News 5/23/18

Top News

A New York Times article says that hospital EHRs are a “medical records mess” that impede research efforts because of incompatible data formats and the reluctance of health systems to share their patient data.

The creator of the Metastatic Breast Cancer Project says that genetic tumor analysis is easy compared to manually reviewing hospital charts that are always delivered as paper copies or faxes. He also noted that health systems ignore the patient-approved medical records requests more than 50 percent of the time.

The article notes that six-year-old oncology EHR and data vendor Flatiron Health – sold to drug maker Roche for $1.9 billion early 2018 by its 31- and 32-year old co-founders — has published the de-identified hospital records of 2.2 million cancer patients, but it took 900 nurses and tumor registrars to extract the 50 percent of required data elements that were stored as unstructured text.

Reader Comments

From Martin Shkreli: “Re: blockchain. This article has a good explanation of blockchain and health IT.” The article offers a balanced and easily read overview of blockchain and its potential uses. The author, who is a Bitcoin developer, concludes that the decentralized nature of blockchain comes with high costs and lack of scalability that make the “slow, expensive database” unsuitable for nearly everything except as currency and for feeding hype to investors:

This naturally means that the software or database must not change things around often, if at all. There should be little upside to upgrading and much downside to screwing up or changing the rules. Most industries are not like this. Most industries require new features or upgrades and the freedom to change and expand as necessary. Given that blockchains are hard to upgrade, hard to change, and hard to scale, most industries don’t have much use for a blockchain. The one exception we’ve found is money.

From Tonsorial Advances: “Re: Epic. Judy once hinted during a staff meeting that it would offer billing services. It was followed by a slide showing Cerner’s much higher services revenue. That is probably where the rumor you were sent came from, since an RCM acquisition might make sense.”

Webinars

May 24 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Converting Consumers into Patients: Strategies for Creating Engaging Digital Experiences People Demand.” Sponsor: Healthwise. Presenters: Antonia Chappell, director of consumer solutions, Healthwise; Josh Schlaich, senior product manager, Healthwise. Nearly three-quarters of US adults use a digital channel to manage their health and the internet to track down health information. It’s clear that consumers have come to expect online interactions as an integral part of their overall patient experience. In fact, the Internet may be the first way people come in contact with your organization. They have more choice than ever on where to get healthcare services, and their decisions are increasingly influenced by how well organizations connect with them in the digital space. This webinar will show you how to create engaging digital and web experiences that convert casual consumers into patients and keep them satisfied throughout their entire patient journey.

June 5 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Increase Referrals and Patient Satisfaction with a Smarter ‘Find a Doctor’ Web Search.” Sponsors: Phynd Technologies, Healthwise. Presenters: Joseph H. Schneider, MD, MBA, FAAP, retired SVP/CHIO, Indiana University Health; Keith Belton, VP of marketing, Phynd. A recent survey found that 84 percent of patients check a hospital’s website before booking an appointment. However, ‘Find a Doctor’ search functions often frustrate them because their matching functionality is primitive and the provider’s information is incomplete or outdated. Referring physicians need similarly robust tools to find the right specialist and to send the patient to the right location. Attendees of this webinar will learn how taxonomy-driven Provider Information Management improves patient and referrer satisfaction by intelligently incorporating the provider’s location, insurance coverage, specialty and subspecialty, and services offered that can be searched via patient-friendly terms.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Patient communication and appointment management system vendor Luma Health raises $6.3 million in a Series A funding round, increasing its total to $9.7 million.

Doctor house call provider Heal raises $20 million in funding, increasing its total to $69 million. The service operates from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. in parts of California and Washington, DC, with house calls covered by some insurance plans or $99 otherwise. Singer Lionel Richie is a company investor and pitchman.

Athenahealth’s second-largest shareholder — London-based Janus Henderson Investors, which owns 11.9 percent of the company — urges Athenahealth’s board to put the company up for sale. Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank thinks the company is worth $170 per share, but warns that the company’s suitor, activist investor Elliott Management, takes a long time to close deals. ATHN shares rose slightly Tuesday to around $154.

The US Supreme Court sides with Epic and two other companies in finding that mandatory employee arbitration and non-disclosure agreements are enforceable, meaning employees may not organize together to file workplace-related class action lawsuits.

Sales

• Columbus Regional Healthcare System (NC) chooses Cerner Millennium via the CommunityWorks hosted model.
• Australia’s NSW Health names Sectra as its preferred RIS/PACS vendor.

People

Todd Plesko (Vocera) joins Management Health Solutions as CEO.

HHS CTO Bruce Greenstein joins home health provider LHC Group as chief innovation and technology officer.

Announcements and Implementations

InstaMed announces Engage, a patient app that allows patients to check in for visits via Bluetooth beacon alerts or text messaging, view benefit information, pay for services with a digital wallet, and enroll in payment plans. 

Adventist Health System joins Florida HIE’s Encounter Notification Service to monitor out-of-network admissions, facilitate transfers, and plan discharges, The services is operated in partnership with Audacious Inquiry.

A Black Book survey of 900 physician organization finds that medical practices are moving to value-based care instead of selling out to health systems, with two-thirds of practices with 10 or more doctors planning to hire consultants in the next year to help them transform their operations. Nearly all respondents say they need outside help with implementing value-based care and population health management as well as choosing new software needed for those efforts.

A new KLAS report finds that most organizations are missing at least some elements of a mature enterprise imaging strategy in the categories of IT support and funding, the ability to electronically ingest images, defining an encounter-based imaging strategy, and applying strong governance. Most of those that have deployed a VNA and universal viewer are not fully meeting the four goals of image access, physician productivity, care collaboration, and data management, with customers of IBM Watson (Merge Healthcare) and Agfa performing best.

Life Flight Network launches an Uber-like mobile app that allows hospitals and first responders to request its air ambulance transport services.

COPD disease management app vendor HGE Health partners with Change Healthcare to support population health management and improve health plan-provider communication in managing chronic conditions.

Government and Politics

The House passes a bill that would require the VA to provide Congress with regular updates on its Cerner project and to notify lawmakers promptly if it experiences contract or schedule changes, milestone delays, bid protests, or data breaches.

A federal report finds that 40 percent of Americans would have to borrow money or sell something to pay an unexpected $400 expense, which is at least better than 2013’s 50 percent. The report also says that 25 percent of people have zero retirement savings.

Privacy and Security

A 28-year-old doctor in Nigeria is arrested for hacking into bank accounts and for creating fake payment notices to car dealers to steal cars, including an $80,000 Porsche. He says Nigerian banks are easy to hack and claims to have targeted actors such as John Travolta.

An investigation by Ireland’s data protection commissioner finds that hospitals are giving patient records to researchers without the patient’s consent. It also notes the presence of employee snooping, lack of computer audit trails, insurance companies being given full access to a patient’s medical history, and patient information being discussed in public areas where it could be overheard.

Other

Sutter Health President and CEO Sarah Krevans addresses last week’s system downtime in a video message to employees, deeming it unacceptable that clinical services were impacted “despite all of our planning, our protocols, our investment in technology, despite our emergency systems.” Meanwhile, two anonymous Sutter Medical Center nurses say the hospital, unlike other Sutter facilities, continued to perform elective surgeries even though the surgical team did not have access to the history and physical information of patients.

In Australia, an investigation into February’s hospital-wide power outage at Royal Adelaide Hospital finds that its facilities management company ignored erroneous low-fuel warnings from its diesel generators, not realizing that the false alarms prevented the fuel tanks from filling and caused the generators to run out of fuel during system testing.

In England, University College London Hospitals partners with an artificial intelligence institute to explore automating ED triage, sending appointment reminders, and analyzing images for research projects.

Marketers from addiction treatment centers, which are making fortunes from treating insured opioid addicts, are joining private Facebook addiction support groups to recruit patients, sometimes posing as concerned strangers. Some have been arrested for taking kickbacks for referring patients to rehab companies. The owner of a marketing company that runs a support website sued a treatment center for unpaid patient recruitment fees totaling $700,000 in 18 months from just that single facility.

Mary Washington Healthcare (VA) reprises its outstanding, “Hamilton”-themed EHR video from last year with a sequel that celebrates its Epic go-live next week.

A Georgia plastic surgeon who refers to herself as “doctor to the stars” and who made 20 YouTube videos of herself singing and dancing over unconscious surgery patients is being sued by several patients for malpractice. Windell Davis-Boutte, MD recently settled a case in which a patient claimed to have been left with permanent brain damage after an eight-hour tummy tuck procedure. Her website claims she’s board certified in both surgery and dermatology, but state records indicate that she is certified only in dermatology.

Sponsor Updates

• The Texas Hospital Association endorses Collective Medical’s care collaboration network for identifying and supporting complex patient populations and for manage ED usage and ED opioid prescribing.
• Access releases ESignatures 8.0, which includes a patent-pending handoff function.
• Meditech associate VP Larry O’Toole joins CommonWell’s board.
• Black Book names Impact Advisors as a leading cybersecurity consulting firm.
• Bernoulli Health will exhibit at the 108 IHI/NPSF Patient Safety Congress March 23-25 in Boston.
• CompuGroup Medical will exhibit at COLA – Symposium for Clinical Laboratories May 30-June 2 in Miami.
• Collective Medical Clinical Advisory Board Member Anne Zink, MD wins several ACEP awards.
• Conduent is named to the Fortune 500 list of largest US companies.
• The 2018 EPA National Adoption Scorecard from CoverMyMeds wins a Stevie Award for Best Annual Report.
• Dimensional Insight will exhibit at the MUSE International Conference May 29-June 1 in Orlando.

Blog Posts

• Physician Suicide Loss Survivors: Janae Sharp and The Sharp Index (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Adding EPCS to Your Meditech System: What You Need to Know (Meditech)
• Mobile Form Solutions for Patient Consent Process: 8 Benefits (Access)
• The Calm After the Storm (AdvancedMD)
• Seven lessons on developing a sustainable community partnership (Advisory Board)
• Are you missing out on revenue and reimbursements? (Agfa Healthcare)
• Tackling Social Determinants of Health in Oregon (Arcadia)
• Shocking Facts About Paging (Spok)
• Cloudy Outlook: A 2018 CIO Cloud Perspective Survey (Datica)
• Ignore At Your Own Risk: How GDPR Will Impact US Companies (Burwood Group)
• Change Healthcare and the Fight for Blockchain Solutions (Change Healthcare)
• What You Need to Know About GDPR (Dimensional Insight)
• 50 Questions to Ask Prospective EHR Vendors (DocuTap)
• Samuel Getachew’s Success with ChartLogic Revenue Cycle Management (ChartLogic)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 5/21/18

Top News

Cerner President Zane Burke blames an unnamed competitor (presumably Epic) for publicizing negative reports about the DoD’s MHS Genesis project, labeling the resulting coverage as “fake news” in Friday’s annual shareholder meeting.

Burke said, “If you had an axe to grind with us and wanted to perhaps keep us from getting to a Veterans contract, and you’re one of our competitors, you might want to use some information negatively. There was some negative information out there.”

He didn’t specify whether the “fake news” involved publication of the DoD’s own internal assessment of the project or some other event.

Burke said that just keeping VistA running would have cost more than $20 billion in the next 10 years vs. the $10 billion the VA will spend on Cerner, so it’s a good deal for taxpayers. Chairman and CEO Brent Shafer, ,asked about what issues keep him up at night, answered, “The VA was keeping me up at night until last night. It was a good night last night,” but added that his big issue is retooling the company to move more quickly.

Cerner has posted the audio recording and presentation from the shareholder meeting.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It’s an even split among the minority of respondents who care either way about someone’s use of fellowship credentials such as FHIMSS and FCHIME.

New poll to your right or here: what should the VA have done about an EHR? Show your work by clicking the comments link on the poll after voting and explaining.

This week’s “Wish I’d Known” question involves taking the first leap to overseeing the work of others.

Webinars

May 24 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Converting Consumers into Patients: Strategies for Creating Engaging Digital Experiences People Demand.” Sponsor: Healthwise. Presenters: Antonia Chappell, director of consumer solutions, Healthwise; Josh Schlaich, senior product manager, Healthwise. Nearly three-quarters of US adults use a digital channel to manage their health and the internet to track down health information. It’s clear that consumers have come to expect online interactions as an integral part of their overall patient experience. In fact, the Internet may be the first way people come in contact with your organization. They have more choice than ever on where to get healthcare services, and their decisions are increasingly influenced by how well organizations connect with them in the digital space. This webinar will show you how to create engaging digital and web experiences that convert casual consumers into patients and keep them satisfied throughout their entire patient journey.

June 5 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Increase Referrals and Patient Satisfaction with a Smarter ‘Find a Doctor’ Web Search.” Sponsors: Phynd Technologies, Healthwise. Presenters: Joseph H. Schneider, MD, MBA, FAAP, retired SVP/CHIO, Indiana University Health; Keith Belton, VP of marketing, Phynd. A recent survey found that 84 percent of patients check a hospital’s website before booking an appointment. However, ‘Find a Doctor’ search functions often frustrate them because their matching functionality is primitive and the provider’s information is incomplete or outdated. Referring physicians need similarly robust tools to find the right specialist and to send the patient to the right location. Attendees of this webinar will learn how taxonomy-driven Provider Information Management improves patient and referrer satisfaction by intelligently incorporating the provider’s location, insurance coverage, specialty and subspecialty, and services offered that can be searched via patient-friendly terms.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cerner shares rose only 1 percent Friday after the announcement Thursday after the market’s close that the VA had signed its $10 billion contract with the company. CERN shares are down 4 percent in the past year vs. the Nasdaq’s 21 percent gain, while over five years CERN us up 28 percent vs. the Nasdaq’s 113 percent gain.

TransUnion will acquire Fort Worth-based Healthcare Payment Specialists, which offers solutions for hospital Medicare reimbursement that include Medicare bad debt review and disproportionate share analysis. 

Decisions

• Major Health Partners Medical Center (IN) will switch from NextGen Healthcare to a Meditech ambulatory EHR system by the end of 2018.
• East Carroll Parish Hospital (LA) plans to go live with JumpStock inventory control software.
• Brooklyn Hospital Center Downtown (NY) will switch from Allscripts to Epic ambulatory EHR in August 2018.

These provider-reported updates are supplied by Definitive Healthcare, which offers a free trial of its powerful intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and healthcare providers.

People

RCM vendor Access Healthcare hires Jim Carlough (Cognizant) as SVP of North America operations.

David Adams (Revenue Platforms) joins consulting firm Crux Strategies as VP of business development and revenue cycle management.

Government and Politics

President Trump will nominate acting VA Secretary Robert Wilkie to the permanent position, adding in Friday’s announcement at a prison reform event, “He doesn’t know this yet. I’m sorry that I ruined the surprise.” Wilkie is a former lawyer and White House security advisor.

Other

Eastern Maine Health Systems (ME) ends its addiction treatment partnerships with two cities that named individual physicians – some of them present or former EMHS doctors – in their billion-dollar lawsuits brought against drug manufacturers and distributors. The city councils of Bangor and Portland voted to join the lawsuits, causing the health system to say that it will withdraw from any initiatives involving cities or counties that sue it.

I belatedly learned via a tweet that former UPMC CIO Dan Drawbaugh has since 2015 been CEO of orthopedic group The Steadman Clinic and its research institute in Vail, CO.

Weird News Andy says there’s “so much wrong” in this story, in which a former hospice executive pleads guilty for her involvement in a $60 million fraud scheme that also involved intentionally killing unprofitable patients as ordered by the hospice’s owners, a CPA and his wife (above). The former operations director says the owners ordered her to falsify EHR entries to admit patients who weren’t eligible for hospice services, fabricated “do not resuscitate” orders to avoid paying for ambulance trips when families called 911, and took patients off medications solely because they weren’t covered by insurance. The FBI’s search warrant says the CPA texted a nurse, “You need to make this patient go bye-bye.”

Medical residents at an hospital in India go on strike to demand better hospital security after the angry family members of a patient who died prior to planned gallbladder surgery beat up two doctors, a nurse, and a visiting relative of another patient who tried to stop the attack. The hospital realized afterward that it had never followed through with installing a security alarm as planned two years ago and says it will get that done.

Rainbow City, AL police arrest a doctor for breaking into the office of the medical practice from which he had recently resigned to steal six computers, a server containing patient information, and medical equipment. He opened the practice’s safe, apparently in an effort to make the break-in look like a robbery, but police immediately suspected him because the safe’s contents were intact, including cash and narcotics.

Sponsor Updates

• HBI Solutions posts a case report titled “Client Success: Improved Transitions of Care at DFD Russell Medical Centers.”
• The SSI Group will host a regional user group meeting May 22-22 in Scottsdale, AZ.
• Sunquest will exhibit at the Pathology Informatics Summit May 21-24 in Pittsburgh.
• TriNetX will exhibit at the ISPOR Annual International Meeting May 19-23 in Baltimore.
• Wolters Kluwer wins eight Stevie Awards during the 2018 American Business awards.
• ZappRx CEO Zoe Barry will speak at the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce’s Executive Forum May 22.
• ZeOmega will host ZeOmega Connections18 May 21-24 in Plano, TX.

Blog Posts

• Just What the Doctor Ordered: Healthcare & Life Sciences at Connections (Salesforce)
• Norman Doors and Healthcare IT (Sansoro Health)
• What Do Healthcare Consumers Really Want? (The SSI Group)
• Professional services that bring results. (Voalte)
• Reducing Alarm Fatigue and Interruptions: Clinicians See a Bigger Problem than IT Does (Vocera)
• The Bare Bones Social Media Guide for PT Clinics (WebPT)
• The high cost of low-value healthcare (Philips Wellcentive)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 5/18/18

Top News

Acting VA Secretary Robert Wilkie signs a 10-year, $10 billion contract with Cerner, saying its system will allow patient data to be “seamlessly shared between VA, DoD, and community providers.”

Wilkie adds that VA “will add capabilities as necessary to meet the special needs of veterans, VA clinicians, and our community care partners” and will collaborate with the DoD to share lessons learned.

Wilkie said in the announcement, “President Trump has made very clear to me that he wants this contract to do right by both veterans and taxpayers, and I can say now without a doubt that it does.”

Cerner President Zane Burke said in an announcement that the company’s technology “has been deployed successfully at Department of Defense (DoD) medical facilities and thousands of provider sites globally … My thanks to the administration for selecting Cerner to collaborate in creating seamless care as service members transition from active duty to VA medical centers and community providers. We expect this program to be a positive catalyst for interoperability across the public and private health care sectors, and we look forward to moving quickly with organizations across the industry to deliver on the promise of this mission.”

The total project cost has been estimated at $16 billion. Cerner will serve as its own prime contractor.

Reader Comments

From Pilsner: “Re: Epic. Heard they have acquired a small revenue cycle form to jump start a outsourced services offering.” Not true, according to a company contact that I was kind of embarrassed to ask given the near-certainty that this didn’t actually happen. Which it didn’t — Epic has never acquired another company and I don’t expect that to change.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I have zero responses to this week’s “Wish I’d Known” question, so it will be a skip week unless folks weigh in over the next day or two.

Here’s the recording of this week’s webinar titled “You Think You Might Want to Be a Consultant?” with Frank Poggio.

Webinars

May 24 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Converting Consumers into Patients: Strategies for Creating Engaging Digital Experiences People Demand.” Sponsor: Healthwise. Presenters: Antonia Chappell, director of consumer solutions, Healthwise; Josh Schlaich, senior product manager, Healthwise. Nearly three-quarters of US adults use a digital channel to manage their health and the internet to track down health information. It’s clear that consumers have come to expect online interactions as an integral part of their overall patient experience. In fact, the Internet may be the first way people come in contact with your organization. They have more choice than ever on where to get healthcare services, and their decisions are increasingly influenced by how well organizations connect with them in the digital space. This webinar will show you how to create engaging digital and web experiences that convert casual consumers into patients and keep them satisfied throughout their entire patient journey.

June 5 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Increase Referrals and Patient Satisfaction with a Smarter ‘Find a Doctor’ Web Search.” Sponsors: Phynd Technologies, Healthwise. Presenters: Joseph H. Schneider, MD, MBA, FAAP, retired SVP/CHIO, Indiana University Health; Keith Belton, VP of marketing, Phynd. A recent survey found that 84 percent of patients check a hospital’s website before booking an appointment. However, ‘Find a Doctor’ search functions often frustrate them because their matching functionality is primitive and the provider’s information is incomplete or outdated. Referring physicians need similarly robust tools to find the right specialist and to send the patient to the right location. Attendees of this webinar will learn how taxonomy-driven Provider Information Management improves patient and referrer satisfaction by intelligently incorporating the provider’s location, insurance coverage, specialty and subspecialty, and services offered that can be searched via patient-friendly terms.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The search for a CEO for the proposed joint healthcare venture of Amazon, Berkshire Hathway, and JPMorgan (or as Gizmodo likes to call it, the incredibly vague healthcare company of rich guys) stalls as the companies change their recruiting tactics to focus on someone with entrepreneurial experience. Payer and policy experts like Todd Park, Andy Slavitt, and Gary Loveman were on the initial wish list, as was entrepreneur and Grand Rounds Health CEO Owen Tripp, who has downplayed any interest in the position.

