packages that fall within the $5,000 limit. Humana’s lawyer is surprised, given that he has never been to small claims court. The doctor tells him, “This is the first of 25 claims we’ll be submitting … Humana could save those $350 filing fees times 25 and his time and fees times 25 if they would just process our claims." Even though the tactic hasn’t worked for other doctors because Humana got their case moved to federal court, it did this time: Humana coughed up $80K and the doctor is hoping to collect the rest of what they owe him before their next court date.

I’ll be charitable in characterizing the post-holiday response to my HISsies nominations plea as modest. The voting that will follow next week or so is going to be pretty dull if nobody nominates their best and worst vendor, industry figure of the year, etc. It takes just a minute or two and validates my pathetic existence, so humor me.

Former Cerner sales VP Mike Supple joins recruiting firm B.E. Smith as SVP of business development.

Ten-provider Orthopaedic Center of Southern Illinois chooses the SRSsoft EMR after its free trial, saying the docs are saving 30-60 minutes each per day.

Madrigal sent me an e-mail announcing Meditech’s merging of PtCT into its regular organization, which I reported last week. The company has posted the announcement and a company Q&A.

Universal Health Services chooses Cerner and its Remote Hosting Option for its 24 hospitals. The modules weren’t stated (red flag – did they commit to all of Millennium or just a few modules?), but per FlimFlam Man, they will replace Opus Healthcare, Siemens pharmacy and ADT, RMS, and others.

Cerner also announces a deal in which Tenet will increase its Millennium use from 14 hospitals to 47. Shares were up 6% today, hitting a 52-week high and raising the market cap to $7.29 billion and nearly making Neal Patterson a hemi-billionaire (he’s got $496 million worth).

Revenue cycle vendor Passport Health Communications names David Whitt CFO.

Jobs: Eclipsys Systems Engineers/DBAs, Anesthesia Product Specialist, Clinical Implementation Specialist.

Former Eclipsys SVP Tom Dunn joins QuadraMed as SVP of sales and marketing.

Tennessee gets $2.7 million in stimulus money for a project that CMS says will improve patient outcomes. Reading further: the money will be spent on “planning activities”, like doing a study to figure out why doctors won’t use EMRs.

Three Montana provider organizations go live on the beta version of EMix, a vendor-neutral cloud computing platform from DR Systems for sharing radiology images and reports. They claim it’s as easy to use as e-mail. The company pitches charging patients to manage their images online, for which it takes a cut of the revenue.

Newham University Hospital NHS Trust says its Cerner system is saving it money and reduced patient wait times. Patients in the same area are using Philips home monitoring diagnostic equipment in a test for NHS.

The owners of paging and communications systems vendor Amcom Software sell controlling interest to a partnership of a private equity firm and a venture capital firm. The private equity firm says they’ll probably sell it at some point.

I think I missed this when it was announced: Epocrates names Geoffrey Rutledge MD PhD, formerly of Wellsphere, as CMO/EVP of product development.

Google announces its Nexus One Android-powered cell phone. It seems anti-climactic, hardly an iPhone-killer. Too bad it didn’t involve cheap cell service, although maybe the master plan is to serve up phone ads that offer a lower cost all around.

Odd lawsuit: a woman sues Walgreens, claiming that a store employee leaving the bathroom knocked her down with the door. She wants medical costs, damages and “other sums to compensate her for her injuries,” claiming that Walgreens should have instructed employees to look before opening the door, for failing to tell her to move, and for failing to equip the door with a warning device.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

In yesterday’s HIStalk Practice, I touched on a few nuggets of information about the latest EHR meaningful use recommendations. I might add it is worth a read because there are some points Mr. H and I haven’t seen covered elsewhere (and while you are there, sign up for the e-mail updates.) One particularly confusing item relates to the timeline for proving meaningful EHR use in order to earn incentive dollars. I tried to summarize a bit on the timeline for getting money, but because it is particularly confusing, I decided a graphic might help (click it to enlarge).

For those that want to follow along at home, this information is found around pages 23 to 31 in the larger, 557-page document. As I interpret things, to qualify for stimulus money during 2011, a hospital or eligible professional (EP) must demonstrate meaningful use of EHR for “any 90-day period within the first payment year.” The earliest possible start date for that 90-day reporting reporting will likely be January 1, 2011. The latest day to start a 90-day reporting period and still qualify for 2011 money is October 1, 2011. After earning incentive money in the first year, entities will be required to prove meaningful EHR use for a full year, starting on January 1, in order to qualify for second-year funds. Thus, if an entity qualified any time during 2011, it would have to continue to prove that it used its EHR meaningfully from January 1, 2012 to December 31, 2012 in order to qualify for the 2012 incentive funds. And, if the entity doesn’t try to qualify for the first time until sometime in 2012, then it must prove meaningful use for the full year beginning January 1, 2013, to get the second-year funds. And so forth. If someone interpreted things differently (or can explain this better), please advise.

athenahealth signs a deal with Caritas Christi Health Care to offer athenaclinicals to 500 employed providers and 1,200 affiliates. CIO Todd Rothenhaus, MD, the Caritas SVP/CIO, confirmed to me that Caritas will offer athena and eClinicalWorks, which was announced previously.

I was talking EMRs with a girlfriend at lunch today (isn’t that what most gal pals do?) and we agreed that we can’t think of any providers that currently enter 80% of their orders themselves. We thought we might come up with a doctor who uses e-prescribing 75% of the time (but we thought of lots of reasons why a patient and provider might prefer the paper prescription). We couldn’t come up with a single small office group that is currently capable of sending patient data electronically to other providers (often times because the receiver can’t accept the data). The one bright spot is that the recommendations clearly state that “documenting a progress note for each encounter” is not a requirement for proving meaningful use. Otherwise, the mountain is high.

Ridiculously sad, any way you look at it. An unemployed, unmarried 35-year-old mother of nine sues three doctors and two nurses after being sterilized against her will. The mom was delivering baby number nine via a planned C-section and and asked for an IUD to be implanted immediately after delivery. Instead, the doctors performed a tubal ligation.

Trinity Health (MI) buys 1,200 bundled EHR/EPM software licenses from NextGen, increasing its rollout to all employed providers in its network.

Happy 2010, by the way. The ever-generous Mr. H gave me a bit of time off during the holidays, but now I am back at it. Mr. H and I have each waded through pieces of the latest meaningful use documents in hopes of becoming industry experts. Unfortunately, at least in my case, more wading is required. I was hoping there might be some clarification about what exactly a “certified EHR technology” is. Of course “CCHIT” is never mentioned anywhere, even though it seems a given that CCHIT will be a requirement since they are the only certifying body out there. Why can’t the Secretary or the ONC come right out and say it’s CCHIT 200x for now? That way buyers know what is required and vendors know what they need to do if they want to participate.

Send Inga meaningful words.

Monday Morning Update 1/4/10

From Ned Flanders: “Re: remote ICU monitoring. Publication bias apparently runs both ways. JAMA rejected a study evaluating the clinical and financial impact of remote ICU monitoring last year because although the results were extremely impressive, they claimed the study had a weak design (before and after) and did not shed light on the actual reasons why remote ICU monitoring helped (since it had already been shown to help). Curious considering the recently published study had the same design and flaws, with the only difference being outcome.” This highlights a little-appreciated reason for not believing everything you read: the most powerful influence wielded by publishers isn’t how they spin a particular story, it’s their choice of which stories to include in the first place. That process has zero transparency to readers, so it’s the most dangerous. The second most powerful is where the piece appears if it is published. The third is how the headline (or abstract) is worded since many people will base their conclusion, consciously or subconsciously, on that alone.

From FinSoft: “Re: QuadraMed. Jim Klein is out – read the 8K from December 30.” This was actually reported by Misys_ex to me in early December, but I always hesitate to run rumors about named individuals unless it’s public knowledge since I’d hate to see my own name in “he’s been fired” speculation (no need to give the boss ideas). Jim was SVP of product management and CTO until his “involuntary termination”. Some degree of executive change is all but mandatory when a company is acquired. Companies don’t generally buy other companies because they don’t want to change a thing.

From Anne Onymous: “Re: HHS rules. For years, vendors charged a fortune for simple interfaces to the systems of other systems. Now, in order to get certified, they have to offer this interoperability. In addition, they may not be able to charge for it! There are no provisions for them to charge for receiving patient data, although there is no mention about sending patient data (I could have overlooked it). I predict that in the final rules, certified vendors will have to receive select patient data and respond to inquiries for it from other certified systems at little or no cost. This is reasonable and necessary for patient care. The impact of these rules will be very positive for vendors that provide niche applications.”

From Downtown: “Re: meaningful use. Awesome summary. Will anyone other than attorneys read the whole thing? With an unusual lack of fanfare, ONCHIT seems to have published a new Web site, StateHIEResources.org. It was registered on the 13th by some Canadians. Now I’m really confused!” I signed up for the listserv and it’s apparently a follow-up to (and the same domain registrant as) the State Health Information Exchange Leadership Forum, run by AHIMA “through a cooperative agreement with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT.” The new site has no AHIMA reference. ONCHIT apparently offshored its Web development to Canada.

From ChiSalesChick: “Re: a big EMR vendor I won’t name. They are ‘restructuring’ a lot of their sales people right out of a job.”

From Cleveland Brown: “Re: HIStalk. I was scrolling down the sponsor list yesterday and thinking about how far your little blog site has come in the years that I have been reading. All of your hard work and your integrity surely has brought you well-deserved respect and fame (if not fortune). Thank you so much for producing the one blog that I turn to daily! I do admit, however, that I do not share your site with many of my peers. It is important for my ego to always know more than anyone else and reading HIStalk makes it so.” Lots of readers have confidentially told me they keep their HIStalk reading habits secret for the same reason, which is flattering and amusing. I guess that does slow the word-of-mouth effect, although I note that December’s HIStalk visits were up nearly 40% year-over-year, which is closer to shocking than merely surprising since I keep figuring that anyone who cares has already found it.

Speaking of the remote ICU article, thanks to the reader who sent over the JAMA full text article. The article by a University of Texas Medical School associate professor looked at mortality, complications, and length of stay before and after implementation of Philips VISICU in six ICUs in five hospitals (in a single health system) from 2003 to 2006, using around 2,000 randomly selected patients (about half the total). Hospital mortality dropped a little, but that was not statistically significant after adjusting for severity. There was minimal effect on complications and length of stay. The big gotcha: two-thirds of the patients studied had doctors who allowed the intensivists to intervene only in life-threatening situations, i.e. they were not really letting the remote intensivists manage those patients. Also: the hospitals did not integrate their CPOE and progress notes into VISICU, so all the intensivists had to work from was a daily fax (note the irony that, among all that expensive technology, the only “interface” was a daily fax from one user to another). My conclusions (crediting Smalltown CIO for some thoughtful comments left on my original post about this article): (a) as is often the case, implementation decisions had more impact on outcomes than did the technology itself; (b) you could flip the conclusion around and say that, since tele-ICU had no negative impact, it provides opportunities to maximize use of scarce resources; (c) rural sites could use tele-ICU and keep the patient closer to family members without negatively impacting outcomes (and helping support those rural facilities instead of big academic medical centers); and (d) hospitals buying remote ICU monitoring technology should first see if local docs will support it by letting those remote intensivists do something more than just provide off-hours fire watch coverage.

Speaking of tele-ICUs, Advanced ICU Care, a St. Louis ICU monitoring service whose 60 intensivists and ICU nurses use VISICU, raises another $2 million of investor money, bringing its total to $12 million.

It’s a new year – time for parades, bowl games, and HISsies nominations. Tell me your thoughts about 2009’s best and worst vendors, the smartest and stupidest vendor moves, and of course the granddaddy of all HIT industry awards: your choice for “HIT industry figure in whose face you’d most like to throw a pie.”

Another New Year’s tradition: newspaper profiles of the local hospital’s first baby of the year, which as I annually note, seldom involves married parents.

Listening: Boston-based Lyres, which sounds like the Animals or Seeds time warped from a 1960s garage into the 1990s with their Farfisa organ in tow.

