Monday Morning Update 2/4/19

February 3, 2019 News 11 Comments

Top News

Dignity Health and Catholic Health Initiatives complete their merger to form the 142-hospital, $29 billion CommonSpirit Health.

The new health system said in the announcement, “We didn’t combine our ministries to get bigger, we came together to provide better care for more people.” I’ll be interested to see the post-merger metrics that prove success beyond the “bigger” part.

CommonSpirit Health will be run by co-CEOs (a horrible idea) from its ritzy headquarters in Chicago. The system does not otherwise operate in Illinois.

Interim co-CIOs Laura Young-Shehata and Denis Zerr are running IT until a replacement for Deanna Wise is hired.

Reader Comments

From Significant Brother: “Re: HIMSS health IT trends forecast. What did you think of it?” I didn’t see anything in it that was particularly insightful or interesting, to be honest, so I didn’t even mention it (plus they called it the “first annual” report, which is a journalistic no-no – you describe something as “annual” only after it has been around for two years). The full-body photo and boilerplate quote from CEO Hal Wolf did little to dispel the perception that it’s just a vanity piece intended to remind everybody how influential HIMSS thinks it is. It also focuses entirely on care providers rather than public health (the former has only a tiny impact on the latter). We have the cliche reference to “the perfect storm” and the yet-again maturing of digital health. The report was obligingly parroted as news by the HIMSS marketing – err, media – division. That group just did a conference tips video that was absolutely painful, ranging from the obvious (wear comfortable shoes, make a schedule, allow enough time between events) to the self-serving (watch HIMSS TV, track down the social media ambassadors as the “celebrities of HIMSS,” and read the vendor-friendly HIMSS publications).

Here’s my scorecard from two years ago on rating self-proclaimed industry thought leaders, which might work well in scoring the LinkedIn profiles of those “celebrities of HIMSS” in the form of social media ambassadors. I hadn’t heard of a particular one, so I checked that person’s LinkedIn and calculated a score of exactly zero — no healthcare experience, no degree, no membership in HIMSS, few health-related tweets, few health-related followers, and a ton of Twitter followers that mostly seem to be the phony ones you buy online to look influential.

From Crafty Ploy: “Re: HIMSS. Are you interviewing CEOs there?” No. I attend anonymously with a phony name, job title, and employer name on my badge. I meet with no one, attend no parties, and don’t even utter the word HIStalk. I just trudge the exhibit hall and then go back to my VRBO place to write up what I saw and heard. You can’t be objective while hanging out with executives or sucking up trying to bag ego-flattering speaking engagements or advisory board positions. Remaining anonymous keeps me objective and transparent since it’s all right here on the page.

From Truant: “Re: Best in KLAS. I didn’t see some department systems in there, like pharmacy.” Best-of-breed ancillary systems have mostly died off. First to go were pharmacy and medication administration systems (due to the need to integrate with ordering), then radiology, and finally lab systems. Those departments liked their standalone systems better, but were outvoted in favor of enterprise integration. About the only survivors in hospitals – and it’s a short-term position as Cerner, Epic, and Meditech eat the world – are LISs from Orchard, SCC, and Sunquest. You do not want to be a standalone hospital system vendor whose company future depends on your customer not ousting you in favor of their EHR’s integrated module. The appeal is obvious — integration becomes a single vendor’s problem and you’re down to one throat to choke.

From Ignoble End: “Re: doctors getting lap dances to prescribe opiates. What’s the world coming to?” The world has already arrived at this destination. Regardless of their expressed noble intentions, everybody (doctors, corporations, patients, software vendors, social media platforms, and politicians) will do whatever rewards them the most. Your only hope is that their most-sought reward is something more altruistic than cash, but you’ll be wrong in most cases. It’s also true that doing something slimy that involves only a relatively small punishment is still a net win. It’s nice but unreasonable to think that doctors are more virtuous than the rest of us.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Three-fourths of poll respondents say they’ll be working harder next week, with identical percentages for attendees as well as those left behind. Let’s agree not to think about how much productivity is lost from attending the annual spring boat show.

New poll to your right or here: Did the VA make the right decision in abandoning its Epic schedule pilot and implementing Cerner instead?

My once-yearly reader survey has drawn the usual mix of positive and negative, but I appreciate every response equally because someone cared enough to fill it out — indifference kills more sites than anything. One randomly chosen respondent will be reimbursed (aka “paid,” but we coyly don’t call it that in healthcare) with a $50 Amazon gift card, so fill it out and nobody will be the wiser whether you’re being nice or just looking for Amazon giftage. I try not to peek before all responses are in, but I’m touched by how many folks have kept reading even after they retired or moved to other industries, as well as by those who apparently worry daily that HIStalk will have gone dark because I’ve lost interest or died (I’m hoping for the former if forced to choose). I can also say that while my audience is self-selecting, I’m sitting on a treasure trove of their feedback that tells me why they keep reading year after year and everybody knows that rewarded behavior is likely to recur.

Here’s the digital technology that could revive Apple and maybe some people besides – create a real-time sensor for measuring blood levels of alcohol and recreational drugs, or use existing ones to detect overdose symptoms and call a pre-defined friend for help.

I got wrapped up in the music that was cranking in a small store I was in the other day, picking up on some deep tracks from Pink Floyd and a few other prog bands. The kid working said it was a Pandora Pink Floyd playlist customized via extensive use of the thumbs up/down option, which I always forget about. It had a few missteps, such as Credence and the Rolling Stones because older people listen to older music and fool the algorithms, especially Spotify’s, into thinking the bands are similar. My search for early Pink Floyd jams led me to new music from Rodrigo y Gabriela, a Mexico-based acoustic guitar duo whose all-guitar cover of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” (from 1971’s “Meddle”) is perfect. I then understandably needed to revisit the stunning original, as recorded by the visionary Floyd live (using their regular touring gear) in the ruins of Pompeii in 1972 with no audience present in a brilliant exploration of a new art form by impossibly god-like band members who were all in their 20s. The contributions of the underappreciated Nick Mason (drums) and Richard Wright (keyboards and vocals) are evident, even more so on “A Saucerful of Secrets.” No crowd noise, no idiots waving cell phones, just the band getting deep into the zone in broad daylight (for some of the tracks) while ignoring the film crew. Just because it’s not loud or flashy doesn’t make it for stoners only. Music as contemplative art for the ages – what a refreshing idea.

If Pink Floyd isn’t your thing (how is that even possible?) then there’s new music from one of my favorite hard-rocking bands, Norway’s The Dogs.

Dear industry people who aren’t technologists: please stop using the phrase “full stack” immediately. Thank you.

Orlando’s weather for HIMSS19 is looking about as good as it did in 2017 in my photos from then above, with highs predicted to be around 80 and lows in the mid-60s. You’ll be sunning yourself while sprawling in the convention center’s questionably hygienic grass under that HIMSS sign before you know it.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Avaya. The Santa Clara, CA-based company offers unified communications and contact center products and services. For healthcare, that means collaboration solutions (mobile communications, multimedia, automated workflows); patient services (resource matching, omnichannel solutions, automated administration), and virtual care solutions and outreach. Seamless care team member communication improves outcomes, provides patient support, and keeps EHR information updated; patient services such as digital scheduling, referrals, reminders, and revenue cycle inquiries create a better patient experience; and telehealth video and outreach provide remote access to specialists and care teams and support care plan coordination. See Avaya at #6451 at HIMSS19 for communications solutions demos. Thanks to Avaya for supporting HIStalk.

Thanks to these companies for recently supporting HIStalk. Click a link for more information.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

People

Waystar hires Steve Levin (Connance) as chief strategy officer and Bill Barrett (Connance) as general counsel.

The SSI Group promotes Mark Blossom to chief data operations officer and Will Israel to VP of enterprise analytics solutions.

Other

The editorial board of the New York Times warns that 23andMe’s consumer DNA testing performs poorly in predicting the risk of developing chronic diseases because it only recognizes a few relevant genetic mutations and thus isn’t a substitute for medical office testing, calling it “more parlor trick than medicine.” The authors describe the company’s BRCA breast cancer test as “like proofreading a document by looking at only a handful of letters” since 23andMe tests only two rare BRCA mutations while ignoring 1,000 others. The tests also offer predictions for diseases that aren’t most often cause by genetics. The article notes that FDA reversed its decision to allow the company to perform health-related tests only because the company posts a host of disclaimers.

In Australia, a law professor questions why any doctor at Queensland Health can change the medical record of any patient in the nine hospitals where IEMR is live.

It’s not just this country that spends ridiculous sums erecting ornate hospital buildings that do little to improve patient care or access – the estimated cost of Ireland’s National Children’s Hospital has swollen to $2.3 billion, or $4.7 million per bed. That price doesn’t include IT systems, the research center, and integrating the three existing hospitals that will be combined. The wildly over-budget project is so expensive that only four beds will be added beyond the total of 473 that were already available.

Here’s a good example of something that clinicians do better than EHRs, at least for now – compare the rise in abnormal liver lab results with courses of drug therapy to see what caused the damage (or false positives, you could also interpret). This might be something that a well-trained machine learning algorithm could have kicked out as suspicious.

Thanks to ethnographic researcher Sam Ladner, PhD (she’s a female, by the way) for tweeting out the link to this Microsoft paper titled “Guidelines for Human-AI Interaction.” The 18 AI design guidelines it lists include some that are particularly relevant to healthcare:

Time services based on the user’s current task
Make it easy to invoke and dismiss the system’s service and to correct it when it’s wrong
Clarify the user’s intent or “gracefully degrade” the system if the user’s goals are not clear
Remember recent interactions to provide user context
Personalize the user’s experience by learning from their behavior
Notify users when capabilities are changed or added

This is a fresh take. IT systems often provide value in catching physician mistakes, but sometimes are over-programmed as an enforcement tool by hospital executives and ancillary departments who are convinced that doctors will harm patients without their wise oversight. That’s a dynamic that needs to be better understood – just how clinically autonomous should physicians be? What organizational structures and policies best protect the patient’s interests? Are we expecting too much or too little from the decision-making of doctors? Should we trust them to turn off EHR oversight (like certain warnings or informational pop-ups) that they find more intrusive than helpful? If medical practice is to be standardized and corporatized, what is the best use of physician expertise?

Sponsor Updates

Liaison Technologies releases a new executive perspective video, “Digital Transformation Starts With Data.”
LiveProcess publishes a hospital emergency preparedness self-assessment quiz.
Health systems realize significant financial benefits from AI-driven revenue cycle solutions from Recondo Technology.
Pivot Point Consulting will exhibit at the AHA Rural Healthcare Conference 2019 February 3-6 in Phoenix, AZ.
Zen Healthcare IT partners with Aigilx Health to deliver healthcare data exchange and interoperability services.

Blog Posts

Integrated prescription drug monitoring supports smarter opioid prescribing (Meditech)
Understanding clearinghouses: why the back end of your PM system matters (Waystar)
Part 3: What You Need to Know About the 21st Century Cures Act: Maintaining a Proactive Clinical Workflow (Netsmart)
Is Your Community Connect Program Delivering Results? (CereCore)
How to increase clean claims and reimbursement rates (Experian Health)
The Surprising Link Between Vendor Management & a Modern Payment Experience (Patientco)
More Voices Join the Physician Burnout Chorus (PatientKeeper)
Top 52 Health IT Conferences to Attend in 2019 (Sansoro Health)
Why PTs Must Stop Obsessing Over Reimbursement Rates (WebPT)

Contacts

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

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11 Comments

Weekender 2/1/19

February 1, 2019 Weekender 1 Comment

weekender

Weekly News Recap

EMDs acquires Aprima
Nordic acquires Healthtech Consultants
Harris Healthcare’s Iatric Systems acquires Haystack Informatics
The VA ends its pilot of Epic scheduling and will instead implement Cerner at all facilities
KLAS releases “Best in KLAS 2019”
Australia’s Queensland Health and SA Health struggle with their Cerner and Allscripts projects, respectively
FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD outlines several ways in which the agency will use digital systems to make healthcare more efficient and patient focused
The VA’s Office of Electronic Health Record Modernization opens positions for deputy chief medical officers to help oversee its Cerner implementation

Watercooler Talk Tidbits

Readers funded the DonorsChoose teacher grant request of Ms. K in Indiana, who asked for math manipulatives and calculators for her fifth grade class. She reports, “My students are very excited about these fun new activities. We use them daily to play math games, explain and show different math processes, and even to check our everyday calculations. Having these hands on tools will allow my current as well as my future students to learn numerous math skills. Being able to visualize, draw, and understand these foundational math skills will allow these kids to become life long learners and the future leaders of America!”

The Internet lit up this week with endlessly retweeted “news” that scientists in Israel have confidently predicted that they will develop a cure for cancer within a year with a “cancer antibiotic.” The coverage proves that even news sites will run anything that draws clicks, actual journalism is basically dead for lack of demand and the real goal is to be first rather than best, and that consumers have no ability to realize they’re being misled. The holes in the story are ample:

Every website picked up the story from the Jerusalem Post without digging further.
The original story had just one source – an interview with the board chair of the company working on the treatment, who has no clinical credentials and is not a scientist (despite the headline). The “complete cure for cancer” quote was his. His previous experience includes running a chicken breeding operation and consulting for a business intelligence company.
The company lists just three employees on its website.
The company has not conducted any human trials, published any research articles, or enlisted the involvement of outside oncology experts, saying it doesn’t have enough money to do so. It has completed one experiment in mice.
The New York Post, Forbes, and Fox News ran with the Jerusalem paper’s headline without doing any research or asking local experts to evaluate the company’s claim. They backtracked a bit afterward, but the revised tweets drew just a fraction of their original uncritical stories.
The company backtracked after higher-quality news organizations questioned the comment, explaining that “cure” means “starting human trials within a year.”

Federal authorities arrest three people for running “birth tourism” companies that charge wealthy, pregnant women who are Chinese citizens big money to bring them to the US for delivering their babies in hotel-like birthing houses, which under US law makes the babies immediate US citizens. The company’s websites pitched customers that their children could get US government jobs, free education through high school, and Social Security benefits even when living outside the country. The companies told the women to lie on their visa application, wear lose clothes through customs to hide their stomachs, list their destination as the Trump Hotel in Honolulu to improve their chances of being ignored by immigration officials, then fly to Los Angeles to deliver. One couple paid a hospital its indigent care rate in cash, then hit Beverly Hills for a shopping spree at Rolex and Louis Vuitton. Sixteen of the 19 people who were charged were clients who ignored court orders to remain in the US to assist with the investigation. They also skipped out on their hospital bills. Estimates suggest that up to 36,000 Chinese citizens have babies in the US each year.

Non-profit dental insurance company Delta Dental takes heat for paying its CEO $14 million (until they fired him for having an affair with a subordinate), paying its top 10 executives more than $30 million, flying board members and their families to Barbados for company meetings, and planning to acquire a for-profit competitor. Dental insurers are minimally regulated, with no requirement that they spend a specific percentage of revenue on care, and are exempt from paying federal income tax. The company gave the excuse all non-profit healthcare companies use when caught lining executive pockets – we have to pay well to attract top talent to benefit patients and we use outside companies to make sure pay is appropriate.

Shriners Hospitals for Children will stop offering inpatient care for children at five of its 20 hospitals, saying fewer patients need care of that level of complexity.

A Miami plastic surgeon’s nationally marketed cosmetic surgery practice – located in a strip mall and offering discounts and payment plans to working-class Hispanic and African American patients – has had eight patients die after botched cosmetic procedures performed in assembly-line fashion. The owner had previously lost his license for allowing unlicensed employees to perform surgery and had changed the business name several times over the years.

A pain management doctor pleads guilty to stealing the IDs of his patients to obtain opioid prescriptions for himself.

A reader sent a link to something that has zero to do with health IT, but is cool (no pun intended). A Michigan school superintendent and a high school principal create a fabulous snow day announcement, featuring amazing acting, humor, and singing to the tune of “Hallelujah.” Surprised by their video going viral, the talented duo followed up with another vortex-related video, this one set to “Frozen.” I could watch these guys all day.

Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital (LA) will stream the San Diego Zoo Kids channel to patient rooms. In related news, Baton Rouge Animal Hospital will offer its patients San Diego Jail TV.

Get Involved

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Morning Headlines 2/1/19

January 31, 2019 Headlines Comments Off

eMDs Acquires Aprima, Further Strengthening Position as a Leading Healthcare Ambulatory Solutions Organization

EHR and practice management company EMDs acquires competitor Aprima.

Freshman Lawmaker Will Oversee VA’s Multibillion-dollar EHR Overhaul

Rep. Susie Lee (D-NV) will take over as head of the House Veterans Affairs Committee’s Technology Modernization subcommittee.

Nordic adds Healthtech Consultants, enters Canadian market

Nordic acquires Canada-based Healthtech Consultants, increasing its headcount to over 1,000.

Harris Healthcare, Through Iatric Systems, Acquires Haystack Informatics

Iatric Systems acquires Haystack Informatics, a patient privacy monitoring startup spun out of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in 2014.

VA Going with Cerner Scheduling Software

The VA will scrap its successful MASS pilot of Epic scheduling and instead use Cerner at all of its facilities.

Comments Off

News 2/1/19

January 31, 2019 News Comments Off

Top News

EHR and practice management company EMDs acquires competitor Aprima.

Reader Comments

From On the Hunt: “Re: Health Catalyst. Completed its second RIF in six months, with all affected employees working in the HCI division (the former Medicity).” I reached out to Health Catalyst, whose statement I’ll summarize as follows:

The company identified an unspecified number of positions that were not financially sustainable as it integrated the former Medicity.
The affected employees will be invited to apply for the company’s 40 open positions, where they will automatically be considered finalists.
Those who aren’t offered or don’t accept a new position will receive a minimum severance of three months and the company’s help in finding a new job.
The company increased headcount from 500 to over 700 in 2018 and expects to add 100 more in 2019.

From Vaporware?: “Re: DoD. I was wrong when I accused Cerner of not being able to share data.” A Bloomberg Law article – of which I can read only the first couple of paragraphs that aren’t paywalled – says that hackers found that the MHS Genesis Cerner system was “not survivable” when military hackers tested its cybersecurity. That sounds like the report from October 2018, but perhaps the formation of a new DoD cybersecurity working group is the new development.

From Robert Lafsky, MD: “Re: NEJM article. I know you’re not a sports guy, but I’m sending this because of its privacy implications and potential qualification as a Weird News Andy item if you read to the end.” A NEJM case study recaps the abdominal issues of an unnamed 18-year-old professional athlete. It wouldn’t take much to identify him from the article – he plays professional sports in the Boston area; he weighs just 72 kg (so that rules out football and probably basketball); he’s just 18, making baseball a strong possibility, probably on a farm team at that age. I scanned past rosters and found one pitcher from the Lowell, MA minor league affiliate that was the only match, although perhaps the patient has been traded in / out since the medical incident whose date was not indicated. The WNA connection is that the patient’s problems and hospital encounters were caused by a toothpick he had swallowed. I’ve poked my nose (and nearly my eye) with a restaurant sandwich’s well-hidden toothpick more than once, so I’m all for stopping the practice of overstuffing sandwiches to the point that inedible hardware is required to hold them together.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Nordic acquires Canada-based Healthtech Consultants, increasing its headcount to over 1,000.

RTI Institute becomes a minority equity investor in analytics and population health management vendor SPH Analytics. The nonprofit healthcare research organization plans to help SPH broaden the scope of its research and consulting services.

Livongo acquires MyStrength, adding the startup’s app-based mental health therapy software to its digital diabetes management program.

Iatric Systems acquires Haystack Informatics, a patient privacy monitoring startup spun out of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in 2014. Terms were not disclosed, though the deal went through Iatric parent company Harris Healthcare. I interviewed co-founder Bimal Desai, MD, MBI in August 2017.

