Clinical Decision Support

The New Healthcare Team: GE & Microsoft

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Jeremy Bikman. You can read more about the GE and Microsoft Venture on EMR and EHR.

Guest Post: Jeremy Bikman is Chairman at KATALUS Advisors, a strategic consulting firm focused on the healthcare vertical. We help vendors grow, guide hospitals into the future, and advise private equity groups on their investments. Our clients are found in North America, Europe, and Asia. www.KATALUSadvisors.com

Healthcare is being held hostage and it doesn’t even know it.

It is held hostage by burdensome regulations, by archaic practices, and (oddly enough) by technology itself. In this age of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, an age where anybody with internet access can connect to somebody else on the other side of the globe and share personal information and other data with the click of a mouse, it is impossible that you could visit a hospital in the next town over and they would be able to procure your personal health information as easily or as quickly.

Healthcare, globally and locally, is utterly huge and mind-blowingly complex, and thus absolutely needs the very best innovation of everybody involved. Yet, healthcare technology companies almost universally deliver products which are built on closed-minded concepts. They lock down their platforms, creating real barriers to interoperability, patient data exchange, and actual innovation. This is the present reality within, and across, practically every hospital on earth. The recently announced joint venture between GE and Microsoft offers hope of an alternate reality, one where hospitals can bring together data streams from all over the enterprise, while utilizing new innovations and technology as they see fit, including different best-of-breed sources.

Giving Hospitals a New Choice
There are huge flaws in how technology is delivered in healthcare today, flaws which impact quality of care within a hospital and across the entire industry irrespective of country or region. While the rest of the tech world is moving towards open platforms and collaborative delivery models, healthcare seems to be stuck in the dark ages of single-source solutions which compel all-or-nothing investments to the tune of millions and millions of dollars. Too often those investments fail. But, the more important question is why must hospitals be forced into all-or-nothing decisions in the first place? Why must they choose between integration and functionality, between a single platform, however mediocre, and a best-of-breed mix? We believe those are questions of the antiquated past and that brave new innovation can deliver a new avenue for hospitals who refuse to be painted into a corner. Hospitals shouldn’t have to choose between apples and oranges. They want, and should be able to get, both.

The Basics of the Joint Venture
Selected product lines from both companies’ health groups will be part of the new company. These products were chosen for their specific focus on “empowering connected patient-centric care.”

GE is contributing an interoperable clinical data model and decision support system via Qualibria. GE’s eHealth is an HIE solution in use at a large number of sites in North America. Microsoft is bringing Amalga to the table, which is a data aggregation platform which facilitates interoperability and a host of other advanced capabilities. Vergence and expreSSO come through Microsoft’s acquisition of Sentillion and provide strong context management and single sign-on solutions. The strategy appears to be one of leveraging Microsoft’s platform technology (Amalga) to underpin GE’s clinical depth (Qualibria, eHealth). Additionally, this model will allow hospitals and vendors to integrate best-of-breed 3rd party products into the ecosystem as they see fit. This mix of products and capabilities will enable a true best-of-breed environment emerge while still having the core elements of integration as well. This ecosystem will be powered by the partnership’s own applications and those built by ISVs. No other major vendor offers this unique model and set of abilities, although Allscripts is the one traditional EMR vendor that is building a strategy of accepting of 3rd party solutions.

Tackling the Big Problems

No one is saying that this joint venture is guaranteed to be a resounding success. However, we applaud the visionary model and risks this new team is taking. It looks like they want to address all the big hairy obstacles that every provider organization, region, and nation is facing. Big data? Absolutely. Enterprise analytics and business intelligence? Yes. Clinical decision support? For sure. Population management? You bet. Nobody else in the industry has shown they can tackle these issues even though every hospital is clamoring for this type of model. So why not this joint venture between GE and Microsoft? We say good luck, and more power to them.

The principals of KATALUS Advisors have worked with hundreds of healthcare organizations, vendors, and other consulting firms across the globe. The opinions expressed here are our own and are not intended to promote any specific vendor and do not reflect those of any other organization or individual.

The “Smart EMR” Differentiator

Written by: John Lynn

As I’ve been able to talk to more and more EMR companies I’ve been trying to figure out a way to differentiate the various EHR software. In fact, when I meet with EHR software companies I suggest that instead of them showing me a full demo of their EHR software, I ask them to show me the feature(s) that set their EHR apart from the other 300+ EHR companies out there. I must admit that it’s always interesting to see what they show me. Sometimes because what they show me isn’t that interesting or different. Many of my EMR company specific posts come from these experiences.

