News 12/4/14

Top News

International Rescue Committee plans to roll out a new EHR at its Ebola treatment unit opening the week of December 15 in Monrovia, Liberia. The tool, developed by IRC along with healthcare IT vendor Vecna, will be accessed via waterproof Sony tablets that can be taken into high-risk zones. Wilson Wang, MD senior clinical advisor for IRC’s Ebola response team, is confident the new EHR – the first to be used by providers working in the midst of the West African outbreak – will enable better physician support, especially in light of the fact that there is not yet a single source of information for the most up-to-date data on what’s working in the current outbreak. “We think this has the potential to really change not only how quality and safety is addressed in an Ebola situation, but it can also be adapted to any health care situation,” Wilson adds.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

The folks behind National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day (December 12 this year) contacted me to let me know they have partnered with Save the Children for the Make the World Better with a Sweater campaign. The idea is to spread holiday cheer all in the name of a good cause. Money raised will go towards Save the Children’s mission of “giving children in the United States and around the world a healthy start, the opportunity to learn, and protection from harm.” Seems like a good excuse to get a few co-workers together and have some fun on a Friday. Send me pictures of you in your ugliest Christmas sweater, and I’ll make a donation on behalf of HIStalk Practice readers.

HIStalk is offering 25-percent off webinars (promoted or produced) through the end of the year. Email Lorre for all the details. You can pretty much guarantee they’ll be a hit, as we put your webinar content before several executive-level members of our review committee to ensure your presentation is engaging and educational (rather than a blatant sales pitch).

Webinars

December 17 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. There Is A 90% Probability That Your Son Is Pregnant: Predicting the Future of Predictive Analytics in Healthcare. Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Dale Sanders, SVP of strategy, Health Catalyst. Predictive analytics is more than simple risk stratification. Once you identify an individual’s risk, what are the odds that you can change their behavior and what will it cost to do so? This presentation, geared towards managers and executives, addresses scenarios in which predictive models may or not be effective given that 80 percent of outcomes are driven by socioeconomic factors rather than healthcare delivery.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

E-commerce services and on-demand software vendor Ebix acquires Oakstone Publishing, which develops continuing education and certification materials for physicians, dentists, and allied healthcare professionals. Ebix will integrate Oakstone into its A.D.A.M. Health Information Exchange Division.

Announcements and Implementations

CareSync launches its Chronic Care Management tool to better connect providers, patients, families, and caregivers. The new tool offers care plan development, appointment scheduling, medical records collection, and discrete data entry to create meaningful reports.

Ingenious Med joins athenahealth’s More Disruption Please program. (I am kicking myself for picking up just one pair of shades at Ingenious Med’s booth at the Health IT Leadership Summit a few weeks ago. The color screams “Digital Diva,” don’t you think?)

Seven health plans in Colorado – all part of the CMS Comprehensive Primary Care Initiative – are working to develop an online data-sharing tool that will offer physicians a single source for claims data from each health plan. Rise Health will partner with the state’s Center for Improving Value in Health Care to build the tool, which will be available in early 2015.

Oscar Insurance Corp. selects NaviNet’s Clinical Document Exchange and Open payer-provider collaboration platform to work more closely with its physician network in New York and New Jersey, and to support patient-centered clinical workflows and value-based reimbursement models. (You can read Lt. Dan’s summary of Oscar’s evolution here.)

EHR vendor CureMD chooses DrFirst’s EPCS Gold to add e-prescribing of controlled substances (EPCS) to its system. DrFirst reports that EPCS volumes jumped by 200 percent in the most recent three-month period, likely boosted by New York’s I-STOP mandatory e-prescribing requirement for all drugs beginning March 27, 2015.

Government and Politics

Several medical associations, including the National Physicians’ Council for Healthcare Policy, push for Congress to further delay ICD-10, which is set to be implemented by October 1, 2015. Politico reports that a second delay could be attached to a continuing resolution on the $157 billion labor, education, and HHS funding bill, which expires December 11, or to a repeal of the sustainable growth rate, which physicians also are pressing for. Draft language on the continuing resolution is expected next week.

