Thanksgiving Edition News 11/27/14

Top News

The New York-based HIXNY RHIO unveils its patient portal, which it anticipates will improve access to patient information between providers through the SHIN-NY (come to find out it’s pronounced “shiney”) statewide HIE.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

Don’t let the holidays pass you by without acknowledging how much you appreciate that colleague who  goes above and beyond. Managers, peers, and customers can nominate a non-management employee (vendor or provider) for the HIStalk “Beacon of Selfless Service” award. We’ll happily announce winners over the next several weeks, hopefully inspiring others to go that extra mile. The HIStalk team will also be running recaps of holiday-related company good deeds or celebrations this holiday season, so please send along your recaps with a photo or two.

Watching: Thanksgiving at my house doesn’t officially start until the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade commences. It’s a great excuse to lounge on the couch in leisurely attire just a little bit longer before heading into the kitchen to finish prepping the turkey and trimmings. This article provides helpful links to the route map and where to watch live-stream video (great for people like me who cut the cable cord long ago.)

Long holiday weekends are golden opportunities for binge watching. On deck for me is Netflix original Peaky Blinders, a gangster family epic set in 1919 Birmingham, England. It won’t take you long to figure out where the title comes from.

Announcements and Implementations

Drchrono uses Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint reader to authenticate physicians logging into its EHR. Apple opened up the biometric reader to third-party developers when it released iOS 8. Three taps of the finger – one to get into the iPad, one to open the app, and another to open the EHR – gets them in without having to enter a passcode (though that option is still available).

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Optimized Care Network aims to install 100 CareSpace telemedicine kiosks in hospitals and physician practices as part of an investment deal with Mobility Exchange, which will bundle the kiosks with wireless data plans from Verizon. Founded less than a year ago, OCN landed a $1 million investment earlier this month from Modern Medical CEO Joseph Favazzo.

Forbes lays out the past, present, and likely dim future of digital health IPOs, calling out companies like Castlight Health, Vocera, Imprivata, Everyday Health, epocrates, and Accretive Health as those that have underperformed since their respective IPOs. Of those reviewed, only Veeva Systems and Medidata Solutions are trading above their IPO price, leading to the conclusion that, “Despite sizable market opportunities within the healthcare sector thanks to government legislation, the public seems confused about what digital health is.”

Government and Politics

Thanksgiving also marks Family Health History Day, as ONC so kindly reminded me in the holiday edition of its weekly e-blast. While I agree that knowing my family’s health history is important, it’s not necessarily going to be my first topic of conversation over turkey at the dinner table. A quick peek at the My Family Health Portrait online tool makes me think it’s in dire need of a redesign.

People

The National Association of Professional Women recognizes Karen Mingain (HealthNET Systems Consulting) as 2014 Professional Woman of the Year.

Research and Innovation

An AHRQ study finds (not surprisingly) that EHRs should be developed for pediatricians with functionalities “related to a child’s evolving maturity.” Researchers determined that EHRs should include vaccination, development, physiology medication dosing, pediatric diseases management, pediatric norms and the relationship between pediatric patients and their caregivers. They added that, “Key Informants indicated that if these functionalities are implemented well, the EHR will also better support the care of all patients.” I think the keyword here is “well.” Pediatricians likely already have the ability to document most of these details, but finding the time to do it “well” when faced with an already overbooked day of appointments probably makes it very challenging.

An overwhelming majority of physicians on PracticeFusion’s EHR say that their patients have not asked about incorporating health data from wearable fitness trackers or health apps into their health records. Combine this with privacy and security concerns, plus a physician’s lack of desire to receive this type of data, and it’s not likely we’ll see much marketplace traction with Apple’s HealthKit.

Other

The Commonwealth Fund issues a brief outlining the significance of the release of Medicare physician payment data, limitations of the dataset, current uses of the information, and proposals for making the data more meaningful for public use.

There’s apparently still time to register for the HITLab Innovators Summit, happening December 1 in New York City. The promo code will knock your general admission registration fee down to $550, plus a $30.95 processing fee.

