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TECH: Interesting employment agreement

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There’s a certain fast growing practice management company with a very outspoken CEO, who has a very famous last name. I poked fun about their sorority-crowd employees at HIMSS. But I didn’t know the type of scrutiny that they’d have had to come through. Look at this as part of their employment application agreement:

I understand that the Company reserves the right to require me to submit to a drug test at any time and also reserves the right to require me to submit to an alcohol test and/or medical examination to the extent permitted by applicable law. I authorize the Company to investigate my driving record, my criminal record (Federal, state and local, as well as any record of health care fraud and abuse or other offenses retained by the OIG or other regulatory agencies), and my credit history, and I understand that an investigative consumer report may be prepared whereby information is obtained through personal interviews with neighbors, friends, and others with whom I am acquainted. This inquiry would include information as to my character, general reputation, personal characteristics, and mode of living. (THCB emphasis added) I understand I have the right to make written request within a reasonable period of time to receive additional information about the nature and scope of this investigation.

Well they wouldn’t give me a job! Nor basically anyone else in San Francisco. Then it hit me; what a tradition said company is joining. There’s Henry Ford who sent his minions out to investigate his employees behavior, and then more recently someone else equally outspoken and equally paranoid also started a pretty big health care IT firm and put lots of conditions on his employees behavior too. So I suspect this pretty much guarantees AthenaHealth’s success…..

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

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.

Continue reading…

HEALTH PLANS: UnitedHealth keeps gobbling

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United is buying Sierra Health Services, a regional HMO in Nevada for $2.6 billion. Sierra is a more traditional HMO than most of the health plans United’s bought in recent years (Golden Rule et al). The price is a modest 15% increase over Sierra’s current stock price, which last month was hit by the rather interesting news that it was taking a bath on its new Part D plan—mostly because a certain other plan (hint: it’s one of united’s big competitors) was shunting its sick people onto Sierra’s plan.

TECH: Silverlink–Automating Outreach

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I had an interesting chat with Stan Nowak, CEO of Silverlink. Being a mere dumb blogger I’d never actually heard of Silverlink, but they are going great guns. They have 80 people, they’re growing at 80% run rate and they raised $14m in VC about a year ago. Their business is making automated phone calls for health plans and PBMs. And these aren’t your ordinary automated calls. They’re recorded by professional voice types, they have multiple scripts that people can use a “Press 1 to hear again, press 2 to learn more about this disease, 3 to get to a nurse” approach to navigate around, and they can record data back. They’ve started in mostly informational type calls, e.g. PBMs use them to remind people to refill prescriptions. Then they moved on to helping Part D recipients understand their choices. They now do HRAs on the phone, and now they’re putting a package together for full disease management—starting with diabetes—including communicating Healthwise material over the phone.

As you might expect they claim a 5 to 1 cost advantage over having humans make the same calls, and  they believe that they’re not eliminating outbound calling staff, but rather both extending the reach of DM to the at risk population (who the call center nurses don’t have time to call) and minimizing their work. (Stan said that is was surprising how many companies have nurses calling wrong numbers!). They claim really high response rates (up to 80% depending on the type of call).

I’ll have a longer conversation with Stan on THCB soon, but the automated outbound calling play is very interesting—given that lots of people still don’t use the web.

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

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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.

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

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This is the transcript from the podcast with Bob Lorsch at mymedicalrecords.com. You’ll note that at the end Bob offers you a free trial of his system by going to the site, www.MyMedicalRecords.com and sign up for an account, putting in promotion code "TryMMR". You’ll receive a 90 day free account and you can find out for yourself and get your own phone number and your own lifeline. If you want to listen to the audio, that podcast is here. For the words, and a little fesitiness (but not alot) about whether his model and his company has a shot, read on.

Matthew:   Bob Lorsch is the chairman and CEO and founder of MyMedicalRecords.com. We had quite an interesting discussion yesterday. MyMedicalRecords.com is a personal health record company that has what I’ve described as pretty much the standalone model. Any reader of the blog knows that I’ve been pretty negative about the prospects for that kind of thing, and we had a rather interesting discussion. I thought we’d continue online today. So Bob, thanks for chatting with me.

Bob Lorsch:  Hey, it’s my pleasure to be here. I’m looking forward to making you a believer.

Matthew:  Right. So, let me get to the heart of the matter. Correct me if I’m wrong, MyMedicalRecords.com is what I would call primarily a sort of vault system where it’s got a very sophisticated way of allowing people to fax in information and submit information which it then stores in kind of a templated document management fashion. Is that roughly accurate?

Bob:  It’s roughly accurate, yeah. I would describe it more as a fully functional online life storage system. Founded because of the boom in electronic medical records, but it’s really the kind of a product that will store medical records, insurance information, financial information, advanced directives, any document or information that would be necessary to an individual in an emergency from anywhere in the world, seven days a week, 24 hours a day over any Internet‑connected computer. The unique thing about MyMedicalRecords is it works off dumbed‑down existing technologies. For example, it doesn’t require interface with an EMR system. An individual who cares about their health or cares about their medical record storage can have a MyMedicalRecords account and with a fax machine and a plain old ordinary Internet connection, they can have a complete document management network of patient charts, X‑rays, film, important documents, advanced directives, wills, policies, whatever information they want to have online.

Matthew:  Now that’s really the crux of the matter here. I’ve always argued that in the personal heath records space—and we’re obviously talking about a business which has yet to take off—In the personal health records space it’s going to become more like online banking. People are going to essentially get information that’s already in the system and just use their personal health records as a vehicle with which to view it. If people could watch, say, what WebMD is doing, or where Intuit is going, all they’re discussing is basically a product that’s attached to a large health plan or provider system, which is also what the companies are using Epic are doing. You know, it’s a view into other data.So you’re taking a very different approach and obviously  it has yet to be resolved as to which one works.

Why do you think people would actually go the trouble of doing all that when they could get to their health plan or go to their provider at some point? Most of them are going to be offering a personal health record where they can view most of their information there, rather than why would they go to a standalone entity which they’re going to have to go to the trouble of inputting their own data and collecting information and then sending it in?

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JOB POST: Ultimate Super Hero of UI Designers

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Sermo.com  CNN called Sermo ‘A MySpace for Physicians’. The Motley Fool said ‘Add Sermo to the IPO watch list.’ We’ve built the largest on-line community for physicians, by physicians. Take charge of UI & visual design for Sermo’s on-line physician community, the client product lines (e.g. financial services), create visual mockups & design guidelines, produce graphic elements & specs of design elements. Define use cases, design & specs of workflows. Create story boards, & UI specs. Assist in UI implementation using HTML, CSS & JavaScript in a JSP environment. Drive UI process improvements in Sermo’s Agile development environment. Conduct & respond to usability tests. 6+ years of UI Design, w/ 3+ years of UI Design for the Web. B.A./B.Sc./equivalent. Please submit portfolio. Competitive salaries-full benefits-401(k)-stock options-FREE lunch-Bring your dog-Xbox & Wii-Gym in building!Reimbursed for haircuts,education,Internet,mobile,Dry cleaning,car detailing,yoga,PARKING,many more! Must LOVE dogs ….

To apply: jo**@***mo.com

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