An ONC blog post by Karen DeSalvo, MD called “Health Data Outside the Doctor’s Officer” references a new JASON report titled “Data for Individual Health.” The report addresses the steps needed to move to “a system focused on health of individuals rather than care of individuals” in creating a learning health system. Some of its recommendations:

• HHS: take action on previously created reports and measure progress.
• HHS: adopt interoperability standards and incentives.
• HHS: support open API standards and pay providers more (the report suggests a 0.25 percent bonus in CMS’s Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program) for using “ecosystem-friendly EHRs” that follow those standards.
• HHS: encourage non-profits (such as disease-specific advocacy groups) to mark consumer apps with their stamp of approval to increase their adoption.
• Joint Commission and professional schools: add informatics training requirements.
• FDA: loosen control of product services that could be construed as practicing medicine, for example, allowing apps to report their information to both provider and consumer as a risk mitigation strategy.

Research and Innovation 

A HIPAA compliance survey of nearly 1,200 physician practices and billing companies finds that:

• 66 percent of respondents were unaware of HIPAA audits.
• 35 percent said their business has conducted a HIPAA-required risk analysis.
• 34 percent of owners, managers, and administrators were "very confident" that their electronic devices that contain PHI were HIPAA compliant.
• 24 percent of owners, managers, and administrators have evaluated all of their BAAs.
• 56 percent of office staff and (non-owner) care providers have received HIPAA training in the last year.

Coincidentally, a local business paper highlights what many of those survey takers already know: Physician practices aren’t doing enough to protect patient information. Small practices need to “understand that just because they are small doesn’t mean they aren’t targets; in fact, they may just be easier targets.”

Canada’s National Physician’s Survey finds that 75 percent of MDs use EHRs to enter or retrieve clinical patient notes on a laptop or desktop. That number has tripled since the survey was given in 2007 by the College of Family Physicians of Canada, Canadian Medical Association, and Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. The biggest physician challenges to accessing information include reporting technical glitches, compatibility issues with other systems, and firewall or security issues. The survey’s upbeat findings contrast sharply with news out of Quebec that its $1.4 billion EHR project is an abysmal failure.

In case you were wondering, a Bankrate survey reveals that nearly two-thirds of respondents find selecting a new health insurance plan to be at least as bad as having a cavity filled, and over 70 percent say the process compares to the fun of doing their own taxes or sitting in the middle seat on an airplane. In other amusing, but barely relevant news, former CMS Administrator Kathleen Sebelius compares Healthcare.gov’s first open enrollment to “buying an airline ticket using your fax machine.”

People

Laurens Albada (Greenway Health) joins Vista Equity Partners (Greenway’s owner) as managing director of financial services.

Anthelio Healthcare Solutions names Gary Trickett (Allscripts) SVP of IT services.

Glen Loomis, MD (St. Elizabeth Physicians) receives the Citizen Doctor of the Year Award from the Kentucky Academy of Family Physicians.

Kim Snare (Greenway Health) joins DocsInk as vice president of sales.

Navid Asgari is promoted to vice president of service and support for CompuGroup Medical’s Ambulatory Information Services division.

Medecision expands its leadership team with the appointment of Jennifer Ponski (White Goose Innovations) to chief administrative officer; Augusta Kairys (Highmark) to senior vice president, market owner, health plans; Greg Leder (Elsevier) to senior vice president, sales and account management, health delivery solutions; and Mary Sirois (Divurgent) to senior vice president, consulting and professional services.

Other

News of Allied Physicians Group (NY) acquiring three physician practices prompts one merging MD to comment that, "I have been in solo practice now for 25 years. Trying to keep pace with the technical requirements necessary to administrate a medical practice, as well as the increasing costs, had pushed my resources to the brink. Joining Allied will now liberate me from the onerous responsibilities of administration, and allow me to focus on patient care. This should make my practice financially stronger, and allow me to do what I wanted to do for years: hire additional pediatricians to help me shoulder the load."

