HIStalk Quotes
News 06/10/05
In my last entry, I wrote: “Assume the worst if several days go by without anything new here,” joking that I might be dead if that happened. Then, I up and disappeared! Well, I wasn’t experiencing a premonition of my own demise, but perhaps was of my PC’s, whose power supply sent epilepsy-like irregular spikes out to its internals, thereby shorting out its ticker (motherboard.) It is being transplanted as we speak, while I work from a spare unit. If I’m less informative or witty than usual, blame my hardware. And why IBM and Microsoft (and all laptop makers) have to mess around with the universally standard PC keyboard layout is beyond me.
Thanks to new HIStalk sponsor Healthcare Growth Partners. I appreciate the support and ask your company to join them in keeping me going with a few dollaro. I notice that the lifetime HIStalk visitor count will hit 100,000 soon, probably by the time you read this.
A couple of readers “got” the tidbits of pop culture that I tossed around last time, thereby encouraging me to do it again. Sorry for whomever it annoys.
Dr. John (he been in the right place) defended lawsuits against my usual tirades: “Forty years ago the ED was full of children injured, disabled, and sometimes killed at the playgrounds I enjoyed as a child. Things are different now; even adjusting for demographic change injury rates at playgrounds are a fraction of what they once were. Playgrounds are more costly, but we have far more money now to spend on them -- and they are much safer and at least as much fun. That change wasn't driven by insightful and persuasive physicians, it was driven by ambulance chasers who lined their own pockets -- and helped society at large (even when they might not have done that much for their clients).”
From Joe: “If Pfizer’s CEO is so concerned about the slow adoption of technology in hospitals, perhaps he could get together with his buddies at the other big drug companies and settle on a common bar code strategy. Then hospitals could more easily implement bar coding for inventory control, documentation and charging the way ‘the corner supermarket” did 30+ years ago. Does it seem strange to anyone else that when we talk about improving the use of technology in healthcare, so much of the discussion revolves around a technology as old as bar codes?” Bravo! That’s hitting big pharma where it hurts (as the truth always does.)
A reader is interested in your opinions of inpatient clinical documentation systems, which I don’t know a whole lot about. Let me know what you think.
From Anonymous Reader: “I work in Sales at one of the vendors- - one customer I'm working with is an all-McKesson shop (STAR reg, rad, Horizon Lab, etc.) – and Mckesson didn't make their top 4 vendors for an EMR. The MDs said it was terrible. I don't think that McKesson is competitive at all – we aren't seeing them as finalists in any of the large customers that we deal with.” All I’ll say is, from my experience, if MCK had spent as much time integrating products as they did selling people what they said were integrated products, they’d have been a lot better off. I’ve seen foreign systems connected by a half-hearted interface that integrate better than Horizon stable-mates. Hint for prospects: if two vitally connected clinical products each require their own database and ADT interface, you might suspect some lack of integration.
Eclipsys seems to be making changes in their executive line-up again, but I’ve lost track of who’s who to the point I’ll let you score at home.
Give a fellow blogger a look: Dalai’s PACS Blog, whose radiologist author e-mailed me to say “It's nowhere near as complete, well-written, or amusing as yours, but you (and maybe a reader or two) might find it interesting....” Doc’s been reading here awhile, and now I’m wondering if he got his Dalai moniker from my Top 10 favorite movie of all time, Caddyshack (“… so I got that goin’ for me.”) It’s a cool blog about a timely topic.
From Chauncy Gardener (pop culture coming back to me – “he does talk like one. I think he's brilliant”): “I see Rick Skinner is listed as an author of a book entitled ‘The CEO-CIO Partnership: Harnessing the Value of Technology in Healthcare.’ I guess the harness came loose or was faulty as Rick recently got bounced as CIO of
From Healthcare Geek: Lehigh Valley Hospital wins a couple of Stevie Awards for IT, although I’d be suspicious that it refers to “MIS,” which is about as dated as “DP” in referring to the computer gods. From the award description, it sounds like a marketing scheme, but congrats anyway.
McKesson thought their HBOC-related shareholder lawsuits were history, but a federal judge disagrees, denying approval of their $960 million settlement. However, it seems the objections aren’t significant, so the agreement is likely to go forward in slightly modified form.
UPMC latches on to yet another early-stage healthcare technology: remote concurrent coding from a company I’ve never heard of: Salar. The CEO looks to be almost old enough to drive.
CIO Salary of the Week: WakeMed,
A while back in the Pathways days, when it was only products they wrote
(yeah, this was a long time ago) they still didn't have integrated
databases, masterfiles, or even use of the same programming language (or
within a single product's code, even style). Of course, we also were
looking at upgrading HealthQuest (Mainframe) and they didn't have anything
interfaced beyond ADT/Demographics.
You'll be glad to know my hits have increased exponentially since you
mentioned my blog! The name came from a "battle" on AuntMinnie.com with
one of the vendors that plays prominently in my blog postings. I picked
the first title I could think of that no one would connect to me; the
vendor figured it out within 15 minutes....
