Monday Morning Update 3/23/15

Top News

HHS, CMS, and ONC publish proposed rules for Meaningful Use Stage 3 and 2015 Edition EHR certification criteria. The announcement was posted as a Word document, bizarrely, and late on a Friday afternoon as is always the case. The Stage 3 rule is here and 2015 certification criteria here. Your comments are welcome, both here (any time) and at the Federal Register links (by May 29, 2015). I’ll be honest in saying that I’m so sick of the topic that I haven’t even bothered to read either document. I’m sure the many special interest groups will call out the parts they find objectionable and thus are probably the most needed. Feel free to chime in on parts you find interesting or surprising.

Reader Comments

From Yours in Nomenclature: “Re: SNOMED-CT MOOC. It’s going to happen. I might sign up since my work bumps against it.” The College of St. Scholastica offers a free massive open online course (MOOC) called “Exploration of SNOMED-CT Basics”  that starts April 20. Registration stays open until May 18 since the student just needs to finish the course by June 15. It offers 12 AHIMA CEUs. The instructor is Mike Grove, PhD of Accenture.

From Paul: “Re: Epic’s Deep Space architecture award. While I must congratulate Judy, I just left Verona with a sense of dismay at what our organization has been putting up with to build this place — north of $400 million by estimates — for a forum we’re only visiting once a year.” I think they should have concerts there. It would be fun to go to Verona for training and then walk over to see Rush or U2.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Two-thirds of poll respondents don’t think Congress will insert another surprise ICD-10 delay into SGR legislation, a belief that seems well founded in the draft versions presented so far. New poll to your right or here: which company do you trust least to make information exchange common and inexpensive? Of course I’m fascinated to learn why you voted as you did, so click the “comments” link afterward and explain.

I’ve emailed the 13 CMIOs who expressed interest in attending my HIMSS conference lunch on Tuesday, April 14. I still have a handful of spots left. I don’t often volunteer to pick up the lunch tab, so it’s a rare opportunity.

I’m really getting annoyed at half-wits who think it’s hilarious to use “FHIR” as “fire” in creating a lame pun for a headline or tweet.

Listening, as I was taking an extended drive and used Siri’s “what is this song” option to get the titles of the radio tracks I liked best as I constantly scanned: Christian rocker Matthew West’s “The Motions,” The Smashing Pumpkins with “Today,” a forgotten classic by the indefatigable Butthole Surfers, “Pepper,” new from Incubus, and my favorite song (nearly 40 years old) of the amazing Electric Light Orchestra.

HIStalkapalooza

HIStalkapalooza invitations have been emailed. Spam filter problems are rampant these days, so I’ve added a second level of checking: see this page, which lists who was invited in a somewhat de-identified format (first three letters of the last name, comma, and first two letters of the first name). We cannot accommodate walk-ins or guests, so the security people will admit only those who are on their full registration list. Some sponsors didn’t submit their guest lists in time, so if you’re being invited by one of the event sponsors and aren’t on the list, you should be getting an invitation directly from that sponsor.

I’ll take a second to again thank the HIStalkapalooza sponsors that are making it possible for a large number of folks to attend the event. Several of those listed are going above and beyond, with Sagacious, for example, running guest check-in and badge printing and Elsevier managing the traditional red carpet entrance. These companies are springing for dinner, drinks, and entertainment, so it seems reasonable that you click their links in return to see what’s new with them.

Platinum Sponsors
Elsevier
Santa Rosa Holdings

 
Gold Sponsors
Divurgent
Sagacious Consultants

Silver Sponsors
Aventura
CommVault
Falcon Consulting Group
Greenway Health
PatientSafe Solutions
Sunquest
Thrasys
Validic

Speaking of red carpet, here are skeletal details of the ever-popular HIStalkapalooza fashion awards, where your hot shoes will be burning down the avenue (Dearborn Street in this case). We’ll have four winners: best shoes male and female and then best overall appearance, also male and female, which will earn the HIStalk King and HIStalk Queen sashes, since like high school, we overly emphasize appearance because it’s all we have time to evaluate. Plan to enter early (maybe 6:45 to 7:15) via the red carpet, where our distinguished judges will cast their critical eyes feetward and then full body. Your regular host Jennifer Lyle of Software Testing Solutions serve as expert along with one of our patient scholarship winners Amanda Greene, who was involved with the red carpet at the Oscars this year and who works with fashion magazines. We’ll bring the four winners up to the stage to be sashed.

Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• A proposed Congressional SGR “doc fix” bill would make health IT interoperability a national priority to be achieved by the end of 2018 and proposes to penalize those who intentionally obstruct it.
• A contracting billing company’s employee falls victim to a phishing scam, exposing the information of 14,000 patients of Sacred Heart Health System (FL).
• Cerner and Athenahealth chide Epic via Twitter for its non-participation in CommonWell following its negative comments about the organization in congressional testimony.
• Premera Blue Cross discovers that hackers have had access to its 11 million patient records since May 2014.
• Meditech reports full-year 2014 results that include an 11 percent drop in revenue and profits that were reduced by 7 percent, although the company had previously restated its financials and that change may have affected the totals.
• CHIME offers a $1 million prize for an idea or technology that increases patient ID matching from the current 80 percent to 100 percent, although presumably members of Congress who could enact national patient identifier rules are not eligible.
• Implementation of New York’s mandatory e-prescribing law is delayed for a year, to March 27, 2016.

Webinars

March 31 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Best Practices for Increasing Patient Collections.” Sponsored by MedData. Presenter: Jason Bird, director of client operations, MedData. Healthcare is perhaps the last major industry where the consumer does not generally have access to what they owe and how they can pay for their services. Collecting from patients is estimated to cost up to four times more than collecting from payers and patient pay responsibility is projected to climb to 50 percent of the healthcare dollar by the end of the decade. Learn how creating a consumer-focused culture, one that emphasizes patient satisfaction over collections, can streamline your revenue cycle process and directly impact your bottom line. 

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Vince Ciotti has been tracking vendor annual revenue for decades. Here’s the first installment as he introduces the episodes to follow. He confirms the feeling I’ve had that HITECH goosed company revenues for a couple of big years, but that has tailed off and left a lot of software and consulting vendors scrambling to resize themselves appropriately.  

People

 

Valence Health hires Kai Tsai (PwC Consulting) as EVP of consulting services and strategic initiatives and Mary C. Anderson, MD (Rush University Medical Center) as medical director of population health.

Karen Wavra (Allscript) joins Beacon Partners as Cerner practice director.

Announcements and Implementations

The headline “El Camino says goodbye to paper medical records” wasn’t written during its TDS implementation in the 1970s – it describes El Camino Hospital’s (CA)  $125 million move to Epic.

Surescripts names 24 health systems and technology vendors for its “2014 White Coat of Quality Award” for electronic prescribing.

Government and Politics

This is a scary graph. Healthcare is the highest-employing industry in 35 states.

An editorial in the Burlington, VT paper applauds an announcement by the governor that if Optum can’t get the state’s insurance exchange working by October, he’ll shut it down and move to the federal exchange. The state will have spent $198 million in federal taxpayer dollars by the end of 2015, with unimpressive results following screw-ups by CGI that resulted in its replacement by Optum.

Acting VA CIO Stephen Warren says that even though the DoD is shopping for a commercial EHR, the VA will stick with VistA because it was developed for patient care rather than built around billing as were commercial systems.

Technology

Good Morning America goes inside Apple’s secret fitness lab, where employee volunteers tested various sensors and technologies over the past two yeas without knowing their work was for the development of Apple Watch.

Other

A Virginia Peninsula newspaper points out that the region is one of the first in the country in which all competing health systems (Bon Secours, Riverside, Sentara, and Chesapeake Regional Medical Center) use the same EHR, Epic in their case. Like a lot of newspapers and marginally informed pundits, this article mistakes HITECH as being part of the Affordable Care Act, but this one takes it a step further in proclaiming that hospitals didn’t start testing EHRs until the 1990s and that just two major players remain (Cerner and Epic, forgetting about still-common but somewhat fading Meditech).

UnitedHealthcare runs a cute commercial that features an ICD-9 code and virtual visits.

Bob Wachter, MD, pitching his new book, writes a New York Times editorial whose content he summarizes via Twitter as “Why health IT is so bad and how to make it better.” The former was mostly anecdotes and I didn’t see much of the latter: his suggestions are: (a) train doctors to focus on the patient, not the computer; (b) create new ways to practice provider teamwork in the absence of a shared chart; (c) create federal policies that promote interoperability; (d) increase collaboration between academic researchers and software developers. Doctors may hate EHRs, but all it took was $44,000 in federal money to get them to use them. My argument would be that doctors should redesign the encounter system so they don’t need to use computers at all unless they need its help — doctors are the only professionals (accountants, lawyers, psychologists, plumbers) who key their own information into the computer instead of focusing entirely on the paying client sitting in front of them, and not only that, do most of their keystroking for the benefit of someone other than themselves. You could argue that medicine is the only profession that is practiced as a team, which might hit Bob’s second point, but I’d still say bring on the scribes and let doctors be doctors and not the medical equivalent of the grocery store checkout clerk. Everybody agrees that the information needs to be recorded, but it’s not reasonable that the highest-paid professional in the medical food chain be the one doing it.

Bob Wachter tweeted out an interesting excerpt from his book as he quoted National Coordinator David Brailer responding to the question if ONC would shrink itself as the HITECH money runs out. “Bureaucracies don’t retrench,” Brailer said. “ When a bureaucracy that starts out as the Candy Man runs out of candy, it goes dark and turns into Regulatory Man.”

Anyone who attended HIMSS09 in Chicago saw the weather change from a near-blizzard on Sunday to pretty good later in the week. Here’s what the not-so-bad weather looked like at O’Hare on April 12 of previous years (the Sunday opening day of this year’s conference):

2014: low 42, high 69, rain 0.43 inches.
2013: low 34, high 45, trace of snow.
2012: low 40, high 66, no precipitation.
2011: low 36, high 68, no precipitation.
2010: Low 48, high 63, no precipitation.

The family of a Virginia radio personality who died after routine hernia surgery is awarded around $2 million from the hospital and its PCA pump manufacturers. Nurses mis-programmed the pump and delivered five times the ordered dose of narcotic, which just about everybody agrees was because of the device’s complexity, although the manufacturer claims the nurse hadn’t been properly trained, didn’t monitor her patient, and waited eight minutes after finding the patient unresponsive before calling for help.

This photo, which a paramedic took surreptitiously as a California ED doctor grieved after his 19-year-old patient died, has received a lot of Internet attention after being posted on social media. Minutes later, the doctor had moved on to his next patient with his game face on. It’s a good reminder that a hospital is just a very clean hotel with a lot of expensive executives and non-clinical hangers-on – lives get saved, as they do on the battlefield or in an ambulance, by a well-trained fellow human who is willing and able to help.

Sponsor Updates

• Shareable Ink’s ShareQuality technology is featured in Nashville Medical News.
• Voalte CEO Trey Lauderdale shares his belief that “With Apple ResearchKit, mHealth Springs Forward.”
• Zynx Health will exhibit at the 2015 Population Health Colloquium March 23-25 in Philadelphia.
• The SSI Group and ZirMed will present at the Region 4 Mid-Atlantic HFMA Education Conference March 24 in Baltimore.
• Verisk Health will exhibit at the AMGA Annual Conference March 23-26 in Las Vegas.
• Xerox Healthcare asks, “Does Better Healthcare Require Better Patients?”
• Sunquest Information Systems will exhibit at the 2015ACMG Annual Clinical Genetics Meeting March 25-27 in Salt Lake City.
• PMD offers “Telemedicine: The Work of the Gods.”
• MedAptus, PatientKeeper, and Passport Health will exhibit at the AMGA 2015 Annual Conference March 23-26 in Las Vegas.
• The local business paper interviews Quest Diagnostics CEO Steve Rusckowski about the company’s recent successes and future plans.
• MedData will exhibit at the OHIMA Annual Meeting & Trade Show March 24-25 in Columbus, Ohio.
• MEA I NEA CEO Lindy Benton discusses the importance of improving practice communications on eHealth Radio.
• Navicure posts “Price Transparency: What does it have to do with Patient Engagement?”
• NVoq offers how to “Avoid Those ‘Few Extra Clicks’ and Improve EMR Workflow.”
• Nordic releases the second episode of its HIT Breakdown podcast entitled, “What does a great population health program look like?”
• Park Place International publishes a blog on “Winders Server 2003 End of Life and Active Directory.”
• Orion Health and Sandlot Solutions will exhibit at the 12th Annual World Health Care Congress March 22-25 in Washington, D.C.
• NTT Data will exhibit at the CIO Summit March 22-24 in Chicago.
• Perceptive Software’s In Context blog addresses “Hospital IT: Beyond the EHR.”
• BBC’s Click Tech program features the Oneview Healthcare solution used by UCSF Medical Center (CA).