CNBC reports that GE Healthcare will sell off half of its healthcare business in an effort to pay down debt, a move that, combined with its other planned business dealings, could generate $50 billion. GE plans to take its healthcare unit public later this year.

Meditech files its annual report: revenue up 2 percent, EPS $1.51 vs. $2.08. Revenue rose to $488 million, the highest since 2014’s $517 million. Last year’s net income of $56 million is by far the lowest since 2014 and less than half of the $124 million that was booked in 2014 specifically. Product revenue has jumped 30 percent in the past two years. The report indicates that the company commendably pays its executives extraordinarily modestly, gives them tiny bonuses, and does not offer them stock options.

McKesson announces Q3 results: revenue up 5 percent, adjusted EPS $3.40 vs. $3.41, beating Wall Street expectations for both. That excludes the huge boost in last year’s earnings from the White House’s generous corporate tax cuts.

People

Paul Grundy, MD (HealthTeamWorks) joins Innovaccer as chief transformation officer.

Solutionreach hires Nagi Prabhu (Icertis) as chief product officer.

Provider management and credentialing company Symplr promotes Amie Teske to VP/GM of provider management operations and Randy Bahr to VP of product development.

Livongo hires Anmol Madan (Ginger.io) as chief data officer and Julia Hoffman (VA) as VP of behavioral health strategy.

HealthStream names Scott McQuigg (GoNoodle) as SVP of HStream Solutions.

Former National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH joins venture platform LRVHealth as executive advisor.

Sales

Total Life Healthcare, part of the St. Bernards Healthcare system in Arkansas, selects medication risk mitigation, e-prescribing, and EHR software from Tabula Rasa Healthcare.
The VA will implement UpToDate Advanced decision-making software from Wolters Kluwer Health.
Northwell Health (NY) will integrate Jvion’s predictive analytics with its Allscripts EHR to reduce readmissions at 15 hospitals.
Sanitas will offer CirrusMD’s white-label chatbot app to patients at its medical centers in Florida.

Announcements and Implementations

Meditech adds Nuance’s Dragon Medical Virtual Assistant to its Expanse EHR and enhances its population health capabilities using data and analytical insights from Arcadia.

New York HIEs HealthlinkNY and HealtheConnections will merge to create the state’s largest HIE, covering 26 counties.

KLAS issues its “Best in KLAS 2019” report, with overall software suite rankings above and these winners being the most interesting to me:

Large hospital EHR: Epic
Large hospital patient accounting and management: Epic
Community HIS: Athenahealth
Ambulatory EMR >75 physicians: Epic
Ambulatory EMR 11-75 physicians: Epic
Practice management >75 physicians: Epic
Practice management 11-75 physicians: NextGen Healthcare
Practice management < 10 physicians: Aprima, an EMDs Company
HIE: Epic
Laboratory: Epic
Claims and clearinghouse > 20 physicians: Waystar
Home health: Thornberry
Long-term care: MatrixCare
ERP: Workday
Patient access: DCS
Front-end EMR speech recognition: MModal
Patient portal: Epic
Population health: HealthEC
Application hosting: Epic
Management consulting: Premier
Health IT advisory: Optimum Healthcare IT
Enterprise implementation: Impact Advisors
Implementation support and staffing: Galen Healthcare
Partial IT outsourcing: ROI Healthcare Solutions
Revenue cycle outsourcing: Navigant
Strategy, growth, and consolidation consulting: Premier
Value-based care managed services: Arcadia
Cardiology imaging: IBM Watson Health
Large hospital PACS: Sectra
VNA: Carestream
Care management: Casenet

KLAS’s Category Leaders include:

Community hospital EMR: Athenahealth
Community hospital patient accounting and patient management: Athenahealth
Care plans and order sets: Elsevier
Clinical decision support point-of-care clinical reference: Wolters Kluwer
Emergency department: Wellsoft
Retail pharmacy: Epic
Ambulatory RCM: Greenway Health
Ambulatory specialty EMR: PCC
Ambulatory therapy / rehab: WebPT
Behavioral health: Credible
Urgent care: Practice Velocity
Business decision support: Strata Decision
Clinical documentation improvement: MModal
Computer-assisted coding: Dolbey
Credentialing: Verge Health
Document management and imaging: Hyland
Patient flow: Epic
RTLS: CenTrak
Staff scheduling: Schedule360
Physician scheduling: Shift Admin
Talent management: Workday
Time and attendance: Kronos
CRM: Salesforce
Secure communications: Telmediq
Single sign-on: Imprivata
Business solutions implementation: ROI Healthcare Solutions
CDI services: Claro Healthcare
Clinical optimization: Impact Advisors
Revenue cycle optimization: Navigant
Transcription services: MModal
Price transparency: Change Healthcare

KLAS also released its “Global Best in KLAS 2019,” with the leading EHRs by region being:

Asia / Oceania: Cerner
Canada: Meditech
Europe: Epic
Latin America: MV
Middle East / Africa: Cerner

Government and Politics

The VA will scrap its sucessful MASS pilot of Epic scheduling and instead use Cerner at all of its facilities. Epic went live on time and on budget after nine months in Columbus, OH and delivered significant improvement in patient access metrics. Epic also offers FHIR-powered Book Anywhere, which allows VA schedulers to book appointments at any site whether they use Epic or not.

Document Storage Systems will integrate the MyCare iMedicware EHR from Eye Care Leaders with VistA at all VA eye care clinics.

VA Secretary Robert Wilkie downplays the notion that the agency is moving towards privatization in his remarks announcing proposed standards that will allow veterans to seek care outside of the VA system. As vets seek care further afield, the pressure (and media scrutiny) for interoperability between VA facilities and outside providers will likely mount.

Privacy and Security

In Canada, Health Sciences North CEO Dominic Giroux commends hospital staff for the way they handled downtime procedures after a virus took down its IT systems – and those of nearly two dozen area facilities — for several days earlier this month. He says:

The IT staff’s quick decision to shut the system down prevented loss of data: “What we’ve learned from cybersecurity experts is that other hospitals who go through similar situations, 80 per cent of the time, decide not to shut down the systems. It ends up being the equivalent of trying to change the engine while the plane is still flying.”
The HIS team had to manually re-enter data for hundreds of patients during the digital freeze.
A pharmacy robot named Pixie was disabled “with 50,000 unit doses trapped inside it.”
Emergency management training that was conducted a few days prior helped hospital leaders keep staff calm and focused so that clinical care was not affected.
The hospital used runners to deliver lab results.

Other

In Australia, Queensland’s Department of Health puts a stop to the procurement process for a new patient administration system after discovering that EHealth Queensland CEO Richard Ashby had an inappropriate relationship with a staff member who was involved with the $210 million project. Ashby, who has been under investigation by the state’s Crime and Corruption Commission since last year, has resigned. As CEO, he was also the front man for the state’s struggling ieMR EHR roll out. DXC and Cerner had been contenders for the new PAS system, which some department employees said was too short of a list, and Cerner got the contract in 2015.

Interesting: a witness in the federal racketeering case brought against Insys Therapeutics says the drug company hired as a regional sales director a former stripper, who the witness observed at a company-sponsored dinner giving a lap dance to a pill mill doctor (to whom the company also paid consulting fees) in hopes of increasing his inappropriate prescribing of its addictive fentanyl spray.

Sponsor Updates

Sansoro Health names Micky Tripathi (Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative) to its board.
CarePort Health releases a new video, “Unlock Real-Time Data to Better Manage Care.”
CTG appoints Romulo Juarez (Slalom Consulting) managing director, delivery, of its health solutions and life sciences business in North America.
Surescripts joins the Elite Partners Program of the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs.
QuadraMed partners with LexisNexis Risk Solutions to improve patient matching within its Enterprise Patient-Matching Index.

Blog Posts

One Year After Surviving Pending Closure, Rural Alabama Hospital is Still Going Strong (Medhost)
Successful Patient Engagement Strategies (EClinicalWorks)
Healthcare execs and patients agree: AI can improve the patient experience (Formativ Health)
CIOs: 8 Ways to Prepare Yourself for HIMSS19 (The HCI Group)
Powering Patient Relationships – How We Can Help People Prepare for the Future and Still Hope for the Best (Healthwise)
Integrated prescription drug monitoring supports smarter opioid prescribing (Meditech)
Considering a Postmodern Approach to ERP System Selection (Huntzinger Management Group)
Ten Best Practices to Mitigate Cybersecurity Threats (Iatric Systems)
Overcome risk to drive a successful healthcare IT strategy (Part II) (Imprivata)
The Evolution of Health IT: What Lies Ahead (InterSystems)
4 Ways to Make a Difference at HIMSS19 (Spok)
Why Choose Community Connect? (Optimum Healthcare IT)
Better Technology for the Patient’s Sake (EClinicalWorks)
One Year After Surviving Pending Closure, Rural Alabama Hospital is Still Going Strong (Medhost)

Contacts

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

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EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 1/31/19

January 31, 2019 Dr. Jayne 2 Comments

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It’s officially HIMSS time, with the first set of party invitations hitting my inbox this week. I am sad to say that there is so much overlap I’m not going to be able to make half of what I’d like to attend – too many events on Tuesday evening, for sure. I’ve heard from several vendors who are also doing happy hours in the exhibit hall (one that even lets you start getting happy at 3 p.m.) so it’s going to be all about pacing yourself, along with having good shoes.

I’m also starting to get information about product launches or significant updates that vendors are featuring. If you want me to consider dropping by your booth, let me know what you’re showcasing at HIMSS and I’ll see if I can work you into one of my booth crawl schedules. So far, my list of must-see booths include HIStalk sponsors FormFast (#2121 )and perennial Dr. Jayne favorite First Databank (#1921). I’m also looking to attend a session about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s efforts to include voice assistants within their EHR.

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I’ve also got Medicomp (booth 3901) on my must-see list, especially with their new OpEHRation Game. They’re giving away $100 every half hour, so I’m sure there will be lots of others checking it out. I’m looking forward to seeing how they deployed their Quippe Clinical Documentation solution within CareCloud’s platform. They have a dedicated HIMSS page, which was great for better understanding what they hope to accomplish at HIMSS and what they’ll be showing. I’ve heard they’re also getting into the HCC coding space.

I’ll definitely be strolling the hall with phone in hand, capturing the moment and the craziest things I see. After HIMSS, I’ll go back to my curmudgeonly self, keeping my phone out of sight and out of mind bolstered by research that continues to show that trying to capture the moment for posterity actually interferes with the experiences themselves. Research by faculty at the Olin Business School of Washington University in St. Louis also looked at texting during experiences and concluded that “behaviors, such as texting, tweeting, and posting on social media that surreptitiously distract people from the moment” result in “diminished enjoyment.”

I’m always exhausted when I return from HIMSS, so I’m wishing that someone would sneak in while I’m away and install this innovative new sleep platform that has been shown to improve sleep and memory. Maybe the sleep would be more restful – research subjects fall asleep faster when rocking and spend more time in deep sleep.

From Smoke ‘em if You Got ‘Em: “Re: recent piece Thanks for your recent piece on medical marijuana. You’re not the only one doing homework on the topic. Cleveland Clinic has also decided to Just Say No.” The Cleveland Clinic shared their opinion earlier this month in an op-ed piece, stating, “We believe there are better alternatives. In the world of healthcare, a medication is a drug that has endured extensive clinical trials, public hearings, and approval by the US Food & Drug Administration. Medications are tested for safety and efficacy. They are closely regulated, from production to distribution. They are accurately dosed, down to the milligram. Medical marijuana is none of those things.” The piece calls on the US and Ohio governments to “support drug development programs that scientifically evaluate the active ingredients found in marijuana that can lead to important medical therapies.” I suspect the client I mentioned last week will likely decide along those same lines.

Planned Parenthood is entering the world of chatbots with its new offering Roo, which is designed to interact with teens 13 to 17 years old via text message. Topics include birth control and sexually transmitted diseases. The project was funded through a private grant with hopes that teens would embrace the anonymous nature of the chatbot to ask questions they may be afraid to ask elsewhere. When I was a medical student teaching sexual health in a school district where there was a high rate of teen pregnancy in their middle school, we used the low-tech “write your question down and throw it in the hat” to reduce barriers to asking questions. It was amazing what they didn’t know about their own bodies and how pregnancy and diseases can happen.

CMS has released the “What’s Covered” app to display what “Original” Medicare covers for patients. It distills some of the most-visited content from Medicare.gov into a format that can help beneficiaries and their caregivers see what is covered. I can tell you right now that most of my Medicare-eligible relatives have no idea whether they’re on Original Medicare or a Medicare Advantage plan, despite whatever any wording on their materials might say. CMS began its eMedicare initiative in 2018 to deliver information to its beneficiaries, noting that about two-thirds of them use the Internet on a daily or near-daily basis. Other tools are being designed to help patients sort through their coverage options and understand what their choices might do to their out-of-pocket costs. I hope that make those tools available to physicians, because half the time I can’t quickly find the information I need to best counsel patients and loved ones.

The institute for Medicaid Innovation is calling on EHR users to increase their use of ICD-10 codes to document social determinants of health. Z56 covers issues with employment and underemployment. I actually used Z56.5 (uncongenial work environment) last week to document a patient who was having issues with absenteeism due to a coworker harassing her. Z59 covers problems related to housing and economic circumstances including homelessness, poverty, lack of safe drinking water, and more. Both codes are non-billable, but help to quantify the number of patients facing serious challenges.

NCQA is redesigning its Patient-Centered Specialty Practice and Oncology Medical Home programs, with a launch scheduled for July 1, 2019. The redesign mirrors changes to the flagship Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) program, redesigned in 2017. A crosswalk matching the new PCSP program to the 2016 program is available along with a video summary of changes. Practices will engage in ongoing transformation with annual reporting instead of the current three-year recognition cycle. NCQA cites multiple reasons for the change, including increased flexibility for practices, simplified reporting, and better alignment with current public and private initiatives along with greater adaptability to future changes.

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As we tick ever-closer to Valentine’s Day (which some of us will be celebrating at HIMSS) I’ll be mourning the loss of conversation hearts. Candy producer Necco folded last year and the new owner Spangler Candy Company decided not to make any this year because it couldn’t ensure it could meet consumer expectations since the acquisition didn’t occur until September. Hopefully they’ll be back for the 2020 Valentine’s season, but until then, I’ll be looking for other options. I’m betting more than one HIMSS exhibitor will be handing out candy.

If you’re exhibiting, will you be incorporating Valentine’s Day into your booth swag? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

2 Comments

Morning Headlines 1/31/19

January 30, 2019 Headlines Comments Off

Secretary Wilkie: Revolutionizing VA Health Care

VA Secretary Robert Wilkie downplays the notion that the agency is moving towards privatization in his remarks announcing new standards that will allow veterans to seek care outside of the VA system.

EPAS no more as SA govt moves to reset patient records system

SA Health in Australia will make immediate changes to its Allscripts-powered EPAS project after an external report criticized the project’s lack of accountability, poorly articulated clinical benefits, underuse of expert consultants, and lack of physician involvement.

UnitedHealthcare stops sharing data with research group

Healthcare pricing transparency advocates cry foul over UnitedHealthcare’s decision to stop sharing de-identified claims data with the Health Care Cost Institute, which expects a similar move from Humana next year.

Livongo Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire myStrength to Address Behavioral Health Needs for People with Chronic Conditions

Livongo acquires digital mental health therapy startup MyStrength in an effort to bolster its chronic condition management services.

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Morning Headlines 1/30/19

January 29, 2019 Headlines Comments Off

Breaking Down Barriers Between Clinical Trials and Clinical Care: Incorporating Real World Evidence into Regulatory Decision Making

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD outlines several ways in which the agency will use digital systems to make healthcare more efficient and patient-focused.

Doctor booking app Zocdoc will start charging a new patient fee despite objections from some providers

Queenslanders’ health at risk from electronic medical record software, clinicians say

In Australia, Queensland Health’s nearly $1 billion Cerner ieEMR EHR project continues to struggle with mislabeled specimens, missing data, medication errors, and missing test results.

Zebra Technologies to Acquire Temptime Corporation

Zebra Technologies will acquire healthcare temperature monitoring solutions vendor Temptime.

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News 1/30/19

January 29, 2019 News 2 Comments

Top News

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says in an address to the Bipartisan Policy Center that “digital technologies are one of the most promising tools we have for making healthcare more efficient and more patient focused.”

He added that streams of real-world data from EHRs, devices, and medical claims can provide important safety and effectiveness information beyond randomized controlled trials.

Gottlieb says that adding real-world data into regulatory quality programs is a “key strategic priority for the FDA.”

FDA will:

Convene stakeholders to develop a framework for incorporating digital systems into clinical trials oversight
Bring clinical trials to the patient using data from EHRs and wearables
Use software-based learning to analyze real-world data to suggest drug labeling changes
Work with universities to develop an FDA curriculum on machine learning and artificial intelligence and to offer a post-doctoral fellowship on AI tools

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Filling in your HIMSS19 dance card? Check out what HIStalk’s sponsors will be doing there in “HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS19” (online) or downloadable as a PDF file here. Spoiler: they will be doing presentations (with customers in many cases), cocktailing, donating to worthy causes for each booth attendee, and giving stuff away.

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Also for your HIMSS19 list, please drop by our unbelievably tiny and sparsely furnished booth (#4085), perhaps multi-tasking by swinging by on your way to the adjacent restroom. No swag, no BS, just Lorre (who’s stuck solo in there all week) saying hello and the usual cadre of really cool industry people who seek us out. We have nothing to sell and little to give away, although I expect that our friends at Arcadia will again provide the ever-popular conference first aid kits.

Perhaps you’ve basked in the verdant Wisconsin summer moments between sessions of Epic training or UGM, fantasizing about drowsing away an afternoon in the company treehouse or spending a lazy day baring souls with Judy over Chardonnay (a milkshake in her case) in a swing chair as the Epic herd grazes contentedly below in the fragrantly rolling fields. Visitors this week will instead be dashing dangerously from bus to building, appreciating only the geothermal heating and the countless fireplaces that adjoin training rooms. Many of us aren’t thrilled about going to HIMSS19, but Orlando’s blue sky and green grass with highs in the mid-70s are probably sounding pretty good right now to Epic employees as they watch their exhaled breath shatter.

Speaking of weather, the AP Stylebook reminds me of yet another pet peeve, this one involving immaculately coiffed TV weather celebrities. It’s the weather that gets warmer, not the temperature (temperatures, or “temps” as they sometimes say, merely increase). I watch zero broadcast TV except when I’m stuck somewhere, but I’m always amazed at (a) the near-ubiquity of “scare weather” intended to keep people panicked in tracking the steady march of certain Armageddon in the form of a few minor impending flurries or sprinkles; and (b) milking what should be a 10-second update (temperatures now and for the next couple of days, chance of rain or snow) into a grinning, gesticulating, graphics-heavy spiel that lasts several minutes as advertisers wet themselves from excitement. I’m also puzzled (not quite annoyed since I haven’t figured it out) by the suddenly rampant use of the word “inform” in odd ways , such as “to inform product strategy.”

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Zebra Technologies will acquire healthcare temperature monitoring solutions vendor Temptime.

Philips will try to dodge trade war tariffs by swapping production to and from the US and China in the first half of 2019. An analyst likes the company’s recently reported numbers, but says that “Connected Care & Healthcare Informatics was, like previous quarters, well below expectations.”

