News 1/15/15

Top News

ONC reports that 56 percent of eligible providers and 77 percent of eligible hospitals scheduled to attest to Stage 2 Meaningful Use have done so. As Mr. H pointed out in his assessment, “Those aren’t great numbers, but they’re a heck of a lot better than you might think.” Providers have three months left to attest, while hospitals have just one.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Practice Platinum Sponsor Versus Technology. Over 700 hospitals, as well as clinics and and senior living facilities, use its RTLS and RFID solutions for optimizing and automating workflows using location information for patients, staff, and assets. I highly recommend you watch the recent HIStalk webinar Versus sponsored featuring John Olmstead of The Community Hospital (IN) to hear just how successful it has been in improving patient satisfaction, reducing staff overtime and turnover, and fighting a potential MERS outbreak using Versus solutions. Check out the Twitter recap if you’re pressed for time. Thanks to Versus Technology for sponsoring HIStalk Practice.

Just in time for #TBT, Sony re-introduces the Walkman as a flash memory based digital audio player great for audiophiles who enjoy the larger DAP file format. Needless to say, the new Walkman looks nothing like the one I sported in the mid-80s. While the first cassette I ever bought was one by the Moody Blues, I distinctly remember donning my Walkman’s headphones to listen to Paula Abdul. Don’t judge.

The Choose Your Own Adventure series seems to be making a comeback too, as evidenced by a new way to enjoy it on Twitter and the above tome, which I picked up at the Palo Alto Networks table at a recent cyber security event. Choices in the data-center thriller include, “If you decide to make your firewalls presentation to Patel right now, turn to page 48” and “If you decide to reschedule with Patel so you can focus on the possible data breach in front of you, turn to page 23.” Apparently, choosing the data breach results in all hell breaking loose at your data center and the subsequent loss of your job. The upside? You end up in Nashville opening for the Zac Brown Band. 

Announcements and Implementations

Optimizerx Corp. integrates its SampleMD patient savings and support system into Practice Fusion’s EHR, enabling physicians that e-prescribe to provide coupons for patient co-pays and free sample vouchers for medications.

PokitDok introduces the Enterprise Scheduler system for group practices, telehealth providers, and hospitals to centralize scheduling and make open appointment times available on intranets, websites, and mobile apps. The company has also partnered with Healthiest You to incorporate its physician search engine, and pricing and scheduling tools into HY’s telehealth membership plans.

Zwanger-Pesiri Radiology (NY) chooses the Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform for its 58 Long Island radiologists, integrated with the practice’s vendor-neutral archive and enterprise workflow engine.

HealthLoop releases an iPhone app that sends push notifications to a physician when a patient triggers a clinical alert or when another physician sends a triage handoff. It’s part of the company’s package that costs $199 per physician per month.

Government and Politics

HHS breaks down its internal e-mail silos by moving to a cloud-based Microsoft system developed specifically for the federal government. HHS anticipates the move will better enable collaboration amongst departments, which have thus far been unable to communicate with each other due to security issues and firewalls. HHS CIO Frank Baitman seems optimistic about outsourcing the new e-mail service: “I’m a big, big, big supporter of cloud. I’m a big supporter of as-a-service offerings. I think that the way the federal government develops applications, systems is unbelievably inefficient and ineffective, and we have large-scale systems across the federal government that we spend hundreds of millions, sometimes billions, of dollars on that are never delivered.” Cue the taxpayer warm fuzzies.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe agree to settle a 2011 antitrust class action lawsuit by tech workers who accused the businesses of conspiring to avoid poaching one another’s employees, specifically prized engineers. Plaintiffs accused the Silicon Valley companies of limiting job mobility and salary increases.

Cary, NC-based SmartLink Mobile, a spinoff of referral coordination software vendor Infina Connect,  raises $2.5 million in funding for its secure patient-doctor texting platform.

Athenahealth acquires inpatient EHR vendor RazorInsights for an undisclosed sum. RazorInsights primarily serves rural, critical access, and small community hospitals. I debated whether or not to include this news, given that it’s related more to hospitals than physicians, but ultimately felt it was worth mentioning since ambulatory-centric Athena is obviously intent on making a play for the hospital market despite doom and gloom stock predictions that don’t seem to be weighing it down. The announcement also makes me wonder if Athena will merge RazorInsight’s north-of-Atlanta offices into its fairly new Ponce City Market digs.