HHS didn’t make its proposed Meaningful Use standards easy to work with, scattering them over two verbose PDF files (they didn’t exactly lead by example when it comes to discrete data and interoperability). I pored over the documents again in my usual nerdy New Year’s Eve (while watching some guy doing an Evel Knievel-style car jump on TV and all three hours of Rush in Rio) and put the actual criteria and thresholds into a handy-dandy Excel worksheet (note: it looks crappy in the preview, but perfect once you download). It spells out the provider parts of the MU requirements in concise detail. Certification and payment specifics means nothing if you can’t look down this list and nod your head that, hey, we can do all this stuff on the computer. Let me know of any additions or changes. I numbered the criteria just for reference, but it’s a made-up number.

Some thoughts on the proposed Meaningful Use criteria:

• I’m trying to figure out who the big winners will be if these criteria are approved. Consultants for sure. Companies like RelayHealth that provide eligibility, claims, and information exchange services. Companies that can perform a security analysis. Vendors that offer a usable medication reconciliation function. Vendors with patient portals. Companies that can help put vital signs information directly into the EMR.
• Losers: EMR vendors already strapped to pay for CCHIT certification who now have to cough up another million or two to meet the additional requirements. That’s another blow to small and innovative vendors who aren’t raking in the cash, meaning the market tilts even more in favor of the older, bigger ones whose sales were so limited that the government decided to intervene in the free market in the first place. Market consolidation is probably good, but I expect the development agenda will now be even more driven by Uncle Sam, not users (especially since the HITECH sales window is small, so even sales-driven innovation may dry up once everybody has chosen their dance partner).
• Lots of folks, me included, expected the criteria to be a slam dunk for moderately tech-savvy hospitals and practices. Not so: considering the small percentages of them using CPOE and e-prescribing, the minority that can provide electronic copies of information to patients, and the small number of practices that can provide patients with fast access their online health information, the these are stretch goals. I bet those requirements will be dialed back in the final version for that reason.
• Good luck with providing the denominator number for the reimbursement measures. You will need to know the total number of prescriptions generated, the number of orders issued, and the number of episodes in which medication reconciliation should have been performed. The document indicates an estimated time to generate the denominator at one hour using the EMR’s capabilities, which is surely a mistake since the EMR doesn’t help you count paper orders.
• The CPOE requirement is generous to hospitals, which have been screwing around since the 1980s trying to get doctors to use CPOE with dismal results. They are required to hit only 10% CPOE usage since “CPOE is traditionally one of the last capabilities implemented at hospitals.” (like, decades after buying it?) Practices, most of them considering their first EMR in a quick ramp-up to earn HITECH money, need 80% usage right out of the gate. I expect changes here, too, with the hospital target raised and the practice one lowered.
• With the minimal CPOE usage required for hospitals, the five required (and undefined) clinical decision support rules won’t have much impact on patient outcomes.
• The report cites a pseudo-fact that, “Some vendors have estimated that EHRs could result in cost savings of between $100 and $200 per patient per year.” Vendors say a lot of things, but I believe only those that are enumerated in a contract, preferably with rewards or penalties to encourage backing up self-serving statements with risk. I’m not sure I would have included that stat.
• The report used the high estimate of EHR cost from a range of $25,000 to $54,000 per provider, stating that “we believe the cost of such technology will be increasing.” Why should software costs increase when user bases are increasing, which should allow vendors to spread their fixed software development costs over more users? The only one factor that would raise the price is the vendor cost of complying with certification requirements (government meddling in free markets never comes free).
• That higher upfront EMR cost makes the elusive $44K jackpot even less enticing. Doctors were already avoiding EMRs because of cost and negative workflow impact. Providers are questioning whether they can qualify for the incentives and whether they trust the government to pay them.
• Conclusion: if you like the idea of having the government use taxpayer money to encourage the use of specific products in the pursuit of lofty and possibly unrelated goals, this at least pushes some theoretical behavior change in the users who choose to participate. If you’re a provider trying to decide whether the government money has too many strings attached, this might convince you that it does. And if you asked me how the odds of high EMR utilization changed with the release of these proposed requirements, I’d say they got worse.

Apparently we are not collectively certain that Epic is a proven solution for acute treatment of seriously ill patients, at least based on the results of my last poll. A new one to your right (or lower left if your screen resolution is set low): are the initial Meaningful Use criteria too easy for providers to meet, too hard, or about right?

I love this newspaper article because it reminds me how shocked I was the first time I saw what it describes first hand: the person in scrubs assisting a surgeon performing an OR procedure is sometimes an unlicensed salesperson of the medical device being used. In addition to the skilled medical personnel in the OR, “at the foot of the operating table, there’s Chuck Bates, a guy who studied biology in college and always wanted to go to medical school but never did. Instead, he began his career selling hot dogs to grocery stores. As the surgeon prepares to make an incision, Bates stares at the X-ray monitor. Come up one centimeter and make your incision there, Bates tells the surgeon.”

This is what the lure of taxpayer-funded EMR Welfare has done. An Indiana group holds its first planning meeting about applying for $15 million in federal HIT money (the Beacon Community Program) even though the representative of the only hospital involved (and the main beneficiary of the grant) skips the meeting because he’s on vacation. Their application is due January 8, so they met without him. The county health department director figured the financial windfall would be nice, but low EMR provider usage makes the group a pretty poor EMR beacon for the country to follow: “It’s been a real struggle. The hospital’s computer system has been crap. I’m not sure it is even 15 percent, let alone 25 percent.”

E-mail me.

ONCHIT Releases Preliminary Definition of Meaningful Use

The federal government announced regulations this evening that define “meaningful use” of EHRs and the CMS incentive program associated with it, barely meeting the December 31 required date for issuing an initial set of standards.

The rules will go into effect 30 days after publication following a public comment period. The meaningful use rule is here (warning: PDF).

The incentive rule (all 556 pages of it) is here (warning: PDF). It contains specifics about percentages of orders, payment schedules, specific numerators and denominators for measures, etc. I gave it a quick skim and got most of the information about use measures, but if someone wants to summarize the payment portion early Thursday, I will post it (since I’ll be at work).

These specifications apply to Stage 1, which take effect in 2011. They fall into four categories of standards: vocabulary, content exchange, transport, and privacy and security.

Stage 2 requirements start in 2013 and Stage 3 requirements in 2015. Those will be defined later by HHS.

This is a summary of the most important information.

CPOE
Practices: Use CPOE for orders involving medications, laboratory, radiology, and referrals.
Hospitals: medications, laboratory, radiology, blood bank, PT, OT, RT, rehab, dialysis, consults, and discharge and transfer.
Orders do not have to be sent electronically to the fulfilling department (lab, pharmacy, etc.)
Practices must enter 80% of their total orders directly by the clinician into the CPOE system. Hospitals must have 10% of all orders entered by CPOE.

Clinical Checking of Orders
Real-time screening (drug-drug interactions and drug-allergy contraindications), formulary check, user ability to maintain screening rules, track user responses to alerts.

Problem List
Longitudinal current and active diagnoses coded in ICD-9-CM or SNOMED CT.
80% of unique patients must have at least one coded problem/diagnosis, with “none” being an allowed entry (hospitals and practices).

E-Prescribing
Practices only.
Must send 75% of non-controlled substance prescriptions electronically.

Active Medication List
80% of unique patients must have at least one coded entry, with “none” being an allowed entry (hospitals and practices).

Medication Allergy List
Longitudinal with allergy history.
80% of unique patients must have at least one coded entry, with “none” being an allowed entry (hospitals and practices).

Demographics
Practices: preferred language, insurance type, gender, race, ethnicity, and data of birth.
Hospitals: all of the above plus date and cause of death if applicable.
80% of patients must have demographics recorded as structured data

Vital Signs
Height, weight, BP, BMI, growth charts for patients 2-20 years old, temperature, pulse.
80% of patients aged 2 and over must have blood pressure and BMI entered.
Children 2-20 must have a growth chart.

Smoking Status
Record if current smoker, former smoker, or never smoked.
Must be recorded for 80% of patients.

Structured lab results
Display results, translate LOINC codes, allow maintenance based on new results.
Must record as structured EHR data 50% of all results that are delivered in positive/negative or numeric format.

Patient Lists
Allow user to select, sort, retrieve, and output patient lists based on demographics, medications, and conditions.

Report Quality Measures to CMS and States
Calculate, display, and submit quality measure results

Patient Reminders
Practices only: issue based on patient preferences, demographics, conditions, and medication list.

Five Clinical Decision Support Rules
Beyond drug screening, based on demographics: diagnoses, lab results, or medication list. Real-time alerts and suggestions based on evidence. Track response to alerts.

Eligibility
Allow user to record and display based on eligibility response from insurer.
Must cover 80% of unique patients.

Submit Claims
Must submit 80% of all claims filed electronically.

Electronic Copy of Health Information to Patients
Allow user to create an electronic copy of test results, problem list, medication list, medication allergy list, immunizations, and procedures. Hospitals must also provide a discharge summary but not procedures.
Must provide an electronic copy of health information to requesting patients within 48 hours.

Electronic Copy of Discharge Instructions
Hospitals only.
Must provide electronically to 80% of discharged patients who request them.

Timely Patient Access to Health Information
Practices only: diagnostic results, problem list, medication list, medication allergy list, immunizations, and procedures. Within 96 hours of availability.
Must provide to 10% of unique patients.

Clinical Summary of Each Office Visit
Practices only: diagnostic results, medication list, procedures, problem list, immunizations.
Must provide for 80% of office visits.

Information Exchange
Enable electronic sending and receiving of diagnostic test results, problem list, medication list, medication allergy list, immunizations, and procedures. Hospital requirements also include a discharge summary.
Must conduct at least one test of exchanging information.

Medication Reconciliation
Compare and merge two or more medication lists into a single list that can be displayed in real time.
Must be performed in 80% of encounters and care transitions.

Submit Data to Immunization Registries
Must conduct at least one test of submitting information.

Submit Lab Results to Public Health Agencies
Hospitals only.
Must conduct at least one test of submitting information.

Submit Syndrome Surveillance Data to Public Health Agencies
Must conduct at least one test of submitting information.

Protect Electronic Patient Information
Unique identifier, emergency access for authorized users, session timeout, encryption where preferred, encryption when exchanging information, maintain audit logs, provide integrity check for recipient of electronically transmitted information, verify user identities and access privileges, record PHI disclosures.
Must conduct a security risk analysis and implement security updates.

Transport Standards
SOAP and REST
HL7 CDA R2 Level 2 CCD or ASTM CCR
ICD-9-CM or SNOMED CT for problem lists
ICD-9-CM or CPT-4 for procedures, moving to ICD-10-PCS or CPT-4 for Stage 2
RXNorm for medication lists
UNII for Stage 2 allergy lists (no standard now)
CDA template for Stage 2 vital signs (no standard now)
UCUM for Stage 2 units of measure (no standard now)
LOINC for lab results
NCPDP Formulary & Benefits Standard 1.0 for drug formulary checks
NCPDP SCRIPT 8.1 or 10.6 for prescription information
ASC X12N and NCPDP for transactions
CMS PQRI 2008 Registry XML for quality measures
HL7 2.5.1 for submitting lab results to public health agencies, with UCUM and SNOMED CT encouraged
HL7 2.3.1 or 2.5.1 for submitted surveillance information to public health agencies and for immunization information
Encryption only if organization sets it as a standard

Median Estimated One-Time Costs for CCHIT-Certified EHRS to Be Certified as Complete EHRs
CCHIT Ambulatory 2008: $1 million
CCHIT 2007/2008 Inpatient: $1.38 million

Median Estimated One-Time Costs for Pre-2008 or Uncertified EHRS to Be Certified as Complete EHRs
Practice EHR: $2.4 million
Hospital EHR: $3.3 million

Estimated Median Industry Costs for EHR Preparation
2010: $61.35 million
2011: $54.53 million
2012: $20.45 million

News 12/30/09

From C’mon Man: “Re: would you buy an EHR from this man? Or a demonstration of how easy it is to smile at the patient, hold the computer, and enter data all at the same time. I do not get it, why is anyone fussing? This ad has sold me, outdated CCHIT and all.” Hey, have some holiday compassion: it’s tough making a living trying to get doctors to use EMRs they don’t really want. My first thought reading the “gift that keeps on giving” part of the ad: the old joke about syphilis.

