News 8/23/17

Top News

CliniComp files a bid protest lawsuit against the VA, saying that it improperly issued Cerner a no-bid contract for an EHR that will replace VistA. CliniComp’s systems are used in several VA hospitals.

CliniComp prevailed in a similar 2014 lawsuit in which it protested that the VA’s selection process was flawed when it awarded a $4.5 million bid to Picis instead of low bidder CliniComp.

The White House took credit for the VA’s surprise selection of Cerner, apparently believing that interoperability with the Department of Defense will be easier if the organizations use the same vendor’s system. 

Reader Comments

From Givenchy: “Re: Athenahealth. Their community hospital webpage is misleading customers by claiming financial success for a time period in which it had no hospital customers.” I’m not clear from Athenahealth’s community hospitals web page if the claimed improvement in financial and quality measures is specific to hospitals, but I’m thinking not since, as you observed, the footnote cites customer data “based on a weighted average for Athenahealth clients with valid pre-Athenahealth benchmark data that had their 15 month anniversary with Athenahealth between January 1, 2010, and October 31, 2013.”  Athena didn’t acquire RazorInsights and its small-hospital system until early 2015. They also could be referring to hospital customers that use its other systems in their ambulatory operations.

From Lab Animal: “Re: best-of-breed LIS vendors. I left one of those companies to work on Epic’s clinical solutions in a major medical center. Beaker is now competitive enough to convince enterprise customers to convert. I have seen the advantages of integrated solutions. It’s not a new trend, though – my peers and I are contacted several times each week by recruiters looking for people experienced on the LIS I previously worked on to keep the lights on while the LIS team goes to Epic training and builds Beaker. The best-of-breed writing has been on the wall for years.” Sunquest and SCC (but not so much Orchard from what I can tell) are trying to find runway in the genetics information system business to offset their significant customer losses due to LIS domination by Epic and Cerner. Sunquest has also smartly branched out into lab instrument interface software, specialty pathology applications, and clinician collaboration, although I haven’t seen numbers of how much profit those products contribute or whether revenue is growing significantly. You don’t want to be a best-of-breed vendor these days unless Cerner and Epic don’t offer your particular product (yet, anyway, since Epic’s selling the industry-leading LIS also seemed unlikely a few years ago).

From Boomer: “Re: Medhost. Heard a rumor they are being considered for acquisition by a physician systems vendor that might be interested in entering the hospital market. They are strong with chains like Community Health Systems, which is selling off a bunch of its hospitals.” Unverified.

From Leftcoaster: “Re: Portland Adventist’s partnership with OHSU and scheduled conversion to Epic. It’s at risk due to a high-profile infant death lawsuit that could place OHSU at risk if the partnership occurs.” 

From Failed Merger: “Re: Presence Health merging into Ascension Amita. That should be interesting as Ascension is on Cerner, the Resurrection portion of Presence is on Epic, and the Provena part is on Meditech. At one point, Adventist Midwest was McKesson.” Thanks to Turnaround Failure, who tipped me off over the weekend of the merger rumor that I ran in the Monday Morning Update. Ascension proposes to acquire the struggling, 11-hospital Presence Health and operate it within its Amita Health joint venture that includes Adventist Midwest Health, pending regulatory approval.

Lloyd McKenzie, who is a co-chair of HL7’s FHIR Management Group, provided some background on the FHIR specifications that a reader asked about last week.

There are two mechanisms for sharing FHIR specs. The first is a computable format that uses FHIR itself. It allows sharing system capabilities and expectations; rules around data elements, such as what elements are required, optional, or conditional; what codes are allowed for use for which elements; etc. That format is intended to support automated testing, comparison of system capabilities, software configuration, etc. It can also be rendered for human review. The computable “resource” format is formally defined as part of the FHIR specification. HL7 strongly encourages implementers to expose their capabilities using this format.

The second mechanism is the human-readable rendering of FHIR implementation guides. Typically this is an HTML representation with hyperlinks back to the FHIR specification. HL7 produces tooling to support generating such human-readable rendered views, but does not mandate it. The tooling is also quite flexible, allowing content to be organized in a variety of ways, so it’s certainly possible to find interface documentation of varying quality and expressiveness that is generated using the same tooling. As well, the HL7-maintained IG publisher is not the only set of tooling available. HL7 developed and maintains it because it also needs a way to publish implementation guides and we’re happy for other organizations and implementers to make use of it. Best practices for producing human-readable FHIR interface documentation are far from settled, so expect the tooling to continue to evolve based on implementer feedback.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I questioned as a card-carrying cynic why so many people – many of them ignorant or even dismissive of science and math – would rearrange their lives to watch the moon block the sun for a short period, much like sticking your thumb into the air and obscuring the celestial fireball yourself for 10 seconds of child-like fun. I’ve heard that airlines weren’t able to meet the demand for flying in and out of certain (and hopefully cloud-free) parts of the country and hotels there were charging extortionate room rates for out-of-towners. I’m pretty sure that quite a few fad-following science haters who don’t vaccinate their kids, who don’t think climate change is real, or who argue passionately that the earth is actually flat still confidently uttered “totality” at every opportunity. I took a hooky break and went to the golf course — I’ve never played an actual round of golf, but I like to blast balls unskillfully on the driving range, putt on the practice green while quietly imploring others nearby to “miss it, Noonan,” and then have a burger and beer afterward, which seem to be the best parts of the game anyway – and nobody was paying the slightest attention to the sky or fishing in their golf bag for a flashlight. At least it got folks looking up from their phones long enough to share a rare in-person experience and it gave long-faded singer Bonnie Tyler a chance to sing her 34-year-old hit that has nothing at all to do with an actual eclipse (the writer, who isn’t Bonnie,  says it’s about vampire love).

Webinars

September 13 (Wednesday) 1:30 ET. “How Data Democratization Drives Enterprise-wide Clinical Process Improvement.” Sponsored by: LogicStream Health. Presenter: Katy Jones, program director of clinical support, Providence Health & Services. Providence is demonstrating positive measurable results in quality, outcomes, and efficiency by implementing clinical process improvement solutions in arming operational and clinical stakeholders with unlocked EHR data. Providence’s army of process engineers use their self-service access to answer questions immediately instead of waiting for reports to be written and double checked for possibly inaccurate information. The presenter will describe practical applications that include antibiotic stewardship, hospital-acquired infections, and comprehensive knowledge management.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Vestar Capital Partners acquires health plan network management software vendor Quest Analytics.

Discharge software vendor SilverVue acquires Ergo Sum Health, which offers preventive care software that supports MACRA payments to providers.

A jury orders Johnson & Johnson to pay $417 million to a woman who blames her use of the company’s baby powder for her ovarian cancer, extending a string of verdicts against the company of $110 million, $55 million, and $72 million despite a lack of evidence that the product is unsafe. That’s a lot to pay out from revenue of a product that sells for $3 at Walgreens.

Sales

University of Utah non-profit reference lab ARUP Laboratories will offer physician users Illumicare’s Smart Ribbon to display cost and risk of patient harm on EHR screens.

People

Andy Page (23andMe) joins Livongo as president and CFO.

Announcements and Implementations

Rush University Medical System (IL) sues Draeger for fraud, claiming the $18 million patient monitoring system it bought issued unreliable alarms, erased log data, and lacked the promised capability of automatically switching from wired to wireless monitoring during patient transport. Rush replaced the system for $30 million last year.

Datica posts a “Rethinking Health Technology” ebook that includes contributions from several industry luminaries, including St. Luke’s Health System VP/CIO Marc Chasin, MD and University of Wisconsin Health Center SVP/CIO Jocelyn DeWitt, PhD.

In the UAE, Al Jalila Children’s Specialty Hospital goes live on Vocera’s secure text messaging and hands-free voice communication platform.

A Department of Justice-funded project at Penn State’s nursing school will use telehealth technology to support rural sexual assault nurse examiners, offering them live physical exam mentoring, peer review, and education.

Government and Politics

The DoD proposes spending $250 million to build a five-bed hospital at Guantanamo Bay that would serve 5,500 residents and 41 prisoners. The Senate Armed Services Committee has asked for an analysis of why a tiny remote hospital would cost $50 million per bed.  

Privacy and Security

Patient rights groups complain to insurer Wellmark that one of its executives described at a local Rotary Club meeting how a 17-year-old’s hemophilia cost the company $1 million per month to treat in trying to explain that health insurance doesn’t work actuarially if only people who are already sick sign up. The group claims that the remarks constitute a HIPAA violation, which might be the case since she cited the patient’s specific age even though she didn’t step over the HIPAA line in providing geographic information that is more granular than state level.

Other

A DC magazine profiles Meghan Buck, a former political consultant who formed Veda Data to apply machine learning to keeping physician directories updated.

This is either heart-wrenching, morbid, or both. A St. Louis hospital buys Cuddle Cots, a refrigerated bassinet that allows parents of stillborn or deceased babies to “put time on hold” in allowing them take photos and dress the body instead of moving it directly to the morgue. An article from earlier this year profiles families who spent up to two weeks with their deceased child’s body, taking it home and going for stroller walks as part of their grieving process.

The Miami paper runs a Q&A with CareCloud, whose CEO Ken Comee says the company will go public because, “My competitors are 20- and 30-year-old technologies and I have the best damned platform in the space.”

In India, the dean of a medical school’s hospital is placed on leave for trying to sabotage the parent company’s enterprise patient record and imaging project in favor of the hospital’s preferred vendor.

A Forbes Africa report finds that trained doctors are forced to work as restaurant servers and call center operators due to restrictive government policies and lack of coordination between the Department of Health and individual provinces, even as hospitals struggle with a shortage of practitioners.

In India, the government denies that a reported drop in oxygen levels killed three hospitalized babies. This follows an incident in which 60 babies died when another hospital’s oxygen supply ran out due to non-payment of bills. This time, a NICU doctor noticed low levels in the oxygen storage unit and called the hospital operator, who didn’t answer and was later arrested for being drunk and asleep on the job. The hospital says parallel systems kept the oxygen flowing to the wards while the problem was resolved, blaming the deaths on natural causes and therefore declining to perform autopsies, triggering the predictable complaints of a cover-up.  

Weird News Andy isn’t elevated by this news. In Spain, a 25-year-old woman who had just delivered a daughter by C-section is crushed to death when a hospital elevator malfunctions on the way to the maternity ward. Her daughter was on the same gurney, but was unharmed.

Sponsor Updates

• Attendees at Aprima’s annual user conference make and donate 150 blankets to the Children’s Medical Center in Dallas.
• Datica announces self-service onboarding and free trials of its updated platform.
• Besler Consulting releases a new podcast, “Utilizing data and technology to manage your EPM programs.”
• Nine healthcare organizations select Nuance solutions to replace legacy radiology systems.
• ClinicalArchitecture and Diameter Health will exhibit at the SHIEC Conference August 27-30 in Indianapolis.

• The CoverMyMeds hockey team wins the league championship.
• CTG will exhibit at the AI Summit August 24-25 in Cincinnati.
• Cumberland Consulting Group raises over $2,000 for the Center for Family Services Project Backpack initiative.
• Ohio Business Magazine includes Direct Consulting Associates in its list of Best Places to Work in 2016.

Blog Posts

• Do Your Patient Access and Front-End Revenue Cycle Processes Need a Health Check? (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Medicaid Incentive Program & MACRA Medicare QPP Differences (AdvancedMD)
• #RSNA17: The countdown has started (Agfa Healthcare)
• Investing in Care Management (Arcadia Healthcare Solutions)
• Spear Phishing: Hackers Aiming for Healthcare (Datica)
• Solutions for Improving Medication Nonadherence Costs (CareSync)
• Examining the Implications of the Human Cloud (CTG)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 8/22/17

Q&A with Rucker: Giving patients modern access to their health data

In an interview with Modern Healthcare, National Coordinator for Health IT discusses information blocking, the future of API-based interoperability, and the role patients will play in getting data where it needs to be.

Community Health Systems investor calls for replacing CEO Wayne Smith

ASL Strategic Value Fund, an investor in CHS, calls for the ouster of CEO Wayne Smith, arguing that the $7.6 billion acquisition of HMA was poorly executed and directly led to a downward spiral in CHS stock prices.

Pharmacy and medical practice accused of using San Diego Marines in $67 million healthcare fraud

A doctors office in Tennessee and a pharmacy in Utah have been implicated in a scheme to defraud Tricare, the insurance provider for the military, of $67 million by generating fraudulent prescriptions for expensive compound medications.

