Monday Morning Update 8/3/09

Meditech’s Revenue Flat, Earnings Up
Xbox Game Used for Hospital’s Veterans Therapy
Hospital Employees Charged with Selling Patient Information

From Colorado Epic Doc: “Re: Microsoft. Microsoft is taking credit for the improved outcomes at Kaiser in Colorado and claiming that patients are using HealthVault’s platform to communicate with their doctors, when in fact it is Epic that provides the portal. ‘The whole system is build around empowerment of patient, increased collaboration between healthcare professionals and with the patients, pay per quality ad performance. The patients are encouraged to manage their own health, are educated and informed. They have their own health space (called My Health Manager) based on HealthVault platform and can communicate easily with the healthcare team.’” It mentions an EHR without naming Epic, but mostly touts HealthVault and Amalga, which would do next to nothing without a robust EHR as the centerpiece. Microsoft’s folks are good at self-evangelizing.

From Support Tech: “Re: Sage Software. They’re closing the New Smyrna Beach office and laying off the staff. The office had the most senior and experienced MedWare product support teams. Support staff were initially told we would be able to work from home. Only two techs were willing and able to relocate.” Unverified, although someone posted a similar comment on JobVent. But from what you wrote, they didn’t lay you off, you opted not to take a company transfer to a location 2 1/2 hours west. I give Sage credit for offering, as inconvenient as it might be for employees to take them up on it in a terrible Florida housing market. Jobs are hard to find and the Tampa area is nice, so I hope everybody made the decision that was right for them.

In the last poll, I asked HIMSS members about its level of involvement in government relations projects. Participation wasn’t all that high, but 62% said HIMSS should do less of that, 16% said more, and 22% said about the same. New poll to your right: what do you think about the NPfIT project in the UK?

Welcome aboard to brand spankin’ new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor MedAptus. The Boston company, founded by doctors, offers charge capture automation for physician groups; an Inpatient Edition for managing patients and charges by hospital specialists like hospitalists and anesthesiologists; the EMR Edition for physician groups wanting to add robust charge capture to their clinical workflow; and other solutions for hospital-based outpatient clinics, infusion services, and large academic medical centers and IDNs. Lahey Clinic is saving $1 million a year with its coding and compliance tools. Looks like a strong management team and solid financial backers. Thanks, Medaptus, for supporting HIStalk and its readers.

Listening: Sloan, Canadian power pop.

Clinical Architecture has put together a 15-minute narrated screencast on how to work with the NLM’s RXNorm drug nomenclature database.

Several Boston-area companies wanted to distance themselves from the unnamed and supposedly struggling HIE vendor we mentioned earlier without naming them. One was PatientKeeper, who e-mailed to say (a) it’s not them, and (b) they are, in fact, hiring like mad, especially developers.

Wolters Kluwer Health announces a redesign of the user interface and searching tools in the Facts & Comparisons Online for Health Systems drug reference tool.

Meditech just filed its latest 10-Q. Revenue was flat, EPS $0.57 vs. $0.46. Its customers who have reached Stage 6 of the HIMSS Analytics EMRAM are listed here.

The former Fletcher Allen Health Care CFO who tipped off authorities about its fraudulent bookkeeping for a construction project lands a new job with Marin Healthcare District (CA), where he will coordinate a computer implementation run by Affiliated Computer Services. The Fletcher Allen CEO who fired him for refusing to take part got two years in jail for conspiring to defraud a state regulatory agency, joined there by several other Fletcher Allen brass. The CFO was charged with making false statements, a misdemeanor.

More big salaries for supposedly non-profit hospitals: the former CFO of Danbury Hospital was paid $4.7 million in one year, while an HR VP (!!) got $2.1 million. Paging Senator Grassley.

Investors in Maaguzi, a 2005 clinical trials software startup, made less than 20 cents on the dollar when the company was sold last week. Blamed: a poor economy, delays in getting product to market, huge contractor expenses to get the software ready to sell, and lack of access to further financing. There’s a good lesson to be learned: everything looks wonderful on its site, so don’t believe everything you read.

Pondering: Cash for Clunkers was so successful to the point of blowing its entire budget in a week. Maybe that’s the model that should have been used for EMRs. Trade in your old, character-based, non-interoperable system for a new one and get cash back. (Actually, Cash for Clunkers seem to indicate that today’s cars are overpriced by $4,500).

A New York hospital offers a new treatment to veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder: Virtual Iraq, a $50,000 simulator created by customizing the $20 Xbox video game Full Spectrum Warrior (now available as a free download, courtesy of the US Army, which paid $5 million toward its development, only to get screwed when developers ignored all the Army’s specs). According to a therapist, “It’s like watching a scary movie over and over again; by the 100th time you see it, you’re not as fearful.”

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says Apple is too expensive, Linux is too cheap, and Windows is just right.

A New York clinic owner is arrested and charged with bribing hospital workers to send a lawyer friend the names of patients involved in auto accidents, who then steered them to the man’s chiropractic and acupuncture clinics. The clinic helped patients exaggerate their injuries so they could file lawsuits, the charges say, while the clinic billed their no-fault insurance carriers for millions in bogus services. The clinic owner has no clinical credentials. Two hospital employees have been charged so far.

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News 7/31/09

Cerner boosts earnings on cost cutting, but misses estimates and issues warnings
FTC pushes Red Flags rule back again
Ad industry worries about increased government oversight of healthcare advertising

From Michael: “Re: trouble. A number of reliable sources are saying that the high visibility HIE vendor in the Boston area is in trouble. The senior engineers have left. Less than a handful of employees can be seen entering the building. Phones are not answered. Customers are bailing.” We guessed at the vendor in question and Inga placed some calls to their offices, all of which went to voice mail. It’s hard to believe that a company in that business would scale back right on the cusp of massive government HIT spending, but I can’t explain why they’re so hard to reach. Lots of their developers are offshore, I’ve heard, so maybe nobody’s left near the phone.

From Perez: “Re: site name. ‘So,’ my wife said walking by, ‘what’s new on your his story website?’ An avid reader of Perez Hilton, she’s always looking for similar vices she can nail me on. ‘It’s HIStalk’, I said. ‘Hiss – like the noise a snake makes. It’s an acronym, not a guy thing.” This got me thinking … what IS the gender ratio of HIStalk readers?  And is it even possible to have a cool name for a site like this that someone like my wife would understand as something more than just another celebrity gossip website?” According to one of the site analyzer tools, the HIStalk audience is 63% male, 37% female. As to names, maybe we need a synonym since I made up HIStalk back in 2003 with the firm belief that I would be the only one reading it, so the name wasn’t too important. I bet some of those marketing people I’m always making fun of could come up with something.

From C.C. Ryder: “Re: Utah’s law requiring patient ID. You’ll note that this is useless — there are no penalties for the provider not asking or the patient not providing.” Right you are, according to the bill’s text.

From Raleigh in Raleigh: “Re: Allscripts. Heard that Allscripts has offloaded their field engineering staff to Decision One. The move will be announced by the end of this week. All the field engineers were told about it on Monday.” Unverified.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: HP printers in sync. TPD got a kick out of some guys who synced a group of printers to produce a clever video of printing coordination.” It’s brilliant.

Summa Health (OH) goes live with Sentillion’s single sign-on and context management, with an eventual rollout to 4,000 caregivers.

A software entrepreneur whose wife was dying of cancer promised her he would develop tools to help home medical companies. He started Ankota.

Nurses at St. Joseph Hospital (CA) accused by administrators of intentionally oversedating ICU patients blame what sounds like Pyxis Consultant narcotics tracking software, claiming it didn’t give a true picture of their activities. One of them admitted that the night crew regularly brought in food, played their guitars, read books, played games, checked eBay, and watched Internet video, but said they gave good care nonetheless.

Cerner reports Q2 results: flat revenue, with obvious cost cutting to earn $0.52 vs. $0.42, missing estimates slightly and warning of lower Q3 earnings and FY09 revenue. Global revenue declined by 21%, but domestic revenue was up 6%. Pat yourself on the back for helping the cause if you’re paying maintenance fees because that revenue was up 13%. From the earnings call: as everybody is finding out, providers are not making capital expenditures and are also waiting until meaningful use is defined (thanks for the slowdown, Uncle Sam). They announced plans to take over more of the IT operations of customers and to sell Lighthouse clinical optimization services. They’re also looking to sell into small hospitals (better be ready to cut the price). This sounds interesting, even though I don’t have a clue what it means: “For the most part, the core of our business runs on several hundred large relationships, across a few thousand individuals. The real consumers that establish the success of our brand are those that rely on our solutions and services as part of their day-to-day role in healthcare … This is only one click away from an even bigger audience, patients. The number jumps to 60 million to 70 million plus interactions across our client base annually … We envision a day when Cerner has more than 120 million relationships, self organizing all with a contextual identity, consuming Blue Sky services to navigate and address their healthcare needs.” Sounds like they’re trying to add some dot-com sexiness or maybe planning to get into some kind of consumer advertising, maybe to avoid talking about Epic. Blue Sky is Cerner’s cloud computing strategy. Neal wasn’t on the call.

The government wants to ban peer-to-peer software from government and contractor computers following reported information leaks and a consultant’s demonstration of how installing LimeWire opens up the My Documents folder for full sharing. LimeWire’s chairman showed up to dispute that claim, stating that no files are shared by default and Office and PDF files aren’t shared at all. Arguments aside, there’s no reason anyone needs LimeWire to do their jobs, so banning it makes perfect sense to me.

The advertising industry is upset that the government is raining on its parade — frowning on consumer drug advertising, considering laws against Internet user tracking, threatening increased FDA oversight of nutritional claims, and flexing control over ad budgets at Chrysler and GM. They’re also worried about potential FDA regulation of health-related searches. But, this advertising CEO had a brilliant comeback: “Advertising is the makeup on the public face of capitalism, for better or for worse, so any tension that people feel about capitalism comes right down to their feelings about advertising. If what happens in business offends them, the advertising gets blamed.”

Computer Weekly points out that the UK’s NPfIT is being used as an example, but not as the government planned. It quotes an Economist article: “They’d wanted the NPfIT to be used by various governments as an exemplar. It is – as a type of scheme to be avoided.” And, quoting another newspaper editorial: “We only have to read current headlines from England to see the unintended consequences of trying to implement a nationalized HIT system … the programme was started in 2002 and implementation began in 2005. It was originally supposed to cost $3.7bn over a three year period of time for full implementation … it  should have been up and running successfully since 2008. As of this month, only very small parts of the NHS NPfIT are working correctly and two of their four main contractors have either been fired or quit. There is now a revised completion date of 2015 and a revised projected cost of $32.9bn – if it is even finished…”

Former MedAssets software VP Wade Wright joins RemitDATA as CTO. The Memphis company sells Web-based tools for practice reimbursement and document management.

The National Library of Medicine’s PubMed search engine will get a Web page makeover later this year, with the goal of improving the way related information is presented when users search.

Buffalo-based Computer Task Group’s profits fell 32% in Q2, but the CEO says the company is getting lots of EMR activity that should help business.

The big Medicare fraud raids this week were made possible by cooperation among the FBI, HHS, DEA, and the Texas Attorney General, but also software that can detect fraud “as it’s happening, using real-time data analysis of Medicare billing records.”

Odd lawsuit: an anesthesiologist claims someone at his previous hospital employer caused him to lose his new job by stealing his credit card and ordering a sex toy under his name, shipping to a female colleague.

HERtalk by Inga

From Richie Simmons: “Re: obesity rates. I think we should start with Congress reducing their obesity rates! While at Healthcare Unbound Conference, I was appalled by the number of obese participants. Surely they see the numbers every day as to why there is now such a market for remote patient monitoring. Check out this related article.” The article, entitled “Overweight and Obese Health Providers Aren’t Taken Seriously”, looks at the problem of overweight providers who struggle when they need to advise a patient to lose weight.  Maybe we need to start some virtual HIStalk weight-loss contest. Perhaps the winner could have his/her picture posted in HIStalk in a speedo/bikini (a la Valerie Bertinelli in People magazine).

From Friend of Minne’s: “Re: new Allscripts partner. Allscripts does have a new partnership with mPayGateway. I’m at the ACE meeting in Orlando and they are showing off the new product, called Patient Payment Assurance. It’s already in GA for the Tiger product and will soon be available for the other product lines.”

Speaking of the Allscripts Client Experience (ACE), the company announces a record 2,700 registrants for the event, which includes both Allscripts customers and the former Misys clients.

Last week we noted that Cardinal Health hired the former Motorola exec Patricia Morrison as CIO. Interestingly, Morrison sits on the board of SPSS, the company IBM just announced it was buying.

Genesis Physicians Group, a 1,400 member physician organization in Dallas, has secured Covisint to provide its cloud-based healthcare platform. The solution will provide physicians a centralized view and SSO access to such applications as e-prescribing, EMRs, and referral management.

The FTC again pushes back the deadline to enforce the “red flags” rule, moving it from August 1 to November 1 to provide additional resources and guidance to businesses.

St. Elizabeth Healthcare (KY) announces plans to roll out Epic throughout its entire system, which includes 31 primary care offices. Beginning in September, St. Elizabeth’s will  introduce EpicCare Ambulatory to its nearly 1,000 physicians. St. Elizabeth’s is also adding Resolute Hospital Billing, EpicCare Inpatient, Prelude Registration and Cadence Scheduling.

Legacy Hospital Partners (TX) announces four new management team members, including former PHNS COO Lawrence V. Schunder as CIO and SVP of business processes.

Crittenden Regional Hospital selects Healthcare Management Systems to supply financial and ancillary clinical HIT solutions, planning to go live in October.

The University of Miami UM-JMH Center for Pain Safety deploys a hand hygiene compliance pilot project that uses IR-RF sensors in soap dispensing units. The IR-RF devices read staff ID badges and monitor the location and timing of hand-washing events. Dynamic Computer Corporation and Versus Technology provided the technology for the project, which I am going to propose to a couple of my favorite dive restaurants.

Affiliated Computer Services promotes Connie Harvey to group president of business process solutions.

Did we really need a scientific study to figure this out?  A PhD surveyed 1,400 adults and concludes that taking time for leisure activities helps people function better physically and mentally. And, the more time you spend doing different enjoyable activities, the better one’s health tends to be. I’m thinking about heading to a beach to confirm if this is true.

Here is a brilliant new business model for healthcare. An Iowa dentist gives up his traditional practice and sets up shop at Iowa 80 Truck Stop (the world’s largest truck stop). About 35,000 people a week stop at Iowa 80 and Dr. Thomas P. Roemer correctly guessed he could stay busy helping truckers who needed immediate dental care (apparently he does a lot of extractions.) Some days he doesn’t see any patients; others he sees as many as 15.  I bet it’s only a matter of time until some enterprising doctor follows suit.

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News 7/29/09

McKesson beats earnings estimates on flat revenue
Confirmed: VA puts Cerner LIS project on hold 
Varian acquisition does not include Varian Medical Systems (correction below)

 

From The Alchemist: “Re: shocked, amazed, and totally blindsided.” IBM announces that it will acquire statistical and data mining software vendor SPSS for $1.2 billion in cash. Everyone who has taken Stats 101 in the last few years has almost certainly bought a copy of one of their products. IBM is paying 4x annual revenue and 33x annual net income, which seems way too much to a cheap seater like me.

From A Reader: “Re: Cedars-Sinai. Went live on schedule across the house with EpicRx (Epic pharmacy module) this weekend, after the activation of all Epic revenue cycle modules (Cadence, Prelude, Resolute, and Coding/Abstracting) in March. Next Epic clinical roll-out will be in the emergency dept (all disciplines) plus inpatient nursing and clerk order entry in the fall.”

From Captain Hook: “Re: Epic. I represent a hospital who recently selected Epic to replace Meditech after more than 20 years. Meditech let their product languish and chose to take money out of the business instead of investing in their product. The choices were clear — stay with Meditech and share in that stagnation or seek a solution that created a connected, integrated care environment, which Epic does. Does it cost more than Meditech? You bet. We are well on our way to creating that integrated care community (including patients) and would have been nowhere near it with Meditech.”

From Tony Romano: “Re: Google. A hospital where I used to work was looking for a CMS to run our intranet and to search documents. Proposals ran into the tens of thousands of dollars and required an IT learning curve. Enter Google Appliance for $3K – searchable documents from the storage servers already set up.” I love Google Search Appliance and it truly mystifies me why most hospitals don’t have it. Why work to set up a complicated folder structure, permissions, and document naming convention when you can just let Google crawl the darned things and offer a full-text search? Everybody has tons of policies, paper order sets, forms, meeting minutes, lists, etc., but nobody can ever find them easily. Google Mini handles 50,000 documents for $2,990 for two years.

I got both “like it/don’t like it” comments about putting the biggest news stories first, mostly because of appearance. One person said they didn’t want me picking the top stories and instead suggested tagging every item in some way, but that’s beyond the scope of this little makeover. So, here’s the compromise, as you’ve already seen. I’ll put the headlines of what I think are the main news items first, then go right into the usual format.

McKesson announces Q1 numbers: flat revenues, EPS $1.06 vs. $0.83, handily beating earnings estimates. The company raised its full-year outlook.

Meddius announces the launch of SecureTransport, an SSL-based connectivity platform that allows healthcare networks to exchange information over a public network without using site-to-site VPNs.

Stamford Hospital (CT) buys 100 licenses for eClinicalWorks. The hospital will use EHR, PM, the patient portal, the electronic health exchange, the Enterprise Business Optimizer, and eClinicalMobile.

I don’t even know where to begin with the spelling and grammar errors in this CIO job posting. Other than bizarre upper case and underlining, maybe the zero-for-two spelling of the two vendors mentioned: “Siemans” and “GE Contricity.” Or, maybe they’ve had a bad experience with GE and made up their own derogatory name.

