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HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS16

February 20, 2016 News Comments Off on HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS16

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Access

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Booth 4761

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

One place. One view. ALL of your forms. Access develops electronic forms management solutions that clear your paper path—eliminating the expense, risk, and inefficiency of paper forms. Our software, including Web-based Access Passport and Formatta, enables organizations to capture, manage, sign, and share e-forms data with other systems without paper, printers or scanners. Staff can interact with paperless e-forms anywhere, anytime using any device. By integrating e-forms, e-signatures, and clinical data into EHRs and other healthcare or business applications, you can improve care, remove the impact of paper, and enhance patient safety, compliance, and downtime planning initiatives. Everything related to forms is in one place with Access — so reduced costs, paper-free routines, and complete EHRs can be real-world destinations.    And, if you’re feeling worn out from all those educational sessions, stop by our booth (4761) for a free latte, Americano or whatever you need to keep you going for the rest of the show.


AdvancedMD

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Aaron Glauser, director, product marketing
aglauser@advancedmd.com
801.984.9500

Since 1999, AdvancedMD has helped private practices improve clinical outcomes, patient experience, staff productivity, and financial performance. Our cloud EHR and PM suite is exclusively designed for independent physicians and includes financial analytics, peer-to-peer benchmarking, patient engagement, and telemedicine. Control your destiny. advancedmd.com


The Advisory Board Co.

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jordan English, senior director, strategic marketing
EnglishJ@advisory.com
202.266.6237

Please come to our HIMSS16 presentations: Closing Keynote for the Nursing Informatics Symposium: Shifting from Implementation to Optimization: “Looking Towards the Future; Imagine the Possibilities” with Edward Marx (Monday at 3:15 pm in Marcello 4404) – Innovation Symposium opening presentation: “The Rise of Intelligent Machines in Health Care” with Ken Kleinberg (Monday at 8:15 am in Galileo 901) – “PQRS and Alignment Opportunity – Concept to Operationalization” with Tony Panjamapirom (Tuesday at 2:30 pm in Palazzo D) – “The Rise of Intelligent Machines in Health Care” with Ken Kleinberg (Wednesday at 4:00 pm in Galileo 1004) – “Planting Seeds: Developing a Mature Health IT Team” with Ernie Hood (Friday at 10:30 am in Marcello 4401). The Advisory Board Company is the leading provider of insight-driven analytics, research, and services for healthcare organizations. Through its innovative membership model, the Company collaborates with more than 230,000 leaders at 5,200 member organizations to elevate performance and solve their most pressing problems. The Company provides strategic guidance, actionable insights, cloud-based software solutions, and comprehensive implementation and management services. For more information, visit www.advisory.com.


AirStrip

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Booth 6642

Contact: Chris Lato, director, marketing communications
chrislato@airstrip.com
210.805.0444

Experience how the AirStrip ONE mobile interoperability platform transforms care coordination and drives health system innovation. AirStrip ONE lets you achieve true interoperability. Mobilize your existing technologies to give caregivers the insights they need to provide patient-centered care — anytime, anywhere. Enter our daily social media drawing to win:  Bose SoundLink On-Ear Headphones and a GoPro Hero4 Session Camera  Apple TV 4 (32 GB).


Aprima Medical Software

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Booth 7314

Contact: Judy Friedman, marketing and events
jfriedman@aprima.com
844.4APRIMA

A single application, built on a single database, the Aprima EHR and PM systems are fully integrated. That’s why our software continues to be one of the fastest products for doing complete visit documentation in real time. Stop by booth 7314 at HIMSS to take our Stopwatch Challenge and compare Aprima to ANY EHR! When you take the Stopwatch Challenge, we’ll give you a stopwatch so you can do your own comparison.     Thousands of providers have left their old EHR and made the move to Aprima. When you work in the ever-changing world of healthcare, your medical practice needs systems that are agile and responsive. That’s why over the last 10 years more than 95 percent of our customers have stayed with us, and why thousands of providers have recently made the switch to Aprima. Aprima is one of the few companies with a 18-year track record of success. To learn more about Aprima, visit us at HIMSS in booth 7314 or visit www.aprima.com.


Arcadia Healthcare Solutions

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Booth 4612

Contact: Greg Chittim, vice president, strategic marketing
greg.chittim@arcadiasolutions.com
603.496.1242

Think aggregating high-quality data from many different EHRs is impossible? Come see how we’ve been doing it for a decade. Come to booth #4612 (near the main entrance behind McKesson) to receive: HIStalk’s "best giveaway of HIMSS15" – a conference survival kit and a bottle of water; a look at our "Data Gallery" – an art gallery of visualizations from our provider benchmark database; a demo of our platform recently rated by Chilmark as the best "User-centered Design" among Analytics platforms for Population Health Management; and a raffle for fantastic prizes.  Arcadia Healthcare Solutions (http://www.arcadiasolutions.com) is an EHR data aggregation and analytics technology company delivering managed care to ambulatory networks taking on value-based risk. Arcadia specializes in the integration of data from 30+ EHR platforms, enriching them with claims and operational data, and using that data to drive improvements in patient care quality, practice efficiency, and financial performance. Trusted by independent provider groups, health plans, and integrated delivery networks nationwide, with expertise in both fee-for-service optimization and value-based performance environments, Arcadia supports providers with the benchmark data, insights, and outsourced services to excel in the evolving landscape of American healthcare. Founded in 2002, Arcadia is headquartered outside Boston in Burlington, MA, with offices in Seattle and outside Chicago in Rockford, IL.


Aventura

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Booth 1324

Contact: Jennifer Haas, vice president, marketing
jennifer.haas@aventurahq.com
978.697.3921

With Aventura, security and clinical efficiency doesn’t have to be black or white. Aventura’s Sympatica platform leverages situational awareness to deliver a highly secure, personalized clinical desktop. With security, personalized desktop and interoperability functionality, Sympatica is a flexible, modular offering that fits every operational need and budget. Choose from three levels of functionality to solve a specific issue or leverage all three for a complete, integrated clinical desktop solution. Stop by booth 1324 for a demo and pick up a copy of our Iris & Friends coloring book.


Besler Consulting

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jim Hoffman, COO
jhoffman@besler.com
732.233.5008


Billian’s HealthData

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Booth 1459

Contact: Ben Mauldin, national sales manager
bmauldin@billian.com
678.282.1029

Billian’s HealthData offers unparalleled business intelligence on 875,000 US healthcare providing organizations, including 2M+ healthcare executive contacts. Insight into breaking hospital news, RFPs, emails, financials, HIT utilization, CRM integration, and more offer you an unprecedented amount of data you can use to reduce prospect and market research burdens, identify best-fit partners, and initiate relevant correspondence. Search profiles at https://billianshealthdata.com or visit booth 1459 for a data demo.


Boston Software Systems

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Nick Topping, marketing program manager
nick.topping@bossoft.com
913.839.9527

Boston Software Systems revolutionizes how healthcare works by providing error-free automation for any application, enabling successful EHR migration, streamlined business processes, and improved productivity. Our Active Data Quality (ADQ) platforms are the most sophisticated automation platforms available, giving customers’ peace of mind that critical data is 100-percent error free. We have the best reputation for ease of use and customer support, helping organizations bridge the gap between technologies to help provide optimal patient care. Hospitals and healthcare vendors worldwide respond to regulatory and business initiatives by using technologies from Boston Software Systems to automate and improve processes throughout a variety healthcare organizations and departments. For more information, please visit the company’s website at www.bostonsoftwaresystems.com or call 866.653.5105.


Bottomline Technologies

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Booth 5046

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

Bottomline Technologies powers mission-critical business transactions. Our privacy and data security solution for healthcare protects healthcare information, prevents fraud, and helps customers with their compliance of the HIPAA and HITECH mandates. Our healthcare solutions improve patient and clinician satisfaction while reducing costs with digital forms management, discrete data capture, and eSignature across platforms and devices. Based on our deep market knowledge combined with development and business expertise, we constantly set, anticipate, and respond to changing industry and organizational demands. http://www.bottomline.com/us/healthcare


Caradigm

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Booth 5427

Caradigm is an award-winning population health company dedicated to improving patient care, advancing the health of populations, and reducing healthcare costs. Its enterprise software portfolio encompasses all capabilities critical to delivering effective population health management, including data control, healthcare analytics, care coordination and management, and wellness and patient engagement. See a live demo by visiting us in booth 5427 at HIMSS16 or learn more at www.Caradigm.com.


CareSync

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Booth 147

Contact: Courtney Larned, vice president of marketing and corporate communications
courtney@caresync.com
727.366.5389

CareSync is the leading patient-centered engagement solution that combines technology with 24/7 nursing services to facilitate care coordination among patients, family and caregivers, and all providers. CareSync provides turnkey chronic care management services and a software-only option, allowing practices of any size to easily meet the billing requirements for CPT code 99490. CareSync patients are at the center of their healthcare, with access to health information, actionable goals, and comprehensive care plan tasks, and as a result, are experiencing more productive medical appointments and better health outcomes.


Catalyze

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Kevin Lindbergh, vice president, sales
kevin@catalyze.io
612.202.7087


CenterX

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Booth 3073

Contact: Christopher Marshall, president
christopher@centerx.com
855.CenterX

CenterX is a is a comprehensive e-prescribing network that helps your physicians spend more time with their patients and less time completing prior authorizations. The CenterX ePA solution will execute all PA types electronically – pharmacy, medical, and specialty – decreasing PA turn-around time by 90 percent. Save time by identifying, capturing, and automating the PA process in your EHR – before the patient leaves the office. Giveaway: Stop by booth 3073 to learn how CenterX can help you save time and grab a free swag bag, pen and notepad.


The Chartis Group

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Daniel Herman, director and informatics and technology practice leader
dherman@chartis.com
412.370.4900

The Chartis Group is a national advisory services firm dedicated to the healthcare industry. We provide strategic and economic planning, accountable care, clinical transformation, and informatics and technology consulting services to the country’s leading healthcare providers. Our firm is comprised of experienced healthcare professionals who apply a distinctive knowledge of healthcare economics, markets, clinical models, and information technology to help clients achieve demonstrative outcomes. Chartis has been privileged to work with leading healthcare organizations across the world. Our collective experience across many organizations provides us a deep knowledge base, client network, and perspective on what it takes to make meaningful and sustainable change. Over the past decade, we have worked with leading healthcare organizations across the country and throughout the world including over two-thirds of the academic medical centers on the US News & World Report “Honor Roll of Best Hospitals,” seven of the 10 largest integrated healthcare systems, four of the five largest not-for-profit health systems, nine of the top 10 children’s hospitals, emerging and leading ACOs, hundreds of community-based health systems, and leading organizations in healthcare services.


Clinical Architecture

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Booth 721

Contact: Mark DuBois, executive vice president of sales
marck_dubois@clinicalarchitecture.com
317.853.1080

We develop software focused on the quality and usability of clinical information. Our solutions address industry gaps in content acquisition, terminology management, interoperability, decision support, and analytics. Each day we will donate $500 to the charity of the winner’s choice. Stop by our booth (#721) to enter.


CoverMyMeds

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Booth 754

Contact: Alison Bechtel, marketing manager, EHR solutions
abechtel@covermymeds.com
614.581.1803

More than 500,000 providers choose CoverMyMeds, the nation’s largest electronic prior authorization platform. CoverMyMeds is integrated with over 360 EHR systems including Epic, Cerner, and Allscripts. Providers submit requests for medications in workflow at the point of prescribing for the fastest, most efficient way to complete prior authorizations. Check your integration status at http://www.covermymeds.com/epa/healthsystems CoverMyMeds is located in booth 754 in the main exhibit hall. Stop by and mention "HISTalk" to be entered to win a $100 VISA gift card.


Craneware

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Rick Weissinger, vice president, marketing communications
r.weissinger@craneware.com
404.617.6794

Craneware executives will be at HIMSS to speak about the value cycle, an exciting new strategy for achieving quality patient outcomes and optimal financial performance and how Craneware is building their solutions for a value cycle future. Attendees can expect to learn more about the switch from revenue cycle to value cycle, and how this will impact the healthcare IT community.


CTG

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Booth 5255

Contact: Amanda LeBlanc, vice president and CMO
amanda.leblanc@ctg.com
800.992.5350

We’re Computer Task Group (CTG), the most reliable IT services provider – built on 50 years of meeting our commitments to make technology work for you and deliver real business value. Our customers come to us from industries worldwide including healthcare and life sciences, energy, financial services, government, technology, and telecommunications. Visit us at booth #5255 to join the celebration! CHEERS T0 50 YEARS.  Toast innovations in healthcare and CTG’s success over the past half century with our CEO and team members.


Cumberland Consulting Group

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Dave Vreeland, managing partner
david.vreeland@cumberlandcg.com
615.335.5272

Founded in 2004, Cumberland Consulting Group is a leading full-service strategic advisory, performance improvement, information technology implementation, and support services firm. Cumberland provides technology implementation and project management support to help its clients advance the quality of services they deliver and to improve their overall business performance. Our experienced consultants deliver results for clients through technology optimization and process improvement. Need help with IT planning? Integration? Upgrades? Optimization? RCM? If so, we can help. For more information on Cumberland, please visit www.cumberlandcg.com.


DataMotion

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Booth 12144

Contact: Bud Walder, vice president, marketing
Budw@datamotion.com
973.455.1245 x512

DataMotionHealth at HiMSS16: Sharing information is at the heart of healthcare reforms and initiatives! At HIMSS16, DataMotion Health will showcase the latest in secure health information delivery services and solutions. Learn about empowering your team to share information for care coordination, patient engagement, population health, and more. Stop by Booth #12144! Or if you prefer, contact us  at www.datamotionhealth.com to schedule some time for a meeting at our booth or hospitality suite at the Venetian.


Direct Consulting Associates

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Frank Myeroff, president
fmyeroff@dc-associates.com
440.996.0051

Direct Consulting Associates provides a broad range of healthcare IT consulting and staffing solutions including staff augmentation, temp-to-perm, and direct hire. Healthcare organizations trust us to acquire the best IT talent in the industry in order to meet their IT initiatives.


Divurgent

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Booth 11612

Contact: Keri DeSalvo, marketing director
keri.desalvo@divurgent.com
757.213.6875

Back by popular demand … Divurgent will host a fast-paced, fun-filled interactive High Roller Charity Drive to raise $5,000 for the Children’s Hospital of Nevada at UMC. HIMSS attendees are encouraged to stop by booth #11612 and toss the bright red, oversized inflatable dice high into the air – whatever number the dice lands on, will determine the donation value that Divurgent will contribute on the attendee’s behalf!

Divurgent will also be announcing some very exciting, industry-breaking news during the HIMSS conference centered around our cybersecurity, MACRA/MU, and revenue cycle optimization strategies … stay tuned!

Divurgent is a nationally recognized healthcare IT consulting firm, specializing in cybersecurity and privacy solutions, population health management, clinical documentation improvement, and activation management and implementation. Visit booth #11612 to learn how Divurgent can help improve your operational effectiveness, financial performance, and quality of patient care.  To view all of Divurgent’s exciting events and happenings during HIMSS, click here.


DrFirst

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Booth 943

Contact: Ellie Whims, director, marketing communications
ewhims@drfirst.com
301.231.9510 x2808

DrFirst (www.drfirst.com) pioneers healthcare technology solutions that inform the doctor-patient point of encounter, optimize provider access to patient information, enhance the doctor’s clinical view of the patient, and improve care delivery and clinical outcomes. Our growth is driven by a commitment to innovation, security, and reliability across a wide array of e-medication management and secure communication and collaboration services. We are proud of our track record of service to over 335 EMR/EHR/HIS partners and an extensive network of hospitals, post-acute care facilities, ambulatory practices, and pharmacies nationwide. Come by the DrFirst booth on Tuesday, March 1st at 5 PM for a special reception, and world premiere of a new ZDogg Video!


ECG Management Consultants

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Michelle Holmes, principal
mholmes@ecgmc.com
206.689.2231

ECG is a strategic consulting firm that is leading healthcare forward, using the knowledge and expertise built over the course of more than four decades to help clients see clearly where healthcare is going and to navigate toward success. We work as trusted, professional partners with medical groups, hospitals, health systems, and academic medical centers across the country. With deep expertise in technology, strategy, finance, and operations, ECG builds multidisciplinary teams to meet the unique needs of every client. We’re proud to partner with providers across the country to better leverage technology and achieve their goals. For more information, visit www.ecgmc.com.


Elsevier

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Booth 3039

Contact: Yazmin Zayas, senior manager, events/exhibits
y.zayas@elsevier.com
215.239.3490

Encourage Quality. Enhance Efficiency. Improve Outcomes. Consistent, high-quality patient care requires evidence-based content incorporated into the care process. Elsevier provides more than 25 percent of the world’s clinical content and serves more than 20 million healthcare professionals. Integrated into clinical workflows and EHRs, this content empowers healthcare professionals and their patients to make better decisions at every stage of the patient journey. Reference and Decision Support • Order Sets and Care Plans • Learning and Competency Management • Patient Engagement • Professional Practice Services • Academic Education and Certification. When you visit our exhibit, be sure to step inside our Rewarding Knowledge prize booth for a daily chance to win a FitBit, Beats by Dr. Dre, or a $100 VISA gift card. It’s the one place in Vegas where the odds are in your favor. Empowering Knowledge. Enabling Action.


E-MDs

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Booth 5222

Contact: Allison Jones, director, marketing
ajones@e-mds.com
512.257.5200

E-MDs is a leading provider of integrated EHRs, PM software, revenue cycle services, and credentialing solutions for physician practices and enterprises. Founded by physicians, the company is an industry leader for usable, connected software that enables physician productivity and a superior clinical experience. E-MDs software has received top rankings in physician and industry surveys including those conducted by the AAFP’s Family Practice Management, AmericanEHR Partners, MedScape, and Black Book. E-MDs has a proven track record of positioning clients for success as demonstrated by Meaningful Use attainment in 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014. According to data provided by CMS, E-MDs clients are attesting in the top proportion of all major vendors. For more information, please visit http://www.e-mds.com.


Etransmedia Technology

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Booth 1469

Contact: Connie Smith
connie.smith@etransmedia.com
518.283.5418

Etransmedia helps improve revenues and clinical outcomes, enabling physicians to focus on patient care. Etransmedia is a leading healthcare information technology company delivering integrated software, service, and connectivity solutions to simplify critical functions for healthcare providers. Our clients include some of the country’s leading healthcare systems and hospitals, as well as affiliated physician practices. Eight consecutive years, Inc 5000 and four consecutive years, Deloitte Technology Fast 500.


Extension Healthcare

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Booth 1261 and Intelligent Hospital Pavilion Booth 11655-17

Contact: Jenny Kakasuleff, social media PR manager
jkakasuleff@extensionhealthcare.com
317.345.4176

Learn what Extension Healthcare has done for Kaiser Permanente, St. Joe’s, University of Maryland Medical Center, Parkland, and 200 more customers at HIMSS16 booth 1261. Our team at HIMSS will be demonstrating our award-winning, event-driven care team communication workflows, including our real-time waveform integration, and can answer any questions about new features, functionality, and enhancements to Extension Engage Mobile. On Wednesday, March 2, at 11:30 am, NYU Langone Medical Center, an Extension Engage customer, will present the details of their deployment in the Intelligent Hospital Pavilion. Visitors to either Extension booth will be entered into a drawing for an Apple Watch upon completing a survey.


FormFast

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Booth 4849

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

FormFast’s enterprise software platform automates documents and workflow, capturing data and streamlining processes. With more than 20 years exclusively focused on healthcare needs and over 1,000 healthcare clients, FormFast is considered the #1 in eForms for hospitals, according to HIMSS Analytics. At booth #4849, FormFast will give HIMSS16 attendees a test-drive of their automation offerings, which include solutions for registration, mobile bedside consents, electronic signature capture, human resources, clinical documentation, and more. Learn more at: www.formfast.com and follow us on Twitter @FormFast. Booth Promotions: Register to win the Ultimate Supercar Driving Experience! Visit FormFast at booth #4849 to register! Includes: -Exotic Supercar Test Drive on Course  – Round Trip Airfare for 2   -3 Day/2 Night Deluxe Hotel Stay  -$250 Gift Card. FormFast will also have a premiere, luxury car on display at booth #4849 for attendees to check out and to capture an amazing photo opportunity!


