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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.

Even grand visions should begin by soliciting feedback from as many employees as possible, according to Jerry Sobolik, senior business analyst at the famed health system.

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.

(SPONSORED) The future of healthcare is already here. From automated insulin pumps to diagnostic instruments that can interpret their own results, today's medical devices are smarter and more sophisticated than ever. What's driving these innovations? The answer is data.   

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.

Open-source technology will offer flexibility and cost-efficiencies, officials say.

The hospital was also the first pediatric facility to achieve Stage 7 for its EHR use, the pinnacle on HIMSS Analytics Scale.

Other new contributor members include lifeIMAGE, a medical image sharing network, and MediPortal, a developer of patient engagement tools.

The software vendor intends to showcase two apps it is working on as part of the massive modernization contract.