People

Dennis Cail (Trintech) joins Nordic as VP of ERP solutions.

Sales

• Faith Regional Health Services (NE) will implement Epic over the next 18 months through a purchasing arrangement with Nebraska Medicine.
• Crisp Regional Health (GA) will deploy Cerner Millenium across its ambulatory, acute, and post-acute facilities.
• Arkansas Surgical Hospital (AR) chooses perioperative software from Picis Clinical Solutions.

Announcements and Implementations

Holy Cross Hospital (NM) implements Wellsoft’s EDIS.

Government and Politics

Democrats call for the ouster of acting VA CIO Camilo Sandoval as part of an overall outcry about the lack of effective leadership they believe has led to agency waffling on the proposed Cerner EHR contract. Sandoval’s time as director of data operations for the Trump campaign while it was contracting with Cambridge Analytica and $25 million lawsuit filed against him for discrimination and harassment against campaign staffers have led the lawmakers to declare he “should be put nowhere near veterans’ health and benefits data.”

An assessment of Delaware-based Vaughn Correctional Center’s healthcare services produces a long list of EHR-related problems, including poor connectivity, inefficient workflows, and numerous workarounds. One healthcare employee, who typically sees between 12 and 15 patients a day, reported spending 80 to 100 hours each week on documentation. Vaughn prisoners, who have complained of inordinately long appointment wait times, led a violent uprising last year that resulted in the death of a correctional officer.

FDA says data vendor IQvia has for years provided it with incorrect national opioid dispensing data, as calculation errors “raise serious concerns about systemic issues with IQvia’s data and quality control procedures.” The agency is demanding a third-party audit of the company’s procedures. IQvia was known as QuintilesIMS until a November 2017 name change. Shares of the Durham, NC-based research company trade on the NYSE at a market cap of $20 billion.

Privacy and Security

In Houston, the University of Texas Health Science Center alerts patients that an email sent last week announcing the departure of a physician at its Davis Clinic mistakenly exposed 2,800 patient email addresses.

LifeBridge Health (MD) notifies patients of a September 2016 malware attack on the server that hosts its registration and billing systems, and the EHR used by its Potomac Professionals group. The health system, which detected the breach on March 18, has since enhanced password protocols and its cybersecurity system. CIO Tressa Springmann says the breach was the work of an external entity and that the organization is on a communications offensive in an effort to be transparent about the incident.

The EU’s General Data Protecting Regulation goes into effect next Friday, making it a good time to review earlier guidance from Advisory Board that compares it to HIPAA. My interpretation is different from theirs – they say it applies to a US provider delivering care to anyone hailing from a EU country, while I read it as being only for patients who are physically in an EU country at the time services are rendered (telemedicine, website use, and marketing sign-ups are the only use cases I can think of).

Other

In Australia, SA Health brings in 30 staffers to help clear a data entry pileup brought on by burdensome data entry requirements of the $37 million Cerner enterprise pathology laboratory information system it implemented last year. The backlog has caused delays in getting test results to patients, and in some cases, lost results. SA Health is in the midst of a 10-year, $471 million Allscripts EPAS roll out, which has also been plagued with problems and political hand-wringing.

A federal jury convicts Suresh Mitta and several co-conspirators for their roles in Cerner impersonation schemes that included selling a fake MRI machine to Dallas Medical Center for $1 million. Mitta even sued an international tech company under the guise of Cerner LLC, ultimately winning $24 million. UPDATE: Suresh Mitta died in the custody of US Marshals hours after his conviction, with law enforcement officials saying it appears he had a seizure in the cell he shared with other prisoners.

Columbia University Medical Center raises the ire of some ethicists by creating a family tree from inpatient EHR data – including each patient’s emergency contact along with more obvious connections such as mother-child status – to study inherited conditions. “It’s a way of looking at genetics but without having any genetic data,” one author said of the assumption that emergency contacts are often blood relatives. Bioethicists object that those emergency contacts did not give their consent (one compared the study to Cambridge Analytica) and observe the irony in finding “information to help your health, but we’re not going to give you that information.” Columbia is sharing its 2-million de-identified patient record database and its algorithms for detecting family relationships for similar studies. The authors say they can now say as a result that runny noses are inherited, although they admit that they can’t discern shared environmental issues or the possibility that the EHR does not list all conditions.

Anesthesiologist and Surgeon General Jerome Adams, MD comes to the aid of a Delta passenger who had lost, then regained consciousness before takeoff. Adams, with help from two nurses, saw that the passenger was taken back to the gate and on to a hospital.

Sponsor Updates

• The Lightbeam Health Solutions team packs 5,625 meals for distribution by the North Texas Food Bank.
• Diameter Health becomes a Group Solution Partner of the Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative.
• PokitDok adds its real-time health insurance eligibility app to the Salesforce AppExchange.
• Learn on Demand Systems becomes the official lab provider or the Veeam Certified Engineer technical certification program.
• Medicomp Systems will host Medicomp U May 21-24 in Reston, VA.
• National Decision Support Co. will exhibit at the NPSF Annual Patient Safety Conference May 23-25 in Boston.
• Netsmart will exhibit at the LeadingAge TX Annual Conference May 22 in San Antonio.
• Optimum Healthcare IT will sponsor and present sessions at Health IT Expo May 30-June 1 in New Orleans.
• Hewlett Packard Enterprise names CloudWave and its customer, Upson Regional Medical Center, the Grand Prize Winner of its 2018 Awards for Customer Excellence.
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, will exhibit at the E-Health Conference & Tradeshow May 27-30 in Vancouver.
• Gartner recognizes Healthfinch and Redox as one of its “2018 Cool Vendors in Healthcare Providers.”
• Platinum System adds Solutionreach’s patient relationship management capabilities to its practice management and EHR software for chiropractors.
• Healthwise partners with XG Health Solutions to deliver evidence-based assessment and care plan content to payers via Epic’s Healthy Planet software.
• Phynd publishes a new white paper, “Solving the Health System Network Management Challenge with High Quality Provider Information.”
• Vecna adds Imprivata’s biometric palm vein scanning technology to its patient check-in platform.
• In the UAE, Healthpoint implements GetWellNetwork’s interactive patient care system.

Blog Posts

• Are You Ready for Audit Time? Compliance Assessment for AWS and Azure (Logicworks)
• How nurses can immunize your organization against cyberattacks (Meditech)
• Healthcare Is A Journey and We’re Providing a Roadmap (Leidos Health)
• Risky Business: 3 Problems With Outdated Software (Spok)

Sponsors Named to Modern Healthcare’s “Best Places to Work in Healthcare 2018”

• Burwood Group
• CTG
• Cumberland Consulting Group
• Divurgent
• Experian Health
• Health Catalyst
• Huron
• Impact Advisors
• Pivot Point Consulting, A Vaco Company
• PMD
• ROI Healthcare Solutions
• Santa Rosa Consulting
• The Chartis Group

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 5/16/18

Top News

Sutter Health confirms that some of its electronic systems remain down from an unstated problem that started late Monday. Sutter’s Epic system in at least some of its facilities as well as its public website are offline.

Some of the health system’s 24 hospitals have cancelled surgeries and gone back to paper during the downtime, but have access to Epic’s locally stored copy of patient information.

A spokesperson said late Tuesday that the downtime was caused by the activation of a data center fire suppression system.

Reader Comments

From Don’t Understand Investments: “Re: investors. Why don’t they put their money into companies that address problems like social determinants of health, public health, and mental illness? Those are the biggest issues we face.” Here it is in a nutshell:

• The only goal of investors is to make a profit, preferably quickly with a rapidly scalable offering.
• The only way a company can make a profit is to find willing customers who believe the benefits of its product or service (tangible or intangible) outweigh its cost.
• Most health IT products can’t really boost provider profit other than by the nebulous ideas of capturing more market share or increasing productivity measurably (and hospitals are poor at labor management, so that’s a tough sell), so their pitch nearly always involves lowering cost. (An exception would be anything related to revenue cycle, where the massive amount of billing and collections activities makes even a small amount of skim lucrative as long as enough patients have insurance to make collection likely).
• Lowering cost by reducing volume works for health systems only if they are paid at mostly capitated rates, where spending less means profiting more, or if they can keep non-paying patients out of their facilities. Most hospitals are still paid mostly as fee-for-service, which means they don’t want to reduce their big costs because they would also then be reducing their big revenue from patients who are insured. You don’t see a lot of hospital billboards trying to recruit more charity patients.
• Other than consumer plays such as telemedicine, that leaves deep-pocketed, for-profit companies as the most likely technology customer – insurers hoping to reduce unnecessary care they have to pay for or drug companies trying to keep a lucrative market share. It’s no coincidence that nearly every startup’s unrealistically optimistic business plan carries the built-in expectation that insurers or drug companies will make it rain and then stick someone else with the newly added cost.
• Consumers mostly can’t afford healthcare on their own, so their only value as a profitable widget is if they are insured. Charity care is a social construct, not a promising investment for VCs.
• In summary, like most endeavors that involve societal good without having for-profit fingers stuck in the pie, investors have every reason to invest in something less noble that is more likely to be profitable. You would do the same with your money, then perhaps donate some of your profits to charity to help the many Americans who aren’t as fortunate in their interactions with our healthcare and economic systems.

From Skip Tumalu: “Re: EHR vendors and prescription pricing. I’ve heard that some insurers provide real-time prescription pricing to EHR vendors for physician use in helping patients get their meds filled, but in return they bar those EHR vendors contractually from displaying anyone else’s lower drug prices. That forces patients to buy medications from the payer’s own pharmacy benefits manager. Is this widespread?” Tell me anonymously if you’ve seen one of these contracts, or even better, send me a copy that I will redact.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to returning HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Advisory Board, now part of Optum. The best practices firm combines research, technology, and consulting to improve the performance of 4,400 healthcare organizations. It offers research memberships, workforce surveys, consulting (medical group, IT strategy, revenue cycle, and its Clinovations implementation, optimization, and support services). Technology offerings include the Crimson product line (referral patterns, medical group performance, continuum of care, population health, surgical profitability), HealthPost (patient self-scheduling), IRound (real-time hospital experience and service recovery), and Audience Rx (consumer engagement). Consider doing what I’ve done for years in subscribing to the company’s “Daily Briefing,” which is the most information-packed, BS-free daily email healthcare newsletter I’ve seen and actually use to uncover news nuggets worth mentioning on HIStalk. Thanks to Advisory Board for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

May 16 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “You Think You Might Want to Be a Consultant?” Sponsor: HIStalk. Presenter: Frank Poggio, CEO/president, The Kelzon Group. Maybe you just got caught in a big re-org and don’t like where things are headed, or, after almost a year of searching for a better opportunity your buddy says, “You’ve got decades of solid experience and you’re a true professional, you should become a healthcare IT consultant.” Now you start thinking, “This could be my ticket to success. I know the healthcare industry and can show people how to do things right. The sky’s the limit!” Not so fast. Consulting offers many advantages, and many pitfalls. This webinar will discuss both the rewards and the risks of moving into a full-time consulting role, as an independent, or part of a large firm. It will present a checklist you can apply to assess whether consulting is a good fit for you, and present the ground work necessary to be a successful consultant.

May 24 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Converting Consumers into Patients: Strategies for Creating Engaging Digital Experiences People Demand.” Sponsor: Healthwise. Presenters: Antonia Chappell, director of consumer solutions, Healthwise; Josh Schlaich, senior product manager, Healthwise. Nearly three-quarters of US adults use a digital channel to manage their health and the internet to track down health information. It’s clear that consumers have come to expect online interactions as an integral part of their overall patient experience. In fact, the Internet may be the first way people come in contact with your organization. They have more choice than ever on where to get healthcare services, and their decisions are increasingly influenced by how well organizations connect with them in the digital space. This webinar will show you how to create engaging digital and web experiences that convert casual consumers into patients and keep them satisfied throughout their entire patient journey.

June 5 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Increase Referrals and Patient Satisfaction with a Smarter ‘Find a Doctor’ Web Search.” Sponsors: Phynd Technologies, Healthwise. Presenters: Joseph H. Schneider, MD, MBA, FAAP, retired SVP/CHIO, Indiana University Health; Keith Belton, VP of marketing, Phynd. A recent survey found that 84 percent of patients check a hospital’s website before booking an appointment. However, ‘Find a Doctor’ search functions often frustrate them because their matching functionality is primitive and the provider’s information is incomplete or outdated. Referring physicians need similarly robust tools to find the right specialist and to send the patient to the right location. Attendees of this webinar will learn how taxonomy-driven Provider Information Management improves patient and referrer satisfaction by intelligently incorporating the provider’s location, insurance coverage, specialty and subspecialty, and services offered that can be searched via patient-friendly terms.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Elliott Management scolds Athenahealth’s board publicly for failing to respond to its $7 billion acquisition offer, adding that it knows Athenahealth has received acquisition interest from other parties as well. Elliott’s offer letter said Athenahealth’s value has been hurt by executive turnover, low margins, product execution, quality of service that fails to meet its “grand vision,” and poor financial forecasting and guidance. It also says former GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt was a poor choice for Athenahealth’s board chair and questions why the company hasn’t hired a full-time president since promising to relieve CEO Jonathan Bush of that additional responsibility nine months ago.

Crowdsource investing platform RedCrow is focusing on early-stage healthcare startups and has partnered with Cleveland Clinic, but that’s not nearly as interesting as this: one of the co-founders is Jerry Harrison, former guitarist of long-defunct band Talking Heads.

Sales

Colorado’s CORHIO HIE will use Verato’s patient matching technology.

In Bulgaria, Puls Hospital joins TriNetX’s clinical trials research network.

People

Phynd hires Prashant Gharpure (Xpanxion) as CTO, Cathy Jones (Nuance) as VP of sales operations, and Keith Belton (Belton Strategies) as VP of marketing.

HIMSS hires Charles Alessi, MD (Public Health England) as chief clinical officer of HIMSS International and Bruce Steinbert (Big White Wall) as EVP/managing director of HIMSS International.

Retired HIMSS CEO Steve Lieber’s victory lap continues as he joins recruiting firm Quick Leonard Kieffer to assist with executive search in the oddly titled position “of counsel,” of which that company has several.

Announcements and Implementations

Market research firm Kalorama names Cerner as the global EHR market leader with a 17 percent market share, followed by Epic at 9 percent and Allscripts at 6 percent, although: (a) the company doesn’t disclose the methodology behind the $4,000 report; (b) they don’t say what they mean by “market share” (I’m guessing annual sales, which would be a SWAG for privately held companies that don’t release that information and not the same as market penetration or number of beds or providers); and (c) the author’s credibility is questionable given her quote that Epic is “acquiring technology” for physician practices (apparently unaware that Epic has never made an acquisition) and listing Kronos as a EHR vendor (perhaps confusing the labor management systems vendor with actual EHR vendor DrChrono).

LifeImage launches LITE (LifeImage Transfer Exchange), an API-powered interoperability platform for sharing medical images and other clinical information.

Government and Politics

A GAO investigation commissioned under the 21st Century Cures Act finds that patients are sometimes charged more than HIPAA allows for copies of their medical record. Two patients interviewed were charged over $500 for a single request, one had to pay $148 for a PDF copy, two were told they couldn’t get their information unless they paid a subscription fee, and one was charged a retrieval fee by the hospital’s release-of-information vendor, which is explicitly prohibited under HIPAA. Investigators also found that providers were often unaware of the patient’s right to their records or that the federal government limits the allowed fees. GAO asked HHS OCR how it handles patient access complaints and the results are not surprising – providers are basically never penalized but instead are given “technical assistance” that, at least in my personal experience with filing a complaint about a hospital that refused to give me my records electronically in saying they aren’t required to do so, lets the provider off without doing anything.

Former VA CIO Roger Baker – now an independent consultant — comments on the military’s report that called out extensive problems with its MHS Genesis pilot sites, saying:

• The VA will have an even tougher time installing Cerner than the DoD given that VistA is #1 in user satisfaction while the DoD’s AHLTA is dead last.
• Military physicians have to follow orders, but VA doctors have more autonomy about system changes and are more likely to express dissatisfaction.
• The firing of former VA Secretary David Shulkin left the VA without a strong Cerner champion who is willing to spend political capital to get the job done.
• Most big government IT projects fail, with Baker warning, “VA needs to remember that the probability they’re flushing that $16 billion down the toilet is actually greater than 50 percent.”
• All that aside, Baker thinks the VA has gone too far down the Cerner path to reconsider despite the DoD’s report.

Privacy and Security

A Black Book survey of 680 provider organizations finds that 96 percent of their IT security professionals worry that hackers are outpacing their ability to maintain information security due to flat budgets and lack of staffing. One-third of executives whose organizations recently bought cybersecurity solutions say they did so blindly and 57 percent of IT management respondents say they don’t even know the full extent of available solutions for mobile security, intrusion detection, attack prevention, forensics, and testing. Thirty-two percent of organizations didn’t scan for vulnerabilities before an attack and one-fourth of them haven’t performed measurable cybersecurity assessments.

Sheriff’s deputies arrest an underage high school student for hacking into his high school’s computer system to change grades. He set up a replica of the school’s website, spent five minutes sending a phishing email asking teachers to log in, then used the credentials they entered on his site to log in to the real system himself. Officers tracked him down at his parents’ house by getting a warrant to obtain the IP address of the fake website from his web host, then used an electronics-sniffing dog (who knew?) to find the flash drive he had hidden in a tissue box (a lot of good jokes are awaiting your creative ribaldry).

Other

A new KLAS report on interoperability in England’s NHS finds that data-sharing is rarely integrated with physician workflow and the exchange of structured data is uncommon, with one-third of organizations displaying external information via a separate EHR tab and another one-third using a standalone portal. Other challenges include unstructured data, inconsistent formatting, and missing data. The most significant barriers to interoperability are lack of standards, unwillingness to share, vague information governance, and a lack of understanding across care setting. The most widespread sharing is via HIEs, of which InterSystems and Cerner are the top vendors.

New York Times-owned Wirecutter looks at online therapy providers and rates Amwell tops, followed by Doctor On Demand. Amwell’s sessions run $59 to $99 for cash-paying customers seeking help for anxiety, OCD, PTSD, depression, or life transitions.

Newly released tax forms indicated that UPMC paid 32 executives $1 million or more and 10 of those more than $2 million in FY17.  I couldn’t find its CIO’s salary in the non-searchable PDF, but it was a large document and I might have missed it.

Forbes profiles money-losing ED and anesthesiology outsourcer Envision, which is taking heat for increasing healthcare costs through out-of-network billing (62 percent of its bills vs. a hospital average of 26 percent) that increases cost more than 100 percent in hospitals that hire it. A stock short-seller claims Envision’s business model is a “scam,” claiming that it pays physician groups cash upfront to lock them in at below-market rates for up to 10 years and thus is capitalizing salaries and then using its cash flow to sign up new practices. Envision blames high-deductible insurance plans, inadequate insurer payments to ED doctors, and the fact that EDs have to evaluate all patients regardless of ability to pay.

My favorite newfound healthcare expert is Austin Frakt, PhD, a professor and VA policy director who is a fun writer contributes to The New York Times. His latest piece on why healthcare costs took a dramatic upward turn versus other developed countries in 1980 even as life expectancy started declining is getting extensive exposure, but I also like his informal speculation about the cause:

Maybe our health system caters to the wealthy. As their incomes grow, so does their demand for ever more expensive, high-tech care that is only marginally better than what came before. Political and social influence being what it is, they get it, but we all pay for it. The share of our economy going to healthcare grows. But outcomes for the vast majority of the population with lower incomes don’t improve as much, because more high-tech, expensive, low-value healthcare isn’t what they need as badly as they need higher wages, better education, better housing — things provided by other social programs that the healthcare budget is consuming.

