News 10/02/04

The gloves come off in Jeanne Patterson's run for Congress. Say the Cerner first lady's commercials, her goal is: "to create jobs here, not overseas.” Says her minister opponent, referring to Cerner's outsourcing of jobs to India: “That's like me saying I believe in baptism, then turning off the water spigot at the church. There are people walking around the streets of this community right now unemployed while one of our largest employers is not only sending jobs abroad, but then turning around and making a statement about preserving jobs.” Says a Cerner spin doctor: “We're not outsourcing our work to a separate company.”

Neal Patterson's reticent-by-comparison partner, Cerner vice chair Cliff Illig, is doing OK, judging from his recent Arizona house purchase: three stories, 6,000 square feet, on a golf course, for $2.7 million. 
 
Pittsburgh's always-entrepreneurial hospital group UPMC, fresh off an estimated $255 million annual profit, calls for big vendors like Siemens and GE to partner with it in "mini-Manhattan projects," referring to the effort that led to creation of the atomic bomb. Cynics might suggest that they already have such a weapon of horrible destruction right under their noses in the form of a bloated and never-ending Cerner implementation.

Bay Pines VA Hospital is going after BearingPoint to repay some of the $117 million the company has received so far for delivery of the failed CoreFLS system. The Carnegie Mellon University auditing team brought in to assess the situation calls it "an exemplary case study in how not to do technology transition." Thank goodness for those bulldogs at the St. Petersburg Times, who uncovered the Bay Pines story and refuse to let it die.

The State of Florida isn't too happy with BearingPoint and its identical twin Accenture either, cancelling a $173 million contract with both companies after auditors questioned the idiocy behind the award. Former state CIO Kim Bahrami "signed contracts so vague that the state's potential financial exposure couldn't be adequately forecast." It paid off for her, anyway, as she now works for BearingPoint, seemingly in violation of state ethics laws prohibiting her from working for the company for two years after she left the CIO role. BearingPoint lamely claims it's OK because she doesn't work for the same office that signed the contract she approved.

The UK will prevent healthcare fraud by requiring every citizen to carry a healthcare ID card that includes fingerprint and retinal scans. Great idea, if you ask me, considering the amount of fraud we have here (although since most patients can't be made to pay for services received even when positively identified, I guess the value is limited.)

PeopleSoft clears the way for the company to be taken over by Oracle as it fires CEO Craig Conway, who fought the proposal.

Trauma centers will get financial help from the State of Texas after the Department of Public Safety implements ticket surcharges, delayed for a year after their approval due to computer problems. Driving without a license carries a $300 add-on fee, driving without insurance a $750 charge, and DUI racks up a $3,000 hit. Says the Republican congresswoman who wrote the bill after noticing a 24% reduction in traffic fatalities in New Jersey after passage of a similar law: "I have no sympathy for DWIs. They can howl all they want to."

The healthcare industry needs more informaticians to meet demand cause by the push for electronic medical records. "National initiatives like POE [physician order entry] require skilled, trained, experienced, applied people on the ground implementing these systems, and skilled, trained, knowledgeable, theoretical people building innovative systems that work. We don't have enough of either to address the growth of EMRs at the pace suggested by Dr. Brailer."

The State of Colorado, angry over an underperforming and error-prone $200 million Medicaid computer system built by Electronic Data Systems, is just one of many unhappy customers of the company, says this article. Unfathomable is that an $8.8 billion modernization contract with the Navy is a money-loser, with the red ink hitting EDS's books to the tune of $1.6 billion.

Idiotic hospital lawsuit of the week: a Texas cardiologist who claimed he was unfairly stripped of privileges is awarded $366 million, payable by a hospital and its three physician peer reviewers. He claimed defamation of character, unfair termination of his contract, and emotional distress. The hospital's internal medicine chair is personally liable for $141 million, the cath lab head $32 million, and the chief of cardiology $32 million. That's on top of the hospital's bill for $161 million. If you work for a hospital, good luck on finding docs willing to help out by doing peer reviews for you.