News 7/22/15

Top News

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute approves nearly $142.5 million to support development and expansion of its National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network. The PCORnet project is  designed to link researchers, patient communities, and providers in research partnerships that leverage the power of large volumes of health data maintained by the partner networks. The new funding includes support to add seven such networks, which will focus on Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, autism disorders, heart disease, obesity, and behavioral health disparities among low-income population, among other areas.

Webinars

July 29 (Wednesday) 11:30 ET. “Earning Medicare’s New Chronic Care Management Payments: Five Steps to Take Now.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Robert J. Dudzinski, PharmD, EVP, West Healthcare Practice; Colin Roberts, senior director of healthcare product integration, West Healthcare Practice. Medicare’s new monthly payments for Chronic Care Management (CCM) can improve not only patient outcomes and satisfaction, but provider financial viability and competitiveness as well. Attendees will learn how to estimate their potential CCM revenue, how to use technology and clinical resources to scale up CCM to reach more patients, and how to start delivering CCM benefits to patients and providers by taking five specific steps. Don’t be caught on the sidelines as others put their CCM programs in place.

July 30 (Thursday) 3:00 ET. “De-Silo Your Disparate IT Systems Around the Patient with VNA.” Sponsored by Lexmark. Presenters: Steven W. Campbell, manager of diagnostic applications and interfaces, Piedmont Healthcare; Larry Sitka, VNA evangelist, Lexmark. The entire patient record, including both DICOM and non-DICOM data, should be available at the point of need. Disparate, aging systems that hide data inside departmental silos won’t cut it, nor will IT systems that can’t integrate medical images meaningfully. Learn how Piedmont Healthcare used a vendor-neutral archive to quickly and easily migrate its images and refocus its systems around its patients.

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

Announcements and Implementations

Summit Software Technologies offers SwervePay’s payment processing technology to its GE Centricity customers.

Athenahealth offers a new secure text messaging service as part of its EHR and Epocrates app.

Garner Internal Medicine surpasses 10,000 electronic referrals with Infina Connect’s Intelligent Care Coordinator referral solution.

Black Book Market Research ranks Drchrono as the top mobile EHR for the third consecutive year.

IPatientCare integrates PatientPay’s billing solution into its EHR and PM technologies.

ChartWise Medical Systems integrates new ICD-10 PCS Query Wizard technology into its 2.0 documentation software.

Clarity Health integrates its preauthorization and referral management solutions with Athenahealth’s EHR.

Signix incorporates its digital signature and authentication technology into Relatient’s patient relationship management platform.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Virtual physician assistant tech startup Bright.md raises $3.5 million in Series A financing from Oregon Angel Fund, Stanford-Start X, and Seven Peaks Ventures. The Portland-based company raised $1 million in a seed round last fall.

Iora Health opens a third clinic in Seattle, a city in which it is working with Humana to serve Medicare Advantage patients. The company also plans to open six additional clinics in Arizona and Colorado. I interviewed  CEO and co-founder Rushika Fernandopulle, MD earlier this year.

Specialty EHR vendor Modernizing Medicine acquires GMed, a Florida-based company specializing in healthcare IT solutions for gastroenterology. The deal, terms of which were not disclosed, is expected to close in the third quarter of this year, at which point GMed President Joe Rubinsztain, MD will join the Modernizing Management senior management team.

People

Wayne Orchard (New Benefits) joins MyTelemedicine.com as vice president of strategic partnerships.

Clinicient welcomes Steven Sipowicz (ShiftWise) as CFO and Jim Neumann (Webmark Partners) as vice president of marketing.

Telemedicine

Illinois becomes the 11th state to enact the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact.

The Colorado Medical Board proposes new draft guidelines that would allow telemedicine providers to see patients virtually "so long as the relationship is established in conformance with generally accepted standards of practice." The legislation could be decided on as early as next month.

Research and Innovation

Wichita State University biomedical engineering students develop a remote health monitoring system that enables physicians to check on patients via a Pebble smartwatch. The students, which took third place for the Mobile HealthLink technology at WSU’s Shocker NewVenture Competition in May, are beta testing their prototype at Via Christi Hope and Advanced Orthopedic Associates, both based in Wichita, KS.