Confirmed in a Modern Healthcare story by Joe Conn: one of the halted VA projects is the one that would have replaced VistA’s LIS with Cerner. That could be a bump in the road or it could be a second chance to reevaluate what a lot of people (me being one) thought was an ill-advised push toward commercial software.

Healthcare Growth Partners releases its Q2 HIT industry transaction report (warning: PDF).

St. Barnabas Hospital (NY) chooses Eclipsys Sunrise Acute Care, hoping for a quick implementation that will meet meaningful use requirements.

I Google “histalk” a couple of times a year just to see who’s saying what, so I was happy to find a PowerPoint PDF from John Lillie, interface supervisor at SISU Medical Systems (it’s a non-profit IT resource sharing organization in Duluth, MN). In his slide urging attendees to keep up with their HIT education, he mentioned, in order, the State of Minnesota, HIStalk, HIMSS, AMDIS, and HITSP. Thanks, John. I need to buy him a beer or something.

Inga did a great HIStalk Practice interview with Christoph Diasio, a pediatrician who likes technology, but not necessarily EHRs that take more of his time. “That’s just not enough money for it to be worth it for me to do this. This is just a major gift to the EMR industry and it’s the guy who’s head of the VA said, ‘We’ve basically had major market failure,’ and that’s why you’re having to pay people to adopt EMRs that slow them down. A one-time payment or a couple years’ payment is just not going to be enough to convince me that I should do something that doesn’t make sense to me.”

A New Zealand newspaper article says the growth of integration technology vendor Orion Health has slowed from the predicted 20-30%, much of that because of hospital conditions in the US. Says the CEO, “Even though there is going to be a huge investment over the next three years, in the last six months there have been hospitals that have been struggling.”

Speaking of Orion Health, estimates for an EHR for New Zealand are $32-$96 million US if you believe the government or $300 million if you believe Orion’s CEO. He mostly seems unhappy at the prospect of competing with US vendors for the business, saying the health boards seem “pretty keen on getting a big American product in here … If they are New Zealand-supplied solutions, we can take that intellectual property and can sell it to the rest of the world.”

Agfa’s Q2 numbers: revenue down 12.9%, earnings up 2.7%. Healthcare sales dropped because customers delayed their IT investments.

Inga and I have been working hard to bring you some interesting interviews, several of which are yet to come. Know someone we should talk to, preferably on the non-vendor side of the house so that nobody claims bias?

A proposed e-health plan for Australia recommends that the government steer clear of a “big procurement” free market approach and instead create standards and technology goals that developers can follow, with e-prescribing being the highest priority.

Agilent Technologies will acquire rival medical instrument maker Varian for $1.5 billion. It looks like most of the rags missed the HIT connection that we hospital types got immediately: that acquisition includes Varian’s widely used oncology EMR, ARIA (formerly OpTx, acquired by Varian in 2004). Agilent, you may recall, was a 1999 spinoff of Hewlett-Packard’s medical products business by then-CEO Carly Fiorina in her first year with the company. CORRECTION: some of the initial media reports were incorrect and have been updated — thanks to the reader who pointed out that Varian Medical Systems, spun off in 1999, is not part of the acquisition. Agilent is buying only Varian, Inc., which shares its headquarters with Varian Medical Systems. Oddly enough, Varian Medical uses the domain varian.com, which didn’t help my confusion. Also not involved in the deal is a third spinoff, Varian Semiconductor Equipment Associates. So, no change for ARIA customers.

IBM and Nuance announce an expansion of their joint agreement to accelerate the use of advanced speech recognition in several industries, one of them being healthcare and life sciences. IBM still has ViaVoice as far as I can tell (one of the last consumer-grade competitors to Dragon Naturally Speaking), but Nuance even sells that under some kind of exclusive distribution agreement.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

From St. Pauli’s Girl: “Re: new Allscripts partner. I hear that Allscripts has signed on with another strategic partner, this time mPay Gateway.” Unconfirmed, but sounds like it would be a good fit. mPay Gateway offers a Web-based credit card payment system that helps practices calculate and collect patient monies at the time of service.

QuadraMed launches Quantim Coding Simulator, its ICD-10 compliant encoder training tool. The new tool is designed to enable coders to gain proficiency in using ICD-10-CD/ICD-10-PCS code sets. QuadraMed is showing it off at this week’s AHIMA Assembly on Education Symposium in Las Vegas.

Adena Health System (OH) selects Rhapsody Integration Engine to improve access to and facilitate messaging with the hospital’s Meditech system.

Orlando Health expands its use of MedeAnalytics software with the addition of Patient Access Services. The new tool will facilitate front-end patient workflow, including helping staff to estimate patient payment obligations.

RelayHealth signs a deal with VHA to supply its RevRunner financial clearance services. The agreement also establishes revenue management educational opportunities and preferential pricing for VHA’s members.

I mentioned in HIStalkPractice yesterday that obesity rates are rising rapidly and one in four Americans is considered obese. The medical costs for an obese person is $1,492 per year more than normal weight people and 9% of all medical spending is attributed to obesity care. Care for obesity-related conditions is costing us $147 billion a year. Since Congress seems interested in becoming involved in every other part of our life, how about they come up with a plan to give some money for everyone who is not obese and tax those that are? OK, I see all sorts of flaws in the plan, but really, when you consider how much we spend for healthcare compared to other countries and our 30th ranking for life expectancy, shouldn’t we be doing more to “fix” obesity?

Meanwhile, if you are considering bariatric surgery, refer to HealthGrades’ new report identifying the 88 best performing hospitals for the procedure. Patients treated at one of the top hospitals have, on average, a 67% lower chance of serious complications than those treated at poorly rated hospitals.

Speaking of HealthGrades, the company reported Q2 profits of $1.73 million, up from $1.21 million for the same quarter last year. HealthGrades is expecting full year revenues of $50 million, which is a 25% increase over 2008.

Arizona’s University Medical Center contracts with MEDSEEK to redesign its consumer-facing Web portal.

Advocate Health Care (IL) signs a three-year extension for its license to IntraNexus’ SAPPHIRE Patient Financial Management software suite. The extension covers all nine Advocate hospitals and continues a 16-year business relationship.

I love pop culture, but I am officially sick of hearing about Michael Jackson, his probable drug problems, and his likely negligent doctor(s). There. I feel better. OK, now back to pondering what it will take to get an invite to drink a beer at the White House.

In a report to the Board of Trustees for Phelps County Regional Medical Center (MO), CIO David Dowdy reports the hospital’s EMR has helped reduce mortality rates by 15%. Phelps has achieved Stage 6 EMR adoption with its Meditech product.

KLAS releases a new report that concludes hospitals are considering vendor-neutral solutions for archiving and accessing medical images in order to avoid being locked in to closed, proprietary software.

Another KLAS reports suggests that the release of Medtech 6.0 will provide an improved user interface and easier navigation, but many users may struggle to achieve full CPOE adoption. The biggest hurdle for most hospitals will be covering the costs associated with implementation and hardware and infrastructure upgrades.

And, Hilo Medical Center (HI) engages Healthcare Informatics Associates in a multi-year contract to implement MEDITECH 6.0 across its East Hawaii Region facilities.

E-mail Inga.

QuadraMed Names Duncan James CEO

QuadraMed announced this morning that Duncan W. James will become CEO of the company when it files its 10-Q report next week. He succeeds interim president and CEO James Peebles.

James was previously with McKesson Provider Technologies, where he was group president for Health Systems Solutions from 2000-2009. Previously, he was senior VP for consulting firm Scient and VP of marketing and product management with McKesson.

Monday Morning Update 7/27/09

Top Stories

1. Enforcement of the Red Flags Rule starts this week. Providers who extend or facilitate customer credit (even doing nothing more than mailing bills after services are rendered, some attorneys have interpreted) are required to check patient ID to prevent identify theft, have a policy on handling questionable patient documents and patient complaints, and check to see that patients who claim insurance have proof.
2. Bankrupt OB systems vendor LMS Medical Systems sells its its assets to the Canadian subsidiary of PeriGen for $3.5 million. McKesson bought the IP rights to CALM OB in April, relabeling the product Horizon Perinatal Care, but LMS supposedly kept the rights to support McKesson’s customers and to sell the product outside McKesson’s customer base. Perigen, renamed from E&C Medical Intelligence in April of this year, also sells OB risk reduction software.
3. David Blumenthal of ONCHIT says he doesn’t have an opinion on whether health systems should comply with FISMA, the security guidelines for federal computer systems, to share information with federal agencies.

The Top Stories thing above is an experiment that a couple of readers asked for, putting the stories that I think are most important at the top. I like the concept, but I worry that people will infer that everything else is trivial, which it isn’t (I wouldn’t put it on HIStalk if I didn’t think it was important). What do you think, good idea or too enabling of skimmers who will miss important information? I will say that I get e-mails all the time from people who say, “Wow, I just read this and you should put it on HIStalk” even though I have already covered it in detail, so I already worry that some readers are missing good information.

From Dan: “Re: EMR powered by MS Office.” It’s CCHIT-certified gloStream, which we’ve mentioned in HIStalk Practice (in fact, I see that item is listed on the company’s News page, so that’s pretty cool). The user interface is Office-based (which I wouldn’t necessarily find advantageous if it uses Office 2007’s ribbon bar, which I spend way too much time whining about instead of just learning to love it or downloading this free utility to bring back the old menus).

From Otis Miman: “Re: Epic. Meditech hospitals in some areas are getting pressure to upgrade to Epic since physicians are using Epic in their practices. This seems like a tremendous cost burden to healthcare – to throw out a a cost-effective, integrated solution instead of a more expensive, non-complete HCIS and non-integrated solution. Having little or no competition in the marketplace is not a good thing.” Both Meditech and Epic, having sprung from related loins, have the same tendency to not want to play well with others, probably more so than any other HIT vendors. Epic is simply capitalizing on a stagnant HIT market that isn’t putting up much of a fight, although I think hospitals would be hard pressed to get ROI on the cost difference between Meditech and Epic (not many Prius owners are candidates to move to a Cadillac Escalade, not to detract from either system). Every vendor has a showcase site or two that has done great things with their system. They also have some real whiner customers who blame the vendor and vow to buy again from someone else, only to find that their failure cloud follows them. Which category a given site falls into is much more a function of their own abilities than those of their vendors. Anyone who is seriously considering buying Epic who hasn’t been on their current system for at least 6-8 years is demonstrating that they have no idea what they are doing (why didn’t they buy Epic in the first place if that’s what they wanted?) Big-name hospitals choose Epic mostly because all other big hospitals choose Epic, just like they used to buy Cerner and, before that, SMS. Theoretically, the march of the lemmings will eventually end since the market is ripe for new entrants, but so far vendors are just handing their customers over to Epic with heads hung. I don’t blame vendors for selling what customers demand – I blame customers for not demanding better, cheaper, and more open systems (and for being too easily influenced by what everybody else is doing).

From Looking for Answers: “Re: Cerner. I hear the Cerner PETA person wasn’t disgruntled, just looking to score points with his babe — though he does enjoy a good steak! ;-)” Reason enough, I say. 

From Eclipsys Watcher: “Re: Eclipsys. I’m hearing rumors of major organizational changes in the next several weeks with more layoffs, etc.” That’s usually a safe bet with most vendors these days, but especially unsurprising since a new Eclipsys CEO was brought in, presumably to make changes. And, while the excuses have changed, company performance hasn’t – shares are worth less now than 10 years ago and its limited clinical product line which, despite having CPOE and documentation that are among the best, still lags way way behind in new sales to Epic, Cerner, and maybe even McKesson. A strong CPOE and documentation system, integrated pharmacy, industry-leading EPSi, and what used to be a strong consulting practice – if none of that translates into sales and then financial results, you have to blame the corner office people. I haven’t been a big fan of most of the company’s management team once Harvey Wilson stopped being actively involved, but most of the folks I knew have been replaced, so maybe the new blood can shake the company out of its doldrums. I can’t decide whether getting into the practice EMR business is a logical extension or a distraction for them.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Google Wave. As a software developer, TPD gets to see new and interesting applications in their early concept development stage. Google has an upcoming release of an advanced collaboration tool that combines e-mail with instant messaging and many other features in an application called Google Wave. It could be use in healthcare to improve communication amongst numerous caregivers and departments.” According to the demo, it was developed by the Google Maps people. Google has so darned many Web tools out there that I bet someone could write some cool hospital apps purely by mash-up. If I were Medsphere trying to get a foothold against legacy vendors, I’d look at that as an inexpensive way to interject some cool factor. An internal messaging app based on Gmail Chat? An Intranet based on Sites? Documentation via Forms? Social networking with Orkut or Wave? Dumping resource-intensive internal e-mail in favor of Gmail? All possible, all useful to customers, and all with a free backbone for vendors to use for their product extensions.

Listening: In This Moment, a female-led metal band now on the Warped Tour.

Jonathan Bush on Fortune, referring to Epic: “The Cleveland Clinic has software that they had to pay $200 million to get. It was written in MUMPS in 1974. There is nobody left alive who can write MUMPS any more. That’s the model … the curve of innovation, the disruptive technology engine in healthcare is broken.”

I’m a Tiger Direct junkie, but this deal is stunning even to me: Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Preferred with a headset for $49.99 (it’s $118 on Amazon). The rebate ends 7/31. Amazon has a lot of reviews, the gist of which seem to suggest that some users will struggle to get it up and running, but those who do find it pretty amazing. It’s heartening to read the reviews of people who can’t type because of nerve disease, wrist problems, etc. for whom DNS is their lifeline. (Note: this version isn’t for use with EMRs – you would want to look at DNS Medical for that.) I keep thinking that maybe I’d enjoy dictating HIStalk, so I may get it. I know some writers who record interviews, then play them back into headphones while repeating what their subject says into Dragon so it can “transcribe”.

AT&T says the $300 subsidy it pays for each new iPhone it sells hurt its most recent quarterly numbers, but will eventually pay off in lower churn for its exclusive service. The carrier activated 2.4 million iPhones in Q2, many of them because of the new 3G S model.

Cardinal Health names Patricia Morrison as CIO after its spinoff of CareFusion and the Friday announcement that CIO Jody Davids was quitting. The new CIO has no healthcare experience, having been CIO at Motorola and Office Depot. That brings up an interesting argument: should hospitals do what Cardinal did and bring in IT leadership from another industry that’s more technologically advanced than healthcare, or is it better to get healthcare experience even though it’s a technologically backward sector? Who would you pick for CIO: a geek doctor who thinks 10-year-old, off-the-rack apps are cool or someone who knows nothing about patients, but who has vast experience with e-commerce, state-of-the-art infrastructure, and self-developed technology as a strategic differentiator? I waffle on that, I admit.

The results of my poll on CHIME’s new CHCIO credential: 9% think it’s a good way for CIOs to demonstrate competency, 13% say it’s a vanity credential, 33% say it has no relationship with competency, and 45% say it’s just another income source for CHIME (so, that’s 91% against). New poll to your right, for HIMSS members: should it devote fewer resources to Government Relations, more, or about the same?

I continue to be impressed with EHRtv. Check out its EMR Matters newcast. I don’t know how they get such dazzling video and audio quality with fast streaming, but I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s also an interview with Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman a few weeks ago that I hadn’t seen. I think it’s brilliant, much more interesting than sticking a $100 camcorder in someone’s face and asking a few trite questions.

Bill Stead of Vanderbilt and Informatics Corporation of America CEO Zegiestowsky talk about interoperability in this article. Here’s what Bill had to say about Vandy’s StarChart, now commercialized by ICA: “The simple idea was to assemble information from any source and to use computational algorithms to turn it into something that can be used. It has no boundaries and it’s analogous to what Google has done. Google answers questions by crawling over any number of sources of information — each of which are used for a single purpose but none having the original purpose of answering your question.” Bill’s the man, I say.

Housekeeping stuff: put your e-mail in the Subscribe to Updates box to your right (like 4,474 of your peers and despised competitors have done) so that you’re among the first to know when I write something new (remember Todd Cozzens of Picis at the HIStalk reception at HIMSS, asking for a show of hands of how many people run to the PC to read it as soon as the e-mail comes? Several CEOs raised theirs). It’s spam-free since I don’t use it for anything else and don’t make it available to vendors even though I get asked all the time. The Search HIStalk box lets you dig through the six-plus years of HIStalk to find whatever tickles your fancy: your name, your employer, or a vendor. Click the disturbingly green box to report a rumor to me, which I always enjoy. The links at the top of the page let you go do HIStalk Discussion, Industry Events (the HIStalk calendar), and also the Archives links to previous articles. You can e-mail me for anything else (interview ideas, guest articles, volunteering to write for HIStalk, etc.) Thanks to you for reading and to HIStalk’s sponsors for bringing it to you.

The HIMSS conference will go back to New Orleans in 2013. I’m surprised since I thought HIMSS was sticking with Orlando, Atlanta, and Las Vegas (which never seemed to pan out, actually). I figured the 2007 conference in New Orleans was strictly a one-time charitable, post-Katrina offering. I didn’t think it was all that great, so I can’t say I’m elated at the news (I miss San Diego and maybe even Dallas, which was at least cheap and had barbeque). Now that we’ve had a snowy conference in Chicago to keep attendees hanging around the exhibit hall, maybe HIMSS should have cut a deal with Detroit, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh, all of which could surely use the economic boost.

Bill Gates, speaking from India, says the American healthcare model is flawed because the government won’t adopt a national identity card, doctors aren’t allowed to share electronic medical records (?), and virtual visits are banned (?) He also predicts that cell phones will be used to test for diseases and that voice recognition will be big (maybe he got the Tiger Direct e-mail too).

