News 3/16/16

Top News

HHS announces the members of its Health Care Industry Cyber Security Task Force. Names that catch my eye include CISOs from Anthem, Merck, Sutter Health, and Cook Children’s Health Care System. The 22-member task force will meet four times this year, and will work to develop and submit a report on improving cybersecurity to Congress before it disbands in March 2017.

Webinars

March 22 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Six Communication Best Practices for Reducing Readmissions and Capturing TCM Revenue.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Chuck Hayes, VP of product management, West; Fonda Narke, senior director of healthcare product integration, West Healthcare Practice. Medicare payments for Transition Care Management (TCM) can not only reduce your exposure to hospital readmission penalties and improve patient outcomes, but also provide an important source of revenue in an era of shrinking reimbursements. Attendees will learn about the impacts of readmission penalties on the bottom line, how to estimate potential TCM revenue, as well as discover strategies for balancing automated patient communications with the clinical human touch to optimize clinical, financial, and operational outcomes. Don’t be caught on the sidelines as others close gaps in their 30-day post discharge programs.

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

Check out the Twitter recap of today’s HIStalk webinar featuring Children’s Hospital of Colorado’s journey with communications technologies from Spok. One of my favorite observations from CTO Andrew Blackmon: “We had so many devices we joked that we needed suspenders so scrubs wouldn’t fall down.”

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Management consulting firm Oliver Wyman predicts at least $200 billion of current healthcare spending will flow into alternative sites of care like retail clinics, urgent care centers, and telemedicine providers. The global company’s prediction stems from recent research that shows a sizeable uptick in consumer awareness and utilization of these services. Nearly 80 percent of those surveyed found care at an alternative site to be the same or better than a traditional physician’s office, proving once again that practices need to be on high alert when it comes to marketing and patient engagement in between appointments.

People

The Pennsylvania EHealth Partnership Authority promotes Kay Shaffer to certification, compliance, and privacy officer.

Telemedicine

Atlantic Spine Center (NJ and NY) launches virtual consultations. The new service also gives patients the ability to upload X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans for review by ASC physicians.

Government and Politics

Thirty-four provider organizations, including the American Academy of Family Physicians, American College of Physicians, MGMA, and the National Rural Health Association, write to Acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt asking for the return of the 90-day reporting period in 2016. The organizations stress that “announcing this as soon as possible will reduce the number of providers who will feel compelled to rely on filing for a hardship.”

Research and Innovation

San Francisco-based startup AliveCor is developing a heart-monitoring sensor for the Apple Watch. The sensor, which is awaiting FDA approval, will be accompanied by a speech-recognition app that generates real-time heart-rate analysis from users voicing their symptoms and touching the sensor, which snaps onto the back of the Watch. The app also lets users email their analyses to physicians. AliveCor CEO CEO Vic Gundotra, a former Google executive, is confident the app “will become the first FDA-cleared accessory for any smartwatch device.”

Dutch researchers conclude that disruptive patients do indeed affect a physician’s ability to make an accurate diagnosis. The study of 63 family practice residents found that their diagnostic accuracy suffered when dealing with disruptive patients, though “deliberate reflection” after the initial diagnosis helped to improve that accuracy. A patient’s “likability” also had no bearing on the amount of time a physician was willing to spend with them – disruptive patients were afforded just as much as non-disruptive ones. It would be interesting to conduct a similar survey with EHRs thrown into the mix. Would disruptive patients combined with too many clicks cause diagnostic errors?

Other

Patient Safety Week is in full swing. Sponsored by the National Patient Safety Foundation, the campaign seeks to raise awareness about safety issues in all healthcare settings. Providers and consumers can also take a pledge to “stand united in striving to reduce harm in patient care,” which also entails reading the foundation’s Free From Harm Report and hosting a related discussion group with staff.

Sponsor Updates

• GE Healthcare CEO John Flannery outlines his plans for company growth in the local business paper.
• GE Healthcare join The Patient Safety Movement’s Open Data Pledge.

