News 10/26/16

Top News

The local business paper highlights some of the steps Athenahealth is taking to ameliorate its inability to to hit 30 percent year-over-year growth in new clients – a fact divulged in a Q3 earnings call late last week. They include: hiring an as yet unnamed chief people officer, the creation of which was announced by CEO Jonathan Bush in May; a shift in sales tactics now that Meaningful Use has died down; and getting the most out of its More Disruption Please program participants, most of which are early stage companies in need of an eager scaling partner. Mr. H provided his own summary of the earnings call in this week’s Monday Morning Update.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

HIStalk’s Must-See Exhibitors Guide for MGMA 2016 is live. Click here to look over the products and innovations our sponsors plan to showcase, and map out your trip to the exhibit hall accordingly.

Webinars

November 8 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “A CMIO’s Perspective on the Successful 25 Hospital Rollout of Electronic Physician Documentation.” Sponsored by Crossings Healthcare. Presenter: Ori Lotan, MD, CMIO, Universal Health Services. UHS rolled out Cerner Millennium’s electronic physician documentation to its 6,000 active medical staff members — 95 percent of them independent practitioners who also work in competitor facilities — across 25 acute care hospitals. UHS’s clinical informatics team used Cerner’s MPage development toolkit to improve the usability, efficiency, communications capability, and quality metric performance of Dynamic Documentation, embedding clinical decision support and also using Nuance’s cloud-based speech recognition product for the narrative bookends of physician notes. This CMIO-led webinar will describe how UHS achieved 70 percent voluntary physician adoption within one month of go-live, saved $3 million in annual transcription expense, and raised EHR satisfaction to 75 percent. It will include a short demonstration of the software that UHS developed to optimize the physician experience.

November 9 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “How to Create Healthcare Apps That Get Used and Maybe Even Loved.” Sponsored by MedData. Presenter: Jeff Harper, founder and CEO, Duet Health. Patients, clinicians, and hospital employees are also consumers who manage many aspects of their non-medical lives on their mobile devices. Don’t crush their high technology expectations with poorly designed, seldom used apps that tarnish your carefully protected image. Your app represents your brand and carries high expectations on both sides. This webinar will describe how to build a mobile healthcare app that puts the user first, meets their needs (which are often different from their wants), creates “stickiness,” and delivers the expected benefits to everyone involved.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. View previous webinars on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Announcements and Implementations

Drchrono updates its mobile EHR app with new design features and user interface functionality.

DirectTrust announces steady growth in the number of Direct exchange users, addresses, and exchanges. The number of healthcare organizations served by DirectTrust Health Information Service Providers increased by 62 percent to nearly 70,000 year over year. New participants include HealthLinkNY, LifeWire, and SSL.com.

PatientPoint develops a new app for physicians that delivers medical news and point-of-care patient education materials.

Bellmore, NY-based Sybrid MD launches a $1 billing solution for physician practices. (One dollar will ensure service for the first 30 days.) The company boasts in a grammatically incorrect way that, “Non-techie and new physician practices can quickly adapt this robust billing service and get paid in time without having to worry about impending regulations and newest technologies.” Grammar usage like this makes me wonder if copywriters have gone out of business.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Primary care management services company VillageMD expands into Chicago through partnerships with multiple primary care groups.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona subsidiary Trinnovate Ventures invests an undisclosed amount in ACO Partner, its joint venture with McKesson. Created in April, the JV seeks to help payers and independent practices transition to value-based care models using McKesson’s physician engagement, care management, population health services, and technology.

Telemedicine

The American Red Cross and Teladoc launch a pilot collaboration that will bring telemedicine services to people served by the Red Cross in areas of natural disaster. As part of the pilot, Teladoc employees will be encouraged to donate time and resources to the Red Cross via the company’s Teladoc Cares volunteer initiative.

Government and Politics

US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, MD gets into some Step It Up smack talk with US Olympian Dominique Dawes. The Fitbit-sponsored challenge ends today. Americans have racked up a collective 57.2 billion steps so far.

