Monday Morning Update 2/13/17

Top News

From the Cerner earnings call, following its release of Q4 results that met analyst expectations but sent shares down 4.4 percent Friday:

• Full-year bookings revenue was basically unchanged vs. “a very tough comparable” of 2015, while revenue grew 8 percent.
• President Zane Burke says that “2016 was disappointing from an ITWorks perspective,” referring to the company’s IT management services.
• Population health revenue grew 13 percent in 2016.
• Non-US revenue grew 6 percent on the year vs. 9 percent growth in domestic revenue.
• The company touted its Value Creation Office that will work with clients in a joint governance model to make organizational improvements, with Cerner going at risk to earn a share of the financial outcome.
• The migration of former Siemens Health Services clients is about halfway through, with a Cerner win rate of 80 percent.

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.

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.

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

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.

Morning Headlines 2/10/17

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.

News 2/10/17

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.

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

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.
Get HIStalk updates. Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

HIStalk Interviews Andy Slavitt, Former Acting Administrator, CMS

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.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 2/9/17

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.

Morning Headlines 2/9/17

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.

HIStalk Interviews Tom White, CEO, Phynd

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.

Morning Headlines 2/8/17

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.

News 2/8/17

Top News

A National Academy of Sciences article describes a reusable, inkjet-printable lab-on-a-chip for point-of-care diagnostics that costs just $0.01.

Heading the NIH-funded project is Stanford Genome Technology Center’s Rahim Esfandyarpour, PhD, an engineering associate who says inexpensive diagnostics could improve low survival rates in developing countries of conditions such as breast cancer, malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV.

Esfandyarpour summarizes, “Maybe $1 in the US doesn’t count that much, but somewhere in the developing world, it’s a lot of money.”

Reader Comments

From Guacamole Greg: “Re: EHR. This doctor’s article says she inadvertently closed the wrong EHR tab and lost the note she was writing without warning. It fascinates me to what extent my colleagues view things like this as anything less than criminally negligent design errors. Still, I’m also amazed to the extent to which medical people don’t grasp the difference between structured data entry and word processing.” The doctor-author practices at Bellevue Hospital. She doesn’t mention the EHR she was using, although I assume QuadraMed since I don’t think they’re live on Epic yet. She bemoans the “special circle of hell created by cocksure computer programmers whose systems can incinerate hours of work” and wonders why EHRs don’t have a Word-like auto-save feature. Perhaps those who know common EHRs can answer the question – do the systems you know allow closing an entry screen without warning the user that they will lose their work? I think expecting auto-save is a bit much, but it’s reasonable to warn a user that their action is going to trash whatever they’ve entered but haven’t saved. The author had previously complained in a New York Times article that the EHR has a limit of 1,000 characters and she struggles to squeeze in lengthy notes.

From Chris: “Re: VitalWare’s website. It’s been hacked again, with comments suggesting a different hacker. Any concern with PHI or customer data?” Not likely. Their public-facing website is running WordPress v. 4.7, which is getting hacked all over the place due to a REST API vulnerability. They really need to apply the 4.7.2 upgrade, which takes maybe 30 seconds and is unlikely to cause problems. Auto-updating of the WordPress core is enabled by default, I think, so perhaps they made the mistake of turning that off. In any case, it’s probably only WordPress that was hacked and that platform isn’t connected to anything sensitive on the back end – it’s just a website content management system.

From Cabin Boy: “Re: Stanford. I can confirm the changes reported by Silicon Valley Geek in your late January post. At least some parts of the Epic rollout have been cut back after the organization failed to fund parts of its project plan and a lot of executives and contractors were replaced.”  

HIStalkapalooza Sponsor Profile

Healthcare’s most trusted data integration and compliant hosting company has a new name — Datica. Same trusted expertise; new and exciting moniker. The rebranded name better reflects the company’s emphasis on healthcare’s great challenge — a deluge of data to be integrated, exchanged, shared, and protected. Datica provides the ways and means for connecting healthcare. Check out the rebranded website www.datica.com, the new Twitter page @daticahealth, and make sure you stop by HIMSS booth #8152 for coffee or check this HIStalkapalooza sponsor out at their Datica cabana on the dance floor.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

We funded the DonorsChoose grant request of Ms. L in Texas, who asked for books and a storage cart for her elementary school class. She says students are now able to choose books at their own reading level, where they “pick spots on the floor where they are able to stretch out and read.”

Stopping by our HIMSS booth (#4845) on Tuesday, February 21 will be Industry long-timer and WebPT CEO Nancy Ham, who will offer career advice to women from 4:00 until 5:00 p.m. Saying hello to visitors from our microscopic booth on Monday from 1:00 to 2:00 will be Regina Benjamin, MD, MBA, the 18th US Surgeon General.

Thanks to new HIStalkapalooza sponsors Clearsense (healthcare data science) and Hedgeye (financial and research media). I’ll have more about them later. 

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor AssessURhealth. The company helps clinicians assess a patient’s health risk in several mental and behavioral health categories using a five-minute iPad survey that can be completed in the waiting room, after which the results are securely delivered directly to the EHR so they can be reviewed with the patient. Providers increase their revenue while screening patients for depression, anxiety, opioid risk, PTSD, and other conditions in raising awareness of mental and behavioral health. Thanks to AssessURhealth for supporting HIStalk.

I found this AssessURhealth intro video on YouTube.

Dear HIMSS-owned publication, sorry to be on your case again, but it’s really embarrassing that a publication dispensing health IT information can’t spell HIPAA correctly. Not that it matters since the JPP case had nothing to do with HIPAA despite your headline – ESPN is not a covered entity. Searching your site even turned up examples where you’ve spelled your own organization’s name incorrectly. Fake news! Sad!

Webinars

February 8 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Machine Learning Using Healthcare.ai: a Hands-on Learning Session.” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Levi Thatcher, director of data science, Health Catalyst. This webinar offers a tour of Healthcare.ai, a free predictive analytics platform for healthcare, with a live demo of using it to implement a healthcare-specific machine learning model from data source to patient impact. The presenter will go through a hands-on coding example while sharing his insights on the value of predictive analytics, the best path towards implementation, and avoiding common pitfalls.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information on webinar services.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

HIPAA-compliant hosting and integration services vendor Catalyze renames itself to Datica. I’m sometimes skeptical of a seemingly gratuitous rebranding, but co-founder Travis Good, MD explained that quite a few healthcare-related companies, incubators, and venture funds have used the name Catalyst as their service mark, observing that the Internet has made it hard to find a name that is securable and unique. There’s a good lesson there for newly formed companies – choose a name that is memorable, Google-able, and not already in use in healthcare, which is harder than it sounds (which is why new companies often prefer making up a word).

