News 8/19/15

Top News

Practice Fusion’s CEO switch (announced via company blog) makes waves ahead of a rumored IPO, with industry insiders speculating that Ryan Howard’s ouster was a board decision rather than a personal one stemming from burnout. Interim CEO and board member Tom Langan insists it was part of a larger strategy around enhancing the company’s commercialization efforts, which makes sense given Langan’s former role as chief commercial officer. HIStalk readers have their own explanations, of course, including the notion that the possible IPO could simply be a smokescreen for the downplayed executive shuffle.  

Webinars

August 25 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Cerner’s Takeover of Siemens: An Update (Including the DoD Project).” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Vince Ciotti, principal, HIS Professionals; Frank Poggio, president and CEO, The Kelzon Group. Vince and Frank delivered HIStalk’s most popular webinar, "Cerner’s Takeover of Siemens, Are You Ready?" which has been viewed nearly 6,000 times. Vince and Frank return with their brutally honest (and often humorous) opinions about what has happened with Cerner since then, including its participation in the successful DoD bid and what that might mean for Cerner’s customers and competitors, based on their having seen it all in their decades of experience.

Previous webinars are on the YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for webinar services including discounts for signing up by Labor Day.

#HIStalking Tweet Chat: Compliance from the Patient’s Point of View

Join @ThePatientsSide (Amy Gleason, COO of CareSync and White House Champion of Change for Precision Medicine) and me (@JennHIStalk) for a discussion on using healthcare technology to drive patient compliance. Preview Amy’s #HIStalking discussion questions here.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The local paper highlights the long-running feud between independent Plum Creek Medical Group (NE) and nearby Lexington Regional Health Center stemming from PCMG’s successful patient-centered medical home, which has reduced the hospital’s cash flow from PCMG patient ER visits and readmissions. The vitriol (including lawsuits) has reached such a fever pitch that PCMG felt the need to take out a one-page ad in the local paper stating its case. Its physicians resigned their hospital privileges en mass late last year. 

Announcements and Implementations

Allscripts integrates CoverMyMeds electronic prior authorization technology into its eAuth software. The partnership will increase the number of health plans available to Allscripts end users and enable prescriptions to be filled more rapidly. CoverMyMeds announced similar partnerships with Practice Fusion and Epic earlier this year.

Webster, MA-based Product Development Management Group launches ICD9CodeUp, a SaaS tool that enables practice staff to submit claims with ICD-10 codes using their existing ICD-9 billing systems.

Outpatient rehab provider Spooner Physical Therapy implements Clinicient’s PracticeInsight EHR and billing solution at its 16 facilities in Arizona.

People

Steve Crusenberry (Rackspace) joins ClearData as senior vice president of products.

Government and Politics

CMS will host a National Provider Call August 27 (five weeks out from the October 1 transition date) focusing on the “Countdown to ICD-10.” Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt, as well as representatives from AHIMA and AHA will be on hand to offer coding guidance and tips.

U.S. Dept. of Education Chief Privacy Officer Kathleen Styles asks for feedback on the ability of colleges to disclose student medical records without consent. Current guidance leans towards protecting the privacy of students: Schools shouldn’t share records without consent or a court order unless the lawsuit relates to medical matters. The comment period for draft guidance ends October 2.

Telemedicine

The Ontario Telemedicine Network partners with WellDoc and Samsung to offer a new version of WellDoc’s BlueStar mobile prescription therapy for diabetes to 300 Toronto patients. The updated version integrates Samsung’s S Health health metric tracking, offering patients the ability to self-manage their condition. OTN’s goal is to validate the integration of self-management and lifestyle tracking tools into the traditional Type 2 diabetes standard of care.

PBS News Hour spotlights internist Michael Fratkin, MD and the palliative care he provides via telemedicine to patients in the rural areas of Eureka, CA. Fratkin is founder of ResolutionCare, a practice he started with funding from an Indiegogo campaign late last year. ResolutionCare is in the midst of a six-month pilot program to provide palliative care via telemedicine to 55 members of Partnership HealthPlan of California, which administers Medi-Cal benefits to eligible patients. If successful, the program may be rolled out to more of the plan’s 530,000 members.

