HIStalk Quotes
News 09/06/06
posted 09/05/2006
From Anon: "Epic is ordering former Philips employees who worked on Xtenity and were terminated by Philips when the Epic partnership was killed to not seek employment with HIT consulting firms. Originally, Epic said only competitors were off limits, not Epic customers and consultants. A month into their job searches, Judy Faulkner's personal assistant called the former Philips employees individually to advise them that Epic had changed its mind. Many of them had already made verbal agreements with agencies and some had signed offer sheets. Epic has also contacted consulting partners and told them to end contact with Philips folks. This comes after Epic had extended offers to Philips employees, but with much less pay for experienced implementers and with required relocation to Madison." If that's true, they should seek legal counsel. Courts are usually sympathetic to former employees just trying to make a living, although it will be hard to prove anything.
From Anonymous: "In your Inside Healthcare Computing editorial, you mentioned McKesson as the only dark horse that could challenge the Big Three. Every interaction I've had with them, including several of their internal groups and locations, leaves me shaking my head or cursing. They are insular and navel-gazing, yet arrogant and clueless." No argument here. But, they're selling more than the other also-rans and have big bucks behind them. I heard a good joke on why Vanderbilt's original name for Horizon Expert Orders was "WizOrders," but I'll leave that to your imagination.
From Northern Lights: "The announcement of Ken Rardin as the new CEO of Merge will happen on Wednesday, Sept. 6th, two days before their reported scheduled conference call to discuss their latest SEC filings. I still can't believe that Merge hasn't adequately checked Rardin's past work history, and I would hope that investors in the company would vet him for their own good."
From Anonymous: "Confirmed: Bob Pickton is at Cleveland Clinic Foundation, role unknown."
From Orlando Portale: "Trip report: MS-HUG. Microsoft had set aside a one-hour session to go over the Azyxxi product acquisition. The session presenter, a physician on the Microsoft team, provided a brief history and a high-level overview of the Azyxxi product. What was missing from the presentation was any discussion about a product roadmap, resource commitments, or how the product is positioned with or against their ISV partners and channels. The presenter is the new Azyxxi product 'evangelist', however, it was clear that she was not fully prepared for the range and depth of questions from the audience. The first question from the audience was, 'Does the Azyxxi product require that all data from the various legacy systems be replicated in the Azyxxi database?' What seemed like a softball question clearly caught her off guard. She struggled with understanding the question. It appeared that she may not have an informatics background." Link.
From Anonymous: "Cascade Healthcare Community is suing Cerner for $14 million, accusing them of fraud, negligence and interference with contractual relations. They claim that Cerner made false integration promises for physician EMRs and were negligent in system design." Link.
From Anonymous: "Re: tick tock e-mail: (a) there is more to life than work; (b) being present at work and actually doing productive work are two completely different things; and (c) if you need to work unreasonable hours, somebody made a mistake on the financial planning. If you cannot operate a profitable business with employees working reasonable hours, then the business is a failure, and overtime is masking that failure. The people responsible for company morale are the management. If morale is bad, it means you have poor managers. Remember that one volunteer is worth ten pressed men. If you have lazy, uncommitted staff, then what made them that way? Few people are born lazy, and most wish to feel that they are making a worthwhile contribution with their efforts. Remuneration is more than just mere money, and definitely more than a cheesy 'employee of the month' programme."
From Mark: "HIStalk is really getting its due. I remember when I used tell people about your site. Now, everyone I mention it to already knows about it." Like a stand-up comic on a bare stage with just a microphone and a stool staring into blinding spotlights, HIStalk is just a never-satisfied, one-sided blank screen from my point of view. I don't talk about HIStalk with anyone, so I'd have no idea that someone might be a reader, even if they sat across the hall from me at work, and I can't imagine meeting someone face to face who would say, "Hey, I read your stuff all the time."
From Anonymous: "Any thoughts or rumors as to who might be buying Greenway? I know they’re out raising money, but just heard it could be a sale."
From Anonymous: "The Misys Laboratory division just moved in to a brand new building on the east side of Tucson. With the rumors of potential buyers flying around daily, I guess they want to look pretty for their suitors. Here's a picture:"
Speaking of Misys, rumors are they'll get takeover bids by this week's deadline, likely from interested parties SunGard, Fiserv, and General Atlantic Partners. Shares are up in anticipation.
From Haley's Comet: "Re: Picis IPO and losses. Most of the net income losses are due to amortization of acquisitions, i.e. non-operating, non-cash charges You can't write off goodwill in the same quarter of an acquisition any more. It also appears there's been a lot of non-cash stock compensation expense, which would be normal for a company at this stage. EBIDTDA is at or near break-even in the most recent quarters and cash flow is positive. They have $20M in the bank and some long- and short-term debt. Revenue growth was 60% from '04 to '05. The business section is a good read and the customer list is impressive. Nothing other than normal in the risk factors. I will tell you that it's very impressive to see Goldman Sachs as the sole bookrunner on the deal. As far as I can remember, they've never led an HCIT IPO. Goldman does not enter sectors they don't think they can make money in and they don't take companies out they don't think are going to do something."