Research and Innovation

Researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College find that physicians who use HIE to share reports on imaging tests are 25-percent less likely than their peers to perform duplicate tests. The study evaluated the Rochester RHIO (CT), which works with 70 healthcare organizations in 13 counties.

Practice Fusion’s population health collaboration with Merck results in an increase in recorded vaccinations among  eligible patients on Practice Fusion’s EHR. Over 20,000 physicians participated in the four-month test period, which resulted in a 73-percent increase in recorded vaccinations compared to pre- and post-program.

People

John King (Standard Register) joins the Azalea Health Board of Directors.

John Glaser (Siemens Healthcare) joins the American Telemedicine Association’s Board of Directors.

Other

Teletherapy vendor eTherapi cashes in on the Kaiser mental health employee strike going on in California, alerting Kaiser patients that they can access one of their therapists for a discounted rate of $40 per appointment during the strike and for 30 days after.

This article highlights the growing pains healthcare appointment-booking startup ZocDoc has experienced as it has scaled to availability in all 50 states. “[T]here are some obvious challenges that are presented in growing from a company of less than 20 people to now a company with millions of patients using it each month,” explains Anna Elwood, VP of operations. “For one, you need to develop systems where you can actually track the experiences of users. And yet, at the same time, you need to make sure that those systems aren’t the ones controlling the experience.”

Sponsor Updates

• SRSsoft offers four key ways to make and keep resolutions in the new year.
• NextGen’s ViaTracks Solutions clearinghouse will participate in CMS ICD-10 end-to-end testing with seven Medicare payers from January 26-30.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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Do Third-Party Patient Portals Offer Any Advantages Over Vendor-Specific Options?

Of all the new healthcare technology providers are admonished to adopt, patient portals are perhaps the most popular. A 2013 Frost and Sullivan report predicted a 221-percent growth for patient portals by 2017 – a tremendous prediction certainly influenced by providers scrambling to meet Meaningful Use criteria. The prediction begs the question, how should providers actually choose a patient portal? A 2012 KLAS survey highlighted an existing relationship with a vendor as the primary factor in selecting a product. Essentially, this means going with whatever your EHR vendor supplies.

That might not be the best method for selecting such an important piece of medical software. It’s reported that nearly two in every three patients will switch providers for better access to their health information. Surely that places a bit more weight on the patient portal decision.

Simplicity derived from a decreased number of vendor relationships will always have its appeal, but the KLAS report highlights that physicians make such a selection despite third-party options offering more intuitive interfaces (important for engagement), better patient education tools, and perhaps even better data exchange.

The inauspicious number of Stage 2 attestations to date perhaps signifies Meaningful Use’s waning influence – or at least it’s misunderstanding of physician priorities. Either way, it’s best to think of a patient portal outside of simply how it can help you with Meaningful Use.

Though the business case for this type of software hasn’t always been the simplest to make, a systematic review suggested measurable success with these systems (namely in improving health outcomes for patients with common chronic diseases) was best achieved with a strong coupling between the patient portal and case management. This indicates the importance of data exchange in deriving value from patient portals.

And here we find a clear advantage third-party systems can claim over vendor-specific platforms. Vendor-provided platforms have less incentive to communicate with disparate products, while third-party systems clearly see this as an advantage: The more systems a patient portal communicates with, the more scenarios in which it can thrive.

For example, third-party software Updox acts as the Health Information Service Provider for Direct messaging for over 40 EHRs. That’s in addition to its patient portal’s features such as online bill pay, appointment scheduling, and so on.

There’s also a strong case to be made for thinking of patient portals as more than websites where patients perform certain standalone tasks and instead consider them as part of a patient relationship management program. Yes, another industry/technology term is certainly the last thing providers need, but the distinction here is noteworthy.

Customer relationship management has become standard practice for nearly all service providers in other industries, and it’s critical to begin building similar systems in healthcare. In a nutshell, CRM automates many of the administrative tasks that keep effective communication channels open with customers. Healthcare could surely benefit from the same set of principles and technologies.

Solutionreach is an excellent example. Beyond patient portal capabilities, this software also supplies practices with the ability to automate appointment reminders, sending quick email reminders to patients about upcoming office visits. If your office hours are booked and you have patients on a waiting list for appointments, this software can send e-mails to these patients once you have a cancellation, which lets you cover open appointment slots.

