Spring 2016 Newsletter

President's Message

What happened in Vegas…

Was all about Healthcare IT from February 29th though March 4th! The Northern California Chapter held several events, and enjoyed looking to engage our members in discussions around Healthcare IT and what we saw at HIMSS. 

We attended the Awards Gala on Thursday evening, where we accepted our award for Chapter of the Year. It was a fantastic evening celebrating the accomplishments of our chapter. Continuing our goal of providing great programs and networking for our members, we have many more events coming up... 

Mark your calendar for the following events:

  • 4th Annual Patient Engagement Event at Stanford Health on April 5th
  • CPHIMS Review Course & Exam on April 8th
  • Nursing Informatics Boot Camp on May 5th and 6th
  • Annual State HIT Day at the Capitol on May 25th

I look forward to seeing you at these events!

Warmest personal regards,

Nancy

Nancy Hall, President NorCal HIMSS
norcal.president@himsschapter.org


Innovation Conference Recap

by Jim Bloedau and Sherri Douville

Continuing the theme of how clinical innovation is changing as we begin to move into a post EMR era, the Innovation Conference Committee produced an exciting and insightful gathering at the Intel auditorium on January 21st. “We’ve struck a chord with our members’ educational needs and the innovation community in the Bay Area as seen in the more than doubling of attendance from last year’s conference to 360 – an all time high for the chapter,” said Jim Bloedau, Innovation Committee Chair and Conference Chairman and Producer.  “This doesn’t happen without the selfless efforts of our Conference Committee, board members, sponsors and most importantly our volunteers – congratulations on the outcome you created and thank you,” he continued.

Also, special thanks to Joan Hankin and Jennifer Esposito, our lead Intel sponsors, and the tireless support of Michelle Meyers who took care of many of the details for Intel.

We will continue this journey of how IT is shaping and adjusting to the changing care delivery landscape next January 19, 2017 again at the beautiful Intel auditorium in Santa Clara, so save the date! 

Speaker highlights include:

Intel Keynote: How are we going to care for one another?

Dr. John Sotos, Worldwide Medical Director of host sponsor, Intel opened the day with an educational keynote.  In contrast to a Silicon Valley mantra to “move fast and break things”, Dr. Sotos had a much more palatable message, “Aim for Transformation, Not Disruption” and posed the question to attendees, “How can we get to a better, faster, and smoother system?”  He shared his belief in medicine being similar to warfare, which can be described broadly as a loop of: Observe, Decide, Act:

Observe: This includes beyond our eyes and listening to include tools such as Genome, microbiome, and other omics, remote patient monitoring, and sensors.

Decide: Analytics and the filtering and visualization of data to assist clinical decision-making

Act: Communications, telemedicine and secure messaging fits here

Dr. Sotos also emphasized the importance of security in the healthcare environment.

“Lean” Innovation in Healthcare v. The 7 Deadly Sins of Healthcare Startups

Todd Dunn, Intermountain Health’s Director of Innovation, provided the second keynote and implored the audience to be a hand joiner, not a finger pointer. He spoke about the importance of cooperating intensely, instead of reverting to blaming between stakeholders including payers, providers, and clinicians.

We loved the analogy Todd used of how top crews operate in the sport of rowing, whereas a coxswain determines the course and pace of the race, coaching the team in real time.  Todd compared the clinician in a care setting to the coxswain in a crew boat.  The physician or “coxswain” coaches, guides, and motivates the boat, which is how he described care delivery to ideally be.  

Being an instructor of “Lean Startup” and disciple of “Design for People” methods, Todd advised that entrepreneurs building for the health systems could use these methods in unison.   Design for People pivots on customer empathy, being curious and running experiments as rapidly as possible.  This last point dovetails into the Lean Startup protocol that starts with a hypothesis then proceeds on through writing down assumptions, designing the  experiment and then running the test.  The idea is to learn what is required, expected, desired or would ultimately delight the customer to have them emotionally invest in the product and how that shapes the market outcome.

After lunch, a series of fireside chats among innovation leaders from prominent Northern California systems educated the providers, entrepreneurs, and investors in the audience about how to best work with them. 