Forward Health Group

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Booth 2477

Contact: Barry Wightman, director of marketing
bmw@forwardhealthgroup.com
608.729.7522

Forward Health Group to unBooth at HIMSS16! A visual extravaganza is rolling into booth #2477. FHG, a leader in value-based population health management solutions, zigs when everyone else zags. The fast-growing company will feature prodigious, on-the-fly artistic talents, generating marvelously whimsical graphic population health management collaborations with HIMSS visitors. Producing giant, eight-foot hand-drawn murals each day, recording booth visitors’ visions of their value-based population health futures. FHG will also provide demonstrations of five new PopulationManager products – including innovative pre-packaged FastStart PopulationManager solutions for chronic care, acute episodes, behavioral health, bundled payments, and national standards reporting. Fresh oranges, too. A splendid time is guaranteed for all! Don’t miss the unBooth #2477.


Galen Healthcare Solutions

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Booth 3273

Contact: Justin Campbell, vice president
justin.campbell@galenhealthcare.com
617.379.0841

Galen Healthcare Solutions is an award-winning, #1 in KLAS, healthcare IT technical and professional services and solutions company providing high-skilled, cross-platform expertise. Galen Healthcare Solutions was one of the few vendors to receive multiple 2015/2016 Best in KLAS awards, winning #1 in Technical Services and #1 in HIT Implementation Support & Staffing. For over a decade, Galen has partnered with more than 300 specialty practices, hospitals, HIEs, health systems, and integrated delivery networks to provide high-quality, expert-level IT consulting services including strategy, optimization, data conversion, archival, project management, and interoperability. Galen also delivers a suite of fully integrated products that enhance, automate, and simplify the access and use of clinical patient data within those systems to improve cost-efficiency and quality outcomes. We will be giving away three Apple Watches. HIMSS attendees can enter the contest by scheduling a time to meet during HIMSS: www.galenhealthcare.com/HIMSS16/   


GE Healthcare

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Booth 3055

Contact: Chris Bowler, general manager, Americas region marketing
christopher.bowler@ge.com
860.747.7123

Visit GE Healthcare at booth 3055 to learn how actionable insights can help you improve clinical, financial, and operational outcomes. With over 20 demo stations showcasing solutions for financial management, workforce management, enterprise imaging, and care delivery management, you’ll see first-hand how our software, services, and partners can help spark your success. And don’t miss the chance to talk to our experts and see live presentations featuring our newest solutions: GE Health Cloud – a scalable, secure, connected cloud ecosystem that will enable you to manage data as you need it; and Analytic Applications – an advanced analytics platform and consulting service that helps healthcare organizations quickly generate actionable insights that drive better outcomes.


The HCI Group

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Booth 6832

Contact: Chris Parry, marketing director
chris.parry@thehcigroup.com
904.239.4670

The HCI Group is recognized as a world leader in healthcare IT consulting. Our services include implementation and training of all EHR vendors as well as service lines in optimization, clinical adoption, integration and testing, go-live, and advisory services, among others. From Johns Hopkins and Tenet Health to, Canada, Europe, Asia and beyond, we’ve developed a track record of proven excellence in developing smarter approaches to solving healthcare IT challenges.


Healthcare Growth Partners

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Booth 10650

Contact: Christopher McCord, managing director
chris@hgp.com
312.445.8750

Healthcare Growth Partners is an investment and merchant bank focused exclusively on health IT, digital health, and health information services. Since its founding in 2005, HGP has closed over $2 billion across over 80 health informatics and digital health transactions. Services include M&A advisory, capital raising, and strategy, as well as principal investments through HGP Capital. Through our advisory relationships and investments, HGP aims to unlock health IT’s great potential in solving fundamental challenges in the management and sustainability of health.


Health Catalyst

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Booth 3069

Contact: Patty Burke, program manager

Come by booth #3069 and read any one of our 50 client success stories on display in and around our booth.


Health Data Specialists

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Booth 8402

Contact: Steve Grenier, vice president
sgreiner@hds-llc.com
805.233.0616

Health Data Specialists (HDS) is a privately held, healthcare information services company that has been providing quality consulting services to healthcare organizations nationwide since 2003. Our mission is to provide exceptional consulting services, valued specialists, and trusted advisers to facilitate the IT business strategies of our clients. We focus on assisting healthcare organizations in meeting their IT goals in a cost-effective, efficient manner. HDS is committed to bringing value and proven solutions to our clients’ information technology initiatives. HDS has assisted facilities of all sizes – from large teaching facilities to multi-entity IDNs to regional healthcare centers. We offer a full range of staff augmentation, optimization, and consultative services with expertise in software solutions for Epic, Cerner/Siemens, and Meditech. We provide expertise in Meaningful Use, mock audit services, revenue cycle and ICD-10 support. We value our intangibles, such as our ability to relate to clients regarding their needs, management style, corporate culture, commitment, and confidentiality. These elements differentiate us from other consulting firms and give us a sustainable competitive advantage while strengthening our long-term relationships with our clients.


Healthfinch

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Booth 10828

Contact: Karen Hitchcock, vice president, marketing
karen@healthfinch.com
608.513.6566

Healthfinch’s practice automation platform, Charlie, leverages EHR data to automate, delegate, and simplify routine, repeatable tasks, like prescription refill requests, visit planning and diagnostics results management. Our flagship application, Swoop for prescription refill requests, is used by major health systems to improve workflows and get providers working top-of-license by reducing their inbox volume.    Healthcare leaders who want to improve efficiencies, workflows, and maximize their investment in their EHR should stop by booth 10828 to learn how "Charlie" can help.


Healthwise

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Booth 3617

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

Stop by Healthwise booth 3617 and check out our demo stations to discover how to effectively engage your health populations. Healthwise solutions for episodic care, care coordination, automated programs, and patient portals will deepen the impact of your patient touchpoints. Visit our kiosk in the Population Health Knowledge Center and learn how the right population health strategy can broaden the reach of your care team without adding resources.


Iatric Systems

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Booth 7730

Contact: John Danahey, executive vice president
John.Danahey@iatric.com
978.805.4153

We invite you come by the Iatric Systems booth #7730 in the Venetian Ballroom to see how we can help you enhance your existing healthcare technology investments. Your challenges around analytics, EHR optimization, interoperability, and patient privacy are serious. We look forward to a great conversation around how our diverse healthcare experience, extensive partner network and advisory/consulting services are the foundation for solutions that enhance your healthcare technology investments. It’s serious business, but you won’t want to miss The Magic Castle performer and professional magician Chef Anton’s entertaining and amazing magic tricks – and be entered to win not just one, but TWO Apple Watches. www.iatric.com/HIMSS16


IMO

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Booth 4221

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

IMO provides the most widely-used and physician preferred medical terminology solutions for EHRs.  Visit us at booth 4221 to see the latest innovations around IMO Problem IT Terminology and IMO Procedure IT Terminology. New at HIMSS16: IMO Anywhere – the mobile-enabled solution that lets users access IMO Terminology anytime, anywhere, on any device. IMO 2.0 Enhanced Terminology Platform (ETP) – a new, feature-packed platform that keeps dictionaries updated long into the future. IMO Problem IT Plus – now with our unique intelligent Problem List to give users a clear, concise, and organized view of their patient Problem Lists. IMO SurgIT – the new service that provides highly accurate IMO codes for surgical procedures. Come learn about “The IMO Way” to capture and preserve true clinical intent because The Patient Story is too important to lose. At the vendor solutions sessions, don’t miss “How Capturing True Clinical Intent Improves Patient Care” Tuesday, March 1 at 2.30 pm in Galileo 1001 at the Sands Expo Convention Center. Cool giveaways include T-shirts, flashlights, and more!


Influence Health

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Booth 6232

Contact: Anna Powell, vice president, marketing
anna.powell@influencehealth.com
205.982.5805

Momentum demands movement, movement demands Influence Health. Run, walk, skip or hop toward booth 6232, where a specialized team can help you explore solutions to support your population health and patient engagement efforts. Learn how we can help your organization gain the momentum you need to provide successful, value-based care and improved outcomes. Influence Health’s digital solutions are helping hospitals and health systems nationwide close the gaps in care by providing aggregated patient data and reporting quality measures and outcomes. Stop by the Influence Health booth 6232 Tuesday-Thursday at 11 am and 2 pm for a product demo and a chance  to win NIKEiD custom shoes!* * Winners will be randomly selected at the end of EACH demo. Must be present to win.


InMediata

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Nick Challen, vice president, strategic partnerships
nchallen@inmediata.com
704.998.9129

InMediata drives innovation in healthcare payments by focusing on solving complex reimbursement issues for large provider groups, hospitals, and billing services. We believe in challenging the status quo, utilizing our experience and knowledge to provide tailored solutions that address specific client and industry needs. For example, our InBanking product suite bridges the gap between banking and healthcare claim payments. By automating the payment reconciliation process, healthcare entities are able to gain greater insight into their finances and cash flow while reducing the administrative inefficiencies involved with processing payer and patient revenues. At inMediata, we’re different for a reason. Please contact us to discuss strategic partnership opportunities, and to register for our $500 drawing, which will take place on Wednesday at 5:00 pm.


InterSystems

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Booth 4443

Contact: Ross Whittaker, market development manager
ross.whittaker@intersystems.com
617.621.0600

InterSystems provides the information engines that power some of the world’s most important applications. In healthcare, finance, government, and other sectors where lives and livelihoods are at stake, InterSystems has been a strategic technology provider since 1978. InterSystems is a privately held company headquartered in Cambridge, MA (USA), with offices worldwide, and its software products are used daily by millions of people in more than 100 countries. HIMSS2016 – THEME  Right Connections, Right Conclusions, Right Actions – FEATURED  HX360, Transforming End-of-Life Care, HIE Community Networking Breakfast  The Path to Deriving Clinical Value from FHIR, The Internet of Healthy Things presentation and book signing by Joseph Kvedar, MD. SAMPLE PRESENTATION TOPICS  HIE cost and care improvements – HIE support for population health – Hospital in “The Cloud” – Genomic data – Remote patient monitoring. GIVEAWAY – Conference Survival Kit. More info about InterSystems at HIMSS16  http://www.intersystems.com/himss16.


Legacy Data Access

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Booth 949

Contact: John Hanggi, director, business development
jhanggi@legacydataaccess.com
678.701.5589

Running old applications just to get to the data? STOP! We need to talk … With a singular focus on the healthcare industry, Legacy Data Access provides the industry’s most comprehensive set of software tools and solutions for working with data from retired systems. Legacy Data Access stores data from systems that are being retired and provides secure, Web-based, interactive access to the information. Please visit us to discuss how we have successfully retired 192 different healthcare applications – a total of 463 applications. We will be providing “Coffee, Tea, and Legacy” Tuesday morning in our booth. Giveaways include ear buds, tote bags, and the best dark chocolate in the Exhibit Hall. Sign up for a chance to win an Apple Watch or one of two Apple TVs.


Leidos Health

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Booth 3432, 9908, and 13329

Contact: Matt Maloney, director, marketing
matt.maloney@leidoshealth.com
317.908.8345

For more than 25 years, Leidos Health has been helping our clients improve care and reduce costs by leveraging information technology and best practices. As one of the largest and most experienced health IT consulting firms, and a provider of health IT services to nearly every federal agency focused on healthcare, we bring diverse perspectives and proven solutions to help you succeed. Our experts will be available to discuss the latest happenings and challenges in healthcare, and share how we’re helping organizations with solutions for implementation, optimization, interoperability, cybersecurity, federal health IT, and more. Come by our booth to register for a chance to win an Apple Watch ($350 value). We’ll be giving one away each day.


Lexmark Healthcare

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Booth 6225

Contact: Katie Booth, manager, global healthcare marketing
katie.booth@lexmark.com
913.307.4549

Patients are anxious. Clinicians are frustrated, and IT staffs are overwhelmed. All because the EHR is missing vital patient information. Lexmark Healthcare can help. Our solutions uniquely deliver comprehensive information — medical images, documents, and clinical photos — in one view within the EHR. Ready to transform your tomorrow? Visit HIMSS booth 6225.


Liaison Technologies

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Booth 11610

Contact: Amanda Thomas, director of marketing
athomas@liaison.com
408.309.0867

Liaison Technologies will be giving away a Drone a Day! You can also enter to win a Hoverboard. Stop by the booth to find out how!


LifeImage

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Booth 968

Contact: Jackie Leckas, vice president, marketing
jackie@lifeimage.com
617.244.8411 x203

LifeImage is a network for connecting users and systems to patient imaging histories online. Our platform has been adopted by more than 120 multi-site health systems across the country, which use it to extend their enterprise imaging infrastructure to exchange data with outside facilities, physicians, and patients. This improves care coordination, increases referral business, and eliminates redundant imaging. Visit us at booth #968 during HIMSS16 to learn: •Best practices for integrating external imaging data into your EHR. •Common workflows for exchanging images with patients. •How to ensure your image sharing platform is interoperable with needed applications. We’ll also be giving away an Apple Watch Sport each day of the conference. For more information, visit us at www.lifeimage.com.


LogicStream Health

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Booth 4977

Contact: Nicole Nash, marketing coordinator
nicole@logic-stream.net
651.269.2454

Stop by LogicStream’s booth to enter a drawing to win a hover board. Schedule your show floor demo and get a Starbucks gift card at the booth (email nicole@logic-stream.net).


MEA|NEA|TWSG

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jerry Thomas, chief sales officer
jerry.thomas@twsg.com
407.375.7272

Contact MEA|NEA|TWSG at marketing@mea-fast.com and find out how our solutions for hospitals, including those for esMD (Electronic Submission of Medical Documentation) – a topic that will be discussed in the HIMSS16 Session: Improving Workflow and Increasing Efficiencies with the CMS esMD Electronic Solution on March 3 – along with a suite of highly-integrated software solutions facilitate the secure exchange of health information and the efficient management of healthcare communication via voice, fax, image, data, and electronic documents. Our solutions allow clients to effectively manage critical information that typically resides outside the EHR, closing the continuum on a fully accessible patient record. www.mea-fast.com / www.tracecommunication.com


MedAptus

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Booth 418

Contact: Malachi Charbonneau
mcharbonneau@medaptus.com
617.896.4000

MedAptus solutions streamline the process of delivering patient care. From simplifying pre-care clinical workforce needs to automating administrative tasks at the point-of-care, our offerings provide customers with a foundation for improved operational efficiency, personal productivity, and ultimately, optimized financial performance. Adoption of the MedAptus suite enables providers to spend their time where it matters most – with patients.


MedCPU

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Booth 435

Contact: Gabriela Benincasa
GBenincasa@medCPU

Visit medCPU’s booth (#435) at HIMSS 2016 and experience a quantum leap in healthcare IT. MedCPU proudly hosts Key Opinion Leaders in Decision Support at HIMSS 2016. MedCPU joins Froedtert/Medical College of Wisconsin and UPMC at HIMSS 2016 for a timely presentation on decision-support challenges and solutions. http://www.medcpu.com/himss


MedData

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Booth 5065

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

MedData is among the nation’s leading providers of RCM services including coding, billing, patient reimbursement, eligibility and enrollment, third-party liability, and patient satisfaction services – all with a proven compliance record. For more than 35 years, we’ve been committed to delivering industry-leading and patient-focused RCM solutions to our growing network of more than 1,000 hospital sites nationwide.    Giveaways and promotions: Retro candy throughout the day and craft beer in the afternoons/evenings * ICD-10 or Not Game – Test your knowledge of the new codeset for a chance to win gift cards and other prizes.


Medecision

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Booth: 3438  Population Health Knowledge Center: 14115  Career Center: 13329-8

Contact: Sherri Stuart, senior vice president, marketing services
Sherri.Stuart@medecision.com
610.540.0202

Make Accountable Predictable at HIMSS. Be sure to drop by to experience Aerial for Population Health Management. You could be the winner of Nest, a programmable WiFi learning thermostat.


Medhost

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Booth 3821

Contact: Tom Mitchell, vice president, marketing
Tom.Mitchell@medhost.com
615.761.2011

Medhost HIMSS16 – Solutions to Manage your Facility, Provide Care, and Build a Brand. Visit us at booth #3821 to discover tools to transform healthcare in your community. We offer integrated EHR solutions and an engagement platform that not only empowers providers but also promotes healthy consumers while helping you build a brand and consumer loyalty. Medhost has the solutions you need to optimize patient care while running your healthcare organization with a strong bottom-line.


Medicity

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Booth 4049

Contact: Lauren Tilelli, director of marketing
ltilelli@medicity.com
770.633.9013

Medicity, a Healthagen business, has been creating clinically connected communities for more than 15 years. Today, the company provides population health solutions for more than 90 million people. Medicity makes data smarter, removing the noise and turning it into a strategic asset that enables better sharing of information across the health system. This creates a new dimension in population health, one that leads to more robust analytic insights, more effective care management, and more proactive physician engagement. Medicity’s solutions further enable clinician engagement, improved transitions of care, reduced duplicative services and the opportunity for patients to take an active role in their personal health. Medicity’s breadth of industry reach includes: · 1,000 hospitals · 27 million lives in its analytics solution · 3.6 billion annual transactions · 265 unique EHRs integrated · 250,000 end-users. For HIMSS16, Medicity will be showcasing its entire suite of population health solutions, with a spotlight on Manage, its most recent care management offering. The company also will be launching its new network analytics solution, Explore SmartNetworks, which provides a more complete picture of network leakage and opportunities for network development.


Medicomp Systems

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Booth 1354

Contact: Dave Lareau, CEO
info@medicomp.com
703.803.8080

Lights, camera, action! Let’s play Quipstar. Back by popular demand, Medicomp Systems invites you to play Quipstar, the World’s Favorite HIT Quiz Show. This interactive health information technology quiz show will show the live, studio audience why doctors love Quippe, and how easy it is to learn and use. New this year, teams of contestants will compete for cash and prizes using Medicomp’s newest member of the Quippe family of products, Quippe Clinical Lens. Working with existing EHR systems, Quippe Clinical Lens provides problem-oriented views of relevant clinical information at the point of care. After a brief training, Quippe contestants will utilize Quippe Clinical Lens to answer questions in a game show format. Register to reserve a seat at www.medicomp.com/himss16. Show times are Tuesday and Wednesday at 11 am and 4 pm, and Thursday at 11 am and 2 pm. Giveaways: At each show, participants will have an opportunity to win one of 5 iPad Pro tablets and cash prizes. That is a total of 30 iPad Pros over the course of HIMSS16. Register now!


Merge Healthcare

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Booth 2116

Contact: Kayley Weinbaum, marketing communications lead
kayley.weinbaum@merge.com
312.946.2517

At HIMSS 2016, we will be showing multiple demonstrations of work in progress that unites IBM Research, Watson Health Imaging, and Merge technologies to help transform HIT in addition to our full solutions suite, including our Best in KLAS solution, IConnect Enterprise Archive (our VNA). IConnect Enterprise Archive helps organizations easily collect, manage, archive, and present growing volumes and variances of patient images – DICOM or non-DICOM – both from inside and beyond the walls of your healthcare enterprise.


MModal

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Booth 5029

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

MModal’s Fluency is the only closed-loop clinical documentation platform on the market today. What does this mean to you? It means that from technology to tools to services, MModal’s Fluency platform delivers everything a healthcare provider needs to create, complete, and use clinical information in one connected platform. Learn more about our: •Front-end speech recognition •Intelligence-driven CDI •Enhanced coding workflow •Flexible transcription platform •Radiology reporting solution •Technology-enabled transcription, CDI, and coding services. MModal’s closed-loop clinical documentation solutions support the revenue cycle, facilitate compliance and quality, and most importantly, deliver information where and when it is needed most –  to the physician at point-of-care. Come see us at HIMSS, booth #5029, to learn more.


National Decision Support Co.

