Bill Siwicki

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.

Hospital workers resort to handwritten notes and faxes after hackers demand $3.4 million in Bitcoin from the hospital in a ransomware attack.

The healthcare economist and 20-year HIMSS attendee says the patient component of healthcare is finally coming of age.

Healthcare economist Jane Sarasohn-Kahn is delighted that the patient component of the healthcare information technology is finally coming of age. Health IT professionals have been witness to the growing role of the consumer in educational sessions and at exhibitions and she expects even more of that at HIMSS16 when it kicks off later this month. Sarasohn-Kahn, who will be attending as a Social Media Ambassador, writes the Health Populi blog and tweets at @HealthyThinker. She shared her thoughts on how much the patient perspective has gained traction in the two decades she’s been attending HIMSS, the need for healthcare organizations to take a hard look at the return on EHR investments and the importance of getting workflow right. [Also: Bill Bunting talks 2016 predictions, patient engagement] Q: One health IT prediction for 2016? A: Now that some $35 billion in HITECH funding has been spent, healthcare providers wonder: what's the ROI? Congress, too, asks the question in other ways, although bipartisan support continues for health information technology inside the Beltway. In 2016, we will see more candid conversations about the lack of ROI from big capital spending for EHRs. This will result in healthcare provider demands for lighter (and less capital intensive) streamlined approaches to data liquidity, data collection (say, via sensors), and standards adoption like FHIR. As my fellow HIMSS16 Social Media Ambassador Charles Webster, MD is fond of saying: "It's all about the workflow." And in a value-based payment environment, that workflow is part of the lifeblood for healthcare providers.  Q: Shifting gears a bit, what is one thing about you that not even devout followers are likely to know? A: I'm a huge believer in the role that food and nutrition play in health, beyond healthcare. We know that our genes tell only a fraction of our personal health stories. Our lifestyle behaviors contribute mightily to our overall health and wellness. So my family and I belong to our local community-supported agriculture farm, led by our wonderful and talented homeopathic farmer, Erik. And we are Italo-philes devoted to the Slow Food movement founded in Bologna, Italy. Q: So what inspired you to apply for Social Media Ambassador credentials? A: As a member of HIMSS for more than 20 years, I can remember that the patient was rarely part of educational sessions or the exhibit hall in my early days of being involved with the organization. I joined HIMSS' Connected Patient Committee several years ago, and we collaborated to help drive the message of the patient's role in healthcare to the organization and its members. Q: What are you most looking forward to learning more about at this year’s conference? A: Topics such as self-care with patient portals and personal health records systems, health engagement. Also, financial wellness, such as what providers are doing in terms of revenue-cycle management, financial services for patients and healthcare banking. See all of our HIMSS16 previews Q: And what do you see as the untold potential for social media in healthcare? A: There's no doubt that social media has become an integral part of the healthcare landscape in the U.S. Today, social media is driving the collective wisdom of patients and the wisdom of providers - the tremendous impact of peer-to-peer healthcare for consumers and caregivers, provider-to-provider and provider-to-patient. This is resulting in greater democratization in healthcare and better information symmetry between patients and their clinicians, all of which enables health engagement that underpins the Triple Aim to improve outcomes, enhance the healthcare experience and lower per capita costs. 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.

Revenue cycle management company ZirMed will launch its new Remit and Deposit Management system at HIMSS16, the company said. The company said the new system is designed to help provider organizations greatly reduce the manual work typically involved with reconciling payments. Provider organizations waste a tremendous amount of time manually matching payments with remittance advice, the information that associates payment amounts with corresponding services, said Ric Sinclair, vice president of product at ZirMed. See all of our HIMSS16 previews “Providers have to go through a very manual, intense and burdensome process to reconcile payment information with the actual dollars on hand,” he added. ZirMed’s Remit and Deposit Management system takes all the information from a provider organization’s bank accounts and in real time uses proprietary algorithms to compare and match data, company officials said. “This matching process can become a mega-problem when you think about all of the complexities in healthcare today,” Sinclair said. “As organizations make acquisitions and deal with new payment models, the number of bank accounts and the number of ways to get paid increases. This results in a gigantic payment posting cash reconciliation process, with a lot of money coming in and the need to figure out how to apply and distribute it.” [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] At one healthcare organization pilot testing the new system, ZirMed said it was able to automatically match 97 percent of payments and remits, a process that would take an individual 3 to 4 minutes per match, with thousands of matches required every day. That left the organization to only have to match the 3 percent of exceptions. However, Remit and Deposit Management offers tools that assist individuals with matching the remainders, tools that cut the time this process took by 50 percent. ZirMed declined to reveal this client organization, but Sinclair said it will do so at HIMSS16. “At our pilot clients, their overall time to reconcile is going from hours and hours of multiple staff members a business day to one full-time employee in less than an hour a day,” Sinclair said. “This becomes killer when you think about all the healthcare organizations looking at bundled payment models and new contracts with insurance plans that include things like being reimbursed a single payment for an entire episode of care.” Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT

The Young Adult and Family Center at the University of California at San Francisco’s Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital and Clinics is using social networking technology to deliver mental health services to adolescents, young adults and veterans who need additional care or who might not otherwise receive care. In this case, the social networks are private and secured, only for the use of patients and related caregivers. Kim P. Norman, MD, distinguished professor of adolescent and young adult health at the University of California, San Francisco, and founder and director of the Young Adult and Family Center, will discuss the center’s pioneering healthcare IT work in an educational session at HIMSS16 titled “Create Chronic Disease Services Using Secure Social Networks.” See all of our HIMSS16 previews Norman explained that along with other clinical research teams across the country, UCSF is using personal health social networks to create scalable clinical interventions that “allow us to overcome the barriers of distance, a dearth of clinical resources, stigma, and expense that make it so hard for us to provide quality healthcare services to remote and underserved populations.” Norman will discuss how caregivers at the UCSF center leverage secure social networks to reach veterans struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, to help underserved youth and their families overcome trauma and to aid high school and college students in building resiliency skills. Norman said that healing, by its very nature, is social, and that social technology lends itself to the healing process. “Technology can create true collaborative care among multiple providers in multiple systems of care, and secure social media can serve as a virtual psychotherapy office,” Norman said. “My colleagues and I also are focusing on integrating mental health services into medical care programs for chronic diseases using personal social networks, including to deliver better cancer, diabetes and dementia care.” Innovative clinical programs leveraging cloud-based medical-grade records and also tie together patients with families and other non-medical caretakers, Norman said, arming them with access to relevant data. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] “We use private, secure social networks to build longitudinal relationships with our patients and their families to extend care beyond the traditional points of service into the home, school and community, and, for the first time, to integrate behavioral health and the social context of patient care within chronic disease care programs,” Norman explained. “We believe this is the future of chronic disease care.” Norman’s session, “Create Chronic Disease Services Using Secure Social Networks,” is slated for March 2, 2016, from 8:30-9:30 a.m. at the Sands Expo Convention Center in 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.

Konica Minolta is stepping in a new direction. When the imaging vendor acquired Viztek in October 2015, it sought to provide enhanced value through its healthcare IT solutions centered on digital radiography, integrated X-ray devices, point-of-care ultrasound, integrated PACS, radiology information systems and electronic health records. “We’re entering the EHR space so we want to be able to go to a group of clinics, multispecialty groups, and say, ‘Hey, we can provide RIS and PACS and do practice management and charting and billing for OB-GYN, orthopedics and others in your groups,’” said Steve Deaton, vice president of healthcare IT sales, Konica Minolta Medical Imaging. See all of our HIMSS16 previews At HIMSS16, Viztek executives will join Konica Minolta executives to showcase the Konica Minolta Exa Healthcare IT enterprise imaging platform. Calling the combined offering “a full provider-based EHR,” Deaton explained that Exa is different from competitors electronic health records systems in that it includes not only RIS and PACS in an enterprise imaging platform but also those EHR and practice management capabilities.” Exa uses a standards-based interface to import data from existing EHRs to give radiologists a more complete picture of a patient than systems that don’t integrate with an EHR, Deaton said. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] Konica Minolta said that its experience replacing imaging and radiology information systems at provider organizations will help it in its quest to expand farther into the EHR space. “What we’ve learned from the radiology space is how to become experienced in the replacement market,” Deaton said. “In radiology, every time we replace a system we are interacting with radiologists who can be some of the hardest users because they are looking at the exact same things all day long. If we can make them happy, we can make other clinicians happy.” For calendar year 2016, Deaton said, the company will target imaging providers, such as orthopedics, urgent care, cardiology, and so on. Then in 2017 it hopes to carry the platform outside of that, to non-imaging practices. 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 software vendor intends to showcase two apps it is working on as part of the massive modernization contract.