Note to Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour: don’t ask a question if you don’t want to know the answer. The Gov, getting his tweet on, sends out a blurb pitching cost cutting. An administrative assistant in University Medical Center’s nursing school tweets back, suggesting that maybe he should get his medical exams during normal working hours like everybody else instead of requiring employees to come in after hours on overtime. The Governor’s Office is not appreciative, tracking her down and demanding that the hospital’s compliance officer deal with her. They did, citing HIPAA laws in telling her to quit or be fired even though she didn’t know anything about his health first-hand. The Governor’s Office claims they didn’t contact anyone.

I just noticed that the verified e-mail subscriber count has passed 5,000. Thanks to everybody who reads HIStalk. I can’t express how satisfying and humbling that is, especially when I’ve had a sucky day at work (not today, though – it’s great with everyone taking time off, although the long winter grind starts in earnest next week).

From Thanks: “Re: KLAS. Thank you for publishing the article on KLAS. I was really upset that you never said much lately about this. KLAS is a big scam.” The Readers Write article by Swearingen Software CEO Randall Swearingen drew quite a few diverse comments. Some believe KLAS is an evil money factory, while others say their approach is reasonable. Not that you care, but here are my observations about KLAS.

• I have contributed to KLAS surveys (although not recently) and never detected any suggestion of impropriety. I found their information useful and referred to it fairly often, although not to the exclusion of doing my own homework. I wouldn’t have paid for the subscription and reports.
• I would like to see more statistical transparency in their methods, preferably by external and impartial oversight. Adam Gale said he welcomed this in my 2007 interview with him, but I haven’t seen any changes.
• I don’t believe it when KLAS insists that wild result swings (the “first-to-worst” phenomenon) is a reflection of vendor changes. I think it highlights the problem of trying to extrapolate hard statistics from squishy interview data, no matter how many mumbo-jumbo graphs you include.
• KLAS doesn’t claim to be the Consumer Reports of the industry (see Adam’s comments in my interview). They are a survey company, not a software testing company. At best, they accurately summarize information that vendor customers have given them.
• KLAS has always taken specific data of limited usefulness and wildly extended it into all kinds of repurposed reports that mean very little but that provide extra sales revenue. I have always ignored those anyway, so I can’t say that bothered me.
• The KLAS business model is the same as that of HIMSS: providers pay little to nothing, but their participation motivates vendors to pay to play. Whatever they are selling, vendors keep buying of their own free will.
• Like every other survey-based award, vendors who score well plaster their results everywhere. Those who don’t complain that the process was rigged.
• For me, I paid the most attention to the user comments rather than the fancy graphs and stoplights. For we provider-siders, I bet I could provide an equally valuable service by just contacting a lot of verified system users, asking them a handful of questions, and publishing the results.
• My overall conclusion: the evils of KLAS are really a reflection of the evils of its provider and vendor members. Vendors try to game the system without getting caught, while providers unwisely overweight the value of KLAS in making their IT decisions. All of that is highly profitable to KLAS, but more power to them for creating a niche that still has minimal competition and strong business after all these years.

Back in 2005, I wrote an editorial pitching the idea of a standard healthcare database schema. I’ve seen other folks pick up that idea lately. Given the push for interoperability, I still like the idea. Here’s a snip of what I said then:

This is where my noodling got out of hand. Why can’t every vendor voluntarily or mandatorily use the same database layout for core information? How many ways can you express and repose standard elements such as date of birth, gender, address, etc.? Vendors can, when under duress, feed their data to a standard interface. Why can’t all systems just use an approved core set of tables, updated by the same core set of business rules, and then add their value through additional related tables, GUIs, business rules, etc.? Everyone’s patient database could look and work the same. Seen one, seen ’em all. Customers would be as thrilled by this idea as vendors would be appalled by it. Standard reports would work for every hospital, not just those of a particular vendor. Data translation for third-party reporting would be a no-brainer. Conversion of one system to another would be a piece of cake. Hospitals could easily merge and un-merge with each other to their heart’s content, with data conversion and extraction being assured. You might even have your choice of database software, given an Internet-like abstraction layer that supports everything from Oracle to Cache’. Talk about your interoperability!

An unconvincing article a couple of months ago concluded that remote monitoring of ICU patients by intensivists had little impact on outcomes. I can’t see the full text of this new JAMA article, but it seems much more conclusive, even though its conclusion is the same: “Remote monitoring of ICU patients was not associated with an overall improvement in mortality or LOS.” It’s the CPOE problem, however – many of the institutions had it, but weren’t really using it (although that in itself might, as for CPOE, give an organization reason to question its own capabilities before whipping out the checkbook).

LifeBot announces GA of its VoIP-based workstation for EMS telemedicine, offering full compatibility with digital radio systems.

Inga’s got a couple of great interviews running on HIStalk Practice: Scott Decker (new president of NextGen) and William Zurhellen, MD (a pediatrician and CCHIT expert panel member who has some shockingly frank things to say about the state of EMRs, CCHIT, and standardization).

Listening: Ben’s Brother, slightly whiny Britpop that still sounds good, although I eventually needed some nasty chick music to offset it and headed over to desk-drum to L7 for the zillionth time.

OHCHIT has an upcoming conference call to talk about the $6 million it will spend to get universities to develop a health IT competency exam (warning: PDF) for degree-less HIT people, a little chunk of its $120 million Health IT Workforce Development Program.

Greenway Medical rolls out its PrimeSuite EHR, PM, and interoperability product to Bethesda Healthcare System (FL).

Northwestern Medical Center (VT) gets CON approval to implement Meditech for $5 million, also expecting $577K in stimulus money as a result.

Odd lawsuit: a man sues Barnes Jewish Hospital after he claims he slipped on a Q-tip while visiting a patient, causing extensive injury, disability, and suffering.

E-mail me.

AMICAS To Go Private in $217 Million Buyout

Medical imaging vendor AMICAS announced this morning that it will be bought by private equity firm Thoma Bravo LLC for $5.35 per share, a 21% premium to Thursday’s closing price.

Stephen Kahane, AMICAS president, CEO, and chairman, was quoted as saying, “With the additional capital and operational expertise available to AMICAS through Thoma Bravo, we will be able to grow as the needs of our customers evolve and will be enabled to better serve our market.”

Monday Morning Update 12/28/09

From Madrigal: “Re: letter sent to Meditech customers on December 21.” Unverified, but here’s what the reader sent:

I am happy to announce that effective January 1, 2010, the products, functions, and staff of Patient Care Technologies, Inc. (PtCT) will be fully merged into MEDITECH. PtCT will no longer exist as a separate entity, and all divisions within PtCT will report through MEDITECH’s organizational structure. PtCT’s products will become part of MEDITECH’s HCIS, and will include three offerings: Home Health, Hospice, and well@home Telehealth.

From Lee Morningwood: “Re: Wellogic. Did you decide not to expose them?” I hadn’t named the Cambridge, MA HIE vendor by name, but I received several e-mails purporting to be from former employees back in August. They made a number of claims about the company. I exchanged a couple of e-mails with the CEO and sent him a list of questions, but didn’t hear back. So, all I know now is what I knew then: JobVent said in November 2006 that Wellogic asked it to remove negative postings about the company and Wellogic’s 24-hour support line rang to voice mail (and still did when I tried it today, despite the CEO’s assurance in August that it was a temporary problem due to a telephone system switchover). Meanwhile, I see that JobVent has several recent postings of unknown veracity about the company that repeat some of the same claims that I got by e-mail.

From RocketRobo: “Re: Cerner. The Vancouver Island Health Authority gets local media mention for their $67M Cerner implementation. Five years to bring up the first four hospitals, another three years to bring the rest up. A lot of remote communities will benefit from this model.”

From Ed: “Re: update. Is an update available on the rumor that a major health system will cancel its outsourcing agreement?” I mentioned previously that I had received a couple of anonymous e-mails claiming a big outsourcing contract will be cancelled in early January. The client was supposedly Ascension Health and the vendor CSC, with which Ascension signed a ten-year, $1.4 billion agreement in 2004. Ascension CIO Mark Barner did not return my e-mail of December 8. Therefore, it’s just a rumor – for now.

Construction begins on the future Kansas home of the Kansas City Wizards soccer team and 4,000 Cerner employees, encouraged by $230 million in incentives offered by an apparently desperate Kansas. This architectural rendering is apparently from Neal’s perspective as he can happily note that the parking lot is substantially full and all the Wizards are hard at work, although the pizza delivery vehicle is difficult to discern.

The DoD-VA IT integration project will be delayed for up to two years after a Pentagon review discovers an “inappropriate and potentially unethical relationship” between a DoD manager and the CEO of network performance technology vendor Adara Networks. The tiny company was reported to be under a DoD investigation in July after paying $240,000 in lobbying fees and then getting earmarked funds from Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi.

ONCHIT announced $80 million in grants for HIT training last month. Now comes another $38 million for universities for competency assessment and certificate programs. I’m picturing David Blumenthal wielding one of those tee shirt shooter guns like you see at sporting events, launching $5 million packets of taxpayer currency to crowds of handout-hungry universities. HIT Geek sends this assessment: “Why not a program to re-employ the many skilled workers who have been laid off from healthcare IT vendors due to the economic downturn? No need to train them, and they are available immediately.”

Speaking of David Blumenthal, he declares that ONCHIT’s advisory work group meetings will be open to the public starting January 1. Modern Healthcare reporter Joe Conn had called them on it, questioning whether “it was appropriate to close the meetings even if they had legal authority to do so” considering the President’s recent open government order. Suddenly, Blumenthal’s blog cheers the “no closed meetings” idea like he had just thought it up, declaring that “we want to do more to bring you into the conversation” without referencing the earlier resistance to open meetings (and a somewhat haughty-sounding defense of the practice). It’s a good move, but a simple “we were wrong” would have been nice, especially since I bet the closed door meetings were inconsequential anyway.

The HIStalk party at HIMSS will be Monday, March 1 at 7:00 at Max Lager’s, a short walk from the Georgia World Congress Center. Thanks to primary sponsor Encore Health Resources. Ivo Nelson and Dana Sellers know how to throw a bash, as several of you mentioned by e-mail after the last conference in Chicago. More to come, including the usual online RSVP.

Two unnamed Mayo Clinic employees, one of them a doctor, are fired for violating privacy policies.

I was in the Apple store today (Saturday, the day after Christmas). Recession or not, it was packed with buyers, not returners. A big announcement is supposedly coming in January, which I’d speculate is its rumored tablet offering. I was feeling up the Mac Mini, which is a cool little $599 computer for PC’ers like me who don’t need to re-buy a monitor and keyboard.

Recent articles aside, EMR adopters shouldn’t put too much stock in the results realized by users who preceded them, according to my last poll. New poll to your right: when I asked John Gomez from Eclipsys about Epic’s dominance, he said, “But when you get into the real serious acute care, when you get into the real treatment of very, very sick patients; to the best of my knowledge, I don’t know if they’ve proven themselves yet.” Do you think Epic has proved itself in that regard?

Creepy: a Canadian inventor creates a robotic dream girl that speaks 13,000 sentences in two languages, recognizes faces, plays games, and slaps anyone who paws her. Her “husband” says she’s the perfect woman because she “is always helpful and never complains.” He hopes his robot can serve as a home health companion, which I’m guessing could be funded by selling it for seedier purposes.

Finnish doctors have the same EMR gripes as US ones, according to this Helsinki newspaper article: work slowdowns, lack of an easily understood abstract of immense amounts of information, and decreased time with patients due to increased time entering data. “Software companies have started to become interested in listening to users only in recent years,” a board member of the Finnish Medical Association said.

