News 7/21/17

Top News

Athenahealth reports Q2 results: revenue up 15 percent, adjusted EPS $0.51 vs. $0.34, beating expectations for both.

ATHN shares rose 7 percent in after-hours trading following the announcement. They’re up 15 percent in the past one year and 54 percent in the past five, but both significantly trail the performance of the Nasdaq index.

The company’s market value is $5.7 billion. Co-founder, CEO, and board chair Jonathan Bush holds shares worth about $45 million.

Activist investor Elliot Management disclosed in May 2017 that it had acquired 9.2 percent of the company’s outstanding shares and will try to force the company to consider “strategic opportunities.”

Reader Comments

From e(x)HMP: “Re: David Waltman’s golden parachute at Cerner. Not the first time he has found a way to fail upwards. He represents everything that is wrong with the VA/VistA fiasco. By all means, let’s give this guy a third shot.” The reader linked to a 2013 story about the VA’s $162.5 million contract award to ASM Research to improve the user experience with VistA, triple the price offered by two competitive bidders. One month later, the VA’s David Waltman – who had worked on the contract as chief UX architect of the iEHR project – announced that he would be leaving to take a chief strategy officer job with Accenture-owned ASM. ASM’s subcontractor in the project was Agilex, which had hired former VA CIO Roger Baker. Waltman lasted only nine months at ASM before going back to the VA as chief information strategy officer. Baker worked two years for Agilex, which was then also acquired by Accenture.

From Soft Machine: “Re: Teladoc and Analyte Health. Definitely headed toward covalent bonding. What do you make of them?” Analyte Health offers telehealth providers lab ordering, specimen collection, and testing services. The CEO is industry long-timer Kevin Weinstein, who was chief growth officer at Valence Health through its acquisition by Evolent Health. Teladoc and Analyte health announced a partnership in January 2017. Being a hospital guy, I’m not crazy about Teladoc’s model since I can’t fathom why hospitals don’t launch their own branded telehealth service with their own doctors and keep patients within their system (no different than retail clinics), but TDOC shares have doubled in price in the past year to a $2 billion market cap, giving the company money to use for acquisitions. Analyte Health would be a significant differentiator since many telehealth encounters involve an awkward lab test handoff and having integrated lab services opens the door to offering services for conditions beyond the usual rashes and ear infections. Hospitals that compete with or are indifferent to Teladoc might like working with Analyte Health since it doesn’t run its own labs – it contracts with hospitals and commercial lab providers and thus could steer business to the hospital lab.

From Aging Programmer: “Re: your HIT index. Loved it! I scored myself and got an 82. The main potential issue I see is the definition of management – maybe it should be managing at least five employees, in which case my score drops to 67. Ironically, my consulting time had almost as much impact as my CMIO experience, but I know there’s a lot of dead wood consultants out there.” I reviewed AP’s LinkedIn and I think his very high score of 82 seems about right given his medical education and extensive provider experience that emphasized informatics. I thought about trying to define the scope of management, but the only person who would know that is the individual since LinkedIn only lists titles, so I think you get points for title regardless of actual responsibility. In comparison, quite a few of the “most influential” folks would score in the low single digits with no healthcare-related education or significant health/health IT work experience. I’m certain many of them would protest that their speaking engagements, unpaid advisory board participation, and blog posts should boost their scores, but I don’t see how those necessarily qualify someone to render analysis and opinion. Nobody pays much attention to what armchair quarterbacks and barstool coaches think about football.

From Scribe Feedback: “Re: scribes. I’ve had two experiences with scribes in the past two weeks. The PCP scribe was new and could not navigate Epic well. The PCP was also coaching someone, so I was outnumbered four to one by the PCP, scribe, MD-to-be, and the nurse. The PCP spent 80 percent of his time focusing on the scribe and the person he was coaching while communicating with the nurse. The second interaction with the specialist was very good – he kept his eyes on me and after explaining the role of the scribe, it was like she wasn’t even in the room. The specialist also uses Epic. I’m not sure if the PCP’s documentation requirements caused the difference, but there has got to be a way to make the scribe less intrusive.”

From Can Spam: “Re: Athenahealth turnover. The amount of churn is remarkable. Since 2015, they’ve lost their chief technology and product officer, COO, two CFOs, and the VP who was instrumental in building AthenaNet. Likely more to come given the involvement of activist investor Elliott Management.” Investors have reacted positively to Elliott’s involvement (as they often do), although customers should probably be less enthused since it’s not necessarily in their best interest to have the company sold or broken up into more lucrative pieces.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

We’ll be missing Dr. Jayne’s regularly scheduled post tonight as she struggles (yet again) with the Microsoft Surface she unwisely purchased that seems to have given her constant problems since. This time a software update killed it.

This week on HIStalk Practice: Waud Capital Partners acquires ChiroTouch. Nebraska HHS, HIE work with DrFirst to advance PDMP. Cow Creek Health & Wellness Center rips and replaces with help from Greenway. Solo family physicians advocate for low-cost, easy-to-use patient-generated data tools. New CDC director takesTwitter for a spin. Carolina Center for Occupational Health goes with Bizmatics HIT. Tom Lee, MD hands over One Medical reigns. North Carolina health officials find themselves in hot water due to a trail of data entry oversights.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Netsmart acquires home care and hospice software vendor DeVero.

The State of New York provides $2 million in tax breaks to electronic referrals vendor EHealth Technologies, which will expand its 215-employee Henrietta operations in adding 160 full-time positions in the Finger Lakes area. 

EHR security tools vendor Protenus raises $3 million in an extension of its Series A funding round that has raised $7 million.

Private equity firm Waud Capital Partners acquires chiropractic software vendor ChiroTouch from private equity firm K1 Capital, installing its own CEO as part of the “partnership.”

In the United Arab Emirates, Emirates Hospital — owned by UAE-based investment group KBBO – buys a 60 percent position in Dubai-headquartered MD 24-7, which offers online and face-to-face wellness and concierge services.

Sales

Medical Associates of Clinton, IA chooses EClinicalWorks 10e cloud-based EHR for its 49 providers.

People

PokitDok hires Joe Murad (Willis Towers Watson) as CEO and board member. He replaces co-founder Lisa Maki, who remains on the company’s board.

AHIMA announces in a member email that CEO Lynne Thomas Gordon’s last day was July 15, although it did not provide a reason for her departure. A search for her replacement is underway.

Home care software vendor HHAeXchange promotes Greg Strobel to president and CEO. Founder and former CEO Raphael Nadel will become chief innovation and strategy officer.

Missy Krasner (Box) reportedly joins Amazon in unannounced healthcare role.

Announcements and Implementations

Arizona Pulmonary Specialists (AZ) and Harbor-UCLA Medical Center (CA) go live on ZappRx’s specialty medication drug prescribing platform, with the director of Harbor-UCLA’s pulmonary hypertension center saying its first prescription was approved within 48 hours vs. the common paper-based process that sometimes took more than three weeks.

Three of North Carolina’s largest health systems – Novant Health, Carolinas HealthCare System, and Duke Health – will connect to the state-operated HIE NC HealthConnex, which also announced that the Coastal Connect regional HIE will join.

Seventy-bed Jones Memorial Hospital (NY) and two other hospitals affiliated with UR Medicine receive a $5.7 million state healthcare transformation grant to replace Meditech and LSS with UR’s Epic system.

In Ireland, a former hospital CEO develops CliniShift, a staffing app that allows a hospital to match its vacant shifts with available staff. It also tracks the status of credentials and allows managers to monitor how the app is being used. The company expects to begin a pilot project at an unnamed large hospital on the US East Coast in September and has opened an office in Boston. 

Meditech announces that it will offer CommonWell interoperability services in early 2018.

Change Healthcare joins the Hashed Health blockchain technology consortium.

Government and Politics

England’s NHS Digital responds to a review of its practices that notes ambiguous expectations, a lack of centralization of innovative ideas, worse than expected feedback fro its data services customers, and reliance on outdated technologies. NHS Digital says it will:

• Implement an effective enterprise architecture function
• Create a service operations capability and future roadmap
• Standardize delivery methodologies
• Create a build vs. buy strategy
• Develop a unified security model and security operations center
• Implement new business intelligence and customer relationship management tools
• Work more closely with stakeholders
• Create a thought leadership program
• Create an investment approval subcommittee of the NHS Digital Board
• Set up a workforce planning center to extend recruitment and review the eight office locations

An investigative article finds that HHS is using taxpayer money that was intended to promote Affordable Care Act insurance signups to instead fund a PR campaign against it, creating videos of people who claim to have been harmed by the ACA. The White House chose the video subjects and flew them to Washington DC, with some of those participants later saying that the HHS people pushed them into being more negative about the ACA than they really feel. Former CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt commented, “Congress appropriates funds for you to carry out laws they passed, not to spend those funds on activities that counteract those laws.”

Privacy and Security

Japan will take “strict action” against drug maker Bayer, which acknowledges that three of its employees inappropriately accessed survey-generated patient data to plan a promotion for the company’s Xarelto blood thinner.

Fortified Health Security releases its mid-year cybersecurity report.

Other

Sherpaa founder Jay Parkinson, MD, MPH blasts the venture capitalists who funded his company, then tried to liquidate it given the inherent disconnect between the VC desire to quickly scale and sell out vs. the “glacially-moving industry” of healthcare. Sherpaa’s handful of employed doctors offer online-only routine primary care encounters, charging individual customers $270 per year for unlimited app visits 24×7, which includes managing prescriptions, lab tests, referrals, and second opinions. Parkinson said the investor made himself CEO and then fired all the staff, including the doctors who could not legally stop seeing patients without giving them advance notice. He also accuses the investor of sending the company’s primary competitor, One Medical, its client and payments list in unsuccessfully trying to sell the company. The investor/CEO and board finally resigned a year ago and left the company’s remains for Parkinson to revive, but Parkinson says One Medical’s sales team then used Sherpaa’s proprietary information to badmouth it and to undercut Sherpaa’s employer rates. It’s an interesting idea and certainly cost-effective given the expense and overhead of arranging a PCP visit, but I would have to wonder how the VC was pitched in the first place. The company requires no upfront fee or ongoing commitment, so anyone who wants to give it a shot only has to pay the the first month’s $25 and then request a visit. I’m not sure how their doctors handle prescribing across state lines or how they manage referrals that are within the customer’s insurance network. 

An insightful editorial says it’s counterproductive to call someone who is experiencing g a horrible disease – specifically Sen. John McCain – a “fighter” since the “warrior rhetoric” doesn’t improve their outcomes and can cause them to feel that they’re letting people down if they struggle or if they wisely choose palliative care instead of suffering through more rounds of painful treatments that offer little chance of success.

A Cancun, Mexico hospitals refuses to allow a premature baby to be transported back home to the US until the parents pay $30,000. That solved Mexico problem preceded the inevitable US one – the grandparents paid $18,000 for air transport to a Florida hospital that refused to accept the baby because of the mother’s Indiana Medicaid insurance, so now they’ll have to pay another $30,000 to get him to Indiana.