The LA coroner’s office is investigating security breaches in which Michael Jackson’s death certificate was viewed “hundreds of times” by employees, some of whom were said to have printed it. They had blocked access to all but the highest-ranking employees, but later found a flaw that could have let others in. The chief coroner investigator says he thinks such violations are only internal policy violations and didn’t break laws, but my understanding that HIPAA is still in effect even when the patient is dead (although maybe coroner’s records don’t count since they become public documents when completed anyway).

HITSP’s Privacy and Security Workgroup wants EMR standards that include encryption, access controls, and audits. Deb Peel isn’t happy with their prioritization of patient consent management, which isn’t scheduled until 2015 and which she calls “foxes designing the hen coops.”

Bad news for hospitals: if CIT Group goes into bankruptcy, that could be one fewer line-of-credit vendor willing to loan money based on receivables.

Australia-based medical device vendor Applied Physiology gets $5 million in financing to launch its Navigator circulation guidance system, which turns information from cardiac monitors into graphical treatment guidance for doctors.

CPSI announces Q2 numbers: revenue up 11.2%, EPS $0.32 vs. $0.28, missing expectations for both.

The City of Los Angeles submits a plan to City Council to replace outdated e-mail technology (“the slowest, most inefficient, crash-prone e-mail system in the history of mankind”) with Google Docs. 

Odd lawsuit: an AIDS advocacy group sues the LA County Health Department, alleging that it isn’t doing enough to stop the spread of disease among porn stars.

E-mail me.

News 7/24/09

From Org Insider: “Re: HIMSS. I was told HIMSS may have exceeded the 20% lobbying limit allowed by Congress and the IRS and is trying to rearrange its financials to satisfy the requirements so its 501(c)3 status won’t be jeopardized.” Unverified, but per the Webex I mentioned below, it doesn’t sound like that’s the case. If anyone has firm information, send it over, but I would be very surprised if this is true.

Inga verified with a spokesperson that Elekta, Sweden-based parent company of IMPAC Software, laid off 100 employees as BadNoodle said earlier this week. She said it happened at the beginning of the fiscal year, which would go back to May or June, I think. They have 3,000 employees and they didn’t say where the cuts fell.

Six-hospital, 1,260-bed Kettering Health Network (OH) will spend over $50 million on its just-announced EMR project, buying from — who else? — Epic.

Electronic drug detailing vendor Physicians Interactive acquires Skyscape, which sells online medical references for portable devices.

Christopher Pike is named VP/CIO of Health Alliance Plan (MI).

The HIMSS Webex for staff about its governmental relations activities didn’t say too much. HIMSS does not employ a registered lobbyist, but estimates that it spends 4-8% of member dues on lobbying. It says it started up its government relations group in 1998 because of member concerns about HIPAA. It began offering government relations services to “sister organizations” in 2008, which seems odd (CHIME? AHIMA? They didn’t say). Mentioned: Institute for e-Health Policy, run from the HIMSS Foundation instead of the main organization.

Two of the seven out-of-cluster NHS trusts stay on with iSoft rather than switching to a local implementation of Cerner Millennium, saying it was too risky and expensive. “The implementations of CM [Cerner Millennium] in London have had a damaging effect on trusts, which has led to the creation of a new deployment model, which has yet to be tested on a deployment.”

And in Australia, Lismore Base Hospital officials claim that Cerner SurgiNet has compromised patient safety such that “negative outcomes, including death, will inevitably result from the continuing use of this system.”

If  Epic, the NHS, and bad Australian publicity weren’t problems enough, Cerner has now incurred the wrath of PETA, which is all over it for using glue traps to inhumanely kill mice on its campus. Cerner’s director of properties, PETA says, told its people that “their use of glue traps was no one else’s business but theirs.” You have to figure a disgruntled CERN employee must have turned them in.

eHealth Initiative releases the results of its HIE survey. Conclusions: more HIE initiatives are underway, those actually operational jumped way up, and doctors reported a positive impact on their practices.

From Weird News Andy: a woman gets a call from a hospital’s ED doctor saying her husband had died there from electrocution. She and her sons rush to the hospital, only to get a call from her husband, to whom she replied, “‘Doug, you’re dead. We’re going to the hospital to view your body.” The hospital had called the wrong Doug Wilcox’s family. The hospital refused to talk on camera and hasn’t contacted the woman to apologize, but e-mailed a statement blaming “a breakdown in our communications.” Understandable, but the bunker mentality won’t win it any friends.

Misys announces year-end numbers: revenue up 41%, profits up 43%, helped mightily by the performance of Allscripts.

Microsoft turns in terrible Q4 results Thursday evening: revenue down 17%, EPS $0.34 vs. $0.43. For the year, the company’s revenue fell for the first time since it went public in 1986, falling short of expectations by a mile. Windows revenue tanked a staggering 29%. Shares are down 7% in after hours trading, back to 1996 levels.

The OMB director isn’t impressed with Aetna’s claim that its software reduced the use of medical services by 6.1% back in 2001. “One cannot reject the hypothesis that the true effect … on outpatient and RX charges is zero.” Aetna’s CMO co-founded the ActiveHealth Management, which developed the software and then sold out to Aetna in 2005. OMB says it didn’t do much except for hospital inpatients. That’s its PHR above, from a pretty cool video on its site.

Credentialing software vendor Medversant files a patient infringement against Morrissey Associates, saying it is “marketing for sale a process that is consistent with our AutoVerifi process.”

A judge in a medical malpractice lawsuit in Canada gives Meditech a nice pitch from her bench, explaining a $5 million ruling against a hospital that had misfiled a patient’s paper-based meningitis diagnostic results for a full year, resulting in his incapacitation. “Despite the UBC Hospital’s acknowledgement of its heavy responsibilities and its knowledge of past failings, it relied exclusively on a manual system with no back-up system in place to manage virtually inevitable employee error. The absence of such a system is particularly unfortunate given that in September 1999, the hospital possessed that capability through the Meditech computer system, which it was using to track films for billing purposes.”

Ann Coulter is a bit of a wack job even to a conservative like me, but this is a fun quote: “The reason seeing a doctor is already more like going to the DMV, and less like going to the Apple ‘Genius Bar,’ is that the government decided health care was too important to be left to the free market .. We already have near-universal health coverage in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ hospitals, emergency rooms and tax-deductible employer-provided health care – all government creations …  The whole idea of insurance is to insure against catastrophes: You buy insurance in case your house burns down – not so you can force other people in your plan to pay for your maid. You buy car insurance in case you’re in a major accident, not so everyone in the plan shares the cost of gas.”

HR 2630, submitted by Rep. Ron Paul, would give individuals to opt out of any federal EHR system, repeals the act requiring HHS to create a unique patient identifier, requires informed consent for any use of electronic patient information, and prohibits the federal government from requiring providers to participate in an electronic healthcare system. It’s from a few weeks back, but I just ran across it.

Christ Hospital (OH) extends its outsourcing agreement with CareTech Solutions.

I mentioned earlier that for Red Hat VP had started up Axial Exchange, which offers open source healthcare interoperability solutions. She and her startup venture get profiled in the Raleigh paper.

WebMD announces the free Medscape Mobile for the iPhone.

Zynx and eClinicalWorks sign a deal to make the former’s AmbulatoryCare order sets available to eCW customers.

Medicity spinoff Allviant, which will market consumer access tools, announces its advisory board members.

The DoD will expand its PHR pilot that ties its data into HealthVault and Google Health, but it’s also evaluating RelayHealth. DoD required Google and Microsoft to use only US-based servers and to delete all information immediately for an employee who opts out.

Odd lawsuit: a woman who gained 20 pounds during her hospitalization for Crohn’s disease is suing the hospital, saying it overhydrated her with IV fluids. She wants compensatory damages.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

The local paper reports on the status of an Epic installation at Atrium Medical Center, which  is one of three Premier Health hospitals now live on on Epic’s EHR. Ambulatory clinics are also getting on board. Officials estimate the implementation will be completed by the end of 2010.

The VA selects Anakram.TFA Two-Factor Authentication as its enterprise authentication tool for remote access to VA systems.

John Muir Health (CA) claims it saved $8.5 million using VHA’s Non-Salary Cost Reduction solution over a two-year period.

St. Joseph Medical Center (PA) selects McKesson’s Revenue Management Solutions to manage its medical billing processes. St. Joseph physicians will deploy McKesson Practice Complete for RMS services, along with Horizon Practice Management software and RelayHealth payor connectivity services.

Tufts Medical Center (MA) places an order for a Carestream Health RIS/PACS system and contracts for Carestream’s eHealth Management Services for remote disaster recovery.

Someone at the University of Michigan Health System clearly listened to his/her mother. UMHS lawyers and doctors are quick to say they’re sorry and admit mistakes up front, finding the policy creates savings in time, money, and feelings. Between 2001 and 2006, malpractice claims fell from 121 to 61 and the average time to process a claim fell from 20 months to eight months. In addition, costs per claim fell 50% and insurance reserves dropped by two-thirds. I like the words of Richard Boothman, the system’s chief risk officer: “What we are doing is common decency.”

The National Institute of Health Clinical Center picks the QuadraMed AcuityPlus platform to ensure interoperability with existing ADT and staff scheduling systems. The NIH facility will use AcuityPlus to make its nurse resource allocation process more efficient.

HIT consulting company Virtelligence is recognized by the Midwest Minority Supplier Development Council as Class II Supplier of the Year. The award is based on such factors as company growth and development and quality of products and services.

Carefx says its Fusionfx clinical workflow solution is now successfully deployed at Fletcher Allen Health Care (VT). My interview with Fletcher Allen CIO Chuck Podesta posted earlier this week. One reader wrote in saying that, based on the interview, they’d work for Mr. Podesta.  I concur.

The VC folks seem to think health care companies are worth investing in these days. In the second quarter, health care firms raised $2.2 billion in VC funds, surpassing last year’s $1.89 billion figure. HIT providers are of particular interest as result of growing demand for health care solutions.

Speaking of VC money, MedVentive, a provider of P4P software for evidence-based money, raises $7.25 million in series C funding. Excel Venture Management led the round.

Those choosing an alternative to Mr. H’s DIPSHIT certification program may want to check out Johns Hopkins new master’s degree in health informatics. The one-year program focuses on how to develop IT systems to be used in hospitals, clinics, and public health settings.

E-mail Inga.

News 7/22/09

From Ralph Hinckley: “Re: HIPAA. Looks like we have actual prosecution for HIPAA privacy violations by several individuals.” A doctor and two former employees of St. Vincent Health System (AR) plead guilty to federal charges of snooping into the medical records of murdered local TV anchor Ann Pressly out of curiosity. The misdemeanor charge carries a maximum penalty of a $50,000 fine and a year in prison. Here’s the part that always gripes me: the hospital canned the two employees, but let the doctor off with a two-week suspension.

From Wompa1: “Re: Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. I thought you might appreciate this.” The piece has a long quote from Atlas Shrugged about a surgeon who refuses to practice under a system of socialized medicine. Now I’m all hot to read Atlas Shrugged again, so I’ll have to go digging through the bookcases to find it.

From BadNoodle: “Re: [vendor name removed]. They have quietly laid off over 100 people worldwide, with software training and support hit fairly hard.” Inga is trying to confirm and I have suspicions about the anonymous source since the posting appears to have come from a competitor, so I’ll leave the company name out for now.

From Org Insider: “Re: HIMSS. HIMSS produced a Team Training seminar, ‘What is Government Relations’ on June 23, 2009. HIMSS discusses the differences between advocacy, lobbying, and government relations,’What does HIMSS do?’ It is produced by Carla Smith, Executive VP, and Dave Roberts, VP of Government Relations (who is also Mayor of Solana Beach, CA). It appears executive management is trying to sell the staff on the idea that HIMSS is not a lobbyist or vendor organization HIMSS will share IRS and congressional regulations with a ‘sister’ organization to keep under the radar. Is that AHIMA?” Please, sir, may I have some more? I couldn’t get to the link you sent and I didn’t follow the ‘sister organization’ part.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: What Would Google Do? Our fellow blogger Will Weider has read the new book about Google called ‘What Would Google Do" and recommends it for CIOs and other executives. Harper Collins Publishers has a browse version of the book on the Web for HIStalkers to view.” The preview looked good, although some of the Amazon reviews are scathing. I’d read it.

From Dr. Know: “Re: technology. Interesting article in US News about the use of advanced technology in hospitals.” Included: rounding robots with video, RFID, implanted identifiers (they must have missed the Verichip flop), EMRs, and cool rooms. Only in the last paragraph is it mentioned that hospitals have halted almost all of these projects because of economic uncertainty.

From Bob! in accounting: “Re: VA. Ha!” The VA stops (temporarily, it says) 45 IT projects that are over budget or behind schedule until the project managers submit new plans. They’re listed in the article. I see a lot of LIS stuff on the list, so I wonder if the VA is reconsidering its stated intention of replacing some of its own VistA applications with commercial ones from Cerner since it was to start with lab?

Apple’s Q3 numbers: revenue up 12%, EPS $1.35 vs. $1.19. Strong Mac sales and punishing iPhone demand led the estimate-beating numbers. Good timing for me since I had just finished my next guest editorial for Inside Healthcare Computing titled A Harvard Vision of One-Stop Shopping: Why Someday You Might Buy a Michael Jackson Ringtone, a “Pull My Finger” Game, and CPOE from the Same Vendor. It’s a very serious treatise on healthcare IT architecture and the disruptive technology of infrastructure instead of applications. Well, maybe not all that serious.

Here’s an iPhone example: Cannabis, an application that gives directions to medical marijuana suppliers and related services updated from iMedicalCannabis.com. Check the banner ad on the site for Marijuana Medicine Evaluation Centers, which apparently gives exams and certification cards to supposedly legal users (“Come get your medical marijuana card today!!”) There’s even a helpful ICD-9 list of conditions that can be treated with cannabis just in case one is looking for a disease to justify use of its treatment (hypertension? back pain? constipation? You’re in!)

Some folks added new events to the HIStalk Calendar (and why not since it’s free and the events show up on the main page of HIStalk?) You can add your event, too, or check the calendar to see what’s coming.

A reader provided a link to this ACLU video for its Surveillance Campaign, which frets about massive invasions of privacy using “invasive new technologies.” It ties ordering a pizza with having healthcare information immediately available at the call center.

Nasty Parts told you on May 29 that Allscripts would acquire Medfusion and Medem. He’s on track so far: Medfusion announced today that it has bought the health services operations (which I’m guessing is everything but the company name) from Medem. Then, Allscripts announced that it had signed a strategic agreement to make Medfusion’s patient portal available to its customers. Will Allscripts go ahead and buy Medfusion?

Also related: Allscripts posts Q4 numbers, but I’m not smart enough to understand how post-acquisition numbers are derived so I won’t comment. Glen seemed happy with the results, they seemed to beat expectations, and share price is down only a little since then. I think they did well.

The HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association re-elects Justin Barnes (Greenway) as chair and brings on Mark Segal (GE Healthcare) as vice chair and Carl Dvorak (Epic Systems) as executive committee member.

Listening: new from July for Kings, Cincinnati-based alt-rock.

I must be cranky today since I just saw something else that gripes me. A vendor executive lists a big-name business school in the Education section of his LinkedIn profile, right under his only other credential, a bachelor’s degree from a lower-tier state school. I checked out his big-name credential and it was nothing but an expensive, one-week executive seminar, maybe placed there with the hope that it would be confused for a graduate degree. It wasn’t by me, anyway.

Speare Memorial Hospital (NH) names Bob Dullea as director of IS, bringing him over from Dartmouth.

President Obama, making a healthcare speech from what was called Children’s Hospital (I assume it was Children’s National Medical Center in DC) mentions the CIO directly: “We just — I spoke to the chief information officer here at the hospital, and he talked about some wonderful ways in which we could potentially gather up electronic medical records and information for every child not just that comes to this hospital, but in the entire region, and how much money could be saved and how the health of these kids could be improved, but it requires an investment.”

A VA-funded study finds that all the paper records clinicians keep (sticky notes, index cards, and notebooks) can provide insight into how to design an improved human interface to clinical systems. It’s a shamefully small observation study (20 workers in one hospital), but still an interesting concept since everybody keeps paper for mostly good reasons. I’ve used this method: follow a clinician around and write down every piece of information they need, when they need it, where they were at the time, and what they did with it. That’s what an IT system will have to do if you really want to kick out paper.

Also from the VA: it’s testing a BlackBerry application that let cardiologists read EKGs remotely and order treatment to be immediately started in the ED or other location. “The ER pages a cardiologist and sends an electronic EKG to the doc’s mobile device. It also cc’s the electronic health record system, Vista. The cardiologist receives the EKG alert and opens the file by pressing on an icon and logging in. After reading and interpreting the image from a smartphone, the cardiologist clicks a ‘call’ button to contact the ER with a treatment orders. This all happens within 3 minutes.”

Yet another VA item: the Philadelphia VA’s brachytherapy (implanted radiation therapy) program, which was shut down in 2008, gave 92 of its 114 patients the wrong dose of radiation therapy over six years because the dose checking PC had been unplugged from the network.

ACS gets a five-year contract extension worth $10 million to run IT at Rehabilitation Hospital of the Pacific (HI).

A Fox News report says that the universal health plan in Massachusetts is an albatross around the neck of potential Republican presidential candidate Governor Mitt Romney. Costs are out of control, the state is being sued by Boston Medical Center for underpaying it, and legal immigrants who pay taxes are being dumped from the plan to save money. The parties blame each other, apparently, and the only idea anybody’s come up with to cover its costs is to tax smokers even more. They’d better hope those smoking cessation programs don’t work.