Innovation is the future of health care

Hackensack Meridian Health (NJ) is launching a $25 million incubator program to spinoff healthcare technology companies.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 8/21/17

My practice values service to the community and often does workshops for scout groups. Sometimes we’re teaching essentials of CPR and sometimes it’s first aid.

This weekend, I had the chance to help one of my partners put on a workshop for the Medicine merit badge for his son’s Boy Scout troop. He’s an official merit badge counselor and asked me to help a couple of months ago. My brother is an Eagle Scout, so I remembered seeing the merit badge booklets around the house and thinking that they had all kinds of interesting information. Apparently now they’re full color and you can also get electronic copies, so I was glad to see that scouting is keeping up with the times.

There are also a host of unofficial sources for information. My partner steered me to a website that had a PDF workbook for the items that the boys were expected to cover. I grabbed a copy of the actual book from the library, but ended up procrastinating the actual preparation until a couple of days ago, thinking I could just do my parts of the presentation off the top of my head

When I finally hit the merit badge website Thursday night to prepare and cracked open the paper booklet, I noticed that the last update to the book was 2002 (although the website mentioned that the requirements were updated in 2005). I figured I’d be in for some entertainment as I read about how medicine was portrayed to scouts 15 years ago. I was surprised, though, with how well the materials have held up. The healthcare professionals portrayed in the booklet represent a diverse workforce and are filling a variety of roles in medicine. I realized as I was reading that much of the information provided should be required reading for people entering medical fields or for people who want to better understand the medical people they work with.

Game time came too quickly for someone who had procrastinated their preparation. I found myself Saturday morning in our break room in front of a group of teenagers eager to show their knowledge medicine. During the first part of the requirements, the scout has to do a great deal of research on historical medical figures – individuals like Hippocrates, Florence Nightingale, Louis Pasteur, Jonas Salk, Marie Curie, and more. I was impressed by the boys’ ability not only to throw out interesting facts about their subjects, but to talk about why those contributions are important to healthcare even today. (A note to the Boy Scouts: if you consider updating this, let’s think about throwing in Larry Weed for his contributions to patient care and healthcare IT).

We next moved into my part of the morning, which was to teach the boys how to take a pulse and perform a blood pressure measurement. I was quickly cast aside by an older scout who asked if he could teach the group because he had volunteered at a blood pressure screening. I’m not sure why I was even there (other than to prevent them from doing goofy things with the blood pressure cuffs, which may or may not have happened) because the scout did a great job using the EDGE method, which includes explaining, demonstrating, guiding the student, and enabling their success. Since I spend a great deal of my time dealing with processes that have gone wrong, it was so gratifying to see a teenager taking charge and getting things done. Frankly, he was a better teacher / trainer than some of the folks I work with on a daily basis. I suspect that he is going to have a great future regardless of the field he chooses.

I was also tasked with talking to them about the instruments we use in the office, including EKG machines, pulse oximeters, spirometers, and more. We talked a little about electronic health records and how information sharing works in healthcare today, and I gave a little plug for careers in healthcare IT. I don’t think any of them had ever been exposed to a clinical informaticist before (not that I would expect them to have been) and I could see a couple of the boys perk up when we started talking about the technology. They perked up the most when we talked about defibrillating people and what that process actually entails. The drama of shouting “clear” and shooting electricity through someone’s body is well-portrayed on TV and they were definitely interested in learning more about it.

Another requirement is for the boys to discuss what makes a good screening test and why tests aren’t always perfect. Listening to them tell me about specificity and sensitivity and how patients had to be informed consumers so they didn’t spend a lot of money on tests that wouldn’t do them any good truly warmed my heart. These kids are clearly growing up in a world where being an informed patient is going to be critical to staying healthy and they were embracing it.

They branched off into a little discussion on the Affordable Care Act and how people didn’t understand that it was the same thing as Obamacare and why it was a mess. I knew these kids would be informed (one of the other requirements is to research the healthcare delivery systems in Sweden and China and compare them to the United States health system) but I was impressed. I know some of them have been working with my partner individually on the requirements, but they’ve clearly done their research.

The badge also requires the scout to discuss the roles of medical societies, the government, and the insurance industry in how they influence the practice of medicine in the US. From the presentation one of the scouts gave, I suspected we had a ringer in the group who had a physician in the family. It turns out that his mom is a family medicine physician, and he talked about how much his mom’s group struggles with Meaningful Use and other programs. That was an eye-opener for some of the other boys, whose only exposure to healthcare may have been at their own doctor’s office or through what they had read in the merit badge booklet and at our workshop.

They also have to explain how their state monitors healthcare quality and how it provides care to patients who don’t have insurance. These are pretty deep subjects for the average adult, let alone for a 12-18 year old boy, and I was impressed by the fact that the badge dug into it. The boys also had to present on different types of healthcare providers along with their training and educational requirements, as well as different subspecialties and what it takes to become a physician in those disciplines. It was entertaining to hear what the boys thought some of the specialties do vs. what we actually do – paperwork and charting were never mentioned in any of their synopses.

The scouts also had to research the Hippocratic Oath and explain it, along with comparing the original to a more modern version. They had to “discuss to whom those subscribing to the original version of the oath owe the greatest allegiance” (for those of you who haven’t read it lately, it’s not the patient). That led to a discussion of the patient-physician relationship and how it’s important in delivering quality care.

We also discussed the role of patient confidentiality and HIPAA. A couple of the boys in the group are 17 and will be adults soon, so I was able to talk to them a little about deciding whether to include their patients to be able to receive information when they go to the doctor and who they would want to make decisions for them in the event that they couldn’t. These are topics that most parents don’t cover with their young adults before they head off to college. It was a little bit outside of requirements, but it was a valuable discussion.

The scouts also have to volunteer at a health-related event in the community that they’ve had approved by my partner. Some of them have already done their volunteer work and it was interesting to hear what they did – handing out health flyers at a community event, volunteering at a free clinic, and working as a teen aide at the hospital. A couple more are planning to work at an upcoming blood drive and then they’ll be able to earn their badges. Looking at the information they had to explain, discuss, and tell about during the workshop (more than an hour and a half of discussion for each scout) plus the additional research to prepare for their presentations and the documentation they all brought, it seems like this might be one of the more intense merit badges the boys are exposed to. According to my partner, the Public Health merit badge has even more requirements.

It was exciting to see the leaders of tomorrow motivated to learn about our field and willing to spend time serving their community. It gives me hope that even as complicated as healthcare is, we have bright young people eager to try to figure out the best ways to serve patients in the coming decades.

Have you talked to young people about your career in healthcare IT? Email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

HIStalk Interviews Gadi Lachman, CEO, TriNetX

Gadi Lachman is CEO of TriNetX of Cambridge, MA.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I was born in Israel. I served in the Special Forces there. Everybody starts as a soldier and a few become officers. I was lucky to become one.

I studied accounting and law. I turned around my father’s business, which was educational services. He was a big entrepreneur there. Then I came to the United States. I did my MBA at Harvard and was a Baker Scholar. I worked at Lehman Brothers, and after that, a lot of technology IT companies, always in the healthcare space. A lot of healthcare IT, all either in extreme build-out mode and extreme growth or turnaround situations. I live in the Boston area with my wife, my three kids, and my dog.

How is technology changing the clinical trials enrollment process?

It’s technology, it’s data, and it’s a huge desire for change. All good people, all trying to develop therapies for the benefit of patients. Structural problems in that industry make it very hard to be successful, to develop good therapies in a short timeframe and at an OK cost, not at a cost that’s skyrocketing and goes up and up.

The main structural impediment to the success of this industry is the fact that each part of that industry tries to do the best job themselves, but the collaboration between the different industry players has been minimal and tactical. You have hospitals and institutions that have a lot of data, but it has been hard to use that data in an efficient way in the drug development process. You have players that need that information, but develop very tactical relationships with the healthcare organizations on the side.

We are a Novartis vision and a Novartis idea. They wanted to disrupt the clinical trial design space. Some of the reasons that clinical trials fail are good reasons. Some drugs and therapies should never be developed. They’re just not effective. It’s OK and good for those things to fail as soon as possible so people can move on quickly.

But a lot of times, the development of good drugs and good therapies is failing for the wrong reasons. It’s failing because of bad protocol design and bad trial design because the wrong sites are being selected.

We were created to solve the bad reasons for which some of those processes are failing. Novartis’s vision was, and our vision is, that a solution to big problems has to come from collaboration at the strategic level that did not exist before we came. Hence, what we do and what we’re trying to solve and disrupt. We’re building a global network of collaboration between pharma companies and companies that serve them, such as the CROs and HCOs. When I say HCOs — healthcare organizations — those are mega-hospitals, those are big institutions that see a lot of patients and have access to millions and millions of patient records.

The idea was that the only way to solve the big problem is to bring all those players to the table strategically. We are almost a club. Everybody brings different things to that club and gets different points of value from the club. Only by doing something like that, we believe, can you tackle a really big problem.

What can a large health system do differently in being in a network with other players?

By joining a network like that, you help support the process of designing an efficient protocol with real-world data, which is data that has been generated in real care settings as opposed to lab-generated data. You’re going to get more visibility to all the pharma members of that network, which means you’re going to get more study opportunities. You don’t have to take every opportunity pharma is giving you, but now you have the privilege, by joining the network, to see more opportunities in the therapeutic areas that are interesting to you.

A few of the sites that are members of our network got more than 50 trial opportunities from pharma and CROs that they would otherwise not get. Did they elect to participate in all those 50? Absolutely not. But now they can be more selective. They can decide to participate in trials that are interesting to them and try to give more hope to their patients any trials that they think they can be successful in delivering. As an HCO, you become part of a deal flow of studies that are coming your way.

Second, and I didn’t know this when we started the company, we’re living in the era of networks. Because everything is precision medicine, every cohort is getting smaller and smaller. Every therapy is becoming more and more directed at smaller subsets of the population. If you’re just one site — even if you have access to data of three or four or five million patients — it’s just not good enough. You start to look at the rare disease cohorts that you have and it’s not enough to get any insight.

Sites that join us get the privilege to be able to collaborate with other sites and share data, so if there is a rare disease that you have five patients, but you add another five sites to your network, now your researchers at the site can see data from 30 patients and that is very meaningful. That’s another reason they join us – not just to get more business from pharma and CROs, but so they can do a better job researching cohorts that they can’t do by themselves.

A third reason is that we are giving the sites very powerful tools to conduct clinical research. Before we came, their researchers needed to use suboptimal systems with very limited insight. We are giving them a user interface and the ability to query large amounts of data in a way that makes a lot of meaning for those that are interested at the HCO, not just to take care of and treat patients, but also to make progress with research and to move the boundary forward.

What do you think of organizations such as UCSF that are mining the wealth of data from their EHRs and other systems to look for new drug uses or correlations between genomics and disease states?

That’s exactly why we have TriNetX, absolutely. I wholeheartedly believe in that. Everybody who works for me and myself, we’ve all lost family members for therapies that were developed and brought to market a few years later. It’s also relevant for us as people that want to live longer and with high quality. A lot of the data to make a big impact is already available — it’s just no one was able to make it available.

I’ll give you a few numbers. We have more than 55 huge HCOs joining us that have together more than 80 million patients from all over the world. We have sites in the US, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the UK, Israel. We just recently signed Singapore. We’re building global collaboration and we’re giving it back to the researchers because they will come up with the questions and they will come up with the answers. They will find the correlations that no one even thought to ask and no one even thought made sense in the first place.

To do something like that, you’ve got to be able to harmonize tons of data all over the world. Demographics are important in our mission. There are populations from a demographic standpoint that are being under-represented in studies, and therefore the therapies that are being developed could potentially be less relevant for them. By building a global network that has all nationalities and all those different types of patients, you can start finding correlations between things, again, that you didn’t even think to ask.

I feel we hit the market at the right time. Maybe if we tried to do that 10 years ago, people would have been shy about that. Today, it’s the opposite. They are very savvy. They want to collaborate. They want to come together into a gigantic network. Not everybody is fortunate to be a part of the UC system, so you want to be part of something bigger. We are providing them with that opportunity and they get a ton of capabilities in return, exactly like that collaboration that you mentioned.

Will the FDA’s role change as study cohorts become virtual and study methods change?

