News 11/12/15

Top News

Practice Fusion names Tom Langan permanent CEO. Langan, who joined the company in mid 2014 as chief commercial officer, had been interim CEO since August. Langan’s title jump caused a bit of an uproar, with some  insiders speculating that the ouster of former CEO Ryan Howard was a board decision rather than a personal one on Howard’s part. At the time, rumors swirled that the company was preparing for an IPO, a development that might be escalated now that Langan seems to have found his permanent footing in the C-suite.

Webinars

Medecision experts Laura Kanov and Tobias Samo, MD presented 12 population health management predictions during today’s HIStalk webinar, spanning physicians, consumers, and technology. My new favorite buzzphrase, coined by Kanov, is “payvider space.” Check out my tweet recap of their presentation here.

November 18 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “Making VDI Secure and Simple for Healthcare.” Sponsored by Park Place International. Presenters: James Millington, group product line marketing manager, VMware; Erick Marshall, senior systems engineer of virtual desktop infrastructure, Park Place International. Deployment of a virtual solution can optimize the experience of clinician users. Attendees will learn how to address the evolving demands of security and mobility in clinician workflow to improve the quality of care.

November 20 (Friday) 2:00 ET. “The Athenahealth Leadership Institute Presents: Dr. John Halamka Interviewed by Jonathan Bush.” Sponsored by Athenahealth. Presenters: John Halamka, MD, MS, CIO, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Jonathan Bush, CEO, Athenahealth. Providers are fed up with interface fees and the lengthy, fragmented narratives we’re exchanging today. But what is the right course of action to help deliver better care across the continuum? Bring your questions as we join Dr.Halamka and Jonathan Bush to discuss the current state of healthcare and how we can improve care coordination and interoperability.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

#HIStalking Tweet Chat

The next #HIStalking tweet chat will take place Thursday, November 19 at 12pm ET. Nonprofit Healthwise (@healthwise) will host. Stay tuned for topics.

Announcements and Implementations

The Canada-based Centre for Effective Practice will offer its evidence-based tools and programs via CognisantMD’s Ocean Platform, which acts as an interface between patient tablets, secure messaging, and data collected in EHRs. The integration will launch with CEP’s patient poverty screening tool, followed by an opioid manager and lower-back pain screening tool.

Dougherty Laser Vision (CA) rolls out VersaSuite’s EHR and PM platform across its four locations.

AtlantiCare implements online scheduling via ZocDoc for its primary care and specialty physicians.

People

David Smith (EEI Global) joins OptimizeRx as vice president of client services.

Government and Politics

Newly released documents show that the State of Vermont has invested $1.3 billion in 132 IT projects, the bulk of which focus on healthcare. Coming in at just over $866 million, healthcare IT projects include the ongoing development of the Vermont Health Connect insurance exchange, which is set to cost $302.3 million to implement and maintain between this year and next. It’s the state’s most expensive project to date.

Research and Innovation

Accenture expects the number of retail clinics to increase 47 percent, at a minimum, between 2014 and 2017, creating capacity for 25 million patient visits. The forecast validates Walgreen’s recent decision to move its Healthcare Clinics over to Epic. The company, which currently operates over 400 clinics, wouldn’t share with me its expansion projections for the coming year (or the cost of the implementation), but I think it’s safe to assume that the big bucks it’s spending will not just be for its current locations.

Telemedicine

Scottsdale, AZ-based HealthiestYou secures a $30 million investment from Frontier Capital. The company will use the cash infusion to ramp up sales and marketing efforts to employer groups, expand its executive team, and develop its technology to capture more of the telemedicine market.

Raintree Systems integrates SnapMD’s telemedicine tool into its EHR and PM system for physical therapists.

Other

Because I know you were wondering: Sony finally decides to discontinue Betamax, the long-ago competitor of VHS tapes. The company halted production of Betamax players in 2002, but carried on making tapes for Japanese recording studios and die-hard fans of the outmoded technology. As Quartz points out, “Betamax was never granted a hipster revival.”

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 11/11/15

Top News

Microsoft expands its Microsoft Software & Systems Academy for veterans from three regions to nine. The program, which now services 12 military bases in the US, was created two years ago to offer military personnel technology training before they transitioned to civilian life. Areas of study include BI, software development, and server cloud/database. Microsoft has hired a quarter of the program’s graduates, while 79 other private-sector companies have hired the rest. I’d be interested to find out how many are now working in healthcare IT.

