News 3/30/16

Top News

Today marks the 25th anniversary of National Doctors Day. Signed into law by President George Bush in 1991, the day serves as a nice excuse to recognize physicians, their commitment to patients, and their contributions to the community (not to mention the healthcare IT-related suffering they’ve endured over the last several years.) With physician burnout reaching new highs, do your favorite MD a favor and send them a note of thanks – preferably through their patient portal so they can check that patient engagement box for MU.

Webinars

April 1 (Friday) 1:00 ET. “rise of the small-first-letter vendors … and the race to integrate HIS & MD systems.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Frank L. Poggio, president and CEO, The Kelzon Group; Vince Ciotti, principal, HIS Professionals. Vince and Frank are back with their brutally honest (and often humorous) opinions about the rise of the small-first-letter vendors. Athenahealth and eClinicalWorks are following a growing trend toward real integration between hospital and physician systems, but this is not a new phenomenon. What have we learned from these same efforts over the last 30 years? What are the implications for hospital and ambulatory clients? What can clients expect based on past experience?

April 8 (Friday) 1:00 ET. “Ransomware in Healthcare: Tactics, Techniques, and Response.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenter: John Gomez, CEO, Sensato. Ransomware continues to be an effective attack against healthcare infrastructure, with the clear ability to disrupt operations and impact patient care. This webinar will provide an inside look at how attackers use ransomware; why it so effective; and recommendations for mitigation.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Announcements and Implementations

Illinois Cancer Specialists – part of The US Oncology Network – partners with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois to launch the state’s first oncology intensive medical home pilot. The program will enroll 150-200 patients annually, each of whom will participate for six-month stints. “This program with BCBSIL gives us valuable data that providers can use to improve the care our patients receive,” says ICS Practice President David Hakimian, MD. “This is a real opportunity for direct access to quality and cost data that will help inform decisions about how best to care for our patients. Blue Cross is making this level of transparency possible, something that wouldn’t otherwise be available to us.”

Jersey City, NJ-based ITelagen integrates TransFirst payment processing tools into its EHR.

Telemedicine

HealthTap announces its US network of virtual care physicians has grown to over 100,000. A fun HealthTap fact on this National Doctor’s Day: The Palo Alto, CA-based company’s physicians have received nearly 29,000 notes thanking them for saving a patient’s life.

Government and Politics

An Office of Management and Budget analysis shows that federal agencies have quite a bit of work to do when it comes to meeting their cybersecurity responsibilities. Agencies scored 68 out of 100 overall in 2015 – an 8-percent drop from 2014 that the office attributes to a more thorough scoring methodology. HHS scored 58 last year – quite an improvement from its 2014 score of 35.

NIST publishes a new computer security standard that it claims will help protect credit card numbers and potentially protect personal health information. I don’t pretend to completely understand the ins and outs of the two new techniques for “format-preserving encryption,” but I can surmise that it may help to disassociate Social Security numbers from sensitive health data used for treatment research. Security experts can check out NIST’s FPE recommendation here.

Other

Looks like employers have their work cut out for them in this new era of rampant cyberattacks: A SailPoint survey finds that one in five employees would sell their company passwords for less than $100 – a stat that has risen from last year’s one in seven. US-based staff were most willing to sell out their employers, though France beat them in terms of a willingness to accept low offers. Equally sad is the fact that two-thirds of respondents use the same password for multiple apps; a third confessed to sharing passwords with colleagues.

Privacy concerns surface as wearables come to schools. A school board in Connecticut debated the benefits and drawbacks of purchasing Polar heart-rate monitors for seventh and eight graders as part of a monitoring activity in PE. Concerns ranged from what Polar employees may do with student data to how to de-identify the data without impacting the purpose of the project. “I just don’t view [student names and heart rates] as particularly problematic if it were to get out there,” said one school board member. “If you had your address, parent names, social security number, that sort of stuff, which is frankly shared on a daily basis by all of us, I think that’s a lot more problematic.”

Similar concerns are associated with site-tracking software installed on school-provided laptops. Ontario Christian Schools provided students with GoGuardian-equipped laptops, which, in addition to blocking “timewaster” sites like Netflix, also alerted school officials to suicide-related search histories. The alerts, which successfully led to school and parental intervention, have also prompted privacy concerns. “On the surface,” says Carolyn Stone, ethics chair of the American School Counselor Association, “it sounds like a very good idea to err on the side of caution when it comes to student suicide. But this is something that sounds like it could spin out of control. … It’s a slippery slope.”

