News 12/19/03

Just in case you're taking next week off and won't be reading (whaaaaat?) then I hope you have a wonderful Christmas or whatever it is you're celebrating. And for the folks who work for me, thank you. You are the best in the business and I'm thankful every day for the privilege of working with such a talented group.

HIStalk.com reader Susan asked me about Mobiam Solutions, winner of a big Department of Defense contract for enterprise scheduling and registration. Their website has little detail. Firstserve is their radiology and scheduling product name, but they appear to use it interchangeably as their company name. They exhibited at RSNA - did anyone learn more?

I mentioned AHRQ's big grants earlier, but you might want to take another look. They seem to be aimed squarely at community hospitals instead of the usual universities and companies. The third RFA is the biggie: grants can be as big as $500,000 per year for three years ($1.5 million total per grant.) The grant's topic is proving the value of healthcare IT, with an emphasis on patient safety. If you're a big vendor with clinically related products, you could probably help a customer put together a nice proposal and win yourself some PR to boot.

KLAS announces its year-end Top 20. As usual, Epic grabs three of the top four spots. Most of the Top 20 overall are departmental applications, but a few are broad (Keane Patcom, Eclipsys Sunrise Clinical Manager, and IDX Flowcast.) Of enterprise clinicals, it's interesting that Quadramed's would have been #1 had the sample size been sufficient. I've seen the product and like it. At the bottom of their KLAS categories are Siemens and Kodak PACS, Meditech clinicals, IDX radiology, Cerner surgery, Siemens Invision ADT, and SCC lab. It should be noted that some categories have lower-rated products that didn't have adequate sample size. Also, the spread was pretty tight in some groups so that attempted rankings are probably not all that relevant. And as usual, I would caution that the KLAS methodology is certainly not infallible or even consistent, as products bounce up and down in the rankings each time new surveys are done.

Rumor is that a couple of high-ranking development execs got the axe this week from a major HIS vendor over system performance problems. Guess this won't be a real happy Christmas for them and their families. Condolences.

Interesting doctor. He has a private autopsy business, moonlights as an expert witness, and cranks out 72 Viagra prescriptions an hour for Internet patients. Oh, and he's just lost his medical license for that last little item.

Revenue warnings by UK software vendor Misys are a "complete disaster," says a financial analyst watching the stock drop 20% yesterday. Their healthcare business did OK but not as well as expected, but 2/3 of their business is in the financial sector anyway. In case you've forgotten, Misys has snapped up companies such as Medic and Sunquest, as well as the old Patient1 inpatient clinical product. Overall, I'd judge them as one of the better HIS vendors but their limited product line makes it easier to excel and harder to sell.

IBM will sell healthcare software, folks are saying.

Citrix is buying pop-up ad king Expertcity Inc., better known as the GotoMyPC company, for $225 million. 

Hospital IT outsourcer PHNS was always in the news a few months ago. It's been quiet there lately, judging from a lack of news mentions on their website and otherwise. Their potential home run of a deal with Adventist Health Sytem fell through earlier this year.

Speaking of Adventist, Palmetto Health's losing its CIO Tim Thompson to them. He'll replace Hal Lexow. Adventist also had shakeups at their Florida Hospital division this week with some IT demotions, resignations, and reassignments.

My Microsoft expert confirmed that Office licenses do indeed permit on-demand deployment. Those software tools I talked about this week should be more interesting, then. Why not slash your Office costs by centrally managing seldom-used apps such as PowerPoint and Access, in effect moving them to a concurrent licensing structure instead of per desktop load?

Interesting twist on the VA's Vista software. Open source evangelists are offering it to hospitals in developing countries as a free alternative to expensive HISs. It's won a lot of acclaim in this country for reducing medical errors and is available free to all takers.

Tom Aikens resigned as McKesson Series VP today. He reportedly was unhappy a few months ago with my pronouncement that his division was in a plainly obvious death spiral. Maybe he didn't want to get trampled at the door by the few underlings left.
 
A nice writeup on El Camino Hospital's use of Pyxis automated dispensing to reduce medication errors. They do a lot of interesting stuff out there.

I've talked about the danger of IV pumps and why "smart pumps" from Alaris and other companies are important. Here's an example from yesterday: a nurse killed one patient and seriously injured another at Virginia's Mary Washington Hospital when she misprogrammed an IV pump. It happened this summer but was just announced after a newspaper's probe. The patients received 50 times the ordered narcotic dose. And at Johns Hopkins, a two year old died from an IV drug overdose this month.

Pittsburgh's UPMC is accused in two lawsuits of falsifying Pap smear results.

Vendors always want to know what are the hot trends and problems in hospitals. My list:

1. Implementation of all those clinical systems and CPOE projects hospitals got shamed into buying.
2. Getting serious about information systems security.
3. Having IT and CIOs evaluated more critically than ever for the business value of their efforts and the success of their initiatives.
4. Wasting a lot of time addressing Microsoft security flaws, viruses, biomedical equipment security, and desktop management.
5. Patient safety, particularly barcoding.
6. PACS and related products such as brokers, RIS, and digital modalities. PACS and HIS vendors are racing to get into each other's business.
7. Network storage and data archiving.