Morning Headlines 10/21/13

The sad state of EMRs: How they are doing more harm than good

Val Jones, MD, a blogger and advocate for digital health, writes that EHRs have come to the point that they are doing more harm than good. She cites the “enormous time suck” that charting into an EHR has caused for physicians.

CMS planned for paper processing before Obamacare launch

Just days before the launch of Healthcare.gov, CMS extended its contract with UK-based Serco, who had been managing its paper insurance application process, leading many to speculate that CMS knew the insurance exchange enrollment site was going to fail.

Medical Identity Theft: Recommendations for the Age of Electronic Medical Records

The California Attorney General’s office publishes a report on medical identity theft and recommendations for health systems in the age of EHRs, adding that nearly half of medical identity theft cases are actually incidents in which someone loans their insurance card to an uninsured friend or relative to obtain treatment under their insurance.

AMC and VUmc conclude contract with Epic for new joint EPD

Two Amsterdam hospitals, American Medical Center and VUmc, sign up to implement Epic.

Monday Morning Update 10/21/13

From Across the Pond: “Re: Epic. Two large academic hospitals in Amsterdam, AMC and VUmc in The Netherlands, signed a contract with Epic last week.” Academic Medical Center has 7,000 employees, 2,300 medical students, 120 medical informatics students, and an annual volume of 26,000 admissions and 350,000 outpatient visits . VUmc, which cooperates closely with AMC, is affiliated with the other big university in Amsterdam. Wikipedia says The Netherlands has eight university medical centers and 10 large non-university hospitals.

From Jane Jetson: “Re: Weight Watchers. I received an email this morning owning to the fact that they had technical problems. Perhaps I should forward to Kathleen Sebelius so that Healthcare.gov could borrow the wording.” The problem with the government is that nobody is ever individually responsible for anything; the incompetence is collective. It would be unheard of to acknowledge that something isn’t working except for political gain, or to accept responsibility for anything but success. All of the professional bureaucrats are busy trying to hang onto jobs that must be pretty sweet given their ducking and covering to keep them.

From Kittanning: “Re: startups. Why don’t you cover more startups? That’s where the innovation will come from.” I cover startups that have interesting consumer-facing technology, but rarely those who are targeting hospitals. Reason: most of them think their great technology idea will offset the founders’ lack of knowledge (and lack of interest) about how hospitals and doctors work and who just want to cash in quickly rather than helping patients or providers. Newbies can’t come in guns blazing telling everyone in healthcare that they’ve figured it all out as a 30-year-old programmer turned self-proclaimed CEO, insulting those who have more years in healthcare than they’ve had breathing, and nobody in a position of enterprise IT responsibility is going to be impressed by swaggering overconfidence from unpolished newcomers who think they’re the next Steve Jobs just because they are as abrasive as he was. I’ve seen very few great startup ideas that have the potential to turn into anything more than a spare bedroom business, and of those, only a tiny percentage are being run by people on whom you’d make even a small bet as a customer or investor. Creating enterprise technology innovation, unlike writing cute iPhone apps, requires a lot more than a Foosball table and cases of Red Bull. I’ve seen company pitches, most of them naive and unskillfully prepared, and the commonalities are: (a) lack of money and of a realistic plan for profitability that will allow ever bringing their product to scale; (b) a low barrier to entry that virtually guarantees that any degree of success can quickly be replicated by competitors; (c) lack of realization that it takes a lot of skill, money, and time to connect your great idea to hospitals even willing to undertake a pilot, much less buy the product, and the lack of appreciation of just how long the hospital sales cycle is and how imitative their purchases are; (d) having no one on the team who has ever sold technology to hospitals or partnered with similar firms; and (e) lack of understanding that people bet on the jockey, not on the horse, and impressive developers usually don’t make impressive CEOs regardless of their level of hubris. Great ideas are  a dime a dozen; the hard work is the long, expensive slog trying to get traction with them, and if you are new to healthcare selling a product whose target customer is hospitals, it’s a near-certainty that you’re going to justifiably fail, with your only hope that a better company will buy yours before it splats to the ground. That’s not anti-innovation at work – it’s the reality that healthcare attracts a lot of flaky, poorly thought out startups that don’t deserve to succeed. Come back when you hit $1 million in annual revenue.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Omate watch. Another watch, funded through Kickstarter, is now available for purchase starting at $249. The Omate TrueSmart Watch can be used as a phone with its Bluetooth capability while still being fully functional without the phone. This no-hands phone style of watch will surely be used in healthcare settings.”

From Expense Reports Gone Wild: “Re: consultants. I continue to get bothered by the number of submissions on the bills of consultants for coffee, snacks, lunch, dinner, beverages, protein bars, etc. Why is it that we as a customer are expected pay for all this sustenance? Is the $200+ hour not enough? I am fine with paying for folks to get from home to the location, but why has there been this tradition of paying for other than travel? I think it is time to begin to object to these costs. If we are going to be part of saving health care we can’t continue to exacerbate the issue with rampant unnecessary spending. I have heard all the arguments around inconvenience of travel and this to make up for that but then let the employer of that person eat the cost. The per diem fee doesn’t fly either — when I go to work, I have to pay for my food, just because work means getting on a plane doesn’t excuse one from that obligation. Convince me I am misguided.” I agree, but taking the counterpoint as a consultant might, I could make the same argument for buying $500K hospital CIOs cars, club memberships, travel of a questionably patient-valuable nature, and bonuses for doing the job they were already paid to do. I think the conclusion is that everybody gets to pass the literal buck down to the patient bill, and only recently did big hospitals worry about their inability to create enough charges to pass through the excessive costs.

The problems with Healthcare.gov are either due to (a) screwed-up government software bidding and contractor oversight , or (b) not unexpected for a rollout of that scope, say most poll respondents. New poll to your right: is the influence of private equity firms on healthcare IT positive or negative? Your answer doesn’t provide any context, so after you’ve voted, click the Comments link to explain.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Sentry Data Systems, which offers hospital pharmacy procurement, revenue cycle, and compliance solutions. Sentinel RCM manages financials, inventory, charge master, auditing, and order flow, allowing them to track drugs from the point of purchase all the way to billing. Sentrex helps hospitals manage their 340B contract pharmacy relationships to maintain compliance by using a proprietary rules-based engine to apply hospital policies and procedures, supporting both 340B and Own Use programs. These products run on the Datanex infrastructure platform that processes millions of transactions each day. Hospitals running a 340B drug program need specialized technology to avoid running afoul of a maze of regulatory and auditing challenges and Sentry is the company to call. Thanks to Sentry Data Systems for supporting HIStalk.

I cruised YouTube for more on Sentry Data Systems and found this pharmacy director testimonial.

AtHoc is a brand new HIStalk Gold Sponsor. Over 200 hospitals rely on AtHoc for critical communication and personnel safety, turning their IP network into a closed-loop, multi-modal notification and communication system. Examples: protecting home health nurses with a smartphone duress/panic button, communicating with clinicians during IT downtime, and automating shift availability and filling processes. Above is a video on Kaiser Permanente’s use of AtHoc for staffing. Thanks to AtHoc for supporting HIStalk.

Athenahealth turned in unimpressive numbers that fell short of expectations Thursday, some but not all of them related to its Epocrates acquisition, but that didn’t stop shares from going on a tear after the announcement. ATHN hit an all-time high Friday and closed up 24 percent on the day at $130.83, valuing the company at almost $5 billion. Investors apparently ignored the financial results and instead were encouraged by a growing client base and an extended contract with PSS World that will put more salespeople on the ground pushing athenahealth offerings. Above is the one-year chart of ATHN (blue) vs. the Nasdaq (red). Jonathan Bush holds $40 million worth. From the earnings call, which is always informative whether you care about ATHN or not because Bush is willing to say what others won’t:

• One large client, an ambulance company that was never named at that company’s request (but had to be Rural/Metro), went bankrupt even before going to pilot with athenahealth and “new leadership fired us.”
• Like everybody else, athenahealth talks about population health a lot.
• The company will roll out athenaKnowledge in 2014, which will provide financial and clinical decision support to physicians.
• AthenaClinicals  can automatically make a note in the chart when patient prescriptions are filled, although so far that works in only about 23 percent of orders.
• AthenaClinicals users who also use athenaCoordinator can exchange patient information via athenaNet with no additional interfaces or exchanges.
• When asked whether athenahealth would gain or lose hospital business through consolidation, Bush replied, “I don’t know, dude. I assume we’ll win. I mean — the for-profit sector is where most of these mergers are going on that you’re talking about, and it’s a very rational sector. Most of the headwind we face in the enterprise world is with institutions who don’t view their bottom line as all that important. And their reputation as the bringer of great new physicians into the world and their reputation as the provider of procedures that no one else can provide, trump their abilities, their interest in asset efficiency. Now as we’ve said in past calls, we believe that asset efficiency is going to rise in appeal to even the most theoretical of academic medical centers as the pressure builds.”
• According to Bush, “At some point, the idea of information being liquid across people who don’t own each other is a major trump card when you think of this tragic lemming march of acquisitions, doctors and hospitals marrying up in marriages of convenience, nothing wrong with doctors and hospitals marrying up in marriages of love, but this wave of kind of moony, large-scale marriages of convenience just to get information integrated when there is another way, to me, it’s sort of a profound megatrend to watch.”
• When asked about hospitals using athenahealth products to control physician behavior, Bush said, “Well, I’ll tell you every proposal to a new enterprise today include a Google Map of all of the doctors that have admitting privileges at their institutions that are already on athenaNet. And those Google Maps are getting more and more dotty, lots and lots of little dots around their blue H. And the fact that now we don’t say we can direct, but we say, ‘Listen, hospital, do you want to — speaking of manifestos, do you want to get compliance via force or do you want to get compliance via love?’ … be the most high-quality, easy-to-do business with receiver of patient referrals. Be big and successful and survive this drought that’s coming by being the best, and that means being the most integrated, the most available … we don’t even need the tipping point for that, right? We could just show up and say, hey, you’re going to do a go-to-market strategy with your subsidized EMR the way poor Long Island Jewish did with Allscripts banging away, giving it away at red lights, trying to get the windshield wiper guys to give it away. Here, you got thousands of doctors paying for it, wanting it, and all you’ve got to do is light up your logo inside of the order screen.
• On selling athenaClinicals to customers who already have an EMR, “I know the last time I looked, it was 40 percent of our clinical sales today were people throwing one out … you have a huge wave of folks who looked, went out and jammed the EMR thing because Obama told them to, and then they got to Meaningful Use day and they got nothing … Used properly, they’ll get you Meaningful Use. But doctors are not supposed to be using them properly. All they’re supposed to be doing is seeing patients … Nobody wants to go back to their Board of Directors or their Board of Doctor Owners and say, ‘Yes, so sorry but I convinced you spend thousands and at times, millions of dollars on something that I really want to throw out now.’ But it is what it is. It’s a cash-on-cash no brainer. You just have to go through the embarrassment.”

