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.

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News 10/19/16

Top News

Florida’s 15-member Telehealth Advisory Council meets for the first time to hash out the state’s stance on virtual consults, an issue lawmakers within the Sunshine State have been attempting to legislate for the past four years. The initial meeting focused specifically on identifying how and where telehealth already occurs, including physician offices, kiosks, hospitals, and private residences. The council, which will publish its initial findings at the end of this year, ultimately hopes to get stakeholders within the state to agree on how to regulate the cost and reimbursement of such technology, and then get legislators to sign off on implementing those regulations.

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.

Announcements and Implementations

Kareo adds real-time pharmacy cost comparisons and prescription drug coupons from GoodRx to e-prescribing capabilities within its EHR.

EHNAC will replace its HIPAA-related privacy and security assessments with HITRUST CSF certification in an effort to streamline the accreditation and certification programs of both organizations. “The healthcare industry is plagued by well-meaning yet inefficient processes, standards and protocols,” says HITRUST CEO Daniel Nutkis. “It is through this partnership with EHNAC, and potentially other like-minded standards organizations, that we are growing our vision of helping the industry eliminate the complexity relating to information protection and compliance.”

Imperial Health’s Center for Orthopaedics (LA) signs a 10-year EHR agreement with Better Day Health.

Anesthesia Business Consultants develops the MACRA Made Easy Platform to help guide anesthesiologists through the steps of participation in the new value-based payment program.

People

Physician Compass brings on Austin Fleer (EatStreet) as sales and marketing manager, and Kristina Nardi (LinkEHR) as account manager.

Telemedicine

Private-label telemedicine vendor SnapMD adds technical support from Monarch Telehealth Services as part of its Virtual Care Management platform.

Acquisition, Funding, Business, and Stock

New York-based Capital District Physicians’ Health Plan and CapitalCare Medical Group (NY) launch Acuitas Health to help independent practices transition to value-based payment models and implement population health management programs. The new company plans to hire 10 employees within the next six months, and double that number over the following six months.

Government and Politics

The FDA issues a call for “information about scientific and technological advances that are so unknown they don’t show up – or barely show up – on a Web search.” FDA Associate Director Donna Mendrick explains in a blog post that, “Our goal [with the Emerging Sciences Idea Portal] is to identify areas not yet addressed in current products like hibernation for surgery and brain-computer interfaces. Once we have such information it can be used for science-based planning, programs, policies, reporting, and communication within and outside FDA.”

Research and Innovation

The National Institute on Drug Abuse awards researchers at Indiana University a $1.4 million grant to analyze social networks for patients who visit multiple physicians to gain prescriptions for controlled substances – a red flag for prescription drug abuse. Researchers will apply the social analysis to a database of de-identified information on physicians, patients, and prescriptions in order to identify doctor shoppers and the physicians they target. “These measures, once they are developed and tested, could be applied to state prescription drug monitoring programs,” says principal investigator Brea Perry. “They could be translated to effective interventions, both to help the patients who are doctor shopping and to provide education for doctors who are being targeted.”

Sponsor Updates

• The Dubai Health Authority signs a collaboration agreement with GE Healthcare for hospital predictive analysis, efficiency, and training.
• Aprima earns high ratings for its RCM services in a KLAS specialty report highlighting ambulatory billing services.
• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at AAP 2016 October 22-25 in San Francisco.
• Healthwise will exhibit at the EClinicalWorks National Conference October 21-24 in Orlando, FL.
• GE Healthcare will work with India-based Tata Trusts to train 10,000 students for healthcare technology careers.

Blog Posts

• 5 Strategies to Reduce Financial Risk (AdvancedMD)
• Translating EHR Training into Improved Revenue Cycle Metrics (Culbert Healthcare Solutions)
• EHRA Reiterates Key Recommendations for Program Alignment and Practicality in Comments on HOPPS (E-MDs)
• What a top 10 college football matchup has to do with healthcare IT consulting (Nordic)

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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Contact us online.
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News 10/18/16

Top News

Vice President Joe Biden provides an update on the Cancer Moonshot initiative. The 17-page report to President Obama cites several interoperability-related barriers to winning the war on cancer, including:

• A lack of open access and rapid sharing of research data and results allowing researchers to build on each other’s successes—and failures—to make new discoveries faster. 
• Hurdles surrounding the sharing of medical records that offer no additional level of protections for patients. 
• Insufficient collaboration around, and utilization of, technological capabilities to harness the vast amounts of data within EHRs to improve cancer prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care.

