HIStalk Quotes
News 08/09/06
posted 08/08/2006
From Watch: "Re: Epic/Philips. You don't need to be involved with either company to see why this did not work. Anyone who watches the industry knows that Epic talks about how many clinics from the mid-market they refuse to sell to because they want to chase big hospitals. It is easy to see what Philips was thinking: 'All these midmarket clients begging for the Epic product - all we have to do is give it to them.' They sold to only one customer. Epic/Philips did not realize that in the 2-3 years between their signing the agreement and starting to sell the new product, other companies had rushed into the midmarket. Epic/Philips was 2-3 years too late. Open question to any Epic insiders out there - if the midmarket didn't beat down the door for Xtenity, why would they do so for Epic Lite?"
From Anonymous: "Re: Epic/Philips. The poster had it right, including the problem of attrition for Philips. 'Top brass' hired away is a generous description. Apparently the brass didn't get it done for Philips."
From The Pacs Designer: "TPD gave HIStalk readers a tip on UPMC's Simple DICOM Wrapper recently If you missed it, UPMC has a website page with some old releases and a new Simple DICOM Viewer V4.0 which will be released soon." Link.
From Anonymous: "GE has told some customers that they don't plan to continue work on integrating Picis into the CareCast platform and won't sign new customers under that arrangement. They're apparently planning to add capability to their own product. Details won't be announced until later in the year."
From FCGroupie: "Now that Larry Ferguson is on board at FCG, look for the retirement of Steve Heck by year end. Word is an exit deal is in the works. No room for the two egos to co-exist."
From Anonymous: "Re: Medsphere. JUMPS is not Medsphere's: it was developed by CAV, a long-established Israeli software house that wrote it to convert their own MUMPS applications to Java/RDBMS technologies. From their website: 'JUMPS - Java from MUMPS - is a comprehensive framework for automated migration from the MUMPS language and runtime to Java and relational databases. Jumps allows a gradual migration of legacy MUMPS systems, code and database, to Java systems working with relational databases. The migration process is fully automated: It only requires mapping of the MUMPS hierarchical database schema into a relational one. JUMPS is implemented as a compiler that compiles MUMPS code into Java code. The legacy database is mapped using a built-in tool and the relational DB schema is automatically created. The data is also imported automatically.' It seems that CAV has been using JUMPS to migrate their banking, ERP, and tourism applications from Cache' or GT.M to Java and Oracle. The VA has tried to do relational mapping of its tables and to convert parts of VistA to Java and Oracle over several years, all with seemingly little success." Link. Now that's darned interesting. Is Medsphere working to convert VistA to Java and Oracle to appeal to those scared off by MUMPS? Did someone confuse the JUMPS utility with something developed in-house, and if so, why would it be posted as open source anyway? I'm assuming it's a proprietary tool, although I don't see on CAV's site where it says so. If you search on JUMPS and Java, you'll see their Google ad, so I'm pretty sure it isn't free.
Something strange is happening with the Firefox browser (at least the copy I use) and HIStalk. I've notified the blog service, but everything works peachy with IE and Opera. Sometimes the site looks unavailable, sometimes the sponsor ads don't display, and sometimes it works fine. Maybe it's just my Firefox copy due to a plug-in or something.
Listening to now: New York Dolls. The two surviving members of the original five just released a follow-up to their 33-year old record and it kicks. "The New York Dolls are, simply, the Beatles of attitude. Thirty-five years into their existence (thirty-one since they disbanded down in Florida in a haze of smack withdrawal and managerial anarchy), with three men down, they can still take your band, pretty for pretty, ugly for ugly, onstage."
Trumpets and banners, please, to welcome HIStalk's newest sponsor, SolCom! I'm happy they've chosen to support HIStalk with a banner ad anchoring the exclusive real estate that follows the articles on this page. SolCom has great workflow and document solutions for medical records and patient accounting, providing immediate value in the transition from paper to electronic workflow. I can say from first-hand experience that this kind of transformation can be dramatic in terms of records turnaround and completion, collections, collection of patient documents, and in many other areas. Here are some nice comments from Steve Thompson, SolCom's Director of Sales and Marketing: "Hey, great job in providing healthcare IT insight. I read you all the time and wore my 'I Am Mr. HIStalk' button proudly at HIMSS. We are pretty excited about being a closer part of the HIStalk community by sponsoring the banner at the bottom of the page! We have some really cool things going on here and it will be fun getting acquainted. We want to try to encourage you to cover more Canadian HIT since have several Ontario cilents and are working with the LHIN's up there as well as our very cool SolComSource services and work with our US clients!" I like their style! As I've said before, can you imagine the puzzled looks that must result when a guy like Steve goes to the bean-counters for approval to send ad money to an anonymous blogger who prattles endlessly about the New York Dolls? I'm sure they think it's some kind of "you don't know me, but my father was a wealthy Nigerian prince ... " e-mail scam. Anyway, please give SolCom your experienced look-over and expect to hear more about them in the future.
Emdeon sells its Practice Services division to Sage Software for $565 million in cash, a little less than 2x revenue. Big news, obviously, and the culmination of their exploration of strategic options from earlier this year. Sage is a large British software company mostly selling accounting and HR software, so this would appear to be their first (but maybe not their last) healthcare offering.
Integration software vendor Orion Health names John Lightfoot, formerly of Healthvision and MIT, as CTO.
A former IntelliSoft employee is suing the credentialing software company, claiming she was fired from her software trainer's job because of her breast cancer treatments.
I may have mentioned this before. CMS is working with TriZetto on a feasibility study to determine how to convert claims data to personal health records.
Some of former HHS secretary Tommy Thompson's Medicaid reform ideas appear to benefit companies who now pay him, including Medicaid HMO operator Centene, Medicaid consultant Deloitte, and chipmaker Verichip. He claims his ideas predated his business relationships.
The SNOMED CT Clinical Subset Module is released.
A report critical of NHS's Connecting for Health project appears to have been written by its former London chief (I could write a long article on why Word is terribly insecure and dangerous for document distribution - PDF format is a zillion times better.) The report contradicts a previous, positive auditor's report, stating that "The conclusion here is that the NHS would most likely have been better off without the national programme.” The project is hammered regularly for mostly political reasons, but high-profile failures plus this criticism may be its most serious blow yet.
Perot Systems bags an $80 million, ten-year outsourcing deal from Marshall University's medical school faculty practice division. The deal also includes implementation of Allscripts TouchWorks.
comments