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Booth 11010

Contact: Bob Cooke, vice president, marketing strategy
rcooke@nationaldecisionsupport.com
855.475.2500

NDSC is a globally recognized provider of innovative clinical decision support (CDS) solutions widely adopted by healthcare providers and integrated with leading EHR vendors. We offer a scalable, cloud-based architecture for delivering actionable CDS based on nationally recognized guidelines into provider workflows. Through production and delivery of its flagship solution, ACRselect, NDSC has developed a proven process for digitizing consensus medical guidelines and delivering them at the point-of-care. Healthcare is evolving and so is National Decision Support Company. As part of our commitment to making medicine safer, more effective, and accessible, we have launched CareSelectDS to better reflect our company’s scope, competency, and mission. With CareSelectDS, we have broadened the current solutions portfolio in diagnostic imaging and extended its reach into lab and care pathways with the CareSelectDS content community. Whether you’re looking for more information about National Decision Support solutions and services, have specific questions about workflows and integrations, or just have some thoughts to share — we’re always interested in hearing from you.


NEC

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Being the first enterprise communications technology provider in healthcare, NEC is proud to be part of HISTalk and the dedicated professionals who have grown with us and made this the most exciting, challenging, and rewarding vertical industry. Leveraging 65,000 patents and over 100 years, NEC continues to develop healthcare industry-focused applications in communications infrastructure, IT/networking solutions, and award-winning biometrics. Want to learn more about NEC’s mission to orchestrate a brighter world through optimized solutions for healthcare? Follow us @NECHealthcare or #NECHIMSS16 and join our traveling “meet-and-greet”!  We will post our positions to host you for coffee or a libation several times a day throughout HIMSS.


Netsmart

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Booth 5057

Contact: info@ntst.com
800.472.5509

Netsmart is committed to helping health and human services providers deliver effective, outcomes-based care to more than 25 million consumers. Netsmart serves more than 20,000 clients organizations across all 50 states, resulting in approximately 450,000 users of its software and technology solutions. Netsmart clients include mental health and addiction services agencies, health homes, psychiatric hospitals, private and group mental health practices, public health departments, social services and child and family services agencies, managed care organizations, and vital records offices. Netsmart’s CareFabric, a framework of innovative clinical and business solutions and services, supports integrated, coordinated delivery of health services across the spectrum of care. Netsmart’s HIT Value Model, a vendor-agnostic planning and measurement system, provides a path for health and human services organizations to evaluate where on the healthcare IT spectrum they should focus their efforts, the value associated with that strategic decision and a comparison with peer organizations nationwide. Netsmart is pleased to support the EveryDayMatters Foundation, which was established for behavioral and public health organizations to learn from each other and share their causes and stories. For more information, visit www.everydaymatters.com. Learn more about how Netsmart is changing the face of health care today. Visit www.ntst.com or call 1-800-472-5509.


NextGen Healthcare

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Booth 4421

Contact: Lynn Belanger, marketing director
lbelanger@nextgen.com
215.657.7010

NextGen Healthcare is a leader in value-based care, population health, interoperability, and revenue cycle services. See demos and speak with our experts on how we help practices foster healthy communities, engage patients, manage care, and deliver healthy bottom lines – all key elements for a successful transition to value-based care. We will be showcasing solutions designed to help you transform your practice to a value-based revenue entity. To totally understand the costs associated with your provider model, you’ll need to meet at least three goals: Achieve interoperability – data exchange and aggregation across hospitals, physicians, and other systems for a clear, longitudinal view of the patient and your population; enhance the patient experience ― patient access, patient engagement, and communication; and improve financial performance ― revenue cycle management and operational efficiencies. While you’re at our booth, pop across the aisle and visit booth #4429 to see how NextGen interoperability, powered by Mirth technology, is changing the game for interoperability and patient data management, and helping to facilitate care for over 150 Million patients. Happy Hour each day!  Of course, we’re not all work and no play! We invite you to stop by the booth after a long day pounding the convention floor for a pick-me-up. Happy hours run the last hour of the show each day at our booth. Get your headshots at the NextGen Healthcare booth: Drop by and “Say Cheese!” If the last headshot you got was in high school or college, then you NEED to stop by NextGen Healthcare booth #4421. We know you look good and we want to give you proof. We’ll be taking professional headshots for attendees, so stop by and let us get your best side! Headshots will be available about a week after HIMSS16.


Nordic

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Booth 8233

Contact: Drew Madden, president
drew.madden@nordicwi.com
608.616.2000

Visit Nordic, Help a Charity – Stop by booth #8233 and vote on one of three charities to which Nordic will donate money at the end of HIMSS. The charity with the most votes will get the largest donation. As a bonus, while you’re at the booth, you can chat with any of our health IT experts about improving health outcomes and the health of your business with our #1 in KLAS EHR consulting services. Visit booth #8233. Vote on a charity. Have a great HIMSS16.


NTT Data

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Booth 3854

Contact: Larry Kaiser, senior marketing manager
lawrence.kaiser@nttdata.com
310.301.1284

NTT DATA offers IT solutions that increase efficiency, reduce medical errors, and enhance the revenue cycle. Our ONC-ATCB certified solution, Optimum, features an industry-leading RCM solution, EHR, ERP, portal, and post-acute solutions. Reasons attendees should visit the NTT DATA booth: 1. Discuss current industry trends and see how NTT DATA is addressing them.  2. Learn about what NTT DATA offers.  3. Have your mind read by our mentalist. NTT DATA will be giving away a drone to attendees who watch our show and get a raffle ticket.


NVoq

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Interoperability Showcase Booth 11954-38

Contact: Debbi Gillotti, CMO and VP/GM Healthcare
deborah.gillotti@nvoq.com
206.465.1765

NVoq is a cloud-based provider of speech recognition services for the healthcare industry headquartered in Boulder, CO. We offer a real-time client application and RESTful API services for developers to voice-enable their applications, and optional point-of-care coding support for ICD-10 and other standards. No voice training is required to use SayIt, so providers can be productive immediately. Our proven cloud solution works anywhere there’s an Internet connection and there’s no network software or equipment to purchase. In the 2016 Interoperability Showcase, we’ll be demonstrating how simple SayIt voice commands can convert audio to text, create structured data using NLP, and interface structured data directly to major EHRs. We’ll be presenting a variety of specialty use cases illustrating the range of workflow automation powered by SayIt. Didn’t think you had options for speech recognition? You do now. Come see us in booth 11954-38.


Obix by Clinical Computer Systems

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Intelligent Health Pavilion Booth 11655 and Booth 6052

Contact: Heather Ruchalski, director, marketing
marketing@obix.com
888.871.0963

Obix by Clinical Computer Systems, a medical software company, will be participating in the Intelligent Health Pavilion at HIMSS. We are sponsoring the LDR Suite in the pavilion, which will highlight ours and other technologies associated with labor, delivery, and recovery of mother and baby. Within the pavilion, we will be in Kiosk 6, where you can learn more about our strategic perinatal software solutions. The Obix Perinatal Data System is a comprehensive, computerized system for central, bedside, and remote electronic fetal monitoring. It includes archiving, point-of-care charting, single-click management reports, and Internet-based physician access. We will also feature the TrueLabor Maternal Fetal Monitor, which offers a unique digital signal processing technology that enhances fetal monitoring in evaluating uterine contractions and FHR information. We would like to spotlight two speakers that will be presenting in the Leadership Theater within the pavilion on Tuesday, March 1. 1 pm – 1:30 pm Sean Blackwell, MD will speak to:  Resign of Patient Care Work Flow for the Diabetic Gravida: What Should We Be Doing in the Digital Age? 3:15 pm – 3:45 pm Dick Taylor, MD will speak to:  A Clinician in the Intelligent Hospital: Free to be Me. You will have the opportunity to ask questions following their presentations.


Oneview Healthcare

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Booth 8215

Contact: Jeff Fallon, president, North America
jfallon@oneviewhealthcare.com
724.272.1240

Oneview Healthcare, founded in Dublin, Ireland in 2007, is a patient engagement technology company. Come to our booth (8215) for a pint of Guinness, Irish music, and Irish dancers from 4:30 to 6:00 pm on Tuesday, March 1 and Wednesday, March 2! Or stop by any time for a demo and to meet the team. Oneview Healthcare’s patient engagement solution integrates seamlessly with a hospital’s existing EHRs to connect patients with their care teams across the care continuum. While patients enjoy movies on demand, games, meal ordering, hospital concierge services, educational content, and more at their fingertips on a bedside device, the solution works behind the scenes, gathering valuable data for hospitals. Tasks and requests are routed seamlessly to the right resources at the right time, streamlining hospital workflows and creating a relaxed environment for patients. Perhaps most importantly, hospitals can keep a real-time pulse on patient satisfaction through customized surveys they can distribute at any time. Oneview’s ambulatory solution, Oneview Connect, brings patient engagement full circle on patient mobile devices. Patients receive pre-admission scheduling, notifications, and education to prepare them for their hospital visits. They can view maps and check in once they arrive. The high-touch interaction continues post-discharge as patients receive follow-up care notifications, appointment scheduling and continued education, all with care team messaging capabilities to ensure all questions are answered and patients are fully equipped to take care of themselves at home.


Optimum Healthcare IT

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jenny Paal, marketing manager
jenny@optimumhit.com
904.373.0831

Optimum Healthcare IT is committed to building a true business partnership with our clients. We are not just another staff augmentation vendor or consulting firm. Our motivation and passion is about supporting your success and healthy outcomes for your patients. We understand patient care does not stop so your health system can implement new IT processes. That is why our clients rely on our expert IT consultants and FTEs to manage the IT side of the implementations so our clients can focus on their patients. Our commitment to providing excellence in service is driven by a Leadership team with more than 50 years of experience in providing expert healthcare staffing and consulting solutions to all types of organizations. We are passionate about what we do and work hard to deliver premium services to our clients. This philosophy starts at the top of our organization and is the core set of values we impart in all of our employees and consultants. Optimum Healthcare IT is different from the rest because we have built our business on personal experience, based on years in the healthcare industry. We have been on both sides of the transaction and know what is most important to our clients and our consultants. We have based our business model on attracting the best and brightest consultants the industry has to offer, who are experienced clinicians and hospitalists and are considered to be experts in Healthcare Information Technology and business. Working with these stellar consultants make our presentations to healthcare systems that much more impressive. Our ability to view the client from this holistic perspective gives us the advantage of providing superb services, which span a large spectrum of Service Lines. When our clients have a need, we can fulfill it.


Orchestrate Healthcare

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Booth 7520

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

What Happens In Vegas … Helps You Positively Impact Your Organization!  Stop by booth #7520 to hear how our consulting philosophy is Best In KLAS, share with us your upcoming projects and learn how we come in on-budget and without scope creep, and discuss how our information security practice can proactively help your organization. See how 30 impactful minutes with us will change your IT consulting direction!


Patientco

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Booth 14034

Contact: Annie Czarnecki, sales representative
annie.czarnecki@patientco.com
888.747.2455 x401

Patientco empowers healthcare providers to optimize and increase patient revenue cycle efficiency with cloud-based patient payment technology. Patientco goes beyond basic payment processing to connect every patient payment event throughout multi-facility healthcare networks—delivering unrivaled visibility into and control over the patient revenue cycle. The result is improved cash flow, reduced A/R days, cost-saving efficiencies, and increased patient and provider satisfaction. Any provider who schedules and attends a Patientco demo will receive a $25 Amazon Gift Card.


PatientKeeper

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Booth 5249

Contact: Cristina Christy, senior events manager
cchristy@patientkeeper.com
(781) 373-6378

PatientKeeper believes in the promise of IT to enable better healthcare, just as numerous medical technology innovations over the years have dramatically improved our quality of life. Visit our exhibit at HIMSS16 to discover the many ways PatientKeeper is making physician lives better through intuitive applications that streamline order entry, medication reconciliation, documentation, charge entry, and other common workflows. While you’re visiting, have your picture taken in our Pioneers of Modern Medicine photo booth.


PatientMatters

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Sheila Schweitzer, CEO
info@patientmatters.com
407.872.7969


PatientSafe Solutions

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Booth 4257

Contact: Alex Condurso, senior manager, marketing
acondurso@patientsafesolutions.com
760.525.1081

Schedule your show floor demo and get a Starbucks gift card at the booth! http://www.patientsafesolutions.com/himss-2016


PDR

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Booth 1068

Contact: Todd Helmink, national senior vice president, business development
todd.helmink@pdr.net
201.358.7140

Trusted by generations of healthcare providers, PDR delivers innovative health knowledge products and services that support prescribing decisions and patient adherence to improve health. As a leading provider of behavior-based prescription management programs, PDR provides event-driven and clinically relevant healthcare messaging through its patented process that improves patient compliance and outcomes, while preserving privacy. This network is made up of e-prescribing, EMR, and EHR applications, chain and independent pharmacies, and sponsors of healthcare-related education such as pharmaceutical manufacturers, health plans, payers, and pharmacy benefit managers. Learn more at www.pdrnetwork.com.


PeriGen

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Chip Long, senior vice president, growth and development
chip.long@perigen.com
727.460.8167

PeriGen offers the only fetal surveillance software solution that is single-vendor, comprehensive, and fully-integrated. While at HIMSS, preview our new "on-demand" perinatal integration feature.


PerfectServe

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Booth 225

Contact: Leigh Ann Myers, chief clinical officer
lmyers@perfectserve.net
865.212.6140

PerfectServe delivers healthcare’s only secure care team collaboration platform, making it easy to quickly connect with the right care team member in any situation. Using a cloud-based system, PerfectServe Synchrony features Dynamic Intelligent Routing, high reliability notifications, cross-organizational connectivity, and proven interoperability. Nearly 58,000 physicians use the platform for improved care team productivity, better patient experience and HIPAA-compliant messaging. At PerfectServe booth #225, you’re going to feel like a kid in a candy store. Not only will you be surrounded by sweet treats, you’ll get to play with devices and experience first-hand how PerfectServe Synchrony can enable more efficient and productive care teams.


Phynd Technologies

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Booth 10728

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

The Phynd Unified Provider Management (UPM) Platform allows healthcare organizations to unify, manage, and share a single, verified, custom profile on each of their providers, regardless of where that data exists in their multiple legacy IT systems. With the UPM Platform, hospitals and health systems have the ability  to manage their provider (referring and credentialed physicians, nurses, and mid-levels) profiles  across all of their core IT clinical, financial, and operational systems. This single, accurate source for provider information streamlines workflow, improves productivity,  speeds up billing, optimizes the revenue cycle, and enhances care coordination enterprise-wide.


Point-of-Care Partners

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Tony Schueth, CEO and founder
tonys@pocp.com
877.312.7627

Point-of-Care Partners is a leading management consulting firm assisting healthcare organizations in the evaluation, development, and implementation of winning health information management strategies in a rapidly evolving electronic world. Our accomplished healthcare consultants, core services, and methodologies are focused on positioning your organization for success in the integrated, data-driven world of value-based care. Areas we can help you achieve success include: •ePrior Authorization (drug, device, procedure) •ePrescribing/EPCS/Specialty •Clinical Decision Support •Biosimilars (tracking, tracing, naming) •Health Information Exchange •Long-term, Post-Acute Care •Patient Engagement •Population Health/Analytics •Specialty Pharmacy Automation •Telehealth •Medication Therapy Management. In addition, we provide resources to help you stay up-to-date with frequent changes in US healthcare regulatory requirements for both ePrescribing and electronic prior authorization. Visit www.pocp.com to learn more.


Porter Research

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Cynthia Porter, president
cynthia@porterresearch.com
678.427.6241

Porter Research has been in the healthcare IT industry as a proven go-to-market research firm for HIT vendors, healthcare payers, providers, biomedical companies, and consumers for 25+ years. Porter Research offer seven proven services: •Go to Market Strategy Research •Win-Loss Analysis •Brand /Competitive Analysis •Content Development •Customer Experience •Prospect Profiling/Lead Generation •Mergers and Acquisition Research Services. “So many companies in healthcare attempt to package and launch new solutions without fully understanding their target market, articulating their value proposition, and correctly positioning their solution,” says Cynthia Porter, president, Porter Research. We solve these foundational business problems through data-driven research and decades of healthcare experience. “By truly listening to the market and building strong value propositions that resonate with targets, our clients achieve faster brand awareness, market penetration, and business growth.” Porter has worked with over 300 HIT vendors, payers, providers, and biomedical companies since its inception in 1989.


Qpid Health

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Booth 11421

Contact: Amy Krane, senior director, marketing
Amy.Krane@QpidHealth.com
617.982.5400

Is your CFO asking if your value-based reimbursement is what it should be? Do your clinical leaders doubt you are getting credit for the care you deliver? Is manual data abstraction to fill the gaps your current – and costly – solution? If so, it’s time to take a fresh look at how you are reporting on quality measures. Please visit us in Booth #11421 to learn how QPID Health’s clinical reasoning technology locates and synthesizes information from anywhere in patient records to streamline quality reporting, clinical data registry submissions, and medical necessity reviews. Sorry no raffles or giveaways. But … we guarantee that you will be a Super Hero to your team back home when you tell them there’s a new way to optimize the data in your EHR.


Recondo Technology

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Jay Deady, CEO
jay.deady@recondotech.com

Now THIS is a game-changer…. If you are interested in learning about the FIRST true, self-service price transparency solution in healthcare, reach out to Recondo’s CEO, Jay Deady, to schedule some time to connect at HIMSS2016. jay.deady@recondotech.com. View a demo of the first self-service price transparency solution in healthcare and receive a FREE Amazon gift card.


Sagacious Consultants

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Booth 4770

Contact: Stephanie Speth, manager, marketing
stephaniespeth@sagaciousconsultants.com
314.487.0819

Sagacious Consultants leverages its extensive Epic and healthcare industry experience to drive financial performance and improve patient care in organizations worldwide. Using proven methodologies for revenue and clinical transformation, Sagacious Consultants improves KPIs and enhances provider efficiency. Sagacious Consultants is now part of Accenture, expanding its breadth of services and geographies served. Visit Sagacious Consultants at HIMSS booth #4770 to chat with our EHR experts and pick up some great swag! Hear our revenue cycle presentations: 1) “Rady Children’s Hospital Recharges its Revenue Cycle” on Tuesday, March 1 at 11:00 am in the Accenture Booth #7710; and 2) “IT Transformation: Rev Cycle Insights from the CIO” on Wednesday, March 2 at  2:30 pm in the Rock of Ages Theater, Session ID: 155.


Santa Rosa Consulting

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Booth 2157

Contact: Ashley Burkhead, sales operations and marketing manager
ashleyburkhead@santarosaconsulting.com
972.804.4216 (texts welcome)

Booth Giveaway: This year, we will have another tiered giveaway program. We will be giving away 2 items: a $100 Amazon gift card and a tablet (winner’s choice – value up to $400).


Sensato

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Booth 11612 (Divurgent’s booth)

Contact: John Gomez, CEO
john.gomez@sensato.co
844.736.7286

Cybersecurity – one of the hottest and most challenging topics facing HIT leaders this year. Unfortunately, the topic is surrounded by hype, conjecture, and a healthy dose of myth.  Practical strategies, approaches, and real-world solutions are fast becoming unicorns. Sensato is a small, boutique healthcare cybersecurity firm – we are 100-percent focused on HIT and our DNA is HIT.  We don’t use hype, fear, or uncertainty to establish long-term partnerships. Rather, we focus on earning the trust and support of our clients by providing real-world, practical cybersecurity solutions that are respectful of an organization’s challenges and economics. Medical Device Security – Managed Security Services – Compliance – Security Operations Center – Education – Incident Response – Incident Simulation – Strategic Planning – Virtual CISO – Friends – Partners – Coaches … yes … stop by … introduce yourself … changing the world starts by just saying hello! 😉


Spok

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Booth 4829

Contact: TJ Fisher, business solutions advisor
thomas.fisher@spok.com
952.230.5366

Spok is proud to be a leader in critical communications for healthcare, government, public safety, and other industries. We deliver smart, reliable solutions to help protect the health, well-being, and safety of people around the globe. Organizations worldwide rely on Spok for workflow improvement, secure texting, paging services, contact center optimization, and public safety response.  When communications matter, Spok delivers. JOIN SPOK AT HIMSS IN BOOTH 4829 TO SEE HOW YOU CAN: • Manage patient alarms to reduce alarm fatigue and improve the patient experience • Encrypt smartphone communications for HIPAA compliance • Deliver patient test results quickly to speed discharge times • Reach the right on-call clinician quickly for well-coordinated care. Spok will do one drawing at the end of each exhibit day for a chance to win an Amazon Echo.