Sponsor Updates

• Aprima will exhibit at the Texas MGMA Annual Meeting March 30-April 1 in Dallas.
• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at the 2016 Health Care Symposium April 1 in Costa Mesa, CA.
• Healthwise will present at the Society of Behavioral Medicine meeting March 30-April 2 in Washington, DC.

Blog Posts

• EHR Improvements After the AMA “Hateful 8” List (AdvancedMD)

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 3/29/16

Top News

The CVS Health Foundation awards $1.5 million in grants to 46 community health centers and free clinics. The funds will be used for a variety of improvement programs including care coordination, chronic disease management, outcomes measurement, and telenursing. Hunterdon Healthcare Foundation (NJ), whose team is pictured above, will use its $10,000 to fund its Visiting Health and Supportive Services Telehealth Program. Many of the recipients will also use the funds to hire additional staff, and expand hours and services.

Webinars

April 1 (Friday) 1:00 ET. “rise of the small-first-letter vendors … and the race to integrate HIS & MD systems.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Frank L. Poggio, president and CEO, The Kelzon Group; Vince Ciotti, principal, HIS Professionals. Vince and Frank are back with their brutally honest (and often humorous) opinions about the rise of the small-first-letter vendors. Athenahealth and eClinicalWorks are following a growing trend toward real integration between hospital and physician systems, but this is not a new phenomenon. What have we learned from these same efforts over the last 30 years? What are the implications for hospital and ambulatory clients? What can clients expect based on past experience?

April 8 (Friday) 1:00 ET. “Ransomware in Healthcare: Tactics, Techniques, and Response.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenter: John Gomez, CEO, Sensato. Ransomware continues to be an effective attack against healthcare infrastructure, with the clear ability to disrupt operations and impact patient care. This webinar will provide an inside look at how attackers use ransomware; why it so effective; and recommendations for mitigation.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Louisville, KY-based startup Lucina Health (fka CerviLenz) unveils its headquarters and announces its first customer, Passport Health Plan. The six-employee company uses data analytics to help health plans identify pregnant women with a variety of risk factors for preterm birth, and provides steps the moms-to-be can take to avoid complications. It anticipates hiring another 10 to 15 staff within the year, and expanding its services to other conditions like diabetes and obesity.

Physicians looking for a change of scenery way want to consider moving to Mississippi, Iowa or Minnesota – ranked by WalletHub as the top three states for physicians based on opportunity, competition, and medical quality. Rhode Island, New York, and Washington, DC make up the bottom three.

Announcements and Implementations

Kids First Pediatrics (GA) implements PatientPay’s paperless billing software across its three locations.

Patient reminders business PatientlySpeaking now supports PracticePro PM software from Medical Transcription Billing Corp.

ChartLogic partners with Change Healthcare to add a lab ordering system to its EHR. The partnership will also enable ChartLogic users to connect to labs across the country via Change Healthcare’s Clinical Network.

Telemedicine

WellCare’s StayWell health plan offers its Medicaid members in Florida access to behavioral healthcare via telemedicine. Orlando-based Impower, a nonprofit mental health and child wellbeing organization, has been a key partner in piloting the service. It was previously the only organization of its kind in Florida with permission from the state to prescribe controlled substances to telemedicine members. The Florida Board of Medicine loosened its regulations earlier this month to allow other telemedicine providers to also prescribe under the appropriate conditions.

The FTC applauds proposed “procompetitive” legislation from Alaskan lawmakers that would give out-of-state doctors the ability to treat in-state patients. “These provisions would likely increase the supply of telehealth providers, enhance competition, and reduce health care costs,” the FTC writes, “thereby benefiting Alaskans, especially underserved populations with limited access to health care.”

A study of California Public Employee Retirement System HMO claims finds that office-based doctors were more likely to order the appropriate step test than were Teladoc physicians, who also inappropriately ordered antibiotics for bronchitis more often than their brick-and-mortar counterparts. The study also found that Teladoc users were not located in underserved communities. It’s worth noting the data was collected between 2012 and 2013; perhaps Teladoc has improved its prescribing practices.

