Morning Headlines 2/15/17

February 14, 2017 Headlines No Comments

VA moves ahead with homegrown scheduling IT

The VA will move forward with its rollout of its Vista Scheduling Enhancement, an “Outlook-style interface that gives schedulers a dashboard view of appointments.”

Government drops target for ‘paperless NHS’ by 2018

In England, NHS Secretary Jeremy Hunt drops his call for a paperless NHS by 2018, blaming “weak hospital IT systems.”

Great Ormond Street picks Epic in potential £50m deal

Great Ormond Street NHS Foundation trust has selected Epic as its next EHR vendor, making it the fourth Trust in the UK to select Epic.

Senate easily confirms Trump pick of Shulkin as VA secretary

The Senate confirms David Shulkin as the next secretary of Veterans Affairs in a 100-0 vote, making him the first non-veteran to run the organization.

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News 2/15/17

February 14, 2017 News 9 Comments

Top News

The VA will continue its planned tests of a homegrown patient scheduling system, but will hedge its bets by resuming testing of the Epic-developed, $624 million Medical Appointment Scheduling System (MASS) that had been put on hold in April 2016 pending a decision on which system to use.

The VA issued a scheduling system RFP in late 2014 following the wait time scandal that had nothing to do with technology. I wrote in mid-2015 in responding to a reader rumor that the Lockheed/Epic MASS project might be in jeopardy as a bolt-on solution,

The VA neatly sidestepped Congressional demands for firings, reorganization, and funding decreases by simply throwing its scheduling system under the bus and signing up for Epic. I don’t know what it will take to compartmentalize Cadence to run without any other Epic apps and then integrate it with the VA’s systems, but I do know that standalone healthcare scheduling systems have fallen by the wayside given the need for integration. It also seems that $624 million is a lot to spend for automating a single function, but then again both the VA and DoD are used to squandering mountains of taxpayer money on systems that are often failures in every way except as never-ending revenue streams for the chosen contractor.

A 2010 GAO report found that the VA had spent $127 million in trying to develop an outpatient scheduling system but hadn’t implemented anything, with the unnamed contractor that developed the defective system walking away with $65 million.

Reader Comments

From Tyga Choonz: “Re: Epic 2016 release. Being renamed to Epic 2017 after it was released in late November and no customers upgraded to it. The name change is to help ensure that ‘customers don’t feel behind.’” Unverified, but reported by several readers.

From Neon Cowboy: “Re: HIMSS. Will you be looking for booth reps on their phones again?” Of course, with my phone camera at the ready to document their inattentiveness for posterity (the above photo was posed by the Epic people at HIMSS14 as their homage to my never-ending phone rants). It’s moot, however, since past conferences have fulfilled my trifecta: (a) finding reps already staring at their phones within the first few seconds of the exhibit hall’s opening; (b) for booths that have at least three reps working, catching all of them immersed into their imaginary phone worlds simultaneously; and (c) watching a rep ignore someone standing right in front of him or her in favor of screwing around with their phone and then watching the potential prospect walk away in frustration. As I always say, vendors are spending fortunes to staff the world’s most expensive phone booths. Preliminary results in this week’s poll make “friendly, alert reps” easily the #1 draw for HIMSS attendees, with games, fancy booths, and refreshments finishing last in attracting passers-by into booths. Here’s the simple advice I gave to exhibitors back in 2015 to encourage their reps to seek out interaction with those whose appearance suggests at least mild interest:

Confiscate the phones of people assigned to booth duty.
Make it clear that booth reps shouldn’t be talking to each other unless they are with a booth visitor.

HIStalkapalooza Sponsor Profile

CareSync is the leading provider of software and services for chronic disease management, combining technology, data, and 24/7 nursing services to facilitate care coordination among patients, family and caregivers, and all healthcare providers. Founded in 2011, CareSync exceeds Medicare’s requirements for Chronic Care Management (CPT code 99490, 99487, 99489), and also offers care coordination services and technology for Annual Wellness Visits, Transitional Care Management, and CPC+. Additionally, CareSync clients are well positioned for positive payment adjustments with support for measures in all of the performance categories under the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), and the CareSync consulting team helps healthcare organizations of all sizes prepare for the shift from fee-for-service to value-based healthcare. CareSync nurses serve as an advocate for the patient to turn doctor’s instructions into action, remove the barriers to care plan adherence, and ensure that information is shared with the right people at the right time. For more information about CareSync, visit www.caresync.com/ccm.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Here’s an interesting fact about upcoming HIMSS conferences. After HIMSS18 in Las Vegas, it’s then two straight years in Orlando for 2019/2020 since HIMSS pulled the 2019 conference from Chicago in a “two strikes and you’re out” hotel room pricing spat, with Chicago’s loss being Orlando’s gain. The Orlando dates are a bit screwy – February 11-15 in 2019 and March 9-13 in 2020, a full month’s difference.

We funded the DonorsChoose grant request of Ms. K in New York, who asked for SmartBoard replacement bulbs for her seventh grade special education and English language class since her school can no longer afford technology resources. She says the newly reactivated projectors have “awakened her students,” adding that they marveled that her project was chosen among all the others on DonorsChoose.

I have seats left for my CMIO lunch at the HIMSS conference next Tuesday at noon. It’s a no-agenda social get-together (provider CMIOs only). I’m buying a great buffet at a private table and it’s right off the exhibit hall, guaranteeing a return to the hubbub both physically and mentally nourished. Everybody seemed to enjoy it last time. Apparently the term “CMIO lunch” is confusing since vendor VPs keep signing up, but I will clarify by not sending them an invitation.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Aetna decides not to follow through on its vow to appeal a federal judge’s decision that blocked its $34 billion merger with Humana, instead opting to pay Humana the $1 billion breakup fee and move on. Humana also announces that it will exit the ACA insurance marketplace in 2018, the first insurer to pull out after President Trump’s first steps to repeal Obamacare.

In a related story, Cigna terminates its planned $54 billion merger with Anthem and sues Anthem for a $1.85 billion termination fee plus $13 billion in damages. Anthem, meanwhile, says Cigna doesn’t have the right to cancel the deal.

Sales

Hanover Hospital (PA) chooses QuadraMed’s enterprise master patient index.

Hospital for Special Surgery (NY) will implement PerfectServe’s Synchrony care team collaboration platform.

In England, Great Ormond Street NHS Foundation Trust chooses Epic, the fourth UK trust to do so.

Novant Health selects Voalte Platform for care team collaboration in its 14 hospitals.

BJC Healthcare will deploy Oneview Healthcare’s interactive patient care solution at its Barnes-Jewish Hospital Tower and St. Louis Children’s Hospital, committing to 2,000 devices.

People

Chadron Community Hospital (NE) names CIO/COO Anna Turman as interim CEO, where she will transition to permanent CEO in six months.

Jennifer Haas (Aventura) joins TriNetX as marketing VP.

Skilled nursing facility operator National HealthCare Corporation hires Andy Flatt (Corizon Health) as SVP/CIO.

Healthwise Chief Science Officer Michael Barry, MD is appointed to the US Preventive Services Task Force.

Announcements and Implementations

First Databank launches its Prizm medical device knowledge platform that helps providers make supply chain and clinical decisions.

Government and Politics

The Senate confirms David Shulkin, MD as Veterans Affairs secretary in a rare 100-0 vote and as the first non-veteran to run the agency. Among other accomplishments, he founded DoctorQuality, a safety reporting vendor that was acquired by Quantros in 2004.

Politico reports that Congress originally considered shutting down ONC as part of 21st Century Cures to reduce EHR frustration, but ended up giving the office even more responsibility, although potentially with more focus on coordinating rather than administering.

The US Supreme Court pushes back its review of whether employee class action lawsuits are valid if the employees are covered by arbitration clauses — which includes Epic as one of three cases to be argued — until the fall term that begins in October 2017, presumably when all nine judges will be in place.

In England, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt says his 2013 goal of a paperless NHS by 2018 won’t be achieved, with hospital IT systems being a weak link. He’s now hoping for 2022. He replied to a question about using patient data to drive NHS strategy:

This is an area in which we have been behind but we are hoping to leapfrog the rest of the world due to a very remarkable thing that our GPs did about 10 years ago. They decided to ignore the Government’s plans for a national IT program in the NHS and exercise their right to go their own way. The government program collapsed, but they set up fantastic electronic health records, some of the best primary health records anywhere in the world … they have digitized people’s lifetime records … What we do not do at the moment, but it is starting to happen, is allow those records to flow around the NHS … If you are trying to set up electronic health records in America, you simply do not have that asset to use, because they have very good electronic hospital records, but those are episodic records, not people’s lifetime records … next year we will go a step further and introduce what we are calling the Blue Button scheme.

Privacy and Security

The Protenus Breach Barometer lists 31 reported incidents for January, with 58 percent of them attributable to insiders. HHS wasn’t notified until an average of 174 days after the breach, exposing those organizations to heavy fines for missing the 60-day reporting window.

Other

A STAT investigation finds that billionaire doctor Patrick Soon-Shiong’s “Cancer Moonshot 2020” has made little scientific progress, proclaiming it to instead be an “elaborate marketing tool” for his money-bleeding publicly traded companies. An independent scientist reviewer described the progress as only “the most miniscule and vague findings,” with some of the claimed success involving old research done elsewhere. The article also quotes MD Anderson’s lawsuit over the “moonshot” name (which it trademarked for its fundraising projects) in which it describes Soon-Shiong as “a greedy, if not shady, billionaire businessman who oversells his ideas and falsely takes credit for other’s work.” HIMSS is giving him stage time, which he will use to pitch NantDaVinci, a medical reasoning engine. A snippet from the STAT article, of which NantHealth and NantKwest investors were apparently either indifferent or unaware based on minimal share price reaction:

Soon-Shiong’s moonshot initiative looks less like a diverse coalition than a roll call of his tangled web of business interests. For starters, it’s not a separate legal entity; it appears to be housed within Soon-Shiong’s cluster of companies. The five biotech companies that are participating in the moonshot are the only ones sponsoring registered QUILT trials. And they are all closely tied to Soon-Shiong: He is either the CEO, a board member, or the controlling owner in each of them. Though Soon-Shiong has talked for a year about bringing major drug companies into the coalition, so far, just two have joined: Amgen and Celgene. He is a shareholder in both. And both are investors in Soon-Shiong’s companies … The moonshot website also touts a “historic alliance” with companies … The role of both appears to be simply that they cover doctors’ use of the GPS Cancer diagnostic for patients on their insurance plans. (Other corporate partners, BlackBerry and Allscripts, have invested in Soon-Shiong’s NantHealth.)

Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta will spend more than $1 billion to build a new pediatric hospital at North Druid Hills Road and I-85.

Pope Francis says in an address that when healthcare delivery models emphasize money, “there can be a temptation to lose the protections to the right to healthcare” for the poor and elderly. He adds that communities should reach out to those who live alone and not just the tiny fraction of people who are hospital inpatients.

Researchers find that the number of Americans over age 65 who are prescribed at least three psychiatric drugs has tripled in the past 10 years, with nearly half of those patients having no recorded diagnosis of mood, chronic pain, or sleep problems. The paper observes that the jump was highest in rural areas, leading them to speculate that the lack of availability of talk therapy, massage, or relaxation techniques may cause excessive reliance on drugs (they didn’t note that much of rural America is zonked out on narcotics, which might cause an increased demand for other drugs).

A fascinating Wall Street Journal story describes Evan Morris, a drug company lobbyist who oversaw a $50 million budget in running a “black ops” program to influence lawmakers. He wined and dined elected officials in convincing the Bush administration to stockpile $1 billion worth of Roche’s Tamiflu to prepare for an bird flu/H5N1 outbreak that never happened. He then launched a grassroots campaign to promote the use of Avastatin — a $90,000-per-patient breast cancer drug whose use the FDA wanted to ban given low effectiveness and significant side effects – planting articles on conservative websites describing women who said it gave them their only chance, with the resulting consumer and political pressure buying the company another year of sales and another $1 billion in revenue before the FDA finally cracked down. He raised money for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in hoping to land an ambassadorship. Upon hearing that his drug company employer was investigating his unusual expenses in suspecting embezzlement, he played a round of golf, ate a steak dinner while buying the whole restaurant a round of drinks, then took a $2,000 bottle of wine into the woods and killed himself.

Bizarre: in Ghana, a family reneges on paying an undertaker who had prepared the body of an elderly relative for burial and instead steals the body to bury it themselves. The undertaker crashes the funeral with an assistant, opens up the casket, and starts carrying the decedent away until the family hurriedly pays up. Some attendees ran away in horror, while others whipped out their phones to record video in making their own “Grim Repo Man.”

Sponsor Updates

Besler Consulting’s The Hospital Finance Podcast wins a Gold AVA Digital Award.
CareSync adds services to support CPC+ practices.
Carevive Systems publishes its poster presentation from ASCO’s Cancer Survivorship Symposium: “Survivorship Care Plans: Strategies to Enhance Patient Utility and Value.”
Consulting Magazine recognizes The HCI Group as the eleventh fastest-growing consulting form of 2016.
HealthCast will exhibit at the 2017 MUSE Executive Institute.

Blog Posts

Trends in hospital mergers (Infor)
2017 Best in KLAS report recognizes Nordic as top performer in optimization (Nordic)
Does your Community Connect Team Have a Leader? (Optimum Healthcare IT)
7 easy ways to transition to “Practice 2.0” with automated integrated workflow (AdvancedMD)
Shark Tank’s Robert Herjavec: Healthcare is ripe for innovation (Agfa HealthCare)
If it’s 2017, Then it Must be Time for MACRA/MIPS (Aprima)
Why Pay $976 for a $200 Prescription? Variation in Drug Prices (Arcadia Healthcare Solutions)
2017 Healthcare Trends, Part 4: Healthcare costs and challenges are about a lot more than healthcare (Datica)
Fighting the HAI Crisis Through EHR Optimization (CTG)
4 Traits Needed to be a Great Leader in 2017 (Direct Consulting Associates)
Value-based Care Makes Cybersecurity Even More Critical (ECG Management Consultants)
Verifying Patient Eligibility: Leveraging Epic Benefit Collection Workflow for Improved Collections (Hayes Management Consulting)
Meet the Trump Healthcare Administration (Healthcare Growth Partners)
The Best Laid Plans: Informing Care Plans Through the Power of Shared Decision Making (Healthwise)

Contacts

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

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HIStalk Interviews Kevin Daly, President, Zynx Health

February 14, 2017 Interviews 2 Comments

Kevin Daly is president of Zynx Health of Los Angeles, CA.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I’ve been in healthcare for about 25 years in different segments. I started my career at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts. I spent a number of years at McKesson, both on their payor focus and then their hospital focus in software. I was a partner at Milliman for about 10 years, working on their Milliman Care Guidelines. I joined Hearst about four years ago. In January 2016, I was offered the opportunity to lead the Zynx group, which is one of the foundational companies of Hearst Health.

What’s the level of maturity among health systems in using evidence-based order sets and guidance?

I always represent that I’m not a clinician. My joke is I play one at work, but we can’t say that in the media. [laughs] Maybe the adoption is there, but what’s the use? Have hospital systems and post-acute organizations received the full benefit of evidence-based medicine and what it can actually do? I think the data shows that we still have a lot of opportunity to do some work in that area.

The core foundation of how Zynx started X number of year ago out of Cedars-Sinai was standardization and variation of care. That led to that evidence-based medicine and how it can be rolled through systems.

Now that health systems have in most cases implemented EHRs, are they still using ZynxOrder to maintain order sets and assemble external evidence?

ZynxOrder and ZynxCare are the foundational content or product offerings that help manage patients across the continuum. They’re actually still quite relevant. The question becomes, what next? Now that we have this solution, how can we continue to enhance it, build upon it, and then ultimately get to that nirvana of using clinical decision support in the optimal way?

As you think about where Zynx has been, we’ve been tremendously successful in pivoting in different ways around that concept of standardization and variations of care. Those two product offerings, order sets and plans of care, were extremely helpful. They’re still very helpful and relevant, but we’re looking at how can we continue to grow with some other offerings that the market needs.

Companies are taking guidelines from professional societies, like the American College of Radiology, and creating real-time decision support ordering guidelines. Are they competitors to Zynx or will you incorporate that kind of guidance into your products?

As you think about what Zynx does, it’s clinical content at the core. It’s how we look at the evidence and different types of data. We synthesize it and we bring it forward.

Some of that technical functionality that some of these standalone organizations are bringing actually resides within the existing EMRs. Is it as perfect? Is it as strong? Is the graphical user interface as nice? Maybe not, but that functionality still rests within most of the EMR vendors. We’re partnering pretty tightly with them to continue to keep our content in that forefront.

What’s the overlap in products or strategies among Zynx and the other Hearst Health offerings?

Greg Dorn is the president of Hearst Health. He was one of the co-founders of Zynx along with Scott Weingarten. There’s Zynx. There’s First Databank, or FDB. MCG, previously Milliman Care Guidelines, which is the group that I was originally associated with. Most recently, we have Homecare Homebase, which focuses in that post-acute homecare setting. Then MedHOK, which is a platform that focuses around payor interactions.

The umbrella of Hearst Health gives an organization like Zynx an opportunity to leverage a lot of different domain expertise and experience. One of the comments that was on HIStalk was about some of the changes that were going on at Zynx. We have made some changes in some structures and some reorganization within Zynx, but what’s enabled us to continue to grow and innovate is that we have some resources from Hearst Health. Not just our sister companies, but the actual broader Hearst Health.

