Monday Morning Update 3/7/16

Top News

The VA is reassessing whether VistA has a long-term place as its EHR and has halted some of its VistA modernization steps following a business case analysis ordered by new VA leadership. The VA says it requested $40 million less in 2017 VistA modernization money because it will focus instead on making its existing systems interoperable.

According to Assistant Secretary for Information and Technology LaVerne Council (photo above), “We want to take a step back and look at what we really need an EHR and a healthcare system to do. There are multiple needs that are different than in 2014 around the area of women’s health, the Internet of Things, and how we manage private sector care.”

House Appropriations Chair Hal Rogers (R-KY) wasn’t happy with the VA’s testimony to the committee, saying, “We’ve been at this for 10 years and we’ve given you billions of dollars. I’m hearing muckety-muck here. I don’t know what you’re saying. Apparently, you’ve not made your mind up yet about whether you’re going to replace VistA with something off the shelf. Is that right or wrong? Yes or no?”

Council replied that the VA hasn’t decided yet, blaming her VA predecessors for not developing a sound plan but extolling the virtues of the VA-DoD Joint Legacy Viewer. She joined the VA in July 2015 after retiring as corporate VP/CIO of Johnson & Johnson.

Council also says that a visual overlay to the VA’s 30-year-old patient scheduling system may eliminate the need for its planned $690 million replacement depending on how the VA-wide rollout in April is received.

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Reader Comments

From Vegas Blues: “Re: healthy health conventions. Is it a foregone conclusion that we can’t eat healthy at a Las Vegas conference venue?” Plenty of sugary snacks, fatty sandwiches, and coffee were available, but I didn’t see much fruit or unprocessed food. It’s a fine line between providing what attendees want vs. what’s good for them, however. The H in HIMSS stands for healthcare, not health. It’s like McDonald’s, which offers a lot of healthy food that nobody orders, earning it scorn for the choices its customers make.

From Jardin: “Re: delegating computer tasks to non-physicians. The Senate unanimously passed this because, according to the committee chair, ‘hospitals and providers dread EHRs’ and “MD documentation is burdensome.’ After a year-long review that included HIMSS and physician lobbyists, Congress proposes a solution that adds costs, introduces errors, and eliminates many EHR benefits. After spending billions on health IT, we’re regressing back to the e-secretary model, pushing the burdens of the same EHRs to scribes or RNs. Nurses continue to be invisible in the law. Why isn’t there an industry outcry to actually fix the problem instead of just passing it off?”

From Flaming Introvert: “Re: HIMSS conclusions. As a near-entry level vendor employee, this is my second HIMSS and I’m not sure if I love it or hate it. It’s upbeat and our customers provided positive feedback about our changes and their needs. It’s refreshing to connect with patient advocates, even if most conversations end with the defeatist consensus of, ‘It really sucks, but what can we do about it?” Low point was getting to HIStalkapalooza too late for the shoe judging – I don’t normally parade around in six-inch heels without potential ROI. Maybe that same sentiment applies to HIMSS overall – it continues to yield enough return to induce me to participate, but I’m always glad to get home.”

From Bonus Room: “Re: iTriage. Just laid off 33 employees and CTO Patrick Leonard is leaving.” Unverified. I haven’t seen any official announcements from the medical question and doctor finding app vendor that’s owned by Aetna. However, the report came from a non-anonymous iTriage employee.

From Love American Style: “Re: Epic’s 2015 release. I’m a project director for an Epic customer. We are still in the testing phases and the severity and number of patches at this point in the release cycle has been unprecedented. Patient safety problems, patches that break workflows, performance problems all abound. Things I would have expected Epic in prior years to have nipped in the bud long before now.” Unverified.

From Delled: “Re: Michael Dell at HIMSS. He’s my hero, but I was stuck in the overflow room for his keynote. The moderator was so bad that people left in droves like the session was over. At one point Dell had to remind the moderator that he was supposed to ask a specific question. Finally I worked my way to the front against the crowd streaming for the exits, and at the end when he was leaving the stage, I asked to shake his hand (photo attached). He ignored me.” Michael Dell would have been an awful choice to keynote even if he wasn’t trying to sell out Dell’s pitiful healthcare offerings so he can finance his $67 billion passion for computer storage in acquiring EMC. EMC owns VMware, which has watched its shares drop 40 percent and has laid off 800 people since Dell came sniffing. Other than funding Dell Medical School, his healthcare accomplishments are zero or less, hoping desperately to sell Perot Systems for the same price he paid in 2009, backpedaling on the the idea that the future is in services rather than hardware.

Here’s my formula for becoming a highly-paid, well-received HIMSS keynote speaker, not inspired by Michael Dell since I didn’t attend any HIMSS keynotes:

1. Be famous for any reason. Healthcare relevance is unnecessary and even detrimental – the goal is to raise the spirits of attendees by making them think they are as cool, rich, good-looking, or smart as the celebrity podium-gripper.
2. Negotiate a speaking fee of several hundred thousand dollars, making sure to insert contractual clauses requiring approval of the introduction and the freedom to sell whatever product or service the speaker offers on the side.
3. Arrange travel to minimize the time hanging out with the insufferably fawning organization people who hired you and who therefore think they’re entitled to face time or the privilege of escorting you through the exhibit hall that makes you glaze over.
4. Announce to the worshipful masses how utterly delighted you are to be in their midst, carefully omitting the fact that you could have attended any time you wanted in previous years if your delight didn’t carry a price tag.
5. Begrudgingly allow a high-ranking executive of the group running the conference to (a) hug you before or after your speech; (b) ask carefully scripted softball questions after the stage is reset into a fireside chat type configuration; and (c) annoy the audience by prattling on instead of letting you talk as you’re being paid to do. At least moderator verbosity prevents audience members from asking their own pointed questions that might result in an unfortunate, life-ruining off-the-cuff answer. After the friendly chat, allow the executive to magnanimously present your foundation with a big check above and beyond your personal speaking fee.
6. Have your hired copywriter modify the harmless, standard speech you’ve given dozens of times to conventions ranging from car dealers too the Bowling Proprietors’ Association of America, penciling in four seemingly insightful anecdotes as provided by the people writing the check that are sure to make the audience feel that you understand them even though you have no idea what they actually do. You don’t  have to review the scripted comments in advance – they will be right there in front of you on the Teleprompter per your contractual requirement.
7. Include a handful of humorous, self-deprecating, name-dropping insider anecdotes to allow geeky non-profit IT people to live your celebrity life vicariously and to brag afterward that they briefly shared your aura.
8. Be vaguely motivating in a boilerplate-type way that won’t require actually thinking up something new, extolling the generic virtues of teamwork, leadership, doing what you love, and being true to oneself.
9. Close with over-the-top accolades that defer glorification to whatever the audience members do for a living, telling them that they are the real heroes even though (a) they’re paying to see you and not vice versa, and (b) you just made more money in 60 minutes than they make in a year.
10. Go straight offstage to a limo with the engine running to minimize unpaid downtime before the next cookie-cutter speaking gig.

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HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A little more than half of poll respondents doubt that Athenahealth and eClinicalWorks will become major inpatient systems vendors. Skeptical says that if eCW’s entry into inpatient is like its interoperability solutions, “we should expect major-league hype and minor-league results.” Vote Early and Often says eCW employees stuffed the ballot box and the company can’t service enterprise customers that expect project discipline and management maturity. Frank Poggio says it’s too late – the market has been sewn up by Cerner and Epic with Meditech, the only small-hospital vendor, losing ground. It’s All Good says there’s a long history of companies aspiring to be what they aren’t (Allscripts) and that eCW should stick to ambulatory.

New poll to your right or here: HIMSS attendees, will the hard-dollar benefit of your attendance cover your employer’s cost to send you within one year? Click the Comments link after voting to explain.

Here’s an extra, reader-requested poll for HIMSS15 exhibitors: in the year that has elapsed since, did you make a sale that you wouldn’t have made had you not exhibited?

Ms. Livingston says her New Mexico elementary school students “have the idea that they don’t deserve what the schools that have more money enjoy having” and therefore are having great fun with math story books we provided in funding her DonorsChoose grant request.

 

Also checking in was Mrs. Jochum from Nebraska, who sent photos of her students using the Osmo learning systems we provided.

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Webinars

March 16 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Looking at the Big Picture for Strategic Communications at Children’s Hospital Colorado.” Sponsored by Spok. Presenters: Andrew Blackmon, CTO, Children’s Hospital Colorado; Hemant Goel, president, Spok. Children’s Hospital Colorado enhanced its care delivery by moving patient requests, critical code communications, on-call scheduling, and secure texting to a single mobile device platform. The hospital’s CTO will describe the results, the lessons learned in creating a big-picture communication strategy that improves workflows, and its plans for the future.

March 22 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Six Communication Best Practices for Reducing Readmissions and Capturing TCM Revenue.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Chuck Hayes, VP of product management, West; Fonda Narke, senior director of healthcare product integration, West Healthcare Practice. Medicare payments for Transition Care Management (TCM) can not only reduce your exposure to hospital readmission penalties and improve patient outcomes, but also provide an important source of revenue in an era of shrinking reimbursements. Attendees will learn about the impacts of readmission penalties on the bottom line, how to estimate potential TCM revenue, as well as discover strategies for balancing automated patient communications with the clinical human touch to optimize clinical, financial, and operational outcomes. Don’t be caught on the sidelines as others close gaps in their 30-day post discharge programs.

Contact Lorre about our post-HIMSS webinar sale.

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Sales

Sixty-nine bed Madison Memorial Hospital (ID) will implement Cerner at a cost of $6 million upfront and $86,000 per month in maintenance fees. They chose Cerner over Epic and their incumbent vendor Meditech.

Virtua Health System (NJ) chooses Epic, which apparently beat Cerner in offering a replacement for Siemens Soarian.

Steward Health System chooses Imprivata Cortext for provider communication across its nine hospitals.

Aurora Health Care (WI) chooses Strata’s StrataJazz as its full financial analytics and performance platform.

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People

Healthgrades hires C.J. Singh (Backcountry.com) as CIO.

Ross Martin, MD assembled video good wishes for Deloitte’s Chris Brancato, who is recovering from unfortunately eventful spine surgery that has left him hospitalized and therefore unable to attend the HIMSS conference. Some of the greetings were recorded at HIStalkapalooza.

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Announcements and Implementations

CPSI announces a program by which its revenue cycle customers can apply their additional revenue toward buying its Evident Thrive EHR with no upfront costs. CPSI shares have rallied a bit in the last few months, beating the Nasdaq slightly by increasing 3 percent in the past year.

Health Catalyst arranges its product roadmap around nine subject areas.

Intelligent Medical Objects will work with Northwestern University’s medical school to support pharmacogenomics clinical decision support through creation of terminology to support concepts such as “ultra-rapid metabolizer of clopidogrel.” IMO will make the results available to members of the federally funded eMERGE consortium at no cost.

Vital Images launches an ACO imaging analytics solution and announces a personalized HIE/EMR viewing platform.

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Privacy and Security

The personal information of all employees of Main Line Health System (PA) is exposed when one of them replies to a spear phishing email.

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Innovation and Research

Mass General’s “Ambulatory Practice of the Future” calls for undergraduate and graduate engineering students to compete for $400,000 in prizes for creating innovations in primary care (technology, instrumentation devices, etc.) Pre-proposals are due April 18, 2016. Ten finalist teams will be awarded $10,000 and the top three winners will receive $150,000, $100,000, and $50,000. Last year’s winner was Hemechip, a point-of-care diagnosis device for sickle cell disease.

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Other

The HIMSS16 final attendance count was 41,885, down 3 percent from last year’s 43,129. This is the first time I can recall attendance going down year over year unless maybe it was in 2000 due to the Y2K scare. Possible reasons I came up with:

• Industry hangover from MU and ICD-10.
• Fatigue with the novelty of having the federal government drive so much of the conference agenda.
• Lame keynote choices.
• Election year uncertainty.
• A move to immediately valuable vendor user group meetings instead of a massively broad conference that is more useful to providers who are shopping products.
• A cutback in travel funds from vendors anticipating a market slowdown.
• Questionable return on investment for both providers and vendors.
• An increasingly less-useful education track that favors just pushing attendees into the exhibit hall nonstop.

A reader sent a link to the Sands Expo’s brochure describing its “green “ practices conference planning tool that should relieve HIMSS attendees worried about the lack of obvious recycling efforts. Interesting facts from it:

• The Sands Expo facility earned LEED Gold certification for existing buildings.
• Meeting rooms are equipped with sensors that control energy-efficient lighting.
• Onsite solar panels address some of the energy requirements.
• The convention center recycling rate is 80 percent, with waste sorted at both on-site and off-site recycling stations.
• Leftover food is made available in the employee dining room with the unused amount composted and sent to a local pig farm.
• Carry-out and concession serviceware is compostable.
• The entire property is smoke free except for the casino and 6 percent of guest rooms.
• The facility offers volunteer opportunities to conferences exhibiting that include helping with soap and shampoo recycling, creating Clean the World hygiene kits from recycled materials for locals in need, helping sort donated products for the local food bank, packaging nutrition bags for senior citizens in poverty, packing food in backpacks for local children, boxing meals for after-school programs, and volunteering with Opportunity Village to support those with severe intellectual disabilities.

HIMSS barely missed what would have been a huge PR scoop as the Denver Broncos announce that Peyton Manning will retire, just two days after his HIMSS conference keynote.

An 86-year-old woman accidentally strangles herself to death when her medical alert bracelet, which did not have a breakaway clasp, gets tangled in her walker.

Weird News Andy advises people to “Don’t Worry, Don’t Be Happy.” A study finds that joy – along with anger, grief, and fear – can cause emotional stress that contributes to takotsubo (aka broken heart) syndrome. 

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Sponsor Updates

• Huron Consulting Group and Strata Decision Technology announce a partnership to create a value-based care transition solution.
• NextGen Healthcare integrates CareSync CCM into NextGen Ambulatory EHR and will offer the product to its customers who want to perform and bill chronic care management services.
• Aventura chooses HealthCast as its single sign-on partner.
• Catalyze will add support for Microsoft Azure to its HIPAA compliance platform as a service.
• The Advisory Board Company offers case studies from four health systems that saved $4 million using its Crimson performance analytics program.
• Nordic will offer its customers visual analytics from Qlik Sense.
• NextGen Health integrates inMediata’s inBanking payment reconciliation solution with its practice management system, allowing payments to be electronically reconciled against banking deposits.
• VMware integrates Imprivata’s user credentialing and messaging products into its Workspace One provider digital workspace.

Blog Posts

• #HIMSS16 – Where are we on the journey to value-based care? (Nordic)

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Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Lt. Dan.
More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Dr. Jayne’s HIMSS16–Thursday

I was able to sleep a bit later this morning – no breakfast meetings or client calls. Trying to determine which sessions I want to catch has been an exercise in frustration. It feels like most of the ones I’m interested in all occur at the same time.

While I was looking at the short list of possibilities for today and eyeballing what I missed, it struck me that some submitters were much better at creating eye-catching titles than others. Some of my favorites:

• Patient Engagement: No Diamond Ring Required
• Five States, 700 Physicians, and Four Best Practices for HIEs
• Just Press Print: Challenges in Producing EHRs in Litigation
• Patient Identification: Biometric or Botched
• How to Avoid Getting Sued by Your Cyber Risk Insurer
• Rise of the Medical Scribe Industry – Risk to EHR Advancement
• Hard Truth about a Soft Go Live

A couple of the sessions I was particularly interested in happen to occur on Friday, so I’m looking forward to finding them online. I’m also looking forward to reviewing “What Do You Do When Your Improvement Project Fails” because it’s near and dear to my heart. When I went for my Lean Six Sigma certification, my first project was a complete and total bust. It ended up being a good thing, however, since it led to the creation of an upgrade methodology that I still use today, but it was definitely painful at the time, not to mention embarrassing.

I had mentioned yesterday about the lack of recycling (or discussion of single stream management) and a reader commented that there were signs near the waste receptacles. I made a more concerted effort to notice today and still didn’t find any more than I had already seen. The conference center did have divided bins (waste vs. cans/bottles) that I saw previously and failed to acknowledge, but most of the bins I saw in the exhibit area were unmarked.

My hotel had no mention of recycling whatsoever. They did mention on the express check-out card that they don’t issue paper bills for environmental reasons. Still, I needed a paper copy for reasons of my own and the desk clerk actually scolded me, saying I’d receive it via email by the end of day. It’s midnight in my world and I still haven’t seen it, but I guess in Vegas time they have a couple more hours.

I noticed some bachelorette-appearing ladies coming out of Treasure Island in what appeared to be last night’s clothes. They were sporting some adult-themed balloon hats and I’m just sorry I wasn’t fast enough to get a picture. It’s a good thing that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas because they were looking pretty rough. Perhaps they were headed up the street to White Castle for some hangover therapy. I didn’t remember seeing it on the strip last time I was here, but the strip can be overwhelming and things are easily missed.

I did a last-minute swing through the exhibit hall and heard quite a few comments about people getting ready to head out. I do wish I had more time to see more products and attend more sessions, but staying through Friday wasn’t an option. I’m not thrilled about the schedule shift that occurs when HIMSS is in Las Vegas and it seems like others aren’t so thrilled either. Next year we’re back in Orlando, which is challenging for its own reasons. I wish HIMSS would reconsider other options for the meeting.

The show floor was still fairly busy although nothing like opening day. I had equal numbers of reps who were smiling and trying to engage people walking by as compared to those who were looking pretty bored. I popped down to Hall G to see a couple of specific vendors and ended up running into someone I hadn’t seen in ages and chatting took up most of my remaining time.

It takes a lot of discipline to try to see everything and do everything at HIMSS. I’d like to blame my broken toe for slowing me down, but I think the whole event is almost too much. Thanks again to Edifecs and their #WhatIrun for literally making it possible for me to limp my way through the week in comfort.

I was fortunate again this year to have a vendor executive offer to share his car to the airport, allowing me to bypass the taxi queue craziness and providing a nice chat on the way. I enjoyed getting his thoughts on the industry and the move to value-based care. The airport was surprisingly low key and I made it through security in record time, for which I was grateful.

During my flight, I was able to catch up on the unbelievable amount of email that had come in during the week. One was from a PR firm correcting me for not using their client’s full name in my mention. Although I appreciate their position and their diligence to the brand, I hope they understand that (a) HIStalk is not my full-time job; (b) sometimes we write quickly and on the fly; and (c) during HIMSS, I usually end up writing at 1-2 a.m. after hitting the show all day and at least three or four vendor events each night. An email from a different vendor used the analogy of “a tree falling in a vast, cold, poison-ivy infested forest” gets my compliments for best prose of the day.

Weird News Andy wins the award for best fashion advice in the “What Not to Wear” category, sharing a piece explaining the perils of wearing shoes with gun-shaped heels and bullet-shaped accents.

I also received a note from a vendor exec apologizing for missing HIStalkapalooza. Apparently there was an EHRA dinner and awards ceremony that overlapped and they couldn’t make it to Mandalay Bay before the doors were closed. Another physician reader who did attend asked if I had any photos of her team and John Halamka doing the limbo at HIStalkapalooza. I am very sad to say that I do not, but if anyone does, please share.

What has been the best part of HIMSS? Email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Jenn’s HIMSS 3/3/16

My last day at HIMSS … how I already miss seeing friendly faces around every corner, the fantastic free food in the press room, readers stopping by the HIStalk booth to tell me why they love (or hate) some of the things we do. I’m already looking forward to Orlando, and can’t say goodbye quickly enough to Pacific Time. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My last morning got off to a nice start. I found that chivalry is indeed not dead, as several gentleman helped me cart my luggage between the HIMSS shuttle and conference entrance. I wasted no time in grabbing coffee from the press room before meeting with Lauren Douglass, brand manager for Medhost’s YouCareUniverse. She brought me up to speed on several nuggets of news, including the fact that the company’s YourCareEverywhere mobile app has recently been certified for Meaningful Use – the first of its kind to attain certification, to the best of her knowledge. The company, like many others at the conference, is joining the interoperability conversation in a big way via a project with an unnamed EHR vendor.

Encore Health CEO Dana Sellers joined me afterwards to chat about the show. (I love talking with smart folks that have been in the industry as long as she has; it’s a great way to absorb just a tiny bit of their wisdom.) We talked about everything from The 5 Love Languages to value-based care. She pointed out that, while a theme usually emerges by this point in the conference, she just couldn’t put her finger on one this time around. She equated it to post-Y2K, when the industry settled into a six month lull to catch its breath. “We’re in that same lull,” she explained, adding that her customers are taking a step back to recover from Meaningful Use and ICD-10. Sellers predicts that once they’ve taken a breather, providers will move full speed ahead with figuring out how to derive value from their healthcare IT.

Her comments regarding lack of a theme hit a nerve. HIMSS conference news cycles in years past have been driven by industry-wide EHR adoption, then ACOs, then Big Data (as its history of HISsies attests), and I was fully prepared for yet another buzzword to rear its ugly head. While population health management, analytics, cybersecurity, and value-based care have been tossed around, I haven’t gotten a sense that one is more important than the rest to providers walking the exhibit halls. Yes, everyone is talking about interoperability, but as BIDMC CIO John Halamka smartly said in his session with Jonathan Bush, “Interoperability is a bit like porn. I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” I haven’t even heard much mention made of precision medicine, aside from HHS reps talking it up in various sessions. Perhaps readers will offer a different perspective.

After coffee talk, I walked just a few yards to the HX360 Pavilion, which turned out to be a really nice, open space for its exhibitors, including Matter and Startup Health. I’m not sure how it compared to pavilions past, but it was nice to enter into an exhibit space not filled to the gills with humanity.

I caught the #HITsm panel featuring illustrious thought leaders like Drex DeFord, a longtime friend of HIStalk and participant in our HIMSS16 CIO luncheon. Host @HealthStandards kept the live and virtual discussion high level by focusing on innovation in HIT. A number of themes emerged, including the consumerization of healthcare and technologies poised to have the biggest impact. My vote goes to any type of tech – high or low – that can alleviate the costs associated with aging in place, long-term care, and palliative care. A big chunk of healthcare dollars goes towards caring for the elderly in these categories, and so it stands to reason that technology that addresses these areas might make some waves (if it’s not already doing so) in terms of cost and outcomes.

Standards were also mentioned, at which point everybody groaned.

I spent the rest of my time walking through the exhibit hall one last time. Traffic was light in some areas and heavy in others, as this picture of HL7 International’s booth can attest. Folks were lined up two to three deep to hear Massachusetts EHealth Collaborative President and CEO Micky Tripathi talk about the Argonaut project.

The #FHIRSelfie photo op just around the corner from where he spoke looked like a lot of fun.

Healthfinch co-founder and CEO Lyle Berkowitz, MD (and associate CMO of Innovation at Northwestern Memorial HealthCare (IL)) was gracious enough to stop and snap a selfie with me, even though I initially mistook him for Cedars-Sinai CIO Darren Dworkin.

My last official “drive by” of the day was to say one final thank you to the Xerox team for the lovely dinner the night before. Chief Innovation Officer of Commercial Healthcare Tamara StClaire and I chatted about the fabulous food and conversation (creamed corn = amazing / value-based care = struggle), and Xerox’s new population health management solution, which I’ll cover in HIStalk Practice’s Population Health Management Weekly Wrap Up on Sunday. I threw her a curveball in asking for her thoughts on HealthSpot’s stealthy departure/implosion. She equated Xerox’s partnership with HealthSpot as a learning lesson – one that has left the company now fully committed to remaining in the telemedicine space with an eye towards offering virtual queuing and payment processing. She wouldn’t name names, but did say that the company is in talks with several telemedicine vendors to prop up their IT infrastructure in the coming months.

I shuffled through tweets as I queued for a taxi to the airport (the line was not that bad), and had to share this one because it is apropos no matter which HIMSS conference.

As is this chart tweeted by @MandiBPro and @drNic1. The expo’s WiFi actually ended up being pretty reliable, which isn’t always the case at HIMSS.

My flight home has thus far been fun. The terminal was filled with familiar faces and longtime friends and I’m about to crack open one of the books I splurged on at the airport bookstore. I’m hoping humor – and healthcare IT – will get me through the long flight. Safe travels everyone!

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Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Lt. Dan.
More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

From HIMSS 3/3/16

 

From Idiosyncratic Reaction: “Re: change. Thought you would like this.” It’s perfect.

From Civil Discourse: “Re: HIStalkapalooza. I realize that some people like loud music, but I would rather see a provider-only get-together that facilitates making contacts and having more in-depth conversations with peers.” The tug-of-war between “it’s a party” and “it’s a networking event” started in the event’s second year in 2009, but since then, HIStalkapalooza has evolved more into a party and attendees are self-selecting knowing that’s the case. Maybe there should be a two-hour, provider-only networking event before the regular HIStalkapalooza starts, or even a separate event entirely. The downside is that just putting on HIStalkapalooza consumes lots of time for weeks beforehand and I’ve assumed that the conference provides ample networking opportunities already. I’m open to ideas.

From Mutually Assured Destruction: “Re: HIMSS16 observations. See if these resonate.” Here’s what MAD submitted:

• Best new addition to HIMSS Annual Conference. HIMSS Living Room. We attend the annual conference for the networking and it’s such a pleasure to be able to connect in a comfortable space with food for sale and a nice mix of comfortable seating, mini conference tables, etc. I had more ad hoc face-to-face meetings in two days than in months of scheduled meetings, and the hallways weren’t lined with floor-sitters trying to rest their weary feet.  Well done, HIMSS!
• Most interesting tone change. I’ve noticed throughout my HIMSS lifetime that each year, a different villain was blamed for problems with health IT. One year it’s physicians who wouldn’t accept change. Next year it was health system administrators who wouldn’t budget more than 3 percent of spending on HIT. Then the government for issuing unworkable mandates. Then health IT vendors whose EHRs weren’t user friendly enough. It was very refreshing to hear Karen DeSalvo say, (paraphrasing) “Let’s stop the blame and shame and look for solutions.”
• Biggest irony. That a conference focused on developing solutions for improving the nation’s health is hosted in a location where daily exposure to second-hand smoke is unavoidable. Anyone with even the mildest asthma condition spent the week wheezing and coughing. I know there are only so many venues that can handle the HIMSS annual conference, but if we never return to the Vegas Strip it will be soon enough for me.
• Biggest stressor/biggest regret. Being a no-show at HIStalkapalooza because of a last-minute work command performance conflict, knowing I’ll be blacklisted next year.

From High Pitch: “Re: HIMSS session on cognitive computing. It was a pure Watson vendor pitch. Don’t they have a customer who is willing to speak on behalf of the success they’ve had?”

