The following is a list of organizations I’ll personally be visiting with at HIMSS14, along with several others. Each has a compelling story and I’m looking forward to learning more about them.
Any thoughts on who you think I might be missing, or have overlooked?
AirStrip provides a complete, vendor and data source agnostic enterprise-wide clinical mobility solution, which enables clinicians to improve the health of individuals and populations. With deep clinical expertise and strong roots in mobile technology and data integration, AirStrip is empowering the nation’s leading health systems as the industry continues to evolve to new business models, accountable care and shared risk. Based in San Antonio, Texas, AirStrip allows health systems to unlock the full potential of their existing technology investments with a complete mobility solution that provides access to critical patient data across the care continuum. AirStrip is backed by investments from Sequoia Capital, Qualcomm, Inc., Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) and the Wellcome Trust. AirStrip’s customers includes HCA, Texas Health Resources, Vanguard Health Systems (part of Tenet Healthcare Corporation), Dignity Health and Ardent Health Services.
Allscripts delivers the insights that healthcare providers require to generate world-class outcomes. The company’s Electronic Health Record, practice management and other clinical, revenue cycle, connectivity and information solutions create a Connected Community of Health for physicians, hospitals and post-acute organizations.
Axial’s products improve the quality of patient care, and reduce the cost of providing it, by credentialing the most qualified providers, delivering point of care decision support tools, and utilizing a 360-degree cloud-based predictive model to stratify risk and quantify outcomes. Axial furthers the IHI Triple Aim of driving healthcare value by developing cost-effective, quality-based treatment pathways combined with seamless IT and workflow integration.
TEKsystems, a provider of IT staffing solutions, IT talent management expertise and IT services, releases the results of a survey that explored the current state of business intelligence (BI) system deployments among healthcare organizations. The research, released in advance of HIMSS14, explores many of the concepts serving as central themes to the annual event, including clinical analytics and BI, as well as data interoperability. Despite the acknowledged benefits that healthcare organizations would realize, the study finds that the vast majority have yet to implement a BI system.
The survey, conducted on behalf of TEKsystems’ Healthcare Services division, represents views of more than 250 healthcare professionals, including senior-level health IT executives and medical staff such as CIOs, directors of information systems and clinical informatics, physicians, and chief nursing officers. Respondents represent a wide cross section of healthcare organizations including hospitals, medical clinics, ambulatory care centers and integrated delivery systems.
Key highlights from the survey include:
Business Intelligence System Implementation Lags
More than half of all healthcare organizations have yet to implement a BI system. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed indicated that their organization has not implemented a BI system. This number is includes the 36 percent that simply do not have a BI system, 15 percent that do not have such a system but plan to implement one in the next 12 to 24 months and 7 percent that have a BI system but have yet to implement it. Forty-two percent of respondents have implemented and are currently using a BI system.
Finance, operations and clinical care top areas for planned use. Nearly three-quarters of respondents indicated they expected a BI system to be widely used in finance (76 percent), operations (75 percent) and clinical care (71 percent). Interestingly, about half (53 percent), expected it to be widely used for compliance.
Here’s a worthy event I plan to attend, and cover, while at HIMSS next week. Verisk Health and volunteers will prepare 4,000 food packs for the Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida at HIMSS. This program provides nutritious meals, with kid-friendly, shelf-stable items, to children who do not have access to school cafeterias during the weekend.
Verisk invites all HIMSS conference attendees to help with the packing. Complete details follow:
WHAT: To support the Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida, Verisk Health is hosting an event to prepare 4,000 food packs for the Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida’s Hi-Five Kids Pack Program during the HIMSS Conference. This program provides nutritious meals, with kid-friendly, shelf-stable items, to children who do not have access to school cafeterias during the weekend. HIMSS attendees are invited to volunteer an hour of their time to help assemble the food packs
WHERE: Rosen Centre Hotel, a two-minute walk from the Orange County Convention Center, accessible via the sky bridge
WHEN: 6 p.m. on Tuesday, February 25, 2014
WHO: Verisk Health, a subsidiary of Verisk Analytics, provides data services, analytics, and advanced technologies for the healthcare industry. The company’s solutions help health plans, employers, providers, and other risk-bearing entities improve the quality of healthcare delivery, reduce costs, optimize risk-adjusted revenue, ensure payment accuracy, and support compliance.
Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida is a private, nonprofit organization that collects, stores and distributes donated food throughout Central Florida. They initiated the Hi-Five Kids Pack Program when educators came to the Food Bank looking for a solution to provide a weekend-supply of food to needy students who would arrive at school on Monday ill and unable to learn because they had not eaten since their school lunch the previous Friday. The program provides nutritious meals to children in-need who do not have access to school cafeterias during the weekend.
Results of the 2013 HIMSS Security Survey show that, despite progress toward hardened security and use of analytics, more work must be done to mitigate insider threat, such as the inappropriate access of data by employees. Although federal initiatives such as OCR audits, meaningful use and the HIPAA Omnibus Rule continue to encourage healthcare organizations to increase the budgets and resources dedicated to securing patient health data, in the previous 12 months, 19 percent of respondents reported a security breach and 12 percent of organizations have had at least one known case of medical identity theft reported by a patient.
The 2013 HIMSS Security Survey, supported by the Medical Group Management Association and underwritten by Experian Data Breach Resolution, profiles the data security experiences of 283 information technology (IT) and security professionals employed by U.S. hospitals and physician practices. The data from respondents suggests that the greatest perceived “threat motivator” is that of healthcare workers potentially snooping into the electronic health information of friends, neighbors, spouses or co-workers (i.e., inappropriate data access).
Recognizing inappropriate data access by insiders as an area for which organizations are at risk of a security breach, there has been increased use of several key technologies related to employee access to patient data, including user access control and audit logs of each access to patient health records. On a related note, although more than half of the survey’s respondents (51 percent) have increased their security budgets in the past year, 49 percent of these organizations are still spending 3 percent or less of their overall IT budget on security initiatives that will secure patient data. Continue Reading
Robert Hitchcock, M.D., FACEP, is T-System’s vice president and CMIO, leading the company efforts for solving regulatory issues and identifying trends. He is a nationally recognized meaningful use expert and active member of the HIMSS Physician Committee and other HIMSS subcommittees advocating usability and responding to regulatory issues.
Dr. Hitchcock also is a practicing ED physician and an Emergency Department Practice Management Association (EDPMA) board member. In 2001, he earned recognition for excellence in teaching from internal medicine residents, and in the early 2000s, he trained basic and advanced life-support EMS providers. His goal is to advance system adoption and usability to improve the quality and efficiency of ED delivery.
Here, he provides perspective about developments of meaningful use Stage 2 and Stage, how meaningful use is impacting vendors and practices, how they feel — or should feel — about it, and what Stage 3 means for everyone in the industry.
How do you see the market responding to meaningful use? How are physicians moving forward, or beyond, it?
The market’s overall response to meaningful use is generally clear: they’re pushing back, particularly on Stage 2. Vendors aren’t ready, so there are not as many certified products out there. Physicians and hospitals are both calling for delays. By some estimates, as many as 50 to 70 percent of physicians who were successful in Stage 1 will not be successful in Stage 2.
To give some perspective, the Eisenhower interstate system was authorized and construction began in 1956. Phase 1 was completed in 1992. It took 35 years to build roads in this country, a decidedly low-tech undertaking. With meaningful use, we’re attempting to take a relatively un-automated industry and automate it beyond what was ever considered possible in six years. Everyone is pushing back because it’s simply too much, too fast.
Printing is like electricity – when it works, no one really notices it. They only notice it when it’s not working.
Think about it. Quality communication is a cornerstone of delivering excellent patient care. Almost every department in a healthcare organization relies on their printers to provide instructions and information that are vital to a patient’s health. So, when the printing environment is offline or ineffective, it has a real impact on how healthcare is controlled and delivered.
At Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA), our motto is to deliver “care that never quits,” meaning we place our patients and their caregivers first and foremost in every action and decision that we make. As such, we rely on our technology systems to be seamless, secure and reliable so that we can deliver on our motto.
The Importance of Printing
When a patient arrives at any one of our six treatment centers, he or she receives a personalized booklet providing details regarding his or her treatment schedule. Over the course of a stay, patients will receive additional documents such as prescriptions, post-surgery instructions, discharge summaries and insurance information, just to name a few. Administrative departments also generate and print reports, spreadsheets and presentations that are essential to hospital business functions.
All in all, approximately 90 percent of CTCA’s 5,000 employees rely on printers, printing roughly 30 million pages annually. That means, on average, our employees print more than 82,000 pages per day across the network.
Once again, HIMSS is asking for perspective about the value of Health IT. The organization asked members of the social media and blogging community to respond to this very question last year for its second year celebrating National Health IT Week. It’s doing so again in preparation of #HIMSS14.
As I pointed out last year, even though it seems like a simple question, there still don’t appear to be any simple answers. There remains different answers depending on who you ask. So, again, instead of offering my lone opinion, I’ve asked a variety of folks to respond to the question, “What is the value of health IT,” based on their insight and experience serving the space.
The value of health IT lies in its ability to address three of the major, although competing, forces of change in healthcare. The need to standardize care, personalize care, and reduce costs requires the synthesis of vast amounts of data as well as dramatic changes to workflow and process. I can conceive of no way to go about pursuing these changes without technology. The old adage “you cannot improve what you cannot measure” tells us that improving health care requires us to leverage our data, turning it into knowledge and to then build the new workflows that will change the way we deliver care.
Health IT is the means for providing the best possible data at the point of care. It addresses the who, what, when and where of a patient’s care, which helps healthcare providers enhance the patient experience and deliver high-quality of care to improve health and well-being, preserve privacy and ensure security. Health IT facilitates innovation and overcomes interoperability challenges that gives providers transparency for the patient pathway to improve quality of care and minimize clinical and financial costs by eliminating duplicate patient records, incomplete medical histories, incorrect medications, clinical errors, billing mistakes, and avoidable readmissions, as well as correcting the overuse, underuse, and misuse of beneficial care. Adopting health IT is the one strategy healthcare organizations can take to enter a golden age of patient care.
Guest post by Ed Simcox, healthcare business leader, Logicalis US.
Healthcare is undergoing a significant transformation today, and so is healthcare IT. As a result, healthcare providers and their IT departments need to brace themselves for change – which is happening faster than they might realize – in five business-critical areas: healthcare IT infrastructure, mobility and BYOD, business continuity and disaster recovery, storage and vendor-neutral archives, and patient portals and mobile applications.
With pressure mounting to meet new regulatory requirements and ICD-10 deadlines, as well as the increased demands being placed on IT departments for interactive communications among patients, providers, and payers, healthcare CIOs need a set of “best practices” to help them navigate this IT transformation and arrive at the data-driven, value-based future of healthcare from where they stand today.
We call this IT transformation a “journey” because it isn’t something that happens overnight. This is a multi-stage process requiring significant evaluation of not only IT systems, but also of what the future workflows and business processes will be and how healthcare providers, patients and payers can all seamlessly share time-critical data. It’s a journey that is taking healthcare IT to the new levels of IT sophistication needed to support a substantial business change from volume to value, and there are five important milestones that every healthcare IT department is going to have to tackle along the way.
HIT Infrastructure — Of all the technical capabilities healthcare IT professionals are being asked to master today, the key is an ability to rapidly adapt to change. As a more technology-oriented generation of doctors and tech-savvy patients take their place in healthcare’s future, IT is going to be drawn increasingly into the actual delivery of health services. As a result, healthcare IT professionals won’t be spending the bulk of their time caring for their IT infrastructures. The good news is that if the IT infrastructure is transformed from today’s siloed systems into a virtualized, automated IT-as-a-Service resource, then the IT department will be able to focus its efforts directly on using technology to help doctors and nurses care for their patients and allowing patients to electronically manage their own care and wellness.
