News 5/18/15

Top News

ONC posts (in typical late-Friday fashion) the comments it received on its draft interoperability roadmap, which was released early this year. A quick skim of the first 10 pages of comment results finds submissions from a variety of stakeholders, with citizens crying privacy foul at the notion that their medical records would be considered public/government property and used for research without their consent. ONC plans to release the next version of the roadmap in the coming months.

Webinars

May 19 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Lock the Windows, Not Just the Door: Why Most Healthcare Breaches Involve Phishing Attacks and How to Prevent Them.” Sponsored by Imprivata. Presenters: Glynn Stanton, CISSP, information security manager, Yale New Haven Health System; David Ting, CTO, Imprivata. Nearly half of healthcare organizations will be successfully cyberhacked in 2015, many of them by hackers who thwart perimeter defenses by using social engineering instead. The entire network is exposed if even one employee is fooled by what looks like a security warning or Office update prompt and enters their login credentials. This webinar will provide real-world strategies for protecting against these attacks.

May 20 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Principles and Priorities of Accountable Care Transformation.” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Marie Dunn, director of analytics, Health Catalyst. Healthcare systems must build the competencies needed to succeed under value-based payment models while remaining financially viable in the fee-for-service landscape. This webinar will outline key near-term priorities for building competency at successfully managing at-risk contracts, with a particular focus on the importance of leveraging data to drive effective decision making.

May 27 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Introducing Health Catalyst Academy: An Innovative Approach for Accelerating Outcomes Improvement.” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenters: Tommy Prewitt, MD, director, Healthcare Delivery Institute at Horne LLP; Bryan Oshiro, MD, SVP and chief medical officer, Health Catalyst.  The presenters, graduates of Intermountain’s Advanced Training Program, will introduce the Health Catalyst Academy’s Accelerated Practices program, a unique learning experience that provides the tools and knowledge for participants to improve quality, lower cost, accelerate improvement, and sustain gains.

Announcements and Implementations

Modernizing Medicine and Miraca Life Sciences partner to offer EMA Urology, a cloud-based EHR system for urologists. The native iPad application is equipped with an interface that enables urologists to send clinical data to MLS pathologists, and offers the American Urological Association’s Choosing Wisely treatment guidelines.

Medical Transcription Billing Corp. (MTBC) joins the Amazing Charts Partner Community program.

Skywriter MD launches an on-demand virtual scribe service in which doctors wear a microphone and share their EHR screen with a remotely located scribe who navigates the EHR and enters information into it. Lt. Dan digs into the details on HIStalk Connect.

Utah Health Information Network technical partner Secure Exchange Solutions achieves ONC HIT 2014 Edition Release 2 Modular EHR certification for its Direct secure messaging transport.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Kodu Care graduates from the 9Mile Labs accelerator program in Seattle. The company is working to launch an on-demand house call app under the leadership of co-founder and CEO Mauricio Gonzalez de la Fuente, who has a long history with Microsoft and an obvious love for animals, having been a board member of The Seattle Humane Society and founder of Earthbark, a company focused on environmentally responsible pet ownership.

The local business paper reports that Aledade is working with Primary Partners LLC (FL) to set up an ACO under the leadership of Kelly Conroy, executive director of Aledade’s Florida division. (Conroy confirms the news via tweet.) The new ACO will cover more than 6,000 Medicare beneficiaries, and necessitate the recruitment of physicians first in Orlando and then throughout the state. (I assume this is the state Aledade CEO Farzad Mostashari, MD alluded to as “coming soon” in my interview with him earlier this year.) It will also become the first independent physician-led ACO to receive admission, discharge, and transfer notifications for its patients from the state HIE.

Shareable Ink raises $3 million and plans to bring in another $1 million in funding. Lt. Dan provides the backstory (including a look at the company’s CEO shuffle) at HIStalk Connect.

