Drugs Into the Cheesecake The New York Times reports that Pharma is pumping up its appeal to physicians in an innovative way. Cheerleading has become "a springboard for many careers in pharmaceutical sales." A University of Kentucky cheerleading advisor points out that drug companies cruising for recruits visit college campuses where they "don't ask what the major is. Exaggerated motions, exaggerated smiles, exaggerated enthusiasm... can get people to do what they want." According to the Times article, some spirit squad members "keep their pompoms active." One rep "works the sidelines for the Washington Redskins" on Sundays, but on weekdays she's working gynecologists on behalf of a yeast infection med. "You'll never meet an ugly drug rep," offers University of Michigan's Dr. Thomas Carli, who spearheaded an effort to curtail reps' physician access. Dr. Carli observes that male drug reps are hunky, too, but sees a day when Pharma will understand that "the days of this sexual marketing are really quite limited." A new employment firm specializing in cheerleaders, dubbed Spirited Sales Leaders, has been formed to meet the rising demand... Read the note on Kaiser Family Foundation's website. [ contents ]
I N T H E R H I O W O R L D : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : Statewide RHIO Envisioned, NAHIT CEO Leads Cheer At a conference that brought together potential partners in a new Oklahoma RHIO, the keynote speaker was Scott Wallace, President and CEO of The National Alliance for Health Information Technology (NAHIT) and Chair of the Commission on Systemic Interoperability. The outspoken Wallace, whose commission last month released its report titled "Ending the Document Game: Connecting and Transforming Your Healthcare Through Information" (see HITSync #21), presented a picture of the HIT-hot climate in Washington. Wallace described HIT as the "perfect silver bullet for Washington politicians." He described a government that is unwilling to regulate drug prices, reduce Medicare or Medicaid payments, reform tort laws or raise taxes to ease the healthcare cost crunch. Raising the question of "rationing" healthcare, the NAHIT CEO stated that "At this point, Medicare and commercial plans aren't prepared to kill people." Wallace had something to say about the current state of HIT products, and what an electronic health network ought to look like, HIT Transition Weblog reports... [ contents ]
San Diego Launches Big RHIO To become one of the nation's larger RHIOs, the San Diego effort plans to connect 20 hospitals, 7,000 physicians, 2,700 health and human resources professionals, 370 pharmacies, all health plans, private labs, the Department of Public Health's Immunization Registry, and numerous community clinics. In an article in CIO Insight, organizers note that the federated model they have chosen sidesteps sticky data ownership issues and will permit providers to continue using whatever EMR software they have chosen. Healthcare Integration Platforms, a division of Sun Microsystems, will provide core technologies, including translator technology from SeeBeyond. A majority of San Diego County physicians are not currently using electronic health records, but even these will be permitted to view records of those providers who do. It is hoped that the availability of information will drive holdout docs to automate. The project is phased to first roll-out directories, adding functionality over a three-year period. Expected cost per hospital is $100,000. The San Diego County Medical Society Foundation, a private foundation, will fund the IT infrastructure, with a low anticipated $50,000 hardware price tag resulting from the architecture's ability to work with existing hardware. [ contents ]
Military EMR Up and Running According to a release from the American Forces Press Service, the U.S. military officially rolled out AHLTA, its new Internet-based EMR system, on November 21. Using off-the-shelf technology, the $1.2 billion implementation began eleven months ago. Currently serving about 60% of the U.S. defense force, AHLTA is expected to be fully deployed by January 2007. The system will serve 9.2 million beneficiaries and 124,500 medical staff with an estimated annual 2.1 million prescriptions, 1.8 million outpatient encounters, 400,000 dental procedures and 2,000 births across 900 points of delivery around the globe. AHLTA will be used extensively to assess disease patterns. Incidentally, according to Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, AHLTA is officially not an acronym, it's the system's "name."
