Tag: Podcasts

PODCAST/TECH: Bryan Dieter , CEO of Purkinjie–EMR for the masses?

Mar 13, 2007

Here’s the transcript of my interview with Bryan Dieter from Purkinjie, who have a new EMR/practice management product for the smaller physician market. The only thing that I didn’t notice but did get picked up by one of my savvy commenters when the audio podcast was put up, was that Purkinjie’s Chairman is John Doerr’s brother! That’ll be relevant as you read on.

Matthew Holt: OK, the podcasts are coming thick and fast now. Matthew Holt again from The Health Care Blog" and one of my last podcasts from the HIMSS floor is with Bryan Dieter who is the CEO of Purkinje. Bryan, good morning.

Bryan Dieter: Good morning.

Matthew: Don’t be too fussy about the mike, I’ll just wave it around and put it in your face and you’ll talk and it works fine. So Purkinje is the result of a merger that happened a couple years back. Can you talk a bit about what you do and what the components were of that merger and what parts of the IT space you play in?

Bryan: Sure. The merger took place in February of 2004. A company that was founded in St. Louis called Wellinx acquired Purkinje in Canada and we adopted their name as a result of that acquisition. The products that Wellinx offered was primarily an e‑prescribe application, diagnosis driven, into which we incorporated evidence based information for helping the physicians with prescribing decisions. Purkinje, in Canada, as you may be aware, has a pretty large footprint across the country. Some of the customers there include the Canadian Department of Defense. There are a couple of province wide initiatives and community health centers rolling out their EMR product, their e‑prescribing application is being deployed across Quebec and we have a pretty large presence in Ontario as well. The application there is primarily an EMR; it was one of the first to market in the early 90s. They’ve had tens of millions of dollars invested in their clinical knowledge base and we were interested in the product for that reason. What we are in the process of doing now is melding the capabilities of the application from Canada with the United States along with a native browser‑based application that we’ve recently completed the development and just made the announcement of it being in general availability here in the states.

PODCAST/TECH: John Capobianco, President of Medecision “making the unknown known”

Mar 12, 2007• 1

Here’s the transcript from interview with John Capobianco from Medecision talking mostly about the “payer-based health records” they’re developing with several big health plan customers, and distributing to providers. The audio podcast is here.

Matthew Holt: Matthew Holt with The Health Care Blog, still at HIMSS. Now I’m meeting with John Capobianco, who is the President of MEDecision, and also with Tracey Costello, who is the VP of marketing. So welcome to you both, hi John.

John Capobianco: Hi.

Matthew: Hi, Tracey.

Tracey Costello: Hello.

Matthew: John, tell us a bit about MEDecision. As some of the readers of the blog know, I’ve had folks from ActiveHealth Management and Click4Care do podcasts. I was thinking about the whole space around payers and data, and analyzing what’s going on in that world is something that probably most of our readers don’t know that much about. So give me a brief overview of what you guys do, where you fit in the space generally, and how you compare yourself to those guys, or other competitors.

John: Hi, Matt. I’d be happy to do that, Matt. MEDecision started about 18 years ago creating a solution to a mission statement that was put forth. That was: how to improve the relationship amongst payers, patients, and providers. We started out going after the payer community because it was not only where the money is, but where the data is, to create clinical records for patients. If you want to improve the outcome, you want to improve the health of patients, what you have to do is to get health information exchange to actually work.By spending the first 18 years going after providing the right information for care managers, for utilization in case and disease management, we figured out how to analyze and gather the data together that was inherent within the only currently available digital systems in the industry that have a lot of data. That’s from the payer’s claims data. We also then created the workflow applications for the case disease utilization mangers. We’ve now recently added the clinical overlays for both utilization as well as case and disease conditions, and what the best practices and processes are around that. Then just a few years ago we started to create the communication vehicles from those inside the walls of the payer to the outside, to the provider communities.About a year ago now, we entered into what we think is probably the most important phase of that. That is, above and beyond the great work we’ve now been able to do with authorizations and referrals and extensions as communication vehicles, we’re actually now starting to take what we call the patient clinical summary. That summarized view of this patient and all their conditions and move it out to the point of care.With several of our clients now, we are not only populating the personal health records, or personal health management systems that they choose, but we’re also providing that data out to either their provider portals or through the standard vehicles we put in place to do authorizations and referrals. Delivering that patient clinical summary right to the provider at the point of care.

PODCAST/TECH: Interview with the Cisco health care brain trust–Transcript

Mar 9, 2007• 1

This is the transcript of my interview at HIMSS with Cisco’s health care team leaders Jeff Rideout & Frank Grant. The audio podcast is available here.

Matthew Holt: This is Matthew Holt with The Health Care Blog. It’s another podcast from the HIMSS floor and today I have got the brains trust from Cisco’s Health Care Group, Jeff Rideout, who is the vice‑president and the medical director. He was formerly in the health plan world, and he’s been at Cisco, what, three years now?