Sponsor Updates

• Change Healthcare releases InterQual 2018, which includes AutoReview automated real-time medical review using EHR data.
• Formativ Health wins a Silver Stevie Award in the Startup of the Year category at the American Business Awards.
• TriNetX will present at the ISPOR 2018 annual meeting May 19-23 in Baltimore.
• Access publishes an e-book titled “7 Signs It’s Time to Upgrade Your EMR.”
• The Center for Plain Language honors Healthwise with its Grand ClearMark Award.
• Arcadia will exhibit at the Greater Oregon Behavioral Health Spring Conference May 16-18 in Bend.
• Meditech EVP Helen Waters is named to Health Data Management’s “Most Powerful Women in Healthcare IT.”
• Bluetree Network will exhibit at the Minnesota HIMSS Spring Conference May 22 in Minneapolis.
• CompuGroup Medical will exhibit at the AUCH Annual Primary Care Conference May 17-18 in West Valley City, UT.
• Columbus CEO features CoverMyMeds CEO Matt Scantland.
• Culbert Healthcare Solutions will exhibit at the Centricity Live 2018 User Conference May 16-18 in Las Vegas.
• Cumberland Consulting Group will exhibit at the CBI Medicaid and Government Pricing Congress May 21-23 in Orlando.
• Elsevier collaborates with the International Association of Forensic Nurses to enhance forensic nursing content.
• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at the 2018 Star Ratings & Quality Improvement Summit May 21-22 in Championsgate, FL.
• Hayes Management Consulting and InterSystems will exhibit at Centricity Live 2018 May 16-18 in Las Vegas.
• Healthwise will present at ZeOmega Connections18 May 23 in Plano, TX.
• The Chartis Group publishes a white paper titled “Are You Overlooking the Power of Technology to Address Your Mission-Critical Imperatives?”
• Imprivata’s marketing team receives the SiriusDecisions 2018 ROI Award at the SDSummit for their use of account-based marketing.
• InstaMed will exhibit at the HFMA Region 1 Annual Conference May 23-24 in Uncasville, CT.
• Kyruus will present at the Millenium Alliance Patient Experience Transformation May 17-18 in Dove Mountain, AZ.

Blog Posts

• Is Your Practice Ready When the Next Hurricane Hits? (AdvancedMD)
• Can patients & care providers communicate conveniently, in both directions? (Agfa Healthcare)
• What We’re Building: Datica’s Public Product Strategy and Roadmap (Datica)
• Operate with Care: The Cloud is Like a Bugatti (Burwood Group)
• Why We Love Nurses: A Collection of Nurse Appreciation Stories and Quotes (CareSync)
• ChartLogic Revenue Cycle Management: Bringing Revenue Back to the Practice (ChartLogic)
• 4 Questions with Amy Andrade, AVP of Research, Meharry Medical College and Data Science Center (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Piedmont Healthcare Partners with PerfectServe to Standardize After-Hours Communications Across all Physician Practices (PerfectServe)
• The Backbone of Healthcare (Clinical Architecture)
• Content Conundrum? Content as a Service Brings a Lot to the Table (Healthwise)
• Hyland Healthcare is heading to HIMSS Europe (Hyland)
• Healthcare Listings Management: Here’s How to Keep Up (Influence Health)
• Why Every Hospital Needs an eForm Management Solution for Surgical Consent (Access)
• 4 Takeaways from the WSWA 75th Annual Convention & Exposition (Dimensional Insight)
• ERP Implementation: How to Get Started on the Right Foot (Divurgent)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 5/14/18

Top News

A newly declassified April 30 Department of Defense evaluation of the military’s four MHS Genesis pilot sites concludes that the system “is neither operationally effective or operationally suitable” and says it is inadequate for managing and documenting care delivery.

The DoD’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation Robert Behler – a retired major general with executive experience in software engineering and consulting — found that the Cerner-powered MHS Genesis isn’t scalable enough for a full DoD rollout. Pilot sites experienced ongoing response time and downtime problems that worsened as each new site was brought online.

Some items from the report, which was published by FCW:

• 156 critical or severe incident reports were filed.
• Drop-down selection lists include options from all four pilot sites, requiring users, for example, to search through every provider from all four sites to book an appointment.
• User were only able to complete 56 percent of the 197 performance measurement tasks, leading the auditors to report that MHS Genesis “does not contain enough functionality to manage and document patient care.”
• Users questioned the system’s interoperability with medical and peripheral devices.
• Uses rated the system’s usability at 37 on a 100-point scale, far short of the 70 percent minimum target. They also lowered their scores as they gained experience with the system, the opposite of what would be expected.
• Seven long downtime events occurred during the three go-lives, with users unable to log in for hours at a time or one pilot site being down for several hours due to another site’s go-live.
• Help desk personnel were overwhelmed by the 14,000 tickets that were opened from January through November 2017.
• Testing at the largest of the four pilot sites, Madigan Army Medical Center, was postponed because of poor results from the first three sites.
• Prescription fill time at pharmacies increased from 15-20 minutes to 45 minutes or longer and pharmacists had to perform manual workarounds due to interface problems. The system does not support the use of NDC drug numbers or NPI provider IDs, requiring pharmacists to perform manual searches to select drugs and prescribers.
• Providers were unable to review radiology results because radiologists couldn’t match patients to images due to interface problems.
• The Joint Legacy Viewer did not always display critical MHS Genesis patient data.
• The report found that, “Essential capabilities were either not working properly or were missing altogether (e.g., referral requests not processing, lab results not showing, oral surgery apps not launching). To compensate for missing functionality, users relied on lengthy and undocumented workarounds (e.g., telephoning to check whether referrals had been received). Additionally, ineffective or non-existent workflows (e.g., the inability to flag certain patient records, insurance eligibility inaccuracies, appointments tracked to the wrong clinic) caused some users to create their own workarounds. Actions that used to take one minute to complete were taking several minutes using MHS GENESIS. Users reported that, even under conditions of proper functionality, actions required up to three times as many mouse clicks than before. User comments accompanying the IRs and user interviews indicate that MHS GENESIS increased patient encounter times to the point that providers were seeing fewer patients per day, despite some providers working overtime. Users also noted operational incidents (e.g., system freezes, lockouts, login errors) that caused mission failure or delay.”

Politico reports that DoD officials said in a Friday briefing that improvements have been made since the review ended in November, allowing visit and prescription volume to increase significantly. It quotes a White House spokesperson who noted that Senior Advisor Jared Kushner wasn’t involved the DoD’s bidding process but still believes that it’s important for the the VA to use the same system.

Reader Comments

From El Mariachi: “Re: fellowships. I was surprised by your comments. My organization’s fellowship does not require extra application fees, extra dues, or mandatory CE.” I don’t know what AMIA will do with its new FAMIA fellowship beyond requiring AMIA membership, peer recommendation, and AMIA involvement, but HIMSS doesn’t charge applicants directly either upfront or ongoing, although previous HIMSS participation is required. CHIME’s fellowship is attainable only if you’re a CHIME lifer since it requires 10 years of membership plus heavy participation in its activities. AHIMA requires 10 years of HIM experience and previous membership and levies a $250 application fee. All of these fellowships are a combination of loyalty points and industry experience. None of these appear to charge renewal fees or impose mandatory education once the credential has been earned, which I think is unlike medical fellowships such as FACOG and FACC. The terminology could be confusing since scholarship-based “fellowship” and the resulting F-letters to a doctor, academic, or researcher means obtaining additional specialty study and practice, which is vastly different than just sending in a reformatted resume to a membership organization and becoming labeled as its loyal fellow in return. Even more confusingly, AMIA already offers FACMI, conferred by simple voting (17 of those fellow designations were awarded in 2017). The “pro” argument from AMIA is that members who work in a hands-on informatics role should have a way to “celebrate their accomplishments” that are “evident in the settings in which they work.”

From Darth Vader: “Re: EHR vendors. With Elliott making a play for Athenahealth, how long until Optum uses its deep pockets to acquire an EHR vendor?” I would hope that Optum is too smart to spend money buying an EHR vendor in an era of declining product demand, vendor consolidation, and questionable profit potential. It will be interesting to see if Athenahealth sells out to the aggressive (some say ruthless) Elliott Management, stays the course, or entertains new interest from other potential acquirers. Lots of companies have lost fortunes thinking they could crack the code selling EHRs. Probably the biggest financial winner but operational loser in this drama is Jonathan Bush, who owns around $70 million worth of shares (and who would benefit from the company’s change-in-control golden parachute that was enacted in October 2017) but who is in the crosshairs for not making improvements until the activitist investor stepped in and who is now prepared to put his money where his mouth is. Elliott’s challenge would be deciding whether it can leave Bush in charge (he was already stripped of his board chair role because of Elliott’s pressure) since much of the company’s success and identity was the result of his charismatic engagement with Wall Street, customers, and employees. Athenahealth without Bush would be a lot less interesting.

From Alhambra: “Re: the DoD’s analysis of MHS Genesis. It’s impossible to know whether the two competing teams would have performed better, but Cerner is failing in one of the most important areas – Military Medical Readiness. I hope the pause allows Leidos / Cerner to fix this critical component. As for me, I’m ticked that the DHMS PEO PR machine touted deployment and operational success for months and it turned out to be lies.” The people associated with projects, either on the vendor or user side, have a vested career interested in making their work appear to be successful regardless of reality, but the DoD’s scathing review of MHS Genesis is stunning in the extent of the rollout’s problems, even for a huge project like this one. I don’t know how a review could be much worse. Nor could the report’s timing, which comes out just before the VA is set to sign a White House-pressured, no-bid contract with Cerner, which also contains a massive risk that nobody is talking about – the DoD and VA implementations would be occurring simultaneously and thus would compete for resources and vendor attention, not to mention that Cerner would be the VA’s prime contractor versus its role as a subcontractor under Leidos with the DoD. There’s also the unlikely scenario in which the VA signs a $10 billion Cerner contract and then the DoD bails out (note to VA: get that in the contract). VA and DoD technology implementation projects share the common theme of disappointing outcomes despite wildly high costs, a decades-long trend that won’t end any time soon regardless of whether the software is developed internally, by consulting firms, or by commercial vendors.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Sansoro Health. The Minneapolis-based company’s API solution provides real-time data exchange between EHRs and digital health applications. Its supports chart retrieval (medical records requests, prior authorization, release of information, quality reporting, risk adjustment); advanced analytics; telehealth; surveillance; and clinical workflow that improves user satisfaction and patient outcomes with intuitive, mobile, and voice-driven interfaces. The Emissary real-time RESTful API solution allows information to be exchanged securely across any EHR platform within days rather than months of setup time while avoiding data-mapping exercises and time-consuming maintenance. It eliminates copy/paste and system toggling to provide a better user experience and improve patient outcomes. Co-founder and CEO Jeremy Pierotti is an industry long-timer, having spent time at Leidos Health,  Stanford Health, and Allina. Thanks to Sansoro Health for supporting HIStalk.

This YouTube explainer video describes Sansoro Health’s Emissary API solution.

Poll respondents aren’t too interested in connect their Fitbit to an EHR, with comments suggesting a lack of added value and concerns about privacy.

New poll to your right or here: what is your reaction to seeing a fellowship credential such as FHIMSS, FCHIME, or the upcoming FAMIA on someone’s bio or business card?

Responses to last week’s “What I Wish I’d Known Before” question were thoughtful in relaying both good and bad examples of physician participation in technology projects.

This week’s question is for anyone who has worked for a solo medical practice in any capacity.

Webinars

May 16 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “You Think You Might Want to Be a Consultant?” Sponsor: HIStalk. Presenter: Frank Poggio, CEO/president, The Kelzon Group. Maybe you just got caught in a big re-org and don’t like where things are headed, or, after almost a year of searching for a better opportunity your buddy says, “You’ve got decades of solid experience and you’re a true professional, you should become a healthcare IT consultant.” Now you start thinking, “This could be my ticket to success. I know the healthcare industry and can show people how to do things right. The sky’s the limit!” Not so fast. Consulting offers many advantages, and many pitfalls. This webinar will discuss both the rewards and the risks of moving into a full-time consulting role, as an independent, or part of a large firm. It will present a checklist you can apply to assess whether consulting is a good fit for you, and present the ground work necessary to be a successful consultant.

May 24 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Converting Consumers into Patients: Strategies for Creating Engaging Digital Experiences People Demand.” Sponsor: Healthwise. Presenters: Antonia Chappell, director of consumer solutions, Healthwise; Josh Schlaich, senior product manager, Healthwise. Nearly three-quarters of US adults use a digital channel to manage their health and the internet to track down health information. It’s clear that consumers have come to expect online interactions as an integral part of their overall patient experience. In fact, the Internet may be the first way people come in contact with your organization. They have more choice than ever on where to get healthcare services, and their decisions are increasingly influenced by how well organizations connect with them in the digital space. This webinar will show you how to create engaging digital and web experiences that convert casual consumers into patients and keep them satisfied throughout their entire patient journey.

June 5 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Increase Referrals and Patient Satisfaction with a Smarter ‘Find a Doctor’ Web Search.” Sponsors: Phynd Technologies, Healthwise. Presenters: Joseph H. Schneider, MD, MBA, FAAP, retired SVP/CHIO, Indiana University Health; Keith Belton, VP of marketing, Phynd. A recent survey found that 84 percent of patients check a hospital’s website before booking an appointment. However, ‘Find a Doctor’ search functions often frustrate them because their matching functionality is primitive and the provider’s information is incomplete or outdated. Referring physicians need similarly robust tools to find the right specialist and to send the patient to the right location. Attendees of this webinar will learn how taxonomy-driven Provider Information Management improves patient and referrer satisfaction by intelligently incorporating the provider’s location, insurance coverage, specialty and subspecialty, and services offered that can be searched via patient-friendly terms.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Spartanburg, SC-based retail pharmacy technology vendor QS/1 lays off around 30 employees in a restructuring.

Meditech reports Q1 results: revenue up 4.5 percent, EPS $0.08 vs. $0.39. Product revenue jumped 17 percent quarter over quarter. Accounting changes involving unrealized marketable securities makes comparisons to previous quarters mostly irrelevant – the company’s operating income actually increased by 19 percent quarter over quarter but net income took a major hit due to the $18 million expense entry. 

Cumberland Consulting Group acquires EHR-focused managed services firm LinkEHR, expanding its consulting and services offerings into Epic-focused help desk, application break-fix, maintenance, physician concierge support, and build / optimization.

Vision insurer VSP Global makes an unspecified investment in PokitDok. VSP’s innovation lab has been testing PokitDok’s blockchain solution and says blockchain technology will be implemented quickly in healthcare for claims adjudication, supply chain management, and interoperability with EHRs.

Venture capitalist and early Theranos investor Tim Draper says founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was “bullied into submission,” adding that he is “thrilled at what she has done” despite SEC charges that the company was a massive fraud from the beginning. Draper previously called for the Wall Street Journal to fire reporter John Carreyrou, whose investigative reporting (“like a hyena going after her”) triggered CMS investigations and sanctions. He also blamed worried competitors and the federal government for causing the company’s problems, saying last week, “I think it was a great mission and she did a great job … We have taken down another great icon.”

Decisions

• Johnson Memorial Hospital (IN) went live with Cerner supply chain management software in August 2017.
• Sagecrest Hospital-Grapevine (TX) will change from a long-term acute care hospital to a short-term acute care hospital by the end of 2018 and plans to construct surgical suites.
• Matheny Medical and Educational Center (NJ) will go live with a Yasasii healthcare information system in May 2018.

These provider-reported updates are supplied by Definitive Healthcare, which offers a free trial of its powerful intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and healthcare providers.

People

T-System hires Steve DeCosta (Research Now) as CFO.

Cedars Sinai hires Anne Wellington (Techstars) as managing director of its accelerator program.

Announcements and Implementations

Intensivists at Western Australia’s Royal Perth hospital will monitor the ICU patients of Emory Healthcare (GA) overnight, exploiting the 12-hour time difference by using Philips eICU remote monitoring.

Privacy and Security

Two California hospitals announce that the information of 900 patients was inappropriately viewed by a former employee of its medical transcription vendor Nuance.

Other

A coroner in Australia urges medical providers to stop using “antiquated technology” after a hospital faxed a patient’s lab results that suggested chemotherapy complications to the wrong number. Without the information the second hospital gave the patient another round of chemo. He died four days after. The coroner couldn’t say for sure that the lack of communication killed the patient, but said it was “difficult to understand why such an antiquated and unreliable means of communication (faxes) exist at all in the medical profession.”

In England, an 88-year-old computer programmer creates Doctor Tick-Tack, an Android app that helps doctors communicate with patients who don’t speak the same language.

A Hong Kong man credits his Apple Watch with saving his life after it warns him of an elevated heart rate, sending him immediately to the ED where doctors diagnosed him with coronary artery blockage that required angioplasty. I’m not sure that the diagnostic power of non-baseline, first-episode, asymptomatic tachycardia is good enough to warrant emergency medical evaluation in every case, but it worked out for him.

GeekWire profiles Seattle-based MultiScale, a joint venture between Providence St. Joseph Health and a life sciences computing vendor whose product extracts EHR data into a secure cloud to allow building apps, creating dashboards, performing analytics, and sharing data with third parties.

Google’s new AI-powered Duplex voice system for making appointments is so realistic that it has raised ethical concerns, forcing the company to add a notice to the call recipient that they are in fact talking to a computer.

In England, chain bookstore operator WHSmith blames a computer glitch and apologizes for pricing Colgate toothpaste at $11 in one of its 129 hospital outlets, more than triple the price it charges at its other stores. A 2015 BBC investigation caught the company marking hospital prices up heavily on items ranging from bottled water to notepads, reports of which led to government pressure that forced the company to lower prices in its hospital locations.

Sponsor Updates

• Liaison’s Alloy Platform now exceeds GDPR compliance standards.
• National Decision Support Co. will exhibit at the Society for Pediatric Radiology Annual Meeting May 15-19 in Nashville.
• Netsmart will exhibit at the MHCA Spring Conference May 15 in Savannah.
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, will exhibit at the NOHIMSS Spring Conference May 18 in Warrensville Heights, OH.
• The Technology Association of Georgia recognizes Patientco with its 2018 Advance Award.
• Pivot Point Consulting will exhibit at the Oregon Chapter of HIMSS 2018 Annual Conference May 17 in Portland.
• Surescripts will exhibit at Centricity Live 2018 May 16-18 in Las Vegas.

Blog Posts

• Executive Spotlight, Kelli Mangino, Community Connect (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Think Outside the Box to Tackle the Healthcare IT Staffing Crisis (Liaison Technologies)
• 3 Blogs to Celebrate National Nurses Week (Meditech)
• Phoenix Children’s Hospital realized $1M in cost savings with the help of clinical documentation technology (Medicomp Systems)
• Does Your Revenue Cycle Technology Pass the Test? (Navicure/Waystar)
• The biggest priorities for perioperative EHR optimization in 2018 (Nordic)
• How Northwell Health cut claim denials by 50 percent in four years (Experian Health)
• PatientPing Success Story: HCR ManorCare (PatientPing)
• National Nurses Week 2018 – Moments Mean Everything (PatientSafe Solutions)
• Nota Bene – or Not (PatientKeeper)
• HIMSS18 and the future of clinical communications (PerfectServe)
• Let Nurses be Nurses (Qventus)
• HL7 Standards: The Implementation Process, Unique Challenges, and Solutions (Redox)
• Healthcare Artificial Intelligence Outlook: Benefits, Projected Growth & Challenges (The SSI Group)
• Sunquest helps labs respond to healthcare market forces and lab challenges (Sunquest)
• A Training Revolution: Visage 7 Powers UF Health’s SIMulation (Visage Imaging)
• The power of pink pants. (Voalte)
• Inspire, Innovate, Influence: This Is How Nurses Lead (Vocera)
• The Ultimate Checklist for PT, OT, and SLP New Grads (WebPT)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 5/11/18

Top News

VA CFO Jon Rychalski tells the Senate Appropriations Committee in a Wednesday budget hearing that the agency will decide if it wants to move forward with a Cerner contract by May 28.

Asked about the project’s delays, Rychalski said, “[Acting VA Secretary Robert Wilkie] has said that he’s going to make a decision by Memorial Day. He explained that when he came in, he sort of came in cold. He knew what was going on within DoD, but not enough about the VA and needed to do due diligence to make sure he was comfortable with making a decision of this magnitude … Before that, they were looking at the contract, the interoperability, which was probably worthwhile because they came up with about 50 recommendations to improve it.”

The most interesting aspect of this quote is that it suggests the possibility that the VA may be reconsidering signing with Cerner at all rather than just hammering out specific contract terms and conditions, although at this point the money has been allocated, the no-bid decision has been announced, Wilkie doesn’t seem to have a problem with Cerner, and various members of Congress and the White House have made it clear they expect the VA to get the project underway, making it likely that the deal will be done.

Reader Comments

From Apricot Sky: “Re: [EVP/CIO name omitted]. Heard he has left the organization. That’s huge!” Unverified, so I’ve expunged the person’s name until if/when I get a response to my inquiry from the health system. His LinkedIn remains unchanged. UPDATE: Memorial Hermann Health System confirms that EVP, Chief Strategy Officer, and CIO David Bradshaw has left the organization after 20+ years.