Absolutely. I think if you look at the history of development of therapies from fighting bacteria to finding a way to live with HIV, things that used to take 50 years then take five and three and two years if everybody’s really in it together and doing things differently. I think the FDA and every regulatory body was doing extremely important work to protect the safety and balance all those different forces from that ecosystem. They’re starting to take a look at those technologies and those access points to data that we provide and figuring out that some things could be accelerated. Some trials could be conducted in real-world settings. There are alternative ways to understand the potential positive or negative impact of therapies and drugs and they are much more accelerated and they’re cheaper, potentially, on massive quantities of data.

If you think about it, there are so many trials being conducted today where nobody is calling them a trial. Every time an off-label drug is being recommended or prescribed, there are a lot of interested parties that would love to know the effectiveness of that off-label behavior, including those that are prescribing it. It just wasn’t able to be a reality a couple of years ago, but our vision is to make this a reality. To be able to take all this data and bring it back to the people that need to see that.

It’s not just the FDA,  just to add another facet to your question. You have people and players that avoided research because they couldn’t afford to be part of that, to license those technologies, or they never had access to the data. But by making it available in such a broader way, you will bring more participants into this research community, and I think only good things will happen from that.

What can we learn from the disproportionate success of Israel-based entrepreneurs and startups?

One is a mindset. I did work on that when I did my MBA, not to say I’m an expert on the entrepreneurial success of Israel and why, but there are structural components to the success there. One, as an example, the lack of natural resources and the need on the military side to compete with enemies that are 10 times your size. If Israel will always have one tank and the nations surrounding it have 10, then it means that one Israeli tank needs to take out 10 tanks in order for Israel to prevail.

How do you trade effectiveness of 1 to 10? The answer is mostly technology. Israel was always forced to take technology to the cutting edge in order to survive. All those military technologies and a lot of that mindset, even if it’s not a military technology, transpires. You have a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of new ideas.

Also in Israel, everybody has to serve in the military. You get that mindset. When you leave the Army, you still have that mindset. You are OK daring and trying to do new things and trying to get that 1 to 10 ratio that you were taught in the military that that’s what you need to have in order to survive.

Having your back against the wall, the need to be an innovator or die, and the access you had to like-minded people and cutting-edge technology — you can then bring it back and try to do other things with that.

Do you have any final thoughts?

I would love all the players to always, in the end, think of the patient. That should drive every decision they make, more than financial decisions, more than “this is my data and I’m not letting anyone touch it,” more than “I’ll be the biggest I can be, but maybe I don’t need to collaborate with anyone else.” If there’s something I pray for, it’s that alongside corporate decisions, P&L decisions, financial decisions, and this and that, people always go back to that inner soul that they have and that helps drive some of the big decisions as well. I think it will help a lot.

Morning Headlines 8/21/17

The Appointment Ends. Now the Patient Is Listening.

The New York Times covers the growing trend of patients recording their own medical appointments so that they can revisit the conversation in the future.

Trends in Laboratory Information Systems

A small survey of laboratory managers and directors find that 60 percent are currently looking to replace their existing LIS.

Bedside portal at WellStar reduces patient anxiety, lowers costs

A local paper covers the WellStar (GA) implementation of Epic MyChart across its hospitals.

MCMC may sell visiting health services

Mid-Columbia Medical Center (OR) is considering options for its unprofitable home health agency, which it says is difficult to improve because it runs a different EHR than the hospital, making care coordination cumbersome. The hospital is on Epic, and migrating the agency to Epic would reportedly cost $750,000.

Monday Morning Update 8/21/17

Top News

The New York Times reviews patients recording their doctor visit for their later review.

The article notes that one family practitioner records patient visits himself, then uploads the annotated recordings to a secure web platform that patients and family members can review at any time. He says the de-identified recordings could help researchers find ways to improve medical communication.

University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston buys recorders and batteries in bulk and offers them to cancer patients, with 300 of them accepting the devices each year. The program will be expanded to internal medicine and geriatrics.

The article describes how a neurosurgeon records his visits on an iPad and posts them to a platform he created called Medical Memory. He says half of the patients watched their videos more than once and its use has cut the practice’s malpractice insurance costs in half. 

A recently published research proposal describes a Dartmouth project to develop a platform that would store visit recordings and use machine learning to tag their specific elements, such as the treatment plan.

Reader Comments

From Nutmeg Grater: “Re: Allscripts. This is their new, top-secret EHR. Two years of work and just recently deemed not ready to demo at ACE. I wonder if they forgot about this website?” The Care Otter website doesn’t mention Allscripts specifically, but (a) some of the folks whose bios are listed hail from there, and (b) I found a cached copy of a since-removed API documentation page whose FHIR API license agreement lists Allscripts as the licensor. The company touts its “bleeding edge technology” and data science. The group’s address is, per Google Maps, a defunct steakhouse in Litchfield, IL. Their job postings list technologies such as Azure, Power BI, Apple’s Swift 3, the Xamarin moble app development platform, and reactive programming. Care Otter’s LinkedIn lists 56 employees, including former Allscripts engineering SVP Jeff Franks as president. Here’s a YouTube video highlighting Silicon Valley aspirations with dogs running around the office, free snacks at the bar, impromptu kite-flying, and collaborative slouch-ready furniture in what they call the “SiloCorn Valley.” I like the strategy of putting a creative group in a freewheeling setting far from corporate overseers, although the ultimate success measure is whether Care Otter earns market share.

From ACD_Fan: “Re: Epic. Our local hospital seems to be moving to it under the Community Connect program of Parkview Health Systems in Fort Wayne, IN. Another Paragon client jumps ship.” DeKalb Health’s web page says it is moving to Epic.

From Turnaround Failure: “Re: Presence Health. Word on the street is that Presence Health will announce Monday its merger with Ascension. Bet that Advocate, North Shore, and Northwestern will have something to say about that.” Unverified. The struggling 11-hospital Presence, created by the 2011 merger of Provena Health and Resurrection Health Care, announced plans earlier this month to sell two downstate hospitals to OSF HealthCare. I think Presence uses Epic, while Ascension is mostly Cerner.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I ran a reader’s query last week about the status of Cerner PowerInsight. The company provided this response, although the referenced HealtheEDW does not appear anywhere I could find on Cerner’s website:

PowerInsight Explorer is still available and widely used across Cerner’s US and global client base as a real-time reporting tool for Cerner Millennium. Cerner’s go-forward enterprise data warehouse, HealtheEDW, was released in 2011 and built on the source-agnostic cloud platform HealtheIntent. PowerInsight EDW will be supported in the US and sold globally as Cerner transitions legacy clients to HealtheEDW and stands up the cloud platform in global markets.

I received these responses to the reader’s question about FHIR specs:

• Much better than HL7’s old-style PDF bundles. Faster to navigate, easier to reference in our own documentation.
• I’m confused by what Sweet Ride is asking. I’ve done next to nothing with FHIR, having spent most of my career working with 2.x and V3/CDA, so maybe I’m looking at the wrong specs but the FHIR specs I’m looking at on hl7.org (starting with http://hl7.org/fhir/) are HTML and seem to me to be well-organized and easy to use. It’s definitely different than the PDFS HL7 used to use but I find it easier to navigate than previous specs – particularly V3/CDA.
• Anything is better than the current format.

It’s probably a lost cause trying to take the term “cloud-based” back to its original technical meaning as companies have turned it into a loosely-defined marketing slogan. Clustered says that while it really just means “in our basement instead of yours” and marketing departments have abused the term, it’s still accurate although incomplete, requiring prospects to perform due diligence.

New poll to your right or here: which of these inpatient EHR vendor companies do you admire most? I’ve hidden the interim results this time to hopefully decrease desperate ballot box stuffing. Feel free to add a comment explaining your choice.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Image Stream Medical. The Littleton, MA-based company’s technology connects providers with visual information and collaborative insight that allows them to make better decisions and to spend more time caring for patients. Solutions include procedure space integration, procedure recording, medical virtual presence for teaching, live video streaming, real-time room status, clinical video and image content management, video editing, and integrating procedure and video images with EHR, PACS, VNA, and other repositories to create a unified patient record. Healthcare systems benefit from increased clinical efficiency, reduced risk, improved patient safety by automating tasks, and reduced infection risk in allowing observers to participate outside the procedure room. The company, acquired by Olympus Corporation of the Americas in May 2017, just announced MedPresence, a virtual presence solution that allows surgical and interventional clinicians to connect and collaborate virtually. Thanks to Image Stream Medical for supporting HIStalk.

This Week in Health IT History

One year ago:

• Gartner predicts via its Hype Cycle that the technologies that will most quickly find mainstream adoption are machine learning, software-defined anything, and natural language question answering.
• Promedica (OH) attributes its swing to a big first-half loss on the cost of implementing Epic, while MD Anderson Cancer Center (TX) also blames Epic-caused higher expenses and lower patient revenue for its 77 percent drop in net income.
• A Medscape physician EHR survey finds that Epic is the most-used by far, Allscripts falls from #2 to far down in the list in user scoring, the VA’s VistA is the top-rated EHR overall, and VistA and Epic lead the pack in connectivity.

Five years ago:

• NextGen President Scott Decker resigns following the addition of dissident shareholder representatives to the board of parent company Quality Systems.
• Walgreens announces plans to deploy an customized version of Greenway PrimeSuite as its pharmacy EHR.
• University of Michigan Health System names Sue Schade as its new CIO.

Ten years ago:

• Congress gives the VA $1.9 billion for EMR and DoD integration, with the Appropriations Committee calling for blocking any EMR expenditures for software that won’t work with DoD systems and for the VA to work with private software companies to improve interoperability and mobile apps.
• West Penn goes live on Eclipsys.
• Misys licenses iMedica’s PM/EHR to get a small-practice system to market quickly.

Weekly Anonymous Reader Question

I got a ton of responses to “best musical group or performer seen live,” so I will excerpt (the asterisked ones were named more than once):

• Prince*
• Depeche Mode*
• Bruce Springsteen*
• Rolling Stones*
• Led Zeppelin*
• Moody Blues*
• Garth Brooks*
• U2*
• Pink Floyd*
• Billy Joel and Elton John*
• Paul McCartney*
• Adele*
• Santana*
• Radiohead
• Nine-Inch Nails
• AC/DC
• Journey
• Tedeschi Trucks Band
• My Morning Jacket
• LCD Soundsystem
• The Who
• Living Colour
• Nektar
• Grateful Dead
• Genesis
• Annie Lennox
• Jason Mraz
• Dead Kennedys
• Earl Scruggs Review
• Train
• Chicago
• The Wiggles
• Soundgarden
• Bryan Ferry
• Lindsey Buckingham
• Ray Charles
• Paco de Lucia
• John Prine
• Arcade Fire
• Ed Sheeran
• Mark Knopfler
• Tragically Hip
• Meatloaf
• The White Stripes
• Kid Rock
• Styx
• Beyonce
• James Taylor
• Steve Wonder
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor
• Kendrick Lamar
• The Clash
• Sarah Brightman
• John Mayer
• Phish
• Great Big Sea
• Shinedown
• Alanis Morrisette
• Red Hot Chili Peppers
• Jethro Tull
• John Hiatt
• Steve Winwood and Traffic
• Savages
• Jimi Hendrix
• Neil Young with Booker T and the MGs
• Uncle Tupelo
• The Old 97s
• Gladys Knight and the Pips
• Big Head Todd and the Monsters
• Coldplay
• Brian Wilson
• J. Geils
• Air Supply
• Guns N Roses
• Clarence Clemons
• The Rippingtons
• Metallica
• Lynyrd Skynyrd
• Bee Gees
• Iron Maiden
• Frank Zappa
• Melissa Etheridge
• The Eagles
• Jimmy Buffett
• Aretha Franklin
• Van Cliburn
• Dixie Chicks
• Gil Shaham

This week’s question:  what is the most memorable, creative, or effective thing you’ve seen a HIMSS conference exhibitor do to drive business, establish relationships, or create buzz?

Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• HIMSS Analytics data shows Cerner holding a slight edge over Epic in overall US hospital count, but Epic handily leading in large-hospital customers, total beds served, and doctors that use its ambulatory EHR.
• Google buys Senosis Health, which is developing smartphone sensors and apps for diagnosis jaundice, reduced lung function, and low hemoglobin.
• NIH awards Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia an NIH grant to mine databases to look for causes of pediatric cancer and birth defects.

