EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 2/27/20

I’m always on the lookout for good outcomes from all the work that goes into EHRs. I enjoyed reading about an EHR “nudge” that was shown to reduce inappropriate testing for the nasty C. difficile infection. The system flags patients with contraindications to testing and the authors looked at data across four hospitals ranging two years before and after the intervention. The percentage of inappropriate orders fell by 2% with the intervention, and overall orders were down 21%.

I attended a medical seminar this week and was surprised that no one is modifying their behavior in response to flu season or even fears of coronavirus. Still a lot of hand shaking going on and a couple of people gave me the side eye when I declined to shake hands. I guess everyone has forgotten the pandemic flu of 2009 when everyone was doing elbow bumps instead. CDC has raised their level of dialogue around coronavirus preparedness and HIMSS has followed suit by announcing it will be a handshake-free meeting. I anticipate some other behavior changes around whether people will accept samples of food or candy and whether people will even want to travel to such a large event. HIMSS notes that registrations are up over 2019 and the cancellation rate is below 0.05%.

Still, HIMSS has announced its preparedness plan, including collaboration with ED physicians, onsite support from the Florida Department of Health, onsite screening and isolation as needed, and more. They plan to have three medical offices at the convention center, with one of them dedicated to flu-like symptoms. There will also be an increased number of hand sanitation stations, increased wipe-down of commonly used surfaces, and the availability of medical-grade face masks at the information booths.

That’s more masks than I currently have at my office, which makes me sad. I’m a bit of a prepper already, so making sure I have enough personal supplies stocked in wasn’t a stretch, and I’ve warned my younger colleagues who rely on DoorDash and GrubHub for every meal that they might want to consider having at least a small ramen noodle supply at home. The next couple of weeks should be interesting.

CDC is also circulating their infographic about the proper fit for high-end masks. I had no idea some of these facial hair styles even had names.

Anyone who has ever worked in hospital IT knows the fear that an upcoming visit from The Joint Commission strikes into the hearts of coworkers. There are many accrediting organizations out there, and often they are cited as the source of rules and regulations that don’t actually exist, leading to frustration for operational and technology teams alike. A recent report notes that CMS plans to strengthen oversight of accrediting organizations due to concerns about conflicts of interest. Some of the organizations provide both accreditation and consulting services which can be an issue, and CMS Administrator Seema Verma also called out accrediting organizations that use standards that are different from the CMS conditions of participation. The Joint Commission is one such organization that has created requirements above and beyond the CMS standards.

Verma also mentioned the upcoming Meaningful Measurement 2.0 program, which is a follow-up to the 2017 Meaningful Measures program. (Language nerd side note: Why did they have to change it from Measures to Measurement? That’s going to be annoying.)

There are strong feelings out there about the way that technology is escalating the medicalization of things that were previously “normal” physiological process. From smart toilets that analyze stool patterns to diet and nutrition trackers, technology is everywhere. I’m part of an online group that mentors young mothers and nearly everyone either has or wishes they had a multi-hundred dollar smart bassinet to help their babies sleep better. A recent Washington Post article looked at the impact of AI baby monitors on nervous parents. It’s gone beyond the walkie-talkie style units of the past, with camera systems that transmit data to parents while they are away and also those that process the video to determine whether infants are in risky positions or getting tangled with blankets. Privacy advocates are concerned about the sharing of such private data and clinicians are worried that monitor companies are promising a level of safety that is not supported by research.

I’ve definitely noticed a heightened level of anxiety in the moms in my group, although I recognize that to some degree it might self-select anxious mothers since they’re participating in the group in the first place. Some of them are desperately trying to track and quantify every element of their babies’ existence, from feeding to diapers, sleep, and developmental milestones. I’ve seen mothers who have lost the ability to trust their instincts and are relying too much on data.

It’s similar to when physicians are in training and have to learn to “treat the patient, not the numbers.” The privacy issue is certainly a big one, with parents having no control over the images of their children once they’re transmitted to the vendor. Definitely food for thought.

Speaking of the quantified self, approximately a third of fitness trackers are abandoned after a while, winding up in nightstand drawers or the landfill. Recycle Health, affiliated with Tufts Medical School, has collected more than 5,000 wearables for redeployment to exercise and nutrition programs for low-income patients. Vendors have gotten into the act, with Fitbit, Fossil, and Withings sending excess inventory. Apple has not donated. In addition to individual donations, they also gather unclaimed lost devices from theme parks and tourist sites, which is a novel approach. Corporate wellness programs donate as well.

In other wellness news, recent research shows that odd-shaped parks may be better for public health. The authors used satellite imagery, cause of death statistics, and residence near a green space larger than 900 square feet as indicators. They found a decrease in deaths for every percentage point increase in green space. They found that irregular parks were beneficial because they might be more appealing to be in, or might be easier to stumble upon compared to formal parks with limited entrances. Complex-shaped parks were also linked to reduction in chronic health conditions. Recommendations for civic planners include finding ways to connect small or fragmented parks via greenways or other natural features.

I always enjoy when a scholarly publication has a sense of humor, and a recent article in the Journal of Surgical Education did not disappoint. In “The Sorting Hat of Medicine: Why Hufflepuffs Wear Stethoscopes and Slytherins Carry Scalpels,” the authors surveyed surgical coordinator and residents to score various personality traits that tend to define medical specialties. There were more self-reported Slytherins in surgical subspecialties, particularly in orthopedic surgery. Family medicine had no Slytherins, which is not surprising. I don’t think students are going to start selecting their specialties based on their Hogwarts sympathies, but it was an amusing read.

Lots of chatter among the scribes in our office this week as the folks at Mayo Clinic Medical School mistakenly sent acceptance letters to 364 applicants. The school is blaming it on a technical glitch and said that as soon as they knew about it they withdrew the offers via email. Everyone affected has also been contacted by phone. The letters went to everyone who had interviewed, and there are typically only 46 actual spots available for students, with initial offers usually being made by phone.

The medical school admissions process isn’t something I would wish on anyone. It’s an emotional roller coaster and it’s expensive. Based on the fact that they were invited to interview, the applicants affected are generally qualified to attend, and I feel bad for them.

I got a chuckle out of reader Matt’s comment on my post about HIMSS shoes. He recommends HOKA, but notes that “they’re not inexpensive so you may have to add laser hair removal to your practice, add retail vitamin sales, or go into orthopedics.” You have to love a company that has a shoe named “Speedgoat” and their color combinations are certainly appealing.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 2/27/20

Joint Audit of the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs Efforts to Achieve Electronic Health Record Interoperability

Inspectors general at the DoD and VA will conduct a joint audit of efforts by the two departments to roll out an interoperable EHR.

Ribbon Health Raises $10.25 Million; Launches Cost And Quality Solution

Ribbon Health raises $10.25 million and announces GA of health data aggregation software that can be used to bolster provider directories, referral management, and care navigation for providers, payers, and digital health vendors.

Spok Reports Fourth-Quarter and Full-Year 2019 Operating Results; Wireless Trends Continue to Improve; Sequential Improvements in Software Operations Bookings and Expense Management Trends

Clinical communications vendor Spok reports a slight dip in software bookings and revenue on the heels of the launch of its Spok Go technology.

First-Time HIMSS Attendee Tips

From Mr. H (reader thoughts follow)

“What tips do you have for a first-time HIMSS conference attendee?” a physician researcher asked me via LinkedIn after her employer approved her attendance at the last minute.

I instantly thought of Vietnam war movies, where the fresh-faced recruit asks the battle-hardened veteran (he looks like R. Lee Ermey from “Full Metal Jacket” except unshaven and gaunt), what’s it like to be in combat? I’m not sure anything I can say will prepare her for the front lines. You just have to experience some things firsthand and do the best you can.

The biggest and truest cliché about the HIMSS conference is the “three blind men describing an elephant” analogy. The conference offers many tracks, experiences, and opportunities to network. Your HIMSS20 won’t be similar to my HIMSS20 except for some keynotes (assuming I go, which I usually don’t) and way too much time spent roaming aimlessly in the exhibit hall. It’s like one of those hipster-trendy food halls crammed with wildly different restaurants and bars that share only a common seating area. HIMSS20 will be 25 unrelated conferences that share only an exhibit hall.

Which is my first observation. The conference is really a boat show that is surrounded by just enough semi-educational opportunities to convince provider attendees that they aren’t stealing from their employers when they expense the whole junket. Exhibitors foot the bills, so it’s like a Las Vegas hotel – no matter where you want to go, you have to walk the intentionally winding path through the casino, or in this case, the exhibit hall.

I tell attendees to set their dials on three conference activities that compete for their time — education, exhibit hall, and socializing. Decide upfront what you would like to gain from each, hopefully with your expense-bearing provider employer and their patients in mind. What combination of  new industry education, specific product and company knowledge, and fond memories of eating, drinking, and shouting too much would make HIMSS20 a success? Are you really planning to accomplish actual work there, or is it just your employee bonus with few strings attached?

I admit that I nearly always leave HIMSS conferences feeling guilty that I mostly goofed off, or at least used my time inefficiently despite higher initial ambitions. I always vow to attend an ambitious list of education sessions and to perform serious vendor research, but I end up walking zombie-like miles of deep exhibit hall carpet filling up my trick-or-treat bag with vendor ChapStick and pondering just how cheaply I value my time. Or I sign up for some vendor party in picturing a grand evening under swaying Orlando palms that sounds swell in winter’s dark back home, but realize once I’m there that parties really aren’t my thing and I’d rather feed my introversion some quiet time.

I’m too lazy to put a lot of thought into my HIMSS conference advice, so I’ll divide it into two parts. First are my off-the-cuff thoughts, then the suggestions of readers who chimed in at my behest (because it’s less work to ask them to come up with ideas than me doing it myself.)

Before Leaving Home

I’m speaking to my fellow males here. Get a pedicure the week before the conference. I admit that I was squirming with discomfort the first time Mrs. HIStalk insisted that I get a pre-HIMSS foot tune-up. She made me a bourbon and lemonade in a Solo cup that I brought in with me for liquid courage (which was actually pretty cool at 11 a.m.) She had her nails done in the adjacent chair and tolerated my trite newbie observations about why nail techs are always from VIetnam and how it’s odd seeing a roomful of women all staring longingly at their phones while having their feet worked on by another woman. But it was shocking how much calloused, dead skin they shaved off with the cheese grater and how my walking and balance improved in return for my $30, which included a sugar scrub and hot stones that seemed pointless but felt good.

Pack a backpack or briefcase. You’ll get a free one when you pick up your badge, but the one they handed out last year was useless. Your bag will serve as a temporary home for vendor collateral, which you take in a moment of either camaraderie or temporary interest and then toss into the trash when packing for home.

Bring a phone charger battery. Phone batteries drain fast when slugging it out for a signal in packed rooms. Use low-power mode if you think of it.

Wear comfortable clothes, especially shoes, unless impressing someone is on your list of activities. Don’t wear anything that won’t get you through 10 miles of walking and standing each day. Forget high fashion unless you’re working a booth or interviewing for a job — nobody will be impressed that you busted out your high heels or best suit for walking a half-marathon each day (literally in many cases) on exhibit hall carpet.

Bring business cards, especially if you are among the significant percentage of attendees who are hoping to get a better job than the one provided by the organization that covered their attendance expense (ironic, isn’t it?) 

Getting There

Drive your own car instead of flying if you’re within a 12-hour car ride. I dislike the inefficient stress of flying for business, crammed into tiny seats surrounded by sugared-up, screaming kids wearing Mickey Mouse ears or testosterone-jacked tire salesmen heading off to their Las Vegas hooker and machine gun getaway. The elapsed time from leaving for the airport to setting foot in your Orlando lodgings may not be much less than driving, especially if your flight isn’t direct.

I think of driving as an extended meditation session, where I let Waze tell me what do while I reflect on life in general. I don’t worry about overweight or lost luggage, missed connections, security lines, and the mile-long cab line at MCO. I can leave the conference for home whenever I want, which is important since I usually bail out even earlier than I planned.

I hate milling around sterile HIMSS hotels with all the other nerdy, badge-wearing lemmings, so I always book a condo via Aibnb or VRBO. It feels much more like home or a vacation than solitary confinement and it costs less than a hotel.

Staying There

Hit the nearest Publix for full week’s worth of food and drinks. You’ll spend about the same as you would for one hotel dinner or room service. Then come back to your condo, savor the attendee-free quiet, and enjoy time in front of Netflix, the lake, or a local bar where tourists never tread (having your car provides options).

When you buy those groceries, get breakfast items and snacks. You’ll save time and money eating breakfast before you head out each morning and a granola bar will get you through the mid-morning, low-glucose woozies. You’ll save even more time and money by drinking your coffee while relaxing in your condo instead of staring at the suited butts of 500 of your fellow caffeine addicts who are ahead of you in the Starbucks line. Bonus points if you bring an insulated cup and take extra coffee to the convention center for more deliberate slurping.

Check out the HIMSS bus routes since your rental place may be near a stop and thus your chariot will await. HIMSS says the buses are only for people who booked their hotel through HIMSS, but the driver doesn’t care. Prepare for frustration, however, especially on the first day of the conference when everybody is headed to the convention center at the same and the full buses drive by without stopping. Going home can be a chore if your stop is way down on the list. Bus stops aren’t usually covered, so if it’s raining in the morning, call an Uber or Lyft to avoid starting your day bedraggled and wet.

Once you’re on your way home to your hotel or condo, take off your badge and put it in your non-HIMSS backpack to create an instant shield of anonymity. Breathe deeply as a traveler, not as an identically labeled conventioneer or obvious tourist. That smell is freedom.

Education Sessions

I don’t attend sessions in which any speaker is a vendor (sorry, “market supplier.”) I don’t doubt their commitment or intelligence – I have just been burned too many times by speakers who recited the company line or whose world view bore little resemblance to my reality. Seek them out in the exhibit hall presentations instead, where the audience is smaller, the topic is more focused, they can talk more about their company and competitors, and you don’t waste a full hour in a packed conference room. I sometimes enjoy those exhibit hall talks, which is rarely true of the big room sessions.

Choose sessions based on who’s presenting rather than topic. Interesting, insightful presenters can make any topic worthwhile, while under-accomplished slide-readers can’t save even the most contemporary presentation from becoming a snooze-fest. It’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, however, since the native language of some big industry names is “platitudes,” while some fearless no-names might actually express some original thoughts.

Attendees get audio recordings of most sessions after the conference at no charge, so you don’t have to physically attend everything. Or anything, for that matter. Just play back what seems interesting afterward at double speed. You don’t even have to climb across 50 sets of legs to escape a dud session. Try not to think about the cost and effort involved in traveling to the conference that brags on “education” that could have been distributed as MP3 files.

Sit where you can escape easily if the session bombs in the first five minutes, which is usually the case. Remember that the presenters had to submit their talk many months in advance, so not only is their content stale, they have over-rehearsed and end up reading their slides like a “follow the bouncing ball” monotone sing-along. I have no patients for presenters who write out full sentences as bullet points, read them in a grade schooler sing-song, turn their backs on the audience to look at the screen, and add zero value to just reading the PowerPoint printouts on your own.

