KHIT Health Information Technology blog: February 2014

Farzad's successor as ONC National Coordinator is the right person at the right place at the right time for Health IT, in my view. I wish her every success. The challenges are myriad and complex. She seems to have a good fix on them.

Maybe I should add this pic to my Facebook album "My Women." :)

I'm sure my largely rhetorical question is a non-starter, but I had to air it anyway, like I did repeatedly (exasperatingly) to Farzad. Were Congress to newly appropriate half of the initial REC grant expenditure to fund the 62 RECs through Stage 2, it would work out to about $65 per month per EP, based on the latest MU enrollment numbers. Commercial HIT consultants are will cost you $100 per hour at best (which is why the Privateers hated the REC initiative right out of the chute, particularly the vendor-neutral RECs like mine). It irks the crap out of me that HHS will let this hard-won new resource just fade away -- all the Happy Face talk about "no-cost extensions" and "sustainability" notwithstanding.

Federal Ag Extension Centers are now 100 years old since they were legislated into being. Given that the HIT effort will likely be 10 years in bearing visible Triple Aim outcomes and financial fruit, you would think that the feds would take a longer view. Maybe not a century, but, jeez, how about six years?

But, No.o.o.oo.OOOOh...

Having retired from the REC, I have no dawg in this fight, but, still, when I see ONC trying to spin how effective they've been for MU, it just begs a compelling question.

I'm in your corners, RECs. I lament that the REC "trade association" never got the first bit of traction.

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FINAL DAY PHOTO RAMBLE

Above, the tear-down continues apace.

Above and below, 7:20 a.m.; the final day early morning is always so ghostly quiet.

Above and below, 15 minutes out from closing Keyotes. Nothing like Hillary Day.

Above: these computer-controlled stage lights always remind me of the
egg pods in "Alien," lol.

CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner

Above and below, the HIMSS14 Press Availability. Dr. DeSalvo was gracious with her time.
I really appreciate her taking my question, my not being a "real" reporter.
I had to muscle my way in to get to ask it. The press would have kept at her for another hour,
her people had to finally insistently extract her from the room.

Below, final session, on the RECs. There were maybe three dozen people attending,
including my former HealthInsight colleague Wyatt Packer.

Another fine conference.

CODA

Brian Ahier's interview with Dr. DeSalvo.

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More to come...

First, my interview with Fred Trotter late yesterday afternoon in the Exhibit Hall -- warts and all. My new project. We sat on a couch out in the open amid the din over at booth 2838. I'd have preferred a booth in the media interview room, but Fred is beset on all sides for his attention at HIMSS14, and I appreciated his willingness to even do this. We'd both attended the "Walking Gallery" presentation, and afterward he said "how about here," pointing to the leather couches and coffee table. There was no time to shlep back the the media interview room.

OK.

I scrambled anxiously to quickly set up my audio gear for the first time in an ad hoc live setting, plugged in the headset mics, and we popped the clutch, no test run -- EQ'ing and level-balancing on the fly, couldn't use either compression or noise gating (some hard lessons learned here).

One take, no script. I'd merely scribbled a few tentative talking point questions, and let the interview go it where it took us. We could have gone another ten minutes (really wanted his take on my pet peeve, "interoperability"), but the booze was flowing and the increasing party atmosphere ambient noise made it prohibitive. Fred is a great interview; articulate clear thinker and a Health IT SME if ever there was one.

Thanks, Fred.

NOTE: if you don't have the Flash mp3 audio plugin, click here to download the interview. 19:57, ~28 megs, mp3 audio format.

See my 2012 reviews of Fred's book here and here. And, another post of mine featuring Fred.

PS -the little exit "chase theme" snippet is courtesy of my great Vegas pals Santa Fe and The Fat City Horns, from their most recent CD "When The Curtain Goes up..." The intro brass shuffle comes from my old stock library of music beds that I've had since the late '80's.

An email I just sent:

We’ve been notified that Hillary’s people are dictating “no press coverage” of her Keynote.

:(

We can go as HIMSS14 attendees, but looks like no cameras or other recording devices or subsequent overt “reporting” of her speech. How they will enforce the latter escapes me, but they obviously are already doing 2016 message control. Not happy about that in the broader sense.