From Clapton is a Bishop at Best: “Re: GDPR. I seem to have slept through the discussion. Do readers feel US health IT will require changes before the end of the month, or is everybody assuming we’ll be OK as long as we are HIPAA-compliant and not operating in the EU?” The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation enhances the privacy of all EU citizens and regulates the exportation of their personal data outside the EU. It guarantees “the right to be forgotten,” mandates prompt breach reporting, requires opt-in consent for data sharing, and carries big fines for violation. US companies, including health systems, fall under GDPR requirements only if they collect information from anyone who is physically in the EU at that moment (or at least that’s how I read it) and that’s the big out – GDPR doesn’t apply when a EU resident receives care in the US since they aren’t physically in an EU country at that moment. Potential health system problem areas for the May 25 implementation date mostly involve web pages that collect information from anyone via a contact form, survey, or newsletter signup, in which case you’re on the hook if one of your respondents is in an EU country. I look at GDPR as a potential competitive advantage for a US-based health system since patients are always worried about privacy, although I doubt GDPR awareness is high among the US population and therefore they might not care either way. I don’t know what impact GDPR has on EHR vendors that sell to EU customers. I’ll open the floor to readers.

From Southern CIO: “Re: CHIME. It bothers me when I receive a message from CHIME that includes a vendor name, as in this example. I looked to CHIME as being focused on members and not corruptible by the industry. I will chalk it up to a sign of the times.” HIMSS long ago eliminated the line of decorum between vendors and providers and in fact turned itself into one big, profitable vendor itself in its “ladies drink free” model of using low-paying provider members to attract high-paying vendors anxious to sell them something. It’s brilliant as a business strategy as long as providers don’t rebel at being exhibited like Amsterdam red-light district hookers to salivating vendor-johns, which based on casual HIMSS conference observation, is questionable behavior that is nonetheless entirely consensual all around. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome back to returning HIStalk Gold Sponsor Burwood Group. The 250-employee, Chicago-based healthcare IT consulting and integration firm helps organizations develop strategy, deploy technology, and create an operational model, also working with them to improve patient safety, quality, and satisfaction outcomes by applying expertise in technology selection, clinical communication strategy, facility transformation, and end-user adoption planning. The company’s clients have realized improved staff engagement and waste reduction through workflow automation, meaningful clinical alerts, and streamlined communication and collaboration. Thanks to Burwood Group for supporting HIStalk.

Listening: new suave harmonies from The Temptations, which despite frequent member changes in the group’s 50+ year history, still have one original member left in the 76-year-old Otis Williams (I’ll defer to their amazing musical legacy by declining to snarkily dismiss the group as “The Temptation”). The album features covers of present-day hits from Bruno Mars, The Weeknd, and others, while the album’s bonus track of “Stay With Me” covered gospel style is stunning. I shall acknowledge and support this premise – after some number of decades, a band with few or even no original members left can still rightfully perform under the original name as long as it respects its legacy in accepting the torch as handed off by the founders, no different than a symphony whose membership revolves while its sound remains the same. Anyway, today’s Temptations may well still dutifully cover the band’s nostalgia-inducing hits while strutting 1960s-style hokey dance moves, but they are far from a novelty act – their new music is nothing short of contemporary and grand.

Webinars

May 16 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “You Think You Might Want to Be a Consultant?” Sponsor: HIStalk. Presenter: Frank Poggio, CEO/president, The Kelzon Group. Maybe you just got caught in a big re-org and don’t like where things are headed, or, after almost a year of searching for a better opportunity your buddy says, “You’ve got decades of solid experience and you’re a true professional, you should become a healthcare IT consultant.” Now you start thinking, “This could be my ticket to success. I know the healthcare industry and can show people how to do things right. The sky’s the limit!” Not so fast. Consulting offers many advantages, and many pitfalls. This webinar will discuss both the rewards and the risks of moving into a full-time consulting role, as an independent, or part of a large firm. It will present a checklist you can apply to assess whether consulting is a good fit for you, and present the ground work necessary to be a successful consultant.

May 24 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Converting Consumers into Patients: Strategies for Creating Engaging Digital Experiences People Demand.” Sponsor: Healthwise. Presenters: Antonia Chappell, director of consumer solutions, Healthwise; Josh Schlaich, senior product manager, Healthwise. Nearly three-quarters of US adults use a digital channel to manage their health and the internet to track down health information. It’s clear that consumers have come to expect online interactions as an integral part of their overall patient experience. In fact, the Internet may be the first way people come in contact with your organization. They have more choice than ever on where to get healthcare services, and their decisions are increasingly influenced by how well organizations connect with them in the digital space. This webinar will show you how to create engaging digital and web experiences that convert casual consumers into patients and keep them satisfied throughout their entire patient journey.

June 5 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Increase Referrals and Patient Satisfaction with a Smarter ‘Find a Doctor’ Web Search.” Sponsors: Phynd Technologies, Healthwise. Presenters: Joseph H. Schneider, MD, MBA, FAAP, retired SVP/CHIO, Indiana University Health; Keith Belton, VP of marketing, Phynd. A recent survey found that 84 percent of patients check a hospital’s website before booking an appointment. However, ‘Find a Doctor’ search functions often frustrate them because their matching functionality is primitive and the provider’s information is incomplete or outdated. Referring physicians need similarly robust tools to find the right specialist and to send the patient to the right location. Attendees of this webinar will learn how taxonomy-driven Provider Information Management improves patient and referrer satisfaction by intelligently incorporating the provider’s location, insurance coverage, specialty and subspecialty, and services offered that can be searched via patient-friendly terms.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Analytics vendor Innovaccer secures $25 million in a funding round that brings its total raised to $41 million.

The Sequoia Project will divide its corporate structure into two subsidiaries – Carequality and EHealth Exchange – this summer. The EHealthExchange health information network, which will adopt the Carequality framework, is used by 59 HIEs and 15 EHR vendors.

Healthcare Growth Partners examines the trend of publicly traded health IT companies going private, as in the case of what Elliott Management is proposing in its bid for Athenahealth. HGP says market dynamics have changed such that private companies may be valued higher than their publicly traded counterparts, adding that acquirers may believe that paying a premium for full control may more than offset the built-in discount for share illiquidity. My unsolicited enhancement to HGP’s analysis is this – in a poor, thin IPO market, it may make sense for investors to take over a struggling company private by buying all shares at a premium, improve its operations and financials, and then take it public again down the road when conditions have improved and investors are ready to chase the next sure thing.

NantHealth reports Q1 results: revenue up 18 percent, EPS –$0.21 vs. -$0.34. NH shares have lost 10 percent in the past year vs. the Nasdaq’s 21 percent gain, valuing the company at $334 million.

People

Wes Wright (Sutter Health) joins Imprivata as CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

AMIA announces a fellowship (FAMIA) program that targets applied informatics practitioners. It sounds much like the lightly-regarded, non-academic FHIMSS or those fellowships sold by medical membership groups (FACOG, FACC), whose primary focus seems to be creating an ongoing revenue stream for the parent organization by charging would-be fellows to evaluate their credentials and provide them with mandatory ongoing education and membership (although to its credit, HIMSS does not require FHIMSS holders to renew their fellowship, so there’s no ongoing expense). It appears that you’re in as long as you work in a relevant job, have been a member for years, and can get other members to vouch for you – no effort is required beyond completing the application. I would question whether the accomplishment really means anything that isn’t already clear on someone’s resume, but people love having alphabet soup after their names and a wall full of self-love certificates.

AdvancedMD develops Rhythm, cloud-based software that puts EHR, PM, RCM, and patient engagement tools on a single platform.

Wellsoft works with GoRev to develop integrated EHR, PM, and RCM software for urgent care practices.

Medication administration software vendor EBroselow offers a free version of its dosing software for medical emergencies.

Sales

• The Indiana Family and Social Services Administration will implement Cerner Millenium and RCM software at its six inpatient psychiatric facilities.
• Mayo Regional Hospital (ME) chooses Cerner Millennium and revenue cycle solutions using the CommunityWorks hosted deployment model.
• Northern Valley Indian Health will deploy EHR software from EClinicalWorks at seven locations in California.

Government and Politics

At AHA’s annual meeting, HHS Secretary Alex Azar laments the lack of interoperability he encountered during his recent inpatient stays for diverticulitis:

Today’s compartmented system is a burden on both patients and providers. Imagine if I could have shared my medication list just once. Imagine if, instead of running through my story with each new contact, I could have told it just once. Think about the opportunities for mistakes and inaccuracies that would eliminate—and think about the time that would free up for seeing more patients, offering them the care and attention they need. Now, think about that not just in the context of one guy with an angry colon, but across 330 million Americans: It is amazing what freer exchange of information would mean for our whole system. That is the promise of interoperability.

At the VA budget hearing, VHA Executive in Charge Carolyn Clancy, MD says telehealth will be the VA’s “killer app,” not only for providing services, but also for recruitment. By 2020, all VA clinicians will be required by their job descriptions to be available to provide telehealth services.

The CEO of drug maker Novartis goes into damage control mode after STAT reveals that the company paid $1.2 million to President Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen in trying to get a leg up on a new, unknown White House administration. The company said  paying a self-proclaimed Trump fixer to gain access was a mistake, but blames its former CEO, who left in February 2018. It also notes that Cohen was unable to deliver the work he promised, but couldn’t be fired because of the contract the drug company signed (he’s a lawyer, after all).

Other

Mayo Clinic attempts to cheer the 400 transcriptionists it is laying off with gifts for Medical Transcriptionists Week, which starts May 13. The transcriptionists, who have until May 19 to accept severance packages, aren’t convinced that the provider’s new Epic system in Rochester isn’t responsible for their downsizing.

Meanwhile, a local TV station says it has received several complaints from temporary nurses who were hired by contractor HCI to help with the implementation. One unnamed nurse was quoted as saying, “Since we’ve been in orientation with HCI, we have been verbally abused, we have been intimidated, we have been threatened that we would lose our job, not on a daily basis, but almost a nearly hourly basis.” HCI Group says it will look into the issues raised during the training sessions.

The Michael J. Fox Foundation and Alphabet’s Verily division will outfit 800 participants with the Verily Study Watch as part of a two-year project that will capture fitness, environmental, and physiological data, which will then be made available to independent Parkinson’s researchers.

A small survey of hospital RCM decision-makers finds that 69 percent use more than one RCM vendor, resulting in problems with denials that impact their bottom line.

A senior living center nurse is charged with the death of the father of former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. The contract LPN is accused of failing to perform neurological checks after finding his patient following an unwitnessed fall, then falsifying the medical record to indicate that he had done the exam.

A Black Book survey of 7,400 hospital nurses finds that only 4 percent are so frustrated with their EHR that they want to go back to paper recordkeeping, down from 26 percent in 2015. Nearly all respondents say their IT department responds quickly to their suggestions for EHR documentation changes, although 82 percent complain that they don’t have easy access to computers or mobile devices in patient care areas and their productivity suffers accordingly. Nearly all respondents say that  that EHR competency is a highly-sought employment skill, while 80 percent of  job-seeking RNs indicate that the EHR a hospital uses is an important part of their decision to take a new job.

Sponsor Updates

• The American Cancer Society adds the Healthgrades physician search finder tool to its website.
• CareCloud adds speech-recognition technology from NVoq to its EHR documentation tools.
• Loren Mann (Advisory Board) joins The Chartis Group as performance practice director.
• Cumberland Consulting Group will sponsor CBI’s Medicaid and Government Pricing Congress May 21-23 in Orlando.
• LogicStream Health releases a new podcast, “Partnering with physicians to make a solid business case and deliver ROI with Dr. Richard Priore.”
• Elsevier partners with PerkinElmer and its ChemDraw software to enable faster, more intuitive chemistry research.
• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at the Kentucky Primary Care Association 2018 Spring Conference May 14-15 in Lexington.
• Hayes Management Consulting will exhibit at Centricity Live 2018 May 16-18 in Las Vegas.
• HBI Solutions will exhibit at Pop Health East May 14-15 in Boston.
• The HCI Group partners with the Mayo Clinic (MN) on a successful go live in Rochester.
• Healthwise and Iatric Systems will exhibit at ANIA through May 12 in Orlando.
• Huntzinger Management Group congratulates customer Adena Health System on its 2018 Gallup Great Workplace Award.
• Image Stream Medical will present at Product Camp Boston May 12.
• InterSystems will exhibit at the Healthcare Providers Transformation event May 15-16 in Dove Mountain, AZ.
• Kyruus will present at RevDev18 May 16 in Boston.
• Audacious Inquiry Director of Master Data Management Services Jeremy Wong joins The Sequoia Project’s new Patient Unified Lookup System for Emergencies Advisory Council.
• Aprima concludes an award-winning fiscal year as it looks ahead to its 20th anniversary.
• Change Healthcare announces it will work with Microsoft and Adobe to improve patient relationship management and engagement initiatives.
• Spok forms physician and nurse advisory councils for its Care Connect platform.
• Access HealthNet partners with Datica to ensure compliance requirements are met for its healthcare bundling platform.
• Datica will provide security and compliance layers for cloud-based bundled payment solutions vendor Access HealthNet. 

Blog Posts

• National Nurses Week: Celebrating All Nurses from the Bedside to the Keyboard (FormFast)
• Developing a Revenue Integrity Program? Get Help with the Right Partner (Hayes Management Consulting)
• Athenahealth & Elliott Management – Why Health IT Companies are Going Private (HGP)
• With Grit and Compassion, Nurses are Everyday Heroes (Healthgrades)
• How to Execute the Perfect Go-Live (Part 2) (Leidos Health)
• Structured Content and Content Strategy: Beyond the Migration (Healthwise)
• Choosing the “Host” of Your EHR Extension in the Acute Setting (Impact Advisors)
• Debunking SSO Security Myths (Imprivata)
• Top 3 blogs to celebrate National Nurses Week (Meditech)
• Why Cultural Awareness can Improve Patient Outcomes (Influence Health)
• Integrating EMS into the Healthcare System (InterSystems)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 5/9/18

Top News

Athenahealth shares spike on yesterday’s news of an unsolicited takeover bid from Elliott Management, which has made several buy-out offers since taking on a 9-percent stake in the company last year. The hedge fund this time around made an all-cash offer of $160 per share for Athenahealth, putting the total value of the transaction between $6.5 and $6.9 billion. Elliott representatives believe they can close the deal in as little as three weeks, after which they plan to take the company private.

Athenahealth’s Board of Directors responded with a letter to shareholders announcing that they will review the offer.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Responses to this week’s question so far run the gamut, from realizing that tantrum-solving skills would come in handy, to going into projects with a more appreciative attitude for “physicians who were not only generous with their time, but also key contributors.” There’s still time to share your experience.

Webinars

May 9 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “How to Make VBC Work for You: The Business Case to Transform Into the Health System of the Future.” Sponsor: Philips Wellcentive. Presenters: Mason Beard, co-founder and chief product officer, Philips Wellcentive; Scott Cullen, MD, principal, ECG Management Consulting; Seema Mathur, director of strategy, Sage Growth Partners. How well is your organization funding its transformation to VBC? This free webinar explains how to achieve ROI as your organization transforms to meet the future. You’ll learn how VBC is impacting healthcare system management, three strategies for funding your transformation, and what the healthcare system of the future will look like.

May 16 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “You Think You Might Want to Be a Consultant?” Sponsor: HIStalk. Presenter: Frank Poggio, CEO/president, The Kelzon Group. Maybe you just got caught in a big re-org and don’t like where things are headed, or, after almost a year of searching for a better opportunity your buddy says, “You’ve got decades of solid experience and you’re a true professional, you should become a healthcare IT consultant.” Now you start thinking, "This could be my ticket to success. I know the healthcare industry and can show people how to do things right. The sky’s the limit!" Not so fast. Consulting offers many advantages, and many pitfalls. This webinar will discuss both the rewards and the risks of moving into a full-time consulting role, as an independent, or part of a large firm. It will present a checklist you can apply to assess whether consulting is a good fit for you, and present the ground work necessary to be a successful consultant.

May 24 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Converting Consumers into Patients: Strategies for Creating Engaging Digital Experiences People Demand.” Sponsor: Healthwise. Presenters: Antonia Chappell, director of consumer solutions, Healthwise; Josh Schlaich, senior product manager, Healthwise. Nearly three-quarters of US adults use a digital channel to manage their health and the internet to track down health information. It’s clear that consumers have come to expect online interactions as an integral part of their overall patient experience. In fact, the Internet may be the first way people come in contact with your organization. They have more choice than ever on where to get healthcare services, and their decisions are increasingly influenced by how well organizations connect with them in the digital space. This webinar will show you how to create engaging digital and web experiences that convert casual consumers into patients and keep them satisfied throughout their entire patient journey.

June 5 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Increase Referrals and Patient Satisfaction with a Smarter ‘Find a Doctor’ Web Search.” Sponsors: Phynd Technologies, Healthwise. Presenters: Joseph H. Schneider, MD, MBA, FAAP, retired SVP/CHIO, Indiana University Health; Keith Belton, VP of marketing, Phynd. A recent survey found that 84 percent of patients check a hospital’s website before booking an appointment. However, ‘Find a Doctor’ search functions often frustrate them because their matching functionality is primitive and the provider’s information is incomplete or outdated. Referring physicians need similarly robust tools to find the right specialist and to send the patient to the right location. Attendees of this webinar will learn how taxonomy-driven Provider Information Management improves patient and referrer satisfaction by intelligently incorporating the provider’s location, insurance coverage, specialty and subspecialty, and services offered that can be searched via patient-friendly terms.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Mobile messaging vendor MPulse Mobile raises $11 million in a Series B round led by SJF Ventures. The company also announced development of AI-based chat bot messaging capabilities.

Microsoft patents related to sensors for stress and blood pressure monitoring emerge, suggesting the company may be getting back into wearables. It discontinued its Band fitness tracker in 2016 as smart watches began to overtake trackers in popularity and capabilities.

Wall Street Journal Theranos investigator John Carreyrou uncovers a list of high-profile investors who helped the company secure hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. Founder Elizabeth Holmes, who settled with the SEC in March over fraud allegations, has told the last remaining shareholders that the company will be liquidated by August.

Former CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt launches Town Hall Ventures to invest in health IT companies focused on serving Medicaid and Medicare populations.

Sales

• Cody Regional Health (WY) selects Plexus Technology Group’s Anesthesia Touch EHR.
• University of Missouri Health Care will extend its Cerner Millenium system to affiliate Capital Region Medical Center.

People

Kristin Gillen, RN (HonorHealth) joins Bluetree Network as CNIO.

HealthTap’s Board of Directors ousts CEO Ron Gutman after looking into high turnover rates and concerning reports about his abusive conduct. Career CEO Bill Gossman has been tapped to take over the position.

Announcements and Implementations

Patientco announces availability of its Smart Patient Financial Engagement Platform.

Developers and healthcare organizations can now leverage FHIR for data exchange on the Redox network.

Meditech announces GA of its Expanse Web-based EHR in the UK and Ireland.

The VA San Diego Healthcare System rolls out LiveData’s PeriOp Manager in its eight ORs.

Health Fidelity investor UPMC (PA) implements the company’s HF360 Provider workflow software to identify and close gaps in risk across patient populations.

Privacy and Security

After visiting three Navy facilities and two Air Force facilities, the DoD’s Office of the Inspector General finds glaring disregard for data security across 17 information systems. The laundry list of problems included a lack of multifactor authentication, adequate passwords, system review and assessment procedures, and physical security standards to protect PHI. Excuses included a “lack of resources and guidance, system incompatibility, and vendor limitations.” Resulting HIPAA violations could cost up to $1.5 million annually for each violation.

Other

In an effort to help cancer patients avoid the ER, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (WA) and Microsoft will develop and pilot AI-powered technology to identify and help those patients likely to suffer from severe chemotherapy side effects. The company has also committed $25 million over the next five years to develop AI that will help people with disabilities.

In order to cut down on fraud and abuse, Walmart will require that all opioid prescriptions be filed electronically with its pharmacies by 2020.

A Black Book survey of 709 inpatient facility executives finds the majority are open to outsourcing clinical areas of expertise, particularly teleradiology and medical imaging, as they focus already stretched internal resources on the move to value-based care.