Nonprofit Fight for the Future creates a tech support hotline – 1 (844) 294-A-CLUE – to “help” members of Congress, especially those befuddled by last week’s Internet outage. The corresponding website puts the organization’s mission into perspective: “Are you a member of Congress who has been asked to give a TV interview about the massive DDoS attacks that took down ‘the internet’ last week, but have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about? We can help!” The pros at Politico shared their hotline experience:

“The phone line greets you with a ‘press one if you’re a member of Congress’ prompt, and instructs that if you have a rotary phone, you should get a new one. ‘Have some self-respect,’ the automated voice says. Your … host lied and pressed 1, where a staffer identified himself as a "cyber bot" to skewer a specific member of Congress. He then offered meaningful cybersecurity advice, served with a side of chiding Capitol Hill for passing last year’s cybersecurity information sharing law and others that the group argued presents a threat to digital privacy.”

Other

MultiCare Puyallup Urgent Care (WA) staff accidentally lock Savannah Lewitt and her four month-old son in the building at closing time after taking the baby’s vitals and then telling Lewitt the physician would be in to see them “in about 10 minutes.” Thirty minutes later, she walked out of the exam room to find the clinic empty and locked up tight. She and her son managed to leave with assistance from the cleaning crew. As a result, the clinic now requires that staff check every room and door just before closing.

Contacts

Jenn,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 10/25/16

Top News

The MACRA flexibility train just keeps on chugging: CMS announces additional opportunities for physicians to participate in Advanced Alternative Payment Models, including:

• Reopening the application process for the Comprehensive Primary Care Plus program.
• Adding participants to the Next Generation ACO model.
• Making participation in the Oncology Care Model’s two-sided risk program available in 2017 so that it qualifies as an Advanced APM beginning in the 2017 performance year.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

HIStalk’s Must-See Exhibitors Guide for MGMA 2016 is live. Click here to look over the products and innovations our sponsors plan to showcase, and map out your trip to the exhibit hall accordingly.

Webinars

November 8 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “A CMIO’s Perspective on the Successful 25 Hospital Rollout of Electronic Physician Documentation.” Sponsored by Crossings Healthcare. Presenter: Ori Lotan, MD, CMIO, Universal Health Services. UHS rolled out Cerner Millennium’s electronic physician documentation to its 6,000 active medical staff members — 95 percent of them independent practitioners who also work in competitor facilities — across 25 acute care hospitals. UHS’s clinical informatics team used Cerner’s MPage development toolkit to improve the usability, efficiency, communications capability, and quality metric performance of Dynamic Documentation, embedding clinical decision support and also using Nuance’s cloud-based speech recognition product for the narrative bookends of physician notes. This CMIO-led webinar will describe how UHS achieved 70 percent voluntary physician adoption within one month of go-live, saved $3 million in annual transcription expense, and raised EHR satisfaction to 75 percent. It will include a short demonstration of the software that UHS developed to optimize the physician experience.

November 9 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “How to Create Healthcare Apps That Get Used and Maybe Even Loved.” Sponsored by MedData. Presenter: Jeff Harper, founder and CEO, Duet Health. Patients, clinicians, and hospital employees are also consumers who manage many aspects of their non-medical lives on their mobile devices. Don’t crush their high technology expectations with poorly designed, seldom used apps that tarnish your carefully protected image. Your app represents your brand and carries high expectations on both sides. This webinar will describe how to build a mobile healthcare app that puts the user first, meets their needs (which are often different from their wants), creates “stickiness,” and delivers the expected benefits to everyone involved.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. View previous webinars on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Announcements and Implementations

Managed care company Premier Eye Care (FL) implements data storage and management solutions from NetApp, reducing its backup-and-recovery time from up to nine hours to seven minutes.

Allscripts recertifies Universal Research Solutions, enabling it to incorporate its OBERD patient outcomes data collection systems with new versions of TouchWorks.

Telemedicine

MyTelemedicine launches a Partner Portal to help resellers manage their customer base. Features include real-time activation, utilization stats, prospect management, and commission tracking.

