Readers Write 10/17/11

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!

Video to Smart Device Technology Improves Patient Care in Rural Areas
By Kevin Lasser

Innovative technologies are connecting doctors to experts around the globe, instantly and in real time. These innovations, including video to smart device technology, address the significant gap that rural patients experience compared to their urban peers. By improving access to expert medical care, innovations that can connect physicians to specialists are improving the quality of patient care and the outcomes of that care.

Access to specialty care is a challenge that rural Americans must tackle daily; according to a study published by the American Hospital Association, more than half of Americans in rural areas travel more than 20 miles for specialty care, with an average reported distance of 60 miles.

The plain fact is that rural Americas do not have access to adequate health care.

• 50 million Americans live in rural areas, yet there are only 65 primary care physicians per 100,000 rural Americans. By comparison, there are 105 physicians for every 100,000 urban and suburban Americans.
• Rural areas have less than half the number of surgeons and other specialists than urban and suburban areas.
• Saving lives means changing the status quo.

In emergencies, these rural patients can be in the fight of their lives against the clock. The current status quo for doctors in rural areas is to transport patients who need emergency specialty care to another physician. In life threatening emergencies, this delay in care can cause serious and irreparable harm.

Video to smart device technology is bridging the gap between physical location and access to expert care. By allowing a doctor to broadcast video over a secure network, a specialty physician can see the patient’s condition and advise on appropriate care.

“Video to smart device technology allows physicians immediate access to a patient via the mobile phone that they already carry,” said Dr. David Wang, director of the INI Stroke Network. “Other solutions, including personal computers or laptops, are cumbersome and impractical.”

Since the technology is real-time, diagnoses and recommendations can be made and implemented quickly; this real-time technology can save a life in settings where access to immediate expert care is required. The INI Stroke Network recently produced a video on how its use of video to hand-held device technology is saving lives in critical situations.

For the expert, including the stroke specialists in Dr. Wang’s practice as well as cardiologists, neurologists and specialty internists, video to smart device technology allows easy consultation with emergency room doctors and rural health care providers. Combined, these physicians deliver best in class health care to patients, regardless of their physical location.

Using technology to connect rural physicians to specialists in urban areas allows the patient to stay with a doctor that they know and trust while still receiving the best medical care. Real-time, real expertise leads to real care that can save a life.

Leveraging the power of innovation can change the outcome of care for rural patients. When access to expertise is critical, the phone in a doctor’s pocket might be more important than any other tool in their medical bag.

Kevin Lasser is president of JEMS Technology of Orion, MI.

Imaging’s Test: The Balance of Cost and Quality
By Steven Gerst, MD, MBA, MPH, CHE

Providers will be put to the test as they deal with President Barack Obama’s recent proposal to trim trillions from the deficit and hundreds of billions from Medicare. Specifically, radiology professionals should take note. 

The proposal calls for nearly $1.3 billion in savings by raising the assumed utilization rate on some imaging equipment and by requiring referring doctors to get prior authorization when ordering scans. It is still unclear if this authorization process will be managed via the now dominant radiology benefit management (RBM) model. Yet a better model exists.

Today, more than 150 million patients are at the mercy of RBM companies. Health Affairs reported in their May 14, 2009 issue that, on average, telephonic utilization review protocols, denials, and appeals processes costs the average physician $68,274 per practice. This wasted time and cost totals between $23 and $31 billion, annually. This tremendous cost is unnecessary, especially based upon the availability of new electronic, point-of-order, appropriateness criteria-driven clinical decision support (CDS) systems.

Evidence-based medical imaging CDS systems are proving their value. According to a recent study published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology, physicians at Seattle-based Virginia Mason Medical Center saved the institution 23% to 26% on selected imaging procedures by using a CDS. At the Everett Clinic, also in the Seattle area, from January of 2009 to November 2010, the number of CT and MRIs dropped by 39% (from nearly 210 to 128 images/ per 1000) following implementation of an evidence-based, point-of-order CDS solution.

These solutions will become increasingly important under newer “pre-funding” models which reward the most appropriate utilization for the lowest possible cost and the highest possible quality of patient care. With bundled payments, growth in capitation, and the pressures for DRG cost containment, providers, payers and blended ACO organizations will face pressure for both quality improvement and cost containment. Decision support delivers value on both fronts. In the next few years, CDS systems will likely replace the current contentious, inefficient telephonic utilization review protocols by leveraging point-of-order technology, authorization, and payment mechanisms. CDS is destined to become mainstream tools for physicians under healthcare reform.

It is estimated that more than one third of all medical imaging tests may be medically unnecessary and 20% may be unnecessarily duplicative. There is significant merit in attempts to curb unnecessary testing and duplicate tests that are contributing to cost increases. As the Virginia Mason and Everett Clinic Studies indicate, when ordering physicians are provided with evidenced–based criteria at the point of ordering, a physician appears more likely to order the most appropriate test for the patient resulting in the highest quality of service and potentially at the lowest possible cost.  Health reform and ACO development create financial incentives to rapidly adopt this new technology.

In the RBM model, a UR nurse or medical director reads criteria off a utilization review screen during call center discussions, and the burden of that call falls upon the ordering physician, even though that physician is not reimbursed for the study that is being ordered. It is much more efficient to make criteria available to physicians directly at the point of care. Technology can replace an inefficient and costly middleman model.

Most RBMs and carriers develop their protocols around the American College of Radiology appropriateness criteria. With a CDS, these criteria can be loaded directly into the CDS system as an integrated application within the hospital and physician’s EMR. In this scenario, the most appropriate physician imaging orders (ranked levels 7, 8 and 9 on the ACR criteria) could automatically bypass the UM or RBM process electronically and receive an instantaneous authorization for approval and payment. This is known as “Gold Carding.” 

For tests that are clearly inappropriate (ranked 1, 2, or 3), the ordering physician could be given the clinical evidence electronically at the point of ordering  through a decision support system to select a more appropriate test (without having to step out of the normal ordering workflow). In some instances, physicians may want to override the system. Here, the doctor should be able to enter free text to include the reasons for not following the ACR criteria. This is an important part of the audit trail.

Decision support systems allow the hospital to carefully monitor ordering trends by individual practitioners. Those with inconsistencies may be reviewed in conjunction with the medical director to determine causes and to discuss potential resolutions going forward.

Depending on the business needs of the hospital or ACO, if deemed inappropriate, the test may be programmatically blocked electronically from ordering. For proposed studies which score in the 4, 5, and 6 range of the ACR rankings, the CDS system itself may suggest an alternative, more appropriate test. CDS systems should easily allow physicians to select this better test without exiting the workflow. 

What about Meaningful Use? While Stages 2 and 3 are yet to be solidified, it is believed that Meaningful Use Stage 2 will require 60% of all radiology orders to go through the hospital’s EMR CPOE function. Stage 3 has proposed 80%.  A medical imaging clinical decision support solution will, therefore, become a powerful tool in the hands of a conscientious hospital or ACO medical director.

In the past 10 years, the use of advanced imaging procedures (CT, MRI, etc.) has more than doubled in some large health systems. In these systems, clinician decisions drive roughly 84% of cost of care. While estimates vary, a conservative average for an advanced imaging procedure cost is $429 per study. On average, assume a typical hospital performs 230 procedures per day, or 84,000 studies per year. For a hospital at risk under a DRG, bundled payment model, ACO shared savings scenario, Medicare Advantage, Managed Medicaid, or their own employee plan, if just 10% of duplicate studies were avoided, nearly $3.6 million could be saved. 

Why wouldn’t an organization use a medical imaging clinical decision support system?

Steven Gerst, MD, MBA, MPH, CHE is vice president of medical affairs for MedCurrent of Los Angeles, CA.

The Perfect Storm:  All the Buzz from the Healthcare Business Intelligence Summit
By Laura Madsen, MS

Earlier this month at its annual Medical Innovations Summit, the Cleveland Clinic released a listing of the Top 10 medical innovations for 2012. While most would expect many of the items on the list, such as a novel diabetes treatment and new discoveries with gene sequencing, one of the list’s items took many by surprise. Specifically, according to the list, “harnessing big data to improve healthcare” will be a forthcoming medical innovation.

In May 2011, the McKinsey Global Institute published findings after studying “big data” in five domains. According to their research, “If US health care were to use big data creatively and effectively to drive efficiency and quality, the sector could create more than $300 billion in value every year. Two-thirds of that would be in the form of reducing US health care expenditure by about eight percent.”

Last week, nearly 200 people from provider and payer settings gathered at the Healthcare Business Intelligence Summit offered in its third year in Minneapolis. This year’s speakers represented a myriad of organizations including Northeast Georgia Health System, Hennepin County Medical Center, BlueCross BlueShield of Kansas City, and the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority.

As one of the event’s lead organizers, I give credit to my colleagues who served on planning and organizing committees, and also to those who presented and those who attended.

The day was full of sharing information, observations, and insights around business intelligence (BI) in healthcare. In debriefing with colleagues and pondering my own experiences from the day, the following key themes emerged.

The Perfect Storm For Healthcare BI
Many folks told me they are buckling under the pressure of increasing volumes of data, increasing regulatory requirements, and increasing exposure to data and reports by people across and outside of their organizations. Especially with the HITECH Act and Meaningful Use, we have the perfect storm for investment in healthcare data capture, storage, and analytics. Today’s organizations must leverage a new and distinct approach to data, one configured specifically for an ever-changing landscape. Yet caution is necessary. Healthcare is a different animal than retail, manufacturing, and finance.

What About Quality?
Concerns exist about the value associated with data. Healthcare data, especially clinical data, can be subjective. It is fragmented and often incomplete, making analysis and knowledge distillation an ongoing issue. While most know that data quality is critically important, most folks don’t know how to tackle it. Some have decided that they are better off exposing bad data to end users as a way to demonstrate the impact that these end users themselves can have on the quality of data. This, of course, is not recommended. 

Where’s the Value?
When talking about data value, a shift is underway. A few years ago at the conference, the question was “Is there value in our data?” Today the question is “How do we determine where there’s the most value?”

Data, Data Everywhere
As data volume increases, so, too do the challenges of data disparity. Data integration is becoming a hot topic. Everyone knows they need to bring disparate sets of data together. Some have done it successfully.Others are just embarking on the adventure. Yet we all know that as data sources and volumes increase, so does the reliance on “Extract, Transform and Load.” ETL is a fundamental practice in business intelligence, yet it is often misunderstood. This seems to be weighing on people’s minds.   

ACOs, MU, Etc.
Data reliance is becoming a mainstay in healthcare and increasingly important as Meaningful Use continues to evolve and as the new shared risk model of accountable care is adopted. Most people at this year’s event agree that the industry needs a higher degree of sophistication associated with data management, reporting, and analytics. When discussing MU, ACOs and the like, most organizations reported feeling ill-prepared.

Representatives from CMS led a heavily-attended breakout, with significant discussion on data warehouses to support Meaningful Use. One attendee, a vendor working with MU in ambulatory care, indicated that nearly 50% of the groups he’s worked with in the past few years have more than one EHR and are struggling to determine how to move forward with these multiple environments. One individual from a provider environment said he felt they were being penalized for being an early adopter of EHRs because they had more than one, and as a result, were not sure how to proceed. At this point, they are leaning toward dumping everything and starting over. Even though they will miss some incentives, they will make the final deadline.

The discussion of data EHR and data consolidation raised a major question that’s seemingly on most people’s minds:  will there be a time that ONC/CMS will recognize the need and/or value of a traditional data warehouse for healthcare organizations striving to meet MU? If this happens, how will they handle will certification of processes including data integration, data modeling, and reporting? 

Perhaps next year at this time I’ll be writing about the ONC’s response to this very question. Until then, best wishes with the unique healthcare challenges and opportunities of big data and business intelligence.

Laura Madsen, MS is healthcare practice lead at Lancet Software of Burnsville, MN.

Orion Health Acquires Microsoft’s Former HIS Product; Companies Will Co-Market Offerings

Orion Health, an independently owned software company that offers HIE, integration, and clinical portal products, will announce later today that its subsidiary, Orion Health Asia Pacific, has signed an agreement to acquire the Microsoft software suite formerly known as Amalga HIS and Amalga RIS/PACS. The companies will also announce that they will co-market Orion Health HIE and Microsoft Amalga Unified Intelligence System (Amalga UIS) to health information exchanges and integrated delivery networks.

Amalga HIS was developed at Thailand’s Bumrungrad International hospital by Global Care Solutions and was acquired by Microsoft in October 2007. It  offered 50 clinical and administrative applications (including lab, medication management, RIS/PACS, electronic medical records, CPOE, clinical documentation, financial management, and HR management) that were used by seven Asia-Pacific hospitals. Microsoft announced that it was ceasing ongoing development of the product in July 2010, but would support existing customers for five years.

Orion will market the former Amalga HIS solutions as Orion Health HPM (Health Process Management.) According to Orion Health CEO Ian McCrae, “The addition of the Microsoft’s HIS assets is a natural extension of Orion Health’s portfolio of products that enable us to offer a complete solution to a wide range of hospitals and health organizations in Asia Pacific. The health sector in a number of Asia Pacific countries is overdue to make the transformative leap to the next generation of systems which integrate the complete healthcare ecosystem rather than siloing information in individual organizations or facilities.” The Thailand development center will become Orion Health’s fourth software engineering location.

We spoke to Paul Viskovich, president of Orion Health North America, who said, “The initial focus of the product will be the Asia and Australasia market. We’re focusing on moving customers forward and expanding that and integrating that application suite with Orion’s current offering.”

The agreement also calls for the two companies to co-market Orion’s HIE and worfklow solutions along with Amalga UIS.

Paul Viskovitch told us, “We can provide the HIE solution requirements, with Amalga UIS providing the analytics and the business intelligence that they require. When you sell to the IDN space, they’re starting to look at an HIE as the foundation for an ACO in many cases. We’re starting to see the Amalga UIS component, with its business intelligence and analytics, as a key part of providing a solution.”

Nate McLemore, general manager of business development, policy, and international sales of Microsoft’s Health Solutions group, told us. "We were hearing a lot from both customers and prospects that as we were in the HIE market, both in the community HIE as well as the enterprise-based HIE, that they loved the portal and workflow solutions that Orion provided, but also understood  the value that Amalga provided with a deep data platform and data analytics. Our customers and prospects were torn because we came at the problem from different directions. We spent the last several months working on how to address that and really go to market with a combined offering that gives customers the robust portal and workflow of health exchange through Orion, but also the data analytics and data platform capabilities of Amalga.”

We asked Nate McLemore how Microsoft might work with other potential partners like Orion. He said, “As Amalga moves more and more toward a data platform, we see working with partners to provide the data aggregation components of Amalga into the solutions they have.”

Orion Health, headquartered in New Zealand with a head USA office in Santa Monica, CA, offers an HIE platform, the Orion Health Hospital clinician portal, the Symphonia messaging and mapping tools, and the Rhapsody Integration Engine.

Monday Morning Update 10/17/11

From Epic4All: “Re: Epic. It’s the de facto EHR for hospitals in Seattle with two more area community hospitals implementing it – Overlake and Valley General Medical. This is on top of the largest system Swedish Medical Center (and associated hospitals), UW, and Group Health already live.” Unverified. Your statement will probably elicit scathing comments from the same handful of high-strung readers who howl that any mention of Epic is pandering favorably to the company, conveniently missing the point that they are outselling everyone (not to mention that I run quite a few negative comments about Epic as well.) I’d bet money that anyone who gets that worked up at the mention of Epic either (a) works for a struggling competitor, or (b) applied to work for Epic and got turned down (or both). I suppose I could write endlessly about Invision or STAR, but who would find that relevant or interesting?

From Soliloquy: “Re: Epic. Heard that one of the Adventist facilities on the West Coast is stopping its ambulatory implementation and will put out an official announcement next week. Someone also told me that Ventura County is walking away from Epic at their two public hospitals.” Unverified.

From Another Take: “Re: Fasttrack’s comments on Cerner Health Conference. This consultant writeup is favorable, but seems to be without bias. I found it an interesting juxtaposition.” Most interesting to me was that Neal Patterson compared Cerner to Apple, which seems a stretch given the implementation challenges and user-visible complexity of Millennium, Cerner’s unwavering focus on investors instead of innovation, and emphasis on enterprises instead of individual users. I’d say Cerner is a lot more like Microsoft, Oracle, or IBM in that regard, but Neal’s obviously looking to ride some Apple coattails (or perhaps is badly hiding some Steve envy). That doesn’t detract from what Cerner has accomplished, but drawing a self-comparison of a conservative enterprise software vendor to the consumer-focused and innovative Apple is always going to cause some eyes to roll.

