In this series, we are featuring some of the thousands of vendors who will be participating in the HIMSS15 conference and trade show. Through it, we hope to offer readers a closer look at some of the solution providers who will either be in attendance – with a booth showcasing and displaying key products and offerings – or that will have a presence of some kind at the show – key executives in attendance or presenting, for example.
Hopefully this series will give you a bit more useful information about the companies that help make this event, and the industry as a whole, so exciting.
Elevator Pitch
AirStrip enables transformational and lasting improvements in healthcare delivery by creating innovative technology for caregivers to collaborate and care for their patients. AirStrip provides a complete, vendor and data source-agnostic, enterprise-wide mobile interoperability platform and application that advance care collaboration and serves as a catalyst for health system innovation. With deep clinical expertise and strong roots in mobile technology and data integration, AirStrip is empowering leading health systems globally as the industry evolves at a rapid pace.
Founder’s Story
Dr. Cameron Powell and Trey Moore are innovators in the field of mobile patient monitoring, having developed a technology platform and applications that address the many challenges facing modern healthcare. The two initially met in their Texas church’s parking lot, which led to the creation of AirStrip with co-founder Gene Powell more than a decade ago. Moore boasts an extensive background that includes application development, team leadership and building scalable business applications for both the desktop and handheld platforms, with a focus on creating innovative and compelling user interfaces. Dr. Powell, an obstetrician by training, stopped practicing in 2008 to devote himself full-time to AirStrip. Both remain active members of the AirStrip leadership team, with Dr. Powell serving as chief medical officer and Moore the chief technical officer. Through AirStrip, Dr. Cameron Powell and Trey Moore have delivered on their vision of making the complexities of healthcare technology simpler to navigate than ever before, making patient data accessible regardless of time or location and enabling faster and more informed care decisions, which can lead to improved patient outcomes.
Market Opportunity
Healthcare is changing, growing in complexity like never before. New clinical challenges, new regulations, new financial pressures and new business models. AirStrip supports healthcare providers in meeting those challenges by using the power of interoperable mobility, erasing the boundaries that separate clinicians from each other and from their patients. AirStrip ONE can empower clinicians to make informed patient care decisions instantly—whenever they need to, wherever they are. That changes everything: for physicians, for patients, and for healthcare organizations. AirStrip puts the power to transform care in your hands.
In this series, we are featuring some of the thousands of vendors who will be participating in the HIMSS15 conference and trade show. Through it, we hope to offer readers a closer look at some of the solution providers who will either be in attendance – with a booth showcasing and displaying key products and offerings – or that will have a presence of some kind at the show – key executives in attendance or presenting, for example.
Hopefully this series will give you a bit more useful information about the companies that help make this event, and the industry as a whole, so exciting.
Elevator Pitch
Wolters Kluwer’s Clinical Solutions provides integrated and comprehensive solutions in clinical decision support, drug information, patient surveillance, disease management and intuitive documentation, terminology and coding solutions at the point of care. Serving more than 150 countries worldwide, clinicians rely on Wolters Kluwer’s market leading information-enabled tools and software solutions throughout their professional careers from training to research to practice. Our offerings bridge multiple care settings, including hospitals, health systems, ambulatory surgery centers, physicians’ offices and retail pharmacies, and are integrated via common processes, systems and highly motivated and experienced people.
Market Opportunity & Problems Solved
Physicians struggle with the growing amount of data pouring into clinical systems and must often act upon more information than any one person can handle. In addition to EHRs, clinicians must make sense of information from multiple, disparate systems, including labs, pharmacies and others. The first solution to emerge from Wolters Kluwer’s Innovation Lab is POC Advisor, a comprehensive platform that aggregates, normalizes and codes patient data and runs it against clinical scenarios to deliver actionable, evidence-based advice at the point of care. The first application of POC Advisor aims to reduce the mortality and morbidity of sepsis (septicemia), a disease which claims an estimated 750,000 lives in the U.S. alone and costs hospitals $20 billion annually, making it the most expensive condition in the country.
A significant contributor to the negative outcomes involving sepsis – often the result of delayed or improper diagnosis that can rapidly lead to a cascade of events culminating in organ failure and death – is the siloing of crucial data in disparate clinical information systems. The inability of physicians to access and process the entirety of a patient’s data, forces them to make critical decision based on fragmented evidence. By utilizing a patient’s complete information, POC Advisor alerts care provides to potentially septic patients allowing clinicians to begin treatment long before the condition becomes life threatening.
