Morning Headlines 4/17/14

Scientists embark on unprecedented effort to connect millions of patient medical records

PCORI will invest $100 million to build a nationwide database containing 26 to 30 million EHR records in an effort to begin supporting retrospective clinical research.

Telehealth Medical Treatment Coming to all 50 States, Brought to You by MeMD

MeMD announces that its subscription-based telemedicine service has expanded to include licensed providers in all 50 states.

Budget Office Lowers Estimate for the Cost of Expanding Health Coverage

The Congressional Budget Office expects that expanding insurance under the ACA will cost $100 billion less than previously forecast over the next 10 years, according to a report published Monday that cites an increase in non-elderly coverage and a decrease in the forecasted cost of insurance subsidies.

Readers Write: Can Intuitive Software Design Support Better Health?

Can Intuitive Software Design Support Better Health?
By Scott Frederick

Biometric technology is the new “in” thing in healthcare, allowing patients to monitor certain health characteristics—blood pressure, weight, activity level, sleep pattern, blood sugar—outside of the healthcare setting. When this information is communicated with providers, it can help with population health management and long-term chronic disease care. For instance, when patients monitor their blood pressure using a biometric device and upload that information to their physician’s office, the physician can monitor the patient’s health remotely and tweak the care plan without having to physically see the patient.

For biometric technology to be effective, patients must use it consistently in order to capture a realistic picture of the health characteristics they are monitoring. Without regular use, it is hard to see if a reading is an anomaly or part of a larger pattern. The primary way to ensure consistent use is to design user-friendly biometric tools because it is human nature to avoid things that are too complicated, and individuals won’t hesitate to stop using a biometric device if it is onerous or complex.

Let’s look at an example.

An emerging growth area for healthcare biometrics is wireless activity trackers—like FitBit—that can promote healthier lifestyles and spur weight loss. About three months ago, I started using one of these devices to see if monitoring metrics like the number of steps I walked, calories I consumed and hours I slept would make a difference in my health.

The tool is easy-to-use and convenient. I can monitor my personal metrics any time, anywhere, allowing me to make real-time adjustments to what I eat, when I exercise, and so on. For instance, at any given time, I can tell how many steps I’ve taken and how many more I need to take to meet my daily fitness goal. This shows me whether I need to hit the gym on the way home from work or whether my walk at lunch was sufficient. I can even make slight changes to my routine, choosing to stand up during conference calls or take the stairs instead of the elevator.

I download my data to a website, which provides easy-to-read and customizable dashboards, so I can track overall progress. I find I check that website more frequently than I look at Facebook or Twitter.

Now, imagine if the tool was bulky, slow, cumbersome and hard to navigate. Or the dashboard where I view my data was difficult to understand. I would have stopped using it awhile ago—or may not have started using it in the first place.

Like other hot technology, there are several wireless activity trackers infiltrating the market, each one promising to be the best. In reality, only the most well-designed applications will stand the test of time. These will be completely user-centric, designed to easily and intuitively meet user needs.

For example, a well-designed tracker will facilitate customization so users can monitor only the information they want and change settings on the fly. Such a tool will have multiple data entry points, so a user can upload his or her personal data any time and from anywhere. People will also be able to track their progress over time using clear, easy-to-understand dashboards.

Going forward, successful trackers may also need to keep providers’ needs in mind. While physicians have hesitated to embrace wireless activity monitors—encouraging patients to use the technology but not leveraging the data to help with care decisions—that perspective may be changing. It will be interesting to see whether physicians start looking at this technology in the future as a way to monitor their patients’ health choices. Ease of obtaining the data and having it interface with existing technology will drive provider use and acceptance.

While biometric tools are becoming more common in healthcare and stand to play a major role in population health management in the future, not every tool will be created equal. Those designed with the patient and provider in mind will rise to the top and improve the overall health of their users.

Scott Frederick, RN, BSN, MSHI is director of clinical insight for PointClear Solutions of Atlanta, GA.

Readers Write: Addressing Data Quality in the EHR

Addressing Data Quality in the EHR
By Greg Chittim

What if you found out that you might have missed out on seven of your 22 ACO performance measures, not because of your actual clinical and financial performance, but because of the quality of data in your EHRs? It happens, but it’s not an intractable problem if you take a systematic approach to understanding and addressing data quality in all of your different ambulatory EHRs.

In HIStalk’s recent coverage of HIMSS14, an astute reader wrote:

Several vendors were showing off their “big data” but weren’t ready to address the “big questions” that come with it. Having dealt with numerous EHR conversions, I’m keenly aware of the sheer magnitude of bad data out there. Those aggregating it tend to assume that the data they’re getting is good. I really pushed one of the major national vendors on how they handle data integrity and the answers were less than satisfactory. I could tell they understood the problem because they provided the example of allergy data where one vendor has separate fields for the allergy and the reaction and another vendor combines them. The rep wasn’t able to explain how they’re handling it even though they were displaying a patient chart that showed allergy data from both sources. I asked for a follow up contact, but I’m not holding my breath.

All too often as the HIT landscape evolves, vendors and their clients are moving too quickly from EHR implementation to population health to risk-based contracts, glossing over (or skipping entirely) a focus on the quality of the data that serves as the foundation of their strategic initiatives. As more provider organizations adopt population health-based tools and methodologies, a comprehensive, integrated, and validated data asset is critical to driving effective population-based care.

Health IT maturity can be defined as four distinct steps:

1. EHR implementation
2. Achievement of high data quality
3. Reporting on population health
4. Transformation into a highly functioning PCMH or ACO.

High-quality data is a key foundational piece that is required to manage a population and drive quality. When the quality of data equals the quality of care physicians are providing, one can leverage that data as an asset across the organization. Quality data can provide detailed insight that allows pinpointing opportunities for intervention — whether it’s around provider workflow, data extraction, or patient follow-up and chart review. Understanding the origins of compromised data quality help recognize how to boost measure performance, maximize reimbursements, and lay the foundation for effective population health reporting.

It goes without saying that reporting health data across an entire organization is not an easy task. However, there are steps that organizations must take to ensure they are extracting sound data from their EHR systems.

Outlined below are the key issues that contribute to poor data quality impacting population health programs, how they are typically resolved, and more optimal ways organizations can resolve them.

Variability across disparate EHRs and other data sources

EHRs are inconsistent. Data feeds are inconsistent. Despite their intentions, standardized message types such as HL7 and CCDs still have a great deal of variability among sources. When they meet the letter of national standards, they rarely meet the true spirit of those standards when you try to use.

Take diagnoses, for example. Patient diagnoses can often be recorded in three different locations: on the problem list, as an assessment, and in medical history. Problem lists and assessments are both structured data, but generally only diagnoses recorded on the problem list are transported to the reports via the CCD. This translates to underreporting on critical measures that require records of DM, CAD, HTN, or IVD diagnoses. Accounting for this variability is critical when mapping data to a single source of truth.

Standard approach: Most organizations try to use consistent mapping and normalization logic across all data sources. Validation is conducted by doing sanity checks, comparing new reports to old.

Best practice approach: To overcome the limitations of standard EHR feeds like the CCD, reports need to pull from all structured data fields in order to achieve performance rates that reflect the care physicians are rendering– either workflow needs to be standardized across providers or reporting tools need to be comprehensive and flexible in the data fields they pull from.

The optimal way to resolve this issue is to tap into the back end of the EHR. This allows you to see what data is structured vs. unstructured. Once you have an understanding of the back-end schema, data interfaces and extraction tools can be customized to pull data where it is actually captured, as well as where it should be captured. In addition, validation of individual data elements needs to happen in collaboration with providers, to ensure completeness and accuracy of data.

Variability in provider workflows

EHRs are not perfect and providers often have their own ways of doing things. What may be optimal for the EHR may not work for the providers or vice versa. Within reason, it is critical to accommodate provider workflows rather than forcing them into more unnatural change and further sacrificing efficiency.

Standard approach: Most organizations ignore this and go to one extreme or another: (1) use consistent mapping and normalization logic across all data sources and user workflows, making the assumption that all providers use the EHR consistently, or (2) allowing workflows to dictate all and fight the losing battle to make the data integration infinitely adaptable. Again, validation is conducted using sanity checks, comparing new reports to old.

Best practice approach: Understand how each provider uses the system and identify where the provider is capturing all data elements. Building in a core set of workflows and standards dictated by an on-the-ground clinical advisory committee, with flexibility for effective variations is critical. With a standard core, data quality can be enhanced by tapping into the back end of the EHR to fully understand how data is captured as well as spending time with care teams to observe their variable workflows. To avoid disruption in provider workflows, interfaces and extraction tools can be configured to map data correctly, regardless of how and where it is captured. Robust validation of individual data elements needs to happen in collaboration with providers to ensure completeness and accuracy of data (that is, the quality of the data) matches the quality of care being delivered.

Build provider buy-in/trust in system and data through ownership

If providers do not trust the data, they will not use population health tools. Without these tools, providers will struggle to effectively drive proactive, population-based care or quality improvement initiatives. Based on challenges with EHR implementation and adoption over the last decade, providers are often already skeptical of new technology, so getting this right is critical.

Standard approach: Many organizations simply conduct data validation process by doing a sanity test comparing old reports to new. Reactive fixes are done to correct errors in data mapping, but often too late, after provider trust has been lost in the system.

Best practice approach: Yet again, it is important to build out a collaborative process to ensure every single data element is mapped correctly. First meetings to review data quality usually begin with a statement akin to “your system must be wrong — there’s no way I am missing that many patients.” This is OK. Working side by side with the providers to ensure they understand where data is coming from and how to modify both workflow and calculations ensure that they are confident that reports accurately reflect the quality of care they are rendering. This confidence is a critical success factor to the eventual adoption of these population health tools in a practice.