This article points out the UK’s need for EHRs in light of the recently uncovered fact that one fifth of data security breaches in the healthcare sector are the result of paper records being lost or stolen. To combat the problem, the Department of Health has appointed Dame Fiona Caldicott to the new position of national data guardian for health and care. Health secretary Jeremy Hunt has committed to ensuring a paperless NHS and fully integrated digital patient records across NHS and social care services by April 2018.

Ryan Jeffrey Shaw, assistant professor in the Duke University School of Nursing, voices his frustration with the over-hyped wearables craze:

“[T]he biggest challenge for most patients isn’t gathering data, but changing human behavior. You can have the hottest medical gizmo on the planet, but it’s not going to help you much if you keep eating junk food and avoiding the gym. So, yes, by all means push aside those turkey leftovers and go check out these new wearable health devices on Black Friday. Just don’t expect them to magically make you healthier. That’s something you — and our country’s health care system — still need to work on if these tempting holiday gifts are going to live up to their promise.”

If you’re an optimist and believe that a wearable will make all the difference in your journey to health and wellness, check out CNET’s guide to 14 Black Friday deals.

Boston.com correspondent MD Mama, aka Claire McCarthy, MD shares a list of things she’s thankful for, including:

• “that baseball season is completely over (since Boston Children’s is right near Fenway Park–traffic gets nuts)”
• “that nobody in the family complains if I work late”
• “my job and my wonderful colleagues–and my wonderful patients who let me into their lives and let me serve them.”

Sponsor Updates

• Intelligent Medical Objects, Allscripts, and eClinicalWorks earn glowing remarks from the HIStalk Advisory Panel.

Contacts

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

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5 Questions with James Stevermer, MD Medical Director, Callaway Physicians

James Stevermer, MD is medical director of Callaway Physicians, a part of the University of Missouri Health System. The practice, which recently met NCQA patient-centered medical home level 3 criteria, employs 16 full-time and 16 part-time staff members who see an average of 80 patients a day.

How have you and your colleagues seen technology change the way healthcare is practiced at CP, especially given that it recently celebrated its 40^th anniversary?
There have been remarkable changes, whether we are looking at therapeutic interventions or the day-to-day practice. EHR has been a substantial work-flow change.

What EHR does CP use, and where are you with Meaningful Use?
As part of MUHealthcare, we use Cerner Powerchart. We’ve met Stage I and will work towards Stage 2 next year.

Given that CP is in a rural setting, has it looked into adopting telemedicine services?
We have had telemedicine, but it’s been little used. Partially because it wasn’t used much when first put in, due to technologic barriers at the time. Although rural, the distance isn’t that far to referral systems, so I think patients prefer to travel. We use it regularly for educational purposes.

Has the practice encountered any healthcare IT implementation challenges recently?
Our biggest challenge was a couple of years ago when we went to CPOE. Fewer challenges in the last couple of years. Things also improved when we moved bandwidth beyond a bare minimum for the size of the practice.

What implementation best practices can you share with other providers?
Have several champions, not just physicians. Have extra help during transitions. Be prepared for unanticipated workflow changes.

Contacts

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

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DOCtalk with Dr. Gregg 11/25/14

MU: It Do and It Don’t

Dr. Robert Wachter recently wrote a wonderful piece that later posted on Healthcare IT News entitled Meaningful use: Born 2009 — died 2014? His subtitle was “I believe that meaningful use is now doing more harm than good,” a sentiment perhaps echoing through the barren halls of MU leadership as top echelon folks seem to be good at writing-on-the-wall reading.

It does seem that MU has gotten waylaid in processes and procedures, becoming less and less meaningful, and more useless than useful.

Did MU make a difference? You bet it did. If it doesn’t change its current course, will it continue to be of value? Doubtful, very doubtful.

Reflecting on its effects and impacts, here’s a few observations on the impact of MU, when “it do” help and when “it don’t.”

It Do:

• Every time you see the notes from a consulting doc whose scribble used to be illegible, and whose notes are now clean and crisp in their Times New Roman or Arial font.
• Whenever a lab result comes whistling into your EMR, directly from the lab, with values that are trended over time, and easy to view.
• When pop up reminders help you catch a vaccine that might have been missed or remember a lab redraw that you didn’t want to forget.
• When you want to hurry through your last few patients because it’s been a very long “one of those days” and your brilliant little EMR catches you in your tired rush before you prescribe an antibiotic to which a patient is allergic.
• Each time a patient messages you through the portal and you realize how easy the portal makes it to communicate better with your patients, with less interruption to your daily flow (and with no phone tag!)
• As your bank account receives a boost when the MU check clears after successfully meeting and attesting to your MU compliance.
• When you want to know something about your practice, or your patients, and a relatively simple search reveals insights your paper chart system could never have supplied.