Brother International’s OmniJoin Web conferencing division develops new waiting room features for telemedicine applications that include one-click attendee admission or expulsion capabilities and wait-time tracking.

Alliance Physical Therapy pilots Docity’s telemedicine software at its nine locations in and around Chattanooga, TN.

ViiMed partners with EHR integration startup Redox to add its telemedicine technology to software from the major EHR companies. Headquartered in Washington, DC, ViiMed launched in 2007 as a sports training company that developed collaborative training technology using interactive video and tailored workout programs.

Government and Politics

Perhaps taking note of my penchant for baking in lieu of reading the final MACRA rule in its entirety, AAFP kindly releases its own easy-to-digest, five-page executive summary.

Seventeen companies including Uber, Lyft, Matter, and Rock Health commit to helping HHS attract freelancers and entrepreneurs to Healthcare.gov once open enrollment gets going on November 1.

Research and Innovation

Hot on the heels of Friday’s IoT-enabled DDoS attack on Dyn, the National Cyber Security Alliance and Internet security company ESET release survey results that show – surprise, surprise – most consumers are worried about hackers taking over their smart devices. Eighty-five percent of respondents know full well that hackers can remotely watch them via breached webcams, and 50 percent are reconsidering purchasing an IoT device due to cybersecurity concerns. Perhaps its time to rethink the notion that we really need smart fridges, thermostats, toasters, and toothbrushes.

Other

NPR’s Marketplace takes a look at the progress the Aledade West Virginia ACO is making in helping reducing patient ER visits and overall costs. While I’m sure healthcare IT plays a role in helping patients like COPD patient Millard Scott, it seems his health has been improved through good old-fashioned human interaction via community health workers. “If I know [Samantha Runyon’s] coming, I can sit here and make it through it,” 76 year-old Scott says of his bad days. “But if there wasn’t somebody I could depend on, I wouldn’t have even sat here. I would go to the ER. But I know she’s coming.”

Uber and Passport Health partner to deliver free flu shots and “flu-fighting” care packages today to customers in 17 cities including Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.

Contacts

Jenn,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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

News 10/24/16

Top News

American Society of Clinical Oncology nonprofit/subsidiary CancerLinq announces that over 1 million patient records are now in the CancerLinQ platform, which aggregates cancer patient medical records to uncover patterns and trends, and benchmark oncology practices. The milestone stems from the organization’s agreements with 70 oncology practices representing over 1,500 oncologists to participate in the platform. I interviewed medical oncologist Robin Zion, MD of Michiana Hematology Oncology, about the practice’s decision to become one of the first to connect to the CancerLinq platform earlier this year:

“The promise of this technology lies, in part, in being able to better care for our patients. I hope one day we will be able to answer the question so often asked by our patients regarding our experiences in caring for patients just like them. Additionally, patients may derive some comfort and reassurance in knowing that another set of expert eyes is looking at their case via mass data collection and analysis, thereby comparing what we are recommending to what was learned from the Rapid Learning System. Furthermore, the RLS may also be able to use the patient data in better informing research questions, which complements the expressed desire of patient willingness to contribute to advancing cancer care. From the practice standpoint, we have and want to continue to be involved in cutting-edge initiatives that will benefit our patients while simultaneously making us better doctors and oncology providers.”

HIStalk Practice Musings

I had every intention of reading through the final MACRA rule this weekend, but, with cooler temps and changing leaves finally making themselves apparent in my neck of the woods, I set aside my 2,000-plus page homework and instead made my first batch of homemade ginger snaps, courtesy of an easy recipe from Kelly Minter. Even if fall hasn’t made it to your area, the smell of these cookies right out of the oven will put you in an autumnal mood in no time. Paired with a cup of coffee, they may help me stay awake as I dig through the rule.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

HIStalk’s Must-See Exhibitors Guide for MGMA 2016 is live. Click here to look over the products and innovations our sponsors plan to showcase, and map out your trip to the exhibit hall accordingly.