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Four hospitals in Israel were infected with ransomware in the past month alone.

Dignity Health will expand its use of Cerner.

Some of the DrFirst roving reporter interview videos from HIMSS16:

• Politico’s David Pittman’s prediction of key themes at HIMSS16
• Mark Mixon discusses privacy and security in rural community hospitals
• Linda Stotsky: insights on the future of clinical decision support
• Healthcare lawyer Matt Fisher discusses security and privacy on social media
• What Parkview Medical Center does to protect privacy and security

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Lots of folks were wheeling suitcases through the casino this morning and packing up their exhibits this afternoon, foretelling the usual poor attendance at Friday’s sessions. It will be cold where a lot of people are going, with these highs Friday: New York 39, Boston 36, DC 43, Atlanta 59, and Chicago 38. Las Vegas will be sunny and 80 degrees.

Overheard: “I’m a hospital business analyst. I stopped by the booth of Borda RFID to get product information. The rep didn’t want to let me in the booth. I tried to get some collateral and she told me I couldn’t have anything because it was for CIOs who were coming by later. She made me put it down. I pointed out my CIO across the aisle and said, ‘Notice that his bag is empty while mine is full. Guess who initiates product investigation at my hospital?”

I spent the morning wandering downstairs Hall G, walking slowly and offering eye contact at each booth to see which vendors were paying attention:

• I had great coffee and a brownie at BridgeHead.
• CaptureProof explained their secure patient-provider photo, video, and comments exchange.
• Doc IT Solutions is a first-time exhibitor. They offer document management and said they’ve done great this week.
• Oblong Mezzanine is a telepresence-like visual collaboration conference room setup that is realistic and allows impressive image manipulation via a wand, almost like in “Minority Report.” It’s being used by Mercy Virtual. Their full-scale mock conference room was nicely done. They say it’s being used by tumor boards and other groups that need a lifelike virtual meeting setup. This was the coolest thing I saw today.
• Stibo Systems is a master data management vendor that serves 34 of the top 50 retailers in the world. They said MDM is not yet widely known in healthcare, but interest is growing.
• IMAT Solutions offers tools to normalize and aggregate data in real time for reporting.
• DataMotion Health equips providers with the ability to let their patients download their data.

I ran across this booth in the Hall G maze. Pretty cool.

I checked out FormFast, which had an iPad-powered self demo. They offer electronic forms, barcoding, and data collection, including online consents.

 

The folks at Netskope were giving away this book, which is actually very good. Netskope’s tools allow companies to find situations where PHI or other sensitive information is being sent to unauthorized cloud services, which its studies have shown happens in 21 percent of healthcare organizations. The average healthcare organization uses 1,017 cloud apps. The company’s technology allows creating policies for each risky activity. They offer a free cloud risk assessment.

That’s all I have for the moment. I left mid-afternoon today because I’m super tired (probably like everyone else). I’ll wrap up anything I have left to say about HIMSS16 this weekend. Safe travels home, everybody.

Jenn’s HIMSS 3/2/16

My third day at HIMSS started bright and early thanks to the paper-thin walls of my hotel room and the 4:45 am wake-up call for the room next door. Given that I was still on East Coast time, I gave in and got up. I cabbed over to HIMSS, thinking it would be quicker than using the shuttle. My hotel is not that far from the Sands Expo, and yet it still took about 20 minutes for my cabbie to navigate the traffic. He’s not a fan of the very narrow taxi drop-off area. I think I’ll try the shuttle tomorrow morning and see if that’s any quicker. At least it will be free.

After grabbing a quick coffee in the press room, I hunkered down at the HIMSS Spot to watch the passers by and catch up on email and tweets. The WiFi was surprisingly bearable today, which meant I was able to get work done on the go rather than attempting to cram it all in before bed. After watching the masses zip past, I headed over to our booth to relieve Lorre, who left to play hostess for a few hours at HIStalk’s CIO luncheon. The highlight of my morning was sashing Ross Martin, program director at CRISP; a member of the HIStalkapalooza alumni; and president, founder, and fellow of the American College of Medical Informatimusicology. After singing a few notes, I too became a member of ACMIMIMI. It was a very productive morning.

I also had the chance to chat with Robert Donnell, MD interim CMIO at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and Shiv Rao, MD a cardiologist at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. My favorite game to play at HIMSS thus far has been to ask folks how they define population health management. It’s amusing because no two answers have thus far been the same. Rao believes PHM is a state of mind, not necessarily a solution, with domain experts making the difference. Donnell told me that, while PHM is talked about everywhere he goes, there’s no standard definition. He thinks of it as community health, a kind of “warranty service” that ideally will one day be fueled by IoT. We didn’t get into the security or privacy implications of that notion.

The very dapper Steve Whitehurst, CEO of Health Fidelity (above, top), stopped by to say hello; as did Nuance Director of Corporate Communications Ann Joyal and Director of Cloud and Mobile Marketing Jonathan Dreyer cruised by to tell me a bit about the company’s new Dragon Medical One platform. I wish I could remember the fun statistic they shared equating a tower of Bibles to physician notes.

The ARC Devices team also stopped by to demo their wireless smart thermometer, coming soon to a peds hospital near you in versions with your favorite comic book characters. It may be low-tech, but this is the kind of product that’s already helping to improve nursing workflows.

The Drchrono team also stopped by to give me a live demo of the company’s new medical billing app, which was pretty slick in that the physician doesn’t have to actually type anything in. No clicks, just taps and drags. I took a picture of the demo, but instead opted to run the one above of company co-founder and COO Daniel Kivatinos petting President Obama’s dogs while in town for the Precision Medicine Summit. Drchrono is one of a handful of vendors that have agreed to support the initiative via a commitment to deploying the applications required for consumers to donate their health data directly to the PMI cohort. Kivatinos tells me he had aspirations of having his picture taken with the president, but the dogs had less security.

HC1 CEO Brad Bostic and Chief Marketing Advisor Ali Roach stopped by to follow up on an after-hours invite they sent last week, and we ended up chatting about healthcare CRM. HC1, which offers healthcare relationship management software, seems like it might face some competition from Salesforce. Bostic assured me that it’s nearly the opposite – a rising tide lifts all boats, and Salesforce’s entry into the market actually validates what his company has been offering for some time.

After Lorre returned, I finally had the opportunity to take a turn around the exhibit floor. The CenterX booth caught my eye because of its vibrant pink and oddly angular shape.

The Leafsprout booth had a very welcoming alien, which made me think they must have had a balloon artist lurking around somewhere.

DSS Inc. promoted its EHR solutions via a full-on screen-printing press. I suppose the ceilings are so high that ventilation wasn’t an issue.

The folks at Hyland did their best to entice me with a beer. Their booth’s permanent bar was definitely hopping.

Dimension Insight’s booth compelled me to stop zipping around and stare at its digital fish. It’s the most relaxing booth display I’ve seen thus far. I might have to return tomorrow for a few minutes of Zen-like stillness in between appointments.

I finally had the chance to meet PerfectServe CEO Terry Edwards in person. This is the company’s third HIMSS – his tenth – and the best so far in terms of attendee interest in PerfectServe’s secure messaging (and much more) solution.

I’m not a car aficionado, so I can’t even tell you what this type of care is. I do know, however, that it’s cool (so does the guy stepping up to have his picture taken with it.) Maybe a Formula One model?

Thanks to the folks at Aventura who sent me off with these cute plush owls and a coloring book. They ran out of owls last year, and have already started rationing them. I may spend today with my eyes peeled for crayons or colored pencils. Coloring during the flight home may be good stress relief.

I ended the day at Xerox’s dinner at Envy Steakhouse, where I got to enjoy good food (my only real meal of the day, in fact), great conversation, and even better company. Xerox Healthcare CIO of Commercial Healthcare Tamara StClaire did a great job of keeping us talking about value-based care and population health management. My favorite tangent had to do with healthcare IT’s love of buzzwords, often used as a way to either jump on some sort of product-buzz bandwagon. Given that I read dozens of press releases every day, I can attest to the fact that today’s marketing teams tend to use buzzwords and acronyms as a crutch, enabling their messaging to limp along without putting full weight on the underlying end-user problem their solution solves. I mentioned a rising tide earlier, and there’s nothing like sitting amidst a group of brilliant people to make you want to really bring you’re A-game expertise. Thanks to Xerox for having me.

My last night in Vegas ended at a decent hour. A good night’s sleep will set me right to visit a few more booths and attend one or two more sessions tomorrow before heading home. The #HIMSSanity is almost over!

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Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Lt. Dan.
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From HIMSS 3/2/16

From Bonus Question: “Re: HIStalk. How big is your team? How many events people do you have? Where is your headquarters?” I always have to laugh when someone thinks I have an HIStalk team, like it’s a real business instead of just doing what I love doing. Jenn and I write, Lorre handles sponsor stuff and webinars. That’s the whole team. We don’t have events people – Lorre spends a lot of time arranging HIStalkapalooza. Our headquarters location is our computer screens.

From Cereal Killer: “Re: CMIO lunch. Why didn’t you have one this year?” I’ve only had one of those lunches, which was at least year’s conference since McCormick Place had a HIMSS Bistro setup near the show floor that’s not available in Las Vegas. I should have realized that the Venetian and Palazzo have lots of restaurants I could have booked, but I always forget that while HIMSS controls every hotel and conference room for miles during conference week, it doesn’t insist on managing restaurant space (yet).

 

From Sirius: “Re: HIMSS booth dress and food fest. One may be more appropriate versus appealing.” I’ve noticed that booth food is a lot less available than in years past, but Iron Mountain has put out some impressive spreads, including the chocolate-dipped fruit I saw today.

From Digital Probe: “Re: Hall G exhibitors. They could sponsor HIStalk for a year and get tons more exposure than a three-day booth setup that nobody sees.” I feel sorry for companies that paid dearly to exhibit in the downstairs Hall G without understanding how little traffic it gets and how crammed in the tiny booths of unknown companies are. As I overhead from one attendee, Hall G attracts companies whose business model avoids competing with Epic and Cerner (he claims there are 30 companies down there demonstrating instant messaging), but of which 40 percent will be defunct within a year.

From Cherry Pie: “Re: booth eye candy. Your news item had a photo of attractive dancers and you’re complaining about booth babe eye candy? Please!“ This comment made me angry. I had included a photo that Party on the Moon took from their stage that showed the male singer and four females that included singer Kelsey Chandler in costume, captured during one of their amazing numbers and posted by the band to their Facebook. Cherry Pie apparently is happy to insult Kelsey by suggesting that her primary contribution is her appearance, which is absurd if you had heard her singing Monday evening. CP’s smug opinion doesn’t help the cause of talented women who are free to look, dress, and behave however they like. I know CP probably fancies himself a progressive man, but he’s not doing women any favors by insinuating that attractive ones must have been chosen just for their looks – that’s just as maddeningly sexist as actually hiring subjectively attractive women over more qualified but subjectively less-attractive ones. You’re either gender blind or you aren’t and I doubt Kelsey needs your approval of her choice of dress, showmanship, or vocal talent.

Looks like from the preliminary HIMSS estimates that conference attendance down quite a bit from last year. I hope that’s true – I’d like to see HIMSS worry about it enough to eliminate some of the practices that might be turning people off. I’m happy to provide my own list.

 

Stop by our Booth # 5069 Thursday at 11, when we’ll have your HIStalkapalooza hosts Barry Wightman and Jennifer Lyle on hand to say hello. Barry is director of marketing at Forward Health Group, where he deals with software-assisted outcomes, but he’s also a published book author, voiceover talent, fiction editor, and rock musician. Jennifer is founder and CEO of Software Testing Solutions, which helps health IT software vendors accelerate end-user delivery (and therefore revenue recognition) via automated testing, whether it’s for interoperability interfaces, middleware, outreach software, or LIS applications, cutting testing time from weeks to days. They would be ecstatic to see some HIStalkapalooza attendees drop by.

I’d like to give a shout-out to the folks who are minding the store while the rest of us are screwing around at the HIMSS conference worrying about which party to attend. My conclusion is this: the folks here can’t be all that important if their organizations run seamlessly in their absence. People who don’t travel much think it’s glamorous and fun, so those here can score points by emailing back to work and thanking the people who stayed behind.

I really appreciate the vendors and CIOs who participated in my CIO lunch on Wednesday. Lorre reports that everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, the food and Maggiano’s were great (I paid for lunch, just in case someone thinks it came out of the money donated), and Dana Moore says he’ll write a description of what each sponsor talked about for me to run later. I funded a lot of projects from the proceeds, with every dollar donated going directly to helping a lot of classrooms, teachers, and students that needed some financial assistance. A vendor executive who is setting up a family charitable foundation told me he had DonorsChoose vetted and they passed with flying colors, which isn’t surprising given their near-perfect Charity Navigator scores. The CEO, a former teacher, takes a very low salary.

Speaking of DonorsChoose, Epic QA donated $50, to which I applied matching funds as well as some personal money to purchase a library of 25 biographies for Mrs. Hale’s third grade class in Indianapolis, IN. She responded almost immediately, “From the bottom of my big, third grade teacher heart, THANK YOU! Thank you so much for taking the time to help get my students biographies that are kid friendly and engaging. They will be so excited to read about people from the present and past. I can’t wait to see their faces when I tell them we have so many new biographies to choose from.”

Ross Martin, MD, MHA was too busy changing jobs and houses to perform at HIStalkapalooza like we originally planned. However, I had a sash made for him, which he picked up in our booth today. He made a great Elvis here at our 2012 event.

Nordic’s Aaron Mann dispels the notion that HIStalkapalooza is just a party, explaining that a chance encounter is actually pretty likely when you have a room full of the industry’s coolest people.

DrFirst filmed Jonathan Bush doing his Donald Trump imitation at HIStalkapalooza.

Here’s an HIStalkapalooza flashback video from the 2012 Las Vegas event, hosted by the amazing ESD. I watch this every few months since I really like the music and the atmosphere it captured. For trivia buffs, we held this one at the since-closed First Food & Bar restaurant in the Palazzo. Let’s hear your memories and comparisons if you were there.

DrFirst captured John Halamka accepting his HIStalk Lifetime Achievement Award on stage. He won several awards Monday evening. I’m a big fan.

I will never like this product name, formed by leaving out the “t” in “quantum.”

Chris Miller of the DoD led a discussion about their EHR project. He said military users demanded an integrated system and that DoD is happy making configuration decisions instead of leading technical design sessions for self-development.

A CEO suggested that I take a look at Novarad’s VNA. That’s not my strongest area of expertise, but it was simple to understand and their services agreement covers maintenance and disaster recovery. The zero-footprint viewer running on Google Chrome was cool. Users can upload any document from a network-attached drive and store it in designated patient folders in the VNA.

Is it just me or is it bizarre that in this day and age, Las Vegas apparently doesn’t recycle? I didn’t see any blue trash cans.

I watched a kiosk demonstration at the Fujitsu booth and pondered this question about biometric security since they offer palm vein scanning ID systems. People have rightfully observed that if biometric credentials are stolen, there’s little recourse since users can change passwords but not their fingerprints or palm vein patterns. Here’s my idea. In both cases, all that’s stored by the scanning system is a set of mathematical inferences from the image, not the image itself. Why not allow each vendor to develop their own ID matrix from the hundreds of available data points? Maybe Vendor A takes the mathematical representation of the palm vein scan and uses 25 data points of their choosing to construct a verifiable user ID, while perhaps Vendor B uses a different 52 data points to string together their own ID characteristics. That form of “encryption” allows each vendor to positively ID patients using characteristics that are meaningless outside their own environment, making it pointless to steal the entire biometric database because it doesn’t work on other systems. Even if Vendor A gets breached, they can simply choose a new algorithm and convert existing profiles, immediately locking their own systems back down while preserving the ability to keep using biometrics without noticeable patient impact. Interoperability of biometric ID is unnecessary – it’s perfectly fine for individual IT systems to positively ID patients from their individual, proprietary subset of the entire biometric scan.

A reader told me about this 2013 TEDMED video by ZDoggMD on testicular self-examination, set to the crotch-grabbing music of Michael Jackson. It’s brilliant. “I’m checking out my nads in the mirror.” He was on stage at HIStalkapalooza with Jonathan Bush.

HIMSS Media was doing a live radio show from the exhibit hall. I can’t imagine that anyone was actually listening.

CareTech had their “mission control” display out. Pretty cool.

Allscripts had quite a few people in their booth today.

The coolest product I saw was from EchoPixel, which is exhibiting “blended reality” in the HP booth. It’s a fuzzy monitor image above because it’s 3D, but putting on the 3D glasses makes it shockingly real for clinicians to look at diagnostic images spatially, practice their procedures, and interactively pick up and move objects like implantables to plan surgeries. Not only was it super cool, the friendly lady showing it was Janet, who has a biomedical engineering PhD from Cal Berkeley (she was shyly embarrassed a little when I noticed the credentials on her business card and starting gushing like a star-struck fan). It was an outstanding product demonstrated by a really cool engineer. You should see it before the exhibit hall closes Thursday.

Epic’s booth sign claims that moving from Cerner or Allscripts increases profitability.

Cerner strikes back in pointing out that Banner bought University of Arizona Health Network and promptly announced plans to replace Epic with Banner’s Cerner systems. UA had made a bit of a mess of it, with project budget overruns being one of several reasons it had to sell out to Banner.

Hall G is a lot of tiny booths of mostly unknown companies. I’m sure there’s some good stuff down there, but it was sort of depressing down there in the basement, especially knowing that companies paid dearly for a low-traffic location.

Legacy Data Access made their point with a dinosaur. Pretty cool.

I asked NTT Data about Bob the amazing magician they have in their booth. Apparently he’s about to retire, but they’re hoping to lure him back next year. I commented that I saw him doing absolutely unreal things in talking about the deceased relatives of some HIMSS attendees watching his performance – they said that in the demonstration shows he did for their employees, several left the room crying after his apparent contact with their family members who have passed on. I wouldn’t have believed it myself, but I strongly recommend that you see him Thursday and decide for yourself. I thought I was going to have to physically support my fellow HIMSS attendee whose deceased grandmother Bob described in amazingly precise detail despite knowing nothing more than her name.

Thanks, LifeImage, for the cool backup battery for electronics.

Our booth neighbors Stericycle Communications have been tolerant of our never-ending parade of visitors. Stop by and have your picture made with Elvis – it will make their day. They’re nice people.

I don’t understand how either of these neighboring companies are still in business.

I heard the hall-filling sound of singing and found Anthelio’s Sinatra imitator cranking up his backing music to very high levels. You could hear him 20 rows over. I’m sure neighbors complained given the strict HIMSS rules on sounds or activities that detract from other exhibitors, so I’m certain they had to turn it down. He was OK.

I saw quite a few vendor people eating lunch in their booths out in the public areas. Bad idea. Attendees are either going to feel they’re intruding or they’re going to get hungry. You’re on stage when you’re in your booth on the time clock, so act like it.

Every year I’m amazed at how customer-indifferent the people working the Microsoft booth are. I stopped by today as the only person in front of four Microsoft employees standing in in front of some notebooks and Surface Pro devices. Two immediately walked away chatting together as I stood there trying to make eye contact, while the remaining two talked among themselves in studiously avoiding eye contact until I finally left. They really are self-important geeks who shouldn’t be allowed within 100 yards of prospects or customers, yet every year I experience the exact same treatment in their booth.

Medecision’s mentalist was sporting a cool suit.

I was happy not to see the distractions of previous HIMSS conferences like people pretending to be statues, dozens of booths baking cookies, and golf simulators. Here’s the odd thing, though: nearly every vendor was giving away pens, but I couldn’t find a single one offering anything to write on. I really needed a notepad.

I found myself pondering why low-level vendor employees have to wear company shirts while on HIMSS booth duty, while their richly compensated bosses don suits instead. Shouldn’t the company’s highest-paid person be proudest to work there?

The HIMSS “Ask Me” people are really friendly and helpful. Kudos to them.

Overheard: “Todd Park left Athenahealth with $40 million in shares to go to work as HHS CTO. Federal service requires liquidating such holdings, but since the government then recognizes the proceeds as tax free, Todd avoided paying the many millions of taxes that would have otherwise been due on the $40 million stock sale. I’m not saying he took the job for just that reason, but the man knows how to work a spreadsheet to his advantage.”

Cerner’s booth had an open feel, complete with a journey through various healthcare settings.

The DoD EHR project got some podium and booth time.

Epic claims to not have a marketing department, but someone there is doing a pretty good job of stating the company’s case.

Jenn’s HIMSS 3/1/16

Oh, how naïve I was to think that I could sleep past 4:30 am Vegas time … The early start was actually a good thing, giving me plenty of time to get my bearings, enjoy the eventually beautiful sunrise, and prepare for the day’s events.

My first stop was the HIMSS16 Media Breakfast, during which panelists from HIMSS, including HIMSS North America Executive Vice President Carla Smith, Divurgent Vice President of Clinical Information Dana Alexander, and Metro Health (OH) Vice President and CIO Don Reichert took members of the press through results of the association’s 27th annual leadership survey. The two big takeaways seem to be that more and more providers are including a clinical IT executive in their C-suites – a trend that is having a “notable impact on the organization’s orientation toward health IT.”

The other is the association’s long overdue focus on the gender-based wage gap, and the larger conversation that opens up about diversity. Survey findings indicate that women lag behind men by about $25,000 in compensation for C-suite roles. Kudos to Smith for taking the lead on bringing these statistics to light. She and her team are hopeful that the findings will lead to additional research that will in turn evolve into HIMSS resources and programs focused on engendering diversity in organizations that have historically been led by white males. Reichert held up Metro Health as an example of an organization that has made a conscientious effort to focus on diversity in its hiring practices via new programs. Perhaps that’s the kind of case-study session HIMSS needs to think about offering next year in Orlando. 

I headed over to the HIMSS Spot shortly after the breakfast, where I caught up with ONC CNO Rebecca Freeman, RN University Hospitals Health System Interim CIO Sue Schade, and Encore Health CEO Dana Sellers at the #healthITchicks meetup. All three had great advice to share on balancing work and life, especially when caring for young children and aging parents; working in a male-dominated field; and encouraging young women to learn more about STEM.

My favorite session of the day by far was the lunchtime “View from the Top” featuring Beth Israel Deaconess CIO John Halamka and Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush. The duo tag teamed a talk about how far we’ve come in health IT, how far we have to go, and the opportunities that are staring us right in the face. Their talk was a bit toned down compared to their on-stage antics at HIStalkapalooza the night before. I had no idea Halamka was such a great speaker, or that he is the nation’s leading expert on poisonous mushrooms and plants. Apparently he does a brisk business in telemedicine visits with parents of children who’ve eaten mushrooms (the garden-variety kind and the psychedelic kind) , and adult nature lovers who are convinced the wild variety they find in the woods will go great in homemade stroganoff.

What was perhaps most interesting to me was the juxtaposition of Halamka’s humorous (the Chairman Mao-Meaningful Use analogy was hilarious) yet critical eye towards government regulations with Bush’s obvious ability to make money off of those burdensome, click-inducing regulations. Yes, the top vendors can get together at posh resorts and commit to sharing data with one another (as the picture above shows them doing at the recent KLAS summit.) Yes, they can publicize their pledge to HHS that they will help consumers access and share their health data, preclude information blocking, and implement government-friendly interoperability standards … but what will that look like in practical terms and how long will it take? As CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt mentioned during a media briefing later in the afternoon, we’ve really got to push vendors to do the things they say they’re going to do. There’s no letting up if the journey towards interoperability is ever going to progress.

Things lightened up once I headed over to the HIStalk booth. (If you’re looking to find us in the 5000 row, wind your way through or around Epic then head straight back. We’re near the fun folks at MedData and next to Stericycle, which has a fun array of gummy candies to nosh on. I had the chance to chat with “HIStalk Celebrity Lawyer” David Schoolcraft, who I hope will swing back by and keep me company at some point. I also got to pick the brain of passers by including Michael Paul Gimness, MD (above) of Family Medical Specialists of Florida and Mike Narumiya, director of data and information systems at North Central Texas Trauma.

Gimness, whose practice runs Allscripts and Caresync for CCM was roaming the aisles in search of additional population health tools to help him make the move towards value-based care. Given that I had just spent come out of a media briefing with Andy Slavitt, I asked Gimness about his thoughts as an independent doc on MACRA. “I feel MACRA’s coming, and it’s going to stay. They can say they’re getting away from MU, but they still have to have a carrot and a stick when moving towards population health and value-based care. I don’t like docs getting penalized, but it’s the government’s money and they can do what they want with it. I can’t opt out of Medicare or Medicaid. My staff is not going to take a pay cut.”

Narumiya, meanwhile, was on the hunt for security tools, which were easy to find given that, in his opinion, at least a third of the booths had products related to privacy and security. (Thus far both he and Dr. Paul have validated my initial predictions of cybersecurity and population health management being big items of interest at HIMSS. Validation feels good.) He has shied away from looking into products from the big vendors, opting instead to focus on smaller companies and startups. He also mentioned that his organization has been happy with encryption tools from DataLocker.

The fun folks at Mobile Heartbeat trekked across the aisle to introduce themselves to us. Their booth seemed to have consistently busy traffic. Providers must still have a strong interest in migrating from pagers to mobile clinical communications (or making a vendor switch).

I didn’t spend much time wandering around the exhibit hall today. I’m pretty sure Mr. H and Dr. Jayne will cover that part of the conference in their typically excellent fashion. I did make a point to stop by the Georgia HIMSS reception to say hi to friends. On the way I just had to snap a pic of the ScienceLogic trio above. I wonder if they’ll give me a shirt if I talk nerdy to them?

The reception was buzzing, as was the Intermountain Healthcare bus. I wonder if I could sneak on board and use what I’m sure is far more reliable WiFi than the tenuous exhibit hall connection provides. Intermountain CIO Marc Probst – who was coincidentally up for a HISsie – seemed very excited about the bus when I interviewed him a few weeks ago. He mentioned that he too will be looking for security solutions during the conference.

My last session of the day featured a fireside chat with National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo and Andy Slavitt. The two seemed completely at ease with each other – joking about their tendencies to be positive (DeSalvo) and negative (Slavitt). Slavitt humorously pointed out that of course DeSalvo’s positive – she spends her time with technology and vendors. He, on the other hand, has been spending a lot of time lately with grumpy physicians. The two took a good hour to cover the evolution of Meaningful Use and hopes for MACRA, highlighting the aforementioned pledge from healthcare stakeholders to make EHRs work better for patients and providers, and the just-announced “FHIR Cloud” – a new FHIR app ecosystem that will incorporate app challenges and resources to help providers and consumers take advantage of innovative tools based on open APIs.

