HIStalk Interviews Ralph Fargnoli, CEO, Beacon Partners

Ralph Fargnoli, Jr. is president and CEO of Beacon Partners of Weymouth, MA.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I started my healthcare career in a health system in Rhode Island that was an early adaptor of technology. I started working at IDS up on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston in 1983. That really put me into the forefront of healthcare systems, working for Paul Egerman. I worked at IDS, which changed their name to IDX, until 1988. 

I was managing many implementations. What I saw in the management of those implementations was that they were hiring consultants. The consultants were at the time, I think, Big 8 or Big 10. I felt that I had some things to offer the other side of the table, and instead of working on the vendor side, working on the consulting side. 

I left IDX and started Beacon Partners in 1989. The goal was to provide healthcare professionals with experienced healthcare professionals who understood their business, who understood the technology and how it would impact their business. From there, Beacon has grown substantially from a small company focused mainly on IDX to 300 employees, with service lines of the major vendors including IDX, Epic, Meditech, and Siemens.

We’ve been shifting our business to be more strategic in nature over the last three years. We are focusing more on strategic planning, working with many organizations about aligning physicians, changing over legacy systems, ICD-10, security, and so forth. The business model has changed from just providing implementation and project management services into strategic areas.

Beacon Partners is a national firm. We have clients from Hawaii to Puerto Rico – actually to Ireland — and of course, in Canada. We have a Canadian practice with clients in most of the provinces except Quebec. 

The growth has been exciting. It has been fueled by technology, but also all the opportunities with regard to the regulatory and compliance issues that are either being mandated or pushed into the provider world by the federal or the state government. We’ve put together a good senior leadership team, and you’ll see announcements about new people who are joining the company. 

It’s an exciting time to be in this business. We look for another five to 10 years of growth and opportunity for everyone in the company.

Do your customers care about innovation and competitive advantage when they’re choosing systems vendors? Or are they just trying to make modest process changes and measure those in hopes of learning from the data what they should do next?

My perception is that customers are trying to find some type of innovation, something that will help their patients and their provision of medical services and in getting to data to help them with patient care. But it looks like to me it’s unknown whether that will be the ultimate outcome of all these major investments that are going on right now.

We see a lot of demand for vendor software, but what I also see is that it seems to be a market play. Let’s get as much software in as we can, then we’ll go back and optimize it and see what kind of data we want to get out of our system. So to me, it’s more of a technology push. 

I think we also see that in the studies that are being done, physicians are not really bought into all this technology. They feel it’s interfering, or that it’s not the right software for them to practice medicine so far. 

I think that the innovation of how to use data to enhance patient care will be over the next three to five years, versus what we see going on right now, which is basically just a technology replacement and adaption.

Have you seen examples where someone truly got a lot better clinically or operationally by just installing something?

I can say that in some of our clients, we have seen that they’re starting to use the data in their research or they’re trying to understand patient access and looking at opportunities for more advanced service lines for patient care. We’re starting to look at that. I also see data analysis for cost controls and understanding what their true costs are.

I think we all know about the Kaisers of the world and Mayo Clinics and Cleveland Clinics. They seem to be at the forefront. I think many organizations need to understand how they’ve turned their technology investments to a competitive advantage, because I see many of our clients still at that phase where they’re trying to get the systems installed and have some type of realization on those investments.

Their model is different than 99% of what goes on in hospitals and they can afford technologies that nobody else can. Can what we learn from them be plugged into the average 200-bed community hospital?

That’s going to be very difficult. Kaiser is a not-for-profit, but it’s a well-run business corporation that provides medical services. The 200-bed  community hospital is not there. They’re not business people. They’re not driving it towards running it like business. I think they’re caught up with the patient care aspect of it and the patient services, which is their mission, but they truly need to take a step back and say, “That’s our mission, but how do we do this in the best way to maximize these investments, to get realization of these costs so we can contain them for the future of our mission?”

I think many organizations look at it independently. I look at it that we have technology, we have patient care, we have our physicians. If you look at some of these organizations and the way they’re integrated in their communication of technology and how we’re going to use it, it seems to me very siloed. They’re not there yet.

Will reimbursement and policy changes, along with the difficulty in delivering technology, do the same as it did for the solo independent physician practice, to the point that it will no longer be practical to run a 100-bed unaffiliated community hospital?

I do think that most, if not all, of the community hospitals will eventually have to align. It’s interesting here in Massachusetts. We have a very good community hospital, South Shore Hospital, that is now aligning itself with Partners HealthCare System. It has been a strongly-willed independent, but they need access to specialty care to drive their competitive nature. They’re aligning themselves with Partners because they need the dollars for the specialty care. They also want a more competitive edge against other community hospitals that are also forming their own smaller systems. You see the physicians not only aligning, but actually becoming employed by these hospitals.

I see a trend where you’ll have a network of the smaller community hospitals, but they will try to maintain their independence like South Shore. South Shore Hospital is going maintain their independence to some degree and the physicians will become employed, but I think they all have to be at some point integrated to maximize technology investments, to maximize data exchange, and to control their costs. They all realize that with all the specialties out there now and new technologies for medicine, they all can’t afford it. They all can’t just be independent in that degree and make those investments, so they have to leverage each other at what they’re good at. I think that will evolve over the next couple of years.

Meaningful Use has been good for the healthcare IT business. Do you think it’s been good for providers and patients?

I’m not sure how much patients know about Meaningful Use in the sense of technology adaption. I think providers look at it with some degree of angst, especially some of our senior providers. There seem to be mandates and a lot of push, that Meaningful Use dollars to grab the incentives and avoid the penalties. From an organizational standpoint, it helps with the investment. Of course it doesn’t pay – I  would be surprised if it paid for 25% or 30% of the total cost of the investment.

Some providers are definitely excited about the adaption, but I think some of them are finding hurdles to it. Now they have to change their work flows. It’s not necessarily the way they’ve practice medicine for years. What we see out there is a lot of hesitancy, a lot of training and educational issues.

On the patient side, we see some questions about, “Why is he staring at his computer? Why is he typing and not paying attention?”

We have many of these physician rollouts going on. The word from the consultants is that patients seems to be curious about the technology and there is a learning for physicians to try to balance the patient attention versus getting the information into their system. It’s definitely going to be a learning curve for both the patient and the provider and how to interact with each other in the technology.

Until the patient sees the benefit for being at home and being able to access portions of their medical record to see their lab results — that’s happening today, but as more and more get that access, we’ll see a better response to it all around. I think even the physicians eventually will see that this is a good use of technology so they don’t have to make phone calls and push out letters and so forth.

A lot of the attention of the providers is being directed toward Meaningful Use and implementing the systems required to get the financial carrot. When do you see that tapering off, and then what’s the next hot issue waiting in the wings?

I think Meaningful Use will start to end probably around the 2016 timeframe, but I think the technology adaption will be around for at least five to 10 years. I look at what we see as some deficiencies in technology out there. There’s just so much to be done that the market, from a technology adaption standpoint, could go on for the next five to 10 years. Meaningful Use, because of the timeframe that the government has put in place — there’s a great push to avoid the penalties. When we get to the penalty side — like anything else that happens in healthcare and with the government — they could say, “We’re not going to penalize you. We’ll push it out for another year.” 

What also is driving our business and others like us is the changeover in ICD-10. That’s going to be a major project for many organizations. I believe that most of them are not prepared to take this on. They’re not thinking about how it impacts their downstream revenue when this happens. 

We also have security of patient information as we pass data from organization to organization through HIEs. That’s something that we see as a business driver also, because there’s a lot of questions out there. How do protect the PHI? As you probably see, we’re not very good at it yet. We seem to have PHI on laptops and USB drives. We have basic password issues. 

Business intelligence and understanding data from all these investments that we’re making is going to be a large business driver for us and others the next five years.

Any concluding thoughts?

We seem to be spending an awful lot of money adapting technology. Organizations that are no more than maybe five miles apart are spending $75-$100 million to adapt similar technology as a competitor down the street. At some point, some of these boards that approve these projects are going to be asking “We spent this money. Are we getting the ROI and meeting the expectations from these big investments?” Many of these boards are approving these large implementations and procurements of these systems, but not really understanding the magnitude of what it takes to get this done.

As we progress over the next couple of years, this is going to be a business driver. We see it as an opportunity, if you have the right people, to help these organizations be successful. I also believe that someone needs to take a step back and look at this and say, “Do we have the people? Where are we going to get the resources?” 

I think that they’ll be questioning whether these investments are paying off. Also, whether they can use the data they have collected to improve and enhance patient care.

Over the next three to five years, those questions will be asked. It will be interesting to see what those answers come out to be. I’d still question many of these organizations spending these dollars very independently from each other. Why not together?

News 7/4/12

Top News

Speech recognition vendor M*Modal will be acquired by the private equity arm of JP Morgan Chase for $1.1 billion in cash, representing an 8.3% premium over Monday’s closing share price. Philips owned a 70% share of MedQuist until 2008, when it sold its shares to CBay for $200 million. The resulting MedQuist Holdings then acquired bankrupt transcription vendor Spheris in 2010, acquired M*Modal in July 2011 for $130 million, and then took that company’s name in January 2012.

Reader Comments

From HISEsq: “Re: Cerner. Sued for patent infringement by a patent troll named CeeColor, whose only claim to fame seems to be suing HIT and security companies.” CeeColor’s intellectual property, like that of other patent trolls, is vaguely described. In their case, it’s a proximity-based computer security system. I mentioned in March that the same company sued Imprivata claiming similar infringement. Googling their name turns up nothing but lawsuit filings, so one might logically assume all they have is a patent bought elsewhere and a lawyer with lots of free time available to hound companies into paying them “licensing fees.”

From Reppin’: “Re: GSK. You should run the GSK Las Vegas sales kickoff video if you can find it. That’s what’s wrong with healthcare. The big boys scream to government, ‘Get off our backs, we can regulate ourselves.’ They can’t, and a $3 billion fine is nothing to them. Executives should have been fired. They aren’t alone: Abbott, Pfizer, etc.” Drug maker GlaxoSmithKline will pay $3 billion for promoting two of its popular drugs for unapproved uses and for hiding safety information about a third drug. Its marketing tactics included sending doctors on pheasant hunting trips to Europe and paying them for speaking. GSK pushed doctors to prescribe Paxil for depression in children even though the drug was not approved by the FDA for patients under 18. GSK says it has learned its lesson, which would be remarkable given the very long list of similar problems the company has bought its way out of over years (overbilling Medicaid, charging third-world countries high prices for AIDS drugs, adulterating drugs, dodging US taxes, and hiding drug side effects.) Company profits dropped in the most recent quarter to a “disappointing” $2.1 billion, so the “huge” fine amounts to around 18 weeks’ of profit. Maybe that’s the lesson they’ve learned – settlement payouts for arguably criminal wrongdoing are just a marketing cost. If it were me, I’d go after the docs who were willing to place their patients in danger for perks – publishing their names publicly should have been a condition of the settlement. We know drug companies often lean toward scumbaggery given ample opportunity, but they didn’t take the Hippocratic Oath and represent themselves as the patient’s advocate while pimping out their prescription pads.

From Luis: “Re: GSK. Cleveland Clinic is mentioned. Did they find the drug problems with data mining out of Epic?” The original journal article was published by Steven Nissen MD, chairman of cardiovascular medicine at Cleveland Clinic and drug company critic. He did the legwork proving that Vioxx and Avandia cause problems, leading to an FDA crackdown on their use. Above is an interview in which he talks about healthcare reform and how Cleveland Clinic is different. They went live on Epic on the ambulatory side in 2000, so they may well have dug into their own data to link drugs to patient harm. Even if they didn’t, many health systems will be able to do that going forward – all they need is enough patients to make a valid sample size.

From GreenGiant: “Re: Valley Medical Center, Renton, WA. Live on Epic ambulatory on July 2.” I apparently missed the link on their main page. Its board voted in December 2010 to move from McKesson to Epic.

From HIT Guy: “Re: fat-producing foods. The Supreme Court talks about broccoli, healthcare firms punish obese workers, and Vince Ciotti talks about making certain foods expensive. Science is now saying that diets that were previously thought good for you aren’t, and the early studies were good examples of how not to do a study.” A New York Times article talks up a theory that I believe in firmly: weight isn’t as simple as calories in minus calories out, with a new study finding that it’s more about the carbs consumed than the calories. My theory is that weight problems are due to fat storage and insulin regulation (i.e., the hypoglycemic index), not just taking in more calories than are burned off. I also believe that not all exercise is created equal, and pure cardio is good but building muscle is better. You can run your butt off on the treadmill for an hour and only burn the equivalent of a candy bar, so that’s not going to work for most folks unless their body composition changes.

From James: “Re: healthcare system repair. Taiwan was a free market system like ours and became one of the best by going with a single payer, which gets the full pool of money for both healthy and sick patients, can’t cherry pick the young and healthy, negotiates prices with providers and manufacturers, and makes judgments for what to reimburse. Private payers still have a crucial role for all the stuff that the main payer doesn’t cover, like physical therapy, allied health, home care, etc.” I’m frustrated enough with the current non-system here that this alternative is sounding attractive.

From Tom: “Re: healthcare system repair. If I could change one thing, it would be to eliminate employer-based health insurance, a remnant of the World War II era. Individuals buying insurance directly from payers improves continuity of care, removes a major employer cost, incents individuals to manage their health, and reinforces the need for interoperability. It would open the floodgates on HIT innovation and use of tools such as mHealth and PHRs.” I’m becoming cynical that any solution that involves insurance is doomed. Not only because insurance companies will always find ways to make a profit from healthcare, but because healthcare insurance covers more than just catastrophic situations. Homeowner’s insurance is relatively inexpensive because you collect significant amounts only if you suffer major damage, which nobody in their right mind wants, so if we all pay a little everybody is spared from losing their home due to a tornado or fire. Imagine the cost of homeowner’s insurance if it covered every possible problem with appliances, appearance, and the lawn and business were created around collecting inflated payments for providing those services. Not only would policies be priced out of reach, services would become so expensive that you’d have to have insurance to afford them, causing prices to just keep going up to everybody’s benefit except the person needing the service. I’d like to see the concept of healthcare separated completely from the requirement of buying a third-party company’s actuarial bet that you’ll consume less of it than they charge you.