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us online.

Morning Headlines 3/20/15

A bill to amend title XVIII of the Social Security Act to repeal the Medicare sustainable growth rate

A new bill in Congress calls for the permanent repeal of the SRG, but also names health IT interoperability a national priority to be achieved by the end of 2018.

Graphical Display of Diagnostic Test Results in Electronic Health Records: A Comparison of 8 Systems

AHRQ publishes a study comparing the differences in how laboratory results are displayed across eight EHR systems. The study was based on 11 criteria for the proper display of lab data. None of the vendors met all 11 criteria, and some deficiencies were misleading enough to have a significant, negative impact on patient safety.

The inside story of how Apple’s new medical research platform was born

Apple reportedly began working on ResearchKit in 2013, having been inspired by a MedX presentation by Stephen Friend, MD on the future of medical research. During  his presentation he describes his ideal platform, “Here you have genetic information, and you have what drugs they took, how they did. Put that up in the cloud, and you have a place where people can go and query it, [where] they can make discoveries.” Apple VP of medical technologies Mike O”Reilly was in the audience.

Epic System’s auditorium, contractor win national award

Epic’s new 11,000 seat, space-themed underground auditorium has been named the best new building in America in the over $200 million category.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 3/19/15

It was good to get away from my day job last week. I spent my days off seeing patients and intentionally not checking my hospital email account. I’m aggravated at how things are going with our upcoming EHR migration and how my team is being treated, so I thought unplugging would be therapeutic.

Initially we were told that our team would be transitioned to the new project and placed in similar job roles. Our ambulatory group continues to acquire new practices and a small team would remain to continue implementing at those sites as well as to support existing sites. We communicated this to the team and they were comfortable with the approach.

About a month ago, the plan changed. Leadership decided that they want to structure the team more consistent with what the vendor recommends. Now we’re looking for a fairly large number of project managers and plan to hire a completely new training team.

I’m reading between the lines and thinking that perhaps they don’t want people with experience because they’re worried about preconceived notions of how an implementation should look. New trainers will certainly be easier to mold to a new paradigm, but I have serious concerns about throwing away as much cumulative experience as our team has. In addition to being solid trainers, they understand our physician base and how our offices run. The offices trust them and see them as advocates.

Before I left for vacation, our leadership informed the staff of this new plan and essentially told people to get their resumes in order. If they want to move to the new project, they will need to apply for the project manager positions. Most of my team members thrive on the front lines and on working directly with users. If they had wanted to be project managers, there have been quite a few opportunities during the last couple of years. On the other hand, they don’t want to be stuck turning the lights out on a dying project and risk being let go at the end.

Because of flip-flopping by the leadership, the team is nervous and scared. At this point, I don’t know what to tell them. I’m still in limbo regarding my own position. I’ve seen at least half a dozen variations on the proposed clinical leadership structure and none of the positions have jumped out at me as being a good fit for my particular skill set. Like the team, I’ve been told to get my resume in order. Once the positions are posted, I can apply along with the rest of the CMIOs that are being consolidated.

We’ll have three days for internal candidates to apply before the positions are posted externally. It goes without saying that they’re going to hire a new system-wide CMIO who has experience with our new vendor, so at least we’re not all fighting each other for the top job. Postings are supposed to go up next week, but they’ve already been delayed several times, so I’ll be surprised if they are there before HIMSS. Once I see what is available, I’ll make my final decision on whether I’m going to stay or fly the coop.

Most people find uncertainty to be disconcerting. For me, it’s been somewhat liberating because I’ve given up on trying to figure it out. This might be the first time in my life that I haven’t had a plan. I’m starting to understand how my colleagues that fly by the seat of their pants feel every day.

After my week off, I came back to work much more relaxed and ready to see what the next curveball might be. We’ll see how long that lasts, based on the craziness that we’re thrown on a daily basis.

In the mean time, there’s always room for pastry therapy. In honor of St. Patrick’s day I made some outstanding cupcakes that a friend had suggested I make. I just may have found my new favorite buttercream frosting recipe. Slainte!

Email Dr. Jayne.

News 3/20/15

Top News

The House’s proposed doc fix SGR bill includes a requirement stating that “Congress declares it a national objective to achieve widespread exchange of health information through interoperable certified EHR technology nationwide by December 31, 2018” and orders HHS to take action if interoperability metrics aren’t reached that could include Meaningful Use penalties and EHR decertification. The bill would also require providers to declare that they that they haven’t restricted interoperability as part of their attestation (that sounds tricky to interpret). It also calls for studying the creation of an EHR feature comparison website. Other language in the proposed legislation addresses data usage and telemedicine, so it’s pretty heavy in IT-related language. Now the political sausage-making begins, hopefully without someone’s ICD-10 Hail Mary sneaked in as time expires.

Reader Comments

From Data Driver: “Re: Demand-Driven Open Data (DDOD). I’m cautiously optimistic about this new mechanism to open and track government data requests. I say ‘cautiously’ because I’ve seen competent people in HHS’s ‘Entrepreneur in Residence’ program have their projects stymied by unspecified limitations.” HHS’s DDOD program, launched in November 2014, lets startups, providers, and researchers tell HHS (via online use case requests on Github) what data or APIs from CMS, NIH, CDC, and FDA they would like to have. Requests are prioritized by potential cost savings and input from data users, and if approved, the requestor works with HHS to manage its development as a project. Some interesting use cases: retrieve Medicare pricing by CPT, create a consolidated registry of marketed medical devices, export FDA’s drug warning letters to data format, and create a de-identified claims dataset for tracking utilization and quality.

From Brutus: “Re: Standard Register. I haven’t seen any news on its implosion. The CFO resigned in January, they got booted from the NYSE, and now they’ve filed Chapter 11. They bought iMedConsent from Dialog Medical awhile back and seemed to be making a slow transition from their paper forms business.” They’ve announced restructuring plans to sell the company to a turnaround-focused hedge fund for only $275 million. Standard Register’s electronic healthcare offerings include electronic forms, document capture, electronic consent, electronic storefronts, medication history, discharge follow-up, and workflow. The company bought Dialog Medical for $5 million in 2011.

From Sturges: “On the noise around Epic and the Senate interoperability hearing, everyone is missing one piece: who asked the question on CommonWell to Epic’s Peter DeVault?  The answer: Tammy Baldwin, US senator from Wisconsin. Judy is one of her largest political donors. So, Epic (and/or Brad Card, their lobbyist) planted the question with Baldwin’s staff. Baldwin is happy to help a large donor. Epic’s DeVault provides his rehearsed, untruthful reply. It is typical Washington." Senator Baldwin is not only Judy’s heaviest-supported politician (Judy’s campaign contributions are listed are above), Senator Baldwin was one of five members of a Congressional delegation that in 2011 wrote a letter to the Department of Defense urging it to consider buying Epic, which seemed cheeky at the time, but now Epic is one of three finalists for the DoD’s $11 billion EHR project and the free VistA is off the table.

From MrSoul: “Re: Spartanburg Regional Medical Center (SC). They’re going Epic, replacing GE Centricity in the clinics and McKesson Horizon inpatient. That means Bon Secours St. Francis, GHS, and Spartanburg Regional will all be Epic soon. No Epic jobs on their site yet.” Glassdoor is now showing some Epic jobs at Spartanburg Regional.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

This week on HIStalk Connect: Health Catalyst raises a $70 million Series D round to expand its data analytics platform. Google secures a patent for a wrist-worn system that will search for and then attack cancer cells in the bloodstream. 23andMe announces that it will begin using its genome database for drug discovery research. HealthTap introduces RateRx, a platform for doctors to rate the effectiveness of medications.

This week on HIStalk Practice: Austin Regional Clinic gets into virtual visits via CirrusMD. Mettrum Health launches physician portal for medical marijuana services. AHIP attempts to one-up the AMA in Chicago. VSee helps telemedicine go galactic. Jerry Broderick outlines how practices can give themselves a leg up when it comes to capturing physician commitment. HHS and PwC look back at ACA hits and misses. Zobreus Medical takes its EHR to Kickstarter. Physician optimism around mobile apps may be naive.

Webinars

March 31 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Best Practices for Increasing Patient Collections.” Sponsored by MedData. Presenter: Jason Bird, director of client operations, MedData. Healthcare is perhaps the last major industry where the consumer does not generally have access to what they owe and how they can pay for their services. Collecting from patients is estimated to cost up to four times more than collecting from payers and patient pay responsibility is projected to climb to 50 percent of the healthcare dollar by the end of the decade. Learn how creating a consumer-focused culture, one that emphasizes patient satisfaction over collections, can streamline your revenue cycle process and directly impact your bottom line. 

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Clinical trials software vendors CentrosHealth and Clinical Ink merge.

The Houston business paper profiles seven-employee Medical Informatics Corp., which offers the FirstByte alarm management program and says its real-time clinical decision support application should pass FDA approval and enter the market in this year.

IBM invests an unspecified amount in Modern Medicine, which is working on Watson-powered ambulatory clinical decision support.

Sales

Washington’s Department of Social and Health Services chooses a hosted version of Cerner’s Millennium and revenue cycle for three psychiatric hospitals.

Announcements and Implementations

Premier announces PremierConnect Supply Chain to manage a health system’s entire purchasing process including, real-time supply analytics, online sourcing, catalog management, and materials management. Test sites included Adventist Health and Fairview.

Cerner and Intermountain announce implementation of iCentra — the EHR/PM system they’ve been working together to develop — at two hospitals and 24 clinics, with the rest of Intermountain going live through 2016. The announcement says the collaboration makes iCentra “more unique” (which is grammatically horrifying) than competing EHRs.

Government and Politics

California tax authorities and Blue Shield of California are criticized for failing to disclose that the insurance giant’s non-profit status was revoked seven months ago before people starting signed up for insurance on Healthcare.gov. The state’s insurance commissioner applauds, saying Blue Shield charges excessive rates and doesn’t operate any differently than for-profit insurance companies. The organization paid its CEO $4.6 million in 2011 (and has declined to say what it has paid him since) and spent $2.5 million for a San Francisco 49ers luxury box last year. Blue Shield’s just-resigned public policy director is running a public campaign to convert the insurer to  a for-profit company that could be worth up to $10 billion and use the money for safety net care. The questions raised could be logically extended to health systems that don’t pay taxes despite billions in income, millions in surpluses, and the highest executive salaries in the non-profit world.

Privacy and Security

Sacred Heart Health System (FL) notifies 14,000 patients that their information was exposed when the email account of a contracted billing vendor’s employee is hacked. Please, well-intended writers and self-appointed experts – stop yammering about encrypting data at rest (which wouldn’t have prevented any of the recent big breaches) and focus on phishing attacks. They aren’t as easily detected as earlier primitive attempts that featured laughably poor English and poorly disguised links that would fool only the least computer-literate employees. Phishers have become convincing in luring even intelligent people into clicking official-looking links or opening malware attachments that claim to be faxes, legal documents, or password reset links. That doesn’t even account for phone phishing where smooth-talking people convince employees to divulge passwords. Encryption is worth zero if someone steals the password of an employee who has data access.

Innovation and Research

An AHRQ-funded review of how eight inpatient EHRs display lab values finds inconsistency and graphical limitations, with the authors suggesting that ONC beef up certification criteria. Some EHRs failed to include the patient’s birthdate, a description of the value being displayed, or a data legend.

Clinicians and technologists in Vermont join to create MEDSINC, a mobile app for poor countries that allows users with no medical training to input information about a sick child and then receive suggested treatment options based on local conditions. The app was envisioned by UVM pediatrician Barry Finette, MD, PhD and built by Physicians Computer Company co-founder John Canning with input from 10 university pediatricians who reviewed WHO protocols and evidence-based research. Testing at UVM suggests that pediatricians and the app agree 94 percent of the time vs. the 80 percent agreement typically found when two board-certified pediatricians review a case. Field deployment in Bangladesh begins later this year. The developers say it might eventually land in the US provided they can get through the FDA’s process. They’ve formed a company called ThinkMD.  