Today at MGMA as I went from one EHR company to another I started to get an idea for what might be the future differentiation between EHR companies. I’m calling it: “Smart EMR.”

You can be sure that I’ll be writing about my thoughts on Smart EMR software many more times in the future. However, the basic idea is that far too many EHR software are just basic translations from paper to electronic. Sure, some of them do a pretty good job of capturing the data in granular data elements (something not possible on paper), but that’s far from my idea of what a future Smart EMR software will need to accomplish.

I’m sure that many of those that are reading this post immediately started to think about the idea of clinical decision support. Certainly clinical decision support will be one important element of a Smart EMR, but I think that’s barely even the beginning of how a Smart EMR will need to work in the future. However, clinical decision support as it’s been described to date focuses far too much on how a clinician’s discretely entered data elements can support the care they provide. That’s far too narrow of a view of how an EMR will improve the patient-doctor interaction.

Without going into all the detail, EHR software is going to have to learn to accept and process a number of interesting and external data sources. One example could be all the data that a patient has in the PHR. Another could be patient data that was collected using personal various medical devices like a blood pressure cuff, an EKG, and blood glucose meters. Not to mention more consumer centric data devices and apps such as RunKeeper, Fitbit, sleep tracking, mood tracking, etc etc etc.

Another example of an external source could be access to some community health data repository. Why shouldn’t community trends in healthcare be part of the patient care process? None of this is far reaching since we’re collecting this data today and it will become more and more mainstream over time. Something we can’t do today, but likely will in the future is things like genomics. Imagine how personalized healthcare will change when an EHR will need to know and be able to process your genome in order to provide proper care.

I don’t claim to know all the sources, but I think that gives you a flavor of what a Smart EMR will have to process in the future. I’ll be interested to see which EHR software companies see this change and are able to execute on it. Many of the current innovations in EHR have been pretty academic. The Smart EMR I describe above will be much more complicated and require some specific skills and resources to do it right.

Guest Post: Overcoming EMR Integration Challenges

Written by: John Lynn

Dan Neuwirth is the CEO of MedCPU, provider of the innovative MedCPUAdvisor™ platform: with applications for decision support for clinical guidelines, Meaningful Use, and care pathways, that captures the complete clinical picture in real time, including narrative text and structured data to deliver the most accurate clinical and compliance guidance.

There’s no question that healthcare needs to adopt new technology that makes us more effective and efficient and curbs costs, like Electronic Medical Records (EMR) solutions and Clinical Decision Support (CDS) systems. In today’s world, providers of all sizes continue to find it challenging to integrate existing HIT systems with EMRs for a variety of reasons. As our industry evolves, technology solutions need to be smarter and empower seamless integration.

EMR and HIPAA guest author Susan White covers in depth how a lack of connectivity standards affects EMR integration. There are no mandated standards for EMR vendors to follow, making it hard to coordinate data sharing between medical devices and other systems (including from one EMR to another), even at the same facility. As those systems operate in disparate fashions, critical clinical information is often lost or stuck in silos. Most importantly, the information is not where clinicians need it most–at their fingertips, in an exam room, with a patient.

This lack of data sharing is a pervasive concern. One Markle report finds that roughly 80 percent of both consumers and physicians demand that hospitals and doctors be required to share information that improves coordination of care, cuts unnecessary costs, and reduces medical errors.

In 2010, more than $88 Billion were spent on developing and implementing EHRs, health information exchanges (HIEs) and other health IT initiatives. When you consider that the average 10-physician practice spends more than $137,000 per year on prior authorizations and pharmacy callbacks alone, you’ll have to agree that the lack of data integration and sharing get very costly. And although I agree with John Halamka, who recently wrote these challenges exist because healthcare is inherently more complicated than other industries, I am a strong believer that a lot of them can be overcome by the use of smart technology.

We need smart, flexible solutions, which capitalize on existing technologies and require minimal integration. Technologies that employ advanced screen extraction, for example, empower several important improvements in the clinical decision support space such as the capturing and analysis of both free and structured text. A lot of time such solutions are rendered ineffective as they either lack compatibility with leading EMR systems or are too hard to integrate.

As the industry evolves, developing robust protocols for capturing both structured and unstructured data along with standards for data integration and sharing will become increasingly important. With all the data points created on patients every day, we will need a consistent, secure, and reliable way to capture and share patient data among all systems and healthcare providers. What is your experience? What are top data capturing and integration challenges faced by your organization? Looking forward to continuing the dialog and hearing your feedback.