Other

Houston physician Samuel Pegram, MD takes to the local paper to air his grievances with ICD-10, calling transition to the new code set part of the “never-ending siege waged by CMS against the private practice of medicine in our country.” He adds that, “For physicians in private practice, transitioning to this new system will range in cost from $83,290 to $2.7 million depending upon the size of your medical practice; use of the system is mandatory for a single-physician practice in Angleton, just as it is for physicians at the Texas Medical Center. The substantial administrative cost and financial burdens of new software, computers, training, etc., will force many small practices out of business at a time when patient access to care is already in dire jeopardy.”

Physicians converge on a town-hall meeting hosted by the AMA and Medical Association of Georgia to express their dissatisfaction with EHRs and Meaningful Use. Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) and AMA President Steven Stack, MD hosted the 90-minute event, which they used to raise awareness of AMA’s Break the Red Tape campaign to delay finalization of MU Stage 3 regulations.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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DOCtalk with Dr. Gregg 7/21/15

Dr. Happy and Dr. Mad

Dr. Happy burst forth into the physicians’ lounge yesterday, his typical ear-to-ear grin stretched across his clean-shaven face. Dr. Mad sat across the room, sullen and slinking well into his faux leather club chair. Ensconced in a copy of the Journal of Medical Ethics, I denied the impulse to engage, preferring to fly-on-the-wall it while listening to the ensuing debate. I just knew it’d be fun.

Dr. Happy: So, Dr. Mad, did you have a chance to review the new system updates and play around a bit with the new EHR features they rolled out last week? Weren’t they great?! I love the new customizability they added to our Note Tags.

Dr. Mad: Great?? Seriously? Took me three hours just to figure out where they put the link to my custom notes section! These geeks never leave well enough – or should I say, “bad enough?” – alone. Just when you start to have a pseudo-feel for how to navigate these confounded digital charts, some dweeb has to come along and rearrange everything, all in the name of “system enhancements.”

Dr. Happy: Oh, now … it’s not that bad. These systems are so much better than what we used to have, and light years beyond our old pen-and-paper days. You can find information so much better and faster, plus the old “I can’t read the handwriting” issue is obliterated.

Dr. Mad: Not that bad, my butt. The hospital system has gotten so bloated that I often can’t find a thing. It often seems like the old “you can’t get there from here” thing. “Bloatware” would be insulted if it were compared with our EHR. As to the bad handwriting thing, I don’t think going from the proverbial frying pan into the digital fire is a good trade, not at all. Maybe I couldn’t read every note or scribble in somebody’s chart before, but now I can’t find a freakin’ thing amidst all the massive amounts of useless data incorporated into each and every note. Last week I got a copy of a note from the ER for a child who had an ear infection. SEVEN PAGES! Seven pages just to tell me the kid had an acute right otitis media with a cold and was treated with amoxicillin. I just told you in 12 words what it took the system seven full pages to document. You call that “better”?

Dr. Happy: OK, so there are some things we need to work on, I’ll grant you that. But that’s exactly what the new system upgrades are all about: making the EHR work better for you and me.

Dr. Mad: Better for you and me?! Hah! I don’t believe that for a blippin’ nanosecond. The only reasons they made us all go to electronic records in the first place was so that the number crunchers and the bureaucrats could increase their control over us. The C-suiters, the insurance companies, the feds – that’s all any of them want. They want to control us, to tell us what to do and how to do it … and they want to take a huge cut of our pie as they do it. Greedy so-and-sos.

Dr. Happy: Oh, come on now, doc. You don’t really believe that all this wonderful technological improvement for capture and manipulation of healthcare data is about some giant conspiracy to undermine and steal from us providers, do you?

Dr. Mad: You bet your 401K I do! Back in the day, you never had to explain every little thing. You treated people and helped them get better. They paid you for it. Period. Now, every managerial Tom, Dick, and Harry wants to know how many commas and periods you use in you notes, they want to tell you what you should and shouldn’t do, and they want to bill you for the intrusion. Back in the good old days, I never once had a patient demand a refund. Lordy, I never even knew what the term “take-back” meant… well, except maybe as a kid on the school playground. This whole digital healthcare revolution is all about money, nothing more. And the digital tools they are forcing us to use are all about controlling us and keeping us off balance so they can figure out even more ways to cut into our business.

Dr. Happy: Oh, you just have your Grinch hat on today. You know all this technology is leading us toward a better future in healthcare. I know you know that the overload of medical information was just becoming unmanageable with our old ways of doing things and that we just couldn’t continue down that paper-strewn path for long.