Thanks to HIStalk reader Jared, who sent me an iTunes gift certificate with a note of thanks for HIStalk. He wasn’t looking for a plug, but I’ll give him one anyway since it was a nice surprise – he’s the founder of Splint, which is building EMR client iPhone apps for nurses (of which he is one.)

Armed with a bulging iTunes balance courtesy of Jared, I decided to see if I could find an interesting iPad app or two for HIStalk readers. The result: Splashtop Remote Desktop, one of the coolest things I’ve seen lately (especially for $1.99). Load the app on your iPad or iPhone, install the free streamer app on the PC you want to control, and you’re done – the app finds your PC and you can instantly start controlling it just like you were sitting in front of it. Not only is the video fast and smooth, the PC’s sound even plays over the iPad’s speakers (!!) I sat outside on the deck with a snack and fired up Word, ran my Iolo System Mechanic registry backup, closed down my invoicing program that I’d forgotten was open, and streamed some Flash video that normally doesn’t work on iPad. It looked exactly like the video above. You can run your desktop apps from anywhere, send files to yourself that you forgot to take along, run Office apps or Outlook without having anything installed on your iPad or iPhone, and maybe even do work-related IT geeky stuff like remote into servers, launch non-Web enabled apps, and do inside-the-firewall stuff from anywhere (by using remote desktop). That’s pretty amazing if you ask me.

I must be getting cranky since I keeping coming up with new grammatical pet peeves, but here’s an HIT-specific one: calling an enterprise-wide implementation of Cerner, Epic, VistA, Meditech an EHR (“The hospital is installing Epic’s EHR.”) I really dislike the non-specific term EHR in general since it describes the end result (stored patient information) and not the applications that create or view that information (CPOE, medical device interfaces, imaging systems, etc.), but it’s really a stretch to use the term EHR to include patient-irrelevant applications such as revenue cycle, supply chain, and workforce management that are often part of the same enterprise-wide implementation. The Feds got everybody throwing around the term EHR to make the same old EMRs of yesteryear sound more appealing, but the tried and true terms made more sense because they were specific: PM/EMR, clinical systems, order entry, etc.

Listening: new from reader-recommended Mayer Hawthorne, a young white nerd from Michigan who shockingly sounds exactly like a 1970s Motown / Philadelphia soul act with high vocals, horns, strings, and funky bass (Stylistics, Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose, Billy Paul). Here he is on my new fave music show, Live from Daryl’s House. Super catchy, fresh, and retro. He does a great job on Private Eyes with Daryl Hall on the video. This is another chance for those folks stuck in a post-college musical rut (AC/DC in drive time, anyone?) to listen to something recorded in this millennium — think of it as a gateway drug to music that your parents didn’t listen to.

Readers aren’t quite sure how ACOs will affect quality and cost, with the number of those who predict both will improve being exactly offset by those who say both will get worse. New poll to your right: should HITECH compensate providers for using EHRs they bought before the program started? (I didn’t forget that I don’t like the term EHRs, but I used it since we’re talking HITECH here.)

Thanks to the following sponsors (new and renewing) that supported HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, and HIStalk Mobile in September. Click a logo for more information.

My Time Capsule editorial this week, stretching its legs after being filed away since 2006: Don’t Look Now, Your Loop is Open. An excerpt: “We bought the technology least likely to be used, that addresses errors least likely to be harmful, that doesn’t help the user who needs it most, and deployed it in patient care areas where serious errors are least likely to occur.”

RIS/PACS vendor Candelis gets FDA 510(k) clearance for its cloud-based diagnostic image routing and sharing tools.

A SIS-sponsored survey finds that 43% of anesthesia providers either use or will implement an anesthesia information management system, with 28% planning to evaluate systems in the next year.

Ohio State University Medical Center was scheduled to go live on its $102 million Epic system early this past Saturday morning.

Physician’s Computer Company earns ONC-ATCB certification for its pediatrics-specific PCC-EHR v6.0.

Virginia Tech researchers develop software that limits smart phone access to data to specifically defined locations, then wipes it clean when the phone leaves that area. It can also limit smart phone functionality by location, such as shutting down cameras and e-mail when phones are in a hospital operating room.

Awarepoint and Meditech collaborate to develop an ED offering that allows locating patients and tracking critical milestones in real time from the Meditech system. Monongahela Valley Hospital (PA) is its first user.

Florida’s doctor-shopping database finally Monday morning. It’s not perfect, however: pharmacies can wait up to seven days to update it with prescription records, its use is optional for doctors and pharmacies, and most of its potential users don’t know it’s coming online. I was talking to a rural GP who uses an interesting approach to weed out his many drug-seeking patients: he gives them a quick urine screen every time they visit. If they show use of marijuana, cocaine, or other illegal drugs, he shows them the door immediately. He also sends them packing if they have excessive levels of their prescribed drug (indicating abuse) or zero levels (indicating that they’re selling the drug instead of using it). Not surprisingly, the vast majority of his abusing patients are on Medicaid.

Kansas City-based hospital chain HMC/CAH files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, with its biggest creditor being software vendor CPSI at $1.2 million owed.

Bill Wallace, a retired SVP of IT of BCBS Kansas, is named CEO of Kansas Health Information Exchange Inc., the organization’s first employee.

A personal injury law firm’s press release says it settled a wrongful death lawsuit against Northwestern Memorial Hospital (IL) for $5 million, where a 55-year-old physician patient died after a nurse gave him insulin despite a doctor’s order saying it should not be administered. The law firm deposed a nurse who said she had contacted hospital administrators several times to complain about high workload and inadequate staffing. The law firm manages to squeeze in a jab against the medical profession, saying “it is both tragic and ironic that this type of obvious error would happen to a physician in this age of physicians protesting malpractice claims.”

E-mail Mr. H.

HIStalk Interviews Jeremy Bikman, Chairman, KATALUS Advisors

Jeremy Bikman is chairman of KATALUS Advisors of Alpine, UT.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

It’s kind of an old tale. I was raised in Canada, born in the US. Got sick of the taxes, the cold, and the Medicare and socialized medicine and decided to come down to the States and go to school.

I got involved in the Internet back in the 90s and got into some startups, got into some bigger companies, and then got recruited in KLAS by Ralph Reyes, who was one of the original founders of KLAS. Just a fantastic guy. I’d been there seven years and then moved on to re-start KATALUS.

KATALUS is a company I started back in 2001. I shut it down after a couple of years to go to KLAS and then just re-started it about 13-14 months ago. You can think of KATALUS as a management consulting firm. We work mainly with executives of the different organizations, be it healthcare vendors, private equity firms, or even hospitals.

With the vendors, it’s really strategy that’s the main thing we think about. Maybe the vendor is entering a new market. It could be a company coming to the US. We have a Japanese client that’s trying to work in the US. Anyone who has been in healthcare for a long time knows everybody wants to try to work in the US, so we have these firms that are trying to work in the US and we help them every step of the way. 

Some from the US are trying to go to Asia or trying to go to Europe. We work with them. Some are trying to turn around their businesses, some are trying to understand the profile of the customers. We work with them.

With private equity, it’s mainly helping them make the right the investments. Due diligence on M&A. Try to look at their portfolios. 

For hospitals, that’s probably the easiest one. We’re the gophers for hospitals and executives. Not necessarily on technology that they’re going to implement right now, but things out in the future. Right now, it’s Meaningful Use, ICD-10, 5010, and other things like that they have to worry about. But there are things further out in the future. They say, “I know in a couple of years I’ll have to deal with that.” It could be cloud computing, it could be something else. We get them information.

That’s a broad set of activities. Are you planning to grow in to the size that will support all those, or will you focus on current opportunities and change as time goes on?

That’s a very good question. With any company that’s growing, you have to make sure you’re not drinking your own Kool-Aid and make sure you’re administering your medicine. You have to zero in and focus.

Our main focus is on the vendors. We don’t do a ton with hospitals, and when we do work with them, it’s pretty easy because we’re just the gopher for information.

Most vendors are trying to do the right thing. That’s one thing that I learned even back when I was at KLAS. There’s different levels of execution, but most are really trying to do as good a job as they possibly can.

More of our focus is around how well they understand their client base, especially the larger vendors. They have a really hard time understanding. They bought so many different companies, except for a couple like Epic that builds as opposed to buys. Maybe to understand that profile of their customer base. They’ve bought a lot of different companies, and some of those customers, some of those hospitals are having very rough experiences and some are having fantastic experiences. They need to understand how that is impacting their bottom line and how is it impacting their top line. That’s where a lot of our focus is right now.

On the other side, with the private equity firms and the vendors, there’s so much M&A activity. We’re getting a lot of requests to do due diligence on different markets, due diligence on different technologies and vendors that they’re looking at. If I had to look at the two biggest areas we’re working right now, it would be those two I just described.

What parts of the KLAS business model do you like or don’t like and how do you intend to be different at KATALUS?

We’re nowhere near the same. KLAS will rank vendors, put out reports. We don’t do any vendor rankings or put out research reports. That’s not really who we are. We take a side.

When I started with KLAS, they were really quite small. When they hired me, they weren’t even sure how long I was going to be there or how successful I could be because of how small they were. It really was Kent and Ralph and some other individuals there, like Adam.

There was such a great opportunity. There really wasn’t much competition. As we moved into new areas like PACS, medical equipment, and HIE, it really took off. 

I left after being there seven years because there were so many times where I had vendors and hospitals specifically say, “OK, Jeremy, I know you can’t take a side, I know KLAS can’t take a side. But what can I do here? You know. You’ve seen everything about these vendors and you’ve talked to so many of their hospitals out there. You know what I should do.” And the answer had to be, “Well, we’re independent. Go look at the data.” You couldn’t take a side. 

After being there seven years and growing the company 700% — I ran the research division, sales, and strategy there — it just got to a point where I wanted to expand and do more than what KLAS’ mission was. KLAS’ mission is good. They want to rank vendors and they try to keep them as honest as possible.

That’s the reason I left. There was more to do. Where KLAS stops, we pick up the baton, so to speak, and keep running.

KLAS can obviously improve their transparency. Any vendor in market research in general needs to be very, very transparent. It’s tough, especially when you’re ranking so many different vendors and products. So they certainly could improve in their transparency. I know that’s a goal of theirs to do. But they do have really good people and they really are trying to do the absolute best that they possibly can.

There is no perfect vendor. There is no perfect data. There are no perfect reports. There are always errors. There are always mistakes. There’s always human bias that makes it into different data points. I understand the vendor side now being a vendor, being a buyer of KLAS data, Gartner data, HIMSS Analytics, etc. You have to look at it and say, “All this data that’s coming through — I can’t just treat it as the Bible.”

I don’t think KLAS or any other market research firm intends their reports to be the Bible. But unfortunately, too many users of it say, “Oh, it says it in this report that this vendor is Number One or this one is Number Three. That’s it — that’s our ranking as well.”

What framework or instinct do you us to distinguish between a company that’s doing things well versus a company that isn’t?

It really goes back to the management team that they have. There is an old saying in the investment world that, “A fantastic management team can take any idea and make it go north, while a mediocre management team can take the best idea and go south.”

I’m sure you’re familiar with Novell. If you try to compare Novell to Microsoft, Novell’s technology in most cases is hands down quite a bit better than Microsoft’s. Why is Microsoft so dominant? The difference was a much more dynamic, stable management team than you saw at Novell.

The same thing with Epic. Epic’s technology is the same as Meditech’s, in reality. What’s the difference? Epic keeps promises. Their technology isn’t interoperable. There’s obviously big limitations if you want to do real hardcore data analytics within Epic’s framework. How do you get to the next phase? Is Epic built technologically to get to that next step where healthcare is going to get to in 10 years? True interoperability has to be the case. 

Interoperability is not Epic’s strong point, but given how strong their management team is with Judy and Carl, I’d have to think that they’ll be able to get there, but we’ll see. They have a big row ahead of them, I think 10 years out, that healthcare is going to go back to being best-of-breed. Even 10 years it’s integrated, best-of-breed; integrated, best-of-breed. We’ll see what happens.

The one thing Epic has that may alter that cycle is they’re so expensive, so switching costs are high. It may be that people live with Epic longer than they would have lived with a Meditech that didn’t really cost so much. The two issues that are most interesting to me about Epic are that and their succession plan. Can the company do as well when Judy decides to go live on an island someplace?

That’s a great question. I don’t think there’s been an answer for it. When you have an organization where you don’t even know what people’s titles are from the outside, it’s really hard to know.

The good thing for them is that they’re private. They don’t have to answer to anyone except their own customers, although Epic has found a good way to dictate to their customers as well. It’s a fascinating model. I have one hospital executive that calls a company like Epic a benevolent dictatorship. They’re dictating to you and they hold on to you, but you’re also having pretty good results.

That’s a big case with what Epic’s doing in Europe, where they’re having to focus on the Netherlands. You have to have the IT savvy that’s necessary, but also a budget to be able to be able to afford an Epic.

That’s an interesting point that you raised — can people uncouple from it? I think eventually if it goes to true interoperability — which I have to think that healthcare’s going to go the way of every other industry out there where systems have to work together and have to work together well — no one vendor can do everything. If Epic doesn’t migrate to the trend that has evolved in healthcare, then I think there’ll be some innovative healthcare company or some other technology company will help you uncouple.

It could be dbMotion with what they’re doing, or a Microsoft Amalga replicating data, where they have now have all the data and you can start just plugging on top of it, almost like a desktop browser, different applications that are going to best suit that department, not just what makes the CIO happy or the board happy.

If your theory about the return of best-of-breed turns out to be true, can those vendors hang on until customers using Cerner and Epic and Meditech decide to come back? Will there be any vendors left for those customers to come back to?

What got me thinking about it, two years ago, I was talking to hospital. It was a big Siemens Invision site, academic, multiple facilities. I was asking the CIO, “What are you going to do?” She said, “Well, we’re not going to go to Soarian. We’re actually going to go to Epic. But Jeremy, I’ll tell you right now, if I could do what I want to do, it would be interoperable best-of-breed. I know what’s going to happen. I’ve seen it 30 years now, that everything is fully integrated, but it’s not necessarily the best thing for each clinician. It’s the best thing under the environment and under the parameters with which the government and other people are saying it should be, but that’s other people saying it. That’s not all of us hospitals saying, yeah, that’s the best thing. Jeremy, I’m going to go with Epic now, but in 10 years if I had to bet money, I won’t be Epic in 10 years. I may be Epic for my CDR or in med-surg, but I may be this vendor over here – Picis here, SIS there, and Thomson Reuters, and who knows what, and they’re working together.”

That’s what I see happening. This is an Epic hospital saying it. I came out of the high tech industry before I got in healthcare eight, nine years ago. I just can’t see healthcare constantly staying that much apart from everybody else with the technological trends.

But your point about is any vendor going to be around … I think so. I’ve been impressed with Flagler Hospital going with Allscripts. You’re going to get some independent hospitals. With real strong leadership, they’re going to say, “We could go this direction to go with fully integrated Cerner or fully integrated Epic. You know what? We like what Allscripts is doing. We like what McKesson is doing over here.”

The one good thing about having an Epic or an Apple in other industries, it forces everybody to say, “We just can’t act like we’ve done before.” I have to believe with innovation, like in other industries here, you’re going to have some vendors that are going to get crushed and they’re going to be absorbed and gone. There’s no doubt about it. There’s going to be others that are going to continue to innovate. 

I like what NextGen is doing with buying Opus. It will be interesting to see whether Athena jumps in because Jonathan Bush has done some amazing stuff there – of course, he’ll be happy to tell you about it as well. That’s what I see happening.

Has Epic shaken those companies you mentioned out of the doldrums they were in that allowed the market to validate and choose Epic so predominantly, at least in the larger hospitals? Or will they need to be replaced with a new layer of entrants to do what they can’t?

Yes and yes. I think some of the ones that I’ve currently mentioned had to be shaken out.