My favorite part of the presentation came when Slavitt started getting into the nitty gritty of his recent physician focus groups. The comment above is just one of hundreds he’s been listening to throughout the course of eight meetings with providers. A telling comment: “To order aspirin takes eight clicks on the computer. To order full-strength aspirin, 16. That’s not patient care. It’s clicks.”

My evening ended at the HIMSS Women in Health IT Reception at Madame Tussaud’s –  a unique venue if ever there was one. I spotted DeSalvo mixing and mingling. I wonder if she thought the figurines were slightly creepy like I did. I did end up taking a pic with Andre Agassi, just to show my tennis team. All in all, my second day at HIMSS proved to be fun – great sessions, tremendous networking, and beautiful weather. Now if I could just manage to sleep a little later … 

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Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Lt. Dan.
More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
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From HIMSS 3/1/16

From Organized Thyme: “Re: leap day. We were impacted by a large documentation management system vendor that would not allow us to scan in yesterday. Rumor has it that every one of their customers in the US were impacted.  Can you believe that in 2016 a medical software vendor could not program to handle leap year day? Their workaround was to have us hold all documents from 2/29/16 and scan them on 3/1/16.” That is indeed hard to believe. Luckily (or not), we’ll all be dust by 2100, when the usual leap year logic is skipped on the “every 100 years” exception schedule.  

From Thrill Me: “Re: HIMSS. One of my pet peeves is when companies hire female eye candy for booths.” The only way to pick them out is to engage them in product conversation since being attractive and talented certainly aren’t mutually exclusive, but I honestly saw only one person in the exhibit hall today who even looked as though they might be a booth babe. I think those days are happily gone. I’m also thrilled that companies aren’t even shy about putting obviously valuable geeks out on public display, like guys with long, gray ponytails or technologists who can’t look someone in the eye. However, I wish clueless vendors would stop putting non-clinicians in scrubs and white coats – that’s an insult to their target audience, obviously one of the stupidest things you could do in trying to move product.

From Pshaw Y’all: “Re: HIMSS. A gentleman with a HIMSS badge was walking through the Mirage lobby with a shuffled, stuttered walk. A woman stopped him, noticed his eyes, and realized he was having a stroke. She dropped her bags, ran to the front to get paramedic help, and returned to be with him. Several others had noticed, including myself, and from behind assumed it was a disability. It took a special person to stop, look at his eyes, and help.” It’s likely that few of the big-bucks people at the conference would have any idea what to do if faced with a patient in distress, or even if they did know, whether they would actually deign to render aid. Kudos to whomever that person was. You want a clinician and not a bureaucrat when you have a medical need. I had a funny HIStalkapalooza sash made for Jonathan Bush that read, “I CPR’ed some random guy,” but let’s face it – when that homeless guy went down on the San Francisco sidewalk, it was former Army medic and New Orleans paramedic JB who pushed the gawking suits out of the way and resuscitated the guy. Strokes are scary, so let’s hope our fellow conference-goer had a good outcome.

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HIStalkapalooza

Lorre had at least 1,000 email exchanges with people wanting individual attention for HIStalkapalooza in the last few days – wanting to bring a guest, wanting to come even though they didn’t sign up, wanting to bring a colleague who wasn’t invited. She was literally sitting in the green room 15 minutes before the event started still furiously trying to keep up with event-related emails. Today started the in-person versions, of which this one was unfortunately typical in the “how exactly do I answer this?” manner:

• (Some guy who ran up to Lorre in the hall): “You ruined my HIMSS conference. You didn’t invite me to HIStalkapalooza.”
• (Lorre): “Did you sign up?”
• (Guy): “I didn’t know I had to. I got all this crap from HIMSS and didn’t see an invitation.”
• (Lorre): “Do you think we invite every HIMSS attendee? Do you even read HIStalk? The invitation process hasn’t changed in eight years and we explained it every day for weeks starting in early January.”
• (Guy, indignantly): “I read every post carefully.”

The no-show rate was high as usual, but Eventbrite check-in allows us to give those folks lower priority if I decide to do an event next year.

Thanks once again to our HIStalkapalooza sponsors that made the event possible:

Athenahealth
Clinical Path Consulting
Elsevier
Experian Health
Forward Health Group
Fujifilm
Healthwise
NEC
NextGen Healthcare
PatientSafe Solutions
Sagacious Consultants
Validic
Wellcentive

Also deserving special recognition is Ashley Burkhead of Santa Rosa Consulting, who jumped energetically into the fray when our registration sponsor fell through. She and her team organized the entire process staffed the check-in area. We’ve had bad experiences with companies whose people weren’t well prepared or who couldn’t understand that nobody gets in without an invitation, causing long lines and an uncertain headcount, but the Santa Rosa people handled it perfectly. She earned Lorre’s seldom-won admiration. One guy who hadn’t signed up to attend actually emailed Lorre to praise the fact that Ashley’s team refused to let him in even though he tried to bribe them with $200 in cash.

I appreciate our hosts Barry Wightman of Forward Health Group and Jennifer Lyle of Software Testing Solutions. All the nerve-wracking details are easier to work through knowing that I have two experienced and skilled people running the stage show.

I’ll be getting more photos and videos through the week and will share them then.

Party on the Moon posted some photos on Facebook that they took from the stage. Dennis the band leader and guitarist says they love playing for the HIStalkapalooza crowd. They fill the dance floor with their first notes and never slow down until that final song where the big horn section kicks in one last time.

The super helpful and fun folks at PatientSafe Solutions not only provided an HIStalkapalooza photographer, they burned the midnight oil to turn them into this cool video.

Here’s a couple of band shots from Nordic.

Validic sent over this photo of the evening’s big HISsies winner, John Halamka, spending time in their HIStalkacabana. John said on stage that winning the Lifetime Achievement Award can only mean that he’s done and has nothing to look forward to.

Here are your HISsies winners from last night.

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A newsy item: Mayo Clinic’s financial report indicates that it plans to spend $1 billion over five years to implement Epic.

I compared Uber vs. a taxi covering the same Las Vegas route of a handful of miles. Uber was half the price, plus they don’t insult passengers by charging a flat $3 per credit card swipe. That’s almost as obnoxious as the mandatory Las Vegas resort fees that can almost double the cost of a cheap room. I also noticed that Uber is smart enough to give you a choice of which hotel entrance you’d like for pickup.

Walking through the convention center this morning was dangerous, as attendees got their HIMSS legs. People were stopping short to stare at their phones in wonderment, veering across people walking straight ahead, slowing everyone down in trying to drink coffee while afoot, and hitting the brakes in high-traffic areas to glad-hand suddenly spied old friends. If the halls were highways and attendees drove like they walk, the death toll would be massive.

Caradigm provided really nice backpacks this time around. A significant portion of them might actually be packed back home instead of filling up hotel trash cans. Nice job.

I feel like I’ve accidentally wandered into a restricted area when I go down to the lower level restrooms, which requires navigating uncarpeted, battleship gray stairs under harsh fluorescent lights.

The most brilliant conference giveaway in history: Lifepoint Informatics was handing out those little 5-Hour Energy bottles.

DrFirst is filming a HIMSS interview series. Above is one of the series of videos, to which more will be added in the coming days. 

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HIMSS Conference Random Observations and Photos

The first booth I checked out was Oneview Healthcare, which offers an interactive patient system. They’re booth is close to that of GetWellNetwork, oddly enough, so you can compare their systems easily.

Athenahealth’s escalator ad is clever.

 

MedData wasn’t allowed to bake scones in the hall this year, but they have retro candy and craft beer. I had a Lemonhead and an IPA, although not simultaneously.

How quickly imitative trends die: I saw maybe two Farzad-style bowties the entire day as his former legion of fawning fanboys apparently moved on to other forms of unoriginal behavior.

The YourCareUniverse people gave me an overview of their product, which offers a consumer health site, a patient portal, and a personal health record.

The VGo Robot people say they’re bringing out a stethoscope that can capture and send data.

I’m always surprised to see these guys coming back since I’ve still never heard of them selling anything in the US after years of trying.

 

Epic’s outside booth signs were based on fun song titles. Bravo to the Monty Python reference.

The most interesting product I saw today was West’s patient engagement platform that can provided outreach for routine care, transitional care, or chronic care. It’s a nice UI in which organizations can define pathways with timed actions such as sending a survey, doing medication reconciliation, or sending an appointment reminder. The provider can bulk review performance and exceptions. Patient contact can be by phone, mobile or IVR. It’s purely technical tool that should work great for automating ongoing patient contact to make it easier to identify outliers.

Jama Software has nothing to do with the medical journal, offering requirements tracking and collaboration for critical development projects such as working on FDA-regulated software.

Arcadia was showing a Data Quality Scorecard Analysis that plows through data looking for incorrect data assumptions, rule patterns, and database composition.

Summit Healthcare was showing its Enterprise Downtime Viewer.

My iPhone takes crappy pictures, especially if it’s steamed up in my sweaty pants pocket, but this sign indicates that Access was generous in offering to provide latte to its fellow exhibitors, with the only restriction being that its booth guests get served first. I really like these people – we always talk barbeque (some of their folks are on competition teams), they got where they are by self-bootstrapping and hard work, and they have fun. Check out their display case showing manual methods of document delivery vs. their electronic imaging – the crashed drone with (fake) human hair attached made me laugh out loud.

Merge Healthcare was demonstrating its cardiology system database analyzed by its new owner, IBM Watson. A cardboard sign attached under the monitor said “Work in Progress.” I imagine quite a few more of those signs could probably have been deployed throughout the exhibit hall.

Sunquest had its new logo in place. I sat through a session by Rob Atlas on Sunquest Diagnostic Communities and its precision medicine applicability. It connects to EHRs, collects all patient lab orders in a Clean Orders Hub, and checks for duplicates or other problems before filing them away in a repository.

It’s easy to miss the downstairs Hall G and its mishmash of small vendors, educational institutions, and special interest groups, but there’s a DeLorean down there in the CrossChx booth.

Hyland had a replacement magician, which crushed my HIMSS spirit until I saw the astonishing one at NTT Data’s booth. He was snarky in doing the usual eye-popping tricks, but then delved into telling people things there’s no way he should be able to know about their deceased relatives. He was amazing and NTT’s Larry Kaiser was the perfect deadpan foil. This is a must-see – email if you take the time to see him and aren’t impressed.

Park Place International features its new name, CloudWave.

Practice Fusion’s booth was dead. The reps were huddled in a circle, looking inward for strength as the out-of-runway company goes down in flames around them.

Meditech had more reps on the phone as a percentage than any booth I had seen by mid-morning, but the other vendors caught up quickly. I tweeted a joking observation that some booths looked like they were demoing cell phones rather than software.

The food both lines were long by mid-day, sending me fleeing downstairs to Hall G seeking sustenance. Which I found: there’s a food court type setup with no lines and plenty of seats. I scored three spicy chicken tacos, black beans, Spanish rice, and a great salsa bar with homemade pico gallo for $12. It was surprisingly good, although my first bite of chicken was so surprisingly zesty that I gulped down half of my $3.25 can of Diet Coke.

NantHealth’s booth was pretty dead. About all they had to show was a big-picture video about the cancer moonshot.

MedCPU’s booth was a lot bigger and the company is riding the wave of its fresh investment and implementation by UPMC. They’re one to watch since UPMC had tried to develop similar text-mining technology years ago (the MARS system) and should have expertise as well as cash to offer.

I watched an interesting presentation from a Mass General molecular pathologist on managing genomics data, presented by InterSystems. They’re using Cache to store 300 TB of genomics data collected from just a few thousand patients over three years. They’re planning to build decision support tools around the data since it’s too hard for an oncologist to digest at the point of care. InterSystems is one of the most quietly brilliant (and quietly but massively successful) healthcare IT companies.

Greenway’s booth was quiet, but they had a nice happy hour late in the afternoon.

The hot booth furnishing this year: carpet that looks exactly like a hardwood floor. I also noticed that the multi-year transition to light green as the favored branding color is apparently nearing completion. 

Forward Health Group had HealthLinc CEO Beth Wrobel speaking in their booth. I interviewed her a few months back. She says her FQHC wants to “put a face on the denominator.” She says anyone can run FHG’s systems and the only decision to be made is how to integrate it into workflows. She says commercial insurers are their worst payer by far and hopes to use FHG’s data to convince them it’s in everybody’s best interest for them to provide more funding.

Also in the FHG booth was industry long-timer John Holton (Atwork, Scheduling.com, SCI Solutions). He’s doing some HIT investing and advising these days. 

HCI Group was talking about their Securonix system, which offers security behavior profiling, a policy engine, and a risk engine.

I was about to joke to the lady pouring Black Box wine that its vintage must be Friday when I noticed that the company was more clever than I – its name is Black Box Network (no relation).

I was really surprised to not be overwhelmed by vendor buzzwords like analytics, big data, population health management, and patient engagement. Those concepts were mostly just worked into product value propositions instead of being shouted from the rooftops. That leaves me without an obvious HIMSS16 theme so fare.

Overheard Conversations

• “Of course former US CTO Aneesh Chopra is stumping for interoperability. He now works for vendor Hunch Analytics, which makes money ‘unleashing data sets’ that it can’t get unless other vendors share them.”
• “No vendor does population health management well. Nobody even knows what it means yet.”
• “Epic is killing the standalone lab system business.”
• “EClinicalWorks is the least interoperable vendor. The rumor is that CMS is looking into its data-sharing practices.”
• “Meditech is really as much of a real estate company as an HIT vendor. They are the second-largest commercial real estate owner in Massachusetts.”
• “Karen DeSalvo doesn’t care about doctors or EHRs. She’s just using them as a steppingstone to being elected to Congress.”
• “I only come to HIMSS because of HIStalkapalooza.” (Jonathan Bush)

Jenn’s HIMSS 2/29/16

Oh Las Vegas …. Where else do I get the chance to see multiple Michael Jackson impersonators crossing the street, a cabbie (mine) get into a cursing match with a pedestrian, and Jonathan Bush pull out his best Donald Trump impersonation? I’ve been here less than 24 hours and my first day at HIMSS has already been memorable.

The day started off as many of my HIMSS seem to – catching up with the Patientco crew at the airport. Marketing Director Josh Byrd brought me up to speed on the impact the company’s new Payments Hub is having in the revenue cycle space. It’s already making waves in hospitals, and seems poised to have a big play with RCM vendors, too. The flight was full of the usual suspects. I recognized vendor shirts from Greenway and Modernizing Medicine, and overheard countless HIMSS-related conversations. (I wonder how much money HIMSS could make if they started chartering flights out of major hubs for vendors and attendees?)

I had the good fortune to sit next to Stuart Post, regional vice president at LogicStream Health, who gave me a rundown on the company’s quality improvement and revenue management tools. The four-year-old firm is exhibiting for the first time this year, and so I need to make a point to show ‘em some love and swing by their booth for a twitpic or two. Post, who’s been around the health IT block in various positions at McKesson, Harris, and Microsoft, is firmly convinced that smaller (and presumably more nimble) firms have greater influence than they once did. “The industry is really speeding up,” he explained. “It’s all about small companies with big ideas, whereas 10 years ago it was about a handful of big companies dominating the market.” I’ll have to keep that sentiment in mind as I stroll the exhibit hall over the coming days.

Post also asked me for my “HIMSS hot topics,” and, based on recent headlines, I predicted that cybersecurity, population health management, and chronic care management will be exhibit-hall buzzwords. (Population health made waves earlier this evening as a contender for the HISsie award for most overused HIT buzzword. It lost to big data, which I believe has won three years in a row.) My prediction was affirmed by chatter at the HIMSS #HITMC meetup, where the topic of choice was what defines an uncertain HIT marketplace. I’d cast my vote for the uncertainty vendors seem to feel around population health versus population health management. Some use the terms interchangeably; some have adopted the phrases in what seem like desperate moves to cash in on their buzz-worthiness. Marketers, messaging is important; so is clarity.

My time at the conference today was short – just shy of an hour spent getting my badge and attending the aforementioned meetup. I was surprised at the amount of people already roaming the halls, although I hear tomorrow will be the peak day, with 40,000-plus expected. I feel like I’ve spent most of the day in various modes of transportation, bouncing between the airport, my hotel, the Sands Expo, and the House of Blues. I don’t know that Uber would have been any better, especially since one HIStalk reader’s Uber got pulled over on their way to HIStalkapalooza. If that’s not a good reason for being late, I don’t know what is.

I’m ashamed to admit that I left HIStalkapalooza early. The East Coast time caught up with me and I headed back to my hotel room with enough energy left to write today’s recap and to review tomorrow’s jam-packed itinerary. (The 10 events I have on my schedule pale in comparison to the to-the-minute schedules of more seasoned HIMSS-goers.) I had a nice time entertaining our sponsors during our pre-party meet and greet, and a fantastic time listening to my secret crush – Eric Quinones, MD national director, healthcare, Slalom Consulting – recite poetry to me from the House of Blues stage. Never did I think healthcare IT buzzwords could sound so lyrical. Until tomorrow …

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Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Lt. Dan.
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From HIMSS 2/29/16

I shouldn’t really title this post “From HIMSS” since I’ve done nothing conference-related today and have no plans to. Finally I’ve cracked the code that has eluded me so long on how to enjoy HIMSS – stay away from the fray as much as possible.

I mentioned that I rented a large, luxurious house for $200 per day and filled it with family and friends (all female) helping out with HIStalkapalooza tonight. Two of them are in their 20s and another is in her teens, so they’ve had a blast hanging out in the pool and hot tub, playing music and giggling. They weren’t impressed with the Strip, so last night we took them to the real Las Vegas – downtown around Fremont Street.

I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun. I chose for us the old-school $9.99 prime rib dinner at the California Hotel, which was just fine and even included a great salad bar. One of the girls decided to treat us to a bottle of wine and the barely English-speaking cocktail waitress brought back an alarming 1.5 liter bottle of Cabernet (equivalent to two normal bottles). I tactfully offered to pay since I was afraid it might be an unexpected $120 budget-buster for our young friend, but it was actually only $38.

Then we spent a couple of hours at the Fremont Street Experience enjoying the cover bands on stage (one Beatles, one rock), watching the zip line riders flying overhead, and drinking beer in the street. The girls had a ball posing for pictures with street performers. The neon alone is worth the trip. The top-rated Las Vegas restaurant on Tripadvisor is Andiamo Steakhouse in the the D hotel and Hugo’s Cellar in the Four Queens isn’t far behind – both are in that area. The Strip is like a sterile mall whose every feature is designed to extract cash elegantly from wallets, while downtown is a formerly decrepit but now quirky business district that has roared back to life.

Tonight the girls get to dress up in their Rent the Runway dresses and help out with HIStalkapalooza. They have been excited for days.

This morning everybody except me headed over to the convention center to pass out the booth signs I had made for sponsors who wanted to display them. Then they’ll head over to House of Blues to make sure they are ready for tonight’s HIStalkapalooza. I ate leftover pizza for breakfast and hit the hot tub. I just noticed that my cheap Timex watch didn’t recognize that it’s Leap Day, so I almost dated this post as 3/1/16.

I’ll catch up on a few news item to lighten my load tomorrow since I’ll be tired after being out late tonight.

Divurgent hires Bert Reese (Sentara) as VP of portfolio management and innovation.

Epic signs an agreement to give its users access to Tableau Software-powered analytics dashboards and workbooks.

Healthwise integrates its patient education content and tools with Salesforce Health Cloud.

UPMC takes a majority position in MedCPU, will lead a new $35 million funding round, and will become a MedCPU customer. 

EClinicalWorks will implement inpatient software systems in up to 300 hospitals in India. I didn’t realize that its main business there is inpatient software, which might explain the company’s recently announced plans to develop inpatient software for the US market.

Health Catalyst raises another $70 million in a Series E funding round co-led by Norwest Venture Partners and UPMC, increasing its total to $222 million.

From HIMSS 2/28/16

Hello from Las Vegas. I always skip the usual HIStalk format during the HIMSS conference, focusing on what I see or hear directly for the most part. I’m holding off mentioning all but the most significant vendor announcements until next week because I don’t have the time or interest to wade through the glut of press releases that companies unwisely held until this week while everyone is too busy to care.

The weather continues to be great in Lost Wages, so folks coming to the conference from cooler climes are going to love it. The trees and grass are green, the sky is blue, and the restaurant patios are perfect for a leisurely lunch. Until Tuesday, that is, when the area is overrun with pasty-skinned, tote bag-slinging HIMSS attendees determined to glad-hand their way out of winter and get in your way at every opportunity.

Here’s a tip if you need to drive to the Sands Expo for exhibit setup or some other reason – use the Palazzo parking garage and self park (don’t valet unless you want to wait to retrieve your car), which has a very busy entrance on Las Vegas Blvd. and less-busy one off Sands. It’s the best parking garage in Las Vegas with 4,000 spots, it’s free, and the escalator will take you right to the casino, from which it’s a short walk to the hall. Also, Uber finally beat the Las Vegas taxi lobby, so there’s that.

Here’s another tip. Just a few hundred yards down the street from the convention center across from the Wynn is Fashion Show Mall, which doesn’t look big, but has 250 stores and restaurants. If you rip your pants or realize you forgot your socks, there’s a Macy’s as well as a lot of higher-end stores right there (even an Apple Store). Good chain restaurant choices there that I can vouch for are Maggiano’s, Kona Grill, and RA Sushi.

I snapped this photo in the conference center hall. It looks as though HIMSS has just over 60 corporate supporters, of which I note that at least 15 are also HIStalk sponsors (my iPhone picture isn’t quite clear enough to read every logo).

I’m impressed every year that HIMSS sells ads on nearly every square inch of available convention center real estate – walls, escalators, tabletops, and even on the floors. Here’s my business model for the only space they missed in the Sands (above): I propose to replace that ho-hum artwork above the urinals with vendor ads. In addition, I will hire someone just to stay in the restroom all day, and once a HIMSS attendee has settled in at his chosen spot, my lackey will sidle up behind him and announce in his ear, “Hi, I’d like to just say a couple of words about your restroom sponsor ABC Tech, which is in Booth #9999. Don’t stop what you’re doing – I’m just going to slip their business card into your pocket. Excuse me if we don’t shake hands.” When he’s not busy, my man will also slip printed collateral under the door of occupied stalls. Talk about your captive audience. It reminds me of the HIMSS conference a few years ago when a vendor brilliantly placed ad-imprinted drain screens in all the urinals, at least until they got busted by HIMSS.

I look forward to only two things about the HIMSS conference: the Hyland magician and MedData’s scones. I had heard previously that the latter might be threatened by Sands Expo rules prohibiting baking in booths (can you imagine?) I was horrified to see actual evidence of this – the MedData booth contains no scone-baking apparatus. If the magician is a no-show, I’m going home.

All of us exhibitors were doing setup today, with the exhibit hall acres covered with palletized equipment, plastic-covered carpet, yet-to-be installed signs and furniture, a few blue-jeaned vendor employees, and leisurely Freeman people with drills and ladders. We carted in our mighty HIStalk exhibit today, which involves two roll-up signs, a tablecloth, and a banner, weighing maybe 20 pounds total. It all fits into a single duffel bag. We have little to give away, nothing to sell, and no real reason to even be back in Booth #5069 by the freight door other than to give our fellow outcasts a place to call home among the multi-storied, fluorescent sterility.

I always ponder as I walk through the Las Vegas hotel equivalent of a mall food court littered with cookie-cutter restaurants bearing celebrity chef names: have those big-name cooks ever actually set foot in the place? My suspicion is that they just license their name out to some dull restaurant chain operator, take their cash, and move on to their next venture. I picture the Venetian having one giant commissary kitchen that makes all the food for every individually branded restaurant using corporate-approved formulas and quality control, with the “chefs” given about as much creative freedom as they would have packaging airline meals or prison food. That’s one more way Las Vegas seems like Orlando to me other than they’re the only two cities hosting HIMSS conferences in the future – unsophisticated visitors can’t wait to try all the chain restaurants they don’t have back home.

Bands coming to town this week that I wouldn’t mind seeing are Iron Maiden, Metric, and Gin Blossoms. 

We’re giving away these first aid kits from Arcadia Healthcare Solutions in our booth. If the HIMSS conference gives you a headache, heartburn, foot blisters, or sticky hands (how could it not?), you’ll want one. Arcadia will have them in their booth, too. I snagged a couple of them last year and they’re very handy both during and after the conference.

From Former Bruin: “Re: City of Hope Medical Center (CA). Specializing in oncology treatment. Switching from Allscripts to Epic.” Unverified.

From The Oracle of Alpharetta: “Re: McKesson. All signs point to McKesson EIS to be in Stage 1 Shutdown Mode. Customers continue to leave for other vendors. Horizon conversions to Paragon are at a trickle. InSight users group attendance was abysmal. Customers are angry. EIS senior management have no healthcare experience, but they do have expertise in valuation and slimming down businesses prior to dissolving them. Large RIF likely coming in March. Development and QA rapidly shifting to third-party, offshore workers to reduce headcount and severance and bonus liabilities. Constant reorgs in Alpharetta, Charlotte, and Westminster. MCK will focus on its roots: pharma and med/surg distribution. HIT was fun while it lasted.” Unverified.

Ireland-based Oneview Health plans to go public on the Australian stock market, valuing the company at $200 million.

Next up: HIStalkapalooza. I’ll probably post a brief recap and some pictures Monday night. Safe travels.

Monday Morning Update 2/29/16

Top News

From the transcript of President Obama’s remarks Thursday about the White House’s Precision Medicine Initiative:

Part of the problem with have right now is that every patient’s data is siloed — it’s in a hospital here, a hospital there, a doctor here, a lab there. The goal here is if we can pool and create a common database of ultimately a million people that’s diverse so that they have a lot of genetic variation, we can now take a disease that may be relatively rare, but because we have a pretty large sample size and start seeing patterns that we might not have seen before. But a couple things that requires — it requires, first of all, us understanding who owns the data. I would like to think that if somebody does a test on me or my genes, that that’s mine, but that’s not always how we define these issues …

In terms of the model that we use for health records that hopefully will be digitized more and more, companies help hospitals keep and collect that data. They should get paid for that. They’re building software. They’re building an infrastructure. On the other hand, we don’t want that data just trapped. So if I am sick and voluntarily I want to join with other people who have a similar disease to mine and donate our data to help accelerate cures, I’ve got to be able to work with the electronic health record companies to make sure that I can do that easily. There may be some commercial resistance to that that we have to talk about — although we’re seeing some terrific participation now, and that’s part of what we’re announcing, of those companies in terms of helping that happen.

