News 6/23/16

Top News

Aledade celebrates its second anniversary in the ACO formation business with a slew of announcements. It has partnered with PCPs to form new ACOs in Nevada/Utah, Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia; and signed its first commercial contract, with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana. Physicians enrolled in its Louisiana-based ACO will work with patients via BCBS Louisiana’s Quality Blue Value Partnership program.

Webinars

June 28 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Your Call Is Very Important.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Cyndy Orrys, contact center director, Henry Ford Health System; Brian Cooper, SVP, West Interactive. The contact center is a key hub of patient engagement and a strategic lever for driving competitive advantage. Cyndy will share how her organization’s call center is using technologies and approaches that create effortless patient experiences in connecting them to the right information or resource. Brian will describe five key characteristics of a modern call center and suggest how to get started.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel. Be sure to ask for her “Summer Doldrums Special” that we always run through Labor Day and you’ll get a great deal.

Announcements and Implementations

Practice Fusion develops a predictive modeling program using de-identified EHR data to help physicians identify rare diseases. The program uses clinical decision support advisories in the EHR to alert physicians to a patient’s propensity for having a rare disease, and then offers resources including available testing to confirm or rule out a diagnosis.

People

Jim Boswell (Baptist Medical Group) joins IKS Health as executive vice president and managing partner, client advisory services.

Continuum Health Alliance names Don McDaniel (Sage Growth Partners) president and CEO, and Robert Haft (Morgan Noble) chairman of the board.

Government and Politics

ONC posts recordings of its annual meeting sessions.

HHS adds new members to its Health Information Technology Standards and Health Information Technology Policy Committees. Appointees include Aaron Miri (Imprivata), Rajesh Dash (Duke University School of Medicine), Kay Eron (Intel), Peter Johnson, Kyle Meadors (Drummond Group), Terrence O’Malley, MD (Massachusetts General Hospital), Andrey Ostrovsky, MD (Care at Hand), Wanmei Ou (Oracle), and Larry Wolf (Strategic Health Network).

Cue the healthcare and technology media hysterics: First, President Obama jokes about joining LinkedIn once his term is up. Next, he includes precision medicine in his list of potential future gigs. “… [T]he fact that now you can have your personal genome mapped for a thousand bucks instead of $100,000; and the potential for us to identify what your tendencies are, and to sculpt medicines that are uniquely effective for you. That’s just an example of something I can sit and listen and talk to folks for hours about.”

Telemedicine

Supplemental health benefits company Healthera offers organ donors free telemedicine and portal messaging services via HealthiestYou.

Following in Louisiana’s footsteps, Alaska Governor Bill Walker signs legislation no longer requiring telemedicine providers to be physically located within the state.

Other

A new report from security software company Kapersky Lab finds that ransomware attacks have increased at an alarming rate over the last two years. Nearly 720,000 people were ransomware victims between April 2015 and March 2016 – nearly 600,000 more than were hit the year before. While at-home users remain the object of most ransomware attacks, targeted attacks on corporate users have more than doubled.

Contacts

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

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DOCtalk with Dr. Gregg 6/23/16

EHR Litter

Hot topics in HIT these days are all around interoperability, big data, data exchange, MACRA, etc., all of which pretty much revolve around the generation of data. But before we get too far down the data-generation path (if we’re not there already), maybe it’d be a good idea to consider a much less sexy concept – the notion of “EHR litter.”

In all likelihood, you’ve never heard of EHR litter before. I hadn’t. In fact, I think I may have coined the term. It came to me one day when out mowing my lawn …

Living on a fairly busy street in our town, one of the seemingly incessant scourges is that of litter. As I was picking up the fourth piece of somebody’s waste – a used Kleenex, I believe it was, yuck! – it struck me yet again how lovely it would be to just once mow the grass without having to handle the often gross refuse of my neighbors.

As I mowed on, it further struck me that so much of the detritus that I receive in digitally-created notes from hospitals and other providers is very similar to my yard experience: There’s good stuff in there, but doggone if there isn’t a whole heap of “litter” that just wastes my time!

Think about it. If “big data” is ever going to get us anywhere, it should be big, useful data, not copy-paste crap that often isn’t actually applicable to the current patient note, or system-generated phrases that add no value to the medical story other than making it easier/faster for some poor clinical schlub to get through his dullardly data-capture duties and get his bullet points all clicked to ensure reimbursement.