Who are some of the big spenders when it comes to healthcare lobbying? Other than the obvious drug companies: GE, AMA, AHA, Blue Cross Blue Shield, American College of Radiology, Siemens, and UnitedHealth Group.

Vanderbilt chooses Omnicell for supply systems.

Hopkins Medicine deploys Cernium video analytics software for security, which ads to the capability of security cameras by not requiring people to sit and watch them. It looks for erratic movements, lurkers, converging groups, and suspicious packages. A bit Big Brotherish, but cool, especially for hospitals.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

From Heard it thru the grapevine: “Re: rumor control. Hope you are doing well and up to your eyeballs in new shoes. Wouldn’t it be interesting if it were Eric Sellers was the one going to MED3OOO?” Eric Sellers is a former Misys exec, as “Little Birdy” suggested last week. His LinkedIn profile says he has been in real estate for the last five years.

Hayes Management Consulting and Aternity partner to help improve physician adoption of EHRs. The companies will combine the rapid prototype methodology of Hayes with Aternity’s Frontline Performance Intelligence Platform to organizations increase implementation efficiencies.

Hendrick Health System(TX) completes installation of Sentillion’s Tap & Go, which uses passive proximity cards for authentication. Hendricks uses the program in its trauma center to enable caregivers to instantly sign on to any workstation.

ENT and Allergy Associates (NY/NJ) announces it has expanded the use of their NextGen EMR system to 10 of its 30 practice sites. The practice includes about 90 physicians.

UC-San Diego Medical Center selects Dragon Medical for physician documentation.

Former Cisco exec Diane Adams joins to Allscripts as EVP of human resources.

E-mail Inga.

Being John Glaser 7/21/09

American Airlines. Amazon.com. Federal Express. Bank of America. These organizations and others are often cited as examples of exceptional effectiveness in applying information technology (IT) to improve organizational performance and, at times, achieving a significant competitive advantage.

These organizations are more than one-hit wonders. They have been exceptional over very long periods of time. They seem to have one IT success after another.

What is it that these organizations have done to achieve such IT excellence? What makes them different?

Several researchers have pursued answers to these questions. The have identified a series of factors that lead to organizational IT excellence.

Leadership was critical
The leadership in these organizations was smart, honest, seasoned, committed, and valued the healthy exchange of ideas. They were individually excellent and a great team. This leadership understood the strategy, communicated the vision, was able to recruit and motivate a team, and had the staying power to see the organization’s strategies through several years of hard work.

Strong, sustained and clear themes provided the basis for IT strategy decisions
Organizations often develop themes or strategic imperatives such as “we must continuously improve the care we deliver” or “we must relentlessly focus on efficiency.” If there is sustained commitment to pursuing these themes, organizations become increasingly competent at addressing them. This competency extends to IT. In effect, organizations, year in and year out, get better and better at improving care and get better and better at applying IT to improve care.

The evaluation of IT opportunities was thoughtful and rigorous
IT initiatives that involve major commitments of resources and significant organizational change must be analyzed and studied thoroughly. However, these organizations also understood that a large element of vision, management instinct, and “feel” often guided the decision to initiate investment and continue investment. These organizations were careful to ensure that IT initiatives were strongly linked to key organizational strategies and plans.

Extracting value from IT required innovation in business practices
If an organization “merely” computerizes existing processes without rectifying (or at times eliminating) process problems, it may have merely made process problems occur faster. In addition, those processes are now more expensive since there is a computer system to support. All IT initiatives must be accompanied by efforts to re-engineer the processes that the system is designed to improve.

These organizations often focused on continuous incremental innovations rather than “big bang” initiatives
Organizations will often introduce very expensive application systems and process change “all at once.” Big bang implementations are very tricky and highly risky. It is exceptionally difficult to understand the ramifications of such change during the analysis and design stages that precede implementation. As a result, organizations risk significant operational degradation and non-trivial project overruns.

On the other hand, IT implementations (and related process changes) that are more incremental and iterative reduce the risk of organizational damage and permit the organization to learn before they make the next change. Incremental change helps the organization’s members to understand that change and performance improvement are never-ending aspects of organizational life rather than something to be endured every couple of years.

The strategic impact of IT investments came from the cumulative effect of sustained near term initiatives to innovate business practices
The incremental steps in aggregate led to a competitive advantage. Organizations often took five to seven years for major initiatives to fully mature and the results to be seen. Persistent improvements by a talented team, over the course of years and across many initiatives, resulted in significant strategic gains. Exceptional effectiveness is a marathon. It is a long race that is run and won one mile at a time.

Innovation was encouraged
These organizations were comfortable and competent at innovation. This innovation was not confined to IT. They knew that innovation had to be practical and goal directed. Innovation had to focus on a real business problem, crisis, or opportunity and the project needed budgets, political protection, and deliverables.

Well-architected technology was the great enabler
Information systems that are difficult to change, unreliable, overly costly, functionally weak, and impossible to integrate can severely hinder an organization’s strategies. The organizations studied had taken the time to develop approaches and policies needed to ensure that desired levels of integration and reliability, for example, were achieved. Their CIO had, and shared with the leadership team, a strategic understanding of information technology architecture. 
 

Achieving organizational excellence in IT requires much more than great information systems and a great IT staff (although these are important). Excellence requires talented people, great working relationships, organizational thoughtfulness, and dogged, year-in and year-out pursuit of performance improvements. These factors are probably not materially different from the factors that determine organizational excellence in general.

It is more important for an organization to focus on addressing these factors than it is to work on any specific IT application.

John Glaser is vice president and CIO at Partners HealthCare System. He describes himself as an "irregular regular contributor" to HIStalk.

Monday Morning Update 7/20/09

From Leo: “Re: HHS. HHS is expanding its health information privacy enforcement team.” They’ve opened two new positions for Health Information Privacy Specialist.

From Hal Ebola: “Re: execs. Isn’t it interesting that in the midst of the biggest news about HIS in decades, the senior execs at many of the largest companies in the space have gotten the boot? In the past 18 months — McKesson, Siemens, Eclipsys, QuadraMed, etc.” A couple of folks e-mailed to say that new involuntary executive departures have occurred at McKesson and Eclipsys, but I don’t have specifics. Obviously all that potential HITECH money has raised the performance bar, maybe rightfully so now that there’s more at stake (so HITECH’s unintended consequences may have been vendor brass turnover). I only hope they don’t bring in a bunch of non-healthcare people who see patients as widgets since I’ve worked for HIT execs like that and I wanted to maim then regularly. Some of the most frustrated employees I’ve seen were clinical people who went to work for vendors — they had always thought the problem was lack of company knowledge, not lack of company interest in doing anything beyond the minimum required to sell systems.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: America’s Best Hospitals. U.S. News & World Report has released its annual survey of America’s Best Hospitals. TPD likes to focus on who is new in the listings and who has moved up in the rankings as it shows institutions that have made progress to better themselves in the eyes of physicians.  Johns Hopkins remains #1, and rounding out the Top 5 are Mayo Clinic, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, The Cleveland Clinic, and Massachusetts General Hospital.” No surprises there except maybe UCLA. It would be interesting to see how the winners stack up in terms of cost (probably easy to do since the information is out there). You could do the same with the idiotic Most Wired awards, just out yet again, determining whether all of those highly wired hospitals have reduced cost or significantly improved outcomes in the last 3-5 years. Everybody involved with Most Wired stands to gain from the “buy it and they will come” illusion: HHN magazine, McKesson, CHIME, and resume-padding CIOs. Who knew that supporting your organization’s strategic goals through IT was a competitive sport?

From Nasty Parts: “Re: Sage. Exodus of talent from Sage continues. Dennis Mahoney, six-year vet, resigned last Friday. Dennis was most recently their top VP of sales.” Unverified.

From Looking for Answers: “Re: Banner Health. Isn’t it funny that if a vendor came in offering free software they wouldn’t be let in, but if they come in with expensive software and cut the price down, it all looks great?” Brilliant. In this change-resistant industry, maybe Medsphere should price OpenVista at $30 million and start the discounting at 50%, proceeding to 100% of the client insists. Like heavy software discounting by proprietary vendors, it would let providers think they are sharp negotiators.

From B.P. Fife: “Re: pretty darn good article.” Link. Washington Monthly’s Code Red: How software companies could screw up Obama’s health care reform. It’s yet another comparison between Midland Memorial’s OpenVista implementation vs. proprietary ones, this time the initially problematic Cerner one at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, both of which I’ve reviewed amply here (in fact, I hate to say it, but I’m kind of tired about hearing about Midland Memorial since repeatability is a key concept and one implementation isn’t enough to judge Medsphere or, for that matter, Cerner). The article seems to imply that a sinister conspiracy exists among proprietary vendors, HIMSS, CCHIT, etc. to keep open source applications a big secret. They aren’t: CIOs, rightly or wrongly, are passing on a free system that they’re surely aware of, so you have to assume that (a) even though they may be overly risk averse, they aren’t stupid; (b) they aren’t universally easily manipulated; and (c) they would jump all over a free app if they had confidence in it and their hospital said OK. If Medsphere and companies like it can’t make their case and get traction, maybe vast collusion is just a convenient, far-fetched excuse for offering what the market doesn’t want, no different than a sign offering “free kittens”. 

Related to that, from my poll on open source EMRs: 45% of respondents said CIOs should consider them because they’re just as good as proprietary systems; 20% said they’re not as good but should be considered because they’re cheaper; 13% said they should be avoided because they’re not good enough to be worth the potential cost savings; and 23% said they should be avoided because they’re unproven and risky. Obviously it’s not CIOs responding unless their responses differ from their actions.

Weird News Andy checks in: (a) a Lortab Lothario male nurse suggests to an addicted patient that he will provide pills in return for her favors. He signs out the pills for another patient, leaves them tucked in the first patient’s belongings, and, well, read The Rest of the Story. (b) Paramedic fired after telling a woman in pain to have drink and she dies the next day. Also from WNA: “Here is a link to a purposely confusing Republican chart that describes the Democrats’ socialized medicine plan.” Link (warning: PDF).

CHIME announces its new CIO certification program for healthcare CIOs who “want to enhance their professional stature.” CHCIO is much like CPHIMS: pass a test and you are in, but in CHIME’s case, you have to already have been a CIO for three years or more (so maybe the point is to unmask those poser CIOs who really weren’t qualified after all?) Obviously CHIME gets the same benefits that HIMSS does: certification generates revenue, makes the organization look like the de facto authority, and locks certificants into further revenue-generating renewals and conference attendance. It seems pointless to me – if you’ve got three years of CIO experience, I doubt slapping a credential nobody’s heard of after your name is going to impress anyone further (especially potential employers or peers). Certification often appeals to those lacking academic credentials, but there is no excuse for someone holding a six-figure CIO job not to have a master’s degree, given the plethora of convenient, cost-effective offerings widely available (I did it myself for one of my degrees while working two jobs and writing HIStalk, so I don’t buy the “I don’t have time” excuse). Still, for the insecure folks looking for a vanity credential that demonstrates what you already know instead of studying something new to earn a recognized degree or graduate certificate, you’ve got a new option. I’m thinking of launching my own certification, Designated In Primary Study of Healthcare Information Technology. I think the acronym would look real nice on a business card.

So, new poll to your right – what do you think of CHIME’s new credential? Don’t let me influence your answer.

Buddy Fain is promoted to VP/CIO of the University of Tennessee Medical Center. He’s a UT alum.

A Kaiser Permanente hospital is hit with a $187,500 fine this week for failing to protect the privacy of Octomom’s babies, adding to the $250K fine levied against it in May for failing to protect the mom’s records. Kaiser says 27 employees inappropriately reviewed their records, of which 16 quit, two were fired, and nine were disciplined. There’s a good lesson there: the punishment is just as harsh when the “celebrity” is at the end of their pitiful 15 minutes’ of fame.

Sun, on its way to being acquired by Oracle, pairs with healthcare data management vendor BridgeHead Software to offer an enterprise archiving system that offers a half-day installation and storage of multiple copies of the same data when needed. Sun liked BridgeHead because it’s big in the Meditech world. Did you ever notice that our own industry gives Meditech short shrift compared to companies like Epic and Cerner and yet big non-healthcare technology players instantly recognize the massive Meditech customer base as fertile ground for add-on technology, complementary applications, and consulting services? They’re like Rodney Dangerfield: they get no respect.

Chip at PCC blogs from this week’s CCHIT meetings. He’s got a lot of interesting observations (changing CCHIT membership, some friction between Mark Leavitt and one of its work groups, dropping the “version lockdown” certification requirement, and disagreement over whether an increase in applicants means CCHIT is doing a good job). Kudos to Bill Zurhellen, MD who said this directly to them: “If our goal is to certify to get ARRA payments, we’re doing the wrong thing. We should be focusing on improving health care.” Leavitt actually agreed and suggested that perhaps CCHIT’s mission statement should be changed to emphasize outcomes improvement instead of HIT adoption (not exactly an original thought since AMDIS and other groups have pressed CCHIT on that previously). I take that to mean that (a) all the CCHIT criticism and potential competition from other certification agencies has made CCHIT more responsive, or (b) it’s at least awakened a belated need to pretend to be more responsive.

Related: the Health IT Policy Committee recommends that CCHIT not be named the sole certifying agency, that CCHIT gives the appearance of conflict of interest, and that HHS should set the criteria instead of the certifying agencies themselves. Full details and PowerPoints from the committee’s Thursday meeting are here. That’s pretty big news that everybody seems to have missed. A new meaningful use matrix is also on that page, which Inga had already found and referenced in Friday’s post.

Since some folks (jokingly) accused me of making up the positive comments posted against Gregg Alexander’s interview with me, here’s a real one send from Mike Nelson, CIO of 25-hospital Universal Health Services, that he invited me to post: “I would also like to extend my appreciation for the work that you put into the writing and the site. And while it may sound like a plug (but it’s not) I like having sponsors here so I have another avenue to identify healthcare firms when I have a need for something, especially specialized consulting services.” I’ll vouch for that: in the past, Mike has copied me directly on inquiries he made to HIStalk sponsors for services he was about to buy. I appreciate both his eagerness to give HIStalk’s sponsors a chance to earn his business and his nice comments.

Florida’s state senate launches an investigation into the state’s blood banks following an Orlando Sentinel story that exposed lucrative contracts given by  Florida’s Blood Centers, which takes in $100 million per year, to its board members. The chair of the Health Regulation Committee said he was “shocked” that FBC charges hospitals $310 per unit of blood. Most disturbing to me were e-mail comments from FBC’s $600K salary president, in which in one sentence she twice referred to the organization as “the company.”

Temple University Physicians signs up for Ingenix CareTracker Services for revenue cycle management and cost control in its radiology department, citing its 3% increase in collections and 16% reduction in payment times for the other seven departments using it.

As Inga mentioned, Nuance acquires Jott, a voice-to-text transcription application aimed at mobile users to create notes, use e-mail tools, and update application databases. While general cell phone users are its target audience, there certainly are healthcare possibilities there (nurses calling in vital signs to the EMR, maybe, or doing progress notes by cell phone).

Microsoft Health Users Group Exchange 2009 will be in Redmond on September 2-3. They have tracks for clinical informatics, IT professionals, and developers, with a presentation from Microsoft VP/CIO Tony Scott. Registration is here.

I’m making several changes that should help the HIStalk page load faster (for my nerd compadres, I had Apache upgaded, combined several WordPress widgets into one to reduce the number of MySQL calls, am having WordPress and all plugins upgraded, and am installing a caching application to render pages as static HTML instead of database-generated pages). Heavy server load is a nice problem to have, I admit.

Voalte needs field engineers, project managers, and clinical trainers, in case you are looking for a new gig. Other jobs: Epic ADT Consultants, Laboratory Requirements Analyst, Revenue Cycle Project Manager.

Cleveland Clinic chooses MediServe for referral tracking, authorizations, scheduling, documentation and the plan of care, integrating it with Epic.

UnitedHealth gets a $21.8 billion contract to manage DoD benefits, of which UnitedHealth will keep $1.5 billion for administrative services after paying providers. When it comes to “illions” in healthcare costs, “m” is so 1.0.

Bill Moyers lauds the choice of Regina Benjamin as surgeon general nominee, contrasting her hardscrabble upbringing and low-rent medical practice serving the less fortunate to the suits running the for-profit side of healthcare. Named: Cigna’s chair ($11 million in the last year), Aetna’s CEO ($17 million), and McKesson’s John Hammergren ($29.7 million). The list above was provided in a comment on the article. I wish I’d said this: “Here’s the difference. To Dr. Regina Benjamin, health care is a public service, helping people in need with grace and compassion. To Ed Hanway and his highly paid friends, it’s big business, a commodity to be sold to those who can afford it. And woe to anyone who gets between them and the profits they reap from sick people … As we reported last week, that behavior includes spending nearly a million and a half a day to make sure health care reform comes out their way. Over the years they’ve lavished millions on the politicians who are writing and voting on health care reform. Now it’s payback time.” From this hardcore fiscal conservative, amen, liberal brother Bill Moyers. If you want to make a million dollars a year without actually delivering patient care, then please choose another industry because healthcare can’t afford you, whether you’re a drug company czar or an overpaid hospital CEO (your results have kind of sucked anyway). Unfortunately, politicians gravitate to money like mosquitoes to a bug zapper, so people just as accomplished and dedicated as Regina Benjamin don’t carry much weight.

Stratus Technologies announces that PC Mall will sell its Avance high availability software.

iSoft gets a $17.4 million maintenance contract extension in Northern Ireland.

The Wall Street Journal says Internet companies are losers when it comes to investing, pointing out that they’re more like unexciting utilities. “Microsoft has spent billions on Internet strategy without a dime of profit. And even Google can’t seem to find any other business model other than the one they stumbled into when they bought Applied Semantics in 2001 that had a little piece of software called AdSense. And the new guys: Twitter and Facebook are still scrambling for profits despite blistering usage growth.”

