Tag: HIT

CareCloud CEO Albert Santalo Talks IPO and the EHR Market

Mar 10, 2014• 13

By Kim Krueger

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XThHGrQyo1Y[/youtube]

Matthew Holt sat down with CareCloud President and CEO Albert Santalo to discuss the latest news from the Miami-based cloud practice management and EHR services provider. CareCloud got started in 2009 and since then has raised $55 million in angel and private venture funding and grown to 270 employees.

Currently, about 5,000 doctors use CareCloud for their practice management services with about a quarter of those doctors also using the CareCloud EHR. Santalo expects that number to grow to about 12,000 by the end of the year, explaining in three points why he thinks the market is primed for CareCloud’s cloud-based, integrated practice management and EHR system.

While Santalo’s grin says more than his answer when asked about a potential IPO, he shares some interesting thoughts on practice consolidation, meaningful use requirements, and the cloud in in-patient settings in this interview recorded at HIMSS last month.

What A Green Three Ring Binder Says About the State of Meaningful Use and Health Information Exchange

Feb 24, 2014• 5

By Rob Cronin

The photo says it all.

The green notebook and pen represent the latest and greatest health IT innovations used by the hospital nurse to record my wife’s health information in the hours before her surgery to re-attach a fully torn Achilles tendon.

(Apologies for the cheeky intro and to my wife and anyone else for any HIPAA violations I may have committed in the capturing of this image).

It’s not that the hospital does not have an electronic health record.

They do – from a vendor widely considered a leader in the industry: Meditech. Same goes with the physician practice where she receives all her care and where her surgeon and primary care doctor are based.

They too have an EHR from another leading vendor: NextGen.

The problem? These systems are not connected. Thus, confirming the not so surprising news that health data interoperability has yet to make its debut in our corner of the NYC burbs.

Fortunately for my wife, she is well on her way to recovery (a bit more reluctant to juggle a soccer ball with her son in airport passenger lounges, but nevertheless feeling much better…and mobile). By everyone’s estimation – hers, mine, friends who suffered the same injury and friends who happen to be doctors – she received high quality care.

What’s more, we feel the overall patient experience at our physician practice and the hospital was quite good. That said, I cannot help but ask myself a series of ‘what ifs?’

What if…we forgot to mention a medication she was taking and there was a bad reaction with medication they administered as part of the surgery or afterwards?

What if… the anesthesiologist or surgeon couldn’t read the nurse’s handwriting?

What if the next time we go to the hospital, it is a visit to the emergency room and the attending clinicians have no ability to pull any of my family’s health records and we are not exactly thinking clearly enough to recall details related to medical history?

CVS Caremark Enters CommonWell

Feb 24, 2014• 4

By John H. Hammergren

One of the most critical issues facing our healthcare system is the fact that the IT systems we’ve put in place have not yet led to a more connected, intelligent approach to patient care.

While we have made notable headway toward interoperability through health information exchange solutions, we must dramatically accelerate our progress to support the transition to value-based care and realize our full potential as an industry.

With this vision in mind, McKesson, Cerner and other leading healthcare IT companies announced the CommonWell Health Alliance last year at HIMSS13. Members of the Alliance are united by a shared commitment to develop a core set of interoperability services and standards that will enable patient data to be shared securely across care settings and electronic health record (EHR) platforms.

In the twelve months since, tremendous progress has been made in making this aspiration a reality. CommonWell is running robust initial projects and collaborating with a myriad of practices. We’re also continuing to expand with new members who share our ideal of the trusted exchange of patient data, regardless of vendor, system, or setting.

Now, the Alliance is welcoming its first pharmacy member in CVS Caremark. This is a watershed event for several reasons.

CVS Caremark is one of the nation’s largest retail pharmacy chains and pharmacy benefit management companies. Few organizations in any segment of healthcare have more access to patient data and more trusted influence.

But CVS Caremark’s role in driving innovation in our healthcare system, and its importance to the goal of interoperability, is vital for other reasons.

What You Need to Know About Patient Matching and Your Privacy and What You Can Do About It

Feb 21, 2014• 4

By Adrian Gropper, MD

Today, ONC released a report on patient matching practices and to the casual reader it will look like a byzantine subject. It’s not.

You should care about patient matching, and you will.

It impacts your ability to coordinate care, purchase life and disability insurance, and maybe even your job. Through ID theft, it also impacts your safety and security. Patient matching’s most significant impact, however, could be to your pocketbook as it’s being used to fix prices and reduce competition in a high deductible insurance system that makes families subject up to $12,700 of out-of-pocket expenses every year.

Patient matching is the healthcare cousin of NSA surveillance.

Health IT’s watershed is when people finally realize that hospital privacy and security practices are unfair and we begin to demand consent, data minimization and transparency for our most intimate information. The practices suggested by Patient Privacy Rights are relatively simple and obvious and will be discussed toward the end of this article.