Government and Politics

AHRQ looks to fund grant proposals focused on researching safe healthcare IT practices related to design, implementation, and usability by all users including patients and caregivers. The agency hopes to use resulting projects and their evidence to guide health IT certification and policy.

Research and Innovation

Anti-addiction advocacy group Shatterproof compiles a 52-page report on prescription drug monitoring programs and the state legislation needed to make them truly effective. The New York-based organization includes 12 guiding practices, many of which focus on linking, sharing, and tracking data.

Other

Consumer Reports rolls out primary care practice ratings for eight states based on how well they provide evidence-based care for common health problems. The data seems to be culled from commercial payers, HMOs, and voluntary and state-mandated reporting from the practices. “These regions all deserve credit for pushing for this effort,” says medical consultant John Santa, MD “as do practices that have agreed to share the information — especially those who may not do so well. That takes courage and a commitment to honesty and transparency — qualities that are also essential to good medicine.”

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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DOCtalk with Dr. Gregg 3/29/16

Post-HIMSS 2016: Settled Dust & Workflow Friendliness

It’s been long enough now that the 2016 post-HIMSS dust has settled. Monitoring each and every one of the showtime products, vendors, events, and such isn’t possible, nor is monitoring all of the post-HIMSS analysis that inevitably follows. Add to that the fact that at this time of year, and at this year’s HIMSS, I have barely had time to breathe, no less stay up on the blogosphere and email blasts, and I admit to feeling a little not-so-in-touch with the usual pre-, post-, and intra-HIMSS hoopla.

However, this year seems different. It seems there’s less rave and more yawn. Maybe it’s just my somewhat disconnectedness, but maybe it’s that there just wasn’t quite as much to get excited about this year. That settled dust seems to have gathered on my EHR brain.

Or, perhaps, it’s that we’re moving from the entrepreneurially-dominated, disruptive-type early phase of HIT adoption into the more sedentary and, well, dull phase of incremental HIT advancement, such as in Gartner’s Hype Cycle “Plateau of Productivity.”

If this is true, then it wouldn’t be a big surprise that while the HIMSS bacchanalia is as big or bigger than ever, the upshot hype would be somewhat less adrenalin-inducing.

Given my schedule, my rather poor connectivity of late, and the above, I thought I’d wait until after all the dust had settled to see what rose to a radar blip that might be worth checking into. And, a couple of things that really floated my HIT boat did ping the scanner, though both are definitely more incremental advances than cool new tool tech. Perhaps they caught my attention because both are heavy on near-and-dear-to-my-heart workflow-friendliness, but thank goodness for such advances!

The first is the new “Quippe Clinical Lens” from the folks at Medicomp Systems. If you didn’t make it by any of their now-annual Jeopardy-like events (“Quipstar” as they call them), then you missed out on a very clinician-friendly, new middleware tool that any provider would enjoy, especially docs, nurses, etc. who provide care for multi-problem patients, or who see patients with multiple providers, or who just like to be able to find truly relevant information with as little fuss and muss as possible.

Providers – you know how difficult it can often be to find what you need in long patient charts, voluminous problem lists, extensive medication lists, and laboriously lengthy lab histories. Even with EHRs, finding relevant bits and pieces of info amidst the ones and zeroes can often be about as problematic as it was with paper, despite the notion that digitized records are supposedly so much better than paper charts for information manipulation and retrieval. With Clinical Lens integrated into your EHR, data finding becomes what it should be in a digitized world.

Pick a problem, pick a drug, pick something you want to know more about, and Clinical Lens immediately shows its clinical savvy via massive mappings between SNOMED-CT, Medcin, HL-7, LOINC, Rx-Norm, ICD-10, CPT, etc. to put related data right to your eyes. Medicomp provides an “easy to use SDK” allowing your EHR vendor to fully integrate this tech into your current system. Imagine not having to leave your well-rehearsed current workflow, yet now being able to immediately find related, relevant data simply by highlighting one particular data element. Very, very provider-friendly!

The other really cool HIT “wowzie woozie” I’ve seen of late actually didn’t come via HIMSS; in fact, I don’t think they even participated in Vegas. But, they did connect with me during the post-HIMSS period and I loved what they’re doing so much, I couldn’t help but include it in my post-HIMSS considerations.

