Monday Morning Update 2/12/07

HISsies voting is closed. Thanks for participating. I'll write up the results when I get time, although maybe without the Billy Biff commentary since that took hours that I don't have at the moment. We'll see.

From TenaciousD: "Re: Eclipsy layoff report. I guess I was wrong. I felt like my source was pretty solid. Regardless it should be interesting to listen to the earnings call next week. Anyway, love your blog. Read it religously and as long as you don't mind will keep submitting stuff I hear." We like humility here, so you're forgiven.

From HITman: "Re: Dairyland. I met with some Dairyland folks today and they denied any talks or that the company is even on the market. DHS is an ESOP company and some folks stand to make a lot of money if the rumors are true, but it is all denied as of now." That's trouble with rumors, including the Eclipsys one. You don't know whether they're true until they happen, and until then, companies always deny them. It sounds so easy: "Just confirm the rumors before you run them," at least until you think about the logistics of doing that (especially as an anonymous blogger working full time) and the likelihood of success. "Hey, Andy, Mr. HIStalk here ... did you really lay off hundreds of people? No? OK. Well, thanks, bye."

From Aspetuck: "Re: medical tourism. Being a European, I want to remind your audience that the same tourism is flourishing within the European hemisphere and to other contents, but with a different driver behind it: the infamous waiting lists. Consumer groups and employers basically forced local insurance companies to reimburse global health trips. German and Austrian docs set up shops in Hungary, etc. The other perks (cost, holidays, etc.) are secondary benefits. Bottom line: healthcare goes global, ask yourself what the implications are for IT?" Interesting. Models of healthcare delivery are so different among countries that few systems could be used without extensive localization, I would think. I would also assume that the US system is the most different, meaning US-centric products would need major surgery to work well in most other countries.

From Prisoner of Cerner: "Re: medical tourism. Good stuff so far, but I haven't seen anyone mention (sorry if I missed it!) what most litigation-minded Americans would consider a major drawback to medical tourism ... no oversight by the US judicial system. No ability to sue the snot out of everyone who touched you, ever  thought of touching you, and anyone who ever knew/slept with/worked with any of the above-mentioned in the foreign hospital. Forget about it, you take all the risk, but if something goes wrong, you have no legal recourse in the US. <sarcasm> And isn't that what so many Americans have worked so hard for anyway?</sarcasm>" Ha! Loved the HTML tag humor. Sarcastic, but you're right - in September, I mentioned that a New York man was suing his Thailand dentist, providing me with Idiotic Lawsuit of the Week fodder.

From WileyT: "Re: Meditech GUI. Meditech offers an interface they call 'NUI'.  It allows you to use a mouse or tablet pen for menu navigation. Point at an item on the menu instead of typing the item number and it opens that item. Once you get to a data entry screen, you have to go to the keyboard although there are some buttons on the side of the window that allow lookups, etc. Meditech has offered a web portal in the past, but I've never seen widespread adoption of it because Meditech decides what goes to the portal, not the customer." 

From Anonymous: "Re: Jim Turnbull comment. I don't know Jim Turnbull or anything about Denver Children's. However, in my experience as a CIO, turnover is generally driven by the outrageous and, usually, unfulfilled expectations of the medical staff, especially in an academic setting. The requirement for them to actually enter data in order to make the information useful seems to come as a shock and creates a great deal of unrest. And, it is usually the old-line, entrenched clinical leadership who rarely see patients that react the worst. They are accustomed to being waited upon and resist the requirement to actually do this 'scut' work themselves."

Someone said they were surprised by a comment that Children's Dallas was replacing Cerner with Epic. I mentioned it here in May of last year, courtesy of a Rumor Report from Tex. I also confirmed it this week. Here's the happy announcement of their original go-live on Cerner's site (not for long, I suspect) cheering that Children's was the 3,000th Millennium conversion. If you count conversions from Millennium, they'll be adding a few to that total. Considering it's only been 2 1/2 years since their go-live, Children's must have really wanted it out of there. Seems that Cerner is losing more than just new business to Epic.

If you've e-mailed me lately, I apologize for being swamped. My days have been 14-16 hours long over the past week or two. I'm not complaining since I'm doing stuff I like to do for the most part, but I'm a bit overwhelmed. Thursday, for example, I rushed home after work, ate a TV dinner, and hit the computer for six more hours doing HIStalk stuff. My wife got home after me (thus the TV dinner) and I didn't see her until I finally went to bed. I didn't work this much when I was youthful and energetic.

Cerner leases 750,000 square feet of office space on the old Marion campus and will move 300 employees there immediately.

My sponsors:

EnovateIT (Platinum)
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Hayes Management Consulting (Gold)
Healthcare Growth Partners (Gold)
Inside Healthcare Computing (Platinum)
Medicity (Platinum)
Novo Innovations (Gold)
Picis (Platinum)
SCI Solutions (Platinum)
SolCom (Gold Banner)

I have another sponsor or two coming online shortly, which I really appreciate. I'll send a packet if your company is interested.