Crap.

B

SOME RANDOM PICS FROM YESTERDAY

Nicely done. Good session.
Though, I remain dubious regarding the
convenience practice of rank-ordered rollups
of risk and outcomes into Likert Scale data.

Above and below, the #HITsm "tweetup" and Bingo game.

Above: former ONC Head Farzad Mostashari. I call him "Sensei."
He takes my ribbing with such good humor.
Would love to score a one-on-one audio interview with him.

Above and below, the artist and passionate patient advocate Regina Holliday of
"The Walking Gallery."

LOL

IN OTHER NEWS

From my friends at ScienceBasedMedicine.org:

Open Data
Posted by Steven Novella on February 26, 2014

PLOS (the Public Library of Science) is a non-profit open access publisher of science articles. Their goal is to make scientific data accessible to everyone, in the name of transparency and open communication. Now they have taken their approach one step further, announcing their policy that all articles published in a PLOS journal must submit their original data so that anyone can access and analyze it for themselves...

GOING TO SXSW?

South by Southwest’s unpaid labor problem: Why it’s risking a class action lawsuit

Exclusive: Company running the hip festival relies on 3000 volunteers. Experts say that violates minimum wage laws

Next month, more than 150,000 people will be in the city of Austin to attend South by Southwest, which started in 1987 as a tiny indie festival but has blossomed into a nine-day conference featuring the hottest names in music and film and politics and computers. There will be live performances and movie premieres alongside panel discussions addressing everything under the hot Texas sun. It’s Coachella mixed with TED talks and some Sundance; a sort of Burning Man for brands, corporate and personal, that is forecast to inject more than $200 million into the local economy.

SXSW will be hosting some of the hottest brands from entertainment to politics: Lena Dunham will be delivering an opening keynote address at the film festival; Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein of “Portlandia” will be talking comedy on a panel with “Saturday Night Live” alum and late-night host Seth Meyers. Celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson will be there. Even WikiLeaks founder and fugitive Julian Assange will be making an appearance (via Skype) to discuss “the future of democracy.” And when this all happens? Every media person you follow on Twitter will be tweeting away about it to the point of unfollowing.

“What we’ve got is this incredible brand that sells excitement and novelty,” said Eric Glatt, one of the many speakers booked for SXSW 2014, when I spoke to him. “Here’s the place to discover the next big thing. If you are cool, you are going to be in Austin because that’s where all the cool people are going to be exchanging ideas on the next big technology start-up or the next app or the next band or whatever it might be.”

He doesn’t have a show on HBO or an international arrest warrant like some other presenters, but Eric is one of the more interesting invites.

He told me that his hosts at SXSW should probably be sued.

SXSW should have expected that. In 2011, Eric and others who worked as unpaid interns on the movie “Black Swan” sued film studio Fox Searchlight for back wages, an experience he’ll be talking about on the panel “Debating Internships: The Value of Unpaid Work.” That’s relevant because at SXSW, more than 3,000 people – some called “volunteers” and others called “interns” – work for nothing...

THE STRAIGHT DOPE

Annapolis Police Chief Cites Parody Story About Marijuana Overdoses in Testimony

You can’t make this up. During testimony on a proposed bill to legalize marijuana in Maryland, Annapolis Police Chief Michael Pristoop cited a parody story about marijuana overdoses to make his case against legalization. From the Capital Gazette:

Testifying against bills proposed to legalize and decriminalize marijuana in the state, Annapolis Police Chief Michael Pristoop cited a hoax story that claimed 37 people had died the first day marijuana was legalized in Colorado...

“The first day of legalization, that’s when Colorado experienced 37 deaths that day from overdose on marijuana,” Pristoop testified at Tuesday’s Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee hearing. “I remember the first day it was decriminalized there were 37 deaths.” ...

The jokes just write themselves.

ERRATUM

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HILLARY

Well, that was worth missing live in the ballroom.

We simply watched a remote stream in the press room. I got fussed at by a HIMSS staffer (the one who'd incorrectly told us that Hillary was going to "announce" for 2016 during her Keynote) for even taking this picture. Seriously? Is this the USSR? Or MLB?