Missed incentive payments under value-based reimbursement models

An integrated data asset that combines data from many sources should always add value and give meaningful insight into the patient population. A poorly mapped and validated data asset can actually compromise performance, lower incentive reimbursements, and ultimately result in a negative ROI.

Standard approach: A lackluster data validation process can result in lost revenue opportunities, as data will not accurately reflect the quality of care delivered or accurately report the risk of the patient population.

Best practice approach: Using the previously described approach when extracting, mapping, and validating data is critical for organizations that want to see a positive ROI in their population health analytics investments. Ensuring data is accurate and complete will ensure tools represent the quality of care delivered and patient population risk, maximizing reimbursement under value-based payments.

We have worked with a sample ACO physician group of over 50 physicians to assess the quality of data being fed from multiple EHRs within their system into an existing analytics platform via CCDs and pre-built feeds. Based on an assessment of 15 clinically sensitive ACO measures, it was discovered that the client’s reports were under-reporting on 12 of the 15 measures, based only on data quality. Amounts were under-reported by an average of 28 percentage points, with the maximum measure being under-reported by 100 percentage points.

Reports erroneously reported that only six of the 15 measures met 2013 targets, while a manual chart audit revealed that 13 of the 15 measures met 2013 targets, indicating that data was not being captured, transported, and reported accurately. By simply addressing these data quality issues, the organization could potentially see additional financial returns through quality incentive reimbursements as well as a reduced need for labor-intensive intensive chart audits.

As the industry continues to shift toward value-based payment models, the need for an enterprise data asset that accurately reflects the health and quality of care delivered to a patient population is increasingly crucial for financial success. Providers have suffered enough with drops in efficiency since going live on EHRs. Asking them to make additional significant changes in their daily workflows to make another analytics tool work is not often realistic.

Analytics vendors need to meet the provider where they are to add real value to their organization. Working with providers and care teams not only to validate integrity of data, but to instill a level of trust and give them the confidence they need to adopt these analytics tools into their everyday workflows is extremely valuable and often overlooked. These critical steps allow providers to begin driving population-based care and quality improvement in practices, positioning them for success in the new era of healthcare. 

Greg Chittim is senior director of Arcadia Healthcare Solutions of Burlington, MA.

CIO Unplugged 4/16/14

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are mine personally and are not necessarily representative of current or former employers.

How Snow White Changed My Life

OK, life change is a stretch, but Snow and some of her peer princesses did remind me of a critical aspect of leadership—creating special moments. In the case of Disney, it’s “where dreams come true.” For my Starbucks aficionados, it’s, “Handcrafted beverages are the secret to making life better.”

Five years ago, I added “create perfect moments” to my personal strategic plan. It’s one technique to help ensure “creating perfect moments” moves from bench to bedside. In the big things of my life, this has worked well, but not the common everyday stuff of earth.

While in Orlando recently, I spent time exploring Disney’s Epcot. Just for fun — and to make my wife and 20-year-old daughter smile — I decided to grab a photo op with Snow White.

Was my pride ever challenged! There I was, sandwiched between animated toddlers and star-struck preteens, in line to take a pic with Ms. Purity herself. Seemed everyone was dressed like a princess except me. I stood close to one toddler hoping passersby would think I was part of her family. Heaven forbid someone I knew might see me standing in line at Disney for a personal princess pic.

My turn came. I sheepishly held my arm out for Snow White. My friend took the pic.

I was ready to run, but Snow would not let me go. Help! She turned, looked me in the eye, and engaged me in conversation. I was pulling away, but she kept me there. It was longer than a moment, but not excessive, maintaining eye contact the entire time. As if someone just discovered my hand in the cookie jar, I was about to break out in a nervous sweat.

I texted the pic to my wife and daughter and they both replied ROTFL. So when I saw Sleeping Beauty, I stepped in line again.

This time, I carefully observed all the interactions between the princess and her devotees. Miss Beauty held eye contact with every fan and engaged in brief conversation.

My turn came, and though I tried to pull away, she clung to my arm until we talked. Awkward, yes, but so enlightening. Ditto with Belle, Cinderella, and last but not least, Ariel. They were indeed making dreams come true for their fans. They made me feel important.

How can we take something as simple and yet profound as a Disney princess engagement formula and put it into practice ourselves? How can we allow this to become a natural part of who we are?

As leaders, we are so rushed. I preach to myself here. We walk past our staff with nary an acknowledgement. When we do stop to talk, we are thinking about the meeting we are headed to.

On one hand, we claim that the right people in the right places are our most valuable assets. But do we give them the gift of our time, fully present, even for just a minute? This proves a contradiction in our leadership.

Since my return from Disney, I’ve been doubling down on creating special moments, this time with my staff. I am making sure every interaction, however brief, is meaningful. Eye contact. Genuine interest. While the other person may be rushed, I will remind myself that my agenda is their agenda, and my role as a leader is to serve them. True, not every person will want the time, but for those who do, I am there.

Before the end of my final day at Disney, I was looking for the next princess. Why? Because I enjoyed the way they made me feel. Special. If a princess can do this for strangers, we can do it for those we serve. Pics or no pics.

Create special moments.

Ed Marx is a CIO currently working for a large integrated health system. Ed encourages your interaction through this blog. Add a comment by clicking the link at the bottom of this post. You can also connect with him directly through his profile pages on social networking sites LinkedIn and Facebook and you can follow him via Twitter — user name marxists.

HIStalk Interviews Jim Prekop, CEO, TeraMedica

Jim Prekop is president and CEO of TeraMedica of Milwaukee, WI.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I’ve been in health IT for about 30 years. The last 10 have been with TeraMedica. Before that, I was in the EMR space and companies like PeopleSoft and Dun & Bradstreet software.

TeraMedica is middleware. The industry term is vendor-neutral archive. We collect clinical objects and are responsible for making them available to the source system, but also making them available in a patient-centric view to additional consumers of that data, whether they’re outside in institutions, exchanges, or new technology that gets adopted by the provider. We perform that role in the healthcare architecture.

How has the unbundling of PACS from single-solution vendors changed the demand for vendor-neutral archives and what’s the end result for the provider and the patient?

It’s a natural progression. With systems, historically, the new idea is a more or less a closed-loop answer. It’s the same way with accounting systems going back decades. 

What was a box has now become a layer in the architecture, the process of acquiring and managing an image and then making it available down the road to new consumers or later in my lifetime. The solution has had to evolve. The VNA, or the ability to seamlessly have the interaction with departmental activity but yet be the conduit into the enterprise, it’s a natural progression. It’s not to say that PACS is bad, just that the focus going forward on PACS will be different, just as the responsibility for the VNA will change over time as well.

What about universal viewers?

The universal viewer is interesting. They’re approaching this through the lens of the physician, whereas the VNA approaches it from the infrastructure up. 

The advantage for the enterprise viewer is that they can combine data from multiple sources. But the other thing that has to be kept in mind is that there is response time and there is certainty that is needed in what is delivered to the enterprise viewer. You get into a federated discussion of going after 20 different data sources, combining that answer, and then delivering it in one view to the clinician versus the ability to have all of that patient matching resolved by the VNA. It’s one-stop shopping. It goes to any consumer of the VNA.

We see the consumers being an EMR. We see the consumers being an enterprise viewer. Going forward as more adoption comes into the United States, it will be different exchanges that imaging will become part of. So to us, it’s just a consumer. We optimize its ability to be confidently assured that they’ve asked for and gotten the right information and that all the information is there. If you have a federated view and make a request and one of those systems is down, you might not get the answer.

Enterprise viewer implies that there’s behind the scenes fetching going on that then presents a unified view, as opposed to the VNA where it’s actually stored in a single system.

Yes. It’s already stored and normalized and you’re having one conversation behind the scenes. 

Unless somebody’s invented something new in IT that I haven’t seen, you pretty much have to ask the same question across multiple systems or go to some sort of index and find out all the Jim Prekops and then go and find out where they’re located, go get them, and then present it to me in an organized way. Can those enterprise viewers do that? Absolutely, and we have great partners in that space. Is it the best experience for the provider or the clinician? Maybe not.

What are the optimal ways to integrate a variety of images into Epic or Cerner?

I call it a landing page. EMRs address all the departments in the organization and rightfully so. But if I want to go look at all the different clinical objects that Jim Prekop created in a facility, chances are the links to that information are within various locations within the EMR. 

One of the advantages that TeraMedica brings to the table to leverage the investment that the provider has in the EMR is to give a patient-centered view of all the clinical objects, should they want that. That’s an option in our system. We can be tied to a report and just show that image, or we can present a complete inventory of what we have in the VNA, so that in one location, a clinician can see things that might be related to other departments. I don’t necessarily have to navigate over to that section of the EMR to see those objects.

It’s probably important to note that all images are objects but not all objects are images. Are you seeing demands for new object types?

Absolutely. When I first got here, I had to get an education on DICOM and all the nuances and it was a big education. But not everything is DICOM when it comes to clinical objects. 

Our customers asked us very early to not just manage DICOM. It’s a wonderful thing and is the heavy lifting in our business. But to be truly patient-centric, you have to address all different types of file types, whether it be JPEGs, MPEGs, PDFs, a Word document, or in the case of cancer care, lots of calculations are done using Excel and other types of planning systems.

To represent that an image is just a DICOM object is not fair. It’s usually one of the arguments when you try and decide what a VNA really is. There are lots of folks that manage DICOM and they do a good job, but they declare themselves as the VNA. That doesn’t meet our definition of a VNA.

