Tag: HIMSS 2012

HIMSS12 Takeaway: Follow the Money

Nov 1, 2018

By John Moore

Last week we attended the big healthcare IT confab HIMSS in that grand city of sin, Las Vegas. While many spoke of how HIMSS hit an all time record of over 37K attendees (an impressive number), HIMSS is still dwarfed by what is arguably the largest US-based healthcare trade show, RSNA, which had a 2011 attendance of just over 57K, (roughly 54% greater than HIMSS). Why such a radical difference you ask? As one colleague put it:

RSNA is where providers come to make money and HIMSS is where they go to lose money.

While that may be the case today, it is unlikely to be so in the future. The healthcare industry is undergoing a massive transformation that will likely take a decade to complete as we transition from a reimbursement model largely based on fee for service to one based on outcomes. Under this new model, providers will be taking on a greater portion of risk. In reward, these providers have an opportunity to receive a significantly higher net reimbursement. This transition is making for some interesting bedfellows as payers and providers join together to create new care delivery models such as Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and Patient Centered Medical Homes (PCMHs). These new models will be increasingly dependent on a robust HIT infrastructure to effectively measure quality, risk and performance, something that simply cannot be done effectively with the antiquated systems that are in place today in many healthcare organizations (HCOs).

KP CEO George Halvorson on His Organization’s Mobile App Strategy

Feb 27, 2012• 1

George Halvorson is the CEO who initiated and oversaw the biggest (private sector) EMR implementation ever. What’s Kaiser Permanente doing to expand on that? How is the new technology changing their thinking about care? How fast does George think the rest of health care is changing (very) and can others catch Kaiser (he thinks it would help Kaiser if they tried)? And what about getting other non-Epic apps on that KP system? I spoke with George at HIMSS12 yesterday, and his views are well worth a listen.

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Who Is Biz Stone and What Is Twitter?

Feb 22, 2012• 3

By Fred Trotter

Yesterday, one of the founders of Twitter, Biz Stone, gave the opening keynote at HIMSS.

This is probably going to be the best keynote at HIMSS, followed by a speech from Dr. Farzad Mostashari, which will also be excellent. It goes downhill after that: there will be a talk about politics and another talk from an “explorer.” I am sure those will be great talks, but when I go to HIMSS, I want to hear about health information technology. Want to know what @biz actually said? As usual, Twitter itself provides an instant summary.

HIMSS stands for Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. The annual HIMSS conference is the largest Health IT gathering on the planet. Almost 40,000 people will show up to discuss healthcare information systems. Many of them will be individuals sent by their hospitals to try and find out what solutions they will need to purchase in order to meet meaningful use requirements. But many of the attendees are old school health IT experts, many of whom have spent entire careers trying to bring technology into a healthcare system that has resisted computerization tooth and nail. This year will likely break all kind of attendance records for HIMSS. Rightly so: The value of connecting thousands of health IT experts with tens of thousands who are seeking health IT experts has never been higher.

It is ironic that Biz Stone is keynoting this year’s talk, because Twitter has changed the health IT game so substantially. I say Twitter specifically, and not “social media” generally. I do not think Facebook or Google+ or your social media of choice has had nearly the impact that Twitter has had on healthcare communications.

HIMSS, and in many cases traditional health IT along with it, is experiencing something of a whirlwind. One force adding wind has been the fact that President Obama has funded EHR systems with meaningful use, and made it clear that the future of healthcare funding will take place at Accountable Care Organizations (ACO) that are paid to keep people healthy rather than to cover procedures when they are sick. It is hard to understate the importance of this. Meaningful Use and ACOs will do more to computerize medicine in five years than the previous 50 years without these incentive changes.Continue reading…

Seizing the Opportunity in the ICD-10 Delay

Feb 22, 2012• 5

By HEATHER HAUGEN, PHD

Innovative thinkers and influential healthcare leaders aren’t relying on the decisions coming out of HHS to determine their strategy. Despite the fact that many healthcare organizations were on target to transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10, Health and Human Services (HHS) announced it would initiate a process to postpone the date by which certain healthcare entities have to comply with ICD-10.