Webinars

October 25 (Tuesday) 1:30 ET. “Data Privacy/Insider Threat Mitigation: What Hospitals Can Learn From Other Industries.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Robert Kuller, chief commercial officer, Haystack Informatics; Mitchell Parker, CISSP, executive director of information security and compliance, Indiana University Health. Cybersecurity insurers believe that hospitals are too focused on perimeter threats, ransomware, and the threat of OCR audits instead of insider threats, which are far more common but less likely to earn media attention. Attendees will learn how behavior analytics is being used to profile insiders and detect unusual behaviors proactively and to place privacy/insider risk within the risk management matrix.

November 8 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “A CMIO’s Perspective on the Successful 25 Hospital Rollout of Electronic Physician Documentation.” Sponsored by Crossings Healthcare. Presenter: Ori Lotan, MD, CMIO, Universal Health Services. UHS rolled out Cerner Millennium’s electronic physician documentation to its 6,000 active medical staff members — 95 percent of them independent practitioners who also work in competitor facilities — across 25 acute care hospitals. UHS’s clinical informatics team used Cerner’s MPage development toolkit to improve the usability, efficiency, communications capability, and quality metric performance of Dynamic Documentation, embedding clinical decision support and also using Nuance’s cloud-based speech recognition product for the narrative bookends of physician notes. This CMIO-led webinar will describe how UHS achieved 70 percent voluntary physician adoption within one month of go-live, saved $3 million in annual transcription expense, and raised EHR satisfaction to 75 percent. It will include a short demonstration of the software that UHS developed to optimize the physician experience.

November 9 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “How to Create Healthcare Apps That Get Used and Maybe Even Loved.” Sponsored by MedData. Presenter: Jeff Harper, founder and CEO, Duet Health. Patients, clinicians, and hospital employees are also consumers who manage many aspects of their non-medical lives on their mobile devices. Don’t crush their high technology expectations with poorly designed, seldom used apps that tarnish your carefully protected image. Your app represents your brand and carries high expectations on both sides. This webinar will describe how to build a mobile healthcare app that puts the user first, meets their needs (which are often different from their wants), creates “stickiness,” and delivers the expected benefits to everyone involved.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. View previous webinars on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

MACRA was definitely on the minds of attendees at the annual EClinicalWorks UGM in Orlando. @drchrissy1 tweeted a pic of the #epicpartyband that played at the conference’s concluding party, but I have a hard time believing any cover band is better than HIStalkapalooza favorite Party on the Moon.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos tells an inquisitive physician in the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit audience that, while he can see applications for Alexa within healthcare, the company doesn’t yet have specific plans to bring it to the world of healthcare. “It would be going too far to say that we have worked out a vision,” he said. “We’re working on having a vision in that arena because I do think it would be very helpful. … The medical care system is so big, no one company can do this. It has to be that you provide tools, and then hospitals and doctors and nurses and so on use those tools to improve health care.” (I dug into Alexa’s potential in healthcare for this HIStalk feature.)

Announcements and Implementations

Seward Community Health Center, a FQHC in Seward, AK, will go live with Epic on October 31. The implementation seems to be the result of a shared-system agreement between SCHC and nearby Providence Health and Services. I can only assume that they will tie in some sort of festive “Trick or Treat” theme during the roll out. Hopefully it’s more treats than tricks.

People

David Young (MindCare Solutions) joins AI and data analytics company Faros Healthcare as chairman of the board.

Telemedicine

Signia develops an app that connects hearing-aid users with providers to help them adjust to the devices. The MyHearing app connects to the company’s TeleCare portal, where providers can monitor hearing-aid utilization and progress, and make adjustments remotely.

Government and Politics

Just in time for open enrollment, California’s Office of the Patient Advocate releases its annual report cards on health plans and medical groups. This year marks the first time OPA has included pricing data in its ratings. Consumers can now search and compare over 200 medical groups by county, quality, and cost.

