News 10/6/11

From Elvis 2.0: “Re: MGMA picks. MGMA has posted a series of ‘Webisodes’ highlighting the details of this year’s conference, exhibit hall events, and fun stuff to do while in Las Vegas. Thought you might be interested to know that on Sunday afternoon, you can watch Cirque du Soleil in the exhibit hall while drinking wine and beer.” I am so there. Elvis also recommends the Healthcare Innovation Pavilion, which features 20-minute educational sessions on a variety of topics. Sounds like a good pick, given my limited attention span.

In his latest blog post, SRS CEO Evan Steele  makes an interesting observation about customer satisfaction and company ownership. Turns out that in the latest KLAS rankings,  five of the six top EHR vendors are privately held, while the bottom six vendors are publically traded. Steele’s theory: publicly traded companies are beholden to Wall Street and may sacrifice product and support issues in favor of earnings, while privately held companies are accountable first and foremost to their clients. I am guessing one of the top three vendors is Greenway, which is the process of going public. Based on Steele’s theory, it will be interesting to compare their current rankings with those a year from now.

Speaking of SRS, the company announces a partnership with Omedix to incorporate Omedix’s patient portal technology into the SRS EHR.

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

NaviNet introduces the Doc Xchange program, which allows providers to exchange medical documents electronically with other providers, HIEs, and insurance companies.

3M Health Information Systems releases a new version of its 3M Coding and Reimbursement System, which includes an ICD-10 Readiness Tool. The upgrade, which is free to current 3M coding clients, features a translation window that allows coders to complete ICD-9 to ICD-10 code translations.

The local paper highlights Westport Family Medical Center’s (MA) September 12 implementation of eClinicalWorks. The office manager notes that, “Six months from now everyone will love it, but getting from A to B will be arduous,” while one of the doctor says, “This week’s much better than last week and I expect next week to be close to not a problem.” I’d say they have the right attitudes.

eClinicalWorks, by the way, introduced several new products at its National User Conference this week:

• Patient Apps, which will run on any Web-enabled service, and give patients the ability to set reminders for treatment compliance and record pertinent health data.
• Project Scribe,  which allows providers to enter data through dictation or typing free text and have the information automatically populate the patient progress note in the appropriate fields.
• Project Nimbus, which enables practices to view and update patient data during outages.
• eClinicalWorks for iPad.

Almost half of all physicians admit to seeing encounter diagnostic errors in their practice at least monthly, while 75% are “confident” that decision support tools and artificial intelligence aids will help prevent diagnostic errors in the future.

E-mail Inga.