Government and Politics

The AMA sends a letter to Representative Ted Poe (R-TX) supporting his bill, Cutting Costly Codes Act of 2015, which would cancel the migration to ICD-10 completely, and instead instructs CMS to wait for the international adoption of ICD-11 in a few years. Given the results of recent ICD-10 industry surveys, I’m beginning to wonder if physicians would welcome such a move, given all the other pressures their overwhelmed by right now. Practicing pediatrician and Kiddo EMR CEO Joe Cohen, MD tells me that ICD-10 is long overdue, adding that “if the new ICD-11 further improves the care and wellbeing of patients, then having practices upgrade twice in two years (possibly) will be a moonshot at best.  This is a clear case of bureaucratic inefficiencies and the growing gap between legislation and the actual needs of physicians when considering health information technology.”

In other ICD-10 news, Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) introduces the Increasing Clarity for 5 Doctors by Transitioning Effectively Now (ICD TEN) Act, calling for HHS to study its ability to handle the transition, and create an 18-month period of transition during which no Medicare claim can be denied due to coding inaccuracies.  I’d love to hear from other small practice MDs as to where they stand on the matter of delay, strategic transition, or skip ahead to ICD-11.

Washington State Governor Jay Inslee signs legislation creating an all-payer claims database. First introduced in January of this year, the bill also mandates that payers provide data on the cost and quality of care, a sticking point that was left out of previous similar legislation. The database will be made available to employers, consumers, and providers.

Telemedicine

The ATA names the following to its Board of Directors: Reed Tuckson, MD president (Tuckson Health Connections); James Peake, MD president-elect (CGI Federal); Peter Yellowlees, MD vice president (UC Davis Health System); Herb Rogove, secretary and treasurer (C30 Telemedicine); and Yulun Wang, immediate past president (InTouch Health). Amnon Gavish (Vidyo) and Kristi Henderson (University of Mississippi Medical Center) have also joined the board.

India-based Karma Healthcare raises an undisclosed amount of money from Ennovent Impact Investment Holding, hot on the heels of its round last month from Ankur Capital. The year-old startup runs four clinics in rural Rajasthan, relying heavily on telemedicine technologies to connect patients with specialists in urban areas. The company will use the funding to scale up operations and expand its service lines.

Octovis incorporates M100 Smart Glasses technology from Vuzix into its Telle telemedicine platform.

Mental health therapy startup Talkspace raises a $9.5 million Series A funding round led by Spark Capital and SoftBank Capital. The three year-old company connects patients to therapists via text for $25 a week, and has partnered with IBM to give therapists greater insight into their patients via Watson’s semantic analysis.

Research and Innovation

Researchers find substantial and expensive differences in the quality of care between primary care practices that do a good job of coordinating care for chronically ill patients and those that do not. Using a database of over 500,000 commercial insurance claims, they found that patients of PCPs with fragmented practice styles had higher rates of hospitalizations (91 percent) than those in the most coordinated practices (7.1 percent). High fragmentation was also  associated with $4,542 in higher costs.

Other

The local news station highlights the traction patient engagement startup Orb Health is seeing with local physicians. A graduate of the Dallas-based healthcare accelerator Health Wildcatters, the Phoenix-based company has 20 physicians signed up to pilot its portal, which pulls together lab, EHR, and wearables data and converts it into patient-friendly charts. Scott Conard, MD is one of the first end users, and considers the portal to be “one of the bridges to go from running out of rooms every 15 minutes with six minutes in front of a person, to letting me help [my patients] live well. I’m not going to babysit you while you die. I’m going to give you tools to live a great life.”

HHS creates Healthfinder.gov to offer those suffering from Web-induced medical stress (WIMS) a non-anxiety-inducing resource for health news, physician advice, health and wellness tips, and guidelines.

Sponsor Updates

• NVoq offers a new blog focusing on industry response to its new SayIt Code Fast service.
• Nordic offers a new edition of its HIT Breakdown podcast, focusing on new revenue opportunities via the CCM CPT code.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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Readers Write: Connecting Smart Data Analytics and Population Health Management

Connecting Smart Data Analytics and Population Health Management
By Shane Pilcher

Healthcare organizations across the country are accumulating copious amounts of clinical and claims-related data. The amount of data, partially driven by Meaningful Use initiatives, is expected to increase exponentially over the foreseeable future. According to studies from McKinsey, Gartner, and others, data are being generated at staggering rates, with volume reaching exabytes (a million terabytes) and even zettabytes (a billion terabytes) each year. The Kaiser Family Foundation forecasts that the volume of healthcare data gathered will grow 50-fold between 2013 and 2020.