InLight EHR, from the folks at Pri-Med, has been making great strides since it launched last year. They take their vision from HIT grandfather Lawrence Weed, MD and put the problem-oriented medical record (POMR) front and center. Any physician alive today will attest to training in the POMR format; it’s a standard for medical documentation and truly “a way doctors think.” (Virtually every EHR/EMR out there claims to “work the way doctors think” – virtually none of them do.)

Not only does InLight organize all information – labs, meds, orders, notes, referrals, etc. – around the patient problem list, but it does so within a very eye-friendly, Web 2.0-sort of way. Very easy to use.

As if this weren’t enough, they have also acquired the IP behind the very best patient portal I have ever seen – my dear, sort-of-departed konciergeMD. InLight now calls it “Thrive,” and though it hasn’t yet been deployed, I was able to see a sneak peek. I can verify that it is in very good hands! (Still the best looking, most patient-friendly, and workflow-savvy patient portal I’ve ever seen.)

Such workflow-friendly and/or -enhancing tools as the ones above may be putting a little hype back into the HIT Plateau of Productivity. (They certainly have blown the settled dust off my EHR-frustrated brain!)

From the trenches…

“When the dust settles and the pages of history are written, it will not be the angry defenders of intolerance who have made the difference. The reward will go to those who dared to step outside the safety of their privacy in order to expose and rout the prevailing prejudices.” – Bishop John Shelby Spong

Dr. Gregg Alexander, a grunt in the trenches pediatrician at Madison Pediatrics, is chief medical officer for Health Nuts Media, an HIT and marketing consultant, sits on the board of directors of the Ohio Health Information Partnership, and is the semi-proud author of “Monsters Don’t Fart!”

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 3/28/16

Top News

There’s no stopping I-STOP: New York’s mandatory e-prescribing mandate goes into effect over the weekend despite an uncertain level of prescriber readiness even after the 12-month postponement a year ago. Paper or call-in prescriptions can be issued upon patient request or upon technology failure, which then requires the prescribing physician to report the prescription to the state’s Department of Health, which has not implemented appropriate reporting technology and suggests that prescribers just note it in the EHR instead. Medical Society of the State of New York President Joseph Maldonado, MD has asked for two exceptions to the new requirement – exempting providers that write less than 25 prescriptions per year and reducing documentation requirements when technical problems temporarily force physicians back to paper.

Webinars

April 1 (Friday) 1:00 ET. “rise of the small-first-letter vendors … and the race to integrate HIS & MD systems.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Frank L. Poggio, president and CEO, The Kelzon Group; Vince Ciotti, principal, HIS Professionals. Vince and Frank are back with their brutally honest (and often humorous) opinions about the rise of the small-first-letter vendors. Athenahealth and eClinicalWorks are following a growing trend toward real integration between hospital and physician systems, but this is not a new phenomenon. What have we learned from these same efforts over the last 30 years? What are the implications for hospital and ambulatory clients? What can clients expect based on past experience?

April 8 (Friday) 1:00 ET. “Ransomware in Healthcare: Tactics, Techniques, and Response.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenter: John Gomez, CEO, Sensato. Ransomware continues to be an effective attack against healthcare infrastructure, with the clear ability to disrupt operations and impact patient care. This webinar will provide an inside look at how attackers use ransomware; why it so effective; and recommendations for mitigation.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Here’s the recording of last week’s webinar, “Six Communication Best Practices for Reducing Readmissions and Capturing TCM Revenue.”

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Japan’s NTT Data will buy Dell’s IT services business, the former Perot Systems, for $3.05 billion. Dell is selling the business, which it acquired for $3.9 billion in 2009, to raise money to finance its $60 billion acquisition of storage vendor EMC.

On-demand healthcare provider and payer Zoom+ will relocate its Portland headquarters to the capitol’s Pearl District next year. The company’s new offices will take up 30,000 square feet, house 300 employees including medical professionals and technologists, and will include a virtual care hub and innovation lab.

People

Erika Running (Jacobus Consulting) returns to Sisu Healthcare IT Solutions in the new position of vice president of analytics.

Andrea De La Bruere (Ingenuity Health) joins Vermont Information Technology Leaders as senior solutions specialist.

Anna Baird (RadiumOne) and Baljeet Singh (Twitter) join Livongo Health as CFO and vice president of product management, respectively.

