News 01/10/06

From Where are they today?:  "I notice that Joe Thear, Senior Vice President of Revenue Cycle Services is not listed on the 'key' executive team of QuadraMed. Joe came to QMed in 2004 from McKesson. Before the most recent organizational changes, Joe was responsible for development and marketing of Affinity Patient Accounting, Decision Support, and scheduling."

From HIS Cynic: "Dave Bowen goes to FAA. Bowen joins the FAA from Blue Shield of California where he served as Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer."

QuadraMed loses a director: "Mr. Feshbach submitted his resignation letter ... indicating his opposition to the Company's decision to market its pharmacy software to psychiatric hospitals and citing his objections to psychiatry as a science."I'm with QD on this one. If they've got the cash, who cares about their science?

From Anonymous Reader: " The point seems to be missed that the specialty hospitals employ the same physicians, etc. that see little value in the current systems. As such, why take a bad system to a new hospital.You imply that 'CPOE and stat-of-the-art clinical systems' are both equal and good. I believe there is a vast difference between state-of-the-art clinical systems and  the current set of kludged together CPOE systems. My experience is that, although the hospitals appear to have financial success assured in the future, the (for profit) management team is much more acutely aware of unnecessary spending on things like technology for its own sake. They indeed get it. Overhead is purposely kept low, systems must be cost effective, and staffing is not bloated. Many current information systems may be advanced and good, but they are not cost effective. Many more are neither advanced nor good. Wal-Mart has achieved the balance of effective and efficient systems that are cost effective. Hospitals still buy systems based on archaic rules utilizing uninitiated committees making decisions with emotion based on recent publicity. Non profit hospitals appear to make decisions based on requirements, efficiency, and cost effectiveness."

Suddenly every website requires strong passwords whose bizarre composition rules assure they'll be left laying around on Post-Its to violate the security they were intended to protect. Here's one I hit today: "A password must be a combination of letters and at least one number (length between 8 and 12). A number must be located in the second through the next-to-last position. Do not begin or end your password with a number." Of course, every security geek makes up their own quirky rules, seemingly just to infuriate users, so you can't even use the same unmemorable password among sites. Bring on biometrics, I say.

Please help me out with the HISsies nominations. Anyone can join in the fun and you don't have to complete all categories. I'll have to remove some categories if they don't pull enough nominations, thereby depriving us all of the sniggering, elbow-jabbing jollity we old-timers remember from last year's HISsies. Maybe the winners will put up signs in their HIMSS booths, d'ya think? Or, would the "pie in the face" winner auction off that right to a lucky thrower for charity?

CIO Field Report

• Hospital type: Community, Multiple Hospital Group, >800 Beds, East.
• IT Operating Budget: $5-12 million.
• Most important IT projects now underway: Advanced Clinicals/Wireless, PACS, OR Management, Physician Integration, Disaster Recovery, Homecare POC
• Systems you’ll be buying within the next three years: Physician Portal, OR Management,Voice Recognition, Practice EMR, Clinical Data Repository
• Best application vendors: Meditech, Meditech, Meditech
• Worst application vendors: McKesson DSS, Care Centric POC
• Hottest IT skills in the market: Nursing Informatics, Pharmacist with IT
• Interesting rumors you've heard: Meditech MAGIC being sunset
• Hottest people in the HIT industry: Glaser, Halamka, Faulkner, Brailer
• Trends really heating up: Physician anything related to integration
• Trends cooling off: CPOE as a solution to medical errors

Fill out the online CIO/IT Director Field Report and I'll shoot you an HIStalk Yearbook. It's quick, pretty much just filling in the fields you see above.

Eclipsys announces GA of Sunrise 4.5 XA.

Virginia's Sheltering Arms Hospitals signs up for MediServe's rehab system.

My editorial debut is in this week's Inside Healthcare Computing electronic newsletter, where I rant on the topic of: "Is the paradigm of forcing physicians to use our computer systems personally and directly a flawed one?" One of these days I'll run out of things to shoot off my mouth about, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Idiotic Hospital Lawsuit of the Week: healthcare union SEIU sues Sutter Health for its proposal to renovate Sutter General Hospital, a cancer center, a church, and a children's theater. Their claimed concern: pollution.

Jay Deady's deal at Eclipsys: $450K annually, guaranteed $200K bonus this year, 100,000 shares now, 400,000 share options, guaranteed 18 months' severance, 24 month's payout on change of control. Shares are at $21.14 if you want to calculate his loot, but it's the usual multi-million upfront wad that Eclipsys tends to give their suits.