John Lynn did an ICD-10 Hangout on EMR & EHR Videos.

GE reports Q3 numbers: revenue down 1.5 percent, adjusted EPS $0.31 vs. $0.33, but train and plane sales along with aggressive cost-cutting helped the company exceed Wall Street’s expectations, sending shares to a five-year high. GE Healthcare’s sales were flat, but earnings rose 7 percent.

A series of Wisconsin Democratic Party focus group meetings identifies the two favored candidates for governor, one of whom is Judy Faulkner of Epic. The strengths the groups favored were a wealthy, politically outsider woman not from Dane or Milwaukee Counties with name recognition who hates everything about Republican Governor Scott Walker.  I don’t think I’d take the results too seriously since they seemed to favor celebrity status over political qualifications – the group’s other choice was just-retired Green Bay Packer and “Dancing with the Stars” winner Donald Driver.

Eric Topol, MD isn’t impressed with MD Anderson’s use if IBM’s Watson to undertake a “moon shot” aimed at eliminating cancer. He tweeted, “This ‘Ending Cancer stuff, while a laudable goal, is sending a wrong message to public.” He didn’t explain, but I assume he meant that cancer isn’t one disease and the likelihood of eliminating it, with or without Watson, is nearly nil. Prevention is more important than treatment, I conclude, but if MD Anderson thinks Watson can help eliminate cancer (or help it market itself to cancer patients, which bring it nearly $4 billion per year in revenue for treating cancer rather than preventing it), then it’s worth a shot, moon-worthy or otherwise, even if it does encourage minimally intellectual Americans to think that anything less than a cure is a failure.

Val Jones, MD (aka blogger Dr. Val) says that despite her previous support of digital data in medicine, EMRs are doing more harm than good. Her reason: data entry is “an enormous time-suck for physicians” that harms thoughtful interaction with patients that would allow a correct diagnosis and sensible treatment plan. She doesn’t like correcting offshore transcription, hospitals with large IT departments (“40 young tech support engineers were furiously working to keep the EMR from crashing on a daily basis”), and EMR-required data fields (she called out Allscripts, whose system requires the doctor to indicate for every discharge prescription whether the medication comes in a tablet or capsule, which the system knows full well but which has to be entered again to allow the inpatient EMR to accept the information). I think she might have aimed her wrath more precisely at the one hospital at which she apparently had a bad experience since what she describes is certainly not universal, but certainly some hospitals are exactly as she describes.

Peace River Center, a Florida non-profit psychiatric agency, is awarded a $30,000 United Way of Central Florida grant to implement technology that will allow its home case workers and clinicians to remotely connect to its EMR.

In Canada, Victoria County Memorial Hospital loses its telephone service and Internet connectivity when a construction vehicle severs cables, causing the hospital to cancel walk-in diagnostic and lab services.

Twitter’s just-announced November IPO may be tarnished by “Twitter quitters,” those who try the service but abandon it because they can’t figure it out or don’t find value in it. A new poll shows that 36 percent of those who sign up for Twitter don’t use it and 7 percent close their accounts, much worse numbers than for Facebook. According to an active Facebook user who stopped using Twitter, "I didn’t really get the point of it at all. Most of them were people I wasn’t interested in hearing what they had to say anyway.” Twitter is big, but then again so were Second Life and Myspace.

Madison, WI-based 11-employee Wellbe raises $1.4 million in funding. The company’s Patient Guidance System, which it describes as a GPS for health, sends patients emails and information before and after their surgeries.

HHS gave UK-based government contractor Serco, under investigation there for contract fraud, an $87 million contract extension to its existing $114 million CMS contract to handle paper insurance applications just five days before the launch of Healthcare.gov, leading to speculation that the government knew Healthcare.gov was going to fail and paid Serco to handle the inevitable flood of paper-based insurance applications. However, CMS suggests that the Congressional Budget Office had estimated that 20 million people would apply, with 6 million of those doing so on paper, and the 2,000 people Serco hired were necessary to process the paper applications. HHS gave Serco a $1.2 billion contract in July to manage paper insurance applications for 34 state insurance exchanges in its first-ever US healthcare project. The parent company has annual revenue of around $8 billion. Serco took over NHS’s largest hospital pathology laboratories in 2009 in a privatization joint venture worth $1.3 billion over 10 years and was involved in a series of admitted serious patient errors, including losing samples, incorrect computer flagging resulting in administration of inappropriate blood, a software problem that calculated kidney function incorrectly, and a section of blood chemistry equipment that had to be shut down for four days after a computer virus infection. The 1,000-employee JV, called GSTS Pathology, couldn’t control its costs, had to borrow money from the hospitals to continue its operations, and announced that it would need to pull out of certain markets. GSTS Pathology continues to bid on new UK business, hoping to capture 30 percent of the pathology market.

California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris issues “Medical Identity Theft – Recommendations for the Age of Electronic Medical Records.” It cites a recent report stating that nearly half of medical identify theft isn’t really that at all – it occurs when someone with insurance loans their card to someone who doesn’t have insurance. EHR-specific recommendations include:

• Implement role-based access controls.
• Embed a copy of a patient’s photo (but not a government-issued ID) into the EMR.
• Give patients clear instructions on how to get a copy of their information.
• Give patients a copy of Clinical Care Summary documents asking them to verify the information but warning them keep it confidential.
• Set up the EMR to flag suspicious issues (known a “red flags”), such as a patient refusing to show an ID (other than in the ED); presenting an ID whose photo doesn’t match their appearance; presenting an ID with a name or address that doesn’t match the EMR information; giving a Social Security number, address, or telephone number that is already assigned to another patient;  receiving returned, undeliverable mail from the patient’s address; receiving previous denial of payment for situations such as a second appendix removal; bills returned as undeliverable while new charges continue under that same address; patient interview information is inconsistent with the EMR information; observing that a patient is not aware of the information in their record; and finding information in the EMR that conflicts with other information or with the patient’s presentation.
• Develop a process for instantly reporting any of the red flags above to a team that will review all available records and place affected accounts on hold, looking for problems such as erroneous data entry or inappropriate medical records merge.
• Document findings and policies in the EHR where it can be seen.
• Create a database of identities that have been used fraudulently.
• Add a message to the patient portal encouraging patients to review their records regularly, also giving them instructions on how to report discrepancies.
• Audit EHRs for unauthorized access.
• Build demand for provider detection software, which the report says is offered by only a handful of unnamed vendors whose applications are too expensive for all but the largest health systems.
• Correct records as needed, either annotating them or moving them to a specific “medical identify theft” location and then starting a new record.
• Use the Continuity of Care Document to electronically notify business associates and other providers that the record has been corrected.
• Follow HIE rules for correcting information.
• Encourage development of technical standards that would allow Health Information Organizations to exchange red flag information, such as modifying the MPI to indicate the addition of a red flag by a member.
• ONC should include red flag recommendations in Meaningful Use Stage 3.

Weird News Andy titles this story GIGO, wondering, “Who, if anybody, tested this thing?” (answer: government contractors). Not only is Healthcare.gov failing to allow most would-be users to get into the system, it’s also sending erroneous data to insurance companies from those who do. Duplicate enrollments, spouses listed as children, and missing data have been reported.

WNA also files these reports from his Weird Newsroom. Doctors are unable to determine why a Tennessee man has been crying blood for seven years, an unnerving trait that has cost him every job he has held. A Denver woman whose arm was unnecessarily removed after an incorrect cancer diagnosis tries out a robotic arm, but her rare underlying condition remains – any bruise she gets turns to bone, which is gradually transforming her into a human statue who knows she will be fully immobile soon.

A hospital sues one of its patients who refuses to leave because she likes her bed there. The patient was discharged after a four-day stay for pneumonia, but intentionally had her state-provided hospital bed removed from her home so that she could argue that her discharge was unsafe. The hospital says the patient is abusive to staff and fellow patients, complains if her room is at any temperature other than 83 degrees, and repeatedly calls the police department, public health department, and the attorney general to complain about her stay. The hospital wants a temporary injunction to send her packing.

Vince continues his fascinating HIS-tory of McKesson, specifically HBO, with information he received directly from Walter Huff himself. It’s fascinating to read how many early HIT pioneers were hospital CFOs who did programming or other computer work for their hospitals, and how many vendor systems came out of those hospitals.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Time Capsule: My Can’t-Miss Entrepreneurial Brainstorm: Display Computer Data in the Handwriting of the Person Who Entered It

I wrote weekly editorials for a boutique industry newsletter for several years, anxious for both audience and income. I learned a lot about coming up with ideas for the weekly grind, trying to be simultaneously opinionated and entertaining in a few hundred words, and not sleeping much because I was working all the time. They’re fun to read as a look back at what was important then (and often still important now).

I wrote this piece in October 2009.

My Can’t-Miss Entrepreneurial Brainstorm: Display Computer Data in the Handwriting of the Person Who Entered It
By Mr. HIStalk

I don’t want to brag, but I’m a business genius, one of your classic serial entrepreneurs who is so full of hot ideas that I haven’t found the time to stop working as a hospital wage slave. Each idea is so much better than the one before it that I can’t decide on the best one to pursue, so I’m continuing my decades-long preparation of reading Forbes and MSN from the catbird’s seat, located deep in the bowels of an academic medical center.

(One of these days, maybe when I retire, the world will be shocked and awed by the torrent of pent-up business expertise that I’ll unleash, even more so since I’ve never actually been in business except for a short stint as a paperboy back before Craigslist drove all the newspapers out of business.)

You will no doubt value my latest brainstorm appropriately – healthcare IT data elements displayed in a font created from the handwriting of the person who entered the data. Boo-yah and ca-ching!

Everything needs a serious-sounding name for the newly created genre, like “social networking” (or “social not-working.”) I like to call this “Reverse Handwriting Optical Recognition” (RHOR) or “Character Recognition and Proxy Personalization” (CRAPP). You are hereby non-disclosed.

They say every successful product has to solve a customer’s problem (I’ll believe that when someone explains what purpose the TV show “The Bachelor” serves). So, here’s the one I’ve targeted: clearly wrong information looks believable when you see it on a computer screen or printed report.