Research and Innovation

A Black Book study finds that Allscripts, Greenway, McKesson, and Athenahealth rank highest with large group practice customers for increased customer satisfaction over the last year. Satisfaction categories included user experience, documentation, and productivity enhancements. Nearly 20 percent of surveyed large group practices plan to replace their original EHRs by the end of 2016.

Other

One Medical Group Vice President Sandeep Acharya outlines contributing factors to sluggish healthcare innovation, pointing out that payers are creating some of the biggest barriers:

“[I]n order to generate revenue for your innovative service, payers like Aetna or Blue Shield first have to agree to reimburse you for it, then doctors have to recommend it. It can take years for entrepreneurs to move through this process. Compare this to Apple bringing the iPhone to market in 2007. Imagine if, before you could buy an iPhone, Apple had to convince your bank to fund it, then get your financial adviser to recommend you purchase it. You might still be using a first-generation Razr.”

Boston Magazine highlights the success many patients have in finally finding accurate diagnoses via CrowdMed, a website that aims to solve medical mysteries by crowdsourcing suggestions from users – even those not in healthcare. “We believe that the most credentialed people are not always the best when it comes to solving cases,” explains founder Jared Heyman. “There’s a lot of med students out there and nurses and chiropractors and nutritionists who don’t have MDs by their name, and are actually very good at solving tough medical cases.”

Sponsor Updates

• Nordic offers “HIT Breakdown 10 – Patient Engagement possibilities with MyChart.”
• AdvancedMD offers a look at its new ICD-10 website.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 8/18/15

Top News

Riding high on the coattails of the transition to ICD-10, coding software and services company Aviacode secures a $16 million investment from growth equity firm Frontier Capital. The Salt Lake City-based company plans to use the funds to expand sales and marketing, and scale up product development.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

I have yet to encounter a physician’s office during unexpected downtime. After reading Dr. Jayne’s latest Curbside Consult, I can only imagine the frustration staff and patients must feel in dealing with unorganized paper-based workflows. I encourage you to take a look at her recommended best practices for just such a situation. I recommend a big dose of patience for those patients who unknowingly encounter just such a situation. It’s times like these that make me seriously consider signing up for a mobile-friendly PHR. 

Webinars

August 25 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Cerner’s Takeover of Siemens: An Update (Including the DoD Project).” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Vince Ciotti, principal, HIS Professionals; Frank Poggio, president and CEO, The Kelzon Group. Vince and Frank delivered HIStalk’s most popular webinar, "Cerner’s Takeover of Siemens, Are You Ready?" which has been viewed nearly 6,000 times. Vince and Frank return with their brutally honest (and often humorous) opinions about what has happened with Cerner since then, including its participation in the successful DoD bid and what that might mean for Cerner’s customers and competitors, based on their having seen it all in their decades of experience.

Previous webinars are on the YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for webinar services including discounts for signing up by Labor Day.

#HIStalking Tweet Chat: Compliance from the Patient’s Point of View

Join @ThePatientsSide (Amy Gleason, COO of CareSync and White House Champion of Change for Precision Medicine) and me (@JennHIStalk) for a discussion on using healthcare technology to drive patient compliance. Preview Amy’s #HIStalking discussion questions here.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Rehab therapy EHR vendor WebPT acquires Therabill, a PM software firm specializing in physical and occupational therapy, speech-language pathology, and behavioral health. The combined company’s technology will provide practices with an integrated tool for documentation, scheduling, reporting, and billing.

Announcements and Implementations

Texas-based Urgent Clinics Medical Care implements EHR, PM, and billing solutions from DocuTap at its seven locations across Houston.

23andMe announces it will offer additional health product tests by the end of this year, including tests that indicate autosomal recessive traits. The company is obviously clearing the regulatory hurdles it has encountered over the last several years. Readers may recall the FDA forced 23andMe to stop marketing its $99 “spit kit” as a testing tool for susceptibility to genetic-related conditions, causing the company to focus that product on consumer ancestry. Bloomberg reports that it is planning to raise $150 million in new venture capital financing, and has hired new CFO and Director of Operations Dean Schorno to lead the charge back into healthcare.

