Cottage Hospital (CA) reaches a $2 million settlement with the California Attorney General’s office after the health system left a server containing patient records exposed to the Internet for over three years. Investigators found that Google searches led to hundreds of records being inappropriately accessed during that time.
In Florida, only 21 percent of physicians and 57 percent of pharmacists have registered with the state’s PDMP. The state has had a PDMP since 2011, but adoption has been slow because checking the database is voluntary, and EHR integration is still missing.
Ginger.io, a digital health startup building a behavioral health surveillance and disease management platform, pivots its strategy due to lackluster demand for its product. The company will now move into the provider space, offering technology-driven behavioral health services.
CNBC reports that Amazon Web Services and Cerner will announce an agreement this week involving Cerner’s HealtheIntent population health management system, which is already hosted on AWS.
The new deal may involve allowing researchers to analyze HealtheIntent data using AI technology.
CERN shares led the S&P 500 in gaining 5 percent Wednesday afternoon after the article ran.
Reader Comments
From Dr. Scripps: “Re: Eric Topol, MD. Has been pushed out of his position as chief academic officer at the Scripps Healthcare System, where he reported to CEO Chris Van Gorder. He still practices cardiology at Scripps Clinic one day a week, but is no longer a member of the executive leadership team. He has joined The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), which shares the Scripps moniker, but is not part of the health system, which never adopted the ideas Eric has been evangelizing for years.” Eric’s LinkedIn shows that he left the CAO position in August 2017, moving into the role of EVP and professor of molecular medicine at the Research Institute.
From A Little BIrdie Told Me: “Re: Iraan General Hospital. They were implementing Athenahealth because of the cost model in the clinics and decided to put it into the acute side. I’m working on what the specific drivers were to go back to CPSI.” Unverified. The trend of CPSI customers going to Athenahealth and then returning quickly to the fold is close to astonishing, although it would be interesting to see what if any inducements CPSI gave them.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Just over half of poll respondents think the VA’s Cerner system will allow it to exchange information with providers outside the VA. Commenters note, however, that being able to exchange information doesn’t necessarily mean that the VA will actually make it happen.
New poll to your right or here: where did you do your online electronics shopping last week, if anywhere?
I limited my Black Friday shopping to getting a Google Home Mini and Chromecast to play around with, unable to resist the great deal Google was offering. I was tempted by an $800 Mac Air, but that device is so long in the tooth (especially the display) that it seemed like an unwise investment, especially since I recently paid less for a much better equipped Windows 10 laptop and my only interest was learning Mac stuff and running a couple of Mac-only apps. Actually, I went back Saturday for one more Black Friday weekend special – Amazon-owned Woot! has fantastic deals on Diamondback bicycles (inexpensive, but plenty good for someone like me who hasn’t ridden in years) that beat every price available plus $5 shipping, so the his-and-hers models are on their way.
A minimally Spanish-speaking friend is traveling in South America, so I checked out the much-improved, still-free Google Translate app. It can now be used with the mobile device’s microphone both ways – you set the to/from language (like English to Spanish), speak into it (“Where is the nearest bar?”) and it puts the translated text on the screen with an option to play it aloud with a natural-sounding voice for the other person to hear in their language. Then, you flip the languages and let the other person speak in Spanish, which you then see on-screen or hear in English. Google has improve the translation engine a lot, apparently, so it’s more conversational than before. A cool new option (via a Google acquisition) is the ability to translate written words on the screen by pointing the device’s camera at road signs, menus, etc. that then displays the English translation as an image overlay in real time. You can also download the language package so it can be used while offline.
This Week in Health IT History
One year ago:
President-elect Trump nominates Tom Price, MD as HHS secretary and Seema Verma as CMS administrator.
Orion Health shares drop to a post-IPO low following poor quarterly results and its announced post-election US sales concerns.
Five years ago:
KLAS lists its top radiology PACS innovators as Infinitt, Intelerad, DR Systems, McKesson, Novarad, and Sectra.
Cleveland Medical Mart signs Cleveland Clinic and GE Healthcare as tenants.
OIG warns that CMS is not adequately auditing Meaningful Use attestation submissions, recommending that CMS conduct random audits, issue guidance of the types of documentation it expects providers to have available, and require certified EHRs to issue verification reports.
Ten years ago:
UPMC CIO Mark Hopkins dies of cancer at 47.
A nursing professor creates simulation training on Second Life.
Experts at Penn’s Wharton School predict that personal health records such as Microsoft HealthVault could serve as the bridge between incompatible hospital EHRs.
Athenahealth buys a 130,000 square foot office facility in Belfast, ME as its second site.
Carestream Health announces plans to integrate its radiology solutions with IBM’s Lotus Sametime messaging.
Last Week’s Most Interesting News
The AMA severs its relationship with Outcome Health following fraud allegations that also caused the company to offer buyouts that were accepted by one-third of its staff.
The VA announces that it is considering merging its Choice program with the DoD’s Tricare following discussions about their planned joint EHR.
Banner Health confirms that its Tucson-based hospitals are experiencing patient delays following its October 1 Cerner go-live.
Advisory Board closes the sale of its healthcare business to Optum.
Webinars
November 30 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Making Clinical Communications Work in Your Complex Environment.” Sponsored by: PatientSafe Solutions. Presenters: Steve Shirley, VP/CIO, Parkview Medical Center; Richard Cruthirds, CIO, Peterson Health. Selecting, implementing, and managing a mobile clinical communications platform is a complex and sometimes painful undertaking. With multiple technologies, stakeholders, and disciplines involved, a comprehensive approach is required to ensure success. Hear two hospital CIOs share their first-hand experience, lessons learned, and demonstrated results from deploying an enterprise-wide mobile clinical communications solution.
December 5 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Cornerstones of Order Set Optimization: Trusted Evidence.” Sponsored by: Wolters Kluwer. Updating order sets with new medical evidence is crucial to improving outcomes, but coordinating maintenance for hundreds of order sets with dozens of stakeholders is a huge logistical challenge. For most hospitals, managing order set content is labor intensive and the internal processes supporting it are far too inefficient. Evidence-based order sets are only as good as their content, which is why regular review and updates are essential. This webinar explores the relationship between clinical content and patient care with an eye toward building trust among the clinical staff. Plus, we will demonstrate a new evidence alignment tool that can easily incorporate the most current medical content into your order sets, regardless of format, including Cerner Power Plans and Epic SmartSets.
Behavioral app vendor Ginger.io pivots its business to become a technology-focused national medical practice that will provide therapists. The company, which had raised $28 million with its most recent funding round in late 2014, had struggled to get hospital customers in its previous model.
Philips acquires Analytical Informatics to enhance its PerformanceBridge Practice imaging department management system. The company offers applications for quality analysis, productivity, dictated report search, scanner utilization, peer review, undictated studies lists, image quality problem reporting, and real-time alerts.
Announcements and Implementations
Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (GA) will spend $1 billion to build a replacement 446-bed hospital on a new campus on North Druid Hills.
University of Pennsylvania Health System (PA) will spend $3.9 billion on construction in the next five years, including $1.5 billion for a 17-story patient tower, updating other buildings, and adding a new Center for Health Care Technology that will house IT and other corporate functions.
UMass Memorial Medical Center (MA) goes live on Agfa HealthCare’s enterprise imaging platform.
Cottage Hospital (CA) pays $2 million to settle state charges regarding two incidents between 2011 and 2013 in which patient information was freely discoverable in Internet searches. The hospital, which faced up to $275 million in penalties, has agreed to upgrade its security infrastructure and to hire a chief privacy officer.
Other
Researchers find that only 21 percent of Florida physicians have registered for the state’s prescription drug monitoring program database, with lack of EHR integration being found as one significant factor. Use of the database to check patient opiate histories is voluntary, but submission of opiate prescription and dispensing data is mandatory.
A designer creates a virtual reality system to reduce death anxiety in terminally ill hospital patients by creating a sensation of leaving the body. He says,
The fear and experience of death is a neglected topic. If we began treating our anxieties surrounding death, it might mean the process of dying could become more comfortable. In the developed world, the majority of people die in hospital or a care home, turning deaths into medical experiences. But doctors are trained to save and prolong lives, not tend to our demise. They simply lack the tools.
China, following through on its ambition to lead the world in AI by 2030, announces plans to build an unmanned, AI-powered police station that can handle DMV-type issues such as administering driver exams and vehicle registration.
I wrote last week about the dedication of a new e-health center in India that admitted afterward that it had no actual doctors or staff, with outside workers brought in for the ceremony as pretend employees to impress the locals and the governor of Punjab. The center has closed four days after it opened after the lone doctor at the dispensary where it was housed “was found missing” (is that an oxymoron?) and even the dispensary itself has closed until a replacement is found.
November 21, 2017NewsComments Off on News 11/22/17
Top News
The AMA asks to have its content removed from the platforms of waiting room advertising technology firm Outcome Health “in light of recent unfavorable reports in the media” that involve fraud accusations against the company.
Another publisher, Harvard Health Publishing, says it is “reviewing the situation” in determining the future of its relationship with Outcome Health.
Outcome Health offered voluntary buyouts to most of its employees late last week because of “challenging times.” More than one-third of its employees – about 200 – took the company up on its offer of a 90-day severance payment to quit. That will reduce the company’s headcount to just over 300, based on previous estimates. The company laid off employees in late September just after pledging to add 2,000 Chicago jobs by 2022 when it dedicated Outcome Tower on Chicago’s North State Street.