My inspiration is the news that Cedars-Sinai overdosed CT scan patients for 18 months because none of the techs noticed that the screen defaults were wrong.

Hospital people usually seem blithely unconcerned when presented with hilariously incorrect computer information, like a pregnant male patient or an ED bill for $12 million. The neat and orderly computer output throws off their radar in the absence of a visual cue that would identify the blithering idiot who entered the information in the first place.

Here’s my technical architecture design. Each user’s security profile will include a handwriting sample that has been scanned to a font. When the computer displays or prints something entered by that person, it does so in their own handwriting.

Brilliant, right? The bad information won’t be so reassuring if it’s displayed in a child-like scrawl or a breezy note punctuated with that smiley thing that tip-seeking waitresses draw on your check. Your radar would say, "I don’t trust a thing that fool says."

Skeptics or cynical venture capitalists might ask me, "What about information that the computer creates, like drug schedules or co-pay amount?" I smirk knowingly as only a world-weary entrepreneur can do. Computers, although good at idiot savant tasks like spitting out lists or calling up historical information, are the dumbest pseudo-people in the room. I’ll display their primitive conclusions in the sloppy scrawl of a 14-year-old who was raised with a keyboard instead of a pen, or maybe as indecipherable teen-like text messages saying something like UR PT IS DED ROTFL .

No longer will doctors and nurses place undue confidence in information just because it looks official. Those worthless clinical observations entered by a co-worker you wouldn’t trust with your drive-through order? Visual elimination made easy by Mr. CRAPP (send me that royalty payment, please, Cedars).

Darn, now I’m getting one of those serial entrepreneur brainstorms that may cause me to skip CRAPP and just go on to CRAPP 2.0. We write an add-on software application that lets users rate each data element for accuracy and usefulness. If someone’s a real bonehead, you answer "Did you find this data element useful?" with “no.” If someone enters an incorrect allergy or creates a duplicate medical record that has to be merged later, you rate them low. When enough people do the same, the user gets anonymous feedback of scorn and ridicule.

I don’t watch “The Bachelor” or other reality TV (except “Shark Tank” and my fellow high-flying capitalists), but I’ve heard of a concept that I might use in CRAPP 2.0. If you enter enough bad information, your co-workers might vote you out of a job.

Morning Headlines 10/18/13

Sebelius Stands Firm Despite Calls to Resign

Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius is refusing calls for her resignation after the failed launch of Healthcare.gov.

athenahealth, Inc : athenahealth, Inc. Reports Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2013 Results

Athenahealth reports Q3 results: revenue jumped to $151 million, up 43 percent from $105 million during Q3 2012. Epocrates accounted for $13 million of that total.

St. Luke’s expects to spend $200 million on electronic records system

Nine-facility St. Luke’s Health System will spend $200 million implementing Epic across all of its hospitals and clinics. The system is expected to be live across the network sometime after 2017.

HIMSS Analytics Essentials: Virtualization Software and Dictation with Speech Recognition Applications Positioned for Aggressive

Data visualization and speech recognition applications are predicted to see a surge in sales according to a recent HIMSS Analytics report.

News 10/18/13

Top News

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is reported to have no intention of quitting after Republican criticism of the Healthcare.gov online insurance exchange debacle. Sebelius has acknowledged the problems, but says fixes are being put in place and those who were unable to sign up should try again. Success rates for those attempting to enroll were less than 20 percent the week of its rollout on October 1 and under 13 percent the second week, although one researcher says fewer than 1 percent of those who tried to register were successful. Another report finds that the cost for the system ballooned from the original estimate of $94 million to $292 million, with those payments going to the US federal government division of Canada-based CGI. Other estimates peg the total cost of Healthcare.gov to be more than $500 million.

Reader Comments

From Dr. Travis: “Re: Color me pink. Breast cancer awareness month has jumped the shark this year.” Travis tells me he likes the innuendo of this poster’s message, which I believe was from the Twisted Taco restaurant in the Atlanta area. Thanks for the reminder to support breast cancer research, get screened regularly, and/or encourage your loved ones to be screened.

From Reader One: “Re: from a vendor-specific forum today. ‘We inadvertently assigned 5,000 accounts to a bad debt agency. Is there a way to mass cancel?’ Now that’s what I call exciting.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Boston Software Systems. The company offers an error-free workflow automation platform that allows its healthcare customers and business partners to streamline their business processes and improve productivity. Boston WorkStation lets IT departments efficiently solve problems and eliminate performance gaps in existing IT systems – integrating third-party registrations, performing eligibility checks, integrating lab results, posting payments and collections notes, performing mass updates, creating backup databases, running and distributing reports, and managing dictionaries and tables. Existing systems can be enhanced by creating new business rules and workflows and providing real-time access to external applications. IT departments love Swiss Army knife-type solutions that be used to enhance systems without vendor involvement or ongoing labor requirements, such as the hospital that’s saving 125 hours per month using Boston WorkStation to automatically create a pre-registration account at the time of scheduling or another that saves $500K by automating their materials management system to load inventory purchases and manage price updates. The company also offers Cognauto, the next-generation automation platform. The company’s products are used by over 2,500 hospital customers running many IT systems. Thanks to Boston Software Systems for supporting HIStalk and for issuing a very cool press release announcing that fact.

 
 
Thanks to Bonny and Catherine from Aventura, self-proclaimed “HIStalk minions” who volunteered to report from the American College of Emergency Physicians Scientific Assembly (ACEP13) in Seattle this week. They conducted some ED doc interviews about IT that I’ll have up later, but here are some of Bonny’s observations:

• The topic of scribes performing EMR data entry split the group, with some ED physicians expressing satisfaction in offloading tasks to what is often a pre-med student, but others feel guilty about making scribes do what some would say is their work.
• The best-of breed EDIS vendors were there (Picis, T-System, MEDHOST) as were the big enterprise vendors with EDIS, with Epic notably being MIA.
• Education and discharge instructions vendors (Discharge 1-2-3, Elsevier ExitCare, Krames) were exhibiting.
• Bonny says MEDHOST stole the show with a patient throughput solution that pushes preemptive communication about patients from the ED or OR, such as when a patient is likely to be admitted but whose emergency care is still underway. It also offers real-time and forecasted financial operational metrics for executives.
• ACEP rented out the Space Needle, the Chihuly Museum, and the Experience Music Project for attendee events.
• In the all-important vendor swag category, Bonny lauds Interactive Health Massage Chairs, whose booth was across from Aventura’s such that Bonny and Catherine could perform their own first-hand research as well as watch attendees shed their stress and exit happy. Check out the photo above – who wouldn’t want to have a chair massage while covered lightly with a blanket right on the show floor?

Highlights from HIStalk Practice this week include: a local paper profiles two physicians with opposing views on EMRs. CMS pushes a PQRS reporting deadline back three days. A vendor speaks out against shortened exhibit hours at MGMA. Most medical practices are concerned that ACA insurance exchanges will lead to increased collection burdens and lower reimbursements. Epocrates adds a provider directory to help members identify clinicians for consults and referrals. Emdeon will pay its departing CEO $2.4 million over the next two years. Thanks for reading.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Athenahealth announces Q3 results: revenue up 43 percent, adjusted EPS $0.29 vs. $0.30, missing analyst estimates on both.

IVantage Health Analytics acquires Professional Data Services, a provider of managed care analytics and benchmarking solutions for hospitals.

StartUp Health admits 14 new companies to its three-year development program for health technology startups. Lt. Dan profiles the companies on HIStalk Connect.

Medical practice technology vendor Waiting Room Solutions changes its name to WRS Health.

Sales

Medical Services of America (SC) chooses Allscripts Homecare for its 70 home care service locations.

Elmcroft Senior Living (MO) will install Cerner CareTracker at its 85 assisted living facilities.

The 30-bed Aspire Hospital (TX) will implement clinical and financial applications from Healthcare Management Systems and physician documentation from Patient Logic.

The VA and DoD award Systems Made Simple a re-compete of the iEHR system contract for systems integration and engineering support.

Saint Luke’s Health System selects PeriGen’s PeriCALM fetal surveillance system for seven birthing hospitals in northwest Missouri and northeast Kansas.

The VA awards Harris Corporation a $60 million, four-year contract to design, install, and support the wireless infrastructure at 112 VA medical centers.

Riverside Medical Group (VA) selects athenaCollector for billing and practice management for its 300+ physicians.

The Texas Health Services Authority chooses EHNAC to develop a state accreditation program for private and public HIEs operating in Texas.

Texas Health Physicians Group selects StrataJazz from Strata Decision Technology as its integrated financial platform.

St. Luke’s Health System (ID) will implement Epic at a cost of $200 million and will offer Epic ambulatory to independent practices through an affiliate program.  St. Luke’s, defending itself against antitrust claims for its purchase of Salzer Medical Group, says Epic is a superior system that will allow providers to share information with patients and with each other more easily.

People

Northwest Community Healthcare (IL) names Glen Malan (Cadence Health) VP/CIO.

OpenTempo names Jim Crook (IDX) chairman of the board, Walt Marti (GE Healthcare) chief administrative officer, and John Jordan (dbMotion) VP of sales and marketing.

Announcements and Implementations

Quantros releases IRIS 2.4, a configurable dashboard to view overall hospital performance and display trends, distribution, and variations in performance.

Government and Politics

A California state appellate court rules that providers do not necessarily have liability to patients when medical records are stolen or misappropriated unless they are accessed by a third party. The ruling stems from a 2011 incident in which a UCLA Health physician’s laptop containing medical records on 16,000 patients was stolen from his home. The provider could have been liable for up to $16 million as part of the  class action lawsuit, even though there was never any indication the data had been accessed. The suit was dismissed. Rebecca Fayed, associate general counsel and privacy officer at The Advisory Board Company, tells me the ruling only applies to California, which has its own statute governing the disclosure of medical information and allows affected individuals to sue for damages for certain violations. She adds:

Although the ruling would not apply nationwide at the federal level, other states with similar state laws may look to this case for reasoning and may analogize to it even if it has no precedential value in any state other than California.

The ONC Tweeters seem happy to be back at the keyboard after a 16-day furlough.

Innovation and Research

 

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) offers Harvest, an NIH grant-funded open source software toolkit that allows biomedical researchers to explore large data sets, such as those from EHRs and genomic databases. Researchers from CHOP’s Center for Biomedical Informatics are testing Harvest against several data collections, including the Longitudinal Pediatric Data Resource that tracks data from children with conditions detected in newborn screenings.