It’s pretty nice to be able to pick up the phone and speak with Anil Kotoor, the founder of MedHOK, and talk about, what are you seeing as the risk model is moving around within this particular space? It’s actually quite useful.

You’re on the sharp end of technology changes that involve things incorporating pharmacogenomics into decision support, but also changes that involve the structure of how healthcare works, such as continuity of care. How do you incorporate those changes into your products?

I always like to say the folks on the sharp end of that stick are the clinicians and the administrators trying to get it done. I just happen to be the guy who shows up with what I think is the solution that’s best for them.

When you look at all those changes, everybody likes to think that their product or their offering is the total solution. We’re a component of a lot of bigger problems. That’s where being able to leverage, for example, the strengths of FDB is helpful. We do a lot of synergistic work, particularly with our order sets and their pharmacy data. As they’re spending a significant amount of time and effort in this pharmacogenomics area, we’re able to leverage that work as well.

I’m seeing that synergy with our sister company for sure. Care teams, care management, and how our tools or our content support all the changes that are coming as the risk models change. It’s kind of interesting because from a legacy perspective, Zynx was very much focused in the acute hospital setting. We had tremendous success, that’s where all the opportunities were, that’s where a lot of the mechanisms existed to deliver our solution, namely the legacy EHRs.

Now as you think about this post-acute space and some of the opportunities that are happening there, we’re still partnering with the legacy EHRs — the standard-bearers, if you will — but there’s some new, interesting players in this space. Hopefully there will be a press release about somebody we’re working with at HIMSS that will talk about what’s a longitudinal care plan and how can you execute on it utilizing someone’s technological platform and Zynx’s content that spans the continuum. Things like that are what’s exciting to me.

What’s the future look like for Zynx?

In my view of what we need to accomplish as an organization, you have to stick with what your core competency is. Then, not be afraid to stretch and expand. But when you think about standardization and variation of care, Zynx has been extremely successful in supporting and helping the standardization and limiting that variation.

How do we take that concept and continue to apply it, across not just the acute setting, but the post-acute setting? That’s why we are thinking about the different technological mechanisms by which to deliver this content in different places along that continuum. Is that a component of partnering with an organization that’s doing alerting versus us creating a technological platform or buying someone that does alerting? It’s those facets of sticking with what our core competencies are, understanding it, and then expanding it in a way that’s responsible and reflects our continued support of our existing customers.

We have a very significant install base of users who are still looking for what Zynx has always done, which we will continue to do, but we need to make advancements. We were just recognized again by KLAS for our order sets, which is important and valuable, but where are we going in the future? There’s a product called Knowledge Analyzer where we are seeing a significant amount of opportunity to help organizations who are merging, who are trying to understand their variations in their order sets and their plans of care and other documentation, and getting back to standardization and clinical variation. How can we, Zynx, continue to support that?

Do you have any final thoughts?

Zynx products are foundational to managing patients across the continuum. We’re going to continue to support our legacy products, but we’re going to continue to grow and evolve through additional product offerings and technological innovations that the industry needs and continue to support the mission that has mattered for 20-plus years. I thank you and I thank all of our customers and everybody who’s reading HIStalk.

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Morning Headlines 2/14/17

February 13, 2017 Headlines No Comments

DirectTrust Issues Recommendations to Significantly Improve Usability of EHRs and Health IT Applications Providing Secure Direct Messaging

DirectTrust issues a white paper containing recommendations to EHR vendors aimed at improving interoperability.

A millionaire’s mission: Stop hospitals from killing their patients by medical error

STAT profiles Joe Kiani, founder and CEO of medical technology company Masimo, focusing on his ongoing efforts to convince other medical technology vendors to make their systems more interoperable in the interest of patient safety.

Surrounding states push for Missouri to create prescription drug monitoring program

Neighboring states are lobbying for Missouri to implement a statewide drug monitoring program because it has become a magnet for “doctor shoppers.”

Ex-drug company CEO Martin Shkreli to speak at Harvard

While out on bail awaiting his federal securities fraud trial, Martin Shkreli will appear at Harvard to speak about healthcare an investing at an event being held by the Harvard Financial Analysts Club.

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HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS17

February 13, 2017 News No Comments

Download and print a PDF version of this guide.

Access

Booth 1778

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

For more than 15 years, Access has developed electronic forms management solutions that eliminate the unnecessary expense, risk, and inefficiency of paper forms. Our 100-percent paperless technology enables organizations in any industry to capture, manage, sign and share forms data without printing or scanning.

To help our partner The Last Well bring clean water to every man, woman, and child in Liberia by the end of 2020, we’re going to fund a well on behalf of those who visit our HIMSS booth. Stop by to see how a real water pump works and learn from The Last Well founder Todd Phillips. If you’d like to support the cause, visit www.thelastwell.org.

Advisory Board

Booth 9000 / Interoperability Showcase

Contact: James Green, managing partner
greenj@advisory.com
202.266.5443

Advisory Board will be participating in the Interoperability Showcase, demonstrating how to coordinate patient communication and care to maintain patient relationships throughout the entire continuum of care. Come learn how hospitals and health systems use insights and analytics to find opportunities for brand advantage through patient experience.

Also, our experts are part of the speaking lineup at HIMSS17, where they will present the latest innovations, including:

Doug Thompson on “Consumerism: Strategies to Meet New Market Demands and Rising Expectations” Sunday, February 19, 2-3pm ET in 304E (session ID: INV5)
Naomi Levinthal on “Lessons Learned from the Mandatory Joint Replacement Bundle” Wednesday, February 22, 1-2pm ET in 311E (session ID: 194)

Agfa Healthcare

Booth 1761

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

Agfa HealthCare, present in one hospital out of two, is a leading provider of eHealth and digital imaging solutions. Care organizations in more than 100 countries rely on Agfa HealthCare to optimize their efficiency and improve patient care. With its deep experience in interoperability, Agfa HealthCare has developed a range of solutions to meet the needs of the modern, value-based care healthcare enterprise. The platform approach to medical image management enables the health system to reduce it’s IT infrastructure and resources, while maximizing the value of images and documents across the continuum of care. At HIMSS17, attendees can learn more about Enterprise Imaging Solutions, which include Enterprise Imaging Vendor-Neutral Archive, Enterprise Imaging Exchange, XERO universal image viewer, and more. The platform includes standardized Departmental Workflows, which allow all image-producing service lines to capture and associate multimedia imaging studies with an episode of care.

Aprima Medical Software

Booth 2603

Contact: Marilyn Taylor, marketing coordinator
mtaylor@aprima.com
469.863.8305

Stop by our booth and take the Aprima Stopwatch Challenge!

Arcadia Healthcare Solutions

Booth 2703

Contact: Alyssa Drew, strategic marketing manager
alyssa.drew@arcadiasolutions.com
860.908.6805

Seven Great Reasons to Visit Arcadia at Booth 2703

Explore our Data Gallery — including brand new data visualizations this year!
Ask John Halamka, MD, your questions on digital health on Tuesday at 4pm, followed by a cocktail hour. Dr. Halamka just joined the Arcadia Advisor Network.
Discuss “Six Ways Data Quality Issues Erode Trust … and Five Fixes” with Principal Data Scientist Michael Simon. Learn about the importance of deep, high-quality EHR data to achieve an ROI in value-based care – and how to improve data quality without overwhelming your physicians.
Pick up the “most useful handout ever” at last year’s HIMSS (according to HIStalk) either at our booth or at HIStalk’s (4845).
Enjoy wine, beer, and appetizers at our booth each evening at 4:30pm, and meet our clients.
Q&A with Patrick Charmel, CEO of Griffin Hospital and co-author of “Putting Patients First: Best Practices in Patient-Centered Care” on Tuesday at 10am.
Learn how AMITA Health and Arcadia have partnered to take on risk for nearly 20 years in an informal Q&A on Wednesday at 2:30pm.

AssesURhealth

Booth 223

Contact: Tori Couch, brand development
toric@assessURhealth.com
813.774.9800 x401

Visit the AssessURhealth booth, 223, to see a product demo; explore our interactive tablets; enjoy coffee or cocktails at select limited seating sessions with the 18th US Surgeon General, Regina Benjamin, MD; see our giant brain (we’re serious, we’ll have one); and discover how to gain substantial new revenue! AssessURhealth empowers clinicians by providing the tools and resources needed to positively impact the identification, treatment, and awareness of mental and behavioral health while adding new revenue.

Bottomline Technologies

Booth 937 / Cyber Security Pavilion, kiosk 23

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

Bottomline Technologies helps customers create patient experiences that are simple, secure and seamless – that’s why more than 1,500 healthcare organizations rely on Bottomline for solutions that include privacy and data security, eCapture, eSignature, and on-demand forms. http://www.bottomline.com/us/healthcare

Speaking Sessions:
“Beyond Audit Logs: Three-Tier Privacy Analytics”
Presented by Darren Dworkin, CIO, Cedars Sinai; and Boaz Krelbaum, CTO, Bottomline Technologies
Monday, February 20, 10:30– 11:30am Room W206A

“A Dual Case Study on Improving Privacy Results”
Presented by Mark Benoit, director, privacy and data security, Bottomline Technologies
Monday, February 20, 11:15-11:45am Cyber Security Command Center

Caradigm

Booth 4561

Contact: Jennifer Thorson, senior marketing manager
Jennifer.Omholt@caradigm.com
425.201.7626

Caradigm is an award-winning population health company dedicated to improving patient care, advancing the health of populations, and reducing healthcare costs. Its enterprise software portfolio encompasses all capabilities critical to delivering effective population health management including data control, healthcare analytics, care coordination and management, and wellness and patient engagement. Caradigm’s 200+ customers include Greenville Health System, Virtua and other large integrated delivery networks; ACOs; academic medical centers; government facilities; and community hospitals. Caradigm solutions are operating in more than 1,500 hospitals worldwide, and connect to about 500 customer systems, and to data for more than 175 million patients. In addition, its identity and access management solutions are employed daily by over 1.2 million users, ensuring patient privacy and security by safeguarding access to patient health information. For more information, visit www.caradigm.com.

Carevive Systems

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Ricardo Mazzi, CMO
ricardo@carevive.com
800.460.3790

Carevive Systems provides personalized and dynamic cancer care plans for patients that improve clinical outcomes and enable oncology practices to operate in emerging value-based models. Our care plans continuously update to provide ongoing guidance to patients based on their experiences throughout the journey. This process allows us to collect longitudinal Real-World Evidence (RWE) on the cancer patient experience that will drive better care delivery, and oncolytic drug use and future development. The company’s automated software enables each patient to receive his or her own unique, personalized care plans that can be customized and edited by oncology physicians and nurses at each clinic visit, in a way that is not possible with either EHRs or care management software. To develop our care plans, our software generates automated, personalized symptom assessment and management guidance based on individual patient diagnosis, treatment, and risk. Carevive’s patient care plans and associated tools for clinicians facilitate patient-centered, coordinated, and integrated multi-disciplinary cancer care — all of which are concepts proven to decrease costs, and improve clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction.

Casenet

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Kelli Bravo, VP, product marketing
kbravo@casenetllc.com
781.357.2706

When people and data work in harmony, a real, positive impact can be made on the health of individuals and populations. Casenet is a leading provider of enterprise population health and care management solutions. Casenet’s platform automates workflows, integrates member-centric information, improves care coordination, and enables regulatory compliance reporting. Our solutions are proven to drive positive outcomes and to enable clients to adapt to market changes while driving down costs. Contact us at www.casenetllc.com or info@casenetllc.com for more information.

The Chartis Group

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Gregg Mohrmann, director
chartis@chartis.com
877.667.4700

The Chartis Group is a national advisory services firm dedicated to the healthcare industry. The only firm to rank among the top five overall for both healthcare management consulting and IT services in the “2016/2017 Best in KLAS: Software and Services” report, Chartis provides strategy, performance, and informatics and technology consulting services and decision-support tools to the country’s leading healthcare providers. Chartis has been privileged to work with:

Over two-thirds of the academic medical centers on the US News & World Report “Honor Roll of Best Hospitals.”
Seven of the 10 largest integrated healthcare systems.
Four of the five largest not-for-profit health systems.
Nine of the top 10 children’s hospitals.
Emerging and leading ACOs.
Hundreds of community-based health systems.
Leading organizations in healthcare services.

Connect with Chartis via five HIMSS presentations and one career poster session:

Benchmarking, IT Cost Controls and Efficiencies – session #191
How to Make IT the Underpinning of the Enterprise Strategy – session #146
Care Coordination Transformation: Road to Population Health – session #112
The Future of IT Governance: Fully-Integrated and Operationally-Led – session #310
Managing a Legacy Team in an EHR Transition – session #75
Career Development Poster Session: HIT Career Pursuits: Thoughts on Personal Best Practices to Get Where You Want to Go – session #PSEP1

Clinical Architecture

Booth 3171

Contact: Marck DuBois, EVP, sales
marck_dubois@clinicalarchitecture.com
317.580.8400

Founded in 2007, Clinical Architecture has become the leading provider of innovative healthcare solutions focused on the quality and usability of clinical information. Our customers include leading provider organizations and IDNs; EMR/EHR, population health, and analytics application vendors; pharma and life sciences companies; HIEs; content publishers; and the payer community. Our healthcare terminology platform comprehensively addresses the acquisition, management, distribution and utilization of terminologies, unstructured text, and clinical knowledge enabling our clients to overcome industry gaps in interoperability, decision support, and analytics.

Clinical Computer Systems

Booth 922

Contact: Elizabeth Hobson, marketing manager
Marketing@obix.com
888.871.0963

CCSI is a high-tech leader in perinatal healthcare. Some of the largest hospitals across the country utilize its comprehensive, computerized OBIX Perinatal Data Systems for centralized, bedside, and remote fetal electronic monitoring. Come discover how the benefits of the OBIX system extend beyond the labor and delivery department. We welcome conversations with leadership team members seeking cost-savings methods and positive patient feedback. Our representatives can explain how the system can be deployed using your existing infrastructure, and demonstrate the system’s intuitive design and ease of use. Rest assured, we work side-by-side with customers throughout planning, implementation, education, and system go-live. Visit booth 922 and see how meaningful integration enhances clinical workflow.

CloudWave

Booth 3191

Contact: Bryan Blood, EVP, sales
bblood@gocloudwave.com
508.251.8803

CloudWave is a full-service cloud services provider and solutions integrator for healthcare. In addition to implementing private cloud solutions consisting of on-premise hardware and software, CloudWave delivers technology consulting services as well as hosting, disaster recovery, archiving, and systems management services via our OpSus Healthcare Cloud. Come join us for a cup of coffee in booth 3191 to discuss how we can help you with your journey to the cloud.

CTG

Booth 1223

Contact: Angela Rivera, VP
angela.rivera@ctg.com
619.397.0446

CTG is the most reliable IT services provider, built on more than 50 years of meeting our commitments to make technology work for our clients and deliver real business value. We provide advisory, implementation/upgrade, optimization and performance improvement, enterprise information management, application management, patient portal/clinical service desk, and strategic staffing services. Stop by the CTG booth, 1223, to learn why reliability matters and have a chance to win an Amazon Echo or a drone.

Culbert Healthcare Solutions

To schedule a meeting:

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

Datica (fka Catalyze)

Booth 8152

Contact: Casey Bryson, chief strategy officer
casey@datica.com
816.289.5441

Catalyze is now Datica and you can find us on the convention floor at booth 8152. Schedule a meeting at the Datica booth (near the Intelligent Health Pavilion), and you’ll be treated to a hot cup of Portland coffee, flown in and brewed especially for you. Let’s discuss healthcare partnerships, integrations, managed HIPAA-compliant hosting, and the “why” of the company rebrand. Schedule a meeting now at hello@datica.com.

Definitive Healthcare

Booth 7954

Contact: Marissa Peoples, enterprise account executive
mpeoples@definitivehc.com
888.307.4107

Definitive Healthcare is the leading provider of data and intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and other healthcare providers. Definitive Healthcare’s data provides clients with the analytics and insight needed to effectively segment and research the healthcare provider market.

Diameter Health

Booth 9000 / Interoperability Showcase

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

Diameter Health improves patient safety and optimizes patient care and operational performance by de-duplicating, cleaning, aggregating, and enhancing complex clinical data across the care continuum. Our scalable and cost-effective platform empowers organizations that depend on multi-sourced data streams – HIEs, ACOs, health systems, and health plans – to realize greater value from data used for managing population health and value-based care. Visit us at the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase as we collaborate with Caradigm, Cerner, Medhost, and Qvera in demonstrating how interoperability improves the care provided to a patient living with diabetes. Diameter Health technology is used to visualize a consolidated clinical view of the patient, as well as report on pertinent clinical quality measures.

Direct Consulting Associates

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Tom Clark, VP, operations
tclark@dc-associates.com
440.996.0874

Whether you’re an IT professional searching for that perfect opportunity or a client company looking for the very best IT talent you can trust, rely on DCA to help meet your goals.

DrFirst

Booth 1179

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

DrFirst has pioneered healthcare technology solutions that inform the provider-patient point of encounter, optimizing provider access to patient information, enhancing the provider’s clinical view of the patient, and improving care delivery and clinical outcomes. DrFirst’s growth is driven by a commitment to innovation, security, and reliability across a wide array of services, including electronic prescribing, medication management, medication adherence, secure messaging, and care collaboration. We are proud of our track record of service to more than 330 EHR/HIS vendors and an extensive network of providers, hospitals, and patients. For more information, please visit www.drfirst.com or connect with us @DrFirst.