I talked to a CTO of a hospital who came out of a different industry. He said it’s amazing how much stuff we put up with with the vendors. How many vendors treat us this way? In any other industry, if a vendor missed a go-live by 3-4 months and their system went in and didn’t talk to other systems, it would be gone. That vendor would never work with us again. It would be over with. Can you imagine Walmart putting up with this? Walmart is really more of an IT shop than a retail shop, and they wouldn’t. 

I think Epic is shaking people out of the doldrums. Not technologically at all, but from a culture perspective of, “If we say we’re going to do something, we do it.” Of course it helps that Epic’s very good at self-selecting. They obviously have brilliant marketing and sales people on that self-selection. They understand that sometimes the best sales are the one you walk away from, or the one that you manipulate.

With Microsoft getting into it, I think it’s helping that Amalga is a different type of technology. With Microsoft’s girth in healthcare, they’ll spend millions of dollars before they actually turn a profit. They can sit and be patient and make a few things happen. Some other ones like NextGen, Athena .. I think Allscripts, too, is doing some really good things. Of course Cerner’s been very successful. 

It is going to be a mix of those vendors that are in healthcare and some that may come out. It will be interesting to see if somebody else jumps in. I’m going to have to imagine somebody is going to.

You talked about the companies that have strong management as their best predictor of success. I always hear and like the phrase, “Bet on the jockey, not on the horse.” Do you think that’s true also of hospital IT departments, where it isn’t so much what they have to work with, but which CIO or other leaders are running the show?

Without a doubt. If you look at UPMC, everyone keeps wondering, when Epic is going to come inpatient? When you talk to the different executive leadership over there, they’re not. They like what’s happening. They have obviously a lot of money. They have very strong leadership in Dan Martich, Dan Drawbaugh, and others and they say it’s working: “Epic out here in the outpatient world, Cerner in the inpatient world. We’re getting the best of both worlds. We’re making it work with dbMotion.” They’re really pushing the needle on that.

You’ve seen it happen. When a hospital is struggling, they get new hospital leadership, including new CIO to come in. You look at the results two or three years later, they’ve turned things around. Their negative margins are now at least marginally margins on the positive side. They’re utilizing technology in a very great way. It comes from the leadership. It really does. There’s tons of examples. 

It’s so trite, but it would be so easy to say, “If we just went with Epic, or if we just went with these systems, we’re going to solve our issues.” I don’t think even Judy would say, “If you implement this one, then that’s what’s going to solve everything.” I doubt Judy would say, “This hospital, it’s 600 beds, it’s in our sweet spot, but their CIO’s weak, they’re not really committed.” They’ll probably say, “Come back when you’re worthy.”

Any concluding thoughts?

It’s just consistently the question, and that The Innovator’s Dilemma, according to Christiansen — it’s going to hold true here. Epic is shaking out the big vendors, and my suggestion to them would be, “Watch out for the guys coming from below.”

If you look at other industries, Xerox got outflanked by Canon. Microsoft’s being outflanked in other industries by Google and other ones. Facebook’s coming up. The same thing’s going to happen to get Epic outflanked. 

Epic’s on top of the world right now and so is Cerner. You have these other guys coming in, and I don’t even know who they are yet. They could be Athena — they’re still small, still outpatient. They could come out with the absolute world leader inpatient system and their customer service level is just through the roof and, slowly but surely, they start chipping away and it’s pure cloud-based and then maybe Mark Benioff with Salesforce buys them and decides, “Hey, we’re going whole hog into it.”

The main thing is people need to be consistently looking for innovation and technology. I hope some hospitals start taking risks a little bit, although they’re not paid to take risks.

Time Capsule: Don’t Look Now, Your Loop is Open

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 September 2006.

Don’t Look Now, Your Loop is Open
By Mr. HIStalk

Three babies dead in Indiana, overdosed with the wrong heparin product in a hospital not using bedside barcode verification of meds. Technology failed them, plan and simple.

Ten years ago, nursing and pharmacy systems didn’t talk to each other (pharmacists and nurses didn’t either, but that’s another story.) Finally, everyone agreed that was pretty stupid, so vendors did a little bit of integration to make their systems look like they did. The electronic Medication Administration Record (MAR) was born, although most hospitals stuck with once-a-day printed versions for a several reasons, most of them illogical.

Along came CPOE, usually awkwardly bolted up to those same nursing and pharmacy systems. It was (and is) expensive, rarely used, and inefficiently designed for physicians, but it caught the eye of well-intentioned hospital executives who were blissfully unaware that all those CPOE-preventable errors weren’t the ones harming patients anyway. I like to think of it as the Job Security Act for Chief Medical Informatics Officers.

Don’t buy the ubiquitous vendor buzzword “closed loop,” which implies we’ve got meds under control. We don’t. The dent in harmful medication errors has been slight. Why? Because nurses still walk a tightrope without a net, armed only with limited drug knowledge, too much work, paper records updated with pens, and a wide-open candy machine of increasingly dangerous drugs … uhhh, I mean decentralized medication distribution cabinets.

We bought the technology least likely to be used, that addresses errors least likely to be harmful, that doesn’t help the user who needs it most, and deployed it in patient care areas where serious errors are least likely to occur.

But let’s look on the positive side. Technology is the only hope of improving the situation, so there’s opportunity galore.

If you’re a vendor with an integrated bedside verification system, get those sales guys on the road because I guarantee you’ll sell a bunch of them in the next year if yours is any good. Guarantee, I said. The Indiana errors are the pin that will pop the CPOE balloon, making even the big-picture types comprehend that they’ve been chasing the wrong solution. Board members will find the money, given the extreme embarrassment and financial exposure likely to follow a high-profile screw-up.

If you sell add-on tools for electronic MARs or have the expertise to consult in that or any other patient safety area, polish up your shingle. Plenty of organizations need your help. They haven’t fixed their own problems, so a well-dressed stranger who flies into town and has PowerPoints seems like the next thing to try.

If your company is one of the few that sells medication distribution cabinets, get some real informatics people designing improvements instead of those engineers who are more concerned with servo motors and drawer design instead of intelligent software. You could definitely do better and the market will reward you for it.

And if you’re Cerner, congratulations! You bought Bridge Medical and their bedside verification technology just at the right time and announced plans for your own line of medication distribution cabinets. You’ve got a widely installed customer base that wanted closed loop meds. If you don’t mess it up, you could build a huge business on the other half of the loop, the one that isn’t closed. I guarantee that, too.

But for goodness sake, let’s all agree not to dawdle. Too many parents will already know the sorrow of celebrating their baby’s first birthday in a cemetery.

News 10/14/11

Top News

Forbes lists the 25 highest paid corporate CEOs in the Unites States. Leading them all: McKesson’s John Hammergren, with single-year compensation of $131.2 million. Forbes helpfully points out that “ObamaCare could end up helping three of the top-10 improve their lot in years to come … Hammergren won’t have to worry about waiting in line to see a doctor.”

Reader Comments

From MoreOutTheDoor: “Re: Dell Services. Two more Perot vets gone from the healthcare group, Jack Evans in the summer and now Dave Marchand. Both had significant leadership roles and were well respected.” Unverified.

From Lead Pipe: “Re: article comment. I commented on an article with a link to my company. It did not appear.” I delete comments that (a) pitch a product or company (that’s not fair to paying sponsors or to readers), or (b) pitch an site or publication that accepts advertising (that means they compete with HIStalk, which is fine, but it’s not my job to promote them.) Sometimes if the comment has value, I’ll just remove the pitch part.

From CMIO/CIO: “Re: Cerner Health Conference. As a 13-year veteran, neither I or my associates attend for the breakfast, unlike FastChange. This has been one of the best CHCs with leading edge differentiators coming to general availability like NLP (nCode) and semantic search. Great networking with not only US clients, but ever-increasing global client base.”

From Shippy: “Re: Cerner conference. Although the comments by FastChange are not incorrect, they could be counterbalanced with the fact that Cerner at least has a vision and passion in the right direction Also, half the problems that Cerner clients are having are not a result of Cerner and its products, but with IT management teams  that understaff projects and still don’t really understand what doctors do.”

From North Dallas Forty: "Re: Nemours. Sent a letter to employees this week stating that computer backup tapes from 2004 were taken from a locked storage cabinet. The tapes include personal information that includes bank account information. I wonder if anyone has been reprimanded?” Verified. Like most organizations that have been breached, Nemours is belatedly passionate about security practices, publicly vowing to start encrypting backups and to store tapes securely offsite.

From Lindy: “Re: University of Virginia Medical Center. CIO left a few weeks back after a semi-successful Epic install. Docs were starting to complain.” Unverified.

From Confused Friend: “Re: Epic. A friend works for an Epic customer and wants to get into consulting, but was told by the company she talked to that they have a 90-day non-compete for customers who are currently installing. She insinuated this was being pushed by Epic. Odd given that the customer went live more than a year ago on her particular product. I’m a former Epic employee and that’s the first I’ve heard of this. Is Epic instituting new policies for consulting firms?” I’ve long since stopped trying to make sense  of Epic’s non-compete policy, so I’ll open it up to anyone who knows its latest flavor.

From Hospital Geek: “Re: [health system name omitted.] We started an ambulatory rollout of Epic about six months ago that would have covered 600 physicians. The project was cancelled a couple of weeks ago.” I omitted the health system’s name because, frankly, I don’t think this is true. If it is, send over some non-anonymous proof and I’ll be happy to name names.

From Too Big to Fire: “Re: Microsoft. Elite developers from an EHR vendor have received 80%+ discounts at the fabled Company Store when visiting Microsoft’s campus. Customers are now required to purchase more Microsoft products. A vendor that allows this practice should disclose those discounts to customers.” I don’t understand what it is that customers are being required to purchase or what the vendor would disclose, so I don’t really have a reaction.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

This week on HIStalk Practice: athenahealth and Cook Children’s Health Care introduce technology to integrate 2D vaccine barcode data with athenaclinicals. Seventy percent of hospitals and health systems plan will hire more physicians over the next 12-18 months. Phytel wins a contract with Lehigh Valley Health Network’s physician group. eClinicalWorks takes the top stop on the Worcester Business Journal’s list of top-growing private regional companies. Jonathan Bush goes to DC and shares his thoughts on the flaws of EMR attestation. And coming up next week: HIStalk’s Must-See Vendors for MGMA 2011 since I’m heading to Vegas in about 10 days and will be sharing updates on speakers, educational sessions, exhibits, parties, and of course, fashion. Sign up for e-mail updates so you don’t miss a thing.

I’m back from a short, Internet-free vacation in which I interacted with Mrs. HIStalk rather than e-mail. I was apparently one of few: it seemed that many folks around us were too focused on their smart phones to actually look up at either the person they were with or the rather picturesque surroundings. We sat adjacent to a young couple in a restaurant as the male half of the couple endlessly flicked his phone (while eating — he obviously required multi-modal sustenance) to see if any of his fake friends had posted something on Facebook to which he needed to be made immediately aware, while his real-life female partner sat completely ignored (I tried not to draw inferences about how he might correspondingly conduct his romantic overtures.) Maybe I should have followed his model — I’m hopelessly behind on e-mail and general HIStalk tasks to the point I should have just stayed home, not to mention trying to catch up on my hospital job.

I’ve observed, too, that with everybody running around with smart phones and poking at them constantly as though they suffer from an involuntary nervous tic, everybody expects e-mail conversations to be conducted like instant messaging. If you don’t reply quickly (because you’ve turned the darned device off, it’s late at night or into the weekend, or you just don’t have the time, like my trying to prioritize 300 or so e-mails), they send the message again. Not only are people going to die having spent most of their waking hours staring at their phones as though they were crystal balls emitting the secrets of the universe, they won’t even realize they are dearly departed until someone posts a Facebook update.

Inga ran things just fine in my absence, I notice with satisfaction. I get swamped pretty easily since I’m the single point for almost everything (I obviously don’t scale well,) but Inga jumps in where she can on the rare occasions I reluctantly cede temporary control. As for me, I’m already overwhelmed and exhausted anew.

Speaking of BlackBerry, I’m struggling to decide: which company is going to die first of executive incompetence, RIM or Netflix?

Listening: Kingdom Come, a 90s hair band that sounded a whole lot like early Led Zeppelin, which as good as they occasionally were, led (no pun intended) them to be considered a Zep ripoff (“Kingdom Clone,” the wags called them.) I remembered them only because I read a fascinating biography of long-dead Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant while on vacation (I found it by the pool towel hut) and he said Kingdom Come was terrible. I never was a Zeppelin fan, so Kingdom Come sounds fine to me.

On the sponsor-only Jobs Board:  HL7 Interface Developer, RVP Sales – Western Territory, Front End Engineer, Physician Consultant – Sales Support. On Healthcare IT Jobs:  Manager of Clinical Information Systems, Solutions Sales Executive, Pharmacy Informatics Analyst, Epic Ambulatory Lead Trainer and Trainer.

Thanks to World Wide Technology, Inc., supporting HIStalk as a Platinum Sponsor. The St. Louis-based systems integrator, which has been around since 1990 and has $3.3 billion in annual revenue, offers healthcare-specific services that include patient identification, temperature and humidity monitoring, privacy and security, point-of-care communication and collaboration, IT infrastructure, staff and asset visibility, and services specifically for Cisco TelePresence (they sell a billion dollars’ worth of Cisco products each year.) I notice that the company was named on Thursday to the InformationWeek 500 for the first time, so that’s a pretty big deal. WWT has sales offices around the world and engineers in most US cities, making them easy to find. Thanks to World Wide Technology for supporting HIStalk. I’m a bit in awe when a company that size (or any size, for that matter) steps forward to help me with what I do, as offbeat as that sometimes is.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Infosys says it is not in discussions for the acquisition of the healthcare business of Thomson Reuters despite earlier media reports (including a mention in HIStalk.) That could mean that those reports were incorrect, but also potentially only premature.

Mobile developer Remedy Systems and physician marketer Physicians Interactive form Tomorrow Networks, a healthcare-only mobile advertising network for app developers that can “tie advertisements to healthcare data points that include ICD-9 codes, CPT codes, and healthcare professional (HCP) specific information.”

Sales

Orlando Health chooses Brainware for document processing.

People

Debbie Ruggles, RN, is named clinical informatics manager of Providence Medical Center and Saint John Hospital (KS), tasked with overseeing the hospitals’ implementation of Epic.

LodgeNet Healthcare hires Sachin H. Jain, MD, MBA, as senior medical advisor. He was previously Don Berwick’s senior advisor at CMS and a special assistant to former ONC head David Blumenthal.

VistA guru Tom Munnecke decides to un-retire and get back into health informatics consulting. An interesting new post from his blog: he wrote a book called The Friendly Computer in 1980 that gave Commodore’s president the idea to call their computer the Amiga, and more impressively, pitched the idea of the “Intelligent Telephone” in 1977 – to none other than Steve Jobs.

Announcements and Implementations

Cardiology Associates of North Mississippi implements White Plume Technology’s AccelaSMART charge capture and medical coding review technology to pass charges between its GE Centricity EHR and athenahealth practice management system.

Ohio State University Medical Center announces plans to double its telestroke technology capabilities using technology from REACH Health.

Thomson Reuters releases Infection Xpert, a clinical intelligence dashboard to improve infection prevention workflow.

Shareable Ink earns 2011/2012 EHR Modular ONC/ATCB Certification. Said Founder, President, and CEO Steve Hau, “It’s the first time you can get Meaningful Use with pen and paper.”

Barnes-Jewish Hospital (MO) launches a mobile app to reduce appointment no-shows.

Premier partners with Encore Health Resources to create an HIT implementation roadmap for organizations moving toward an ACO-type model of integrated, coordinated care. It will be based on Encore’s CoreQUEST and CoreGPS tools.

Government and Politics

The Center for Public Integrity, through its iWatch News publication, tries to stir up some HITECH controversy in its report on EHR stimulus payments. The authors question why long-term EHR users are getting incentive checks if the the goal was new adoption. A representative for Senator (and obstetrician) Tom Coburn is quoted:

If providers have been paid for systems they already had in place, that seems to be an inexcusable waste of taxpayer dollars. It makes no sense for HHS to pay physicians for systems they already have.

I have to side with HIStalk contributor Dr. Lyle Berkowitz who, in the same article, points out that achieving Meaningful Use is not a slam dunk, and paying providers for “doing the right thing before there were even rewards to do so is actually not a bad message to send.”