Sponsor Updates

• Surescripts publishes its annual National Progress Report.
• Aprima opens registration for its user conference August 17-19 in Dallas.
• Audacious Inquiry achieves EHNAC accreditations recognizing excellence in information security.
• Bluetree Network will exhibit at the HIMSS Executive Institute Leadership Live Conference May 14-15 in Dallas.
• The Editorial Board from Biomedical Instrumentation & Technology awards Bernoulli Health a Best Research Paper Award for its “Continuous Surveillance of Sleep Apnea Patients in a Medical-Surgical Unit” paper.
• Influence Health partners with Sg2 to add strategic planning capabilities to its hospital marketing services.
• Collective Medical partners with the Florida Hospital Association, giving members access to its real-time, risk-adjusted event notification and care collaboration platform.
• CompuGroup Medical will exhibit at the AUCH Annual Primary Care Conference May 17-18 in West Valley City, UT.
• Conduent will exhibit at the National Medicare Advantage Summit May 16-18 in Washington, DC.
• CoverMyMeds will exhibit at AAACN May 9-12 in Orlando.
• CTG publishes a new case study, “Inova Health System Relies on CTG for Epic Clinical Service Desk Solution.”
• Culbert hosts its 12^th annual employee celebration at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
• Divurgent publishes a new white paper, “A Culture of Security: Turning Your Greatest Threat into an Asset.”
• The local news highlights Docent Health’s patient experience work at Dignity Health’s Memorial Hospital (CA).
• The Microsoft Build 2018 Developer Conference showcases Datica’s compliant cloud technology.

Blog Posts

• Why Every Hospital Needs an eForm Management Solution for Surgical Consent (Access)
• In or Out-source Your Value-Based Care (VBC) Revenue Cycle Management? (AdvancedMD)
• A Mobile Imaging Workflow to “mobilize” your image-enabled EHR (Agfa Healthcare)
• What Current Issues Concern ACO Leaders? (Arcadia)
• Unleashing the EHR with Real-Time Data (Bernoulli Health)
• Medicare Advantage Evolving Star Ratings Criteria: How Technology Can Bridge the Post-Acute Gap (CarePort Health)
• Using Healthcare Artificial Intelligence in Explaining Lab Test Results to Patients (CareSync)
• 6 Tips for Dealing with Workplace Stress (Direct Consulting Associates)
• Customer Spotlight: Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System (Dimensional Insight)
• 6 Healthcare Innovations You May Not Know Were Created by Nurses (Spok)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 5/7/18

Top News

Mayo Clinic goes live on Epic at its Rochester, MN campus as part of a $1.5 billion system-wide software overhaul that will bring all of its facilities onto a single platform. Preparation for the big-bang event on May 5 was so extensive that the local power company created a new substation to power it.

Mayo has already implemented Epic at its facilities in Wisconsin and southern Minnesota, and expects to begin deployment at its hospitals in Florida and Arizona after the Rochester implementation is complete.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Recent privacy breaches have swayed the majority of reader interest in consumer genetic testing services, though the comments left don’t give me a good indication if they’ve been more swayed into not using these types of services. Wary Consumer points out that, “When you add to the privacy breaches the fact that Chinese companies have invested in the DNA companies and are now offshoring our genetic data, it should give all of us pause. Additionally, you’re paying for a service, so unlike free sites where you basically pay with your data, you’re basically paying twice, since you know they’re going to reuse or resell your data. It’s crazy that people don’t stop to consider this when clicking through end user agreements that they don’t read.” Steve’s interest has stayed the same – zilch. “Wasn’t interested before, still am not. People are so concerned with the risk that their credit card information might end up on line (when you can easily cancel a credit card). Some of these same people are more than willing to send in their DNA to be stored for years to come. How many hackers do we think are actively working to find their way into those databases?”

New poll to your right or here: Does connectivity to your EHR make you more or less likely to buy a Fitbit?

Here are reader responses to “What I Wish I’d Known Before … Firing Someone for Cause.” A lack of support, plus a tendency to tiptoe around tossing bad apples seem to be common themes.

I’m hoping Epic employees and others toiling in the Minnesota trenches of the Mayo Clinic will anonymously weigh in on this week’s question.

Webinars

May 9 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “How to Make VBC Work for You: The Business Case to Transform Into the Health System of the Future.” Sponsor: Philips Wellcentive. Presenters: Mason Beard, co-founder and chief product officer, Philips Wellcentive; Scott Cullen, MD, principal, ECG Management Consulting; Seema Mathur, director of strategy, Sage Growth Partners. How well is your organization funding its transformation to VBC? This free webinar explains how to achieve ROI as your organization transforms to meet the future. You’ll learn how VBC is impacting healthcare system management, three strategies for funding your transformation, and what the healthcare system of the future will look like.

May 16 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “You Think You Might Want to Be a Consultant?” Sponsor: HIStalk. Presenter: Frank Poggio, CEO/president, The Kelzon Group. Maybe you just got caught in a big re-org and don’t like where things are headed, or, after almost a year of searching for a better opportunity your buddy says, “You’ve got decades of solid experience and you’re a true professional, you should become a healthcare IT consultant.” Now you start thinking, "This could be my ticket to success. I know the healthcare industry and can show people how to do things right. The sky’s the limit!" Not so fast. Consulting offers many advantages, and many pitfalls. This webinar will discuss both the rewards and the risks of moving into a full-time consulting role, as an independent, or part of a large firm. It will present a checklist you can apply to assess whether consulting is a good fit for you, and present the ground work necessary to be a successful consultant.

May 24 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Converting Consumers into Patients: Strategies for Creating Engaging Digital Experiences People Demand.” Sponsor: Healthwise. Presenters: Antonia Chappell, director of consumer solutions, Healthwise; Josh Schlaich, senior product manager, Healthwise. Nearly three-quarters of US adults use a digital channel to manage their health and the internet to track down health information. It’s clear that consumers have come to expect online interactions as an integral part of their overall patient experience. In fact, the Internet may be the first way people come in contact with your organization. They have more choice than ever on where to get healthcare services, and their decisions are increasingly influenced by how well organizations connect with them in the digital space. This webinar will show you how to create engaging digital and web experiences that convert casual consumers into patients and keep them satisfied throughout their entire patient journey.

June 5 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Increase Referrals and Patient Satisfaction with a Smarter ‘Find a Doctor’ Web Search.” Sponsors: Phynd Technologies, Healthwise. Presenters: Joseph H. Schneider, MD, MBA, FAAP, retired SVP/CHIO, Indiana University Health; Keith Belton, VP of marketing, Phynd. A recent survey found that 84 percent of patients check a hospital’s website before booking an appointment. However, ‘Find a Doctor’ search functions often frustrate them because their matching functionality is primitive and the provider’s information is incomplete or outdated. Referring physicians need similarly robust tools to find the right specialist and to send the patient to the right location. Attendees of this webinar will learn how taxonomy-driven Provider Information Management improves patient and referrer satisfaction by intelligently incorporating the provider’s location, insurance coverage, specialty and subspecialty, and services offered that can be searched via patient-friendly terms.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett reiterates his commitment to the healthcare improvement project his company is launching with JPMorgan and Amazon. At Berkshire’s annual shareholders meeting, he reiterated that all three companies want their 1 million-plus employees to receive better care at lower costs, but didn’t get into specifics. He did mention that a CEO for the new venture will likely be placed within the next two months.

People

TeleTracking promotes Christopher Johnson to president.

David Nace, MD (Lantern) joins Innovaccer as CMO.

Announcements and Implementations

In the UK, the Somerset Partnership NHS Foundation Trust joins TriNetX’s research network.

Sales

• Renown Health selects Phynd to synthesize, transform, and share provider information across its health network in Nevada.
• In Australia, the Victorian government allocates $124 million to implement Epic at three hospitals.
• Calvary Hospital (NY) will host their Meditech system on CloudWave’s OpSus Healthcare cloud.
• Massac Memorial Hospital (IL) selects Parallon Technology Solutions to implement and host its Meditech Expanse software.

Decisions

• Holzer Medical Center (OH) will switch from Allscripts to Athenahealth in late May or early June.
• Kingman Regional Medical Center (AZ) will go live with Meditech supply chain management software in September.
• Crisp Regional Hospital (GA) will switch from Meditech to Cerner in 2019.

These provider-reported updates are supplied by Definitive Healthcare, which offers a free trial of its powerful intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and healthcare providers.

Government and Politics

New York City-based urgent care chain CityMD will pay $6.6 million to settle a civil fraud lawsuit filed by a whistleblower and the Manhattan US Attorney General’s Office. CityMD, which has 88 facilities, admitted to billing Medicare for procedures that weren’t as lengthy or complex as it claimed.

This article suggests that President Trump will meet with National Association of Veterans Affairs Physicians and Dentists President Samuel Spagnolo, MD to discuss his potential nomination for VA Secretary. Spagnolo is also a senior attending physician at the VA Medical Center in Washington, DC and a professor of medicine at George Washington University. He has served in numerous positions within the VA throughout his career.

Other

The majority of respondents in a Reaction Data survey of 145 believe that Anthem’s decision to stop covering ER visits it deems unnecessary will have a negative impact on their organizations and patients, especially when it comes to out-of-pocket patient expenses and restricted clinical care.

Sponsor Updates

• Medicity publishes a new perspective paper, “Interoperability 2.0: How to Consume, Organize and Share Health Data to Achieve Greater Value.”
• The New York State Psychiatric Association endorses DrFirst medication management tools for use by the psychiatric community in New York State.
• Mobile Heartbeat will present at the 2018 ANIA Conference May 12 in Orlando.
• Liaison Technologies is accepting applications for its fall semester 2018 Data-Inspired Future Scholarship.
• Meditech, PatientSafe Solutions, and PerfectServe will exhibit at the 2018 ANIA Annual Conference May 10-12 in Orlando.
• The National Council for Behavioral Health awards Netsmart the 2018 Mental Health First Aid Business Leadership Award.
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, will exhibit at the Allscripts Client Experience May 8-9 in Saskatchewan.
• OmniSys, Experian Health, and Surescripts will exhibit at the NCPDP Annual Technology & Business Conference May 7-9 in Scottsdale, AZ.
• Qventus and TriNetX exhibits at the HLTH 2018 conference through May 9 in Las Vegas.
• T-System partners with Precision Practice Management to develop the Complete Care clinical and business solution for urgent care providers.
• T-System exhibits at the 2018 UCAOA Urgent Care Convention & Expo through May 9 in Las Vegas.
• Heather Russell joins TransUnion as chief legal officer.
• Wellsoft will exhibit at the Annual Rural Health Conference May 8-11 in New Orleans.
• WiserTogether partners with digital health marketplace ZendyHealth.
• The local news profiles ZappRx.
• Consulting Magazine includes Impact Advisors VP Keith MacDonald in its list of top 25 advisors of 2018.

Blog Posts

• GDPR (Learn on Demand Systems)
• Complying with GDPR and How Data Pseudonymization Can Help (Liaison Technologies)
• The ONE Thing That Patients Really, Really Want In Consumer-Driven Healthcare (LifeImage)
• End-to-End vs. Individual Solutions (Lightbeam Health Solutions)
• Why Silent Mobile Notification Is the Future of Hospital Communication Systems (LiveProcess)
• Why process improvement, technology and common sense are critical to patient safety (LogicStream Health)
• #1 Genetic Screening Company Migrates HIPAA Compliant Workloads to AWS (Logicworks)
• Medicaid Coverage – Good for Your Patients and Your Bottom Line (MedData)
• Strengthen Your Network Through Automated Appeals and Grievances (Medecision)
• Win the run for the roses with your revenue cycle (Navicure/Waystar)
• Experts in Home Health Give Thoughts and Advice for 2018 – Part VIII (Netsmart)
• Healthcare price transparency tools: Because costs shouldn’t be a guessing game (Experian Health)
• Recap: PatientPing Midwest Community Summit (PatientPing)
• Partnering for Improved Patient Care (PatientSafe Solutions)
• Stop Measuring the Wrong Thing (Patientco)
• Getting the Most Out of Your EHR (Pivot Point Consulting)
• How To Reduce Primary Non-Adherence to Medications (PatientKeeper)
• Creating the Real Time Health System (Qventus)
• The Wrinkly Policy of Integrating Social Determinants of Health Data (Redox)
• GDPR: What All Marketers Need to Know (Salesforce)
• Healthcare Artificial Intelligence Outlook: Benefits, Projected Growth & Challenges (The SSI Group)
• Are You a Client or a Customer to Your Vendor? (Summit Healthcare)
• Convergence of molecular diagnostics & anatomic pathology (Sunquest)
• A personal approach to end-user training. (Voalte)
• Inspire, Innovate, Influence: This Is How Nurses Lead (Vocera)
• A Training Revolution: Visage 7 Powers UF Health’s SIMulation (Visage Imaging)
• 6 Ways to be the Healthcare Partner Your Patients Want (WebPT)
• The technology factor in referral intelligence (Philips Wellcentive)
• Delivering on Consumer Expectations in the Age of Smart Speakers (Access)
• New Proposed CMS Rule – Improving Interoperability (Optimum Healthcare IT)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 5/4/18

Top News

Allscripts announces Q1 results: revenue up 24 percent, adjusted EPS $0.16 vs $0.17. CEO Paul Black says the company is looking forward to integrating Practice Fusion, McKesson’s Enterprise Information Solutions business, and Change Healthcare Homecare’s solutions – via Netsmart – into its portfolio.

The Chicago-based company will expand its FollowMyHealth patient engagement offering with the acquisition of patient engagement and CRM company HealthGrid for $60 million. HealthGrid co-founders Raj and Charkri Toleti headed up patient self-service kiosk startup Galvanon until its acquisition by NCR in 2005.

Reader Comments

From mike: “Re: The Lockhorns. This comic in my analog copy of the newspaper on Wednesday caught my eye; first because of the doctor’s head mirror; but especially the "H Blog" on the wall … could this be a direct reference to HIStalk? Hmmm.” It’s certainly fun to think so, though it may be some sort of homage to a Harold Blog, MD a New York-based internist who passed away several years ago. H. Blog MD appears in several of the comics.

From Associate CIO: “Re: Trinity Health’s move to Epic. This is rather stunning as they had been in the process of rolling out Cerner to the remainder of their hospitals as late as last year…. Cerner seems to be lost after the passing of Neil …” In announcing the move, the Michigan-based health system added it will train 100,000 employees on the new software.

From TryToStayAnon: “Re: Your Health Catalyst/Medicity news. Notable for a few reasons – Medicity is struggling with data architecture and analytics. Clients exploring that space with Medicity should be rejoicing. It isn’t clear to what extent Aetna will remain engaged with Medicity clients. Most likely, this announcement will also clear the path for the CVS and Aetna deal to close.”

Webinars

May 9 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “How to Make VBC Work for You: The Business Case to Transform Into the Health System of the Future.” Sponsor: Philips Wellcentive. Presenters: Mason Beard, co-founder and chief product officer, Philips Wellcentive; Scott Cullen, MD, principal, ECG Management Consulting; Seema Mathur, director of strategy, Sage Growth Partners. How well is your organization funding its transformation to VBC? This free webinar explains how to achieve ROI as your organization transforms to meet the future. You’ll learn how VBC is impacting healthcare system management, three strategies for funding your transformation, and what the healthcare system of the future will look like.

May 16 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “You Think You Might Want to Be a Consultant?” Sponsor: HIStalk. Presenter: Frank Poggio, CEO/president, The Kelzon Group. Maybe you just got caught in a big re-org and don’t like where things are headed, or, after almost a year of searching for a better opportunity your buddy says, “You’ve got decades of solid experience and you’re a true professional, you should become a healthcare IT consultant.” Now you start thinking, "This could be my ticket to success. I know the healthcare industry and can show people how to do things right. The sky’s the limit!" Not so fast. Consulting offers many advantages, and many pitfalls. This webinar will discuss both the rewards and the risks of moving into a full-time consulting role, as an independent, or part of a large firm. It will present a checklist you can apply to assess whether consulting is a good fit for you, and present the ground work necessary to be a successful consultant.

May 24 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Converting Consumers into Patients: Strategies for Creating Engaging Digital Experiences People Demand.” Sponsor: Healthwise. Presenters: Antonia Chappell, director of consumer solutions, Healthwise; Josh Schlaich, senior product manager, Healthwise. Nearly three-quarters of US adults use a digital channel to manage their health and the internet to track down health information. It’s clear that consumers have come to expect online interactions as an integral part of their overall patient experience. In fact, the Internet may be the first way people come in contact with your organization. They have more choice than ever on where to get healthcare services, and their decisions are increasingly influenced by how well organizations connect with them in the digital space. This webinar will show you how to create engaging digital and web experiences that convert casual consumers into patients and keep them satisfied throughout their entire patient journey.

June 5 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Increase Referrals and Patient Satisfaction with a Smarter ‘Find a Doctor’ Web Search.” Sponsors: Phynd Technologies, Healthwise. Presenters: Joseph H. Schneider, MD, MBA, FAAP, retired SVP/CHIO, Indiana University Health; Keith Belton, VP of marketing, Phynd. A recent survey found that 84 percent of patients check a hospital’s website before booking an appointment. However, ‘Find a Doctor’ search functions often frustrate them because their matching functionality is primitive and the provider’s information is incomplete or outdated. Referring physicians need similarly robust tools to find the right specialist and to send the patient to the right location. Attendees of this webinar will learn how taxonomy-driven Provider Information Management improves patient and referrer satisfaction by intelligently incorporating the provider’s location, insurance coverage, specialty and subspecialty, and services offered that can be searched via patient-friendly terms.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Announcements and Implementations

Island Hospital (WA) goes live on Meditech Expanse with help from hosting partner Engage.

People

Meditech promotes Geoff Smith to VP, product development.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (MA) taps CIO John Halamka, MD to lead its new Health Technology Exploration Center, which will explore the role of emerging technologies like blockchain and IoT in healthcare delivery.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Data analytics vendor Health Catalyst acquires HIE vendor Medicity – both based in Salt Lake City – for an undisclosed price.

Heart monitor smartwatch company IBeat raises $5.5 million in seed funding, bringing its total funding to $10 million. Launched by Practice Fusion founder and former CEO Ryan Howard in 2016, the startup will use the investment to prepare for initial shipments of its Heart Watch this summer.

Surgery coordination software vendor Casetabs secures $6 million in a Series A funding round led by Nueterra Capital.

Doc Halo rebrands to Halo Communications.

HGP publishes a refreshingly concise look back at the public market health IT landscape, noting that the number of publicly-listed companies is decreasing while IPOs are outpaced by privatizations and acquisitions.

Cerner shares drop after the company reports lower than forecasted Q1 revenue of $1.29 billion, and a $13 million decline in net earnings so far this year. President Zane Burke attributed the decline to “the delay of a large contract,” referring to the $16 billion VA contract that has yet to come through the pipeline. “We still expect to sign the contract,” he clarified, adding that it will now likely be signed in the second half of the year.

Sales

• McLaren Health Care (MI) will implement PerfectServe’s clinical communication and collaboration software across 20 locations including 14 hospitals.
• WakeMed Health & Hospitals (NC) selects analytics, supply chain services, and performance improvement tools from Premier.
• Mayo Regional Hospital (ME) will transition from three different EHRs to Cerner Millenium in January 2019.

Privacy and Security

Florida Hospital notifies an undisclosed number of patients about malware on three of its websites – FloridaBariatric.com, FHOrthoInstitute.com and FHExecutiveHealth.com – that may have compromised some patient information.

A report from Protenus and DataBreaches.net finds that 110 health data breaches occurred in the first quarter of 2018, impacting 1,129,744 patient records. The analysis also found that it took healthcare organizations an average of 244 days to detect a breach.

Other

A new patient payment study from Waystar finds that nearly 100 percent of the 900 hospital executives surveyed report billing patients with paper statements, and yet half of the 1,000 patients surveyed would prefer an electronic billing option.

NHS Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt says a 2009 algorithm error likely contributed to 450,000 women missing breast cancer screenings over an eight-year period, resulting in the deaths of between 135 and 270. Hunt has stressed that an independent inquiry will be conducted, and that patients and their families will be contacted. “For them and others,” he said, “it is incredibly upsetting to know that you did not receive an invitation to screening at a correct time and totally devastating to hear you may have lost or be about to lose a loved one because of administrative incompetence.”

Hospital networks with integrated technology products report higher user utilization and product satisfaction rates than those that use different EHR and RCM systems, according to new research from Black Book. Top-rated health IT vendors included Allscripts, Meditech, Cerner, McKesson, Epic, and CPSI. Of the 490 hospitals surveyed, a majority of those under 150 beds who haven’t yet settled on an single-source vendor plan to do so by the end of the year.

A hair salon near the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN wants to help staffers look their best for this weekend’s Epic go-live.

