News 2/26/15

Top News

CMS extends the EHR attestation deadline for Medicare EPs from February 28 to March 20. In addition to offering physicians more time, the extension also allows EPs who have not already used their one "switch" to switch programs (from Medicare to Medicaid, or vice versa) for the 2014 payment year. It has also extended the EHR reporting option for PQRS to the same date. AMA President-Elect Steven Stack, MD wastes no time in throwing in his two cents:

“Only 24 percent of physicians have attested to Meaningful Use for 2014 as of the beginning of February. The deadline extension underscores that the Meaningful Use program is not working and that policymakers need to act on our recommendations to make it more flexible, remove the measures that physicians are having the most difficulty in meeting and revamp the certification program so that electronic health record vendors can innovate to create products that better serve patients and physicians. We thank CMS for today’s effort and hope that they will go further in addressing the problems with this program when they issue their Meaningful Use rules this spring.”

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

I am getting very, very excited about HIMSS this year, especially given the fact that the HIStalk team and Walking Gallery founder Regina Holliday have chosen five patient advocates to attend on HIStalking Gallery scholarships. I hear one recipient is a bit of a fashionista, so I’m looking forward to seeing how she supplements her HIMSS coverage with wardrobe commentary.

A friend of the HIStalk family is looking for a nursing professional to contribute his or her writing skills to an article on the impact Meaningful Use is making on their part of the profession. Email me if you’re interested and confident that your writing skills are just as good as those you use in the exam room.

Webinars

March 4 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “5 Steps to Improving Patient Safety & Clinical Communications with Collaborative-Based Care.” Sponsored by Imprivata. Presenters: Robert Gumbardo, MD, chief of staff, Saint Mary’s Health System; Tom Calo, technical solutions engineer, Saint Mary’s Health System; Christopher McKay, chief nursing officer, Imprivata. For healthcare IT and clinical leadership, the ability to satisfy the clinical need for better, faster communication must be balanced with safeguarding protected health information to meet compliance and security requirements.

March 5 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “Care Team Coordination: How People, Process, and Technology Impact Patient Transitions.” Sponsored by Zynx Health. Presenters: Grant Campbell, MSN, RN, senior director of nursing strategy and informatics, Zynx Health; Siva Subramanian, PhD, senior VP of mobile products, Zynx Health. This webinar will explore the ways in which people, process, and technology influence patient care and how organizations can optimize these areas to enhance communication, increase operational efficiency, and improve care coordination across the continuum.

March 12 (Thursday) 1:00 ET.  “Turn Your Contact Center Into A Patient-Centered Access Center.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenter: Brian Cooper, SVP, West Interactive. A patient-centered access center can extend population health management efforts and scale up care coordination programs with the right approach, technology, and performance metrics. Implementing a patient-centered access center is a journey and this program will provide the roadmap.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

OrbitHCI announces a $1 million seed round led by Formerly Known as Atlas and Google Ventures. The Boston-based startup is developing smart devices that will unobtrusively connect aging parents to other family members. I’m a big fan of co-founder and CEO Keith Kocho’s statement that, “Sensors do not measure quality of life. There are many reactive products out there that treat people like assets to be monitored. Every generation has stories to tell and we believe technology should make that easier, not get in the way.”

Sikka Software raises $5.5 million in Series B funding led by Sierra Ventures and Series A investor ATA Ventures. Sikka’s cloud platform caters to practices in dental, veterinary, hearing, and vision.

Healthbox opens up registration for its eight-week Healthbox Studios accelerator programs in Miami, Chicago, and Salt Lake City.

Announcements and Implementations

Horizon House (PA) chooses CoCentrix for EHR, care coordination, and billing.

Semira Bayati, MD implements interactive patient education technology from TouchMD at her office in Newport Beach, CA.

Tidewater Physicians Multispecialty Group (VA) selects population health management technology from Lightbeam Health Solutions across its 50 locations.