Senator Chuck Grassley wants to know who authorized the shutdown of HHS’s National Practitioner Data Bank, established in 1986 to confidentially track physician malpractice and disciplinary cases. The reason: a Kansas City reporter was able to identify a Kansas neurosurgeon even though the publicly accessible data was supposed to be de-identified. HHS says the information wasn’t intended for the public to see in the first place, but says they’ll still put it back online “as soon as possible.” Two facts stand out: (a) there’s no such thing as truly “de-identified” information, assuming someone has the resources and motivation to match up multiple public data sources; and (b) Chuck Grassley writes a lot of indignant and demanding letters that never seem to amount to anything except get him mentioned in the press (no offense, Chuck, I’m a big fan, but follow-through is everything.)

The VA is testing an iPad-based portal to its electronic medical records called the iHealth adaptor.

Technology

Cerner announces its Skybox on-demand storage service offering, an enterprise-wide cloud storage system powered by Nirvanix Private Cloud Storage that allows customers to consolidate their storage of clinically related data objects under a usage-based pricing model.

Other

From KLAS: since Virtual Radiologic’s purchase of telaradiology provider NightHawk last year, NightHawk customers are reporting challenges with turnaround times and the transition to vRad’s technology and up to half of those customers are seeking alternatives. vRad’s performance scores have also slipped.

Meanwhile, KLAS provides a less-than-glowing report on Meditech’s v6 in unusually blunt terms, saying Meditech’s products are generally less functional but cheaper than those of competitors, and even though 6.0 is “half-baked and more expensive,” it’s still cheaper than those competing products and therefore “worth the pain to make it work for them.” KLAS concludes that customer satisfaction depends on their expectations.

Here’s Vince’s latest HIStory, this time covering JS/Data in the first of a two-parter. He’s finding that veterans of these long-gone companies still speak fondly and happily about their experiences and the people they knew there. Sometimes I wonder if it will be the same positive feelings down the line for today’s rookies, for whom HIT was already a big business by the time they came on board.

HIT service provider Anthelio will hire 200 people in Michigan, mostly medical insurance billers and coders. The company is building a 50,000 square foot Center of Excellence in between Detroit and Flint.

Dennis Ritchie, who created the C programming language and co-developed UNIX, died Wednesday at 70 of prostate cancer.

Shareable Ink CEO Steve Hau tells a group of Nashville executives that he is not yet convinced the region offers a critical mass of superior engineering talent. He moved from Boston to Nashville last year to capitalize on Nashville’s healthcare industry concentration.

Healthcare Growth Partners releases its Q3 merger and acquisition review. Trends they’ve spotted: non-traditional vendors are entering the market, ACO activity is motivating investment in systems such as analytics, hospital best-of-breed solutions are struggling against enterprise vendors, and vendors are seeking growth financing rather than selling out.

Somebody just posted this video tour of the famous Epic treehouse.

Epic is awarded a patent for GUI method called a “dynamic order composer” of entering patient orders using a pre-populated order entry form. It sounds like it suggests orders based on patient information and popularity.

Doctors in China are striking over being physically attacked by the family members of patients. One orthopedist says doctors are a disadvantaged group since “we have spent so much of our youth on a medical degree that yields so little economic reward.” Ninety-six percent of doctors there say they are unhappy with their salaries, which average just 19% higher than those of factory workers.

An employee of a Baltimore law firm loses a portable hard drive containing the medical records of 161 cardiac stent patients who are suing a local cardiologist. The company explained that its employee was taking the information home on an unencrypted drive as a precaution against loss, but forgot it on the light rail. The law firm offered patients a one-year membership in an identity theft service in a letter mailed to patients two months after the breach, saying it was on “behalf of St. Joseph Medical Center,” the hospital at which the cardiologist formerly practiced. The law firm’s own site doesn’t mention the event at all as far as I can tell.

Weird News Andy finds this story fascinating, especially the last line. Two pregnant women get into a fight with two other women in a Philadelphia hospital room, with one of the moms-to-be slashing the two non-pregnant ones with a knife. All were visiting “a male patient who is recovering from a gunshot wound.”

Sponsor Updates

• Billian’s HealthDATA launches Better Business by 2012, a blog series for healthcare vendor sales and marketing teams. The company is also offering an October 19 Webinar on clinical informatics featuring Michele Burke RN, clinical transformation manager with North Shore Long Island Jewish Health System, who will talk about EMR implementation.
• CynergisTek CEO Mac McMillan will discuss security challenges and best practices for long-term care at this weekend’s 2011 Leading Age and IAHSA Global Aging Conference in DC.
• Peer Consulting enters into a Provider Consulting Organization agreement with CapSite for its Hospital Purchasing Database solution.
• Palestine Regional Medical Center (TX) selects ProVation Medical Software for its gastroenterology procedure documentation and coding.
• Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center and Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital (LA) implement GetWellNetwork’s interactive patient care solution.
• Allscripts deploys the IXIASOFT DITA CMS DITA to manage its documentation process.
• Ysbyty Ystrad Fawr, a new hospital opening in December in Wales, will feature the use of Vocera’s communication system.
• The MedAssets Bundled Payment Solution earns PROMETHEUS Payment-ready certification from the Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

A few weeks ago, I complained about having to fill out paper credentialing forms. Today I received my hospital’s proposed updates to the Medical Staff Bylaws. Under the section addressing allied health professionals (nurse practitioners and physician assistants), there are several revisions that pertain to electronic submission of data for paperless credentialing. Let’s hope it doesn’t only apply to them but to the physicians as well.

HIMSS has announced the lineup of keynote speakers for the 2012 Annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition. Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, leads off on Tuesday, followed by National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Farzad Mostashari on Thursday. Friday closes out with political strategist Donna Brazile, former White House press secretary Dana Perino, and Blue Zones founder Dan Buettner. I’m not that excited about HIMSS in general, but I do rather fancy Mr. Mostashari in his dapper bow tie.

Friday is the last day for the HIMSS 2011 Annual Award nominations. As an anonymous pseudo-celebrity, I’ll never qualify for one of these and I’m not sure how relevant they really are. Frankly, the HISsies are the only awards I really follow.

The Washington Post reports on data indicating that our bacterial friends actually help keep us healthy. Researchers cite both antibiotics and an obsession with cleanliness as causing potential imbalance in the microbial universe, contributing to asthma, allergies, obesity, diabetes, and other conditions. I guess the “Three Second Rule” for edibles that hit the floor may not be as bad for the average college student as we once thought.

Inga beat me to the punch reporting on a recent study that concluded that high chocolate consumption is associated with a lower risk of stroke. Dark chocolate (my personal fave) is also thought to raise HDL (good cholesterol) as well as lower LDL (bad cholesterol) and blood pressure. Although an apple a day gets all the publicity, I’m going to start a “Truffle a Day” campaign.

Field correspondent Martini McBride reported in from the AHIMA opening reception in Salt Lake City. The QuadraMed booth featured both ICD-10 and ICD-9 cocktails. The word is that the ICD-10 version was much better and the light-up glasses were also fun. Let’s hope the real ICD-10 is also smooth and refreshing. I have readers promising to send updates from McKesson and other exciting get-togethers, so stay tuned.

Contacts

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

News 10/12/11

Top News

At this week’s Cerner Health Conference, Cerner CEO Neal Patterson tells 10,000 attendees that Meaningful Use is creating a “duopoly” in healthcare IT and that healthcare will fundamentally change over the next  decade. Patterson also unveiled plans for cloud technology that will coordinate clinical data from multiple systems and use Cerner search and analytics tools to evaluate and manage health.

Reader Comments

From HomeBody “Re: Homecare technology. Homecare technology is definitely an up and coming topic of interest among healthcare today, especially on the hospital side. I see it only becoming a more and more important piece of this proposed continuum of care model.” Thanks for all the comments in favor of increased coverage on homecare, assisted living, and long term care IT. Mr. H and I will strategize a bit more. Meanwhile, if you happen to be an expert willing to share your expertise, let us know.

From FastChange “Cerner Health Conference. Ughhh. Painful!  No breakfast, too crowded because facility is too small, making us  get scanned for every session- causing huge lines of course. No consistency in their Solutions Gallery- lots of vaporware from various groups competing with each other and they are still 1-2 years behind other vendors in things like mobile and ACO type software. Ten thousand people here but that includes Cerner staff, which appear to be every other person I meet. Haven’t met a happy Cerner client yet. But the keynote speaker, blogger and doctor Wendy Sue Swenson (Seattle Mama Doc) was great.” Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? I should add that despite FastChange’s less than glowing report, I noted many very positive comments posted on Twitter (#CHC11).

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Mr. H is on one of his well-deserved Internet-less get-aways, so it’s all me today.  Whenever Mr. H leaves me in charge, I feel Alexander Haigish, in that I’m-in-control-even-though-I’m-really-not kind of way. Mr. H will return to power soon.

Thank you to all my Facebook friends who sent over birthday greetings. If you would like the opportunity to make me feel special next year, it’s not too soon to Friend me (and Mr. H and Dr. Jayne) or like HIStalk on Facebook. We are also happy to connect with you on Linked In, should you would prefer to keep our relationship on a more professional level.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

VC funding in HIT more than tripled in the third quarter, compared to a year ago. Fifty different organizations invested $207 million for 17 deals, which included ZocDoc ($75 million) and Awarepoint ($27 million.) M&A transactions totaled $4.7 billion for acquisitions that included Emdeon ($3 billion), Sage Healthcare ($320 million), and M*Modal ($130 million.)

Sales

Surgical Care Affiliates chooses workforce management solutions from Kronos.

SIU HealthCare (IL), a network five hospitals and 43 clinics,  selects GE Healthcare’s Centricity Business to compliment its existing Centricity EHR.

People

Medsphere Systems hires John Bright as VP of sales and marketing. Bright previously led sales for Henry Schein Medical Systems.

Virtual Radiologic names Jim Tierney SVP of Operations for vRad Radiology Alliance. Tierney was formerly CEO for the 62-physician Suburban Radiologic Consultants.

Allscripts and IDX veteran Todd Young joins PureWellness as COO.

Announcements and Implementations

The Community Health Information Collaborative’s HIE Bridge connects to the VA to exchange veteran health data via the ApeniMED NHIN platform.

Kettering Health Network (OH) completes its four month, enterprise-wide transition to the InterSystems Ensemble platform.

Local boy scouts and other community members helped create a festive atmosphere during Chelsea Community Hospital’s (MI) $12 million transition to Genesis System EHR.

The local paper profiles Lakeland Regional Medical Center (FL) and its go-live on Cerner’s EHR. I was slightly amused that the hospital’s chaplain was the first person quoted about the transition, saying, “We’ve been circulating on our patient units and they’re feeling confident. It’s exciting.” I never realized that hospital chaplains were active participants in EHR implementations, but then again I have never worked in a hospital.

CPSI customer Morton County Health System (KS) becomes the first hospital in Kansas to receive payment from Medicare for its meaningful use of EMR.

Government and Politics

Illinois Governor Patrick Quinn announces that the state’s Office of Health Information Technology selected InterSystems to develop the infrastructure for the Illinois HIE.

Innovation and Research

In addition to the meta data cloud project, Cerner hints at future products that optimize iPhone and iPad technology, as well as software that incorporates voice commands.

Other

Florida Hospital places a newspaper advertisement in the Orlando paper notifying patients of improperly accessed patient information. The “Public Notice” informs patients that between January 1, 2010 and August 15, 2011, three employees, who have since been fired, were believed to have accessed patients’ demographic data. The employees targeted ER patients involved in car accidents and passed the information on to an attorney-referral service. The hospital is offering credit monitoring to patients that might have been affected.

Best news of the day: Swedish scientists find that eating chocolate – preferably dark – can reduce a woman’s risk of stroke by 20%. Other benefits include reduced blood pressure, lower insulin resistance, and less crabbiness (ok, that last one conclusion was based strictly on my own personal research.)

Sponsor Updates

• Edge Solutions partners with BridgeHead Software to resell and deliver Bridgehead’s backup, recovery, and archiving solutions.
• At this month’s MGMA meeting in Las Vegas, MED3OOO will showcase its newly released InteGreat EHR, which now includes end-to-end integration with the MEDCIN Engine.
• T-System Inc. will highlight its products in a “virtual ED” at this week’s ACEP Scientific Assembly. T-System will also host the next Board Certification for Emergency Nursing meeting October 17-18 in its Dallas headquarters.
• Greenville Hospital System University Medical Center goes live with Holon’s Pharmacy Workflow Manager at all 11 of its pharmacies.
• Besler Consulting’s Vicente Farina shares insight into Direct Graduate Medical Education (GME) and Indirect Medical Education (IME) payments, two types of Medicare payments specifically for teaching hospitals.
• EDIMS is exhibiting at this week’s ACEP 2011 Scientific Assembly in San Francisco.
• Wellsoft announces its fall conference schedule, which includes the 2011 ACEP Scientific Assembly, the Emergency Department Administration Conference (EDAC), and HealthAchieve.
• Surgical Information Systems (SIS) announces that SIS Anesthesia V5 has received ONC-ATCB certification by the Drummond Group.
• Practice Fusion will simulcast its November 11th Connect 2011 meeting.
• Imprivata earns a Strong Positive rating  in Gartner’s report, MarketScope for Enterprise Single Sign-on.
• The local paper highlights Hasbro Children’s Hospital’s (RI)use of the GetWellNetwork.
• Intelligent Medical Objects is participating in the Cerner 2011 Health Conference, AMIA, and NextGen’s User Group meeting.
• Healthwise will participate in this month’s Patient Centered Primary Care Collaborative in Washington, DC.
• Ignis Systems releases its EMR-Link Maintenance Training Webinar schedule.
• Greenway’s PrimeSuite EHR achieves CCHIT certification in Women’s Health.

Contacts

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

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 10/11/11

The bean counters in my organization are all abuzz about how we might be able to mimic the financial results of the Medicare Physician Group Practice Demonstration project. For those of you who may have been living under a pay-for-performance rock, the PGP Demonstration was the first Medicare P4P initiative and dates back to legislation passed back over a decade ago.

The Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP Benefits Improvement and Protection Act of 2000 authorized this project to encourage coordination of Medicare Part A (hospital) and Medicare Part B (outpatient) services; to promote efficient and effective care through care management and process redesign; and to reward physicians for improving health outcomes.

The five year demonstration project involved ten physician groups (approximately 5,000 physicians) who continued to be paid regular Medicare rates but also earned performance payments of up to 80% of the amount saved. The other 20% savings was kept by the Medicare Trust Fund. (Hopefully, they put that savings in the proverbial Lock Box, but I doubt it.)

Over the life of the program, quality measures were factored in and by year five, 50% of the performance payments were based on cost efficiency and 50% on quality. The 220,000 Medicare beneficiaries involved (aka patients) were tagged to a participating group “if the group provided the plurality of their office or other outpatient evaluation & management services during the performance year.” Patients averaged five visits at the group during the year.

Spending was risk-adjusted and quality was measured based on 32 indicators, starting with diabetes and adding heart failure, coronary artery disease, hypertension, and cancer screening. Groups were scored against national benchmarks and the measures were developed by CMS in conjunction with various well-respected quality organizations.

Over the life of the project, payments have varied. In performance year one, two groups shared $7.3 million. The next year four groups shared $13.8 million. Years three and four both had five groups receiving payments – $25.3 million and $31.7 million respectively. Year five had four groups sharing $29.4 million in payments.

It’s not just about the money though – the groups have also demonstrated increases in quality that should translate to increases in quality of life for the patients involved. In year five, all ten groups reached benchmark levels on at least 30 of the 32 measures with seven groups hitting them all.

Each group was able to design their own mechanism to drive towards desired outcomes. Strategies included:

• Packing as much evidence-based care as they could into each patient visit
• Protocol-driven medication management
• Increased patient education
• Streamlining transitions of care
• Leveraging technology such as automated outreach, registries, and scheduling as well as EHR

So why are the financial folks excited? They read blurbs in email blasts or in fluff journals (or possibly on cutting edge, thoughtful, and sassy websites like HIStalk) and say to themselves, “Hey, I’m sure we can do that too!” If only it were that easy.

Glassy-eyed by the thoughts of millions coming in the door, they forget that out of 50 possible group-year payment opportunities, only 20 have resulted in an incentive payment. That’s one in five. Would those same money-crunchers invest in a new diagnostic device that only had a one in five chance of breaking even?

I’d like to see data on how much these health systems spent trying to hit the benchmarks needed to achieve the quality measures. And for those who didn’t receive incentive payments, how close were they? Were there wide gaps, or in the words of Maxwell Smart did they miss it by “that much?”