Blog Posts

• 5 Essential Tips to Starting Your Independent Practice: Part 5 – Medicine as a Business (AdvancedMD)
• Patients and Doctors Divided on Access to Electronic Records (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.

News 3/15/16

Top News

HealthSpot holds a fire sale, putting all of its assets up for purchase after declaring bankruptcy in February. The health kiosk company generated $600,000 in revenue in 2015, up from $223 in 2014, and shut its doors with $5.17 million in assets and $23 million in liabilities. Companies such as Cox Communications and Xerox – two of HealthSpot’s largest investors – are among the 20 that have expressed interest in acquiring the now-defunct company’s 190 telemedicine booths and software. Xerox’s interest jives with what Chief Innovation Officer of Commercial Healthcare Tamara StClaire told me at HIMSS. She equated Xerox’s former partnership with HealthSpot as a learning lesson – one that has left the company now fully committed to remaining in the telemedicine space with an eye towards offering virtual queuing and payment processing. She wouldn’t name names, but did say that the company is in talks with several telemedicine vendors to prop up their IT infrastructure in the coming months.

Webinars

March 16 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Looking at the Big Picture for Strategic Communications at Children’s Hospital Colorado.” Sponsored by Spok. Presenters: Andrew Blackmon, CTO, Children’s Hospital Colorado; Hemant Goel, president, Spok. Children’s Hospital Colorado enhanced its care delivery by moving patient requests, critical code communications, on-call scheduling, and secure texting to a single mobile device platform. The hospital’s CTO will describe the results, the lessons learned in creating a big-picture communication strategy that improves workflows, and its plans for the future.

March 16 (Wednesday) noon ET. “The Physiology of Electronic Fetal Monitoring.” Sponsored by PeriGen. Presenter: Emily Hamilton, MDCM, SVP of clinical research, PeriGen. This webinar will review the physiology of EFM – the essentials of how the fetal heart reacts to labor. The intended audience is clinicians looking to understand the underlying principles of EFM to enhance interpretation of fetal heart rate tracings.

March 22 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Six Communication Best Practices for Reducing Readmissions and Capturing TCM Revenue.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Chuck Hayes, VP of product management, West; Fonda Narke, senior director of healthcare product integration, West Healthcare Practice. Medicare payments for Transition Care Management (TCM) can not only reduce your exposure to hospital readmission penalties and improve patient outcomes, but also provide an important source of revenue in an era of shrinking reimbursements. Attendees will learn about the impacts of readmission penalties on the bottom line, how to estimate potential TCM revenue, as well as discover strategies for balancing automated patient communications with the clinical human touch to optimize clinical, financial, and operational outcomes. Don’t be caught on the sidelines as others close gaps in their 30-day post discharge programs.

Announcements and Implementations

St. Clair Specialty Physicians (MI) completes its enterprise-wide implementation of MD Coder Dialysis charge-capture software from Medical Design Technologies.

Morris Heights Health Center (NY) implements EHR and population health management software from EClinicalWorks across its eight locations and 200 physicians. Included in the roll out is a patient portal and accompanying Healow smartphone app.

Airrosti selects PatientPay’s paperless billing solution and TransFirst’s healthcare payment processing services. The five-state chain of physical therapy centers is one of the first companies to take advantage of combined TransFirst-PatientPay offerings, the result of a strategic alliance announced last year.

Flatiron Health embeds Via Oncology’s evidence-based Pathways decision-support tools for eight types of tumors into its OncoEMR software. Pathways for additional types of tumors will be added later in the year.

People

Charles Koontz (Computer Sciences Corp.) joins GE Healthcare as president and CEO of GE Healthcare IT, and GE Healthcare Chief Digital Officer.

Government and Politics

ONC releases a final report on the State HIE Program, established via $564 million in HITECH Act funding to rapidly establish HIEs across the country. The 14-page report outlines program planning, implementation, operation, lessons learned, challenges (interoperability, funding, and sustainability), and impact. Fun fact: The report’s list of abbreviations includes a whopping 63 acronyms and their descriptions.