Jeopardy!’s Watson Computer and Healthcare

Written by: John Lynn

I’m sure like many of you, I was completely intrigued by the demonstration of the Watson computer competing against the best Jeopardy! stars. It was amazing to watch not only how Watson was able to come up with the answer, but also how quickly it was able to reach the correct answer.

The hype at the IBM booth at HIMSS was really strong since it had been announced that healthcare was one of the first places that IBM wanted to work on implementing the “Watson” technology (read more about the Watson Technology in Healthcare in this AP article). Although, I found the most interesting conversation about Watson in the Nuance booth when I was talking to Dr. Nick Van Terheyden. The idea of combining the Watson technology with the voice recognition and natural language processing technologies that Nuance has available makes for a really compelling product offering.

One of the keys in the AP article above and was also mentioned by Dr. Nick from Nuance was that the Watson technology in healthcare would be applied differently than it was on Jeopardy!. In healthcare it wouldn’t try and make the decision and provide the correct answer for you. Instead, the Watson technology would be about providing you a number of possible answers and the likelihood of that answer possibly being the issue.

Some of this takes me back to Neil Versel’s posts about Clinical Decision Support and doctors resistance to CDS. There’s no doubt that the Watson technology is another form of Clinical Decision Support, but there’s little about the Watson technology which takes power away from the doctor’s decision making. It certainly could have an influence on a doctor’s ability to provide care, but that’s a great thing. Not that I want doctors constantly second guessing themselves. Not that I want doctors relying solely on the information that Watson or some other related technology provides. It’s like most clinical tools. When used properly, they can provide a great benefit to the doctor using them. When used improperly, it can lead to issues. However, it’s quite clear that Watson technology does little to take away from the decision making of doctors. In fact, I’d say it empowers doctors to do what they do better.

Personally I’m very excited to see technologies like Watson implemented in healthcare. Plus, I think we’re just at the beginning of what will be possible with this type of computing.

Skills in Search As Valuable as Memorization

Written by: John Lynn

Neils’ article about Unrealistic Expectations about Clinical Decision Support made me think of how important the ability to know where to find the information can be in so many different situations. In fact, memorization of where to search might be more valuable and useful than strict memorization of everything.

The core point is that with very rare exception, the human mind can only store and recall so much information. However, if you only have to remember where to find a certain piece of information, it’s much easier to remember. For example, many of my readers probably don’t realize that I have a network of TV blogs. I get a lot of credit on those websites for listing out the music for those shows. Funny thing is that I’m not all that good at identifying songs. However, I am great at searching and finding the information.

Why can’t we accept this from doctors? Why do we expect that doctors should know everything as opposed to accepting that they don’t know everything, but they know where to find out more? Many actually can accept this.

Of course, many people might appropriately ask the question, “If my doctor’s just going to look up the information, why don’t I just look it up myself?”

There are quite a few reasons why it’s not the same. Let me just give one of them. While Doctors don’t know everything, they have been trained to identify the relevant information. Understanding what’s relevant turns out to be incredibly valuable when trying to solve a problem.

How about an example for comparison sake. Many Windows users are quite familiar with what’s affectionately called the Windows “Blue Screen of Death.” To the untrained eye, the blue screen of death is a daunting screen that provides an information overload of error messages of what went wrong your computer. To an IT person like myself, I can quickly identify the 1 or 2 lines that are actually relevant to the problem and find a possible solution.

While certainly not a perfect comparison, I think the skills that a trained doctor uses to identify a medical issue are similar to the above scenario. Funny thing is that no one would have any issue with me doing a search for how to solve the problem the blue screen of death identifies. However, many are uncomfortable with the idea of their doctor doing a similar search.

This isn’t to say that patients shouldn’t participate in their own care. That’s a related, but different topic. However, I echo Neil’s call for patients to be more accepting of doctors who use clinical decision support and other tools that help provide better care. Not to mention his call for doctors to not be afraid to admit when they don’t know everything, but that they have the tools, resources and skills to provide great patient care.

Medical Establishment Continues to Cling to Status Quo

Written by: Neil Versel

One of my favorite conference speakers, Lexington, S.C., family physician Allen Wenner, M.D., who created Primetime Software’s Instant Medical History software, often jokes that many of his contemporaries “need to die” before we see much change in the way physicians practice medicine. I’m increasingly convinced that he’s right.

It’s, of course, older doctors, that seem to be the most resistant to change. They also happen to be the ones most likely to hold leadership positions, if for no other reason than their seniority.

