If you have been using GE Healthcare’s Centricity Practice Solution or Centricity Electronic Medical Record solution to demonstrate Meaningful Use, you might be in for something of a rude shock. According to an InformationWeek Healthcare story by Neil Versel,

“Some customers of GE Healthcare may not be able to achieve Meaningful Use with their current electronic health records (EMR) systems, as the vendor has discovered “inaccuracies” in its software’s reporting functions.”

According to Versel, GE admitted the problem in a letter that went out to users of the two Centricity products on Thursday and promised a solution by end-November. At the time the InformationWeek story was written, this GE link was not working, but is now. In the document, GE details exactly where its reporting was going wrong. It appears as if the problems lay in the following areas:
- the default race and ethnicity provided by GE’s Centricity products didn’t always map exactly to OMB’s race and ethnicity categories (as an example, GE’s Centricity provided for a single Multi-Racial category, whereas OMB requires that a multiracial person be allowed to select as many races as s/he wants)
- inaccurate recording of smoking status
- inadequate training of doctors on educating their patients about medications
[Link]

Among the recommendations put forward by GE:

- If you’ve already attested for 2011, run reports again for attestation period once GE issues its software update. If the results don’t match up,
a) check if you clear all applicable Meaningful Use thresholds for the original period
b) check if you meet thresholds for all applicable measures

- If you haven’t attested for 2011, hold off on attesting till GE issues its updates.

- Prospectively follow GE’s recommendations for the rest of the year

While the GE letter points out there is still time till Feb 29, 2012 for 2011 attestations, these were my first reactions to reading this piece of news:
- Even a Stage 1 Meaningful Use certified software from a well-known company is not immune to inaccuracies in reporting

- It might seem like a trivial change to move from “Multi-racial” to allowing multiple check-boxes for races, but it could mean the difference between demonstrating MU and not being able to. From GE’s perspective, I would want to know why these small-seeming errors were not caught at the time these Centricity products were Stage 1 MU certified

- How many/what percentage of Centricity EMR and Practice Solution users were affected? It’s not very clear/GE doesn’t say.

- The letter and recommendations don’t show up on GE Healthcare website, and to me it’s also quite interesting that a story like this doesn’t have any hits beyond the InformationWeek article.

- Are there any recourses apart from following GE directives? Maybe if you have softwares other than GE’s Centricity, maybe you can cross-check your results. But I don’t know how many practices actually can afford two or more EMRs. So this really might be a worthless suggestion, unless you can press one of those free EMRs into service!

Full Disclosure: GE is an advertiser on this site, but I’m not sure Priya Ramachandran knew that when she wrote this article.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not exactly sure what an Accountable Care Organization is. In fact, I’m betting nobody is — there’s a bunch of harrumphing and throat clearing out there, but I haven’t seen any crystal-clear descriptions out there.  Shall we say that ACOs are more honored in the breach than in the observance and leave it at that?

Now, we come to the puzzling part of this piece. If nobody’s managed to define an ACO clearly, how can any particular EMR be a better ACO tool than another?  We’ll have to ask KLAS about this one, since they’re the ones that discovered this “fact.”

Today, KLAS announced that it had interviewed 197 providers at 187 organizations to see how ACOs are forming up. A third of the respondents said that they were pursuing a formal Medicare ACO designation, and the majority were felt ACOs were the future, KLAS reported.

Sure, considering that ACOs are just risk-taking organizations with a capitated feel, some people already have a sense of what to expect. But throw an EMR into the mix and we’re in new territory — hopefully good territory, but new nonetheless.

So, tell me how providers know that Epic and Cerner are the most ACO-ready? Apparently, respondents believe that Cerner already has many of the IT pieces needed to run ACOs; moreover, they say Cerner is working closely with providers interested in the ACO model.

Survey takers also gave a nod to Epic, which they see as being close to ready (though behind in analyics and ability to share data with non-Epic users).

Wait a minute — let me get this straight.  Respondents know Cerner has the right pieces, even though the ACO doesn’t exist yet?  They like Epic, even though it doesn’t share data outside of its walled garden?  KLAS is kidding, right?

At this point, I’ll be kind and say that Epic and Cerner users are a bit brainwashed, which I too might be if I’d spent the kind of money those folks have on an EMR.

But the voice in my suggests that KLAS might have had its finger on the scales just a little bit. I will not publicly state that Allscripts, CPSI, GE Healthcare, McKesson, MEDITECH, QuadraMed and Siemens scored worse because they didn’t pay for play…but something sure isn’t right here.

So, here’s a vendor move which I’m surprised others haven’t made yet (at least to my knowledge).

GE Healthcare has formed an official Patient Safety Organization, one blessed by HHS and AHRQ, a step which puts its EMR in the hospital buyer’s face without its having to constantly pitch.

As I see it, this is a clever move which not only helps GE gather data useful in refining Centricity, but also helps make sure people don’t think of safety problems when they think EMR.

The PSO works as follows.  GE has brought together sixteen hospitals, most in Rhode Island, to share data on medical errors.  The data will be captured through MERS, a Web-based event reporting system which all participants will use.   To handle heavy-duty data crunching, GE’s PSO is working with SAS, whose job it will be to integrate and analyze root causes that  contribute to risk.

Not only does this promote GE Healthcare’s brand, it also tightens the bond between itself and the hospitals, which may become reliant on the integration and data management capabilities vendor like SAS can supply.  (Somehow, I doubt your average community hospital has SAS  on board;  its products are just too costly.)

All told, a very interesting development.

I find it interesting that I was sent another EMR YouTube video. No doubt YouTube can be a great tool for getting the word out, but so far the views on EMR videos are pretty low. However, I must admit that this video by GE Healthcare is much more interesting than the previous meaningful use video I posted. Plus, they focus on physicians number 1 concern: productivity and reimbursement. Take a look for yourself.

GE has announced a new VC fund for healthcare to the tune of $250 million. They’re calling it the GE Healthymagination Fund. I wonder how long it took them to come up with that name. Here’s some more details on what areas the VC fund will target:

The formation of the fund is part of GE’s $6 billion Healthymagination initiative, a global commitment to deliver better healthcare to more people at lower cost. The fund will target three broad areas for investment:

-Broad-based Diagnostics, including imaging, home health, patient monitoring, molecular diagnostics, pathology, novel imaging agents and other technologies for disease diagnosis.
-Healthcare Information Technology, including electronic medical records, clinical information systems, healthcare information exchanges and value-added data services.
-Life Sciences, including tools for research and development in biopharmaceuticals and stem cells, and technologies for manufacturing of biopharmaceuticals and vaccines.

The fund will draw on capabilities from across GE Healthcare, GE Capital and GE Global Research, and will have a global footprint.

No doubt GE has a ton of capital available to them. One thing that I find interesting is how GE will balance the funds goals of investing in high quality products and the challenge of funding something that might compete with an existing GE product. I think the EMR example is a simple and good one. Will GE fund an EMR that competes with Centricity EMR. This is nothing new for large corporations, but is definitely a challenge they’ll face.

One thing is certain. There are a lot of really great opportunities to invest in the healthcare space right now.

Thanks to Shahid for pointing this out.