Technology

Deloitte introduces PopulationMiner, a data analytics solution that draws clinical, financial, and operational data from Intermountain Healthcare’s warehouse to support patient-outcome analysis.

ArborMetrix integrates surgical video analysis capabilities into its reporting and analytics platform, enabling healthcare organizations to improve performance benchmarking of surgeons.

Ninety percent of surveyed nursing home physicians say their use of drug references on mobile devices prevented at least one adverse drug event the month before the survey.

Other

Virtualization software and dictation with speech recognition applications are emerging as top areas for growth potential in hospitals, according to a HIMSS Analytics report on the US hospital IT market. The demand for ambulatory EMRs and ambulatory PACS also appears to be growing.

Joint Commission issues a sentinel alert warning for objects left inside surgery patients, which it says has caused 16 deaths in the past eight years. Most of the recommended actions involve processes and communication, but consideration of “assistive technology” such as RFID-tagged counting systems are also recommended.

In Canada, information on 2,000 patients of Parkwood Hospital is exposed when an unencrypted laptop is stolen from the car of a McKesson Automation employee.

Weird News Andy notes that California’s insurance exchange, Covered California, pulled down its online provider directory just eight days after go-live when the California Medical Association noted that obstetricians were labeled as ophthalmologists and doctors were incorrectly identified as speaking foreign languages. CMA also observed that some doctors were listed as exchange providers who didn’t actually sign up since insurance companies were permitted to add their in-network doctors to the list without their permission unless the doctor specifically opted out.

Staff and patients of Unit 5, the children’s cancer floor of the University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital, create a video titled “Brave.”

Sponsor Updates

• SRSsoft hosts about 300 customers at its User Summit this week in Greenwich, CT.
• Sunquest and the Association for Pathology Informatics will offer an October 24 webinar on the topic of IT-driven virtual autopsies.
• Clinovations celebrates its five-year anniversary and highlights a few of its awards and honors.
• E-MDs integrates PatientPay’s online bill pay solutions within its PM software. The company will also integrate Phreesia’s point-of-care check-in solution into its EHR .
• St. Elizabeth Hospital’s (WA) use of e-form solutions from Access and hosted services from Inland Northwest Health Services helped the hospital meet HIMSS Stage 7 paperless requirements while eliminating the need for dedicated on-site hardware.
• Greythorn conducts a market survey for HIT professionals to analyze compensation, benefits, job satisfaction, hiring trends, and industry participation. Greythorn will donate $1 to the Boys and Girls Clubs of Bellevue and Chicago for every submission by November 20.
• Ed Bayliss, executive director for ChartMaxx, participates in a panel discussion on data exchange across the continuum of care at the eHealth Initiative 2013 Data Exchange Summit October 30-31 in Washington, DC.
• Humedica publishes a case study detailing how Mayo Clinic Health System prepared for value contracting using Humedica MinedShare.
• ZeOmega will embed Health Language technology from Wolters Kluwer Health into its Jiva care management platform.
• The Drummond Group certifies SRS EHR as a 2014 Complete EHR.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

You can tell that fall has arrived when every coffee vendor (including the one in the hospital lobby) is pushing pumpkin spice latte. Unfortunately, it is also the time I start sweating the fact that I need to come up with an extremely creative Halloween costume and come up with it stat. One of my favorite former bosses throws a massive party and the price of admission is a great costume. I enjoy Halloween immensely and have a closet full of costume options, but this party is peopled with brilliant individuals from academia, healthcare, and health IT so throwing on the Princess Leia braids simply will not do.

Maybe I’ll print a bunch of completely random attributes (some of which relate to me and some that do not) and go as my LinkedIn profile. I always laugh when people endorse me for knowledge of vendors I have never even heard of. I know several of the attendees are faithful HIStalk readers. Maybe I can convince my date to adopt a couples costume and we can go as Inga and Mr. H. Of course I could always go as Dr. Jayne, but that might be a little obvious. I guarantee at least one attendee will be wearing a bowtie and a Farzad-worthy grin.

The lobby of our medical school has a wall with pictures of our staff who have won various Nobel prizes. I could always dress as one of them and see if anyone picks up on it. Getting someone to identify that choice might be a little dependent on how far after the start of the cocktail hour I arrive, though, so not entirely a safe bet. I’m leaning towards possibly a World War I nurse just to have an excuse to purchase an awesome vintage cape. In medicine (and nursing) we used to dress more formally and I miss that. I understand that the current culture of scrubs is all about comfort and practicality, but I can’t help but think that if we dressed more seriously our patients (and administrators) might take us more seriously.

I took a course recently that covered communication and corporate culture. We did several exercises looking at how appearance plays a role in group dynamics. Watching several videos, we scored the characters based on believability, authority, seniority, and a host of other factors. Regardless of the scenario, those characters who dressed in traditional business attire scored higher than those who dressed casually. Besides dress, there are a lot of other factors at play with power dynamics, including the position of the participants (same height vs. seated/standing), tone, demeanor, etc.

I had the opportunity to rotate through a hospital in the UK during the late 1990s and was struck by the formality of the nursing staff. They still wore traditional dress whites (with caps) and nursing trainees wore blue. Physicians wore the long white coat and neckties. There were very few female physicians who I interacted with during my rotation, so I can’t particularly remember what they wore.

I trained at an academic medical center with an extremely traditional surgery department. Surgeons were never to wear scrubs outside the operating room. Trainees were not allowed to consume food or drink in the hallways – not even a sip of coffee – and white coats were to be fully buttoned at all times. Conversely, the OB/GYN house staff wore scrubs and sneakers 24×7, which created more than a few resentments. I wonder though if the patients or other hospital staff really perceived the departments differently? Was it a factor of dress code or of other factors that the dress code exemplified, such as discipline, order, and precision?

Scrubs and casual dress have become a way of life for most hospitals and medical offices. My hospital requires care teams to wear certain colors of scrubs depending on employee roles. Nurses wear navy, respiratory therapy wears light blue, patient care technicians wear khaki, etc. This seems to better help patients understand who is caring for them and what to expect. Unfortunately, physicians run the gamut between coat and tie and whatever scrubs they put on at the last hospital they rounded at. Some are so casual it’s hard to take them seriously. In response to a number of male physicians going sockless in loafers, one local facility created a rule requiring that “hosiery be worn at all times.” I’d like to have been a fly on the wall at the medical staff meeting where that was discussed: readmission rates, surgical site infections, ventilator-associated pneumonia, and bare ankles.

In the ambulatory care setting, the proliferation of scrub styles is mind boggling. We see a lot of “hip” medical assistants and patient care techs in low rider scrubs with flare bottoms that drag the ground to the point where they fray. I hope they never have to run to a code or crouch down to provide CPR, and if they do, that they have their waistband firmly in hand. One pediatrician I know has hand painted lab coats for every holiday and season. She’s the only physician on staff who wears a blue coat, so it really stands out. I smile every time I see her in the elevator, but I’m not sure what some of the patients and visitors think.

Generally I think the offices where staff dresses in a more uniform manner appear more organized and professional, but again maybe the dress code is a side product of management rather than a causative factor. Many of our offices provide staff with practice-logo polo shirts to be worn with khaki pants. This can be useful to reinforce an office brand as well as to help patients identify staff members, especially in busy offices with many ancillary services. That might be a great costume idea – maybe I’ll borrow a polo and masquerade as a staffer for a competitor practice.

I didn’t set out to write a fashion review, but perhaps Inga has been a greater influence on my writing than I previously thought. I could write an entire column on sassy patent leather hospital clogs, but we’ll save that for another night. I’m off to the internet for costume ideas. Got a great one? Email me.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

Morning Headlines 10/17/13

Francisco Partners to Acquire McKesson’s Automation Unit

Private equity firm Francisco Partners acquires McKesson’s pharmacy automation business for an undisclosed sum. McKesson acquired the former Automated Healthcare in 1996 for $65 million.

Pace of EMR Adoption During the Past 5 Years

A HIMSS study finds that 25 percent of US hospitals have failed to raise their standing on the HIMSS Analytics EMR adoption model over the past five years. However, 20 percent of hospitals jumped four or five stages during that time.

Hospital Progress To Meaningful Use: Status Update

Health Affairs reports that as of July 2013, two-thirds of hospitals have achieved Stage 1 Meaningful Use and nearly all are engaged with the program in some way.

Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense Interagency Program Office Awards Systems Made Simple Re-compete of iEHR System Integration Contract

The office responsible for overseeing the DoD/VA iEHR development has awarded a re-compete contract to incumbent iEHR service and support vendor Systems Made Simple. As the prime on the contract, SMS will provide technical support for the iEHR project, working to develop stronger integration between the VA and DoD systems.

Advisory Panel: Keeping Peers Informed About IT

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: What methods do you employ to keep your executive peers informed about IT initiatives, spending, and plans?

Regular face to face meetings (or a call) are always the best. 

Annual work plan development. Capital budgeting, especially the part of the process where business execs say yes/no to requests and as a result prioritize investments. Monthly leadership report of IS accomplishments to plan.

It’s all about governance. You have to have the structures in place to meet with your peers and have the decision making process completely transparent. I also use our executive meetings as opportunities to get on the agenda on a quarterly basis to give updates regarding IT activities.

Routine updates at Exec Team meetings. Lots of meetings. Annual report.

Multi-year IT roadmap, status reports, status meetings.

Our admin team is right down in the weeds with us since HIT is such a big expense. They have been reasonably agile and able to understand what we are doing, and actually ask good questions. Sorry, not a very Dilbert response.

Historically, there has been a disconnect between what IT sends out the end-user leadership and what actually gets communicated down to the folks in the trenches. If I had a dollar for each time I’ve rounded on floors during downtimes on the weekends and heard, “No one told us the system was going to be down”, I’d be typing this from a warm sunny beach somewhere. To bridge the gap, we have started publishing, at a minimum once a month) a newsletter focused on the team members and what they need to know about  IT initiatives. The plea I have made is for each department leader to discuss the contents at their respective huddles and to place it on the communication boards each department maintains. Thus, any team member who works has an opportunity to review it. (Are they up on all the boards in the hospital? What do you think? ) IT Updates are now a standing agenda item at the Friday weekly leadership huddle attended by senior leaders and department heads. I have two agenda items with the hope that repetition will help them connect the dots: (a) Here is what is happening one to two months out, and (b) here is what is going on next week. Beginning this budgetary cycle, I’m meeting with each department head (instead of their vice presidents) to discuss their goals / dreams / hopes for 2014. Many times IT has been backed into a corner by surprise requests coming from senior leaders that were unaware for whatever reason what their reports were considering. The hope here is if we can deal directly with the department head, we can set up a win/win experience for them and for us in terms of managing expectations.