I got several responses to my "what do you call people working in informatics, especially nurses without specific education" quandary. Scot Silverstein (he's a doc) likes Nurse Analyst for the IT nurse, Physician Director of Clinical Systems for an MD, and Domain Champion for department-level experts. He referenced an interesting article in which the domain of Biomedical Informatics is broken out into Bioinformatics (molecular level), Imaging Informatics (tissue and organ level), Clinical Informatics (patient level), and Public Health Informatics (population level.) The Clinical Informatics area includea medical, dental, pharmacy, etc. Scot wrote an article on the whole "what is informatics?" issue several years ago, but for IT types, I'll warn you in advance that he's hostile about the traditional IT/CIO role vs. clinicians in information systems. Pete goes the other way, saying that nurses and doctors could be described by Clinical Project Manager, but equally by Meddler and Pain in the Ass. Otherwise, he thinks you're either a Super User or you ought to be IT with a traditional job description. "The reason that 'Informaticists' are so ill-defined is that they are trying to straddle two separate worlds which don't require straddling. If you want to be a Lab Tech, be a Lab Tech. If you want to monkey around with the lab system, apply for an analyst job in IS. Trying to do both is just going to lead to either job being done poorly." I think we all agree that, to start waving an Informatics title around, you ought to have both formal education (graduate level?) and work experience in a clinical discipline, business, and computer science (including technical components like programming, data structures, and taxonomy, not just how to run projects.) Feel free to jump in.
You may have noticed this article comment from Anonymous: "I have a feeling that you might like Cerner and its founders if you knew more about them. No company is perfect, but there are an awful lot of dedicated Cerner associates who stick around for the long haul. The company and its associates have great values." As I've said before, I admire Neal Patterson, despite (because of?) his shoot-from-the-lip, whatever's on his mind comments like the "tick tock" e-mail. I like his humble beginnings and bootstrapping. I admire that he risked everything with Wall Street when he hunkered the company down to write Millennium. I like most of the associates I've met, which goes all the way up to the level just below Neal (Krebs, Newman, etc.) However, being that they're big, successful, and good at marketing more than anything else, I have to rag on them occasionally (they inquired about sponsoring once and I was relieved they didn't since I'd need a new target.) Since I ran a picture above (a rare event,) it made me think of this HIStalk (see the picture.)
Listening to now: new Dream Theater, recorded live with orchestra. Prog that rocks hard. The song Octavarium is amazing.
Small-hospital HIS vendor (and HIStalk Gold Sponsor) American HealthNet has earned 2006 Gold Certified status in Microsoft's partner program, with competencies noted in ISV/Software Solutions and Data Management Solutions. Their Clarus system has passed Windows client and SQL Server certification.
A surgeon fired by New Mexico's St. Vincent Regional Medical Center is suing his former employer, claiming they broke promises made to him when he was recruited. He also alleges that other hospital surgeons committed medical malpractice, performed unnecessary surgery, and killed one patient by error. Oddly enough, he was fired by CIO Rick Crabtree, who had taken over negotiations from the CMO.
Brian Gould joins NaviMedix as SVP of Care Management Services.
Two members of transaction processor MedAvant's board quit. No reason was given in the terse announcement. The departed were wished well, but not very sincerely.
A Canadian hospital interfaces MEDITECH to Varian using BizTalk.
The British government auditor's report on Connecting for Health will be re-done after it was found to have been altered to be more positive just two months ago. Some Members of Parliament, as usual, are publicly critical of the project: "The government is convincing no one that the situation is under control. The National Programme for IT in the NHS is currently sleepwalking towards disaster. It is far behind schedule. Projected costs have spiralled. Key software systems have little chance of ever working properly. Clinical staff are losing confidence in it. Many local trusts are considering opting out of the programme altogether. These problems are a consequence of over-centralisation, over-ambition and an obsession with quick political fixes."
A cancer patient in Canada dies when her take-home chemo delivery pump was mistakenly set to give the drugs over four hours instead of four days.
Oracle adds to its stable of free software, now giving away Oracle Application Express, its browser-based easy application builder.
Medicare head Mark McClellan quits, saying he'll take a think-tank job that offers a more normal work schedule.
News, rumors, casual liasons: e-mail me. Just kidding on that last item, Mrs. HIStalk.
comments (5)
1. Milwaukee's Best left...
09/06/2006 7:23 am
Goldman is leading the Picis IPO for only one reason I can think of. Picis
CEO must be a private banking client. They would not get involved with
something so small if not. With that being said - I agree with the
assessment of the financials - and think this is a good play. The
comparison to EICU is not accurate, Picis has much stronger historicals,
client base and backlog with many more areas of growth. For anyone that
knows them, the quiet period must be killing their CEO.
2. HL7RN left...
09/06/2006 8:31 am
I find Pete's comment interesting, "Pete goes the other way, saying that
nurses and doctors could be described by Clinical Project Manager, but
equally by Meddler and Pain in the Ass." I have been the only clinician on
an Interface-building team where I had to explain medical concepts, patient
safety and privacy issues to my fellow programmers. I tried to skip
clinical practice after nursing school, opting to get a master's in MIS
instead. One of my nurse friends said, "If you don't practice nursing
first, you'll just write programs that we can't use like the rest of them
do." So I did some clinical practice before I went back into the computer
world. I may be a pain-in-the-ass, but somebody has to speak up for the
patients and the people trying to help them. It is amazing the assumptions
that programmers are willing to make about clinical workflow!
3. Mr. HIStalk left...
09/06/2006 10:23 am
Ken Rardin was named CEO of Merge Healthcare this morning. That would be
news only to those who don't read HIStalk, since it was reported here two
weeks ago, courtesy of Northern Lights. Merge also filed their Q2 report.
The stock is up 10%.
4. AAAAAA left...
09/06/2006 11:49 pm
"...Scot Silverstein (he's a doc) likes Nurse Analyst for the IT nurse,
Physician Director of Clinical Systems for an MD..."
5. wanting to Keep contributing left...
09/11/2006 8:23 pm
As a dedicated reader and healthcare worker. I was wondering if there has
ever been thought given to those of us who have many valuable years left
to give, but have acquired severe health issues that may slow us down a
bit, our brains are great but we move a little slow and have a few more
doctor visits.And in some cases we can produce large amounts of work
cushort periods of time. Seems like something we will be Facing in our
overall population maybe those in this field could address it first. A far
better approach than disability