E-mail me.

News 12/23/09

From BlackBerry Bramble: “Re: BlackBerry. Tonight, for hours, a widespread BlackBerry service outage has occurred and spread to Messenger. Does anyone depend on it for patient care and can I sign up for a backup system?” Sounds like a Messenger upgrade cause the problem like it did last week.

From HC Biker: “Re: Cerner’s IMC acquisition. I know IMC pretty well. They recently decided to use eClinical Works for the primary care side of their business and had some custom software written to link eCW with the occupational medicine software that they were using. Not sure what Cerner plans on doing with this business, but they had a couple of failed bids to provide employer-based primary care and perhaps this is their way to finally get some success in the business. On the surface, it does not appear to be a good fit.”

From RaleighObserver: “Re: my 2010 prediction. Dell acquires Allscripts for their footprint. Tullman pockets a ton of money before Dell realizes the house of cards that it inherited and he runs for public office.”

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Microsoft live@edu. Microsoft is trying to attract new students to its e-mail application called live@edu. So, if you are a student reading HIStalk, let your school administration know about their service. One of the key features is each user is granted 25GB of storage space for their e-mail address, plus they also have some other nice features at low cost to the institution.” It doesn’t work with Chrome, I see.

From Weird News Andy: “Re: no longer a member of the 3-H club.” Harlem Hospital gives a 54-year-old woman an advertised $15 mammogram, throwing in a blood test for free. She claims the hospital told her the blood test revealed that she had terminal HIV, hepatitis, and herpes. She suffers for weeks, then gets a call from the hospital saying it was a mistake and she’s fine after all. No apology, though. She thanked God for her new lease on life, then got herself a malpractice lawyer because “we don’t want anyone else to go through what we’ve been through.” People always say that when suing, but they always just keep the money.

From Marvin Gartner: “Re: Why nothing on the AM J Med article by Himmelstein et al entitled ‘Hospital Computing and the Costs and Quality of Care: A National Study?’ No savings – limited outcomes improvement in only one of four measures. This article needs to be discussed.” OK, allow me to rant: I get e-mails fairly often from someone who indignantly claims I missed or intentionally ignored some big story, when in fact it was prominently featured and mentioned more than once. I pretty much never miss a story, but casual readers much less rarely skim blissfully right by them. I mentioned that article twice in November, one writeup coming in uncharacteristically long at four paragraphs, 555 words, and even a picture of one of the authors (that was exactly one month ago today). So, it has been discussed amply right here, with my conclusion being that the article is not surprising, but not definitive, either. I bought a guitar once, but I’m not blaming the manufacturer for my inability to play the guitar parts of Rush’s The Trees since I’m pretty sure Alex Lifeson could pick up my old six-string and knock it out flawlessly, so mileage most definitely varies with both guitars and EMRs, mostly because of who’s playing. This article matched up a few databases and then blamed the guitar, written by folks who have a definite political agenda and who profess that “idiot hospital administrators” buy EMRs “to extract more money” and “jack up the charges.” I don’t disagree with the concept that providers haven’t historically shown impressive IT results (I preach that myself all the time), but I question the takeaway that nobody should be implementing software systems because they universally don’t work. The problem isn’t that 80% of providers are too weak in change management and reproducible processes to implement software successfully — it’s that they think they are in the 20%.

From Big Wayne: “Re: Flower. You might want to take a look at a sorta grassroots movement to get patients informed about interoperability issues and asking their providers to ‘talk’ to each other.” Flower is some kind of interoperability manifesto. I have a short attention span, so I couldn’t really figure out if it’s a movement, a technology, or a business.

I made a couple of tweaks to speed up page loads: I cut the number of front-page stories from five to three (click the Archives link at the top of the page to see the last 200) and I took pictures out of the View/Print Text Only page. In case you were wondering.

E-mail me.

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas
By Inga

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through IT
Not a creature was stirring – not a single PC.
The charges were updated by users with care,
In hopes that more money would make its way there.

The doctors were finished, all smug in their heads,
While nurses were checking on every last bed.
And the CIO in his office, and I in my cube
He cleaned out his email while I watched YouTube.

When out from Windows 7 there ‘rose an odd clatter,
I switched off The Who to check on the matter.
Then away across the ‘Net I flew – launching Flash,
I opened up HIStalk, hoping nothing would crash.

My tunes on Pandora were silenced at once
Yet my laptop moved slowly – it seemed to take months.
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear
But a miniature Mr. H and Inga, that dear.

As my GeForce driver became lively and quick
I knew in a moment it must not be a trick.
More rapid than eagles, his rumors quickly came,
And he whistled, and grumbled, and called them by name.

“Now Neal! Now Glenn! Now Girish and JB!
Now Philip! Now Judy! Now Pappalardo and Sunny!
To the top of web page! To the top of the crawl!
I know all your secrets! Yes I do know them all!”

With news and some gossip, the wild rumors fly
The leaders read closely, hoping they will not win pie.
Daily to HIStalk – those the top dogs do click
To read Mr. H and his Inga, with all of their shtick.

And then, in a twinkling, I heard a new sound
My disk drive was churning and chugging around!
As I drew down my head to refresh the screen
Out popped Mr. H – an amazing sight to be seen!

He was dressed in polyester, from his head to his foot,
He had quite the old-fashioned programmer look.
A bundle of gadgets he had flung on his back,
As well as a Blackberry, still new from its pack.

His eyes – how they twinkled! His dimples how merry!
He looked ready to scribe a new fun commentary!
His droll little humor was clear from the start
This was the man who made blogging an art!

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth
And a light was encircled on his head like a wreath.
He had a kind face and pooch at his belly
So this the man who turned vendors to jelly?

He was quiet and quick – the picture of stealth
As he checked out the tech things in our office of health.
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head
He noted our software and computers by beds.

He spoke not a thing as he took a keyboard,
I recalled how his words were stronger than swords.
Then touching his finger upon the word “send”
Today’s posting had clearly come to an end.

He sprang to my laptop and gave a short whistle
Then into cyberspace he left – as fast as a missile.
But I heard him exclaim as he slipped out of sight
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!”

E-mail Inga.

Monday Morning Update 12/21/09

From Pete Pistol: “Re: Dell/Perot. Looking at additional details on the conference call, ‘Chief Executive Michael Dell has suggested that the company may purchase another software company to beef up its offerings’. Care to speculate who that might be or what type of software they are likely to buy? I’m thinking an EMR vendor (based on another mention on that call), but not sure. They also mentioned becoming a Primary Source Vendor for the federal government and expanding services to outside of the US, which I thought was interesting.” It always makes me nervous when a company with one fading core competency, even one like Dell that was a hotbed of manufacturing and logistics innovation years ago, runs out of runway and suddenly decides to jump into something it knows nothing about without any apparent conviction, especially when patients are involved. I’m hoping it’s not an EMR vendor since the last thing we need is another big company like GE or Siemens dipping a corporate toe into healthcare just because it makes diversification sense. But, if it’s a healthcare software vendor they want, I’d suspect their partners might get a look just like Perot did (Allscripts, eClinicalWorks, AMICAS, etc.). So let’s help Michael Dell out … who should Dell buy? Tell me.

Another of those jumps into a non-core competency … Cerner’s announced acquisition of IMC HealthCare. I’m not sure I’d want a software company providing my healthcare services, any more than I’d want a healthcare provider selling software. I’d have to guess that Cerner picked it up cheap since it had only 23 health centers and was announced as having no impact on Cerner’s 2010 financials. The company says it has custom-developed software, so maybe that’s what Cerner wants. I’ve heard no rousing employee endorsements of Cerner’s health clinic, so maybe having Mr. Tick Tock managing your healthcare matters isn’t the height of employee compassion.

From Avid Reader: “Re: a summary of healthcare overhaul on a napkin.”

David Blumenthal sends an e-mail announcing availability of $60 million more of taxpayer money to “fund research focused on identifying technology solutions to address well-documented problems impeding broad adoption of health information technology,” whatever that means. He calls the program Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects, preferring the cute acronym of SHARP rather than the correct one of SHITARP (hey, they picked the name and decided to turn it into an acronym, not me). 

Rodney Schutt resigns as CEO of troubled vendor Aspyra. COO Ademola Lawal will replace him. I don’t have a link, but someone sent over the 8K form. Going down in flames.

I’ve said more than once that click-and-dropdown EMR forms don’t provide the richness of information as an old-fashioned narrative, despite their appeal due to supposed ease of use and the capture of discrete data. A Nuance survey proves it. When presented with an HPI note for the same patient, one dictated in Dragon Medical and the other from a completed EMR point-and-click template, 97% of doctors said the former would be more useful in their treatment of the patient. All the press people must be taking Christmas off early since I got all these announcements that aren’t on the Web yet.

National eHealth Collaborative announces Laura Adams of the Rhode Island Quality Institute as board chair; Simon Cohn, MD of Kaiser as vice chair; and Thomas Fritz of Inland Northwest Health Services as treasurer. I haven’t seen the press release posted yet. The organization is still looking for board members, with nominations due by Christmas day.

I think the above results say all that needs to be said about my last poll. A new one to your right (or to your lower left if your screen resolution is set low): should a provider implementing an EMR care about general studies that attempt to generalize success rates?

It’s a Weird News Andy twofer: he notices that Intermountain Healthcare has resumed its employee 401K contributions, but then also finds that it’s facing a class action lawsuit for claimed overcharging of patients.

Astronaut, LLC announces the beta of VistA Shuttle, a Amazon cloud-based version of either WorldVistA or OpenVista.

Southwest General Health Center (OH) finishes the first phase of its ambitious $26 million IT plan that includes clinical systems, wireless technology, tablet PCs, biometric security, mobile carts, periop documentation, speech recognition, enterprise scheduling, and an HIE. That’s a lot for a hospital of around 300 beds.

Practice EMR vendor DoctorsPartner offers the Sushoo (bless you) independent HIE, free for DoctorsPartner customers or $2,500 upfront and $80 per month otherwise.

Saskatchewan’s electronic health record could be finished for all residents within four years for an additional $365 million beyond the $235 million already spent with another $60 million a year in operating costs. The problem is they may not have the money due to “nose-diving potash prices.”

I plan to write HIStalk at least some of the time over the holidays, if for no other reason than because almost nobody else does that (pros and amateurs alike). It’s a good time to write a guest article or tell me something interesting since hard news may be in short supply (but you never know).

E-mail me.

News 12/18/09

From Lucius Q.C. Lamar: “Re: Cerner. I hear they are working with Cisco to develop a payer product.” Unverified, although the companies have worked together on Cisco’s health center and Cerner’s pilot of Cisco’s TelePresence, so maybe they are BFFs.

From Broadway Joe: “Re: Best holiday wishes to Mr. H and Inga! I really enjoy your blog and appreciate all the hard work you both do to provide us with timely and witting industry information.” Thanks and back atcha. We wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t fun for us, too.

From Hellboy: “Re: EMR articles. Why do you deny conclusions that EMRs don’t provide the expected benefits?” Because I also deny conclusions that they do. Healthcare people are already lemming-like enough without obsessing over whether a 1982 Invision implementation disappointment should mean anything to them. On the other hand, fretting doubters are probably justified in holding back since that kind of hand-wringing usually predisposes to project failure. All these articles carry the subtle message that the semi-study of a few wildly different implementations will yield a universal predictor of software-correlated outcomes. I don’t buy that for a minute. As I’ve said ad nauseam, if software was a magic bullet, every hospital spending their $50 million on Epic or Cerner would simply drive all their competitors out of business with lower costs and better outcomes. They aren’t. Your mileage will most assuredly vary no matter how many articles you read.

From Skip Tracer: “Re: GE. As the owner of a EMR reseller and a competitor to GE, it’s offensive that they received government bailout money and then have turned around and offered free financing to their prospective clients. Now, I know, we’re all feeding at the Obama trough, so I wouldn’t be as ticked if GE used the money to improve their product or services. Instead, they’re floating free money to overcome the fact their product is having problems and their successful installs are few and far between. And, in a roundabout way, I’m helping them do it. Only in America.” GE got $140 billion of taxpayer money to save the GE Capital garbage heap, but only after elbowing its way to the front of the federal bailout bread line by convincing panicking bureaucrats to broaden the definition to “affiliates” of an FDIC-insured institution.