Webinars

September 13 (Wednesday) 1:30 ET. “How Data Democratization Drives Enterprise-wide Clinical Process Improvement.” Sponsored by: LogicStream Health. Presenter: Katy Jones, program director of clinical support, Providence Health & Services. Providence is demonstrating positive measurable results in quality, outcomes, and efficiency by implementing clinical process improvement solutions in arming operational and clinical stakeholders with unlocked EHR data. Providence’s army of process engineers use their self-service access to answer questions immediately instead of waiting for reports to be written and double checked for possibly inaccurate information. The presenter will describe practical applications that include antibiotic stewardship, hospital-acquired infections, and comprehensive knowledge management.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Investment research firm Hedgeye picked up the rumor I ran last week from reader At Last an Alias that Baylor Scott & White will replace Allscripts with Epic starting in the next few weeks, saying another research company confirmed the rumor with Allscripts. The firm’s tweets say that Allscripts has lost two of its top five Sunrise customers in the last six months (New York-Presbyterian and now BSW, assuming they have confirmed the rumor), with those two health systems representing 12.5 percent of all US Sunrise business with their 19 hospitals and 7,000 licensed beds. They tweeted out the graphic above (click to enlarge) that shows the top 25 Sunrise customers and indicating which are at risk. The elephant in the room is obviously Northwell Health (the former North Shore-LIJ) which along with University Hospitals are the only two of the top six Sunrise customers that haven’t already announced plans to replace it with Epic or Cerner. The former Baylor Health System is the only part of BSW that still runs Allscripts following its 2013 merger with Epic-using Scott & White.

Meanwhile, Hedgeye speculates on the identity of the puzzlingly unnamed six-hospital system that Allscripts announced as a new Sunrise customer in its August 3 earnings announcement. NantHealth’s Patrick Soon-Shiong bought struggling six-hospital Verity Health in July. The company later worked out a deal that allowed Allscripts to trade back its devalued $200 million investment in NantHealth for the FusionFx software suite and NantHealth’s promise to buy Allscripts products. The Allscripts 10-Q form says its Q1 bookings growth was almost entirely driven by “a large new multi-year relationship with a commercial partner that was executed during the second quarter of 2017.”

Decisions

• Enloe Medical Center (CA) will switch from Meditech to Epic in 2018.
• Erlanger Bledsoe Hospital (TN) will go live on Epic in October 2017.
• Erlanger East Hospital (TN) will go live on Epic in 2017, replacing McKesson.
• Virtua Memorial Hospital (NJ) will go live on Epic in the spring of 2018.

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

Announcements and Implementations

A new Reaction report from a survey of 119 people (most of them lab managers and directors) covers trends in laboratory information systems, concluding that best-of-breed LIS vendors such as Sunquest, SCC, and Orchard are at significant risk as a shocking 60 percent of LIS customers overall say they are considering replacing systems, with many of those likely to move to their EHR vendor’s offering in enterprise decisions made by executives instead of lab managers. Sunquest is listed as having the highest risk of contract replacement and the lowest net promoter score among the best-of-breed vendors as well as the lowest mindshare among all vendors that offer LISs, while the report notes that Epic has massive mindshare despite its KLAS-leading LIS offering that is just five years old. Orchard leads the NPS scores of all vendors by far, but it’s a tiny sample size. The report concludes, “It’s also not unreasonable to expect continued (although modest) consolidation, as the writing may be on the wall for some best-of-breed LIS vendors, causing them to seriously consider finding suitors among the EHR vendors.” Allscripts is now in the LIS business with its acquisition of McKesson EIS that includes a lab system as well as a blood bank module that Epic says it will never develop. Allscripts has previously offered Orchard LIS to its Sunrise customers. 

Technology

Amazon releases a developer toolkit for Alexa that provides programming interfaces for adding hands-free voice control to software products.

Other

An Atlanta-area business paper profiles the use by several area WellStar hospitals of Epic’s MyChart Bedside, in which the hospitals give patients a tablet that contains care team bios, meds, lab results, vital signs, and treatment schedules.

MaineGeneral Medical Center (I detest that spelling) blames a technical error for its sending of nearly 10,000 bills of under $25 to a collection agency.

US tourists are apparently being served tainted or drugged alcohol at upscale, all-inclusive resorts in Mexico’s Riviera Maya, sometimes resulting in crimes being committed against them. The story says nobody in Mexico really seems to care, including the resorts themselves, as visitors are assaulted, extorted by police, fall victim to drowning, or are regaining consciousness only to find unexplained broken bones or other injuries and no memory of the preceding hours, all after minimal alcohol consumption and often with simultaneous symptoms among group members. The US State Department has issued a Mexico travel warning about tainted alcohol and the Mexican government confirms that up to half the alcohol consumed there is produced illegally. Tourists report frustration at the indifference of the resorts when they report problems, the upfront cash required to obtain medical treatment at hospitals, and the fact that nobody ever gets arrested even though the tourists file reports in person with the local police departments.

When injured tourists turned to police, an instinctive step for many Americans, they were often stonewalled again. For starters, resorts in Mexico don’t typically call law enforcement to the scene. Vacationers have to take complaints to the police station. The few who did encountered further indifference: Nothing to investigate. It was an accident. You were drunk. In one case, a woman who was sexually assaulted by a hotel security guard … said the police chief overseeing her case seemed genuinely concerned and determined to help her … The chief tried to get the Iberostar Paraiso Maya resort to cooperate with the investigation and to provide photos of security staff. Frias was shot dead in his squad car months later. Local news reports said it was likely a killing meant to intimidate law enforcement.

The money-losing visiting health service of Mid-Columbia Medical Center (OR) says its use of a non-Epic EHR while the hospital uses Epic is hard since physician care plans don’t move electronically, but the service is still not willing to spend $750,000 to implement Epic.

I’m surprised that the names and logos of these healthcare services companies haven’t earned the attention of Epic’s legal team.

Potential jurors being interviewed by attorneys involved in the securities fraud case against pharma bro Martin Shkreli had some interesting comments recorded, although perhaps some of them were just grandstanding to get out of  jury service:

• I’m aware of the defendant and I hate him.
• He’s the most hated man in America. In my opinion, he equates with Bernie Madoff with the drugs for pregnant women going from $15 to $750.
• I just walked in and looked right at him and that’s a snake.
• I believe the defendant is the face of corporate greed in America.
• I don’t think I can [judge him impartially] because he kind of looks like a dick.
• The only thing I’d be impartial about is what prison this guy goes to.
• I just can’t understand why he would be so stupid as to take an antibiotic which HIV people need and jack it up 5,000 percent. I would honestly, like, seriously like to go over there …
• It’s my attitude toward his entire demeanor, what he has done to people. And, he disrespected the Wu-Tang Clan.

A hospital visitor in China is detained by police after posting online criticism of the price of the cafeteria’s meals, saying he “wanted to faint” when he saw the small portion of his $2 bowl of noodles, adding, “Poor quality, expensive prices, little food – is this still a hospital for the people?” After the man’s arrest, local police reminded Internet users that it is illegal to post false information online although they didn’t actually say he was lying. The article reminds me of how weird hospital cafeterias are: (a) they are just about the only place other than grocery store food bars to sell some foods by weight; (b) they don’t allow free refills on their overpriced drinks; (c) they are often outsourced to companies accustomed to serving low-bidder meals to prisoners and high school students, outfitting their unsmiling employees in jaunty, chef-like attire to suggest culinary artistry instead of the heating of frozen institutional entrees; and (d) they are passionate about portion control but indifferent to taste, customer experience, and wiping down tables and chairs between occupants, some of them wearing scrubs bearing materials you would not want near you while eating. There’s a challenge for you – send me photos of whatever you find weird about your hospital’s cafeteria.

Sponsor Updates

• Redox will exhibit at Health:Further August 23-24 in Nashville.
• Impact Advisors employees donate 385 pounds of personal care products to troops deployed overseas.
• The SSI Group will exhibit at the NC HFMA Summer Institute August 23 in Myrtle Beach, SC.
• Sunquest Information Systems will host its users group meeting August 21-24 in Tucson, AZ.
• Visage Imaging publishes a new whitepaper, “Can you? Visage can. Volume 1: Speed.”
• Medecision is named to the 2017 IDC Health Insights HealthTech Rankings Top 50.

Blog Posts

• What the new changes to MU and IQR mean for you (Advisory Board)
• 70 Healthcare Books for People Who Want to Understand the Industry (Redox)
• 5 Methods to Prevent Colleagues from Being Backseat Drivers (Salesforce)
• MACRA Challenges for Hospitals in 2018 (The SSI Group)
• Your Online Reputation: Learn How to Own It, Work It, and Reap the Rewards (Solutionreach)
• NACDS Total Store Expo: Pharmacies are increasingly playing a critical role in driving interoperability in healthcare (Surescripts)
• Jumping the hurdles to value-based care (Verscend Technologies)
• Close collaboration creates solid solutions. (Voalte)
• The Evolution of 911 and PSAP Data (West Corp.)
• Opioid Overdose: Looking for the signs (Conduent Health)
• Tips and Tools to Monitor Charge Correction at Go-Live (Sagacious Consultants)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 8/18/17

A Start-Up Suggests a Fix to the Health Care Morass

The New York Times profiles Aledade, a startup founded by former National Coordinator for health IT Farzad Mostashari, MD.

Strategic partnership enables physicians to conduct clinical research and offer new clinical therapies to their patients

Allscripts announces a partnership with Elligo Health Research that will allow users to enroll patients in clinical trials managed by clinical research organizations.

Mylan Agrees to Pay $465 Million to Resolve False Claims Act Liability for Underpaying EpiPen Rebates

EpiPen manufacturer Mylan will pay a $465 million fine to settle a false claim act for intentionally misclassifying EpiPen as a generic drug to avoid paying rebates to Medicaid.

Cerner selected as Medical Center’s new electronic health record provider

St. John’s Medical Center (WV) choses Cerner Millennium CommunityWorks as its next EHR.

News 8/18/17

Top News

The New York Times profiles Aledade, started by former National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM.

The piece calls Aledade a tech startup (it has raised $75 million in investor funding), which seems incorrect since technology is just a tiny part of its ACO program to improve healthcare quality and reduced cost via its primary care doctor participants. The profile was run in the Technology section of the paper.

Aledade gets paid only if it saves Medicare money, which didn’t happen in 2016. Second-year results are due in October and Mostashari says he expects the company to generate revenue then.

Reader Comments

From At Last an Alias: “Re: Baylor Scott & White. Replacing Allscripts with Epic starting in October, estimated to take 18 months. I think this just refers to the 10 owned facilities. The North Texas ambulatory practices (aka Health Texas Provider Network) converted from Centricity to Epic in October 2016.” Unverified.

From Sweet Ride: “Re: FHIR. Older health standards are published as PDF or text documents, but FHIR has developed a new format for sharing specs that has the same look, feel, and functionality as the FHIR Standard for Trial Use, which they believe will be preferable to their developer audience. Our organization is trying to decide if we should move fast or slow to this format for our FHIR specs given that most hospitals and vendors aren’t used to FHIR yet and may prefer PDFs. Any chance you could run a survey to get input from your readership?” I set up a survey for those willing to help Sweet Ride out. I don’t know anything about it, so maybe we could all stand some enlightening from those who do.

From BI Watcher: “Re: Cerner PowerInsight. Did they quietly discontinue it? I’m looking at the latest KLAS analytics report and there’s no mention of it. It was listed last year, albeit with dismal scores.” I don’t know, but I bet someone who does will respond.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Blain Newton of HIMSS Analytics is providing great information on EHR vendor footprints, which I appreciate. Here’s his latest, responding to an HIStalk reader who wondered about total inpatient beds served by vendor (click to enlarge). The dominance of Epic and Cerner is obvious.

Here’s a view comparing 2012 market share by bed count vs. that of 2016. Meditech and Allscripts each lost 15 percent of their bed coverage over those years as hospital EHR uptake was booming, while McKesson customers stampeded for the door (and into the arms of Cerner and Epic) as the company lost nearly half of the beds it was covering in 2012. Both Cerner and Epic gained a lot of business, but Epic jumped most significantly (120 percent) to lead the pack. 

This last graph shows the utter dominance of Epic in terms of physicians using its ambulatory EHR and the dismal failure of Cerner to make a respectable showing.

