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.
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#HIStalking Tweet Chat Recap

HIStalk Practice Interviews Tee Green, CEO, Greenway Health

Tee Green is CEO of Greenway Health.

Tell me about yourself and the company, which seems to have gone through a rebranding.
We’re certainly in the midst of an evolution. Now that we’re over a year and a half past the Vitera acquisition, we’re looking back out externally to tell the industry and our customers, “Here’s where we’re at now.” If you look at our original business plan, it was written around the concept of electronification, consumerism, and a thirst to improve health. Those were the guiderails behind Greenway. As we looked into the next decade, we asked, “How do you take that and build a brand?” We looked at three things and asked ourselves, “What is the mission behind our organization?” Greenway Health is about three things. It’s to serve and it’s to connect and it’s to care.

What you’ll see with our rebranding is an evolved logo and our three pillars, which really build off the three tenets of that original business plan. The branding has evolved into three specific words – serve, connect, care. That’s what you’ll see in the new logo as it rolls out.

How will this evolution impact the company’s investment strategies?
You’re seeing an industry, certainly Greenway, taking the lead and moving away from being just a software provider to being a services provider. We’re building one of the most innovative platforms that our customers can use, especially our enterprise customers. I think this is the fundamentally key difference in Greenway and some of the other companies out there. We don’t operate under the Hotel California model where you can come but you can’t leave. What we recognize is that to truly improve health in this country, we have to be an open platform, and so we’re building technology like Greenway Practice, Greenway Exchange, Greenway Clearing Services, Greenway Patient, and Greenway Community. This is an innovation platform that we use to deliver clinically driven revenue cycle services to our customers.

This is especially vital to that 10-doc practice that wans to remain independent, doesn’t want to build a care coordination team because they don’t have the expertise or the know-how, realizes that managing a billing team internally doesn’t create a lot of scale, and is always having to deal with HR issues and turnover, not to mention that ICD-10 is coming down the pipe …. You can outsource that to us, because we’re experts at it. We’ve designed the technology to do it. We also have larger customers, or enterprise-like environments, where they do have their care coordination teams. They do have professionalism, or experts, in the revenue cycle business. What they don’t have is the platform. Greenway Health gives physicians the ability to use the same  platform to drive those services, or outsource them to us. We know that the business models are changing so fast in this industry, that the Hotel California model just doesn’t work anymore. If I want to use your innovation, I have to use all of your services. That just doesn’t make any sense in the next decade.

Given Greenway’s experience with enterprise environments, does the company have any plans to get into acute care?
If you look at our chronic care management service, those will be services that’ll be offered to the acute side, especially in managing discharge patients. What does the CFO of an enterprise most care about right now? Those bounce-backs. The services that we’re introducing are able to act as air traffic controllers for patients after discharge. Enroll him in our chronic care service and we’ll make sure that patient gets into the right provider’s office. We can eliminate those bounce backs to the hospital system. Will we build an HIS system like a Cerner or Epic? Probably not. Will we offer services on top of our platform to acute settings? I think absolutely.

What was the impetus for getting into population health management with your Community solution?
That goes back to one of the core tenets when we talk about care, or improving health. We can’t offer some of the services that we’re offering without that Greenway Community, without the population health technology platform.

You mentioned openness, and the necessity for that to drive healthcare forward. Update us on what Greenway is doing with CommonWell and how that alliance is moving interoperability forward.
From day one we have believed that, with our Greenway Exchange platform, it was about creating liquid data that flowed across the healthcare ecosystem. We’ve been a leader in every interoperability project that I can think of in the United States, with CommonWell being one of the frontrunners. We are participating in a number of different pilot sites with CommonWell. We’re also part of the group that’s making the Greenway-CommonWell exchange free to our customers. We’re announcing that at our user conference coming up.

If you go back to Reagan when he stood in front of the Berlin Wall and said, “Tear down these walls,’ that’s a very serious time in our nation’s history, and I’m not saying this is equivalent, but when you talk about lives, I think it is equivalent. Greenway’s been at the forefront of saying, “Tear down these walls.” I think we’ve shown that through our leadership in CommonWell, Carequality, and Healtheways. We just launched Greenway Interoperability University, probably one of the first interoperability university courses in the country, where we’re taking people that didn’t know anything about interoperability and they’re going through our university program, graduating, and contributing to tearing down these walls.

Do you have any plans to open up that program to the greater community?
We’re actually discussing that right now. We’re looking at opening it up to our business partners and customers, especially our enterprise customers that have staff. We’re asking ourselves, “How do we make them champions of this tear-down-the-wall mentality?”

What are you hearing from physician practices right now with regard to challenges? What’s keeping them up at night? What are they clamoring for?
Two things: care coordination or managing chronic care; and how does that drive their financial processes, these risk-based programs. I think those are the two biggest things right now, outside of ICD-10. You can always throw ICD-10 at the top, but that’s just too easy. I think it’s really around, “How do I manage a patient inside of a community, and move that patient in and out of different environments?” I think that’s one of the fundamental issues we’re going to wrestle with, and it really comes down to how providers are going to manage consumers.

