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Readers Write 6/27/11

June 27, 2011 Readers Write Comments Off

Submit your article of up to 500 words in length, subject to editing for clarity and brevity (please note: I run only original articles that have not appeared on any Web site or in any publication and I can’t use anything that looks like a commercial pitch). I’ll use a phony name for you unless you tell me otherwise. Thanks for sharing!

Will Meaningful Use and EMRs Help Jump the ACO Hurdle?
By Frank Poggio

The Accountable Care Organization (ACO) is the government’s latest attempt to improve quality of patient care and control the ever-escalating growth in healthcare costs. The Affordable Care Act (commonly known as the health reform law) encourages, via financial incentives and penalties, the formation of ACOs by organizing healthcare teams, technology, and knowledge around patient needs.

As might be expected, there are many complex organizational, monetary, and other significant policy issues surrounding the ACO model of care delivery.

The ACO concept is not new to the healthcare world. In past decades, we called them PHOs (Physician Hospital Organizations) or HMOs (Health Maintenance Organizations). Both of these in the 1980s and 1990s had only a small impact on healthcare costs. Many PHOs and some HMOs are still in existence today.

In fact, we have always had some form of ACO going as far back as 1939. For example, the Kaiser Health Plan, The Cleveland Clinic, Sharp HealthCare, Geisinger Clinic, and many others are basically ACOs. If they include an insurance component, they are more like an HMO.

The simplest definition of an ACO is a health care delivery system where the physicians and hospitals work under one corporation, have one set of synchronized patient objectives, and share in the profits and losses from normal operations. Medicare wants doctors and hospitals to work together and accept one payment for all levels of care and accept the responsibility for coordinating the care of the patient across all modalities of care.

Where ACOs work and why

The concept has worked at Mayo, Kaiser, and Cleveland Clinic because the attending docs are part owners of the hospital. They get paid a salary and bonus based on both the performance of their practice and the performance of the hospital and other health services.

For example, the physicians readily accept that fewer support staff will save the hospital money, which in turn could result in a year-end monetary bonus while hopefully improving patient care. That, in turn, can lead to more patient referrals and more revenues. The same is true for ordering fewer tests or procedures. Fewer tests equal less costs, and under a fixed payment system like Medicare DRGs, that means more profit.

But today, the independent physician makes his or her money seeing as many patients in his or her office as possible. The hospital is just a cost-neutral and convenient place for physicians to perform complex procedures. If an ACO is that simple and beneficial, why are there so few of them?

How did we get here?

Today and for the past half century, we have been in a situation where the person most responsible for “product definition” and most responsible for “bringing in the business” is not an employee of the hospital. That person is the attending physician, or sometimes called the independent practitioner.

It goes back to the establishment of the AMA and the AHA in the early 20th century. Both of these groups were focused on increasing utilization of hospital and medical services. Even at that time, just as today, medical care was relatively expensive. To drum up business, they both came up with the idea to sell a medical insurance policy.

Rather than work together, around 1940, the AMA founded Blue Shield and the AHA started Blue Cross. Each had similar, yet different objectives. Keep in mind that almost all doctors in the early part of the 20th century were independent practitioners and hospitals were places to be avoided.

In 1966, along came Medicare. If you go back and study the legislation of the day, you will find that physicians fought Medicare with a vengeance and wanted no part of the government or the institutional side of the package. Of course today, if you tried to take Medicare away, you’d have a rebellion — and not just from seniors. Medicare in 1966 solidified the doctor-hospital split via separate payment systems by creating Medicare Part A for hospital payments and Part B for physician payments.

Then in 1972, as the health insurance industry matured, the Federal Trade Commission became concerned that doctors and hospitals selling insurance was a little to cozy. The AMA had to spin off Blue Shield and AHA split with Blue Cross. Later, as the Blues saw themselves more as insurance companies than part of the medical establishment, many of the Blues merged and eventually morphed into today’s United Health, Wellpoint, etc.

To drive the hospital-physician wedge deeper, in 1993, Congress passed OBRA, which contained the infamous Stark amendment. The Stark amendment made it a crime for doctors to refer patients to a hospital in which they had a financial interest. The feds saw this as a conflict of interest that would drive up healthcare costs.

The structure we have today — full physician independence — has been around a very long time. It has been repeatedly fortified through separate provider and piecework-based payment systems.

That raises today’s big question: who is accountable for all the care a patient receives?

How can we create more ACOs?

Now, after more than a half century, the government has come to the conclusion that doctors working separately from hospitals with separate payment systems and different incentives is a counterproductive operating model. (too bad we didn’t see that coming when we initiated the Medicare-Medicaid systems.)

Under the duress of a very large federal deficit (in part, a result of healthcare costs), we are trying to reverse 70 years of misdirected legal and financial incentives. Under an ACO, the feds want both parties to work together, share the payments, and share the risks.

The ACO statute of April 2011 lists the following provider combinations as potentially eligible ACOs:

ACO professionals in formal group practice arrangements.
Networks of individual practices of ACO professionals.
Partnerships or joint venture arrangements between hospitals and ACO professionals.
Hospitals employing ACO professionals.
Such other groups of providers of services and suppliers as the Secretary determines appropriate.

Combinations 2 and 3 are what I call the “virtual’”ACO. Combinations 1 and 4 are more like the PHO/HMO of the past, or the Mayo model.

As stated by CMS, ACO compliance with the requirement to reduce costs and improve care may involve a range of strategies, which they state includes the following examples:

A capability to use predictive modeling to anticipate likely care needs.
Utilization of case managers in primary care offices.
Having a specific transition of care program that includes clear guidance and instructions for patients, their families, and their caregivers.
Remote monitoring.
Telehealth.
The establishment and use of health information technology, including electronic health records and an electronic health information exchange, to enable the provision of a beneficiary’s summary of care record during transitions of care both within and outside of the ACO.

Promote the virtual ACO

As can be seen from the compliance strategies, CMS is leaning heavily on HIT and EMR to help avoid some very difficult political battles. As an interim step, they are encouraging hospitals and physician groups to use EMR systems to build and support a virtual ACO.

In this scenario, the physician and the hospital would remain corporately separate, but the patient information and the payment would be shared. This dovetails with the new federal HITECH Act that promotes EMRs and stronger coordination of care via interoperability.

CMS has defined the five levels of ACOs and has set target dates for providers to achieve one of the levels. If a provider organization achieves an ACO level during the next five years, they will get a financial bonus. If they don’t, their Medicare payments will be reduced. Sounds like MU all over again.

Initially, the AMA was indifferent towards the ACO concept. AHA gave it mild support. But after CMS issued draft regulations in April noting the bonus-penalty provisions and the shared payment component, both associations came out strongly against it.

Of course, the 800-pound gorilla is who should run the ACOs, physicians or hospital executives? If there’s to be a single payment for Medicare patient services to the ACO, how do you split that payment?

CMS is staying out of this battle and leaving it to the docs and hospitals to fight it out. To say the least, AMA probably views it as the death knell for the independent physician practice, and AHA may see it as the surrendering of institutional autonomy to physicians.

I think it will be a long arduous road getting to real ACOs. Remember, the overall objective is to reduce the costs of healthcare. According to a CMS analysis of the proposed regulation, Medicare could potentially save as much as $2 billion over the first three years, so somebody’s ox has to get gored.

But as we stumble down this long and very bumpy road, I believe in the early years, the focus will be on the virtual ACO. The CIO’s office will be right in the middle of it. If you look at the Meaningful Use criteria for CCR, CCD, and interoperability, the first hurdle is staring us in the face.

Frank Poggio is president of The Kelzon Group.

Security: An Often Overlooked Meaningful Use Requirement
By Jeff White

During the first quarter of 2011 alone, there were media reports of inappropriate access to electronic Personal Health Information (e-PHI) of four sizeable healthcare organizations. This is damaging in terms of public relations, patient confidence, possible revenue loss, and increased costs to protect patients with exposed identifying details. It seems that many organizations are overlooking or delaying the need to perform a security risk assessment.

Yet under the HITECH Act, one of the core Meaningful Use measures is the requirement to “Conduct or review a security risk analysis … and implement security updates as necessary, and correct identified security deficiencies prior to or during the EHR reporting period to meet this measure.”

This measure is, therefore, a key task healthcare providers must conduct before attesting to their ability to meet Stage 1 requirements. Additionally, the risk analysis requirement in the HIPAA Security Rule is not only an integral part of meeting Meaningful Use for HITECH, but also for being in compliance with the law.

A risk analysis is the very foundation from which to build your information security compliance program. A security risk analysis should be conducted with active participation of internal auditors, IT leadership, and IT subject matter experts.

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the security watchdog for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), suggests that a covered entity use the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) risk-based approach for doing a risk analysis, which encompasses nine primary steps:

System characterization to fully understand key technology components in your infrastructure.
Threat identification.
Vulnerability identification.
Controls analysis to assess the capabilities of your existing set of controls to meet your environment’s needs
Likelihood determination to assign likelihoods, considering the threat motivation and ability, the nature of the vulnerability, and current and planned controls
Impact analysis to analyze that impact, considering for each system the effects of lost confidentiality, integrity, or availability, and the effect of any current or planned mitigating controls
Risk determination, a combination of the impact rating and the likelihood determination
Control recommendations, a roadmap for planning controls for future implementation
Results documentation.

To prepare for Meaningful Use attestation, it is recommended to conduct the security risk analysis at both the technical design and system build phase when implementing a new EHR system. Additionally, it will be important to update the risk analysis further on in the MU Roadmap approximately four months prior to go-live.

As ongoing changes happen, new risk occurs. An annual risk assessment should become part of the compliance process; that is, the risk assessment can be merely updated as an addendum and not as an overbearing intrusion that competes with other organizational needs. A regular review of your risk posture is what is required to protect e-PHI. Too many new threat vectors and vulnerabilities are introduced into information environments each day. A reasoned, systematic, and consistent approach will help to achieve your organizational goals.

Spurred by the HITECH Act, the healthcare industry is embracing EHRs at an accelerating rate. This move carries with it a need for heightened responsibility since digital information can be copied, transmitted, or used so easily. As such, the risk accruing from this transition to electronic records must be well understood.

In its passage of HITECH, the US Congress took special consideration to note that security and privacy of patient records should be a paramount concern. In essence, HHS recognizes that the very success of the HITECH program rests in part on patients’ ability to trust provider information systems with sensitive information.

Jeff White is a principal with Aspen Advisors of Pittsburgh, PA.

Readers Write 6/22/11

June 22, 2011 Readers Write 22 Comments

Epic Ponderings
By Cam O’Flage

Epic is a marvelous marketing machine, from initially establishing themselves as a boutique firm with a certain mystique since they were able to tell clients whether they were the right customer (rather than the customer telling Epic that they were the right vendor). And it continues to be a superlative marketing machine. They tell a good story, present a great vision, and manage customer expectations nonpareil. They’re superb business people.

Epic doesn’t do everything right, but who does?

Epic makes many good decisions, but they make some bad ones.

Epic releases aren’t always so bug free.

Now, I know that I speak from a biased perspective since I currently am involved with provision of implementation consulting (staff augmentation) services. But I’ve been around a long time and seen lots of successes and failures across multiple delivery systems using multiple vendor applications.

Epic’s current implementation methodology, however, is circumspect. While it’s partially in response to ONC’s mandated MU timetable (another source of discussion), Epic does believe that it knows the best way to install its product. But a tight timetable with little time to consider workflow needs or optimizations or deferral of vital function simply to make a deadline is so wrong.

We’re told time after time, plan and engineer correctly in advance to maximize return on investment and minimize production problems. It’s in our business school case studies. It’s in our re-engineering process improvement literature. It’s in our quality theories. Yet, Epic – and ONC – have embraced a slam dunk implementation methodology. Get it in, optimize later.

There are so many choices. So many informatics considerations (one of my biggest fears since so many of Epic’s designers and installers simply don’t have a good basis in understanding clinical informatics needs – or revenue cycle considerations, for that matter). So many process issues. So many opportunities to improve, to ensure that clinical documentation is complete, that patient safety is maximized, that budget is truly aligned with needs and expectations, that appropriate governance has been put into place, that risks are adequately mitigated, that expectations are properly established, that work/life balance is dealt with, etc.

There are too many customers that go apoplectic when there are budget overruns, even if scope has changed. While that’s not an Epic problem per se, the perception that their plan is comprehensive and constitutes the safest way to attain MU is contributory. CIOs and COOs and CFOs and VPs simply need to get real. An EHR implementation is an immensely complex organizational change, fraught with unknowns and potential failure points.

There are too many customers who wish that they had done their implementation differently. There are too many times that customers realize that optimization entails rebuilding the foundation. There are too many customers who find themselves a year later not where they wanted to be. HIStalk pages certainly document such things.

However, all of that said, I can’t say enough good things about Epic. Epic truly focuses on improving the patient experience. Their culture is one of excellence, of passion, of dedication and commitment. Their employees are smart and industrious. And they continue to deliver what they promise. I can’t say that about many IT vendors.

Why Are We Still Struggling with CPOE?
By Daniela Mahoney

I often ask CIOs a simple question: what keeps you awake at night? Over the years I have received many different answers. Lately I have been thinking about my work and my experiences from previous days and could not stop asking myself, “Why, after more than 30 years, are we still struggling with getting CPOE going?” What other industry has tried implementing technologies and three decades later they are still in their infancies with the results?

I was excited about the idea of writing an article each month for HIStalk to share some of my insights about what to do with this entire CPOE business and how to best prepare for its challenges. Then I was wondering about our colleagues in the industry, and who wants to keep reading about CPOE? Mine would be just one more article of something you read somewhere, else because “theoretically,” we know what we need to do and there is already a lot of information about it. And that is the exactly the key — we know the “whats” but we oftentimes miss the “hows”.

But, one would ask, why should anyone listen to Daniela? Well, you don’t have to. I am only going to share what I have learned by doing CPOE for over 20 years. I am going to keep it simple because I find that we can achieve much more when we present information in a way that we can relate to and it makes sense to most of us. It is like baking a molten chocolate cake – it has only six basic ingredients, but the outcome is divine! You can add the raspberries on top if you wish. Simple is good, and we can achieve exceptional results.

Did you know that CPOE has been talked about since the 70s? In June 1971, the National Center for Health Services selected El Camino Hospital, CA, to evaluate and implement the Technicon Medical Information Management System (TDS) to be used by nurses, physicians, and others. The main goal was to expedite the overall patient care processes.

By 1974, 45% of all orders were entered directly by physicians into their CPOE system. Yes, we had it then, and unfortunately at that time in the 70s and 80s, some of the institutions and vendors who attempted had varying degrees of failures, with some limited successes. It was not until the late 80s and early 90s that we experienced a renewed effort and interest in CPOE. I started my journey on this path in 1990, so I can say that we have learned a lot. Or did we?

I am going to begin with the end in mind, assuming that we are not just doing CPOE to meet the political timelines, but also to do the right thing for the patients and give our clinicians a tool they can appreciate and incorporate into their everyday workflow. Based on this assumption, we will work backwards and talk about the right things to do as we prepare for this CPOE journey. Almost three decades later, it is about time that we get it right the first time around! Here is the roadmap we will talk about in the next 12 months:

Is it only CPOE, or there is more? We have to think about what is ahead of us more holistically because CPOE is no longer a standalone project.
What support we need from our leaders to pave the road for us and why?
Why should I (physician) use it? What’s in it for me? How do we create a value proposition?
How much will it cost?
How do we create the teams (who steers the wheel vs. who shifts the gears)?
Don’t let perfection get in the way of good. Setting the scope of what CPOE is and what it is not.
Clinical process transformation. How to manage and not get crushed by the magnitude of change.
How about the vendor? Where do they fit into this?
Did we get it right? How do you know? (aka, success factors).
What is going to make us fail? If 30% of CPOE installs have historically failed, how do we rise above this? (aka, risk factors).
Large or small hospital, we need to roll out somehow. What are the options and their respective pros and cons?
No, I did not forget about training and support. I will address this as well.

And if there are any other readers who enjoy cooking as much as I do, here is the link to the molten chocolate cake. 30 minutes to prepare, six minutes to cook, and 10 minutes to savor your work of art. And while you are enjoying this superbly rich chocolate delicacy, please try not to think of CPOE!

Daniela Mahoney RN is president and CEO of Healthcare Innovative Solutions of Seville, OH.

Thoughts on Lazar Greenfield Stepping Down
By Tiffany Carroca

On Sunday April 17, renowned surgeon Lazar Greenfield MD resigned from his position as president-elect of the American College of Surgeons (ACS). The resignation came just over two months after he had written a controversial article that caught the attention of nearly everyone in the healthcare community, including those in medical coding, and has achieved a level of infamy nationwide as the Valentine’s Day editorial. The controversy of the article stems from a statement made in which Dr. Greenfield suggests giving women semen for Valentine’s Day instead of chocolates.

The editorial was originally published in the February 2011 issue of the American College of Surgeons affiliated newspaper, Surgery News. The paper, made available free to the public online, was pulled from the Web site when the controversy erupted soon after the story ran. Interestingly, Dr. Greenfield was also editor-in-chief of the publication, but was subsequently removed from the position due to the content of his article.

Although Dr. Greenfield apologized for the editorial and reaffirmed his belief in the rights of women in health care, these actions did not end the controversy. Besides offending many female surgeons who have had to put up with sexual harassment for decades in this male-dominated field, Dr. Greenfield managed to dig himself in deeper when he sent an e-mail to several media outlets defending his claims. However, Dr. Greenfield did ultimately determine that resigning would be the best way to put an end to the uproar over his article. In a statement given to ABC News, Dr. Greenfield said, “My personal and written apologies were ignored, and my suggestion to use my experience to educate others rejected. Therefore, rather than have this remain a disruptive issue, I resigned.”