Solutionreach can also integrate with various social media channels, which makes posting educational information or answering patient questions much easier than working with three or four separate accounts. An increasing number of patients are using social media to find information and choose providers, so this feature is more than just a marketing tool.

Similarly, so is this type of automated communication. That’s why it’s quickly becoming standard for communicating with customers in a number of other industries, and while the term “automation” may engender thoughts of robotic interactions, it’s actually a quite targeted strategy.

While the convenience of deploying vendor-specific patient portals holds undoubted appeal, the expanded functionality and increased data exchange capabilities of third-party software may be wiser investments for producing continued value from this increasingly common software.

Zach Watson is the content manager at TechnologyAdvice.

Contacts

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

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News 1/13/15

Top News

Congresswoman Renee Ellmers (R-NC) re-introduces H.R. 270 – The Flexibility in Health IT Reporting (Flex-IT) Act, which aims to lower the Meaningful Use reporting period this year from 365 days to 90. The original co-sponsor, Rep. Jim Matheson, has retired, leading Ellmers to team up with Congressman Ron Kind (D-WI) in her efforts to help the bill gain the momentum it lacked when initially introduced last year.

“There is a tremendous need for our healthcare providers to have flexibility in meeting HHS’ stiff deadlines, and this is precisely why I am reintroducing the Flex-IT Act, “ Ellmers explains. “The time constraints imposed on doctors and hospitals are inflexible and simply unmanageable — and this is evident by the dreadful Stage 2 Meaningful Use attestation numbers released by CMS late last year. It’s hard to comprehend how HHS can move forward to full-year reporting when the numbers for 90-day reporting are so low — particularly when noting that half of the physicians in our country are now facing costly fines. Physicians, hospitals, and healthcare providers in our districts are eager for relief and are ready for this legislation to move forward. My colleague, Congressman Ron Kind, and I are committed to the passage of the Flex-IT Act.”

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

January means it’s time for your HISsies nominations. Submit your choice for the worst vendor, the smartest vendor action taken in 2014, the industry figure of the year, and the all-important “Industry figure in whose face you’d most like to throw a pie.” The final ballot will contain the most-nominated entries, so think of this as the primary election that precedes the general one by a couple of weeks. For any industry newbies out there, the HISsies will be presented at HIStalkapalooza, our annual networking bash at HIMSS. Though it does cater to hospital folks, I can’t help but assume HIStalk Practice readers may also attend. This year’s party will take place the evening of Monday, April 13, at the House of Blues in Chicago. Stay tuned for invitation details.

Speaking of HIMSS, Dr. Jayne kindly pointed out in a recent post that the opening reception will have a Speakeasy theme, so I’ve already begun hunting for Roaring 20s-inspired attire. Hopefully I won’t look like the only attendee who just stepped out of the Great Gatsby. Gentlemen, it’s time to dust off your spats. Ladies, let me know if you come across a wearable that counts dance steps, and looks good with diamonds and feathers.

Watching: Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, courtesy of five seasons now available on Netflix. Watching these episodes as an adult makes me wonder if Wayne White, creator of Magic Screen and much more, should be credited with thinking up the iPad. You can learn more about his distinctly unique body of work in the streaming documentary “Beauty is Embarrassing.” 

Webinar

January 13 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “The Bug Stops Here: How Our Hospital Used its EHR and RTLS Systems to Contain a Deadly New Virus.” Sponsored by Versus Technology. Presenter: John Olmstead, RN, MBA, FACHE, director of surgical and emergency services, The Community Hospital, Munster, Indiana. Community Hospital was the first US hospital to treat a patient with MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome). It used clinical data from its EHR and staff contact information from a real-time locating system to provide on-site CDC staff with the information they needed to contain the virus and to study how it spreads. Employees who were identified as being exposed were quickly tested, avoiding a hospital shutdown. Mr. H keeps telling me what a great dry run Versus and John Olmstead have done, so I’ve signed up to listen in. The folks behind @VersusTech and I may do a bit of live tweeting, too.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Digital health investments show no sign of slowing down. Behavioral health technology startup Ginger.io raises $20 million to speed up development of its mental health technology. Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, and several other investors contributed to the Series B fund. Total investment in the company now amounts to $28 million since it was founded in 2010.