Dr. Mad: Well, bah, humbug. All the Whos down in Whoville can just go without their roast beast for all I care. All these changes are killing me! Just when I get one good workflow down, they go and pull the electronic rug from under me. Perfect case in point: this doggone ICD-10 conversion. I mean it… good lord… I mean it… (getting aggravated) …it’s not bad enough that I have to deal with these confounded billing codes in the first place – and I have learned almost all the codes I need to know on a regular basis – but now they wanna throw all those out the window and bring in some Extormity-based new mega-set of codes. Hector’s pup, I’ll be retired by the time I learn all these new ones. Don’t tell me this isn’t all about keeping us off-base so more money can be finagled from our coffers!

Dr. Happy: Well, my friend, I’m sorry you are so unhappy with our system. Me? I find it fascinating, and an enjoyable challenge. I love all the little bells and whistles that come along with it, and I love all the new ways I can manage patient info. I even love using the patient portal to communicate and even think it’s enhanced my patient care.

Dr. Mad: As I said, and I’ll say it again, “Bah, humbug.”

Dr. Happy: (Leaving) You’re such a curmudgeon. See you at the golf outing fundraiser?

Dr. Mad: Yes, though I bet it’ll rain.

From the trenches…

"I was going to buy a copy of "The Power of Positive Thinking", and then I thought: What the hell good would that do?” – Ronnie Shakes

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, and sits on the board of directors of the Ohio Health Information Partnership.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 7/20/15

Top News

The Michigan-based Great Lakes Health Connect surpasses its goal to have 1,000 physician practices utilizing its closed-loop Referrals application. The HIE, which also recently surpassed 1 billion annual health information transactions, plans to link 1,000 practices to the state’s immunization registry.

Webinars

July 22 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Achieve Your Quality Objectives Before 2018.” Sponsored by CitiusTech. Presenters: Jeffrey Springer, VP of product management, CitiusTech; Dennis Swarup, VP of corporate development, CitiusTech. The presenters will address best practices for building and managing CQMs and reports, especially as their complexity increases over time. They will also cover quality improvement initiatives that can help healthcare systems simplify their journey to value-based care. The webinar will conclude with an overview of how CitiusTech’s hosted BI-Clinical analytics platform, which supports over 600 regulatory and disease-specific CQMs, supports clients in their CQM strategies.

July 29 (Wednesday) 11:30 ET. “Earning Medicare’s New Chronic Care Management Payments: Five Steps to Take Now.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Robert J. Dudzinski, PharmD, EVP, West Healthcare Practice; Colin Roberts, senior director of healthcare product integration, West Healthcare Practice. Medicare’s new monthly payments for Chronic Care Management (CCM) can improve not only patient outcomes and satisfaction, but provider financial viability and competitiveness as well. Attendees will learn how to estimate their potential CCM revenue, how to use technology and clinical resources to scale up CCM to reach more patients, and how to start delivering CCM benefits to patients and providers by taking five specific steps. Don’t be caught on the sidelines as others put their CCM programs in place.

July 30 (Thursday) 3:00 ET. “De-Silo Your Disparate IT Systems Around the Patient with VNA.” Sponsored by Lexmark. Presenters: Steven W. Campbell, manager of diagnostic applications and interfaces, Piedmont Healthcare; Larry Sitka, VNA evangelist, Lexmark. The entire patient record, including both DICOM and non-DICOM data, should be available at the point of need. Disparate, aging systems that hide data inside departmental silos won’t cut it, nor will IT systems that can’t integrate medical images meaningfully. Learn how Piedmont Healthcare used a vendor-neutral archive to quickly and easily migrate its images and refocus its systems around its patients.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Texas Tribune covers the growing trend of private-equity firms looking to buy into primary care practices. While investors contend they are not interested in micromanaging physician offices, some physicians worry they’d lose their independence, leading to higher costs and less personalized care. Technology has factored into the equation: Younger, more tech-savvy docs seem to be more open to the idea of an outside firm taking control in return for otherwise impossible funding for new healthcare IT.

Announcements and Implementations

Healthcare CRM vendor Updox launches Updox Dmail, a secure, personalized Direct email address that physicians can register for and keep as they change practices or if they have an additional address through their EHR.

