News 5/27/11

Top News

St. John’s Regional Medical Center (MO) may not be salvageable, according to hospital’s president Gary Pulsipher. He says St. John’s, which is part of Mercy Health System, will open a 60-bed mobile hospital by Sunday and will rebuild. The hospital went live on EHR less than a month ago, but will soon be back online to connect the mobile hospital with other Mercy sites.

Reader Comments

From Easily Amused: “Re: magazine typo. A finance newsletter described a vendor as ‘provider of elf-service and revenue cycle management applications.’ I had visions of Santa’s helpers pitching in to improve collections.” At least they aren’t involved in elf gratification.

From Meaningless User: “Re: attestation. Do you have any info regarding which hospitals have attested to MU and what their success has been? I have not yet heard any announcements or rumors of a hospital achieving MU yet.” I doubt there’s a publicly available list, but some have met the Stage 1 requirements. It would be interesting to know if any have been turned down, but that’s not the kind of news that makes vendor press releases (not to mention that hospitals probably wouldn’t apply unless they were pretty sure they qualify).

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

In case you missed it this week on HIStalk Practice: Kareo lends advice on how to handle medical billing after a zombie apocalypse. Massachusetts eHealth leads the nation in enrolling primary care physicians for its REC. AMA reports a 45% increase in profits for 2010.  Dr. Gregg reflects on egos in the industry. And my personal favorite: the fake doctor who used toothpicks to treat his patient.  None of this news appeared on HIStalk , so if you follow the practice side of technology and aren’t signed up to get HIStalk Practice e-mail blasts, then you are getting left in the dust.

I’m taking a few days off for fun family stuff and trying to spend minimal time on the laptop, so I’m a little bit disengaged at the moment as I struggle to resist the gravitational pull of work and focus on non-work. I’ll be happy to get back to endless HIStalk hours in a few days.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

 

Standard Register enters a definitive agreement to acquire 100% ownership interest in informed consent provider Dialog Medical. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Resilient Network Systems raises $5 million in Series A funding, led by Alsop Louie Partners. Resilient’s technology facilitates the electronic transfer of health records.

People

Former Healtheon/WebMD CEO Mike Long is named president and CEO of EGHC, of which he was already board chair. The company’s businesses include a health plan, the Lumeris quality management software line, and ClearPractice EMR.

Announcements and Implementations

HIMSS introduces the ICD-10 PlayBook to educate providers on the transition to ICD-10

Allegheny General Hospital (PA) resorts to paper recordkeeping Wednesday after shutting down its Allscripts EMR. The hospital says it upgraded the system over the weekend and began having slowdown problems Monday and Tuesday. The hospital voluntarily shut down the system for about 12 hours while Allscripts fixed the issues.

CHIME reports that 109 individuals have earned Certified Healthcare CIO designation since the credentialing program was launched in July 2009. I said it was a dumb idea then and I’ll stand by that opinion now. Obviously the credential hasn’t exactly gone viral if only 109 out of thousands of hospital CIOs have signed on over two years, voluntarily jumping onto the hamster wheel of spending hospital money on renewals and going to CHIME meetings to earn CE. To each his own, but I’d be embarrassed to use a non-educational  credential earned by passing a multiple choice test of job-specific knowledge (designed by asking CIOs what they do on the job, then testing them to see if they theoretically know how to do it). My theory has been that CHCIO appeals to CIOs who feel inferior to their better educated C-level peers because they never expended the minimal effort required to earn a graduate degree by any of a zillion inexpensive, flexible, geography-indifferent programs that are out there.

athenahealth releases its sixth annual PayerView Rankings and awards Aetna the top spot among major players. BCBS-RI was the best overall performer, while state Medicaid providers were the worst in terms of days in AR and denial rates. Compared to last year, payers averaged payment one day faster with 5% fewer denied claims.

RCM provider RealMed announces its integration with Epic’s billing software.

Medicomp Systems announces that its Quippe electronic documentation system SDK is available for licensing to EMR developers. The browser-based, iPad-friendly system (which Dr. Gregg, Inga, Dr. Jayne, and I all raved about after working with it at HIMSS) uses the company’s MEDCIN-powered patented prompting technology to create and present EMR information in an amazingly intuitive way that even a non-doctor like me could use immediately after a ten-minute overview.

NCO Healthcare Services earns the “Peer Reviewed by HFMA” designation for several products related to eligibility, bad debt, and and extended office services.

Government and Politics

More grumblings about the proposed ACO regulation, this time from seven US senators. The lawmakers send Secretary Sebelius a letter urging HHS to withdraw its proposed ACO rules, saying, “the proposed ACO regulation will fail to accomplish its purpose” of better quality care and lower costs. The senators claim the proposed rules do not align incentives and accountability and include requirements that are too complex and an ROI that is uncertain.

CMS clarifies financial incentives for ACOs in rural areas, saying participants would be eligible for a savings exemption. CMS says that ACOs with fewer than 10,000 assigned beneficiaries would be exempt from the 2% savings threshold required of larger ACOs.

Add BIDMC to the list of hospitals claiming to be the first to receive HITECH money, $2.57 million in its case.

Other

Emergency physicians claim the biggest challenge to cutting costs in the ED is fear of lawsuits. An American College of Emergency Physicians poll finds that 53% of ER docs say the main reason they conduct the number of tests they do is fear of being sued.

Sponsor Updates

• SCI Solutions is attending and exhibiting this week at the National Association of Healthcare Access Managers conference in San Antonio, providing their traditional “Stress Free Zone” that features massages and cocktails.
• ESD heads to MUSE later this month (booth 910) as well as the Canadian E-Health Conference (booth 203). The ESD folks also shared that their KLAS ratings are up should you be interested in taking a look.
• Oklahoma Surgicare picks Provation MD software for gastroenterology documentation and coding.
• NextGen announces that Springfield Center for Family Medicine (OH) received federal funds for demonstrating Meaningful Use under the Medicare incentive program.
• Tim Reiner, VP of revenue management for Adventist Health System, describes that organization’s use of self-service technology from NCR for patient collections in a YouTube video.
• Yavapai Regional Medical Center (AZ) contracts for several applications from Lawson Software.
• Prime Healthcare Systems, California’s largest for-profit system at 14 hospitals, expands its use of document management technology from FormFast  to improve health information, revenue cycle, and patient registration.
• Self Regional Healthcare (SC) chooses RelayHealth as its HIE partner to improve care and support the Meaningful Use efforts of its eligible providers.
• Tele-Tracking releases Patient Flow Dashboard for monitoring enterprise-wide patient flow and getting more efficient use of existing capacity.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

I’ve been fairly critical of the federal Meaningful Use program lately. For the record, I want to mention one piece of the program (even if it did get relegated to the Menu Set) that I’m absolutely in favor of: increasing the number of providers who report syndromic surveillance data to public health agencies.

We’ve seen huge benefits to the field of epidemiology with increasing availability of health-related data. I still like the Google Flu Trend site as an idea even if it’s only search data. And “old school” diseases aren’t going away – the number of measles cases reported across the US just hit a 15-year high. 

The ability to track, trend, and prevent killer diseases is one of the cooler things we can do with healthcare IT (and one that’s proven to work, mind you). Can you imagine the TV show Quincy ME  if Jack Klugman had population-based aggregate data to work with?

In that same vein, a throwdown to my favorite elected officials. Hey Congress, how about putting together a true “Menu Set” of information technology interventions that have been proven to be effective and incentivizing them individually so that providers aren’t faced with the “all or none” problem with Meaningful Use? Any of us who have had to fill out the awful paperwork from the county health department to report a sexually transmitted disease would be happy to interface it directly from our EHR at the click of a button.

The American Medical Association offers a new app to assist with CPT codes. Only available for Apple users at this point, it allows you to search for, track, and e-mail selected codes. The first problem I had with it is that it apparently ignores the iPad’s gyroscope – it can only be viewed in portrait mode, which is a bummer for those of us that like to prop the iPad on our desk landscape-style so we can stream Netflix while we multi-task.

Navigation to the various sets of codes was pretty easy, but there wasn’t enough information on the screen to make a decision about the right code. The user would have to select each code and read the description. It would be more helpful to have a quick blurb visible on the screen rather than having each entry on the list say “office consultation,” which isn’t very helpful. (It was particularly unhelpful in the preventive codes section, but I couldn’t get a screenshot off my iPad to show, so I clipped this from the AMA Web site.)

I didn’t receive any IT-related checklists for a potential Zombie Apocalypse, but Inga did turn up Kareo’s thoughts on handling medical billing after the fact. I hadn’t really thought about Web-based telecommuting as a strategy to prevent employees from being eaten, but it does make a lot of sense.

Rest assured that due to our decentralized, multi-state virtual office architecture, the HIStalk staff is at significantly lower risk for being decimated by zombie attack than most health IT vendors.

Although Kareo’s piece mentions they didn’t know the code for having one’s brain eaten, I can propose (courtesy of IMO’s Problem IT product): E968.7 Assault by human bite and E979.8 Victim of crime or terrorism.

The Journal of the American Medical Association reports on Navigating the Challenges of In-flight Emergencies. There are apparently minimal standards for emergency medical kits, but kits and employee training vary from carrier to carrier. Airlines also have their own reporting systems and protocols, often relying on physician passengers rather than employed medical control officers on the ground.

The article proposes standardized reporting to the National Transportation Safety Board; expert recommendations for first aid kits (and eventually evidence-based kits based on the data gathered through reporting); enhanced training for flight attendants; and enhanced ground-to-air medical support.

Having had to respond to “Is there a doctor on board” more than once, I’m in agreement. Plus, it looks like an excellent opportunity for vendors to go after another potential customer base. Anyone want to hire a sassy CMIO to write your content for airline medicine? I’d be happy to travel all summer and write code for the most common airline emergencies I encounter along the way.

Contacts

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

News 5/25/11

Top News

The market for anesthesia information systems is predicted to increase 50% by 2012 and be valued at $4 billion by 2017. Vendors battling for market share include Picis, GE Healthcare, Draeger, IMDsoft, Merge, and Philips.

Reader Comments

From Baywatch: “Re: UCSF. The CIO is leaving involuntarily. Looks like the board finally figured out that the Centricity debacle was as much of a leadership problem as a software problem. The Epic project is floundering and bleeding money, with poor direction and an incompetent staff.” We asked a UCSF press contact, who replied: “Mark R. Laret, CEO of the UCSF Medical Center, today announced that ‘Last Friday, CIO Larry Lotenero notified me that he will retire at the end of June, completing 10 years of service to UCSF.’”

From TopCrush: “Re: AAOE meeting. I’m at the American Association of Orthopaedic Executives in Orlando this week, along with a few hundred other folks and about sixty exhibitors. ACOs are definitely a concern for these guys. Orthopedic docs are scared of being left out and worried about the financial ramifications. Kind of funny but they have a VIP entrance for participants that have been coming for years or on a chapter board.  AAOE set up a fun Sports Lounge in the middle of the show floor – shuffle board and fuse ball included.” Thanks for the update from the field. I wish I had a special door I could walk through every once in awhile, just to make me feel more important.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Mr. H semi-left me on my own tonight, just in case you were wondering why there are fewer smoking doctor images that usual. Mrs. H deserves a date night every once in awhile and I hope he is taking her somewhere special.

People

Community Health Network (IN) appoints Ronald Strachan CIO. Strachan is the former CIO for WellStar Health System and for HealthEast Care System.

Shared Health names Hedge Burt VP of sales. Burt has served as SVP of business development with Entrada, as well as VP of provider sales for Kryptiq.

PACSGEAR names Eli Rapaich CEO. Rapaich succeeds company co-founder Brian J. Cavanaugh, who will assume the role of COO. Most recently Rapaich served as VP of sales at Philips Healthcare.

Announcements and Implementations

The DoD awards SAIC a $53 million contract to provide IT and EHR system support to the TRICARE Management Activity MHS.

Gulf Coast Medical Center (FL) will move to Epic EMR next month.

CMS notifies Jefferson Regional Medical Center (AR) that it has met Stage One Meaningful Use requirements and will receive approximately $3 million. Jefferson uses Allscripts’ Sunrise Clinical Manager EHR.

Catholic Health Initiatives selects Beryl to provide outsourced patient experience solutions, including physician referral services.

Hospital EHR vendor eCareSoft, the US subsidiary of Mexico’s largest HIT vendor, embeds task-oriented tutorials and collaborative e-learning tools into its application. Hospital users can share shortcuts and workarounds and provide feedback to the vendor’s support team right from the application.

Trinity Health (MI), Baycare Health (FL), and Jackson Health System (FL) go live on the LegacySuite solution from Legacy Data Access. LegacySuite provides data storage and Web-based solutions for retired HIT applications.

The Federal Health Architecture (FHA) awards CGI Group a one year contract for $5.7 million to support FHA’s CONNECT NHIE Gateway solution.

Swedish Medical Center (WA) picks PRISM contact management software from Aegis Health Group to automate its physician relations management process.

Jefferson County Hospital (MS) selects Custom Software Systems to provide ChartSmart EMR, document management, and lab modules.

Texas Health Resources, where Ed Marx serves as CIO, receives over $19.5 million in Medicare EHR incentive payments for the meaningful use of its Epic system. THR has invested more than $200 million on its EHR initiative.

Innovation and Research

A new study concludes there’s no consistent association between EHRs and clinical decision support in ambulatory patient visits. Researchers looked at data from 2005-2007 so perhaps newer decision support tools might paint a different picture. However, only one of 20 indicators showed superior quality with EHR visits versus non-EHR visits.

Other

The video above is from St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Joplin, MO, heavily damaged after taking a direct hit from a tornado. Its 183 patients were evacuated, but five patients and a visitor died and several employees were injured. Hospital x-rays were found 70 miles away, with the hospital asking anyone finding hospital records to hold them while they figure out a way to collect them. Missouri’s disaster medical team has set up a makeshift 30-bed hospital in a tent, staffed by 40 doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and support staff.

Health IT ranks among the top 10 most popular career path for college graduates, according to a University of CA-San Diego study. Top jobs include healthcare integration engineers, system analysts, clinical IT consultants, and technology support specialists.

Sponsor Updates

• DIVURGENT will host a CHIME College Live session June 8th entitled Accountable Care Organizations: Overview and the Role of Information Technology.
• Thomson Reuters’ Meaningful Use Quality Manager 1.0 earns ONC-ATCB modular certification from CCHIT.
• Voalte signs up to resell the Epocrates Essentials premium clinical suite with Voalte’s communications solution.
• CynergisTek CEO Mac MacMillian and Ohio Presbyterian Retirement Services CIO Joyce Miller-Evans will present at the Colorado Health Information Management Association’s Long Term Care Spring Meeting this week.
• Geisinger Health System (PA) picks Orion Health Rhapsody Integration Engine as its integration platform.
• Vocera CEO Bob Zollars is named a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year award for Northern California.
• The Redwood Falls City Council (MN) approves the $50,000 purchase of Provation software for the Redwood Area Hospital. The hospital will interface the software with its Meditech EMR.
• Awarepoint is awarded a patent for its wireless interaction-based tracking system.
• MED3OOO announces the general availability of InteGreat V6.4, which includes the components required to meet Meaningful Use standards.
• University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust implements Imprivata OneSign for its 5,100 users.
• Baylor Health Care System (TX) affirms its plans to implement GE Centricity EMR across its entire HealthTexas Provider Network of more than 500 physicians.
• Prime Healthcare Services (CA) expands its rollout of FormFast document management technology to its recently acquired facility, Alvarado Hospital.
• BridgeHead Software celebrates the 10th anniversary of its partnership with MEDITECH.
• Lakeland Healthcare (MI) selects the ChartMaxx Epic integration package to integrate their physicians’ ChartMaxx EMR with the health system’s Epic program.

Contacts

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

HIStalk Interviews Jim Traficant, President, Harris Healthcare Solutions

Jim Traficant is president of Harris Healthcare Solutions, the healthcare business of Harris Corporation of Falls Church, VA.

Give me a brief background about yourself and your new job. Congratulations, by the way, on being promoted to president.

Thanks. It’s a great privilege.

I’ve been at Harris now for 10 years. I worked at a small business prior to joining Harris, so I’ve experienced both large and small companies. I’ve worked in government and commercial business. I’ve got 25 years’ experience as a technologist and as a business executive, but my passion for transforming healthcare comes as a result of being a patient.

