From HIMSS 02/25/07

I flew into New Orleans Friday night. The airport was a ghost town at 9:00 and so was all of the city I saw from the hotel shuttle, including the French Quarter. Everything looked normal, but like a Hollywood set of New Orleans - the same restaurants in old buildings, gaslamp-lit streets, and the narrow French Quarter alleys - all pretty much empty except for a few unsavory-looking characters. Maybe they were movie extras.

Billboards warned about unethical contractors. The weather forecast called for strong storms and suggested that those in FEMA trailers seek safer shelter. A convention center guy told me that local government is bragging that 10% of homes have been rebuilt, but he thinks it's less than 5%. Cab and shuttle drivers warn you to stay away from much of the city and to be very careful walking about. You can take a Gray Line Katrina tour to gawk at the damage, which the convention center guy actually recommended to remind everyone how bad it still is here for the locals.

The convention center is back to normal, despite having had all kinds of misery and suffering and death take place there just a year and a half ago. Hard to believe people may have spent their last moments on earth near HIMSS Central or the restaurant information kiosk. Are the locals glad to see HIMSS and 25,000 free-spending conventioneers coming to town? You bet. The hotels are OK, the facilities are OK, the weather is great so far (mid-70s, but humid), the restaurants and jazz clubs are going strong (those that can find enough employees to run them, anyway) and the raffishness and seediness are just like old times, other than some of the employees that businesses have to hire don't seem to be A-listers. For HIMSS attendees, nothing seems much different than the last time we were here. I ate a po-boy and watched LSU beat Florida in basketball.

I'm sitting here with an atrocious wireless Internet connection that I'm paying a larcenous daily rate to use. It's like dial-up except far less reliable - about half the time, the connection fades and I get a "page not found" error.

From Yancy Derringer: "Re: QuadraMed stock. Up 8% in one week and on volume 10 times normal." Could be something's going on there. We may hear this week if so.

From New to HIT: "Re: Meditech. I posted a question about Meditech GUI a few weeks back and I just wanted to say thanks a lot to all the readers who took the trouble to answer."

From HISJonnyDamon: "Re: You're Suspect in this town, KLAS. Vendors take their time to train their end users to properly respond to surveys, especially KLAS, in order to reach optimum scoring, and then KLAS is funded by the vendors. As others have mentioned, the whole process seems suspect. P.S. John Glaser's guest article was excellent." The KLAS comments drew a lot of interest. A reader suggested offering Adam Gale a chance to be interviewed here to respond to the questions and he has agreed, once we get this HIMSS stuff out of the way. Send over any questions you want me to ask. I'd be curious to hear from vendor executives, too - do you participate in KLAS because it's worth it to run your business or because you feel pressured in some way?

From Sam: "Re: Epic and KLAS. As a former Epic employee who was fairly high up in administration within the last year, I can tell you that the company did not then perceive a favorable KLAS 'bias'. I departed abruptly and I no longer work in the industry -- did not before, either, and perhaps it's because I never could surrender my outsider's point of view that I was so unhappy. Anyway, I have some rather pointed and negative opinions about all of healthcare informatics, and especially about some at Epic. Still, despite what you hear here, so far as an alleged KLAS bias towards Epic, we felt it was quite the contrary. We all really wanted KLAS to better understand our then-current and planned work. If anything, we felt that KLAS was starting to become enchanted by novelties, merely for the sake of reporting something new. This is a common fault of reviewers in any field. We sincerely appreciated past KLAS recognition, but felt more and more that our new work was being overlooked in what was becoming a beauty contest. Just my two cents."

From Anonymous: "Re: Medcin. A couple of years ago you wrote about Medcin. I just saw a demo of MedcinWeb.com and they said they have a booth at HIMSS. I know Allscripts and DOD use their stuff but don't know much about it. Maybe one of Mr. HIStalk's many assistants can find out more.....?" I mostly hear about the company in the DOD context. Report, anyone?