The comments made by Dr. Greenfield on Valentine’s Day seemed like a joke to some and the crass opinion of a womanizer to others. However, the statement does have a basis in scientific and medical fact. Dr. Greenfield was referring to a study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2002. The study was performed by psychologist Gordon G. Gallup, PhD at the State University of New York in Albany, and gained widespread attention when it was reported in the article Crying Over Spilled Semen by Tiffany Kary for Psychology Today.

The study was conducted on 293 college women who were sexually active. The results showed that women experienced less depression after having unprotected sex, and the depression slowly returned as the time progressed after their last sexual encounter. Women who used condoms did not experience any reduced or heightened rates of depression.

The conclusion reached by Dr. Gallup was that the hormones contained in semen are absorbed through the walls of the vagina and elevate the mood of the woman after intercourse. Other variables that could have caused the reduced depression, such as birth control and behavior patterns, were also taken into account.

The group most outraged by the editorial was women in the healthcare field, most notably women surgeons. Colleen Brophy MD, a prominent professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and chairwoman of the ACS’s surgical research, explained to Pauline W. Chen MD who reported on the story that she was “aghast” at the editorial. However, when the ACS refused to stand by her response, Brophy resigned from the College in response, claiming, “The editorial was just a symptom of a much larger problem. The way the College is set up right now is for the sake of the leadership instead of the patients.”

Many women in the healthcare field voiced their outrage over Dr. Greenfield’s editorial, but he was not without his supporters. Dr. Greenfield, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, had always been highly regarded and was presented with the Jacobson Innovation Award just last year, according to NPR’s Health blog.

A colleague at the University of Michigan, Diane M. Simeone MD, came out in his defense, saying that she has witnessed several accounts of gender bias among surgeons, but never from Dr. Greenfield. Similarly, Dr. Gallup, who conducted the initial study, also came to the defense of Greenfield, noting that what he said may not have been tasteful, but does have “some basis in available science.”

Undoubtedly, Dr. Greenfield’s remarks caused a public outrage even though they were based on science. However, a lewd and womanizing comment based on science is no less offensive that one based on fiction. If Dr. Greenfield was trying to be humorous or otherwise non-offensive with his comments, he failed miserably, as public opinion has shown. Even an esteemed doctor and scientist can fall from grace when injecting personal opinions into the science. As most scientists will agree, it is best to keep the science pure.

Readers Write 6/8/11

June 8, 2011 Readers Write 41 Comments

Note: today’s first article was written by the CIO of an academic medical center that will move to Epic once the necessary approvals are in place (not yet announced). I suggested drafting some thoughts about why Epic is so successful in that market, even with hospitals that had no plans to replace their existing systems. I thought the perspective of a CIO in the middle of that decision would be interesting since it’s hard for the rest of us to understand how Epic can be so consistently successful, and therefore tend to blame unspecified “Epic Kool-Aid drinking” rather than the real differences between Epic and its competitors.

Why Epic? Why So Many Decisions to Deploy Epic?
By Thoughtful CIO

As a nation of healthcare delivery systems, we seem to be selecting Epic in record numbers. I’m told that nine of every 10 decision-makers are selecting Epic.

It is astounding, but it is also rather obvious. Epic has become the market choice for many of us. And like many market swings, the causes are many.

I’ve given it some thought. I fully expect that many will disagree. This is just one person’s opinion.

In some ways (I hope you can forgive the melodramatic root cause), I think our focus on Epic and the need for tight integration and simplification of our environments might relate to the upcoming 10th anniversary of September 11. We are longing for a return to a simpler time.

It has been ten years since the “world stopped turning.” I think many of us are carefully revisiting where we have been and what we have accomplished since that September day. It might not be deliberate, but I think it is real, nonetheless.

We all refocused on the “main thing” back in 2001. It may have been different for different industries, but in healthcare, we decided we were going to make a difference. And I think we meant it.

Sadly, in spite of much hard work, and many system deployments, we are not yet achieving safe, efficient, and effective healthcare to the degree we all had hoped.

Here is some thinking out loud.

In a world where healthcare decisions and information flows are growing increasingly complicated and are conflicting, our care providers are overwhelmed with complexity, burdened by too much not-always-relevant information, and are often interrupt-driven as they attempt to make decisions. It feels like chaos because it is. It’s a difficult balancing act. Many of us are longing for a simpler and safer approach to the management of information. We haven’t yet found it, and we worry that it is hurting our patients and making it more difficult to be a care provider.
Patient- and family-centered care is going to become even more critical in the world of individualized health and personalized medicine. This will require improved access to longitudinal patient records. It will necessarily involve and empower the patient to be an active member of the care team. It will soon be the only way to effectively and efficiently manage and allocate scarce resources. Targeted interventions and therapies will be the future of medicine, and information technology will be a critical component of the deal. But we are not yet delivering on the promise, in spite of many millions of dollars of investment.
To deal with this complexity, chaos, and the critical focus on the patient-centeredness, we are focused on minimizing the burden on our care providers and our patients. We want to collect data once, at the source, in the most user-friendly way possible. We want our data collection to be the by-product of care, not an added responsibility. And we want it to be easy to do. We have not yet found a way to achieve these goals in a meaningful way, at least not consistently.
Some current vendor-supplied solutions offer choices and options. They promise to be all things to all people. They rely heavily upon a provider-based organization to make wise decisions and “perfect decisions” in the midst of a very imperfect world. The decisions that must be made expect that there is clarity, when in fact there is not. We are not realizing increased productivity, lower costs, and more efficient care. In fact, many of our healthcare delivery systems are questioning the investments we have made and are not yet able to clearly define the benefits we had hoped to achieve.
Many of us have experienced implementations that over-promised and under-delivered. We trusted our vendor partners and some of them failed us. We then we failed our user partners. The systems didn’t perform well, the vendor was unable to deliver the rich functionality that was promised, the product didn’t scale, the developer didn’t listen, etc. Everyone loses, and we were parties to the losses.
Enter Judy Faulkner and Epic. There is no ambiguity! For more than 30 years, she has been crystal clear about her strategy and the strategy of Epic. The patient is at the center. The business of healthcare is about saving lives and managing information to support life-saving activities. No ambiguity. It’s about the basics, and she gets the basics right! From the beginning, what you see is what you get. No ambiguity.
Judy Faulkner and Carl Dvorak treat everyone the same. No deep discounts, no development partners. We’re all in this together. There is no ambiguity.
Judy and Carl have a healthy optimism about the future. They believe there are many opportunities we can leverage, but they never make a promise they can’t keep. They tell the truth. They do what they say they will do.
Judy doesn’t offer to solve problems she can’t solve. She is completely transparent and tells the truth, both when it is popular and when it isn’t. No pretense. She doesn’t need to be liked. She has a product that works, that scales, and is fully integrated. There is no ambiguity.
Judy also sells a product that works well. She provides the rules for how it must be implemented. Again, she eliminates the ambiguity. Follow the rules and everybody wins.

I’m not sure I’ve captured what I was hoping to capture. In summary, when I think of Epic, I think of a few words:

Honesty
Integrity
Candor
Trust
Transparency
Consistency
Focus
Commitment
Patient-centered

These are words I hope folks will use to describe the work we all do in healthcare IT.

What Providers Need to Know about Patient Engagement
By Donna Scott

Given all the talk these days about patient-centeredness, is there really change afoot? Will the US healthcare system of the future really be built around the needs of patients? Or is “patient-centered” just another buzzword which won’t quite survive the complexities, the political realities, and the multi-faceted stakeholders in the great healthcare reform debate?

Well, I have been called an “optimist,” so you can probably guess my opinion on the subject. Yes, I believe that we are truly at the crossroads of change in the healthcare system in the United States. In spite of the complexities and difficulties ahead of us, the desire to implement new ways of managing healthcare in this country has never been stronger.

Regardless of what you think about the future success of Accountable Care Organizations or Patient-centered Medical Homes, there appears to be widespread agreement that US healthcare delivery needs to shift from a quantity orientation to quality of care and better outcomes. And better patient outcomes will be enabled by a much higher level of patient engagement across the healthcare industry. This shift toward quality outcomes and patient engagement represents both an opportunity and a challenge for providers.

Because of this shift, a small group of patient engagement enthusiasts and industry pundits were recently asked by The Institute of Technology Transformation to write a paper for providers about the current state of patient engagement. The objective was to offer healthcare providers a summary of the latest research that exists about patient engagement and provide some key points for their consideration as they embark on the healthcare reform journey. The Top Ten Things You Need to Know about Engaging Patients is the result of our efforts. The paper can be accessed here.

In summary: there is a lot of good patient research out there that our group has synthesized into the following key ten considerations for providers:

Providing Patient Education Online
Interactive Online Dialogue
Patient Segmentation
Role of Caregivers
Trust in Physicians
Consumer Mobility
Security and Privacy Concerns
Leveraging Inexpensive Tools
ROI of Patient Engagement
Changing Care Models

In each of these ten areas, we briefly discuss the research and the key learnings which are relevant to providers. In addition, we include four key recommendations for practical action:

Walk the talk: set specific patient engagement objectives and measure them
Champion your hospital’s social media strategy and assure mobility as a key component
Pay attention to caregivers and do your homework on patient demographics
Consider HIT solutions that already incorporate patient access and engagement capabilities

For some progressive hospital administrators, this information will simply affirm what they are already doing. For the others, we hope it will spark ideas on how to take their patient engagement strategy to the next level. Because the need for more patient engagement in the U.S. healthcare system will impact all of us, sooner or later.

Donna Scott is leader of the Patient Engagement Action Group for the Institute of Health Technology Transformation and executive director of marketing strategy for RelayHealth.

Twitter, Dogs, and Healthcare
By Ronnie James Dio

I see a lot of dogs out in public these days. They’re everywhere. People bring them to Home Depot and into Starbucks. Sometimes they’re peeking out of purses.

I love dogs. I’d even go so far as to say I consider most dogs excellent judges of character. But I’m not wild about sharing my coffee and oatmeal at Starbucks with somebody’s dog right next to me. When I go to the grocery store, I don’t want to see a dog riding in the basket of the grocery cart.

I went to the dentist the other day. Guess who’s hanging out by the reception desk? You got it — a big black Lab. Named Elliot, by the way, which I consider to be a decidedly un-dogly name. The look in his eyes said, “I’m begging you, call me Fetcher.”

I want some boundaries is my point. Just give me a shopping experience without dogs.

Same goes for ubiquitous talk about social media. More specifically, Twitter. I really don’t care that Anderson Cooper of CNN on-air wants to tell me he’ll be tweeting during the broadcast. (I especially don’t like the word “tweeting,” while we’re coming clean with each other.)

Also, I don’t need software I use in my healthcare IT business to update Twitter with what I’m doing, as a contract management tool I have is dying to do for me. Just sent a contract out! Third one today!

I don’t say this thinking trade secrets could be disclosed. It’s much simpler: I’m just not that interesting.

And now that we have these two things on the table (too many dogs in public; I’m largely boring) I need to cover one more thing. I don’t find Twitter interesting or helpful for healthcare except, I’m sad to say, in a catastrophe such as an earthquake or tornado, where we actually learn things we couldn’t know otherwise.

When tornadoes strike or a tsunami hits, Twitter can be indispensable. It can become a strikingly important tool for healthcare, if only to inform others where help is needed. When we least expect it, a hula hoop becomes a vital messaging tool.

Otherwise, it’s the dog in Starbucks, the thing I can’t escape that I actually don’t dislike, but I want to pick and choose my interaction with it.

And just because there’s a tool that lets us share 140 characters of text with the world doesn’t mean it’s valuable. In the real world of healthcare, when things are not catastrophic, I’m arguing that Twitter is rarely helpful, and as parents can attest (via the attestation process) in the breezy “real” world teenagers move in, few have the slightest interest in Twitter. It interferes with their texting.

I have a very high professional focus on healthcare IT, so I typed in “healthcare IT” from the main Twitter screen. This popped up:

We r letting d Tfare issue overshadow d aim of the damn lunch. It was a forum where issues of light, good healthcare / education were discussed.

Besides the fact that I find the phrase “damn lunch” funny, I have no idea what the post means, but I’ll bet a quarter it’s right at 140 characters. I’m also pretty sure there is no such thing as “light, good healthcare,” and I’m positive that you should be able to find “healthcare IT” in context when using an ever-present tool for social media.

So I put to you a simple question. Outside of emergencies or catastrophes, when does Twitter actually benefit healthcare? Who is helped, and how?

I’m wide open to learning something here, but please answer in 140 characters or less. I’ll be back in touch after I take my dog to church, then out for a damn lunch.

Readers Write 5/16/11

May 16, 2011 Readers Write Comments Off

The Four Principles of Getting Things Done Well
By Mark Johnston

There are thousands of self-help and business books out there, each promising to change your life with the author’s “new” and “revolutionary” ideas. But when it really comes down to it, most of these books are based on fads or the repackaging of old knowledge, and are not worth the cover price.

In my experience, someone who’s looking to get more done in their professional and personal lives (and to do it better) can do so by practicing four simple things until they become habit: organization, prioritization, execution and discipline. Let’s take a quick look at each one:

Organization

Is your desk a mess? What about your car? If you answer yes to either of these, chances are your work life is messy, too. To be effective, you must become more organized. My advice? Go clean your desk. Tomorrow, clean your car. The next day, clear out your garage (or, if it’s really that bad, this next weekend).

Then start on your paper-based and electronic documents. Create a logical file structure so that you can find any piece of information you need within seconds. Do you travel a lot? Then keep a pre-packed bag of travel-sized toiletries in your carry-on bag.

Indentify other areas of your business and personal life that are disordered, and do the necessary! Sounds simple, but you’ll be amazed at how much productivity you’ll gain by weeding out disorganization.

Prioritization

In business, particularly at a small company where everyone wears a lot of hats, there are always 101 things to get done. If you think every one is of equal importance, you’ll never get anything done, let alone to the best of your ability.

Instead, write weekly and daily to do lists, with the most crucial things at the top. This crosses over into organization, showing how these principles are closely connected. Again, this may sound patronizing, but to make an impact, you need to get your daily activities in order.

Execution

All the organization and prioritization in the world is useless if you don’t follow through. Know you’ve got to finish writing a report? Block off two hours on your calendar and set your IM status to “busy” so you won’t be disturbed. Create a distraction-free work environment that lends itself to focusing on your priorities, and start checking items off your to-do list.

Procrastination will kill your productivity and decrease your effectiveness in business and in your personal responsibilities. As Nike ads say, “Just do it!”

Discipline

To regain control — over your workspace, your documents, your to dos, your life — takes discipline. Is it fun to reorder every file on your computer and put them in logical folders and subfolders? Is it fun to write detailed lists of your daily and weekly priorities? What about cleaning your desk, garage and car?

No, no and no, but such tasks are effective because they remove mental and physical clutter.

Discipline is the daily practice of doing what needs to be done, and is the umbrella that overarches organization, prioritization, and execution. Discipline doesn’t just apply to work, but also to eating right, working out, and making time for your family. If practiced for a few weeks, discipline becomes a habit that will apply to most situations for the rest of your career and lifetime.

It is all too easy to confine the combination of organization, prioritization, and execution to your office, and to focus so much on work that it becomes the only thing in your world – to the detriment of your family, friendships, and other non-work commitments. Equally, it is possible to let the many responsibilities of your personal life (particularly when you have kids) minimize your efforts in your job.

Both scenarios are examples of imbalances that prevent us from being all we can be. That’s why discipline is so crucial. It enables us to regulate each aspect of our lives so we’re living out a commitment to excellence in everything we do.

The first time I shared these principles with a younger team member I was mentoring, his wife came up to me at a company event and said, “I don’t know what you did to him, but he picks up after himself, our car is clean, and he cleared out the garage for the first time in 10 years!” So, even beyond what they will do for your work life, these principles can make you more popular in your home. And that’s got to be worth something!

Mark Johnston is president of Access of Sulphur Springs, TX.

Building a Healthcare Storage Archive
by Charles Mallio, Jr.

The healthcare storage archive is a centralized repository managed by IT, but made available to all departments throughout the organization. It is home to the approximately 80% of hospital data that is static, unchanging, and best managed in a centralized repository that provides the appropriate protection based on the profile of the data.

This healthcare archive should have the ability to store the data intelligently and to leverage the mix of media assets available in the organization. This includes reserving the highest cost storage assets — typically fiber-channel disk in a storage area network — for the dynamic data and managing static data on more cost-effective media, such as lower-cost disk, optical, tape, or even cloud.

With its storage archive in place, an organization can eliminate storage silos, optimize existing storage assets, facilitate data interoperability, and provide a level of data protection that enhances its disaster recovery strategy. And it does all this while delivering a strong return on investment in existing and future storage infrastructure.

Data Interoperability

With a truly healthcare-aware archive in place, the CIO can collaborate with peer department heads to facilitate enhanced data interoperability of systems. To do this effectively, the archiving solution must leverage healthcare standards by which these systems can interact and fully exploit the benefits of shared data. These standards include:

HL7 (Health Level 7), for the exchange, integration, sharing and retrieval of electronic health information.
DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine), for the storage and transmission of medical images and medical imaging data.
XDS/XDS-I (Cross Enterprise Document Sharing / for Imaging), for the sharing of clinical documents, images, diagnostic reports, and related data.

In addition to the above, the archive should have the ability to index both metadata and content to make that data easily searchable, by both applications and end users.