Sponsor Updates

• Liaison Technologies awards its first data-inspired Future Scholarship to high school graduate Antonio Ferris of Mesa, AZ.
• Tech.MN includes LogicStream Health in “The Ultimate Guide To HealthTech in Minnesota.”
• Santa Rosa Consulting is named a “best place to work”by Modern Healthcare for the sixth consecutive year .
• Optimum Healthcare IT is named one of the 50 fastest-growing companies in Northeast Florida for the second straight year.
• LogicWorks partners with CloudHealth Technologies to optimize cloud management and performance.
• Meditech will exhibit at the AHA 2017 Leadership Summit July 27-29 in San Diego.
• Obix Perinatal Data System, developed by Clinical Computer Systems, will exhibit at the AWHONN Florida Section Conference July 27-28 in Ponte Vedra, FL.
• Experian Health receives the 2017 MongoDB Innovation Award in the healthcare category.
• PatientSafe Solutions joins the Integrating the HealthCare Enterprise as a member organization.

Blog Posts

• The Hidden Costs of Dirty Orders (Liaison Technologies)
• Centralized Appointment Scheduling Aids Patient Experience (MedData)
• How to utilize CPT 99490 to increase revenue opportunities (Meditech)
• In a Troubled Healthcare System, ‘Digital Empathy’ is the Way Forward (HealthLoop)
• The CY2018 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule Proposed Rule – The Upshot (National Decision Support Co.)
• A Day in the Life: You Know You’re a Practice Administrator When … (Navicure)
• Clinical Alerting: The Key to a More Intelligently Connected Hospital (Spok)
• Passion and Vision for the Future: The Legacy of Neal Patterson (Netsmart)
• The Friction at the Gala: Getting to know the “Solver in Chief” (NTT Data Services)
• Helping Hands, CloudWave and Community Hospitals (CloudWave)
• Why Chronic Conditions Need Continuous Care Coordination (PatientPing)
• The Real Health IT Prize (PatientKeeper)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 7/20/17

The US Digital Service Report to Congress: July 2017

In its report to Congress, the US Digital Service provides details on the work it is doing with CMS to develop APIs that “will reduce the cost and burden of participating in CMS programs by enabling the market to build software that interacts directly with Medicare systems and data.”

Trump administration to continue paying cost sharing reductions

The White House announces that it will continue paying cost sharing subsidies to help consumers afford coverage on exchanges through the month of July, but that the subsidies’ status is “undetermined beyond that.”

Trump Demands That Senators Find a Way to Replace Obamacare

One day after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged that the newest ACA repeal and replace bill did not have the votes to pass, GOP senators are now pursuing a repeal-only version of the bill that the CBO estimates will increase the number of people without health insurance by 17 million in 2018.

Electronic Health Records Are Stressing Doctors Out

KQED covers the frustrations clinicians are having with EHRs, including increased administrative burden and ongoing interoperability shortcomings.

Morning Headlines 7/19/17

Glass: We’ve All Been Busy

Google revives its Google Glass business with a focus on enterprise sales, rather than consumer applications.

Cleveland Clinic names CIO

Ed Marx, former CIO of University Hospitals(TX) and EVP at the Advisory Board Company, is named the new CIO of Cleveland Clinic.

Gov. Eric Greitens orders prescription drug monitoring program for Missouri

The governor of Missouri signs an executive order mandating that a PDMP be implemented in the state, though the state representatives are questioning the validity of the order because the governor does not have the authority to allocate funding to pay for the project.

Mackenzie Health Launches First in Canada Epic End-to-End Electronic Medical Record

In Canada, Mackenzie Health goes live on Epic across its inpatient and outpatient locations, marking the first system-wide Canadian install for Epic.

City Hall In Your Borough: First Year of Electronic Medical Record System at Two Queens Hospitals Shows Improved Patient Experience

NYC Health+Hospitals calls its Epic implementation a success in a one-year retrospective review of the project.

News 7/19/17

Top News

Google revives its long-dormant Glass hands-free display – which never graduated from consumer beta status — with an enterprise edition that can run apps, display training materials, and connect workers with colleagues via a live video stream.

Technically Glass Enterprise Edition is part of X, the “moonshot company” research subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet. The still-mothballed Glass Explorer Edition is under Google’s hardware group.

Google is featuring Glass’s use as an EHR remote scribe charting and documentation solution as sold by Augmedix.

SwyMed will deploy its telemedicine solution on Glass Enterprise Edition as part of its DOT Telemedicine Backpack, which connects mobile care providers to doctors in real time. 

Reader Comments

From Bill: “Re: Nuance. Seriously mis-timed marketing or a company that just doesn’t care after two weeks without service to some health systems.” Some Nuance systems remain offline 21 days after its malware attack, so perhaps the new client pitch could have been timed better. Still, the company has to continue on under the assumption that its systems will eventually be fully restored.

From Unbreak Healthcare: “Re: Athenahealth. A university practice customer wanted to directly send outbound orders to the hospital lab’s LIS and EHR after finding that poorly configured fax orders were sending one order per page, meaning thousands of pages per day. However, Athena only allows transmission of outbound orders by its AthenaCoordinator Receive Lab Orders. The company wants to charge the hospital (which has no desire to be an Athena ‘customer’) subscription model pricing instead of as a one-time fee, incurring a significant cost for each patient requisition with some discounts for volume. This has not been warmly received by the hospital. Thanks, Jonathan, give me more of this disruption, please!” Unverified, but the document above that I found on Athenahealth’s website says labs can receive orders only if they sign a contract and pay $1.00 per order. 

From Expanding Paunch: “Re: HIT100. I’d like to see the winners scored on real-life experience and accomplishments instead of chronic Twitterhea.” I spent way too much time thinking about this idea, coming up with a scoring methodology that reflects what I look for in assessing someone’s accomplishments in deciding whether they are therefore qualified to render healthcare-related opinions. Here’s my first pass – score yourself and your peers and tell me which criteria you would change. I’ll grade the HIT100 once they are named, using the self-reported information (often inflated) from their LinkedIn profiles since everything should be right there. The scores I tested tracked pretty closely to my assessments of some of our industry’s more prolific pundits, ranging from 0.5 points to over 70. I was kind in deleting an additional metric that deducted points for using self-styled, questionably accurate labels such as thought leader, visionary, thinker, innovator, and entrepreneur.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The latest in my long string of pet peeves is using the initialism CMO, which in our industry means chief medical officer, not chief marketing officer. I’m also annoyed at sites that use trademark and copyright symbols when referring to products and companies – that’s not good form outside of company-produced material since those symbols apply to commerce, not journalism. I’m also frustrated at awkwardly worded sentences caused by incorrectly using “there” as a subject and then stubbornly trying to wrangle the rest of the sentence into submission, but that’s hardly new.

Listening: new from Charlotte & Thieves, a Norway-based band whose moody, slow song “Apparently” is quite fine.

Thanks to new HIStalk and HIStalk Practice Founding Sponsor Medicomp Systems. I have just two Founding Sponsorships available on each site (both of which have been held by the same companies for 10+ years, Medicity being one) and Nuance’s new marketing person hadn’t heard of HIStalk and decided to end their sponsorship, after which at least a dozen companies expressed interest in grabbing their Founding spot. Medicomp got first dibs as the oldest sponsor, with CEO Dave Lareau (he did a great interview with me a couple of years back) graciously stepping up as he has in years past, including sponsoring great HIStalkapaloozas in New Orleans and Orlando. Physicians and nurses love Medicomp’s intuitive Quippe documentation and clinical viewer tools that work with any EHR and allow them to see more patients with better usability and more focus on the patient instead of the screen while giving them the full clinical picture. Quippe Clinical Lens offers a problem-oriented view of all relevant clinical data for any disease state, eliminating the clinical static to improve effectiveness and efficiency. Medicomp has been singularly focused since 1978, when it was founded by legendary MEDCIN terminology inventor and company president Peter Goltra (I met him years ago at a HIMSS conference and he’s an impressive and humble guy). Thanks to Dave and Medicomp for supporting HIStalk and HIStalk Practice, not just now, but for many years running.

Here’s a overview video I found on YouTube describing how Medicomp’s Quippe Clinical Lens helps prevent MACRA-caused lost productivity and physician dissatisfaction.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Ability Network acquires patient payments management system vendor Secure Bill Pay.

Bright.md, which offers a patient interview tool for telehealth visits, raises $8 million in a Series B funding round, increasing its total to $11.5 million.

Singapore-based ST Engineering will acquire TUG robot vendor Aethon for $36 million. Aethon — which had raised $56 million but reported an asset value of negative $1 million as part of the acquisition — sold its pharmacy logistics line last week.

The private equity owner of EMDs is looking for a buyer, according to a Wall Street Journal article that estimates the EHR vendor’s 2017 EBITDA as $13 million.

Sales

Colorado’s HHS chooses H4 Technology’s Compass data management and analytics platform for its behavioral health program. Founder and CEO Chris Henkenius also founded Stella Technology.

People

Cleveland Clinic (OH) hires Ed Marx (Advisory Board) as CIO. He replaces Martin Harris, MD, MBA, who left late last year to become AVP/chief business officer of the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin.

e

Karl Stubelis (Athenahealth) joins Arcadia Healthcare Solutions as CFO.

Joe Alberta (Verscend) joins OmniClaim as SVP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

In Canada, Mackenzie Health goes live on Epic’s first full-suite implementation in a Canada-based hospital.

CMS qualifies National Decision Support Company’s CareSelect as a decision support platform for Appropriate Use Criteria under PAMA and MACRA.

The patent office issues a patent to Sphere3 for its Aperum LeadIt, which correlates data from nurse call lights, smart beds, and RTLS to patient care perception.

Government and Politics

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) writes a lot of indignant letters making demands that go nowhere, so here’s his latest – he and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) want CMS to go after the $729 million in Meaningful Use incentives that HHS OIG estimated was overpaid in its June 2017 report. The senators also want to know how much of the $291,000 was recovered from the 14 sample EPs who were found to have been paid too much and are asking for a random review of EP self-attestation documentation.

The DoD’s MHS Genesis project continues as its second site, Naval Hospital Oak Harbor (WA), goes live on Cerner. Meanwhile, Cerner hires former VA IT executive David Waltman for its federal team. He led the VA’s VistA Evolution program before a short stint as chief strategy officer of federal IT contractor AbleVets.

Missouri Governor Eric Greitens signs an executive order directing the state’s Department of Health and Senior Services to create a prescription drug monitoring program database. Missouri is the only state that doesn’t have a PDMP database, but experts say the state’s new one won’t be fully functional since pharmacies will be required to submit prescription information, but doctors and pharmacists won’t be able to us it during prescribing and dispensing — it’s only intended to be used by pharmacy benefits managers to monitor drug cost and overprescribing. The governor signed the order at the headquarters of pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts. Lawmakers question whether the governor’s order is legal since his office can’t allocate spending, so the legislature will be required to provide any funding to create it.  

A Politico article observes that the Affordable Care Act gave hospitals – especially big ones – more paying customers who would previously have been charity cases, with the top seven hospitals enjoying a combined $4.5 billion annual revenue boost while their charity care dropped by 35 percent. The article notes that hospitals still enjoy tax-exempt status and adds, “Many US cities boast hospitals that are among the best in the world, but the communities around those hospitals might as well be the Third World” as the non-profits provide their executives with million-dollar salaries and country club memberships.

