Industry Watch

Vscan, GE’s pocket-size, battery-powered ultrasound device, made a landmark achievement in December 2011 when the Ministry of Health of the Italian region of Lombardia (Lombardy) became the first governmental entity in Europe to order the device. The organization purchased 135 Vscans for use by general practitioners – an encouraging action because government orders can drive broader adoption of medical technology and devices.

Vscan provides black-and-white anatomic and color-coded blood-flow images in real time. According to GE, since its introduction in 2009 the device has been used by physicians to improve maternal and child care in rural Indonesia, by trained clinicians and cardiologists in remote jungle villages in east Malaysia and by emergency medicine doctors to examine athletes at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Popular Science magazine gave the device a “Grand Award” for innovation in health in 2010.

Learn more about Vscan at http://vscanultrasound.gehealthcare.com.

“Certified Health Data Analyst (CHDA) Reference Guide,” by Susan White, Ph.D., CHDA, and June E. Bronnert, RHIA, CCS, CCS-P, is intended to prepare candidates for the CHDA exam. This title covers the three CHDA domains: data management, data analytics and data reporting. The CHDA credential was created to meet the demands of a health information management (HIM) industry that is increasingly data driven and data dependent.

This guide is available through the AHIMA web store: www.ahimastore.org.

Accusoft Pegasus, a provider of imaging software development kits (SDKs) and viewers, has released Barcode Xpress Mobile for Android. One use is to provide patient record indexing in apps built for medical professionals, allowing instant accessibility to patient medical information. A physician can scan a patient’s chart or wristband to pull the patient records from an online database using a mobile device. Additionally, users can view medical images from a patient record with the AIMTools SDK, Accusoft’s mobile imaging toolkit.

The Barcode Xpress Mobile for Android product will read QR Code, Code 39, Code 128, EAN-8, EAN-13, UPC-A and UPC-E. The product download includes an Android-compatible barcode library and two sample programs.

Learn more at www.accusoft.com.

Evidence-based Care

Watson, the much-hyped IBM computing system that competed and won against two top (human) Jeopardy! players earlier this year, is now going to work for WellPoint.
IBM and WellPoint, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, announced an agreement in September to develop and launch Watson-based solutions “to help improve patient care through the delivery of up-to-date, evidence-based healthcare for millions of Americans.”

The system, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, was built by a team of IBM scientists to rival a human’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence. IBM says that Watson can sift through the equivalent of 1 million books (roughly 200 million pages of data), analyze the information and provide precise responses in less than three seconds.

As a WellPoint team player, Watson may help physicians identify treatment options that balance the interactions of various drugs and narrow among a large group of treatment choices, enabling physicians to select the more effective treatment plans for their patients quickly. It is also expected to streamline communication between a patient’s physician and their health plan, helping to improve efficiency in clinical review of complex cases. It could even be used to direct patients to the physician in their area with the best success in treating a particular illness.

WellPoint anticipates employing Watson technology through clinical pilots in early 2012.

Medicare and Medicaid

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched a new initiative on Sept. 28 to help primary care practices deliver higher quality, more coordinated and patient-centered care. Under the new program, Medicare will work with commercial and state health insurance plans to offer additional support to primary care doctors who better coordinate care for their patients. This collaboration, known as the Comprehensive Primary Care initiative, is modeled after innovative practices developed by large employers and leading private health insurers in the private sector.
The voluntary initiative will begin as a demonstration project available in five to seven healthcare markets across the country. Public and private healthcare payers interested in applying to participate in the initiative must submit a letter of intent to CMS by Nov. 15, 2011.
In addition to the usual Medicare fees that these practices would receive for delivering Medicare-covered services, CMS will pay participating primary care practices a monthly fee for supporting activities such as:

• Helping patients with serious or chronic diseases follow personalized care plans;
• Giving patients 24-hour access to care and health information;
• Delivering preventive care;
• Engaging patients and their families in their own care; and
• Working together with other doctors, including specialists, to provide better coordinated care.

PACS/RIS/Diagnostic Imaging

Not even flood conditions and a four-day loss of electric power, telephone and Internet service at its hurricane Irene-devastated Ridgefield, Conn., headquarters in late August could keep CoActiv Medical from maintaining its seven-year 100-percent up-time service record. The company’s national PACS (picture archiving and communication system) medical facility clients were unaware that the CoActiv headquarters was closed for several days with full utility outages due to the storm.

“When we left our Ridgefield offices on the Friday before the hurricane, we forwarded all of our phone lines to our night and weekend answering service, which contacts our national network of on-call PACS and IT engineers for our 7/24/365 support,” says Ed Heere, CoActiv president and CEO. The company reports that its headquarters lost all utility services and almost flooded at 4 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 28, as Irene blasted through the area.
Because CoActiv’s EXAM-VAULT Archive datacenters, which support its vital healthcare services, are located in hardened, cloud-based, remote Tier-IV centers in Connecticut and New York, CoActiv client hospitals and medical offices in the hurricane-devastated region and throughout the country enjoyed complete service throughout the extended outages. Company engineers and support personnel worked from remote commercial and residential locations when necessary to weather the adverse effects of the event.

Learn more about CoActiv solutions at www.coactiv.com.

Claims and Coding

After a Sept. 13 article in the Wall Street Journal poked fun at the sometimes head-scratching detail of ICD-10 (including actual codes describing injuries that took place while crocheting or being struck by a parrot), Wendy Wittington, M.D., MMM and chief medical officer at Anthelio Healthcare Solutions, decided to create her own list of reasons to take the federally mandated coding system update to heart. About 18,000 ICD-9 codes used to describe medical services and facilitate billing to insurance companies will be converted to more than 155,000 in-depth entries in the ICD-10 system. The deadline to complete the change is Oct. 1, 2013.

Five reasons to take ICD-10 seriously today, as outlined by Dr. Wittington:

1. ICD-9 was developed in the 1970s. A lot has changed in medicine since then, and the current system has run out of enough codes to describe the work physicians do every day.
2. ICD has roots dating back to the 1700s and was never intended to have anything to do with the way doctors get reimbursed.
3. The U.S. is the only developed nation still on ICD-9; most of Europe has been on ICD-10 for years.
4. ICD-9 doesn’t allow for meaningful comparative effectiveness research or for the development of protocols that are sorely needed to manage patients in an increasingly complex system.
5. What the public may not realize is that this decision has been put off for so many years already that it has reached an urgency level that leaves little room for more delays.