Interesting: the merging Catholic Health Initiatives and Dignity Health (set to become CommonSpirit Health this week) operate hospitals in 21 states, but none of them are in Illinois even though the combined organization will have its headquarters in a fancy office building on Chicago’s West Loop. A CHI spokesperson says the Chicago office “will house the office of the CEO” even though the 150,000 widgets of production will stay in their non-Illinois trenches. That’s not the stupidest part of the new organization’s plan – the CEOs of both merged organizations will become co-CEOs of the new one, a democratic mess that always results from mergers that one side won’t approve if the other side gets the big chair or more board seats. Co-CEO Kevin Lofton (paid $6.8 million by CHI in the most recent tax year) sits on the board of a drug company and Rite Aid, while Co-CEO Lloyd Dean (his side of the “ministry” paid him over $10 million last year) serves on the board of McDonald’s, so they can do their business stuff far from paying patients. The non-profit, merged ministry’s 140 hospitals will crank out an unholy annual revenue of $28 billion. While I was poring over tax records, I noticed that former Dignity CIO Deanna Wise outearned some of the hospital presidents at an eye-popping $2.3 million for the most recent tax year, eclipsing her CHI counterpart Michael O’Rourke’s $1.3 million. Deanna’s new employer Banner Health paid her CIO predecessor Ryan Smith around $900K.

Patient scheduling website Zocdoc will start charging physician subscribers for each new patient who books an appointment, abandoning the flat-priced subscription model that has been in place since 2012. One dermatologist says that a new patient appointment will cost him an unsustainable $35. The CEO of the Jeff Bezos-backed Zocdoc helpfully advised that half of New York subscribers would pay less (meaning that .. well, it’s pretty obvious) and adds this insultingly dumbed-down excuse as to why the fee structure the company itself developed now makes no sense since it leaves money on the table: “Providers who receive a greater volume of bookings from our Marketplace have benefited the most from this flat fee structure. However, it has been a less sensible economic decision for the many providers who received fewer bookings via our Marketplace.” Punishing your best customers isn’t usually the soundest business strategy.

Apple reports Q1 results: revenue down 5 percent, EPS $4.18 vs. $3.89, beating expectations for both. The company has stopped reporting individual product unit sales that would likely be embarrassing in the case of the IPhone, whose sales revenue dropped 15 percent year over year, a situation Apple blames on China’s economic uncertainty instead of offering a premium-priced product in a commoditized market. Services revenue was flat at $10.9 billion, representing 13 percent of total revenue.

Sales

Summit Healthcare (AZ), an 89-bed specialty provider, chooses Allscripts 2bPrecise for precision medicine. The hospital is also replacing Allscripts Paragon with Sunrise.
West Calcasieu Cameron Hospital (LA) will implement Wellsoft EDIS.
Northeastern Health System (OK) selects the IntelliGuide financial advocacy and patient eligibility system from PatientMatters.
Orlando Health is implementing Collective Medical’s EDie help its ED clinicians identify and support patients at risk of opioid use disorder and those exhibiting opioid-seeking behavior.

Announcements and Implementations

A former IBM VP says the company fired her after she warned her bosses that their layoff plans would expose the company to age bias lawsuits. She also says she ordered to ignore the federal government’s request to provide the names of those employees over 50 who were laid off from her Nevada business unit as the company attempted to “correct seniority mix.” Catherine Rodgers offers a simple way to resolve the issue: “IBM is a data company, Release the data.”

Health Catalyst releases Rapid Response Analytics Solution, which reduces the time required to develop analytic insights by 90 percent by allowing less-technical people to answer their own questions.

Clinical Architecture releases Symedical 2.1 for clinical content management.

Government and Politics

The VA’s Office of Electronic Health Modernization is recruiting deputy chief medical officers holding the MD/DO degree and state medical license to share EHR best practices, oversee EHR change management, and coordinate with their DoD counterparts. The four-year term positions pay $145,000 to $245,000 per year and require relocation to Washington, DC, Seattle, or Kansas City.

Walgreens will pay $209 million to settle federal charges that it defrauded Medicare and Medicaid by dispensing more insulin pens to patients than their prescriptions called for, falsified claims information, and programmed its pharmacy computer system to prevent its pharmacists from dispensing less than a five-pen box regardless of the quantity actually ordered.

Privacy and Security

Facebook blocks crowdsourced tools that allowed journalists and the public to see how its advertisers – especially those running political ads — target users. Facebook says the change was necessary to protect user privacy under its terms of service.

Singapore’s Health Ministry says the medical records of 14,200 people with HIV were posted online by a previously jailed and deported American who had lied to officials about his own HIV status. Authorities think the information was obtained by the man’s lover, a doctor who formerly headed up a public health unit until he was fired for submitting his own blood samples so that his partner wouldn’t be fired.

Other

China’s Ping An Health Medical Technology Company installs one of its unstaffed “One-minute clinics” (they don’t really pay attention to US trademarks like MinuteClinic over there) in a highway rest stop, offering drivers and passengers medical advice and prescription drugs that have been “cryogenically refrigerated to ensure their quality.” It’s basically a drug vending machine attached to a Porta Potty-like telemedicine booth. “Cryogenic” actually means using temperatures lower than –238 degrees Fahrenheit, which if the announcement were true would be great for those who enjoy watching liquids explode.

Stanford researchers, including iconoclast John P. A. Ioannidis, warn that healthcare “unicorns” like Theranos often have not published peer-reviewed studies to prove their claims, reiterating a previous definition of “stealth research” in which seemingly brilliant ideas are packaged within aggressive corporate announcements and mass media hype rather than any forms of transparency, accountability, and credibility that might help identify investment thesis holes that range from irrational exuberance to outright fraud.

In Australia, a newspaper’s investigation finds that Queensland Health’s Cerner ieEMR EHR project continues to struggle with mislabeled specimens, missing data, medication errors, and vanished test results. Clinicians in critical areas such as ICU and anesthesia are struggling most after replacing their best-of-breed products. Cost has risen from the original 2017 estimate of $428 million USD to nearly $1 billion today,. Cerner was given a no-bid contract for the project. EHealth Queensland is under investigation by the Crime and Corruption Commission.

Also in Australia, SA Health will make immediate changes to its Allscripts-powered EPAS project — including applying an upgrade and “rebranding” the system – after an external report criticizes the project’s lack of accountability, poorly articulated clinical benefits, underuse of expert consultants, and lack of physician involvement. The government advocates starting over at two sites to decide whether keep Allscripts, also indicating that it will scrap the billing module for a system specifically built to meet the needs of hospitals in Australia. The project has consumed $229 million of its budgeted $301 million at the 25 percent completion mark. Politicians are arguing whether the software or the implementation is the problem and whether changing the project’s name is just a way of saving face.

You would think marketing people would know how to craft a message that doesn’t instantly make the rest of us roll our eyes, but Illinois Medical District innovation community decides that “launching a new brand identity” is newsworthy, bragging on its “clear, concise, and arresting new creative assets” and reiterating that it offers “the full suite of new branding assets” (the announcement gratingly uses the word “assets” four times in six paragraphs). Change your brand identity all you want, but expect universally negative reaction for thinking that (a) it’s important news; and (b) an announcement is necessary at all, no different than someone issuing a press release touting how much better they look after finally getting new clothes.

A new book tells the story of Paul Le Roux, a South African computer programmer who made hundreds of millions of dollars selling opioids and other prescription drugs to US customers without ever setting foot here, dealing with small-town accomplices (doctors and pharmacists) who solved his “last mile” problem for cash as customers found his online pharmacies via paid search engine ads. His cartel was run from a laptop, openly publishing pharmacy websites whose ownership was obscured by the domain registrar and servers that be created himself. He branched out into dealing arms; created a fleet of yachts, planes, and drones to move hard drugs around the world; set up his own militia in Somalia; bought gold and laundered money; and hired mercenaries to collect money and kill opponents. He was caught by the DEA in a sting operation after a 10-year investigation by young Minneapolis DEA diversion investigator named Kimberly Brill. This “Breaking Bad” type story has Netflix written all over it.

A woman sues a hospital, claiming that she gave her permission to turn off life support for her brother, only to find that the patient she had been visiting for days was someone else with the same name and similar appearance. Family members gathered to say goodbye to Fred Williams as he died, only to find out as they were making funeral arrangements that their Fred Williams was actually in jail for assault — they had authorized pulling the plug on someone else’s Fred Williams.

Sponsor Update

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Audacious Inquiry employees take part in the MLK Day of Service.
AssessURHealth will exhibit at the Greenway Health User Exchange February 5 in Atlanta.
CoverMyMeds will exhibit at the NACDS Regional Chain Conference February 3-5 in Palm Beach, FL.
Divurgent publishes a new white paper, “Navigating Healthcare Through Today’s Cybersecurity Landscape.”
Hospital application performance and availability monitoring technology vendor Goliath Technologies achieves its ninth consecutive year of record growth.

Blog Posts

The Engage Suite Series #1 – Bridging the Integrated Care Journey (Agfa Healthcare)
Seven Tips for HIMSS Success (Access)
How to Choose a Domain Name that Builds Trust (Atlantic.Net)
Part I: Maintaining a successful downtime preparedness strategy (Bluetree)
What is the cost of a HIPAA audit? (Datica)
Six Reasons to Initiate a Network Assessment Now, Not Later (Burwood Group)
How Providers Can Reduce Stress When Using EHRs, PMs, and Other Health IT Software (ChartLogic)
Patients at the Center of the System: Coffee and a Chat with CoverMyMeds’ Perry Lewis and Patient Advocate Melissa Paige (CoverMyMeds)
The Changing Role of the CIO: The Patient Experience (Culbert Healthcare Solutions)
How Analytics Can Help During Flu Outbreaks (Dimensional Insight)
Urgent Care Quarterly Annual Report Edition – Sneak Peek (DocuTap)

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Contacts

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

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2 Comments

Morning Headlines 1/29/19

January 28, 2019 Headlines Comments Off

Leading Hospital Supply Chain Management Solution Rebrands as Syft®

Management Health Solutions celebrates its twentieth anniversary by rebranding to Syft.

Investcorp Announces Acquisition of Health Plus Management

Global investment company Investcorp acquires practice management business Health Plus Management for an undisclosed amount.

New App Displays What Original Medicare Covers

CMS launches the What’s Covered Medicare app to give members easier access to program resources and coverage information.

Cork-based healthcare group secures contract for 15 US hospitals

Ireland-based healthcare supply chain software company Genesis Automation signs its first US health system deal with 15-hospital Novant Health (NC).

HIV Status of More Than 14,000 People Leaked in Singapore Data Breach

Health Ministry officials in Singapore say an American man who formerly worked in the country leaked the records of over 14,000 HIV patients.

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HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS19

January 28, 2019 Uncategorized 6 Comments

Access

Booth 3571

Contact: Mike Kelley, VP of sales
mike.kelley@accessefm.com
314.330.5021

Paper-based consent forms (especially informed consents) and other paper-based processes cause all sorts of problems. Simply put, Access EForms solves your paper challenges with an EHR-integrated and tablet-enabled electronic form and e-signature experience. We spend most of our time figuring out how we can more deeply integrate our solutions into your EHR UI and workflow to make life easier for you and your team. Come find us at booth 3571 and we’ll show you what your paperless future looks like.

Bernoulli Health

To arrange a meeting, contact Sam Larson.

Contact: Sam Larson, VP of marketing
slarson@bernoullihealth.com
203.877.1999

Bernoulli is the leader in real-time solutions for patient safety, with more than 1,200 installed, operational systems. Bernoulli One is the market’s only real-time, connected healthcare platform that combines comprehensive and vendor-neutral medical device integration with powerful middleware, clinical surveillance, telemedicine/virtual ICU, advanced alarm management, predictive analytics, and robust distribution capabilities into ONE solution that empowers clinicians with tools to drive better patient safety, clinical outcomes, patient experience, and provider workflow. For more information about Bernoulli One, visit www.bernoullihealth.com.

Black Book Research

To arrange a meeting, contact Doug Brown.

Contact: Doug Brown, managing partner
Doug.Brown@BlackBookMarketResearch.com
727.463.7806

Bluetree

Booth 2187

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

We’re an Epic-focused consulting firm making a meaningful and measurable impact in healthcare. Based in Madison, WI, our more than 250 employees work from coast to coast and help customers maximize return on their Epic investments with an integrated approach. We help our customers get there by enlisting an end-to-end delivery process that taps into our 50/50 blend of operational and Epic experts.

Promotion: For every badge we scan, we’re donating one tree in our booth visitors’ names to the National Forest Foundation. We’re also co-sponsoring a networking reception with Instamed at Blue Martini on Tuesday from 6:30-10:30pm, and hosting an in-booth Happy Hour on Wednesday from 3:30-5:30pm.

Cantata Health

Booth MP65

Contact: Neil Taurins, VP of sales
Neil.Taurins@cantatahealth.com
512.917.9819

Cantata Health provides RCM and EHR solutions for acute, post-acute and long-term care facilities. With efficient, flexible, and modern solutions, Cantata Health guarantees to improve patient visibility throughout the continuum of care while increasing your bottomline.

Cantata Health will host a cocktail reception at the Hilton Orlando on Wednesday, February 13 at 7pm. Please contact Neil Taurins to join.

Ciox

To arrange a meeting, contact Cindy Bagley.

Contact: Cindy Bagley, marketing director
marketing@cioxhealth.com
800.737.2585

Every record represents a real person. Each data point is a potential game-changer in someone’s life – a connection to be understood and acted upon. And so our goal is to enable greater health by improving the way health information is managed. For 40 years, Ciox has advanced the healthcare industry through better health information management and exchange of health information. Our broad reach in medical records extends across industries, allowing us to modernize workflows, facilitate access to clinical data, and improve the accuracy and flow of health information. We help our clients manage, protect, and leverage health information to achieve operational improvements, optimized revenue, and better patient outcomes.

Clinical Architecture

Booth 3973

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

Founded in 2007 by a team of healthcare and software professionals, Clinical Architecture is the leading provider of innovative healthcare IT solutions focused on the quality and usability of clinical information. Our healthcare data quality solutions comprehensively address industry gaps in content acquisition and management, content distribution and deployment, master data management, reference data management, data aggregation, clinical decision support, clinical natural language processing, semantic interoperability, and normalization.

CloudWave

Booth 4107

Contact: Christine Mellyn, director of marketing
cmellyn@gocloudwave.com
781.636.8169

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 like Office 365 and Microsoft Azure. 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. Stop by booth 4107 to charge your device, enjoy a cup of coffee, and learn more.

Collective Medical

Booth 888, Kiosk 12 (Personalized Health Experience Pavilion)

Contact: Kat McDavitt, chief marketing officer
kat.mcdavitt@collectivemedical.com
610.392.4726

Collective Medical empowers care teams to improve outcomes by closing the communication gaps that undermine 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 Medical’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 Medical is proven to streamline transitions of care, improve coordination across diverse care teams, and reduce medically unnecessary readmissions.

At 3:45pm on Tuesday, February 12 in the Personalized Health Experience Pavilion, Collective’s head of product, Mandira Singh, will give a talk titled, "Collaboration as a Radical Approach to the Opioid Epidemic." At 4pm on Thursday, February 14 in room W206A, Benjamin Zaniello, MD Collective’s CMO and Beth Landon, the New Mexico Hospital Association’s head of policy, will present a session titled, "New Mexico Reduces Avoidable ED Visits with Technology."

ConnectiveRx

Booth 921

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

ConnectiveRx is a leading, technology-enabled life sciences company that improves lives by simplifying how patients get on and stay on therapy to maximize the benefits of specialty and branded 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 copay programs, managing awareness/adherence communications, and establishing a state-of-the-art hub service, we help our customers overcome barriers to access and use so patients can experience better health. Visit us at booth 921 to experience our interactive digital roadmap detailing how we touch each critical stage of the patient journey.

CoverMyMeds

Booth 3278

Contact: Angela Masciarelli, PR manager
amasciarelli@covermymeds.com
614.360.1735

It all started with a question: “Why won’t my health plan cover my meds?” This was the catalyst of an idea to create a solution that enables providers and pharmacists to electronically manage their prior authorization requests. The CoverMyMeds platform was created to provide a solution that benefits all areas of the healthcare network. As a result, growth in one area of the business adds value to every other part of the network. In fact, in 2018 alone we saved providers $109 million by keeping staff off fax and phone.

Learn how you can be a part of this ever-growing network of more than 700,000 providers, 62,000 pharmacies, and payers representing 94 percent of US script volume to answer the next big question: “How do I get my patients the medications they need at a price they can afford?”

Come visit CoverMyMeds at HIMSS19 to learn more about our solutions that help patients get the medications they need to live healthy lives. There is also a Twitter Machine at the CoverMyMeds booth that dispenses exciting prizes that will "knock your socks off!"

Culbert Healthcare Solutions

Contact: Brad Boyd, president
bboyd@culberthealth.com
781.935.1002, Ext. 113

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.

Datica

Booth 621

Contact: Laleh Hassibi, VP of marketing
laleh@datica.com
888.377.3184, Ext. 725

Get through the maze of compliance and onto the cloud faster with Datica. Whether your biggest challenge right now is integrating your digital health product with a hospital or getting through a 2019 HITRUST audit, our products can help.

Visit Datica at booth 621 to see demonstrations of Compliant Kubernetes Service, Compliant Managed Integrations, and our newest SaaS product, the Cloud Compliance Management System. Reserve a demo spot ahead of time and get a MiiR cup or a copy of our new book, “Complete Cloud Compliance” at the show. You can also see a demo of Datica in the Microsoft booth or listen to a presentation on preparing for a 2019 HITRUST assessment in the AWS booth.

Definitive Healthcare

Booth 2770

Contact: Aly Scott, CMO
ascott@definitivehc.com
617.821.9200

Join Definitive Healthcare at both 2770 for HIMSS19! Definitive Healthcare delivers a best-in-class data and analytics platform on healthcare providers for unmatched sales and marketing intelligence.

This is a big year for Definitive Healthcare at HIMSS: As of January 2019, Definitive Healthcare acquired the data services business and assets of HIMSS Analytics, including their Logic, Predict, Analyze, and custom research products. With this acquisition, Definitive Healthcare further bolsters its leading market intelligence platform, which already helps thousands of customers successfully engage with healthcare providers and advance industry efficiencies and best practices.

Looking for more reasons to visit our booth? Enjoy our beer keg and enter to win a free Oculus Rift Virtual Reality Headset. To arrange a meeting or software demonstration with a Definitive Healthcare representative at HIMSS19, book a time in Calendly.

Giveaway: Please visit our HIMSS booth (2770) to grab a beer from our keg and enter to win an Oculus Rift Touch Virtual Reality Headset.

Diameter Health

Booth 8441 and in the Interoperability Showcase

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

Diameter Health enables clinical insight through the normalization, cleansing, de-duplication, and enrichment of clinical data from across the care continuum. This creates a single, unified source of longitudinal, structured patient information for improved care and actionable analytics. The Diameter Health platform empowers organizations that depend on multi-source data streams, such as HIEs, ACOs, health systems, and health plans to realize greater value from their data. Visit us at booth 8441 to see a demo of our technology, and discuss the challenges and opportunities of clinical data standards. Pick up a free mobile phone wallet when you mention HIStalk.

Dimensional Insight

Booth 4358

Contact: Priscilla Ballaro, director of marketing
pballaro@dimins.com
781.229.9111

Every member of your healthcare establishment has a critical mission that may feel impossible. Dimensional Insight invites you to meet with us at HIMSS19 to share your daily challenges so that we can make your mission possible with the KLAS award-winning Diver Platform. Visit us at booth 4358 to gather intelligence on how to explore and use your data to make confident decisions, as well as to be entered in a raffle to win an Echo Show.

Direct Consulting Associates

To arrange a meeting, contact David Duggan.