United Hospital Center (WV) will go live on parent company WVU Medicine’s Epic system on August 1.

Technology

Microsoft, always late to any technology party, will set up an artificial intelligence research lab.

Other

The interim CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals declares its implementation of Epic a success in two Queens hospitals, citing improved patient experience, growing patient interest in MyChart, a reduction in time from ambulatory visit arrival to completion from 104 minutes to 80 minutes, and improved management of unscheduled visits. He also says improved capture of patient information has increased the case mix index in adding $7 million in revenue in one hospital. The organization will begin rolling out Epic’s revenue cycle system in Q4 2018 and expects to complete the full Epic implementation by the end of 2020.

Eric Topol tweeted out an interesting study about whether people can detect Photoshopped news photos, which the article concludes they cannot. The article’s genesis was a 2015 photojournalism awards program in which 22 entries – including the winner – were disqualified for manipulating their entries. Everybody already knows this, but just because you see a photo or video doesn’t mean you’ve seen truth.

A remarkable LA Times story finds that USC’s former medical school dean hung out with criminals and prostitutes and was a a crystal meth and ecstasy user, all unwisely captured in photos and video. He quit his $1.1 million job after word leaked out that his 21-year-old female companion’s hotel room overdose on a date rape drug required him to call 911. USC also placed him on leave as an eye surgeon once the story ran.

In India, a hospital contract nurse who hadn’t been paid for two months beats up a doctor on rounds “with her footwear first.” Also in India, the local government orders several nursing schools to suspend classes for five days and send their students to hospitals as replacements for their striking nurses.

Sponsor Updates

• The Boston Business Journal recognizes Definitive Healthcare as the fourth-best place to work in Massachusetts.
• Besler Consulting releases a new podcast, “A new study shows readmission penalties don’t correlate to heart attack outcomes.”
• The Tampa Bay Business Journal recognizes AssessURHealth’s Kyle Mynatt as a Hero at Work.
• CareSync publishes a new white paper, “Chronic Care Management: Improve Patient Health, Increase Practice Revenue.”
• Cumberland Consulting Group is included in Gartner’s “Market Guide for Revenue Management in Pharma and Biotech.”
• Direct Consulting Associates will exhibit at mHealth & Telehealth World July 24-25 in Boston.
• Elsevier and HIMSS Asia Pacific launch the CMO of the Year Award.
• Healthgrades will integrate Medicom Health’s health risk assessment tool with its CRM solution.
• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at the 2017 Michigan Primary Care Annual Conference July 24 in Acme, MI.
• FormFast announces that over 100 “Most Wired” healthcare organizations use its technology.
• InterSystems will exhibit at the Defense Health Information Technology Conference July 25-27 in Orlando.
• Medical Billing Service Review includes AdvancedMD in its list of top five medical billing service companies.

Blog Posts

• Meditech’s Mobile Blood Bank Improves Speed, Safety of Donation Drives in Botswana (Meditech)
• 12 Pitfalls of Electronic Patient Signatures in Registration (Access)
• The real problem with EHR training isn’t webinars, learning styles, or physician buy-in (Nordic)
• The bad news about CMS’s planned delay to the EHR upgrade mandate (Advisory Board)
• Infusion Insight: The AAMI Foundation’s National Coalition to Promote the Safe Use of Complex Healthcare Technology (Ivenix)
• Developing a Sense of Urgency in Healthcare (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• #AHRA2017: Impressions from the exhibition floor (Agfa Healthcare)
• SaaS, PaaS, IaaS: What’s the Difference? (Datica)
• Are you a brilliant woman? We’d like to talk. (Nordic)
• Tapas on FHIR (Infor)
• Provider Sentiment Around Prior Authorization (CoverMyMeds)
• Keep Teams on Track with Project Management (CTG)
• Advantages & Disadvantages of Working Remotely (Direct Consulting Associates)
• The Nuts & Bolts of Potential Health Insurance Changes (Dynamic Computing Services)
• How to Succeed in Value-based Care (Diameter Health)
• Visual Standards in Dashboard Design (Dimensional Insight)
• Revisiting Productivity as a Basis for Compensating Physicians (ECG Management Consultants)
• The house call, once upon a time (EClinicalWorks)
• The Evolving Role of Digital Marketing in Healthcare (Evariant)
• How to Reduce Billing Errors Using GE Centricity EMR Forms (Hayes Management Consultants)
• EHR Implementation: You’ve Signed a New EHR Contract, Now What? (The HCI Group)
• 6 Ways Content as a Service Boosts Your Business (Healthwise)
• CIO Chat – Mike Maksymow, Beebe Healthcare (Huntzinger Management Group)
• Why Professional Dress Isn’t Really About Clothes (Impact Advisors)
• Roaming quickly and securely at Cumberland Healthcare (Imprivata)
• 6 Best Practices for Healthcare Brand Governance (Influence Health)
• Six ways actionable insights can impact top and bottom lines (Ingenious Med)
• How a Mobile-First World Influences Your Patients (Insta Med)
• Building a business case and governance for your EMR (InterSystems)
• Three Patient Access Models: How Health Systems Can Find the Right Fit (Kyruus)
• Medical Device Data Transparency Could Help Health Systems Hit the Elusive Supply Chain “Supply Spot” (First Databank)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 7/18/17

Emids Acquires Encore, Broadens Services to Healthcare Providers

Health IT service provider Emids acquires Encore Health Resources for an undisclosed sum.

Senate Letter to CMS Administrator Seema Verma

Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Charles Grassley (R-IA) send a letter to CMS asking what steps have been taken to recover the EHR Incentive Program overpayments uncovered in a recent OIG investigation.

Taking the Next Step: Deploying a Single Integrated Record across Inpatient and Outpatient Settings at Naval Hospital Oak Harbor

Cerner and the DoD bring Naval Hospital Oak Harbor live on MHS Genesis, its first inpatient setting go-live.

Cerner hires former VA IT strategist for EHR team

Cerner hires former VA chief information strategy officer David Waltman to work on its federal team. During his time at the VA, Waltman worked on the VistA modernization project and DoD/VA interoperability efforts.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 7/17/17

There’s a well-known quote attributed to Henry Ford: “Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.” Sometimes that’s a hard sell for organizations that haven’t done the cultural transformation work to make it a reality. Practice administrators sometimes make excuses for this with the old adage, “When the cat’s, away the mice will play” or try to convince me that their team just tends to slack off.

Usually this conversation segues right into the concept that what gets measured gets managed, and that there are ways to motivate people that don’t always involve having a manager looking over their shoulders. Quality is often driven by the goals we set for people – whether they are goals related to compliance with a specific processes or to a desired outcome.

I’m a big fan of setting both individual and organizational goals. I’ve worked with too many organizations that either set one or the other, or try to blend goals but give too much weight to one. When individuals are overly incentivized without the right systems in place, we sometimes see a breakdown in teamwork.

I’ve seen members of consulting teams who jeopardize their clients’ success by scheduling them far into the future when other team members have current capacity — to make sure they hit their billable metrics. Others may create their own collateral and tools and not share with peers because they feel it offers them a competitive edge. They don’t believe that the rising tide floats all boats, but rather seem to be focused on making sure their boat doesn’t take on any water and stays farther ahead than the competition.

When organizations swing too far to the group incentive side, I tend to see formerly hard-charging individuals begin to withdraw. They may feel that the group is pulling them down or that they aren’t empowered to lead the group to higher levels of achievement. If the group incentives aren’t aligned with what individuals can actually impact, we sometimes see outright apathy.

I saw this recently with a group of workers who previously had individual productivity goals that were directly tied to tangible bonuses and were then shifted to a bonus framework that was tied exclusively to the overall financial performance of the hospital. They had done a great job controlling their own costs and utilization metrics under the previous system, but were disheartened at knowing that poorly performing departments would likely cost them their bonuses in the coming year. Since there weren’t any cross-functional initiatives to take the successes from one team and implement them elsewhere and there weren’t any ways for the teams to work together, they saw it as a lose-lose situation and their own performance suffered.

These are always challenging issues to deal with in healthcare, where our ultimate customer is a patient with a health need. It sometimes feels crass to talk about processes and metrics when you’re working with a certain quantity of human suffering in the equation. Of course, there are extremes: organizations that seem to treat the patient like a widget that can be moved from point A to point B and always with the same characteristics. Such organizations are often accused of being heartless or profit-driven, regardless of their not-for-profit status. The other end of the spectrum often fails to understand the business ramifications of their processes and decision-making or refuses to factor in efficiencies due to the perceived uniqueness of each patient’s or worker’s situation.

As with many things, the answer is typically somewhere in the middle and this also applies to how we incentivize our teams. In addition to balancing individual goals, we also need to look at blending both short-term and long-term goals. When the finish line (or the prize) is too far in the future, it’s hard to stay motivated.

This is the particular challenge we are seeing in trying to motivate physicians and their teams to fully engage with quality initiatives. I think many of our friends in government assume that physicians are motivated by money, hence the way regulatory programs have been structured. Although a good number of physicians took advantage of the incentives or finally jumped in to avoid the penalties, others were more motivated by the idea of autonomy and continue to opt out. One could argue that the incentives (or penalties) weren’t large enough to meaningfully hit people in the pocketbook, but that only applies to some.

Autonomy can sometimes be a negative force when we’re looking at clinical transformation, as providers feel that “their way” is better than that of their peers and don’t want to come together to participate in common care paths or clinical protocols. I’ve seen this to the point of irrationality, where one physician was willing to leave the practice because her personal colorectal cancer screening protocol (which incidentally didn’t mesh with current available data) was not built into the EHR’s clinical decision support framework. Providers like this are the same ones who argue with me when I recommend posting signs for diabetic patients to remove their shoes (shown to increase the percentage of diabetic foot exams) because they have any number of reasons they disagree with it.

In order to be successful under new value-based care systems, we have to let go of some of that autonomy and figure out how to align our individual goals with those of both small (practice) and large (ACO) organizations. We also have to design systems to address short term “wins” such as a more efficient workday that will help get people to the right psychological space to play the longer game with quarterly holdbacks and annual payer incentives.

Finding the right way to motivate people is always a challenge. Physicians tend to be at least a little competitive, having been through the process of medical school admissions, residency matching, and finally entering their fields. Some will be motivated by seeing their performance against their immediate peers, such as partners or hospital data, more than they will be motivated by national benchmarks. Those individuals love real-time reporting or as close to real-time as their technology will allow. They may be more willing to participate in operational tweaks to streamline outcomes and have a vested interest in being part of the solution. Others who are less competitive or unsure of their own abilities tend to shy away from those frameworks, needing more individual coaching or peer-to-peer involvement to be successful.

This spectrum varies across specialties as well. Some have been used to publicizing complication rates for some time, where others find this brand new. One has to be careful with competition though, especially when you’re dealing with top-caliber people and processes. I am working with one organization where all of their providers are routinely in the top decile for various care metrics, if not in the top 3-5 percent. Pitting them against each other isn’t going to be productive from an efficiency (or psychological) perspective.

There’s no magic recipe or secret sauce on how to incentivize people. The best advice I can offer an organization is for them to spend time and energy consciously thinking through these concepts and working with their managers and employees to find a solution that will motivate them to excellence. Assuming it’s one size fits all is a mistake but one that I see all too frequently, as is assuming that people are just intrinsically motivated to do the right thing.