GE announces Q2 numbers: revenue down 17%, EPS $0.26 vs. $0.54, much of that due to problems in its financial business (I hate to brag, but I said Jeff Immelt’s haughty dismissal of GE Capital’s problems as trivial early in the economic meltdown was BS and it was). GE Healthcare had drops of 12% in revenue and 21% in profit.

Private equity firm Warburg Pincus invests $300 million to form RegionalCare Hospital Partners, which will invest in non-urban hospitals. There’s a lot of talk in the announcement about meeting community needs and service to others, which sounds strange coming from a PE firm.

Another hospital computer breach: UCSD sends letters 30,000 patient letters after finding out about hackers hacking.

Informatics Corporation of America wins its second consecutive Future 50 award from the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce in recognition of its growth.

Marietta Memorial Hospital (OH) “insources” its IT department to CareTech Solutions, keeping its employees but bringing in a CareTech director.

Red Hat will replace CIT Group on the S&P 500.

E-mail me.

News 7/17/08

From: Samuel C. “Re: Yesterday’s health care bill. After yesterday’s health care bill it is safe to say: ‘It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctively native American criminal class except Congress.’ – Mark Twain.” The Senate health committee approves legislation that includes a plan to provide nearly every American with health insurance, regardless of income or medical condition. The program also calls for a government program to compete with the private insurance companies. Opponents include the private insurers, as well as small business owners who fear the financial burden of providing healthcare for all employees.

From: Little Birdy “Re: MED3000. I hear that in addition to Tom Skelton, another former Misys VP is coming out of retirement to join the company. Look for an announcement in the next couple of weeks.”

HERtalk by Inga

Yesterday we published an interview with Mr. H, which is a must-read for any HIStalk fan. I’m not sure he revealed too many secrets, but the piece does re-iterate how hard he works and how humble he is (am I gushing?)  I must admit I didn’t know the interview was coming and was a bit surprised by it. I’ve long asked Mr. H to do an interview, but he always turned me down. So, thank you Dr. Gregg Alexander for being a better arm-twister than me. Mr. H actually skipped town for a bit, leaving me at the helm. I am pondering if there is any correlation between the kind words he had for me and his delegation of all the HIStalk chores for a few days.

Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center selects Patient Care Technology Systems to provide hospital asset tracking. The Amelior Tracker system will track and manage hospital assets throughout Wake Forest’s 4.1 million square foot campus.

Senator Jay Rockefeller orchestrates a donation of almost $2 million in medical equipment to Welch Community Hospital (WV). Rockefeller had asked staff members last year to prepare a wish list of the hospital’s greatest needs. GE Healthcare helped make wishes come true with donation of an anesthesia machine, EKG monitor, portable X-ray machine, and more.

Meanwhile, GE wins a $12.5 million from LSU Health System (LA). GE will provide LSU the technology to digitize its central database and radiology image repository. The GE contract is just the first phase of LSU’s $116 million, five-year plan to add EHR throughout its 10 public hospitals and 500 clinics.

Boston Medical Center is back in the news, this time for filing a law suit against the state of Massachusetts. BMC accuses officials of illegally cutting payments made to the hospital for treating thousands of poor patients. The state says it has done nothing wrong, and officials are quick to point out that BMC has received $1.5 billion in state funding over the past year.

Sunquest Information Systems introduces a new release to its lab and POC solution suite. The updated version incorporates new modules for molecular testing, along with increased functionality and workflow enhancements for existing applications.

The University of Ottawa Heart Institute cuts its hospital readmission rates 54% for patients participating in a home telehealth monitoring program. The program is also attributed with saving $20,000 for each patient not re-admitted.

Providence Health & Services (CA) names Peter Spitzer CMIO. Spitzer will oversee clinical IS systems in this newly created role.

Henry Ford Health System extends its IT outsourcing agreement with CSC for another 63 months. The value of the new contract is estimated to be $115 million.

Netsmart Technologies acquires Crown Software, a provider of pharmacy management software. Netsmart sells software and services for health and human service providers.

Ingenix subsidiary The Lewin Group launches The Lewin Group Center for Comparative Effective Research. The new entity will focus on providing fact-based, comparative effectiveness research to improve patient care and optimize resources.

United Health Group and Cisco Systems announce a national telehealth network to bring remote medical care to rural and underserved areas. The Connected Care network will use Cisco videoconferencing to simulate an in-person doctor visit.

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) submits comments to the ONC and HIT Policy committee, stressing that EHR certification does not necessarily equate with effectively using the system’s available functions, nor does it assure changes in clinical practice or patient outcomes. AMIA does not believe the current certification process is sufficient and stresses that certification should focus on process and care improvements over time.

Meanwhile, the ONC’s HIT Policy Committee approves the latest revised definition of EHR “meaningful use.” Since the initial definition last month, the committee made a few tweaks to its draft, including:

• Establishing a 10% threshold of CPOE for hospitals in 2011 (rather than the original and less specific requirement for “CPOE for all orders”)
• Allowing the 2011 criteria apply not just for 2011, but for the provider’s first adoption year. In other words, rather than 2011, 2012, 2013 requirements, change to Year 1, Year 2, Year 3 requirements
• Starting clinical decision support sooner
• Making access to personal health records a requirement earlier than originally proposed.

More here.

The information storage vendor Iron Mountain sponsors a white paper recommending the federal government maintain a 10-year retention policy for paper records. The 10-year retention window would give providers plenty of time to migrate to electronic records. And, perhaps give Iron Mountain plenty of time to fully migrate its business model from its original off-site document storage roots.

The Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce names ICA to its list of Future 50 Award winners, based on its projected growth in revenues and employees over the next three years.

iMedica changes its name to Aprima Medical  Software to avoid confusion with several other similarly-titled healthcare companies. The company also rolled out a new website, aprimaehr.com.

Two former executives from Province Healthcare launch a company to acquire and operate rural hospitals. Marty Rash and John M. Rutledge have created RegionalCare Hospital Partners, leveraging $300 million in startup funds from Warbug Pincus.

HIMSS gives Dr. Regina Benjamin a thumbs up following her nomination for Surgeon General. After Hurricane Katrina, the HIMSS Foundation actually provided Dr. Benjamin’s clinic a $5,000 grant to acquire EHR hardware and services. Dr. Benjamin and her staff are featured in this short video about EHR and the HIMSS Katrina Phoenix Project.

Target considers following Wal-Mart’s lead and support mandatory health insurance coverage by large companies.

Nuance Communications purchases startup company Jott Networks, a provider of mobile voice-to-text technology.

A Florida mans sues a physician at the Age Defying Surgical Center in Florida after he was denied a hair transplant. Apparently the 28-year-old hair-challenge patient is HIV positive and Florida law forbids denying medical treatment based on HIV status. The lawsuit is for at  least $15,000. I’ve said it before, but I don’t get why men get so hung up on hair loss. Bald is sexy.

E-mail Inga.

News 7/15/09

From Ex-Cerner Guy (among the many): “Re: Banner’s Cerner pricing. The pricing for the full HIS, @ $30M or so, looks pretty accurate. It likely started in the $45-50M range, then someone from KC came in and probably cut the SW pricing to get the deal. KC types will cut the pricing until the prospect says yes. From a customer perspective, there’s no value in saying yes until the SW fee is $0 and hourly rate is $125 or less. Banner probably said yes a little early.” The paper actually said each of their smallish hospitals was spending $30 million, so that’s what I questioned. Good negotiating tips, by the way.

From Bob in Accounting: “Re: sometimes you keep track of these things.” A doctor at Fletcher Allen Health Care (VT) is reprimanded by the state medical board after admitting that he improperly accessed the medical records (presumably paper ones) of eight women, one of them a previous acquaintance who found about it and turned him in. The article refers to “breeches of patient medical record confidentiality,” which either means someone makes little pants to keep records safe or the reporter trusted his spellchecker instead of his dictionary.

From Mark Moffitt: “Re: ARRA. Is anyone else viewing the ARRA as an investment opportunity v. subsidizing IT? GSMC is spending $1.3 million to net $2.7 in Year One and using the proceeds for other non-IT clinical needs.”

From The PACS Designer: “Re: SAML. The porting of applications to the web has increased the need for security enhancement solutions. To address this need, there’s a specification called Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). SAML provides the means for multiple organizations to exchange security information to protect each other’s security requirements. Also, security software promoting federation and the use of single sign-on solution for multiple systems through the use of SAML enhances the user experience and removes the need for multiple IDs and passwords.”

From Wayne Panera: “Re: strong passwords. Pretty good paper from Microsoft called ‘Do Strong Web Passwords Accomplish Anything?’ discussing the fallacy that strong passwords produce additional security.” Link (warning: PDF). The article says that passwords are stronger than they need to be to thwart brute force attacks (as long as you don’t allow more than three incorrect login attempts) and yet do nothing to prevent phishing and keylogging. Interesting idea: it suggests making user IDs longer is easier for users to remember and equally effective in preventing brute force guessing. Their example: PayPal requires an eight-character password that isn’t in the dictionary, uses mixed case, and has at least one special character, despite the fact that even a six-digit PIN has only a 1% probability of being cracked after a 10-year brute force attack. With regard to lockouts, the article also suggests that instead of a fixed lockout, like 24 hours, that the application simply geometrically increase the lockout time between each unsuccessful login attempt and, to prevent bot attacks, consider setting the lockout by IP address.

From Lynn Devine: “Re: Healthport. They’re looking to outsource their EMR development to integrate it with their PM product. They project a year to do this – it’s only been suggested for the past five years.” Unverified. Inga is attempting contact the company.

University of Florida says it will invest $70 million in clinical and translational research over the next 5-7 years, with “a large portion of those funds” being used to roll out Epic’s EMR to the faculty practice.

Listening: Lady Ga Ga, hopelessly trendy and way outside my usual genres, but it sounds pretty good now that I’ve listened to the CD three times.

A 50-provider medical group in California drops two CCHIT-certified (“point-and-click”) EMRs, replacing them with the EMR from SRSsoft after a free pilot.

A BlackBerry executive grudgingly admits that docs love the iPhone, confirms that the Chalk Media technology BlackBerry acquired will be used for medical education, and urges healthcare customers to take advantage of their BlackBerry Enterprise Server and client licenses to push data. He also touts BlackBerry’s App World and says customers have an appetite for it “and other app stores”.  Basically, he thinks Apple is promoting innovation that BlackBerry has had in place for years. If there’s an App Store … er, App World … application to measure the sourness of grapes, it’s time to roll it out.

Thanks to the reader who sent over the BMJ article from Kaiser Permanente Hawaii on its use of HealthConnect to proactively generate risk-based nephrology referrals instead of waiting on generalists to do it. Last-minute nephrology referrals by primary care providers occurred 30-42% of the time in the pre-study population, causing missed clinical opportunities for patients. The targets and results: (a) reduce late referrals, defined as being within four months of the onset of end-stage renal disease, aka ESRD (dropped from 32% to 12%); (b) creating the “life line” arteriovenous fistula in time for it to mature (increased from 18% to 36%); and (c) start dialysis as an outpatient (increased from 35% to 56%). How they did it: HealthConnect was used to identify at-risk patients, looking at glomerular filtration rate, urinary protein, and serum creatinine lab results in a monthly download. Those patients were assigned a numerical risk rating for ESRD. HealthConnect was used to recommend the referral, capture notes about whether the PCP and patient followed through, to deliver electronic messaging between the PCPs and nephrologists, and to issue alerts for patients showing a deterioration trend from one monthly download to the next. The result was that 280 patients were referred and some of the PCPs learned how to manage the patients themselves better after electronically reviewing the work of the nephrologists. Interestingly, the original plan was to let the PCPs do all the managing themselves, but they pushed back, saying they were too busy and worried about the impending HealthConnect implementation. Good work by Kaiser, a nice example of physician collaboration, a great reminder of how medical practice can change positively once information is available electronically, and a fine service to patients who surely had better outcomes as a result.

This from Weird News Andy, who says, “They took him to get a blood test at a hospital to prove he was drunk. He proved they were right.” A DUI suspect flees Research Medical Center in a stolen ambulance before his ride is ended by “stop sticks” and a police dog’s bite. As you might expect, he was not a first-time offender, with a rap sheet that included three previous alcohol-related convictions and a revoked driver’s license.

Michael Sinno is promoted to VP/CIO of Cooper University Hospital, which is in some hitherto unknown state called South Jersey.

Thanks to IntraNexus and CEO Rick O’Pry for supporting HIStalk as a brand new Platinum Sponsor. The Virginia Beach-based company offers the Sapphire Web-based (or client-server, if you prefer that option) hospital information system (still the coolest product name ever if you ask me), a complete single-database system with patient access, document imaging, revenue cycle, scheduling, general financials, EIS, clinical care, imaging, CPOE, critical care, ED, EMR, lab, LTC (!), pharmacy, point of care, radiology, and other modules. Here’s a writeup about beta site Oswego Hospital, who said “Sapphire was the best go-live we have ever had.” They just went live at St. Luke Hospitals (KY). Thanks to IntraNexus for supporting HIStalk.

Bad news for Microsoft: a survey says that 60% of its business customers won’t buy Windows 7 because of cost and compatibility concerns (the same reasons those customers passed on Vista, in other words). Microsoft’s real problem, if you ask me (and you didn’t), is that its cash cow products aren’t strategic – everybody can live without new versions of Windows and Office. And in tough times, they apparently will.

The American Heart Association will donate $50,000 toward creation of an open source CPR learning application for the Wii.

AMDIS announces its 2009 award winners: Michael Dominguez (University San Antonio), Fallon Clinic, Cynthia Herzog (MemorialCare Orange County), Kaiser Permanente, Steve Margolis (Orlando Health), Jon Morris (Wellstar), Matt Sprunger (Dupont Hospital), and the UPMC interoperability team.

The New York Times highlights Cook Children’s Health Care System (TX), a 350-physician practice that will install a Web-based EMR from athenahealth and Microsoft’s HealthVault. It will also open an Innovation Clinic with two or three doctors that will operate under the capitation model.

Cardinal Health’s debt ratings are lowered to near junk levels because the upcoming spinoff of its clinical and technology products business means there’s not much left except low-margin drug distribution. I guess analysts weren’t distracted by the CareFusion jazz festival.

China’s health ministry puts a halt to a clinic’s rather extreme program of Internet addiction therapy in teens, saying it will no longer allow “freaky treatment” that included electroshock therapy, kneeling in front of parents, and forced confessions of wrongdoing.

While everybody’s salivating over stimulus money, here’s a sobering fact: the US budget deficit just hit $1 trillion so far this year, the first trillion-dollar deficit ever, but nothing special considering estimates are now at $2 trillion for the year (not counting the new calls for another round of stimulus money because the first one didn’t really do much, with unemployment even higher than the level threatened if the stimulus wasn’t passed).

The Terminator fires three of the six members of the California Board of Registered Nursing and its executive officer quits after a nonprofit investigative newsroom found that it took years to get dangerous RNs off the job. Newspapers run by bad businesspeople (big corporations saddled with acquisition debt) keep getting smaller, stupider, and more reliant on wire service celebrity gossip, so this example of a non-newspaper doing real investigative work in the public interest is sure to raise the debate about what journalism really is.

Odd hospital lawsuit: frightened by stories of a hospital’s hepatitis-positive surgery nurse who replaced OR needles with her own dirty ones while stealing drugs, a patient files suit against the hospital even though her own test results aren’t back yet. The patient’s attorney wants the court to oversee patient testing for hepatitis. He also says he has people who are “literally scared to death,” which even an ambulance chaser should know means they are six feet under instead of trying to jump on a class action lawsuit.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

I am back from my big vacation, a little more rested, tanned, and a new fan of rum punch. Oh, and I made time for wee bit of shoe shopping. The vacation gods made me forget the power cord to my laptop so I was forced to keep my Internet surfing to a minimum. And, low and behold, the HIT world continued without me!

Providence Associates Medical Laboratories rolls out a new billing system built on the InterSystems Cache’ database. The lab reports that month-end processing time has been slashed by 88%.

Novant Health (NC) hires CareTech Solutions to manage its web content and provide secure hosting for its 10 Web sites.

e-MDs announces the release of its 6.3.0 Solution SeriesTM, which incorporates First DataBank’s drug database solution, enhancements to its Surescripts e-rx application, support of continuity of care documents, and other features.

The National Rural Health Association’s Services Corporation selects Virtual Radiologic as its provider of choice for teleradiology services.

Image On Call, another provider of teleradiology services, promotes COO MIchael Lampron to CEO. Lampron was VP of services and GM of the Vision Series Financials Group at Amicas.

Allscripts announces it is working with the AMA to offer an AMA-branded e-prescribing tool. The tool will be available at no cost to subscribers of a new online solution being developed by the AMA, with help from Covisint.

Sales from wi-fi enabled healthcare products will total almost $5 billion by 2014, a 70% increase over today’s numbers, according to a new study.

Healthland appoints Odell Tuttle to the role of CTO. He was previously with Gearworks, focusing on  the company’s mobile healthcare product OnCare.

The financially struggling Shriners Hospitals for Children will begin accepting insurance reimbursement rather than close six of its 22 hospitals. This follows a plunge in endowments from $8 billion to $5 billion during the economic downturn. For 87 years, the Shriners have provided free care to children without billing insurance providers.

Boston Medical Center is also in financial straits, anticipating a $175 million loss in the fiscal year that starts October 1. The hospital laid off 250 people earlier this year and took other measures to cut costs by $40 million. It’s the state’s largest provider of care for the poor and also offers a food pantry for patients with special diets and legal aid. What happens when the nets collapse at safety net hospitals?