Whether obtained via fax, PDF on CD or flash drive, C-CDA, or secure messaging, so much of the “medical” content that we providers now have to wade through is like so much litter; it’s truly trash that takes time to scrounge through and wastes digital space. It serves no purpose for ongoing patient care.

To be honest, sometimes I’m not sure if it is any better than the old handwritten pen-and-paper notes that were often illegible. Both waste provider time, both provide limited (if any) value, and both are fairly infuriating. Both are, essentially, medical content litter.

All this waste-of-space content will divert us from our goals of making big data useful, data exchange worthwhile, and interoperability efficient.

I promise to do my best to eliminate “litter” from my notes. I hope you – be you provider or EHR vendor – will do your part to get rid of your EHR trash.

(And, if you happen to drive by my yard, please don’t throw your trash out there, either.)

From the trenches …

“If what I write is literature, I guess you’d better emphasize the ‘litter.’” – Lydia Lunch

Dr. Gregg Alexander, a grunt in the trenches pediatrician at Madison Pediatrics, is chief medical officer for Health Nuts Media, an HIT and marketing consultant, sits on the board of directors of the Ohio Health Information Partnership, and is the semi-proud author of “Monsters Don’t Fart!”

Contacts

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

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News 6/22/16

Top News

HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell and Attorney General Loretta Lynch announce that 301 people have been arrested in a national crackdown on Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Sixty healthcare professionals – including 30 physicians – were taken in for falsely billing over $900 million for medically unnecessary services, or services that were never provided. The takedown is the largest in the nine-year history of the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, exceeding last year’s 243 arrests accounting for $712 million.

Webinars

June 28 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Your Call Is Very Important.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Cyndy Orrys, contact center director, Henry Ford Health System; Brian Cooper, SVP, West Interactive. The contact center is a key hub of patient engagement and a strategic lever for driving competitive advantage. Cyndy will share how her organization’s call center is using technologies and approaches that create effortless patient experiences in connecting them to the right information or resource. Brian will describe five key characteristics of a modern call center and suggest how to get started.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel. Be sure to ask for her “Summer Doldrums Special” that we always run through Labor Day and you’ll get a great deal.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Durham, NC-based Eye Care Leaders Group adds consulting services to its line of EHR and PM software solutions for ophthalmologists and optometrists.

People

Brian Dillon joins OptimizeRx as senior vice president of product and strategy.

Telemedicine

The Maryland Health Care Commission awards $115,000 to help fund telemedicine projects launching this month at private practices Gilchrist Greater Living and MedPeds. Gilchrist, a geriatric care practice, will use the funds to provide chronically ill patients with in-home telemedicine monitoring, while MedPeds will use the resources to launch around-the-clock telemedicine services. The programs will run through November 2017.

Louisiana lawmakers pass telemedicine-friendly legislation, no longer requiring physicians to conduct an initial in-person/in-state patient history or physical exam before engaging in a telemedicine encounter. The revised legislation also changes the state’s definition of telemedicine to “interactive audio” without video if care standards are similar to those of an in-person visit.

Government and Politics

If you build it, they will come: ONC proudly announces that its Mobile Health Apps Interactive Tool has been viewed 12,000 times since launching in April. The interactive tool, built in collaboration with the FTC, FDA, and OCR helps app developers answer questions related to federal legal requirements.

We may no longer see federal employees standing in long taxi queues at HIMSS. Rumor has it a bipartisan Government Travel Modernization Act is being proposed that will allow government workers to take advantage of Uber and other ride-sharing services. I guess it’s not all that surprising that bureaucracy favors more expensive, potentially slower modes of transportation over easy and cheaper access.

Other

Georgia public radio looks at the reasons behind physician burnout in the US, which has increased by 10 percent in the last five years. Family physicians in private practice are particularly feeling the squeeze thanks to increasing patient loads, declining reimbursements, burdensome payer paperwork, and, of course, EHRs. PCP Lisa Robins, MD who has been practicing for 20 years, has experienced her fair share of burnout. “I think that medicine is all encompassing,” she explains. “It just takes up so much of your energy, your time, your whole self. It got to the point where there was nothing else in my life outside of medicine.” Instead of leaving the profession entirely, Robin decided to cut back office hours and take more time for herself.

National Cyber Security Alliance Executive Director Michael Kaiser believes passwords will soon be a thing of the past thanks to advances in biometrics like multifactor authentication incorporating live facial recognition (Blink, and your phone will unlock). Google is already working on such security measures to grant users access to apps. “Let’s work together to make passwords obsolete by embracing innovative techniques that increase our security,” Kaiser suggests. “The future of cybersecurity doesn’t need to be some deep dark secret code; it could simply be you.” 