Faced with potentially zettabytes of data, it is no wonder that many healthcare organizations around the country are approaching data analytics with some trepidation. According to the third annual Health IT Industry Outlook Survey, conducted by our firm, more than 84 percent of CIOs, CMIOs, IT project managers, IT directors, and consultants had questions around type, quantity, and ways in which to use their healthcare data. In addition, 62 percent stated the biggest barrier to IT initiatives around MU and data analytics was a lack of organizational buy-in or financial resources. As a first step to overcoming these issues, it is important to transition from just a data analytics focus to a smart healthcare data analytics approach.

The transition to a smart healthcare data strategy requires ensuring the organization is collecting the right type of data and in the right quantities. This requires a careful evaluation of the organization’s current HIT tools and an assessment of how and where the data are captured, and how the information can be accessed. Once an organization has the tools and workflow to transform data into smart healthcare data, effective and reliable analytics can begin.

Population Health Management Essential

One of the strongest and growing trends around smart healthcare data and analysis is population health management. With 40 percent of survey participants indicating improved patient care across the healthcare continuum as their key business objective in 2015, the trend toward PHM is no surprise.

In analyzing claims, clinical, lab, imaging, and medication data, profiles begin to emerge to help identify at-risk patients within an organization’s patient population. These at-risk profiles help providers develop customized treatment plans and follow-up methods, which can reduce that risk and improve their outcomes. At-risk profiles can isolate a particular diagnosis population, focusing on conditions affecting the greatest percentage of the healthcare organization’s patients, or targeting a specific diagnosis or demographic subset for strategic results.

The use of smart healthcare data analytics does not stop there. Karen DeSalvo, National Coordinator for Health IT, recently stated that data can provide a broader view of population health that can help communities prioritize which health issues are the most pressing: “There’s an opportunity to be more inclusive of data sources, not only from public health, but social and human services agencies and, of course, patient-generated health data and patient-reported outcomes.”

Patient-Generated Data Fill Gaps

By including patient-generated data, such as blood-glucose readings, blood pressure, daily diet, and exercise routines, providers can take PHM to a new level of provider and patient engagement. This leads to improved monitoring and tracking of treatment regimen adherence and individual patient responses, which can alert providers when patients need treatment changes or increased support between patient visits. The agility this engagement brings to care delivery yields improved patient outcomes with fewer unplanned visits and hospitalizations, ultimately reducing care-delivery costs.

Once we break the surface of smart healthcare data analytics and transition to PHM, imagination is really the only limitation. If an organization can imagine the questions to ask of its smart healthcare data, the right analysis can guide providers to the desired patient outcomes while decreasing the cost of care.

Shane Pilcher is vice president of Stoltenberg Consulting, Inc.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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Population Health Management Weekly Wrap Up 5/15/15

Top News

Population health, precision medicine, and chronic-care management company Persivia launches under the direction of Mansoor Khan, MD CEO and Fauzia Khan, CMO. The husband and wife team seem to be the same pair who worked in similar roles at Alere Analytics before it was shut down by parent company Alere earlier this year.

Webinars

May 19 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Lock the Windows, Not Just the Door: Why Most Healthcare Breaches Involve Phishing Attacks and How to Prevent Them.” Sponsored by Imprivata. Presenters: Glynn Stanton, CISSP, information security manager, Yale New Haven Health System; David Ting, CTO, Imprivata. Nearly half of healthcare organizations will be successfully cyberhacked in 2015, many of them by hackers who thwart perimeter defenses by using social engineering instead. The entire network is exposed if even one employee is fooled by what looks like a security warning or Office update prompt and enters their login credentials. This webinar will provide real-world strategies for protecting against these attacks.

May 20 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Principles and Priorities of Accountable Care Transformation.” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Marie Dunn, director of analytics, Health Catalyst. Healthcare systems must build the competencies needed to succeed under value-based payment models while remaining financially viable in the fee-for-service landscape. This webinar will outline key near-term priorities for building competency at successfully managing at-risk contracts, with a particular focus on the importance of leveraging data to drive effective decision making.

