News 08/02/06

From The Pacs Designer: "Surgery/OR rooms can be configured with devices that are wall-mounted, boom-mounted, located in an adjoining room, or deployed as computers on wheels (COWs.) The Operating Room of the Future Discussion Forum is a place to voice views on how the OR and surgery suite should look as we travel the path to enterpise PACS." Link. TPD has been generous in contributing ideas from his particular area of expertise. If you find them useful, please let him know. I confess to knowing little of that domain, so I'm glad for some backup. I might also plug HIStalk Platinum sponsor EnovateIT a little, since they have the hardware stuff he mentioned and it's ultra-cool (with end users, it's all about ergonomics, and theirs is ridiculously well designed.)

From VP: "Re: Brailer's replacement. The real problem with finding a replacement for Brailer is the salary is NOT competitive with what top industry folks are making." I've said the same thing in editorials. The job pays what would be darned near subsistence wages for DC, ruling out anyone in mid-level leadership who still needs to bring home a family-supporting paycheck (obviously Dave didn't, since he pocketed millions from CareScience.) Maybe you could monetize the likely future windfall that most ex-government bigwigs manage to bag from consulting and lobbying firms, getting a couple of years' worth of expense money against the big loot.

From Anonymous: "If Epic is not in play, and Philips no longer has a deal with them, then name the only huge multi-national conglomerate with a multi-billion dollar imaging/monitoring business which doesn't own a big HIT player? (assuming of course that IDX counts as big). So how long before Philips decides that it has to pay up for one too?" First MedQuist, now a botched Epic partnership. Cash-rich healthcare companies make some of the stupidest HIT decisions I've ever seen (Siemens, GE, McKesson, etc.) I bet Philips will be paying Judy long and hard for their one Xtenity customer (and if I were Metro Health, I'd try hard to weasel out of the Philips deal and sign with Epic directly if they haven't already.)

From Anonymous: "How much was UC Davis's Epic contract worth and have they announced cost to date?" I couldn't find that information, so if you know, please e-mail me.

Open source darling and VistA vendor Medsphere fires founders Scott and Steve Shreeve and sues them for $50 million, claiming violation of trade secrets, computer crime, racketeering, and a laundry list of other charges. Internationally known healthcare expert Ken Kizer, hired as Medsphere's CEO in December, convinced the company's board to fire VP Feyzi Fatehi in June, after which the Shreeves said they would no longer work with Kizer, the suit says. Kizer announced a "transitioning" of the Shreeves' roles in June, which was followed by a surprise announcement from Steve Shreeve two days later that Medsphere's source code was freely downloadable from open source repository SourceForge. The suit also claims that the Shreeves hacked Kizer's e-mail account. Kudos to Andis Robeznieks of Modern Healthcare (an HIStalk reader, I've heard) for some fine heads-up reporting (caught me completely off guard.) Lots of reporters in this industry are just press release reformatters, but not Andis and Joe over there.

Healthcare vendor technology doesn't usually make the high-tech press, but InfoWorld's John Udell has a nice video piece on mTuitive. They talked to a physician who's building a tablet-based ED application using mTuitive's authoring system for expert systems. "Given that mTuitive's toolkit is a .NET-based inferencing engine, there's plenty of raw technology under the covers, but that's not the main theme. Instead we focus on what it is like, from a domain expert's perspective, first to use and then to create a rule-based assistant. What matters most, in both cases, is how well the technology accommodates the expert's familiar ways of thinking and ways of doing." I've seen mTuitive's authoring tool and it's cool, one of those apps where you hope the guy doing the demo has to step out so you can sneak over to the PC and start building stuff without supervision. It looked to me like you could add a lot of value to legacy apps by smartening up the user interface with their tool, and I can say for sure that any non-IT subject matter expert would have a blast creating the logic flow and then seeing it run.

Network security firm Intrusic names Chris Bishop, formerly of Initiate Systems and McKesson, as sales SVP.

Blast from 2001: Genuity Black Rocket. Wish I'd kept those toys they gave away.

Connecting for Health's ADT system has been down since Sunday due to hardware failure.

I've e-mailed a few folks about interviewing them, but not much luck so far. If you're a CEO (as 5% of HIStalk's readers are, according to my last survey) then I'd be happy to talk to you if you have something interesting to say. My Most Wanted (changes depending on my mood): Judy Faulkner, Neil Pappalardo, and Charlie McCall. Oh, and the CIO from Metro Health (Bill Lewkowski) to talk about Xtenity (I probably should just call him up.)

A 29-year-old programmer's little company is up to 11 employees, one of their offerings being a $70 a year web-based personal health record called Patient Assist. It's not the slickest website I've seen (way too long Flash intro and lots of popping Ps in the cheap microphone used to narrate) but I admire their pluck in leaving the corporate womb and getting out there.

FCG gets a $2 million deal to write Quantum Choice claims management software for Plexis.

Emageon's Q2 numbers: revenue up 62%, EPS -$.04 vs. $0.09, some of that due to their digestion of Camtronics.

Allscripts just announced Q2 numbers: revenue up 115%, EPS flat at $0.05. Not bad considering their A4 acquisition costs. They also announced a 587-physician, $6 million sale to North Carolina's Novant Health, their largest deal in history.

Your news, rumors, and ideas area always welcome.