A report says Apple decided to move ahead with ResearchKit in September 2013 after one of its executives heard a Stanford MedX talk by Stephen Friend, MD, PhD, a  former drug company oncology SVP who co-founded Seattle-based non-profit Sage Bionetworks that provides tools for large-scale, transparent biomedical research. It says Friend decided to work with Apple rather than Google or Facebook because as a hardware manufacturer, Apple won’t sell data.

Technology

Don DeCoteau is developing BellaVista, an EHR-agnostic, native client (iOS, Android, and JAVA-supported desktop) that displays clinical results with a framework to integrate QR codes, real-time medical device streams, videoconferencing, and voice-based ordering and documentation. He’s got it running with the VA’s VistA to illustrate that the client can work with any EHR that offers an API for accessing clinical information. Don is looking for early adopters.

A New York Times Magazine article pokes fun at people who worship “optimization” because it’s easier to appease their “inner bean counter” than to develop talent or ambition also takes on the Apple Watch in comparing it to the Stalin Gulag’s computer-driven optimization of “maximum work given minimum food”:

After time keeping, the watch’s chief feature is “fitness tracking”: It clocks and stores physiological data with the aim of getting you to observe and change your habits of sloth and gluttony. Evidently I wasn’t the only one whose thoughts turned to 20th-century despotism: The entrepreneur Anil Dash quipped on Twitter, albeit stretching the truth, “Not since IBM sold mainframes to the Nazis has a high-tech company embraced medical data at this scale. And yet what attracts me to the Apple Watch are my own totalitarian tendencies. I would keep very, very close tabs on the data my body produces. How much I eat. How much I sleep. How much I exercise and accomplish. I’m feeling hopeful about this: If I watch the numbers closely and use my new tech wisely, I could really get to minimum food intake and maximum work output. Right there in my Apple Watch: a mini Gulag, optimized just for me.

Other

It’s fun to have a sideline seat for the public vendor interoperability squabbling generated by the Congressional testimony of Epic’s Director of Interoperability Peter DeVault, who disclosed upon direct Senatorial inquiry this week that Epic charges customers $2.35 per patient per year to send data to non-Epic systems. Athenahealth’s Jonathan Bush says he’ll pay Epic’s $1.4 million fee to join CommonWell, while Cerner calculates the many millions Epic receives from its data sharing tollbooth. Meanwhile, as reader Where’s Waldo suggests, we can take one important issue off the table right now if McKesson’s John Hammergren will simply state in writing that his RelayHealth business (CommonWell’s technology provider) will never sell data, which is different than having CommonWell itself say it won’t sell data. Hammergren has seemed awfully excited when describing CommonWell to investors.

A KLAS report on small-practice (1-10 doctors) EHRs puts Cerner at the top for broad market vendors in a fairly stunning turnaround, with PCC topping the specialty category (pediatrics in its case). Bottom-ranked and trending hard in the wrong direction are NextGen, Allscripts, and McKesson. McKesson leads the pack in clients planning to replace its product at 43 percent, while PCC has the highest planned retention at 98 percent. Small-practice customers in general say their EHR vendors spend too much time chasing Meaningful Use and ICD-10 rather than delivering customer-suggested enhancements. Users of Greenway Intergy, NextGen, and McKesson called their vendors out as having “black-hole syndrome” where support loses or ignores their tickets or fails to follow up. Customers of Allscripts, eClinicalWorks, and Bizmatics complained that the support reps often don’t speak English very well and one NextGen customer reporting that he’s tired of getting calls from overseas at 3 a.m. The biggest complaint by far of customers planning to replace their EHRs is poor usability (although those same EHRs had the same poor usability when those same customers bought them, so those customers are more to blame than anyone). 

A random telephone survey (which raises validity flags every time even if you ignore the leading questions that are asked or days and times calls were made) finds that 75 percent of respondents think their providers should be able to share their information, while 87 percent don’t think either providers or patients (i.e., themselves) should have to pay for it. Most respondents also said they love puppies and their country (wait, I made that part up). The real way to tell if data sharing is important is to ask people (a) if they’ve switched providers who don’t or can’t share information, and (b) would they pay extra for it.

Epic’s underground Deep Space Auditorium is judged the best new building in America in the over $200 million cost category, with the Madison-based contractor that built it also winning a top award.

A female pediatrician in England accuses a gym chain of “blatant sexism” upon finding that she couldn’t enter the women’s dressing room because the gym’s security system assumes that anyone with a “Dr.” title is male.

An Internet domain company challenges a policy under which the new .doctor domain will be issued only to medical doctors who provide evidence of their credentials, saying it’s not fair to PhDs and companies with “doctor” in their name, such as Rug Doctor.

Sponsor Updates

• PatientSafe Solutions President and CEO Joe Condurso publishes “Liberate and activate EHR data with mobile tools for clinicians and patients.”
• InterSystems releases a white paper entitled, “Data Scalability with InterSystems Caché and Intel Processors.”
• Intellect Resources posts a new blog on “Identifying Your Career Motivators.”
• Hayes Management Consulting Offers “3 Ways to Minimize Anxiety During an EHR Implementation.”
• HDS posts “The Push for Pull Marketing in Healthcare.”
• InstaMed offers “Why Healthcare Needs Apple Pay.”
• E-MDs will exhibit at American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons 2015 March 24 in Las Vegas.
• Galen Healthcare Solutions introduces Web Access for VitalCenter in its latest blog.
• Ingenious Med blogs about “The Future of Innovation.”
• Healthwise will exhibit at the World Health Care Congress March 22-25 in Orlando.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us online.

Morning Headlines 3/19/15

DirectTrust Interoperability Report Suggests Best Practices, Improvements

DirectTrust reports that thus far 35,000 healthcare organizations are connected to the Direct Network, accounting for 23 million Direct exchanges last year.

Healthcare reform: Five trends to watch as the Affordable Care Act turns five

PwC reports on the impact the Affordable Care Act has had on the healthcare industry five years after its passage.

Health Insurance Coverage and The Affordable Care Act

In its own five-year analysis, HHS reports that 16.4 million uninsured adults have gained insurance coverage since the implementation of the ACA.

Morning Headlines 3/18/15

Premera Blue Cross Says Cyberattack Could Affect 11 Million Members

Premera Blue Cross discovers that 11 million of its patient records have been compromised by hackers, with bank account information and clinical data among the exposed information.

High Value Health IT: Policy Reforms for Better Care and Lower Costs

A Brookings Institute report recommends that the Meaningful Use program focus on supporting payment reform, and improving outcomes and interoperability.

Medical Information Technology, Inc. Form 10-K

Meditech reports 2014 annual results: revenue down 11 percent to $517 million. Sales revenue dropped 26 percent, but impact on total revenue was partially offset by a $10 million increase in service revenue.

Health Catalyst Raises $70 Million to Fuel Product Development

Data analytics vendor Health Catalyst raises a $70 million Series D investment round on a $500 million valuation, instantly becoming the next rumored health IT IPO.

News 3/18/15

Top News

Seattle-area Premera Blue Cross discovers that hackers have had access to the demographic, clinical, and claims information of 11 million people going back to May 2014. The FBI is investigating. The organization describes the attack using the mandatory adjective “sophisticated” that hints at a higher level of corporate competence than the incident suggests.  

Reader Comments

From EMRAMfan: “Re: Radboud University Medical Center. It is the first in the Netherlands and the third in Europe to achieve HIMSS Stage 7.” They use Epic, I believe.

From Questionable Content: “Re: LinkedIn discussion email (aka ‘spam’). Of the 13 article headlines, ONE has a title that isn’t a question. I’m not sure when media coverage of the healthcare industry ceased to be researched articles that took a position and became this regurgitated series of questions with no value added whatsoever, but it’s painful. This is why I read HIStalk.” Titling an article with a question is lazy, especially when the article fails to answer the question it asks (which is almost always). It’s a combination of lazy readers as well as lazy writers – someone must be reading this drivel, which is probably due to social media-shortened attention spans. If an article doesn’t tell me something I truly needed to know, it wasted my time and I’ll hold a grudge. I also avoid opinion pieces written by people whose lack of relevant credentials suggests that they should be reading rather than writing.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Surescripts. The company backs up its tagline of “How Healthcare Gets Connected” by connecting 900,000 providers (including 95 percent of pharmacies and 400 hospitals) and 270 million patients. Its network processes 7 billion transactions and a billion electronic prescriptions each year, integrating with 700 EHRs. It’s also one of just 105 US companies with ISO 27001 security, the highest level possible. Surescripts offers automated clinical messaging, CompletEPA EHR-integrated electronic prior authorization, electronic prescribing (including controlled substances), immunization registry reporting, aggregated medication histories from pharmacy and claims data, and a patient portal with secure messaging. Thanks to Surescripts for supporting HIStalk.

I found this Surescripts overview video on YouTube.

Our HIMSS conference patient scholarship winners have finally lined up their Chicago housing. FormFast has graciously volunteered to donate a hotel room (and a very nice one at that) so that our winner from France won’t have to couch surf as she was planning. Medicity also provided a room as I mentioned earlier. The five ladies are getting a lot of attention from vendors wanting their time and asked my advice, which was this: keep companies at arm’s length during the conference since it’s easy to be swayed and I don’t want them to lose their activist fire. Their job is to be somewhere between inquisitive and politely disruptive in representing the interests of patients. They came up with the #HIStalking hashtag if you want to follow their activities on Twitter.

We’re wrapping up our HIMSS guide, but only a fraction of sponsors have submitted their information (booth number, giveaways, events, etc.) Once it’s done, it’s done, so this is your last chance (until HIMSS16, anyway) to contact Jenn to get listed if your company sponsors HIStalk.

Webinars

March 31 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Best Practices for Increasing Patient Collections.” Sponsored by MedData. Presenter: Jason Bird, director of client operations, MedData. Healthcare is perhaps the last major industry where the consumer does not generally have access to what they owe and how they can pay for their services. Collecting from patients is estimated to cost up to four times more than collecting from payers and patient pay responsibility is projected to climb to 50 percent of the healthcare dollar by the end of the decade. Learn how creating a consumer-focused culture, one that emphasizes patient satisfaction over collections, can streamline your revenue cycle process and directly impact your bottom line. 

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health Catalyst raises $70 million in an oversubscribed Series D round, increasing its funding total to $170 million and valuing the company at over $500 million. An IPO seems inevitable.

Diabetes management app vendor Glooko raises $16.5 million in a Series B round.

A federal judge allows a proposed class action lawsuit to proceed against Epocrates for failing to disclose change in its drug company advertising contracts. The lawsuit claims that Epocrates, which was acquired by Athenahealth for $300 million in 2013, tried to boost its doctor alerting business after its IPO by implementing a “use it or lose it” policy that forced drug companies to buy new sponsored alerts in the hopes of propping up sagging revenue.

Meditech files its 2014 annual report, with full-year revenue down 11 percent and profit down 7 percent. Service revenue increased, but product revenue took a 26 percent dive. Revenue and net income slid back to 2010 levels. Neil Pappalardo owns 42.7 percent of the company, which values his stake at around $700 million.  

Sales

The US Navy selects Carestream’s PACS for its 1,000-bed USNS Mercy hospital ship.

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (NY) selects Versus RTLS to improve patient flow at its urgent care center, extending its implementation beyond the initial two outpatient clinics.

People

  

Recondo Technology hires Alicia Hanson (MedAssets) as SVP of business development, Jamie Oakes (Adreima) as RVP of sales, and Kevin Kenny (Allscripts) as VP of strategic sales/east.

In-home medical assessment vendor CenseoHealth moves Executive Chairman Kevin McNamara to CEO and names David Brailer (Health Evolution Partners, an investor in the company) as board chair.

Geisinger Health System’s XG Health performance improvement company names Marcy Stoots, DNP, RN (EHR Transformation Associates) as general manager of EHR apps.

Indiana HIE promotes John Kansky to president and CEO, a role he has held in an interim capacity since June 2014.

Announcements and Implementations

Labor and delivery software vendor PeriGen joins the CommonWell Health Alliance.

CHIME pre-launches a National Patient ID Challenge, offering a $1 million prize for a solution that increases patient ID matching from 80 to 100 percent. It will be interesting to see how CHIME puts together a million dollars (from vendors, I’d have to guess) and who owns the winning solution.