Leave as soon as the presenter is finished since the Q&A attracts suck-ups who have no questions, only statements in which they attempt to demonstrate the depth of their knowledge. You’ll see them creeping up to the microphone before the speaker is even finished, oxygenating with deep breaths so they can at first opportunity rattle off a multi-minute pontification without coming up for air or asking an actual intelligent question (I’ve seen them spew their self-congratulatory nonsense and then leave the room before the speaker even finished answering them, seriously). Don’t try to make your way to the podium for glad-handing the speaker when they launch their uninvited monologue because you’ll get run over by the masses who are running faster for the doors than if someone shouted “Fire!”

Have a backup session in mind in case the room is packed or the handout looks less interesting that you thought. I usually just pick something randomly in a nearby conference room since it won’t disrupt my planned, miles-long route from one room to the next. Some of the best sessions I’ve attended were ones where I just stumbled into the first room with a lot of empty chairs.

Lunch

Bring something from your rental condo refrigerator or plan to eat really early. Every convention center food outlet will be mobbed throughout the hours that might be considered lunch, say from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. You will pay $12 for a chicken Caesar salad in a plastic coffin that is handed over by a clearly unenthused worker, after which you will sit on the floor in an unused corner of the building because every single table, chair, or flat surface on which you or your food might have been placed has been appropriated by an equally desperate attendee seeking horizontality. It’s the casino analogy again – vendors want you roaming the exhibit hall, not lingering over your sandwich and telephone on a comfy chair, so chair-seekers outnumber chairs by about 100 to one. On the other hand, feeling like an outcast grade schooler in the cafeteria is humbling, and quite a few attendees could use a serious dose of that.

Lunchtime frustrates me more than any other time during conference week. It takes way too much time, the food is mostly not good and usually unhealthy, I hate scouting for a freshly vacated seat at a debris-laden table full of people screwing around on their laptops trying to look important, and I end choosing the food venue with the shortest line and quickly realize why the crowds went elsewhere. On the other hand, one Orange County Convention Center food stand remains easily the best I’ve ever had at a conference, with food that is fresh, ample, and more cutting edge. Its existence is binary – it is either closed or packed with people – but I still think of that place years after I last ate there. I’m not telling you which one because longer lines will send me fleeing to yet another greasy personal pizza from a chain I would never patronize at home.

Exhibit Hall

Decide what do you need from your exhibit hall experience. Fake adulation from booth people who see you as either a sales prospect or an insufferable bore who is fun to jack around? A celebration of your admirable existence that allows you to earn a salary for wandering through neon gulches of unreality while fueled by free snacks? Actual information in the form of product and vendor research, at least while waiting for exhibit hall happy hour to kick in?

What I like about the hall is that whatever you learn there sticks. You probably won’t forget what you were told. I also like that I’m in charge of choosing what interests me and walking away when I lose interest (just tell the overzealous rep that you’re running late for a scheduled meeting, never mind that it’s 9:43 a.m.) Most of the reps are nice people and are just as bemused as you by the futility of creating a meaningful exhibit hall experience, at least when they aren’t staring at their phones in boredom or in anger that they have no chance of earning commission given the heavily non-decision maker HIMSS attendance. Just don’t let the time get away from you in wandering around. It’s easy to feel like you are networking and learning while high on carpet glue and salesperson cologne, but afterwards realize that it was mostly an illusion.

I’m a contrarian in refusing to schedule meetings with vendor people. Schlepping a mile to their booth can eat up more time than it’s worth. Just show up when you feel like it and risk that you’ll have to talk to a lesser god, knowing that it’s their job to be flexible when a customer or prospect is involved. They’ll find you.

Seek out the little booths in Siberia, or at least stop paying lip service to disruption and innovation if you are embarrassed to be seen in a booth that doesn’t feature an attended espresso bar and foot-deep carpet that’s crawling with glad-handing suits. Visit booths whose size is inversely proportional to the degree of risk your organization historically accepts  — employees of risk-averse health systems (was that redundant?) might as well stick to the main aisles because there’s no way they are buying anything from people in 10×10 booths like I used to pay for.

The exhibit hall is a meat market for people trying to get new jobs. Reason: because it works, especially if you work for a vendor or would like to.

Social Events

I long ago decided that I’m not willing to sacrifice an entire evening jostling around strangers just to earn a couple of beers and to hear the most inoffensively white-bread music imaginable, but that’s just me. Social events abound, and listen closely through the day and you’ll heard about them. Some require a vendor’s invitation and thus a sneaky strategy to obtain one as a non-prospect. Vendor employees aren’t welcome to most events since nobody wants to pay to entertain competitors, which is why HIStalkapalooza was such as success even if it was a huge pain to manage.

I usually skip the HIMSS opening reception because it’s too big, too loud, and too boring, especially when the conference is in Orlando and the entertainers are Disney day-jobbers channeling Cirque du Soleil. Still, it’s like the clock in Grand Central Terminal as being a good place to pre-arrange meeting colleagues on fly-in day, and with the retirement of the old two-drink ticket system, it’s fun to watch ever-louder attendees getting hammered before they’ve even checked in to their hotels.

Don’t do anything that would embarrass your employer if you are wearing  a badge with their name on it. Whether that means behaving or taking your badge off is your call.

The Last Day

I rarely stay for the final day since it’s short and usually pointless, especially since the exhibit hall isn’t open (and HIMSS without the exhibit hall isn’t exactly a thrill ride). However, it’s also a relaxing, no-pressure day and maybe you’re sticking around to avoid the departing masses. I usually enjoy it, although my expectations are modest. It’s tougher to find food venues, though. An even better idea is to take a two-hour drive over to Florida’s west coach beaches and eat a grouper sandwich on a restaurant’s Gulf-front patio, then leave at your leisure over the weekend.

Wear your most obnoxiously casual (and therefore comfortable) clothes on the last day you’re attending. Nobody cares at that point, assuming they ever did, and you may be heading straight to the airport. Now’s the time for shorts, Hawaiian shirts, and sandals since it’s Florida (change into warmer clothes in the bathroom if you’re going home to freezing weather). Plus people might mistake you for an investor — a valuable HIMSS lesson is that the startup guys who need investor money dress look like children whose parents made them dress up for a formal British wedding, while the people who actually have money look like they just popped in from a members-only golf course or a bottomless mimosa breakfast buffet.

Back Home

Don’t be depressed because you think that you or your employer are underachievers compared to the swaggering experts you saw riding the podia or vendor lecterns. Most of those people are harmless blowhards working for organizations that are just as clueless as yours. Being an effective, innovative provider organization in the dysfunctional US healthcare non-system is like being the tallest jockey. You are probably just as effective as anyone else, just less skilled at bragging.

Make up a convincing answer when your boss and co-workers ask you how the conference was. You have to make them think you were working as hard in Orlando as they were back home.

The Part Where I Get Less Cynical

Go home with new energy and commitment. If watching an A-Rod keynote or eating too many exhibit hall pastries does it for you, then that’s your business.

Embrace the diversity of attendees who are young, from other countries, and who consider themselves caregivers first. It wasn’t that way for most of the formative years of HIMSS.

Expect vendors and their employees to be enthusiastic about their products and services. Agree or not, you wouldn’t want them there otherwise.

Perfection is the enemy of good. Don’t get dragged down because EHRs, interoperability, the government, and your employer aren’t perfect. Don’t let anyone convince you that they offer something perfect, either. We are all making it up as we go and nothing about your careers is likely to earn a spot on your tombstone.

Respect the truly remarkable result of HIMSS people who spend years planning every conference so well that you don’t even notice the work involved. Nothing you will see or do happened without a lot of planning, arguing, executing, and monitoring. Every memory you take home was made possible by someone who sweated the details.

Patients make the industry, the conference, and your job possible. Be a good steward of the resources with which you’ve been blessed and always ask yourself, what would patients want? Find another job if it’s just another job.

From HIStalk Readers (add your own comments below)

Set up meetings ahead of time.

Search out patients or patient advocates.

Go to as many educational sessions as you can.

Make the most of interactions – in line, on the bus, while grabbing coffee, when attending sessions. So much of HIMSS is about making connections, sharing interest and becoming engaged with one another and the opportunity to do so is all around you. Follow up with a LinkedIn connection request or a Twitter follow.

Plan for curiosity. HIMSS is hectic and a pre-planned schedule will help you remain focused but do schedule time to be engage with last minute vendors, sessions, conversations that spark your interest.

Let vendors know you want to demo or attend in-booth activities to maximize your time on the show floor. Most vendors offer pre-scheduling tools via email and/or their website to facilitate this; use it.

You’ll miss many things. Sign up for post-HIMSS webinars and seek out blogs for what you missed and insights on this year’s topics- HIStalk of course being among the most useful sources of HIMSS coverage.

Many vendors offer breakfast briefings, lunches and social events, all of which are additional means of expanding your learning and networking without missing educational sessions.

Follow #HIMSS20 across LinkedIn and Twitter.

Attend your HIMSS chapter event.

Hand sanitizer is your friend. Apply frequently and liberally.

It has become a humble-brag for established companies, a hot air balloon ride for smaller ones. I genuinely think they forgot about mid-sized ‘buyers’ along the way, especially end-user doctors. It’s insular, it’s full of self-promoting blow-hards, it really lacks any actual value from almost any perspective.

If you see someone on jeans, they are probably financing most of the ‘cool’ startups you are seeing. People in suits have the real jobs.

As a researcher, just let us all know when you find novel technology that has actually conducted research on the outcomes / benefits of their solution. Because in 14 years of attending, I never once saw actual research, just a bunch of cherry-picked stats provided by a ‘beta’ client that was generously compensated for the data. (and yes, reduced fees for a product is compensation, IMO).

Morning Headlines 2/26/20

AMA playbook to aid record-sharing with patients

The American Medical Association releases its Patient Records Electronic Access Playbook, which aims to dispel HIPAA myths and help practices understand their patient records request obligations.

Prepared Health is now Dina

Prepared Health rebrands as Dina, the name it previously used for its digital assistant that analyzes patient assessments from home and makes evidence-based recommendations.

Nuance Announces the General Availability of Ambient Clinical Intelligence

Nuance announces GA of Dragon Ambient Experience (DAX), its “exam room of the future” where “clinical documentation writes itself.”

News 2/26/20

Top News

The American Medical Association releases its Patient Records Electronic Access Playbook, which aims to dispel HIPAA myths and help practices understand their patient records request obligations. Some points:

• Physicians must allow patients to connect their health apps to the practice’s EHR.
• Deploying a patient portal don’t necessarily make a practice HIPAA compliant.
• Medical images must be provided if they are stored in the practice’s system, even if they originated elsewhere.
• Practices are required to provide patient information only in the “readily producible” form; they are not obligated to pay an EHR vendor for new capabilities. However, they cannot give paper or PDF copies just because they don’t know how to use available electronic options.
• EHRs that are certified under 2015 Edition criteria must provide API access, the ability for patients to view and download their information online, and an option to send information via secure email.
• Practices cannot refuse to send information to a patient via unsecure email or insist that they choose another delivery method, as long as the patient acknowledges the security risk verbally or in writing.
• Information should not be copied to the patient’s own USB drive because of malware risk.
• Patients must be given the ability to view, download, and transmit their information within four business days of their request and to receive copies within 30 calendar days (with an optional 30-day renewal). More stringent state laws are common and override HIPAA defaults.
• Third-party requests, such as those from life insurance companies, are not subject to the HIPAA right of access requirements.
• Patients can be charged the lessor of state-specified “reasonable” fees or the practice’s actual copying costs, including employee time, media costs, and postage. Practices should not charge a retrieval or records maintenance fee.
• The report includes forms to calculate the cost of providing medical records copies, a list of state-allowed medical records copying charges, and sample forms for patient requests and the practice’s response.

Reader Comments

From Concerned Vendor: “Re: HIMSS20. Companies across the globe are pulling out of industry conferences. The vendor and provider community needs to put pressure on the HIMSS organizers to cancel or at least postpone HIMSS20.” I don’t think that cancelling HIMSS20 two weeks out is logical, from either a public health or a business point of view. I’ll defer to epidemiologic experts, but avoiding public gatherings and using US border security as a protective moat probably won’t help much (HIMSS says less than 1% of registrants are from countries that are under a travel ban). It’s late in the game to consider cancelling or rescheduling when it’s a domestic trip for the majority of attendees and the odds of problems are low. The conference is the primary money generator for HIMSS; people have already paid for hotel rooms, flights, and other non-refundable travel items; and conferences stay on schedule during much deadlier epidemics, such as the flu. There’s no way HIMSS20 could simply be rescheduled given the years of planning required. HIMSS should:

• Offer free respiratory masks and perhaps handkerchiefs (exhibitors, there’s your last-minute giveaway idea, especially if you put fun slogans on the masks to make them less ominous). It’s going to be weird to see the convention center full of people whose faces aren’t visible, at least if you aren’t from Asia where masks have been common for a long time, but we’re medical people after all.
• Put out plenty of handwashing stations and hand sanitizer squirt stands.
• Encourage attendees to use Ebola-nostalgic fist bumps instead of handshakes.
• Suggest that immunocompromised registrants consider the possibility of added risk.
• Make sure people know that medical teams will be on site and hospitals will be on call.
• Urge attendees to stay in their hotel rooms if they have flu-like symptoms. The good news is that unlike some other infections, transmission risk seems to run parallel with symptom severity, so COVID-19 being spread by people who don’t know they are sick seems unlikely, and few examples of person-to-person transmission have occurred in this country.
• Avoid checkpoints and mandatory thermometer gun inspections since they don’t work well.
• Calm everyone down with a reminder that our only majorly deadly communicable disease outbreaks in the past 100+ years US were AIDS in the 1980s and Spanish flu in 1918 (which wiped out a third of the world’s population). Hysterical media coverage aside, swine flu, bird flu, Ebola, SARS, MERS, Zika, etc. were not big killers and have been mostly forgotten. Worry more about interruption of our drug supply chain, which is more driven by China’s steps than ours.

Meanwhile, feel free to cast unpleasant looks at anyone who sneezes or coughs without covering – droplet exposure is the biggest risk. Skip the theme parks if you have global paranoia. The latest sitreps show that we’ve had only a few dozen COVID-19 cases in the US, nearly all of those being returnees from Diamond Princess or recent trips to China, and nobody has died. Meanwhile, the media-unsexy plain old flu has this season caused 29 million US illness episodes, 280,000 hospitalizations, 16,000 deaths, and zero calls to cancel HIMSS20. Perhaps a measured, long-term approach would be to question whether the cost, effort, and carbon footprint involved in dragging people to a specific building to talk about technology (such as remote visits and online digital services, ironically) are worth it even without outbreak threats.

From Illuminati: “Re: Atrium Health. All of Atrium’s primary enterprise (Carolina Medical Center and most of Atrium-owned facilities) have been using Cerner Millennium EMR for years and added Epic revenue cycle about four years ago. That last piece, allowing Atrium to use revenue cycle without Epic clinicals, is unique. It allowed Atrium to buy licenses to all Epic products, implement the full suite in some managed facilities, and then offer it to Navicent. It was also attractive to the full primary enterprise. It’s a big loss for Cerner, but it took a few years and Epic was already more widely deployed on the acute care side than Cerner.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A reader who is a physician, researcher, and professor got last-minute approval to attend the upcoming HIMSS conference as a first-timer. She messaged me for any tips I might have. Your assignment is twofold: (a) send me useful, lesser-known tips — we all know to wear comfortable shoes – of the type that clickbait sites might refer to as “hacks,” especially anything that is pertinent to her specific background; and (b) let me know if you want to extend an invitation to her for whatever velvet ropes you control, be they social or educational, that would enrich her experience. I’ll write up the tips I receive plus my own in the next day or two. I admit that my ego soared in an impostor syndrome kind of way when I saw her wealth of clinical credentials on LinkedIn along with her being in the HIStalk Fan Club group that reader Dann set up forever ago (and noticing that the group has 3,700 members).