What’s the distinction between storing non-DICOM data in its native format instead of using a DICOM wrapper?

Unlike other industries where you can create data marts and if there’s a problem you just snap another copy of the data, we’re into terabytes and hundreds of terabytes of data. As you acquire that information as the VNA, you have to be clinically responsible to the source system. If I go get a PDF of Jim Prekop from a clinical system and I wrap it in DICOM and that system wants it back, I either have to create duplicate storage — which is not cost productive — or I have to be able to unwrap it from that DICOM and enter that as a PDF to that source system.

The overhead of doing that simply doesn’t work and it doesn’t scale. To believe that you have to wrap everything in DICOM so it follows how your system works … I would suggest you have the wrong system if it only works with DICOM.

A well-known VNA consultant who comes from a PACS mentality is adamant that everything should be wrapped in DICOM. We needed to get him to sign an updated non-disclosure agreement, so I had my engineers wrap our NDA in DICOM before I sent it to him. His asked me what I had sent him since he operates on a Macintosh that doesn’t understand the file type, which is a .UCM. He didn’t even recognize that I had sent him a DICOM file. He didn’t understand that he was essentially justifying the reason why we believe that it’s DICOM and non-DICOM.

Who are your main competitors and how do you differentiate your product from theirs?

Since the VNA term was adopted — I prefer Vendor-Neutral Architecture — lots of folks put their hat into the game. As you would expect, a lot of PACS vendors have begun to open up and allow multiple DICOM systems to enter data in there.

It’s usually TeraMedica and Acuo that end up being the finalists in any evaluation. There are some other ones that are out there that do some of the things that we do. There’s some newcomers — Mach7 is out there, but I think they have more activity outside the US than they do within the US. But there are others that are coming into the space, and rightfully so. It’s a competitive market.

Hospitals acquiring medical practices and each other have left them trying to figure out how to get their systems to talk to each other. Is that true of imaging systems or other systems that would populate a VNA?

There’s two aspects of that. We’re having organizations that are buying us because they’re strategically positioning themselves to acquire other entities. They know that they can’t rip out those clinical systems, so they will use us as part of their strategy to get control of the data and share it across the enterprise.

As far as the other way, we have sites that are established either because of acquisitions or because of differences on campuses that have multiple EMRs. Our technology allows, again using myself as the example, Jim Prekop to be referenced, and if I know the request is coming from Epic, I’ll behave one way to put it properly in Epic. At the same time, I can put it into Cerner. There’s one source of the truth.

One of the value propositions that we bring as a VNA is that we can identify consumers and react accordingly. We can also respond to multiple consumers, but yet give them the exact data that they’re looking at, whether they come in through the physician’s office with one EMR or they come in through the hospital with another EMR. It’s one source of the truth with multiple consumers.

Where do you see the company going in the next three to five years? 

I think it’s based around being a good partner with our customers and bringing to them more use cases, more managing the data. As you would expect, we can sit behind a PACS, but the thing about VNAs is we’ve had to come around the curtain. We’ve always considered doing the plumbing behind the scenes. But now we’re very active in different departmental workflows.

We’re getting involved with our iPad app, as an example, in departments like wound care and dermatology, where the clinicians are actually interacting with our software and we are part of the EMR, but the clinician doesn’t even know we’re there. A lot of times when someone says, “I didn’t know you were there,” that’s a bad thing. For us, that’s a good thing, because we want seamless integration into these different systems. I can see us doing more of it.

I can see us taking responsibilities for more functions of a generic nature in the provider space so that they can optimize the platform that they’ve invested in. Clearly the leading investment is the EMR. But the VNA is also a strategic investment, and we need to do more for them when it comes to clinical workflow.

Morning Headlines 4/16/14

Public Workshop – Proposed Risk-Based Regulatory Framework and Strategy for Health Information Technology, May 13-15, 2014

The FDA, ONC, and FCC will co-host a free three-day public workshop at NIST’s campus in Gaithersburg, MD from May 13-15. The event will provide experts and stakeholders an opportunity to provide input on the recently published FDASIA health IT report.

ICD-10

CMS finally acknowledges the ICD-10 delay in a new post on its ICD-10 readiness website that says, "CMS is examining the implications of the ICD-10 provision and will provide guidance to providers and stakeholders soon."

Meaningful Use Not Correlated With Quality in Study

A study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (MA) that compared the quality scores of 540 physicians who achieved MU with those of 318 physicians who did not finds that adoption of Meaningful Use does not correlate with improved quality.

IT landscape changing for sharing Oklahoma patient medical records

A local paper covers the launch of two competing health information exchanges in Oklahoma and discusses the impact the competition will have on the overall sustainability of the project.

News 4/16/14

Top News

FDA left unanswered questions about its FDASIA report, such as how to submit the comments the report solicits. The agency announces a free, three-day public workshop May 13-15 at NIST in Gaithersburg, MD that will also be presented via webcast. Comments on the FDASIA report can be left here.

Reader Comments

From Lois Lane: “Re: short label names for ICD-9, CPT, and MS-DRGs. Any source for these other than an EMR vendor?” If anyone knows, please leave a comment.

From Guillermo del Grande: “Re: signs that whoever is talking about Epic doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” GDG’s list:

1. “Model the Model”
2. “EPIC”
3. They think NVTs are actually meaningful.
4. They ask where they can buy Epic stock.
5. They wonder why Epic doesn’t hire doctors and nurses to help improve their product.
6. They don’t know that the god-awful screen they are looking at is customizable.
7. They think Epic was born as a billing product.
8. They don’t know real people work there, just implementers.
9. They actually think there’s no internal politics at Epic.
10. They think Epic’s the only software running a MUMPS descendant.

From Bill Kilgore: “Re: VerbalCare. I think you might like these guys. Very cool product.” Inpatients get an VerbalCare icon-driven tablet instead of the 1950s-era call button, allowing them to choose the icon describing their need instead of just pushing a call button or trying to communicate through a drive-through quality speaker-microphone. Employees can receive and acknowledge requests on their smartphones or from a central console. The interactions are also tracked for later analysis. VerbalCare offers a commitment-free pilot. Everything looks good except they spelled HIPAA as “HIPPA” on their site, which is almost unforgivable. You should at least correctly spell the name of the requirement with which you are claiming compliance.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Ms. Dayton, a Teach for America teacher in Arizona, sent pictures and her thanks to HIStalk readers for supporting her magnet school sixth graders by providing them with math stations. She explains, “You have truly transformed my classroom. My students now look forward to math and enjoy the time spent playing the wonderful games that you donated. On a daily basis I hear from my students, ‘Ms. Dayton, can we play the games today?’ or ‘Ms. Dayton, can we skip writing and do math all day?’ I hear these things because of you!”

Upcoming Webinars

April 16 (Wednesday) 11:00 a.m. ET. Panel Discussion: Documents, EMRs, and Healthcare Processes. Sponsored by Levi, Ray & Shoup. Presenters: Charles Harris, senior technical lead, Duke University Health System; Ron Peel, technical advisor, LRS; and John Howerter, SVP of enterprise output management, LRS. IT department in hospitals implementing EMRs often overlook the role of document-driven workflows. Prescriptions, specimen labels, and discharge orders, and other critical documents must be reliably delivered with minimal impact on IT and clinical staff. This panel discussion will discuss the evolving use of documents in the “paperless/less-paper” environment.

May 1 (Thursday) 1:00 p.m. ET. Think Beyond EDW: Using Your Data to Transform, Part 2 – Build-Measure-Learn to Get Value from Healthcare Data. Sponsored by Premier. Presenters: Alejandro Reti, MD, senior director of population health, Premier; and Alex Easton, senior director of enterprise solutions, Premier. Once you deploy an enterprise data warehouse, you need to arrive at value as quickly as possible. Learn ways to be operationally and technically agile with integrated data, including strategies for improving population health.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Truven Health Analytics acquires Simpler Consulting, a provider of Lean enterprise transformation services to healthcare, government, and other commercial organizations.

Struggling BlackBerry invests in Patrick Soon-Shiong’s NantHealth. The companies are jointly developing a smartphone optimized for viewing diagnostic images, scheduled for a late 2014 release.

Vocera opens an innovation center in Bangalore, India.

Sales

Lahey Health (MA) selects Phytel’s population health and engagement platform in support of its ACO.

Dialysis Clinic, Inc. will implement Sandlot Connect and Sandlot Dimensions from Sandlot Solutions for care coordination and analytics.

Shenandoah Medical Center (IA) will deploy Allscripts Sunrise solutions for its 78 beds.

The 260-provider Phoebe Physician Group (GA) selects athenahealth for EHR/PM and care coordination.

Citizens Medical Center (TX) will implement T-System’s EV emergency department information system and Care Continuity patient transition management solution.

People

Explorys appoints Tom Chickerella (Vanguard Health) COO.

Precyse promotes Christopher A. Powell from president to CEO, replacing company founder Jeffrey S. Levitt, who will assume the role of executive chairman of the board.

ESD promotes John Alexander to testing practice director and hires Mia Erickson (Epic) as Epic practice director.

CHIME names George McCulloch (Vanderbilt University Medical Center) as EVP of membership and professional development.

Edifecs names Dave Arkley (Parallels, Inc.) CFO and Michiel Walsteijn (Oracle) EVP of international business.

Health Data Specialists promotes Angie Kaiser, RN to clinical informatics officer.

Donna Scott (McKesson Health Solutions) joins USA Mobility as SVP of marketing.

MHealth Games names investor Keith Collins, MD as its board chair. He was at one time CIO of the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Medicomp appoints Michael Cantwell, MD (National Library of Medicine) to its MEDCIN terminology team.