Data Protection

The healthcare archiving solution must provide safeguards against data loss and security breaches. It may do this by methods inherent to the solution, by leveraging the features of specific storage devices, or by a combination of both. However it achieves these objectives, it should accommodate the following features:

Multiple copies of data, stored on disparate media types in separate locations, will ensure survivability of data in the event of a disaster. The healthcare archive should employ a user-configurable, intelligent policy engine to determine the optimal number of copies and locations
Data replication complements the multi-copy strategy by facilitating mass duplication of entire repositories of data to a secondary location.
Encryption prevents unauthorized access to data in the archive. This is critical for Protected Health Information (PHI), as well as financial records and sensitive communications.
Digital fingerprinting technology ensures that data retrieved from the archive is identical to data committed to the archive, safeguarding against deliberate or accidental data tampering.

The data protection characteristics of the healthcare archive also complement IT’s disaster recovery strategy. While backup is necessary for whole-system retrieval, it is not optimal for the more granular recovery allowed by an archive. Furthermore, backups do not protect against file corruption, whereas an intelligent archive ensures the integrity of the data committed to it.

Return on Investment

By investing in a healthcare archive, hospitals not only gain the aforementioned benefits, but can also realize substantial cost savings. By eliminating storage silos and consolidating expensive primary storage, tier-1 storage assets are no longer underutilized. Thus, hospitals do not pay for expensive storage that sits idle.

Organizations also have more flexibility to employ cheaper storage where the data access profile or data value supports that decision. And by employing intelligent data management policies to move infrequently accessed data to lower-performing, but more energy-efficient devices, they can be more “green” with their storage strategy, which translates into costs saved on power and cooling.

Charles Mallio, Jr. is vice president, product strategy and business development, of BridgeHead Software of Surrey, UK.

IT Governance Remains a Top Organizational Challenge
By Dan Herman

IT governance has been topic of interest for many years. Even though the concept has been embraced within the healthcare industry, the reality is that it’s still not operationally working well within most healthcare organizations.

According to the 22nd Annual HIMSS Leadership Survey released in March 2011, the metrics regarding IT governance look strong at first glance. The majority of respondents (87%) reported that there is a strong level of integration between the IT strategic plan and the organization’s overall strategic plan. In addition, nearly three-quarters of senior IT executives reported that they sit on the executive committee at their organization.

The HIMSS Leadership Survey does a good job of tracking the pulse of the industry, but our industry needs to reevaluate how we measure the effectiveness of IT governance. IT governance should be looked at holistically and not merely whether the IT plan is integrated with the organization’s business plan and whether the CIO sits on the executive team.

Strategic alignment is definitely an important element of IT governance, but having effective committee structures, well-defined roles and responsibilities, specific processes and workflows, and a project portfolio management structure to drive value delivery, measure performance, and manage risk and resources are critical success factors for IT to help the organization achieve its objectives.

In the past three years, we have assisted over 30 clients with their IT strategic planning efforts. In 80% of the cases, enhancing existing IT governance, decision-making, executive sponsorship, and project prioritization processes have been a key focus of the planning effort.

There is a finite set of variables to control: funding, resources, and scope. It’s important to focus on a limited set of major projects that support the organization’s strategic goals. Appropriate alignment of IT resources ensures that IT is spending the organization’s money prudently, and effective IT governance is essential to making that a reality.

Critical success factors for effective IT governance include the careful definition of who is responsible and accountable for decisions. Executive involvement is critically important for holding the clinical and business sponsors, as well as IT leaders, accountable for project success. Executive involvement is also vital for assuring that resources are actually available until projects are completed.

IT should not be the primary sponsors of projects, so clinical and management sponsors must be involved from the beginning as well as the clinicians who will actually use the systems implemented. Executives must also assure adherence to the governance process, so that the benefits of governance are received.

While executive and board involvement is always cited as important in IT governance, translating that into specific roles and responsibilities isn’t easy or obvious. The task is to define roles and responsibilities that result in the effective allocation of resources and in successful projects.

There are a number of considerations in determining committee structure. Authority, time, and expertise are important considerations.

IT governance requires the definition of a process for project proposal, consideration, approval, and management. This process is often closely related to or integrated with the capital budgeting process, especially in terms of the timeline for project approval.

IT governance will not result in successful projects unless effective project management is in place.

In conclusion, governance remains one of the biggest challenges of healthcare IT. Organizations continue to battle with the dilemma of having much more demand for IT services than supply and budget to service. Requests for new projects arrive with typically no effective mechanism to control how projects get prioritized, funded, and resources allocated. IT then gets put in the position where they’re overwhelmed, under-budgeted, and under-delivering.

With the number of competing initiatives on the priority lists of hospital executive teams such as Meaningful Use, ICD-10, and Accountable Care Organization structures and their IT implications, it’s even more essential that a strong governance model be deployed to prioritize initiatives, align projects and capital spend with key organizational priorities, establish the appropriate champions and sponsors to successfully drive the top priorities forward, and define ways to measure results.

Dan Herman is founder and managing principal with Aspen Advisors of Pittsburgh, PA.

Readers Write 5/9/11

May 9, 2011 Readers Write 4 Comments

Nurse Buy-In Essential to ACO Success
By Lisa Reichard, RN, BSN

Though the healthcare technology landscape has changed greatly over the last 10 years, what the clinical nurse cares about most has not: delivering the best care possible to the patient. As National Nurses Week celebrates the caregivers that most would agree form the backbone of healthcare, it is interesting — as an RN who now works on the vendor side of things — to watch the leadership role of nurses evolve, especially in light of the policies behind accountable care. The ACO model will directly affect a nurse’s role at the bedside, or, as mobile technologies may have it, over the phone, via text, or by Skype.

The pending ACO model will be physician driven, true, but it must also include nurses and other providers to improve the quality of healthcare services and reduce costs. Regardless of whether an organization pilots an ACO, gets ready for the Medicare Shared Savings Program, or even chooses to wait and see how ACOs develop, the main cornerstones of ACOs — assumption of clinical risk, improvements in quality care measures, and decreasing costs — will be required of all organizations as the healthcare industry moves through reform. Therefore, nurses will be required to enhance their overall accountability and embrace the role of patient advocates in the ACO model, especially with regard to management of patients’ chronic conditions.

As CMS statistics show, 75-80% of healthcare costs are related to chronic conditions. The impact of the clinical nurse on continuity of care, from emergency room to clinic or physician office to home care, will be crucial to accountable care’s success. So how will this need for greater accountability work its way into a nurse’s already pressure-filled shift? How can administrators, doctors, payers, and even vendors get a nurse to buy in to an ACO?

Vendors tend to emphasize new technology and cost containment surrounding ACO policy as the biggest pieces of the pie when going into a clinical setting. It is important to understand, however, that at first glance, the clinical nurse may be inclined to view ACOs as roadblocks to patient care since they are used to the “treat the illness and hope that patients will comply at home” model now in place. This is where vendors and policy makers can point out and emphasize the benefits of the ACO model – improved patient outcomes and higher quality patient care, which, after all, are what nurses value most.

The time is ripe for nurses to take the lead in defining the way ACOs will deliver. Opportunities abound, including:

Identifying patients at risk for 30-day and multiple readmissions;
Assisting in developing clinical criteria and benchmarks around “The Right Care At The Right Time,” which is central to ACOs;
Increasing the usage and compliance with regards to home monitoring devices;
Ensuring timely care coordination between hospital and community-based providers;
Involving nurses as change agents to improve quality indicator scores;
Taking an active role in delivery models that focus on ongoing care coordination and resultant evaluations of clinical and financial effectiveness;
Developing nurse peer groups and support around new technologies like EMRs and PHRs; and
Helping with the development of quality measures not currently being tracked by CMS. These could include measures for the treatment of cancer, arthritis, osteoporosis, or chronic pain. It will be challenging to create outcome measures that capture all key attributes of successful treatments.

Vendors can assist in this process by walking in the nurses’ shoes, understanding their world and what is at the heart of their work — helping patients to get well and stay well. Coming from this angle of understanding and cooperation, friends will be made, and yes, care will even become accountable.

Lisa Reichard, RN, BSN is director of business development at Billian’s HealthDATA.

Meaningful Use: A Case for Choosing Cloud-Based Technology
By Russ Keene

On Monday, April 18, a moment that was once among the most hyped in recent health IT memory passed almost unnoticed. That day, the Department of Health and Human Services opened the process for physicians to attest to demonstrating Meaningful Use of an EHR system so they could qualify to receive Medicare incentive payments.

Of the estimated 95,000 physicians now using an EHR system, just 150 stepped forward to attest to achieving Phase 1 Meaningful Use measures.

What gives?

As Douglas Foreman, DO, one of those 150 physicians learned, demonstrating Meaningful Use isn’t difficult. In fact, he exceeded the requirements, and did so within the first 90-day eligibility period.

Foreman’s (and his staff’s) commitment to his patients and to meeting the Core and Menu Set requirements cannot be discounted. But a decision he made in 1997 to use a cloud-based practice management and EHR system gave him a head start.

The term cloud computing is a recent entry to the IT lexicon, but the technology has been around for a while. Cloud-based health IT systems don’t require client-server hardware or for physicians to install special software on each computer. They deliver advanced health IT capabilities through a simple Web browser. System maintenance and upgrades are included in a monthly subscription rate, and delivered seamlessly.

Foreman’s example offers a clear case for physicians to consider cloud-based technologies for their health IT systems and to rid themselves of the archaic client server-based systems which are difficult to upgrade and costly to support.

Foreman received his Meaningful Use upgrade one weekend in May 2010, along with thousands of other doctors. Within days, he said he could see how well-designed technology contributes to his ability to improve patient care while also making it easier to demonstrate Meaningful Use.

However, as Foreman told Physicians Practice, the EHR vendor needs to support physicians’ efforts to demonstrate Meaningful Use. “Your vendor should have a support team. They need to be familiar with the process and support you,” he said.

He’s right. Health IT providers owe it to their clients to help them be successful at demonstrating Meaningful Use, to make using health IT simple and affordable, and to ensure the technology really delivers when it comes to supporting better patient care.

Dr. Foreman was successful because of his commitment to make technology work for his practice and because of the technology that he chose. As a result, he will receive his first payments soon. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of other EHR users are still waiting for their health IT vendor to get around to upgrading the systems in their offices. As those companies know, scaling to meet that demand is exceptionally difficult.

Physicians shopping for an EHR system should ask a couple of questions. If it’s this difficult for the old technology companies to enable their current clients to meet Phase 1 Meaningful Use requirements, how will they fare in preparing even more users for Phases 2 and 3? And, can they realistically support ICD-10 and future regulatory changes that require updates to their software?

Meaningful Use is just one stop on a long ride of technology advancement. As such, the case for “the cloud” is clear.

Minimum upfront investment, lower total cost of ownership, and rapid ROI
Cumulative value and simple interoperability with a wealth of systems and health industry partners
Adaptability to future demands, from ICD-10 to new Meaningful Use rules to additional performance and quality measurement capabilities

It’s time to focus on the needs of the end user. The cloud offers the easiest, fastest, and most economical means for many physicians to implement and use an EHR system.

Russ Keene is vice president of Ingenix CareTracker.

The Power to Fail
By RJ Dio

As good as the fine novel Spooner is by Pete Dexter, it’s Dexter’s bio on the back jacket that pleases me more. Dexter wrote the bio himself and it states:

Pete Dexter began his working life with a US Post office in New Orleans, Louisiana. He wasn’t very good at mail and quit, then caught on as a newspaper reporter in Florida, which he was not very good at, got married, and was not very good at that. In Philadelphia he became a newspaper columnist, which he was pretty good at, and got divorced, which you would have to say he was good at because it only cost $300. Dexter remarried, won the National Book Award, and built a house in the desert so remote that there is no postal service. He’s out there six months a year, pecking away at the typewriter, living proof of the adage “What goes around comes around” –that is, you quit the post office, pal, and the post office quits you.

What can we learn from this (besides using a sense of humor when we can)? Courage. Not many people admit their mistakes, and few of us would be candid in our assessments of ourselves or our efforts.

It takes courage, for example, to admit an HIT project was a disaster, and to candidly discuss how it went wrong, lessons learned, and what can be done to avoid this again. The typical post-mortem that all thoughtful projects (even unsuccessful ones) should use at their conclusion.

Where’s the story on the eight-year Cerner rollout that wasn’t intentionally slotted for eight years, for example? The lowdown on why a vendor would explain poor business intelligence reporting by suggesting the hospital spend close to another million dollars to add CPUs in a database server so the reports will run faster? The honest facts on a clinical workflow software solution that’s a glorified Intranet?

As the woman in the Wendy’s commercial in the 1980s demanded, “Where’s the beef?”

We live in a world where everyone has a raving recommendation on LinkedIn — or maybe 30 — and most of us have written them, too. Meanwhile, we could use a few people to step up courageously with constructive feedback on HIT efforts that lost their way, without permanently judging (or misjudging) those who didn’t succeed. Some great leaders (but not enough) readily say to others, “Let me share some of my mistakes with you so you don’t have to make them, too.”

After all, failure serves a purpose in life, and business, and sometimes it makes us far better than we ever could have been otherwise. It just takes time to know. “A lot of good things in my life came from half my mistakes,” says the songwriter Radney Foster, and I’m right on board with him, (even if I did use too many parentheses in this piece).

Readers Write 4/27/11

April 27, 2011 Readers Write 3 Comments

There is Nothing Normal about the “New Normal”
By Tom Carson

I recently had a conversation with a physician friend of mine. He shared the experience of their hospital system’s EMR implementation for their ambulatory practices, which is, so far, an 18-month project and counting.

This project has resulted in a 12% decrease in physician-generated revenue, 75% of which is attributable to reduced physician productivity. Fewer patient visits, in other words. When I asked what they intended to do about what sounded like a serious problem, he told me, “Nothing. Our administrators are calling this the ‘New Normal’ for production.”

If this had been the first time I heard this explanation, my jaw would have dropped. I mean, really, whoever heard of implementing technology to decrease the productivity of the most expensive resource in the healthcare delivery chain?

As it is, the “New Normal” mantra is being repeated often. Vendors of these products (and their customers) must be hoping it catches on as truth, preserving the reputations of both.

Here is my problem with reduced productivity as a “New Normal.” Management doesn’t really believe it. If they did, hospital administrators in these provider organizations would be reassuring all the physicians involved that to make up for their productivity losses, they would all be given 12% raises and their visit quotas would be reduced accordingly.

No longer would doctors be spending 2-4 hours each day off the clock to catch up on documentation responsibilities made more burdensome by their new system requirements. Instead, the dark side of the “New Normal” is the implied expectation that doctors will suck it up and find a way to return to former levels of productivity, regardless of personal cost. That is simply not sustainable.

Every business leader I know understands the correlation between happy employees and satisfied customers. An unhappy work environment creates stress in all parts of our lives. it is destructively unsustainable for both individuals and the companies that employ them. When doctors are free to practice medicine on their terms, the organizations that employ them can attract better doctors. The result is satisfied patients and better outcomes. This is a positive feedback loop that is sustainable.

I don’t know when this breakdown of honest communication and respect occurred, but it would be in the best interests of patients, physicians, and provider management to fix it. Here are my ideas.

Management, you do not have to settle for a “New Normal” that reduces your economic performance and crushes the enthusiasm of your staff. Ask yourself if you would have made the system purchase under the terms you did if the vendor had explained up front that you should factor in a 12% revenue reduction. If the answer is no, then do your fellow administrators and the industry at large a huge service and start raising Cain. Eventually, your vendor, or his replacement, will honestly address the problems.

I have never seen a documented case in which average physician productivity in an ambulatory setting did not decline following implementation of an EMR system. There are ways to recover productivity outside of the vendor’s design, including the use of virtual scribes, physical scribes, and speech recognition for some physicians. These won’t be free, but they will cost much less than what good physicians cost.

Physicians, you owe it to yourselves to not fall into the trap of believing that you can overcome long-term limitations through the short-term measure of working more hours. You owe it to your management group to provide fact-based feedback on the realities of what is going on at the patient encounter level.

I am not anti-EMR. Far from it. My company has been committed to moving physicians to electronic records for 11 years. However, we have always believed that the transition will work best when working with and for the physicians — not around them.

Tom Carson is president and CEO of MD-IT of Boulder, CO.

Build IT Right
By Guy Scalzi

According to Modern Healthcare’s 32nd annual Construction and Design Survey published March 14, the healthcare construction industry continues to show signs of rebounding. There’s pent-up demand from years of capital freezes that will soon explode, so it’s more important than ever to get the information services right the first time when designing and building any new facility.

Timing is Everything. IT professionals need to be involved as soon as possible in the planning or design specification stage and stay actively plugged in throughout the project.

IT – A Critical Element of Design. IT must be involved before the design specification is generated to define what applications and technology will be used in the space. It’s important that as soon as required work space is estimated, the space needs of the hardware to support the activities are included and the plans reflect those needs. This is the time to get it right, so the workflow will be enhanced by the space, not compromised.

The overall project budget should incorporate IT requirements. Many times, the square footage needs to be reduced or the planned services have to be scaled back to fit within the amount of available dollars. Don’t try to retrofit old IT equipment into the space to save on budget because this technology is often at the end of its life cycle or not powerful enough to run the current software.

Best Practices and Next Practices. The new space should make optimal use of the next release of major software applications and functionality. iPhones and iPads are already being incorporated into new releases of HIS software. This means fewer requirements for viewing data on workstations, but a heightened need for docking stations and additional places to enter data. New space will most likely take advantage of RFID tags and generally richer user interfaces requiring powerful hardware.