Give me some advice here. A reader alerted me to a potential conflict of interest with large, state-funded RFP in which Epic consultants are to be engaged. The health system hired Vendor A in an advisory role to manage the selection, and quite a few of Vendor A’s people were involved in various committees and oversight groups. Some of Vendor A’s employees are actually 1099 contractors who work for other companies that are bidding for the Epic work. Neither Vendor A nor the health system’s compliance department have responded to my inquiries, but my question is this – what line would you draw in describing a situation like this as either unethical or illegal versus just how business works when taxpayer money is involved? I assume (maybe incorrectly) that Vendor A doesn’t have people on the selection team and won’t be allowed to bid on the services work, but is sending the employees of bidding companies on site while wearing Vendor A badges unusual? I’ve seen the bidder list and quite a few companies have a vested interest in the outcome.

Webinars

March 4 (Wednesday) 1 ET: “Tools for Success: How to Increase Clinician Satisfaction with HIT Solutions.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenter: Andrew Kanter, MD, MPH, FACMI, FAMIA, chief medical officer, IMO. Dr. Kanter will explore how striving to achieve the Quadruple Aim (by focusing on the provider experience) can improve clinician satisfaction and population health needs while also reducing per capita healthcare costs. Attendees will learn how to set providers up for success with new technology, the potential unforeseen consequences of purchasing without the clinician in mind, and the factors that are critically important to clinicians who are using new health information systems.

March 4 (Wednesday) 1 ET: “Healthcare Digital Marketing: Jump-Start Patient Discovery and Conversion.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Victoria Petrock, MBA, MLIS, principal analyst, EMarketer; Kristi Ebong, MBA, MPH, SVP of corporate strategy, Orbita. Does your digital front door capture consumers who search for health-related information one billion times each day? Do you have actionable steps to convert them into patients? Do you understand voice and chat virtual assistants? The presenters will explore the consumer challenges involved with finding, navigating, and receiving care, discuss why healthcare marketers need to embrace conversational voice and chatbot technologies, and describe how new technologies such as conversational micro-robots can improve engagement.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Bloomberg Businessweek visits a Walmart Health center in Georgia, which offers a $30 medical checkup, $25 teeth cleaning, and $1 per minute psychological counseling, with prices clearly displayed in the 12-room, 6,500 square foot facility that has its own entrance. Walmart changed direction after opening just 19 Care Clinic urgent care centers because they provide little value, especially for chronic conditions. It accepts insurance, but patients often save money by paying cash given high deductibles and co-pays. Beyond medical, dental, and eye care, the center also performs X-rays, hearing checks, and lab tests. Walmart says patient volume is running above expectations and that it has lowered costs by 40% by reducing “all that administrative baloney,” with one of its doctors saying that paperwork takes her 25% less time than in hospitals.

Sales

• Arizona’s Health Current statewide HIE chooses NextGen Healthcare’s Health Data Hub for sharing and aggregating patient information. It includes clinical content management, an API-first design, a user portal, consent and data protection, and AWS cloud hosting.

People

Continuous monitoring solutions vendor EarlySense hires John Dragovits (Allscripts) as SVP of strategic partnerships.

Price transparency and provider rating vendor Healthcare Bluebook hires Scott Paddock (GuideWell Connect) as CEO. He replaces founder Jeff Rice, who will become executive chairman.

Announcements and Implementations

Nuance announces GA of Dragon Ambient Experience (DAX), its “exam room of the future” where “clinical documentation writes itself.” Dig deeper by reading my interview with Nuance CTO Joe Petro a few weeks back, including the interesting tidbit – the company got the idea 5-6 years ago from Epic President Carl Dvorak, who “floated the notion of a room being able to listen.”

Prepared Health renames itself to Dina, the name it previously used for its digital assistant that analyzes patient assessments from home and makes evidence-based recommendations. The company is a first-time exhibitor at HIMSS20 and will co-present with Jefferson Health. I interviewed CEO Ashish Shah — who worked a long time at Medicity before co-founding what is now Dina in 2015 —  last year about the concept of “healthcare with no address.”

Medhost adds COVID-19 screening tools to its systems, including travel-related screening questions in its Enterprise EHR and EDIS.

Allscripts announces GA of TouchWorks EHR 20.0.

Waystar launches Hubble, an AI and robotic process automation platform that will reduce the labor required for revenue cycle management. It is being used in 10 of its RCM solutions so far.

Apple and drug company Johnson & Johnson launch a study to see if people on Medicare who use the Apple Watch have a lower risk of stroke via early detection of atrial fibrillation. It’s a two-year study, so expect the same lack of conclusive results that have plagued similar studies because their study group wasn’t representative and dropout rates were high, not to mention that Android phone users are excluded even though they outnumber the IPhone crowd.

Government and Politics

ONC publishes its health IT priorities for research (full report).

Other

CBS runs a flattering, consumer-oriented review of “Epic, the software company that’s changed the sharing of medical records (including, probably, yours.” They got nice shots from a campus visit, interviews and demos from staff, and a rare on-camera extended interview with the “76-year-old genius behind Epic” Judy Faulkner, who “built this curious place in her own curious image.” It’s a decent overview, Judy came across well, and the look back at the era of paper records flying around a hospital via pneumatic tube is fun. Judy also mentioned the “Hey, Epic” voice assistant that the company is developing.

A Twitter war erupts between UK healthcare chatbot and doctor referral vendor Babylon Health and user @DrMurphy11 (oncologist David Watkins, MBBS), who called out problems with its symptom checker that offers advice for chest pain and other conditions. Babylon Health, which was founded by an investment banker, says its “anonymous detractor” (who has since revealed himself) found just 20 serious errors in 2,400 tests in “trying to trick our AI.” Interestingly, the company footnoted its document with its standard warning that “Our AI tools provide information only and do not provide a medical diagnosis, nor are they a substitute for a doctor.” The company has apparently expanded to the US.

Healthcare in America. A Miami guy fresh off a China work trip develops flu-like symptoms and heads to the hospital ED. He asks them to run a flu test first since he had purchased non-ACA (aka “junk”) insurance as allowed by White House policy changes and didn’t want to run up extra charges. The blood draw and nasal swab proved that he had the plain old flu. He then received a bill for $1,400 from his insurance company, which discounted the hospital’s charge of $3,270 on the condition that he provide three years’ worth of medical records to prove that his flu wasn’t a pre-existing condition. Meanwhile, the hospital says more bills are headed his way but couldn’t explain when or for what (like $3,270 wasn’t enough for a couple of low-cost items). The big finish is this – he works for a medical device company that doesn’t offer its health insurance to its employees.

Sponsor Updates

• Kyruus team members help out at Cradles to Crayons Massachusetts.
• Avaya wins the 2020 Channel Influencer Award from Channel Partners and Channel Futures.
• CoverMyMeds will exhibit at the 2020 American Glaucoma Society Annual Meeting February 27-March 1 in Washington, DC.

Blog Posts

• Healthcare IT Trends at HIMSS20 (314e)
• 4 ways to tell if your EHR is a teen or adult (AdvancedMD)
• Back to the Basics: Core EHR (EClinicalWorks)
• Arcadia Customers to Demonstrate How to Make Value-Based Care Profitable at HIMSS20 (Arcadia)
• Six Things to Know Before HIMSS20 (Datica)
• Challenges in Selecting Your SNF Partners, and What Data to Measure (CarePort Health)
• Preview the New ChartLogic EHR at AAOS 2020! (ChartLogic)
• Lab Ordering System Design: Two Roads Diverged (CereCore)
• HIMSS20 Presentations Showcase Collective Medical Clients Helping Vulnerable and Complex Patients Receive Appropriate Care with Technology (Collective Medical)
• Interoperability: Health IT’s Dynamic Future (CoverMyMeds)
• What We’re Looking Forward to at HIMSS20 (Dimensional Insight)

Sponsor Spotlight

At CloudWave, we’re on your team. It’s your mission to provide the technology and tools your caregivers need to delivery quality care. That’s our mission, too. CloudWave helps hospitals bring public, private, and cloud edge resources together into a single operating environment with hosting, disaster recovery, security, backup, and archiving services. Let us help you fulfill the promise technology makes to healthcare – by enabling and empowering the delivery of care to your community. (Sponsor Spotlight is free for HIStalk Platinum sponsors).

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 2/25/20

Verizon and Emory Healthcare light up nation’s first 5G healthcare lab

Emory Healthcare will use 5G capabilities supplied by Verizon to help its Healthcare Innovation Hub partners develop connected ambulances, remote physical therapy, and next-generation medical imaging.

National health information technology priorities for research: A policy and development agenda

ONC publishes its policy and development agenda for better enabling healthcare research through the use of healthcare IT.

Sharecare acquires Visualize Health to drive better patient outcomes

Digital health engagement company Sharecare acquires Visualize Health, which offers quality reporting, practice analytics, and value-based care program management.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 2/24/20

A new report from the UPMC Center for Connected Medicine finds that only four in 10 providers feel that digital technology is being successfully integrated into the overall patient experience. The team at UPMC surveyed more than 130 health systems and found that many of them are experiencing challenges around the costs associated with purchasing, implementing, and maintaining digital tools. Integration remains a concern due to interoperability issues with third-party applications. Unsurprisingly, organizations are ranking patient engagement tools as high priority projects and hope they will assist with major clinical initiatives such as chronic disease management.

According to Katie Scott, vice-president of digital strategy and innovation, UPMC Enterprises, “Patients now assume they’ll have the same digital experience in healthcare that they get everywhere else in their lives, and they’re dissatisfied when we don’t deliver. Increasingly, if hospitals and health systems can’t provide a feature-rich and seamless digital experience for their patients, those individuals are going to look elsewhere for care.”

Based on recent experiences with two patient portals, I can’t say I disagree. One of the portals took me in circles as I tried to figure out what was going on with a bill for a date of service that occurred more than eight months ago. Apparently the organization’s Division of Ophthalmology follows billing rules from some other universe, and according to the folks I had to call for help, these delayed bills are pretty much routine.

The other one allowed me to access data from two practices, both of which had different access settings for my information. While one practice had shared full office notes and lots of discrete data to the portal, the other only had lab results, but there were no annotations on the results. I ended up clicking dozens of links trying to figure out what my blood pressure might have been running over the last couple of years, and ultimately wound up with two useful data points and a lot of frustration. Although more than 80% of organizations cite the patient portals as one of the top three currently implemented technologies, it’s unclear how much benefit patients and practices are truly receiving from them.

The UPMC Center for Connected Medicine is a joint venture between UPMC, GE Healthcare, and Nokia. Other findings of the survey include: more than 75% of organizations are offering at least one digital health tool to patients, with 25% offering four or more tools; of the quarter of organizations who haven’t deployed digital health tools, 97% of them have plans to do so; half of respondents labeled digital tools as critical or high priority, with larger organizations more apt to call them critical; and less than one-third of organizations agreed that their organizations are able to deliver a digital experience that is “on par with the best digital consumer experience.”

There have been a couple of articles discussing the results of the report, and all of them focus on the perceived advantages held by organizations that are leading with digital health tools. They also predict that organizations that don’t embrace digital tools will be left behind as patients vote with their feet to move to organizations with a more seamless experience.

This reminds me of how hospitals were behaving years ago as they all competed based on their beautiful birthing suites, on-demand dining, and bedside entertainment systems. They may have gotten people to look twice, but I’m not sure it really made a difference in how patients selected their hospitals,since often that decision is driven by insurance contracts or where physicians have chosen to be on staff.

As patients have become consumers and people are increasingly sensitive to the cost of healthcare, I’d like to propose a new paradigm in hospital competition. Rather than pushing for just price transparency and infection rates, let’s get some real competition. Let’s get hospitals to publish their data on accurate billing, clean claims, and responsiveness to patient inquiries. In addition to your wait time in the emergency department, what is your wait time when you have to call about a bill from six months ago that finally dropped? How quickly can you deliver medical records upon request? How do your score on the ability to deliver those records in the format patients want?

Let’s create some metrics for care team communication with families, adequate discharge planning, and appropriate end-of-life decisions and get them circulating in the community. As far as other metrics, how quickly does someone answer the patient call light/bell, and how efficiently can someone help an elderly or immobilized patient to the bathroom? Let’s get that metric up on a billboard just like the emergency department wait times.

For anyone who has ever been an inpatient or had to closely take care of a hospitalized family member, let’s add some other ones like timeliness of medication administration, the percentage of time that handwashing is done properly, and the speed with which staff can silence or otherwise address the alarm on an IV pump.

I’m now at the point in my career where I’ve spent more time as a clinical informaticist than I did as a “regular” physician, and trust me, I do love the technology side of things. But as we are with so many things in our society, we’re focused on the wrong things. Is digital technology just a distraction from other issues? Are we trying to use it as a proxy for the actual healthcare that our patients deserve? Do patients really want an interactive, immersive experience or do they just want to get out of the hospital without a hospital-acquired infection? Do they really need online bill pay or would they be much happier with a bill that was simply understandable and accurate?

I’m curious what others think about this and what your organization’s relative spend is on digital patient engagement versus what many of us would consider the staples of running a healthcare organization. Do you spend more on technology than infection control? How does it compare to salaries for nursing staff and other critical patient care resources? Are we just experiencing the healthcare equivalent of bread and circuses? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 2/24/20

Strategy on Reducing Burden Relating to the Use of Health IT and EHRs

HHS and ONC publish “Strategy on Reducing Regulatory and Administrative Burdens Relating to the Use of Health IT and EHRs,” meeting the requirement of the 21st Century Cures Act that HHS address government-imposed burdens on EHR use.

Queen’s notifies 2,900 patients their medical information was inadvertently shared

Queen’s Health Systems (HI) notifies 2,900 patients that their information was exposed by an employee who emailed an attachment to the wrong address.

MO HealthNet receives $9.3 million to help hospitals and providers electronically connect patient information

The MO HealthNet HIE will use $9.3 million in federal funding to develop a Provider Health Information Exchange Onboarding Program, which will subsidize connection and subscription fees for member providers.

MTBC Announces Telehealth Division, Appoints Leadership Team to Drive Growth

Health IT vendor MTBC launches a telehealth division and announces its three-member leadership team.

Monday Morning Update 2/24/20

Top News

HHS and ONC publish “Strategy on Reducing Regulatory and Administrative Burdens Relating to the Use of Health IT and EHRs,” meeting the requirement of the 21st Century Cures Act that HHS address government-imposed burdens on EHR use.

HHS was looking at strategies that could be achieved in 3-5 years and that HHS could implement under its existing or expanded authority or as a influencer.

I noted these specific items, although it’s not clear how HHS and ONC see themselves being  involved beyond calling out the status quo as undesirable:

• Use existing EHR data to reduce re-documentation and work with stakeholders to promote clinical documentation best practices.
• Streamline the prior authorization process via standardized templates, data elements, and transactions.
• Improve EHR usability by aligning design to clinical workflow, improving the usability of clinical decision support, and improving the presentation of clinical data.
• Harmonize basic clinical operation across EHRs.
• Standardize medication information and order entry displays.
• Optimize end user log-on.
• Simplify scoring of the Promoting Interoperability performance category.
• Standardize data mapping across systems and implement a standards-based API approach for HHS’s electronic administrative systems.
• Consider a first-year test reporting approach for new ECQM clinical quality measures.
• Improve interoperability between health IT and state PDMP programs.
• Increase electronic prescribing of controlled substances.