Cloud-based patient matching system vendor Verato raises $12.5 million in a Series B funding round, increasing its total to $25 million.

A Connecticut investment bank loses its bid to avoid paying $1.25 million to two elderly retirees to whom its broker sold shares of Nashville-based EHR implementation vendor iPractice Group in 2012. The Nashville startup shut down the following year.

Physician staffing company TeamHealth will pay $60 million to settle charges that its hospitalists up-coded to create inflated bills as pressured by the company.

People

Rich Walsh (Philips Wellcentive) joins Continuum Health Alliance as VP of business development.

Sales

Novant Health (NC) chooses Glytec’s eGlycemic Management System for personalized glucose control in its 14 hospitals.

Oregon Advanced Imaging (OR) selects McKesson for revenue cycle management.

Saint Francis Healthcare Partners (CT) will implement Orion Health’s Amadeus precision medicine platform.

Announcements and Implementations

First Databank and Translational Software, Inc. will collaborate to develop pharmacogenomics-based drug knowledge that will provide clinicians with genomic-related risk information when prescribing drugs.

BloodCenter of Wisconsin and Fresenius Kabi launch a pilot program at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin that will use RFID to track and inventory blood products.

InstaMed releases a secure token that allows providers and payers to accept online credit card payments without storing or accessing cardholder data directly.

Other

A USA Today article by the CEO of The Permanente Medical Group questions why the US isn’t paying more attention to India’s 20-hospital Narayana Health, where state-of-the-art heart surgery costs $1,800 vs. $90,000 in the US with outcomes that are among the best in the world. He observed the procedures first hand:

In surgery, the experience of the surgeon and the team are the best predictors of superior clinical outcomes. As you might imagine, given the huge volume of procedures his team performs each day, his hospital’s results are exceptional … clinicians use a sophisticated electronic health record they developed, with the information stored on an iPad. Unlike nearly all US EHR systems, the application is so intuitive that minimal physician or nurse training is required. The operating rooms themselves have huge windows leading to protected gardens designed to allow natural sunlight to enter and spur creativity. The bedside monitoring equipment links with a central computer system, allowing clinical leaders like Devi to measure each day how long it took a physician to intervene for a potentially urgent medical problem. In the United States this often exceeds an hour at night and on the weekend. In India it was eight minutes. The disruptive innovation he has implemented isn’t just lower cost, it’s also higher quality. The hospital’s focus on people was widely evident. Embroidered on the white coats of doctors, nurses and staff was the question, "How can I help you?"

Weird News Andy titles this story “Roach Nosetel,” where roaches check in but don’t check out – they get evicted. Doctors in India investigate a woman’s “wiggling” sensation in her nose following her unsuccessful visits to three other hospitals, finally identifying the problem as a full-grown, live cockroach that had made its way high into her nasal passages. They removed it, adding it to their list of successful nasal extractions in previous patients that includes beads, batteries, chalk, and a leech.

Sponsor Updates

• The Sequoia Project appoints Medicity’s Brian Ahier to its board.
• Florida Governor Rick Scott honors Voalte Founder and President Trey Lauderdale for creating jobs in the state.
• ZeOmega’s Jiva 6.1 achieves ONC Health IT 2014 edition modular EHR certification from ICSDA Labs.
• ZirMed will exhibit at the Healthpac Users Meeting February 9-11 in Savannah, GA.
• Meditech posts a case study titled “It’s in Their DNA – Avera Health Drives Precision Medicine at the Point of Care”
• Agfa HealthCare and Telemedicine Technologies Company sign a memorandum of understanding at Arab Health.
• The South Florida Business Journal profiles Aprima Medical Software’s acquisition of Healthcare Data Solutions.
• Bernoulli publishes a new booklet, “Medical Device Connectivity & Informatics.”
• Besler Consulting releases a new podcast, “What is Revenue Integrity?”
• CoverMyMeds COO Michelle Brown will speak at the Columbus Women in Technology event February 15 in Columbus, OH.
• HCI Group releases a new podcast, “MACRA: Preparation, Benefits, and Third-Party Assistance.”

Blog Posts

• Applying Agile Principles to Epic System Maintenance (Ellis  & Adams)
• Bridging Communication in the Multi-Generational Workplace (TierPoint)
• Will Blockchain solve healthcare’s interoperability challenges? (Infor)
• At HIMSS17, unlock the power of your data (Medicity)
• KLAS Recognizes Impact Advisors as Clinical Optimization Leader (Impact Advisors)
• CEO Bruce Cerullo shares a few things you might not know about Nordic (Nordic)
• Zynx Health Named KLAS Category Leader for CDS – Order Sets for Second Consecutive Year (Zynx Health)
• 5 Things We’re Looking Forward to at HIMSS17 (Dimensional Insight)
• Verscend Receives 2017 Best in KLAS Award for Payer Quality Analytics and Reporting Solutions (Verscend Technologies)
• Transitioning to MACRA & MIPS in 2017 – Have You Picked Your Pace? (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• From a “Wait-and-React” to a “Detect-and-Prevent” Healthcare Model (Validic)
• How population health analytics can help identify and address opioid abuse (Verscend)
• More perspectives on healthcare’s future (Conduent Health)
• Value for the Patient (Arcadia Healthcare Solutions)
• 2017 Healthcare Trends Part 3: The Rise and Fall of the EHR (Datica)
• Healthcare Supply Chains Face Cost Issues and Data Hurdles (Black Book Market Research)
• Competency-Based Training Program (Culbert Healthcare Solutions)
• How to Succeed with CPC+: Three Areas of Focus for Primary Care Practices (ECG Management Consultants)
• 4 medical innovations to watch for in the next 100 years (Elsevier Clinical Solutions)
• 4 Pillars to a 360-Degree Physician View (Evariant)
• How Analytics can Benefit 4 Key Members of the Compliance Team (Hayes Management Consulting)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 2/7/17

Examining the ‘Copy and Paste’ Function in the Use of Electronic Health Records

NIST publishes findings and safety recommendations from its review of “copy and paste” practices within EHR clinical documentation tools.