How does your organization motivate people? Email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Emids Acquires Encore Health Resources

Global health IT services provider Emids has acquired Encore, A Quintiles Company, the company announced this morning. Terms were not disclosed.

Pharma development services vendor Quintiles acquired 300-employee Encore Health Resources in 2014 for an unspecified price. Quintiles merged with competitor IMS Health to form QuintilesIMS in a $9 billion deal in May 2016.

Encore will be operated as an Emids business unit under Tom Niehaus, president and CEO of Encore. Encore co-founder Dana Sellers will join the Emids board. Encore has 200 consultants.

Sellers and Ivo Nelson launched Encore Health Resources in early 2009 with headquarters in Houston, focusing on EHR-related services. The company gradually transitioned into analytics.

Nashville-based Emids also has offices in London and Bangalore.

Emids Founder and CEO Saurabh Sinha said in a statement, “As healthcare becomes more integrated and the focus on consumerism grows, payers and providers are working more closely together. The ability to provide healthcare technology expertise and solutions that serve both payers and providers, as well as healthcare technology partners, will be critical to help our customers succeed in the future.”

Morning Headlines 7/17/17

athenahealth Announces Chief Financial Officer Transition

Athenahealth CFO Karl Stubelis resigns after just a year on the job, while current board member Jack Kane takes on the role of interim CFO. Discussing potential replacements, CEO Jon Bush says, “We intend to focus our CFO search on leaders who bring a record of operating discipline and value-creating capital allocation. I look forward to working closely with the athenahealth Board, especially Jack Kane and Tom Szkutak, former CFO of Amazon, to identify the best individual for the role.”

eClinicalWorks Settlement Reaction Survey

A small survey of providers’ opinions finds that 27 percent report a decrease in confidence in their own EHR vendor following the eClinicalWorks settlement announcement.

KVH in the process of making large-scale electronic medical record switch

A local paper covers Kittitas Valley Healthcare’s (WA) consolidation of various clinical IT systems on a single Cerner implementation.

Monday Morning Update 7/17/17

Top News

Athenahealth CFO Karl Stubelis resigns “to pursue other opportunities” after just over a year on the job. Board member Jack Kane has been appointed to serve as interim.

Stubelis’s predecessor Kristi Matus resigned in May 2016 “to pursue other challenges” that her LinkedIn profile suggests she hasn’t found yet.

ATHN shares closed up 2 percent Friday on the news, but the year-long price chart is basically flat.

Reader Comments

From IT Guy: “Re: expensive implementations like at Mayo Clinic. Same thing is going on at NYCHHC. With the total cost of some of these implementations, these hospital systems could literally BUY an HIT vendor.” We had that discussion many years ago at my hospital, where I somewhat jokingly suggested that we buy the company instead of its product since the investment wasn’t much different and we could at least control our own destiny. We also signed up with a desperate vendor that we privately worried we would drive out of business via the overly generous contract they signed in trying to meet that quarter’s revenue target. Don’t forget, however, that the software vendor’s licensing fees are a tiny chunk of the contract’s value, with most of the cost being labor (both internal and external), third-party licenses, and hardware. A $1 billion Epic implementation does not mean the health system writes Epic a $1 billion check. It’s also true that the client would have borne some of those expenses anyway – it’s not like they went from paper to Epic, they were already paying contract fees and labor for the legacy systems being replaced and the savings will offset some part of the new system’s cost. Finally, a lot of the figures you see are just a rumored number with no confirming detail.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

More than half of poll respondents spend one hour or less each week on Facebook, with many of those not using it at all. Thirty-eight percent are on the site for one to 10 hours, while around five percent of respondents spend more than 10 hours weekly on Facebook. I can’t personally imagine that the seven people who park for 20 or more hours each week won’t eventually regret spending a big chunk of their lives staring at an imaginary world instead of taking 10 steps outside to see the real one where actual people and experiences live, but that’s just me. Quite a few people live under the illusion that they aren’t under Facebook’s spell, a premise easily disproven by observers who can plainly see how often and how long they are entranced by it on their PCs and phones.

New poll to your right or here: of the endless number of awards available in healthcare — most of them created solely to advance the agenda of the awarder – which ones do you think are meaningful? (you can choose more than one). Click the Comments link on the poll after voting to explain.

I was reading yet another celebratory announcement about a donor who funded the purchase of some hospital’s new diagnostic imaging machine as a benefit to the community. I’m puzzled why it’s a community benefit since the hospital isn’t going to perform those procedures for free (begging the question, why not?) The hospital will undoubtedly profit from cranking out more billable procedures on the machine, paid for by the insurance companies of those same community residents and thus raising the costs for all. As I’ve said before, I’ve spent most of my career working for hospitals and never, ever would I donate money to one or mistake them for a charity rather than a business of questionable motivation and management.

I’ve just about run out of DonorsChoose money even though I have matching funds left, but the project we funded for Ms. A in South Carolina  was a big hit as her students “clapped and cheered” when their new “teacher’s table” arrived, giving them a space to work on small group projects.

This Week in Health IT History

One year ago:

• Hacker The Dark Overlord lists the digital assets of breached healthcare IT vendor PilotFish Technology on the Dark Web.
• The VA hires KLAS for $160,000 to advise in on an EHR selection.
• Philips acquires Wellcentive.

Five years ago:

• Dissident Quality Systems shareholder and board member Ahmed Hussein launches his fourth attempt to take control of the company by nominating his own board.
• The CDC reports that 55 percent of US doctors use some type of EHR, with an 85 percent satisfaction rate.
• SAIC announces that it will acquire MaxIT Healthcare for $473 million.
• Microsoft reports the first quarterly loss in its 26-year history as a publicly traded company, triggered by a $6.3 billion write-down of its purchase of ad platform AQuantive.

Ten years ago:

• Cerner announces the retirement of 48-year-old COO Paul Black.
• A Modern Healthcare editorial says “national interoperability can wait” and instead advocates the use of patient-carried smart cards that contain information downloaded from each provider’s EHR.
• McKesson announces plans to acquire Awarix.

Weekly Anonymous Reader Question

Responses to last week’s question:

• Evernote has become my go-to app for everything from minutes, notes, and online article indexing to creativity with its drawing capabilities. All data elements are available on all devices, which alleviates access issues, especially for those of us with a hectic travel schedule.
• I use the Hemingway Editor to trim emails and write-ups. Brevity is a virtue.
• OneNote. I use it to organize meeting notes and key documents that are needed for reference. I take handwritten notes during conference calls and then take photos of the notes to post in OneNote for recall later.
• CamScanner on my smart phone to create PDFs. Allows me to work on expenses during my travel — no scanner required.
• FollowUpThen.com, a free service that automatically reminds you about emails you send to other people after whatever time you specify elapses. For example, if I email my co-worker asking for some information or action, I can add 2days@followupthen.com in the BCC field, and I’ll get a reminder in two days about it. If I put the email address in the CC field instead, we’ll both get reminders. It’s like a nearly-automatic task list for email follow-up.
• Any time (iPhone or http://e.ggtimer.com/) where I can put 60-90 minutes on the clock, turn my phone over, minimize Outlook, and dig into something without interruptions. That and Evernote.
• Evernote. Love being able to synch notes between my ipad, PC, and phone. Use it for everything from meeting notes to grocery lists.
• OneNote. It’s an amazing tool for keeping me organized and I’m sure I don’t even use a fraction of its capabilities.
• Google Inbox.
• Outlook. As much as I have a love-hate relationship with it, it has a fair amount of flexibility to do the things your need if you spend the time to set it up fully.
• Excel. I can dump and sort data there. If I’m trying to reason something out, I can structure my thoughts in a list or table and easily add rows/columns.
• Tiny Scanner. Mobile scanning app, free, and it has saved my neck so many times.
• Datawatch’s Monarch software. I was a programmer/analyst before I retired but when I worked there wasn’t a day that went by where I didn’t use Monarch for data/problem analysis. You could create ad hoc extracts or put code in scripts using Monarch to extract data from downloaded reports and delimited or fixed length files. Coupled with some other free or inexpensive software that ran in DOS (and its successor environments) like febootimail, WinSCP, etc., I could put together a script that grabbed a standard report from an HIT system, separated the wheat from the chaff, put it into a human- or machine-readable format and email/FTP the output, typically in less than a couple of hours. I’ve been out of the HIT biz for a few years now and I still use a personal copy of it from time to time.
• SelfControl www.selfControlapp.com. Free open-source application for Mac OS. It lets you block your own access to distracting websites, your mail servers, or anything else on the Internet. Just set a period of time to for blocking, add sites to your block list, and start. Until the timer expires, you will be unable to access those sites–even if you restart your computer or delete the application. ColdTurkey https://getcoldturkey.com, Flexible and difficult to circumvent. Dashboard accommodates a weekly schedule, including a lock to prevent the impulse to make changes during the lock time. It accepts brea ktime between work periods. It will allow for setting up blocking everything except for a few sites, or the entire Internet, and offline games. Wonderful for assuring sleep time with Frozen Turkey, a feature which assures you’ll be locked out of your device for a specified period of time. It is also activated 10:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. on kids’ devices during the week.

This week’s question: How well does your boss know you and your family socially? What off-work interaction do you have?

Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• Mayo Clinic goes live on Epic at the first sites of its $1 billion implementation.
• Cerner Chairman, CEO, and co-founder Neal Patterson dies of cancer at 67.
• Jawbone’s financial pressures lead to its planned shutdown, with its founder moving on to data acquisition and analysis vendor Jawbone Health Hub.
• Some Nuance cloud-based systems remain unavailable to users nearly three weeks after its June 27 cyberattack.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Collectly — which offers EHR-integrated personalized debt collection programs with a focus on physician practices — raises $1.9 million in seed funding. The company charges a flat rate of 10 percent of collected debts that are less than six months overdue.

Sales

Baylor Scott & White Health (TX) chooses Kyruus for provider search and scheduling across its 48 hospitals and for its API-powered ability to match consumer-reported conditions and symptoms to potential providers on its website.

Decisions

• Mary Starke Harper Geriatric Psychiatry Center (AL) went live on CoCentrix in 2017.
• Cozad Community Hospital (NE) will replace NextGen Healthcare’s revenue cycle management software.
• Several Select Specialty Hospital locations will implement Epic.
• Treasure Valley Hospital (ID) will replace Healthland with Cerner in July 2017.
• Saint Thomas Highlands Hospital (TX) will implement Cerner in October 2017, replacing Medhost.

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

Howard Landa, MD (Alameda Health System) joins Sutter Health as VP of clinical informatics/EHR.

Stony Brook Medicine hires Kathy Ross, MBA (Ascension Health Services) as CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

A tiny Reaction survey of 113 ambulatory providers finds that a significant percentage of them trust EHR vendors less in general following news that EClinicalWorks paid $155 million to settle Department of Justice charges, with two-thirds of them also indicating that they probably won’t consider buying EClinicalWorks in the future.

Other

The local paper covers the replacement by Kittitas Valley Healthcare (WA) of its NextGen, Empower Systems, McKesson Paragon, and McKesson Horizon Home Care with Cerner.