May 27 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Introducing Health Catalyst Academy: An Innovative Approach for Accelerating Outcomes Improvement.” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenters: Tommy Prewitt, MD, director, Healthcare Delivery Institute at Horne LLP; Bryan Oshiro, MD, SVP and chief medical officer, Health Catalyst.  The presenters, graduates of Intermountain’s Advanced Training Program, will introduce the Health Catalyst Academy’s Accelerated Practices program, a unique learning experience that provides the tools and knowledge for participants to improve quality, lower cost, accelerate improvement, and sustain gains.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Symphony Performance Health rebrands to SPH Analytics to better reflect the company’s expanded analytics capabilities since acquiring The Myers Group, a member/patient experience survey company, last week. SPHA was originally formed via the merger of Voyance, MDdatacor, and Archimedes Clinical Analytics.

Allscripts CFO Richard Poulton explains on the company’s earnings call that the possibility of acquiring population health management companies is “definitely an area this is high on our list of areas to invest in. Whether it’s purely an acquisition, though, is a different question. I don’t have to tell you that some of the companies that are out there, fairly immature companies, are with advertised capabilities are trading at crazy valuations. We’ve looked at a bunch and we’ll continue to look at a bunch, but right now, we have a pretty good plan that is not heavily dependent on acquisitions.”

Announcements and Implementations

Mercy Health (MO), Mosaic Life Care (MO), and Missouri Health Care team up to form MPact Heatlh. The collaborative will work to create a database to support population health, expand telemedicine services to underserved areas, and work with payers to offer low-cost network options for patients.

Greenway Health launches the Greenway Community suite of analytic, risk stratification, care management, and data exchange solutions. The population health management tool integrates with the company’s EHR platforms, plus others, as well as HIEs and immunization registries.

New Jersey-based Regional Cancer Care Associates and Osler Health IPA collaborate to share data between their physicians via combined use of RCCA’s COSTA analytics tool and Osler’s proprietary MDclick population health management, disease severity stratification, and analytics platform.

People

Seattle Children’s promotes Sandy Melzer, MD to executive vice president for networks and population health.

Research and Innovation

The University of Vermont’s Center for Rural Studies will develop an online community health and public safety data dashboard to help local officials respond to behavioral health issues as they emerge. Monitored data points will include arrests for behavioral health issues, subsequent ER visits, number of calls to crisis lines, number of homeless on shelter waiting lists, size of the waiting list for youth drop-in services, and the number of people in opiate treatment centers and on waiting lists for those services. Participating organizations include the University of Vermont Medical Center, the Howard Center, Burlington Police Department, and Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission. The publicly accessible dashboard will go live in August.

Other

Non-profit Tri-County Health Network (SC) looks at incorporating music therapy into its population health management strategy, particularly in the area of chronic-disease management, after hearing from Barry Bittman, MD senior vice president – chief population health officer, Highmark Allegheny Health Network, at its annual conference. Bittman, who is also CEO and president of the Yamaha Music & Wellness Institute, is researching the role of gospel music in the healing process.

Techwire looks at at the California Health and Human Services Agency’s Open Data portal ahead of the National Day of Civic Hacking: Health 2.0 Developer Challenge in early June in Sacramento. The portal includes data sets, charts, and maps on population health indicators, facility performance, and access to services, among other categories. The competition will award a total of $20,000 to teams that harness the data sets to raise consumer and policymaker awareness around community healthcare issues.

Funny for your Friday, courtesy of @doc_rob

Sponsor Updates

• Healthwise will exhibit at the TriZetto Annual Healthcare Conference May 17-20 in Orlando.
• ADP AdvancedMD offers a sneak peek of its solution for any browser.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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News 5/14/15

Top News

Outpatient IS and RCM vendor SourceMedical acquires LaClaro, a Colorado-based company specializing in RCM services for outpatient centers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition will add automated workflows, analytics, and management reporting to SourceMedical’s solutions for ambulatory surgery centers and other outpatient facilities.