Come by DrFirst’s booth, 1179, for two presentations:

Improving Medication Reconciliation: The People, Processes, and Technology
Presented by Nick Barger, principal pharmacist
Monday, February 20 at 2pm and Tuesday, February 21st at 11am

Using Communication to Comply with New Healthcare Initiatives
Presented by Linda Fischer, senior director of product solutions and former CIO, Huntington Hospital
Monday, February 20 at 4pm and Tuesday, February 21 at 3pm

ESD

Booth 1639

Contact: David Tucker, VP, business development
dtucker@contactesd.com
512.350.1735

For over 25 years, ESD has been providing implementation support services to healthcare systems across North America through our network of 10,000+ clinical and healthcare IT experts. Our full-cycle implementation support model assists in all stages of the transition – including training, build, configuration, project management, automated testing, go-live support, and optimization, as well as providing staff augmentation, on-shore clinical service desk, and patient portal help desk services. If you are preparing for an upgrade, switching to a new EHR or needing to optimize your current system, stop by our booth to learn how we can make the transition as seamless as possible.

Evariant

Booth 3985

Contact: Courtney Smigiel, senior marketing specialist
courtney.smigiel@evariant.com
860.917.6558

Stop by booth 3985 to enter to win one of three Amazon Echos, and discuss how your organization can improve the healthcare experience through more personalized interactions by integrating data into a centralized engagement hub.

FDB

Booth 2531, 8361

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

Main themes for FDB would be tackling medication alert management to enhance CDS; addressing the lack of standardized and often incomplete information about medical devices in HIT systems to improve operational, financial, and clinical decisions; and helping hospital organizations improve patient medication adherence that also leads to improved HCAHPS scores and reduced readmissions.

Learn more about the launch of our medical device knowledge platform (FDB Prizm) that will be of interest to information system vendors and providers on the supply chain and clinical side – both in our booth and in the Intelligent Health Pavilion. On Tuesday, February 21, from 1-1:20pm, Henrik Bacho, senior product manager for FDB Prizm, will speak about how to improve OR workflow with our new medical device knowledge platform.
Learn more about new enhancements to our FDB AlertSpace alert management and customization solution that includes business analytics capabilities.
Learn more about how Meducation’s simplified patient medication instructions are now integrated with Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, Meditech, and Athenahealth. Also, hospital-based attendees can come by the booth and receive a customized ROI for their hospital institution based on improving value-based purchasing through HCAHPS scores and reducing readmission penalties.
We have a Hearst Health network interactive, five-question, multiple-choice healthcare quiz where participants can “earn” a $10 donation to the National Patient Safety Foundation for each correct answer.
Giveaway: We are serving gourmet coffee and giving away coffee travel mugs, as we’ve done over the past several years.

FormFast

Booth 451

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

With 25 years exclusively focused on healthcare needs and over 1,000 hospital clients, FormFast is recognized as the industry leader in electronic forms and document workflow technology. FormFast’s enterprise software platform integrates with EHRs and other core systems to automate required documents, capturing data and accelerating workflows associated with them. By using FormFast, healthcare organizations achieve new levels of standardization and operational efficiency, allowing them to focus on their core mission – delivering quality care.

FormFast’s theme for the leading health IT event is “Bringing Document Workflow Up to Speed,” highlighting the speed, agility, and efficiency FormFast’s solutions bring to critical processes across the care continuum. Featuring seamless integration, FormFast enhances EHRs and other core systems, and accelerates the completion of necessary documents by streamlining the processes surrounding them. With FormFast’s document workflow solutions, healthcare organizations experience improved cost and operational efficiencies, clinical outcomes, compliance, and patient engagement.

FormFast Booth 451 Highlights

Solution Demos

FormFast Connect: Allows patients to complete forms and task checklists beyond hospital walls from the convenience of their personal device or computer. This helps the patient navigate their care journey pre-admissions or post-discharge, while giving providers the real-time information they need to deliver a higher quality of care and enhance patient engagement.
FormFast Capture: Offers best-in-class electronic forms and capture technology to help digitize point-of-care checklists, care guidelines, rounding, informed consents, and ancillary care documents – not addressed by the EHR.
FormFast Mobile Bedside Consents: An integrated eConsent solution that presents the correct documentation for patient signatures on mobile devices at the bedside. Upon completion, consents are archived to the EHR and instantly visible to the care team.

Cash for Dash Charity: By getting a glimpse into the capabilities FormFast’s solutions bring to healthcare organizations through a quick solution demo, booth visitors will get a chance to spin a virtual prize wheel for a chance to win up to $500. With each spin, FormFast will match the prized amount to the American Heart Association.

Forward Health Group

Booth 510

Contact: Barry Wightman, creative director
bmw@forwardhealthgroup.com
414.418.5654

Forward Health Group’s population health measurement platforms and data strategies drive success in the move to value. Visit booth 510 to elevate your data! Forward Health Group’s Data Elevation makes population health easy. Measure quality. Motivate clinicians. Maximize incentives. Population Health Without the Wait.

Harris Healthcare

Booth 3961

Contact: Susan Pouzar, VP, sales and marketing
spouzar@harriscomputer.com
571.267.3928 x74343

Harris Healthcare brings together “The Brightest Solutions Under One Umbrella” and we’re inviting the brightest minds in health and IT to experience the difference at HIMSS 2017.

Speak with clients in our booth, 3961, to get the low-down on real-world applications and integration among our products. Hunterdon Healthcare System’s IT and clinical IT leadership team will be on site Tuesday, February 21 from 4-5pm to share their experiences and their approach to solving the healthcare IT challenges of a community-based integrated delivery system.
We will have multiple demo stations available, allowing you to take a peek at each of our available products.
Visit our booth each day for a chance to win high-end sunglasses from brands like Ray-ban, Chanel, Oakley, and Maui Jim. Multiple chances to win by visiting booth 3961 each day.

HBI Solutions

Booth 6179, kiosk 2

Contact: Eric Widen, CEO
ewiden@hbisolutions.com
415.350.3140

HBI offers a proven suite of predictive analytics and performance analysis tools, both easy to use and easy to install into any healthcare IT system. Our Spotlight Data Solution uses real-time EHR data, billing, claims and public data sources to provide real-time risk predictions for patients and populations. Spotlight’s predictive models also use built-in natural language processing to include unstructured data types like visit notes. Our wide range of disease and event-based predictive models are published in peer-reviewed research journals and in production on over 20 million patients. Customers include health systems, physician practices, FQHCs, ACOs, payers, HIEs, and technology vendors. Stop by booth 6179, kiosk 2 for a demo of our solution or to chat with some of our executives and customers. For more information, visit www.hbisolutions.com.

Healthcare Growth Partners

Booth 7374

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

Healthcare Growth Partners is an exceptionally experienced transaction and strategic advisory firm exclusively focused on the transformational health IT market. We unlock value for our clients through our Sell-Side Advisory, Buy-Side Advisory, Capital Advisory, and Pre-Transaction Growth Strategy services, functioning as exclusive advisor to over 90 health IT transactions representing over $2 billion in value since 2007.

HealthCast

Booth 686

Contact: Mike O’Mara, national sales manager
momarra@gohealthcast.com
Direct 510.338.0689 Cell 510.393.1911

HealthCast has some big plans for the near future – come see how our innovations have led us to create so many award-winning solutions. We’ll be giving away one brand new Microsoft Surface Pro 4 after each of our six presentations. Stop by booth 686 for your chance to win!

Health Catalyst

Booth 5173

Contact: Patty Burke, program manager
patty.burke@healthcatalyst.com
801.708.6800

Health Catalyst is an award-winning, mission-driven data warehousing, analytics and outcomes-improvement company that helps healthcare organizations of all sizes improve clinical, financial, and operational outcomes needed to improve population health and accountable care. Stop by booth 5173 to see a live demo of one of our many analytics applications, or hear about any of our 100+ client success stories. We’ve got the usual event swag to take home to your kids, too! You can read more about our clients’ successes here: www.healthcatalyst.com.

Healthfinch

Booth 994

Contact: Karen Hitchcock, chief experience officer
karen@healthfinch.com
608.513.6566

Did you know that your next strategic hire is a bird? Charlie the Healthfinch works seamlessly within your EHR to simplify, delegate, and automate routine, repeatable clinical tasks. Charlie swoops in to handle jobs like prescription refill requests, pre-visit planning, and more. Come meet Charlie and his team of humans at booth 994. We’ll have a small number of limited-edition Charlie plushies to give away, and we’ll also offer a special HIMSS discount on your first month subscription to Charlie if you schedule a demo time with us. See you soon at booth 994!

Healthlink Advisors

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Lindsey Jarrell
lindsey@healthlinkadvisors.com
727.729.2602

Healthlink Advisors is a healthcare consulting firm whose mission is to improve healthcare delivery and IT operations. Our work focuses on management consulting, IT strategy and finance, vendor selection and negotiation, and forecasting. From academic medical centers to integrated delivery networks to community-based hospitals, we serve both investor-owned and community-owned organizations. Our team is comprised of experienced healthcare professionals who have been individually selected to be a part of our team. As a consulting firm, we are defined by our people, their actions, and the quality of the work we produce. As a company, we are defined by our values and our broader purpose. We firmly believe we must create a company that is socially responsible, fun, and focused on fulfilling our purpose of improving healthcare delivery. Our purpose is pursued not just through engagements but also through our work in the community and helping each other. Ask about our cocktail hour at HIMSS.

HealthLoop

Booth 1789

Contact: Bevey Miner, chief marketing and business development officer
bevey@healthloop.com
858.922.3458

HealthLoop empowers tens of thousands of patients every day with the right information at the right time, before admission and weeks after discharge, guiding them until they are fully recovered. By automatically sending notifications to patients to ‘Check In,’ HealthLoop remotely monitors all of your patients and identifies the patients that need help, allowing clinical teams to proactively intervene before costs and complications escalate. Developed as an enterprise solution to support all clinical specialties, HealthLoop’s content and analytics are deeply integrated into your care management workflows. Especially useful under new bundled reimbursement models, HealthLoop facilitates effortless PRO collection, helping you earn back financial bonuses for meeting or beating quality metrics.

In the HealthLoop booth, attendees will:

Better understand how to scale clinical adoption of patient engagement technology and the ease and speed with which it can be implemented.
Explore ways to use analytics to identify at-risk patients in real time before complications result in adverse outcomes and elevated, post-acute care costs.
Review validated results across thousands of patients that will show the impact of engaged and satisfied patients on improved quality and collection of PROs.

Healthwise

Booth 1523

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

Stop by Healthwise booth #1523 to discover how to make every moment in care matter. Our demo stations for Point of Care, Care Coordination, Digital & Web Experiences, and Care Transformation will showcase how you can engage patients with consistent, evidence-based health education for improved outcomes, increased satisfaction, and lower costs.

Huron

Booth 3631

Contact: Meredith Rock, manager, marketing and alliances
mrock@huronconsultinggroup.com
224.221.5761

4 Health IT Sessions You Can’t Miss at HIMSS 2017 Come visit us at booth 3631 to learn how we’re working with our clients to solve their most pressing business problems with the leading healthcare technologies. Huron is a global professional services firm assisting clients with complex issues by delivering high-value, quality solutions to support long-term strategic objectives. Huron’s healthcare practice specializes in strategic direction setting, clinical transformation, financial and operational excellence, technology implementation and optimization, and patient and caregiver engagement.

Huron has served more than 450 health systems, with over 1,400 specialists and experienced consultants dedicated to the healthcare industry including a leadership team that brings more than 25 years of healthcare and consulting experience. In August 2016, HSM Consulting became part of Huron. This acquisition has strengthened Huron’s IT/EHR consulting services, adding deep expertise in Meditech, Cerner, Allscripts, and NextGen. Together, Huron and HSM improve their ability to help healthcare providers implement and optimize technologies to improve quality, cost of care, and better manage patient populations.

Iatric Systems

Booth 2715

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

Take control over your most challenging 2017 healthcare IT issues. Join us at the Iatric Systems booth to discuss how you can stay ahead of the constantly changing healthcare IT environment. Iatric Systems will deliver many products and services that will optimize EHRs, monitor patient privacy, help manage vendor risk, ensure data is available to folks that need it – when they need it, help providers make sense of various data, increase patient safety, improve workflows, and augment staffs that need expert help – and more!

Promotions/Giveaways – Fresh off his national TV appearance on Penn & Tellers ‘Fool Us’, two time US Champion Trick Shot pool player Chef Anton is back! See the master at work! After every show, he will give away a $25, $50, or $100 Amazon gift card. Participate in our social media promotion and be entered to win not just one, but TWO Amazon Dots – today’s hottest tech for home or office.

Infor

Booth 2147

Contact: Mike Polling, SVP and GM, healthcare
healthcare@infor.com
646.336.1700

Make sure a stop at Infor booth 2147 is on your HIMSS17 agenda. Infor Healthcare can offer you a single-system solution in the cloud, bringing clinical and operational data together. We understand that healthcare providers like you need a sophisticated solution that helps you react quickly, intelligently, and personally to every patient interaction in order to achieve better outcomes and lower costs while also making the best operational, financial, and clinical decisions. Our micro-vertical solutions give you comprehensive functionality that allows you to put the patient at the center of your strategy.

Schedule a 1:1 demonstration from these solutions – Care Solutions/WFM/Human Capital Management/Talent Management/Talent Science/Infor CloudSuite Financials & Supply Management/Infor Cloverleaf Integration Suite/Infor Cloverleaf Clinical Exchange/BI and Analytics for Healthcare/Physician Relationship Management/Infor CloudSuite Clinical. Schedule a live demo or one-on-one meeting to see the software in action. If you would like to schedule a live demo, please email healthcare@infor.com, or access the registration link directly at http://bit.ly/infordemos.

Intelligent Medical Objects

Booth 4651

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

IMO is the developer of the most widely-accepted medical terminology solution for the management of medical vocabularies and software applications at healthcare organizations worldwide. IMO terminology is used by more than 3,500 hospitals and 450,000 physicians daily, and this trusted terminology platform supports innovations by provider systems. IMO medical vocabulary and mapping products effectively capture clinical intent and help EMRs preserve and communicate this across the entire spectrum of care. IMO clinical terms are mapped to all standard coding systems including ICD-9, ICD-10, and SNOMED. The accuracy of IMO’s interface terminology was found to be “nearly perfect” in an independent study published by the US Centers for Disease Control.

Visit us at HIMSS17 to learn now to Code Once with IMO and know you will always be Delivering Value across the spectrum of care. When a clinician enters a diagnosis or procedure into their EHR, IMO adds the appropriate billing and reference codes so that clinician doesn’t have to. Once captured with the IMO Unique Identifier, the concept never needs to change. No matter if it is added through text, speech, C-CDA, or FHIR, the proper IMO identifiers are continuously linked. IMO takes care of mapping the concept to all the necessary code sets so changes don’t have to be made manually by clinicians. Code Once and users are able to use the same terms and patient information for reimbursement, risk stratification, population health management, data analytics or clinical use cases. IMO focuses on the coding so clinicians can do what they do best, deliver Value-Based Healthcare. Read more at www.e-imo.com

Stop by booth 4651 after 4 p.m. on Monday and Tuesday to enjoy a glass of wine, and take a short survey to get a cool IMO t-shirt. Giveaway this is a Wine Tumbler, while supplies last.

SNOMED and SNOMED CT are registered trademarks of the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation.

Ivenix

Booth 9000 / Interoperability Showcase, kiosk 12

Contact: Julie Kuhlken, director of product marketing
jkuhlken@ivenix.com
619.453.9486

Ivenix is a venture-backed medical technology company with a vision to transform infusion therapy in every care setting. Technology within the infusion pump category has been slow to evolve despite an increase in the complexity of drug dosing regimens, demand for hospital EHR integration, and persistent patient safety issues. Ivenix is focused on bringing its first solution to market – a new and innovative infusion management system for hospitals. Ivenix will participate in a connected demonstration at the Interoperability Showcase. The Ivenix Infusion Management System will be featured with leading EHRs and alarm management systems in a live demonstration of auto programming of patient-specific infusion orders, auto documentation of infusion data, and communication of alarm status to mobile devices. Ivenix will also participate in the new Product Marketplace demonstration area within the Showcase. Sue Niemeier, RN, CNO, will present “Strategies in Making the Journey to Smart Pump BCMA-EMR Interoperability” during the Nursing Informatics Symposium poster session on Sunday, February 19.

Kyruus

Booth 5045

Contact: Lindsey Cohen, event marketing manager
events@kyruus.com
617.419.2060

Kyruus delivers proven provider search and scheduling solutions that help hospitals and health systems match patients with the providers best suited to care for them. The ProviderMatch suite of solutions—for consumers, access centers, and referral networks—enables a consistent patient experience across multiple points of access, while aligning provider supply with patient demand. The company’s proprietary provider data management platform forms the foundation of its solutions, powering them with accurate data by coupling data processing with administrative applications. To find out why a Better Match Means Better Care, please visit www.kyruus.com or come visit us in booth 5045!

We will have coffee and beer/wine available throughout the show (and get a pair of custom Kyruus socks!) Stop by to chat with our team and learn more about our enterprise-wide patient access solution.

