News 12/17/08

From MM: "Re: EMR. $83 million for an EMR? Unbelievable! Who besides me thinks EMRs cost a little less than an order of magnitude too much? I don’t blame vendors entirely. I blame the conceptual model used in the industry (CDR-centric that duplicates data already available electronically). Epic has the right idea with regards to customizing a solution based on the unique systems in place at a given facility. They have the absolute wrong pricing model – $75+ million for an EMR! Facilities basically hand over to Epic all the financial gains of moving to an EMR to Epic. All vendors are trapped in their financial and conceptual models. What entity will drive innovation and disrupt the healthcare IT market with a new model? Comments welcome."

From Kenny Rogers: "Re: Novo Innovations. I hear it’s about to be acquired or maybe to acquire another company." Well, I’ve heard that too, with Medicity supposedly being the suitor. No confirmation yet, but I’m not sitting on it just in case it’s true and the real journalists scoop me because I’m stuck in some meeting at work when the news breaks or Kipp e-mails me. I was highly impressed with both Novo and Robert Connely when I interviewed him in 2006 (I guarantee it’s worth a read or re-read even now — I keep dropping hints that I’d like to have a redux with him). Medicity, of course, has rocketed out of relative obscurity to become a game-changer, which would only be enhanced with Novo’s smart agent technology to connect and synchronize multiple sources of information (hospitals, practices, etc.) Now I’ve been a loud-mouthed critic of RHIOs since the beginning, but it’s becoming clear that there are two dissimilar types: (a) the impulsive "let’s put on a show" kind where two life-and-death competitors in one market swear they’ll smoke the technology peace pipe, only to be quickly crushed by the reality of their intense mutual hatred and financial naivete; and (b) the kind that is more thoughtfully designed to have a broad participant base, a solid business model, and a quick path to actually moving data instead of endlessly arguing about the shape of the conference room table. Medicity is mostly associated with that second type, which not surprisingly, is more collectively successful. Novo made its name with individual non-RHIO groups that just wanted a slick, painless way to share information at a low cost. That’s a powerful match, if indeed the rumor is true.

From The PACS Designer: "Re: wireless mesh. Wireless access at times can be frustrating in that the signal gets lost when you are in a dead zone. Within institutions, it can be even more critical if a wireless disconnect occurs during a critical time of treating a patient. Now, a concept that has been around for a few years is starting to gain some traction and it is called ‘wireless mesh’. The wireless network consists of wireless radios that overlap each other, so if one wireless radio disconnects from users, another picks up the additional users, thus maintaining continuous wireless connection through a self-healing process. Also, placement of the individual wireless radios in both inside and outside locations can provide campus-wide service to users. Wireless mesh is also referred to as a ‘mesh cloud’ by some, as it is another cloud concept to consider for your work environment." Link.

From Slick Willy: "Re: Best in KLAS. Always interested in your take on it." Methodology arguments aside, the results are hardly shocking. Epic dominated all the big hospital categories (EMR, billing and patient management, pharmacy, and even radiology) and had its usual strong showing in ambulatory. I can never figure out USA and its wins in surgery and enterprise scheduling because I’ve never known anyone who uses it. athenahealth was #1 in practice management in the 2-5 and 26-100 physician categories, which is maybe a surprise move up the rankings rather like Epic a few years back. I suppose an outsider might be surprised that the big companies did poorly: GE and Siemens had one winner each (in PACS and lab, respectively), Cerner had zero, and McKesson two (Paragon for small hospitals and ERP, although the latter is a pretty big win against non-healthcare vendors like Oracle). Eclipsys had a win, but only for the EPSi decision support product it just bought. MEDITECH has the most customers, but no wins. Everybody must have waved their white flags and high-tailed it because Epic continues to take whatever business it wants, with these rankings giving it yet another selling point it doesn’t really need.

From Bobby Orr: "Re: GE Playbook 101. Acquire, re-org, and then lay off a few years later. Not good news for the former IDX team." He’s referring to the story I ran earlier that GE Healthcare will be cutting jobs here and there, most likely some of them in Burlington. Show of hands: who really respects what GE has done in healthcare IT? (I’m typing with two, so there’s my answer).

From Francisco Franco: "Re: BlackBerry. The Bold is a major winner. I have tried them all (iPhone, Tilt, Curve, Palm, Treo, etc.) going back 11 years now. And by the way, we are close to allowing Macs on our network here. VMWare Fusion is the answer." FF gave me some Bold setup tips, which I appreciate. That’s an interesting idea for the Macs using Fusion (above).

From Susan Sweet: "Re: layoffs. Just curious why you have not reported on the layoffs at the HCA corporate campuses in Nashville. I was one of 109 IT&S employees which were laid off on Thursday, Dec 4 and there have been continuing layoffs in the other corporate areas as well. Have I missed the news?" I missed it. HCA laid off corporate staff including 109 in IT, giving them the part-time option (80% accepted) that most likely means fewer hours and benefits. IT was hit the hardest of the 2,600 Nashville employees. Like several other companies that now regret it (the Chicago Tribune owners, for example), HCA got cute with a leveraged buyout and is getting eaten alive by the overwhelming debt it required ($27 billion in HCA’s case). There was a time in a go-go economy when leveraged anything was good — houses, cars, businesses. Not now. Everybody’s grandparents were right — borrowing money to finance today’s fun is a really bad idea (as Uncle Sam will probably find out the hard way).

GE sticks with its 2008 earnings estimates, but says it won’t forecast earnings at all going forward. Jeff Immelt says GE Capital will still make more than half its usual profit next year, about $5 billion, which is surely optimistic.

Microsoft will issue a critical Internet Explorer security update Wednesday following discovery of a vulnerability that lets hackers gain control of PCs without doing anything more than getting unsuspecting users visit infected Web sites.

Colorado Governor Bill Ritter brags on the Colorado RHIO, which kicked off its live trial two weeks ago. Despite having spent $8 million plus unstated private money, the RHIO says it needs more federal or private money to actually roll it out beyond the current three users: University of Colorado Hospital, Denver Health, and Children’s Denver. On the other hand, not asking for federal money is so 1990s.

Washington University and BJC HealthCare (MO) sign for the mdlogix Clinical Research Management System.

SCI Solutions rolls out its new Web site.

It’s corruption as usual in Chicago, according to claims: a Cook County commissioner (who kind of looks like Corporal Agarn from F Troop to me) reportedly leans on MedAssets to give part of its hospital billing contract to a minority-owned subcontractor run by the commissioner’s crony and campaign contributor, after which the crony’s firm bills MedAssets $40 per hour per employee instead of the agreed-on $17 per hour. MedAssets drops the subcontractor, so another pal of the commissioner, the hospital board’s audit committee chair, proposes that the board audit MedAssets after receiving only one bill. MedAssets is turning the matter over to its lawyers, eliciting an eloquent response from the commissioner: "He’s full of s— … "If [MedAssets President John Bardis] continues to imply those things and slander me, I will sue the s— out of him and go after him to the fullest extent of the law."

I poked a little fun at our pals at HIT Transition Group the other day, so Marty pokes a little back. I liked this better, though, being a fan of caustic cynicism: "And who wouldn’t want to be a bank these days? Remember when American Express was a credit card — er, charge card company? That was before last month, when the government started using the Fiscal Shock and Awe technique that proved so effective as a post-invasion strategy: throwing pallets loaded with cash at banks, no embarrassing questions asked. Amex was immediately pacified: Don’t call us a credit card company, call us a Bank Holding Company." He’s speculating that insurance companies will use health savings accounts to get into the banking business, also mentioned by Susanne Madden when I interviewed her. Insurance companies are like dowsing rods for dollars: if anybody’s got money, they’ll find it.

Congratulations to those HIStalk sponsors who won Best in KLAS, announced Monday morning: Allscripts (Enterprise EHR, ambulatory EMR 26-100 physicians); Greenway (PrimeSuite Chart, ambulatory EMR 2-5 physicians and 6-25 physicians, PrimeSuite Practice, practice management 6-25 physicians); Nuance eScription (back-end speech recognition); CareTech Solutions (IT outsourcing – extensive); Hayes Management Consulting (topping the list of professional services firms). Listed as Market Segment Category Leaders: Sunquest CoPath (anatomic pathology – over 200 beds); Sunquest Blood Bank (blood bank – over 200 beds); RelayHealth HTP RevRunner (revenue cycle – patient access); QuadraMed Pharmacy (community pharmacy – 200 or fewer beds); MEDSEEK eConnect Physician Portal (clinical portals); Allscripts Care Management (acute care discharge planning); Sentillion Vergence (single sign-on); Virtual Radiologic (teleradiology services). If you’re a sponsor and I missed your win, let me know. Surprising, isn’t it, how many HIStalk sponsored nailed their categories?

Lame duck HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt announces his own voluntary privacy initiative to the NHIN Forum, including what the press release calls the "Leavitt Label," his personal Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. It’s one big-ass Label, given that the template (warning: PDF) runs 12 crammed pages of not-very-clear questions that would baffle the average citizen for whom it will supposedly benefit. Other than that, it was just a laundry list of the usual feel-good, detail-free principles that nobody could really be against, proposed by a political lifer in the last days of his four years as Secretary. Update: after sleeping on it, I’ve decided the questions are really pretty good since they are intended for vendors. The template is actually just six pages, plus another six of instructions. I’m still not sure about the ego behind pre-anointing it with the secretary’s name, but it may encourage some good conversations about disclosure.

IT people often call network stuff "plumbing," but this hospital CIO is the spokesperson about real plumbing. Kym Pfrank of Union Hospital (IN) extols the virtue of PEX plastic water piping in the hospitals big expansion project. The quote quickly segues into information about RFID badge tags, but then goes back into non-IT territory with talk about corridors and water pumps. That’s a busy guy.

PDA drug information provider Epocrates cancels its $75 million IPO plans. It’s already received $86 million in VC money. My April 21 comment when it was announced: "Clinical reference provider Epocrates, fresh off its iPhone stage time with Steve Jobs and apparently unafraid of a terrible stock market, files for a $75 million IPO. It’s profitable, anyway." I was actually being nice since I thought they were nuts, but then again I’m just a non-profit working stiff, not a captain (or even private) of industry.

Streamline Health’s Q3 numbers: revenue up 11%, EPS $0.00 vs. $0.00. A tiny company, but the guy running it (Brian Patsy) is supposedly interesting.

Christine Cournoyer, Picis president and COO, is elected to the board of BJ’s Wholesale.

Orchestrate Healthcare wins Best in KLAS for technical services, which I mention because they’re is running a text ad to your right to announce that fact here.

IT job prospects in North Carolina have gone "from bad to worse," the Raleigh paper says, reciting a litany of recent layoffs that includes Misys and Allscripts.

Odd: a Chicago company called Global Medserv Inc. (which I couldn’t find on the Web, but that is apparently involved in electronic medical records) offers to buy a failed but publicly traded golf course company just to get on the American Stock Exchange cheaply. I think the company may be DGF Medserv, a transaction processor that shares an address and telephone number with several chiropractic companies.

Siemens will pay $1.6 billion to settle charges of bribery and kickbacks to earn business. How good was the case against them? "We have been dealt with very fairly," its lawyer said contritely.

Royal United Hospital Bath, NHS Trust extends its IT management contract with IBM.

The US Postal Service is investigating an identity theft case at Saint Francis Hospital of Memphis. The police chief, himself a victim when someone charged $900 on a Wal-Mart credit card using his recently deceased wife’s name, says he heard that the breach occurred when a hospital employee allowed a family member to get on a computer.

If you care about uninformed public perception, you might be interested that the only healthcare companies to make the "Most Trusted Companies For Privacy" list are drug maker Johnson & Johnson and WebMD.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

From Mati Hara: “Re: holiday party? Thursday night at (a Raleigh restaurant), Tom Skelton and Rich Goldberg are ‘hosting’ — but not paying — for a reunion of old and new Misys folks, including some HR types, various sales talent, senior implementation folks, a few marketing people, and a couple of financial gurus. Hmm … could something be up?” Every month or so, someone sends over a rumor that these guys are buying a company, but so far we haven’t seen anything to suggest they are about to make an acquisition. But, who knows? Yule-time fest or job fair?

Community Care Physicians (NY), a 190-provider multi-specialty group, selects Allscripts Practice Management. The group is already an Allscripts Enterprise (formerly TouchWorks EHR) user.

The Hayes Management Consulting folks sent us an e-mail saying that, in lieu of traditional holiday cards, they are donating to the Toys for Tots Foundation and Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Of course, that totally works for me!

The VA renews its contract with QuadraMed for $23.4 million: $19.9 million in software fees, $2.6 million in services, and $900,000 for travel expenses. The VA uses QuadraMed’s Encoder Product Suite.

The Columbiana County (OH) health commissioner resigns after pleading guilty to theft in office, accused of charging personal items to the county health district’s credit card.

Maybe there is something in the water in Illinois. The HHS is investigating Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s business dealings with hundreds of affiliated doctors. Everyone is being tight-lipped about the whole thing, but the hospital is cooperating.

USA Today examines ways ERs are trying to solve overcrowding problems. Dublin Methodist Hospital (OH) uses CPOE to speed the orders and results process; Scripps Mercy Hospital’s (CA) computerized tracking system monitors patients and available bed space; and Hudson Valley Hospital Center (NY) registers patients at the bedside using a portable computer. Other hospitals are establishing fast-track areas staffed by mid-level providers who can handle minor issues.

A medical journal documents a new sleepwalking condition described as "zzz-mailing,” or e-mailing someone while asleep.

California announces the formation of the California Center for Connected Health, a new organization to boost services to patients in remote and underserved areas. CHCF is providing the center $5.5 million in initial funding.

A Michigan doctor and a pharmacist are charged with running a painkiller scam involving more than 200,000 illegally prescribed doses of OxyContin.

Siemens donates a Ysio digital radiography solution to Children’s Health Fund (CHF). Hospitals will get chance to bid on the system, with proceeds benefiting CHF. Bidding starts at $99,999 and closes December 18th at 5:00 EST.

Dennis Quaid and his wife agree to a $750,000 settlement with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center over the 1000-fold heparin overdose error that nearly killed the couple’s twin infants. Their lawsuit against the drug maker Baxter Healthcare is ongoing.

The former City of Angels (CA) hospital CEO pleads guilty to paying kickbacks in a Medicare and Medicaid fraud scheme. Dr. Rudra Sabaratnam admitted paying a co-conspirator about $493,000 to recruit homeless patients and take them to the hospital for unnecessary services. The “patients” were also paid small sums for pretending to be ill. Sabaratnam will pay $4.1 million in restitution and faces up to 10 years in prison.

E-mail Inga.

Monday Morning Update 12/15/08

From Orlando Portale: "Re: Being John Glaser. I like John’s recent post, but I’m disappointed that he left off one of his key phrases, ‘Core Nucleus’. Recently, we attended a meeting at Brookings Institution, where he must have said ‘Core Nucleus’ at least 30 times! The absence of ‘Core Nucleus’ from his post would indicate that it’s not in the ‘Core Nucleus’ of his lexicon; therefore, we may conclude that it is reserved for special circumstances where a distinct focus on ‘Core Nucleus’ is his wont." Well, you know star chefs sometimes leave out a recipe’s key ingredient just to make sure you don’t steal their thunder. I also was pleased to notice that some readers got in the spirit of his glossary by using his key words in their comments on the article, which gets them extra style points. Very cool (see?)

From oneHITwonder: "Re: HouseCalls. The MGMA listserv reports that HouseCalls is changing its business model from selling software to being an ASP only. They announced that, effective just three weeks from now on 1/1, they will no longer support anyone who already has their product. Even if you’ve already purchased it, you still have to start paying a monthly subscription fee. They didn’t even bother to contact users, apparently." HouseCalls is sold by TeleVox of Mobile, AL, which ironically bills itself as "high tech, human touch" despite apparently not bothering to let its customers know it was about to make them unhappy. Granted, subscription licensing is somewhat new to the industry, but let’s not be stupid about it.

From GE Kills Healthcare: "Re: departed executive. Yet another example that GE Healthcare folks can’t cut it in real HCIT organizations. Allscripts COO Ben Bulkley is odd man out at Allscripts after one year on the job. Tullman paid a huge fee to Heidrick to get him just 18 months ago." His LinkedIn profile shows him gone as of September and now an entrepreneur-in-residence at San Diego’s CONNECT, where he was already a board member.

I didn’t want to run a second e-mail blast since it’s the weekend, but HITMan Dan wrote a great HIStalk piece on some cool, cheap techie Christmas gifts (with pictures). Guys, surely your sexy lady craves a USB Aromatherapy Burner. Mrs. HIStalk will be so surprised when she opens that necklace-sized package, especially when she finds out how sensible I was in paying only $5.99 for her gift!

The Wall Street Journal quotes athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush on why any government healthcare IT investment should not include subsidizing software, which he compares to propping up Big Three car makers struggling under an obsolete business model. "The damaging side would be if help from the government ended up in the form of subsidies for broken approaches that have not worked … then broken purveyors of the broken approaches would be able to live longer and not die. Software isn’t the dominant approach in financial services or retail banking or anywhere else, and it shouldn’t be in health care."

I can never figure out how those wacky but wicked smart guys from Healthcare IT Transition Group make money since they give away a lot of stuff (I’m thinking they must have rich families who just let them do whatever interests them instead of working real jobs, kind of a dot-Mom thing). Their latest is a PC-based provider lookup offering, described by Michael: "Everybody wants some way to do provider searches, but we designed it with claims in mind. Say I’m a in hospital billing department looking up NPIs for physicians on claims, filling in missing (and now required) data on referring providers, secondary providers, etc. In a perfect world, my billing software would be smart enough to do that for me, but some systems are woefully sloppy about this. What we hear so far is that people are thrilled that there’s finally a tool like this." The download, with monthly updates, is free for your first state and $49 for each additional (I need to talk to the guys about value-based pricing since that sounds way too cheap, although in their defense, I see they are smartly offering a primo sponsor ad slot on the lookup screen, so some company will get their message on about a zillion desktops).

NHS executive David Nicholson finally admits that NPfIT isn’t really going so well. "If we don’t make progress relatively soon, we are really going to have to think it through again … We have said to Cerner and BT that they have to solve that problem at the Royal Free before we will think about rolling it out across the rest of the NHS."

