Bill Siwicki

Advanced degrees and credentials literally pay off for health IT professionals. Additional credentials such as certifications, in fact, roughly double the chances professionals have of earning an annual salary greater than $130,000, according to a new survey from the University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine, Bisk Education, and HIMSS. While 29 percent of survey respondents said they make more than $130,000 annually, only 12 percent without credentials rank in that category. Women lead in the realm of furthering education, with 232 reporting additional credentials compared with 150 male survey respondents, the survey said.  [Also: Healthcare IT workers shortage stings in Georgia] The majority of health IT professionals earn salaries greater than $80,000 per year, the study found, and 140 survey respondents said they were very satisfied with their career in health informatics compared with only 18 describing themselves as very dissatisfied,. The survey included 404 health IT professionals from 7 countries and 42 U.S. states. There is a correlation between the level of education and job satisfaction: Professionals with advanced degrees (master’s and doctorates) are more likely to be very satisfied (89 respondents) or at least somewhat satisfied (55) with their career choice, compared with people who are very dissatisfied (4), the survey determined. [Also: Big salary gap between men, women healthcare pros] Of the 404 survey respondents, 303 reported unique job titles. The potential exists to categorically break down job titles and discover how the different categories correlate with income and education, the University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine said; however, there is a larger narrative here concerning the profession’s many niches, which require professionals with a wide range of skills and backgrounds. Health IT professionals overwhelmingly see career growth over the next five years: 337 survey respondents believe their career will continue to grow, compared with only 41 who do not. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT

After facing an unacceptable 70 percent patient matching rate, the San Diego Health Connect health information exchange said it has turned its performance around using identity validation technology to better match patients and in the process clean up its master patient index. Its current patient matching rate is 98 percent. "To a certain degree, we caused the problem ourselves," said Dan Chavez, executive director of San Diego Health Connect. "We use very strict matching criteria. Not every HIE uses the strict matching criteria we do. We require a 100 percent match on six variables to automatically match patients. Other HIEs make the governance decision not to match on such strict criteria. If you loosen the rules in probabilistic and deterministic matching, you can have a higher rate. We want the machine to do as much as possible, but we don’t make it easy because we want the faith and trust that what comes out of the HIE is 100 percent correct." [Also: 'New value propositions' emerge for HIE.] At the 70 percent matching level, San Diego Health Connect had a backlog of requests that had to be manually reviewed. For example, Dan Chavez and Daniel Chavez and Daniel J. Chavez could all be the same person, with different records at different facilities in the San Diego area. Further, when consumers get married or divorced and change names, multiple different records may exist. "There are more than a few Chavez's in San Diego, as you might expect, so my name might go into the exception queue — and I’ve received care at Sharp and Scripps, and maybe my records do not match," he said. "Prior to using Verato, someone from the Sharp medical records department and someone from the Scripps medical records department would have to get together through an e-mail or phone call. If I had additionally been to UCSD, or if someone fat-fingered my Social Security number, the exception would pop up yet again for me, and UCSD would have to get online with Sharps and Scripps. So you see the magnitude of the problem." The exceptions queue grew so large and the backlog so long that medical records departments in the community said this HIE thing was killing them. [Also: New HIE, vendor members for CommonWell.] Verato's Carbon is a cloud-based identity data management system, what the company claims to be the most complete and accurate database of U.S. identities. "We source billions of records including credit agency and telecommunications provider data, along with government and legal data; and we use proprietary technology to produce our view of individual identities," said Joaquim Neto, senior solutions architect at Verato. San Diego Health Connect, for instance, automatically ran its exception queue against the Carbon database and quickly matched 80 percent of the exceptions to their correct records, Chavez said. "Then, with a little bit of examination, we could much more easily deal with the additional 20 percent — associating pediatric patients with parent addresses," Chavez cited as an example. "One of the challenges of patient ID in pediatrics is naming conventions. With the interactions with Carbon, we then could go back to the community and say, 'We all are doing some things incorrectly.' It gave us some guidelines in community-wide naming conventions, so we could go back to participants in the HIE and say, 'If it’s a hyphenated last name, let's place the second name in this field and the first name in that field.'" Improving the patient matching rate earned San Diego Health Connect a higher degree of confidence in the information coming out of the health information exchange among healthcare organizations in San Diego and Imperial County, Chavez said. "People know if the HIE is delivering information for Dan Chavez that there is a 98 percent-plus chance that we in fact have the right Dan Chavez," he said. "That confidence was not there before." [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] The HIE declined to share the cost of using the Carbon system from Verato, but the vendor said the ticket could be between $250,000 to $500,000 a year for an organization the size of San Diego Health Connect. "The soft return on investment is the confidence in the HIE as we deal with the medical records in the entire community of 3.2 million people; these providers know when they get patient information from SDHC, it is correct," Chavez said. "The hard ROI comes in no need for medical records departments to call up anyone to check exceptions. They do not have to challenge the data or make 3-5 phone calls to reconcile. Those phone calls at a minimum of 5 minutes a head are expensive." Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT

A new module will enable users to snap pictures with smartphones and tablets and then saving them to the Carestream platform and integrating them with an EHR.