Augmedix rounds up $16 million in Series A funding, led by Emergence Capital and DCM Ventures. The latest infusion of cash brings the San Francisco-based technology company’s total investments to $23 million. The investment is yet another indication that Google Glass, which powers Augmedix’s clinical documentation solution, may still have some life left in it.

Atlanta-based Ingenious Med adds Ascension Ventures, Heritage Group, and Kaiser Permanente Ventures to its roster of investors, which also includes North Bridge Growth Equity. The company anticipates working with the new investors will open up enterprise opportunities for its IM1 patient encounter platform.

The Camden Group, a Los Angeles-based healthcare business advisory firm, acquires consulting firm Health Directions LLC for an undisclosed sum. The businesses will operate under The Camden Group name.

Praesidian Capital invests for a third time in Troy, N.Y.-based Etransmedia Technology. The undisclosed amount will be used to support Etransmedia’s merger with DoctorsXL, which offers RCM ad PM services.

Announcements and Implementations

Tulane University Medical Group (LA) implements the eClinicalWorks Care Coordination Medical Record platform for population health management by its 350 physicians. TUMG has used eCW’s EHR since 2009.

Atlantis Health Group chooses Influence Health’s Navigate population health management solution for a defined network of 1,650 physicians. AHG manages and works with over 20 physician-owned ACOs across the country.

Software development firm Pointclear Solutions launches the Accelerated Solutions Center, a set of 14 services that will help healthcare IT vendors bring products to market faster. Pointclear customers include Emdeon, Greenway Health, and Walgreens.

Flatiron Health collaborates with the National Comprehensive Cancer Network to create the NCCN Outcomes Database. The cloud-based repository of NCCN member institution data, culled from their respective EHRs, will be aggregated to help identify care patterns and trends, and enable cancer quality and outcomes assessment. Member institutions will also be able to access Flatiron’s OncoAnalytics tool via the new database.

RubiconMD and CredSimple join Athenahealth’s More Disruption Please accelerator program. MDP is accepting applications from healthcare IT startups interested in sharing the company’s new office space in San Francisco.

A DrFirst market share analysis of EHRs used in New York finds that 80 percent of the ambulatory EHRs and 85 percent of the hospital EHRs are ready for the state’s I-STOP law that takes effect March 27, 2015. The law requires that all prescriptions be sent electronically from prescribers to pharmacies. New York pharmacies aren’t as well prepared as prescribers, however, with only 58 percent of them ready to accept electronic prescriptions for controlled drugs.

Government and Politics

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signs a telehealth bill into law that allows for health insurance reimbursement on a range of telehealth services. Assemblywoman Addie J. Russell sponsored the bill, which will go into effect in a few months. Fort Drum Regional Health Planning Organization Executive Director Denise Young explains that, “It’s been about eight years in the making – right from putting the fiber in the ground, to putting equipment in offices, to getting protocols in place to make this work for the patients of our region.”

The Washington Examiner creates an interactive graphic showing the price tags of several flights taken by HHS personnel, and the reasons for the first- and business-class tickets. HHS executives spent $31 million taking 7,000 first-class and business-class flights between 2009 and 2013, including 253 trips for which a one-way ticket cost over $15,000.

The American College of Physicians urges Congress to: (a) repeal Medicare’s SGR formula; (b) continue Medicare’s 10-percent bonus for primary care; (c) restore the Medicaid program that pays primary care physicians no less than Medicare rates; and (d) provide relief from “burdensome and unrealistic” Meaningful Use requirements and “other excessive regulatory burdens.”

CMS extends its deadline for volunteer ICD-10 end-to-end testing to January 21.

Research and Innovation

Intel develops the True Key password manager app, which replaces passwords with facial recognition. Unveiled last week at CES, the app works with webcams on Windows computers and Android phones, with an iOS release expected later this year. I asked Michael Trader, president of patient identity management company RightPatient, for his thoughts on the new technology: “Facial recognition is a good fit for Intel’s application because the technology is generic and offers distinctive advantages, mostly because it can be utilized with any off-the-shelf camera embedded in a PC, tablet, or phone. Expect to see a continued increase in the application of biometric identification technology in the healthcare industry as discovery of its utility and ability to protect sensitive data grows.”