Telemedicine

Independence Blue Cross in Southeastern Pennsylvania begins offering telemedicine coverage. Members can take advantage of employer-sponsored virtual consults through MDLive, or through their local primary care physician.

24/7 Kid Doc signs a three-year agreement with 24/7 Pediatric Care Centers to supply on-call practitioners to meet expected demand as Kid Doc launches and expands its telemedicine services into school districts across the country.

Research and Innovation

A study in JAMA Internal Medicine finds that primary care physicians receive nearly 77 notifications daily from their EHRs, and that specialists receive close to 30. Researchers conclude that the average PCP spends at least 1 hour each day – uncompensated – managing their EHR inbox instead of making eye contact with patients. They add that, “[I]nbox notification capabilities should be periodically reviewed to be sure that this component of the EHR is working in the best interests of patient care and not creating an unnecessary burden on physicians.”

Other

AHRQ tailors its TeamStepps program to physician practices, offering practice leaders tools and resources to help them with quality improvement and practice transformation endeavors. TeamStepps for Office-Based Care is available as a classroom, online, or hybrid course.

Physicians looking to cope with burnout may want to attend The American Meditation Institute’s annual mind/body medicine conference October 25-29 in Lenox, MA. Physicians have a chance to earn 30 CME credit hours, courtesy of accreditation through the Albany Medical College Office of Continuing Medical Education. Conference curriculum will include mantra meditation, easy-gentle yoga, yoga psychology, nutrition, and functional medicine.

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.

HIStalk Practice Interviews Prakash Khot, CTO, Athenahealth

Prakash Khot is CTO of Athenahealth in Watertown, MA.

Tell me about yourself and the company.
I have about 24 years in the industry. I’m pretty much a self-made entrepreneur. I have founded three companies and I’ve successfully exited two. I’ve worked on aspects of technology up and down the stack. At this point in my career, I’m really interested in working at a company that actually means something to society – on something that can provide a unique value to where we live. That’s why I was attracted to Athenahealth, where I could apply a deep knowledge of technology and push the technology envelope as deep and as hard as possible. I’m hoping to provide some good solutions for healthcare, and hopefully help somebody get better sooner, help a doctor cure a patient sooner.

What are you hoping to bring to the table, given your previous experience at Kaseya and Salesforce, among other companies?
Broadly speaking, I have spent the last 10-plus years in building cloud-scalable systems – across the board, whether it’s the UI aspect of it, the middle tier, or even the infrastructure. I’m hoping to bring a lot of cumulative knowledge and experience to this company. I’ve largely been working at enterprise software companies; some very familiar with the rigors and the demands of client needs. I’ll also bring what I’ve learned exploring what social computing has done to user interfaces and user expectations. I’m also very familiar with the vast advances that we have made in pure-play technology, especially with respect to open source and what is there and what you can do with it.

That is my expertise, and if you really ask me what is the one area of focus that I want to bring to Athena, it’s to really advance the capabilities of our platform. I’m talking not just the surface area part of it, but the kind of user interfaces we can build, and the in-depth programming capabilities we can provide to our developers in-house and through our More Disruption Please program to the outside world. I’m really looking to help create that backbone. That is what I’m planning to do at the 100,000-feet level.

Given your time at Salesforce, how are you seeing the world of CRM and healthcare converge?
That’s a great question. Take a look at Salesforce and how it has evolved. It has evolved into a customer service company. They really want to make sure that their customers, and in turn the customers of their customers, are really successful. I think that sums it all up. In a way, we are here to make sure that healthcare actually works better. We want to help the provider, we want to help patients, we want to help everyone in between, so that patients get the care they need, the doctor gets paid on time, and we can let doctors be doctors. All of those ideas … they’re very similar to making customers successful. That’s one broad aspect.