In New Zealand, Waikato District Health Board is recovering from a Conficker computer worm attack that disrupted services to the point that non-emergent patients were asked to stay away. I read somewhere that over seven million PCs are infected with it, meaning those computers will accept remote commands from hackers.

Also in New Zealand, the former health district CIO who was accused of taking $755K worth of kickbacks from a service provider pleads guilty. He had struck a deal to approve a help desk services contract for $95 per hour, of which he received $25. When they board found out, they simply hired the same three people who were already working the help desk, saving $500K per year.

This is juicy: federal prosecutors say former McKesson chair Charlie McCall should be jailed immediately because he violated terms of his 2003 release with his 2006 arrest for soliciting a prostitute. I have a couple of boffo lines, but I like to keep it family-friendly (but I bet you are thinking the exact same ones). He’s been out on $1 million bail since 2003 with a condition that he not commit any crimes. He’s already been found guilty of the $8.6 billion HBOC stock fraud and will be sentenced in March. The US attorney says Charlie needs locked up since he might skip town before then.

RIM just announced Q3 numbers: smoking BlackBerry sales pumped up revenue by 41% and moved earnings to $1.10 vs. $0.69, with most of the good numbers coming from consumers rather than business customers.

University of Alberta professors design software that helps senior citizens identify and organize their tablets and capsules (which are not the same as “pills” no matter what the article says), hoping to port it to a smartphones.

I usually read Bruce Friedman’s Lab Soft News, which has interesting conjecture about the Abbott acquisition of Starlims:

Putting all this all together, I think that it’s possible that Abbot has the following scenario in mind as a long-term goal: sell to clinical labs, as an integrated package, analytic instruments, reagents, and test result management supported by a cloud-based LIS/LIMS. Pricing would be on a per-click or taxi-meter basis. This would be the first PaaS offering for the clinical lab industry

David Whiles, IT director at Midland Memorial Hospital (TX), is recognized by the hospital district’s board of directors for its implementation of OpenVista. He expresses surprise: “It’s a hospital project, not an IT project.” Seems like they should give him a CIO title.

Dell says its acquisition of Perot Systems will allow it to expand its healthcare services, which one might hope given that it just paid $3.9 billion for the company.

Quantros announces creation of a healthcare IT consulting division to be led by Michael Tulloch.

Cerner will offer HealthDock from Certify Data Systems, which it says will help hospitals using its Cerner Hub connectivity services exchange data with any practice EMR system.

MDI Healthcare Solutions gets a mention in the Jacksonville, FL business paper. The company uses claims data to predict the future cost of caring for a given individual. The article’s timing isn’t so great since the company’s Web site is “undergoing renovations” at the moment, consisting of just a picture of what it might look like if it actually worked.

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, whose tax woes killed his nomination as HHS secretary, is profiting from HITECH, according to a Huffington Post article. It says he set up a law firm division to cash in on stimulus money, implying that he’s had face-to-face meetings with David Blumenthal “in trying to position our clients for meaningful use.” He’s also on the advisory board of GE Healthcare’s “healthyimagination” project, joining Bill Frist, Newt Gingrich, and “former chiefs of Medicare and the Food and Drug Administration”, although the company implies it’s not paying them much (by their standards, anyway). From the law firm’s Web site: “Our life sciences team members include former U.S. Senate majority leaders Senator Bob Dole and Senator Tom Daschle, a former CMS administrator, a former associate FDA commissioner and a former associate chief counsel for Enforcement at FDA.”

Another hospital thanks their fairy godmother Congressman for EMR money instead of the taxpayers who have to pay it: Rome Memorial Hospital (NY), which will get $250K in Congressional pork funds (aka the $410 billion “Omnibus appropriations act”).

I could write a novel from this: an Indiana otolaryngologist whose sinus clinic was raking in $3 million a year, some of it apparently via insurance company fraud, disappears from vacation in Greece owing $5.7 million. Italian authorities arrest him in the tent he’s living in on a glacier at the foot of Mont Blanc, suspecting he’s fleeing to Switzerland after stops in Monaco, China, and France (and making America’s Most Wanted in the process). He smuggles a box cutter into jail in his rectum and slashes his throat in a suicide attempt, but ends up with only minor neck injuries despite his expertise as a throat surgeon.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

From Easy Money: “Re: Lourdes whistle-blower. The whistle-blower that alerted federal officials of the potential fraud activity at Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center earned a nice $356,000 bonus. He was supposedly a ‘consultant’. Do you think the hospital paid him a consulting fee?” Easy Money is referring to the $8 million settlement between Lourdes and the Justice Department. The hospital was charged with fraudulently inflating charges to Medicare patients. I did a quick Google search of Anthony Kite and determined he must moonlight as a whistleblower, having been awarded several hundred thousand dollars in similar lawsuits over the last few years.

Here’s some good and bad news for HIEs. The good news is most physicians believe that HIEs would improve quality of care, reduce costs, and save time. However, don’t count on the doctors to help keep the lights on. This survey of 1,000 physicians didn’t find a single doctor willing to pay a proposed $150 a month fee to connect to an HIE. In fact, half of the doctors said access should be free.

Someone might want to share the news with Thomson Reuters, who just announced plans to launch a new HIE platform.

The CIO of the 300-physician Springfield Clinic (IL) claims their Allscripts EMR plus a patient kiosk system netted a $4.5 million ROI in the first year, thanks to staff reductions and reduced transcription costs.

Stratus Technologies announces its Zero Downtime $50K Guarantee. The company says the server line has surpassed 99.999% uptime reliability since introduced in 2001.

Congrats to Cumberland Consulting Group for its #10 ranking in Consulting Magazine’s Best Small Firms to Work For, 2009.

Special alert for all you road warriors: McDonald’s, in partnership with AT&T, will provide free Wi-Fi in over 11,000 restaurants by January. Personally, I’ll remain partial to Panera when it comes to eating and surfing. But, there are definitely more McDonald’s and they have the best fries.

QuadraMed announces GA of Quantim Workflow.

WellStar Health System (GA) selects Kronos to provide workforce management solutions to manage its 11,000 employees in five hospitals.

Every time I see the name Kronos, by the way, I think about Zeus’s father, who ate his children. The Greeks also had a Kronos, the father of time. I am pretty sure that the latter Kronos is the company’s namesake.

Baylor Health Care System (TX) signs a multi-year agreement to license TeleTracking patient flow solutions across 14 hospitals.

Picis says that 67 healthcare facilities have gone live on its LYNX E/Point solution over the last six months.

Healthland wins back a hospital client that left its fold several years ago. The 15-bed Webster County Memorial Hospital (WV) re-signs with Healthland for its patient accounting system, which they claim is its first step towards moving to an EMR system.

Vangent wins a $20 million contract with the DoD to implement a an integrated SSO and context management solution throughout the Military Health System.

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center completes a self-service check-in pilot program and now plans to deploy D2’s My Patient Passport Express kiosk throughout its facilities.

Southcoast Health System (MA) selects Wolters Kluwer’s ProVation Orders Sets for its three hospitals.

St. Joseph Health System chooses Accenx to help integrate its hospitals with affiliated physicians.

A faculty physician at UC San Francisco falls for an e-mail phishing scam and ends up exposing personal information on about 600 patients. The doctor gave out his user name and password when replying to what he thought was an internal e-mail.

And in Detroit, health department officials say that clinical and demographic information on 10,000 patients has been compromised following two separate thefts. A flash drive containing patient data was stolen from an employee’s car in October and a desktop computer was taken from a health department facility over Thanksgiving.

Cape Cod Healthcare (MA) signs a seven-year agreement with Siemens to implement Soarian, including Clinicals and Financials. The hospital expects the project to be completed by mid-2011.

Former Ottawa Hospital chair Ray Hession takes over as chairman at the troubled eHealth Ontario.

I’m betting this Congressman gets re-elected. Madison Memorial Hospital (ID), having collaborated with Congressman Mike Simpson for three years, learns it is “likely” to receive a $350,000 EMR grant from the federal government.

Collaborate here.

News 12/16/09

From Edison Carter: “Re: another one bites the dust. Arizona Medical Information Exchange shuts down.” AMIE runs out of Medicaid Transformation Grant money and will set its sights on grabbing some ARRA cash by reinventing itself as a statewide HIE.

From Bob in Accounting: “Re: contest. If you can’t make people buy it, then give it away?” Inga mentioned this on HIStalk Practice: CDW and Cerner pair up to give one lucky (?) physician practice a Cerner EMR. The fine print is interesting: entrants must sign over the rights to use their image and biographies, agree to hold the sponsors harmless for everything in the world, and sign a liability release. Only Cerner would create a multi-page legal agreement requiring a team of lawyers to interpret just to enter a contest giving away an EMR that few want anyway. What are the odds that the winner’s implementation will never happen or will be so unimpressive that you’ll never hear anything more about them? My two-word analogy: free kittens.

From Bridget: “Re: Vigilance iPhone app. Is it FDA approved? It looks like a patient monitor to me. I looked at Acuitec’s Web site and couldn’t find any info on the FDA certification. As a clinical engineer, if it has waveforms and physiological info on it, it better be accurate, and as for alarms, you can’t call it an alarm unless it ‘alarms’ within 10 seconds of detection of physiological condition contributing to alarm status. Thanks for the excellent Web site — I work in the CE/IT interface arena.” Above is shot of Vigilance running on a different device, which I’m including because I think it’s cool. I e-mailed Acuitec and received a nice reply from Lionel Tehini, president and CEO:

Those products of ours for anesthesia charting that require FDA approval have this. In the case of Vigilance, it does not require FDA approval, provided the systems it is aggregating data from and the information being represented in the application have FDA approval. So for example displaying of the wave forms — if we render those ourselves, then it requires the FDA approval (and has it). If those use the rendering services of the vitals sign vendor (Philips, GE, etc.) then it does not, since those are already FDA approved. Yes, I know a complicated answer for such a simple question. But when it comes to the FDA, nothing is simple. My advice is always err on the side of caution and submit the for approval and let them make the judgment call.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Windows 7 screens. InformationWeek has given use some useful information about what Windows 7 screens look like for us new users. TPD will be testing a Dell Wi-Fi netbook with Windows 7 Home Premium and will post a user perspective of the pluses and minuses for HIStalkers in the near future.”

From Lester Bangs: “Re: ARRA certification. Companies like this one (and they aren’t alone) get checked off on SOME of the ARRA criteria (which are changing) and get labeled as Pre-ARRA Certified by CCHIT. Amazing. And we wonder how folks are confused.” I found CCHIT’s disclaimer more interesting (click the above screen shot to enlarge) since it clarifies that the certification is preliminary, possibly irrelevant depending on the standards that are eventually approved, and possibly worthless since CCHIT may not even be a recognized certification body by them.

From Toadie: “Re: interviews. Some of the interviews read like a press release, while others are interesting. How do you choose who to interview?” Readers suggest some of the interviewees, PR firms sometimes e-mail to say they read HIStalk and can connect us to a CEO, and sometimes I just read about someone interesting and e-mail them. I get turned down sometimes (most recently by Atul Gawande, who was at least polite about it). Each interview is done by either Inga or me and we do our best to ask the right questions and steer the conversation away from self-promotion. It’s worked well, I think, since nearly every interview has redeeming aspects that makes it worth reading. No matter how an interview turns out, I’m always thankful that a busy person will take time to be interviewed by some idiot blogger who warns upfront that (a) the conversation will be published as transcribed; (b) I will not provide my questions beforehand for prep; and (c) I don’t allow proofing or changes afterward. What you read, good or bad, is a real conversation.