Trump, Congressional GOP Back Off From Immediate Obamacare Repeal

In an interview with Bill O’Reilly, President Trump dials back the timeline to develop an ACA replacement plan, saying “I would like to say by the end of the year, at least the rudiments.”

Uncertainty, Headwinds Hurt Final Marketplace Enrollment Total

Tim Jost provides commentary on Healthcare.gov’s final enrollment figures: 9.2 million individual enrollments, of which three million were new consumers.

A tale of two accountable care organizations

Modern Healthcare covers the experiences and associated financial results of two ACOs delivering value-based care to Medicare and private payer beneficiaries simultaneously.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 2/6/17

I’m playing cleanup for one of my clients this week. They’re dealing with one of the most common management challenges I see – lack of redundancy for key positions or functions.

Due to some leadership personality issues, individual contributors were allowed to become “experts” on a variety of topics without any thought to backup, collaboration, or shared responsibility. When issues came up, it placed the experts in a position of being able to swoop in and solve the problem using their sacred knowledge, further solidifying the idea that only the rescuer had full command of the information. Instead of raising appropriate red flags about why only one person could solve a problem, previous leadership continued to groom these expert resources.

In reality, what some of the experts were doing was front line customer support, but because no one else had visibility into what they were doing, it appeared that they were doing a lot more than was actually going on. Now that a couple of them have left the organization, it has become apparent that some of them were doing very little, and others were doing work that could have been handled by appropriately training the practice call center employees who interact with the internal customers on a daily basis.

When I came into the situation, the organization was in a tailspin trying to figure out how they could possibly replace these people. The reality was that we were able to outsource it pretty quickly, along with selling them some consulting services to document the process, educate others, and prevent this from happening in the future.

In looking at the broader structure of the organization, however, there are much larger cultural factors at play that allowed this behavior to continue. There is a history of promoting individual contributors to management positions because there was no other career path for them. When you take people with no management experience and plop them into a management role, it often feels very uncomfortable. That can lead to the new manager withdrawing from those responsibilities and instead to try to create new individual responsibilities that are more in their comfort zones. Couple that with upper management that is too crisis-oriented and doesn’t budget adequate time to develop these new managers and you have a recipe for a mess.

My task with these folks now is to evaluate the depth and breadth of the experts and figure out what they were actually doing. Some of them have been doing obscenely little given their titles and pay grade. Others were trying to do more than anyone could possibly do well because of wheel-spinning and inefficiency. Once we identify the core body of knowledge and the tasks that need to be completed, I assign an external resource to first cover the acute needs, but second, to document everything and create a training plan to build out multiple resources to cover the needs moving forward. I’m unfortunately seeing a lot of resistance as members of the organization figure out that the emperor has no clothes and begin to worry that they might be next in being exposed.

This fear of being exposed leads to all kinds of bad behavior: information hoarding, siloing, manipulation, maneuvering, and more. People feel threatened when they’re worried others will figure out they have been operating outside accepted boundaries and will do anything to protect themselves.

My favorite strategy is blaming the consultant, who has clearly been brought in by the leadership to fix something that has been identified as a problem. There’s a certain level of trust (and money on the line) when you bring in an outsider and give them carte blanche to realign resources and shift roles and responsibilities. Complaining about it or pitching a fit only makes you look bad and potentially tees you up to be “realigned” outside the company if you are uncooperative enough. Couple that with the fact that the consultant was able to replicate your job duties at a fraction of your cost, and it might just be better to keep your head down and cooperate.

I’m on site this week doing stakeholder interviews, trying to sort out what people think about their role in the project and how the project is going overall, vs. what others have to say and what the leadership thinks is going on. It’s not looking good for some members of the management team who are behaving like cornered animals. Although downsizing was not an original goal of this consulting engagement, how they’re handling it is making it seem like losing a few people might be a good idea.

I enjoy doing stakeholder interviews and organizational assessments. Sometimes they can be enlightening, but often they’re fascinating journeys into the underlying psychological baggage that people carry around with them. Some of my standard interview questions involve the team, its goals, what people think about their participation, the overall health of the project, and how they think they’re contributing.

I conducted one interview this morning where the participant raved on and on about a colleague and how helpful she is, how much of an asset to the team, how she enjoyed working with her, etc. A few hours later, I met with the subject of the glowing commentary, who went on and on about how she thinks my previous interview subject hates her and is trying to undermine her within the company. This client has a fair number of “you can’t make this up” scenarios that I have to figure out how to deal with. I’m thinking I need to bring in a therapist in addition to subject matter expert consultants.

The leadership is not without blame here. Although they’re relatively new and inherited the bulk of the mess, they’ve been complicit in allowing some of the craziness to continue without stepping in earlier. They’ve allowed the process of making people managers because there’s no way to promote people in various job classes, which has compromised people’s effectiveness and weakened the organization.

Members of the leadership also project the air of being too busy to help the little people sort it out, which is going to be a long-term issue. They’d be much better served by at least appearing that they’re willing to roll up their sleeves and dig in to build the organization rather than making it clear that their main goal is to continue acquiring physician practices and everything else is secondary. Adding more practices (many of which are distressed when they’re acquired) when they’re struggling to support their existing practices doesn’t seem like the best strategy, so I’ll continue to work on that piece as well.

What’s your current project? Does it make you want to crawl back in bed every morning? Email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Health IT Changes the Game for Workplace Wellness

From next-generation wearables to predictive analytics, healthcare technology is helping employers gain greater ROI from workplace wellness programs.
By @JennHIStalk

The month of January has come and gone, no doubt leaving a plethora of abandoned New Year’s resolutions in its wake. Personal goals related to weight loss, healthier eating, better sleep, and less stress – to name a few – have fallen by the wayside for some, as regular routines (and familiar bad habits) kick back in after the holidays. This month’s Super Bowl parties, Valentine’s treats, and even HIMSS exhibit hall fare threaten to trip up even the most dedicated of goal-keepers.