I think people miss that sometimes. The consumer is what’s having the biggest impact on this industry right now, more so than anything else. And the consumer is not only the patient, but also the employer. If you look at the number of employers that have gone self-insured and introduced high-deductible health plans since 2013, it has skyrocketed, and it’s only going to continue to do so. We are creating this consumer movement, which I think is just awesome, but healthcare, as a system, has never dealt with the consumer. They’ve never dealt with somebody like Tee Green who’s not only a patient, but he’s a CEO that has 1,900 team members. Every dollar we don’t spend at Greenway Health on healthcare drops to our bottom line. Am I interested in negotiating directly with the health system? Absolutely. Those are new days, because the CEO of the health system, or the ACO, is not necessarily used to negotiating with me. They’re used to negotiating with a group of payers. Well, I am the payer. That’s this fundamental shift that providers are struggling with. Most of them don’t recognize that it’s happening, but that’s where Greenway becomes a real value proposition for our customers.

I know you mentioned ICD-10 as an easy area to pick on. What are your thoughts on the work that CMS and the AMA has done to give physicians a year of transition?
I applaud it. We have to see if Medicaid and the commercial payers are going to follow suit, or is it just Medicare? If it’s just Medicare, then what does it really mean? Does it mean anything different for our customers or Greenway? No. Everybody’s got to be ready. Everybody’s got to be prepared. Everybody’s got to have fallback plans if payers can’t process this information in a timely and efficient manner. I think the headlines read well. I’m not sure it fundamentally changes anything for us or our customers unless all payers participate.

Do you have any final thoughts?
I think as we usher in this next decade, we can look at Greenway as being a leader in helping providers really effectively manage chronic disease and wellness. As we extend our platforms all the way into the home, we’ll certainly be increasing our footprint in the United States. We’re able to create liquid data across our platforms, and we’re able to introduce services that truly enable our providers to thrive clinically and financially.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice  updates.
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News 7/15/15

Top News

Former CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner will join AHIP as president and CEO later this summer. She’ll assume the duties of Karen Ignagni, who helped the trade group become a driving force behind passage of the ACA – legislation that, under Tavenner’s watch, prompted the creation and much-maligned roll out of Healthcare.gov.

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

Don’t miss the next #HIStalking tweet chat on July 16 at 1pm ET. Dave Chase (@chasedave) and Leonard Kish (@leonardkish), co-authors of “95 Theses for a New Health Ecosystem,” will host. Check out discussion topics here.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Twenty federal agents raid the Jackson, MI offices of Anesthesia Business Consultants on suspicion of healthcare and Medicare fraud. The self-proclaimed “largest physician billing and practice management company specializing exclusively in the practice of anesthesia and pain management” recently made news for the launch of its Anesthesia Valet quality reporting and analysis tool.

Telemedicine

Portland, OR-based Zoom+ announces the addition of video visits to its service line, which also includes health insurance plans. The company, formerly known as ZoomCare, is no doubt looking to cash in on Oregon’s recently passed legislation requiring payers to cover all telemedicine consultations.

Research and Innovation

An AMGA survey of 251 medical groups finds that 75 percent of physician specialties saw an average 2.8-percent compensation increase last year. Primary care specialists – a group that saw an increase of 3.8 percent in 2013 – brought down the 2014 average with a compensation decrease of 0.3 percent. As I alluded to in yesterday’s post, primary care docs are likely to see their salaries increase, albeit slowly, as they become scarce, yet increasingly valuable, commodities.

New York University researchers invite fitness enthusiasts to share data from their RunKeeper apps as part of the Keeping Pace study, which looks to better understand how urban environments contribute to exercise routines over time. The de-identified data transfer is made possible via ResearchKit and the Open Humans Project, a website where people can store various health data collected by assorted trackers.

Announcements and Implementations

PerfectServe announces that its unified clinical communications and collaboration system reaches 50,000 physician users, a 51 percent increase in 18 months.

The Urgent Care Integrated Network selects Forerun as its vendor of choice for urgent care documentation. The Waltham, MA-based company offers the cloud-based UrgiChart HER for urgent care centers and EDs. 

John Rudd, MD an internist at Cedar Grove Medical Associates (TN), launches GetRx, an app that transfers prescription information to pharmacies, eyeglass makers, and other parties. A patient version  offering prescription refill and pick-up location requests is also available.

Theranos partners with Medicaid managed care organization AmeriHealth Caritas to offer members in underserved areas low-cost, less-invasive diagnostic tests. Theranos received FDA approval of its hardware, software, and testing platform earlier this month. (Forbes contributor Dan Munro offers a compelling, inside look at the consumer side of the Theranos process here.)

People

Jacob Reider, MD (Kyron) joins Uniphy Health’s Board of Advisors.

Other

UPMC Health Plan alerts 722 of its members to a June data breach stemming from a data file that was sent to an incorrect email address rather than the physician’s office it was intended for. PHI included member names and ID numbers, birth dates, phone numbers, primary care office names, and types of insurance plans.

