Blackstone to take Emdeon private for $3 billion - Healthcare business news and research | Modern Healthcare

Blackstone to take Emdeon private for $3 billion - Healthcare business news and research | Modern Healthcare: "Emdeon, a publicly traded healthcare billing and finance company, announced that private-equity firm Blackstone Group will become its majority owner in a deal valued at roughly $3 billion."

17 Leading EHR Vendors -- InformationWeek

Electronic Health Records are a hot topic in healthcare today. The need for these systems has spawned massive proliferation of competitors in this space - more than 800 in the USA alone according to some studies!

I came across this listing of the "17 Leading EHR Vendors" in Information Week and thought it was worth sharing.

17 Leading EHR Vendors -- InformationWeek: "Electronic Health Records can help healthcare providers in the delivery and management of care to patients, including those with chronic conditions. The systems can also bolster decision making by providing clinicians with more comprehensive patient data, as well as help eliminate medical errors and reduce costs associated with unnecessary or redundant tests."

When physicians take a patient-centric approach, healthcare utilization decreases

This study, recently released, provides fact-based evidence that a patient-centric approach to medicine actually decrease healthcare utilization while improving outcomes.

Better service pays off big in healthcare.

Patient-Centered Care is Associated with Decreased Health Care Utilization -- Bertakis and Azari 24 (3): 229 -- The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine

Google to Kill Google Health

If we needed any further confirmation that the Personal Health Record, where patients store their own personal health information, has a steep hill to climb before becoming a viable business model, the mighty Google has now signaled that they are getting out of this race altogether according to Modern Healthcare. Apparently the service will be shuttered by January 1, 2012. When a firm with more than $100 billion in cash decides to discontinue investment in a given business model that, on the surface, would appear to have strong long term potential it is worth taking note.

With the PHR model, I believe a major challenge comes from the closed nature of current EHR / EMR (electronic health records) vendors. These vendors each want their own PHR modules to be used by patients eliminating the possibility for a system like Google Health to get widespread automated data input into its patient accounts. Left without that automated information stream, patients have to manually enter the data and the average person does not see the benefit to what would result in a partial picture of the healthcare encounters and associated data at best.

This announcement comes on the heels of a recent article in the Wall Street Journal where new CEO Larry Page talked about cutting unprofitable businesses, eliminating red tape, and getting back to the agile, productive environment that made Google great to begin with.

Here is an excerpt from the WSJ article -

"Some managers believe Mr. Page will eliminate or downgrade projects he doesn't believe are worthwhile, freeing up employees to work on more important initiatives, these people said. One project expected to get less support is Google Health, which lets people store medical records and other health data on Google's servers, said people familiar with the matter."

The complete article is here - At Google, Page Seeks to Cut Red Tape - WSJ.com

Ind. health exchange connects with immunization registry | Modern Healthcare

As a leader in healthcare innovation, Indiana is home to one of the most innovative and most widely adopted health information exchanges in the country - Indiana Health Information Exchange, or IHIE.

IHIE has achieved another major milestone by connecting 1,700+ physicians to information on immunization records of patients.  

"Providers, including 1,700 physicians connected to the Indiana Health Information Exchange, will be able to check on the immunization records of their young and older patients when the Indianapolis-based health information organization connects as planned with the state health department's Children and Hoosiers Immunization Registry Program, or CHIRP."

IHIE is also a Bostech customer and our team is excited about the opportunity to work with a nationally recognized HIE.  IHIE has already achieved many significant goals and many more exciting capabilities are in store for Indiana's healthcare organizations thanks to IHIE's efforts.

Ind. health exchange connects with immunization registry - Healthcare business news, research, information and opinions | Modern Healthcare

Patient health records lost on subway train results in $1 million fine

With all of the concerns over cyber attacks and digital security, it is interesting to consider the state of security of private health information like patient records in general.

Often times, health information is stored in paper charts that are handled by various people, photocopied, FedEx'd, and otherwise shuttled around in an analog fashion. The reality is that this approach to managing personal health information is much less secure than properly encrypted digital files.

In one case, Mass General lost scheduling documents for hundreds of patients on a subway train...

"Massachusetts General hospital system agreed to a $1 million settlement with the civil rights office for losing scheduling documents for 192 patients. The documents -- which bore personal information such as names, insurance data and diagnoses -- were accidentally lost on a subway train."

The next step up from paper charts has been in-office computer systems that store patient information electronically. This is a step in the right direction. However, the basic password protection available on these systems is easy to crack, the servers and PCs running the software that contains this information are relatively easy to pick up and steal, and any sort of natural disaster (like a flood or tornado) can decimate these records rendering the information impossible to retrieve.

This all argues for a shift to healthcare cloud computing, implemented with proper security measures, as the next major leap in information security. With encryption in flight and at rest, striped drives, geographically distributed data centers, and two phase authentication, health information is much more secure in the cloud than it is when on a subway train in a paper file.

Here is an article that addresses this subject -

Hospitals, health plans face fines over privacy issues - East Valley Tribune

Why ACOs Are Like Oakland

The implications of the accountable care organization, or ACO, in healthcare are far-reaching. The ACO federal rules are defined in 429 pages provided by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services at the end of March 2011.

Here are a couple of interesting excerpts from a post that thoroughly addresses the topic of ACO's including what is currently there and what is not:

"Under the rubric of "Medicare Shared-Savings Programs," an ACO was defined in the PPACA as a group of health care providers—it could be a physician group; a network of medical practices; a joint venture or partnership among a hospital, community physicians and ancillary providers; or a hospital that employs them—working together under shared governance with primary care physicians in the leadership role, managing and coordinating care for at least 5,000 Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries."

"An ACO will need processes to measure and report the quality and cost of its care and to promote evidence-based medicine from outpatient disease prevention and health maintenance, through hospital admission, to post-discharge community follow-up. Mature ACOs will be paid by CMS for episodes of care rather than for à la carte services, and the ACO will be responsible for distributing the payments among its providers, dividing any savings realized through care improvement as bonuses."

This article draws the comparison between ACOs and Oakland by contending that "like the city of Oakland in Gertrude Stein's famous putdown—there's no there there."

Healthcare organizations need to implement processes and systems to measure and report the quality and cost of the care they are providing while promoting evidence-based medicine. Cloud-based solutions (including hc1.c0m) are the ideal way to address these challenges as they can be designed to span the continuum of care and unite all of the information silos and disjointed processes enabling this type of monitoring and measurement.

See the entire post in Hospitals & Health Networks (H&HN) here - Why ACOs Are Like Oakland