The townies will fuss about this: Morgan Hospital and Medical Center (IN) will no longer draw labs for outside companies like LabCorp and Quest, saying the hospital was "unknowingly" giving its competitors a free service. The hospital defends its much higher prices (which cost one diabetic patient more than $400 extra out of pocket in one visit) by arguing they help cover unprofitable services and also provide higher value when results are posted to the hospital’s EMR. I’m beginning to feel really militant about the BS hospital pricing policies — the ever-increasing number of self-pay patients are supposed to swallow that aspirin with a phony $8 "list price" without a complaint while insurers get them for nothing. It’s as big a scam as the whole AWP pricing thing. Nobody pays list, other than those too poor to have an alternative. Hospitals whine about uncompensated care, but they screw cash-paying patients at every opportunity with a ridiculously high price-to-cost ratio. I don’t see how you can fix healthcare without fixing that. No wonder patients would rather go to India or Thailand to get the cash savings. One of these days I’m going to head over there for a first-person report on a medical tourism hospital.

Peter Witonsky joins medical device information integrator iSirona as president and chief sales officer, sliding founder Dave Dyell into the CEO-only position. I’ll throw out a guess that he’s Carl Witonsky’s son since he’s young and has a work history at Falcon Capital Partners, where Carl is the man.

Listening: new from Rise Against, hard rock with a punk edge (although their older stuff was harder). They’re from Chicago, so I’m thinking HIMSS should get them to do the opening song from last year’s conference, "This Is Our Time," previously warbled emotionlessly and repeatedly in Orlando by Disney day-jobbers, thankfully inspiring only a tiny bit of embarrassing execu-crunking. Also: Epica, Dutch goth-opera (try Track 2). I’m on record as not being against the idea of Simone Simons singing to me.

Open Health Tools Foundation announces a new project with Misys to develop server-based interoperability for HIEs.

Jobs: Director, Clinical Product Management (QuadraMed); Medical Director, Clinical Informatics (UW Medical Foundation); McKesson STAR Patient Accounting (Noesis Health). Weekly job blast signup is here.

I thought the osteopathic vs. allopathic (DO vs. MD) arguing was uneasily settled years ago, but it’s back at the University of North Texas, aka Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine, which is thinking about adding an MD degree to its DO curriculum despite the objections of the non-MD side of the house.

Everybody likes to weigh in on the "why doctors won’t use EMRs" issue, so here is my simplistic interpretation. Doctors, like 99% of people, want to be consumers of information, not creators of it. Develop systems that provide doctors with valuable data in the right context of patient care and you will sell lots of them, with appropriately positive patient benefits, since doctors are nearly universally in favor of delivering the best care they can. Develop applications that assume and require doctors to enter information for someone else to read and you will get kicked out of more offices than you can count. The model of forcing doctors to share their thoughts through manual electronic documentation is fatally flawed. There is no industry … none … where someone with the education and time value of a physician is expected to peck on a computer, especially in front of a client who’s only going to get seven minutes of time (I’ve never seen a CIO typing meeting minutes into a PC, yet they’re often the ones beefing about computer-avoiding doctors). There are no small business owners (doctors included) who will use tools they believe provide them no value; likewise, nobody would dream of trying to force those small business owners to use computers based on some kind of naive philosophic jihad against the inefficiency of paper-based recordkeeping. It’s no surprise that the best-selling physician systems involve practice management and billing functions that physicians don’t use personally (no different than in law and accounting office applications, in other words). It’s egalitarian wishful thinking that doctors will happily pony up to sit in front of a keyboard just because someone else thinks they should. On the brighter side, though, speech recognition is finally ready for prime time, better designed EMRs provide value to docs while still collecting information from them, and the "network effect" makes individually contributed information more valuable as more doctors interconnect.

Interesting: an Illinois children’s hospital (hopefully not the one the idiot governor was reported to have been extorting) reports the results of its FMEA on emergency IV meds, claiming the use of InformMed’s handheld calculator reduced emergency IV med risk by 88%.

Doctations will use clinical terminologies from Intelligent Medical Objects in its Web-based EMR.

Funny stuff from the Chicago Tribune’s media guy on NBC’s (owned by GE) moving Jay Leno’s cheap-to-make show to prime time: "NBC isn’t competing with ABC, CBS and Fox for the most viewers so much as it’s competing with GE Healthcare, GE Aviation and other parts of parent General Electric for the most profits." That’s true of GE Healthcare as well, of course.

AHA spends $4 million on lobbying in the latest quarter, some of it for "a better health information system."

Odd: Indiana driver’s license applicants can’t smile for their pictures any more because it interferes with face-recognition technology.

An Oregon Health & Science University employee’s laptop containing information on 890 patients is stolen from the employee’s hotel room in Chicago.

Forbes blames privacy laws for the failure of New York-Presbyterian to report the Plaxico Burress shooting to police, saying pressure to protect patient privacy may have confused them. "Privacy may be the biggest unfunded mandate of them all," it concludes, citing Modern Healthcare’s HIPAA cost figure of $43 billion over five years. The ED doctor who treated Burress without reporting it has been suspended. The hospital is getting some heat about its VIP policy from the local paper, which noted that Britney Spears was ushered straight to treatment in its ED after twisting her knee while filming a video in 2004, while everybody else waited for the usual hours

BlackBerry Bold Review

 

I’m not a big cell phone user and I’ve never owned a smart phone, so I’m either the best or worst person to review the new BlackBerry Bold smart phone. When AT&T offered to send a unit over for me to try, I figured it would be a good learning experience.

My first reaction (second, actually, after marveling at how small the box was) was how solid and balanced the Bold is. The next was that the display was shockingly high quality, like HDTV compared to analog. Video and sound quality are excellent. Watching a video on the Bold is like having a tiny DVD player in front of you (sorry for the stock photo above – I was taking a picture of the Bold, but my camera’s batteries died right as I was setting it up and the macro function was about as crappy as you’d expect for a $79 camera that I bought on sale at Circuit City, so welcome to Stock Photoville).

I didn’t really need a manual beyond the quick start guide. All the menus are clear and easy to navigate. A set of home icons takes you most places you’d want to go once you’ve got the Bold set up to suit you.

Connectivity is a strong suit, using regular cell, EDGE, 3G, and WiFi. It took seconds to have it running on my WiFi at home, bringing up Web pages very quickly. My Razr doesn’t connect from my desk at work because of low signal strength, but the Bold locks on every time (the only negative: I get a lot of HIStalk e-mails all day and the ‘vibrate’ frequency conducted to my body via the belt holster seems to be nearly identical to that of my stomach when it’s growling, so I keep thinking I’m hungry).

The browser worked just fine, showing full pages with amazing clarity and easy zoom-in by clicking the rollerball and fine-movement arrow pointer. Using it was entirely intuitive.

Big pluses: the keyboard is very well designed with a satisfying tactile feel. The rollerball is smooth and intuitive. Both are back-lit. No learning curve there.

The Bold works as a GPS, although I didn’t try that because the one in the car works fine. It has the usual camera and memory slot, of course, and a media manager application, voice command, etc. 

I connected to my e-mail accounts nearly instantly. You can open and even edit Microsoft Office attachments. I was waiting to have my car’s oil changed today and caught up on e-mail, checked the weather on AT&T’s MediaNet, approved some pending HIStalk article comments by clicking the e-mail link just like always, and read the headlines. There’s a reason people call it the CrackBerry. I’ve seen some of the really scary geeks at work carrying theirs into the toilet stall to prevent the "I need something to READ in here" syndrome.

Businesses will like the Bold, I think. It’s easy to use and is a taskmaster for its main business functions of calling, e-mailing, and texting. IT shops are already familiar with deploying and supporting BlackBerry devices as an extended PC desktop, with infinite enterprise configurability and security. The Bold is about as cool as you’re going to get without chucking out everything you know and like about RIM and going to the iPhone, which most folks seem to feel is superior for Web browsing, media handling, and availability of third party apps (your boss and your IT shop are probably just as happy that you do less of those activities on company time and equipment anyway).

Everybody wants an iPhone, of course, but businesses don’t usually take those decisions lightly (try to get permission to buy and connect a Mac to the network at most hospitals, no matter how arguably superior it might be). I think the Bold is like Hawaiian Shirt Friday at work — maybe not as cool as those iPhone-carrying 24/7 turtleneck-wearers, but still pretty darned cool for serious business.

I know some HIStalk readers are Bold and iPhone users, so feel free to comment. I’m a total noob with the Bold and am using it without connecting to the BlackBerry setup at work, so I’m missing part of the story.

Vendor Deals and Announcements

• IntelliDOT announces that 17 additional Health Management Associates sites have implemented its CBPC solution.
• Bon Secours health System (MD) completes its initial rollout of Vignette’s IDM to capture and digitize paper patient information and index the content for its EHR.
• BCBS of Minnesota names Jay Levine its new CIO and Colleen Connors senior VP of human resources and facilities.
• WellCentive Gateway announces the launch of two new HIT solutions designed to facilitate the sharing of patient data within a community.
• Parmer County Community Hospital and Collingsworth General Hospital (TX) will implement an ASP hosted version OpusClinicalSuite at their rural hospitals. Funding for the project comes from federal CAH HIT grants.
• Cancer Treatment Centers of America contracts with Sunquest Information Systems for the purchase of its Collection Manager software.
• The Dossia employer coalition will allow MediKeeper’s PHR software to its employees.
• The Daughters of Charity Health System extends its agreement with Perot System to provide full IT outsourcing services. Perot has provided Daughters similar services for the last seven years.
• Former Midmark Diagnostic Group President Michael Paquin is appointed to the board of CardioComm Solutions. Yury Levin also joined the board of the cardiovascular technology company.
• TeleHealth Services and Medcalm are partnering to release a new pediatric channel called Blue Monkey Planet. The channel will provide family-friendly wellness education content.
• Vangent is awarded a government contract to support and develop an upgrade to the EHR system used by the Indian Health Service.
• Patient Care Technology Systems announces that over 5 million ED patients visits have now been supported by its Amelior suite of products.
• Zix Corporation is rolling out an e-RX to 200 primary care physicians in Texas.
• Former AMISYS CEO Kevin Brown is named CEO of Casenet, a health insurance and managed care IS provider.
• The University Medical Center of Southern Nevada is deploying (warning: PDF) the Horizon broadband solution from InnerWireless.
• Scotland County Hospital (MO) is going live on Healthland’s EMR system.
• Streamline Health Solutions is integrating its enterprise document workflow solution into the MEDITECH Magic HIS at Massena Memorial Health (NY).

E-mail me.

Gifts for a Cool (Tech)Yule

By HITMan Dan

Do you know a fellow HISTalker who is difficult to shop for, or have you been described as such? Here are a few inexpensive gadget gifts with the techie in mind.

Create your Internet of Things that makes objects smart. Just label and tag your items, then run them over the detector to open your music programs or just about any other program. Tikitag supplies you with a reader and 10 tags and then, voila! your computer responds.

$49.95
Tikitag

Know if your suitcase needs to go on a diet before learning the hard way at the airport check-in desk. Airport luggage scales from any manufacturer are a must-have for consultants or frequent flying IT types (nothing is free with the airlines any more). They are available from just about any retailer for around $20.00. That beats the prices they charge for overweight bags!

$24.95
Edwards Luggage

Deadline got you stressed? No bubble wrap around to pop? This is just the thing. The electronic bubble wrap keychain claims to be just as good as the original stress buster and office annoyer. Keep this little gem around the next time your deadline is near.

$9.99
ThinkGeek

Not sure what to get the HERTalker in your life? Make this the Christmas she’ll remember with this USB Aromatherapy Oil Burner. One drop in the stick — instant office zen. Be sure to use this in a horizontal USB drive or you may not reach zen (you’ll be buying a new computer). 

$5.99
ThinkGeek

Disco might be dead (that’s a matter of debate for another article), but don’t let the kids use those old vinyl records for Frisbees just yet! This turntable from Ion turns those old records into mp3s in one step.

$87.99
Amazon.com

Can’t figure out how to move files over to that new computer you got for Christmas? This hard drive enclosure holds drives up to 1 TB and makes for easy transfer of those pictures, songs, and videos. Just pop it in and it mounts as an available volume.

$34.99
Newegg

Let the serious techie on your list deck the halls with silicone this year … recycled silicone motherboards, that is. These three ornaments in holiday colors, motherboards in another life, now bring Christmas joy to all techies.

$19.99
ThinkGeek

Keep your organization off the front page by preventing a data breach with the Iron Key USB Drive. You get 10 attempts at the correct password, then your data is mad totally unreadable. Seems pricey, but think of it as an insurance policy. USB drives are all too easy to misplace or lose, so at least make them inaccessible if they fall into hostile hands.

$69.99
Newegg

How many times does your PDA, phone, or music player die and you can’t find a place to charge it? Charging your device is as easy as some AA batteries. The new Energizer Energi To Go chargers allow you to place a call within 30 seconds on a phone with a dead battery. This is a great stocking stuffer for the serious airport traveler, or just to have in an emergency.

$14.99
Amazon.com

HITMan Dan receives no financial incentives for recommending any of the sites or products. Check prices online and in your local sales flyers.

Being John Glaser 12/12/08

Over the course of my 20-plus years as a CIO, I have developed a special vocabulary. Sometimes the English language just doesn’t have the right word or the right phrase to capture what I really want to say. Rather than risk being inarticulate or unclear, I make up new words or use existing words in a new way.

While this enables me to be clearer and really express what I want to express, the risk is that my colleagues won’t know what I am talking about. I thought that it would be useful to provide a glossary of Glaser-speak. You may decide to use some of these words yourself.

Duck Soup. The task we have to do will be easy and straightforward.

• You: We have to put together an outline of the project.
• Me: Duck soup.

Cakewalk: The task will be more than easy. We could do it in our sleep.

• You: We have to attend the meeting but we don’t have to do or say anything.
• Me: Cakewalk.

Non-trivial. The work that needs to be done is really, really complicated and difficult. There is a high probability that we are in for a gut-wrenching roller coaster ride.

• You: We have to implement 27 major applications in one week.
• Me: That will be non-trivial.

Boatload of trouble. A whole lot of trouble or bad news. Not your regular bad news. Some really, really bad news.

• You: The payroll system is down and it looks like it will be down for a month.
• Me: Sounds like a boatload of trouble.

How are we doing? We are in a boatload of trouble. Bad things have happened and we need to get out of here quickly. But I’m not sure what we have to do and I need to get your thoughts and ideas.

• Me: How are we doing?
• You: The data center has disappeared. We can’t find it. I think that we should run for the hills.

Gorbal 5000. A catch-all term used to describe the screwy technology that all vendors claim to have that will solve all problems that we might ever have. In addition to being a cure-all, the technology is very inexpensive. A myth. Brochure-ware.

• You: The vendor claims to have some interesting new products that represent a major leap in information technology. If they gave Nobel Prizes in Computer Science, the vendor thinks that they would get one.
• Me: Sounds like the Gorbal 5000.

Fat Chance. There is no way that that will happen. It is more likely that aliens will land today and take over the earth.

• You: The vendor would like you to visit their headquarters to learn more about their exciting new technology, the Gorbal 5000. They want to know if you can come early and play golf with their CEO.
• Me: Fat chance.

I look forward to the conversation. If I have anything to do about it, there is no way that we will ever talk again. I’d rather listen to fingernails scratching on a black board than listen to you again.

• The vendor: How about your team and our team get together for a one day session to explore how the Gorbal 5000 can increase productivity and enhance patient care?
• Me: I look forward to the conversation.

Fair enough. There are two uses for this term. One, you’ve been explaining something to me and you still feel the need to continue to explain it, but I get what you are trying to say, so you can stop explaining and move on. Second, you think my idea is a bad idea and you’ve told me, generally in a nice way, why it is a bad idea and now I get it. You’re right.

• You: Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. …
• Me: Fair enough.

Or

• You: You’re wrong. You’re wrong. You’re wrong.
• Me: Fair enough.

Right on. A pleasant, but minor surprise.

• You: The meeting has been cancelled. You have a free hour.
• Me: Right on.

Gotcha. I understand the issue or the problem and I know you’re looking for insight and wisdom but I don’t know what to say, so I’ll stall and hope that something comes to me.

• You: We need to do something about world hunger and bringing lasting peace to us all.
• Me: Gotcha

Terrific. There are two uses for this word. One is nice work, good news, I’m pleased. The other is yuck, bad news, go ahead and ruin my day.

• You: The implementation has gone really well. The users are ecstatic.
• Me: Terrific

Or

• You: The users are really mad. They are heading down the hall and they want to skin you alive.
• Me: Terrific

Interesting. My initial reaction is that this is likely to be a very good idea. Or that the comment seems to be very insightful.

• You: I’ve figured out a way to bypass that problem that we had talked about. I think it will save us a big headache.
• Me: Interesting.

Very cool. A major league, exceptional idea. A deep, maybe profound insight into what we should do. Service-oriented architectures are an example.

• You: We should do a service-oriented architecture.
• Me: Very cool.

Correct. You have said something that is true. Or at least you have reached the same conclusion that I reached.

• You: We should try to do this project well.
• Me: Correct.

On the nose. After much discussion and perhaps going around and around, you have arrived at the right answer. I listened patiently until you got to where I wanted you to go.

• You: Maybe this. Maybe that. Maybe something else. Maybe something other than something else. Hey, wait a minute, how about we try it this way.
• Me: On the nose. 

Sometimes CIOs are accused of being unable to communicate with other members of the C-suite. The use of words and phrases such as above should solve that problem.

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

News 12/12/08

From Andy: "Re: Hey, Sexy Guy …" Link. The AvMed HMO sends out membership cards inadvertently listing the customer service line with an (800) prefix instead of (888). You get a recording (like you would with most HMOs) and the folks on the other end are equally nasty, but in a different way ("Hey there, sexy guy … we love nasty talk as much as you do"). Audio here. I can’t believe people haven’t figured out, after all these years, that not all toll-free numbers start with (800).

From Annonny: "Re: interesting article." Link. Massachusetts brings up a new Web site that allows residents to compare hospital quality and cost information. Theoretically, anyway: navigation is not very intuitive and you have to spell the hospital’s name perfectly (and the front page graphic and tagline are painfully distorted). I screwed around with it for several minutes and never did figure out how to compare two hospitals unless their names can be found within a single search (like within one city). Nice idea and the information is good, but the site’s design is really bad for the intended audience.

From OHio: "Re: The Breakaway Group. They have decided, yet again, to redirect focus and abandon a product offering. Previously, they were change management leaders, then RIS/PACS implementation leaders, then Lawson’s learning partner, then EMR implementation leaders. Lawson Healthcare ERP was the #1 focus of the company, then the group was terminated and they no longer offer those services. Is anyone else sick and tired of these opportunists that are not from healthcare looking to capitalize in this sector?" All unverified. I’ve had a good report or two about the company from trustworthy sources, so I wouldn’t write them off just because they’re looking for a niche.

From eScriptionGuy: "Re: increases. Nuance Communications today announced that the staff will not receive merit increases this year; however, they will partially pay year-end bonuses (despite missing internal organic growth goals). The former eScription business achieved their financial targets, but won’t receive merit increases or year-end bonuses." Unverified, but even if it’s true, I’d still be pretty happy just to have a job in this economy. Probably not what you wanted to hear, but I’m a realist.