IT DON’T:

• When you visit your otherwise very high-tech specialist who still uses paper charts and who swears that, after considering the negative impact on their currently comfortable workflow and running the ROI numbers, he thinks the penalties for MU avoidance are less bothersome than the expense of going digital.
• As you want to contribute to electronic syndromic surveillance and are stymied by the inability of your state public health agencies for accepting such digital submissions.
• Each time the fax machine rings and you receive another 87 pages of records transfer that you’d just love to have in digitally manageable form.
• Indeed with every fax you receive as you realize that so little interoperability has been implemented that you still receive the vast majority of your patient-related communications from other providers the same way you did 20 years ago.
• When you open your mail (snail-type) to read a consultant’s report that comes from a hospital-based specialist, part of a hospital system that you know for a fact uses Extormity, and yet here you are slicing open an envelope.
• Whenever you decide to switch EHRs and realize that data migration standards and capabilities are less 2014-ish than they are 1995-ish.
• When you receive a letter from CMS notifying you of an upcoming audit and you go online to read about some pretty nasty – and lengthy – provider MU audit experience nightmares.

Dr. Wachter has a line near the end of his post that reads: “Rather than continuing to push highly prescriptive standards that get in the way of innovation and consume most of the bandwidth of health IT vendors and delivery organizations, MU Stage 3 should focus on promoting interoperability, and little else.”

Seems like a good prescription, doctor.

From the trenches…

“It do and it don’t.” – Barry Hunter, manager and trainer of dethroned boxing champ (steroid-related) Lamont Peterson

Dr. Gregg Alexander, a grunt in the trenches pediatrician at Madison Pediatrics, is Chief Medical Officer for Health Nuts Media, an HIT and marketing consultant, and sits on the board of directors of the Ohio Health Information Partnership (OHIP).

Contacts

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

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News 11/25/14

Top News

HHS acknowledges it has been over-reporting the number of individuals who have signed up for insurance policies at Healthcare.gov by 400,000, adding fuel to the fire of Republicans who have filed a lawsuit against HHS and the Department of Treasury. HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell told her staff that, “One of our most important obligations to the American people is to report information and data accurately. We are working quickly to understand what happened and to improve our processes in order to prevent similar mistakes from occurring again.” Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., didn’t miss a beat, declaring that “… the administration engaged in an effort to obscure and downplay the number of dropouts.” He has asked CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner to testify on the matter early next week. HHS now pegs enrollment, as of October 15, at 6.7 million, not the 7.1 million Burwell previously cited.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

I think it’s no secret that healthcare IT consulting is in decline. As one HIStalk reader explains, “Very few large implementations remain, providers aren’t chasing MU $, and uncertainty surrounding possible repeal of the ACA has Medicare heavy hospitals and health systems freezing spending. The market is dead.” Can the same be said for physician practice consulting? Are opportunities dwindling at a similar pace, or have they dried up altogether? How much IT consulting will you use in 2015 versus 2014? Let us know via this poll and then click Comments to explain.

Webinars

Webinar recordings recently added to YouTube:

Improving Trial Accrual by Engaging the Digital Healthcare Consumer.

Cerner Takeover of Siemens, Are You Ready?
Mr. H reports that Vince and Frank have hit over 1,000 YouTube views in four days, giving them a good shot at surpassing Dim-Sum’s all-time record. I’ll reiterate my advice to anyone who has been in healthcare IT five years or less – do yourself a favor and listen to this great industry history lesson.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

MediGain acquires revenue cycle and PM company Millenium Practice Management Associates just a few months after receiving a $38 million in growth capital from Prudential Capital Group. The company expects the acquisition to significantly enhance its domestic and international presence, especially in India and Sri Lanka.