Meanwhile, a Chicago Tribune investigation finds that the company has struggled for years with salespeople making false and misleading statements to medical practices in trying to get them to replace a competitor’s system with that of Outcome Health. Examples include one salesperson describing drug company advertisers as “diabetes advocacy organizations;” using a drug company rep’s conference badge to obtain material from a competitor’s trade show booth; telling practices using a competitor’s system that the competitor had approved replacing its product with that of Outcome Health; and lying to prospects about how many of the competitor’s systems it had replaced.
Outcome Health also twice sued competitor AccentHealth for making misleading statements to prospects in the same manner it has been accused, but then bought that same company months later in November 2016.
Reader Comments
From Lee Carmen: “Re: UI Health Care’s Epic Community Connect program. The Community Connect program is currently part of UI Health Ventures. UI Health Ventures is going through a reorganization process and our Community Connect program will transition into UI Health Care in the coming months. Operations will continue as usual for our current clients, but we are putting a hold on new contracts for now as we complete the transition.” Thanks to UIHC CIO Lee, who provided this response to a reader rumor I ran earlier this week.
From PreviousGen: “Re: NextGen. Looks like someone sent their patient safety problem alert to the wrong list!” I give them credit for notifying users of potentially patient-endangering software problems, which amazingly is still not done by some vendors.
FromItchy Scratchy: “Re: HIMSS social medial ambassadors. Can you explain the point?” The précis: HIMSS likes to get mentioned in tweets by folks it can bribe with free conference registration and the chance to mug with each other for Twitter selfies. My admittedly cynical observation is that for some of those chosen, their social media volume is inversely proportional to their relevant education and real-world accomplishments.
Webinars
November 30 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Making Clinical Communications Work in Your Complex Environment.” Sponsored by: PatientSafe Solutions. Presenters: Steve Shirley, VP/CIO, Parkview Medical Center; Richard Cruthirds, CIO, Peterson Health. Selecting, implementing, and managing a mobile clinical communications platform is a complex and sometimes painful undertaking. With multiple technologies, stakeholders, and disciplines involved, a comprehensive approach is required to ensure success. Hear two hospital CIOs share their first-hand experience, lessons learned, and demonstrated results from deploying an enterprise-wide mobile clinical communications solution.
December 5 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Cornerstones of Order Set Optimization: Trusted Evidence.” Sponsored by: Wolters Kluwer. Updating order sets with new medical evidence is crucial to improving outcomes, but coordinating maintenance for hundreds of order sets with dozens of stakeholders is a huge logistical challenge. For most hospitals, managing order set content is labor intensive and the internal processes supporting it are far too inefficient. Evidence-based order sets are only as good as their content, which is why regular review and updates are essential. This webinar explores the relationship between clinical content and patient care with an eye toward building trust among the clinical staff. Plus, we will demonstrate a new evidence alignment tool that can easily incorporate the most current medical content into your order sets, regardless of format, including Cerner Power Plans and Epic SmartSets.
Yale New Haven Health (CT) chooses the Visage 7 enterprise imaging platform.
Iraan General Hospital (TX) goes back to CPSI’s Evident Thrive EHR, saying it had previously switched to an unnamed system that caused billing problems and couldn’t handle its service lines.
People
Smartphone wound image analysis app vendor Tissue Analytics hires Mark Becker (Cerner) as VP of sales.
Jonathan Teich, MD, PhD (Brigham and Women’s Hospital) joins InterSystems in a role he didn’t specifically name in his Facebook update. UPDATE: Jonathan report that his new job title is CMIO/director of product management.
Patrick Conway, MD, MSc, former CMS administrator for innovation and quality, joins BCBS of North Carolina as president and CEO.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announces his plan to “stop micromanaging the Internet” in ending net neutrality regulations that prevent broadband providers from selectively throttling back or blocking traffic from specific sites and apps and from charging cable-like a la carte pricing for accessing specific websites, expected to be approved at FCC’s mid-December meeting in a straight party line vote. Internet service providers would be free to do whatever they want as long as they disclose their policies to users, making Internet service less like a public utility in transferring most oversight of consumer protections to the Federal Trade Commission.
Other
The AI-powered robot of a China-based company passes the country’s national medical exam with an above-average score. IFlytek will launch the robot in March 2018 to improve cancer care and to train PCPs. A reported 500 million people in China use its voice product that translates between English and Chinese, which also powers business functions such as transcription, automated call center replies, and sending voice instructions to ride-hailing app drivers. The 10 robotic greeters in the lobby of one hospital in China give directions to departments based on what symptoms the patient says they have, while clinicians use it to input voiceprint-verified information into the EHR.
A report on the use of technology by the “death industry” cheerily projects a big increase in sales of equipment to private morgues that correlates to the number of US hospitals. Refrigeration units are the big seller for which business is “booming,” driven by North American Christian burials that require holding bodies for long periods.
In India, a governor performs the dedication of a new pharmacy-based telemedicine center, although its head later admitted to the press that it has no doctors or other staff, adding that the busy technicians conducting tests in the background were just brought in for the photo opportunity. According to the local paper’s account, “The centre has been set up by converting a courier container, which was lying unused at the Dhanas dispensary for nearly a decade.” Meanwhile, another paper reports that dispensary patients were told to come back the next day since its only doctor was hosting the festivities.
Sponsor Updates
Visage Imaging will demonstrate the AI-powered research and diagnostic capabilities of Visage 7 at RSNA.
The Minnesota High Tech Association names Ability Network the software category winner of its Tekne Awards for its cloud-based revenue cycle management application.
Nuance will showcase AI enhancements for radiologist effectiveness at RSNA.
The White House publishes revised figures on the opioid crisis, reporting that drug overdoses are now the leading cause of injury death in the United States, outnumbering traffic crashes or gun-related deaths. The report estimates that the cost of the opioid crisis in 2015 was $504 billion, or 2.8 percent of GDP.
In a Health Affairs article, former National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD explores how EHRs can help coordinate care for patients impacted by natural disasters. In 2005, DeSalvo lived in New Orleans and worked at Tulane University School of Medicine as the Vice Dean of Community Affairs and Health Policy when Hurricane Katrina devastated the city.
Stanford University researchers have developed an AI algorithm trained on a data set of 100,000 chest x-rays that were annotated with information on 14 different diseases that turn up in the images. The algorithm has proved to be more reliable at spotting each of the 14 diseases than a group of board certified radiologists that also interpreted the images.
During its recent earnings call Apple CEO Tim Cook mentioned digital health app VisualDx, noting that the company is using Apple’s machine learning plugin to help dermatologists diagnoses skin conditions from a photo.
Jennifer David, RN, BSN, MHA is vice-president of clinical operations for Avant Healthcare Professionals of Casselberry, FL.
President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a national emergency. As a reaction to this announcement, Intermountain Healthcare, a Utah-based hospital chain, pledged to decrease opioid prescriptions by 40 percent in 2018.
Making a commitment to addressing the crisis is a crucial first step. However, only addressing the patient-use side is not a holistic approach to the problem.
The mental health of the nurses and doctors who care for overdosed patients are not considered in the opioid equation, yet every day they feel the magnitude of the epidemic and they are left alone to manage their pain. Ultimately, they may leave their job or the profession altogether without support in facing this problem.
Nurses are the frontline warriors in this epidemic. Several times each day, they’re responding to the screams of withdrawal, managing the inherent chaos of addiction, and dealing with family members who demand an immediate solution. For many patients, it’s the second, third or tenth time to the emergency department for the same problem. Families are desperate, angry, and looking for someone to blame, often defaulting to the nurse.
I’ve had nurses from hospitals around the country explain that they feel that they’re enabling drug-addicted patients by administering pain medications. However, “managing pain” is an important aspect of HCAHPS. Nurses are conflicted between caring for a patient and adding to the problem. This conflict can lead to anger, stress, and frustration among nurse staff, and in some cases, could drive nurses to quit.
Some hospitals have made steps in protecting nurses against these patients with a patient code of conduct, which states that violence and verbal abuse against staff will not be tolerated. A large hospital in New York has their patient code of conduct displayed throughout their hallways and another facility in Missouri strictly enforces that their staff will not be disrespected by patients. When these rules are up against patient discretion on HCAHPS scores, they become harder to enforce.
The best thing hospital leadership can do is to mentally prepare nurses to care for these difficult patients. This will also reduce staff turnover and improve employee communication.
The first place to start is to recognize the potential of a problem. I make personal visits to our nurses on assignment and always ask them how they are dealing with opioid-addicted patients. It is not always easy or possible to give individual attention to every nurse on staff. However, it is important to identify who is having issues. Surveying the nurse team to ask if they feel respected at all levels and supported in their job challenges is a great strategy to begin with.
Once honest communication begins, explore what support nurses want and need, then put a plan together. It should include a healthy dose of continuous learning intended to help build understanding and empathy for patients’ needs. Seeing how our nurses were affected, we now incorporate training on how to care for drug-addicted patients in our curriculum as well as provide consistent follow up while nurses are on assignment. We want to pre-expose them for what they might face and be there for them when they face it.
There will likely be multiple tiers of support needed, varying from the occasional discussions about a particularly challenging patient to more intense, personalized support from the human resources department. Everyone has different experiences and belief systems about addiction, so allow for that. One of the hardest things to address is that opioid-addicted patients should not be discriminated against.
Not all days are the same when dealing with these patients, and some days might be especially challenging. Consistent follow up is necessary to maintain a healthy staff and also allows for positive patient experiences. If nurses feel that their employer constantly empathizes with them, they will feel the support they need when caring for such patients.