From Kent Winkdale: "Re: Doctations. A friend saw their product at an informatics conference. It’s a Flash-based EMR that takes advantage of Web services and sounds impressive. Does anyone have experience with them?" Kent isn’t a company shill trying to get sly PR (I know him), but I don’t know much about Doctations or anybody on its management team or board, although Louis Cornacchia (president and CEO) invited Inga to their MGMA booth in October in an HIStalk comment (he obviously was a company shill trying to get PR, but we’re OK with that as long as it’s an executive and not a PRtist).

From HIT National Attention: "Re: athenahealth. Seems the entire national media is going to athena’s CEO when it comes to HIT. Every time I turn around, they are in the news. I am curious to know what they know we don’t – they do mostly rev cycle, right?" Jonathan Bush is a very smart guy who is also press-friendly and able to clearly express a long and objective view in an eminently quotable way. Like most CEOs, his knowledge base extends beyond athenahealth’s core business of revenue cycle and PM/EMR. I’m guessing he can explain it as well as anyone, plus be entertaining in the process.

From Mark Loes: "Re: Contra Costa County. Announced yesterday was the appointment of David J. Runt as the new Chief Information Officer of Information Systems division of the Health Services Department of Contra Costa County in Martinez, California. David brings over 27 years of progressive executive leadership in healthcare information technology to the role. Most recently, David was the Vice President, Information Services and Chief Information Officer for Sun Health in Phoenix, Arizona where he had a 10-year tenure. David will be joining the team at Contra Costa County on January 4, 2009."

Listening: Crimson Sky, female-led melodic prog-metal from the UK that I found while trolling Rhapsody. So obscure they’re not even on Amazon or Wikipedia, but they sound pretty good. Also: Traening, fine, lush, dramatic, complex music by a long-gone band from Denmark (a more popular successor group is here).

pMDsoft introduces its charge capture software for the iPhone, which it says is the first to market.

A source tipped us off to the new version of Microsoft CUI Patient Journey Demonstrator. It now uses SNOMED-CT and has new ECG and angiogram markup tools. The demo script is here (warning: PDF).

The Middle East arm of Indian tech company Wipro announces its HIS Lite information system for nursing homes and small hospitals, licensed as a monthly subscription.

Maricopa Integrated Health System (AZ) gets a local newspaper write-up for its $83 million EMR project. The article splashes on a little cold water near the end when it talks about the hospital’s almost-denied Joint Commission accreditation.

Frimley Park Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in Surrey, England chooses Picis CareSuite for surgery, anesthesia, and critical care.

Leerink Swann and Nasdaq OMX hosted a healthcare IT forum earlier this week featuring Glen Tullman of Allscripts, Steve Klasko of USF, and others. You can view the Webcast after signing up here, they tell me.

Speaking of Webcasts, several people have asked about having HIStalk run one on their behalf (implicit in that, I would hope, is that I’ve got a short attention span and am therefore BS-averse, so they would have to be entertaining and useful to someone other than the company trying to sell a product or concept). Do you watch them? Is it worth my time to do those? (my presumptive answer is no, but I’m always open to counterpoints).

Amanda Adkins, a Cerner manager over its Healthe government business and 2004 campaign manager for Sen. Sam Brownback, looks to be the next chairwoman of the Kansas Republican party.

Ray Ghanbari, former CTO of Ingenix, is named VP pf strategy and products at Vital Images.

Shenandoah Valley Medical System and West Virginia University Hospitals-East are working on a health information exchange in eastern West Virginia, connecting Shenandoah’s NextGen system to WVUH’s MEDITECH systems. In the mean time, the statewide West Virginia Health Information Network will RFP its HIE framework in early 2009.

Hospital layoff: Boca Raton Community Hospital (FL) – 39 employees.

Crossflo Systems buys the assets of three-employee Iameter of Belmont, CA, which offers hospital data analysis and process improvement tools.

AHIC Successor will announce its new name right after New Year’s.

Peter Neupert of Microsoft Health Solutions Group is named to the board of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

Red Hat invests in BI vendor Jaspersoft as part of a $12.5 million round of growth equity funding.

CSC releases (warning: PDF) a pretty gloomy report that summarizes the current and upcoming impact of our economic situation. The perfect storm is brewing, they say: Medicare/Medicaid cuts, declining margins, higher interest rates for capital improvement projects, more uncompensated care, and declines in elective procedures. In response, most hospitals have initiated such cost-cutting measures as delaying/deferring construction plans and IT projects. Forty-three percent anticipate needing to lay off staff.

Take a look at this RP-7 robot by InTouch Health being piloted at military hospitals. It allows for two-way audio and video interaction between a doctor, patient, staff, or family. The units are about $250,000 and weigh about 200 lbs.

Not that I am necessarily eyelash-challenged, but a girl can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many eyelashes. Thus, good news here on a newly FDA-approved product to enhance eyelash prominence (I am happy to accept samples of LATISSE and provide my expert evaluation).

Here is a question for you HIPAA gurus. The FBI is looking over the medical records of pitcher Roger Clemens to determine if he committed perjury after denying he ever used human growth hormones or steroids. Did Clemens have to give his permission?

A JAMA study finds that people are more likely to lose weight if they have a financial incentive to do so. Well, duh!

The Health Research Institute at PricewaterhouseCoopers publishes its 2009 list of top health industries issues. The economic downtown tops the list, technology ranks #6, and IDC-10 is #9. 

IT support and service provider ITelagen is a new reseller for the Allscripts MyWay platform. That’s the old Misys MyWay for anyone not keeping up.

The Memorial Hermann Healthcare System (TX) sells off a couple of non-campus medical billings for approximately $16 million.

In San Antonio, the Army and Air Force come together to break ground on a $724 million construction and renovation project at Brooke Army Medical Center and Wilford Hall Medical Center. The unified facilities will be named the San Antonio Military Medical Centers North and South.

In another sign that the economy isn’t all bad, Ryan Cos. announces the start of a new $25 million medical office project in Auburn Hills, MI.

This last weekend, I got my Christmas tree up and the lights on, so I am settling into the holiday spirit. A friend sent me a cool Christmas CD called “A Miracle Foundation Christmas” which will get even Mr. Grinch in the mood. One hundred percent of the proceeds for this $15 CD go to support the Miracle Foundation, an organization that runs several orphanages in India and provides children with such basics as food, clothing, water, shelter, medical care, and education. So, great CD, great cause, and includes Bob Schneider singing the sexiest version of “Silver Bells” ever.

A study by actuarial company Milliman, Inc. finds that low Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements to hospitals and physicians costs consumers and employers almost $90 billion. The report claims that annual health care spending for a family of four is $1,788 higher than it would be if the government paid rates similar to private carriers. The underpayment from public programs effectively shifts the uncovered costs over to employers and consumers. Not surprisingly, several big insurance companies paid for the study.

The NY State Health Department releases $47 million to Kingston Hospital to facilitate its combining with Benedictine Hospital. The money will be used to expand the ER, to fund the new Foxhall Ambulatory Surgery Center, and to pay hospital debt.

Washington, DC is also handing out money. The city extends $51 million in medical grants for three healthcare entities to improve primary and emergency care for children and the poor.

It’s apparently not a great time for a career in healthcare if you live in Minneapolis/St. Paul. In addition to the 300 jobs eliminated by Allina Hospitals and Clinics a couple of months ago, Fairview Health Services, Park Nicollet Health Services, and North Memorial Health Care are terminating 200, 600, and 233 employees, respectively. Good luck, all.

This survey claims that 27% of American adults say they are "extremely likely or somewhat likely" to create an online personal health record to help track their medical history and medications.

Only one in five hospitals collecting data on patient injuries or deaths from medical errors shares that information with managers or others who could implement measures to address the problems. This based on an AHRQ survey of 1,600 hospital risk managers. Which begs the question: why not share that information? Wouldn’t it help everyone to get better?

An AHRQ report suggests that doctors using e-Rx were more likely to write prescriptions for lower cost drugs that lead to savings. If e-RX were used by all doctors, researchers claim the savings potential could be $3.9 million per 100,000 patients per year.

David Muntz and Lynn Harold Vogel are named CHIME’s newest Board of Trustees members. Muntz is senior VP and CIO at Baylor Health Care System (TX) and Vogel is VP/CIO at UT-MD Anderson Cancer Center (TX).

E-mail Inga.

News 12/10/08

From Kentomatic: "Re: ComputerWorld 100 list just published. Several notable healthcare CIOs made the list." On it: Joseph DeVenuto, Norton Healthcare; Karen Graham, Cooper University Hospital; Jeremy Meller, Marshfield Clinic; and Gregory Veltry, Denver Health & Hospital Authority. Congratulations to all.

From Wompa1: "Re: Video of healthcare seminar. Cato Institute, a libertarian organization, did an event called ‘Does America’s Health Care Sector Produce More Health?’ You can stream it in Real Video or MP3." Link. I like the Libertarian message, but it’s been totally lost as the government nationalizes entire industries of incompetent businesses and runs the printing presses 24 hours a day to create funny money to pay for it all. At least they could bring back the Civilian Conservation Corps, which built some truly inspiring national parks back in the previous depression.

From Inspector Clouseau: "Re: rumors. How safe is your site and how traceable are the reported rumors?" If you e-mail me or use the Rumor Report, I delete your message, leaving no trace (even though I also use an anonymous Yahoo account). I don’t name names and I often rewrite stuff so that nobody can recognize the writing style. Since I don’t know who the tipsters are, putting me on the stand wouldn’t help, either.

From The PACS Designer: "Re: modular data centers. Microsoft is publicizing its vision of a future style for modular data centers  With their Generation 4 concept for a data center, the need for more computer resources can be quickly set up using vans loaded with the configurations needed for each customer who wants to employ Microsoft Live solutions." Link (warning: video).  

From At the Mouse’s House: "Re: Pyxis. Cardinal announces new Pyxis MedStation 4000. Pyxis literature in the hotel drop bag at the show includes a footnote that Cardinal may not offer the MS4000 for sale. Their press release makes no such disclaimer. Is it real or a concept?" Cardinal announced the launch of Medstation 4000 Monday, but that could mean anything, especially since some of its businesses will be spun off within months. I saw no mention or pictures on Cardinal’s site, which is usually a symptom of vaporware. Here’s how to find out: (1) corner a company exec in the booth and ask who the beta site was; and (2) tell them your Omnicell contract is almost up and you need to know how quickly they could get 4000 up and running in your place. Enjoy the Midyear.

From Rogue: "Re: cheap technologies. This company has a 10-number pad with a programmable display that administers patient questionnaires. Used in drug trials but neatest app. I saw a waiting room sleep apnea questionnaire that was on the chart before the doc walked into examine the patient. Full disclosure: I know the guy who owns it, but have no financial interest." Link. I usually delete stuff like this, but it’s from a hospital guy. Look or not – I’m neutral.

From Moishesdad: "Re: Glen Tullman. I have to believe he is going to be making the trip to DC at some point. Glen has deep ties with Obama. Given the news over the weekend about the push to EMRs, Glen would be an obvious choice. And for Glen, an elegant way to wind down at MDRX." It wouldn’t surprise me either way. And while we’re on the subject, here are some of the motley crew nominated for ONCHIT by you readers: Scott Shreeve, John Glaser (that one is recent, so he must have scored points with his Being John Glaser), Orlando Portale, and Mr. HIStalk (hah!). If you’ve ever read the congressional transcripts of all those politicians ripping viciously and personally into Brailer mostly because he was GW’s boy, then you would know ONCHIT isn’t for the faint of heart.

McKesson announces (actually, the press release says "unveils," which sounds more dramatic) results of its pharmacy performance survey, then launches right into a plug for highlighted "good example" Vanderbilt, which was touted in the next paragraph as having paid McKesson to improve its performance (what a happy coincidence!) McKesson also sponsors the Most Wired nonsense, so they’ve mastered the art of making supposedly industry-serving surveys nothing more than a Trojan horse for a commercial pitch.

Thanks to John Glaser for offering to write occasionally for HIStalk. I had e-mailed him asking if he knew any good CIOs who write well who might want to contribute here (assuring him I wasn’t like a recruiter asking, "Do you know anyone who would be interested in this job?" to see if you’ll bite). He offered to share his thoughts on occasion, which is quite an honor given his stature in the industry (and his sharply honed dry sense of humor). Give him a little love by dropping a nice comment onto his piece from today so he knows he’s appreciated by someone other than me.

Let’s hope that the former junior senator from Illinois and President-elect is the apparent first completely uncorrupt Chicago politician. Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich is busted by the Feds after trying to conduct an eBay-style auction of Obama’s former Senate seat. He also reportedly considered appointing himself to the office to give him a better chance to beat corruption charges (he could still do it, in fact, since Obama’s replacement is still his choice). He also suggested, according to affidavits, that he be named HHS secretary and also tried to take away $8 million in state money from a children’s hospital because one of its executives declined to give him a $50,000 political contribution. Odds are good that he’ll be the second consecutive Illinois governor to earn federal corruption jail time. The scary thing is that people from Illinois keep voting these scumbags into office, only to watch them get hauled off.

ANCC and Cerner announce that Abington Memorial Hospital (PA) is the winner of their 2008 Magnet Prize for innovative ANCC Magnet-recognized programs. One might be struck by the irony that Abington is a showcase Eclipsys site.

A laptop containing PHI of 50 patients is stolen from the cardiology department of Salem Hospital (MA).

Allscripts CEO (and Obama campaign policy advisor) Glen Tullman says he expects the incoming administration to promote EMRs and e-prescribing, although maybe spending less than the $50 billion Obama promised while campaigning.

HHS is looking for an ONCHIT policy analyst in DC, with pay topping out at $127K. I’m disappointed, of course, that they didn’t list it on Healthcare IT Jobs, but other jobs there include Epic Rx Trainer, Account Executive – Northeast States, Texas Regional Sales Manager, and Regional Sales Director.

A Harvard study finds that e-prescribing saves money if it informs doctors of the relative costs of various pharmacologic alternatives. That’s great, provided it takes the entire cost of therapy into account (required lab monitoring, likelihood of compliance for complex dosing schedules, true cost and not just phony AWP, side effect profile, etc.) It’s odd that everybody talks about consumer transparency, but nobody’s telling doctors what drugs, labs, and treatments cost. Surely among all those crappy dot-com business models some startup could have attacked that angle.

 
Brigham and Women’s signs for Omnicell’s SinglePointe medication management system, which provides automated distribution of all meds, not just those in the dispensing cabinet. I’m hating the name, of course, since it’s both conjoined and faux-Brit (like "centre" and "grille").

Software developed in Australia for GPS-equipped Nokia and Symbian phones allows security guards and other high-risk employees (including those in healthcare) to be tracked by supervisors. it also gives then a panic button that sends their location instantly when pressed.

Fifty Kaiser medical directors will be trained by an "anger management guru" in emotional intelligence, which takes just four hours (must not be some of the docs I know). Cut up in the class and see what happens.

GE’s Wisconsin-based diagnostic equipment unit will cut costs and jobs due to declining demand for big-ticket MRIs and CT scanners.

Everybody’s applauding (their words) Obama’s post-campaign, pre-inauguration HIT warblings. You may recall the same reaction back in 2004 when President Bush ("The Google") made his quickly forgotten Vanderbilt speech that claimed an unswerving commitment to technology-driven healthcare reform ("The president went to Vanderbilt and all I got was this CCHIT.")  Politicians get elected making rhetoric-filled promises, a tiny minority of which actually amount to anything, but then again, I’m a cynic with a long memory. I hope I’m wrong.

Interesting: a hospital in Thailand aims to become a "hospital without walls" in three to five years, using technology to deliver its services anywhere. Steps so far: a wireless network, electronic medical records, and patient TVs that allow doctors to use the EMR by inserting their ID card. Coming: home monitoring and telemedicine. That could be done by any number of institutions here, of course, except for one big roadblock: getting paid for it.

Pittsburgh has few jobs that don’t involve non-profits, but never underestimate the economic power of being a highly compensated healthcare middleman. Highmark Inc. is on a hiring tear, especially for techies. Experience in writing claims denial routines and indecipherable patient communication letters preferred (sarcasm mine).

DoD starts testing of Google Health and HealthVault.

I saw this headline ("Your mouth can signal your overall health") and wasn’t thinking about the gum condition it is actually about. I was instead picturing a tonsil-baring scream or curse-laden begging for Dilaudid, which isn’t usually a good sign, either.

Oakwood Healthcare Systems (MI) freezes hiring, postpones a hospital improvement project, and delays computer upgrades. It will get really interesting if the Big Three pink slips start flying, which should be the case if they have such a crappy business model that even government oversight ("Car Czar") is more innovative and nimble. Even Beaumont is throttling back.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

From Lauryn Hill: "Re: holiday gifts. You inspired me with one of your recent posts regarding a company that is donating money to a food shelf instead of having a holiday party. We have decided to donate money to a food shelf in honor of our clients who we would normally send gifts to at this time of year. We are sending the clients a letter letting them know of the donation. Not the same as a box from Godiva, but I think this year is exceptional." Godivas are great, but nothing beats food on the table. A couple of weeks, ago a reader commented that when companies cancel/scale back their holiday parties, it’s bound to hurt the local economy and those in the hospitality industry. I can’t disagree. However, I’ll never forget the first time I helped deliver food and holiday gifts to families many years ago. My life seemed pretty rosy after seeing the one-bedroom home shared by three generations. Grandpa was sleeping on a mattress in the living room and everyone had coats on. The only heat they had was coming from the stove’s gas burners, which were set to high. So thanks, Lauryn, for helping make a difference.

Here is an oldie but a goodie. If you’re a manager worried that budget cuts and trimming the holiday festivities will negatively affect morale, try handwriting a note of appreciation to staff. That advice comes from a Harvard Business School expert, no less.

A survey conducted by CHIME, NAHIT, and AHA Solutions finds that hospitals are delaying capital projects and cutting capital and operating budgets in order to cope with the financial crisis. Though overall hospital employment is still rising, one in four hospital CIOs and CFOs claim to have recently laid off workers and/or instituted a hiring freeze. Fifty-seven percent of the respondents also indicated they are deferring IT equipment purchases and 52% are lengthening time frames for HIT implementations. More than a third of CIOs are reducing spending on outsourced IT services.

Wen Chyan, a 17-year-old Texas high school student, creates a polymer that could help prevent hospital infections. It can be used on catheters, breathing tubes, and other medical devices. His feat earned him a $100,000 college scholarship as part of the national Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology. What does one invent to follow that up?