Sony Pictures Entertainment suffers a hack resulting in the theft of over 25 gigabytes of data on tens of thousands of company employees, including Social Security numbers, salary information, and health savings account data on over 700 staffers. The news comes nearly a week after another cyberattack took down the company’s corporate email system, prompting the FBI to designate it the “first major destructive cyber attack waged against a company on U.S. soil.” Fingers have been pointed at hackers in North Korea, whose government is not happy with SPE’s latest film, “The Interview.” North Korean officials have denounced it as “undisguised sponsoring of terrorism, as well as an act of war.” Seems like a marketing gimmick to me.

Sponsor Updates

• PerfectServe posts a blog entry titled “Evolving Healthcare: Six New Realities for the C-Suite.”
• NextGen connects its Share platform with Merge Healthcare’s iConnect Network.

Contacts

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

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News 12/2/14

Top News

New RAND research finds that it’s too soon to determine the benefits of HIEs due to a lack of evidence. Funded in part by the VA, the research finds that only 13 of the nation’s 100-plus HIEs have been evaluated, with six of those being in New York. It also concluded that most medical groups claim they want exchanges, but must overcome barriers to acceptance and sustainability. “The real message here is that we don’t have enough data to draw conclusions,” said lead author Robert Rudin. “It’s very possible some of these operational [exchanges] are doing a great job and producing a lot of value in terms of cost savings and benefits. Until we have more evidence of impact, every health information exchange effort in the country should be considered as an experiment. The only way to learn from experiments is to evaluate them.”

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

I’m a bit biased as far as the latest HIStalk poll goes, given that I live in one of the seven cities contending for the title of the “Nation’s Capital of Health IT.” Not that I’ve tried, but you can only vote for your city of choice once.

#GivingTuesday kicks off December 2, and I’d like to use it as an excuse to highlight HIStalk Practice readers over the next several weeks who are doing good things for their patients, customers, and communities. Staff at the Greater Buffalo United Accountable Healthcare Network (NY) are a great example. They gave away 100 Thanksgiving turkeys to patients most in need for the second year in a row. Send me a short write-up of your organization’s good deed along with a pic or two, and I’ll post it here, inducing warm fuzzies and hopefully inspiring others to follow in your charitable footsteps.

Thanks to the following renewing sponsors for their support of HIStalk Practice. Click a logo for more information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Fruit Street Health amends its certificate of incorporation to become a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation, chartered to "to use business to have a social impact." The press release announcing the switch focuses more on the company’s recent media coverage than it does on explaining why the change was made. It does note that CEO Laurence Girard decided to convert the company to a DPBC to “hold the company true to its social mission and also ensure that this time around the directors act in the interest of not only investors, but also employees, society, and the patients and healthcare providers that Fruit Street serves.” It expects to launch its $300-a-month digital health and wellness platform in the next few weeks.

Royal Philips acquires a minority stake in Image Stream Medical as part of its agreement to incorporate ISM’s surgical image stream management technologies into its hybrid suite and interventional lab solutions with integrated video and live-streaming capabilities. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The deal comes just two months after the company announced it will combine its healthcare and consumer lifestyle divisions under the HealthTech name.

The National Institutes of Health awards Leidos a $113 million contract to support IT services for its Electronic Research Administration, which manages the NIH’s multibillion-dollar research and non-research grants program.

Cybersecurity firm FireEye discloses that an unidentified hacking ring dubbed FIN4 has spent the last 18 months stealing corporate secrets in order to cheat the US stock market. The group has attacked email accounts at over 100 US firms, most of them pharmaceutical and healthcare companies, looking for insider data that could be used to profit on trades before the data was made public.

Announcements and Implementations

Advocate Community Partners (NY) selects the eClinicalWorks Care Coordination Medical Record and Electronic Health eXchange interoperability platform to help it meet Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment program objectives, which include reducing avoidable hospital use by 25 percent over the next five years. ACP, formerly known as AW Medical Office, serves 437,000 patients from primarily Asian and Latino communities.