Veteran and Microsoft Vice President of Military Affairs Chris Cortez sums up the company’s efforts: “On this Veterans Day 2015, it’s the responsibility of the IT industry to honor those who have served with more than an artillery salute and a brief word of thanks. We are compelled to set an example of what it can look like to dig in with our transitioning service members as they prepare to cross the bridge to the civilian world.”

Webinars

November 12 (Thursday) 1 :00 ET. “Top Predictions for Population Health Management in 2016 and Beyond.” Sponsored by Medecision. Presenters: Tobias C. Samo, MD, FACP, FHIMSS, CMIO, Medecision; Laura Kanov, BS, RRT, MBA, SVP of care delivery organization solutions, Medecision. With all the noise and hype around population health management, the presenters will share their predictions for 2016 and their insight into meeting the mounting pressures of value-based reimbursement and the tools and technology needed to manage care delivery.

November 18 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “Making VDI Secure and Simple for Healthcare.” Sponsored by Park Place International. Presenters: James Millington, group product line marketing manager, VMware; Erick Marshall, senior systems engineer of virtual desktop infrastructure, Park Place International. Deployment of a virtual solution can optimize the experience of clinician users. Attendees will learn how to address the evolving demands of security and mobility in clinician workflow to improve the quality of care.

November 20 (Friday) 2:00 ET. “The Athenahealth Leadership Institute Presents: Dr. John Halamka Interviewed by Jonathan Bush.” Sponsored by Athenahealth. Presenters: John Halamka, MD, MS, CIO, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Jonathan Bush, CEO, Athenahealth. Providers are fed up with interface fees and the lengthy, fragmented narratives we’re exchanging today. But what is the right course of action to help deliver better care across the continuum? Bring your questions as we join Dr.Halamka and Jonathan Bush to discuss the current state of healthcare and how we can improve care coordination and interoperability.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

#HIStalking Tweet Chat

The next #HIStalking tweet chat will take place Thursday, November 19 at 12pm ET. Nonprofit Healthwise (@healthwise) will host. Stay tuned for topics.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

StartUp Health expands into Finland through a partnership with Finpro’s Team Finland Health program. Startup Health Finland will set up shop at the Health Innovation Village at GE in Helsinki, and initially accept five startups into its entrepreneurial coaching program.

WorkWell Medical Group, Central California’s largest independent occupational medicine and urgent care provider, announces a new round of funding from private equity firm Salt Creek Capital. WorkWell plans to use the funding to expand beyond its five clinics.

Announcements and Implementations

Heart of the Rockies Regional Medical center (CO) chooses Aprima for its ambulatory clinics.

The Retina Group of Washington replaces its legacy EHR with Modernizing Medicine’s EMA Opthalmology solution.

Chart Scout, a patient data-tracking tool from Emerge Clinical Solutions, is certified by the Allscripts Developer Program, paving the way for further product development with Allscripts and integration into its EHR.

Upland, CA-based BMS Practice Solutions integrates rehabilitation management and outcomes tools from CareConnections into its EHR for physical therapists.

Medical marketing firm Solution21 offers practices a white-label app featuring appointment management, access to treatment information, friend referral, and special promotions.

People

The New York EHealth Collaborative will recognize Teladoc CEO Jason Gorevic as an honoree at its annual gala next week in New York City.

Government and Politics

CMS offers a FAQ on Meaningful Use pertaining to a practice’s ability to benefit from patient messaging.

Telemedicine

The ATA awards accreditation for online patient consultations to Avera Health. The South Dakota-based health system partnered with American Well this summer to launch a direct-to-consumer, urgent care telemedicine service.

Canada-based Ask the Doctor acquires UK-based telemedicine company Patients Connected for an undisclosed sum. “With NHS in a financial crisis,” says Prakash Chand, president and CEO of parent company ATD Health Network, “and wait times at all UK hospitals and clinics increasing to over five hours to see exhausted physicians, the timing couldn’t have been better for us to integrate our platform with Patients Connected.”

Research and Innovation

Vodafone Australia partners with the Australia-based Garvan Institute of Medical Research to develop the DreamLab smartphone app, which captures data for cancer research from phones while users sleep. In essence, the app takes advantage of the computing power that typically goes untapped during a phone user’s non-waking hours – perfect for those with unlimited data plans like those offered by Vodafone. Users can choose how much data they want to contribute each night, and select the type of cancer project to which they want to contribute. The company claims that if 1,000 people use the app, “cancer puzzles would be solved 30 times faster.”