The local paper highlights the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center’s plans to use a $3 million HHS grant to help 50 primary care practices across the state with on-site coaching and EHR support. The initiative and grant are part of AHRQ’s EvidenceNOW project announced in May, which seeks to help primary care practices reduce patient risk for cardiovascular disease.

The Commonwealth Fund offers an interactive snapshot of Medicare quality and spending for physician practices, hospitals, nursing homes, and home health based on geographic area. Vermont seems to set a high bar for physicians when compared to New York and New Jersey.

I do love a good shoe story: Nike bases its latest shoe design on the idea of Florida teen and cerebral palsy patient Matthew Walzer, who posted an open letter to the company online suggesting it design a shoe that wouldn’t require him to have someone else tie his laces. The design’s zippered, wrap-around entry-and-closure system is a first for the company, which wanted to create a shoe for people like Walzer with disabilities that impair their hands.

Sponsor Updates

• ADP Advanced MD offers “New ICD-10 transition period, a little breathing room.”
• Versus Tech client EMMC Cancer Care wins an ACCC Innovator Award for its use of RTLS technology.

Sponsors on the 2015 HCI 100

EClinicalWorks
GE Healthcare
Greenway Health
Leidos Health
Nordic

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 7/14/15

Top News

CMS announces that its Fraud Prevention System has helped it identify or prevent $820 million in inappropriate Medicare payments in its third year of use. The system, which uses predictive analytics to spot suspicious billing patterns and claims, was a driving force behind the recent HHS and DoJ crackdown on 243 individuals involved in false billings worth $723 million. “We are proving that in a modern healthcare system you can both fight fraud and avoid creating hassles for the vast majority of physicians who simply want to get paid for services rendered. The key is data,” explains CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt. “Very few investments have a 10:1 return on taxpayer money.”

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.

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

Tweet Chat

Don’t miss the next #HIStalking tweet chat on July 16 at 1pm ET. Dave Chase (@chasedave) and Leonard Kish (@leonardkish), co-authors of “95 Theses for a New Health Ecosystem,” will host. Check out discussion topics here.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Medical Transcription Billing Corp. acquires the clearinghouse, EDI, and RCM divisions of SoftCare Solutions, the US subsidiary of Canada-based QHR Corp. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, though QHR President and CEO Mike Checkley did note that QHR will now focus on its core healthcare technology businesses including EHRs, secure messaging, virtual care, and online booking.

Announcements and Implementations

TheHappyMD.com launches The Burnout Proof app to equip physicians with skills to overcome stress and successfully unplug when off the job.

Minnesota-based HealthPartners develops Beating the Blues, an online cognitive behavioral therapy program for its members and patients that treats stress, sadness, tension, depression or anxiety.

The Indiana Health Information Exchange selects Clinical Architecture’s Symedical terminology management software for content updates, advanced mapping, and central control of terminology to improve interoperability.

Government and Politics

Deputy Director of the US Office of Management and Budget Beth Cobert takes over the responsibilities of US Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta, who resigned late last week after the OPM reported that the personal information of 21.5 million military and civilian government workers was compromised during a May 2015 cyberattack on its federal background investigation system.

The Alliance of Specialty Medicine, a coalition of national medical societies representing 100,000 specialty physicians, takes to Capitol Hill this week to meet with lawmakers about a number of issues including a delay of Meaningful Use Stage 3.

Telemedicine

New York City-based startup Pager makes funding headlines, though I can’t be sure if it’s for the amount of money raised or the celebrity star power behind the financing. The doctor-on-demand and telemedicine service raised $14 million in Series A funding from New Enterprise Associates and actor Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures. Kutcher and investment partner Guy Oseary launched the firm earlier this year after dabbling in the tech startup scene via investments in Uber, Spotify, and Airbnb. Fun Fact: Uber co-founder Oscar Salazar also helped to found Pager, and is now its chief product officer.

Co-working space HQ Raleigh names RelyMD the official telemedicine provider for its businesses, offering the group of nearly 100 companies a discounted rate of $10 per video consult. RelyMD is itself a startup, founded at the beginning of this year by a group of providers from Wake Emergency Physicians (NC).

The local news station profiles Mend, a telemedicine and house call startup serving patients in Orlando and Winter Park, FL. Consumers can choose from a $99 video consult via the Mend app, or schedule a house call for $49 plus the cost of a co-pay.

Appalachian State University’s Beaver College of Health Sciences receives a $175,000 grant from the Golden LEAF Foundation to develop a Rural Health Outreach Collaborative, which will initially establish telehealth access and programming for senior centers in several North Carolina counties.

Research and Innovation

Physicians’ Alliance of America releases the latest set of findings from its recent EHR efficiency survey. Of the 250 practices surveyed, internists fared the worst when it comes to lost productivity, charting at least two hours a day. PCPs noted their own set of troubles related to EHR utilization: Nearly 65 percent cited working with payers as their most time-consuming and frustrating administrative EHR task.

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.