The local paper highlights EnovateIT and the niche it is building with its computer wall cabinets and moveable carts. The company, which last month announced plans to manufacture its own cart in the USA, employs 46 and has revenues of $46 million. I interviewed company president Ron Sgro last year and found him to be pretty fun (medical carts make for a pretty dry topic, but he was entertaining), plus I like their green approach to business.

Scotland becomes the first country in the UK to deliver e-prescribing services. More than 90% of all prescriptions are now submitted electronically using the national Acute Medical Service (eAMS).

Maine plans to go live on its statewide HIE later this month. HealthInfoNet will connect 15 hospitals, three health clinics, and the Maine CDC. Health information from more than 400,000 patients has already been loaded into the HealthInfoNet system, which is powered by 3M Health Information Systems.

GE announces a new partnership to integrate the Medicalis CDS-DI solution with its Centricity Imaging IT and EMR products.

The HIMSS Electronic Health Records Association (EHRA) sends a letter to the ONC recommending, among other things, that CCHIT be “the single certifying entity to avoid duplication of effort, unnecessary expense and confusion in the market.”  Uproars from the anti-CCHIT folks to follow.

E-mail Inga.

Monday Morning Update 7/13/09

From afh15: “Re: EHR data. I’d love to read your thoughts on this study and the long-term uses of EHR data in preventive care.” I don’t have access to the full text of the article, but I truly believe that once the pain of getting EMRs running as data collection appliances is over (meaning we’ve got data collection clerks known as doctors and nurses in place, which is the “pain” part), the benefit will be incredible. This article apparently deals with having nephrologists automatically consulted when the EHR finds problems. There are other benefits. You could do society-improving medical research by just slicing and dicing data from millions of patients, at least the parts of it that aren’t just clinical-sounding billing events that are useless or even misleading. You could find candidates for research trials. Patients could be followed over many years, even as they move around and use the services of a variety of providers. And for individual patients, there could be great value in putting research findings into the hands of front line doctors. Not to mention giving patients a platform whereby they can participate in their own care and add non-episodic information related to lifestyle, personal health assessment, etc. Clinical systems will not save time, as clinicians know – they exist to create data whose value mostly accrues to someone else. My advice to providers: much of your future income may be based on the data you create and the ownership in it you retain. Don’t be like the Native Americans and let greedy outsiders buy your land for trinkets.

From Anonymous: “Re: Craneware. Interesting question to ponder: How did two young Scot lads, with no US healthcare knowledge, manage to visualize and create Craneware, the country’s first automated CDM software based on complex Medicare regulations? The designer of Craneware’s core CDM products is a US healthcare consultant and not a Scot. Nora McNeil (NJ) is Keith Neilson’s American mother-in-law. She co-founded Craneware with KN and his partner Gordon Craig and taught the Scots everything they needed to know about US healthcare policy and regulations. She was  also the sole marketing and salesperson of Craneware’s CDM products for the first two years of the company’s existence. So why have the duo not publicly acknowledged Nora’s existence as a founding partner and her primary role in creating a successful company?” The company’s documents say it was founded by Keith Neilson and Gordon Craig “following on from discussions with Nora McNeil.” I would guess there’s a family squabble somewhere in the mix. And when that happens, the lawyers are usually not far behind. I don’t have a horse in the race, so I’m neutral.

From Cracker: “Re: Nuance. Nuance’s domination of health care speech recognition gets more scary when you also consider the current M*Modal customers taking a serious look at Nuance. I know second hand of two current M*Modal customers looking at Nuance and will do some research to find some more.” Cracker references a news piece describing an anti-trust investigation of Nuance’s $96 million acquisition last year of Philips Speech Recognition systems (the old SpeechMagic). My assumption, reading between the lines, is that a competitor complained and the investigation is just making sure Nuance isn’t raising prices after knocking off Philips (not likely since Philips had minimal US presence). I don’t know much about M*Modal so I don’t know how they stack up to Nuance, but they and a few other vendors are facing a large, highly successful, and aggressive competitor whose name is nearly synonymous with speech recognition.

From Captain Hook: “Re: Valco rumor. We are a current client and since the announcement have spoken with a couple of our prior contacts at Valco (and they appear to still be working for the company). It is clear that some of them have been let go. Spoke to AJ Hyland as well. No indication that Valco technology will be sunsetted, at this point but it would make sense to do so. It is clear that Hyland bought the client base and entree into Meditech clients.” Valco sold portals, electronic forms, scanning solutions, and other healthcare tools.

From Commander Cody: “Re: Medical Center Odessa. They paid $6.2 million for CPOE, but their regional neighbor Midland Memorial paid only $7 million for their entire clinical transformation project. After five years, Odessa is just now doing McKesson CPOE, two years after Midland has fully implemented OpenVista hospital-wide. Taxpayers paying for high-priced proprietary EMR systems is a bad idea.”

Should CPOE be a requirement for demonstrating meaningful use of hospital-based EMRs? Yes, according to 69% of those who answered my poll. New poll to your right, inspired by the comment above: should hospital CIOs consider open source clinical systems?

McGill University Health Centre is working with Medical.MD to develop its MedforYou PHR.

The local paper covers EMR implementations in two Arizona hospitals. Banner Health, the story says, will spend $30 million (hardware, software, and training) each at two of its hospitals: 430-bed Banner Boswell and 272-bed Del E. Webb. They’re Cerner, I believe. I hope that dollar figure is a misprint, but then again, Banner paid its CEO $2.7 million, the CFO $1.7 million,  and its CIO $600K in 2007, so maybe big numbers don’t bother them. Its 2007 profits … sorry, “surplus” …, was over $300 million. Since they’re not paying taxes, I guess the money has to go somewhere.

Say hello to TELUS Health Solutions, supporting HIStalk as a Platinum sponsor. The company, which took a big jump up the HCI Top 100 this year from #33 to #20, offers a wide range of healthcare solutions (claims management, the new TELUS Health Space personal health platform, pharmacy management systems, telehealth, patient and resource scheduling, and the renowned Oacis Unified Patient Record). The open architecture Oacis, in fact, has been supercharged into an integration platform that offers an integration gateway, EMPI, CPOE, ED tracking, clinical documentation, Web-based Enterprise EMR, and data warehouse/BI portal, making it suitable for healthcare organizations and entire regions. I remember from talking to the folks there awhile back that Oacis has two big strengths: it can handle the interoperability requirements of regional deployments and for hospitals, it can be implemented without ripping and replacing (it also excels at being customizable, as I recall). OK, I’m prattling on because I was pretty charged up with Oacis when people started telling me about it years ago, but for now, let’s leave it at this: thanks to TELUS Health Solutions for supporting HIStalk.

Cerner moves up to the Nasdaq-100 Index, replacing the Oracle-acquired Sun Microsystems.

HIMSS is thinking more and more like a vendor. How do they improve (“reposition”) the perception of its CPHIMS certification credential? Hire a marketing company to develop a “correlating creative platform and 12-month integrated communications plan.” Because of the tsunami of federal HIT dollars, “the CPHIMS new brand positioning will be more essential than ever,” at least in the eyes of the marketing people (a knowing wink to fellow grammar zealots: “more essential” makes no more sense than “more pregnant”).

The California Nurses Association union files a complaint with the state’s Department of Public Health, alleging that UC Irvine Medical Center has overdosed at least five patients with narcotics by using malfunctioning Curlin infusion pumps that let patients control the flow of pain med IVs. The hospital disagrees, saying keystroke logs indicate that in at least three of the cases, nurses entered the wrong dosage. Meanwhile, an enterprising group of ambulance-chasing lawyers has bought Google search ads trolling for victims who have “sustained damage” after a Curlin pump recall, helpfully noting that companies have to pay out even if they weren’t negligent under current strict product liability laws. Maybe the lawyer proceeds of healthcare-related lawsuits should be taxed at some reasonable rate (90%?) to help fund healthcare reform since the former lawyers in Congress keep avoiding tort reform.

Industry long-timer Bob Fetters died Tuesday at 70 in Kennett Square, PA. He worked for over 20 years at SMS and had already RSVP’ed for Vince Ciotti’s November reunion. The memorial service was Saturday morning, but messages for the family can be left here. Condolences.

I like this fresh thinking: if we’re already paying double what most countries pay for healthcare, why should healthcare reform cost anything? I also like this answer: “We owe the insurance companies, pharma, etc. a severance package, payable into the future for some undisclosed period of time. Like the Hotel California, their lobbyists are making sure we can check out anytime we like, but in fact, we can never leave.”

Former Cernerite Anne Jamieson is named CEO of Portsmouth Regional Hospital (NH).

A hospital in Canada whose computer network was infected with the CoreFlood trojan horse sends warning letters to 11,500 patients, warning that the trojan was designed to capture information and send it to hackers and therefore may have done so. The virus was not detected by the hospital’s unnamed antivirus software (considering that Symantec has been protecting against it since 2002, maybe it’s time to check the updates, change vendors, or fire employees who disabled it on their PCs). CoreFlood was written by hackers in southern Russia to capture secure information such as passwords, e-mail contents, and bank records. It’s doing its job, collecting 500G of personal financial information in just six months, including details on thousands of banking and credit card accounts.

Siemens will provide Soarian to 37 hospitals and 300 clinics in South Africa as a subcontractor. That’s a huge and much-needed deal for Soarian, which was always loaded with unrealized promise.

The VA gets $3.3 billion to spend on IT in 2010, up 30% from 2009.

West Jefferson Medical Center (LA) gets a mention from the local TV station for its implementation of GetWellNetwork, explaining that it’s not for just patient entertainment, but also patient education. The article says patients can also find a hotel, check their bill, and send an instant message to hospital departments.

I like this opinion piece on Taj Mahospitals: “If your competitors have serious woodwork, you can’t get by with woodgrain Formica. If they have armies of PR people on staff, you need them, too. If they have billboards touting the No. 1 rating conferred on their pediatric nephrology team by a local magazine, you too need billboards. If they offer their patients such amenities as wireless Internet, on-demand video, room service-style dining and concierge service, you’d better follow suit. In fact, a recent study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that such amenities are three times as effective in increasing demand for a hospital’s services as improved clinical results are. (What? We don’t care if we get better as long as we can have YouTube and American Idol on tap?) The irony is that it’s all necessary, even though it’s a total waste in the sense that none of it improves anybody’s health one iota.”

Scary stats out of California, not like to improve now that the state is nearly bankrupt: the state’s nursing board takes an average of three years to investigate and discipline problematic nurses, gives probation to offenders but doesn’t crack down when they mess up repeatedly, and doesn’t have records to keep fired and disciplined nurses from moving on to the next hospital. One nurse kept his license for five years after hospital complaints that he had stolen and used drugs and fell asleep while performing CPR; he admits he was high at work.

Cleveland Clinic launches its health and wellness portal.

Dossia announces an API for its PHR platform, allowing programmers of new personal health tools to exchange  information with it. Documentation for it is here.

Insurance company UnitedHealth Group announces that it will spend tens of millions of dollars to build a national telehealth network based on Cisco’s Telepresence technology. It has hired former MinuteClinic CMO Jim Woodburn to run the program. More details will be announced on July 15.

E-mail me.

News 7/10/09

From John Q. Seriously: “Re: Eclipsys. In a morning blind-side, Eclipsys has released former MediNotes CEO Don Schoen and former Bond Technologies President Travis Bond. Bond created the EHR Bond Clinician, which was acquired by MediNotes in spring of 2008. It was subsequently acquired in the the acquisition of MediNotes by Eclipsys in the fall of 2008 and renamed Eclipsys PeakPractice. Schoen was co-founder of MediNotes, known for their Charting Plus and MediNotes EMR products.” Several readers e-mailed with the same rumor, saying that business unit had been merged into an existing Eclipsys one. I’ve offered Eclipsys the chance to respond and haven’t heard back yet. It’s unusual for entrepreneurs of acquired companies to stick around after an acquisition, but they usually leave under their own power.

That rumor follows news that Chris Perkins has been named CFO of Eclipsys, rejoining his former Per-Se colleague, CEO Phil Pead. He gets an immediate 22,222 ECLP shares ($362K worth) plus options for another 133,334 shares to “align Mr. Perkins’ interests with those of Eclipsys shareholders,” who are unaligned in the sense that they had to pay for their shares with their own money. He’s also getting $400K in salary and a targeted bonus of $200K with $100K guaranteed. Also announced are severance deals with Pead and Perkins: a year’s salary, 100% of target bonus, an extra year of vesting, and 18 months of health insurance.

From Ken Kashimoto: “Re: Valco. Heard through the grapevine that as a result of Hyland Software’s acquisition of Valco Data Systems last week, all Valco employees were let go last week.” Unverified. Valco’s headcount was around 35, I’ve heard.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Google OS. Google has announced a new web operating system called The Google Chrome Operating System. The Google Blog states, ‘Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don\’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.’ It appears that Microsoft and other major operating system vendors have something to worry about when it comes to competition from open source web operating systems.” Don’t underestimate the benefit of having a change-resistant customer base. Chrome is already out there and not making much of a dent in IE. Linux, on which Chrome OS will be based, is also free but has taken only a tiny percentage of PC users. People don’t like change even more than they don’t like Windows. I like all the Web emphasis, but they better not make Microsoft’s Vista mistake and tell users that dysfunctional and outdated plug-and-play drivers aren’t the fault of the operating system. Google is smart to be going after Microsoft’s cash cows of Windows and Office, though. For Netbook users and those who really don’t need anything running locally on the desktop, Chrome OS will probably be just fine, but that’s not a big bunch of users so far.

From Rhythm n’ Blues: “Re: CareFusion. I’d be interested in your response to this unique marketing tactic. Hope they’re stopping in a city near you!” Cardinal Health’s planned technology business spinoff and IPO, CareFusion, will sponsor a jazz festival series that’s going to Newport, Chicago, Montery, Sydney, Paris, and NYC. They’re using a lame excuse for it, saying that “there is a clear connection between jazz and medicine.” Dear Saint Obama, while you are looking into ways to cut massive healthcare costs by throttling the incomes of the people who deliver care, please make sure not to forget to save a little of Uncle Sam’s well-intended meddling for those companies that make a fortune from patients in the form of Pyxis and Alaris patient care devices whose high prices and market penetration have allowed them to hoard enough healthcare cash to stage an international festival series for jazz music, which nobody likes anyway except pedantic posers not quite up to classical and secretaries who aren’t allowed to play real music on the office radio. Sincerely yours, the people paying for it.

I get e-mails every few days from people aren’t getting the update blasts any more. I’m still sending them, so if you aren’t getting yours, your e-mail server is rejecting them as spam. I can’t fix that on this end, but you can contact your e-mail administrator to ask to have my e-mail address added to the “white list” of known non-spam e-mailers. If you use Gmail or one of the other free accounts, you can probably set it up yourself. I send HIStalk e-mails at least three times a week and usually 4-5, plus HIStalk Practice is good for two at minimum and sometimes 3-4. if you aren’t getting them, that’s the problem. You can also use the Subscribe to Updates box to your right to add your home e-mail address in addition to your work one since it’s usually the work one that is overly aggressive about discarding suspected spam. I don’t want you to miss anything.

Readers have added several new events to the HIStalk Calendar, which is how they got them listed and linked on the main page of HIStalk (to your right). Notice the cool way the event listings include links, direct links to a location map and weather, options to download to your e-mail calendar, etc. You can submit your HIT-related event for free. Here’s a tip for those doing so: if you click “Check If Recurring,” you can enter the event once and choose the days it covers, which is a little bit easier than making separate entries for each day.

My guest editorial for Inside Healthcare Computing this week is titled A Day in the Life of IT-Visionary Hospital VPs: Laying Out CPOE Benefits to Luddite Doctors. See if you can detect the thinly disguised sarcasm: “One was late in responding because her top-of-the- line hospital laptop had failed after her teenaged son had used it for several consecutive hours of doing Internet research for a school project in his locked room, necessitating a call to the VP-only IT support hotline so that a technician could be dispatched to her house on a Friday evening.” The publisher tells me that 88% of readers like my stuff there, with 12% chiming  in with the person who wants them to get rid of me and my “clever cynicism.” I was hoping for at least a 40% disapproval rating as validation that I’m stirring people up enough.

Origin Healthcare Solutions adds patient payment collection tools to its Origin Manager practice management system. I couldn’t follow the references to Connecticut and SSIMED, but anyone interested in that news will probably know what it means.

Jobs: Business Systems Analyst-Pharmacist, Laboratory Requirements Analyst, Regional Sales Director.

In the UK, the entire 26-member EHR team at Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust has been let go as the hospital breaks away from NPfIT and implements Cerner via its vendor, UPMC (yes, a non-profit US hospital is also UK vendor, as confusing as that is). They can apply for one of 19 available one-year contracts. In the meantime, since Pittsburgh’s infrastructure is crumbling because of a billion dollars’ worth of debt, entrenched unions, a declining population (even smaller than what’s left of New Orleans, which is actually growing) and a plethora of big-income organizations that don’t pay taxes, the city is considering surcharges on its hospital admissions and college students, which would hit UPMC directly other than it will probably just pass it along in one form or another.

GetWellNetwork announces several new clients for its PatientLife System for patient engagement, including big names Florida Hospital East Orlando, Children’s National, Miami Children’s, and several Adventist facilities.

Don Miller, MD, founder of prenatal care system eNATAL, e-mailed to mention to tell me that the company has several iPhone applications for obstetrics in Apple’s App Store. The application itself is sold in an interesting ASP pricing model: OBs buy “tokens” that are good for one per pregnancy. Here’s what Don had to say about certification: “eNATAL is not CCHIT-certified, never will be, and highlights what is wrong with CCHIT certification. eNATAL is an affordable niche EMR that adds tremendous clinical value, improves patient safety, incorporates clinical decision support functionality that the ‘big boy’ EMRs only dream of, saves money for all healthcare stakeholders, and is used in a ‘meaningful’ way every day across the country. But our subscribers will not receive a nickel from Obama for its use.”