Other

The Personal Connected Health Alliance presents Walgreens with its inaugural Digital Health Innovation Award.

In other Veterans Day news, it appears that Uber and Lyft are offering free rides to those who have served.

Alabama.com highlights the medical oddities found throughout the state’s three medical museums, including the radio-active suppositories pictured above. Radio-active products were popular in the early 1900s, and included lipsticks, toothpaste and soaps. Though discreetly packaged, the suppositories promised to restore a user’s energy and sex life.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at the 2015 Western States Health-e Connection Summit & Trade Shows November 17 in Scottsdale, AZ.
• Healthwise will exhibit at the ACO Congress November 16-18 in Los Angeles.

Blog Posts

• Modified Stage 2 Objectives with Alternates for Stage 1 (AdvancedMD)
• Overcoming the trickier parts of Meaningful Use: insights from a Nordic nurse (Nordic)
• The Revenue Cycle After ICD-10 (Culbert Healthcare Solutions)

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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Readers Write: Ambulatory Interoperability – Paving the Way for Improved Health

Ambulatory Interoperability: Paving the Way for Improved Health
By Rob Newman

The health IT industry is buzzing with talk of interoperability – a gap those of us in the market have long recognized and worked to overcome. Consumers and the media are now taking notice and discussing how healthcare delivery, costs, and outcomes could be improved if physicians and other care providers and their patients were better connected.

What does interoperability really mean to you and your practice? And in the digital age, where information flows quickly and freely, why is healthcare interoperability such a challenge?

Setting the Stage
If interoperability goes in one of your ears and out the other like any other buzzword, I’d like to take some time to set the stage. We define interoperability as the exchange and communication of health data across information technology systems with the goal of advancing effective delivery of healthcare. These systems may reside within an ambulatory practice, a hospital, a government agency or even with healthcare consumers through their mobile devices or wearables. When interoperability is working correctly, data flows seamlessly from one system to the other in a meaningful way, and with checks and balances in place to protect sensitive information. When interoperability fails, a patient’s data sits siloed with individual providers, or it is passed along in a way that is heavy on volume and low on actionable insight.

In the ambulatory space, interoperability ensures both the patient and provider gain access to the right information, at the right time, in the right place. Health outcomes can be improved for whole populations – making it possible to achieve success in a value-based model – when doctors treat more than an immediate health need by looking across the patient’s health record and medical history. This connectedness ensures physicians can see where, when, and how the person has been treated; what has worked versus what hasn’t … and can even keep tabs on patient compliance along the way.

The convenience of having this information available before a physician even encounters a patient in the office is also a game changer. Physicians want to manage their time wisely to ensure all patient needs are met in a timely manner. When data is well-connected, office visits become more streamlined and efficient with fewer introductory questions and less guessing. Actual visits to the office can even be prevented entirely … either through provider-patient communications and proactive care coordination, or early telemedicine or other online communications and interventions.

Through these linkages, providers also have access to the right information to make a proper diagnosis, care coordinators know how to follow up, and patients are empowered to be better healthcare consumers with access to their medical information and care plan. All of this helps facilitate ongoing, proactive care and better health.

There are Benefits, But …
Despite the benefits of interoperability, there are always hurdles with new technology solutions— particularly when those solutions contain data as sensitive as medical information. Currently, there’s no streamlined method in place to identify patients across offices and systems, and no national appetite for a unique patient identifier that would enable physicians to track a person in this way. Without such an identifier, data is mismatched when multiple people share names, dates of birth, or addresses because individual healthcare providers are using their own unique way to identify patients within their systems.

Headway at the KLAS Keystone Summit
Is there any good news about interoperability? The answer is a resounding yes. In recent years, interoperability has made significant strides forward in the ambulatory space with increased EHR adoption and collaborative efforts by EHR vendors to more effectively share data between their systems. While the aforementioned pain points around patient identity remain, solution providers are coming together to solve these issues as an industry. Greenway Health is a member of the Ehealth Exchange, Surescripts, and CommonWell Health Alliance, each of which is pushing to eliminate lost pockets of data. In fact, we recently convened with other key EHR solution executives and healthcare provider organizations at the KLAS Keystone Summit, where the group agreed to adopt a standard interoperability measurement tool. The vision is to link everyone together, regardless of EHR solution they’re on. We are all committed to building tools to bridge providers and patients, focusing on translating immense data into useful nuggets of actionable information to improve care coordination and health outcomes.

