Co-founder and former president and CEO of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) Richard A. Correll announced his plans to retire at the end of the month, after 23 years. Correll has been serving as the organization’s chief operating officer and senior strategic advisor since April 2013 following the appointment of CEO Russell P. Branzell.
Correll has led the CHIME organization since it was created more than two decades ago as a nonprofit, professional association for senior IT leaders in healthcare.
“My years serving CHIME have been a privilege and the most rewarding of my career,” said Correll in a statement. “With the indispensable support of our members, board and staff, the organization has become a recognized leader and advocate for the CIO role and the effective use of information management to improve patient care quality and safety.
Correll helped forme CHIME in 1992, enlisting 192 charter members in the first year, led by founding board chair Dr. John Glaser. While serving on the HIMSS board in the 1980s, Correll identified the need for a professional organization dedicated to the development of the emerging top healthcare IT executives taking on the new title of CIO. Today, CHIME has grown to more than 1,500 members and 150 Foundation firm supporters.
“Our ability to utilize information technology to improve the quality, safety and efficiency of care has been significantly furthered because of the efforts of Rich Correll,” said Glaser, senior vice president of Cerner in a statement. “Rich’s creation and leadership of CHIME have led to major advances in the knowledge, skills and capabilities of the healthcare IT leadership community. His legacy is substantial; we all have been shaped his work.”
After CHIME was formed, Correll and Glaser spearheaded the creation of the CHIME Foundation in 1994, comprised of healthcare IT vendors and consultants to partner with the members of CHIME, and in 2007, a second office location in Washington, D.C. to create sustained contact with lawmakers while informing and influencing federal policies meant to transform the delivery of healthcare through IT.
In January of this year, Anthem, Inc. a managed care provider, learned of a cyber attack to their IT system. This attack, which occurred over several weeks beginning in December, 2014, compromised the identities over 80 million customers. The breach, in which the healthcare information of millions were compromised, constitutes a serious HIPAA violation, exposing the provider to potentially devastating legal liability.
Unfortunately, this sort of breach perpetrated against healthcare providers is becoming ever more common. The Ponemon Institute, along with ID Experts, issued a report in May this year that showcased healthcare data breaches. The Fifth Annual Benchmark Study on Privacy and Security of Healthcare Data calculates a 125 percent growth in healthcare cyber attacks over the past five years. Although employee negligence and lost or stolen devices still result in many data breaches, a shift is occurring from accidental loss to intentional targeting of data that reveals individuals’ names, Social Security numbers, and other personal information.
The reason that healthcare providers are being targeted is that the information they maintain to provide care for their patients is often substantial enough that cyber criminals can use the data from a single healthcare provider to engage in identity theft. Moreover, cyber criminals target healthcare data because they recognize that many healthcare facilities, including insurance companies, don’t have the resources or technologies to prevent or to detect attacks.
Anthem is a large corporate entity that can afford and use the technology required to protect HIPAA sensitive data, and yet the breach still occurred. What can other healthcare businesses do to prevent or detect a cyber attack on HIPAA sensitive data?
Meeting Standards, Avoiding Fines
The growing use of electronic health records and electronic protected health information (ePHI) accounts for the need to protect information contained in these records. But while these records are often well secured, an often overlooked vulnerability point is credit card processing. Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and HIPAA rules require entities to maintain reasonable and appropriate safeguards for protecting credit card payments. What this actually translates into actionable steps, however, is less clear. To that end, here are four rules to follow when accepting credit card payments to ensure that you’re meeting HIPAA/PCI mandated or suggested compliance guidelines:
PwC’s Health Research Institute (HRI) projects U.S. medical inflation will dip to 6.5 percent in 2016, capping a 10-year trend of slowing employer medical cost-trend growth in the employer-sponsored market. In the latest installment of its annual report Medical Cost Trend: Behind the Numbers, HRI identifies three factors that are expected to reduce the medical growth rate in 2016:
The Affordable Care Act’s looming “Cadillac tax” on high-priced plans which is accelerating cost-shifting from employers to employees to reduce costs;
Greater adoption of “virtual care” technology that can be more efficient and convenient than traditional medical care; and
New health advisers helping to steer consumers to more efficient healthcare.
Despite the year-over-year slowdown, HRI also reported that medical inflation still outpaces general inflation, underscoring the challenges ahead for the health industry. In fact, Behind the Numbers identified two factors that will likely exert inflationary pressure on health spending in the year ahead:
New specialty drugs entering the market in 2015 and 2016 will continue to push health spending growth upward; and
Major cyber-security breaches are forcing health companies to step up investments to guard personal health data, adding to the overall cost of delivering care.