Comments Off on Readers Write: Preparing Nurses for Opioid-Addicted Patients
November 20, 2017Readers WriteComments Off on Readers Write: Tips for Selecting EMR Training and Activation Support Vendors
Tips for Selecting EMR Training and Activation Support Vendors By Kevin Smith
Kevin Smith is CEO of TrainingWheel of Fort Myers, FL.
The contracted EMR vendor often does not deliver experienced staff for the activation. The go-live is the first time some of the vendor’s elbow support resources enter a hospital without being a patient or family member.
Here are a few helpful tips based on lessons learned to save organizations time and money:
Know what the organization wants and what it is paying for. Consider more than the proposed training and support cost. For example, the cost may be different because the vendor provides licensed clinicians, while others may provide non-clinical rounders with no hospital for a lower cost.
Insufficient planning can lead to less-experienced resources. What recourse does the contract include? If a bank teller or oil rigger joined the firm last week, are they prepared to help the clinicians? A body is not what matters to the clinicians. They want someone helpful to them as they learn how to do their work using new tools.
Ask the vendors to provide resumes, CVs, immunization records, background checks, and proof of experience in advance. Vendors often slide inexperienced people into a project and shuffle them around. They want to maintain high resource numbers, but the clinicians are not getting the support.
Does the vendor rely on one or more third-party companies to provide trainers and support staff? If so, it will be hard to know what type of resources are being provided. This is important because many vendors subcontract to the same companies. There may be two different bids, but the organization ends up with the same subcontracted company. If the primary vendor can’t answer basic support questions, the organization may already be in trouble. An experienced vendor will match clinical support personnel to support areas based on their clinical role and/or experience.
Can the vendor present a full project cost proposal with a support schedule, detailed expense projection, and a list of their proposed resources after one walk-through of the facility? Staffing ratios help, but are not always accurate. If a vendor doesn’t understand the makeup of the organization’s staff and the layout of the facility, how can they give an accurate estimate of clinical support resources?
Does the vendor develop curriculum and clinical scenario-based training or does training simply cover system functionality? If training only covers functionality, then users will require more elbow support because they won’t be prepared to use the system for their real-time clinical workflow. The #1 complaint from clinicians in EMR training is that it only teaches them navigation and what each click does. This leaves clinicians anxious and also forces every clinician to come up with their own approaches and workflows.
Can the vendor recognize issues in the build and offer recommendations based on past client experiences? The training partner should be an asset to the team, identifying issues in the build that may come up during the training. Better to know this ahead of time and make corrections than during or after the go-live. Make sure the organization and the vendor have a joint commitment to be open and sharing in this regard.
Does the vendor pursue continued improvement and feedback? Are they as committed to quality as the organization?
Vendor involvement is an integral part of implementation success. As an organization, ask the necessary questions to guarantee the right vendors are selected.
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November 20, 2017Dr. JayneComments Off on Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 11/20/17
I spent a rare couple of days traveling for non-work business, but through the magic that is the small world of healthcare IT, I ran into a friend I normally only see at HIMSS. It’s always fun to run into people out of context, when you’re trying to make sure they’re really who you think they are before you call out to them. Since I was wandering around the city while my friends were attending a patient safety conference, it was nice to see a friendly face.
I did end up in some healthcare IT conversations over dinner and drinks, however, and I heard some horror stories from a conference panel on HIPAA requirements and security risk analysis. One of my friends admitted that she had her work laptop stolen and didn’t report it to anyone despite it containing protected health information. That sort of thing is one of the perks (or hazards, depending on how you look at it) of owning your own practice and not fully understanding the huge number of laws that impact our practices. At least she realized after attending the conference that she should have taken additional action.
One of my other traveling companions works for a large integrated delivery network, where policy and procedure reign. She shared her thoughts around a session on patient safety and how it relates to impaired or distressed physicians. I agree with her suspicion that we’re going to see more of those types of situations as physician stress and burnout increase. We had a great discussion on addressing the needs of physicians with chronic health conditions that are impacting their ability to deliver care. She’s in a leadership role, and given the size of her organization, has dealt with a number of issues including early-onset dementia, a surgeon with new-onset seizures that began in the operating room, and uncontrolled diabetes leading to a physician collapsing on a patient. She’s approaching retirement and I think she might have a bright future as a storyline consultant for a medical TV show.
We were also entertained by another member of our physician “ladies weekend” party who was trying her hand at social media. Even though her practice has been around for nearly 20 years, they’ve never taken the plunge. She was trying to figure out how to post conference snippets on Facebook and Twitter without being overly obvious or violating any terms of the conference or the social media platforms. They’re concerned about having patients follow them on Facebook and post personal details, revealing that they’re patients. We discussed different ways of controlling posts to their page and how to respond when there are potentially inappropriate submissions. Their practice could be a case study in physician workforce management and advertising: an OB/GYN practice which has recently converted to GYN-only to meet the needs of their “mature” physician staff, but wants to try to grow the practice.
They’re also trying to limit the number of surgical procedures they do, but I don’t think that they realized how challenging it would be to try to build a patient panel to support Well Woman visits that only occur once a year. They are considering the incorporation of some non-core procedures that we see other physicians adding as their demographics shift: facial aesthetic services, leg vein treatments, weight management, and other typically cash-only services. It will be interesting to see how their strategy has evolved when I meet up with her again at a conference we’re scheduled to attend in April. Hopefully by then her social media habits will have matured enough that she’s not obsessing over every “like.”
I returned home to a day in the patient care trenches, which made it seem like I was never on vacation. Work has a way of sneaking up on you like that, and since I was training a new physician assistant as well as keeping my eye on a couple of new patient care techs, it was more stressful than usual. We’re gearing up for a busy pre-holiday week and are starting to see increased volumes from out-of-town visitors. Add in the extra patients from primary care offices that are closing or working shortened hours this week and it will only get busier. Since I don’t travel for Thanksgiving, I usually work multiple shifts around it to allow my partners who do travel to have some breathing room. I’m sure by next Sunday I’ll be dragging, although hopefully some leftover Turkey and dressing will keep me fueled. Our practice has tripled in size over the last two years and there don’t see any signs that things will slow down anytime soon.
I closed out the weekend with some online training for an analytics startup that asked me to do some work. They’re looking for independent review of their overall approach but also of their training curriculum and whether outsiders think it will be as easy to implement as they have convinced themselves that it will be. Although the training was solid, there are definitely some holes in their workflow since they’re making the assumption that everyone in the office will be using the solution at the point of care. The problem is that it’s not embedded in the EHR, so it’s yet another one of those “one more place to go for data” destinations that clinical users struggle to reach. For small practices that don’t have dedicated care coordinators or care managers, the idea of analytics is daunting enough on its own. Add in the assumption that physicians should be doing it while they’re seeing patients and I think it becomes a bit of a non-starter.
I’ll complete my write-up for them later this week and then will have a debrief with their marketing team and training team next week. I’d rather have a debrief with their strategy team and CMIO, but we’ll just have to see where my preliminary findings take us. The startup’s leadership seems pretty convinced they’ve nailed it and I’m not sure how open they are to receiving feedback that isn’t 100 percent in line with their expectations. I’ve been in the startup space before and I know I’d rather receive critical comments from internal and external testers rather than from clients whose expectations we missed.
Is your organization all-in with analytics or just dipping your toes in the water? Email me.
The views and opinions expressed are mine personally and are not necessarily representative of current or former employers.
New York, New York
I woke up and the sun was glistening off the glass and steel skyscrapers that had become my GPS. Between them, just across the water, there she was, tall and beautiful — Lady Liberty greeting me each morning. A faithful companion reminding me of my roots and our great country. My belongings had shipped the day before, so there would be no run on the Highline today.
I showered, dressed, and began my familiar walk up Church, giving respects to Hamilton, left down Broadway, turning up Wall Street, dancing with tourists marveling at sacred Federal Hall and the Exchange. A final right on Broad where the cobblestone street forced a jump in my step, leading up to 55 Water, where I took my seat alongside my team in our shared space.
A beautiful high-rise vista, we shared views of the East River with its gorgeous bridges connecting us to Brooklyn through the harbor at its edges. We arguably had the best vantage point to observe security logistics whenever dignitaries made their way into Manhattan via heliport. We waved to presidents and popes.
Today was different. This would be my last walk through hallowed grounds of our founding fathers and fellowshipping with my team.
Shy of three years, I was the leader of our team that carried our broken division. If you observed us and knew our outcomes, you think we had been together for decades. Our bonds grew quick and deep. The urgency of our mission, our passion, and the significant time spent huddling after hours hastened our bonds.
Our team included spouses and children who knew one another well. None of us native to this country, we were the perfect mix serving the NYC melting pot. Easily the most painful part in my decision to leave NYC was departing our team. Against all odds, our team did what others failed to do, what many said was an impossible task.
I rarely reference the organizations I serve, but NYC Health & Hospitals was special. I knew I was called here for a season of life and how it all came to pass implied providence. Public health is vital to the greater good and I was honored to make a contribution, however small in the bigger picture.
Reporting to the CEO, the experience opened my eyes to the critical role of public health in our society. The specific NYC mission fills many gaps in caring for everyone regardless of status or ability to pay. We had routine meetings with City Hall to ensure alignment and accountability with municipal leaders. Each time at City Hall I would sneak off and spend time in the rooms set aside to pay homage to our founding fathers. It was sacred ground that reaffirmed my calling to healthcare service.