Clinical Architecture launches Content Cloud, a content update service that delivers updated healthcare terminologies in a standard and consistent format.

People

The National Medical Association elects Edith Mitchell, MD president. In addition to  her work as a practicing oncologist, Mitchell is also a retired brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force – the first female physician to attain that rank.

Nitin Karandikar (DeVero) joins DigiSight Technologies as vice president of engineering.

Telemedicine

CVS Health Research Institute summarizes findings from its 2014 telehealth pilot project at MinuteClinic locations in California and Texas, concluding (without a hint of bias, I’m sure) that 95 percent of patients were highly satisfied with the quality of care they received, the ease with which telehealth technology was integrated into the visit, and the timeliness and convenience of their care. One-third of the program’s 1,700 patients noted they preferred a telehealth visit to one with a clinician in the same room.

Government and Politics

HHS encourages health IT-savvy practices of any size to submit nominations for the 2015 Million Hearts Hypertension Control Challenge. Practices that have achieved hypertension control rates of greater than 70 percent are eligible to enter through October 31.

Research and Innovation

An informal survey finds that millenials might not be as averse to the traditional primary care office visit as we might stereotypically think. Author Christina Farr (herself a millenial) points out that, “What surprised me in my research is that while millennials do shop around for primary care, similar to how they compare auto insurance or airline flights, many said they were willing to commit once they’ve found a doctor who fits the bill. Others told me that they would prioritize seeing their regular doctor and would only consider seeing a new doctor via Doctor On Demand or One Medical if the wait time for a visit surpassed a couple days.”

Researchers conclude that, despite well-documented abandonment rates, exercise apps really do help people exercise more. Of the 726 people studied, current app users had lower BMIs (25.16) than past and non-users (26.8 and 26.9, respectively). Researchers conclude that “exercise apps can be viewed as intervention delivery systems consisting of features that help users overcome specific barriers.” As a “past user,” I can conclude that using an exercise app for just one week caused me to be more mindful of my activity levels, not to mention my need to decrease overall screen time.

Other

Practices looking for the latest and greatest WiFi router take note: Google launches the $199 wireless OnHub via online retailers today, with an in-store launch planned for early next month. The company claims the new device, managed via a companion app, is easier to use and more reliable and secure than competing products. No word yet on whether yet whether OnHub will remain in Google or will be spun into another part of the new Alphabet holding company.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice  updates.
Contact us online.
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5 Questions with Jill Monroe, Wellness Program Manager, City of Kansas City, MO

Jill Monroe is wellness program manager within the Benefits Division of the City of Kansas City, MO’s Human Resources department. The city partnered earlier this summer with the Kansas City Health Care Trust, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, and Mosaic Life Care to install a telemedicine kiosk for employees at City Hall.

What was the impetus for installing the telemedicine kiosk?
The City of Kansas City, MO is dedicated to the health of its employees. The City understands that employees are busy and continue to become busier, so having an opportunity to provide an easily accessible, affordable option to get quality healthcare is a win for everyone.

Have employees found it beneficial?
Yes, since the implementation of the telemedicine kiosk, the employees have embraced and used it.

How do you hope it will help improve employee health and wellness?
To improve the health and wellness of the employees, the City has provided the telemedicine kiosk, an Employee Health Care Trust Medical Clinic, and a robust Fountain of Health Employee Wellness Program to employees. By integrating services, we’re hoping to provide quality preventative and chronic disease care, along with concentrating on the employee’s total wellbeing and work/life balance.

Did the city have prior experience with telemedicine (i.e. installing units in schools, health centers, etc.)?
Telemedicine is new to the City; however, we have had excellent guidance from our insurance provider and Mosaic Life Center, which operates the kiosk.

What sort of due diligence was done with regard to checking out telemedicine vendors, and how other city governments have used telemedicine to benefit their workforce?
Due diligence was done by the City’s insurance broker and provider prior to bringing the telemedicine kiosk to the City’s Health Care Trust Committee.