Let the Data Flow
If data sharing becomes seamless, the information will be a utility. As an example, we don’t think about the water getting to our faucet; we just expect that if we turn the faucet, water will come. But there was a time this wasn’t the case. Pipes had to be laid connecting a water source to a treatment plant to your house and back again. In the same respect, we’re currently building out the health data interoperability infrastructure. We have to figure out what size pipes to use and how to refine the data into actionable information that supports providers in most effectively determining how and when to take action. Along the way, the data must be protected and accurate, not corrupted or lost in transit.

I trust we will take down the barriers to clinical information and get to a place where providers don’t think about interoperability — not because it’s a buzzword, but because it’s so seamless they don’t have to worry what will happen when they turn on the faucet. When this data becomes more than information, it becomes powerful. It is the fuel necessary for efficiency, productivity, conversation and, ultimately, for improved health.

Rob Newman is vice president of interoperability at Greenway Health in Carrollton, GA.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 11/10/15

Top News

Scottsdale, AZ-based PM consulting firm PracticeMax acquires Brewster, NY-based Medical Management Corp. of America for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition provides PracticeMax access to MMCOA’s specialty physician client base in the Northeast. Its last acquisition was of Optimum Medical Management in September 2014.

Webinars

November 11 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “Trouble Upstream: The Underinsured and Cash Flow Challenges.” Sponsored by TransUnion. Presenter: Jonathan Wiik, principal consultant, TransUnion Healthcare. The average person spends nearly $15,000 per year on healthcare as deductibles keep rising. Providers must educate their patients on plan costs and benefits while controlling their own collection costs by using estimation tools, propensity-to-pay analytics, and point-of-sale collections. This webinar will highlight industry trends in managing underinsured patients and will describe ways to match patients to appropriate funding.

November 12 (Thursday) 1 :00 ET. “Top Predictions for Population Health Management in 2016 and Beyond.” Sponsored by Medecision. Presenters: Tobias C. Samo, MD, FACP, FHIMSS, CMIO, Medecision; Laura Kanov, BS, RRT, MBA, SVP of care delivery organization solutions, Medecision. With all the noise and hype around population health management, the presenters will share their predictions for 2016 and their insight into meeting the mounting pressures of value-based reimbursement and the tools and technology needed to manage care delivery.

November 18 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “Making VDI Secure and Simple for Healthcare.” Sponsored by Park Place International. Presenters: James Millington, group product line marketing manager, VMware; Erick Marshall, senior systems engineer of virtual desktop infrastructure, Park Place International. Deployment of a virtual solution can optimize the experience of clinician users. Attendees will learn how to address the evolving demands of security and mobility in clinician workflow to improve the quality of care.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Patient IO will use an undisclosed amount of funding from Athenahealth to ramp up product development of its care coordination tool, and integrate it with the AthenaNet cloud platform. The Austin, TX-based startup will also join Athenahealth’s More Disruption Please accelerator program, which conveniently opened a third location in Austin earlier this year.

People

Peter Tippett, MD (Verizon) joins the DataMotion Board of Directors.

Susan Anderson (Alberta Health) joins Orion Health as managing director of Canadian operations.

Telemedicine

XG Technology partners with GlobalMedia Group to offer a telemedicine delivery system for use in remote and underserved areas. The XMax Telemedicine Network Solution will combine XG’s mobile broadband technology with GMG’s telemedicine platform, and can also be adapted for use during emergency situations.

Walgreens expands and upgrades telemedicine services from MDLive to an additional 20 states via its mobile app. Telemedicine services were launched within the app in 2014, and are now available to consumers in 25 states.

On a related note, Walgreens launches the Connect app, offering its Balance Reward members who own Well at Walgreens connected blood glucose meters or blood pressure wrist monitors to earn points for taking daily readings. Measurements are captured and transmitted via Qualcomm Life’s 2net platform and mobile tools.

Government and Politics

The Patriot Promise Foundation launches ahead of Veterans Day to assist veterans in finding quality healthcare, which will including bringing commercially available healthcare technologies to the attention of physicians that care for veterans. Alliant Healthcare Products President and CEO Bob Taylor, who founded the organization, stresses that “we need to get beyond simply pointing fingers at the VA and work with them to do what it takes to find and fix any gaps in healthcare, whether it’s the availability of the latest technology or actively treating Post Traumatic Stress for vets.”