Those looking to mimic these outcomes also should note that the up-front costs for this program were borne by the participants. Although they may have been able to use grant money or other funding sources, there was no pot of gold at the beginning of the rainbow. There had to be substantial organizational commitment to these projects and the willingness to take a loss and continue pressing forward.

Transforming the way we deliver care is definitely a marathon, not a sprint. Organizations need to commit to being in it for the long haul. They can’t be in it in a flavor of the month way, which we see all too frequently. Participants need to be sure they’re willing to go all-in not only financially but philosophically. The faint of heart need not apply – groups with a history of shuffling leadership every time a loss appears will have a hard time stabilizing. Groups with a history of cutting ‘expensive’ staff (aka nurses) will struggle.

Leadership needs to be supportive of the initiative at every juncture – even if it means finally dealing with those difficult physicians who refuse to use the EHR properly, antagonize the care coordinators, or fail to comply with order sets and evidence-based protocols. Substantial technology investments need to be pursued despite lack of short-term ROI. IT staff who can interact with clinicians, understand their needs, and deliver support models that work will be in high demand.

The groups participating in this project already had well-seasoned structures for looking at issues of quality, cost, and access and were able to engage and energize these teams to move forward in a coordinated fashion. They weren’t acting on a whim. They had clear priorities and direction and strategically reduced barriers to achieving that mission.

Unfortunately, I see far too many groups and providers at both the macro and micro level motivated to go after the money without understanding the hard work and resources (financial and other) needed to succeed. They also fail to understand the time it takes to properly implement programs on this scale. For those of you working in organizations like these, you have my sympathy. For those of you on the other end of the spectrum who have dynamic, engaged, and visionary leaders, you have my admiration.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Monday Morning Update 10/10/11

From Spell Chequer: “Re: HIPAA. I thought you’d appreciate this full-page ad, from an e-guide on HIPAA compliance.” We’re reaping what we sow as a society. It’s considered uncool to correct anyone’s spelling or grammar these days, and thus sloppy mistakes are the rule. Text message writers and tweeters have dumbed down the language the point that it’s barely understandable. What could be more cluelessly arrogant than the implied message, “I’m too important to take the time to spell and write well, so I expect you to translate for me?” As foreign students work endless hours to master English to ensure their future success, ours spend their time butchering it. But even near-illiterates shouldn’t misspell an acronym, especially one in which they claim renowned expertise.

From Major Payne Diaz: “Re: 5010 upgrades. You still need to feed the clearinghouse 5010 data, so the practice management software needs to be updated with vendor code to enact the changes. Then the facility needs to make their modifications – install the new 5010 sub-forms, modify table values, modify the loop/segment data sent for a particular payor. None of these can be performed by the scrubber or clearinghouse. Consider just one – Pay to Provider (rather important, don’t you think?) How would the clearinghouse know this information unless the source system / scrubber values it appropriately? Since when did the clearinghouses get crystal balls?”

From McMessy: “Re: McKesson. Both employees you mentioned left after they got word that Horizon Clinicals is going maintenance-only.” I’ve seen no announcement about Horizon, so if you have, please send something my way to confirm. That rumor keeps floating around (like the one suggesting that MPT is going to be sold,) but it’s all smoke and no fire so far.

I was asked by a book publicist to consider writing about a new book called Your Medical Mind. I did, and it was a somewhat mixed review. It contains good if not occasionally obvious ideas about making medical decisions, but isn’t all that much fun to read, is a bit padded, doesn’t fully answer the question the subtitle asks, and either isn’t clear on its intended audience or fails to engage them on their level. I still like the concepts, though, even if I wouldn’t necessarily invest the time or money to buy the book. I’d like to see the authors (or someone else) turn it into a movement that would probably be more effective on a larger scale. It’s a good conversation-starter, at least.

My Time Capsule editorial this week from September 2006: Drug Rep Gifts Banned – What About IT Reps? A snip: “Having decision-making authority means vendor reps will try to soften you up like gangsters wooing supermodels — with flattery, rapt listening, and a shower of baubles.”

Most respondents to my poll said they follow their employer’s security policies all the time, but of course I didn’t really ask how stringent those policies are (especially those related to encryption of data on portable drives, accessing Web sites and online e-mail accounts from company devices, etc.) New poll to your right: what effect will ACO-type reimbursement models have on quality and cost?

St. Louis-based NextGen reseller KIG Healthcare Solutions is sold to another reseller, GBS Corporation of North Canton, OH.

A jury finds that Teva, Baxter, and McKesson must pay $20 million for selling the anesthetic Propofol in large vials that the plaintiffs say implied the vials could be used for multiple patients. Punitive damages of up to $600 million are being sought. The first two companies (not McKesson) were hit with a $500 million verdict previously in another case. Plaintiffs claimed the companies stopped making smaller vials of Propofol because the larger ones were more profitable; patients sued after contracting hepatitis from a Nevada colonoscopy clinic. The CDC said the infections came from the clinic’s use of Propofol vials for multiple patients, but the defense argued that the infection could have come from improperly sanitized instruments. The clinic’s former owner and some of his employees were indicted on criminal counts that included racketeering, insurance fraud, and patient neglect, but he was found incompetent to stand trial. Since McKesson is a distributor and not a manufacturer, you would expect their involvement to have been limited to filling the orders of its customers. Nearly 300 lawsuits have been filed against Teva, which says it will pay any damages levied against its distributors such as Baxter and McKesson.

Howard Hays, MD, MSPH, acting CIO of the Indian Health Service, testifies in a Senate hearing on that organization’s use of real-time videoconferencing, consultations, patient monitoring, and mobile health. They are providing services such as behavioral telehealth, home blood pressure monitoring for chronic disease management, tele-nutrition, and remote neurosurgical consultations from the University of New Mexico Regional Trauma center. Video of the hearing is here.

A Texas Tribune article covers practice groups in that state that are following new IT-enabled models. Examples: one practice performs all wellness exams in a single visit, answers patient e-mails 24×7, and logs diagnostic results immediately to their EMR. Another offers specialty storefronts, same-day appointments, and valet parking. Kelsey-Seybold Clinic in Houston has 373 physicians in 20 facilities, all with in-house lab and x-ray facilities, uses a single EMR (Epic), has offered an accountable care plan through Cigna for four years. They use the EMR to prevent duplicate tests or treatments and to provide best-practice alerts and preventive reminders. It’s a good reminder that a well-run practice can scale up without needing a hospital to buy it, although most practices are run as small businesses without a lot of business savvy (hint: if your business manager is the spouse of one of the doctors and the IT expert is one of their unemployed nephews, the chances are good that even notoriously inefficient hospitals could run it better).

Great Plains Health Alliance will use $5.2 million in federally guaranteed USDA loans to buy clinical software for 22 rural hospitals.

A Massachusetts state senator introduces legislation that would take away the power of the Massachusetts Historic Commission to restrict the use of land that isn’t listed in the state’s Register of Historic Places. That’s in response to Meditech’s announced plan to take its jobs elsewhere when the Commission insisted that a lengthy archaeological survey be performed before new offices could be built.

The widely decried “Coke and fries” program in Australia in which retail pharmacists would have received computerized reminders to push a particular company’s herbal remedies along with prescriptions has been shut down. The president of the pharmacy guild that came up with the idea is appalled that media coverage was negative. “The idea that community pharmacists would take part in commercial up-selling without regard to their professional standards is offensive to our profession and rejected by the guild.”

Hospital software vendor CPSI pays $102,000 to its employees after a Department of Labor compliance audit finds minor errors in some of its pay rules. CPSI was paying 1.5 times the hourly rate for overtime and a flat fee for being on call over the weekend. The issue involved employees who were already on overtime before the weekend started. The company thought (as did I) that on-call pay is discretionary and not subject to overtime regulations. Of its 1,000 employees, audits found 247 who were affected, with an average payout of $60. As CPSI CEO Boyd Douglas said, there would have been no discussion if CPSI simply shafted its employees like most companies and forced them to take call with no extra compensation.

Cleveland Clinic announces its Top 10 Medical Innovations for 2012, of which two involved healthcare IT: data analytics and mobile apps for physicians. Its just-ended Medical Innovation Summit was like a dream for right-winger capitalists rather than compassionate healthcare advocates, with keynotes by Dick Cheney, Jeff Immelt of GE, and the CEOs of drug and device companies looking for the next bottom line booster.

Oracle settles charges that it overcharged the federal government for software over a nine-year period by not offering Uncle Sam the same discounts that the company’s commercial customers receive. Oracle will pay $199.5 million under the False Claims Act, with the company’s former employee who filed the whistleblower lawsuit pocketing a cool $40 million. Oracle says it followed the rules, but the incidents are so old (1998 to 2006) that it can’t find reliable witnesses and would rather just move on.

Merge Healthcare chooses Dell as its preferred provider of cloud-based computing services, storage, and enterprise hardware. Meanwhile, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announces that Merge intends to grow its local workforce from 900 to 1,100 over the next two years and install 100 of its Vital Kisoks around the city.

Last month’s arrest of the 17 year-old Matthew Scheidt posing as a physician assistant in a Florida hospital marks the third time he attempted to practice medicine at local hospitals. The earliest documented attempt was in 2007, when the then 13 year-old Scheidt masqueraded as a nurse; he also twice claimed to be a sheriff’s deputy. The Orange-Osceola State Attorney’s Office announced that Scheidt will be procescuted as an adult on two felony counts of impersonating a physician assistant and four felony counts of practicing without a license.

Nuance Communications discloses it has acquired Swype Inc. for $102.5 million. Swype is a provider of alternative keyboard input functions for mobile devices.

We were sent a fun resignation letter that made its way around. The author gave the OK to run it as long as his name and that of the company were removed (although he knows it won’t be hard to figure out which company he resigned from.) He was surprised that his vendor employer didn’t delete it off the e-mail server. Inga and I found him amusing in a Ricky Roma kind of way, so we’re trying to get him to write for us.

Let’s be honest. Resignation letters are usually brief, nice and boring. My goal is to make this none of those things. The only good ones are those accidentally sent out to the whole company where everyone tries to figure out why they got an e-mail about “Frank” who worked here for eight months as an IT consultant in Boise. Good ol’ Frank – he was solid from a technical standpoint, but not so solid at the TO: line of an e-mail.

I thought I might write this as a Top 10 list because that has never been done before … ever. I’m sorry, I have just been informed that I am only able to write this as a Top 7 list. If you want the full Top 10, you will need to wait for the next version – top10.1.1 or Service Pack 2.

And now, the thoughts of a man in a powder blue tuxedo.

10. Keep in touch. Keep in touch is the worst phrase ever. Let’s update that one: “Keep in touch on LinkedIn because I may need a recommendation soon.”

9. The Mothership. I am taking credit for giving the office this moniker, and it has now passed the test because I heard an “executive” use this phrase. I also like to put the word “executive” in quotes.

8. Casual attire. For those of you reading this outside of the Sanctuary walls (no, not that kind of sanctuary, that’s the name of our building), did you know that we can wear jeans every day? There are still some guidelines and I feel some of our IT friends need a little assistance. I have seen so many Canadian tuxedos in the last six months that I feel like I am backstage at a Rush concert.

7. Last season, our softball team was named the Crooked Numbers. It’s a softball term, I guess, but I also think it also describes the reason why we lost so many “executives” a few years ago.

6. Handing in your two-week notice. Other than my current haircut, this was my biggest mistake. I should have said that I am going to consult for all of our top competitors and am building an EHR in my garage so they would have kicked me out right away. Now I had to stay for two weeks to help “transition” someone into my “role” and “drag down morale” with my “shifty eyes” and “rugged good looks.”

5. (This item was not approved by legal, technical accounting, corporate, finance, and/or a gang of angry ninjas.)

4. I will miss many of you. Not all of you of course. But if I had to pick what I will miss most, it is you, free Diet Coke machine. Thank you for early morning wake-ups, late night keep-ups, and mid-day pick me ups. You are the epitome of ICARE.

I have worked here for nearly four years and there are some great people here. I thank them for everything.

Always up for a fried appetizer.

E-mail Mr. H.

Pediatric Office of the Future by Dr. Gregg

Lots of folks are gearing up for (or just gearing down from) their pick of the onslaught of fall HIT and/or healthcare conferences. I know most of you HIStalk fans aren’t pediatric-oriented per se, but I’m guessing that most of you were, at one point or another, children. I’m further guessing that many, if not all, of you appreciate a little humor amidst your techno-serious daily chores.

With these guesses in mind, I asked Mr. H to share the following two video clips with you. They were 100% donated to the 100% non-profit, educationally-focused “Pediatric Office of the Future” (POF) exhibit which I am honored to direct at the upcoming American Academy of Pediatrics-National Conference & Exhibition, Oct. 15-18th, in Boston. These very fun clips were created specifically for our brand new “Tech Talk Theater” by the very good and amazingly-talented folks at Nuesoft. These were all done in house with family and friends, but you’ll swear they hired out!

I can 99.9% guarantee these short “sizzle reels” will bring a smile to your day! (The 0.1% accounts for those incorrigible curmudgeons out there or those who watch just after walking out of a hospital finance meeting.)

Please disregard the blatant “self”-promotion for the greatly expanded POF with our new focus upon all 3 offices where docs work: outpatient, inpatient, and mobile. Disregard, too: our 500% growth; our 31 fantastic sponsors; our brand new “Hospital of the Future” booth; that we’re helping a local free clinic; that we’re giving away low cal ice cream; that we’ve got robots, telemedicine, patient engagement & education tools, cool hospital tech, diagnostic wizardry, etc.; or that we’ve got our new Tech Talk Theater running 28 little 15-minute talks throughout the show with a diversity of speakers on “news, views, & current events from the world of pediatric healthcare technology.”

Did I hear someone say “Emmy”? We’re Tweeting about it at @PedsOfficeFutur.

E-mail Dr. Gregg.

Time Capsule: Drug Rep Gifts Banned – What About IT Reps?

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 September 2006.

Drug Rep Gifts Banned – What About IT Reps?
By Mr. HIStalk

Stanford Hospital last week joined the growing number of academic medical centers that prohibit their physicians from accepting gifts from drug company salespeople. The reps aren’t even allowed on campus, except by appointment to conduct product inservices.

Bravo to Stanford. Physicians think they’re too savvy to be influenced by free lunches, rounds of golf, or drug samples, but drug companies know better – subtle bribery works. A $100 staff lunch influences even a $500K a year doctor whose prescriptions for one medical condition might generate thousands of dollars a week of business for the drug company.

I’ve taken my share of IT vendor goodies: junkets, executive dinners, trips on private jets, and one memorable evening spent in an internationally known billionaire’s back yard. Having thereby flouted the rules of propriety myself, I’m qualified to issue my first-ever standards of conduct for CIOs and other provider-side executives.

The most important fact is this: it doesn’t matter whether your acceptance of vendor swag is improper; it matters only that it might appear improper to an outsider, like the attorney of a bid-losing vendor who’s suing you for tortuous interference or the “60 Minutes” camera crew accosting you on your way to drop the kids off at school.

It’s obvious, but if your organization is sending out RFIs or RFPs or is otherwise involved in system selection, accepting anything is unwise. Even speaking to vendor reps is not smart. Don’t let vendors provide free lunches or giveaways to employees attending demos. Vendors shouldn’t pay for your site visits – if you can afford their product, you can spend your organization’s own money on flights and hotels. Spurned vendors aren’t nearly as chummy, I’ve found.

Otherwise, lunches are always OK, whether one-on-one or group. Stuff for the IT department is OK, like shirts, food brought in, or sports tickets. This is the IT version of the unrestricted grants that drug companies offer, where you accept small items without reciprocating and the chance of undue influence is minimal. Corporate ethics people are usually OK with this, as long as the gifts aren’t for the specific benefit of an individual.

On the other hand, it’s never OK to solicit stuff from a vendor: free software from the Microsoft rep, donations for a pet cause, money for a department party, or entry fees for a fundraiser. Vendor strong-arming is tacky.

I also don’t like the idea that vendors buy access to prospects by sponsoring conferences and giveaways for HIMSS and CHIME, but that’s apparently a hopeless cause. It looks like Halloween, except the trick-or-treaters are wearing suits or conscientiously casual golf apparel.