I think getting our products to work really well together would be another Salesforce angle that I could tackle. You know, we are actually built on the same platform. We build the most tightly integrated part that you can see so that you can have an organic flow from one aspect of the work to another. I think I will continue to build on what we have already done in terms of our great platform, high integration, and a lot of expositive data. That’s what’s easy about analytics. I feel that I spent a lot of good, quality time defining what analytics means to that world.

Fortunately, we already use a lot of analytics at Athenahealth, so I’m hoping to build a great analytical studio over here as well. Those are some of the elements. Obviously, platform continues to be the common theme. We already have a great one. We’ll continue to enhance it and make it better every day. Those are the things I can see that is a clear overlap between that my Salesforce experience and experience thus far over here.

What specific projects will you be focused on in the coming months?
I think our platform services is going to be a great way to express and continue to build our platform. We are looking at a single-source of truth from a provider directory perspective. I’ll be doing some work in making sure that we provide that exposure to our internal teams as well to our MDP teams. I will take a look at all of our internal processes to see what we can do better. We are looking at a great new vision for our infrastructure as a service, so we can actually provide more computing and a safe computing environment for our partners, our customers, and ourselves. I’ll also be looking at how we can support the streamlining of clinical campaigns so that they are available to all of our existing and future customers. Those are some of the things that I’m going to focus on. I’m pretty certain the list will get longer.

Given that you’re coming to Athenahealth from outside of healthcare, I’d like to get your perspective on the company’s plans to move further into the inpatient market in 2016.
We are really focused on it and would love to provide those capabilities in as extensive a manner as possible. Since I am so new to this space, I’ll be focusing on looking at platform capabilities that exist today and how I can help the inpatient initiative move along faster so that we can have a comprehensive solution.

Are you making an effort to meet end users?
Meeting with enterprise clients is something I’m really, really familiar with and very comfortable with. I’ll start from there. I will actually talk to all of our stakeholders and customers. I think I will begin meeting with them on a quarterly basis to find out how they use the product, what do they actually see, what are their ideas, etc. I guess I’ll be travelling a lot.

How will the enhancements you’ll be working on specifically help physician practices?
We have some core principles over here that we to use in all of our decision-making. They’re related to scalability, stability, security, speed, and the speed of innovation. We will be doing things across our products that encompass these four things, and all of them will help our users. For example, if we really look at computing in the last 10, 15 years, we have gotten so much better at computing power, at storage architectures, networking paradigms, mobility, and end-user paradigms. We have made spectacular advances, and all of them really should be applied to healthcare so that the life of a doctor, of a patient, would be much simpler, much better. We would be the catalyst, making things much better very, very quickly. Mobility, for example, is of huge interest to me. Can I put a relevant set of information into the pockets of doctors so they can actually look things up? So that they can push orders from that particular device or app?  We’ll look at several new cases across all of these five areas to see how we can continue to better serve providers.

Again, as someone who’s coming from outside of healthcare, what’s your take on interoperability? What’s it going to take to get EHR vendors in on sharing data with competitors?
We are in a very unique position because we are a true EHR-in-the-cloud company. We have capabilities to surface the right set of interfaces to the outside world in a manner that is safe and secure, so that users can actually achieve interoperability. I think one thing we will do very well is to lead by example. Since we are in this unique position, we will do it the right way. We will actually help the standards move forward, and we’ll show everybody how it can be done and how it should be done. That way, we can provide leadership within our industry so that we can all effectively help patients and doctors. I think that it is definitely something I’m hoping that I can contribute to in a very meaningful way.