Interesting: a failing, formerly county-run Alabama hospital prevails in a four-year-old legal battle over the 12 citizens of China it recruited to invest $500,000 each in return for a fast-tracked citizenship via a federal government program. US Citizenship and Immigration Services rejected the application in saying that the hospital didn’t meet the federal government’s definition of a “troubled business” that would allow wealthy foreigners to buy their US citizenship via investments.

Here is Part 2 of Vince’s HIS-tory of Cerner from a few years back. It’s fascinating to read about Cerner predecessor PGI’s fortuitous entry into health IT when lab systems were catching on and the big players were HBO, Spear, BSL, MedLab, SMS, and McAuto, all long gone since those heady days of 1980. I saw some familiar but also-dead companies on his 1988 list – TDS, Antrim, Citation, and Terrano, for example. I’m peeking ahead at Vince’s next episode and I’m fascinated about how the name Cerner was chosen and by whom.

Weird News Andy pitches a new TV series he’s calling “Ambulance Wars,” even providing a tagline of “Both companies are losing patients.” Houston-area Republic EMS sues rival City Ambulance and its president Mohammad Massoud, claiming that City Ambulance vandalized its ambulances a dozen times in retaliation for losing business and employees to Republic. Republic says City Ambulance hired people to shoot out its ambulance windows, cut the brake lines of one of its ambulances, and covertly installed GPS trackers on its ambulances to harvest client addresses for follow-up advertising.

Sponsor Updates

• Optimum Healthcare IT posts a study of its work on Allegheny Health Network’s Epic Community Connect.

Blog Posts

• Our 4 biggest takeaways from the revised Senate bill (Advisory Board)
• EviCore Designated by CMS as Qualified CDSM for Decision Support Mandate (Qpid Health)
• Demystifying Command Center Coordination (Impact Advisors)
• Can you? Visage can. Vol. 1 Speed | Chapter 8: Priors (Visage Imaging)

   

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 7/14/17

Opioids in Medicare Part D: Concerns about Extreme Use and Questionable Prescribing

An HHS OIG report finds that one in three Medicare Part D beneficiaries received a prescription opioid in 2016, while 90,000 beneficiaries were given extreme amounts of opioids, and 400 prescribers had questionable prescribing patterns.

HGP Releases its Mid-Year Health IT Market Review

Healthcare Growth Partners releases its midyear health IT market review.

Elizzbeth Holmes Just Put Theranos’s Palo Alto Headquarters Up For Rent

Theranos puts its 116,000 square foot Palo Alto headquarters office up for rent.

Mayo launches new $1.5 billion records system

Mayo Clinic brings its first facilities live on its $1.5 billion Epic installation.

News 7/14/17

Top News

An HHS OIG report finds that one out of three of Medicare Part D’s 44 million prescription drug coverage beneficiaries filled at least one opioid prescription in 2016 at a taxpayer expense of over $4 billion.

Alabama and Mississippi led prescribing rates, as nearly half of their Part D patients received opioids.

HHS finds that 90,000 people are at risk of misuse or overdose due to high doses or apparent doctor-shopping. One patient filled 11 opioid prescriptions in a single month from eight prescribers and six pharmacies across five states.

The report says prescribers must use state PDMP doctor-shopping databases, recommends that HHS crack down on doctors who overprescribe opioids for possible patient resale or recreational use, and urges improved public health surveillance and advancement of pain management practices. 

Reader Comments

From Mel Practice: “Re: lab results. We had a patient harmed because the lab didn’t receive their orders from the EHR due to interface problems. For HIStalk readers, do your nurses track pending results and follow up with the lab or does the EHR auto-alert the provider if no results are reported? What happens when the lab receives a specimen without an order?”

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Five-employee, Seattle-based BloomAPI raises $2.4 million in venture funding to continue development of its EHR information exchange and record release and technology. Founder Michael Wasser also co-founded insurance signup site HealthSherpa as an alternative to Healthcare.gov.

Venture capital firm Canal Partners sells its stake in rehab and therapy EHR vendor WebPT to Battery Ventures for 16 times its original investment.

A Craneware trading update says the company expects to report double-digit revenue and earnings growth in its September report, also noting the first sale of its cloud-based Trisus Claims Informatics solution.

Social services coordination platform vendor Healthify raises $6.5 million in a Series A funding round led by BCBS Venture Partners, increasing its total to $9.5 million.

The fading-fast Theranos lists its Palo Alto, CA headquarters building for partial or complete sublease.

Minneapolis-based medical liability insurance vendor Constellation sells its health IT consulting and analytics business (MMIC Health IT) to Med Tech Solutions.

Sales

New York-Presbyterian (NY) chooses Epic to replace several systems, most notably those of Allscripts. MDRX shares have declined in price by around 7 percent following analyst reports stating that NYP is the fifth-largest Allscripts Sunrise EHR customer, representing 6 percent of its installed base and contributing up to $30 million of the annual revenue of Allscripts.

People

Merrie Wallace, RN, MSN (Premier) joins PerfectServe as chief revenue officer.

SPH Analytics hires Suzanne Cogan, MBA (Orion Health) as chief commercial officer.

AuntMinnie.com International Editor Eric Barnes died July 5.

Announcements and Implementations

USC’s Keck Medicine (CA) goes live on QGenda for publishing ambulatory clinical and call schedules.

Datica publishes its Digital Health Success Framework, which helps digital health developers “take products from napkin scribble to market without any snags.”

Health Fidelity launches a patient data acquisition and aggregation platform for providers and health plans, with its first customer Mount Sinai Health Partners (NY) using it to automate retrieval of Epic patient records for review in bypassing the use of extract-transform-load tools.

Healthcare Growth Partners publishes its mid-year health IT market review, which notes that while digital health investments have increased dramatically, mergers and activities haven’t quite kept up. The economic analysis is, as always, near-poetic in its brilliance:

Last year, HGP discussed the concept of Exploiters and Solvers in the healthcare industry. The US healthcare economy is indisputably inefficient. Inefficient markets create opportunities for exploitation or solution. Exploiters seek to exploit inefficiencies to maximize returns for a select few. Solvers seek to eliminate inefficiencies to maximize returns for many. In the context of healthcare, one can quickly see the potential for moral hazard. Martin Shkreli, for example, is an egregious exploiter.

However, exploiting versus solving in healthcare cannot be taken at face value because economic interests often do not align with patient interests. Martin Shkreli is chastised for his actions, but many stakeholders in the healthcare industry pursue some degree of self-interest at the expense of patients that ultimately utilize their product. Two non-profit health systems in the same region may compete at the expense of the patients they serve. Shkreli just crossed the subjective line of moral hazard.

The basic economic pricing model underscores the disconnect. Pricing is generally the equilibrium (or optimization point) between profit and quantity based on the consumer’s perceived value of the product. In practical terms, this means that a product is priced as high as a customer can bear before choosing a substitute product. The latter definition of pricing certainly sounds like a moral hazard in the context of healthcare, and it would be if the patient were the customer. However, the patient is not the customer because he or she is not part of the economic equation to establish price equilibrium

Piedmont Atlanta Hospital (GA) rolls out Atlanta-based Gozio Health’s mobile way-finding app.

Mayo Clinic’s first sites go live on its $1 billion Epic system.

Government and Politics

HHS’s Medicaid Strike Force charges 412 defendants — including 115 licensed professionals – with fraudulently billing $1.3 billion in medically unnecessary services, many of those incidents involving patient recruiters who were paid kickbacks to provide patient information. Of those charged, the DOJ says 120 were prescribing and/or distributing opioids. 

Paralyzed Veterans of America urges the VA to focus on moving ahead with its Cerner contract negotiation and implementation, explaining that the organization believes that, “Cerner Corp. holds the key to saving the lives of disabled veterans in the future, and doesn’t want it waylaid by political posturing about the bigger healthcare debate.”

Privacy and Security

In England, the government pledges $27 million to help hospitals update their IT systems to protect them against ransomware. NHS Digital will also issue cybersecurity threat alerts, staff an incident hotline, and conduct onsite security assessments.

Other

Here’s Vince’s HIS-tory of Cerner, Part 1 from a few years back to pay tribute to Neal Patterson. I’m thinking about re-running the remaining five parts of the series since I enjoyed them the first time around.

Sponsor Updates

• Optimum Healthcare IT is named a top-rated implementation services firm in a new KLAS report.
• EClinicalWorks describes how its Healow Kids mobile app connects parents with their child’s pediatrician.

Blog Posts

• Passion and Vision for the Future: The Legacy of Neal Patterson (Netsmart)
• CIO Chat – Mike Maksymow, Beebe Healthcare (Huntzinger Management Group)
• Meditech Customers Lead 2017 Great Community Hospitals List (Meditech)
• Can you? Visage can. Vol. 1 Speed | Chapter 7: Thin-Slice Reading (Visage Imaging)

Contacts

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

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 7/13/17

I’m going on Hour 8 being stuck in an airport and I’m getting a little punchy. My flight has been delayed a couple of times and I’m now looking at getting to my destination airport at 2:45 a.m. I’ll then have another hour drive to my client, assuming I find an alert taxi driver at that hour since a rental car will be out of the question.

My road warrior readers know what this is like, but for those of you who haven’t spent a good chunk of your lives at the whim of the airlines and the weather, please have pity on the rest of us when we arrive tired and perhaps a little bedraggled. Hopefully the old residency adage that “a shower is worth two hours of sleep” will hold enough to get me through the day.

The airport I’m in has a number of seating areas with electrical outlets, but unfortunately none of them work. Airport decision makers that are OK with that sort of thing should be forced to spend a couple of days stranded at their workplace, left in limbo without charging their phones or using electronic devices yet still being responsible for their daily work.

As long as my battery lasts, it’s a good opportunity to catch up on some vendor updates and try to make a dent in my email backlog. I’ve unfortunately already finished the novel I brought for emergencies, so I may have to break down and go back through security to hit the bookstore, which is bafflingly not in the actual gate area where all the captive people are.

CMS released an article about the “modernized National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES)” which is used for providers to obtain and maintain their National Provider Identifier (NPI) number. The document is heavy on detail, but from what I gather, they’re making the process around non-individual providers more secure and efficient. Not surprisingly, people responsible for maintaining the IDs of hospitals, nursing homes, and physician groups were sharing credentials, which helped lead to the changes. New fields have been added to PPES to document provider-specific information such as languages spoken, race, ethnicity, accessibility, hours, and the provider’s direct email address.

I’m fine with most of that information being collected since I have to provide it every year on various credentialing applications. Hopefully it will be shared somehow so I don’t have to fill it out over and over. I’m not about to provide my direct email address, however, without understanding how it’s going to be used and who will have access.

CMS also published the 2017 CMS Quality Reporting Document Architecture Category III (QRDA III) Implementation Guide Version 1.0 for Eligible Clinicians and Eligible Professionals Programs. For anyone suffering from insomnia, I highly recommend it as an alternative to the Federal Register or Ambien. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the document or who have never heard QRDA, it’s the recipe for electronic exchange of clinical quality measure data. Vendors must keep expert resources on staff who not only know the material, but who can expertly digest updates to the specifications and deploy them to developers, engineers, and more. It’s incredibly dense information and I admire the people who master it and make the world safe for those of us who need to report quality measures.