Sponsor Updates

• Ellkay hosts a rappelling event at its office to raise $70,000 for the autism-focused Alpine Learning Group.
• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at the 2018 UCAOA Urgent Care Convention & Expo May 6-8 in Las Vegas.
• Change Healthcare updates its Acuity Revenue Cycle Analytics to include front-end patient access analytics.
• Formativ Health will exhibit at HLTH 2018 May 6-9 in Las Vegas.
• FormFast publishes “The Essential EHR Guide to Value & Sustainability, a Meditech eBook.”
• Healthfinch will exhibit at the National Physicians Conference May 10-12 in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
• Healthwise will exhibit at the EClinicalWorks Health Center Summit May 9-11 in Orlando.
• LogicStream Health publishes a new case study featuring Carilion Clinic, “Reduction of Post-Surgical Venous Thromboembolism with Clinical Process Measurement.”
• Iatric Systems will exhibit at ANIA 2018 May 10-12 in Orlando.
• Loyale Healthcare adds patient financing solutions from ClearBalance to its Patient Financial Management software.
• Imprivata exhibits at NAHAM May 3-6 in Denver.
• Owler names Pivot Point Consulting Managing Partner Rachel Murano one of the top 10 female leaders of private companies.
• Intelligent Medical Objects will exhibit at the AMIA Clinical Informatics Conference May 8-10 in Scottsdale, AZ.

Blog Posts

• How Nordic’s revenue cycle acquisition is helping our clients succeed (Nordic)
• The New Resident: How Millenial Physicians Are Changing Medicine (Spok)
• What patients can teach us about social determinants in behavioral health (Meditech)
• With Rhyme and Reason, Epic Launches Sonnet into the Market (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• When health insurance denied his wife’s cancer meds, this physician fought back (Elsevier Clinical Solutions)
• Revenue Integrity Leaders Gather to Find Solutions to Healthcare’s Financial Challenges (Hayes Management Consulting)
• Asthma Awareness: Take Control in 4 Steps (HBI Solutions)
• Implementing IT Managed Services for Healthcare: 3 Steps to Success (The HCI Group)
• ERP: The Driving Force of Your Company (HCTec)
• What does social media and the EMR have in common? (Hyland)
• A-Hunting We Will Go … for IT Cost Savings! (Impact Advisors)
• A preview of the upcoming NAHAM 2018 conference (Imprivata)
• Is Your Patient Experience Killing Your CRM? (Influence Health)
• The Only Thing Worse Than Jet Lag … Stolen Data: What Healthcare Can Learn from the Orbitz Breach (InstaMed)
• Bimodal IT – Innovation in the Age of EMRs (InterSystems)
• Centralized Provider Data: Powering Effective Referral Management (Kyruus)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Health Catalyst Acquires Medicity

Data analytics vendor Health Catalyst acquires health information exchange vendor Medicity. The companies are 14 miles apart from one another in Salt Lake City. 

“Based on the evolution of Aetna’s consumer health strategy,” a company representative says, “we have agreed to divest Medicity to Health Catalyst. The transaction is expected to close within 90 days. We are not disclosing further details at this time.”

Though the company rep didn’t disclose price, it’s worth noting Aetna acquired Medicity in early 2011 for $500 million.

Health Catalyst President Brent Dover served as president of Medicity prior to joining Health Catalyst in 2013. His time with the company began with Park City Solutions, which Medicity acquired in 2006. This acquisition is Health Catalyst’s second. It purchased competitor Health Care DataWorks in 2015. Though the Medicity team alerted us to the development early, I chose not to release the news until employees and customers had been notified.

News 5/2/18

Top News

Reports surface that West Palm Beach family physician Bruce Moskowitz, MD has participated in several planning calls with the VA/Cerner contracting team, and may in fact be responsible for its delay. Moskowitz, who has ties to President Trump’s inner Mar-a-Lago social circle, has been vocal about his dislike of Cerner’s software based on his use at two Tenet hospitals in Florida – technology deemed out of date by investigators from the VA’s Office of Information and Technology.

Moskowitz’s influence and that of Marvel Entertainment Chairman Ike Perlmutter, who has also been on the calls, reportedly rankled former VA Secretary David Shulkin, MD and clinicians involved with the EHR project. Their influence came to national light in 2016, when they helped to convene a hush-hush meeting at Mar-a-Lago between President-elect Trump and leaders from the Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, the Mayo Clinic, and Partners HealthCare.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Responses to this week’s question are trickling in, with most emphasizing the tightrope managers must walk in firing someone that deserves it, but not being able to articulate the reasons why to the rest of the company for confidentiality reasons. I hope you’ll add your experience to the mix.

Webinars

May 9 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “How to Make VBC Work for You: The Business Case to Transform Into the Health System of the Future.” Sponsor: Philips Wellcentive. Presenters: Mason Beard, co-founder and chief product officer, Philips Wellcentive; Scott Cullen, MD, principal, ECG Management Consulting; Seema Mathur, director of strategy, Sage Growth Partners. How well is your organization funding its transformation to VBC? This free webinar explains how to achieve ROI as your organization transforms to meet the future. You’ll learn how VBC is impacting healthcare system management, three strategies for funding your transformation, and what the healthcare system of the future will look like.

May 24 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Converting Consumers into Patients: Strategies for Creating Engaging Digital Experiences People Demand.” Sponsor: Healthwise. Presenters: Antonia Chappell, director of consumer solutions, Healthwise; Josh Schlaich, senior product manager, Healthwise. Nearly three-quarters of US adults use a digital channel to manage their health and the internet to track down health information. It’s clear that consumers have come to expect online interactions as an integral part of their overall patient experience. In fact, the Internet may be the first way people come in contact with your organization. They have more choice than ever on where to get healthcare services, and their decisions are increasingly influenced by how well organizations connect with them in the digital space. This webinar will show you how to create engaging digital and web experiences that convert casual consumers into patients and keep them satisfied throughout their entire patient journey.

June 5 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Increase Referrals and Patient Satisfaction with a Smarter ‘Find a Doctor’ Web Search.” Sponsors: Phynd Technologies, Healthwise. Presenters: Joseph H. Schneider, MD, MBA, FAAP, retired SVP/CHIO, Indiana University Health; Keith Belton, VP of marketing, Phynd. A recent survey found that 84 percent of patients check a hospital’s website before booking an appointment. However, ‘Find a Doctor’ search functions often frustrate them because their matching functionality is primitive and the provider’s information is incomplete or outdated. Referring physicians need similarly robust tools to find the right specialist and to send the patient to the right location. Attendees of this webinar will learn how taxonomy-driven Provider Information Management improves patient and referrer satisfaction by intelligently incorporating the provider’s location, insurance coverage, specialty and subspecialty, and services offered that can be searched via patient-friendly terms.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Agfa Healthcare receives FDA 510(k) clearance for its DR 800 multipurpose digital imaging system.

Enterprise telemedicine vendor InTouch Health acquires competitor Reach Health for an undisclosed sum.

AMA invests $27 million in the Health2047 technology company it founded in 2016 with a $15 million investment. The company launched health data network Akiri (fka Switch) last year, and plans to develop additional companies in the areas of physician productivity, value-based care, chronic disease, and data exchange.

Operations management and analytics company EXL will acquire SCIO Health Analytics for $240 million.

Health data management company Datavant raises $40 million and acquires data de-identification vendor Universal Patient Key. Former FDA CIO Eric Perakslis now serves as Datavant’s chief scientific officer.

People

Lety Nettles (Baker Hughes) joins Novant Health as CIO.

Omkar Kulkarni (Cedars-Sinai) joins Children’s Hospital Los Angeles as its first chief innovation officer.

Clearwater Compliance names John Moore (PwC) chief risk officer and Richard Staynings (Cisco) chief security and trust officer.

Announcements and Implementations

In an effort to keep up with the Apple and Amazon Joneses, Fitbit will use Google’s Cloud Healthcare API to share user data with providers via their EHRs.

Providence St. Joseph Health (WA) launches a Virtual Health System comprising 50 telemedicine programs across 100 facilities in five states.

UCHealth Yampa Valley Medical Center (CO) will go live on Epic in early May.

Kaweah Delta Medical Center (CA) goes live on Cerner. The organization was due to replace its Cerner/Siemens Soarian system with Cerner Millenium in November 2017.

Main Line Health (PA) integrates Bernoulli Health’s clinical surveillance, medical device integration, and data analytics platform with its EHR at four hospitals.

The SSI Group adds patient payment management capabilities to its Access Management line of revenue cycle software.

Government and Politics

CDC Director Robert Redfield, MD asks for and receives a pay cut after reports surface that his projected salary of $375,000 was far above those of his HHS colleagues, including his boss, HHS Secretary Alex Azar. Redfield’s initial compensation was determined by the Title 42 salary program, which was established to attract top-notch researchers to government posts.

Former HHS Secretary Tom Price, MD gives a keynote at the World Health Care Congress, during which he admits that doing away with the individual mandate “actually will harm the pool in the exchange market because you’ll likely have individuals who are younger and healthier not participating in that market. And, consequently, that drives up the cost for other folks in that market.”

White House officials conclude that several of the allegations made against President Trump’s former personal physician and VA Secretary nominee Ronny Jackson, MD released last week by Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) are not true. Jackson, who withdrew his nomination after the allegations came to light, will stay on as an active duty Navy physician within the White House medical unit.

Sales

• University of New Mexico Hospital will implement Glytec’s eGlycemic Management System.

Privacy and Security

The NHS will convert all devices to Windows 10 in an effort to prevent cyberattacks like WannaCry, which last year hit a third of its facilities and led to the cancellation of thousands of appointments and procedures.

Other

As part of its $1.5 billion transition to Epic this weekend, Mayo Clinic will activate 51 patient intake kiosks at its campus in Rochester, MN. This won’t be the health system’s first foray into kiosks. It tried out two HealthSpot telemedicine kiosks in 2014 to remotely serve a local school and employer. That endeavor ended when HealthSpot went out of business two years later.

Sponsor Updates

• Pivot Point Consulting partners with Trinisys to help customers migrate their legacy EHR data to new systems.
• Clinical Architecture and CompuGroup Medical will exhibit at HLTH 2018 May 6-9 in Las Vegas.
• KLAS gives Health Catalyst an “A” for high rates of customer satisfaction and customer retention in a new report, “Decision Insights 2018: National Trends & Best Practices.”
• AdvancedMD will exhibit at APA’s annual conference May 5-9 in New York City.
• Docent Health CEO Paul Roscoe will speak at HLTH 2018 May 8 in Las Vegas.
• Casenet adds MCG Health’s Chronic Care Guidelines to its new TruCare Assessment and Care Plan Interface.
• Aprima and Surescripts will co-present at Asembia’s 2018 Specialty Pharmacy Summit May 2 in Las Vegas.
• Bluetree Network will exhibit at the 2018 Spring Hospital & Healthcare IT Conference May 2-4 in Atlanta.
• Datica CEO Travis Good, MD will present at HLTH 2018 May 6-9 in Las Vegas.
• Cumberland Consulting Group will exhibit at the NCPDP Annual Technology and Business Conference May 7-9 in Scottsdale.
• Surescripts publishes a new white paper, “Changing the Course of the Opioid Epidemic: The Power and Promise of Proven Technology.”
• Vyne develops an exchange platform to help payers manage member-related communications.
• Medecision adds appeals and grievances monitoring, tracking, and management capabilities for payers to its Aerial product line.
• GCS Medical College, Hospital & Research Centre in India selects the eClinicalWorks Hospital Management Information System.
• ZappRx adds FDB’s e-prescribing capabilities to its specialty drug prescribing and prior authorization platform.

Blog Posts

• Consultant insight: FISH cytogenics in Beaker (Nordic)
• Enhance Patient Experience with Technology (AdvancedMD)
• Empower your X-ray department (Agfa Healthcare)
• Highlights from Arcadia Aggregate2018 (Arcadia)
• May is Mental Health Awareness Month (AssessURhealth)
• Best practices for clinical optimization sprints (Bluetree Network)
• It’s Not Adding Up: How Interval Monitoring Creates Gaps in the Sepsis Storyline (Bernoulli Health)
• Spring 2018 Report Review: A look at the Impact of Healthcare Innovation (Datica)
• Digital Health Tools for Patients: Wearable Technology is Reaching Seniors (CareSync)
• Reducing Unnecessary Costs: Worry About Patients, Not the Bottom Line (ChartLogic)
• Industry Experts Weigh in on Patient Support at eyeforpharma in Philadelphia (CoverMyMeds)
• Behind the scenes of some of Crossings’ most successful solutions (Crossings Healthcare Solutions)
• Preventing Challenges in Recruiting (CTG)
• How to Begin Benchmarking Your Business Intelligence (Dimensional Insight)
• Blockchain: What is it and What Does it Mean for Healthcare and EHRs? (Divurgent)
• Need a new urgent care EMR? Get your boss on board. (DocuTap)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 4/30/18

Top News

DoD officials reassure legislators that the MHS Genesis roll out will pick back up with West Coast facilities in 2019, and that full deployment by 2022 is still achievable. Implementation of the Cerner-based system had been paused for several months to deal with issues at the program’s four pilot sites, including problems with e-prescribing, referrals, log-in time, and training. The DoD has been sharing its experiences with VA officials on a regular basis to prepare them for their own Cerner roll out, provided a contract is signed in the coming months as some still optimistically expect.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The contract drama playing out in Illinois hasn’t swayed the majority of poll respondents to think more positively about the parties involved, though Cerner does have a slight lead in a vendor-to-vendor matchup (an outcome one reader has attributed to ballot-box stuffing). At this point, I have to wonder how in-the-trenches end users feel. Email me if you happen to work at the health system, or have experienced a similar situation at another organization and would like to share your thoughts – anonymously, of course.

New poll to your right or here: Have recent privacy headlines impacted your interest in consumer genetic testing services? It seems we live in a time when data breaches are par for the course, and signing away your data rights just to trace your ancestry doesn’t give people as much pause as it should. I could offer a number of response options, but I’m keeping it simple with just three in hopes that you’ll explain in the comments why your interest has waned, stayed the same, or increased.

Check out reader responses to “What I Wish I’d Known Before … Creating, Defending, or Managing a Hospital IT Budget.” While I can’t say I’m surprised by any of them, I can say I appreciate the advice of “realistic contingency” from a reader’s college professor.

This week’s question seems timely given the plethora of headlines surrounding government officials who are being shown the door through media (and Twitter) pressure.

Webinars

May 9 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “How to Make VBC Work for You: The Business Case to Transform Into the Health System of the Future.” Sponsor: Philips Wellcentive. Presenters: Mason Beard, co-founder and chief product officer, Philips Wellcentive; Scott Cullen, MD, principal, ECG Management Consulting; Seema Mathur, director of strategy, Sage Growth Partners. How well is your organization funding its transformation to VBC? This free webinar explains how to achieve ROI as your organization transforms to meet the future. You’ll learn how VBC is impacting healthcare system management, three strategies for funding your transformation, and what the healthcare system of the future will look like.

May 24 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Converting Consumers into Patients: Strategies for Creating Engaging Digital Experiences People Demand.” Sponsor: Healthwise. Presenters: Antonia Chappell, director of consumer solutions, Healthwise; Josh Schlaich, senior product manager, Healthwise. Nearly three-quarters of US adults use a digital channel to manage their health and the internet to track down health information. It’s clear that consumers have come to expect online interactions as an integral part of their overall patient experience. In fact, the Internet may be the first way people come in contact with your organization. They have more choice than ever on where to get healthcare services, and their decisions are increasingly influenced by how well organizations connect with them in the digital space. This webinar will show you how to create engaging digital and web experiences that convert casual consumers into patients and keep them satisfied throughout their entire patient journey.

May 29 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Increase Referrals and Patient Satisfaction with a Smarter ‘Find a Doctor’ Web Search.” Sponsors: Phynd Technologies, Healthwise. Presenters: Joseph H. Schneider, MD, MBA, FAAP, retired SVP/CHIO, Indiana University Health; Keith Belton, VP of marketing, Phynd. A recent survey found that 84 percent of patients check a hospital’s website before booking an appointment. However, ‘Find a Doctor’ search functions often frustrate them because their matching functionality is primitive and the provider’s information is incomplete or outdated. Referring physicians need similarly robust tools to find the right specialist and to send the patient to the right location. Attendees of this webinar will learn how taxonomy-driven Provider Information Management improves patient and referrer satisfaction by intelligently incorporating the provider’s location, insurance coverage, specialty and subspecialty, and services offered that can be searched via patient-friendly terms.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Erlanger Health System (TN) attributes its third quarter $4 million shortfall to a 10-year, $100 million Epic implementation that kicked off with inpatient services last fall. The system held off on billing during November as it worked through software issues, ultimately writing 30 million lines of code to resolve 15,000 workflow problems as part of an expected stabilization phase.

From the Athenahealth earnings call, which sent shares down 11 percent on Friday:

• The company expects to continue to rely on its core ambulatory and growing small-hospital markets.
• Management team and board member Dave Robinson and Chief Product Officer Kyle Armbrester have both left the company, with an ongoing search for a president progressing apace.
• CEO Jonathan Bush admits the company hasn’t done much with market share: “We are good at getting our clients’ patients back, when it’s time for them to come back. But new work needs to be done to get net new market share for our clients. I believe I mentioned when we were talking about the cost guarantee a couple of calls ago that someday I wanted to have a market share guarantee.”
• Bush also points out that the company’s coordinator and inpatient software may have been brought to market too early.
• Sales and marketing spend may have been cut too drastically, though the company isn’t scrambling to adjust its budget yet. Its strategic overhaul of staff and spending is nearly complete.
• With regard to a national patient-centric medical record, Bush said that the “ability to be integrated in to all the hospitals in the country, all the labs in the country to present whether it’s a pharmacy, clinical staffer, pharmacy based staffer or virtual physician or an emergency room doc, with a complete picture of a patient regardless of where they’ve gotten their care is a power position that no one has right now in the country, no one. We believe we will attain that position.”
• The company’s lighter bookings season has given Bush’s team time to reassess the way it assigns customer success managers and on-boards new clients. “We’re getting much more instrumented,” Bush stressed; “we are working very hard on the number of days associated with ramping up some ones’ collections to full volume after they go live.”
• Bush attributes churn to ambulatory M&A: “We’ve seen as groups get consolidated up in to bigger networks, if the bigger network is on competitive product, decision might be to go on to one platform, and that has tended to be the biggest driver of churn.”
• Bush says, “Epocrates is crushing it. Docs on the app are increasing and the appetite to feed a content is increasing, the ability for us to manage content, serve it up in a modern way for our advertising customers is improving and the energy is just electric. I can’t tell you how proud we are after such a long road.”
• Regarding recent layoffs and reductions, Bush says that “[a]fter-surgery recovery is a big deal, even if the surgery is life saving and Athena certainly inflicted surgery upon itself in the fourth quarter of last year. So attrition and cultural confidence, engagement, belief that there is not some other shoe looking to drop, these are the kinds of things that are the prime focus for me and my team right now.”

Sales

• Cape Fear Valley Health System (NC) will replace two Cerner systems with Epic beginning in Summer 2019.

People

Athenahealth SVP of Network Services Jonathan Porter takes on the role of chief product officer.

Privacy and Security

In Montana, Billings Clinic notifies 934 patients of an email data breach that may have compromised patient names, birth dates, phone numbers, and some medical information.

Other

In the UK, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt brings in Eric Topol, MD to lead a review of how to best train NHS staff on using new technologies including AI, digital health, robotics, and genomics. NHS is in the middle of its 100,000 Genomes Project, which aims to use genetic sequencing and big data to develop precision medicine programs.

A new study in JAMIA finds that health system adherence to the ONC-funded SAFER (Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience) guides developed in 2014 is lacking. Researchers found that only 25 recommendations were fully implemented at the eight health systems who participated in SAFER self-assessments. The study’s authors conclude that national policy programs are needed to ensure proactive SAFER assessments become a best practice.

In his latest “Doctors Gone Wild” segment, Weird News Andy recounts the arrest of Georgia family practice physician Marian Antoinette Patterson, MD who threatened to slit the throats of her employees, and cut another’s head off for use as a hallway bowling ball. Her other unsavory activities, which some have attributed to intoxication but WNA thinks also exude a hint of physician burnout, include throwing water on employees and tearing her diploma off the wall and stomping on it.

Sponsor Updates

• Surescripts will exhibit at the MicroMD User Conference 2018 May 2-3 in Warren, OH.
• Vocera Communications will host its first Chief Experience Officer Roundtable April 25-26 in San Francisco.
• WebPT publishes a new guide, “Retention, Please: Why Patient Dropout is Killing Rehab Therapy Practices – and How to Stop It.”
• KLAS recognizes LogicStream Health as a high performer in its latest report on clinical process improvement.

