Bernie Monegain

Nashville-based Ardent Health Services, which operates hospitals in Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas, plans to unite all its hospitals and physician groups on an Epic Systems EHR platform.

Patricia Flatley Brennan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and a former practicing nurse with a Ph.D. in industrial engineering, will take the lead as director at the National Library of Medicine. The NLM is the world's largest biomedical library and the producer of digital information services used by scientists, health professionals and members of the public worldwide. National Institutes of Health Director Francis S. Collins, MD, announced the pick today. Brennan is expected to begin her new role in August 2016. "Patti brings her incredible experience of having cared for patients as a practicing nurse, improved the lives of homebound patients by developing innovative information systems and services designed to increase their independence, and pursued cutting-edge research in data visualization and virtual reality," Collins said in a statement. For seven years, Brennan worked in both critical care and psychiatric nursing. As Collins sees it, Brennan's combination of skills makes her ideally suited to lead the NLM in the era of precision medicine. She will take charge of the library as it becomes the epicenter for biomedical data science, not just at NIH, but across the biomedical research enterprise, he noted. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she is a professor at the School of Nursing and College of Engineering. She also leads the Living Environments Laboratory at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, which is developing new ways for effective visualization of high dimensional data. Brennan is recognized as a pioneer in developing information systems for patients.   She designed ComputerLink, an electronic network to reduce isolation and improve self-care among home care patients. She directed HeartCare, a web-based information and communication service that helps cardiac patients at home to recover faster, and with fewer symptoms. Brennan also directed Project HealthDesign, an initiative designed to stimulate the next generation of personal health records. She also conducts external evaluations of health information technology architectures, and works to repurpose engineering methods for healthcare. She received a master of science in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Following seven years of clinical practice in critical care nursing and psychiatric nursing, Brennan held several academic positions at Marquette University, Milwaukee; Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. NLM Acting Director Betsy L. Humphreys led the NLM over the past year, after Donald Lindberg, MD, retired having served more than 30 years. Twitter: @Bernie_HITN Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook and LinkedIn

Two southeast Missouri healthcare organizations – SoutheastHEALTH, in Cape Giradeau, and Missouri Delta Medical Center, in Sikeston – will each install a Cerner Millennium EHR system. The platform provides an integrated digital record of a patient's health history, including clinical and financial data. Also, by using the online patient portal, patients will be able to securely message their physicians, schedule appointments and access their health history. "SoutheastHEALTH prides itself on being a high-tech, high-touch hospital focused on making a positive impact, and the EHR will help fulfill that mission," said Ken Bateman, president and CEO of SoutheastHEALTH, in a statement. Besides transitioning to Millennium, Missouri Delta Medical Center will also deploy Cerner's CommunityWorks technology, a prescriptive and remote-hosted IT platform tailored to support community healthcare organizations that provide care to rural communities. [Also: Cerner taps John Glaser to lead EHR company's population health efforts] More than half of Cerner clients that are live with the CommunityWorks model have achieved Stage 6 of the HIMSS Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model. "As a rural community hospital, we have been recognized with top performing patient satisfaction scores and clinical process of care measures," said Jason Schrumpf, president and CEO of Missouri Delta Medical Center, in a statement. Both organizations expect to benefit from advanced interoperability capabilities, which will enable the transfer of patient data between the organizations and among health systems across the country. Twitter: @Bernie_HITN Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook and LinkedIn