Legacy Data Access

Booth 4225

Contact: John Hanggi, director, business development
jhanggi@legacydataaccess.com
678.232.7922

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

Please visit us to discuss how we have successfully retired 229 different healthcare applications – a total of 555 applications. Giveaways include ear buds, tote bags, and the best dark chocolate in the exhibit hall. Drop a card for a chance to win an Apple Watch or one of two Apple TVs.

Lexmark Healthcare

Booth 1961

Contact: Alisa Moloney, marketing manager
alisa.moloney@lexmark.com
770.365.8382

Do you feel like chaos is taking over? Shifting payment models, cyber threats, M&A activity. And in the face of all these challenges, you are still expected to improve patient outcomes while cutting costs. All of these objectives become more difficult when vital patient information is trapped in silos across the organization and inaccessible from your EHR. It’s time to take back control. Lexmark Healthcare can help. Our solutions uniquely deliver comprehensive information — medical images, documents, and clinical photos — in one view within your EHR.

Healthcare Content Management: Lexmark Healthcare has brought together industry-leading technologies to create Healthcare Content Management (HCM) — a modular, enterprise strategy that allows you to securely capture, manage, view, and share vital information with the applications you use every day. With Lexmark HCM, you can make more informed decisions, future-proof your business, and maximize your technology investments. Lexmark HCM is comprised of vendor neutral archive, enterprise content management, enterprise viewing, process intelligence, and PACSGEAR connectivity. Schedule an appointment in HIMSS booth 1961 to experience the transformational power of Lexmark Healthcare.

Lifepoint Informatics

Booth 5351

Contact: Vincent Gryscavage, SVP of sales
vgryscavage@lifepoint.com
201.679.1059

Lifepoint Informatics has been a trusted leader in healthcare IT for over 18 years, focusing on clinical integration, HIE, and data interoperability solutions for hospitals, hospital systems, and clinical laboratories. We offer vendor neutral data integration solutions that facilitate health information exchange, enable successful outreach connectivity, EHR integration, EHR interfacing, physician portal, and quality reporting among disparate clinical systems.

Please stop by the Lifepoint Informatics booth, 5351, to learn about our newest interfacing methodologies, which enable us to setup connections faster, and more economically. Also, while at the booth, look for an energy boost as well as other unique items.

LogicStream Health

Booth 875

Contact: Scott Olson, director of marketing
scott@logic-stream.net
651.335.8643

Schedule and attend your 15-minute demo to be entered to win an Apple Watch, Bose noise-cancelling headphones, or a $150 Visa gift card. One prize drawn daily. Each 15-minute demonstration will highlight how Clinical Process Measurement solutions from LogicStream are delivering self-service access to information operational stakeholders throughout health systems that need to improve quality and reduce the cost of healthcare. The three disciplines of Clinical Process Measurement include Standardizing Processes, Measuring Adoption, and Improving Outcomes.

M*Modal

Booth 1043

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

Creating Time to Care with M*Modal. Stop by booth 1043 and enter to win a Google Home.

MedData

Booth 6479

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

MedData is a leading national provider of technology-enabled healthcare solutions designed to help physicians and hospitals better engage patients throughout the entire healthcare continuum. The MedData suite of solutions includes a range of patient access and communications; RCM; and consulting and analytics services including billing and coding, patient responsibility, eligibility and disability, complex A/R services (such as workers compensation, out-of-state, and more), and mobile-first engagement and communication software for patients and providers. For more than 36 years, we’ve been committed to delivering industry-leading and patient-focused RCM solutions to our growing network of more than 2,000 hospital sites nationwide. HIMSS GIVEAWAYS: Freshly baked scones.

Medicity

Booth 5961

Contact: Lauren Tilelli, VP, marketing
ltilelli@medicity.com
858.414.4117

Medicity builds complete, ubiquitous, and indispensable networks that power clinically connected communities and empower population health. The Medicity Network provides the data foundation and integrated workflow solutions to enable today’s population health management objectives, including timely clinician engagement, improved transitions of care, reduction in duplicative services, and the opportunity for patients to take an active role in their personal health.

Medicomp Systems

Booth 2303

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

Medicomp Systems, a physician-driven provider of clinically contextual patient data solutions, will be exhibiting at booth 2303. At HIMSS17, Medicomp is launching Quippe Clinical Lens, the company’s newest point-of-care decision support tool. The new solution delivers physicians optimized EMR data that is easy to digest and promotes new levels of clinical insights. Long-time Medicomp partner Meridian Medical Management, an industry leader in physician technology, revenue cycle, and analytics, is joining Medicomp at this week’s HIMSS17 Conference & Exhibition in Orlando to demonstrate Quippe and the new Quippe Clinical Lens functionality. Quippe Clinical Lens is a web-based application that can be added to any electronic health record (EHR) or health information exchange (HIE) system to make sense of data from multiple encounters across systems. It is the latest addition to the Quippe suite of solutions, which uniquely delivers longitudinal patient information within a problem-oriented clinical view, mirroring the way physicians think and work to drive optimal patient outcomes.

Attendees are also invited to Medicomp’s Quippe Virtual Experience Game at HIMSS17. The game illustrates how Quippe Clinical Solutions enable physicians to make better, faster decisions at the point of care, streamline documentation and ensure regulatory compliance. It also shows how Quippe easily integrates with any existing HIS system—and helps physicians to see up to 25% more patients. Play the game to experience the Quippe difference and to win a real-life dream cruise each day of HIMSS17. The cruise winners will be announced at 4 p.m. on Monday and Tuesday and 3 p.m. on Wednesday. Attendees must be present to win.

Meditech

Booth 3279

Contact: Nicole Lund, supervisor, trade shows
nlund@meditech.com
508.864.3018

Be sure to visit Meditech at booth 3279, and see why there is so much buzz surrounding our innovative, physician-designed Web EHR. Hear why this contemporary, modern, and transformational EHR is driving the new generation of EHR leaders in the market to move forward with Meditech’s latest release. In addition to the Web EHR, come see the latest solutions Meditech offers for improving patient engagement, RCM, telehealth, population health, and much more.

You’ll also get to see clinicians demonstrating our solutions LIVE, showing how you can reclaim your productivity. Hear from industry experts in Meditech booth 3279, and learn who reduced A/R days by 50 percent, who surpassed patient portal adoption goals with a 60 percent usage rate, who obtained a 99-percent patient satisfaction rating, and more!

National Decision Support Co.

Booth 3492

Contact: Diane Mardini, marketing and sales
dmardini@nationaldecisionsupport.com
917.887.1580

National Decision Support Co. enables stakeholders in the healthcare process to deliver more efficient and appropriate care, improve population health, and save money. Variations and gaps in care delivery cost providers and patients billions of dollars annually, and result in life-threatening medical errors. NDSC’s CareSelect decision support platform enables the transition to value-based care and payment models, and risk-sharing payment models while reducing inconsistencies in patient care. The CareSelect platform converts published guidelines from credible, compliant content sources — covering diagnostic imaging, medication, lab, and care pathways — into actionable decision support criteria delivered directly into the EHR workflow. Feel free to stop by our booth, 3492, for a demo.

Nordic

Booth 903

Contact:
events@nordicwi.com
608.268.6900

Nordic is the world’s largest Epic consulting firm and a trusted advisor to healthcare systems, connecting strategy through to IT execution. At booth 903, we’ll have team members ready to talk with you about your needs in advisory services, Epic implementation, optimization, data and analytics, managed services, population health, and affiliate extension solutions. If you can’t make it to our booth, contact events@nordicwi.com and we’ll find a time to connect.

Optimum Healthcare IT

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jenny Paal
Jpaal@optimumhit.com
904.373.0831 x325

Optimum Healthcare IT is a leading healthcare IT staffing and consulting services company based in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Optimum provides world-class consulting services in advisory, implementation, training and activation, Community Connect, analytics, and managed services – supporting our client’s needs through the continuum of care. Our excellence in service is driven by a leadership team with more than 50 years of experience in providing expert healthcare staffing and consulting solutions to all types of organizations.

Orchestrate Healthcare

Booth 1423

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

We focus on four core competencies that dramatically affect healthcare processes and systems – EHR strategies, integration and interoperability consulting, information security consulting, and activation and go-live support. We listen to our clients first, and then our 18+ year-experienced consultants step in as the make-it-happen kind of people that deliver solutions for the challenges you face – ON TIME, ON TARGET, and ON BUDGET. We do project-based work as well as healthcare IT staffing – whatever your needs. Our leadership is available and attentive to our clients, keeping us nimble, responsive, and accessible. Our commitment to quality over quantity attracts the very best talent in healthcare IT, which results in projects with maximum achievement and minimum disruption and costs – and, ultimately, delighted clients. Come visit booth 1423 and see how 30 impactful minutes with us will change your IT consulting direction!

PatientKeeper

Booth 2333

Contact: Kathy Ruggiero, senior director of marketing
kruggiero@patientkeeper.com
781.373.6433

PatientKeeper provides highly intuitive software that streamlines physician workflow to improve productivity and patient care. At HIMSS17, PatientKeeper will preview its new health IT innovation platform, which is intended to advance the use of computers by physicians and care teams, and make them indispensable tools for 21st century clinical care. PatientKeeper’s new platform integrates third-party apps and data from multiple EHRs, embeds advanced clinical decision support capabilities in a truly useful way, and provides an individualized experience for each user. For more information, visit patientkeeper.com/himss17.

PatientKeeper will give away a Peloton exercise bike plus a one-year subscription to streamed studio cycling classes. Healthcare providers may enter the raffle at PatientKeeper’s booth (2333) at HIMSS17. The winning raffle ticket will be drawn at the booth on Tuesday afternoon, February 21.

PatientSafe Solutions

Booth 815

Contact: Kim Tucker, marketing
ktucker@patientsafesolutions.com
858.746.3318

Stop by booth #815 to experience PatientTouch, the only care collaboration platform that unites clinical communications and critical workflows in one smartphone app. Secure messaging, voice, alerts, and nurse call are fully integrated with workflows including specimen collection, rounding, assessments, nursing documentation, and more, all in a single interface. Real-time patient and clinical context is available in-message and in-workflow to speed communication among assigned care team members, improve patient safety, and clinical outcomes.

But don’t just take our word for it! Join us for a free Lunch and Learn panel on Wednesday 2/22 at 1 p.m. in W312B, above Hall C. Hear IT and Informatics leaders from CHRISTUS Trinity Mother Francis, Parkview Medical Center, and Onslow Memorial Hospital discuss how PatientTouch has increased care team efficiency and improved clinical outcomes by uniting communication with workflow in one easy-to-use application that their frontline care teams love. Space is limited, >” target=_blank>sign up today.

PerfectServe

Booth 3315

Contact: Tom Hills, EVP
thills@perfectserve.net
877.844.2777

PerfectServe Synchrony is an integrated system of secure communication services built on a single cloud-based architecture, which ensures secure messages are delivered to the right care team member at the right time across all care settings. Stop by booth 3315 for a 10-minute demonstration.

Phynd Technologies

Booth 7785 / Innovation Zone, kiosk 3

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

Learn about the Phynd Unified Provider Management platform – the only on-demand, cloud-based, enterprise IT solution that eliminates the challenges and organizational inefficiencies caused by working with inaccurate provider data. Whether you are a clinically integrated network struggling to manage an exploding quantity of provider data, or you need to improve the effectiveness of your online provider search capability, the Phynd UPM platform can help.

In addition, don’t miss the following talk that will be given by Michael Meade from Orlando Health and our CEO Thomas White. Michael will share his perspective on their provider data management challenges and review how the Phynd UPM platform is helping. What is Disrupting Provider Data Management? February 21, 11:30am ET Innovation Zone, booth 7785, session ID: IZ19.

Point-of-Care Partners

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Tony Scheuth, CEO and managing partner
tonys@pocp.com
954.346.1999

Point-of-Care Partners is a leading health IT management consulting firm that helps healthcare stakeholders develop and execute winning management and IT strategies in an evolving electronic world. POCP Advantages:

Multi-stakeholder projects across many segments of healthcare.
Rich directory of people in all segments to add perspective to projects.
Experienced staff of consultants with diverse healthcare backgrounds.
On the leading edge of the evolution of health care IT and its application to healthcare for 12 years.

POCP practice leads will be available at HIMSS to discuss a broad range of health IT topics, including EHRs, ePrescribing, specialty pharmacy automation, ePrior authorization, clinical decision support/clinical messaging, real-world evidence/outcomes/analytics, population health management, HIE, biosimilars, medication therapy management, and long-term care. Please contact Tony Schueth to schedule an appointment or visit pocp.com to learn more.

PokitDok

Booth 4087

Contact: Vivian Li, senior product marketing manager
vivian.li@pokitdok.com
650.302.0970

PokitDok provides a software development platform to free, secure, and unify business data across the entire continuum of care. Its 30 API endpoints facilitate eligibility checks, claims submissions, appointment scheduling, payment optimization, patient identity management, pharmacy benefits, and other business processes. These healthcare transactions that exchange business data can be quickly and easily integrated into any app, website, or service without requiring that providers or payers rip and replace legacy solutions or IT infrastructure. Healthcare organizations, digital health companies, and business process outsourcing providers use PokitDok to improve workflows, cut costs, and speed time to market.

Qpid Health, an EviCore company

Booth 5574

Contact: Amy Krane, provider marketing
amy.krane@evicore.com
617.982.5400

Qpid Health and EviCore healthcare have merged to help providers optimize quality and manage costs for success under value-based care. Qpid’s clinical analytics software uses NLP and machine learning to generate patient insights from medical records. EviCore’s utilization management expertise and 25 years refining best practice guidelines drives appropriate use of healthcare resources. Visit us in booth 5574 to discuss how we can help you with our solutions:

Qpid “content as a service” Intelligent Clinical Content optimizes Epic with a library of clinical concepts for intelligent search, problem list reporting, specialty views, and quality measure reporting.
Qpid quality reporting software speeds workflows and finds more data to improve scores.
EviCore CDS integrates into the ordering workflow with robust guidelines for the industry’s broadest set of clinical scenarios for radiology, cardiac imaging, and oncology. And the solution automates prior authorization where best practices guidelines are applied.

EviCore is proud to sponsor a cross-stakeholder executive breakfast on how to lower the operational and financial burden of prior authorization on Tuesday, February 21. Join us!
Resolving Prior Authorization Pain Points – A Critical Cross-Stakeholder Conversation
February 21, 7-8am ET Room W209B

Spok

Booth 2671

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

Spok will demonstrate the latest evolution of its integrated healthcare communications platform at HIMSS17. This release of Spok Care Connect offers new functionality for each solution area of the suite — clinical alerting, secure texting, and the hospital contact center console — to deliver smarter clinical communications that enable care teams to improve the delivery of patient care. Spok will have team members as well as several customers available to discuss the Spok Care Connect platform at HIMSS17 in booth 2671. Spok Care Connect will also be featured in the HIMSS Interoperability Showcase. Giveaways: HIMSS attendees can stop by the Spok booth for a chance to win an Apple Watch. We will have a drawing each day of the event.

Sunquest Information Systems

Booth 3551

Contact: Trish Moxam, VP, marketing
trish.moxam@sunquestinfo.com

This year, Sunquest is showcasing our commitment to giving every patient the best chance at good health. On-site demos will highlight personalized, patient-centric care; end-to-end diagnostic informatics; and precise, targeted diagnoses and treatments. In addition, Sunquest is hosting a networking happy hour in booth 3551 on Monday, February 20, 4:30–6pm ET. Be sure to stop by to meet the Sunquest team and enjoy a refreshing cocktail or beverage!

Sutherland

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Sachi Bhalerao
Sachi.bhalerao@sutherlandglobal.com
862.290.1192

As a process transformation company, Sutherland rethinks and rebuilds processes for the digital age by combining the speed and insight of design thinking with the scale and accuracy of data analytics. We have been helping customers, across industries from financial services to healthcare, achieve greater agility through transformed and automated customer experiences for over 30 years. Headquartered in Rochester, NY, Sutherland employs over 38,000 professionals spanning 19 countries around the world.

SyTrue

To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Kyle Silvestro
kyle@sytrue.com
530.321.7484

You can find us in multiple booths – MidasPlus, nVoq, IDS, and XIFIN.

TransUnion Healthcare

Booth 372

Contact: Pat Gilmore, SVP, sales
pgilmor@transunion.com
303.483.1931

Please come by and visit TransUnion Healthcare at booth 372. TransUnion makes the healthcare financial process more efficient for patients, providers, and payers by helping providers:

Engage the patient early, and connecting them with the best payment options.
Collect more cash upfront.
Maximize revenue and reduce collections costs.
Lower uncompensated care.

Stop by and enter our raffle for three Amazon Echos (one given away each day).

Versus Technology

Booth 1723

Contact: Liz Lutheran, marketing coordinator
info@versustech.com
231.946.5868 x1232

Increased productivity. Happier employees. A better patient experience. These are benefits of using Versus RTLS to optimize your healthcare operations. Our solutions for multi-campus IDNs, single clinics, or small community hospitals include asset tracking, staff and patient workflow, smart hand hygiene, and accurate analytics. Our singular goal is to assist you in improving the delivery of care while enhancing the patient experience. Case in point – HIMSS session speaker Dan Hamilton, COO of Nor-Lea Hospital District, faced an explosion in patient volume, up 78 percent; wait times to see the physician became measured in hours; and satisfaction rates of both patients and staff went from the 90s to all-time lows. Hear how Hamilton’s journey of re-thinking his workflow resulted in optimized scheduling, resource utilization, and care delivery. Session #156: Using Data to Increase Capacity in Ambulatory Care.