Healthcare technology services provider CitiusTech names Gary Reiner and Cory Eaves (both of its recent investor General Atlantic) to its board.

Announcements and Implementations

Kids First Pediatrics Group (GA) integrates PatientPay’s electronic billing and payment solution with its Greenway PrimeSUITE practice management system.

Memorial Community Hospital & Health System clinics (NE) will transition to Epic starting June 25.

The HEALTHeLINK clinical information exchange launches an automated syndromic surveillance state reporting service.

North-Shore-LIJ (NY) rolls out the Allscripts FollowMyHealth patient portal for its Plainview and Forest Hills hospital patients.

Geisinger Health Plan (PA) implements Caradigm Care Management for population health.

Government and Politics

CMS introduces a Code-a-Palooza Challenge to encourage developers to create apps that use the new Medicare payment data to help consumers improve their healthcare decision-making.

CMS, which has been strangely quiet about the implementation delay for ICD-10, finally acknowledges the legislation but notes only that it “is examining the implications of the ICD-10 provision and will provide guidance to providers and stakeholders soon.” Meanwhile, CMS still lists October 1, 2014 as the date ICD-9 will be replaced by ICD-10.

ONC invites voting for ideas submitted in its Digital Privacy Notice Challenge, which include games, responsive templates, a Web widget, and an NPP generator.

Innovation and Research

Meaningful Use of EHRs was not found to be correlated with performance on clinical quality measures in a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine. The  research compared quality scores of 540 physicians affiliated with Brigham and Women’s Hospital who achieved MU with those of 318 physicians who did not. Critics note several factors making the validity and applicability of the study difficult to evaluate, including the fact that MU quality metrics are so specific that they exclude many patients with particular conditions.

Technology

Google files a patent for a contact lens system that would include a built-in camera and could potentially be used as an alterative to Google Glass. That’s technology I could embrace since I don’t see myself as one of those nerdy hipster-types that Dr. Jayne and I continually made fun of as we walked the HIMSS exhibit floor.

Awarepoint introduces an RFID tag that monitors room humidity.

Other

The Coalition for ICD-10, an industry advocacy group whose members include CHIME, AHA, and AHIMA, calls on HHS to establish October 1, 2015 as the new ICD-10 implementation date.

The Oklahoman looks at the soon-to-be-launched Oklahoma City-based Coordinated Care Oklahoma HIE and the more established Tulsa-based MyHealth Access Network and considers the impact of having two competing networks in the state. It’s a scenario that will undoubtedly be repeated numerous times in coming months as funding disappears for older HIEs and newer organizations emerge.

An InstaMed report on trends in healthcare payments finds that patient payments to providers jumped 72 percent from 2011 to 2013, with the average amount increasing from $110.86 to $133.15.

Attorneys specializing in representing whistleblowers in healthcare pounce on the newly published Medicare data to search for evidence of fraud.

Travelers who pass through Madison, WI’s Dane Country Regional Airport (MSN) can now enjoy free Wi-Fi courtesy of Nordic.

The SMART project at Boston Children’s Hospital, which has been pretty quiet since its big “EMRs should work like smartphone apps” announcement four or so years ago, names a 14-member advisory board to promote its mission.

I paid a visit to my neighborhood ER over the weekend. Despite being the patient, I couldn’t help but check out their use of IT systems. It’s a boutique ER attached to a surgery center about two miles from my house. I was the only patient at the time (good to know that all my neighbors had better things to do on a Saturday night.) In terms of IT, what surprised me the most was the lack of it, at least at the point of care. They must have some sort of EMR because they printed out all my information from a visit last year, but everyone who treated me used pen and paper to note my vitals and whatnot. At discharge they handed me a generic patient education sheet with aftercare instructions, but no details on what meds they gave me (I recall one was a narcotic) and no medication information sheet warning me about possible side effects. They advised me to follow up with my regular doctor, but I’m now realizing that in my narcotic-induced haze I didn’t ask anything about the results of the tests from my blood draw. I’m sure if I had gone to the ER at the big chain hospital another 10 minutes away I would have left with more complete information, but I chose (and probably would again) the more convenient ER that otherwise provided good care. For all the great stories we constantly share about the amazing strides in automating healthcare, I’m sure there are just as many anecdotes that serve as a reminder that we are not “there” yet.

Sponsor Updates

• Talksoft Corporation makes its appointment reminder app Talksoft Connect available for Android devices.
• Columbus CEO magazine profiles CoverMyMeds in an article highlighting characteristics of top workplaces.
• The AHA exclusively endorses MEDHOST PatientFlow HD patient flow management solution.
• LifeIMAGE celebrates the growth of its network, which connects 533 hospitals and has exchanged 1.1 billion images over the last five years. 
• Health Catalyst releases a free eBook that explores common approaches to data warehousing in healthcare.
• AdvancedMD introduces the 1.5 version of its iPad app.
• A NueMD ICD-10 survey conducted prior to the official delay shows that the majority healthcare professionals participating wanted the ICD-10 transition to be pushed back or canceled.
• The Boston Business Journal ranks Nuance number two on its list of  top publicly traded Massachusetts software companies based on its $5.2 billion market capitalization.
• Kareo CMIO Tom Giannulli will discuss the role of technology in improving patient care at UBM Medica’s Practice Rx conference May 2-4 in Newport Beach, CA.
• Madhavi Kasinadhuni, consultant for The Advisory Board, explains the importance of measuring care episodes and not just individual encounters when identifying missed revenues.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis, Lorre.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Morning Headlines 4/15/14

DeSalvo calls for big data use over next decade

In a speech on Capitol Hill last Thursday, Karen DeSalvo, MD, said that one of the ONC’s goals for the next decade would be bringing about the benefits of big data, which she says will require that “the underpinnings of EHRs” be reconfigured to support the free flow of information.

Lawyers start mining the Medicare data for clues to fraud

Lawyers specializing in healthcare fraud cases begin analyzing the recently published Medicare payment data, looking for potential signs of fraud.

Dutton "Committed" To Electronic Health Record

In Australia, Health Minister Peter Dutton expresses support for the country’s EHR program, leading to speculation that while the federal government will not keep the program in its present form, it does not plan to cancel the $700 million project outright.

New York’s electronic medical record plan gets $55 million boost

New York approves an additional $55 million in funding to support its health IT goals, including a $4.5 million investment in the state-run Healthcare Information Exchange of New York.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 4/14/14

I wrote last month about our health system purchasing another physician group in a bid to strengthen its primary care base for Accountable Care activities. The IT team is always brought into the acquisition phase too late, which is a shame. Our ability to identify potential issues and prepare for a smooth transition is always forgotten until we’re later asked to deliver a miracle after the ink is already dry. That was the beginning of my “pastry therapy” sessions, which have progressed significantly.

At the time, my biggest worry was figuring out how to get them through the EHR upgrades needed to get their first-timers ready to attest for Meaningful Use. My team was tasked with preparing for the upgrades, which is a standard duty for us. In reviewing what they had done to the EHR, I was entirely unprepared for the volume of customizations they have put in place. I was also unprepared for how ridiculous some of them are.

They have a robust EHR that allows creation of custom workflows even though the out-of-the-box workflows are pretty solid. This is good for customers who have specialties the EHR doesn’t cover, but not good for customers that use the EHR as a means of managing physician behavior.

After several weeks of reviewing their content and consulting with our development, training, and support teams, I was ready to meet with the combined medical leadership of our two organizations with a plan to gradually bring their workflows to our standard so that eventually we can convert them onto our database. (Initially the Powers That Be wanted an immediate conversion, but I was able to convince them we couldn’t do it on the timeline we have.)

Allowing for a slow retirement of their customizations would allow us to make two smaller steps rather than one giant leap, which I felt would be better for physician adoption and user acceptance. The first move would happen with their upgrade to the EHR version certified for 2014 and would involve addressing customizations that either impaired MU data-gathering (such as creating custom fields rather than using existing vendor fields that feed canned reports) or didn’t make sense (extra navigation buttons that cluttered up the screen and distracted from important clinical data.) The first step would also allow them to get used to our training style and expectations so that next time we can just use our proven franchise model with them.

The second step would be the true move onto our content, although we’d keep them on their own database until the dust settled. The final step would be to perform a relatively quiet migration a few months later.

Although the overall plan would take more than a year, we felt it would adequately balance the need to keep the volume of change manageable with the fact that we aren’t getting very many additional resources or dollars to pull this off. Although we’re going to assimilate their IT and training teams, we quickly discovered that they only had a rudimentary knowledge of the software since they had referred nearly all their changes out to consultants and contractors. We’ll have to retrain them not only on the product, but also add some discipline and critical thinking to the mix if they’re going to stay with us.

Our meeting with the medical leadership started out well with them nodding at all the right places as we presented the high-level plan. They agreed in principle, but it started turning ugly when they began asking about which specific customizations we planned to retire in the first phase.

My ever-OCD development manager quickly produced a spreadsheet. Her team had carefully catalogued every customization on a template by template basis with helpful information including why we recommend retiring it and what the proposed replacement workflow would be. They also attempted to gather information on why the changes were made in the first place, but for the vast majority, there was no compelling business case that any of the analysts could remember.

I was proud of my team for pulling this together in such detail on a tight timeline, especially when they had absolutely no documentation to work from. They literally had to do a visual inspection of each part of the workflow because our new partners apparently had never heard of a build specification document, let alone an approval tracker or anything else.