Government and Politics

A WEDI survey finds that a third of respondents haven’t heard of Blue Button, but the survey methodology is shaky: (a) it drew only 274 responses and the method of recruiting respondents wasn’t specified, which I assume means it was an online, self-selecting survey; and (b) nearly half of the respondents were technology vendors or from “other” categories beyond government and providers, which makes you wonder why they responded at all or why their responses were used (most likely answer: because throwing those responses out would have left a ridiculously small sample). I don’t understand the point of asking non-providers how their PHRs work or whether they’re using Direct. I see other sites writing decisive articles with headlines such as “Blue Button Awareness, Personal Health Record Usage Grows” and  “Blue Button protocol for easy EHR transfers fails to gain traction,” but rest assured neither conflicting conclusion can be drawn from this skimpy and poorly collect data. Let’s hope the federal government doesn’t actually use this report for anything (or pay WEDI for producing it).

HHS’s Office of Inspector General publishes its annual “Compendium of Unimplemented Recommendations,” listing the top 25 cost and quality items OIG has recommended that HHS has ignored. The two IT-related items are to improve the Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System and to get ONC and CMS to collaborate on addressing EHR fraud vulnerabilities.

New York’s RHIOs ask for $45 million in the state’s 2015-2016 budget.

An analysis of around 100 health insurance plans offer to New Yorkers via Healthcare.gov finds that nearly none of them offer out-of-network coverage. The report blames the unintended consequences of a 1992 state law that required insurance companies to cover anyone who wanted insurance regardless of their health but didn’t require individuals to buy insurance, sticking insurance companies with the cost of treating a high proportion of chronically ill patients.

The Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions convened a hearing Tuesday titled “America’s Health IT Transformation: Translating the Promise of Electronic Health Records Into Better Care.” AHIMA President Angela Kennedy gave a personal account of how lack of interoperability makes it harder to care for her children. Epic Director of Interoperability Peter DeVault, pictured above, testified that the company charges $2.35 per patient per year to send data to non-Epic systems. He said Epic declined to join CommonWell because it would have cost millions of dollars and the company was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement, which Epic took as meaning that CommonWell had something to hide (like planning to sell data, he gave as an example) and the “lack of transparency didn’t sit right with us.” Instead, Epic connects to Healtheway’s Carequality connectivity network and urges CommonWell to join it. Cerner issued a statement in response to DeVault’s comments: “Today’s rhetoric is a slap in the face to many parties working to advance interoperability. It was discouraging to hear more potshots and false statements when it’s clear there is real work to be done. We’re committed to CommonWell as a practical, market-led way to achieve meaningful interoperability.”

The House is finalizing a permanent SGR Medicare payment fix at a cost of $200 billion over 10 years, with taxpayers paying $140 billion and high-income seniors paying $60 billion in new Medicare costs.

CMS releases its physician referral data sets.

A Brookings Institution report says the Meaningful Use program should be refocused on value and outcomes rather than specific technology requirements and that ONC should take a more active role in creating interoperability standards. 

Privacy and Security

Microsoft will offer enterprise-grade biometric security (fingerprint, eye, or face) in Windows 10. What it won’t offer in Windows 10: Internet Explorer, which will finally be killed off in favor of a newly written and so far unnamed browser shown in the prototype above.

Innovation and Research

In China, a health district and technology company jointly open the country’s first cloud hospital that connects 100 healthcare organizations and 226 “cloud doctors” who see patients in virtual diagnosis rooms and send prescriptions electronically to pharmacies.

Technology

Banks that were anxious to jump on the Apple Pay electronic payment system are now complaining about fraud rates that are 60 times higher than with traditional credit cards, mostly because Apple made it so simple to sign up for credit that thieves can easily use stolen credit card numbers without being caught. Apple Pay was ironically designed to reduce fraud by making it impossible to steal credit card numbers, but banks receive minimal customer information from Apple that would help them detect fraud and have been too scared of Apple to speak up.

Botswana is delivering broadband and telemedicine services to remote areas via unassigned TV band frequencies.

Other

A study of questionable validity and applicability finds that hospitals with fewer readmissions have more user-voted stars on Facebook, with the authors concluding that social media ratings correlate with traditional hospital quality measures. The many sites that confuse correlation with causation should therefore urge all hospitals to enlist volunteers to rate them highly on Facebook to improve their readmission rates.

University of Pittsburgh, UPMC, and Carnegie Mellon University form the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance to perform research and to commercialize products.

Venture capitalist and Uber investor Bill Gurley says he’s passed on over 100 healthcare technology business plans because healthcare is driven by regulation and subsidies rather than market forces. “It’s asinine,” he says, adding that the government used HITECH money to interfere with the market’s low demand for EHRs.

A study finds that medical residents are underpaid (average salary: $47,000 per year) because they are willing to work for less for a prestigious hospital that has limited openings. Here’s a fun fact I didn’t know that’s timely given that Friday is national medical residency match day: the two men who developed algorithm that matches graduating medical students with residency programs based on their mutual interest won a Nobel Prize in economics for their program, which is also used to match kidney donors and to assign students to public schools. Doctors are also aware that the program underwent a complex modification in the 1990s to try to match married medical students to residency sites that would accept them together.

Coca Cola admits that it paid dietitians and bloggers to write posts recommending Coke as a healthy snack.

Bizarre: a New Jersey doctor charged with selling oxycodone prescriptions for up to $3,000 attempts to hire someone to burn down his office (and the incriminating records in it) in return for an oxycodone prescription.

Weird News Andy critiques a study finding that loneliness shortens life as much as obesity or smoking, with WNA analytically pondering, “What about lonely, drunk, fat smokers?” However, he then retracts his call for further research after reading a scientific study that concludes that we have too many scientific studies.

Sponsor Updates

• The Indiana Hospital Association endorses Besler Consulting’s Transfer DRG Recovery Service for its members.
• HealthMEDX CEO Pam Pure will present at this week’s NextGen Health Care Symposium on “Advancing Transitional Care”  in Indianapolis, IN. I couldn’t help but notice as I scrolled down the list of speakers that only three of the 26 are female, so bravo to Pam for being one of them.
• Caradigm Provisioning earns certification for use with FairWarning’s Ready for Identity Management program.
• A Forward Health Group video describes its work with Northwestern Medical Center.
• PerfectServe posts “Real-time healthcare: Preventing the need for immediacy from eroding quality.” 
• Zynx Health joins the NPSF Patient Safety Coalition.
• ZeOmega posts “The Five Pillars of Population Health Management: Data Aggregation and Integration.”
• The Chartis Group publishes “Local, Regional, and Beyond: Clarifying the Role of Academic Medical Centers.“
• Divurgent and Sensato will host “Hacking Healthcare 2015” March 24-26 in Long Branch, NJ.
• Culbert Healthcare Solutions will exhibit at AMGA 2015 Annual Conference March 24-26 in Las Vegas.
• CommVault posts a blog about “Learning from Emailgate” and the challenges of information management.
• CareSync CEO Travis Bond is interviewed in the Health Data Consortium’s latest blog.
• Anthelio Healthcare Solutions CEO Asif Ahmad will be featured on Fox Business Network March 22 at 11:30 a.m. ET.
• Bottomline Technologies will exhibit at Microsoft Convergence 2015 through March 19 in Atlanta.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us online.

Morning Headlines 3/17/15

American Telemedicine Association receives 200 applications for accreditation program

The American Telemedicine Association has received 200 applications for its Accreditation for Online Patient Consultations certification, which certifies that an organization is delivering telehealth services to the ATA’s standard.

Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange Blue Button Initiative Survey Results

A WEDI survey finds that awareness of the Blue Button PHR interoperability initiative among industry stakeholders has decreased overall since 2013, while provider awareness remained flat, and significant increases were measured among government respondents.

Standard for improving emergency information interoperability: the HL7 data elements for emergency department systems

HL7 has completed its review of the updates that the Data Elements for Emergency Departments System (DEERS) with get with HL7 v3. DEERS is a standards-based specification for ED-related HL7 data exchange.

Readers Write: For Cybersecurity, Prevention First, But Don’t Forget About the Treatment

For Cybersecurity, Prevention First, But Don’t Forget About the Treatment
By Terry Edwards

Cyber-attacks are nothing new. We’ve all seen the attacks on major retailers, entertainment giants, and financial institutions. Healthcare is gaining attention as the next industry under attack since cyber-criminals are finding unprecedented value in patient health records.

A patient record can sell for $50 to $150 per record on the black market, more than a credit card number or a Social Security number. This gives buyers the  ability to impersonate patients using all the personal information included in a health record to commit identity fraud or even obtain prescription drugs. In 2014, a record number of healthcare providers were hacked and a number of high-profile healthcare breaches have already made headlines in 2015.

The healthcare industry is taking these attacks seriously and working hard to protect itself against potential threats. However, it’s becoming more difficult for healthcare providers to ensure the continued integrity of patient data. Not only are hackers growing more advanced and nimble, but the number of vulnerabilities in the system is only increasing as the industry moves to population health management.

Care delivery is not quite as contained as it used to be. Patients can be treated in a variety of settings as their care teams grow in size. In addition, more types of devices are collecting and sharing patient data, offering more entry points for cyber-criminals to infiltrate. Healthcare organizations are also dealing with tight IT budgets, which in some cases only cover what’s necessary for regulatory requirements.

While it’s critical for healthcare organizations ramping up IT defenses to protect the data of their patients, to avoid a breach, organizations need to get back to the basics by focusing on the following:

1. Develop an internal security committee to conduct a formal risk assessment and identify any areas at risk for a data breach. The committee needs to have the backing of the highest levels of the organization to demonstrate the commitment to protecting patient data.
2. Following the risk assessment, the committee should develop an organization-specific risk management strategy to include processes, procedures, tools, and technologies.
3. Educate the staff on the new processes and procedures. Implementing new procedures can be the biggest challenge for organizations. It’s not enough to deliver one training session and assume employees are following protocols. Instead, organizations must provide employees with frequent reminders to flag suspicious emails, keep their passwords protected, and encrypt any communication with protected health information.
4. Reassess risk ongoing to make sure employees are following the appropriate processes and procedures and to identify any new vulnerabilities within the system. Cyber-criminals are constantly using new methods to find weaknesses in the system, so healthcare organizations must stay on their toes to keep technology up to date.

Even with the strongest security protocols in place, sometimes a cyber-criminal can find a way through. The experience of other industries shows that while customers are generally understanding when a breach occurs, they need assurance that the organization recognizes the breach and is taking steps to avoid another one. One of the biggest threats of a data breach for healthcare organizations is the potential hit to patient trust, the cornerstone of the patient-physician relationship. Healthcare organizations need to maintain that trust to deliver effective care.

To protect patient trust and the reputation of the organization following a breach, providers must put a treatment plan in place:

1. Communicate early and often. Immediately following a breach, a healthcare organization must alert patients with details on what data may have been jeopardized, what actions they need to take (such as changing a password), and how the organization is working to protect the security of patient information. By giving patients as much information as possible, the healthcare organization can convey it is treating the issue seriously and is taking all necessary precautions to ensure another breach does not occur.
2. Offer services to monitor and alert patients. By offering tools to monitor their credit and identity theft, healthcare organizations can show they’re concerned about minimizing any risk to patients. In addition to credit reporting, healthcare organizations should reach out to patients whose data was compromised to ensure patients are regularly reviewing their explanation of benefits for any fraudulent activity. Organizations can consider email guides, webinars, and in-person meetings to help patients understand how to review their accounts regularly and what to look for.
3. Educate staff on how to handle patient inquiries. Some patients will have questions about the breach and may ask employees like receptionists or nurses who are not used to fielding those types of inquiries. Give employees guidance on how they should respond to upset or concerned patients so that they can get the correct information through appropriate channels.

It does not look like cyber-criminals will stop their attacks on healthcare organizations anytime soon, but with the right protocols and procedures in place, healthcare organizations can put their best defense forward and be prepared to respond in case of a breach.

Terry Edwards is CEO of PerfectServe.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 3/16/15

I wrote last week about my new urgent care job. This week I worked a bumper crop of shifts to try to immerse myself in the new policies, procedures, and workflows.

From a clinical standpoint, it’s been terrific. The support team is top notch. I have the option to use a scribe, but I haven’t yet taken advantage of it.

Today was the second-busiest shift that my location had ever seen. I thought I kept my head above water despite having some really ill patients. I had several patients needing procedures or multiple diagnostic tests, so at times we were a little backed up.