Contact: David Duggan, account manager
dduggan@dc-associates.com
440.371.7783

Direct Consulting Associates is the relationship-focused executive search and contract staffing firm that assists top-tier organizations with recruiting and acquiring high-impact HIT talent for mission-critical technology initiatives. We are constantly in contact with hiring managers, candidates, and opportunities across the healthcare IT space.

EClinicalWorks

Booth 149

Contact: Laura Bujnowski, sales
sales@eclinicalworks.com
508.836.2700

Come to booth 149 to see how EClinicalWorks is transforming healthcare IT, with leading-edge products and services for ambulatory and specialty practices, urgent care facilities, ASCs, health centers, and hospitals. Our intuitive EHR lets providers document on the device of their choice. The EClinicalWorks Virtual Assistant and EClinicalWorks Scribe are streamlining workflows and helping reduce the risk of physician burnout. Our interoperability solutions deliver the most up-to-date patient information, on demand and at the point of care. EClinicalWorks strengthens patient engagement with kiosk check-in, Healow apps, and Healow TeleVisits. Our solutions for population health include data analytics and dashboards to improve planning and close care gaps. And Healow Insights automates the sharing of clinical records and supplemental data between providers and payers to streamline quality reporting. Together with our 15,000+ customers, EClinicalWorks is promoting patient safety, healthier societies, and understanding of the healthcare challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.

Ellkay

Booth 3671

Contact: Ajay Kapare, VP of marketing & strategy
ajay.kapare@ellkay.com
201.808.9128

Ellkay is a recognized healthcare connectivity leader, providing solutions and services nationwide. With 16 years of industry experience, Ellkay empowers hospitals and health systems, diagnostic laboratories, EHR/PMS companies, ACO and HIE companies, and other healthcare organizations with cutting-edge technologies and solutions. With over 50,000 practices connected, Ellkay’s system capability arsenal has grown to over 700+ EHR/PMS systems across 1,100+ versions.

At Ellkay, we are committed to making interoperability happen and are focused on innovation. Stop by our HIMSS booth (3671) to learn how we can help your organization with secure and efficient “data plumbing” for complete data connectivity.

Elsevier

Booth 3331

Contact: Coleen Stilwill, director
C.Stilwill@elsevier.com
404.574.9189

Elsevier enables you to make faster and better decisions throughout the patient journey. Our expert content and technology solutions help you to turn information into actionable knowledge to drive improved outcomes and more cost-effective care. Stop by our booth to:

See an exciting virtual presentation: “Achieving High Quality Care with Next-Generation CDS,” featuring a panel of informatics experts from leading healthcare organizations. Everyone who attends a virtual panel session is entered into hourly drawings to win a Google Home or Oculus Go VR Headset.
Get product demos for advanced clinical decision support, clinical practice, patient engagement, clinical reference and decision support, and learning and competency management.
Participate in product development research interviews.
Find out how to partner with us.

You can also find us at the Interoperability Showcase (booth 9100) and at presentations for Innovation Live, Lighting Sessions, and Personalized Health Experience.

EMDs

Booth 3100 and 9100

Contact: Patrick Hall
phall@emds.com

EMDs combines leading technologies with tailored services to remove operational burden and empower healthcare providers to maximize the impact of their care. Founded by physicians, EMDs brings decades of expertise and understanding to our integrated EHR products, practice management software, RCM solutions, and credentialing services for medical practices and enterprises. With tens of thousands of deployed clients across a range of specialties and settings, our extensive experience allows us to craft proven, transformative solutions that meet the unique needs of healthcare organizations, enabling unmatched productivity and a superior experience for patients and practitioners alike. Expert Solutions. Stronger Partners. Healthier Patients. Connect with us at www.emds.com and @emds.

To learn more about how Aprima, an EMDs company, can help your practice or organization, visit us at HIMSS19. We will be in the exhibit hall at booth 3100 and in the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase 9100 Hall F. While you’re there, you can see for yourself why our latest acquisition, Aprima EHR/PM has earned back-to-back Best in KLAS awards for both 2019 and 2018 in the Small Practice Ambulatory EMR/PM Category (1-10 physicians) and learn more about how Aria Health Services can meet your revenue cycle needs.

EMDs is participating in the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase. As part of the Clinical Exchange & Price Transparency tour featuring Surescripts National Record Locator & Exchange technology, this showcase is a collaboration of more than six health IT vendors and will demonstrate how EMDs uses interoperability standards to exchange information and improve the quality and value of care provided.

Join us as we follow Angela Davis, a 52 year-old with Rheumatoid Arthritis, as she moves across the country and visits multiple care providers – primary care, specialist, and emergency – in different care settings using multiple EHR technology platforms. Automated processes for clinical information exchange, drug price transparency, electronic prior authorization, and specialty prescribing enable Angela and her care team to make better informed treatment decisions that improve outcomes and the overall healthcare experience.

Where: Hall F – Booth 9100|Tangerine Ballroom

When: Tours of Clinical Exchange & Price Transparency start 15 minutes past each hour

Engage

To arrange a meeting, contact 509.230.8763 or rsvp@thinkengage.com.

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

Engage is the premier vendor for Meditech application consulting and hardware technical services. Please visit with us during our coffee hour at the NetApp booth (2779), Tuesday from 10-11:30am. Engage is also co-hosting a bourbon tasting with Pure Storage on Tuesday and Wednesday from 2:30-5pm in booth 3827. Please be sure to register for the Meditech Customer Appreciation Celebration Wednesday evening from 7-10pm at Mango’s Tropical Cafe, co-sponsored by Engage. To register, visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/meditech-customer-appreciation-event-himss19-tickets-53251735374.

Epsi

Booth 3501 (Allscripts booth)

Contact: Ralph Keiser, CEO
ralph.keiser@epsi.io
512.745.2559

Epsi has launched its new cloud-based Cost Accounting application, the first application on its innovative RealCost platform, architected for the cloud and leveraging Amazon Web Services’ state-of-the-art technology. Epsi has the leading suite of integrated solutions that provide both the tools and knowledge to attain superior financial outcomes. Epsi’s holistic approach includes capital management, operational budgeting, strategic planning, cost accounting, labor productivity, and decision-support modules. Each component contributes to faster identification of fundamental business issues and helps avoid costly missteps. Together, the suite, including the new cloud-based offerings, provides enterprise-wide perspective proven by customer success and awarded for industry-leading innovation.

Experian Health

Booth 2033

Contact: Kristen Simmons, SVP of strategy, innovation & marketing
kristen.simmons@experian.com
949.567.7675

HIMSS Educational Session – Continuing Education Credits available. “Dive into the world of data: The intel you need now.” Uplift the patient experience and your business results. Attend one of two 30-minute sessions on February 12 at 4pm or February 13 at 10am. A reception will follow the 4pm session on February 12; drinks and appetizers will be provided.

First Databank (FDB)

Booth 1921

Contact: Scott Ashworth, VP of sales
sashworth@fdbhealth.com
800.633.3453

FDB (First Databank), part of the Hearst Health network, 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 four decades of experience in transforming medical knowledge into actionable, targeted, and effective solutions that help improve patient safety, operational efficiency, and healthcare outcomes.

FDB will be launching Targeted Medication Warnings – our NEW, patient-first approach to medication guidance; and AlertSpace Analytics to help users identify insights to optimize alert management and crowd sourcing optimization opportunities.

We will host a wine and cheese reception in booth 1921, Wednesday, February 13 from 4:30 – 6pm to promote the launch of the Targeted Medication Warnings product (also, visitors may keep the stainless steel stem-less wine glass!). We will serve coffee in our booth throughout the exhibit.

Case study presentations highlighting FDB solutions:

“Dignity Health Boosts Medication Adherence with SMART on FHIR (Meducation®)” on Monday, February 11 at 3pm at the Rosen Centre in Rosen Centre Grand C.
“SMART on FHIR Integration to Improve Medication Adherence (Meducation®)” on Wednesday, February 13 at 8:30am at the Orange County Convention Center in W304E.

Formativ Health

To arrange a meeting, contact Mike Demuth.

Contact: Mike Demuth, VP of sales
mike.demuth@formativhealth.com

Formativ Health offers technology and services that enable hospitals and health systems to give their patients a high-touch, consumer-first experience. At HIMSS this year, we’ll demo our Patient Engagement Platform in the Salesforce booth (3311), to show how we can improve efficiency, schedule utilization, patient payments, appointment logistics, and more.

Fortified Health Security

Booth 2889 and 400-67 (in the Cybersecurity Command Center)

Contact: Judy Cooper, director of marketing
fortified@fortifiedhealthsecurity.com
615.600.4002

Join the Fortified Health Security team at booth 2889 or in the Cybersecurity Command Center (400-67) to gain mission-critical insight on the latest vulnerabilities in cybersecurity and details on escalating cyber attacks. Fortified Health Security teams with healthcare organizations to develop dynamic, agile cybersecurity solutions that help our partners proactively mitigate cyber risks, resolve IT performance gaps, and maintain industry-mandated compliance throughout their organization. We offer our clients access to a comprehensive suite of cybersecurity services designed explicitly for the healthcare industry. Our expansive portfolio of strategies include:

Connected medical device security.
Data-loss prevention.
Vulnerability threat management.
HIPAA risk analysis.
Security information and event management.
Penetration testing.

From initial risk assessment to ongoing support (and every step in between), Fortified Health Security’s team of cybersecurity experts helps reduce IT gaps and minimize system risks for seamless, speed-of-light performance at all times. For more information, visit www.fortifiedhealthsecurity.com.

Forward Health Group

To arrange a meeting, contact Cameron Nankivil.

Contact: Cameron Nankivil, corporate development analyst, sales operations associate
cameron.nankivil@forwardhealthgroup.com
608.347.0073

Data + Analytics x Visualizations x Passion = Improved Outcomes. Forward Health Group has a population health management solution that does what it’s supposed to do. It’s a data strategy and analytics platform that’s ahead of the curve. It’s able to measure care effectiveness and optimize networks. It becomes the catalyst for care improvement and is the key to managing risk and being financially successful. This makes real change possible. Fast forward to value-based reimbursement.

Glytec

To arrange a meeting, contact info@glytecsystems.com or 864.370.3297.

Contact: Jeremy Hogg, VP of population health
jhogg@glytecsystems.com
615.268.2392

What can your hospital, health system, or payer organization do, right now, to markedly improve outcomes, safety, and cost of care for patients with diabetes? Partner with Glytec. We offer a turnkey, virtual care program proven to reduce A1C by an average of 2.7 percentage points, saving you an estimated $7,560 per patient (or per member), per year. We combine FDA-cleared technologies with the services of diabetes care management professionals to optimize insulin therapy for your highest-risk patients and deliver the results that matter most – rapid attainment of target blood glucose and sustained reduction in A1C. Our program centers on use of Glucommander Outpatient, a pioneering digital therapeutic (software-as-a-medical-device) able to respond to blood glucose trends in a dynamic, highly personalized, and evidence-based manner to ensure people with diabetes are taking the right dose of insulin at the right time.

Goliath Technologies

Booth 527 (Citrix Ready Partners booth)

Contact: Michael Clark, VP of marketing
michael.clark@goliathtechnologies.com
856.857.5882

Learn how to ensure that patient records are always available with:

The Industry’s only purpose-built modules for Cerner, Epic, Meditech, and Allscripts EHR systems.
A single console combining metrics for EHR performance, Citrix performance, and end-user experience.
Unique products available for purchase directly from Cerner, and allowed to monitor Cerner RHO.
The only monitoring and troubleshooting tools available from the Epic App Orchard.
A proactive early warning system that troubleshoots your entire delivery infrastructure, automatically.

Stop by the Goliath Technologies booth to learn why hospitals like UHS, Catholic Health Initiatives, Monroe Clinic, NorthBay Healthcare, and many more trust Goliath to help healthcare IT anticipate and troubleshoot issues before users are impacted. You can also enter our drawing for an Amazon Echo Spot.

HBI Solutions

To arrange a meeting, contact Eric Widen.

Contact: Eric Widen, CEO and co-founder
ewiden@hbisolutions.com
415.350.3140

HBI Solutions was founded in 2011 by a physician, a data scientist, and a healthcare IT business executive who shared a vision of improving health and reducing costs. HBI partners with healthcare organizations worldwide to deliver actionable information that helps providers reduce patient health risks, improve care quality, and lower the cost of care. The HBI Spotlight solution is grounded in clinical care and data science, and the analytic approach and methods are prospectively tested, peer-reviewed, and published in leading scientific and medical journals. Visit HBI online at www.hbisolutions.com.

HCTec

To arrange a meeting, contact Rob Borella.

Contact: Rob Borella, VP of marketing
rborella@hctec.com
615.786.9496

Join us at The Pub for the Tennessee HIMSS Chapter reception on February 12 at 5:30pm. Email info@hctec.com for further details and an invitation.

HealthCast

Booth 4114

Contact: Rachel Stephenson, event and social coordinator
rstephenson@identityautomation.com
281.220.0021

Identity Automation helps healthcare providers enhance clinical workflows, improve patient care, and embrace security. For over 20 years, HealthCast has designed innovative clinical workflow solutions purpose-built for healthcare’s mission-critical environments. Now, with Identity Automation’s acquisition of HealthCast, our complete portfolio of identity and access management (IAM) solutions offer a better alternative for addressing healthcare’s regulatory, identity lifecycle, and integration challenges. Identity Automation operates globally, with tens of millions of identities managed across on-premises and cloud resources.

Identity Automation will be featuring our award-winning HealthCast product line alongside our RapidIdentity IAM solution in booth 4114. Stop by to demo our solutions and be entered for the chance to win discounts and free licenses for ExactAccess, QwickAccess, EPCS, and Remote Access.

Stop by our booth for a demo and you will be automatically entered for a chance to win:

500 ExactAccess one-year subscription licenses.
250 EPCS one-year subscription licenses (existing customers only).
Remote Access for 250 users.
Fifteen-percent discount on a one-year subscription license of QwickAccess (with a pre-scheduled demo).
A Peleton bike.
Plus many more booth giveaways you’ll have to come by to receive!

Need a new headshot for your LinkedIn profile? We’ll provide free, professional headshots in booth — no demo required!

Healthfinch

Booth 2790

Contact: Dawn Burke, director of marketing
dawn@healthfinch.com
608.561.1844, Ext. 17

Healthfinch develops the Charlie Practice Automation Platform, which helps organizations reduce provider burnout, improve quality metrics, and enhance patient satisfaction. Charlie seamlessly integrates with EHRs to automate routine, repetitive workflows, allowing clinicians to spend more time on direct patient care and less time performing non-reimbursable, below-license busywork. Learn more at healthfinch.com.

Please visit us at the Allscripts booth at 12pm on Tuesday, February 12 for a fireside chat with Healthfinch founder Jonathan Baran. Afterward, Healthfinch will host an in-booth happy hour from 4-6pm. Visit with the Healthfinch team at booth 2790. To schedule a meeting during HIMSS, please email sales@healthfinch.com with your availability.

Healthwise

Booth 4449

Contact: Bruce Hedemark, account executive
BHedemark@Healthwise.org
208.331.6936

Since 1975, our singular mission has been to help people make better health decisions. The Healthwise mission, combined with our innovative spirit, leads to health education, technology, and services that power patient relationships. From the point of care to coordinating patients beyond the clinical setting, Healthwise easily embeds within existing workflows to deliver enterprise-wide solutions. Patients access relevant health education wherever they are, on any device.

Iatric Systems

Booth 400-61 (Hall A – Cybersecurity Command Center)

Contact: Judy Volker, marketing director
judy.volker@iatric.com
978.805.3191

Secure remote access. Protect patient privacy. Hacking was named the #1 health technology hazard of 2019 by ECRI Institute. And internal users still cause 56 percent of healthcare breaches, according to Verizon’s 2018 Data Breach Investigation Report. Come to our kiosk in the Cybersecurity Command Center to learn how hospitals are securing remote access and successfully reducing patient privacy threats. Be sure to attend our 20-minute case study presentation, “Confront Internal & External Threats,” on Wednesday, February 13 at 10:15am in Cybersecurity Theater 2.

IMO

Booth 4859

Contact: Dennis Carson, director of tradeshows and events
dcarson@e-imo.com
314.308.3378

IMO is the most-widely used terminology service for EHRs with over 4,500 hospitals and 500,0000 clinicians relying on it every day. IMO provides over 1.5 million diagnoses descriptions and code mapping, ensuring that the patient encounter is accurately documented with the correct terms and billing codes.

IMO Lightning Session: “A Smart Solution for Cumbersome EHR Problem Lists: A Case Study,” with Shaun Miller, MD, associate CMIO, Cedars-Sinai, February 12 at 3:15pm in Hall D, booth 7145.

Wine in the booth: Join IMO for a glass of wine in one of our unique tumblers February 12 and 13 from 4:30 – 6pm in booth 4859. Toast Valentine’s Day with IMO on Thursday, February 14 from 12-2pm.

Booth presentation: “HIMSS19 Tales from the CPO Trenches” on Wednesday, February 13 at 3:30pm in booth 4859. Hear from two battle-hardened chief product officers – one from a large and prominent healthcare system in Southern California and the other from a dynamic and rapidly growing technology firm in the EHR space. This is a facilitated discussion covering industry, healthcare delivery, and innovation at Cedars-Sinai, and how tech companies can work best with large provider organizations. Both will address the future of health IT, so it’s well worth the time. Open to all HIMSS19 attendees, this is of value to provider organizations, CMIOs, CNIOs, CIOs, CEOs, and director-level hospital executives.

Imprivata

Booth 2959

Contact: Kerry Pillion, director of corporate communications
kpillion@imprivata.com
781.761.1452

Think Healthcare. Think IT Security. Think Imprivata. Only Imprivata offers the most complete end-to end identity and access management platform, purpose-built for healthcare. Visit us at booth 2959 and explore:

Interactive demos on clinical efficiency, multifactor authentication, EPCS, and patient identification.
Revealing stories on healthcare solutions presented by your peers, while you relax in our theater.
Thought-provoking insights into the future of healthcare security and more global regulatory changes.

Learn more at https://www.imprivata.com/himss19.

Leidos

Booth 1209

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

Stop by the booth to discover how we are helping healthcare organizations improve patient care, optimize clinical workflows, improve financial performance, and enhance public health as part of our mission to help create a healthier world. Stop by for a chance to win a drone.

LiveProcess

To arrange a meeting, contact Terry Zysk.

Contact: Terry Zysk, CEO
tzysk@liveprocess.com
603.759.1221

Born in the crisis-oriented world of emergency management, LiveProcess has more than a decade of success enabling large and complex networks to plan for and respond to critical, catastrophic, and time-sensitive incidents. We now bring our proven logistics and coordination expertise across healthcare settings, within and beyond hospital walls, enabling personnel to take control of situations and collaborate to resolve operational disruptions, urgent healthcare needs, and routine transitions in patient care. Headquartered in Chelmsford, MA, more than 650 healthcare organizations and public agencies rely on LiveProcess’ unmatched mobile SaaS solutions to effectively manage, analyze, and respond to changing conditions. Learn more about our approach to emergency management and clinical communication and coordination on our blog at www.liveprocess.com/blog.

Loyale Healthcare

To arrange a meeting, contact Michael Morrison.

Contact: Michael Morrison, chief marketing officer
michaelm@loyale.us
406.868.9179

Loyale Healthcare is committed to a mission of turning patient responsibility into lasting loyalty for its healthcare provider customers. Based in Lafayette, CA, Loyale and its leadership team bring 27 years of expertise delivering leading financial engagement solutions for complex business environments. Loyale currently serves approximately 2,000 healthcare providers across 48 states. Loyale recently announced an enterprise-level strategic partnership with Parallon, including deployment of its industry-leading technology to all HCA hospitals and physician groups nationwide.