The NYC Regional Electronic Adoption Center for Health expands its partnership with SA Ignite to offer the company’s MU Assistant solution to an additional 500 physicians. NYC REACH originally piloted programs with SA Ignite to assist physicians at Murray Hill Medical Group and Brownsville Multi-Service Family Health Center with the EHR initiatives.

ADP AdvancedMD releases ICD-10 Toolkit, a free app that gives private practices a suite of ICD-10 preparation tools.

Telemedicine

A proposed bill in the Minnesota legislature gains bipartisan support for its requirement that payers reimburse providers for telemedicine consultations in the same way they pay for in-person visits. If passed, the state would join 22 others plus Washington, D.C. that already mandate coverage for medical care delivered via electronic networks.

The Missouri Telehealth Network partners with University of Missouri’s Thompson Center for Autism to create the Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (ECHO) Autism project. Project ECHO will train local physicians to offer autism-related care via telemedicine software.

Doctor On Demand licenses PokitDok’s APIs to more quickly determine what services are covered by health insurance and to submit claims for telemedicine care across PokitDok’s 177 payer partners.

Research and Innovation

A Navicure survey finds that 81 percent of physician practices are optimistic that they’ll be ready for ICD-10’s October 1, 2015 implementation date and two-thirds of respondents don’t think it will be delayed again. Practices say their main concern is that payers won’t be prepared. My main concern is that my birthday, which lands on October 1, will get lost in the ICD-10 compliance shuffle. I’m definitely going to think twice about the timing of my annual wellness exam. Do I opt for a few weeks before, when practices might still be dual coding, or bite the bullet and make my appointment after the 1st? Physicians, feel free to weigh in by leaving a comment below.

Government and Politics

CMS awards veteran-owned Data Computer Corp. of America a contract worth up to $60 million to to provide technical support services to test functionality of its Medicare claims processing systems.

The VA releases a summary of its $4.1 billion IT budget for 2016, earmarking 55 percent for medical programs, 20 percent for regularly adding new features and functionality to the Veterans Benefits Management System, and 19 percent for maintaining IT services across its 1,000-plus facilities.

New Mexico lawmakers sponsor a bill that would create a health information system to help consumers, legislators, and payers make more informed decisions about when, where, and how to access healthcare. Opposition to the bill, which has largely come from hospital associations that feel the bill’s timeline is too aggressive, has (not surprisingly) resulted in a competing bill that would introduce the data in a less consumer-friendly manner within the same timeframe.

HHS and the CDC recognize 30 public and private health care practices and systems as 2014 Million Hearts Hypertension Control Champions that achieved blood pressure control for at least 70 percent of their patients through the use of healthcare IT and electronic health records, patient communication, and team approaches.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to close NYDoctorProfile.com, a state-run doctor search tool that he says is too expensive to taxpayers at $1.2 million per year given that similar information is available elsewhere.

People

The AMA honors seven public servants with its 2015 Dr. Nathan Davis Award for Outstanding Government Service.

Telemedicine company eVisit adds three new staff: Jacob Boddeker (Honeywell), director of product; Teresa Iafolla (Health Professions Press), content marketing manager; and Brooke Watton, NewLAWu.s, director of client success.

Other

The local business paper covers the launch of the Buffalo, NY chapter of Health 2.0, an organization that works to build collaboration and foster ideas surrounding IT and healthcare. Co-founders include Paul Lee, ophthalmologist and founder of startup syr.indi.care; and Donald Lee, VP of IT services at Algonquin Studios. Board members include Mike Hickok of Catholic Health, Scott Falbo of HealthNow NY, industry leader John Hennessy, and healthcare consultant Laura Berrady.