Members of the Senate HELP and Finance Committees write to CMS and OCR asking for an explanation of the steps being taken to aid medical identity theft victims and prevent future cyberattacks. The authors point out the increasing frequency of such attacks, and highlight the reluctance of CMS to correct Medicare billing records for identity theft victims. They conclude with a series of 12 questions in the hopes of receiving a response by November 24.

The above letter’s timing is especially apropos, given the White House’s release of Privacy and Trust Principles for its Precision Medicine Initiative. The four-page document assures participants they have the right to access results of the studies they participate in, and to be informed of any data breaches. It also prohibits re-identification of de-identified data.

The “who owns the data?” debate rages in Pennsylvania, as the House approves a bill that would require outpatient diagnostic imaging centers to notify patients or their designees of any significant abnormalities at the time of service or within 20 days after the results are mailed to the patient’s physician. Supporters of the bill, which now moves to the Senate, steadfastly believe that test results belong to the patient, while detractors are concerned such a practice will interfere with the sacred physician-patient relationship.

Research and Innovation

The third annual Practice Profitability Index shows that physicians still aren’t optimistic when it comes to turning a profit, though they are more upbeat about revenue than in years past. The forecasts align with the nearly 20 percent of practices that plan on budgeting for the replacement of their EHR and PM systems due to the prohibitive expense and sluggishness of current tools, plus their inability to easily integrate with other tech. The usual suspects – declining reimbursement, rising costs, and regulatory changes – ranked as the top threats to overall profit growth.

Other

Tweets from the HIMSS Connected Health Summit are flying fast and furiously, with HHS CTO Susannah Fox attempting to validate the usefulness of tweeting from conferences (a practice I know Mr. H has no time for, but I often enjoy.) Kudos to Fox, who spoke about insider views on government innovation, and cheekily referred to herself as “Lord of the Geeks” in the process.

The Wall Street Journal looks at the “Weird World of Brain Hacking” and the ethical concerns that arise when at-home scientists use DIY devices to treat a variety of conditions, including boosting creativity and cognitive performance. “You don’t often find a tool inside a lab that people replicate outside the lab and use their own way,” says MIT researcher Anna Wexler. “The controversy gets at the larger issue of who gets to control the tools of science.”

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 11/9/15

Top News

GE Healthcare acquires The Camden Group for an undisclosed sum. The Los Angeles-based Camden Group, which offers advisory services for physician groups and hospitals, will become the GE Healthcare Camden Group and serve as as the US business unit of global advisory firm GE Healthcare Partners. GEHCG becomes one of the largest consulting firms in the US, according to Daniel Marino, executive vice president of the new organization. GE Healthcare acquired UK-based Foresight Partnership and Finnamore last year.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

Thanks to the following sponsors, new and renewing, that recently supported HIStalk Practice. Click a logo for more information. Interested in learning about HIStalk Practice sponsorship benefits? Contact Lorre for details.

Mr. H plugged the HIStalk Fan Club late last week, so I thought I’d also let readers know that you can also follow news across all three HIStalk sites on LinkedIn and Google +.

Webinars

November 11 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “Trouble Upstream: The Underinsured and Cash Flow Challenges.” Sponsored by TransUnion. Presenter: Jonathan Wiik, principal consultant, TransUnion Healthcare. The average person spends nearly $15,000 per year on healthcare as deductibles keep rising. Providers must educate their patients on plan costs and benefits while controlling their own collection costs by using estimation tools, propensity-to-pay analytics, and point-of-sale collections. This webinar will highlight industry trends in managing underinsured patients and will describe ways to match patients to appropriate funding.

November 12 (Thursday) 1 :00 ET. “Top Predictions for Population Health Management in 2016 and Beyond.” Sponsored by Medecision. Presenters: Tobias C. Samo, MD, FACP, FHIMSS, CMIO, Medecision; Laura Kanov, BS, RRT, MBA, SVP of care delivery organization solutions, Medecision. With all the noise and hype around population health management, the presenters will share their predictions for 2016 and their insight into meeting the mounting pressures of value-based reimbursement and the tools and technology needed to manage care delivery.