The Arkansas nurse who stole accessed and disclosed a patient’s health information for personal gain is sentenced to two years probation and 100 hours of community service. The US District judge who sentenced Smith recommended that she spend some of her community service hours educating others on the consequences of violating HIPAA. Hey – maybe she’ll do a column for HIStalk!

The University of Oklahoma College of Nursing contracts with Medsphere for the OpenVista EHR solution, including implementation and support. Medsphere offers a discount as part of its Academic Incubator program, designed to help educate students in nursing and medical schools about HIT and clinical informatics.

The 105-physician Sadler Clinic (TX) selects NextGen for its EHR, enterprise practice management, patient portal, and image control solutions.

Sunquest Information Systems receives FDA clearance for its Sunquest Transfusion Manager.

Kaiser Permanente is ordered to pay a former radiologist $3.9 million for forcing him to resign after he tried to improve hospital standards. He quit after his supervisor accused him of racism and sexually harassing behavior toward a male technologist.

E-mail Inga.

Being John Glaser 12/9/08

Last week we held a meeting of the Partners External Integration Committee.

Partners has and is pursuing a wide array of clinical affiliations with other providers in its region. These providers include other academic medical centers, community hospitals, physician practices, health centers, and university clinics. Sometimes these affiliations focus on a specific area, e.g., oncology, and sometimes they are broad, reflecting the mixture of patients and conditions that are seen.

The systems support being requested by these affiliations is all over the map. Merged networks and shared desktops. Access to the other’s e-mail and phone directories. Structured clinical data being transmitted from one system to the other. PDF-like summaries being sent for particular events. Share medical logic that informs one organization when something happens (or doesn’t happen) at another organization. Reports of affiliation activity. Whole scale movement of an application from one organization into the other.

I am a big believer in the national agenda and activities that are focused on advancing interoperability. And I spend a non-trivial amount of my copious free time helping to further those initiatives.

But when I look at the external integration challenges we are facing and I compare that to the national agenda, I think it’s a lot more complex and messier out here in the wilds of Boston than moving structured test results into an electronic health record, as important as that movement is.

And the diversity of integration approaches (and each of these affiliations has their unique combination of integration needs) is compounded by the need to create governance structures for each affiliation that deal with issues such as budget, who is responsible for what pieces of the integration, policies for re-use of data, and mechanisms to enforce the policies, e.g., privacy, of one organization over the staff of the other.

We (Partners) will work our way through these issues. That’s the role of the External Integration Committee. But I suspect that other organizations are also working their way through these issues. It’s probably not a bad idea to augment the national conversation to include conversations that center on the messy reality of very diverse IT approaches to supporting clinical relationships (and patients) between multiple organizations.

This will give me more opportunities to avoid real work at Partners and visit the very fine city of Washington DC.

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

Monday Morning Update 12/8/08

From Bucky DeVol: "Re: ONCHIT. The Halamka rumors are not true. He might be talking to Daschle’s people, but he’s not going to DC." He’s leading in the poll to your right, although Dan Nigrin has been written in three times (he swears someone is doing that as a joke – Inga asked him about it from an earlier reader’s comment). Other write-in nominees include Jeannie "Bill becomes a Law" Patterson (sic), Charlie McCall, and Justen Deal. You people are fun.

From Steve-O: "Re: stories you cover. How do you decide what goes in HIStalk?" I include whatever interests me as someone working in hospital IT every day, which hopefully also interests you as well. Grade me: over the past month, what useful information did you get from what sources? I pick what you can use, summarize ruthlessly, get it to you fast, and encourage reader feedback to add value. I also go after stuff that nobody else is talking about and filter out the 99% of BS "news" that nobody cares about. You’re the ultimate judge, though, since the only person I know I please 100% of the time is me.

New to your right: I installed the Google Friend Connect social networking app. It looks interesting, especially as they roll out new widgets. Give it a try if you like. 

The Charlie McCall nominee got me going, so I found this book that has his endorsement from him back in his pre-HBOC CompuServe days: "To survive and succeed in a decade of rapidly changing technologies and increasing global competition for service companies, we must strive to ‘change the rules of the game.’" Your punchline is as good as mine.

Listening: Flyleaf, sweet chick rocker warbling with a positive message (check the video of their World Vision trip to Rwanda and the bio of the lead singer). Very nice.

Carondelet St. Mary’s (AZ) goes live on Amelior EDTracker integrated with ultrasound asset tracking from Sonitor Technologies.

HSW International acquires 14-employee DailyStrength in what TechCrunch calls a "mercy acquisition". It’s one of many Rounded Arial sites that hoped to become the MySpace for health with a mixture of good intentions and profit motive, although it seems deceiving to run a VC-funded dot-com under a .org address.

I mentioned Gartner’s EMR report for the VA and DoD that said only Epic and Cerner could meet their needs. If someone has a copy of that report, please send it my way. It’s important: vendors and DoD are pushing for proprietary vendor solutions, while the VA’s unparalleled success with open source, standards-based VistA makes it wary of that approach (but the VA, apparently, is badly outnumbered). Open source is already a mere footnote to the hospital systems business and losing its VA poster child makes it irrelevant, unfortunately, even though non-adopters always cite cost as the main reason they stick with manila folders.

Tim Clover, CEO of T+ Medical, added a comment to the mention here about discontinuation its trial by the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital for diabetes care, saying my mention was inaccurate. Which it was, at least through omission: I referenced the use of the product in general and later noted a story saying the hospital had stopped using it, but I didn’t mention that it’s being successfully used by a several others. He should have just e-mailed me, but I’ll overlook that by approving his comment that plugs the product.

Mark Tepping, CIO of Bridgeport Hospital and a 35-year member of HIMSS, tells me he’s retiring. Food for thought: his wife, a former neuro nurse, said the spouses of patients often expressed regret at waiting too long to do all the things they planned together, so he’s not making that mistake. He’ll send over an e-mail address for anyone who wants to get in touch.

 
Original Version – Google Cache

 
Current Version – Site

Curious: above are the original (from Google’s cache) and current (from the HIMSS site) versions of the HIMSS press release referring to the organization (for the first time ever, as far as I can tell) as a trade association. That troublesome phrase has been quietly expunged. I guess we still don’t know if it is or not.

We’ll be introducing some guest writers and some fun "HIT Moment With …" subjects shortly in our never-ending effort to make HIStalk more useful. It will be time for the HISsies and HIMSS-related activity before you know it! If you want to get involved in some way or have suggestions, shoot me an e-mail (although remember I work a zillion hours a day between my job and HIStalk, so I’m always in catch-up mode).

USP gets out of the medication error reporting business, sending MedMarx off to Quantros and MERP to ISMP (that’s a lot of acronyms, but if you don’t know what they mean, the story won’t interest you anyway).

Housekeeping: plunk your e-mail in the Subscribe to Updates box to your right to help knock my server offline as it tries to simultaneously deliver e-mail updates to 3,302 people at once. Make it even worse by clicking on the Email This to a Friend graphic right below it to tell a few pals about HIStalk. The Google-powered Search function roots through 5.5 years and many millions of words of HIStalk to find whatever interests you (yourself, your company, or your hated rival). Click the crude Report a Rumor to Mr. HIStalk graphic to send me confidential info anonymously.

Microsoft convenes a healthcare provider symposium in Redmond, talking up its "partner ecosystem." I’m not sure that touting a partner’s Visio add-in for analyzing patient flow shows a lot of innovation and leadership, but I wasn’t at the meeting.

An AHRQ-funded article in Annals of Emergency Medicine doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. Respondents from 65 hospitals reported insufficient space, too many patients to care for properly, and inadequate access to computers and electronic medical records (I can only see the summary since I don’t subscribe).

Hospital layoffs: Yakima Regional Medical and Cardiac Center (WA), Carlisle Regional Medical Center (PA), University of Toledo Medical Center (OH).

Nurses at Lawrence Memorial Hospital (MA) are doing a study to see if music calms patients waiting for endoscopies. They’re using Internet streaming radio from Pandora to choose music that the patient likes instead of the usual Muzak. I suggest HIStalk Radio, although patients might clench up from some of the hardcore tunes (playing now: Union Carbide Productions, Noir Desir, and the Blue Stingrays).

Civilians treated at the Yokota Air Base hospital in Japan weren’t billed because the Coding Compliance Editor software wasn’t set to send bills without human intervention.

London hospitals want NHS to compensate them for unplanned legacy system maintenance needed because NPfIT is years behind.

Nuance announces Q4 results: revenue up 41%, EPS $0.09 vs. -$0.02. Nice. A conference call comment supports what I’ve been saying about hospitals insisting on non-capital ways of buying systems (or, more precisely, expected system benefits): "We are finding customers, even some of our larger hospital customers, who express preference for a subscription pricing or a transaction-based pricing, a form of leasing in effect, rather than an upfront capital payment. As we said in the prepared comments, we benefit from that over time. It’s economically superior to us over time but it does have a different revenue stream over the course of this year." Everybody benefits except those companies on too shaky financial ground to make the transition to stretched-out payments, so subscription pricing will definitely be used by big vendors to outsell smaller ones whose products may be superior. You have been warned.

Vendor Deals and Announcements

• CPSI announces its 100^th sale of its PACS solution ImageLink.
• Deb Bradley is D2Hawkeye’s new VP, Chief Client Solution Executive. Bradley has spent the last 13 years at Trizetto, serving as VP of Product Management, VP of Sales Support, and Director of Care Management roles.
• Maxell Medical Imaging (NY) selects Aspyra’s Access RAD RIS/PACS solution.
• Phoenix-based DiCOM grid, Inc. announces that Michael V. Wall is its new CEO. Wall previous worked for Intel, Cray Research, and IBM.
• Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia contracts with Acuo Technologies for a new archiving solution that will become the basis of CHOP’s medical imaging management platform.
• gMed releases (warning: PDF) a gastro-specific EMR named gGastro.
• Nuance reveals a new on-demand solution named Veriphy 3.0, designed to help healthcare provider organizations communicate test results. Nuance also announces it has integrated its RadWhere radiology application with DeJarnette Research System’s PACSware Intelligent Router product.
• Mediware’s blood and medication management systems will be installed across 40 South African hospitals as part of an agreement with the Provincial Government of the Western Cape.
• Associated Cardiovascular Associates (NJ) picks Sage Software Healthcare’s Intergy EHR/PM solution for its 38 doctor practice.
• VMware is now successfully deployed at St. Vicent Catholic Medical Centers of New York.
• Emdeon premieres a new US Healthcare Efficiency Index to monitor healthcare business efficiency as the industry moves away from paper. Phase 1 of the Index estimates the total annual savings potential to be nearly $30 billion for medical claims-related transactions. The Index also suggests that the direct deposit of medical payments could provide an $11 billion annual savings.
• Consulting firm HighPoint Solutions adds a new Quality and Compliance practice to address the increased regulatory requirements and related information technology issues in the life sciences industry.
• Eric Silfen, MD is named the new (and first) chief medical officer and VP of Philips Healthcare. Silfen was previously in the department of biomedical informatics research at Philips Research North America, and also spent time working for HCA.
• Orion Health’s Rhapsody integration engine will be employed for the SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium. Rhapsody will link healthcare information across 18 remote Alaska Native communities.
• The Hawaii Medical Service Association is launching a new online care service that will connect patients and physicians via the Internet or telephone. The cost of a visit will be $10 for members or $45 for nonmembers.
• Baptist Health (AR) claims to have realized over $1 million in savings since implementing Thomson Reuters’ Clinical Xpert CareFocus. The CareFocus solution has improved pharmacist efficiency and increased documented clinical interventions by about 30%.
• The state of New Jersey is bailing out six financially distressed NJ hospitals where access to health care services is threatened. A total of $44 million will be distributed to provide care for the uninsured and low-income residents. About half of the money went to Jersey City Medical Center.
• MedCurrent Corporation introduces a new Web-based, real-time insurance eligibility verification application that is being targeted to radiology practices. Currently the MedCurrent Verify program will connect with over 350 insurers.
• Medical Imaging Northwest (WA) is teaming up with Compressus to implement a single enterprise-wide worklist solution that integrates digital imaging and data management systems at its multiple sites.

E-mail me.

News 12/5/08

From Cheryl: "Re: low-cost IT projects. I have been starving to hear stories like these! Leonard and Larry shared common problems, not hospital-specific issues. I am always on the lookout for how others are doing things better, especially solutions that can become best practices. To discover how these guys solved solved problems with easy-to-implement, cost effective solutions makes my little heart sing. Thanks for a truly valuable read! I want more! Cheers to Leonard and Larry. My new BFFs." If you, too, want to be Cheryl’s BFF (and who doesn’t?) then e-mail me your own small-project success stories. We may focus on big-ticket, multi-year endeavors most of the time, but somebody’s job could be saved by executing a quick and dirty project whose idea came from here, so give it up.

From Barney Chavous: "Re: BlackBerry improvement project. Can you provide contact information for Leonard Kravitz?" Ordinarily, no — I always provide a fake name unless someone asks specifically that I run their real name. In this case, Leonard (Lenny Kravitz, get it?) says it’s OK since a couple of folks asked: he’s Chris O’Connor, MD, FRCPC, Director of Medical Informatics, Trillium Health Centre, Mississauga, Ontario. He’s also involved with Open Source Order Sets, a project to roll out evidence-based content in Canada shared among contributors (great idea). You can e-mail him there. I found a BlackBerry writeup about the project he mentioned, which included his picture above. They did a Q&A and I liked this from him (it’s from 2006): "It is now remarkable to me, that in 2006, people are still using receive-only numeric pagers. It is the worst possible communication tool one can use, and yet it is the norm in medicine today. I still remember Pager Liberation Day: the day I released my pager and it sailed down to the bottom of the garbage pail and I never saw it again. That was fantastic and I have never looked back."

From OK in UK: "Re: iSoft. Any idea what happened to Paul Richards?" Link. Richards is replaced as iSoft’s managing director of the UK and Ireland by Adrian Stevens of Agfa. I don’t know where he went.

From Jade East: "Re: e-prescribing bonus. How did you guys come up with a maximum incentive of $1,600 per year? I cannot find anything that shows a capped amount." We actually said "average," not "maximum." That number has been reported in several articles, including the one we referenced that quoted a CMS administrator directly.

From Katrina Waves: "Re: insurance requiring that providers pay for claims appeals. Do you know of any documentation to substantiate this?" The reader did not provide a link, but being an intrepid Internet sleuth, I came up with this BCBS of NC document (warning: PDF – relevant part above). Want to know why they’re doing it? Because they can. 

From H.I. McDonough: "Re: newsletter editorial. That was a great column. I wonder if anybody got it?" I wrote a particularly manic guest editorial this week for Inside Healthcare Computing called Camping Out for a Cerner Black Friday Door-Buster Special: Mr. HIStalk’s Plan to Stimulate the HIT Economy By Encouraging Unrestrained Holiday Season Greed, in which I advocated an HIT Black Friday sale (with major sarcasm). Above is an amuse-bouche clearly illlustrating my run-on sentence enthusiasm. Eat my literary dust, Pliny the Elder.

I have to learn to quit shooting off my mouth now that I have more readers. A nice person from Vanderbilt (you will be meeting him soon in "An HIT Moment with …") apologized that their article about moving from an HIT-rich environment to the technological boondocks seemed smug (my word). A good point: the article actually argued that the high-tech hospital has the responsibility to teach its trainees to work with more common low-tech systems like paper charts. I asked him to be our guest in a mini-interview and he’s up for it, so stay tuned. That’s pretty cool, especially instead of apologizing (a sly move!) he could have ripped me a new one for my cheekiness, although if he reads here, he’s probably used to that.

I ran a rumor of a possible ONCHIT candidate, so now you get a chance to influence Tom Daschle’s decision (I’m sure he reads HIStalk religiously and appreciates the counsel). A new reader-suggested poll to your right asks who should follow Brailer and Kolodner in the government’s big HIT chair. Vote for one or write in your own choice since that’s what democracy is all about.

Dann, the keeper of the HIStalk Fan Club on LinkedIn, tells me that over 400 folks have signed up. I see several familiar names and faces as I scroll through the list, so hello to everybody there. LinkedIn is doing some cool things, providing a discussion forum within groups and offering tie-ins to other apps (I’ve added the HIStalk RSS to my profile so you can see story excerpts right from there). I was also trying out a cool UK-based collaboration / social networking app called Huddle when I noticed that it, too, can be connected into LinkedIn as a widget. I was thinking about doing some kind of private workspace for groups (fan club members, CIOs, sponsors – obviously I’m looking for an excuse to play around and find a problem for the Huddle solution since it looks like fun). As always, Inga and I will approve all connection requests since LinkedIn is now a competitive sport, much like getting your high school yearbook signed by the cool kids or at least bunches of the not-so-cool ones. I see some of the magazines have started their own fan clubs (losers!) but I’m pleased that HIStalk’s did it on their own (we’re kind of a self-starting crowd). Thanks to everyone involved, especially Dann.

This is cool: Josh Nesbit (that’s him above on the right), a Stanford student of international health and bioethics, sets up a telemedicine-like project for a hospital in Malawi, where Internet connectivity and even electricity is uncommon. He used a freeware SMS messaging application to connect the hospital with volunteer health workers, often poverty-stricken locals themselves, who were given prepaid cell phones to exchange information with the hospital. He’s hoping to add solar panel charging for the phones and the ability to send images. Other researchers are porting the application to the Google Android mobile platform, which would eliminate the cost of the laptop. His blog (click his name above) has specific details about the types of messages being sent and the impact on patients. Bravo.

Speaking of texting: a physician volunteer in the Congo performs a life-saving arm amputation on a 16-year-old while following text message instructions sent to him by a London colleague.

Booz Allen has declared the need for the VA to modernize it and work with DoD on common systems, according to a report uncovered by Nextgov. Interesting: Gartner looked at EMR systems and found that only those from Cerner and Epic would meet their requirements. The price tag (read carefully because you’re the one paying): $1.4 to $5.2 billion over six to 17 years.

The State of New York is requiring that new hospital clinical systems connect to the Statewide Health Information Network, meaning that Mount Sinai has to run its application to spend $34 million on Epic by that group next week.

Florida Hospital (FL, duh) will use RFID to track implantable medical devices.

Quinnipiac University researchers will study whether the use of integrated sensors in the Healthsense eNeighbor system (movement detection, door sensors, bed and toilet sensors) reduces hospitalization and improves independence.

St. Vincent Indianapolis Hospital (IN) will use per review software from startup Acesis.

Some healthcare IT folks (unnamed) met with Amazon and other vendors at Harvard Medical School this week to talk about cloud computing.

We already told you this on August 1, but Perot Systems officially announces that it will roll out VistA to two hospitals and a clinic in Jordan.

Eleven children with cancer in South Australia were overdosed on etoposide due to a computer error that first arose in January 2005 and was just now discovered. The kids are all OK.