I’ve had two liver transplants. The first one, my neighbor saved my life. We were the fifth to have the surgery, the first that weren’t related. I have had two transplants in between an episode of sepsis. 

In my experience traversing the healthcare market, I learned that people are passionate about their work in healthcare, obviously. They have lots of data, but what was missing was information.

After my second transplant, I sent a note to the Harris CEO asking to take the company into healthcare. Harris is a pretty large company. We move information with lives at stake in every market we serve, like defense and intelligence. We have two million passengers that ride on our Harris Network for the FAA. I knew if we could move information in healthcare like we did in those other markets that we could save lives, make a difference, and maybe even create a business. 

Five years ago, I didn’t know if I would ever get to work again. To be honored by working at Harris and leading us in healthcare is a privilege I could not have imagined. It’s just terrific.

Harris has mostly been known, as you said, as a government contractor. It seems like that may not necessarily be the case going forward. Will the company go after the commercial healthcare markets?

The way I like to describe it is that Harris will have a significant role to play in helping to shape the future of healthcare, and healthcare is going to have a significant role in shaping the future of Harris. It’s a really good match.

Tell me about the strategy behind the Carefx acquisition.

We were really fortunate. Early in our healthcare venture — we’d been at this for four years now — we were awarded the Nationwide Health Information Network Connect program. We were working on behalf of the Federal Health Architecture to integrate the largest creators of health information, like military health, the VA, and Indian Health Services, so they could share information securely with each other and then provide that information to the largest consumers of health information at the federal level, like National Cancer Institute, the CDC, Social Security — which spends, you know, a half billion dollars a year just trying to find health information so they can determine benefits.

We had a couple of breakthroughs in that process. One was that Social Security used to take on average 83 days to find health information to determine benefits for our citizens. When they went through the gateway that we created for the Federal Health Architecture, this program called Connect, they went from 83 days to 24 seconds getting that information. That’s the kind of transformation I think the nation’s looking for out of IT being applied in healthcare.

A second thing we learned was that over half of the care provided for our active duty and retired service members comes out of the private sector. If we were going to play a role in transforming healthcare, it wasn’t sufficient that we could just get the federal sector connected to try and create a tipping point in health information exchange. We had to connect it to the private sector. 

What Carefx brought to us was this real strength in the private sector. They were at over 800 hospitals globally, over 650 in the US. What we had done at the federal level to provide this integration and connectivity connecting the infrastructure, they did on the commercial, side but in a different context. They were able to take the information from where it was created and deliver it to the computer screen and organize it the way a clinician thinks and works according to their workflow — labs, images, med reconciliation. 

It seemed like a perfect fit. Culturally, it was a perfect fit. They’re just great talent, great people, very deep in the healthcare domain, and really able to inform this rich technology base that Harris has as we move out and try to play a role in transforming healthcare.

That acquisition was a pretty strong signal of the interest of Harris to get into the commercial space. Do you see the potential for more acquisitions, or do you think Harris will be more of a builder than a buyer?

I would say this about Harris. It’s a great company. It has answered national priorities in almost every dimension over its hundred-plus year history. Healthcare is a national priority that’s going to require bold thinking and a strong presence and Harris is one of those companies. We’ll continue to grow organically, and I would expect over time that we’ll do more acquisitions. We’re committed to playing a key role in healthcare, so all of those options are going to be in play.

Healthcare divisions of big and broad conglomerates seem to lose some of their innovative capabilities. Do you see the Harris culture being different?

We have a very rich culture. In fact, it was one of the surprising things for me when I came out of a small business into this large, now six billion dollar company.

One of the things that many don’t know about Harris is that defense and intelligence invest very dramatically in Harris to take the state of the art in a number of technical disciplines and advance it or apply it in unique ways. In combination of significant investment plus what we contribute, we do about a billion dollars of research and development a year.

What we’ve seen is there are great parallels in healthcare to the challenges that have been faced in these other markets. I’ll just give you an example. What we saw post-9/11 in the intelligence community was we had all of the data. What was missing was a situational awareness at the national level that would be able to piece together all the information that was in these isolated pockets. 

In healthcare, what we see is a very fragmented market. There’s lots of data, but it’s isolated with stovepipes. It needs to be connected. Then we need to make sense out of the information and create situational awareness for healthcare just like we do for intelligence.

The other corollary we see is when you think about what an intelligence analyst does, they sift through a variety of information sources and then apply judgment in a time-critical fashion with national security and lives at stake. We provide that information on a global scale and enable that capability. It’s exactly what physicians do. They have to piece together information on disparate sources and apply judgment in a time-critical fashion with lives at stake. 

We see this transference of technology from our core markets into healthcare as a totally logical and compelling way for us to do this. All this innovation that exists really distinguishes us from a lot of the players in healthcare.

For example, from a security standpoint, we are very unique nationally for ability to secure information and move it anywhere in the world and any device authorized to see it. In healthcare, it’s not going to be, “Can we secure information in healthcare?” It’s going to be, “Can we translate our security in a way that can be meaningful in healthcare, that they can afford it, that it can be used in a very efficient way?”

The innovation exists in Harris. I would say these other companies have innovation as well, but the passion, the national mission, the sense of purpose applies directly. One of the ways I like to communicate healthcare inside Harris and also with our potential customers is that Harris is uniquely trusted at the intersection of life and data and every market that we serve.

It’s a very natural extension for us to move into healthcare. The response we’re getting in healthcare, I think, is evidence of the fact that we really have something to offer.

Harris is used to taking on projects with a large price tag and large scale. Who do you see as your customer in healthcare?

We started at the federal level because it was familiar. We knew how to compete. There are also some real strong forces at play when you look at military health. Harris being a defense contractor — that’s a logical place for us to participate.

The Department of Veterans Affairs — how do we take care of our servicemen and women who served us so well for so long? Those entities are not only providers of care, but they are payers. We knew there would be alignment and rewarding of enterprise solutions that would deliver efficiencies that would help us provide better care at a lower cost. 

We began there and got traction almost immediately, moving our technologies from the intelligence community for imaging, for example. We created an architecture for military health. We acquired a company in the VA that allowed us to do imaging across the enterprise for the VA, and then connectivity between DoD and the VA, not only from the integration or interoperability standpoint, but also for images and photographs and scanned documents, all of those being shared and able to be associated with a health record.

We knew that to transform healthcare, we had to move into commercial sectors. We’re not looking at healthcare in the same way we would look in defense or intelligence. We recognize that the buying and the programs tend to be much smaller in size, but we believe and we’ve demonstrated we could move technologies and do it very efficiently and create compelling solutions that will be affordable and transformative in the healthcare context. 

We’re very excited about what this market has to offer. Just from a business context, it’s hard to deny that it’s four times the size of the Defense Department. I think that’s why others are pursuing it. We’re looking at more as a chance of, if we can make a difference in healthcare, focus on the transformation, then the money will take care of itself. So far that’s been the way it’s played out.

You mentioned the VA and the DoD. I’m interested in the conversations being held about whether they should buy or build or how they can agree on a single system. You have a unusual perspective and viewpoint. What are your observations?

I think we have to be careful in one sense. I think there needs to be seamless system. It can’t be that the information struggles to come back from theatre to stateside and then into the VA. And then we have to think about the continuum. It doesn’t stop there. It has to be able to be connected to the private sector as well. That’s when ONC and some of these federal initiatives become really important as we set the foundation for how healthcare will happen in the US.

The military mission is different from the VA mission. I think we need to make sure that whatever we come up with, I’m not sure one size fits all. But we have to make sure that we can fit the military mission primarily for the military, and then make sure that what we’re providing for the VA is able to provide a continuity of care that bridges both the military as well as the private sector.

I don’t know if you can do that in one off-the-shelf system. You might be able to. I don’t think anybody knows, to be honest.

The other thing that the VA is challenged with, but I give them credit, is they get to work through these very hard solutions on a very large scale in a public way. Everybody’s watching every move they make, so if there’s any flaw, it gets exposed and printed. Most enterprises don’t have that type of scrutiny. 

What the VA and the military have been able to do — quite extraordinarily when you look at enterprise healthcare in managing multi-millions of patients and doing it securely and on that scale — they really helped advance healthcare in the United States. I commend them for what they’re trying to do. I’m not sure what the solution needs to be, but they got the right minds looking at it and I’m confident they’ll come up with the right answer.

Have the taxpayers seen value from their projects?

I’d have to say yes. They have seen value. You have to remember that the VA has led in a lot of instances. Ninety percent of all doctors trained in the United States go through a VA facility in the course of their training, so there’s a benefit broadly to the US for what the VA has done that we can’t lose.

At the same time, there are new technologies and new systems that are coming into healthcare. I think the VA, very strategically, is looking, “Hey, we’ve been doing it our particular way, but that doesn’t mean it has to be the way we do it going forward.” So again, I give them credit that they’ve been self-reflective and wherever they can leverage commercial investment and solutions, I expect that they will do that more, not less, but time will tell.

Harris recently announced the joint venture with Johns Hopkins Medicine to do some work with medical imaging products. I’m curious what the scope of that project is.

Hopkins saved my life on more than one occasion. My first transplant was there. I had sepsis and they again saved my life a second time. I knew a lot of the physicians there. 

I went back to them and after I was given the privilege of starting a healthcare business. I said, “Look, you saved my life, maybe even saved my career.” We started working together. What materialized is when they looked and saw the kinds of things we could do in imaging. I’ll just give you an example. 

In the intelligence space, somebody at the edge of the network — one of our servicemen or women serving in harm’s way — makes a request of imagery of some type. We go through a discovery process and find what’s been requested and enhance it with additional information that would make it more germane to their circumstance. We deliver it anywhere in the world on any device authorized to see it in near real time. It is awesome. Harris is literally a national asset in the imaging context.

What we see is a very unique ability to translate some of those technologies to healthcare in an accelerated way and create solutions that didn’t exist previously. That’s the opportunity we see at Hopkins. They’re the most trusted name in healthcare. Harris, I’d like to argue, is the most trusted name in secure information management. When you put those two things together, it enables Hopkins to leverage the information sciences in very unique ways, in this case particularly imaging, and help fuel the transformation that the nation’s looking for. We’re very excited about what’s possible in that relationship.

When you look at what healthcare IT advances are out there or potentially coming, as a technologist and a taxpayer and a patient, what gets you excited?

A couple of things. I think that when we move from a disintegrated, fragmented, and we can argue primarily paper-based system — although there’s a lot going on to digitize it. But if we had a digital system versus a paper-based system, it would better than what we have, but a far cry from what we need.

What has to happen is it has to be a connected framework for healthcare — where instead of walking into a hospital with your life at stake and your information carried under your arm in a notebook with some CDs in your hands hoping somebody can make sense out of this and figure out how to save your life — that the information shows up when you do and it’s a complete picture of your health. And now we take the knowledge base of these tremendously skilled and dedicated clinicians and enable them to take more information and apply judgment against it in an accelerated way. We will totally transform healthcare.

If we get to a data-driven care delivery model, OMB has said we will take out one-third of the national spend. When you look at the impact nationally of healthcare, the cost of healthcare in the United States and what we get as a return that investment, we’re not getting nearly the return that we need.

The technology will not in itself transform healthcare, but it will enable that transformation. I consider it a privilege and my life’s calling to be part of that transformation, leveraging the rich technologies of Harris to make it happen.

Doctors don’t want to type into a computer all day and patients have no interest in entering their information into personal health records. Do you think there’s a challenge that we may either not have anybody willing to create data or that there won’t be enough people sitting on the back end to monitor and react to it?

I think we’re going to get better at this. We’re in the very early stages of a transformation and it’s a little bit awkward right now. 

I came out of the aerospace world previously. We used to fly satellites, for example. Like in the Apollo 13 movie, they’re staring at streams of paper that are flowing and guys are sitting down and doing math equations trying to solve hard problems. Then we went to the computer, and all we did was emulate what we were doing on paper. We did it on the computer. We would look at strings of bits and bites and try to make sense out of it.

Eventually we advanced the interface so that we could run constellations of satellites with one or two operators. We did that because we were able to distill the information from bits and bites and go from data, to information, to knowledge. 

That’s going to happen in healthcare. It won’t be that we’ll supplant the clinician or the judgment in healthcare, but we’re going to give them a stronger knowledge base from with to apply judgment and be able to deliver it in a simple, easy to assimilate way. It’ll just become part of the workflow.

I really think we’re just in an awkward phase of transition. This is going to get to a point where it will be second nature, just like it is for us on our smart phones and how we engage even socially using computer technology. It’s certainly going to transform healthcare.

What would you say are the most significant opportunities and threats to healthcare IT as an industry?

That we allow it to be digital and fragmented is the biggest threat.

Once we connect the framework for healthcare, there’s going to be innovation in healthcare in an accelerated, unprecedented way that healthcare has never experienced previously. There’s going to be an enablement of a system approach to healthcare that has never been possible previously. We’re going to see competitive models. We’re going to see efficiencies delivered.

We’re going to go through a transformation. I’m not sure how quickly it will happen. It might take us five years. I hope it happens in less than 10, but we’ll get to a place where the information flows in healthcare like it does in other industries.

The biggest risk is that we continue to behave as if digitizing is sufficient, we continue with proprietary technology, we continue in monolithic systems.

My confidence in healthcare is that it’s just part of the transition. It will be the first phase of the transition. It won’t be the endpoint. We will certainly get to a place where we’re operating in a system framework, information flowing securely and ubiquitously. It will patient-centric, data-centric — a whole network built around patients. I think that’s the biggest opportunity. It takes advantage of what America’s great at, and that’s innovation and technology.

I think we’re in a great spot to lead the world and help to transform this. I think it’s going to go from a terrific cost and drag on our national economy to fueling our national economy in ways that we have not imagined.

Do you have any concluding thoughts?

First, thank you for doing this interview. I really appreciate it.

I also would like to thank the caregivers in healthcare. They’re the unsung heroes. They’re the part of the healthcare system that’s yet to to be tapped. I think they know a lot about how we can improve it. I think this future state of technology is going to make it more efficient, better care, lower cost, and transform this economically in the United States.

The last thing I would say, and this is personal, is I’d like to thank the people that work with me at Harris Healthcare for their passion and dedication. I like to say the two best days in a person’s life are the day you’re born and the day you know why. We are fulfilling what for me is a dream. The people that are working with me are just the finest. That goes for the latest part of our family at Carefx — just great people, committed to making a difference. I’m just proud to be associated with them.

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 5/23/11

I was looking for the perfect quote to start this week’s Curbside Consult and thought I had it nailed. Like many avid readers, I tend to remember bits and pieces of great literature, but not everything. Just enough to do passably well at cocktail parties and trivia nights, but not well enough to lead a book club.

So, when I hit the Internet to validate the quote I was going to use, I was blown away by the parts I had conveniently forgotten.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

This is the opening of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I was going to use the best of times / worst of times metaphor to talk about two recent physician visits, one of which was electronic and one was paper. I’ll let you guess at which one was which because the poignancy of the rest of the quote and how applicable it is to healthcare in general strikes me too much to want to talk about anything else.

First published in 1859, the story is set in the tumultuous time of the French Revolution. The opening line serves largely to portray the contrasts inherent in that time — poverty vs. affluence, ignorance vs. enlightenment, good vs. evil, and so on. When you think about it, sometimes it seems that things haven’t changed as much in the last two hundred as we might have hoped. It feels like we’re on the cusp of a different kind of revolution, and not necessarily for the better.

Undoubtedly, this is the best of times for many people. People are living longer, largely due to improvements in health technology. Mechanical replacements for diseased body parts, amazing new drugs, implantable defibrillators — you name it.

We are, however, in a system with a great deal of inequality about how this technology is employed, resulting in a great cost to society and for many a great personal cost as well. Medical bankruptcies are again on the rise, accounting for more than sixty percent of all personal bankruptcy filings. The worst of times, indeed, when people have to choose between purchasing food and filling their prescriptions.

Meaningful Use should be the poster child for the age of wisdom and the age of foolishness. It seemed so promising: “free” federal money for providers to do what they should have been doing all along, implementing systems to improve patient care and strengthen patient safety. Many providers were already doing these things, and it seemed so easy to reward them.

The way it’s unfolding, though, is just sad. The disparity between the Medicaid and Medicare incentive programs is laughable. At times, the whole business feels like a crapshoot. If this were an investigative study, it would never have made it past the Institutional Review Board.