CMS Administration Seema Verma said in announcing the report, “The taxpayers made a massive investment in EHRs with the expectation that it would solve the many issues that plagued paper-bound health records. Unfortunately, as this report shows, in all too many cases, the cure has been worse than the disease. Twenty years into the 21st century, it’s unacceptable that the application of health IT still struggles to provide ready access to medical records,  access that might mean the difference between life and death. The report’s recommendations provide valuable guidance on how to minimize EHR burden as we seek to fulfill the promise of an interoperable health system.”

Reader Comments

From No More Tangles: “Re: Atrium Health. It’s a bigger deal than the commenter says, pretty much a rip-and-replace. They are Cerner’s first and largest hosted customer and this was a big decision for them even beyond acquiring Wake Forest. They are almost entirely Cerner, with some miscellaneous Meditech and old McKesson. They were using Epic only for professional billing in a subset of their physician practices. Navicent also had an urgency to move and passed on Cerner for their long-term future and chose Epic.” Atrium Health released its 2019 financial report last week that showed a $284 million profit on $7.49 billion in operating revenue (not including that of its regional partners) and CEO compensation of $7.25 million.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

We’re in that pre-HIMSS quiet period, where companies – wisely or not – hold their announcements for opening day, when they are likely to get lost among the others. It will therefore be light reading today.

HIStalk sponsors sent some cool write-ups for my HIMSS guide – descriptions of what their company does, what they will be demonstrating, fun giveaways and donations to charities, and in-booth events such as whiskey tastings, happy hours, podcasts, presentations, and Google Cloud’s “Build with a Googler.” I’ll make a downloadable PDF shortly.  I’ve done zero prep for the conference, but I’m starting this weekend by making a list of booths I want to visit from this list of 60 or so. You can text me during the conference at 615.433.5294.

Lorre wants to spice up our webinar calendar with new entries, so contact her and you’ll get a pre-HIMSS deal. Another sponsor thing I just remembered: fill out the form to be featured in my reader-requested Sponsor Spotlight. Hey, it’s free, so why wouldn’t you?

Most poll respondents have little faith in organizations keeping their health information private, but some trust medical practices and health systems.

New poll to your right or here: What would most entice you to interact with a HIMSS exhibitor that you don’t know much about?

Webinars

March 4 (Wednesday) 1 ET: “Tools for Success: How to Increase Clinician Satisfaction with HIT Solutions.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenter: Andrew Kanter, MD, MPH, FACMI, FAMIA, chief medical officer, IMO. Dr. Kanter will explore how striving to achieve the Quadruple Aim (by focusing on the provider experience) can improve clinician satisfaction and population health needs while also reducing per capita healthcare costs. Attendees will learn how to set providers up for success with new technology, the potential unforeseen consequences of purchasing without the clinician in mind, and the factors that are critically important to clinicians who are using new health information systems.

March 4 (Wednesday) 1 ET: “Healthcare Digital Marketing: Jump-Start Patient Discovery and Conversion.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Victoria Petrock, MBA, MLIS, principal analyst, EMarketer; Kristi Ebong, MBA, MPH, SVP of corporate strategy, Orbita. Does your digital front door capture consumers who search for health-related information one billion times each day? Do you have actionable steps to convert them into patients? Do you understand voice and chat virtual assistants? The presenters will explore the consumer challenges involved with finding, navigating, and receiving care, discuss why healthcare marketers need to embrace conversational voice and chatbot technologies, and describe how new technologies such as conversational micro-robots can improve engagement.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

People

World Wide Technology promotes Justin Collier, MD to chief healthcare advisor.

Privacy and Security

Queen’s Health Systems (HI) notifies 2,900 patients that their information was exposed by an employee who emailed an attachment to the wrong address.

Other

A health reporter for The Atlantic writes up “the Uber for BS” of corporate buzzwords, calling out “stakeholders,” deep dives,” “optics,” “growth hacking,” “value-add,” and “synergy. She quotes an author who says people use buzzwords for the same reason they wear ties or Ann Taylor clothes to the office – to tell the world they are working. An anthropologist takes a more cynical view, saying that people use buzzwords when they aren’t really doing anything. Stay tuned for the HISsies “most overused buzzword winner – will it be “artificial intelligence,” “social determinants of health,” “cloud,” or “disruption?” I’ll circle back shortly after I’ve leveraged consensus in preparation for moving the needle among thought leaders.

#IgnoredTwitterSpellcheck

Larry Tesler, who invented such computer functions as cut-copy-paste and search-replace in the early GUI days at Xerox, is Control-X’ed at 74.

Sponsor Updates

• Meditech adds Staff Gateway, a Web-based HR solution portal, to its Human Resources Planning solution.
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, will exhibit at the Kaleidoscope Conference February 24 in Houston.
• OmniSys will exhibit at the PDS Super Conference February 27-29 in Orlando.
• EHealth Radio features StayWell President Pearce Fleming.
• Vocera celebrates 20 years of innovation.
• Spok creates an infographic titled “3 Challenges That Affect Care Team Well-Being.”

Blog Posts

• pMD Streamlines Communication with Secure Voice Calls and Automated Appointment Reminders (PMD)
• The Tools to Create the Strongest Clinically Integrated Networks (Lightbeam Health Solutions)
• Transform Situation Awareness into Hospital Efficiency (LiveProcess)
• The Challenges of Growth: Where to Begin? (EClinicalWorks)
• Top Healthcare Trends for 2020 & Some Early Wins in the Quest for Transformation (Loyale Healthcare)
• Promoting CC&C at the Heart of Clinical Workflows (Mobile Heartbeat)
• Combining clinical and business analytics for efficiency at Kalispell Regional (Meditech)
• From Volume to Value: 10 Essential Strategies for Navigating the Healthcare Shift (Health Catalyst)
• What You Need to Know About Managed Care & PDPM: Ask the Experts (Netsmart)
• Best Practices for EHR Implementation Training (Impact Advisors)
• Nobody likes surprises: how to add transparency to your billing process (Experian Health)
• The Do’s & Don’ts of Urgent Care Collections (PatientBond)
• How to Improve Revenue Cycle Performance (Patientco)
• Jonathan Bush and Aneesh Chopra weigh in on anti-data blocking regulations (Redox)
• If knowledge is power and data is king, then what’s in an identity? (SailPoint Technologies)
• How to Create an EHR Training Program That Prevents Physician Burnout (Santa Rosa Consulting)
• Patients are Ready to Talk Dollars with Their Doctors (Surescripts)
• See the new Hillrom at HIMSS20. (Voalte)
• Health Information Technology: To Err Is Human – and Still Too Common in Healthcare (Vocera)
• How to Calculate Your MIPS ROI (WebPT)
• The Strategic Role of Health Plans and Providers in the Opioid Battle (Wolters Kluwer Health Language)

Contacts

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

HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS20

Access EForms

Booth 3071

Contact: Cody Strate, VP of marketing
cody.strate@accessefm.com
603.205.3479

Access EForms converts frustrating, paper-based forms into Epic/Cerner/Meditech-integrated and tablet-enabled EForms that patients electronically sign. We’re a Meditech partner, and our technology powers Cerner’s new “Cerner Forms Suite.”    At HIMSS, we will put a particular focus on the paper-based informed consent problem that causes expensive delays/cancellations in the OR, frustrates the surgical team, and makes for a very poor patient experience. Our paperless, EHR-integrated Informed Consent solution feels like an inherent part of your clinician’s EHR experience, which promotes user adoption. In the end, we eliminate the paper, we reduce OR delays and cancellations, we improve the lives of the surgical team, and we improve the patient experience. Stop by booth 3071 and we’ll show you what’s possible with eliminating your difficult, paper-based processes.

Agfa Healthcare

Booth 3745

Contact: Miriam Ladin, director, marketing and communications – North America
miriam.ladin@agfa.com
617.852.4545

We at Agfa HealthCare believe that the ability to optimize resources through a consolidated imaging management platform will become a competitive advantage for our clients. The CIO and IT functions typically support as many as 70 distinct  service lines that capture and consume medical imaging. Learn how to reduce complexity with a converged single platform technology and bring order and value to these disparate systems, workflows, and behaviors across the enterprise. We believe that consolidated clinical alignment will better enable high-impact, data-driven, cost-conscious care, compared to the complexity of maintaining multiple and redundant systems.

Visit Agfa HealthCare to discuss how to create a controlled environment for managing and sharing images, including a secure, single sign-on framework that provides context-controlled and audited access to data. The genuine, standards-based consolidation platform facilitates security hardening, thus reducing multiple points of security failure. Single platform technology arguably enables your team to guard fewer gates. Enterprise imaging enables accurate attribution of metadata to episodes of care, providing actionable information and a trail of documentation for use in revenue and risk mitigation gains. With patient safety in the forefront of quality care delivery, easy access to secure and accurate patient data becomes a necessity to clinical and fiscal excellence. Support busy clinicians with clinical confidence in the records they view and drive both their productivity and satisfaction.

Learn how to reduce complexity and TCO while you enjoy the virtual reality (VR) video experience in our Virtual Reality Lounge. Enter to win your own Oculus VR headset in booth 3745.

Black Book Market Research

To arrange a meeting, contact Doug Brown.

Contact: Doug Brown, president
doug.brown@blackbookmarketresearch.com
727.463.7806

Bluetree

Booth 2487

Contact: Ryan Hill, marketing manager
rhill@bluetreenetwork.com
651.380.3713

Bluetree was named the top-ranked Epic Systems Strategy, Support, & Implementations firm according to Black Book Market Research in August 2019. If you visit Bluetree’s booth this year and fill out a leaf, the National Forest Foundation will plant one tree in your name or your organization’s name. One daily grand prize winner will receive 100 trees planted in their name.

Bright.md

To arrange a meeting, contact Ray Costantini.

Contact: Ray Costantini, CEO and co-founder
ray@bright.md

Founded in 2014 and based in Portland, OR, Bright.md is a leading healthcare automation company dedicated to modernizing direct-to-patient telehealth for healthcare systems with its AI-powered virtual-care platform, SmartExam. Bright.md partners with premier healthcare organizations in North America, including three of the top five not-for-profit health systems in the United States. These partners offer SmartExam to more than 10 million patients who are seeking convenient urgent and primary care online. Bright.md has been named the Leader in the “Forrester New Wave: Virtual Care Solutions for Digital Health” report, a Gartner Cool Vendor in Healthcare, a Vendor to Watch by Chilmark Research, and is the preferred choice of Avia’s Virtual Access cohort. Bright.md is venture-backed by B Capital Group, Seven Peaks Ventures, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Oregon Venture Fund, and the Stanford-StartX Fund. For more information, visit Bright.md.

Capsule Technologies

Booth 2441

Contact: Sam Larson, head of global marketing
slarson@capsuletech.com
475.223.6174

Capsule continues ‘making the complex simple and the simple insightful.’ Whether you’re considering unlocking the power of medical device data to automate clinical documentation workflows in critical care for the first time, interested in simplifying patient vitals acquisition and utilization for overloaded med-surg staff, or investigating ways to identify at-risk patients sooner hospital-wide, we can help you make change happen. Stop by our booth and speak directly with a representative to find out how our new Capsule Medical Device Information Platform can make the complex simple and simple insightful for your facility. The Capsule Medical Device Information Platform captures and contextualizes clinical data, providing real-time patient information that can facilitate early intervention and enable better clinical outcomes.

CareSignal

Booth 8200, kiosk 8200-45 and Booth 680, kiosk 680-09

Contact: Jason Roche, director, marketing
jason.roche@caresignal.health
314.272.2586

With 10 peer-reviewed publications, CareSignal is an evidence-based, remote patient monitoring platform without the headache of devices or apps. Standardized, automated text messages scale patient engagement and monitoring, collecting real-time patient-reported health data to prioritize patient intervention.

We will be raffling off hundreds of dollars worth of Visa gift cards each day for those who visit the booth and complete the demo.

CareSignal will co-host a CIO Reception Monday, March 9 from 5-7pm at Urban Tide in the Hyatt Regency Orlando. RSVP here.

The Chartis Group

To arrange a meeting, contact Gregg Mohrmann.

Contact: Gregg Mohrmann, director and Informatics & Technology Practice co-leader
chartis@chartis.com
877.667.4700

Chartis provides comprehensive advisory services and analytics to the healthcare industry. With an unparalleled depth of expertise in strategic planning, performance excellence, informatics and technology, and health analytics, Chartis helps leading healthcare organizations achieve transformative results. Connect with us at HIMSS to learn about some of the results our clients have achieved in these, among other, areas: 

• Using technology-enabled innovation to unlock new potential and accelerate digital transformation. 
• Using ERP to improve margin, cost, satisfaction, and differentiation.
• Harnessing the power of data and analytics. 
• Leveraging the EHR to improve cost, quality, outcomes, and satisfaction. 
• Ensuring IT, as a strategic partner, delivers high impact and high value.

CI Security

Booth 413

Contact: Vivian Zhou, healthcare program director
vivian.zhou@ci.security
206.620.0277

CI Security protects and defends healthcare organizations from cyber threats with HIPAA-compliant Managed Detection and Response solutions and expert consulting services. CI Security was founded by the CISO of a major city and a co-author of the HIPAA Security Rule because they saw a need for cybersecurity solutions built to protect and defend critical services, patient care, and protected data. Ten years later, CI Security is the MDR leader proven in healthcare, and has been recognized in Gartner Research’s Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services in 2018 and 2019. Hospitals and clinics trust CI Security to monitor networks 24/7, protect patient care and EPHI, and manage risk in a rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape. Find out more at https://ci.security.

Clinical Architecture

Booth 1629

Contact: John Wilkinson, EVP, sales and partnerships
john_wilkinson@clinicalarchitecture.com
317.580.8417

Clinical Architecture was founded in 2007 by industry veterans, clinicians, and informatics experts to deliver innovative solutions that maximize the effectiveness of healthcare. We work with industry-leading organizations, four of the top five health systems, leading EHR/HIE vendors, the Joint Commission, the CDC, and others to solve challenges around healthcare data quality, interoperability, and clinical documentation. Visit our booth (1629) to find out who the Informonster is, pose for a picture with him, and grab a stuffed version of the Informonster to take home with you.

CloudWave

Booth 1021

Contact: Bryan Blood, EVP, sales
bblood@gocloudwave.com
877.991.1991

CloudWave is the healthcare cloud transformation company. We create solutions that embrace the full cloud continuum – from the Cloud Edge, to managed private cloud services in our OpSus Healthcare Cloud, to seamless federation with public cloud services. CloudWave’s focused portfolio of OpSus Healthcare Cloud services includes hosting over 100 healthcare applications, disaster recovery, systems management, security, backup, and archiving services. CloudWave architects healthcare IT solutions with the goal of operational sustainability. Our engineers and consultants have long-standing, successful track records designing and implementing solutions for hospitals. For more information, please visit www.gocloudwave.com.

