News 12/14/04

Cerner ... or Neal Patterson, anyway ... was to have seen the results today of the RAND study they sponsored on the potential benefit of IT in healthcare. They were to meet with CMS director Mark McCellan. MSNBC quotes: "Welcome to the quirky world of electronic medical records (EMRs), where everyone thinks technology is a great idea, but few people actually want to use it ... adoption of IT in the health care industry is so slow that even die-hard capitalists ...are looking to the federal government to pressure the foot-dragging industry." Now the the election's over, the government seems a lot less interested, at least if interest is gauged by where the money goes.

Cardinal Health, drug wholesaler and IT company (Pyxis, Alaris) will cut 4,200 jobs (7% of its staff) and close 25 locations to save money. The company also reduced its 2005 earnings estimates.

Matching Eclipsys, Misys creates a new Chief Marketing Officer role. Keith Sturges, former CEO of the Misys homecare division, takes the job. Sturges wasted no time in spewing marketing cliches in the press release announcing his new job: "Our current market penetration is high ... We now need to strengthen our overall brand awareness to reflect the size of our footprint ... so our name is top of mind when considering healthcare IT solutions."

SoftMed Systems announces agreements for its document scanning and imaging solutions with Ohio State UMC, Hackensack UMC, and Summa Health System.

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What's the biggest banner over on the MEDITECH Industry Issues and News page? A nice graphic link to "HIStalk's Exclusive Interview with President and COO Howard Messing." Cool of them to mention it and to highlight the "exclusive" part. If you know someone else important and interesting I can interview (one of those "six degrees of separation" things,) let me know.

Sisters of St. Francis will implement McKesson's Horizon Emergency Care in its 12 hospitals in Indiana and Illinois.

Long-time HIT vendor guy Lew Altman joins Axolotl as SVP of sales and marketing.

Hospital CIO Salary of the Week: Baptist Health System, Birmingham, AL, $264,000.

Respected healthcare quality group IHI, led by Don Berwick, rolls out its "100K Lives" campaign at its annual meeting, which calls for saving 100,000 lives a year through six simple, inexpensive, highly effective changes. They are: deploying rapid response teams for patients who are crashing; standardizing care for MI; preventing medication errors by reconciling the variety of meds lists kept; reducing infections from central lines; reducing post-op infections by better selection and timing of antibiotics; and reducing ventilator-associated pneumonia. Noticeably absent from the list: IT, particularly CPOE. The spin doctors are already trying to convince everyone to read between the lines and see the obvious need for lots of expensive technology, although the intentional use of the words "simple" and "inexpensive" would seem to contradict that. You know my stance on all the things hospitals could be doing instead of chasing the rainbow of CPOE, so as you would expect, I think the 100K Lives program is brilliant.

Could biomedical systems be a terrorist's target? "A terrorist or a madman could access software-driven medical devices and injure many people and perhaps kill some victims. Medical device manufacturers have been somewhat carefree about publishing master passwords for devices or shipping all devices with the same master password."

BPM software maker Hyperion sues competitor OutlookSoft for patent infringement.

Australia's IBA Health gives up its quest for Health Communication Network when its competitor Primary Health Care outbids it.

I told you before that Oracle would end up with PeopleSoft, so maybe this isn't news. You have to wonder where that leaves Lawson. Rumor is that Lawson might have been looking at either SIS or Picis at some point, which might make more sense than ORCL-PSFT, which will be an integration and customer satisfaction nightmare. Rumors have Microsoft making a play for Lawson since their SAP talks fell through. I think it's safe to say that Microsoft is highly likely to make an acquisition with heavy healthcare impact, although whether its Eclipsys, Lawson, or someone else remains to be seen. With their cash and a newfound interest in getting into applications, anything could happen.

Idiotic lawsuit of the week (somewhat hospital related): the town of Greenwich, CT settles for $6 million with a 42-year-old urologist who was injured while sledding on city property. He ran his sled into a ditch, suffered injuries that have apparently completely healed, and sued the town for not filling in the ditch. The town settled for $10 million just three months ago in a similar case, in which another doctor received permanent injuries in a bicycling accident.