Many of us on the healthcare IT side of things are living in the spring of hope. We’re well on our way to having the right software installed with the right workflows and the right numerators and denominators kicking out at the end.

For some of us though, this will lead right into the winter of despair. Meaningful Use is the ultimate pass/fail class. Miss the mark by half a percent on one measure and you’re out. This doesn’t seem in keeping with the spirit of trying to improve healthcare and health outcomes.

What if we treated patients like this? “I’m sorry Mr. Jones. I know you’ve done a tremendous amount of hard work to get your diabetes under control, including exercising and losing weight. However, your hemoglobin A1c level only came down from 9.0 to 6.2. The goal was 6.0, so you lose. Here’s a scarlet ‘L’ to wear on your shirt. I’m raising your health insurance premiums by 40%.”

Many of my peers have done the math and know that even with the penalties that are coming, they can “do nothing,” see one or two more patients a day, and come out far ahead of their colleagues who are on the MU hamster wheel. Could the unintended consequence of ARRA and healthcare reform be the downfall of Medicare and decreased health outcomes for our growing senior population? Will it be the final blow to an already ailing primary care workforce? Will it be little more than a windfall for technology interests and consultants?

Only time will tell. But I leave you to ponder on the closing lines of the book.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Monday Morning Update 5/23/11

From The PACS Designer: “Re: SlideRocket. Microsoft PowerPoint has been the dominate force in the presentation arena for business applications, but there are new ideas surfacing that could challenge their market share.  One is a Web-based application called SlideRocket, acquired by VMware last month. You can try it by importing an existing PowerPoint presentation to see what a Web-based format can do to enhance your creative abilities.”

From Little Birdie: “Re: [SVP name omitted]. Fired from Ingenix last week.” I’m leaving the name off since nobody likes seeing themselves in unflattering headlines, but the source is a good one.

From Lawdy Mama: “Re: Ford’s in-car medical monitoring. The target is much larger. Truckers include a large population of diabetics and, since they live on the road, have problems managing their disease. It can also be dangerous for diabetics to drive while suffering dizziness or other symptoms.” I’m always fascinated by trucker health since I talked to a guy once who runs a company that provides healthcare services from truck stops – it was truly fascinating to hear about their particular risk factors and the challenges of delivering healthcare services to them when every minute off the road costs them money. I guess I can see the value there, although Ford didn’t mention trucks in their announcement. As long as the built-in device doesn’t require drives to interact with it (or drivers exercise reasonable caution by pulling over when doing so), then there may be some medical value.

My Time Capsule editorial this time deals with missing clinical information, even in supposedly advanced IT systems. A snip: “I can think of only two reasons: (a) command and control is so fragmented within our episode-based system of revolving door specialists that everyone assumes that someone else is watching the big picture, or (b) providers are too busy to do anything more than patch and mend, buried in piles of disjointed facts that are difficult to comprehend and act upon.”

I got a nice e-mail that I need to anonymize quite a bit, but here’s the gist. The author said reading HIStalk for years taught him/her two major lessons that he/she will use directly in his/her new vendor leadership role: (a) move your products up the value chain via application and technology integration, and (b) if your product enhances expensive hospital information systems, then price it accordingly based on the value it delivers. The conclusion: “Your blog sure cut down my learning curve for many things healthcare. I thank Dr. Jayne the newcomer, Inga, and yourself for your commitment to the industry.” I really appreciate that.

CMS may not show a lot of confidence in providers, but the feeling is apparently mutual. New poll to your right, for providers: are you confident that your employer’s security practices will keep your medical records private?

I found this installment of Vince Ciotti’s HIStory to be his most interesting so far, in which he also mentions the EMR that’s 40 years old and still running today (and it’s not Meditech).

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Kony Solutions of Orlando, FL. They help companies (more than 35 Fortune 500 ones, in fact) get their message out to every mobile device that’s out there, providing a highly configurable out-of-the-box solution that allow companies to put mobile-rich apps (smart phone, mobile web SMS, etc.) in the hands of consumers in as little as a few weeks and at a lower cost than any other solution. These are not cookie cutter templates. Healthcare examples of what they can do: generate outbreak alerts, manage appointments, do prescription refills, and create provider-finder apps. Like their ad says, just putting an iPhone app out there is missing a bunch of consumers who use other technologies. I interviewed Aaron Kaufman, VP of the company’s healthcare and life sciences solutions division, just a few weeks back. Thanks to Kony Solutions and Kony Healthcare for supporting HIStalk.

Thanks to the readers who sent over new Annals of Internal Medicine articles on RHIOs and EMRs. Talking points: (a) only 13 of 179 RHIOs reported that they could meet Stage 1 Meaningful Use requirements, and (b) two-thirds of RHIOs won’t survive financially once their grant money runs out. The RHIO article points out that it’s not surprising that RHIOs can’t wean themselves off the taxpayer teat since free-flowing HITECH money encourages them to start up, but nobody wants to pay for information exchange except for directly beneficial transactions such as lab results. It also mentions that RHIOs are being held back by low EHR adoption (the accompanying editorial says RHIOs struggle “in exactly the same way as a cable company would if no one owned television sets.”) Here’s all you need to know about the article, which comes from its summary: “No RHIO in the nation met our expert-derived criteria for the comprehensive HIE needed to substantially improve care quality and efficiency.” The article had some unintentional humor in the footnotes: the authors who concluded that RHIOs are pretty much a failure were, like the RHIOs themselves, supported by ONC grant money. Doh!

Even Epic’s contractors get big new buildings. The company working on Epic’s never-ending construction projects figure they’re never going to be finished at this rate, so they build a 22,000 square foot building to hold their 65 on-site professionals that oversee several hundred construction workers. The construction company says they will have up to 700 people on site next year as they ramp up work on Epicenter 2, a second on-campus Epic auditorium that will seat up to 13,000 people.

A book detailing the 2004 murder of Cerner nurse Julie Keown by her husband (he poisoned her Gatorade with antifreeze), has been published.

A study finds that hospitals are over-promoting their robotic surgery gadgets and, in 73% of their Web sites, are using word-for-word questionable information provided to them from the manufacturer who sold them the equipment. According to the Hopkins surgeon who led the study, “To me, this is exactly what is wrong with American health care.  We are adopting technology without being up front about the outcomes to consumers. And we adopt technology before we properly evaluate it.”

Bizarre lawsuit: a woman sues an Ohio hospital, claiming it mailed her picture of her premature baby who died there. She says she received 154 pictures of her dead baby propped into a variety of poses, including some of his body being held by an unknown hospital employee, even though the mother told the hospital she didn’t want pictures taken.

Sponsor Updates

• DIVURGENT’s latest newsletter addresses activation management. The ACO book by partner Colin Konschak is now available on Amazon.
• Practice Fusion is hiring at its San Francisco headquarters, looking for talent in account management, marketing, engineering, legal, customer engagement, and executive management.

E-mail Mr. H.

Time Capsule: Information Technology Can’t Easily Fix Health Care System Gaps

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 March 2006.

Information Technology Can’t Easily Fix Health Care System Gaps
By Mr. HIStalk

A New England Journal of Medicine study last week found that ethnicity, income, insurance status, and geographic area do not influence the preventative care received by Americans. Great news! Well, not entirely — we’re collectively getting only about half the care we should. The embarrassing gap just isn’t prejudicial, that’s all.

The study used a RAND Corporation list of several hundred medical care standards that are hardly controversial, with common-sense items like, “Providers should reassess the alcohol intake of patients who report regular or binge drinking at the next routine health visit.” So, if the standards make universal sense, why aren’t they being followed? Unless you know of doctors who wake up vowing to harm their patients, it must be something else.

I can think of only two reasons: (a) command and control is so fragmented within our episode-based system of revolving door specialists that everyone assumes that someone else is watching the big picture, or (b) providers are too busy to do anything more than patch and mend, buried in piles of disjointed facts that are difficult to comprehend and act upon.

The authors recommend IT as the solution. Why not? No judgment is required, just analysis of discrete data elements with specific combinations of values. It’s a piece of cake compared to fly-by-wire electronics on a jet.

Sounds good, but I’m seeing red flags all over the place. Can your clinical information system or practice management application detect the following situations?

• Patients <75 years old presenting with an acute myocardial infarction who are within 12 hours of the onset of MI symptoms and who do not have contraindications to thrombolysis or revascularization
• Patients with major depression who have medical record documentation of improvement of symptoms within six weeks of starting antidepressant treatment
• Patients under age 75 with preexisting coronary disease who have an LDL level >130 mg/dl after six months of dietary cholesterol-lowering treatment

You don’t have to go far to find out. If your database person can’t do it in SQL, it probably can’t be done.

AHRQ and other groups have observed for years that we collect a lot of data, but often in unusable forms (paper, free text, or scanned documents), in scattered locations, entered too late to be actionable (diagnoses, surgical records), and with logic and structure better suited for creating bills than delivering care. Reading these standards makes that obvious. We IT folks are on the hook to solve the problem, but current systems (and use of them) are going to be a problem.

RAND was kind enough to make its standards freely downloadable as a public service at . If you’re a CIO, vendor executive, or system user, evaluate your system’s capabilities to capture and repose the necessary data elements. Then, look at how many are actually available.

How many of the standards are you managing by automation today? How many are you working to add? Think competitive advantage since it’s unlikely that this kind of scrutiny will just go away.

I maintain that most hospitals, even those using advanced clinical functions like CPOE and clinical decision support, still are missing much of the electronic data needed to make clinical decisions. While the NEJM article wasn’t written to make that observation, I think it ends up doing exactly that.

An HIT Moment with … Sandy Pitman, President and CEO, SuccessEHS

An HIT Moment with ... is a quick interview with someone we find interesting. W. Sanders Pitman is president and CEO of SuccessEHS of Birmingham, AL.

What were your conclusions about the HIMSS conference and the interests of those who attended it?

HIMSS is the largest tradeshow in our industry, and despite the struggling economy, a record number of people were in attendance this year. This is a very expensive venue for the vendors and each year seems to bring a new level of extravagance.

There is so much information and hype it is very difficult for even the most experienced healthcare executive to discern the true differences among the many vendors at the show. For the novice, I would expect that they came away confused and hardly able to truly differentiate the offerings of the many vendors as it relates to their specific practice and set of circumstances.

I do think, however, that HIMSS is a good opportunity for various vendors to identify complementary offerings and business relationships.

What steps are you taking to get your clients to Meaningful Use?

We have numerous initiatives underway to ensure that our providers can capitalize on the EHR incentive programs. From the start, we sought to help our clients achieve Meaningful Use by seeking certification at the earliest moment possible; we were among the first in the country to achieve certification as a Complete EHR.

Following our certification by CCHIT, an ONC-ATCB, in September of 2010, we launched a series of weekly webinars for our clients, educating physicians on the incentive programs and on changes they could begin making in their workflow to achieve Meaningful Use. Recorded classes were published to our Learning Management System (LMS) so clients who were not able to participate in the webinars could access this information at their convenience. These webinars are still being offered live on a weekly basis.

We also developed a comprehensive Meaningful Use Toolkit which was distributed to clients and is also available for on-demand access via our LMS. This toolkit contains an introduction to the incentive programs, information on enrolling and understanding the program, an overview of all Meaningful Use measures, a Physician Toolkit, a System Administration Toolkit and links to additional resources. The Physician Toolkit is designed to provide physicians with concise information and screenshots demonstrating the system functionality to support Meaningful Use, while the System Administration Toolkit guides practice administrators through the system configuration changes needed to support the Meaningful Use measures. We designed this toolkit to walk our clients step-by-step through the process of achieving Meaningful Use.

Our goal is not just to provide the tools needed to achieve Meaningful Use, but to partner with our clients to make sure that they understand what they are eligible for, how to use the system to obtain it, and that the system/staff proactively work with the physician to ensure compliance.  We will be providing configuration options to “prompt” physicians when compliance opportunities are being missed in an effort to maximize physicians’ opportunities to achieve compliance at the point of care.

Lastly, we have not changed our pricing nor are we charging our current clients an additional fee for the Meaningful Use features, webinars, or toolkit.

What are the specialized requirements of Community Health Centers?

Community Health Centers (CHCs) are, in many cases, run more like a business than a lot of private practices. Typically the physicians are employed, the clinics rely heavily on grant money (which can be a daunting application process for the practice), and they have strict reporting guidelines. These factors make the workflow for the clinics more detailed in regard to data capture and do not allow the flexibility private practices sometimes enjoy in determining the extent to which they want to engage with the EHR.

To some extent, it seems these organizations are a testing ground for what is coming in healthcare reform.  Requirements that have been placed upon CHCs for years are now making their way into private practices.  For example, CHCs participate in Disease Collaboratives that require reporting on protocol compliance for patients with depression, diabetes, and more. Managing clinical protocols and reporting on compliance has now made its way into many of the initiatives for private practices. Many of the initiative programs that are around today in private practices have existed for years in some form with the CHCs.

Specialized requirements for CHCs include the need to:

• Manage sliding fee scales for indigent patients
• Perform monthly, quarterly, and annual reporting such as UDS, cost reports, Ryan White, collaborative reports, and more
• Submit claims with very specific formatting requirements – CHCs have different billing guidelines for Medicare and Medicaid. These are typically paid on an encounter basis, so there are special requirements for billing, posting payments, and transferring balances. 

It has been our experience that Community Health Centers really take to heart the mission of serving the underserved. There is a genuine interest in improving the quality of care for patients. They are often providing a wide scope of services, including comprehensive primary care, dental services, behavioral health, and HIV care while documenting the data necessary to meet federal reporting requirements. Clinical decision support is important to achieving the goal for these clinics of not just meeting the federal reporting or billing requirements, but improving patient care.

There are hundreds of EHR and PM vendors out there. If a practice is interested in choosing one, what criteria and methods should they use to distinguish one from another?

Evaluating EHRs is a daunting task, with so many vendors to choose from and so many features to comprehend. Of course, certification is a huge help in determining which products include core features needed to operate efficiently and profitably.

Unfortunately, the evaluation process only starts with selecting a certified vendor. The disconnect between Certified EHRs and Certified EHRs that can deliver value is significant, and if you choose incorrectly, you may end up with a vendor who is not aligned with your goals and offers no assurance that you will actually receive value. There is a way to accurately measure the potential of Certified EHR vendors — you must consider more than the features and functions a system brings to the table.

When evaluating EHRs, keep in mind that single-database, integrated EHR and practice management systems work the most seamlessly, as there is no need to build and maintain an interface between the two systems. Be sure to consider whether the system is scalable enough to meet the changing needs of your practice. Also evaluate the level of support offered by the vendor, as this varies widely across the spectrum of EHR providers and can make a huge difference in the level of satisfaction with the software.

Quite often the relationship you develop with the vendor is just as important as the feature set you are buying. At some point you are going to run into serious issues (it is almost guaranteed). Having a stable company with experienced leadership that you can count on in a real time of need can be the difference between success and failure.

Do you think usability will be rolled into Stages 2 and 3 of Meaningful Use? Are vendors doing enough to design and test their applications to comply with formal usability standards?

There is talk of trying to roll in usability, but it will be extremely difficult. With most government certification programs you must have a clear set of guidelines that are not subjective. For phase 1 Meaningful Use certification, ONC utilized both CCHIT and Drummond Group. They were very clear that the requirements must be followed to a T with no deviation.

Since usability is largely a subjective issue, I do not know how they can establish ironclad guidelines to quantitatively measure it. With different certifying bodies and many judges employed by each certifying body, it will be virtually impossible to insure continuity.

I think EHR vendors are going through the natural progression that follows any new developments in technology. We first all scrambled to meet the fundamental requirements as dictated by ONC. I am sure that most vendors did their best to consider workflow while developing the base requirements, but given the fact that the core requirements were not finalized until the summer and we early birds were testing in the fall, there is always room left for improvement which, again, follows the natural progression.

ONC has dictated a set of fundamental requirements which is a good thing for the industry, but I think it is up to each vendor to focus on usability in their own way. At the end of the day, it is up to the free market to decide what is “usable” and what is not.

In the automobile industry, there are governmental guidelines that must be adhered to for safety and emissions, but the individual features like color, style, and usability of available options are up to the consumer. In that same vein, I believe that having specific feature requirements as dictated by ONC is a good thing, but in the end, usability and personal taste depend upon the individual consumer.