Cerner gets $8 million in tax breaks to build a downtown Kansas City data center space, 120,000 square feet costing $60 million.

Speaking of Cerner, the stock split pre-market open today, so hopefully you didn't choke on your coffee when you checked your holdings mid-morning. No, it didn't drop 50%.

MedHost brags a little on its #1 KLAS ED ranking, in which it beat Wellsoft by 0.05 points. Still, that's a great showing. I don't know much about the company or product, but they seem to be growing fast and edging Wellsoft is no easy task.

Hospital CIO Salary of the Week: W.A. Foote Memorial Hospital, Jackson, MI: $289,572. HIStalk CIO Enrichment Index: 118.

UK doctors think NPfIT will eventually provide clinical benefit, but in the meantime it's poorly managed, costs too much, and is managed without enough physician input. They particularly dislike Cerner's Choose and Book patient scheduling system. "We piloted Choose and Book a year later and sure enough it took 20 minutes to refer – this is an unacceptable amount of time just to simply request an appointment."

According to the blog provider's stats, December was HIStalk's largest readership to date, and by a long site at that: 54,000 page hits, 30% higher than prior record month November (and both with holidays and my uncharacteristic slacking off at that.) Sorry I can't see who you are past the footlights, but thanks a bunch for hanging out with me.

Listening to right now: Cosmic Rough Riders, Scottish folk rock meets a West Coast version of REM with Byrds-like goodtime jangling. Followed by Black Sabbath's Reunion, the best live album ever recorded. Not only do the arena fans know all the words, they sing them more on key than Ozzie does.

Here's a cool extension of usability testing and market research: innoveillance. "A medical device company (which understandably wants to remain anonymous) decided to surreptitiously videotape, with hospital administrators' permission, how nurses actually used its prototype drug delivery system. The company quickly recognized that its product wasn't being used the way it was supposed to be. Moreover, it discovered what kind of shortcuts the nurses would take-creative and otherwise-to get the system to work, and at what points they would either ask for help or simply give up. This information proved enormously helpful and led to a fundamental redesign of both the product and how hospital staffs are trained to use it. That, in turn, completely changed how the company marketed its systems to hospitals and nurses."

Open source application vendor Medsphere acquires Clinical Informatics Associates, vendor of add-on modules for VistA.

Per-Se wastes no time in filling key positions following the close of its NDCHealth acquisition last week. Named: Per-Se CFO Chris Perkins will assume a new COO role, Scott Mackenzie from NDCHealth is named president of the pharmacy solutions division, Patrick Leonard moves up from VP to president of the physician solutions unit, and former Per-Se division president Philip Jordan takes the new position of chief of product strategy.

Speaking of Per-Se, Medicare says its Part D computer problems are fixed, but pharmacists are unable to confirm benefit status, forcing them to either fill prescriptions on faith that they'll eventually get paid or send patients to the emergency room. Verification systems vendor Per-Se, nee NDCHealth, says it knows of no such problems.

News, rumors, ideas, pictures, furtive whisperings of affection: e-mail me.

Stock message board upchuckings:

Eclipsys
"If you were part of the old SMS crew....you're fired!"

"When I first reviewed Eclipsys' organizational structure, I too noted that it seemed top heavy - you couldn't swing a cat in any direction and not hit a Vice President. But it appears that the new CEO didn't waste any time - looks like he cleared out mahogany row within 4 weeks of his arrival. Re-organizing to focus more on the customer and their needs is the best way to go in today's industry atmosphere - and with all of the CMS mandates on standardization of vocabulary and technical infrastructure etc., there's much to be done. It's clear that Eclipsys chose a wise direction. Finally, it appears to me that the new Sunrise Release truly completes the product. It now has all of the feature / functionality that the market demands."

Cerner
"I also loved my job at Cerner and miss it very much. I can't say enough good about Cerner as a company for it's products, it's vision and for treating it's employees very, very well. I'm disabled due to a nasty illness a few years ago and Cerner handled my case with great understanding and empathy. They went out of their way to help me get back to work and giving me working conditions that helped me heal. When it was more than obvious that I could not work any longer, they went out of their way to be sure I got what I needed and my benefits were handled in a very timely manner. Now, I'm having some problems with my disability and Cerner is helping again. I've worked for a lot of vendors out there over the past 30 years and Cerner is the place to be and the system to have. The problems are overshadowed by the amazing systems and the wonderful people. If I physically could, I would go back to work there until I was forced to retire. How many other companies out there would help someone who is no longer an employee (associate) and has not been for two years?"