Shawnee Mission (KS) Medical Center has announced that it intends to buy 42 acres in south Overland Park for a hospital of up to 400 beds. The project is at least two years from construction, and includes 240,000 square feet of medical office space. Financial details of the purchase were not disclosed by Shawnee Mission representatives.
As part of his budget proposal, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell is expected to press for remaining provisions in his plan to improve access to affordable healthcare, cut costs and enhance quality. Lawmakers have shown little interest in his plan to help fund a healthcare overhaul with a tax on employers that do not offer health insurance to their workers. As a result, Rendell has backed a plan that would draw on more than $400 million accumulated in a state fund that helps doctors pay their malpractice insurance costs.
I pose this question after sitting through a press conference on the "2007 Healthcare IT Sanity Check," a survey undertaken by HIMSS Analytics and O'Keeffe & Company. Their survey analyzed how CIOs shop for goods and services in the vast IT marketplace and how well IT vendors meet expectations. The answer, in short, is not very well. When they go shopping for new systems, CIOs, it seems, are Doubting Thomases.
Healthcare IT executives want the facts. And they prefer to get them from objective sources, namely their peers. The IT purchasers surveyed cited information from peers as their No. 1 source of reliable information. Vendor marketing came in way down the list at No. 10. The message from the CIOs: Stop spamming me, tone down the sales pitches, and give me real-world case studies of how your product works.
I can certainly relate to all three gripes, especially now that February is upon us. This month marks the annual conference hosted by HIMSS, the parent company of HIMSS Analytics. The conference is a double-edged sword. Its educational sessions--the ones presented by hospital, payer, and medical group executives, that is--are remarkable in their breadth and depth. The industry is rife with examples of organizations using IT to streamline operations and improve care delivery. And the HIMSS meeting is still the best place to hear about them.
In contrast, the HIMSS exhibit hall has become an over-the-top exercise in booth extravaganza and showmanship. The pyramids come to mind when you encounter the mega-booths with their duplex skyboxes and built-in theatres that tower over the exhibit hall. Listen to some demos there and you'd think an EMR installation was a snap--certainly nothing like the difficult projects described in the education sessions.
No less an authority than IT proponent David Brailer, MD, President Bush's former federal point man on EMR technology, hit on this theme when he spoke at HIMSS 2006. Alluding to Bush's goal of having an EMR in place for the majority of Americans by 2014, Brailer quipped that the U.S. was already well on the way. Just tally up the claims of the various IT vendors, he said, referencing the exhibit hall, and you will see.
In the weeks leading up to the event, my e-mail inbox nears melt-down with pitches trying to entice me to swing by one of the hundreds of booths. I haven't even registered for the show yet, and already I have fielded dozens of invitations. I don't know about you, but to me, three invitations in three consecutive days from the same company borders on being pushy.
The barrage is bad enough for a reporter. But for a CIO, it's even worse. After all, many of them go to HIMSS actually looking to buy something. And the survey demonstrates that CIOs value functionality more than price. Just over three-fourths of them cited functionality as the top consideration in making an IT purchasing decision, while less than half cited price. Having endured countless press releases and demos from IT vendors, I can assure you that figuring out functionality can be trying. The IT sanity check suggests that the CIOs may be losing theirs in trying to understand it all.
Part of the problem, the survey reveals, is that vendors are not spending their dollars wisely. IT executives turn to their peers for steerage on what to buy, and 70 percent of them go to four or more sources. In contrast, IT vendors spend very little on facilitating these types of peer-to-peer exchanges (one notable exception is Cerner, whose annual user conference draws a throng of hospital IT executives). The vast majority of vendors spend less than 5 percent of their marketing budgets on facilitating the kind of exchange their customers value the most.
The modern word for that is "disconnect." It's kind of ironic in an industry that is supposed to be all about connectivity.
CliniComp, a provider of multidisciplinary charting and surveillance solutions to hospitals and health systems, has received the U.S. Department of Defense's Approval to Operate certification for a computerized patient record system. The certification paves the way for any military hospital to install and connect the latest version of the system to its IT network, according to CliniComp.
Halifax Health in Daytona Beach, FL, will present one of the state's first live online surgical procedures, an automated implantable cardiac defibrillator case. The event takes place Thursday, February 28 at 6:30 p.m. ET. The surgery may be viewed at halifaxhealth.org.
The Lance Armstrong Foundation is teaming up with Web-site operator Demand Media Inc. to launch a health-and-wellness Web site funded by advertising. The Foundation currently spends about $40 million a year on health programs and cancer research, and the group felt launching a for-profit site would increase awareness about the foundation and promote its core mission of helping people with cancer.
When a patient comes into a facility for a diagnostic imaging exam, the interpreting physician reads the study and notes abnormal findings in the report. The staff contacts the referring clinician directly with the results, and then waits for the referrer to follow-up. Some of these requests for follow-up due to abnormal results fall through the cracks, but a team at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Baltimore has created an automated application to ensure that none of its follow-up requests are overlooked.
Physician blogger Bob Wachter, MD, disusses the way doctors analyze and use clinical IT. Wachter says that while he has no doubts that IT systems have improved patient care, it is vital to understand some of the unexpected consequences of using the technology.
Marriott has joined a growing legion of companies providing electronic personal health records to their employees. But unlike some of the personal health records offerings being rolled out by other employers, Marriott's system also taps into a sophisticated clinical rules engine that looks to avert potential medical mistakes or gaps in care that could lead to serious complications and costs.
Three years of state grants totaling $750,000 will come to an end in June 2008 for the Tampa Bay Regional Health Information Exchage. The RHIO is now actively seeking additional sources of funding and developing a business plan as it tries to avoid the fate of dozens of RHIOs around the country that are defunct because they lacked sustainable business models.
