Next I talked with John Copabianco, President of Medecision. They’ve been helping some big payers roll out payer-based health records, building on their core utilization and care management business. Here’s his take.

I’ll be doing a little more later today and tomorrow and may have time to jot some other impressions of interesting things and people I saw…or the French Quarter may distract me. We’ll just have to see!

Then I got the Cisco health care brain trust together (Jeff Rideout and Frank Grant) who told me why Cisco really cares about health care. I wasn’t too contentious with them, but then again they are an occasional client–and anyway they’re doing interesting stuff! Here’s the interview with the two of them.

Here’s the Cisco team photo (Jeff and Frank are not the two good looking ones at either end!)

Next I had a good combative chat with Bob Lorsch who’s sunk a lot of money into MyMedicalRecords.com and believes that a standalone personal medical record company can survive and prosper. I’m somewhat skeptical, so it was fun to get into a little bit of contention. Here’s the interview.

My next interview is with Bryan Dieter, CEO of Purkinjie. Not as well known as Allscripts but
with a new product to market aimed at the problem area of the small
physician practice, and a new round of $10m in financing, most of which
John Doerr (of Kleiner Perkins) probably found under his couch
cushions.  Here’s Bryan

UPDATE: Bryan didn’t mention this snippet, and I didn’t notice, but Tom Leith in the comments did! He’s still a fan, though

> new round of $10m in financing, most of which John
> Doerr (of Kleiner Perkins) probably found under his
> couch cushions.

I guess it helps to have a rich brother(?) (Matthews’ note: The bro in question is Tom Doerr MD, the Chairman of Purkinjie)

Anyway, FWIW I have helped to implement the Purkinje CareSeries EMR
and PM system with a solo doc here in St. Louis. Too early yet to give
a good report on effectiveness, but I think the prognosis is good. I
think their model and price point will be disruptive in the market.

Two really interesting conversations today. First a chat with Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman. Find out what he thinks about Barack Obama, the dot-com boom and the bust, and ePrescribing. Not necessarily in that order. He also brought HIMSS doc of the year Jim Morrow with him–a passionate and very interesting EMR user. Here’s the interview.

Bob Laszewski has been, correctly, all over the issue of Medicare Advantage payments and what the Dems will do to them. And he’s at it again CBO Pours Gasoline on the Democratic Plans to Cut Medicare Advantage Payments to HMOs.

It just blows my mind that UNH is up 20% since the election. But the evidence is right here that Wall Street doesn’t believe Bob, or just doesn’t care. Maybe someone smarter (and richer) than me can explain why. I’m just glad I was too chicken to short UNH after the election.

 UPDATE: Bob has answered my question. He thinks that Wall Street is short-termist and doesn’t believe that there’ll be cuts in 2007.

Of course the other big non-HIMSS tech news is that KP dumped interim CIO Phil Bruce Tukstra and brought in another outsider. While the LA Times says that Tukstra ran Health Connect, I’m not so sure. Andy Weisenthal told me that he (on the TPMG side) and Louise Lang (on the plan side) ran it, and expressly said that Dodd (the CIO who went a few months back) had not much to do with it. And I’m a little cynical about the LA Times reporting on this last week too.

However, I have extracted a promise from a senior TMPG regional CMIO to go on the record about what he’s seeing—so hopefully I’ll have more details for you all soon but suffice it to say that not everyone was too happy about the Citrix approach

Meanwhile there was an interesting session I sat in on at HIMSS Monday from the CIO of Kaiser Hawaii about how to deal with down-time when you have an EMR. What he said was that every hour a mirror of the latest data is made and that it’s on a separate system that can be accessed if the main HealthConnect goes down. And then he said that most doctors would dream of having that level of data (i.e. what’s in the backup) and he’s probably right! But I guess the real question is was the low uptime (the Times says 80% only in some cases) a function of the power failures last year, or is it still going on? My understanding is that it’s the former.