I’ve also asked Blain if he can identify the fastest-growing large health systems/chains and which system they use corporately (which would foretell vendor footprint gains for doing nothing but watching their customers grow). It would also be really interesting to add up the total revenue of each vendor’s customer base as an even better indicator of customer footprint, but that sounds like a daunting project. Fascinating stuff. It’s pretty cool that Blain is willing to share this information given that HIMSS Analytics is in the business of selling rather than gifting it. I certainly appreciate it.

An anonymous HIStalk reader donated to my DonorsChoose campaign. Her money plus matching fully funded the first project below and provided the remaining funds needed to complete the other three:

• Beginner robotics and STEM activities for Ms. M’s first grade class in Knoxville, TN
• Tolerance and individuality books and study desks for Mrs. P’s first grade class in Williamsburg, VA
• Educational materials for teaching tolerance through STEM exploration for Ms. P’s first grade class in Orlando, FL
• Frederick Douglass autobiography books for the tolerance project of Ms. O’s high school class in San Antonio, TX

I’m growing increasingly impatient at articles – most of them written by inexperienced industry newbies, some of them submitted to me as Readers Write articles aimed at a C-level audience – whose authors think they are insightful in reciting dull, plainly obvious facts, often to pad out questionably valuable articles. I’m a harsh self-editor perpetually in “just the facts” mode and such journalistic flab drives me nuts. Here’s a sampling from some of those sites that elicit an instant “duh” when I read them:

• Get everyone on the same page.
• Now is the time to start steering toward actionable information for the sake of clinicians and, even more important, the patients that IT, administrators, executives and caregivers all serve.
• The barriers to EHR implementation and interoperability are slowly coming down and once they do, vendors will start looking to add more functionalities to the systems.
• Improved healthcare interoperability is a top priority for providers, policymakers, and patients in 2017.
• Getting a footing in the health IT industry is more challenging than it looks.
• Care coordination between healthcare settings can have a significant impact on patient care.

This week on HIStalk Practice: Amazing Charts decides to sunset InLight. AdvancedMD develops physician reputation management tool. HHS celebrates National Health Center Week with grants to centers across the country. Aledade partners with local PCPs to launch New Jersey ACO. DuPage Medical Group welcomes $1.45 billion investment. UnitedHealthcare helps fund telemedicine services at Kansas FQHC. Prescription management and delivery service company Phil raises $10 million. New Jersey Academy of Family Physicians President believesphysicians are shouldering too much of the opioid epidemic blame. AMA President David Barbe, MD shares his frustration with home state of Missouri’s PDMP efforts.

Listening: Ayreon, progressive metal rock opera from a Netherlands-based virtuoso who “casts” singers to portray “characters” that perform only in studio since the “band” never appears on stage. With one exception: they’re playing their first-ever actual concerts September 15-17 in the Netherlands featuring 16 singers, including the incomparable Floor Jansen of After Forever and Nightwish. 

Webinars

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

Vince and Frank put their usual expert and brutally honest spin on “Allscripts’ ‘Repeal and Replace’ of McKesson’s EIS” in Thursday’s webinar. We had a bunch of people watching live and the boys answered their questions at the end, guaranteeing that your one hour of watching the YouTube video will be well spent. I tuned in for a quick look and ended up hooked into watching the entire presentations.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Israel-based Medaware, whose technology warns a physician when their drug order appears to deviate from the normal prescribing patterns of similar patients, raises $8 million in Series A funding, increasing its total to $12 million. 

Revenue cycle technology vendor ESolutions acquires RemitData, which offers comparative analytics.

Forbes names Salesforce as the world’s most innovative company for 2017.

EpiPen maker Mylan will pay $465 million to resolve False Claims Act charges that the company intentionally misclassified the drug product as a generic drug to avoid paying rebates to Medicaid.

Sales

St. John’s Medical Center (WY) chooses Cerner Millennium CommunityWorks, explaining that it “began seeking an alternative EHR vendor when industry events called into question the hospital’s ability to ensure that support from the vendor would continue to be available.” I believe they are (soon to be were) a McKesson (soon to be Allscripts) Paragon user.

Gwinnett Medical Center (GA) chooses ROI Healthcare Solutions to provide around-the-clock support for its legacy systems during its new EHR implementation.

People

The Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative names Kelly Thompson (Pennsylvania Department of Health) as CEO.

Verisys hires Joe Montler (McKesson) as SVP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Glytec earns its fourth FDA clearance for components to Glucommander, the core of its patented EGlycemic Management System: a titration module for enteral nutrition patients, an insulin-to-carb ration titration for outpatients, a more streamlined transition of inpatients from intravenous to subcutaneous insulin therapy, and general enhancements to the user interface, workflow capabilities, and messaging.

Allscripts will offer its EHR users access to clinical trials via integration with the trials recruitment system of Elligo Health Research.

Sunquest Information Systems will resell automated laboratory testing software from Software Testing Solutions.

Other

A St. Louis podiatrist who owns a company that services nursing homes is sentenced to 90 months in prison and ordered to repay $7 million for creating an EHR that automatically logged diseases and symptoms the patients didn’t have and for pressuring his employed podiatrists to provide unneeded services. His attorney wife is already in prison for the same conspiracy and the company’s CEO and four of its podiatrists are awaiting sentencing.

A 31-year-old restaurant owner is charged with assault after a cardiology clinic’s front desk employee told him his test wasn’t covered by insurance, after which he grabbed her computer monitor (luckily, it was a flat panel) and threw it at her.

I was amused by this newswire photo, which suggests that VA Secretary David Shulkin, MD rushed right over from hospital rounds to appear in a White House photo op, stethoscope poking conspicuously from his pocket. I have to laugh when doctors who clearly have no use for a stethoscope – such as administrators, psychiatrists, and dermatologists – still drape one over their shoulders or hang it prominently from their pocket to make sure everybody reflexively genuflects. At least Shulkin is an internist and still sees patients, according to some reports. My early experience in rural community hospitals was that the biggest quacks we had on staff – mostly foreign medical graduates back then when standards were low and they didn’t even have to take US boards – were likely to strut around in stiffly starched, name-embroidered lab coats adorned with stethoscopes, perhaps for convenience in pronouncing dead the patients they were mismanaging with a stunning mix of incompetence and arrogance.

A Jackson Memorial Hospital (FL) respiratory therapist is arrested for attempting to view child pornography on a hospital computer that a co-worker had left logged on. There was no happy ending to the story — he couldn’t even see the material he was arrested for seeking because the hospital’s web monitoring software blocked him (doh!)

Sponsor Updates

• Medecision Chief Marketing Officer Ellen Dalton will speak at a Technology Association of Georgia Marketing roundtable September 6 in Atlanta.
• Meditech and Parallon Technology Solutions will exhibit at the HIMSS Summit of the Southeast August 23-24 in Nashville.
• Navicure will exhibit at the Azalea Health annual user conference August
• Optimum Healthcare IT interviews Jon Morris, former SVP/CIO of WellStar Health System.
• Imprivata joins the CommonWell Health Alliance.
• NTT Data begins accepting applications for its global Open Innovation Contest.
• Nvoq will exhibit at Aprima’s annual users conference August 18-20 in Dallas.
• Clinical Computer System, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, will exhibit at the Indiana AWHONN State Conference August 25 in Plainfield.
• Uniphy Health appoints Ken Fishbain (Cardiothoracic & Vascular Surgical Associates) to its health advisory board.

Blog Posts

• As Excitement Builds, What Does Data Tell Us About the Upcoming Eclipse? (Liaison Technologies)
• Breaking Down the Top 5 Healthcare Revenue Cycle KPIs (MedData)
• 5 vital EHR features to help reduce sepsis (Meditech)
• Establishing the Leadership to Optimize your IT Strategy (Leidos Health)
• Health Insurance Companies are Evil, and Other Things People Believe (Redox)
• Improving Care Through Adopting Technology: What’s Next? (Netsmart)
• The Value of Online Reviews in Healthcare (HealthLoop)
• Increasing Family Engagement Needs a Proactive Approach (PatientPing)
• A Guide to Mobile Computing: Healthcare Going Mobile (PatientSafe Solutions)
• Forget the Rearview: Look Ahead to More Patient Payments (Patientco)
• What Bears Can Teach Us About Risk (PatientKeeper)

Contacts

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

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 8/17/17

The Office of the National Coordinator continues to advocate for strengthening the health IT workforce. The September 6 webinar will review workforce training materials that were available to the more than 9,000 people who participated in recent programs on population health, care coordination, interoperability, and analytics. Registration is open, and as a participant in one of the educational programs, I’d say it’s worth a look.

In other government news, the Medicare Quality Payment Program hardship application for the 2017 year is now available. Applications must be submitted by October 1, 2017 to avoid payment adjustments in 2018. I continue to run across providers that aren’t sure if they qualify for a hardship exception or not, so if you’re in the practice management or operations space, do your docs a favor and make sure they understand.

Physicians who are in the know have been very happy with the CMS final rule that makes the use of 2015 Edition certified EHRs optional for Medicaid Meaningful Use in 2018. Depending on vendor status, many practices were looking at having to upgrade their EHRs prior to January 1 so they could complete full-year reporting on a 2015 Edition system. The requirement now calls for a 90-day reporting period for Meaningful Use measures. Although Clinical Quality Measure reporting is still full-year, providers can now use 2014 Edition, 2015 Edition, or a combination of Certified EHR Technologies. It’s a welcome reprieve for organizations that are suffering from change fatigue and who may lack the resources to manage an upgrade along with other clinical and business initiatives. Although that change was documented in a final rule, unpublished guidance seems to indicate that practices that are part of the Next Generation ACO program can use either 2014 Edition or 2015 Edition CEHRT.

It’s been a relatively busy time in governmental circles, with the Department of Veterans Affairs also announcing their new telehealth project, “Anywhere to Anywhere VA Health Care,” which will permit VA providers to treat patients across state lines using telehealth technology. Providers can practice across the country within their designated specialty scope of practice. They also released their new VA Video Connect app. Veterans can use their mobile devices to access 250+ VA providers at nearly 70 sites across the country. Although solutions like the app have the potential to reduce travel hardships for veterans, they assume adequate capacity. If providers don’t have adequate time for patient care, simply shifting away from in-person encounters isn’t going to be a solution.

There’s also been action in the Senate to authorize a CMS Innovation Center project to boost use of certified EHRs in the behavioral health space. Psychiatric hospitals, community behavioral health centers, clinical psychologists, and social workers would be encouraged to expand EHR use along with residential and outpatient mental health and substance abuse treatment facilities. The 2009 HITECH Act didn’t apply to many mental health treatment organizations, which may help explain low rates of information sharing between behavioral health and other providers. A parallel bill has already been introduced in the House. Hopefully both will begin to work their way through the House and Senate committees soon.

One of the exciting parts of being in the healthcare information technology space is watching researchers come up with innovative solutions to difficult problems. Laboratory medicine is a big part of clinical informatics, so I was glad to hear about a new technology for Zika virus testing in the field. Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis are using nanorods to develop a test that can provide results without electricity or refrigeration. Proteins attached to the nanorods change color when exposed to Zika virus-containing blood. Although the initial study was very small, it shows a great deal of promise. I was also glad to see the varied affiliations of the authors – mechanical engineering, anesthesiology, and biochemistry/molecular biophysics. The engineering and biophysics fields are expanding rapidly and make great areas of emphasis for premedical students who aren’t sure about their future in patient care.

Speaking of laboratory medicine, LOINC is looking for experts to join four new special topics workgroups. The groups will meet monthly and provide recommendations to the LOINC Committee. Workgroup topics include: Document Ontology, which looks at the framework for displaying clinical results; LOINC ShortName for addressing situations where LOINC codes need to be stored or exchanged but the ShortName is not appropriate; Cell Marker Naming for review of ambiguous terms; and High-Sensitivity Troponin, which will look at the best way to model cardiac assays in LOINC. Workgroups start August 30 and more information can be found on the LOINC website.

I haven’t been able to attend the MGMA conference in years, the last time being when it was in San Antonio. For those who can’t make it to Anaheim for MGMA17, there is an opportunity to attend remotely via MGMA 2017 Monday Live. Registration is $350 for MGMA members and includes access to the general session and several breakouts. Advertising collateral mentions the opportunity to not only listen to sessions but to “network with your peers,” which might be a little challenging given the virtual environment.