Not a Night and Weekend Job. Depending on project size, there needs to be one or more IT staff dedicated from design to opening. Questions will arise on a daily basis, and bad decisions are made when there’s a lack of knowledgeable IT input.

New Sandbox for Strategic IT Direction. This is an opportunity to pilot new processes, systems, and technology. There’s no reason to move workflow, applications, or hardware that are only marginally acceptable, or failing. While beta testing of applications should be avoided, technology that’s proven elsewhere but still new to your organization can be piloted.

Test, Test, and Test Again. A few weeks before the opening, fully staff for two or three days with test patients cycling through the systems, at about half of what’s expected at peak volume. Data can be entered in a test database, so it’s easy to review but won’t interfere with production. Necessary changes can be implemented quickly and be ready for the next test session.

Blanket with Support. On opening day, have as many IT people and vendor staff as possible on site during all hours of operation. While the staff is in a learning mode, they’ll be receptive to new ideas and skills. A lot of progress can be made quickly.

By applying these and other industry best practices, IT can be strong partners in ensuring healthcare facilities meet the needs of patients and practitioners alike.

Guy Scalzi is a principal with Aspen Advisors of Pittsburgh, PA.

Summary of the ONC EHR Usability Meeting 4/21/11
By Vicente Fernandez

”A computer makes it possible to do, in half an hour, tasks which were completely unnecessary to do before.” Larry Wolf, Health IT strategist, Kindred Healthcare (original author unknown)

”Cumbersome system design is the biggest threat to the ARRA investment.” Kamal (Bill) Hashmat, CEO, CureMD

“Every industry believes it’s ‘special’ and doesn’t want to deal with the issue of standards. Variability of design and display of common and necessary information is not creativity, it’s chaos.” Ben Shneiderman, PhD, University of Maryland, CureMD

Synopsis

Most of the discussion seemed to pivot around the pleas from the provider community to standardize usability measures by either making them a part of certification, creating a Consumer Reports-like system of reporting and comparing EHRs and/or mandating a common user interface.

There was also a call for EHRs to be held to accessibility standards, to support system-wide interoperability for the wholesale migration of data from one product to another, and to be more transparent with their internal usability and accessibility guidelines.

Probably the most intriguing testimonies were from Ben Shneiderman from the University of Maryland, Stanley Wainapel MD of Montefiore Medical Center, Eva Powell from the National Partnership for Women and Families, Mary Kate Foley of AthenaHealth, Carl Dvorak from Epic, and Doug Solomon of IDEO.

Cerner was also represented by David McCallie, who contributed this interesting insight: “The tools [EHRs] are designed for the volume of documentation instead of the value of the information.”

Executive Summary

Although the conference title specifically stated EHR (Electronic Health Record) Usability, the presentations and discussions were applicable to all types of electronic and Web applications across all healthcare environments. The resulting work and recommendations from the Health IT Policy Committee will have far-reaching effects, and are likely to impact all forms of future human-computer interaction in healthcare settings.

The EHR Usability Conference presented fresh and insightful perspectives from five separate panels: Care Provider, Patient/Consumer, Vendor/Technology Developer, Measurement and Improvement, and Options Around Usability.

The most important items addressed were:

The current state of usability in healthcare applications
Accessibility standards in healthcare applications
How usability affects the well-being and lives of patients/consumers
How usability should be included in health technology certification
The roles of vendors, providers and organizations in developing usability standards and guidelines
The role of the Federal Government in producing and enforcing usability standards and guidelines
The roles of vendors, providers and patients in ensuring that delivered products are usable

Dominant opinions and recommendations from providers, consumers, developers and experts included the following.

Current usability in healthcare applications is atrocious

Difficult to navigate.
Time consuming.
Frustrating.
Cluttered and disorganized.
Unsearchable.
Leads to fatigue and ultimately burnout.
Does not adequately support disabled community.
Does not adequately support clinical workflows.
Critical information is dispersed & buried.

Recommendations to vendors

Develop streamlined methods of entering, retrieving and displaying complex data sets.
Display data from disparate sources in fewer, simpler views.
Create navigation pathways that match the workflow and thought flow of clinical work.
Design and build applications within accessibility guidelines and enable integration with accessibility hardware and software.
Support patient-centered information flow.
Provide a mechanism or process for the customer to submit feedback for rapid changes and fixes.
Allow for customizable views of varied information from multiple sources.
Modularize and increase interoperability of product offerings.
Publicize internal usability guidelines and standards.
Work closely with the clinical community to develop best practices and appropriate workflows.
Limit or change the use of structured data capture for specific workflows.
Incorporate usability personnel and best practices in product development.
Design and build products to support effective partnerships between providers across care settings, and between patients and providers.
Design and build products to support a patient-centered healthcare system.
Work with regulators to develop standards and tests to measure usability.

Recommendations to HIT professional associations and certification agencies

Develop usability standards and metrics.
Work with regulators to develop standards and tests to measure usability.
Publicly report usability comparisons across healthcare applications.
Create reporting mechanisms for the healthcare community to voice their opinions and relate their experiences with healthcare applications.
Develop methods of measuring and relating usability to “effectiveness.”
Educate and provide guidance to vendors on a user-centered design process.
Educate providers on what to look for in a user-centered design vendor.

Recommendations to provider institutions

Allocate the appropriate personnel and resources for effective application implementation.
People, systems, processes, and hardware.
“Vote with your wallets” – create the demand and pay for products with high usability standards.

Recommendations to government agencies/regulators

Work with providers and vendors to develop standards and testing as a part of certification.
Require public reporting of comparative vendor performance of usability.
Foster an innovative vendor environment by requiring interoperability at the enterprise level to allow the wholesale migration of an organization’s data from one vendor to another and requiring interoperability at the modular level so that providers can select the best combination of applications that will work together seamlessly.
Require healthcare applications to meet accessibility guidelines.
Mandate consistency in the presentation of standard data types.
Mandate a common user interface.
Promote the wealth of usability science and resources already available.
Allocate resources to get feedback on usability from providers.
Develop simple, best practice guidelines for providers to follow in selecting, customizing and implementing healthcare applications.
Garner best practice workflows for safety.
Develop usability quality measures that coincide with the specific practices.
Increase transparency and discussions around usability efforts.

Vicente Fernandez is “just a dude trying to make a difference in healthcare with my skills as an interaction designer.”

Readers Write 4/13/11

April 13, 2011 Readers Write Comments Off

Thoughts on the Department of Defense/VA
By Arturo

Back in the 1980s, Congress, responding to the clamor for greater productivity and using the private sector should the private sector be more efficient (hence leading to such things as outsourced waste pickup and selling of municipal-owned utilities), mandated a competition for selection of the information system to be used by the VA. And so there was a competition involving EDS, McDonnell Douglas, SMS, and the VA (if I recall properly).

At that time, the VA VistA system was, in many respects, kludgy, somewhat proprietary (after all, what OS or application isn’t somewhat proprietary in one way or the other for the general population?), had a user interface not particularly friendly to many end users, and quite disjointed.

By disjointed, I mean that various modules were written at different locations, sometimes with different standards and feels, and that was simply not a standard or uniform implementation of the system throughout the system. There was no such thing as a general release of the system.

The competition ended up with the selection of the VA system. Now, I’ll never really know if it was the right decision, but I suspect that it really wasn’t.

Shift forward a couple more years and we had another competition for the Department of Defense TRIMIS system – CHCS (Composite Health Care System). The selection didn’t compare apples to apples in the beta implementations (a single site installed by each competing vendors). The winner in this one was SAIC, which had used the VA system as its basis.

The SAIC bid for the five-year deployment came out about a half billion dollars lower than its nearest competitor. Interestingly enough, SAIC required another $500KK to complete its implementation and the DoD had a system that really wasn’t ready for the future — a database that wasn’t SQL compliant, a more or less command-driven system (MUMPS at work) that wasn’t ready to meet the demanding needs of clinicians, etc.

Eventually, sometime in the first half of the 1990s, as I recall, there was a DoD RFP for a clinical workstation. I believe that this ultimately led to the 3M proposal for a clinical workstation and clinical data repository which was to become the foundation for DoD’s computer-based patient record system. (3M continues to support the DoD repository – a good thing, I suspect.)

Then came CHCSII. Now I guess that it’s AHLTA.

And throughout all of this, we just don’t have a tight linking of DoD and VA EHRs.

Now we could talk about some of the inflexibility of VistA, its inability to provide workflows and screens tightly linked with different disciplines, the need for a more robust database manager, or the fact that VistA (and the VA) just didn’t know how to deal with female veterans. Or why the VA delivery system was perceived as being substandard for so long before emerging as a leader in preventative healthcare (although why did we have the disaster with veterans returning from Iraq not so long ago?)

Is it time to use a commercial product for the DoD and VA? Or should the DoD and the VA have taken the lead long ago in providing a robust EHR for deployment throughout our healthcare delivery system? Or if VistA was so good, why didn’t more provider organizations deploy it sooner?

Something for thought. And, Epic, despite all of its success — is it really the right product or is it really any better?

Filling in the Holes in Your EMR/EHR
By Tim Elliott

With all the hype about electronic medical/health records (EMRs/EHRs) and pressure from internal folks (everyone from the executive team to various committees), hospitals often rush into their EMR projects without seeing holes between their systems, people, and departments. These typically get filled in later, often with inefficient manual processes. This approach reduces the productivity gains delivered by the EMR and frustrates the IT/IS team, clinicians, and administrative staff members who thought they’d be leaving paper pushing behind.

It’s a good idea to get people from each department that’ll be using the EMR to analyze the potential gaps in their areas well before vendors come on site instead of waiting to find and address these gaps later. Involving experts from outside your organization in the process is often beneficial, because they have the objectivity that it can be difficult to get when you’re running through processes you’re involved in. They’re also not going to be worried about hurting anyone’s feelings, which can be a concern when analyzing your colleagues’ daily tasks.

If you didn’t do this before going live with your EMR, it’s not too late. A good place to start a post-deployment review is to ask yourself and your team the same questions that you posed during project planning. By getting feedback from multiple departments (patient registration, HIM, clinical areas, etc), you’ll figure out how the EMR system is working well in some ways, and how can it can do better in others.

Again, consider why you’re doing what you’re doing. What are your goals for people, processes, and systems? How do these impact your overall initiatives, such as patient safety and disaster planning?

Don’t accept a process that isn’t working just because of a vendor’s limitations. If something’s not working right, call them and tell them exactly what the challenge is and what you need to achieve. Chances are they’ve heard a similar question before and will get right on it. Maybe you need a custom workaround, additional functionality in a newer release you didn’t know about, or a couple of extra training sessions for your staff.

We vendors spend lots of dollars on building products that solve problems. It pains us to see customers not using all of the tools we created to make their facility run smoother. Maybe you don’t want all of it, but if you need additional functionality, please ask. If your vendor is worth their salt, they have it, can build it, or will include it in a future release if several facilities share that same challenge.

We want to help you to cut your costs, enable your staff do their jobs better, and improve your patients’ care and safety. Often, the first step is you picking up the phone.

Tim Elliott is founder and CEO of Access.

Readers Write 3/28/11

March 28, 2011 Readers Write 1 Comment

The Status Quo: Profitability’s Biggest Enemy
By Tom Stampiglia

In just a few short years, the financial situation for healthcare providers has changed drastically. While patients only represented 12% of a provider’s revenue sources in 2007, they now account for almost a third of overall revenue, according to a Celent report. Between the rapid growth of high-deductible, consumer-directed care plans and a burgeoning self-pay population, patients are now responsible for a significant portion of both their medical expenses and a healthcare organization’s bottom line.

Despite these changing dynamics, many healthcare providers still employ the same conventional, long-standing approaches to revenue cycle management that were designed strictly with payers in mind. Even if these strategies are precisely what’s needed to capture quick and accurate reimbursement, they are unable to adequately address the unique challenges that come along with patient collections.

Why? Consider the industry standard for capturing patient fees. More often than not, patients are billed for their portion long after services have been rendered because providers are unable to determine exactly what the insurance company will allow for each procedure — the key variable in calculating a patient’s out-of-pocket obligations.

Unfortunately, this approach not only forces providers to postpone patient collections, but it also puts them at serious risk for payment delays and patient bad debt. In fact, more than half of patients’ healthcare obligations are never collected, adding up to more than $65 billion in lost revenues last year alone, according to McKinsey Quarterly reports.

By instituting practices designed to capture these funds at the time of service, healthcare providers can increase the odds that patients will fulfill their financial responsibilities. With recent technology advances, healthcare providers now have the ability to verify a patient’s eligibility and benefits status in real time and then pair it with the relevant CPT codes to determine insurance allowables.

Once allowables are determined, providers can apply patient responsibilities, including co-insurance and deductibles, to calculate precisely what the patient owes. Certainly this process could have been done before. However, using manual processes to examine each of these items for every patient would be cumbersome and unrealistic.

Beyond helping to accelerate cash flow, this upfront approach to patient collections brings greater transparency to payment processes and establishes a platform to conduct more effective patient financial counseling programs. With these initiatives underway, healthcare providers are well positioned to adopt a number of additional retail-based strategies proven to further enhance collections processes, such as introducing more patient-friendly billing statements, offering flexible payment plan options, and accepting credit or debit payments.

Another emerging trend that’s being met with great success is performing soft credit checks prior to the time of service. This approach, which acts like a form of financial triage, generates a rating of a patient’s likelihood to pay medical bills and gives providers the information needed to evaluate any associated financial risks. Once this information is in hand, providers can customize collection policies based on the unique circumstances of each patient.

Looking ahead, healthcare providers that implement these retail-based strategies and embrace their role as patient financial counselors will be well equipped to thrive in this new, patient-centered world. As consumers shoulder greater financial responsibility for care, it’s clear that change is critical to a healthcare organization’s survival, especially when it comes to capturing patient payments both at the point of service and beyond.

Tom Stampiglia is CEO of MPV of Austin, Texas.

Longitudinal Patient Record Systems – A Necessity for Accountable and Collaborative Care
By Alan Gilbert

In response to Dr. Jayne’s inaugural Curbside Consult regarding the lack of longitudinal care systems and the focus on episodic care, our experience has shown that a longitudinal patient record system is critical to realizing a goal of a more effective and efficient healthcare system that results in improved outcomes for patients. We believe that healthcare needs to be delivered at the point of need and not at the point of care.

One example of a longitudinal patient record is the National Clinical Network for Cleft Lip and Palate Services in Scotland. This project was established in 2000 to deliver interdisciplinary care between health professionals providing care for cleft lip and palate patients between birth and 20 years old. The objective was to provide a single record for a patient, creating a virtual multi-disciplinary care team for that patient including dentists, orthodontists, oral surgeons, speech pathologists, ENTs, audiologists, as well as the patients themselves, who were active participants in their own care. The platform accommodated clinical imaging, generated email,and letter alerts to remind clinicians and patient alike of their particular responsibility at specific times, and supported and facilitated audit and outcome assessments.

Benefits realized included:

Improved communication – sharing of information across care providers
Improved standards of care — a single source of patient information to monitor and analyze outcomes
Improved coordinated care — interdisciplinary treatment planning and care has improved due to use of the platform
Improved efficiencies — more effective use of clinicians’ time as well as the patients, their parents, and caregivers
Improved data access — minimized risk of data fragmentation over multiple sites, reduced cost, time and effort incurred by offline data entry and replication
Better patient satisfaction — through improvement in the organization of clinics and coordination among specialties
Improved reporting — reports and analysis on a national basis

Another example of a longitudinal patient record is the National Sexual Health System in Scotland (NaSH) that was started in 2005. This strategy set out a framework for improving sexual health by enhancing access to information and services while enabling flexibility for local services to respond to local requirements. It also highlighted the need to be able to review existing data and develop a data collection framework to provide a more accurate picture of sexual health and wellbeing, in terms of both sexual conditions (chlamydia, AIDS, etc) and behaviors and attitudes.

Benefits realized included:

Ability to produce and aggregate national sexual population and public health data
Improved clinical care and access to patient clinical information by introducing more patient focused processes and the ability to communicate directly with patients through patient portals, secure email and text
Streamlining of services enabling improved throughput and availability
Increased ability to share clinical data across services nationally
Removal of multiple manual record keeping systems
Ability to address some clinical governance issues more effectively
Reduced requirement for duplicate entry of patient data and better quality of data
More efficient and increased integration of systems

These examples, as well as others in diabetes, cancer care, COPD, and infection control, all focus on the need for a technology platform that can create a consolidated clinical view of the patient, no matter their care setting.

Alan Gilbert is VP of business development for AxSys Health of New York, NY.

Playing the Percentages with EHR Uptime Will Not Pay Off
By Nelson Hsu

Playing with the percentages is risky for the many healthcare organizations on the electronic healthcare record (EHR) adoption curve. The percentages in question are EHR systems’ uptime – how often the applications are available and working at sufficient performance to meet healthcare providers’ needs. Industry standards, vendor claims, and assorted misconceptions about uptime conspire to make this critical area of EHR implementation a footnote where it needs to be near the top of the priority list.

EHR’s success depends as much on application availability as it does on functionality. According to a February 2011 report by AC Group Inc., system speed and availability was critical in physicians’ decisions to use an ambulatory EHR application. That’s a good start. Their perceptions of what constitutes acceptable levels of speed and availability, however, leave open the door to punishing financial and productivity costs.

A panel of physicians surveyed at a recent Medical Group Management Association Conference said if the system was not available a minimum of 99% of the time, then they would not consider the application reliable enough to use in the future. While that may sound reasonable, 99% is unacceptable for healthcare applications. System availability at that level roughly translates into an average of more than 87 hours of downtime annually — almost four days. And 99% isn’t even the minimum industry standard. The same AC Group report that included the physicians’ survey polled 37 EHR vendors and found that they don’t guarantee any better than 96% uptime.