Biden goes on to outline the ways in which better data access (easier record sharing and storage, greater interoperability) can begin to put patients at the center of their cancer care, in turn helping them to contribute to more Cancer Moonshot initiatives. “These steps,” Biden explains, “will also enable patients, especially those who have multiple providers, improved care coordination and delivery since they would be able to bring their records with them — or have them sent in advance — as they move between doctors and practices. Importantly, this system must respect and protect patients’ preferences for privacy, and allow them to use their data as they choose.”

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.

Announcements and Implementations

MedAxiom offers members of its cardiology performance community access to cardiovascular EHR and diagnostic technologies from Objective Medical Systems.

Westmed Medical Group (NY) selects app-based portal technology from Bridge Patient Portal and Medical Web Experts to offer patients easier access to its services via mobile devices. The multispecialty group, which employs 350 physicians across 14 locations, will integrate the portal with its GE Centricity EHR.

Analytics and population health management software vendor EagleDream Health partners with EHR Integration Services to develop an analytics tool that integrates population health and point-of-care patient data with an EHR. “Identifying high-risk patients that may impact quality and financial performance is essential to the success of a practice,” says EagleDream President and CEO Betty Rabinowitz, MD. “QIS Inform lets practices seamlessly drill-down to important demographics, geospatial mapping, care gaps and morbidity hot spots.”

Pyramid Healthcare implements the CareLogic EHR from Qualifacts at its 80-plus addiction recovery facilities in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and North Carolina.

People

Clay Ackerly, MD (NaviHealth) joins Privia Health as CMO.

Nancy Ham (Healthagen) signs on as CEO of WebPT. She replaces Paul Winandy, who held the position from 2010 to 2016. Ham will help the Phoenix-based company handle any growing pains it may encounter as it plans for a headquarters relocation and expansion next spring.

The Open Source EHR Alliance elects Mike O’Neill (MedicaSoft) chairman.

Telemedicine

Chat-based telemedicine company HealthTap develops Smart Health Search algorithms based on user PHR data to offer more tailored search results to healthcare queries.

Austin-based startup Medici Technologies rolls out its inaugural app, which enables patients to communicate with physicians, veterinarians, and therapists in a HIPAA-compliant manner via text, photo, and video. I’m curious as to why the company decided to name itself after the famous dynasty that held sway over much of Italy (some might even argue Europe) during the Renaissance.

Government and Politics

MACRA analysis continues … I’m looking forward to Dr. Jayne’s summary, though I’m not sure when she’ll find the time to dig into even the 25-page summary. Her latest Curbside Consult paints a pretty compelling picture of the need to manage team dynamics now in order to start MACRA off on the right foot.

Other

Thanks to the folks at CliniComp for alerting me to the fact that this week is “Healthcare Quality Week” according to organizers at the National Association for Healthcare Quality. While I’m not sure you’ll find heartfelt greeting cards marking the occasion (which aims to “bring greater awareness to the Profession of Healthcare Quality and celebrate and acknowledge the work of healthcare quality professionals”), NAHQ has put together a number of resources to help organizations celebrate throughout the week.

The Mayor of Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city, bans the word “doctor” and other forms of formal address in municipal offices. The move is being made in an effort to put employees on equal footing; apparently the title of “doctor” or “doctora” in Colombia is not necessarily tied to a degree, but rather to “endemic snobbery.” A similar attempt to ban the distinction in Bogotá fell flat after just a few months.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice updates.
Contact us online.
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From the Consultant’s Corner 10/18/16

Restructuring Physician Compensation in a Value-Based World

The concept of value-based care can be traced back to the days of capitation during the 1990s. Under capitated agreements, healthcare providers were provided a fixed, prospective payment for the management and delivery of care for an assigned panel of patients.

In a capitated environment, the primary care provider served as the gate-keeper responsible for directing care based on their professional judgment and clinical practices. Clinical outcomes and cost containment (i.e. value) were major components of the formula, which determined an individual PCP’s capitation payment levels.

In many markets, pure managed care arrangements became obsolete due to the challenge or inability to manage and coordinate medical services throughout the continuum of care. Several macro-level changes have occurred since this time. Clinical integration strategies have organized care networks inclusive of primary and specialty care, as well as inpatient services. Payer contracting is occurring more frequently at the health system level, often extending to networks of affiliated physicians. EHRs have drastically improved the ability to capture and exchange patient information. Each of these factors has played an important role in developing a new foundation for value-based reimbursement programs.