Now’s the time to add your event for free to the HIStalk Calendar (Webinars, conferences, etc.) I noticed that five items were listed for today alone, so everybody must be wrapping up before the holidays. Other housekeeping items: if you aren’t getting the e-mail blast when a new HIStalk article is posted, you really should take a few seconds to put your e-mail address in the Subscribe to Updates box to your upper right (you don’t want your competitors and co-workers to scoop you, after all). And, the best secret weapon there is for looking smart isn’t just Google, it’s the Google HIStalk search box to your right. Even industry noobs can sound like battle-weary HIT veterans when talking on the phone by quickly searching for HIStalk mentions of companies, products, and people, then uttering their newfound pearl at just the right moment to an unsuspecting colleague who doesn’t need to know that you used a lifeline.

KLAS announces the best healthcare IT software vendors, with Epic pulling even further away from the pack (I don’t have access to KLAS, so I’m going by the press release). I did learn from the announcement that Epic renamed some of its products, with its pharmacy system now called Willow and RIS renamed Radiant. Several sponsors of HIStalk and HIStalk Practice made the list: eClinical Works, Greenway, McKesson, Eclipsys, Wellsoft (coming soon), Nuance, CareTech Solutions, and Hayes Management Consulting, so congratulations to them.

Listening: The Oohlahs, reader-recommended, female-led punky pop. Reminds me a little of of Throwing Muses. I like it. Mrs. HIStalk is listening to (and watching) So You Think You Can Dance in the living room, which is obvious because I leap a foot out of my chair each time judge Mary Murphy elicits one of her incessant blood-curdling screams for no apparent reason.

My Health Direct, which sells a Web-based referral management system for EDs to send non-emergent patients to other providers, raises $4 million in Series A funding.

Regional Medical Center (SC) says they are happy with their $15 million Cerner go-live, despite significant clinical delays. “Patients have been quite patient,” a board member said without apparent irony.

Abbott Laboratories will acquire Starlims Technologies, an Israel-based lab systems company, for $123 million. It sells systems to hospitals, HMOs, reference labs, and pharma labs. All Web-based, zero client, and high tech, running the presentation code in a .NET control in the browser. Abbott mentions wanting to get into healthcare informatics, so perhaps this has more than the obvious significance.

Barnes-Jewish Hospital (MO) goes live with SIS surgical scheduling, charging, and the SIS Trax tissue management system BJH co-developed with SIS.

I’m on the EHR Scope e-mail list, so I see they’ve made some improvements to their site, fine-tuned their EMR matching system, and are now offering weekly Dragon Medical Webinars. Article submissions for the January issue are being accepted through December 30. I still think their EHRtv is brilliant and darned professional (check out the set in the interview with Evan Steele of SRS above).

The Senate’s health bill will likely not ban the use of prescription data for marketing purposes.

Pfizer’s sales reps will be required to use company-issued tablet PCs when requesting drug samples for doctors, choosing the doctor on the screen to then display a list of appropriate products for sampling. Pfizer has a mighty big meaningful use incentive: the company paid a $2.3 billion fine for illegally marketing its drugs to doctors, so Uncle Sam wants to keep an electronic eye on them.

Is it just me, or does this article about a Serbian EMR vendor have a distinctly AYBABTU quality? “Antamediamedical.com created an amazing software, which helps doctors in different ways. All the software are unique and has amazing results. Medical software is one of the most efficient and workable software, which has sorted a large number of tensions and problems of those people, who are working in medical centers and hospitals. With its installation, the doctors and other medical staff have taken a sigh of relief, for most of other issues have been resolved by it.”

Free (in some configurations) EMR vendor SynaMed announces its free HIPAA-compliant patient-doctor messaging application (the screenshot’s spelling of “Tylonal” suggests that a spell checker might prove useful). The app does look kind of cool, sort of an Instant Messenger tied into the application’s modules.

Hawaii Pacific Health launches its MyHealthAdvantage patient portal. Gee, I wonder who their unnamed vendor is?

The VA posts the raw data behind its 2008 Hospital Report Card on Data.gov, downloadable as .CSV files.

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HERtalk by Inga

From Professor Higgins: “Re: you must talk funny. I love that new iPhone Dragon app and have been astounded by its accuracy. The main limitation is that one needs a good, high speed connection for anything more than a sentence. But for a quick response while driving — perfect! Maybe your voice is just so charming it got distracted? Also, they explained on their app site that while they do collect names only from your contact list, it is to improve accuracy, so when I say ‘John Vinkelgardenhorse,’ they know what I mean!”

With the release of the KLAS end-of-year reports, it’s time to start the  annual discourse on whether or not the KLAS ratings are fair / objective / rigged / irrelevant, etc. I’m sure plenty of vendors lean on their happiest customers, asking them to (favorably) complete the KLAS surveys. Some likely extend honoraria for their clients’ time. That extra tweaking of the process may help move a vendor’s rankings a place or two, but, I think it’s safe to assume that if a vendor was not serving its client base, it would not have enough happy clients willing to provide a favorable report.

MED3OOO appoints Hillary Harlan, an attorney and RN, as its chief compliance and ethics officer.

PatientKeeper closes a $13 million round of funding comprised of equity and debt. The company says it will use the money to accelerate development of physician documentation and CPOE applications and extend its support operations. As part of the financing, Chip Hazard of Flybridge Capital Partners is joining PatientKeeper’s board of directors. Back in August 2008, I mentioned that PatientKeeper secured $7.5 million in Series F funding, which increased its total VC dollars to $75 million. Those funds were designated for R&D and to grow the company’s infrastructure.

3M Health Information Systems releases 3M Mobile Dictation software, a new option for its 3M Mobile Documentation System. The product is available Blackberry and Windows Mobile platforms and allows physicians to review patient detail on their smartphones.

Amcom Software also announces its new smartphone application, Amcom Mobile Connect. The app allows clinicians and staff to use a Blackberry device for messages and critical codes.

Halfpenny Technologies is also jumping on the smartphone bandwagon, introducing its ITF-Mobile application, which allows physicians to securely access test results.

Healthcare Information Xchange of New York selects InterSystems HealthShare software as its core HIE platform.

The Healthcare Authority for Baptist Health (AL) purchases McKesson Practice Complete to handle physician billing and claims management for its employed physicians. Physicians will also use the McKesson-hosted Horizon Practice Plus PM system.

Sounds like Ohio is seeing an economic turnaround, at least for healthcare workers. Cleveland Clinic says it’s planning to add 1,800 new jobs in 2010, a year after posting a $62 million loss. New positions include jobs for both staff and physicians. Meanwhile, University Hospitals (OH) plans to add 550 workers and MetroHealth (OH) has 270 full and part-time openings.

A new study concludes that EHRs often fail to achieve expected gains in healthcare efficiency. They often improve auditing and billing efficiencies, but decrease clinical efficiency.

ONC accelerates its timetable for rolling out health IT regional extension centers (HITRECs), planning to announce 30 grants on January 21 and another 40 or so in March. Sounds like a good move, given the amount of work that needs to be done in short order.

athenahealth names Dr. William Winkenwerder to its board of directors. He’s chairman of The Winkenwerder Company, a healthcare consulting company, and a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs.

The New York Post obtains 2008 tax records for several of the city’s biggest non-profit health systems and finds that at least a dozen CEOs received $1 million or more in compensation. Dr. Herbert Pardes of New York-Presbyterian took home a $1.67 million salary plus a $1 million bonus.

Anne Arundel Medical Center (MD) goes live on its $35 million Epic system, to which it gave the obligatory cute nickname (Alec), but at least based it on something more cerebral than a strained acronym (it means “protector of mankind” in several cultures, they claim). They even make pegged their super users as Smart Alecs, making the whole naming thing worth it.

Last year I wrote a little holiday poem for HIStalk, which I must say was very clever. I plan to update my prose this week and ask Mr. H to publish it a bit earlier, before the masses turn off their e-mail for the holidays. Stay tuned.

Holiday poems here.

Monday Morning Update 12/14/09

Indiana Regional Medical Center thanks Congressman Bill Shuster (R-PA) for getting it $350,000 in federal money to buy an EMR. Question: shouldn’t they be thanking the people like you and me who are actually paying for the porkfest? Given the federal spending spree, It’s not shocking any more that at least a half-dozen other hospitals were named in news stories this week for getting federal grant money for EMRs.

Proloquo2Go makes Apple’s list of the top iPhone apps for 2009, surprising many who didn’t expect to see a medical app on the list. The $189 software helps people with speech problems by converting text to speech.

Quotes from this week’s e-mail from Kaiser CEO George Halvorson (forwarded by a couple of insiders):

Putting medical information in the computer and then leaving it in electronic silos is just as non-functional as putting medical information on pieces of paper and leaving the pieces of paper in file drawer silos. Medical information needs to flow to the caregiver at the point of care. It needs to be available when the patient needs care … We looked to the other biggest and most successful electronic medical record system in the United States — the Veterans Administration (VA) — and we decided to see if we could figure out ways for patients from our system to visit their system — or patients from their system to visit our system — with the medical information following the patient electronically. Our information can follow our patients now, to some degree. KP patients can remotely access their own medical record.We also often give our patient copies of their medical records. Our patients who travel sometimes carry their medical record with them on a thumb drive. That particular experiment has been a success. So we have done some data transfers for some individual Kaiser Permanente patients. But that data did not flow directly to another caregiver, or to another care team. The goal of our VA project was to see if we could design a secure way to transfer that data purely electronically. We managed to do that.

Inga found this news story, which she calls “something Weird News Andy might like.” A man is arrested after speeding down a country road and running over two people, wearing only pajamas and flip flips. He bolts from police in the five degree weather, heading for his wife’s office. But what’s really bizarre is his lawyer’s defense: “caffeine-induced psychosis”. Next think you know, Folgers will be in a class action suit.

Listening: Biffy Clyro, Scottish rock.

Jobs: Account Executive/Sales Rep, Manager Clinical Application Services, EHR Project Manager, Soarian Clinicals Consultants.

Scumbag lawyers: Google QuadraMed and you’ll get three ads with the same headline, all trying to convince QDHC shareholders to jump on a class lawsuit claiming breach of fiduciary duties by QuadraMed management. Google the names of any of the three law firms and the phrase “breach of fiduciary duties” and you’ll get thousands of hits from their previous legal efforts.
 

From my last poll, it appears that enough new folks will go to HIMSS to offset those who are dropping out. If it’s a representative sample, you might therefore expect attendance to increase a little. New poll to your right: did EMR vendors and trade associations influence the Obama administration’s decision to spend billions on EMR usage?

A WSJ editorial called Health Care’s ‘Radical Improver’ covers athenahealth. One quote from the editor:

The Athena model is superior to most electronic medical record systems, or EMRs, which are generally based on static software that are inflexible, can’t link to other systems, and are sold by large corporate vendors like General Electric. One reason the digital revolution has so far passed over the health sector is sheer bad product. The adoption of EMR in health systems across the country has been dogged by cumbersome interfaces, error propagation and other drawbacks … Mr. Bush is less sanguine about the White House cost-control approach of better living through technocracy … he singles out the idea of dispensing bonus payments to hospitals that find ways to reduce Medicare spending. If the bonus is higher than what the hospital would have been paid under the status quo, then Medicare is worse off—but if the bonus is less than what the hospital would have earned otherwise, in what sense is it an incentive to change?

And a fun quote from Jonathan Bush:

It’s probably terrible that all this new bureaucracy is being created. But there’s going to be 50 new Medicaid-type plans in these insurance exchanges, run by the same insurance commissioners, these same sort of glazed-over-looking state secretaries of health. You know, just not really the brightest bulbs in the chandeliers of the world. Medicaid, the worst payer in the country by a factor of four! Mother of pearl! So I feel a little bit like a robber baron. I am going to make oil money dealing with them.

In Canada, Campbellford Memorial Hospital joins several others in abandoning an $80 million project to use a common hospital information system (Meditech). As is happening in the UK, nobody has the money to chase a grand interoperability plan at the moment. Another hospital in Canada just started its Meditech project last week. 

Ten EDs of Orlando Health and Florida Hospital will start sharing data in January in a Central Florida RHIO project.