I grew as a leader during my tenure. Many blogs and ideas were inspired by the experience. The exposure to political nuances was both awe-inspiring and an insightful awakening. I gained appreciation for the inner workings of government and the challenges of balancing the needs and welfare of arguably the greatest city on earth. Frustrating at times, I loved her.
Serving in public health also fulfilled one of the remaining aspects of my career strategic plan that I developed with my 2004 mentor, Mr. Zenty, the CEO of University Hospitals. I intentionally served in academic medical centers, community-based hospitals, integrated delivery systems, faith-based systems, and in for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. I served in a mix of ambulatory and acute care environments. Armed with this experience, I knew without a doubt that my greatest affinity centered on academic medicine. When the opportunity came about to serve as a senior leader of perhaps the greatest health delivery system on Earth, I did not hesitate. Except for my team.
In fact, it has taken me 70 days to express myself via this blog. I am thankful to have visited with my NYC squad several times since leaving as our friendships remain strong. We learned so much on our journey, but perhaps purposefully, enjoying the moment was the most profound. We all tend to rush here and there and mindfulness gets lost in the stress and adrenalin of crisis and deadlines.
We took deliberate time in each meeting to reflect. We took time weekly to be social. We planned time monthly to bring together families and play. Almost quarterly we gathered somewhere around the country to celebrate life. We cried. We laughed. We jumped into frigid oceans. We ate foods that made us cringe. We lifted each other. We saw sports. We saw Broadway. We made mistakes. We shopped. We served. We saw comedy. We saw stars. We danced. We cooked. We walked. We ran. We held hands. We prayed. We screamed. We talked deeply. We consoled. We counseled. We encouraged. We learned. We challenged. We conquered. We played tricks. We accomplished. We smiled. We won.
If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
Ed encourages your interaction by clicking the comments link below. He can be followed on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
The VA is exploring the possibility of merging the VA’s Choice program, which allows some veterans to receive care from private doctors, with the DoD’s Tricare health insurance program.
Optum completes its acquisition of the Advisory Board. Optum will retain the Advisory Board’s healthcare business unit, and sell its education business unit to Vista Equity Partners.
A California Superior Court judge finds that Sutter Health intentionally destroyed 192 boxes of documents that employers and labor unions were seeking, “knowing that the evidence was relevant to antitrust issues.”
Banner Health’s Tucson-based hospitals are working through operational delays following its October 1 Cerner go-live. John Hensing, MD and chief clinical officer for the health system, says that he expects operations to return to normal by the end of the year.
The VA is considering merging its Choice program – which allows veterans who can’t get timely VA appointments to see private doctors — with the military’s Tricare, which offers health insurance to active service members.
A VA statement says that work on the planned VA-DoD single EHR platform led VA Secretary David Shulkin to have conversations with the White House about merging the programs to “provide better care for veterans at a lower cost to taxpayers.”
Some large veteran groups immediately expressed concern with the plan, fearing that it could turn the VA’s direct care model into a DoD Tricare-like insurance program in which private providers deliver services and insured members pay premiums, deductibles, and co-pays.
In terms of our Choice Program, we still today only have three Department of Defense facilities that participate in the Choice network. We need to get the Department of Defense and VA to make all their facilities and our facilities open to veterans and to active service members. We certainly have to work with Congress and our veteran service organizations to redesign this Choice Program. It will expire essentially at the end of the year, and we need new legislation — this Congress — to make sure that veterans don’t go back to waiting longer than they need to wait to get care in the community. So we have to pass legislation this year.
Reader Comments
From Logic Pretzel: “Re: MHS Genesis. Deployment can’t continue beyond the four completed pilot sites until an independent assessment of cost and suitability is performed, which may not be finished until a year or more from now. That piles more risk on the VA’s piggyback decision and undercuts the credibility of their rationale that there’s no time to do a proper competitive search.” The DoD says the review will continue through late 2018, meaning that the VA is rushing into its no-bid contract with Cerner without even knowing whether DoD will continue its own Cerner rollout.
From Short Attn: “Re: HIStalk. It’s too long for me to read. I’m glad you at least run headlines to save me time.” I spend many hours each week extracting the health IT news and information that I think is most relevant and interesting, condensing it massively and dividing it into categories for easy skipping. You are free to consume as little or as much of what I write, but someone out there is poring over every word to gain an edge to allow them to steal your job or your customer. It’s good to have all the knowledge you can get when you’re a knowledge worker.
From Chalky Aftertaste: “Re: patient-preferred by whom? Check out this bizarre vanity press release.” A horribly written announcement published on a free press release service – I’d bet a stack of non-American currency that it wasn’t written by a native English speaker – lauds the medical accomplishments of an Indiana neurosurgeon, indisputably proven by a single fawning Facebook quote from an alleged patient and a short list of educational qualifications that includes “CMS Meaningful Use Stage 1 Certification from Epic Care Ambulatory EMR” (has he tapped into an unmet consumer demand for Epic-certified neurosurgeons?) The conferrer of the award is Patient Preferred Physicians and Practitioners, an “exclusive medical society” whose corporate address is a Boca Raton mail drop. Most of its honorees seem to be in late in their careers and I’m guessing their modest social media skills misled them into thinking that buying a vanity award would make them seem hipper.
From Pernicious: “Re: diagnostic apps and sites. Don’t you think these will revolutionize healthcare and that you should mention them more often?” No. Non-clinicians think patients are undiagnosed or misdiagnosed a lot more than happens in real life. We don’t have a diagnosis problem – we’re getting killed (literally) by conditions that have been perfectly diagnosed but are either untreated or expensively held in check at best. From a public health perspective, the last thing we need is wiring up millions of Americans, testing their genes, or poring over images of their innards to detect theoretical problems. That’s why experienced doctors roll their eyes at greenhorns who order tons of lab and imaging studies, with the near-certainty of finding something out of range requiring Whac-A-Mole action that’s not good for anyone except the companies making money off unnecessary tests and treatments. Western culture and medicine looks at illness and death much differently than most of the world, and our fascination with gadgetry and medical heroics that prop up the comforting illusion of immortality instead of taking on less-decisive public health issues has left us with a society that’s #1 by far in healthcare costs, but that barely beats Cuba in WHO’s health rankings.
From IA Taxpayer: “Re: University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Shutting down its Epic Community Connect program. Team members were told on Friday, November 17. The business unit will be integrated into UIHC IT, UIHC is not seeking new Community Connect business, services to existing clients will be cut off, and layoff of 50 percent of the staff (more than 30 FTEs) will happen by July 1, 2018. The message is that the program has a financially flawed business model that provides only a fraction of the ongoing revenue needed to support existing staff. UIHC has negative margins, but within increased focus on patient-centered care, referral patterns from those hospitals that joined the program will be negatively impacted.” Unverified. I’ve emailed a contact there for a comment.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
The vast majority of poll respondents think the federal government should review whether the AMA-owned CPT procedure code system constitutes a monopoly. An anonymous reader says rather insightfully that it’s not illegal to BE a monopoly, but rather to ACT like one, while John recalls an early copyright misuse claim in which the ruling was that while the federal government may have created a monopoly by mandating the use of CPT codes, AMA didn’t seek that monopoly. Another anonymous reader wonders whether AMA perpetuates the use of E&M codes, which he or she blames on note bloat and lack of usability of clinical documentation functions.
New poll to your right or here: will Cerner’s EHR allow the VA to exchange electronic information with non-VA providers?
I’m fascinated by the small number responses to my poll in which I asked HIStalkapalooza attendees what aspects drew them to the event. #1 by far was the hosts, stage show, and HISsies, which is surprising because the in-person feedback is usually that they couldn’t hear or didn’t care. Only 10 percent of respondents ranked “free food and drinks” as their motivator. Based on that, the ideal event would be open to everyone, feature a less-expensive dance band, let everyone buy their own food and drinks, and carry on the stage show as always. The only aspect I’ll miss (since I’m still not inclined to do it again) is the interesting roster of attendees, which as far as I know is unmatched since it included providers, vendors, professors, government officials, equities analysts, and even people from competing websites and publications.
It seems as though many members of the Greatest Musical generation of the 1960s and 1970s are dying lately as that cohort starts to hit the mortality wall. The latest: AC/DC co-founder, guitarist, and songwriter Malcolm Young, who died of dementia this weekend at 64 in leaving the band with one original member, his schoolboy-uniformed brother Angus Young. A third brother, AC/DC producer George Young, died last month at 70. Meanwhile, David Cassidy (aka Keith Partridge) is apparently also close to death from dementia and organ failure. Life is a (hopefully) long line to the cliff where it will eventually be your turn to be pushed off.
This Week in Health IT History
One year ago:
The Gates Foundation issues a grant to create a blockchain-powered medical record.
HIMSS and CHIME create an international group to manage programs outside of North America.
HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell warns that a “repeal and replace” approach to the ACA will cause the program to collapse due to insurers pulling out because of uncertainty, leaving 20 million more people uninsured.
Five years ago:
HP writes down $9 billion after finding that its recent acquisition Autonomy misstated earnings.
The CEO of Quest Diagnostics says the company is “redirecting” its EHR business (ChartMaxx, Care360) to work with enterprise EHR vendors like Cerner, Epic, and McKesson.
The National Football League signs a contract with EClinicalWorks to provide an EHR that can support the research and treatment of player head injuries.
New sales were announced by Acuo, Merge, 3M, and Humedica.
Ten years ago:
A UK survey finds that GP support for the NPfIT project is down to 23 percent.
Sunquest, fresh off its acquisition by Vista Equity Partners, announces that it will increase investment in its radiology information system and begin actively marketing it again.
Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare VP of IT Tim Belec is shot by a 17-year-old robber in the organization’s parking lot as he leaves work.
Dennis Quaid’s newborn twins are given a heparin overdose at Cedars Sinai due to improper stocking of a medication dispensing cabinet.
Last Week’s Most Interesting News
VA Secretary David Shulkin asks a House appropriations subcommittee to approve using $782 million of the VA’s budget to kick off its Cerner project while sidestepping member questions about how Cerner will exchange information with community-based providers.
A multi-day system downtime leaves CVS Pharmacy unable to fill prescriptions.
Meditech announces a cloud-based, subscription-priced version of its EHR.
A Black Book survey finds that only 19 percent of post-acute care providers have any degree of EHR capability and that 90 percent of long-term care providers don’t exchange information with referring doctors or hospitals.
In England, a migrant rights group challenges an agreement by which NHS makes patient data available to the Home Office for immigration enforcement.
Webinars
November 30 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Making Clinical Communications Work in Your Complex Environment.” Sponsored by: PatientSafe Solutions. Presenters: Steve Shirley, VP/CIO, Parkview Medical Center; Richard Cruthirds, CIO, Peterson Health. Selecting, implementing, and managing a mobile clinical communications platform is a complex and sometimes painful undertaking. With multiple technologies, stakeholders, and disciplines involved, a comprehensive approach is required to ensure success. Hear two hospital CIOs share their first-hand experience, lessons learned, and demonstrated results from deploying an enterprise-wide mobile clinical communications solution.
December 5 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Cornerstones of Order Set Optimization: Trusted Evidence.” Sponsored by: Wolters Kluwer. Updating order sets with new medical evidence is crucial to improving outcomes, but coordinating maintenance for hundreds of order sets with dozens of stakeholders is a huge logistical challenge. For most hospitals, managing order set content is labor intensive and the internal processes supporting it are far too inefficient. Evidence-based order sets are only as good as their content, which is why regular review and updates are essential. This webinar explores the relationship between clinical content and patient care with an eye toward building trust among the clinical staff. Plus, we will demonstrate a new evidence alignment tool that can easily incorporate the most current medical content into your order sets, regardless of format, including Cerner Power Plans and Epic SmartSets.
Drug company Roche will acquire laboratory-focused health analytics technology vendor Viewics. Roche Diagnostics offers laboratory analyzers, inventory software, and middleware and will deploy the Viewics solution to help labs improve profitability and care.
Madison, WI-based image sharing app vendor ImageMoverMD separates from its CEO, hires a former drug rep as president, and brings on a COO (who comes from Epic) and a sales director in hopes of boosting sales. The two physician co-founders are UW radiologists who are also board-certified in clinical informatics.
Eric Topol apparently isn’t convinced that radiologists will be replaced by artificial intelligence, based on the lack of peer-reviewed publications of the companies that offer imaging AI.
Advisory Board closes the sale of its healthcare business to Optum, with CEO Robert Musslewhite staying on.
People
Glenn Galloway (Children’s Health Network) joins Center for Diagnostic Imaging as CIO. He previously worked as CIO of Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota and co-founded Healthia Consulting in 1998, spending several years as SVP of Ingenix Consulting after it acquired Healthia in 2007. Long-time readers will recall that Healthia (and thus Glenn) sponsored the first-ever HIStalkapalooza at HIMSS08 in Orlando, a two-hour cocktail party for around 200 attendees at what was then the Peabody Hotel.
ZappRx hires Rich Cramer (Upfront Healthcare Services) as VP of commercial operations and names James Cornicelli (UCB) as VP of corporate strategy.
Announcements and Implementations
Sunquest will integrate its Mitogen laboratory information management system for molecular diagnostics and precision medicine with oncology molecular decision support technology vendor N-of-One. Private pathology lab CellNetix will be the first customer.
South Georgia Medical Center (GA) goes live on Epic, saying that within the first two weeks it had exchanged information with 20 or more facilities.
Government and Politics
The controversial president of the Fresno, CA school board attacks a Center for Health Journalism writer for her newspaper series on sex education and high birth rates. He launches a Twitter tirade, compares her on talk radio to a “child sex predator,” and publishes her work phone number on Facebook in urging others to contact her.
A California state judge rules that Sutter Health intentionally destroyed 192 boxes of documents that were being sought by employers and labor unions who had charged Sutter with market power abuse and charging inflated prices.
Florida’s Agency for Healthcare Administration takes the next step after heavily redacting nursing home inspection records in claiming threats to the privacy of residents – removing the records from its website completely. Florida newspapers mentioned the censored inspection reports in their coverage of the deaths of 13 seniors in a rehabilitation center after September’s Hurricane Irma, after which the AHCA took all nursing home records offline without notice. Some South Florida counties have also refused to release the emergency management plans they approved for nursing homes – including the all-important sections of how they would keep residents comfortable during power outages –even though they had previously said they were public record.
Other
The local paper says patient appointments at Banner Health’s Tucson hospitals and clinics are being delayed due to its October 1 go-live of Cerner, with Banner’s chief clinical officer admitting that it has been a “painful period.” The health system expects the situation to be resolved by December 31. The Arizona Department of Health Services is investigating complaints about the impact of the new system but won’t provide details. Banner acquired the former money-losing University of Arizona Health Network in 2015, which had gone live (and well over budget) with its $115 million Epic project less than a year before. Banner’s corporate standard is Cerner.
A JAMA research letter questions whether hospitals are gaming the federal government’s Hospital Readmission Reduction Program in avoiding financial penalties by upcoding severity of illness instead of actually improving care.
County officials question the auditor and CEO of Blount Memorial Hospital (TN) about why they weren’t told that the hospital foundation’s since-fired executive director had embezzled $187,000 over nine years. The employee issued checks to herself using QuickBooks accounting software, then modified the QuickBooks entry to make it appear that the payee was a foundation business partner. The foundation did not require checks to bear a second signature and did not conduct yearly audits.
In England, a man who proposed to his girlfriend last New Year’s Eve — the day before he suffered from sepsis-induced brain damage that nearly killed him — proposes again from the rehab hospital, using eye-tracking technology to communicate. His girlfriend said “yes” a second and his therapists and caregivers prepared him to make his way down the aisle in a wheelchair and to place the ring on her finger. The eye-tracking technology is from Eye Gaze, which offers assistive technology and eye tracking human cognition research.
Sponsor Updates
Medicity publishes a new report, “HIE Preparedness: Learning from Recent Health Care Disasters.”
MedData and Experian Health will exhibit at the Illinois AAHAM Annual State Institute November 29-December 1 in East Peoria.
Meditech will exhibit at the West Virginia HIMSS 2017 Fall Event November 30-December 1 in Morgantown.
PatientPing announces that its ACO customers achieved $120 million in cost savings in 2016.
Navicure will exhibit at HFMA Maine’s Revenue Cycle Workshop November 30-December 1 in Portland.
A large health plan upgrades to ZeOmega’s Jiva 6.1 population health management solution.
The Technology Association of Georgia recognizes Patientco’s Jason Kuo as 2017 TAG Product Manager of the Year.
TransUnion partners with Mercy Home for Boys & Girls to launch the Friends First mentoring program.
Verscend Technologies publishes a new white paper, “Thinking inside the box with a provider decision quadrant.”
Visage Imaging previews its Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform in a new video.
Vocera Communications will present at the Piper Jaffray Healthcare Conference November 28 in November 28.
The estate of a deceased cancer patient files a class action lawsuit against eClinical Works arguing that the company’s $155 million settlement with OCR over falsified Meaningful Use certification statements stemmed from missing functionality that compromised patient safety. The suit is seeking nearly $1 billion in damages.
CHIME suspends its National Patient ID Challenge after two years of effort that yielded no meaningful results. A press release announcing the decision explains, “Though we’ve made great progress and moved the industry forward in many ways through the Challenge, we ultimately did not achieve the results we sought to this complex problem.”
VA Secretary David Shulkin, MD asks Congress to move $782 million from its 2018 appropriations to get its Cerner implementation underway, starting with an immediate $374 million in reprogramming since that’s the maximum that can be moved in the short term.
Committee chair Charlie Dent (R-PA) and ranking member Deborah Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) opened the session by expressing their frustration with previous VA-DoD interoperability efforts, the failure of the VA and DoD to follow the previous directives of Congress to create a single system, and their skepticism that the Cerner project will run as smoothly as the VA is assuring.
Some comments from Wednesday’s session:
The committee declined to discuss cost issues in the open session because the Cerner contract has not been signed and the VA is worried about bid protests. Cost was discussed Wednesday in a closed session that followed the public one.
Shulkin said that modernizing VistA would have cost $19 billion and would only say that the Cerner project will cost billions less.
The VA said it will save 5 percent of the project’s cost if the money is approved quickly so that the VA can align its project with the DoD’s.
Wasserman Schultz referred to the VA’s EHR history as, “The unbelievably lengthy process this has been, even for government,“ adding that, “This issue could have and should have been resolved years ago,” and, “It’s no wonder our constituents get incredibly frustrated with the insanity of the bureaucracy of many federal agencies. This is a textbook case.”
Wasserman Schultz called the DoD’s selection of Cerner as “problematic” with regard to VA-DoD interoperability given that the VA had committed to modernizing VistA, adding that “the patchwork of the Joint Legacy Viewer has left much to be desired.”