Research and Innovation

The Canadian Space Agency taps Montreal-based Carré Technologies to further develop its Astroskin bio-monitoring shirt so that David Saint-Jacques can wear it on his six-month mission aboard the International Space Station in 2018. The wearable’s embedded sensors will monitor breathing and heart rates, electrical activity of the heart, blood pressure, breathing volume, skin temperature, physical activity levels, and blood oxygen levels. Data collected will be sent from the ISS to ground servers for data management and analysis, and eventual consideration for terrestrial applications.

Other

The height of irony: The World Medical Association, a France-based organization created to “ensure the independence of physicians, and to work for the highest possible standards of ethical behavior,” elects an Indian physician facing corruption and conspiracy allegations as its president. Urologist Ketan Desai, MD was jailed briefly in 2010 on bribery charges and seems to still be in the midst of court appearances related to that case and another involving the Medical Council of India.

The local paper gauges physician reaction to the final MACRA rule, with quite a few confident that it won’t have much impact on their Medicare payments or quality. “We’ll just have to pay more attention to what we do … how often patients get treatment … show that patients are getting proper quality of care … if you do it enough it’ll eventually become second nature, [b]ut it is a slightly greater bureaucratic level on physicians,” says Todd Scarbrough, MD adding that he’s skeptical the new payment models will improve overall quality of care. “Generally, the quality of care is good right now … maybe there will be a 1 to 2 percent improvement.”

Let me dust off my Elvish: HarperCollins will publish a collection of the Middle-earth tales of Beren and Lúthien next May. The book is the compilation of stories written by J.R.R. Tolkien beginning in 1917 and collected and edited by his son, Christopher. The publisher promises that, “the epic tale … will reunite fans of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with Elves and Men, Dwarves and Orcs and the rich landscape and creatures unique to Tolkien’s Middle-earth.”

Sponsor Updates

• Intelligent Medical Objects exhibits at the EClinicalWorks National User Conference through October 24 in Orlando.

Blog Posts

• Joint Commission Launches Workplace Violence Prevention Tool (Versus Technology)

Contacts

Jenn,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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

HIStalk’s Must-See Exhibitors Guide for MGMA 2016

We’ve put together a list of HIStalk sponsors exhibiting at this year’s MGMA conference in San Francisco. Take a moment to look over the products and innovations our sponsors plan to showcase, and map out your trip to the exhibit hall accordingly. We’ve also included contact information for those sponsors who will not be exhibiting, but will be available for one-on-one meetings.

AdvancedMD
Booth 711

AdvancedMD strives to be the community of choice for independent providers delivering an integrated workflow and personalized service to ensure the health of every practice and their patients. The company will present a new, fully integrated EHR + PM/RCM solution. Physicians gain the benefits of strong EHR, with integrated e-prescribing and pre-built, customizable templates. Office managers gain access to a strong claims management system, payer-rules engine, and simple denial tracking. AdvancedMD’s solutions are designed to support the needs of medical practices and billing services. Additionally, attendees can explore the AdvancedTelemedicine platform through a free telemedicine psychic reading – an experience not to be missed!

Aprima Medical Software
Booth 1107

Aprima provides innovative EHR, PM, and RCM solutions for medical practices. Throughout the company’s 18-year history, Aprima has delivered quality solutions that have helped thousands of users enhance patient care and satisfaction, as well as improve their bottom lines. The Aprima EHR/PM sets the benchmark for ease-of-use, speed, and flexibility, thanks to its single database and customizable design that adapts automatically to individual physician workflows. The Aprima solution has earned certification for Meaningful Use Stage 2, and been awarded pre-validation status for NCQA PCMH recognition. The company is based in Richardson, TX and performs all development, support, and implementation from within the US. To learn more about how Aprima can help your practice, please visit www.aprima.com, call us at 844-4APRIMA or email us at info@aprima.com.