North Carolina’s Wilma Magazine profiles Coastal Connect HIE CEO Yvonne Hughes, who worked to launch the project in 2011. The HIE now connects affiliated and unaffiliated healthcare providers in 10 counties across rural parts of North and South Carolina.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 2/24/15

Top News

CMS announces a special health insurance enrollment period for tax season on the same day the White House confirms that 800,000 people who signed up for coverage via Healthcare.gov received the wrong tax information. While no blame has officially been placed for the mistake, plenty of fingers are already pointing. “Whether it’s providing taxpayers with incorrect subsidy information or having to create special enrollment periods so that taxpayers can avoid costly penalties, Obamacare continues to frustrate and confuse Americans,” said Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

Mr. H kindly let readers know last week that Rice University and the Baylor College of Medicine will offer a free, four-week online course called “Medicine in the Digital Age” that begins on May 5. Intrigued, I clicked over to check out the course description:

The course is intended for a general audience and is relevant to anyone working or interested in the emerging healthcare environment.  At the end of the course, participants will have the knowledge to successfully engage with the future of digital medicine.

Medicine in the Digital Age maps out out the challenges and opportunities facing healthcare in the networked age. We will explore the role of social media in healthcare communication, the uses of wearable technologies, the potential for big data to reshape health behaviors, the ethics of personalized medicine, and the impact of these new developments on the doctor-patient relationship.  Participants will gain an understanding of the connected health revolution and tools to critically analyze this evolving ecosystem. Medicine in the Digital Age will launch a fresh conversation about what the future of medicine should be, and how we should get there. Join us!

Kirsten Ostherr and Bryan Vartabedian, MD – co-founders of Rice University’s Medical Futures Lab – will lead the course. Given that it starts in May (after HIMSS hoopla has died down), I’ve decided to sign up and see what I can glean from the four-week curriculum. I’d love for fellow HIStalk Practice readers to join me. Perhaps we can put our heads together after our final project is turned in and write about our experiences. 

Webinar

March 5 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “Care Team Coordination: How People, Process, and Technology Impact Patient Transitions.” Sponsored by Zynx Health. Presenters: Grant Campbell, MSN, RN, senior director of nursing strategy and informatics, Zynx Health; Siva Subramanian, PhD, senior VP of mobile products, Zynx Health. This webinar will explore the ways in which people, process, and technology influence patient care and how organizations can optimize these areas to enhance communication, increase operational efficiency, and improve care coordination across the continuum.

Announcements and Implementations

East River Medical (WV) selects EHR and PM software from Benchmark Systems.

NextGen Healthcare integrates the Surescripts CompletEPA electronic prior authorization service into its EHR.

Amazing Charts launches MU Success Services to help its clients successfully attest to Meaningful Use. The offering is well timed, given that significant Medicare- and Medicaid-related MU deadlines are coming up on February 28 and March 31.

RelayHealth Financial launches the ConnectCenter claims management portal for PM and RCM vendors, and billing companies.

For the third year in a row, OmniMD e-prescribing technology receives the Surescripts White Coat of Quality Award for its ability to send and receive electronic messages according to industry standards, among other criteria.

Community health center CareSouth Carolina (SC) implements i2iTracks population health technology from i2i Systems to help manage 30,000 patients across 12 facilities.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Home health company Almost Family Inc. launches a Health Innovations business segment to focus on its technology and accountable care operations. It also plans to invest up to $2 million in NavHealth, a patient data-sharing startup co-founded by former U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra.

Jumpstart Foundry creates the Health:Further annual conference to build on the Nashville-based accelerator’s annual investor day for its graduating class. The inaugural event will take place August 19-22 at the Omni Nashville.

Fortune places Cerner among its “World’s Most Admired Companies 2015.”

CompuGroup Medical acquires South Africa-based practice management vendor Medical EDI Services.

The Wall Street Journal names as one of its 73 startups valued at more than $1 billion Proteus Digital, whose smart prescription pills report back to doctors and drug companies when patients take their medicine.