From SW: “Re: ACA. Stan Hupfeld, former president and CEO of Integris Health, wrote an excellent book summarizing the Affordable Care Act, why solutions for other countries won’t or can’t apply here, and how neither party serves us well.”

From CIO: “Re: ROI due diligence on clinical systems. My organization is spending many dozens of millions to install inpatient clinicals. We paid attention to ROI, but it was not the driving factor, and actually I am grateful for that. Proving out a hard ROI is not only a challenge, but I think it diverts attention from the real reasons an organization may want to pursue a new system. Our organization changed our IT strategy after years of integration issues from a ‘best of breed’ to ‘integrated clinical system.’ We did this prior to the guarantee of Meaningful Use funding because we felt it was the right direction for our organization and patient safety. As a part of our new system installations, we resolved a number clinical and IT data exchange issues that have improved patient safety measurably. One small example relates to interface issues with messages erroring out, requiring manual work to resolve the specific problem. On occasion this included patient allergies and other vital data. And for those of you in the industry, you know all the other examples of data exchange challenges that also impacted best of breed approaches. We could have put a price on risk / actual claims / patient harm for this and related issues, but we kept on focus on the improvements we wanted and not the dollars. And frankly with all the other challenges pressing down on hospitals, I take some pride in knowing that we have a safer environment with our new system than our prior ones. This approach may not stand up to real accounting scrutiny, but I think the real question is, ‘Are patients materially safer?’ For us, the answer is yes.” 

From Bruce Brandes: “Re: Pliny’s question about FDA regulatory oversight of mobile apps. What Pliny is describing is a clinical decision support system. FDA considers these to be at least Class 1 medical devices per their mobile medical app guidance. Where the data is processed is not important. If the input and display take place on a device, whether it’s a mobile app, web page, terminal application, hardware/software product, then the device is a medical device and subject to regulatory oversight. The determination of whether the device is considered Class 1 or 2 depends on the risk to the patient attributed to a misdiagnosis or delay in treatment. From a regulatory standpoint, class 1 and class 2 devices require the company establish and maintain the same quality management system and design and servicing controls. The only difference is Class 2 devices require premarket approval by FDA, Class 1 devices do not.” Bruce is EVP and chief strategy officer of AirStrip Technologies, which has a lot of experience working within FDA guidelines. I’ve always assumed that most of the healthcare apps out there weren’t created with the FDA in mind, but maybe I’m wrong. Feel free to chime in.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

HealthStream acquires Decision Critical, an Austin, TX-based provider of learning and competency management products for acute care hospitals, for $4.3 million.

Dell will purchase IT management software provider Quest Software for $2.4 billion.

Microsoft announces a $6.2 billion write-down of the $6.3 billion in cash it paid to buy online advertising company aQuantive in May 2007.

Announcements and Implementations

Catskill Regional Medical Center (NY) goes live on Epic in its two hospitals of 235 and 25 beds.

Grand Itasca Clinic and Hospital (MN) announces a partnership with Allina Health System to install Excellian, Allina’s version of Epic. Allina will provide implementation assistance and support.

The local paper highlights the T-System and NextGen implementation of White Mountain Regional Medical Center (AZ).

David Runt, CIO of Contra Costa Health Services (CA), tells me that they went live on Epic (called ccLink at their place) on July 1 enterprise-wide (hospital, clinics, and health plan.) I notice from David’s LinkedIn profile that he spent 22 years as a medical service corps officer in the US Air Force Medical Service, so I’ll throw out an Independence Day nod to David and his fellow veterans for their service.

In the UK, Cerner complains to Cambridge University Hospitals Foundation Trust that its EHR bidding process was a sham and it had already chosen Epic without regard to submitted prices. The trust says it followed the rules when it picked Epic in April.

Oracle announces its Health Sciences Network for developing and conducting clinical trials, working with Aurora Health Care and UPMC to create a cloud-based system to manage de-identified patient information from member providers. Aurora was a key player, providing its patient information in hopes of improving its work in several hundred research studies. Expected challenges include the possible unwillingness of academic medical centers to participate, the difficulty in combining information from a variety of proprietary EHR data formats, and the storage required to eventually add genomic information.

Caradigm, the Microsoft-GE Healthcare joint venture, announces that the number of active users of its identity and access management solutions (Vergence, expreSSO, and Way2Care) has increased by 50% in the past 18 months.

Government and Politics

A proposed California bill would change the Confidentiality of Medical Information Act, which allows patients to sue healthcare providers for up to $1,000 per breached medical record. AB 439 would eliminate damage awards for first offenses and in some cases for repeat offenses if the provider notifies patients whose records were exposed and takes preventive action. The bill’s sponsor is McKesson.

Innovation and Research

The for-profit technology subsidiary of Palomar Health Foundation, which operates Palomar Pomerado Health (CA), announces that AirStrip Technologies has acquired exclusive rights to its MIAA mobile EMR viewer application. I first wrote about it in February 2011 when Cisco was helping pay for its development.

DataMotion files a provisional patent for a Direct Project-based secure e-mail messaging system for patients and providers.

Other

A London Daily Mail article covers Epic Systems. It’s loaded with snark and off-topic rants, but says that not only will Epic sign a $16 million, two-trust contract, but will soon take on another two hospitals in England and most likely bag more as each trust makes their own decisions and sees the value of using Epic as a data-sharing replacement for the failed NPfIT. It describes Judy Faulkner as “a 68-year-old Harley-Davidson-riding friend of President Barack Obama” who lives in a “nice, but not palatial” house. The paper tried to pry information from someone who answered the phone at Epic and was told, “Your messages have been passed on, and if we want to get back to you, we will.” It speculates that the massive Verona campus expansion was spurred by the likelihood of Epic’s expansion in England.

Another Epic article, this one from Wisconsin, describes the company’s construction boom, with its reporters counting 12 construction cranes hovering overhead. The company expected to hire 300 more employees in June and 1,000 more for the year, bringing its total to over 6,000 (and another 750 expected next year). The Farm Campus will add another 1,000 offices, underground parking for 1,000 cars, and the 11,000-seat auditorium that looks like a UFO crashed and buried itself into cow field. The article says the new construction on the 811-acre campus is valued at around $400 million, with 1,300 construction workers on site making it the biggest construction job in the Midwest.

Orthopedic surgeon Larry Bone MD (I’m not making that up) finishes up basic training and is shipping off to Afghanistan for a three-month tour of duty as a battlefield trauma surgeon. He’s 64. The head of orthopedic surgery at the University of Buffalo wants to give back for the treatment his son received after an IED explosion in Iraq six years ago.

A JAMIA article evaluates CPOE orders that are cancelled and then immediately re-entered on a different patient, concluding that over 5,000 orders per year are being entered on the wrong patient. The proposed solution: make physicians enter the patient ID twice before allowing order entry.

In England, a 22-year-old teaching hospital cancer patient becomes delirious from dehydration and missed meds, finally dialing the equivalent of 911 to say he’s thirsty and nobody will give him water. Nurses send police away when they arrive, but the patient dies shortly afterward. His mother, who says her son was restrained, sedated, and ignored in his room the night before he died, said a nurse asked afterward, “Can I bag him up?”

Sponsor Updates

• Bottomline Technologies offers webinars on payments and cash management.
• RelayHealth shares details of its role in preparing for ICD-10.
• Liaison Healthcare Informatics will provide awareness activities in support of National Health IT Week September 10-15. Liason is also sponsoring NCHICA’s quarterly roundtable meetings for CIOs and CMOs/CMIOs.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Mobile.

Readers Write 7/2/12

Submit your article of up to 500 words in length, subject to editing for clarity and brevity (please note: I run only original articles that have not appeared on any Web site or in any publication and I can’t use anything that looks like a commercial pitch). I’ll use a phony name for you unless you tell me otherwise. Thanks for sharing!

Note: the views and opinions expressed are those of the authors personally and are not necessarily representative of their current or former employers.

ICD-10: The ED Effect
By Robert Hitchcock, MD, FACEP

As I visit current and prospective hospital clients, they openly express uneasiness about their organizations’ finances. Market forces are squeezing margins and expectations are high that Medicare and private payers will continue cutting reimbursement rates. These challenges are only intensified by ICD-10 and Meaningful Use mandates.

In the 20-plus years I’ve worked in healthcare, I’ve seen no other initiative with the potential to impact hospitals more greatly than ICD-10. With one-half of all inpatient admissions and 45% of a hospital’s overall revenue, the emergency department in particular can help define whether or not this impact will be positive or negative. As the population ages, patient volumes will continue to multiply, and the ED will need to keep up in order to keep the hospital financially afloat.

Most hospitals are anticipating – and depending upon – their departmental or enterprise EHR vendors to provide the necessary changes that will facilitate the capture of the appropriate information needed for ICD-10 coding. Unfortunately, however, some key hospital executives fail to recognize that very different approaches can be taken when implementing ICD-10 in clinical applications.

It is imperative that these executives evaluate how a solution will achieve compliance. How will content be built and maintained? How will ICD-10 codes be generated? How will the system work to maintain productivity? The method for compliance can represent success on one end of the spectrum and failure on the other end – each with tremendous financial implications.

If the vendor does not provide and maintain standardized encoded clinical content for documentation but instead offers “fully customizable content,” the client will be required to update and maintain an extensive data set with the corresponding ICD-10 terminology and/or codes. While a money-saving approach for the vendor, it will mean significant costs to the client.

If the vendor chooses to simply use an ICD-10 clinical terminology look-up function that is not integrated with other clinical content in the application, it could limit the ability of the application to re-use previously recorded information, requiring duplicate documentation. This presents another productivity burden to the clinician.

In terms of ICD-10 code generation, some software designs will offload to the physician the burden of navigating long lists of possible code-able terms to search for the most appropriate clinical diagnoses. ICD-10 represents a vast increase in the number and specificity of codes from ICD-9. As a result, physicians may fail to complete this part of the documentation or choose less definitive diagnoses when and where it saves time. This can negatively impact reimbursement as well as reporting for regulatory compliance, risk management, conformance to clinical polices, etc. Instead, having codes that are generated automatically based on providers’ documentation will not impede clinician workflow, productivity and, ultimately, documentation quality.

To obtain accurate, discrete data for analysis and reporting, physicians must embrace the user interface design of the application. Good data analysis requires a foundation of good data collection. Like CPOE, if the clinical workflow and user interface is well designed, potential benefits are quickly realized. If designed poorly, the results can be agonizing.

The increased specificity of ICD-10 will drive more than just reimbursement, magnifying the impact of the ICD-10 implementation for better or worse. Additional granularity, if accurate, can facilitate many other processes that also have financial implications to the ED and hospital, such as risk management, regulatory reporting, quality initiatives, clinical decision support, and metrics for productivity, patient throughput, ordering of tests, and resource utilization.

As well, ICD-10 has the potential to offer easier and tighter system interoperability. A standardized coding system requires that all systems speak the same language, freeing hospitals to choose the best possible technology for the ED. Indeed, having disparate but interoperable systems in the ED and inpatient environments no longer has to present the same challenges it has in the past.

My advice to those solving for ICD-10: Look beyond the basic issue of compliance and choose technology that will truly optimize the ED. It is the front door to your hospital, the start of the patient record, and the key to your organization’s prosperity. I would hate for any hospital to have to experience the frustrations and wasted expenses associated with having to rip out a system and replace it. 

Robert Hitchcock MD, FACEP is vice president and chief medical informatics officer of T-System of Dallas, TX.

Standardized Data Just the Start in Making Data Usable at the Point of Care
By Jay Anders, MD

3M Health Systems recently announced it will open access to its Healthcare Data Dictionary, which translates standard terminologies and enables semantic interoperability between disparate systems. 3M made this move to meet contract conditions with the VA and Department of Defense, which are using the Data Dictionary to facilitate interoperability for their joint EHR.

The news is significant for several reasons. By making its Healthcare Data Dictionary free, providers and vendors have access to tools that translate a collection of clinical terms in a variety of standard terminologies such as RxNorm, ICD-9, ICD-10, LOINC, and SNOMED. A common language for clinical terms facilitates data standardization, analysis, and exchange.

When data is available in a standardized format, health information exchange is easier. The interoperability of clinical data is essential for Meaningful Use and the cornerstone for new reimbursement models that emphasize outcomes and accountability for patient health over traditional patient encounter volume.

The need for tools that decipher disparate but related clinical concepts will continue to grow exponentially in coming years. The healthcare industry relies on standard terminologies to move information between providers, and many stakeholders are calling for even more standards for files, codes, and other data.

The proliferation of standards aids data exchange, but the data is of limited value without means to disseminate the information and then to make it usable by clinicians. Clinical data mapping addresses part of this problem.

Payers and clinical researchers, for example, rely on clinical data to analyze financial and health trends. Data mining on a large scale is nearly impossible without technology that identifies common concepts, regardless of the terminology.

Similarly, Accountable Care Organizations and HIEs require tools to make sense of vast amounts of data from physicians, health systems, and other providers. Clinical data mapping enables the efficient identification and accurate interpretation of the information required for ACO and HIE analysis and reporting.

Given the amount of clinical data which is about to flood the industry, organizations must have methods in place to both exchange and store clinical data in standardized formats, and to make the clinical data usable at the point of care.

These are not the same.

In addition to 3M’s Health Data Dictionary, there are clinical data technologies and tools available from Clinical Architecture, Health Language, Inc., Intelligent Medical Objects, Medicomp Systems, and others. Regardless of which one of these is chosen to exchange and store clinical data, it is also necessary to organize and present clinical information to the clinician during the patient encounter.

For example, for a patient with five existing clinical conditions, the provider needs to be able to instantly see the clinical data relevant to renal failure, as opposed to their diabetes, hypertension, arthritis, or migraine headaches. Once the HIEs are up and running, there may be thousands of clinical data points for a single patient.

What is needed is an engine to organize and present clinical information at the point of care. This requires millions of links between data points to filter, analyze, and present data relevant for that specific patient encounter.

This is critical in enabling physicians to follow their own thought process and make sense of the flood of clinical data. Widespread standardization and sharing of clinical data between systems has the potential to enhance the quality of healthcare. The power and potential of clinical data is truly realized when data is delivered and made usable at the point of care.

Jay Anders, MD is chief medical information officer of MED3OOO of Pittsburgh, PA.