Wasserman Schultz said, “I was not thrilled at getting a $782 million reprogramming at the end of October that needed to be acted on by November with no real details. I’m also concerned about how this new system will work with the private sector providers .. I’m concerned that the VA’s foot-dragging and missteps have become our emergency because DoD has gone forward and jumped ahead to what we should have been doing in parallel … that’s not really the fiscally responsible way to do things.”
Shulkin reminded the committee that VistA is not a single system, but rather 130 separate systems that cannot continue to function. Those will be shut down one at a time as the Cerner implementation progresses over eight years.
Shulkin admitted that previous VA IT projects have not been delivered on time and on cost, but said the Cerner project will be overseen directly by the deputy secretary and the DoD’s lessons learned will be invaluable.
Shulkin said, “We’re taking advantage of the private sector CIOs. Mr. Blackburn’s going to be on a call with five of the leading CIOs in the country, getting their advice, asking what mistakes are likely to happen, and essentially using private sector input. I’ve been a private sector CEO. I’ve done EHR implementations.” Specifically named as being consulted in response to a later question were the CIOs of Mayo Clinic, Partners, Johns Hopkins, and Kaiser Permanente, all of which interestingly use Epic rather than the VA’s no-bid choice of Cerner.
Shulkin talked up what seems to be CommonWell along with HIEs in response to a committee question about community interoperability, a subject brought up several times by committee members. He added that the VA has just issued an RFI for the Digital Health Platform that will address that issue.
The VA’s EHR modernization executive director, John Windom, guaranteed 100 percent interoperability with the DoD in response to a committee member’s rather pointed question.
Reader Comments
From Winter Rye: “Re: Medent sale. I’ve never understood its reach despite the apparently success of its family and 8,000 reported deployments. The resignation of the son-of-the-father CEO may be telling that other family members want to sell after the father / founder died earlier this year. Potential buyers?” The family seems to be angrily split on selling the 260-employee EHR/PM vendor, which is based in Auburn, NY. It claims 8,000 physician users, with ONC placing it at #13 on the Medicare EHR Incentive Program most-attested vendor list with just under 4,000 EPs. It’s not the best environment to be selling an ambulatory EHR vendor given that segment’s consolidation, but it’s all about the asking price and the acquirer’s confidence of either maintaining the revenue stream or converting users to their own product (the former is much more likely than the latter). The worst thing that could happen is that the family members can’t agree whether to sell and the product languishes amidst the bickering.
From Allscripts Curious: “Re: the new Allscripts ambulatory EHR showcased at MGMA. Anyone seen it and have feedback? It claims to offer cloud hosting, usability, interoperability, mobility, and embedded AI, but management was short on details.” I’m interested as well. I assume this is the Allscripts Care Otter project, which after I mentioned it via a reader’s tip in August wondering why it wasn’t ready to be shown at ACE, all online traces of the project were immediately taken down. This reminds me of why I’m skeptical when vendors suddenly claim to have embedded the oh-so-trendy AI in their products, leading me to wonder exactly what that means beyond the usual hard-coded programming logic (the real definition of AI is that the system simulates human intelligence in applying what it learns to complete new tasks, which sounds kind of unlikely for an EHR).
From Nice Hat: “Re: patient access technology. What does that mean, exactly?” It’s less noble than it sounds, usually referring to technology that increases the number of profitable patients that can be cranked through the system.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Thanks to Healthfinch, which has upgraded its HIStalk sponsorship to Platinum level.
At least 50 percent of the usage of the possessive “its” that I’ve seen lately incorrectly spelled the word as “it’s,” raising the near-certain likelihood that dictionaries will start listing the misspelling as acceptable in their self-assigned role of being descriptive rather than prescriptive.
This week on HIStalk Practice: CDC announces Million Hearts Hypertension Control Challenge winners. GE CEO John Flannery announces major restructuring. Mynd Analytics makes telepsychiatry acquisition. Nomad Health adds telemedicine to healthcare jobs marketplace. Pacifica Labs adds therapist directory to popular mental health app. Forward brings high-tech primary care to LA. The Iowa Clinic embarks on population health management with help from Lightbeam Health. PRM Pro Jim Higgins outlines how PRM tools can help physicians treat the person inside the patient.
Webinars
November 30 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Making Clinical Communications Work in Your Complex Environment.” Sponsored by: PatientSafe Solutions. Presenters: Steve Shirley, VP/CIO, Parkview Medical Center; Richard Cruthirds, CIO, Peterson Health. Selecting, implementing, and managing a mobile clinical communications platform is a complex and sometimes painful undertaking. With multiple technologies, stakeholders, and disciplines involved, a comprehensive approach is required to ensure success. Hear two hospital CIOs share their first-hand experience, lessons learned, and demonstrated results from deploying an enterprise-wide mobile clinical communications solution.
December 5 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Cornerstones of Order Set Optimization: Trusted Evidence.” Sponsored by: Wolters Kluwer. Updating order sets with new medical evidence is crucial to improving outcomes, but coordinating maintenance for hundreds of order sets with dozens of stakeholders is a huge logistical challenge. For most hospitals, managing order set content is labor intensive and the internal processes supporting it are far too inefficient. Evidence-based order sets are only as good as their content, which is why regular review and updates are essential. This webinar explores the relationship between clinical content and patient care with an eye toward building trust among the clinical staff. Plus, we will demonstrate a new evidence alignment tool that can easily incorporate the most current medical content into your order sets, regardless of format, including Cerner Power Plans and Epic SmartSets.
Here’s the video recording of this week’s webinar titled “How Hospitals and Practices Can Respond to Consumerism by Better Engaging Patients Through Price Transparency and Payment Options.”
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Merck-owned Ilum Health Solutions acquires Teqqa — a partner organization that offers analytics for infectious disease analytics — to enhance its antibiotic stewardship offerings with point-of-prescribing decision support.
Patient adherence message vendor ConnectiveRx acquires Pittsburgh-based Careform, which offers technology for specialty drug access.
Hospital and infusion center scheduling system vendor LeanTaaS raises $26 million in a Series B funding round, increasing its total to $39 million.
Banyan Software acquires Atlanta-based student health EHR vendor Medicat. I was puzzled why the company that developed the Vines networking system would buy an EHR vendor, not realizing that Banyan Systems has been defunct for nearly 20 years.
Fast Company profiles Remedy, a shuttered startup that used technology and human billing experts to help people get their incorrect medical bills fixed. The company says hospitals, practices, and insurers wouldn’t cooperate by giving it access to the billing records of their customers, saying in its goodbye message, “Until the industry begins respecting the rights people have to their own information, it will remain difficult for individuals and their agents to be vigilant against baseless medical bill overcharges.” The article acknowledges that perhaps the company should have done more due diligence before placing investor bets on external data access, but adds that the company’s billing subcontractors were buried in paperwork as hospitals and practices required completing manual forms, lost the submitted forms so they had to be completed again, and incorrectly told them that HIPAA made it illegal to work with the company.
AI-powered patient engagement platform vendor Catalia Health raises $4 million in a pre-Series A round, increasing its total to $7.75 million. The company offers Mabu, a supposedly human-like conversational companion whose robotic voice is about as un-human as it can be, making that a good place to spend some of the new windfall.
Sales
Jefferson Health (PA) chooses KyruusOne and ProviderMatch for Access Centers to create and manage a central provider directory that provides visibility into network-wide clinical coverage and provider expertise.
Griffin Hospital (CT) will implement FormFast’s electronic form and workflow technology along with check printing.
In Australia, Royal Adelaide Health chooses the anesthesia information system of Florida-based IProcedures as part of its Allscripts contract.
Allegiance Health Management (LA) selects Medhost’s clinical and financial solutions, EDIS, and YourCareCommunity patient and provider portal for eight of its facilities.
Banner Health will implement Health Catalyst’s Data Operating System for its outcomes improvement program.
People
A UCSD announcement of the go-live of UCI Health on a shared instance of UCSD Health’s Epic system quotes UCSD Health CIO Christopher Longhurst, MD, MS and UCI Health CIO Chuck Podesta.
Protenus hires Megan Emhoff (Curiosity Media) as VP of people operations.
Announcements and Implementations
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak will headline InstaMed’s 2018 User Conference April 9-11 in Philadelphia.
The Iowa Clinic (IA) goes live on the population health management platform of Lightbeam Health Solutions.
The local paper covers the first US deployment of Netherlands-developed, infection prevention-focused OR Cockpit at Ocean Springs Hospital (MS).
Philips and Nuance will bring AI-based image interpretation and reporting capabilities to radiologists in integrating their respective Illumeo and PowerScribe 360 products.
NextGen adds the IMO Problem IT Terminology diagnosis entry tool by Intelligent Medical Objects to the mobile workflow solution that was part of NextGen’s acquisition of Entrada earlier this year.
Image Stream Medical offers HIStalk readers “Surgery is a Team Sport,” a three-part educational series on improving teamwork, increasing care quality, and expanding efficiency.
In Canada, Canada Health Infoway and OntarioMD will align the privacy and security components of their respective EHR certification programs.
Other
An “internal network infrastructure issue” leaves CVS Pharmacy unable to process prescription refills. Annoyed Twitter users dispute the company’s claim that new prescriptions are being filled normally, saying that the multi-day outage has disrupted all CVS prescription activity and has caused store personnel to suggest they head over to Walgreens.
CHIME suspends its highly publicized, $1 million prize National Patient ID Challenge after two years, saying “a new approach is warranted” with no good solutions found and admitting that “we cannot do this alone.” CHIME President and CEO Russ Branzell also notes that Congress may soften its stance on prohibiting HHS from creating a national patient identifier. CHIME says it will bring together key stakeholders to find a national solution that identifies people with 100 percent accuracy (its million dollars would be safe there for sure).