You’ll have many opportunities at HIMSS17 to learn how we pair our multi-platform, scalable approach with KLAS-leading location accuracy, software solutions, expert consulting, and implementation services to ensure your project’s success. We’re not just an RTLS vendor — we’re your partner for process improvement.

Voalte

Booth 673

Contact: Andrew Hofheimer, sales operations manager
ahofheimer@voalte.com
941.312.2830 x267

Voalte develops smartphone solutions that simplify caregiver communication. As the only company to offer a comprehensive mobile communication strategy, Voalte enables care teams inside and outside the hospital to access and exchange information securely.

Wellsoft

Booth 2342

Contact: Christie Guthrie, EVP, sales and marketing
cguthrie@wellsoft.com
214.455.9574 or 800.597.9909

Wellsoft, developer and provider of the industry-leading Emergency Department Information System, offers complete solutions for hospital and freestanding emergency centers. Wellsoft EDIS is Best in KLAS* and has ranked #1 in KLAS and MD Buyline user surveys of EDIS time and again. Providing solutions for freestanding emergency centers, enterprise-wide or single hospital implementations, Wellsoft is the specialist in Emergency Department Information Systems.

* Wellsoft ranked #1 in the 2015/2016, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2003, and 2002 Best in KLAS Awards: Software & Services Emergency Department Market Segment. www.KLASresearch.com

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Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 2/13/17

February 13, 2017 Dr. Jayne No Comments

I spent a couple of hours today getting ready for HIMSS. Priority one was outlining my agenda for continuing medical education sessions, which was tricky since it always turns out that there are multiple sessions I want to attend at the same time. The conference offers 22 hours of the specialized credit that informaticists certified by the American Board of Preventive Medicine need.

HIMSS delivers the sessions on demand as part of your HIMSS registration, but my experience last year was that some of the audio recordings were poor quality. There is also no substitute for attending a session in person and being able to participate in the discussion or connect with colleagues. I chose a primary and alternate session for each available time slot, but we’ll see what happens when I get to Orlando and the exhibit hall is beckoning.

I also worked on planning my social schedule, which also had too many overlapping offerings. I’ll be doing the exhibit hall booth crawl with at least four good friends. It’s always enjoyable to get other people’s opinions on new technologies and solutions. Of course it’s always a bonus to have someone help you scout out interesting shoes or create a diversion so you can photograph footwear or badly-behaved booth personnel without being too obvious.

Speaking of shoes, I spent some time looking for the perfect solution to get me through five days of nonstop walking. Last year I had some awesome pink running shoes from Edifecs as part of their #WhatIRun campaign. I’ve pretty much run those into the ground since then, but enjoyed being part of their campaign. I didn’t have much luck shopping, so I might have to pull out some sparkly running shoes to get through the week after all.

HIMSS is the virtual Super Bowl of conferences, so making sure I have a solid packing list was also part of today’s prep. I have a growing number of devices and various pieces of wearable tech that unfortunately involves a growing number of chargers. I have a universal adapter that takes care of the Android vs. iPad problem, but my Garmin watch has its own charger, as does my new favorite piece of wearable tech, my Ringly bracelet.

I had heard about Ringly more than a year ago, but am not big on wearing rings and was worried about the size of the stone being too much for me. I joked that if they ever came out with a silver bracelet, I’d be the first to order. Shortly after that, they came out with a stainless steel version, so I went on the waiting list last spring. I had to wait until the fall for it to arrive and have been putting it through its paces over the last several months. I’m pleased to say it’s HIMSS-worthy.

I’ve never ordered a piece of jewelry sight unseen, so I was a little nervous about it. It arrived in a big chunky cube of a box with the bracelet front and center. Sliding off the outer sleeve revealed the charging box nested underneath. The charger connects via USB to your laptop or USB transformer of choice. Not a problem for me since I usually end up charging things off my docking station anyway.

Advertising on the website at the time I ordered it said that the charging box had its own battery and would hold an 8-10 day charge depending on use. I was disappointed to learn that only applies to the ring version. For the bracelet, I’ll have to tote the charging box when I travel more than 2-3 days, which is what seems to be its maximum lifespan. I can forgive the lack of clarity on the website since they’re a startup and when I ordered they weren’t even shipping product yet. Still, having a battery in the box would be an improvement for those of us who travel.

Having to pack the charger, however, is a small price to pay for what the Ringly does. I don’t like carrying my phone in a pocket. It’s way too bulky even if I take it out of its protective case. If I put it in a purse, I have to turn the ringer on, which isn’t a great idea most of the time. I don’t like to carry my phone in my hands or leave it on the table when I’m out, which a lot of people do, but just isn’t my thing. The Ringly solves that problem – not only by providing discreet vibratory notifications, but best of all, it allows me to screen my calls and texts by configuring contacts in the Ringly app.

The Ringly app connects with dozens of other apps to provide notifications through a combination of vibrations and LED flashes. You can set it up dozens of ways, depending on how many buzzes and what color blink you associate with each app. For phone calls and texting, it links to your contacts and you can set it to either flash an additional color for certain people, or you can set it to only receive calls and texts from certain contacts. The LED is pretty subtle but helpful for giving you information on whether you need to dig out your phone or take other action.

I wanted to test drive it extensively before I decided to trust it. As a physician who is sometimes on call, I needed to know it was reliable, and it is. The connection screen in the app also shows charging and battery status.

There are a couple of quirky things about the Ringly. It likes your location to be turned on when it connects for the first time (or sometimes when it reconnects after a period of non-use). Every once in a while it doesn’t get along with my phone – usually first thing in the morning – and you have to “forget” it in your Bluetooth settings and then rediscover it. Sometimes it wants to be on the charger in order to connect.

Issues are uncommon, but you need to know the tricks in case it acts up on you. They’re also putting out app updates pretty frequently, and if it really doesn’t want to connect, usually it’s because there is an app update available. Another quirk is that Ringly does all their support through email and Facebook chats, so forget it if you like to talk to an actual person.

The other bonus of the Ringly is that it is an activity tracker. Based on how my phone identified it before I had the Ringly app installed, I suspect that it has Garmin innards. I tested it against my trusty Garmin Forerunner and found that it under-calculates by about 30 percent, however. That’s a pretty big margin of error if you’re into accurate distance traveled, but if you just want something as a relative indicator of activity, it gets the job done. The “silver” bracelet is actually stainless steel, so I’ve worn it running and to the gym with no worries. Not sure I’d do that with the plated gold-tone version.

We’ll have to see how it does on the exhibit hall floor. I’m counting on it to remind me of my appointments and to notify me when people are trying to track me down. It’s also pretty snazzy as a bracelet, so I can’t complain about that. The stone is smaller than I anticipated. If only they’d come out with a stainless version of the ring, I’ll be first in line.

What’s your favorite piece of wearable tech? Email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

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HIStalk Interviews Jason Mabry, CEO, Optimum Healthcare IT

February 13, 2017 Interviews No Comments

Jason Mabry is founder and CEO of Optimum Healthcare IT of Jacksonville, FL.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I started my career in the healthcare industry about 10 years ago. Before that, I worked in the information technology industry. I’ve been focused for the past 15 years on consulting services and the last 10 on healthcare providers.

Along with my business partner Gene Scheurer, we started Optimum in 2012. We have built a company that has grown to over 500 consultants servicing about 75 healthcare systems nationwide. Our services include advisory, EHR implementation, training and activation, Community Connect, security, analytics, and managed services.

What consulting services are you finding are most in demand?

I’ve seen the trends and the evolution of service lines over the last 10 years. When we first started the organization, our clients were looking to us for implementation work. Implementation work was the focus and still is. Systems consolidate and form super systems. Clients are updating their EHR platforms and sunsetting old ones. That work continues.

I’m asked all the time, "Is this a short runway? Do you see this ending in the next two years?" I’ve been saying no for 10 years. All our clients are involved in some degree of implementing, optimizing, or upgrading.

Implementation work has been our bread and butter. We’ve been involved in all phases of that life cycle. From advisory services — where we assist clients with the associated cost and planning around implementing their EHR — to the implementation and build work and eventually the go-live and training.

Over the last two years, we’ve been developing services lines to help our clients prepare for the challenges they face in the coming years. The implementation piece is still there, but clients are looking to the future. They’re thinking and planning how to successfully transition to a value-based care model. They’re thinking about analytics. They’re thinking about Epic Community Connect.

Our focus and our value lies not just with providing key resources to support implementations, but working with and advising clients to proactively prepare for the future — regulatory changes, technology innovations, patient-driven healthcare choices, shrinking margins, and much more.

We’re also strongly focused on managed services. Healthcare organizations have spent an enormous amount of capital on implementing their EHR systems and understandably want to protect the investment. They’re finding, however, that the traditional means of supporting their users and systems are both expensive and ineffective. It’s getting hard for them to justify the large operating budgets being allocated for support. We’ve developed a methodology in this area that’s resonating very well with our clients.

Simply put, we do it better and cheaper. In this new space, we know it’s not good enough to say, “We can do this very well in your place, but it’s going to cost you.” We have a methodology and approach that we know allows us to do it better for less. Our leaders aren’t career consultants, but rather people who have demonstrated success and innovation inside healthcare organizations. They know an effective approach to support goes well beyond having staff who know the mechanics of tweaking the inanimate software system. We’re well aware of the expectations and complexities put upon healthcare IT leaders from inside their organizations. Our managed services method brings relief and credibility to the leaders as much as it provides line staff who do the day-to-day work.

Are you seeing hospitals holding back on implementing new products or services due to uncertainty about the Affordable Care Act?

I’m not. I see the opposite. I’m seeing clients planning for it. They, especially the physicians, are absolutely focused on that. As we transition from a transactional-based model to a financial model more focused around the prolonged well-being of the patient, we’re seeing these CMIOs focus on analytics, evidenced-based care, device integration, home health, and population health. I expect we’ll begin to see healthcare organizations looking to cut costs based on this uncertainty, and when we do, we’ll be here for them.

We recognize that providing services in this space isn’t about working with organizations with unlimited budgets. We understand the cost constraints healthcare organizations are under and our main objective is to stretch the value of their healthcare IT dollar, so they have more resources available for direct patient care efforts. Whether those cost constraints are coming from uncertainty about the future of ACA or something else, the result is the same for us — driving value for our customers.

Are any of them actually doing something with population health management?

The transition to value-base care is top of mind for almost all of our clients, from large health systems to small physician groups. Each of them is in a different phase of evolution in their journey toward patient-centered, accountable care.

We recognized several years ago that population health was going to be the next approach to improving health outcomes for healthcare providers. For us to be able to guide our clients through this period of transformation, we made a strategic decision to broaden and deepen our services in several key areas. Analytics, process improvement, and usable smart technology are some of these areas that we focus on when working with our clients in this space.

We know that healthcare providers must be able to deliver high-quality care with exceptional service at a reduced cost without burning out the providers or staff. Helping them understand their data to produce accurate, timely, and actionable information about the health of their patients, operations, and finances is critical. Next, we know that the workflows of 10 years ago in the ambulatory and acute care settings are not efficient in today’s world. So we focus on Lean methodology to establish new processes that create value for both the providers and the patients.

Finally, we understand that implementing technology that is neither intuitive nor helpful to the client does not create value. So we leverage our knowledge of the EMR and other third-party applications to adapt the technology to enable the efforts around process improvement and the ability to capture useful data. There is a huge focus right now on consumerism and technologies that empower patients to take control of their own healthcare needs. This is really exciting for us as it fits nicely into our service model and will help further value for our clients and their patients.

Are you seeing an interest in exchanging information among competing health systems?

We are. We still see some hesitancy in the marketplace. However, with the M&A activity, the need to find alternative and less-costly EHR options, and the federal regulations geared towards performance-based reimbursement, we’re seeing organizations opening up to options they wouldn’t have considered previously.

Essentially, they know they have to get ahead of this and are implementing the technology to enable it. If the power of a patient’s healthcare is going to be put back into their hands, they will begin to look for different options that best meet their needs. These may be accessing services at different locations, often out of network and often at competing locations. The patient is a smart consumer, so sharing across networks to care for the patient and not manage transactions is key. I think you’re going to see interoperability move forward at a faster pace than we’ve ever seen.

How do you see the balance of power shifting among what is arguably just four significant inpatient EHR vendors?

As a consulting company, we’re vendor neutral. However, we see two large vendors gaining a preponderance of market share. We work primarily with Epic and to a lesser degree Cerner. We support others such as Meditech and Allscripts as well. Then there are all the intermediate, peripheral, third-party vendors associated with the enterprise EHR products. But primarily, those two are the ones rising to the top on a regular basis during vendor selection. It’s no secret that a large part of our consulting staff is subject matter experts in those two areas, including our thought leaders and our line staff.

What we’re seeing outside the US is quite different based on the market. Epic and Cerner are still dominant in commercialized Middle Eastern regions and Europe, but are not yet major players in the Latin-speaking markets. This brings an entirely new set of vendors such as Philips and InterSystems that were built to support Latin speaking markets as a base language.

Is an ecosystem developing around Cerner and Epic where clients are willing to look outside their core solutions, or are those vendors are increasingly promoting those external solutions to their own customers?

Organizations have spent a lot of money on these enterprise systems, so they obviously want to get as much out of them as possible. I think most organizations have a policy of looking to their existing platform for any functionality being pursued before entertaining another vendor as an option. I certainly think these two vendors’ solutions have created a basis for an ecosystem, but there is always room for innovation and exceptions on the periphery.

From an application perspective, I think most healthcare organizations look at their EHR system and their ERP system as their two main hubs. So you have Lawson and PeopleSoft on the ERP side and we do a lot of work in that space as well. But yes, most peripheral applications run through the enterprise systems or as an adjunct to those core platforms. The idea is to drive down costs and increase integration through the use of enterprise platforms.

Are health systems that have developed innovation centers or started an incubator to create rather than simply consume technology seeing success from the time and money they’ve invested?

Absolutely. They’ve seen more end-user engagement because of it. Sometimes innovations are born out of multiple optimization cycles, but we know multiple clients who created their own innovation lab with some of their brightest clinical and technical minds. The end result is to improve the technology they’ve implemented and take the user experience to a higher level.

How has Epic’s Community Connect program touched the small-hospital and the physician practice markets?

It gives those organizations an opportunity to tap into some of the best and most technologically advanced EMRs without all the overhead. It’s a different paradigm. The hospitals themselves turn into the vendor. They have spent months and sometimes years optimizing their own system, so if you’re a recipient, you’re going to be receiving an optimized version of that instance. Epic, for example.

For those that can’t really afford to install their own instance of, say, Epic, or are too small to purchase Epic, this gives them an opportunity partner at a better cost with the hospital. Health systems providing the EMR have already gone through the pains of implementing and optimization. The receiving partner is getting all the lessons learned, documentation, tools, and best practices from the hub health system. Private practicing physicians have all the lab, radiology, and inpatient data at their fingertips allowing for immediate patient care.

As the industry moves from volume- to value-based care, accountable care organizations, and clinical integration, the need for a Community Connect model will continue to be in demand. Sharing information on one platform eliminates the need for interface development and enhances the ability to integrate clinical data.

What’s the demand for vendors hosting their own solutions?

It makes sense. These folks are in the business of providing for patients. With the information technology arm of the hospital requiring more and more investment, I think they view potential outsourcing as a solution to that.

In a particular market, you may have five or six Epic clients that have their own data centers and their own individual staff members devoted to the product. There’s an opportunity to consolidate that. There are opportunities to outsource some of that overhead and reinvest that back into the clinicians, back into the hospital staff.

As we move into the next phase, where margins may be thinner, healthcare providers are looking for ways to cut overhead. Outsourcing is a way to do that. A number our clients are listening to the conversation around managed services, such as a hosted data center or application support.

What was the single most important change you saw in the consulting business last year and what do you think it will be in the next year?

Last year as health systems moved past the large-scale EHR implementations, we saw a noticeable uptick in services involving optimization, data governance and analytics, ERP, managed services, and security. I believe next year we still see massive growth in these same areas, but also a focus on services that help navigate the implications of MIPS and MACRA.

Do you have any final thoughts?

We are excited to be so deeply involved in this industry. Our focus from the beginning has been improving patient care and improving the patient experience. The healthcare industry is exciting because of all the innovation currently underway. Healthcare is growing up at a rapid pace.

The shift from transactions to value-based care will create opportunities for innovation. We’ve seen that in the financial services industry, where instead of going into the bank to check your balance or to move money around, you have an app on your phone. The healthcare industry is moving toward involving the patient in his or her own healthcare in a similar fashion.

We’ve been involved in multiple implementations, but it really hits home when you walk the halls during a go-live. You’ve devoted so much time to bringing this system live and now it’s finally getting turned on. You walk through the NICU and other parts of the hospital and see that patients are at the center. They are the ones affected. Everyone in our company is focused on how to make that experience better.

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Morning Headlines 2/13/17

February 12, 2017 Headlines 1 Comment

Cerner (CERN) Q4 2016 Results – Earnings Call Transcript

In its Q4 earnings call, Cerner President Zane Burke reports bookings were up seven percent, compared to 28 percent growth in 2015, calling the results “solid, particularly when you consider the headwinds created by declines in tech resale.”

Work, Health, And Insurance: A Shifting Landscape For Employers And Workers Alike

A Health Affairs study examines the relationship between work, health, and health insurance given the changing demographic and employment conditions in the US.