There’s privacy issues. We’ve got to figure out how do we make sure that if I donate my data to this big pool that it’s not going to be misused, that it’s not going to be commercialized in some way that I don’t know about. We’ve got to set up a series of structures that make me confident that if I’m making that contribution to science that I’m not going to end up getting a bunch of spam targeting people who have a particular disease I may have. 

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Reader Comments

From Sitz Bath: “Re: your Epic report. How many people downloaded it?” About 1,200 that I know of, but the Politico people messed me up by publishing a direct link that avoided the sign-up page I had created to keep count. You can download it here.

From CMIOmaha: “Re: your Epic report. Much appreciate the amazing summary on Epic. The most objective and down to earth summary I’ve ever seen. I downloaded it this morning and shared with all our C-level with an immediate and incredible feedback! I wish you’d do the same with Cerner.” Maybe it would be interesting to ask the same questions to the executives of Cerner users. Peer60 did all the heavy lifting via their market feedback platform, so it wouldn’t take much of my time.

From HIMSS PR: “Re: Greenway Health. Second staff reduction in the past six weeks. Sales leadership and enterprise sales team taken out. Not the best PR heading into HIMSS.” Unverified. 

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HIStalk Announcements and Requests

 

I’m writing this Saturday from Las Vegas, where it’s sunny and warm. I rented a huge, luxurious house five minutes off the Strip for $200 per night and it’s filled with friends and family (all female, I just realized) who are helping with HIStalkapalooza. We have a heated pool and hot tub in our outdoor oasis, so last night it was pizza and this afternoon I’m grilling hamburgers and hot dogs poolside. I fell asleep last night to the gurgling of the hot tub’s waterfall outside after catching up on emails on the 25-megabit Wi-Fi (take that, crappy hotel Internet made worse by guests streaming Netflix and porn). It’s nice to be able to relax before the madness starts Monday, not to mention that I’m saving a fortune in hotel and restaurant bills. I should hang the HIStalk booth banner over the garage door.

I’m not sure when I’ll post over the next couple of days. Certainly Monday night after HIStalkapalooza (which means I won’t sleep much before a long Tuesday), but maybe Sunday if anything interesting happens.

Here’s your Las Vegas weather forecast. Trust me, it’s probably nicer here than wherever you’re coming from.

I was amused that the marketing manager of a vendor I highlighted as misspelling HIMSS on their site emailed me to accuse me of Photoshopping the screen shot, saying they had spelled it correctly. However, the sneaky alterations were on their end – they took down the page with the misspelling and posted a new one, perhaps not realizing that I could simply email them a link to Google’s cached image of the original page to prove my point. Doh!

The results of the reader-requested poll of health systems allowing the use of test patients in production systems are as follows:

• 15 percent say they never allow it
• 46 percent they allow it under strict conditions
• 30 percent they allow it as needed within reason
• 9 percent say they allow it without restriction

Concerns listed by respondents include the possibility of dropping real charges, the downstream effects on interfaced systems, and inadvertent printing of documents (I’ve seen all of these). 

Two-thirds of poll respondents say IBM Watson Health is just hype. MEHIS Expert says it’s just an IBM ploy to increase consulting revenue, while HackerDoc questions whether IBM has the right medical informatics physicians with computer science backgrounds involved. Hype provided thoughtful analysis:

It’s beyond hype. They have now officially taken what was a brilliant branding strategy (personifying the intangible and making it both relatable and revolutionary sounding) and turned it into pure silliness. The Phytel acquisition last year was when my red flags were raised being that pop health is still just a buzzword, vapor and yet to be proven, but this addition just confirms that IBM is just trying to over-PR their revenue shell game. What is funny is that Truven began as the mixed bag business unit of Thomson Reuters after they went on a silly publishing buying binge while the publishing world was crashing (PDR, Micromedex, etc.). Thomson couldn’t find a way to blend those brands well into their financial and media strategies and spun them off, which resulted in Truven. How IBM is going to find a better fit for these brands that were too out-of-date for an old publishing co company is beyond my logical understanding. It makes me speculate that IBM may want to closely observe what is currently happening to Xerox. Bottom line, I no longer view Watson with the shock-and- awe wonderment that I once did.

New poll to your right or here: will EClinicalWorks and Athenahealth become major inpatient system vendors?

Here’s where Lorre will be spending the week – Booth #5069, with those other companies around us hopefully being OK with the significant traffic of interesting people we bring to an otherwise undistinguished location right next to an area labeled “Chain Link Fence – Storage.” I’m not sure I really get $5,000 worth of value from a 10×10 booth, but I’ll feel better about spending the money if everybody at least drops by to say hello.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold sponsor Ellis & Adams. The Austin-based research and consulting firm offers IT strategic planning, project management, Lean workflow design, cost analysis, and data science services. Co-founder Don Ellis, MBA, MPH has a long industry history working for both providers and vendors; co-founder Jeff Adams, MBA spent a lot of time as a healthcare CTO; and partner Bill Blewitt has spent his whole career in healthcare IT. The company just published a description of its EHR optimization work with Dameron Hospital (CA). Thanks to Ellis & Adams for supporting HIStalk.

Healthcare IT Leaders donated $1,000 to DonorsChoose to attend my CIO lunch this week, which I used (along with third-party matching money) to fully fund these teacher grant requests while sitting by the pool:

• Programmable robots for the media center of Ms. Becote’s elementary school in Florence, SC.
• Physics learning kits for Ms. Stuckeman’s middle school science and math club in Fort Worth, TX.
• Math games for Mrs. Wolfe’s fifth grade class in Little River, SC.
• Programmable robots for Mrs. Marinin’s elementary school classes in Green Bay, WI (she is targeting females, hoping to expose them to careers in to computer science).
• A maker space (programmable robots, invention kits, kinetic sand, and a duct tape creation kit) for the library of Ms. Harrison’s elementary school in San Juan, TX.
• Six Amazon Fire tablets for the gifted elementary school classes of Mrs. Evans in Orlando, FL.

 

Mrs. Newman reports on the STEM activity kits we gave her Indiana second graders by funding her DonorsChoose grant request: “Thanks to you, my students are benefiting more from discovery learning as opposed to teacher led instruction. With team work, they are working collaboratively building roller coasters to learn more about gravity. They are also reading instructions on how to incorporate levers and pulleys into their creations. It is so exciting to watch them in action! Your help in providing these amazing STEM materials has been appreciated by my students, parents, and myself. Thank you very much!”

Also checking in is special education teacher Mrs. Allen from South Carolina, who reports, “My students were so excited when they came back from Christmas break to new headphones! They actually want to use the computers now … They have begun taking pride in our computer center and want the computers to look neat … I had no idea that something as simple as headphones could make such a difference in the attitudes of my students.”

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Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• The White House announces commitments from vendors and providers to support its Precision Medicine Initiative, most of them involving patient-contributed research data, patient access to their own data, and interoperability. 
• HIMSS announces the retirement of two EVPs, John Hoyt and Norris Orms.
• ResMed announces that it will acquire Brightree for $800 million.
• EClinical Works announces plans to develop an inpatient EHR.
• England’s Royal Berkshire Hospital cancels surgeries when its Windows XP pathology systems are taken down by malware.

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Webinars

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

We’re running a HIMSS special on webinars. Contact Lorre or see her at our booth #5069 (don’t blink or you’ll miss it).

Here’s the recording of Thursday’s webinar, “Analytics For Population Health: Straddling Two Worlds.” 

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People

XG Health Solutions promotes Mike Bertrand to CTO.

Cerner reassigns John Glaser to SVP of population health. I’m not a fan of the title since “population health” is not at all the same as “population health management,” which in turn is not at all the same as “population health management software.” Despite his new title, John isn’t responsible for the health of any population other than his own.

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Sponsor Updates

• Whirl Magazine features TeleTracking’s volunteer activities in its March issue.
• Validic publishes a new white paper, “The Unprecedented Convergence of Healthcare and Technology.”
• The local news covers the opening of Versus Technology client University of Minnesota’s Health Clinic and Surgery Center.
• Voalte publishes a case study featuring Frisbie Memorial Hospital (NH).
• Leadership Excellence recognizes PerfectServe Vice President of Human Capital as a Top Corporate Leader in the over 35 category.
• PeriGen releases a new eBook, “A Vision of the Future of Obstetrics.”

Blog Posts

• Bundled Payments Gather Momentum (Verisk Health)
• How to have a ‘Hack’ of a good HIMSS (NextGen)
• 3 Important Things to Know Before Attending HIMSS16 (VitalWare)
• Is Your Organization Making the Right Investments for Your Successful Transition to Value-based Care? (ZeOmega)
• As Healthcare Data Expands, So Does Security (Xerox Healthcare)
• Lessons of Mercy (PatientKeeper)
• Guide to Evaluating ROI of Secure Texting Apps (PracticeUnite)
• How to Make the Best of CMS Payment Incentives (PMD)
• I-Stop? Maybe Not. (Point-of-Care Partners)
• Top Three Insights from the HL7 FHIR Connectathon (RelayHealth)
• Value-based Analysis: Leveraging Clinical & Financial Data (Streamline Health)

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Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Lt. Dan.
More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 2/26/16

Top News

The White House announces several commitments to its Precision Medicine Initiative call to action, including:

• The Advisory Board Company will create APIs for up to five pilot sites interested in building FHIR-based applications.
• Allscripts, Athenahealth, Drchrono, Epic, and McKesson will pilot open APIs that will allow patients to contribute their EHR data to research in “Sync for Science” pilot projects.
• The CRISP HIE will enable consumer “data donation” to support research.
• Get My Data will initiate a “virtual march” of consumers via pop culture events, social media, and media campaigns.
• Hackensack University Medical Center will adopt FHIR and open APIs for patient access.
• Intermountain Healthcare will create a patient portal for cancer genomic data.
• Ochsner Health System will expand its wearables data pilots.
• PicnicHealth will publish a guide explaining how consumers can get access to their data and will create a Web-based portal for requesting data from the country’s 500 largest health systems.
• PCORnet will help patients get access to their EHR data and contribute it for research.
• Sage Bionetworks will create a way for study patients to contribute data for research.
• St. Joseph Health will make data from Allscripts and Meditech available through an API and allow patients to see, edit, and contribute their own data.
• Surescripts will give patients participating in the first precision medicine cohort the ability to contribute their medication and health information.
• University of California Health System will give patients tools to download their information from all five of its medical centers and to share the information with providers and researchers. It will also develop a Blue and Gold Button, working with Cisco on a standards-based interoperability platform.
• Validic will give users an opt-in form that will allow them to donate their patient-generated data to researchers.
• Yale New Haven health will give patients access to their full medical record and allow them to share or donate their information.
• New York Genome Center will use IBM Watson to generate cancer insights.
• Inova Health System will create a $100 million precision medicine venture fund.
• UPMC will make its legacy EHR data available to applications and services via a FHIR API.
• University of Arizona Health Sciences will spend $22 million to expand its open-source analytic methods for disease-associated gene expression changes.

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Reader Comments

From Sage on the Stage: “Re: same old HIT problems. Usability, interoperability, and security require addressing socio-technical challenges that start-ups and politicians are reluctant to admit, much less address. For those going to the HIMSS conference, ask vendors the hard questions.” Here’s the list from SOTS:

• Do your system designers observe real clinician users in their busy clinical setting, recording how many errors they make, the problems they have finding data, or workarounds used in providing care to someone’s mother? If you have conducted those observations, what are you doing to correct the problems? If not, do you have any free tee shirts?
• How does your EHR identify patients from disparate organizations, reconcile clinical terminologies, and normalize the clinical and administrative data before importing it and integrating it into your EHR and displaying it to clinicians? If so, can you connect me with a customer using those features? If not, do you have any free golf balls?
• Does your product use two-factor authentication for remote access? How do you ensure that clients have implemented all the appropriate security precautions and most recent application and OS updates? Do you perform announced penetration tests on your clients’ networks and databases?

From Boy Wonder: “Re: HIMSS conference. Today in our company-wide prep meeting we reviewed your ‘booth rules for vendors’ rant from a few years ago … such good content. Hopefully our team members will learn from it and not screw up!” It was a culmination of my life’s work a couple of years ago to capture the fleeting image of every single employee in one vendor’s booth simultaneously tuning out passers-by while obsessing over their phones. I can’t top that, but I will be on the prowl for inhospitable booth behavior that disrespects attendees and robs employers. I would offer to mystery shop for companies interested in my blunt, objective opinion, but I fear I would be overwhelmed with requests.

 
 

 

From Blown Cover: “Re: HIMSS spelling. It’s crazy after decades that people in the industry don’t know the difference between HIMSS and HIMMS. Come on, people – get it together!” Googling “HIMSS16” gives 5,410 results, while searching for just “HIMMS” returns  577,000 results. Even hashtag “#HIMMS16# “ turns up usage by tweeters like CHCF Innovations, Carestream, GetMyHealthData, CSC Health, and Cylance. You might find this startling lack of attention to detail is concerning given that, by definition, it involves companies offering patient-impacting technology products.

From Gone Guy: “Re: HIMSS and SIIM. Last time I checked they dealt in the digital world.” The stock photography doctor not only is peering intently at a now-antiquated film, she’s got a giant, turquoise syringe handy should she feel the need to inject something unsterile into someone. I can only imagine how often the HIMSS-SIIM Enterprise Imaging Workgroup’s name will be mangled into HIMMS-SIMM.

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HIStalk Announcements and Requests

 

We provided an Osmo learning system in funding the DonorsChoose grant request from Ms. Murphy in Wisconsin, who emailed, “As you look around the room when students are using these materials, you can see the excitement on their faces, how highly engaged they are in the math, and the social skills that are being developed. You can hear mathematics vocabulary being used in their discussions and how they work together to solve problems, whether they are academic or social.”

 

We also provided math picture books for Ms. Schmidt’s Indiana kindergarten class, which she says are so popular that the kids are reading them outside of their math workshop sessions.

This week on HIStalk Practice: The US Oncology Network and McKesson Specialty Health help oncologists move to value-based payment models. Family Health Care of Siouxland sees success in depression screening with new check-in tablets. : Andy Slavitt addresses physician burden, MACRA next steps at AMA conference. MBS/Net merges with Medsphere. KP Northwest enters the standalone – and telemedicine-friendly – clinic market in Portland. Georgia rolls out HIV telemedicine program at its public health clinics.

This week on HIStalk Connect: Fitbit shares fall 20 percent on low Q1 earnings and revenue guidance. Insurance startup Oscar Health raises a $400 million private equity round to expand its geographical footprint. Crisis Text Line releases a dataset containing more than 13 million de-identified text messages between its crisis counselors and teens that use the service. Opternative raises $6 million to ramp up its online eye exam business.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Ability Network. The Minneapolis-based company has for 20 years been helping providers and payers simplify the administrative and clinical complexities of healthcare through innovative applications and data analytics. It has helped hundreds of health IT vendors connect to Medicare and commercial payers, giving easy EDI payer access and embedding eligibility and claims management directly into the vendor’s software. Hospitals can take advantage of platforms for Medicare billing management, FISS/DDE connectivity, all-payer eligibility and claims, and Medicare claims submission and remittance advice. The company has grown tremendously, fueled by over $500 million in capital investment and several notable acquisitions, the most recent being Thursday’s acquisition of RCM and analytics services vendor G4 Health Systems. Industry long-timer, pharmacist, and former McKesson President and CEO Mark Pulido is Ability’s CEO and board chair. Thanks to Ability Network for supporting HIStalk.

 

The folks at Peer60 helped me survey C-level executives from Epic-using organizations to create a free report, “Epic: the cold hard facts.” I came up with questions I always wanted to ask Epic sites. Are provider executives willing to speak up if they find Epic-related issues that could impact patient safety? Does Epic provide competitive advantage? Do Epic-using CIOs prefer Epic sites when looking for a new job? Did Epic go in on budget and do CFOs think it’s worth the cost? Are customers happy with Epic’s interoperability? It’s a free download – the form asks for basic information just for my use in understanding who is reading it, but you can enter dummy data if you aren’t comfortable sharing with me. It’s been crazy trying to get this finished during all the HIMSS hoopla and I’ve already noticed that I made a couple of aggravating minor typos, so forgive me for those. Free really is free: there’s no advertising, no charging vendors for copies, and no behind-the-scenes selling of data. Thanks to the provider executives who participated.

I’m heading to Las Vegas early this weekend, just to get settled in before the wave of HIT immigrants overwhelms the baggage carousels, taxi lines, and check-in desks. Nothing really happens until Monday, so I’m hoping to finally take a breath and get into HIMSS mode after a way too busy February.

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Webinars

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

We’re running a HIMSS special on webinars – 25 percent off produced and two-for-one on promoted. Contact Lorre or see her at our booth next week.

Here’s this week’s webinar, sponsored by LifeImage, titled, “Completing Your EMR with a Medical Image Sharing Strategy.”

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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Google’s DeepMind Technologies forms DeepMind Health, offering two apps it acquired. Streams, for acute kidney injury detection, was developed by Royal Free Hospital London, while clinical task management  and communication app Hark was created by an Imperial College London team. Neither app uses DeepMind’s machine learning or artificial intelligence capabilities – these are apparently simple, hospital-built apps that don’t do a whole lot despite the Tweeters wetting their pants in anticipation of Google mounting an undeclared challenge to IBM Watson.

E-prescribing and electronic prior authorization network vendor CenterX raises $3.3 million in funding.

UPMC makes an unspecified investment in Vivify Health and will implement its care management and patient engagement technology. UPMC’s investment completes a round that was started in November 2014, increasing the company’s total to $23.4 million.

Meditech solutions provider Park Place International will rename itself CloudWave. 

Minneapolis-based employee health benefits management technology startup Gravie lays off 21 employees – 25 percent of its workforce, with CEO Abir Sen explaining, “It’s a bad market out there and we need to invest in growth.” Crunchbase reports that the company has raised $25.6 million, with its last round of $12.5 million being completed in April 2015.

VitalWare receives an unspecified growth investment from F-Prime Capital Partners, which gets two board seats.

Medsphere merges with EHR implementation consulting firm MBS/Net.

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Sales

The State of Oklahoma chooses Orion Health’s Healthier Populations Solutions Suite for Health-e Oklahoma.

Mission Health (NC) selects PeraHealth’s clinical surveillance solution.

Maine Medical Center (ME) chooses Lexmark’s accounts payable automation, which includes Perceptive Intelligent Capture and Perceptive Content.

University of Kansas Hospital (KS) selects Cerner’s HealthIntent population health management system. I was distracted by the press release’s use of two pompous substitutions (“leverage” and “utilize”) for the perfectly serviceable “use,” but I’ll give them a bye for whipping out “proactive” a couple of times, which is two too many.

Intermountain Healthcare will use Ayasdi’s clinical variation management software.

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People

LifeImage promotes Jim Phillips to SVP.

Orion Health prometes Wayne Oxenham to president of its North America operations.

Huron Consulting Group hires LaDonna Sweeten (Leidos Health) as managing director.

PatientSafe Solutions promotes co-founder Si Luo to president and CEO.

  

HIMSS announces pre-conference organizational changes: HIMSS Analytics EVP John Hoyt retires, Blain Newton is promoted to replace Hoyt, and HIMSS EVP/COO R. Norris Orms announces his retirement.

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Announcements and Implementations

Catalyze announces Stratum, a compliance layer for healthcare infrastructure.

Aprima adds Chronic Care Management functionality to its EHR.

American Well releases a software development kit that allows providers to embed the company’s online doctor visit technology into their mobile apps.

LogicStream Health adds an executive overview area to its clinical process measurement platform, allowing leaders to monitor care activity at levels ranging from specific conditions (such as CAUTI or VTE) to overall quality.

CHIME announces a “unique partnership” with OpenNotes, with the press release babbling endlessly without actually saying what the partnership involves until Paragraph 7, which finally gets to the point in explaining that CHIME’s task is to “bring greater awareness.”

First Databank announces its OrderSpace CPOE medication ordering content system, with McKesson Paragon being the first inpatient system to make it available to users.

Geisinger spinoff xG Health Solutions will use Cerner’s HealtheIntent population health management platform, while Cerner will use xG’s clinical content in its HealtheCare and HealtheAnalytics solutions.

The Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety releases Toolkit for the Safe Use of Copy and Paste.

Elsevier lists its activities at the HIMSS conference, including serving as the red carpet sponsor of HIStalkapalooza. I’ve worn  the sunglasses they provided last year in Chicago countless times while running, sunning, or doing yard work — I call them my Elsevier safety glasses.

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Government and Politics

ONC announces its Interoperability Proving Ground, a community for sharing information about interoperability projects.

The National Institutes of Health says during Thursday’s White House summit on precision medicine that it hopes to be gathering data on 1 million people by 2019, also announcing that it will fund a Vanderbilt University study involving Verily (the former Google Life Sciences) to determine how to attract those volunteers.

Army veteran Dennis Magnasco spent two days trying to schedule an appointment with the VA clinic in Bedford, MA, but could never get through the phone tree to reach an actual human. He works for Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), who filmed Magnasco’s attempt and posted it to Facebook, where it received more than 2 million views. The outcry motivated the Bedford clinic to fix its PBX and earned Moulton several new sponsors for his Faster Care for Veterans bill that would require the VA to run an 18-month pilot project in which veterans can self-schedule using a smartphone app. Moulton criticized the VA’s plan: “They were planning to spend $623 million developing their own app. This is available today. God knows how long it would take them to spend that.” He says the VA just likes building its own proprietary systems, adding, “They gave a variety of silly excuses.”

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Privacy and Security

A law professor’s USA Today op-ed piece that appears to be satirical proposes going back to paper to thwart hackers, explaining:

The truth is, paper records are inherently more secure. To steal 10 million electronic user records from a government agency, all you might need is a cracked password and a thumb drive. To steal that many records on paper, you’d need a fleet of trucks and an uninterrupted month. And ransomware wouldn’t work on paper records. What would you do – put a padlock on the file cabinets and demand ransom for the key? And often, putting things on computers is a crock anyway. Electronic medical records, touted as saving money and streamlining care, are a major cause of physician burnout. It’s gotten so bad that some hospitals actually advertise the lack of electronic medical record systems as a selling point in recruiting doctors. If I were running an intelligence agency, I’d have all my important stuff done in handwriting or on mechanical typewriters and distributed in sealed envelopes. If I were setting up a voting system, I’d use paper ballots. And if I were running a hospital, I’d seriously consider doing everything on paper. There’s a place for computer records, of course. But for things that really matter and that need to be genuinely secure, we should try a more advanced technology: Paper and ink. Take that, hackers.

A Venafi survey finds that CIOs are not properly managing security keys and certificates. You will no doubt be shocked to learn that Venafi sells tools to secure keys and certificates. The survey suggests that more hackers are attacking using untrusted keys and certificates that can be bought on the black market for around $1,000 to encrypt their evil-doing traffic.

Pro football player Jason Pierre-Paul sues ESPN and one of its reporters for violating his privacy in running a photo of a surgery schedule proving that he had blown off a finger playing with fireworks on July 4, 2015. Jackson Memorial Hospital (FL) fired a nurse and a secretary earlier this month for sending the information to ESPN. JPP is suing under a Florida health professions regulation, which seems to hold little chance for legal victory since, like HIPAA, it covers providers but not sports networks running celebrity news.

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Technology

Apple sold 11.6 million Watches in 2015, placing it in wearables third place behind Fitbit and Xiaomi. I knew little about China-based Xiaomi, but learned that its $15 Band Plus Pulse (pictured above) added a heart monitor to its existing step counting, sleep analysis, incoming call alert, and integration with the iOS Health app.

NHS England Nursing Technology Fund provides Princess Alexandra Hospital with $1.4 million to purchase Nervecentre’s mobile clinical platform software for iPad-based documentation.

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Other

An analysis of LinkedIn’s share free-fall says the company’s problems are fundamental to its business model as somewhere between business card holder and spam delivery service: its only content is generated by self-promoting but sporadic users (often only when they’re looking for work) who are then pestered endlessly by recruiters. The article says LinkedIn should stop rewarding bad user behavior, allow users to block unwanted communications, and integrate better with email.

A Pennsylvania VA nurse is charged with assisting in an emergency surgery while drunk. The nurse, who says he forgot he was on call, drove recklessly from a casino bar and was caught on hospital security video stumbling into the facility. He then had problems logging in to the OR computer and documenting the procedure.

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Sponsor Updates

• The Atlanta Business Chronicle interviews Liaison Technologies President and CEO Bob Renner.
• Allscripts announces that its APIs have been used to exchange data one billion times in three years.
• HCI Group partners with Securonix to enhance its security offerings.
• Extension Healthcare will add AirStrip’s mobility platform to its Engage Mobile, providing event notifications and waveforms 

Blog Posts

• Are You Ready to Explore a New Dimension at HIMSS16? (Medicity)
• How Can You Defend Against Cyber Vigilantes? (ID Experts)
• Protecting Against Ransomware (Impact Advisors)
• Understanding Your Customer’s Stage in Their Healthcare Journey (Influence Health)
• The Network Effect is Coming to Healthcare (Ingenious Med)
• Healthcare Providers’ Population  Health Challenges in Managing Risk and Moving to Value-Based Care (Forward Health Group)
• Three Opportunities to Enhance Payment Security at Your Practice (InstaMed)
• The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Medicine (MedAptus)
• Eight Steps for Improving Patient Collections (Navicure)
• Tips for your Epic phases of care implementation (Nordic)
• Future of Interoperability (NVoq)
• Destination HIMSS16 – 7 Things to Know Before you Go (Oneview Healthcare)

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Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Lt. Dan.
More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 2/24/16

Top News

Sleep apnea technology vendor ResMed will acquire home health and durable medical equipment billing software vendor Brightree for $800 million in cash. ResMed, which also gets a $300 million tax benefit, will pay seven times revenue and 19 times earnings for Brightree.

Battery Ventures was an early Brightree investor and expanded the company with several acquisitions. It announced in December that it was exploring a sale of the company.

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Reader Comments

From Pointed Commentary: “Re: Practice Fusion. Tough times, per the Wall Street Journal. While the article doesn’t focus specifically on health IT, I believe the current investment environment will be brutal on startups and companies working to scale. I predict we are going to see accelerated consolidation of the space and private equity players are going to have a field day picking up companies that are struggling.” The article, titled “For Silicon Valley, the hangover begins,” gives Practice Fusion as its opening example of venture capital drying up and forcing cash-challenged companies to frantically change their business before their financial runway ends. That isn’t really surprising — it’s the usual cycle where innovative startups strike amazing business gold, the VC money flows in indiscriminately chasing the Next Big Thing before it takes someone else’s cash, and flawed startups ruin the party by going up in flames fueled by the money investors poured into them. It’s a cruel but necessary Darwinian process.