This month's HIT Scavenger Hunt: What did AHLTA stand for before it lost its official acronym status? If you find the mynorca, email the editor. What will you win? Sorry, that's classified. [ contents ]
RHIO Funding Whitepaper HIT Transition Group has made a free whitepaper on RHIO funding available for download, entitled "The Integrated Path - Incorporating Contributed Revenue in the RHIO Finance Mix." The paper emphasizes the importance of including a fundraising capacity as an intrinsic business function. Most RHIOs already have the necessary business elements necessary for successful contributed revenue generation. It argues that there's no good reason to leave any money on the table at each inflection point---start-up, new projects, service expansions---by failing to take advantage of funding opportunities, offering evidence of the benefits of such an integrated fundraising program. The paper quotes Scott Wallace, President and CEO of The National Alliance for Health Information Technology (NAHIT) and Chair of the Commission on Systemic Interoperability on the fight within the Department of Health and Human Services over the usefulness of current AHRQ grants, and looks ahead to a period when government interest cools and private funding sources become ever more important. [ contents ]
Imminently Fundable: Electronic Immunization Registry
For upstart RHIOs looking for a quick 'n' splashy success to secure public (i.e.: legislative) interest and start pushing some XML around, how about an electronic registry for children's immunizations? Now there's a HIT project with legs! Tucked down deep in a story about a $7.2 million public health package promoted by Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski (R) is a brilliant spoonful of sugar to help the spending on medicine go down. Public health officials want the database to help parents and practitioners to keep better track of immunization records. Parents, who are required to hold on to paper vaccination histories, often lose them, and school filing systems can't be relied upon. Alaska is not the first state to adopt electronic immunization tracking. Online registries allow physicians and other health officials to check before giving vaccines to see if the patient had already received vaccination, making better use of scant supplies and controlling costs. Gov. Murkowski, sly dog, expects that about one-eighth of his proposed public health spending package will come from the federal government. We predict that, as this story and others like it get wide play, RHIOs nationwide will plug this add-on right on in, since the data and mechanisms are implicitly present. [ contents ]
Wireless Transition a Blessing and a Curse Two recent studies that surveyed senior level executives found that IT departments are having a tough time keeping up with the demand for wireless computing and system support. The mobile and remote user base is mushrooming, and will reach 103 million in the U.S. by 2008, and nearly a billion by 2009 worldwide. This sea change in data delivery is called "an IT crisis" by some. Others, including hospitals, see it as the much-needed revolution that will enable automation at healthcare's last mile: the physicians. "We were amazed at how excited our physicians were," stated Keith Grantham, director of information technology at Saginaw, Michigan's Covenant HealthCare. "We started our deployment with a small group of 12 physicians in August... our user group grew to almost 40 users within a month prior to our formal launch." Over 175 physicians signed on at the launch. [ contents ]
Cards Not for the Holidays If Empire Blue Cross has its way, patients may soon be carrying a hybrid card that serves dual duty as insurance ID and health savings account debit card for paying co-payments and deductibles, reports Albany's Business Review. The partnership between American Express and Empire Blue is just one of numerous similar efforts underway nationwide. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association has crafted an agreement with Visa; UnitedHealth Group has gone so far as to charter its own bank to issue a MasterCard/insurance ID card. Magnetic code on UnitedHealth's card contains the insured's coverage and co-payment data, and the company is piloting a card that embeds electronic medical records. Will providers adapt and adopt? Survival is a powerful mandate -- as more first-dollar responsibility moves into the patients' hands, providers will have to lose their squeamishness about asking for money at the front end of an uncertain transaction. Tech-savvy providers might go further -- push for standardization of the card formats and processes and, more significantly, disclosure of deductible balances at time of treatment. This bit of data is supported by the HIPAA eligibility transaction, but is not required by the situational rules of the standard. A proposal to include such accumulators in voluntary guidelines was recently rejected by CAQH/CORE as too difficult to implement for many plans. [ contents ]
NDCHealth Plugs In Part D Eligibility for Pharmacies
In a joint announcement, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and NDCHealth Corporation announced that the Medicare Part D Eligibility solution is now available for unlimited free testing by the retail pharmacy industry. According to the announcement, "The development of the real-time Part D Eligibility solution required unprecedented cooperation between the government and all segments of the pharmacy and payer industries to support the effective implementation of the new prescription drug benefit program, while taking an important step to reduce the burdens on pharmacists." The announcement also stated that "CMS and NDCHealth are also on track to deliver the TrOOP (True Out-Of- Pocket) Facilitator Services which will enable Part D Plans to accurately track and update their patients' out-of-pocket expenses." Read more at the MediFacD Website. [ contents ]