Blog Posts

• 5 Ways Your Small Marketing Team Can Deliver Big Results (Salesforce)
• Hospital Revenue Cycle Management Solutions in 2018 (The SSI Group)
• Millenial nurses demand mobile communication. (Voalte)
• The Other Health IT Industry (Philips Wellcentive)
• Trend-Weaving Medecision Liberation 2018 – Part 3: From the Fog of Ware to Re-Imagining Healthcare (Medecision)
• Getting the Most Out of Your EHR (Pivot Point Consulting)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 4/27/18

Top News

Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, MD withdraws his nomination for VA Secretary after Senate Democrats publish allegations against him that include giving out prescription drugs to staffers, drinking to excess while on the job, and managerial misconduct.

The VA issues a somewhat bizarre press release confirming that, despite a lack of top-level leadership, it will move forward with near-term priorities including the Cerner contract now that “employees who were wedded to the status quo and not on board with this administration’s policies or pace of change have now departed VA.” A House appropriations bill released yesterday sets aside $1.2 billion for the software.

Reader Comments

From JK: “Re: Stericycle. This article suggests that the company has turned to JPMorgan for financial advice on the potential sale of its communications services. Stericycle previously acquired NotifyMD and PatientPrompt.” The company hasn’t been on my radar since we exhibited next to them at HIMSS16. Perhaps it’s looking for cash to fund the fines it keeps having to pay to the Washington Department of Ecology for overwhelming the municipal waste plant in Morton with polluted wastewater from its nearby medical waste processing plant.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Bluetree Network. The Madison, WI-based company was founded by former Epic leaders to offer quality Epic expertise for solving the biggest health system challenges — staffing and support, training and mentoring, optimization, revenue cycle, analytics, managed services, and solving strategic problems. Health systems benefit from engaging patients and reducing provider burnout, making data a competitive advantage, and making more money. The company offers case studies from UCHealth, Cottage Health, WVU Medicine, Cambridge Health Alliance, and other health systems. Thanks to Bluetree Network for supporting HIStalk.  

Webinars

May 9 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “How to Make VBC Work for You: The Business Case to Transform Into the Health System of the Future.” Sponsor: Philips Wellcentive. Presenters: Mason Beard, co-founder and chief product officer, Philips Wellcentive; Scott Cullen, MD, principal, ECG Management Consulting; Seema Mathur, director of strategy, Sage Growth Partners. How well is your organization funding its transformation to VBC? This free webinar explains how to achieve ROI as your organization transforms to meet the future. You’ll learn how VBC is impacting healthcare system management, three strategies for funding your transformation, and what the healthcare system of the future will look like.

May 24 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Converting Consumers into Patients: Strategies for Creating Engaging Digital Experiences People Demand.” Sponsor: Healthwise. Presenters: Antonia Chappell, director of consumer solutions, Healthwise; Josh Schlaich, senior product manager, Healthwise. Nearly three-quarters of US adults use a digital channel to manage their health and the internet to track down health information. It’s clear that consumers have come to expect online interactions as an integral part of their overall patient experience. In fact, the Internet may be the first way people come in contact with your organization. They have more choice than ever on where to get healthcare services, and their decisions are increasingly influenced by how well organizations connect with them in the digital space. This webinar will show you how to create engaging digital and web experiences that convert casual consumers into patients and keep them satisfied throughout their entire patient journey.

May 29 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Increase Referrals and Patient Satisfaction with a Smarter ‘Find a Doctor’ Web Search.” Sponsors: Phynd Technologies, Healthwise. Presenters: Joseph H. Schneider, MD, MBA, FAAP, retired SVP/CHIO, Indiana University Health; Keith Belton, VP of marketing, Phynd. A recent survey found that 84 percent of patients check a hospital’s website before booking an appointment. However, ‘Find a Doctor’ search functions often frustrate them because their matching functionality is primitive and the provider’s information is incomplete or outdated. Referring physicians need similarly robust tools to find the right specialist and to send the patient to the right location. Attendees of this webinar will learn how taxonomy-driven Provider Information Management improves patient and referrer satisfaction by intelligently incorporating the provider’s location, insurance coverage, specialty and subspecialty, and services offered that can be searched via patient-friendly terms.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Doctor on Demand raises $74 million in a Series C funding round.

Athenahealth announces Q1 results: revenue up 12 percent; adjusted EPS $0.76 vs. $0.03, beating earnings estimates.

People

Quantros names Trey Cook (Hill-Rom) president and CEO.

AdvancedMD hires John Marron (InMediata Health Group) as VP and GM of its RCM division.

Shawn Morris (Cigna-HealthSpring) joins Privia Health as CEO.

Sales

• Jellico Community Hospital (TN) selects Artifact Health’s mobile app for physician queries.

Government and Politics

CMS Administrator Seema Verma announces at Health Datapalooza that the agency will release Medicare Advantage data to researchers, a plan it shelved last summer over questions about the data’s accuracy. Verma added that Medicaid and CHIP data will also be forthcoming.

Also at Health Datapalooza, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD announces the launch of the Information Exchange and Data Transformation incubator, which will initially focus on the development of digital tools for cancer treatment and drug development. The FDA will also tweak its pre-certification software program to better accommodate AI-powered technology.

Announcements and Implementations

Central Georgia Health Network deploys Arcadia analytics as part of its population health management efforts.

Redox develops single sign on capabilities to help improve connectivity between digital health vendors and their end users.

Mercy Health wraps up implementation of PerfectServe’s clinical communications technology across 23 facilities in Kentucky and Ohio.

Other

STAT looks beyond the investment rounds and hip office furnishings of telemedicine startup Lemonaid Health to highlight its trials and tribulations, including antiquated state regulations that have kept it from scaling beyond 18 states, drug-seeking patients who lie about their symptoms, those who call in to video consults from behind the wheel, and a burgeoning reputation for annoying competitors with complaints about them to state medical boards.

Sponsor Updates

• Mobile Heartbeat will exhibit at the American Telemedicine Association conference April 29-May 1 in Chicago.
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, completes SOC 2+ HITRUST CSF Certification.
• Qventus will exhibit at the IHI Patient Care Summit 2018 April 26 in San Diego.
• LogicStream Health releases a new podcast, “Patient care, policy and politics with U.S. Congressman Erik Paulsen.”
• Meditech publishes a new case study, “Ontario Shores Improves Outcomes with Meditech’s Patient Portal.”
• Ellkay will present at the Executive War College Conference on Laboratory & Pathology Management May 2 in New Orleans.

Blog Posts

• Interoperability 2.0 – Creating a Holistic Model of Care Part 3 (Medicity)
• Role-Playing and Shared Labs (Learn on Demand Systems)
• Why Silent Mobile Notification is the Future of Hospital Communication Systems (LiveProcess)
• Fighting the epidemic by controlling opioid (LogicStream Health)
• Trend-Weaving Medecision Liberation 2018 – Part 2: Design to Liberate Healthcare (Medecision)
• Standing on the front lines to fight the opioid battle (Meditech)
• Spring-Clean Your Revenue Cycle: Toss, Keep and Maximize Value (Navicure/Waystar)
• Important EHR Questions for Children and Family Service Agencies to Consider (Netsmart)
• Are you using data to understand your pharmaceutical costs? (Nordic)
• Patients before paperwork: Putting healthcare workflow automation into action (Experian Health)
• Why I’m Here (PatientKeeper)
• Optimizing EHRs to Aid in Reaching Value-Based Care, Population Health and Quality Reporting Goals (Pivot Point Consulting)
• How Blockchain Can Complement Healthcare Infrastructure (PokitDok)
• The EHR Journey – Selecting an EHR Vendor (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• How Hawaii’s Busiest Emergency Room Went Paperless with Electronic Patient Signatures. (Your Hospital Can, Too.) (Access)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 4/25/18

Top News

A proposed HHS rule would retarget the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs to “a new phase of EHR measurement with an increased focus on interoperability and improving patient access to health information.”

CMS proposes renaming the incentive programs to “Promoting Interoperability Programs,” noting that the word “incentive” is obsolete now that most payments have ended.

The rule would require using CEHRT certified for the 2015 Edition beginning with the 2019 covered year. It would allow a 90-day reporting period for 2019 and 2020.

HHS proposes to replace the six Medicare EHR Incentive Program measures with four:

• E-prescribing
• Health information exchange
• Provider-to-provider exchange
• Public health and clinical data exchange

HHS also proposes two opioid-related e-prescribing measures for connecting to PDMPs and verifying treatment agreements that would be optional for the first year.

The proposed changes would also require hospitals to publish their charge master price list online every year, but asks whether more specific information might be useful to consumers, such as details on a hospital’s average discounted charges across all payers. HHS also asks if providers should be required to disclose a patient’s out-of-pocket cost for a service before performing that service, presumably to reduce surprise out-of-network charges.

The public’s comments about the 1,900-page document are due June 25.

Reader Comments

From Stealthily Healthy: “Re: HLTH conference. I’ve been asked a dozen times if I’m attending and I’m uncertain. What do you think?” Beats me. The speaker roster is huge, which I expect is because the VC-funded first-time conference used its cash to pay expenses and hype it up a bit. They’re also offering free provider registration hoping to give vendors their money’s worth in corralling prospects. I’m not sure anyone’s thrilled at going back to Las Vegas in early May after just leaving HIMSS there in March. The big question is whether it will do well enough financially to warrant a repeat next year. The conference claims it will create “a much-needed dialogue focused on disruptive innovation in healthcare” even though it’s run by two tech guys with zero healthcare experience and the track record of folks waving the “disruptive” flag without understanding what they’re disrupting isn’t great. We have way too many healthcare conferences, but fortunately for those offering them, way too many people willing to spend their employer’s time and expense money to attend them with questionable outcomes beyond glad-handing self-validation. Ironically, I would bet that high-accomplishment conference presenters didn’t actually waste their early-career time attending those same conferences.

From System CIO: “Re: HIStalk. It’s a really valuable read for me. I’m not one of those CIOs who is constantly networking with everything and everyone in our industry to keep up (primarily because there’s so much work to do and time necessarily spent focused inwardly) but HIStalk allows me to see/stay connected more broadly. Thank you for all of the time and effort you spend to make it what it is.” Thanks for making my day.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’m getting good responses to this week’s question. I’m sure yours would be even better (hint).

Listening: reader-recommended The Prefab Messiahs, a barely-noticed early 1980s punk band that college students have rediscovered with their new album. It’s raw and I expected the typical garage band weak vocals, but they sound good when belting out wry, withering social commentary on songs like “The Man Who Killed Reality.”

I’ve seen video from recent conferences in which attendees were urged to hug each other, dance at their seats, or exchange high-fives, all of which seem not only to be crassly contrived, but straying way outside the comfort zone of many in the audience. I remember one hospital management event I attended where they hired a super-cheesy motivational speaker (some local guy who formerly played in an awful rock band with small talent and big hair) who demanded that we all “share” with our tablemates, which made me want to rip off his $2,000 suit and choke him with it. At the long-awaited end of his de-motivational speech, he brought up a slide of his wife and fake-cried about how much he loved her, leading all of us recent sharers to wonder what exactly we were supposed to do with that. Dear conference organizers and presenters – just do your presentation without expecting the paying audience to do anything except watch. Or just thrust your microphone Ozzy-style at the crowd and let them read the slides while you wiggle your hands approvingly as a conductor rather than performer.

Webinars

May 9 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “How to Make VBC Work for You: The Business Case to Transform Into the Health System of the Future.” Sponsor: Philips Wellcentive. Presenters: Mason Beard, co-founder and chief product officer, Philips Wellcentive; Scott Cullen, MD, principal, ECG Management Consulting; Seema Mathur, director of strategy, Sage Growth Partners. How well is your organization funding its transformation to VBC? This free webinar explains how to achieve ROI as your organization transforms to meet the future. You’ll learn how VBC is impacting healthcare system management, three strategies for funding your transformation, and what the healthcare system of the future will look like.

May 24 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Converting Consumers into Patients: Strategies for Creating Engaging Digital Experiences People Demand.” Sponsor: Healthwise. Presenters: Antonia Chappell, director of consumer solutions, Healthwise; Josh Schlaich, senior product manager, Healthwise. Nearly three-quarters of US adults use a digital channel to manage their health and the internet to track down health information. It’s clear that consumers have come to expect online interactions as an integral part of their overall patient experience. In fact, the Internet may be the first way people come in contact with your organization. They have more choice than ever on where to get healthcare services, and their decisions are increasingly influenced by how well organizations connect with them in the digital space. This webinar will show you how to create engaging digital and web experiences that convert casual consumers into patients and keep them satisfied throughout their entire patient journey.

May 29 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Increase Referrals and Patient Satisfaction with a Smarter ‘Find a Doctor’ Web Search.” Sponsors: Phynd Technologies, Healthwise. Presenters: Joseph H. Schneider, MD, MBA, FAAP, retired SVP/CHIO, Indiana University Health; Keith Belton, VP of marketing, Phynd. A recent survey found that 84 percent of patients check a hospital’s website before booking an appointment. However, ‘Find a Doctor’ search functions often frustrate them because their matching functionality is primitive and the provider’s information is incomplete or outdated. Referring physicians need similarly robust tools to find the right specialist and to send the patient to the right location. Attendees of this webinar will learn how taxonomy-driven Provider Information Management improves patient and referrer satisfaction by intelligently incorporating the provider’s location, insurance coverage, specialty and subspecialty, and services offered that can be searched via patient-friendly terms.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

China’s largest Internet healthcare platform, insurance subsidiary Ping An Healthcare and Technology, plans a $1.1 billion IPO on the Honk Kong exchange. The 900-employee, AI-assisted service provides 370,000 free consultations each day and offers free, two-hour prescription delivery in major cities. Its network includes 3,100 hospitals and 7,500 pharmacies. Reports from a year ago suggested that investors were losing interest because of profitability concerns despite huge demand that is driven by dissatisfaction with China’s overwhelmed healthcare system.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone invests an unspecified amount in India-based Visit, which offers AI-supported video visits.

Sales

War Memorial Hospital (MI) expands its use of FormFast electronic forms and workflow solutions, integrated with Meditech 6.1.

Announcements and Implementations

Mobile technology vendor Dictum Health adds a video laryngoscope to its Virtual Exam Room platform. The company offers a suitcase-sized patient examination system, an in-clinic telehealth system, and a medical telehealth tablet connected to cloud services.

A small KLAS study on clinical process improvement finds that Stanson Health and LogicStream Health lead the way in analyzing clinician EHR use to optimize alerts and order sets, respectively, and identifying training opportunities for individual users. KLAS also finds that while many clinicians don’t trust the data presented to them or ignore recommended care guidelines and workflows, frontline doctors say that tools from Stanson and LogicStream are easily understood and useful.

Government and Politics

The Senate postpones the VA secretary nomination hearing of Admiral Ronny Jackson, citing allegations of improper conduct in his military career that require further investigation. President Trump nominated Jackson via Twitter without the usual vetting process that would have resolved any confirmation issues outside the public eye. The New York Times says the issues were raised by anonymous White House associates of Jackson and involve his oversight of a hostile work environment, overprescribing of drugs, and claims that Jackson drank on the job. President Trump distanced himself in his reaction to the delay, blaming partisan opposition but admitting, “There’s a lack of experience.” He concluded, “If I were him, I wouldn’t do it.”

Privacy and Security

Kansas-based transcription firm Medantex takes down its customer web portal after security researcher Brian Krebs notifies the company that its audio recordings and site administrative functions were wide open to any Internet user. Medantex says it had been attacked by WhiteRose ransomware and apparently misconfigured the servers it rebuilt, exposing them to the world. I tried to pull up the company’s public webpage and was blocked by Bitdefender’s malware detection system.

Other

A small study finds that anticoagulation lab test and drug ordering improves when physicians use the CDC’s PTT Advisor app.

The family of Prince sues Trinity Medical Center (IL) for failing to correctly identify the counterfeit drug he had taken before the singer’s private plane made an emergency landing in Moline on April 15, 2016. They’re also suing Walgreens for filling his narcotics prescriptions that were written under his bodyguard’s name. Prince lied about his drug intake and refused all testing in the hospital in hopes of concealing his years-long addiction from the public, but the family says the hospital should have run extensive tests to determine that the black market drug he thought was Vicodin actually contained fentanyl. He died six days later of a fentanyl overdose. That’s the disadvantage of being a celebrity addict surrounded by sycophantic coat-tailers– your star-stuck doctor will write any prescription; your handlers will get it filled under their name and score illegal drugs to supplement when necessary; and you have enough time, money, and enablers to make addiction seem like a normal response to pain, stress, or disappointment.

Sponsor Updates

• IMAT Solutions will exhibit at the National Association of ACOs spring conference in Baltimore April 25-27.
• LabFinder.com will use Ellkay’s integration services to connect with physician office EHRs.
• Obix Perinatal Data System vendor Clinical Computer Systems, Inc. earns SOC 2 and HITRUST certification.
• AdvancedMD will exhibit at ACOG April 27-29 in Austin, TX.
• Aprima will exhibit at AROC April 25-26 in Atlantic City, NJ.
• Arcadia will exhibit at the NAACOS Spring 2018 Conference April 25 in Baltimore.
• AssessURhealth publishes a new customer success story featuring LoCicero Medical Group.
• CarePort CEO Lissy Hu, MD will present at ACMA National April 26 in Houston.
• Netsmart receives the first ONC-Health IT 2015 Edition Certified solution for palliative care.
• Spok and Bernoullli Health partner to improve clinical alarm management.
• The local paper profiles CoverMyMeds after its top ranking as a best place to work in Columbus, OH.
• CTG will exhibit at the Texas Regional HIMSS Conference April 26-27 in Dallas.
• DrFirst VP Linda Fischer will participate in a panel discussion at the Critical Connections’ Opioid Crisis Symposium April 25-16 n Baltimore.
• Consulting Magazine names Divurgent Principal Ralph Whalen a 2018 rising star in healthcare.
• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at the 2018 Physician Practice Management & ASC Symposium April 25-26 in Nashville.
• Healthwise will exhibit at GetWellNetwork’s getconnected 2018 conference April 30-May 2 in National Harbor, MD.
• InstaMed will exhibit at the Georgia MGMA Annual Conference April 29-May 1 in Savannah, GA.
• AWS features Kyruus in its coverage of hot startups for April 2018.

Blog Posts

• Lessons Learned in 40 Years of Software Development (Medicomp Systems)
• EHR Optimization as a Bridge to Population Health Management (Pivot Point Consulting)
• 5 Questions Every Practice Owner Should Ask (AdvancedMD)
• FDA Releases New Guidance on Children’s X-ray Exams (Agfa Healthcare)
• Using Real-Time Data to Impede the ‘Quiet Killer’ (Bernoulli Health)
• The Differences Between LPN vs. RN: Choosing a Nursing Career (CareSync)
• How Hospitals Can Improve On-Site and Post-Service Self Pay Capabilities (Change Healthcare)
• Are you using data to understand your pharmaceutical costs? (Nordic)
• Leveraging Data to Improve Your 3-Day Rule Waiver Program (CarePort Health)
• A Positive Response to Negative Reviews About Your Urgent Care (DocuTap)
• Striving for Health in Rural America (EClinicalWorks)
• Project Spotlight: Calderdale & Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust (UK), Part 2 – Jackie Murphy & Dr. Allistair Morris (The HCI Group)
• The Secret That One Third of Hospitals Already Know (HCTec)
• Online Appointment Scheduling Helps Staff and Patients (Healthgrades)
• Does Your Workflow Do This? 4 Requirements for an Enterprise Approach to Communications (Spok)
• Teaching the Importance of Protecting Patient Privacy – Inside and Outside the Hospital (Iatric Systems)
• Four Important Steps to Clinical Optimization (Leidos Health)
• Tips for Managing Coding Quality (Impact Advisors)
• ‘Trust’ and Shared Access in EMRs: an Interview with Dr. Tzfanya Korach (Imprivata)
• Respond at Your Own Risk: Avoid these common reputation management mistakes (Influence Health)
• Separating the Hype from Reality in Healthcare AI (InterSystems)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Readers Write: How AI and Blockchain Can Combine to Benefit Population Health

How AI and Blockchain Can Combine to Benefit Population Health
By David Campbell

David Campbell is senior developer for Macadamian of Gatineau, Quebec.

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to gain momentum as we see how it can augment a healthcare system’s effectiveness. Similarly, blockchain’s potential is very appealing to the healthcare industry for helping to solve the interoperability challenge.

While they have each individually demonstrated their potential to impact the industry, combined together they could greatly benefit population health and transform healthcare.

It seems inevitable that AI will revolutionize healthcare. The potential of AI is massive and our responsibility is to harness its power to maximize its benefits. For instance, how useful would it be for a doctor to compile a list of conditions to which their patient is susceptible to based upon their medical records and cross-referenced with general medical trends? AI can make this happen.

However, before AI can play a full role in healthcare, data collection, transportation, and storage present some complex privacy, integrity, and availability challenges that must be addressed.