Rockford Health System in Rockford, Illinois is using the Health Level 7 data exchange standard to see both the real-time fetal monitoring strip and the patient’s electronic record on the same computer screen. In the past, clinicians had a computer-based patient record in one location and a fetal monitor elsewhere. Using the HL7-based GE Healthcare Centricity Perinatal Connect technology enables Rockford to combine and save documentation from both the EHR and the perinatal systems into its Epic patient record. The most important benefit of the vendor interoperability is increased patient safety, because nurses now can view fetal strips as part of the overall medical record, said Angie Asche-Willoughby, RN, Centricity perinatal system manager at Rockford Health System. [Also: HL7 and ONC launch challenge seeking C-CDA rendering tools for clinicians] “While admitting a patient in the computer system, the fetal monitor is on the other side of the bed; but now, I can visualize the fetal strip on my screen as I am doing a patient assessment, so if a baby is having any sort of distress on their monitor, I literally see it,” Asche-Willoughby said. “But the integration also decreases my time working with technology and charting, and thus increases the time I can spend with my patient. It’s so seamless because anything you document goes into Epic." And that means nurses being able to see both the real-time fetal monitoring strip and the patient’s electronic record on the same computer screen, as opposed to having a computer-based patient record in one location and a fetal monitor elsewhere. Further, the HL7-based Connect technology enables the organization to combine and save documentation from both the EHR and the perinatal systems into the Epic patient record. The No. 1 benefit of the vendor interoperability is increased patient safety, because nurses now can view fetal strips as part of the overall medical record, said Angie Asche-Willoughby, RN, Centricity perinatal system manager at Rockford Health System. “While admitting a patient in the computer system, the fetal monitor is on the other side of the bed; but now, I can visualize the fetal strip on my screen as I am doing a patient assessment, so if a baby is having any sort of distress on their monitor, I literally see it,” Asche-Willoughby said. “But the integration also decreases my time working with technology and charting, and thus increases the time I can spend with my patient. It’s so seamless because anything you document goes into Epic.” In addition to reducing the anxiety for nurses who no longer have to worry about what is going on between two different screens, the interoperability actually can reduce the anxiety of mothers during childbirth, Asche-Willoughby said. “This set-up gives a nurse more time with her patient, so the patient isn’t thinking that all the nurse is doing is computer work,” she explained. “It provides a patient with a greater sense of comfort because a nurse is not as worried about her documentation. As a nurse, you don’t want a patient feeling like the only thing a nurse is doing is working on a computer; you want your patient to know you are taking care of her.” The GE Healthcare Centricity Perinatal Connect systems integration module uses the HL7 2.x protocol, with ORU-type message specification exchanges. It can translate between HL7 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5, back and forth. And it can work with any EHR system, GE Healthcare said. GE Healthcare and Rockford Health System declined to reveal the cost of the interoperability module. However, the vendor said a provider organization can measure return on investment through increased productivity, among other improvements. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT

Iatric Systems intends to unwrap a set of analytics services to help healthcare providers meet federal mandates at HIMSS16. The vendor specializing in patient privacy, analytics, EHR optimization and interoperability, said that it will debut a new offering dubbed Analytics On-Demand at the conference, which begins late next month. “Analytics On-Demand was built to help provider organizations move to value-based care,” said Frank Fortner, president of Iatric Systems. “It comes with prebuilt modules. Initially, these modules will be heavily weighted toward things like quality measure management, meaningful use and the value-based model – all coming together under one program.” See all of our HIMSS16 previews Readmission management, population health management – providers are struggling to get good tools around these kinds of things, Fortner said. “For us, this is just a starting point,” he said. “It’s about helping providers transition to value-based care, but not stopping there. Executives will be able to create their own modules in a DIY dashboard style and address many of the hot-button issues in healthcare.” The rules in healthcare change every year and, as such, provider organizations suddenly find they need to report on new or different measures; as a result, analytics is a challenge, he added. [Also: Making analytics work for quality improvement?] “Our goal is to provide a quick, one-stop shop that can handle all this reporting for healthcare executives, as well as bring professional services around these areas,” he said. While the 26-year-old Iatric Systems will be debuting Analytics On-Demand at HIMSS16, it also will focus its efforts at the annual conference and exhibition on the various core components of its business including interoperability, patient privacy and electronic health records optimization. Iatric Systems will be in booth 7730. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT

MedicFP LLC, a new vendor that focuses on combating phantom billing and other healthcare fraud, and Fujitsu will debut an identity validation product that scans palm veins at HIMSS16.

The new software aims to help researchers, molecular pathologists and clinicians work together more easily to improve care.

Cyber-criminals continue to pose major threats to healthcare information technology departments, and experts say it’s the lure of electronic protected health information that keeps them coming.

A new report shows 84 percent of U.S. FDA-approved health apps tested by IT security vendor Arxan Technologies did not adequately address at least two of the Open Web Application Security Project top 10 risks. 

The American Medical Association has invested $15 million to become founding partner of Health2047, a high-tech incubator that will explore innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing the nation's 1.1 million physicians and their patients.