Collective Medical

Booth 8200-31 

Contact: Wayne Grodsky, chief revenue officer
wayne.grodsky@collectivemedical.com
215.287.990

Collective Medical empowers care teams to improve patient outcomes by closing the communication gaps that undermine patient care. With a nationwide network engaged with every national health plan in the country, hundreds of hospitals and health systems, and tens of thousands of providers, Collective’s system-agnostic platform is trusted by care teams to identify at-risk and complex patients and facilitate actionable collaboration to make better care decisions and improve outcomes. Based in Salt Lake City, Collective is proven to streamline transitions of care, improve coordination across diverse care teams, and reduce medically unnecessary hospital admissions. Learn more at www.collectivemedical.com.

CompuGroup Medical

To arrange a meeting, contact Tillmann Schwabe.

Contact: Tillmann Schwabe, VP of sales, CGM US
tillmann.schwabe@cgm.com
480.440.6516

CompuGroup Medical is one of the leading e-health companies in the world. With a revenue base of approximately EUR 717 million in 2018, its software products are designed to support all medical and organizational activities in doctors’ offices, pharmacies, laboratories, and hospitals. Its information services for all parties involved in the healthcare system and its Web-based personal health records contribute toward safer and more efficient healthcare. CompuGroup Medical’s services are based on a unique customer base of more than 1 million health professionals including doctors, dentists, pharmacists, and other service providers in inpatient and outpatient facilities. With locations in 19 countries and products in 56 countries worldwide, CompuGroup Medical is the e-health company with one of the highest coverage among e-health service providers. More than 5,500 highly qualified employees support customers with innovative solutions for the steadily growing demands of the healthcare system. For more information, please visit www.cgm.com.

ConnectiveRx

Booth 7950

Contact: Mark Mosebrook, senior director, EHR business development
marketing@connectiverx.com
908.809.6100

Leading technology-enabled pharmaceutical services company that simplifies how patients get on and stay on complex medications. We work with biopharmaceutical manufacturers, EHRs, pharmacy systems, and others to help patients afford medications, increase adherence, and simplify the patient-provider experience. We do this by leveraging our technology-enabled services to accelerate speed-to-therapy, and by expertly navigating the complexities in accessing innovative therapies and improving outcomes. Based on our experience pioneering co-pay programs, managing awareness/adherence communications, and establishing a state-of-the-art hub service, we help customers overcome barriers to access and use so patients can experience better health. Visit us at booth 7950 to learn how we touch each critical stage of the patient journey.

Culbert Healthcare Solutions

To arrange a meeting, contact Brad Boyd.

Contact: Brad Boyd, president
bboyd@culberthealth.com
857.919.2003

Culbert Healthcare Solutions provides high-value, professional services focused on improving clinical, operational, and revenue cycle performance and the overall patient experience. Our experienced healthcare professionals help group practices and hospitals optimize technology and navigate the change-management process. For more information about Culbert Healthcare Solutions, visit www.culberthealth.com.

Cumberland Consulting Group

To arrange a meeting, contact Praneet Nirmul.

Contact: Praneet Nirmul, partner
praneet.nirmul@cumberlandcg.com
917.214.0975

Cumberland is a leading healthcare consulting and services firm providing strategic advisory consulting services, IT professional services, and outsourced managed services to clients in the payer, provider, and life sciences markets. We deliver solutions that advance the business of healthcare. Our comprehensive suite of services includes:

• Advisory and IT strategy.
• System selection.
• M&A support.
• Systems implementation.
• Systems optimization and upgrades.
• Application service desk.
• Advanced maintenance support.
• Advanced application support.
• IT service desk.
• Legacy systems support.

For more information on Cumberland, visit www.cumberlandcg.com.

Diameter Health

Booth 7461

Contact: Tom Gaither, VP of marketing
tgaither@diameterhealth.com
781.249.9475

Diameter Health identifies and fixes systemic clinical data quality issues so you can put clinical data to work to improve care and lower costs. Diameter Health automatically turns clinical information into a structured, clinical data asset optimized for use in downstream applications. Built on a foundation of hundreds of millions of patient records, deep clinical expertise, and adherence to national standards, our scalable, API-driven technology is the critical success factor for clinical data integration. Diameter Health will be part of a use case demonstration in the Da Vinci booth, 7972. Diameter Health President and Chief Strategy Officer John D’Amore and Health Current CIO Keith Parker will present “How to Tame Your Data Dragon: A Statewide Approach” on Wednesday, March 11, from 10–11am. Visit Diameter Health’s website and check out our video testimonials.

Direct Recruiters

To arrange a meeting, contact Frank Myeroff.

Contact: Frank Myeroff, managing partner
fmyeroff@directrecruiters.com
440.996.0051

For over 37 years, Direct Recruiters has been recognized as the relationship-focused search firm that assists top-tier organizations with recruiting, acquiring, and retaining high-impact talent for mission-critical positions. Direct Recruiters services clients across North America and has years of experience placing candidates internationally. What does relationship-focused mean to us? We get to know you, we have in-depth knowledge of your industry, and we understand our candidates, helping you make the right decisions that will positively impact your organization.

Ellkay

Booth 4071

Contact: Auna Emery, director of marketing communications
auna.emery@ellkay.com
520.481.2862

As a nationwide leader in healthcare connectivity, Ellkay has been committed to enabling interoperability for more than 15 years. With connectivity to over 50,000 practices across over 700 EHR/PM systems, Ellkay builds the data pipeline for hospitals, health systems, practices, EHR/PM systems, laboratories, payers, HIEs, ACOs, and other healthcare organizations. At HIMSS, Ellkay will demonstrate its innovative connectivity solutions. Ellkay is hosting happy hour at its booth, 4071, on Tuesday and Wednesday from 4-6pm.

Engage

Booth 1585

Contact: Rich Robinson, director of marketing
rich.robinson@thinkengage.com
509.230.8763

With more than 20 years of experience solving the most complex IT challenges, Engage is an innovative IT services and consulting company with exceptional expertise in Meditech Expanse and other supporting technologies. With a unique IT delivery model, Engage has a proven history of delivering projects on time and within budget. Engage provides EHR and ERP implementation and optimization, support, cloud-hosting services (private, public, and hybrid) and consulting to more than 170 hospitals and clinics across the US. By developing long-term relationships, Engage helps customers achieve impressively high EHR adoption and satisfaction rates, along with reduced risks and total cost of ownership. Visit www.thinkengage.com for more information. Visit us at booth 1585. Also, stop by our Bourbon Tasting with Pure Storage Tuesday and Wednesday from 3-5pm at booth 1529.

Ettain Group

To arrange a meeting, contact Dawn Wasson.

Contact: Dawn Wasson, senior marketing and communications manager
dwasson@ettaingroup.com
704.719.2796

Ettain group is the talent solutions company that delivers recruitment solutions and managed solutions in five practice areas – technology, healthcare IT, digital, professional, and government. Ettain health, a division of Ettain group, is led by business, technology, and clinical experts with deep expertise to support our customers in selecting, implementing, and optimizing their IT investments. We are committed to providing customized solutions and connecting talent to meet the critical needs of healthcare customers nationwide. With expertise across Epic, Cerner, Meditech (certified Meditech Expanse consulting firm), and other majors EHRs, Ettain health is the partner you can trust to provide expertise and deliver and manage top talent across the full spectrum of healthcare IT projects.

First Databank

Booth 2559

Contact: David Manin, senior director of marketing
dmanin@fdbhealth.com
650.872.4588

FDB is the leading provider of drug and medical device knowledge that helps healthcare professionals make precise decisions. With thousands of customers worldwide, FDB enables our information system developer partners to deliver valuable, useful, and differentiated solutions. We offer more than four decades of experience in transforming medical knowledge into actionable, targeted, and effective solutions that help improve patient safety, operational efficiency, and healthcare outcomes. For a complete look at our solutions and services, please visit www.fdbhealth.com.

HIMSS Highlights:

• FDB CDS Analytics – Introducing a new solution to evaluate and improve the efficacy of clinical decision support for meds and beyond.    
• FDB Specialty Pharmacy Module – Interactive scripts – Coming in 2020 to Epic’s Coordinated Care Management.
• Lehigh Valley Health Network Case Study – LVHN successfully leverages hyperkalemia and pharmacogenomics-related decision support content in FDB Targeted Medication Warnings.
• Session: Friday, March 13 at 10:45am in room W300.
• Meducation Receives Cerner Award – FDB’s SMART on FHIR app wins Cerner Open Developer Experience (code) Program Member Adoption Award.   
• FDB Drug Info Now in Amazon Alexa – Drug information authored specifically for Alexa now provides answers to consumers’ medication questions.   
• Wine Reception and $1,000 Amazon Gift Card Raffle – Join us for a glass of wine and a chance to win $1,000 Wednesday, March 11, from 4:30-6pm in booth 2559.

Get-to-Market Health

To arrange a meeting, contact Steve Shihadeh.

Contact: Steve Shihadeh, CEO and founder
steve@gettomarkethealth.net

Get-to-Market Health is a specialized consultancy focused exclusively on accelerating sales and driving revenue growth for our healthcare technology clients. We work with business leaders to simplify the complexity and unique buying patterns of the healthcare technology market. We help our clients overcome the challenges they face as they work to drive revenue and market innovation. We bring deep, broad experience and valuable network connections across multiple levels of the healthcare technology industry. The partners at Get-to-Market Health are industry experts, having worked at and with dozens of healthcare technology businesses ranging from small startups to large, established companies. We’ve helped private, seed stage, VC-backed, PE-owned, and public companies develop successful teams in all major commercial disciplines.

HBI Solutions

To arrange a meeting, contact Laura Kanov.

Contact: Laura Kanov, SVP, product strategy
lkanov@hbisolutions.com
615.392.5201

HBI Solutions, a precision health analytics company, provides machine learning as a service to better predict, prevent, and personalize treatment before a condition becomes acute, chronic, and costly. Additionally, our acute surveillance and transition risk solutions help hospitals and health systems identify and mitigate event and utilization risk to reduce costs and improve outcomes. Come visit us in the InterSystems booth, 3301.

The HCI Group

Booth 4467

Contact: Chris Parry, VP of business and talent development
chris.parry@thehcigroup.com
904.239.4670

The HCI Group is a global leader in healthcare digital transformation. We are committed to improving healthcare globally through a combination of disruptive innovation, design thinking, and cost optimization. HCI offers a broad scope of digital transformation solutions in nearly 20 countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific. Join us on Tuesday and Wednesday at 11am and 3:30pm at booth 4467 for insightful and practical 20-minute talks with Ed Marx. He’ll share a digital transformation model with expert guests who have helped cross-industry organizations around the globe with world-class human-centered and physical design.

HCTec

To arrange a meeting, contact Brenna Davis.

Contact: Brenna Davis, marketing manager
bdavis@hctec.com
615.786.0733

HCTec is the trusted partner to more than 250 hospitals and healthcare systems across the US for highly specialized health IT staffing, project-based consulting, and application managed services support. With HCTec’s HIT solutions, hospitals are able to reduce operating costs, improve quality, and optimize labor forces.

Health Catalyst

Booth 2428

Contact: Sarah Stokes, marketing director, events
sarah.stokes@healthcatalyst.com
801.634.6287

Health Catalyst is a next-generation data, analytics, and decision-support company committed to achieving massive, sustained improvements in healthcare outcomes. We are the leaders in a new era of advanced predictive analytics for population health and value-based care with a suite of machine learning-driven solutions, decades of outcomes-improvement expertise, and an unparalleled ability to unleash and integrate data from across the healthcare ecosystem. Visit us at booth 2428 to see how the Health Catalyst Data Operating System (DOS) — a next-generation data warehouse and application development platform powered by data from more than 100 million patients and encompassing over 1 trillion facts — can help improve your organization’s quality, add efficiency, and lower costs.

Healthcare Growth Partners

Booth 4490

Contact: Christopher McCord, managing director
chris@hgp.com
713.955.7935

Healthcare Growth Partners (HGP) is an exceptionally experienced investment banking and strategic advisory firm exclusively focused on the transformational health IT market. We unlock value for our clients through our Sell-Side Advisory, Buy-Side Advisory, Capital Advisory, and Pre-Transaction Growth Strategy services, functioning as the exclusive investment banking advisor to over 100 health IT transactions representing over $2 billion in value since 2007. With our focus, we deliver knowledgeable, honest, and customized guidance to select clients looking to execute high-value health IT, health information services, and digital health transactions.

Healthfinch

Booth 2079

Contact: Dawn Burke, director of marketing
dawn@healthfinch.com
608.561.1844 x17

Healthfinch develops Charlie, the healthcare industry’s most trusted, most used prescription renewal delegation engine. Charlie’s unique combination of EHR-integrated technology and protocol content enables health systems across the country to deliver a better, safer patient experience while also achieving lower rates of provider burnout, improved quality metrics, and significant time and cost savings. Learn more at healthfinch.com or at booth 2079.

Stop by anytime during exhibit hall hours to see a demo and get a “Charlie the Healthfinch” plush! Healthfinch will also host an in-booth happy hour at booth 2079 on Tuesday, March 10 from 4-6pm. RSVP for the happy hour here.

Healthwise

Booth 2533

Contact: Jim Watkins, VP
jwatkins@healthwise.org
208.387.6774

Healthwise has set the standard for patient education since 1975. Nonprofit and independent, we’re a trusted resource for health content, technology, and services. Discover new ways to connect with your patients and save your clinicians time. Stop by booth 2533 to learn how.  

• Explore new longitudinal programs that digitally connect patients with education resources for critical health interactions, saving care teams time and strengthening patient engagement.  
• See how savvy healthcare marketers are using plug-and-play health education to create rich digital experiences for patients in less than half the time it used to take.    
• Preview how industry-leading medical illustrators are using 3-D animation to bring medical concepts to life in a way that’s engaging and easy to understand.

Hyland Healthcare

Booth 2759

Contact: Megan Phelps, global programs manager
meghan.phelps@hyland.com
913.343.1305

Hyland Healthcare provides connected healthcare solutions that harness unstructured content from all corners of the enterprise and link it to core clinical and business applications such as EHRs and ERP systems. Hyland Healthcare offers a full suite of content services and enterprise imaging solutions, bringing documents, medical images, and other clinically rich data to the healthcare stakeholders that need it most. This comprehensive view of patient information accelerates business processes, streamlines clinical workflows, and improves clinical decision making.

Join us for daily happy hours in our booth from 5-6pm on Tuesday and Wednesday, and from 3-4 pm on Thursday. Enter our drawing for a chance to win Apple AirPods.

Impact Advisors

To arrange a meeting, contact Keith MacDonald.

Contact: Keith MacDonald, VP and client relationship executive
keith.macdonald@impact-advisors.com
617.935.9320

Impact Advisors is a nationally-recognized healthcare consulting firm that is solving some of the toughest challenges in the industry by delivering strategic advisory, technology implementation, and performance-improvement services. Our comprehensive suite of digital health, clinical optimization, and revenue cycle services spans the lifecycle of our clients’ needs. Our experienced team has a powerful combination of clinical, revenue, operations, consulting, and IT experience. The firm has earned a number of prestigious industry and workplace awards, including Best in KLAS for 12 consecutive years; Healthcare Informatics HCI 100; Crain’s Chicago Business Fast Fifty; as well as “Best Place to Work” awards from: Modern Healthcare, Consulting Magazine, Becker’s Hospital Review, and Achievers. For more information about Impact Advisors, visit www.impact-advisors.com.