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HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor ECG Management Consultants. The Seattle-based, healthcare-only, full-service management consulting firm has offices in eight US cities. Its technology practice supports achievement of strategic, financial, and operational goals. The company has industry-leading expertise in system strategy, selection, implementation, and optimization, with a particularly notable history of helping ambulatory clinics improve their operations via technology, revenue cycle, and EHR systems. The company just announced formation of its bundled payments practice. Give their Value-Based Readiness Quiz a try or scroll through its impressive list of experts. Thanks to ECG Management Consultants for supporting HIStalk.

I found this ECG Management Consultants intro video on YouTube.

 

Ms. Stitt from North Carolina says her second graders were so excited when our DonorsChoose package came with a library of books that they insisted she immediately read one of their new volumes, voting to skip recess.

 

Also checking in was Ms. Tyler from California, whose Algebra 2 students are enjoying the eight scientific calculators we provided for students who can’t afford to buy their own.

CenterX donated $1,000 to DonorsChoose to attend my CIO lunch at the HIMSS conference next Wednesday, which funded these projects:

• A programmable robotics kit for Mrs. Buchanan’s K-5 technology classes in Fort Mill, SC.
• Electrical components for a student-led project at Ms. Read’s all-girls school in Austin, TX.
• Eight motorized robot kits for the third-grade class of Mrs. Cespedes in Arcadia, FL.
• Pizza gift cards to feed the after-school robotics team and their college engineering student advisors of Mr. Chen’s high school in Boston, MA. The student who is leading this project explains, “We are not trying to use the gift cards to start a feast, but we plan to use it slowly throughout the season. Also, Vivian sees that I, as the coach teacher, often provide my pocket money for getting the team food. As a result, she wants to take the lead to write this student-led project to get food for our team.” They emailed me to say, “Wow! Thank you so much for funding our project! We are writing to confirm with you that we have got the funding from you! We cannot be more excited to know about this! In the near future, we will share some pictures with you on how your donation helps our Robotics program! There are times that we hope that we can go easy on expenditures on food! Your help truly makes a huge difference! We cannot thank you enough for all this!”
• An iPad Mini, case, and headphones for Ms. Alley’s elementary school class in Richmond, VA.
• A 18-book STEM library for Mrs. Ochoa’s elementary school class in Phoenix, AZ.
• A listening center and audio books for Ms. Bolinger’s elementary school class in Indianapolis, IN.

A couple of CIOs had to cancel their plans to attend the lunch. If you are a health system CIO who can spare a couple of hours next Wednesday to socialize and enjoy a delicious lunch (on me) with my donating vendors who are supporting DonorsChoose, contact Lorre.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Audacious Inquiry. The Baltimore-based information policy and technology company helps government, private, and non-profit organizations share, manage, leverage, and protect information. Its implementation of master data management tools for health information exchange set the standard for HIEs throughout the US. Its Encounter Notification Service has securely delivered 10 million real-time event notifications and clinical summaries to patient hospitalization stakeholders in three years and powers FLHIE’s Event Notification Service, DHIN’s Encounter Notification System, UHIN’s cHIE alerts, CRISP’s Encounter Notification System, and HSX’s Encounter Notification Service. Here’s an overview of Audacious Inquiry’s Event Notification Services that I found on YouTube. Thanks to Audacious Inquiry for supporting HIStalk.

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HIMSS Conference

The HIMSS ramp-up in HIStalk page views has started, with 8,700 of them in 6,700 unique visits Monday. The 52-week high is 13,500 page views on the Wednesday of HIMSS15. It would be cool to break the record this year.

I was looking over the HIMSS education schedule, which is indistinguishable from the exhibit hall stage talks given the number of sessions that have been turned over to vendor presenters, some of them using an entire slot just to talk about their products. It’s remarkable how the once-vital educational track has degraded into a lot of lame-sounding sessions presented by people I’ve never heard of. I’m clicking through the awkwardly designed session list on the HIMSS site trying to find something worth the time, but following my rule of never attending anything with a vendor presenter, there’s really not much left. Maybe providers are too busy cruising the exhibit hall for freebies to present.

I get this feeling that once I’m at the conference, I’ll just skip the education sessions and cruise the exhibit hall. The online guide shows 1,285 exhibitor booths, staffed by thousands of bored employees using them as the world’s most expensive telephone booths in screwing around with their phones instead of paying attention to attendees (although I admit that most of those attendees aren’t prospects or decision-makers anyway). I’m feeling sorry for the vendors banished to the downstairs Siberia that is Hall G (Booths # 9900 – 15209), which at HIMSS12 would have had few casualties if a bomb had leveled it. HIMSS must feel bad, too since they’re opening up only Hall G during Monday’s opening reception, giving it a few hours of undivided attention. We’ll be on the main floor in #5069 with our usual parade of interesting people sharing our area rug-sized space.

I doubt I’ll be the only attendee leaving Las Vegas long before Peyton Manning takes the mop-up snap after lunch on Friday to end the lamest set of keynotes I can recall. At least there’s no insurance company executives, Clintons, Bushes, Dana Carvey, or mountain climbers who hacked off their own arm this time around.

I was reading over my HIMSS12 Las Vegas coverage and decided I liked this line I wrote best: “Here’s a shot taken from the Venetian looking out to Las Vegas Boulevard. Inside, it’s a fake canal under a fake sky, women with fake breasts, and men with fake tans. Finally the exhibit hall isn’t the only place where things aren’t as they seem.” I opined that Las Vegas is like Orlando except with obnoxious adults instead of obnoxious kids.

DrFirst will be doing video interviews again at the HIMSS conference in the DrFirst-HIStalk “Roving Reporter” series. Healthcare IT leaders willing to share their experience, challenges, and perspective with their HIStalk-reading colleagues can schedule an interview time with Wendy Johnson.

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HIStalkapalooza

HIStalkapalooza Sponsor Profile – NEC

Being the first enterprise communications technology provider in healthcare, NEC is proud to be part of HIStalk and the dedicated professionals who have grown with us and made this the most exciting, challenging and rewarding vertical industry. Leveraging 65,000 patents and over 100 years, NEC continues to develop healthcare industry-focused applications in communications infrastructure, IT/networking solutions, and award-winning biometrics. Want to learn more about NEC’s mission to orchestrate a brighter world through optimized solutions for healthcare? Follow us @NECHealthcare or #NECHIMSS16 and join our traveling “meet and greet!” We will post our positions to host you for coffee or a libation several times a day throughout HIMSS.

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Webinars

February 24 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Is Big Data a Big Deal … or Not?” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Dale Sanders, EVP of product development, Health Catalyst. Hadoop is the most powerful and popular technology platform for data analysis in the world, but healthcare adoption has been slow. This webinar will cover why healthcare leaders should care about Hadoop, why big data is a bigger deal outside of healthcare, whether we’re missing the IT boat yet again, and how the cloud reduces adoption barriers by commoditizing the skilled labor impact.

February 25 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Clinical Analytics for Population Health: Straddling Two Worlds.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Brian Murphy, lead analyst, Chilmark Research; Jody Ranck, senior analyst, Chilmark Research. The Chilmark Research clinical analytics team will be sharing some of their key findings from the recently released “2016 Clinical Analytics for Population Health Market Trends” report. This will be followed by a Q&A session to make sure everyone goes to HIMSS16 well informed.

We’re running a HIMSS special on webinars – 25 percent off produced and two-for-one on promoted. Contact Lorre or see her at our booth next week.

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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

CTG announces Q4 results: revenue down 14 percent, EPS $0.16 vs. $0.08, beating earnings expectations but falling short on revenue and guiding down.  

Insurance startup Oscar Health receives a $400 million investment that values the company at $2.7 billion, up $1 billion since its last round in September 2015.

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Sales

Northwell Health (NY) chooses SigmaCare’s EHR for its skilled nursing facilities.

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People

Raj Sundaramurthy (Equifax) joins Catalyze as chief product officer.

Huntzinger Management Group hires Ed Fisher (E.L. Fisher Consulting) as practice executive of technical services.

PM/EHR vendor MedEvolve names private equity investor Jim Crook and Jon Phillips (Healthcare Growth Partners, above) to its board.

Tim Zoph (Northwestern Memorial Hospital) joins Impact Advisors as strategic advisor and client executive.

Former Merge Healthcare CEO Justin Dearborn is named CEO of Tribune Publishing, which owns the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and several other newspapers. Merge Healthcare was controlled by Michael Ferro, whose investment company bought a $44 million stake in Tribune Publishing in February. Ferro’s $20 million Merge investment in June 2008 netted $190 million when IBM acquired the company  in October 2015 for $1 billion.

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Announcements and Implementations

St. Clair Hospital (PA) launches a cost transparency portal, powered by Experian Health’s Patient Estimates, that allows patients to determine their estimated out-of-pocket cost for services using actual contracted cost.

EClinicalWorks announces that it will develop a cloud-based, single patient record EHR called EClinicalworks 10i that will span inpatient, ambulatory, and allied health. Tidelands Health (SC) will serve as development partner. The initial release in 2017 will focus on operations modules such as CPOE, bed management, inventory management, ED, surgery, and analytics. The CIO/SVP of Tidelands Health is Todd Rowland, MD, who completed a medical informatics fellowship at Harvard. I believe Tidelands is using Meditech.

Epic will integrate genetics-powered drug ordering clinical decision support from Genelex into its product. Genelex’s YouScript Precision Prescribing software provides alerts if the patient’s genetic profile places them at higher risk for drug-specific adverse events. I see that Genelex will be exhibiting at the HIMSS conference, suggesting that it may be seeking additional EHR partners.

Forward Health Group’s PopulationManager achieves Oracle Validated Integration with Oracle Enterprise Healthcare Analytics.

FormFast announces its Mobile Bedside Consent Solution.

Clinical Architecture launches a natural language processing application for converting free text to discrete data, with the SIFT for Meds Web API service translating free text from clinical documents into RxNorm codes. It can also be used in real time to suggest coding as free text is being entered.

ZeOmega and Vivify Health will integrate their respective population health management and remote patient monitoring technologies.

Zynx Health announces a new release of its Knowledge Analyzer for management of clinical content and documents.

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Government and Politics

ONC announces the ONC Tech Lab that will coordinated interoperability standards, work on testing tools, conduct standards implementation pilots, and run challenge contests.

The Healthcare Leadership Council calls for six immediate steps to improve US healthcare, including setting a firm date of December 31, 2018 for achieving nationwide health IT interoperability.

A Harvard Business Review op-ed piece by David Blumenthal, MD and Aneesh Chopra calls for penalties “for providers and vendors that slow-walk the digital revolution to protect their economic interests” and a payment system that rewards improved quality and cost. It says, “If healthcare markets functioned well in the US, HITECH would have been unnecessary. The industry would have wired itself like our financial, travel, and retail sectors.”

The Wall Street Journal says New York’s hospitals and physicians will struggle to meet the state’s mandatory e-prescribing law that eliminates paper prescriptions as of March 27, 2016. Some providers are demanding an extension to the date that had already been moved back a year.

In Western Australia, the Labor party calls for the resignation of the health minister following an auditor’s report released last week that concluded that a $32 million data center contract has run $58 million over budget. The agreement with Fujitsu was amended 79 times, often by employees who were not authorized to make changes. The case has been referred to the state’s Corruption and Crime Commission.

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Privacy and Security

Dartmouth College researchers announce a commercial prototype of a digital “magic wand” that allows non-technical home users to easily and securely configure new Wi-Fi devices, such as medical monitoring tools.

St. Joseph’s Healthcare (NJ) notifies 5,000 employees that their information has been exposed in a phishing scam.

Child activity tracker uKnowKids announces that its database was breached by a white hat hacker who was trying to convince the company that its security systems were inadequate, exposing 6.8 million text messages, 1.8 million images, and the names and addresses of its young users.

Office of Personnel Management CIO Donna Seymour resigns two days before she is scheduled to face a House committee on the massive China-based theft of government personnel records last year. OPM’s OIG warned the office that the systems were insecure and therefore operating illegally, but Seymour overrode those concerns.

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Innovation and Research

A small study funded by the Gates Foundation finds that fingerprick-drawn blood can give wildly different hematology results compared to venipuncture due to significant drop-by-drop variability. This could be important for point-of-care hospital testing and certainly adds another question mark to the nanotainer draws used by Theranos.

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Technology

Google announces a Watson-like service called Cloud Vision API, which will generate insight from images. It can detect common objects, analyze the emotional attributes of people in the photos, and extract text using optical character recognition. Pricing is $2 per 1,000 images for label detection and $0.60 for 1,000 images for OCR.

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Other

A man’s lawsuit against the nursing home in which his mother was killed by her roommate will test the legal validity of the arbitration clauses nursing homes insert into their contracts. Judges have consistently ruled that the clauses, which are also common in cell phone and credit card contracts, are binding if signed by the purchaser, even in cases where purchaser can’t read or write. The woman’s son argues that the contract he signed was not binding on his mother since he did not have power of attorney.

Alibaba Health shares drop 14 percent when the Chinese government’s version of the FDA decides to allow alternatives to its drug supply chain tracking system, support of which generates half of Alibaba Health’s revenue.

Healthgrades announces its top hospitals for 2016.

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Sponsor Updates

• Awarepoint customer Zion Medical Center (CA) – a Kaiser Permanente organization – wins the IHA 2016 Award for Innovative Healthcare.
• Besler Consulting releases a podcast on the future of bundled payments.
• Bottomline Technologies wins a Killer Content Award in the Agency/Publisher Partnership category from Demand Gen Report. 
• Divurgent publishes a new white paper, “Improving Your ICD-10 Program: Preparing for Oct. 1 2016 & Beyond.”
• CTG Advisory Services delivery directors Vivian Chun and Patricia Newcomb achieve the Patient-Centered Medical Home Certified Content Experts certification from NCQA.
• Extension Healthcare is nominated for a Mira Award honoring the “Best of Tech in Indiana.”
• SK&A publishes a market profile of US orthopedic surgeons.

Blog Posts

• Fight Prescription Drug Abuse with AdvancedEPCS (AdvancedMD)
• Telehealth: the Key to Improving Physician Workflow and Patient Care (AirStrip)
• 3 Things You Need to Know about AirWatch & End User Privacy (AirWatch)
• #HIMSS16 Hacks (Billian’s HealthDATA)
• Strategies for Assessing Readiness for New Healthcare Technology (Burwood Group)
• What is the Natural Language of Healthcare? (Clinical Architecture)
• Nicole’s Trip to Key West: a CoverMyQuest Journey (CoverMyMeds)
• Taking Security Seriously (Spok)
• Automation of the Revenue Cycle (Culbert Healthcare Solutions)
• Casey Bryson: The Man, The Myth, The Legend (Catalyze)
• Driving Revenue through Patient Collections (E-MDs)
• One-on-One with FormFast’s Mobile Bedside Consent Solution Product Manager (FormFast)
• Redefining the Use of Software & Data for Cancer Care Providers (Galen Healthcare Solutions)
• Ignore the Buzzwords – Why a Strategic Approach to Advanced Analytics Provides a Return (Hayes Management Consulting)
• Healthcare Innovation: the Catalysts Driving Change (The HCI Group)

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Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Lt. Dan.
More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Empowering Patient-Centered Care – Will New OCR Guidance be Enough?

We dig into the ramifications of OCR’s new clarifications on patient access to PHI.
By @JennHIStalk

Since its introduction 20 years ago, HIPAA has come to mean a number of things to a number of people. Patients typically associate it with yet another form to be filled out without reading when visiting the doctor’s office, a vague reassurance via a Notice of Privacy Practices that their PHI will be protected from prying eyes.

Providers, meanwhile, see it as a framework governing security of that same health data – one that seems to have evolved into a rigid set of processes aimed at denying patients their PHI access rights. Business associates and payers likely look upon it with trepidation, wondering if and when their trove of hopefully secure health data will be breached.

What nearly all healthcare stakeholders seem to have forgotten is that HIPAA is also intended to be a means by which patients have clear rights of access to their data, a playbook that providers and patients can rely on to ensure timely delivery of sensitive – and sometimes life-saving – information.

Patient access complaints continue to mount even as the federal government widely publicizes its push for patient-centered and empowered care, a contradiction to be sure. To remedy the situation and send a reminder of what HIPAA is truly about, OCR issued updated guidance last month on how providers can best comply with patient PHI requests in a timely manner that doesn’t burden the patient with delay or expense. But will it be enough to truly turn the tide on an issue that seems to have historically been swept under the rug by both providers and OCR?

The Precision Medicine Push

OCR Deputy Director for Health Information Privacy Deven McGraw is confident the new guidance will bring HIPAA’s patient-empowerment side to light. “We have long wanted to provide additional guidance on this issue,” she explains. “When we began to get more involved in the White House’s effort to create the Precision Medicine Initiative, we could clearly see how the right of the individual to access a copy of her health information and send that information directly to a third party, like a researcher, could be very important. It would be very driven by the individual and their donation of data. The Precision Medicine Initiative really provided a hook to move this access issue up the priority list and get the new guidance out in a timely way.”

McGraw says that it’s been a long time coming, an issue that she has wanted to address from Day One. “The inability to access health information has always been one of the top five categories of complaints that we’ve received,” she explains. “When I interviewed for this position, I said, ‘I really want to work on the access issue,’ and it just so happened that they were thinking along the same lines.”

Understanding the Numbers

The sheer volume of patient access complaints (including Mr. HIStalk’s still-unresolved, six-month-long records request drama) may help explain why OCR has at times been sluggish in enforcing compliance with offending healthcare organizations.

“We get so many complaints that come into our office every year — in the tens of thousands,” says McGraw. “If one-fifth of those are complaints about access, we can’t investigate all of them. We try to deal with many of them by contacting the covered entity and just telling them they have to comply with the rules. I do suspect that often times what the individual or patient ends up getting may not be exactly what they want, and may not follow the letter of the law. Sometimes those people will complain again to our office and we’ll try to follow up, but often times they’ll just give up and take what they received, which is obviously not an ideal situation.”

The Root of the Problem

The access issue seems to stem from a lack of knowledge on the part of patients and a lack of efficient processes on the part of providers. Patient requests for records have historically been treated by providers as unusual occurrences. “It has not been built in as an ordinary function of providing healthcare,” says McGraw. “It’s really been dependent on people asking, and a lot of people didn’t know they had the right to ask. Sometimes they get turned away under the misimpression that HIPAA doesn’t allow them to obtain a copy of their own records, when in fact the truth is the exact opposite.”

McGraw continues, “An entity is required to give an individual a copy of their medical records. There has been a lot of misconception out there about what our rules require in terms of the actions that have to be taken by providers and health plans to respond to individual requests. That’s why we put the guidance out there.”

Because patients have been in the dark about their access rights, providers have in turn not rushed to make the process of delivering PHI efficient. “These processes may be antiquated for a variety of reasons,” says Erin Whaley, a partner at Troutman and Sanders law firm in Arlington, VA. “For instance, some providers still require individuals to deliver a request for access in person so that the individual’s identity can be confirmed. The provider isn’t trying to create a barrier to access. They’re trying to employ a best practice to verify the authenticity of a request.”

“They’ll need to make sure that they provide multiple avenues for an individual to request access, know which electronic formats they are capable of producing above and beyond the standard PDF, and enable various methods for transmitting the responsive information,” she adds. “Developing a new request form with all of this is obviously the first step. To the extent OCR has reviewed forms that it thinks represent the gold standard, it would be helpful to share those with the provider community.”

Getting the Word Out

McGraw and her team at OCR plan to move beyond the new guidance’s initial release with awareness campaigns aimed at trade groups, healthcare organizations, and patients. The office will release more in-depth FAQs into fees and the right of the individual to send their records to a third party within the next several months. It will also reach out to professional associations like AMA to help spread the word.

More consumer-friendly materials are also in the works via a partnership with ONC. “We’ve done some strategic thinking about how we’ll get these patient-centric materials out to people,” McGraw notes. “We’ve been in preliminary contact with other government agencies about how we can piggyback on their community outreach efforts. It’s premature to release any details about that.”

Enforcement is Coming

Enforcement is also a big part of the issue. That seems challenging given OCR’s bottlenecks in even responding to complaints, much less following up with enforcement.

McGraw emphasizes that enforcement isn’t an efficient process, with cases often taking years to resolve. She points to the civil monetary penalty levied against Cignet Health (MD) in 2011 – the only time a provider has been taken to such public task for violating the HIPAA Privacy Rule. Cignet willfully ignored the medical records requests of 41 patients between 2008 and 2009, and then disregarded OCR’s attempts to resolve the situation and subsequent subpoena in the years following. All to the tune of an eventual $4.3 million fine.

“The Cignet case was obviously an egregious one where there was a pattern of non-compliance,” McGraw explains. “It wasn’t just that they were making patients jump through hoops, but that they were refusing to give people copies of their records. Then on top of that, they didn’t cooperate with us. That was a pretty egregious set of circumstances.”

McGraw says OCR will step up enforcement. “Given the new guidance, we’re working with our regional office heads to come up with a strategy for how to step up our enforcement of these access cases. Clearly we’re going to have to pursue more of these. We will start enforcing this more aggressively. When we’re able to put out more details about this, we’ll do so. People shouldn’t put their heads in the sand about this. We’re quite serious.”

But Are Providers Ready?

Whatever the level of enforcement, Whaley believes providers are not ready for the increased scrutiny. “Providers know that OCR is looking to launch Phase 2 of its HIPAA audit program in early 2016 and are making sure that their house is in order in case they’re selected,” she explains. “While individual access is certainly part of HIPAA compliance, providers, for the most part, have been focusing their compliance efforts in other areas. There are still far too many who are not conducting a comprehensive annual risk analysis, or who have never updated their BAAs following the passage of the HIPAA Omnibus Rule. These providers are focusing on closing these gaps and not on their individual access processes. Hopefully, OCR will understand that while the individual access right is not new, there is a lot of new information in the guidance that will take providers time to implement. If providers are making good-faith efforts to respond to requests from individuals for access to their records, hopefully OCR will recognize this.”

Patients are the Decision-Makers

McGraw is enthusiastic about OCR’s efforts to shed more light on the patient access issue, and believes that fewer barriers will ultimately help speed up the road to interoperability and truly patient-centered care. “The role of the HIPAA rules is to create a baseline,” she says. “Nobody can fall below what we require in terms of access, but people can certainly go above and beyond. To be really patient-centered as a healthcare provider, even as a health plan, I think you have to give people the same access to the data that you have in terms of patient care and payment for care. Patients are the ultimate decision-makers for the type of treatment that they want. We have to give them information in order to enable them to make those choices.”

Monday Morning Update 2/22/16

Top News

In England, Royal Berkshire Hospital cancels surgeries after its Windows XP pathology systems are taken down by malware delivered as an email attachment. Australia’s Royal Melbourne Hospital had a similar problem a few weeks ago as malware affected its Windows XP pathology servers.

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Reader Comments

From Red Zone: “Re: Allscripts India. President Nitin Deshpande is leaving Allscripts to join Valence Health. He set up the India office of Eclipsys from scratch in 2007.” Unverified.

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HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Job seekers would choose Epic’s offer first, followed by Athenahealth. Allscripts and McKesson are the least-favored hiring companies. New poll to your right or here: is IBM Watson Health real or just hype?

A reader asked this question that I agreed to run as a poll for provider organizations: to what degree do you allow creating test patients in production systems? Feel free to help the reader out by clicking “comments” to explain after voting.

This weekend’s Las Vegas weather will be nice: high 70s and sunny, around 50 at night. It should be good HIMSS conference weather.

I feel like I’m running my own “Just Say No” campaign in fending off people determined to selfishly waste my crazy, pre-HIMSS time:

• Can I bring a colleague HIStalkapalooza who didn’t sign up? No.
• Can you interview my CEO right now so it will run right before HIMSS? No.
• Can I pay you to run our article on your site? No.
• Will you run a list of our HIMSS booth and speaking activities in your news post? No.
• Can I schedule time to meet with you in our HIMSS booth? No.

I’m thinking this week will be slow as everybody saves their energy for next week’s conference.

Check out what HIStalk sponsors are doing at HIMSS with our online (and printable) guide. It lists everything from giveaways to educational presentations. For those sponsors who aren’t exhibiting, it includes their contact information for scheduling a meeting. Thanks for supporting the companies that support HIStalk.

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center’s decision to pay a hacker’s ransom to regain access to its malware-locked systems was probably a great business call by them – they had been without access for 10 days and were diverting patients as a result, so their $17,000 was well spent. Unfortunately for everybody else, their widely reported decision at will encourage ransomware hackers to step up their hospital attacks. The right thing for the hospital to do is to share what happened, how they detected it, how it affected their operation, and whether the FBI or other involved agencies advised them to pay up.

Mr. Ventura’s Nebraska school requires blurring student faces in photos, but he sent the one above showing a student using the green screen we provided in funding his DonorsChoose grant request. She is performing a Winter Concert reading as Apple’s iMovie projects behind her on the green screen, making it appear that she’s outdoors. They’re also using the green screen to allow students of the month to record their accomplishment. Next up is increasing the confidence of students by having them do Readers Theater projects on screen.

 

I will allow Mrs. Swope from Alabama to describe the listening center project we funded in her own words: “The air in my class was charged with excitement when my students and I received a ‘mystery box’ one day after lunch. As I opened the box, my students couldn’t help themselves. They gathered around and proceeded to help me open our special gift (this has never happened to me before). It was almost as exciting as Christmas morning! As I unpacked each component to our new listening center, the children marveled at the equipment. They were so overwhelmed. The looks on their faces were priceless. My students couldn’t wait to get their hands on our new listening center. EVERY child has felt empowered when they have used the listening station to read books.”

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HIStalkapalooza

Reminders for those invited:

• You must RSVP the emailed Eventbrite order confirmation (click the “Attend Event” button). Once you’ve done that, you get a second email containing your actual PDF ticket. Once you get your ticket, you are set.
• Print your ticket out in advance or installed the Eventbrite app on your phone – you’ll be checked in by scanning the unique barcode on your ticket.
• We will close the check-in desk no later than 8:30, so arrive before then.
• Security will turn away anyone without a ticket, just like at a Taylor Swift concert.

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Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• IBM announced plans to acquire Truven Health Analytics for $2.6 billion, rolling it into IBM Watson Health, the fourth such acquisition.
• Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center (CA) pays hackers $17,000 to return access to its systems that were crippled for 10 days by ransomware.
• An investigative article warns consumers who might want to buy life, long-term, or disability insurance that any genetic testing results can legally be used to deny them coverage.
• Cerner announced results that beat expectations, but shares dropped on the company’s first bookings miss since 2008.
• Partners HealthCare’s $1.2 billion Epic project takes a hit on its operating profit.