Health IT tries to be different from other IT sectors. There are many reasons for this, few of them are good reasons. Health IT practices are dictated by HIPAA, where the rest of IT is either FTC or the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Healthcare is mostly paid by third-party insurance and so the risks of fraud are different than in traditional markets.

Healthcare is delivered by strictly licensed professionals regulated differently than the institutions that purchase the Health IT. These are the major reasons for healthcare IT exceptionalism but they are not a good excuse for bad privacy and security practices, so this is about to change.

Health IT privacy and security are in tatters, and nowhere is it more evident than the “patient matching” discussion. Although HIPAA has some significant security features, it also eliminated a patient’s right to consent and Fair Information Practice.

Why Healthcare Should Be Worried About the Target Cyber Attacks

Feb 11, 2014• 38

By Joe Flower

If you are a CEO or COO of a health care organization, and your IT people have been trying to get your attention, it’s time to have a serious sit-down with them.

If they haven’t been trying to get your attention, it’s time to have an more serious sit-down with them, complete with charts and graphs and arrows on fip charts.

Here’s why: Remember in November it was revealed that the Target retail chain’s computer systems were compromised? Some 70 million names, home addresses and phone numbers were stolen (pretty good raw material for identity theft) and 40 million credit card numbers.

It has turned out since then that some two dozen other companies, including Neiman-Marcus, the Michael’s arts-and-crafts chain and the White Lodging Services hotel management firm, have been hacked in similar ways, with the attackers software sitting in the companies’ servers, credit card machines and cash registers often for months before they were detected, sucking down every transaction, every bit of data moved about.

Hey wait, you say, I have every confidence in our computer security. Why we passed a security audit just recently.

Heh. So did Target — just before they discovered the break-in. They got a clean bill of health, and the auditors failed to find the malware installed on every server, every credit card terminal, every cash register.

Why? Because the attackers have gotten way more sophisticated, and they used new techniques and methods of entry. You can now buy ready-made hacking software designed to do this on the Internet for less than $1000.

Here’s the kicker: Target has security guards at the doors, it has those beeper tags on small high-value items so you can’t sneak them out without paying for them, it has burglar alarms — but the perps in the biggest heist in the company’s history entered through the thermostat.

Got that? The thermostat.

Improving Clinical Document Exchange

Feb 11, 2014• 3

By David Kreda & Joshua Mandel, MD

2014 will see wide-scale production and exchange of Consolidated CDA documents among healthcare providers. Indeed, live production of C-CDAs is already underway for anyone using a Meaningful Use 2014 certified EHR.

C-CDA documents fuel several aspects of meaningful use, including transitions of care and patient-facing download and transmission.

This impending deluge of documents represents a huge potential for interoperability, but it also presents substantial technical challenges.

We forecast these challenges with unusual confidence because of what we learned during the SMART C-CDA Collaborative, an eight-month project conducted with 22 EHR and HIT vendors.

Our effort included analyzing vendor C-CDA documents, scoring them with a C-CDA scorecard tool we developed, and reviewing our results through customized one-on-one sessions with 11 of the vendors.

The problems we uncovered arose for a number of reasons, including:

material ambiguities in the C-CDA specification
accidental misinterpretations of the C-CDA specification
lack of authoritative “best practice” examples for C-CDA generation

The Pharmacies and Retailers Say They’re In. Is the Blue Button Initiative About to Change Everything?

Feb 11, 2014• 11

By Alex Howard

The Obama administration announced significant adoption for the Blue Button in the private sector on Friday.

In a post at the White House Office of Science and Technology blog, Nick Sinai, U.S. deputy chief technology officer and Adam Dole, a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, listed major pharmacies and retailers joining the Blue Button initiative, which enables people to download a personal health record in an open, machine-readable electronic format:

“These commitments from some of the Nation’s largest retail pharmacy chains and associations promise to provide a growing number of patients with easy and secure access to their own personal pharmacy prescription history and allow them to check their medication history for accuracy, access prescription lists from multiple doctors, and securely share this information with their healthcare providers,” they wrote.

“As companies move towards standard formats and the ability to securely transmit this information electronically, Americans will be able to use their pharmacy records with new innovative software applications and services that can improve medication adherence, reduce dosing errors, prevent adverse drug interactions, and save lives.”

While I referred to the Blue Button obliquely at ReadWrite almost two years ago and in many other stories, I can’t help but wish that I’d finished my feature for Radar a year ago and written up a full analytical report.

Extending access to a downloadable personal health record to millions of Americans has been an important, steady shift that has largely gone unappreciated, despite reporting like Ina Fried’s regarding veterans getting downloadable health information.