Stanson Health

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Booth 162

Contact: Kimberly Denney, vice president, commercial operations
kimberly.denney@stansonhealth.com
747.220.4190

Stanson Health recently launched version 2.0 of its closed-loop analytics platform. This powerful platform pulls in all alert data of every type from best practice notifications to drug-drug, barcode, health maintenance, allergy, duplicate checking, etc. to provide more meaningful provider insights across your EHR’s entire alerting environment. During our in-booth demonstrations, we can show you how Stanson Health’s closed loop analytics and active CDS have helped our clients save on average $3k per provider.


Stella Technology

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Interoperability Showcase Booth 11954 |Exhibit Hall G Use Case #11

Contact: Salim Kizaraly, senior vice president, business development and founder
salim@stellatechnology.com
650.793.4131

Visit the Stella Technology kiosk located in the HIMSS16 Interoperability Showcase booth 11954 in Exhibit Hall G. Stella Technology will be conducting the following product demonstrations and theater presentations:

  • Interoperability Showcase Use Case #11 – Stella Technology will participate in this use case by ensuring that the clinical documentation (CCDA) sent by the PCP to the specialist as part of the referral is of high and meaningful clinical quality, as measured by its IQHD (Inspector of Quality Healthcare Data) tool.
  • Demonstration of the Interoperability Test Tool (ITT) used by the ConCert by HIMSS 
  • lnteroperability Showcase Theater Sessions:
    Tuesday, March 1st at 1:00 pm PT. Come listen to our interoperability expert and CTO, Lin Wan, who will be presenting on the topic of “Content Interoperability” and how to overcome any challenges your organization is having around the quality of your clinical data.
    Wednesday, March 2nd at 12:00 pm PT. “ConCert by HIMSS: The Trusted Solution for Interoperability.” Learn how the ConCert by HIMSS certification program is defining interoperability. 
  • HIMSS Blog: "Content Interoperability: Achieving Clinical Data Quality Success" by Lin Wan, CTO, Stella Technology – http://www.himssconference.org/updates/content-interoperability-achieving-clinical-data-quality-success We look forward to seeing you at the Interoperability Showcase!

Strata Decision Technology

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Booth 119

Contact: Rachael Britnell, senior marketing specialist
rbritnell@stratadecision.com
312.827.7711

Strata Decision Technology provides an innovative, cloud-based financial analytics and performance platform that is used by healthcare providers for financial planning, decision support, and continuous improvement. Founded in 1996, the company’s customer base includes 1,000 hospitals and many of the largest and most influential healthcare delivery systems in the US including CentraCare Health System, Fairview Health Services, Mission Health, and Yale New Haven Health System. The Company’s StrataJazz application is a single integrated software platform that includes modules for capital planning, contract modeling, cost accounting, cost management, decision support, financial forecasting, management reporting, operational budgeting, and performance improvement and strategic planning. StrataJazz earned top honors for the second consecutive year as the KLAS 2015/2016 Category Leader for Decision Support – Business in the 2015/2016 Best in KLAS: Software and Services report. The company has also been recognized with the Chicago Innovation Award, as one of Becker’s Healthcare 150 Great Places to Work in Healthcare, #1 in Black Book Ranking, and inclusion on the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies list, among many other industry accolades.


Summit Healthcare

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Booth 3700

Contact: Sara Wildes
swildes@summit-healthcare.com
781.519.4840

Summit Healthcare offers an array of integration/automation solutions. Our Summit Downtime Reporting System delivers access to critical data during downtime, while the Summit Scripting Toolkit and Summit InSync cover your automation needs. The Summit Interoperability Platform features the Summit Express Connect interface engine; Summit Care Exchange, which supports CCD data exchange with an integrated HISP; and Summit Provider Exchange, which simplifies bi-directional physician office integration. Visit us at booth #3700.


Sunquest Information Systems

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Booth 1925

Contact: Corrine Tso, vice president, marketing
corinne.tso@sunquestinfo.com
520.570.2240

At HIMSS16, Sunquest is demonstrating its solutions to enable fully-connected diagnostic communities across the care continuum. Attendees can receive in-booth demonstrations of Sunquest’s clinical and anatomic pathology solutions, as well as learn more about how GeneInsight, Atlas Medical, and Data Innovations can enhance the Sunquest solution. In addition to solution demos, Sunquest and Jitin Asnaani, the executive director of the CommonWell Health Alliance, will co-present on the future of interoperability and Sunquest’s strategy. Join Sunquest at HIMSS16, booth #1925.


SyTrue

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Kyle Silvestro, CEO
kyle@sytrue.com
530.321.7484


Talksoft

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Booth 2272

Contact: Josh Mogilefsky, finance manager
jmogilefsky@talksoftonline.com
866.966.4700 x6023

The Coolest thing in Healthcare! Giveaways include coolers and beverage coozies.


Fujifilm Medical Systems – TeraMedica Division

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Booth 1024

Contact: Beth Roncke, manager, marketing communications
beth.roncke@fujifilm.com
414.908.7744

Synapse VNA integrates more specialties, more devices, and more data than any other VNA. Period. With 16 years of industry leading experience, our TeraMedica Division remains independently focused on advancing VNA technology and healthcare interoperability, while now leveraging Fujifilm’s clinical capabilities. As the centerpiece of Fujifilm’s comprehensive medical informatics portfolio, Synapse VNA provides the industry’s leading image management solution. Schedule your private HIMSS16 appointment at himss.fujimed.com and visit us in booth 1024.


TransUnion Healthcare

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Booth 11318

Contact: Pat Gilmore, vice president, sales
pgilmor@transunion.com
303.256.7187

TransUnion’s ClearIQ patient access platform and coverage discovery solutions (eScan) more accurately identifies and helps providers understand, predict, and integrate the financial behavior of patients so they can efficiently maximize reimbursement for the care provided, which ultimately help providers reduce uncompensated care and deliver a more transparent and improved patient experience.


T-System

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Ann Baty, senior marketing communications manager
abaty@tsystem.com
469.791.2445

Robert Hitchcock, M.D., FACEP, T-System Chief Strategy Officer will be leading an educational session alongside Joseph Pocreva, M.D., Col., USAF, MC, Medical Director, Keesler Medical Center at HIMSS16. Learn how to leverage the power of EHR data to facilitate process change and improve key performance indicators. Using the U.S. Air Force’s Keesler Medical Center as an example, this session discusses utilizing EHR data to actively manage and make decisions related to clinical flow, throughput, staffing resources, bottlenecks and more.

HIMSS Presenter Session ID 57: http://www.himssconference.org/session/using-ehr-data-process-change-throughput-and-satisfaction


Valence Health

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Booth 1368

Contact: Kevin Weinstein, chief growth officer
k_weinstein@valencehealth.com
888.847.0250

If you’re not familiar with Valence Health, we’ve been helping provider organizations accept financial responsibility and rewards for the care they provide since 1996. With our integrated set of population health technology, advisory services, and managed services, our goal is to help you make the essential volume-to-value transition as seamless as possible. Visit us at booth #1368, where we’ll be showcasing our population health technology solutions, which help you: •Aggregate multiple data sources to create a comprehensive patient view  •Identify and close care gaps to manage populations •Measure performance to align clinical and financial goals and •Track patient adherence to care plans.


Validic

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To schedule a meeting:

Contact: Chris Edwards, chief marketing officer
chris.edwards@validic.com
919.260.2231

Validic is the healthcare industry’s leading cloud-based, digital health platform. Validic provides convenient and quick access to patient data from in-home clinical devices, wearables and patient healthcare applications. By connecting its growing base of customers – that includes providers, pharmaceutical companies, payers, wellness companies and health IT vendors – to the continuously expanding list of digital health technologies, Validic enables healthcare companies to better coordinate care across their communities, improve their patient engagement strategies and more efficiently manage their patient populations. Validic’s innovative, scalable and FDA Class I MDDS technology delivers actionable, standardized, and HIPAA-compliant consumer health data from the best in-class mobile health devices and applications. Validic was recognized for healthcare innovation by Gartner and received Frost & Sullivan’s Best Practices and Best Value in Healthcare Information Interoperability award, as well as Top Ten Healthcare Disruptor award. Validic’s leading global digital health ecosystem reaches over 160 million lives in 47 countries and continues to grow daily. To learn more about Validic, follow Validic on Twitter at @validic or visit www.validic.com.


Versus Technology

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Booth 5246

Contact: Jeanne Ehinger, marketing communications manager
jeannee@versustech.com
231.946.5868

Are you looking for locating technology but can’t decide on a direction? With our multi-platform, scalable approach, you’re always on the right path with Versus. Whether you want to leverage WiFi infrastructure for enterprise visibility or delve into advanced locating to optimize clinical workflow, your first step begins at HIMSS16. The only live RTLS demonstration on the exhibit floor, our Experience Center features a fully operational Versus Sensory Network, demonstrating real-time cues for clinical workflow. Learn how we use location data combined with powerful workflow intelligence to not only drive efficiency at the point of care, but also automatically document key measures – helping you measure and manage your operations. We also offer ample opportunity to speak peer-to-peer with RTLS users. Visit the Versus booth to meet a client with 10 years of experience using RTLS automation across eight different solutions. Or, visit us during our exhibit hall cocktail reception, where you’re sure to meet more Versus clients – Wednesday from 4-6pm.


Vital Images

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Booth 732

Contact: Nichole Gerszewski, corporate brand and PR manager
ngerszewski@vitalimages.com
952.487.9500

Visit Vital’s booth (#732) to get your All Access Pass to our VIP Suite featuring game-changing technology. Learn more about VNA on demand, zero-cost data migration, personalized viewing, enterprise interoperability, ACO image governance, and more.


VitalWare

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Booth 6251

Contact: Leslee Paganelli, ambassador, company culture and communication
lesleepaganelli@vitalware.com

VitalWare makes the business of healthcare easier through intuitive cloud-based technologies and advanced knowledge sharing. Our team shapes businesses in the marketplace by delivering best-in-class products and service for a powerful user experience. We identify and simplify challenges in an ever changing and regulated industry, making your job easier. Visit us in booth #6251 to speak with our experts and enter for a chance to win a GoPro HERO.


Wellsoft

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Booth 3128

Contact: Denise Helfand, vice president, sales and marketing
dhelfand@wellsoft.com
800.597.9909 or 732.507.7200

Wellsoft Corp., developer and provider of the industry-leading EDIS since 1988, offers complete solutions for freestanding emergency centers, hospitals EDs and urgent care centers. Visit Wellsoft at HIMSS16 – Booth 3218 and learn more about 1) How to realize more revenue each year with Wellsoft  2) Why Wellsoft is ranked #1   3) Why clinicians and IT love Wellsoft. Wellsoft EDIS is Best in KLAS – Wellsoft ranked #1 in the 2015/2016, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2003, and 2002 Best in KLAS Awards: Software & Services Emergency Department Market Segment.


West

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Booth  6221 & 4200

Contact: Tanya Flores-Olney, campaign marketing manager
ttflores-olney@west.com
800.841.9000

The West Engagement Center combines technology enabled communications with clinically managed services to activate and engage patients beyond the clinical setting. Our solutions for patient access, routine care, transition care, chronic care, and RCM help organizations maximize revenue, quality, and the patient experience. Stop by daily for a hot cup of gourmet coffee and a chance to win an Apple Watch.


Wolters Kluwer – Clinical Drug Information

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Booth 5537

Contact: Matthew Bennardo, market manager
matthew.bennardo@wolterskluwer.com
330.650.6506

Wolters Kluwer Clinical Drug Information joined forces with some of our Medi-Span drug data clients, collaborating on two presentations for HIMSS16 — both related to how healthcare organizations used Medi-Span filter settings and standard EHR tools to better manage alerts, helping reduce noise and the fatigue that comes with unwanted alerts, while simultaneously enhancing medication safety and clinical decision support.

ALERT FATIGUE: IMPROVING ALERT IMPACT BY REDUCING NOISE 
WHEN: Wednesday, March 2, 4-5 pm PT 
WHO: Michael Ochowski and Phillip Boll, Group Health Cooperative South Central Wisconsin  

OPTIMIZING DRUG DOSE CHECKING TO MINIMIZE ALERT FATIGUE 
WHEN: Friday, March 4, noon-1 pm PT 
WHO: David Kaelbar, MD, The MetroHealth System, Cleveland, Ohio  

Come visit us at HIMSS booth 5537 and tell us about your alert wish list. We can share more about how we help healthcare organizations reduce alert fatigue and better manage and optimize medication-related alerts.


Xerox

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Booth 8005

Contact: Kirsten LeMaster, vice president, marketing and communications, Healthcare Provider Solutions, Xerox
Kirsten.lemaster@xerox.com
214.693.5040

Xerox Healthcare helps healthcare organizations focus on improving lives through better, more affordable, and more accessible care by designing processes that work for the people delivering, enabling, and receiving care. We provide a range of technology, analytics, and business process solutions to over 2,200 hospitals, 32 states, and major health plans. Come visit us at booth #8005 and learn why so many health professionals choose us. We can help you implement EHR and ERP, optimize business processes, increase technology adoption, deliver quality and care data, support claims accuracy, communicate member benefits, drive medication adherence, provide risk assessments, and enable access for patients. Stop by our booth to speak to Regina Holliday, artist, influential patient advocate, and founder of The Walking Gallery. She will be speaking with guests and painting their stories in the Xerox booth.


ZeOmega

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Booth 262

Contact: Gus Orr, marketing manager
gorr@zeomega.com
214.619.3961

Stop by ZeOmega’s booth (#262) at HIMSS to learn how we can supercharge your EHR and deliver the unique tools you need for a successful transformation to value-based care. While you’re there, you can recharge your mobile device at our convenient charging station while you complete a Jiva demo!


ZirMed

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Booth 6647

Contact: Stacy State, director of enterprise marketing
Stacy.State@zirmed.com
888.803.8732

1. Stop by booth #6647 at HIMSS16 to learn how leading US hospitals and health systems uncover 1-3 percent in new net patient revenue. 
2. Visit ZirMed at booth #6647 to find out how one health system cut AR days by more than 20 percent — while implementing a new EHR and growing their physician business by more than 20 percent! 
3. Come see ZirMed at booth #6647—meet the team that just won Best in KLAS for the third year in a row, and learn about ZirMed’s solutions for population health, remit and deposit management, and AR management!


Comments Off on HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS16

Morning Headlines 2/19/16

February 18, 2016 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 2/19/16

IBM to buy data company Truven Health Analytics for $2.6 bln

IBM acquires Truven Health Analytics from Veritas Capital for $2.6 billion. Truven will join the IBM Watson business unit.

Allscripts Announces Fourth Quarter 2015 and Full-Year Results

Allscripts announces Q4 results: revenue climbed one percent to $346 million but missed analyst forecasts, EPS $0.09 vs. –$0.01.

Cerner  Q4 2015 Results – Earnings Call Transcript

In its earnings call, Cerner executives note that the company would have met its bookings guidance but two major deals failed to close by the end of Q4. The company also reports that new business is growing, with 36 percent of its Q4 bookings coming from new clients.

Somerville man accused of plotting attack against Children’s Hospital

A Massachusetts man has been arrested while trying to flee to Cuba for his role in coordinating a denial-of-service attack against Boston Children’s Hospital as part of the hacker group Anonymous.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 2/19/16

News 2/19/16

February 18, 2016 News 1 Comment

Top News

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IBM will buy Truven Health Analytics for $2.6 billion, with Watson Health GM Deborah DiSanzo saying the acquisition makes IBM “the world’s leading health data, analytics, and insights company.”

The Watson Health unit houses previous acquisitions Phytel, Explorys, and Merge Healthcare.

Veritas Capital acquired the healthcare business of Thomson Reuters in June 2012 for $1.25 billion, renaming it Truven Health Analytics. Reports in March 2015 suggested that Truven was preparing for an IPO that would have valued the company at $3 billion.


Reader Comments

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From CareCloudian: “Re: former CEO Albert Santalo. He has been fully removed and last Friday was his farewell party. That’s the second company he’s founded and then was fired from.” Unverified. He’s still listed on the company’s executive page and I assume he’s still chairman of the board. Santalo was removed as CareCloud CEO in March 2015. Revenue cycle vendor Avisena fired him as its president and CEO in September 2008 and then sued him and CareCloud, claiming that he had violated his non-compete agreement.

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From Seashore: “Re: Sandlot Solutions. I heard they’re going bankrupt.” Unverified. I didn’t hear back from Rich Helppie or anyone from the company after running the rumor that they’ve had big layoffs.

From British Bulldog: “Re: EMIS Health, the former Ascribe. Phasing out operations in Asia Pacific through the end of 2017.” Unverified. The England-based vendor renamed itself in June 2015 to unify products that include EMIS (primary care software with 53 percent of the UK GP market), Rx Systems (retail pharmacy software), Ascribe and Indigo 4 (pharmacy and e-prescribing), and Digital Healthcare (retinopathy screening). EMIS bought Ascribe for $80 million in 2013.

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From Dedicated Reader: “Re: Boston Children’s hacker. Caught after trying to flee to Cuba.” The FBI arrests 31-year-old Somerville, MA resident Martin Gottesfeld after he was rescued from his small boat off the coast of Cuba by a passing cruise ship. He is charged with coordinating a week-long denial-of-service attack against the hospital in April 2014 on behalf of the hacker group Anonymous. He faces a five-year sentence for conspiracy.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Catalyze. The Madison, WI company offers “Healthcare’s HIPAA Compliant Cloud,” making healthcare applications and digital health data secure, trustworthy, and interoperable. Developers build their tech stack, then turn things over to Catalyze to provide a HITRUST-certified platform-as-a-service that offers monitoring, dedicated logging, encryption, high availability, and backup and disaster recovery. The company just launched Redpoint, which offers an developer API that provides interface mapping, a RESTful API, a keep-alive VPN connection, and testing. Redpoint offers pre-configured EHR integration scripts (prescribing, encounter or note creation, results alerting, etc.), EHR connectors, and integration workflows. The company offers free reports, open source projects, and an innovator video interview series on its site. HIStalk readers will probably know co-founder, CEO, and privacy officer Travis Good, MD, MBA, who wrote HIStalk Connect for years until Catalyze grew so large (35+ employees) that he ran out of time. Thanks to Catalyze for supporting HIStalk.

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Here’s a nice video of Catalyze’s Travis Good talking about compliance.

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Ms. M from Colorado says, “I can’t believe someone would be this generous” in noting our funding of her DonorsChoose request for hands-on materials for her advanced placement statistics students.

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Also checking in was Mrs. Dickel from her Nebraska kindergarten class, explaining, “The kids are so into these new math tools that they even choose them over Legos during our regular center time! You are truly making a difference in these kids lives. THANK YOU!!!!”

This week on HIStalk Practice: Florida Accountable Care Services and UnitedHealthcare form Central Florida ACO focused on sharing technology and real-time data. Telemedicine market set to surpass the $13 billion mark by 2021. Associates in Dermatology rolls out Iagnosis telemedicine services. CMS introduces new core clinical quality measures. Brad Boyd ponders effective IT governance in the latest Consultant’s Corner. MTBC acquires Gulf Coast Billing. Genesis Medical Associates keeps acquirers at bay by staying tech savvy. Daria Bonner and Phillip Miles outline the importance of physician coder training systems in light of ICD-10.

This week on HIStalk Connect: As apparel companies race to build digital health ecosystems, Asics acquires fitness app Runkeeper for an undisclosed sum. Hackers turn to ransomware to monetize cyber attacks on provider organizations. Microsoft partners with Novartis to create a Kinect-based MS assessment tool. Researchers find little inter-rater agreement in a study designed to evaluate mobile health apps.

Listening: indie rock from Canada-based Wintersleep, whose upcoming release contains “Territory,” featuring a killer bass track by Rush’s Geddy Lee. They sound kind of like Nada Surf, which also has new album out in a couple of weeks. I’m also desk-drumming to a new release from the quirky boys of Weezer.


Webinars

February 23 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Completing your EMR with a Medical Image Sharing Strategy.” Sponsored by LifeImage. Presenters: Don K. Dennison, consultant; Jim Forrester, director of imaging informatics, UR Medicine. Care coordination can suffer without an effective, cost-efficient way to share images across provider networks. Consolidating image management systems into a single platform such as VNA or PACS doesn’t address the need to exchange images with external organizations. This webinar will address incorporating the right image sharing methods into your health IT strategy.