That’s why I’m so troubled by the attitude of physicians such as Arvind Goyal, M.D., a family physician in Rolling Meadows, Ill., who’s on the faculty of Chicago Medical School/Rosalind Franklin University in North Chicago, Ill., and is a past president of the Illinois State Medical Society. Last week, the Chicago Tribune published a lengthy, scathing letter from Goyal, in which he thoroughly trashed electronic medical records based on a negative experience he had with “a popular brand of EMR” at a Federally Qualified Community Health Center.

Goyal brought up some salient points about what can go wrong with a poorly implemented EMR. “The system was slow generally, froze up a few times a day and crashed every few months, requiring us to reschedule patients. Pricey service calls, multiple system updates, periodic shutdowns, user training and hiring of a full-time IT expert at a significant cost helped some, but the dissatisfaction persisted,” he wrote.

He ticked off the standard laundry list of why physicians struggle with EMRs, including the argument that “documentation and accessibility of information in EMR is more time-consuming than paper records.” Forgive me if I’m wrong, but that sounds like a workflow problem more than a technology problem.

“Federal incentives for adoption of EMRs come with complicated bureaucratic requirements,” he added. Perhaps, but will you still be making that argument when Medicare and then private payers start requiring EMR usage as a condition of reimbursement?

“Data backup is a prudent need and often requires an additional investment.” Well, duh, but isn’t that true of your home computer as well? Your practice management systems?

But Goyal really stepped over the line when he repeated one of the greatest fallacies in medicine, that doctors know all.

“In my successful suburban solo family practice of several years, I did not use electronic medical records. Knowledge of each patient I served was on the tip of my tongue when an emergency-room doctor seeing one of my patients called in the middle of a night. I was available 24/7 with few exceptions. The paper records were organized such that I was able to access clinical details quickly when needed,” Goyal wrote.

How can knowledge of each patient be on the tip of his tongue if he’s woken up in the middle of the night and his precious paper files aren’t right there next to his bed? Is his memory that good that he knows every pertinent detail of every patient, even when still in a haze from an unexpected wake-up call? Yeah, nice try.

Furthermore, it’s great that Goyal is available to other doctors around the clock in case of an emergency, but is he available to patients? Medicine is changing. It’s supposed to be about patients, not physicians. But some physicians still wrongly believe they know everything and will do just about anything to cling to the status quo.

In case you haven’t noticed, the status quo isn’t so good.

Meaningful Use Measures: CPOE – Meaningful Use Monday

Written by: Lynn

CPOE (Computerized Provider Order Entry), is the direct entering of orders into a computer (or mobile device), so that the order is documented in a digital, structured, and computable format.

Meaningful Use Core Measure: CPOE
More than 30% of unique patients with at least one medication in their medication list seen by the EP have at least one medication order entered using CPOE.
Exclusion: providers who write fewer than 100 prescriptions during the reporting period.

CPOE is one of the measures that elicited quite an animated response from the provider community. When initially proposed, this measure required 80% of all orders to be directly entered by the provider. To overcome objections to the scope of the requirement and the burden it would impose, CMS ultimately limited the measure to medication orders and reduced the threshold to 30%. (The proposal for Stage 2 reinstitutes lab and radiology orders, but the requirements have not yet been finalized.)

There was also a great deal of conversation about who has to enter the order into the EHR—does it have to be the authorizing physician him/herself? This is the only measure in the Final Rule in which CMS addresses who can perform the function, identifying “…any licensed healthcare professional who can enter orders into the medical record per state, local and professional guidelines.” While some providers are unsure about where these specific guidelines can be found, CMS does provide further guidance, stating that CPOE should be done by someone who can exercise clinical judgment and take action based on the alerts and/or clinical decision support information that the order might generate.

Because for now CPOE is limited to medication orders, it is accomplished either in the course of ePrescribing or by using the same workflow but not transmitting the prescription electronically, (e.g., when prescribing controlled substances or prescribing for patients who request a printed prescription.) All of these prescriptions count in the numerator of this meaningful use measure because they are entered into the EHR.

Lynn Scheps is Vice President, Government Affairs at EHR vendor SRSsoft. In this role, Lynn has been a Voice of Physicians and SRSsoft users in Washington during the formulation of the meaningful use criteria. Lynn is currently working to assist SRSsoft users interested in showing meaningful use and receiving the EHR incentive money. Check out Lynn’s previous Meaningful Use Monday posts.