Blackstone Group co-founder Peter Peterson forms the Peterson Center on Healthcare, an offshoot of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation that will promote practices by hospitals, doctors, and others that cut healthcare spending waste. Advisory board members already include Ezekiel Emanuel, former advisor to President Obama; Joseph Antos, health economist at the American Enterprise Institute; Drew Altman, CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation; and Bill Gates.

Government and Politics

ONC schedules its annual meeting for February 2-3, 2015. There doesn’t seem to be a registration fee, which is a good thing given that D.C. has a habit of shutting down during unexpected snowfalls. The teaser email I received notes that the meeting will include an “exciting panel of ONC’s former National Coordinators.” It will be interesting to see if Karen DeSalvo, MD becomes a fully former coordinator over the next two months.

U.S. Public Health Service volunteers working at the first and so far only U.S. government-operated clinic in West Africa mourn the loss of their first Ebola patient, an unnamed Liberian nurse who came to the clinic in the final stages of the disease. “She was one of us,” says Captain and lead physician Russ Bowman, MD. “This is what this unit is for — to provide care to folks … providing care for the people of Liberia. We’re here to back them up. And we weren’t able to save her. And that’s a tragedy.”

CMS schedules a provider call on December 2 to discuss changes to the Medicare physician quality reporting programs in the 2015 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule final rule. The call will cover changes impacting the PQRS, Physician Compare, EHR Incentive Program, Comprehensive Primary Care Initiative, and Medicare Shared Savings Program.

The VA solicits bids for a new medical appointment scheduling system to replace the one that’s been in use since 1985. RFPs are due January 9, though it’s likely that date will get moved back à la DHMSM.

Announcements and Implementations

The Kings County Sheriff’s Office in Hanford, CA implements NaphCare’s TechCare EHR, while the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services implements the company’s medical claims management services.

Healthcare marketing analytics company Crossix Solutions expands its data network to include medical claims and EHR data, which means marketers can now create targeted campaigns based on patient health behavior across prescription, over the counter, consumer, and medical claims data.

Research and Innovation

Johns Hopkins biomedical engineers develop Mutation Position Imaging Toolkit (MuPIT) Ebola Edition, a free online tool that enables researchers to visualize Ebola gene mutations in the context of 3-D protein structures. In layman’s terms, it may give researchers new targets for preventive vaccines and serums to treat those who are already infected. The tool also connects with the new Ebola Genome Browser released  by the University of California, Santa Cruz, which offers detailed genetic information about the virus.

This article highlights 10 apps that are helping to reshape healthcare in Africa. MedAfrica, a remote diagnostic and symptom monitoring tool for those living in rural areas, seems especially ripe for growth given the Ebola epidemic.

Researchers studying development and rollout of the first HIE-sponsored portals find that MU incentives may not be enough to drive adoption; and that functionality, connectivity, and cost will be the deciding factors between a HIE-sponsored portal or one tethered to an EHR already in use at a hospital or practice. The results are to be expected, making me wonder why the study was conducted in the first place. As a patient, the numerous portals I have the option of logging into for various providers is sometimes daunting, which in my mind reaffirms the clamor so many industry groups are making for interoperability in Stage 3 of MU.

People

Dave Morgan (Vista Consulting Group) joins Greenway Health as CFO.

David Toews (Tectrol) joins Nightingale Informatix Corp. as CFO.

Care Innovations forms an Advisory Board led by David Nash (Thomas Jefferson University) to help guide the CI Validation Institute, which aims to improve standards for measuring and promoting the benefits of population health and remote care management solutions and services.

Other

Arizona State University installs an InstyMeds prescription-drug vending machine on its Tempe campus to replace its on-campus pharmacy, which closed in September. Students obtain a personalized prescription security code via an ASU Health Services provider, which they then input into the machine along with their date of birth. The machine, which dispenses the 50 most commonly prescribed medications, scans the medication three times prior to dispensing, and honors the security codes for only 24 hours.

Presbyterian Medical Group (NM) sees a 20-percent increase in its Epic MyChart patient portal use over the last year, and expects utilization to increase from 85,000 to 100,000 patients by the end of 2014. Pediatrician Kevin Maben, MD notes that the portal helps him reduce in-person visits by between 10 percent and 20 percent, adding that, “It’s an integral piece of what I use in the office.”