We began to work through the spreadsheet and were immediately stopped by our new colleagues. For every item we proposed retiring (even if it was actually contrary to the stated goals of meeting Meaningful Use, being an ACO, and providing quality care) they had an excuse why we needed to keep it. Many of the excuses took the form of, “This is something Dr. Jones really needs,” but they couldn’t provide any concrete reasons to back their statements.

After a dozen or so of these exchanges, it became apparent that rather than only modifying the EHR when it was deficient, they had been using EHR design changes as a way to appease cranky providers.

I’m all for modifying the EHR when it’s needed – if it’s truly deficient, if the workflow is inadequate, or if you are trying to document a specialty that’s not available from your vendor. Our group has been at this nearly a decade and all our customizations have a robust business case and have been vetted through a formal review process. We have design standards that keep pace with our vendor, so even when we customize, it appears seamless to our users.

We also log every single customization with our vendor so they know there’s a deficiency, defect, or workflow need. We can’t fault them for not designing to meet our needs if we haven’t told them what our needs are. Often we find that in the process of logging an enhancement request, the vendor is already coding what we want in their next version. We can make our customization look like what they’re doing so that when we upgrade, it is truly seamless.

I finished my mini-lecture on rational customization. The folks on the other side of the table just sat there with blank stares. They clearly either weren’t buying what I was selling or simply didn’t care.

Pulling out my best behavioral health “motivational interviewing” skills, I tried to get them to at least acknowledge a need to change even if they didn’t like it. It became obvious that they are scared to death of having to actually deal with their peers, let alone actually manage employed physicians.

Our trainers are pretty tough, but if management is not going to help us lead the physicians through a meaningful change process, we are never going to be successful. What makes me the angriest, however, is that we’ve been through this. We know what needs to be done to achieve success. We were in the same place many years ago. We have a proven track record of not only bringing practices live, but actually achieving clinical transformation and improved outcomes. We also have been able to do this without a significant change in practice revenue or any loss of clinical quality.

Unfortunately, we’re now being faced with providers who have been coddled and apparently don’t know the meaning of being an employee. Rumor has it that some of them are so politically charged that they’re being paid above fair market value just to keep them from leaving.

With those kinds of forces at play, the idea of achieving standardization seems impossible. If we can’t get them to agree on EHR workflows, how are we going to get them to agree on clinical content such as order sets or care protocols for chronic disease management? Looking at the impassive faces across from me, it was clear that we’re going to have to bring some bigger guns to support us. I’ve scheduled a follow-up meeting with our CIO and CFO as backup, but I’m not optimistic.

There’s nothing in medical school or informatics training that prepares you for this. I’d love to be able to turn to some of my CMIO pals for advice, but the idea of admitting this level of dysfunction — even to my closest confidantes — makes me squirm. It’s good, then, that I can turn to my virtual colleagues for advice. Leave a comment if you have some words of wisdom.

For those of you who just want some pastry therapy, that was Martha Stewart’s Chocolate, Banana, and Graham Cracker Icebox Cake. I didn’t have any milk chocolate, so I pulverized and melted several dark chocolate Easter rabbits, which was therapeutic in its own right. I also left off the whipped cream topping that Martha recommended – it was a little too over the top for my primary care brain.

Email Dr. Jayne.

HIStalk Advisory Panel: IT Service Management

The HIStalk Advisory Panel is a group of hospital CIOs, hospital CMIOs, practicing physicians, and a few vendor executives who have volunteered to provide their thoughts on topical industry issues. I’ll seek their input every month or so on an important news developments and also ask the non-vendor members about their recent experience with vendors. E-mail me to suggest an issue for their consideration.

If you work for a hospital or practice, you are welcome to join the panel. I am grateful to the HIStalk Advisory Panel members for their help in making HIStalk better.

This question this time: Does your organization use a formal IT service management program such as ITIL, and if so, what results have you seen?

Responses indicating no: 4.

[from a practicing physician] No , I am not aware of any formal IT management program used by my now very large company, but that is not to say that they do not need one.

We started with one, but we didn’t have the institutional memory to keep it alive. As new people came, it became increasingly difficult. Some good remnants remain, but only if somebody remembers to enforce them.

Yes and no. We’re a small shop, so we use ITIL and other models as a source of best practices and implement what makes sense for us. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel, but a full-scale implementation in a small organization is not cost-effective. The processes, templates, etc., that we have pulled in are extremely useful and allow us to more efficiently manage a large workload with a small team.

Not at this time. We have evaluated the use of ITIL and COBIT, but our plates are too full at this time to put any formal processes in place. Luckily the management team has experience with ITIL, so we apply the concepts to change management and service delivery as much as possible.

We have begun to install ITIL. It has been challenging given we are short on resources and when busy, people tend to fall back into the old way of doing things. We have had success with incident management, which is a good thing.

I was one of the first to enthusiastically jump on the ITIL bandwagon, many years ago, then I saw firsthand how the ITIL process became the goal, not a means to a goal. After two ITIL implementation attempts with two different teams, in which internal client satisfaction with IS declined and my employees became demoralized drones, I threw away any philosophy to implement the details of ITIL and instead focused on the concepts and the end goals. Those end goals are (1) internal customer satisfaction with IS; (2) IS employee satisfaction; and (3) achievement of both #1 and #2 at the lowest possible IS budget.  Since then, I’ve watched ITIL spread to other organizations and watched the same pattern that I experienced. There seems to be an inverse relationship, or at least a tipping point of inflection, between dogmatic adherence to ITIL and IS success and creativity.

At this time we don’t have a formal service structure methodology. We are beginning to look at this due to our organization growing and that all areas now have a major IT component. We most likely would lean towards ITIL.

Yes, we do. If you agree that using ITIL can be helpful and that every part of ITIL may not apply to your operations, it can provide consistency in support that many organizations need. We have found that it is helpful in many aspects of providing end-user services more consistently and more timely with much fewer variations.

We do not use ITIL formally. We will soon be joining a larger system and they have adopted ITIL and we are comparing our current practices to this framework.

We have been trained in the basics of ITIL and have incorporated several concepts and processes. We have not gone full out at this point.

HIStalk Interviews Kyle Silvestro, CEO, SyTrue

Kyle Silvestro is founder and CEO of SyTrue of Chico, CA.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I’ve been in the world of clinical natural language processing and semantic interoperability for the last decade. My team collectively has been in the industry for more than 45 years. 

As a company, we focus on the world of data. We look at ourselves as an oil refiner, taking all the data that’s being created — transcription, dictation, typed notes, structured order entry, what have you — and creating a refinery process that we put it through. On the other side of that, we get structured data that’s semantically interoperable. 

We focus on that pipeline that allows organizations to create normalized data to drive down to processes like analytics, decision support and population health.

People often get natural language processing confused with speech recognition. Describe NLP.

It’s the ability for the computer to go through a written document — a Word document, PDF, or something that is the by-product of speech recognition – and recognize and understand the content. Not only the content, the meaning behind the content as far as it’s something positive, something negative, or something concerning. Beyond that, be able to make decisions as far as how that should be encoded with a terminology or medical knowledge base such as SNOMED, ICD-9, or ICD-10.

I’m a huge fan of keeping the clinical narrative and patient narrative and not just discrete data element factoids. Is there a demand for that?

It’s interesting what’s occurred over the last decade and really the last several years. Data has become important and incentives are changing to where they’re making data much more relevant in the chain of care. As organizations are looking at this, they’re looking at a lot of claims data, which gives you an incomplete picture.

Until you start marrying the clinical narrative with the claims data, you are not going to see the outcomes or the population that needs to be managed comprehensively as you would just looking at a single point of data. The market is realizing that the data is important and the data is the key for them to being successful.

How good is NLP’s inference capability in reliably turning free text into discrete data?

That’s a question we get asked frequently. My response back is, how accurate is the physician’s note? At times, and depending on where you are across the nation, the note may mean different things. Words may mean different things, context may be a little bit different. 

It’s about being able to create a ability to normalize that information and then continuously learn on top of it. Create a feedback loop of this data to ensure that the inferencing or accuracy gets extremely high. Once it’s extremely high, you can build some rules around that to flag inconsistent actions or items that may not be just exactly right for manual review.

It’s great for a number of different processes, but there are still some situations like Core Measures or others that do require clinical opinion. In that context, it assists organization significantly and it’s highly accurate.

Google Flu Trends stopped working because it was measuring indirectly captured data that Google didn’t control or understand as it changed. Is that a risk in using NLP to analyze EMR data of a somewhat uncontrolled origin?

No. You have to put it through a process where you can turn data into semantically interoperable content, to create a process that fits an organization and its work flow.

I’ve been at one hospital and seen 152 different ways that they document the section heading of medications. In one hospital. How do you give organizations the ability to normalize that data and to ensure that the section heading of medications corresponds to the appropriate LOINC code and that all these 152 ways all roll up to a single code of medications, if that’s what the organization desires?

It’s about giving them the ability the look inside a black box that was formerly called NLP and terminologies and being able to use that information in line with the organization’s objectives, work flows, and outcomes. Each document can have a different purpose in life and have a different recipient in life based upon on the data that’s within it. Being able to give organizations that flexibility that they haven’t had in the past to be able to perform actions like this changes the paradigm and maybe the questions that are being asked. 

What can end up is organizations get to highly accurate data that’s interoperable, that drives downstream processes, can identify patients that are at risk for medication non-compliance, and a whole other host of activities that are either going to reduce cost, help alleviate risk, or identify opportunities for revenue.

You mentioned that the system can learn. How does that work?

In the case of ICD-10 right now, it’s a documentation issue. A lot of the problems that we’re facing in healthcare come back down to documentation. It may not be as sexy as some of the other topics that are out there, but at the end of the day, if you can get to the point of care with a document or parts of documentation are being created, what you’re doing is able to add almost real-time support into that encounter, or creating something along the lines of a encounter-based analytics. As you’re moving forward in this process, it’s about identifying the points in the work flow that can make a difference to have that impact that you’re looking for. 