Bias in the ER

Michael Lewis, author of “Moneyball” and “The Big Short,” argues in his new book that doctors are just as likely to ignore statistics, often treating a statistically unlikely diagnosis that fits the observable symptoms. He quotes a Canadian trauma center doctor who explains, “You need to be so careful when there is one simple diagnosis that instantly pops into your mind that beautifully explains everything all at once.”

Marathon Pharmaceuticals to Charge $89,000 for Muscular Dystrophy Drug After 70-Fold Increase

Marathon Pharmaceuticals intends to bring a drug used to treat muscular dystrophy to the US for $89,000 per year, while it is available in Europe for just $1,600 per year.

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Monday Morning Update 2/13/17

February 12, 2017 News 6 Comments

Reader Comments

From Radar Love: “Re: tracking HIMSS attendees. You said it was gone from badges, but it’s back in the HIMSS conference app.” The HIMSS17 app from Canada-based Sherpa Solutions boasts geolocation services that allow attendees to find each other and apparently for exhibitors to track them (“leverage this innovative tool to reach the right people and boost their ROI.”) It also invisibly monitors attendees – which booths they visit and how long they spend there – so the conference organizer can “implement new pricing strategies, boost your booth space revenue, and design your most effective floor plan ever.” Seems pretty big-brotherish coming from an organization that runs privacy conferences. The app warns that it tracks location even when it’s not open and eats up your phone’s battery power accordingly. Pass.

From New Girl In Town: “Re: stress levels. I’m new to HIT (January) and feeling overwhelmed. Maybe this wasn’t the right industry for me.” I can assure you from experience that health IT has clearly defined seasons and this is the busiest one. January 2 until the HIMSS conference is an absolute madhouse of strategy-setting, PR, and business moves and everybody gets frazzled. A couple of weeks after the conference ends, everything quiets down by 60 percent, and then the summer doldrums begin in May and last until after Labor Day, when the second season runs until Thanksgiving. It may continue to be overwhelming if you work for a fast-growing or fast-failing vendor, but for most of us, a return to a more normal pace is imminent. The HIMSS conference is like the Super Bowl – it’s all you hear about for weeks before and the week after, but then nothing much happens for months.

From Taped Tie: “Re: the Andy Slavitt interview. It’s unusual that you ran it in two parts, the second on a Friday. The Twitterverse was all over it.” The conversation ran longer than usual, so I split it up to make it less burdensome to read in one sitting. Readership is usually a bit lighter on Fridays as people are traveling home and otherwise wrapping up their work week, but the site got around 6,000 page views that day. More importantly, since I run full interview transcripts and don’t give the interviewee a chance to see my questions in advance or to edit their responses afterward, it’s an unfiltered look into what he’s thinking. Speaking of the interview, here’s a fun behind-the-scenes fact – I had told Andy I would need 30 minutes, and as we were getting close to the bottom of the hour, he graciously alerted me that NPR would be calling at any moment, but he would put them off if I needed more time.

From Nurse Analyst: “Re: Presence Health (IL). Just announced Cheryl Rodenfels as SVP of IT operations after serving as interim since Deceber 5, 2016.” The forwarded internal announcement and her LinkedIn profile say just that.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The folks who aren’t going to the HIMSS conference mostly say it’s because their employer doesn’t pay for their attendance (which suggests they would attend otherwise) or because it’s not useful to their jobs. Other reasons expressed:

“It’s too much of vendor peeing contest.”
“It’s become a boondoggle / network event.”
“Too expensive for value provided to us.”
“Tired of feeling like the duck in the shooting gallery.”
“It’s about creating new business – not.”
“All show and not enough substance.”

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

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Diameter Health. The Farmington, CT-based company’s platform aggregates and normalizes EHR data for use in clinical and analytic applications by health systems, ACOs, HIEs, and health plans. Its Fusion core product scrubs and enhances EHR data using parsing, natural language processing, and proprietary logic to standardize, classify, de-duplicate, and enrich clinical data to create a single, longitudinal patient view that can be exposed via its API. Other products include Analyze (clinical data quality ratings and dashboards); Envision (detects gaps in clinical documentation); and Predict (identifies high-risk patients). The company’s CEO is industry long-timer and biomedical engineer Eric Rosow (Premise, Allscripts). They’ll be at the HIMSS17 Interoperability Showcase, Booth 9000. Thanks to Diameter Health for supporting HIStalk.

I found a brand new explainer video for Diameter Health on YouTube.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Salesforce. Salesforce Health Cloud puts patients at the center of care, giving providers a deep understanding of them (demographics, communications, clinical and non-clinical information, and data from EHRs and wearables) to deliver insightful, personalized care faster. Patients can access and track their health goals and care plans from any device, while providers unlock their EHR data by using it in apps that turn the system of record into a system of engagement. Salesforce Health Cloud is the ultimate patient relationship management platform. The world’s #1 CRM, reimagined for healthcare, costs $300 per user per month (Health Cloud Enterprise) and includes patient health timelines, care team productivity and collaboration, population analytics, patient lists, a patient community, EHR integration, EHR data objects via FHIR integration, and sophisticated security, support, and educational offerings. You can watch an online demo, schedule a HIMSS meeting (or just drop by Booth # 2675), and see Fitz and The Trantrums live Tuesday night of HIMSS week at the company’s party at BB King’s. Thanks to Salesforce for supporting HIStalk.

I found an intro video for Salesforce Health Cloud on YouTube.

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We funded the DonorsChoose teacher grant request of Ms. S in South Carolina, who asked for hands-on science supplies for her sixth grade class. She reports: “I was originally supposed to teach sixth grade math, but we lost a teaching position so I was given a near-empty classroom. We have used the meter sticks in several scientific investigations, we have used the magnets with iron filings to see magnetic fields, and the electric motor / generator kits were a huge success. Their eyes lit up when they actually made the motors work. I will forever be grateful for the opportunity to see how my students worked together to create science.”

Orlando weather looks good, especially for those now buried in snow: the extended forecast says the HIMSS conference will kick off Sunday with 82-degree sunshine. Northeasterners may be shocked to emerge into a world of nearly forgotten colors like green and blue, shown in the live webcam shot of Orlando that I took Saturday afternoon.

Listening: new from One Desire, a new band from Finland whose Flying-V, swirling-synthesizer, harmony-heavy rock sound is reminiscent of Asia, Survivor, or Journey. Fresh nostalgia for fans of 1980s album-oriented rock only. Or, there’s Charly Bliss, which is good once you can get past the helium-sounding vocals that remind me of Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses.

Last Week’s Most Interesting News

A Black Book survey finds that 70 percent of hospitals don’t use any electronic patient information that originates from outside their EHR.
The VA indicates that it will pursue a commercial EHR, with the GAO saying that system should be Cerner since the DoD uses it.
The Department of Defense goes live at its first MHS Genesis EHR site, Fairchild Air Force Base.
The Advisory Board Company is reported to be exploring strategic options following share acquisition by an activist investor.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Internet company J2 Global and its Ziff Davis subsidiary may sell off the less-profitable parts of freshly acquired Everyday Health, which runs sites such as MedPage Today (acquired 2010), KevinMD.com (acquired 2010), MayoClinic.org (partnership signed 2009), and Cambridge BioMarketing (acquired 2015) as well as hospital marketing firm Tea Leaves Health. Publicly traded J2, which also owns PCMag.com, bought the company for $465 million. It admits that Tea Leaves Health, acquired for $30 million in August 2015, may never make money. J2 will also lay off 7 percent of the workforce and combine two offices, but its Medpage sites seem safe.

Decisions

Arkansas Children’s Hospital (AR) will switch from Meditech to Epic in November 2017.
Crawford Memorial Hospital (IL) will go live with a BD Pyxis MedStation automated dispensing cabinet system in April 2017.
Sitka Community Hospital (AK) will go live with an Omnicell automated dispensing cabinet system in 2018.
Scotland County Memorial Hospital (MO) will switch from TouchPoint Medical MedDispense to a BD Pyxis MedStation automated dispensing cabinet system In June 2017.
New London Hospital (NH) will switch from BD Pyxis MedStation to an Omnicell automated dispensing cabinet system in summer 2017.

These provider-reported updates are provided by Definitive Healthcare, which offers powerful intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and healthcare providers.

People

Audacious Inquiry hires Samit Desai, MD (Saint Agnes Healthcare) as chief medical officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Definitive Healthcare adds episode of care data for hospitals and post-acute care facilities, helping users to understand cost variance in high-impact procedures and conditions covered by CMS Bundled Payments for Care Improvement and Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement programs, made possible by the company’s incorporation of ICD-10 claims data a few weeks ago.

Rauland and Versus Technology announce bi-directional integration of their respective nurse call and RTLS systems.

Registration continues through March 6 for the Healthcare IT Marketing and PR Conference in Las Vegas April 5-7. Register with promo code “histalk” to save $300. I agreed to mention the event in return for a free pass that I offered to the first responding reader willing to write what they learned on HIStalk afterward, so look for that report later.

Government and Politics

I missed this from a few weeks back. A CMS review of Medicare Advantage Organization online provider directories finds that 45 percent contain inaccurate provider contact information or incorrectly state that the provider was accepting new patients. CMS was following up on the results of a study of dermatologist plan directory listings in which 46 percent were duplicates and only half of those remaining had correct contact information, accepted the stated insurance, and were willing to schedule a new patient visit. CMS found common problems: medical groups list all their providers at each location regardless whether they actually see patients there; the Medicare Advantage providers don’t validate their provider information thoroughly; and doctors listed as active had often had been retired or dead for years. The studies will continue through a second round.

Other

Marathon Pharmaceuticals, whose CEO’s previous company acquired old drugs cheap and then jacked up their prices, will sell a 1990s drug that costs $1,600 per year in Europe for $89,000 per year for US patients with a rare form of muscular dystrophy. Marketing the drug, which offers modest improvement rather than a cure, also earned the company a free FDA fast-track voucher that it can sell to any bidder, which in the past has profited the holder by up to $350 million. The company’s CEO also founded the Chicago-based healthcare technology incubator MATTER.

An excerpt from a new book from “Moneyball” and “The Big Short” author Michael Lewis says that doctors are no more logical than anyone else when faced with a diagnostic situation – they tend to force observable patient factors into a convincing but possibly wrong diagnosis instead of applying probability theory (note that we’re getting into the issue of whether emotionless artificial intelligence might outperform individual diagnostic judgment, although the article doesn’t mention that). It observes that doctors see what they’re trained to see with undue weighting applied to their own previous cases. It says medicine does not acknowledge uncertainty because doing so also unacceptably acknowledges that doctors make mistakes. Lewis points out that doctors invariably think that a patient’s recovery was due to the treatment they ordered and will more heavily order those same treatments on other patients even though conditions often resolve themselves without treatment. Lewis describes the disconnect between treating an individual patient and treating cohorts of patients:

The safest treatment for any one patient, for instance, might be a course of antibiotics; but the larger society suffers when antibiotics are overprescribed … A doctor who did his job properly really could not just consider the interests of the individual patient; he needed to consider the aggregate of patients with that illness. The issue was even bigger than one of public health policy. Doctors saw the same illness again and again. Treating patients, they weren’t merely making a single bet; they were being asked to make that same bet over and over again … To avoid troubling issues, they were likely to order additional tests … In treating individual patients, doctors often did things they would disapprove of if they were creating a public policy to treat groups of patients with the exact same illness.

A Health Affairs article analyzes the relationship among employment, health, and insurance. Some of its points:

The labor force continues to age because of the Baby Boomer generation and those who are working past 65.
Higher numbers of part-time and contract workers, the increasing “gig economy,” and a decline in union membership have led to a 10 percent reduction in employer-sponsored insurance from 2000 to 2010.
Widespread opiate misuse has increased mortality in middle-aged, less-educated men who were already hit hardest by unemployment.
Higher unemployment has encouraged more people to claim disabilities, with 43 percent of middle-aged, unemployed men reporting having a disability, with many of them taking prescription pain medications every day.
The Affordable Care Act raised the number of insured people, including Medicaid, but did not reduce the extent of employer-sponsored insurance. It created a safety net that mitigated some aspects of the changing labor market.
Employers are trying wellness programs to address costly chronic conditions by rewarding good health behavior, but they won’t necessarily see financial benefit since employees might not stick around as long as it takes for their health to improve. Wellness programs may also raise employee privacy issues, the targeted conditions and financial penalties they incorporate may fall disproportionately on lower-income employees. and some aspects of those programs can run afoul of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

A hospital inpatient is arrested for drug possession after nurses revive him from a narcotic stupor, only to find that “numerous” visitors afterward were bringing him more heroin.

Sponsor Updates

Verscend Technologies’ HEDIS Measure are certified and ready for the 2017 season.

Blog Posts

Remote Patient Monitoring: Industry Barriers, Tech (Validic)
How far can automated claim editors go? Three fast facts you should know (Verscend)
On Your Way to VNA? (Vital Imaging)
The best (and brightest). (Voalte)
The 10 New Rules of the Inbound Contact Center (West Corp.)
The data are in: Health analytics save lives (Conduent Health)

Contacts

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

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HIStalk Interviews Andy Slavitt, Former Acting Administrator, CMS (Part Two)

February 10, 2017 Interviews 4 Comments

Andy Slavitt, MBA was acting administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from March 2015 until January 2017.

This is Part Two of the lengthy interview. Topics in Part One included perceptions of the healthcare system, high healthcare prices, doing a better job of explaining the Affordable Care Act, risk pools, and the individual mandate.

Experts thought high-deductible plans, which is a lot of them these days, would encourage people to become wiser healthcare consumers. Studies suggest that didn’t happen, that instead people who can’t afford to pay the deductible are avoiding getting care.

You’re right and you’re wrong. You’re right in the fact that we don’t have a functioning market that people make rational decisions because they’re paying out of pocket. You’re wrong. though. in how you’re characterizing what insurance looks like and feels like to people.

There are meaningful differences in the number of people today that say they can afford to take their medications — and do take their medications — than before the ACA. There’s meaningful differences in the number of people who report having a regular relationship with a primary care physician than before the ACA. There’s meaningful numbers of people who say they are satisfied and can sleep better at night because of coverage.

Two-thirds of policies have primary care outside of the deductible. About the same number — actually it’s more than that, it’s about 80 percent of policies, last I saw — you can get three primary care visits outside your deductible. About two-thirds have prescription drug coverage outside of the deductible. Lesser numbers, you can see specialists and have name-brand drugs outside of the deductible. Preventive care is free. There’s a whole package of things.

By the way, cost-sharing reductions have meant that up at least until 2016 — I haven’t seen the data for 2017 — the average out-of -pocket costs, i.e. deductible and co-insurance, have declined every year slightly. They’re about flat, but they have actually declined from 2015 to 2016.

There’s this mass media perception driven by, I think, a lot of propaganda which isolates several of the stories. Particularly, again, of the middle-class people that people are paying attention to, but it’s about 2 percent of the population as a whole that’s showing these higher deductibles.

I’m not a believer that higher deductibles make people better shoppers. I do think that the package of things in the ACA — given what you said earlier, which is that we have to work on unit cost and healthcare is still too expensive — is a darned good package for people and really valuable. Because when things happen, they will have the out-of-pocket max and then they have no limit in terms of what’s covered.

It’s a really great deal. Can it be made better? Of course. Of course it can be made better if people really put the spirit to it.

Did we as taxpayers get our money’s worth in funding $35 billion in EHR incentives?

Not yet. Not yet we haven’t.

Here’s what we’ve accomplished — and I’m sure you could agree or disagree and have as much knowledge base if not more than I do on this topic — but there’s now what I call a chicken in every pot. You walk into a doctor’s office, you walk into a hospital, they have technology there. It’s not as connected as it should be, it’s not giving people the information they need. It’s not satisfying the clinicians in general. it’s not increasing their productivity. It’s probably not improving care.

But remember, before the ARRA, we didn’t even have the means to have the technology to hook up. We’re sort of like using computers pre-Internet, wondering why our factories aren’t getting more productive. We’ve got computers and it’s just basically fancy ways of writing down what we used to do in pen and paper.

It has come some of the way. We clearly, though, have productivity breakthroughs, Moore’s Law breakthroughs, and other breakthroughs ahead of us. I don’t think anybody should lose promise in the power of what technology can do and that that investment will eventually pay off.

But if not, we need to be very honest about the barriers. We need to be very honest about what it’s not doing.

I get a little bit sickened every time I go to HIMSS, in some part, because we’ve got this massive industry that puts on a great party and has massive shows, and yet they have a customer base that is basically unsatisfied with the product. That seems like it’s where we should put all our energy.

Are incentives aligned to use technology to improve care?

You’d like to think that’s where it goes next. That’s exactly where it has to go next. If you’re an internal medicine physician seeing patients every day, people should be building things for you to help you do a better job with your patients, and that they feel and that you feel.

I just got back from a trip in Silicon Valley. I visited with some of the country’s and world’s best technology companies, and the way they do things … I mean, complex problems have been solved before. Let me give you an example.

Before TurboTax, you literally had to sit down with the tax manual and a bunch of forms and do a bunch of back and forth, back and forth, and back and forth. It took people weeks to do what you can do in like 20 minutes now. You don’t even have to accumulate your forms — for most people, they’re automatically lined up and populated. If you stacked up the IRS code, it would be over your head by double in terms of the volume of paper. They took all that, they codified it, and they put it some simple yes and no questions and preloaded all the information.