People

Miles Romney (Radiate Media) joins eVisit as CTO.

Other

This article highlights the success of KiddoEMR, an app developed by Joseph “Joe” Cohen, MD and initially deployed at his Cedar Park Pediatrics (TX) practice. The homegrown technology is now in beta at 160 facilities nationwide, and houses data on 14 million children. Cohen seems to be a fan of all things Google, even Glass, but with a few caveats: “I could see Glass becoming even more useful when we can record more video without worrying about battery, but right now it’s simply not good enough, especially while the device costs $1,500.”

Uproar from customers over a 2-percent surcharge to help offset ACA-related healthcare expenses at a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant in Texas has led the eatery to rescind it just 24 hours after instating it. One disgruntled patron fussed over an extra 40 cents, while another made it clear that, “I probably would think twice about going back to that place if they were adding a surcharge.” Transparency about the surcharge is one thing, but an extra 2 percent at a wings joint to help your hardworking server see a physician when they need to is nothing to complain about. We should all be tipping just a bit more in these times of high premiums and even higher deductibles.

Sponsor Updates

• Allscripts will integrate Perceptive Software’s enterprise content management into its EHRs, giving customers a common infrastructure for storing and sharing patient content.
• Medicity publishes case studies on Trinity Health’s use of Medicity HISP to transmit information and Intermountain Healthcare’s lab results notification and public health reporting via Medicity Exchange. Brian Ahier, Medicity’s director of standards and government affairs, publishes an article with Wisconsin Statewide Health Information Network COO Jean Doeringsfeld titled “FHIR and the Future of Interoperability.”
• Optum’s latest blog looks at how providers use analytics to better manage their populations and reduce costs.
• nVoq releases a case study on the success Teleradiology Specialists (AZ) experienced with its SayIt cloud-based speech recognition technology.
• Entrepreneur and author Sramana Mitra lists eClinicalWorks among those “Unicorn” companies that generate initial funding from sales rather than from financing in a profile for her upcoming book.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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

News 1/8/15

Top News

Genentech, the U.S. unit of Swiss drug manufacturer Roche, invests $10 million in personal genetics company 23andMe. The funding will enable Genentech to access data from 23andMe’s Parkinson’s community – one of the company’s largest thanks to recruitment efforts by the Michael J. Fox Foundation – to help it discover new targets for drugs and diagnostic tests. “I think that this illustrates how pharma companies are interested in the fact that we have a massive amount of information,” says Anne Wojcicki, CEO and co-founder, 23andMe. “We have a very engaged consumer population, and these people want to participate in research. And we can do things much faster and more efficiently than any other research means in the world.”

Webinars

January 13 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “The Bug Stops Here: How Our Hospital Used its EHR and RTLS Systems to Contain a Deadly New Virus.” Sponsored by Versus Technology. Presenter: John Olmstead, RN, MBA, FACHE, director of surgical and emergency services, The Community Hospital, Munster, Indiana. Community Hospital was the first US hospital to treat a patient with MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome). It used clinical data from its EHR and staff contact information from a real-time locating system to provide on-site CDC staff with the information they needed to contain the virus and to study how it spreads. Employees who were identified as being exposed were quickly tested, avoiding a hospital shutdown.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

LexisNexis Risk Solutions completes its acquisition of Health Market Science, which maintains a provider database of healthcare practitioners, organizations and their affiliations, as well as a medical claims warehouse. LexisNexis is working to integrate the proprietary data of HMS into its High Performance Computing Cluster Systems platform to help clients manage risk.

Healthcare network development company VHA acquires consulting firm Medical Development Specialists. MDS founder Phil Dalton will join VHA as senior vice president.

Tennessee tech accelerator Jumpstart Foundry decides to work only with healthcare technology startups based on the success of the seven it has already graduated. “[T]hose seven companies, about 20 percent of our graduates, have raised more than half of the money and have had a better success rate — meaning they’ve survived more than the average Jumpstart company,” explains Marcus Whitney, president. “I don’t believe that our healthcare founders were any better than our music tech founders or our social network company founders. But this ecosystem is just really well suited for healthcare companies. It really is.”

Staffing services company General Employment Enterprises acquires Jacksonville, FL-based medical scribe contractor Scribe Solutions.