From Anonymous: "Re: Mike Lawrie's comments about Misys. He did use that specific sentence '...defocus on hospital systems.' and said they were trying to determine the value of the CPR and lab businesses. He'll meet with analysts on the March 8th date mentioned, but did not say there would be a major announcement then. Richard Atkin, hospital systems president, said in an all-employee call afterward that the March 8 meeting would be generalities and a mention of the physician focus." Well, they have to dump those businesses now, right? Why else announce to the world (and your existing lab and CPR customers) that those product lines are also-rans? Must be great to be a Misys sales guy trying to beat the odds and move some of those systems, only to have the boss tell your prospects that they really aren't important.

From Soul Survivor: "Re: Misys. Do people know Vern was turned down for a lower level position in the past by the talent scouts and people developers of Misys? Vern, do us all a favor and get rid of the seven dwarfs known as HR VPs and bring in a new crew of brown nosers."

From TweedleDee: "Re: Lawrie's comments. He really said that and more. Watch for a blue-light special in the near future. Also seems Atkins is out of the loop per his comments on a subsequent call. He didn't like that Lawrie honestly answered the questions asked - something foreign to Misys management under Atkins."

From exitinterview: "Re: HISsies. HIStalk is like Vegas, you never know what you might see, but you're never surprised, either. Great work on the HISsies!! One comment - I'd like to see more visibility on hospitals/vendor employee satisfaction. Maybe next year we can add a couple categories such as, 'best/worst vendor to work for' and 'best/worst hospital IT department to work for'?" I think I had that category one year, but the problem was that voting was all over the place since everyone has limited experience, especially when you get into providers, and the results were therefore inconclusive. Maybe it should be more of a "tell us why you like or dislike working where you do" question, more of a narrative instead of a survey? Just an idea.

From Dr. Auschlander: "Re: Kaiser CIO. Announcement Monday and buzz is it won't be the guy who is the interim and who was promised the job.  Smells like a lawsuit. He made a number of significant changes based on his belief that he had the job and they were approved by the oversight committee because they were under the belief that he had the job. The scary part is that the new person is rumored to be from outside healthcare. The last three KP CIOs came from outside healthcare and all failed. Hmm, I guess they are slow learners." Rumor is that Turkstra didn't get the job, so we'll see Monday. Great phony name, by the way. Anything St. Elsewhere gets my attention. 

From Mulva: "Re: Eclipsys. Eclipsys being bought by Oracle? Any truth to this rumor?" Beats me, but I admire the roster of Seinfeld-related phony names that have been used, even though I never watched or liked the show (except the AssMan episode with Fusilli Jerry.)

I'm hearing strong rumors, unconfirmed so far, that McKesson will announce its acquisition of physician office EMR vendor Practice Partner this week. The deal was rumored to have been signed late Thursday or early Friday. Supposedly Andy Ury will stay on to run the business. I interviewed him a few months ago.

Adam Wright of Oregon Health and Science University sent over the short piece he co-authored for Annals of Internal Medicine that addresses USB PHR systems. The authors chose five PHR systems that are USB drive-based and tried to hack each of them, adding their own programmed actions to the thumb drives by changing the executable that launches the PHR viewing. Every one of the systems allowed that, giving another way to get a malicious program onto a PC. The conclusion is that Web-based PHR applications don't have this problem.

I had a phone chat with Don Trigg, Cerner's chief marketing officer. The company surprised a lot of people at last year's HIMSS by opening up their massive booth into a set of easygoing conversation pods staffed by their customers, who pretty much ran the entire exhibit for them. Hints are that other vendors are freely stealing that idea this year, so I wondered if Cerner will raise the bar again? Don said Cerner listens to what their current customers suggest and it was clear that those customers are changing how they view the HIMSS conference, seeing it as more of an educational event than they did before. Cerner changed its display presence to emphasize education and peer-to-peer interactions. Don claims those clients in the booth aren't compensated, haven't been coached, don't have to sign agreements to be nice, and can say whatever they want (and he offered to hook me up with one to talk about the experience, which might make a fun HIStalk story.) Cerner's theme this time is All Together, with 20 customers who weren't there last year putting their caregivers in booths arranged by medical conditions of their own choosing, like AMI. They'll show how they user Cerner applications in different settings for those conditions, illustrating Cerner's capability in breadth and various venues of care. I'll report back once I've traipsed through the exhibit hall. Let me know what you see, too.

