News 11/01/05

From IT Historian: "Nussbaum ruins another company - FCG. A very little known fact is that besides the current damage he is inflicting on the once-great FCG organization, Luther Nussbaum has been fine tuning these 'skills' his whole career, having wrecked a once great Ashton-Tate almost single-handedly in the late 1980s (the Microsoft Access team should be sending him monthly thank-you checks), as well as the once leading computer retailer chain Businessland, which played a very important role in the emergence of PCs in the business environment during the early 1980s. Unfortunately, this was long ago and many of the articles and related documents highlighting him ruining these two leading companies of their time, have never been retractively posted to the web.With untimely death of the visionary FCG founder of Jim Reep, Luther backdoored his way once again onto the company-destroying CEO stage. Search Google with his name and these two companies, or check out these articles: article 1, article 2."

OK, it looks like we need to come up with an HIStalk button design for HIMSS. Should it just be the logo and a tagline? Or something else? Folks say they want something offbeat and memorable that the cognoscenti will recognize. I need ideas! Talk to me.

Quick reminders: (a) there's a poll over to your right; (b) place your name in the spam-proof Mailing List box to get instant e-mail updates; (c) try the much cooler new search function; and (d) remember HIStalk Discussion (including the jobs page.)

Cerner connects Hospira's Plum A+ IV wireless smart pumps to its bedside barcode system. Smart pumps are definitely going to be the standard very soon, considering the incredible number of harmful errors that happen when nurses mess up IV rate settings. Alaris is still the best known of the genre, but I'd be interested to see the functionality and price point of Hospira's offering. About the only dig on the technology is that it's expensive. Over in the Alaris camp, Cardinal Health returns fire, announcing that Alaris pumps are now bar code capable, too, and offering new enhancements for PCA pausing, a rules library that hospitals can customize, and alerts and warnings that can be sent to an electronic medication administration record system.

Speaking of Cerner, a UK hospital executive finally admits that their Cerner-powered Choose and Book appointment system will be at least a year late. I'd love to have this guy's name and accent: Sir Nigel Crisp. I bet the ladies swoon, although he looks more like Bill Gates than Brad Pitt.

And speaking of NHS, their Connecting for Health will work with SNOMED and CAP to create an international standard. When we look back on how we got from paper to EMRs (we can argue about how long from now that will happen) SNOMED will be an important milestone, given the primitive nature of prior terminologies, their lack of breadth, and most of all their lack of utility and acceptance. I like the move.

Medical University of South Carolina will spend $20 million on McKesson clinicals.

Oregon Health & Science University starts a two-year, $21 million Epic implementation. They're hoping for an unremarkable 10-year payback period, mostly from transcription savings.

Former HIS guy Scott Blau (I couldn't track down which company he worked for back in the mid-1980s) is CEO of Datacap, a data entry and capture software company. Nice business, doing very well, it seems.

Transcription vendor Spheris is the fastest-growing HIT company and #16 overall, according to Inc. They'll hire 2,000 new transcriptionsts next year (doesn't say if here or India.)

MEDITECH gets a nice mention as one of few, only-in-Massachusetts companies that have grown to maturity without being snapped up by a larger firm. "Meditech also offers evidence that Clark Yennie may be onto something after all. Like Yennie's Covesoft, Meditech based its applications on its own radical database design. For hospitals, it proved a better answer than the 30-year-old database structures on which IBM and Oracle built their empire." If you're new here, I interviewed Howard Messing, MEDITECH's President and COO, about a year ago. I've always liked the company and the interview was fun.

In yet another theft of a PHI-containing hardware device from a hospital, the University of Tennessee Medical Center has a laptop stolen. In their case, the information was password protected, at least, and contained only names, birth dates, and Social Security Numbers. Memo to hospitals: either stop employees from storing PHI locally (hard to do) or implement hardware protection. This is happening a lot and will increase as devices get smaller and more common.

CIO has a piece on CPOE that's not bad. Quote from medication error expert David Classen: "What's clear is that not all medication errors are created equal. We need to find the ones that cause harm or death." I've written on this before: the urge to squash all errors equally (and therefore unsuccessfully) with blissful ignorance that most of them are of no consquence to patients, rather than concentrating on those that are.

Idiotic hospital lawsuit settlement of the week: Oregon's Providence Hospital caves in to a billing practices class action suit from The Scruggs Law Firm, whose own press release portrays them as Mother Teresa-like ministers to the poor instead of sleazebag backwater ambulance chasers who have previously and successfully gone after tobacco ($250 billion settlement, making Trent Lott's brother-in-law Dickie Scruggs a billionaire) and asbestos (he's suing insurance companies now over Hurricane Katrina as his latest hobby) From a previous interview: "Q. You want people to believe, people who are looking at you as a personal injury lawyer, a pirate in the courtrooms of America, that you really just care about the public health? The money didn't matter. Scruggs: The money mattered. It didn't matter as much as the public health. It is not often in life that you have a chance to make a mark on humanity. And we all got caught up in the opportunity that this presented to us." I'm choking up and my eyes are tearing up, mostly because I'm physically ill that our system rewards this kind of behavior instead of outlawing it. Dickie's got his gun in the back of 70 more hospital systems, so the fun is just beginning.

IDX is the subject of a "purported" class action suit that questions their selling price to GE. Sounds like a flake lawsuit (is that you, Dickie?) Does anyone really believe that IDX got the short end of GE's $1.3 billion?

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