Virtual environments are less of a barrier for the one-on-one contact of telehealth. Employers are gravitating toward inclusion of telemedicine services in employee benefits plans. The Large Employers’ 2018 Health Care Strategy and Plan Design Survey estimates that nearly 96 percent of employers will offer telemedicine services in states where it is permitted, with more than 50 percent including behavioral health as part of the offering. More employers are also offering on-site health centers. My local school district is piloting an on-site employee clinic that received a fair amount of traffic in its first year. They haven’t made a decision to expand, but will continue to pilot during this academic year.

Do you have access to an employer-based health center? Have you had the occasion to use it? Email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 8/17/17

Docs, Hospitals Respond to CMS Retreat on Bundled Payments

CMS announces plans to eliminate several Obama-era bundled payment programs designed to test the impact of bundling some cardiac and orthopedic health services payments.

Healthcare data breaches caused by hacks are on the rise

Cyberattack-related data breaches at healthcare organizations have increased 162 percent so far in 2017, according to data from OCR.

Questions About The FDA’s New Framework For Digital Health

Health Affairs analyzes the FDA’s new Digital Health Innovation Plan.

Express Scripts to limit opioids, concerning doctors

Pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts intends to limit the number and strength of opioid drugs prescribed to first-time users as part of a broad effort to curb the opioid epidemic.

Morning Headlines 8/16/17

The Effects of Terminating Payments for Cost-Sharing Reductions

The Congressional Budget Office issues a report forecasting the financial impact that halting federal payment of cost-sharing subsidies to insurers selling plans on public exchanges will have, concluding that premiums would climb 20 percent in the first year, and continue to raise slightly more in years later.

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to Lead New Pediatric Data Resource Center for Research in Childhood Cancer and Structural Birth Defects

The NIH is funding a big data project led by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Center for Data Driven Discovery to discover causes of pediatric cancer and structural birth defects.

Bolton NHS Foundation Trust selects Allscripts to enhance care and clinical engagement

In England, Bolton NHS Foundation Trust has selected Allscripts Sunrise EHR.

Physicians Healthsource, Inc. v. Allscripts-Misy’s Healthcare Solutions, Inc.

A physician practice, described by an obviously annoyed presiding judge as “a professional class-action plaintiff”, has filed a class action lawsuit against Allscripts for sending junk faxes without opt out instructions.

News 8/16/17

Top News

The Congressional Budget Office scores the expected impact of the White House’s threat to stop paying Affordable Care Act-mandated cost-sharing reductions:

• Insurers would pull out, leaving 5 percent of the country with no access to exchange insurance.
• Premiums would increase 20 percent in the first year.
• The federal deficit would increase by $194 billion through 2026.
• The number of uninsured people would increase slightly in 2018 but then start moving slightly lower in 2020.

CBO qualifies its prediction based on how and when the White House stops making the payments, which the President has incorrectly described as “insurance company bailouts.”

The big takeaway is the deficit estimate. Paying premium subsidies based on income actually saves the country money.

CBO adds that President Trump’s CSR threats alone have already driven premiums up since insurers are required to request approval for their 2018 prices now.

The House of Representatives sued over the ACA’s cost-sharing reductions in 2014, arguing that the payments are illegal since Congress never appropriated the money to fund them. That case remains open.

Reader Comments

From Keelhauler: “Re: cloud computing. Thought you would enjoy this.” I did, thanks.

From Surprise!: “Re: Allscripts. Layoffs today of around 60 worldwide. Some senior people had their positions eliminated. Pretty eventful couple of weeks with the Paragon and NantHealth stuff.” Unverified, but reported by several readers. I reached out to the company’s media contact, who responded, “Allscripts does not discuss rumors or speculation,” which leaves the rest of us to do so without its participation.

From Life’s Changing the Ocean Floor: “Re: [health IT site name omitted]. Seems to be dead.” Sure does. Googling turns up no user outrage or fond reminiscing, which suggests that its demise was not untimely.

From Pacifico: “Re: Caradigm. LinkedIn shows that several top execs, salespeople, and security team members have left. GE is taking over, cutting headcount and leveraging shared services.” Unverified. I compared the company’s September 2016 leadership page to the current version – the 13 executives are now down to seven, of whom two are new.

From Gaslighter: “Re: market share by hospital size. Were those numbers for US hospitals only? Wondering since Meditech has a significant presence in Canada.” Blain Newton of HIMSS Analytics, who provided the count, says the numbers cover only domestic hospitals.

From Supine on the Sand: “Re: market share by hospital size. The most meaningful stat is the 500+ bed hospitals since they often take smaller hospitals with them when they choose a vendor, which is why Meditech and Siemens (Cerner) have lost hospitals. Number of beds is most important since it equates better to the number of people – particularly doctors – who use the systems. Meditech is in big trouble because it has no ambulatory presence and Cerner, too takes a hit with ambulatory. Epic is much stronger than Cerner because of its 500+bed dominance and its ambulatory market share. I would love to see market size by beds and by ambulatory doctor count.” I mentioned your interest to Blain and he’s going to analyze EHR vendors by total beds and total physicians, so watch for that. I think Meditech can maintain its relevance for those hospitals that can’t manage the complexity or afford the cost of Epic or Cerner, but I agree that Meditech waited too long to conclude that the offering of partner LSS – which Meditech later bought – wasn’t the integrated ambulatory answer many of its clients and prospects were looking for. All three companies have common traits: they offer single-platform products for nearly every hospital service, they rarely acquire companies (“never” in the case of Epic), and they run on a single database. Those characteristics seem obviously desirable with 20-20 hindsight, but were lost on now-lagging competitors who were busily milking their cash cows, buying and nameplate-integrating anything that moved, and waltzing with Wall Street.

From EclipsysGal: “Re: Chad Eckes. Glad to see an IT leader move into the CEO role.” Chad takes the CEO role at Pinnacle Dermatology, a private equity-backed dermatology practice in the Midwest that hopes to expand to 100 locations. He has served time as CIO of Cancer Treatment Centers of America and EVP/CFO of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center (NC).

From Vaporware?: “Re: MHS Genesis pilot sites. I found this testimony from March that says interoperability at Fairchild is through the legacy JLV portal via logging into AHLTA. Future plans include moving the legacy portal into Genesis. Fair to take that as a ‘no’ on CommonWell?” I’ll invite knowledgeable readers to chime in since I don’t know much about the DoD and the planned interoperability with the VA once they’re both on Cerner. It may be that workarounds are necessary until Genesis is live at all DoD facilities.

From Eco Chambers: “Re: nonsensical terminology. I submit ‘ecosystem’ or ‘hyper-convergence.’ Where does this stuff come from?” I suspect someone (probably folks aspiring for cleverness in their books or articles) spends a lot of time coming up with words they hope will spread virally. Unfortunately, that sometimes happens, replacing perfectly serviceable and accepted words with cute new ones that only a marketer could love. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I thought my old Plantronics USB headset was failing since my new laptop wouldn’t recognize it (it wasn’t failing, as it turned out – I fixed the problem by deleting and reinstalling the latest version of the motherboard’s audio driver). I wanted a more comfortable headset since I often listen to music for hours while writing HIStalk and remembered that the best one I’ve owned was a gamer version. My solution: the fantastic EasySMX PS4 for $18.99 (for some reason, it’s gone up to $28.99 since last week). The driver-free headset’s deep ear cushions eliminate room noise while pumping out impressive bass from its 40mm driver with a cool option to vibrate as well, which I like. I’m rocking out to the much richer sound.

Listening: new from former Oasis singer-songwriter Liam Gallagher, whose Lennon-like brilliance is tempered by bizarre behavior that should make him a top pick in the rock dead pool. I’m also enjoying the immensely talented Sia, who is suddenly a global superstar at 41 (you’ve surely heard her stunning tropical house hit “Cheap Thrills” or “Chandelier”) after writing songs for other stars and battling personal demons.

The healthcare relevance of the folks HIMSS chooses for keynote speakers often puzzles me and Magic Johnson is no exception. His accomplishments, as far as I can tell, were (a) surviving HIV when most other patients didn’t, and (b) getting rich off basketball and the business deals he struck after he retired (I’ll skip his awful 1998 TV talk show, whose low quality and alarmingly short tenure was eclipsed only by the pitiful late-night efforts of Chevy Chase and Pat Sajak). At least he has directed some of his attention toward social causes and that alone will probably make his speech interesting. He’s on the agenda for Friday of HIMSS week, with the absence of most of us dearly departed attendees providing an intimate setting for those stalwarts can never get too much time at conferences or in my least-favorite city.

Thanks to HIStalk sponsors EClinicalWorks and ZappRX for upgrading their Gold sponsorship to Platinum.

Thanks to Nuance, which apparently dropped their long-held HIStalk Founder sponsorship by mistake and have reconnected as Platinum since their original spot had already been snapped up by the time they realized it.

Webinars

August 17 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “Repeal and Replace McKesson’s EIS.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Frank Poggio, CEO, The Kelzon Group; Vince Ciotti, principal, HIS Professionals. The brutally honest and cynically funny Frank and Vince will analyze the Allscripts acquisition of McKesson’s EIS business. They will predict what it means for EIS’s 500+ customers, review what other vendors those customers might consider, describe lessons learned from previous industry acquisitions, and predict how the acquisition will affect the overall health IT market. Their 2014 webinar on Cerner’s acquisition of Siemens Health Services has generated over 8,000 YouTube views.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Credentialing technology vendor Silversheet raises $5 million in Series A funding, increasing its total to $10 million. I interviewed CEO Miles Beckett, MD just over a year ago since I was fascinated that he created the “lonelygirl15” web series that ruled YouTube in 2006-2008.

A Goldman Sachs report says Amazon’s initial healthcare ambitions may involve partnering with a pharmacy benefits manager to optimize prescription ordering and delivery. The report also speculates that Amazon could provide patient monitoring and telemedicine visits via its Echo that would then allow patients to order the drugs prescribed. It also says Amazon could be interested in using the patient data it collects to cross-sell products, which wouldn’t be the day’s best privacy news.

Google buys Seattle-based Senosis Health, which was developing apps that use smartphone sensors for diagnosing newborn jaundice, reduced lung function, and low hemoglobin levels. Those apps have yet to earn FDA’s marketing clearance.

Medication management technology vendor Swisslog Healthcare makes an unspecified investment in managed telepharmacy solutions vendor PipelineRx. 

Personalized health behavior change technology vendor Happify Health raises $9 million in funding.

Dublin, Ireland-based Clanwilliam Group makes its 13th medical technology acquisition in three years in buying digital dictation vendor Medisec Software, which is a supplier to NHS.

CHOP spinoff Haystack Informatics closes an additional funding round to expand the rollout of its privacy solution, which analyzes EHR activity logs to identity potentially inappropriate user activity.

Clinical research organization PRA Health Sciences will pay $520 million to acquire Symphony Health Solutions, which resells prescription data of 280 million US citizens to drug companies who use the information to market their products to doctors.

Sales

St. Luke’s University Hospital (PA) will implement MModal’s Fluency Direct EHR-integrated clinical documentation as it moves to Epic in 2018. St. Luke’s CMIO James Balshi, MD calls MModal’s platform “cloud-based but not cloud-dependent.” 

Children’s Hospital New Orleans (LA) selects Vocera’s smartphone app for secure text messaging and hands-free communication.

Saint Luke’s Health System (MO) will expand its FormFast implementation in rolling out the company’s electronic signature product.

In England, Bolton NHS Foundation Trust chooses Allscripts Sunrise.

MIT’s student and faculty ambulatory care center chooses Cerner Millennium and HealtheIntent.

People

Libby Curtis Webb (Copatient) joins ZappRX as SVP of product.

Announcements and Implementations

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (PA) will run an NIH-funded project to mine big data to look for causes of pediatric cancer and birth defects, with partner organizations running several data portal, genomics standards, and analytics sub-projects that will combine clinical and genetic sequence data from several cohorts into a centralized database.

PatientPop – which offers practice-building tools – adds the ability for Google searchers to schedule an appointment directly from the practice’s Google My Business listing that shows up to the right of the search results.

Navient subsidiary Xtend Healthcare buys HIM and revenue cycle consulting firm Elipse.

A technology paper profiles Phynd, with founder and CEO Tom White explaining its provider data management solution. The company’s Phynd a Doc consumer search function is used on Duke Health’s website (above).

The Tennessee Hospital Association and Audacious Inquiry launch ConnecTN, which will share real-time ED visits and hospital admissions among THA’s hospital members and TennCare.

Apple is reportedly talking to Aetna about making the Apple Watch available for free or at a discount to the insurer’s customers, which would extend the program beyond Aetna’s wellness program that covers its 50,000 employees.