Do you foresee installing additional kiosks in other city government facilities?
Only time will tell. The kiosk has been open and accessible to City employees for just over a month. At this point, the City is focused on the success of the telemedicine kiosk at City Hall and the medical clinic that we have at our Health Department location for employees.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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

News 8/17/15

Top News

Y Combinator graduate Circle Medical launches a unique house/office-call service in San Francisco, offering patients insurance-covered, full-service appointments with full-time physicians. Its accompanying app sets a high bar for practices of any stripe, allowing consumers to see physician profiles and check out potential copays in advance.

Webinars

August 25 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “Cerner’s Takeover of Siemens: An Update (Including the DoD Project).” Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenters: Vince Ciotti, principal, HIS Professionals; Frank Poggio, president and CEO, The Kelzon Group. Vince and Frank delivered HIStalk’s most popular webinar, "Cerner’s Takeover of Siemens, Are You Ready?" which has been viewed nearly 6,000 times. Vince and Frank return with their brutally honest (and often humorous) opinions about what has happened with Cerner since then, including its participation in the successful DoD bid and what that might mean for Cerner’s customers and competitors, based on their having seen it all in their decades of experience.

Previous webinars are on the YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for webinar services including discounts for signing up by Labor Day.

#HIStalking Tweet Chat: Compliance from the Patient’s Point of View

Join @ThePatientsSide (Amy Gleason, COO of CareSync and White House Champion of Change for Precision Medicine) and me (@JennHIStalk) for a discussion on using healthcare technology to drive patient compliance. Preview Amy’s #HIStalking discussion questions here.

Announcements and Implementations

Greenwood, IN-based AmeriVeri develops verification software to help physicians reduce coding and billing errors. 

People

Practice Fusion replaces its founder and CEO Ryan Howard ahead of an expected IPO announcement. New CEO by Tom Langan has only been with the company for a year, and was promoted from his position as chief commercial officer.

Dan McGraw (Nuance Healthcare) joins SRSsoft as senior vice president of sales.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

East Lansing, MI-based Medical Advantage Group, a subsidiary of medical malpractice insurer The Doctors Company, acquires physician practice consulting firm Health Care Management for an undisclosed sum.

The New York Times paints a fascinating yet cringe-inducing portrait of the inner workings of Amazon, where founder Jeff Bezos seems to have instilled a do-or-die work ethic that has enabled the $250 billion company to sell “everything to everyone everywhere.” Aside from a steady stream of employee crying jags and discouragement of work/life balance, Amazon’s management philosophy has prompted some to go above and beyond: “I was so addicted to wanting to be successful there,” says Dina Vaccari, who left the company last year. “For those of us who went to work there, it was like a drug that we could get self-worth from.”

Telemedicine

Much has been made of telemedicine’s growth trajectory for patients of the two-legged variety, but what about for pets? UK-based PawSquad launches this month to capture what is sure to become a booming market given that pet owners will often pay obscene amounts of money for insurance and vet bills. (Not to mention the fact that vet/pet EHRs and PHRs have made news recently for being so user friendly.) The only catch is that the company won’t offer diagnoses or prescriptions, and will instead focus on behavioral issues.

Research and Innovation

American Heart Association researchers believe mobile apps and wearable sensors have the potential to help people live healthier lives, despite limited scientific evidence backing their effectiveness over the long term. Researchers came to that conclusion after reviewing a decade’s worth of clinical trial and analysis data, which showed that studies have been short-term and limited in size. “The fact that mobile health technologies haven’t been fully studied doesn’t mean that they are not effective,” explains Lora Burke, lead research author and professor of nursing and epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh. “Self-monitoring is one of the core strategies for changing cardiovascular health behaviors.”

A MeriTalk report finds that governments spend $342 billion annually on providing care through public programs to people who aren’t eligible. Lack of data integration is thought to be a big contributing factor: 44 percent of IT professionals surveyed contend they aren’t able to access all the necessary data due to system and integration challenges. Just over 20 percent say their current IT system is “analytical,” while only 16 percent believe their system to be “intuitive.”

Other

Aprima Medical Software welcomed nearly 800 attendees to its annual user group meeting. The event, held over three days in Dallas, coincided with the launch of the company’s new cross-platform technology. Kudos to the staff and attendees who made over 100 fleece blankets throughout the event for patients in the ICU at The Children’s Medical Center of Dallas.