A UK hospital cancels blood tests this week due to computer problems from the Conficker worm, which exploits a Microsoft server service vulnerability.

Cleveland Clinic has been panned hard in the past for its doctors (starting with its CEO) making big bucks from vendors whose products they use on patients. They aren’t saying that practice will stop, but its online physician roster will list each doctor’s financial disclosures (only companies, not amounts, but they claim they’ll add that later, maybe). The CEO’s disclosures are above. Every vendor should do what a couple of drug companies started: post every payment they make to doctors online. If it’s such an above-board practice, surely those docs won’t mind everybody knowing.

Scottish patients, including some minor celebrities, get a letter from a hospital advising them that a doctor may have inappropriately looked at their electronic medical records. The police are involved.

Detroit’s major employers are begging for handouts and threatening to take the economy down with them (much of that due to out-of-control healthcare costs), but Henry Ford’s suburban hospital — all $360 million of it — will offer walking trails and cooking lessons when finished. The CEO has zero healthcare experience, having worked at Ritz-Carlton. It’s located safely away from downtown, out where private insurance grows tall. As a hospital marketing VP I used to know always said, "We serve all, but market to few."

An interesting study: the performance of radiologists seems to improve if they’re given a photo of the patient along with the pics of their innards. They put the pictures right into the PACS.

SunTrust announces its eligibility and claims system for physician offices and hospitals.

Ohio State University’s medical school will give every student an iPod touch loaded with reference materials.

Kaiser Permanente gets a writeup for its Oakland, CA innovation center, which evaluates healthcare technology offerings from Intel, Motion, and others. The only person quoted is a doctor, but hopefully they have other kinds of professionals doing the evaluations as well.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

I don’t know much about the world of brokering domain names, but it sounds like if you are savvy and able to secure a name before anyone else thinks it’s a great idea, the business could be profitable. HealthCareSolutions.com just sold for $55,000 and HIPAA.com went for $23,500. Curiously, www.inga.com seems to be already taken.

Glen and Trish Tullman donate $1 million to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation to accelerate the development of an artificial pancreas. Their son and niece both have Type 1 diabetes. They made a similar donation to the organization in 2006.

AT&T announces plans to cut about 12,000 jobs, which represents about 4% of the company’s total workforce. Capital expenditures for 2009 will also be reduced from the 2008 levels. The company’s wireless, video, and broadband business, however, will continue to add clients to meet growing demand.

A lawsuit is filed on behalf of the Texas Faculty Association, asking that the UT System’s decision to approve massive UTMB layoffs be declared void. The lawsuit claims the decision to lay off 3,800 people violated the Texas Open Meeting Acts because the regents conducted the discussions behind closed doors. The lawsuit also questions why the UT regents purchased only $100 million worth of flood insurance and why the UT System can’t re-allocate surplus funds to prevent the layoffs.

InteGreat signs a 14-year ASP agreement with the West Virginia HealthCare Alliance to provide an EMR for its 30 network physicians.

Medical transcription provider MedQuist will pay $6.6 million to settle whistle-blower lawsuits, accused of knowingly overbilling federal clients like the VA and DOD.

Officials with the Louisiana Health Care Quality Forum claim that recent hurricanes have hampered efforts to recruit primary care physicians for a federally funded EHR demonstration project. The project has the potential to bring the state $29 million for physician practices to defray EHR costs. During the first four weeks of the application process, only 50 doctors came forward.

A survey of healthcare workers at 102 nonprofit hospitals finds that 67% of the respondents believe there is a link between disruptive physician behavior and medical mistakes. Eighteen claimed they knew of a mistake that occurred because of an obnoxious doctor. In addition, the non-profit Institute for Safe Medication Practices found that 40% of hospital staff members claimed to have been so intimidated by a doctor that they did not share their concerns about orders for medication that appeared to be incorrect. As a result, 7 percent said they contributed to a medication error.

WebMD repurchases 640,930 shares of its common stock for $12.8 million.

Sage announces its fiscal year earnings, reporting a 12% increase in revenues and a 6% increase in organic revenue growth — excluding the healthcare division, which saw an 11% revenue decline. When the healthcare’s group results were included, organic revenue growth was only 3%. On the bright side, the company says the North American management team is now in place and driving operational efficiencies.

RSNA names Gary J. Becker, MD its new president. Becker is a professor of vascular and interventional radiology at the University of AZ college of medicine.

E-mail Inga.

News 12/3/08

From Former Siemens Employee: "Re: CEO. Healthcare CEO abruptly resigned last Friday AM. Announced at RSNA yesterday." Link. Jim Reid-Anderson lasted only seven months to the day, having replaced Erich Reinhardt, who resigned April 30 after new compliance issues broadened the apparent scope of the company’s multi-billion dollar bribery problems.

From The PACS Designer: "Re: open source for virtualization. The virtualization space has been supported by proprietary software from mainly IBM and VMware. Now, open source Linux developers have added a Kernel Virtual Machine or KVM to compete in the virtual marketplace. HIStalk sponsor Red Hat has added KVM to their version of Linux. Michael Ferris, Red Hat’s director of product strategy, had this to say in an InformationWeek article: ‘adding KVM to Red Hat Enterprise Linux will reach new customers who might not otherwise have considered Red Hat as their virtualization vendor.’" Link.

Listening: the new reissue of Murmur, the debut album of R.E.M. from 1983. I keep forgetting how much I like them. So much so that went to this year’s Accelerate and it sounds fine, too. Thinking man’s (or woman’s) alt-rock. I’m air-drumming and making intense-looking facial gestures as I play Cuyahoga from Life’s Rich Pageant, pretending to be Keith Moon except with zero rhythmicity.

Tomorrow is Readers Write day, so it’s not to late to send me over something.

Health Level Seven and The Health Story Project announce an implementation guide for making information from narrative radiology reports available to EMRs.

Hospitalist application vendor Ingenious Med brings on Hart Williford as CEO. He was previously with Memorial Health of Savannah.

Jobs: Regional Sales Director, VP Sales, Epic Security Consultant.

A reader sent over an e-prescribing article featuring Glen Tullman of Allscripts from Ode Magazine, whose self-described audience is "intelligent optimists."

Someone passed along a juicy but totally unsubstantiated rumor about Rob Kolodner’s potential replacement at ONCHIT (it’s a political appointee job, as you probably know). The job seeker being speculated is a Man in Black (no, not Johnny Cash). It would be a big pay cut, but a giant ego boost for the Harmonizer. Sure, it’s probably totally off the wall, but fun.

New York Presbyterian Hospital suspends an employee for failing to report that NFL star and bonehead (was that redundant?) Plaxico Burress sought treatment after shooting himself in the leg while carrying an illegal weapon in a crowded nightclub. The hospital itself is also under investigation for failing to report the shooting to police. Mayor Bloomberg makes it clear he wants Burress behind bars since there’s an automatic 3 1/2 year penalty for illegally carrying a loaded gun. "It’s pretty hard to argue the guy didn’t have a gun and it wasn’t loaded. You’ve got bullet holes in and out to show that it was there." He also said, "It’s a chargeable offense, and I think that the district attorney should certainly go after the management of this hospital." Burress just signed a five-year, $35 million contract in September, but the Giants realized he was a flake and made most of the money contingent on his nearly non-existent good behavior.

I’ve been saying all along that hospitals are struggling with reduced occupancy, investment losses, and uncompensated care, all sure to hit IT. The feel-good publications pretend it’s business as usual, but here’s the clincher if you needed one: 30,000-employee Intermountain Healthcare stops its employee 401K matching for at least a year and scales back its holiday parties. Hospitals can save money in many ways (shouldn’t the lipsticked Centricity be doing that for them?) so I would have to suspect that this is a way to create voluntary attrition.

Nebraska Medical Center signs for McKesson Horizon PACS.

Intellect Resources shared the results (warning: PDF) of its survey on the economy’s impact on healthcare IT. Lots of companies are reducing headcount or freezing hiring as we’ve been saying. In the mean time, IR has some pretty sweet-sounding positions open.

A 32-year former employee of UCLA Medical Center pleads guilty to selling Farrah Fawcett’s medical records to the National Enquirer. Farrah should be suing the Enquirer if you ask me. You have to go after demand, not supply.

Snelling Executive Search, which did the "101 Healthcare IT Marketing Ideas" booklet with Chuck Christian that I mentioned in March, will be doing a HIMSS presentation in Chicago about CIO job changes, voluntary and otherwise. Contact VP Steve Bennett if you’d be willing to chat about the topic from experience (or if you’d like a free copy of the booklet, which I have – it’s great). They’re also turning the IT marketing booklet into a full-fledged book that HIMSS will publish, so if you have ideas or case studies, Steve’s your guy there, too.

Results of a new Deloitte survey show that the CIO role is not well defined, nobody knows what they’re supposed to be doing, and CIOs themselves are equally confused. The conclusion is that there’s no one-size-fits-all CIO and their ideal function is to make IT so innate to business process that their job becomes obsolete, freeing them up to move on to other senior management roles.

I’m still marveling that HIMSS called itself a "trade association" of 350 corporations in a press release, apparently for the first time. At least that’s an honest explanation for all the lobbying it does (I admit I never got Advocacy Day – why would provider people like me march on Washington to bug low-ranking political aides to spend more taxpayer dollars on healthcare IT?) As I always say, it’s Ladies Drink Free: we ladies (members) get liquored up for nearly nothing while the men (vendors) pay full price just to be around in our potential moment of weakness. I like both providers and vendors, but being represented by the same group just seems strange, especially if you’re watching from the sidelines as a patient (would you want your doctor joining the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and chumming up with drug companies for their marketing and lobbying work?)

Cincinnati Children’s chooses AMICAS PACS.

The Hartford business paper highlights (their photo above) bed management software vendor Premise, now running in five of the country’s eight top hospitals listed in US News & World Report.

I forgot to extend my usual best wishes to those heading off to RSNA (is it a trade association?) I hope your travels were pleasant and the subfreezing weather is gone by April when the rest of us get there to enjoy our winter flashback. I see O’Hare got buried in snow Sunday and flights were messed up all over the country as a result (the bad news: it’s supposed to snow every day with highs Thursday and Friday of 24 and 25, respectively. That’s Fahrenheit, unfortunately).

Speaking of Chicago, I ran across this by accident: Bistro HIMSS, a chance to wildly overpay for union-produced concession food right on the McCormick Place show floor. Actually, $23 a head to keep prospects captive in the hall isn’t bad, so make your reservations now. Maybe I’ll buy an HIStalk table and hold court.

Payer software vendor Medecision names Scott Storrer, formerly of Cardinal Health, as president/COO and James Adamek as SVP of sales.

Who says doctors can’t be skilled at using a computer? This British surgeon is accused by six female patients of fondling their breasts, one of whom claimed he did so while working the computer with the other hand and breathing heavily all the while.

Glyn Hayes, a British doctor and "undisputed elder statement of primary care informatics" is named an Honorary Fellow of the British Computer Society.

The Montgomery paper writes a nice article on the DoD-VA integration project, describing a real-life example of its use in a veteran’s treatment.

Vanderbilt rather smugly announces the results of their survey that describes the tragic disappointment and disillusionment doctors experience when they leave the technical nirvana of Vandy ("Health Information Technology-Rich Training Environment") and have to deal with "less modern facilities," i.e. the non-Vandy, non-Ivory Tower real world. I try to like them, but they make it so hard. It doesn’t matter since they’re obviously in love with the mirror.

Hospital layoffs: Portsmouth Regional Hospital (8 employees); Oregon Health & Science University (coming soon); Fairfield Medical Center (20-25 employees); Pinnacle Hospital (21 employees). if yours hasn’t, it will.

Interesting: a UK hospital uses BlackBerry devices to alert nurses when recurring patients are admitted, bringing nurses together who know the patient’s background. Orion Health helped develop it. It decreased length of stay: lung cancer patients from eight to six, lower GI from nine and a half to five. It’s also being used for patients with MRSA or C.diff.

Nuance announces Veriphy 3.0 for verified notification of critical lab results.

iSOFT wins a big pharmacy management system contract with Western Australian Department of Health.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

Red Hat donates cash for 800,000 meals this holiday season rather than host a holiday bash for employees. In addition, the employees are running canned food drives and collected coats for the needy. Well done.

SCI Solutions closes its fiscal year with 43 new clients across 63 hospitals, bringing its customer total to 300.

Virtual Radiologic also reaches a customer milestone with the recent live of its 1000th medical facility. I also see that Virtual Radiologic is now partnering with Brazil teleradiology provider Pro-Laudo.

Poudre Valley Health System (CO) is named the 2008 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award winner in healthcare, based on high scores in clinical quality while effectively controlling costs (in the 99th percentile); patient loyalty (in the top 1% in the US); and employee satisfaction (top 3%, plus top 1% for physicians). Poudre Valley was also named the top hospital for nursing quality by the American Nurses Credentialing Center. Pretty darned impressive.

Israel’s Clarit Health Services commits $25 million for Carestream Health’s RIS/PACS solution.

Sentillion appoints Colin Wicks as its UK Regional Sales Manager. He previously worked for ICL (now Fujitsu Systems) as well as various identity and access management VARs.

Here’s a pretty disappointing statistic: only 2% of valid US prescriptions are being sent electronically to pharmacies. Will Medicare’s upcoming 2% bonus program (an average of $1,600/year per doctor) make a significant impact, or will most doctors still resist?

An Archives of Internal Medicine study indicates that physicians with EHRs pay less for malpractice settlements.

Fujifilm Medical Systems acquires its first proprietary RIS system with its purchase of Empiric Systems.

Ten percent of physicians who vaccinate privately insured children may discontinue that service because they lose money on it.

Outpatient facilities are not adopting PACS as fast at inpatient facilities, according to a new KLAS report. In addition, community-based hospitals have lower adoption rates than larger independent or IDN hospitals. Lack of finances seems to be the primary barrier.

Christmas is just three weeks away (wow!) and HIMSS a mere 17 weeks (it seems like we were just in Orlando). We already have nine companies lined up for HIStech Reports, but still have a few openings for companies that want us to do an in-depth executive interview. You can e-mail me.

I am not sure if these two announcements are related, but, Streamline Health Solutions names (warning: PDF) an interim CFO, then two days later says its Q3 results will be delayed “to provide additional time for the completion of necessary audit work and to finalize the results.” Donald Vick Jr. was named interim CFO to replace Paul Bridge, Jr., who resigned last month after learning his employment contract would not be renewed. Streamline’s financials will be revealed December 15th.

I feel kind of bad about this story, but in a twisted way it makes me feel marginally better about my 401K’s declining value. In August, Nuance offered speech recognition software vendor Zi Corporation an $.80/share buyout. Zi rejected the bid, claiming the offer was too low. The stock price at that time was about $.70/share. Like the rest of the market, Zi’s stock price has plummeted and today closed at $.34/share. Nuance has made a new offer, offering an all-cash deal equal to about half the original bid. Zi’s board of directors must decide this month whether to accept or reject the deal.

I was a little late getting my news to Mr. H tonight, in part because a friend of mine made me take a quick ride on his vintage Vespa. I feel incredibly hip.

E-mail Inga.

Monday Morning Update 12/1/08

From Jane Grierson: "Re: Whitwell Middle School’s paper clip site. This noteworthy school project has been in existence for a few years. However, the recent magnanimous contributions of MEDSEEK, a healthcare IT company with (as far as I know) little to no ties to public schools, etc., yet great Web products, deserves the biggest THANK YOU at this most appropriate time of year. If Peter Kuhn (last I heard, President) and Jay Drake (last I heard, CEO), representing all MEDSEEK staff, are still around — or whomever — the 11 million named and nameless souls will not be forgotten." Link to the school’s Children’s Holocaust Memorial site (the paper clip connection: they were invented by Norwegians and worn by them in national unity to protest Nazism in World War II, for which occupying Nazi forces would sometimes arrest them). The comment above comes from someone in the industry (phony name substituted by me) who isn’t from MEDSEEK.

From Matt Montini: "Re: insurance companies charging providers for appeals. This example is one of many that makes it clear that this nation does NOT need ‘healthcare reform.’ What it badly needs is ‘healthcare insurance / reimbursement / payment (or whatever synonym one wants to use) reform.’ By correcting the terminology, only then will we be able to change a hideous, broken system that is the root of all access problems, transparency issues, the un-insured, the under-insured, etc."

From Billy Kilmer: "Re: IT initiatives. I really liked the article about IT initiatives under $25,000. How about a request for the ONE coolest hospital gadget/process that is REALLY improving care from the patient’s point of view? And everybody’s best IT-implemented idea that made the patient experience better?" Great idea. Let’s hear from the hospital IT people (just e-mail me). I’ll keep the responses anonymous unless told otherwise since I know that worries people.

Did you have a good holiday? Hope so.

Listening: The Distillers, melodic and creative punk with a quite talented and pretty but foul-mouthed female lead singer. I’m also listening to AC/DC, but only indirectly since it is apparently an NCAA requirement that every college football game have gratuitous, testosterone-eliciting background music in a fixed ratio of 80% AC/DC to 20% Metallica.

Fujitsu Siemens launches its ESPRIMO MA tablet PC for healthcare, based on the Intel Mobile Clinical Assistant spec. In less rosy news, Siemens is selling its 50% stake in the company to Fujitsu for $567 million and it’s cutting 700 jobs in Germany due to poor market conditions.

Charge master software vendor Craneware is named Scottish software company of the year.

A bizarre use of technology: a rifle’s scope attached to a video monitor lets the spotter of a blind hunter direct his gun so he can kill animals for sport.

St. John’s Hospital (IL) will go live on MEDITECH Monday, an event written up in the local newspaper. It noted that early cost estimates were $20 to $30 million, which seems like a lot for a one-hospital MEDITECH implementation other than it’s 734 beds, which would surely be one of the biggest MEDITECH hospitals.

Another vendor "good news" item: MedVentive just finished a Thanksgiving drive for the local food bank. The company says it also tripled its sales force and launched two new products.

Inga says she was having a bad day when she mentioned the "good news" thing and enjoyed mentioning a couple of items, but please don’t send more. It was fun when CEOs were writing, but now the PR people have been mobilized just to get their companies mentioned.

Raymond James is doing a two-minute survey on healthcare IT spending for 2009. You can participate here.

Students at Taiwan’s Ming Chuan University develop a prize-winning hospital software package that includes a real-time doctor advice system, patient monitoring, and a staff locating system.

Cerner opens an office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Online health and wellness vendor Aperture Health announces that Kevin Moley has joined its board. He’s a former HHS deputy secretary and US ambassador as well as former CEO of Integrated Medical Systems. The company’s business model is to run targeted ads with health information and share the revenue with members.