GE Healthcare announces keynotes for its Centricity LIVE 2015 user conference, April 29-May 2, 2015, in Orlando: Atul Gawande, MD, MPH (surgeon and author), Melissa Etheridge (singer-songwriter), and LeVar Burton. I wonder if Burton, who hosted beloved children’s series Reading Rainbow for over 20 years, will talk about the benefits of crowdfunding given that he raised $6 million to revive the show as an app earlier this year. 

Gila River Health Care (AZ) selects NextGen’s ambulatory EHR, PM, and NextPEN solutions as part of its efforts to transition its behavioral health services from paper to digital, and to prepare for Meaningful Use Stage 2 and the transition to ICD-10. GRHC is part of the Gila River Indian Community, which manages healthcare administered by the federal Indian Health Services.

Government and Politics

HHS announces that over 462,000 people signed up for or renewed health insurance coverage during the first week of open enrollment at Healthcare.gov. Enrollment numbers were likely given a boost during Black Friday, thanks to outreach kiosks set up at malls in Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, New York, and the state of Washington. HHS has also announced marketing partnerships with the National Community Pharmacists Association and the XO Group, which runs websites targeting brides, new mothers, and homeowners.

CMS seeks comment on its proposed final ACO rule, which makes adjustments to the Medicare Shared Savings Program that include:

• Providing more flexibility for ACOs seeking to renew their participation.
• Encouraging ACOs to take on greater performance-based risk and reward.
• Emphasis on primary care.
• Alternative methodologies for benchmarks.
• Streamlining data sharing and reducing administrative burden.

Those of you itching to comment are out of luck at the moment. Links to the full proposal and comments page both seem to be down as of Monday night.

People

Community Health Services of Lamoille Valley (VT) honors Diana Smith with its annual Spirit Award for her work as the EHR systems specialist for the organization’s eClinicalWorks software program.

Research and Innovation

A MIT Technology Review article titled “Google Glass is Dead; Long Live Smart Glasses” says interest in Glass has rapidly evaporated as Google has lost key personnel and failed to advance the product from geek beta experiment to consumer mainstream. The article says the technology is fine, but the form factor needs to evolve so that the technology is hidden within the glasses instead of being perched like a prism on top of them, perhaps even being incorporated into a contact lens. Despite MIT’s dire prediction, Glass is looking to develop a more consumer-friendly, second-generation headset featuring an Intel processor. Rumor has it Intel will promote the new model to hospitals and manufacturing companies.

Researchers from the Pitt Graduate School of Public Health identify six categories of barriers to sharing medical data worldwide: technical, motivational, economic, political, legal, and ethical. Dean Donald Burke explains that, “These barriers and categories describe a landscape of challenges that must be addressed comprehensively, not piecemeal. We must work together as a global community to develop solutions and reap the benefits of data-sharing, which include saving lives through more efficient and effective public health programs.”

Other

Practice Fusion co-Founder and VP Matthew Douglass takes to TechCrunch to argue for “an open and unbiased Internet” to “ensure a future of American digital healthcare progress and startup innovation.” He points out that:

“This new concept of tiered pricing based on the type of content being delivered would disrupt the internet as we know it and would harm doctors, patients, and smaller startup Internet companies working diligently to upgrade our nation’s digital healthcare infrastructure. To ensure America’s healthcare technology infrastructure can continue to grow and flourish for the rich and poor alike, it is imperative that ISPs are not allowed to create tiers of speeds in this manner.”

Several commentators point out that his argument is weak on facts, but I give the guy high marks for responding to each naysayer.

Brant S. Miller, MD shares his frustration with the walk-in clinic experience after waiting 65 minutes for a flu shot at a clinic affiliated with the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio:

1. The CVS MinuteClinic business model appears to be in trouble.
2. It has severe IT problems.
3. It doesn’t take a NP to give flu shots.
4. It doesn’t take an electronic medical record to give flu shots.
5. There appears to be little, if any, supervision of the MinuteClinic NPs by the UT system.
6. If this were a heart attack patient coming in with symptoms masquerading as "the flu," the NP would be so busy fooling around with the computer that she wouldn’t recognize the potentially fatal acute condition until it was too late.
7. It’s important to focus on the patient first, and not on the computer or the business model.
8. I wonder if and when the business gurus managing this clinic will figure out that it is taking way longer than 8 minutes to administer flu shots.