Employers of all sizes have, over the last several years, recognized they have a part to play in the resolution game – one that extends beyond pounds shed and muscle gained to fewer sick days, increased productivity, and lower overall healthcare costs for employee and employer alike. Nearly 20 percent of all employers offered comprehensive wellness programs in 2015 and 2016, according to a 2016 United Benefit Advisors survey, which also found that such programs are the most prevalent among education, government, and utilities employers.

These programs have typically consisted of health risk assessments, biometric screenings or physical exams, coaching for high-risk employees, seminars or workshops, and, of course, incentives for participation. Technology’s role in these programs has become increasingly sophisticated,  evolving from basic clip-on pedometers to BYOD programs that serve up tailored employee offerings based on claims and clinical data. Some may see that level of sophistication as being in direct correlation to the out-of-pocket healthcare costs increasingly shouldered by consumers.

“In the past, employee wellness programs have mostly been built around physical health,” explains Michelle Snyder, chief marketing officer at Welltok, which has developed a wellness technology platform that uses predictive analytics to offer employees custom programs and incentives. “But now that consumers are having to take on more of the cost burden for healthcare, they’re beginning to want their employers to help them manage not only their physical health, but also their financial health, emotional health, and social connectedness.”

Employers, in turn, are looking to better control their healthcare costs and improve employee productivity, satisfaction, and morale. Snyder adds that employers are also eager to find ways to better engage employees in wellness programs already up and running. “The two main reasons we’ve found that employees aren’t engaging have to do with the fact that they didn’t know the programs existed and the programs aren’t relevant to the individual employee.”

From Pedometers to Predictive Analytics

As employers have begun to focus on more than just the physical health of their employees, their need for more tailored technologies has grown. “I think wearables sometimes get a bad rap,” Snyder says. “People will wear them and some employers think of that as the centerpiece. That’s the answer to their corporate wellness program. That’s great, but those devices should be just a piece of the bigger picture. The real-time data you can get from wearables is important, but its importance is tied to all of the other data streams that are a part of that wellness program. Those step counts, for example, have to be tied to other data sets to make it really rich and valuable for the employer, and for the employer to figure out how to better target and engage with employees.”

The State of Colorado has realized the need to think beyond pedometers in the years since it launched its wellness program. “When we launched our program in mid-2013, we secured funds to distribute 1,000 digital pedometers on a first-come, first-serve basis,” says Statewide Wellness Coordinator Nate Sassano. “Those pedometers connected automatically to a customized activity in our program. Since then, we have expanded that activity, and Welltok, which provides our platform, has expanded its digital connections. Today, employees who own just about any device can connect it to our physical activity programs on the CafeWell platform.”

Sassano has steered the state beyond pedometers to include CafeWell Concierge, an IBM Watson-powered app that offers up personalized recommendations to help employees achieve optimal health and get the most out of their state health plan benefits. “I believe that having one hub, as we do with CafeWell — where employees can go to access all of our wellness programming as well as become educated about their benefits — has greatly enhanced our program and increased participation.”

Sassano isn’t stopping there. He is in the process of expanding the offerings in the CafeWell platform to include other wellness vendors that deal with weight and stress management. He adds that, “This connection between vendors will allow our employees to participate in activities seamlessly and help them easily earn incentives for their participation.”

Turnkey Benefits

Smaller companies tend to look for similar wellness program benefits, albeit in a more turnkey fashion. Sanford, FL-based beverage distribution company Wayne Densch, for example, is somewhat new to the world of wellness programs, but is already aware of the role health technology can play in making them a success.

The company, which launched its wellness program in 2015 with biometric screenings, began using activity trackers when it adopted UnitedHealthcare’s Motion program in January 2016. The program enables employees and their covered spouses to earn up to $1,500 per year in deductible credits by meeting daily walking goals related to frequency, intensity, and tenacity. Deposits are made on a quarterly basis and help employees and their dependents offset covered medical expenses.

“As a relatively small company, it was important to find a wellness program that was largely turnkey and easy to implement, while still effective in driving engagement,” says Thomas Williams, director of accounting. “We use the program’s proprietary Trio device, which was developed to track the program’s specific walking goals. Employees are able to keep tabs on their progress using the program’s mobile app or website. By using technology that is intuitive and engaging, our employees have become more invested in maintaining and improving their well-being.”

Fine-Tuning for Better Engagement

UnitedHealthcare initially rolled out its Motion program early last year as a pilot across 12 states and has since expanded it to 40 states. That initial trial helped the company realize what employees liked and disliked about the program. “Interest in the program has been very broad, with companies across all industries and sizes adopting it,” says Craig Hankins, VP of digital products. “After introducing the program as a pilot, we identified several lessons that we applied to the broader expansion. First, to help people get going with the program, we added a registration credit. By providing a $40 credit for signing up, we created an incentive to get people started, which helped drive higher adoption rates. Second, we recognized people are interested in accessing additional devices. That’s why we worked with Qualcomm Life to introduce a BYOD model, which enables the addition of activity trackers from some of the nation’s leading technology companies.”

“Ultimately,” he adds, “the motivation for implementing Motion was simple: Help create happier and healthier employees. We know wearable devices represent a new way to encourage employees to become more active, helping people walk their way to improved health and earn financial incentives in the process.”

Understanding Employer ROI

Healthier, happier employees are surely good for a company’s bottom line, but how do employers translate happiness into lower overall costs and greater productivity? Where does the pilot phase end and true ROI begin?

Sassano seems optimistic about the State of Colorado’s expected return. “Participation in our first year was 50 percent, which I think speaks to the excitement of our employees and their interest in the program,” he says. “Of the 32,000 benefit-eligible employees we have today, we have around 52 percent participation today. While it is still early to effectively measure effects on health outcomes and productivity, we are starting to see evidence that participating employees have a lower cost in our health plans.”

Williams sings a similar tune, noting that Wayne Densch’s initial results have been positive for both employees and employer. “With participation rates exceeding 90 percent, the response from employees has been overwhelmingly positive. We are seeing walking and wellness become a bigger priority among our employees, with daily walking groups helping to keep people motivated. We have seen employees shed pounds and improve their fitness levels.”