IMO – Intelligent Medical Objects
Booth 1637

IMO – Intelligent Medical Objects – The developer of the most widely-used and physician-preferred medical terminology service for EHR systems, now used by more than 3,500 hospitals and 450,000 providers daily. IMO’s clinical interface terminology service contains over 460,000 clinician-friendly terms that are seamlessly mapped to reference and reimbursement coding systems including SNOMED CT, ICD-9-CM, ICD-10-CM, RxNORM, CPT, LOINC, DSM-IV, and DSM-5. With this system, physicians can quickly build problem lists and order procedures without having to search for the correct codes. IMO simplifies the transition to ICD-10 and supports MU. Read more at www.e-imo.com.

MEDITECH
Booth 2328

As healthcare continues to experience tremendous change, MEDITECH is focused on creating new opportunities for organizations to enhance workflow and do more – so we worked with physicians to identify the driving factors behind user experience and their relationship to satisfaction and productivity. The result is a highly refined, smarter, mobile Web EHR – our most advanced product yet. With it, MEDITECH customers of all shapes and sizes are displaying measurable productivity gains, providing higher quality care, with greater efficiency, to more people, at a lower cost. Now that’s disruptive innovation.

NVoq
To schedule a meeting, contact Lynda Alpert  Lynda.alpert@nvoq.com.

NVoq has been delivering affordable, highly accurate speech recognition in the cloud since 2011. If you’ve been led to believe that there is only one speech-recognition product that works with Epic, Cerner, Meditech, NextGen, EClinicalWorks, or any other EHR, you’ve been misinformed! Talk to us about why SayIt is the right choice for your practice: 

1. Save money – we’re priced at a fraction of other "cloud" offerings, with NO LONG TERM CONTRACTS OR COMMITMENTS! No-obligation trials are available. 
2. Improve provider productivity – dictate findings directly into the EHR. Complete templates in seconds with voice or touch. 
3. Reduce the need for IT support – SayIt can be managed centrally without the need to install any software on PCs. NVoq also provides options for low-cost transcription and coding support. 

We look forward to meeting you! Visit us at sayit.nvoq.com.

PerfectServe
Booth 1317

PerfectServe provides healthcare’s only comprehensive and secure communications and collaboration platform, uniting physicians, nurses, and other care team members across the continuum and facilitating timely interaction. With PerfectServe Synchrony, you can consolidate patient communication onto a single, secure platform; manage HIPAA compliance across voice, mobile, secure text, SMS, and other modes of communication; maintain your privacy so patients only see your office number when you return or make calls; eliminate lost charges and claim denials, increasing revenue and reimbursement; and route calls based on your preferences for that moment in time. Stop by booth #1317 to see why more than 64,000 physicians have partnered with PerfectServe to manage patient care communications.

Contacts

Jenn,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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

News 10/20/16

Top News

Athenahealth announces Q3 results: total revenue for the quarter up 17 percent to $276.7 million; consolidated revenue up 19 percent to $794.8 million; and 10,000 providers added to its network. I’m sure CEO Jonathan Bush will break down these results in his trademark fashion during tomorrow’s investor conference call. The company acquired 12-employee, Austin-based care coordination system vendor Patient IO in August.

In related news, physician support company Tandigm Health will offer Athenahealth’s population health management technology including analytics, risk stratification, and quality management capabilities to its network of over 440 PCPs.

Webinars

October 25 (Tuesday) 1:30 ET. “Data Privacy/Insider Threat Mitigation: What Hospitals Can Learn From Other Industries.” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Robert Kuller, chief commercial officer, Haystack Informatics; Mitchell Parker, CISSP, executive director of information security and compliance, Indiana University Health. Cybersecurity insurers believe that hospitals are too focused on perimeter threats, ransomware, and the threat of OCR audits instead of insider threats, which are far more common but less likely to earn media attention. Attendees will learn how behavior analytics is being used to profile insiders and detect unusual behaviors proactively and to place privacy/insider risk within the risk management matrix.