The billionaire chairman of India's Wipro Ltd. wants to open software development centers in Georgia in some sort of reverse outsourcing.

The 59th Medical Wing of Lackland Air Force Base (TX) wins a Department of Defense patient safety award for their ED patient tracking system, which they developed themselves for only $50,000 when they couldn't afford a commercial replacement for a failed product. Patient wait time was reduced 25%. Kudos. I know most of us don't wander into the military side of the HIMSS exhibits, but if we're welcome there (don't know, never been) it would be nice to give them thanks for saving taxpayers a few dollars and helping their patients with their resourcefulness.
 
Like most topics not involving celebrities or sports, Americans are completely ignorant about electronic medical records, yet they want them intensely and strongly agree about their benefits for patient safety and cost reduction. Or at least they would if it wasn't for privacy fears, which outweigh any possible EMR benefit. Even Harris Interactive seems exasperated at the moronically contradictory responses: "While several aspects of health information technology and EMRs are appealing to many people, a substantial plurality (42% to 29%) of the public believes that the privacy risks of EMRs outweigh the potential benefits.This response is surprising given that 64 percent of the public (Table 3) say, when asked, that they would like to have an EMR. This apparent contradiction can be explained by the fact that many people know nothing, and therefore presumably have no opinion, about EMRs." These are likely the same people who end up on juries or who watch TV 24x7 for Anna Nicole Smith death updates and get frustrated when stories of other deaths (American soldiers) interrupt their tearful electronic celebrity vigil.

Siemens Medical Solutions admits to cheating on a Cook County radiology equipment deal in 2000 and then lying right to a federal judge's face about it. You may remember that Siemens formed a phony partnership with a minority-owned business partner to meet Cook County's requirements that encourage exactly that. Instead of giving their minority partner a cut of the profits from the $49 million contract, they paid him off with $450,000 and wrote it off as a sales commission. Two Siemens employees and one of their lawyers are still waiting to be tried. Siemens changed their strategy of putting one of their managers on the stand to lie because "he could not say with a straight face that no flat-fee agreement had been reached." How'd that honest guy get in there? Ah, he wasn't honest, just a bad actor. Anyway, Siemens pleaded guilty to obstructing justice and providing false testimony to a federal judge. They'll pay a $1 million find and $1.5 million in restitution to Cook County. They lost the Stroger deal anyway since GE Medical System cried foul and sued Cook County, who soothed them by taking the contract away from Siemens and giving it to GE. You may also remember a recent article saying that Siemens Germany is being investigated for using slush fund money to illegally win bids overseas. Still, I bet a bunch of hospitals will keep right on buying from them, in some cases because nice, free trips to Germany provided a new level of appreciation about how Germans assemble imaging equipment.

Not much of a surprise: Marc Fleury, obnoxious founder of JBoss, quits Red Hat only a few months after its $350 million acquisition of his company.

Newt Gingrich (I didn't really have to give his last name since there aren't many Newts) wants his home state of Georgia to be the first to have electronic-only prescriptions. His for-profit company, Center for Health Transformation (which sponsored the appearance mentioned) is making him a mint masquerading as a public-spirited thinktank, even using a .net web address. Among the companies stuffing bills in Newt's G-string: GE Healthcare, Siemens (shocker), the American Hospital Association, Allscripts, CHIME, and Quovadx. Among the Center's noble services are "corporate branding and positioning" and "marketing and sales communications and strategy." Newt will make you a Founding Charter Member if you meet the long list of requirements: "Open to any group or individual who pays the annual charter membership fee." For that, you'll get "Access to Newt Gingrich." Well, at least they're honest - you want Newt face time, you pay. I've always liked his politics because I'm an obnoxious right-winger most of the time, even though critics had a field day with some of his alleged personal failings and being the first Speaker of the House to be reprimanded and fined $300,000 for ethical misconduct.

In looking for the CHIME-Newt connection, I ran across the CHIME Foundation. Maybe they're emulating his success in getting companies to cough up cash in return for access. Your vendor's $75,000 annual Premier Membership gets them "The opportunity to conduct up to six focus groups of CHIME CIOs ... Designated no-fee sponsorship recognition from a comprehensive menu of opportunities ... Up to 50 press releases published on the CHIME website ... Two feature articles annually in our CIO Connection newsletter ... Exclusive access to our strategic advisory council comprised of a select group of nationally recognized CIOs." Is it really ethical having vendors pay for CIO good times? Even doctors are finally wrenching free of whoring themselves out to drug companies since patients are picking up the eventual tab there, too. I don't know much about it, so I'm open to CIO or vendor counterpoint.

Speaking of whoring out, I keep forgetting to mention the text ads to your right. If your company can afford those Premier Memberships, you can afford those. At least I'm open in requesting your money for personal benefit, like gifting my way out of Mrs. HIStalk trouble caused by my all-evening disappearance to the HIStalk breaking news center.

News, rumors, gift certificates for Newt access: e-mail me.