Optimum Healthcare IT opens a managed services office in Duluth, MN and is profiled in the local paper.

OpenEMR enhances its open source EMR to operate as an out-of-the-box cloud services solution using Amazon Web Services, providing benefits that include automatic scaling of computational resources for cost effectiveness, cutting edge network security, zero hardware maintenance, easy software deployment, and robust backup and recovery solutions.

Privacy and Security

The Department of Justice demands that web hosting company DreamHost turn over the personal information of 1.3 million visitors to an anti-Trump website, ordering the company to provide IP address, contact information, photos, and emails.

Technology

Microsoft defensively downplayed a Consumer Reports estimate from last week that 25 percent of its Surface tablets and laptops experienced problems – which caused CR to withdraw its “recommended” rating – but internal Microsoft documents suggest that Microsoft was fully aware that the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book have high customer return rates. Here’s some easily-remembered advice: never buy hardware from Microsoft other than keyboards, mice, joysticks, and Xbox components. The rest of their lineup is stuff other companies sell better and cheaper (unless you still believe the Zune was a great digital media player and subscription music service).

Other

The HR SVP and an interim hospital CEO of Broward Health (FL) quit following the resignation of an SVP who had been accused of overpaying a politically connected marketing company by $1.7 million in a secret side agreement. The health system’s then-CEO committed suicide 18 months ago, after which the board ignored the candidates presented by its search firm and instead gave a fellow board member the $650,000 job. That CEO is a nurse whose only graduate degree was issued by a notorious diploma mill that has since closed.

I hadn’t seen this: Physicians Healthsource sues Allscripts under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act for sending junk advertising faxes without opt-out instructions. The plaintiff claims it received 36 faxes from 2008 through 2011 and seeks class action status. The judge labeled Physicians Healthsource as a “professional class-action plaintiff” that has filed several similar “junk fax” class action lawsuits using he same law firm and notes that fax machines have mostly been replaced by computer software, meaning that recipients expend little money or time in discarding unwanted faxes even though federal law still allows filing such lawsuits. The judge also noted that Allscripts had previously been sued by a physician’s office for the same issue and paid $600,000 in legal fees plus whatever settlement they agreed to, concluding that Allscripts “should adjust its marketing strategy a bit, or at the very least, stop sending faxes to what might be one of the more litigious businesses, in terms of junk fax litigation, in the country.” The court also notes that the maximum penalty for junk faxing is $500, but such class action lawsuits can create a windfall for the law firm as both sides pay expensive attorneys to argue over the small sum. The judge’s comments are entertaining and cynical, showing obvious disdain in the ruling above for a Congress-created law that he clearly thinks is ridiculous.

Sponsor Updates

• UnityPoint Health (IA) is optimizing its EHR build by using LogicStream Health’s Clinical Process Improvement solutions to review sepsis screenings and to compare protocol usage to evidence-based best practices in real time.
• EClinicalWorks supports National Health Center Week and the 700 Community Health Centers that use its systems. The company was also named as a Frost & Sullivan customer value leadership award winner for its RCM services.
• Kyruus will integrate its ProviderMatch for Consumers with Binary Fountain’s online patient reviews to enhance its online search directory pages.
• Besler Consulting will present at the HFS Provider User Meeting August 18 in New Orleans.
• Gartner includes Dimensional Insight and its analytics applications in three healthcare research reports in July 2017.
• IDC Health Insights includes Medecision in its HealthTech Rankings Top 50.
• Glytec CMO Andrew Rhinehart, MD discusses Glytec’s contributions to value-based reform.
• Ingenious Med will exhibit at the HFMA NC Summer Institute August 23-26 in Myrtle Beach, SC.
• InterSystems will exhibit at the Sunquest User Group meeting August 21-24 in Tucson, AZ.

Blog Posts

• Are Your Healthcare Communications Ready for the Total Solar Eclipse? (Spok)
• Embracing Differences and Maximizing Strengths (Access)
• Aprima’s Adaptive Learning Technology and the AI/Machine Learning Buzz (Aprima)
• Why There is No Up Front Pricing (Datica)
• Help with Physician Burnout and Other Challenges Physicians Face (CareSync)
• Lessons Learned from an Internship (Direct Consulting Associates)
• 2017 National Health Center Week: Celebrating the Care All Americans Deserve (EClinicalWorks)
• Are You Ready for Value-Based Care? 7 Things to Consider (Hayes Management Consulting)
• Healthcare Digital Transformation: What, Why & How? (Part 2) (The HCI Group)
• The Tension Between Healthcare Pricing and Consumerism (Healthcare Growth Partners)
• Change is Constant, How Do You Manage It? (Iatric Systems)
• Bipartisan legislation in US Congress requires e-prescribing to combat opioid abuse (Imprivata)
• 5 Ways to Grow Your Healthcare Brand with Consumer Reviews (Influence Health)
• Back to School: 5 Lessons Learned in Healthcare Payments (InstaMed)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 8/15/17

Google Verily Unit Acquires Senosis Health

Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences business, acquires Senosis Health, a smartphone-based medical condition monitoring app. Financial terms were undisclosed.

MIT Medical Selects Cerner’s Integrated Health Care Technology for Care of Students, Faculty and Staff

MIT Medical, which serves MIT students, faculty and family members, selects Cerner as its next EHR.

Coverage For Mental Health Via Telemedicine Soars At U.S. Employers

56 percent of US employers plan to offer telehealth-based behavioral health services in 2018, more than doubling availability compared to 2017 rates.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 8/14/17

I work all over the country, so I see both national and regional trends. For a while now, we’ve seen private equity firms sinking money into larger practices, particularly in the profitable subspecialties such as dermatology and oncology. In these larger organizations, the private equity involvement usually starts around capital expenditures, such as opening surgery centers, infusion centers, or purchasing equipment. The organizations themselves are already fairly well developed and may be looking to expand or merge with another practice, but they’re typically pretty savvy about running a business and how to interact with financial backers. Recently though, I’ve seen a couple of scenarios play out where smaller organizations have gotten themselves involved in with private equity money and the practices are clearly in over their heads.

The first organization I saw this with was a primary care group that had a decent number of physicians, but at 50 or so providers, was in no way a large group. They were located in Texas and had delusions of expanding their group statewide and had gotten some backing to do so. I was working with them peripherally through a consulting subcontract with their laboratory vendor, so was able to watch it play out from the sidelines. I watched the practice administrator threaten leadership from their EHR vendor, using phrases around their plan to “triple in size” and to become “a force to be reckoned with.”

First off, even if they tripled in size, that would put them in the 150-physician range, which their vendor doesn’t even remotely see as a “large” client. The practice had failed to realize this before making their demands for free services and free software in preparation for their growth. They also failed to understand that primary care practices rarely have the footprint or financial ability to become a force as they envisioned unless they are very large or have very tight ties to key subspecialties.

The practice administrator had sold her physicians a bill of goods and they were all buying into the illusion that someday they would be the pre-eminent primary care practice in Texas, and by bringing in some PE financing, they were on their way. The physicians didn’t understand that once you bring PE into the mix, you lose a fair amount of control because you’re spending someone else’s money. I never had the opportunity to read the agreement, but it was clear that either they gave away more rights than they understood or that the PE group was taking advantage of them.

The administrator, who is from Detroit, and the PE leader, who hailed from New York, also failed to understand Texas culture. They never could quite figure out why small practices and independent providers weren’t interested in merging with them. Having spent several years living there and dissecting the culture as a relative outsider, I could have given them some pointers.

First off, although Texas is legally a single state, when you travel around it and meet lifelong residents, you quickly realize that it might as well be multiple states. I know people who live in Dallas and Fort Worth who have never been to the other city despite them being only about 30 miles apart. For those folks, crossing that gap might as well be a trip to the moon, which is a shame when you consider what each of the cities has to offer.

When you look at the cities that are farther apart physically, the differences are even more striking. The drive from Brownsville in the South to Texline in the north is almost 900 miles and you cross through multiple cultural traditions on the way. Parts of Texas think they’re in the old south, parts of it think they’re in the Old West, parts of it think they are in old Mexico, parts of it think they’re “big cities,” parts of it ooze small-town charm, and parts of it are just weird (Austin, you know I love you). Oh yeah, and then there’s the Gulf Coast.

To think that you’re going to be able to understand and accomplish expanding to physician practices across that broad of a spectrum within 12 months seems like a long shot. Some of us can’t even get physicians to agree across county lines, let alone across cultural divides and geographic barriers. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it’s going to be expensive and psychologically exhausting as you try to address the distrust that people have of each other when they’re coming from different perspectives.

Eventually, the practice burned through a lot of money trying to figure out the expansion and the PE group became frustrated. In the end, they were snapped up by a hospital system that they had previously shunned.

Another group I worked with more recently was a procedural subspecialty practice in the Midwest. They had been wooed by a PE firm promising market dominance and expansion, which resonated with the practice’s leadership. Although they’re just trying to achieve regional expansion and grow from their 30-physician size, they didn’t understand that the face they were presenting to the market they were trying to conquer wasn’t a nice one.

My first exposure to them was a meeting where the head of the practice opened with expletives and started shouting at the vendor in front of the PE team. Never a good sign. This guy would go out to practices they were looking at “merging” with (code for acquiring) and behave inappropriately. I once watched him threaten prospective partners and promise that they would be sorry if they didn’t align with his group. I felt like I was in a 1920s-era gangster movie and expected to see Robert De Niro walking around the room with a bat.

I was somewhat gratified to see both his administrative and IT teams begin to ally themselves with the PE team against him. This continued for weeks and he never had a clue that the axe was going to fall until they walked him out the door. In the aftermath, the physicians feel hoodwinked, and frankly I don’t think they wanted to expand that much at all but were relatively powerless to block the actions of the administrator because of their previous corporate setup. They clearly didn’t want to give up as much autonomy as they did for the promise of being the top dogs. If they thought their schedules were oppressive before, they are certainly not enjoying the MBA-level micromanagement that is now going on behind the scenes. I don’t doubt that the practice will eventually grow, but the PE managers have a vested interest in tightening the collective belt so that they spend as little of their own money as possible.

Anyone who doubts that medicine has become a business needs only to look at these types of examples to understand what is going on. Medical schools have done a great job adding courses in patient engagement and complimentary / alternative medicine to their curricula. Now they need to add solid business courses. If they don’t, then physicians need to seek this knowledge on their own just like they would learn a new procedure or therapeutic regimen. There are plenty of smooth-talking individuals looking to work with physician groups and all too easy for them to be on higher ground.

How does your group learn about trends in practice management? Have you had private equity interest? Email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 8/14/17

As losses mount, Soon-Shiong’s NantHealth to lay off dozens, reduce headcount by 300

NantHealth announces a fresh round of layoffs following its poor Q2 results. Some of the affected employees are being re-assigned to Allscripts as part of previously announced product acquisitions.

ONC’s Rucker hones agency mission around 21st Century Cures Act

Speaking at the Allscripts Client Experience conference, National Coordinator for Health IT Don Rucker, MD discusses the need to give consumers more control of healthcare spending, explaining “We know how to do pay-for-value as consumers when we’re spending our own money. If there’s anything Americans are good at, it’s knowing how to shop.”

Distributed Ledger Technology in Healthcare: Update from the Delaware Blockchain Initiative

The Medical Society of Delaware is working with blockchain technology company Symbiont to develop a blockchain-based solution to address the challenge prior authorization requirements pose.

Monday Morning Update 8/14/17

Top News

NantHealth shares dropped 14 percent on Friday after Thursday’s announcement of poor financial results, a 300-employee layoff, and re-acquisition of heavily devalued NH shares previously purchased by Allscripts. NH shares closed Friday at $3.49, valuing the company at $424 million.

Above is the one-year share price chart of NH (blue, down 71 percent) vs. the Nasdaq (green, up 19 percent).

CEO Patrick Soon-Shiong said in the earnings call that acquisitions had swelled NantHealth’s payroll to 1,000 employees. He says synergies, a refocusing on artificial intelligence and decision support products, and transferring some employees to Allscripts as part of its purchase of NantHealth’s patient-provider portal product will enable the 30 percent headcount reduction.

Soon-Shiong says the FusionFx product that Allscripts is buying is non-core business because the company can exchange clinical documents without its interoperability component and that “this middleware that actually talks to EMRs was merely a tool and not really core and was better in the hands of an organization with hundreds of salespeople calling on customers during EMR implementations.”