I think the answer really is yes to your question. Organizations are seeing that value.

How much setup is required to get the information that you need from the EMR and to figure out its structure?

The US government is, I think for the first time, focusing on standards. If the laws around Meaningful Use are still upheld in October, that standard’s going to be Direct over the Blue Button. If you’re able to then able to pull information out of these standards, process it, put it together in a consolidated CDA, you’re able then to hand that off to the next person in the chain.

If organizations start complying with this thought of interoperability and data mobility, we all  — vendors or third parties to the record or to the process – can help move forward this continuous care to increase outcomes and value within the healthcare system. Their thinking, and what we find, is the closer we go to the data, the easier it is, and the further away, the harder it becomes. We end up pretty close to the data source. 

Going forward, we’re anticipating this model where we can get that in real time via a standards-based approach that would allow organizations to create something like a meta layer or meta data of smart intelligence. Then the EMR and HIE that can add value into that record in real time. 

Organizations that work with us are up and running within an hour more often than not, minus some of the interfaces that they have to create.

What are some examples of what people are doing with your system?

Organizations are looking to identify populations that may be at risk for heart attack or stroke. They are looking through their more often than not transcribed documents, because these are high-value specialties that use maybe a limited piece of an EMR to identify patients that might have been missed or have not been recalled in a certain period of time to follow up for a visit.

We’re being used to look at site selection for clinical trials, by being able to identify possible patients that would fit within a certain selection. Other areas to alleviate risk, or feed data into third-party systems to assist their predictive analytics, decision support, or business intelligence. We act as a platform across different organizations so they can send data and have it refined, processed, and get that refinement back out in order to add value to what they’re currently doing.

You compete with least one or two big companies that offer NLP-based services, including Nuance and its Clinical Language Understanding. Why is your product a better choice?

There’s a very large untapped market. It’s a matter of focus. We’re heavily focused in areas that Nuance isn’t and we’re able to add value along those lines.

As I look at the industry and I look at the last 10 years of being in the business, I’ve probably failed more than most in failure of sales, but I’ve also been quite successful. I think I’ve come to understand the bottlenecks and the impediments and the push-backs that have always been around clinical natural language processing. I think we’ve addressed those and we’ve focused on those points. 

Building that into our pipeline and workflow that will allow both a rapid adoption and a platform-type view of this data, where many people can tap into via a Web service-based approach. It will utilize technology that gives them the ability to do natural language queries and then to be able to bring a refined data set into any one of their processes. 

While there’s a lot of competitors out there the market and a lot of new companies emerging, I think it’s the collective 45 years of experience my team has that give us an advantage in the way that we look at the marketplace and the solution that we’ve brought to bear.

Where do you see the company going forward?

We just started releasing the product commercially. We’ve been hand-selecting our clients and beta sites to ensure that we have something that is meaningful that will make a difference in the market. 

When people looked at it, they’d say wow, I’ve never seen anything like that. HIMSS was the first time that we started showing that off. That’s kind of the response that we’ve gotten, at HIMSS and almost every other discussion that we’ve had. 

The company is focused on methodically growing its client base and delivering beyond expectations to our current users. We’ll continue to add clients based on our reputation and our delivery.

Do you have any final thoughts?

We have a very interesting time in front of us. The world and specifically healthcare is opening up to the idea that clinical documentation is important. It’s the needle in the haystack. If you can look there, you’re able to look across the longitudinal record and add value to the people’s lives who matter, who feel like the forgotten soldiers in this, which are physicians and patients. If you can remove the impediments and barriers to that, everything will go forward and healthcare will be a fundamentally different place.

Morning Headlines 4/14/14

Sebelius’s Slow-Motion Resignation From the Cabinet

The New York Times reports that the writing was on the wall for Kathleen Sebelius after her "wooden" performance on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show in October left the administration questioning whether she was the right person to fix the healthcare.gov debacle.

Image sharing gets to early majority. Nuance’s rumored move validates.

Nuance will reportedly move into the image sharing business and on Monday will announce the acquisition of a small Atlanta-based company working in this space.

What you won’t see in the raw Medicare claims data

The American Medical Association publishes a piece addressing the recent release of Medicare payment data, explaining that the numbers are sometimes inaccurate, and do not represent an individual physician’s take home pay because it does not account for the overhead of running a practice.

‘Heartbleed’ Bug Coder: ‘It was a simple programming error’

The programmer responsible for introducing the OpenSSL bug in 2012 addresses accusations that he introduced the bug intentionally, explaining that it was "a simple programming error in a new feature, which unfortunately occurred in a security relevant area."

Monday Morning Update 4/14/14

Top News

The New York Times says the White House decided that Kathleen Sebelius needed to go as HHS secretary after her “wooden” appearance on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” in October (during which Stewart speculated openly that Sebelius was lying to him about Healthcare.gov) and the pressure she was getting from Republican members of Congress. The President waited until last week until the Healthcare.gov crisis was over to give her the hook, with the Times calling it a “slow-motion resignation.” It may be a first that a Cabinet member was forced out because of a TV show appearance and for antagonizing the other party. Even her carefully orchestrated Rose Garden farewell speech was marred by technical difficulties – she stumbled because her notes were missing a page. I don’t expect much to change with her replacement – Congress and the White House can’t keep their hands out of what HHS is doing, so the Secretary’s job is to announce big changes rather than to propose them (and to be the President’s unusually obedient lap dog in Sebelius’s case.)

Reader Comments

From Anon: “Re: Wipro. Remember how they were going to save the day with low cost IT managed services? Won a $200m contract with Catholic Health Initiatives? Big problems. They can’t even keep Microsoft Exchange running, service applications, HR system, let alone CHI’s various EHRs. Unplanned downtime is becoming a daily occurrence.” Unverified. CHI signed the deal with the India-based Wipro in March 2013, saying it expected to save $42 million over five years.

From NoPicis: “Re: Picis. Just been in a meeting where complaints were ventilated on Picis not being MU2 certified. Nobody at Picis took the time to let their customers base know about their non-compliance.” Unverified. I contacted Picis/Optum but didn’t hear back. ONC shows Picic products as being certified under 2011 criteria.

From Pokey: “Re: Cerner-Intermountain partnership. The baby has a name!” The project will be called iCentra, which is how I would picture Brits pronouncing “eye centre” based on how they spell it.

From Biller: “Re: 1500 format. On April 1, 2014, CMS has required the use of new formats to submit bills, replacing the 1500 format. Our vendor was desperately unprepared and did not have the code to make the change.  And when they did, systems were crashing like cars in a sleet storm. Were the other vendors of billing systems so unprepared?” Readers: if you had this problem, leave a comment and name your vendor if you like.

From Mark: “Re: Oconee Medical Center (SC). A Paragon site, about to be absorbed by Greenville Health System, which is moving to Epic.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It was political maneuvering that caused the ICD-10 delay, according to more than half of poll respondents. Anydoc had a good comment: “For sure, the lack of both provider and vendor readiness in an election year. One could easily imagine the backlash in November elections after a year of debating at nauseum the failures of Healthcare.gov compounded by providers frustrations with payment delays, lost productivity, etc. only one month before going to the polls.” New poll to your right: who is most responsible for the ACA failures like Healthcare.gov that led Kathleen Sebelius to step down?

Saturday is my grammar pet peeve day. Topping my list this week: people who write “it’s” as a possessive. Please, I know it isn’t logical, but the possessive form is “its” so just live with it, OK? Also driving me crazy: people who say “thanks but no thanks” thinking it’s cute, which requires double the number of syllables to say precisely the same thing as just “no, thanks.” OK, one more: using the word “very,” which when used often is either superfluous (“very interesting”) or incorrect (“very unique.”)

Listening: Superdrag, a decent, defunct alterna-pop band from Knoxville, TN. Not to be confused with my favorite Superchunk, which is better, non-defunct, and in fact celebrating their 25th anniversary.

I had HIStalk and the other sites migrated to a much larger server this weekend. It’s a dedicated one running a four-core Xeon processor, 16GB of DDR3 memory, a terabyte of 7,200 rpm disk, an identical second drive just for backups, MySQL databases running on a 120GB solid-state drive for extra speed, and 20TB of premium transfer. OS is CentOS Linux 64 bit and Litespeed. HIStalk keeps growing and response time was slowed at times when hundreds of readers were on at the same time, so the new server should be fast with plenty of capacity for continued growth.

Upcoming Webinars

April 16 (Wednesday) 11:00 a.m. ET. Panel Discussion: Documents, EMRs, and Healthcare Processes. Sponsored by Levi, Ray & Shoup. Presenters: Charles Harris, senior technical lead, Duke University Health System; Ron Peel, technical advisor, LRS; and John Howerter, SVP of enterprise output management, LRS. IT department in hospitals implementing EMRs often overlook the role of document-driven workflows. Prescriptions, specimen labels, and discharge orders, and other critical documents must be reliably delivered with minimal impact on IT and clinical staff. This panel discussion will discuss the evolving use of documents in the “paperless/less-paper” environment.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A lifeIMAGE blog post says Nuance will enter the image sharing market in a Monday announcement that it will acquire “a small, Atlanta-based company.” I hear (unconfirmed) that company is Accelerad. KLAS ranked the company’s SeeMyRadiology.com #1 in image sharing in November 2013. It’s an odd business for Nuance to be entering, but shareholder pressure to deliver better results may have made diversification attractive for either strategic or accounting reasons even though it strays from the company’s traditional core mission of speech recognition and consumer apps (Dragon, Siri, and software for scanning and PDF editing.)