Spouse trips are out. So are ridiculously transparent junkets, phony advisory board conferences, honoraria, or a visit to the German countryside to see your future PACS system being assembled. It’s tempting when all your cross-town colleagues are lining up at the feed trough, but it’s still wrong, don’t you think?

Having decision-making authority means vendor reps will try to soften you up like gangsters wooing supermodels — with flattery, rapt listening, and a shower of baubles. You know what they really want. Surely your integrity is worth enough that you won’t sell it that cheaply, especially knowing that they won’t respect you in the morning.

Book Review–Your Medical Mind

TLC Book Tours asked me to review Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What is Right For You by Jerome Groopman MD and Pamela Hartzband MD. No compensation was provided other than they sent a free copy. I agreed to review the book because I’m a fan of one of the author’s previous books, How Doctors Think.

This book asks a sobering question: can you trust clinicians to always recommend the best course of medical action given your particular personal beliefs and circumstances? Reading it can be uncomfortable. You are reminded that medicine is not quite the pure science that it sometimes seems and that most of us would like to believe. There are few silver bullets.

Physicians and patients each have their own value systems and motivations. They don’t always overlap. The authors urge patients to take control of their treatments, do their own research, and work with their doctors to individualize their treatment to their own satisfaction.

This paragraph from the introduction neatly encapsulates the entire book’s theme (to the point that I wouldn’t necessarily suggest buying the book if you already understand this concept):

Despite many scientific advances, the unsettling reality is that much of medicine still exists within a gray zone where there is no black and white answer about when to treat and how to treat. Often, there are several differing approaches to treatment, each with its own risks and benefits. The best choice for an individual may be anything but simple or obvious.

In other words, with apologies to the 1960s counterculture movement: Question (Medical) Authority, but in a constructive way.

Those of use who work in hospitals get this point since we see examples of it all the time. Doctors sometimes offer patients a single treatment option that they themselves admit they wouldn’t accept for their own family members. Professionals whose opinions differ don’t speak up, figuring it’s none of their business. The book will provide a service if it only gets that point across – nobody knows your body and mind better than you, so you need call your own shots when it comes to medical care.

The opening chapter, called “Where Am I in the Numbers?” urges patients to both understand any numbers presented to them (such as, “This drug causes side effects in x% of patients”). Also, to realize that “stories” from other patients may over-influence the perceptions of both physicians and patients since both tend to believe stories that echo what they already believe (or want to believe.)

The chapter called “But Is It Best for Me?” is slightly critical of evidence-based medicine, the idea that if you read enough scientific literature, every patient can be treated from a cookbook. Its key point is that even those guidelines are subject to bias, only this time that of the people who reviewed the literature to create the guidelines for treating “average” patients.

The book also examines the effect of coping mechanisms. An interesting example is the driven patient who, when faced with a new diagnosis, gets consumed with the idea of researching “the best of the best,” convinced that making the right provider choice can overcome the disease process. Conversely, providers and insurance companies have engaged their advertising agencies to use that belief to bring in new business with feel-good personal stories in ads that suggest everything will be fine if you just call up the particular organization with your insurance card handy.

Other patient decisions are addressed. How do you make end-of-life decisions, and are a patient’s “pull out all the stops” wishes good for the society that bears the economic cost? Do economic formulas such as quality of life indicators really mean anything? Should you choose a doctor who thinks like you, or one who doesn’t?

The authors bring forth critical medical issues, especially since it does so in an economically motivated environment where treatment decisions are often driven by the government, computers, and corporations. Most patients would be surprised to find that they have a voice in even routine treatments, and more importantly, that their voice is essential in achieving the outcomes most important to them as a human being. If everything could be distilled into a formula, restaurants wouldn’t need menus – you would just sit down and let the computer order for you the same meal that everybody else like you gets or that you’ve enjoyed in the past.

Your Medical Mind should start (or augment) a patient-centered movement. Medicine may be a science, but treatment is an art. As much as we’d like to see the body as a set of numbers that can be made to go up and down by drugs and surgery, it’s not that simple. Its message is that everybody (and every body) is different, and you can’t treat the body without the involvement of the mind. As wise doctors have said long before technology, you treat the patient, not the symptoms.

I would probably recommend this book, but with reservation. It’s not especially fun to read, especially if you’re like me and want to cut to the chase like the subtitle suggests (how to decide what is right for you.) The patient stories wear a bit thin, especially when they are broken out into sections separated by chunks of often unexciting citations of other works. It seems to me that the core idea was padded out considerably to justify the price of a full-sized hardcover book (it contains 308 pages, of which 90 are acknowledgments, notes, and the index; the stories sag under the weight of pointless detail). It could have done a better job in distilling all the stories into an action plan for various medical circumstances, such as what to ask before agreeing to surgery or starting on a new prescription. Its readability level is probably too high for the average patient to comprehend.

What I would really recommend, then, is that somebody take these and other patient-centered ideas and turn them into something the average patient can start using now. Most patients will never read the book, and many who read it won’t connect it to an immediate medical decision when the time comes to make one. If the idea is to education patients beyond just selling books (which  few people read these days,) then the message needs to be mobilized in the form of videos, checklists, or how-to pamphlets that can be handed out in medical practices. On the provider side, how about a set of guidelines on how to communicate (both ways) with patients about what’s best for them?

My final thought was this: we’re getting further away from what Your Medical Mind advocates, at least for the average patient seeing the average doctor. Insurance companies and hospital-owned practices don’t want to pay for exploring patient wishes. Doctors get paid for cranking out the encounters and following a corporately-developed, cost-effective treatment formulas. The country is already going broke over healthcare costs, so who’s going to pay for anything more than symptom Whac-a-Mole, where limiting an encounter to ten minutes, getting lab results into the “normal” range, and prescribing from standard treatment algorithms constitutes a medical job well done no matter what the patient thinks?

In that respect, Your Medical Mind is revolutionary. The idea “you’re not the (medical) boss of me” is threatening to the status quo. Doctors and patients have to stay on the good side of insurance companies and the government, where “having insurance” is equated to “having access to healthcare.” If there’s going to be a patient-centered revolution, it will need to be fought behind the closed doors of the examination room, where medicine still what it always was – respectful and honest conversations between doctors and their patients about what’s best for them.

Cerner To Acquire Clairvia

Cerner announced this morning that it will acquire Clairvia, a Durham, NC-based vendor of care coordination and workforce management solutions that are used by more than 400 organizations. Cerner will integrate Clairvia’s Care Value Management suite into its Healthe Intent and CareAware solutions as a comprehensive resource management offering.

”Health care worldwide is experiencing a resourcing deficit that is forecasted to grow dramatically in the next several years," said Jeff Townsend, Cerner executive vice president and chief of staff. "The fundamental supply of staff and other assets simply cannot meet rising patient demand. Clairvia’s predictive models driven by EHR data not only cut costs by aligning the right resource at the right time but, more importantly, optimize patient outcomes. With this acquisition, we are solidifying our commitment to the workforce management marketplace and interoperable cloud-based solutions that focus on providing positive clinical, operational and financial returns for our clients."

The acquisition is expected to close this month and is not expected to have a material impact on Cerner’s fiscal year results. Clairvia President and CEO Beth Pickard will join Cerner with the acquisition.

HIStalk interviewed Beth Pickard last December.

News 10/7/11

Top News

The Cerner Health Conference starts Saturday in Kansas City, with more than 10,000 attendees expected.

Reader Comments

From Tired CIO: “Re: McKesson Paragon. A recent invite was sent to the Paragon user community for a Webinar that will discuss ‘product line updates’ from company executives. This is a first, as far as I know. Also sent was an e-mail blast informing the clients that the support line for Paragon will be re-routed to the HPF division on Friday so that all Paragon employees can attend an off-site meeting (also a first.) It’s looking like there may be something in the works for Paragon.” Unverifed, but that makes a couple of recent rumblings along those lines.

From Joseph Prang: “Re: 5010 upgrades. Most of the 5010 work is being done by clearinghouses, but practice management system vendors are sending daily faxes and e-mails to their customers demanding that they upgrade to be 5010 compliant. Why would practices need to upgrade unless they are submitting directly to a payor or their clearinghouses are requiring 5010 claim input (which none are, as far as I know?) It should not matter. Practices are coughing up big bucks to get their upgrades in, but should be able to submit in Sanskrit if the clearinghouses do their job.” We talked to a couple of other in-the-know folks, who agreed.

From Emmett Hunter: “Re: Cerner. Making an acquisition Friday. Cloud-related.” Unverified.

From Blue Devil: “Re: Todayskick.com. Were you consulted prior to launch?” Brilliant. A site dedicated to showing off your shoes and shopping for new ones. Nope, I wasn’t consulted, which is likely why there appears to be a dearth of sexy pumps. I might have to go through my closet this weekend and upload my Alexander McQueen / Stuart Weitzman / Christian Louboutin collections.

From AtlantaHITGal: “Re: Jay Deady of Awarepoint has hired two employees away from McKesson in what looks like some sort of package deal since both resigned the same day this week. I know McKesson isn’t pleased, but I’m not sure they can do anything to stop the talent exodus that began two years ago.” I omitted the employee names since I didn’t verify their departure.

From Gitane: “Re: Swedish Medical Center alliance with Providence Health Services. In a FAQ document for employees, Epic is mentioned briefly. Document attached.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

One more thing to ensure HIT well-roundedness: read HIStalk Practice. This week’s highlights include wine and acrobatics in the MGMA exhibit hall (look for the Medic and IDX booths in the video.) Private companies outshine public ones in the KLAS mid-year rankings of ambulatory EHRs. Navicure readies for ICD-10. Physicians believe that decision support tools and AI will prevent diagnostic errors. Rob Culbert advises on the the right way to subsidize employed physicians. Stay in the know by signing up for e-mail updates. Thanks for reading.

Listening: The Killers, grandiose pop that sometimes sounds like U2, sometimes 80s Britpop, sometimes Muse. The Las Vegas band is hardly obscure: they’ve sold millions of albums, won a slew of awards, and on Independence Day last year, played in a salute to the military on the White House lawn at the President’s invitation.

Inga thinks we should run more stuff about homecare, assisted living, and long term care IT. Neither of us knows too much about it. What do you think? Is there an audience for that and any experts who might help us out?

Jobs on the Job Board: Regional Director of Enterprise Sales, Product Director – Acute Revenue Cycle Solutions, Implementation Project Manager. On Healthcare IT Jobs: Pharmacy Informatics Analyst, Solution Sales Executive – Microsoft HSG, HL7 Interface Analyst, Epic Consultant Manager.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Navigant acquires Paragon Health, a practice management and consulting firm specializing in cardiovascular practices.

Practice management and billing software provider Kareo, Inc. closes a $10 million equity investment led by Greenspring Associates. Kareo, which has grown more than 100% per year for the past three years, will use the capital to expand its sales and marketing initiatives and to add at least 30 employees by the end of the year.

Wireless asset tracking vendor AeroScout acquires Sentient Health, which offers medical supply inventory management tools.

Sales

PeaceHealth signs agreement through GE Healthcare to upgrade to Streamline Health’s AccessAnyWare v5.1.

Advocate BroMenn Medical Center and Advocate Eureka Hospital (IL) select MediRevv to provide A/R management services.

Ventura County  (CA) enters into a $32 million contract with Cerner to provide EHR to the county’s hospitals.

Children’s of Alabama selects iSirona’s device connectivity solution to deliver data from medical devices to its Allscripts EMR.

People

Aegis Health Group hires William Walker (Medkinetics) as VP of IT services.

Dell names Andrew W. Litt, MD (Litt Healthcare Ventures, NYU Langone Medical Center) chief medical officer for the company’s Healthcare and Life Sciences Services division.

Announcements and Implementations

Merge Healthcare introduces Merge Honeycomb, a cloud-base medical imaging sharing network that is open for use by anyone at no charge.

Iatric Systems earns Surescripts e-prescribing certification for its discharge instructions function that allows prescription routing to retail pharmacies in all states.

Medical Specialists, an Indiana medical practice, uses Shareable Ink and its Allscripts EHR to, in its words, “merge technology and personalized healthcare.”

Verizon Connected Healthcare Solutions and Duke University will collaborate on projects for mobile health and consumer healthcare education, with Verizon providing the infrastructure and Duke contributing people and intellectual property.

Government and Politics

Meaningful Use by the numbers:

• 88,399 physicians and hospitals had signed up for the Medicare program by the end of September; an additional 24,030 registered for the Medicaid program.
• As of September 30, CMS had paid more than $850 million in EHR incentives ($357 million for Medicare and $493 million for Medicaid.)
• Medicare incentive payments have been paid to 3,772 physicians and 158 hospitals.

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) votes to endorse a plan to repeal the sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula for Medicare physician pay and replace it with one that keeps rates steady for primary care physicians over the next decade and cuts other physician services 5.9% for three years, then freezes those rates for seven years.

Innovation and Research

A UTMB report looks at the use of telemedicine and the use of mobile and wireless technologies in healthcare. It’s brief, but interesting. The site of its Center for Telehealth Research and Policy has good resources.

Other

Computer Science Corporation (CSC) shareholders file a class action lawsuit against the company over its participation in the UK’s NPfIT project, alleging that CSC deliberately misled them with overly optimistic projections of its ability to deliver, its financial performance, and the viability of the Lorenzo software from subcontractor iSoft, claiming the company knew for years that it was “dysfunctional and undeliverable.”

Plastic surgery for men is on the rise, with facelifts up 14%. Rhinoplasty is the procedure of choice for men, though otoplasty and liposuction are popular as well. Anyone want to venture a guess what surgical procedure remains the top pick for women?

I’ve read a bunch of Steve Jobs quotes in the last 24 hours. Here’s my favorite:

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

I’ve enjoyed watching this excellent video of Steve Jobs delivering Stanford’s 2005 commencement address. It’s like Apple’s products: carefully designed, casually presented, and deceptively simple. The message of finding a job that matches what you love to do is powerful. On death: “I’ve looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ Whenever the answer has been ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”

Athenahealth Chairman and CEO Jonathan Bush writes a guest post for Forbes titled Hospitals Might Be Heading Into Trouble, where he likens the “buying binge” and excessive borrowing of hospitals acquiring physician practices to that of Fannie Mae in pushing people into houses they couldn’t afford. He predicts that (a) hospital systems will fail in numbers too big to be bailed out by investors or the government, or (b) hospitals will complete their vertically integrated monopolies and strong-arm higher patient volumes and prices. A snip:

In my ‘hospitals gobbling docs’ scenario, software is the bottleneck to profitability. The supposed enabler of the referrals that the above business model is predicated on, is not working to that end. Why would it be? Software is not a web-native connected system. It doesn’t update when the rules change. Software doesn’t even let you send patients from one hospitals to the next (unless one is owned by the other and using the same server – can you imagine? In this day and age?). In fact, outside of vertically integrated systems like Kaiser Permanente and Cleveland Clinic (and they are highly-specialized solutions) and a few others, you’d be hard-pressed to see any cases where software is greasing the referral wheels. In other words software is mucking up the model.

Weird News Andy channels Buster Keaton in his wordless wry commentary. It’s pretty common to see cemeteries adjoining hospitals in the South, leading to the inevitable knee-slapping quip by one’s father driving the family car, “People are dying to get out of one and into the other.”

A six-year-old boy is treated by a hospital ED for a broken wrist. Three months later, the boy suffers permanent brain damage after being beaten by his mother’s boyfriend, who walks away with two misdemeanor charges and probation. The boy’s father sues the boyfriend and the hospital, claiming the ED doctors should have suspected child abuse from the broken wrist, requiring them to contact authorities. The boyfriend ignores the suit and the hospital prevails in two courts, but another court reverses the decision. This time, the jury finds the hospital negligent and orders it to pay the family $25 million.