As value-based care takes hold, revenues and financial performance will be dependent on a practice’s ability to embrace care coordination, enhance patient access, achieve quality outcomes, manage costs, and improve patient satisfaction. Yet during the transition to value-based care over the next few years, the reality is that fee-for-service, volume-based reimbursement will remain the essential component of physician practice and health system revenues.

A major challenge facing healthcare executives is how and when to shift physician compensation to ensure alignment with the future tenets of value-based reimbursement. The shift from volume to value will not happen overnight. Both the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and Alternative Payment Models (APMs) require practice executives to establish short- and long-term goals and strategies, as well as physician compensation structures. Next year’s performance, which starts in less than three months, will impact reimbursement in 2019. Commercial payers are implementing these changes in different timeframes compared to CMS, but the reimbursement mechanisms are aligned with the same objectives. As a result, physician compensation programs will need to change over time.

During this transition, physician productivity and volume-based reimbursement are essential for practice viability. Yet practices today need to prepare for the inevitable reality of value-based care. To ease this transition, practices should start incentivizing those behaviors that will be necessary for success in the near future. Incentivizing value-based care tenets today (panel size, access metrics, patient satisfaction) while transitioning the overall compensation structure concurrently with your payers’ transition to value-based reimbursement programs mitigates the operational, cultural, and financial risks of the shift from volume to value. Over the short term, practices will need to accommodate prevailing productivity measures while gradually adding quality-based incentives to the mix.

Keep in mind, of course, that overall practice compensation will not necessarily go up or down under value-based care models; it will simply shift toward high performers and away from lower performers. It will incentivize collaborative and preventive care typically seen in the primary care setting. Primary care compensation should reflect the increased time spent on care coordination, provided the appropriate results are achieved in terms of quality.

The objective for practices now is to redesign physician compensation in a way that adjusts the practice culture to incentivize collaboration, coordination, patient engagement, and other components of value-based care. Compensation will shift towards a base salary, plus a range of incentives for achieving target metrics for factors such as panel size, patient access, and care quality.

Specialty appropriate quality measures, such as those found in the 2016 PQRS measure lists, can be used to measure and reward care quality, and tools built into the EHR can help providers access clinical best practices to guide appropriate orders, documentation, and treatment plans. Likewise, physicians should be encouraged to maintain patient panels of a size that allow for both optimal care coordination and improved patient access.

After all, value-based care forces some providers to alter the way they have cared for patients for decades. Physician communication and engagement, therefore, are critical to how well value-based compensation plans take root in any practice. Even the best goals and most carefully aligned compensation will still fall flat without these two drivers of cultural change. They are every bit as important — if not more so — as setting target percentages and dollar amounts.

One small — but crucial — early step that group practices must take is to ensure that their compensation plans encourage physicians to embrace the new value-based ideals. Most physicians applaud the concept of collaborative, proactive care; they just need the tools and reimbursement mechanisms to support it.

Brad Boyd is president of Culbert Healthcare Solutions.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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Contact us online.
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News 10/17/16

Top News

In case you weren’t aware … CMS publishes the final MACRA rule to mostly positive acclaim. Fun facts about the new rule:

• It is 2,204 pages.
• Knowing what a time crunch physicians are already in, HHS has summarized it in 24 pages.
• HHS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt has put together his own summary, clocking in at 1,344 words.
• The department has also created a website to help stakeholders digest it.

In his summary, Slavitt offers consolation to small practices worried about the new, potentially burdensome regulations:

“We know that small practices deliver the same high-quality care as larger ones. Yet at every practice we visited or event we held, we heard from physicians in small and rural practices concerned about the impact of new requirements. We heard these concerns and are taking additional steps to aid small practices, including: reducing the time and cost to participate, excluding more small practices (the new policy will exclude an estimated 380,000 clinicians), increasing the availability of Advanced APMs to small practices, allowing practices to begin participation at their own pace, changing one of the qualifications for participation in Advanced APMs to be practice-based as an alternative to total cost-based, and conducting significant technical support and outreach to small practices using $20 million a year over the next five years, as well as through the Transforming Clinical Practice Initiative. Due to these changes, we estimate that small physicians will have the same level of participation as that of other practice sizes.”

With MGMA kicking off in a few weeks, I thought it was worth reaching out to Anders Gilberg, MGMA’s senior vice president of government affairs, to get a better sense of the association’s reaction (and to see how many session titles might have to be changed in light of the final rule’s mid-October publication).

How would you suggest physician practices begin to digest the final rule?
Look to MGMA and professional specialty societies to distill key elements of the rule, despite the sheer magnitude of the regulation. The 2017 requirements have been significantly scaled back and every physician practice should begin to engage. They should also attend MGMA’s 2016 Annual Conference to participate in the “Under the MACRAscope” series, which breaks down the final rule in three separate conference sessions, as well as a general session on the final day of the conference.

