HIStalk Quotes
News 04/20/07
posted 04/19/2007
From The PACS Designer: "Re: pathology inside PACS. TPD notices an increase in the number of practitioners with pathology expertise who are contributing to The DICOM Workgroup 26. Bringing pathology into the PACS world will enhance the ability to view more patient information and further expand the migration of PACS to help practitioners handle cases more quickly and improve overall diagnosis outcomes. As progress is made in getting the right architecture in place to handle things such as Accession Numbers, we should see more evidence of pathology systems working inside of PACS in the near future."
From Ex-MEDITECH: "Re: Reign Over Me. I can guarantee that MEDITECH did not pay for product placement! If they will not advertise in any print media, they sure as heck will not do it on the big screen! It is still nice to see it up there, though."
From Anonymous: "Re: Connecting for Health. I have experience there. The critics are absolutely right. It is a total failure and will probably be cancelled when Blair leaves office. Such a shame. Check out Granger’s background. He’s an ERP guy. Never did a health care system before in his life. Ask yourself how many ERP guys understand clinical informatics. Then you’ll see why they are where they are."
We haven't connected with Piedmont about their HIPAA audit yet, but I do know what OIG asked them for upfront (with a 10 calendar day notice.) Some items: lots of policies and procedures (establishing and terminating system access, emergency access, timeouts, auditing systems with PHI, employee sanctions, audit logs, network perimeter monitoring, physical access, remote access, Internet access, wireless, encryption, antivirus software, and patch management). Also, these lists: PHI-containing systems with network diagrams; terminated employees and new hires; authentication and encryption technologies used; contractors with PHI access and a copy of the contract; users with access privileges; and remote users. There's more, but these are the big items.
McKesson gets an injunction against Connecticut's social services commissioner to prevent him from releasing medical necessity documents that McKesson says contain trade secrets. McKesson is a subcontractor for WellCare, which has been accused of using its own medical necessity criteria for making patient care decisions. McKesson says it owns the criteria.
Pittsburgh-based transcription outsourcer and offshorer Acusis acquires competitor Digital Records Corporation.
My editorial this week in Inside Healthcare Computing: "Is Healthcare IT Really 'The Right Thing to Do?' Prove it."
St. Jude Medical gets FDA approval of its Internet-based repository for patient monitors. Kudos to them for highlighting their successful completion of IHE standards testing.
Hear that clapping sound? It's SureScripts giving themselves a round of applause. The company "applauds" AHRQ, CMS, and HHS for e-prescribing tests. Hmmm ... I suppose it would be hard to characterize SureScripts as indifferent to e-prescribing, wouldn't it? It's like they wanted to be interviewed but no one asked, so they just pretended they were via a self-serving press release. Those wacky marketeers.
WebMD Health fires CTO David Gang.
OK, I'm doing my share here by writing just about every day now (and in being wise enough to seek help and thus give Inga a platform.) Your mission, should you choose to accept it: send me good information, rumors, advice for healthcare IT types, guest articles, etc.
Inga's Update
Springfield Service Corporation (SSC), the 10th largest player in the US medical billing and revenue-cycle management market, is acquired by SPi, one of the world’s largest business outsourcing organizations. SPi, a subsidiary of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company, paid $44 million for the Illinois-based SSC. Seems SPi was interested in a expanding the $4.2 billion in US medical billing that already is being outsourced offshore. SSC claims to annually bill over $1.3 billion in physician charges.
Interoperability vendor dbMotion appoints Joel Diamond, MD as Chief Medical Officer. He's a practicing doc in Pittsburgh and former UPMC CMIO. He's also done EMR/CPR consulting for Misys. He's also a self-proclaimed “huge HIStalk fan” and told us about UPMC's project. “The UPMC interoperability project is impressive. I believe that it will be the industry model for data availability, and integrated work-flow, which will ultimately compliment the incredible accomplishments that UPMC has attained with their eRecord work thus far." His practice partner, Bill Fera, MD, is UPMC’s new Director of Medical IT Software and Solutions.
Meditech Magic to C/S
I spoke with Joe Devenuto at Norton Healthcare (KY) about their transition from the Meditech Magic product to the Client Server version. Joe was open about the experience, even though he wasn’t familiar with me or even HIStalk (he is now!) We discussed whys and hows of the migration process and his overall impressions of the two products.
Norton’s primary motivation for moving to Client Server was their desire to have all their various hospitals on a single system with a single medical record. Norton had acquired a number of hospitals over the years, including some that were using the Columbia HCA version of Magic.The project began in June 2003 with two non-Meditech hospitals. For those implementations, they relied primarily on Meditech. Their other hospitals were moved over in 2005. For the second wave of installations, Norton was fairly self-sufficient and didn’t require much help.
“We are very happy with the Client Server product and it works very well, “ Joe says. He did indicate, however, that Magic is a more mature product and thus more stable. “In general the support on the two products has been similar.” Joe’s impression is that because Magic is proprietary and has been around for 20 years, Meditech seems to have an easier time addressing issues. “With Client Server, Meditech has more dependency on other organizations, such as Microsoft, for their embedded code.” Diagnosis of issues related to print drivers, for example, is a bit more complicated and not as controlled as it was with Magic.
When asked about the major advantages/disadvantages between the products, Joe first pointed to the overall navigation of the products. “Navigation in Client Server is more contemporary “ than the Magic version, though Joe believes Meditech may be addressing some Magic enhancements in that area. Users have indicated that some aspects of Magic are still better, perhaps because of product maturity and because it has been “beat on more.” Joe could not immediately name any one feature that was superior in Magic, though he noted that initially some users expressed displeasure with the functionality differences between a menu-driven system and a Windows application.
“Initially, some users had issues with moving from a menu-driven navigation to a Windows world, says Joe. “One aspect of Magic that users particularly missed was the ability to ‘pre-type’ in Magic – something that can’t be done in the Windows world. We had to have some behavior adaptation.”
When asked if he believed Meditech would in time phase out the Magic product, Joe commented that Meditech is quick to remind people they have many old versions that have been supported “forever.” However, Joe’s opinion is that eventually Meditech will need to focus on development for a single product. “It can’t be efficient from a resource perspective. At some point they will have to commit to a single product.”
Joe indicated that there currently is no data conversion when migrating from Magic to Client Server. Norton was able to move over some data (pathology and blood bank information, for example) but in general, none of their clinical data was transferred. In order to access old and new records, they initially kept Magic and allowed users to link over to it as needed. Norton developed a system that captures the old Magic data and places it into a Web-based application with a SQL. Users are then able to run standardized reports to retrieve old records. In time, Norton hopes to soon discontinue support of the Magic product entirely.
While Norton was able to successfully address the issues associated with an old and new medical record, Joe did point out that “Meditech will have to develop a way to convert data if they want to move folks off the old system.”
Joe noted that they are utilizing the product more fully than they had their Magic product, partly due to good product functionality and partly because users are more open to automation. Finally, Joe wanted to make sure it was understood that they are pleased with the outcome of the transition and that it successfully enabled them to achieve the primary goal of one single system with a single patient record.
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comments (2)
1. p_anon left...
04/20/2007 8:49 am
I would just like to point out two things re: MEDITECH Client/Server's
shortcomings:
2. Art_Vandelay left...
04/21/2007 6:56 am
For conversion, why not write a HL7 interface and start enumerating through
all the "rows" to send the information, at least as a long
transcription-like document, to the new record? Is the application that
unfriendly that you cannot at least do that for Lab, radiology, pathology,
and transcribed documents?
