Monday Morning Update 03/06/06

From Cardinals Fan: "Apparently, Sisters of Mercy in St. Louis is in negotiations to replace a failed Cerner implementation. The main reason behind this that they have spent tens of millions of dollars without achieving their goals of an integrated chart and medication administration. The system has shown to be slow and not nearly as integrated as Cerner claims. With recent acquistion of Apache, Bridge, Wellsoft, and document imaging, Cerner's message of single database integration appears to be falling apart."

From anon_mrn: "Latest Clark Consulting CIO survey stats. Leading academic healthcare organizations, median net revenue of $944M. 25th percentile, $241.6; 50th percentile, $307.2; 75th percentile, $375.4." Seems like a large paycheck given the often anemic results delivered, but that's coming from a guy working just as hard and making a lot less (me.) $300K to manage a department of just a couple of hundred techies? Good work if you can get it.

From RegularReader: "The CIO at Memorial Health University Medical Center, Savannah, GA has left. Memorial was in the process of rolling out a number of McKesson products (HEO among them). Wonder how this will affect McKesson as he was a regular at McK investor meetings?"

In his memory, CIO Salary of the Week: Memorial Health University Medical Center, Savannah, GA: $239,124. HIStalk CIO Enrichment Index: 53.

From Wheelybop: "Do you use a specific site for location hospitals FORM 990?" www.guidestar.com.

From Dave: "Re: HIStalk CIO Enrichment Index. It really makes a big difference which revenue figure you use for this calculation, gross or net." I use Line 12 of Form 990, labeled Total Revenue. That's all I know.

From Anonymous: "If you want to see a company that understands and genuinely cares about its users, take a look at Flo Healthcare, who makes Computers on Wheels. Unlike the usual ugly unwieldy barges that engineers create for 50-year-old nurses to drag down the hall, these guys actually studied the user and painstakingly designed for them. Their attention to workflow and ergonomics, right down to the colors and rounded corners, make them the iPod of cart designs. They were the highlight of HIMSS for me." I agree. Wouldn't they make a great HIStalk sponsor?

National Patient Safety Foundation unwisely allows McKesson to ride their coattails, with NPSF's president making what sounds like a direct pitch for McKesson in a MCK press release. "According to McKesson, the world's largest healthcare services company, the information technology (IT) tools are available today to create a safe, automated healthcare environment." Since the press release doesn't actually claim that those wonderful tools are available under the McKesson nameplate, I supposed it would be hard to disagree. It sounds like they're calling the work done, which is a long way from reality for both the industry and McKesson. John Muir is mentioned: "In addition, the percentage of errors causing harm has remained below national averages since 2003." That's an improvement (assuming they were worse pre-MCK and that MCK software is responsible for the improvement) but is "below national averages" really a press release-worthy home run?

I hope this document management vendor CEO isn't speaking for all physicians, but I fear he is: "America is basically asking the physician community to stand up and fund EHRs so that everyone in this country -- including the government -- can benefit ... it is untenable for physicians to dedicate the resources and change the way that they practice medicine to ensure nationwide implementation." The cynic in me wants to say, "OK, how much do you want to stop harming your patients?"

The VA is planning a replacement for ITS spectacularly failed CoreFLS ERP system, put out of its misery after $342 million of taxpayer money was flushed down the BearingPoint toilet. Progress so far includes bringing yet another consulting firm (Pricewaterhousecoopers, a name so stupid it hurts me to type it), giving it a cool acronym (FLITE,) and asking for more taxpayer money. They seem to be nonchalant about their previous mess: "It is another spin at trying to do what CoreFLS was supposed to do." At least the company with the stupid name is telling them to standardize process before throwing IT at the problem, which is painfully obvious to all but apparently the VA and/or BearingPoint since it was missed in that first "spin."