That number of hours of downtime costs time and money. AC Group determined that for every minute an EHR application is down, the average physician practice spends 2.15 minutes to perform the required tasks manually plus the time required to update the computer systems once the system is back up and operating. The average cost of downtime, the survey analysis determined, was $8.13 per minute per provider, which equates to a median across all practice sizes and specialties of almost $488 per hour.

Nevertheless, most EHR software vendors will not even include uptime SLAs in their contracts unless specifically required to do so. When they are, almost every vendor AC Group talked to said that the cost of the system would increase from 5-20% for each 1% increase in uptime guaranteed beyond the standard 96%. With the products available today specifically designed for uptime assurance, there is no justification for levying such price premiums.

To gain the full value of their EHR implementations, physicians and healthcare managers must become their own uptime advocates. Eighty-seven percent of medical practices spend no time evaluating their EHR implementation’s uptime and service levels, instead leaving it to software providers who have little interest in it. Neglecting the amount of system downtime that a practice might experience could cost the average five-physician practice nearly $25,000 if the product is down just 10 hours during the course of a year.

Software providers may or may not recommend or provide a high-availability platform solution (either hardware or software) for their applications. Regardless, practices and clinicians must make this a requirement for the critical applications they depend on to run their practices and care for patients. The medical profession always tells patients to take responsibility for their own health. Now it’s time for the profession to take its own advice on this important issue.

Nelson Hsu is senior director at Stratus Technologies of Maynard, MA.

Readers Write 3/16/11

March 16, 2011 Readers Write 6 Comments

Privacy and Security
By Glen F. Marshall

The primary issue with healthcare privacy and security is the lack of ongoing risk management as a routine business practice, plus the failure to share data from existing risk analysis in a form that the general public can understand. For example, while anecdotal evidence says that provider employee snooping is the largest threat to privacy, real data are harder to find.

The evidence I have of this is anecdotal. I continually get questions from HIT people about what technology to implement or whether the latest gadget is a good thing to buy. If there was a body of risk analysis information to draw upon, the selection and implementation of mitigating technologies would more often be an informed business process. So would the selection and implementation of physical and administrative controls, e.g., locks on doors, privacy training for employees, or privacy-enhancing advisories for health care consumers.

It is more convenient for the general and HIT press to focus on sound-byte instances of breaches, versus the actual threats and outcomes in comparison to other threats to privacy. It is more readable to assess blame for breaches than identify and celebrate good privacy and security practices that provably prevent, detect, limit, and disclose breaches before damage occurs. The eagerness of the general public, provider community, and political leaders to consume this lazy news reporting amplifies the problem and crowds out the solutions.

Glen F. Marshall is the principal of Grok-A-Lot, LLC of Berwyn, PA.

Patient Privacy and Information Accessibility: A Necessary Balance
By John Tempesco

In the original HHS privacy rule, a core component of HIPAA’s purpose was the ability to protect patient privacy while at the same time allowing the sharing of personal health information to facilitate patient care. And while healthcare has finally been dragged, kicking and screaming, to a more comprehensive use of technology, a serious divide has emerged between advocates of patient privacy versus the free flow of data needed to improve patient care.

As EHRs become more widely used by physicians and health information exchanges (HIEs) become more commonplace, the debate between privacy and the sharing of information for the purpose of enhancing patient care and lowering the costs of care delivery will only intensify.

As guidelines continue to be developed, it will be important to consider the mechanisms of how patients will determine the exchange of their health information. If restrictions are too severe, the goals of ARRA and HITECH will be in jeopardy. Patients will be driven by policy to “sit on” their data which will nullify the ability of the healthcare system to achieve its goals of improving patient care and safety, and reduce costs. But if data is exchanged too readily, patient privacy will certainly be in jeopardy. This dichotomy is the essential conundrum.

Opt-Out most closely resembles the state of fair and controlled information exchange as it exists today. Opt-Out protects patient privacy and enables the sharing of health records unless the patient specifically opts out. The Opt-Out provision requires that the patient is given an adequate amount of time to make a decision about consent, including urgent need of care. It also requires a clear explanation of consent choice that must be provided by the physician or hospital as well as the consequences of opting out.

Opt-In, on the other hand, would stop the sharing of patient information unless the patient opts in to the system enabling the transmission of health data. This option not only severely restricts health information exchange, and limits the ability of health information technology to improve patient care and reduce costs, it demolishes many of the core benefits of health information technology, particularly the multi-organizational and multi-community benefits of HIEs.

The ONC is still deliberating a final ruling on information exchange. While patient privacy must be attended to, clearly the critical exchange of patient information through HIEs is a central and key component to achieving the reforms of ARRA and the HITECH Act. There are numerous studies that point to health information technology as providing the necessary tools which enable improved patient safety and the improved efficiencies desperately needed to lower healthcare costs.

Let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water. Let’s move forward with a rational, forward-thinking approach that will ultimately get us to where we want and need to be.

John Tempesco is chief marketing officer of Informatics Corporation of America of Nashville, TN.

HIStalk Written on an EMR
By Robert D. Lafsky, MD

Given the mixed feedback regarding the recent HIStalk format change, it occurs to me that all available options have not been explored. The following sample report represents a modest proposal, which if adopted would allow Mr. HIStalk to enjoy the same efficiencies utilized by most EMR users. Apologies to 1960s-era MAD magazine and the late Jonathan Swift.

SUBJECT
Goniff Group

CHIEF COMPLAINT
“Cash flow problems”

HPI
The COMPANY is complaining of INSUFFICIENT INCOME. DATE OF ONSET: 1/15/2010. DURATION OF PROBLEM: 14 months. The problem is made worse by LOWER SALES. The problem is made better by HIGHER SALES. The problem is aggravated by EMR WORKFLOW ISSUES. The EMR WORKFLOW is felt to be SLOW. The EMR WORKFLOW is felt to be TEDIOUS. The problem is aggravated by EMR DESIGN ISSUES. The DESIGN is felt to be AWKWARD. The DESIGN is felt to be UGLY. The problem is aggravated by LEADERSHIP ISSUES. The LEADERSHIP is felt to be INCOMPETENT. The LEADERSHIP is felt to be INDIFFERENT TO USER COMPLAINTS. The LEADERSHIP is felt to be INDIFFERENT TO USER FEEDBACK.

PAST HISTORY
Problem List
1. Insufficient capitalization
2. Insufficient programmer staffing
3. History of SEC sanctions

MEDICATIONS
1. Bank loans
2. Penny stock
3. Overdue payroll

FAMILY HISTORY
CEO’s brother doing 3-5 in Allenwood for stock fraud

ALLERGIES
Revealing stories in HIStalk

REVIEW OF SYSTEMS
Obfuscatory logorrhea (last stockholder’s meeting)
Bilateral buttock pain (participants last board meeting)
Spastic torticollis (CFO explaining financial picture)
Chronic corporate latrocinosis

PHYSICAL EXAMINATION
Blood pressure: 60/30
Pulse: Undetectable
Head: Spinning
Neck: Horizontally positioned
Chest: Heaving
Heart: Absent
Abdomen: Distended and firm along course of colon
Extremities: Erythematous from red ink stains
Genitalia: Numerous, especially CEO and CFO

DIAGNOSTIC IMPRESSION
537926 Corioliform Hydrodynamic Gravitational Descent (“Circling the Drain”)
872035 DDI: Database Design Defects, Congenital
472653 Ugly Interface Syndrome

PLAN OF TREATMENT
First class ticket purchases to BRAZIL for CEO, CFO
Cash transfers to OFFSHORE BANK ACCOUNT in CAYMAN ISLANDS
Urgent resume production by employees
Reduce thermostat settings in office during cold weather
Discontinue free coffee in break room

Robert D. Lafsky, MD is a gastroenterologist and internist in Lansdowne, VA.

Readers Write 3/7/11

March 7, 2011 Readers Write 10 Comments

Meaningful Use Does Not Have to Burden Physicians
By Evan Steele

As the CEO of an EHR technology company, I am driven by an unwavering dedication to physician productivity. As readers no doubt recall, the preliminary version of Meaningful Use generated an outcry from physicians — specialists in particular — regarding the burden they would have to shoulder to qualify for the government’s EHR incentives and the resulting effect on their productivity. Many physicians decided that they would not comply, and would simply forgo the incentives.

In response to significant lobbying efforts and to the more than 2,000 comments the government received last summer regarding the Proposed Rule on Meaningful Use, the Final Rule included considerable easing of the requirements for physicians in general, and significant accommodations for specialists in particular.

I want to share with HIStalk readers my view of Meaningful Use from a workflow perspective. The pie chart above illustrates how Meaningful Use is achievable without negatively impacting physician productivity, taking advantage of the exclusions available (to most specialists) and shifting the bulk of the burden away from the physician to the staff.

The implications of demonstrating Meaningful Use vary by specialty. For most specialists, the available exclusions make it relatively easy for a physician to comply. For primary care physicians, there is more to do to meet the requirements.

However, the pie chart illustrates how everyone can achieve Meaningful Use through a practical and efficient use of staff resources, combined with a productivity-focused EHR. This chart is for a typical orthopaedist, but similar charts for other specialties and primary care are also available.

The physician him/herself has four areas of responsibility. The act of ePrescribing alone addresses five of the Meaningful Use measures, and good ePrescribing software increases physician productivity. For example, we have documented that it takes to 23 seconds for a physician to prescribe on paper and a mere fraction of that time using our ePrescribing module.

Maintaining a problem list could be done by the nurse or MA, but we recommend that the physician at least review it, so he/she can view the clinical decision support alert at the point of care.

For some specialties, there are no (or few) relevant clinical quality measures, but where there are relevant measures, most of the work is done in the normal course of the visit: documenting the problem and ordering tests and/or medications.

As illustrated, the rest of the Meaningful Use measures can be handled by clinical and support staff, and some measures are excludable. So, with the right EHR and the right workflow, Meaningful Use is definitely achievable by specialists and primary care physicians alike.

Evan Steele is CEO of SRSsoft of Montvale, NJ.

Usability = Adoptability: What if Facebook and Amazon Built an EMR?
By Dale Sanders

Below are screen mock-ups based on Facebook’s and Amazon’s user interfaces. Borrowing ideas from them is comfortable because they parallel healthcare processes quite nicely, but also because the user interfaces on today’s EMRs are abominable, and adoption rates are terrible (without financial coercion) as a result. People flock to Facebook and Amazon by the millions, without financial incentives. Why? Because:

Total Value of Software Applications = Functional Value x Usability

If either Functional Value or Usability drop to zero, the overall value of the application drops to zero as well. EMRs might be functional, but they are not user friendly, so their Total Value to healthcare is very low.

In Facebook, we have a perfect framework for longitudinal documentation, collaboration, messaging, and scheduling between a patient and members of their entire care team, including family and friends. We also have a framework for easily integrating data from other sources to enhance the value to the patient’s healthcare — there’s no equivalent of HL7 interchange going on in Facebook. It references data located in other sources and systems. Can you imagine Facebook surviving if it required itself to house all the data that it presents? Facebook takes great advantage of referencing and pointing to data in the source systems to build rich content.

In Amazon, we have a perfect and familiar metaphor for ordering tests and procedures; tracking them; assessing their costs; rating them and seeing how other clinicians rated those orderables and referrals; and adjusting orders based on the behaviors and ratings of other clinicians, etc.

Here are the screen shots. Let’s start building these, eh? Think Mark Zuckerman or Jeff Bezos would help? 🙂

(Note: click the pictures to enlarge them).

Dale Sanders is CIO of the Cayman Islands National Health System. He writes about healthcare IT on his blog.

Readers Write 2/9/11

February 9, 2011 Readers Write 5 Comments

Comments on the PCAST Report
By HITworker

You don’t have to look very far to see evidence of just how much this PCAST report is a sophisticated marketing piece for Microsoft’s ailing Health Solutions Group.

The committee co-chair (note – not just a member, a full co-chair so presumably he had a lot of control over input and direction) is Craig Mundie. The Health Solutions Group was set up by Craig Mundie and the Peter Neupert, who leads the Health Solutions Group and reports to Craig.

Listed under expert input at appendix A are a list of 47 ‘experts’ who contributed to the report. Thirteen of those experts are from vendor companies, the rest coming predominantly from federal departments and health providers. Of the 13 experts, three of them are from Microsoft including:

Craig Feied – Microsoft Health Solutions Group’s chief strategy officer, who joined Microsoft after selling the Azyxxi product he built to Microsoft, which later became Amalga UIS (which just happens to be a clinical data aggregation technology – so favored in the PCAST report).
Sean Nolan – Microsoft Health Solutions Group’s chief architect, who admits to having no experience in health IT before he led the development team that designed Microsoft HealthVault (which is a personal health record, also so favored in PCAST).
Peter Cullen – Microsoft’s chief privacy officer, who has a significant role around advocating in relation to Microsoft’s approach to privacy in cloud computing, (the third and final favored technology in PCAST).

Then of course, there’s Craig Mundie.

I got to looking into this after reading a blog posting on John Halamka’s blog (Life as a Healthcare CIO), where Sean Nolan of Microsoft illustrated how he believed Microsoft had all the answers for a Universal Exchange Language for health using their products Amalga and HealthVault. This was only a couple of weeks after the PCAST report was published in which he was a named ‘expert’.

So curious, I dove a little deeper into the other 10 ‘experts’ and found that seven of them work for three companies (Ingenix, athena, Sage, and Medicity) who all have partnership relationships with Microsoft.

Now I’m not opposed at all to vendors contributing to these kinds of reports – industry often has expertise and insight that is not readily available within government — but something didn’t seem right. These just aren’t the companies that would leap to mind at all when I think of the leading vendors in health IT with the most expertise and insights to contribute. Something’s amiss.

We’re being asked to believe a committee chaired by someone who runs Microsoft Health Solutions group, independently and without bias sought input from experts, and that three of the 11 experts from industry consulted just happened to work for the chair of the committee within Microsoft. And that these three had direct responsibility for products that just happened to address the three key technologies called out as enablers of the PCAST recommendations. Furthermore, seven of the other industry contributors work for companies that are Microsoft partners.

Something is most definitely wrong with this picture.

Bill Bria for ONC
By Ann Farrell

Note from Mr. H: industry long-timer and consultant Ann Farrell is mounting a campaign to have Bill Bria, MD (CMIO of Shriners Hospitals for Children) considered for David Blumenthal’s replacement at ONC. Her reasons: he’s an industry thought leader, he is regarded for his work with AMDIS, he is not self-promoting, and he recognizes the value of informatics in areas other than those involving physicians. Ann believes that his appointment would unit the industry and signal an HHS commitment to patient-centric, benefits-driven, interdisciplinary, and workflow-friendly technology strategies. Her letter is below.

Greetings,

I am a career-long champion of EMRs as end-user at first US commercial implementation, EHR vendor VP and now Principal of Strategic HIT consulting firm. The news of Dr. Blumenthal’s departure while not totally surprising is nonetheless of concern with now third hand off of leadership in high impact initiative that is advantaged by continuity. Nevertheless, this is an opportunity to look carefully at the character, characteristics and capabilities of the new leader so we can align the next set of challenges to the appropriate candidate and perhaps overcome flaws with current approach.

We recognize value of the next leader having directly supported ONC in HITECH initiatives. We also appreciate value of someone who has successfully supported change management with “hands on” experience in implementing EHRs in several diverse organizations who’ve achieved goals of HITECH in real world settings. The person ideally would be universally respected by vendors, hospitals, colleagues and the market – without political baggage and not part of “old boy network”.

In this regard, we think Dr. Bill Bria would make an exceptional candidate. His knowledge, passion and track record well position him for success. Perhaps most importantly, Dr. Bria recognizes that healthcare does not equal “MDs“ alone but requires a care team who execute MD orders as well as plans of care that together drive efficiencies and outcomes. All caregivers contribute to EHRs and patient care. Till this time, a clear MD-centric bias is reflected in Meaningful Use content, phasing of criteria and messaging. Ironically, this approach has had unexpected negative consequence for MDs as well as the program.

Dr. Bria has played a critical role in the “visioning” and design of several lead EMR/EHRs since the early days and played key leadership roles at diverse prestigious healthcare organizations and AMDIS. Bill is a hero to those of us who worked with him. Dr. Blumenthal’s departure provides a chance to “reboot” HITECH – Dr. Bria could bring a new more realistic and a-political, patient-centric, interdisciplinary approach needed to optimize this once on a lifetime opportunity for HIT.

Regards,

Ann
Ann Farrell
Principal, Farrell Associates
San Francisco , CA 94114

Five Things Hospitals Should Know About Backing Up Virtual Machines
By Charles Mallio

As more hospitals introduce virtualization to their data centers, they must incorporate virtual machines (VMs) into their backup and recovery strategies. How is backing up VMs in a hospital environment different? There are five things that hospitals should think about as they incorporate VMs into their overall DR program.