Research and Innovation

A small Northwestern Medicine study finds that smartphone sensor data including number of usage minutes and daily geographical locations can be used to detect depression. Researchers found users were more likely to be depressed if they spent more time on their phone in fewer locations. Based on the phone sensor data, the researchers could identify people with depressive symptoms with 87 percent accuracy.

Telemedicine

The Mississippi Board of Medical Licensure withdraws a proposed rule that would require telemedicine companies operating in Mississippi to establish a formal agreement with a Mississippi-based healthcare entity and to use only secured video conferencing when medication is prescribed. The board has decided to commission an economic impact statement before it decides on a final rule. Teladoc chimed in with a statement declaring that the proposed rule would be “unreasonably limiting” to Mississippi physicians looking to practice via telemedicine.

The Federation of State Medical Boards will receive a $225,000 grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration to implement the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact, which will help to expedite physician licensing processes across state lines. FSMB will use the funding to develop specifications for technical infrastructure and educational outreach.

Senators Joni Ernst (R-IA) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) introduce the Telemedicine for Medicare (TELE-MED) Act, a bill that would enable Medicare patients to receive care across state lines via telemedicine. The bipartisan bill has gained the support of the Healthcare Leadership Council, Health IT Now Coalition, and the Parkinson’s Action Network.

Government and Politics

The #SaveAHRQ movement has transcended Twitter and landed in Congress, courtesy of a letter sent by nearly 200 organizations calling for the Senate to spare the agency from the its proposed 35-percent funding cut. The House, as you may recall, has proposed doing away with the agency entirely in 2016.

Mark your calendars: Politico reports that ONC will hold its annual Consumer Summit in Washington, D.C. on October 1, lending even more weight to a date that is already fortunate enough to be associated with my birth and the transition to ICD-10.

Other

Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush calls the rise of the convenient care movement one of the most important in the last decade, pointing out the retail power of a company like Target, and the overall impact it will have on healthcare’s demand curve (not to mention the leverage it has in demanding that local healthcare organizations connect to its IT systems, rather than the other way around.)

Ancestry.com launches AncestryHealth, a product the company hopes will enable consumers to create a digital record of diseases and causes of death that have affected their families over the decades. The company is working on a corresponding mobile app, and plans to partner with EHR vendors so that users can share family health histories electronically. The company, which also offers AncestryDNA, plans to add genetic information to the mix soon via its own testing service.

Sponsor Updates

• NVoq offers “Your iPhone has Good Dictation. Why Doesn’t your Enterprise Application?”
• PerfectServe offers “Care Transitions – Tips for Bridging the Gaps.”
• Greenway Health announces its new brand. (Check out my interview with CEO Tee Green about the rebranding and refreshed company focus here.)

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.

Population Health Management Weekly Wrap Up 7/17/15

Top News

St. Joseph Health (CA) signs a five-year, $25 million agreement with Dātu Health for development of collaborative care programs, extending the two-year agreement already in place between the two organizations. The arrangement also includes joint development of the company’s Persuasion Engine digital engagement technology, which will help further SJH’s population health management objectives.

Webinars

July 22 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Achieve Your Quality Objectives Before 2018.” Sponsored by CitiusTech. Presenters: Jeffrey Springer, VP of product management, CitiusTech; Dennis Swarup, VP of corporate development, CitiusTech. The presenters will address best practices for building and managing CQMs and reports, especially as their complexity increases over time. They will also cover quality improvement initiatives that can help healthcare systems simplify their journey to value-based care. The webinar will conclude with an overview of how CitiusTech’s hosted BI-Clinical analytics platform, which supports over 600 regulatory and disease-specific CQMs, supports clients in their CQM strategies.

July 29 (Wednesday) 11:30 ET. “Earning Medicare’s New Chronic Care Management Payments: Five Steps to Take Now.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Robert J. Dudzinski, PharmD, EVP, West Healthcare Practice; Colin Roberts, senior director of healthcare product integration, West Healthcare Practice. Medicare’s new monthly payments for Chronic Care Management (CCM) can improve not only patient outcomes and satisfaction, but provider financial viability and competitiveness as well. Attendees will learn how to estimate their potential CCM revenue, how to use technology and clinical resources to scale up CCM to reach more patients, and how to start delivering CCM benefits to patients and providers by taking five specific steps. Don’t be caught on the sidelines as others put their CCM programs in place.