Loyale Healthcare will have several specialists in attendance at HIMSS this year. We’re not exhibiting this year, but we are eager learn more about your patient-pay challenges. Loyale Patient Financial Manager is the industry’s leading end-to-end patient financial engagement platform. Let’s see if we can make a difference for your patients and your bottom line. Interested in learning more? Contact Michael Morrison, CMO, at michaelm@loyale.us or 406.868.9179. We’ll gladly make arrangements for a conversation at this year’s HIMSS conference. We look forward to seeing you there.

MDLive

Booth 6979

Contact: Michelle Rider, SVP of marketing
mrider@mdlive.com
972.345.6400

MDLive is delivering the future so you can deliver the best digital telehealth patient care today. The future is here. Instant communication, world-wide connectivity, new concepts, cutting-edge technology, and the upheaval and overthrow of past paradigms. How do you manage, let alone stay in the forefront, of consumers’ demands and shifting utilization? We are your partner in the digital healthcare space. We’ve perfected a frictionless patient experience, created superior telehealth professional services, designed varied market solutions, will support you with specific adoption and buy-in strategies, offer interoperability, and are Medicare and Medicaid plan experts.

What you can learn and do at the MDLive booth:

Talk to a sales representative.
Learn about the exciting new offerings we are adding to our suite of products and services for 2019.
Experience a demo of the platform.
Learn about MDLive Engage for driving utilization at your health system.
Talk with our CMO about joining our network of providers.

Giveaways: We are giving away many prizes at our booth. Scan your badge for a chance to win an Apple Watch.

Medhost

To arrange a meeting, contact Brian Grant.

Contact: Brian Grant, senior director of marketing
brian.grant@medhost.com
615.761.1998

Medhost has provided products and services to healthcare facilities of all types and sizes for 35 years. Today, more than 1,000 healthcare facilities are partnering with Medhost and enhancing their patient care and operational excellence with its clinical, financial, and operational solutions.

Whether you are a clinician, an administrator, or work in healthcare IT, Medhost has a solution with you in mind.

The Medhost Healthcare Hero Utility Belt includes:

Fully integrated EHR.
Emergency department information system.
Hosted and managed solutions.
Revenue cycle solutions and services.
And exceptional customer support and implementation services.

For more information about Medhost solutions and services, visit www.medhost.com.

Medicomp Systems

Booth 3901

Contact: James Aita, director of business development
jaita@medicomp.com
647.207.0080

Medicomp Fixes EHRs Where They Hurt – Experience the Medicomp Cure in Booth 3901. Are you suffering from EHR aches? Disorganized data? Quality quandaries? Medicomp has the cure. Isn’t it finally time to fix your EHR AND win prizes? To learn more, play our OpEHRation Game and see our solutions in action. Plus, we’re giving away $100 to a lucky winner every 30 minutes. To reserve your space to play OpEHRation or to schedule a 15-minute demo with the Medicomp team, visit www.medicomp.com/himss19. If you have any questions, please email himss@medicomp.com.

Also, you’re invited to join Medicomp and Phoenix Children’s Hospital on Tuesday, February 12 at 1:30pm in room 311 for “Enhancing Patient Care with Physician-Driven Documentation at Phoenix Children’s Hospital,” presented by Vinay Vaidya, MD CMIO and VP at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, and Michael Shishov, MD a practicing pediatric rheumatologist. Can’t make the live session on Tuesday? Join us in our booth for a Q&A with Phoenix Children’s on Tuesday at 4pm. Refreshments will be served.

Meditech

Booth 3921

Five decades. One EHR. No limits. More than ever, Meditech’s reputation for excellence resounds across every care setting. As we celebrate 50 bold years of vision and innovation, we invite you to see healthcare through a whole new lens with Expanse, the premier EHR for the digital healthcare paradigm. Our cutting-edge solutions help organizations and providers all over the world to take on the challenges of healthcare’s ever-expanding landscape. Come see the latest solutions Meditech Expanse offers for engaging patients, improving clinical workflows, adapting to value-based care, and much more.

You’ll also get to see clinicians demonstrating our solutions LIVE, showing how you can reclaim your productivity. Hear from industry experts in Meditech booth 3921, and learn to work more efficiently, access information faster, build stronger relationships with patients, and more!

Join our #HIMSS19 Tweetup on Tuesday, February 12 at 12:30pm to discuss "The Nurses’ Voice: Incorporating Nurse Feedback to Improve Care."

Midmark RTLS

Booth 2909

Contact: Stephanie Bertschy, senior marketing manager
SKBertschy@Midmark.com
231.313.8564

Better care doesn’t happen by chance. It happens by design. To help you design better care in your health system, Midmark provides a complete, connected ecosystem of solutions. Fueled with accurate data from our real-time locating system (RTLS), thoughtfully designed workstations, diagnostic devices and more, we’ll help you transform your clinical spaces to provide an exceptional care experience for every patient. Midmark RTLS, formerly Versus Technology, uses both precise and WiFi real-time locating system (RTLS) technology to effectively manage mobile assets, enhance safety, and improve patient flow. Let our lean workflow consulting, implementation services, and industry-leading location accuracy help you improve the delivery of quality care and enhance the patient experience.

Visit the Midmark RTLS booth, 2909, for LIVE demonstrations featuring a fully operational patient flow system, along with new software options that make it simpler than ever to optimize patient flow. Want to know more? Don’t miss the following session by a client who has experienced first-hand the benefits of RTLS, improving exam room utilization by 67 percent, despite moving to a facility with 40-percent less space: “Using RTLS Data to Increase Ambulatory Care Capacity,” with presenter Rodney Haas, VP of operational excellence at the University of Minnesota Health Clinics and Surgery Center, Tuesday, February 12, at 3pm in room W204A.

MModal

Booth 2079

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

Join MModal as we showcase our our cloud-based clinical documentation solutions that connect workflows for efficient and accurate medical speech recognition, medical transcription, CDI, and coding. We facilitate physician-patient relationships by making it easy for doctors to capture the patient story, and by delivering information when it is needed most – at the point of care.

National Decision Support Co.

Booth 4185

Contact: Mary LaRusso, director of marketing
mlarusso@nationaldecisionsupport.com
847.345.2648

Join National Decision Support Co. at HIMSS 2019! The HIMSS Global Conference & Exhibition brings together 45,000+ health information and technology professionals, clinicians, executives, and market suppliers from around the world. NDSC, a Change Healthcare company, is the market leader in EHR integrated decision-support solutions. CareSelect leverages our evidence-based clinical standards, analytics, native workflow integration capabilities, and services to enable value-based care and clinical process improvement. Through CareSelect, healthcare organizations identify and eliminate waste and care variation in order to save money and improve quality. CareSelect has facilitated more than 30 million clinical decision support consultations at more than 500 health systems, representing more than 3,000 acute care facilities nationwide. Join us in booth 4185 to find out more. Make your NDSC in-booth appointment today!

Netsmart

Booth 1413

Contact: Cory Harden, business development
charden@ntst.com
913.242.6078

Visit with us at HIMSS19 to learn from one of our experts how Netsmart is going beyond the EHR to integrated care, and enter to win a Roomba!

NextGate

Booth 926

Contact: Mary Molaskey, sales development representative
mary.molaskey@nextgate.com
928.237.2939, Ext. 109

Stop by booth 926 to learn how NextGate can help your organization overcome the clinical, operational, and financial challenges that result from duplicate records and disparate EHR and IT systems. As the global leader in healthcare enterprise patient identification, NextGate’s flagship EMPI platform currently manages patient identities for more than two-thirds of the US population.

During HIMSS19, our executives will be on hand to discuss how NextGate will continue to pave the way for a new era in patient matching and provider data management with advances in geocoding, machine learning, referential data, and mobile application for patient enablement. For every visitor that comes to our booth, NextGate will make a donation to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. We’ll double that donation if you pre-schedule a demo or attend one of our SDOH panels on Tuesday, February 12. To learn more about NextGate’s HIMSS19 activities, visit https://nextgate.com/events/himss19 or follow us on Twitter @NextGate.

Nordic

Booth 2579

Contact: Michelle Lichte, EVP of client partnerships
events@nordicwi.com
608.268.6900

NVoq

To arrange a meeting, contact 866.383.4500 or connect@nvoq.com.

Contact: Kristen Ayers, director of marketing
kristen.ayers@nvoq.com
303.304.7021

NVoq offers a variety of healthcare-oriented, HIPAA-compliant speech solutions. Our desktop client, SayIt, works seamlessly with any EHR and is compatible with both PCs and Macs. SayIt offers highly accurate, secure, cloud-based speech recognition technology that saves providers time and money. We also offer a wireless mic and tablet solution. For more information about the NVoq platform, please contact us at connect@nvoq.com.

Obix by Clinical Computer Systems

Booth 8559 (in the Intelligent Health Pavilion)

Contact: John Murray, national accounts manager
john.murray@obix.com
888.871.0963, Ext. 648

Clinical Computer Systems will be exhibiting at HIMSS19 demonstrating the Obix system in the Intelligent Health Pavilion (booth 8559), in the LDR room, and at a kiosk. The Obix system will also be shown in the Interoperability Showcase (booth 9100) as part of the connected demonstration and integrating with Epic in the Mother and Infant Mortality Prevention use case.

Visit our booths in the IHP and Interoperability Showcase where demonstrations will provide firsthand experience of our integration capabilities and our clinical decision support. Your visit will also provide the opportunity to learn more about our capabilities, whether it be the premises-based Obix system or the Obix Hosted Solution.

Clinical Computer Systems stands out in the industry affirmed by KLAS as the Category Leader in Labor and Delivery nine out of 10 years. As a leader, we never stop seeking innovative solutions. Our commitment to the development of the Obix system is based upon solutions that incorporate changes in technology, regulations, and standards in the obstetrical department to support hospitals’ strategic initiatives. Ultimately, our goal is to provide our customers with software that incorporates the clinical workflow specialized for perinatal care.

OmniSys

To arrange a meeting, contact Scott Warshaw.

Contact: Scott Warshaw, CFO
scott_warshaw@omnisys.com
214.459.2574, Ext. 2577

OmniSys is a technology company that helps pharmacies and pharmaceutical manufacturers drive growth by engaging patients, competing on value and distinguishing their brands. With over 25 years of experience, we leverage our unique market insight, pharmacy workflow expertise, and extensive industry knowledge to deliver valuable solutions to our customers. We provide medical billing, immunization services, and patient communication solutions for pharmacies and consumer engagement programs for pharmaceutical manufacturers that drive value and deliver real results. OmniSys currently serves over 25,000 pharmacies, connects to hundreds of payers, and touches millions of patient lives.

OnPlanHealth by Flywire

To arrange a meeting, contact Patrik Vagenius.

Contact: Patrik Vagenius, VP of sales, healthcare
patrik.vagenius@flywire.com
219.229.5733

Flywire is a Signature Sponsor at the HIMSS pre-conference Revenue Cycle Solutions Summit, where Leslie Richard from CHI will present a 15-minute case study alongside EVP and GM, Healthcare John Talaga. "Owning the Patient Financial Experience In A Consolidated World: A Catholic Health Initiatives Case Study" will be presented on Monday, February 11 at 2:10pm.

Flywire’s healthcare platform was developed in collaboration with hospital partners by the creators of the industry’s first online patient billing solution and is infused with the intelligence and expertise developed over 30 years in the industry. Co-founded and lead by John Talaga, an industry leader who has partnered with hundreds of healthcare providers to develop innovative patient billing and payment solutions, Flywire’s platform offers a complete patient pay strategy that fills the gaps in revenue cycle processes in order to enhance collections while building strong, long-term relationships. Please contact Patrik Vagenius at patrik.vagenius@flywire.com if you would like more information on Flywire’s innovative healthcare payments platform.

Flywire’s OnPlan Health is a full-service patient billing and payment platform that engages patients with responsive payment offers, based on their profile and ability to pay. This creates a personalized, relationship-building financial experience that improves response time to settle balances on mutual terms, reduces patient calls, prevents unnecessary placements to agencies, and increases cash. OnPlan combines accounts into a single view, both online and offline, providing a seamless experience for patients and providers, including the tools that revenue cycle teams need – a robust CRM, automated payment posting, performance analytics and reporting, and payment security and compliance. OnPlan makes it easy for providers to optimize their revenue cycle strategy by integrating seamlessly with any existing systems and processes.

Optimum Healthcare IT

To arrange a meeting, contact Larry Kaiser.

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

Optimum Healthcare IT is a Best in KLAS Healthcare consulting firm based in Jacksonville Beach, FL. We offer expertise in advisory services, EHR implementation, EHR training and activation, security, managed services, community connect, ERP, and ancillary services such as laboratory. We are hosting a Lunch and Learn on “Optimizing Outcomes with Real-Time Data Harmonization” on Tuesday, February 12. Click here to learn more and register.

PatientBond

Booth 4591

Contact: Brent Walker, SVP of marketing & analytics
brent@patientbond.com
513.314.5981

Founded in 2011, PatientBond’s mission is to leverage healthcare consumer insights and innovative technology solutions to help its clients better navigate the rise of consumerism in healthcare and evolving reimbursement models. PatientBond’s highly configurable communications platform leverages a proven psychographic segmentation model developed by healthcare consumer experts from Procter & Gamble to motivate and influence patient/member behaviors. PatientBond supports a diverse set of digital workflows to help our clients build a tighter bond with their patient/member population while improving healthcare consumer acquisition, loyalty, and health outcomes. PatientBond is a portfolio company of First Health Capital Partners. Information about PatientBond is available at www.patientbond.com.

PatientKeeper

Booth 1903

Contact: Kathy Ruggiero, senior director of marketing
kruggiero@patientkeeper.com
781.373.6100

PatientKeeper software optimizes EHR systems to streamline physician workflow, improve care team collaboration, and bolster revenue. Over 400 provider organizations comprising more than 65,000 physicians use PatientKeeper. A

t HIMSS19, PatientKeeper will showcase its integrated software suite including CPOE, medication reconciliation, e-prescribing, clinical documentation, sign-out, and more – and point solutions, such as physician charge capture and clinical communications. In addition, visitors can see PatientKeeper’s joint solutions with Medhost and ShareableForms. Medhost now offers its inpatient EHR customers PatientKeeper’s mobile apps, while ShareableForms is integrating PatientKeeper Charge Capture with its iPad-based EHR lite app.

Giveaway: The first 50 visitors to PatientKeeper’s booth (1903) each day will receive PatientKeeper’s popular “Physicians save lives. I save physicians.” T-shirt.

PatientPing

To arrange a meeting, contact SVP, Head of Growth Brian Manning at bmanning@patientping.com.

Contact: Melissa Palardy, senior marketing manager
mpalardy@patientping.com
401.309.4848

PerfectServe

Booth 1113

Contact: Carlene Anteau, VP of marketing
canteau@perfectserve.net
865.212.6380

PerfectServe (booth 1113) is building healthcare’s most advanced communication and collaboration solution to unify the entire care team across the continuum – from inpatient, to outpatient, to patients at home. The secure platform uses advancements in mobility, AI, and analytics to optimize scheduling, automate clinicians’ communication-driven workflows, eliminate non-clinical tasks, and decrease clinician burnout, resulting in quicker time to treatment and superior patient outcomes. PerfectServe’s scalable cloud-based architecture is not affected by on-site outages, allowing the 500,000-plus clinicians who rely on the platform for clinical communication to focus on delivering the best patient experience possible.

Wrap up your day on Tuesday and Wednesday for Happy Hour in our booth from 4:30-6pm.

PeriGen

We will be at the Qualcomm Life booth 5759

Contact: Mike Espy, strategic account director
mike.espy@perigen.com
773.322.5162

PeriWatch Vigilance is an automated early warning system for labor and delivery. Using artificial intelligence and other analytical techniques, PeriWatch Vigilance notifies clinicians when a patient’s condition is worsening.

Philips

Booth 2101

Contact: Kaitlin Pierce, marketing leader
kaitlin.pierce@philips.com

Philips’ mission is to continuously improve the health outcomes of patient populations through effective insights, monitoring, interventions, and programs. Our portfolio of diverse solutions empowers our customers to deliver care more effectively. By aligning care delivery strategies across the entire continuum of care – from the ICU and the hospital bedside, to out-of-hospital care with remote monitoring programs – we enable a strong collaboration between patients, providers, and payers through interconnected platforms and technologies. Stop by booth 2101 to learn more about how Philips is improving the lives of 3 billion people by 2025.

Phynd Technologies

Booth 975

Contact: Keith Belton, VP of marketing
Keith.belton@gmail.com
978.421.5710

Your providers are your lifeblood. Every step of your patients’ journey – from website to scheduling to discharge to care coordination – requires provider information. Isn’t it time to invest in a platform that manages all employed, credentialed, referring, and affiliated providers … so your operations hum, as you scale? Phynd manages all operational provider data – who your providers are, where they work, their expertise, and what networks they serve. Using Phynd, health systems enroll, manage, report on, and search for providers. Phynd integrates with EHRs, websites, and other systems that depend on intelligently searchable provider data. It powers core processes via easy-to-use provider enrollment, management, search, and reporting. Health system leaders use Phynd … Yale New Haven, Kettering Health Network, Michigan Medicine, UNC Health Care, Duke Health, Orlando Health, and more … 250+ hospitals and growing. Join the crowd! Come by booth 975 to learn more!

Pivot Point Consulting, a Vaco Company

To arrange a meeting, contact Rachel Marano.

Contact: Rachel Marano, managing partner
rmarano@pivotpointconsulting.com
773.633.3448

Pivot Point will have an open meeting space at the Urban Tide Restaurant in the Hyatt (connected to the convention center) with food and drinks. If interested, please contact us via phone 800.381.9681 or email info@pivotpointconsulting, or simply stop by on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday between 9am and 4pm.

Pivot Point Consulting is giving away some amazing gifts as part of our Back to the Future theme for HIMSS19. Win a set of Apple AirPods, a pair of Original Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses, or a Patagonia hip pack. Come to our Tuesday night event at 6pm at Marlow’s Tavern in Pointe Orlando to enter the drawing. We’ll be giving away a prize every hour and you must be present to win. Register here: www.pivotpointconsulting.com/himss19. No vendors, please.

PMD

To arrange a meeting, contact sales@pmd.com or 800.587.4989, Ext. 2.

PMD gives healthcare professionals powerful, intuitive, mobile software that improves patient care. With PMD’s mobile communication, data capture, and care navigation platform, healthcare teams finally have an elegant and simple technology to maximize efficiency and collaboration, capturing everything right at the point of care. PMD interfaces with all major EHRs, hospital systems, and medical billing systems, enabling the efficient sharing of data and cutting down on medical errors. The PMD team is committed to developing the best solution and providing superior customer service. For more information, contact PMD.

PreparedHealth

To arrange a meeting, contact Tim Coulter.

Contact: Tim Coulter, COO
Tim@preparedhealth.com
707.330.7870

PreparedHealth’s solutions safely links hospital case managers with home health aides, skilled nursing facilities, social workers, and other post-acute providers, enabling all parties to share patient information and status reports electronically – and all with the intuitive simplicity of familiar social media platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn. By facilitating a more accurate, real-time exchange of information, PreparedHealth helps patients receive higher quality care as they transition from hospital to home.

Recondo Technology

Living Room #3

Contact: Elyse Lazartic, marketing director
marketing@recondotech.com
303.974.2895

Recondo delivers industry-leading automated, accurate, and actionable financial clarity to all participants within the healthcare revenue cycle. Recognized by Black Book Research as one of the top three leaders in RCM software, Recondo empowers more than 900 hospitals with solutions that connect providers, payers, and patients to ensure proper payments across the care continuum. The company’s patented software and expertise streamline operations and allow providers to be paid more, faster, and at a cheaper cost. Recondo brings efficiencies and cost savings to patient access through to payment processing — a continuum today where inaccuracy and inefficiencies currently cost US healthcare a staggering $480 billion per year.