Don’t assume agentless backup. One of the most common misconceptions about VMs is that you will be able to perform backups on any machine without an agent. VMware does help in this regard, but it is often the case that you will need a backup client – virtual or physical – especially when you consider how you are going to recover applications.
VMware doesn’t reduce the importance of good DR planning. For example, virtualizing your server environment does not negate the need to fully optimize your backup routines. In every hospital, approximately 20% of data is dynamic (i.e. current, active content that is highly likely to be accessed and or changed), which should be given the highest priority in your DR cycle. Yet, around 80% of a hospital’s data is static (such as DICOM images from PACS, which will never change and are highly unlikely to be recalled again). Whether this static data is in a physical or VM is irrelevant – the fact is, if you don’t move it out of the primary backup stream, you will end up making unnecessary copies of copies, place a considerable, additional burden on your infrastructure and dramatically delay your backup processes.
VM sprawl will require more thorough DR planning. As VMs multiply within the data center, each hospital must align each VM with their overall DR strategy and assign policies for restoring mission-critical applications and data so that business continuity criteria are met.
VMware has produced some new features in vSphere, but these do not provide a DR silver bullet. vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) offers great new facilities, such as changed Block Tracking, that may be applied in a VMware environment to enhance data protection and disaster recovery. These tools are ideal when protecting file and print servers, but you should always ensure they offer adequate facilities to RECOVER applications in your environment.
Choose backup hardware that meets your business needs. Although migrating from physical to VMs will bring new economies to the data center, it does not mean that you are restricted to disk-based backup. VMs can just as easily be protected on more affordable, portable tape media. Hospitals should choose the backup media that best meet their budgets and business processes.

Charles Mallio is vice president of product strategy and business development at BridgeHead Software.

Capitalizing on PQRI’s Financial and Quality Improvement Learning Opportunities
By John Nelson

It is not often that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) offers an initiative or mandate that allows doctors to receive extra money, deliver better care, and attract and retain patients without inflicting enormous pain and extra work on a practice. However, after a false start, CMS’s Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) has become such a program, enabling us to easily collect a bonus while positioning us to learn what we need to do to further enhance quality and prepare for an era where payments will be based on outcomes rather than visit or procedure volume.

This was not always the case. When the program began in 2007, the Heart Center of North Texas, a nine-doctor cardiology practice in Fort Worth, Texas, found that collecting and reporting PQRI quality measures was so burdensome and expensive that we did not want any part of the program. But we changed our minds in 2009 after CMS, acting on physician complaints and feedback, not only made it easier for doctors to participate in the program but also enabled them to report quality measures through registries.

Another reason we participated in PQRI is that the Texas Medical Association offered a coupon covering nearly the entire cost of the fee we had to pay CMS to register our participating physicians.

It took a clerk only a month to collect the information from our electronic health record and clinicians, which she then forwarded to our registry. Her effort had no impact on clinician workflow but had a huge impact on our bottom line: CMS paid us $87,000 for the 2009 reporting year.

Collecting data for 2010 turned out to be even easier than in 2009 in part because CMS changed the definition of consecutively seen patients. Now, the reporting physician did not have to see 30 patients consecutively which allowed them to go back and gather the data. This plus the fact that we stand to receive another substantial bonus led us to participate in PQRI again. We urge our colleagues follow our example, as they still have plenty of time to meet the March 15, 2011 deadline for the 2010 reporting period.

Another reason to file for 2010 PQRI incentives is that the bonus will be at its highest level. CMS will reduce the 2 percent bonus to 1 percent in 2011. From 2012 through 2014, the bonus will drop to 0.5 percent. In 2015, the carrot changes to a stick: reimbursement for non-participating physicians will drop by 1.5 percent and by 2 percent in 2016. Why pass up the bonus when it’s so easy to participate now?

Additionally, we believe PRQI enables us to identify areas where we are strong and where we can improve, giving us a head-start on accountable care, bundled payment, pay-for-performance and other care models that CMS and other insurers are rolling out. It is my job to ensure my group is clinically, financially and administratively efficient. The bonus, information and electronic reporting help me achieve these goals.

John Nelson is practice administrator of Heart Center of North Texas, a nine-physician cardiology practice in Fort Worth, Texas.

Readers Write 1/24/11

January 24, 2011 Readers Write 3 Comments

Connecting Performance Measurement and Clinical Decision Support to Improve Patient Care
By Gregory Steinberg, MD

In late 2009, the National Quality Forum (NQF) convened a panel of experts from across the health care industry to lay the foundation for promoting clinical decision support (CDS) to enhance performance measurement and help improve patient care. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act had standardized the information needed for quality measurement.

However, it did not address the lack of standardization when it comes to the information and algorithms for measuring clinical performance, or the importance of linking clinical performance measurement with CDS to help improve it.

Over the past year, a panel of CDS experts, including Dr. Madhavi Vemireddy (our chief medical officer at ActiveHealth), worked to create a “taxonomy,” or classification of the information that connects quality measurement and CDS in clinical information systems. The result – the first step in defining the data sets needed to ultimately drive performance improvement. The panel’s new taxonomy is described in the report Driving Quality and Performance Measurement – A Foundation for Clinical Decision Support, announced this month by the NQF.

This new taxonomy has the potential to significantly improve health care. Today, many health care providers’ and organizations’ systems do not automatically capture the necessary information to drive CDS and performance measurement reporting. Having a common language for CDS and performance measurement is essential to improve quality with every patient.

All too frequently, at the individual practice level, performance measurement data has to be manually collected at the end of each performance year to create static reports that are not linked to CDS. The new CDS taxonomy will not only automate and standardize the data sets within electronic health records (EHRs), but also create the foundation to transform CDS into a dynamic workflow tool that is tightly linked with performance measurement improvement and supports performance measurement reporting as a byproduct of everyday practice. It is this connection that will improve performance and, ultimately, improve patient care and reduce health care costs.

The NQF’s report is only the first step in standardizing CDS datasets and in synergistically linking clinical performance measurement with CDS. Now, it will be up to health care vendors and organizations to begin using the taxonomy, building CDS and performance measurement alignment into their IT infrastructures. The hope is that this alignment will soon become standard practice in hospitals, physician practices, and other provider organizations across the country.

Gregory Steinberg, MD is CEO and president of ActiveHealth Management.

The “One” Thing HIT Vendors Need to Know
By Cynthia Porter

Reading the Web’s recent prognosis for Meditech strongly reinforced this simple truth: the customer is at the heart of the healthcare IT industry. This can sometimes get lost in the marketing, sales, and product development shuffle, with a company none the wiser until a valued client is no longer a returning client.

Recent blogger opinions beg several questions. What can an HIT company do to make sure it holds onto customers? Why is it so hard at times to better understand clients’ needs? It all comes down to the simple skill of listening. HIT vendors need to listen to what their clients are saying — and they’re saying a lot right now, to be sure.

Market research services fill this listening need. The HIT market is now more than ever in need of an unbiased third party to assist them in listening to their customers. Someone that will derive true opinions from a vendor’s clients — so valuable in continuing to meet clients’ needs when considering future product development.

The third-party solution provides an outlet for HIT customers to compliment or vent to. No selling, no marketing — just an ear that cares.

It is this skill of listening that will enable seasoned (some may say complacent) HIT companies like Meditech to survive. Meditech has been the “one” market leader for years – in the 200-bed market. What HIT vendors like Meditech need to realize is that the market is moving beyond the four walls of the hospital. HITECH, HIE, and ACOs are changing the game and expanding the walls.

Vendors need to listen to their customers and better understand the impetus behind their growing need for new HIT solutions. EHR integration, as mentioned in connection with Meditech’s issues, is just one part of this.

As Curly says in the movie City Slickers, there is just “one” thing and that is all there is to know. But the “one” has gotten bigger. One hospital is now one community. One state is now multiple states or regions. One patient is now the e-patient who demands access to his or her data any time, anywhere.

Meditech will need to adapt to this new way of thinking to remain the “one” vendor its customers have traditionally turned to. Luckily, it has one of the best and most active user groups on hand to help navigate this new course.

Cynthia Porter is president of Porter Research.

Steps to Take Against Medical Snooping
By Pete Niner

Medical snooping is in the news again, with the firing of four workers for looking at Congresswoman Giffords’ hospital records after the Jan. 8 shooting. While this instance was swiftly detected and punished, most instances of snooping will not make headlines, and are thus more difficult to detect.

Few care providers will ever have a patient whose treatment will be front page news (thankfully). But lower-profile patients are victims of snooping as well. For every case that makes the tabloids, there are doubtless many more cases involving less-newsworthy victims. A concerned father looking at his daughter’s suitor’s records, an irritated neighbor looking for malicious gossip, or a bitter ex-spouse seeking ammunition in a custody battle are much more difficult to catch.

Technology, alas, isn’t too much help here. Information security products have historically been focused on stopping unauthorized access, not the misuse of authorized access. Though there are a few products on the market that purport to detect and stop medical snooping, they are both expensive and cumbersome, beyond the financial and technical resources of many organizations. Those who can’t afford to spend six figures on a sleek, high tech product need to use other means to detect medical snooping.

Assuming your security fundamentals are in place, below are some additional ideas we’ve seen work.

Implement thorough segregation of duties. Many organizations default to an "all access" or an "all clinical access" policy for information. While this aids in staff flexibility, it is worth asking whether all staff need access to all information and judiciously trimming unneeded access.

Periodic review of access entitlements. Most organizations have solid processes to grant access; far fewer have good procedures to modify or remove access once it’s no longer necessary. An annual or bi-annual review of entitlements can clean up obsolete permissions and prevent surprises from lurking in dusty corners.

Spot checks of access, This can be done two ways: patient-centered or personnel-centered. Either review all access used to a particular patient’s records or review all access used by a particular employee. These can be done either randomly or for cause — an employee who steals medication is probably more likely to have misused his access as well.

VIP monitoring. Should a VIP enter your doors, closely monitor who accesses his or her information and why. We know of one organization that, when a VIP checked in, created half-a-dozen null records of non-existent persons with identical demographic and treatment information to that of the real VIP (security types call this a honeypot — stage actors recall 1 Henry IV, Act 5, Scene 3: "The king hath many marching in his coats".) All those who viewed the record of the dummy VIP were terminated.

Once the misuse is detected, of course, there should be clear, HR-approved procedures in place to very publicly discipline the offender.

Medical snooping can be tough to detect, but you’re not helpless. There are steps to take that will increase your ability to detect and deter such misuse.

Pete is a director at Techumen.

Readers Write 1/17/11

January 17, 2011 Readers Write 10 Comments

Remote Access Is Not Mobile Access
By Cameron Powell, MD

Healthcare organizations are quickly learning that both remote and mobile access strategies are required. See Table 1.

Remote access lets providers work in the hospital computing environment when they are not on location. This includes accessing the EMR and clinical applications via a PC or laptop from office or home. Secure the session with something like VPN, add the necessary authentication and encryption, and clinicians can use their Windows desktop and a browser to interact with hospital applications.

Offer mobile access when you need to empower providers to perform specific tasks anytime, anywhere. This would include visual assessment of images and waveforms, checking lab values, reconciling medication lists, checking allergy status – all while on the go. Providers want the data transformed into meaningful chunks; they don’t want to navigate the medical record from their Droid in order to make timely treatment decisions. Mobile data should be provided via native applications, built to run securely on a specific device and operating system.

Some organizations have considered using Citrix to provide interpreted or emulated application access to the EHR or CIS via a mobile device. Accessing patient monitoring data via a non-native solution is discouraged, because visual distortion is almost certain when things like medical aspect ratios cannot be controlled. [1] Further, the FDA is mandated to regulate mobile devices. [2], [3]

Mobile versus Remote Access

Consideration	Mobile Access	Remote Access
Accessibility	Single, personal mobile device Anytime, anywhere cellular or Wi-Fi access	PC, laptop, or workstation-based, even if it’s a workstation on wheels
Interface	Native Application – Designed to run in the computer environment (machine language and OS) being referenced (i.e.: Android, iPhone, Blackberry, etc.)	Citrix or web access to desktop applications
Data Transformation	Improves clinical decision making at the point of care through data transformation – does something with the data. Adds meaning with graphing, trending, colors, visuals cues, etc.	Looks and functions like the desktop electronic health record (EHR). Presents data in the same fashion as the computer program being accessed.
Added Value	Works with clinician workflow by delivering in meaningful ways. Incorporates evidence based medicine and knowledge-based prompting.	Supports office- or home-based access via computer.
Meaningful Use	Physician usage quickly ramps up, is sustained over time.	Initial usage spike, unsustained; often drops off after weeks/months. Physicians will seldom help organizations achieve data access/sharing objectives when they have to go to the data.

References

[1] http://ahealthydoseofmobility.com

[2] http://www.ebglaw.com/showarticle.aspx?Show=12184

[3] http://www.law.uh.edu/healthlaw/perspectives/2010/kumar-fdamobile.pdf.

Cameron Powell, MD is president, chief medical officer, and co-founder of AirStrip Technologies of San Antonio, TX.

Transcription Today
By Diligent Monk

Transcription is back.

As EMR adoption picks up in response to Meaningful Use, it is worth noting that lurking in the shadows is a familiar enemy to EMR companies: transcription. The age-old practice of dictating for capturing clinical observation is the most efficient, accurate, and preferred method for physicians to document a patient encounter.

Over the past few months, announcements from large organizations have signaled a return to relevancy for the transcription industry. IBM, Nuance, 3M, HealthStory Project, major universities from around the globe, and many other dominant players in the transcription service industry have made significant strides in utilizing technology to create more value from transcripts.

Enter the transcription technology revolution.

Partnering the skilled labor of transcriptionists with technology produces a rich and accurate dataset from a traditional transcript. Whether labeled natural language processing (NLP) or discrete reportable transcription (DRT), the concept is quick, simple to understand, and the value is just now being seen by the industry at large.

Using extensible mark-up language (XML), data is pulled from transcripts and provided in common transport standards (CCR, CCD, CDA) to be used in EMR systems and reports. A physician can dictate his/her notes and collect all of the data required for meeting the objectives and measures for incentive payment per the HITECH Act without purchasing an EMR.

Historically, the EMR sale was built on an ROI derived from transcription savings. Looking at a practice or hospital balance sheet, the transcription bill seemed to be the easiest to pick on, and with the point-and-click interface promoted by EMR vendors, it was a straight replacement for clinical documentation. EMR adoption would eliminate transcription costs. As an industry, the transcript was losing its relevancy in an age of electronic records, but physicians and practices weren’t thrilled with the results. And back to the revolution.

Permitting a physician to dictate in their preferred and normal manner, coupled with the ability to ‘tag’ the data elements of importance from the note, provides the best of both worlds.

Unfortunately, this does nothing to eliminate that pesky transcription charge, which is still the focal point of many EMR pitches. The transcription industry, however, counters that the prevention of productivity loss will more than cover the cost of their services and therefore be a win-win for all involved. As well, the risk of errors in reports is significantly decreased by the medical language specialists that review documents for clinical quality and integrity before submitting back for approval from the physicians.

As crazy as this sounds, and as hard to believe as it may be, transcribing may be the best way for practitioners to achieve Meaningful Use and the most cost-effective for their practice. The technology continues to improve and adoption continues to be strong, so yes, transcription doesn’t appear to be going away, and that may be a good thing.

FDA Comes to HIT… But Through the Back Door
By Frank L. Poggio

For several decades, there has been a raging debate as to whether HIT systems should be regulated by the FDA. A search of HISTalk on ‘FDA’ brings up hundreds of mentions. Some clinicians believe FDA oversight is desperately needed; others feel it would be a major detriment to new development.

Now the debate is over. It came earlier this month through a back door called ONCHIT, probably while you were sleeping.

On January 7, ONCHIT issued the Permanent Certification Program Final Rules PCPFR. These are the rules that will transfer the testing activities from the ‘temporary’ agencies to ‘permanent’ ones as of January 2012. On the surface, you would think these rules would impact only the companies like CCHIT, Drummond, InfoGard, etc. But our creative friends at CMS–ONCHIT went many steps beyond that.

Here are some highlights from a vendor perspective.

A new entity was created called the ONC-AA called the Approved Accreditor agency. The current ATCB will be changed to ACB, or Authorized Certification Body.

In a nutshell, the ACB administers the test and the AA oversees the ACB. Today under the temporary rule, the ATCB does both. What is now a one-step process will become in 2012 a two-step process for software firms seeking certification. The AA will also be the agency that selects and contracts with the ACBs for testing services (such as CCHIT, Drummond, etc.)

The new ONC-AA is required to insure that the ACBs conduct ‘surveillance’ of certified vendor products. Surveillance is CMS’s way of saying ‘audit’.

Here’s how the surveillance will work. The AA can walk unannounced into an ACB office and review all certification documentation, or can randomly sit in on tests. More importantly, the AA or ACB can audit at will, unannounced, the MU criteria out in the field at the providers shop to ensure the certified system really does what it was certified to do.

And it doesn’t stop there. Similar to the FDA processes, any user of a certified system (provider clients or their employees) can file a complaint directly with the ONC-AA or ACB stating that the vendor’s installed certified system DOES NOT MEET the certification criteria. At that point, the AA will conduct an investigation at the site and make a determination whether the vendor’s certification should be pulled.

If so, as with the FDA, press releases to that effect will be circulated. OUCH! Better start thinking about stronger client support in the future and set up internal channels to catch the gripes before they get so bad a user wants to scream ‘ONCHIT’.

On of my friends called this the ‘HIT Whistle Blower Act’, a good description. It’s just like the FDA: if a device or drug has an unexpected adverse impact, anyone can file a complaint. I hear a train a coming …

Frank L. Poggio is president of The Kelzon Group.

Readers Write 12/29/10

December 29, 2010 Readers Write 13 Comments

The Role of Automation in Reconciling Patient Records
By Beth Just

Duplicate patient records have long been a serious problem for hospitals, creating the potential for missing or inaccurate patient information that can lead to life-threatening care situations. They are also a substantial drain on financial, health information management (HIM), and IT resources.