News 5/20/11

Top News

The UK’s National Audit Office (NAC) says that the billions spent so far on the country’s National Programme for IT has been poorly used and the project needs to be reassessed. The NAC concludes that the investments don’t represent value for the money and officials are not confident that spending more will be any different. The NAC believes the project’s core aim of having an electronic record for each patient will not be achieved.

Reader Comments

From Frank Mac Court: “Re: study on operational RHIOs. Here’s more information on the study.” Earlier this week, I mentioned the report that found only 13 of 75 operational RHIOs met the basic criteria for Meaningful Use. The information was collected in early 2010 and the authors admit that “data exchange could have accelerated in the interim.”  It’s likely that today there are more than 13 HIEs exchanging Meaningful Use-caliber data, though admittedly it’s still a pretty small club.

From Certs Two Mints in One: “Re: [vendor name omitted]. One of our sites is under siege by these folks, whose product holds only Modular EHR certification. They told the customer in writing that they ‘will be ONC-ATCB certified as a complete EHR for Meaningful use by July 1st, 2011.’ Vendors are supposed to be prohibited from pre-announcing their status and clearly they are saying something they can’t know is true. Maybe they failed and have made software changes that they assume will earn them certification.” That’s at least a poor choice of words – swapping ‘will’ with ‘hope to’ would have removed all grounds for complaints from either customers or the certifying body.

From Sarah: “Re: ONC and security awareness. If you heard and met some of the so-called IT consultants that standalone providers hired, you would think they needed some awareness. Many of the providers we deal with have IT people that can’t even set up a domain or workgroup correctly without leaving gaping security and permission holes, let alone manage security at a level we implement internally to protect their PHI. In some areas, the only option (no joke) is Geek Squad. They need step-by-step list for the techs and automated verification tools that providers can run themselves during annual security audits.” I think those are great ideas. Hospitals are reasonably good at basic security, but physician practices often don’t even know they need it, much less how to make it happen.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: the just-released Rome from Danger Mouse, spaghetti western-style music mixed with a little R&B and played on vintage instruments (the keyboards are amazing) recorded straight to tape, some by the original musicians from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and similar movies. Mellow 60s hip with that shimmery, sharp, echoey movie soundtrack sound that makes you think that a guitar-carrying Claudine Longet could wander in looking wide-eyed and pensive in a mini-dress at any moment. Guest Norah Jones sounds sweet and Jack White is pretty good. If you’re in the right mood (and I’ll leave you to decide what that mood is), it’s transcendent.

This week on HIStalk Practice: the irreverent Joel Diamond, MD resurfaces and ponders what HIStalk would be like if it offered with some quaint, Andy Rooney-style observations. Don Michaels, PhD and VP of Hayes Management Consulting makes his premier on HIStalk Practice and offers tips to determine if one’s organization is ready for an ACO. Julie McGovern with Practice Wise shares insight into the high quality talent to be found in the country’s HIT programs. Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick helps eClinicalWorks celebrate the opening of its new office. Computer trumps doctors in detecting acromegaly. The AMA Board of Trustees argues against EMR standardization, claiming it would stifle product innovation. Participants in an ACO demonstration project contend that CMS’s proposed ACO framework is too risky. While you are paying a visit to HIStalk Practice, check out some the Web sites of some of our sponsors and learn more about their nifty products and services.

On the sponsor-only Jobs Page: Program Manager, Data Implementation Engineer, Healthcare Informatics Analyst, Systems Engineer. On Healthcare IT Jobs: Clinical Nurse Analyst, Regional Business Development Manager, Clinical Project Manager, Director Technical Infrastructure, Allscripts Report Writer.  

I had a routine doctor’s office visit this week. I observed perhaps 10-12 employees of the university-owned practice as I waited my turn, ranging from the front desk people to assistants to nurses. Every single one of them, other than my doctor, were somewhere between significantly to massively overweight, while all the patients in the waiting room were pretty much of normal size. I wondered how effective those employees are at convincing patients to change their dietary and exercise habits? That reminded me of the two respiratory therapists I’ve known who smoked constantly, with their cigarette packs prominently sticking out of their shirt pockets as they counseled patients on good pulmonary health. Healthcare is a funny business.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Israel press reports that Reed Elsevier is in talks to buy Israel-headquartered dbMotion for $250-$300 million. dbMotion officially told me they could not comment. In February, dbMotion and Elsevier announced a partnership to integrate Elsevier’s analytics solutions into dbMotion’s interoperability platform.

Proof that Irrational Exuberance II is upon us even amidst a recession and smothering national debt, only this time limited to just a handful of darling companies. LinkedIn share prices more than doubled in their first day of trading Thursday, opening on the high end of their range at $45 and closing at $94.25. That values the company, which lost money for years until finally eking out a $15 million profit last year, at almost $9 billion. Hopefully the huge ranks of the unemployed will somehow benefit from the trickle-down effect of millionaire secretaries and trade-in VC wives buying Ferraris and McMansions. I hate everything about LinkedIn except that just about everyone is on it.

People

   

HIMSS runs a bio and interview of its 1990s CEO John Page. Interesting: he says his greatest achievement was splitting HIMSS off from AHA, which he said was essential for its survival. He also mention his greatest challenge – trying not to disenfranchise the management engineers that formed HIMSS as the IT side of the house started invading and eventually pushed them out like greedy European settlers marching red-skinned Americans off their land and into concentration camps called “reservations.” It must be lonely being among the tiny ranks of folks making up the MS part of HIMSS.

Announcements and Implementations

Detroit Medical Center anticipates receiving $40 million in Meaningful Use incentives, including $16-$17 million this year.  Meanwhile, Beaumont Hospitals is planning for $26 million, including $10.3 million this year.

Verizon Wireless and Medco Health Solutions release a mobile app to guide patients and doctors to the lowest cost prescription drug. The app gives information on out-of-pocket costs and lower cost options, based on a patient’s specific insurance plan.

Ford will expand its Sync in-car automation to create “the car that cares,” planning to roll out allergy alerts and connected medical devices to monitor blood sugar with the help of its partners Medtronic, WellDoc, and SDI. I don’t get the point, not to mention that the last thing we need is a bunch more marginally skilled drivers screwing around with yet another electronic device instead of paying attention to the road. Maybe Ford can add monitors for bladder distension and grumbling stomachs and fund the whole project by running GPS-localized restaurant and gas station ads.

Government and Politics

CMS announces that the first Medicare EHR incentive payments will be issued this week. Greenway Medical says their client Childs Medical Clinic (AL) was among the first to receive funds Thursday, as was Cerner client Dr. Juan Salazar (TX).

Innovation and Research

An upcoming study in an economics journal claims that higher usage of EMRs would save a lot of babies. You can guess what they did: combined old (2006) data from several sources that include that of HIMSS Analytics, taking a guess at when those systems went live (since HIMSS Analytics reports products bought but not yet installed), did some kind of county-level breakdown, and found that EMRS are “associated” with lower infant mortality (leading to the dramatic title, “Can Healthcare IT Save Babies?”, that in my mind is a question left unanswered.) I would have been more convinced had they looked at infant mortality at individual hospitals pre- and post-EMR, also ruling out related OB-specific systems that don’t really require EMRs. I don’t doubt that hospitals with the ambition and money to buy EMRs may well have better outcomes with newborns (possibly because they aren’t usually in poor, inner city neighborhoods), but its a stretch to say it was the EMR itself that made them better (or to assume, even with everybody and his brother installing EMRs, that we’ll be seeing a drop in infant mortality anytime soon). It’s a free PDF download if someone wants to critique it in more detail.

Other

Officials with Saint Elizabeth Regional Medical Center (NE) say they will hold off on plans to form an ACO, following the release of proposed ACO rules. The hospital fears potential financial risks may not be sufficient to cover high initial investment costs, including IT-related expenses.

KLAS looks at partial and extensive IT outsourcing and concludes that CareTech, Dell, and Siemens rank high in both categories. CTGHS topped all firms for partial IT outsourcing and CareTech led for extensive IT outsourcing.

In the under-200-bed community hospital market, 80% of organizations report confidence in their vendor’s ability to ultimately satisfy Meaningful Use requirements. The other 20% are looking to replace their vendor. All of the Cerner clients participating in this KLAS survey expressed confidence in Cerner’s ability to meet Meaningful Use; at least three customers from each of the other seven vendors felt achieving Meaningful Use with their current vendor would be a long shot or probably won’t happen.

Weird News Andy likes this quote about NPfIT from UK MP Richard Bacon: “This turkey will never fly and it is time the Department of Health faced reality and channelled the remaining funds into something useful that will actually benefit patients. The largest civilian IT project in the world has failed.”

A NEJM editorial says the provider payment system based on CPT and E&M codes forces EMR vendors to modify their programs to create reams of repetitive and clinically worthless documentation instead of doing something useful, like improving clinical decision support. It points out that payments encourage upcoding and over-documenting, but nobody has come up with a better alternative.

Alan Cremer, founder and acting CEO of drug database search application vendor IntelliDex, e-mailed to ask me to mention that he’s looking for a president and CEO for the company. If you have startup leadership experience, preferably in a medical informatics company, check out the job description and consider throwing your hat into the ring.

Sponsor Updates

• iSirona demonstrated its integration technology at last month’s Vision User conference in Salt Lake City. The company used its software to upload patient vitals from a Stryker Bed InTouch and a Fukuda Denshi bedside monitor, which were then verified and uploaded into the Siemens clinical suite.
• H/P Technologies, which provides staffing and consulting for all Meditech modules, will exhibit at MUSE May 31–June 3 in Nashville.
• The MSO Mississippi Health Partners selects RelayHealth to provide health information exchange for its 800 physicians and 13 hospital members.
• ESD hires Dan Oberle as VP of business development. His previous employers include Santa Rosa Consulting, CTG, and ACS.
• Orion Health and NextGate partner to include NextGate’s  MatchMetrix EMPI and Provider Registry products in the Orion Health HIE solution.
• Dossia partners with Health Language Inc. to embed HLI’s language engine into the Dossia Health Management System.
• API Healthcare announces that it achieved its highest number of deployments ever during the first quarter of 2011.
• Ovum, part of Wolters Kluwer Health, introduces OvidMD, a clinical tool that incorporates medical research with Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate resource tools.
• Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CA) selects MobileMD to provide HIE services to its 800 physicians and 1,000 referring physicians.
• Healthcare Innovative Solutions co-sponsors a Victoria Era fashion show, which raised over $1,000 for the Seville Food Pantry (OH).
• Hayes Management Consulting unveils a partnership with The Coding Network to provide audit and remediation services to physician practices using MDauditComplete.
• Capario says it is now processing inbound 5010 claims (Errata version) and providing 5010 ERAs with submitters.
• Sage SVP Tony Ryzinski offers up 10 areas for improvement when managing the revenue cycle.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

WebMD reports this week that even mild exercise with the Wii Fit game can improve fitness for COPD patients. Big surprise: patients are more likely to stick with exercising at home if it’s fun. I have to admit, the Wii is one of my guilty pleasures and its price point is more realistic for people than some of the other game consoles. If it gets people off the couch for even 10 or 15 minutes a day, I say go for it — although I’m not sure I want to know what my blood pressure looked like when I was trying to find the last three i-points on Island Flyover. But then again, there’s something therapeutic about crashing your biplane into the ocean repeatedly after a long day listening to physicians complain about computers.

I keep getting e-mails from the American Medical Association about their AMAGINE physician portal ,which “offers a low-cost approach to meet the needs of your practice and achieve each level of meaningful use.” If you’re a provider or someone who works closely with a provider, have you checked this out yet? I’d be interested to hear what you think. Featured products on the site when I stopped by included NextGen, Ingenix CareTracker, and Care360 EHR.

I’m still a bit in awe of being a minor Internet celebrity. I wonder if Centers for Disease Control spokesman Dave Daigle was ready for his brush with fame? The normally sleepy Public Health Matters blog featured a new topic this week: Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse. The site has been so popular after being named a Twitter “Top Tweet” that it’s intermittently crashing, so be patient. I’m not sure of the specific impact of zombie apocalypse on IT infrastructure (my medical training was more in dealing with the brain-eating aspects of zombie behavior) but it’s always good to be prepared and make sure you have a disaster plan for each of your critical systems. If anyone has a good zombie preparedness checklist for enterprise EHRs, please share!

I agree with Inga, it was feeling like a bit of a slow news week, at least until I came across this headline: Don’t forget! Your computer job is still killing you. Based on the multitude of upgrades our organization has to complete in order to be ready for Meaningful Use attestation, I was sure the author had been following me around. I’m not sure about their level of medical fact-checking, but I do like their graphics. It’s a good reminder for those of us who have traded walking the clinical halls of academic medicine for a more desk-jockey lifestyle that we need to get up and move.

Finally, having spent some time attending a renowned Southern institution famous for matriculating Mrs. degree candidates, I learned that there are a few things that aren’t fit for discussion in mixed company if one wants to catch a good husband. Since I’ve turned into a grizzled IT veteran (although I do know how to identify a fish fork and exactly how to use it) I’m going to break that rule today. Last November, Mr. H mentioned a UK team that was working on a smart phone app that would instantly diagnose sexually transmitted diseases after urine or saliva was … ahem … applied to a chip that would then be attached to the phone, leading to a quick diagnosis. It seems this product will have an expanded target market after June 1 since Apple has approved a “prostitution-friendly” app aimed at pairing “sugar daddies” with willing companions. I was going to say something pithy about Adam, Eve, and an Apple until I read further to find it’s compatible with Android and BlackBerry devices as well. Instead, to the App Store, I say — “well bless your little heart.”

Contacts

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

CIO Unplugged 5/18/11

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

This is the third in a short series of posts on The CIO’s Best Friends, BFFs who are critical in ensuring CIO effectiveness. This time we cover the vendor account executive–CIO relationship.

Don’t Fudge the CIO–Account Executive Relationship

I was new in my role as a director. For that matter, I was new to managing a vendor relationship. I was getting by, but only because the vendor account executive (AE) took pity and mentored me in how to manage such a relationship.

I had a responsibility to implement new applications to make our hospital easier to use than the competitor down the street. We had significant success, but it had little to do with my abilities. It was the AE.

I nearly ruined this relationship.

I set out to leave the office, looking forward to a family vacation the next morning. I don’t recall the infraction, but I said something unfair and unkind to the AE. I knew I was wrong and felt awful. I fired off an e-mail apology,  but I wanted to do more. My time was scrunched.

On my desk laid two large, wrapped boxes of fudge from the famous Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. An AE from another company had shipped these to me as a thank you for hosting a site visit for a prospect. I set aside one box for my team and intended to open the other. In my haste to demonstrate remorse, I repurposed that second box, taped my handwritten note to it, and sent to the offended AE. Damage repaired, I left for vacation.

I posted previously on maximizing vendor relationships, which I prefer to call partnerships. Strong relations in this area are instrumental to the success of provider organizations. The AE is the face of the partner and is as critical to the relationship as any product or service provided.

Partners use unique approaches and generally assign one or two AEs to the provider. I prefer one AE. Some partners have multiple AEs representing specific products and services, which I find suboptimal and challenging to manage. Others call their representative an AE, but those are only a salesperson in disguise. Some are assigned exclusively to healthcare, while others are assigned to diverse industries but have some exclusivity to specific accounts.

I’ve experienced many approaches. What trumps any specific structure is the AE themselves. A strong AE can overcome the weakest structure. Conversely, a weak AE can ruin the reputation and business of the most progressive vendor.

That said, here is what I have found works best:

• Single AE. I can’t handle multiple relationships with multiple partners. But a single AE with a handful of partners is doable. Have you ever bought a car and had to work with the salesperson, and the manager, and the fleet director …
• Formal structure. See link.
• Relationship. We don’t have to like each other, but it doesn’t hurt if we do. Clearly you can’t allow a friendship to trump business judgment. I tend to keep a safe distance for the protection of all parties.
• Transparency. I have yet to meet one AE who did not appreciate brutal honesty. It took some getting used to, but it was a freeing experience. Being transparent allowed for honesty, so I also knew the truth of what a vendor could or could not do. Don’t BS me with jargon — give it to me straight.
• Identity. Who do you work for? I prefer an AE who makes me feel as if they work for me. Obviously they must remain loyal to their company, but bravo to those who master the identity question.
• Accountability. Do what you said you’ll do, and be timely.
• Accessibility. If I need you, be there. I’ll do the same for you.
• Value-added service. Go the extra mile to help me with my business.
• Empathy. Give me an AE who cares about what I need, not about what they have on the dock to sell. Understand our world and our challenges. Skip the clichés — relevancy makes a difference.
• Integrity. I need to work with someone I can trust and solve business problems with.
• Post-sale support. Service and support after the deal is sealed. True relationships continue long past the initial sale. Maintain communication after the big sale and provide service that allows both parties to learn and continually improve.