More on the government of the Philippines investigation of who spilled the beans on the rumored leaky breast implant repair of its president: the National Bureau of Investigation is interrogating employees of a hospital that it claims asked for government help to make sure its employees didn’t breach patient confidentiality.

Hospitals in New York State have readmission rates that are much worse than average. The local hospital association (trade group) blames poverty, but didn’t offer an explanation of why Harlem Hospital Center excels and IT-loaded and $3 million CEO-led Montefiore Medical Center lagged.(I noticed while snooping around Montefiore’s federal records that even its chairman of dentistry makes $1.7 million a year, which seems absurd).

Medical Center Hospital of Odessa, TX says implementing its $6.2 million McKesson CPOE system will be a “massive, difficult project,” but its seems eager to snag $5.4 million of that amount from us stimulating taxpayers. A good line from the CFO about the CIO: “I’m looking forward to the day when we have a meeting when Gary [Barnes] doesn’t speak.”

A Canadian medical malpractice jury awards more than $5 million to a man who suffered injuries from spinal tuberculosis after he ignored his radiologist’s urging to come back for more tests to investigate problems he’d spotted. The judge found the patient 30% liable as punishment for not cooperating, but made the excuse for him that he was probably to busy to follow the doctor’s advice. The hospital says it has since implemented software that will prevent misfiled records and miscommunication.

Florida-based Metropolitan Health Networks chooses eClinicalWorks for its nine internal medicine offices.

Microsoft tries to use an Obama-like pitch to get people to “join the movement” and sign up for HealthVault on its I am Enabled site. It’s loaded with the usual cliche Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube connections. Jerry Seinfeld isn’t mentioned.

Speaking of which, I think spammers are going to kill Twitter if it doesn’t die of natural causes before they can do it. It seems like most of the new followers are just the same old pests who nearly ruined e-mail.

E-mail me.

News 7/8/09

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Palm Pre. Since the Palm Pre has employed its own Web operating system called the Palm webOS, TPD thought it would be good to give HIStalkers information on this new application. O’Reilly Media has posted the first chapter of a new book to the web on the Palm webOS covers some of the basics for this new system.”

From VSM: “Re: HITECH lawsuit. The supposed nurse (could not find evidence of license) who has filed a suit against Obama and HHS Secretary for HIPAA privacy violations due to HHS requiring EHRs has a history of legal issues. Her husband is a plaintiff’s attorney. See the court documents on their bankruptcy filing.” She’s licensed, according to the New Hampshire nursing database, and I don’t think her previous suits are relevant. It will be tough to prove her claim (warning: PDF) that HITECH is illegal because it forces disclosure of medical information from patients not on either Medicaid or Medicare. The suit’s claims wander all over the place, reading like a wacked out conspiracy theory rather than a serious challenge and making it less viable, I suspect.

From Joy: “Re: poll showing most readers don’t think providers are resisting IT to hide their profits. Isn’t this group of HIStalk readers already biased as medical and hospital informaticians?” Yes. But, we know the real reason hospitals aren’t adopting IT: they aren’t all that competent and confident about it. Still, when it comes to connecting to the outside world, I would guess that a fair number of practices and hospitals would be worried about outsiders seeing information like how much they charge and how much they make.

Listening: 10-year-old Britpop from The Charlatans.

Some calling himself or herself THR-IS Staffer left a scathing comment on Ferdinand Velasco’s interview that I deleted. It was curious for three reasons: (a) it was the only negative comment posted; (b) it was quite nasty and personal; and (c) the electronic footprints indicate that it actually came from someone inside arch-competitor Baylor Health. I like catching would-be scammers in the act, which I believe I just did.

SRSsoft bags another customer willing to drop their CCHIT-certified EMR in favor of the SRS hybrid EMR. Southeastern Orthopedic Center thought they were good to go with regard to HITECH, but says, “The CCHIT EMR we had purchased would have placed overwhelming demands on our physicians and resulted in a significant loss of productivity, even if we had overcome the initial implementation hurdles.”

A nurse poll finds that 50% would not want relatives receiving care at their workplace, 72% think staffing on their unit is inadequate, and 53% are considering leaving their jobs, most often because of staffing problems.

Emdeon, gearing up for its IPO, acquires claims processor eRX Network LLC.

Vince Ciotti is arranging a November get-together of former SMS’ers to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the company’s founding. The shindig is aimed at those who worked in King of Prussia in the 1970s, but Vince says the Malvernians who don’t mind listening to “what I did in the big war” stories are invited as well. Full details, including some cool old customer newsletter scans, phone lists, etc.

Bill O’Toole will have to explain this healthcare-related lawsuit product to me since I don’t understand it even after reading the press release and the Web site (and unless “subrogration” is in your lexicon, you won’t understand it either). It seems to be related to insurance companies being able to find out which policyholders are planning to sue providers and to get their attorney contact information. I’m sure the people who might use it would understand the description, so this is my gift to all of those folks reading.

A study of VA data finds that abnormal CT findings are often recorded in the EMR a long time afterward, if at all.

Detroit Medical Center connects to an HIE whose bizarre, contrived, and entirely forgettable name could have only come from a committee of clueless marketing people: my1HIE(R). I’m including the provided italicization to make sure you see just how weird it looks in print. Maybe it’s the same perky, brand-obsessed bunch who decided that GE-owned The Sci Fi Channel would be much more of a hot property if it “relaunched” itself as Syfy. This quote from the Syfy (gag) president should really wow its entirely geeky audience: “We really do want to own the imagination space … It made us feel much cooler, much more cutting-edge, much more hip, which was kind of bang-on what we wanted to achieve communication-wise.” They’re even mimicking GE’s “healthymagination” assault on grammar, coming up with the radical variant “Imagine Greater”, which it says is “a call to action … an aspirational, optimistic message about enhancing people’s lives.” That’s asking a lot from ancient reruns of Battlestar Galactica and Mork and Mindy.

I don’t have the records to look it up, but I wonder if Barry Chaiken is the first HIMSS board chair who works on the vendor side of the fence instead for a non-profit hospital? I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Kaiser’s Health Care Innovation Center in the San Francisco area gets a mention in the Fort Wayne paper for some reason. I think someone invited me there once, so maybe I’ll check it out one of these days.

Another use of Twitter: selling “medicinal marijuana”, including home delivery (driver tips are appreciated).

In the UK, the conservative party says they would dump NHS’s Connecting for Health and replace it with HealthVault, Google Health, or other online services. “This is an agenda we are massively keen on. We’re thinking about how in government the architecture of technology needs to change, with people ‘owning’ their own data, including their health records.”

A reporter in the Philippines says the government there is monitoring his activities after he wrote a newspaper story last week claiming that the country’s female president had breast implant repair surgery.

Merge Healthcare announces preliminary Q2 numbers: revenue up 13%, net income less than $1 million vs. $2.8 million, all complicated by its pending offer to buy etrials and the sale of its equity interest in Eklin Medical Systems.

A former Red Hat VP launches the Axial Project, which will be some kind of open source clinical information delivery system. I’m not seeing any healthcare background among the principals, so we’ll see what they come up with.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (misspelled in the article) have figured out how to guess the Social Security number of people born after 1988, sending their method to the Social Security people with the suggestion that maybe they ought to start randomizing the numbers. A Social Security guy pooh-poohed the findings, saying that the code-cracking suggestion is “a dramatic exaggeration,” but simultaneously admitting that  Social Security numbers will be randomly assigned starting next year.

Sunquest names Patrice Nedelec, previously with AMICAS, as VP of Quality and Regulatory Affairs.

A Canadian woman gets a $3 million jury award for a 1999 incident in which she sat on a hospital chair that collapsed under her, causing her no physical injury except claimed fibromyalgia, an ongoing pain whose diagnosis is entirely based on what the patient says they feel.

E-mail me.

Monday Morning Update 7/6/09

From Cliff Kirtland: “Re: Interesting use of funds in Health Technology Center’s federal filing forms. I thought you might be interested given Molly Coye’s next role as CalRHIO CEO. Can they afford her?” Non-profit technology research organization HealthTech took in nearly $4 million in 2007, lost $700K, and paid CEO Molly Coye $630K and the COO over $400K. CalRHIO’s records show that former CalRHIO CEO Don Holmquest (now in “a senior advisory role” with CalRHIO and not listed on its site) was paid $276K. Either Molly’s taking a huge pay cut or CalRHIO is upping the ante. She’s also board chair of CalRHIO. Whatever’s left of HealthTech is going to Public Health Institute, another research non-profit (it took in $88 million in 2007 and its CEO made $380K). I need to set up HIStalk as a non-profit so I can make some real money.

From Mike Quinto: “Re: big box medicine. Dr. Halamka blogged about a local hardware store. We should support the Green’s Hardwares of the world, avoiding the big box stores that have standardized the experience and limited the menu to keep costs down. It occurred to me: aren’t we working toward standardized medicine that will give every patient the same experience at every doctor, making medicine have that big box feeling to keep the costs down through standardization?” It’s probably the same: people will moan about losing local restaurants and stores that bring back fond memories, all while spending their money at chain restaurants and Wal-Mart. Still, the masses get to vote with their dollars and their feet, and if they don’t like cookbook medicine, they will seek alternatives that others will be financially encouraged to provide. Maybe what should have been done with stimulus billions is to find a better, cheaper, faster way to educate physicians, although with loose controls on how they are paid, they would all be lighting up the sky with profitable X-rays and raising the healthcare tab even higher instead of lowering it through increased provider supply.

From CogNwheel: “Re. insurance companies. You have got to comment on this PR piece from United. An HIT vendor telling everyone that if the government and companies would only buy more of their stuff, they would all save money and the American consumer would directly benefit.” UnitedHealth says healthcare could save $332 billion over 10 years if providers updated their technology to use something like its own, although it also estimates that commercial payors like itself would reap $100 billion of that benefit. They didn’t mention specifics, but they do own Ingenix, which offers technology to providers.

Information Week profiles Chad Eckes, CIO of Cancer Treatment Centers of America. His proudest accomplishment, he says, was replacing 18 legacy applications with 25 Eclipsys modules. His most admired tech vendor CEO is (was?) departed Eclipsys CEO Andy Eckert.

The DEA is helping LAPD with its Michael Jackson investigation by analyzing the state’s controlled substance prescription database, trying to figure out who prescribed the propofol found in his house that may have killed him.

Bill O’Toole got so many responses from readers about his HIT Moment With that he decided to become an HIStalk Platinum Sponsor (sounds odd, I know, but people interviewed here are always shocked at how many old and new acquaintances they hear from). So, welcome to O’Toole Law Group PC of Duxbury, MA, an HIT-only firm involved with acquisitions, licensing, intellectual property, and contract negotiation on both the provider and vendor sides. I don’t know of many HIT-only attorneys, so if you need one (and every vendor and provider does every now and then), get in touch with Bill.

A British doctor helping out Royal Free Hospital with its Cerner implementation says he saw doctors “almost in tears” with frustration over the project. I don’t exactly know what that means since you’re either crying or you’re not, but it sounds intentionally dramatic.

Rural health center operator HealthReach (ME) will get $1.3 million in stimulus money, most of which will be used to implement an EMR. Since I’m salary-fixated all of a sudden, I’ll report that its CEO made $50K last year according to its federal records, making it clear that actually delivering care isn’t as highly valued as talking about it. A lot of administrative overhead wears suits and sits in plush offices.

A former Cigna public relations VP testifies to Congress that the company’s underwriters intentionally pushed small businesses that had filed expensive claims to drop their Cigna policies by jacking up their premiums. He quit after Cigna waffled on paying for a teen’s liver transplant, then changed its mind right before the patient died. He warned that the insurance industry will kill meaningful healthcare reform, saying, “You cannot trust these guys … What we have is rationing by corporate executives who are beholden to Wall Street.”

Cumberland Consulting Group, new to the Healthcare Informatics 100, brings on Tom Hogenkamp as a partner.

Cerner will roll out uCern later this summer, a social networking site for customers that will also offer a customer-modifiable documentation wiki and screencasts.

An article by Christiana Care CIO Steve Hess credits its GetWellNetwork rollout with increasing patient education utilization by 127% and improving patient satisfaction related to having information explained by 23%. Patient education pathway items that are triggered in the EHR alert the patient on their in-room TV, reminding them to watch the educational material until they have done so.

Mount Sinai School of Medicine is seeking “the Holy Grail” mobile device for its doctors. It sounds like they believe the iPhone would be it if Cerner and Epic would develop clients for it. They’re also expecting good things for the Kindle e-book reader.

Maybe Cerner and Epic should follow the lead of Meditech in offering an iPhone client, lauded by Doylestown Hospital (PA) CIO Rick Lang as a key reason that its physicians have flocked to the iPhone and gained “major workflow improvement” as a result.

From Weird News Andy: a Tennessee boy is arrested after sheriff’s deputies find $5,000 worth of medical supplies, an oxygen machine, and a purse in a camper on his mother’s property. Paramedics reported that the items were stolen from their ambulance while they were treating the boy’s mother.

An internationally recognized informatics professor from Canada expresses frustration that his own healthcare providers don’t share information.

David Brailer says that the government’s lack of specificity about how stimulus money will be paid out to providers is hurting EMR adoption as potential customers wait and see. He also predicts that meaningful use criteria will be loose even if that dilutes the whole point of having them. “They’ll go for the big tent as opposed to a narrow solution. That’s not good policy, but that’s the politics of the matter." The CNN article mentions EMR licensing expense and the potential use of VistA, quoting Medsphere CEO Mike Doyle in comparing the $9 million the State of West Virginia paid it for eight hospitals vs. the $90 million West Virginia University (which he incorrectly called the University of West Virginia) paid Epic. “If Obama is serious about this, he won’t be able to do it $90 million at a time.”

Former Misys CTO/CIO and current Allscripts board member Cory Eaves joins private equity firm General Atlantic as SVP.

An overwhelming 81% of you don’t believe that healthcare providers are sandbagging on IT to keep the public from seeing how profitable healthcare delivery is, according to my most recent reader poll. New to your right: should hospitals have to use CPOE to meeting meaningful use criteria?

Seattle Children’s Hospital says healthcare applications vendors are foot-dragging on certifying and supporting their applications to run in virtualized mode.

University of Florida’s Doctor of Pharmacy program will require students to own either an iPhone or iPod Touch.

I would hope that by now healthcare providers have figured out that WEP security isn’t adequate for wireless networks, but in case any need convincing, here are step-by-step instructions on how how to crack WEP passwords.

A Seattle data center fire on Friday takes down a bunch of local IT systems, including those of Swedish Hospital.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University develop a $2,900 mobile kiosk whose six sensors check for problems and initiate e-mail contact with the patient’s doctor if needed. The sensors measure blood pressure, balance, hand grip, hearing, and visual acuity. It also creates a personal medical history and may eventually include medication reminders.

An employee at Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center (ID) couldn’t resist opening the attachment in Michael Jackson e-mail spam, launching a virus that crippled several hundred hospital computers. The hospital spokesperson said, “There is a variety of things happening — slow log-ins, programs shutting down, glitches … We have a whole team working on it. It’s a major headache for us but it hasn’t hurt patient care. We have stopped the spread, and we are in clean up mode now. It’s been a bear for the IT people.”

HERtalk by Inga

OnBase developer Hyland Software purchases Valco Data Systems, a provider of software, integration, and consulting services for hospitals. Valco is best known for providing paperless hospital solutions that integrate with MEDITECH software.

UMass Memorial Health Care and Bethesda Healthcare System each sign multi-year contracts for Soarian, Siemens Healthcare’s Web-based HIS. UMass is implementing Soarian Clinicals, Financials, and Quality Measures as part of their seven-year agreement. Bethesda’s nine-year contract is an extension of its 25-year relationship with Siemens and includes migration to  Soarian Clinicals, Critical Care, ED, and several other applications.

Spectrum Health (MI) and Medicity announce they’ve successfully deployed a platform that enables the secure exchange of health information between hospitals and physicians. More than 75 physician offices are now receiving data electronically from Spectrum Health and 70 more are in the process of being connected.

Capital Regional Health Care (NH) contracts with McKesson for its Horizon Enterprise Revenue Management solution. The health care system already utilizes Horizon Clinicals.

GE Healthcare and InterComponentWare (ICW) sign a strategic agreement to integrate and co-develop their HIE solutions.

HIMSS announces four new officers and four new board members to its board of directors. Dr. Barry Chaiken of DocsNetwork Ltd. takes over as chair.

CalRHIO names Molly Joel Coye, MD, MPH as its new president and CEO. Coye was an original CalRHIO founder and has been chair of the board of directors since 2007. She was also founder and CEO of the research non-profit Health Technology Center.

AirStrip Technologies and CliniComp agree to pair both companies’ product offerings at hospitals nationwide. AirStrip provides real-time remote access to labor and delivery and intensive care data via mobile devices. You may recall AirStrip was one of a few companies given the given the opportunity to demo their iPhone application at the Apple WWDC. CliniComp is a provider of documentation and EMR systems.

Good Samaritan Hospital (NE) completes implementation of Horizon Medical Imaging PACS.

A CHIME survey of 335 CIOs finds that almost 60% of their organizations use CPOE at some level. Physician adoption continues to be low, with 45% of the CIOs indicating their physicians are using CPOE for just 20% or fewer orders. A mere 16% claim physicians are entering orders 90% or more of the time. CHIIME members tend to come from more progressive institutions, which suggests their CPOE adoptions number are likely higher than everyone else’s. Any way you look at, full CPOE adoption has a long way to go.