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Webinars

February 23 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Completing your EMR with a Medical Image Sharing Strategy.” Sponsored by LifeImage. Presenters: Don K. Dennison, consultant; Jim Forrester, director of imaging informatics, UR Medicine. Care coordination can suffer without an effective, cost-efficient way to share images across provider networks. Consolidating image management systems into a single platform such as VNA or PACS doesn’t address the need to exchange images with external organizations. This webinar will address incorporating the right image sharing methods into your health IT strategy.

February 24 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Is Big Data a Big Deal … or Not?” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Dale Sanders, EVP of product development, Health Catalyst. Hadoop is the most powerful and popular technology platform for data analysis in the world, but healthcare adoption has been slow. This webinar will cover why healthcare leaders should care about Hadoop, why big data is a bigger deal outside of healthcare, whether we’re missing the IT boat yet again, and how the cloud reduces adoption barriers by commoditizing the skilled labor impact.

February 25 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Clinical Analytics for Population Health: Straddling Two Worlds.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Brian Murphy, lead analyst, Chilmark Research; Jody Ranck, senior analyst, Chilmark Research. The Chilmark Research clinical analytics team will be sharing some of their key findings from the recently released “2016 Clinical Analytics for Population Health Market Trends” report. This will be followed by a Q&A session to make sure everyone goes to HIMSS16 well informed.

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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Opternative raises $6 million in Series A funding to further develop its app that allows consumers aged 18-40 to conduct their own vision exam, then send the result electronically to an eye doctor to have a prescription written. I’m sure it’s fine for generating a convenient eyeglass or contact lens prescription, but an exam should cover checking retinal health and screening for glaucoma. It seems like one of those bad ideas in which consumers get what they want instead of what they need. As the company’s disclaimer describes, “Opternative’s service does not include any type of eye health exam … our doctors recommend that all patients between 18 and 40 years old receive an eye health exam at least once every two years from a local eye care professional … Opternative’s technology is only intended and suitable for use by licensed ophthalmologists to perform online refractive eye exams on patients between the ages of 18 and 40 and in good health.”

Francisco Partners increases its ownership of CPSI to nearly 2 million shares, 14.6 percent of the company. Above is the one-year share price chart of CPSI (blue, up 4.5 percent) vs. the Nasdaq (red, down 9.2 percent).

From the Allscripts earnings call:

• Recurring revenue made up 76 percent of 2015’s total.
• Q4 bookings exceeded the company’s 2011 record quarter.
• The company sells all products are being sold as subscriptions rather than upfront licenses.
• Service volumes are down as clients choose hosted options.
• The company expects growth in UK, Canada, Australia, and Southeast Asia.

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Sales

Connecticut Children’s Medical Center (CT) chooses Fujifilm’s Synapse VNA version 6.0.

Sarah Bush Lincoln Health System (IL) chooses Cerner, which will replace Meditech.

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Announcements and Implementations

Peer60 releases a new report called “The Big Mega HIT Purchasing Report.” The top purchasing plans for 2016 involve population health management and patient engagement. Epic continues to hold the top inpatient and outpatient EHR mindshare, although the outpatient figure really is hospital-based since only hospital employees were surveyed. Epic also holds the top mindshare for population health management and patient engagement, although that finding might call into question the interpretation of respondents. Cerner leads in enterprise analytics.

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Other

Here’s another pretty funny Athenahealth commercial.

Weird News Andy says his proposed title of “Pharmacists > Crooks” is not a menu, but a mathematical representation. An Alabama pharmacist resolves situation in which a gunman took hostages and demanded drugs. She chose drugs that put the gunman to sleep, after which she took his gun and waved in police to arrest him. Or as WNA says, “Say ni-night, Mr. Robber. Hope you were not to surprised when you woke up in the Greybar Motel.”

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Sponsor Updates

• The St. Louis Business Journal profiles TierPoint’s new $30 million data center in Oklahoma City.
• WeiserMazars donates books to the Ronald McDonald House New York as part of its #HookedOnBooks campaign.

Blog Posts

• T-System Recognizes Exceptional Employees with Annual CHART Award (T-System)
• The Quality of Patient Care (TeleTracking)
• Exploring New Quality and Payment Initiatives (Verisk Health)
• The company we keep. (Voalte)
• Can Machine Learning Prevent Death in the ICU? (Xerox)
• The Necessity of Maintenance (Zynx Health)

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Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Lt. Dan.
More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS16

Download and print a PDF version of this guide.

Access

Booth 4761

Contact: Lindsey Keith, sales and marketing operations manager
lindsey.keith@accessefm.com
913.752.9938

One place. One view. ALL of your forms. Access develops electronic forms management solutions that clear your paper path—eliminating the expense, risk, and inefficiency of paper forms. Our software, including Web-based Access Passport and Formatta, enables organizations to capture, manage, sign, and share e-forms data with other systems without paper, printers or scanners. Staff can interact with paperless e-forms anywhere, anytime using any device. By integrating e-forms, e-signatures, and clinical data into EHRs and other healthcare or business applications, you can improve care, remove the impact of paper, and enhance patient safety, compliance, and downtime planning initiatives. Everything related to forms is in one place with Access — so reduced costs, paper-free routines, and complete EHRs can be real-world destinations.    And, if you’re feeling worn out from all those educational sessions, stop by our booth (4761) for a free latte, Americano or whatever you need to keep you going for the rest of the show.

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AdvancedMD

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Aaron Glauser, director, product marketing
aglauser@advancedmd.com
801.984.9500

Since 1999, AdvancedMD has helped private practices improve clinical outcomes, patient experience, staff productivity, and financial performance. Our cloud EHR and PM suite is exclusively designed for independent physicians and includes financial analytics, peer-to-peer benchmarking, patient engagement, and telemedicine. Control your destiny. advancedmd.com

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The Advisory Board Co.

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jordan English, senior director, strategic marketing
EnglishJ@advisory.com
202.266.6237

Please come to our HIMSS16 presentations: Closing Keynote for the Nursing Informatics Symposium: Shifting from Implementation to Optimization: “Looking Towards the Future; Imagine the Possibilities” with Edward Marx (Monday at 3:15 pm in Marcello 4404) – Innovation Symposium opening presentation: “The Rise of Intelligent Machines in Health Care” with Ken Kleinberg (Monday at 8:15 am in Galileo 901) – “PQRS and Alignment Opportunity – Concept to Operationalization” with Tony Panjamapirom (Tuesday at 2:30 pm in Palazzo D) – “The Rise of Intelligent Machines in Health Care” with Ken Kleinberg (Wednesday at 4:00 pm in Galileo 1004) – “Planting Seeds: Developing a Mature Health IT Team” with Ernie Hood (Friday at 10:30 am in Marcello 4401). The Advisory Board Company is the leading provider of insight-driven analytics, research, and services for healthcare organizations. Through its innovative membership model, the Company collaborates with more than 230,000 leaders at 5,200 member organizations to elevate performance and solve their most pressing problems. The Company provides strategic guidance, actionable insights, cloud-based software solutions, and comprehensive implementation and management services. For more information, visit www.advisory.com.

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AirStrip

Booth 6642

Contact: Chris Lato, director, marketing communications
chrislato@airstrip.com
210.805.0444

Experience how the AirStrip ONE mobile interoperability platform transforms care coordination and drives health system innovation. AirStrip ONE lets you achieve true interoperability. Mobilize your existing technologies to give caregivers the insights they need to provide patient-centered care — anytime, anywhere. Enter our daily social media drawing to win:  Bose SoundLink On-Ear Headphones and a GoPro Hero4 Session Camera  Apple TV 4 (32 GB).

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Aprima Medical Software

Booth 7314

Contact: Judy Friedman, marketing and events
jfriedman@aprima.com
844.4APRIMA

A single application, built on a single database, the Aprima EHR and PM systems are fully integrated. That’s why our software continues to be one of the fastest products for doing complete visit documentation in real time. Stop by booth 7314 at HIMSS to take our Stopwatch Challenge and compare Aprima to ANY EHR! When you take the Stopwatch Challenge, we’ll give you a stopwatch so you can do your own comparison.     Thousands of providers have left their old EHR and made the move to Aprima. When you work in the ever-changing world of healthcare, your medical practice needs systems that are agile and responsive. That’s why over the last 10 years more than 95 percent of our customers have stayed with us, and why thousands of providers have recently made the switch to Aprima. Aprima is one of the few companies with a 18-year track record of success. To learn more about Aprima, visit us at HIMSS in booth 7314 or visit www.aprima.com.

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Arcadia Healthcare Solutions

Booth 4612

Contact: Greg Chittim, vice president, strategic marketing
greg.chittim@arcadiasolutions.com
603.496.1242

Think aggregating high-quality data from many different EHRs is impossible? Come see how we’ve been doing it for a decade. Come to booth #4612 (near the main entrance behind McKesson) to receive: HIStalk’s "best giveaway of HIMSS15" – a conference survival kit and a bottle of water; a look at our "Data Gallery" – an art gallery of visualizations from our provider benchmark database; a demo of our platform recently rated by Chilmark as the best "User-centered Design" among Analytics platforms for Population Health Management; and a raffle for fantastic prizes.  Arcadia Healthcare Solutions (http://www.arcadiasolutions.com) is an EHR data aggregation and analytics technology company delivering managed care to ambulatory networks taking on value-based risk. Arcadia specializes in the integration of data from 30+ EHR platforms, enriching them with claims and operational data, and using that data to drive improvements in patient care quality, practice efficiency, and financial performance. Trusted by independent provider groups, health plans, and integrated delivery networks nationwide, with expertise in both fee-for-service optimization and value-based performance environments, Arcadia supports providers with the benchmark data, insights, and outsourced services to excel in the evolving landscape of American healthcare. Founded in 2002, Arcadia is headquartered outside Boston in Burlington, MA, with offices in Seattle and outside Chicago in Rockford, IL.

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Aventura

Booth 1324

Contact: Jennifer Haas, vice president, marketing
jennifer.haas@aventurahq.com
978.697.3921

With Aventura, security and clinical efficiency doesn’t have to be black or white. Aventura’s Sympatica platform leverages situational awareness to deliver a highly secure, personalized clinical desktop. With security, personalized desktop and interoperability functionality, Sympatica is a flexible, modular offering that fits every operational need and budget. Choose from three levels of functionality to solve a specific issue or leverage all three for a complete, integrated clinical desktop solution. Stop by booth 1324 for a demo and pick up a copy of our Iris & Friends coloring book.

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Besler Consulting

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jim Hoffman, COO
jhoffman@besler.com
732.233.5008

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Billian’s HealthData

Booth 1459

Contact: Ben Mauldin, national sales manager
bmauldin@billian.com
678.282.1029

Billian’s HealthData offers unparalleled business intelligence on 875,000 US healthcare providing organizations, including 2M+ healthcare executive contacts. Insight into breaking hospital news, RFPs, emails, financials, HIT utilization, CRM integration, and more offer you an unprecedented amount of data you can use to reduce prospect and market research burdens, identify best-fit partners, and initiate relevant correspondence. Search profiles at https://billianshealthdata.com or visit booth 1459 for a data demo.

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Boston Software Systems

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Nick Topping, marketing program manager
nick.topping@bossoft.com
913.839.9527

Boston Software Systems revolutionizes how healthcare works by providing error-free automation for any application, enabling successful EHR migration, streamlined business processes, and improved productivity. Our Active Data Quality (ADQ) platforms are the most sophisticated automation platforms available, giving customers’ peace of mind that critical data is 100-percent error free. We have the best reputation for ease of use and customer support, helping organizations bridge the gap between technologies to help provide optimal patient care. Hospitals and healthcare vendors worldwide respond to regulatory and business initiatives by using technologies from Boston Software Systems to automate and improve processes throughout a variety healthcare organizations and departments. For more information, please visit the company’s website at www.bostonsoftwaresystems.com or call 866.653.5105.

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Bottomline Technologies

Booth 5046

Contact: Heather Barr, marketing manager
hbarr@bottomline.com
603.501.6654

Bottomline Technologies powers mission-critical business transactions. Our privacy and data security solution for healthcare protects healthcare information, prevents fraud, and helps customers with their compliance of the HIPAA and HITECH mandates. Our healthcare solutions improve patient and clinician satisfaction while reducing costs with digital forms management, discrete data capture, and eSignature across platforms and devices. Based on our deep market knowledge combined with development and business expertise, we constantly set, anticipate, and respond to changing industry and organizational demands. http://www.bottomline.com/us/healthcare

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Caradigm

Booth 5427

Caradigm is an award-winning population health company dedicated to improving patient care, advancing the health of populations, and reducing healthcare costs. Its enterprise software portfolio encompasses all capabilities critical to delivering effective population health management, including data control, healthcare analytics, care coordination and management, and wellness and patient engagement. See a live demo by visiting us in booth 5427 at HIMSS16 or learn more at www.Caradigm.com.

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CareSync

Booth 147

Contact: Courtney Larned, vice president of marketing and corporate communications
courtney@caresync.com
727.366.5389

CareSync is the leading patient-centered engagement solution that combines technology with 24/7 nursing services to facilitate care coordination among patients, family and caregivers, and all providers. CareSync provides turnkey chronic care management services and a software-only option, allowing practices of any size to easily meet the billing requirements for CPT code 99490. CareSync patients are at the center of their healthcare, with access to health information, actionable goals, and comprehensive care plan tasks, and as a result, are experiencing more productive medical appointments and better health outcomes.

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Catalyze

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Kevin Lindbergh, vice president, sales
kevin@catalyze.io
612.202.7087

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CenterX

Booth 3073

Contact: Christopher Marshall, president
christopher@centerx.com
855.CenterX

CenterX is a is a comprehensive e-prescribing network that helps your physicians spend more time with their patients and less time completing prior authorizations. The CenterX ePA solution will execute all PA types electronically – pharmacy, medical, and specialty – decreasing PA turn-around time by 90 percent. Save time by identifying, capturing, and automating the PA process in your EHR – before the patient leaves the office. Giveaway: Stop by booth 3073 to learn how CenterX can help you save time and grab a free swag bag, pen and notepad.

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The Chartis Group

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Daniel Herman, director and informatics and technology practice leader
dherman@chartis.com
412.370.4900

The Chartis Group is a national advisory services firm dedicated to the healthcare industry. We provide strategic and economic planning, accountable care, clinical transformation, and informatics and technology consulting services to the country’s leading healthcare providers. Our firm is comprised of experienced healthcare professionals who apply a distinctive knowledge of healthcare economics, markets, clinical models, and information technology to help clients achieve demonstrative outcomes. Chartis has been privileged to work with leading healthcare organizations across the world. Our collective experience across many organizations provides us a deep knowledge base, client network, and perspective on what it takes to make meaningful and sustainable change. Over the past decade, we have worked with leading healthcare organizations across the country and throughout the world including over two-thirds of the academic medical centers on the US News & World Report “Honor Roll of Best Hospitals,” seven of the 10 largest integrated healthcare systems, four of the five largest not-for-profit health systems, nine of the top 10 children’s hospitals, emerging and leading ACOs, hundreds of community-based health systems, and leading organizations in healthcare services.

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Clinical Architecture

Booth 721

Contact: Mark DuBois, executive vice president of sales
marck_dubois@clinicalarchitecture.com
317.853.1080

We develop software focused on the quality and usability of clinical information. Our solutions address industry gaps in content acquisition, terminology management, interoperability, decision support, and analytics. Each day we will donate $500 to the charity of the winner’s choice. Stop by our booth (#721) to enter.

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CoverMyMeds

Booth 754

Contact: Alison Bechtel, marketing manager, EHR solutions
abechtel@covermymeds.com
614.581.1803

More than 500,000 providers choose CoverMyMeds, the nation’s largest electronic prior authorization platform. CoverMyMeds is integrated with over 360 EHR systems including Epic, Cerner, and Allscripts. Providers submit requests for medications in workflow at the point of prescribing for the fastest, most efficient way to complete prior authorizations. Check your integration status at http://www.covermymeds.com/epa/healthsystems CoverMyMeds is located in booth 754 in the main exhibit hall. Stop by and mention "HISTalk" to be entered to win a $100 VISA gift card.

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Craneware

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Rick Weissinger, vice president, marketing communications
r.weissinger@craneware.com
404.617.6794

Craneware executives will be at HIMSS to speak about the value cycle, an exciting new strategy for achieving quality patient outcomes and optimal financial performance and how Craneware is building their solutions for a value cycle future. Attendees can expect to learn more about the switch from revenue cycle to value cycle, and how this will impact the healthcare IT community.

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CTG

Booth 5255

Contact: Amanda LeBlanc, vice president and CMO
amanda.leblanc@ctg.com
800.992.5350

We’re Computer Task Group (CTG), the most reliable IT services provider – built on 50 years of meeting our commitments to make technology work for you and deliver real business value. Our customers come to us from industries worldwide including healthcare and life sciences, energy, financial services, government, technology, and telecommunications. Visit us at booth #5255 to join the celebration! CHEERS T0 50 YEARS.  Toast innovations in healthcare and CTG’s success over the past half century with our CEO and team members.

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Cumberland Consulting Group

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Dave Vreeland, managing partner
david.vreeland@cumberlandcg.com
615.335.5272

Founded in 2004, Cumberland Consulting Group is a leading full-service strategic advisory, performance improvement, information technology implementation, and support services firm. Cumberland provides technology implementation and project management support to help its clients advance the quality of services they deliver and to improve their overall business performance. Our experienced consultants deliver results for clients through technology optimization and process improvement. Need help with IT planning? Integration? Upgrades? Optimization? RCM? If so, we can help. For more information on Cumberland, please visit www.cumberlandcg.com.

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DataMotion

Booth 12144

Contact: Bud Walder, vice president, marketing
Budw@datamotion.com
973.455.1245 x512

DataMotionHealth at HiMSS16: Sharing information is at the heart of healthcare reforms and initiatives! At HIMSS16, DataMotion Health will showcase the latest in secure health information delivery services and solutions. Learn about empowering your team to share information for care coordination, patient engagement, population health, and more. Stop by Booth #12144! Or if you prefer, contact us  at www.datamotionhealth.com to schedule some time for a meeting at our booth or hospitality suite at the Venetian.

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Direct Consulting Associates

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Frank Myeroff, president
fmyeroff@dc-associates.com
440.996.0051

Direct Consulting Associates provides a broad range of healthcare IT consulting and staffing solutions including staff augmentation, temp-to-perm, and direct hire. Healthcare organizations trust us to acquire the best IT talent in the industry in order to meet their IT initiatives.

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Divurgent

Booth 11612

Contact: Keri DeSalvo, marketing director
keri.desalvo@divurgent.com
757.213.6875

Back by popular demand … Divurgent will host a fast-paced, fun-filled interactive High Roller Charity Drive to raise $5,000 for the Children’s Hospital of Nevada at UMC. HIMSS attendees are encouraged to stop by booth #11612 and toss the bright red, oversized inflatable dice high into the air – whatever number the dice lands on, will determine the donation value that Divurgent will contribute on the attendee’s behalf!

Divurgent will also be announcing some very exciting, industry-breaking news during the HIMSS conference centered around our cybersecurity, MACRA/MU, and revenue cycle optimization strategies … stay tuned!

Divurgent is a nationally recognized healthcare IT consulting firm, specializing in cybersecurity and privacy solutions, population health management, clinical documentation improvement, and activation management and implementation. Visit booth #11612 to learn how Divurgent can help improve your operational effectiveness, financial performance, and quality of patient care.  To view all of Divurgent’s exciting events and happenings during HIMSS, click here.

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DrFirst

Booth 943

Contact: Ellie Whims, director, marketing communications
ewhims@drfirst.com
301.231.9510 x2808

DrFirst (www.drfirst.com) pioneers healthcare technology solutions that inform the doctor-patient point of encounter, optimize provider access to patient information, enhance the doctor’s clinical view of the patient, and improve care delivery and clinical outcomes. Our growth is driven by a commitment to innovation, security, and reliability across a wide array of e-medication management and secure communication and collaboration services. We are proud of our track record of service to over 335 EMR/EHR/HIS partners and an extensive network of hospitals, post-acute care facilities, ambulatory practices, and pharmacies nationwide. Come by the DrFirst booth on Tuesday, March 1st at 5 PM for a special reception, and world premiere of a new ZDogg Video!

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ECG Management Consultants

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Michelle Holmes, principal
mholmes@ecgmc.com
206.689.2231

ECG is a strategic consulting firm that is leading healthcare forward, using the knowledge and expertise built over the course of more than four decades to help clients see clearly where healthcare is going and to navigate toward success. We work as trusted, professional partners with medical groups, hospitals, health systems, and academic medical centers across the country. With deep expertise in technology, strategy, finance, and operations, ECG builds multidisciplinary teams to meet the unique needs of every client. We’re proud to partner with providers across the country to better leverage technology and achieve their goals. For more information, visit www.ecgmc.com.

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Elsevier

Booth 3039

Contact: Yazmin Zayas, senior manager, events/exhibits
y.zayas@elsevier.com
215.239.3490

Encourage Quality. Enhance Efficiency. Improve Outcomes. Consistent, high-quality patient care requires evidence-based content incorporated into the care process. Elsevier provides more than 25 percent of the world’s clinical content and serves more than 20 million healthcare professionals. Integrated into clinical workflows and EHRs, this content empowers healthcare professionals and their patients to make better decisions at every stage of the patient journey. Reference and Decision Support • Order Sets and Care Plans • Learning and Competency Management • Patient Engagement • Professional Practice Services • Academic Education and Certification. When you visit our exhibit, be sure to step inside our Rewarding Knowledge prize booth for a daily chance to win a FitBit, Beats by Dr. Dre, or a $100 VISA gift card. It’s the one place in Vegas where the odds are in your favor. Empowering Knowledge. Enabling Action.

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E-MDs

Booth 5222

Contact: Allison Jones, director, marketing
ajones@e-mds.com
512.257.5200

E-MDs is a leading provider of integrated EHRs, PM software, revenue cycle services, and credentialing solutions for physician practices and enterprises. Founded by physicians, the company is an industry leader for usable, connected software that enables physician productivity and a superior clinical experience. E-MDs software has received top rankings in physician and industry surveys including those conducted by the AAFP’s Family Practice Management, AmericanEHR Partners, MedScape, and Black Book. E-MDs has a proven track record of positioning clients for success as demonstrated by Meaningful Use attainment in 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014. According to data provided by CMS, E-MDs clients are attesting in the top proportion of all major vendors. For more information, please visit http://www.e-mds.com.

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Etransmedia Technology

Booth 1469

Contact: Connie Smith
connie.smith@etransmedia.com
518.283.5418

Etransmedia helps improve revenues and clinical outcomes, enabling physicians to focus on patient care. Etransmedia is a leading healthcare information technology company delivering integrated software, service, and connectivity solutions to simplify critical functions for healthcare providers. Our clients include some of the country’s leading healthcare systems and hospitals, as well as affiliated physician practices. Eight consecutive years, Inc 5000 and four consecutive years, Deloitte Technology Fast 500.

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Extension Healthcare

Booth 1261 and Intelligent Hospital Pavilion Booth 11655-17

Contact: Jenny Kakasuleff, social media PR manager
jkakasuleff@extensionhealthcare.com
317.345.4176

Learn what Extension Healthcare has done for Kaiser Permanente, St. Joe’s, University of Maryland Medical Center, Parkland, and 200 more customers at HIMSS16 booth 1261. Our team at HIMSS will be demonstrating our award-winning, event-driven care team communication workflows, including our real-time waveform integration, and can answer any questions about new features, functionality, and enhancements to Extension Engage Mobile. On Wednesday, March 2, at 11:30 am, NYU Langone Medical Center, an Extension Engage customer, will present the details of their deployment in the Intelligent Hospital Pavilion. Visitors to either Extension booth will be entered into a drawing for an Apple Watch upon completing a survey.

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FormFast

Booth 4849

Contact: Aaron Vaught, director, marketing
avaught@formfast.com
314.603.9674

FormFast’s enterprise software platform automates documents and workflow, capturing data and streamlining processes. With more than 20 years exclusively focused on healthcare needs and over 1,000 healthcare clients, FormFast is considered the #1 in eForms for hospitals, according to HIMSS Analytics. At booth #4849, FormFast will give HIMSS16 attendees a test-drive of their automation offerings, which include solutions for registration, mobile bedside consents, electronic signature capture, human resources, clinical documentation, and more. Learn more at: www.formfast.com and follow us on Twitter @FormFast. Booth Promotions: Register to win the Ultimate Supercar Driving Experience! Visit FormFast at booth #4849 to register! Includes: -Exotic Supercar Test Drive on Course  – Round Trip Airfare for 2   -3 Day/2 Night Deluxe Hotel Stay  -$250 Gift Card. FormFast will also have a premiere, luxury car on display at booth #4849 for attendees to check out and to capture an amazing photo opportunity!

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Forward Health Group

Booth 2477

Contact: Barry Wightman, director of marketing
bmw@forwardhealthgroup.com
608.729.7522

Forward Health Group to unBooth at HIMSS16! A visual extravaganza is rolling into booth #2477. FHG, a leader in value-based population health management solutions, zigs when everyone else zags. The fast-growing company will feature prodigious, on-the-fly artistic talents, generating marvelously whimsical graphic population health management collaborations with HIMSS visitors. Producing giant, eight-foot hand-drawn murals each day, recording booth visitors’ visions of their value-based population health futures. FHG will also provide demonstrations of five new PopulationManager products – including innovative pre-packaged FastStart PopulationManager solutions for chronic care, acute episodes, behavioral health, bundled payments, and national standards reporting. Fresh oranges, too. A splendid time is guaranteed for all! Don’t miss the unBooth #2477.

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Galen Healthcare Solutions

Booth 3273

Contact: Justin Campbell, vice president
justin.campbell@galenhealthcare.com
617.379.0841

Galen Healthcare Solutions is an award-winning, #1 in KLAS, healthcare IT technical and professional services and solutions company providing high-skilled, cross-platform expertise. Galen Healthcare Solutions was one of the few vendors to receive multiple 2015/2016 Best in KLAS awards, winning #1 in Technical Services and #1 in HIT Implementation Support & Staffing. For over a decade, Galen has partnered with more than 300 specialty practices, hospitals, HIEs, health systems, and integrated delivery networks to provide high-quality, expert-level IT consulting services including strategy, optimization, data conversion, archival, project management, and interoperability. Galen also delivers a suite of fully integrated products that enhance, automate, and simplify the access and use of clinical patient data within those systems to improve cost-efficiency and quality outcomes. We will be giving away three Apple Watches. HIMSS attendees can enter the contest by scheduling a time to meet during HIMSS: www.galenhealthcare.com/HIMSS16/   

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GE Healthcare

Booth 3055

Contact: Chris Bowler, general manager, Americas region marketing
christopher.bowler@ge.com
860.747.7123

Visit GE Healthcare at booth 3055 to learn how actionable insights can help you improve clinical, financial, and operational outcomes. With over 20 demo stations showcasing solutions for financial management, workforce management, enterprise imaging, and care delivery management, you’ll see first-hand how our software, services, and partners can help spark your success. And don’t miss the chance to talk to our experts and see live presentations featuring our newest solutions: GE Health Cloud – a scalable, secure, connected cloud ecosystem that will enable you to manage data as you need it; and Analytic Applications – an advanced analytics platform and consulting service that helps healthcare organizations quickly generate actionable insights that drive better outcomes.