2014 Health IT Leadership Summit

I had the opportunity to attend the fifth annual Health IT Leadership Summit in Atlanta last week, and as at MGMA, enjoyed connecting with readers and sponsors. Greenway Health used it as a platform to formally announce plans for a new technology development center, which will open in January just a few doors down from where the Summit was held.

Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush offered an entertaining keynote presentation on “Where Does it Hurt in Healthcare?” focusing on the need for innovative companies to avoid becoming mired in the typically inevitable problems associated with bloated growth and lack of strategic direction. His contrast of Microsoft and Apple helped illustrate the concept of “Upper Right Quadrant Syndrome” quite nicely. Extremely tweetable quotes included:

• “$20 million is like valet tips at CMS.”
• “We’re going Flock of Seagulls at DoD.” (in regard to’80s-era healthcare IT already being associated with the DHMSM project)
• “We’re on track to having a hospital ‘Black swan’ event. 1st year that zero acuity beds were added.”
• “Entrepreneurs are doing porn & gaming on the West Coast. We’re over here (in Atlanta) doing the hard stuff.”
• “We’ve made our healthcare system the spoiled, bratty fat kid.”
• “Instead of calling 911 and waiting for the ambulance … send me a paramedic in a Prius (much cheaper).”

Bush’s keynote was enjoyable, but my favorite presentation was from Emory Healthcare CMIO Julie Hollberg MD, who covered the health system’s efforts to effectively screen patients and care for those with Ebola. She emphasized that Emory took many of its cues from the lessons at Texas Health Resources, adding that nurses were the key to successfully implementing Ebola-related clinical decision support tools both in its EDs and ambulatory settings, including urgent care.

Getting those new tools implemented by their EHR vendor was challenging. While Hollberg didn’t name the company outright (I’m pretty sure it’s still Cerner), she did note that it took some convincing to get the company to push out the targeted screening questions Emory wanted. She made a good point in that physicians and vendors are in a tough situation with infectious disease outbreaks. Physicians don’t want to see new forms in their EHR every day as disease data changes, and it’s not very cost-effective for vendors to make them.

I ran into Justin Barnes, who co-sponsored the Summit’s inaugural start-up pavilion. It’s a natural fit given that he is now entrepreneur-in-residence at Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center  mentoring young companies looking to make a difference (and a profit) in the industry. He also keeps himself busy with new radio show This Just In (get it?), which focuses on  the latest trends in healthcare, innovation, policy, and strategy. (Seems like Mr. H and our DoD expert Dim-Sum might make for good interviews, hint, hint.)

Numerous awards were given out. Jim Morrow, MD won the Metro Atlanta Chamber Phoenix Award for community leader of the year, while the Azalea Health team took home the Phoenix Award for emerging company of the year. (You can read my interview with Morrow here, and Azalea Health CEO Baha Zeldin here.) Predictive analytics company Jvion took home the Intel Innovation Award. I haven’t had a chance to interact with Jvion’s technology, though I have seen several company representatives speak on how they’ve helped clients transition to ICD-10. I remember their booths at HIMSS and ANI always being a lot of fun.

The Summit is unique in that it places special emphasis on encouraging students to become interested in healthcare IT through the Student Health IT Innovation Award. This year, high school and middle school teams were tasked with coming up with smoking cessation apps. The Meadowcreek High School team not only impressed me with its Stop It app, but also with their ability to work the crowd for votes. I had no trouble getting the award-winning Pine Grove Middle School team to pose with their certificates.

In the four years I’ve attended, I’ve found the Summit to be a great place for networking, and this year was no different. I had the pleasure of meeting several people, including Nick Peters, MD founder of the new Institute for Digital Health in London. Peters seemed to be in town drumming up awareness of the institute, which aims to be “a collaborative and authoritative body for all stakeholders and international alliances for promoting and sharing technological solutions, best practice and efficient routes to implementation.” It seems like a timely concept given the fact that UK’s Department of Health has issued a broad and bold patient-focused health IT plan covering the next several years.