I was so busy I barely had time to eyeball my phone. I headed home to put my feet up and was surprised to find multiple emails from patients waiting for me. Apparently my new employer subscribes to an online rating service that allows patients to submit feedback in an attempt to mitigate any negative feedback that might be otherwise posted to online rating sites.

I’m all for patient engagement and receiving feedback, but I wish I would have been warned. Although the email came from the rating service, it’s unclear whether patients can see my email address. Regardless, I would have set up a separate account to handle the traffic.

Even more unclear is what I am supposed to do about feedback that might be negative. At one time we had multiple very ill patients in the office and had even called EMS to transfer one to the hospital. I wasn’t surprised that one of my feedback submissions was about having a long wait. I called for backup when I felt it getting bad (we have flex staff that can swing over from our other locations) but it took time for the float to arrive and pitch in.

Our practice management system tracks all the different times in the patient cycle, from door to doctor to discharge and everything in between. I’m sure my numbers looked pretty bad at multiple times today, but the numbers don’t reflect acuity or case mix. They don’t give you the true picture of what might be going on.

I’m comfortable being rated on the timeliness of my care when I’m in a practice setting with scheduled appointments. I pride myself in running on time and I do well keeping up as long as the appointment slots are on a pretty standard schedule. If you want to grade me on that, I’m game.

However, being graded on being too slow is uncomfortable when you’re in a walk-in setting. It’s not uncommon to have a half dozen patients walk in right after one another. Maybe having multiple patients at the same time who should have really been in a hospital emergency department isn’t that common, but it was my reality.

Thinking through the day, I know I saw patients as quickly as I could, giving the best care possible. My team worked extremely well together, and although people’s lunch breaks were delayed and they were working hard, it felt good. One of the nurses was celebrating her 40th birthday and a member of the management team came to the office with treats. She also brought my official monogrammed scrubs, which made me feel even more like a member of the team.

Although the patients were served faster than they would have been at my hospital’s ED — not to mention that their primary physicians were unable to serve them at all — we didn’t meet their expectations.

I was facile enough with the EHR to run without elbow support, even figuring out a couple of shortcuts. For some reason, my favorite medications are all duplicated, though. With the mad rush we had, there wasn’t time to look at it or resolve it, so prescribing medications is much slower than I’d like it to be. I did get quite a few favorites built on the fly and picked up some tips from the staff at the end of the shift as things slowed down.

I’m waiting to hear back from the owner about what they want me to do with any feedback that wasn’t five stars. In the mean time, I’ve got a new Gmail account ready to receive patient comments rather than having it sent to my personal account. Since I’m only working a couple of shifts a month, I hope the follow-up they expect from me is minimal.

I’m also waiting to hear about their ICD-10 training plan. I’m hoping to get them to hire me to do their training when the time comes. I’ll definitely have the skill set and it might be good for them to be able to have one of their in-house physicians deliver it rather than having to contract it out.

In the mean time, I’m unwinding with a nice glass of wine and recharging before I head into the CMIO trenches tomorrow.

How do you unwind after a long day? Email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 3/16/15

Cuomo approves delay in electronic prescriptions

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signs into law a bill that will delay mandatory e-prescribing requirements for doctors in the state, calling the delay a win for patient safety and explaining, “The fact that many software companies are not ready for e-prescribing could have resulted in patients’ inability to fill their prescriptions.”

Missed Connections: A Nurses Survey on Interoperability and Improved Patient Care

West Health publishes a survey of nurses measuring the impact that integrated medical devices would have on patient safety, finding that 90 percent of hospitals report having six or more medical devices that could integrate with an EHR, but that only one-in-three hospitals actually have interfaces in place to exchange data.

HealthKit and Human Subject Research

Apple publishes its standards for developers connecting to its HealthKit API. Storing health data on iCloud and sharing data with third-parties are both banned. Apps are also required to maintain a privacy policy.

Is France’s envied health care system threatened?

In France, doctors are protesting as the country moves from a business model where patient’s pay doctors directly for care, to one that involves insurance companies paying doctors for health services.

Monday Morning Update 3/16/15

Top News

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signs legislation delaying the state’s mandatory electronic prescribing law for one year to March 27, 2016, the same bill he giddily approved in 2012. “This is a victory for patient safety,” said plastic surgeon Andrew Kleinman, MD, president of the state’s medical society. Assembleyman and pharmacist Roy McDonald says 98 percent of the state’s pharmacies were ready to receive all prescriptions electronically, but the Drug Enforcement Administration and EHR vendors waited until too late to begin their preparations.

Reader Comments

From Jeff Steiner: “Re: Memorial Hospital at Gulfport.  I wanted to respond to a story posted about our hospital’s bond rating change ‘due to a Cerner EHR conversion that inflated accounts receivable and jumped AR.’ Memorial Hospital is in the midst of exciting work and tremendous growth. We are undergoing a $65M expansion project spread over the next two fiscal years (with no planned debt). We are living with revenue pressures from Medicare and Medicaid due to changes in their reimbursement methodology. We’re a busy organization and are facing plenty of market pressures and dynamics like so many of our peers. We wanted to add clarity to the ‘100 days in A/R’ comment. This includes a mix of prior non-Cerner systems and Cerner. This snapshot was a 90 day post live look where MHG was on Cerner’s solutions at our fiscal year end.  We look forward to our partnership with Cerner and a very productive relationship.” Jeff is CFO of the hospital.

From Castro’s Cousin: “Re: Banner Health. A high-placed source says it will replace Epic with Cerner at recently acquired University of Arizona medical center and clinics. Official announcement won’t drop until summer.” Unverified, but expected.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Sixty percent of poll respondents say they don’t feel welcome and appreciated when interacting with their preferred hospital. Donald says the service he gets is good because it’s a rural area, while OutsourcedMom says she feels too welcome, as in “like a spider’s web of financial ruin.” New poll to your right or here: will ICD-10 be delayed again by Congressional action? I get nervous when I see Congress talking about an SGR fix since that is where an unknown politician slipped in the last delay. It doesn’t matter what the experts think should happen – none of the lobbyists who whisper in Congressional ears have a vested interest in wanting the rollout of ICD-10.

Here’s a generous offer from HIStalkapalooza Gold Sponsor Divurgent. Divurgent gets a bunch of tickets in return for their sponsorship, but graciously offered to donate all but a handful of them them to HIStalk readers who might otherwise be unable to attend if we sell out. I will execute their largesse as follows: if you haven’t already signed up to attend, do it here. I’ll guarantee that the first 50 folks to sign up will get an invitation courtesy of Divurgent, with just one exception: I’m not going to give a bunch of invitations to people from the same company just because a secretary was ordered to sign everybody up. You might think, “Nobody would do that,” but at least two companies signed up 30+ people each to attend, which seems ridiculous since the point is to get a lot of readers there, not to have me (and the event sponsors) pay for someone’s company party. Thanks to Divurgent, who clearly is sponsoring the event to support HIStalk rather than for their own benefit.

I have a few spots left for CMIOs (or physicians working in a CMIO-type role) interested in attending a lunch with peers Tuesday of HIMSS week. It’s near the exhibit hall, so the time commitment is minimal unless you just want to hang out. The signup form is here. Thanks to the company that offered to sponsor the lunch even though I turned them down – it was a nice gesture, but I’d rather spend $500 out of my own pocket than to give the impression that I’ll do anything as long as some company pays – I get those offers pretty often and I usually decline.

Last Week’s Most Interesting News

• Apple releases its smartwatch and ResearchKit.
• Stanford University says 11,000 people signed up for one of its research studies within the first 24 hours of the release of Apple ResearchKit.
• Epic’s Judy Faulkner tells a reporter that she will sign over all of her Epic shares to her private charitable foundation when she dies or decides to turn over control, with her intention being to guarantee that the company will never be taken public.
• Two big academic medical centers in the Netherlands stop their implementation of the former Siemens Soarian, expressing concern about how Cerner might handle the product with its Siemens acquisition.
• Oregon finally shuts down its health insurance exchange, which due to technical problems never enrolled a single customer despite its $284 million cost.
• FDA issues draft guidance on using electronic informed consent in clinical studies.

Webinars

March 31 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Best Practices for Increasing Patient Collections.” Sponsored by MedData. Presenter: Jason Bird, director of client operations, MedData. Healthcare is perhaps the last major industry where the consumer does not generally have access to what they owe and how they can pay for their services. Collecting from patients is estimated to cost up to four times more than collecting from payers and patient pay responsibility is projected to climb to 50 percent of the healthcare dollar by the end of the decade. Learn how creating a consumer-focused culture, one that emphasizes patient satisfaction over collections, can streamline your revenue cycle process and directly impact your bottom line. 

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Indianapolis business paper profiles Hc1, which just raised another $14.4 million from angel investors, increasing its total to $28 million. The 100-employee company’s revenue doubled each of the past three years and is expected to triple to $35 million in 2016. The company’s Healthcare Relationship Cloud offers collaboration, CRM, and analytics. I don’t see any healthcare experience on the executive team other than the chief medical officer – most of the folks came over from the founder’s previous company, ChaCha, which offers human-guided, text-message based search using freelancers (seemingly unsuccessfully – it looks like not much is happening there and the company has scaled back over the years). Despite a lack of healthcare background, CEO Brad Bostic seems to get it: “When I order a book on Amazon.com, they treat it like a life-or-death situation if they deliver it to me. But if I go to a healthcare situation, where it actually is life or death, I get treated like a number. This is a really big deal. It’s a big game-changer about, how do you treat patients like individuals?”

Eko Devices receives $2 million in new funding and will begin clinical trials at UCSF of its Eko Core digital extension for analog stethoscopes.

The business paper in North Carolina’s Triangle area profiles seven-employee Polyglot Systems, which raised $1.4 million in equity financing as part of its deal with First Databank to distribute the company’s medication instructions. The proceeds will be used to integrate Polyglot’s product with EHRs.

People

NYU Langone Medical Center names Paul Testa, MD, MPH as CMIO, a position he had held as interim since September 2014.

CTG hires Cliff Bluestein, MD, MBA (Dell Services) as president and CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Divurgent and Sensato produce a white paper titled “Cyber-Security in Healthcare: Understanding the New World Threats.” It contains an interesting quote from a hospital CIO: “The reason no one bought your service was that, frankly, if we found out about security holes, then we would have to fix them. It is easier to react after the fact than to convince everyone we need to do something before it happens.”

Privacy and Security

Apple publishes its app store guidelines for HealthKit for human subject research. Apps will be rejected if they store a user’s information in iCloud, fail to include a privacy policy, or provide diagnosis or treatment advice. The app developer must also agree not to use data for advertising or to share it with third parties.

Healthcare IT attorney Nicholas Terry says the White House’s draft wording of the “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights Act” may have HIPAA implications since it no longer specifically excludes HIPAA covered entities, meaning that health systems could become responsible not just for keeping the information they collect private, but for collecting it responsibly. Terry adds that the FTC’s “data minimization” concept may clash with ONC’s interoperability efforts and could limit selling data to third-party brokers. The proposed policy would be enforced by FTC and the attorneys general of individual states. The bill would also preempt the laws of states that may already have stronger privacy laws on the books given that it doesn’t specifically prohibit selling consumer information to data brokers without their permission.

Other

Philly.com’s story on unemployment in the Malvern, PA area originally contained wording suggesting that Cerner is laying people off after its acquisition of Siemens Health Solutions, but for some reason that section of the story was removed and no Cerner reference remains.

A West Health Institute poll of nurses about medical device interoperability concludes (via the mandatory cute infographic) that almost all nurses say they would spend more time with patients if freed up from dealing with medical devices and think those devices should share data with EHRs automatically, while half of the nurses say they’ve seen a medical error due to lack of device coordination. Nurses, not surprisingly, think their own uninterrupted time is the most important factor in improving patient safety and most of them think that manually documenting device information creates errors and delays. West Health calls for ONC to add medical device information sharing to its interoperability roadmap, for FDA and HHS to recognize open standards for medical device communication and to provide guidance to manufacturers, and for Congress to provide “adequate incentives” for developing and using interoperable medical devices.

Stanford physician and author Abraham Verghese says in his keynote to the American College of Cardiology that doctors should rediscover the humanity of practicing medicine and the non-technical benefits of the medical encounter ritual, saying that EHRs have obliterated the stories of patients as the typical ED physician spends nearly half of their time working on a computer. He explains, “EMR has nothing to do with your heart or your patient’s heart.”