Monthly updates in executive meetings if within organization – outside organization at regional and national meetings. Email within organization when appropriate. Newsletters to executives when appropriate.

IT leadership directly involved in system leadership councils and directly report to most senior leadership to be sure efforts are aligned with strategy. Involvement of clinical leadership in IT prioritization, governance bodies.

Monthly meetings, inclusion in the distribution announcements, phone calls on surprises, etc. This is most effective if the executive understands the importance of IT and informatics. When they don’t, it’s pretty useless.

IT participates in strategic planning sessions with health system executives. This was not true a few years ago, but is now. IT produces and sends out a monthly dashboard to executives of all key projects, which includes project status and barriers to completion. Each project has a health system executive as the key sponsor.

Lots of financial reports, for one. Those are what matter really, cost projections and cost actual. Outside of that we have a very simply way of showing project statuses. The classic green, yellow, red with only 5-10 lines of detail. There are also numerous meetings with different members of the executive suite on any given week as well. 

CIO Unplugged 10/16/13

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

Thankfulness in Action

During a leadership meeting, one of our chief nursing officers, never nominated for Miss Congeniality, came rushing towards me. Although smiling on the outside, I braced on the inside for the tornado I expected would hit. I extended my hand in greeting, but she went straight for a hug. Not knowing her intentions left me cautious and suspicious.

She released the impromptu embrace. “Ed, you sent me a thank you card for serving in nursing while acknowledging my top 100 nurse recognition, and I was like ho-hum. But what caught me off guard is when I walked into the nurses’ lounge on our med-surg unit. On our community board was another card you sent to one of our floor nurses for her recognition as well. I tracked her down and she was blown away that a non-nursing executive would take the time to acknowledge her contributions in this way. It means a bunch to her, to me, not to mention her peers who all see the card.” Then she chided me for being forced to change her password every six months (j/k).

I’m paperless and proud of it. I have no printer drivers. You’ll rarely find me with a notepad, and I judge people—particularly those in healthcare technology—who still rely on paper. But I have one major exception. I still pen handwritten thank you cards. I always carry blank thank you cards and I send out an average of eight per week.

Here’s why:

Thank you card sales have hit an all-time low. Digital convenience has displaced some of the need, but I think the reason goes deeper than that. I suspect it’s a combination of laziness and lack of training. Growing up in the Marx household, we could not enjoy any gifts received without first having written a thank you card. This became second nature to us kids, and we’ve since passed this tradition down to our kids. I suspect they will do the same with theirs. No thank you cards, no gifts.

It makes a difference. Since handwritten cards are rare, the impact they have is magnified tenfold. People still love to receive snail mail, especially personalized mail. You can open a card and hang it in your office or place it on a desk. You can touch it, smell it, hold it to your chest. As another benefit, thank you cards differentiate you. When interviewing candidates, darn right I pay attention to which interviewee sends a card and which one does not. That little bit of effort speaks volumes and differentiates candidates.

Handwritten thank you cards are a physical expression of the word “care.” Recipients not only see that care, but they feel the effort and time it cost the sender.

What’s the best virtue of handwritten notes? They don’t beg for a response as do email. You send an email thank you, and the person now feels obligated to reply—“Back at ya.” Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?

Techniques:

1. Carry with you a stash of cards, and when you hear of a deserving act, whip one out. The five minutes you spend writing could bring a day’s worth of happiness to someone.
2. Write cards with your leadership team. This is a standing agenda item at our weekly meetings. There is always someone deserving of praise. (Not to mention it’s leadership by example.)
3. When you see or hear of someone who has received honor, send a card. For instance, whenever the top 100 nurse list is published, I target the nurses who work in my organization.
4. After concluding a meeting during which someone went above and beyond, start writing.
5. Each Friday, a task pops up on my schedule that says, “Give thanks.” I reflect on the week and decide who to thank.

Testimonials:

• A grumpy finance executive responded to a thank you card via email. “Thank you so much for the card. The timing was perfect. Had a real rough week. Made everything worthwhile.”
• A physician sought me out. “I have never received a thank you card from administration. This has given me fresh perspective.”
• I was rounding with nurses in one of our hospitals when one approached me during a break. “Oh, you’re Ed Marx? We’ve never met, but you sent me a card two years ago [emphasis mine] for working with your team on an order set. Thank you for noticing and sending the card.”
• Employees routinely stop me in the halls to say thank you for the card, some with tears in their eyes.
• My first platoon sergeant, a tough Vietnam vet, said, “Lt Marx, I was like what the shit, I am just doing my job … and then it hit me, leaders do the little extras. I just sent short notes to my squad leaders.”
• I sent a note to a CEO thanking him for his leadership and for my privilege to serve with him. “…nobody ever sent me a thank you card for no specific reason other than to say thanks for leading.”

I have a confession to make. I do store some paper actually—a pile of thank you cards I’ve received over the years. I can’t toss them. They carry such meaning. I’d wager it’ll be the same for the people who would receive a card from you. It becomes an oasis in the dessert. A Starbucks red-eye during an all-nighter. It’s salve on a wound and the bridge over a chasm. It can make our toils all worthwhile.

For whom are you thankful? Staff, your boss, a peer? Take action. Grab a card now and share your thoughts with that person. If your handwriting sucks, don’t worry, mine does, too. But no one has ever complained about it, and I doubt they even care.

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.

Francisco Partners Will Acquire McKesson Automation

Private equity firm Francisco Partners announced this morning that it will acquire Pittsburgh-based McKesson Automation, which offers hospital pharmacy automation solutions. McKesson had announced plans to divest the business earlier this year.

According to a Francisco Partners spokesperson, “McKesson Automation is highly regarded in the healthcare industry for its system-wide approach to and deep understanding of the medication delivery process. We are excited to work closely with the existing leadership team to expand the automation business as a standalone company.”

McKesson acquired the former Automated Healthcare in 1996 for $65 million.

Morning Headlines 10/16/13

Cerner Joins Wolters Kluwer, Hit 52-Week High

Cerner stock hits a 52-week high at $55.98 per share following an announcement that it will partner with Wolters Kluwer Health in a joint venture to develop a new physician documentation solution that will embed Wolters Kluwer’s clinical decision support tools.

Patient Engagement: How To Do It Right

InformationWeek profiles both the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic and the work they are doing to draw patients into their patient portals.

IBM’s Watson wants to fix America’s doctor shortage

IBM’s Watson supercomputer will be implemented at Cleveland Clinic in an effort to create a digital assistant capable of scanning a patients record and pointing doctors to crucial data and likely diagnoses. The tool is still a prototype and will initially not be consulted until after a doctor has made a diagnosis. Neil Mehta, MD, the Cleveland Clinic project lead says "I’ve had a couple of patients where Watson found things that I had missed. It doesn’t work every time, but it’s getting better."

CareCloud CEO: We may go public next year

Ambulatory EHR vendor CareCloud hints at a 2014 IPO.

Novant Health honored for implementation of Epic

North Carolina-based Novant Health receives HIMSS Stage 7 designation after installing Epic across its 350 ambulatory offices this August.

News 10/16/13

Top News

Cerner shares hit a 52-week high Tuesday following announcement of a partnership with Wolters Kluwer Health to develop a physician documentation system using Provation Clinic Note content with Cerner Millennium. CERN shares are up 52 percent in the past year, with the company’s market cap now at $19 billion. 

Reader Comments

From Veteran: “Re: insurance marketplace. I take it all back. This really is a disaster. A New York Times article this weekend chronicled a whole series of issues going back months, not the least of which was HHS’s decision to project manage this themselves when they (and everyone else) knew they had neither the expertise nor the experience. Hope this doesn’t set health reform back years.” Veteran (and a few others) were critical of my comment that the opening day of the insurance marketplace was a “failure” because I was unable to access the system. According to the Times, insiders were aware of the system flaws long before the launch, but because of political concerns, continued with the original timeline. By one estimate the project is now about 70 percent of the way toward operating properly, but the time frame for completion could be anywhere from two weeks to a couple of months. Apparently I am just one of a few thousand people who have opted to wait a few weeks before making additional attempts to enroll.

From CA/DC Fellow: “Re: failed health insurance exchange site. Will US CTO Todd Park take the fall?” Healthcare.gov is a high-profile political embarrassment. In politics and government, someone has to be lynched publicly to appease the press. Todd was sent out to try unsuccessfully to talk around the situation, which I think puts him at risk. Sebelius would toss him overboard in a second to save her image. Nobody ever blames the contractors since it was someone’s job to manage them.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: Nada Surf, a nearly perfectly listenable alternative rock band that’s been around for 20 years. I’m playing them constantly.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A report predicts that HIT funding will double over last year thanks to the implementation of the ACA and HITECH. Venture capitalists invested $737 million in 51 deals during the third quarter, compared to $623 million in 168 deals a year ago.

CareCloud CEO Albert Santalo tells the Boston Business Journal that his company may launch an IPO next year.

A business publication says transcription vendor MModal, saddled with heavy debt and slow sales, may need to seek restructuring if its current turnaround efforts fail.

Sales

Australia’s NSW Heath will implement iMDsoft’s MetaVision throughout the state’s adult, pediatric, and neonatal ICU beds.

Adventist Health System selects the Explorys suite of analytic and population health management solutions.

TeamHealth (TN) chooses Shareable Ink’s Anesthesia Cloud and ShareMU solutions for selected sites nationally.

Virginia Hospital Center Physician Group selects eClinicalWorks EHR for its 100 employed physicians.

People

Henry Schein appoints Steve Klis (CareFusion) president of global practice solutions.

CareCloud names R. Scott Lentz (Aprima Medical, Picis) CFO.

AtHoc names John Tempesco (Informatics Corporation of America) as senior director of healthcare operations and marketing.

Vocera Communications hires Paul Johnson (Intuit) as EVP of sales and services.

Announcements and Implementations

Heritage Valley Health System (PA) activates Allscripts Sunrise for its Beaver and Sewickley campuses.

Medfusion rebrands its recently reacquired Inuit Health patient portal technology back to its original name and adds Vern Davenport (formerly of MModal) and Buck Goldstein (UNC Chapel Hill) to its board.

For-profit surgical hospital operator Victory Healthcare (TX) implements Omnicell’s G4 Unity medication management system.