Healthcare Cure?
By Vince Ciotti

The idea is simple: keep people healthy. We do a great job of treating those who are already sick, but it is costing us far too much, whether through taxes, premiums, or deductibles and co-pays. How to keep people healthy? Discourage them from getting sick. How to do that? Make the cost of things that make them sick prohibitive. How do we do that? Pass the cost of curing sick people on to those products that cause specific, preventable illness.

One of the leading cancer killers today is lung cancer, pretty directly attributable to smoking. Best way to break the smoking cycle? Turn our capitalist free-market system loose by passing the cost of treating lung cancer directly on to those who smoke, until the price is so prohibitive they cease to buy tobacco. Thanks to PPS and DRGS, we know what treating most specific diseases cost. Let’s say last year the ≈300,000 people who died from lung cancer cost us taxpayers about $100,000 each to treat. That’s roughly $300B in taxes and premiums we all paid for their care. Now allocate that $300B across the tobacco companies based on their revenue. That’s a pretty stiff hit on any company’s bottom line, so they’d have to triple or quadruple the price of cigarettes to $20 or even $30 a pack to maintain a decent profit margin.

By letting the free market accurately reflect the healthcare cost of a given product, we consumers would be a lot wiser in buying unhealthy products, and their manufacturers would have to develop healthy alternatives or see their revenue gradually dry up. Farmers would have to plant other crops, and the many attorneys who file tobacco lawsuits would have to find other segments of society to represent.

Let’s shift to another easy target: obesity. Pass the cost of treating diabetes on to sugar manufacturers. Not a tax, but an invoice for what they are costing us in health care to treat diabetes. Like tobacco manufacturers, they would have to raise the price of their product to cover the resulting health care cost. Now, Wheat Checks and Al Bran would only cost a fraction of what sugar-laden cereals cost and more people would buy them, catching manufacturers’ attention. So on and on, with every disease that is directly attributable to a specific product or ingredient: mesothelioma and asbestos, cirrhosis and alcohol, heart attacks and cholesterol, melanoma and tanning booths. 

It would be a bitch to set up. Many politicians, their PACS, and lobbyists would fight hard every step of the way for each disease being targeted. Maybe we should pass the cost of treating heart attacks and ulcers on to them. Jobs would be created for medical experts, economists, and statisticians. Jobs would be lost for lawyers, doctors, and marketers.

In the long run, consumers would follow their wallets to those products that cost the least, once they included healthcare costs, and avoid those products that cost the most, because of high healthcare costs. That’s the beauty of capitalism’s free-market way. This is an economic problem for which we need an economic solution.

Vince Ciotti is a principal with H.I.S. Professionals LLC.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 7/2/12

It’s been four days since the Supreme Court issued its decision on the Affordable Care Act. I did get to have a little fun with it on Friday. One of the guys I work with fancies himself a Supreme Court aficionado, so I left a beribboned bunch of broccoli in a decorative vase on his desk. He totally didn’t get it, which made the day of several people.

Watching my physician colleagues react to the decision has been interesting, particularly because some are so detached from really understanding its impact. They’re well-versed, however, in knowing what the various talking heads are saying about it on TV and in other media.

In talking through it with one of my CMIO colleagues, we came up with a theory. Since we spend so much time in hospitals, most of the physicians we’re exposed to on a daily basis are hospital based. These are typically procedural specialists in higher income brackets and they tend to be more self protective and income oriented. Not surprisingly, most of them cited the upholding of the Act as the end of truth, justice, and the American way.

Reaching out to some primary care colleagues, there was a greater proportion of physicians who support the act, but I was surprised by the number of front-line family physicians who reacted with extreme negativity. Several expressed the opinion that this decision is just the beginning of ongoing legal wrangling which will distract from the real work that needs to be done in reworking the American health care system. Although the Act will allow more patients to be covered by private insurance or Medicaid, it doesn’t materially change the availability of care in the short term.

Professional organizations are predicting an increase in patients seeking care in the emergency department rather than in the ambulatory primary care setting. The forecast shortage of physicians needed to care for the influx of patients into the health care system still hovers at 60,000. Interventions such as telemedicine that could allow physicians to better care for patients in continuity (and keep them off of overcrowded office schedules) still aren’t reimbursed by major insurance payers. Subspecialty providers are rewarded for performing procedures and high-tech interventions, while primary care practices are forced to subsidize care management initiatives with the promise of potential future income that may never be realized.

The American Academy of Family Physicians praised (their word, not mine) the decision in an online posting and received numerous negative comments. These reflect the ongoing divisions in the medical community that won’t be resolved until real care transformation takes place.

I’m sure additional legal challenges will follow and states will maneuver as much as they can. Physicians will continue to be in limbo. I don’t foresee a jump in the ranks choosing primary care, nor do I see care actually becoming more affordable.

Are you a front-line physician with an opinion on the decision? E-mail me.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Monday Morning Update 7/2/12

From Hellcare: “Re: ACA. Interesting reader responses. You have collected many devoted readers and contributors with varied backgrounds, experience levels, and opinions over the past few years. What about an open forum week, in addition to your regular articles, where we discuss, ‘What is wrong with the healthcare system and how do we repair it?’ Who knows, maybe we’ll do better than Congress! I don’t think that it even needs to be a dissection of the ACA, but maybe opinions from more than just C-level management that have to give the answers they have to give to save their jobs. If Ell Jeffe is right, then there is much to discuss and even better, more to learn.” I’m game. To keep it positive instead of everybody just complaining, tell me what you’d change and why. Also, operate under the assumption that we aren’t going to simply throw out today’s healthcare system, so your changes should be realistic. Anyone want to start us off?

From Pliny: “Re: mobile apps. The FDA says they are subject to its oversight if they process user input with a formula or algorithm, output a treatment recommendation, or perform a calculation that results in an index or score. That would cover any mobile app that connects to an ARRA-certified product, would it not?” Good question. I interpret it as meaning the logic is running from the mobile device itself, which wouldn’t be the case with most clinical system front ends that are just displaying data and capturing input, no different than a Citrix session. Anybody else want to chime in?

From The PACS Designer:”Re: Apple’s 7-inch iPad? With the launch of Google’s $199, 7-inch tablet called Nexus, can Apple be next with a 7-inch iPad? Earlier this year, such rumors were swirling about a mini iPad that would make a better fit in lab jacket pockets, so we may see it in 2013 at a price of around $300.”

From DrLyle: “Re: AMDIS meeting. About 300 attendees, mainly CMIOs and similar, about 50% more than last year. Some great discussions from both academics and applied informaticians, with topics such as problem list management, ACOs and population health, EMR usability, analytics, and role of the CMIO.” Presentations from the AMDIS 21st PCC Symposium are here. Above is a DrLyle photo from the meeting last week in California.

A surprising 91% of readers say hospitals and practices aren’t using sound financial principles when they decide to buy their clinical systems. New poll to your right: what’s your professional and personal reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision that Obamacare (as both parties now call it) will stand as law?

From the above poll results, here’s my challenge to CIOs of hospital that are spending $100 million or more on an inpatient clinical system. Readers are skeptical that your employer did its due diligence on return on investment. Explain to them why they are right or wrong (e-mail me a paragraph or two – I will leave you anonymous unless you indicate otherwise.) How did your organization justify the expense and what’s being measured to prove that the decision was a good one? Or if you made your investment and went live more than a year or two ago, how do the benefits you’re seeing (both financial and non-financial) compare to what you expected?

I haven’t followed the PPACA drama all that closely, but here are the healthcare IT ramifications I would expect judging from what I’ve heard here and there.

• The majority of people and companies who paid little attention to PPACA under the assumption that some or all of it would be found unconstitutional will have to scramble to catch up. Few expected it to survive unscathed, so they wasted the first couple of years after it became law in March 2010 when they could have been figuring out what it means to them.
• More people will have access to insurance, so hospitals theoretically won’t see as much self-pay and bad debt. However, they will need even more people and systems to handle all of those insurance transactions.
• A fly in the ointment, however, is that employers may decide that the penalty for not providing insurance is cheaper than actually buying it with their significant employee subsidies, so they may just drop coverage entirely and force employees into the open market via health insurance exchanges. Employees may make the same choice, especially in PPACA’s early years, when penalties for not carrying medical insurance are minimal (just a few hundred dollars per year). Real-time eligibility checking and a plan to collect patient responsibility upfront will be required for provider survival.
• States have made poor progress in developing health insurance exchanges, so they probably won’t be ready any time soon.
• Medicaid rolls will swell massively under the plan, so providers will need to watch their reimbursement rates and payor mix carefully, especially since states are already teetering financially and now have another headache to deal with.
• With 30 million newly insured citizens and a shortage of primary care providers, the pressure will be on to improve PCP efficiency (even if just to restore the time EMR usage has stolen).
• Platforms that provide the ability to schedule PCP visits against their open schedules will be in demand to even out supply and demand based on provider and location.
• Given the likelihood that PCPs will still be overloaded, I would expect more care to be delivered by extenders and telemedicine, which will change the expectation of the systems in use.
• The demand for provider information will be insatiable. The same federal government and insurance companies that require endless petabytes of questionably useful information will now want even more of it once the promise of cost reductions isn’t realized. They are even more in charge of providers now than they were previously.
• Medical device vendors can’t be happy since PPACA requires them to start paying an annual 2.3% tax on gross revenues starting in January.
• PPACA’s impact on cost will probably be to increase it. In that regard, the biggest problem has still not been addressed since the special interests would have killed the bill otherwise – the healthcare system, regardless of who’s paying, is bloated, inefficient, and run by those special interests (including the biggest special interest of all, politicians.) 

Investor reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision: shares of hospital chains and healthcare IT vendors are mostly up, insurance company shares are down. Allscripts was up 8% on the week, while Quality Systems, McKesson, and Cerner jumped around 4%, a little better than the S&P 500. Athenahealth was up, but only by 1%. Cerner’s market cap is up to $14 billion, with Neal Patterson holding $462 million worth.

Not getting your HIStalk e-mail updates? Here are two solutions: (a) sign up for them if you haven’t already (duh), and (b) add mlsend.com to your so-called whitelist of e-mails allowed to get through your spam filter (your e-mail administrator will probably need to do this). I changed the e-mail service a few weeks back, so if you aren’t getting the e-mails all of a sudden, go with option B and tell your e-mail person that mlsend.com e-mails aren’t spam.

CapSite releases its Revenue Cycle Management study, which finds that 21% of hospitals plan to replace their RCM solution in the next to years and 53% say they will upgrade what they have. Interestingly, the larger the hospital, the more likely they are to replace or upgrade their RCM. The most-desired bolt-on solution is patient insurance eligibility verification, although 400+ bed hospitals are more interested in kiosks and the most-planned purchase of all is coding solutions. I was also interested in a relatively minor stat from the extensive report – in 400+ bed hospitals that responded, the #1 registration/ADT vendor (as a proxy to overall system penetration in my mind) was Epic, followed by Siemens, Cerner, and GE. I also liked the strategic priority question above.

The non-profit Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) is hosting the National Workshop to Advance the Use of Electronic Data in Patient-Centered Outcomes Research this week in Palo Alto, CA. Assuming it’s a bit late to plan attendance in person since they just sent me the announcement, they’ll have a live webcast (July 2-3). Speakers include folks from PCORI, Stanford, UCSD, NIH, FDA, and other big organizations. I hadn’t heard of most of the speakers, but those whose names I recognize are Doug Fridsma (ONC) and Paul Tang (PAMF).

Medical image management vendor UltraLinq offers Cardiac Accreditation Accuracy, software that allows users to track their QA documentation and statistics through integration with its exam data.

The PACS Designer is updating his list of iPhone apps, so if you’ve run across any that are interesting, post a comment to tell him about them.

CTG announces four new contracts for outsourcing, business process re-engineering, IT medical management, and HIE implementation support.

A jury returns a $15 million verdict against Springhill Memorial Hospital (AL) for a 2008 incident in which a 45-year-old non-ventilated patient died after bypass surgery due to an overdose of the anesthesia drug propofol that was administered by a nurse working her first shift in the cardiac recovery unit. The nurse was found to have no documentation of training appropriate to her assignment, had no experience in working with cardiac recovery patients or propofol, and failed to call for help when the patient lapsed into an immediate coma. Afterward, the nurse changed her documentation of the patient’s vital signs and ventilator settings, then erased the IV pump’s memory and destroyed the propofol container.

Vince’s HIS-tory this week covers HMS, tracking down co-founder John Doss for a first-person account.

Wall-mounted entertainment consoles are being removed from South Australia hospital patient rooms after at least four patients are harmed by units falling off the wall. Plans to install 3,500 of the units were cancelled.

Strange: a journal article chronicles the case of a 24-year-old software engineer from India who experienced an intense headache every time he tried to watch pornography, forcing him to change his plans. The authors didn’t figure out what caused the headaches, but they successfully treated the patient by advising him to pre-medicate himself with ibuprofen and acetaminophen.

E-mail Mr. H.

Time Capsule: Untethered Caregivers = Great Clinical Systems Opportunity

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 August 2007.

Untethered Caregivers = Great Clinical Systems Opportunity
By Mr. HIStalk

Networking hardware vendor Cisco made a surprising announcement last week. The company’s two-year-old hospital division has become its growth leader. Sales have doubled in those two years to a cool $1 billion annually. Much of that involves wireless networking. That’s an unqualified "great" for Cisco and a qualified "good" for hospitals.

Healthcare customers were already buying a lot of Cisco gear, so carving out a separate healthcare business may not have made much difference. Still, the company must see a lot of opportunity in hospital wireless, infrastructure upgrades, and new construction. They’re smart.

Cisco will learn from a hospital-focused division. The company supposedly ran afoul of FDA regulations after making meaningless claims about a "medical grade network." It backed off a little, but is now pushing the good concept of integrating medical devices via wireless connectivity.

Hopefully Cisco won’t misstep again when injecting its products between patients and caregivers. If the company backpedals on reliability guarantees or has a patient-harming episode and hides behind legalese, word will spread fast. Cisco has a couple of hot little competitors like Meru and Aruba who would be more than happy to snatch a few of its crumbs.

Anyway, what’s most interesting about the announcement is that, clearly, most hospitals now have some flavor of wireless network. They vary in coverage, reliability, speed, use, and user acceptance, but they’re out there in force. And because of that variation, Cisco and other vendors see a gold mine in replacement the early-generation 802.11b and 802.11g systems that are limping along unimpressively.