Sponsor Updates

• Rockcastle Regional Hospital and Respiratory Care Center (KY) shares clinical data with the Kentucky HIE using the Healthcare Management Systems Connex interoperability platform.
• Nuesoft Technology names Cornerstone University and Colorado College the Fall 2011 winners of its College Health Scholarship program. 
• Merge Healthcare releases an eBook entitled Meaningful Use Guide for Radiology.
• Metropolitan Medical Services partners with iMDsoft to offer the MetaVision Anesthesia Information Management System.
• ZirMed and HEALTHCAREfirst announce a partnership to offer an RCM  solution to home health and hospice care agencies.
• nVOQ and Health Language Inc. will collaborate to deliver the voice recognition solution Say It for Health Care.
• HITEC-LA selects NextGen Healthcare as a preferred vendor.
• Wellsoft receives the highest marks for EDIS solutions in the recent KLAS EDIS report.
• JHIM highlights three hospitals using T-SystemEV to attain Meaningful Use  in the ED.
• EDIMS will participate in the ACEP 2011 Scientific Assembly October 15-18 in San Francisco.
• New Zealand-headquartered Orion Health celebrates the opening of its Paris office with an event at the New Zealand Ambassador’s residence in Paris.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

I’m waiting anxiously to hear what the Institute of Medicine has to say tomorrow regarding essential health benefits. As part of the Affordable Care Act, insurers will be required to cover these essential benefits across 10 categories that include professional services, drugs, hospital care, and laboratory services.

The Washington Post feature Wonkblog covered this in an easy-to-read article. I need to be more careful, though, because I was reading this piece while multitasking (aka “not paying attention”) during a Big Meeting and apparently had some facial leakage that might have been perceived as smirking.

My favorite quote is from Tekisha Dwan Everette, director of federal affairs for the American Diabetes Association: “You have to be cognizant that you can’t narrowly include every miniscule coverage option or the whole thing will implode on itself.” I love her use of “implode” and think it’s a perfect descriptor for what we’ll be seeing over the next few years. A close second from National Health Council Vice President Marc Boutin: “As we moved through some of the actuarial analysis, we found that covering everything really isn’t affordable.” Duh. Did they really need to ask an actuary about that, or just a middle school algebra student?

I wonder how many patients will lobby for coverage of the new gray hair prevention pill under development by cosmetic giant L’Oreal? Patients will have to start taking it daily at least 10 years before their hair starts turning gray and then continue taking it for life. I wish I had known about this before I crossed the line into IT administration. I hope they include a Magic 8-Ball to help predict when patients might go gray.

Although many states have already started issuing Meaningful Use checks, providers in the Beehive State can start applying for their piece of the pie starting Monday. For those of you who have forgotten those state nicknames you learned in fifth grade, let me Google that for you: Utah.

Quirky FDA approval: A gel called LeGoo has been approved to temporarily plug small blood vessels during bypass surgeries. It typically dissolves after about 15 minutes, but can be eliminated earlier with application of a cold pack. The FDA wisely warns physicians not to use it on vessels that deliver blood to the brain. Duh #2 of the day.

A new book The Web-Savvy Patient instructs patients facing a medical crisis how to best use the Internet to be an informed patient. Tips include how to tell the difference between good information and poor or vendor-sponsored information. It encourages readers to populate a Personal Health Record to centralize their health information.

Inga scooped me earlier this week with photos from the eClinicalWorks National Users Conference. Although my contacts weren’t as fast with their smart phones, they did deliver the goods. According to my roving reporter, the highlight of the exhibit hall was the Harlem Globetrotters guy and the basketball setup at the Emdeon booth. I know some other meetings are coming up this fall – and I hope to see more submissions from readers. Extra consideration will be given to photos that feature excellent cocktails, costumes, celebrities, or general mayhem. Cerner, AMIA, and NextGen attendees, I’m counting on you!

Contacts

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

Steve Jobs Dies

Apple co-founder and visionary Steve Jobs has died, Apple announced this evening. He was 56.

News 10/5/11

Top News

A former patient files a $20 million class-action lawsuit against Stanford Hospital & Clinics on behalf of 20,000 fellow patients, seeking $1,000 each following a data breach in which patient records were posted on a commercial Web site for almost a year. Stanford has issued a statement blaming co-defendant Multi-Specialty Collection Services, which at the time of the breach was providing collection and billing services.

Reader Comments

From Boot Scootin’: “Re: eClinicalWorks National Users Conference. You should have been at the party. I think you would have enjoyed the dancing and noticed some good-looking cowboy boots.” Indeed, these folks look to be having some fun and the “skirts with boots” look is one of my all-time faves. eCW is entertaining a crowd of 2,700 this week in Scottsdale.

From Rye Catcher: “Re: subcontractor payments. I’m a long-time reader and huge fan. I did EHR implementation work this summer as a subcontractor for one of your sponsors. I’ve done work for them previously and was always paid on time, but haven’t been paid for June and July hours and haven’t worked for them since July. The CEO gives me ever-changing reasons for the delay, telling me four times that the check was in the mail and giving me fake tracking numbers twice. I wonder if your readers have experienced this problem and can offer any tips? I’d rather not take the legal route, but my options are dwindling.” Please leave a comment on this post if you have ideas that can help RC (short of engaging a leg-breaker to get someone’s attention.)

From The PACS Designer: “Re: Apple iPhone 4S instead of iPhone 5. CEO Tim Cook surprised his audience with the announcement that the new features for the iPhone family will be called iPhone 4S. Prices will be $199 with 16 GB of memory to $399 with 64 GB. It will come in a black or white case. A new feature called Assistant adds voice activation capabilities for apps. Transcribing with the iPhone 4S could be a future enhancement for healthcare users when the app becomes available.” A little more horsepower for graphics, GSM and Sprint capability, the Siri personal assistant, eight-hour talk time, and a better camera are the features, but the most significant change may be the lower price (not to mention that the previous models will be discounted as well). Sounds like a comparative disappointment, putting some wind in the Android sails (or sales). Apple shares closed down a tiny percentage. Somehow it all seemed kind of dull without Steve Jobs around, like watching a band play with a replacement lead singer.

Here’s a demo of Apple’s Siri technology. They bought the company for a couple of hundred million last year. There’s a Nuance connection other than Siri uses Nuance speech recognition: the company that formed Siri out of a government research project (SRI International) incubated and IPO’d Nuance at the end of the 1990s.

From Shanana: “Re: HCA. Do you know if they’ve made their decision on Epic or Cerner? Or when they will?” I haven’t heard, but I have readers from there who may provide an update.

From Inga’s BFF: “Re: AHIMA. Here are some shoe pictures!” I get two reactions when I run shoe pictures: the ladies gush and the men accuse me of pervdom. Like most men, though, I don’t know a flat from a pump, but I’ll take my chances in pandering to the women.

From Pathos: “Re: Sunquest’s acquisition of PowerPath. Wonder what will happen to its CoPathPlus AP product?” According to the FAQ (which is marked confidential, but it’s out there on the Web), both products will be supported and enhanced going forward, giving Sunquest a 24% market share. All Elekta employees working on PowerPath will transition to Sunquest and there is an “absolute and clear ‘No Sunset’ policy.”

From Denali: “Re: McKesson Paragon. Heard they’re going to start selling it as just a revenue cycle product. They will still support clinicals. Are they finally admitting that HERM will never be more than a slick PowerPoint?” Unverified. McKesson said they would provide a response from their PR folks, but I haven’t heard back for a couple of days.

From Loop Froots: “Re: HIPAA. Our small healthcare information technology needs to speak with someone about making sure our storage of PHI is compliant with HIPAA and other regulations. We haven’t stored PHI so far, but may need to in the future.” I think Loop is looking for some consulting or advisory help if anyone is qualified and interested. E-mail me and I’ll pass your info along.

From Bomp deBomp: “Re: [provider name omitted]. They’re using an outdated system to rip off the government stimulus money. The system does not allow scanning or viewing images, so they use pieced together applications that are dangerous to patient care. EKGs and x-rays are viewed by different systems and outside reports aren’t available until the patient is discharged. The system is tedious to use, so notes are scant and can’t be followed by other personnel, not to mention that ordering meds and labs is so time-consuming that most physicians do verbal and faxed-in orders. Critical results are hard to find. The lawyers are going to have a heyday, but their physicians will take the brunt of the settlements. Meaningful Use has never been so bastardized.” Unverified.

From Been There: “Re: NPfIT. Having worked for several miserable months on the UK disaster at the very beginning, it was obvious that it would fail. The guy running it had zip, zero, nada experience in health care and didn’t see why that would matter. He was all about writing gotcha contracts with the vendors and ‘holding their feet to the fire.’ Don’t blame it on the docs, blame it on the idiots in charge.” I’ve made that observation previously and it’s a fascinating one: just about every vendor involved got pressured to sign unfavorable contracts, then bailed when it was clear they could be neither successful nor profitable. I don’t know of any precedent where vendors with multi-billion dollar contracts still wanted out and there weren’t really any others qualified to replace them.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Posted on Twitter: “#FF @histalk and @IngaHIStalk are great sources of HIT industry scuttlebutt, rumors, and inside knowledge. Also music & shoe ideas too.” What a great 140-character summary.

My doctor’s office now has an electronic check-in kiosk. Very cool. You verify your appointment online, print out a one-page confirmation with a bar code, then when you get to the office, just skip around all the people waiting in line, wave your bar code under the scanner, and take a seat. It’s way easier to use than an airport kiosk and a great way to avoid all the coughing, bleeding, and wheezing folks (and their secretions and excretions) who would otherwise be ahead of you in line.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Business integration and data management service provider Liaison Technologies closes $30 million in financing to accelerate its growth in the life sciences, healthcare, and HIE markets.

Sales

University Medical Center in Nevada contracts with Interpoint Partners for revenue cycle and clinical products, as well as Interpoint’s 835 denial management software.

The National Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Research awards Harris Corporation a $37 million re-compete contract to continue managing data for the center’s clinical research.

Capital Health System, Inc. selects Hayes Management Consulting’s MDaudit Hospital software for proactive risk mitigation.

Carson-Tahoe Regional Healthcare (NV) selects ProVation Order Sets, powered by UpToDate Decision Support, as its electronic order set solution.

Central Illinois Health Information Exchange finalizes a contract with ICA to implement the CareAlign HIE platform.

People

Keith Hagen, former COO of Aperio and CEO of QuadraMed, is named president and CEO of Quantros, which offers quality performance and risk management applications.

Connexall USA appoints Bob Kennedy (Kryptiq) as VP of sales.

Radiologist and former White House Fellow Pat Basu, MD joins Virtual Radiologic as chief medical officer.

The National Quality Forum hires Rosemary Kennedy, the former chief nursing informatics officer of Siemens Medical, as its VP of HIT.

AHIMA elects Kathleen Frawley, associate professor and chair of HIT at DeVry University, as the association’s president-elect for 2012. Other new members to AHIMA’s board include Ann Frischkorn Chenoweth (3M Health Information Systems), Dwayne M. Lewis (DML Consulting), and Melissa M. Martin (West Virginia University Hospitals.)

Ingenious Med names former A.D.A.M president and CEO Mark Adams as its CFO.

Jonathan Goldberg, VP/CIO of St. Peter’s Health Care Services (NY), will hold the same role with the newly formed St. Peter’s Health Partners, which brings together St. Peter’s, Albany Memorial, St. Mary’s, and Samaritan, all in the Albany area.

Announcements and Implementations

Anthelio enters a strategic partnership with MedQuist to implement MedQuist’s clinical documentation services at several of its facilities, also offering the company’s Front-End Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding solutions to its clients.

Connecticut Children’s Medical Center preps for its $20 million Epic implementation that will cover both the hospital and its 165 specialty physicians.

HHS, AHIMA, and North Shore Medical Labs (NY) announce a demonstration project to support broader use and adoption of EHRs by providers in underserved communities. AHIMA will provide free HIT training and North Shore will donate EHR software and services through Nortec Software. The project is part of AHIMA’s “HIM Jobs for America initiative,” which supports employment and training opportunities for HIT professionals.

Streamline Health, which has posted losses in recent quarters, announces a new brand identity (logo, Web site, and product names) intended to “represent the Company’s progress as it continues its transformation into an externally focused, high-growth healthcare technology company.” I wonder if my life would be any spicier if I refreshed by brand identity (hair color and new wardrobe) or if, in the end, it would just be a better-looking me with the same old life. Hmm.

The local paper reports that the cost for Kettering Health Network’s (OH) Epic implementation is $100 million. That’s double what network officials said when the project was announced two years ago.

Vocera announces the release of its B3000 Communication Badge, which offers enhanced durability, audio quality, and speech recognition.

Nuance Communications announces a new version of its eScription platform, which includes a streamlined documentation creation process and enhancements to the quality assurance workflow.

RelayHealth adds Blue Button capability to its network, allowing patients to download, print, and share their health information with a single click.

Government and Politics

ONC awards APP Design, Inc. a $1.2 million contract to design ways to help patients understand their choices about how their information is shared, including in an HIE environment. It will result in an e-consent pilot with Western New York’s HEALTHeLINK.

Technology

eClinicalWorks unveils four new products at its National Users Conference this week, including a patient app for Web-enabled devices; Project Scribe, which converts free text to structured data; Project Nimbus, which enables practices to view and update patient data during outages; and eClinicalWorks for the iPad. All will be out by next summer.

Security companies will host a free Medical Device Hacking Summit in Minneapolis next month.

Rock Health opens up the application window to find its next round of startups to accelerate in San Francisco. Applications are due by November 14 and the next group of entrepreneurs moves into its office in January for five months. The above video has entrepreneurs explaining what Rock Health is. Below that are the folks who run it: Halle, Leslie, Clare, and Jess.

Other

From KLAS:  over 80% of providers will use emergency department information systems to help them attest for Stage 1 Meaningful Use, though many products lack required functionality such as medication reconciliation and CPOE. Half of Epic, Cerner and Medhost customers report being ready for MU, but 2/3 of those using McKesson, Meditech, and Picis mention one or more functionality gaps that need to be addressed.

Cherie Lester, an old friend of HIStalk, has an interesting post on her EngageMeHIT blog on how to prepare for a Skype-based job interview. My favorite tip: no pets. If you’ve every been on a conference call with a working-from-home person who doesn’t know how to use the mute button and whose giant-sounding dog barks at every passing vehicle outside, you’ll understand.

A telehealth project in Canada diagnoses and treats dermatology conditions in Africa’s developing countries, expanding the Canada-only Consult Derm to an international philanthropic program called Telederm Outreach.

Weird News Andy cleverly notices that in this case, the mouse really is connected to the computer. Scientists in Israel implant a computerized cerebellum into a brain-damaged mouse, allowing its brain to communicate with its body. If you’re wondering where the scientists happened to find a brain-damaged mouse, you probably don’t want to know more about how animal experiments are conducted.

A hospital staff psychiatrist makes The New York Post for pulling down $516K in taxpayer-paid overtime in addition to his $174K salary, reporting an average of 110 hours per week that also include one four-day stretch of working around the clock.

Sponsor Updates

• Mac McMillian, CEO of CynergisTek, participates as a panelist during the October 5 webcast Health Information Exchange Privacy and Security – Are you Ready?
• SRSsoft partners with Omedix to provide SRS clients with a fully integrated patient portal.
• Mike Smyly, chief business development officer for Inland Northwest Health Services, will co-present with Tim Cromwell from the VA in a National eHealth Collaborative Webinar on HIE leadership and sustainability Wednesday afternoon (October 5) at 1:00 p.m. Eastern.
• Merge Healthcare announces the creation of a clinical advisory board, led by CMO Cheryl Whitaker.
• AsquaredM offers an October 11 Webinar called Applying Value Stream Mapping to the Revenue Cycle.
• Hayes Management Consulting releases a synopsis of the final CMS rule for RACs.
• InHealth Clinical Documentation Solutions joins MD-IT as an MTSO Associate.
• QMACs Inc partners with MED3OOO to offer its physician clients the company’s InteGreat EMR and PM products.
• Brian Levy, MD, CMO and SVP of Health Language Inc., presented an education session on medical terminology and interoperability at this week’s AHIMA convention.
• Medicity’s Kipp Lassetter and McKesson’s Emad Rizk, MD  earn nominations to Modern Healthcare’s and Modern Physician’s list of the 50 Most Influential Physician Executives in Healthcare.
• NextGen Healthcare hosts an October 6 webinar entitled Providing Practices a View into What Matters Financially.
• Concerro will preview its new ShiftPredict schedule modeling tool at the ANCC National Magnet Conference this week in Baltimore.
• SourceHOV signs an agreement with 3M Health Information Systems to make  its outsourced coding resources available with 3M’s suite of ICD-10 products and services.
• San Juan Regional Medical Center (NM) selects Access Universal Document Portal to move perinatal documents from GE Centricity into Meditech.  ‎

Contacts

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

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 10/3/11

Last month I mentioned that the AMA had recently released its 2010-2011 Health Care Trends Report. The report’s “Science and Technology in Medicine” section includes items summarized from other sources, including MGMA data. Surprisingly, MGMA noted that independent practices were “more likely to have fully implemented and optimized EHR systems than hospital-owned practices.”