The local paper covers the financial woes of Southeast Health in Cape Girardeau, MO. Billing problems caused by the hospital’s Siemens Soarian implementation as well as that system’s $15 million per year operating cost earned it a bond ratings downgrade in 2013. New CIO Mike Nichols is planning to take advantage of the Siemens acquisition to move to Cerner Millennium. The health system spells their name “SoutheastHEALTH” in the apparently misguided belief that marketing by misspelling is the secret to organizational success. You have to squelch the creatively bankrupt marketing people when they babble nonsense like the words they put in the former CEO’s mouth for the hospital’s annual report: “This is not simply an evolution in name alone. We are a far-reaching network of providers and facilities uniting to provide a regional system of healthcare services.” Sounds good except they’re going broke as they lay people off, with the board chair explaining, “Back here, in the old model, we got paid for doing things. In the future, that’s not how a hospital will be paid. Unfortunately, we are sitting in a spot in the middle, because that model hasn’t been explained to us yet.” 

Doctors in France protest health reform, unhappy that under proposed changes they’ll be paid by insurance companies instead of having patients hand over cash directly. They say insurance companies will control both doctors and patients and doctors don’t have the clerical staff to manage the reimbursement paper trails. Patients now pay $25 in cash for a visit and are reimbursed by either the social security system or the patient’s insurance company. A doctor who is leading the protest warns that France’s healthcare system, which he says is the best in the world, will “end up like in the UK” where patients who don’t pay upfront don’t mind wasting the doctor’s time “for any old reason.” He adds, “If we change the system, it will be whichever insurance company pays me, who is responsible. The Social Security service will say to me, Mr. Henry, you are prescribing too many antibiotics. You are prescribing too many pills and sending people for too many tests. They will tell me I have to prescribe less. I will no longer be free to ask the question, what is the best thing for the patient’s health? I will no be longer be independent.”

Sponsor Updates

• Medicity publishes “The Challenges and Benefits of Interoperability.”
• Xerox Healthcare publishes “Survey Says: Your Patient is Unhappy.”
• Voalte asks that “Nurse Leaders, Please Step Up!”
• PMD covers “The ‘Choreographed’ Care Model.”
• Oneview Healthcare highlights the ways in which a “New Study Establishes that Activated Patients Cost 31% Less.”

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk updates.
Contact us online.

HIStalk Interviews Mark McCloskey, President, Oneview Healthcare

Mark McCloskey is president and founder of Oneview Healthcare of Dublin, Ireland.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I started my career in retail and then moved on to telecom, then into banking, and now healthcare. They’re different industries, but they are all focused on service. 

Oneview is an Irish company. In the last two years, we’ve grown from eight people to 44. We have offices in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Dublin, Dubai, Sydney, and Melbourne. We’re opening an office shortly in New York. All of our staff are shareholders. We’re energetic, we’re entrepreneurial, we have a passion for innovation, and we just love doing what we’re doing.

Our product empowers patients to be engaged in their care. It also optimizes clinical performance and workflow efficiencies within the hospital. It improves productivity and performance by delivering a good ROI.

Even budget hotels have had to figure out how to meet a minimum standard of entertainment and broadband services. Is that expectation moving into traditionally consumer-indifferent hospitals?

We’re seeing that hospitals are now employing people that have been in the hotel industry. The patient experience now is of huge importance. What we’re also seeing is that there are patient experience officers now at C-suite levels. That’s going to be the norm in the future.

Several companies offer interactive patient systems that use in-room monitors or mobile devices. What makes Oneview different?

We are very much operating in a global market — in Australia, the Middle East, and the United States – and that gives us a broad perspective on healthcare. We have an international advisory board with medical doctors and IT superstars and technologists from around the world and that group is transforming our product. That’s where we have the leading edge. We feel we’re on the crest of the wave in this market.

How important is it to extend the engagement beyond just the patient’s room to post-discharge follow-up on mobile devices?

Patients have to take a knack for all of their treatment and care. They have to expect better outcomes. For them to be truly prepared for that, hospitals and providers need to communicate with their patients before they come into the hospital, once they’re in the hospital, and also when they’re at home. 

We have built our own patient portal, but we also have an open architecture, so we integrate into existing patient portals. We’re not re-creating the wheel. We’re now also going to the assisted living market, and eventually by the end of this year, we’ll be in the home market and integrating with products that will give information back into the hospital about the patient’s condition.

What problems are hospitals asking you to solve using your technology?

The financial reality is that revenue is not going up, so cost must go down. There will be a continued shift to care in an outpatient setting and even in the home. The big problem for hospitals is that the average margin in the United States at the moment is about 2.5 percent. If the hospital performs poorly looking after a patient, they’re going to be hit even harder on that very small margin. There will be more care outside of the hospital environment and that would be obviously facilitated then by patient portals, where it’s going to make it easier for patients and clinicians to connect.

You’re doing some work with UCSF. What success metrics would a hospital or a health system track?

Number one is the whole patient experience and how patients view the product. It’s a fantastic hospital to work with. We’re across their three hospitals, which is a children’s hospital, a cancer hospital, and a women’s hospital. 

The metrics that they would be using is that the patient is much more engaged. They understand what the treatment is. They understand what their discharge dates are. They understand what their goals for the day are. They have a pathway to understand what they need to do to make them better and to get out of the hospital. Then by educating that patient through that continuum of care and continuing that education while the patient is out, it should reduce readmissions, which is a huge problem for American hospitals.

Are you getting product suggestions back from UCSF that will be rolled into future versions of the product?

Yes. One of the things that I’m very, very strong on is that it’s very much a partnership approach. When a hospital takes our system, they have the ability to join our advisory board. Dr. Seth Bokser is on our advisory board from UCSF. He has the ability to shape the product in consultation with the staff and other hospital leaders. There will be many exciting developments coming from UCSF in the future. We’re just delighted to be part of that experience.

I was impressed that you provide accessibility options, which health systems seem to pay little attention to even though they see special needs patients who need technical accommodation. Based on your experience with accessibility tools such as sip-and-puff, what should vendors be offering in their consumer-facing products?

I don’t think it should be a problem for any person, in whatever form of disability, to have an interactive approach within the hospital. We’ve leaped in with a couple of different companies.

You asked specifically about sip-and-puff, which enables a patient who can’t use their hands to navigate using sip-and-puff hardware. They can watch entertainment, they can watch their favorite movies, and they can be part of that whole media experience with the hospital. We’re also looking at eye tracking for navigating our system using the latest eye-tracking technology. A person will focus on a point and then that point will then open up whatever they’re looking at. They could be looking at an icon for a movie. We’re also looking at speech recognition and screen readers, which enable patients with limited sight to read on-screen information. It’s just making everybody a part of that multimedia experience within the hospital.

The hospital experience can be grim where you’re stuck in a bed with limited TV options and a nurse call button. Are patients surprised that they can carry on their lives with communications, entertainment, and Internet connectivity?

Surprised and delighted would be the words. I was at the opening of UCSF and I spent the week within the hospital, just going around asking people what they thought. We have messaging in our system where the patients or the family members can post a message. When the clinicians come into the room, the message is clearly visible for the clinician to see. The very first message we got was from a little boy who was seven years of age who said, "When can I go home?" I met him two days afterwards, and he said, "I want to stay here because it’s just fantastic. I’ve got a 65-inch TV, I’ve got a tablet, and I’m having a blast." I thought that was just fantastic.

Do you have any final thoughts?

We’re delighted to be involved in this business. We’re delighted to be part of something that I think is going to be fantastic for patient engagement and patient experience. Technology will play an important role in this. It will have to be from companies that have open platforms that are easily integratable. I think that’s going to be the top priority for hospitals for the next three years.

Readers Write: Hacking the Healthcare Conference

Hacking the Healthcare Conference
By John Gomez

Outside it was 19 degrees and snow continued to fall as it had for the last few days. Inside the two-story brick building in downtown Asbury Park, NJ, a group of operators huddled around a set of whiteboards and large flat-screen TVs doubling as computer monitors that are connected to a variety of computer hardware.

One of the screens provided satellite images of a convention center. Another screen detailed the locations of all the hotels being used by attendees of a healthcare conference. Yet another screen highlighted the booth locations of the key exhibitors, with cross-references to their key clients, employees, and partners with their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter account names and pages.

The operators had been developing cyber-attack plans for one of the largest healthcare information technology conferences in the world. The Alpha teams would focus on infiltrating the conference itself, while Bravo team members would exploit opportunities at hotels, restaurants, and the popular vendor-sponsored parties. The current debate was centered around if team members should register to attend the conference or simply swipe the passes of attendees and blend in with the crowd.

The last team, Command One, would provide command and control. It had already secured several adjoining suites at a hotel across from the convention center. The suite would provide real-time, 24×7 communications to the team members as well as manage the botnet and provide the initial command and control capabilities for the RAT software the field teams would be deploying.

The RATs being deployed by the field team were custom developed using a derivative of Stuxnet. This assured that the RATs would work across operating systems and devices. It also assured that the RAT would lie dormant for the most part except in some special cases.

One of those special cases was that if the RAT determined it was on a laptop, it would turn on the computer’s microphone and camera to record confidential conversations between vendors and clients as well as between vendor teams about their clients. The hope was to garner details that could later be used to exploit employees or other details that could lead to further compromises. RATs deployed to machines running a server operating system or Linux variant would replicate, eventually being introduced to a corporate network and then become active establishing themselves inside the corporate infrastructure of vendors and attendees.

Aside from the RATs, the Bravo teams had already visited area hotels and catalogued the wireless networks and their providers, deploying SDR and other toys to about 40 hotels. The goal was to eventually compromise the wireless networks using man-in-the-middle attacks and other techniques. In situations where they could not bypass the hotel’s wireless infrastructure, the team planned to compromise targets of opportunity being used in lobbies and public areas.

The team was now in its final planning stages. “Do we have the dummy business cards?”

The team had created a fictitious company, complete with a website, Delaware LLC, and 800 phone number complete with employee directory and voicemail. The team also had false employee IDs issued by the fictitious company. This allowed the team to play the role of a vendor attending the conference.

A subset of the team had spent the past two weeks becoming familiar with their cover of representing a new hospital system being created in the Midwest. The team included a fake CMIO, CIO, and VP of operations. The team developed LinkedIn accounts with complete work and educational histories as well as a fake website for the new healthcare system, with architectural renderings of their new 650-bed acute care facility and their upcoming regional clinical care centers.

At this point, you are probably wondering if what you are reading is an expose of a crack hacking team or simply a fictional piece of work. It is actually a little of both.

One of the things my team often does is to run simulated attacks on a variety of targets. We basically map out the entire attack and do all the prep work, short of launching the attacks. In this scenario, we decided to attack a healthcare conference.

The simulation was actually carried out over a period of three days. Everything you read is real. All the techniques, tools, and practices are the actual methods we would use to carry out a large scale cyber-attack against a healthcare conference. Our goal in doing this was to help develop suggestions for those attending any healthcare conference in hopes of making the lives of people like us much more difficult.

The above doesn’t include everything we would do or how we would do it, but what I did divulge is not all that sophisticated or uncommon. There is nothing in the story that isn’t already known or possibly already being undertaken by cyber-criminals, cyber-terrorists, or cyber-spies. Although we would never carry out this type of activity, there are those who would and probably will. Hopefully you will heed our counsel and employ the suggestions below, thereby keeping you and your organization a little safer.