Expectations have changed. Wireless is mission critical. Entire clinical systems strategies have been crafted around mobile caregivers wandering seamlessly around buildings while using portable computing devices.

Software vendors haven’t quite caught up. Applications are sometimes mobile user-unfriendly, requiring carefully targeted mouse clicks and keyboard entry that doesn’t work well when cradling a tiny notebook PC in your arm. Less-than-youthful caregivers may have to squint painfully to read screens that were designed for 17-inch monitors. .

The writing is on the wall, however. Wired devices will soon be as antiquated as those early-generation VCRs that had a wire-attached remote control. Wire’s last advantage is about to be eliminated as 802.11n matches or exceeds its speed.

Hospitals will save a bundle by not hard-wiring buildings. It’s painful to sit through construction meetings trying to convince architects and construction project managers that network wiring requirements are just a bit more complex and expensive than running electrical power to wall outlets. That’s a concept you can tell your grandkids about some day, like when TVs had a picture tube or when music came from a store instead of a download.

The downside, as it always is, is cost. We’re re-buying all this gear from Cisco and other vendors, ripping out what we bought just a few years ago. That’s capital that could have been used elsewhere, like virtualizing servers or improving redundancy.

If all goes well, this second round of spending probably buys the performance you expected from the first round.

Still, wireless technology developments are exciting. Hospitals need to figure out how to improve patient care given untethered caregivers who carry an impressive arsenal of technology in lightweight devices. There is cool stuff yet to be done using VoIP communication devices, new bedside patient monitoring and diagnostics, and information systems designed to help deliver care, not just document it.

Clinical systems vendors, it’s a great time to rework or build applications without the assumption that users are sitting at a desk all day. Ubiquitous wireless connectivity changes the game. If you don’t believe it, think about what went on in coffee shops before Wi-Fi.

News 6/29/12

Top News

 

A GAO report finds that the VA and DoD have made progress in their pilot project to integrate care at the James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center (IL), but delays in implementing the IT component have resulted in additional costs. IT investments have already surpassed $122 million and some initiatives are almost two years behind schedule.

Reader Comments

From Convener: “HIStalk’s announcement on the Supreme Court ruling. Once again you beat Modern Healthcare and all the others, and with a more comprehensive article.” Since Mr. H is busy traveling for his hospital job, we decided in advance that I would sit by computer and TV, listen for the announcement, and send readers a quick update. The moment MSNBC said the healthcare law had been upheld, I looked for an online write-up. Above is a screen shot of what CNN posted, which obviously left me mighty confused (obviously several so-called journalists hit the “post” button for their pre-written stories after reading only the first sentence of the ruling.) Thankfully I decided CNN simply had it wrong before I blast the news incorrectly to the HIStalk universe. Boy, Mr. H would have never let me live that down.

From SummerFun: “HIStalk Practice Advisory Panel. I liked the write-up. Great questions and interesting answers.” In case you missed it, our first HIStalk Talk Practice Advisory Panel post was published earlier this week. The participants, who are primarily physicians and staff in ambulatory care practices, shared thoughts on their EMRs and discuss other technologies. It’s a fun read and a good mix of positive and negative impressions, just like real life.

From Blue Eyes: “Re: healthcare reform act. What do you think of the news and its effect on healthcare IT?” I think people have forgotten that Thursday’s ruling affirmed only the legality of creating the law, not to assess it as a good or bad idea. I’ve yet to hear anyone claim to have read and/or understood the 2,900 pages of legalese, including the politicians who voted for or against it, and it’s discouraging that even the Supremes voted pretty much along liberal / conservative lines (it’s either legal or it’s not, but you wouldn’t know that from the 5-4 opinion). I don’t know if anyone of us know what it means beyond lots of newly insured people showing up at the doors of hospitals and practices (at least when they can find a primary care provider to schedule them). I’d bet healthcare costs will continue to go up, healthcare IT will ramp up for another year or two until the Meaningful Use wad has been shot and providers go back to buying only what boosts their productivity or bottom line, and we’ll nonetheless start getting some highly useful big-picture data telling us where we stand from a population health perspective but leaving us to actually do something about it (like finding a way to get Americans to lose weight, exercise, and manage their expensive chronic conditions wisely and cost effectively). Here’s where the crowdsourcing thing works well: click the Comments link at the bottom of this post and tell me what you think. For those who have never commented, you don’t have to register first and you can give a phony name to stay anonymous. My general assessment when wearing my HIT tunnelvision goggles is that it’s a good thing. As a taxpayer, I’m not really sure.

From Watcher of the Skies: “Re: HCA. Going Epic. I was in training in Verona and someone from HCA in my class said so.” Unverified. HCA originally said they were doing a one-hospital Epic pilot to decide between it and upgrading Meditech, but nobody’s told me definitively which way they’re going.

From Robbie Douglas: “Re: McKesson. Close to making an acquisition of [company name removed], whose offerings include an ambulatory EHR and billing and management services.” I removed the company’s name since the rumor is unverified, but it sounds like a done deal. It’s a pretty big outfit. 

From Cool Runnings: “Re: Drex DeFord. Leaving Seattle to take CIO position at Steward Health in MA. Steward’s for-profit 80-hour work weeks have taken their toll on a few CIOs in a short period of time. The CEO likes to call his leadership on weekends and expects them to work as many hours as he does.” Drex has updated his LinkedIn profile to list the Steward CIO job, so I’ll call that rumor verified. I worked for a for-profit hospital chain once for a short time. It was run by the biggest scumbags in the industry given my first-hand observation of their indifference to patient care and total worship of the bottom line. I wouldn’t care to repeat the experience, but to each his own.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Here’s some highlights from the last week on HIStalk Practice, in addition to the above-mentioned post from our Practice Advisory Panel: the biggest challenges of running a group practice. Alleviant announces plans to open a new facility in Vermillion, NC. The Office of the Inspector General finds that EMRs from Allscripts, eClinicalWorks, and GE Healthcare were products most widely used by physicians to document E/M services. Humana is the top payer among US health insurers in athenahealth’s Payerview Rankings. Aaron Berdofe discusses the federated model in the second part of his series on healthcare infrastructure data models. It takes so little to make me happy: a glass of nice wine, a new pair of strappy sandals, or a few new subscribers to HIStalk Practice. Make me merry, if you can. And thanks for reading.

On the Jobs Page: Software Engineering Manager, Project Manager, Web User Interface Design Engineer, Senior Buyer – Third Party Labor.

Listening: Lush, underrated alt rockers from England who had a 10-year run that ended in the late 1990s when their drummer killed himself. The music is rich, sweeping, and sweet, but rocking in a wistful sort of way (some place them in the “shoegazer” genre, but I’m not sure about that). I don’t know how I missed them, but it’s not too late since it still sounds fresh today. You’ll like it if you enjoy Cocteau Twins.

Everybody’s talking about voting of one kind or another these days, so here’s an urge to visit the (electronic) polls. Register to vote by signing up for e-mail updates. Cast your vote for progress by liking, friending, and connecting with the HIStalk party (Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Travis, and me) via the social media ballot boxes. Send us your tired, you poor, and your rumors and news. Show your appreciation of our supporters by checking out the sponsor ads to your left and trying out the searchable, categorized Resource Center and Consulting RFI Blaster. As Alice Cooper says, I’m your top prime cut of meat, I’m your choice, I wanna be elected – as HIT’s go-to site for news, scandalous rumors, and occasionally irrelevant amusement. Thanks for your vote to keep me in (my upstairs spare bedroom) office for another bunch of years – I won’t let you down. I’m Mr. HIStalk and I approved this message.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Practice Fusion secures an additional $34 million in Series C funding led by Artis Venture. The company has raised $64 million since it launched in 2007.

Carena, which offers webcam-based provider visits and other products, completes $14 million in financing led by Catholic Health Initiatives.

People

The Digital Pathology Association appoints Sharp HealthCare CIO Bill Spooner to its board.

Employee scheduling software vendor Avantas announces the promotion of Christopher Fox from SVP of growth and innovation to CEO and Jackie Larson from VP of client services to SVP. Fox takes over for founding CEO Lorane Kinney, who is retiring.

athenahealth appoints Charles D. Baker (General Catalyst Partners) and Jacqueline B. Kosecoff, PhD (Moriah Partners/Warburg Pincus)to its board.

Announcements and Implementations

Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian (CA) implements Unibased’s ForSite 2020 RMS resource management and patient access solution across all of its diagnostic imaging locations.

The Pennsylvania eHealth Collaborative announces a grant program that gives providers a free year of DIRECT messaging services for secure health information exchange.

RiverView Health (MN) will go live on Epic July 1.

Ochsner Health System (LA) will go live on Epic this week ad its health center locations.

Government and Politics

Five senators introduce a bill that would create a national standard for notifying affected individuals about information security breaches. The bill, the fourth attempt to create national requirements, would also move enforcement to the Federal Trade Commission and allow that agency to levy fines of up to $500,000.

Other

The Bethlehem Area School District (PA) joins The Children’s Care Alliance, which maintains an EMR database of student health data supplied by school districts and made accessible to area hospitals.

Meditech President and CEO Howard Messing provides the opening remarks for the 11th Annual Pappalardo Fellowships in Physics Symposium at MIT, which is obviously supported by Neal Pappalardo of Meditech. Both are MIT alumni and physics fanboys. It’s a good talk.

Highline Medical Center and Franciscan Health System (WA) announce plans to explore a strategic affiliation, partly driven by Highline’s interest in using Franciscan’s Epic system that will go live next year.

University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (TX) notifies patients that a computer containing patient and research information was stolen from a physician’s home April 30. The hospital says it will step up efforts to encrypt its computers, making you wonder how an organization as smart and rich as MDACC needed negative press to finally move the needle on encryption. Here’s a gentle nudge for their fellow fence-sitters: if you don’t encrypt your portable devices, you are being inexcusably irresponsible and deserve the inevitable headlines, CIO firing, and class action lawsuits that are likely to result when the “pay me now or pay me later” time bomb you allowed to be planted finally goes off. Everybody knows that healthcare IT is stuck in a 1980s time warp, but are we seriously still waffling on encrypting PHI-containing devices?

Meanwhile, the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services agrees to pay HHS $1.7 million to settle possible HIPAA violations stemming from the,theft of a USB hard drive from an employee’s car. The Office of Civil Rights determined that the Alaskan agency had inadequate security and risk controls in place and now must take corrective action to safeguard electronic PHI.

Is that a parachute in your backpack or are you just glad to see your surgeon? Mexican doctors remove a 33-pound tumor from the back of a two-year-old, 26-pound boy.

Sponsor Updates

• ICA announces that the Central Illinois HIE is live, with four up and running.
• Kony Solutions expands support of open standards with the release of its KonyOne Platform v5.0.
• Phoenix Children’s Hospital (AZ) chooses Access Intelligent Forms Suite to integrate data among its Allscripts HIS, electronic forms, and its MedPlus ChartMaxx content management application.
• Kareo releases a free iPhone app for accessing physician schedules online.
• Ingenious Med explains how its PQRS Registry is helping healthcare facilities to avoid penalties and improve revenue.
• Medicomp Systems CEO Dave Lareau  discusses five EHR considerations for organizations preparing for ICD-10.
• Julie Corcoran, principal consultant with Hayes Management Consulting, highlights five of the major issues facing hospital revenue cycle teams.
• MyHealthDIRECT expands its partnership with Amerigroup to include Amerigroup’s Maryland provider partners and giving them access to MyHealthDIRECT’s online scheduling services.
• Wolters Kluwer Health announces that Essentia Health (MN) is the 1,000th customer to deploy its ProVation Medical software.
• BridgeHead Software releases the results of a survey finding that only 26% of worldwide HIT leaders have robust disaster recovery plans in place. 
• Centracare Health System’s St. Cloud Hospital (MN) selects Merge PACS.
• New York eHealth Collaborative says it’s the first REC to hit 1,000 providers qualifying for Meaningful Use money.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

Like Inga and Mr. H, I sometimes become annoyed when my day job cuts into my HIStalk time. Unfortunately, this is one of those weeks. I had taken some time off this week to make sure I would be able to immediately respond to the much-anticipated Supreme Court decision, but it has been sucked up by a couple of hospital projects that have gone off the rails. I’ll definitely be responding to the decision, whatever it may be, but just not tonight.

HIStalk reader and contributor Micky Tripathi writes about “The Dangers of Too Much Ambition in Health Information Exchange.” He warns of over-architected HIEs that try to be all things to all people at the expense of short-term wins with real value. It’s a great piece that I hope obtains wide readership.

CMS will begin enforcing the use of version 5010 HIPAA transactions next week. Although it doesn’t seem there are continued widespread issues, anecdotal reports include ongoing tales of claims difficulties.

Physicians are subject to as many as 20 different varieties of payer audits. The American Medical Association has archived a webinar that covers the who, what, where, when, and why of auditing. Anyone who wonders about the high cost of health care and declining levels of provider satisfaction should take a peek.

No surprise: An online article in the Journal of the American Medical Association discusses the higher per-patient operating costs found in clinics with higher medical home scores. Medical homes can reduce overall health care spending, but there is little incentive to incur the upfront burden if the savings isn’t passed to those doing the work.

For Inga: a chocolatier says the  Massachusetts pharmaceutical gift ban is hurting its business. Their popular corporate gift: chocolate shoes.

PremierConnect debuted this week, allowing providers and healthcare systems to access data from payers, claims, lab, billing, and other sources to monitor clinical performance and perform predictive modeling. The aggregated database includes data from more than 2,600 hospitals.

I was in Canada recently and heard quite a few public service announcements on the radio encouraging blood donors to step up and give. I haven’t heard much at home, but blood supplies in the US have reached “emergency levels,”according to the Red Cross. Summer heat and vacations typically limit donations and only 3% of people in America donate blood. If you’re looking for an air-conditioned place to spend some time over the upcoming holiday, consider taking a trip to your local blood bank. Chances are you’ll leave with a cookie and some orange juice in addition to knowing you may have just saved a life.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Mobile.

Supreme Court Upholds Healthcare Law

The Supreme Court rules to uphold the ACA, including the individual mandate.

CIO Unplugged 6/27/12

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

Excellence, the Road Less Travelled

Another summer working for meager wages was no longer an option for John and me. Both married with kids, we searched for a breakaway strategy where we could make decent cash to hold us over until our first big break. Under-experienced and over-educated in the utopic college town of Fort Collins, this proved a herculean task.