George Washington University Hospital increases employee satisfaction with hospital communication by 33% by using solutions from Netpresenter: "broadcasting" to individual PCs via interactive PC screensavers, digital signage, and emergency alerting.

A Microsoft study finds that lay people screwing around on the Web trying to self-diagnose often mistake their common symptoms for rare diseases, a situation the authors call "cyberchondria."

The Nashville paper writes up the use of RFID-based patient tracking system systems in hospitals, not really saying anything new, but providing a glossy and short overview for lay people.

Mike Webb, 55, IT director at Central Peninsula General Hospital (AK), was killed on the job Wednesday by a distraught former employee. A PACS administrator who was fired Tuesday returned Wednesday morning with a semi-automatic rifle and opened fire on his co-supervisors, Webb and hospital radiology director Margaret Stroup, who was critically injured. Webb had been on the job less than a year, moving to Alaska from Southern Tennessee Medical Center. The suspect, Joseph Marchetti, formerly managed cardiac databases at Nebraska Medical Center. He was shot dead on the scene by Alaska state troopers when he fired on them. Condolences.

An interesting healthcare information technology advocate: IntraHealth International, a Chapel Hill, NC non-profit that works with software developers in Africa to deploy open source healthcare applications to African practitioners (among its other healthcare projects in developing countries). It apparently has a subsidiary site for IntraHealth Informatics and is looking for volunteer designers, developers, and documenters.

Four University of South Florida physicians want an investigation into the firing of a colleague by the Bay Pines VA Healthcare System, claiming the hospital singled him out because of his 2003 complaints about computer system flaws that threatened patient safety. The doctor, a USF professor and founder of the hospital’s nephrology department, admits he was frustrated with network problems that kept doctors from getting critical patient information and protested by dumping his computer into a trash can in a public hallway. The VA fired him on November 7 for refusing to sign a memo from the new dialysis unit chief about unit changes.

Indian IT services company Tata Consultancy Services will commercialize its WebHealthCentre patient portal, originally developed as a social project to help deliver rural patient services such as health information, telemedicine, personal health records, and medical consultations.

A Harvard psychiatrist whose endorsement of antipsychotic drugs for children led to a 4,000% increase increase in the diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder is found by Congressional investigators to have been profiting handsomely from drug companies selling products used to treat it. Joseph Biederman violated Harvard’s policy on reporting outside income by failing to acknowledge drug company payments of up to $1.4 million. He twisted J&J’s arm to fund his research center at Mass General, listing three goals in its annual report that included "move forward the commercial goals of J&J." One executive from the drug company urged prompt payment of a $3,000 honorarium to Biederman, warning his superiors that Biederman has "a very short fuse … not someone to jerk around." Parents who are suing drug companies over harm caused by the expensive drugs want to depose him. Also exposed: an NIH-funded radio psychiatrist who extolled the virtues of such drugs without disclosing his $1.3 million payments from drug companies for giving marketing lectures. And: the chair of Emory University’s psychiatry department, who earned $2.8 million from drug companies over seven years and failed to report nearly half of it to the university. Kudos to Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) for outing the scumbags, of which there is apparently ample supply.

E-mail me.

News 11/26/08

From Jupiter Jones: "Re: insurance companies and Susanne Madden interview. Boy, the ice is going to get thinner and thinner under the insurance apologists as Verden’s predictions start to ring true. BC of NC and LA (and maybe others) just published a new rule: providers must now PAY for any APPEALS. That’s right – the insurance company mis-pays a claim, which happens every single day, and the doctor has to pay at least $50+% of the claim to appeal it. I’m not kidding. If that doesn’t look like the result of ‘…they all sit in a room and think of creative ways to simultaneously drive up prices and reduce the attractiveness of the product, even if it means scaring off a bunch of their customers…’ then I don’t know what does!"

From Todd: "Re: virtual HIMSS. I filled out my virtual HIMSS satisfaction survey with these remarks. 1) Presentations could have been more substantive. A major health system talks about clinical transformation in a greenfield exercise in Australia? Interesting, but comparatively easy. How about someone who has been through the trenches of clin tran in a large, established health system? If a presenter is doing an ‘all happy story of IT implementation,’ you can guess it’s not reflective of your audience’s reality. I understand there are dozen or hundreds of applications for these speaking positions to choose from. 2) All the Web 2.0 stuff was unnecessary and confusing and some of it froze. There were only a handful of Webinars to manage. This wasn’t Orlando with 27,000 people. One page with all the presentation links would have done it. 3) Weak vendor turnout. Would have really liked to see some online demos of various new business and clinical apps (OR, bed management, ICU, med rec, etc.)  Premise and others, what made you decide not to participate? 4) If it were free, cherry picking a presentation or two would have been a nice diversion for the day, but of course it’s not free if you don’t work for a hospital."

From Wompa1: "Re: demand. Not exactly IT related, but it certainly could affect hospital revenue and spending." Link. Since I’m a big fan of economic theories, this Keynesian one is fun: when consumer demand drops, businesses decrease production rather than lower their prices. HSA guru John Goodman says that’s true in healthcare, where patients defer self-pay elective surgeries in tough times, leaving hospitals with less profitable insurance and charity cases.

From Eliza Cummings: "Re: jobs. Is there a way we can have a forum to look for software sales jobs? There is a boat load of great sales people and this is such a small industry that we really need to focus on who are the vendors that are looking." Absolutely. You can post jobs or resumes in the Jobs Offered/Positions Wanted section of HIStalk Discussion. You have to register, but it’s free (e-mail me first if you’re using a generic Hotmail or Gmail account since I usually delete those otherwise because of spammers). Any other ideas on how I can help?

Informatics Corporation of America wins two of five innovation award categories at the Healthcare IT Summit: greatest market potential and most innovative presentation. The company was also nominated for best new technology and best value. All were for its clinical interoperability products, which were originally developed at Vanderbilt.

Nova Scotia wins a public sector technology award for its EMR linked with lab and rad results. Nightingale Informatix is its partner on the project.

Ochsner CIO Lynn Witherspoon credits SIS with increasing virtual capacity of the hospitals ORs after Hurricane Katrina.

Dr. Deborah Peel posts this critique of Google Flu Trends on the Patient Privacy Rights site, along with Google’s response to her inquiries. I have to say that, of all the healthcare privacy issues to fight, this one seems pretty inconsequential, but that’s just my opinion.

Emageon acquirer Health Systems Solutions gets a CEO interview on Fox Business. He says they have the interest and the financial backing to make more acquisitions and will be doing so.

RTLS vendor Awarepoint gets $13.3 million in Series D financing.

Here’s a way to cut your IT costs: arrest the CIO who’s robbing you blind. The New Zealand health district that I mentioned previously saw its IT spending drop from $8 million a year to $2 million the year after it fired the CIO who is accused of stealing $17 million over six years by submitting fake invoices. A board analyst says he asked the CIO about budget-busting server maintenance costs and was told, "What to you want me to do – turn the f…… things off?"

HIMSS "applauds" (does it have little hands somewhere?) Tom Daschle’s appointment as HHS secretary, apparently joining every other industry in hoping for some Uncle Sam handouts. HIMSS says it’s looking forward to "working closely" with Daschle, Obama, and every citizen of Washington, DC and its suburbs to make sure the feds help pay for technology that supposedly already pays for itself. HIMSS calls itself both a membership society and a vendor trade association in its press release, which is the first time I recall hearing anyone there publicly admit the latter. Does that mean we all belong to a vendor trade association?

Jobs: ANSOS Consultant (MA), Program and Project Manager (CO), Senior Product Manager (UT). Gwen at Healthcare IT Jobs is feeling expansive for the holidays and will give a free job listing for each one bought before December 31 if they mention HIStalk. You know it’s hard to get people relocated and working over the holidays, but that’s a great time to recruit and interview to be ready for January.

The folks at Nuance confirm that eScription co-founders and co-CEOs Ben Chigier and Paul Egerman are giving up day-to-day responsibilities, serving as advisors going forward. Nuance announced its $363 million eScription acquisition in April.

Lawmakers in Indonesia support a bill that requires HIV/AIDS patients in its remote Papua province to be implanted with microchips to allow them to be tracked and punished if they deliberately infect others. Strangely enough, the guy with that bright idea is a doctor and member of parliament. "Seeing that the number and spread of HIV in Papua is so high, I’ve been researching it and found online that microchips can be used in humans, so I am convinced that this can help us detect signals related to the spread of HIV in society." Well, at least he used the Internet to come up with his bizarre recommendation. What the hell is he thinking when he talks about "signals?"

IBM launches a cloud computing validation service, with the first customer being Allscripts and its online backup and recovery service that will move to IBM’s technology in the spring.

Francisco Partners closes its acquisition of labor management systems vendor API Software, also naming its new board members, all of whom have deep healthcare IT experience.

Medical University of South Carolina will require 1,200 employees to take four days off without pay starting in January. It will also lay off a dozen others.

Odd lawsuit: a woman in labor in the hospital is started on an epidural, but a physician’s assistant sneaks into her room and steals her fentanyl. He is arrested, claims the narcotic was for his dying dog, and pleads guilty and serves probation. The woman and her husband are suing the hospital and the PA two years later, claiming the hospital was negligent in hiring him, took too long to get her another dose, and seemed more worried about apprehending the PA than taking care of her labor.

An official in India asks people to not trash hospitals after patients die, even if the doctor involved was negligent.

Here is some vendor good news sent my way after I expressed fatigue with the other kind that has everyone in a funk:

• Sunquest is running a company program through the end of the year to support the World Vision humanitarian organization, encouraging employees to donate.
• Inpatient practice management system vendor Ingenious Med says it recently hired new employees in sales, marketing, development, account management, and implementation and is looking for more developers and implementers.
• Coding vendor CodeRyte will hire 25-30 people in 2009.
• Marc Winchester of Digital Healthcare, which offers the Retasure retinal imaging service, says revenue is up 75%, headcount is up 125%, space is up 100%, and patients served has increased 1,350%.

Have a great holiday. I will be eating turkey, watching football, and maybe writing a little HIStalk stuff if I can’t resist the siren song. If you need me for anything, now is a great time to e-mail me since I’m not in my usual frenzy to keep caught up.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

From Gatelynn: “Re: Mary Staley-Sirios. I so enjoy reading your info, especially the one noted below. Very inspiring. It makes you take a pause in all our hectic work lives to be successful for our companies and ourselves. I thought it was worth the time for me to say – THANK YOU!!! I hope you slip a few more of these in every once in awhile.” Gatelynn is referring to the post on former Baylor Healthcare System VP Mary Staley-Sirois leaving the corporate world to serve as VP of non-profit MediSend.

From Dr. Nick: “Re: Facebook. Are you and Mr HIStalk on Facebook?” Not yet, anyway. I kind of like that idea, actually. Maybe I’d learn secret details about our readers’ lives.

Intermountain Healthcare (UT) is adding additional Agfa Healthcare technology, including integrating IMPAX PACS systems for its 21 hospital facilities and 150+ clinics.

MEDSEEK donates its web portal and content management system to Tennessee-based Whitwell Middle School. The website will facilitate communication between the school, students, and the community. MEDSEEK’s system will also host a separate site dedicated to the school’s Children’s Holocaust Memorial and Paper Clips. I hadn’t heard of this project before, but apparently Whitwell students collected 11 million paper clips, representing six million Jews and five million others killed by the Nazis. A German rail car once used to transport Jews to concentration camps was donated and then filled with the paper clips. The memorial now permanently resides on the school grounds.

Epic also has the good neighbor thing figured out. So far this year, the company has donated about $356,000 to local Verona, WI organizations. Recipients include the public library, the food pantry, the police and fire departments, and area schools. In addition, Epic has donated over 300 PCs and laptops to the school system over the last two years.

CareTech Solutions is one of 11 companies in Michigan awarded tax incentives aimed at creating additional jobs. The Michigan Economic Development Corp. approved a $38 million credit over 10 years to encourage Caretech to expand in Michigan instead of Ohio. If Caretech accepts the deal, the company will build a new data center in Troy and create 400 direct jobs.

The HIMSS folks say that attendance at their recent virtual conference and expo was up 65% from April. An estimated 2,800 attendees logged in during the two-day event.

The Louisville paper profiles local medical billing company Zirmed, which is building new office space to accommodate its growth. Between 2003 and 2007, the company’s revenues have grown 465% and are expected to hit $35 million this year.

The AMA would like at least another year before enforcing a new Joint Commission policy that denounces disruptive, intimidating, or abusive physician behavior. It’s not that the AMA wants to allow its doctors another year to be bad; rather, they’d like clearer definitions for what constitutes bad behavior. Sounds like an opportunity for Miss Manners.

The Michigan State Medical Society is establishing the first state-sponsored physician network to connect 15,000 physicians. The service will be free to members; nonmembers will be charged a yet-to-be-determined fee.

I noticed in a recent post on Loftware’s blog that the Sisters of Mercy Health Systems’ supply chain division has added specific terms in contract language that require the use of GS1 standards in transactions and in production processing.

Nuance Communications announces a Q4 profit of $22 million ($.09/share,) which is much improved from its $3.41 million loss for the same quarter last year.

I am taking off to hang with family for the next few days and I can’t wait. I went to a friend’s funeral last week, which made me especially aware of my many blessings. It’s easy to take for granted so many things in life, such as health, financial and physical security, our loved ones, and our many freedoms. Life is short and uncertain, but I have a renewed commitment to living my dreams today. I hope everyone has time to give some thanks this week and perhaps make some time to reflect on how you can live your life’s passions — today. I am incredibly thankful to HIStalk, Mr. H, our sponsors, and our readers, because this is one fun job! Happy Thanksgiving all!

E-mail Inga.

Monday Morning Update 11/24/08

From Fourth Hansen Brother: "Re: big time Philips layoffs." Link. Philips will cut 1,600 jobs in its healthcare unit, along with raising prices and cutting other expenses. The North Andover, MA headquarters will get hit with100 layoffs.

From Aries Ram: "Re: Intel. Heard at the mid-year ATA show there was a small demo of Intel’s new home monitor. Comments were not endorsing, primarily based upon how data was displayed. Also, they had a slow booth at NAHC. Philips was busy … and picking up additional customers after Intel’s recall of acquired product.It isn’t always about the bells and whistles. Get the users to weigh in on the product."

From Alias Unknown: "Re: The MedicalPhone. The MedicalPhone website was down for a day or two earlier this week after they received press mentions. Glad to see it’s back up." Here’s the link again.

I’m tired of gloom and doom news. Let’s hear more about positive company developments and maybe something about the charitable causes companies will support during the holidays. On the business front, EnovateIT e-mailed over its list of 2008 accomplishments: gross sales up 35%, headcount doubled, square footage expanded eightfold, and new customers and products. Anyone else? 

The Wall Street Journal investigates questionable practices in UPMC’s liver transplant program and the shady transplant surgeon it brought in and later fired, but casts the net wider. "UPMC is a nonprofit hospital system whose income is largely exempt from taxes. Yet, it is increasingly run like a for-profit company, paying its executives high salaries, jumping into new activities and expanding abroad … Its chief executive, Jeffrey Romoff, earned $4 million in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2007, and 13 other employees earned in the roughly $1 million to $2 million range. For their transportation, UPMC leases a corporate jet. Earlier this year, UPMC relocated its headquarters into Pittsburgh’s tallest skyscraper, the 62-story U.S. Steel Tower."

Brigham and Women’s is using IVR/speech recognition technology from Vocantas to collect information from patients who have started new drug therapy. The company has developed applications for discharge follow-up, disease management, and running emergency call lists.

The Project Valour-IT fundraising challenge will wind down this week, ending on Thanksgiving Day. You can donate here to help cover the cost of a several wounded military member’s rehabilitative technology. The $54,532 raised so far is a long way from the $250,000 needed. Thanks.

I wrote Thursday about nurses in the UK using cell phone software to monitor data entered by chronic patients at home. The celebration was premature, as it turns out: the hospitals using the t+ Medical software have ditched it already, saying it was too cumbersome to put into practice.

Picis offers a free report on business intelligence tools.

I don’t have the courage to look at my 401K or IRA balances, but I figured it was time to check out HIT stock prices over the past six months since I don’t hold those:

• Google: down 58%
• Siemens: down 55%
• GE: down 54%
• QuadraMed: down 51%
• Allscripts: down 51%
• McKesson: down 46%
• Cardinal Health: down 45%
• NASDAQ Composite:  down 44%
• Dow Jones Industrial Average: down 36%
• Eclipsys: down 36%
• Cerner: down 30%
• Microsoft: down 30%
• Perot Systems: down 25%
• Athenahealth: down 23%
• HP: down 22%
• Quality Systems: down 9%
• CPSI: up 27%

Landmark Medical Center (RI) is operating under a court-ordered supervisor and seeking a buyer. Among other examples of bad healthcare conditions, the article mentions that 10 of New Jersey’s 80 hospitals have shut down in the last two years.

It appears that Oklahoma State University Medical Center is on the brink of closing or selling out to St. John Medical Center, with its Web site turned into a plea for state government help. It might be the only hospital Web site in existence that doesn’t say where the hospital is (Tulsa) or how to contact it.

The Social Security Administration wants to develop a system that can extract medical records information for disability claimants from EMR systems using the Continuity of Care Document format. It’s being piloted now at BIDMC and Cleveland Clinic.

An argument between Muskogee Regional Medical Center (OK) and local surgeons goes to the state’s Supreme Court. The hospital insists that two surgeons must be on ED call for 192 hours per month, based on its bylaws that require around-the-clock coverage. The doctors say the hospital gets federal money for ED coverage and should hire its own.