Government and Politics

Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) reintroduces the Electronic Health Fairness Act, a bill that would exempt patient encounters that take place in ambulatory surgery centers from counting toward Meaningful Use requirements. There is currently no requirement that ambulatory surgery centers use EHRs, and ONC offers no certification program for them. On the flip side, however, physicians taking part in the EHR incentive program must perform at least half of their outpatient encounters in a facility with a certified EHR or be subject to a penalty.

Politico highlights the growing frustration of physicians with the high cost of interoperability, citing between $5,000 and $50,000 as the going rate for setting up connections that allow practices to share EHR data with laboratories, HIEs, and governments. “The No. 1 factor hindering the exchange of information between health care stakeholders is the exorbitant fees that most EHRs are charging for integration, connectivity and reporting,” says Lance Donkerbrook, COO of Commonwealth Primary Care ACO (AZ). “The government needs to step in immediately and require these vendors to open access.”

People

MGMA names Halee Fischer-Wright, MD (St. Anthony North Medical Center) as president and CEO.

Ian Bonnet (Anthem) joins Authentidate as president, CEO, and director.

Bobbie Peterson (Medsphere) joins Apprio as executive vice president of healthcare solutions.

Aneesh Chopra (NavHealth) joins the board of Imperium Health Management.

Scott Fiscus (Hospital Sisters Health System Medical Group) joins Integrated Medical Partners as senior vice president of RCM operations.

Research and Innovation

The US Agency for International Development awards Fighting Ebola Grand Challenge funding to the Scripps Translational Science Institute for development of a Bluetooth-connected wearable that will help medical staff remotely monitor the vital signs of Ebola patients in West Africa.

A State of Email Trust study calls out healthcare for being behind the times when it comes to email security. The study, which analyzed 6.5 billion emails, found that an email from a healthcare provider is four times more likely to be fraudulent than one from a social media site. Thirty percent of healthcare organizations analyzed achieved the dubious distinction of scoring “0” – the lowest possible – for implementation of email security protocols.

A separate but corresponding study finds that nearly half a million people were victims of medical identity theft in 2014, with 65 percent of respondents spending an average of $13,500 to resolve the issue.

Telemedicine

Lawrence Bentvena, DC launches ClickAClinic, the first telemedicine platform to be approved as a clinic in the state of Florida.

Virtual consultations go mainstream, as the above Gilt City American Well offer shows. Given that deductibles are rising and consumers are becoming more cost conscious, this type of mass telemedicine marketing will likely become more commonplace. I wonder if we’ll soon start to see urgent care and retail clinics begin to peddle their services on Groupon in an effort to keep up with the competition.

Rock Health provides a thorough yet concise breakdown of the past, present, and near future of telemedicine via its healthcare reform series.

The Partnership for a Connected Illinois launches the Illinois Telehealth Initiative to increase access to healthcare across the state. Backed by the Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council, the initiative will work to actively demonstrate the benefits of telehealth as it relates to cost and access, and will develop plans for regional and statewide telehealth networks.

Other

Roswell Pediatric Center (GA) writes a note of thanks to the local community in recognition of the one-year anniversary of a fire that destroyed its office, and of the opening of its new facility:

“Our deepest thanks are extended to the Milton and Alpharetta fire departments who responded quickly and worked together to douse the flames. The firemen remained on the scene the following day and assisted us with removing computers containing patient health records and other sensitive documents. Due to our sophisticated electronic health record system and our backup system, we were able to see patients the day of the fire with absolutely no loss of patient medical records and no disruption to delivering medical care. There are no words to adequately thank these men for their service to us on that day.”

The local business paper profiles One Medical Group (CA), a concierge primary care practice that caters to such enterprise customers as Doximity, Uber Technologies, Adobe, Fitbit, and NBCUniversal. Founded in 2005 by Epocrates co-founder Tom Lee, MD the practice counts Google Ventures, Benchmark, DAG Ventures, and Oak Investment Partners among its backers.