A woman sues EClinicalWorks for $999 million, hoping to attain class action status in claiming that her husband died because ECW’s EHR left him “unable to determine reliably when his first symptoms of cancer appeared in that his medical records failed to accurately display his medical history on progress notes” without really describing what happened. The complaint cites the certification issues that were listed in ECW’s settlement with the Department of Justice.
In England, a physician’s op-ed piece complains that a private telemedicine provider is advertising itself as a replacement for seeing GPs while excluding more complex patients, thus cherry-picking the easiest ones and threatening GP practices that are paid a fixed $200 per patient per year in which the healthy subsidize the sick. The yearly fees are transferred to telemedicine provider Babylon when a patient signs up for an online visit. The author says his practice can’t provide services to truly ill patients if telemedicine providers skim off the profitable ones:
But while anyone can join its service, the website says it may not be suitable for “complex mental health problems or complex physical, psychological or social needs.” Or if you’re pregnant or older and frail, and as long as you don’t have dementia or learning difficulties or safeguarding issues … We cannot refuse to register patients or advise them to register elsewhere based on age, gender, or disability. If my surgery put a list on its website telling the most ill people in our catchment area we weren’t suitable for them, NHS England would serve us a breach of contract notice and could close us down.
I mentioned that Thursday night’s “Grey’s Anatomy” winter finale involves a hospital cyberattack, with a sneak preview showing that it’s ransomware. It’s a pretty realistic EHR screen and “Tim from IT” gets a fun line before his day is wrecked in cutting off the nurse’s description of the problem by asking her if she’s tried turning the computer off and back on. Hollywood loves playing sounds when text displays on a screen like a teletype and did so here, which might be desirable for ransomware but not otherwise. The hacker appears to be demanding 4,932 bitcoin, making the ransom at bit steep at $38 million.
Sponsor Updates
Elsevier adds an Opioid Epidemic Resource Center to its Connect website.
Salesforce offers an e-book titled “How a Mobile CRM Makes You More Successful” and a guided tour of Community Cloud Lightning.
Datica CTO Adam Leko and Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare analytics director David Deas will present a session on eliminating HIPAA compliance as a development barrier at the Amazon Web Services AWS re:Invent conference on November 27 in Las Vegas.
Brava Magazine profiles Healthfinch VP of Finance and Operations Leah Roe.
Healthgrades partners with Code.org to bring Hour of Code to schools in Atlanta, Denver, Madison, and Raleigh.
Healthwise will exhibit at the Next Generation Patient Experience November 28 in San Diego.
Iatric Systems releases a preview of its forthcoming Security Audit Manager.
Imprivata customer support wins the 2017 TSIA Star Award.
The HCI Group partners with the Dubai Health Authority for the DHA Transformation Forum.
Consulting Magazine includes Impact Advisors in its list of fastest-growing firms for 2017.
Not healthcare IT, but providers will probably have to document conversations on this in the EHR. The US Environmental Protection Agency has approved the release of so-called “weaponized” mosquitoes in parts of the US. They’re officially classified as a “biopesticide” and their creator, MosquitoMate, will be licensed to sell them for five years. The lab-grown male mosquitoes are infected with a bacteria; females mating with them will produce eggs that don’t hatch. The goal is to reduce the spread of diseases such as yellow fever, dengue, and Zika. The modified mosquitos don’t bite and will be on sale to municipalities and individuals. The US isn’t the leader here, with lab-grown mosquitoes already in use in China and Brazil.
I struggle with articles that overly-simplify the challenges we face in healthcare and this one on HealthcareDIVE is a prime example. Trumpeting the headline of, “The healthcare of tomorrow will move away from hospitals,” it tries to boil down discussion from the US News & World Report Healthcare of Tomorrow conference into a few sound bites. First, it states that “locating services in a patient’s home or somewhere close by and easily accessible is more convenient for patients, but also produces more comprehensive and effective care.” This is a gross oversimplification and doesn’t take into account that some of the most convenient sites of care (retail clinics) are also the least comprehensive, as they are sometimes staffed by mid-level providers with limited scope of practice. I see dozens of patients each month who are referred to urgent care because their conditions are out of scope of the retail clinic, resulting in two visits and two charges for the patient.
This also doesn’t take into effect the proven concept that for some situations, regional or specialty centers provide better outcomes than local or community facilities. Complex procedures like cardiac surgery, neurosurgery, high-risk pregnancy, and other similar conditions fall into this bucket. This isn’t supported by their sound bite of, “If you have to go to the hospital, we have failed you.”
As a patient / consumer who has recently faced difficult decisions in this area, it’s not a simple choice. Should I keep going to the local physician-owned imaging center for my mammograms, where they are high quality but lower cost, or move to the hospital because it has a high-risk surveillance protocol and better track record for finding early breast cancer through combined mammography and MRI, but with a higher cost and a higher hassle-factor? I honestly went back and forth on this decision for a couple of months before I decided to go with the hospital option. Should the day come where something is found, however, I’ll be ditching that hospital’s cancer care team for the one at the academic medical center, which has an equivalent track record for finding cancer, but better outcomes in treatment. If these decisions are difficult for a physician, they’re doubly challenging for the average patient.
I agree with the statements that telemedicine needs to become more commonplace – and that means being reimbursed in the same way that we reimburse for face-to-face visits. Whether we’re living in a fee-for-service world or one of value-based care, somehow the physician, mid-level provider, or other caregiver’s time needs to be paid for. I agree that consumers are going to drive many healthcare shifts over the next few years – I look at the growth of my own practice (from five locations to 15+ in a little over two years) as an example that patients are voting with their feet and their co-pays for convenience along with the more full-service experience that we offer. Essentially, we function as a cross between a primary care office and an ED and provide all the services in between plus pharmacy for a fraction of the cost of the ED. We’re not cheaper than primary care and don’t quarterback a patient’s comprehensive care, but if you need to be rehydrated during your gastroenteritis, we’re the hip place to be.
Patients are willing to pay the larger urgent care co-pay in order to not have to wait to get in to see a primary physician (assuming they have a primary physician, which many do not due to the relative primary physician shortage in our area). It’s telling that most of our new staff physicians are former PCPs who have found the urgent care lifestyle more conducive to their humanity as compared to being a primary care doc. We’ve been accused of poaching primary care physicians and making the PCP shortage worse, but this is market economics at work. The idea that a physician is “called” to work long hours for low pay as a PCP has become antiquated as providers vote with their wallets and their free time to work 160 hours a month for the same pay as they were previously working 200 or 240 hours, with less stress.
When you look at it, urgent care provides a similar case mix to what many of us trained for during family medicine residency: acute care, chronic care, and procedures, the latter of which is missing in many primary care practices now that physicians are asked to do more high-level work and less of the procedural work that we found enjoyable regardless of the fact that it could be done by mid-level providers. Of course, we don’t have the continuity of care that originally sought as PCPs, but we have more continuity with our families and our personal lives. The playing field has changed as third-party forces have transformed healthcare from a calling to a job.
I do appreciate the comments from Jason Spangler, MD, MPH, a quality and medical policy director at Amgen. He calls for the industry to “pay and incentivize patients toward high-value care and disincentivize them against low-value care.” Modifying patient behavior is extremely challenging, as anyone who has ever tried to convince a patient to change their lifestyle vs. just taking a pill once a day for high blood pressure knows. I’m sure there was a broader and richer discussion at the conference, but the coverage provided is problematic. Those who try to boil these complexities down to sound bites aren’t doing much to help the situation.
My condolences to the family, friends, and close colleagues of Uwe Reinhardt, healthcare economist and Princeton University professor. He was a master at dissecting the US healthcare system and showing how it defies logic. I once had the chance to meet him as we were assigned to share a car to the airport following a conference where we spoke on separate healthcare panels. He could easily have used the time to check email or catch up on phone calls, but instead he wanted to learn more about me and my thoughts on the US healthcare system from the primary care and CMIO trenches. He was kind, thoughtful, and a good listener, which are qualities we don’t always see among some of the loudest voices in healthcare. If you’re not familiar with his writings, they’re definitely worth a read.
For the first time, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital researchers have injected a patient with a CRISPR-based therapy designed to permanently edit his DNA in hopes of curing his Hunter syndrome, a rare but terminal genetic disease.
The top two executives at the Health Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, a new HHS office established to help providers protect themselves from cyberattacks, have left the fledgling department amid fraud allegations.
A Nature article explores the possibility of combining sequencing of pathogen gene sequencing to help epidemiologists bring about innovative digital disease detection platforms.
In the October 28, 2017 issue of HIStalk, Mr. H made this critical observation and raised an important question. He wrote (finishing with tongue in cheek):
For those with short memories or short healthcare IT careers, it’s time to relearn the oft-repeated lesson that big companies dip their toes into and out of the healthcare IT waters all the time with little loyalty to anyone except shareholders. McKesson bailed out this year and now GE is apparently mulling its exit after wrecking a slew of acquisitions over many years. Siemens is long gone. Nothing good ever comes from conglomerates licking their chops at what they naively think is easy money and higher growth than their other verticals (see also: Misys and Sage). How hard could this healthcare thing be?
GE of course isn’t alone, but they may hold the prize for most kicks at the can. This will be their third time since 1970 — three tries and billons later and nothing to show for it. Ironically, GE has had great success in medical devices, so one could assume they know more about the healthcare business than a Revlon, Apple, IBM, NCR, Martin Marietta, Lockheed, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, et al.