Promotions: Come get your special pair of Recondo socks and learn about integrating Best in KLAS patient access content directly into your Epic system with RevSmart in HIMSS Living Room #3.

Redox

Booth 7861

Contact: Erin, program manager
paige@redoxengine.com
608.535.9501

Redox accelerates the development and distribution of healthcare software solutions with a full-service integration platform to securely and efficiently exchange data. Provider organizations and technology vendors connect once and authorize the data they send and receive across the most extensive interoperable network in healthcare. Redox exists to make healthcare data useful and every patient experience a little bit better. Learn how you can leverage the Redox platform at www.redoxengine.com.

Join us on Monday night for a Block Party at The Pointe sponsored by Redox, PointClickCare, and ImageMover. RSVP here. Stop by the Redox booth (7861) for demos from our customers at 1pm and 3pm on Tuesday and Wednesday, and at 11am and 1pm on Thursday.

ROI Healthcare Solutions

Booth 4573

Contact: Jason Berry, SVP of sales
jason.berry@roihs.com
678.270.2867, Ext. 201

A Brief Word About ROI: Top Rated KLAS Leader in Business Solutions Implementation and Partial IT Outsourcing. ROI Healthcare Solutions is healthcare’s trusted IT services partner, founded in 1999. We save clients time and money, creating clinical, operational, and financial excellence through ERP and EHR initiatives. ROI offers industry-centric project management, consulting, implementation. optimization, support, and staffing services. Our leadership is committed to delivering quality services with highly engaged team members to clients who appreciate long-term partnerships.

About Our Practice Areas: ROI’s HIS practice focuses on managing, implementing, and optimizing clinical, revenue cycle, technical, and reporting systems such as Cerner, Siemens, AllScripts, McKesson, Epic, and Meditech. We are the top-rated KLAS Partner in Partial IT Outsourcing. We are also a Cerner Preferred Collaborator with multiple resources certified through Cerner’s Revenue Cycle Certification Program. Our core offerings center around project management, legacy support, application management/shared services, data migration/extraction, and decommissioning services. Our proven methodologies are applied to create smooth transitions of people, processes, and systems for healthcare providers across the country. ROI is a CloudSuite-specialized Infor Alliance Partner and KLAS Category Leader that works with providers to reduce costs, increase efficiency, create confidence, and drive success of planning, implementation, and optimization of Infor’s ERP and BI solutions. We give life to our clients’ mission and vision through optimizing processes, people, and technology. We are recognized by both Inc 5000 as a fast-growing private company and Modern Healthcare as the #23 Best Place to Work in Healthcare. ROI has been rated within KLAS Research’s "Partial IT Outsourcing" category, with a current score of 95.7.

ROI will exhibit this year within the largest HIMSS State Chapter Pavilion – Georgia. (Click here to see our exact location within the convention center.) We invite our clients, prospects, and partners to our booth, so we can exchange mutually beneficial information and figure out how we can help one another.

Daily raffles will include gift cards, a Megaboom Speaker, and fun/functional giveaways. We will announce winners each day of the conference, as well as at the Georgia HIMSS Reception on Tuesday, February 12 at 4:30pm in the pavilion.

SailPoint Technologies

Kiosk 400-89

Contact: Matthew Radcliffe, director, healthcare vertical
matthew.radcliffe@sailpoint.com
410.937.2562

SailPoint enables healthcare providers to confidently secure patient data and other sensitive information while improving user access to drive better operational workflows. Recognized by Gartner, Forrester, and KuppingerCole as the leading authority on identity governance, SailPoint delivers modern, comprehensive identity solutions that are central to security, privacy, and compliance. Its technology provides process automations that increase operational and cost efficiencies. Furthermore, SailPoint solutions reduce cybersecurity and compliance risks inherent to manually governing a diverse user population with multiple personas and access requirements across cloud and on-premises environments.

Schedule a private visit in meeting pod 400-105 to discover how smart identity will help your organization optimize workflow while improving security and compliance. You can also stop by to fill out a quick survey to instantly generate your organization’s identity score – an indication of your cybersecurity and compliance risk. We’ll be giving away a $100 Visa Card to each organization who consults with us!

Join us Wednesday, February 13 at 4:45pm in the Cybersecurity Pavilion – Theater B to attend a panel discussion on how smart identity will aid healthcare provider organizations.

Visit SailPoint’s kiosk 400-89 at your convenience for live demonstrations and conversation.

Sansoro Health

Booth 5649

Contact: Kelly Thotland, marketing specialist
kelly.thotland@sansorohealth.com
952.465.7903

Sansoro Health provides powerful, one-stop integration solutions for enterprise health technology leaders so they can rapidly deploy and scale innovative solutions. Sansoro Health believes deeply in the power of innovation and collaboration to usher in the next generation of healthcare. To learn how Sansoro enables integration at the speed of innovation, visit us at booth 5649. At our booth, we’ll have information on the advantages of API integration in healthcare, a Plinko board to play for prizes, and a charging station for your devices to keep you connected at the show.

Also, subscribe to our new 4×4 Health podcast series on ITunes featuring opinions from industry innovators, media, analysts, and clinicians, including Dave Butler, MD, Calyx Health; Ed Marx, CIO, Cleveland Clinic; Don Rucker, former ONC director; Nick Van Terheyden, MD founder and CEO, Incremental Healthcare; Mark Hagland, editor-in-chief, Healthcare Informatics; and Aneesh Chopra, president, Care Journey; as they discuss predictions on the future of healthcare.

Santa Rosa Consulting

Booth 3106

Contact: Gala Wilson, sales & marketing manager
galawilson@santarosaconsulting.com
813.966.1920

Join Santa Rosa Consulting in booth 3106. Acknowledge someone you view as a Healthcare Champion on our #HealthHeroWall and we’ll make a $5 donation (up to $5,000) to one of our favorite charities, Together We Rise. We will also give away conference survival kits filled with the items you need to get through HIMSS.

Our HIMSS19 Speaker Series will help demystify some of the trickier aspects of implementing and continually optimizing your EHR technology. All presentations will take place in our booth. They include, "Test Automation: Defeating the Constraints of Manual Testing," on Tuesday, February 12 at 10:45am; "ELearning: Transforming Apprentices into Masters," on Tuesday at 3pm; "Activation: Assembling the Go-Live Super Team" on Wednesday February 13 at 10am; and "Integration: Nailing the Follow-Through" on Thursday, February 14 at 10am. Visit santarosaconsulting.com/himss19 to learn more and add presentations to your schedule.

Spok

Booth 3371

Contact: Derek Kiecker, solutions advisor
Derek.kiecker@spok.com
952.230.5306

We know you’re on a quest to be a champion of health. To do so, your communication technology needs to integrate with existing workflows in your hospital, and enable you to deliver information to clinicians who need to take action. Top hospitals rely on the Spok Care Connect platform to enhance workflows for clinicians, support administrative compliance, and provide a better experience for patients. Our customers send over 100 million messages each month through their Spok solutions. Spok is making care collaboration easier.

At HIMSS19, we will demonstrate the first phase of our new, cloud-native healthcare communication platform. You’ll find us at booth 3371 and the Interoperability Showcase.

Giveaway: You play — we pay! Locate one of the interactive displays in the Spok booth to play “Pop for a Purpose.” Your goal is to pop as many highlighted bubbles as possible. We’ll donate the dollar amount popped to the charitable organization of your choice (Cancer Research Institute, American Lung Association, or Mental Health America). Make sure to scan your HIMSS badge for a daily chance to win a $500 donation in your name.

Strata Decision Technology

Booth 879

Contact: Rachel Broghammer, marketing coordinator
rbroghammer@stratadecision.com
319.310.8748

Ranked “Best in KLAS” four years in a row, Strata Decision Technology is known for a platform that has emerged as the solution of choice in the market. Our solution, StrataJazz, is the leading, cloud-based SaaS financial planning, analytics, and performance platform in healthcare. We provide seamless integration between our enterprise-wide solution and existing EHR, ERP, and EDW systems to leverage the organization’s existing infrastructure and investments.

We will have an exclusive survey only offered at HIMSS19 for attendees to complete in exchange for a $5 Starbucks gift card. An analysis of the survey results will also be shared with participants. Contact kbores@stratadecision.com to reserve a time to complete the survey, or stop by booth 879 while in Orlando!

We also wrote the book on cost, titled “Margin + Mission: A Prescription for Curing Healthcare’s Cost Crisis,” and will have copies to share with attendees.

Surescripts

Booth 6158

Contact: Leah Bruch, director of consumer marketing
customer@surescripts.com
703.921.2121

Surescripts serves the nation with the single most trusted and capable health information network, built to increase patient safety, lower costs, and ensure quality care. Through the Surescripts Network Alliance, we convene health IT stakeholders to tackle critical issues all year long. HIMSS19 is an excellent opportunity to continue that work. If you’ll be in Orlando, visit us in booth 6158 to learn how we’re partnering across the Network Alliance to address some of healthcare’s biggest challenges, with a special focus this year on prescription price transparency. Or, just stop by for a coffee break and say hello.

Highlights Include:

The Interoperability Showcase: "Clinical Exchange and Price Transparency," Tuesday, February 12-14.
Panel: "Enabling Price Transparency with Actionable Intelligence at the Point of Care," Tuesday, February 12 at 12:30pm.
Booth Panel: "Advancing Healthcare with the Surescripts Network Alliance,” Tuesday, February 12 at 4pm.

SymphonyRM

To arrange a meeting, contact Sheetal Shah.

Contact: Sheetal Shah, VP of client development
sshah@symphonyrm.com
310.916.7379

Visage Imaging

Booth 1391

Contact: Sean Lambright, global head of sales
slambright@visageimaging.com
480.200.9385

Visage Imaging is a proven global provider of enterprise imaging solutions scaled to support PACS replacement and more, at the world’s most prestigious and sophisticated imaging organizations. The Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform delivers amazingly fast server-side rendered images, streamed via an intelligent thin-client viewer. Radiologists and referring physicians have a customized, protocol-driven workflow to natively view multi-dimensional imagery using One Viewer.

Visage delivers best-in-class modular interoperability, enabling institutions to optimize their informatics investments. To that end, Visage offers Visage 7 Open Archive, a native, modular component of the Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform, including enterprise-class speed, capability, and scale with no additional software required. Visage 7 also supports the viewing of non-DICOM and medical multimedia objects, provides diagnostic mobile access with Visage Ease Pro, and most recently at RSNA 2018 announced Visage 7 AI (works-in-progress) unifying research and diagnostic imaging in the same platform. Come experience why more of the top institutions have chosen Visage than any other vendor, including two of the top-four ranked hospitals in the US. Visage has the proven experience at massive scale to deliver what your institution needs for impactful, lasting, future-proof imaging transformation.

Voalte

Booth 2287

Contact: Melissa Pickle, marketing specialist
mpickle@voalte.com
941.312.2830, Ext. 179

Voalte develops smartphone solutions that simplify caregiver communication. Ranked number-one and named 2017 Category Leader in the Best in KLAS: Software & Services report for the Secure Communications Platform segment, Voalte is the only company to offer a comprehensive mobile communication strategy that enables care teams inside and outside the hospital to access and exchange information securely. Founded in 2008, Voalte is a privately held company based in Sarasota, FL. Visit booth 2287 to power up your care team collaboration!

Vocera Communications

Booth 1747

Contact: Shanna Hearon, manager of PR and communication
shearon@vocera.com
669.999.3368

Meet the new Vocera Smartbadge: For too long, complex clinical workflows and disparate systems have caused unnecessary hassles and fatigued nurses and doctors. Visit booth 1747 and see how the new Vocera Smartbadge makes it easier for clinicians to bring care together with hands-free communication, secure messaging, and intelligent notifications, delivering real-time situational awareness about patient status. https://www.vocera.com/himss

Vyne Medical

Booth 3391

Contact: Molly Maron, director of marketing
molly.maron@vynecorp.com
865.292.0505

Vyne Medical serves a growing base of over 600 active hospital and health system clients nationwide. Best practices are hardwired through technology solutions proven to help hospitals achieve sustainable top performance. Well-published results include improvements in financial performance, physician/staff alignment, patient experience, compliance and patient safety/quality.

YOU MAY HAVE TO TALK LOUDER at the Vyne Medical booth this year as we are giving away mini cell phone speakers that amplify the sound on any phone without having to connect via Bluetooth or cords. And be sure to enter the drawing for a Bose Bluetooth Speaker, perfect for the party you’ll throw after seeing how much time and money we can save your hospital!

Waystar

Booth 6149

Contact: Tina Newman, director of events
events@waystar.com
844.4WAYSTAR (844.492.9782)

Break through to a simpler, more modern revenue cycle with Waystar. Stop by booth 6149 for an immersive visual experience — and a chance to win a Peloton treadmill or an ORU kayak. We’re also hosting a private reception on Wednesday, February 13, at the Hyatt Regency Pool Terrace. Contact your friends at Waystar for an exclusive invitation. We hope to see you soon!

WebPT

To arrange a meeting, contact Shawn McKee.

Contact: Shawn McKee, VP of marketing
shawn.mckee@webpt.com
866.221.1870, Ext. 314

WebPT is the market-leading software platform for physical, occupational, and speech therapy professionals. With WebPT, therapists, executives, and front office staff have access to patient medical records and operational reporting anywhere, anytime, from any Web-enabled device. In addition to documentation, billing, analytics and outcomes reporting, patient engagement, scheduling, and an interactive home exercise program, WebPT provides the highest levels of compliance and security as well as seamless integrations with numerous EHR systems. Ranked the highest performer in the 2018 KLAS Ambulatory Rehab/Therapy Report, WebPT has a 99.9-percent uptime rate and a 99-percent customer retention rate. To see WebPT in action or schedule a consultation with one of our experts, visit webpt.com.

Zen Healthcare IT

Booth 8643

Contact: Marilee Benson, president
Marilee@Consultzen.com
949.528.3600

Don’t miss the opportunity to improve your health information exchange, data quality, and data integration strategy. Your path to simpler interoperability begins with visiting the Zen team at HIMSS. Zen offers a unique Healthcare Integration as a Service (IaaS) platform, as well as interoperability tools and engineering services to help organizations answer these mission-critical questions:

How can we expand our data exchange abilities and scale for volume?
How can we add interfaces quickly and efficiently?
What tools can we use to improve data quality?
How can we quickly connect to Carequality, EHealth Exchange, or other HIEs?
What options do we have to improve efficiency in supporting data exchange and data aggregation?
Who can help us when we don’t have the technology or the expertise to deliver on a mission-critical integration project?

Need answers or better ways to address these common challenges? Meet the Zen team at HIMSS. They will share ideas and discuss technology solutions that will help you fill gaps in your current platforms, and expand your capabilities to meet the ever growing need to connect with the healthcare ecosystem in your community.

Schedule a meeting: Pick a day and time to meet at HIMSS.
Request a free 15-minute Engineering Q&A session.
Contact the team: info@consultzen.com.
Visit the website: www.consultzen.com.

Giveaways: Swing by the Zen booth to pick out your own Interoperability Flare Buttons, with several designs to choose from. These are very popular, so come by early!

6 Comments

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 1/28/19

January 28, 2019 Dr. Jayne 1 Comment

I had a particularly gruesome Sunday in the urgent care trenches. Not with the expected cases of influenza, but with people behaving badly.

It has been years since I worked in the big-city emergency department, so I never dreamed I’d be searching for handgun-related ICD-10 codes at one of our sleepy suburban urgent care locations, but there I was today (in case you are curious, it’s the Y22 series of codes for handgun discharge, undetermined intent.)

These are the days you want to just head home, drink an adult beverage, and relax. But that’s hard to do when you are two hours past closing time and still seeing patients who waited until the last possible minute to be seen. Woman with the toddler that fell of the sofa and hit his head on the coffee table — no worries, we got this. Man who has been vomiting all day but waited until after a certain TV program was over before he came in — not so much. (Note for the future, we have large, flat-screen TVs in all our patient rooms and you could have been watching your show with some IV fluids and good drugs rather than vomiting into a trash can at home.)

I had several patients get mad that our independent urgent care is not part of the big health systems and doesn’t share data with them. It’s hard to explain to information blocking to patients, especially when it’s their much-loved hospital’s policy that we can only fax information to their practices and can’t send anything electronically. We can’t even get a directory of fax numbers for the owned practices or employed physicians, requiring us to call each office to track down a fax number if we don’t already have one in our file. If they won’t even receive our information, you can guarantee that they aren’t going to share theirs with us.

I experienced this acutely earlier in the weekend, when I had to refer a patient with a new cancer diagnosis and the potential need for an emergent surgery to the emergency department at one of those local powerhouses. I called six hours later and asked to be transferred to the nursing unit for patient X, only to be told “we don’t have her” by the switchboard. Apparently, that’s code for “she hasn’t been admitted to our facility” and the central patient directory service was unable to tell me if she was still in the emergency department.

It wouldn’t be unheard of to spend many hours in the ED during peak influenza season, so I asked to be transferred. There I was told that not only did they not show her as a patient, but they couldn’t tell me if she had ever even arrived because “we can only see patients in the system for up to two hours after discharge.”

I asked to speak with the charge nurse and summarized the situation back to her, saying, “Let me make sure I understand. She hasn’t been admitted and no one can tell me if she ever even showed up because the computer restricts access by ED personnel after two hours.” She confirmed that is what happens, which just floored me as a referring physician.

When I called the ED prior to the transfer to tell them about the patient, I had given the name of the patient’s surgeon. Since I know the surgeon well, I decided to call her to find out what was going on. It turns out they didn’t even call the patient’s attending surgeon, and you can bet that my colleague was livid when I called her to find out what was going on. Since she’s a faculty physician, she immediately accessed the EHR and I could almost hear the steam coming out her ears. Not only did they not call her, but they called a surgery resident to assess the patient in the ED. That resident in turn called the on-call surgeon (on-call for patients who don’t already have a surgeon, that is) rather than the patient’s surgeon. The on-call surgeon decided to send the patient home.

The patient had a couple of critical lab values and some ominous ultrasound findings, yet there was no consultation note from the surgical resident and no ED physician note in the chart to help anyone understand the thought process. We’re not sure what the patient understands about her care and what she thinks about being referred to a general GYN for follow-up care rather than the GYN-Oncologist she needs.

I’ve been trying to call the patient for two days. I’m sure she thinks her surgeon and I are either incompetent or clueless since we’re the ones that referred her to the hospital for potential admission and a possible procedure. She hasn’t returned my calls and I feel terrible. These kinds of episodes are becoming more and more common in our healthcare non-system.

At least in this case, I’m eternally grateful that my colleague was able to pull up the EHR chart (such as it was) on her phone while at her daughter’s sports practice so that we would at least know that the patient made it to the hospital and had some additional testing. Hopefully her office will have more luck reaching the patient than I have.

How different things would be if we had actual coordination of care and information sharing. I sent the patient to the ED with paper copies of all the tests we performed at our facility, along with a CD copy of her imaging studies. I wonder if the hospital even looked at what I sent (they certainly didn’t pay much attention to my referral report) or if they just started over? Our practice requires that the “business end” of each patient chart is complete prior to discharge – vital signs, exam, procedures, assessment, and plan. For patients referred to another facility or transferred by ambulance, we have to get the entire chart done and printed to go along with the patient. Even though the ED in question uses scribes, the note still wasn’t done more than two hours later. Despite every clinical employee having advanced communication devices on every shift, they still couldn’t make the right phone calls.