UPMC’s health plan will offer the $690 Insight Brain Fitness Program software to its Medicare members at no cost.

University Medical Center (NV) notifies 71 trauma patients who were seen on Halloween and the day after that their personal information appears to have been sold to personal injury lawyers. They are now requiring employees to enter PINs on copy machines and may add electronic door controls.

Red Hat will host an online forum on cloud computing on February 10.

Congratulations to the hospital IT people named as Computerworld’s Premier 100 IT Leaders:

• Avery Cloud, SVP/CIO, New Hanover Regional Medical Center
• Philip Fasano, SVP/CIO, Kaiser Permanente
• Stanley Huff, CMIO, Intermountain Health Care
• Edward Marx, CIO, Texas Health Resources
• Bill McQuaid, CIO/AVP, Parkview Adventist Medical Center
• Susan Schade, VP/CIO, Brigham and Women’s Hospital

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News 12/11/09

From Mogall: “Re: Sentillion. Word on the street is $200 million for the purchase of Sentillion. It will be interesting to see if anyone hears the Sentillion name again.” If I were guessing, I’d say the name will fade away from widespread use since Microsoft likes its own brand, but the technology and the people will do fine under the Microsoft banner, perhaps jump-starting a concept in which Amalga UIS is the “control panel” that launches various applications and databases and tie them together with CCOW (sort of like making iGoogle or MSN your home page). It’s a good strategy — it’s time for the best-of-breed pendulum to swing back, and visual/virtual integration provides customers with a lot of options, including interoperability. Microsoft has been working with Sentillion since at least early summer, so that peek up their skirt must have stirred up some ideas.

Speaking of which, thanks to Peter Neupert and Rob Seliger for inviting me to chat with them about the acquisition the day before it was announced. A reader had tipped me off, so when Jenn from Sentillion e-mailed to see if I was available, I probably startled her a little by speculating that it must be Microsoft announcement time. I was surprised to see quite a few folks on and reading HIStalk on so early when I posted the article (since I was bound to an after-midnight embargo), so I jotted down some of their locations: UK, Ontario, India, Dubai, Austria, Sri Lanka, Australia, and what must have been a bunch of night shifters or insomniacs right here in the US.

From Fashionista: “Re: Dr. Halamka’s blog. If there was ever a day to read it, today is it. He itemizes each piece of the $1,500 outfit he wore to meetings today … serenity now.” He always says he rarely sleeps, but I think he might need a nap or a jet lag cure judging from his obsessive ensemble: a Gortex suit, a Kevlar shirt, and vegan boots (who knew?), all donned before riding a folding bike to work in sub-freezing Boston blizzard. Maybe the Kevlar is for protection the next time the BIDMC network goes down.

From Tim: “Re: Christmas ornament. Or is that YOUR name?” Inga and I use names sometimes. They aren’t necessarily the ones on our birth certificates, not that it matters.

From TV’s Frank: “Re: AHIP. Surely Karen Ignagni’s hugely oversized income has nothing to do with the health insurance industry and its cost to the system.” She’s the president and CEO of AHIP, a trade group and lobbying organization for insurance companies. According to a Modern Healthcare article, she was paid $1.9 million last year. AHIP lost  $4.6 million after spending $1 million on lobbyists, $2.5 million on lawyers, and $10 million on consultants. AHIP got snippy with a Mother Jones reporter a few weeks back when she asked the company what Ignagni’s coverage and copay is. I’m sure she’s like members of Congress — convinced she is qualified to decide what insurance dozens of millions of us can have, but secure in the knowledge that she’ll never have to stoop so low anyway (that’s Point #16 by Dan Fields – everybody in government should be required to use whatever health system they cobble together for the rest of us).

From Thomas Servo: “Re: Healthvision. A good source says Battery Ventures will close the sale of the company around New Year’s.” Unverified.

From RoadWarrior: “Re: Allina. Heard through the grapevine that they are out for RFP on a new LIS. Rumor is that ‘integration’ has been touted as a high priority, but McKesson and SCC have been engaged.” Unverified.

I mentioned that I like reader pictures related to HIT, so here are a couple from Joe of Clarian Arnett Hospital in Lafayette, IN.

Cerner wins its five-year-old patent dispute with Visicu (now Philips). I enlisted an attorney to give a legal overview of it way back in December 2004.

Keane will implement RCM for Atlantic General Hospital (MD).

Listening: The Volebeats, who must be really obscure since they’re barely on the Web at all. Sounding good, with finely crafted, brooding jangle indie pop like R.E.M. at their best. I’m also anxiously watching the mail for delivery of some DVDs that I didn’t know existed, but now crave: homebrew recordings of Mystery Science Theater 3000, one of my favorite TV shows ever.

Hayes Management Consulting has developed a hospital version of its RAC auditing tool called MDaudit Hospital. Webinar signup is here.

SCI Solutions announces that it signed 51 new contracts with 76 hospitals this year for its Order Facilitator, Schedule Maximizer, and Revenue Accelerator.

CCHIT announces three new board members and five new commissioners: On the board are Lori Evans (ActiveHealth), William Jesse (MGMA), and Stephen Klasko (University of South Florida). New commissioners are Patricia Becker (University HealthSystem Consortium), Barbara Byrne (Edward Hospital), Timothy Elwell (Misys Open Source Solutions), Jay Srini (UPMC), and Grace Terrell (Cornerstone Health Care). That’s a pretty strong lineup considering the heat that CCHIT has been taking. It must have been a quick turnaround for Bobbie Byrne since she just quit her CCHIT job this month, but is now a commissioner.

Vanderbilt joint venture partner Acuitec releases an iPhone version of its Vigilance messaging system for high-acuity providers.

John McInally, formerly of biotech company CollabRX, joins MetroHealth (OH), replacing the retired Vince Miller. He was also CIO of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at one time.

A Weird News Andy find, although not a happy one: a woman drinks herself into a stupor while celebrating her 20th birthday and is taken to the ED of Uniontown Hospital (PA). The doctor leaves her passed out on the floor with her legs tucked under her for 12 hours, she claims, with the lack of circulation eventually requiring her legs to be amputated at the knee. She’s suing the hospital and the doctor.

A reader in his early 20s asked me for some education and career advice, also suggesting that a good interview question would be to ask industry veterans what they would do if they were starting fresh in HIT. Feel free to comment or Readers Write me on his behalf.

Kansas, following the federal government’s lead of trying to buy its way out of a recession, throws more money at Cerner and Neal’s soccer team, freeing up an immediate $47 million in cash of its $230 million incentive to start construction on the $414 million project.

Maybe lawyers could be our main export, at least to Singapore. A woman who was overdosed on chemo by a hospital receives a cordial visit of apology from the country’s health minister. She said she was touched. Her husband is philosophical, telling the two pharmacists who made the error, “You will have much more to achieve. Do not allow a single mistake to be a permanent psychological barrier. Just focus on helping more patients and serving them well.” He also urged the hospital not to fire them. I can’t even imagine that here. The injuries from the lawyers trying to leap over each other to get to the bedside would be widespread.

The Georgia inspector general gets involved after Business Computer Applications of Atlanta wins a big contract to develop a prison EMR despite a bid that is double that of eClinicalWorks, the second-ranked vendor. Someone from the Atlanta company hinted to an evaluation team member that he might be hired if BCA got the bid. In fact, it played out exactly that way, with the employee going to work for the vendor less than a month after the company was chosen on the basis of subjective evaluation to which that employee contributed.

Interesting conjecture in Charlie McCall’s case: did his high-powered legal team intentionally allow an attorney to be seated on the jury, knowing they might be able to find something to challenge later just in case he lost? Charlie’s team is demanding a new trial, claiming the jury foreperson, an attorney, improperly defined a term for her fellow jurors. The judge doesn’t seem impressed. “Please, Mr. Wells, you knew when you left her on the jury she was a lawyer … This is such a mess you’re inviting.”

iSoft sells its first PACS system to a customer in Germany. The company also said it may hire up to 500 new employees in Australia. The managing director, in complaining that innovative businesses often are acquired or sold to an overseas company, also admitted that half of iSoft’s 4,700 employees are in India.

The FBI launches a privacy investigation at University Medical Center (NV) after a Las Vegas Sun investigative reporter’s source produces copies of patient face sheets, saying they are regularly being sold to ambulance-chasing lawyers.

ONCHIT chooses members of the Health IT Policy Committee’s privacy and security workgroup.

CMA Consulting Services fires its CEO and former New York state Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno within hours of his conviction on two felony fraud counts. Competing bidders Thomson Reuters and Ingenix protested, the newspaper article says, when CMA was awarded a $159 million contract to build a Medicaid data warehouse despite his indictment earlier this year.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

The VA awards QuadraMed a $24 million contract for its Encoder Product Suite and training services.

MedAssets confirms its 2009 forecast, predicting revenues of $341 to $345 million. The company also forecasts 2010 revenues of $390 to $400 million.

The Georgia Department of Community Health will use recently awarded grant money to create a State Medicaid Health Information Plan, designed to manage incentive programs for EMR adoption. The $3.2 million in federal funds will promote the state’s to give all Medicaid providers access to an EMR and the ability to participate in health information exchange.

Community Memorial Health Systems (CA) selects Allscripts’ EHR, PM, and RCM products. Community Memorial Health System will host applications for 70 contracted physicians and a pilot group of 12 community physicians. The health system will also use technology from dbMotion to allow physicians access to a virtual patient record that includes aggregated clinical information from all the heath system’s computers.

Speaking of dbMotion, the company was chosen to provide an interoperable EHR for the Canadian province of Manitoba. IBM Canada is also participating in the project.

St. Vincent’s Medical Center (CT) picks Streamline Health’s Contractor Management Solution for workflow management to ensure OSHA compliance. Streamline Health released its third quarter numbers this week: a net loss of $296,000, compared to net income of $15,000 a year ago. Total revenues were $4.1 million, down from $4.4 million.

Streamline Health also negotiated a 45% tax credit from the state of Ohio, valued at about $214,000. The credit will help the company undertake a $2.75 million expansion project expected to create 25 jobs.

A UK study concludes that one in 10 handwritten hospital prescriptions contains a mistake. Poor handwriting, transcribing errors, and ambiguous prescriptions create most of the problems. Most mistakes are minor and few lead to serious patient harm. Not sure if that last part is suppose to make us all feel better.

Hospitalist management company PrimeDoc Management Services signs a three-year contract renewal with Ingenious Medical to provide automated charge capture, practice management, and reporting.

Nuance introduces a Dragon Dictation app for the iPhone that help users create e-mail, text messages, and notes. Despite the warnings that it downloads and stores all your contact, I added it to my phone. While it’s cool, so far it’s been less than 50% accurate for me. Does it mean I talk funny?

Deck Inga’s e-mail.

Microsoft to Acquire Sentillion

Microsoft will announce later today that it will acquire Sentillion, Inc. of Andover, MA. Terms of the acquisition were not announced. The transaction is expected to close in early 2010.

Privately held Sentillion, founded in 1998, sells patented solutions for single sign-on, context management, and identity management. It has over 1,000 hospital customers and over 500,000 users. It was named by KLAS as the #1 healthcare SSO vendor in its December 2008 report.

I interviewed Peter Neupert, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group, and Robert Seliger, CEO and co-founder of Sentillion, about the acquisition on Wednesday.

Neupert says clinician users of Microsoft’s Amalga Unified Intelligence System, live in 115 hospitals, will benefit from Sentillion’s SSO and context management technologies. “Our goal is not to be an EMR,” Neupert said. “When we provide data and they want to take action on it, we want to make it easy for them.”

The companies signed an agreement this past June to incorporate Sentillion’s SSO and context management in Amalga UIS. The announcement quoted a Microsoft spokesperson as saying, “… for clinicians and others to readily adopt and get the maximum value out of a new platform like Amalga UIS, it needs to become an inherent part of the clinical workflows that drive the patient care delivery process. Our collaboration with Sentillion is designed to achieve that level of integration.”