Sponsor Updates

• Intelligent Medical Objects will exhibit at Hack Illinois February 27-March 1 in Urbana, IL.
• Healthwise will exhibit at Preventive Medicine 2015 on February 25 in Atlanta.
• Five Versus Technology clients will present on RTLS at HIMSS15.
• SRSsoft’s Scott Ciccarelli writes about “Dreams vs. Reality.”
• Nordic’s Scott Gierman offers advice on how to “Prepare for a Successful Season with EHR Spring Training.”
• Perfect Serve announces it will exhibit at the Society of Hospital Medicine and American Medical Group Association annual conferences in March.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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Contact us online.
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DOCtalk with Dr. Gregg 2/19/15

Top 10 Dubious HIT Bumper Stickers for 2015

I cannot verify the existence of any of the following stickers, but their appearance on bumpers – from Priuses to Beemers – has been rumored across the country.

TOP 10 HIT (& RELATED) BUMPER STICKERS OF 2015:

10.

9.

8.

7.

6.

5.

4.

3.

2.

1.

Oops… I just saw one more…

From the trenches…

"There’s a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.” – Charles M. Schulz

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, and sits on the board of directors of the Ohio Health Information Partnership.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 2/19/15

Top News

The White House tweets that 11.4 million Americans have signed up for healthcare coverage via federal and state insurance exchanges. This figure doesn’t include those who experienced trouble signing up at Healthcare.gov over Valentine’s Day weekend. Those folks have been extended an extra seven days to get their applications wrapped up. Administration officials have also hinted that the deadline might be extended through April 15 so that consumers can avoid the tax penalty.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

Occasionally I have the pleasure of running into readers, who more often than not express their fondness for the empire Mr. H has build up over the last 10-plus years. I ran into one such fellow, at church of all places, who proudly boasted that he has been a HIStalk follower since before our main site was HIStalk2.com. It’s interactions like these that make me love my job even more. Thanks to all who read HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect, and the granddaddy of them all, HIStalk. Keep reading, and be sure to tell your friends.

The folks at Xerox Healthcare invited me to participate in a Google + Hangout on patient engagement earlier this week, and I was so glad I said yes. I got the chance to speak alongside health IT experts Eric Topol, MD director of Scripps Translational Science Institute and chief academic officer for Scripps Health; Geeta Nayyar, MD chief healthcare advisor for Femwell and assistant clinical professor of medicine at Florida International University; and Tamara St. Claire, chief innovation officer of Commercial Healthcare at Xerox. I’m still trying to get over the statistic Geeta shared on physician eyeball time with patients.  You can check out the presentation here. We had some great Q&A from the audience, so be sure to watch until the very end.

Listening: Happy Camper Radio. Though snow flurries are falling outside my window, I’m already thinking ahead to the Spring camping season. HCR’s series of podcasts keeps me from contracting cabin fever.

Webinars

March 5 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “Care Team Coordination: How People, Process, and Technology Impact Patient Transitions.” Sponsored by Zynx Health. Presenters: Grant Campbell, MSN, RN, senior director of nursing strategy and informatics, Zynx Health; Siva Subramanian, PhD, senior VP of mobile products, Zynx Health. This webinar will explore the ways in which people, process, and technology influence patient care and how organizations can optimize these areas to enhance communication, increase operational efficiency, and improve care coordination across the continuum.

The recording of John Gomez’s well-attended webinar, “Inside Anthem: Dissecting the Breach,” is available above or here.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Stratice Healthcare – developer of the Web-based eDMEplus EHR-integrated ordering platform for medical equipment – will expand its operations in Indiana, adding 2,000 square fee of office space and up to 43 new jobs within the next two years.

Chicago-based incubator Matter officially opens, offering 25,000 square feet of workspace to an initial 70 member companies working in health IT, medical device, diagnostics, and biopharma. In addition to its member companies, the incubator will work with the AMA to launch a 450-square-foot “physician office of the future” at its Merchandise Mart location.