February 24 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Is Big Data a Big Deal … or Not?” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Dale Sanders, EVP of product development, Health Catalyst. Hadoop is the most powerful and popular technology platform for data analysis in the world, but healthcare adoption has been slow. This webinar will cover why healthcare leaders should care about Hadoop, why big data is a bigger deal outside of healthcare, whether we’re missing the IT boat yet again, and how the cloud reduces adoption barriers by commoditizing the skilled labor impact.

February 25 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “Clinical Analytics for Population Health: Straddling Two Worlds.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Brian Murphy, lead analyst, Chilmark Research; Jody Ranck, senior analyst, Chilmark Research. The Chilmark Research clinical analytics team will be sharing some of their key findings from the recently released “2016 Clinical Analytics for Population Health Market Trends” report. This will be followed by a Q&A session to make sure everyone goes to HIMSS16 well informed.


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Healthcare API vendor PokitDok receives an unstated investment from McKesson’s investment arm. The company had previously raised $46 million.

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Leidos reports Q4 results: revenue up 10 percent, adjusted EPS $0.78 vs. $0.69.

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Bloodbuy, which connects hospitals to blood centers, closes a $3.75 million financing round with Premier and St. Joseph Health (CA) as participants.

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Allscripts announces Q4 results: revenue up 1 percent, EPS $0.09 vs. –$0.01, meeting earnings expectations but falling short on revenue.

The local paper profiles 20-physician, western Pennsylvania-based Genesis Medical Associates, which says UPMC and Allegheny Health Network are buying practices everywhere “to secure their patients, their referrals.” The practice says it has turned down “amazing” formal offers to be acquired. It describes its 2007 EHR implementation as “a challenge,” saying it will replace that system (apparently with Athenahealth) and adding that its patient portal isn’t user-friendly. However, the practice’s executive director embraces data-driven quality, seems to approve of the Meaningful Use program, and likes tracking referrals electronically.

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From the Cerner earnings call:

  • The company says two big deals that didn’t close in Q4 would have allowed it to meet bookings guidance, avoiding the company’s first bookings miss since 2008, but says those deals are still on the table.
  • The former Siemens Health Services contributed $930 million in revenue for the full year. Cerner says the acquisition is meeting or exceeding financial expectations. However, Cerner says fuzzy revenue projections on the Siemens side impacted Cerner’s revenue expectations.
  • 2015 was Cerner’s best year ever for new footprint business, with 36 percent of Q4 bookings coming from outside.
  • President Zane Burke says the marketplace is becoming more aware of Epic’s high cost of ownership, lack of system openness, and lack of cloud-based systems to support population health, saying Cerner expects more success in new sales and selling population health software to Epic users. It says Epic-using Geisinger’s selection of Cerner’s HealtheIntent  validated “the shortcomings of our primary competitor.”
  • Forty Siemens customers signed to migrate to Millennium during the year.
  • Cerner says the EHR market is changing to what it envisioned in working with Intermountain, explaining, “We believe that EHR will evolve from a transactional system to an intelligent activity-based system that will enable faster adoption of best practices, reduce variance, personalize care, improve outcomes, and the ability to identify unit costs, which will be critical as reimbursement shifts to outcomes-based and bundled payments.”
  • EVP Jeff Townsend reports that Neal Patterson’s cancer treatments have gone well and he is progressing as expected.

Sales

Barnabas Health (NJ), East Texas Medical Center (TX), and Stanford Children’s Health (CA) choose Orion Health’s Rhapsody integration engine.

Partners in Care (NJ) chooses Wellcentive’s population health management solution.

AssistRx, Cerner, DrFirst, NextGen, and Practice Fusion subscribe to the ePrescribing State Law Review from Point-of-Care Partners to proactively identify system modifications that may be needed to address ongoing state and federal regulatory changes.

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Phelps Memorial Health Center (NE) chooses Interbit Data’s NetRelay secure texting platform.

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South Georgia Medical Center (GA) chooses Epic in a $50 million project to replace McKesson Horizon.


People

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Divurgent will announce next week that it has hired Steve Eckert (MD Revolution, Encore) to the newly created position of president and COO.

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Quality Systems hires Jamie Arnold, Jr. (Kofax) as CFO.


Announcements and Implementations

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Nuance announces Dragon Medical One, a cloud-based, voice-driven physician documentation system.

Patientco announces Patientco Payments Hub, which allows RCM vendors to offer patient payment functions to their solutions with processing of all payment types and automated reconciliation. 


Government and Politics

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Apple goes public with its refusal to comply with the FBI’s request that it add a security back door to a new iOS release that would allow the FBI to examine the phones used in the San Bernardino terrorist attacks in December. Apple says a security bypass could fall into the wrong hands and would then jeopardize the data of every iPhone user, adding that “the government is asking Apple to hack our own users” and taking the unprecedented step of trying to force an American company to weaken its security.


Privacy and Security

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Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center (CA) pays a $17,000 Bitcoin ransom to an unknown hacker to regain control of its computer systems that had been down for 10 days. The CEO says it was “the quickest and most efficient way to restore our systems,” as registrations had reverted to paper, medical records were unavailable, and the hospital was diverting patients to other facilities. The 434-bed for-profit hospital, which is owned by a Korean fertility specialist, was back up and running Monday. I assume they use a McKesson product since their portal is from RelayHealth. I collected some ransomware prevention tips:

  • Keep Windows, browser, browser plug-ins, and antivirus files updated.
  • Set the email servicer to block executable attachments such as .exe, .vbs, or .scr.
  • Disable Volume Shadow Copy Service (vssaexe), which ransomware sometimes uses to delete volume snapshots that could have otherwise been used to restore compromised files.
  • Disable Windows Script Host, Windows PowerShell, remote services such as RDP, and file sharing.
  • Store backups off site.
  • Don’t plug in USB storage or map network drives unless needed since ransomware often attacks there first. Use read-only folders wherever possible.
  • Define Software Restriction Policies to prevent executable files from launching from questionable folders such as /Temp and /AppData.
  • Make sure Office macros and ActiveX aren’t set to run automatically.
  • Enable “show file extensions” in Windows.
  • Install a browser pop-up blocker.
  • Deactivate AutoPlay.
  • Don’t stay logged on as an administrator unless necessary.
  • Install Office viewers so you can see what Word or Excel files look like before opening them.

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A Fast Company article warns that while federal law prohibits medical insurers from denying coverage due to genetic testing results, companies that sell other forms of insurance (life, long-term care, and disability) are allowed to deny coverage to applicants with unfavorable genetic test results on file. Life insurance companies haven’t so far mandated that applicants be tested, but may decline to issue a policy if the applicant refuses to answer questions about past testing. The Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act originally covered all types of insurance, but the legislative sausage-making stripped out everything except medical insurance. Researchers are concerned that more people will drop out of clinical studies for fear that their entire family could be denied life insurance forever.


Other

A New York Times op-ed piece titled “America’s Stacked Deck” points out the influence of money on elected officials, observing that drug companies spent $272,000 per member of Congress to lobby against allowing Medicare to negotiate Medicare drug prices, which it calls “a $50 billion annual gift to pharmaceutical companies.”

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Florida deputies charge Malachi Love-Robinson with practicing medicine without a license upon finding that the 18-year-old is running a West Palm Beach holistic medical practice called New Birth New Life Medical Center & Urgent Care. The self-proclaimed doctor examined an undercover officer and provided medical advice, leading to his exit from his practice in handcuffs. He was also charged with stealing checks from an 86-year-old patient during a house call in which he wore a lab coat and a stethoscope, diagnosed her with arthritis, and charged her $3,500 for vitamins, later emptying her bank account by forging checks. Love-Robinson expressed indignation at his arrest, saying he feels “deeply saddened and a little disrespected.”


Sponsor Updates

  • Nordic publishes a new white paper, “Finding Your Balance: Applying Supply and Demand to Health IT for Growth and Efficiency.”
  • Computerworld profiles Nuance’s speech-to-text offerings.
  • Boston Software Systems offers white papers “Eliminate the Chaos: 5 Myths to Avoid in Your EHR Migration” and “Checking Medicare Claims Status: A Vendor Perspective.”
  • PatientPay announces the $10,000 Healthcare Billing Challenge.
  • Nordic releases a new HIT Breakdown podcast, “Chronic care management from three perspectives.”
  • Intelligent Medical Objects will exhibit at HackIllinois February 19-21 in Champaign-Urbana.
  • Oneview Healthcare publishes “5 Minutes with Niall O’Neill, COO.”
  • Verisk Health announces that its HEDIS solution is ready for the 2015 reporting system with HEDIS Certified Measures.
  • The Advisory Board Company announces two case studies in which health systems saved $7 million using its Crimson physician performance analytics software to identify improvement opportunities.
  • MModal announces that its Computer-Assisted Physician Documentation is being used at 150 sites.
  • Streamline Health will exhibit at the 2016 HFMA WA-AK Annual Conference February 24-26 in Seattle.
  • Sunquest Information Systems posts a client testimonial video from Tucson Medical Center (AZ).

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EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 2/18/16

February 18, 2016 Dr. Jayne 1 Comment

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Although health IT news is a bit slow in the run-up to HIMSS, I’m pleased to see that things are starting to pick up. I’m back on Twitter after a long hiatus and enjoying some of the conversations around HIMSS shoes. In looking for comfortable yet fun alternatives, I realized there is an entire market dedicated to alternative prom footwear of the sneaker variety. Although I’ve been to a wedding where the bride wore vintage Chuck Taylors, she was a PE teacher and it was part of a running joke. I’m going to have to completely rethink my plans for HIStalkapalooza.

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I’m putting together my list of vendors to visit as well as my list of spectacles to try to photograph. As usual, several booths are planning a Las Vegas theme with blackjack or games of chance. Others such as FormFast are bringing exotic supercars or other “cool factor” displays. I always enjoyed the Indiana Jones-style guy they had in their booth that would throw hats to the audience. At least they’re tying in the car with their name and their business line through their “Fast Matters” campaign.

I’m also seeing an uptick in pre-HIMSS webinars as well as a couple of vendor campaigns encouraging practices to seek out replacement systems. I don’t know if it’s tied to HIMSS or not, but it was noticeable. My favorite communication from an EHR vendor this week was from Kareo, who asked me to take a survey about my practice’s success with their system. They should know that I haven’t logged on to their system in more than six months, which should be telling enough.

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Edifecs has launched the #WhatIRun campaign supporting women in technology. They are donating a dollar to brightpink.org for every share or tweet of the #WhatIRun hashtag. Visit them at booth #8107 and they will also donate $5 to Miracle Flights for Kids.

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NCQA has proposed an “ambitious redesign” of their Patient-Centered Medical Home recognition program. They’ll be hosting a Google Hangout on February 24 where practices can get an update on the redesign progress and hear from practices that participated in a redesign pilot program. I’m interested to hear about the changes, which will not only impact practices but also EHR vendors who support clients in achieving recognition. The Patient-Centered Medical Home movement is turning nine this month and the American Academy of Family Physicians put together a nice blog post summarizing a recent review of studies around the impact of PCMH on cost and quality.

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Telemedicine is a hot topic and I was intrigued to hear about Nurx, which allows women in California and New York to receive prescription and delivery of FDA-approved contraceptives within 48 hours of accessing the app. They have plans to expand to HIV PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) as well. Some are referring to Nurx as “the Uber of birth control” and I’ll be interested to see how it goes. I recently had the opportunity to speak at my local school board about proposed changes to their human sexuality curriculum, so I can imagine feelings about such a service will run the spectrum. Nurx waives its consultation fee for uninsured patients and in some markets patients can receive their medications the same day. Plans for expansion into markets in Illinois, Washington, and the District of Columbia are in progress.

For those of you who have been following my ongoing saga about Maintenance of Certification requirements for the Clinical Informatics subspecialty, I have some good news to report. Several Institute for Health Improvement Open School courses have been approved for ABPM LLSA credit. If you’re a member of an ABMS specialty board, you are eligible for a 10 percent discount by entering the code MOCABMS at check-out. Approved courses cover quality improvement, graduate medical education, and patient safety.

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Packing for HIMSS is always a challenge and a reader shared a link to Heelusions as a way to make things easier. Invented by the reader’s wife and her mother, it allows you to accessorize a single pair of shoes for multiple looks. I’m all about supporting small businesses, so I’m happy to share. It’s a cool idea, but sadly my stiletto days are numbered.

Seeing patients this week has been a bit bumpy, with our cloud-based EHR being down intermittently for the last few days. Luckily our downtime procedures went more smoothly than the last time we had an outage, but it’s never fun when you don’t have all the regular tools at your disposal. I’m back in the office tomorrow so cross your fingers for me.

What’s the most annoying thing about the EHR being down? Email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

HIStalk Interviews Matthew Hawkins, President, Sunquest

February 18, 2016 Interviews Comments Off on HIStalk Interviews Matthew Hawkins, President, Sunquest

Matthew Hawkins is president of Sunquest of Tucson, AZ.

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Tell me about yourself and the company.

Sunquest is a market-leading provider of laboratory software to more than 1,700 laboratories. We help laboratories optimize their results to drive improved financial outcomes, improve patient safety, and work effectively across healthcare systems.

I have been with Sunquest for more than a year and a half now and love it. We have a great team of people here. We are headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, with more than 700 employees. I live in Tucson, where the business is headquartered, and thoroughly enjoy the company.

Software vendors selling standalone lab, pharmacy, and radiology systems have been hit hard as customers move to integrated offerings from Cerner and Epic or get bought by larger health systems that use those systems. How has that impacted your business?

I would emphasize that Sunquest continues to grow. Sunquest, as part of this growth, is absolutely committed to innovation and very focused on helping laboratories work effectively across an enterprise.

For example, Sunquest was a founding member of the CommonWell Health Alliance. We believe that interoperability across applications is very important. We don’t believe that any health system should have to sacrifice capability to select an enterprise. We think that our steadfast focus on helping laboratories do the best work they can outpaces the benefits of being part of an enterprise system.

Does the laboratory information systems business look simple until you understand what’s involved and the level of EHR integration that’s required?

On the surface, it could be perceived as easy. What actually is the case is it’s a very dynamic business. Laboratories play such an important role in the delivery of great healthcare.

Here’s a couple of stats that are surprising, but very important to understand. Laboratory testing represents typically less than two percent of overall healthcare spend, but influences more than 70 percent of all patient outcome and management decisions. Laboratory-related data makes up the majority of any patient’s electronic health record.

In some cases, there are basic blood tests, for example, that have become relatively simple to perform. In other cases, laboratory work is becoming increasingly sophisticated as our understanding of molecular and genetic science, for example, enables us to learn and understand so much more about a patient’s health.

Sunquest’s focus on laboratory excellence covers more advanced aspects of pathology, for example, in the cellular sciences — anatomic and microbiology, for example — as well as molecular and genetic testing capabilities. I feel that the next decade will enable us to know more about how to care for patients than any decade before. Hence, laboratories are becoming in some cases much more sophisticated operations than they’ve ever been.

Genetic and genomic data is a large amount of information that has to be immediately available in the work flow. How do you position the company against EHR vendors that may also see that as a market opportunity?

We see Epic and Cerner as nice electronic health record companies. The great news is that Sunquest integrates with them very effectively. We take large data sets — molecular and anatomic test results and now genetic test results — and can have those interpreted and put into a digestible report that can be inserted right into an electronic health record — for example, from an Epic or a Cerner or others — and be used in a clinical application to care for and treat a patient.

I would just emphasize that Sunquest’s commitment here is second to none. We’ve had a few recent acquisitions that I’d love to highlight, one of which is an investment — not a full acquisition yet, but an investment — that we’ve made in a business called GeneInsight, which is a genetic testing software platform developed by the folks at Harvard Medical School and the Laboratory for Molecular Medicine in Boston. It has been in continuous clinical use since 2005. Test result reports that are very complex and data-rich can be simplified and included in an electronic health record setting so that the ordering physician can use that to treat a patient.

What has changed in the almost four years since Sunquest’s private equity owners sold the company to a publicly traded industrial company, Roper Technologies?

Several things have changed. It’s a very exciting time at Sunquest.

We are financially backed by Roper Technologies. Roper Technologies is a publicly traded technology company listed on the New York Stock Exchange that invests for long-term growth and success of its businesses. We’re thrilled by that because that gives Sunquest a stable home.

In the last approximately year and a half since I joined Sunquest, we’ve had a considerable ramp-up in our internal product development efforts. We’ve invested heavily in product management and in product development. We have approximately 30 percent of our staff today that has been in and around a clinical setting or have clinical training and expertise. As a result of this last year and a half plus worth of effort, in 2016 alone, we plan to launch 15 substantial product upgrades, including two or three new product launches.

There’s a lot of things that have happened in the last few years since Roper acquired Sunquest. Many of these product upgrades include Web-based applications and support for the latest mobile devices. That’s what’s been going on organically.

We’ve also announced a new headquarters location for the business that promises very exciting things for our team members and employees, with great areas to collaborate and areas in which to work in an inspired setting in Tucson. We’re thrilled by that.

The other thing I would say that as far as Roper’s investment in the business, it hasn’t stopped. In fact, in the last 12 months, Roper — who is typically the acquirer of every company that it acquires and then will bolt them on or tuck them under the platform of various companies — has acquired three businesses that directly became part of the Sunquest platform. A business called Data Innovations, a business called Atlas Medical, and then a business called CliniSys, which is headquartered in Europe.

These acquisitions create across the Sunquest growing platform a unique breadth of capabilities that support laboratories in all of their facets, from connecting laboratories to very sophisticated lab instruments and equipment manufactured by the likes of Roche or Abbot or Beckman or others. Also, they help Sunquest solutions and Sunquest clients connect effectively to the healthcare communities, physician offices, and other places where — in the future and increasingly so — lab tests will be ordered and lab results will be shared with patients to improve the way patient care is delivered.

CliniSys has a large global footprint. How do you pair that up with the Sunquest offering for synergy or product alignment?

I’ll tell you a little more about Sunquest international business. That will bring this into a richer, more fulsome view.

Sunquest has approximately 1,700 laboratories that it works with. Nearly 200 of those are outside the United States and North America. Many are in Europe and in the United Kingdom.

For example, we have laboratory clients in the UK and in the Middle East that are a part of the Sunquest laboratory platform, and some in Australia. Sunquest also has a product called Sunquest ICE, which is an integrated clinical exchange solution that is in approximately 75 percent of the market in the UK, across several trust systems, et cetera.

The way we see CliniSys working closely with Sunquest, CliniSys has a market-leading presence in the United Kingdom for laboratory software. That will play very well working with the Sunquest Integrated Clinical Exchange product that will enable very efficient lab ordering and lab resulting back to the general practitioners in the United Kingdom.

CliniSys is also a market leader in France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg. We think about CliniSys as being the Sunquest of Europe. We’re very excited about the opportunity to collaborate and identify ways that we can help our shared clients in the UK as well as new clients across Europe and other parts of the world take advantage of the efficiencies that our software can help deliver to those clients to emphasize the role of the laboratory in offering great healthcare services.

You made it clear in your introduction that Sunquest is a laboratory information system business, but at one time the company offered other software products, such as for radiology and pharmacy. Will that laboratory focus continue or would Roper consider non-laboratory acquisitions that might be paired with Sunquest products?

At Sunquest, our mission is to make healthcare smarter and patients safer. We believe that our focus on laboratories will enable those smart healthcare solutions. But in focusing on laboratories, we immediately see adjacent areas of focus as well that come into play and that we’re focused on organically as well as through Roper’s acquisition.

Let me highlight just a couple. One is, again, the advancement of precision medicine. It hasn’t historically played directly into the lab, but we believe it is absolutely becoming front and center in the way that patients will be treated. In the partnership today with GeneInsight, we are putting that software technology right into the heart of Sunquest and enabling those solutions to work for all of our clients.

Another exciting area that isn’t necessarily a core part of the lab today — but we believe will be and should be because of the incredibly important clinical data that laboratories produce — is in the whole world of analytics. We are launching a platform called Sunquest Analytics. We’re making significant investments in that platform, but in the future, that platform could also be bolstered by future acquisition opportunities aided by Roper as well.

Those are two examples of many that we’re focused on as we continue to round out Sunquest growing from a laboratory software platform to becoming a diagnostic solutions partner to the clients that we work with every day.

The industry is watching with fascination the train wreck that is Theranos. Do you think there’s lessons learned there for your business?