Innovating for Clinical Healthcare

Mitesh B. Rao, MD, MHS System Patient Safety Officer and Director, Center for Advancing Patient Safety, Stanford Health Care, moderated the discussion with participation from Dr. Martin Entwistle Executive Director, Center for Health Systems Innovation at Palo Alto Medical Foundation/Sutter Health, Dr. Michael Aratow Chief Medical Information Officer, San Mateo Medical Center, and Michael Aubrey, Director of Technology at Marin General Hospital.  Their advice to innovators is to answer the following:

What are the ROI and the economics?

How do the nurse and physician view the whole situation with your product?

Does the business model address both FFS and fee for performance?

The panel expressed optimism in working on FHIR, a future open standard that will allow for two way data exchange and loading their EHR data into an enterprise data warehouse for vendors to potentially access.

"Internet of Every Healthcare Thing”

To educate us about how we adapt both validation methods and clinical care with respect to Internet of Things, panel moderator Seth Bokser, MD, Associate CMIO at UCSF led a discussion with Rajiv Kumar, MD, Medical Director of Clinical Informatics, Stanford Children’s Health, Danielle A. Schlosser, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry; Director of the Digital Health Core in the Department of Psychiatry at UCSF, and Jafar Shenasa, Head of Global Regulatory Affairs at Proteus Digital Health,

According to Bokser, by 2022, we’re each going to have #5000 things capturing data from each individual.  UCSF is looking at adjusting their clinical trials design to better suit iterative software development, in contrast to traditional medical device and Pharma trials.  The new methodology would include incorporating end-user feedback, refining the design, and then randomizing clinical trial participants.

Dr. Kumar spoke about a trial using Blood pressure, weight scales and cuffs through Apple Kit into the EHR and how that reduced readmissions by 40% at one health system that monitored patients remotely.

Transformational Nursing - A Chat Among the Pioneers

Towards the end of the day, we had nursing informatics stars talk about the importance of approaching technology implementation from the perspective of clinical workflow.  They all talked about their professional journeys, and some projects they’ve taken on. The panel was moderated by Lisa Grisim, RN, MSN, VP & Associate CIO, Clinical Systems Stanford Children’s Health, Stanford Health.  Joining her on the panel were Daniel Weberg, PhD, RN, Director Nursing Innovation and Advanced Technology, Kaiser Permanente, Sandy Ng, MSN, RN-BC, Associate Director of Enterprise Analytics, UCSF Medical Center, and Jon May, RN, BSN, Chief Innovation Officer at St. Helena Hospital’s Smart Hospital Project, Adventist Health.

The Nursing informatics superstars emphasized that you can’t do any mobility projects without robust wifi infrastructure. Sandy Ng shared that UCSF is tracking discharge before noon, infection rates, and other data driven outcomes.  Sandy also described a dashboard on top of EDW and UC-wide data warehouse, aggregating #14M patients’ data to plant the roots for personalized medicine to go live next month.  They anticipate this initiative to drive patient improvement and quality initiatives.

Our own Jim Bloedau rounded up the day by moderating the VC panel with Jordan Kramer, Director, Kaiser Venture and Robert Mittendorff, MD, MBA, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners and ER Physician who shared their advice including the following tips:

  • The next generation of digital health will be backed by results from clinical evidence including sensitivity and specificity.  Entrepreneurs must prove ROI for someone to pay for the innovation.
  • Jordan believes that the system will continue pushing care outside the four walls of the traditional medical center.  Somehow all the data needs to be filtered from noise to signal whether the patient is inside or outside the hospital.

Attendees finished with a well attended catered food and wine reception for some great networking and left the conference with actionable ideas and new friends.  So, thank you all for making this the best event ever for the chapter and save January 19th, 2017 for next year’s conference; it is becoming the one must-attend conference about clinical innovation in the region.


Patient Engagement Event

by Janet Thomas

Join the Northern California HIMSS, HFMA, and Bay Area Nursing Informatics Association on Tuesday April 5th, for our fourth annual summit in engaging patients in population health across the care continuum. Technology and its integration into healthcare has changed the way we care for patients. In addition to having a consumer base with information at its fingertips, we have an aging community that is about to burst the healthcare scene wide open. It is not good enough to be providing care just in time. We need to understand the trends in healthcare offered by analytics, provide personalized medicine, and provide treatments that empower patients and place technology in the hands of healthcare workers.