I asked my partner AEs for their perspective. Their key success factors proved similar:

• Alignment. Beginning with the end in mind. Have a clear understanding of the alignment between strategic business initiatives, IT’s role in supporting those initiatives, and being able understand the relative priority of the active projects for the organization as a whole.
• Questions. If brevity is the soul of wit, the ability to ask good questions is the soul of a successful AE. Questions indicate a desire and willingness to help as well as a tacit admission that he or she doesn’t know all the answers — but they’ll work on your behalf to find others who might.
• Listening. Contrast this with an AE that does all the talking and simply discusses features and benefits or licensing arrangements. They make little effort to learn your business, and they’ll never learn your business while they’re doing all the talking.
• Relationships. Work “with” rather than “around” IT leadership to build relationships with the lines of business. Excellent AEs collaboratively develop relationships, think strategically, and have a network of partners and friends who can help you. They include you in those relationships, and conversely you are able to return the favor. Having a long-term view of the relationship helps navigate through the tactical day-to-day issues that may surface.
• Communications. Talk through expectations at a personal and organizational level. e.g. what do you want from your AE and what do you want from the vendor? Meet regularly to update both organizations on goals and strategy. Ensure accessibility and responsiveness on both sides. Have frank discussions about what’s working and what can be improved. Set agreed-upon and mutually shared goals.
• Trust. Built over time through the experience of working together.

The benefits to all parties are measurable: More innovative ideas to help the company improve its market position. More revenue generating and clinically effective solutions. More cost savings proposals. More vendor stability for the account, reducing personnel turnover. Success for both organizations and, by association, the AE and CIO.

Following my vacation, I returned to the office and found a note from the AE I had offended. “Ed, thank you for your card. Apology accepted. And thank you for the box of fudge. FYI– next time, you might want to make sure there is no note inside of it (from another partner). I am glad your demo went so well! I had a good laugh, and all is forgiven.”

Embarrassed and humbled, I put my tail between my legs. But I did learn many great lessons through that AE. So remember, if you receive fudge from me …

What are your ideas on what makes for a great AE relationship? I would love to hear from both AE and providers.

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

News 5/18/11

Top News

HHS’s Office of Inspector General spanks its fellow agency ONC for pushing interoperability without mandating security controls or encouraging standards. Examples of what it wants to see: requiring portable media to be encrypted, requiring two-factor authentication for remote access to PHI-containing systems, and mandating timely OS patch application and antivirus updates. OIG based this work on a previous project that looked at providers, in which it found unsecured wireless networks, lack of application vendor support for OS-level changes, poor antivirus practices, lack of event logging, allowing shared user accounts, and giving too many users administrative rights over their PCs.

ONC’s response to this report: (a) we turfed security work off to HITSP and incorporated some of its specs as HHS policy and in EHR certification requirements; (b) Stage 1 of Meaningful Use requires providers to fix their own security problems; (c) our job is to convince providers to use EHRs and we will worry about security later in the process; (d) our chief privacy officer is drafting a plan. It sounds to me like the typical external auditor’s report: their job is to find stuff to make sure you keep hiring them, while yours as the IT shop is to balance their sometimes ivory tower observations with your own realities. My only takeaway is that ONC should spend some of its billions to push security awareness, which you would think highly paid hospital and vendor IT people wouldn’t need, but apparently they do.

Reader Comments

From Mia: “Re: CompuGroup. Big layoffs at Noteworthy Medical (last week, I think) and other of their companies. Will be interesting to see how many of the 420 ONC-ATCB certified EHR companies are around five years from now.” Unverified.

From CPOE Zealot: “Re: medication error. Incidents such as these give CPOE a bad rap.” The parents of a five-week-old premature baby who died after being given 60 times the ordered dose of IV sodium chloride sue Advocate Lutheran General Hospital (IL) for wrongful death. Like most fatal medication errors, CPOE was a non-factor here: — most in-hospital medication error deaths are caused by incorrect IV preparation or administration. In addition, the doctor ordered stat labs and then a re-test after getting a high sodium level back, but nobody drew it, leaving the baby on the hyper-concentrated fluid for 20 hours. There is one good reason CPOE gets a bad rap in cases like these, though: vendors sell and hospitals buy the seemingly logical argument that CPOE prevents patient harm, when what it mostly does is prevent lots of errors that were being caught anyway (like poor handwriting, in which somebody just calls the doctor for clarification). The risk of harm doesn’t change much unless you work at the sharp end of the stick where EHRs fear to tread – medication preparation and administration. The best IT systems in existence (including bedside bar-code checking) couldn’t have saved this baby’s life when hospital employees, despite experience and best intentions, are just as prone to distraction and carelessness as the rest of us humans, especially when they are overwhelmed and tired (sometimes because their peers were laid off to help pay for CPOE systems).

From Wireless Observer: “Re: Cerner. Word on the street is that Cerner is getting ready to announce some big organizational changes and these are not good kind of changes for the employees (may be good for Wall Street, however). This is supposed to hit the CareAware division pretty hard.” Unverified. CareAware is Cerner’s solution for connecting medical devices to EMRs (video above).

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

FairWarning will hire 70 employees over the next 24 months.

Salt Lake City-based MediConnect Global announces plans to hire 100 employees across multiple departments.

Cerner names SenSage its “Accelerate Partner of the Year” for demonstrating speed to value for Cerner and its customers. SenSage also an expanded alliance with Cerner to offer a SaaS-based version of P2Sentinel, Cerner’s enterprise clinical system auditing program.

CareCloud partners with Xpress Technologies to launch a combined EMR/PM solution for urgent care facilities and hospital ERs.

Sales

Sharkey Issaquena Community Hospital (MS) selects Custom Software Systems ChartSmart EMR.

Onslow Memorial Hospital (FL) contracts with Language Access Network  to provide hospital video language interpretation services.

People

 

Awarepoint names Ralph Keiser (MedeAnalytics) EVP of sales and Jaime Ojeda (PCTS) EVP of marketing and business development.

Government and Politics

CMS announces plans to release applications for “mature ACOs” interested in participating in its new Pioneer ACO Model and taking part in shared savings. CMS is also seeking input on the idea of an Advance Payment ACO Model, which would give certain ACOs access to their shared savings up front so they could build the required infrastructure. For providers wanting to learn more about ACOs, CMS is offering four free Accelerated Development Learning Sessions beginning in June.

Innovation and Research

Of the 75 operational RHIOs in the US, only 13 meet the basic criteria for Meaningful Use (e-prescribing, clinical data exchange, quality reporting) according to Harvard researchers. I don’t have access to the study, but apparently the findings are based on data from 2009 (so old they use the term RHIOs, apparently). Surely there’s been some improvement since 2009. If you’ve seen the full report, please share your insights.

JAMA reports that the use of telemedicine in ICUs reduces mortality rates and length of stay.

The New Zealand government awards a $252K grant to Vensa Health to conduct further research related to its mobile health reminder system. The company recites an impressive list of technology features, but like just about every mobile health vendor, they have no evidence showing that their product is effective in improving health. Like Bill Gates told me at lunch once (well, OK, me and a huge ballroom full of people at the mHealth Summit), reminders and education don’t necessarily work when it comes to wellness – plenty of fat people own bathroom scales.

Other

I got another “urgent news” e-mail blast today from one of the rags that reinforces my argument that most industry publications either (a) can’t distinguish real news from press releases, or (b) don’t care as long as it draws readers and advertisers. Today’s hot news: a bond rating agency issued a press release claiming their study correlated use of advanced IT to hospital profitability and quality. I downloaded the “special report” from Fitch Ratings and it was, as I expected, not worth the excitement, being even less methodical (and therefore even less useful) than the Most Wired survey. Here’s a summary.

• The bond ratings company looked at only the 291 hospitals that use its services. That’s out of maybe 6,000 US hospitals – a tiny, non-randomized, non-representative sample that excludes for-profit and government facilities.
• They checked Leapfrog, Baldrige, and Healthgrades and found that 75 of their clients had won a quality award (all awards are created equal in drawing room studies like this that just match Readily Available Data Set A with Readily Available Data Set B).
• They checked with HIMSS Analytics and found that 24 were at EMRAM Stages 6/7 (ignoring all other forms of IT except inpatient clinical).
• Apparently disappointed to find that only 12 of the 24 EMRAM 6/7 hospitals had won quality awards, they invented an excuse related to “the evolution and maturation of how quality is measured.” (maybe that should have been the headline – that half the hospitals who reached IT Nirvana haven’t won even one major quality award as a result).
• They found that richer hospitals won more quality awards and had more IT (neither of which necessarily has anything to do with patient outcomes).
• They looked at utilization trends and concluded that higher IT hospitals (meaning richer ones) are improving, although they did not look at their absolute performance (meaning a hospital could still be terrible as long as it’s less terrible than before).
• The bottom line: even if the bond ratings firm had conclusively proved any kind of relevant correlation (which they most definitely did not), that still wouldn’t have proved causation. The implicit message in running this yawner of a study as real news is that everybody now has the justification to buy more IT, which is an absurd conclusion for an industry that somewhere down deep is supposedly based on science.

Speaking of questionable studies, here’s another one: do seven percent of doctors really use video chat in patient care? I’m not interested enough to buy the company’s report to evaluate its methodology, but I would have to bet that they surveyed a disproportionate number of telemedicine physicians or tele-ICU intensivists. Most docs won’t even e-mail patients, much less fire up a Skype session for a leisurely and probably unreimbursed Webcam chat.

Quality IT Partners, Inc. announces its Facebook launch featuring a dedication to the Scott Hamilton Cares Initiative, including a song and video written and produced by the company.

Sponsor Updates

• Sonoma Valley Hospital (CA) picks ProVation Order Sets.
• BridgeHead Software will exhibit at the 2011 International MUSE Conference May 31-June 3 in Nashville.
• Emdeon introduces Emdeon Audit Advantage, which will provide real-time prescriber eligibility and patient coverage alerts to pharmacies. The company also wins a five-year GSA contract that allows it to offer products to  over 90 government entities.
• Healthwise Patient Education EMR module earns ONC-ATCB certification.
• Imprivata announces GA of OneSign Anywhere for authentication and single sign-on for remote and mobile users.
• Delta Health Alliance, one of the country’s 17 Beacon Health communities, collaborates with Medicity to connect participating physicians and hospitals.
• Daughters of Charity Health System (CA) expands its partnership with Passport Health Communications and adds three additional RCM solutions from Passport’s eCare Patient Access Suite.
• McKesson medical director David K. Nace, MD is named first vice chairman of the board of directors of the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative.
• Practice Fusion says it has grown from a team of four in 2007 to 75 today. The company is expects to reach 150 employees by the end of the year and is seeking new office space.
• MyHealthDirect assumes a silver-level sponsorship for the 19th Annual Medicaid Managed Care Congress this week in Baltimore. CEO Jay Mason will also participate in a panel discussion on ACOs and patient-centered medical homes.
• API Healthcare publishes a whitepaper entitled Achieving Quality of Care and Controlling Costs, which includes best practices for workforce automation.
• Concerro creates a Mac versus PC parody that compares healthcare scheduling solutions with paper-based systems.
• The City of Philadelphia selects eClinicalWorks to provide an EHR/PM solution for the Department of Public Health, which includes 230 providers and 20 primary care and correctional clinics.
• JEMS Technology announces a rental program that allows hospitals to provide smart phone video consultation capabilities (JEMS Consults) to their physicians starting at under $1,000 per month.
  

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Contacts

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

Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 5/16/11

When I started as a solo practice physician, if someone had told me that someday I would be able to have actual conversations about the business side of the house, I would have told them they were crazy. As a naïve postgraduate, I actually believed that most of practice would be about caring for patients. Tincture of time and a few rides on the revenue cycle roller coaster quickly proved otherwise. (No one likes going bankrupt, which is a real danger for small practices these days).

Knowing other providers have also had this experience, it shouldn’t have been surprising to me that business-related articles on HIStalk have generated quite a bit of feedback. In a recent EPtalk, I talked a bit about the need for office-based physicians to work on maximizing their use of practice management systems as a prelude to maximizing their use of electronic health records.

One reader asks:

When determining the first pass clean claims rate, do you count as ‘unclean’ a claim that (1) doesn’t make it through the EDI/clearinghouse scrubber (rejected), or (2) makes it through the clearinghouse/scrubber but is then denied by insurance (e.g., wrong coding, more medical information needed, etc)? I have seen a clean claims rate calculation as being just those rejected by the scrubbers, but I have also seen it where it includes every claim that wasn’t paid with only one touch.

I have to rely on my anonymous celebrity claims expert Bianca Billinghouse, who responds:

First pass is defined as a clean claim when it makes it through the practice management system’s claims scrubber as well as the clearinghouse. If it doesn’t make it through the clearinghouse, this is what we term a rejection. The office staff typically didn’t run their claim edits and it was caught by the clearinghouse. These count against the practice. If it makes it all the way through to insurance and results in a denial, depending on the reason, then it falls into controllable or not controllable denial. We see this often with eligibility, even though we are attempting to do this upon check-in.

I also got a fair amount of feedback on last week’s Curbside Consult about evaluation of practice management systems and their readiness for 5010. Several readers suggested other organizations as sources for evaluating practice management systems, such as KLAS or AC Group.

Another wrote with an interesting perspective on 5010 compliance, which I thought I’d share:

The new 5010 standard, in the short run, is the same old data repackaged a slightly different way from the 4010 standard. The truth is that if you send your claims via a clearinghouse in the short run, you don’t need to do anything. The clearinghouse and the insurance companies need to be able to exchange data in the 5010 format by January of 2012, and many companies are doing testing now through the end of the year. The reason that a provider doesn’t need to stress about this is the actual new data from the provider — i.e. ICD-10 codes — don’t go into effect until 2013.

Software companies, as you can imagine, use any change as a way to sell an upgrade or new release, and most of my clients are told you must do this or that. Whenever you are told you must do something by a software company, nine times out of ten you probably don’t. If you’re an office that sends all your own claims yourself direct to all the insurance companies, you may need an upgrade by January 2012. If you use a clearinghouse or a billing service, you probably have another year until your software needs to accommodate ICD10 codes. If you’re looking at a $2,000 upgrade vs. paying a clearinghouse $50 per month to take care of things for you, that is your choice.

Considering that my primary ambulatory system is with a vendor that doesn’t charge for upgrades (they’re included in maintenance), I have no skin in the game on upgrading vs. not upgrading as a cost-saving maneuver. Interestingly though, the same day I received that e-mail, I also received my snail mail copy of American Medical News with the headline, “Not electronic-claim compliant? Then expect no payments in 2012.”

The article mentions that 5010 requires submission of nine-digit ZIP codes on claims, which I suppose a clearinghouse with the postal database can “plug” as the claims pass through. It also includes the ability to “distinguish between principal diagnosis, admitting diagnosis, external cause of injury, and patient reason for visit codes” which I can’t imagine a clearinghouse being able to manipulate unless I’m not understanding what that means. (Damn it Jim, I’m a doctor, not a biller!)

However, 5010 is also a precursor to ICD-10. I worry that physicians who think they can delay the upgrades for 5010 adoption will unwittingly delay progress towards adoption of the new coding standard, which is already anticipated to be an extremely difficult transition for physicians.

Of course, another conversation with Bianca was in order:

He’s obviously using the clearinghouse spin, touting that they will take care of everything. Ultimately, it’s still the provider’s responsibility to comply with the mandates. I wouldn’t feel comfortable relying solely on my clearinghouse to map/plug the required loops/segments. He’s right that clearinghouses help in the process, but what will the clearing house do when its clients don’t get their claims paid because the primary payer wants 5010 and the secondary wants 4010 or even paper?

The American Medical News article goes as far as recommending that practices increase cash reserves and consider lines of credit to buffer potential rejections after the switch, which certainly doesn’t do anything to reduce physician anxiety. Personally, I’m extremely thankful that Bianca is looking out for my colleagues and me (no one ever gives the billing / claims / collections folks the credit they deserve). But I still I think I might have to temper my anxiety over ICD-10 with a nice Riesling.