Nevertheless, armed with respective degrees in psychology and Spanish (teaching certificate), we came up with a vision that would forever change our lives. We started our own company. Men… who do Windows!

We visited our local janitorial supply store. With 10 minutes of in-store advice and a $100 investment in buckets, soap, and squeegees, we were bound for glory.

After analyzing our competition in the Yellow Pages, we realized we’d need a bold approach. Competing with dozens of vendors and with no time or money for static advertisement, we took an unconventional approach. We created fluorescent-colored flyers and paid teens to deliver them to targeted neighborhoods. Our phone began to ring.

We bid each job in person and dressed in nice clothes. We parked our company car (a urine-colored Honda CVCC) down the road a few houses so as not to tarnish the high-end brand we strived for. Who would notice the 24-foot extension ladder strapped on top of an 8-foot car? We wore “uniforms.”

We priced our services higher than our competitors — a bold move. But we hoped to differentiate ourselves by stressing customer service and excellence.

Included in our bid was our happiness guarantee: “We not only clean your windows, but your screens and window sills as well. When we enter your home, we take off our shoes. We have towels under all of our tools so you never need worry about us leaving your home a mess. We will move all drapes and curtains and furniture as needed. Prior to us leaving your home, we will inspect each window with you. If you are dissatisfied with any, we will redo them until you are happy with our work.”

We closed 90% of our bids. Our window redo rate = 0.01%.

After a few weeks, we could not keep up with demand and had to stop all advertising. It became vogue in some neighborhoods to have the Men… who do Windows sign in their yard. A few customers insisted on serving us lunch on their decks overlooking a lake. Excellence creates demand.

With graduate school awaiting me and another summer break for John, we resurrected the business the following year with the same results. We grossed an average of $400 per day, with the cost of doing business a low 5%. Excellence is profitable.

John and I believe our success was attributable to the high quality we put into our craft. We encouraged one another to be our best as we honed our squeegee skills to ensure a streak-free finish. Why would people willingly pay a 50% premium for our window-washing services? Because they knew it would be done to perfection. Our customers knew we would meet expectations and not leave without their approval. Excellence elevates the performance of those around you.

We both replicated this value in our personal and professional relationships — John as a teacher and later a pastor and I in healthcare. This pursuit of excellence has blessed our families and careers. Moreover, the people and organizations we serve have benefitted. Excellence creates differentiation that separates good from great.

Ten years after Men…. who do Windows, I was invited back to Colorado State University to serve on the advisory board of the college from which I received my Master’s. During lunch, I was approached by a fellow board member who asked if I had ever cleaned windows. I revealed myself as the founder of Men. He looked me straight in the eye and earnestly exclaimed, “My windows have never been so clean!”

Imagine — 10 years later and he still recalled the service he received from our company for washing windows. Excellence is not forgotten.

Twenty years after Men, both John and I visited Ft. Collins with our families. The owners of Trios AVEDA Spa and Salon knew we were in town. They had a big social after-hours shindig taking place one evening, and yes, they asked if we could reprise Men and clean their windows so they would dazzle. We obliged. It was a great reunion, and we still had our skills. Excellence sets a pattern for future performance.

The Men experience was priceless. Alas, the time came for us to move into our chosen professions.

Rather than sell the business, we gave it away to others in similar circumstances as we had been in two years’ prior. We taught them everything we had learned, from window washing basics to customer relationship management. Even the happiness guarantee.

By the end of the first season, the business lost half its value. We mourned when Men folded midway through the following year. Excellence requires passion to attain and sustain.

A long time ago, a writer in Greece observed the games that would eventually become the Olympics. He said, “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.”

Excellence is doing everything you do with the very best you have.

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.

News 6/27/12

Top News

ONC’s Director of Meaningful Use Joshua Seidman, PhD resigns to take a job as managing director of quality and performance improvement with Evolent, the ACO services provider spinoff of The Advisory Board Company and UPMC.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Atlantic Health Solutions acquires fellow medical billing company DataSolv Services.

Sales

Lehigh Valley Health Network (PA) chooses MedAssets to provide RCM technology and consulting services, including MedAssets Charge and Reimbursement Integrity solutions and Collections Management product.

Bradley County Medical Center (AR – above), Ellis Hospital (NY), and Jamaica Hospital Medical Center (NY) sign contracts with QuadraMed for the ICD-10 compliant version of Quantim Coding and for QuadraMed’s 3-Learning and Education program.

The West Coast Regional Office of VHA and Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center (PA – above) sign agreements with Avantas for the company’s healthcare enterprise labor management technology.

The VA awards Ray Group International a $4.9 million contract to support the Open Source EHR agent project, which allows developers to contribute software code for the VA/DoD integrated EHR.

The Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) signs a contract with PatientOrderSets.com to use its solutions in public and DIR-eligible hospitals.

Summa Health System (OH) selects PatientKeeper Charge Capture software for its 300 physicians.

Lenco Diagnostic Laboratories, a New York reference lab, implements EMRHub from Lifepoint Informatics, which allows it to distribute lab data to an unlimited number and variety of EMRs through a single connection.

People

RCM provider Recondo Technology names Major General (Ret.) Elder Granger, MD (TRICARE) to its board.

GetWellNetwork appoints Beth Martinko (Avid Technology) SVP of client experience and Hugo Borda (NeighborBench) VP of enterprise architecture.

Medsphere Systems adds Mike Morotti (Validus Medical System) as VP of sales.

PerfectServe appoints George Pace (Verisk Health) RVP of sales.

Ernest & Young names The Advisory Board Company CEO Robert Musslewhite a winner in of a 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year award for the Greater Washington Region. Ernst & Young also names T-System CEO Sunny Sanyal a finalist for the 2012 Southwest Area North Entrepreneur of the Year.

Beacon Partners names Jon Mello (EMC) as EVP.

Greenway reseller iPractice Group names Monte Ruder (Integrated Healthcare Solutions) its VP of sales and adds three additional account executives. Last week iPractice announced that an undisclosed California company is investing $32 million in the company.

Announcements and Implementations

Kaiser Permanente and the Social Security Administration announce a pilot program to exchange electronic health information using the NHIN.

The Kentucky HIE, St. Elizabeth Healthcare, and HealthBridge announce their successful secure exchange of patient health information.

McPherson Hospital (KS) implements Meditech.

OTTR Chronic Care Solutions announces the arrival of its OTTR 6 release.

Merge releases its eClinical OS Platform for capturing any type of data from any source and over any modality.

Former BayCare Health System (FL) critical care nurses Cynthia Davis and Marcy Stoots form CIC Advisory, which offers strategic consulting services specializing in EMR-driven clinical process improvement. They were involved in BayCare implementations in executive roles.

Government and Politics

ONC releases a new version of its online Certified Health IT Product List that lists 1,700 EHRs and modules and includes several new features, including functionality to identify hybrid certified EHRs.

Other

Winter Haven Hospital (FL) says it has pushed backed the full implementation of its EHR system from last spring until October 1 in order complete physician training. Cerner, I believe.

KLAS takes a look at Epic consulting firms and ranks Impact Advisors highest in enterprise implementation leadership and advisory, Encore highest for team implementation leadership and advisory, and Nordic Consulting highest for staffing implementation and support. KLAS identified 45 firms with Epic consulting engagements and found that nearly every firm received good marks for consultants. Thanks to KLAS for allowing us to quote their report and include the graphic above.

The Wall Street Journal covers the failed EMR implementation of 25-bed Girard Medical Center (KS), which says it paid Cerner $1.2 million and still can’t quality for Meaningful Use money (we reported its lawsuit against Cerner back in January). The hospital claims that Cerner didn’t include quite a few items in its $2.9 million agreement, but also admits that it didn’t understand the contract it signed and relied on Cerner to tell its executives what it covered. According to the CIO of the IT department (which had only two employees when the hospital signed with Cerner), the additional costs were only $100,000 over the term of the five-year agreement, but the hospital decided to stop paying Cerner to get their attention over poor service. They did – Cerner e-mailed the hospital to say it was walking away. Based on the skimpy description in the article, I’m siding with Cerner – the hospital didn’t do its due diligence, bought way more system than it needed or could maintain, and then tried to play tough over a price discrepancy of less than 4% of the total contract value. Granted some vendors (Epic) wouldn’t have sold a deal like that knowing the chance of success was minimal, but it’s not Cerner’s job to advise the hospital as a neutral party. If someone deserves blame other than the hospital, it’s the federal government for financially baiting providers into buying systems they otherwise had been wisely avoiding as a bad fit.

The president of CVS Caremark’s MinuteClinic says its retail clinics support continuity of care by giving every patient a copy of their medical record, sending their physician a copy if the patient approves, and integrating with practices by either sending them electronic information or (for the large number of practices that don’t have an EMR) a nightly batch fax.

An article by early Epocrates executive Michelle Snyder observes that despite all the technology being thrown at physicians, they’re less productive now than 10 years ago. She urges the use of simple technologies that, like Epocrates, are easy to use and save individual doctors time – no more, no less. Examples: HealthFinch (lets doctors delegate prescription refills to staff); ImagingCloud (Webex-like medical image collaboration); and Doximity (LinkedIn-like physician referrals and consultation).

Sponsor Updates

• NextGen changes the name of its Practice Solutions Division to NextGen RCM Services. 
• Bulletin Healthcare Briefings partners with the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners to publish and electronically deliver its members-only daily electronic news briefing PNP Daily News.
• ZirMed and DoctorSites offer a free webinar entitled, “Online Marketing and Payment Secrets That can Make – or Break – your Practice.”
• Mowery Clinic (KS) selects NextGen’s EHR/PM and portal solutions for its 33 physicians.
• Imprivata scores a score of 88.4 on KLAS’s 2012 mid-term performance report.
• Emdeon announces that three of its RCM solutions have received HFMA Peer Reviewed designation.
• Allscripts reminds developers that the deadline for its Million Hearts Clinical Decision Support Challenge is July 13. The company is offering a $50,000 prize for the best publicly available app that optimizes cardiovascular disease care through clinical decision support.
• Passport Health adds its PatientTrack and PatientRisk modules to the Care Cycle Suite.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Mobile.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 6/25/12

I maintain staff privileges at a hospital where I almost never admit. Even with my non-existent volume, I still have to attend training, so I wasn’t surprised a few months ago when I received the postcard saying that it was time to talk about finally going live on CPOE.

It’s kind of funny, because more than four years ago I served on the selection committee for this particular product. I remember at the time being shocked that we were even considering it because the user interface was so buggy at the hospital where we did our site visit. Meanwhile, I had moved on to greener CMIO pastures, but I still keep those privileges out of nostalgia (or maybe out of fear that one day I might have to go back into traditional practice.)

Luckily the final training blocks coincided with a couple of comp days I had already scheduled. I wrote about my recent Meaningful Use upgrade training a few months ago and I hoped that this would be a similar experience. However, I think I could use it to write a case study in how to alienate the medical staff.

Being a veteran trainer, I arrived 15 minutes early because I knew I’d have a logon / password issue since I rarely go to that facility. The training room was dark, so I poked my head into the room next door to make sure I was in the right place. The training team was sitting around and barely noticed me. In fact, they were talking about another physician – making fun of one who had arrived half an hour early because he was cutting into their break time. I pretended I didn’t hear them and asked if I was in the right place. I was told they’d be in the room shortly.

I went to the room and found a seat at a folding card table (no, I’m not kidding) with actual damp coffee on it. They finally walked in five minutes after training was supposed to start and began passing around a coffee-stained sign-in sheet for continuing medical education credit. That was a plus – I hadn’t expected to receive hours and it’s always good to have some “live” credit since I do most of my CME online. But the coffee was a turn-off.

Additionally, since the last time I rounded, the facility had gone to proximity badges. I didn’t have one, which created much hubbub, although none of the trainers could tell me who to talk to in order to get one. Surprisingly, my ancient logon and password were not expired.

After dealing with the sign-in sheet and the proximity badges (I wasn’t the only one without one – the other doc who had arrived 30 minutes early didn’t have one either) they finally decided to fire up the projector and went through a whole “how do I adjust the keystone” saga. My new Twitter BFF, @MeetingBoy, would have been proud.

Training finally started about 15 minutes late. To my chagrin, they not only accommodated late arrivals, but stopped class and rehashed everything that had been covered to that point.

I was given a cheat sheet with some patient names, one of whom was a 14-year-old male named “Samantha,” which added realism to the scenarios. The class moved at a glacial pace to allow for one of the more senior members of our class (whom I know to be at least 85 years old) to keep up. I felt so sorry for her – she is very sweet and is a fixture at the hospital, and they really should have offered her an individualized class.

About an hour and a half into the class, everyone was kicked out of the application. The trainers explained that the build team was still creating order sets and had a tendency of uploading their work several times a day “to keep the environment fresh.” I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t need their recent (probably untested) build work to make it through class.

I was surprised to see that the version being deployed was the same version we looked at four years ago. I know this product didn’t make its vendor’s “go forward” list, but I’m pretty sure there’s been another release since then. I’m not sure about the rationale for taking outdated software into a live environment.

All the bugs and UI glitches that we had seen during selection were still there. Some orders were in alphabetical order when it would have made more sense to have them sorted by frequency of ordering or grouped by body system. Others were arranged by the order in which they were added to the database rather than being in alphabetical order. You could see what the “oops, forgot that one” tests were because they were at the bottoms of the lists. Seeing “do not use” abbreviations is always a treat as well. Several screens had such inconsistent use of color that it looked as if a bag of Skittles had been upended on the screen.

I was pleasingly surprised to see that the system had a button for logging bugs (really a glorified e-mail launch) and the other docs in the room got a kick out of that too. Docs were told to log anything they thought should be added and that it would be placed in the system. There was no mention of change control, governance, or peer review of the suggestions.

Laughs were had over the trainer’s warning that we shouldn’t try to use the embedded help files because the system had been customized so much that they weren’t relevant. The trainers took great pride in telling us how many hundreds of hours it took to build some screens vs. others and the hours quoted were really quite unreal.

Several common acronyms were used in the order sets, but unfortunately some elements were out of order and others were missing, making it hard to recognize the acronyms. With as many thousands of hours as were allegedly spent building, it didn’t appear that there was much clinical oversight. No surprise – the hospital in question does not have a CMIO and I’m not sure there were medical informatics experts involved in system planning and design either.