I’m planning to take a couple of days R&R, leaving Mr. H to fend for himself (which he does perfectly well, but my ego requires that I maintain the illusion that I am indispensible). In between fireworks, family gatherings, and adult beverages, I hope you remembered to wish the country a happy 233rd birthday!

E-mail Inga.

News 7/1/09

From Dwarf: “Re: meaningful use. To all of the acronyms (HIMSS, etc.) who claim ‘meaningful USE’ definitions: you are defining meaningful FUNCTIONALITY, not USE. At least be honest about it. The biggest problem most EHR/EMRs have is their poor usability and this just makes it codified and worse!”

From Jack: “Re: Pittsburgh. Pervasive multi-system problems with a Cerner upgrade. The cover-up is on. Reporters will be punished to the fullest extent of medical staff by-laws and employment contracts.” This comes from a hospital I won’t name, especially since I have not verified the anonymous report.

From Carpluv: “Re: ARRA. LOL. Government , which comes up with ARRA, is going to pay doctors for EHRs. Then it does not tell them how they get reimbursed for it. This has stopped the buying cycle again. Morons.”

From The PACS Designer: “Re: CSA. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has been formed by vendors to address Cloud and Internet security issues. The CSA mission statement is ‘To promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing, and provide education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all other forms of computing.’ As we contemplate employing public and private clouds, it is good to consider CSA services that promote and educate everyone about security issues within cloud applications.”

Community Health Information Collaborative offers its health information exchange to providers in 18 Minnesota counties.

Virginia state officials admit that the recent hacking of the state’s doctor shopper database for drug abusers has caused doctors to prescribe fewer narcotics, sometimes to the detriment of patient care. Obama’s CTO, the former state technology secretary, put together the sexy $2 billion, 10-year cloud computing contract with Northrop Grumman that all the state’s applications are supposed to run on. At least one state delegate wants to kill the contract, saying nobody even knows whether the new contract will save money over the old one. Grumman is working hard to bag NHIN contracts, so you’d think keeping hackers out of an unexciting state patient database wouldn’t have been all that challenging. It’s still down, so doctors have to call in by telephone.

And in related (and belated) news, Lemuel Stewart, director of the Virginia agency that oversees the Grumman contract, is fired hours after he recommends not paying Grumman’s monthly invoice after a series of missed dates and what he claims were insufficiently documented invoices (not to mention that the agency is out of money). In the mean time, legislative hearings are underway as to why the state held closed door meetings to debate the massive Grumman contract. State employees give Grumman an “average at best” rating in terms of services provided. Even the interim CIO (also getting heat because he is also technology secretary and board member, all of which were supposed to be separate jobs) says Grumman’s “service levels in general are below expectations.” If anyone has an uplifting example of how a government partnership with big, publicly traded consulting firm has saved money or increased service, please send it my way since I can’t think of any.

The director of the Jefferson Regional Medical Center School of Nursing (AR) says its nursing students are benefiting from having Eclipsys Sunrise available for EMR training.

Finding it hard to get an Epic Systems job? There’s a spot for you if you are a talented cook.

Surgical information Systems (SIS) is a new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor, so welcome to them. The Alpharetta, GA company offers best-of-breed, integrated surgical solutions, exclusively focusing on the OR and perioperative systems. They’ve got a client testimonial video here and one on regulatory compliance here. I learned an important fact from the videos: I’ve been pronouncing the name wrong (I say “s-i-s” while customers say “siss”). No matter how you say it, thanks to SIS for supporting HIStalk (which, now that I think of it, has exactly the same pronunciation conundrum: is it H-I-S talk or hizz-talk?

Concerro (the former BidShift) acquires the assets of the CommandAware hospital incident command business from PortBlue Corporation. The press release tries to make a case of why an incident command system has anything to do with shift-bidding, but I wasn’t sold. Still, it looks pretty cool as long as your incident doesn’t involve downtime.

My latest driving-to-work inspiration. Doctors don’t use EMRs willingly because the entire paradigm of PC use assumes that: (a) users are sitting down; (b) they should be navigating with a keyboard and mouse since those work great when you’re sitting down; and (c) PC use requires concentration since applications are loaded with drop-downs, unforgiving edits, and user-unfriendly navigation. Have you ever seen all the available people at an airline ticket counter huddled around one screen and scowling as they try to figure out something as simple as your boarding pass? Or, hotel front desk staff who don’t look at you because they’re struggling with navigation of your room reservation? The PC is a terrible tool for on-the-go use, yet application programmers picture people seated and focused like they are when designing programs for them to use. Doctors are rarely sitting and able to interact intently with a computer (or if they are, they are not very good doctors). I know I say it all the time, but doctors the only highly educated and expensive professionals who are expected to happily peck away on a keyboard all day. Accountants, lawyers, hospital leaders, insurance company bigshots, and EMR vendor executives hardly ever do their own PC work, instead hiring assistants to free their time up for something more strategic. I don’t blame doctors for failing to see benefit since the people who are trying to convince them apparently don’t eat their own dog food.

Sixteen Mississippi hospitals receive threatening state letters for failing to collect mandatory state trauma registry information from their EDs. Some of them say Digital Innovation’s Collector Trauma Registry software, which was designed to work with national trauma databases, isn’t working too well for hospitals, taking up to an hour to abstract a single chart. They prefer the previous product, TraumaOne from Lancet Technology.

Ambulances in Franklin County, PA get connected from their laptops to the hospital for a smoother patient handoff. Why I as a federal taxpayer had to help pay for this is beyond me since I doubt I’ll ever set foot there, but that kind of common sense is hopelessly unfashionable in these feel-good days of having the government being the largest employer, insurance company, and bank.

Ireland’s health services oversight body says patient ID numbers should be rolled out immediately to reduce medical errors and simplify EMRs.

Conflicting findings among Hong Kong’s doctors: 80% say there should be a territory-wide health information exchange, but 80% of them also say their IT knowledge is insufficient to use computers themselves in practice. Nearly that percentage are worried about privacy and security.

A Kaiser article notes complaints of e-prescribing doctors, including security log-outs, inability to prescribe Schedule II drugs, and patient histories that aren’t current. One of the 50 doctors involved in a Shared Health pilot in Tennessee went back to paper. Another practice reports a 20% failure rate of prescriptions sent electronically, meaning patients show up at the drugstore and their prescription isn’t there.

An interesting thought as we move toward Internet-delivered medical applications: news of Michael Jackson’s death took down Google News, CNN, the LA Times site, and Twitter.

The CEO of a United Arab Emirates hospital credits Cerner with providing both access to patient information and management visibility that is helping them be more service-oriented. It’s a Hopkins affiliate, by the way.

RelayHealth, Medfusion, and Medem are mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article on virtual patient visits.

The pathetic soap opera that is Grady Hospital has a new episode. Two of its former CEOs are suing each other. The first CEO sued his replacement, who was head of the hospital authority that fired him, claiming she just wanted his $600K job. She just sued him for slander, claiming he told people she was sexually available and he could have had her if he wanted.

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HERtalk by Inga

Vitalize Consulting Services expands its existing consulting services to offerings for ambulatory care clinics. VCS is launching a new initiative that includes consulting services for Allscripts, ECW, GE Healthcare, and NextGen applications.

The privacy rights folks applaud the Supreme Court’s decision to let stand a New Hampshire law preventing prescriptions from being used to profile what each doctor prescribes. Two publishers of healthcare information argue against the NH law, claiming that data mining for commercial purposes is protected by free speech rights. Also, a federal appeals court refuses to block a Vermont law limiting the use of prescription drug data to profile the prescribing patterns of Vermont physicians. Look for more states to pass similar laws prohibiting data mining of prescription data.

New York-Presbyterian Hospital migrates a significant portion of its enterprise-wide IT server processing and storage infrastructure to Eclipsys’ Remote Hosting Services.

The Congressional Budget Office predicts that by 2082, health care will account for 99% of the nation’s gross domestic product at the rate we’re going. In 1960, healthcare spending was a mere 4.7%  of GDP. Last year we hit 16.6%. But why should we worry about that since most of us will be dead by then?

Michelle Obama announces the release of $851 million in community health center grants. The funds are part of the ARRA stimulus package and designated to address facility and equipment needs more than 1500 health centers. Over 650 facilities are expected to use funds to purchase new equipment or HIT systems and almost 400 will adopt or expand the use of EHR. Mrs. Obama made the announcement at Unity Health Care Clinic in DC, and apparently wore a light gray elbow-length jacket with a large silver high-waisted belt and dark gray pants. She accessorized with several silver bangle bracelets and diamond earrings. While I am sure the outfit was fabulous, I would have preferred this “news” article to leave out the fashion statement. That’s the kind of stuff we bloggers are suppose to discuss, right?

Tucson Medical Center markets “birth packages” to wealthy Mexican women coming to the US to give birth. Though the practice of Mexican women giving birth to children in the US is not new, the marketing efforts are. The marketing materials leave out the key draw: the newborn has US citizenship. Obviously, some folks aren’t too keen on the ploy.

Iowa Health Systems selects the Orion Health Rhapsody Integration Engine for message exchange from legacy systems and to make patient information accessible to physicians from the health systems EMR. Rhapsody replaces Sun Microsystems’ eGate integration software.

Siemens Healthcare appoints Michael Reitermann CEO of its US operations. Reitermann has served as CEO of Siemens Molecular Imaging since 2005 and was president of Siemens Nuclear Medicine before that. He will replace Dr. Heinrich Kolem, who becomes the global head of Siemens Angiography, Fluroscopy and X-ray business unit.

Physicians Medical Group of Santa Cruz County (CA), successfully demonstrates the exchange of health information within multiple communities.

CalRHIO announces its selection of RAND Corporation and USC to measure savings resulting from physicians’ electronic access to patient information via the CalRHIO HIE. The first phase will focus on emergency department savings.

Perot Systems’ Government Services Business unit wins a $119 million contract with the CDC to provide infrastructure and IT services support.

Participation in healthcare spending accounts has jumped 46% in the last year, a trend that is expected to continue at least through 2010.

E-mail Inga.

Monday Morning Update 6/29/09

The Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems (AMDIS) files its response (warning: PDF) to ONCHIT’s proposal for the definition of “meaningful use.” Its recommendations:

• Rewrite the standards from the point of view of patients
• Clarify how ARRA payments will be determined
• Focus on consistent use to capture problems, meds, allergies, histories, prescriptions, and vital signs, plus having that information coded so it can be shared
• Defer quality reporting until 2013 to give doctors time to routinely collect the needed information
• Take out anything that requires CPOE because it’s loaded with the possibility of unintended consequences
• Hold technology vendors accountable for data exchange capability by making that part of certification.

Publicity-seeking missile Jesse Jackson, apparently fantasizing that he was there with Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, and Michael as one of the Jackson 6, has insinuated himself into the limelight yet again, this time to dramatically repeat the obvious: the cardiologist who was in Michael Jackson’s house when he died needs to be found and interviewed (duh, Jesse). I’ve already made a bet at work that toxicology results will find at least one each of a narcotic, antidepressant, and stimulant, but the gossip sites say it will be more like a broader, Elvis-type blood-borne pharmacy since MJ was strongly rumored to have been a Demerol and Oxycontin addict in the past and, like a lot of celebs, had found himself some Dr. Nick-like docs willing to write anything he wanted even if it was likely to harm him (a Beverly Hills pharmacy sued him in 2007 for over $100K (!!) in unpaid prescription bills). Like former father-in-law, like son-in-law, sadly. Surely the tabloids are floating around offers to buy illegal copies of his medical records.

The final results of the HIStalk poll on HHS’s meaningful use draft: 20% think providers will achieve it too easily, 42% think the criteria are too hard, and 38% say they are about right. New poll to your right: do you think, as the technology journal article insinuated, that doctors and hospitals have intentionally resisted computerization to keep the public aware of how profitable their businesses are?

Also to your right, in Beta mode to see how many of you enjoy nerd humor like me: Dilbert. You can see the current strip, but also click the date link at the top to pop up a calendar and choose any date going back to 1989 or so (to the Phil, Prince of Insufficient Light days). My favorite is anything with Dogbert Consulting Company.

Justen Deal already told you this a couple of weeks back, but a new Canada Health Infoway report confirms: after eight years and $1.6 billion spent, EMRs contain information on only 17% of Canadians, far short of its 50% goal. Given its apparently failure to deliver what was promised, the organization’s response was: (a) we still might make it by the end of 2010, and (b) what the heck, it’s creating a bunch of HIT jobs, anyway. I guess our countries really are a lot alike. I was interested in the CEO’s educational background, but it’s never mentioned in his bio, which seems odd. 

Sentry Data Systems announces its new Claims Guardian application, which matches pharmacy procurement bills to charges for benchmarking, identifying missed billing opportunities, and documenting costs for submitted claims.

Cerner shares closed at $61.59 on Friday after hitting an all-time high, valuing the company at $5 billion and Neal Patterson’s shares at $344 million. Had you bought $10,000 worth of CERN in 1990, those shares would be worth $1.5 million today, for all us Neal-bashing losers (see stock chart above covering 1990 to now, with CERN in the blue and the Down in the red, no pun intended). Allscripts hit a yearly high Thursday and closed Friday at $14.74, but still way short of 2000 prices that were in the 80s. CEO Glen Tullman, predicting company growth, tells Jim Cramer, “we’re just getting started.” McKesson is in the 40s, way off its pre-HBOC prices in the 90s in 1998 despite paying massive CEO dollars.

But maybe your best HIT stock buy of all would have been NextGen parent Quality Systems. Your 1998 investment of $10,000 would be worth $627,000 today. The graph above shows the Dow (green), CERN (red), and QSII (blue). 

India’s national e-governance project will roll out Web-based telemedicine software called e-Sanjeevani, a .NET-based solution that’s claimed to be “the world-wide leading provider of connected medical devices or medical equipments, peripherals, and software used in telemedicine.” e-Sanjeevani was developed by CDAC Mohali, an ISO-9001:2000 certified R&D institute. I like its goals, which include “To provide multi specialty health care to the common man at the most affordable cost.” Maybe we should use it here to connect to specialists in India since our common man can’t afford it either. 

New York State Senator Pedro Espada owes the state and the IRS hundreds of thousands of dollars from the operations of his medical clinic/medical home, which gets funding from the state health department. The clinic paid the Senator $460K last year, but omitted that payment from its IRS filings. The clinic says it was promised $200K to convert to an EMR, but has received only half that amount. The Senator has been in hot water before, claiming a vacant apartment as his district residence and charged (but acquitted) of using clinic money to pay off his campaign debts.

China will restrict viewing of Internet-based medical research papers about sex starting next month, another step in a series of crackdowns that include requiring new PCs to have filtering software and requiring Google to block politically sensitive results from its searches. Medical information sites will be required to implement technology that will restrict sex-related medical research papers to medical professionals.

I’m torn: Microsoft is selling its Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade for $49.99 for a couple of weeks, temporarily discounted from its insane list price of $120 (Apple’s Snow Leopard will be only $29 and $49 for a five-license family pack, plus their stuff seems to be much less trouble–prone). Reasons against: (a) I have no unmet operating system needs since XP works fine for what I need, which is mostly to use Firefox to get to Google Apps and Gmail; (b) my Vista upgrade was a disaster, with all kinds of flaky behavior and lack of device support, (c) installing it requires a complete reinstallation of everything on the drive; and (d) I keep thinking of that Office 2007 ribbon bar, surely the stupidest and worst-designed software “feature” in recent memory, and wonder what similarly unpleasant surprises might have been tucked into Windows 7. I could load the release candidate version, but it’s just as risky in all those same ways except financially.

Speaking of Apple, I found its site for medicine and clinical practice. It’s a pretty short list of Mac-based EMRs, though, and I’d hope doctors wouldn’t choose a system just because it runs on a Mac. From the screenshots I’ve seen of some of those systems, they’re not much different from the hundreds of Windows-based apps out there.

Thieves in Canada who stole a truckload of computer monitors that a local hospital was donating to impoverished schools in Africa return them after finding out where they had been headed, attaching a note saying “sorry for the trouble, hope you forgive us, hope those kinds in Africa enjoy.”

Great news! Frugal politicians say they can try to fix healthcare for only $1 trillion. Let’s hope the government doesn’t run out of currency-printing green ink before it all turns to budget-busting red ink.

Jeff Amrein, who sold Advanced Imaging Concepts to Allscripts in 2003, moves on to his next venture: an online poker site called Hog Wild Poker Leagues. I thought the whole poker thing was as passe as swing music and pacifier-sucking teenagers, but maybe not.

Imaging vendor Merge Healthcare is added to the Russell 3000. Shares have been on a tear, jumping from around 40 cents in December to $4.30 now following major restructuring and a new private investment a year ago. Timing is everything, though: the share price was at nearly $30 in early 2006.

Odd hospital lawsuit: a heart surgery nurse sues her hospital employer, claiming she was demoted for complaining that a surgeon threw a 4-by-6 inch hunk of heart tissue at her during an operation and joked about it. His humorous line wasn’t mentioned, but I pictured him belting out Janis Joplin’s Piece of My Heart.

The surgeon general under the first President George Bush, who is now (but probably not for long) a VP of Florida Hospital in Orlando, pleads guilty of labor charges at her former New York health commissioner. She forced state employees to work overtime doing tasks such as having security guards move furnishings in her house and publicly chewing out state guards for mishandling her personal shopping bags. The inspector general’s report sand she added “new dimension to the definition of ‘arrogance’ and ‘chutzpah’." She’s also the sister-in-law of Father Guido Sarducci for you old school Saturday Night Live fans.

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