1. Share the wealth. One of the most important things you can do is educate others on the possible threats that exist when attending conferences of any size. An easy way to do that is forward this article to your teams. Like GI Joe once said, “Knowing is half the battle,” and that is especially true in the world of cyber-security. Most people don’t realize the sheer audacity that attackers employ. Hopefully the above story illustrates a little bit of that audacity.
2. Encryption matters. All of your devices should use local file encryption, especially if you are going to be shipping them where they are out of your control. This also applies to any device that you are taking with you on the road — laptop, tablets, etc. All communication should be encrypted, even if you are using a closed network, but especially if you are connecting to the Internet.
3. Stay In control. Do not leave your laptops or other computing devices in your hotel. If you are going to leave them behind, lock them in a safe and make sure the device is encrypted.
4. Remove history. Delete your web browser history every day and also delete all previous wireless access points from your computing device history. For example, if your iPad is setup to automatically connect to your home wireless network, delete that before you go to a conference. Why? Because I can use the MAC address of your home network to find your home address. Don’t believe me? Email me your MAC address and we can bet a cafe mocha.
5. Just say no to thumb drives and DVDs. If anyone — partner in crime, spouse, child, parent, boss, vendor, speaker (including George Bush) — offers to give you a thumb drive or DVD for any reason, just say no. Ask them to e-mail you the item, or better, print it out. If they e-mail it, do a virus scan and make sure it is from someone you met before the show. Otherwise, FedEx works great to mail you documents quickly. Thumb drives and DVDs can harbor malware. Even if you know the person, you don’t know where they got the thumb drive or how they made the DVD. Save yourself a lot of pain and just say no.
6. Lock down machines. Vendors should lock their server rooms and demo equipment. You shouldn’t hire third-party security — you should be your own security during off hours. I know this sucks and is a burden, but it’s your technology. If the answer to this is that you wipe your equipment, good for you, but I am not after your equipment — I am after your data and network. Wipe away — chances are someone on your team will connect to your demo network.
7. No demo networks. Don’t connect to demo networks. You don’t know what is on them no matter what your IT team tells you.
8. Limit Wi-Fi. If you must use Wi-Fi, limit it to your hotel (it’s not the safest, but it’s better than a coffee shop or airport) and use a secure connection over a VPN. A better alternative, though not cheap, is your own personal hotspot over a secure connection.
9. Wipe machines. After every conference, you should do a DoD-level format of all hardware used at the conference. This includes a visual inspection of the internals, if possible, to assure that nothing was added by your third-party, $10 per hour security resource.
10. Lock down demo machines. Tape over webcams, disable USB drives, and put tape over the ports. Disable unused ports and other services. Hire someone to attack your demo environment.
11. Establish a conference VPN. Set up a VPN just for the conference and require two-factor authentication using something like Google Authentication to connect back to your corporate resources. After the conference, disable the VPN system and never use it again.
12. Establish BIOS passwords.
13. Create a bootable DVD. A great option for vendors is to use a bootable DVD with your demo clients on them. Please don’t tell me that you use virtual machines and somehow that makes you safer. If you believe that, you have a lot to learn about cyber-security.
14. Awareness. If something doesn’t feel, smell, or seem right, it probably isn’t. Conferences are highly social venues. It is important that you don’t forget that most of what happens to you is because you let it happen. This applies in the real and cyber worlds and is critical in both to maintain your personal security.
15. Email invites and marketing. Vendors love to send you all kinds of invites, updates, tidbits, and other neat stuff via e-mail during a conference. I would suggest you unsubscribe or just delete mass e-mailing from any vendor. A better option is to inform your rep that you will only accept e-mails from them directly and would appreciate minimizing things you have to click on. Think this is overboard? Consider that Anthem was compromised with a single click in an e-mail message.
16. Blips matter. Ever say, “That was strange,” or “What just happened?” and then things go back to normal? Often this is just an anomaly, but it could also be an indication that your computer device is under attack. Think about what you were doing right before the blip — surfing the web, opening an e-mail, connecting to a network, clicking a link, downloading something. Put things in context, and if you get nervous for any reason, say something to your IT team.

Hopefully if nothing else this article will get you to think and ask questions of your teams and how well you are prepared to attend a conference. Conference operators do all they can to provide a safe and secure environment. But in this day and age, there is only so much they can do. The real burden of security — physical and cyber — is on the shoulders of individuals. This is how it should be because security works best when it is a personal responsibility.

Take time to talk with your teams (exhibitor or attendee) about security best practices. The pre-meeting is a great time to brief your teams on security practices or invite someone to speak to them. You should also have a cyber-security response plan for the conference that includes who to speak to, what to do if there is a threat, and how to report information to the conference coordinators so that multiple incidents can be correlated and viewed through a broader lens.

The reality is that life has changed.

The simulation outlined in the opening of this article was simply that — a planning simulation for a real-world attack. The emphasis is on real-world attack planning. The only thing that kept us from carrying out that simulation is that we fight for good, but there are plenty of others out there who don’t — we call them the bad guys.

John Gomez is CEO of Sensato of Asbury Park, NJ.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 3/12/15

I mentioned in Monday’s Curbside Consult that I took some time off from my day job this week to immerse myself in the routine at my new moonlighting gig. I also used some of the time yesterday to finish my tax return. As I went to put my documentation in the file cabinet, I realized that the drawer was full and I should probably spend some time dealing with some non-hospital document retention.

At work, we’re rabid about document retention. We keep everything exactly as long as required by laws or regulations, and then it’s off to the physical or virtual shredder. There’s a certain liability in keeping things longer than you need to, and as a risk-averse organization, we don’t want to shoulder any more liability than required. I definitely had files at home that were well past the need for retention, so I started culling through them. The amount of document detritus that can accumulate over a physician’s career is pretty impressive.

In addition to the usual household paperwork such as tax documentation, financial paperwork, mortgage paperwork, and important receipts, physicians have a host of other documents to manage. If you’re lucky enough to work for the same employer for most of your career it might not be too bad, but for those of us that have worked for several groups, the paper carnage can be impressive.

I’m not even talking about patient records or office-related information – just the personal ones. There are medical liability insurance documents, payer credentialing documents, hospital privilege documents, employment contracts, CME documentation, licenses, and DEA and state narcotics documents. There are college and medical transcripts, records of licensing exams, diplomas (and their certified translations if you went to a Latin-loving med school like I did), board certification documents, and now maintenance of certification documentation.

The pile was impressive. For conventional financial documents, there are retention standards. Some of the professional documents need to be kept for even longer, especially if they relate to liability insurance. I’m not going to rely on a former employer to prove that I had liability coverage if a claim occurs at the end of the statute of limitations. With the prevalence of identity theft, I’m not going to get rid of some of my original documents that relate to licensing or board certification. I was, however, able to weed out quite a bit of documentation and reduce the pile. Now that it’s more organized I should scan it all, but that’s a project for another day.

After I made it through the “official” file drawers, I turned to some of the documents I had kept for more personal reasons. It was a reverse chronological tour through what it takes to become a doctor. I started with student loan payoff documents and worked my way back through the application to defer payment during residency and the heart-stopping promissory notes I originally signed as a 22-year-old. I distinctly remember the day I signed the first one – if nothing motivates you to not wash out of medical school, it’s the possibility that you could have upwards of $200K in debt with no way to repay it.

The tour down memory lane also included rejection letters from a handful of medical schools and acceptance letters from others, as well as my original Association of American Medical Colleges application packet. Back in the days of the typewriter, I had filled it out by hand first and then typed it up. Both copies were there and it was funny to think about doing business without the now-familiar fillable PDF or online form. Reading the essay made me smile – it was a good reminder of youthful optimism, untarnished by E&M coding regulations, fear of litigation, or Meaningful Use.

One might ask why I still had all that. Although I do probably tend to be overly sentimental, I think it is more due to the realities of rushing from college to medical school to residency to solo practice without a break. The boxes just moved from one tiny student apartment to another and then to a house. With the crazy hours we work, as long as you have space to keep it, there’s little motivation to spend your free time sorting it all out. It got me thinking about the volume of electronic documents I might have, where space is not a limitation.

For good or bad, my hospital has a fairly liberal retention policy for email. A CMIO buddy of mine works at a hospital where all emails delete after three months and they have limited archive space allotted, so he’s constantly having to either save emails to other file formats or risk deletion. I try not to keep email too long but there’s never time to sit down and clean it out. I realized I hadn’t purged my archive folder in what looked like about two years. I spent a couple of hours deleting tens of thousands of emails. In that history were both the mundane and the heroic. I looked back fondly on standing up the region’s first HIE, but with the bittersweet sense that it is now defunct.

Those electronic missives tell the story of hundreds of thousands of hours of work. Not only by the IT teams, but also by the clinicians and other end users that did the work alongside us, whether enthusiastically or reluctantly. I know the emails needed to go and it was somewhat cathartic to watch those massive chunks of data disappear from my folders. On the other hand, it made me miss the simpler days when our main goal was to do the right thing by our patients rather than checking boxes and counting measures.

I enjoyed being reminded of colleagues who have moved on to bigger and better things as well as some pretty crazy stories. The hail storm that struck during one of our EHR design sessions, totaling cars. The analyst who ran our first EHR upgrade and slept at the office all night in a folding lawn chair while the rest of us went to our vendor’s user group meeting (bad plan, by the way). The vendor rep who got food poisoning during a site visit and still called in to our meetings while lying on the hotel bathroom floor (that’s dedication). Team-building tricycle races, cosmic bowling, and mini golf. And the software developer who put up with my newbie questions and helped me bring a feature live that no one else seemed to care about but that made a huge difference for our users.

Those are not exactly the stories you memorialize in a scrapbook but I’m grateful for the memories and to everyone who has helped me along the way. We may not always have Paris, but we’ll have the EHR.

Email Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 3/13/15

Thousands Have Already Signed Up for Apple’s ResearchKit

In just 24 hours, Stanford University enrolled 11,000 people in a cardiovascular study through Apple’s recently unveiled medical research API ResearchKit, a feat it says would have taken 50 medical centers a full year to accomplish.

Cerner To Integrate Patient-Generated Data Using Validic Digital Health Platform

Cerner partners with Raleigh, NC-based integration engine Validic to import patient-generated fitness, wellness, and nutritional data into its EHR.

New health identification number for every individual

Ireland announces that it will will move forward with a plan to create a national patient identification number for all citizens.

11 charged in Blue Cross ID theft, fraud

In Michigan, 11 people have been charged with ID theft and fraud after a Blue Cross and Blue Shield employee stole the personal information of 5,000 customers and then shared the information with a team of criminals that fraudulently purchase $742,000 worth of merchandise from Sam’s Club.

News 3/13/15

Top News

Stanford University reports that 11,000 people signed up for one of its cardiovascular studies using Apple’s ResearchKit in the first 24 hours of the app’s availability on the iPhone. The university says it usually takes a year and 50 medical centers to hit the 10,000-enrollee mark. However, the best metric won’t be known for some time and may never be announced – how many of those 11,000 casual applicants will be actually be accepted into the study and participate? My suspicion is that the majority of responses are from people screwing around with their new Apple toy who don’t realize what’s involved, so it’s going to take quite a bit of work for Stanford to get down to usable subjects. Someone make a note to ask Stanford in a month how large their cohort is and what percentage of the Apple self-submitters were accepted.

I was thinking about the “research” part of ResearchKit. Traditional medical studies involve carefully assembling a cohort of people who meet narrowly defined study criteria, with the intention of proving a specific hypothesis in a specific population. On the other hand, research using patient-generated data may uncover relationships that nobody thought of or that may prove useful in managing an individual patient’s condition even in the absence of a generalized population study. Direct care lives at the interesting intersection of big, decisive research studies and anecdotal “it just works” clinician practice based on experience. A given patient’s endless supply of non-inpatient electronic data, along with similar data generated by people like themselves, could improve that patient’s life more decisively than any study, provided that physicians are willing to practice based on data snapshots rather than studies that take many years to complete. Another positive is that studies are often funded by drug companies or special interests that have a vested interest in manipulating data in particular way or in killing a study that might hurt product sales.

Reader Comments

From Clinic Director: “Re: Meaningful Use audits. We are now at 96 audit requests of our 139 Epic-using physicians and have passed all. CMS says providers are chosen randomly, but is 70 percent of our providers really random? I needed help, so I asked our congressional office, which referred me to the auditor. ONC referred me to the CMS EHR Info line, which referred me to the auditor. The auditor referred me to the CMS Info Line. It feels as though I’ve entered the Twilight Zone.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Several CMIOs expressed interest in a HIMSS get-together. I booked a table for Tuesday, April 14 at either noon or 1 p.m. right in McCormick Place and I’ll buy lunch for up to 20 attendees via the Bistro HIMSS program. CMIOs or physicians working in a CMIO-type role regardless of title can sign up here.  It’s a convenient location near the exhibit hall where you can actually sit to eat (unlike most other convention center locations), the food should be decent (salads, lemon-sage chicken with polenta cakes, and dessert with healthy options), and Lorre will be on hand to say hello and introduce everybody since it was her idea.

Speaking of events, some readers are confused by the two I’m having at the HIMSS conference. Event #1: HIStalkapalooza is the big event on Monday evening – it’s open to those whom I will invite from the list of folks who previously submitted the online form indicating their desire to attend. Event #2: the sponsor-only networking event is Sunday evening and is open only to sponsors of HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, and HIStalk Connect. We’ve reached out several times to our sponsor contacts (not all of whom are efficient in passing the word along to the suits upstairs who might want to come), so Lorre will still entertain invitation requests for that event (and new sponsorship inquiries from companies anxious to talk business with their peers in a social setting). I suppose we now have Event #3: the CMIO lunch above. I just know I’m writing a lot of checks. Anyway, just to be clear, walk-ups will be politely turned away from all three events since I’m working with a fixed attendee count.  