“While the health industry has improved in efficiency over the past decade, the slowing employer medical cost growth is because of the increased role of savvy health consumers facing higher cost-sharing responsibilities and more complex decisions,” said Kelly Barnes, PwC’s U.S. health industries leader. “This will continue to impact the New Health Economy in the coming years.”
From relieving people of repetitive tasks, to building everything around us that shapes our lifestyle, and on to transformation of volumes of data into new insights and perspectives, software has become the new feedstock for the human evolution. All facets of life are touched by software, and healthcare is no exception.
The Complex Web of Health Industry
The health and social care industry is a highly fragmented and complex industry with medical practitioners, nurses, health professionals, hospitals, clinics, government, and non-government agencies all providing health services.
Martin Callinan
The spectrum of healthcare providers range from individual clinicians such as general practitioners to large monolithic entities, such as the National Health Service in the UK, which is the third largest employer in the world today.
Health and social care providers offer a complex and diverse range of facilities and services. By the nature of these services, the healthcare industry is driven by large and varied amounts of data which in turn require varied and complex IT systems to manage this data. Generally, these systems come under the umbrella term of eHealth. While there is no consensus on the exact definition of eHealth, two example definitions are:
“…the cost-effective and secure use of information and communication technologies in support of the health and health-related fields including healthcare, health surveillance and health education, knowledge and research.” –The World Health Organization (WHO)
“…the use of modern information and communication technologies to meet needs of citizens, patients, healthcare professionals, healthcare providers, as well as policy makers.” –The European Commission
Whatever way people choose to define eHealth, it generally encompasses:
Guest post by Deanne Primozic Kasim, research director, payer health IT, IDC Health Insights.
Who will be the next big health plan to merge with and/or acquire Humana? This has been the topic of a lot of industry conversation and I have actually thought about starting an online betting pool. In lieu of creating a “bracket challenge,” I have been informally asking opinions on this topic and the results are all over the map. A deal for either Humana, valued at $27 billion, or Medicaid provider Centene Corp., at $8.3 billion, would be the biggest acquisition of a U.S. payer in more than a decade. It’s an exciting time this summer with the upcoming Supreme Court decision on the legality of insurance subsidies on the federal marketplace, and an anticipated consolidation between Humana and another large insurer.
Why will health plan consolidation continue? Two major reasons:
Increasing Medicare and Medicaid memberships
According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Medicare membership is expected to reach 68.4 million in 2023, up from a projected 54.4 million this year. In addition, Medicaid will add 9.3 million people over the same period. Baby boomers are hitting Medicare eligibility at a rate approaching 10,000 per day. Part of the reason companies like Humana and Centene are attractive acquisitions to other payers is because of the size of their Medicare and Medicaid memberships. It is important to note that regardless of how mergers and/or acquisitions play out, payers with multiple lines of government-sponsored business will need effective processes and related IT tools for understanding the complex demographics and health needs of these members. Many Medicare and Medicaid members are high-risk/high-value patients who have clinical and non-clinical factors that can result in the development of costly and complex conditions.
Here are some selected FAQs about telehealth service delivery that focus most particularly on the home healthcare arena, which is most probably the health service sector most unaffected by new technology introduction and use until recent decades. Strictly hands-on, or ‘high touch” care service delivery was the order of the day throughout the 20th century. Yet home healthcare is likely to become a very critical component for achieving the much broader and longer term view of patient care delivery after patients’ discharge from hospital. It is then and at home that patients will receive subsequent services through their continuum of care that will keep them well over a long term.
Can I get reimbursed for providing telehealth?
The answer is yes, usually, for providing home telehealth services but not in the usual billing scenarios most home healthcare organizations are used to for submitting bills to Medicare or other insurers. As of now, mid-2015, changes in Medicare and Medicaid fee for services are just coming on-board affecting home telehealth service delivery. There is still a long way to go until Medicare will not very much require face-to-face home healthcare visits during a patient’s admission period—this is the same insurer who absolutely required specific documentation about every portion of nurses’ contact with patients and let the home health agencies (HHAs) know that to CMS, if something was not documented [e.g., a telephone call between nurse and patient about wellness directives] , it didn’t happen [and the bill would therefore not be paid]. Today there are many insurers beyond Medicare that are paying for home telehealthcare (e.g., Aetna, United Healthcare), but it’s very early on—we need to return to this question later this year.
How will I develop a home telehealth service capability? How will I develop a strategic and operating plan for this new delivery channel? Where will I get the technology? What type of training will be required of my people and what will the cost of training be and how many employee hours need to be dedicated to this training?
It’s best to keep in mind that, although the technology is new, you’re not beginning with a blank slate for running a healthcare service delivery business. While all of these questions about telehealth tool acquisition and use are important, the very first question to ask, not mentioned in this list of questions is, hands down, who are my HHA’s most costly patients? An agency-wide chart review would reveal that these are the patients that require the most visits, and additional training in self-management skills and routines.