Absolutely. We believe that some lab tests — the basic lab tests and ones that don’t typically require a lot of consultative interaction with the pathologist — are likely to become more managed by a disruptive technology like a Theranos. There is probably a place in the market for those types of disruptive technologies for basic lab tests. We’re watching that very closely.

We also work with a number of high-performing, comprehensive laboratories that manage millions of lab tests and very sophisticated, complex cases every day. We see a segment of the market continuing to become more and more sophisticated given technology and clinical capabilities and understanding.

We’re excited about both ends of the market. We’ll continue to watch for and enable those disruptive technologies ourselves if we have the opportunity to do so, for the simple, direct-to-patient type testing capabilities. But for the comprehensive and complex test cases, we have comprehensive solutions that address those cases and enable the clients that we work with to manage those cases in a time-effective, cost-effective and patient safety-focused manner.

Where do you see the company in five years?

We see Sunquest continuing to grow and make significant headway in laboratory-related and diagnostic-related technologies that make healthcare smarter, improve patient safety, and deliver patient outcomes. The team members at Sunquest are truly inspired by our mission. We’re crazy enough to believe that, as we focus every day on serving our clients and on delivering innovative solutions, we can positively impact the lives of up to a billion patients. That’s our goal.

In five years, we see a company that’s passionate about serving our clients, committed to innovation in and around the laboratory that enables cost savings as well as dramatic work flow improvements that take direct costs out of the lab, but also dramatically impacts the indirect costs associated with downstream savings. For example, reduction in length of stay or reduction in returning to the hospital because patients weren’t diagnosed accurately the first time.

We’ll do this through dramatic improvements in the clinical applications around genetic testing and molecular testing. We’ll do this through the use of analytic information that’s produced by the laboratory to influence and help aid in physician diagnoses and patient outcomes. We’ll do this through helping health systems optimize the way they interact with laboratories. I’m very excited about the future for Sunquest.

Do you have any final thoughts?

We are really delighted that you would take the time to visit with us. I’m excited about being at Sunquest and about working with the team of very focused and dedicated people and helping to deliver solutions to our laboratory clients that make a difference in patients’ lives.

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IBM To Acquire Truven Health Analytics for $2.6 Billion

February 18, 2016 News Comments Off on IBM To Acquire Truven Health Analytics for $2.6 Billion

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IBM Watson Health announced this morning that it will acquire Truven Health Analytics for $2.6 billion in its fourth acquisition since Watson Health was formed in April 2015. The acquisition will give Watson Health 8,500 new clients and increase its coverage to 300 million patient lives.

“With this acquisition, IBM will be one of the world’s leading health data, analytics, and insights companies, and the only one that can deliver the unique cognitive capabilities of the Watson platform,” said Deborah DiSanzo, general manager for IBM Watson Health.

The Watson Health unit houses previous acquisitions Phytel, Explorys, and Merge Healthcare.

Veritas Capital acquired the healthcare business of Thomson Reuters in June 2012 for $1.25 billion, renaming it Truven Health Analytics. March 2015 reports suggested that Truven was preparing for an IPO that would have valued the company at $3 billion.

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Morning Headlines 2/18/16

February 17, 2016 News 4 Comments

Hollywood hospital pays $17,000 in bitcoins to hackers who took control of computers

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center caves to the demands of hackers, paying a $17,000 ransom in bitcoin to restore access to its network. Hackers had initially demanded $3.6 million.

CMS and major commercial health plans, in concert with physician groups and other stakeholders, announce alignment and simplification of quality measures

CMS and insurance lobby group America’s Health Insurance Plans agree on seven sets of  clinical quality measures that will standardize quality reporting across multiple payers.

Cerner Downgraded to Hold at Everccore ISI, Price Target Cut to $52

Cerner stock continues to fall, closing 4.8 percent down at the end of trading Wednesday, after lowering its estimate on projected bookings and being downgraded from ‘buy’ to ‘hold’ by analysts.

The NHS’s future is digital – but not if we simply replicate poor paper processes

The Guardian analyzes the potential impact EHRs will have on NHS care delivery, noting that implementing improved business and clinical workflows within the new systems will ultimately dictate the value derived from the investment.

HIStalk Interviews Bryan Hinch, MD, CMIO, University of Toledo Medical Center

February 17, 2016 Interviews 1 Comment

Bryan Hinch, MD is assistant professor of medicine and CMIO of University of Toledo Medical Center of Toledo, OH.

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Tell me about yourself and your job.

I work clinically in internal medicine. I’m assistant professor of internal medicine and chief medical information officer at the University of Toledo Medical Center, as well as an associate program director for the internal medical residency. I wear a few hats.

On the CMIO tech side, I help coordinate, oversee, and am one of the decision-makers on the inpatient and outpatient EMR front. Most of my time is spent optimizing clinical activity or implementing new products.

I also help guide a skunk works that we’ve developed in house. We have a group of programmers that develop custom applications that fill niches that the bigger systems don’t fill. We’ve developed a number of applications that meet our unique needs. I help give them guidance and oversee what they’re doing and whatnot. That’s been my role lately.

I started here in 2008. I did my medical school training here. I did my residency here. I left for six years, four of which was in Dearborn, Michigan at Oakwood Hospital – a good place to work — my wife was doing her residency there in orthopedics.We went to Cleveland for a while and I worked at Metro Hospital. Then I came back because my wife’s family is from here and joined a group.

When I started, I was hired in in part to help them implement an outpatient EMR, which was Horizon Ambulatory Care, the McKesson system. From there, my responsibilities grew and I took over some of the inpatient stuff. They really didn’t have anybody like me on staff, so I started doing the CMIO position without the formal title. Eventually they formalized it with the title.

What is the medical center doing in the recently announced development project with Athenahealth?

We’re really excited about this. We were primarily — and still are — a McKesson shop, more or less. Horizon, McKesson’s systems, permeate everywhere. There was some dissatisfaction with the outpatient product. The practice plan decided a couple of years ago to begin looking at a replacement. Athena won that contract. 

From the clinical side, at least, we’ve been really happy. In terms of the clinical workflows, the number of complaints that I used to get with the McKesson system was enormous. Every day I’d get complaints from the docs about workflows or whatever. It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not much.

With Athena, I had conversations with people about that. Are people just not happy with me and they’re not complaining to me any more, or are they happy with the EMR? It seems like they’re happy with the EMR and they’re complaining about other stuff now. They’re not complaining about IT on the outpatient side.

It’s been a relatively smooth transition. We’ve been live on Athena outpatient for just over a year. We went live on January 21. We basically swapped out the entire system, big bang in one day. It was about a five-month project. After contract signing, it took us about five months, which is a bit truncated, and it was a holiday. There was a ton of work in a short period of time, but we got it done.

It was relatively smooth. It was rough at first, but like any of these projects go, it was relatively successful.

There were some rumors going around with McKesson Horizon, but they made it very formal. Right as we were making this transition to Athena on the outpatient side, they told us that Horizon is going to be going away. They gave us a deadline of March 2018.

When we were reviewing our options, looking at budgets, timelines, Meaningful Use, and all of that stuff, we felt that we were somewhat going to be stuck with Paragon. McKesson was going to give us a deal that we were going to swap out what we currently own. There’s going to be a lot of cost reductions there because of swapping one-for-one for some of the stuff that we own. But Athena came along, and when we were doing our go-live on the outpatient side, they approached us with this idea of this partnership to help them work on the inpatient space.

We were relatively impressed with their vision, the corporate culture that they have, and what they’re trying to do with healthcare in general in terms of technology. We took this pretty seriously. We spent quite a bit of time reviewing our options and what it really meant to do an alpha. We understand it’s a ton of work. 

We ultimately decided that they have proven themselves in the outpatient arena of building a really good product. The KLAS rankings is one metric that shows that. Our internal satisfaction with the clinical workflows was another.

We had a kickoff meeting just about a week ago. I’m as impressed now as I was then with their approach. What they’re looking to do is not just build an EMR, because they’ve done that. They’ve got a product that’s in place in a couple of critical access hospitals that they’re using as a test bed. But the approach that they’re taking with us is more than that.

Yes, we’re going to have an EMR at the end, but they’re looking to use us to learn how hospitals — especially hospitals with an academic mission – work and identify what they call the hidden industry of scut work that could be automated or offloaded away from the staff, whether it’s nurses or doctors or whoever, to make them more productive.

It’s exciting. We’re really looking forward to taking this journey with them. We have some expectations of some concrete deliverables later this year, something we can show our board, “Yes, we’re making progress.” We expect to have something in place, like physician documentation or whatever. But so far, we’re pretty excited about this.

How do you draw the box around what you’re building with Athena?

A couple of things. The initial discussions with them were all about the clinical workflows. Lab would stay in place, so we’d keep McKesson. We have Horizon Lab, which I don’t think is getting sunsetted. But basically everything that’s getting sunsetted by McKesson, Athena’s made a promise to us that they’re going to swap out in some way, shape, or form.

That would be our ED system, so HEC, the nursing documentation system, HED, McKesson’s clinical portal, which is not the patient portal, but the physician workflows of looking at results and transcribed documents and that kind of stuff. That would be replaced. Physician workflows, order entry, and documentation, so HEO.

We had never implemented HEN, Horizon Expert Notes, which is the physician progress notes. We were never really satisfied with that product, so we were still paper until our skunk works built an online notes for the docs to use for progress notes if they want. That went live a couple weeks ago, but that was an internal thing. We built that thinking that’ we’ll be on Paragon, because Paragon is basically flip-the-switch two years from now. I wanted something in place for our medical students and residents to use, something electronic to give them that experience.

The pharmacy system is getting swapped out. That’s probably going to be later in 2017. Horizon Surgical Manager … we were under the impression that that would be sunsetted or at least swapped out, but McKesson is indicating that may not be the case, but we likely will swap that out, too.

Revenue cycle …  we approached them and said, if you do a good job with this, what do you guys think about revenue cycle? Star, which is the McKesson product, is our current revenue ADT feed. They said, why not?

If this all goes well, we may consider using them for our registration system, which would be nice because one of the troubles we have on the outpatient side is having the two registration systems. A lot of our clinics are facility-based and registering for both the facility side and the clinic side has been a bear. Getting that down to a single registration system would be ideal. That is contingent upon things going well with the clinical side.

That’s a long list of tasks to accomplish. How many people are Athenahealth and the Medical Center putting on the project?

From our side, because most of our resources on the inpatient side right now are in optimization mode and not implementation mode because we’ve got everything in place except for upgrades, those same resources, we expect, will be used for Athena. We have a core group that we think can handle the amount of work.

From the Athena side, we don’t have specifics yet, but we expect they’re going to be all over this place with folks, learning our culture, learning how the workflows operate in an academic setting, and helping us with all this work.

A big piece, of course, is our interface team. We are in the process of evaluating how much work the interface guys are going to need to do and bulking that group up on our side, but also on their side, making sure that we’ve got a good collaborative relationship with their interface team.

People who have worked with one system often end up building a new one that looks just like the old one because that’s their world view. On the other hand, the vendor needs to have enough knowledge to build a product that can be commercialized instead of just taking what one hospital says and going to market with it. How will you balance those interests?

I’ve given that some thought, as has our CIO. Our CIO, Bill McCreary, is taking on the stewardship of ensuring that what we create is going to be marketable to more than just us. He’s helping Athena negotiate that, thread that needle, so that we get what we need, but it’s also something you could sell tomorrow to another hospital.

We’re very aware that we’re not building just a custom job for us and that the relationship really is one of collaboration. We want this to be successful, and if we’re the only customer, we know that’s not going to be a success. We want it to be successful.

The second issue that you raised is, how do you prevent yourself from rebuilding what you have? The interesting thing is a lot of what we have in the clinical portal is what we built ourselves to meet our needs. It’s not just McKesson’s stuff in front of us. It really is a lot of custom work that we’ve built. We think we’ve got knowledge of how to interface with technology and provide physicians what they need at the time they need it. We want to take that knowledge and use it with Athena.

Athena, on their side, they’re planning on bringing some folks that are experts in human interface with technology. They’ve got some in-house expertise there. They’re going to bring those folks here and talk to us and do time-motion studies. Dive into the workflows and identify what needs to be blown up and what works and should be replicated.

Have you had discussions about the underlying technology?

It’s cloud-based. They’re going to host it. I don’t know their database architecture for this. That’s going to be one of our conversations, especially once we get with the interface team and start talking about this.

In terms of mobile access, to me, it’s a given. They already have a relatively decent mobile platform on the outpatient side. Most of our custom apps that we’ve built in-house, we’ve built with mobility in mind.

For instance, we have this patient hand-off tool that we built a couple of years ago. We’ve redesigned it twice ourselves. The redesign was specifically to make sure that we could scale it to an iPhone or equivalent smart phone. This replaces the traditional paper list that resident teams keep to track their patients. We saw that there was a need there. We just deployed it to the surgery department a couple of weeks ago. But medicine — my department – has been using it for two and a half years, squashing bugs and vetting it.

Mobility is going to be a big part of this. I don’t see nurses, especially, getting tied down to a computer. That’s one of the biggest complaints I have, and docs have, and nurses have, no matter what hospital I work in. I don’t just work at UT. I do teaching rounds at another hospital that uses Epic. The biggest complaint is that they feel like they’re tied to the computer typing all day. Is there a way around that?

The other thing that we implemented, right before Athena got in place, was voice-to-text. We use Nuance Dragon. How do we leverage that kind of technology to help speed up the process of inputting data in some way, shape, or form, and doing it in a way that’s hopefully structured so you can report against it?

There’s a lot of balls in the air, you’re right. How do we coalesce this down into a streamlined, functional workflow for the doc, the nurse, the physical therapist, et cetera? That’s what we’re looking to have these conversations with Athena about.

What happens if you don’t make the 2018 sunset date for the Horizon products?

We are going to be checking our progress. I think Bill McCreary, our CIO, is using Gartner as an external oversight to make sure that we are staying on task. We’re having a third party keep us honest in terms of making sure we hit these deliverables.

Worst case scenario, we would bail and go to Paragon, but I am loath to even consider doing that because the docs here have such an animus against the McKesson products. I think I’d be burned in effigy.

To answer your question, though, absent pulling a ripcord and jumping away from this — which to me, is a nonstarter — I don’t think it’s going to happen. Knowing our culture, at UT, we just get the job done. Historically, any time we ask the staff — the physician staff, the residents, the nursing staff — to step up, whether it’s Joint Commission or the ACGME coming through or Meaningful Use, they get the job done. They have this work ethic that’s phenomenal. 

I get that sense from Athena as well. When I’ve gone out to visit them and seen their folks and interact with them, they are just about getting the job done and doing it really well.

That being said, there’s a couple of possibilities. One is that if we miss the deadline, it’s not like suddenly the system is just shut down at midnight. They continue working. Our IT department has a wealth of knowledge of using these systems. McKesson has made it very clear that if this goes dark, you’re on your own. We understand that.

However, that being said, in terms of the core systems that we require to function on a day-to-day basis, I think we’ve got enough buffer in the timeline. Again, we don’t have a concrete timeline yet, but when we’re talking with Athena, we’ve got enough buffer in here that I feel pretty comfortable that we’re going to have things in place.

I think the other thing I would stress is that Athena’s not starting from scratch on this. They have acquired intellectual property through RazorInsights, their acquisition there, and with their agreement or their relationship with Beth Israel. I feel pretty good about saying this — they’ve got a pretty good bench strength on the pharmacy system and inpatient core systems that we need. I think they’ve got that knowledge, intellectual property, et cetera.

On top of that, you marry that up with our guys, like on our pharmacy team. Many of our custom apps are for the pharmacy and they’ve built them themselves. We’ve got guys in my pharmacy team who are both pharmacists and IT and they build apps. We feel pretty comfortable that whatever Athena can’t deliver on, we will probably be able to, in some way, shape, or form, take care of.

That’s a risk. This is the risk of the relationship. Going down this path with someone who has something that’s on the market. They’re in some critical access hospitals, they’ve deployed in a few places, but nothing like us. Nothing with the complexity of a larger hospital and the complexity of academics.

We understood that risk going into this. We made it very clear to the board and to all the decision makers that  the risk of going with another vendor is that you probably are going to have a lower-quality product for the capital expenditures and whatnot that we have available to us, versus going into a partnership with Athena. The risk is a little bit higher because there is a product that’s not basically on the market right now, but the expectation is that we’re going to have something truly awesome. We felt that that reward was worth the risk. 

We didn’t feel staying with McKesson was a safe choice, either. We really didn’t. They’re a good company and the folks we work with individually are wonderful, but we felt like in terms of the product we would get, we feel with Athena it’s going to be better.

That being said, our Plan B is to go back to McKesson, if this blows up in our face, and see what they can do. We’ll see, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Isn’t the medical school’s academic affiliation moving to ProMedica?

That is correct. The medical school is basically a victim of its own success. It has grown tremendously and is outgrowing the footprint of the hospital here. Same with the residency. We’ve grown the residency here as well.

We are busting at the seams with learners. As many medical schools do, they look outside and they look for some affiliations. We will be transitioning learners from this campus to the ProMedica campus. Yes, that is true.

Will you still be an academic medical center and the kind of partner Athenahealth originally envisioned?

That’s a good question. I don’t think all the learners are going to go. I think there’s still going to be learners here. This transition is a five-year plan in terms of transitioning the bulk of the learners over, at least the students, and some of the residents over.

To be honest with you, we had a pretty frank conversation with Athena about this. We tried to be as transparent as possible about this process. From my point of view, if you look at what they’re trying to get out of us, which is institutional knowledge of academics, that’s not going anywhere. I’m part of this process. The staff here all know how to work with residents. When you look at the timelines involved, the bulk of the work is done well before the significant number of learners will be over at ProMedica.

I think they’re going to get what they need out of us in terms of that knowledge and ongoing expertise. We were very upfront and transparent with Athena about that. They felt pretty comfortable understanding that things are changing here, too, in terms of that affiliation, but they still felt really comfortable going forward with us.

Morning Headlines 2/17/16

February 16, 2016 News Comments Off on Morning Headlines 2/17/16

Cerner Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2015 Results

Cerner reports Q4 results: revenue was up 27 percent to $1.2 billion compared to $926 million during the same quarter last year, adjusted EPS $0.61 vs. $0.47. Stock prices dropped 14 percent in after hours trading due to downward adjustments to bookings projections.

Under Armour Partners with IBM and SAP to Widen Connected Fitness Potential

Under Armour generated $53 million in revenue from its connected fitness initiative in 2015, up from $19 million in 2014, after acquiring digital health apps MyFitnessPal and Endomondo for a total of $560 million.

What The Flint Water Crisis Reveals About Public Health

Bill Frist and Karen DeSalvo, MD co-author a Forbes opinion piece reflecting on the Flint water crisis and the need for increased public health spending in the US.

Allscripts, Cerner and CPSI Brands Merit the Most Devoted Hospital Clients, Reveals 2016 Black Book HIT Loyalty Index

A Black Book report measures healthcare IT vendor loyalty from “2,077 crowdsourced hospital users” concluding that Allscripts, Cerner, and CPSI have the highest consumer loyalty in the EHR market.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 2/17/16

News 2/17/16

February 16, 2016 News 5 Comments

Top News

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Cerner reports Q4 results: revenue up 27 percent, adjusted EPS $0.61 vs. $0.47, beating expectations for both.  The company adjusted revenue projections slightly downward on lower bookings, with shares dropping 14 percent to below their 52-week low in early after-hours trading Tuesday. CERN shares were already down 21 percent in the past year.


Reader Comments

From Take the Cannoli: “Re: news. Why so little recently? Industry downturn?” We’re in the pre-HIMSS conference quiet period, where companies save their questionably interesting fluff “news” like fall squirrels stashing nuts in their cheeks, misguided into thinking that they’ll get more exposure by expelling their PR flatus during the conference. Nobody will be paying attention as piles of press releases go out all at once on Tuesday and Wednesday, screaming for attention but earning little of it in the self-congratulatory din. Maybe that’s how I could have gotten more sponsor support to expand the HIStalkapalooza invitation list – charge companies for 60 seconds on stage to read their overwrought press releases to the crowd like town criers.

From PointProf: “Re: CHI in Houston. Heard they had 50-hour Epic downtime. Wonder what the root cause was?” I saw some Reddit chatter that said it was a Citrix provisioning problem.