Doing your taxes now is a breeze. In fact, you’re not even focused on getting them submitted. Now you’re focused on, "How do I optimize to get my best refund?" and so on and so forth. That’s a pretty good analogy for the complexity that’s in healthcare systems.

They could have had you fill out the IRS 1040 form on the computer, typing into something that looked like the form. They didn’t. That’s what you have with EMRs. You’re basically going through and filling out a billing record instead of something that is helpful and intuitive to a doctor and a patient.

I don’t think it’s hard, It doesn’t happen for a variety of reasons, of which I’m happy to talk about, but I think that’s exactly what needs to happen.

What does your post-government career look like?

Everybody tells you when you leave the government, you shouldn’t make any decisions for 90 days. You should just take in all the incoming and hear what people have to say. I’ve already kind of violated that, I think, because we’re just in a special moment. I’m going to keep a presence in DC. It won’t be a full-time thing. I’ll announce in the next few weeks where that’ll be.

Essentially, to the extent that I can be helpful as sort of an honest broker, what we really need to do is stop healthcare from being either a Democratic issue or a Republican issue. It wasn’t great for us as Democrats. Republicans are finding it’s not great for them, either. But more importantly, the country, patients, physicians, innovators, and hospitals just will not be able to afford the back and forth and the high-risk, high-stakes nature of this. People resent having their healthcare politicized.

I’m going to do something. It will be in a more pragmatic fashion. I’ve been really doing that on the road, talking to CEOs, talking to governors, talking to people on the Hill, anybody who needs help and is working on an honest path towards a solution.

Other than that, I’m free, so I’m spending more time with my family and I’m letting the phone ring. People want to talk to me about something and it seems interesting, I’ll talk to them and see where I can be helpful. A lot of people are trying to figure out what to do next, so it’s a nice thing to be able to do to be able to help your friends when they need help. I’m in no rush to tie myself up for the next long-term thing as long as I can be helpful doing what I’m doing. I’m speaking and I’m writing and I’m convening sessions and so forth.

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Morning Headlines 2/10/17

February 9, 2017 Headlines 1 Comment

Judge, Citing Harm to Customers, Blocks $48 Billion Anthem-Cigna Merger

A federal judge blocks the proposed $48 billion merger between Anthem and Cigna. The decision comes just two weeks after another federal judge blocked a similar merger between Aetna and Humana.

Black Book Survey Finds Top Rated Hospital EHR Vendors are also 2017’s FHIR and Interoperability Champions

A Black Book survey on interoperability finds that 70 percent of hospitals are not using any patient information generated outside of their EHR.

Nurse spared jail over fatal blood transfusion blunder

A nurse in England is spared jail time after transfusing a patient with blood of the wrong blood type, ultimately causing his death. The nurse opened the wrong chart in the hospital’s EHR to verify the patient’s blood type, explaining that both patients had the same last name and it was not clear to her that she was in the wrong chart.

Baidu shuts mobile health care unit to focus on artificial intelligence

Chinese search engine Baidu shuts down its mobile health business unit to focus on its AI-powered healthcare research unit.

1 Comment

News 2/10/17

February 9, 2017 News 2 Comments

Top News

VA Acting Assistant Secretary/CIO Rob Thomas tells the House Veterans Committee that he is confident that the VA will replace VistA with a commercial system.

GAO Director of Management Issues Dave Powner added, “VA needs to let go of VistA and go with a commercial solution. We see no justification for VA and DoD pursuing separate systems.”

Thomas said the VA has remedied its previous lack of a coherent strategy, but Powner says a series of revolving door CIOs has caused too much strategic pondering without much to show for it.

HIStalkapalooza Sponsor Profiles

Lucro is a digital platform helping healthcare organizations make better purchasing decisions. Created with input from innovators at the nation’s leading health systems and a deep understanding of the healthcare buying cycle, Lucro exists to support providers by giving them the tools to evaluate and choose their best vendor partners. Accelerate your decisions with Lucro. Visit www.lucro.com.

Hedgeye Risk Management is an independent investment research and online financial media company. Focused exclusively on generating and delivering thoughtful investment ideas in a proven buy-side process, the firm combines quantitative, bottom-up and macro analysis with an emphasis on timing. The Hedgeye team features some of the most highly-regarded research analysts on Wall Street, all with buy-side experience, covering Macro, Financials, Energy, Healthcare, Retail, Gaming, Lodging & Leisure (GLL), Restaurants, Industrials, Consumer Staples, Internet & Media, Housing, Materials, Technology, Demography and Washington policy analysis. For more information please visit www.hedgeye.com.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Casenet. The Bedford, MA-based company offers the TruCare enterprise care management solution to improve care coordination, offering a single, member-centric, interoperable platform for utilization, case, disease, and population health management. Its customer base includes health plans, TPAs, and states that manage their own Medicaid programs. Benefits include improved outcomes, reduced cost, enhanced care management team productivity, and increased satisfaction. Thanks to Casenet for supporting HIStalk.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Solutionreach. The Lehi, UT-based company offers patient relationship management tools. Solutions include SR Conversations (incoming text message management), Limelight Self-Scheduling, appointment reminders, appointment wait list management, a check-in tablet, a patient portal, patient payments, patient surveys, electronic newsletters and email marketing, patient reviews and referrals, online reviews with Healthgrades integration, video testimonials, integrated social media, patient geographic mapping, and a mobile app that allows patients to manage appointments, submit payments, and send secure messages. Sign up for a demo and get a $50 Amazon gift card and download the “No-Shows No More” white paper. Thanks to Solutionreach for supporting HIStalk.

I found this just-published Solutionreach video describing how the company’s technology helps a dental clinic fill gaps in its schedule by text messaging patients.

We funded the DonorsChoose grant request of Ms. M in Arkansas, who asked for economics books and games for her elementary school classes. She reports, “The excitement that my students express when we have a day filled with economics games and experiences is hard to explain. I am so blessed with students who love to learn; however, challenged with the responsibility to continue to find innovative ways to reach each of them. Your donation provided my students with games such as Ticket to Ride and The Game of Life. These games simulate the economics present in our lives.”

One final HIStalkapalooza reminder before we stop talking about it and actually do it: those who received an email invitation must click the enclosed link to complete their registration. You otherwise won’t be on our check-in list, meaning you’ll be sulking around dejectedly at the neighboring Bongo’s Cuban Cafe while more attentive link-clickers are carousing without you inside the House of Blues. At least you’ll be warm even with our cold shoulder in that case – the extended weather forecast for Orlando looks like mid-70s for the high each day.

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Well, this is a confidence-inspiring vendor email.

This week on HIStalk Practice: InnovaTel Telepsychiatry raises $2 million. Community Care of North Carolina launches digital doc-sharing program with pharmacists. Innovaccer, Modernizing Medicine add MIPS reporting tools. Illuma Care Connections launches with HIE-like capabilities for eye care providers. Fauquier Free Clinic adds telepsychiatry services. Mission Treatment and Recovery adopts Telehealthcare’s messaging tech. The Consultant’s Corner focuses on healthcare reform’s impact on revenue cycle integration.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Cerner reports Q4 results: revenue up 7 percent, adjusted EPS $0.61 vs. $0.61, meeting analyst expectations for both.

A federal judge blocks the proposed $48 billion merger of insurers Anthem and Cigna, citing anticompetitive concerns. Anthem, which will owe Cigna $1.8 billion if the deal falls through, says it will appeal.

Phynd Technologies announces that it has received an unspecified new investment by the venture fund of UNC Rex Healthcare (NC).

Doctor review site CareDash raises $2 million in venture debt financing and a line of credit. The company says it differs from other doctor review sites because it doesn’t accept money to remove negative reviews and it focuses on lower-income consumers. CareDash has raised $500,000 in equity funding and says it generated $6.7 million in revenue in 2016, although it doesn’t say how it makes money. I looked up a few doctors and the tiny number of reviews make the site’s usefulness questionable compared to Healthgrades or other doctor search sites.

Nashville-based healthcare blockchain vendor consortium Hashed Health raises $2 million in an initial funding round led by Martin Ventures.

Israel-based Intensix, which offers a real-time predictive analytics solution that detects ICU patient deterioration, raises $8.3 million in a Series A funding round.

China-focused search engine provider Baidu shuts down its mobile healthcare business to focus on AI-enabled healthcare research. The two-year-old unit focused on online hospital appointment scheduling and an ask-a-doctor service. Baidu’s AI arm will add a service where experts answer medical questions online as well as a diagnostic chatbot. The company says it wants to move upstream from low-tech healthcare offerings into AI-powered genomic and drug research. The Chinese government restricted the company’s healthcare advertising last year following the death of a student who sought questionable treatment based on Baidu’s paid search results of a company that was operating from inside a hospital, but only as a paying tenant.

Sales

San Juan Medical Center (NM) chooses Cerner’s clinical, financial, and population health management systems.

People

Welltok hires Rob Scavo (TriZetto) as president/COO.

Alex Ginzburg (Intervention Insights) joins Casenet as CIO.

Avaap hires Craig Joseph, MD (El Camino Hospital) as chief medical officer.

Announcements and Implementations

HIMSS announces its 2016 Book of the Year as “Health Information Exchange: Navigating and Managing a Network of Health Information Systems,” edited by Brian Dixon, PhD of Indiana University.

The Society for Participatory Medicine will create a research library at Weill Cornell Medicine (NY) to identify key literature references related to participatory health interventions, best practices for patient participation, and benefits.

Netsmart will use the InterSystems data and analytics platform to expand the capabilities of its MyAvatar CareRecord behavioral and post-acute care EHR.

Government and Politics

The Department of Defense goes live at its first Cerner-powered MHS Genesis EHR site at Fairchild Air Force Base (WA), adding that it will provide more information about the implementation to the public next week.

Privacy and Security

The National Hockey League, defending itself against a class action lawsuit related to player head injuries, demands research information from Boston University that includes the identities and medical records of deceased athletes who donated their brains for research. The university’s studies of the brains of 96 former National Football League players found that 92 showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, as did those of all five professional hockey players it has reviewed. The NHL argues that the link is inconclusive even though the NFL has acknowledged the problem among football players.

The owner of a Milwaukee,WI-based educational publishing company sues pharmacy benefits manager EnvisionRXOptions, saying he keeps getting patient faxes intended for the PBM even though their fax numbers are not at all similar. The publishing company owner says the PBM is negligent (but doesn’t explain how since they aren’t the ones sending the faxes) and argues that receiving PHI-containing faxes makes him liable for HIPAA violations (which clearly is not the case since he’s not a covered entity or business associate). The publisher seeks more than $500,000. He had previously offered to sell his fax number to the PBM, but no deal was reached.

Other

Results from a new Black Book EHR user survey show that interoperability is falling short for most providers:

70 percent of hospitals aren’t using any information from outside their own EHR
22 percent of medical records administrators say they can’t obtain external information in a useful format
21 percent of hospital-based doctors don’t trust information sent from outside
More than three-fourths of independent practices don’t think their technologies can support value-based payments
Two-thirds of independent practices are considering merging with a health system because of technology and reimbursement issues
81 percent of doctors expect their EHR vendor to enable the interoperability they will need to support population health management, precision medicine, and value-based payments

In England, a nurse whose mistake killed a heart bypass patient is spared jail time. She pulled the wrong blood type from a dispensing cabinet, checked it against the wrong computer records, then tried to blame a co-worker after the patient died. She claimed that the information of two patients with the same last name were not displayed correctly on the computer screen.

An Austin, TX lawyer says that public records show that the University of Texas Dell Medical School gets 84 percent of its faculty compensation from taxpayer-funded Central Health, taking $105 million so far from funds that he says should instead be spent on providing services to low-income residents.

Sponsor Updates

Sagacious Consultants employees pack 1,400 pounds of food to help prepare 20,000 meals at the Atlanta Community Food Bank.
AdvancedMD opens registration for its Evo17 user conference that will be held in Nashville September 20-24.
HCS redesigns its website.
Sara Miller joins Audacious Inquiry as senior director.
Diameter Health posts a new video titled “Taming Clinical Data Across the Care Continuum.”
Optimum Healthcare IT hires Toni Tribble Jarrett as executive director for advisory services.
Gartner includes Logicworks in its “Market Guide for Cloud Service Providers to Healthcare.”
MedData will exhibit at the American Physical Therapy Association Combined Sections Meeting February 15-18 in San Antonio.
Medicomp Systems will host its customer conference April 24-28 in Reston, VA
Navicure will exhibit at the 2017 Healthpac Annual Users Meeting February 10-12 in Savannah, GA.
Experian Health will exhibit at HFMA North Dakota February 16-17 in Minot, ND.
PeriGen will exhibit at the AWHONN California Section Conference February 17-18 in Berkeley.
Point-of-Care Partners releases a new video, “EHR Trends: Integrated PDMPs. Key to Combating Opioid Abuse.”
Think Bigger Business Magazine names Sphere3 a 2017 “25 Under 25 Award” winner.

Blog Posts

Are you ready to get more clarity at HIMSS17? (Medicity)
Community Connect success defined: on time/under budget (Nordic)
Provider Communications in the Murky Middle (Spok)
MModal Fluency Direct Awarded #1 out of 4 in KLAS Ranking for Speech Recognition, Front-End EMR (MModal)
A Virtualized Healthcare Environment: The keys to improving Metro Health: University of Michigan Health’s clinical and patient experience (Imprivata)
Increase Hospital Revenue with Qualified Leads (Influence Health)
Predictive Analytics in Healthcare: Fact, Fiction or Future? (Liaison Technologies)
Are your patient payment processes “a serious problem” or a “game changer?” (Navicure)
The Technologies That Are Changing Healthcare (Orion Health)
Notemares (PatientKeeper)
Enterprise Imaging: Supporting today’s health IT demands (Lexmark)
Patient Generated Health Data: Taking Steps Toward Better Health Care (PMD)
A Virtual Goldmine: Why Criminals Target Patient Data (Part 1) (Protenus)
A Good Reason to be in Cleveland in the Winter (Summit Healthcare)
A Lack of Electronic Data Exchange Capabilities Makes Caregiving “Dizzying” (Surescripts)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Lt. Dan.
More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.
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Contact us.

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HIStalk Interviews Andy Slavitt, Former Acting Administrator, CMS

February 9, 2017 Interviews 4 Comments

Andy Slavitt, MBA was acting administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from March 2015 until January 2017.

This is Part One of the lengthy interview. Topics in Part Two include whether high-deductible plans encourage wise consumer choices, the value delivered by the HITECH EHR incentive program, whether incentives are aligned for EHRs to improve patient outcomes and the provider experience, and Slavitt’s future plans.

Everybody has their own perceptions and beliefs about the US healthcare system and how it should change. How much of that is driven by personal experience that can vary widely based on income, health status, and location?

That’s a great question to start with. People would always come at us at CMS with whatever their point of view is. My warning to the staff — because you get pretty cynical because people always are representing some interest, whether it’s money, some industry group, etc. — is that everybody is right, to some extent.

If you say that there’s too much burden in healthcare, you’re right. If you say that there is too much fraud in healthcare, you’re right. If you say that we don’t measure enough, you’re in part right. If you say we measure too much, you’re right.

Then you add to that the fact that the healthcare industry isn’t really capable of changing at any great pace — and certainly not en masse at scale — and you end up having to always balance a lot of perspectives. Sometimes just moving forward in any direction, as long as it’s somewhat positive, is better than doing too much overthinking. Getting to understand what actually engages people. If they’re engaged by technology, if they’re engaged by measurement, if they’re engaged by simplicity, getting them to make progress along those fronts is going to just move things in the right direction.

Healthcare arguments always boil down to access and cost. Studies have suggested that we have a problem with high prices, not high utilization, and prices were not addressed by ACA. Will pricing pressure be applied to the health systems and drug and device companies that have benefited from having more insured patients?

Unit costs are the primary factor. You are right — it’s one we don’t talk enough about. We’re not talking as a country about prescription drug costs for a couple of reasons, and I think maybe there’s lessons in here. It has hit people extraordinarily hard. People depend on their medications and so many people are past the point of being able to afford them. Then there’s just been some really egregious examples.

I think in healthcare, for there to be a change in attention, yes, you need data, but you need stories. I think the EpiPen became a story everybody could relate to. The $50 aspirin in the hospital became a story that people could relate to.

If you talk to a serious hospital CEO or a serious pharmaceutical company CEO, they will tell you that they need to work on their unit cost and their pricing. Most serious hospital CEOs – of big IDNs, I’m not talking about serious community hospitals, I’m talking about ones with scale — have some sense that they need to reduce their cost structure by 10 to 20 percent and are working on it.

Likewise, not exactly parallel, but in the pharma industry, you have many of the big pharma CEOs who understand that around the world, there is some gating factor on prices and that they have to figure out how to strike that balance.

We can afford to get people access to care before we completely tackle unit prices. I don’t think you would wait, but I think you can use the force of more consumers and more volume. That’s what we’ve been trying to do to get people to take these issues on. They’re very serious issues and there’s plenty of resistance.

Does it sting a little bit when people blame the Affordable Care Act for higher premiums and deductibles when they might have increased anyway?

Boy, I tell you what, if I felt stung by every little criticism, I would be in the wrong place. At this point, I’m pretty calloused to that.

Let me start this way. We clearly could do a better job of explaining to people why the ACA matters to them, what the ACA is intended to do, what it means to people, and why it matters in their lives.