I asked Neupert why Microsoft wants to acquire Sentillion rather than just continue the licensing arrangement. He said Microsoft can use Sentillion’s domain expertise in context sharing to create more solutions, particularly those that allow customers to continue with their best-of-breed strategies. “We want people to understand that best-of-breed is a reasonable path for them to pursue,” Neupert said.

“Our goal is not to just sell Microsoft products,” he said. “Our goal is to help create new innovation in the health ecosystem. What we are trying to enable is workflows that cross organizational boundaries.”

I asked him if there are important aspects of the announcement that might go unnoticed. “This shows that Microsoft is continuing to invest, the Health Solutions Group in particular, to make health an important vertical inside the company, making a series of thoughtful steps in acquiring domain knowledge and technology and people to make that investment practical,” Neupert replied.

I asked Seliger why he’s selling Sentillion now. “We are a healthy company, profitable, and growing … the next step is a perfect outcome. You take our business legacy and commitments to customers and preserve that, but also take it to new levels, new countries, new venues that we wouldn’t get to as quickly on our own … To build an entire organization with P&L behind it that says Microsoft is unprecedented. It’s a fabulous home for Sentillion.”

Seliger says the Sentillion management team will stay on. The company will be operated as a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary from its Andover office, with Seliger reporting to Neupert.

News 12/9/09

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Google Chromium OS. Courtesy of InformationWeek, we can get an idea of what Google’s Chromium OS is all about, even though it won’t be released for another year.”

From Joe Bologna Sandwich: “Re: [health system name omitted]. I heard second hand that they will cancel their contract with [vendor name omitted] in January.” I’ve e-mailed the CIO. Sorry for the redacting, but this is a publicly traded vendor and a humongous contract, so I’d like to confirm the rumor if possible.

From Nancy: “Re: Bobbie Byrne. The pediatrician, Eclipsys alum, and former clinical director of CCHIT is leaving CCHIT to become CIO of a hospital.” According to her LinkedIn page, she is now VP of informatics at Edward Hospital (IL), having left CCHIT sometime this month after only seven months or so.

From Cracker: “Re: Spheris. Warburg Pincus is looking to unload its albatross Spheris stake to CBay Systems, the largest medical transcription company in the US since their purchase of MedQuist in 2008. Spheris, second largest, recently ended a three-year run as a quasi-public company — public debt, not public stock. Uncompetitive technology and a heavy debt load handicap Spheris as medical transcription prices fall.” Unverified. Spheris doesn’t file SEC reports any more, but management had said margins and revenue were down. I also noticed that Spheris is no longer listed on the portfolio page of Warburg Pincus even though it’s still showing in the Google cache of the page, so I’d say something is up.

From Anonymous Coward: “Re: NHS cutting back on IT project. Enjoy your writings a lot. I work for one of the Big Vendors that I wish you talked about more — we are doing some good stuff (finally….).” Budget deficits take their toll in Britain, with a proposed large scale-back or maybe outright scrapping of the $20 billion and overdue NPfIT project. The arguments are the same as here: do those big systems really pay their way in terms of outcomes or cost reductions? The Conservative Party has proposed moratorium on all government computer projects, claiming the Labour government has spent $162 billion on IT in the past 12 years and another $115 billion will come due in the next two years. Lots of interesting comments on NPfIT are here.

Thanks to our HIMSS contact for chasing down our inquiry (on behalf of a reader’s question) about how government employees are compensated for speaking at the annual conference.She says HIMSS works within federal guidelines and does not offer honoraria or expense reimbursement to government employees (as I assumed). David Blumenthal asked for nothing and was offered nothing.

I like the move by Francisco Partners to buy QuadraMed. QuadraMed has had more than its share of struggles, all of them conducted in the spotlight since it was a publicly traded company (albeit with little benefit since market cap was low and share price stagnant). It had some old preferred shares that were so favorable that those shareholders were getting much of the cash. It has good products (HIM, Affinity, and QCPR) that ought to be selling well, especially if the QCPR migration to Cache’ is indeed complete. Francisco Partners has been a good steward of the companies it has bought, getting their houses in order, distancing them from previous baggage, and clarifying their identities and strategies. I think it’s the best possible outcome for customers and employees. A reader tipped me off with perfect accuracy last night, so I watched the news ticker this morning to jump on the announcement as soon as it went out.

The Chicago inspector general will review the 13 bids the health department received for a mental health system, determining whether anything suspicious was involved in choosing Cerner over 13 other bidders. The system had disastrous financial repercussions, it’s claimed, when billing problems prevented collection of money from the state for services rendered.

I was a bit loosey-goosey in my description of the products of new sponsor BridgeHead Software, so their VP contact provided clarification. Just so I don’t do it again, here’s the verbatim quote, better than I could have done anyway:

BridgeHead provides healthcare data management solutions that combine backup and archive into a single platform that it easy for IT to manage.  While you mentioned it’s cool that we can “do business intelligence on a backup”, it’s actually the archive that provides that value. Our archive is able to capture data from a variety of sources (including DICOM data from various PACS), transform that data (dedupe, compress, encrypt, containerize), index the content and make it all searchable. This truly enables the EHR by providing a foundation for managing all the data sources that comprise the electronic health record, regardless of whether that data is actually “owned” by your primary EHR application. Backup complements the solution by providing point-in-time recoverability, and this is just one aspect of our larger disaster recovery/business continuance functionality.

The HIT Policy Committee’s NHIN Workgroup will meet next Wednesday. On the agenda: a review of objectives and NHIN Meaningful Use. The Webcast runs from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Eastern.

Wirral University Teaching Hospitals is the first UK client to go live on Cerner PowerTrials, which connects physicians and researchers to support clinical trial participation by patients.

Lancaster General Hospital (PA) releases data about its use of auto-programmed smart IV pumps, linking them to the Cerner Bridge Medical eMAR/bedside barcode checking system. Their results: nurse IV pump programming time was reduced by 25%, infusion pump programming steps were cut from 17 to seven, and reprogramming was cut by 90%.

In New Zealand, Auckland Hospital’s clinical systems go down hard for four hours when a UPS circuit board fries. Related: the health board spends $1 million for software to track requests for follow-up X-rays after doctors missed a request; 10 patients were overdosed on meds because the automated dispensing cabinets don’t check doses; patient systems at another hospital failed when a roof leak dripped water into a computer; and information entered on the wrong patient caused another patient to be given an unnecessary colonoscopy. For IT noobs, I know this is a splash of cold reality, like that first time you saw your objet d’amour in the dawn’s early without benefit of makeup.

Steve Stanic, formerly the National Director of the McKesson solution center for Perot Systems and CIO of Memorial Savannah, is named CIO of Mississippi Baptist Health System.

Charlie McCall’s lawyers want a new trial after finding out that the jury foreperson, a Stanford Law graduate, gave fellow jury members a definition of “reckless disregard”.

Dennis Quaid, livin’ large on the healthcare conference circuit, announces at his keynote at the ASHP Midyear the National Alert Network for Serious Medication Errors. What caught my eye, however, was the picture below Dennis’s of three hot blondes with violins, apparently holding as much pharmaceutical expertise as Dennis, pre-keynoting fresh from America’s Got Talent … ladies and gentlemen, blond Polish triplets with graduate degrees in fiddlin’!

Someone wanted to hear ideas that would save healthcare $1 billion a year, so here’s mine: stop paying healthcare people to screw around at conferences. If the knowledge is all that important, someone will cover it in a Webinar or journal article (or let everybody pay their own way to go to conferences like I do). I’m pretty sure the salaries, travel costs, and registrations add up to way more than a billion since it seems like half the hospital is junketing somewhere at any given moment and nothing useful ever seems to come of it except the attendees brag to everyone let behind at how enriched their professional lives are since having dinner at Bouchon or cutting up after too many flirtinis at the Donnie & Marie show. Patients, check your drug doses extra carefully this week.

Australia’s industry groups agree on certification criteria for medical software. The National E-Health Transition Authority also announced that the SNOMED CT-AU terminology database is available to Australian license holders (note to vigilant seekers of SNOMED misspelling sightings – Computerworld spelled it SNOWED).

CareFusion announces new Pyxis products at ASHP: drug-lab alerts on MedStation, a PDA-based pre-selection tool for nurses, a maintenance console for all MedStation and SupplyStation systems, and a new version of CII Safe.

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HERtalk by Inga

From Sandy Claws: “Re: Pam Pure. Do you know where she is and what she is doing? I would look and see if she is doing any work with Francisco Partners or Blueline Partners. My guess she is at least consulting with one of them.” Interesting question, especially in light of the QuadraMed/Francisco deal and the recent hire of two former McKesson bigwigs. Blueline owned, at least at one time, a large number of shares of QuadraMed.

Medicity announces the opening of its platform to third-party application development. Partners developing to Medicity’s iNexx API can leverage Medicity’s customer base of 700 hospitals, 25,000 physician practices, and 250,000 providers.

At its Executive Summit in Las Vegas, Allcripts announces its Professional EHR 9.0 release, as well as Allscripts Remote for BlackBerrys. The 9.0 release includes an enhanced user-interface and expanded disease management capabilities.

CliniComp names Phillip LaJoie, the former CIO of the Naval Medical Center and CTO of the Military Health System’s infrastructure arm, as VP of deployment.

On my Christmas list: smart slippers, like these designed by AT&T scientists that include electronic insoles with four pressure sensors and an accelerometer to measure how well you are walking. I’m not sure exactly what I’d do with them. Perhaps make my departing party guests try them in order to evaluate if they are walking well enough to drive home. AT&T is making major investments in telehealth products. Seems they want to establish a “foothold” in the growing telehealth industry.

Moses Cone Health System (NC) selects Streamline Health Solutions’ enterprise document workflow solution.

Gannett Health Services at Cornell University is now live on Point and Click EHR, which is designed for college health. A staff member calls the transition “incredibly challenging, but invigorating.”

St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan lays off 180 of its 3,800 employees to cut costs. The hospital cites “severe financial shortfalls” as a result of the recession and funding cuts. Those affected include managerial and patient care positions. Condolences. There’s never a great time to be laid off, but I’m sure this doesn’t make for a merry holiday season.

Duke University approves a new one-year Masters of Management in Clinical Informatics degree program to be offered by the Fuqua School of Business and the Duke Center for Health Informatics.

The personalized medical care segment of the personalized health and wellness market market could grow to $100 billion by 2015, assuming telehealth takes off. This segment includes telemedicine, HIT, and disease management services offered by traditional health and wellness companies.

No sooner than Charles McCall gets his due then another story of greed in healthcare emerges. The latest scandal comes courtesy of Canopy Financial and co-founder Jeremy Blackburn. Canopy filed for bankruptcy protection after the FBI began looking into alleged fraudulent financial statements that were created as part of a $75 million investment scheme. Blackburn has since resigned as president and his assets have been frozen. KPMG discovered the potential fraud after learning that Canopy was presenting financial reports to prospective investors that were supposedly audited by KPMG. In fact, KPMG had never been retained by Canopy to audit its financials.

If you work in the patient safety, quality of care, or regulatory compliance fields, check out a new social Web site just for you and your peers. Quantros launched the new site called Clinical Cafe.

Two health systems are among five recipients of the 2009 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. AtlantiCare (NJ) and Healthland Health (MO) were both winners in the healthcare category.

The California Nurses Association, the MA Nurses Association, and some members of the United American Nurses combine to form National Nurses United. The new entity represents over 100,000 nurses.

Actuaries calculate that West Virginia could save over $1.1 billion by going digital and centralizing patient care. Savings would be seen by the government as well as private insurers and policy holders. The low-hanging fruit includes e-prescribing (estimated savings of $164 million), EMR ($317 million savings), and the creation of medical homes.

Thanks for the very sweet reader who sent Mr. H and me our own personalized Christmas ornament. I’m glad Mrs. H never reads HIStalk, just in case she happens to be the jealous type.

First, Congress considered taxing cosmetic surgeries. Now they are looking at tanning services. Seriously, what do those folks in Washington have against a little beauty enhancement? Will makeup be next? Or, heaven forbid(!), pumps?

E-mail Inga.