This was the fourth training session of the fourth week (only a few days prior to go live) and at least three of us noticed a major patient safety defect that had not yet been discovered. On some screens, patient demographic and vital signs data rounded up and/or down without reason. I’m not sure about you, but when a patient is documented as weighing 78 kg in the base clinical application, I don’t expect to see him rounded down to 70 kg in the CPOE module. Other areas of the system simply had garbage in the build (the ubiquitous ZZZZ added before pick list items to push them to the bottom) which always drives me crazy.

The doc seated next to me said she couldn’t believe we were forced to attend the class live. It could easily have been given as a 90-minute webinar instead. I didn’t disagree. I did receive two hours of continuing education credit for my four-hour tour, so it wasn’t a total loss.

The hospital went live on CPOE over the weekend. From what I hear, things went well, all things considered. I wish them the best, but hope the next rollout has not only better software but better training.

Have a training horror story? Does your system remind you of colorful candy? E-mail me.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Readers Write 6/25/12

Just as healthcare providers were getting serious about progressing toward the much-heralded ICD-10 era, the announcement of a potential deferral in the compliance deadline has spawned a new wave of delays and second guessing about how best to apply limited IT resources. Some organizations are freezing ICD-10 budgets and slowing down, or even halting work completely, until a new date is set. While a one-year deadline delay may be productive, it would be a mistake to assume that planning can be halted until this time next year and then resumed – primarily because most organizations are already far behind the curve in preparing for ICD-10.

Any delay or reallocating of internal resources in an environment where healthcare provider budgets are already tight can result in process inefficiencies and, ultimately, higher implementation costs. Many are concerned with how to make the extension beneficial to their organization. Providers should use the additional time to implement a more sound and strategic approach to collaborative testing with their primary trading partners – the most difficult and unpredictable segment of conducting a successful ICD-9 to ICD-10 migration. As it is, most large IT projects typically require more testing time than is usually allocated – and the current status of ICD-10 readiness demonstrates this case is no different. In fact, given that ICD-10 can have a tangible impact on revenue flows, providers should ensure that they work hard to mitigate their risk of disruption with trading partners that account for 80 percent or more of their revenue. Such systematic testing initiatives with key trading partners are essential for achieving the goal of financial neutrality.

Across the industry, we can look at the progress health plans have made to set the future for providers. This newly found year of extra time will be a critical period for internal and external testing. Collaborative testing should focus on maintaining the operational status quo. This means keeping the business neutral with respect to key performance indicators such as claims acceptance rates, support inquiries, electronic claim adjudication rates and aggregate claim reimbursement amounts. Many ICD-10 codes will result in an increase in clinical complexity and document specificity as compared to ICD-9. Through collaborative testing with health plans, both parties will be assured that migrating claims to ICD-10 will allow benefit and payment neutrality.

To test effectively, providers and their trading partners must develop scenarios that reflect use of high-risk codes, specifically claims that use codes expected to have high volumes, complexity, and high dollar values. The key is to minimize the risk to the business by focusing efforts on testing scenarios that could have the most impact.

Successful external testing requires new levels of collaboration and information sharing among providers and insurers. While it may be uncomfortable to collaborate on such testing, failure to do so may lead to big surprises in payments after the transition date, which will cause even greater discomfort for insurance companies and providers alike.

The ICD-10 transition is the most substantial effort the industry has faced. The scale of the project means that the testing required to fully ensure business readiness, as well as benefit and financial neutrality, is unprecedented. For those organizations that have the determination to keep moving forward as if the delay had never been announced, it will undoubtedly end up being a true gift on the testing front. Take advantage of the time afforded to realize a true benefit from the delay. And devote any newfound hours to ensuring that neutrality is achieved.

Deepak Sadagopan is general manager of clinical solutions and provider sector at Edifecs of Bellevue, WA.

Payback is a CPOE
By Daniela Mahoney

Right from the beginning of a project, I elicit the customer’s motivation for deciding to invest in CPOE. For meeting Meaningful Use requirements only? Or for what I like to hear, which is things such as “an organizational initiative for quality improvement,” or “to reach the highest level of patient safety goals” or even, in some cases, “cost reduction and avoidance.”

But if only about the money, we need to understand that the return on investment for a CPOE project — outside of incentive dollars — is difficult to calculate. Baseline costs of essential processes are hard to define, and often a number of benefits do not lend themselves to a quantifiable measurement process (i.e., improved communication across departments). Additionally, many organizations have difficulties measuring their medication errors and adverse drug events.

Although measurable improvement may be detected in well-defined areas, such as the use of expensive diagnostic and therapeutic procedures and compliance with core measures, CPOE should be viewed as an indispensable supportive technology and should be included in the overall quality improvement strategies of the organization.

And just how much will it cost an organization to implement CPOE?

For starters, we know CPOE is 80-85% clinical transformation, rather than tangible software, hardware, or infrastructure. Costs are more about people and processes than implementing technology. There are a few good studies published in the past few years that discuss the financial impacts of CPOE from a cost to ROI perspective.

One well-known study was initiated by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC) and the New England Healthcare Institute (NEHI). The study was led by Dr. Bates and his team of physicians and nurses, who audited 4,200 medical charts from community hospitals in Massachusetts over a 12- to 18-month period. Once Dr. Bates’ team completed its work, PricewaterhouseCoopers did a complete financial analysis of the costs associated with each error identified and, if an error had been prevented, to whom the savings would have accrued.

Based on this study, most hospitals that have considered purchasing and implementing CPOE can expect a return on their investment within 26 months, a quick payback. The acquisition cost for a CPOE system was cited as being about $2.1 million, and hospitals could expect annual operating expenses of about $450,000 a year. After breaking even on the initial investment, hospitals with 70% use ratings for CPOE can expect a net savings of about $2.7 million per year.

Examples of cost:

In the example above, averages are from $7,000 to as high as $17,000 per bed as a total cost of implementation. Also, I looked back at the data I have accumulated over the 20+ years to compare the costs for hospitals I’ve worked in and some of the published case studies. Looking at the cost of the implementation per bed, there does not seem to be a significant difference between the larger facilities and smaller ones.

Looking at a range of lows and highs, I am seeing costs varying from $7,550 to $12,000 per bed, depending on how costs were estimated based on the initial project assumptions. In the latter case where the cost per bed is higher, we have accounted for other items as part of the initial capital investment; things such as servers, devices, end-user support staff, and training hours for staff and the entire implementation team members.

CPOE is not an inexpensive endeavor, to say the least. But in the end, it’s cost vs. effectiveness

Organizations will spend a great deal of their initial investment regardless of whether they implement the minimum requirements to meet Meaningful Use or implement to improve quality care delivery for the entire organization. However, one thing is certain: benefits cannot be anticipated if only a handful of providers are using the system and we constantly have to come up with workarounds to bridge the gaps. There are so many benefits to CPOE and real-time clinical decision support.

So I ask the question: what is more important to your organization, cost or effectiveness? This is a critical question to understand and answer to seek because it will help you fully recognize the value of medical technology and the likelihood of adoption by your organization.

We talked about money and the “richness” of CPOE. Why not take this a step further and complement our topic with a nice summer dessert? Extra-rich strawberry ice cream. I guarantee it you will enjoy it, and it will cleanse your palate from the bitter taste this topic leaves behind.

Daniela Mahoney, RN BSN is vice president of Beacon Partners of Weymouth, MA.

Monday Morning Update 6/25/12

From DCollins: “Re: WatchChild. Rumored to be up for sale. That would be a huge signal to the world of HIT – why divest in times of growth?” Unverified, but even if it’s true, I don’t know if I would draw too many negative inferences about the healthcare IT market as a whole. The WatchChild OB monitoring system is owned by Hill-Rom, mostly known for selling expensive hospital beds and a few other marginally related product lines. WatchChild was supposed to be a natural extension of the company’s NaviCare nurse call system. HRC shares haven’t exactly shone lately, dropping from $48 in July 2011 to $30 now, so Hill-Rom may simply see the frenzy of M&A activity in healthcare IT as a good opportunity to sell some or all of its IT holdings to focus on core business. All of this is speculation since they’ve made no announcement that I’ve seen. Hill-Rom used to be known as Hillenbrand Industries, whose humorously complementary business was Batesville Casket Company. I’ve always wondered if they might put some of their nurse call technology in those caskets as an upgrade for those who fear being buried alive.

From TopExecIT: “Re: MRO. Overheard that it has acquired smaller release-of-information vendor Discovery Health Record Solutions.” Unverified.

From Grammar Neighborhood Watch: “Re: grammar mistakes. Thought you would enjoy this WSJ article called This Embarrasses You and I.” You are correct – I did enjoy the article, which calls out the “epidemic of grammar gaffes in the workplace” as the grammatically challenged get even sloppier as encouraged by Twitter and similar stream-of-consciousness outlets for narcissism (especially the younger folks, taught by questionable educational methods to ignore long-standing rules suggesting that maybe it’s a good idea to spell words correctly and compose sentences that the rest of us can easily follow, for the same reason that traffic laws encourage societal harmony.) Worse yet is that people actually get snippy if anyone points out their mistakes, as though being careful about language is a character flaw. The article suggests that companies have become sloppy in allowing poorly constructed writing to be blasted out publicly. It brings up an issue that is one of few that I would defend physically if necessary: the Oxford comma, omission of which is indefensibly illogical. I nearly always have to fix that when folks send items to run on HIStalk. The other is equally illogical and indefensible — sticking two spaces after every period. Unless you’re writing on a typewriter that supports only monospace fonts and thus requires the extra space to provide a visual break, placing two spaces after a period is just plain wrong.

From Kermit Randa: “Re: question about Epic and FDA regulation of transfusion systems. I think the question warrants a broader discussion around software as a regulated medical device. The FDA has classified numerous specific products that perform data and information transfer, storage, display, conversion, and similar management functions, such as a LIS or PACS. Last year, the FDA raised more questions than it resolved when it issued a new classification, the Medical Device Data System (MDDS) which it defines as hardware or software products that transfer, store, convert formats, and display medical device data. The FDA, in its commentary, made clear the definition of an MDDS is narrow. For example, an MDDS does not modify the data or modify the display of the data, does not by itself control the functions or parameters of any other medical device, and is not intended to be used for active patient monitoring. However, the FDA was not clear about whether or how they would classify software that falls on the outside edges of the MDDS definition and does not fall under one of the earlier classifications such as LIS or PACS. Furthermore, the FDA made clear that a health care facility may be directly responsible for compliance with the FDA regs for an MDDS, not just its software vendors. So as we all work to streamline clinical workflows and achieve meaningful use, the intersection between different types of information systems is raising issues about medical device compliance. More here, or click here to see which companies have registered as a manufacture of an MDDS (enter OUG in the product code search field.)” Thanks to Kermit, a long-time reader and COO of Surgical Information Systems, for providing that explanation. It seems that the climate for FDA regulation of some aspects of healthcare IT is heating up, so it’s worth watching carefully.

From Privacy Shrink: “Re: sharing patient data in Boston. I like the comparison between mental illness and Parkinson’s disease.” The article describes how Boston area hospitals handle sensitive parts of the medical record, such as psychiatric notes. Partners HealthCare says every doctor needs to see everything, so patients must request that certain information be placed off limits and Partners makes the final call. BIDMC allows psychiatrists to restrict access to the information they create. Neither system described any capability for patients to become involved in the decision. Privacy is a tough issue, but I’m siding with the patient – why can’t I decide who sees my information? The Partners approach comes across as smug and paternalistic, with the patient serving as a low-ranking, inherently unreliable player apt to gum up the disease mitigation factory works.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Microsoft’s Phone 8. Along with the upcoming Microsoft Windows 8 release this fall, we’ll also get Windows Phone 8. It appears that Microsoft wants a piece of the enterprise business for phone improvements and has structured Phone 8 as an alternative to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to give IT total control of phone security enforcement within institutional walls.” Good luck with that. Microsoft’s consumer strategy seems to be to imitate whatever Apple is doing, adding in its usual missteps, poor design, and uninspired marketing. The result is predictable. There was a time when Microsoft was a near-religion among geeks and businesspeople who dismissed Apple as a bunch of hippies building products used mostly by students and temperamental artistes, but even those former Gates fanboys now worship at the Cupertino altar.

The feds should make doctors and hospitals jump through only evidence-based hoops, 93% of respondents said. New poll to your right: are hospitals and practices applying good financial analysis and ROI calculations to make EMR purchasing decisions? Obviously your yes/no vote makes you one of the silent majority or minority, but you can overcome the “silent” part by adding a comment by just clicking the comments link right below the survey’s voting button.

A hospital in Northern Ireland finds that a problem with its radiology information system caused radiologists to miss reading 17,000 images over several years. They’re reading the images now and have set up a patient hotline.

Nominations are open for HIMSS board and nominating committee positions. I know several folks who have used their HIMSS positions as a nice career springboard, so that might be the additional carrot you need to throw your hat in the ring if you have something to offer HIMSS beyond unbridled ambition.

HealthCor, the Allscripts shareholder that threatened a proxy fight until the company gave it three board seats, raises its ownership of the company from 6.1% to 7.3%. Share price has been flat since it fell off a cliff in late April following several negative announcements. The hugely important next quarterly report is scheduled for August.

HIM/IT services and outsourcing provider Anthelio (the artist formerly known as PHNS) names John Dragovits as president and COO. He was formerly EVP/CFO of Parkland Memorial Hospital and was a Cerner VP before that.

Nordic Consulting, a Madison-based, Epic-only consulting firm, is ranked #1 in staffing and implementation support in “Navigating the Sea of Epic Consulting,” a new KLAS report.

In England, several NHS trusts join together to seek a replacement for their RiO mental health EMR, expecting spend up to $470 million.

Vince has more to say about Dairyland and several related companies this week. You can help him out by reminding him of other companies he can riff about, especially if you were around in the early days prior to 1980 or so. I offer Continental Medical Systems, Megasource, Dynamic Healthcare Technology, Atwork, and Visteon/Avio as a few old-time names I’ve heard recently. In another angle of attack, has Vince missed any big personalities of that era, folks who kept turning up in one company after another? He would appreciate your ideas and contact information for the pioneers he could reminisce with.