Optum and Dignity Health introduce Optum360, a new company that will address the back office functions of healthcare systems.

Unified emergency notification systems Vendor AtHoc announces the launch of its healthcare vertical with the launch of AtHoc Home Care Alerts, which offer home care service organizations with mobile duress and emergency alerting, field reporting, and personnel tracking.

Jordan Shlain, MD and Todd Johnson of automated patient follow-up solution vendor HealthLoop will present at the UHC Conference Innovation State on Friday.

Lewistown Hospital (PA) implements Summit Downtime Reporting System for business continuity.

Lucca Consulting Group and ICD-10 Coach announce a partnership to help small hospitals and practices implement ICD-10.  

Government and Politics

The VA names Health eTime the winner of its medical appointment scheduling competition and a $1.8 million prize. The open source app allows veterans to schedule visits across VA locations and gives VA providers the ability to share appointments with the personal digital calendars of veterans.

A Pittsburgh Tribune-Review investigation finds that the VA is one of the largest violators of health privacy laws. From 2010 to May 31, 2013, VA workers or contractors committed 14,215 privacy violations at 167 facilities that victimized at least 101,018 veterans and 551 VA employees. Violations included postings of anatomy on social media sites and identities stolen to create fraudulent credit cards.

Innovation and Research

CEOs of hospitals with high levels of advanced technologic capabilities earn an average of $135,862 more than hospitals with low levels of technology, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine. Hospitals with high performance on patient satisfaction also compensated their CEOs more, but no association was found between CEO pay and processes of care, patient outcomes, or community benefit. Based on the findings, researchers suggest that hospital boards place more emphasis on quality when setting compensation.

Two graduate students in Israel develop a computerized system for diagnosing Parkinson’s disease consistently. The patient performs specific movements in front of a 3-D depth camera, whose data is the analyzed by computer to determine a diagnosis with 94 percent accuracy.

Other

Encore earns top scores in a KLAS report on go-live support vendors. Santa Rosa Consulting was recognized for having the most engagements overall, followed by Encore and ESD.

The Carolina eHealth Alliance (SC) reports that the four hospital systems participating in its electronic exchange network saved more than $1 million over a 12-month period by reducing unnecessary admissions and redundant procedures.

Clinithink posts an animated video depicting the role of clinical NLP in transforming healthcare.

An article in Medical Marketing & Media says that mobile devices are yesterday’s news for marketing drugs to physicians, concluding that “EHRs will become the dominant context for physicians” in promoting drugs at the time of e-prescribing. However, it warns that overly aggressive drug promotion could lead to regulation. A drug company spokesperson predicts  consolidation of the EHR industry, saying “a relative few will own the space and will own the access” for drug companies to promote their products as part of physician workflow. Drug companies are doing away with traditional field reps for product promotion.

The local newspaper writes up Novant Health (NC), which earned HIMSS Stage 7 EMRAM last week for its $600 million Epic implementation, which Novant says it finished three years ahead of schedule and under budget.

Sponsor Updates

• Caradigm will add predictive clinical analytics capabilities from MEDai to its Care Management platform.
• Sunquest announces a new partnership with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Tucson.
• Cynthia Davis, RN, FACHE of CIC Advisory will speak Thursday at the 2013 Annual Healthcare IT Symposium in Las Vegas sponsored by the Shriners Hospital for Children. Her topic will be “Paddling Upstream: From Data Collection to Better Patient Care.”
• Epic will allow direct use of the QlikView Business Directory platform within Hyperspace and will support content sharing between joint Epic and QlikView customers.
• NTT DATA’s Optimum Suite achieves 2014 Edition Complete EHR Inpatient certification.
• The SSI Group announces that both its clearinghouse services and RCM solutions are ICD-10 ready and that it is currently testing with provider and payer communities.
• An Imprivata survey finds that the adoption of server-hosted virtual desktops in the EMEA healthcare industry could increase 74 percent within 24 months.
• Trinity Health (MI) shares how it generated $3.1 million in profits and an eight to one ROI in five years using Medseek Predict for marketing campaigns.
• VitalWare partners with DCBA to create CDiDocuMint, a clinical documentation improvement tool that uses a query and tracking methodology.
• The Washington Business Journal recognizes Clinovations as the 10th fastest-growing company in the district.
• Utah Business Magazine honors Health Catalyst Chairman David Burton, MD for his lifetime achievement as a healthcare hero.
• Weill Cornell Medical College CIO Curtis L. Cole shares how he helped Intelligent Medical Objects develop its flagship product.
• UltraLinq Healthcare Solutions partners with Mobisante to integrate UltraLinq’s image management platform with MobiUS point-of-care imaging devices, enabling providers to deliver remote diagnosis and second opinions.
• LDM Group’s pharma messaging technology is featured in an article on engaging physicians through EHR messaging.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

HIStalk Interviews Bird Blitch, CEO, Patientco

Bird Blitch is CEO of Patientco of Atlanta, GA.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

My background is in the payment space. I started a company that had a lot of focus on that. From a healthcare perspective, it was the situation where my wife delivered our first baby girl. You get home from the hospital and everything’s great until a couple of weeks later and all sorts of crazy bills start showing up. I turned to my wife and just felt like there’s got to be a better way. That was how we got started down the road at Patientco.

It also helped out that we were in Atlanta, the headquarters of healthcare IT and payments. Eighty percent of all the payments in the world are routed through Atlanta with all the big companies that do that – TSYS, Global Payments, Elavon, WorldPay, and so forth. Then of course with healthcare IT, there’s a lot of great companies in the state of Georgia. It was a really good place for us to get a lot of wind behind our sails and push off on Patientco.

The last touch patients get from a hospital is the bill. Are you getting calls from people who are realizing that the nature of sending out a bill can spoil the relationship that the clinical side has so carefully developed?

Yes. I’ve really been interested in how you’ve been following that subject. That engagement or patient engagement is a big industry buzzword. We feel strongly that we’re leaving out a real vital part of that conversation, which is the financial portion of the patient engagement, which does happen when that patient leaves the hospital.

I think the real-world example is you have a great stay at a fantastic hotel. You have great food, great amenities. You check out. The bill is lots of different bills. It’s the wrong bill. You can’t understand it. It’s hard to ask questions. They haven’t even thought about how you’ll pay for it. If you left that hotel, you probably wouldn’t feel too comfortable about returning and telling people to go there. We feel like patient satisfaction is a big key in this whole part.

Do you think there’s a lot of interest from patients and providers for managing medical bills online?

I really do. When you think about it, there’s a huge problem out there right now. The fastest-growing payer is the patient. If you’re a provider, you’ve got to wake up to the fact that times are changing real fast and there needs to be a different way to manage this whole billing process. We have a cloud-based technology platform to bill patients and the key is in the consumer-friendly way. Patients have a way to uniquely pay providers in a consumer-friendly way. 

I would certainly argue that patients have a big say in this, too. I think I saw recently that is that patient is five times more likely to refer a friend to the hospital if their billing experience is a pleasant one. That relates to the total value of a patient to the hospital.

You tweeted an article recently about the Consumer Reports gripe-o-meter of healthcare complaints. One of the top problems was the patient’s dissatisfaction with the billing process. I think it’s really important. People talk about Meaningful Use, people talk about ICD-10, but there’s a big focus coming back to the revenue cycle. Our key focus is to put the spotlight on the patient. We like to talk about that in terms of patient revenue cycle.

In terms of selective marketing, it would seem that the patient revenue cycle is doubly important because if the patient is the one who has to write that check, then they are more financially desirable patients.

That’s right. Customer loyalty is really important to think about in a consumer space. That’s what we’re dealing with.

Patients are consumers. If you’re a Hilton Honors program member, they treat you differently when you check in if you’re a really good customer. I think it’s important to treat good patients in a really special way that we don’t today. We just send them a bill and hope that they pay. We do that for all patients across the entire spectrum. Why can’t patients be treated differently, especially in ways that would help them understand more and help them pay faster? That’s a real big benefit that we think we can bring to the marketplace.

The other side of that is hospitals really only have one way to deal with this problem today. A lot of times, they might outsource it to an EBO or an agency. That’s great, but sometimes they spend a lot of money to do that and they don’t get great results. It’s one of those things where patients don’t like it. I’d argue in the long term it’s not good for providers either. We just try to get people to think differently about that. 

That also goes to how you pay your vendors — pay your vendors differently. One tactic there is just to stop paying billers for percentage of what the patient pays. It’s your money to start with, so whatever the contingency you pay the agency, it’s probably too much, period.

Patients have always thought of themselves as consumers, but I’m not sure that hospitals have seen themselves as businesses that have competition and that need to cultivate them as customers. Do you think hospitals are going to be able to change their mindset to be directly accountable to the patient?

One of our goals is if you treat people right, they’ll treat you right. That’s how we run Patientco, that’s how we want healthcare to be. People treat patients right on the clinical side. You’ve got to change and think differently.

Our biggest competition is often the status quo and providers who aren’t daring enough to make a change for the better. Times are changing in healthcare. It’s important we educate people about the fiduciary responsibility they have and they can play in making this equation healthy again with patients. The tough thing is, how do you treat patients differently? We try to share to our business intelligence engine ways that patients respond differently across the IDN. If a patient’s done one thing to pay a bill differently, then we think we can share that experience.

Let’s say on a cardiology bill, we send out two e-bills with a ten per cent discount and another bill with a healthy heart recipe on it. If that makes you want to pay faster, then don’t you think that something that the hospital that owns that cardiology group would want to know?

You offer patients a secure messaging feature to interact about their bills or to clarify. Do patients use that a lot?

Yes, they do. It’s interesting because it’s hard to ask questions about your health, especially in a public place. When people are on the Internet, perhaps at work, you’d be surprised at the payments we see coming through from people around lunch hours. When they’re on lunch break working at their desk, they don’t feel comfortable about asking someone about their endocrinology bill. But through Patientco, there is that secure messaging that allows people to access questions and get answers quicker, so they feel more comfortable on what they’re being asked to pay for.

How do physicians fit in the mix?

Physicians bill patients also. If you think about the problems in healthcare, you’re going to go to a hospital. You’re going to get a hospital bill and four or five or six different physician bills. A lot of times those bills come out of different practice management system than the bills that come out of the HIS system. 

It’s important because physicians have really strong personal relationships with the patients. Patients often want to pay those physicians first before they do the hospitals. The unique thing is if you group all these bills together in one place, then a rising tide really does lifts all boats and people pay faster. The other side of that is physicians’ bills are often just as complicated and the goal here is simplicity for everyone.