Medispan Clinical Expands CDS Offerings by Wolters Kluwer Health

Written by: John Lynn

Since I know I have a number of EMR vendors that read this blog, I know they’ll be interested to learn the news coming out of Wolters Kluwer Health about a new clinical decision support (CDS) offering called Medi-Span Clinical. Here’s a part of the press release announcement:

Wolters Kluwer Health, a leading global provider of information for healthcare professionals and students, today unveiled Medi-Span® Clinical, a robust clinical decision support (CDS) platform that delivers the functionality, interoperability and medication-related CDS necessary to advance the practice of evidence-based medicine and to achieve meaningful use of health IT.

From the looks of their website page about Medi-Span Clinical, this looks like it’s the announcement of the features that they have listed nicely as “launching in 2010.”

APIs OFFERING CLINICAL DECISION SUPPORT
SCREENING INFORMATION LAUNCHING IN 2010
Drug Interactions™ API
Route Contraindications™ API
Drug Allergy™ API
Duplicate Therapy™ API
Dose Screening and Drug Orders™ API
Drug Disease Contraindications™ API
Pregnancy, Lactation, Age and Gender™ API

APIs OFFERING CLINICAL DECISION SUPPORT
REFERENCE INFORMATION
Trissel’s IV-CHEK™ API
Integrated MedFacts Module™ API
Integrated Drug Facts and Comparisons™ API
Drug Image and Imprint™ API

That’s quite a robust offering of services that can really benefit an EMR. I tried really hard to get our EMR to implement Medispan since that’s what our pharmacy uses. Unfortunately, they chose to integrate a different drug database mostly because of cost of Medi-Span I believe. We’ll see if they are regretting that after announcements like this.

I know there are a number of interesting API services like this out there. I’d be interested to hear more about EMR vendor and users experiences with the other people in the industry.

One other interesting piece from the press release:

“In addition to unprecedented interoperability, Medi-Span Clinical delivers advanced end-user controls over alerts and warnings that reduce the risk of ‘alert fatigue’ and drive adoption at the point-of-care,” said Subramanian. “By deploying Medi-Span Clinical within their EMRs, providers and vendors alike are able to advance the meaningful use of health IT and provide clinicians with the advanced point-of-care CDS they will actively embrace.”

I think that a third party service offering like this can really help an EMR vendor. It kind of makes sense to have it separated, but tightly integrated through an API. I’m sure it’s all a bit technical for many readers of my blog, but let’s just say it’s a good thing for the EMR industry for these capabilities to continue to improve.

Also, it should help an EMR vendor meet some of the meaningful use guidelines. Although, it does seem a bit gratuitous to use the buzzword meaningful use like this. I wonder if I’ll get any press releases that won’t include that term somewhere.

EMR Features with the Most Potential

Written by: John Lynn

“Physician order entry and decision support I believe offer the most chance of improving healthcare delivery. There are a lot of information systems with bells and whistles that don’t focus on physicians’ real needs.” – Neil R. Powe, MD, MPH, MBA, Chief of Medical Services, San Francisco General Hospital source

I previously posted about the benefits of EMR interoperability. The above quote touts Physician order entry and clinical decision support as the most likely to improve healthcare. Are these the three most promising features of an EMR or is there something they’re missing? What’s the killer feature of an EMR that will make every doctor implement an EMR whether they like it or not?

Alert Fatigue and Clinical Decision Support

Written by: John Lynn

Clinical Decision Support has been called out as an important part of an EMR system. You’ll get no argument from me on this. What I have been thinking a lot about is what people call “Alert Fatigue.” For those unfamiliar with the term, it basically means that a doctor gets so many alerts that they grow numb to the alerts and stop looking at them. For those that are married, it’s like your wife’s nagging. It happens so much that you stop listening (ok, that was a joke. I hope none of us do that or have reached that point. I’m just lucky to have a wife who doesn’t nag).

I think this concept of “alert fatigue” is really important and I think it will be impossible to create an EMR that strikes the perfect balance. Some EMR offer too many alerts and some probably offer too few. So, my question for you is which side should we adopt? Is it better to have too many alerts which doctors then might ignore or is it better to have too few alerts and not be alerted to something important?

There’s some real challenging issues associated with both. Liability unfortunately being a major part of each. Where do you stand on this issue?

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The New Healthcare Team: GE & Microsoft

The “Smart EMR” Differentiator

Guest Post: Overcoming EMR Integration Challenges

Jeopardy!’s Watson Computer and Healthcare

Skills in Search As Valuable as Memorization

Medical Establishment Continues to Cling to Status Quo

Meaningful Use Measures: CPOE – Meaningful Use Monday

Medispan Clinical Expands CDS Offerings by Wolters Kluwer Health

EMR Features with the Most Potential

Alert Fatigue and Clinical Decision Support

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