News 01/29/04

McKesson's pharmacy robot division gets an exclusive deal with HMA's 52 hospitals. McKesson's board also passed a policy requiring shareholder approval for executive severance payments of more than three times annual compensation. As I wrote here months ago, the policy comes a bit late since all the criminals and incompetents involved in the HBOC merger have already taken their money and run. Still, if lightning strikes McKesson again, they'll be ready.

A Wisconsin politician looking to legalize casino gambling to create jobs mentions an HIS vendor: "Not everyone can work at Epic Systems." Epic is apparently the poster child for high-tech growth there. I keep trying to find reasons not to admire them, but I'm stumped so far.

Thanks to a kindred spirit up at Vanderbilt University Medical Center's biomedical informatics department who took the time to drop a line to say he reads HIStalk and passed it along to colleagues. He liked my earlier rant, in which I said if the best McKesson could do with R&D was to write Vandy a check for its Wizorder system and rename it Horizon Expert Orders, then maybe they should get out of the business. Shameless plea: if anyone has connections to help my daughter get into Vandy or (even more importantly) to help me pay for it, let me know. Hey, you know how it is when it's your kid.

Siemens takes another brave and patriotic stand: they issue yet another press release supporting President Bush's challenge to bring healthcare IT into the information age. Maybe Siemens should replace their PR types (and that guy in the lounging-on-the-Gurney-looking-at-Soarian picture that's in all the rags) with coders who can get Soarian out the door. I know I harp endlessly on the lack of any sort of Soarian press, but I find that truly amazing. I'm checking Soarian out at HIMSS and if I see PowerPoints and promises, I'm calling it dead. If you tout the same product for two HIMSS conferences in a row without having delivered it, you should be ridiculed.

And a fun project just came to mind: I'm going to dig up all my prior year's HIMSS proceedings CD's and compare the companies that exhibited year to year. Wouldn't that be interesting? All those flaky PDA and dot-bomb companies that have come and gone could easily be discovered.

I thought it odd today in the Wal-Mart parking lot that I saw a big sign about their "vision center." Somehow I'll never be able to think of Cerner's shock-and-awe KC fantasyland without linking it to cheap Wal-Mart glasses.

Hill-Rom will sell Vocera's wireless voice-over-IP nurse communication system.

The idea that "best practices" exist in medicine is subject to a lot of bitter debate in Minnesota. That's a frustrating aspect of medicine. Just when you think it's a science, the evidence suggests it's an art that isn't subject to consistent outcomes. I was shocked when I went to pharmacy school 100 or so years ago that most of modern medicine outside of surgery and vaccinations consisted of recognizing something seen before and having a cool-sounding name for it. No cures, no definitive causes, just "hey, there's that weird heart thing again."

Important development to watch: nanotechnology. If I had $3,000 burning a hold in my pocket, I'd sign up for this week-long Stanford online program.

I don't know what happened to Buddy Hickman, who moved from West Virginia to take Albany Medical Center's CIO job in November, but it appears the job is posted in HIMSS JobMine. Maybe he froze out. So did the IT director there, apparently, since that job's posted, too.

Anybody got any good invitations for parties at HIMSS? The best I've received so far: the Sentillion blow-out that includes a private dinner within Epcot Center and a private laser show viewing with dessert on the patio. I've done that before and it was pretty fun. Also, I did read today that all of the HIMSS conference will be on the "new" side of the Orange County Convention Center. Early rumor was that it would be split among the old and new sections, which would have made for quite an invigorating walk. When the convention center ran into construction budget problems, they were considering not installating air conditioning on the very long, glass-enclosed bridge that joins the sections. Let's hope they reconsidered.

I'm looking at capital budgeting systems for hospitals. Possibilities: Mezzia and EPSi. I'll let you know more in a couple of weeks.

MEDITECH is rooting for their New England Patriots this weekend with a "Go Patriots" graphic on their Web page.

Lots of guys in suits: Eclipsys has a Chairman Emeritus, a Chairman, a President and CEO, six Regional Presidents, four Executive VPs, another President, seven Senior VPs, and six run-of-the-mill VPs. Mucho dollaro for a company not making any of it.