Are patients are more likely to pay like a solo physician in practice instead of a faceless entity such as a large group practice or hospital to which they don’t have much allegiance?

Yes. We see that case a lot. From the hospital’s perspective, if they can be grouped together with the physicians’ bills then, there’s a 36 per cent chance that when you pay a physician bill and  the hospital bill is there for you to see through Patienco, you’ll pay that bill as well, just from a simplicity’s sake. Think about it. Why are all the different car dealers on the same side of the town? They are because it’s easier for people to make decisions around buying a car. It’s the same thing here. Where you have simplicity and everything in one place, it’s better for the patient.

What would people be surprised to learn about how patients pay bills or how they interact with people doing billing on their behalf?

We focus just as much on the providers as the patients. I’ll throw that out just to say that we look at it from both sides. 

I just talked to one of our CFOs in one of our hospitals in Iowa. He said that one out of every three members of that community pays their medical bill through automation with Patienco and he just thinks that it’s interesting when it’s all together. When you have the ability for patients to pay 24/7 in a variety of different ways and you make it easier for them to not just understand but schedule payments and whether it’s paper or electronic and you make that dynamic, then you’re going to have a lot of different types of results. We measure those results and report on all those to our providers.

What’s the status of healthcare IT and startups in Georgia?

This is a great place to start a company. There’s a lot of resources around here and of course there’s a lot of healthcare IT. You’ve got McKesson Technologies that is headquartered here. You’ve got Greenway. You’ve got athenahealth that is moving a lot of their resources down from Boston. They’ve all chosen to be here because there’s a strong employee base here of people who are knowledgeable. 

Also, it’s more affordable to live in Atlanta. It’s got a lot of the big city amenities. You see companies even like Streamline Health that moved down from Cincinnati. They all come here because you can hire great people and it’s a good city to be living in.

Any final thoughts?

We think that there’s a lot of needed change in the industry, so we want to go toe-to-toe with the incumbents. Change is good. I think if we can make patients happy and providers happy, those are the two entities that usually when one wins the other loses in today’s environment of revenue cycle. Now we have a great challenge and opportunity in front of us that we can make them winners, and what’s good for the patient is also good for the provider. 

Outside of that, it’s just all about easing healthcare’s transition towards a real patient-focused, consumer-focused transition to understanding healthcare and adding vendors that really towards having good responsibility towards the providers.

Morning Headlines 10/15/13

Mostashari shares concerns, ‘insider clues’ in first speech since leaving ONC

In a keynote speech at the CHIME Fall CIO Forum, ex-ONC leader Farzad Mostashari, MD spoke candidly about ONC policy. He reports that the Stage 2 timeline will likely stay on track as planned. He also discussed usability, saying, "“I do worry about usability. Not that it isn’t getting better…but I wonder if the market is incentivizing usability as much as it should."

National eHealth Strategy Review to be Considered This Year

In Australia, Deloitte has been contracted to run a mid-point review of Australia’s national 10-year eHealth implementation, which kicked off in 2008 and which Deloitte is also running. According to Linda Powell, first assistant secretary for eHealth policy, the review will focus on clinical adoption to ensure the systems in place are resulting in "meaningful use."

Petersburg Gets New Hospital Computer System

Petersburg, AK-based Petersburg Medical Center goes live with its $1.4 million CPSI EHR.

Advisory Panel: Three Hospital Improvement Actions

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: What three actions would most improve your hospital overall and how could IT contribute to those changes?

Better understand our variances in high cost procedures. Analytics can help in finding variances and understanding why they happen and then we can work on fixing those problems. Manage high-risk patients better. IT can be used to identify (predictive modeling) and track (registry) these patients, but people will make the difference in helping them. Understand our patients better. IT could be used for better surveying of patients both in real time and retrospectively

Hospitals need to start by realizing that their days of glory are gone and that healthcare is no longer hospital centric and need to regroup. Need to start applying "lean" principles and look for ways to cut cost but not compromise care, which is indeed a balancing act. Invite and involve all the stakeholders in and have a mission statement. Admit that "all healthcare is local" and that certain rules apply in certain markets but are not valid in others where the consolidation is not so pervasive.  Realize once and for all the role of clinicians whose decisions and behavior we are trying to influence and change and  groom real leaders who are in it for the good of the community and not merely to embellish their resumes. Improve communication all the way from the CIO and C-suite to the practicing MD and nurse who are " where the rubber meets the road". It has been my experience that the larger the organization, the more broken the communication and the more bureaucratic the process. IT can do exactly that — improve communication and transitions of care.

Enhance value (improving quality and reducing cost) – IT focused on data analytics to produce actionable descriptions of current conditions and to support experiments planned to move us toward our targets. Wow our patients and families (great service experiences) – right now we’re focused on providing patient portal access. Innovation and partnerships (new models of caring) – deploying and operationalizing health info exchange.

There are three major factors that will determine the viability of hospitals over the next five years that IT has the capability to improve. First and foremost, we absolutely have to reduce the cost of care. Clearly, one of the main ways to accomplish this is through better coordination among providers as well as better clinical decision support mechanisms to reduce unnecessary tests. This is more than just duplicate checking — it is now quickly moving to personalized medicine using the more rapidly available genomic and proteomic information available for patients. Secondly, we must provide better interoperability and analytics for population health between multiple disparate providers of care. We are moving to a model of care where the primary care physician becomes the gatekeeper and we have to be able to communicate in real time the status of every patient and their disease states. This high level of coordination will only be possible with a significant IT support model. Thirdly, we have to optimize our ability to capture charges with payers who still pay in that manner. The list of those payers will continue to shrink, but we need to take advantage while we can. That also includes the ability to capture activity, especially on those newly insured patients that will be creates as a result of the Accountable Care Act.

A few more hours in a day, and a week would be great! Improved collaboration around significant challenges is adversely affected by a lack of time and ability to focus on priorities. Effective use of video technologies might help, but folks are so busy it’s hard to know what can help. Creating a culture of appreciation and not just recognition. Hard to do – perhaps better use of social networking tools? Better financial performance….. if we could drive value from all of our technology investments and truly ensure that we are using 100 percent of everything we deploy and get value from all of it.

Patient safety: better clinical decision support. Patient care: better order sets and workflows. Patient engagement: in-house use of Epic Bedside.

If you are looking for the most bang for your buck in changing the hospital, it would start with the most important determinants of hospital outcome (RNs) and patient satisfaction (CNAs). It is clear to me  but hard to prove that a well-trained RN staff improves outcomes, but a good outcome, at least in the sense of following guidelines and providing consistent, checklist driven care, is now the expectation. Patient satisfaction is proportional to the number and the friendliness of the staff that deals with the personal needs of patients (toiletting, call lights). IT can help with efficient one-click charting, and clinical decision support for the RNs. We should spend a lot of our optimization time on the RN workflow. On the CNA side, a Vocera type solution that allows direct communication to a CNA as well as combining a group into a lift team will speed up response. Oh, and relax the "no personal calls" rule on your devices. These folks, typically ladies, will check on their kids. Let ’em do it quickly, openly, without apology, and back to work.

The government dropping ICD-10 and waiting for ICD-11. The costs of systems, implementations, and training, especially for physicians, is clearly not worth the benefit to a handful of researchers and will do absolutely nothing to directly improve patient care. To complain about the cost of healthcare while spending money that doesn’t directly improve care is ludicrous. The government slowing down the pace of MU and only focusing on those aspects that directly improve patient care. (Seeing a trend here?) The government stopping changes that only impact billing. Let’s put our focus and money to better use improving patient care, not worrying about how to pay less for it or spending more time on record keeping.

A  major issue with us is lack of resources across many of the departments. The Catch-22 is that IT could help by automating some of the workflows, but we do not have the money or the human capital to assist given our EHR implementation. IT is working to generate as many initiatives as possible that would allow team members to better document what we actually did to the patient through documentation and capture applicable charges. The thought here is that we could achieve better reimbursement through increased documentation of what we actually did for the patient. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”….we are pushing out analytics and other business intelligence deliverables to leaders such that they can have information in a more timely and readable fashion. These deliverables are done real time on a proactive basis and provided at least weekly. In their office, leaders can look at throughput, length of stay, payer mix, etc. without having to call down to have one of my team members run a report and then interoffice or email the output.

Create processes for improved communication between departments – streamline tech services; increased qualified staff – mentoring programs on line; identify marketing opportunities to show case hospital success – social media support.

Reduction of regulatory burdens which consume lets and lots of resources including IT to "remediate" and impedes innovation. Support the digitization of all business processes to align with MU and transition to EMR, etc. Drive true patient engagement very openly and aggressively. IT would benefit from these changes and could work to facilitate patient engagement.

Improved integration of IT and Informatics into Strategic Planning and Business Development. Improved adherence to strategic planning (we spend too much time chasing shiny objects that don’t contribute to strategic gains). Improved measurement and learning from strategic actions taken (i.e., measuring how well we actually did).

Robust report writing capabilities with a clear roadmap of standardized reports across the organization. We have lots of data, but much is not useful. Also have people running reports from various systems that don’t match—lots of confusion! Standardized processes for onboarding employed physicians.  We have chaos that includes HR, Finance, Physician Enterprise, Property Management, Credentialing, and IT, due to a non standardized approach. Better integration between hospital operations and ambulatory operations. With the rapid growth of the ambulatory world over the last few years, these two entities have been separately managed and poorly integrated. IT can and should be a strategic partner for the planning and execution of all three of these actions, providing technology solutions and  facilitating standardization.

A shift of focus back on to patient care and not reimbursements/cost only. In our situation, we are a single-entity, regional non-profit. We have many hospital-owned clinics, of course. The past few years with all the cuts to reimbursements the organization has moved on all types of budget and process improvements. I’m all for process improvements, but the other side of budget cuts if not done well can be damaging. The organization’s competitive advantage was always patient care. The patient came to us because they didn’t want to travel to a larger city and a larger care environment. Now that we’ve eliminated whole scores of patient transport people, floor secretaries, and even furloughed some nursing staff, that advantage is gone. We run positive margins is the crazy part. I fear in time those margins will shrink and it’s not going to be because of costs. It’s going to be because we lost our best patients to other competitors. Even if your payer mix is only 10-12 percent insurance, those are the people getting the cancer/spine/heart treatments that keep a unit/hospital in the black. How can IT help that? That’s hard as that is a human element. We can support the frontline with streamlined systems but IT can’t be there caring for the patient. IT is a force multiplier on many things but not patient-focused staffing. Those patient transport staff who used to move patients out of the ER but now there is backlog getting patients to the floor from the ER.  I suppose IT could find a robotic system from and industrial plant and put that to use to automatically transport a patient to their waiting room! That will really help with patient satisfaction scores!