November 18 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “Making VDI Secure and Simple for Healthcare.” Sponsored by Park Place International. Presenters: James Millington, group product line marketing manager, VMware; Erick Marshall, senior systems engineer of virtual desktop infrastructure, Park Place International. Deployment of a virtual solution can optimize the experience of clinician users. Attendees will learn how to address the evolving demands of security and mobility in clinician workflow to improve the quality of care.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Durham, NC-based Validic signs on several new domestic and international clients including Australia-based Health&, France-based VisioMed, and Portland-based Conversa Health. The company, which specializes in connecting disparate digital health platforms, is on quite a roll, having signed on a new partner nearly every month in 2015.

India-based Omega Healthcare prepares to benefit from the transition to ICD-10 and resultant shortage of qualified coders in the United States. The company, which already employs, 2,500 coders, plans to hire an additional 1,000 in the coming quarter and hopes to realize a 30-percent increase in revenue as a result. India employs over 10,000 coders, of which Omega employs the biggest chunk.

Announcements and Implementations

Flatiron Health adds Billing Insights to the analytics capabilities of its OncologyCloud platform, enabling oncology practices and cancer centers to link EHR and billing data to recover missed or incorrectly billed charges.

The Wright Center (PA) receives the 2015 HIMSS Ambulatory Davies Award. The center, which has used the Medent EHR since 2005, provides safety net care to 10,000 patients annually, and provides residency and fellowship opportunities for medical students.

Figmd and Alpha II complete EHNAC’s Data Registry Accreditation Program. They are the first two organizations to complete the third-party review for registries that provide services to HIEs, RECs, and other government entities.

People

WEDI awards its 2015 Sullivan Award to Walter Suarez, executive director of health IT strategy and policy, Kaiser Permanente. Suarez was appointed by HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell to head up the agency’s National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics earlier this year.

Erica Galvez (ONC) joins Aledade as director of HIE.

The AMA Foundation honors fourth-year University of Buffalo medical student (and Taylor Swift doppelgänger) Michele Smith with its 2015 Physicians of Tomorrow Award.

Telemedicine

Japan plans to allow limited drone package delivery by 2018, including deliveries of prescription drugs and blood for transfusions, as part of a nationwide push to invest in new technologies. The nation also plans to ease up on current telemedicine regulations so that AI tools that diagnose conditions based on skin images can be brought to market in the next three years. While the concepts seem promising, the rushed timeline would certainly give me pause, especially if I were an investor. Like so many other Olympic host nations before it, Japan may be rushing innovation too quickly to meet its 2020 deadline in Tokyo. I suppose time will tell if Japan’s plans to use driverless buses and taxis during the games will pan out.

The State of New Jersey’s Senate HHS and Senior Citizens Committee meets to discuss telemedicine applications and services, including legislation introduced earlier this year that focuses on the state’s regulation and reimbursement of telemedicine delivery. It seems New Jersey’s Medicaid program reimburses for telemedicine services, but has not yet afforded the same privilege to private payers, managed care plans, or state employee plans.

Kura MD adds TriageNow nurse call-center services to its telemedicine platform for employers.

Government and Politics

AAFP representatives take their anti-Meaningful Use letter-writing campaign one step further and meet with House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer to further stress the need to delay Stage 3. “We gave him concrete examples of how EHRs are not beneficial for patient care,” says AAFP President Wanda Filer, MD. “We explained how it can be difficult to get pertinent information from the records. Just checking boxes for meaningful use requirements is not advancing patient care. He seemed receptive to our concerns.” Filer also expressed the need to keep AHRQ alive, and increase the federal budget for programs that expand primary care.

Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, introduces the Meaningful Use Hardship Relief Act, offering EPs a special hardship exemption from MU penalties due to the delayed release of the modified Stage 2 rule. For those still keeping track, CMS released the final rule with less than 90 days left in the year, leaving MU participants little time to adjust and collect measurements required in 2015. Price, as readers may recall, co-hosted AMA’s first town hall meeting this summer, where he heard a “Meaningful Use” earful from Atlanta-area physicians.

Other

Infectious disease professor Tara Smith feels compelled to rank pop culture portrayals of zombie outbreaks on a realism scale of 0 to 10. (I can’t believe she left out Shaun of the Dead – THE standard for feel-good zombie flicks.) Her findings, backed up by thorough research:

• The Walking Dead: 4 out of 10
• 28 Days Later (my favorite): 5 out of 10
• World War Z: 0 out of 10 (book, 6 out of 10)
• Resident Evil series: –20 out of 10
• The Last of Us: 7 out of 10

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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