In addition to the Sepsis Module, the Innovation Lab has already started work on applying POC Advisor to MEWS (Modified Early Warning Score) and future applications are expected to include heart disease, pneumonia, diabetes, CLABSI (central line associated bloodstream infection) and CAUTI (catheter associated urinary tract infection). Leveraging health IT to disseminate patient-specific, actionable, clinical knowledge across the care continuum results in a higher quality of treatment and more complete care. Ultimately, POC Advisor exemplifies Wolters Kluwer Health’s goal of providing an integrated suite of services designed to improve triple aim initiatives.
In this series, we are featuring some of the thousands of vendors who will be participating in the HIMSS15 conference and trade show. Through it, we hope to offer readers a closer look at some of the solution providers who will either be in attendance – with a booth showcasing and displaying key products and offerings – or that will have a presence of some kind at the show – key executives in attendance or presenting, for example.
Hopefully this series will give you a bit more useful information about the companies that help make this event, and the industry as a whole, so exciting.
Elevator Pitch
Forward Health Group provides data and analytics services through PopulationManager, a web-based engine that leverages an organization’s existing technology and data from any source — EHR, claims, labs and more — to identify gaps in care for patient populations critical to practice and quality improvement teams. Any data. Any EHR. Any vendor. Any format. Even the really messy stuff.
About Statement
Forward Health Group was founded in 2009 and has since become the go-to health data and analytics partner for leading health care providers and organizations including The Guideline Advantage, an alliance of the American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association. Large integrated systems and small, high-performing specialty clinics use Forward Health Group’s PopulationManager to identify and assess risk and drive meaningful, measurable improvements in their patient populations.
Founder’s Story
Michael Barbouche is a mathematician trained in health services with more than 20 years experience slogging through messy disparate data of all sorts. In 2004, Michael was tapped to help build a system to collect and analyze patient data for the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ), an ongoing initiative that publicly reports on healthcare quality and affordability in the state, based on information shared by healthcare providers, insurers, and other stakeholders. Add his wife, a frustrated internist at a major health system who couldn’t get an accurate patient list to work from, and the rest is history.
Market Opportunity
The healthcare industry is moving from a fee-based model to value-based health care, which requires metrics on managing the health of populations. Population health management only works if the data is accurate and trusted by care teams.
Services and Products Offered
Forward Health Group enables health care teams and systems to drive outcomes by giving them the tools to:
Evaluate individual patients
Identify the most at-risk patients
Determine outlier patients
Compare physician performance
Create action lists so care teams work from the same place
Analyze system and clinic performance
Measure system performance versus incentives
Problem Solved
Unlocking and giving access to data that care teams can trust.
The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI), the nation’s leading nonprofit authority on the use of health IT to create efficiencies in healthcare information exchange, announced the release of its findings from its February 2015 ICD-10 Industry Readiness Survey. In its March 31 letter to the HHS Secretary, WEDI reported concern with the current level of industry preparedness noting that many organizations did not take full advantage of the additional time afforded by the one-year delay.
“Unless all industry segments take the initiative to make a dedicated effort and move forward with their implementation work, there will be significant disruption on Oct. 1, 2015,” said Devin Jopp, Ed.D, president and CEO of WEDI.
Highlights from the latest survey findings include:
Compliance date uncertainty: Uncertainty around further delays was listed as a primary obstacle to implementation, appearing on more than 50 percent of all responses for vendors, health plans and providers.
Health plan testing: More than 50 percent of health plans have begun external testing, and of these, a few have completed testing. This is a slight improvement from the prior survey.
Vendor product availability: About 60 percent indicated their vendor products were available or they had started customer testing. This is a slight decrease from about two-thirds in the August 2014 survey. However, the number that responded ‘unknown’ decreased from one eighth to just a handful.
Provider testing: Only 25 percent of provider respondents had begun external testing and only a few others had completed this step. This is actually a decrease from the about 35 percent of provider respondents that had begun external testing in the August 2014 survey.
Leading into HIMSS15, TEKsystems, a provider of IT staffing solutions, IT talent management expertise and IT services, highlights results that explore the current state of IT operations at healthcare organizations. The findings identify key objectives and challenges for healthcare IT teams, the skills most needed to meet those demands, as well as expectations for spending and confidence. The data is gleaned from information captured within TEKsystems’ 2013–2015 annual IT forecasts as reported by IT leaders (CIOs, IT VPs, IT directors, IT hiring managers) at healthcare organizations.
Key findings from the data include:
Expectations for IT Budget Growth Decrease in 2015; Yet Confidence Continues to Increase
Fifty-one percent of respondents expect their organization’s healthcare IT budget to increase in 2015, down from 68 percent that said the same entering 2014, and returning to levels seen entering 2013 (52 percent). Thirty-eight percent expect IT budgets to stay the same, a significant increase over 2014 (23 percent) and similar to levels of 2013 (41 percent).