I’ve received some feedback on my recent piece on training and adult learning. Most of it has been of the “right on” variety, but one shameless vendor used it as an opportunity to try to guess what hospital system I use and market their simulation software. There wasn’t even a decent introductory greeting, just a link to HIStalk and straight into the sell. Any vendor who thinks that kind of approach works is sad. 

One reader noted, “I have deployed and trained everything from a full EHR to portals to secure messaging to population health. The percentage of clients who let me apply even basic adult learning principles was sadly very, very low. Yet, as we know, the downstream impact of poor and/or incorrect or irrelevant training lasts for years.” I have good data on the costs of retraining as well as the loss of productivity after poor training and I drag it out frequently to convince reluctant practice leaders to do the right thing.

Early bird registration is now open for the AMIA 2017 Annual Symposium in Washington DC in early November. This year’s theme is “Precision Informatics for Health: The Right Informatics for the Right Person at the Right Time.” I like the fact that they used “person” rather than “patient” because we need to continue to understand the impact of technology on the users, not just on patient outcomes. There are days where I feel like I’m a human participant in an unregulated study that some deranged Institutional Review Board approved without regard to the safety of its subjects.

AMIA has also opened submissions for the Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH) program, which aims to bring research communities together around the challenges of designing, implementing, and evaluating interactive health technologies. The theme for WISH is “Citizen Science: Leveraging interactive systems to connect to our data, our families, and our communities.” Submissions are open through August 7.

There are entirely too many conferences going on during October and November, so it’s going to be a challenge to decide where to spend my travel dollars. In addition to industry meetings, several friends are headed to a patient safety conference in New Orleans and it’s awfully tempting to select that over the technology offerings, especially when gumbo and beignets are on the line. I also have to start thinking seriously about my primary care board certification, which is coming due faster than I hoped, so that will factor into the conference shopping process as well.

One trip I did decide on is my semi-annual pilgrimage to put my toes in the sand and think about little more than whether I am reapplying sunscreen often enough. I’ve got my coverage arranged and am looking forward to being disconnected from my clients, at least for a couple of days.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 7/13/17

Improving the Health Records Request Process for Patients

ONC leverages human-centered design principles in its new report on making medical data easier for patients to access.

Enlisting Virtual Reality to Ease Real Pain

The Wall Street Journal profiles the work researchers are doing using VR to treat pain.

Humana And Oscar Partner To Sell Health Plans To Small Businesses

Health insurance startup Oscar Health partners with Humana to begin offering policies to small businesses.

House passes bipartisan FDA user fee bill

The House of Representatives passes legislation reauthorizing the FDA’s ability to collect user fees from drug and device makers, a process that funds much of the FDA’s operations. The Senate still needs to approve its own version, and the two need to be reconciled, before the current authorization expires in September.

Morning Headlines 7/12/17

Celebrating the Life of Neal Patterson

The memorial service for Neal Patterson will be held Thursday, July 13th, at 11am and will be live-streamed.

Nuance Healthcare: Impacted Customer Update

Nuance reports that it will begin holding solution-specific conference calls to update impacted clients on the progress it is making to restore services. Nuance has now been working to restore services for 14 days.

Can Patients Make Recordings of Medical Encounters?

A JAMA review of state laws finds that patients are legally allowed to secretly record clinical encounters in 39 of 50 states and the District of Columbia. A small survey of the general public found that 15 percent of respondents reported having done so in the past.

Neil Woodford-backed healthtech startup Drayson Technologies just raised £10m to make the NHS more digital

In England, Drayson Technologies raises a $13 million Series C funding round to commercialize technology developed with Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

News 7/12/17

Top News

A memorial service for Cerner co-founder, CEO, and chairman Neal Patterson will be conducted at 11:00 a.m. Central time Thursday at United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, KS. The service will also be live-streamed.

Patterson’s extensive and well-written obituary was published in the Kansas City Star and on Cerner’s site.

Reader Comments

From Park City: “Re: Rick Adam. Seems to have left Stanson Health and is now CEO of some Intermountain spinoff called Empiric.” Rick’s LinkedIn profile shows the new job, but it also continues to list his position as president/COO of Stanson and he remains on Stanson’s executive page. The website of Empiric Health says its program is based on Intermountain’s ProComp program. It appears to offer evidence-based, analytics-powered process improvement. Empiric was formed in February 2017 by Intermountain and venture capital firm Oxeon, with Loma Linda University Health as its first customer.

From The Care Rationer: “Re: EviCore. Being bought by UnitedHealth Group.” Unverified, but not surprising if true. The South Carolina-based specialty benefits manager, which focuses on evidence-based cost reduction, was rumored earlier this year to be seeking a sale or IPO, valuing itself in the $4 billion range. The company was formed via the December 2014 merger of CareCore and MedSolutions.

From MerryMe: “Re: IQPC. They reach out to us (as a vendor) about attending their CIO Healthcare Exchange in October in Dallas, dropping a lot of big-hospital names. Is this a viable CIO/CMIO event that would be worth investing in as a sponsor?” I’ll invite readers to comment since I’ve never heard of the event. It’s one of those where the attendees (who I assume get free attendance in the “ladies drink free” model that I’ve experienced) are forced to schedule time with vendors who have paid for captive access to them. Of the 10 listed speakers, four are health system CIOs. The conference is run by IQPC, which claims to offer 2,000 events each year, of which a few are related to healthcare. Sponsors can buy whatever level of influence they can afford – a keynote panel moderator slot, a plenary session speaking session (“the grandest speaking platform at the event”), a half-group session that “is positioned to present the sponsor as a master in the topic,” or the usual giveaways such as meals, WiFi, or hotel key cards.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I incorrectly reported a promotion at Agnesian HealthCare (WI) on Monday. Nancy Birschbach is still VP/CIO – the promotion involved the CFO position, not the CIO role.

I’m getting increasingly frustrated by Spotify, of which I’m a premium subscriber. Every time I click the desktop icon, it launches a clunky web page that runs a software update. It used to just do the update automatically upon launching. That’s a minor problem compared to users and web publishers who host their images on the formerly free Photobucket, which in a desperate bid for revenue after adblockers killed its already shaky ad-supported model, decided without warning to start charging users who display their photos on other sites (which is nearly all of them) $400 per year. That action suddenly left broken images all over sites like Amazon, Ebay, Etsy, and blogs as users accuse the company of a ransomware-like tactic in replacing their long-functioning images with a threatening warning graphic and with no easy resolution other than to ante up. I’m curious about the legal standing of such changed terms of service, although I suspect we’ll find out soon enough via a likely class action lawsuit, which better happen quickly to beat the inevitable demise of Photobucket, which was already circling the bowl even before this monumentally stupid management decision.

Listening: The Alan Parsons Project, which I never liked much, but the local low-powered FM station got my attention by playing “Old and Wise,” which I tracked down with Shazam. I was sure it was the Zombies since the singer sounded like Colin Blunstone (who I saw live in a fantastic Zombies concert a few years ago), and sure enough, he did the singing for TAPP on that 1982 album. Maybe I just like Colin.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

In England, healthcare Internet of Things startup Drayson Technologies increases its total funding to $46 million and announces a deal to commercialize technology developed by Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. The company was started in 2015 by former science minister, entrepreneur, and race car driver Paul Drayson.

Healthcare payment analytics vendor Cotiviti will acquire Louisville, KY-based provider performance analytics vendor RowdMap for $70 million.

Healthcare sourcing and contract systems vendor TractManager acquires MedApproved, which offers a hospital new product approval workflow system. The CEO of TractManager – which offers products under the MediTract and MD Buyline names — is former Cerner, TriZetto, and Nuance executive Trace Devanny, who took the job in October 2016.

Hospital pharmacy technology vendor Inmar acquires the MedEx pharmacy logistics product line from Aethon, best known for its TUG delivery robot.

CellTrak Technologies, which offers a homecare care delivery portal, raises $11 million, increasing its total to $23 million.

Published rumors of Amazon’s quiet rollout of a Geek Squad-like home installation and service knocked a billion dollars off the market cap of Best Buy this week. Meanwhile, a study finds that Amazon gets 37 percent of the money consumers spend online, with its Prime subscription and fast delivery setting a bar few other online retailers can meet. I can identify – I always worry that my trash day recycling activities will trigger a concerned neighbor’s “gunshots fired” police visit while I’m deconstructing mountains of Amazon shipping boxes and loudly popping endless strings of the accompanying packing air pillows.

Lexmark’s Perceptive Software product line is folded into Hyland Software’s product portfolio following completion of a previously announced Thoma Bravo buyout of Lexmark’s enterprise software business.

Sales

University of Virginia Medical Center (VA) extends its contract for LogicStream Health’s clinical process improvement solutions.

Three Florida ACOs — Central Florida AVO, Next ACO of Nature Coast, and Space Coast ACO – choose the population health management solution of EClinicalWorks.

The Nebraska Health Information Initiative and the state’s HHS choose DrFirst to capture prescribing information and deliver it to the state’s prescription drug monitoring program database, the first state to require (as of January 1, 2018) the tracking of all prescriptions dispensed (not just opioids) to give pharmacists and physicians a complete medication record for detecting drug-drug interactions and therapy duplication.

Houston Methodist Coordinated Care (TX) chooses PatientPing to give providers real-time notifications when their patients receive care elsewhere.

People

Stanley Crane (Allscripts) joins prescription price comparison and patient adherence technology vendor InteliSys Health as CTO.

Imprivata hires Mark Nesline (Lionbridge) as SVP of engineering.

Jean-Claude Saghbini (Cardinal Health) joins Wolters Kluwer Health as VP/CTO.

Communication, care coordination, and patient education technology vendor CipherHealth hires Lisa Romano, RN, MSN (CareExperience) as chief nursing officer and promotes Barbara Davis, MA to SVP of client success.

Training and HR software vendor HealthStream hires Jeff Cunningham (Informatics Corporation of America) as SVP/CTP and promotes Jeff Doster to SVP/CIO and Scott Fenstermacher to VP/head of sales.

Bonny Roberts (Aventura) joins Diameter Health as VP of customer experience.

Announcements and Implementations

In Canada, Grand River Hospital goes live on Wellsoft’s emergency department information system.

Cardiac Insight releases its Cardea Solo ECG monitoring system that is FDA-approved for monitoring atrial fibrillation following ablation procedures, noting that unlike competitors, it does not require use of a third-party monitoring service and instead sends data directly to the physician. 

Privacy and Security

Nuance updates suggest that the company has still not fully recovered from its malware attack of June 27. A 14-day outage seems problematic for a company  that offers critical cloud-based services globally.

Other

NPR profiles the nurse recruitment strategy of Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital (FL), which buys lists of clinicians and then applies “geofencing” technology to pop up recruitment ads on their cellphones when those potential job candidates enter or leave designated physical zones. The hospital says not only is it receiving several resumes weekly vs. none before, it can even serve up ads as nurses head off to work at rival hospitals, adding, “We have invaded their space in which they live and work, so it’s a much better use of our dollars.”