From Scuzi: “Re: ransomware. Breaking news tweeted from [publication name omitted].” They gushed their “story” out as “breaking news” early Tuesday evening, two-plus days after I wrote about it. I linked to the local newspaper that did the actual reporting whereas they didn’t, apparently hoping their readers won’t suspect that they’re just rewording articles from other sites. If you’re not doing actual journalism, at least credit your sources.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’m growing weary of the words “solution,” “platform,” “suite,” and maybe even “system” since those terms don’t really add any value over just “software” except to marketing people trying to tart up their product or salespeople trying to paint a grander image of their zeros and ones. I’m interested in opinions on this.

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Susan Newbold, PhD, RN of the Nursing Informatics Boot Camp will be the celebrity guest in our Lilliputian booth (#5069) at HIMSS Tuesday from 10 until 11 a.m.

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Mrs. Spell’s North Carolina second graders are using the math stations we provided in funding her DonorsChoose grant request for small-group instruction. She added, “During my morning meeting about two weeks ago, my students were so excited to see the big brown box on the carpet knowing the ‘donors’ thought they were awesome again! I told them how much other people believed in them and that they wanted to share new math games and activities with them for their math rotations.”

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This company obviously has a selectively keen eye for detail, spelling HIMSS wrong but doing the “little-i” thing that HIMSS puts on its logo but nowhere else.

I bet HIMSS is glad that keynoter Peyton Manning quarterbacked the Super Bowl winning team, but not so thrilled that he’s simultaneously being dogged by allegations of HGH use and sexual harassment that threaten to tarnish his carefully created public persona. Maybe he’ll exit the HIMSS stage thanking God and Budweiser again.


Webinars

February 17 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Take Me To Your Leader: Catholic Health Initiatives on Executive Buy-In for Enterprise Analytics.” Sponsored by Premier. Presenters: Jim Reichert, MD, PhD, VP of analytics, Catholic Health Initiatives; Rush Shah, product manager analytics factory, Premier. Catholic Health Initiatives, the nation’s second-largest non-profit health system, knew that in order to build an enterprise analytics strategy, they needed a vision, prioritization, and most importantly buy-in from their executives. Dr. Jim Reichert will walk through their approach.

February 23 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Completing your EMR with a Medical Image Sharing Strategy.” Sponsored by LifeImage. Presenters: Don K. Dennison, consultant; Jim Forrester, director of imaging informatics, UR Medicine. Care coordination can suffer without an effective, cost-efficient way to share images across provider networks. Consolidating image management systems into a single platform such as VNA or PACS doesn’t address the need to exchange images with external organizations. This webinar will address incorporating the right image sharing methods into your health IT strategy.

February 24 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Is Big Data a Big Deal … or Not?” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Dale Sanders, EVP of product development, Health Catalyst. Hadoop is the most powerful and popular technology platform for data analysis in the world, but healthcare adoption has been slow. This webinar will cover why healthcare leaders should care about Hadoop, why big data is a bigger deal outside of healthcare, whether we’re missing the IT boat yet again, and how the cloud reduces adoption barriers by commoditizing the skilled labor impact.


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Vizient (the former VHA, UHC, and Novation that were combined in November 2015) completes its acquisition of the MedAssets SCM and Sg2 segments. Pamplona Capital Management announced in November 2015 that it was acquiring MedAssets for $2.7 billion but would keep only its revenue cycle management business, merging it with Pamplona-owned Precyse.

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Under Armour says its wearables business brought in $53 million in revenue in 2015, driven by its $560 million acquisitions of fitness apps Endomondo and MyFitness Pal. That company had $4 billion in revenue in 2015, 88 percent of that from clothes and shoe sales and 1.3 percent from Connected Fitness.

Privacy monitoring system vendor Protenus, started in 2014 by two Johns Hopkins medical students, raises $4 million, increasing its total to $5.4 million.

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For-profit hospital operator Community Health Systems announces Q4 results: revenue down 2.4 percent, EPS –$0.66 vs. $1.12, sending shares down 22 percent Tuesday. The company blames the results on a weaker flu season in 2015 and lower volume in its former HMA facilities in Florida. Above is the one-year share price chart for CYH (blue, down 72 percent) vs. the Dow (red, down 10 percent).

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Imprivata reports Q4 results: revenue up 18 percent, adjusted EPS –$0.09 vs. -$0.04.


Sales

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Saint Anthony Hospital (IL) and Cookeville Regional Medical Center (TN, above) renew their IT services contracts with McKesson.

The Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services (NY) chooses Netsmart’s CareRecord EHR.


People

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T-System promotes Robert Hitchcock, MD to chief strategy officer and Robin Shannon, RN to chief product officer.


Announcements and Implementations

A Black Book survey finds that hospitals using Allscripts, Cerner, and CPSI are the most loyal to their vendors. Black Book is murky about its methodology, saying only that it surveyed “2,077 crowd-sourced, hospital users” of unspecified job titles using unspecified selection methods. The company unconvincingly claims that it needed to create a loyalty index since metrics for customer affinity, repurchase intent, and client recommendations weren’t good enough to “understand the complexities of EHR customer behavior and underlying motivating forces” and that it “helps hospitals and physicians make better decisions based on customer insights,” not mentioning that dreaming up some new poll gives it something new to sell.

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Iatric Systems launches Analytics on Demand, which includes pre-built dashboards for quality measures, Meaningful Use, sepsis, and readmissions that are driven by mapped EHR data.

Wolters Kluwer Health announces the release of Health Language Enterprise Terminology Management Platform that standardizes and normalizes clinical, claims, and administrative data.

HCI Group will provide education and consulting services for organizations that want to improve their HIMSS EMR Adoption Model scores, named as the first EMRAM Global Education provider of HIMSS Analytics.


Government and Politics

A Forbes op-ed piece by Bill Frist and Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH triggered by the Flint water crisis observes that  the US ranks low in health and well-being despite spending $3 trillion each year on health, calling for Public Health 3.0 in which health professionals take civic leadership roles and business leaders participate in community health. It adds, “Our ZIP codes are a more accurate determinant of health than genetic codes. As a society, we have a collective responsibility to ensure that we are providing the conditions needed to make the healthy choice the easy choice for all members of our communities.”


Privacy and Security

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Magnolia Health Corporation (CA) notifies employees that “an unidentified third person impersonated our CEO” in obtaining an Excel worksheet that contained their personal information, including Social Security numbers and salaries.


Other

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A PICU medical director in Canada spends the day working as an RN in his unit. He summarizes, “As a physician I think we take for granted that we write an order and the work just gets done … After my day as an RN, I am going to suggest that all the residents who train on our unit do the same. I think there is a huge opportunity to learn how each person on a unit contributes to the care of one patient … RNs spend more time with patients than we as physicians do, having an understanding of how they care for a patient and experiencing a completely different view can only make us better physicians.”

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The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA opens an exhibit titled “Innovations in Healthcare,” sponsored by El Camino Hospital (CA).

Big companies are mining data about their employees to target health messages, identify those with poor credit scores those who may not take their medications, and even to identify women who may be planning pregnancy by looking at their birth control prescription records or snooping into their search history on employee wellness sites. Prominently mentioned are Castlight Health and Welltok, which aren’t bound by laws that prevent companies from analyzing the personal health information of their employees. Health management company Jiff tailors its wellness programs by employee personality type, deciding which of them will likely require a premium discount to participate in fitness programs. 

Great Lakes Health Connect will provide $250,000 in assistance to connect providers in Flint, MI and Genesee County to its network, earmarking $100,000 to link 40 physician offices, $90,000 for a dedicated implementation consultant, $50,000 for an analytics engine, and $10,000 for training.

Detroit’s Care Bridge care coordination system for patients who are covered by both Medicare and Medicaid isn’t working one year into the program scheduled to run three years, with lack of IT standardization and competitive concerns among its participants blamed as possible roadblocks.

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Lightning takes out the fire and alarm systems of Australia’s Robina Hospital, which apparently had no redundancy plan for its Ascom system. The hospital says it has moved the server to another site, thereby scorning the “lightning never strikes twice in the same place” fallacy.


Sponsor Updates

  • Besler Consulting publishes the Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement Special Report.
  • The local paper highlights Clockwise.md’s online check-in app in its coverage of a new Carolinas HealthCare Systems urgent care facility.
  • CoverMyMeds Director Scott Gaines joins the BioOhio Board of Trustees. 
  • Extension Healthcare nominates the winning University of Maryland Medical Center for two Intelligent Health Association awards.
  • The HCI Group releases a video on three things to consider during Cerner go-live planning.
  • Consulting Magazine interviews Huntzinger Management Group CEO and founding partner Robert Kitts.

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

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HIStalk Interviews Steve Brewer, CEO, Galen Healthcare

February 16, 2016 Interviews Comments Off on HIStalk Interviews Steve Brewer, CEO, Galen Healthcare

Steve Brewer is CEO of Galen Healthcare Solutions of Grosse Pointe Farms, MI.

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Tell me about yourself and the company.

I’m CEO of Galen Healthcare, based in our Chicago office. Somehow I guess I’ve turned into one of the old timers in this industry now [laughs]. I was just looking at my schedule and can’t believe I’m about to head off to my 22nd straight HIMSS, which is truly unbelievable. That’s a lot of booth time, a lot of bad carpet.

Galen is essentially a consulting and technology services company. What makes us unique is combining incredible clinical and domain expertise with some of Galen’s proprietary technology platform and tool sets. It’s a combination of those two things, which are a unusual for a firm viewed as a consulting company.

We were just named "Best in KLAS" in both of our core categories. I just arrived here last fall, so I get no credit for that other than really good timing.

Are you seeing results from the KLAS awards or do you expect to?

We are. We’re seeing a lot of inbound activity.

Galen is pretty well known in our core markets. We’ve done hundreds of clinical conversions and EHR optimizations across a bunch of platforms, but we’re a smaller private company, so I wouldn’t say that we’re broadly known throughout the industry. It’s certainly great for name recognition. We’re excited about showing up at HIMSS to leverage some of that, to let people know more about Galen.

What issues keep you busiest these days?

The history of the company is interesting. It was started about 10 years ago by three gentlemen — who I knew back then — who left Allscripts to start a services business. They saw that no matter how good of a job Allscripts did on their side of implementation, most of the clients were going through it for the first time. They hadn’t been through it before and needed assistance. That was the early days of Galen, helping out at some of the largest early EHR implementations in the industry.

What we’re seeing now is a shift. People who have made these huge investments in clinical and financial systems want to leverage those. Our work has shifted a lot up towards conversions, archival, and technical integration of systems, connecting to HIEs and others. There’s been a lot of consolidation and M&A activity in the industry. Having all these systems truly interoperable and moving data in and out of them, or shifting people from one system to another, has become a big part of our work effort.

How are customers using your service that allows them to store and access information from their retired systems?

It’s one of our newer services. We’ve been doing conversions for quite a while and are probably the leader in that space. When one of our large clients acquires a practice or merges with another health system, we for years have done a lot of that  hardcore technical and clinical mapping of the data to get them converted. What we’ve added now, since we have all their data, is the ability to archive and retire those legacy systems.

It varies across the board which systems they are going to. We have been involved in numerous conversions to Epic and Cerner. We have a lot of large Allscripts clients who acquire practices and retire some of the older systems from the practices they’ve just bought. It’s across the board.

What are the most common systems you’re converting from and to?

The largest ones have clearly been to Epic. We’ve had some recent activity with regard to Cerner and Meditech. You’ll see a lot of the ambulatory systems that have been in the market who maybe get caught up in a large Epic conversion, even though they might be very happy with the system they have, and the ambulatory system is going to go away as part of that Epic conversion. Standards or not, that integration and conversion is a pretty significant effort that most of those groups haven’t been through.

Who do you admire in the industry?

I’ve seen a lot in those 22-plus years when I headed off to HIMSS in San Antonio in 1995, so it’s been a few different iterations of companies that have been success stories.

I was involved in a company here in Chicago, Enterprise Systems, that went public, got acquired, and then got acquired again my McKesson. That was interesting. I was there in the early days of Allscripts and the growth and the innovation of leading EHR adoption in the industry was very impressive. It would certainly be hard to ignore what Epic has done over the last five or 10 years, one of the probably great business success stories — even beyond healthcare — in the US over that time period.

How do you approach the HIMSS conference as a vendor?

I’ve always enjoyed it. To me, it’s a great event where a lot of people come out in the industry. It’s certainly a hectic four or five days, but I find it to be a lot of fun.

At Galen, it’s a little different. We’re a small private company. We’ve enjoyed nice steady growth, but world domination or some billion-dollar market cap hasn’t been the strategy. The strategy has been to build a great company and attract super smart people who enjoy being here and who are proud of the work they do for their clients.

From that standpoint, we’re going to be in a 20×30 booth. Hopefully people will know about us and come see us. We know our clients will. We’ll look to continue our reputation and steady growth. You won’t see us in one of those mammoth, block-long, multi-story booths at HIMSS. It’s a little different event for a company like ours, but still exciting.

What should HIMSS attendees ask consulting firms they’re talking to in the exhibit hall?

There’s a lot of different flavors of consulting companies out there. From our standpoint, it’s the combination of the technology we bring to the table as well as the people. A lot of the bigger companies focus on the staffing effort and the professional services, which we certainly do, but we are typically combining that with technical services, integration, and the like.

People should focus on, what’s your history? What do your clients think about you, and specifically, what are they trying to get done? I mentioned our niches earlier around EHR optimization, conversions, implementations, and a lot of the other tool sets we bring to the table.

You see massive efforts in this industry, billion-dollar investments to put these systems in place, and now with HIEs and the like. Where many people are falling down is on the integration piece, on that last mile of connectivity to the practices. Those are the areas we focus on. We coexist well with a lot of the other traditional consulting companies that are out there that typically don’t focus on that.

Population health and information security are hot topics. What are you doing in those areas?

As you’ll see at HIMSS, everybody in some way or another is positioning themselves as a pop health company, or patient engagement, or analytics. They all intersect. Galen’s role in that is making the data that those systems need accessible and relevant to do true pop health and to do true analytics across cohorts and population bases. That’s really what we do.

A lot of this data is stuck in EHRs. It’s stuck in other systems. We’ve worked with a lot of those HIEs and pop health products to get the data in and out so that those systems can do their work.

Security is certainly a big focus of ours as well. Anybody in this industry has to be focused on it. Galen might manage those overall projects, but I wouldn’t position us as a security consulting provider. There are some folks who specialize in that exactly.

You’ve won some awards for being a good place to work, which is probably tough as a consulting company where folks are remote or travel a lot. How do you manage the people side of it?

It’s probably tied to what I mentioned earlier, that the culture’s a little different and our end game is a little different, which makes it a great place to work. We don’t have outside investors. We’re just excited about having a really positive work environment where people learn new skills and enjoy what they do. That’s reflected in the rankings.

You’re right, it’s a heavy travel job and it’s a very intensive job for our consultants, so we very much appreciate their time away from families and the like. We try and balance that load to make sure it’s a sustainable job for them. A big part of what we do on the technical services side can be done from our offices rather than on site at clients, which helps.

Give me three bold predictions for the next five years.

I’m not sure how bold these are, but after years of talk, I think we are finally going to see some very rapid movement in a few areas. 

First, the new payer models will be here for real. That is going to increase the shift in patient services to new settings of care, such as retail, urgent care, and ASCs. This will also speed up the already active consolidation amongst health systems in the market. 

Another area I see acceleration is in the blurring of the lines between payer and provider as these organizations come together to manage risk and control cost. 

Additionally, we will see a shift to the next phase of connected care, where the EHR is no longer the center of the universe, but rather just one of many data collection and feedback tools that need to interact seamlessly with other surrounding systems. 

For Galen, I think these trends will match up well with our focus on optimization of current platforms while our clients also prepare for this changing environment. These new initiatives will require deep integration, conversion, and project management skills to keep pace with the market and patient needs. We’ll look back and see if I got any of this correct, but in any case, we will continue to adapt our business as the priorities of our clients evolve.

And if you’ll allow me to pick a fourth bold prediction, I’ll take the Bears to win the Super Bowl next year.

Comments Off on HIStalk Interviews Steve Brewer, CEO, Galen Healthcare

Morning Headlines 2/16/16

February 16, 2016 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 2/16/16

Theranos Files Plan to CMS for Fixing California Lab Problems

Late Friday, Theranos submitted its proposed plan of correction to CMS after being granted a one week extension to submit the documents.

Interoperability Form and Function: Interview with Doug Fridsma

AMIA President and CEO Douglas Fridsma, MD discusses the path forward for interoperability in a recent interview.

State tells Boston Children’s Hospital to slow down

State regulators in Massachusetts have asked Boston Children’s Hospital to prove that its $1 billion expansion plans will not undercut efforts to reduce healthcare spending in the state.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 2/16/16

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 2/15/16

February 15, 2016 Dr. Jayne 2 Comments

Although I do the majority of my work independently, I have other resources that I lean on from time to time. This weekend, I had the rare pleasure of traveling with one of them as we headed to a job. I enjoyed having another person to talk to while we traveled as well as being able to use the time to plan some upcoming work.

Although he’s more of an infrastructure expert, we share a lot of the same battles: dealing with corporate doublespeak, figuring out how to deal with other people’s emergencies, and having to explain to people why we can’t deliver solutions until we know what the business requirements are.

Both of us have recently had some interesting experiences with collaboration. A recent article in The Economist covers some of the ways in which collaboration goes too far.

I’ve experienced the collaboration curse several times. The IT department at my hospital was notorious for embracing collaboration tools at the expense of actually getting work done. We were so busy with Google Hangouts and HipChat and being collaborative that no one bothered to document requirements, decisions, and outcomes. We had a mix of workers at various career stages, some of whom weren’t terribly skilled with collaboration tools.

Our leadership didn’t want us to spend the time getting everyone on the same page. Add to that an inability to manage logins and permissions adequately (it’s hard to collaborate on documents you can’t edit) and it nearly destroyed some of the teams.

My travel partner experienced it on one of his contract assignments, where management responded to a lack of in-person meeting attendance by instituting compulsory collaboration. Teams of largely remote workers were forced to come into the office one day a week, where they sat on conference calls with other teammates that were working from home on those days. After that, management forced everyone to come in on a single day of the week, where many of the workers ended up sitting in cubicles all day and talking to no one.

I don’t disagree that collaboration can be a good thing. There’s no substitute for being able to work as a team and use diverse skill sets to move a project forward. Nor is there a substitute for getting to know one another as more than just a disembodied voice on the phone or a choppy image on a video conference.

But simply putting people in physical proximity isn’t necessarily going to achieve that outcome. Teams have to be able to work together productively and have to be freed to focus their efforts in the right direction in order to be most effective.

I once worked with an IT support team that estimated their non-productive overhead at 40 percent. That seemed high until I took them through the exercise of documenting all the non-value-added work they were performing on a daily basis. Inefficient corporate requirements sucked away valuable time. Just looking at the cost of highly-paid engineers who had to battle inefficient timekeeping and project tracking systems, we could have paid for a part-time administrative assistant and allowed the team to focus on their work.

When I perform consulting engagements where I look at IT team processes, I usually see at least 20 percent of the time spent on non-productive activities – scheduling, timekeeping, logistics, waiting for people to arrive at meetings, and rescheduling due to lack of key participants. That doesn’t take into account the productivity loss when people have constant interruptions due to misused collaboration tools – the productivity cost of instant messenger and email notifications has been significant for many of my clients.

Some of my favorite consulting work is helping clients fix this problem – developing communication plans, helping teams set boundaries, and assisting them in figuring out how to collaborate but still allow time for productive individual work.

I’ve written previously about the challenges of open office design, and have seen a couple of companies that are moving back towards more traditional workplace arrangements. Others are allowing employees to work at home more regularly in order to increase individual productive time.

One of my clients recently hired scheduling assistants to deal with competing meeting requests. The effort is part of a larger initiative to increase meeting productivity and it seems to be working. Rather than having dozens of workers trying to schedule around conflicts, time off, and available rooms, team members have to send a meeting request to the central scheduler. In addition to the participants and desired time frame, the request has to include an agenda with the purpose of the meeting and expected outcomes. They’ve actually seen the number of meetings start to decline.