Sixty-four percent are confident in their IT department’s ability to satisfy business demands in 2015, an increase over the 59 and 58 percent that felt confident heading into 2014 and 2013, respectively. Ten percent indicated they are unconfident in 2015, the same percentage as 2014 and down from 2013 (13 percent).
TEKsystems’ Take: Expectations for budget increases began to normalize last year. Following the ICD-10 extension by Congress, IT leaders felt less pressure to seek additional funding to meet those deadlines. Confidence has continued to grow even as budget increases have leveled out, now that organizations have core personnel in place or have developed other plans, such as outsourcing, to address workload concerns.
IT Support Aligns with Business Challenges; Focus Is on Improving Operations and Efficiency
Organizational Challenge
2014 Rank
2015 Rank (% of IT leaders)
Operational issues
2
1 (81%)
Risk management
1
2 (79%)
Revenue
3
3 (67%)
Workforce management
4
4 (59%)
Customer attraction, retention and satisfaction
5
5 (22%)
Over the last three years, operationally focused areas (e.g., improving efficiency, reducing costs, improving existing IT applications and infrastructure, and managing risk) have all been cited within the top five business objectives that most need IT support.
Business Objective
2015 Rank (% of IT leaders)
Improving efficiency
1 (49%)
Reducing costs
2 (42%)
Improving existing IT applications and infrastructure
3 (37%)
Managing risk
4 (34%)
Delivering operational results
5 (29%)
TEKsystems’ Take: Now that healthcare organizations have identified the biggest challenges facing them in 2015, they are working to align IT support priorities to address those challenges. They have laid the foundations for their large IT initiatives and must shift focus to ensure that they are implementing new projects and establishing best practices in a way that allows them to make the most of existing investments. Increasing efficiency and making the most of these implementations will better position them to take on other projects in the future.
Most Impactful Technology Trends Include Business Intelligence (BI) / Big Data, Security, Mobility, Consumerization and Cloud; Expected Spending Increases Mirror These Areas
Over the last two years, healthcare IT leaders listed BI/Big Data, security, mobility and consumerization of IT/BYOD as the top four trends impacting their organizations.
Area of Impact
2014 Rank
2015 Rank (% of IT leaders)
BI / Big Data
4
1 (61%)
Security
3
2 (54%)
Mobility
1
3 (42%)
Consumerization of IT / BYOD
2
4 (38%)
Cloud
6
5 (31%)
The majority of healthcare IT leaders expect to see spending increases in security (70 percent), mobility (61 percent), BI/Big Data (60 percent) and cloud (55 percent).
TEKsystems’ Take: These expectations for spending increases make sense considering that security, mobility, BI/Big Data and cloud are all cited as the most impactful areas and tend to have some interdependencies. These areas play a large part in how healthcare organizations can increase operational efficiency and risk management.
Hands-on Roles Still Most Critical For Success, Also Most Difficult to Fill with Exceptional Talent
“Doers” continue to be cited as the most critical positions for an organization to achieve success. In 2014 and 2015, project managers, help desk / technical support and programmers and developers were cited within the top four roles most critical to enabling success.
Critical Role
2014 Rank
2015 Rank (% of IT leaders)
Project managers
2
1 (51%)
Help desk / Technical support
3
2 (47%)
Programmers / Developers
1
3 (45%)
IT managers
7
4 (40%)
Software engineers
6
5 (37%)
In terms of the most difficult roles to fill, project managers rank as the No. 1, climbing two spots up from No. 3 in 2014. Security (No. 2), programmers and developers (No. 3), software engineers (No. 4) and architects (No. 5) also ranked within the top five most difficult positions to fill. BI (ranked No. 11 in 2013) ranks as the sixth most difficult position to fill, down from No. 5 in 2014.
More than half of healthcare IT leaders expect salary increases for project managers (55 percent), software engineers (53 percent) and programmers and developers (52 percent). Approximately one-third (34 percent) expect increased salaries for help desk / technical support.
TEKsystems’ Take: It’s not surprising that project managers and programmers and developers remain in the top four most difficult positions to fill, as these staff members are in the trenches ensuring that organizations continue to make the most of their IT investments to increase ease of use and efficiency. This value translates into greater expectations for salary increases as organizations seek to retain their developed talent.
Vast Majority Expect Staff Salaries to Rise; More Than Two out of Five Expect Full-time and Contingent Hiring Increases
Seventy-three percent of healthcare IT leaders expect overall IT salaries to increase in 2015. The remaining 27 percent expect salaries to stay the same, with no respondents expecting salary decreases.