I had no idea evolutionary robotics was this advanced: Scientists at the University of Cambridge design a robot that builds baby robots, with the ability to use data from each round of building to make even better bot offspring. Lead researcher Fumiya Iida assures us that human-shaped robots are still decades away. “It’s still a long way to go before we’ll have robots that look, act, and think like us,” Iida said. “But what we do have are a lot of enabling technologies that will help us import some aspects of biology to the engineering world.”

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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

Compliance from the Patient’s Point of View – #HIStalking Tweet Chat Thursday, August 20 at 1pm ET

Join @JennHIStalk and @ThePatientsSide (Amy Gleason, COO of CareSync and White House Champion of Change for Precision Medicine) for a discussion on using healthcare technology to drive patient compliance. Preview #HIStalking discussion questions below and brush up on how to participate in a tweet chat towards the end of this post.

Chronic disease has a huge effect on our healthcare system as a whole. For example, seven out of 10 deaths are due to a chronic disease. Half of Americans have one chronic disease, and 25 percent have two or more. Eighty-six percent of healthcare spending each year is on people with one or more chronic diseases. I have spent most of my career working to automate medical records so that we can become more efficient and provide better care. The dream was to also make life better for patients and clinicians. However, healthcare today is anything but easier, more efficient or effective for patients and clinicians.

Five years ago, my sweet 11 year-old daughter Morgan was diagnosed with a rare auto-immune disease called Juvenile Dermatomyositis. We went through the painful experience of being misdiagnosed and struggling to find a diagnosis for one year and three months. The healthcare systems I was so proudly helping to create and implement failed my daughter and her doctors. Instead, her records were fragmented among seven different doctors we saw in that timeframe. None of them could see what the others were doing. We were blindly going from appointment to appointment and not seeing that all of these things were related.

Not only did we contribute to that 86-percent of healthcare spending figure, we contributed to the waste as well. We didn’t mean to, and I know that the vast majority of patients and doctors also don’t want to waste resources, either. However, she would frequently have “just another X-ray” or “just a recheck of labs” because they didn’t have the information available when they were seeing her. Because information wasn’t shared, she required two ER visits that could have been avoided.

Fast forward three years, and my never-a-smoker mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. When she was sent to an oncologist, her pulmonologist sent her records by FedEx to her doctor. They arrived and were signed for, but when my mom got to see the doctor, the records were misplaced and unavailable to her. This trip was in a different state, and she had flown to the visit. Imagine the wasted cost of this visit without the records being available! Thankfully, my mom had her records on her CareSync iPhone app and could share them herself at the visit. For most patients, this is not the reality. My mom only had them because I had gotten the records for her.

I hear a lot about patient “non-compliance” and that this is the reason for a lot of waste. I know there is a lot of “non-compliance” out there. However, I don’t think most patients have really been given the help they need to be compliant. As my family found, it is a lot harder to be “compliant” than you would think. Specialists send you to more specialists who send you back to the original specialist. That process can take weeks and by then you can be in the ER or admitted to the hospital. The orders are saved in the visit, but patients are rarely given clear instructions or guidance.

That being said (my story being told), I am very excited about hosting this month’s #HIStalking chat and getting to discuss these issues with HIStalk readers!

#HIStalking Discussion Questions

Q1 How can we make the confusing healthcare experience easier to navigate for the consumer?

Q2 What successes have you seen in getting patients to be “compliant” and  engaged in their own care?

Q3 Other industries have more advanced information exchange. How can we speed up this process in healthcare?

Q4 How can we make medical records easier for doctors and patients to consume instead of for record keeping?

Q5 If you could change one thing in the healthcare experience, what would you change?

Tweet Chat Instructions

It’s easy to join the Twitter conversation by logging into TweetChat, which automatically keeps you in the conversation by tagging all tweets with the #HIStalking hash tag. If you are unable to access the TweetChat room, simply search in Twitter for #HIStalking and follow the conversation. To contribute, be sure and tag your tweets with #HIStalking so they can be seen by other chat participants.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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