Don didn't mention it, but Cerner will also show Smart Room (think of it as a Vision Center for laypeople) and its drug dispensing machine.

Modern Healthcare's Health IT Strategist newsletter had a good time with the "Beers with Bush" contest and also the HISsies (they especially seemed amused by Neal Patterson's three-peat Pie win.) A snip: "Revenue-cycle management software provider AthenaHealth's novel business approaches such as humorous promotional videos and charging no upfront fees and instead getting paid a percentage of the claims they help customers collect helped Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Bush win the 'Industry Figure with Whom You'd Most Like to Have a Few Beers' honor in a poll conducted by the popular health IT blog, HISTalk. (Other poll categories included "Industry Figure in Whose Face You'd Most Like to Throw a Pie," which was won by Cerner Corp.'s Neal Patterson, again.)" Thanks for that mention. I think it might actually have been the HIStalk interview that won over some HIStalk readers, but that's an aside. 

Medicity has completed a physician portal rollout at Community Medical Centers in Fresno, CA.

Welcome aboard to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor InterSystems. I always Google a new sponsor to see if I've ripped them sometime in the past, but no problem there. In fact, I've editorialized about Cache' before, waxing rhapsodically about its speed and lack of DBA attentions needed to keep it running. The InterSystems folks don't know that I've been a Cache' customer in a previous life and a quite happy one at that (big app, big organization, lots of Cache' seats, no DBA or tinkering needed, especially compared to Oracle or SQL.) You can download a copy of Cache' free from their website. They're here at HIMSS, of course, and invite you to drop by Booth 627 to see Cache', their HealthShare RHIO data exchange platform, and the Ensemble interface engine (#1 in KLAS.) Thanks to them for signing up. Cool ad.

Allscripts gets its first combined TouchWorks and HealthMatics ED sale to Winthrop-University Hospital (NY.) It's a $2 million deal.

My editorial this week in Inside Healthcare Computing: "Despite Your Resolutions, I Know What You’ll Be Doing at HIMSS." Note: it has nothing to do with my earlier poll on sex. I thought it was pretty funny, but what do I know?

Allscripts will demo its new Universal Application Integrator at HIMSS, which allow connecting medical devices to TouchWorks and HealthMatics ED.

Odd: a New Zealand doctor who was fired after taking a cell phone picture of his genitalia, e-mailing it to his work computer, then trying to e-mail it to a female colleague got his job back after suing, but wasn't awarded the damages he sought. The judged characterized his behavior as "bizarre and inappropriate" and his actions as "adolescent and frankly stupid." We males are damned weird when aroused.

Here's another idiot ... uhhh, early adopter of implantable RFID chips. This computer nerd replaced keys for his car and apartment with an implanted RFID chip that activates the devices. He even convinced his girlfriend to do the same. I'm sure she's a hottie, hooking up with a cool cat like him and all.

Can't remember if I mentioned this: Paul Feldman, co-chair of AHIC's privacy and security workgroup, quits in protest over lack of progress in putting security standards in place for NHIN. The government's really getting ripped over this, all the way up to Jonathan Bush's cousin.

A hospital in Canada is hit by a virus that spread to 1,000 PCs, requiring cancelling all diagnostic imaging.

Emageon releases Q4 numbers: revenue up 36%, EPS $0.09 vs -$0.19. Pretty good considering all costs of their November 2005 acquistion of Camtronics have now been charged off.

Well,, I'm actually kind of sorry to see all you HIMSS attendees blowing into town after a quiet weekend. I dread the noise, the lines, the oppressive milling about of guys in suits, and the lack of anyplace within two miles of the convention center where you might actually be able to sit down (other than on the floor) and maybe eat something off a table instead of on the run. It will be a zoo, no doubt. Feel free to e-mail me anything interesting that you see or hear.

News, rumors, booth babe pictures: e-mail me.