News 01/05/07

From HITGirl: "Re: rumor on TriZetto's being acquired. Has anyone else heard rumors pertaining to TriZetto finishing the pending acquisition of QCSI and then being acquired themselves, by either McKesson or WebMD? I have heard this rumor from two sources and wonder if anything will result from the upcoming JP Morgan Healthcare conference. All are presenting at this venue." I haven't heard anything, but as usual, I'll open it up to HIStalk readers who may have.

From Semmelweis: "Re: favor. I have a request for my fellow HIStalk contributors. Please consider choosing an alias to use instead of 'Anonymous.' More than one 'anonymous' makes following the conversations more confusing than need be. I suggest Dilbert characters as a start, if anyone needs some help." Good idea for those so inclined, especially if you'll be posting more than once (and I hope you will.) Personally, I always pick an obscure character's name from a movie I like, such as Lou Loomis, the boss of the caddies in Caddyshack, or Cherry Forever from Porky's. You get the added fun of seeing if anyone 'gets it' and maybe posts under another name from the same movie.

From Anonymous: "Re: Misys. Several mid-level managers and other staff members have been laid off this week in what is being called a 'first round' of restructuring. Love your site, by the way." My read on Mike Lawrie (helped along by knowledgable readers) is that he wants to hang on to the healthcare division, but will insist on wringing profits from it through cost control and the restructuring of the underperforming sales function. Thanks for the report. And speaking of Misys, the poll I'm about to replace to your right is running 2:1 against ClearPractice putting Misys back on track.

From Lou Loomis: "Re: SF newspaper article quotes on hospital challenges. 'intensive efforts by Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health and other large systems to drastically improve their IT infrastructures without breaking the bank ... And Sutter's installation of an Epic Corp. electronic health records system is roughly 2 1/2 years behind schedule and stuck with a projected cost of up to $500 million -- another reason the Sacramento-based nonprofit system, like Kaiser and others, is thinking of retrenching or slashing costs in other areas ... Kaiser this year battled delays in installation of its huge HealthConnect electronic medical record system and warned it could face billions of dollars in losses in coming years if it doesn't dramatically slash costs. That's not easy for a massive organization with nearly 157,000 employees, 13,000 physicians, more than 430 clinics/medical office buildings and 37 hospitals that's also in the midst of a potential $4 billion-plus IT installation and a multi-year seismic rebuild and expansion program with an estimated $21 billion price tag.'" Would you bet the farm on any HIT system out there? If you competed with Sutter or Kaiser and read about their IT projects, would you be frightened or encouraged? How about if you were their patient? Somehow the more dollar signs a project has, the less likely it is to succeed, but they have to try to move forward.

From Anonymous: "Re: Healthvision. Watch for a MAJOR announcement from Healthvision regarding an investment by a publicly-traded, non-healthcare company. The deal is closed and will be announced shortly." Predicted here several weeks ago to occur by this week, thanks to a reader's tip. I don't know who the other party is, though. Oracle? Microsoft? A Web 2.0 player like Google?

From Kaiser Monitor: "Re: interim CIO. Kaiser's 'interim' CIO held an all day meeting yesterday with his leadership team. At that meeting, he indicated that he would likely take over the top spot on a permanent basis."

From The Pacs Designer: "Re: area networks. TPD took a holidays break and is now back in the blogging groove again. TPD would like to wish everyone a happy and prosperous 2007. Thought it would be good to review the types of are networks for HIStalk readers. Just about everyone has used a local area network (LAN) somewhere in their life. If that experience was in a large multi-facility environment such as KPIT, then you have experienced the wide area network (WAN) pluses and minuses. Beyond these two networks lies a metropolitan network or MAN. The MANs are usually in large urban centers and are owned by the telecom giants. Storage architecture that you will find typically attached to these area networks are called storage area networks (SAN) and consist of various types of storage media. TPD mentioned grid storage networks in an earlier post, and while the are not typically viewed as an area network, they are a type of global network put together by firms such as Dell and Oracle, for example, and also various satellite and fiber optic transmission systems." 

From MetaHISser: "Re: SolCom. Sending you this note is almost the most pleasurable thing I've done this year. I don't want you to miss sponsor referrals, so be aware that the Solcom banner does not have a link embedded." I would have preened more at your pleasurable note-sending if you'd sent it my way on 12/31 instead of 1/2, since I guess I beat out only whatever you did on 1/1. SolCom's banner actually has a link embedded at the "more information" text on their banner. Anyway, here's what I liked about them from the get-go: they e-mailed me originally and said, hey, we didn't budget any sponsorship money, but we want to help you out, so we'll figure out a way to underwrite the banner at the bottom of the page. Now is that cool or what? They just wanted to support HIStalk. Just to make sure they get some love, you can click here to pay them a visit. I'm serious when I ask you to pay extra attention to HIStalk's sponsors. Sure, lots of companies blow fortunes on ads in glossy magazines that no one pays attention to, but these kindred spirit sponsors get what HIStalk is about and choose to invest in me (and you as a reader.) If I'm feeling unappreciated or ignored, the sight of those ads perks me up.

Speaking of sponsors, I'm just bursting with pride that SCI Solutions, a Gold sponsor for just a few weeks, has upgraded their sponsorship to Platinum. I appreciate that, I really do. John Holton, a true industry pioneer, was a great HIStalk interview. Please mark them on your HIMSS dance card for a quick booth howdy. They have stellar KLAS scores for access management solutions, which is like enterprise scheduling on steroids.

