TeraMedica launches its VisLite information manager

Milwaukee-based medical informatics company TeraMedica announced the launch of its new Evercore - VisLite Information Manager.
The system is part of the company’s effort to address interoperability challenges in the Visible Light arena. “VisLite integrates and manages ophthalmology, surgery, endoscopy, pathology, microscopy and many other areas,” said Jim Prekop, CEO and president. "Evercore - VisLite Information Manager integrates and manages all visible light modalities, into a single cohesive infrastructure.”
The information manager then serves the visible light dataset to a facility’s electronic medical record (EMR) or RHIO/electronic health record (EHR). “The integrated clinical focus includes connectivity of visible light data sets with traditional medical images and MPEG2, JPEG, BMP files, in a patient centric context. The aggregated device information is gathered seamlessly from systems such as the fyreLINK VL Image Capture system,” added Prekop.
Evercore - VisLite Information Manager also uses open standards in managing and storing digital information and makes the visible light data available at the point of patient care across the health care enterprise in multiple formats and at multiple service levels. “Evercore can literally disappear into a facility's infrastructure, allowing clinicians to focus on patient care instead of on information retrieval,” said Prekop.

Kaiser exec resigns amid EMR-initiative controversy

The executive overseeing Kaiser Permanente’s ambitious $3 billion electronic medical records initiative resigned Tuesday, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times. J. Clifford Dodd, senior vice president and CIO, quit four days after another employee, Justen Deal, sent out an email saying that Kaiser was wasting money and should scrap the project – known as HealthConnect – for “a system that can handle the scale of a company like Kaiser.”

Deal’s email said that problems with HealthConnect has resulted in cost overruns and software breakdowns affecting access to medical records. A Kaiser spokesman said the email was not the reason for Dodd’s resignation and that the allegations were untrue. The HealthConnect rollout has exceeded expectations, the spokesman said. Deal was put on administrative leave pending an investigation of whether he violated company e-mail policies.

Despite the push for paperless medical records, only 20 percent of physicians are using electronic medical record systems. As the nation’s largest nonprofit health organization, Kaiser Permanente’s high-profile digitization project has many in the industry keeping watch. Failure of such a large-scale project could cost Kaiser millions and, in turn, might cost members higher premiums.

In the final quarter of last year, Kaiser posted its first loss in three years, at $211 million. However, the company posted $417 million in third-quarter profit on $8.7 billion in revenue on Tuesday, roughly an 11 percent increase over the same period one year ago.

Use of Medical E-Records Might Rise

Health care advocates have long encouraged physicians to switch to computerized medical records, saying they could improve patient care and increase efficiency.
Doctors, however, have been more concerned about the high price tag -- often more than $20,000 per physician for software, hardware and Internet connections -- as well as having to maintain a computer network. Surveys estimate less than 20 percent of doctors have fully automated their offices.

But federal officials last month paved the way for hospitals to come to the rescue, allowing them to donate medical record systems to physician practices to blunt some of the financial bite.
In addition, those inside the industry recently agreed on technology standards that allow software from different companies to share data, taking some of the fear out of the purchasing decision.

Those moves are apparently loosening purse strings as medical software makers say they've seen a surge in new interest and new customers and predict this may be the spark they needed to pull the $1.5 billion electronic health records industry into the medical mainstream.
It's been a month since the new regulations were announced and the increase in engagement has been immediate, Physicians weren't ready to provide a big investment. The fact a hospital can now provide it for them completely changes the picture. It's created a huge amount of excitement so there's an opportunity for a lot of money to go around.

Electronic medical records have slowly gained acceptance in the health care industry, especially after President Bush in 2004 said he wanted all Americans to have an electronic patient record by 2014. Proponents, who envision a nationwide online database of medical information, say the records can speed up medical decisions, avoid errors and save lives.

Such information would be protected by federal privacy laws covering medical records, and supporters say secure networks would move information between health care providers bound by those laws.

Annual sales of records software are expected to more than triple to $4.9 billion by 2010.

But while hospitals, with their deeper pockets, have steadily evolved to electronic medical records (EMRs), doctors' groups, constrained by declining Medicaid payments and a smaller pool of capital, have proven slower to adapt.

Hospitals weren't allowed to help, blocked by federal laws preventing physicians from referring Medicare patients to businesses in which they have a financial relationship or accepting compensation from a health care provider that could be viewed as an incentive to refer patients.
On Oct. 6, however, federal officials established exceptions to those laws that would cover medical record system donations, albeit with a host of conditions. For example, computer systems that are donated must be able to talk and interact with other health care computer systems around the country -- a protection against hospitals using their donations to deter competition.
Doctors still must pay at least 15 percent of the system's cost and donations are limited to software or such things as maintenance costs or Internet fees. Donations of hardware, other types of software or personnel to run the systems are not allowed.

It is expected it will take several quarters of working through the legal questions and mapping out hospital-physician partnerships before the market sees a significant increase in sales, but they will come.

Bush said he had a 10-year plan for (records). This is a good first step, It's all gravy because it hastens purchasing decisions and broadens the addressable market for them.

For example, Cerner has started to put more sales focus on physician offices, rather than just hospitals, leading the company to sign up more small-scale customers in the company's third quarter than in all of 2005, whose division now serves around 3,000 non-hospital clients.
He added that hospitals are also looking at records networks as an edge in the fight to attract high-quality physicians.