After some 45 years working in the healthcare IT arena, I believe I have the answer to Mr. H’s query. My qualifications in support of my response are:
Over four decades, I was a hospital CFO and CIO at a major teaching hospital.
I spent two intermittent decades as an industry consultant working with healthcare providers and system vendors of all sizes.
In the middle of my career, after my CIO stint, I founded a HIT startup that built both clinical and administrative systems, went public, and was later acquired by one of today’s major vendors.
Most importantly, I have designed clinical and administrative software systems, led installations, and written more than my share of program code.
To summarize, I have seen it from all four sides; buyer, builder, advisor, and patient.
There are four reasons that make healthcare IT hard, really hard.
Organizational Structure
Many people new to the healthcare readily compare it to commercial industry. Why can’t hospitals do as banks, or airlines, or Google, or…?
One reason is they are not organized like these entities. What other industry has as its primary customer the same person that sells and then performs the core services? That same person also defines the product and further determines how it is delivered and implemented. That person is the doctor. The PhDs at GE do not make the final decision on how to make a jet engine or how to deliver it. GE is run by a CEO and the buck stops there. Hospitals are run by a troika (or committee) of the board, the administrative CEO, and the chief medical officer.
In 1974, Professor William Dowling, University of Washington, published the book “Prospective Reimbursement for Hospitals,” which did research on hospital operations. His studies showed that the CEO of a typical community hospital directly controls only 25 percent of the resources and operations. The other 75 percent is controlled by the doctors. They decide what tests to run, when to run them, and what happens next. The fastest way for a CEO to lose his job is to directly challenge the medical staff.
What other industry is organized like this? If you are in the business trying to build and sell million-dollar systems, you had better understand this organizational dynamic and accept the fact it will take years to generate an acceptable return on investment.
Regulatory Quagmire
All businesses are struggling with regulation. I submit that healthcare far exceeds all others.
Case in point: in what other industry does the payer define the structure and content of the bill down to the very last data element? One that comes closest is the defense industry, and many of its idiosyncrasies are incorporated in healthcare regulations. In 1999, Price Waterhouse CPAs completed an analysis of how many pages in the federal register addressed income tax laws. They compared income tax against the number of regulatory pages need to create a payable UB bill for all payers in a given state. The results were 11,000 pages of regulations for taxes and over 50,000 for a hospital bill.
A further complication is the person receiving the care is not the one paying the bill. Sometimes the patient never sees the full bill, and when they do, they are inevitably confused.
Training, Structure, and Definition
Computer systems thrive on definition and structure. The easiest applications to develop are those where the target domain has a history and library of definition and structure. Lack of definition and structure are a programmer’s nightmare. Today there are many tools to help address gray areas, such a fuzzy logic and neural networks, yet learning and applying these tools significantly raises the complexity of the system, thereby increasing development time and costs.
A doctor’s adherence to medical terminology and structure is highly dependent on which medical school they attended. As an example, a study at the Milken Institute SPH at George Washington University found that physicians whose residencies were in higher-spending regions spent 29 percent more on average than their peers who had trained in lower-spending areas of the country. Different protocols for different regions based on training. The federal government spent $30 billion on EMRs and yet we still have wide gaps in medical lexicons, protocols, and the structure and content of EMRs.
Moving Targets
In IT, this is classically called a rolling design, again a developer’s nightmare. But the delivery of healthcare and the practice of medicine are rife with this burden. Medicine is in constant change, with new protocols, test procedures, quality measures, etc. presented every week. Old protocols are challenged on a routine basis, e.g., mammography screening, PSA testing, knee replacements, tonsillectomies, and more.
What if you were assigned to develop a production management system for an auto manufacturer and every month the manufacturing engineers told you that process A — which we coded last month — has now changed to process B? The solution in commercial industry is to freeze the design by freezing the process. Can’t do that in medicine — freeze your protocol and tomorrow it could be the basis of a malpractice suit.
Medicine has always been in constant change, and with personalized medicine around the corner, variation and complexity will grow by leaps and bounds. Scientists have been trying to reverse engineer the human body since the first autopsy a thousand years ago. If only when you were born your mother gave you a 5,000-page human spec sheet with schematics and diagrams, a user’s manual, a troubleshooting guide, and a 1-800 number to call when all else fails. They exist for every car, dishwasher, plane, and other device and sure make software development a lot easier.
When I was a CIO at the end of a difficult IT implementation, the dean of our medical school said to me, “There is a reason we called it the practice of medicine. If we practice long and hard enough, someday we’ll get it right.”
Many of these issues exist in other industries and disciplines. I submit that the depth and interaction to which they exist in medicine and healthcare is what makes IT development hard, very, very hard. All those big companies (and many small) that came into the healthcare industry failed because they did not allow for the depth and interaction of these challenges, and hence they did not prepare for them, lost patience and millions, then chose to cut their losses and run.
From the outside looking in, healthcare is twenty percent of the gross national product, which could support a very attractive business opportunity. It’s a beguiling number which has proved to be siren song for many a big and small firm.
November 15, 2017Readers WriteComments Off on Readers Write: Six Myths Debunked: The True Significance of Social Determinants of Health
Six Myths Debunked: The True Significance of Social Determinants of Health By Erin Benson
Erin Benson is director of market planning with LexisNexis Health Care of Alpharetta, GA.
Predicting future health risks has always been important, but the ongoing move toward value-based care and the emphasis placed on health outcomes is driving the need for greater prognostic accuracy.
At least 25 cents of every healthcare dollar goes toward the treatment of diseases or disabilities that result from potentially changeable behavior. If you can identify risk factors in patients, you can potentially intervene and initiate change. That’s where social determinants of health come in, but first it’s important to separate the myths from the truth.
Myth #1: Adding socioeconomic data to the patient file causes information overload and makes it difficult for providers to zero in on what’s important and relevant.
Medical care determines only 20 percent of overall health, while social, economic, and environmental factors determine 50 percent, making them too significant to ignore. The National Quality Forum, Centers for Disease Control, and World Health Organization have all acknowledged the importance of socioeconomic data.
Incorporating the data into existing workflows and integrating it with electronic health record (EHR) systems makes risk assessment more efficient, not time-consuming. A Socioeconomic Health Score, for example, can provide an immediate picture of unforeseen and avoidable risks. It can then drive informed decisions regarding that patient’s care, as well as offer opportunities for patient-provider discussions about lifestyle.
Myth #2: Social determinants of health include everything related to a person’s lifestyle, environment, situation, and behaviors.
Only certain types of data have been clinically validated to predict health outcomes. Even when attributes are clinically validated, they may correlate to different outcomes with different accuracy strengths.
Improving predictive ability is not just a matter of adding more data. It is a science to determine which datasets enhance predictive power and how they should be weighted in drawing insights about a patient.
Myth #3: A patient’s socioeconomic attributes considered individually allow you to make accurate predictions about a patient’s overall health risk.
Any attribute examined on its own is not adequate to develop an accurate risk score understanding. A combination of relevant attributes—ranging from social and community circumstances to economic stability and education, to neighborhood and built environment—provide context and are critical to developing a complete, holistic picture of the patient.
Myth #4: Socioeconomic data comes from demographic data or must be gathered through the use of surveys.
Demographic data may be too limiting and census data tends to get outdated quickly. Survey data, too, can become outdated. Furthermore, the value of survey data depends on the accuracy of the patient supplying the information and on the staff member who manually enters the results into the system.
Research has shown that public records are a better source of socioeconomic data. Those records are vast, comprehensive, and reliable. Clinically validated information on social determinants of health can be extracted from these records to paint a picture of a patient’s social, environmental, and economic situation and predict future health outcomes.
For healthcare providers who have traditionally relied only on medical and pharmacy data, socioeconomic data can now help fill gaps in understanding the patient and provide actionable insights that can be used to improve patient care.
Myth #5: To personalize care for a patient, you can rely on aggregated data at the ZIP code or census level.
Aggregated levels of data can be useful for expanding a health system’s market share or determining resource allocation. They are not, however, suitable for predicting a patient’s individual health risk.
Within a single ZIP code can be a wide variety of income levels, crime rates, and other factors that are critical components of social determinants of health. An individual’s actual address allows for the collection of social determinants that are more accurate indicators. However, even address data alone are not effective predictive tools. They ignore the influences of education, economic stability, social context, and other important variables that impact health.
Myth #6: Socioeconomic data must be used in combination with clinical data and is not an effective risk predictor on its own.
Even in the absence of clinical data, using socioeconomic data has proven to more accurately predict risk based on total cost than traditional age/gender predictions alone. Small increases in accuracy of as little as a percent or two can have a substantial impact and should not be ignored.
Because higher-risk patients account for the majority of healthcare costs, using socioeconomic scores to more accurately identify them gives providers an opportunity to proactively address their care. The result can be a 10-20 percent savings over traditional age/gender model risk stratification alone.
Healthcare is on the brink of a significant transformation largely driven by the availability of vast amounts of socioeconomic data and advanced analytics. Now that we’ve separated fact from fiction, it should be apparent social determinants of health have great value as a reliable predictor of healthcare risk.
The truth is we’ve only scratched the surface of what can be learned and how the insights gained can be applied. What is clear now is that organizations that embrace using social determinants of health will be better able to understand and manage health risk in their patients, resulting in improved outcomes and reduced healthcare costs.
Comments Off on Readers Write: Six Myths Debunked: The True Significance of Social Determinants of Health
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