Never before has a patient population been more engaged in their own healthcare. With wearable technologies and the ability to interact with their physician through text and email, patients have more choices than ever. It is imperative that those in healthcare understand the rising trends and respond to current and anticipated healthcare needs of the population. Building off our successful series of webinars, we will further explore current trends and forecasts at our all day on site event at Stanford University.

The keynote speaker, Dr. Kyra Bobinet will lead the event discussing how the technology revolution and behavioral health will change healthcare. The audience will then hear a very compelling talk by Kristina Sheridan and her daughter Kate Sheridan, the patient, on their challenges navigating today's healthcare quagmire seeing multiple providers in different health systems over a several year period facing a complex chronic condition. Dr. Rajiv Kumar will discuss the exciting work he has done integrating existing technologies with a mobile health app that seamlessly uploads patient data into the Epic electronic health record, empowering the physician to make meaningful changes in the patient's care. Finally, Dr. Laura Clapper will explore population health and chronic care management from a payer's perspective.

The burden of caring for chronic patients along with our aging population is sure to tax even the most modern healthcare organization. Attend this year's patient engagement summit on population health to ensure your organization has the most up to date information to care for the complex patients of today and tomorrow. 


Engaging Patients in Population Health Across the Care Continuum

by Dr. Robert Wilkov

The Patient Engagement committee ran an outstanding series of webinars starting in October, 2015. The webinars covered topics ranging from Patient Engagement, to Chronic Care Management, to Population Health. Webinars were well attended and provided the audience with a sneak peek into the Stanford Event scheduled for April 5, 2016.

Patient engagement holds the promise of improved health outcomes, better patient care, and lower health care costs. It is of great value to patients by stimulating positive patient behavior, by providing real time patient education and by facilitating shared decision making with clinicians. As our population ages, and has more Chronic Conditions, it is Critical to manage Chronic Care Patients between doctor visits.

The Patient Engagement Committee teamed up with the NORCAL HIMSS Education Committee to sponsor the monthly webinars jointly with HFMA and the Bay Area Nursing Informatics Association.  A recap of the webinars is as follows:

  • The first webinar provided an excellent overview of Population Health Management and was held on was held on Oct. 7 It was conducted by Asha Saxena, a Columbia Professor and CEO of Future Technologies, a data analytics company with Population Health solutions.
  • The second webinar was Technology Trends in Population Health Management. It was conducted by Rajiv Kumar of Stamford on Nov. 4th. Prof. Kumasi gave a very illuminating talk on how he used the Apple Health Kit to enable the management of childhood diabetes patients. Prof Kumar will be speaking at the on site event on April 5th.
  • An exciting webinar featuring two speakers on Chronic Care Management was conducted on 2, 2015. The speakers were Andrew Pashman, Computer Sciences Corp and Dr. Jahan Ghofraniha, CTO of Dynosense. The Andrew discussed the new CMS CPT code 99490, which pays for non-face- to-face care coordination services furnished to Medicare beneficiaries. 
 He also discussed how to create, maintain and share an electronic comprehensive care plan. 
Jahan the requirements and characteristics of state of the art bio medical
devices used in the home and vital sign sensor data monitoring and analytics. 
 He also discussed the challenges of data integration from disparate data sources.
  • The webinar on January 13 was on Patient Engagement / Patient Experience. The speakers were Dr. Thomas Felch, Senior Manager at ECG Management Consultants and Dr. Jeff Turk, Medical Director for Primary Care, Centura Health Physician Group.

Dr. Turk described how Centura Health, a 15-hospital health system, rolled out its new patient portal, MyCenturaHealth. He described how took an innovative approach to its implementation of MyCenturaHealth, exploring the use of an automated registration process, among other tools, to ensure high levels of adoption in both the acute and ambulatory environments. Thomas Felch described the patient-engagement principles of meaningful use and how they can help the implementation of online portals and other interactive tools. He also explained the physician adoption processes used to drive implementation of portals and other patient-facing tools.