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 10/14/13

I was hanging out this week with my nephew, who introduced me to Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, which if you haven’t seen it, explains what happened to Lorenzo Lamas and Deborah Gibson after they left the limelight. There are so many “attack of” movies but this one is truly larger than life. If you don’t believe it, you’re welcome to check out the trailer featured at the link above.

Having to confront things enormous and/or ridiculous reminds me of the daily grind of office practice. There are so many things to worry about from regulatory hurdles and payer nitpicking to patient satisfaction, patient engagement, and quality care. Many of them are important but some are just tiresome. It feels like there is always some shark waiting to eat you or an octopus intent on squeezing the joy out of patient care. I shouldn’t have been surprised then when I started reading a journal article and Top 20 Reasearch Studies of 2012 for Primary Care Physicians turned into “Attack of the Killer Guidelines.”

This is the second year that American Family Physician has worked to summarize the top research studies in primary care. Having been a practicing family doc in a small practice, I know how hard it is to keep up with the literature, and articles like this are very helpful. I don’t have time to read through the 100+ clinical research journals that the authors did in order to find the top 20 studies with the potential to change primary care practice. Having them summarized in a way that makes sense to the clinician in the trenches is key. As primary care docs, we don’t have time for esoteric studies or case reports featuring zebras and unicorns. We need help solving the bread and butter problems we see every day in the office, and help solving them in the most effective and efficient way possible.

Some of the points featured this year are serious game-changers when you’re looking at delivering cost-effective care that makes sense. To some degree, though, they go against the conventional wisdom and if physicians start following them, they’re going to get “dinged” on quality reports and payer metrics. Let’s look at a couple of them:

Diabetes. Does home monitoring of blood sugars lead to better management of Type 2 diabetes in patients who are not treated with insulin? The short answer is no. Hemoglobin A1C levels (which are used to monitor average blood glucose) only came down 0.25 percent after six to 12 months of home testing. The reduction was not clinically significant, but the discomfort and cost that patients bear is certainly significant. How many obese patients are going to develop diabetes in the US? Lots of them. How many are checking their blood sugars for years with little change in their overall diabetes control? Plenty. The authors conclude that home monitoring should be reserved for patients on insulin.

What? What about those commercials with Wilford Brimley hawking diabetic testing supplies “at little or no cost to you?” What about the fact that Medicare pays for it? I’ve had patients argue with me about this before, stating that if Medicare pays for it they should be entitled to it simply because they’ve paid into Medicare, clinical appropriateness be damned.

Again with Diabetes. Do older patients who have functional or cognitive impairment and tightly controlled diabetes do better than those with less tightly controlled diabetes? Surprise, those with tighter control actually had a greater risk of functional decline than those with less tight control of their blood sugars.

It sounds like heresy, but maybe we don’t need to be driving all these blood sugars down as low as we thought we should in the past. And we certainly don’t need to be overly lowering the blood sugars of the octogenarian up the street who is starting to show signs of dementia. Relaxing his blood sugar control (and his wife’s also, for that matter) could reduce their medication bill by $150/month and might prevent secondary complications due to low blood sugar. Unfortunately their primary care physician still has them on multiple medications and has them checking their blood sugars several times each day.

Back to the category of things Medicare pays for, so it must be the right thing to do. Bone Density screening. Review of evidence indicates that women with normal or mildly low bone density can wait up to 15 years before a second screening and those with moderate loss of bone density can wait five years. So why does Medicare cover this every 24 months? I’ve been on the other end of this argument, with a patient who accused me of being in favor of “death panels” simply because I told her the test wasn’t indicated after two years because her bone density was normal and she had few risk factors.

I’m tired of CMS pointing the finger at providers accusing us of fraud and abuse all the time. They come after us for upcoding, but have you ever seen a giant refund to a provider due to the vast downcoding that many perform out of fear? They routinely deny payment for services when physicians fail to understand the arcane minutia of local billing rules, yet are perfectly happy to pay for annual mammograms in 90-year-old patients when the government’s own US Preventive Services Task Force recommends screening every two years for patients stopping at age 75 because “among women 75 years or older, evidence of benefits of mammography is lacking.”

I’d love to see CMS stop paying for services that go against the government’s own evidence-based guidelines. Although some may see this as a slap in the face of patient empowerment, it would be a great help to those of us who spend a lot of time trying to convince patients that just because services are covered by their insurance plan doesn’t mean they’re a good idea. Like personalized medicine, if patients want services that aren’t evidence based, they’re welcome to pay out of pocket. In the realm of non-CMS payers, I’m still dealing with insurance companies that refuse to cover all vaccines, so maybe we could shake enough money loose to prevent some cervical cancer with wider use of the HPV vaccine.

I’m tired and cranky after a gruesome shift in the ER and don’t feel like doing the math, but I bet cutting out unnecessary mammograms, premature PSA testing, aggressive diabetes treatment in the elderly, and a handful of other things would help the Medicare trust fund go a little farther. I’d like to see dollars go into research, subsidized continuing education for health care providers, and preventive medicine rather than paying for services that may be popular but don’t lead to better outcomes.

The burning question however is this: how rapidly can guidelines and protocols adjust to these changes? Similarly, how do we convince front-line physicians that they need to behave contrary to how they have been for decades? What do you think about a truly evidence based coverage revolution? Email me.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Morning Headlines 10/14/13

Cirdan Ultra Acquires US GE Healthcare Subsidiary

GE’s Centricity Lab product is acquired by Lisburn, UK-based Cirdan Ultra. Cirdan will take over all assets and responsibility for service and support for current GE lab customers.

Which Chicago corporate boards deliver for shareholders?

The board of Merge Healthcare is named least-competent Chicago-area board of directors by Crain’s Chicago Business.

Boston Children’s Hospital Innovation Chief Talks Hurdles

Boston Children’s Hospital CIO Naomi Fried is profiled in an InformationWeek interview. She discusses a number of in-house integration projects she oversaw to help her clinicians optimize their EHR, bed management system, and other clinical applications.

eClinicalWorks Kicks off Sold Out 2013 National Users Conference

eClinicalWorks is holding its national conference this weekend in San Antonio, running through Monday.

Monday Morning Update 10/14/13

From Alarm Fatigue: “Re: patient death. Alarms on hospital doors are ignored.” San Francisco General Hospital (CA) offers no explanation of how a 57-year-old patient reported missing from her hospital bed was found dead 17 days later in an alarm-equipped hospital stairwell. The hospital’s chief medical officer suggests that alert fatigue from “a cacaphony of chirps and beeps” may have contributed to the problem.

From Patient Advocate: “Re: retina surgeon follow-up appointment. My two drugs had a dosage change, given to me verbally. I started second guessing myself as I was sent upstairs to see my specialist, who reviewed the surgeon’s notes send by fax with different dosage instructions. The meds seemed to be pre-printed on the form, so I asked the tech to check with the surgeon. The specialist then added another drug, giving me a sample with no dosage label and verbal instructions. Most of this specialist’s patients are 50 an over, going home with verbal instructions only. How about a simple printout of dosage instructions? As I was leaving the exam room, the person charting on the laptop asked me about my other eye drugs so she could enter data.  Guess she was seeing the trees and I was walking through the forest … with less than perfect vision.” Technology should get neither the blame nor the credit for how providers interact with their patients. They are responsible for choosing and using whatever tools they need to get the job done. I can’t think of any other professionals who blame the computer for their inability to perform at a reasonable level, although I also can’t think of any professionals whose minute-by-minute behavior is managed by government, insurance companies, and unseen owners using the computer as a blunt instrument of control.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: 5th Gen iPad. Now that we have the news that October 22 is the launch for the 5th Gen slimmer iPad-mini, here’s an advanced look courtesy of the Sonny Dickson website. The smaller form factor is destined to be a hot item, and eagerly sought by those who are constantly attached to their device.”

The reader-requested poll about ICD-10 and liability and workers comp insurers yielded a scattershot of inconclusive responses. New poll to your right: what’s the cause of Healthcare.gov insurance marketplace technical problems?

Here’s John Lynn’s latest  Hangout, recorded live at CHIME 13.  

In Northern Ireland, medical imaging technology firm Cirdan Ultra acquires the assets of GE Healthcare’s Centricity Laboratory Division and will take over support for the former Triple-G product, which was at one time the highest-rated LIS (before GE acquired it, obviously).

ESD wins the Best Video Award at the CHIME CIO Fall Forum with a CIO-customized Diamond Dave-style version of “Just a Gigolo.”

Weird News Andy concludes that “this just doesn’t cut it.” A man in China suffering from arterial embolism saws off his own leg after being turned down by a doctor because he didn’t have enough money to pay for the procedure. He jammed a block of wood in his mouth and cut the leg off with a saw, also losing three teeth from biting down hard in pain. The man appealed for help to have the other leg amputated, resulting in a doctor offering his services for free.

The non-profit New Cities Foundation publishes a video describing its urban e-health project in Rio de Janeiro, in which GE Healthcare provided “e-health backpacks” to allow home visits for health maintenance in an urban environment.

For the geeks among us looking for a new technical toy, check out WearScript for Google Glass, which allows programmers to control and develop for Google Glass using Javascript. The developers hope to create an open ecosystem around Glass and to encourage accessibility.

Berlin will host the first HIMSS European mHealth Summit in May 2014.

The sold-out eClinicalWorks user conference started this weekend at JW Marriott Hill Country in San Antonio, TX.

On tap this week: Cleveland Clinic’s 2013 Medical Innovation Summit a the just-opened Global Center for Health Innovation in Cleveland. I’m surprised any healthcare work gets done at all in October given the number of people that seem to do nothing all month except attend conferences.

Crain’s Chicago Business names the board of Merge Healthcare as having the least-competent Chicago-area board of directors given their pay, noting that the company lost $28.8 million last year while the six-member board took home $8.2 million in compensation.

Vince launches his HIS-tory of McKesson, having tapped into the personal memories of several industry pioneers including Walt Huff himself (the “H” in HBO & Company). Vince also got some reader help in identifying some of the HIT faces of yesteryear. Vince spends a lot of time gathering information that you won’t find anywhere else, and I for one enjoy the heck out of every episode.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.