In this situation, I don’t even have anyone to complain to or share concerns with since I’m sure they don’t really care what a lowly urgent care doc at a competing facility thinks. All the technology in the world won’t help when you don’t have the right processes in place or the staffing isn’t optimized to support people doing the right thing. Unfortunately, the patient suffers. I’ve got seven more shifts before I head to HIMSS and I certainly hope they’re better than this one.

Have your own terrible tales of information blocking? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

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HIStalk Interviews Jason Krantz, CEO, Definitive Healthcare

January 28, 2019 Interviews Comments Off

Jason Krantz, MBA is founder and CEO of Definitive Healthcare of Framingham, MA.

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Tell me about yourself and the company.

Definitive Healthcare was started in 2011. Our goal is to be the premier provider and the single source of truth for all data on healthcare providers. In the last seven or eight years, we’ve grown significantly. We have about 320 employees today. We offer detailed information and analytics on every single provider in the US and Canada.

Why did HIMSS sell its HIMSS Analytics business and how did Definitive Healthcare end up acquiring it?

HIMSS Analytics has tremendous data assets around technology, infrastructure, and contracts. The match with Definitive is about being a good shepherd of that data. By combining that information with all of the proprietary data that we have around affiliation, quality of care, and now our commercial claims database, we’re able to provide a complete picture for our clients that will give them a competitive edge.

Those clients include companies that are marketing into the healthcare provider market as well as providers themselves that are looking to expand their networks and understand where they can continue to grow their business through physician referral, analytics, and new affiliations. We offer a powerful solution to help advance the industry forward.

HIMSS is keeping the Adoption Model business and the consulting around that, right?

That’s correct. They’re going to continue to provide the EMRAM and the consulting around it. We will focus on the data business and the detailed provider information for both the vendor community and the provider community.

How have mergers, affiliations, and network agreements changed the demand for information as the market gets more complicated than just single hospitals and health systems?

“Complicated” is the operative word. As this industry continues to evolve and health systems become these extraordinarily complicated organizations that are big businesses in their own right, all the participants in this industry need to have access to data that can help them decipher what’s happening. Where are patients going for care? How do all these facilities interact with each other?

More and more, we’re helping our clients understand where there is patient overlap or leakage from one hospital to the next. Our clients are trying to solve that for providers, while the providers are trying to figure on their own how they can continue to protect their business and deal with new payment models. The complexity helps our business over time.

Will these larger corporate entities impose a corporate standard for systems such as EHRs and revenue cycle?

The speed at which mergers are taking place certainly makes that difficult from a technology standpoint. Health systems by and large have the strategy of moving to a corporate standard, but it takes time. Technologies that help these systems talk to each other become increasingly important.

The other important corporate standard is around decision-making for medical devices and pharmaceuticals. Health systems are trying to create standards across their entire organization. That’s good for healthcare. Standard therapies help patients overall and help understand new therapies that come to market. The move to control everything within their network continues, even though it is complex with the technology infrastructure.

Where will the three main inpatient EHR vendors look for opportunities now that the market is saturated?

They are doing some pretty interesting stuff, such as starting to work with insurance companies and different types of facilities such as treatment facilities. Epic is the largest EHR that works within the clinical trial space, which is an interesting way of growing for them. You’ve got all this rich patient data that needs to be collected in one fashion and Epic does well in that market. We’re rolling out a clinical trial product to address the needs of the pharmaceutical companies and medical device companies that we serve, but also the technology companies that want to get a piece of this robust market.

Even though they’re relatively saturated within the hospital and the health system market, these tangential areas are exciting growth areas for them. They open up a new opportunities in life sciences, insurance, and other areas.

Are drug and device manufacturers more interested in using the information that a typical hospital or practice would collect?

Absolutely. Data from EHRs has grown so much and become more standard over time. It’s a tremendous opportunity for improving the quality of care by analyzing that data, getting newly available information and at a larger scale across larger patient populations. There’s a massive interest in getting access to that data from the pharmaceutical side.

What kind of information could a mid-tier hospital software vendor get from you that would help them understand their potential market?

We have data on every single provider in the US — clinics, physician offices, imaging centers, hospitals, and IDNs — and the affiliation of all these facilities. It’s important to know whether they are owned by a health system or are standalone. We have the technology infrastructure data that allows understanding what each of those facilities are using. That data has become stronger through our acquisition of the HIMSS Analytics business. We also have information around the quality of care provided and the Medicare penalties or incentives that each of these facilities is achieving.

All of that is important for these organizations that want to elevate the conversation with their prospective clients. Rather than going in to talk about their product, they can go in and talk about what’s happening at the facility or the health system — the problems they’re seeing in their market and how that compares to other facilities they have. They can use that data to bring their product to life and show those prospective clients why their product can help meet the needs of that organization right now. Making your team smart and targeted to understand the business problems of the hospitals and facilities is an important value-add that we bring to our clients.

How do you see the company changing as it grows?

Our goal is to continue our product innovation. We have grown, mostly organically, over the last seven years at a rate of something like 175 to 200 percent per year. We continue to grow by selling more of what we have. We have a very good product of extremely high quality that covers the market really well.

We are also innovative in what we roll out to clients. In the last year, we’ve been more innovative than in the first six or seven years of our existence. We rolled out a commercial claims database that gives our clients access to data on about 210 million patient lives. We have over two billion claims. This allows our clients to understand diagnoses and procedure utilization rates by facility, provider, or physician. We’re rolling out a clinical trials database, and later this year, we’ll also be rolling out a database with specialty pharma data.

Our goal is to continue to stay on the forefront of new trends that are happening within the marketplace. Each time we do this, we open up a brand new market that we haven’t sold to before. Clinical trials opens up a multi-billion dollar industry for us. Commercial claims gives us access to all of these new markets we haven’t sold to before that need to understand what’s happening in the commercial market. All of this innovation helps us continue to grow.

Over time, we’ll continue to pull in more information, maybe from EHR systems as you mentioned, to help clients analyze that data. That’s potentially something down the road. We’ll start to get into more of health economics and outcomes research. That’s a great market for us. We see the runway as being extraordinarily long. We’re going to continue to grow at the pace that we’ve been used to over the last five to seven years.

Who are the prospects for the all-claims database and how can you correlate that information with your other databases to provide new insights?

Most of our client base is interested in the commercial claims data. Certainly some core markets are life sciences, providers, and tech firms. We take this data, where you can see this utilization by facility and physician, and make it extremely powerful by combining it with all of our proprietary data. Now you can start to do things like roll that data up at the IDN level. What does an IDN look like for knee replacements or other procedures or diagnoses? You can also combine it with things around the quality of care analytics that we provide.

Our clients take this claims data that’s valuable on its own, but we bring it to life and make it an actionable piece of information that they can use to define a new drug launch or develop their markets and create a go-to market strategy for whatever product they might have.

Do health systems use your information for competitive purposes?

We have lots of health systems as clients. They’re using our data to develop their networks, which of course is competitive to some extent. They are looking to develop new physician relationships based on referral patterns. They’re using our data to find merger and acquisition opportunities. We help analyze leakage outside of the system, Our clients are interested in understanding that. They can start to fill those gaps, because any time care is delivered outside of their system, it’s harder to provide the quality of care at the cost that they want to provide it.

How do you see the company’s future over the next five or 10 years?

It’s about continuing to expand our product offering. We have a big team of people that are being highly innovative in thinking through what the trends are within the industry. We can help our clients meet those trends head-on and stay in front of them. Access to our data and our analytics gives our clients a competitive edge. This market is moving fast. To be competitive, our clients need to stay ahead of the trends and we need to help them do that.

Over the next five to 10 years, we’re going to continue to evolve, add new product offerings, and potentially do more acquisitions as the market continues to expand so that we can provide the best data to our clients to meet their needs.

Do you have any final thoughts?

We’re a fast-growing company and there’s a lot of responsibility that goes along with that. We invest a tremendous amount from our company in terms of helping our employees grow as individuals and also to give back. We launched the Definitive Cares program about two years ago, where we have 100 percent of our employees doing a community service project throughout the year. They earn days off by being part of this program.

It’s an important part of our culture because healthcare is about helping people and servicing people. We want to bring that into the fabric of our culture. We help over 30 charities every year. We have a 100 percent volunteer rate within it. As a company, we gave over 3,000 individual service hours during the working day. All of that is important. My final thought is that continuing to give back is important to all corporations. We try to live that on our own.

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Morning Headlines 1/28/19

January 27, 2019 Headlines Comments Off

ResMed Inc. Announces Results for the Second Quarter of Fiscal Year 2019

Sleep apnea equipment and connected health vendor ResMed’s Q2 results fall short on revenue, sending shares down an alarming 19 percent for a market cap of $13.5 billion.

Phynd Technologies, Inc. Announces Completion of Series B Funding

Phynd raises $8 million in a Series B funding round, with three of the four investors representing health systems.

Aetna, Anthem, Health Care Service Corporation, PNC Bank and IBM announce collaboration to establish blockchain-based ecosystem for the healthcare industry

IBM announces a collaborative that will use blockchain technology to process claims and payments more efficiently, exchange health data more easily, and maintain more accurate provider directories.

University of Iowa hospitals reviewing parent-child records access

University of Iowa Health Care administrators consider revising a practice that prohibits parents of children over 12 from viewing their medical records.

Lead a revolution in Veterans’ healthcare records modernization as a Deputy Chief Medical Officer in the Office of Electronic Health Record Modernization

As its transition to Cerner gets underway, the VA seeks candidates to become deputy chief medical officers in St. Louis, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

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Monday Morning Update 1/28/19

January 27, 2019 News 6 Comments

Top News

Sleep apnea equipment and connected health vendor ResMed turns in Q2 results: revenue up 8 percent, adjusted EPS $1.00 vs. $1.00, meeting earnings estimates but falling short on revenue, sending RMD shares down an alarming 19 percent on Friday for a market cap of $13.5 billion. They’re down 8 percent in the past year vs. the Dow’s 6 percent loss, but have more than doubled over the past five years.

The company’s recent health IT acquisitions include Propeller Health, HealthcareFirst, MatrixCare, and Apacheta. It also acquired Brightree in 2016.

ResMed said in the earnings call that the Propeller Health acquisition gives it a big footprint in the management of high-cost lung disease and also ties in well with ResMed’s at-scale digital health for sleep.

The company will spend $7 million per quarter to fund its joint venture with Verily to identify and enroll sleep apnea patients.

Reader Comments

From Stat of the Onion: “Re: readership. My co-worker and I have a bet on the number of visitors you get on HIStalk.” It runs about 1.8 million unique visits per year, although my vanity requires me to say that I intentionally don’t publish in ways that would boost the numbers in a misleading measure of influence (more frequent posts, individual articles instead of one summary, etc.) I rarely look at the stats and thus am not tempted to use reader-unfriendly gimmicks to increase them.

From Blast Furnace: “Re: Facebook. What happened to your page? Did you change pages or just stop updating it? Can I only see your posts on your website now?” I was using Facebook and LinkedIn only as a cc: for tweets indicating that I’ve published something new, but my third-party tools that made it easy kept breaking because these vendors are always fighting against apps they fear will rob them of user screen time, so I only send updates using Twitter and email updates now. Plus I feel more virtuous not using Facebook and LinkedIn because I kind of hate them both, while I’m only indifferent to Twitter.

From Toxic Waist: “Re: HIMSS19 slogan of ‘Champions of Health Unite.’ What do you think about it?” My kneejerk reaction: (a) they are misunderstanding or misusing the word “champions;” (b) attendees are mostly interested in the profitable business of healthcare rather than the human state of health; and (c) “unite” suggests that HIMSS19 is the convener of every one of these champions when clearly it is not. It’s tough trying to come up with a slogan that attempts to describe the wildly varying healthcare interests of a diverse group, but even more to come up with something that doesn’t sound overwrought or downright stupid like 2011’s “Linking People, Potential, and Progress.” I’ll admit that “Getting You To Buy Stuff With Patient and Taxpayer Money,” “Shouldn’t We Be Disrupted By Now,” and “We Have Booth Swag, Parties, and Vendors Faking Respect So You’ll Feel Important” fall a bit short of lofty.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I worry about making decisions without adequate input, so please take a few minutes to complete my once-yearly reader survey. I will not only be happy, I will align our incentives by dropping your name into the Excel-powered randomization hat for a $50 Amazon gift card.

I sneaked a peek at the reader survey responses in which someone once again suggested that I review big announcements from the past to see how many panned out in historical context. I like the idea, but I don’t really know how to do that effectively (by date? by company?) Your thoughts are welcome. I was just thinking this week about IBM’s giant announcement from a few years ago that it was rolling out a ton of healthcare apps that I suspect either failed or were never actually finished.

The most common recommendation that poll respondents have for Apple in terms of healthcare is to stay away, followed by continuing its present efforts to develop health sensors and data collection. The only other significantly chosen option was to display and integrate information from multiple systems and providers. Only 6 percent agree with stock picker Jim Cramer that Apple should buy Epic or Cerner, and even then I bet those were pot-stirrers who just want to see what would happen.

New poll to your right or here: what will you be doing during HIMSS19?

The story on hospitals running “wealth screening” reminds me of how confused I was in an early hospital job when I first heard about “the foundation.” Its well-paid SVP had a lot of fingers in the operational pie. He was always out in the community schmoozing movers and shakers using paid-for memberships in the best clubs, coordinating black-tie galas, and cozying up with vendors that we were trying to keep at arm’s length (“I’m not telling you to buy Siemens PACS, only that you tell me why not if you don’t,” he said right before jetting off with some of his hospital cronies to Germany for a junket that Siemens was paying for.) I was naive that hospitals are run pretty much like any big business, work community relationships to their advantage, play community doctors like a chess game, and plan endlessly on how to get bigger. My naiveté was also shattered the first time I saw how differently we delivered care to bigwigs in beds compared to mere mortals.

Listening: new from Long Beach, CA’s Rival Sons. Hard rock will eventually return to popularity and this band will be waiting.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Phynd raises $8 million in a Series B funding round, with three of the four investors representing health systems. The company will invest the proceeds in increasing its its collaboration with Epic and other EHR vendors and to further develop its provider enrollment, management, search, and reporting platform.

Sales

MassHealth selects Waystar’s Whole Patient Insight risk scoring of social determinants of health risk.
Four agencies of Vermont Care Partners choose Netsmart’s full solution suite to support their work in mental health, substance use, and developmental disability.

Decisions

Phelps County Regional Medical Center (MO) will go live with American Well telemedicine in March 2019.
Hayes Green Beach Memorial Hospital (MI) switched from Meditech to Epic in December 2018.
Eureka Springs Hospital (AR) replaced Healthland (a CPSI Company) with Medhost in January 2019.
Bienville Medical Center (LA) switched from Healthland (a CPSI Company) to Medhost in December 2018.

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

Announcements and Implementations

Scotland Health Care System (NC) is implementing Epic.

A federal judge in Madison, WI rules that Epic’s mandatory employee arbitration clause is valid, denying the complaint brought by lawyers of current and former Epic employees that the US Supreme Court’s decision in favor of Epic was unconscionable.

Privacy and Security

An Iowa man is surprised that a hospital’s policy prevents him from viewing his 12-year-old daughter’s medical records without her consent. State law supersedes HIPAA and some leave it up to individual hospitals to decide the age at which the parent can’t view the child’s records without their permission, with the requirements intended to encourage adolescents to be honest in their conversations with providers about substance use and sexually transmitted disease.

Other

GeekWire profiles Vyrty’s Sync.MD, which claims to empower patients by letting them take phone photos of their medical records (how they get those is breezily unstated), store them, and then selectively share them with providers to whom they provide a QR code. Doctors can print records to a virtual printer to add them to the patient’s file, which is a good idea. The CEO’s LinkedIn (which shows zero healthcare experience) says the company’s technology involves a smart card, so there’s probably a pivot in there somewhere. Unstated in the brochure-ware is that (a) patients don’t want to screw around collecting and managing their own records, as evidenced by both Google and Microsoft failing to impose their personal health record apps on the world; and (b) clinicians don’t trust patient-managed records because they can’t tell if they are complete and it’s easier to just start firing off orders for a barrage of revenue-enhancing tests and imaging studies. Technologists who have no healthcare experience always fail to understand that hospitals and practices don’t trust the records of their peers, rightly or wrongly, and fear the legal consequence of acting on them inappropriately. My personal experience is that dentists are a lot more interested in the records of new patients than doctors.

Four men sue Texas Children’s Hospital for age discrimination, alleging that the hospital fired them from their senior computer operations analyst IT jobs by requiring them to earn Microsoft or Cisco certifications that were unrelated to their job responsibilities, then replaced them with younger employees who didn’t hold those certifications.

It’s pretty obvious why plastic surgeons are about the only happy medical specialists, but Daily Beast asked them directly:

Their surgeries are scheduled in advance and thus they can control their own schedule
They have a high percentage of private pay patients, leaving them mostly free of EHRs, insurance companies, and hospital bureaucrats
Their patients provide immediate positive reinforcement
Their work varies between cosmetic and reconstructive
They work more actively on wellness, including encouraging physical activity at their conferences beyond booth-to-booth hikes (this on seems like a stretch, no pun intended)
They make a crapload of cash

The New York Times notes the odd phenomenon in which Millennials – a generation that is perceived by many to be lazy and entitled — claim they can’t wait for Monday mornings and brag online about how long and hard they work in the “hustle culture” that glorifies ambition as a lifestyle. Experts note that most of the people beating that particular “work is life” drum are shareholding owners and managers, not the workers themselves, and they are insisting on harder, longer workweeks despite data showing that it doesn’t improve productivity or creativity (a la Elon Musk’s push for worker bees to put in a sustained 80-hour workweek peaking at 100 hours) is “grim and exploitative.” Allow me to say from vast experience as a wage slave and overseer of wage slaves – your employer cares only about executives and shareholders, not the breathing, interchangeable widgets that fill cubicles in a modern version of the dehumanizing assembly lines of the early Industrial Revolution. Your life is being wasted if it consists of working for someone else and spending your tiny bit of free time staring at your electronica and cocooning with Netflix. It’s an old but wise adage that nobody’s tombstone says, “I wish I had worked more” and you will see exactly how one-sided the value equation is when your beloved employer marches you out, demotes you, or reorganizes you. If you want to work that hard, make sure it’s your shingle, not a corporate one.

Amazon is using the shopping habits of its customers to target ads, allowing a physical therapy center to aim ads at nearby Amazon customers who had purchased knee braces and a credit card company to push ads at users of competing cards. As a result, experts say Amazon’s ad business is worth $125 billion, with much of the revenue coming from companies willing to pay to have their ads appear next to competing products found in customer searches. An investor calls it “insane scale” when companies can target new parents based on Amazon-stored baby registries or their exact car model entered in its “Garage” section. Amazon can also track user movement among non-Amazon sites to determine, for example, that a diet book customer is now reading CNN and might be profitably invited to buy protein bars.

Eric Topol, MD critiques the 15 published papers covering the use of AI in medical prediction, saying that their lack of sound methodology means that “we’ve yet to see a validation study in a real-world clinical environment.”

Microsoft’s top healthcare executive, corporate VP and computer scientist Peter Lee, PhD, acknowledges that his employer along with Google have failed in their healthcare efforts, noting that when Satya Nadella asked him to take the job, he was doubtful: “The tech industry is littered with attempts by shiny CEOs to go after a piece of this massive healthcare pie. I think pretty consistently the tech industry has gone into it with a lot of naïveté, even some arrogance. So my knee-jerk assumption was ‘Here we go again.’’” He seems to be focusing on storing genetic data.