Legacy Data Access

Booth 1473

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

Running old applications just to get to the data? STOP – We need to talk! For organizations retiring or replacing healthcare systems, Legacy Data Access offers the industry’s most comprehensive set of software tools and solutions for working with data from retired systems. Our solutions provide comprehensive functionality for the storage, access, management, and reporting of retired healthcare data. No time-consuming, labor-intensive, and risk-filled data conversions are required. The data is seamlessly accessible in its original format, with no loss of detail or integrity. Please visit us to discuss how we have successfully retired 304 different healthcare applications – a total of 863 applications.

Giveaways include key chains and the best dark chocolate in the exhibit hall. Drop a card for a chance to win one of three AirPod Pros.

Medhost

Booth 2131

Contact: Brian Grant, senior director, marketing
Brian.Grant@medhost.com

Medhost has been providing products and services to healthcare facilities of all types and sizes for over 35 years. Today, more than 1,000 healthcare facilities nationwide partner with Medhost and are enhancing their patient care and operational excellence with its clinical and financial solutions including an integrated EHR. Additionally, its unparalleled support and hosting solutions make it easy for healthcare facilities to focus on what’s important – their patients and business.

At HIMSS 2020, Medhost will showcase its comprehensive and cloud-based technology solutions that include but are not limited to EHR, EDIS, general financials and revenue cycle solutions and services, patient engagement, and ambulatory integration solutions.

Giveaway: Thought Leaders Wanted! Visit Medhost at booth 2131 and record a podcast with us. For each podcast recorded, we will give away a $25 gift card. Sign up for a 15- to 25-minute slot today and share you expertise about HIT and the healthcare environment in a guided interview.

NextGate

Booth 3128

Contact: Stephanie Fraser, director of communications and media relations
stephanie.fraser@nextgate.com
734.233.1483

NextGate is the global leader in healthcare identity management. With over 250 customers in five countries, our solutions are deployed at the world’s most successful organizations and HIEs. NextGate will have two exciting in-booth events this year: 

• Whisky Tasting on Tuesday, March 10 at 4:30pm: Join Whisky Librarian Dr. Nick van Terheyden for a four-flight whisky tasting as he takes us through an introduction of Scotch Whisky Regional Styles. Register to secure a Glencairn whisky glass (first 50 people). We will also raffle off a bottle of whisky and a whisky dictionary.    
• Let’s Talk About a National Patient Identifier on Wednesday, March 11 at 1pm: Join our expert panelists Ben Moscovitch, Pew Charitable Trusts; Julie Dooling, AHIMA; and policy wonk Mark Segal for an engaging discussion on patient matching and universal patient identifiers.    

Stop by our booth to enter for a chance to win two backpack giveaways filled with a hoodie and $50 Amazon card, or pre-register for our whisky tasting for a Glencairn whisky glass and a chance to win a bottle of Scottish whisky.

Nordic

Booth 2879

Contact: Samantha Tiller-Schenck, experiential marketing manager
samantha.tiller-schenck@nordicwi.com
513.746.0398

Healthcare organizations are challenged to deliver higher quality care at a lower cost. Our award-winning team provides health IT staffing, advisory consulting, and managed services that result in a stronger business with better patient outcomes. Stop by for open and direct conversations, meet new CEO Jim Costanzo, and learn how Nordic has evolved to better serve you. If that’s not enough, we’ll also have a custom tea blend gift that may help calm the common stresses of HIMSS.

Obix by Clinical Computer Systems

Booth 7273 and 8300

Contact: John Murray, key accounts manager
john.murray@obix.com
224.856.3459

Embracing Mothers and Babies Throughout Birth – The Obix system is a clinician-focused software solution supporting integration, compliance, communication, and patient care. The clinical decision-support features and tools promote critical thinking by reinforcing experience and knowledge. Tour a smart hospital where the Obix system is monitoring a patient in the Labor and Delivery room, inside the Intelligent Health Pavilion. Also at HIMSS, Obix and Epic will demonstrate the exchange of data in real time in the Interoperability Showcase’s Maternal and Newborn Health use case.

OptimizeRx

Booth 8300-29

Contact: Maira Alejandra, media relations manager
malejandra@optimizerx.com

OptimizeRx is a digital health technology company, connecting life sciences, payers, providers, and patients using the largest point-of-care communications platform and disease-specific digital health frameworks. The cloud-based solutions support affordability and adherence efforts directly within the provider workflow, as well as after the patient leaves the care setting, providing a true omni-channel treatment experience and advancing positive outcomes. Come see us in action at the Interoperability Showcase.

Optimum Healthcare IT

To arrange a meeting, contact Larry Kaiser.

Contact: Larry Kaiser, VP, marketing and communications
lkaiser@optimumhit.com
516.978.5487

Optimum Healthcare IT has a dedicated meeting space (MP122). If you are interested in learning how our services can help your organization meet its healthcare IT needs, please visit www.optimumhit.com/contact and contact us today!

PatientKeeper

Booth 2006

Contact: Cristina Christy, senior events manager
cchristy@patientkeeper.com
781.373.6378

PatientKeeper’s EHR optimization software solutions streamline physician workflow, improve care team collaboration, and fill functional gaps in existing hospital EHR systems. With PatientKeeper as the “system of engagement” complementing the EHR, physicians can easily access and act on all their patient information from PCs, smartphones, and tablets. At HIMSS20, visitors can see demos of the complete range of PatientKeeper’s physician workflow applications, as well as the new Clinical Communications Suite, which enables care team members to securely communicate anytime, anywhere, through HIPAA-compliant messaging with embedded patient context. PatientKeeper is used by more than 70,000 physicians at hospitals and health systems across North America.

HIMSS giveaway: PatientKeeper will raffle off one Apple Watch each day to a qualified visitor who watches a demo at booth 2006.

PCare

Booth 3721

Contact: Bob Abrahamson, VP, marketing
rabrahamson@p-care.com
267.614.5214

PCare’s interactive patient engagement solution helps healthcare providers educate and collaborate with patients across the care continuum. The PCare open platform integrates with existing EHR systems, patient portals, and mobile health applications to connect patients and caregivers. PCare is the partner healthcare organizations trust to improve care quality, patient outcomes, and financial performance.

Visit PCare at the Spectrum Enterprise “Powering Innovations Across the Continuum of Care” booth, 3721, to learn about the PCare approach to patient engagement across the continuum for value-based organizations.

PerfectServe

Booth 4346

Contact: Guillaume Castel, CEO
gcastel@perfectserve.net
866.844.5484

PerfectServe’s unified platform for clinical communication and collaboration helps physicians, nurses, and care team members improve patient care. The PerfectServe and Telmediq solutions automate communication-driven workflows, eliminate non-clinical tasks, promote nurse mobility, and engage patients in their own care, resulting in quicker time to treatment and enhanced patient safety. The Lightning Bolt provider scheduling solution automatically generates optimized shift schedules to reduce burnout and increase patient access. PerfectServe’s scalable, cloud-based solutions allow 135,000 physician users and 230,000 nurse users to focus on delivering the best patient experience possible.

Visit the PerfectServe booth to learn more about our leading Clinical Communication & Collaboration, Nurse Mobility, Provider Scheduling, Contact Center, Answering Service, and Patient & Family Communication solutions. Book a meeting and find more information at perfectserve.com/himss20.

Phynd

Booth 1775

Contact: Rebecca Jones, content marketing specialist
rjones@phynd.com
603.581.4331

Phynd 360, an innovative provider data platform, serves as health systems’ central hub for all provider data. Phynd enables optimization for provider data – people, places, and services – in EHR, marketing, and claims systems via platform tools for provider enrollment, management, outreach, and search across the enterprise. Phynd is a member of the Epic App Orchard. Phynd clients include some of the most progressive and innovative in the country, with seven of the top 20 “Best Hospital Honor Roll” hospitals, as ranked by US News and World Report, using the Phynd platform to power their provider data. Phynd serves as a vital enterprise data platform for digital marketing teams seeking to optimize their digital front door experience for consumers. It offers real-time provider enrollment into Epic and other EHRs, used by patient access and registration teams to eliminate the dual, never-ending streams of provider data maintenance and claims tickets backlog. 

Schedule a short appointment with Phynd, and we’ll reward you with a $100 Starbucks gift card!

PMD

To arrange a meeting, contact Ryan Sciacca.

Contact: Ryan Sciacca, director of sales
sales@pmd.com
800.587.4989 x2

PMD provides healthcare teams with a suite of powerful, intuitive, mobile software that streamlines communication, enhances productivity, and increases revenue. With PMD’s mobile communication, data capture, and care navigation platforms, healthcare teams finally have an elegant and simple technology to streamline communication and revenue cycle workflows while maximizing efficiency and collaboration. PMD interfaces with all major EHRs, hospital systems, and medical billing systems, enabling the efficient sharing of data and cutting down on medical errors. PMD is committed to developing the best solution and providing superior customer service. Visit our website or contact us today for more information or to schedule a free workflow consultation.

Prepared Health

Booth 4126

Contact: Monica Ginsburg, marketing manager
mginsburg@preparedhealth.com
773.251.4845

The Prepared Health platform simplifies senior care coordination. We empower hospitals and health plans to:   

• Build post-acute and home care networks – organize high-quality providers across the care continuum.      
• Enable real-time communication – smarter care transitions and coordination at every level of care.     
• Activate home-based insights – leverage predictive models to increase healthy days at home. 

“Create Value for the Buyer and the Innovator to Support Emerging Technologies,” session 319, will be held on Friday, March 13 from 10:45-11:45am. Speakers include innovation leaders from Jefferson Health, an 18-hospital system with nearly $6 billion in revenue; and Ashish Shah, CEO of Prepared Health.

QliqSoft

Booth 421

Contact: John Skowlund, VP of business development
jskowlund@qliqsoft.com
866.295.0451

The QliqSoft team is excited to share many new patient and provider communication technology solutions at HIMSS20. Stop by booth 421 to participate in:

1. Customer conversations – Hear from our customers, such as CAN Community Health and the University of Florida, about how QliqSoft solutions deliver results.    
2. Education sessions – Let our customer success team share all they have learned in the field. Subjects include chatbot use cases, operational effectiveness, the personification of technology, and more!   
3. Build your own bot: Earn your Build-a-Bot certification – You’ll leave with some sweet QliqSoft swag and your custom bot that you can take home and share with your team.    
4. Demo for donation – We’re donating $100 to CHIME for each CHIME member who stops by booth 421 to build a bot or demo any other QliqSoft product.   
5. Bots and Brews (Wednesday, March 11 at 4pm – booth 421) – Join us as we raise a toast to our most engaging team member, Quincy. Bring your healthcare chatbot questions. Bring your healthcare chatbot ideas. Let’s see where the conversation takes us.

Relatient

Booth 2193

Contact: James Kanka, VP of marketing
jkanka@relatient.net
615.208.7384

Come chat with us at HIMSS, booth 2193, and learn what makes Relatient different. Customer feedback recently made us the 2020 KLAS Category Leader in Patient Outreach, for a platform that can flex to your needs and offers robust PM/EHR integration.

Swing by to enter for a chance to win in our promotions and giveaways.

Relatient’s CTO, Kevin Montgomery, is co-presenting an Essential Conversation with Oklahoma Heart Hospital’s Jonathan Minson to talk about “Achieving Patient Engagement in a Mobile-First Market.” Don’t miss out on a chance to participate in this discussion about changing patient expectations, healthcare IT dynamics, best practices for patient engagement, and insight from Oklahoma Heart Hospital, which is using patient engagement to save close to $1 million annually. This session will take place Thursday, March 12 at 1pm in room W303A.

ROI Healthcare Solutions

Booth 1213

Contact: Brent Prosser, VP, sales
brent.prosser@roihs.com
678.270.2867

ROI Healthcare Solutions is a trusted EHR, revenue cycle, and ERP consulting firm dedicated to the success of hospital and health systems across the US. Our goals center around driving cost savings, user adoption, business transformation, system performance, and operational excellence. ROI is a KLAS award-winning partner, with a unique approach to working with clients. We use old–fashioned communication, relationship cultivation, deep knowledge, and integrity to create successful on-time, on-budget outcomes. Our role varies from project to project; we are well equipped to assess, implement, upgrade, support, and staff for technology- and process-related engagements.

Our team is excited to meet with you at HIMSS this year in Orlando. We will have several raffles (wireless headsets, speakers, and more). Come by the Georgia Pavilion in Hall A for face-to-face time with our industry experts. Also, join us for a reception in our booth on Tuesday at 4:30 pm.

Spok

Booth 2579

Contact: Derek Kiecker, solutions adviser, team lead
Derek.kiecker@spok.com
952.230.5306

Spok representatives and senior executives will be on hand to show you how Spok is pioneering a new era of care collaboration. Our cloud-native, clinical communication platform gives hospitals the best in security, agility, and breadth and depth of services. Please stop by our booth to learn more about how Spok can help you achieve your hospital’s mission. 

Spok will select one $500 gift card winner per day, at random, and notify them via email. Starbucks gift cards will be distributed in the booth following your demo, while supplies last. Spok will also host a social media contest: Tweet tagging @Spoktweets and using #HIMSS20 for your chance to win a $50 Amazon gift card each day of HIMSS20.

StayWell

Booth 3521

Contact: Eileen Faas, marketing manager
efaas@staywell.com
734.904.5880

StayWell is a health empowerment company that uses the science of behavior change and technology-driven programs to help people live healthier, happier lives. At this year’s HIMSS, StayWell will reveal its latest advancements in its health management solutions that connect the digital health universe among multiple points of engagement.

Using high-touch, high-tech solutions to present a progressive yet balanced approach to managing health risks, StayWell’s newest updates integrate the latest achievements in AI, interactive learning, and online health engagement to improve care, enhance provider knowledge, and advance care management.

Summit Healthcare

Booth 5558

Contact: Christine Duval, marketing manager
cduval@summit-healthcare.com
781.519.4840

We’re here to help you tackle any integration or automation challenge your organization is facing! Stop by to see our Robotic Process Automation (RPA) offerings LIVE. You will also have the chance to experience the company’s other advanced systems integration, automation, and business continuity offerings. These include Summit Exchange, which enables hospitals to manage systems integration at an enterprise level; and Summit All Access, the powerful, Web-enabled platform for 24/7 data exchange and availability. Attendees will also be able to explore the possibilities of utilizing Summit All Access as a business continuity tool in the event of planned or unplanned downtime, as well as resolving patient matching and duplicate record issues with the new Summit EMPI, powered by Dedalus.

Surescripts

Booth 2030

Contact: Komita Primalani, director, marketing events
komita.primalani@surescripts.com
571.303.0884

HIMSS20 invites health IT stakeholders to “be the change,” and Surescripts will be showing up with lots of practical guidance on transforming healthcare interactions for the better. From helping patients get affordable medications to navigating the shifting landscape of interoperability and information sharing, we’ll partner with experts from across the Surescripts Network Alliance to dig into some of the biggest developments in health IT. Visit us at booth 2030 to find out how we can make an impact together.

TransformativeMed

To arrange a meeting, contact Rodrigo Martinez.