I ended the day dining with good industry friends at South City Kitchen, commiserating about the state of healthcare over shrimp and grits, and banana pudding. I suppose it’s now time to think about booking my room for HIMSS and what to wear to HIStalkapalooza.

Sponsor Updates

• GE Healthcare will resell Caradigm’s single sign-on and context management solutions to integrate anatomic pathology information systems.
• EClinicalWorks CEO Girish Navani pens an Entrepreneur article titled “The Case for Never Selling Your Company.”
• NextGen Healthcare earns top ranking among healthcare IT vendors providing outsourced billing / RCM.

Contacts

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

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News 11/20/14

Top News

Nashville-based Emdeon announces it will acquire Change Healthcare for $135 million. Founded in 2007, Change, also based in Nashville, offers cost transparency and consumer engagement tools for employers and health plans. The deal is expected to close later this month, after which Change will continue to operate in its same office with its same employees.

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

Watching: Burt’s Buzz, an amusing yet almost sad tale of the completely unique “Burt” behind the Burt’s Bees brand. The movie poster tag line just happens to be my favorite from the documentary: “A good day is when no one shows up … and you don’t have to go anywhere.”

Webinars

Check out the great presentation long-time HIStalk contributors Vince Ciotti and Frank Poggio gave on Tuesday, all in an effort to help prepare end users for the big transition from Siemens to Cerner or some other competing product. Though geared to hospitals, the tips they gave on vendor/product selection and contract negotiations will help just about anyone looking to purchase new IT.

Announcements and Implementations

Providence Anesthesiology Associates (NC) selects TigerText’s secure messaging solution for its 60 anesthesiologists working at 19 locations throughout the state.

CommonWell Health Alliance offers its 14 members the option to enter into nationwide service agreements, moving beyond the borders of its initial agreements in four geographies at 10 provider sites. Athenahealth, Cerner, CPSI, Greenway, and McKesson have already signed agreements with CommonWell to offer their clients these interoperability services across the nation, including Florida, Massachusetts, and Washington. The expansion stems from CommonWell’s recent cementing of its relationship with RelayHealth, which serves as the conduit through which its services are leveraged. I’d be interested in hearing from physicians who are using the CommonWell service via their EHR vendor as to how the technology is improving their information exchange and daily workflows.

On a related note, Aprima Medical Software announces its CommonWell membership. President and CEO Michael Nissenbaum shared this statement with me: “We’re pleased to join CommonWell Health Alliance’s efforts to enable providers to seamlessly and more securely share patient information. Increasingly, physicians want to leverage information technology to more easily and cost-effectively treat their patients and manage their practice. Aprima is dedicated to easing the transition to this environment for healthcare providers.”

FQHC Mile Square Health Center (IL) chooses Forward Health Group’s PopulationManager and The Guideline Advantage.

Rio Grande Valley HIE and University of Texas Health Science Center choose Wellcentive’s population health management solutions to help manage the care of people with diabetes.

Oakland Physician Network Services (MI) and Citrus Valley Health Partners (CA) sign on to Practice Fusion’s EHR. CVHP physicians note they are looking forward to using the new EHR to integrate with the Citrus Health Information Exchange.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Greenway Health will create 150 jobs in Atlanta when it opens a new technology development center early next year. The company plans to add 200 to 300 positions by the end of its current fiscal year next September 30.

In other Georgia news, consulting firm Quirk Healthcare Solutions announces it will relocate its headquarters from Miami to Savannah, adding 150 jobs over the next three years. The company expects to open the flagship office, as well as a second smaller facility, by June 2015.

Value-based care management company Valence Health receives a $15 million growth equity investment led by Heritage Group, with assistance from Foundation Medical Partners, GE Ventures, and North Bridge Growth Equity. The company received it’s last round of funding to the tune of $30 million in 2012.

CVS Health will open a 100-employee technology development center in Boston for “building customer-centric experiences in healthcare” and to connect with health-related startups. The company will also open three drugstores that will be used for live testing of new digital technologies. Its Digital Health group is headquartered in Woonsocket, RI, where it recently opened a Digital Experience Center.

Gallup offers three “prescriptions” for successful healthcare mergers, which nicely complement the many bon mots Vince and Frank shared during the recent Cerner/Siemens HIStalk webinar.