Announcements and Implementations

Quality of Life Health Services (AL) receives a $396,543 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities 2014 Distance Learning and Telemedicine Grant Program, which it will use to set up telemedicine services at 10 of its clinics. QOL, which is contributing $198,828 in matching funds for bandwidth improvement, hopes to have the program up and running in 90 days.

Arizona-based Sun Valley Medical Billing implements MD Coder 10 charge capture technology from Texas-based Medical Design Technologies to make its largely paper processes more efficient.

ADP AdvancedMD will integrate its EHR with physician practice reporting from Iron Bridge Integration, giving customers access to pre-built connections to 57 registries in 48 states to help meet Meaningful Use Stage 2 requirements.

Walgreens partners with WebMD to create Your Digital Health Advisor, a virtual wellness-coaching program at Walgreens.com. The program will allow users to create health and wellness goals, track progress, chat with a Walgreens pharmacist, and earn Walgreens Balance Rewards. The partnership will also integrate the rewards program, and refill and transfer prescription service into WebMD’s mobile app. The partnership comes just a month after Walgreens began offering virtual consultations with MDLive physicians via its mobile app.

Fruit Street Health launches its Wellness Clinic telemedicine and patient-monitoring solution, which includes video consult, payment and scheduling tools; plus integration with smart scales and wearables from FitBit, Jawbone, and Apple. I have to wonder how tolerant physicians will be of the tool’s alert system, which sounds off when a patient doesn’t get enough exercise and/or sleep, gains weight, or skimps on their fruits and veggies. It also begs the question, just what will docs do with all that data?

Government and Politics

Healthcare.gov sign ups reach 6.6 million so far, including 103,000 who applied for insurance coverage just last week. Those numbers, which don’t include sign ups on state-run exchanges, point to the lowest number of uninsured Americans in years. A Gallup survey confirms the statistic: A poll found that 12.9 percent of adult U.S. citizens were uninsured during the last few months of 2014, the lowest percentage since Gallup began daily tracking of the uninsured in 2008.

Research and Innovation

Physicians on the Health is Primary panel at CES share encouraging statistics related to their use of patient-facing apps at the point of care: Forty percent of surveyed family physicians use consumer health apps with their patients, and 70 percent of those have recommended preventative or healthy lifestyle apps. Concerns include app effectiveness, security and privacy, lack of access to data, and transparency and awareness of how the data is used by the app and its developers.

It doesn’t seem to be a great time to be a physician in New Jersey. The New Jersey Health Care Monitor survey finds that 90 percent of participants feel that the current healthcare environment has negatively impacted their role as a physician. Of that group, over 86 percent reported increased administrative burdens. Over 60 percent are spending less time with patients and more money on technology, while 53 percent are considering changing their practice structure.

Physicians responding to a Sermo poll name wearables-based remote patient monitoring and telemedicine as the top two expected trends of 2015.

People

David Silberstein (Teradata) joins Leidos Health as service line director for analytics.

Scott Whyte (ClearDATA) joins the WEDI Board of Directors.

Sharon Gabrielson (Mayo Clinic), Matthew Gibb (Carle Physician Group), Aric Sharp (UnityPoint Health), and C. Todd Staub (ProHealth Physicians) join the American Medical Group Association’s Board of Directors.

Other

The Journal of the American Medical Association points out two threats to confidentiality created by EHRs – the potential disclosure to parents of health information adolescent patients may wish to keep private and disclosure to the adolescent of information that parents may wish to keep private. Their concerns seem especially valid given the Institute of Medicine’s push in November to include additional social and behavioral health measures to EHR certification and Meaningful Use criteria.

Consumer Reports adds new ratings on over 170 physician groups in California. Groups were rated on patient communication, timely care and service, care coordination, and helpfulness of office staff. As to be expected, the ratings show that all groups have room to improve, and patient experiences vary widely.

Rarely do I come across the book of Genesis mentioned in the same breath as interoperability. Richard Davis, RN likens the efforts of healthcare IT vendors to the tower of Babel in this recent opinion piece:

“The Genesis Bible story of the tower of Babel tells it all when it comes to the software problem in health care. Consider the "city" the modern health care system and the time of one language when health care providers did not use computers and the parallels are striking. It may be a bit of a stretch to say that the God of the Bible set the precedent for modern health care software vendors, but too many of us are dealing with a confused language of all the earth.”