November 8 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “A CMIO’s Perspective on the Successful 25 Hospital Rollout of Electronic Physician Documentation.” Sponsored by Crossings Healthcare. Presenter: Ori Lotan, MD, CMIO, Universal Health Services. UHS rolled out Cerner Millennium’s electronic physician documentation to its 6,000 active medical staff members — 95 percent of them independent practitioners who also work in competitor facilities — across 25 acute care hospitals. UHS’s clinical informatics team used Cerner’s MPage development toolkit to improve the usability, efficiency, communications capability, and quality metric performance of Dynamic Documentation, embedding clinical decision support and also using Nuance’s cloud-based speech recognition product for the narrative bookends of physician notes. This CMIO-led webinar will describe how UHS achieved 70 percent voluntary physician adoption within one month of go-live, saved $3 million in annual transcription expense, and raised EHR satisfaction to 75 percent. It will include a short demonstration of the software that UHS developed to optimize the physician experience.

November 9 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “How to Create Healthcare Apps That Get Used and Maybe Even Loved.” Sponsored by MedData. Presenter: Jeff Harper, founder and CEO, Duet Health. Patients, clinicians, and hospital employees are also consumers who manage many aspects of their non-medical lives on their mobile devices. Don’t crush their high technology expectations with poorly designed, seldom used apps that tarnish your carefully protected image. Your app represents your brand and carries high expectations on both sides. This webinar will describe how to build a mobile healthcare app that puts the user first, meets their needs (which are often different from their wants), creates “stickiness,” and delivers the expected benefits to everyone involved.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. View previous webinars on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Chicago-based healthcare incubator Matter partners with Leavitt Partners to create The Health Care Council of Chicago. The nonprofit, which has 15 founding members so far, is modeled after The Nashville Health Care Council, and, like its Southern counterpart, will work with community stakeholders to increase economic opportunities for all involved. “Chicago is such a diffuse ecosystem,” says Leavitt Partners Chief Development Officer David Smith. “There is no reason for all the health care innovation and human capital in Chicago to not come together in a common platform. We want to be part of the club, and we want the club to exist. We could have a major influence on the national health care scene.” Interestingly, HIMSS and AMA – both based in Chicago – haven’t signed on to the new trade group yet. The council hopes to have 50 members by the end of the year.

Announcements and Implementations

Allscripts adds point-of-care patient educational content from Healthwise to its EHR products.

Woodland Centers, a community behavioral health agency serving patients in Southeastern Ohio, implements EHR technology from Core Solutions. Lighthouse Youth Services (PA) will also implement the company’s Cx360 EHR.

People

Mark Poling (RebmeM) joins Bridging Medical Access as CEO, coinciding with the launch of the company’s telemedicine platform that combines virtual consult capabilities with EHR, PM, RCM, and marketing automation technologies.

Thomas Carella (Goldman Sachs) joins private equity investment firm Warburg Pincus as managing director of its healthcare and consumer group. WP announces its growth capital investment in medical terminology management software vendor Intelligent Medical Objects earlier this month.

Art Jones III (Innovage) joins MAP Health Management as vice president of payer sales and development.

Jason McNamara (Myers and Stauffer) signs on with Audacious Inquiry as director of HIS. McNamara’s career history is an interesting one; he’s done stints with the US Marines, DoD, CMS, Military Network Radio, and still seems to be involved with the military-to-civilian transition services nonprofit Squad Leaders.

Government and Politics

CMS awards 20, two-year Special Innovation Projects to a dozen Quality Innovation Network-Quality Improvement Organizations (that’s a mouthful). As project participants, the QIN-QIOs will work with local stakeholders to address healthcare quality improvement areas within their communities in the hopes of successfully replicating solutions locally, regionally, or nationally. Physician practice-related winners include the TMF Quality Innovation Network, which will work with 80 practices in Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas to strengthen PCP knowledge of treatments for depression and alcohol abuse using Project ECHO and its virtual grand rounds strategies.

Telemedicine

Chattanooga, TN-based startup Docity adds e-prescribing capabilities from DoseSpot to its telemedicine services. The company’s virtual consults are priced at just $15 per month, with the first four consults free for patients in Georgia and Tennessee. If my health-sharing plan didn’t already include MDLive visits, I’d consider using them.

Contacts

Jenn,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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