Bill Siwicki

Cerner has announced that Geisnger Health System subsidiary xG Health Solutions will use Cerner’s HealtheIntent population health management platform and, in turn, Cerner will use xG Health’s clinical content. xG Health’s care management clinical content automates the assessment of a variety of hereditary, socioeconomic, physical, behavioral and environmental risk factors, as well as warning signs and symptoms associated with specific conditions. Cerner clients will be able to use xG Health’s clinical content within HealtheCare, Cerner’s community care management solution that provides algorithms with the ability to identify, stratify and prioritize individuals for assignment to aligned care managers. [Also: 21 awesome photos from past HIMSS conferences] The HealtheCare and xG Health clinical content collaboration will provide evidence-based patient assessments for dozens of conditions, be integrated into workflows, and automate the generation of patient-specific action plans to boost personalized care, the vendors said. The agreement will also see Cerner integrate xG Health’s analytics content into Cerner’s HealtheAnalytics system. The alignment expands Cerner’s population health management suite to provide organizations with analytic discoveries that can help reduce costs and improve healthcare quality and patient outcomes, Cerner said. “What interested us in xG Health is the commercial arm of Geisinger Health System, which acts as a testbed for technology,” said Brad Carey, vice president and general manager of population health. “We’ve initially partnered with xG Health on things that revolve around care management content and population health, and are looking to xG Health’s business intelligence specially derived from claims data.” Cerner also announced that the University of Kansas Hospital will deploy the HealtheIntent population health management platform to coordinate and manage care in rural Kansas communities, according to Robert Moser, MD, director of the Kansas Heart and Stroke Collaborative. Moser said the collaborative will also use HealtheCare, Cerner’s community care management system, to engage at-risk patient and ideally provide optimal treatment resources. Cerner’s population health management platform will be featured in Cerner Booth 2032 at HIMSS16, Feb. 29-March 4 at the Sands Expo Center in Las Vegas. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

The vendor plans to show the new SDK for portals and other apps, as well as multiway videoconferencing technologies, at HIMSS16.

Don’t let the indestructible demeanor of nurses fool you: Like other members of the healthcare team, they too have technological difficulties. “The public and nurses who are not informaticians may have the impression that the quieter stance from nurses means usability issues don’t exist for them – in fact, user experience issues for nurses are severe,” said Nancy Staggers, a professor at the University of Maryland and an expert on clinical informatics whose experience includes serving as an IT executive on an electronic health records implementation at the U.S. Department of Defense. [Also: 21 awesome photos from past HIMSS conferences] Staggers will discuss the top healthcare IT user experience challenges for nurses at HIMSS16 during a roundtable session titled “Conversations on Nursing’s Health IT User Experiences,” at HIMSS16. Current usability problems include specifics like technology designed to fir nurses’ workflow and cognitive support, as well as broader issues such as needing a vision for health IT and strengthening the voice of nurses within provider organizations. Because of their role in the care process, nurses have unique IT user experience needs. “Nurses need a framework for thinking about UX and speaking about their health IT pain points so they can move toward solutions,” Staggers said. “UX is deeper than a simple focus on the computer interface; it is about designing technology to support workflow and the way nurses think and do work.” [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] How important are the issues nurses have with healthcare IT? Extremely, considering the sheer number of nurses and the crucial role nurses play in achieving successful health outcomes. “The U.S. alone has 3.4 million nurses; in fact, nurses are the largest group of health IT users globally, and they act as information hubs for patients in myriad settings beyond acute care, including long-term care, home health, community-based care, and telehealth,” Staggers said. “UX issues span all settings and are critical in the care of consumers, including special groups such as our aging population. Both the volume and the significance of current UX issues make addressing them an imperative to address in supporting nurses as knowledge workers.” Impractical IT user experiences for nurses can result in errors, patient safety issues, delayed decision making and huge inefficiencies, Staggers added. “Fixing UX issues is important to patients, nurses and the healthcare profession as a whole to improve safety and outcomes, enhance productivity, support critical thinking, and reduce inefficiencies,” Staggers said. The session, “Conversations on Nursing’s Health IT User Experiences,” is slated for Tuesday March 1, 2016 from 4-5 p.m. in the Sands Expo Convention Center Galileo 1004. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

The HCI Group, a healthcare IT services consultancy, will highlight at HIMSS16 its new partnership with HIMSS to become the healthcare IT society’s first EMRAM global education provider. HIMSS Analytics provides the Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model with a focus on important areas of healthcare advancement. EMRAM is used globally as a measurement of the maturity of healthcare facilities as they leverage technology to improve the quality of healthcare. [Also: 21 awesome photos from past HIMSS conferences] As a HIMSS global EMRAM education partner, HCI will provide client education and consulting to healthcare provider organizations to help them improve electronic health records EMRAM scores and prepare them for HIMSS Analytics validation as Stage 6 and Stage 7 organizations on the world scale. HCI Group CEO Ricky Caplin said the certification enables HCI “to become expert partners with HIMSS Analytics and support the values brought by EMR adoption.” See all of our HIMSS16 previews Also at HIMSS16, HCI Group executives will be highlighting the results of a new partnership with data security intelligence firm Securonix. The deal is designed to bolster HCI Group’s adaptable security capabilities in a range of environments. Caplin said the partnership with Securonix addresses healthcare organizations’ need to move beyond using HIPAA as the standard for security and allow HCI to offer security-focused solutions. The companies will demonstrate their enhanced security service platform at HIMSS16 at The HCI Group’s booth, No. 6832. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

The second version of the device for inpatient settings features a camera, updated operating system, new carrying options and more.

The electronic health record software maker said it will debut early components of new cloud-based technology at HIMSS16.