The 2015 healthcare industry resolutions and predictions keep coming. The Advisory Board offers three resolutions for healthcare organizations looking to implement population health initiatives, including using healthcare IT to scale coordination between care management teams. Amazing Charts includes accelerated EHR switching, more virtual consultations, and a continued glimmer of interoperability hope among its seven predictions for the coming year.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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Contact us online.
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News 1/6/15

Top News

The American Medical Association includes EHRs, Meaningful Use, and ICD-10 in its list of top issues to watch for in 2015. The trifecta is part of a broader category of administrative load and competing regulatory programs the AMA feels is “pulling time away from patient care without a direct benefit to care delivery or health outcomes.”

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

Happy New Year! It’s nice to be back after taking a break to spend time with family and friends during the holidays. If you’re like me, you may be suffering from social jet lag as you attempt to get back into your normal work routine. Like me, you also may have fallen into the time-honored trap of making resolutions. Mine include getting more sleep (doubtful), finding interesting healthcare IT experts to interview for HIStalk Practice (already in the works), eating better (sigh), and exercising on a more regular basis (i.e. get fit for HIStalkapalooza). I must admit I was this close to downloading some sort of fitness/nutrition tracking app on New Year’s Day, but decided against it due to my record of abandoning such things after a week or two. I’ve decided instead to focus on finding resources that push healthy recipes on a daily basis. Feel free to send your favorites my way.

January always finds a plethora of annual reviews and predictions delivered to my inbox. My favorites so far include TechCrunch’s Healthcare Predictions for 2015 and HIStalk Connect’s Top 10 Digital Health Stories of 2014.

Webinars

January 13 (Tuesday) 1:00 ET. “The Bug Stops Here: How Our Hospital Used its EHR and RTLS Systems to Contain a Deadly New Virus.” Sponsored by Versus Technology. Presenter: John Olmstead, RN, MBA, FACHE, director of surgical and emergency services, The Community Hospital, Munster, Indiana. Community Hospital was the first US hospital to treat a patient with MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome). It used clinical data from its EHR and staff contact information from a real-time locating system to provide on-site CDC staff with the information they needed to contain the virus and to study how it spreads. Employees who were identified as being exposed were quickly tested, avoiding a hospital shutdown.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

UpSpring Baby partners with Doctor on Demand to incorporate its online lactation consultation services into the DOD telemedicine app. The deal came about via a pitch UpSpring Baby founder Julie Jumonville made via LinkedIn to DOD CMO Pat Batsu, MD. (Never has the “power of social media” been a more appropriate buzz phrase.) Given that I have had lactation consultants on speed dial for months at a time, I’m willing to bet new moms won’t blink an eye at spending $40 for an anxiety-reducing 25-minute video consult.

New data from Rock Health shows that 2014 digital health funding exceeded $4.1 billion, a sum greater than that of the past three years combined. This year will likely see that figure climb even higher, given the growing number of finally viable telemedicine business models, and the over-hyped yet continually expanding wearables market.

Healthcare analytics vendor Inovalon Holdings files for a $500 million IPO. The CEO and board chair is cardiologist Keith Dunleavy, MD. The company’s technology is used by NextGen, Greenway, Allscripts, and Walgreens.

Specialty EMR vendor Modernizing Medicine acquires Aesyntix Health, which offers dermatology practice RCM, inventory management, and group purchasing services.

Health management technology and remote patient monitoring services company Honeywell HomMed changes its name to Honeywell Life Care Solutions.

Qualcomm partners with Walgreens to integrate its 2Net Platform with the retail pharmacy’s mobile and web applications, and its Balance Rewards for healthy choices program. Novartis also selects the 2Net Platform to expedite the collection and aggregation of medical device data during clinical trials.

Private equity firm GI partners acquires Canadian healthcare IT company Logibec from OMERS Private Equity. US subsidiary MatrixCare will be retained by OMERS as a separate company.

Announcements and Implementations

Northern Ohio Medical Specialists ACO goes live on eClinicalWorks Care Coordination Medical Records for population health management.

Kentucky Health Center Network selects PopIQ software from i2i Systems to aggregate de-identified patient data from its 161 patient care sites across the state. The project is expected to wrap up in May 2015.