Announcements and Implementations

Cloud services and managed hosting company Carpathia opens its Healthcare Community Cloud Service beta program to physicians, payers, and clearinghouses.

Village Family Practice (TX) selects a population health management platform from Lightbeam Health Solutions to manage value-based contracts across its 25 physicians.

Surescripts creates a step-by-step video guide and tools to help health systems and practices meet New York’s I-STOP mandatory e-prescribing law.

CollaborateMD integrates TransFirst’s transaction processing services into its PM and medical billing services. 

Greenway Health chooses Orion Health’s Rhapsody Integration Engine for financial transaction processing.

Practice Fusion integrates medication electronic prior authorization from CoverMyMeds with its EHR.

Telemedicine

The Federation of State Medical Boards reports that South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming have passed the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact. The new legislation will help speed up the process of multi-state licensing for physicians, an essential ingredient to widespread adoption of telemedicine services across the U.S.

The University of Miami Pediatric Mobile Clinic implements AMD Global Telemedicine’s Portable TeleClinic solution to help provide care to uninsured children. Telemedicine services offered include dermatology, cardiology, nutrition, and, coming in March, obesity management.

The California Telehealth Network partners with eligibility program management company Solix to help providers across the state tap into the FCC’s Rural Health Care Funds program, which offers access to and discounts for telecommunications and broadband services.

Government and Politics

Payers lament that Healthcare.gov’s ongoing back-end IT troubles have taken a backseat to user experience, specifically balking at the unfinished work of automating payment of subsidies for premiums and out-of-pocket expenses. “There’s just going to be a whole lot more workarounds and paper clips and rubber bands for at least another year to get this stuff all sorted out,” says John Gorman, executive chairman of Gorman Health Group, though CMS has expressed confidence it will get its IT act together by the end of this year.

Crain’s digs into the drawbacks of the Statewide Health Information Network of New York (SHIN-NY), a “little-publicized” $486 million project that by the end of this year will electronically link medical records to clinics, physicians, and hospitals statewide. Only 19-percent of private practices had connected as of last October, according to the non-profit New York eHealth Collaborative, which oversees the project. Connection fees of between $5,000 and $10,000 have likely dampened physician enthusiasm.

People

Kevin Keck, MD (The Permanente Medical Group) joins Scio Health Analytics as CMO.

Don Yish (EMSI) joins Virtual Health as executive vice president of sales.

Jon Mello (Beacon Partners) joins NavisHealth Solutions (fka Versaworks) as COO.

Jackie Fantes, MD (Lifespan Corp.) joins the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center as CMO.

Research and Innovation

A revenue cycle management study from NextGen finds that though automated RCM services are popular amongst physician practices, just 4 percent of those surveyed rate their abilities around electronic claims submission as “Excellent.”

A HIE study finds that 72 percent of survey takers (including physicians, hospitals, payers, and vendors) predict the demise of small, independent HIE developers by 2017. In addition, 94 percent of independent physicians are backing away from HIE initiatives due to the “flawed” business models of public HIEs, and an anticipation that payers will pick up the data-sharing slack.

A Salesforce study reveals that 60 percent of Millenials support the use of telehealth options over in-person visits, and an even greater percentage would prefer their physicians use apps to book appointments, share health data, and manage preventive care. On the flip side, less than 10 percent of insured patients reported using the Web, e-mail or text messages to set up appointments.

Other

Mercy Clinic credits its Epic EHR with an uptick in interest from parents about measles vaccination. CMO Howard Schlansky, MD notes that it took just 72 hours for IT technicians to pull together lists in its EHR of 1,900 patients due for the measles vaccine. The clinic is now working through those lists to contact patients with vaccine reminders.

Several health-related features didn’t make the cut for the initial Apple Watch  release because they didn’t work, were too complex, or would have triggered FDA’s interest. The watch won’t be able to run an EKG, measure blood pressure, or capture blood oxygen.