Do you have any final thoughts?
I think the world of social computing and enterprise computing or business computing in general has really started picking up speed in terms of being so close to the customer. They’ve become so relevant to the customer. They’re so easy to use. We could apply a whole lot from that world and actually make healthcare better. That is another area that I’m really excited about. We are this healthcare backbone network. What happens when all of this data gets together is that you can start mining that data, analyzing that data, to find out some interesting factors, interesting knowledge nuggets. Then, you can take those nuggets and start thinking about actions that can be associated with those to make that knowledge more actionable, and then we can provide all of the automation required for those actions. Because the one thing you need to analyze is a lot of data, and we have a lot of data. I am very excited about that part as well. Our goal is to make healthcare IT better. We let doctors be doctors. We will do everything in our capacity to make sure that there is that open platform and ability to exchange the data with everybody else. Those are the things that comes to mind in terms of parting thoughts.

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.

News 3/14/16

Top News

Florida legislators pass House Bill 7087, establishing telemedicine practice standards and requirements for out-of-state providers. The bill does not require an in-person exam to establish the physician-patient relationship, and does not include language referring to public and private payer reimbursement. It does outline steps for establishing a statewide Telehealth Advisory Council, which is charged with compiling and submitting a report on telemedicine opportunities and barriers to the governor by 2018. It’s worth nothing that the state has not yet introduced Interstate Medical Licensure Compact legislation, which would expedite the path to licensure for qualified physicians who wish to practice in outside of the state.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

Thanks to springing forward for daylight saving time yesterday, I’m too tired to celebrate National Pi Day today. The debate continues as to whether or not the elective time change does in fact save energy and money, as first suggested half jokingly by Ben Franklin in 1784. National Geographic has published an entertaining read on the history of DST. A favorite excerpt: “In 1965, somebody wandered into an 18-story office building in St. Paul, Minnesota, and discovered that it housed 9 floors of city employees who did observe [daylight saving time] and 9 floors of country employees who did not.” DST side effects today include a spike in heart attacks and car crashes, plus a dive in employee productivity. Happy Monday!

Webinars

March 16 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Looking at the Big Picture for Strategic Communications at Children’s Hospital Colorado.” Sponsored by Spok. Presenters: Andrew Blackmon, CTO, Children’s Hospital Colorado; Hemant Goel, president, Spok. Children’s Hospital Colorado enhanced its care delivery by moving patient requests, critical code communications, on-call scheduling, and secure texting to a single mobile device platform. The hospital’s CTO will describe the results, the lessons learned in creating a big-picture communication strategy that improves workflows, and its plans for the future.

March 16 (Wednesday) noon ET. “The Physiology of Electronic Fetal Monitoring.” Sponsored by PeriGen. Presenter: Emily Hamilton, MDCM, SVP of clinical research, PeriGen. This webinar will review the physiology of EFM – the essentials of how the fetal heart reacts to labor. The intended audience is clinicians looking to understand the underlying principles of EFM to enhance interpretation of fetal heart rate tracings.

March 22 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Six Communication Best Practices for Reducing Readmissions and Capturing TCM Revenue.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Chuck Hayes, VP of product management, West; Fonda Narke, senior director of healthcare product integration, West Healthcare Practice. Medicare payments for Transition Care Management (TCM) can not only reduce your exposure to hospital readmission penalties and improve patient outcomes, but also provide an important source of revenue in an era of shrinking reimbursements. Attendees will learn about the impacts of readmission penalties on the bottom line, how to estimate potential TCM revenue, as well as discover strategies for balancing automated patient communications with the clinical human touch to optimize clinical, financial, and operational outcomes. Don’t be caught on the sidelines as others close gaps in their 30-day post discharge programs.

Telemedicine

TokBox launches its telemedicine solution at SXSW, enabling developers to embed secure video, voice, and messaging capabilities into existing health and fitness apps.

Government and Politics

HHS announces that a total of 12.7 million consumers have signed up for insurance coverage during 2016 open enrollment periods. Nearly 5 million signed up during the most recent enrollment period. Over 9.6 million signed up via Healthcare.gov, while 3.1 million gained new or renewed coverage via state-based exchanges. Noticeably different this time around was consumer predilection to enroll at the beginning of open enrollment, rather than waiting until the last minute (as is typical with just about anything people have to sign up for). Earlier enrollments suggest increased ease of use and greater consumer awareness.