July 30 (Thursday) 3:00 ET. “De-Silo Your Disparate IT Systems Around the Patient with VNA.” Sponsored by Lexmark. Presenters: Steven W. Campbell, manager of diagnostic applications and interfaces, Piedmont Healthcare; Larry Sitka, VNA evangelist, Lexmark. The entire patient record, including both DICOM and non-DICOM data, should be available at the point of need. Disparate, aging systems that hide data inside departmental silos won’t cut it, nor will IT systems that can’t integrate medical images meaningfully. Learn how Piedmont Healthcare used a vendor-neutral archive to quickly and easily migrate its images and refocus its systems around its patients.

Previous webinars are on the YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for webinar services including discounts for signing up by July 31.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

San Francisco-based Welkin Health secures $2 million in seed funding from investors including Mayo Clinic and Rock Health, and partners with Humana’s Innovation Group to support diabetes outreach for the elderly. The company will use the financing to expand its care coordination platform for chronic disease patients, and develop additional development tools for administrators.

Announcements and Implementations

Tricore Reference Laboratories partners with Sunquest Information Systems to develop diagnostic laboratory software to support population health, precision medicine, and integration pathology. The jointly developed solutions will be utilized in a TriCore innovation center for commercial-grade diagnostic technologies and operations.

Innovista Health Solutions partners with the Houston Regional ACO to help it navigate value-based savings programs and other population health management initiatives. The newly established ACO estimates partnering with 100 PCPs serving 18,000 covered lives by the end of 2015.

Microsoft debuts the Cortana Analytics Suite at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Orlando. The new tool set is already in use at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health System (NH) as part of the new ImagineCare solution, which aggregates sensor and activity tracker data via dashboard to help nurses and health coaches monitor patient health in real time. The health system will officially launch ImagineCare to 6,000 patients in October.

Piedmont Healthcare (GA) implements Health Catalyst’s Late-Binding Enterprise Data Warehouse and Analytics to help drive quality and performance improvement initiatives across its five hospitals and 75-plus primary care and multi-specialty locations.

The University Medical Center of Princeton Physicians’ Organization (NJ) selects population health management solutions from HealthEC, which will also provide enterprise data warehouse implementation services.

Community Care of North Carolina selects the IMAT Enterprise Data Foundation from IMAT Solutions to support its 1,820 participating primary care practices and 14 regional networks. CCNC will use the tool to improve data availability, conversion, quality, normalization, and output.

People

Shawn Frazier (Covisint) joins Agilum Healthcare Intelligence as vice president of sales.

Mary Facciani (City of Casper, WY) joins Wyoming Medical Center as its first population health director.

Other

The Wall Street Journal highlights population health management initiatives at Carilion Clinic that go beyond the latest health IT buzzwords. The Virginia-based provider kicked off its fruit and vegetables prescription program this month, offering underserved, underinsured, and homeless populations healthy foods by prescription free of charge from local vendors brought in to its medical centers. The new program complements teams of nurse care coordinators across Carilion’s primary care practices who connect patients with community resources to help them manage their conditions.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks is named a Leader in the IDC Health Insights MarketScape Report on the HIE market.
• Greenway Health offers “Serve. Connect. Care. The Journey of the Future of Healthcare.”
• Healthwise offers “Riga, Latvia: Lessons from the Baltic.”
• Intelligent Medical Objects will exhibit at the 2015 Summer Institute in Nursing Informatics July 22-24 in Baltimore.
• Leidos Health will exhibit at the NextGen Midwest User Group July 24-25 in Grand Rapids, MI.

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 7/16/15

Top News

A GAO report finds that 11 of 12 fake accounts it created to test Healthcare.gov were approved for subsidies last year, and all 11 were re-approved this year, meaning that administrators have not managed to remove any of the fake accounts in its two years of operation. Democrats have balked at the findings. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has complained that, “… the report up for discussion today is not about any real-world fraud. Not one of them was a real person who filed taxes or got medical services. No fast-buck fraudster got a government check sent to their bank account.”

Webinars

July 22 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Achieve Your Quality Objectives Before 2018.” Sponsored by CitiusTech. Presenters: Jeffrey Springer, VP of product management, CitiusTech; Dennis Swarup, VP of corporate development, CitiusTech. The presenters will address best practices for building and managing CQMs and reports, especially as their complexity increases over time. They will also cover quality improvement initiatives that can help healthcare systems simplify their journey to value-based care. The webinar will conclude with an overview of how CitiusTech’s hosted BI-Clinical analytics platform, which supports over 600 regulatory and disease-specific CQMs, supports clients in their CQM strategies.