E-mail Dr. Jayne.

Readers Write 5/16/11

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!

The Four Principles of Getting Things Done Well
By Mark Johnston

There are thousands of self-help and business books out there, each promising to change your life with the author’s “new” and “revolutionary” ideas. But when it really comes down to it, most of these books are based on fads or the repackaging of old knowledge, and are not worth the cover price.

In my experience, someone who’s looking to get more done in their professional and personal lives (and to do it better) can do so by practicing four simple things until they become habit: organization, prioritization, execution and discipline. Let’s take a quick look at each one:

Organization

Is your desk a mess? What about your car? If you answer yes to either of these, chances are your work life is messy, too. To be effective, you must become more organized. My advice? Go clean your desk. Tomorrow, clean your car. The next day, clear out your garage (or, if it’s really that bad, this next weekend).

Then start on your paper-based and electronic documents. Create a logical file structure so that you can find any piece of information you need within seconds. Do you travel a lot? Then keep a pre-packed bag of travel-sized toiletries in your carry-on bag.

Indentify other areas of your business and personal life that are disordered, and do the necessary! Sounds simple, but you’ll be amazed at how much productivity you’ll gain by weeding out disorganization.

Prioritization

In business, particularly at a small company where everyone wears a lot of hats, there are always 101 things to get done. If you think every one is of equal importance, you’ll never get anything done, let alone to the best of your ability.

Instead, write weekly and daily to do lists, with the most crucial things at the top. This crosses over into organization, showing how these principles are closely connected. Again, this may sound patronizing, but to make an impact, you need to get your daily activities in order.

Execution

All the organization and prioritization in the world is useless if you don’t follow through. Know you’ve got to finish writing a report? Block off two hours on your calendar and set your IM status to “busy” so you won’t be disturbed. Create a distraction-free work environment that lends itself to focusing on your priorities, and start checking items off your to-do list.

Procrastination will kill your productivity and decrease your effectiveness in business and in your personal responsibilities. As Nike ads say, “Just do it!”

Discipline

To regain control — over your workspace, your documents, your to dos, your life — takes discipline. Is it fun to reorder every file on your computer and put them in logical folders and subfolders? Is it fun to write detailed lists of your daily and weekly priorities? What about cleaning your desk, garage and car?

No, no and no, but such tasks are effective because they remove mental and physical clutter.

Discipline is the daily practice of doing what needs to be done, and is the umbrella that overarches organization, prioritization, and execution. Discipline doesn’t just apply to work, but also to eating right, working out, and making time for your family. If practiced for a few weeks, discipline becomes a habit that will apply to most situations for the rest of your career and lifetime.

It is all too easy to confine the combination of organization, prioritization, and execution to your office, and to focus so much on work that it becomes the only thing in your world – to the detriment of your family, friendships, and other non-work commitments. Equally, it is possible to let the many responsibilities of your personal life (particularly when you have kids) minimize your efforts in your job.

Both scenarios are examples of imbalances that prevent us from being all we can be. That’s why discipline is so crucial. It enables us to regulate each aspect of our lives so we’re living out a commitment to excellence in everything we do.

The first time I shared these principles with a younger team member I was mentoring, his wife came up to me at a company event and said, “I don’t know what you did to him, but he picks up after himself, our car is clean, and he cleared out the garage for the first time in 10 years!” So, even beyond what they will do for your work life, these principles can make you more popular in your home. And that’s got to be worth something!

Mark Johnston is president of Access of Sulphur Springs, TX.

Building a Healthcare Storage Archive
by Charles Mallio, Jr.

The healthcare storage archive is a centralized repository managed by IT, but made available to all departments throughout the organization. It is home to the approximately 80% of hospital data that is static, unchanging, and best managed in a centralized repository that provides the appropriate protection based on the profile of the data.

This healthcare archive should have the ability to store the data intelligently and to leverage the mix of media assets available in the organization. This includes reserving the highest cost storage assets — typically fiber-channel disk in a storage area network — for the dynamic data and managing static data on more cost-effective media, such as lower-cost disk, optical, tape, or even cloud.

With its storage archive in place, an organization can eliminate storage silos, optimize existing storage assets, facilitate data interoperability, and provide a level of data protection that enhances its disaster recovery strategy. And it does all this while delivering a strong return on investment in existing and future storage infrastructure.

Data Interoperability

With a truly healthcare-aware archive in place, the CIO can collaborate with peer department heads to facilitate enhanced data interoperability of systems. To do this effectively, the archiving solution must leverage healthcare standards by which these systems can interact and fully exploit the benefits of shared data. These standards include:

• HL7 (Health Level 7), for the exchange, integration, sharing and retrieval of electronic health information.
• DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine), for the storage and transmission of medical images and medical imaging data.
• XDS/XDS-I (Cross Enterprise Document Sharing / for Imaging), for the sharing of clinical documents, images, diagnostic reports, and related data.

In addition to the above, the archive should have the ability to index both metadata and content to make that data easily searchable, by both applications and end users.

Data Protection 

The healthcare archiving solution must provide safeguards against data loss and security breaches. It may do this by methods inherent to the solution, by leveraging the features of specific storage devices, or by a combination of both. However it achieves these objectives, it should accommodate the following features:

• Multiple copies of data, stored on disparate media types in separate locations, will ensure survivability of data in the event of a disaster. The healthcare archive should employ a user-configurable, intelligent policy engine to determine the optimal number of copies and locations
• Data replication complements the multi-copy strategy by facilitating mass duplication of entire repositories of data to a secondary location.
• Encryption prevents unauthorized access to data in the archive. This is critical for Protected Health Information (PHI), as well as financial records and sensitive communications.
• Digital fingerprinting technology ensures that data retrieved from the archive is identical to data committed to the archive, safeguarding against deliberate or accidental data tampering.

The data protection characteristics of the healthcare archive also complement IT’s disaster recovery strategy. While backup is necessary for whole-system retrieval, it is not optimal for the more granular recovery allowed by an archive. Furthermore, backups do not protect against file corruption, whereas an intelligent archive ensures the integrity of the data committed to it.

Return on Investment

By investing in a healthcare archive, hospitals not only gain the aforementioned benefits, but can also realize substantial cost savings. By eliminating storage silos and consolidating expensive primary storage, tier-1 storage assets are no longer underutilized. Thus, hospitals do not pay for expensive storage that sits idle.

Organizations also have more flexibility to employ cheaper storage where the data access profile or data value supports that decision. And by employing intelligent data management policies to move infrequently accessed data to lower-performing, but more energy-efficient devices, they can be more “green” with their storage strategy, which translates into costs saved on power and cooling.

Charles Mallio, Jr. is vice president, product strategy and business development, of BridgeHead Software of Surrey, UK.

IT Governance Remains a Top Organizational Challenge
By Dan Herman

IT governance has been topic of interest for many years. Even though the concept has been embraced within the healthcare industry, the reality is that it’s still not operationally working well within most healthcare organizations.

According to the 22nd Annual HIMSS Leadership Survey released in March 2011, the metrics regarding IT governance look strong at first glance. The majority of respondents (87%) reported that there is a strong level of integration between the IT strategic plan and the organization’s overall strategic plan. In addition, nearly three-quarters of senior IT executives reported that they sit on the executive committee at their organization. 

The HIMSS Leadership Survey does a good job of tracking the pulse of the industry, but our industry needs to reevaluate how we measure the effectiveness of IT governance. IT governance should be looked at holistically and not merely whether the IT plan is integrated with the organization’s business plan and whether the CIO sits on the executive team.

Strategic alignment is definitely an important element of IT governance, but having effective committee structures, well-defined roles and responsibilities, specific processes and workflows, and a project portfolio management structure to drive value delivery, measure performance, and manage risk and resources are critical success factors for IT to help the organization achieve its objectives.

In the past three years, we have assisted over 30 clients with their IT strategic planning efforts. In 80% of the cases, enhancing existing IT governance, decision-making, executive sponsorship, and project prioritization processes have been a key focus of the planning effort.

There is a finite set of variables to control: funding, resources, and scope. It’s important to focus on a limited set of major projects that support the organization’s strategic goals. Appropriate alignment of IT resources ensures that IT is spending the organization’s money prudently, and effective IT governance is essential to making that a reality.

Critical success factors for effective IT governance include the careful definition of who is responsible and accountable for decisions. Executive involvement is critically important for holding the clinical and business sponsors, as well as IT leaders, accountable for project success. Executive involvement is also vital for assuring that resources are actually available until projects are completed.

IT should not be the primary sponsors of projects, so clinical and management sponsors must be involved from the beginning as well as the clinicians who will actually use the systems implemented. Executives must also assure adherence to the governance process, so that the benefits of governance are received.

While executive and board involvement is always cited as important in IT governance, translating that into specific roles and responsibilities isn’t easy or obvious. The task is to define roles and responsibilities that result in the effective allocation of resources and in successful projects.

There are a number of considerations in determining committee structure. Authority, time, and expertise are important considerations.

IT governance requires the definition of a process for project proposal, consideration, approval, and management. This process is often closely related to or integrated with the capital budgeting process, especially in terms of the timeline for project approval.

IT governance will not result in successful projects unless effective project management is in place.

In conclusion, governance remains one of the biggest challenges of healthcare IT. Organizations continue to battle with the dilemma of having much more demand for IT services than supply and budget to service. Requests for new projects arrive with typically no effective mechanism to control how projects get prioritized, funded, and resources allocated. IT then gets put in the position where they’re overwhelmed, under-budgeted, and under-delivering.

With the number of competing initiatives on the priority lists of hospital executive teams such as Meaningful Use, ICD-10, and Accountable Care Organization structures and their IT implications, it’s even more essential that a strong governance model be deployed to prioritize initiatives, align projects and capital spend with key organizational priorities, establish the appropriate champions and sponsors to successfully drive the top priorities forward, and define ways to measure results.

Dan Herman is founder and managing principal with Aspen Advisors of Pittsburgh, PA.

Monday Morning Update 5/16/11

From Former CIO: “Re: high price of Epic. In my experience, the price of Epic software is competitive with others (at least the big guys). The difference is that they drive the customer to look at the true cost of implementation and plan for the resources, internal and external, training, etc. The other vendors hope you won’t actually add it all up until you sign the software contract. This is the best part about Epic since it gets the organization to accept the budget, even if difficult. If you are not prepared to spend the money then they may walk away. In the end, Epic is not necessarily more costly than the others would be.” An excellent reminder that I often need. Software license fees are often nearly irrelevant to overall project cost, especially on the often-forgotten cost of internal labor. It would be interesting to survey recently implemented hospitals to find out how implementation budget overruns correlate to specific vendors.

From Judy: “Re: couldn’t resist telling you. I have yet to receive an e-mail from iHealthBeat, HDM, or whomever that had a news flash I hadn’t already seen on HIStalk. Time to unsubscribe from these eJournals promising the latest, greatest news. Keep up the good work (although I do worry about you, truth be told) and help me SIMPLIFY my life! You should have NO doubts about your impact on this industry and I am SO proud of you!! Really.” I’m moved by that. From my vantage point, HIStalk has been eight years (as of June 20) of long evenings and weekends in an empty room, seven days a week (check out the count of my “sent” e-mails above from my HIStalk-only account). Comments like this keep me coming back, even though I’ll probably wonder on my deathbed what the heck I was thinking in spending all this time on what is basically a spare time hobby. At the moment, I’m still having a ball.

From IT Director: “Re: Siemens. At the recent Siemens Medseries4 User Conference in Salt Lake City, it was nice to see a strong message from Siemens leadership that Medseries4 is a go-forward strategy for Siemens. A recently approved five-year development plan increases focus on development already well under way on both the Clinical and Patient Financials as well as a much anticipated ‘spruce up’ of the General Financials. Also touted was a commitment to enhancing the integration of surround applications such as Pharmacy and EDM. This, combined with UHS’s (Universal Health Services) recent commitment to install Medseries4 in all 106 of its newly acquired facilities is certainly a positive note for Medseries4 customers.”

From Your Favorite Uncle: “Re: Lakeland in Michigan — confirmed. They are going up with Epic ambulatory at the end of the summer and inpatient at the end of the year.” Thanks.

From Nasty Parts: “Re: TSI Healthcare in NC. I hear they have been acquired. They are NextGen’s largest VAR.” Unverified.

From HealthCareIdiotSavant: “Re: healthcare IT stocks. My broker has found nothing other than the usual suspects and none of them are rated all that good. Would be interesting to have your investment banker dude weight in on investing in a fund or a reasonable combination of individual stocks, wit no promises or guarantees, of course.” I actually have quite a number of investment banker dudes (and maybe some dudettes) as readers, so if any of them care to advise (anonymously if desired), I’ll let you know. As you’ve found, not all that many pure HIT plays are publicly traded, though.

Poll respondents: next year will be the big HITECH hump for vendors. New poll to your right: do you trust CMS to accurately collect and report provider and quality data?

My latest Time Capsule editorial that hasn’t seen daylight since 2006 and even then only to print newsletter subscribers: Hospitals Need to Learn from Failed Transformation Missions. A snip: “Sometimes imaginary victory is declared at the HIMSS conference, proclaimed by ventriloquist vendors whose lips barely move when their customer speaks.”

Thanks to the following sponsors (new and renewing) that supported HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, and HIStalk Mobile in April (sorry it’s a long list this time, but there’s always a lot of activity right around HIMSS). As a non-professional part-timer, I’m humbled to see this impressive roster of supporters, especially since it represents just a four-week period. Click a logo for more information.

Ohio Valley Medical Center (WV), embroiled in a lawsuit with its former CEO, claims he struck secret deals with doctors that paid them exorbitantly and also diverted all the money from its endowment fund. The health system is laying off employees and says it is “tens of millions of dollars in debt.” 

Congratulations to John Halamka, named a full professor at Harvard.

Healthcare Interactive, a Maryland-based vendor of something to do with the cloud that’s impossible to figure out from their buzzword-loaded Web site, looks to raise $10 million. Take your guess from this list of adjectives on their home page: suite, actionable, portal, stakeholders, transparency, engagement, cloud, and workflows. Or maybe this simple description from the CEO’s bio makes it crystal clear: “SaaS-SOA healthcare operating system (H-OS) framework leveraging an Inheritance-based Organic Network architecture using a unique combination of identity management, knowledge management and an application framework on a single cloud based environment.” Ready to sign up?

The next fun history lesson from Vince Ciotti, this time covering the 1960s development of “clinical” software, featuring Kelly Girls entering information dictated by nurses who didn’t know how to type.

Microsoft’s Bill Crounse, speaking in Hungary, gives examples of IT systems that are transforming healthcare: the Healthcare.gov Web site, NHS Evidence, and HealthVault. None of these have had any impact whatsoever on me or anyone I know (and Microsoft has a financial interest in at least two of the three), but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

I’m intrigued by recent top executive hires by Siemens: John Glaser (Siemens Health Services Business) and Greg Sorenson (Siemens Healthcare), both brought in from non-profit Partners HealthCare with no business experience and immediately placed in CEO roles. Contrast that with GE Healthcare Systems, who chose as its top executive last week an internal candidate whose background is automotive, finance, and aviation with no healthcare experience at all. That’s a striking difference in philosophy from conglomerates that offer similar products and services. I have to say that as a customer, I like the Siemens approach a lot better — the idea that provider people who care enough about patients to work for a non-profit might bring something to the table that a circuit-riding GE lifer executive doesn’t.

Here’s the TEDxTHR talk of Ed Marx from this past Friday.

CMS gives General Dynamics a five-year, $95 million contract for claims processing support.

Clinical documentation system vendor Salar makes Fortune’s list of 100 fastest-growing inner city businesses with a 27% annual growth rate over the past five years. It’s in the Fells Point waterfront area of Baltimore.

Don Good, former NextGen Practice Solutions regional president, is named president of Talascend Healthcare, a newly created division of the technical professional placement firm.

E-mail Mr. H.

HIStalk Interviews David Riley, President, Alembic Foundation

David Riley is president of Alembic Foundation.

Give me some background about yourself and about what Alembic Foundation does.

I’ve been in healthcare since 1976. I started out in nursing, and then eventually moved from nursing to medical training and became a primary care physician assistant in the Air Force in the early 90s. I went to med school to finish that out and then practiced primary care medicine in one of the Air Force clinics in Los Angeles for a couple of years.