Gaining in Importance

Employers of all sizes look to corporate wellness programs to help them trim costs and attract and retain talent. As the healthcare industry remains on high alert for impending changes to the Affordable Care Act (which may result in higher out-of-pocket costs for all), wellness programs and the technologies they use will have a greater role to play in keeping costly, preventable conditions at bay.

Morning Headlines 2/6/17

Advisory Board Said to Interview Banks About Possible Sale

The Advisory Board Company is considering strategic options, including a sale of the company, after disclosing that an activist investor has secured an 8.3 percent stake in the company.

Athenahealth (ATHN) Q4 2016 Results – Earnings Call Transcript

During its earnings call, Athenahealth CFO Karl Stubelis addressed the Q4 revenue miss that led to a 14 percent drop in share prices on Friday, and reported that the company closed 52 deals with hospitals and health systems in 2016.

What’s a serial entrepreneur to do when the world is topsy-turvy?

Crain’s Chicago Business profiles Glen Tullman.

ESPN’s Jason Pierre-Paul Statement

ESPN settles a lawsuit brought by New York Giants defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul after ESPN published images from his medical record confirming that he lost his finger after a fireworks accident.

Monday Morning Update 2/6/17

Top News

Bloomberg reports that The Advisory Board Company is considering strategic options – potentially including a sale of the company — following last month’s acquisition of 8.3 percent of its shares by an activist investor.

ABCO shares have climbed nearly 50 percent since mid-December 2016, although their one-year performance of 9.6 percent and five-year increase of 29 percent trails the Nasdaq’s 30 percent and 95 percent, respectively. Above is the one-year chart of ABCO (green) vs. the Nasdaq (blue). The company’s valuation is nearly $2 billion.

The Advisory Board announced a six percent workforce reduction last month along with its exit of some business lines and the closing of four offices. The company says it will honor its commitment to add 1,000 jobs as required by a $60 million, 10-year tax break offered by Washington, DC to consolidate its offices at a new location in Mount Vernon Square.

Reader Comments

From Flash in the Pan: “Re: Verscend Technologies, formerly Verisk Health. Restructuring since the Veritas acquisition resulted in 185 layoffs and the elimination of solutions this week.” CEO Emad RIzk, MD provided this response: “Verscend Technologies reorganized this week, resulting in a small workforce reduction. Verscend is a high-performing organization positioned for growth and will continue to invest in its people, technology, solutions, and customers. We reorganized to improve efficiency, reduce redundancies, and position us for significant growth. We are not eliminating any products, and no Verscend offices are closing as a result.”

From Ruby Claret: “Re: APIs. This article says APIs are like the industrial age, when adoption of interchangeable parts changed everything.” I’m not sure that’s an apt analogy. Interchangeable parts were devised to allow a specific company to move from the work of individual craftsmen to mass producing products on an assembly line at a lower cost. Those early companies weren’t standardizing parts to be used by their competitors. Interchangeable parts are more like proprietary code libraries used by vendors across multiple products. As an alternative theory of how interoperability might be supported and incented, I offer a 20-year-old article about Visa founder Dee Hock:

Hock designed the organization according to his philosophy: highly decentralized and highly collaborative. Authority, initiative, decision making, wealth — everything possible is pushed out to the periphery of the organization, to the members … On the one hand, the member financial institutions are fierce competitors … On the other hand, the members also have to cooperate with each other: for the system to work, participating merchants must be able to take any Visa card issued by any bank, anywhere. That means that the banks abide by certain standards on issues such as card layout. Even more important, they participate in a common clearinghouse operation, the system that reconciles all the accounts and makes sure merchants get paid for each purchase, the transactions are cleared between banks, and customers get billed … No one way of doing business, dictated from headquarters, could possibly have worked. "It was beyond the power of reason to design an organization to deal with such complexity," says Hock.

From Banshee: “Re: VitalWare. Site hacked?” Apparently. Most horrifying is that hacker MuhmadEmad, who apparently hit a bunch of sites over the weekend as evidenced by Googling the text above, changed the font to Comic Sans. The good news is that his hack seems to consist of just posting an anti-ISIS messages as a WordPress post while leaving the site otherwise intact, which should make recovery uneventful.

HIStalkapalooza Sponsor Profile

Since its founding in 2010, Nordic has evolved from its roots as a leader in EHR staffing to not only the world’s largest Epic consulting firm, but a firm with a broad set of KLAS-proven healthcare IT solutions. Featuring nearly 700 consultants, Nordic has organized those experts to solve healthcare organizations’ most challenging health IT problems with carefully crafted solutions. These solutions were developed and refined over the last few years to meet the evolving needs of Nordic’s client partners, including the shift to value-based care, mergers and acquisitions, Community Connect, upgrades, optimization, revenue cycle transformation, analytics, a suite of managed service offerings (including tier 2 application support), and more. At HIMSS17, visit Nordic at booth 903 and RSVP for Nordic’s reception. To learn more, visit nordicwi.com.

Meet Your HIStalkapalooza Hosts

Allow your hosts to introduce themselves:

Bonny Roberts slid down the rabbit hole in 2013 when her “Ode to Mr. H” earned her the preeminent title (and sash) as Mr. H’s Secret Crush. Since then she has contributed a bit to the publication and much to the fervor that is HIStalkapalooza. In preparation for role as greeter on the red carpet, Bonny admits to using her Frontier Airline miles to purchase People, Us, and Star magazine subscriptions. She has also studied Melissa Rivers technique and is diligently practicing the complete opposite. Bonny has worked in the healthcare information technology industry for the past 19 years and is the VP of customer experience for Aventura Software in Denver, CO.

First things first – Barry Wightman published his first novel, Pepperland, a revolutionary, technology, rock ‘n’ roll love story in 2013. The book received a starred review on Booklist, won a Silver IPPY for best fiction from the Independent Publishers Book Awards. His day job – he’s creative director for Forward Health Group, Inc., a maker of population health measurement platforms and data strategies that drive success in the move to value. Rest of the time – he can still be found with a guitar in hand figuring out the riffs to old Kinks records.