Jeff Rideout: Yes.

Matthew: Ah, good guess. Jeff Rideout and Frank Grant who is the director of Healthcare Sales, who was roped into this at the last minute and didn’t know he was going to be involved, but anyway! So, we’ll pass the mike between us.For disclosure, as you guys know, I do a little bit of work for Cisco now and again. So it’s a company I like and I’m unlikely to say rude things about them. But the good news is that I don’t think there’s going to be anything rude to say about them, unlike some of the other people that I talk about on The Health Care Blog.So let’s start at the beginning. This is a question for you, Jeff. Why did Cisco decide that it wanted to get into health care, and why did they want to hire you in the first place?

Jeff: Well, Cisco has been working with health care customers for 20 plus years. About three years ago, we were invited to join a White House council and give our thoughts on productivity and how technology could help, specifically in health care. I think that got the bug in the company. John Chambers (Cisco’s CEO) comes from a health care family. Both of his parents are physicians.So, from that point it was really, how do we make more of an impact like we have in other industries? That started the process, which eventually led to what we call a "health care vertical" that Frank and I lead. It is really a coordinated go‑to‑market effort for health care customers.

PODCAST/CONSUMERS/TECH: HealthFacts

Mar 6, 2007• 1

BCBS of Minnesota has set up an interesting approach to transparency and measuring provider performance. They’ve created a site called HealthCareFacts.org for consumers to look at and compare provider details, set up a subsidiary called Consumer Aware to run it, and are now marketing it to the world. The model is nutritional labeling. I met Amelia Schultz (the VP of Sales at Consumer Aware) and she set up this interview with founder and CEO MaryAnn Stump. (The interview was recorded on Feb 14, but posting was delayed because I had to fix some technical problems with it. All better now, I hope!)

PODCAST/TECH: Medecision interview, “making the unknown known”

Feb 28, 2007

Next I talked with John Copabianco, President of Medecision. They’ve been helping some big payers roll out payer-based health records, building on their core utilization and care management business. Here’s his take.

I’ll be doing a little more later today and tomorrow and may have time to jot some other impressions of interesting things and people I saw…or the French Quarter may distract me. We’ll just have to see!

PODCAST/TECH: Interview with the Cisco health care brains trust

Feb 28, 2007

Then I got the Cisco health care brain trust together (Jeff Rideout and Frank Grant) who told me why Cisco really cares about health care. I wasn’t too contentious with them, but then again they are an occasional client–and anyway they’re doing interesting stuff! Here’s the interview with the two of them.

Here’s the Cisco team photo (Jeff and Frank are not the two good looking ones at either end!)

PODCAST/TECH/CONSUMERS: Bob Lorsch from My MedicalRecords.com

Feb 28, 2007• 1

Next I had a good combative chat with Bob Lorsch who’s sunk a lot of money into MyMedicalRecords.com and believes that a standalone personal medical record company can survive and prosper. I’m somewhat skeptical, so it was fun to get into a little bit of contention. Here’s the interview.

PODCAST/TECH: Purkinjie–EMR for the masses?

Feb 28, 2007

My next interview is with Bryan Dieter, CEO of Purkinjie. Not as well known as Allscripts but
with a new product to market aimed at the problem area of the small
physician practice, and a new round of $10m in financing, most of which
John Doerr (of Kleiner Perkins) probably found under his couch
cushions. Here’s Bryan

UPDATE: Bryan didn’t mention this snippet, and I didn’t notice, but Tom Leith in the comments did! He’s still a fan, though

> new round of $10m in financing, most of which John
> Doerr (of Kleiner Perkins) probably found under his
> couch cushions.

I guess it helps to have a rich brother(?) (Matthews’ note: The bro in question is Tom Doerr MD, the Chairman of Purkinjie)

Anyway, FWIW I have helped to implement the Purkinje CareSeries EMR
and PM system with a solo doc here in St. Louis. Too early yet to give
a good report on effectiveness, but I think the prognosis is good. I
think their model and price point will be disruptive in the market.

PODCAST/TECH: Allscripts CEO Interview–What’s the future for eRx and EHR?

Feb 28, 2007• 4

Two really interesting conversations today. First a chat with Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman. Find out what he thinks about Barack Obama, the dot-com boom and the bust, and ePrescribing. Not necessarily in that order. He also brought HIMSS doc of the year Jim Morrow with him–a passionate and very interesting EMR user. Here’s the interview.

PODCAST/TECH: Understanding RFID tracking

Feb 28, 2007• 1

I’ve been saying for a year or two that location tracking for assets and people is the next big thing in hospitals. But do you understand the complexity behind location tracking technologies? Me neither, but product marketing director Ken Lynch from RFID tracking company PanGo did his very best to explain it to me! Here’s the interview.