News 12/17/03

I took a slightly more in-depth look at Softricity's SoftGrid application that "transfers Windows software into centrally managed on-demand network services." It still sounds interesting and the stories of reduced time applying Cerner OCDs are impressive. The company also mentioned an idea that's intriguing: serving up MS Office applications on-demand rather than installing them permanently on desktops and tying up licenses.

We had played around with the idea of using LanDesk to install and deinstall Office components as users need them, but the turnaround time probably wouldn't be acceptable. Today's Computerworld had an article on deploying Office on demand by using various thin client software. One customer reduced their concurrent Office licenses by 50%. Definitely worth a look if Microsoft doesn't prohibit the practice.

We're looking at Office 2003 to see if it's worth the upgrade. What we like: SharePoint, enhanced Exchange, InfoPath, and the XML capabilities. We're thinking we could avoid hand coding Intranet web forms, although we're a ColdFusion shop rather than .ASP. Anybody else considering Office 2003 for a large-scale deployment?

Canada's Calgary Health Region will migrate from Eclipsys E7000 to SunriseXA in its four hospitals. Cincinnati Children's chooses Sentillion's Vergence for single sign-on. Maine Medical Center buys SAS's Strategic Performance Management for balanced scorecard reporting.

Institute for Safe Medication Practices issues its Cheers awards for companies and individuals who set a standard of excellence in the prevention of medication misadventure. The only companies even vaguely related to HIT are Alaris and Baxter for their infusion pumps. Hmmm, no CPOE vendors?

Tempus Software is doing well with migrations to its new scheduling product, TempusOne. Good product, good company. We've been very happy with both at our place.

IBM is sending nearly 5,000 programming jobs to India and China, one of the biggest such migrations yet. Mama, don't let your kids grow up to be coders.

Tampa's St. Joseph's Hospital is sued by the family of a patient who died during robot-assisted surgery. The surgeon cut the patient's abdominal aorta while doing kidney surgery with the da Vinci robot. State records suggest that the surgeon already paid $1 million to the patient's family. The patient's wife says the surgeons were inexperienced with the robot and the hospital shouldn't have let them use it.

The former nurse who says he killed up to 40 patients had been fired by at least two hospitals and was under investigation. Still, he kept landing hospital jobs, bouncing from one to the next and apparently leaving murdered patients in his wake. Some blame hospital policies that prohibit giving bad references to avoid lawsuits.

Your tax dollars at work: this site offers a report telling drug companies how to take advantage of Medicaid when talking to doctors. It happily says Medicaid drug costs will rise from $14 to $40 billion by 2007, great news for drug companies but less so for us taxpayers. Some of the helpful tips for the sales reps: focus on patient fears rather than science and convince patients that more prescriptions mean fewer ED visits.

It's a bit technical, but interesting. Telewall from SecureLogix is a telephone system firewall that secures your telephone network from hacking and unauthorized access. It eliminates unauthorized modem calls, prevents Internet connections that bypass your IP firewall, reports wasteful and fraudulent calls, prevents war dialing, blocks voice calls on fax lines, enforces tie-line usage to reduce LD costs, and has rule-based logic for running your telephone system. I like the security aspect a lot, but even more impressive is that its payback period can be ridiculously short just from reducing unauthorized long distance calling alone. I'm digging deeper and will report more later. In the meantime, they have modem-finding software available for download from their site, great if you're checking your telephone system for vulnerabilities.

I very much appreciate the readers of HIStalk.com who've followed up with vendors I mentioned here and gave HIStalk.com as the source. I got a nice note from Ensure Technologies for simply mentioning that a hospital signed up for its XyLoc security product. I call 'em like I see 'em, so many of my comments are less than complimentary. But, in this case, that one little neutral mention resulted in a few of you contacting Ensure for more information and telling them their interest came from HIStalk.com's writeup. I'm sure I make enough vendors mad, so making a few of them happy is a good thing.

With the holidays coming up, I'm going to give some thought to where HIStalk.com goes from here. It's a lot of fun (and a lot of work) and I need a strategic plan since I'm compulsive that way. Ideas I'm considering so far: adding a discussion board for your comments, trying (again) to get some of you to contribute to broaden the information base, interviewing interesting folks, adding content beyond news summaries and editorials, and (gasp!) accepting limited advertising. Your readership is gratifying: just a few weeks ago I was boasting of 3,000 page reads per month and that number is now almost 5,000. Am I wasting my time? Please do me a favor, just this once, and you can go back to being anonymous lurkers: give me some ideas on what you'd like to see.