With the Department of Justice announcement of the $155 million dollar eClinicalWorks settlement (including personal liability for the CEO, CMO and COO), many stakeholders are wondering what’s next for EHRs. Clearly the industry is in a state of transition. eCW will be distracted by its 5 year corporate integrity agreement. AthenaHealth will have to focus on the activist investors at Elliott Management who now own 10% of the company and have a track record of changing management/preparing companies for sale. As mergers and acquisitions result in more enterprise solutions, Epic (and to some extent Cerner) will displace other vendors in large healthcare systems. However, the ongoing operational cost of these enterprise solutions will cause many to re-examine alternatives such as Meditech...
Epic
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EPIC Systems Bullying
I got word through my medical director at work today that the hospital administrators had been contacted by the EPIC electronic health record software company about this post, and demanded that the screenshots of the EPIC user interface be taken down. Offsetting my pride that someone had actually noticed and read my blog was the sudden fear of facing down a multi-billion dollar company armed to the teeth with expensive lawyers...
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Epic's EHR system to run on Linux
Epic Systems Corp., one of several dominant EHR vendors for large hospitals, recently authorized implementations of its EHR system on Intel x86 servers running open-source Linux, virtualized to VMware. Prior to that, Epic ran exclusively on AIX and UNIX servers.
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Financial Woes At Maine Medical Center
In a memo to its employees last week, one of Maine’s largest health systems said it has suffered an operating loss of $13.4 million in the first half of its fiscal year. Read More »
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Financial Woes At Maine Medical Center: Reading This Blog Might Have Saved Them Millions Of Dollars, And Prevented Massive "Cost Saving Initiatives"
In a memo to its employees last week, one of Maine’s largest health systems said it has suffered an operating loss of $13.4 million in the first half of its fiscal year. Read More »
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For 10th Consecutive Year, HFHS Reports Financial Growth
For the 10th consecutive year, Henry Ford Health System experienced positive revenue growth and net income in 2012. Read More »
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For Hospitals on the Edge, Health IT is the Tipping Point
Without question, massive health IT expense and the predominant proprietary IT model are threats to a hospital or health system’s financial viability, to its solvency. We’re seeing some examples even now. Michigan’s Henry Ford Health System recently reported a 15 percent decrease in net income as a result of uncompensated care and $36 million spent on a proprietary EHR system. According to health system CEO Nancy Schlichting, “We knew that 2012 and 2013 would not be easy years for the system because of the Epic costs.” Read More »
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Game Review: EPIC Systems EHR
EPIC has banned my use of the screenshots. The original post follows, considerably damaged by the lack of screenshots. Thanks a lot, EPIC!...
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GAO Makes Appointments to Health Information Technology Advisory Committee
Gene L. Dodaro, Comptroller General of the United States and head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), today announced 15 appointments to the new Health Information Technology (HIT) Advisory Committee. It is extremely valuable to have a range of perspectives and expertise in helping the government address challenges related to health information technology, “It is extremely valuable to have a range of perspectives and expertise in helping the government address challenges related to health information technology,” Dodaro said...
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Google Joins VistA Team Proposing Open Source EHR for the Department of Defense
Google has thrown its hat into the EHR ring by joining the team led by PwC which is proposing that the Department of Defense (DoD) upgrade their current EHR to Defense Operational Readiness Health System (DORHS), a customized application built for the DoD and based on VistA, the open source EHR developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)...Google’s participation has enormous implications for both the DoD’s EHR and to the healthcare industry as a whole. By choosing the open source EHR team, Google...has sent a clear message to the world that VistA is the best option for the DoD.
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Halamka Discusses Three Disruptive Care Coordination Innovations In Use at Beth Israel
Would you buy an iPhone if the only apps that ran on it were written by Apple? Maybe, but the functionality would not be very diverse. The same can be said of EHRs. Athena, Cerner, Epic, Meditech, and self developed EHRs such as BIDMC’s webOMR are purpose-built transaction engines for capturing data. However, it is impossible for any single vendor to provide all the innovation required by the marketplace to support new models of care I’m a strong believer in the concept of third party modules that layer on top of traditional EHRs in the same way that apps run in the iPhone ecosystem...
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Halamka on What's Next for Electronic Health Records
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Halamka's Reflections on US Health IT Policy Trajectory
I’m in China this week, meeting with government, academia, and industry leaders in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, and Suzhou. The twelve hour time difference means that I can work a day in China, followed by a day in Boston. For the next 7 days, I’ll truly be living on both sides of the planet. I recently delivered this policy update about the key developments in healthcare IT policy and sentiment over the past 90 days. I’ve not written a specific summary of the recently released Quality Patient Program proposed rule which provides the detailed regulatory guidance for implementation of MACRA/MIPS, but here’s the excellent 26 page synopsis created by CMS which provides an overview of the 1058 page rule...
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HIMSS13: A Fork in the Road - How Patients & Payment Are Forcing 'Open' Health IT
This year feels like a fork in the road at HIMSS13, with disruptive forces of patients, digital health, mobility and open standards driving innovation and renewed energy at the annual conference...Without transparency (in health IT and health finance) and data liquidity, bending the cost curve will continue to elude the U.S. health system. At the recently concluded annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference in New Orleans, 34,696 got to experience a yin and yang vibe that embodies the disruption that the health care IT industry is undergoing. That is, the full-on face-off between developers of health IT that have been long-closed to data liquidity and those vendors innovating on open standards and cloud-based platforms. Read More »
How Analytics Are Changing Health Care
There is more to federal health IT than HealthCare.gov. And as agencies grapple with public health research and the care of their patient populations, innovators outside government are showing what's possible with improved electronic health records (EHRs) and predictive analytics.
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How Industry Collaboration Shaped the Carequality Interoperability Framework
Key to the success of the Carequality Interoperability Framework was the enthusiastic participation of healthcare IT industry leaders and organizations and their collaboration with Carequality. This work was carried out under the guidance and direction of the Sequoia Project staff, with input from the Carequality Query Work Group. Carequality, a public-private collaborative initiative of The Sequoia Project, creates a standardized, national-level interoperability framework to link all data sharing networks. The Carequality Interoperability Framework is a collection of documents that are used to operationalize data sharing that include...
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