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The HCI Group

Booth 6832

Contact: Chris Parry, marketing director
chris.parry@thehcigroup.com
904.239.4670

The HCI Group is recognized as a world leader in healthcare IT consulting. Our services include implementation and training of all EHR vendors as well as service lines in optimization, clinical adoption, integration and testing, go-live, and advisory services, among others. From Johns Hopkins and Tenet Health to, Canada, Europe, Asia and beyond, we’ve developed a track record of proven excellence in developing smarter approaches to solving healthcare IT challenges.

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Healthcare Growth Partners

Booth 10650

Contact: Christopher McCord, managing director
chris@hgp.com
312.445.8750

Healthcare Growth Partners is an investment and merchant bank focused exclusively on health IT, digital health, and health information services. Since its founding in 2005, HGP has closed over $2 billion across over 80 health informatics and digital health transactions. Services include M&A advisory, capital raising, and strategy, as well as principal investments through HGP Capital. Through our advisory relationships and investments, HGP aims to unlock health IT’s great potential in solving fundamental challenges in the management and sustainability of health.

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Health Catalyst

Booth 3069

Contact: Patty Burke, program manager

Come by booth #3069 and read any one of our 50 client success stories on display in and around our booth.

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Health Data Specialists

Booth 8402

Contact: Steve Grenier, vice president
sgreiner@hds-llc.com
805.233.0616

Health Data Specialists (HDS) is a privately held, healthcare information services company that has been providing quality consulting services to healthcare organizations nationwide since 2003. Our mission is to provide exceptional consulting services, valued specialists, and trusted advisers to facilitate the IT business strategies of our clients. We focus on assisting healthcare organizations in meeting their IT goals in a cost-effective, efficient manner. HDS is committed to bringing value and proven solutions to our clients’ information technology initiatives. HDS has assisted facilities of all sizes – from large teaching facilities to multi-entity IDNs to regional healthcare centers. We offer a full range of staff augmentation, optimization, and consultative services with expertise in software solutions for Epic, Cerner/Siemens, and Meditech. We provide expertise in Meaningful Use, mock audit services, revenue cycle and ICD-10 support. We value our intangibles, such as our ability to relate to clients regarding their needs, management style, corporate culture, commitment, and confidentiality. These elements differentiate us from other consulting firms and give us a sustainable competitive advantage while strengthening our long-term relationships with our clients.

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Healthfinch

Booth 10828

Contact: Karen Hitchcock, vice president, marketing
karen@healthfinch.com
608.513.6566

Healthfinch’s practice automation platform, Charlie, leverages EHR data to automate, delegate, and simplify routine, repeatable tasks, like prescription refill requests, visit planning and diagnostics results management. Our flagship application, Swoop for prescription refill requests, is used by major health systems to improve workflows and get providers working top-of-license by reducing their inbox volume.    Healthcare leaders who want to improve efficiencies, workflows, and maximize their investment in their EHR should stop by booth 10828 to learn how "Charlie" can help.

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Healthwise

Booth 3617

Contact: Dave Mink, market solutions director
mink@healthwise.org
208.921.4918

Stop by Healthwise booth 3617 and check out our demo stations to discover how to effectively engage your health populations. Healthwise solutions for episodic care, care coordination, automated programs, and patient portals will deepen the impact of your patient touchpoints. Visit our kiosk in the Population Health Knowledge Center and learn how the right population health strategy can broaden the reach of your care team without adding resources.

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Iatric Systems

Booth 7730

Contact: John Danahey, executive vice president
John.Danahey@iatric.com
978.805.4153

We invite you come by the Iatric Systems booth #7730 in the Venetian Ballroom to see how we can help you enhance your existing healthcare technology investments. Your challenges around analytics, EHR optimization, interoperability, and patient privacy are serious. We look forward to a great conversation around how our diverse healthcare experience, extensive partner network and advisory/consulting services are the foundation for solutions that enhance your healthcare technology investments. It’s serious business, but you won’t want to miss The Magic Castle performer and professional magician Chef Anton’s entertaining and amazing magic tricks – and be entered to win not just one, but TWO Apple Watches. www.iatric.com/HIMSS16

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IMO

Booth 4221

Contact: Dennis Carson, director, marketing and tradeshows
dcarson@e-imo.com
847.728.4997

IMO provides the most widely-used and physician preferred medical terminology solutions for EHRs.  Visit us at booth 4221 to see the latest innovations around IMO Problem IT Terminology and IMO Procedure IT Terminology. New at HIMSS16: IMO Anywhere – the mobile-enabled solution that lets users access IMO Terminology anytime, anywhere, on any device. IMO 2.0 Enhanced Terminology Platform (ETP) – a new, feature-packed platform that keeps dictionaries updated long into the future. IMO Problem IT Plus – now with our unique intelligent Problem List to give users a clear, concise, and organized view of their patient Problem Lists. IMO SurgIT – the new service that provides highly accurate IMO codes for surgical procedures. Come learn about “The IMO Way” to capture and preserve true clinical intent because The Patient Story is too important to lose. At the vendor solutions sessions, don’t miss “How Capturing True Clinical Intent Improves Patient Care” Tuesday, March 1 at 2.30 pm in Galileo 1001 at the Sands Expo Convention Center. Cool giveaways include T-shirts, flashlights, and more!

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Influence Health

Booth 6232

Contact: Anna Powell, vice president, marketing
anna.powell@influencehealth.com
205.982.5805

Momentum demands movement, movement demands Influence Health. Run, walk, skip or hop toward booth 6232, where a specialized team can help you explore solutions to support your population health and patient engagement efforts. Learn how we can help your organization gain the momentum you need to provide successful, value-based care and improved outcomes. Influence Health’s digital solutions are helping hospitals and health systems nationwide close the gaps in care by providing aggregated patient data and reporting quality measures and outcomes. Stop by the Influence Health booth 6232 Tuesday-Thursday at 11 am and 2 pm for a product demo and a chance  to win NIKEiD custom shoes!* * Winners will be randomly selected at the end of EACH demo. Must be present to win.

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InMediata

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Nick Challen, vice president, strategic partnerships
nchallen@inmediata.com
704.998.9129

InMediata drives innovation in healthcare payments by focusing on solving complex reimbursement issues for large provider groups, hospitals, and billing services. We believe in challenging the status quo, utilizing our experience and knowledge to provide tailored solutions that address specific client and industry needs. For example, our InBanking product suite bridges the gap between banking and healthcare claim payments. By automating the payment reconciliation process, healthcare entities are able to gain greater insight into their finances and cash flow while reducing the administrative inefficiencies involved with processing payer and patient revenues. At inMediata, we’re different for a reason. Please contact us to discuss strategic partnership opportunities, and to register for our $500 drawing, which will take place on Wednesday at 5:00 pm.

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InterSystems

Booth 4443

Contact: Ross Whittaker, market development manager
ross.whittaker@intersystems.com
617.621.0600

InterSystems provides the information engines that power some of the world’s most important applications. In healthcare, finance, government, and other sectors where lives and livelihoods are at stake, InterSystems has been a strategic technology provider since 1978. InterSystems is a privately held company headquartered in Cambridge, MA (USA), with offices worldwide, and its software products are used daily by millions of people in more than 100 countries. HIMSS2016 – THEME  Right Connections, Right Conclusions, Right Actions – FEATURED  HX360, Transforming End-of-Life Care, HIE Community Networking Breakfast  The Path to Deriving Clinical Value from FHIR, The Internet of Healthy Things presentation and book signing by Joseph Kvedar, MD. SAMPLE PRESENTATION TOPICS  HIE cost and care improvements – HIE support for population health – Hospital in “The Cloud” – Genomic data – Remote patient monitoring. GIVEAWAY – Conference Survival Kit. More info about InterSystems at HIMSS16  http://www.intersystems.com/himss16.

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Legacy Data Access

Booth 949

Contact: John Hanggi, director, business development
jhanggi@legacydataaccess.com
678.701.5589

Running old applications just to get to the data? STOP! We need to talk … With a singular focus on the healthcare industry, Legacy Data Access provides the industry’s most comprehensive set of software tools and solutions for working with data from retired systems. Legacy Data Access stores data from systems that are being retired and provides secure, Web-based, interactive access to the information. Please visit us to discuss how we have successfully retired 192 different healthcare applications – a total of 463 applications. We will be providing “Coffee, Tea, and Legacy” Tuesday morning in our booth. Giveaways include ear buds, tote bags, and the best dark chocolate in the Exhibit Hall. Sign up for a chance to win an Apple Watch or one of two Apple TVs.

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Leidos Health

Booth 3432, 9908, and 13329

Contact: Matt Maloney, director, marketing
matt.maloney@leidoshealth.com
317.908.8345

For more than 25 years, Leidos Health has been helping our clients improve care and reduce costs by leveraging information technology and best practices. As one of the largest and most experienced health IT consulting firms, and a provider of health IT services to nearly every federal agency focused on healthcare, we bring diverse perspectives and proven solutions to help you succeed. Our experts will be available to discuss the latest happenings and challenges in healthcare, and share how we’re helping organizations with solutions for implementation, optimization, interoperability, cybersecurity, federal health IT, and more. Come by our booth to register for a chance to win an Apple Watch ($350 value). We’ll be giving one away each day.

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Lexmark Healthcare

Booth 6225

Contact: Katie Booth, manager, global healthcare marketing
katie.booth@lexmark.com
913.307.4549

Patients are anxious. Clinicians are frustrated, and IT staffs are overwhelmed. All because the EHR is missing vital patient information. Lexmark Healthcare can help. Our solutions uniquely deliver comprehensive information — medical images, documents, and clinical photos — in one view within the EHR. Ready to transform your tomorrow? Visit HIMSS booth 6225.

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Liaison Technologies

Booth 11610

Contact: Amanda Thomas, director of marketing
athomas@liaison.com
408.309.0867

Liaison Technologies will be giving away a Drone a Day! You can also enter to win a Hoverboard. Stop by the booth to find out how!

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LifeImage

Booth 968

Contact: Jackie Leckas, vice president, marketing
jackie@lifeimage.com
617.244.8411 x203

LifeImage is a network for connecting users and systems to patient imaging histories online. Our platform has been adopted by more than 120 multi-site health systems across the country, which use it to extend their enterprise imaging infrastructure to exchange data with outside facilities, physicians, and patients. This improves care coordination, increases referral business, and eliminates redundant imaging. Visit us at booth #968 during HIMSS16 to learn: •Best practices for integrating external imaging data into your EHR. •Common workflows for exchanging images with patients. •How to ensure your image sharing platform is interoperable with needed applications. We’ll also be giving away an Apple Watch Sport each day of the conference. For more information, visit us at www.lifeimage.com.

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LogicStream Health

Booth 4977

Contact: Nicole Nash, marketing coordinator
nicole@logic-stream.net
651.269.2454

Stop by LogicStream’s booth to enter a drawing to win a hover board. Schedule your show floor demo and get a Starbucks gift card at the booth (email nicole@logic-stream.net).

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MEA|NEA|TWSG

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jerry Thomas, chief sales officer
jerry.thomas@twsg.com
407.375.7272

Contact MEA|NEA|TWSG at marketing@mea-fast.com and find out how our solutions for hospitals, including those for esMD (Electronic Submission of Medical Documentation) – a topic that will be discussed in the HIMSS16 Session: Improving Workflow and Increasing Efficiencies with the CMS esMD Electronic Solution on March 3 – along with a suite of highly-integrated software solutions facilitate the secure exchange of health information and the efficient management of healthcare communication via voice, fax, image, data, and electronic documents. Our solutions allow clients to effectively manage critical information that typically resides outside the EHR, closing the continuum on a fully accessible patient record. www.mea-fast.com / www.tracecommunication.com

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MedAptus

Booth 418

Contact: Malachi Charbonneau
mcharbonneau@medaptus.com
617.896.4000

MedAptus solutions streamline the process of delivering patient care. From simplifying pre-care clinical workforce needs to automating administrative tasks at the point-of-care, our offerings provide customers with a foundation for improved operational efficiency, personal productivity, and ultimately, optimized financial performance. Adoption of the MedAptus suite enables providers to spend their time where it matters most – with patients.

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MedCPU

Booth 435

Contact: Gabriela Benincasa
GBenincasa@medCPU

Visit medCPU’s booth (#435) at HIMSS 2016 and experience a quantum leap in healthcare IT. MedCPU proudly hosts Key Opinion Leaders in Decision Support at HIMSS 2016. MedCPU joins Froedtert/Medical College of Wisconsin and UPMC at HIMSS 2016 for a timely presentation on decision-support challenges and solutions. http://www.medcpu.com/himss

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MedData

Booth 5065

Contact: Chris Farrell, vice president, marketing
chris.farrell@meddata.com
440.627.2642

MedData is among the nation’s leading providers of RCM services including coding, billing, patient reimbursement, eligibility and enrollment, third-party liability, and patient satisfaction services – all with a proven compliance record. For more than 35 years, we’ve been committed to delivering industry-leading and patient-focused RCM solutions to our growing network of more than 1,000 hospital sites nationwide.    Giveaways and promotions: Retro candy throughout the day and craft beer in the afternoons/evenings * ICD-10 or Not Game – Test your knowledge of the new codeset for a chance to win gift cards and other prizes.

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Medecision

Booth: 3438  Population Health Knowledge Center: 14115  Career Center: 13329-8

Contact: Sherri Stuart, senior vice president, marketing services
Sherri.Stuart@medecision.com
610.540.0202

Make Accountable Predictable at HIMSS. Be sure to drop by to experience Aerial for Population Health Management. You could be the winner of Nest, a programmable WiFi learning thermostat.

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Medhost

Booth 3821

Contact: Tom Mitchell, vice president, marketing
Tom.Mitchell@medhost.com
615.761.2011

Medhost HIMSS16 – Solutions to Manage your Facility, Provide Care, and Build a Brand. Visit us at booth #3821 to discover tools to transform healthcare in your community. We offer integrated EHR solutions and an engagement platform that not only empowers providers but also promotes healthy consumers while helping you build a brand and consumer loyalty. Medhost has the solutions you need to optimize patient care while running your healthcare organization with a strong bottom-line.

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Medicity

Booth 4049

Contact: Lauren Tilelli, director of marketing
ltilelli@medicity.com
770.633.9013

Medicity, a Healthagen business, has been creating clinically connected communities for more than 15 years. Today, the company provides population health solutions for more than 90 million people. Medicity makes data smarter, removing the noise and turning it into a strategic asset that enables better sharing of information across the health system. This creates a new dimension in population health, one that leads to more robust analytic insights, more effective care management, and more proactive physician engagement. Medicity’s solutions further enable clinician engagement, improved transitions of care, reduced duplicative services and the opportunity for patients to take an active role in their personal health. Medicity’s breadth of industry reach includes: · 1,000 hospitals · 27 million lives in its analytics solution · 3.6 billion annual transactions · 265 unique EHRs integrated · 250,000 end-users. For HIMSS16, Medicity will be showcasing its entire suite of population health solutions, with a spotlight on Manage, its most recent care management offering. The company also will be launching its new network analytics solution, Explore SmartNetworks, which provides a more complete picture of network leakage and opportunities for network development.

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Medicomp Systems

Booth 1354

Contact: Dave Lareau, CEO
info@medicomp.com
703.803.8080

Lights, camera, action! Let’s play Quipstar. Back by popular demand, Medicomp Systems invites you to play Quipstar, the World’s Favorite HIT Quiz Show. This interactive health information technology quiz show will show the live, studio audience why doctors love Quippe, and how easy it is to learn and use. New this year, teams of contestants will compete for cash and prizes using Medicomp’s newest member of the Quippe family of products, Quippe Clinical Lens. Working with existing EHR systems, Quippe Clinical Lens provides problem-oriented views of relevant clinical information at the point of care. After a brief training, Quippe contestants will utilize Quippe Clinical Lens to answer questions in a game show format. Register to reserve a seat at www.medicomp.com/himss16. Show times are Tuesday and Wednesday at 11 am and 4 pm, and Thursday at 11 am and 2 pm. Giveaways: At each show, participants will have an opportunity to win one of 5 iPad Pro tablets and cash prizes. That is a total of 30 iPad Pros over the course of HIMSS16. Register now!

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Merge Healthcare

Booth 2116

Contact: Kayley Weinbaum, marketing communications lead
kayley.weinbaum@merge.com
312.946.2517

At HIMSS 2016, we will be showing multiple demonstrations of work in progress that unites IBM Research, Watson Health Imaging, and Merge technologies to help transform HIT in addition to our full solutions suite, including our Best in KLAS solution, IConnect Enterprise Archive (our VNA). IConnect Enterprise Archive helps organizations easily collect, manage, archive, and present growing volumes and variances of patient images – DICOM or non-DICOM – both from inside and beyond the walls of your healthcare enterprise.

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MModal

Booth 5029

Contact: Lisa Martin, manager of marketing
lisa.martin@mmodal.com
267.535.7222

MModal’s Fluency is the only closed-loop clinical documentation platform on the market today. What does this mean to you? It means that from technology to tools to services, MModal’s Fluency platform delivers everything a healthcare provider needs to create, complete, and use clinical information in one connected platform. Learn more about our: •Front-end speech recognition •Intelligence-driven CDI •Enhanced coding workflow •Flexible transcription platform •Radiology reporting solution •Technology-enabled transcription, CDI, and coding services. MModal’s closed-loop clinical documentation solutions support the revenue cycle, facilitate compliance and quality, and most importantly, deliver information where and when it is needed most –  to the physician at point-of-care. Come see us at HIMSS, booth #5029, to learn more.

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National Decision Support Co.

Booth 11010

Contact: Bob Cooke, vice president, marketing strategy
rcooke@nationaldecisionsupport.com
855.475.2500

NDSC is a globally recognized provider of innovative clinical decision support (CDS) solutions widely adopted by healthcare providers and integrated with leading EHR vendors. We offer a scalable, cloud-based architecture for delivering actionable CDS based on nationally recognized guidelines into provider workflows. Through production and delivery of its flagship solution, ACRselect, NDSC has developed a proven process for digitizing consensus medical guidelines and delivering them at the point-of-care. Healthcare is evolving and so is National Decision Support Company. As part of our commitment to making medicine safer, more effective, and accessible, we have launched CareSelectDS to better reflect our company’s scope, competency, and mission. With CareSelectDS, we have broadened the current solutions portfolio in diagnostic imaging and extended its reach into lab and care pathways with the CareSelectDS content community. Whether you’re looking for more information about National Decision Support solutions and services, have specific questions about workflows and integrations, or just have some thoughts to share — we’re always interested in hearing from you.

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NEC

Being the first enterprise communications technology provider in healthcare, NEC is proud to be part of HISTalk and the dedicated professionals who have grown with us and made this the most exciting, challenging, and rewarding vertical industry. Leveraging 65,000 patents and over 100 years, NEC continues to develop healthcare industry-focused applications in communications infrastructure, IT/networking solutions, and award-winning biometrics. Want to learn more about NEC’s mission to orchestrate a brighter world through optimized solutions for healthcare? Follow us @NECHealthcare or #NECHIMSS16 and join our traveling “meet-and-greet”!  We will post our positions to host you for coffee or a libation several times a day throughout HIMSS.

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Netsmart

Booth 5057

Contact: info@ntst.com
800.472.5509

Netsmart is committed to helping health and human services providers deliver effective, outcomes-based care to more than 25 million consumers. Netsmart serves more than 20,000 clients organizations across all 50 states, resulting in approximately 450,000 users of its software and technology solutions. Netsmart clients include mental health and addiction services agencies, health homes, psychiatric hospitals, private and group mental health practices, public health departments, social services and child and family services agencies, managed care organizations, and vital records offices. Netsmart’s CareFabric, a framework of innovative clinical and business solutions and services, supports integrated, coordinated delivery of health services across the spectrum of care. Netsmart’s HIT Value Model, a vendor-agnostic planning and measurement system, provides a path for health and human services organizations to evaluate where on the healthcare IT spectrum they should focus their efforts, the value associated with that strategic decision and a comparison with peer organizations nationwide. Netsmart is pleased to support the EveryDayMatters Foundation, which was established for behavioral and public health organizations to learn from each other and share their causes and stories. For more information, visit www.everydaymatters.com. Learn more about how Netsmart is changing the face of health care today. Visit www.ntst.com or call 1-800-472-5509.

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NextGen Healthcare

Booth 4421

Contact: Lynn Belanger, marketing director
lbelanger@nextgen.com
215.657.7010

NextGen Healthcare is a leader in value-based care, population health, interoperability, and revenue cycle services. See demos and speak with our experts on how we help practices foster healthy communities, engage patients, manage care, and deliver healthy bottom lines – all key elements for a successful transition to value-based care. We will be showcasing solutions designed to help you transform your practice to a value-based revenue entity. To totally understand the costs associated with your provider model, you’ll need to meet at least three goals: Achieve interoperability – data exchange and aggregation across hospitals, physicians, and other systems for a clear, longitudinal view of the patient and your population; enhance the patient experience ― patient access, patient engagement, and communication; and improve financial performance ― revenue cycle management and operational efficiencies. While you’re at our booth, pop across the aisle and visit booth #4429 to see how NextGen interoperability, powered by Mirth technology, is changing the game for interoperability and patient data management, and helping to facilitate care for over 150 Million patients. Happy Hour each day!  Of course, we’re not all work and no play! We invite you to stop by the booth after a long day pounding the convention floor for a pick-me-up. Happy hours run the last hour of the show each day at our booth. Get your headshots at the NextGen Healthcare booth: Drop by and “Say Cheese!” If the last headshot you got was in high school or college, then you NEED to stop by NextGen Healthcare booth #4421. We know you look good and we want to give you proof. We’ll be taking professional headshots for attendees, so stop by and let us get your best side! Headshots will be available about a week after HIMSS16.

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Nordic

Booth 8233

Contact: Drew Madden, president
drew.madden@nordicwi.com
608.616.2000

Visit Nordic, Help a Charity – Stop by booth #8233 and vote on one of three charities to which Nordic will donate money at the end of HIMSS. The charity with the most votes will get the largest donation. As a bonus, while you’re at the booth, you can chat with any of our health IT experts about improving health outcomes and the health of your business with our #1 in KLAS EHR consulting services. Visit booth #8233. Vote on a charity. Have a great HIMSS16.

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NTT Data

Booth 3854

Contact: Larry Kaiser, senior marketing manager
lawrence.kaiser@nttdata.com
310.301.1284

NTT DATA offers IT solutions that increase efficiency, reduce medical errors, and enhance the revenue cycle. Our ONC-ATCB certified solution, Optimum, features an industry-leading RCM solution, EHR, ERP, portal, and post-acute solutions. Reasons attendees should visit the NTT DATA booth: 1. Discuss current industry trends and see how NTT DATA is addressing them.  2. Learn about what NTT DATA offers.  3. Have your mind read by our mentalist. NTT DATA will be giving away a drone to attendees who watch our show and get a raffle ticket.

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NVoq

Interoperability Showcase Booth 11954-38

Contact: Debbi Gillotti, CMO and VP/GM Healthcare
deborah.gillotti@nvoq.com
206.465.1765

NVoq is a cloud-based provider of speech recognition services for the healthcare industry headquartered in Boulder, CO. We offer a real-time client application and RESTful API services for developers to voice-enable their applications, and optional point-of-care coding support for ICD-10 and other standards. No voice training is required to use SayIt, so providers can be productive immediately. Our proven cloud solution works anywhere there’s an Internet connection and there’s no network software or equipment to purchase. In the 2016 Interoperability Showcase, we’ll be demonstrating how simple SayIt voice commands can convert audio to text, create structured data using NLP, and interface structured data directly to major EHRs. We’ll be presenting a variety of specialty use cases illustrating the range of workflow automation powered by SayIt. Didn’t think you had options for speech recognition? You do now. Come see us in booth 11954-38.

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Obix by Clinical Computer Systems

Intelligent Health Pavilion Booth 11655 and Booth 6052

Contact: Heather Ruchalski, director, marketing
marketing@obix.com
888.871.0963

Obix by Clinical Computer Systems, a medical software company, will be participating in the Intelligent Health Pavilion at HIMSS. We are sponsoring the LDR Suite in the pavilion, which will highlight ours and other technologies associated with labor, delivery, and recovery of mother and baby. Within the pavilion, we will be in Kiosk 6, where you can learn more about our strategic perinatal software solutions. The Obix Perinatal Data System is a comprehensive, computerized system for central, bedside, and remote electronic fetal monitoring. It includes archiving, point-of-care charting, single-click management reports, and Internet-based physician access. We will also feature the TrueLabor Maternal Fetal Monitor, which offers a unique digital signal processing technology that enhances fetal monitoring in evaluating uterine contractions and FHR information. We would like to spotlight two speakers that will be presenting in the Leadership Theater within the pavilion on Tuesday, March 1. 1 pm – 1:30 pm Sean Blackwell, MD will speak to:  Resign of Patient Care Work Flow for the Diabetic Gravida: What Should We Be Doing in the Digital Age? 3:15 pm – 3:45 pm Dick Taylor, MD will speak to:  A Clinician in the Intelligent Hospital: Free to be Me. You will have the opportunity to ask questions following their presentations.