A review finds that while patient-created recordings of their encounters (often made covertly) offer clinical benefit to themselves and malpractice protection for their providers, state wiretapping laws are inconsistent as to which of the two parties must consent. The patient can record their encounter without provider consent in 39 of 50 states plus DC (the light-colored states above are the “single-party consent” states). The authors also note that patient-created recordings are not subject to HIPAA and that patients are free to share those recordings with anyone without permission. While patients are legally allowed to make such recordings in single-party consent states, the physician also has the right to terminate the visit if they don’t want to be recorded. The article did not address the recording of telemedicine visits in which the patient and provider might live in different states.

This might be the jump-the-shark moment for startups. A China-based company whose app allows renting umbrellas from its code-locked public stands (it’s one of an alarming 15 such companies in China) has almost all of its 300,000 umbrellas stolen by renters who didn’t bother to return them (their deposit covered only one-third of the umbrella’s cost and locations to return them are scattered). Unlike two bicycle-sharing startups in China that recently folded when customers stole all of their rolling stock, the company says it will order another 30 million umbrellas and keep trying.

Sponsor Updates

• Datica posts a podcast in which CEO Travis Good, MD interviews Sanjeev Arora, MD about improving rural access to care using telehealth.

Blog Posts

• 4 Questions with Chuck Podesta, CIO of UC Irvine Health (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Engagement and culture are here to stay (Infor)
• 12 Pitfalls of Electronic Patient Signatures in Registration (Access)
• Bridging the Divide: Engaging Physicians and Nurses in Health IT (Spok)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 7/11/17

Fewer issuers apply to participate in Health Insurance Exchanges for 2018

A CMS press release cites a 38 percent decline in applications to sell qualified health plans on the federal exchange for the 2018 enrollment period as evidence that ACA is failing.

Digital Health Funding 2017 Midyear Review: A record breaking first half

Rock Health publishes its midyear report on digital health funding, concluding that 2017 is on pace to be a record-setting investment year, despite ongoing legislative uncertainty, with $3.5 billion invested in the first half of the year.

Georgia’s Health Commissioner Named to Lead CDC

Brenda Fitzgerald, MD and public health commissioner of Georgia, is tapped to lead the CDC.

US  to Fund Advanced Brain-Computer Interfaces

DARPA issues $65 million in grants to fund a moonshot effort a developing brain implants that would result in seamless brain-to-computer communications.

Neal Patterson Guestbook Comments

I invited readers to share their thoughts and memories about Neal Patterson following his death Sunday. I’ll keep this page updated with new submissions from the guestbook form and from my LinkedIn post comments.

I remember doing rounds at Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids Michigan many years ago and Neal kept saying, “Two seconds is too slow!” Somehow I think he believed if he said it enough, it would come to pass. Alas, we in healthcare IT wish for that kind of performance. A true visionary, passionate and compassionate leader lost too young. (Kate Crous)

Neal Patterson had great vision and will be missed.

As an EHR veteran for 20 years, I’ve always felt that Cerner was a “good guy” in the emerging market. Am sad to see his passing and thoughts and prayers are with his family. (Matt Ethington)

My deepest condolences go out to Neal’s family, friends, and colleagues. For nearly four decades, Neal’s vision and spirit helped transform the healthcare landscape in a way that will have a lasting impact for generations to come. (Judy Faulkner)

Neal Patterson was controversial in and out of Cerner. He pushed a lot of buttons and sent many an executive on a high-speed-wobble. He was a hands-on executive with a vision that held true for decades.

I always looked up to Neal as someone who used his vision to craft an entire industry. For those of us old enough to remember, he was doing clinical computing when clinical computing wasn’t cool.  It wasn’t easy to sell clinical applications to CFOs who ruled IT back in the 80s and 90s, yet Cerner always prevailed. He created a clinical software and services company that did revenue cycle, unlike his peers who grew up during the gold rush of revenue cycle dominance a couple of decades ago. His vision that eventually the revenue cycle would become subservient to the core of patient care, where the patient is treated and where medical knowledge resides, proved true as the industry moved to his vision allowing Cerner to become a dominate healthcare companies in the world.

Healthcare can be flaky as a business. Companies come and go as our government shifts policies and changes funding. Few companies have the patience to survive the waves of change. Neal was a one-of-a-kind who saw a future in healthcare and was unwavering in staying the course, even when the course was hard to see through the fog of regulatory uncertainties we’ve experienced over his professional life.

While Neal was a tornado of a businessman, he not only leaves the legacy of Cerner, but also leaders who spawned out of Cerner to run many of the major corporations in our industry – maybe more than any other healthcare company. I’ve met many of those leaders and they all have the same get-it-done, make-no-excuses, grit that Neil fostered in them in building the culture of Cerner. I tip my hat to one of the original entrepreneurs in our industry. (Ivo Nelson)

I got involved with our Cerner EMR Committee at the start of my career, and worked on Cerner pretty happily for 15 years. I got to know Neal over that time and found him to be the CEO you would want in an HIT company – he was a visionary that made things happened. He listened to clients and cared immensely about making their product better and improving the healthcare system at the same time. I enjoyed his quirkiness and quick mind, which made me realize that it’s OK to be a rebel in healthcare. And in fact, this is the quote that I think embraces Neal the best: “Without Rebels, The Storyline Never Changes.” (DrLyle)

Sad news. Neal was indeed a great competitor and as EXVP of IDX I competed with him many times. The industry has lost a valuable asset in changing healthcare. (Bob Galin)

Absolutely loved that man. He was a warm, and dedicated soul. He “got it.” His visionary leadership style has been inspirational. He will be sorely missed. (Alistair Erskine)

I had the pleasure of working with and for Neal for 16 years (not directly). Neal was a visionary. He was brash and intense and at the same time one of the most down to earth and loving people I had the opportunity to know. Neal was passionate about leadership and about culture. He was passionate about innovation and interoperability. Because of his amazing leadership, Cerner will be a place where I am proud to be for another 16 years. We are changing healthcare for the better with our clients and that, in the end, will be Neal’s legacy.

I was a pioneer with the original HBO. I remember when Neal started Cerner. I had just started my own market research firm. He was a real inspiration and a patron to healthcare IT. He left behind wonderful successes in healthcare IT. Many people have had the luck of working with Neal and I bless God that he gave me the opportunity 20+ years ago to conduct his win loss and customer satisfaction studies. Neal had a passion to understand his marketplace and customers and really cared as he was actually involved. I learned a lot from him, like so many others have. Thank you — I will miss you.. (Cynthia Porter)

I bumped into Neal at the Cerner Health Conference one year and made him laugh with my impersonation of an Irish presenter at CHC. He seemed like a hard-driving yet friendly guy.

As a Cerner customer, I had the opportunity to meet Neal on several occasions. I can say without a doubt that he truly wanted to improve the care of patients. One can argue the pros and cons of how he went about that, but I don’t think anyone should doubt that his ultimate goal was to improve the patient’s experience and outcome.

Much has been and will be written about this remarkable man and industry icon. In the many interactions I had with Neal over the past 30 years, one thing was clear — this man was purpose-driven and committed to solving healthcare’s most vexing challenges and to those who worked with him. He built a great company and will be missed. My condolences to his family and friends. (Scott Kolesar)

I had the honor of working with Neal for 20+ years and his passion and leadership will be sorely missed. He never backed down from a challenge and inspired us all. Condolences to Neal’s family and the entire Cerner family. (Sam Pettijohn)

Sad day for our industry. I interviewed with Neal for my start at Cerner in 1990. Thanks for the opportunity Neal and may you Rest In Peace. Thoughts and prayers to Neal’s family. (Jay Deady)

A very sad day! (Bill Gouckenour)

Wow, so many people got their careers started in HIT under his tutelage. (Michael Silverstein)

With a heavy heart, I express infinite gratitude for being in the Cerner family. Neal’s vision and unparalleled tenacity had me at hello. Goodbye is hard. (Jean Scherschel)

I started working for Neal I the early years of Cerner. He was a leader and visionary beyond all. This is a loss of an amazing person. (Sarah Sample-Reif)

Sad to hear the battle was lost. I am proud I worked for Cerner and was led by a man I must say impacted more people to be better and accomplish more than any other man I’ve personally met. His imprint is upon so many other companies because of the leaders he and the Cerner team built. Condolences to his family and the entire extended Cerner family. (Mark Horner)

Possibly the most progressive and visionary health IT executive in the world. Will be seriously missed. RIP and my condolences to his family and all Cerner employees. (Rick Valencia)

His legacy will continue. My condolences. (Jarrett Runey)

Hit me hard when I read the news today. 67 years young and really transformed HCIT. Made a real difference. All the best to family friends and  colleagues. Too young to be gone. RIP. (Jim Maughan)

I love it when a good personality leads a high pressured and elevated role. I could sense his smiles throughout the photos. (Alex Guizzotti)

Proud to have been mentored by Neal for 26 years. Neal was always there for me and my family. Rest In Peace my friend, leader, mentor, and fraternity brother. (Ken Boyett)

I have had the opportunity to be both a client and an employee of Cerner. While I’ve never been fortunate enough to get to know Neal personally, his vision and leadership has significantly influenced my career the past 20 years. Cerner is the company that I measure all other vendors against. It was not surprising to hear that a succession plan was in place and a new CEO would be named shortly. I hope Cerner continues to challenge the status quo and move us to new heights. I am hopeful that Neal was able to instill his way of looking at the world in his top leadership. He will be missed. (Sheri Rawlings)

I would like to extend a posthumous thank you to Neal for creating an organization that introduced me, and countless others, to the complex and wonderful world of healthcare IT. The recruiting program at Cerner Corporation has brought scores of talent into our industry. As it was with many of my fellow recruits, I entered the health IT world wide-eyed and eager to learn with very little (that’s generous) knowledge of healthcare. The Cerner jumpstart program was a constant feeling of drinking from the fire hose. We worked long hours, had some great fun, and established lasting bonds and relationships. I remember those days fondly. Mr. Patterson was a healthcare visionary, entrepreneur, and fraternity brother that will forever leave a lasting mark on healthcare and myself. (Don C. Ellis)

Neal Patterson was brash, arrogant, and aggressive. Yet despite some of his less admirable personality traits, we have to admit that he did reshape the healthcare IT industry. Neal took a relatively small lab company and changed it into an innovative, expansive, and formidable enterprise. By changing Cerner, he inadvertently changed all of his competitors who designed, developed and sold hospital information systems – whether we knew it, or even liked it, we became better vendors because of Neal. I’ll never forget his full-page picture in the Wall Street Journal. And, yes, “tick, tock” — time runs out for us all. Rest in peace, Neal.