Industry estimates are that 3-15 percent of patient records at a typical hospital are duplicates. That number skyrockets to 30 percent or higher for facilities that have been acquired or merged or are part of an integrated network. Exacerbating the sense of urgency surrounding the elimination of duplicates is the impact they can have on a hospital’s ability to qualify for incentive payments under HITECH. In particular, duplicates artificially inflate the number of unique patient records, which are the basis for several Stage One criteria.

That is why eliminating existing duplicates and preventing the creation of new ones must be an integral part of any facility’s data management strategy. In addition to easing the burden of achieving Meaningful Use, doing so also eliminates significant cost drain. One three-hospital system determined that the duplicate volume for its health system was more than 17,000 records.

The estimated annual cost of those duplicates? Anywhere from $554,000 to more than $1.2 million for repeated tests and treatment delays, as well as incremental costs related to longer registration times and correcting duplicate records.

The challenge is that reconciling and eliminating duplicates is a cumbersome, manual process that requires staffing resources most hospitals cannot spare. What’s more, these processes do nothing to prevent future issues.

Traditionally, the reconciliation process is executed entirely on paper. Potential duplicate records are identified as patient charts are pulled. They are then assigned to the HIM staff, which must analyze previous charts and other information to verify whether they are actual duplicates before they can be eliminated.

Even if a hospital’s information system provides reports of duplicate records, the data they contain typically is limited to key identifiers, such as name and date of birth. More research is generally required once potential duplicates are identified.

Progress on reconciliations is also typically tracked on paper, leaving room for error and duplication of work.

By automating portions of the reconciliation workflow, hospitals are able to quickly and efficiently weed out existing duplicates and prevent new ones. By allowing multiple duplicates to be reviewed in a single view, automated processes also heighten user control over the merge process, lessen the time required to complete the process and enable more effective quality assurance before records are merged. High-level process will also support merging records in downstream systems while reducing manual steps and associated costs.

Automation can also reduce the time and resources required for reconciliation. The best systems will also automatically document decision validity, track productivity and generate comprehensive, user-friendly reports that provide a complete view of efforts and insights into problem origination points.

After six months of manually analyzing duplicates records, the previously mentioned hospital system chose to leverage the efficiencies of an automated reconciliation process to eliminate duplicates prior to its transition to a new clinical information system. Today, it relies on the software to maintain clean, high-quality patient records. The automated solution resolves upwards of 500 duplicate records monthly at each of its three hospitals – and it does so with fewer resources than had previously been dedicated to the process.

Beth Just is CEO and president of Just Associates.

How Healthcare Is Different
By Rambling Man

Healthcare is unlike any other industry for a ton of reasons, a few I found the time to ruminate upon this morning.

What industry does not know its costs? There are examples of providers performing this analysis, but most community hospitals, ambulatory care centers, and primary physician offices operate from ignorance of this information. How can providers negotiate payer contracts without this knowledge? This information will become increasingly important as the industry evolves from traditional payment models with ones based on quality of care and outcomes. This begs the question: how will we measure quality care and outcomes? The answer will inevitably involve more consumer involvement.

How will the industry respond to the increasing demands upon the primary physician? Today’s reimbursement models force physicians to fit more patients into their daily routine, while still making the same amount of income. This model will eventually change the face of healthcare, and perhaps for the better. Demands on physicians to stay current with new clinical data, juggle a schedule of seeing 36 patients a day, and “practicing the art” seems super-human and may be outdated.

These demands, combined with an alarming decrease in physician ranks, will create a new layer between the patient and the science. This new layer may be satisfied with Nurse Practitioners or Physician Assistants, or a skill-set not yet defined that focuses on data gathering and psychological insight.

How can patients do to better the system? Medicine addresses our physical vulnerability and fear of death, which are the darkest of human emotions. Physicians must have a serious sensitivity towards the emotional needs of patients, and one could argue society’s reaction towards death has worsened in the last fifty years.

For many, years of pain or confinement to bed are better alternatives to accepting the inevitable. We expect our physicians to be the best scientist and psychologist all wrapped up into one package, but how have we changed as consumers? We need to bear a larger portion in the direction of medical care, and the systems that provide medical information to the consumers must be simplified for all. Health data banks, where consumers store health information and pay for data analysis, will emerge and become the centers of our data.

And finally, and arguably more difficult, is that we require a change in attitude regarding death. Fear of death is the motivation behind the largest portion of healthcare expenditures. Has our consumer psychology foregone quality of life in favor of quantity? Changing these attitudes will not happen overnight and will not be easy. Each of us facing our ultimate demise need to do so with dignity and faith that death is a beginning to a larger chapter in our existence.

As I Stand With Nozzle In Hand
By Mr. HIStalk

Pumping gas is boring. There’s nothing you can except fidget and enjoy the fumes (which I do). The high point for me is spotting a squeegee in a nicely full container so I can at least pretend that my windshield is dirty and entertain myself for a few seconds by cleaning it (or curse the lazy clerks who’ve left the squeegee in a desert-dry container because they just don’t care).

Sometimes I read the stickers on the pump, like the last inspection date or how to find the emergency shut-off valve (daydreaming of heroically saving an entire neighborhood by stopping a spreading ocean of flame as I sprint confidently to shut down the pumps like John Wayne in Hellfighters). While scanning for those exciting tidbits the other day when I was in another state, a sticker on the pump caught my attention. Under a picture of a scowling, R. Lee Ermey-lookalike state trooper, it said Drive Off, Lose Your License.

I marveled at the political clout of the gas station owners. Shoplifting, walking out on a restaurant tab, or any kind of petty theft are all subject to a ponderous legal system with generally light penalties for first-time offenders. The punishment, if it ever comes, is generic and disjointed from the crime. But somehow the gas guys used their political grease to get politicians to approve a very specific (and severe) penalty for a specific type of theft affecting only them.

Obviously the R. Lee sticker was designed to get your attention. The Lose Your License part is a lot more dramatic than, Drive Off, You Will Probably Not Be Arrested and At Worst Will Get a Slap On the Wrist Months From Now Even If You Are Arrested, and That’s Assuming the Unmotivated Dry-Squeegee Clerk Cares Enough to Chase You Down the Street To Get Your License Number.

I was appalled. What does skipping out on a gas station tab have to do with the privilege of driving? That makes about as much sense as … uh oh … penalizing doctors for not using electronic medical records.

Gas stations could have eliminated their problem without judicial favoritism by simply requiring cash customers (are there really any left?) to pay before pumping. Just like EMR vendors could have boosted use of their products beyond the pathetically tiny percentage of busy, pre-HITECH doctors willing to use them by making them easier to use and designing them to increase doctor efficiency rather than accumulating interesting but not always clinically helpful data for insurance companies and the increasingly intrusive Uncle Sam to poke around in to find reasons not to pay for services already rendered.

Even though I’d paid at the pump, I decided to go into the C-store for a soda and some nutritionally devastating snacks (anybody for an jelly orange slice or a pack of those mini-donuts slathered with coconut gunk?) On the wall beside the “deli” (where the commissary-made sandwiches encased in their nitrogen-filled coffins are moved from totes to the refrigerator in a form of “cooking”) was the C-store’s health inspection sign.

I read those. If I’m going to a strange restaurant (especially if it’s Asian or Mexican), I’m going to seek it out right away to make sure the cooks at least occasionally wash their hands and don’t store the goat carcass designated for employee lunches in the same refrigerator as the desserts, at least during the inspector’s surprise visit. (As a second-level review, I always check out the customer restrooms since whatever disgusting state those are in is ten times cleaner than the areas customers can’t see, like the kitchen).

I want to see those health inspection signs on hospital and practice doors. Give me a letter or number score of how well they adhere to quality measures, as measured by a totally independent and fear-inspiring government bureaucracy (not the chummy Joint Commission, which has given hospitals glowing scores right before the state inspectors came down on them like the wrath of God for running shockingly lax operations). I would turn tail just as quickly from an impressively ornate medical provider’s facility with a C-minus score as I would from a $5.39 all-day Chinese buffet restaurant that doesn’t even own a trash can (but with illegal immigrant employees who probably wash their hands more than the average doc even though they’re deboning chicken thighs instead of probing people).

So thumbs-down for making up new penalties to encourage whatever behaviors the politicians and those who influence them have decided are desirable. Thumbs-up for letting businesses run their own affairs, but with mandatory full disclosure to their customers. Let the market decide whether and EMR-wielding C-minus practice is preferable to an A-grade practice using an IBM Selectric and one of those, “Sara, this is Sheriff Taylor” telephones that look like the far end of a clarinet.

But in the mean time, I’m thinking about applying a for a few paltry million of the HITECH bonanza to create an EMR awareness program for the paper-clinging providers. I’m calling up R. Lee Ermey, posing him in a government-looking suit and power tie, and putting him on stickers for manila folders that read Write Order? Lose Income.

Readers Write 12/15/10

December 15, 2010 Readers Write 4 Comments

The Elephant in the Room
By Dana Sellers

I spend most of my time with provider organizations. Recently, though, I spent a day with a company that focuses on payers. As we discussed the many challenges our industry faces in today’s tough economic and regulatory climate, it hit me that we appeared to be coming at the problem from different angles.

One side of the room talked about patients, clinical data, and quality measures. The other side talked about members, population management, and risk reduction. It reminded me of the old story about the blind men who touch the same elephant, but describe it very differently. We were all talking about the same elephant, but we saw it and described it in our own terms.

There’s one thing both providers and payers have in common, though. Everyone’s trying to figure out how to play in a changing world that’s moving toward pay-for-performance, value-based purchasing, and ACOs. Providers are jockeying for position — buying physician practices, networking with community docs, and starting to think a lot more like payers.

Provider CIOs, who are just fully realizing how hard it is to capture the discrete data needed for the first 15 quality measures within their own walls, are facing the challenge of aggregating discrete clinical data over extended provider communities that include a hodgepodge of physician practices, specialty clinics, long-term care facilities, and home care settings.

Key payers are jockeying for position, too. Last week Aetna bought Medicity. Earlier this year, Ingenix, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, purchased Axolotl and Picis. It makes sense that payers want into the HIE world. They need a way to gather clinical data, but more importantly, they want a framework that will allow them to influence the behavior of care providers to drive best practices back out to the point of care. These moves may really complicate things from a provider’s perspective, though.

How all of this will play out isn’t clear by any means, but there are a few things I’d be willing to bet on.

The 15 quality measures in Stage 1 are just the tip of the iceberg. Over the next five years, reimbursement will be increasingly based on data that must be captured, aggregated, and reported electronically, rather than through abstracting.
Physicians are key. To enhance the health of a population in a substantial way, you need to be able to connect with community-based care providers, manage handoffs, and influence decisions at the point of care. Whether it’s through acquisition or networking, healthcare organizations need to include physicians in their IT strategies.
The lines are blurring. Providers are starting to look and talk a lot more like payers, and payers are starting to move into areas long thought to be the domain of providers. We’ll see providers assuming risk and managing populations of members. Interesting alliances and new business models will emerge, and CIOs will need new information systems to support this new world.
Data will be the new gold in whatever finally emerges out of healthcare reform. Not just clinical data or financial data, but both combined … and lots of it. Payers have known this for years, and have invested heavily in systems to capture and report on member data. The organizations that come out on top will be the ones that figure out how to capture data, how to aggregate it, and how to apply the insights they derive from it to bring about real changes in quality. This doesn’t happen overnight. CIOs who don’t take the time to develop an analytics strategy will struggle to keep up.

So maybe at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter so much that we all have the same pachyderm perspective … as long as we can get it to do the heavy lifting.

Dana Sellers is CEO of Encore Health Resources of Houston, TX.

I Have an ONC-Certified EHR and Vendor Meaningful Use Guarantee, Why Do I Need Anything Else?
By James O’Connor

Software is a tool. An ONC-certified EHR captures and reports data, but an EHR system cannot characterize the gaps in your workflow and processes, initiate change within your practice, or foster teamwork to meet a common goal. These activities can be supported by a good software tool, but cannot be enacted by one. Here’s an illustration.

Recording demographics is a core requirement. To an EHR vendor, "readiness" means there is a form somewhere in the system that collects the information and there is a report that calculates the ratio.

To a medical practice, "readiness" means something else entirely. Certainly demographics are being recorded to some extent now, but one of the Meaningful Use requirements is to record a patient’s preferred language. To comply, practices must update forms (if patients still register on paper) and train staff to ask established patients the question (to fill in the gaps).

There is no partial payment for partial compliance. If the ratio doesn’t hit the minimum 50%, there will be no incentive payment. There are a number of requirements that depend on staff, not clinicians, to fulfill. These must be understood and incorporated into the workflow.

It is no great secret that Meaningful Use (at least Phase I) is not rocket science. The steps to prepare do require organization and a certain depth of knowledge. A small- to medium-sized practice willing to dedicate a competent individual to undertake this task can reasonably expect the person to succeed.

It might take a little longer. There may be a few bumps in the road dealing with the HIPAA security assessment. There could be some resistance to change if the individual selected to head the effort has a "regular" job that does not ordinarily have the power to influence senior members. But surely it can be done.

On the other hand, there are benefits to bringing in an outsider: no subtraction from practice productivity, no power struggles, no learning curve, greater objectivity, expertise with security assessments. Also, you can fire a bad consultant, but dealing with a staff member who isn’t performing can be touchy.

Regardless of the path chosen, be sure to read the EHR vendors’ guarantees closely. They generally offer to credit the monthly usage or maintenance fees for a limited period of time if the practice doesn’t receive the incentive payment. Practically speaking, how will that work?

The incentive is paid to individuals, but fees are typically paid by the practice. Does that mean if one physician does not qualify, then there are no fees for the entire practice that month? Does it mean that a portion of the fee will be credited?When you really think about it, what is a monthly maintenance fee compared to $44,000?

Yes, you need an ONC-certified EHR system, but don’t depend on an EHR vendor’s guarantee to get you ready.

James O’Connor, MD is CEO of MDcohort of Ashburn, VA.

Electronic Medical Records, HITECH, and Your Health Information: Does Bureaucracy Inhibit Innovation?
By Doug Wallace

In case you have not heard, the economic stimulus program that passed in 2009 includes a little something called the Healthcare Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) act, funded in excess of 20 billion dollars.

Your doctor is now required to computerize your personal health records. All of them. Boom!

Gone will be your current paper medical charts. But where will they go? Scanned and computerized for easy access and review. And why?

The current administration has claimed that, “To improve the quality of our healthcare while lowering its costs, we will make the immediate investments necessary to ensure that all of America’s medical records are computerized”.

While productivity and efficiency is a necessary goal, who is to decide how to accomplish such an initiative?

Much as the Transportation and Security Administration (TSA) claims that upon purchasing a ticket for air travel, you may well than “give up a lot of rights”. Will this hold true for your medical information?

In the move to enforce compliance of HITECH and physician adoption of electronic medical records, some immediate barriers to this initiative have become evident. Among them: doctors are not moving as fast as the money is flowing; the healthcare market already is positioned to deliver on what HITECH demands; any “preferred EMR systems” in good favor of Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) would hinder free market choices.

Is it fair to use regulation as a way to bypass legislation? Or just let bureaucrats decide? The US healthcare system is approximately 2.5 TRILLION dollars, or 18% of the GDP. Should measures such as our personal medical information be placed on a relative fast track whose journey has just begun, for an outcome that is uncertain?

Doug Wallace is executive VP, business development solutions for My EMR Choice of Doylestown, PA.

Readers Write 12/1/10

December 1, 2010 Readers Write 4 Comments

To Be or Not To Be — Certified; That is the Question
By Frank L. Poggio

The ONCHIT Certification process is in full swing. There are three interim firms designated as Authorized Testing and Certification Bodies (ATCB). Over 100 products and about 70 firms have been approved. The key question is this: should you, as a vendor or in-house system developer, get certified?

I think we all can agree that if you sell a full EMR or EHR system to health providers, certification is a must. If you do not get certified, it is unlikely you will install another new client. Worse, your existing clients will start leaving in droves.

But what if you are a niche vendor? What if you sell a best-of-breed (BoB) package, such as a lab system or a therapy or a dietary system? And what about vendors that sell smart medical devices?

For these situations, according to a strict interpretation of the rules, you do not have to get certified (unless, of course, your clients and prospective clients request that you do). And therein is the rub. ONCHIT is not telling vendors they must get certified before they can sell systems (as does the FDA for blood bank software). ONCHIT is going to let the market tell you.

The potential impact of the Meaningful Use bonus / penalties can add up to millions of dollars over the next five years for a given health facility. The responsibility for realizing bonuses and avoiding penalties will fall on the CIO (or maybe COO) of the health facility. If the facility misses out on a bonus or gets hit with a penalty, it is likely that the responsible executive’s job is on the line.

Given that real personal concern, it is fair to assume the CIO /COO will purchase only certified systems and de-install ones that are not.

Even in situations where a niche product does not directly deal with certification “modules”, it could put meeting MU approval at risk. In a recent discussion about certification by the HITECH Policy Committee, it was explained that if you have a ONCHIT-certified clinical data warehouse and use it to generate quality and MU performance measures, if a non-certified system accesses the warehouse and/or places data into the warehouse, the warehouse could be deemed non-certified. I call it “contamination through association”.

Considering the vast amount of PHI and clinical data that moves daily to and from interface engines while finding its way into, and passing through, multiple systems, you can see where a CIO/COO would not want to take a chance on a non-certified product, regardless of how insignificant the application may be to the overall facility’s operation.

This “contamination” issue is not unique to facilities that favor best-of-breed solutions. It cannot be avoided by purchasing an EMR from a single vendor since no single vendor covers the complete waterfront for all applications needed by a provider.