Medical cart maker Enovate Medical will expand its Murfreesboro, TN headquarters, with plans to create 410 jobs in the next five years.

People

Vermont Commerce Secretary Lawrence Miller, who was tapped to rescue the state’s Vermont Health Connect health insurance exchange after a rocky rollout, is named as the governor’s point person for healthcare reform. His previous background: he founded a brewing company and ran a business that sells pewter jewelry. Meanwhile, the state auditor will investigate Vermont Health Connect and its struggles with vendors Oracle and CGI after a consultant blamed the site’s problems on politics and inexperienced leadership. Vermont has up to $170 million in federal money to spend, gave CGI a contract worth $84 million, and has paid $54 million so far for a crippled site.

Announcements and Implementations

Penn Highlands Healthcare (PA) goes live on its patient portal, or actually “portals” in the plural since the some are Cerner, some are NextGen, and others don’t appear to be from either vendor.

Government and Politics

HIMSS loves Kathleen Sebelius and any other politician who helps divert taxpayer money into HIT vendor and provider pockets, so naturally they gave her a laudatory send-off, saying “the health IT community was blessed” to have her running the department overseeing HITECH payments (and plugging its own EMR Adoption Model in its praise.) I’m suspicious of anybody who refers to a “community” without defining it or explaining how they know what that “community” thinks, especially since most members of the health IT community are citizens paying the ever-rising taxes needed to fund HITECH, Healthcare.gov, and Medicare. Personally, I’m not feeling all that blessed.

The State of Maryland threatens to sue Noridian Health Care Solutions, the $85 million prime contractor of its health insurance exchange.

Technology

April 15 is more than just tax day for nerds jealous at their peers wandering around wearing Google Glass: anybody can buy a $1,500 Glass for that day only without being part of the Explorer program. The downside: it could go into commercial production soon at a lower price and possibly with better features.

The Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL that has exposed web server information (including passwords, credit card numbers, and potentially patient information) for years on two-thirds of the world’s websites was caused by programming error that wasn’t caught by the QA review of the small, open source project, according to the German developer who identified the exploit.

Other

The American Medical Association releases a laundry list of warnings about correlating Medicare payments information to physician incomes. A subset:

• The information could contain errors and CMS doesn’t allow doctors to report inaccuracies.
• Claims filed under a given National Provider Identifier can include services rendered by residents or other healthcare professionals.
• Payments include the cost of physician-administered drugs, which are low margin for doctors.
• Physician payments are actually practice payments that must also cover practice overhead – the physician doesn’t just pocket the Medicare check.
• Medicare’s coding and billing rules vary over time and even by location.
• Doctor’s don’t make all their income from Medicare.

A JAMA editorial by Farzad Mostashari, MD and colleagues from The Brookings Institution says that each primary care physician is in essence a CEO in charge of $10 million in annual revenue, that being the overall annual healthcare spending of the average practice’s 2,000 patients. It concludes that PCPs are underused and that physician-led ACOs will work better than those run by hospitals, but that success has been limited because practices haven’t spent enough on IT or on practice transformation services. It warns PCPs that they will lose control if they just continue with business as usual or sell out to hospitals. I’ll go with that: if you want to encourage efficiency, save money, and improve health and not just episodic healthcare services delivery, the last group you’d want to talk to would be hospitals.

Cleveland Clinic, which anyone who has walked its halls can tell has always treated a cash-paying Middle Easterners, will open a 364-bed hospital in Adu Dhabi, with CEO Toby Cosgrove, MD saying, “We look at it as our petrodollars coming home to Cleveland.”

I missed this announcement from earlier this month: ECRI Institute Patient Safety Organization launches a partnership to identify and learn from health IT safety issues. Among the collaborating organizations are HIMSS, AHIMA, AMIA, ISMP, and AMDIS. Several experts serve on its advisory panel, including David Bates, MD (Brigham and Women’s), Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD (Johns Hopkins), and Dean Sittig, PhD (UT Health Science Center at Houston.)

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis, Lorre.

More news, HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

HHS Secretary Sebelius Quits

President Obama has accepted the resignation of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, according to White House officials. Her five-year tenure was marred by political acrimony over the flawed rollout of the Affordable Care Act and Healthcare. gov, a source of embarrassment for the Obama administration. 

The President will on Friday nominate Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who has been director of the Office of Management and Budget for one year, to replace Sebelius. She was previously president of the Walmart Foundation, worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,  and held several positions in the Clinton White House.

Morning Headlines 4/11/14

Health Secretary Resigns After Woes of HealthCare.gov

Kathleen Sebelius has resigned following a five-year span as secretary of HHS. Her term was marred by the failed rollout of Healthcare.gov, despite a late surge that helped it meet its original enrollment goals. On Friday, she will nominate Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to replace her.

Laptops ‘could save doctors’ time’

Researchers at the Birmingham Women’s Hospital in the UK find that physicians in its neonatal unit who use laptops or tablets spend an hour-per-day less on paperwork, compared to those that still document on paper.

WelVU Wins Dignity Health and Box Developer Challenge

Patient engagement platform WelVU takes first place and a $100,000 prize in a Dignity Health and Box sponsored developer challenged which called for "innovative health applications that will revolutionize the way physicians and hospitals educate patients."

Capturing Social and Behavioral Domains in Electronic Health Records: Phase 1

A new Institute of Medicine report recommends expanding the use of EHRs to capture social and behavioral data on patients, saying that EHRs are currently limited in what they can capture, and concluding that this information would be helpful to physicians and public health researchers alike.

News 4/11/14

Top News

ONC head Karen DeSalvo proposes dissolving the agency’s workgroups and forming four new ones in order to reduce redundancy and create a “less siloed” approach. The proposed workgroups would focus on (a) health IT strategic planning; (b) advanced health models and Meaningful Use; (c) health IT implementation, usability, and safety; and (d) interoperability and health information exchange.

Reader Comments

From Jeff: “Re: Medicare reimbursement data. If you use the New York Times tool, it becomes very, very easy to look up your local docs and their payouts.” CMS released Medicare payment data on Wednesday on 880,000 providers who collectively received $77 billion in Medicare payments in 2012. I struggled to manipulate the data using Excel, but it took me just seconds to look up details on all my doctors (and a few doctor friends) using the Times tool. While I understand why doctors aren’t happy that the world can now see much of our tax dollars ended up in their individual bank accounts, the potential analytics value of the data is pretty exciting.

From Lincoln: “Re: Medicare reimbursement data. What’s your take, Mr. H?” The government didn’t release the data until forced, so chalk up one for the Freedom of Information Act and the responsible publications that pressed the issue. I agree with Inga that the information is interesting, but I think it will raise more questions than it answers. The public doesn’t realize how screwed up Medicare payments are, so the nuances of payments made to groups, doctors being paid directly for administering drugs, and other quirks are going to sail right over their heads. CMS isn’t known for outstanding customer service, so who’s going to answer that deluge of questions about specific examples that are so easy to find? Probably the high-earning providers themselves, who are getting calls from their local papers looking for a hot story. What will they say about Medicare rules allow a single specialist to crank out enough high-paying procedures to earn many millions vs. primary care guys barely making a living – it’s better than fraud, but brings up the whole value question that CMS encourages by paying heavily for procedure medicine. I’m also annoyed at the CMS insinuation that citizens should help them fight fraud –  why don’t some of their bureaucrats who understand the rules and are paid to enforce them look at the information themselves and realize that paying some doctor $20 million in a single year might be cause for concern instead of waiting for amateur SAS jockeys to point that out? Our “pay and chase” system is great for providers and great for hiding government inefficiency that would manifest itself as infinitely delayed payments, but it’s not so great for taxpayers. Patients don’t even know what is being billed and paid on their behalf and checks and balances are non-existent. The great thing about releasing this information is that everybody should be embarrassed at the sorry state and high cost of government-funded healthcare, especially the politicians who let it happen.

From CIO D: “Re: eating your own dog food. Here’s our policy on PC lockdowns. If the PC is used predominately by one person (i.e. that’s Joe’s Computer) it is NOT locked down. If the PC is used publicly by many people (i.e. at a nurse station or in a patient room) it is locked down. I think that’s a fair way to handle it.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A few highlights from HIStalk Practice this week include: satisfaction is climbing among primary care EHR primary care users that implemented their system more than two years ago, according Black Book Rankings. Why I found  a Huffington Post article on patient etiquette offensive. CVS wants MinuteClinic to complement and support the broader healthcare landscape. The PQRS and e-Rx program saw sharp increases in physician participation in 2012. CMS offers a Stage 2 MU Attestation Calculator to assess readiness. Independence Blue Cross and DaVita launch a new healthcare business model aimed at reducing care costs. Securing a new-patient appointment is easier for individuals with private insurance. Culbert Healthcare Solutions’ Brad Boyd discusses three factors for success in using informatics. Thanks for reading.

This week on HIStalk Connect: Dr. Travis discusses CRM for healthcare and the shift within emerging healthcare startups to focus on technology that enhances the doctor-patient relationship rather than building patient engagement apps. HIStalk Connect’s Q1 Digital Research Recap highlights some positive findings across telehealth, patient portals, and EHR-driven outcomes research. Scanadu halts shipments on its Indiegogo-backed, tricorder-like Scanadu Scout.