South Carolina Sports Medicine & Orthopaedic Center selects Phreesia’s point-of-service technology to expedite patient check-in. Phreesia’s solution will integrate with the center’s Athenahealth EHR.

Digital heart health company Qardio launches the QardioMD multi-patient monitoring tool and QardioBase smart scale at CES, which takes over Las Vegas for most of this week. The annual Digital Health Summit at CES kicks off today, featuring such speakers as HIStalk contributor and Cedars-Sinai CIO Darren Dworkin; Withings CEO Cedric Hutchings; Walgreens VP of Digital Health Adam Pelligrini; former ONCer Lygeia Ricciardi, now digital health expert at Clear Voice Consulting; and Dr. Phil, who will likely tout Doctor on Demand, the telemedicine company he started with his son in 2013.

Medical practice performance management company GloStream chooses DrFirst’s EPCS Gold 2.0 controlled drug e-prescribing system to comply with New York’s I-STOP mandatory e-prescribing requirement.

Government and Politics

CMS announces a second ICD-10 end-to-end testing period that will run from April 26 through May 1. Over 800 volunteer submitters will be selected to participate in testing with Medicare Administrative Contractors and the Common Electronic Data Interchange contractor. Volunteer forms are due January 9.

HHS is on the hunt for vendors to run its National Data Warehouse, which captures, aggregates, and analyzes information related to beneficiary and customer experiences with Medicare and Healthcare.gov. Potential contractors must be able to demonstrate experience with “scalability and security in protecting data and information with customer, person-sensitive information including Personal Health Information and Personally Identifiable information (personal health records, etc.).” Interested parties have until January 19 to respond.

Core Pediatrics (NH) physicians express their frustration over the state of New Hampshire’s stymied efforts to create a functioning vaccine registry. Opponents and proponents alike are in dispute over how people would choose to participate in the system and how their decisions would be recorded. The state, which has been working for the last 20 years to create VaxNH, is the only one in the country without such a registry.

Politico reports that the Office of Management and Budget has received proposed rules for Stage 3 of Meaningful Use, as well as a proposed rule changing ONC’s EHR certification program to “make it more broadly applicable to other types of health IT health care settings.” OMB will likely clear both proposals in the coming months.

People

OB/GYN EHR vendor DigiChart promotes Rodney Hamilton, MD to president and CEO.

Forbes releases its 30 Under 30 list of entrepreneurs making a difference in digital health. Healthcare IT-related names include Nat Turner, Flatiron Health; Jason Bornhurst, Patient IO; Katelyn Gleason, Eligible API; David He, Quanttus; and Pelu Tran, Augmedix.

Research and Innovation

A Xerox poll finds that 64 percent of respondents don’t use patient portals due in large part to a lack of communication about portal availability on the part of their physician. Over half of those non-users would be “much more interested and proactive in their personal healthcare” if given online access to their medical records.

Other

HealthTap CEO Ron Gutman brings the concept of telemedicine back down to Earth in a PC Magazine interview: “I’ll be a bit contrarian and say that I don’t think telemedicine is changing anything. Telemedicine is a feature. We’re not feature-thinkers. We’re system-thinkers. We think about virtual care as a continuum, where telehealth is a feature in that. It’s necessary, but not sufficient.”

This article highlights emerging trends in biometric identification that involve the nose, ears, heart rhythm, body odor, and even the gluteus maximus (cheekily referred to as “butt biometrics”).

Journalist Steven Brill releases a new book, “America’s Bitter Pill,” detailing his views on why Obamacare won’t change the high prices of healthcare. Here’s hoping the book is as compelling a read as his similarly titled 2013 piece for Time Magazine, the longest story the magazine has ever run by a single author.

In case you missed it, Fortune describes Athenahealth’s “More Disruption Please” conference as “the Animal House of corporate gatherings,” and contrasts the party atmosphere to skeptical investors who believe that Athenahealth shares are massively overvalued.

Tennessee doctors are diagnosing and treating people with flu by telephone or telemedicine, telling them not to come to the office for fear they’ll spread the virus to other waiting patients. The CDC has formally classified this season’s flu outbreak as an epidemic. Walgreens, which tracks prescriptions for antiviral medications, reports that the top areas for flu as of January 2 are cities in Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, and S.C.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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