The details of the delay have not been revealed, but industry experts are speculating that a one-two year delay is in the works. With only 20 months remaining to the Oct. 1, 2013 deadline, this leaves many organizations in limbo. Do they continue down the path of ICD-10 adoption, revise plans based on speculation about a new timeline or completely put the initiative on hold?

The leaders in healthcare never limited their thinking to a coding mandate. They were aligning their ICD-10 efforts with quality of care initiatives- EMR adoption and improved clinical documentation. They won’t hesitate, they won’t miss a step, and they will focus on providing exceptional care through improved processes, many of which will prepare them for a successful transition to ICD-10 and ICD-11.

The following areas of focus will improve quality of care, reporting and accuracy of reimbursement.

– Lead with purpose- understand the long-term impact of a coding mandate and help providers understand the alignment of greater specificity in coding with quality reporting, improved clinical documentation and clinical decision support.

– Take this time to improve clinical documentation– develop processes and feedback to improve how physicians and other providers document care. This effort will reap financial benefits and directly impact quality of care and reporting.Continue reading…

Eric Topol: Too Clever by Three-Quarters

Feb 22, 2012• 4

By Matthew Holt

Eric Topol was once a lowly (well not that lowly) cardiology professor at the University of Michigan, but he’s now without question the leading renaissance man in health care technology. Virtually every week sees him on some big stage disgnosing his own heart murmur with an iPhone app or showing off how his sleep brain waves and his genome interact or don’t.

His new book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine is a tour de force romp through basically every type of cool new medical technology. He covers the Cloud/Web/Wireless/Sensor phenomenon from both a social, transactional and diagnostic point of view–leaning heavily on his connection to the West Wireless Health Institute which he helped persuade Gary & Mary West to fund. He’s the creator of a new medical school program at Scripps focusing on the genomics and proteomics revolution, and the book covers in great detail the evolution of the human genome project and its impact on disease discovery (coming eventually) and matching patients to the right drug (available more or less now). Finally he was of course the head of Cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic where he not only was heavily involved in the testing of tPA (the drug that built Genetech) but also in unveiling the problems with Vioxx not limited to the drug itself but also concerning Merck’s behavior at the time. (Remember Dodgeball?)

The Melody Of Quality Measures: Harmonize And Standardize

Feb 21, 2012• 13

By Thomas Tsang, MD and Faraz Ahmad, MD

With unsustainably high costs and tremendous gaps in quality and patient safety, the health care system is ripe with opportunities for improvement. For years, many have seen quality measurement as a means to drive needed change. Private and public payers, public health departments, and independent accreditation organizations have asked health care providers to report on quality measures, and quality measures have been publicly reported or tied to financial reimbursement or both.

Throughout the Affordable Care Act (ACA), quality measures are tied to reimbursements in multiple programs. It is critical that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) move forward with a strategy for measure harmonization that will accommodate local and national needs to evaluate outcomes and value. Additionally, a standard for calculation measures such as the use of a minimal data set for the universe of measures should be considered.

The field of quality measurement is at a critical juncture. The Affordable Care Act (ACA)—which mentions “quality measures,” “performance measures,” or “measures of quality,” 128 times—heightened an already growing emphasis on quality measurement. With so much focus on quality, the resource burden on health care providers of taking and reporting measures for multiple agencies and payers is significant.

Furthermore, the field itself is being transformed with the continued adoption of electronic health records (EHRs). Traditional measures are largely based on administrative or claims data. The increased use of EHRs create the opportunity to develop sophisticated electronic clinical quality measures (eQMs) leveraging clinical data, which when linked with clinical decision support tools and payment policy, have the potential to improve quality and decrease costs more dramatically than traditional ones. Innovative electronic measures on the horizon include “delta measures” calculating changes in patient health over time and care coordination measures for the electronic transfer of patient information (i.e., hospital discharge summary or consultant note successfully transmitted to the primary care physician). Additionally, traditional data abstraction methodologies for clinical data require labor intensive, chart review processes, which would be eliminated if data could be electronically extracted.