According to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, “more than 5.4 million veterans have now downloaded their Blue Button data and more than 500 companies and organizations in the private-sector have pledged to support it.”

Could Digital Rights Management Solve Healthcare’s Data Crisis?

Jan 27, 2014• 11

By Newman, Herrera, Frost & Parente

Today, academic medicine and health policy research resemble the automobile industry of the early 20th century — a large number of small shops developing unique products at high cost with no one achieving significant economies of scale or scope.

Academics, medical centers, and innovators often work independently or in small groups, with unconnected health datasets that provide incomplete pictures of the health statuses and health care practices of Americans.

Health care data needs a “Henry Ford” moment to move from a realm of unconnected and unwieldy data to a world of connected and matched data with a common support for licensing, legal, and computing infrastructure. Physicians, researchers, and policymakers should be able to access linked databases of medical records, claims, vital statistics, surveys, and other demographic data.

To do this, the health care community must bring disparate health data together, maintaining the highest standards of security to protect confidential and sensitive data, and deal with the myriad legal issues associated with data acquisition, licensing, record matching, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).

Just as the Model-T revolutionized car production and, by extension, transit, the creation of smart health data enclaves will revolutionize care delivery, health policy, and health care research. We propose to facilitate these enclaves through a governance structure know as a digital rights manager (DRM).

The concept of a DRM is common in the entertainment (The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers or ASCAP would be an example) and legal industries. If successful, DRMs would be a vital component of a data-enhanced health care industry.

Giving birth to change. The data enhanced health care industry is coming, but it needs a midwife.There has been explosive growth in the use of electronic medical records, electronic prescribing, and digital imaging by health care providers. Outside the physician’s office, disease registries, medical associations, insurers, government agencies, and laboratories have also been gathering digital pieces of information on the health status, care regimes, and health care costs of Americans.

However, little to none of these data have been integrated, and most remain siloed within provider groups, health plans, or government offices.

A Little Advice for Karen DeSalvo

Jan 22, 2014• 13

By John Halamka, MD

Karen DeSalvo started as the new National Coordinator for Healthcare Information Technology on January 13, 2014. After my brief discussion with her last week, I can already tell she’s a good listener, aware of the issues, and is passionate about using healthcare IT as a tool to improve population health.

She is a cheerleader for IT, not an informatics expert. She’ll rely on others to help with the IT details, and that’s appropriate.

What advice would I give her, given the current state of healthcare IT stakeholders?

1. Rethink the Certification Program – With a new National Coordinator, we have an opportunity to redesign certification. As I’ve written about previously some of the 2014 Certification test procedures have negatively impacted the healthcare IT industry by being overly prescriptive and by requiring functionality/workflows that are unlikely to be used in the real world.

One of the most negative aspects of 2014 certification is the concept of “certification only”. No actual clinical use or attestation is required but software must be engineered to incorporate standards/processes which are not yet mature. An example is the “transmit” portion of the view/download/transmit patient/family engagement requirements.

There is not yet an ecosystem for patients to ‘transmit’ using CCDA and Direct, yet vendors are required to implement complex functionality that few will use. Another example is the use of QRDA I and QRDA III for quality reporting.

CMS cannot yet receive such files but EHRs must send them in order to be certified. The result of this certification burden is a delay in 2014 certified product availability.

Survey Says: EHR Incentive Program Is on Track

Jan 17, 2014• 98

By Karen DeSalvo, MD

We continue to see progress in improving the nation’s health care system, and a key tool to helping achieve that goal is the increased use of electronic health records by the nation’s doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers. These electronic tools serve as the infrastructure to implementing reforms that improve care – many of which are part of the Affordable Care Act.

Doctors and hospitals are using these tools to reduce mistakes and hospital readmissions, provide patients with more information that enable them to stay healthy, and allow for rewarding health care providers for delivering quality, not quantity, of care.

The adoption of those tools is reflected today in a release from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics which provides a view of the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Program and indicates the program is healthy and growing steadily.

The 2013 data from the annual National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey are encouraging:

Nearly 80% of office-based physicians used some type of electronic health record system, an increase of 60 percentage points since 2001 and nearly double the percent in 2008 (42%), the year before the Health Information Technology and Economic and Clinical Health Act passed as part of the Recovery Act in 2009.
About half of office-based physicians surveyed said they use a system that qualifies as a “basic system,” up from just 11% in 2006.
Almost 70% of office-based physicians noted their intent to participate in the EHR incentive program.

Figure 1. Percentage of office-based physicians with EHR systems: United States, 2001-2013

The report also noted that 13% of physicians who responded said they both intended to participate in the incentive program and had a system that could support 14 of the Meaningful Use Stage 2 “core set of objectives,” ahead of target dates. This survey was performed in early 2013 – before 2014 certified products were even available.