You can wear one of the four “Secret Crush” sashes like the above at HIStalkapalooza if you email me explaining why you have a crush on Dr. Jayne, Jenn, Lorre, or me. People like being sashed and I couldn’t come up with anything more original than the “Secret Crush” ones I’ve done before. I don’t expect many responses, so your odds of winning are good. Of course you need to have signed up for HIStalkapalooza and plan to attend to be sashed since I’m not mailing it for someone to wear around the house.

I’m going to stop mentioning press releases that list a hospital or health system without including its location (both city and state) because I’m annoyed at lame PR people who expect me to do their jobs in deciphering an over-edited company announcement into something factual. Surely it’s not hard to understand that “St. Mary’s Hospital” could be anywhere, as could a hospital whose location is stated only as “Missouri” (if the location is named at all). I’m also annoyed at ‘’announcements” that are too vaguely worded to tell whether a hospital has bought a new system, is beginning its implementation, or is continuing a previous installation (the latter two of which aren’t really news). Attention PR people, especially the lesser competent ones: I’ll consider running your announcement if it’s newsworthy, but being newsworthy means that you provide the five Ws: who did it, what they did, when did they did it, where it happened, and why it happened. Anybody want to see me call out exceptions?

This week on HIStalk Practice: Mental health professionals weigh the pros and cons of moving to EHRs. HealthSpot and Pacify secure new funding. LaHIE launches a patient portal. Kareo acquires DoctorBase. PatientPoint partners with Telemundo for point-of-care content. St. Peters Health Partners Medical Associates and Northwestern Memorial Physicians Group implement new population health management tools. Jim Denny digs deep into physician ICD-10 readiness.

Apple introduces ResearchKit, an open-source API designed to help medical researchers collect data from iPhone and iPad users. The Department of Homeland Security launches an accelerator program targeting wearable technology startups building applications for first responders. TechStars welcomes its second class of digital health startups to its Kansas City campus for a 12-week program. SocialWellth raises $7.5 million to expand its digital health app formulary service platform.

Webinars

March 31 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Best Practices for Increasing Patient Collections.” Sponsored by MedData. Presenter: Jason Bird, director of client operations, MedData. Healthcare is perhaps the last major industry where the consumer does not generally have access to what they owe and how they can pay for their services. Collecting from patients is estimated to cost up to four times more than collecting from payers and patient pay responsibility is projected to climb to 50 percent of the healthcare dollar by the end of the decade. Learn how creating a consumer-focused culture, one that emphasizes patient satisfaction over collections, can streamline your revenue cycle process and directly impact your bottom line. 

Here is the video of Thursday’s webinar by West Corporation titled “Turn Your Contact Center into a Patient-Centered Access Center.”

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Government contractor Maximus acquires Acentia for $300 million in cash from private equity owner Snow Phipps Group, with Maximus lustily eyeing Acentia’s contracts with HHS, FDA, NIH, CDC, CMS, and the Military Health System.  

Austria-based blood sugar tracking app vendor mySugr raises $4.8 million in funding. Its FDA-approved product synchronizes data from medical devices, even using the smartphone’s camera to import readings from the displays of non-connected glucometers (that part works only in Austria).

Sales

DaVita selects Cureatr for secure messaging and patient care transition event notification.

Citizens Memorial Healthcare (MO) chooses Summit Healthcare Web Services Adapter to send public health and immunization information to the state’s HIE, with plans to expand its use to meet Meaningful Use Stage 3 requirements.

Trinity Health (ND) chooses managed cybersecurity services from Leidos Health.

People

Dana Alexander (Caradigm) joins Divurgent as VP of clinical transformation. 

William Bria, MD (The HCI Group) joins CHIME as EVP of medical informatics and patient safety.

Announcements and Implementations

Craneware will offer its customers analytics software from Aridhia Informatics. I’m baffled that someone thought this would be a good product name: “Aridhia Analytixagility.” It looks like the result of my snoozing off at the keyboard after working too late.

Cerner will use Validic’s digital health platform to incorporate data created by home medical devices and wearables into Cerner’s HealtheLife patient portal.

Online doctor visit service HealthTap launches RateRx, which lets its member doctors rate the effectiveness of individual drugs and treatments.

Mediware releases MediLinks Outpatient for pulmonary rehab.

Todd Fisher, who founded consulting and software engineering firm Intraprise Solutions in 1997 and was CEO of MobileMD when it was sold to Siemens in 2011, launches Intraprise Healthcare.

Government and Politics

The family of a VA patient who died of low blood oxygen levels sues the hospital after its former nurse admits turning off the patient’s alarms.

SAMHSA (HHS’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) launches Suicide Safe, an app that provides guidance for PCPs and behavioral health providers who are faced with potentially suicidal patients.

Privacy and Security

The US attorney indicts 11 Detroit-area residents after a former Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan employee provides 5,000 subscriber screen shots to accomplices who used their information to obtain phony credit cards to buy $742,000 worth of merchandise from Sam’s Club. The BCBS CEO announces new steps (the key here being that these practices weren’t already in place) that include limiting employee access to Social Security numbers, enforcing employee password changes, and installing secure printers that require employees to scan their badges before their document prints. The US Attorney makes the point that while technology makes it easier to commit identity fraud, it also makes it easier to capture those who do so. Interestingly, BCBS of Michigan brags on its site that it wasn’t part of Anthem’s breach while not featuring its own breach prominently. 

Other

A small survey-based study of children’s hospitals finds that inpatient EHRs don’t support peds very well, adding speculation that vendor and customer fixation on Meaningful Use is delaying rollout of needed pediatric functionality. It’s somewhat of a subjective study, the survey results are old (going back to September 2011), and dumping responsibility for customer-needed features on ONC rather than the vendors selling EHRs (and thus the customers who drive their development agendas in chasing MU money) seems biased. Correlation also seems skimpy since some hospitals seem to be doing fine, presumably using the same EHR although the study didn’t ask the important question of “which product are you using and how long have you used it?” In addition, some hospitals said they weren’t interested in implementing the features that were missing, such as weight-adjusted blood pressure percentiles or immunization contraindication warnings. It would also have been helpful to know whether those that reported missing features have worse outcomes since simply having the feature available doesn’t necessarily improve care. I was going to to check the supplementary material to see how the survey was worded, but the link is dead. Quite a few publications and tweets summarized this report as thought it’s decisive and insightful, while I would say the only thing newsworthy about it (and thus why I’m mentioning it) is that it really isn’t and those writers and tweeters need to spend more time analyzing the study itself rather than dreaming up attention-seeking headlines.

Here’s a pretty funny commercial from Cox Business, tweeted out by Eric Topol, MD as an unintended reference to his new book, “The Patient Will See You Now.” He adds, “Suck it, doctor’s office.”

Ireland rolls out a national patient identifier, with the CIO of its health services saying it offers “patient safety and ensuring that the right information is associated with the right individual at the point of care. The IHI will also help in managing our health services more efficiently and ensure that health information can be shared safely, seamlessly across different healthcare organizations associated with patient care. ” The government points to effectiveness studies from Canada and the UK showing that a national ID reduces errors, improves EHR data, increases efficiency, and protects privacy.

The bond rating agency of 445-bed Memorial Hospital of Gulfport (MS) notes the hospital’s “sharp decline in liquidity in 2014” due to a Cerner EHR conversion that inflated its accounts receivable by $25 million and jumped A/R days to 100.

NBC News fires Chief Medical Editor Nancy Snyderman, MD over fallout from her previously admitted violation of voluntary 21-day Ebola quarantine when she and her crew, fresh back from Liberia, picked up takeout food. She also appeared to be impaired during a February 22 live broadcast. She will be taking a faculty position at an unnamed medical school.

Cerner’s Neal Patterson and his wife Jeanne (who has cancer) are featured in a KQED series on EHR interoperability. Jeanne says she has given up on having 20 health systems share her records with each other, so she instead carries around a bag of printouts and DVDs. Neal says, “The paradox is that I am one of the few people that should be able to fix this. I’m frustrated that we’re not moving faster.” He adds that the US is one of few countries that don’t have a national patient identifier and streamlined consent processes and that he’s putting his money where his mouth is in funding CommonWell. Epic responded to the reporter’s question of why they haven’t joined CommonWell in saying that its clients can already exchange information and Care Everywhere is “much more mature” than CommonWell. Neal says that if the industry commits to interoperability and the government creates “compelling guidelines,” the interoperability problem can be solved within 10 years.

I ran across some email exchanges between an ambulatory EHR vendor (one I’ve never heard of) and one of its practice clients. The practice, which is replacing the vendor’s system, gave its new vendor access to the old vendor’s system so they could convert patient data. The old vendor says giving them access violated its copyright and is thus a breach of contract. The old vendor is suing the practice and says it will drop the lawsuit for $25,000, adding that lack of immediate response doubles the settlement fee to $50,000. My reactions: (a) practices never seem to pay adequate attention to the contracts they sign, happily agreeing to terms that any lawyer would advise against; (b) practices also seem to choose their systems and vendors with questionable amounts of research; and (c) the old vendor has every right to hold the practice accountable for the contract it signed but shouldn’t have, although the “pay fast or we double it” part is scummy for sure. I suppose vendors are like significant others – you don’t really know what they’re capable of until you try to move on without them.

Forbes should know better than to let a private wealth advisor try to explain “How Telemedicine Can Kill You.” The lack of insight is stunning given the article’s two “potentially devastating problems”: (a) possible computer glitches that “can alter medical records” along with implantable devices “that can go haywire”; and (b) hackers. The fact that neither of these theoretical “problems” have anything specifically to do with telemedicine was missed by whoever crafted the click-baiting headline. I couldn’t decide whether to be angry at the article’s failure to deliver or to laugh at some of its unintentionally hilarious conclusions, such as “being able to control if a person lives or dies can readily lead to exhortation and murder-for-hire” (I’m assuming the author meant “extortion.”) Just last week the same editorially ubiquitous author wrote an equally lame telemedicine piece consisting entirely of quotes from a telemedicine company CEO, who not surprisingly didn’t mention killing any of his patients.

Quantros produces a video to support National Patient Safety Awareness Week, which is this week.

BIDMC CIO John Halamka, MD says that “outsourcing your mess to someone else to host is not cloud computing,” suggesting that CIOs instead focus on “Outcomes as a Service” where vendors are paid for managing people, processes, and technology.

Sponsor Updates

• Navicure completes ICD-10 testing with eight Medicare jurisdictions, to be followed by testing with all 16 jurisdictions in April.
• Nordic leads off its “HIT Breakdown” podcast series with an episode on population health and adds a new video in its series on Epic conversion planning.
• Hayes Management Consulting offers “Overcoming Resistance to Change: It’s All About the Buy-In.”
• LifeImage will exhibit at the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma Annual Meeting March 13 in Chicago.
• HCS will exhibit at the National Association of Psychiatric Health Systems Annual Meeting March 16-18 in Washington, DC.
• Healthfinch posts “Apps that optimize your EHR workflow are essential for care redesign.”
• IHS posts a blog on “Making the Hard Decisions” when going through the HIT selection process.
• Healthgrades gets a nod in a Forbes piece on a need for bipartisan action on healthcare transparency.
• VMware posts “Creating the Perfect Clinical Desktop with Horizon View.”
• Galen Healthcare Solutions posts the second installment of its series og on shifting to value-based payment models.
• HealthMEDX will exhibit at the LeadingAge PEAK Summit March 16-18 in Washington, D.C.
• Healthwise commemorates Patient Safety Awareness Week with “Why Safety is Personal When it Comes to Medical Care.”
• Logicworks will present at the National HIPAA Summit March 16-18 in Washington, D.C.
• Holon Solutions will exhibit at the NW Regional Critical Access Hospital Conference March 17-19 in Spokane, WA.
• Ingenious Med posts the fourteenth installment of its blog series by President and CEO Hart Williford.
• InterSystems outlines the factors creating excitement around patient engagement.
• Lifepoint Informatics will host its annual users conference March 18-19 in Orlando.
• Influence Health will exhibit at TIPAAA (the IPA Association of America) March 19-21 in San Antonio, TX.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

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