Contact: Rodrigo Martinez, chief growth and clinical officer
rodrigo.martinez@transformativemed.com
303.301.4175

TransformativeMed is thrilled to once again attend HIMSS – such an exciting venue to learn about the latest and greatest in technology. We’re already providing EHR-embedded solutions that are solving some of today’s most challenging problems – physician burnout, satisfaction, and efficiency, thus enabling better patient outcomes. We’d enjoy connecting with our current and future clients. Our specialty-specific clinical workflows are rich in content by specialty, intuitive to the clinician’s natural workflow, and deeply embedded in the EHR. Our disease-specific workflow platform provides the care team with disease-specific workflows such as diabetes management, thrombolytics, etc., enabling more effective management of their patients across the care team(s). We will also have a CHIME focus group on Tuesday, March 10 from 4-5:30pm on the next generation of mobility for the health system and clinician.

Waystar

Booth 1421

Contact: Tina Newman, events director
Tina.Newman@waystar.com

Waystar provides next-generation, cloud-based technology that simplifies and unifies the healthcare revenue cycle. Our platform removes friction in payment processes, streamlines workflows, and improves financials for providers in every care setting. Waystar has scored Best in KLAS for claims and clearinghouse every year since 2010, and has earned multiple #1 rankings from Black Book surveys since 2012.

Waystar is proud to introduce Hubble, its new AI + RPA platform. We look forward to sharing how Hubble can help our clients achieve more efficient workflows, fewer rejected claims, and a better bottom line. Stop by booth 1421 to see a Hubble Demo!

Zen Healthcare IT

Booth 8145

Contact: Brian KIsanov, solutions manager
brianK@consultzen.com
949.396.0361

Zen Healthcare IT is 100% focused on the challenges associated with moving data through the healthcare ecosystem. We simplify interoperability by bringing our expertise together with our Gemini Integration as a Service Platform. Designed for big or small healthcare messaging problems, Gemini offers a very flexible platform to meet a wide variety of healthcare interface needs. Zen’s clients include providers, hospitals, HIEs, healthcare vendors, agencies, and payers.

Interested in learning more about the national trusted exchange networks? We will have our EHealth Exchange/Carequality experts in the booth to answer your questions. Zen is a Carequality Implementer and has onboarded many healthcare organizations to IHE-based exchange.

Weekender 2/21/20

Weekly News Recap

• Publicly traded patient survey company NRC Health falls victim to a ransomware attack.
• Atrium Health confirms that it will replace Cerner and other systems with Epic.
• Indian Health Services says it will replace its RPMS system, which is based on the VA’s VistA, with one or more commercial EHRs.
• Cerner promotes Don Trigg to president and expands John Peterzalek’s customer relationship role to include services, consulting, support, and hosting.
• Health Catalyst announces plans to acquire Able Health.
• New York’s Department of Health says Glen Falls Hospital tried to cover up $70 million in lost revenue that was caused by a “catastrophic” Cerner billing system rollout in documents it filed in exploring a potential affiliation with Albany Medical Center.
• Merged interoperability vendors Rhapsody and Corepoint make Lyniate their corporate name.
• China uses virtual visits and app-based medical consultations to address COVID-19.
• HHS OIG finds that lack of CMS oversight allowed companies to capture the information of Medicare Part D beneficiaries from its database for potential use in telemarketing scams.

Best Reader Comments

HHS is basically acting as the caricature of a bad middle manager. Micromanaging EHR vendors despite the fact that they themselves have not been successful in performing the mandated task (Medicare Part D database, DoD project, etc.); no clear line between why they’re asking you to do something and the task itself; and ignoring both internal evidence (their own OIG) and external evidence (public comments) that contradicts their stated goal. (Elizabeth H. H. Holmes)

CPSI mentioned in their earnings that they are seeing less interest from Cerner in the small hospital market and they can sell at a higher price now that Athena is gone. (What)

Once Carolinas made the transition to Atrium, the process of implementing Epic was coming, as the other system that was acquired was running Epic. It’s not really a rip and replace like AdventHealth. It was a merger of Epic and Cerner and they determined that they wanted Epic as the integrated system. (Associate CIO)

What the authors get wrong [in urging that EHR vendors not be allowed to offer continuing medical education] is trying to compare the pharmaceutical industry to the EHR industry. With pharma, there’s a direct relationship between the pharma activity and the opportunity to influence the decision maker. If a pharma company offers CME at a fancy hotel in a desirable location, I can learn about their drug and go home to my practice and prescribe their drug immediately. With EHRs, that isn’t remotely possible. Physician input into the healthcare IT budgeting process certainly is not a direct relationship, and in most organizations, at best can be considered something we may influence but rarely have purchasing authority. (Mark Weisman)

Watercooler Talk Tidbits

Readers funded the Donors Choose teacher grant request of Ms. L in Wisconsin, who says of the programmable robot mouse kits her class received, “Thank you so much for supporting this project! The materials arrived so quickly! My students were really excited to see the boxes arrive. We opened them together and they were gleeful when they saw the mouse robots. We spent about 20 minutes together to learn how to program the mouse robot. There was a lot of excitement. On Friday, I placed them in our robot centers. My students had a great time setting up mazes for the mouse. They then programed the mouse to reach the cheese. They still needed reminders that if the code didn’t work. They needed to start over a try a different code. With time they will get better at it.”

The newspaper of a Shawnee, KS high school profiles sophomore Madison Vosburg’s Cerner Scholar Experience, where she is working on fine tuning Cerner’s voice assistant Gina. She works at Cerner every school day from 1 to 3 p.m. and hopes the experience will help her land a technology job, maybe even at Cerner.

An uninsured freelancer couple who live part-time in Mexico describe their experience with having the husband’s ankle repair surgery in Tijuana for $2,000 instead of the $27,000 quoted at NYU Langone. The private practice surgeon assured the wife that his clinic was safe, his infection rate low, and his success rate high, and when asked whether a higher-priced clinic would do a better job, he said, “It’s just a foot.” The couple had qualms about the building’s shabby exterior, its lack of air conditioning, and the surgeon’s use of epidural anesthesia instead of general. The surgeon became gruff when they called him for better post-op pain control, but he explained afterward that he was frustrated at the clinic’s undertrained employees and Americans who keep showing up wanting opioids. The couple says they were sometimes frustrated with cultural differences that left them unsure how to proceed or unable to communicate with staff, but are happy with the outcome. Their doctor admitted that Mexico is like the US – you get better medical care if you have money.

A former hospital pharmacy technician pleads guilty to stealing 13,000 pills, mostly opioids, from the hospital. She found a loophole in the automated dispensing cabinet’s software that allowed her to withdraw meds for a closed unit and then delete the administration record, which bypassed the system’s tracking function.

A home inspector finds jars of human tongues stored in a house’s foundation, later determined to have been placed there by a former University of Florida professor and dental researcher who forgot them when he moved out.

In Case You Missed It

• News 2/21/20
• EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 2/20/20
• HIStalk Interviews Adam Wright, PhD, Director, Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center
• News 2/19/20
• Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 2/17/20
• Readers Write: Is Healthcare Ready for a New Era of Transparency?
• Monday Morning Update 2/17/20

Get Involved

• Sponsor
• Report a news item or rumor (anonymous or not)
• Sign up for email updates
• Connect on LinkedIn
• Contact Mr. H

Morning Headlines 2/21/20

Cloudbreak Health Attracts $10M Growth Investment

Telemedicine and medical interpretation vendor Cloudbreak Health raises $10 million, increasing its total to $25 million.

Cyberattack on NRC Health sparks privacy concerns about private patient records stored by US hospitals

A ransomware attack forces patient survey company NRC Health to shut down its systems, including client-facing reporting portals.

Indian Health Service CIO Gets Ready to Update One of Government’s Oldest Systems

Indian Health Service CIO Mitchell Thornbrugh says its VistA-based RPMS system will most likely be replaced by a commercial EHR next year.

Second big health system drops Cerner EHR

The Kansas City business paper confirms earlier HIStalk reports that the 40-hospital Atrium Health system will replace Cerner with Epic.

News 2/21/20

Top News

Cerner promotes Don Trigg to president and John Peterzalek to chief client and services officer.

Trigg has been with the company for 18 years. He will head up the company’s clinical EHR, RCM, and strategic growth businesses.

Peterzalek’s client relationship responsibilities will be expanded to include services, consulting, support, and hosting. He will also be charged with establishing a client success office. 

Former president Zane Burke left the company in November 2018 and was named CEO of Livongo a month later. Cerner assigned his responsibilities to 17-year veteran Peterzalek under the chief client officer job title, but did not say at that time who, if anyone, would be named president.

Reader Comments

From BigJimbo: “Re: NRC Health. Has had a malware attack and data breach – call transcript attached. Wondering why this isn’t in the news yet. It’s also interesting that it says it isn’t technically a HIPAA breach but rather a security incident.” Monday’s call transcript says the publicly traded Nebraska survey company – a business associate of many health systems — was affected by a ransomware attack on February 11 that disabled 40% of its servers even though the company shut its network down quickly. They claim the event isn’t legally a reportable breach, which is true only if no patient data was involved  — HHS has specifically said that ransomware is a reportable HIPAA breach if patient information is encrypted because that constitutes impermissible disclosure, unless the company can prove that it was not otherwise exposed (which I don’t think any company has ever been able to do since hackers are always anonymous).

From What’s Up @ Forte?: “Re: Forte. We’re implementing its clinical trials software. They were acquired by Advarra last fall. I hear from my implementer that they are losing several senior people.” I don’t know, but will invite readers to respond. The company’s leadership page has dropped from 26 to 12 people, but nearly all of the 12 were part of the larger team.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’d like to get more responses to my once-yearly reader survey – especially from provider readers so that the sample is representative – so please take a couple of minutes to fill out the form. Responses tell me about reader jobs and experience, which HIStalk features they like or don’t like, and what changes they would like to see. I’ll summarize the results in a few days and draw for one or more $50 Amazon gift card winners.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Department of Health officials discover that Glens Falls Hospital (NY) tried to cover up nearly $70 million in lost revenue due to a “catastrophic” Cerner billing system rollout when the hospital applied for approval to affiliate with Albany Medical Center. The hospital attributed its revenue losses to fewer surgeries and Medicare patients instead of admitting that its billing system didn’t work properly for nearly two years.

Vyne acquires dental practice EDI claims processing and revenue cycle services platform vendor Renaissance Electronic Services.

Telemedicine and medical interpretation vendor Cloudbreak Health raises $10 million, increasing its total to $25 million.

Sales

• Beaumont Health (MI) selects patient referral and self-scheduling software from Blockit.
• Capital Health (NJ) will switch from Aprima, Athenahealth, and Cantata Health to Cerner.
• MUSC Health Lancaster Medical Center (SC) will implement tele-ICU software and services from Advanced ICU Care.

People

Newly merged health data integration vendors Rhapsody and Corepoint rebrand as Lyniate. The new company promotes Scott Galbari to CTO and Sonal Patel as chief customer success officer.

Announcements and Implementations

CoverMyMeds integrates its prescription app with Epic MyChart, allowing patients to see the status of their prior authorization requests and to review the cash price and discount coupon alternatives.

Mille Lacs Health System (MN) implements Medhost’s cloud-based EHR.

Government and Politics

VA officials reveal that Verizon is providing 5G capabilities at its hospital in Palo Alto, CA, while Microsoft and Medivis are supplying surgical visualization tools that incorporate augmented reality and AI. Surgeons wearing Microsoft’s HoloLens glasses can tap into detailed medical images and a patient’s medical record while using Medivis’s interactive 3-D modeling software during procedures. CMIO Thomas Osborne, MD sees medical education for staff and patients as the next use case for the combined technologies.

Indian Health Service CIO Mitchell Thornbrugh says its VistA-based RPMS system will most likely be replaced by a commercial EHR next year. He is open to a multi-vendor approach and hopes to achieve interoperability with the VA’s VistA replacement,  Cerner.

A new KLAS report on healthcare business intelligence and analytics names the “A-List” as Tableau (the most-considered vendor), Health Catalyst, and Microsoft. It says Microsoft’s BI solution is surging now that it can be packaged with Azure, while KLAS seems puzzled about why Dimensional Insight isn’t better known among prospects since it has the highest overall performance, a high retention rate, and a 100% “would buy again” from customers. KLAS finds that IBM and SAP “have become almost irrelevant in current purchase decisions” because their tools and their willingness to partner with customers lag the market.

Privacy and Security

Hackers are using COVID-19 hysteria to their advantage, sending fake emails from WHO and the CDC that warn them that the virus has reached their city, then direct them to phony websites that ask for their personal information.

Other

Vanderbilt University engineers develop a tool to help researchers analyze diagnosis codes and EHR data simultaneously, allowing them to uncover connections that may help in earlier disease detection and management.

A Surescripts survey of 1,000 consumers finds that physician-initiated conversations at the point of care about prescription prices can dramatically improve medication adherence rates:

• 55% of respondents believe these discussions help them with affordability.
• 50% say the were more satisified with their doctor and more likely to remain with them.
• 41% say they’ve referred friends to their provider because of those conversations.

Wired profiles BlueDot, a Canadian company that has developed an illness outbreak and tracking app that identified the COVID-19 outbreak several days before WHO and the CDC. The app also accurately predicted that the virus would spread from Wuhan to Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo. The app, which was developed by an infectious disease specialist, takes in data from global news reports, airline ticket sales, and animal disease outbreak reports and applies an AI-powered disease surveillance algorithm to extract relevant information. Customers include governments, businesses, and public health organizations.

Sponsor Updates

• HCTec staff help Azalea Trace Assisted Living residents celebrate Valentine’s Day.
• OptimizeRx adds a hub-enrollment solution to its point-of-care prescription savings software, giving providers and patients immediate access to forms for specialty drug support programs.
• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at the CPCA Quality Care Conference February 20-21 in Irvine, CA.
• Phynd recaps its 2019 growth, which included adding six new health system clients of its enterprise provider data management platform.
• The Tampa Bay Business Journal recognizes Greenway Health Chief Legal Officer Karen Mulroe as one of its 2020 Top Corporate Counsel Honorees.
• Healthwise will exhibit at the 2020 ANIA SoCal Annual Conference February 21 in Los Angeles.
• InterSystems announces enhanced open-source availability for its IKnow Technology.
• The Chartis Group publishes a new white paper, “Orthopedic Care Delivery Transformation: Is Your Health System Prepared?”
• Spok adds new capabilities to its Spok Go cloud-native clinical communications software.

Blog Posts

• Healthcare IT Trends at HIMSS20 (314e)
• Celebrating American Heart Month (EClinicalWorks)
• Unlocking Patient Access to Specialty Care (PMD)
• Cerner Hospital Troubleshoots End-User Peripheral Issues with Goliath (Goliath Technologies)
• Google completes Looker acquisition (Google Cloud)
• Finding Your Way into Advanced Analytics and AI, A CIO’s Guide (The HCI Group)
• The Strategic Role of Health Plans and Providers in the Opioid Battle (Wolters Kluwer Health Language)
• Investors are Falling in Love with Femtech (Healthcare Growth Partners)
• 5 Mistakes That Will Jeopardize Your Centralized Team’s Productivity (Healthfinch)
• Complete the patient record @ Digital Health Rewired (Hyland)
• Improving Claims Data Access to Advance Value-Based Care (Imat Solutions)
• Destress During Implementation with Simple Décor (Impact Advisors)
• Considerations in your IAAM journey – Part II: Role Based Access Control the Unicorn of IAAM … or is it? (Imprivata)
• The Nursing Shortage: What It Means for You and How Tech Can Help (Mobile Heartbeat)

Contacts

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

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 2/20/20

I’m all about the data, but I’m not happy to have been faked out by this year’s influenza numbers. We were lulled into a sense of hope by what appeared to be an early peak followed by a decline in flu cases, only to have a second (and higher) peak.