Then they moved me to the Pentagon and got me involved in health information technology. I was brought there to specifically get electronic health record stuff off the ground for DoD. Spent a couple of years putting that acquisition together. In the first year of development, I was involved as an independent consultant after I left the military to get that rolling.

Subsequent to that, I stayed in health IT and informatics consulting and was brought to HHS in 2007. That was when we were starting up the NHIN, the Nationwide Health Information Network trial implementation. They put out an RFP on the day that I was brought in to organize the federal agency so that they could come up with a strategy for how they would be involved in the trial implementations and the go-forward strategy for doing an implementation of the standards and going into operations.

That’s when Vanessa Manchester was brought into the picture as my program manager. We stood up the CONNECT project as a part of that activity. We managed the CONNECT project for about two and a half years through the life of that contract and prepared the statements of work for the re-competition for that. 

We disengaged from ONC in November. When we started the CONNECT project as a software development project, we didn’t see a future where ONC would continually be involved in software development. It would eventually be rolled out to an open source community that would pick it up.

We did one year of development, released the software in 2009 as an open source, continued to develop it as the federal agencies were moving into production with it, and began to grow the community. By the end of September of last year, we had about 2,000 unique organizations that were either downloading it, using it, participating in Code-A-Thons, participating in training seminars, or just simply tracking it until their organization was ready for downloading and using the technology.

One of the things we were trying to do was to create an open community where the governance and the prioritization of features were a joint activity of the whole community. Up until then, the federal agency set the priorities. They were funding it, so they set the priorities, but we didn’t have a full open process where community members could participate in decision-making to the degree that you would normally see in an open source community. It wasn’t that the federal partners didn’t want that — they did want that — but they were just trying to figure out how to make the transition without causing problems from an operational perspective.

We had brought in Brian Behlendorf in late spring, May or June of 2009, as a consultant to help us figure out a strategy for building this open community and rolling it out to an open source community. We started the undertaking of a series of steps — they were small incremental steps. First, we made the tracker system available so people could report bugs and enhancements and make change requests from the community. Then we started opening up the development process and making it the backlog available so people could review that. The last step was transitioning it out to another organization from FHA [Federal Health Architecture] to a non-profit that would be able to grow the community and foster that. 

We had always hoped that perhaps somebody else would take on that job of doing that. But when the contract pickup hit in September on the re-compete, we realized that the community was in danger of diffusing all that energy that had been focused. We decided we would set up the foundation to do that.

Initially, we were thinking, “OK, we’ll take on the Aurion Project,” but we saw that there was this growing need among federal agencies to figure out how to engage open source communities. Not just simply to build software, but to actually build full up ecosystems where products and services would be developed around software projects, CONNECT being one. 

I think we’re also seeing the same kind of desire with the VA’s current open source EHR RFP that’s on the street now. Bidding will close on that on May 20 with contract award set for June 22. What they’re specifically requesting there is a custodial agent that can take the VistA code and handle growing the community in the open ecosystem around that. It’s a very similar kind of need. We saw multiple instances across federal agencies where they needed custodial agent services.

When we set the Alembic Foundation as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, the IRS requires you to define your tax-exempt purposes. There’s eight different categories. We selected four tax-exempt purposes. Our primary charitable purpose is defined as being the caretaker of the commons. This is where all this idea of custodial agency comes in — the idea that we create a common infrastructure that’s shared in terms of investment and it’s publicly available under an open source license, and then folks can move up the stack and focus on end user experience on the edge, building functionality, spend their money to build the infrastructure they can focus on the unique things that are value-added to the consumer. That was the model that we were looking at in terms of this idea of a shared commons.

We also have an educational tax-exempt purpose, where we’re looking at this idea of setting up a summer institute of informatics, kind of like Google’s Summer of Code, but it’s not just simply writing code. It’s more in the line of informatics, which is more than just simply writing software.

We also have a tax-exempt purpose that’s focused on scientific and technical research and development for basic applied and operational informatics research.

The fourth area is literary publishing, so that we can publish materials and manuals and how-to guides and all that kind of stuff around this idea of the commons and the informatics research that we’re doing associated with the commons. 

By focusing on transformation through disruptive innovation, using open communities and open processes in those communities to develop open technologies, this is how we plan to nurture and grow the commons. The CONNECT software in that community is the first instance of a community that we stood up with the purpose of continuing to evolve an open source product so that we grow the commons.

The idea now is that we can have full and open participation by government agencies and then private sector working together under a common governance structure, and then common ability to invest on both sides, either through contracts with the government or donations on the part of the private sector, or individuals or corporate sponsorships is one way of participating in that.

At this point there is no official relationship or financial backing from the government?

At this point for our end for Aurion, no, there is not. We brought the community over. We have a volunteer community for the Aurion 4.0 release that just occurred. We had 17 developers from five organizations that participated in implementing the software and building the software for this release. That’s a volunteer force.

What we would anticipate is that at some point down the line, federal agencies may or may not, depending on what their operational needs are, contract for specific features and functionalities. If the community process has set a priority and they have a priority that they think they need on a given time schedule, one way they can do that is either hire a contractor to do that and participate in the community, or they can hire the Foundation to do that. 

So there are multiple ways that they can participate. One is contract directly for services. Another is to hire a contractor who builds that service, and then if they want to contribute it to the community, they can do that. Or, they can have government employees that are on staff direct their focus to participating in the community.

We have about 100 unique organizations that attended the Aurion Town Hall Meeting, which was a couple of weeks ago. We began to review the draft charter. The way we are set up, the non-profit board of directors basically governs the corporate structure. They delegate to communities their governance structures through a charter, so there’s a way to delegate the governance down to the community’s level for the operational governance of communities. By doing that, we separate out the fiduciary responsibilities to the corporate board. 

It’s hard for government employees to serve on a private corporate board because it’s conflict of duties. What we’ve done is the things that would be conflict of duties are reserved to the corporate board, and everything else is delegated down to the community governance structure. Government people can participate as a governor on the board of governors of the community without having to worry about conflict of duties because of the way the duties are separated and split in terms of the corporate board versus the community board of governance. We did that intentionally so government folks can sit on the board of governors at the community level, whether it’s for Aurion or EHR or whatever projects that we happen to take on as we move forward into the future.

Just to refresh the memories of readers who may not be quite as familiar, describe in a couple of sentences what the CONNECT and Direct projects are and how they’re different, if you would.

CONNECT is focused on organizational health information exchange. This is where Organization A wants to send or receive personally identifiable health information from Organization B. 

You’ve got these legal definitions that are involved. Usually whatever Organization A is, it may be multiple organizations, but they’re bound together because they either have contracts or agreements in place. And then, everything else is defined as “them,” so when they want to exchange information with “them,” whoever “them” ends up being, they needed an ability to do that. 

That’s what the NHIN was about, was creating B2B interfaces — the business-to-business interfaces — for exchanging health information. That’s what CONNECT and subsequently Aurion is focused on.

Direct was really focused on provider-to-provider kinds of exchanges. It was like one step up above faxes, so the day Doctor A decides they need to send some information to Doctor B, they do business with them and they know their fax number and so they send it. The trust that’s there, there’s kind of an implied trust, because you’re somebody that I know and I refer patients to. There may not be formal, legal instruments of trust.

For example, at the business-to-business exchange that CONNECT usually is used at, organizations will sign a document like the Data Use and Reciprocal Support Agreement, or the DURSA, to be able to create the legal infrastructure for exchanging data. CONNECT is the technical infrastructure for the trust fabric.

Direct has an implied level of trust, because I know you, we do referrals. It’s a directed push of information, whereas up at the exchange level where CONNECT is applied or Aurion, you can push information, you can request and retrieve information, or you can publish and subscribe to information. We cover all three of those messaging paradigms in CONNECT, whereas in Direct right now, the message paradigm is push. They use secure SMTP for that transaction.

People assumed when you left the project that perhaps it was in trouble, but you’re saying the plan all along was to create an external group and the timing was right.

Well, yeah, the timing was kind of coincidental, I guess, with the contract’s hiccup. The plan was always to roll it out to some organization. We’d been looking at a number of different organizational models, like trade associations like 501(c)(6), and we’d even looked at Mozilla and Apache. Basically we were looking into different missions of these organizations to figure which if one of them could be a suitable home for the software and the community. 

From a licensing perspective, it wasn’t a licensing issue. Any one of those organizations could have probably been a home for it. The issue was the community and whether they had knowledge about healthcare in particular and health information exchange specifically.

We had thought that we probably needed to set up an organization or work with somebody to get a new organization set up to do that. When the acquisition hiccup occurred, it really created an impetus to make sure it was done right away. Because of this interregnum where no development at all was planned to go on until the contract issues were resolved, we realized that there was an opportunity to go ahead with the plan of setting up the organization and just making it happen. The longer we waited, the more danger there was that the community would diffuse away and we would lose the forward momentum that we had.

We just decided that if it was going to be done, the timing was now and nobody else was willing to do it. We gave it a lot of thought and consideration and thought, “OK, we’ll go do that.” That makes for an interesting next step in terms of the work that we’ve been doing. In some ways, it was just kind of opportunistic. We were trying to figure out how to gracefully transition and because of that hiccup, it became more urgent to get something stood up. We just took advantage of the opportunity in the sense of, “OK, we’ll go do it and we’ll do it now.”

You mentioned the VA’s project to assign a custodial overseer of VistA. Is that something the Foundation will be bidding on?

Yes. We’re planning to be a part of a good team on that. The RFP is out and proposals will be due in on the 20th of May and then contract award is expected on the 22nd of June.

How do you see that playing out? It seems like it’s not really clear how much is going to be built and maintained through open source versus how much will be commercial off-the-shelf software.

The recent announcement about the preference for COTS is interesting. From an acquisition perspective in the FAR and the DFAR, open source software is viewed as the equivalent of a COTS product. From the acquisition perspective, they could adopt the use of open source technologies and solutions and still be compliant with that guideline that they said they would prefer COTS solutions first.

It didn’t mean that they would necessarily license proprietary code. It doesn’t explicitly say that they’ll have a preference for open source, but certainly what they’re looking for are what are called non-developmental items, NDIs — things that they’re not having to invest a lot of money in doing development on. Open source is one way to do that. Proprietary products, combinations of those two … all are ways of putting together acquisition solutions that the agencies can go with.

The pendulum swings back and forth between whether we buy something that’s already built in the government, or we whether we build something. It depends on when the last successful project was. If they did a big project where they were building software and it got behind schedule and they had feature bloats and they weren’t able to deliver on time and were going over budget, suddenly the pendulum swings for preferring COTS, going out and just buying something like a lab system from Cerner or something like that, or an EHR from Epic.

Then when they do go down that path and they end up with implementation costs and they overrun budget or schedule and they get bad press or if the Congress is jumping down their neck, then they swing back to the other direction. I’ve been watching this for almost 20 years, this pendulum swinging back and forth.

What we’re trying to do is figure out a path forward where we can create open innovation, not just simply open source, but also working with proprietary vendors to do what Henry Chesbrough characterizes as an open innovation process, where they engage their users and people that have licensed their products to help evolve the products through an open process, even though it’s retained under proprietary license.

In my view, the path forward is engage the open source community, engage the vendors in this open innovation process, so that in the end, what we’d like to see happen is this investment in the common infrastructure that everybody can use move up the stack where the proprietary vendors are building that value added on the edges focusing on the user experience.

In the EHR world, usability and acceptance by the user is the piece that prevents a lot of them from achieving the market penetration that they would like. It’s getting the user experience right. There’s so many doctors and so many ways that they do things that it’s hard to address that when you’re having to build the infrastructure and shoulder the cost of that in addition to building usable applications.

If we all contribute and build what’s equivalent to the Defense Highway System, then I can use that to move fruit and produce and you can use it to move apparel and somebody else can use it to move steel. We’re all using that same common infrastructure that we paid for, in the case of the Interstate system, through taxes. It supports a lot of business models because that common infrastructure is there.

What we’re looking for is, what is that infrastructure in health IT that could be the shared investment that, if we got it in place, that could really spark the innovation that we want in terms of this rich ecosystem of applications that really are focused on the end user experience? Thereby you gain greater penetration into the marketplace of providers using these applications because they have the kinds of apps available to them at a price that’s more affordable.

If everybody’s not having to shoulder the cost of the infrastructure component, you’re not talking about million-dollar systems. You could actually literally end up with an app store built on the common infrastructure where apps may be as low as a couple of dollars, a la the Apple app store model. Or they may be a little bit more expensive if you get something that’s a real sophisticated decision support application, but it still wouldn’t be millions of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars for these apps.

They would be much cheaper. Therefore, you would be more likely to achieve a greater market penetration, but you’d also have more uptake. You’re not having to sell 10 multi-million dollar systems. Your apps are available out there, the distribution channel is a lot cheaper, it doesn’t take as much to get to the marketplace. You have 800,000 people using this app, or maybe 100,000 using that app. Even though it’s a lot cheaper application, you can still make money at it in the proprietary world as well.

Any final thoughts?

It’s a big vision. There’s a lot of work to be done. We’re just going to bite it off a little bit every day and see where we end up and see how much good we can do.  

Time Capsule: Hospitals Need to Learn From Failed Transformation Missions

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 March 2006.

Hospitals Need to Learn From Failed Transformation Missions
By Mr. HIStalk

Michigan’s Trinity Health has put its seemingly successful $315 million clinical system implementation on hold. The announced reason: it is fine-tuning its plan to drive clinical improvements and implement evidence-based medicine.

The industry has been hard-selling “clinical transformation” for years. Hospitals repeat the mantra dutifully, although none ever seem to declare themselves transformed. Like vendors’ claims of integration, it’s always just around the corner. Post-implementation hospitals aren’t necessarily improved clinically or financially. The only predictable transformation is that hospital dollars unfailingly get transformed into vendor dollars.

Who do you blame? Surely not all vendors and hospitals are incompetent. Is clinical transformation (assuming such a thing exists) simply impossible to manage successfully? Maybe the best analogy is the space shuttle.

The space shuttle orbiter is supposedly the most complex machine ever built, despite its now-antiquated technology (there’s a parallel right there). It’s not just a flying machine – it’s an industry of pork-barrel politics, fat-cat contractors, jobs, and national pride. Somewhere in the mix might be a smidgen of science that bears little resemblance to the original promise of an inexpensive fleet self-funded through technology commercialization. (Tang, anyone?) We walked on the moon, but settled for a scientifically irrelevant low-orbit taxi.

Like the space shuttle, clinical system projects rarely unfold as optimistically planned. They require painstaking planning, unerring execution, outstanding change management, and unwavering focus. None of these are strengths of the typical health care organization. Instead of a handful of astronauts, thousands of busy employees have to be convinced to change their comfortable routine. When the going gets tough, the formerly committed VPs disappear and leave the battle to the IT techies.

Sometimes the project explodes while you watch, like Challenger or Columbia. Even when it doesn’t, interest wanes once the flashy launch is over.

If the shuttle crashed 90 percent of the time it took off, would we keep launching and irrationally hoping for success? No, we’d send the engineers back to the drawing board, or maybe even get some new engineers, or ground the program. Or, perhaps we’d just declare the whole thing undoable and settle instead for a high-value subset of the grand plan more within the scope of our capabilities.

Where hospitals are different from the space program is that we don’t learn from the industry’s widespread failures. Hospitals quietly shell out precious millions and unreasonably hope that they’ll find the success that has eluded a long string of predecessors buying the same short list of products. Reality eventually sets in, expectations are lowered, and attention moves on to something else.

Sometimes imaginary victory is declared at the HIMSS conference, proclaimed by ventriloquist vendors whose lips barely move when their customer speaks. One thing is certain: you’ll seldom hear a discouraging word from consultants, member groups, or rah-rah magazines. They make money from the illusion of mass success.

We need success stories that go beyond a glitzy lift-off. We need someone to actually be transformed, not just implemented, and for those who weren’t transformed to tell us what went wrong. The path to clinical transformation is lined with the smoking debris of earlier missions, each of them offering lessons for those willing to listen.

News 5/13/11

Top News

VA CIO Roger Baker, who advocates an open source approach, tells a House committee that replacement of its VistA system with commercial software would cost $16 billion. But in a good example of bad timing, the GAO says the VA’s historically weak project oversight caused a $127 million appointment scheduling application to fail.