Sponsor Updates

• PerfectServe President and CEO Terry Edwards posts “The Consumerization of Healthcare: Can Providers Keep Pace?”
• ADP AdvancedMD offers a guide to “The Top 5 Technologies in Healthcare for 2015 and Beyond.”

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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

News 2/17/15

Top News

HHS extends the February 15 deadline for open enrollment sign-ups to February 22 for anyone who started but was unable to complete registration on Healthcare.gov. As expected (by me, anyway), a last-minute rush to sign up for coverage caused long call-center wait times and back-end technical issues, including problems verifying applicant incomes. Several state-run exchanges, including California and New York, have extended their deadlines as well.

Webinar

February 17 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. Cloud Computing – Cyber-Security Considerations. Sponsored by Sensato. Presenter: John Gomez, CEO, Sensato. This webinar will examine the security challenges involved when healthcare organizations implement cloud-based services.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Bill Frist, MD chats with Marcus Osborne, vice president of health and wellness payer relations at Wal-Mart Stores, during a Nashville Health Care Council. Osborne explained that though the company’s retail clinic strategy is its smallest play in healthcare, it is also the fastest emerging. The clinics, which are now in three markets, follow a primary care model and may sometime in the future incorporate mobile or telehealth components.

Tech startup veteran Tom Higley kicks off the 10.10.10 program in Denver to bring together 10 successful business launchers to meet for 10 days to tackle 10 of healthcare’s biggest problems. Participants include Xerox, Kaiser Permanente, and the Colorado Health Foundation. Higley, who envisions modeling the program for other industries like energy and education, is confident several new companies will be launched in the coming months as a direct result of 10.10.10 conversations.

Fortune profiles eClinicalWorks , which has grown without venture capital and is run by co-founders who placed their ownership in trusts so that none of them can cash in their shares or try to take the company public. CEO Girish Navani told the reporter, “I don’t need to be the richest man in Massachusetts,” adding that employees like profit-sharing cash even more than stock options since “they can buy stock in Apple.”

Announcements and Implementations

After a year of planning, Laguna Beach Community Clinic (CA) goes live on an Epic system hosted by Oregon Coastal Health Information Network. Associate Medical Director Jorge Rubal, MD attributes the new system not only to OCHIN, but to financial donations received from the Assistance League, families, and hundreds of individual donations. While Rubal seems enthusiastic about the clinic’s new technology, it seems to highlight the almost oppressive Meaningful Use hoops small practices have to jump through to get new IT up and running.

Cerner enlists the services of Cloudera to power its data hub. The new infrastructure, powered by Hadoop, has already enabled Cerner clients to determine the probability of patient bloodstream infections. “Our clients are reporting that the new system has actually saved hundreds of lives by being able to predict if a patient has sepsis more effectively than they could before," says Ryan Brush, senior director and distinguished engineer.

Practice Fusion launches Online Patient Check In, a move the company anticipates will help it eliminate a quarter billion pages of paper in 2015.

PerfectServe signed 29 new client contracts and had 260 go-lives in 2014, with 45,000 clinicians using its communications platform. 

Telemedicine

The American Telemedicine Association announces that “the world’s richest doctor,” Patrick Soon-Shiong, MD, will keynote its annual meeting and tradeshow, which will take place May 2-5 in Los Angeles. I wonder if the whistleblower lawsuit brought against him last month by two disgruntled NantHealth employees will again rear its ugly (and inconvenient) head as the ATA meeting kicks off.

The local paper profiles the Central Alabama Veterans Health Care System and its Telehealth Education Delivered truck, which is making stops around the state to raise awareness of the telemedicine services available to veterans. CAVHCS saw 1,600 telemedicine patients last year, with many of those taking advantage of mental health services.