It’s hard to sort out all the causative factors, but staffers cite fewer meetings where key people are double booked or unavailable, which lets them actually get decisions made the first time so they can move forward. The need to have an agenda and outcomes formulated before requesting the meetings has also reduced the number of meetings that didn’t need to happen in the first place.

It was a difficult transition, though, as people had to give up a little bit of calendar autonomy while adding scheduling discipline. Individuals had to clearly identify which appointments on their calendar could not be moved or modified while trusting the schedulers to make things happen for the greater good.

The concept isn’t that different than that of using centralized scheduling for radiology, diagnostic testing, or medical consultations. The schedulers can see all the available resources as well as the queue of requests and look for creative ways to work through constraints. It’s not something I’ve seen in the corporate environment though more than a handful of times. There has to be a balance between collaboration and focused work time as well as between tasks that have to be done personally vs. those that can be centralized.

How does your employer make the most of collaboration? Email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

HIStalk Interviews Bob Gregg, CEO, ID Experts

February 15, 2016 Interviews Comments Off on HIStalk Interviews Bob Gregg, CEO, ID Experts

Bob Gregg is CEO of ID Experts of Portland, OR.

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Tell me about yourself and the company.

This is company number five for me in my career. Six if you count my early days as a CPA. Basically I’m a serial entrepreneur that loves to find companies like this that have huge market opportunities and grow them into significant companies that are making a difference.

I love ID Experts because we’re helping out not only the victims of data breaches that are at serious risk of identity theft, but also the companies themselves that are victims of data breaches of all kinds. We’re helping both sides of the equation. We’re helping the corporate entities that had the breach and we’re helping the individuals, whether it’s their patients, their customers, or who knows who they are. We take very good care of them.

How many breaches has the company managed and what findings have you observed from them?

I couldn’t count them. It’s measured in the upper hundreds at this point, possibly over a thousand. We’ve been doing this since 2006.

I guess the biggest change we’ve seen over the years is that a breach two or three years ago involved stolen laptops, thumb drives, those types of things. Now it’s much more serious. We’re seeing everything from organized crime to state-sponsored hacking with massive data breaches, particularly in the healthcare sector.

In the healthcare sector, one out of every two Americans has been breached in the last year and a half, which is pretty stunning. We just did not see breaches of this size and the number of breaches even two to three years ago. We didn’t see anything like it. Now we’re seeing these massive data breaches.

Unfortunately, in the healthcare arena, it’s pretty clear that healthcare is under attack right now from outside hackers.

What can hospitals do to make post-breach digital forensics easier?

The first thing I tell them is, don’t count on not having a breach. Just expect you’re going to have a breach in the near future. Get in place a master services agreement with somebody who is all prepared to take care of it. When you find the breach, you do not want to be scrambling, deciding who you’re going to hire, and how you’re going to approach it. You need to do all of that ahead of time.

Assuming you’ve done that, as soon as that breach information comes to your desk, you get hold of that group. They can get their forensics people in there quick as possible and they can get to that information. What you don’t want to do is over-notify or under-notify. You’ll want to get exactly who the victims of the breach are, then notify as quickly as possible once you have that information.

How hard is it to sift through the electronic trails to determine how many patients were affected?

Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer to that, because every single breach is a customized situation. I can’t think of any two breaches that are even almost comparable. It depends on the nature of their systems and how buttoned up they are.

Some breaches we can get in there pretty quickly, determine exactly which individuals were involved in the breach, and notify within a few days. Other ones are just very difficult because record-keeping isn’t quite what we would like it to be or the nature of the breach is such that there are multiple vectors of how the systems were penetrated. So, there’s no easy answer to that. Every one is in and of itself going to be different.

We have to be a little sympathetic to the provider when they have a breach. We don’t want to leap to our first conclusion. When we get the forensics people in there, we want to button up that process and know exactly who was breached before we notify. That can take some time in many cases.

What trends are you seeing in the technical nature of how breaches occur?

We do a survey every year for healthcare with the Ponemon Institute. We just last year published our fifth annual benchmark study on privacy and security of healthcare data. The big findings of that study were that, for the first time in the five years that we’ve done this, outside intrusion — criminal hacks — were the reason for the breach. That was never the case in prior years. It was lost data, lost hard drives. All kinds of inadvertent things that happened one way or the other.

Now we’re seeing absolute criminal attacks and hacking being the number one cause., which is a huge development. Because as we coach people, if you lose your laptop on a subway, chances of that laptop being used for nefarious purposes and going after the victim is, in our experience, really very small. If it’s criminally hacked with the purpose of getting that data, the chances that data is going to be used somehow in creating some kind of identity theft or fraud is pretty high. It’s a whole different situation when you get hacked.

What did you think when you heard about the hospital that lost access to its system for weeks due to a ransomware attack?

It’s an emerging threat, no question about it. We’re seeing more and more of it. We always counsel people to immediately get law enforcement involved. Don’t try to manage this yourself, for goodness sake. Get the professionals involved. Make a very thorough evaluation of the risk and the situation that you’re in.

Unfortunately, I have to predict that this isn’t an isolated incident or a few isolated incidents that we’ve seen here. We’re going to see more of these. Again, more and more reasons why you try to button up your systems. But as I said earlier, you have to assume that you’re going to get penetrated or hacked. Some kind of a breach is going to occur and you’d just better be prepared for it when it happens.

Should the average hospital or health system buy cyber insurance? How would that work for them?

I do, but with the caveat that if they do choose to buy insurance, get data breach professionals involved. Companies like ourselves, and there’s many others in the industry. Have one of them involved because every one of these insurance policies that I’ve seen are very custom with all kinds of sub-limits and exclusions.

You could very easily find yourself thinking you’re insured for a particular situation and finding out when you actually read the fine print that this policy excludes that type of situation. Unless you have a lot of experience in the data breach world in how these breaches can occur and what kind of exclusions the insurance companies will put into their policies, you could easily find yourself thinking you’re insured for something that happens, but you’re actually not.

Assuming you do that, I do highly recommend cyber security insurance. You will be hacked or you will lose data and it’s always nice to have some insurance to help pay for that.

Does cyber insurance cover the cost of remediating the breach? Does it cover lawsuits or fines?

There’s different types of policies. You can pretty much get your liability covered up to a certain limits. They’re all going to have limits. That’s classic insurance. It’s a tradeoff of how high you want to make the limits verse how much risk you want to take as an individual entity.

There’s policies available to cover the remediation of the breach, any loses occurred by the breach, even the lawsuit cost, which unfortunately too often happens as a result of these breaches, and the class action lawsuits. We have found that the actual cost of the lawsuits generally far outstrips the remediation, the notification, all those costs. You definitely want to be insured against the legal costs should those occur.

What trends are you seeing with health systems sharing threat information?

What we recommend to people is to watch what’s happening in the financial services world over the last five to 10 years. They follow the track of a lot of what we’re seeing right now in healthcare with criminal hacks and healthcare systems — the actual use of that data for identity theft and fraud and truly having identity victims from these.

These happened a lot in financial services five, six, seven years ago. They did just that. They started coming together and talking to each other. Sharing data on data breaches and the way people got in. They got law enforcement involved. They’ve done a reasonably good job of buttoning up their systems. 

Frankly and unfortunately in the healthcare community, the bad guys turned their guns away from financial services and towards healthcare, thinking they are a lot more vulnerable. They haven’t done all the things necessary to protect the data. It’s a lot easier to get data out of a healthcare provider than it is out of a bank or insurance company today. That’s the unfortunate fact. Our recommendation is pay attention to what financial services is doing and follow their lead.

What healthcare IT security issues will be important in the next handful of years?

It’s got to the board level now. We’ve had enough breaches and they’ve been high profile with enough victims involved that virtually every board of directors of a healthcare payer or provider, when they get together, they are now talking about cyber security and their breach risk. Just a few years ago, that was not the case.

The fact that it’s made it to the board room and people are paying attention … we’re seeing a lot more activity. Healthcare entities want to have that cyber security insurance. They want to a master services agreement with a data breach mediation company on the shelf and completely negotiated and worked out before the breach happens. A lot more systems protection. The CIOs and CISOs at these entities … their whole stature’s being raised up because of the risk that’s involved here. 

Good things are happening. Just like it happened in financial services, once the amount of the attacks and the fraud got to the point where it was intolerable, things started happening to fix it. They’ve come a long way. I think the same thing will happen in healthcare.

Unfortunately, I think it will take a number of years before it gets a whole lot better. In those interim years, we’re going to see a lot of data breaches. A lot more remediation that has to be done. I think we’re headed in the right direction. That’s the good news, but it’s going to take some time.

Do you have any final thoughts?

The whole reason ID Experts is in the data breach business is because we were founded on the premise that we want to fix identity theft victims from bad things happening to them. We have a 100 percent track record of doing that. Because of that, that just launched us into the data breach world and launched us into what we call the MyIDCare product, which is all of the things that we do to help people understand and remediate bad things from a victim’s standpoint.

One of reasons we chose healthcare as a primary market is that healthcare companies care about their customers and their patients. We see that every day. We get excited about that, because when a data breach happens, they step up. Unlike, unfortunately, the credit card companies and the banks sometimes. 

These guys really care about these customers and these patients. They want to do the right thing. We like that, because we obviously want to do the right thing for these individuals as well. We make a pretty good team going forward doing whatever it takes to recover these people from bad things happening as a result of the breach.

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Morning Headlines 2/15/16

February 14, 2016 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 2/15/16

New records system takes bite out of Partners earnings

Partners Healthcare (MA) reports net profits of $13 million, down from $74 million last year. The health system blamed the drop in earnings on unexpected costs associated with its $1,2 billion Epic install.

Hack Attack: Hollywood hospital victim of cyber attack

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center (CA) reports that its network has been  infected with ransomware, with the hackers demanding $3 million to restore access.

NHS will monitor Facebook for comment about hospitals, says new CQC head

In England, the NHS will begin reviewing patient complaints about hospitals posted on Facebook as a source of “early intelligence” that may signal potential problems.

In America, the art of doctoring is dying

A Washington Post opinion piece by a retired internist describes the art of medicine as dead, noting that medical students today are trained to focus on technology and testing, and “know little to nothing about how medicine was once practiced.”

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 2/15/16

Monday Morning Update 2/15/16

February 13, 2016 News 7 Comments

Top News

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Partners HealthCare (MA) announces that it made $13 million in operating profit on $3 billion in revenue in the most recent quarter and lost $38 million overall including investment losses. The CFO says its Epic implementation will negatively impact profit by $200 million over the next three years. Brigham and Women’s in December said it made $68 million in profit in FY2015 instead of the $121 million it expected, blaming most of the shortfall on unexpected Epic implementation costs. The Boston Globe reported in June 2015 that original cost estimates had been doubled to $1.2 billion.


Reader Comments

From Give Rodney Another Chance: “Re: job hunting tips. You ran something awhile back that I could use for the upcoming conference.”Steer clear of companies with these characteristics:

  • The CEO is a well-traveled hack or private equity hired gun whose historical talent is boosting the short-term bottom line to get the company sold before the wheels come off.
  • The CEO refuses to move to the city where most of the employees work.
  • The position is not located in a primary company office. Out of sight means out of mind, which is great until your ambitious peers conspire to stab your absent back.
  • The company demands that you sign a non-compete agreement that will make it tough to land the next job. My favorite strategy is from Dilbert: scan the non-compete into Acrobat, change the wording in your favor, then print it and sign it. Chances are the always-clueless HR department won’t notice that what you signed isn’t what they handed you.
  • Management isn’t smart enough to fix problems, so they harm the business with company-wide budget and travel freezes.
  • They company has laid people off, meaning executives failed with their hiring choices, strategy, or execution and will almost certainly do so again.
  • Executives with reserved parking spots. I loathe big shots who think they are better than everyone else.
  • Your interviewer is late, distracted, or someone you wouldn’t hang out with after work. You’re seeing them as good as they’re going to get.
  • You get a vague answer when you ask what happened to your predecessor or the company declines to name them for fear you’ll solicit their honest opinion about why they left.
  • Your prospective boss talks about himself or herself instead of you.
  • The executive team you would be joining has two people who are related or sexually involved. You, Sammy Hagar, serve at the pleasure of the brothers Van Halen.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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Less than 20 percent of poll respondents are attending the HIMSS conference to attend educational and keynote sessions, with 75 percent of respondents naming networking and the exhibit hall as their primary draw (which explains where you’ll find the crowds). New poll to your right or here: if you had equivalent job offers on the table from the vendors listed, which one would you accept? I asked that poll question back in 2009, so it will be interesting to compare the results.

Northeasterners who are bundling up against wind chills of up to 40 degrees below zero can look forward to better weather in Las Vegas, which so far calls for mid-70s and sun every day.

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Mr. R’s Robotics Team 968 from California sent an update on their activities using the laptop we provided in funding their DonorsChoose grant request. The five students been doing technology in-services at the local senior citizen center and are creating their three-hour Saturday “Rookie Training Days” in which students in grades 4-8 will be invited to learn more about STEM and join their team. We also funded a second request from the team for machining tools to help them build their robots, for which they send “a million virtual thanks.” They are working after school and on weekends to finish their robot for an upcoming competition and closed with, “Wish us luck as we will soon embark to Los Angeles for competition, move on to Phoenix, and hopefully compete in the championships in St. Louis.”

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Ms. H, a speech-language pathologist in New York, received the USB CD drive we provided. She says, “Thank you so much for your generosity and supporting a low income school. This is a great, especially for these snowy indoor months. You have helped to make a difference in our classroom.”

I donated $100 to DonorsChoose in honor of one of my CIO webinar reviewers, which (with matching funds) provided five voice recorders for Mrs. Hendrickson’s Akron, OH elementary school class. She describes her project as, “They come from the most challenging places, experiencing some of the most heart-wrenching things, and they teach me way more than I teach them. They thrive in love and learn only after they realize someone cares about them. They come unmotivated and leave yearning to learn. They struggle significantly in reading-often 3-4 years below grade level. My students will use the Easi-Speak recorders to analyze their own reading. In order to increase reading skills they need practice figuring out their problem.”

Listening: indie pop from England-based Viola Beach. All four band members and their manager were killed Saturday when their car ran off an open drawbridge after a show in Sweden. 


Last Week’s Most Interesting News

  • CommonWell adds several new members, including HIMSS.
  • The President’s proposed and rejected $4.1 trillion budget would have given ONC an extra $22 million for interoperability work.
  • The Senate health committee  passes the Improving Health Information Technology Act that follows on the HELP committee’s recommendations.
  • The Department of Defense gives Leidos and Cerner a $51 million DoD EHR hosting contract over the protests of IBM, CSC, Amazon, and General Dynamics, saying the military needs Cerner’s broad data for managing population health and that Cerner wouldn’t allow them to connect to its systems in any other way.
  • Britain’s NHS announces a $6 billion push toward a paperless environment.
  • Medical practice operator One Medical Group buys the nine-employee company behind the Rise nutrition app for $20 million.

Webinars

February 17 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Take Me To Your Leader: Catholic Health Initiatives on Executive Buy-In for Enterprise Analytics.” Sponsored by Premier. Presenters: Jim Reichert, MD, PhD, VP of analytics, Catholic Health Initiatives; Rush Shah, product manager analytics factory, Premier. Catholic Health Initiatives, the nation’s second-largest non-profit health system, knew that in order to build an enterprise analytics strategy, they needed a vision, prioritization, and most importantly buy-in from their executives. Dr. Jim Reichert will walk through their approach.

February 23 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Completing your EMR with a Medical Image Sharing Strategy.” Sponsored by LifeImage. Presenters: Don K. Dennison, consultant; Jim Forrester, director of imaging informatics, UR Medicine. Care coordination can suffer without an effective, cost-efficient way to share images across provider networks. Consolidating image management systems into a single platform such as VNA or PACS doesn’t address the need to exchange images with external organizations. This webinar will address incorporating the right image sharing methods into your health IT strategy.


Sales

FamilyCare Health (OR) chooses Wellcentive’s population health quality reporting and care management solutions.


People

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Health management software vendor AssureCare names Yousuf Ahmad, DrPH (Mercy Health) as CEO. He had risen from SVP/CIO of Mercy Health to president and CEO, finishing his career there as SVP of system development.

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Verge Solutions hires Mark Crockett, MD (Best Doctors) as CEO.


Privacy and Security

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Another hospital is hit by ransomware as Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center (CA) is locked out of its systems by hackers demanding $3 million to unlock its files. LAPD and the FBI are involved in the “internal emergency” that has lasted more than a week so far.

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A security researcher shows a conference group how he hacked into a hospital while sitting outside in his car, challenged by the Moscow hospital to test its cyber defenses. He couldn’t initially get past the hospital’s firewall, so instead he sat outside and cracked its Wi-Fi network, stole a poorly chosen network key, and then accessed medical equipment. He concludes that hospitals should make sure their medical equipment isn’t connected to a public network. 


Technology

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Chris Evert Children’s Hospital (FL) uses technology from its renovations contractor Skanska to send alerts to the construction crew if noise, dust, or vibration reach disruptive levels.


Other

Professional basketball player Dwight Howard gives pediatric patients at Memorial Hermann Health System a Google Cardboard-powered virtual visit to the home of his Houston Rockets, then surprises them by showing up in person.

A London newspaper profiles the making of autobiographical video exploration game “That Dragon, Cancer,” created by the parents of a five-year-old boy who died of cancer.

Here’s a pretty funny Athenahealth commercial called “What Do You Do for a Living?”

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A retired internist and self-proclaimed “dinosaur” says “the art of doctoring is dying” in a Washington Post op-ed piece. He says he would re-invent himself as a “confidentialist” who would take time to know a patient and “stand down the legions of specialists with their scalpels, catheters, and scopes; the backbone to stand up to bottom-line-toeing administrators and self-serving insurance executives and policy wonks.” He adds,

Physicians are now insulated from knowing too much about their patients. It is all about the technology, the testing, the imaging, the electronic health record, the data — once collected by the doctor, but now so regulated and overwhelming that paramedical professionals have been enlisted to record the so-called minutiae, the often rote information in which may lie important clues. Some of these may remain forever buried, the patient not wanting to share sensitive details with just anyone, especially someone who no longer makes eye contact, whose face remains buried behind a computer screen, who seems uninterested or just unskilled in reading body language — that downward glance, that shift in the chair, that half-swallowed response.

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A Russian scientist makes 48 million journal articles freely available ok Sci-Hub,  the academic version of Pirate Bay, saying she’s tired of not being able to afford the journal articles she needs for her work. She says, “Payment of $32 is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them. Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal.” The article notes that she isn’t alone – prestigious universities say they can’t afford expensive journals and 15,000 scientists are boycotting publisher Elsevier, which not surprisingly is suing the researcher who claims Elsevier’s business model is illegal and immoral since it doesn’t pay the authors of articles it publishes.

England’s NHS will monitor Facebook for negative postings about hospitals and will intervene when indicated.

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CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt submits a great entry to #HealthPolicyValentines.

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Here are others I liked.


Sponsor Updates

  • TeleTracking celebrates its 25th anniversary.
  • Valence Health will exhibit at The Center for Healthcare Governance Winter Symposium February 14-17 in Phoenix.
  • Xerox Healthcare will host Regina Holliday at HIMSS16.
  • ZirMed will exhibit at the Healthpac 2016 Users Meeting February 18-20 in Savannah, GA.

Blog Posts


Contacts

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

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Morning Headlines 2/12/16

February 12, 2016 Headlines Comments Off on Morning Headlines 2/12/16

CommonWell Health Alliance Membership Continues to Expand Across the Care Continuum

CommonWell Health Alliance announces seven new members:eClinicalWorks, HIMSS, ImageTrend, lifeIMAGE, Mana Health, MediPortal, and Modernizing Medicine.

Electronic Health Record Adoption and Rates of In-hospital Adverse Events

A retrospective study analyzing 2012-2013 patient visits finds that “fully electronic EHR” use is associated with a 17 to 30 percent decrease in adverse events for patients with cardiovascular disease, pneumonia, or for surgical patients.

Insurer Centene ends search for missing hard drives

Insurer Centene announces that it found the six missing hard drives containing PHI from 950,000 patients that went missing last month.

US News Withdraws Rankings of 2 Children’s Hospitals

US News has removed Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital (TX) and Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital (NY) from its annual ranking of children’s hospitals after discovering significant errors in the data submitted by the hospitals.

Comments Off on Morning Headlines 2/12/16

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