Webinars

May 19 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Lock the Windows, Not Just the Door: Why Most Healthcare Breaches Involve Phishing Attacks and How to Prevent Them.” Sponsored by Imprivata. Presenters: Glynn Stanton, CISSP, information security manager, Yale New Haven Health System; David Ting, CTO, Imprivata. Nearly half of healthcare organizations will be successfully cyberhacked in 2015, many of them by hackers who thwart perimeter defenses by using social engineering instead. The entire network is exposed if even one employee is fooled by what looks like a security warning or Office update prompt and enters their login credentials. This webinar will provide real-world strategies for protecting against these attacks.

May 20 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Principles and Priorities of Accountable Care Transformation.” Sponsored by Health Catalyst. Presenter: Marie Dunn, director of analytics, Health Catalyst. Healthcare systems must build the competencies needed to succeed under value-based payment models while remaining financially viable in the fee-for-service landscape. This webinar will outline key near-term priorities for building competency at successfully managing at-risk contracts, with a particular focus on the importance of leveraging data to drive effective decision making.

Tweet Chat

Check out the recap of the #HIStalking tweet chat with host @LAlupusLady. The most popular discussion topic pertained to online communities turning patient concerns into “action with impact.”

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Non-profit patient education company Healthwise celebrates 40 years in business. Founder and CEO Don Kemper attributes his zeal for patient education and engagement to his time as a “young lieutenant in the U.S. Public Health Service.”

Announcements and Implementations

Greenway Health launches the Greenway Community suite of analytic, risk stratification, care management, and data exchange solutions. The population health management tool integrates with the company’s EHR platforms, plus others, as well as HIEs, and immunization registries.

Horizon Health Care receives federal funding to open a community health center in Fort Thompson, S.D. Scheduled to open September 1, the new facility will implement Horizon’s PM and EHR system from Greenway Health, and incorporate telemedicine services.

NextGen Healthcare will integrate Wolters Kluwer’s ProVation Clinic Note documentation tool and ProVation Order Sets templates into its new NextGen Now EHR.

Research and Innovation

Australian researchers develop a low-cost mobile phone app that can help healthcare workers diagnose pneumonia in third-world countries. Designed for feature phones, the app uses touch tones to detect accelerated breathing rates, a common indication of the illness. It is currently being tested in Uganda, South Sudan, and Ethiopia.

A Commonwealth Fund study of community health centers and clinics finds that while patient engagement via mobile phones can assist with medication and appointment reminders, weight management, and smoking cessation, there is limited evidence of improving outcomes via those devices in underserved populations.

A survey of 1,000 practices across Ohio, Florida, Delaware, Texas, and New York reveals that physicians are facing revenue loss due to inaccurate coding, lack of timely account receivable follow-ups, and cumbersome eligibility verification and denial management processes. While the survey results aren’t that eye-opening, it would be interesting to dig into how many of these practices are busy preparing for ICD-10, and whether practice managers feel the new code set will improve or hurt coding accuracy.

Government and Politics

Optum declares its work on Healthcare.gov finished, adding that it will not seek to continue its role as senior adviser of upgrades to the website. The company was brought in to rescue the federal health insurance exchange in the fall of 2013. Former Optum Group Executive Vice President Andy Slavitt left the company last year to become principal deputy administrator at CMS. He now serves as acting administrator.

Telemedicine

The Alabama House of Representatives authorizes the state to join the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact. Already enacted in six other states, the compact helps to speed up the ability of physicians to be licensed in multiple states, is also seen as a tool that will speed up telemedicine adoption in participating states. The ATA has given the state a cumulative “C” score for its telemedicine-related physician practice standards and licensure.

Other

Kaiser Health News profiles the ups and downs of L.A. County’s eConsult program. Started in 2012, the program enables PCPs to electronically consult with specialists on behalf of community health center and clinic patients who might otherwise have to wait months for a specialist appointment. The program has streamlined the referral process, but has not made enough of a dent to please participating PCPs, who are not reimbursed for the digital exchanges. As one overburdened physician succinctly explains, “Technology doesn’t solve the problems that were there before technology.”

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.

5/14 #HIStalking Tweet Chat Recap