July 29 (Wednesday) 11:30 ET. “Earning Medicare’s New Chronic Care Management Payments: Five Steps to Take Now.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Robert J. Dudzinski, PharmD, EVP, West Healthcare Practice; Colin Roberts, senior director of healthcare product integration, West Healthcare Practice. Medicare’s new monthly payments for Chronic Care Management (CCM) can improve not only patient outcomes and satisfaction, but provider financial viability and competitiveness as well. Attendees will learn how to estimate their potential CCM revenue, how to use technology and clinical resources to scale up CCM to reach more patients, and how to start delivering CCM benefits to patients and providers by taking five specific steps. Don’t be caught on the sidelines as others put their CCM programs in place.

July 30 (Thursday) 3:00 ET. “De-Silo Your Disparate IT Systems Around the Patient with VNA.” Sponsored by Lexmark. Presenters: Steven W. Campbell, manager of diagnostic applications and interfaces, Piedmont Healthcare; Larry Sitka, VNA evangelist, Lexmark. The entire patient record, including both DICOM and non-DICOM data, should be available at the point of need. Disparate, aging systems that hide data inside departmental silos won’t cut it, nor will IT systems that can’t integrate medical images meaningfully. Learn how Piedmont Healthcare used a vendor-neutral archive to quickly and easily migrate its images and refocus its systems around its patients.

Previous webinars are on the YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for webinar services including discounts for signing up by July 31.

Tweet Chat

Check out the recap of today’s #HIStalking chat on “Democratizing Health Data” with @leonardkish and @chasedave.

Announcements and Implementations

ADP AdvancedMD optimizes its EHR for multiple browsers, including IE, Chrome, and Safari.

Zotec Partners launches the Zotec Interface for Physician Productivity, a workflow management tool for radiologists and radiology practices.

Premier Patient Health Care and Patient Physician Network form the Premier Patient Network to support clinically integrated, independent physicians in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The new network will be driven in part by PPN’s Premier 360 analytics tool, and will offer physicians access to programs and IT for care coordination, population health, predictive modeling, and post-acute care and transitional care management.

People

Nate Volkman (Welbe) joins BluePrint Healthcare IT as regional sales director, Midwest.

Government and Politics

The National Health Council releases a report comparing the patient-friendliness of health insurance exchanges in all 50 states. California, Delaware, and Montana emerged as market leaders, irrespective of the type of exchange offered. Concerns among the other state’s offerings included state oversight, transparency, non-discrimination, uniformity, and continuity of care.

Research and Innovation

The National Rural Health Association, Northwest Georgia Healthcare Partnership, and Verizon launch the Community Health Worker Patient Centered Diabetes Management Program, a year-long pilot that will study the link between technology, diabetes management, and outcomes. This pilot marks the first time the NRHA and Verizon have conducted such a study in a rural area. 

MGMA, HIMSS, WEDI, and The Sullivan Institute for Healthcare Transformation release the Virtual Clipboard Initiative pilot solution definition and design document, which outlines specifications for the initiative just getting underway. The initial phase will facilitate automated/mobile patient registration processes, including collection of health insurance and demographic data. The ultimate goal of the project is to automate patient intake and data transmission in an effort to reduce administrative costs and increase patient satisfaction.

Telemedicine

CNN posts a fun interview with Doctor on Demand founders Jay McGraw and Adam Jackson. My favorite snippet:

Q: If you could pitch to one person, who would it be?
JM: So far, pitching Bryan Roberts, a partner at Venrock, seems to be working out pretty well, as we just secured a $50 million round of funding, in which he played a big role.
AJ: Kelly Ripa. Moms are often the head of household and primary healthcare decision makers – and many moms respect Kelly.

Other

Urgent Care Center of SW Florida makes the local paper for its use of Check-In Express, a texting tool that helps cut down on patient wait times. The center has seen up to 300 people a month take advantage of the  program since its implementation.

If only I were going to be in Atlanta next week: AMA will host a town hall for physicians at the Westin Atlanta Perimeter North on Monday, July 20 from 7-8:30pm ET. The event, co-hosted by Rep. Tom Price, MD (R-GA) and AMA President Steven Stack, MD, will offer providers an opportunity to air their grievances (or share their successes) with Meaningful Use.

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.