Aetna and Inova Health System (VA) jointly form Innovation Health Plans, which will offer new HMO and PPO services. Inova’s healthcare services delivery will be supported by Aetna’s benefits administration and technology (presumably Medicity) that will allow physicians to track patient care.

London-based SwiftKey releases its on-screen tablet or phone keyboard for healthcare that claims to reduce text input time by 49% by predicting the next word to be typed. Price for this version wasn’t given since I suspect they’ll sell through hospitals and software vendors, but their non-healthcare product is $1.99, and priced appropriately given mixed reviews. Watching the guy thumbing his way through entering medical text in the video above made me nervous – doctors don’t pay enough attention to on-screen defaults and choices as it is, so I can envision some major medical errors caused by too-quick approval of the wrong word.

More Accretive Health fallout: the Treasury Department proposes regulations that would require charitable hospitals to keep their collection dogs on a leash, improving their effort to help patients qualify for financial assistance before garnishing their wages or dinging their credit scores.

An FDA report finds that software problems cause 24% of medical device recalls, also noting that the engineering teams that build medical devices are often woefully ignorant of best practices for developing and distributing software. It mentions FDA’s Functional Performance and Device Use Laboratory, which will allow the agency to test user interfaces and analyze device usability.

E-mail Mr. H.

Time Capsule: "Best", "Most Wired", and Other Hospital Surveys: Good for Selling Stuff and Not Much Else

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 July 2007.

"Best", "Most Wired", and Other Hospital Surveys: Good for Selling Stuff and Not Much Else
By Mr. HIStalk

US News and World Report released its Best Hospitals 2007 list last week. Indecisive or brain-dead folks who can’t choose a movie, restaurant, or college now have yet another life decision they can outsource to faceless reporters who will tell them what to do for just the cost of a magazine (anyone who’s worked around reporters would question whether that’s a good idea.)

Few readers will care how "Best" was determined. Answer: a few hundred doctors were surveyed, Medicare mortality was reviewed, and two-year-old AHA survey results were picked through to see who had cool technology and who was really busy. Some kind of unstated weighting was applied and, voila! the Best Hospitals were extruded out the other end.

Best Hospitals isn’t as blatantly biased toward a specific industry sector as the annual Most Wired Hospitals ("Buy more of our products so you can get on our list.") They’re just trying to sell magazines, not multi-million dollar IT gadgets. But what does "best" mean when it comes to hospitals? Is there such thing?

It doesn’t mean much to the average hospital patient, as far as I can tell from those three survey sources. Doctors don’t know anything about most hospitals first hand, so that’s just a popularity contest. Medicare mortality may be relevant (or not) if you’re a senior citizen, but not so much if you’re an expectant mother or trauma victim. Using old AHA survey results to create a brand new conclusion seems iffy.

Not surprisingly, the physician "reputation points" question ensures that only big academic medical centers make the list. It’s like the Best Colleges edition: the only drama is whether Harvard, Stanford, or Princeton will bag the #1 spot in a given year. In fact, the Best Colleges issue itself influences reputation, so maybe the only thing that will ever change is the order of finish.

Rankings aside, you don’t know if your kid will get a better education or a faster meningitis cure just because you picked the Best instead of the local places that only non-magazine reading rubes would patronize. Nobody knows. It’s not predictive. But one thing’s sure: it helps sell magazines.

The bottom line is that we don’t really know, for a given individual or condition, which hospital is best. We don’t even know if it matters which one you go to. Maybe it’s your doctor, your faith, your preventive care, or your genes that has the most effect on whether you walk out happy or not. Whose building you sleep in may or may not play as much of a major role as us hospital types would like to think (except avoiding those that are prone to killing patients with a hospital- acquired infections or medical mistakes). Big hospitals have their share (maybe disproportionately so) of medical errors and poor outcomes.

The best hospitals (or, more precisely, doctors who practice in them) do just one thing obviously better: diagnosis. After that, I’m not convinced there’s much difference. In fact, in the typical giant medical center run by a liberal academic parent, you’re apt to find hordes of geeky diagnosticians wearing bow ties and vast armies of lower-ranking types who are likely to miss your meds and take their time responding to your call button (I like to think it’s because they’re not scared of an employer that deals with incompetent professors by offering them lifetime employment through tenure).

Juxtaposed with this story was hardly shocking news: according to a study, electronic medical records don’t improve patient care. Well, actually, that’s what the headlines said. What the study found was that EMRs didn’t improve compliance with standard practices that ought to improve care. The biggest shock to me was that somebody apparently thought they should. You can buy the golf clubs Tiger Woods uses, but that doesn’t mean you’ll play better golf. When it comes to EMRs, the hopes of the naive apparently needed dashing.

When it comes to what’s most important – whether you, specifically, will walk out of a hospital alive and well – maybe some reporter’s Best Hospitals or Best EMR or Most Wired lists don’t really make much difference. It’s not that easy. That’s a tough message for a data-driven, standardization-obsessed, sometimes sheep-following industry to hear, but I think it’s true.

News 6/22/12

Top News

The VA establishes a goal of conducting more than 200,000 clinic-based telemental health consultations in fiscal year 2012, offered to veterans without requiring a co-payment per VA policy that covers all videoconferencing-based encounters.

Reader Comments

From Overheard: “Re: HIT sales training. A friend tells me he just completed a sales training class led by one of the professional training and coaching organizations. His impression was that the course was developed by a ‘bunch of bitter nerds who are haters getting their kicks off telling the nice-looking popular kids that they are stupid.’” Ouch. Before begging Mr. H to hire me, I considered taking a position as a sales coach. At least in this gig I don’t think too many people call me a nerd and I can get away with telling just about anyone that they are stupid.

From Eros: “Re: Cerner and autocorrect. Have you ever tried typing ‘Cerner’ in a message on your iPhone?” It seems that Apple insists the correct word should be Cerberus, a mythological three-headed watchdog that guards the gates of Hades to prevent anyone from escaping. Perhaps Neal should invest in one for the employee parking deck.

From Printgeek: “Re: [free EMR vendor’s name omitted.] I heard its board and executive team has seen four departures. They are making good headway with physician enrollments, but actual usage is poor and eyeballs on the screen are not meeting expectations. Additionally, the model to generate revenue from data and ad sales isn’t coming close to investor expectations.” Unverified, so I’ve omitted the company’s name, not that most readers aren’t astute enough to know it instantly anyway.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The latest from HIStalk Practice: Medford Medical Clinic (OR – above) signs up with athenahealth. The AMA votes to evaluate ICD-11 as a possible alternative to ICD-10 for replacing ICD-9. The ONC plans to help small providers increase security on mobile devices. Offices with great EHR implementation had only slightly higher patient safety culture scores. Dr. Gregg reveals his interoperability nightmare. Give HIStalk Practice a test drive if you aren’t a regular. Thanks for reading.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

eMerge Health Solutions, a developer of a hands-free documentation and workflow solution for gastroenterologists, closes on $850,000 in seed funding from CincyTech and private investors.

GE Healthcare sells the assets of its Nurse Call business to Switzerland-based Ascom, which markets its own nurse call system outside of the US.

PatientKeeper raises $6.25 million from existing investors to expand professional services and support operations.

Etransmedia Technology acquires Associated Billing Services, a provider of RCM services.

T-System acquires Marina Medical Billing Service, which provides ED medical coding and billing services to 110 facilities.

Sales

Iowa Health System selects Explorys’s Enterprise Performance Management  applications to support its ACO initiatives.

O’Bleness Memorial Hospital (OH) chooses ProVation Order Sets as its electronic order set solution.

People

Former RelayHealth exec Matt Llewellyn joins BillingTree as its VP of sales for the healthcare market.

OTTR Chronic Care Solutions names Sandy DeRoberts (Carefusion) regional VP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Pacific Medical Centers (WA) installs Versus Advantages RTLS to track patient flow at its Totem Lake clinic.

St. Rita’s Medical Center (OH) goes live on Epic.

KLAS names Encore Health Resources the top-rated consulting firm serving Epic clients in the category of Team Implementation Leadership & Advisory.

CareFusion signs an agreement to support bi-directional connectivity between its Alaris smart IV pumps and Epic.

Kony Solutions releases a new version of its Mobile Health Plan.

In the UK, Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust begins implementation of Meditech.

The US Air Force will use SAS tools to support research and to deploy a global dashboard to improve operational and clinical decision support. An example given involves SAS Scoring Accelerator for Teradata, in which researchers can run query of 1.2 million patients to determine which 10% of those with diabetes are most likely to have an ED encounter in the next two months.

Three competing hospital systems in the Charleston, WV area (Thomas Memorial, CAMC, and St. Mary’s in Huntington) meet to discuss their use of Siemens Soarian. The article cites two examples of its use by Thomas Memorial’s CMIO Matthew Upton, one in which he entered patient orders from home before leaving for the conference and another where he followed his patient from a café in Italy using an iPad.

Government and Politics

ONC launches a pilot project to measure the effects of giving providers and pharmacies better access to drug monitoring programs in order to reduce prescription drug abuse.

CMS awards a $20.75 million Health Care Innovation Challenge grant to VHA, Inc, TransforMED, and Phytel for a three-year national project to expand the PCMH concept and test the viability of a patient-center medical neighborhood model.

Other

The Association of Regional Centers for Health Information Technology, or ARCH-IT, is formed as a national association for the country’s 62 Regional Extension Centers. I noticed, by the way, that of the 143,000 providers signed up with RECs, only 12,000 have received incentive payments. Maybe a bit more mindshare wouldn’t be a bad thing.

The Long-Term and Post-Acute HIT Collaborative issue a roadmap for HIT in nursing homes and rehab centers, focusing on care coordination with other providers, implementing quality measurement activities, and promoting technology education among LTC workers.

In New York City, merger talks between NYU Langone Medical Center and Continuum Health Partners break down after Continuum entertains a similar offer Mount Sinai Medical Center.

More Accretive Health news, all of it bad. Minnesota’s attorney general expands the suit against the collections company; Maple Grove Hospital (MN) fires the company at the request of its 25% owner, Fairview Health; and two US congressmen investigating the company’s practices say it has not replied adequately to their inquiries, failing to produce requested internal documents and ignoring their requests for a meeting.

A DrLyle blog post talks about EMR extender tools, postulating that EMRs have become somewhat stagnant infrastructure tools and that the innovation ecosystem will instead involve tools other companies build on top of their platforms.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison buys himself a Lanai, but instead of being a tiny porch like that word would imply for most of us, it’s a 141-square-mile Hawaiian island of that name. The world’s sixth richest man will pay around $500 million cash for the purchase, which you might take a moment to enjoy vicariously the next time your hospital pays an Oracle invoice.

Weird News Andy muses about who the patient (especially for the all-important hospital billing) is in this story and others like it, in which an oral tumor was removed from an unborn child during the mother’s 17th week of pregnancy.

Sponsor Updates

• Pittsburgh Bone & Joint Surgeons (PA) selects SRS EHR and PM for its seven physicians.
• Emdeon launches Emdeon Payment Network, which combines electronic and print payment services for payers.
• TeleTracking announces a series of webinars on improving hospital operations and ROI using real-time capacity management. 
• The Minnie Pearl Cancer Foundation names Emdeon EVP/CIO Damien Creavin and Cumberland Consulting Group partner David Vreeland to its board.
• NextGen Healthcare’s Electronic Dental Record receives ONC-ATCB certification from CCHIT.
• Acusis introduces AcuMobile for the capture of patient encounters on the iPhone.
• T-System will showcase its RevCycle+ solution at next week’s HFMA’s Healthcare Finance Conference in Las Vegas.
• St. Joseph Health (CA, NM, TX) pilots AT&T Telepresence Clinic service.
• Kliniken Maria Hilf (Germany), SALK (Austria), Bakiroy Dr. Sadi Konuk Egitim va Arastima Hastanesa (Turkey), and Boston Children’s Hospital (MA) go live on iMDsoft’s MetaVision solution.
• Greenway Medical exhibits its PrimeRESEARCH solutions at next week DIA 2012 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

I am humbled by the response to this week’s Curbside Consult. My e-mail has been overflowing with readers who know what it means to come from a farming background. Most of the themes revolve around hard work, perseverance, and living with the consequences of your decisions. There was even great story from one reader whose family ran moonshine to earn money after a tragic accident.

One reader stated she was going to post the 4-H pledge at her desk to remind her every day about striving to be better person. From the responses, it looks like there are some regional variations, but for those of you who haven’t Googled it yet, here is the 4-H Pledge:

I pledge my head to clearer thinking,
My heart to greater loyalty,
My hands to larger service,
and my health to better living,
for my club, my community, my country, and my world.

It’s kind of like the Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten list, but maybe it’s something that healthcare should embrace as we slow the pace down and stick to the basics.

Another reader shared her love of trail riding and said that being on a farm is “the one place where I know I can keep all those untamed healthcare acronyms at bay for a while in favor of what my father would call honest work.”

Slightly surprising (but not really) was that nearly all of the responses were from women, several of whom cite their backgrounds as helping them make it in IT:

Being raised around country people, I was fully supported when I ventured into traditionally male roles like running a bush hog, planting, or working on engines. No one thought a thing about it – you did whatever you had aptitude for. I grew up “liberated” and was mystified by all the fuss in the 70s. How fortunate to grow up with the belief that you were only limited by the barriers you set for yourself.

Thank you again to all of you who wrote about the article. You’ve helped recharge my somewhat depleted batteries as I slog through a series of intense go-lives. And now, back to our regularly scheduled healthcare IT message.

John Halamka blogged this week about “meaningful consent” for health information exchanges. His institution is using an opt-in model where patients can choose to share or not share data originating from various institutions. There will be no clinical override or “break the glass” functionality. Although I agree generally with this patient-centric model, I’ve practiced under a similar one and found it to be less than optimal for monitoring basic patient data. When patients can choose to share some data but not all, it fragments the patient record making it very difficult to identify duplicate therapies, drug interactions, and redundant tests. Since this is the prime reason for having an HIE, it somewhat defeats the purpose.

A reader shared this write-up of the new website ChickRx whose tagline is Expert Advice to get Happy, Healthy, & Hot. The review describes it as “what would happen if WebMD met Cosmo.” Presented at a recent Rock Health Demo Day, it has some serious potential as an entertaining alternative to existing consumer-focused sites.