Vendor Deals and Announcements

• Parkland Health & Hospital System (TX) implements Innovation’s PharmASSIST pharmacy automation systems across its nine pharmacy sites. PharmASSIST is integrated with the Cerner PharmNet system to process 6,000 prescriptions a day.
• SecureCare Technologies’ Sfax solution is now integrated into Addison Health Systems’ WritePad EMR.
• Interactive patient care system provider Skylight Healthcare Systems signs an agreement to deploy Skylight ACCESS for Cancer Treatment Centers of America’s new facility at Western Regional Medical Center.
• Edward Hospital and Health Services (IL) will implement Allscripts’ Enterprise EHR/PM solution for 50+ providers. Another 40 providers will use just the Allscripts’ PM solution.
• Centegra Health Systems (IL) signs a long term service agreement with Perot to provide support for its IT platform and assistance implementing a clinical system and other technologies.
• Brigham and Women’s Hospital (MA) will use Vocantas’ CallAssure interactive voice response system to study the effectiveness of using automated telephone follow-up systems to manage chronically ill patients using commonly prescribed medications.
• Former Cerner sales leader Mike Fiorito is named the new chief sales and marketing office for LifeWatch Services.
• Children’s Health System (AL) will deploy Eclipsys’ Sunrise solutions at its new $500 million facility opening in 2012.
• Acesis announces the release of Clinical Product Review Suite, a new product designed to automate the peer review process for hospitals and other healthcare providers.
• Harold Miller is named president and CEO of the Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement.
• Twelve critical access hospitals in North Dakota launch a pilot program focused on improving patient safety through automated and shared data collection. The Critical Access Hospital Quality Network with use Clarity Group’s Healthcare SafteyZone Portal.
• Western Missouri Medical Center completes installation of DR Systems’ PACS solution.
• Rodney Schutt is named Asprya’s new CEO, having previously been with Luminetx, Smith and Nephew Orthopaedics, and GE Healthcare.
• Seattle Children’s Hospital selects DatStat to provide its staff tools to improve enterprise research and to facilitate feedback from employees, patients, and patients’ families.
• Wexford-Mercy PHO (MI) selects WellCentive Registry to help improve clinical quality outcomes and streamline the care delivery process.
• BCBS of Vermont says it has saved almost $500K using VUE Compensation Management’s compensation management technology.
• Orthopedic Associates of Meadville (OH) selects SRS’s EMR solution for its five-physician practice.
• Daniel Kohl is named the new president and CEO of clinical documentation service provider Spheris.
• Bert Fish Medical Center (FL) selects Xceedium’s GateKeeper technology to provide secure remote administration services.
• Mediware Information Systems acquires the assets of pharmacy management software provider Hann’s On Software (HOS). The purchase, which includes $3.5 million in cash plus potential operational performance monies, adds 320 pharmacy facilities to Mediware’s client base.
• dbMotion is named winner of the Healthcare IT Summit’s Innovation Award in the Best Case Study Presentation category. The winning presentation focused on dbMotion’s implementation at UPMC.
• Healthvision solutions is a new reseller for MediSolution’s Virtuo BI solutions.
• The Defense Health Information Management Systems Program selects Base Technologies to provide teleradiology support services for Medweb’s PACS solution in war zones.
• CCHIT announces three new members to its board of trustees. Meighan Girgus, EVP for the American Heart Association; Wes Rishel, VP for Gartner; and Dr. Bruce Taffel, VP/CMO for Shared Health. They will serve staggered, three-year terms.
• Lynn Hudson, national EMR product manager for HealthPort,is a new member of The Electronic Health Records Association Executive Committee.

E-mail me.

News 11/21/08

From Wayne Twitchell: "Re: Boston Globe article. If you’re charged with something serious like manslaughter, do you get the local city/town lawyer to defend you, or do you go into one of the big city firms who have a lot of resources and do a lot of extra things (pro bono work, research, etc.) that a small local firm can’t do? I go with the big city firm. The defense and the outcome could be the same, but it’s my life we’re talking about. Granted, the national (or local) healthcare situation is different in that we’re all paying insurance and there’s the perception that our costs are going up because big city hospitals are getting more money for the same things that community hospitals do. But I think it’s unfair to compare a big hospital or hospital system to a community hospital just because they do some of the same stuff." 

From The PACS Designer: "Re: digitally connected patients and SOA. Intel has entered the digitally connected patient field with a new FDA 510(k) approved application called the Intel Healthguide which allows clinicians to monitor remotely the activities and conditions of their patients. Additionally, Intel will be using service-oriented architecture (SOA) to accomplish the monitoring tasks." Link.

From Unknown1: "Re: health benefits. I think it would be very interesting for you to do a poll on the current health benefits employers are providing their employees this year due to increasing costs of services, economy, etc. Here is a link describing the new plans UnitedHealth Group is providing all its employees. They are only offering plans with HSAs; annual deductibles of $4.6K per family and nearly $10K for annual out of pocket expenses. It is very disappointing to see a leading healthcare insurance company treat its employees the way it treats the providers — squeezing every last dime out of them." Link.

Listening: Camper Van Beethoven, 80s college radio eclectics whose music crosses all genres (and who knock out a respectable Pink Floyd cover).

CCHIT is only halfway covering its budget through certification fees so far, so they’re wondering if Obama will fund them after their federal contract ends on April 19. Seems like just about every Bush HIT goal didn’t amount to much except to get David Brailer a cushy post-government job (thriving RHIOs, EMR adoption, a strong ONCHIT, adoption of VistA, etc. were all kind of a bust) but at least CCHIT has had tangible results. Whether that’s good or bad depends on who you ask.

The Decatur paper writes a feature on St. Mary’s Hospital (IL) and includes a photo of its MEDITECH system.

Google’s SecondLife killer, Lively, dies early in its FirstLife.

Also kaput: the print version of PC Magazine, bowing out after a 27-year run to become an online-only publication. At the rate print publications are shrinking and dying, we’ll have plenty of trees.

To your right: put your name in the Subscribe to Updates box to join thousands of readers who get instant notification when I write something new. Or, right below that, click the Email This to a Friend icon to pop up a handy-dandy form to easily e-mail everyone you know to convince them to read HIStalk and help reduce the neurotic behaviors that Inga and I exhibit when we worry about being unpopular. The Search HIStalk box Googles through the 5.5 years of HIStalk, while clicking the ugly green box below it lets you send a confidential message (with attachments, even) to me like we were spies or something. And please, if you have the interest, please click some of those sponsor ads to your left to avoid me having to explain to some Internet hotshot company VP why they aren’t getting clicks and therefore will not be renewing their sponsorship, which will then raise those neurotic behaviors all over again.

AHRQ gives University of Texas School of Health Information Sciences at Houston a $1.3 million grant to train six students for five years on HIT. They’re working on interesting projects.

Jobs: Soarian Consultants (MA), Epic Resolute Consultant (PA), Multiple Epic Positions (CO).

Henry Ford Health System gets an eHealthcare award for its Web site.

Struggling Canadian EMR vendor MedcomSoft sells its Canadian Medworks 4.0 customer base to HTN for $85,000. Could be related to this announcement, in which a Canadian investment company places a $100,000 loan "to a third-party company in the healthcare/technology sector … to undertake a strategic acquisition." Seems like those numbers should have some additional zeroes to be worthy of press releases.

UCSD (CA) chooses FairWarning for privacy auditing.

Kindred Healthcare (KY) will use Allscripts Referral Management.

Document management vendor DB Technology names Charles Wilson as CEO.

At least it isn’t more Cerner problems: Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead has its ambulance booted. The private towing company said signs were clear, but the ambulance’s tracking equipment showed it was left for just one minute while the driver helped a patient into a dialysis facility.

Also in the UK, nurses are monitoring patients who transmit data to hospitals by cell phone. The t+ Medical software costs around $30 per patient per month.

And still again in the UK, IT systems three London hospitals are shut down and ambulances diverted after the Mytob mail worm is discovered on some PCs.

Unrelated: kudos to Rep. Gary Ackerman of New York, grilling the CEOs of the Big Three auto companies on why taxpayers should underwrite their continued incompetence: "There is a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hand, saying that they’re going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses. It’s almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. It kind of makes you a little bit suspicious. Couldn’t you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here? It would have at least sent a message that you do get it." 

A reader points out another way to help disabled war veterans (other than clicking the Project Valour-IT graphic to your right): donate money or raise puppies for Canine Companions for Independence.

Lofware announces Web services capability for its print server.

A New York Times article profiles American Well, which offers 10-minute virtual patient visits with physicians by Internet webcam through insurers. Interesting: AIG is providing malpractice insurance and it’s cheap enough that the health plans are paying for it instead of charging the docs. The company is a HealthVault partner. Almost everyone on the leadership team came from TriZetto.

Acquisition expert Derek Eckelman joins Sunquest as VP of business development.

Mammoth Hospital, which is anything but mammoth at 17 beds but is in Mammoth Lakes, CA, implements DeviceLock USB security. Some nice quotes are included from IT operations supervisor Paul Fottler. Sounds pretty cool: network admins can lock out USB ports, WiFi and Bluetooth adapters, peripheral devices, ports, printers, and other plug-and-play devices on PCs, even by day of the week and time. It also enforces encryption policies. It’s $42 each. PC Magazine gave it four stars and the company has some interesting free downloads: Plug and Play Auditor, Active Ports, Active Shutdown, and several other utilities.

The iCEphone, originally developed for the British military by The Medical Phone Ltd. of Edinburgh, Scotland, will be sold in a medical/emergency software configuration.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

From Tammi: “Re: holiday parties. My company doesn’t have holiday parties, but this weekend while chatting at the coffee shop, a couple mentioned their son runs a high-end restaurant in the Denver area. Included on his property is a venue which is booked a year in advance for corporate holiday parties. The companies are calling in great numbers to try to get out of their bookings.” In our unscientific poll to the right, it looks like 41% of companies are either cancelling or scaling back parties this year. I’m predicting a related decline in Alka-Seltzer sales as well.

With all this gloomy news about layoffs and poor financial results, I have decided I need news that lifts my spirits. Thus, the rest of today’s HERtalk will contain only good news. Up near the top is athenahealth’s plan to add 100 new jobs in 2009 in its new Belfast, ME facility, which already employs 140.

I also heard that Digital Healthcare, a provider of a retinal health assessment solution, just raised an additional $5 million in funding to expand operations. The NC company employs a number of former Misys folks, including former VPs Marc Winchester and Scott Sanner.

I am sure that Peter S. Amenta, MD, PhD is happy to be appointed the new dean for UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He has served as interim dean for the last two years.

Scott P. Serota, President and CEO of BCBSA releases a statement saying, “BCBSA and the 39 member Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies today announced support for every individual being required to have coverage and all insurers being required to accept everyone regardless of their health status.” For anyone who has ever been declined insurance, this is a comforting statement. AHIP had a similar endorsement today, announcing support for guaranteed coverage without pre-existing exclusions. (OK, I recognize that insurance for all has its issues, but remember, I’m having a happy post day).

Here is a technology I want to hear more about. M*Modal launches AnyModal CDS Mobile for the iPhone. Apparently the SaaS technology allows clinicians to dictate via the iPhone. The product uses “speech understanding” services that allow the dictation to be captured, understood, and transcribed real time, giving physicians the ability to immediately review and sign off on the document.

Speaking of iPhones, I’m betting this poor woman will be happier in divorce than she is in marriage. She discovers that her husband has e-mailed some “personal” photos of himself to another woman via his iPhone. He claims the Genius bar experts at the local Apple store said it’s a known iPhone “glitch” that photos sometimes mistakenly attach themselves to an e-mail address. The skeptical wife sends a question to an Apple discussion board, asking if other users agree with the Genius. The consensus: the marriage has the glitch.

Without a doubt, this story helped lift my spirits. Former Baylor Healthcare System (TX) VP of clinical transformation Mary Staley-Sirois leaves the corporate world to serve as VP of Global Program Development for MediSend, a non-profit humanitarian organization that provides medical aid, healthcare education and technology, and other services to hospitals in developing countries. Staley-Sirois will apparently take her extensive experience from Baylor and from Healthlink before that to grow the organization’s worldwide healthcare initiatives. Love it.

E-mail Inga.

Reports: Obama Chooses Daschle as HHS Secretary

The Washington Post reports that President-elect Obama has chosen former Senate Majority Leader and South Dakota Democrat Tom Daschle as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Sources also report that Daschle will be given broad healthcare policy responsibilities that include expanding healthcare coverage while reducing costs.

Daschle’s book, "Critical: What We Can Do about the Health-Care Crisis," called for a healthcare oversight entity similar to the Federal Reserve Board. He was supporter of the failed Clinton health plan in the early 90s.

The Republication National Committee is already criticizing the choice of Daschle, an early Obama backer, saying that both Daschle and his wife work for lobbying firms.

News 11/19/08

From Jamie Sommers: "Re: Payerpath. Word is that Art Glasgow, the Payerpath president, resigned from Allscripts-Misys today on a town hall conference call. He was a good guy and the reason why Misys bought Payerpath in the first place." Unverified.

From The PACS Designer: "Re: federated identify. You will be hearing soon about a new concept called federated identity. Microsoft and other software firms are working on bringing this concept to fruition in the next year or so. Cloud computing requires a better method of identifying users that won’t overload requests for additions to Active Directories. Microsoft has a software download called Services Connector that provides the ability to identify authorized e-mail addresses from federated databases through its Live ID software when logging on to a cloud service." Link.

From Fourth Hansen Brother: "Re: FDA. Have they been cheating in medical devices?" Link. FDA scientists claim that agency executives pressured them to change their findings so that medical devices could get marketing approval. 

NotADupe claimed last time that a marketing person planted the Clara Barton comment about an Allscripts product at AMIA since it sounded pretty rosy and "I was at AMIA and I didn’t see Allscripts/Misys there." I thought it sounded legit, although it was borderline because it was so positive. My Allscripts contact saw the mention and quizzed all the marketing people there to make sure someone didn’t go rogue and post a fake comment here, then cast the net wider to see what Clara Barton was talking about. There was indeed an Allscripts demo at AMIA, although a brief and informal one. Jacob Reider MD, the company’s medical director, did a five-minute demo of Allscripts Prenatal at the Primary Care Informatics Working Group on Saturday night in front of around 40 people. The product isn’t GA yet, but I’m sure you’ll hear more when it is. I also appreciate that Allscripts was ready to go after anyone on their side who tried to mislead readers here, which is fortunately unnecessary since everything was above-board.

From HITPundit: "Re: Partners. There is a good read in the Sunday Boston Globe about the Partners effect. I thought it was about patients? Non-profit status for most of these places is a joke." Link. Of course it is. The story is about how Taj Mahospitals get paid more money to deliver average care for certain services than their less-ritzy but better-outcome competition. It mentions Mass General’s $686 million expansion and Partners’ $1.7 billion in profit in the last four years, while Caritas Christi was borrowing money to pay for oxygen tanks. It also mentions Partners’ leveraging its patient perception to manhandle insurance companies, resulting in 30% higher payment than similar hospitals (although Children’s Boston has the highest rates in Massachusetts). The quote HITPundit liked came from the chairman of Partners’ board: "Some are able to spend more than others. It’s our fortune that we’re probably in the lead on those investments. And several hospitals aren’t able to keep that pace. And that’s what I, as a businessman, call market forces, if you will." I thought this snip was interesting: "And it is there, in the workaday world of hospital care, that the hospitals’ reputation for unmatched excellence fades – and with it much of the rationale for the higher payments they receive for such treatments. The growing, if still inadequate, body of data available about hospital quality paints a fairly consistent picture of the care at the Brigham and Mass. General: often good, but rarely extraordinary, and sometimes inferior to the care available at other hospitals."

From Pacstech: "Re: stolen records. How about an arrest warrant for the idiot that allowed the records to be stolen? With 25 beds, how many people in medical records are we taking about here?" Bags of paper medical records stolen from Down East Community Hospital (ME) wash up on a local riverbank.

From HCC Princess: "Re: CMS. CMS is auditing 30-40 Medicare Advantage Plans. Claims from 200 random members will be audited and apparently any unsubstantiated claims will be extrapolated across the entire plan’s membership base. CMS is looking to recover a lot of money."

From Vern Den Herder: "Re: Epic. A healthcare organization in Connecticut recently signed with Epic. Wondering who?"

From Vince Ciotti: "Re: the $25K IT project. Spending more in IT won’t get you squat for recognition. Spend less! Use the $25K as rewards for ideas in a cost-cutting campaign that solicits ideas from your IT staff. $10K to the winner, $5K to runner-up, etc. Have finance vet the ideas and only the ones finance says will produce real ROI (that is, reducing someone’s budget next year) get considered. In the 100+ IT assessments we’ve done with The Hunter Group and Navigant Consulting, some of the best ideas have been given to us by IT staffer we interviewed. Why pay us to find them – get them yourself from your own staff!!"

Computerworld writes up Midland Memorial Hospital’s OpenVistA implementation, although emphasizing "cheap" rather than "works just fine" (the "old code" remark was snarky, especially given that many commercial products are older than VistA, which was rolled out in 1996). The hospital’s project was named as a winner of a 2008 InfoWorld 100 award.

I admit that I’m old-school patriotic, not a fair-weather flag-waver, so I was happy to join in the Valour-IT Veterans Day fundraiser, which ends next Thursday (Thanksgiving Day — how appropriate). My 401k may be hitting a rough patch, but I can darn sure find a few dollars to help buy a severely injured soldier, sailor, or airman some technology to help them recover from devastating war wounds. Their sacrifice (and that of their families) isn’t diminished one whet by the fact that I don’t always agree with the orders they are given (I’m sure they’re not always thrilled about it, either, which is all the more reason to get them back on track). It costs around $700 to provide a laptop with assistive technology and I was happy to provide one to someone who deserves it. Being a 19-year-old kid surrounded by the constant threat of harm and miserable conditions far from home is bad enough, but being shipped back to your family missing limbs has to suck big time. All donations of any amount are welcome and are tax-deductible.

Barry Chaiken MD, formerly of McKesson and BearingPoint, is now CEO at Medting of Palma De Mallorca, Spain (field trip!) Never heard of them, but it looks like a physician collaboration platform for sharing cases that can include media.

TELUS, the Canadian telecommunications company that bought Emergis a year ago, which had previously bought Dinmar in 2006 (and therefore its Oacis clinical system), creates TELUS Health Solutions and says it will invest $100 million over three years in it.

SCI Solutions wins two marketing awards: one for its ad graphics and the top award overall for its Access Management magazine.

CodeRyte gets $13 million in Series D funding, for a total VC funding of $50 million.

It took Inga awhile to get confirmation from some earlier reader rumor reports, but she has verified officially that Ingenix has acquired Global Works Systems, Inc. and will make them part of Ingenix Consulting.

This stock analyst says GE is in big trouble, calling it "a bank disguised as an industrial conglomerate" and an over-leveraged one at that, saying that if GE fails, it "could trigger the mother of all bailouts." I’ve speculated all along that its GE Capital exposure was a lot more than Jeff Immelt was owning up to. Speaking of which, may we assume that Intermountain’s CareCast pig-lipsticking project is either dead or at least so far behind that no one could possibly still care?

Right after I wrote the above, along comes a GE Healthcare press release touting "Digital Day One" without ever really saying what it is, although data-sharing and new hospital construction are mentioned. I read the release three times and I still have no idea what they’re talking about, with no clarification available on their site because the press release isn’t there at all. Marc Probst is quoted, so Intermountain is involved, apparently with regard to "timely sharing of newly published medical breakthroughs and best practices."

But speaking of GE, this Motley Fool analyst tries to figure out which company is more screwed up: GE (GE Capital) or Siemens (bribery).

Half of primary care physicians say they’d get out of medicine if they had an alternative, all because of insurance and government red tape. Everything said there is pretty much what Susanne Madden said when I interviewed her.

University of Toledo’s McKesson EDIS implementation is written up on its site.