Forty-three percent of healthcare IT leaders expect hiring for full-time IT staff to increase, while 52 percent expect hiring to remain the same. Just 5 percent expect to see a decrease.
Forty-two percent of healthcare IT leaders expect hiring for contingent IT staff to increase, while 52 percent expect hiring to remain the same. Only 6 percent expect to see a decrease.
TEKsystems’ Take: As more work is done to make the most of investments in BI / Big Data, security, mobility and consumerization of IT / BYOD, organizations will need to at least maintain their full-time and contingent workforces in order to cultivate efficiency and make progress. While retaining top talent by increasing salaries will be a key tactic, new staff will need to be brought on as projects expand.
“Last year, we saw an early surge in the numbers of healthcare IT leaders expecting to see budget increases due to the overarching mandate to meet the former ICD-10 implementation deadline and to get new healthcare technology initiatives off the ground,” said Ryan Skains, executive director of TEKsystems Healthcare Services. “We are seeing those numbers level out as organizations not only make headway on the projects they have begun, but as they increasingly become confident in their staff’s expanding expertise and ability to meet major deadlines. Moving forward, the focus will be on refining systems and processes to increase efficiency and growth opportunity.”
Joe Petro is senior vice president of healthcare research and development, where he provides leadership for all of the research and development required to bring Nuance Healthcare products to market, including: Dragon Naturally Speaking, eScription, Dictaphone (Enterprise Express/iChart), Radiology Platform, Radiology Reporting & Decision Support, SpeechMagic, Critical Test Results Reporting and innovations such as cloud offerings, CLU, and CAPD. Prior to joining Nuance, Joe was SVP of product development at Eclipsys Corporation. While at Eclipsys, he also served on the executive staff and was a reporting officer, where he was responsible for the development of more than 30 products from ADT, departmental, inpatient, ancillaries, patient financial management and outpatient products. Petro received a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from University of New Hampshire and a Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering from Kettering, graduating both with Summa Cum Laude accolades.
Here he discusses Nuance, the evolution of technology in health IT, trends and changes, the patient response, meaningful use’s hamstringing and the biggest obstacles patients face.
Describe Nuance Communications and your role.
Nuance is the market leader in creating clinical understanding solutions that drive smart, efficient decisions across the health information technology industry. More than 500,000 clinicians and 10,000 healthcare facilities worldwide use our technology and solutions. Nuance clinical speech and understanding products are deeply embedded in EHR solutions, such as Cerner, Epic, Meditech, etc., enabling them to deliver innovations that provide a seamless user experience to their clinicians.
I’m the senior vice president of engineering, Research and Development, for Nuance’s healthcare division. I am responsible for the research and development of the entire Nuance Healthcare product portfolio. When not leading the engineering teams, I spend time with clients trying to understand how to improve existing products and devise brand new ideas that someday will become part of our extensive product portfolio.
How is Nuance changing healthcare today and in the future? Where do you see the company, and health IT going?
I think the health IT industry is approaching an inflection point where technology shifts from being viewed as a mandated requirement to more of a ”necessity that I must have in order to get my job done.” We are finally reaching a point where the cloud is enabling the kind of form-factor agnostic experience that we all thought made a lot of sense from the very beginning, but which was challenging to deliver because all of our “things” were not connected.
When it comes to tech adoption, particularly in healthcare, there needs to be a catalyst—we saw that with CMS regulations and meaningful use. Now, we are starting to see perspectives shift: Physicians are asking seemingly obvious questions like “Why can’t I access this data on my smart phone…?” or “Why can’t I do the same things on my phone as I can using the computer on wheels in the hospital?” This kind of shift is creating massive opportunities for a company like Nuance because the ability to get data into the mobile device (and easily access it) can be profoundly impacted by the technologies that we build. And sure there are plenty of challenges, but the industry is becoming more adroit and agile, creating solutions that serve the specific needs of the individual physician – and not just the technology to address government imposed regulations.
In this series, we are featuring some of the thousands of vendors who will be participating in the HIMSS15 conference and trade show. Through it, we hope to offer readers a closer look at some of the solution providers who will either be in attendance – with a booth showcasing and displaying key products and offerings – or that will have a presence of some kind at the show – key executives in attendance or presenting, for example.
Hopefully this series will give you a bit more useful information about the companies that help make this event, and the industry as a whole, so exciting.
Elevator pitch
Serving the healthcare and life sciences industry gives us a strong appreciation for the resource dedication and demanding processes that result in life-saving innovations. We understand that IT is critical in its function to accelerate research and development. That’s why we’re committed to simplifying IT and optimizing the entire enterprise. We provide customers with comprehensive technology and support solutions that help increase productivity while streamlining compliance readiness and improving communication throughout the care continuum. Our ultimate goal is to ensure that IT is improving patient care.