NantHealth’s FusionFx was part of its July 2015 acquisition of Harris Healthcare Solutions, which had previously acquired the former CareFx in early 2011 for $155 million in cash. That offering included HIE, patient and provider messaging, and single sign-on. 

Reader Comments

From Ciro Cumulus: “Re: the question of whether Epic is a cloud-based system. Based on your criteria, I would say yes.” CC provided this review of Epic’s offering:

• It connects via the Internet.
• The user organization doesn’t pay capital expense, just a cost per concurrent user with license fees to InterSystems.
• The standard term is five years with renewals.
• Epic uses software-defined networks and state-of-the-art virtualization across compute, storage, and network.
• Customers can scale up or down on the fly.
• Epic manages the infrastructure and applies upgrades, although with more coordination than the typical cloud provider since application software requires more testing, training, and integration review.
• Epic provides service-level agreements for performance and uptime.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents are not really sure who will benefit most from Allscripts acquiring Mckesson’s EIS business, but the customers of both companies top the list. New poll to your right or here: what kind of term is “cloud-based?”

Blain Newton, EVP of HIMSS Analytics, was kind to answer my question about hospital count by bed size in providing the worksheet above. The information should dispel the notion that the inpatient EHR market is a wide-open race with many participants. My takeaways:

• Cerner, Epic, and Meditech are far ahead of the pack in terms of overall hospital count.
• Epic has nearly double the number of 500+ bed hospitals as Cerner.
• The good news for Allscripts (sort of, anyway) is that McKesson had twice as many hospitals as Allscripts pre-acquisition, but most of those are under 150 beds.
• I consider 250 beds to be the minimum size hospital to provide significant revenue opportunity and that race is all Epic (38 percent), Cerner (31 percent), and Meditech (14 percent).
• Allscripts, which was touted by a reader as being a major, competitive player that generated my original question, is not – they have just 6 percent of the 250+ bed hospital market and only 3 percent of hospitals overall vs. Cerner’s 24 percent, Epic’s 23 percent, and Meditech’s 19 percent.
• The unstated factors involve the “which modules” question — running a full suite of available products vs. just a few key systems from a particular vendor – as well as the overall trend in switching from one vendor to another. Hospitals are often all in with Cerner, Epic, and Meditech, but I suspect much less so with Allscripts given its more limited product line (although Allscripts has a strong ambulatory presence). There’s also the issue of which hospitals are running a system vs. who is paying for it and how much, which then gets into how health systems buy software corporately.
• Regardless of the slicing and dicing applied, I’ll stand by my long-held conclusion that it’s all Epic and Cerner with Meditech as the dark horse when it comes to inpatient EHRs. Everybody else is eating their dust and likely to lose business due to hospital consolidation and a shift toward the most successful vendors as much as all of us who – for our own reasons – wish that weren’t the case. We need more and better competition.

It’s a slow news time every year from early August through Labor Day. After that, everybody puts their nose back to the grindstone, conferences gear back up, and a flurry of work kicks in that lasts until Thanksgiving. Until then, the news is mostly an occasional big announcement (like acquisitions and quarterly earnings reports) and a product sale every now and then.

This Week in Health IT History

One year ago:

• Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH resigns as National Coordinator, replaced by Vindell Washington, MD but continuing in her full-time role as Assistant Secretary for Health.
• Bon Secours Health System (VA) notifies 665,000 patients that a revenue cycle optimization vendor’s mistake left their information freely discoverable on the Internet.
• Patient advocate Jess Jacobs dies.
• The FTC resolves its patient privacy complaint against Practice Fusion, which it accused of soliciting patient reviews about their doctor and posting them to its website without adequate warning.

Five years ago:

• SAIC completes its acquisition of MaxIT Healthcare.
• The Surgeons of Lake County (IL) reports that its system was attacked by ransomware.
• Arkansas Heart Hospital signs a $10 million deal to implement Siemens Soarian.
• CMS publishes requirements for Meaningful Use Stage 2.

Ten years ago:

• The first screenshots of Google Health are leaked.
• Healthcare billing company Verus shuts down following a string of system breaches.
• CompuGroup wins the bidding for taking over iSoft.
• Epic opens its $100 million, barn-red learning center as Campus 2 construction begins and the company’s revenue hits $422 million.
• Walmart announces plans to open 400 in-store medical clinics.

Weekly Anonymous Reader Question

Responses to last week’s question:

• I would love to live in Maui — mild weather, beautiful landscape, and friendly people.
• The Tuscany countryside.
• Boulder, CO.
• Fiji has the most wonderful people I have ever encountered, and it’s beautiful. New Zealand is also beautiful, has wonderful people, and is progressive. I’m buying a house in both places.
• Near my family and my (hopefully) eventual grandchildren.
• Madison, WI.
• San Francisco.
• A restored Vanderbilt mansion in Newport, RI in the summer and a hut on Little Palm Island near Key West in the winter.
• A beach house in Playa del Carmen.
• Notre Dame du Pre, France.
• London.
• Scandinavia or Holland.
• Paris.
• La Jolla, CA.
• New Zealand! Tropical beaches, rainforests, mountains, glaciers, and volcanoes all within driving distance (long ferry ride potentially required).
• Jacksonville, FL.
• Captiva Island, FL, the Caribbean island in the US.
• Denver.
• Oahu, Hawaii — slower pace of life, great weather, great people, great natural world, but still has modern world amenities.
• US Virgin Islands.
• Right where I already am – on the North Shore of Lake Superior.
• Moorea, FP.
• Curacao or the Bahamas.
• Jekyll Island, as close to Driftwood Beach as I can get.
• Alaska.
• Fairhope, AL on the bay.
• In a giant fifth-wheel, exploring the country (and probably spending a lot of time in New England and California)
• Byron Bay, Australia.
• Western Montana.
• London on the Northern or Western ends so I can still have trees around me, and since money isn’t a factor I’m going to have a little cottage on the lower Cape, maybe Eastham or Orleans. Water, but set way back so my house won’t fall into the ocean for at least 20 years.
• Coastal Southern California.
• Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland or some other spectacular Alpine town. Clean water, clean air, solar power and living life in person instead of through an electronic device.
• Florence, Italy.
• Carmel, CA.
• St. John, USVI.
• Destin, FL.
• San Diego, CA.
• Goodyear, AZ.
• Chicago downtown.
• Chapel Hill, NC.
• Paris.
• Vegas, with summer trips to the rest of the world.
• Encinitas, CA.
• Auckland.
• SoCal rocks.
• Carlsbad, CA.
• Jackson, WY.
• Boston.
• Munich, Paris, NYC.
• Redmond, OR.
• Coronado Island Calfornia. The best climate in the country year round and a beautiful beach! Can’t beat it.
• St. Maarten.
• Mobile Bay, AL.
• San Diego. Best of all worlds n the US. Vancouver for Canada.
• Hands down – Ireland (just got back – amazing), also Wyoming, Ft. Myers, FL.
• London.
• Florence, Italy near the Ponte Vecchio.
• I would live a nomadic life in a class B motor home. Then I would really more deeply experience places I’ve visited that caught my eye. Durango, CO, Travelers Rest SC, Venice FL, Seattle, WA, Saranac Lake, NY.
• With George Clooney. Before he was married and had kids.
• San Francisco or Seattle.
• The house I grew up in. There I knew happiness and love.
• San Diego.
• Big Island, Hawaii.
• Costa Rica. It’s an amazing place with amazing people. Have been there five times and am overdue for a trip back!
• Hawaii.
• Santa Fe.
• London.
• The Alaskan Bush.

This week’s question, which isn’t really work related but interesting to me personally since all work and no play makes Mr. H a dull boy:  which musical group or performer is the best you have ever seen in a live, in-person performance?

Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• Allscripts swaps its mostly devalued NantHealth shares for NantHealth’s provider and patient engagement solutions.
• NantHealth announces poor quarterly results and a restructuring that involves laying off 300 employees.
• UC San Diego Health migrates from its self-hosted Epic implementation to an Epic-hosted version.

Webinars

August 17 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “Repeal and Replace McKesson’s EIS.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Frank Poggio, CEO, The Kelzon Group; Vince Ciotti, principal, HIS Professionals. The brutally honest and cynically funny Frank and Vince will analyze the Allscripts acquisition of McKesson’s EIS business. They will predict what it means for EIS’s 500+ customers, review what other vendors those customers might consider, describe lessons learned from previous industry acquisitions, and predict how the acquisition will affect the overall health IT market. Their 2014 webinar on Cerner’s acquisition of Siemens Health Services has generated over 8,000 YouTube views.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Nordic expands its Madison, WI office, adding space for another 60 employees. The company says the new space won’t last long as it rapidly expands beyond its 800 employees and 2016 revenue of $180 million.

Technology company The Bitfury Group and Baltimore-based AI startup Insilico Medicine will work together to develop blockchain applications for healthcare.

Decisions

• Dukes Memorial Hospital (IN) will replace McKesson with Cerner in 2018.
• Dupont Hospital (IN) will go live with Cerner in 2018.
• Carroll Hospital (MD) will replace McKesson with Cerner in 2018.
• UMass Memorial – HealthAlliance Hospital (MA) will implement Epic in October 2017, replacing Siemens.
• Bryan Medical Center – East (NE) will go live on Epic in March 2018.

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

People

Santa Rosa Consulting hires Mike Ragan (NTT Data) as chief revenue officer.

Announcements and Implementations

HIMSS Analytics expands its Logic health IT market intelligence platform with international data, increasing its coverage to 380,000 facilities in 47 countries, including 100 percent of US hospitals. 

Other

In India, the head of a state-run medical college is suspended after the deaths of 60 children in the past week – at least 30 of them on Thursday and Friday alone — that local newspapers claim were due to the hospital’s oxygen vendor cutting off the hospital’s supply after it accumulated $90,000 worth of unpaid bills. The administrator says he repeatedly warned the state that the hospital didn’t have the money to pay the overdue oxygen bills but was ignored. Witnesses say doctors handed out manual resuscitator bags to family members asked them to pump it themselves as many of them watched their children die needlessly.

In Ireland, Mater Hospital’s storage-area network fails, forcing the hospital – which is among the country’s busiest – to divert ambulances and cancel appointments.

Here’s Vince’s final HIS-tory installment on Cerner, closing out a nice look back on the company’s history.

Sponsor Updates

• Forrester Research names Salesforce Service Cloud a leader in its latest report on customer service solutions for enterprise organizations.
• Surescripts will present at ONC’s 2017 Technical Interoperability Forum August 15-16 in Washington, DC.
• T-System joins Athenahealth’s More Disruption Please program.
• Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center joins the TriNetX Global Health Research Network.
• ROI Healthcare Solutions hires Jeff Powell as director of business development.

Blog Posts

• The United States of Digital Health: Therapeutic Devices (Redox)
• Boost Your Google Ranking: 10 Tips to Get You on Your Way (Salesforce)
• MIPS Quality Payment Program Criticized (The SSI Group)
• 4 Practice Marketing Lessons Gleaned From Star Wars (Solutionreach)
• Staying Healthy While Working From Home (Summit Healthcare)
• Building on Direct: Improving interoperability and patient data exchange (Surescripts)
• Thinking inside the box with a provider decision quadrant: identifying FWA and taking action on low-risk providers (Verscend Technologies)
• Cake and Best Practices for Enterprise Imaging (Visage Imaging)
• Nurse satisfaction is at the top of every nursing leader’s agenda. (Voalte)
• Top Seven Reasons Ambulatory Practices Leak Revenue (ZirMed)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 8/11/17

NantHealth Files An 8-K Entry into a Material Definitive Agreement

Allscripts trades its 15 million shares in NantHealth stock for the company’s provider and patient engagement solutions,

Remote Workers Vulnerable In Disputes With Company, Say Employees

Remote transcriptionists working for Nuance are claiming that managers offered them incentives and overtime pay in exchange help working through the transcription backlog that accrued during the company’s malware-related downtime, but Nuance later refused to pay, claiming that the incentives were only approved for a small handful of highly-impacted teams.

Trump: ‘The opioid crisis is an emergency’

President Trump declares the opioid crisis a national emergency, a designation that will offer states and federal agencies more resources to combat the epidemic.

NHS England CCIO Keith McNeil resigns

Keith McNeil, chief clinical information officer for NHS England, has resigned after 13 months in the role. He will return to Australia, working as the CMIO at Queensland Health