What are the forthcoming minimum cybersecurity standards?
Morning Headlines 12/27/23
Constellation Software’s Harris Operating Group Acquires MEDHOST, Inc.
Medhost will be operated as a standalone business within Constellation’s Harris software group.
Mercy medical record transition heats up in bankruptcy court
Mercy Iowa City and Harris-owned Altera Digital Health argue the terms of continued EHR support as the hospital awaits its acquisition by University of Iowa.
Apple files appeal after Biden administration allows U.S. ban on watch imports
Apple stops selling its smart watches that offer pulse oximetry after losing a patent infringement dispute with medical device maker Masimo.
Why do doctors still use pagers?
NPR talks to doctors whose project to replace ED pagers with smart devices failed.
Fun Poll, which EHR is next for Harris/Constellation?
The Harris thing is very interesting. Their acquisition of what is now Altera was a boon for what remains as the EHRs sold to Harris were the failures of the bundle with decreasing licenses and struggling to barely keep up with regulatory requirements.
TW in particular, went through almost a half decade of rewrite to bring it ‘up to date’ just to find that it really was just adding a new browser and modifying the solution to have a middle tier. All the defects were considered legacy defects and if the customer lived with it for this long “we don’t need to fix it”. Not withstanding that many of the defects and deficiencies now acquired new importance as the purpose of the EHR shifted. There is no organization that I know of that is using interoperability protocols (CCDA/FHIR) to write data back to the TouchWorks database. TW is an interoperability failure in my opinion.
Sunrise is a different beast, the software is essentially a bespoken solution, meaning that you can do just about anything you want with it — including paying an arm and a leg to upgrade it. You can have three different SCM instances in the same healthcare system and they will all be different in enumeration, configuration, dictionaries, and workflow. The other thing about Sunrise is that they really don’t have an ambulatory solution that works, hence Touchworks.
The initial intent was to allow the two EHRs (Touchworks and Sunrise) to communicate clinical content via a proprietary CCDA construct. This would give large health organizations an ‘organic’ full solution — ambulatory to ED to acute to surgery. When that failed, or rather a bright shiny object was purchased (dbMotion and FollowMyHealth) the solution was transitioned mid stream to using FMH to send data from the EHRs to dbMotion — then back down again. That too is a bespoken solution that requires immense time and money to set up and upgrade
Veradigm kept the best parts, the parts that were making money, and handed Harris the rest. The solutions that remained are generally profitable and growing, even if the stock does not reflect that reality.