Question: is Cerner not selling anything, or have they just stopped announcing when they do? There's nothing on their site. I'm guessing the latter, although I don't know why.

Thanks to my newly added friends on my MySpace page. I'm probably the oldest, nerdiest, least-cool person on MySpace, but at least I have some hip people in Mr. HIStalk's Friend Space. I can see why MySpace is all the rage. On the other hand, if you're a loser, MySpace just makes it even more obvious because you'll have no friends there, either.

I got the HIMSS conference brochure today. It's pretty much all EMRs and RHIOs. I didn't see much interesting so far. I'll make sure to see Sheldon Dorenfest, who talks about his new China HIT endeavor in the latest Inside Healthcare Computing and who will talk about the US healthcare crisis at HIMSS. He's another industry pioneer for you noobs, having started CompuCare in 1970. What the heck is this? Dave Garets & Friends - Riffing on the Issues? I have mixed feelings on that, I have to say, but I'm sure he'll get turnout. Biggest disappointment: the View from the Top session that used to have vendor CEOs now has a roster of VPs, not even one of whom I've ever heard of. Fine folks, I'm sure, but I keep hoping for a Judy-Neal rematch.

Speaking of HIMSS, I've still got a mostly-full box of "I Am Mr. HIStalk" buttons that Picis was nice enough to try to give away in San Diego last year, so I'm trying to decide if it's worth schlepping them down to New Orleans.

Jon Phillips and I are trying to connect for another interview like we did a year ago. He's with Healthcare Growth Partners, which is an HIStalk Gold Sponsor, but even more importantly knows his stuff about the HIT business (check his predictions for 2006 in the previous interview if you don't believe me.)

Listening to now: in honor of fellow Rick Wakeman fan Matthew Holt, Wakeman's Made in Cuba. Love me some Brit prog. I found an old Emerson, Lake, and Palmer video on YouTube the other day, filmed as they were running through Fanfare for the Common Man at the Olympics in Canada. Fine, fine stuff. I saw ELP live several times (and Yes too) and it was the most amazing display of musical virtuosity I've seen before or since. One of these days, I'll see The Musical Box, which re-creates note for note old Genesis concerts including Peter Gabriel's over-the-top theatrics (before Phil Collins turned them into 1910 Fruitgum Company.) For some reason, the best prog is always from England or Scandinavia. Must be the cold.

Womack Army Medical Center (NC) will deploy CliniComp Essentris.

Great New York Times piece on the biggest health threat to Americans: an epidemic of diagnoses. "One reason is that we devote more resources to medical care than any other country. Some of this investment is productive, curing disease and alleviating suffering. But it also leads to more diagnoses, a trend that has become an epidemic. This epidemic is a threat to your health. It has two distinct sources. One is the medicalization of everyday life. Most of us experience physical or emotional sensations we don’t like, and in the past, this was considered a part of life. Increasingly, however, such sensations are considered symptoms of disease. Everyday experiences like insomnia, sadness, twitchy legs and impaired sex drive now become diagnoses: sleep disorder, depression, restless leg syndrome and sexual dysfunction. Perhaps most worrisome is the medicalization of childhood. If children cough after exercising, they have asthma; if they have trouble reading, they are dyslexic; if they are unhappy, they are depressed; and if they alternate between unhappiness and liveliness, they have bipolar disorder. While these diagnoses may benefit the few with severe symptoms, one has to wonder about the effect on the many whose symptoms are mild, intermittent or transient." Well said. Everybody's a victim. Makes me remember studying the "sick role" in college. Not only that, these diagnoses are often now called disabilities, which adds another layer of entitlement to the usual ills of mankind.

There's a bunch more news stories on PHI-containing computer thefts, but I honestly don't even care any more. It's so common that you might as well get used to the idea that your neighbors and co-workers can find out about your hemorrhoids and implants. Be flattered they care. Is it strange that we humans are so protective of our basically uninteresting health information? I wonder what part of our genetic makeup causes that, maybe not letting a predator see that you're weakened?

Fletcher-Flora announces some kind of web-based LIS called FFlex eSuite. Looks like somebody's Shift key was acting up.

This sounds like a good lab conference just ended, but you have to buy the notes, apparently. I find LIS people to be near the top of the clinical systems food chain and Phil Chen's a brilliant guy, so I bet it was good. If you have the slightest interest in informatics (and not just laboratory informatics) you should be reading Bruce Friedman.

As depressing as it may be, this guy from India has pretty well catalogued why the US is slipping fast down the superpower ladder, including a messed-up healthcare system. I wish I could find more to disagree with. At least we lead the world in the export of emtpy-headed celebrities and lip-syncers. Now I need cheered up.

Ness Technologies, which spun off integration vendor dbMotion, sells its stake for $6 million now that their big UPMC deal has made them hot stuff.

Don Zeppenfeld is named VP of sales at equipment tracking vendor Sonitor Technologies. He used to work for Newbold, scheduling com (now SCI Solutions, of course), HealthVision, and Atwork.

Sage Software sells Intergy EHR to a 62-provider practice in Indiana.

Lockheed Martin Canada will use InterSystems Ensemble for integration in its work with the Canadian Forces Health Information System.

I know you know stuff that I don't, so please use the Rumor Report to tell me about it. Your anonymity is guaranteed. And thanks for reading HIStalk.

News, rumors, booking Rick Wakeman to play at my birthday party: e-mail me.