A national organ donation organization sanctions LA's St. Vincent Medical Center, caught moving a Saudi man to the head of their liver transplant line and removing the person whose place he was given, who later died without a transplant. Like a spoiled child, the hospital indignantly says they'll appeal on grounds that they stopped cheating once they got caught.

What does a 32-bed Army hospital in Alaska do to comply with claimed JCAHO communication requirements? Give General Dynamics $1.1 million to create a nurse call system. How about hollering down the hall or using walkie talkies? 

How stupid can a psychiatrist be? Well, this one from UC Irvine lost $3 million over ten years in one of those "help me get money from my Nigerian uncle's bank accounts and I'll give you half" e-mail schemes that even dim-witted 12-year-olds know are phony. The 89-year-old doc is a bigwig in the School of Medicine. His physician son, worried that his inheritance is evaporating into thin Nigerian air, is suing to get control of the father lode. You may recall my earlier write-ups on the hospital's own transplant problems, also rife with stupidity: healthy liver donations were turned down, patients died because the hospital didn't have a transplant surgeon, eggs and embryos were stolen by doctors from uninformed women, whistleblowers and employees were threatened, and "Other administrators told three internal auditors not to set foot on hospital grounds — or even exit the freeway near the Orange facility — or they would face termination, according to depositions and interviews."

Allscripts will use Per-Se's e-prescribing network and Per-Se will resell Allscripts' EHR product under a new agreement signed by the two companies.

A nurse appeals to the board of her hospital employer to not install MEDITECH's nursing module. "She first addressed the hospitals commitment to Meditech, the computer information system funded by the Hospital Foundation. She requested the board reexamine instituting any further modules, particularly the nursing module. She said the process will require an additional burden on nurses already working very hard that she feared would 'push nurses over the edge.' She suggested the hospital 'Back out. Stand back. Take a breath and see what the future holds.'"

Virginia's new technology czar comes from The Advisory Board Company, which made him a millionaire by age 30 (he's now 33.) Other attributes: he's a player in powerful groups (Indian), he's politically ambitious, he donated money to his new governor boss's campaign, and he's well-connected. That pretty much rounds out the Big Five checklist for government service fitness. He's pitching ambulatory EMRs.

Who took over the plush former campus of PeopleSoft in Pleasanton, CA when Oracle acquired the company and fired just about everyone? Kaiser's HealthConnect, who's putting 1,200 IT employees there. Must be nice, while their counterparts are stuck in basements and crammed-in cubicles.

GE Healthcare loses a lawsuit brought by its employees in France, who demanded that all company documents be made available to them in French instead of English. "'This is fantastic,' said Marceau Dechamps, vice president of the Defense of the French Language, which campaigns against the creep of English. He said it was 'humiliating' that GE employees in France had had to use English. 'We are the natives and the master obliges to speak his language,' he said in a telephone interview." They ought to be glad that brave, English-speaking American and British boys lost their chance to see adulthood just so the ingrates could stop meekly Heil Hitlering each other under their German-speaking master du jour.

I wrote earlier about Phoebe Putney Hospital in Albany, Georgia, described in this article as a "health care soap opera." I said then: "A Georgia surgeon and his office manager, both consultants to a law firm suing 45 hospitals for overcharging, are indicted for sending harassing faxes about Phoebe Putney Hospital that included claimed executive salaries, business holdings, and political connections. They also earned indictments for aggravated assault and burglary against another physician via their hired private investigator." There are new allegations that I won't go into because I'm not that interested, but I found these facts fascinating: their squabbling inspired ambulance chaser Richard Scruggs to attack non-profit hospitals to add to his billions, the attorney for one of those indicted was the model for Matlock, and a physician whose home was burglarized wrote the book that was made into Doc Hollywood.

An odd press release, whose premise is that being in the news is, in itself, newsworthy: "VisualMED Clinical Solutions Corp. (OTCBB:VMCS) announces that its Clinical Information System at Southwest Regional Rehabilitation Center in Battle Creek, Michigan has been in the news."