Upcoming Webinars

April 16 (Wednesday) 11:00 a.m. ET. Panel Discussion: Documents, EMRs, and Healthcare Processes. Sponsored by Levi, Ray & Shoup. Presenters: Charles Harris, senior technical lead, Duke University Health System; Ron Peel, technical advisor, LRS; and John Howerter, SVP of enterprise output management, LRS. IT department in hospitals implementing EMRs often overlook the role of document-driven workflows. Prescriptions, specimen labels, and discharge orders, and other critical documents must be reliably delivered with minimal impact on IT and clinical staff. This panel discussion will discuss the evolving use of documents in the “paperless/less-paper” environment.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Minneapolis-based Healthcare Engagement Solutions, which offers physician collaboration tools, closes a $550,000 angel investment.

Drchrono secures $2.69 million in convertible debt funding, bringing the company’s total to $6.77 million.

Sales

Enclara Health will implement CoverMyMeds to automate prior authorizations in its hospice pharmacies.

Lakeland Regional Health Systems (FL) will expand its use of Allscripts ambulatory EHR and PM, use the company’s managed services, and implement its Payerpath financial management software.

Capital Regional Medical Center (MO) selects Patientco as its patient payment automation solution.

Health information organization SacValley MedShare (CA) selects ICA as its HIE vendor.

Deaconess Health System will integrate its network with Availity for clearinghouse and RCM services at five of its southern Indiana hospitals, 20 primary care clinics, and several specialty facilities.

The Greater Houston Healthconnect selects DICOM Grid to electronically deliver medical images to area hospitals and physicians at the point-of-care.

Bay Area Medical Center (WI) signs a  three-year agreement with Zix Corporation for email encryption.

People

Kareo names Tom Patterson (Teletrac) CFO.

Nextech hires Rhonda Russell (McKesson) as COO.

Carl Byers (Fidelity Biosciences) joins the board of Cureatr.

IMedicor promotes Srini Vasan from SVP of technology to CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

Dignity Health, Box, and The Social+Capital Partnership name WelVU the winner of their developer challenge for personalized patient engagement solutions. WelVU, which allows providers to create customized educational videos during appointments, received a $100,000 convertible note and one-month office space and mentoring.

New Jersey Health Commissioner Mary E. O’Dowd announces the launch of the New Jersey HIN, which connects six regional health information organizations and 9,000 providers.

Wesley Medical Center (KS) adds Lincor’s LINC Technology platform for patient engagement and entertainment to newly updated patient rooms.

Government and Politics

ONC renews its Cooperative Agreement with DirectTrust, a non-profit trade alliance that promotes secure HIE via Direct Protocol.

Technology

The folks at Vonlay remind Epic users that while the Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability doesn’t affect MyChart or EpicCare Link because Microsoft’s IIS isn’f affected, the non-Epic parts of the setup might be, such as the load balancer. Web servers can be checked here, assuming the guy who developed the page knows what he’s doing.

Other

An Institute of Medicine report recommends including information about patients’ social influences and behavioral habits in their EHRs to improve outcomes and advance public health research efforts.

HHS OIG reverses a 2011 advisory opinion that had allowed athenahealth to charge $1 to providers not on the athena network for processing their test orders, saying the arrangement could violate anti-kickback statutes. The termination means that athena can no longer discriminate between in-network and out-of-network providers and will therefore charge $1 for all orders. Athenahealth calls the reversal a “setback” for sustainable HIE.

Third-party ACO vendors outperform EMR vendors when it comes to meeting the needs of physician-led ACOs, according to KLAS. Epic and eClinicalWorks earned the top scores among EMR vendors in meeting physician needs.

Researchers at the UK’s Birmingham Women’s Hospital find that doctors save an hour per day using a tablet vs. paper.

I never cease to be amazed by physicians who totally ignore the business side of their practices. Case in point: a Pennsylvania woman, whose job duties included making bank deposits for her physician employers, is charged with stealing $106,000 over a six-year period, the time it took for anyone to notice that the deposits didn’t match collections.

Weird News Andy might have been predictable in titling this story “Nothing to sneeze at.” An MIT study finds that cough and sneeze droplets may travel up to 200 times further than previously thought, which should be comforting to think about when you hear that guy hacking up a lung 10 rows back on the plane.

Sponsor Updates

• Visage Imaging announces Version 7.1.5 of its Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform.
• CCHIT certifies NextGen Emergency Department Solution version 6.0 as a ONC 2014 Edition criteria EHR module.
• HCI Group launches the HCIsustain service line to provide long-term EHR support.
• Greenway Health partners with TrustHCS to assist PrimeSUITE users with their ICD-10 preparation and transition.
• InterSystems will showcase its healthcare solutions and technology at the Ministry of Health and HIMSS Middle East Conference next week in Saudi Arabia.
• T-System CMIO Robert Hitchcock, MD is re-elected to the Emergency Department Practice Management Association board.
• Coastal Healthcare Consulting selects Divide to build its BYOD program.
• Holon is participating in this week’s Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals Annual Conference & Trade Show in Dallas.
• Elsevier Clinical Decision Support posts two short, fun videos explaining how InOrder sets improve quality of care.
• MaineGeneral Health equips its newly-opened Alfond Center for Health with Versus RTLS and seven Versus applications.
• Coastal Healthcare Consulting offers a case study highlighting their data extraction project with Nebraska Medical Center.
• Marla Simmet, executive consultant for Beacon Partners, shares tips for surviving a MU audit on the company’s blog.
• Perceptive Software introduces Content 7, the latest version of Perceptive’s enterprise content management technology.
• UNC Charlotte and Premier partner to develop tools aimed at helping providers improve population health.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

The hot news in the physician lounge (and in the elevator, the parking garage, and the locker room) this week was the publication of the Medicare physician payment data. Most of the websites I looked at played up the sensational aspect – the 344 physicians who received more than $3 million in payments in 2012. The AMA and other organizations have tried to block access to the data, citing physician privacy concerns and the potential for inaccurate information. Patient advocacy and consumer groups argue that the data will help the public identify providers who provide quality, cost-effective care.

I looked at the data in a couple of different formats:

• The data files directly available from CMS
• The New York Times site
• The Wall Street Journal site

I searched not only for myself in the database, but several of my friends and quite a few physicians who make me crazy at work. Just from eyeballing, I can see that there may be issues with the data. My OB/GYN BFF was cited as receiving barely more than $1,000 from Medicare – 18 breast exams and 15 pap smears. I’ve seen her data in our billing system and she saw (and was paid for) many more Medicare procedures in 2012 including hysterectomies, endometrial biopsies, and more. She doesn’t participate in Medicare Advantage plans, so I’m not sure why there are amounts missing.

In my opinion, the Wall Street Journal site had the best explanation about the data and what it does or does not represent. In short:

• It may not present the full picture about a physician’s practice and its revenue
• The complexity and similarity of CPT codes make it hard to compare physicians
• Physicians may have been paid for others working under their supervision
• Physicians caring for complex patients may be paid more
• It doesn’t include Medicare Advantage payments or procedures that a physician performed on 10 or fewer patients, nor does it include payments for services billed under an employer’s provider number
• Physicians who bill for imaging or other high-overhead services may receive higher payments
• Medicare payments are different across the country

The New York Times site had an explanation about the source data, but it wasn’t nearly that comprehensive. One CMS administrator was quoted as saying, “We want the public to help identify spending that doesn’t make sense.” I’m not sure how providing the data as it currently exists would help the general public decide whether it makes sense or not.

The payments also include reimbursements for drugs – from flu shots to high-dollar chemotherapy agents. Depending on the specialty and type of drug, the physician may be receiving anywhere from less than the cost of the drug to a significant markup or even rebates.

Major institutions including the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, and the University of Michigan Health Systems issued statements explaining how some of their physicians are compensated. Many are employed physicians. Others may be part of project such as the Michigan Primary Care Transformation demonstration project, where the director was tagged for more than $7.5 million in payments for 207,000 patients cared for by 1,600 physicians.

Given the nature of the data released, I don’t see how anyone could extrapolate quality of care or cost effectiveness. I would be concerned, though, if my physician was an outlier among those in the same area or specialty. Looking at one of the physicians who makes me crazy at work, he received more than four times the amount of payments of some of his colleagues. I know that he sees an insane amount of patients, works 12-14 hours a day six days a week, and is essentially a robot. His patients know he’s a robot because he refuses to address more than one patient concern in a single visit. Knowing those facts, maybe his numbers make sense.

If you’re a physician, did you look at your own data? Did you look at that of your peers? If you’re in IT like me, did you check out the physicians based on whether they are naughty or nice? What’s your take on the data? Email me.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis, Lorre.

More news, HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Morning Headlines 4/10/14

DeSalvo proposes new direction for ONC

Speaking at a Health Information Policy Committee on Tuesday, Karen DeSalvo, MD, proposed dismantling the ONC’s existing HIT workgroups and forming new ones that would address: HIT strategic planning; Advanced health models and meaningful use; HIT implementation, usability and safety; and Interoperability and health information exchange. Paul Tang, vice-chair of the HITPC said, "This is a nice step-back point. Now that we’ve finished wrapping up our comments and advice on Stage 3, we will begin to look a lot toward how are we getting the value from meaningful use.”

Final Notice of Termination of OIG Advisory Opinion No. 11-18

The HHS’s Office of Inspector General has reversed its 2011 decision on the Federal anti-kickback statute as it applies to transmitting patient referrals through an unnamed ambulatory EHR vendor’s "trading partner" network. The OIG originally approved of the network, but has since decided that it creates a situation in which transaction fees may be financially influencing referral decisions.

Lincoln Health Center request gives county pause

In North Carolina, Lincoln Community Health Center is looking to local county commissioners to pick up half of the $2 million it will cost to implement Duke University’s Epic system. The county thinks that Duke, which is paying the other half, should be on the hook for more.