Ever since she was a little girl, Julie Yoo‘s lifelong dream has been to emcee the HISsies at HIStalkapalooza. In between grueling rehearsals, Julie oversees the product and business development teams at Kyruus. After February 20, with lifelong aspirations fulfilled, she will shift her focus back to improving patient access one patient-provider match at a time.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents say they’re going to the HIMSS conference primarily to socialize and spend time in the exhibit hall, which should shock only that handful of people who thought the educational track was the big draw. Mobile Man provides the unsolicited but satisfying response: “One word … HIStalkapalooza!”

New poll to your right or here, as suggested by a reader: if you aren’t going to the HIMSS conference, why not? I’m sure I omitted some good reasons in my list of presumptive choices, so I’ve added a space for providing your own answer.

Ms. F from Arizona reports on the Chromebooks we provided in funding her DonorsChoose teacher grant request, saying that most of her students wouldn’t have access to technology otherwise. She is assigning them work on school-approved math programs that can be completed without leaving the classroom. 

Thanks to the following companies for their recent support of HIStalk. Click a logo for more information.

Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• Children’s Health (TX) is fined $3.2 million for repeated non-compliance with HIPAA security standards, including loss of two unencrypted devices.
• Meditech’s FY2016 financial report shows significant declines in product and overall revenue, as net income has dropped 41 percent since FY2014.
• OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma gives the State of Virginia a $3.1 million grant to integrate its prescription drug monitoring database with provider EHRs.
• The source of President Trump’s claim that illegally cast votes cost him a popular vote win is discovered to be Gregg Phillips, chairman of Medicaid eligibility decision support tool vendor AutoGov.
• Global Health Exchange and Vyne are reported to be exploring selling the companies.
• A JAMA article finds that providers continue to overcharge patients for copies of their medical records despite specific HHS OCR guidance that addresses allowable costs that can be passed on.

Webinars

February 8 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Machine Learning Using Healthcare.ai: a Hands-on Learning Session.” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Levi Thatcher, director of data science, Health Catalyst. This webinar offers a tour of Healthcare.ai, a free predictive analytics platform for healthcare, with a live demo of using it to implement a healthcare-specific machine learning model from data source to patient impact. The presenter will go through a hands-on coding example while sharing his insights on the value of predictive analytics, the best path towards implementation, and avoiding common pitfalls.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information on webinar services.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

From the Athenahealth earnings call following a revenue miss that sent shares down 14 percent Friday:

• Collection volumes were down in Q4 and clients pushed some professional services work back.
• The company expects to gain business as provider focus shifts away from government-mandated functionality.
• The company’s Q4 Net Promoter Score of 23.9 fell far short of its target of 44.
• The company closed 52 AthenaOne for Hospitals and Health Systems deals in 2016, says it is building momentum with under-50 bed hospitals, and will double its hospital base in 2017 as customers look for “one throat to choke.”
• Jonathan Bush says whatever form repeal-and-replace takes will help the company sell to under-50 bed hospitals that are short on capital.
• Bush said of the revenue miss compared to previous guidance, “We were very surprised and upset with the revenue guidance thing,” as CFO Karl Stubelis added, “We should have had a better handle on this.”
• Bush said the company “did very badly” in the group segment because Athenahealth’s fees sometimes exceed user cost savings.
• The company reported increased integration with Epic and expects that to increase sales to health systems using Epic, Cerner, and Meditech, noting that population health management requires a “fabric that crosses across systems” since most of the doctors involved will never use Epic.
• Bush says that under HITECH, the company only had to be better than other vendors, while today they have to be “better than doing nothing” since providers won’t buy new systems unless they increase cash. He says the company will be issuing a net patient market share guarantee.

Canada-based long-term care software vendor PointClickCare Technologies raises an $85 million round of funding.

People

Talent management solution vendor HealthcareSource hires Bob Zurek (Scribe Software) as SVP/CTO.

Doctor waiting room advertising company Outcome Health, recently renamed from ContextMedia, hires former US CIO Vivek Kundra (Salesforce) as EVP/chief growth officer.

Privacy and Security

ESPN settles the lawsuit brought against it by pro football player Jason Pierre-Paul, who objected to the network’s tweeting out photos of his medical records indicating that he had blown off a finger while playing with fireworks on July 4, 2015. ESPN maintains that running an illicitly obtained photo of an on-screen surgery schedule describing Pierre-Paul’s amputation – for which two Jackson Memorial Hospital employees were later fired — was “both newsworthy and journalistically appropriate,” calling into question its understanding of both principles.

Other

A Los Angeles TV station uncovers the lucrative side business run by a medical marijuana doctor who, for $150 and a quick Skype chat, will sign a letter proclaiming that his customer needs an “emotional support animal.” Airlines are then required to accept the precious pooch (or in some cases, pigs and monkeys) as a main cabin passenger for free. I Googled “emotional support animal” and came up with many examples of people buying such certification to do what they want instead of what is allowed or reasonable.

A fired surgical resident is caught participating in medical rounds, attending lectures, and observing surgeries in several Boston hospitals by “tailgating” — entering restricted areas without an ID badge by tagging along with people who helpfully hold the door open for someone who seems to be a co-worker. Hospitals worry that such inherent politeness renders their electronic card systems and security cameras less useful, but are reluctant to install subway-style turnstiles, station guards outside ORs, or implement biometric ID. IT people know that anyone can enter card-protected spaces by simply wearing UPS-like brown shorts and a shirt and walking up to a secure door while holding large packages.

Crain’s Chicago Business runs a lengthy (and a obviously homer-written) profile of Glen Tullman (Allscripts, Livongo), including his political thoughts, investments, and investment style. Apparently he sleeps just four hours per night and bolts down meals to move on to something more interesting than eating with his family.

An interesting article explains why the level of fear people have about something (like being killed by a terrorist) is often in disproportion to the likelihood of that happening. It blames the “bleeds it leads” media, click-seeking news reports, and violent movies and TV shows as part of the Mean World Theory, which has led Americans to misperceive that crime rates are high when they aren’t and to ignore known significant but unsexy threats like gun violence and climate change (and as CIO Sean Gilliland notes in his retweet, they are more scared of terrorists than their much more likely but partially preventable executioners, cancer and heart disease). 

The president of Pakistan’s medical association says that 10 percent of the country’s medical schools are “fleecing the public,” offering low-quality education strictly for profit by owners whose other holdings include sugar mills and textile plants.