I worked at Cerner for a brief time and everyone always referred to him as Uncle Neal. When the news of his passing was made public, I received at least 10 text messages among my Cerner friends- all of us in shock. Did you know that Cerner requires all new staff to receive orientation in Kansas City no matter where their home base is? Kansas City is a different place because of Cerner and Uncle Neal. RIP

Neal gave me not only the opportunity of a lifetime, but a renewed passion for the health and care of people. Even though I only got to meet him twice during my 14 years at Cerner, he was a daily inspiration to me and helped me get some very tough days. RIP Neal. You’ve made me a better person. (Liz Chamberlain)

A great guy, and he treated everyone with dignity. I met him abut 10 years ago when I was providing services to him and his wife, Jeanne. They were both kind and unassuming. Neal was appreciative, and even took time to get to know me. As busy as he was, and with all he had going on in his life, it was amazing that he would take the time to be such a decent and pleasant guy to someone like me. I remember one evening my wife and I were walking on the Plaza, and encountered him as he came out of the Capitol Grille. I said hello to him, and he courteously acknowledged me. As we walked on he suddenly ran after me, he had obviously just remembered me (as I was not in uniform and in a completely different environment from where he would normally see me). He just could have not been nicer, and even remembered that I had told him that my wife regularly utilized Cerner programs in her management job at a local hospital. What a memory for as busy as he was. Again, a great guy. He will be missed. (Tom Scatizzi)

Deeply saddened by the loss of a health IT giant and bold visionary. Neal inspired and made it possible for thousands in my generation to start and pursue meaningful health care careers where we can make a difference. I have infinite gratitude to my Cerner family and remember my time there fondly. It’s an honor to have known Neal and to have had personal interactions that I will cherish dearly as treasured memories. For many like me, he remains a lasting example long after last encounters. (Santosh Mohan)

A leader in our industry. Respected by all. A legacy that will live on for decades. Thank you for what you brought to healthcare and technology. (Tom Aikens)

This is indeed sad news to read of Neal’s passing. Like many on this post and countless others, Neal instilled vision and passion in his work, those who worked for him, and transformed HIT like no other single person — he was a contrarian that often bucked conventional wisdom and pushed his organization and the industry to innovative heights. Building Cerner from a meeting on a park bench with friends Cliff and Paul and idea born on the back of a napkin, very few CEOs can lay claim to Cerner’s shareholder ROI over the years. (Greg Leder)

Neal was one of the smartest people I ever met and one of the greatest business minds of any founder/CEO of any industry, let alone healthcare. I met him when he was taking the young lab IT company to a new level with an inpatient system and Cerner was installing it in a brand new hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland. I was supplying the cardiology and patient monitoring stack with Marquette. We made an attempt to buy Cerner after that — you can imagine how long it took him to turn us down.

Later, after starting Picis, we met again and I told Neal that he wasn’t getting the market credit for the complete rewrite of his codebase which was well received by customers. He listened to people and he started to pitch that to the analysts and the stock appreciated quite a bit. Though we eventually became quasi-competitors, Neal would personally stop by the Picis booth every year at HIMSS — once with a young associate who he said to in front of me, “Watch this company.” I took that as a great measure of pride and respect.

Neal built a great team — the Cerner culture is one of a strong sales culture backed by execution and delivering. From his partner Cliff to Paul Black, Trace Devanney, Bill Miller, Mike Valentine, and Zane Burke today — all are leaders in Neal’s image. They know because while being a bear to work with/for, they all came away with great leadership skills. The people I’ve hired out of Cerner know how to get things done. Look at the tremendous same store sales record Cerner has had with its customers over the years as a testament.

Neal was one of those people in my life that greatly influenced me — one that I could sit around with for hours and just engage in the most vibrant conversations I’ve ever had about our industry, politics, Ayn Rand, human nature, you name it. We will miss you greatly, Neal! (Todd Cozzens)

When you look back over your career and think about leaders that made you better, anyone that has worked with Neal would have his name high on their list. The healthcare informatics industry is better because of Neal and the leaders he has supported, coached, mentored, and pushed over the years. Neal has seeded this industry with some of the best and brightest leaders in this industry, including Paul Black, Mike Valentine, Bill Miller, and Zane Burke. His legacy and his vision have been left in good hands! Rest in peace, Neal. We will continue to pursue your vision.

I had the good fortune of working for Cerner for 16 years, half of it in the early days. When Neal would begin to spin a tale of the intersection of health and IT, it was spellbinding, engaging, dramatic, motivating, and above all, about improving the quality, dignity, capability, and humanity of all involved in the endeavor. He has been an inspiration, a motivation, and mentor for many of us. But to me, he was the guy — the leader — the reason to work in this industry. He will be sorely missed. His ideas will live on in the next few generations wherever health is impacted by IT.

Every once in a while you meet people who are doing exactly what they love and are called to do. Neal was one of those people. This news is sad. He was inspirational, innovative, provocative, entrepreneurial, yet personal. The world is a much better place because of Neal Patterson and Cerner. (Doug Pousma)

Neal will be missed. (John Simmerling)

Although I didn’t know Neal Patterson at all, his name and company were well known to anyone in the industry. I was fortunate (or so I think!) to have joined the HIT industry around 17 years ago and still laugh at some of the crazy things vendors did back in the day to convince docs they needed to get on the bus. I really enjoyed reading the HIT eulogies from others in this industry who have also been a part of this movement, both leaders and others like me who were just blessed to be a part of the movement.  It was interesting to see who added their thoughts, as well as those who didn’t. That being said, Neal Patterson won’t be the first or last to leave the planet, but I want to thank him for all the things he did to keep this HIT stuff moving forward. Thoughts and prayers to NP and his family! RIP Neal Patterson.

Healthcare IT is such a difficult place to do business in, and on top of that, to have a vision and look into the future. Not many people have that. Always amazes me that it all started on a bench in a park. Visionary and a true leader. Neal, you will be missed.

Rest in peace, Neal. It was an honor to have had the pleasure to know him, to have been a proud member of the Cerner family, and watch him build a formidable legacy which will continue to unfold far into the future. My deepest condolences to the Patterson family. God Bless! (Guillermo Moreno)

One of the few leaders in our industry who did the “right” things for the “right” reasons. (Mark Edelstein)

I never worked for Cerner, but as a business partner of Cerner’s many years ago, I was in a handful of meetings with Neal, always a small group of four or six. Driven, passionate, and visionary is how I would describe him in those meetings. While I didn’t always agree with Neal’s position, there was no denying that he was a driving force and advanced our industry. His contributions to HIT have been invaluable and everlasting. RIP. (Jim Hall)

All of us who worked in the Cerner family learned from Neal Patterson’s passion, drive, and vision. All of us who knew him are better for the experience, and the world is poorer at his passing. RIP Neal, and respects and condolences to your family, and the great company that was your passion for so long. (James Hazy)

He made a difference in so many lives, including mine. The man had a well lived life, overcoming obstacles as they arose with his own style — brash or pushy to some, direct and incisive to those who got his vision. Show me another CEO who can stand up and answer and ask questions about the entire company for 3+ hours year after year, who saw the big picture and drove innovation years ahead consistently. We need him now more than ever, and he will be missed. If you don’t have a Neal Story or two (even if handed down), you didn’t work at Cerner. You can shove that Pie Award. (Joe Boyce, MD)

Exceptional visionary and indeed he created a visionary company. His legacy isn’t just Cerner, but also the leaders he created that went on to lead many other companies — creating a much wider AND generational impact. I had the privilege of working for him and earning my stripes. He had this innate ability to extract the best out of you! He will be missed! (Hemant Goel)

Neal was an extreme visionary leader and a demanding manager. I’m glad to have worked under his tutelage. (Rich Marra)

My deepest condolences to the family friends and colleagues of Neal. He was a true visionary that helped to transform the delivery of patients, families, and communities world wide. His spirit, passion, and vision has helped all of us drive for improvement.
This world is a better place thanks to his work and that is a beautiful thing. Thank you Neal for helping us take care of one patient and family at a time. Rest well, Starfish. (Cynthia Davis)

Though we met only a couple times — in the Cerner Vision Center when I was a much younger Cerner implementation project manager — your enormous Midwestern presence in those meetings made an endless impression on me. Your ability to see a day in the not-so-distant future when data-driven healthcare delivery would make a positive difference in peoples’ lives is here! As someone who shares in this same vision, I am forever grateful for your work and the opportunities your pursuits have afforded me and many, many others. Rest in peace, Neal Patterson. Your innovative spirit lives on, now more than ever. You will not be forgotten, sir. (Jamie Trigg)

I first met Neal in 1994. A kind but driven man with a vision. He altered the landscape of healthcare and thus the lives of many. Thanks, God Speed Neal. (Tom Liddell)

Neal’s years of dreaming, passion, and creative engineering have brought much to our healthcare system and others around the world. It was always an exciting environment in the vision center with Cliff and Neal driving, energizing and listening to all who would share their passion and convictions for dramatic change and a better system of healthcare. From labs, to hospitals, to health systems, to integrated delivery systems, CINs and ACOs and National Delivery models they and all the leaders who grew up in Cerner (the list is too long to list here) brought so much energy and commitment to making things better for patients, people/employees, and now consumers. My best wishes to all those in his family at home and all those Cerner family members who shared their lives with him. We are all better for his being here with us all these years. God Bless you all. (Jay McCutcheon)

A healthcare game changer and warrior is no longer with us. Neal Patterson has been an icon, a mentor in the industry, and will be remembered forever.

I have been in this challenging arena of healthcare IT for almost 2½ decades. Challenging only because of the constant changes that forced all of us to constantly adapt and re-invent ourselves. I have faced some challenges as an ally to Neal, and some on the other side as competitors. We won and lost some battles together and as competitors. The challenge is what made it fun and Neal’s brilliance made us think harder to stay in the game. The most important thing is that we were always driven by our shared mission and passion to do the right thing for our customers and the healthcare industry. The customers and the industry always won!

As we get older and wiser we all are confronted by our own mortality and realize that we are at that inflection point, where the only way to transform healthcare is by leveraging from the experience gained to this point and joining forces with other game changers to make a difference. Today we should carry Neal’s torch and together execute on our shared vision. We thank you my friend for making us better and joining your mission and vision. We will not disappoint you! (Alan Portela)

Neal’s Cerner was an adventure ride unlike anything Disney had ever imagined. Being on the front lines and having a court-side seat while executing his vision to transform an industry was daunting, crazy, fun, unpredictable, and, above all, incredibly rewarding. For the hundreds of alumni who have gone on to run businesses, the lessons we learned and experiences we gained from Neal Patterson eclipse the most prestigious MBA one could earn.

We vision using white boards, we are never comfortable with status quo, we give ‘pen-raised’ youngsters opportunities beyond their current experiences, and cringe at the words vendor, customer, or employee.

I smile when I think of Neal in Heaven. His new associates will be certain to have their vision statement ready to be recited at a moment’s notice, they’ll absolutely have a riveting question to ask during the Town Hall and, by all means, they’ll know to stay low when a debate gets especially lively.

I extend my deepest condolences to Neal’s family. (Gary Pederson)

Neal was truly an amazing person that never forgot his roots. From the moment I met him, he made me feel very welcome and supported. Like most farm boys, he did not expect people to address him as Mr. Patterson or anything formal. Instead, he would insist that you just call him Neal.

I had the privilege of working closely with Neal for many years and gained invaluable professional experience while also getting to know him personally. Make no doubt, whether in the professional environment or personal, Neal was competitive and encouraged and expected excellence. Those years were packed with many late nights, early mornings, … and fun. Neal would joke that when he was around, others had more fun, but it was a reality. I also got to see the personal side of Neal, which was a very compassionate and caring person, something the business world unfortunately often overlooks.

My hope is that we (not just Cerner, but this industry) continue to do what is right for the person, the patient … us. Let us all be compassionate, caring, empathetic, and make “one last round after sundown” in honor of Neal. Because after all, Neal (and many before him) proved that in the end, health care is personal.

Neal made each of us better. He may be gone from this place, but his legacy lives in each one of us. Let’s make him proud!