Once identified, and these are usually patients living with specific chronic diseases and conditions, such as congestive heart failure (CHF) and non-healing wounds, then the subsequent questions can be addressed. In earlier days of home telehealth service delivery (ca. mid-1990s), a full-scale workstation was typically available that could be assigned to any home healthcare patient and came fitted with telecommunications-ready vital sign measuring peripheral devices such as a blood pressure cuff and pulse oximeter, as well as glucometer for measuring diabetic patients’ blood sugar levels even though some patients didn’t have diabetes. These were kind of a one-size-fits-all system, though these proved to be too costly for HHAs and too complicated for patients to use regularly and correctly. More common now is to order and assign only needed and stand-alone telecommunications-ready peripherals devices for patients to perform daily measurements and transmit them to their clinicians.
Brent D. Lang has served as the president and chief executive officer, and a board member, of Vocera since June 2013. Since joining the company in 2001, Lang has played a role in transforming Vocera from a startup to a publicly traded corporation with more than 380 employees and revenues exceeding $100 million.
Prior to being named CEO, he was the company’s president and chief operating officer and a member of the team that led Vocera’s successful IPO in March 2012. During his tenure with Vocera, he also has served as the company’s vice president of marketing and business development for more than five years, spearheading the initial business plan and the development of product and go-to market strategies.
Before joining Vocera, Lang was the senior director of marketing at 3Com Corporation, and was a strategy consultant for Monitor Company, advising Fortune 500 companies. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Michigan with a bachelor’s degree in industrial and operational engineering before earning an MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business. While at the University of Michigan, he was a member of the 1988 U.S. Olympic Swimming Team and won a Gold Medal in the 4×100 freestyle relay at the summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea.
Here, he discusses Vocera’s mission; how the company serves the healthcare market; how health reforms are impacting businesses; making healthcare communications more efficient; and his vision for the future.
Describe how your background gave you the tools to start/run a communications technology company like Vocera.
In retrospect, my background is a perfect fit for Vocera. First, my industrial engineering degree helped me understand process workflows and how to apply the right technologies to human collaboration and communication challenges, which was a natural link to the problems Vocera looks to address. My technology background helps me understand what we’d need to do with the Vocera products, and the workflow aspect helps me understand our customers’ challenges.
I (worked) at Monitor Company, a strategy consulting firm, which provided me with formal training in understanding customer requirements and defining markets and product strategy. After that, I attended Stanford University to get my MBA, which was focused on entrepreneurship and strategy. I then worked at 3Com, which provided solid knowledge of the networking and wireless space – all of which has proved immensely valuable in helping to grow Vocera.
My athletic background as an Olympic swimmer has also played a big role in my development. Growing and running a company takes hard work and determination – most startups are not primed for immediate success – and as a competitive athlete you learn that there are no shortcuts to the top; you have to put in time and effort over many years to reach your peak. Many professionals focus on the end point of where they will take their business, but the thousands of hours you put in are what drive you to that point – so there is a strong correlation between competing in sports and succeeding in business.
Tell me about Vocera. What does it do and who does it serve, specifically?
Vocera delivers integrated, intelligent, secure communication solutions that enable the flow of information from one care provider to another in real-time, and allows them to act on that information at the point of care, throughout their entire healthcare experience. Our range of solutions allows care professionals to instantly connect patients with the care and resources they need, helping prevent treatment delays and increasing operational efficiency throughout the hospital.
Interoperability standardization is a critical element of e-health innovation. Varied and complimentary standards will be needed in the decades ahead to accelerate development of life-saving and life-enhancing capabilities and to ensure that the greatest potential benefits of e-health are realized around the world.
The IEEE Standards Association is at the tip of this spear and is working to make progress in the field of medical device interoperability. Illustrating the benefit of interoperability of standards in the monitoring and assessment of patients, and creating awareness of current medical device standards, this following infographic gives a short description of six medical device standards that strive to improve medical treatment for both patients and providers.
Utilizing smart phones, people can track and send their data to doctors from a variety of personal health devices such as, sleep monitors, insulin pumps, sleep apnea equipment, health and fitness monitors, health weighing scales and glucose meters. The standards specify the use of specific term codes, formats and behaviors in telehealth environments that promote interoperability of multi-vendor products to create an over-all more seamless tracking of health.
PwC’s 
Interoperability standardization is a critical element of e-health innovation. Varied and complimentary standards will be needed in the decades ahead to accelerate development of life-saving and life-enhancing capabilities and to ensure that the greatest potential benefits of e-health are realized around the world.