Seniors love the fact that their donut holes closed, but they don’t necessarily know it was because of the ACA. People who are employed love the fact that there’s no longer lifetime caps or limits on their policies, but they may not know that it’s because of the ACA. Many young people with pre-existing conditions don’t even remember a time when pre-existing conditions weren’t protected. Then of course you’ve got the millions of people who’ve gotten new coverage. They may know, but they’re not a politically powerful force.

On the one hand, I’d say that story needs to be told better, and I think people are starting to understand those things now. The other side of it is there needs to be an understanding that a law, just like a business strategy, is the first step in a process. It’s not supposed to be the end point. It’s supposed to be the first step.

The ACA was supposed to be a launching point towards improving all sorts of things in our healthcare system. When you go through eight years, where there’s not just active resistance but an active attempt to tear down the law, to strip out funds — billions of dollars were taken out by Congress that were intended to stabilize rates and so forth – lawsuits, etc., you realize it’s harder to make progress.

As a country, we need to move past the place where one party owns health reform or the other party owns health reform. It’s just not the right kind of environment. It’s not so easy. The people now who are putting together plans, people that complained about high deductibles, you look at the replacement plans, what do they have? High deductibles. There are no silver bullets here.

President Obama told me once early on that once we pass the ACA, we tacitly agreed in everybody’s mind that everything that happens in the healthcare system from here on will be our fault. We own it. We just have to understand that there’s now a tactical place to point your concerns. Literally, if your doctor closes his office two hours early, people would write President Obama to tell him it was because of the ACA. That’s what they were led to believe.

The people insured by the ACA are a decentralized population, many of them receiving subsidies, without a lot of economic clout. However, many of the millions of people who obtained insurance via the exchange may have the financial means but don’t have an alternative because insurers don’t otherwise sell individual policies. Are the people who are ACA-insured mischaracterized as a group or are they not a cohesive enough group to convey the message that there is no alternative for them if exchange-sold insurance goes away?

President Obama has said, and I agree with him, that the ACA was a massive policy success and a political failure. If you were going to try to make this a political success, you would have focused on marginal improvements for middle and upper middle class people.

I’ve been in healthcare for decades and a sad reality is that I could do the most brilliant thing in Medicaid policy or the most awful thing in Medicaid policy and it wouldn’t even make the newspaper. But if I did something that affects some fitness craze, it’s going to get massively covered, because people care a lot more about the programs that they can relate to. People just don’t want to read about what happens with people who have less than them.

What’s interesting– and I think this has happened since the election — is the 27 percent of Americans who have pre-existing conditions and are speaking in a more unified, loud voice. I think you’re seeing now today in Congressional town halls, in social media, and in all other kinds of events and places that people are speaking out and saying, I wouldn’t be here today, I wouldn’t have been able to have left my job and started this company today, I wouldn’t have the economic freedom today, if it wasn’t for the ACA.

There’s no pride of authorship for me, whether it’s the ACA or how it continues to evolve. It’s supposed to evolve. But the reality is that group of people is saying, if we go backwards as some are hoping or proposing, here are the consequences. I believe that’s starting to get heard over the last 60 days or so.

Insurance companies struggle to cover costs incurred by a self-selecting risk pool in which young and healthy people don’t sign up and the insurers get stuck paying for older, sicker people. How can that be fixed?

It’s a feature, not a bug. We should step back and think about this. We have never as a country, until six years ago, said to people, we will make sure you can get coverage. It doesn’t matter your financial needs. Doesn’t matter your health status. We will make sure you get access to protection. We’ve never done that. In the history of our country, we’ve never done that. A lot of countries around the world do that. We never have.

We decided to. It’s a big thing. It’s a big change. It’s a hard thing. No one should have been expected to know how many people that would be, how sick people would be.That’s why we created a rate stabilization fund that the Republicans de-funded, because no one could be sure.

The point of it all was to say, we will learn over the first few years what that costs and how to price it. In the mean time, we will get the data, we will study it, and we will look. If it turns out to be more expensive than we thought originally, we can look at that. If it turns out to be less expensive, we can look at that. We can see what kind of adjustments are needed. There are a series of adjustments that I think would help make healthcare much more affordable for that very small group of individuals that are saying “higher rates."

By the way, it’s about 2 percent. So when people talk about the rate increases and the talk about the pool and they talk about all these things, we’re talking about 2 percent of the population. We’re talking about only people in the individual market and only people that don’t receive a subsidy. Maybe 2-4 percent, not to try to be too precise, but it’s a very, very small percentage of the population.

That small percentage is dealing with rates that have grown a little bit higher because, as you say, the risk pool is a little bit sicker. There are things we can do, and if Congress or the states are willing to do those things, they’re pretty incremental. There’s no question it would work because it’s just math. It’s not anything complicated.

The individual mandate is always a question, where young invincibles or people who don’t want to pay premiums and deductibles decide not to buy coverage knowing they won’t be denied care in a real emergency. How do you address the issue of people who are willing to gamble that they won’t need health insurance?

I’s a question of health literacy. You don’t need anything until you need it. We live in a bit of an on-demand society. That’s OK in many arenas. But until you have a kid with autism, you never thought in a million years you’d need mental health services. Until you are a 30-something year old woman who gets diagnosed with breast cancer, you never really thought that was possible.

It’s one of those things that isn’t too useful to rail against it too hard. It is a mindset. Would making insurance a little more affordable or a little more flexible help? Probably, on the margin. But I don’t think you change the fundamental truth that when you’re 25, a little extra pizza and beer money is a little bit more important to you than paying an insurance premium. That’s always a reality.

That’s why you sometimes need policy. The purpose of government policy, not just health policy, is to help make laws for the collective good that aren’t necessarily good for any one particular individual. If you try to make a law that creates the flexibility that every single person gets exactly what they want, then you’re really not supporting the society as much as you need to.

Part Two of the interview will follow.

4 Comments

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 2/9/17

February 9, 2017 Dr. Jayne No Comments

Several readers asked whether I saw this article about Obamacare vs. the Affordable Care Act, so I feel compelled to respond. I don’t know about the exact statistics, but we’re having lots of conversations with patients in the office about their coverage and their concerns about what will be changing. Usually it’s in the context of their being grateful for our transparent pricing and low costs, but a lot of people are genuinely worried about pre-existing conditions and whether their insurance will still cover preventive services.

When patients complain about rising premiums or changes to insurance plan offerings, I typically mention that while the laws regulate doctors and hospitals, there hasn’t been much done in the way of insurance regulation. Whether or not you think enormous bonuses for insurance company CEOs are warranted, the sheer economics dictate that the money has to come from somewhere.

On the payer front, Centene’s recent report showed quarterly revenue and profit ahead of expectations, helped by growth in the individual coverage market and by Medicaid expansion. Net earnings for Centene were $261 million for the fourth quarter of 2016. Based on 11.4 million patients covered, it’s a small margin, but when you couple it with the administrative costs of running a health plan, it represents a tremendous amount of premium and tax dollars that are not being spent on patient care.

I’ve been inundated by requests from HIMSS for their corporate member focus groups. Some of the sessions are pretty drab sounding and others don’t work with my schedule, so I probably won’t make it to any this year. I was a little aggravated, though, that they can’t figure out how to blind copy the invitation – seems like a basic email skill.

Some of the sessions are vendor-specific and it’s obvious who you will be talking to or about, but others are a bit more vague. I was tempted by one that advertised discussion of precision medicine solutions, but I figured it would just irritate me. As a preventive and public health curmudgeon, I have a hard time talking about spending millions of dollars on focused gene-based therapy when we can’t fund the basics of health promotion and disease prevention.

I attended a service launch webinar for another consulting company this week. They’re not in the same space as me, but they’re a fun bunch of people, so I wanted to see what they’re up to. They’ve partnered with a third-party vendor for the tool, although they didn’t say it. If it’s not totally white labeled, I think it’s better to say you’re at least “powered by X vendor” rather than having prospects or vendors see “copyright X vendor” at the bottom of the screen and wonder what’s going on. The presenter also seemed nervous. Even if you’re a presentation pro, I’d definitely recommend a dry run when you’re launching something new or presenting in a new format.

For weird news fans: I stumbled across an article about a patient who lived for six days without lungs. She had been waiting for a transplant but developed influenza and sepsis along with organ therapy. After concluding that death was likely imminent unless there was intervention, physicians removed the source of infection – her lungs. She was placed on an external oxygenation device (Novalung) with rapid improvement and received donor lungs several days later. Four months later, she’s breathing normally on room air, although she does still have to have dialysis following kidney failure. Hearing about physicians pushing the boundaries and having success reminds me of the excitement of medical school, when it seemed like our faculty was making history on a weekly basis.

CMS has extended the submission deadline for 2016 clinical quality measure reporting required by eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals participating in the Medicare EHR Incentive Program or the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting program. Electronic clinical quality measures are now due March 13 rather than February 28. For 2017 reporting, CMS plans to start a rule-making process looking at modifications to the final rule. It’s always fun to wait for the rules to be finalized after you’re already playing the game.

The AMIA Mentor Match program is looking for informaticists willing to spend an hour a month for the next 11 months working with mentees. I’m thinking about signing up, but struggle with how to describe my experience and areas of expertise. Somehow I don’t think “Sassy former CMIO turned consultant seeks idealistic mentee to remind me how idealistic I used to be, before corporate healthcare and chaotic vendors drove me over the edge” is what they’re looking for. Some days I wish I had a mentor of my own to give me perspective on the bizarre work situations in which I often find myself.

I’m spending some extended time in the patient care trenches due to a colleague’s medical leave. We’ve started seeing some EHR performance issues during the times of peak patient volume. It’s bad enough when you’re overwhelmed with patients, but having your system fail you makes it intolerable. At times, the system is at a crawl.

I was spoiled when I was a CMIO because our EHR vendor had a SWAT team they would send out for issues like this. Even if you had strong resources in house, you could leverage the team to review performance and monitoring tools and make recommendations. My current vendor is on the smaller side and not terribly helpful when it comes to helping us manage the issues.

We use a third party to manage desktop and wireless solutions, so as you can imagine, there is a bit of finger-pointing between the access crowd and the application support folks. It always unnerves the IT team when you have a physician who starts asking about latency and Citrix load balancing, but I’m happy to give everyone a nudge to stop the blame game and get about the business of finding solutions.

The HIMSS mailings have started rolling in. Every year it seems like the marketing themes and giveaways get a little goofier. Physicians have long been scrutinized for regarding gifts from industry, but there’s no reporting for the majority of healthcare IT professionals. I hope the Open Payments system has fields available for tracking giveaways such as virtual reality goggles, scooters, art pieces, and more.

What’s the best trade show giveaway you’ve ever seen? Email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

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Morning Headlines 2/9/17

February 8, 2017 Headlines No Comments

VA ‘confident we’re going to commercial’ for EHR, scheduling fixes

During a House Committee on Veterans Affairs hearing Tuesday, Acting VA CIO Robert Thomas reported that he was confident the agency would eventually migrate to an off-the-shelf EHR system.

DOD plugs in new electronic health record system

DoD goes live with its first Cerner site at Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington.

Data breach at Verity Health could have affected 10,000 patients

Verity Health reports that the website of one of its hospitals was hacked between October 2015 and January 2017, potentially exposing the records of 10,000 patients.

Fitbit Faces Criminal Probe Into Jawbone Trade Secret Theft

Jawbone’s ongoing lawsuit against rival Fitbit intensifies as new court filings suggest that Fitbit is also under a criminal investigation for trade secret theft.

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HIStalk Interviews Tom White, CEO, Phynd

February 8, 2017 Interviews No Comments

Thomas White is co-founder and CEO of Phynd Technologies of Kearney, NE.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

Phynd is the third company I’ve co-founded. Two of those were in healthcare IT and one in the 1990s was in Internet real-time news search. All of the businesses that we’ve started have been focused on new categories of software that simplify and improve search, profiling, and content. The second addressed diagnostic results. Now it’s provider data for this third company.

We see an intersection of provider data being important. Historically, there have been patient systems, EMR systems, payer systems, and rev cycle systems. But there’s really never been a provider data system. We see the elevated issue of provider data being an opportunity in the marketplace.

What problems do health systems have with provider management?

Hospitals have 10, 15, or maybe 20 IT systems that silo provider data. Each system has a specific function, whether it’s radiology, lab, EMR, or credentialing. Each has a specific core function with a provider database embedded inside.

Our clients tell us they have a hard time harvesting the data across all those systems and managing the data. There’s good data in all of those core systems that impacts clinical outcomes, rev cycle, and marketing. It is buried in these systems. Our clients have problems exposing the provider data into one platform where it can be curated and managed by the organization versus being buried in these silos.

What benefits do they expect from implementing a provider management system?

On the business side, inaccurate provider data creates a significant delay in the billing cycle. The reality of healthcare is that providers from all over the country are in the databases of hospitals. A hospital in New York is going to have referring physicians from Dallas, Los Angeles, and Chicago. When they discharge the patient and invoice for that claim, they need accurate provider data to process the bill. If they don’t, it will get kicked back. We’ve seen a delay of a month to two months for up to 10 to 20 percent of our clients’ invoices because of inaccurate provider data.

On the clinical side, as hospitals have grown their physical footprint, they have added clinics in the field. They have large referring bases. They’ve created clinically integrated networks. As they have to communicate more and more — whether it’s by fax, phone, or Direct address – maintaining the data elements on the providers in the field has become difficult. We impact the clinical care process from the communications side by having accurate, good information that is curated by the client themselves.

Is it harder for hospitals to track their provider relationships under new care delivery models?

A hospital has to track 10 to 15 times as many providers as they have credentialed. If they have 1,000 providers, they’re going to need to manage 10,000 to 15,000 referring providers.

As they shift into clinically integrated networks, ACOs, narrow health networks, and narrow health plans, the provider base is going to shift. It’s not just their historical credentialed base. It’s everyone within a certain geography or target market segment they’re going after. They need to know who is in the clinically integrated network and then the specific data around their referral patterns, communication preferences, and rev cycle information.

Does having that self-curated information accessible enterprise-wide provide a competitive advantage?

It does. The end user can look at our client’s data through their native systems, whether it’s their EMR, credentialing, radiology, lab, cardiology, or pathology systems or into their marketing platform. Also being able to expose that data on internal and external websites for provider search. Then using the UI to curate and manage the data. It’s available wherever the end user is. We think that’s a competitive advantage.

Are hospitals getting more interested in marketing the physicians that work with them via provider search?

Yes. Our philosophy is that you have to get the provider data right first. That’s the core Phynd platform. Once you have the provider data in a format that’s accurate, then you can expose that data across multiple systems, such as provider search.

Provider search matters because it helps with referral patterns. It helps with customer satisfaction. But it also grows the top line. It’s good for healthcare organizations to provide the best search algorithm environment for consumers to find the right doctor the first time.

Are physicians finding that the marketing clout of their local health system benefits their practices, such as in a hospital website’s provider search function?

Yes. The world of search is a complicated world. How healthcare organizations are creating large franchises on the web is important. That drives traffic into their clinically integrated network providers, people in their ACO, and the different organizations that they’ve created.

What business advice would you offer someone thinking about starting a company?

The first thing is that startups are really hard. In general, they’re very difficult to go do, from concept all the way to customer acquisition. They require a lot of patience and a long-term view of solving the core problem that you’re going after. That’s the first bit of advice.

The second bit is that building happy customers is a long-term approach that requires an all-in mentality. To be at the customer site, to see how they use the product, to hear the conversations they’re having with their peers. Then to communicate with them routinely thereafter. It’s about being a part of the customer conversation long term.

You need the idea to start the business, but the reality is that you pivot. Part of being a startup is you’re pivoting based on conversations you have with your clients. Finding clients that are willing to work with you and to pay you is the hardest part. Once you get those folks, you can pivot the product ideas around what their needs are.

You need the core, basic idea. Ours is that we want to simplify provider data management across the healthcare industry. How we do that is dependent on a number of factors, including our partners, our customers, and then our long-term vision as well.

Where do you see the company in the next five years?

Healthcare organizations are going through significant change. They’re driven by the opportunities to attract new patients across new locations. Their physical footprint is growing. They’re building alliances and clinically integrated networks. They’re participating in narrow health plans.

We see Phynd as a gathering point of provider data that can be used to improve clinical communications, revenue operations, provider, consumer, and web touch points across all these really big businesses that are being formed right now across healthcare. We see ourselves growing with that marketplace.

I’m not sure where the healthcare organization ends. Is it payers? Is it vendors? We’re focused on the hospital space right now. Long term, healthcare is the biggest industry in the country. We see ourselves growing with it.

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Morning Headlines 2/8/17

February 7, 2017 Headlines No Comments

Multifunctional, inexpensive, and reusable nanoparticle-printed biochip for cell manipulation and diagnosis

An NIH-funded research project yields a reusable lab-on-a-chip that can be printed with a standard inkjet printer and costs just $0.01 to produce. The chip “can perform complex, minimally invasive analyses of single cells without specialized equipment and personnel.”

FDB and Translational Software Announce Collaboration to Deliver Pharmacogenomic Drug Knowledge

First Databank will incorporate pharmacogenomic data from Translational Software, Inc. into its drug formulary so that genetics data can be integrated into clinical decision support systems powered by First Databank.

Is Your Doctor Listening?

Danielle Ofri, MD, provider at Bellevue Hospital (NY), author of several books, and regular op-ed contributor to the New York Times publishes a piece for Slate describing an incident in which she lost a note she had written about a patient because she accidently closed the chart without saving it.

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