FitBit launches a global media campaign – the first in its seven-year history – in direct response to Apple Watch and the increasingly crowded wearables marketplace. “We’re actually excited they’re entering,” says Tim Rosa, VP of global marketing. “All ships rise in a high tide, and they’re going to bring a lot of education to the category.” The eight-figure media buy will highlight the new FitBit Charge, Charge HR, and Surge.

Research and Innovation

A survey finds that emerging roles in healthcare include telehealth-trained clinicians, care coordinator, navigator, clinical documentation specialist, health coach, medical scribe, and ICD-10 coder. Emerging executive roles include chief population health officer, chief experience officer, chief clinical transformation officer, and chief strategy officer. Survey respondents included over 300 HR and clinical management leaders from hospitals and health systems across the country.

This article highlights the work engineers are doing to develop microscopic robots that may eventually be able to travel through the large arteries and small veins of living bodies to perform a wide range of medical feats that would otherwise require invasive surgery. One researcher envisions “a generation of biological machines that could aid in drug delivery, surgical robotics, ‘smart’ implants, or mobile environmental analyzers, among countless other applications.”

Walgreens will offer inexpensive, minimally painful blood tests from startup Theranos, with the service already launched in the Phoenix area.

Government and Politics

The HHS Idea Lab announces a new cohort for its Entrepreneurs-In-Residence program, which pairs private-sector entrepreneurs with HHS employees to innovate on “high risk high reward projects” crowdsourced from within the agency. The entrepreneurs include Danny Boice (Speek), Paula Braun (Elder Research Inc.), David Portnoy (Symbiosis Health), and Mark Scrimshire (HealthCa.mp).

Ex-CMS COO Michelle Snyder releases an email sent to former US CTO Todd Park that portrays CMS Administrator Marilynn Tavenner as a demanding official who threatened to have Snyder’s job if Healthcare.gov didn’t launch on time. “I appreciate you (sic) belief in the goodness of others,” she writes, “but at this point I am too tired to pretend that there is a decision to be made – it is just how much crap my team will have to take if it isn’t sufficiently successful – you haven’t lived through the temper tantrums and threats of the last 9 months.” Snyder retired last December as fall-out from the botched launch continued to heat up.

The House Science and Technology Committee finally  succeeds in putting Todd Park in the hot seat of its ACA inquisition, but only after issuing him a subpoena. Park was put through the committee’s wringer, which didn’t end up with much to show for their questioning efforts. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), ranking member of the full committee, hit the nail on the head when she told Park, "This hearing is largely an excuse for the majority to again express their dislike for the Affordable Care Act."

The GAO reports that five CMS transparency tools – Physician Compare, Hospital Compare, Home Health Compare, Dialysis Facility Compare, and Nursing Home Compare – “lack relevant information on cost and provide limited information on key differences in quality of care, which hinders [the ability of consumers] to make meaningful distinctions among providers based on their performance.” It also points out  limitations such as “not using clear language and symbols, not summarizing and organizing information to highlight patterns, and not enabling consumers to customize how information is presented.” In what is probably no surprise to anyone, the cost transparency tools seem to be heavily influenced by the concerns of providers rather than consumers.

People

AMC Health hires Bruce Matter (GE Healthcare) as SVP of sales and client development.

Niall Brennan joins CMS as its first chief data officer in the agency’s new Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics.

ONC welcomes Chartése Day (Ketchum) as director of the Office of Public Affairs and Communications (OPAC), and Amanda Woodhead (Emdeon) as the senior stakeholder engagement lead in OPAC.

Other

The Brookings Institution offers a 67-page ACO Physician Toolkit, authored by Aledade CEO Farzad Mostashari, MD Summit Medical Group CMO Robert Brenner, and ONC Entrepreneur in Residence Mark Montarastelli, as well as several Brookings insiders.

Students in Singapore win funding to develop an app that encourages people to stop using their smartphones. The Apple Tree app immobilizes phones when two or more users put their handsets together. If a phone remains untouched, an apple tree begins to grow on the screen, furnishing the user with digital fruit that can be "harvested" and exchanged for rewards. The app will be released for free in March 2015 as part of Singapore’s 50th birthday celebrations.

Contacts

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

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

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