Wired paints a pretty complete picture of the Kiva robots Amazon uses at its fulfillment center in Tracy, CA to handle the frenetic online shopping associated with the long Thanksgiving weekend. The center houses 21 million items, with the capacity for 5 million more, and ships out 700,000 items on a peak day.

No mention is made of the percentage of ugly Christmas sweaters stored and shipped via Amazon. I haven’t felt the need to don one (ever), but that might change come National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day, which falls this year on December 12.

Contacts

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

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From the Consultant’s Corner 12/2/14

Portals: The Next Step in Patient Engagement

Although healthcare practices are racing to adopt patient portals to meet MU Stage 2 requirements, these tools offer much more than just a way to receive incentive dollars. When employed strategically, they can facilitate personalized patient engagement, improve satisfaction and maintain loyalty, elevating an organization’s clinical and financial performance as well as its service delivery.

How Portals can Capture Patient Attention
Portals facilitate engagement, and ultimately the patient experience, by providing significant benefits to both patients and providers. For example, a portal operates on the patient’s timeframe with 24/7 availability anywhere the patient wants to use it. Moreover, it provides a confidential communication platform for personalized two-way dialogue between patients and providers, allowing patients to get their questions answered in a private and secure manner without having to make an appointment and spend time visiting the doctor’s office. This often encourages patients to address health issues more readily.

Portals also increase efficiency by offering real-time, online appointment booking that saves patients and staff time. Patients can even pre-register for appointments online, streamlining their arrival to the office and getting them in front of the physician faster.

On the business side, portals facilitate patient payment through electronic statement delivery and remittance capabilities. Not only does this make payment more convenient, it increases the likelihood patients will pay, helping the practice improve cash flow while decreasing the risk of bad debt.

Strategies for Optimizing Portals
When used to their potential, portals can provide a competitive advantage over market peers, especially those without a robust tool. The technology communicates that a practice is forward-thinking and patient-focused while enabling convenient and responsive care. As healthcare reform gives patients more flexibility in where they seek services, it is becoming even more important to fully leverage portals to foster patient engagement and satisfaction. This increase in patient satisfaction can ultimately help improve a practice’s financial performance.

In my opinion, practices can get the most out of their portal by implementing the following tactics:

• Create a multi-disciplinary group to develop an overarching portal strategy. When viewed as an IT project, portal implementation tends to focus on meeting MU requirements rather than enhancing the patient experience. To avoid this scenario, practices should bring together clinical, practice management, and IT leaders to define portal goals and objectives, keeping the patient top-of-mind. During this time, the group should clearly outline roles, so that everyone knows the part they play in optimizing portal use before, during, and after implementation.
• Use clinical staff to promote portals and get patients registered. The portal’s credibility goes up when physicians or nurses talk with patients about the tool’s capabilities and benefits, and encourage enrollment. Clinicians should take advantage of one-on-one time with patients to explain how current care could be more efficient if the patient used the portal, providing specific examples the patient can understand. For instance, the provider could point out that patients are able to refill prescriptions via the portal, reducing the time the physician and patient need to spend during the onsite visit discussing refills. To further prompt enrollment while the patient is in the office, practices should provide convenient registration opportunities—perhaps through a designated kiosk, desktop, laptop or tablet.
• Engage patients when sign-up occurs. To fully reap the benefits of a portal, practices should look beyond enrollment. If patients sign up and nothing happens, they probably won’t use the portal in advance of the next visit. On the other hand, if the practice immediately contacts the patient with a personalized acknowledgement, the patient may be more likely to use the technology long-term. I’ve seen practices send a message to patients a few hours after enrollment with a communication from the physician explaining lab results and providing prescription renewals. This draws the patient in and clearly demonstrates the portal’s value. In my opinion, organizations that commit to regularly using the portal to communicate information of value can dramatically expand patient adoption and care involvement.