Female CEOs are doing better than ever on the compensation front, with median pay figured at $15.9 million, 21 percent higher than last year. That compared with median pay for male CEOs of $10.4 million, which was down 0.8 percent from 2013. Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo is at the pinnacle of the top 10 women CEO list, with a salary of $42.1 million. The numbers come from executive compensation benchmarking firm Equilar and the Associated Press. However, there remains a large gap between the number of female CEOs and male CEOs. The study of 340 CEOs included only 17 women. Also, numbers can be tricky. Once they are sliced and diced, the picture comes into better focus. Released along with the list of highest paid women CEOs, was another list – one that ranked highest paid CEOs, regardless of gender. Mayer was the one woman to make that list – at No. 5. As Fast Company pointed out after it crunched the annual paychecks every which way: The top two highest-paid male CEOs make more than all the top-paid female CEOs combined. David Zaslav, the top executive at Discovery Communications, took in $156.1 million in 2014. Leslie Moonves, the CEO of CBS, made $54.4 million. Combined, that's about $210 million. Here are the top 10 women CEOs by compensation: Marissa Mayer: Yahoo, $42.1 million Carol Meyrowitz: TJX Companies, $23.3 million Meg Whitman: Hewlett-Packard, $19.6 million Indra Nooyi: PepsiCo, $19.1 million Phebe Novakovic: General Dynamics, $19 million Virginia Rometty: IBM, $17.9 million Marillyn Hewson: Lockheed Martin, $17.9 million Patricia Woertz: Archer Daniels Midland, $16.3 million Irene Rosenfeld: Mondelez International, $15.9 million Ellen Kullman, DuPont, $13.1 million Other key findings from Equilar: For the first time since 2011, a female executive (Marissa Mayer of Yahoo!) made the list as one of the top 10 highest-paid CEOs with a total compensation of $42.1 million. The four highest paid executives – David Zaslav, Leslie Moonves, Philippe Dauman, and Robert Iger—have all appeared in the top 10 since the study was first published. For CEOs in the current study, median pay increased 0.8 percent between 2013 and 2014 from $10,521,653 to $10,611,031. On average, pay packages in 2014 were composed of 61 percent equity, 36 percent cash and 3 percent other compensation. Female CEOs are outpacing their male colleagues in pay, although they remain vastly outnumbered in the top echelons of American companies. Twitter: @Bernie_HITN Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com

OhioMHAS sent clients a postcard inviting them to take part in a satisfaction survey, thereby disclosing that the individuals had received treatment. And it’s not the first time the department has sent such a postcard.

The platform, developed by Yale School of Medicine researchers and Yale New Haven Health System, is designed to enable patients to both access their records and participate in studies.

As the country celebrates National Women’s Heath Week this week, women at the University of California, San Francisco’s National Center of Excellence in Women’s Health, have double cause to celebrate. It was 20 years ago the center was founded. The founding director, Nancy Milliken, continues to lead the enterprise today. “Women were vulnerable to harm from undertreatment, overtreatment and mistreatment due to the lack of rigorous research on women's unique experience of health and disease,” Milliken said in the May 8 UCSF article. Before launching the center, Milliken was a professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at UCSF. UCSF was designated in 1996 as one of the nation's first six National Centers of Excellence in Women's Health, sponsored by the Office on Women's Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The quest has always been for health equity. “My dream would be that the need for UCSF National Center of Excellence in Women’s Health would be eliminated because sex and gender approaches to research, clinical care, education are in the DNA of UCSF, and inform health care and policy across our nation and the world,” Milliken said in the UCSF article. The other five National Centers of Excellence in Women’s Health designated by HHS in 1996 are located at: – Allegheny University of the Health Sciences, Philadelphia – Magee-Womens Hospital, Pittsburgh – Ohio State University Medical Center, Columbus, Ohio – University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia – Yale University, New Haven, Conn. Read the article here. Twitter: @Bernie_HITN Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com  

Geisinger, University of Utah Health and other leading health systems to test winning designs in the contest called A Bill You Can Understand, sponsored by AARP.

This Mother’s Day, Janet Schijns, vice president, global channels, at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, pays homage to her trailblazing mother, who continues to inspire her today. “I’ve noticed that over the past few years that fewer and fewer women are staying in tech long enough to mentor others or trail blaze for the next generation,” writes Schijns in a May 4 LinkedIN post. “Instead of lamenting, I’ve taken action,” she writes in "The Critical Role That Mothers Play." Read Janet’s column here.    

In response to Cerner missing projected revenues, financial analysts said the market for other technologies is heating up and can increase deal sizes.