They noted that nearly 20% of EHR-owning independent practices felt they had optimized use of their systems, while another 50% had completed implementation and were moving to the next stage. In contrast, one-third of owned practices were still in the beginning stages of EHR adoption.

As far as quantifying how many physicians are using the system, only 43% of hospital-owned practices reported that all physicians used the system, where 72% of independent groups claimed that all of their physicians used the system.

I’ve spent a significant portion of my career toiling in the CMIO trenches, including oversight of ambulatory EHR implementation. Although this was largely in hospital-owned practices with employed physicians, I’ve had experience with private practices under hospital-subsidized arrangements as well as truly independent physicians. I’ve definitely noticed a difference in how the two groups do with EHR adoption and have a couple of thoughts on why they’re different.

My first theory involves the idea of free will. In a typical independent practice, the physicians have to come to at least some kind of consensus prior to purchase of an EHR. They’ve often been active participants in the selection process and in determining how a system will be implemented. Physicians may be active in system setup and customization of workflow and template screens.

In contrast, hospital-owned physicians are generally told which EHR they’re going to implement, as well as when and how. There are typically limits on how much autonomy physicians have with workflow, and customization at the provider level is taboo. It may be the system’s way or the highway. It’s always easier to get people to do what you’re asking when they think it’s their idea or when some reward is involved. It’s awfully easy to rebel when someone is trying to force change.

Speaking of reward, my second theory involves having the proverbial skin in the game. Because employed physicians typically have contracts which include the EHR and implementation as part of their employment agreements, they’re not paying much (if anything) out of pocket for the transition. Often employed groups are committed to keeping their physicians’ compensation stable as an EHR is implemented. Those physicians aren’t really incented to rapidly adopt or to change behaviors.

My colleagues who have had to pay their own IT bills (many of whom can also tell you exactly how much they paid for their EHR systems, down to the penny) have a different view of things. Trainers report that independent physicians are less likely to skip training sessions and tend to be more engaged. I’m sure those value-conscious providers know how much they’re paying for training hours and also how much they’ll be hurt if they can’t return to full productivity as quickly as they’d like.

My final theory revolves around the glacial speed of decision-making within hospital-owned practices. Physicians have given up a degree of autonomy (often for good reason – they’re lured by the promise of practicing medicine without having the pressure of dealing with staff, OSHA, CLIA, credentialing, vendors, and other distractions). Decisions are made among multiple levels of mangers, regional administrators, and hospital presidents.

There are often meetings to discuss the meeting before the meeting, not to mention the obligatory meeting after the meeting. Committees (and subcommittees, action groups, and departmental fiefdoms) have to sign on prior to things actually being decided. The ability to move forward with EHR adoption in a nimble fashion is seriously compromised. Each time the cycle repeats, adoption declines.

For those of you in the ambulatory arena, what’s your theory? E-mail me.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

HIStalk Interviews Deborah Peel MD, Founder, Patient Privacy Rights

Deborah Peel MD is founder of Patient Privacy Rights.

Give me some brief background about yourself and about Patient Privacy Rights.

I never expected to be leading this organization or ever even thought about that. In my younger days, I practiced full time as a psychiatrist and Freudian analyst for a very long time, until it became clear that things were happening in DC that would make effective mental healthcare impossible. Namely, that there were lots of different ideas being floated; for example, the Clinton healthcare initiative. There was a part of it that was going to require everyone’s data from every physician encounter be recorded in federal database.

Fast-forward to the HIPAA privacy rule. That’s what really convinced me of the need for a voice for consumers, because there really wasn’t any. What I’m talking about there is, of course, the change in 2002 that happened under everyone’s radar except for – and this is the is the laugh line – when the 3,000 Freudian psychoanalysts in the nation noticed that consent was eliminated.

In 2004, I started Patient Privacy Rights because there was no effective representation for the expectations and rights that the majority of Americans have for how the healthcare system is going to work. Namely, that people don’t get to see their information without consent. Since founding PPR in 2004, we’ve still been the national leading watchdog on the issues of patient control over information and even internationally. Our power has come because when we came to DC, the other people that were working on privacy, human rights, and civil rights recognized that because of my unique position as a physician and deep understanding of how data flows, that I knew what I was talking about. 

We very quickly got a pretty amazing bipartisan coalition of over 50 organizations. That enabled us to put these issues and problems on the map.

We had some incredible successes in HITECH. Virtually all of the new consumer protections came from our group, including the ban on the sale of PHI, the accounting of disclosures, segmentation, the new requirement that if you pay out of pocket for treatment you should be able to block the flow of that data to health plans and health insurers. We were the ones that worked with Congressman Ed Markey on getting encryption, required stronger security protections, and worked with Senator Snow to get meaningful breach notice into the rules.

All of this work lead to the first-ever summit on the future of health privacy this past summer in DC. The videos and the entire meeting can be seen or streamed online.

If somebody said you had to choose between accepting healthcare IT as it is today or going back to purely paper-based systems, which would you choose?

We’ve never been in favor of going back to paper. Our position has always been there is tremendous technology for privacy and we can have far better control of our information if we implement smart, privacy-enhancing technologies and architectures.

We’ve never been in favor of going backwards, although I do have say, we now know about WikiLeaks and now because of the strong breach notice requirements, it’s appalling how abysmal the security is of electronic records. Actually, it’s looking a lot like paper records are far easier to keep from getting into the wrong hands because there’s only one of them and they’re locked up in a medical records department most of the time.

We wouldn’t make that choice. What we’ve always tried to do is promote systems that give everybody – except the data thieves and data miners – what they want.

I don’t detect any citizen groundswell about the state of healthcare privacy, just organizations doing an occasional biased survey that concludes that the public is extremely concerned or implies that they would be concerned if only they were informed. Is advocacy needed when there have been no events to get the public up in arms?

The public has two minds about this. All the polling shows that they are extremely sensitive about who controls their records and they believe that they should have the control. On one hand, that’s what they believe.

On the other hand, the polls also show they’re extremely concerned about breaches. Large majorities recognize that all these things are going to get broken into. There’s knowledge in some ways and fears about electronic systems. But the key thing is industry and the government have really not recognized how many people are, in Alan Westin’s words, “Health privacy intense.” He’s the guru of polling in health privacy.

At our summit, he presented 20 years of data. The slides are up there for anyone who wants to see. When the polling comes to views about privacy and control of information in the healthcare sector, his findings have been consistent over 20 years — 35 to 40% of the public is privacy-intensive about health information. About other information, it’s 25%. This is a really significant minority.

Even though the public is not yet marching on Washington with pitchforks — and obviously I’m saying that in a joking way — the issues about privacy are simply going to continue to grow. What the industry has really ignored — and I particularly know about because of the patients that I’ve treated for 37 years — is that people will act in ways that endanger their health in order to keep information private. Millions and millions of people. These are not good outcomes. The public knows that electronic systems are far less safe and secure than paper systems.

This is something that has to be faced. There will be people who will choose not to see doctors, who will omit information, who will ask doctors to change diagnoses, who will refuse to get tests, and so on. These are figures from the 2005 California HealthCare famous study that one in eight people does something to try to protect their privacy.

Even earlier figures from HHS in 2000 are troubling. They found that 600,000 Americans a year refuse to get early diagnosis and treatment for cancer because they know the information won’t stay private. Two  million a year — or at least that year –refuse to get early treatment and diagnosis for serious mental illnesses for the same reasons. They know that the information won’t stay private. The same is true with millions of people that refuse to seek treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.

These are not good things. If you look at the military, the Rand Corporation did a survey – I think the book was called Wounded Warriors — that the lack privacy in the military is one of the important reasons that people won’t get treated. There’s 150,000 Iraqi war vets with post-traumatic stress disorder and we have the highest rate of suicide in the military in 30 years. Actually, just this year, we turned the corner that more members of the military killed themselves than were killed by an enemy.

You’ve really, really got to take seriously the fact that people that desperately need help for illnesses and diseases that are very treatable are refusing to get them because the consequences of the information not staying private are too threatening. It’s about two things, mainly – jobs and reputation.

The survey measures their perception, but does their perception reflect reality?

What I’m talking about is the reality — the actual numbers of people who act. My point really is, yes, the polling is off the charts on what the public feels, but the data is in. It’s not just about feelings. It’s about actions people take to protect themselves and their families from job discrimination, reputational damage, insurance discrimination, and the rest.

But it still was self-reported, right?

Well, yes.  These were figures from HHS surveys and from a California Healthcare survey.

As a psychiatrist, your privacy concerns are mostly related to discrimination with regard to employment issues or insurance. Going back to the public’s perception, are there enough occurrences where that’s actually happened that could not have happened with paper medical records?

This issue of discrimination and health information leaking out of the health system is not new because we have health IT. Literally, I learned about this when I hung out my shingle in 1977. The first week I was in practice, a couple of people came in and said, “If I pay you cash, will you keep my records private?”

I was blown away by that. I’d never heard of that in medical school or residency. Nobody talked about that, but these were people who had suffered harm. Again, jobs and reputation. So I said, “Well, sure.”

It’s a very significant issue. Many mental health professionals actually give patients Miranda warnings. If you use a third-party payer, anything you say and do can and will be used against you. Many health professionals will work with people to try to find a fee that they can afford so that they don’t have to have their futures or their children’s futures wrecked.

If patients were allowed to control who can see their medical information, would you be comfortable as a physician making treatment decisions based only on what they want you to see?

As a practical matter, patients still can and do control a lot of what we see and know. I trust what I hear from patients at least on a par, if not more, than what I find in medical records. The history is everything. People are going to withhold information or even lie about it if they don’t trust you. You have to earn patient trust. You get the best information when patients know that you’re really going to protect them and keep their information out of the hands of countless, endless third parties.

I think this is something that physicians and other health professionals – some, anyway – are not going to see coming. As everyone gets their electronic health record – and hospitals are going to get blamed for this too, not just physicians and the practitioners – when they begin to realize how far-flung their data is … that was another thing that came up at the Health Privacy Summit. There’s not even any kind of a data map that can show people all of the places their data goes. It doesn’t even exist. The data gets so far afield. When people see this, they’re going to blame the doctors and the hospitals. That’s not a good thing.

Decisions are made outside the practitioner’s control about who gets that data. At least some EMR vendors believe they own the patient data and can sell it even though that fact may not be clearly stated to patients.

We’ve been pretty actively pointing out that kind of thing. I’m not a lawyer, obviously, but doctors really don’t have a right to sell patient data. That’s one of the reasons we got a ban on the sale of health information into the stimulus bill. Obviously it hasn’t stopped the particular business model of so many electronic health record companies so far, but that was one of the reasons that our coalition worked to ban the sale of PHI without consent.

But as you see, what’s in the federal law and what turns up in regulations is not always the same. That’s a serious problem. I think those contracts will eventually be found to be illegal, just like many health insurers. You probably know about this. You used to get doctors to sign contracts with them with gag clauses, where they weren’t supposed to tell their patients about certain kinds of treatment alternatives. Of course those turned out to be illegal, but that didn’t stop the insurance industry from using them widely for a very long time.

People read about their financial information and Google searches being available to third parties. Do you think they are getting desensitized to the idea that privacy is something they should expect?

No. I think they’re getting more and more rabid about it. You’ve seen lots of pushback, not just in this country, but even more so in Europe, where they have much tougher data privacy and security protection. Google got bit on Buzz. Facebook ended up getting a lot of blowback from their users who believe that they have control over their information. A lot of the controls on Facebook and Google imply that.

I often talk about how people say young people don’t care about privacy. Wrong. I’ve got two teenagers. What’s the premise of Facebook? Some people are my friends and can see things, and others are not.  If you want to think about it this way, it’s an early consent tool. You’re in, you’re out. That’s the new premise of Google Plus, that new circle of friends thing. You have different people that get to know different things about you.

But people really do want control over who sees and uses their information. They feel this very strongly. VCs and other people have begun calling us up and asking what we think about things, because they realize there really are going to be markets for products and systems where people know that they can trust what happens with their information and it doesn’t go anywhere they don’t want it to go.

If you’re one of the good guys in the privacy and confidentiality debate in healthcare, who are some bad guys?

It’s not so easy. It’s not just good and bad.

First of all, there’s a vast number of people who are simply not informed, or they’re well-intentioned and they just don’t know what’s going on. There’s a lot of them. A lot of things happen for that reason.

I also think a lot of the reason we’re stuck with these data-leaking systems is because initially, a lot of the administrative kind of software was imported from other businesses. If you think about this, other businesses don’t have to respect individual privacy in the way that they healthcare system does.

In fact, the difference about healthcare from all other commercial areas — where as you say, we can’t seem to control our data at all – the strongest rights we have to control information are in healthcare. They come from the legacy of Hippocrates. The requirement to get consent is in every ethical code for health professionals from time immemorial. We have extremely strong rights to health privacy despite HIPAA.

One of the slides that I always show is a direct quote from the HIPAA regs that talk about HIPAA is intended to be a floor, and in no way to preempt best practices or stronger privacy protections in state law and medical ethics. Well, what happened to that? HIPAA was never intended to wipe out or preempt state law or anything else.

We’re seeing some movement some beginnings of more movement in ONC to begin to try to put in place the kind of technologies that are a matter of law, like the need to segment mental health and addiction information and certain other kinds of sensitive information — genetic, STDs and so forth. They’re finally starting to spend a little tiny bit of the $29 billion on the things that matter the most to the public.

Publicly visible, high-profile advocates tend to polarize people who either see them as selfless crusaders or shameless limelight seekers chasing personal gain. How do you see your image in healthcare and who agrees and who doesn’t agree with what you do?

In the beginning, I was cast as a very polarizing figure. Everyone saw me as trying to interrupt the $29 billion dollar gravy train, although it didn’t exist until recently. I had some active reporters essentially trying to attack me as a Luddite and stuff. These were people that didn’t even read or listen to what I was saying. It was polarizing in the beginning, but many people really are of good intent.

I think there is a much more mature understanding of the importance of privacy now, as evidenced by the list of top government officials that participated in the first summit on health privacy and the industry people that participated. We had a past chairman of HIMSS,. We had Lisa Gallagher, HIMSS privacy and security officer.  Wes Rishel from Gartner was on the panel. We had top people from this nation, from outside of this nation. We had top government people, top industry people, and advocates and privacy experts in academics who were all taking the question seriously — can we build a system with privacy that’s effective and that works and is reasonable? Can it be done?

There were no catfights on the panels or anything, because everyone there believed this is really an important issue that needs to be addressed. I would say that summit is evidence of me being perceived as – I think at this point – less a polarizing figure than a convener for the people that really want to move this whole effort forward in an effective, responsible, thoughtful way that does not leave the public out and that incorporates what the public expects and what they have longstanding rights to.

Any concluding thoughts?

For me, what’s been really difficult has been the fact that even though the administration — both this one and the previous one — wanted to be inclusive and wanted to have public input, the kinds of financial commitment and staff commitment it takes to actually participate in these government private efforts does not allow the kind of input that’s needed from privacy advocates and experts and academics.

Just speaking for myself and getting back to your point about seeking the limelight for some kind of gain, I have to tell you that I’ve never taken a salary for this. In fact, my family and friends have sacrificed lots of money, lots of time, lots of their own personal efforts to me and to Patient Privacy Rights to enable this to happen. In terms of gain, for me, it’s an honor to work for the public, the people of this nation, for privacy. But in terms of any kind of financial gain, it’s certainly been exactly the opposite.

We are hoping to build on the momentum that started at the summit. We’re going to be putting together several work groups and we’re going to make this an annual event. Patient Privacy Rights is also going to create a new privacy brain trust with leaders in this country and internationally to weigh in on what we can to help move things forward in a constructive way. This nation needs a big counterweight to the many interests that want data without consent, including for-profit research entities, the government, those that sell data, and business analytics kinds of tools with patient data.

This nation and the world needs a group of experts who can provide the kind of credible information on those policy and technology to counter a lot of the one-sided infomercials that come from industry. There’s a real need to hear all sides, so people are coming together under the umbrella of the summit to be able to work together and to have an even more powerful voice than just Patient Privacy Rights and me. It’s a wonderful thing because it isn’t just me who cares about this.