The Future Looks Bright
As providers and patients increasingly accept portals, new applications will broaden their impact on care delivery and the patient experience. For example, portal-enabled e-visits are an emerging way to streamline care for certain patient types and non-urgent issues, while meeting consumer demand for convenience. Instead of making an appointment and driving to and from the practice — sometimes requiring more time than the appointment itself — the patient communicates directly with a nurse practitioner or other clinician via the portal. The e-visit carries a flat fee that is payable when the patient books the appointment online. Even though the cost is not currently covered by all payers, this has not deterred patients in those practices now offering e-visits.

Given the current trajectory, portals stand to play an expanding role in healthcare delivery. In my view, organizations that are prepared with a patient-focused portal strategy can ensure they get the most out of the technology, helping to improve the overall patient experience and strengthening the practice’s future viability.

Brad Boyd is vice president of sales and marketing for Culbert Healthcare Solutions.

Contacts

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

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Thanksgiving Edition News 11/27/14

Top News

The New York-based HIXNY RHIO unveils its patient portal, which it anticipates will improve access to patient information between providers through the SHIN-NY (come to find out it’s pronounced “shiney”) statewide HIE.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

Don’t let the holidays pass you by without acknowledging how much you appreciate that colleague who  goes above and beyond. Managers, peers, and customers can nominate a non-management employee (vendor or provider) for the HIStalk “Beacon of Selfless Service” award. We’ll happily announce winners over the next several weeks, hopefully inspiring others to go that extra mile. The HIStalk team will also be running recaps of holiday-related company good deeds or celebrations this holiday season, so please send along your recaps with a photo or two.

Watching: Thanksgiving at my house doesn’t officially start until the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade commences. It’s a great excuse to lounge on the couch in leisurely attire just a little bit longer before heading into the kitchen to finish prepping the turkey and trimmings. This article provides helpful links to the route map and where to watch live-stream video (great for people like me who cut the cable cord long ago.)

Long holiday weekends are golden opportunities for binge watching. On deck for me is Netflix original Peaky Blinders, a gangster family epic set in 1919 Birmingham, England. It won’t take you long to figure out where the title comes from.

Announcements and Implementations

Drchrono uses Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint reader to authenticate physicians logging into its EHR. Apple opened up the biometric reader to third-party developers when it released iOS 8. Three taps of the finger – one to get into the iPad, one to open the app, and another to open the EHR – gets them in without having to enter a passcode (though that option is still available).

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Optimized Care Network aims to install 100 CareSpace telemedicine kiosks in hospitals and physician practices as part of an investment deal with Mobility Exchange, which will bundle the kiosks with wireless data plans from Verizon. Founded less than a year ago, OCN landed a $1 million investment earlier this month from Modern Medical CEO Joseph Favazzo.

Forbes lays out the past, present, and likely dim future of digital health IPOs, calling out companies like Castlight Health, Vocera, Imprivata, Everyday Health, epocrates, and Accretive Health as those that have underperformed since their respective IPOs. Of those reviewed, only Veeva Systems and Medidata Solutions are trading above their IPO price, leading to the conclusion that, “Despite sizable market opportunities within the healthcare sector thanks to government legislation, the public seems confused about what digital health is.”

Government and Politics

Thanksgiving also marks Family Health History Day, as ONC so kindly reminded me in the holiday edition of its weekly e-blast. While I agree that knowing my family’s health history is important, it’s not necessarily going to be my first topic of conversation over turkey at the dinner table. A quick peek at the My Family Health Portrait online tool makes me think it’s in dire need of a redesign.

People

The National Association of Professional Women recognizes Karen Mingain (HealthNET Systems Consulting) as 2014 Professional Woman of the Year.

Research and Innovation

An AHRQ study finds (not surprisingly) that EHRs should be developed for pediatricians with functionalities “related to a child’s evolving maturity.” Researchers determined that EHRs should include vaccination, development, physiology medication dosing, pediatric diseases management, pediatric norms and the relationship between pediatric patients and their caregivers. They added that, “Key Informants indicated that if these functionalities are implemented well, the EHR will also better support the care of all patients.” I think the keyword here is “well.” Pediatricians likely already have the ability to document most of these details, but finding the time to do it “well” when faced with an already overbooked day of appointments probably makes it very challenging.