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Oneview Healthcare

Booth 8215

Contact: Jeff Fallon, president, North America
jfallon@oneviewhealthcare.com
724.272.1240

Oneview Healthcare, founded in Dublin, Ireland in 2007, is a patient engagement technology company. Come to our booth (8215) for a pint of Guinness, Irish music, and Irish dancers from 4:30 to 6:00 pm on Tuesday, March 1 and Wednesday, March 2! Or stop by any time for a demo and to meet the team. Oneview Healthcare’s patient engagement solution integrates seamlessly with a hospital’s existing EHRs to connect patients with their care teams across the care continuum. While patients enjoy movies on demand, games, meal ordering, hospital concierge services, educational content, and more at their fingertips on a bedside device, the solution works behind the scenes, gathering valuable data for hospitals. Tasks and requests are routed seamlessly to the right resources at the right time, streamlining hospital workflows and creating a relaxed environment for patients. Perhaps most importantly, hospitals can keep a real-time pulse on patient satisfaction through customized surveys they can distribute at any time. Oneview’s ambulatory solution, Oneview Connect, brings patient engagement full circle on patient mobile devices. Patients receive pre-admission scheduling, notifications, and education to prepare them for their hospital visits. They can view maps and check in once they arrive. The high-touch interaction continues post-discharge as patients receive follow-up care notifications, appointment scheduling and continued education, all with care team messaging capabilities to ensure all questions are answered and patients are fully equipped to take care of themselves at home.

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Optimum Healthcare IT

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jenny Paal, marketing manager
jenny@optimumhit.com
904.373.0831

Optimum Healthcare IT is committed to building a true business partnership with our clients. We are not just another staff augmentation vendor or consulting firm. Our motivation and passion is about supporting your success and healthy outcomes for your patients. We understand patient care does not stop so your health system can implement new IT processes. That is why our clients rely on our expert IT consultants and FTEs to manage the IT side of the implementations so our clients can focus on their patients. Our commitment to providing excellence in service is driven by a Leadership team with more than 50 years of experience in providing expert healthcare staffing and consulting solutions to all types of organizations. We are passionate about what we do and work hard to deliver premium services to our clients. This philosophy starts at the top of our organization and is the core set of values we impart in all of our employees and consultants. Optimum Healthcare IT is different from the rest because we have built our business on personal experience, based on years in the healthcare industry. We have been on both sides of the transaction and know what is most important to our clients and our consultants. We have based our business model on attracting the best and brightest consultants the industry has to offer, who are experienced clinicians and hospitalists and are considered to be experts in Healthcare Information Technology and business. Working with these stellar consultants make our presentations to healthcare systems that much more impressive. Our ability to view the client from this holistic perspective gives us the advantage of providing superb services, which span a large spectrum of Service Lines. When our clients have a need, we can fulfill it.

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Orchestrate Healthcare

Booth 7520

Contact: Charlie Cook, president
charlie@orchestratehealthcare.com
877.303.3377

What Happens In Vegas … Helps You Positively Impact Your Organization!  Stop by booth #7520 to hear how our consulting philosophy is Best In KLAS, share with us your upcoming projects and learn how we come in on-budget and without scope creep, and discuss how our information security practice can proactively help your organization. See how 30 impactful minutes with us will change your IT consulting direction!

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Patientco

Booth 14034

Contact: Annie Czarnecki, sales representative
annie.czarnecki@patientco.com
888.747.2455 x401

Patientco empowers healthcare providers to optimize and increase patient revenue cycle efficiency with cloud-based patient payment technology. Patientco goes beyond basic payment processing to connect every patient payment event throughout multi-facility healthcare networks—delivering unrivaled visibility into and control over the patient revenue cycle. The result is improved cash flow, reduced A/R days, cost-saving efficiencies, and increased patient and provider satisfaction. Any provider who schedules and attends a Patientco demo will receive a $25 Amazon Gift Card.

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PatientKeeper

Booth 5249

Contact: Cristina Christy, senior events manager
cchristy@patientkeeper.com
(781) 373-6378

PatientKeeper believes in the promise of IT to enable better healthcare, just as numerous medical technology innovations over the years have dramatically improved our quality of life. Visit our exhibit at HIMSS16 to discover the many ways PatientKeeper is making physician lives better through intuitive applications that streamline order entry, medication reconciliation, documentation, charge entry, and other common workflows. While you’re visiting, have your picture taken in our Pioneers of Modern Medicine photo booth.

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PatientMatters

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Sheila Schweitzer, CEO
info@patientmatters.com
407.872.7969

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PatientSafe Solutions

Booth 4257

Contact: Alex Condurso, senior manager, marketing
acondurso@patientsafesolutions.com
760.525.1081

Schedule your show floor demo and get a Starbucks gift card at the booth! http://www.patientsafesolutions.com/himss-2016

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PDR

Booth 1068

Contact: Todd Helmink, national senior vice president, business development
todd.helmink@pdr.net
201.358.7140

Trusted by generations of healthcare providers, PDR delivers innovative health knowledge products and services that support prescribing decisions and patient adherence to improve health. As a leading provider of behavior-based prescription management programs, PDR provides event-driven and clinically relevant healthcare messaging through its patented process that improves patient compliance and outcomes, while preserving privacy. This network is made up of e-prescribing, EMR, and EHR applications, chain and independent pharmacies, and sponsors of healthcare-related education such as pharmaceutical manufacturers, health plans, payers, and pharmacy benefit managers. Learn more at www.pdrnetwork.com.

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PeriGen

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Chip Long, senior vice president, growth and development
chip.long@perigen.com
727.460.8167

PeriGen offers the only fetal surveillance software solution that is single-vendor, comprehensive, and fully-integrated. While at HIMSS, preview our new "on-demand" perinatal integration feature.

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PerfectServe

Booth 225

Contact: Leigh Ann Myers, chief clinical officer
lmyers@perfectserve.net
865.212.6140

PerfectServe delivers healthcare’s only secure care team collaboration platform, making it easy to quickly connect with the right care team member in any situation. Using a cloud-based system, PerfectServe Synchrony features Dynamic Intelligent Routing, high reliability notifications, cross-organizational connectivity, and proven interoperability. Nearly 58,000 physicians use the platform for improved care team productivity, better patient experience and HIPAA-compliant messaging. At PerfectServe booth #225, you’re going to feel like a kid in a candy store. Not only will you be surrounded by sweet treats, you’ll get to play with devices and experience first-hand how PerfectServe Synchrony can enable more efficient and productive care teams.

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Phynd Technologies

Booth 10728

Contact: Tom White, CEO
twhite@phynd.com
855.749.6363 x710

The Phynd Unified Provider Management (UPM) Platform allows healthcare organizations to unify, manage, and share a single, verified, custom profile on each of their providers, regardless of where that data exists in their multiple legacy IT systems. With the UPM Platform, hospitals and health systems have the ability  to manage their provider (referring and credentialed physicians, nurses, and mid-levels) profiles  across all of their core IT clinical, financial, and operational systems. This single, accurate source for provider information streamlines workflow, improves productivity,  speeds up billing, optimizes the revenue cycle, and enhances care coordination enterprise-wide.

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Point-of-Care Partners

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Tony Schueth, CEO and founder
tonys@pocp.com
877.312.7627

Point-of-Care Partners is a leading management consulting firm assisting healthcare organizations in the evaluation, development, and implementation of winning health information management strategies in a rapidly evolving electronic world. Our accomplished healthcare consultants, core services, and methodologies are focused on positioning your organization for success in the integrated, data-driven world of value-based care. Areas we can help you achieve success include: •ePrior Authorization (drug, device, procedure) •ePrescribing/EPCS/Specialty •Clinical Decision Support •Biosimilars (tracking, tracing, naming) •Health Information Exchange •Long-term, Post-Acute Care •Patient Engagement •Population Health/Analytics •Specialty Pharmacy Automation •Telehealth •Medication Therapy Management. In addition, we provide resources to help you stay up-to-date with frequent changes in US healthcare regulatory requirements for both ePrescribing and electronic prior authorization. Visit www.pocp.com to learn more.

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Porter Research

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Cynthia Porter, president
cynthia@porterresearch.com
678.427.6241

Porter Research has been in the healthcare IT industry as a proven go-to-market research firm for HIT vendors, healthcare payers, providers, biomedical companies, and consumers for 25+ years. Porter Research offer seven proven services: •Go to Market Strategy Research •Win-Loss Analysis •Brand /Competitive Analysis •Content Development •Customer Experience •Prospect Profiling/Lead Generation •Mergers and Acquisition Research Services. “So many companies in healthcare attempt to package and launch new solutions without fully understanding their target market, articulating their value proposition, and correctly positioning their solution,” says Cynthia Porter, president, Porter Research. We solve these foundational business problems through data-driven research and decades of healthcare experience. “By truly listening to the market and building strong value propositions that resonate with targets, our clients achieve faster brand awareness, market penetration, and business growth.” Porter has worked with over 300 HIT vendors, payers, providers, and biomedical companies since its inception in 1989.

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Qpid Health

Booth 11421

Contact: Amy Krane, senior director, marketing
Amy.Krane@QpidHealth.com
617.982.5400

Is your CFO asking if your value-based reimbursement is what it should be? Do your clinical leaders doubt you are getting credit for the care you deliver? Is manual data abstraction to fill the gaps your current – and costly – solution? If so, it’s time to take a fresh look at how you are reporting on quality measures. Please visit us in Booth #11421 to learn how QPID Health’s clinical reasoning technology locates and synthesizes information from anywhere in patient records to streamline quality reporting, clinical data registry submissions, and medical necessity reviews. Sorry no raffles or giveaways. But … we guarantee that you will be a Super Hero to your team back home when you tell them there’s a new way to optimize the data in your EHR.

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Recondo Technology

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jay Deady, CEO
jay.deady@recondotech.com

Now THIS is a game-changer…. If you are interested in learning about the FIRST true, self-service price transparency solution in healthcare, reach out to Recondo’s CEO, Jay Deady, to schedule some time to connect at HIMSS2016. jay.deady@recondotech.com. View a demo of the first self-service price transparency solution in healthcare and receive a FREE Amazon gift card.

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Sagacious Consultants

Booth 4770

Contact: Stephanie Speth, manager, marketing
stephaniespeth@sagaciousconsultants.com
314.487.0819

Sagacious Consultants leverages its extensive Epic and healthcare industry experience to drive financial performance and improve patient care in organizations worldwide. Using proven methodologies for revenue and clinical transformation, Sagacious Consultants improves KPIs and enhances provider efficiency. Sagacious Consultants is now part of Accenture, expanding its breadth of services and geographies served. Visit Sagacious Consultants at HIMSS booth #4770 to chat with our EHR experts and pick up some great swag! Hear our revenue cycle presentations: 1) “Rady Children’s Hospital Recharges its Revenue Cycle” on Tuesday, March 1 at 11:00 am in the Accenture Booth #7710; and 2) “IT Transformation: Rev Cycle Insights from the CIO” on Wednesday, March 2 at  2:30 pm in the Rock of Ages Theater, Session ID: 155.

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Santa Rosa Consulting

Booth 2157

Contact: Ashley Burkhead, sales operations and marketing manager
ashleyburkhead@santarosaconsulting.com
972.804.4216 (texts welcome)

Booth Giveaway: This year, we will have another tiered giveaway program. We will be giving away 2 items: a $100 Amazon gift card and a tablet (winner’s choice – value up to $400).

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Sensato

Booth 11612 (Divurgent’s booth)

Contact: John Gomez, CEO
john.gomez@sensato.co
844.736.7286

Cybersecurity – one of the hottest and most challenging topics facing HIT leaders this year. Unfortunately, the topic is surrounded by hype, conjecture, and a healthy dose of myth.  Practical strategies, approaches, and real-world solutions are fast becoming unicorns. Sensato is a small, boutique healthcare cybersecurity firm – we are 100-percent focused on HIT and our DNA is HIT.  We don’t use hype, fear, or uncertainty to establish long-term partnerships. Rather, we focus on earning the trust and support of our clients by providing real-world, practical cybersecurity solutions that are respectful of an organization’s challenges and economics. Medical Device Security – Managed Security Services – Compliance – Security Operations Center – Education – Incident Response – Incident Simulation – Strategic Planning – Virtual CISO – Friends – Partners – Coaches … yes … stop by … introduce yourself … changing the world starts by just saying hello! 😉

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Spok

Booth 4829

Contact: TJ Fisher, business solutions advisor
thomas.fisher@spok.com
952.230.5366

Spok is proud to be a leader in critical communications for healthcare, government, public safety, and other industries. We deliver smart, reliable solutions to help protect the health, well-being, and safety of people around the globe. Organizations worldwide rely on Spok for workflow improvement, secure texting, paging services, contact center optimization, and public safety response.  When communications matter, Spok delivers. JOIN SPOK AT HIMSS IN BOOTH 4829 TO SEE HOW YOU CAN: • Manage patient alarms to reduce alarm fatigue and improve the patient experience • Encrypt smartphone communications for HIPAA compliance • Deliver patient test results quickly to speed discharge times • Reach the right on-call clinician quickly for well-coordinated care. Spok will do one drawing at the end of each exhibit day for a chance to win an Amazon Echo.

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Stanson Health

Booth 162

Contact: Kimberly Denney, vice president, commercial operations
kimberly.denney@stansonhealth.com
747.220.4190

Stanson Health recently launched version 2.0 of its closed-loop analytics platform. This powerful platform pulls in all alert data of every type from best practice notifications to drug-drug, barcode, health maintenance, allergy, duplicate checking, etc. to provide more meaningful provider insights across your EHR’s entire alerting environment. During our in-booth demonstrations, we can show you how Stanson Health’s closed loop analytics and active CDS have helped our clients save on average $3k per provider.

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Stella Technology

Interoperability Showcase Booth 11954 |Exhibit Hall G Use Case #11

Contact: Salim Kizaraly, senior vice president, business development and founder
salim@stellatechnology.com
650.793.4131

Visit the Stella Technology kiosk located in the HIMSS16 Interoperability Showcase booth 11954 in Exhibit Hall G. Stella Technology will be conducting the following product demonstrations and theater presentations:

• Interoperability Showcase Use Case #11 – Stella Technology will participate in this use case by ensuring that the clinical documentation (CCDA) sent by the PCP to the specialist as part of the referral is of high and meaningful clinical quality, as measured by its IQHD (Inspector of Quality Healthcare Data) tool.
• Demonstration of the Interoperability Test Tool (ITT) used by the ConCert by HIMSS 
• lnteroperability Showcase Theater Sessions:
  Tuesday, March 1st at 1:00 pm PT. Come listen to our interoperability expert and CTO, Lin Wan, who will be presenting on the topic of “Content Interoperability” and how to overcome any challenges your organization is having around the quality of your clinical data.
  Wednesday, March 2nd at 12:00 pm PT. “ConCert by HIMSS: The Trusted Solution for Interoperability.” Learn how the ConCert by HIMSS certification program is defining interoperability. 
• HIMSS Blog: "Content Interoperability: Achieving Clinical Data Quality Success" by Lin Wan, CTO, Stella Technology – http://www.himssconference.org/updates/content-interoperability-achieving-clinical-data-quality-success We look forward to seeing you at the Interoperability Showcase!

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Strata Decision Technology

Booth 119

Contact: Rachael Britnell, senior marketing specialist
rbritnell@stratadecision.com
312.827.7711

Strata Decision Technology provides an innovative, cloud-based financial analytics and performance platform that is used by healthcare providers for financial planning, decision support, and continuous improvement. Founded in 1996, the company’s customer base includes 1,000 hospitals and many of the largest and most influential healthcare delivery systems in the US including CentraCare Health System, Fairview Health Services, Mission Health, and Yale New Haven Health System. The Company’s StrataJazz application is a single integrated software platform that includes modules for capital planning, contract modeling, cost accounting, cost management, decision support, financial forecasting, management reporting, operational budgeting, and performance improvement and strategic planning. StrataJazz earned top honors for the second consecutive year as the KLAS 2015/2016 Category Leader for Decision Support – Business in the 2015/2016 Best in KLAS: Software and Services report. The company has also been recognized with the Chicago Innovation Award, as one of Becker’s Healthcare 150 Great Places to Work in Healthcare, #1 in Black Book Ranking, and inclusion on the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies list, among many other industry accolades.

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Summit Healthcare

Booth 3700

Contact: Sara Wildes
swildes@summit-healthcare.com
781.519.4840

Summit Healthcare offers an array of integration/automation solutions. Our Summit Downtime Reporting System delivers access to critical data during downtime, while the Summit Scripting Toolkit and Summit InSync cover your automation needs. The Summit Interoperability Platform features the Summit Express Connect interface engine; Summit Care Exchange, which supports CCD data exchange with an integrated HISP; and Summit Provider Exchange, which simplifies bi-directional physician office integration. Visit us at booth #3700.

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Sunquest Information Systems

Booth 1925

Contact: Corrine Tso, vice president, marketing
corinne.tso@sunquestinfo.com
520.570.2240

At HIMSS16, Sunquest is demonstrating its solutions to enable fully-connected diagnostic communities across the care continuum. Attendees can receive in-booth demonstrations of Sunquest’s clinical and anatomic pathology solutions, as well as learn more about how GeneInsight, Atlas Medical, and Data Innovations can enhance the Sunquest solution. In addition to solution demos, Sunquest and Jitin Asnaani, the executive director of the CommonWell Health Alliance, will co-present on the future of interoperability and Sunquest’s strategy. Join Sunquest at HIMSS16, booth #1925.

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SyTrue

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Kyle Silvestro, CEO
kyle@sytrue.com
530.321.7484

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Talksoft

Booth 2272

Contact: Josh Mogilefsky, finance manager
jmogilefsky@talksoftonline.com
866.966.4700 x6023

The Coolest thing in Healthcare! Giveaways include coolers and beverage coozies.

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Fujifilm Medical Systems – TeraMedica Division

Booth 1024

Contact: Beth Roncke, manager, marketing communications
beth.roncke@fujifilm.com
414.908.7744

Synapse VNA integrates more specialties, more devices, and more data than any other VNA. Period. With 16 years of industry leading experience, our TeraMedica Division remains independently focused on advancing VNA technology and healthcare interoperability, while now leveraging Fujifilm’s clinical capabilities. As the centerpiece of Fujifilm’s comprehensive medical informatics portfolio, Synapse VNA provides the industry’s leading image management solution. Schedule your private HIMSS16 appointment at himss.fujimed.com and visit us in booth 1024.

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TransUnion Healthcare

Booth 11318

Contact: Pat Gilmore, vice president, sales
pgilmor@transunion.com
303.256.7187

TransUnion’s ClearIQ patient access platform and coverage discovery solutions (eScan) more accurately identifies and helps providers understand, predict, and integrate the financial behavior of patients so they can efficiently maximize reimbursement for the care provided, which ultimately help providers reduce uncompensated care and deliver a more transparent and improved patient experience.

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T-System

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Ann Baty, senior marketing communications manager
abaty@tsystem.com
469.791.2445

Robert Hitchcock, M.D., FACEP, T-System Chief Strategy Officer will be leading an educational session alongside Joseph Pocreva, M.D., Col., USAF, MC, Medical Director, Keesler Medical Center at HIMSS16. Learn how to leverage the power of EHR data to facilitate process change and improve key performance indicators. Using the U.S. Air Force’s Keesler Medical Center as an example, this session discusses utilizing EHR data to actively manage and make decisions related to clinical flow, throughput, staffing resources, bottlenecks and more.

HIMSS Presenter Session ID 57: http://www.himssconference.org/session/using-ehr-data-process-change-throughput-and-satisfaction

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Valence Health

Booth 1368

Contact: Kevin Weinstein, chief growth officer
k_weinstein@valencehealth.com
888.847.0250

If you’re not familiar with Valence Health, we’ve been helping provider organizations accept financial responsibility and rewards for the care they provide since 1996. With our integrated set of population health technology, advisory services, and managed services, our goal is to help you make the essential volume-to-value transition as seamless as possible. Visit us at booth #1368, where we’ll be showcasing our population health technology solutions, which help you: •Aggregate multiple data sources to create a comprehensive patient view  •Identify and close care gaps to manage populations •Measure performance to align clinical and financial goals and •Track patient adherence to care plans.

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Validic

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Chris Edwards, chief marketing officer
chris.edwards@validic.com
919.260.2231

Validic is the healthcare industry’s leading cloud-based, digital health platform. Validic provides convenient and quick access to patient data from in-home clinical devices, wearables and patient healthcare applications. By connecting its growing base of customers – that includes providers, pharmaceutical companies, payers, wellness companies and health IT vendors – to the continuously expanding list of digital health technologies, Validic enables healthcare companies to better coordinate care across their communities, improve their patient engagement strategies and more efficiently manage their patient populations. Validic’s innovative, scalable and FDA Class I MDDS technology delivers actionable, standardized, and HIPAA-compliant consumer health data from the best in-class mobile health devices and applications. Validic was recognized for healthcare innovation by Gartner and received Frost & Sullivan’s Best Practices and Best Value in Healthcare Information Interoperability award, as well as Top Ten Healthcare Disruptor award. Validic’s leading global digital health ecosystem reaches over 160 million lives in 47 countries and continues to grow daily. To learn more about Validic, follow Validic on Twitter at @validic or visit www.validic.com.

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Versus Technology

Booth 5246

Contact: Jeanne Ehinger, marketing communications manager
jeannee@versustech.com
231.946.5868

Are you looking for locating technology but can’t decide on a direction? With our multi-platform, scalable approach, you’re always on the right path with Versus. Whether you want to leverage WiFi infrastructure for enterprise visibility or delve into advanced locating to optimize clinical workflow, your first step begins at HIMSS16. The only live RTLS demonstration on the exhibit floor, our Experience Center features a fully operational Versus Sensory Network, demonstrating real-time cues for clinical workflow. Learn how we use location data combined with powerful workflow intelligence to not only drive efficiency at the point of care, but also automatically document key measures – helping you measure and manage your operations. We also offer ample opportunity to speak peer-to-peer with RTLS users. Visit the Versus booth to meet a client with 10 years of experience using RTLS automation across eight different solutions. Or, visit us during our exhibit hall cocktail reception, where you’re sure to meet more Versus clients – Wednesday from 4-6pm.

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Vital Images

Booth 732

Contact: Nichole Gerszewski, corporate brand and PR manager
ngerszewski@vitalimages.com
952.487.9500

Visit Vital’s booth (#732) to get your All Access Pass to our VIP Suite featuring game-changing technology. Learn more about VNA on demand, zero-cost data migration, personalized viewing, enterprise interoperability, ACO image governance, and more.

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VitalWare

Booth 6251

Contact: Leslee Paganelli, ambassador, company culture and communication
lesleepaganelli@vitalware.com

VitalWare makes the business of healthcare easier through intuitive cloud-based technologies and advanced knowledge sharing. Our team shapes businesses in the marketplace by delivering best-in-class products and service for a powerful user experience. We identify and simplify challenges in an ever changing and regulated industry, making your job easier. Visit us in booth #6251 to speak with our experts and enter for a chance to win a GoPro HERO.

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Wellsoft

Booth 3128

Contact: Denise Helfand, vice president, sales and marketing
dhelfand@wellsoft.com
800.597.9909 or 732.507.7200

Wellsoft Corp., developer and provider of the industry-leading EDIS since 1988, offers complete solutions for freestanding emergency centers, hospitals EDs and urgent care centers. Visit Wellsoft at HIMSS16 – Booth 3218 and learn more about 1) How to realize more revenue each year with Wellsoft  2) Why Wellsoft is ranked #1   3) Why clinicians and IT love Wellsoft. Wellsoft EDIS is Best in KLAS – Wellsoft ranked #1 in the 2015/2016, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2003, and 2002 Best in KLAS Awards: Software & Services Emergency Department Market Segment.

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West

Booth  6221 & 4200

Contact: Tanya Flores-Olney, campaign marketing manager
ttflores-olney@west.com
800.841.9000

The West Engagement Center combines technology enabled communications with clinically managed services to activate and engage patients beyond the clinical setting. Our solutions for patient access, routine care, transition care, chronic care, and RCM help organizations maximize revenue, quality, and the patient experience. Stop by daily for a hot cup of gourmet coffee and a chance to win an Apple Watch.

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Wolters Kluwer – Clinical Drug Information

Booth 5537

Contact: Matthew Bennardo, market manager
matthew.bennardo@wolterskluwer.com
330.650.6506

Wolters Kluwer Clinical Drug Information joined forces with some of our Medi-Span drug data clients, collaborating on two presentations for HIMSS16 — both related to how healthcare organizations used Medi-Span filter settings and standard EHR tools to better manage alerts, helping reduce noise and the fatigue that comes with unwanted alerts, while simultaneously enhancing medication safety and clinical decision support.

ALERT FATIGUE: IMPROVING ALERT IMPACT BY REDUCING NOISE 
WHEN: Wednesday, March 2, 4-5 pm PT 
WHO: Michael Ochowski and Phillip Boll, Group Health Cooperative South Central Wisconsin  

OPTIMIZING DRUG DOSE CHECKING TO MINIMIZE ALERT FATIGUE 
WHEN: Friday, March 4, noon-1 pm PT 
WHO: David Kaelbar, MD, The MetroHealth System, Cleveland, Ohio  

Come visit us at HIMSS booth 5537 and tell us about your alert wish list. We can share more about how we help healthcare organizations reduce alert fatigue and better manage and optimize medication-related alerts.

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Xerox

Booth 8005

Contact: Kirsten LeMaster, vice president, marketing and communications, Healthcare Provider Solutions, Xerox
Kirsten.lemaster@xerox.com
214.693.5040

Xerox Healthcare helps healthcare organizations focus on improving lives through better, more affordable, and more accessible care by designing processes that work for the people delivering, enabling, and receiving care. We provide a range of technology, analytics, and business process solutions to over 2,200 hospitals, 32 states, and major health plans. Come visit us at booth #8005 and learn why so many health professionals choose us. We can help you implement EHR and ERP, optimize business processes, increase technology adoption, deliver quality and care data, support claims accuracy, communicate member benefits, drive medication adherence, provide risk assessments, and enable access for patients. Stop by our booth to speak to Regina Holliday, artist, influential patient advocate, and founder of The Walking Gallery. She will be speaking with guests and painting their stories in the Xerox booth.

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ZeOmega

Booth 262

Contact: Gus Orr, marketing manager
gorr@zeomega.com
214.619.3961

Stop by ZeOmega’s booth (#262) at HIMSS to learn how we can supercharge your EHR and deliver the unique tools you need for a successful transformation to value-based care. While you’re there, you can recharge your mobile device at our convenient charging station while you complete a Jiva demo!

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ZirMed

Booth 6647

Contact: Stacy State, director of enterprise marketing
Stacy.State@zirmed.com
888.803.8732

1. Stop by booth #6647 at HIMSS16 to learn how leading US hospitals and health systems uncover 1-3 percent in new net patient revenue. 
2. Visit ZirMed at booth #6647 to find out how one health system cut AR days by more than 20 percent — while implementing a new EHR and growing their physician business by more than 20 percent! 
3. Come see ZirMed at booth #6647—meet the team that just won Best in KLAS for the third year in a row, and learn about ZirMed’s solutions for population health, remit and deposit management, and AR management!

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