Federal agents arrest a California nurse for running an online pharmacy that sold 20,000 opioid pills. Carrie Markis, who earned a master’s degree in nursing science and healthcare leadership from UC Davis in 2013 (I found her in the school’s graduation video above), told customers in Dark Web chats that she buys drugs from people who resell their prescription meds for cash, eventually netting herself several hundred thousand dollars. On the bright side, reviews of her online store were nearly all five stars.

Pay someone to swap seats if you end up next to this guy on a plane. A Pennsylvania man suffering from depression registers his alligator Wally as an emotional support animal. His mood won’t be boosted much when Wally rips his arm off.

I love this – general practitioner Phil Grimmer, MBChB of Chippenham, Wilthsire, England tweets a photo left by a woman in the room of her mother who has dementia to reassure her about her surroundings. His tweet went viral with over 1 million views, encouraging others to post their own signs and stories for loved ones or patients under their care for cognitive impairment, either to give them comfort or to help caregivers address them in familiar ways and to treat them as people rather than patients.

Sponsor Updates

Lightbeam Health Solutions publishes a new e-book, “6 Strategies to Thrive in VBC.”
LiveProcess publishes a new e-book, “How Clinical Communication and Collaboration Technology Supports Value-Based Care Objectives.”
Mobile Heartbeat will exhibit at the San Diego ANIA Regional Conference 2019 February 1.
Netsmart will exhibit at the NY Coalition for Behavioral Health Annual Conference January 31 in New York City.
Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, will exhibit at the AWHONN South Carolina Section Conference January 30 in Columbia.
Experian Health will exhibit at HFMA MidSouth January 30-February 1 in Tunica, MS.
Sansoro Health releases a new podcast, “Putting Patient Portals into Practice.”
Wellsoft will partner with integration vendor Interface People to offer an ED solution for Meditech customers.

Blog Posts

Top patient-pay trends to keep an eye on (Waystar)
Exceed Patient Expectations with a Platform for Excellence (Loyale Healthcare)
In the News: Fax Elimination (Vyne Medical)
What should hospitals do to improve clinician satisfaction with their EHR? The answer may surprise you. (Meditech)
Why We’re Fixing EHRs Where They Hurt at HIMSS19 (Medicomp Systems)
From App to Powerhouse Platform: Wrapping Up 2018 (Mobile Heartbeat)
Telehealth: Bringing Quality Care to You (Netsmart)
New Survey Finds Patients Prefer Healthcare Payment Plans Over Other Methods of Paying (OnPlanHealth)
Reducing healthcare costs through automation (Experian Health)
How to capture positive online reviews for your practice (PerfectServe)
What does it mean to be a network? (Redox)
7 Networking Tips for Extroverts & Introverts (ROI Healthcare Solutions)
Smartphones can raise HCAHPS scores. (Voalte)
Building a New Facility and Improving Communication: 4 Lessons Learned at Sheffield Children’s (Vocera)
How do your patients really feel about technology in the clinic? (WebPT)

Contacts

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

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6 Comments

Weekender 1/25/19

January 25, 2019 Weekender Comments Off

weekender

Weekly News Recap

A New York Times report describes how hospitals use “wealth screening” analytics to target affluent inpatients to receive donation pitches
Rhode Island’s health department charges four ED doctors with medical misconduct after they voluntarily report imaging errors caused by EHR ordering setup
The US uninsured rate rises to a four-year high of nearly 14 percent
Nextech acquires SRS Health
Researchers note that Medicare patient readmissions within 30 days dropped sharply after CMS started penalizing hospitals financially, but the death rate appears to have increased during the same period
Health:Furthur cancels its annual Nashville health festivals after two years
Alphabet’s Verily announces that its Study Watch has earned FDA clearance as a medical device for performing on-demand EKGs
The VA issues an RFI for a software testing contractor, with 80 percent of the job focusing on Cerner
Researchers at Northwestern University develop a wireless, battery-free soft skin patch that analyzes sweat for PH and levels of chloride, glucose, and lactate

Best Reader Comments

I heard an interesting NPR interview with author A.J. Jacobs, who decided to thank every person involved in making his daily cup of coffee. The list is infinite. I think Atul Gawande will find the same. When tracking the costs, the list of cost centers can be daunting because there is a thread leading to more and more areas that are not obvious on the surface. It would be a good exercise nonetheless. (Julie McGovern)

As a young and still-motivated healthcare IT professional, I unfortunately find myself with a debilitating disease which renders me under the title of disabled and under the auspices of Medicare. With fewer and fewer acute care facilities accepting Medicare, I am forced to either go into significant debt by using an out-of-pocket decent facility or physicians or get worse and die relatively soon. Using out of pocket, I’d wreck my credit. Think of me as your sister or mother. Do you want this to happen to them? This madness must stop. After 30 years in the healthcare business, I never dreamed this situation would happen to me. (Recent Medicare Recipient)

For a tight-knit company that still has traumatic flashbacks to its last involuntary layoff of any size, a program like VSP seems like a kinder way to draw out the people who are thinking of retiring or leaving, anyway. A VSP gives you the chance to thank people, throw some going-away parties, and feel okay about offering a cushion for whatever the next stage of life is for people who have served the company for a long time. I know people who have left to care for sick family members, etc., not just retire. Seems like the people who leave were going to leave anyway; it just accelerates the process. (VSP)

Real creators hate the term influencer because it cheapens what they do and the influence is a means to an end, not the end itself. People who consider themselves influencers or promote that idea are generally the wannabes in the first place that ruin it for everyone else. (James Aita)

Apple could have had the long view to dedicate to enterprise healthcare long ago, but they were quarter over quarter focused. Epic had the long view and that has resulted in its current value. “Healthcare” and “health system delivery” are very different, in general interpretation of meaning. Epic dedicated to the system. Apple did not and can’t buy it. This entire week has taught me who the true students of the industry are, with and the majority just riding the wave with very little true industry experience or foundational knowledge. (Annoyed)

Watercooler Talk Tidbits

Readers funded the DonorsChoose teacher grant request of Ms. Y, who asked supplies for math and STEM projects for her elementary school class in Florida, which took a direct hit from Hurricane Irma. She reports, “My students need these supplies to make our STEAM classes successful. They love hands on steam projects and it takes lots of resources to really do the projects correctly. Because of the hurricane it has been hard to have the parents support our classroom with the resources we need for the projects, so these items will be very helpful. These items will be enough for many weeks worth of hands-on projects. We appreciate everything that you have done for us.”

We’ve seen this endless times – a big hospital haughtily defends sending a self-pay patient a ridiculous bill and threatening to turn it over to collections, then immediately caves by offering a huge discount once a newspaper highlights its callous behavior. The latest example is Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, which refuses to participate in any private insurance networks for its ED because – as one of its executives explained directly when pressed by a reporter – it needs the excess fees to pay for the less-lucrative care it provides. The hospital slashed a bike patient’s ED bill from $20,000 to $200 once national news outlets ran with the story. Forget bringing a family member or friend as your patient advocate and bring a reporter instead. What’s really galling is that the hospital is still happily screwing over the 99.99 percent of patients who aren’t this guy, and in fact will now dig its hands deeper into patient pockets to cover what it magnanimously wrote off in this single case to buy its way out of the unflattering limelight.

A hospital in England deploys “bouncer” nurses to triage ED arrivals and send those patients who have only minor problems to the pharmacy or private practice to avoid clogging up wait times. The hospital added a smart twist – patients are never sent home, just to other providers.

This story says a lot. Washington, DC’s money-losing Newseum – which emphasizes the importance of the free press – will shut down and sell its building to Johns Hopkins University for $373 million, courtesy of additional huge donations from Hopkins alumnus and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. In related news, Bloomberg says it’s “ridiculous” that Hopkins doesn’t have its own police force in high-crime Baltimore, so the university is seeking approval to deploy its own armed force. Hopkins suggests that undergraduates budget $54,000 per year for attendance costs.

In Pennsylvania, a hospitalized man being guarded by state police following a high-speed DUI car chase adds an “open lewdness” charge to his long list –the guard notes in her report that “the mood struck him to masturbate in the hospital bed.”

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Several hundred University of New Mexico Hospital employees honor a 22-year-old organ donor who was killed in an avalanche, lining the hallways as he is taken for organ harvesting.

The New York Times describes “robosexuals” or “digisexuals,” necessarily newly coined terms for people who have fallen in love with AI-powered robots. One woman is engaged to a robot she built, while a man’s formal wedding ceremony featured himself and his holographic bride (that’s the happy couple above, although someone must be a swinger since the shelf is full of other non-humans). Experts say that as in the case of porn, Internet dating, and Snapchat sexting, such relationships will become commonplace and then normal. A $12,000 female sex robot has swappable faces and an AI-powered brain that allows it to carry on conversations, with the inventor noting that lonely customers come home from work to converse with the robot, sometimes over romantic dinners. Lusty entrepreneurs are even opening robotic brothels. The non-creepy aspect of this is that many of the same qualities – conversational ability and even empathy – can be incorporated into robotic caregivers.

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Morning Headlines 1/25/19

January 24, 2019 Headlines Comments Off

Hospitals Are Asking Their Own Patients to Donate Money

Hospitals are running nightly “wealth screening” analytics on inpatients who they then deem affluent enough to ask for donations before discharge.

Rhode Island Docs Alarmed by Subpoenas

The Rhode Island Health Department charges four Rhode Island Hospital ED physicians with medical misconduct after they voluntarily report errors that caused wrong scans to be ordered.

EBSCO Health Acquires HealthDecision

Healthcare content company Ebsco Health acquires HealthDecision, a clinical decision-support and shared decision-making software vendor, for an unspecified amount.

U.S. Uninsured Rate Rises to Four-Year High

The US uninsured rate rises to a four-year high of nearly 14 percent thanks to higher premiums, less competition, elimination of the individual mandate, and shortened enrollment periods.

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News 1/25/19

January 24, 2019 News 2 Comments

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The US uninsured rate rises to four-year high of nearly 14 percent.

The increase was driven by higher premiums, less competition as some insurers pulled out of marketplaces, and the White House’s declaration that “Obamacare is dead” coupled with its elimination of the individual mandate, shortened enrollment periods, and deep cuts in signup promotion.

Reader Comments

From Will the Real HIMS(S) Please Stand Up?: “Re: Hims. The subscription ‘boner and hair pills’ startup will be what comes to mind to non-health IT folks, although maybe they should book a HIMSS booth considering the demographic. The company uses an HIT-like Silicon Valley formula – find an incredibly complex problem, find a disruptively quick ‘solution,’ and throw a ton of money and marketing at it.” This particular Hims offers web-based doctor consultations that always end up with mailed-out prescriptions for what customers want – generic Propecia and Viagra – without looking a PCP in the eye, all under the highly questionable label of “personal wellness.” They will also sell you overpriced vitamins that any competent doctor would assure you offer no benefit whatsoever. It’s weird how in healthcare people cough up exorbitant amounts just because they saw an ad for something that is worthless at best and potentially harmful at worst, but refuse to pay for actual, sound medical treatment – everybody just wants that pill they’ve heard about (and for someone else to pay for it). Hims targets young, tech-savvy men who, I’m willing to bet, don’t bother to buy health insurance or save money to pay unexpected medical bills. Meanwhile, that reminds of something I’ve mentioned several times from years ago, when HIMSS went on a short-lived tear to suddenly start making its staff say out its name as H-I-M-S-S, which made me want to scream a la Sam Kinison to Rodney Dangerfield in “Back to School,” “SAY IT … SAY IT.”

From Don’t Touch the Area Under My Curve: “Re: Apple. I know you have a poll going, but what would you do in healthcare if you were Apple?” Probably nothing. Apple’s problem its lack of innovation in a mature market, compounded by the fact that it already rakes in $350 billion in annual revenue — $40 billion of that from services, about the same as the company’s annual profit – and even buying Epic, Cerner, and 10 other health IT vendors wouldn’t kick a dent in its financial universe in the unlikely event that Apple could improve their respective situations. Apple’s services revenue dwarfs everything in healthcare that doesn’t involve pharma or insurers – the App Store, Apple Care, ICloud, ITunes, and Apple Pay rake in the cash, but those are tied directly to use of it hardware (ICloud is one of few offerings that works on other platforms) and don’t require a lot of customer hand-holding or an explanation of why they are useful. Tim Cook’s priorities, other than trying to do a Lazarus on Steve Jobs, should be to make Apple’s upcoming streaming TV a killer app, redo the awful ITunes to better compete with Spotify, and consider making acquisitions in big-scale streaming content, home security, or online photo hosting / filtering (I would have gone for Sonos instead of Beats by Dre with my billion dollars, but that’s just me). If they really want to get into healthcare, how about:

Buy AirStrip. It seems to have fizzled out after spending $65 million (no new investment since 2014, no press releases since 2016), earning huge amounts of publicity including a demo on the big Apple stage in 2015 and offering what seemed like a sound product.
Buy AliveCor (whose Kardia EKG line is like Apple’s version grew up) or perhaps InPen (insulin delivery).
Check out that sweat sensor research work that just came out. We’re not short on phones, just unobtrusive, continuous biomedical sensors that can feed them useful health information.
Encourage the development of IOS-only apps that can monitor at-home seniors and connect their caregivers.
Buy any one of several companies that offer secure clinical communication and alarm / alert notification, making their product IPhone-only, although selling to enterprises is not Apple’s core (no pun intended) competency.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Last chance for HIStalk sponsors — contact Lorre to get your company included in our HIMSS19 guide, which will describe anything cool you’re doing there (giveaways, booth activities, etc.) She’ll even make you a “We Power HIStalk” sign if you really want to impress your booth visitors (well, you’ll impress me, anyway). I’m also still on the lookout for fun celebrities to hang out in our booth for an hour to welcome your followers (if you don’t have followers, you’re probably not really a fun celebrity). We’ve had everybody from former Surgeons General to Super Bowl players to noted authors squeezing into our microscopic exhibit hall space just to press flesh.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

NextGen Healthcare reports Q3 results: revenue down 0.6 percent, adjusted EPS $0.20 vs. $0.15, beating earnings expectations but falling short on revenue.

Optum sues its former VP of Product Strategy David Smith for violating his non-compete after announcing his intention to head up research for the unnamed healthcare venture of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan. The UnitedHealth Group business sees the new company as a threat even though it hasn’t announced how it will reduce healthcare expenses for the three participating companies. Optum alleges that Smith is one of fewer than 50 employees who had access to detailed profit and loss statements, also noting that he printed a confidential company market analysis exactly one minute before printing his resume and then continued printing internal documents until his last day. Smith’s attorneys argue that Optum can’t prove that he is violating his non-compete since neither they nor anyone else knows what he’ll be working on.

Specialty-specific EHR vendor Nextech acquires competitor SRS Health for an unspecified amount.

Hospitals are running nightly “wealth screening” analytics on inpatients and then hitting them up for donations. Hospitals such as MedStar, Johns Hopkins, Cedars-Sinai, and NYU Langone use software such as that sold by DonorSearch to identify the small percentage of wealthy inpatients by searching public real estate and donation records. They then send those patients extra amenities (like plush bathrobes) or dispatch a hospital executive to their rooms to schmooze. They are also training frontline doctors and nurses to pass along the names of patients who express gratitude so they can be approached. Ethics experts aren’t thrilled with the practice, but it’s legal since a 2013 HIPAA change that allows hospitals to use protected health information for fundraising. The article describes a retired TV engineer and Medicare patient who resented being pressed for a donation from St. Clair Hospital (PA), which last year reported $48 million in profit and CEO compensation of $1 million.

People

Banner Health, responding to my inquiry, confirms that it has hired Deanna Wise, former EVP/CIO of Dignity Health, for what I assume is CIO (Banner didn’t confirm her exact title). She was announced on December 4 as CIO of CommonSpirit Health, the 140-hospital, $30 billion Chicago system that is being formed by the merger of Dignity Health and Catholic Health Initiatives, but she left immediately afterward.

Greenway Health names Kali Durgampudi (Nuance) as chief technology and innovation officer.

Sales

Boys Town National Research Hospital (NE) will implement Meditech’s Expanse EHR.
Novant Health selects Genesis Automation’s inventory management system to track supply receipt and movement at 15 hospitals, integrated with Epic and Lawson ERP.

Announcements and Implementations

Carilion Clinic (VA), Inova Health System (Washington, DC), Little Company of Mary Hospital (IL), Summa Health (OH), and TeamHealth (TN) sign on for clinical communication software from PerfectServe.

DirectTrust reports that its users sent 110 million messages in Q4 2018 as user count increased by 35 percent and organizations served increased by 30 percent.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital will use remote patient monitoring technology from Philips at Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Other

The Rhode Island Health Department charges four Rhode Island Hospital ED physicians with medical misconduct after they voluntarily report errors that caused wrong scans to be ordered. The hospital’s users believe the charges are unfair and will discourage safety-minded providers to self-report issues. The hospital, part of the Lifespan network, rolled out Epic in 2015.

Healthcare futurist Jeff Goldsmith doesn’t like owners of health assets that are poorly integrated under single brand name calling themselves “health systems,” noting that their poor performance should raise questions about how much value they create. He says a true health system:

Operates assets that work together under a common vision rather than simply owning them
Has at its core a clinical entity that is government by actual clinicians and that collaborates under clearly stated professional values
Gives patients a seamless experience and consistently excellent clinical care regardless of how those patients enter the system
Actively manage cost by using accurate data, clinical consensus, and collaboration

Amazon adds “smart” hospital rooms from EIR Healthcare to its retail offerings. The MedModular units retail for $814 per square foot and include a bed and bathroom. Shipping is free, but even Amazon Prime members won’t get their new room within two days.

Sponsor Updates

Elsevier Clinical Solutions President John Danaher and SVP Olaf Lodbrok share predictions for 2019.
Redox announces it nearly quadrupled its year-over-year annual growth in 2018 and increased its network by 500 percent.
Docola will add Healthwise educational content for patients to its Care Communication platform.
Hyland Healthcare provides connected healthcare solutions to all of US News & World Report’s 20 best hospitals.
Gartner names InterSystems to its “January 2019 Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Operational Data Management Systems.”
Kyruus and Providence St. Joseph Health will present on health system digital transformations at HIMSS19 on Thursday, Feb. 14.
Mobile Heartbeat will integrate Imprivata’s Mobile Device Access authentication software with its MH-Cure mobile collaboration technology for smartphones.
Divurgent and Gevity announce a strategic business alliance to expand their services across the US and Canada.
EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “PCMH: How Analytics Drive Better Care.”
Imat Solutions publishes a new case study, “HASA HIE: Liberating Health Data for Enhanced Population Health in Texas, and More.”

Blog Posts

Creating the Frictionless Healthcare Platform: A Provider Readiness Checklist (Loyale Healthcare)
Creative Solutions to EHR Training Challenges (Part Two) (The HCI Group)
Powering Patient Relationships – How We Can Help People Prepare for the Future and Still Hope for the Best (Healthwise)
Successful Patient Engagement Strategies (EClinicalWorks)
Integration vs. Interoperability: What’s the Difference? (Spok)
Overcome risk to drive a successful healthcare IT strategy (Part 1) (Imprivata)
Local Search Ranking Factors for 2019: Changes and Best Practices (Influence Health)
Making sense out of cluttered EHR data (Intelligent Medical Objects)

Contacts

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

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2 Comments

Oh, I have no doubt it would have been plenty bad enough. My co-workers and I saw the database fields…

As one of the Y2K army of programmers, I can assure you there would have been major outages and errors…

Re: "...forced to be physically present in the office when it does nothing for their productivity..." For most of my…

After reading your comments about employees "forced to be physically present in the office when it does nothing for their…

The insurance industry is 'under the gun' right now, and this allows the provider sector to avoid the fundamental issue…

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