Both Inga and I picked up on this piece about the situation where the chief medical officer at Northwest Community Hospital was found to be lacking a medical license. A hospital administrator described needing a medical license as “irrelevant” for administrators. Although I don’t think physicians working in the tech space always need licensure, I feel it’s essential for hospital administrators. If nothing else, it shows solidarity with the physician community and gives the ability to emphasize with burdensome administrative requirements with which the rest of us have to comply. Working at a hospital yet allowing your license to lapse makes an administrator seem detached from the rest of the physicians who have to live under his or her policy decisions.

I found an interesting blog posting that discusses “cloned” EHR documentation. It’s a quick read and illustrates something providers should watch out for. In trying to avoid cloned notes, the author used different wording at each visit for the same physical findings. This resulted in an attorney trying to twist a stable disease into a progressively worsening condition. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Mobile.

EHR Design Talk with Dr. Rick 6/20/12

Special Edition: The ONC/NIST Workshop on Creating Usable EHRs — Part 2

If you ask clinicians which aspects of their EHRs drive them nuts, many can tell you in some detail. On the other hand, if you ask them how to improve those EHR designs, most cannot articulate the issues in ways that would lead to fundamental change. Relying on focus groups and implementing user requests turn out to be similarly unproductive.

If these methods don’t work, how should one design EHR software that meets the goals and needs of its users and thereby improves healthcare?

There are no simple answers. After all, EHR software is a very new cognitive tool.

An alternative to asking users for advice and feedback is to apply rational design methods collectively referred to as User-Centered Design (UCD). This was the focus of last month’s ONC/NIST Workshop.

Since my last post, I’ve been thinking a lot about the term User-Centered Design because it has two distinct definitions.

On the one hand, it can mean design based on our understanding of how the human brain best takes in, organizes, and processes information — in other words, Human-Centered Design. By this definition, UCD encompasses not just usability testing, but also the findings and methods of a number of related fields, including interaction design, data visualization, cognitive science, and human factors.

On the other hand, the term User-Centered Design can refer to a relatively codified method of software design that places emphasis on setting user performance objectives, conducting iterative user testing during development, and ultimately performing formal summative usability testing to evaluate the end product.

I prefer the first definition because it places more emphasis on the design process itself. A design process that brings together the findings and methods of several fields is more likely to foster innovative solutions. One comprehensive design approach I particularly like is Goal-Directed Design, as described by Alan Cooper, Kim Goodwin, and colleagues in their complementary books About Face 3 and Designing for the Digital Age.

The next question is what role, if any, should ONC play in regard to User-Centered Design and EHR usability. There are two basic philosophies on how to improve EHR design and safety.

One approach is to encourage innovation by allowing market forces, including those created by disruptive innovation, to work. The other approach is to regulate the evaluation process — for instance, to require summative usability testing, to have the FDA regulate EHRs as medical devices, and so forth.

While everyone wants safer EHR designs, in practice it’s not clear to me that more regulation will help. Because of the complex and interactive nature of software user interfaces, evaluating the safety of EHRs is orders of magnitude more difficult than evaluating the safety of physical devices.

An EHR can follow a long list of guidelines, pass all kinds of usability testing, and still present the user with terribly problematic interfaces. After having studied the NIST, AHRQ, and HIMSS documents related to EHR usability, I don’t see how mandating formal usability testing is going to make EHRs safer.

For one thing, one usability guideline inevitably conflicts with another. Furthermore, while summative usability testing is reliable and yields quantitative data, exactly what gets tested is highly subjective. Third, evaluating the safety of EHR software is a moving target, as the software development tools, the design patterns, and the platforms are all changing rapidly.

It is clear that ONC has been considering the role it should play in regard to EHR usability. While we don’t know what ONC’s final rules on User-Centered Design will be, we can glean some information from last month’s workshop.

In their presentations, National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari and ONC’s recently appointed acting Chief Medical Officer, Jacob Reider, made the following points:

• The UK model, mandating a particular EHR design, clearly didn’t work.
• Getting feedback from clinicians is generally a poor way to improve EHR design. As Henry Ford remarked about his cars, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The UCD process, broadly defined, is a better way to improve design.
• Market forces should work. The more usable EHRs will be the successful ones. Vendors who understand these issues will make User-Centered Design a high priority instead of focusing on new "bells and whistles."
• It has taken the aviation industry a hundred years to learn how to build safe planes. Health Information Technology (HIT) is a young industry. Transformation will not occur overnight.
• ONC does not see its role as defining how an EHR should look and feel. Rather, its main concern regarding usability is safety.
• The tradeoff between innovation and safety is not a "zero-sum game." With more usable designs, everybody wins.

It would appear this same perspective is reflected in ONC’s March 2012 Notice of Proposed Rule Making (pp. 13842-3). First of all, ONC proposes to limit the UCD process to eight certification criteria, all related to the high-risk area of medications. Secondly, the notice states:

… we believe that a significant first step toward improving overall usability is to focus on the process of UCD. While valid and reliable usability measurements exist … we are concerned that it would be inappropriate at this juncture for ONC to seek to measure EHR technology in this way … Presently, we believe it is best to enable EHR technology developers to choose their UCD approach and not to prescribe one or more specific UCD processes that would be required to meet this certification criterion.

Unless innovative designs are allowed to emerge, the next generation of EHR user interfaces will continue to have all the major usability problems of our current ones. From my perspective as a physician EHR user who also thinks and writes about EHR design, I’d say that ONC got its User-Centered Design policy just about right.

Rick Weinhaus MD practices clinical ophthalmology in the Boston area. He trained at Harvard Medical School, The Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, and the Neuroscience Unit of the Schepens Eye Research Institute. He writes on how to design simple, powerful, elegant user interfaces for electronic health records (EHRs) by applying our understanding of human perception and cognition. He welcomes your comments and thoughts on this post and on EHR usability issues. E-mail Dr. Rick.

News 6/20/12

Top News

CMS says that as of the end of May, more than 110,000 EPs and over 2,400 hospitals had been paid a combined $5.7 billion in EHR incentives from Medicare and Medicaid. That’s about 48% of all eligible hospitals and 20% of eligible Medicare and Medicaid providers.

Reader Comments

From Jenny: “Re: Catholic Health Initiatives. The group is installing Cerner, but the Tacoma-based Franciscan group received permission to install Epic in five hospitals and will go live in April 2013.” Verified.

From Pillsbury DB: “Re: Lahey Clinic. They were installing Allscripts in the ambulatory environment and had a best-of-breed approach using Orion for the inpatient setting. I’ve attached an old case study.  Instead of implementing a true EHR product, they decided to pull data using Orion into a clinical data repository. Paper-based data was scanned and indexed into PDFs which were also available using Orion portal. This worked for clinician viewing, but made it impossible to implement CPOE. They were also scanning millions of records per year requiring many FTEs to perform the function. When HITECH hit, they had no hope of meeting any stage of MU.  To compound the problem, the Allscripts implementation was about a year behind and way over budget.” Above is an extract from the Orion Health case study from last year. I guess MU did reduce the interest in EMRs based on scanned documents quite a bit.

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Microsoft’s Surface tablet. The new challenge to the iPad has arrived in the form of a tablet PC called Surface. One unique aspect of the Microsoft Surface is the keyboard in cover of the tablet. While it won’t really be any threat to the iPad, it may draw interest from PC users who are more comfortable with a traditional keyboard versus an on screen keyboard.” Microsoft has been short on innovation lately (decades), but I don’t get why they used the Surface name on a tablet when it’s already being used by their coffee table gesture thingy. And unlike Apple, Microsoft is selling futures once again since nothing’s ready to ship. They won’t get bold on the pricing because they won’t want to diminish the already iffy prospects of the Ultrabook laptops, so you’ll be able to buy a me-too tablet running probably buggy software for double the price of iPad right as businesses give in and let people bring in their own at zero expense to the enterprise. Apple started failing dismally after firing Steve Jobs and returned to prominence only after they hired him back, but Microsoft’s problem is that Bill Gates isn’t coming back.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’m doing some traveling for the hospital over the next few days (to a vendor location home to a great many HIStalk readers, in fact), so given the difficulty in achieving my usual prodigious output given limited time and connectivity, Inga is handling the brunt of the HIStalk chores. I’ll chime in with whatever is interesting to me as I have time. If you’ve tried to get in touch with me, hang in there until the weekend when I can get caught up.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shareable Ink secures $5 million in series B financing from Lemhi Ventures.  As part of the deal, Lemhi Ventures’ managing partner Tony Miller will assume the role of chairman of the board.

ESO Solutions, a provider of EMR software for the EMS and fire services industries, raises $4 million from Austin Ventures.

North Bridge Growth Equity invests $30 million for a minority interest in Valence Health.

Sales

Missouri Health Connection and the NY eHealth Collaborative select the InterSystems HealthShare platform for their health information networks.

St. Luke’s Hospital (IA) chooses Amcom Software for smartphone communications and Web-based on-call scheduling.

WakeMed Health & Hospitals (NC) contracts with MobileIron to provide mobile device security and enable the organization’s BYOD program.

The Newfoundland and Labrador Centre for Health Information sign agreements with Telus Communications and Orion Health to provide technology for a province-wide integrated EHR.

Allscripts Enterprise EHR  customer Summit Medical Group (NJ) signs a long-term contract for Allscripts Managed Services.

People

Bulletin News names Nick Tabbal (Resonate Networks) VP of analytics for its Bulletin Healthcare subsidiary.

PerfectServe hires Robin Borg (Optum) as VP of human capital.

Beacon Partners names Fernando Martinez PhD as national director for enterprise assurance services. He was previously with Jackson Health System (FL).

MyHealthDIRECT adds HealthWays VP and COO Tom Cox and SSB Solutions chairman Jacque Sokolov, MD to its board of directors.

Announcements and Implementations

Geisinger Health System and Merck announce a multi-year collaboration to develop solutions that facilitate shared decision-making between patients and physicians and improve patient adherence, engagement, and care delivery.

Corniche Hospital becomes Cerner’s first client in the United Arab Emirates to achieve full closed-loop medication administration. Meanwhile, Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust goes live this week on Cerner Millennium after a three-month delay.

Government and Politics

The HIT Policy Committee’s Quality Measurement Workgroup and the HIT Standards Committee’s Clinical Quality Workgroup ask for input on ways in which Stage 3 MU may advance the delivery of high-quality care in diverse care settings.

The White House recognizes 82 providers for their successful implementation of EHR at a Health IT Town Hall in Washington, DC.

HHS awards $772 million to 81 providers, tech firms, and local organizations to advance healthcare innovations that lower costs and improve quality.

VA officials tell lawmakers at a House Veteran Affairs Committee hearing that it has processed fewer than 800 benefit claims despite investing $491 million in new technology. The current backlog is 913,690, which includes 575,773 claims older than 125 days. The VA originally promised a system-wide rollout of its Veterans Benefits Management System this year, but performance issues have pushed full implementation until the end of 2013.

The Military Health System issues an RFI for a system to track lab work within its integrated EHR.

Joe Goedert writes a Health Data Management article describes pending federal legislation that could be the first steps toward regulation of healthcare IT.

Other

The US Supreme Court refuses to consider an appeal by former McKesson Chairman Charles McCall to overturn his 10-year prison sentence for scheming to inflate company revenue.

Lehigh Valley Health Network , Cedars-Sinai Health System, Kaiser Permanente, Palmetto Health, and HCA make the top 25 in Computerworld’s list of 100 Best Places to Work in IT 2012.

The local paper highlights Greenwich Hospital’s (CT) recent $30 million implementation of Epic, which replaces Meditech and will eventually connect with other Yale New Haven Health System facilities.

UnitedHealthcare tops AMA’s fifth annual National Health Insurer Report Card, which considers the insurance billing and payment accuracy of seven of the largest commercial health insurers. Error rates on paid medical claims dropped from 19.3% in 2011 to 9.5% in 2012, saving health systems $8 billion in unnecessary administrative work to reconcile errors.

New from Ross Martin MD:  The Money Machine, which he says appropriately describes your financial hamster wheel, whether it’s the usual problems or EHR adoption or whatever.

Weird News Andy admires the dry analysis of a doctor describing a 16-year-old accidentally shot through the head with a three-foot-long stainless steel fishing spear: “It’s a striking injury, something you don’t see every day … the first obstacle is to not be distracted by the obvious sensational aspect of the injury.” The spear missed most everything important in the boy’s head, doctors removed it, and he’s expected to make a near-full recovery.

WNA also finds this story interesting. A man told by a hospital that his cancer left him with just months to live, along with his wife, rack up $80,000 in debt to complete a hastily compiled bucket list, giving away $30,000 worth of goods, selling their house at a loss, cancelling their health insurance, and traveling the world. The man even takes up smoking again, figuring he has nothing to lose. He then waits to meet his maker, vowing to kill himself if the pain became unbearable even as he questions why he seems so healthy. Finally his hospice worker told them the hospital had made a mistake but didn’t tell him – he’s fine.

Sponsor Updates

• Greenway pilots integration between its PrimeSUITE EHR/PM product and Microsoft HealthVault.
• ICA Informatics exchanges direct messages and trust agents with Cerner, Max MD, Mirth, NitorGroup and Techsant Technologies at the ONC Direct Summit.
• Capsule says that within the last six months it has added or updated more than 70 devices to its device integration list.
• Johns Hopkins’ director of enterprise services discusses his hospital network’s use of Imprivata’s SSO technology.
• The NY eHealth Collaborative announces that Stephen J. Dubner and Dr. David J. Brailer will be keynote speakers at its October Digital Health Conference in NYC.
• Emdeon hosts educational presentations on cost containment challenges at this week’s America’s Health Insurance Plans Institute conference in Salt Lake City.
• Picis announces a strategic partnership with billing and PM provider Anesthesia Business Consultants.
• All Imaging Systems partners with UltraLinq Healthcare to provide cloud-based storage services to UltraLinq clients.
• Medicomp and technology partner Northrop Grumman announced Northrop’s Clinician App integrated with Medicomp’s MEDCIN engine at last week’s Government HIT conference in DC.
• The 400-physician Rees-Stealy Medical Group (CA) lowered transcription costs $800-900,000 annually (80-90%) within 10 months of adopted Nuance’s Dragon Medical voice recognition software.

Contacts

Mr. H, Inga, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Mobile.