The last webinar was conducted by Ms. Kristina Sheridan on February 10, 2016 and was devoted to Patient Centered Medical Homes. Christina gave a very illuminating talk that contained an enormous amount of information. She began with her personal journey with her daughter demonstrating how critical their involvement was in restoring her daughter back to health after years of set backs and frustration. Kristina then discussed a state of the art project she is conducting for MITRE Corporation on a new iPad application her team is developing for patient engagement. She then tied it all together with an overview of Patient Centered Medical homes. Kristina explained that patient centered medical homes are accountable for meeting the large majority of each patient’s physical and mental health care needs, including prevention and wellness, acute care, and chronic care. Kristina is one of the featured speakers at the April 5th event at Stanford.


Healthcare Informatics Education

by Jeff Hawley

Once again, the Northern California HIMSS Chapter in affiliation with Healthcare Informatics Education is proud to sponsor the Nursing Informatics Boot Camp, a 2-day course designed for Nursing Informatics professionals and will be held on May 5th and 6th, 2016, in Sacramento at the Esquire Building on “K” St. This program is designed to serve the Informatics community and provide continuing education credits applicable to certification in Nursing Informatics.

This intensive two day course focuses on current informatics trends and issues in health. It includes content for nurses interested in becoming Certified Informatics Nurses. Other clinical professionals working in informatics may wish to take the course to become exposed to the course topics.  

COURSE OBJECTIVES

  1. Discuss the scope and standards of nursing informatics practice
  2. Describe professional practice, trends and issues within the informatics nurse role
  3. Explore management and leadership issues affecting informatics in healthcare settings
  4. Identify key concepts in informatics, information technology, information management, knowledge generation and data security
  5. Consider human factors in relation to information technology systems
  6. Describe models and theories associated with informatics
  7. Delineate steps of the system life cycle as it applies to information technology in the health setting

Additional details of the event including a registration link can be found at: www.norcal.himsschapter.org/Events  Click on the Nursing Informatics program to view the details including registration fees, location, instructions to register and more.

14 hours of CEU credits will be offered. Axxess Consult Inc. is accredited as a provider of continuing nursing education by the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s (ANCC) Commission on Accreditation. 14.0 hours of continuing education credit will be awarded upon completion of this offering. Full attendance at the program is required.

Note: This program is approved for up to 14.5 continuing education (CE) hours for use in fulfilling the continuing education requirements of the Certified Professional in Healthcare Information & Management Systems (CPHIMS) and the Certified Associate in Healthcare Information & Management Systems (CAHIMS). 

A Wine & Cheese Networking social will follow at 4:30 pm on Thursday, May 6th!

Feedback from the Nursing Informatics Bootcamp, which sold out last year in September was overwhelmingly positive.  Registrants are encouraged to register early for this exciting and informative workshop.  If you have questions regarding the event, please contact the event chair, Jeff Hawley at Jeff.hawley@impact.advisors.com.


Education Committee

by Dr. Cathy Coleman

The Northern California Chapter of HIMSS is committed to the educational development of its members and the community. The Education Committee is working on several initiatives to bring educational programs and other services to the HIMSS community. 

Internship Program – We have been successful in placing 2 college interns with Health IT majors in two major clinics this year. The interns are learning about electronic health records, ICD-10 conversation and meaningful use. The internship lasts for 3 years and is HIMSS provides a monthly stipend to the student interning

Nursing Informatics Boot Camp - On May 5th and 6th, the Northern California HIMSS Chapter in affiliation with Healthcare Informatics Education is sponsoring the Nursing Informatics Boot Camp, a 2-day course designed for Nursing Informatics professionals in San Francisco. CEU credits are available for this course.

CPHIMS Course and Testing – Working with the innovation committee we are planning on offering these classes and same day testing to our member community.

Career Day – The first career day was attended by HIMSS Northern California. Student internships and membership was promoted.

All annual events in Nursing Informatics Emerging Technologies, CIO Forum, Advocacy Day, and E-event offer HIMSS members a way to further their educational and professional development with relevant and timely topics.