News 12/20/05

Healthcare kiosk maker Galvanon is sold to NCR, presumably making a nice chunk of change for the company's founders. Some of whom I knew and had the opportunity to work with, I say with embarrassment since I'm a poor scribe and I'm sure they're shooting champagne corks at each other and planning their next lucrative business.

Unibased Systems Architecture takes the #1 product of 2005 in KLAS, with its RMS product beating Epic as the highest ranked application. Best consulting firm: ACS (Superior Consultant.) Worst in KLAS of those with valid sample size: Accenture consulting, Siemens LCR CDR, Siemens Invision patient accounting, Eclipsys decision support, Agfa dictation, Cernert ED, Cerner Scheduling, PeopleSoft ERP, GE Centricity Lab, Siemens PACS, Mediware pharmacy, Cerner radiology, Mediware surgery, Siemens large group practice management, and Cerner large group EMR. Cerner got in trouble for distorting their KLAS scores at the last HIMSS conference, so it appears their work is cut out for them now that they've bottomed out several KLAS categories since. If you believe in the KLAS rankings, that is.

CIO Field Report

• Hospital type: Community, Single Hospital, 200-400 Beds, East.
• IT Operating Budget: $2-5 million.
• Most important IT projects now underway: Citrix / thin client Deployment, CPOE, patient monitor interfaces, staff scheduling.
• Systems you’ll be buying within the next three years: EDIS, data repository, ECG management, anesthesia documentation, scanning/archiving.
• Best application vendors: MEDITECH, DR Systems, Philips Medical.
• Worst application vendors:Kronos, Kronos, Kronos.
• Hottest IT skills in the market:Network and wireless security, VoIP design and implementation, anything web.
• Hottest people in the  HIT industry: Other than me?? :)
• Trends really heating up:IT and clinical engineering convergence, wireless and mobility, integration of clinical equipment into and with LAN and HIS, PACS in even small hospitals.
  
  

IDX announces that 80% of its shareholders approved the company's acquisition by GE.

Howard University signs with Perot Systems to manage the IT and collection functions of its physician practice plan.

The former Halstead Hospital (Kansas) is sold on eBay.

Transcription vendor Spheris buys transcription software vendor Vianeta, who announced their XML-powered Digital Patient Folder at last year's AHIMA.

First Consulting Group announces a restructuring, along with the usual layoffs. Condolences to those affected, but at least there are plenty of jobs out there.

An unusual event: the stupid win over the dishonest: Cardinal Health settles with Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital, giving them back nearly $9 million. The hospital's no-bid supply deal with Cardinal was supposed to save them big money, but outside auditors found it was costing them millions more than pre-Cardinal. One of Cardinal's employees was arrested for billing the hospital for strippers.

Listening to right now: The Neptunes, excellent surf rock.

Idiotic hospital lawsuit of the week: hospitals that unknowingly received illegally harvested bone marrow from tissue companies are being sued by transplant recipients who show no signs of problems after surgeries last year. "They did not test positive for diseases, but they fear that because of long incubation periods for HIV and other potentially deadly diseases, they could test positive for an illness in the future."

Healthcare will consume 21% of the US GDP in the next 15 years as global healthcare spending triples, according to a new study . Still, 90% of US healthcare leaders don't believe that a national healthcare system is the best solution.

Mandatory hospital medical error reporting takes effect in Indiana on January 1. The hospital records will be made public.

CIO Salary of the Week: Detroit Medical Center, Detroit, MI: $610,165. HIStalk CIO Enrichment Index: 209. With an asterisk, though, since the hospital's most recent report is from 2003, the year they fired CIO Don Ragan for spending $1 billion over 10 years to outsource IT to CareTech Solutions, whose board he served on.

The merger of two Providence health organizations in Oregon is calling attention to possible executive pay raises, particularly since the CEO of one of them already made $6.6 million last year. With an asterisk too, since a big chunk of this was a quite generous retirement payout, which is why rich hospital nonprofits always fight releasing anything except salaries.

Guess who makes the most money in the University of California system? Yep, jocks and docs.

The Gainesville, FL newspaper takes a slightly sympathetic angle on local son Mickey Singer and the Medical Manager corporate fraud investigation. "Singer, 58, is an intensely private man who since the 1970s has followed the meditation teachings and spiritual practices of Paramahansa Yogananda. In 1975, he and other followers built a meditation hall and began a nonprofit organization called Temple of the Universe outside Alachua. Singer, who holds a bachelor's degree in business and a master's in economics from the University of Florida, is a recognized supporter of the arts. His support includes the donation of a painting by Claude Monet to the Harn Museum of Art. Singer developed a software to help physicians manage their billing and patients records that is now used in doctors' offices across the country. He called his start-up company Medical Manager. In its campus-like setting nearby, Medical Manager grew from a staff of three in 1981 to over 150 when the company went public in 1997. 'The product took over the market and now has the largest installed base of any practice management software in the country,' Singer related to The Sun in 1999. When the company went public, Singer received $35 million plus 6.37 million shares of common stock in Medical Manager, according to published reports." Think I was kidding
when I said the Medical Manager developers live in a commune? Check their Yellow Pages listing, which Temple of the Universe placed under the Medical Records Management, Computer & Equipment Dealers, and Computer Software categories. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

The UK's NHS payroll system has been underpaying employees for four months, with some of them now threatening lawsuits. "It has been going on for months and now in the run-up to Christmas it is absolute chaos. Staff have been in tears on several occasions. Most normal people look forward to payday, but we dread it. When you get your wage packet, you just never know what's going to be in it."

A UK-based healthcare IT blog I hadn't run across until an HIStalk link from there: Future Health IT.

Are university researchers really just chummy shills pocketing drug company and device manufacturer cash to render favorable opinions? In the crosshairs: Cleveland Clinic."Last January, The New York Times discussed a number of companies in which the Clinic had a financial interest (including AtriCure, a heart device manufacturer). On December 16, The Wall Street Journalran a front-page article about the Cleveland Clinic’s financial ties with Cardio Vention, the maker of a heart-lung machine blamed for the death of a Clinic patient in May 2002. Press releases issued by the Clinic through Dr. Cosgrove that praised the device in April 2002, failed to disclose that Dr. Cosgrove and the Clinic had a financial interest in the company that ceased operations in 2003. Several Clinic surgeons, including Dr. Cosgrove, were consultants to Cardio Vention and received stock options in the company. Dr. Cosgrove also has financial interests in a number of other companies doing research at the Cleveland Clinic as a result of his investment in Canaan Partners, a venture capital fund that also backed Cardio Vention."

Whatever you've got: e-mail me. If you don't read here before Christmas (rest assured, I'll be writing right through the holidays as usual) then have a wonderful Christmas and New Year's. Coming up shortly: my Top Ten Stories of 2005, the start of the 2006 HISsie Awards, and details on where you can get your HIStalk buttons at HIMSS.