To date, there have been 26 million cases of influenza and 14,000 flu-related deaths, including 92 children. We’ve been seeing a lot of influenza pneumonia in the practice and I’ve just about washed all the skin off my hands. I hope we start to see the end of this soon. Everyone’s keyed up about COVID-19, but few average people are aware of how many people influenza kills each year.

I had a chance to connect with a colleague who lives in Taiwan and who was looking for in the trenches commentary on what people in the US think about COVID-19. He and his family have battened down the hatches for the most part and his children’s school is closed until the end of the month as a precaution. Fortunately, he telecommutes to a job in the continental US, so his livelihood hasn’t been impacted. He’s going to keep me posted from the man on the street perspective as the situation unfolds.

It’s definitely starting to get interesting at work, as we are having difficulty with supplies that typically originate in China, including masks, gowns, and other disposable sterile supplies such as staple remover kits. Fortunately, we have a good stock of standard surgical instruments that can be autoclaved for sterilization, so it’s just a question of shifting to that workflow. Nothing beats a good pair of precision surgical scissors from Germany, so I’m not complaining.

Based on the flu and COVID-19, I expect to see an increase in vendors at HIMSS selling supplies to keep the workplace safe, including washable keyboards, touchscreen covers, sterilization carts, and more. I haven’t received any mailings from them or invitations to any booth events, so if you’re in this part of the industry and you’re not strutting your stuff, you might be missing out. I enjoy touring all the booths that have practical items to promote and aren’t just full of buzzwords and the stuff of pipe dreams. If you have something cool for us to check out, drop us a line and let us know your booth number. We’ll do our best to make it by.

For a while, I was doing quite a bit of consulting around Patient-Centered Medical Home, so I spent a lot of time on the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) website. That business kind of died down and I drifted away, so I was happy to be drawn back by their involvement in the pursuit of Natural Language Processing. Their recent blog covers NCQA’s efforts to convene a NLP working group to help them explore how the technology can be used for quality measurement and reporting. The group includes representatives from Apixio, UPMC, and Wave Health Technologies.

The working group is focused on approaches to ensure that data generated from NLP is accurate. It plans to work toward developing a standard for validating NLP data. Since the working group is vendor focused, NCWA will be running parallel meetings with an independent advisory panel that includes NLP experts and researchers who will also weigh in on the potential validation model. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on their work and how it might impact frontline clinical organizations.

I recently caught up with a vendor friend to talk about their strategy for the new Evaluation & Management coding guidelines that will come into play in 2021. The guidelines are designed to allow physicians to be paid without the onerous documentation they had to do in the past, which theoretically would allow vendors to tailor their clinical documentation to the actual clinical scenario rather than allowing physicians to bill at the highest level possible. I’m looking forward to not having to do more of a Review of Systems than is actually relevant for the visit and to writing notes that are closer to “Strep: Penicillin” than to the multi-page nonsense we generate today. I hope multiple vendors are looking at ways to make documentation easier as well as more coherent.

Time to “Ditch the Disk” in healthcare. Various tech leaders are encouraging the healthcare industry to move beyond CD-ROMs and make sharing images as easy as sending a text message. The task force meets every few months and looks at ways to improve the process. My organization burns an incredible number of discs every month and I’m sure they wind up in piles at patients’ homes, so I’m all for it.

I’m excited to report that readers are responding to my plea for pre-HIMSS shoe shopping tips. Apparently Jeffrey Campbell boots come highly recommended, with one reader noting “I have three of these…  I can even wear them with a broken toe.” That’s high praise indeed. I’m disappointed they don’t have them in my size in the red and blue snake pattern, because they’d be perfect for my upcoming trip to Washington, DC. A little bird told me you can sometimes find them on third party sites, so I’ll have to check them out. I definitely need something comfortable because I’m going to be hitting all the military memorials with a group of Honor Flight veterans.

Another reader recommends Irregular Choice, saying, “My artist sister is obsessed, and I am tempted to peruse their men’s section for the show floor.” I was completely blown away by their creations, especially the Muppets and Disney options. If I had an endless shoe budget, I could definitely go crazy there.

Good luck on your HIMSS prep. As usual, I’ll be on the lookout for the best reader footwear (both shoe and sock varieties). Will your shoes make the hall of fame or the hall of shame? What are your other favorite sites for awesome shoes? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 2/20/20

Maven Raises $45 Million in Series C, One of the Largest Funding Rounds for Female-led Women’s and Family Health Company

Maven raises a $45 million Series C round of financing led by Icon Ventures, bringing the virtual clinic company’s total raised to nearly $90 million.

Former Chief Technology Officer of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to Join LifeOmic

Former HHS CTO Ed Simcox joins precision medicine software vendor LifeOmic as chief strategy officer.

Global Interoperability Leader Rebrands as Lyniate

After merging in 2019, healthcare data integration vendors Rhapsody and Corepoint rebrand as Lyniate, and promote Scott Galbari to CTO.

HIStalk Interviews Adam Wright, PhD, Director, Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center

Adam Wright, PhD is professor of biomedical informatics and director of the Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, TN.

Tell me about yourself and your new job.

I’m a professor of biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. I also direct the Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center, or VCLIC. As a professor, the main part of my job is research. I get grants, write papers, and teach. I teach a lot of the students in our biomedical informatics and medical school courses. Then I also do some service. I help direct the decision support activities here at Vanderbilt, trying to make sure that we have good alerts and other decision support tools and that we’re not unnecessarily burdening our users.

What are the best practices in getting clinician feedback when developing and monitoring CDS alerts?

You need to involve clinicians when you are developing any alert that will affect them. There’s this tendency for orthopedic surgery to say, “We should ask anesthesia to respond to this alert. We should really tell those guys what to do.” That’s almost never the right answer. It almost always works better when users are involved in the development of an alert.

I’m also a huge fan of using data. We have enough data in our data warehouse to forecast ahead of time when an alert will fire, who it will fire to, and which patients it will fire on. Looking at the data is often really illuminating. We’ve just been dealing with some alerts here at Vanderbilt that were firing in the operating room and suggesting giving a flu shot to a patient who’s in the middle of surgery. That’s just not a timely moment to give a flu shot.

You can figure that out after it’s live, but you are better off looking at some data and guessing what’s going to happen. Then making sure that you’ve added all the proper exclusions and tailoring to make sure that it’s firing for only the right people. That’s the most important thing in building the alert and designing it to not frustrate people.

Once it’s live, you need to, on almost on a daily basis, look at your alerts and see how often they are firing, who they are firing for, and trying to figure out if some users are particularly likely to accept an alert or particularly unlikely to accept an alert. There’s this classic problem where alerts fire for patients who might be on comfort measures only. That may not be appropriate for a lot of alerts. Or there’s a particular user type, like a medical assistant, who may not be empowered to act on an alert, but is receiving it anyway. We have found that by looking at the data, we can add additional restrictions and exclusions to the logic until we get the alerts to the right person at the right time.

We have a goal of between 30% and 50% acceptance for our alerts. We don’t always get there, but we see in the literature a lot of places that are at 1% or 2% acceptance for alerts. That is almost certainly a problem, because then people get fatigued and start tuning the alerts out.

Are hospitals comfortable including a “did you find this alert useful” feedback mechanism, knowing that they are then obligated to take action accordingly? Or to allow clinicians who don’t find an alert useful, such as a nephrologist who is annoyed at drug-renal function warnings, to turn them off?

We have a policy here that we are trying to build feedback buttons into all of the alerts. When you see an alert, there’s a little set of smiley faces in the corner. You can vote whether you like the alert a lot, not too much, or not at all. You can click to vote and you can type in a comment. I try to respond to all of those quickly and try to understand the person’s thinking, their rationale.

We were worried that people would use the feedback comments to to grumble about alerts or how they don’t like the EHR. In fact, people tend to give thoughtful comments about why the alert didn’t apply to a patient or it didn’t fit well in their workflow.

We got another one about a week ago about influenza vaccinations. Some clinics don’t stock the flu shot. They don’t have it in their refrigerator, so they can’t give it. We had some conversations with our leadership about whether we should start stocking and administering the flu shots in those clinics, but decided that wasn’t going to be practical. We were able to then edit the alert so that it doesn’t fire for those people.

I agree that some alerts that might make sense for a primary care doctor or hospitals that wouldn’t necessarily make sense for a specialist who really knows that area. It’s futile to show an alert to somebody who says they don’t want it and our data suggests that they are unlikely to accept it. We have to  target our alerts to people who are likely to be willing to accept them.

It’s almost a false sense of security. If we are really worried about renal dosing for medicines and we know that we have an alert that doesn’t work, we shouldn’t just congratulate ourselves for having a renal dosing alert. We should consider more carefully what workflows we have and what additional protections we could put in place to make sure that patients with impaired renal function get the proper medicines rather than congratulating ourselves for having an alert that we know doesn’t do anything.

Default ordering values are important, as emphasized again in a recent study that demonstrated reduced opioid use when default prescribing quantities were lowered. Do you account for this by assuming that physicians aren’t paying attention and will most often accept whatever comes up by default, or is more complex psychology involved?

We had an admission order set that had cardiac telemetry checked by default. We saw that people were ordering telemetry on almost all of the internal medicine patients when they used that order set. We were getting feedback that in many cases, it wasn’t appropriate. As an experiment, we kept it in the order set, but switched it from being checked by default to being unchecked by default. We saw a huge reduction in the number of patients who were ordered cardiac telemetry.

We worried about the risk of that. We did some analysis to see if patients were either having more bad cardiac events or even just if people were then ordering cardiac telemetry the next day or later in the visit, like they somehow missed it in the admission. What we saw was that there was no increase in cardiac problems. There was no pattern where people were ordering delayed telemetry.

You have to be thoughtful about this. You have to get clinical feedback from users. You have to understand what the risks are. I am a huge fan of measurement. We made this change and we measured it the next day. If we had seen that there was a problem, we would have felt confident that we could quickly roll the change back and analyze it. We felt safer knowing that we would be able to monitor it.

In terms of the psychology, some of it is just being on autopilot. You’re admitting a lot of patients, and the computer in some ways seems to almost speak for the institution. The computer is telling you, “We generally recommend that you order cardiac telemetry for patients like this.” That may not be what the builder of that order set intended when they checked it off, but that’s the message that is getting communicated to the intern or PA. They’re likely to trust that that’s the standard of care, that’s the practice here. I’ve seen that again and again. People are willing to trust defaults.

I don’t think it’s laziness. I don’t think it’s that they don’t read it. A lot of things in medicine are soft calls. You might just want to do what people usually do. Seeing something checked or not checked in an order set is an easy way to think that you’re getting a read of the organization’s standard practice.

Your two most recent jobs have been with huge health systems that were among the last to switch from a homegrown EHR to a commercial product in Epic, and both institutions were known for programming their self-developed systems to give clinicians extensive, documented guidance for making decisions upfront rather than punishing them with warnings when they did something wrong. Does Epic give you enough configuration capability provide similar order guidance capability?

Both organizations had for decades developed and used their own electronic health record and CPOE system and then switched to Epic in the last few years. I had a lot of anxiety about that switch. We were used to having the total control that comes with having developed your own software. We could literally pull up the source code of the order entry screen and change it to do whatever we wanted.

I would say that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of levers we have and customizations that we have available to us in Epic. They have thought through most of the common use cases and built some hooks so that we can even go so far as to write custom MUMPS code that changes the way things work.

We have generally been able to find ways to implement things. They might happen at a slightly different point in the workflow or they might look a little bit different than the user expected, but I would say that it’s rare that we come up with a piece of clinical logic that we are not able to faithfully implement in Epic. I was pleasantly surprised. I was actually quite nervous about this and it went better than I thought it was going to.

How do you approach EHR configuration knowing that changes may take more clinician time or increase their level of burnout?

The EHR gets a lot of blame for burnout, and some intrinsic properties of the EHR contribute to burnout. But I also think there’s a lot of regulatory, quality, and safety programs that are implemented through the EHR. The EHR gets blamed for having to enter all this information or to sign the order in a certain way, but some of that is triggered by external forces, like how we get paid for healthcare or how we report quality.

I generally don’t like it when I am asked to implement decision support purely for an external reason, such as because some regulator or somebody else wants us to do it. I would rather partner with clinicians who are likely to have to actually do the work, asking them if are there alternative workflows that we didn’t think of that could achieve the same regulatory goal and meet our obligation to our payers and regulators without  burdening people with point-of-care, interruptive pop-up alerts.

As we  move toward value-based payment, where we’re paid to take care of a patient over the course of a year, we have more opportunities to use things like registries and dashboards. We can have a care manager or a navigator do some of the work, or send some messaging directly to the patient, instead of popping up a message at the beginning of the primary care doctor visit and forcing them to answer a question right then.

One of the things that I’ve tried to do everywhere I’ve worked is to look at requests such as, “Please build a new interruptive pop-up that affects user X.” We go one step backwards and say, what’s going on that makes you think we need to do that? Have we considered all the options before we do this last-ditch effort of interrupting somebody in the middle of their visit?

What are the most pressing informatics priorities at Vanderbilt?

Physician burnout is certainly one of them. We are hearing increasingly from our users that they are spending a lot of time outside the clinic writing notes and finishing their documentation. We are also adapting the EHR to new care models, like value-based payment and telemedicine. We’ve been working on some new approaches for patients to get care either at home or at satellite sites that are not right here in downtown Nashville that might be more convenient to them. There’s been a lot of work trying to get the EHR to do that.

I also have a big interest in academic informatics. Eighty percent of my job is working as a professor. We started this new VCLIC, the Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center. One of the goals of that is to help us navigate this transition from a self-built EHR to Epic. There’s a lot of things that we used to know how to do. How do we get data out of our system? If we have a new idea for a medication prescribing workflow, how can we pilot it in the EHR? Some of that knowledge went away when we made the transition to Epic.

The goal of VCLIC is to make people at Vanderbilt say, it’s easy to interface with EStar, which is what we call Epic here. Whether that means getting data out of the system or putting a new intervention in the system. I want people in the informatics department, in clinical departments, or the pharmacy to be able to know how to get the data and know how to do stuff.

We call it paving the road. Getting access to the data warehouse might be based on bumping into the right person or getting a favor. We want to figure out, what are the requirements to get access? What training do you need to have? What do you need to do or sign to acknowledge the privacy issues? How do you protect the data? Then make it clear to people how they can interact with this new commercial EHR in the ways that they were used to in interacting with our self-developed EHR for the last couple of decades.

Do you have any final thoughts?

This is an exciting time in the field of informatics. We got through this hump of adoption of EHRs. Most doctors and most hospitals are using EHRs. There’s a growing sense that we are not getting everything we expected or hoped out of that investment.

The good news is that achieving adoption was one of the hardest parts. Now we need to be thoughtful about using data, engaging with users, getting feedback, and making smart decisions about how we can improve the EHR so that we get the value out of it in terms of improved patient outcomes and reduced costs that we were hoping would appear.

Some people are in a moment of despair about EHRs. I’m actually in a moment of real excitement. We have everything lined up to be able to give value. We just need to be smarter about how we do that.

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