Telehealth provider VirtuMedix is homing in on emergency care. The company's software, as such, comprises a dashboard for tracking patients while they await consultation, as well as features enabling patients to log-in, view their medical record, and state the reason for a particular visit, according to Kannan Sreedhar, group vice president and general manager of VirtuMedix. Sreedhar said that VirtuMedix will be showcasing the latest version of its platform at HIMSS16 beginning in late February. [Also: 11 essential quotes from notable HIMSS keynotes] EMS physicians, for example, can use telemedicine technologies to give patients the ability to access provider organizations in an on-demand fashion, according to VirtuMedix group vice president Kannan Sreedhar. On the other side, patients can enter e-mails or mobile numbers to get messages alerting them when physicians are ready for their consultations, Sreedhar explained, adding that certain features enable patients to conduct online payments. “A parent might have three kids at home and one has an ear infection, and there’s the need to go to an emergency room, where a person might have to wait for three or four hours – that’s the usage of healthcare resources today,” he said. “But when a parent has the ability to use her smartphone or iPad and connect from home with physicians via telehealth, then she does not need to go to the hospital, and an emergency care physician can diagnosis the ear infection and send a prescription to the parent’s local pharmacy.” See all of our HIMSS16 previews According to a study by the American Academy of Family Physicians 15 percent of clinicians are using telemedicine tools today and 78 percent said they believe telemedicine improves access to care. VirtuMedix will be exhibiting at the HIMSS16 booths of partner organizations Allscripts and IDS, where it intends to showcase the latest version of its VirtuMedix platform. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

Apple chief defies government demands to unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists, creating a backdoor into the system’s software.

Kiosk maker CTS Healthcare Services will start targeting mid-size and smaller provider organizations when it introduces at HIMSS16 new middleware dubbed Kwerk. Since it launched its first kiosks in 2005, CTS Healthcare Services has racked up more than 200 million patient check-ins on its kiosks, the vendor said. More than 95 percent of healthcare organizations using the Welcome patient check-in component of Epic’s electronic health record system use CTS Healthcare Services kiosks, CTS Healthcare Services said. This is because Epic was very early to the patient check-in game, enabling the critical integration component. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT But there is a whole healthcare world beyond Epic, said Sandy Nix, president and CEO of CTS Healthcare Services. “We’ve found a lot of potential customers with an interest in deploying check-in solutions but without the appropriate middleware piece that allows kiosks to talk to their EHRs,” Nix said. “So we developed Kwerk, which will talk to not only the EHRs in larger facilities but also serve as a bundled product we can offer the mid-market so potential customers at that level can have healthcare-proven hardware and high-quality patient check-in software solutions in an affordable package.” Kwerk will connect with EHRs in any size facility, but will also enable smaller organizations that simply want a standalone check-in solution to have one. In addition to patient check-in, the kiosks can accept co-pays and bill payments, be used for patient scheduling, secure consent to treatment signatures, issue privacy notices, change demographic information, and more. CTS Healthcare Services will offer Kwerk on a subscription basis, Nix said. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

SA Ignite plans to launch PQRS Assistant, a system that provides an automated way for provider organizations to track the various levels and scores for Medicare Part B payments, at HIMSS16. The Physician Quality Reporting System is a quality reporting program from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that encourages individual eligible professionals and group practices to report information on the quality of care to Medicare. PQRS gives participating professionals and group practices the opportunity to assess the quality of care they provide to their patients, helping to ensure that patients get the right care at the right time, CMS said. SA Ignite’s meaningful use system is used to automate attestation, the vendor said, and the company now is adapting meaningful use lessons learned to help providers respond to the increasing number of pay-for-performance models in healthcare, said Tom Lee, founder and CEO of SA Ignite. See all of our HIMSS16 previews “PQRS is a longstanding program and set of measures, but in recent years CMS has used PQRS to turn from pay-for-reporting to pay-for-performance in Medicare Part B,” Lee said. “In pay-for-reporting, providers just submit a number of measures and regardless of those values are incentivized in the same amount or avoid the same penalty. In Medicare Part B, the game has changed, and these measures now are used for pay-for-performance. Providers measure values and are rated against other peers across the country, and then are placed in different quality tiers, which directly affects their reimbursement.” Currently, the CMS report card for Medicare Part B is not communicated to a provider organization until nine months after a performance year has concluded, Lee said. As such, there is no real-time monitoring of quality scores during a performance year. “Our new PQRS Assistant system enables a provider organization to predict during a performance year what its CMS quality score will be based on, and as a result, the organization can make changes to its workflows to maximize its score while it still has a chance to make a difference,” Lee said. “The ultimate vision is combining our MU Assistant with our PQRS Assistant and have their predictive analytics focused on back-office score optimization.” The CMS Merit-Based Incentive Payments System, or MIPS, for Medicare Part B starts in 2017, appears to bring together meaningful use and PQRS in a value-based payment model where providers will have a MIPS score. Under MIPS, every provider organization will earn up to 100 points on a competitive scale to be able to gain up to a 27 percent bonus or lose up to a 9 percent penalty. Lee said provider organizations can calculate the return on investment of this technology based on the new reality in healthcare. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] “These value-based rules are very complicated and change all the time, and in the absence of automation it’s very difficult to fulfill the new business processes,” he said. “You are left with people using very primitive tools like spreadsheets to try to manipulate data to try and comply with a payer’s requirements. Further, provider organizations now are forced to do even more with even less. Because of the complexity on the value-based side of payments, including population health efforts, things simply are getting more complicated with more money attached.” When it comes to provider organization staff trying to cope with the new reality of value-based payments, the supply of qualified professionals, such as data analysts and compliance experts, who know how to optimize for value is getting out of balance with the demand, Lee said. “So you need technology that allows fewer people to do more,” he said. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.