Reader Comments

From Court Jester: “Re: Society of Hospital Medicine. Here’s a picture of the action at the SHM meeting.” The action looks a bit light, but perhaps the picture is deceiving. SHM expected 2,500 physicians to attend the four-day event in Dallas.

From Bmore: “Re: Johns Hopkins. I know they have an old version of Epic scheduling, but has Epic always been its own job category? Or is this a sign of something to come?” I’d speculate B, despite no announcement so far. One thing I’ve learned about Epic: there isn’t always that dramatic moment of taking the two vendors of choice down to one and then heading off for extended contract negotiations, followed by the big public lovefest. Somehow, everybody sees the Epic demos and just assumes it’s a done deal, often gearing up for the project even before a contract is signed. I thought Cerner’s Vision Center was the ultimate mass hypnosis selling machine until people started telling me about being bewitched by Epic, with any IT-advocated precautions thrown to the wind as the operational people salivate at kicking out the incumbent vendors at any price and maybe taking down what they see as an unresponsive IT department along the way. That may just be my inaccurate perception, so please weigh in if you’ve been run over by the Epic train at your place.

From BadgerGrandma: “Re: Epic. A few weeks ago, attendees at Epic training were told that this was the biggest week ever, with over 1,000 people onsite for training.” It would be an interesting case study to review how formerly tiny, privately held Trojan horse Epic came late to the inpatient game, then in less than 10 years, totally ate the lunch of everybody in their target market of large academic medical centers. Cerner gets an occasional sale and Allscripts is doing recently better than Eclipsys did at selling Sunrise (which isn’t saying a whole lot), but that’s about it, at least unless the only hope of a worthy contender (Soarian) can move from nice idea to significant sales. It violates every economic principle that competitors haven’t developed something equivalent or superior to Epic without its high price. They’ve just handed the market over to Judy without a whimper, with customers happily plunking down dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars, in some cases replacing systems whose contract ink is barely dry.

From Just a rumour: “Re: Epic. Heard that Lakeland in St. Joe, MI signed up. No reference on their site.” Unverified. Actually, I’ll call it verified since I found the item above in their physician newsletter.

From Rodeo: “Re: hospital hiring. Are they going crazy? I’ve had 10 calls and e-mails from recruiters who dug my resume out of the dungeon – it isn’t posted anywhere. Is May 1 a significant date?” My phone is ringing a lot too, and I dread new LinkedIn connection requests because they’re always from recruiters (my magnetism is apparently entirely occupational).

From Clyde Dale: “Re: Siemens. A. Gregory Sorensen, MD. Director, Center for Biomarkers in Imaging Associate Director, Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Mass General. Going to Siemens to head up Med for US/ Canada.” Verified by Siemens.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Practice Fusion, vendor of the free, Web-based EHR that Brown-Wilson’s Black Book ranks as the #1 EHR product in customer satisfaction among primary care specialties. The company announced last month that its product is now used by 80,000 medical professionals managing 10 million patients, with another one million patients being added monthly. They say “Live in Five,” meaning users can start charting within five minutes of signing up, using the provided test data for practice if they want. Total cost is $0, which includes patient import, specialty modules, lab integration, scheduling, billing, a connected PHR, e-prescribing, and free unlimited US-based support. Thanks to Practice Fusion for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a Practice Fusion video I found on YouTube, with a user (and Desert Storm veteran – thanks for your service, Doc) doing all the talking.

I mentioned that I would be showcasing (at the suggestion of readers) small, innovative companies you might not hear about otherwise. Around 40 companies applied, my volunteer committee (provider, investment banker, financial services VP) chose nine to participate based on size and perceived level of innovation, and I have the first one nearly finished. The end result will be a company profile, interview, customer statement, and a pitch video. I was already overwhelmed, devoid of free time, and definitely not looking for new work, but this seems worthwhile.

The things you do for love (of HIStalk, hopefully): (a) sign up for e-mail updates to your right, giving me direct access to your brain jack so I can project my electronic power of suggestion; (b) send me news, rumors, secret documents, comments, and guest articles; (c) connect with HIStalk, Inga, Dr. Jayne, and me on your favorite social not-work; (d) peruse with wide-eyed wonderment the mosaic of ads of sponsors who support the “HIT information wants to be free” concept by supporting my endless toil, and who would greatly appreciate in return clicks and/or consideration if you are in the market for that which they offer; and (e) beam occasional positive karma our way since we don’t go public with our fears, mistakes, and disappointments, but we’re loaded with them just like everybody else. And for you, a double-barrel index finger point (I’m thinking Isaac the bartender on Love Boat since I’ll be mentioning Doc down the page) — thanks for reading.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cerner will acquire Resource Systems, the 30-year-old Concord, OH company that sells CareTracker, an electronic documentation system for skilled nursing and assisted living facilities.

HCA launches Parallon Business Solutions, a business services subsidiary that will offer services for revenue cycle, workforce management, supply chain, and group purchasing.

Secure healthcare network vendor Ability Network (formerly VisionShare) closes on nearly $20 million venture capital, led by Lemhi Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures.

Cleveland Clinic spinoff Explorys closes $11.5 million in Series C financing. The company’s cloud computing data warehouse aggregates and curates EHR data from multiple systems to allow population analysis, with customers that include Cleveland Clinic, MedStar, Summa, and MetroHealth.

Sales

Anthelio Healthcare Solutions (formerly PHNS) contracts with MedQuist to implement its DocQment enterprise platform at eight of its client hospitals.

The New York City Health & Hospitals Corporation signs a five-year, $20 million support contract extension with QuadraMed for the QCPR inpatient clinical system.

People

GE Healthcare’s Health Systems division CEO Omar Ishrak is named chairman and CEO of Medtronic, replacing the retiring William A. Hawkins. He’ll be replaced at GE by Tom Gentile, moved over from GE Aviation. The division sells medical technology, such as CT, MR, life support systems, and home health. GE also announces that it has created a new business called Global Services that will take over GE Healthcare’s services strategy, to be led by North American services leader Mike Swinford.

Announcements and Implementations

Business analytics software vendor SAS forms the SAS Center for Health Analytics and Insights, an internal incubator that will focus on applying analytics to patient data with the goal of improving healthcare quality and lowering cost. Areas of interest include evidence-based medicine and cost analysis. To which I’ll also add for you PR types: this is how press releases should be written — short, straightforward, chunked into easily readable paragraphs, and not turned into mind-numbing mush by overzealous, trademark symbol-wielding marketing people determined to collectively suck the life out of what started out as something interesting.

Corepoint Health’s integration engine receives ONC-ATCB Modular Ambulatory EHR and Modular Inpatient EHR certification.

Crystal Cruises goes live with Emergisoft Maritime, an EHR specifically for cruise ship crew and guests. I’m picturing the sleazy, shorts-wearing Doc from Love Boat (c’mon, you know you want to sing it with me: “Loooove, exciiiiiiting and new …”) having even more time to letch around with bimbettes half his age, apparently unrestricted out there in international waters of any ethical or legal concerns that would prohibit him from putting his smoove moves on patients.

Government and Politics

CHIME and AMGA announce their opposition to several provisions in the proposed ACO rule. CHIME objects to a privacy provision that would allow patients to opt out of data sharing while maintaining their ability to see primary care physicians within the ACO. It also takes issue with the requirement that 50% of an ACO’s primary care providers must meet MU standards by the ACO’s second year. Meanwhile, AMGA says 93% of its members would not enroll in an ACO based on the proposed framework, which AMGA considers “overly prescriptive, operationally burdensome.” Top concerns center around risk-sharing, static risk adjustment, retrospective attribution, quality measurement, and minimum savings.

In the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron says the government may cancel some or all of CSC’s $5 billion contract to install iSoft’s Lorenzo. CSC has been threatened previously for missing deadlines, and if it finally gets the boot, only BT will be left of the original four big contractors (Accenture and Fujitsu already bailed and were fired, respectively).

Innovation and Research

A University of Arizona study finds that 72% of the software used by retail pharmacies in the state cannot detect all significant drug-drug interactions.

Other

Thirty-four percent of all office-based prescribers were using e-prescribing by the end of 2010. Cardiologists had the highest adoption rates (49%) followed by family physicians (47%.) Providers created 326 million e-prescriptions in 2010, up from 190 million in 2009.

The Triangle/Eastern NC Chapter for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation recognizes Allscripts and EVP Diane K. Adams, who along with CEO Glen Tullman, has family members with juvenile diabetes. Allscripts has contributed over $1 million to JDRF since 2004.

Weird News Andy celebrates what he calls “the breast app ever!” A plastic surgeon develops an app that uses 3D imaging to allow prospective breast implantees to visualize their new protuberances, followed by easy posting of the “check these out” pictures directly to Facebook so that cyber-acquaintances, business associates, and elementary school aged nieces and nephews can weigh in on the proposed alterations.

This came in my work e-mail from some vendor. Somehow I don’t have a lot of confidence in their “HIPPA” wisdom.

SCI Solutions provides laptops and cash donations from its employees to a project run by some surfer buds (one of them SCI SVP Vinnie Whibbs) and some non-profits to provide resources to students and for community projects at Playa Gigante, Nicaragua.

The LBJ School of Public Affairs and the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation will hold the one-day Health Privacy Summit: Getting IT Right: Protecting Patient Privacy in a Wired World on June 13 in Washington, DC, a public forum to address health privacy. Speakers include quite a few folks from government and academia, along with HIT-recognizable names Barry Chaiken (former HIMSS board chair and Imprivata CMO), Mark Frisse (Vanderbilt), Deborah Peel MD (founder, Patient Privacy Rights), Joy Pritts (chief privacy officer, ONC), Michael Stearns (president and CEO, e-MDs), and Latanya Sweeney (the Carnegie Mellon professor who proved that it’s not that hard to re-identify de-identified data when you match it up to a second database). Registration is $100 general, $75 government or academic, and $50 for students. I’d go if it wasn’t tough to get time off from work on relatively short notice, so if you’re attending and want to report from there, do it.

A coroner in Australia rules that a woman’s death after gall bladder surgery was due to medical error. Her gall bladder had been removed 10 years before, but radiology staff misidentified intestinal gas bubbles, the surgeon overlooked the medical history entry about her previous surgery, and everybody noticed but nobody questioned the scar on her abdomen. She died of post-surgical sepsis. Her granddaughter says she hopes the medical system will change so that clinical documentation is shared among physician practices and hospitals.

Sponsor Updates

• Onze Lieve Vrouwe Gasthuis hospital in Amsterdam deploys iMDsoft’s MetaVision to provide tele-intensivist monitoring.
• Moore Regional Hospital (NC) picks ProVation MD for gastroenterology procedure documentation and coding.
• CareTech Solutions launches iDoc Savings Calculator, which estimates savings from implementing its iDoc document imaging and management product.
• Universal American Corp., a Medicare health benefits company, collaborates with NextGen to offer participating physicians access to NextGen’s EHR in multiple markets
• The Texas e-Health Alliance appoints ICA CEO Gary Zegiestowsky to its board.
• The Centre hospitalier Pierre-Janet in Quebec adopts the Vocera voice communication system.
• DIVURGENT announces new hires: Matt Curtain (client services VP), Sarah Rourke (recruiter), and Christina Pena Jones, DHA, (nurse educator).
• Nashville-based iPractice Group will resell Greenway’s PrimeSUITE.

EPtalk by Dr. Jayne

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently launched the first phase of its Physician Compare Web site, which is supposed to display physician address information, medical education, credentials, gender, etc. as well as whether physicians reported quality data to CMS.

Like any good Internet junkie, I of course had to search myself. Not surprisingly, my listing has errors, as does the listing which appears below mine alphabetically (it happens to be a former colleague of mine whose details I know as well as my own).

My listing includes a practice address where I haven’t provided patient care for more than four years, as well as practices where I have never provided care. There’s even a location listed for me that belongs to a practice that used to be owned by my group, but was sold more than a year ago.

This does not give me great comfort in the skills of CMS to accurately portray my ability to report quality data (especially since they can’t accurately portray my address). Phase Two of the site will launch later this year and identify whether physicians are e-prescribing or not. Quality data will be available by 2013. I hope in that time frame they can figure out where I practice.

Speaking of government, for those of you who missed it, Newt Gingrich is officially seeking the Republican nomination for President. Gingrich has been dabbling in the healthcare space for some time, largely through his for-profit Center for Health Transformation (CHT), so this should be interesting.

CHT has a white paper about Accountable Care Organizations that features some well-known examples of ACO-type organizations. It’s pretty basic, but a decent read for those that need a quick study of ACO 101.

Newt’s proposed healthcare reforms are detailed on his Web site and include rewarding quality care, incentivizing health behaviors, stopping fraud, and educating patients on price and quality. For those of us in healthcare IT, the good times will continue to roll as there is more and more focus on data mining to support these efforts.

By the time the 2012 election rolls around, I’ll be sick and tired of the politics along with everyone else. On the other hand, I won’t have to worry about having enough material for HIStalk. Round and round health reform goes; where it stops, nobody knows!

Contacts

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

HITlaw 5/11/11

Termination Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry, Right?

A good learning situation sprang to the forefront of my creative thoughts the other day. I was representing a great EHR vendor (a great client and a great EHR) in a substantial deal and ran into a surprising request from opposing counsel regarding the default / termination process and procedure. In the end, the issue was resolved quite simply and quickly by taking a different path, but I will save that for the end.

The provider / customer side did a very good job of establishing certain milestone events, such as the operational date for e-prescribing, the vendor’s EHR certification deadline, and go-live for the then-certified EHR. Kudos to them because they set the bar precisely where they needed it. The vendor realized the importance and accommodated.

You can guess where this is leading. Failure to meet a milestone event gives the client the option to terminate.

A very straightforward default procedure was included in the standard vendor agreement — one party provides written notice to the other regarding any alleged default, then the supposedly defaulting party has 30 days to cure the problem. If the problem is not cured at the end of the 30-day period, the party that alleged the default has the option to terminate the agreement.

Termination was specifically addressed to include terms such as:

• All licenses granted terminate and all rights automatically revert to the granting party
• Payments due at date of termination must be made within 30 days of termination
• Each party returns the other party’s confidential information, including the software and all associated documentation

Simple, no? No.

The other side wanted to bifurcate the issue and create two sets of “termination” procedures. The first (same as above) required that all licenses and rights granted under the agreement return to the grantor and the agreement terminates. Everything is over and done and the parties go their separate ways. The second proposed that there were conditions where the agreement could be terminated due to certain actions of the customer/user, but that the EHR software would remain in use by the customer/user.

It took two document turns, some polite but blunt e-mails, and two conference calls to assure the negotiators on the other side that there was no scenario under which the license could be terminated and the customer could retain use of the software.

For those of you shaking your heads in amazement, there was credible rationale behind the request, which was basically, “We understand the need to terminate absolutely in most situations, but we don’t want the vendor to be able to walk away for seemingly small issues that could rise to the level of default.”

The conversation between us attorneys at the end went very quickly. If I would add language stating that termination of ongoing maintenance support is at the customer’s option, and that terminating maintenance will not terminate the licenses and other rights granted under the agreement, then we would be all set and the default / termination provision would be acceptable as drafted.

That was it. All we needed was a clarification on maintenance cancellation and the whole issue was put away.

As for me, familiarity with an agreement sometimes begets a comfort that anyone picking up the agreement immediately adopts your perspective and interpretation of the terms and conditions. Not always the case — sometimes I need a reminder.

Lessons for the Day

In the SaaS model, there is no separate license fee and maintenance fee. Both are rolled into the recurring subscription fee. Termination means termination. Everything is over. No access to the software, no service, no maintenance.

On the other hand, in the perpetual license model, the ongoing maintenance features and obligations can be cancelled separately.

Note that I used the term “cancellation” to make a point. The customer in this model pays the fee for perpetual use of the software. Cancelling maintenance does not (should not) alter in any way or manner the license of use previously granted to the client. But general termination is the same in both models — terminate the entire agreement and you terminate use of the software.

Finally, what you believe is plain understandable language might not be to everyone. So keep the terms (and with respect to termination, options) clean and clear in your agreements. It saves time and money up front and in the long run by eliminating confusion.

Please note the above was intended to be short and sweet. There are many other issues that pertain to termination, such as transition services, data extraction, and historical system access — the list goes on. My point is straightforward. Keep it clean, clear, and above all, understandable. If termination, then XYZ.

William O’Toole is the founder of O’Toole Law Group of Duxbury, MA.