Sponsor Updates

• Fortified Health Security is approved as a HITRUST CSF Assessor.

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 2/3/17

Lack of timely action risks security and costs money

HHS announces a $3.2 million penalty against Children’s Medical Center of Dallas (TX) following two separate PHI breaches, one stemming from a stolen laptop and another stemming from a lost blackberry, both were unencrypted.

Jupiter Medical Center Implements Revolutionary Watson for Oncology to Help Oncologists Make Data-Driven Cancer Treatment Decisions

Jupiter Medical Center (FL) becomes the first community hospital to implement IBM Watson’s oncology clinical decision support software.

Meditech: Form 10-K

Meditech reports Q4 and FY16 results: revenue dropped 2.8 percent to $462 million. Net income climbed four percent to $73 million, EPS $0.62 vs. $0.52.

Athenahealth, Inc. Profit Advances 40% In Q4

Athenahealth reports Q4 results: revenue up 12 percent to $288 million, adjusted EPS $0.62 vs. $0.45, a 40 percent year-over-year earnings growth.

News 2/3/17

Top News

Children’s Medical Center of Dallas (TX) will pay $3.2 million to settle HIPAA charges related to the loss of an unencrypted BlackBerry in 2010 and theft of an unencrypted laptop in 2013.

The organization failed to encrypt all PHI-containing devices as recommended by two consulting firms that had performed security gap and vulnerability analyses. It had also allowed its biomedical department to inventory its own IT equipment, causing the IT department to miss those devices in enforcing its security policies.

HHS OCR says Children’s practiced “non-compliance over many years with multiple standards of the HIPAA Security Rule.”

Pam Arora, SVP/CIO of Children’s Health since January 2007, was named last month by CHIME and HIMSS as their John E. Gall CIO of the Year.

Reader Comments

From Deranged Bunny: “Re: mistakes in the HIMSS-owned publication. Here’s one from the first sentence in their lead story today.” Re-wording a press release into a “story” should have been easy for their writer since all the words were right there. For the record, “Purdue” pushes OxyContin, while “Perdue” sells chicken.

HIStalkapalooza Sponsor Profile

InstaMed, healthcare’s most trusted payments network, delivers secure and fully integrated patient payment solutions to the largest health systems, children’s hospitals, and provider organizations across the US, processing billions of dollars in healthcare payments per month. Connect with InstaMed during HIMSS17 at booth 609 to chat about the healthcare payments experience your patients are demanding, the need for integration of patient payments into EHR/PMS, and the increasing pressure on security and compliance, including PCI scope. Plus, we are hosting an evening of conversation, food, and drinks on February 19 after the HIMSS17 opening reception. Learn more.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I still have seats available for our CMIO lunch at the HIMSS conference, Tuesday, February 21 at noon, conveniently located just off the exhibit hall and paid for by me. CMIOs can sign up here. Our 20 or so CMIO attendees will enjoy a great buffet lunch and casual peer-to-peer conversations – the only non-CMIO attendee will be Lorre, who is hosting. Everybody has to eat even with all the conference hustle and bustle, so a relaxing lunch with peers is a nice way to escape the neon jungle.

We funded the DonorsChoose grant request of Mrs. W from Arizona, whose elementary school class is using the document camera we provided for reading and phonics skills along with their sections in science, math, and social studies.

This week on HIStalk Practice: Family Choice Urgent Care implements Practice Velocity software. ATA asks for comments on pediatric, mental health, stroke guidelines. MediSys adds Alpha II PQRS capabilities. PatientClick launches telepsychiatry service. DrFirst acquires VisibilityRx. Das Health develops online mental health assessment tools. Greenwood Genetic Center’s Michael Lyons, MD discusses GGC’s decision to add telemedicine capabilities.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Siemens Healthineers. The company’s product lines include medical imaging, laboratory diagnostics, and point-of-care testing. Imaging and IT offerings include PACS, RIS, image sharing, clinical data management, software for multi-modality reading, cardiovascular care software, and enterprise imaging, workflow, visualization, and archiving. Diagnostic products include data and workflow management systems, diagnostics system remote monitoring, and laboratory inventory management. Nine out of 10 US hospitals depend on the company’s solutions, including every hospital listed on the US News & World Report Honor Roll. Siemens Healthineers and IBM Watson Health are working together to develop and deploy new population health management products and services to help providers transition to value-based care with analytics and patient engagement. It will offer IBM Watson Care Manager, a cognitive solution that supports nurses and other care managers as they monitor and counsel people with chronic conditions. See them in HIMSS Booth # 2323. Thanks to Siemens Healthineers for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a Siemens Healthineers intro video I found on YouTube. It’s from May 2016, when the company announced its name change from Siemens Healthcare.

Listening: new from Horisont, fantastic 1970s-sound prog rock that’s actually from a fairly new band from Sweden (think Kansas meets Deep Purple in Uriah Heep’s basement). Speaking of which, RIP John Wetton, whose long career as a prog-band bassist, singer, and songwriter included stints with King Crimson, UK, Uriah Heep, and most notably Asia. Asia’s tour starts on March 15, but Wetton had already bowed out due to his chemotherapy treatments, replaced by Yes’s Billy Sherwood, who previously replaced another deceased legendary prog bassist, Chris Squire of Yes.

Webinars

February 8 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Machine Learning Using Healthcare.ai: a Hands-on Learning Session.” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Levi Thatcher, director of data science, Health Catalyst. This webinar offers a tour of Healthcare.ai, a free predictive analytics platform for healthcare, with a live demo of using it to implement a healthcare-specific machine learning model from data source to patient impact. The presenter will go through a hands-on coding example while sharing his insights on the value of predictive analytics, the best path towards implementation, and avoiding common pitfalls.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information on webinar services.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Meditech announces Q4 results: revenue down nine percent, EPS $0.62 vs. $0.52. For the year, revenue was down 2.8 percent as product revenue slipped 15 percent, having declined by 38 percent since 2014. The privately held company’s net income was $73 million in 2016, up 4 percent from last year but down 41 percent vs. 2014’s total.

DrFirst acquires VisibilityRx, which identifies and recruits patients for clinical trials.