When it comes to healthcare technology, what should a practice’s number-one priority be when it comes to preparing for MACRA?
For physician practices who have yet to participate in Meaningful Use, as well as those who have been successful with MU in the past, they should review the final MIPS EHR requirements to ensure that they can fulfill the all new program requirements. We recommend leveraging MGMA resources, including our online communities and face-to-face conferences, to network with colleagues who have successfully implemented technology and modified workflows to capture and report data. All practices should engage with their EHR vendors to determine the best approach to meeting MIPS and ensure that the vendor plans to recertify to the more robust 2015 CEHRT by 2018.

How will the release of the final rule affect session content and show-floor buzz at the show in a few weeks?
We knew the rule would come out right before this year’s annual conference and have the content tracks already in place to help physician practices begin this journey. Without a doubt, it represents one of the most significant changes to the healthcare payment and delivery system in 20 years. We expect practice executives, vendors, physicians, and virtually everyone at the conference will be talking about it. Both learning the substance of the rule and affirming relationships between practices and their vendor partners will be critical to success. We expect there will be great ideas and solutions on display in the exhibit hall to help practices meet the new program requirements, which take effect in just a few months. 

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

And speaking of MGMA: If you’re a HIStalk Practice, HIStalk, or HIStalk Connect sponsor exhibiting at MGMA, complete this form and I’ll include your company in our downloadable exhibitors guide. Today is pretty much your last chance to submit information, as I’ll be compiling the guide for publication over the next couple of days.

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.

Announcements and Implementations

Enjoin releases CDocT, a new CDI training module designed to help physicians transition to value-based payment models. (VP James Fee, MD offered HIStalk Practice readers physician engagement-related tips to improve CDI several weeks ago.)

The American Academy of Ophthalmology announces that its three year-old Intelligent Research in Sight (IRIS) Registry has helped 14,000 physicians keep track of practice patterns and clinical benchmarks for 28 million patients over the course of 100 million office visits, thus making it the “world’s largest clinical database.”

Acuity Eye Specialists (CA) and partner Retina Institute go live with CareCloud’s EHR and PM system across 40 locations.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Nashville-based Expression Health Analytics raises $315,000 in seed funding from NueCura Partners, which it will no doubt use to hire additional staff and further develop its multi-payer, claims-fueled BI database. The company officially launched last year under the leadership of Dana Goldberg (Market Connection Consulting) and Jeff McDonald (Evariant). Goldberg, who also heads up research and strategy, tells me the startup’s analytics can help steer decisions related to opening new practices in strategic locations, growing business in existing locations, and identifying the best targets for mergers and acquisitions.

People

Executive search and advisory firm Korn Ferry promotes Jessica Johnson to head of its new Futurestep Healthcare Technology & Services Practice.

Utah Health Information Network promotes Candace Czerny to COO and welcomes Andrew Burchett as CIO.

Telemedicine

TruClinic adds Orca Health’s digital point-of-care and after-care patient education resources to its telemedicine and PM software. TruClinic is currently enrolled in Startupbootcamp’s Miami accelerator, which concludes with a demo day in late November.

Government and Politics

HHS also releases the “ONC Health IT Certification Program: Enhanced Oversight and Accountability” final rule, which gives ONC the power to directly review certified health IT products and take action in the event that such products put the public’s health and safety at risk, and/or present challenges for ONC-Authorized Certification Bodies.

Other

AHIMA is in full swing in Baltimore, offering HIM professionals sessions related to coding, billing, privacy, and security, among others. The #AHIMACon16 tweet stream is filled thus far with pictures from the exhibit hall including sword-swallowers and fun giveaways. I love that AHIMA’s Career Center is offering Bobbi Brown makeovers and headshots. Free show-floor headshots sound good in theory, but the results have left me with the realization that a little freshening up beforehand might have improved things just a bit.

And speaking of coding, the local news covers one practice’s problems with rejected claims due to a processing glitch on the part of Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield. The payer, which is still updating its systems so that it can accept ICD-10-coded claims, has told physicians to hold such claims until October 19. “I’ve never seen anything come through like this,” says Lori Kiser, business manager at Retina Associates (NY), pointing to a stack of envelopes with correctly coded but rejected claims from Excellus. “In a week, it’s well over $100,000. There should have not been any kind of hiccup here because it means loss revenue for us. We’ll eventually retrieve it, but it’s lost right now.”

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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