Sponsor Updates

• E-MDs will host its annual User Conference & Symposium June 23-25 in Austin, TX.
• HealthGrid will deliver patient education content from Healthwise via its patient engagement solution.
• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at 2016 Optometry’s Meeting June 30-July 2 in Boston.

Blog Posts

• Advanced Practice Training: AdvancedInsight Visit Coding Graphs (AdvancedMD)
• A successful approach to making time for optimization (Nordic)
• The CIO of the Future – Long Live the CIO (Culbert Healthcare Solutions)
• The Top 10 Reasons Transformation is the New Normal for Healthcare – Reason 2 (GE Healthcare)

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 6/21/16

Top News

American Well promotes Jon Freshman to CTO, the company’s first since launching 10 years ago. The telemedicine vendor also added a new floor of office space to accommodate its 270 employees. The Boston-based company expects to hire another 30 by the end of the year.

Webinars

June 28 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Your Call Is Very Important.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Cyndy Orrys, contact center director, Henry Ford Health System; Brian Cooper, SVP, West Interactive. The contact center is a key hub of patient engagement and a strategic lever for driving competitive advantage. Cyndy will share how her organization’s call center is using technologies and approaches that create effortless patient experiences in connecting them to the right information or resource. Brian will describe five key characteristics of a modern call center and suggest how to get started.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel. Be sure to ask for her “Summer Doldrums Special” that we always run through Labor Day and you’ll get a great deal.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Dallas-based PediaQ raises $4.5 million, bringing its total raised to $6.4 million. The house call and technology startup will use the latest round of funding to expand services in Dallas and Houston, enter the Austin market, and add adult house-call features for licensees that want to use its technology.

Telemedicine

The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research voices its support for telemedicine in a letter to the Texas Senate, which held hearings last week to better understand its telemedicine benefits. The foundation emphasized the role telemedicine can play in helping Parkinson’s patients access movement disorder specialists, many of whom are typically located in metropolitan areas. The letter also emphasized the need to eliminate provider requirements in state law that limit the ways in which physicians can serve patients. Teladoc has sued the state in hopes of halting regulations that would require an in-person visit before a virtual one.

Announcements and Implementations

Minnesota HIE Koble-MN selects Orion Health’s Amadeus precision medicine software. The HIE was established in 2015 with assistance from South Dakota Health Link.

Point-of-Care Partners expands its e-prescribing state law review resource to include new state mandates related to the dispensing of opiates and biosimilars drugs.

ChartLogic offers a medical billing analysis calculator to help practices better understand billing performance and peer benchmarks.

Alliance Oncology (TN) selects care coordination software from Equicare Health to assist with oncology patient management at 26 treatment centers.

Power2Practice announces Fitbit integration with its physician-built EHR for integrative medicine. A P2P survey found that 70 percent of such physicians already recommend wearable fitness trackers as part of a patient’s treatment plan. I’d love to know how many of those patients end up incorporating wearables and sharing that treatment data, and how those physicians deal with the data (not to mention get paid for dealing with it.)

Higi selects cybersecurity and compliance solutions from Washington, DC-based startup Ostendio. The digital health station vendor, which announced $40 million in funding early this year, has over 4,000 stations installed across the country at retailers like Rite Aid and Publix. 

Ten FQHCs in West Virginia enlist the services of Aledade and the West Virginia Primary Care Association to form an ACO. The only one of its kind in the state, Aledade West Virginia Health Center ACO will serve 13,000 patients, initially focusing on care coordination, population health management, and preventive services.

Government and Politics

CMS will update the HIPAA Administrative Simplification section of its website, promising streamlined content and easier navigation. Dr. Jayne shares her always astute thoughts on that process in this week’s Curbside Consult.

Research and Innovation

It seems pharma reps with at least $20 in their pockets stand a good chance of influencing physician prescribing patterns. An Open Payments data analysis found that physicians who received a single meal promoting the drug of interest had higher rates of prescribing that drug to Medicare beneficiaries. Prescription rates increased alongside dinner dates, though researchers note that the findings represent an association rather than a cause-and-effect relationship.

Other

See if you can follow this: Citrix-owned GoToMyPC resets all user passwords to stop hackers who breach other services from accessing the GoToMyPC accounts of people who reuse passwords. The remote-management service claims it was the victim of a “password reuse attack, where attackers used usernames and passwords leaked from other websites to access the accounts of GoToMyPC users.”