CMS will drop Social Security numbers from Medicare cards in 2018, when it will begin issuing cards with a new billing identifier. Over 60 million cards with the new identifier will be distributed between April 2018 and April 2019. The switch stems from MACRA-related efforts to cut down on identity theft. 

Research and Innovation

Nestlé uses Medidata’s Clinical Cloud platform and EPRO (electronic patient-reported outcomes) app to support a two-year intervention study in China. Launched last fall, the study is evaluating the impact of the company’s nutritional products combined with exercise on mobility in healthy aging adults with joint discomfort. In addition to the EPRO app, study participants have also been equipped with activity trackers to provide real-time objective data.

A survey of 1,035 consumers finds that ease of use is more important than trust when it comes to using online health resources. The online resources of advocacy groups ranked higher than WebMD and Wikipedia for trustworthiness, but fell behind the two more well-know sites for ease of use and popularity. Survey results also show that health system websites are increasing in popularity, with Mayo Clinic being the second most visited site behind WebMd.

Other

Complete Family Foot Care (NB) informs patients that its EHR vendor, San Jose, CA-based Bizmatics, was the victim of a server breach sometime last year. The hack may have resulted in the unauthorized access of patient files, though an ensuing investigation didn’t turn up such evidence.

Neurologist Lawrence Huntoon, MD shares his oratorical take on Medicare-related physician burnout in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons: “To be or not to be free, that is the question. Whether it is immutable fate to continue to accept a conflict of interest with our Medicare patients and suffer the abuse, excessive bureaucracy, and devaluation of services foisted upon us by the government Medicare program. Or, whether it is nobler to opt out of Medicare and reaffirm our professional ethics to serve the best interests of our patients without government interference… .”

Physicians looking for a career change may want to dust off their Japanese and apply to become one of the six ninjas Japan is hiring as part of its bid to boost “warlord” tourism. Ideal applicants should “enjoy being under the spotlight even though he or she is a secretive ninja.” I assume the paperwork would be minimal.

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 3/13/16

RedBrick Health names Todd Price (Oracle) vice president of software development and Dawn Zerneke (Healthways) vice president of client services.

Community Care of North Carolina wins the inaugural Hearst Health Prize, a $100,000 award given by Hearst Health and the Jefferson College of Population Health in recognition of outstanding achievement in managing or improving health. CCNC’s care management program serves 2,600 Medicaid recipients each month and focuses on individuals with chronic conditions at risk for hospitalization or readmission. CCNC President and CEO L. Allen Dobson Jr., MD attributes the program’s success to the use of “robust health analytics along with a statewide infrastructure and a network of physicians and hospitals has allowed us to manage the toughest patients well. Our drive to improve the health of North Carolinians has been grounded in collaboration and the use of data that have shown us how to improve outcomes and to reduce costs.”

President Obama launches The Opportunity Project, a public-private initiative that will use open datasets to foster economic mobility across the country. Via Opportunity.Census.gov, community decision-makers can now access these datasets to help them make more informed investments that will expand access to opportunity and reduce segregation. Data includes open data from the US Census Bureau and Departments of Education, Commerce, Agriculture, and HHS; plus local datasets from eight cities covering such community assets as playgrounds, grocery stores, and health clinics.

Rockville Internal Medicine Group (MD) signs on with Privia Medical Group to take advantage of its technology resources, and team-based care and wellness program expertise. PMG is part of Arlington, VA-based PM and population health management company Privia Health.

Sponsor Updates

• The local business paper profiles Leidos Health’s work with the VA in light of its merger with Lockheed Martin.

Blog Posts

• #HIMSS16 – CHIME CIOs discuss optimization, data, and analytics (Nordic)
• HIPAA regulation: The myths around integrating compliance and patient care (PerfectServe)
• #HIMSS16 – Learning, limboing, connecting, giving [recap] (Nordic)

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.