In fact, many medical device vendors will be faced with the same challenge. For example, if a device such as an IV pump, drug dispensing cabinet, or digital imaging equipment is considered “smart” (that is, receiving and communicating patient information and communicating the data over the core hospital infrastructure), then if the device is not ONCHIT-certified, it could be deemed as a potential “contaminator”, thereby rendering the entire EMR as non-compliant and not eligible for MU. Remember: fail just one criterion and you don’t get a bonus.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your view), there is a now a new cost of doing business in the health systems marketplace: ONCHIT certification. The unfortunate outcome may be that this is a new barrier to entry and will scare off new HIT startups while further embedding the current ones.

The second challenge for a niche IT vendor or device manufacturer is navigating your way through the MU “module” tests. There are 44 certification criteria today. Additional ones are promised for Years Two and Three that will increase the list by orders of magnitude. As a niche player, your product(s) is considered an “EMR Module” and does not have to meet all test criteria. You are required to meet eight privacy and security tests and just one of the remaining 35.

But this may create a real competitive concern. What if you are a BoB vendor or have a smart medical device and none of the 35 criteria apply to your application? From a regulatory standpoint, you do not need to go through certification. Yet your arch-competitor’s application touches just one module criteria and they submit on that one along with the eight P&S criteria and get certified. Whose product or software will the CIO be most comfortable with?

On the surface, you may think it best to try to meet as many criteria as you can, but there are real risks and costs in doing that. Selecting which to pursue, and which to pass on, must be both a strategic marketing and critical development decision.

In summary, it’s hard to see how a niche player can avoid diving into this pool. The more important question is — how deep?

Frank L. Poggio is president of The Kelzon Group.

Is Your Vendor About to Deflate?
By Alan Jack

One of the problems in HITland is the inability of many vendors to hire and keep talented staff, especially in the R&D area. Compared to other sectors , healthcare software companies pay lower salaries, need folks to stay on call 24 hours a day, have long hours, etc. Many vendors do not have great internal cultures, either. The result is that many companies have a reputation problem.

When demand for software developers is good, HIT companies start having problems recruiting, while at the same time, headhunters are targeting their employees. Added to the normally high turnover in the software industry, the losses can start snowballing as workloads go up and more folks bail. Developer numbers will start shrinking despite efforts to recruit more. Software will be delayed just at the time when it is needed most.

Do not think that the vendor will willingly disclose issues with customers. The total headcount at companies experiencing issues will likely be going up, in fact, as other roles are hired: project managers, sales and marketing, and other folks in the easier-to-recruit categories. Employees will often switch roles in those time periods, requiring backfill.

As the economy comes out of the Great Recession, this will become an increasingly difficult problem to deal with. Several companies I’m familiar with are already having issues recruiting.

Given that software developer degrees area unpopular with college students at the moment and the reputation problem companies are having have spread overseas to areas where H1B visa people are recruited, don’t look for things to change soon.

Back to School For a Master of Biomedical Informatics Degree – Part II
By Jeremy Harper

Many HIStalk readers are past the career stage where education adds life-changing value. In fact, they are the men and women who will be interviewing and hiring students in the upcoming years.

This post will discuss the differences students will offer from someone who has experience, but no formal education. It will also discuss some of the general education required for a MBI. Lastly, it will briefly mention internships and how a proactive company could interact with students who would be more inclined towards working at their company upon graduation.

As you saw in my introductory post, I am at the beginning of my career. While I have seen a rapid progression in my career, having entered the full-time healthcare work force in 2007, it would probably take an additional 20 years of experience and luck before I could become a CIO without higher education.

What this degree shows for me — and every other student — is that the person receiving it has a passion for the industry. It shows that that the student is willing to take years out of their life to receive a breadth and depth of knowledge that cannot be equaled solely by work experience. It shows they can determine a long-term goal and marshal the necessary resources to achieve it. These are valuable skills to consider when hiring these students to senior team member and management positions.

As someone with experience at both a vendor and a hospital system, I know the value that real-world experience offers. However, that same experience has a narrow focus. A formal educational setting is changing my perspective on past work to look beyond the scope of the project to see how it fits into the overall arena.

This quarter in pathophysiology, for example, we’re doing clinical reviews every week with a physician. We learn how to do the same types of HX&PE medical students perform (lacking their expertise, of course). We will also shadow a healthcare provider with the specific goal of observing their workflows and reporting them to our fellow students.

The people leaving these degree programs will educated in a variety of different methods, but they will have the ability to adjust and learn to use any system necessary to accomplish a goal. Students learn about disparate topics like database structure, biostatistics, and report writing. This provides a confidence to accomplish more than a work force operating solely on experience.

As a real-world example, I have interacted with two separate interface teams closely in my career. One had exceptionally practical experience, having learned via the school of hard knocks. The other also had practical experience, but also formal clinical education prior to working with the interfaces.

The former team would not modify any data pushed through the interfaces. The closest to modification they would come was translation tables. The latter used their specialized knowledge and depth of understanding to successfully accomplish a stronger interface between two systems that did not inherently talk to one another or have data that could be simply translated with a table.

To close, the OHSU program requires two quarters of real-world internship in whatever specialized field the master’s degree student chooses. In general, the other programs I investigated also required some type of internship and capstone.

These programs had a wide variety in what they were looking to accomplish with the internship. Many past projects from my research were evaluations of an EMR implementation, assisting with EMR implementations, working for software vendors on improving their product, or doing general research for scientific endeavors.

If you have a school in your area (check here)or an internship that can be done remotely, you can start forming professional relationships with these schools and students that will enrich your work force.

Jeremy Harper is a student at Oregon Health & Science University of Portland, OR.

Readers Write 11/12/10

November 12, 2010 Readers Write 16 Comments

On the Largest Medicare Fraud Case in History – $100 Million
By Deborah Peel, MD

Key points:

This case is “the largest single Medicare fraud case” in history.
“There were no real medical clinics behind the fraudulent billings, just stolen doctors’ identities," says Janice Fedarcyk, FBI assistant director-in-charge. "There were no colluding patients signing in at clinics for unneeded treatments, just stolen patient identities."
The organization stole the identities of doctors and filed applications to bill Medicare in their names, often providing a clinic address on the application that was, in fact, the location of a mailbox, according to the indictment. The organization then obtained the stolen identities of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries, including the identities of about 2,900 patients treated at the Orange Regional Medical Center in Orange County, NY.
Members of the organized crime ring also are charged with operating a multi-million dollar scheme to defraud health insurance companies in the New York area by submitting claims for medically unnecessary treatments.
In some cases, defendants allegedly staged auto accidents to generate fake patients who would then undergo unnecessary and expensive treatments that would be billed and reimbursed.

What I still do not get is the inability of very smart people in government, healthcare, and HIT to miss the REALLY big picture.

Privacy isn’t about preventing tomorrow’s profits or blocking meaningful use of data. It’s about the fact that if Americans lose ALL control over personal information in healthcare, we will lose all our privacy rights in the Digital Age. Period. All of them. For every kind of information / data about us. Our strongest rights to control personal information are our rights to control health information.

If we lose the war over control of personal information in health, the US will become a total surveillance state and we will have lost the most precious right individuals have in Democracies: the right to be let alone. Do you think that we can remain a Democracy if everyone — government and private corporations — knows everything about us? There is a reason for the saying “information is power.”

By the way, I am not in the Tea Party or a radical. Standing up for medical ethics, the law, and the right to privacy is a very conservative position!

The big take-away is that as long as patients’ sensitive electronic health information and demographics are so poorly protected, millions of employees of hospitals, clinics, insurers, pharmacies, and health IT vendors will have open access to steal it. We will continue to see an explosion of multi-million dollar healthcare fraud, identity theft, and medical identity theft, unless we radically redesign our health IT systems, protect health data wherever it flows, and restore the right of consent.

The high-profile of this case is supposed to discourage criminals and potential criminals, but when millions of employees in healthcare, government, and health technology corporations have open access to all patient health data, the likelihood of getting away with data theft is high. The innumerable outside hackers and criminals whose business is stealing valuable health data will never stop.

The only solution is to require comprehensive and meaningful privacy and security for all health data, wherever it flows:

1) Restoring patients’ rights to control electronic health information would end open to the nation’s health data by millions of employees of the healthcare system, insurance, government agencies, and technology industry. Requiring informed consent before ANYONE can see our records is simple, cheap, and easy if we require robust electronic patient consent for all data use or exchange.

2) Requiring and enforcing ironclad, state-of-the-art security for all health IT systems and health data wherever it is held online is essential.

If we don’t require and build trusted systems now, before ‘wiring’ all health data systems together, before systems are ‘interoperable’ and before every American is required to have an electronic health record, we will destroy privacy for generations. Once our sensitive data is ‘out’, like Paris Hilton’s sex video, it can never be made private again. And when healthcare systems cannot be trusted, people refuse to get needed treatment, fearing their jobs and futures will be endangered. Creating a healthcare system that people are afraid to use is a national disaster. Trust takes a long time and is very expensive to rebuild.

The implications for Democracy if we lose the right to privacy in healthcare are dire.

Deborah C. Peel, MD is the founder of Patient Privacy Rights.

Before Extending Software Support Contracts, Consider Alternatives
By Tony Paparella

It’s common for a healthcare organization to become unnecessarily tied to an extended support contract when it retires an HIS in favor of a new system. The old system is not an ideal data storage solution. Although patient accounting and clinical data sets still require some functionality and real-time user access, the legacy application is expensive overkill for what is needed.

Support contracts typically run a year or more in length, meaning they’re oftentimes paid for longer than necessary. Furthermore, it may be difficult to negotiate favorable rates and terms with a vendor facing long-term loss of revenue.

Other times, purchasing a contract isn’t an option; the system may be so outdated that the company that owns the software no longer offers support. This places the organization in a precarious position, facing potential loss of vital data. Furthermore, IT staff may become burdened with legacy system upkeep, deflecting efforts away from the new HIS.

“Doing nothing” or opting for an inadequate option invites serious compliance and financial risks. Millions of dollars (and the jobs of CIOs and department directors!) can be lost to: interruption to account billing/cash flow; inability to respond to a payer audit (such as RAC and commercial insurance audits); noncompliance with Federal and State data retention requirements; loss of access to the legal medical record and; increased hardware/software expenditures.

Additionally, fines for non-compliance with Federal employment record, HIPAA and other retention requirements can be significant. Depending on the statute, data retention requirements range from three to 28 years – meaning a short term, one-dimensional solution won’t do.

Fortunately, signing an extended support contract isn’t the only option for organizations that must access and manage legacy data.

Internal warehousing may be considered as an alternative – metaphorically, a home for data, albeit largely unfurnished. Though data access and management is inherently restrictive, this option is typically the most time- and cost-efficient to implement.

In a full detail conversion, all legacy account data is converted into the new system. If precisely executed, compliance and cash flow are maintained. Often, however, the vendor will decline to bring old data into the new HIS. Hence, the risk of cash flow interruption. A high degree of planning and analysis is required before implementation.

Legacy data can also be migrated to a healthcare active archive specifically designed to allow end users to access and update accounts, run reports and, in some cases, post payments and bill accounts. Advance preparation is essential. In some instances, an organization may need to specifically task an IT team member with helping coordinate the migration of data.

Proper planning and preparation will help your organization sidestep a burdensome legacy system support contract. Understand the risks and investigate your options many months in advance.

Tony Paparella is president of MediQuant Inc.

The Quest for Price and Quality Transparency
By Colin Konschak

What one hospital charges for a particular procedure varies widely based on a host of factors. Understandably, many providers who are otherwise all for transparency when it comes to patient outcomes are reticent to disclose cost data. There are real reasons for concerns on the globalization of medicine. However, health care is largely a local phenomenon.

What are the compelling reasons for being as transparent with prices as with anything else? For one, increasingly, consumers are armed with price information today that exceeds anything they could have assembled even just a few years back. Also, in the mind of many consumers, price equals quality. Logical or not, this notion has become ingrained as a result of their consumer experience in other industries.

Wine under one label is deemed more expensive than wine under another label, even in the case where the wine has proved to be exactly the same, from the same source, processed and delivered in exactly the same manner.

Reputation Enhances Price

At the supermarket, branded merchandise still sells at a premium compared to store or generic brands that offer the same ingredients, molecule by molecule. Your hospital’s reputation could prove to be the deciding factor in whether or not a patient will plunk down more money to be treated by you over others who, based on all comparison measures, offer exactly the same care and service.

Suppose a consumer does his homework and finds that you and a competitor have entirely equal success rates for particular procedure, and you charge 15% more. Is this a reason to fear price transparency? No, because with all the data available for a consumer to peruse to his heart’s content, the decision to choose one provider over another is multifaceted. Price is one factor, albeit an important one, among several.

Many consumers will go with the lowest price. Many will choose the best value – a blend of price and quality. Short term, there is not much you can do about the prices for some of the procedures you charge. In the long run, everything is up for grabs.

More Business, Lower Prices

The more often a hospital performs a particular procedure, and the more experience its doctors accrue, the better it is able to offer that procedure at a lower price. Even in health care, greater business volumes contribute to economies of scale. In the short run, you can’t do that much about the volume you handle for any particular procedure. In the long run, you could seek dominance in your local or regional area by publicizing your experience in a given procedure. Thus economies of scale could result and price transparency would work to your favor.

At Alegent Health, based in Omaha NE, the prevailing attitude is that consumers have a right and ought to be able to easily know how much a provider charges. Three years ago, Alegent launched My Cost, found at www.alegent.com, a consumer-friendly feature that offers cost estimates for a variety of tests, procedures, appointments, and services.

So, You Want Cost Data

Visitors can simply enter the name of their insurance providers and any co-payment or deductible information. The system then presents a cost estimate that is useful in personal health care decisions.http://www.alegent.com, The visitor is also treated to financial assistance information via links provided, and a phone number in case their anticipated procedure is not listed on the site. Now up and running for nearly three years, more than 50,000 cost estimates have been generated at My Cost.

Alegent’s experience in promoting price transparency has been that consumers appreciate the honesty and openness of the organization. Instead of price transparency scaring away potential business, in this case it has led to stronger provider-patient relationships. Alegent’s CEO says transparency “isn’t necessarily easy, and it does take courage, but in the end it is the right thing to do for consumers and the community.”

Make the Commitment

Commitment to transparency takes guts. Yet, what other choice is there? Fortunately, as we’ll see, there is room for creativity and initiative.

Providing information on the results that your hospital achieves for patients, at the medical condition level, is vital. Your data needs to include patient outcomes with an adjustment for risk based on prior conditions, the overall cost of care, and measurements for both extending through the care cycle.

Transparency also encompasses offering the experience your hospital has in treating specific medical conditions, by volume of patients, coupled with delineation of such treatments based on methods of care offered. Your processes, in the long run, can be improved only by understanding how results are achieved, which methods are most effective, how they might be refined to make critical differences, and what the actual outcome of such refinements have been.

Details Count

Outcomes for a specific medical condition can and should be expressed many ways. For, say, shoulder surgery several validated measures exist such as range of movement, reduction of pain, and ability to function. Still other outcome measures for shoulder surgery include the interval between the initiation of care and return to normal activity such returning to work or playing tennis again.

Data related to the particulars of patients, known as patient attributes, such as gender, age, genetic factors, and prevailing conditions, are vital elements of transparency and are essential for assessing risk. Accurate diagnoses are vital for both the patient and the provider. A transparent provider will publish measures of diagnostic accuracy including cost, timeliness, and completeness.

Outcome measures that only address episodic interventions fall short because they fail to yield results meaningful to the patient. Such short-sighted reporting and consequence scoring can be counterproductive and lead to the publication of misleading data.

Failure is not pretty and human beings instinctively want to avoid reporting their own shortcomings, much like organizations. Still, ineffective treatments – errors in procedure, medication, or treatment – and complications following a procedure need to be identified and scored. As unpleasant as this task may be, it is a step on the path to improved levels of treatment and overall service. You cannot fix a problem that you refuse to acknowledge.

Expand Your Measures

A traditional core measure, “the 30-day readmission rate,” tracked by the government, is of course a potential indicator of poor quality. Who wants too many patients are readmitted within 30 days for the same problem.

You may be able to devise your own kind of data measures by tinkering with traditional data measures. For example, you could align your total quality management efforts, such as your Six Sigma Performance Improvement initiatives, around improving the 30-day readmission rate and devote resources to that. In turn, for each of the core measures which need to be fully transparent, you may wish to devise two, three, four or more strategies to ensure that your scores improve over time. Rest assured, other providers will be doing the same.

Costs Mysteries No More

Unlike most businesses, many hospitals, to this day, don’t know what their actual charges ought to be. They charge for this procedure or that based on tradition, competition, payer contracts, or whatever cost data they can scrape together. A comprehensive understanding of true cost is often lacking. If and when the government mandates that hospitals publish price and quality information, they will need the technical ability to do so.

In almost all cases, some web restructuring proves to be vital. There needs to be a huge consumer section that is highly inviting. Take the bull by the horns and invite the consumer to go patrolling through your data. Just as industrial companies publish annual reports with a profit and loss statement, balance sheet, and cash flow analyses, you might choose to offer a five-year projection as to the life cycle cost of a procedure and its follow up.

Implications for Your Hospital

Is transparency part of your agenda for your weekly and monthly meetings?
Has your hospital developed policies and procedures in relation to transparency?
Within your own office or division, are top officers involved in the transparency discussion?
Have you attended any conferences and symposiums on transparency?
Are you monitoring other providers who have already made the conversion to transparency?
Are you devising plans to capitalize on the inherent opportunities in offering transparent data?

Colin Konschak is the managing partner of DIVURGENT, a management consulting firm. His book on this topic was just released.

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