Telemedicine

A study of 500 insured consumers who use Web-based health tools and apps finds that telemedicine may have a consumer awareness problem. Thirty-nine percent of those surveyed hadn’t heard of telemedicine. Ninety-three percent of those that have report that it has lowered their healthcare costs. Over 25 percent are unsure of when and when not to use telemedicine. Given that just a third of the respondent health plans offer telemedicine, it seems there’s a big opportunity for payers to help bridge this knowledge gap and lower member costs.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts partners with American Well to offer its members telemedicine services. The launch comes a year after the start of what was initially a two-year BCBSMA/American Well telemedicine pilot program with several physician practices and Blue Cross nurse care managers.

The ATA takes the Washington, D.C. Department of Health to task for its proposed telemedicine rules, which the association deems “onerous and arbitrary” due to ambiguous phrasing; lack of consistency; the need for additional, potentially burdensome patient consent; and an emphasis on tools over clinical expertise.

Government and Politics

The National Association of ACOs and 20 supporting organizations write to Acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt in response to the ACO benchmarking proposed rule issued by CMS early last month. The signers voice their support for incorporating regional cost data into benchmarks, and advocate for the designation of all MSSP ACOs as qualifying alternative payment models under MACRA.

ACT | The App Association urges The White House to rethink its draft data security policies for the Precision Medicine Initiative, particularly as they pertain to small- and medium-sized entities who may face prohibitive costs in complying with them.  “For example,” writes the association, “small- and medium-sized entities may find difficulty in attaining independent third-party reviews of their security plans that, at minimum, include ‘a review of the organization’s adherence to its security plan; regular vulnerability assessments; and evaluation and adjustment of the security program in light of vulnerability assessments and evolving circumstances’ without facing prohibitive costs that are not scaled to the risk they should be managing per the NIST Cybersecurity Framework’s approach.”

Other

Drumroll please: The HIStalk Practice Award for Best Headline goes to … “All Right Stop, Collaborate and Listen! CMS is Back with its Brand New Invention, Preparing for CJR Gainsharing” and “America’s Med Students are a Bunch of Drunks” (from Vice’s Munchies microsite, of course). I’ll let you take time out of your day to read these winners.

The New York Times calls for federal oversight to ensure that employees aren’t discriminated against by their employers based on supposedly de-identified health data provided by companies like Castlight Health, which helps employers anticipate health insurance needs by analyzing employee healthcare claims and demographic data. “As data analysis techniques evolve, such services will be able to draw ever more sophisticated conclusions about people based on their health use,” NYT editors write. “Americans need federal protections to make sure that those conclusions don’t cost them their jobs.”

Sponsor Updates

• Medicity CEO Nancy Ham writes for the HFMA blog on “Determining the ROI of Clinical Care Technology.”
• EClinicalWorks releases a podcast recapping EClinicalWorks Day.
• The Boston Globe features Healthwise CMO Adam Husney, MD in an article on how perks from pharmaceutical companies influence prescribing medicine.
• PerfectServe and Versus Technology will exhibit at the AONE Annual Meeting March 30-April 2 in Fort Worth, TX.

Blog Posts

• Rise in Opioid Deaths, Driving Changes in Prescribing (E-MDs)

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice  updates.
Contact us online.
Become a sponsor.

Population Health Management Weekly Wrap Up 3/27/16

Population health management technology vendor Chess selects cloud procurement software from Verian to streamline its process for ordering goods and services. Chess will initially roll out the new WeProcurement system at Cornerstone Health Care (NC), its largest group practice client of over 300 physicians and advanced practice providers.

In the UK, integrated primary and acute care system Wirral Partners chooses Cerner’s HealtheIntent for population health management.

And speaking of Cerner, the company holds a topping-out ceremony for its $4.45 billion Cerner Trails campus in Kansas City, MO. The 16-building, 4.7 million square foot complex with two, 15-story towers will house up to 16,000 employees. Kansas City will pay $1.1 billion of the project’s cost.

Collaborative for Children and Families (NY) selects care coordination and population health technology from GSI Health to assist with its state-led Children’s Health Home, Medicaid Redesign Team Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (MRT DSRIP), and Medicaid Health Home population health programs.

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice  updates.
Contact us online.
Become a sponsor.