Finding data sources is another major hurdle, but with the advent of consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices, raw data is increasingly available. AI algorithms can use anonymized data from these devices to show general population health trends, but the challenge is mining the huge amount of raw data for useful information with a finite amount of computing power.

Enter blockchain.

Healthcare blockchain represents another source of medical data. The prevalence of these blockchains in the medical domain is increasing because they store transactions in a network of distributed servers, which offers a high degree of availability. This adds protection against network outages and hardware failure. Also, the format of the transactions makes it almost impossible to tamper with the data. Data integrity and accountability are paramount to any healthcare solution.

While the quantity of data does not approach the amount of raw data that can be collected by medical devices, the data received by a medical blockchain is richer.

Using a blockchain solution in an electronic health record (EHR) system allows for the creation of transactions between entities such as patients and medical conditions. In this case, we can think of the diagnosis of a condition as a transaction between a patient and a known condition.

Not only can we store this information as a distributed immutable transaction in a patient record, we can also record the relationship. By updating a patient record using transactions between entities, a graph database can be constructed.

A graph database is a way of storing unstructured data and the relationships amongst the data. For example, if a physician prescribes a drug to a patient, the patient, the doctor, and the drug would be stored along with the relationships amongst the pieces of data. The relationship between the doctor and the patient would be regular doctor / patient or it could be specialist / patient. The relationship between the drug and the doctor would be prescriber.

The graph database can show latent variables, which is information hidden within the data. This can be taken a step further.

One example of a machine learning algorithm that uses graph database to extract and use latent variables is a Bayesian network. A Bayesian network is a graph database built on relationships of cause and effect.

The strength of a Bayesian network is its ability to determine probabilities. When applied to general population health data, it can help make powerful predictions and correlations between seemingly unrelated pieces of information.

For example, smoking has an elevated probability of causing lung cancer. AI can mine data surrounding this relationship from a general graph database using various algorithms. The resulting Bayesian network can be used as a model to predict diagnosis based on the medical history of a patient.

Think about the possibilities where healthcare organizations can leverage the power of these two technologies so that they can find the largest number of common connections such as: if a population is suffering from Condition X and the largest shared connection is prescription to Drug Y, it would be reasonable to investigate whether Drug Y has a side effect that causes or contributes to Condition X.

This only begins to scratch the surface. While there are many obstacles, the potential for AI and blockchain to combine forces is immense and could prove to transform healthcare as we know it.

Monday Morning Update 4/23/18

Top News

The New York Times covers concierge EDs such as those run by Priority Private Care, where affluent families pay thousands of dollars per year to gain access to VIP emergency rooms that — unlike hospitals that prioritize patients by acuity — get them in and out quickly by seeing only a handful of patients each day.

The art-filled facilities don’t handle trauma, but instead address a market in which three-fourths of ED visits don’t involve emergency care.

The membership fees don’t include the cost of services themselves, which are billed to insurers at pricey ED rates. House calls, executive wellness services, and travel medicine are offered at extra cost.

The facilities have clinical staff without much to do, so they don’t discourage low-acuity member visits. The article profiles a man who dropped by to have staff look at a troublesome pimple.

The company has a cozy relationship with hospitals, offering “VIP services … including access to private rooms and direct admissions.” It has also extended coverage into the Hamptons, offering summer house calls and partnership with a helicopter service for medical transport.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents don’t go to Twitter to obtain health IT knowledge, news, or opinions. Some commenters expressed shock that others don’t share their active Twitter involvement as a source of information and connection to various communities; one respondent “called BS” that so many respondents voted “not very” (I’m not sure what kind of conspiracy he’s picturing, but IP analysis at least suggests there isn’t an organizational one); one claims that people who don’t use Twitter lack critical thinking skills, and another respondent said those voting negatively must not know how to use Twitter to participate in the “thriving community of thought leaders, influencers, and curious minds.” Taking the other point of view was a respondent who said he has never understood why people waste time on Twitter; another who says he tweets but is pretty sure he’s the only one reading; and another respondent who says decision-making executives don’t use Twitter and don’t care about any of the reasons listed by the Twitter fans. The vote was actually about six percentage points more in the “not very” category until a few folks tried to drum up support via Twitter in urging non-HIStalk readers to vote, but the resulting swing wasn’t significant.

New poll to your right or here: which organization do you feel more positively about following Cerner’s protest of University of Illinois Hospital selecting Epic?

I always learn a lot from responses to my “What I Wish I’d Known Before” questions and I usually end up being moved in some way (sometimes in an uplifting manner, sometimes not) from what readers share there. That’s true of last week’s question, “What I Wish I’d Known Before … Taking College Courses While Still Working Full Time.”

This week’s question is more pragmatic and targeted to health system IT management. I might have to add my own response since I’ve done this enough times to have some war stories. 

Listening: a surprise, marvelous new release from The Longshot, a new band formed by Green Day front man Billie Joe Armstrong, with a sound that ranges from dead-on “Please Mr. Postman” Beatles to thrashing punk to lighter-swaying balladry. I’m also liking (without being able to articulate why since I really don’t enjoy Sting much) the unlikely Sting-Shaggy reggae collaboration on “44/876,” which Rolling Stone aptly describes as “Roxanne hitting a Sandals resort” (trivia: the Jamaica-born Shaggy served in the US Marines as an artilleryman in Operation Desert Storm and developed his singing style from calling marching cadence). It channels the joy and color of a Caribbean island with UB40 playing on a cheap radio, which makes me long for coconut shrimp and a Carib beer while sitting on a decrepit plastic chair ankle-deep in pee-warm beach water. I’m also enjoying new, frenetic basement pop from Ohio-based pop Remember Sports (which just changed its name from just Sports), along with some great Norway art rock from Gazpacho, which has a new album due any day now.  

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A PwC/CB Insights report finds that VC seed round investments have dropped considerably even as overall funding increases, AI had its first big investment quarter, and healthcare was the #2 sector (behind Internet) in both number of deals and deal value.

Decisions

• Sheridan Memorial Hospital (WY) will go live with a Change Healthcare cardiovascular information system in 2019.
• Hutchinson Regional Medical Center (KS) will switch from Philips Healthcare to Merge Healthcare cardio in September 2018.

These provider-reported updates are supplied by Definitive Healthcare, which offers a free trial of its powerful intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and healthcare providers.

People

Vocera’s board elects President and CEO Brent Lang as chairman, replacing Bob Zollars. I interviewed Brent a few weeks ago.

Announcements and Implementations

A Black Book survey of 3,000 hospital EHR users finds that two-thirds of hospitals don’t use patient information from outside their own EHRs because it’s not available within their workflows. Top-ranked vendors in client experience are CPSI Evident (small and rural hospitals), Meditech (101-250 beds), Cerner (teaching hospitals), and Epic (over 250 beds). 

Other

The Detroit business paper covers the ICU redesign of Beaumont Hospital Royal Oak (MI), which displays data from Epic and monitors in a big-screen graphical format. The ICU director says, “The regular Epic system, you needed to click 13 times to get to the chest X-ray we needed to see. Now we click once to get where we need. Deeper dives into data comes up as a long, scrolling, table five feet long that has everything lined up vertically by time. You see everything happening now and at anytime in the past.”

A Wall Street Journal article says the UK’s NHS is struggling with long waits and shortages of beds and doctors, but as Eric Topol notes, they’re still far ahead of the US.

UCSF’s Bob Wachter, MD worries in a New York Times op-ed piece that immunotherapy-based cancer treatments have made it harder to help families consider palliative care, with the staggeringly expensive and side effect-causing treatment offering near-miraculous cures but only for around 15 percent of patients. Wachter advocates that “comfort or cure” decisions not be considered as mutually exclusive by insurers, training doctors on how to explain benefit vs. harm, and including in studies the question of how to identify that minority of patients that could benefit.

An NPR reporter trying to get her mother placed in a rehab center has to pay $12,000 due to Medicare’s “dueling rules and laws” that require a three-night inpatient hospital stay to be covered for rehab placement, while hospitals are threatened with audits for admitting rather than keeping patients on multi-day observation. In her mother’s case, the “admission or observation” decision was made by McKesson InterQual. The reporter concludes, “I sped to the hospital in a rage. I demanded to know why they were releasing her when she still couldn’t walk. Further, I wanted to know, why were they calling her an ‘outpatient’ when she was sleeping in their bed, under their blankets, wearing their hospital gown, and being cared for by their staff.”

This is brilliant: Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Scottish Rite soothes NICU babies by recording their mothers singing and reading stories to them, with the CDs then played back to them when the mom can’t be there.

Sponsor Updates

• WiserTogether releases a new version of its Return to Health platform that guides consumers to the most effective treatments for their specific conditions and attributes.
• The SSI Group will present at the HFMA Texas State Conference April 22 in Austin, TX.
• Surescripts will exhibit at the AMCP Managed Care & Specialty Pharmacy Annual Meeting April 23-26 in Boston.
• Philips Wellcentive will exhibit at the NAACOS event April 25-27 in Boston.
• ZappRx will exhibit at the ASEMBIA Specialty Pharmacy Summit April 29-May 2 in Las Vegas.
• ZeOmega releases the annual updates to the integrated patient assessments of its Jiva PHM solution.

Blog Posts

• Data-Enabled Strategy for the Social Determinants of Health (Redox)
• Technology That’s Driving Accessibility for the Visually Impaired (Salesforce)
• Healthcare Payer and Provider Contract Management (The SSI Group)
• 5 core competencies of molecular lab management (Sunquest)
• Texting that’s simple and secure. (Voalte)
• Hospital Communications: Reading Hospital Sets Gold Standard for Conducting Joint Commission Surveys (Vocera)
• Don’t Flex Your PTs: 4 Ways to Make Use of Patient Cancellations (WebPT)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 4/20/18

Top News

The State of Illinois Procurement Board finds evidence of a conflict of interest in the $62 million contract awarded to Epic by University of Illinois Hospitals and Health Sciences System, prompting the board to refer the matter to the state’s ethics commission for a public hearing. The review follows a protest by Cerner that it lost the bid despite offering a lower total price. 

Cerner was one of the health system’s incumbent vendors, along with Epic and several other companies.

Board members seemed to agree with Cerner’s attorney that it may have been improper for the health system to hire Impact Advisors to assist with the selection since they also provide Epic implementation services.

Cerner also claims that Epic’s bid did not include the price of those implementation services, which it says could reach $100 million, and that it was not allowed to demonstrate its software.

Reader Comments

From The Hypocritical Oath: “Re: Cerner’s protest at U of Illinois. It’s especially embarrassing given: (a) the hypocrisy of its $16B no-bid VA contract, and (b) the fact that they’re the incumbent vendor and the client hates them so much that they’d rather start over with a new EHR instead of continuing the relationship. I don’t think a demo is going to change much.” Losing vendor protests don’t usually turn out well, especially with regard to public perception (do I as the next potential customer want to consider someone who might sue me if I don’t choose them?). It certainly didn’t help Allscripts when it tried the same thing years ago, when it finally smartened up and dropped its absurd lawsuit against NYHHC and Epic only after firing its own executive team. Imagine the frosty relationship if Cerner prevails and the hospital is stuck implementing a system that it doesn’t want.

From Jolly Rancher: “Re: UNC Health. Several sites have mistakenly said they were the first health system to earn Stage 7 in the HIMSS Analytics categories of inpatient, ambulatory, and analytics this week. They were not.” The HIMSS-owned rag made a mistake in re-wording UNC’s press release in an attempt to look like an actual news report, apparently failing to notice that UNC’s press release said it was the only health system to earn all three Stage 7 designations that has ALSO been named as “Most Wired Advanced” in an unrelated award (the release clearly trying to one-up Duke by even bringing that up). Duke did its three sevens (I’m tired of typing it, so I’m dubbing the trifecta as AM21) on February 22. Other sites embarrassed themselves by either making the same mistake or by using the HIMSS rag’s site as their source instead of reading the actual press release.

From VA Software: “Re: the Columbus, OH Ambulatory Care Center. Went live last weekend on MASS (Medical Appointment Scheduling System). Its backbone is Epic (just the scheduling application) that then writes data back to VistA.” The MASS project was announced in 2015, with Systems Made Simple (Lockheed Martin) and Epic being awarded a $623 million bid in what I think was a competitive RFP. The project was placed on hold in 2016 while the VA tried to decide whether to develop its own system, but Congressional pressure (or so I’m assuming) led for it to be restarted even as the VA decided to give Cerner a no-bid contract. Maybe the VA wants MASS to succeed to prove the value of commercial software, or maybe it hopes it fails so that Cerner looks like the only viable commercial software choice – I really don’t know, but would enjoy hearing from someone who does.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I need more responses to my question this week – care to chime in?

I’m already tired of this phrase that everybody is copying after hearing it: “punching above their weight,” which Google turns up as being used by news sites 3,000 times all of a sudden. I’m hoping against hope that it will die out as people stop trying to be imitatively clever. Soon it will fade and you’ll hear it only from folks who still post-faddishly write “to die for” and “I threw up in my mouth a little bit.”

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Provider data management and scheduling software vendor Kyruus raises $10 million in a corporate funding round, increasing its total to $72 million.

Health IT appears to have created cash flow problems within the financially strapped Tulare Local Healthcare District (CA), which filed for bankruptcy last fall. Former management company Healthcare Conglomerate Associates, which is hoping to recoup over $16 million from the district, attributed its struggles with payroll at Tulare Regional Medical Center to glitches in the Cerner system it implemented in 2016. An independent EHR implementation consultant is also looking to be paid, which lawmakers say may not happen any time soon.

Medeanalytics relocates its headquarters to its expanded office in Richardson, TX.

Sharecare SVP of Corporate Communications Jen Martin Hall responded to my inquiry about its joint venture with HCA, confirming the rumor reported by reader Private Privatized earlier this week:

HCA and Sharecare are putting operations of Share Lab, their joint venture to develop a next-generation online scheduling product, on hold. While the Share Lab team built a great product which was successfully deployed into an HCA facility and was demonstrating promising initial results, we couldn’t agree on a go-to-market strategy.

California Health Care Foundation’s innovation fund invests an unspecified amount in Collective Medical, which closes patient care communication gaps by using analytics to create a shared set of patient information, such as turning HIE data into clinically useful information. The company’s November 2017 Series A funding round raised $47.5 million.

Sales

• Rio Grande Valley HIE (TX) selects data normalization and quality reporting services from Diameter Health.
• Tufts Medical Center (MA) joins the the global health research network of TriNetX.
• West Virginia University Health System will utilize analytics and consulting services from Premier.
• TriHealth (OH) signs a $10 million contract with IBM for Watson Health enterprise imaging solutions and cloud-based clinical review services.
• The Menninger Clinic (TX) chooses Cerner Millennium and RCM.

People

GetWellNetwork names Nikia Bergan (Advisory Board) as chief revenue officer.

Ciox Health hires Arvind Ramakrishnan (IRI) as chief operations officer for clinical data acquisition and insights.

Announcements and Implementations

Comcast and Philadelphia BCBS insurer Independence Health will launch a health technology platform for consumers that will focus on “the effectiveness and efficiency of patient communications and education” that includes patient education and telemedicine. The insurer got the idea from the Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan project, explaining, “We’re going to use all of the data that we have from both companies and actually be able to create specific journeys for you.”

Frankfort Regional Medical Center (KY) goes live on Meditech Expanse with help from Parallon Technology Solutions.

The Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center at the University of Nebraska Medical Center implements an HL7-based discrete genomic results reporting system from GenomOncology to access results more easily via EHR.

Olympus will allow endoscopy images to be shared across health systems via its Knowledge Exchange System connected to InterSystems HealthShare.

Government and Politics

The White House assigns Camilo Sandoval to acting CIO of the VA following Scott Blackburn’s resignation earlier this week, giving him a potentially important role in its Cerner project. Sandoval, a former Trump campaign data director later named as senior adviser to the undersecretary for health, was one of several political appointees who former Secretary David Shulkin accused of conspiring to get him fired. The White House says a permanent candidate for the job is being vetted.

The FDA includes cybersecurity as part of its new Medical Device Safety Action Plan, emphasizing the need to shore up device vulnerabilities that could compromise patient safety. The plan will also help direct the ongoing establishment of the FDA’s National Evaluation System for health Technology (NEST) program.

Other

The local paper covers Mayo Clinic’s (MN) employee training ahead of its May 5 Epic go-live. Over 26,000 staff have been shuttled to a training center daily over the last three years. The clinic has hired 260 trainers to handle the crowds. The center will stay open for ongoing training through 2019.

A new KLAS report on inpatient systems in under-200 bed hospitals contains interesting facts:

• The most-installed vendor systems in order are from Cerner, Epic, Meditech, CPSI, Allscripts, Medhost, and Athenahealth, with those first three getting most of their count from hospitals that are part of a multi-hospital health system.
• KLAS notes that Meditech’s cloud-based Expanse system has  allowed the historically “mediocre developer” to elbow its way into the #3 spot in perceived innovation, behind Athenahealth and Epic and ahead of Cerner (but it’s a close race among all four). Allscripts Paragon, Medhost, and CPSI Evident trail the others by far.
• Allscripts is trying to salvage Paragon despite McKesson’s fumbling that caused some customer loss, although Allscripts is belatedly developing an integrated ambulatory EHR (Avenel) that help may keep customers in the fold.
• On the RCM side, Epic and Meditech customers like their respective product capabilities; those of Cerner like its RCM services while continuing to be disappointed with its revenue cycle software; Athenahealth’s users appreciate its percentage-of-collections cost model; and Paragon, Evident, and Medhost customers say their vendors do little to help them reduce costs or provide new revenue models. 
• Some Meditech legacy users have defected instead of upgrading due to ineffective support and a prohibitive cost structure.
• Some customers have cancelled their Athenahealth contracts and gone back to previous vendors CPSI and Medhost doe to perceived gaps in functionality.
• Most new deals outside of critical access hospitals are going to Epic and Cerner. with Epic’s weak spot being its provider-hosted model and Cerner’s being its longstanding problems with its revenue cycle software.

A Chicago Tribune investigative report finds that Bala Hota, MD – former Cook County Health and Hospitals System CIO / CMIO – fraudulently obtained reimbursement for $248,000 in expenses that he claimed were work related but that in fact involved purchases of toys, ITunes products, and a piano, leading to his resignation in 2014 as auditors uncovered the issues. He repaid the money last year and is now VP, chief analytics officer, and associate CIO of Rush University Medical Center.

Employees of Theranos – back when they had some – drank the Elizabeth Holmes Kool-Aid in believing that Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou was mistreating the company in exposing its fraud to the world, so they created a Space Invaders-type game called “Haters Gonna Hate” that used Carreyou’s head as the invaders to be shot at. Not only was this possibly the only company technology that ever actually worked, insiders went all Jim Jones in chanting “F— you, Carreyou” at an all-hands meeting. They have a dazzling array of reasons to be feeling really stupid right about now.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story featuring Righttime Medical Care.
• LifeImage publishes a new white paper, “Healthcare network as a catalyst for a convergent industry influencing clinical outcomes.”
• Lightbeam Health Solutions will exhibit at NAACOS April 25-27 in Baltimore.
• Mobile Heartbeat achieves Zebra Technologies Validation for its MH-CURE clinical communications and collaboration platform.
• Netsmart will exhibit at at NATCON April 23 in Washington, DC.
• Nordic releases a new podcast, “What is it like to be an affiliate project manager?”
• PokitDok demonstrates its commitment to security through SOC 2 Type II Certification.
• Forbes includes Impact Advisors in its list of best management consulting firms for 2018.
• Surescripts becomes a benefactor sponsor of the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs.

Blog Posts

• Interoperability 2.0 – Creating a Holistic Model of Care Part 2 (Medicity)
• Documentation at Phoenix Children’s saves time, money (Medicomp Systems)
• An Insider’s Look at Unique Device Identifiers (FDB)
• From the Road – A Consultant’s Perspective, Volume 1 (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• How to Eliminate Alert Fatigue (Meditech)
• Three Key Steps to Prepare IT for Machine Learning (Liaison Technologies)
• Help Your Employees Roll with the Changes (Access)
• Rethinking the Traditional Approach to Revenue Cycle Management (MedData)
• Trend-Weaving Medecision Liberation 2018 – Part 1: Liberating Healthcare Through Data Liquidity and Consumer Engagement (Medecision)
• Experts in Home Health Give Their Thoughts and Advice for 2018 – Part VI (Netsmart)
• Parallon Technology Solutions successfully leads Cass Regional Medical Center to Meditech Ambulatory 6.15 go-live (Parallon Technology Solutions)
• Should your health system offer automated payment plans? (Patientco)
• Three Areas Providers Should Focus on to Maximize Savings and Deliver Quality Care (Pivot Point Consulting)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.