Contacts

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

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News 6/20/16

Top News

HHS announces $100 million in funding over the next five years to help qualified organizations assist small and solo practices implement value-based care programs (including health IT) under MACRA, especially providers in rural and underserved areas, and communities facing a shortage of healthcare professionals.

Webinars

June 28 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Your Call Is Very Important.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Cyndy Orrys, contact center director, Henry Ford Health System; Brian Cooper, SVP, West Interactive. The contact center is a key hub of patient engagement and a strategic lever for driving competitive advantage. Cyndy will share how her organization’s call center is using technologies and approaches that create effortless patient experiences in connecting them to the right information or resource. Brian will describe five key characteristics of a modern call center and suggest how to get started.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel. Be sure to ask for her “Summer Doldrums Special” that we always run through Labor Day and you’ll get a great deal.

Announcements and Implementations

Panorama Orthopedics & Spine Center (CO) selects care coordination technology from PinpointCare to help oversee its OrthoPlus program, part of the Medicare Bundled Payments for Care Improvement BPCI initiative. (Check out my January 2016 interview with Panorama Orthopedics & Spine Center COO Lance Goudzwaard here.)

Kinney Drugs, the drug-store division of KPH Healthcare Services, joins the HealtheConnections RHIO in New York, linking medication prescribed with medications picked up at over 70 New York Kinney Drugs stores.  

The International Union of Engineers opens a clinic for its 4,500 Kansas City, KS members and retirees. Kansas City-based Cerner will run the clinic, one of 40 employer-based clinics it oversees across the country.

House call technology company TrueCare24 develops an AI-based messenger bot that can find and schedule healthcare appointments for users. Baymax (a nod to Big Hero 6, perhaps?) integrates with Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Skype to connect users with primary care.

People

Robert Cohen (Evolent Health) joins Appriss as president of its Healthcare Division.

Telemedicine

Columbia, SC-based Doctors Care PA develops and launches a direct-to-consumer telemedicine service to complement its chain of 55 urgent care practices. The company first began using telemedicine two years ago at several of its busiest locations to minimize wait times.

Government and Politics

HRSA will provide a $250,000 annual grant for up to three years to help state medical boards join and implement the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact. An initiative of the Federation of State Medical Boards, compact members will work to develop and implement an expedited licensing process for physicians looking to practice medicine across state lines. Seventeen states have joined the initiative thus far. Pennsylvania will likely make 18; legislation related to joining the compact passed the House late last week.

Athenahealth SVP and General Counsel Dan Haley explains why the company has not – and will not – sign ONC’s transparency pledge, which in Haley’s words, “requir[e] adherents first to promise to provide the free market with accurate and transparent pricing and functionality information; and second, to bury market-facing communications in mandatory disclosures intended to vindicate that first part.” Haley lists the bevy of government pledges that have conspired to force the industry to follow federal rules under the guise of positive PR, including the Blue Button Pledge and Interoperability Pledge, concluding that, “it might be time to draw a line by taking a Pledge Against Pledges.”

Yes, those hazy days of summer cookouts are upon us. In case you were wondering, Y93.G2 refers to “Activity, grilling and smoking food,” while Y93.G9 refers to “Activity, other involving cooking and grilling.”

Other

Google rolls out “symptom search,” a new smart phone feature for its Search app developed with help from Harvard Medical School and Mayo Clinic. Users will now see “digital cards” pop up below the search box with (presumably) more precise information relevant to their healthcare-related query. “A lot of times, what people find scares the daylights out of them,” says AAFP President Wanda Filer, MD “so if these Google cards can add context, that’s going to help doctors and patients out tremendously.”

Sad but true: Columbia University and French National Institute computer scientists discover that 59 percent of social media links have never been clicked, meaning that most people share content without ever reading it. While I’m a big believer in the power of Twitter, I do realize it can turn into a news-cycle vacuum, with one small group of [insert niche here] tweeters inadvertently controlling the type and volume of information shared. That being said, there’s only so much time in the day, and it’s far more convenient (though not necessarily prudent) to share content you think your network will like than to vet it beforehand. Researcher Arnaud Legout backs me up: “This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper.” That being said, I encourage you to click on the links in this post so that you can dig deeper via the original source.

Sponsor Updates

• Nordic receives RightSourcing’s Gold Supplier Award.

Blogs

• Nurses need innovative care team collaboration technology (PerfectServe)

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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Contact us online.
Become a sponsor.