Health IT giant Cerner Corp. has scored a $50.7 million data hosting contract from U.S. Department of Defense as part of its Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization, according to official documents. The DoD last year awarded Cerner and partner Leidos the $4.3 billion contract to deploy the new electronic health record for the U.S. military worldwide. Cerner won the contract over the objections of Amazon.com, Computer Sciences Corp., General Dynamics and IBM Corp., which appealed the decision and lost their case, documents showed. The DoD said that Cerner had made it clear to the government that the comapany does not allow connections to its managed services by any other commercial entity. In fact, Cerner's restrictions made it impossible for the Defense Department EHR's data to be hosted even by the DoD itself. [Also: DoD awards Cerner, Leidos, Accenture EHR contract] Cerner's EHR system also includes historical data, anonymized information from healthcare provider organizations that use the company's EHR and from the vendor's analytical models based on years of research and development. Had the DoD opted for a different company to host data, it would not have been able to use the Cerner historical data in conjunction with military EHR data and would have had to deal with a separate data setting, adding costs to the project, Pentagon officials said. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] The competing vendors' objections weren't all specified, but according to a report from FCW, one vendor had suggested the DoD could compel Cerner to share its data/modeling functions with a third-party hosting company. Another bidder suggested replacing Cerner's analytics modules with those from another vendor. But DoD said that would lead to cost redundancies. Some of these same vendors, such as IBM and CSC, competed for the initial DHMSM contract in 2015 and didn't protest the initial award to Leidos/Cerner. Cerner's suite of healthcare information systems will replace the DoD's legacy health IT system in its 55 hospitals and more than 350 clinics, as well as in ships, submarines and other military locations. In addition to Leidos, Cerner also aligned with Accenture, Henry Schein and a number of small business partners to serve the Military Health System and its 9.6 million beneficiaries. Intermountain Healthcare is also a strategic partner providing clinical governance of solutions and workflow. Jessica Davis contributed to this report. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT

Canadian and U.S. researchers formed a collaborative to explore social media in public health, with plans to generate a practice roadmap. The endpoint: enabling public health entities to harness social media to better help deliver effective intervention strategies. “This trend is an emerging phenomenon that the healthcare industry needs to grasp and couple with the IT infrastructure in place to fully engage individuals in managing their health,” said Susan McBride, a professor at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Nursing. “Public health organizations in both Canada and the United States are using multiple tools in social media programs to intervene on targeted efforts. All of this will further inform the roadmap for use of social media in population and community health.” McBride has more than 25 years of experience in clinical, informatics and outcomes management capacities. McBride’s research focus is on healthcare informatics, analytic methods using large datasets, patient safety and quality. See all of our HIMSS16 previews She will be co-presenting at HIMSS16 with Richard Booth, RN, PhD, an assistant professor at the Western University Arthur Labatt Family School of Nursing in Ontario. These executives will deliver the findings of their latest research during a session titled “Building a Road Map for Social Media in Public Health.” “We are hoping to consolidate some of the current knowledge of social media used in population and public health,” Booth said. While the world has become increasingly networked, government and healthcare have only now begun to realize the importance and value of communication that can be afforded by social media and related styles of communication, Booth added. “I view topics like social media as a new generation or asymmetric way that health IT is growing and evolving. The type of health IT largely driven by consumers – we as healthcare providers and informaticians are late to the game in many respects,” Booth explained. “Unlike traditional clinical or health IT, this type of technology allows for immediate two-way communication with service recipients; thus, it can’t be controlled or managed like traditional health IT.” [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] Because social media is so dynamic, the potential for its use in healthcare is very exciting, Booth added. And while the term ‘social media’ may fade in terms of its relevancy and usage, the communication modality offered by social media will become infused into the everyday way of doing things, including delivering healthcare, he said. “Consumers of the not-too-distant future will be increasingly wanting to discuss and collaborate with each other as much as with their clinicians,” Booth said. “Social media – though not in its exact, current form – will offer us insights into what types of communication patterns might be possible moving into the future. We have a lot of work ahead of us.” The session, “Building a Road Map for Social Media in Public Health,” is slated for Friday, March 4, 2016, at the Sands Expo Convention Center in 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.