Government and Politics

Senate Democrats in Connecticut propose privacy legislation that would mandate healthcare companies to require encryption technologies. Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff (D-Norwalk) believes (somewhat erroneously) that such a mandate would have prevented the Anthem breach. As John Gomez of Sensato pointed out during last week’s HIStalk webinar dissecting the Anthem hack, there’s only so much you can do when trying to protect yourself against criminals who are willing to wait months, if not years, to find a way to slip in to your network via compromised passwords.

GAO is accepting nominations through February 27 for openings on the HIT Policy Committee in the areas of consumers, providers, health plans, and quality reporting.

Research and Innovation

Cyrcadia Health develops the iTbra, which uses a series of embedded temperature sensors, along with an algorithm and app, to detect breast cancer in women with dense breast tissue. CEO Rob Royea believes the sports-bra-like wearable can detect cancer earlier and better than a mammogram. He hopes to achieve FDA approval so that physicians can offer it in place of mammograms, and consumers can eventually use it in place of monthly self-checks.

Researchers at Michigan State University work on developing a technology that will use fingerprint recognition to track vaccinations and other medical record data. “It’s pretty simple,” says MSU Professor Anil Jain, “all it takes is one scan of your fingerprint to pull up your health records and vaccination schedule. So we keep track of who has been vaccinated and who has received the proper dosage.”

A Professional Association of Health Care Office Management study finds that the total cost of ICD-10 conversion for a small practice is around $8,167. Over 275 practices were surveyed about the cost of ICD-10 manuals and documentation, training costs, software system upgrades, bill conversion costs, and staff time spent on implementation. I find that figure surprisingly low given that other studies have shown that implementation can cost small practices between $56,000 and $226,000.

University of Pennsylvania researchers discuss people’s propensity to trust their own guesses or another person’s conclusions over facts based on algorithmically analyzed data – a method of decision-making that may not always work in their best interests. “Even if, in certain domains, people have learned to use a model or an algorithm, [consider when] you’re making an important life decision,” says researcher Berkeley Dietvorst. “Let’s say you’re in the hospital. Do you want to trust the doctor or a computer about whether to get surgery? That [trust] might not carry over. So this is one of those things where even if people can learn it for their job or in a certain domain, it might not carry over to other domains in their life.”

Other

Cambridge, MA-based EHR company Vecna Technologies will host a 5K run for humans, and has extended an invitation to local robots that care to compete in a 100-meter-dash. “We were thinking, ‘What kind of flavor can we have here?’ explains cofounder Deborah Theobald, “and, you know, robots is so obvious.” One of the first to sign up for the dash is vGo, a camera-carrying telepresence robot on wheels that lets people remotely navigate an office space or hospital while interacting with people through its display screen.

The local paper profiles Todd Forman, MD a Long Beach, CA-based physician who combined pre-med studies at Harvard with summers on the road as a saxophonist for Sublime before going into family medicine full time. “In my private practice, which I’ve been in nine years, as a family physician, what I love about it is you say ‘What’s wrong?’ and being exposed to punk rockers and other forms of art, it opens your mind and senses up in a way where you don’t judge,” says Forman. “I’m much more approachable, able to get things out of people, able to describe problems and I love that about family medicine.”

General surgeon Jeffrey Singer, MD writes in the Washington Post that the Meaningful Use program has harmed patients more than it has helped, lowering quality of care and causing costs to rise. “[E]nding the mandatory electronic-health-record program should be a plank in the Republican Party’s health-care agenda,” Singer advocates. “For all the good intentions of the politicians who passed them, electronic health records have harmed my practice and my patients.”

Sponsors Update

• Medicity puts together “A Year in Review” that offers a snapshot of its 2014 accomplishments.
• Healthwise wins international awards for two of its health videos.
• Lynn Schep asks in the SRS “EMR Straight Talk” blog if the MU prayers of providers will be answered thanks to a potentially shortened reporting period.
• Perceptive Software’s “In Context” blog features a piece on “Hybrid Cloud: Concept vs. Market.”
• Nordic’s Abby Polich offers tips on “Extending Your EHR: Preparing for Success.”

Contacts

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

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