Former Cerner sales guy Mike Fiorito is named chief sales and marketing officer of cardiac monitoring services vendor  LifeWatch Services. Hopefully he’ll direct better press release writing since I had to read the first two paragraphs of this one at least five times to make sense of it (and I read a ton of press releases).

Texas Health Resources demonstrates a patient-doctor relationship tool built on the Microsoft’s Surface computers, that "wave your hand over the coffee table" gadget that Steve Ballmer kept yapping about in his HIMSS keynote. More important applications have already been built for it, however, as Harrah’s has Surface computers running in Rio Casino "allowing customers to flirt and order specialty drinks using the technology."

Children’s Health System (AL) picks what sounds like the entire Eclipsys Sunrise product line. A big peds hospital customer is a great opportunity, but I’ve never seen one yet that wasn’t a pain in the adult-sized ass. I guarantee that a six-hospital IDN with one peds hospital will spend 50% of the entire project effort just accommodating the sometimes bizarre but indefatigably argued practices in peds, always defended with the reminder that "kids aren’t just little adults." Sometimes I think they’re as unlike general community hospitals as a veterinary hospital, occasionally for good reasons.

Odd: a former New Zealand health district CIO goes on trial for stealing $11 million US by submitting false invoices. He had "grand properties," a luxury car collection, and a 150-foot, 17-bedroom yacht.

Misys CEO Mike Lawrie on the prospects for Allscripts-Misys: ""Everyone recognises spending in US healthcare is out of control and is projected to consume 17 per cent of [gross domestic product]. And they’ve just spent a trillion bailing out the financial system. There is a limit to how much money you can print. And my view is there’s no way, with a new administration, [rising costs] can be left unchecked. And technology will be part of the solution."

Spheris names former Pediatric Services of America CEO Dan Kohl as president and CEO.

Glenn Dennis is named president and COO of Perry Biomedical Corporation, which makes hyperbaric oxygen chambers. He was previously with DataLoom, Exigent, SoftMed, and GE.

Chinese Internet company Baidu.com reels when it’s found that a chunk of its paid search revenue comes from unlicensed medical and drug customers, whose paid links were mixed in with real results based on popularity. Its a lot like Google, making its founder a billionaire.

Kenya has an ambitious plan to connect all hospitals over the Internet for telemedicine, ordering supplies, and providing second opinions. It will also support TelePresence, Cisco’s high-quality videoconferencing tool.

East Tennessee Heart Consultants brags on its IT outsourcing to Claris Networks, claiming it costs less and is more reliable.

Hospital layoffs: Beaumont Hospital (MI), 500 employees; MetroHealth (OH), 25 employees.

The University of Texas System, reorganizing UTMB after Hurricane Ike damage and massive layoffs that started this week, brings in Kurt Salmon Associates to help develop a plan.

E-mail me.

HERtalk by Inga

A computer virus at Barts and The London NHS Trust causes a system shutdown that lasts more than 24 hours. E-mail and Internet access were affected, but not the Cerner application (finally there is an issue that couldn’t be blamed on a Cerner application).

Speaking of hospitals across the pond, several are facing closure because they are not attracting enough patients. Recent reforms allow patients to choose where they’d like to be treated, which has shifted traffic to the more successful medical centers.

The University of Missouri and Cerner are winners of CHIME’s Collaboration Award for using HIT to help UM family physicians and patients manage chronic diseases.

NightHawk Radiology Holdings announces the appointment of David M. Engert as CEO, following the resignation of Dr. Paul E. Berger. Engert is a former McKesson and Quality Care Systems exec. Berger, who co-founded NightHawk along with his son Jon, will remain as non-executive chairman of the board. Jon Berger, an SVP and board member, has also resigned from both the company and board.

Barcode POC provider IntelliDOT and latric Systems sign an agreement that formalizes pricing for interfaces, implementation, and maintenance for customers using Iatric System interfaces between IntelliDOT and MEDITECH solutions.

Beginning in January, the Seton Family of Hospitals (TX) is implementing a new dress code for nurses and other patient care employees. Tattoos must be covered and piercings limited to earrings and a small nose stud. I personally prefer fashion accessories to permanent body adornment, but tattoos don’t particularly bother me (assuming everyone has had the appropriate hepatitis screening), although I find I can never quite look someone in the eye if they have a nose ring or piercings in their eyebrows. Even though they have no effect on the quality of care, I suppose some patients would be more at ease if they didn’t see a naked lady tattoo while getting a blood draw.

Eclipsys claims they’ve exceeded sales targets for the EPSi budgeting and financial decision support systems for the first three quarters. Their announcement doesn’t mention if their sales goals were set too low or whether the sales have translated to higher profits, but, it’s still good to hear that someone is making headway in these economic times.

A friend mentioned that his employer (a law office) is downsizing its holiday bash this year. Rather than renting a steak restaurant for an evening of expensive food and drink, they’re having a holiday luncheon delivered to the office. Some of the party savings will be donated to charity. It got me wondering what other companies are planning; hence the new poll to your right. This year, Mr. H and I are planning a Virtual Holiday Party. We are thinking perhaps setting up an online chat and he’ll drink his beer while I sip on my wine. Mr. H is tight with his money, so he still hasn’t decided if we can bring dates to the affair. Meanwhile, according to the Raleigh paper, the Allscripts-Misys folks will have a chance to act like one big happy family at their convention center holiday bash.

Red Hat chairman Matthew Szulik is named E&Y’s 2008 Entrepreneur of the Year for turning his company into a billion-dollar business. Glen Tullman of Allscripts was a finalist in the Technology division.

MedcomSoft announces its Q1 results. The news remains bleak for this 2007 Best in KLAS winner, now desperate for a buyer. Revenues were down 10% year on year and the net loss was almost $800K.

Former VeriChip CEO Scott R. Silverman regains control of the company after a $5.4 million purchase of common stock. In addition, the company purchased all intellectual property rights related to its human implantable RFID technology. Silverman claims he is eager to “re-ignite” the company.

Virtual Radiologic appoints Kevin H. Roche to its board of directors. He’s a managing partner at Vita Advisors and formerly the CEO of Ingenix and general counsel for UnitedHealthGroup.

Thomson Reuters releases its annual study of the top cardiovascular care hospitals.

Peter Dolphin is named VP of business development for Beacon Partners. He was most recently the VP of sales at eScription, and before that worked at IDX Systems (GE Healthcare).

E-mail Inga.

Monday Morning Update 11/17/08

From GatorFan: "Re: Philips. Rumor has it that Philips is undergoing a significant restructuring that could result in a layoff of 5,000 people. The announcement will supposedly be made early next week." Apparent confirmation is here — the Plain Dealer says 5% of the healthcare headcount will be cut loose.

From Carlotta Ailes: "Re: retail clinics. RediClinic opens that largest retail clinic in the nation with Memorial Hermann. The clinics are using athenahealth’s EMR/PM system." Link. It’s in a Houston H-E-B grocery store, 926 square feet with three exam rooms and a blood draw room.

From Bill the Cat: "Re: OSF. Our company was told by the higher-ups at OSF that they were moving to Epic about four months ago. Plans are in place and it should be done in 2-3 years (migration is never easy)." And from Techsan: "Re: OSF. They are already live on Epic’s Ambulatory EMR and Scheduling, but they are now also replacing existing ‘core’ systems (i.e., remaining rev cycle and inpatient EMR) with Epic."

From NotADupe: "Re: Clara Barton. Sounds like you were duped by a marketing plant. I was at AMIA and I didn’t see Allscripts/Misys there." Could be, but it’s hard to tell. The comment (barely) passed the sniff test, I admit, but it was just believable enough that I ran it. Companies try planting PR sometimes, but I don’t run it if I’m suspicious (a consulting company that I should name tried it today, posing as a customer innocently inquiring about a competitor’s acquisition). A few companies have also stiffed me on their HIStalk sponsorship in one way or another (want me to name them?) and they won’t be getting mentioned here, either, at least not in a positive way.

From Nasty Parts: "Re: Sage Healthcare. Rumor is that [name omitted]’s days are numbered. Top consultants are looking at internal processes, comp plans, etc. All of Andy Corbin’s former hires are slowly being excised from the company. Everyone is happy." I didn’t feel right mentioning the name, but if it happens, I’ll give you credit for predicting it.

From Pro from Dover: "Re: layoffs. A week ago, McKesson began laying off salespeople, approximately 20% of ‘new’ salesforce. Also, Misys/Allscripts sales layoffs are beginning this week." It would be more newsworthy if a company wasn’t laying off, especially in sales, where "layoffs" is often a nice synonym for "parting ways with under-performers who aren’t making their numbers." It’s always been a cold business, but likely to be colder still for at least a short while. No one in sales would be surprised by that revelation. On the other hand, stocking up on cheaper noobs is hardly a recipe for success, so companies will have to balance expense vs. potential long-term benefit. 

From Chuck Lumley: "Re: Sensitron. Rajiv Jularia, CEO of Sensitron, died last month rather suddenly. The company and product status are unclear. While they struggled, they had an early stage, device-agnostic, Bluetooth-enabled vital sign data capture system."     

Listening: The Who, Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970. Video here. Keith Moon was the most exuberant and charismatic drummer in modern history, arguably the lead instrument instead of Townshend’s guitar, especially amazing since Moon was probably stoned out of his mind most of the time (a video from another concert shows him extracted unconscious from the drum kit by roadies and hauled offstage, with an audience volunteer chosen to finish up the set in his place). He died in 1978 at 32; bassist John Entwistle died in 2002. Daltrey is now 64, Townshend is 63. Also: The Dilettantes, 60s-sounding psych-pop.

Streamline Health isn’t so good at keeping secrets (or maybe they’re crafty about technically honoring a hospital’s wish not to be named, but identifying them nonetheless). This press release (warning: PDF) coyly refers to a "leading New York City-based medical institution" without naming it. Check out the link address, though. Super sleuth Inga noticed that. I told her this week that she’s like a terrier when she latches onto a rumor, instilling 60 Minutes-type fear in PR and executive offices as she starts bugging everyone she can find to tell her the truth. Readers benefit from that, of course.

Sentry Data Systems of Deerfield Beach, FL has shown its support for HIStalk by becoming a Platinum Sponsor, for which I am most grateful. If you’re in hospital IT, your pharmacy contact will be interested in Sentry because they offer Sentinel RCM (supply chain compliance, GPO, and 340b tracking), Datanex (secure technology backbone with APIs), and Sentrex (pharmacy claims, including 340b replenishment). Just announced: the HealthBIT business intelligence platform for hospitals, which constructs a queryable data set from clinical and administrative data sources and provides tools for reviewing clinical protocols, identifying patient safety concerns with pharmacy procurement, cost analysis, and a notification engine. Thanks to Sentry Data Systems for supporting HIStalk and its readers.

Nortel dumps ballast overboard (employees and executives) trying to stay afloat after a $3.4 billion quarterly loss. It appears to not be working as the stock sheds another 28% Friday to end up at $0.56 per share, dropping its market cap to just $278 million. 

Think your company is the only one struggling a little and laying off staff? Not so. I hear a lot of insider stuff and the headlines you see only begin to tell the story. Hospitals are getting stung hard by investment losses and lack of capital funds, so IT will take hits in many of them. I think that’s why companies are acquiring consulting firms — business should be good as hospitals try to implement and improve systems already on the books and new hires will be hard to get approved. Consulting firms are good at making a sound business case to strapped hospital CFOs (much better than the average IT department, unfortunately) so I think you’ll see more CIO replacements, more outsourcing, and more contract implementations tied to specific patient care and financial results. None of that’s bad unless you’re on the wrong end of it.

And speaking of providers, here’s a question for hospital CIOs, CTOs, and other IT management. Let’s say an average 400-bed hospital is cutting back on some big-ticket IT projects, leaving the IT department looking for high impact, short-term projects to knock out during the slack time. Let’s say the limits are $25,000 not counting internal labor, it can’t require capital funds, and it has to deliver high visibility/high ROI with immediate operational impact. What projects have you done that you would recommend?

Max Baucus (D-MT), chairman of the Senate finance committee, releases his Call to Action paper (warning: PDF) on health reform. From his remarks: "Let me be clear about one thing: There’s no way to really solve America’s economic troubles without fixing the health care system.If you fix Wall Street, you fix the housing crisis, you change taxes, you fix everything else, and you don’t fix health care, then government spending will keep going up. Health care costs suck up more than 16 percent of our economy, and they’re growing. Deficitswill continue to rise. And America will just have more economic troubles down the road."

Fundraising ends for Project Valour-IT on Thanksgiving, so click the graphic to your right to help provide assistive technology laptops to severely wounded soldiers. $37,000 has been donated so far and our Navy team is in the lead (although all money goes to all service branches – having teams is just a way to keep score). The project has no money for laptops at the moment and is hoping for $250,000 in donations to buy a bunch of laptops at around $700 each (DoD was so impressed with Valour-IT that they buy the Dragon NaturallySpeaking). Any amount is appreciated.

John at Chilmark Research likes the idea that big players are studying PHRs, but is skeptical about CITL’s optimistic, vendor-sponsored report. "For the cost/benefit analysis, CITL proposed a scenario of 80% user adoption within 10 years that will generate $19B in annual savings. 80% adoption? $19B is savings? What are they smoking over there?"

Odd: a Seattle dentist and oral surgeon (but also an MD) is sued for messing up a 15-year-old girl’s non-cosmetic breast reduction surgery. He’s been sued for malpractice at least 10 times, has paid out over $1 million in claims, and was mildly reprimanded (fined $4,000) for being implicated in the death of a liposuction patient, for whom CPR was initiated six minutes after the patient stopped breathing.

An industry rag wrote this, a reader reports, although it was fixed in the online version by the time I went for a screen shot: "In addition, Epic won the first certification for an enterprise EHR that provides comprehensive ambulatory, inpatient and emergency department EHRs that are inoperable."

Emageon’s acquirer HSS announces Q3 numbers: revenue up 106%, EPS -$0.42 vs. -$0.40. They’re good at hiding the loss, not mentioning it until the eleventh paragraph after leading off with a revenue headline and jamming in all the good-sounding numbers first. Readers with a short attention span might be impressed by their quarterly results.

Citrix will release its XenDesktop and XenApp software available for the iPhone in a few months, allowing all Windows applications to be virtualized and then run over an iPhone virtual desktop. That’s already available for Windows Mobile and Symbian devices, but the iPhone version will allow using the cool gesture stuff. I imagine this will be hot, although I don’t know how much work you could do on that little screen that doesn’t have a real keyboard.

An SVP of drugmaker Gilead Sciences advises Microsoft on healthcare IT: "If Microsoft really wants to own the world, create a standardized electronic medical records system and give it away for free the first five years. Then start charging." I bet he’s not nearly as keen on the idea of doing the same in his own industry, i.e. making generic Tamiflu and Flolan at a cheaper price instead of charging to much to treat diseases like HIV for a $2 billion annual profit. He’s got a point about standardizing by offering a free product that sets the standard by its own ubiquity, but then again, even a free EMR isn’t much of a deal for doctors unless it saves them time.

A British surgeon is suspended for downloading NHS medical information about his secretary, her family, and her boyfriend after becoming infatuated with her. He claims his current wife was a bad choice and he hoped to do better by turning the secretary’s information over to a private detective to check her out before he made his move. The secretary found out when the surgeon’s wife accused her of having an affair with her husband, after which the secretary then snooped around on his work computer and found her own medical records, the surgeon’s list of tactics on how he planned to win her over, and an impressively massive porn stash.

Cleveland Clinic doctors pick the Top 10 procedures and products that will influence medicine in the next year. On the list: NHIN (#10), which the good doctors must not know much about if they’re thinking it will have an effect in the next 13 months.

South Korea and its hospitals want a piece of the medical tourism action, trolling for budget-conscious Americans as well as rich Arabs who can’t get a US visa because of terrorism-induced red tape. One hospital is building a hotel, a concert hall, and an art museum to complement its 18-hole golf course. Immigration rules were changed to allow patients and families to stay up to four years without a visa. "For Hassan and Fatima Abdulla, the trip has been one seamless surgery/tourism package. When they arrived in Seoul in October, a car from Wooridul and an English-speaking nurse were waiting for them at the airport. Abdulla found his wife’s hospital room – furnished with a television, broadband Internet access, private bathroom, sofas and an extra bed – so comfortable that he decided to stay with her rather than go to a hotel." Reminds me of the old days of pre-outsourced, small-town hospital cafeterias, where local cooks made food that was good enough that townspeople would actually drop by for lunch. Now it’s just surly Aramark contractors heating up Sysco TV dinner quality fare, not much different than feeding prisoners.

University of Iowa Hospitals fires one employee and suspends seven more for snooping in electronic patient records.

Vendor Deals and Announcements

• Mac enthusiasts have a new kiosk option with the release of MacPractice Kiosk Interface with signature pad.
• Wandering WiFi is now providing wireless service at six Ardent Health Services hospitals in Oklahoma and New Mexico for patient and visitor Internet access.
• Perot Systems acquires Tullurian, a managed services hosting provider serving 13,000 physicians and 565 practices. Perot, by the way, has launched healthcare service operations in China. David Miller will serve as managing director for the region’s consulting and clinical transformation services.
• Lake Charles Memorial Hospital (LA) announces the start of a $6 million, three-year process of migrating to McKesson’s Paragon and Practice Partner digital health record solutions.
• Beaver Dam Community Hospital (WI) selects McKesson’s Paragon HIS and document management solution.
• Clarian Health (IN) activates a MobileAccess Universal Wireless network across three hospitals, covering more than 4 million square feet.
• HIE SharedHealth is using Orion Health’s Concerto Portal Solution to enable an EHR solution and provide access to its Clinical Xchange platform.
• Ochsner Health Systems (LA) is installing InterSystems Progeny Anatomic Pathology information system.
• Spectrum Health (MI) selects InterSystems Ensemble software for integration initiatives across the entire enterprise.
• Passport Health Communications and SelfPay Company announce a strategic partnership to provide electronic charity care assessments.
• Charlotte, NC-based Patient Care Technology Systems is more than doubling its office space to support its growing employee base.
• DocuSys names David Young, MD medical director for its Presurgical Care Management solution. Young founded Prompte, a company acquired by DocuSys earlier this year. He is also medical director of presurgical testing at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital (IL) and a faculty member at UCSD.
• The 45-radiologist practice Radiology Associates (AR) will utilize AMICAS Web-based PACS, AMICAS Reach, and AMICAS Teleradiology solutions.
• Former Misys Transaction Services and IBAX exec Denis Connaghan is named president and CEO of etrials Worldwide, a provider of adaptive eClinical software and services.
• Clinical Solutions will integrate HLI’s Language Engine clinical decision technology into its IntefleCS Telephone Triage and IntefleCS Face to Face applications.

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