Founder’s story
As a pre-med student at age 19, Michael Dell founded PC’s Limited with $1,000 and a game changing vision for how technology should be designed, manufactured and sold. After just four years, Dell completed its initial public offering in 1988, raising $30 million and increasing market capitalization from $1,000 to $85 million. Dell’s commitment to the healthcare industry is exemplified by his ongoing efforts to improve the efficiency and quality of care today. Speaking at the Health Evolution Partners Leadership Summit in 2011, he encouraged healthcare organizations to expedite adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) and cloud computing to create new information-driven efficiency and care advantages. “Digitizing patient information and making it available in a secure and convenient way across our healthcare system are among the best opportunities we have to improve U.S. healthcare and create a better system for future generations of Americans,” Dell said. Dr. Cliff Bleustein, chief medical officer, supports the company’s strategic initiative to revolutionize the way healthcare is managed with patient-specific data that spans the entire continuum of care and leads to better outcomes. Dell Healthcare & Life Sciences’ focuses on improvement of quality, patient safety and efficiency starts at the intersection of information and technology.
Market opportunity
When healthcare is information-driven, data is interconnected and available when and where it is needed to save lives. Data becomes knowledge and moves healthcare beyond episodic care to preventative, precision medicine. And data ultimately allows patients to take control of their own health. Dell’s four-part information-driven healthcare approach is a reflection of our commitment and expertise:
What follows is a nice, yet concise, infographic developed by Clearwater Compliance — an organization that helps health systems ensure patient safety and improve the quality of care by safeguarding the confidentiality, integrity and availability of protected health information (PHI) – that provides a nice overview of the current state of healthcare breaches.
Clearwater Compliance states that according to Breach Level Index, there were 336 healthcare data breaches reported in the U.S. last year; “the Office for Civil Rights portal on the HHS website cited 165 breaches affecting 500 or more individuals in 2014.”
Interesting, the organization points out that non-digital breaches remain an issue. “Paper data breaches accounted for 9 percent of compromised records in the first half of 2014 – and a surprising 31 percent in the second half. In total, nearly 200,000 paper records were compromised last year, along with nearly 60,000 pieces of individually identifiable health information ranging from lab specimens to radiology film,” wrote the Clearwater Compliance team.
Additionally, insider mistakes and malice can be costly. In breaches examined, there were 45 incidents involving insider actions that resulted in the compromise of more than 478,000 records. “That means that about half of all the incidents we studied involved either mistakes or malice by an organization’s own employees and business associates.”
Clearwater Compliance makes the case that, despite an organization’s best efforts, “it’s almost impossible to eliminate all workforce-related data breaches. But organizations can take steps to foster an atmosphere of compliance and prevention.”
Lindy Benton, CEO of MEA|NEA, recently wrote in a piece for MultiBriefs: “According to the Wall Street Journal, Forrester Research recently conducted a survey of more than 2,100 healthcare IT pros and found that only about 60 percent of them said they encrypt devices like laptops, smartphones or tablets. Also according to the research, 39 percent of healthcare security incidents since 2005 have included a lost or stolen device.
“For some additional perspective, since federal reporting requirements started, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has tracked major breaches (those affecting 500 people or more) and has identified more than 945 incidents affecting patients’ personal information, affecting more than 30 million people.
“A majority of these breaches are tied to theft (17.4 million people), followed by data loss (7.2 million people), hacking (3.6 million) and unauthorized access of accounts (1.9 million people), according to The Washington Post. And these numbers do not even include the Community Health Systems numbers.
AirStrip enables transformational and lasting improvements in healthcare delivery by creating innovative technology for caregivers to collaborate and care for their patients. AirStrip provides a complete, vendor and data source-agnostic, enterprise-wide mobile interoperability platform and application that advance care collaboration and serves as a catalyst for health system innovation. With deep clinical expertise and strong roots in mobile technology and data integration, AirStrip is empowering leading health systems globally as the industry evolves at a rapid pace.
Forward Health Group
Serving the healthcare and life sciences industry gives us a strong appreciation for the resource dedication and demanding processes that result in life-saving innovations. We understand that IT is critical in its function to accelerate research and development. That’s why we’re committed to simplifying IT and optimizing the entire enterprise. We provide customers with comprehensive technology and support solutions that help increase productivity while streamlining compliance readiness and improving communication throughout the care continuum. Our ultimate goal is to ensure that IT is improving patient care.