Finally, I’m going to be on a panel in Vegas on April 30th with two one leading Kaiser basher”* (Justen Deal and Gadly) and apparently Kaiser has declined an invite <sigh>. Which I guess means that I’m going to be their tame blogger and be castigated for defending HealthConnect….

* term adopted from “Japan basher”

UPDATE: Justen emailed me to point out that not only had I called Bruce, Phil (hey it was 6 am!) and that he was not going to be on the Vegas panel (should have checked, his name was on an earlier agenda I saw but he never agreed) but also this:

Bruce was, without question, the "architect" of HealthConnect.  Before he became
interim CIO, he was the VP specifically for HealthConnect.  Dr. Liang has always
handled making sure HealthConnect improves the "quality" of our hospitals, while
Andy Wiesenthal’s job is to work with the physicians to make sure the system
meets their needs.  Turkstra was in charge of designing and implementing the
system, while Dodd was in charge of making sure the infrastructure was in place
to support it. Finally, I hope you’ll consider not calling me a "basher"
("Japanese" or American) of Kaiser Permanente. Trying to paint someone as a
"basher," frankly, only makes you look like a "cheerleader." Since neither, as
far as I know, is true, I hope you’d consider not using it in the future.

I don’t know about who did within HealthConnect, so hopefully someone who does will tell me if Justen’s right or not.

As for the "basher" term, this is a little inside baseball, but the "Japan bashers" of the late 1980s actually felt that they were very pro-Japanese but that Japanese politics and society needed to become more open. So I think the reference to Justen as a Kaiser-basher is extremely correct in that context.

The Los Angeles Times reports that police in Orange County and the Medical Board of California are investigating a Kaiser surgeon involved in the death of a patient under suspicious circumstances at Sierra Medical Center in San Louis Obisbo. Dr. Hootan Roozrokh is alleged to have "hastened" the death of a potential organ donor by ordering that he be given a lethal dose of painkillers. Roozrokh was suspended by Kaiser over the incident in May, at about the same time that the HMO ordered its controversial transplant program closed.

Picking up from the Times report:

State law specifies that transplant doctors cannot direct the treatment
of potential organ donors before they are declared dead. This
restriction is designed, in large part, to assuage concerns that organ
retrieval might take priority over patient care.In this case,
however, Roozrokh entered the operating room at Sierra Vista and was
directing the administration of drugs to Navarro, the sources said. When
the patient didn’t die, Roozrokh allegedly told nurses: "Let’s just
give him some more candy," according to a person who was briefed on
what took place but spoke on condition of anonymity because of the
ongoing investigations.

THCB’s live blogging coverage of HIMSS 2007 New Orleans would not be possible without the generous assistance of the kind souls at CDW Healthcare. Take a moment to go check out their specials for physicians and other health care providers and you’ll help us continue to provide independent coverage and cutting edge discussion of the issues facing healthcare. We get credit for every person who clicks over, so please take twenty seconds and go visit their site. If you decide to place order, tell them the Health Care Blog sent you — Matthew

 

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Stark Study by GE Healthcare Predicts Accelerated Electronic Medical Record Adoption within the Next Year

“Stark Relaxation has created a tremendous opportunity for physicians to overcome the many barriers that prevent them from adopting EMR systems, most notably cost,” said Mike Raymer, Vice President and General Manager, Product Strategy and New Business Initiatives for GE Healthcare Integrated IT Solutions. “By allowing hospitals and other entities to provide EMR technology to physician practices at a subsidy of up to 85 percent, physicians are now better positioned to implement these comprehensive systems and provide a complete and current picture of a patient’s medical history – helping physicians raise the quality and improve the safety of healthcare.”

This is a bit of a Joe Namath guaranteeing a win story. Hmm, if there aren’t some pretty big Centricity/IDX wins in the next year, do you think that Mike Raymer will want to be reminded of this study?