Athenahealth reports Q4 results: revenue up 12 percent, adjusted EPS $0.62 vs. $0.45, beating earnings expectations but falling short on revenue.

Sales

George Washington University (DC) chooses Castlight Health’s employee health benefits management platform.

Announcements and Implementations

Catholic Health Services (NY) rolls out Uniphy Health’s mobile collaboration app to its providers.

Jupiter Medical Center (FL) will go live in March 2017 on IBM Watson for Oncology, the first community hospital to do so following the system’s “training” at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. It presents individualized, evidence-based treatment options to oncologists in drawing information from 15 million pages of text from medical journals and textbooks.

UCHealth (CO) announces technology-related developments that include virtual visits, online scheduling, a new app, and adoption of the OpenNotes standard.

Government and Politics

A Florida urologist will pay $3.8 million to settle False Claims Act charges that he ordered medically unnecessary lab tests. Meir Daller, MD ordered 13,000 FISH bladder cancer tests of questionable medical value on Medicare patients who were steered to a lab owned by his employer, who then paid the doctor $2 million in bonuses. The assistant US attorney says the doctor would look at paper-based urinalysis results but then throw them away so he could enter whatever he wanted into the EHR, often falsely recording that blood was found in the patient’s urine to justify ordering the test. The practice’s owner, 21st Century Oncology, previously paid $20 million for its role in over-ordering the $1,000 tests for Medicare patients. The company, which operates 180 cancer treatment centers, also reported an October 2015 breach of its systems that exposed the information of 2.2 million patients.

USA Today reports that shares of McKesson were among the healthcare-related investments made by HHS Secretary nominee Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) since 2012 that appear to be improper. Price bought MCK shares in March 2016, McKesson warned investors in early May that Medicare’s reduction in medical equipment payments could hurt its bottom line, and Price introduced legislation to cancel the cuts on May 12.

Privacy and Security

In England, an analysis of the four-day October downtime of three-hospital Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust finds that it was caused by a misconfigured firewall that allowed ransomware to penetrate its systems.

President Trump’s long-time doctor Harold Bornstein, MD lists the president’s medical conditions and prescriptions in a New York Times interview, raising the question of whether he violated HIPAA in doing so.

Other

HRH Princess Haya of Jordan, the junior wife of UAE’s prime minister (she’s the second of his five wives), addresses the Arab Health Exhibition and Congress in Dubai:

I have already alluded to the difficulty faced in embracing new technology in healthcare. To ensure successful adoption, we need to equip the physician, the patient, and the system with the right tools and knowledge. We also need to improve medical training to ensure future generations of doctors are proficient in the use of technology, social media, and digital platforms. This is my point. This is where the balance lies. We have seen all kinds of machines and technologies that have created the architecture, but in the end, it was for the benefit of the people, to give them a home for the future. This same balance needs to be struck between innovation and medicine.

An interesting article lists the biometric measurements that will soon allow police to identity suspects in ways that go far beyond fingerprints. They include signature recognition, typing pattern recognition, recognizing patterns used in reading predefined passages aloud, eye movement tracking, gait analysis, and identifying people by their body odor. Facial recognition systems are already in place, with the FBI having stored the images of half of Americans in its databases. The article notes that President Trump’s executive order on immigration calls for expediting the use of biometric screening at the US border.

Sponsor Updates

• Kyruus will present at the Harvard Healthcare Business Conference February 4 in Boston.
• ZeOmega’s Jiva 6.1 earns ONC Health IT 2014 Edition Modular EHR certification.
• Learn on Demand Systems releases details about its invite-only Launch event in March for customers and partners.
• LiveProcess releases a new case study, “Communication During a Cyberattack.”
• MedData will exhibit at the HFMA NENY Women in Leadership Conference February 9 in Clifton Park, NY.
• Medecision releases a new video, “Aerial Powering Population Health Success.”
• Meditech will exhibit at the AHA’s Rural Healthcare Leadership Conference February 5-8 in Phoenix.
• Navicure will exhibit at the 2017 Healthpac Annual Users Meeting February 10-12 in Savannah.
• Nordic will sponsor the inaugural Epic North Carolina Users Group Meeting February 8-9 in Greensboro.

Blog Posts

• Strata Ranked #1 in KLAS for Business Decision Support for Third Consecutive Year (Strata Decision Technology)
• Sentri7 from Wolters Kluwer Earns Category Leader Designation for Clinical Decision Support-Surveillance in the 2017 Best in KLAS Report (Wolters Kluwer)
• It’s Time to Grade Data Breach Responses (ID Experts)
• DNS – The Essential Hidden Server (Impact Advisors)
• The Case for Email Personalization (Influence Health)
• Why Not All Hospitals Would Suffer Under a Full ACA Repeal (Definitive Healthcare)
• Agfa HealthCare’s XERO Viewer Captures 2017 KLAS Category Leader Award (Agfa Healthcare)
• 5 Things to Do Now for a Successful 2017 (InstaMed)
• AI technology spreads its wings in healthcare sector (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Useful, Usable, Desirable: The Importance of UX in Healthcare (Spok)
• “Best in KLAS” Report Names Iatric Systems No. 1 for Patient Privacy Monitoring for Third Consecutive Year (Iatric Systems)
• Meditech Wraps Up 2016 with Strong Q4 Sales (Meditech)
• Three Elements Your Find-a-Doc Needs to Drive Patient Conversion (Kyruus)
• When 1+1+1+1 Does Not Equal 4: How Revenue Cycle Management Components Work Together to Yield True Performance Improvement (Navicure)
• Integrating Care: Moving Beyond Interoperability to True Collaboration, Part IV (Netsmart)
• Precision Medicine (Part 1) Exploring the Role We Need to Play (Orion Health)
• When Will Interoperability Be a “Given” in Health IT? (PatientKeeper)
• It Takes Two to Tango! (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Why Beanbag Chairs Don’t Make You a Cool Place to Work (PokitDok)
• Why Accurate Provider Data is Critical to Cost Control and Revenue Cycle Improvements (Phynd Technologies)
• 4 Things to Check out at HIMSS17 (Protenus)
• The Importance of a Strong Compendium (Summit Healthcare)
• Can Manual Prior Authorizations Damage Patient/Provider Relationships? One Doc’s Word of Caution (Surescripts)

Contacts

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