An overwhelming majority of physicians on PracticeFusion’s EHR say that their patients have not asked about incorporating health data from wearable fitness trackers or health apps into their health records. Combine this with privacy and security concerns, plus a physician’s lack of desire to receive this type of data, and it’s not likely we’ll see much marketplace traction with Apple’s HealthKit.

Other

The Commonwealth Fund issues a brief outlining the significance of the release of Medicare physician payment data, limitations of the dataset, current uses of the information, and proposals for making the data more meaningful for public use.

There’s apparently still time to register for the HITLab Innovators Summit, happening December 1 in New York City. The promo code will knock your general admission registration fee down to $550, plus a $30.95 processing fee.

This article points out the UK’s need for EHRs in light of the recently uncovered fact that one fifth of data security breaches in the healthcare sector are the result of paper records being lost or stolen. To combat the problem, the Department of Health has appointed Dame Fiona Caldicott to the new position of national data guardian for health and care. Health secretary Jeremy Hunt has committed to ensuring a paperless NHS and fully integrated digital patient records across NHS and social care services by April 2018.

Ryan Jeffrey Shaw, assistant professor in the Duke University School of Nursing, voices his frustration with the over-hyped wearables craze:

“[T]he biggest challenge for most patients isn’t gathering data, but changing human behavior. You can have the hottest medical gizmo on the planet, but it’s not going to help you much if you keep eating junk food and avoiding the gym. So, yes, by all means push aside those turkey leftovers and go check out these new wearable health devices on Black Friday. Just don’t expect them to magically make you healthier. That’s something you — and our country’s health care system — still need to work on if these tempting holiday gifts are going to live up to their promise.”

If you’re an optimist and believe that a wearable will make all the difference in your journey to health and wellness, check out CNET’s guide to 14 Black Friday deals.

Boston.com correspondent MD Mama, aka Claire McCarthy, MD shares a list of things she’s thankful for, including:

• “that baseball season is completely over (since Boston Children’s is right near Fenway Park–traffic gets nuts)”
• “that nobody in the family complains if I work late”
• “my job and my wonderful colleagues–and my wonderful patients who let me into their lives and let me serve them.”

Sponsor Updates

• Intelligent Medical Objects, Allscripts, and eClinicalWorks earn glowing remarks from the HIStalk Advisory Panel.

Contacts

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

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5 Questions with James Stevermer, MD Medical Director, Callaway Physicians

James Stevermer, MD is medical director of Callaway Physicians, a part of the University of Missouri Health System. The practice, which recently met NCQA patient-centered medical home level 3 criteria, employs 16 full-time and 16 part-time staff members who see an average of 80 patients a day.

How have you and your colleagues seen technology change the way healthcare is practiced at CP, especially given that it recently celebrated its 40^th anniversary?
There have been remarkable changes, whether we are looking at therapeutic interventions or the day-to-day practice. EHR has been a substantial work-flow change.

What EHR does CP use, and where are you with Meaningful Use?
As part of MUHealthcare, we use Cerner Powerchart. We’ve met Stage I and will work towards Stage 2 next year.

Given that CP is in a rural setting, has it looked into adopting telemedicine services?
We have had telemedicine, but it’s been little used. Partially because it wasn’t used much when first put in, due to technologic barriers at the time. Although rural, the distance isn’t that far to referral systems, so I think patients prefer to travel. We use it regularly for educational purposes.

Has the practice encountered any healthcare IT implementation challenges recently?
Our biggest challenge was a couple of years ago when we went to CPOE. Fewer challenges in the last couple of years. Things also improved when we moved bandwidth beyond a bare minimum for the size of the practice.

What implementation best practices can you share with other providers?
Have several champions, not just physicians. Have extra help during transitions. Be prepared for unanticipated workflow changes.

Contacts

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

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