As always, I welcome your comments either here on the blog, or by emailing me directly at spencer@itpodcast.org. If you would like to email Chad, you can reach him at Chad.Hendricks@McKesson.com. For more information about Practice Partner, you can click here and a new window will open and you will be taken to their page.

If you want to add this feed through iTunes, please click here:

If you want to add this feed to your Google homepage, please click here:

The articles that I reference in the podcast are linked below:

GDS International Puts on Excellent CIO Summit for Healthcare

Hacking Implantable Defibrillators

Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! Mail account hacked

12,000 Laptops Lost Every Day in U.S. Airports

I thank you for listening to this podcast, and as always I welcome your comments either directly to this blog (you can do this by clicking on the title of this post and adding your comments on the new page)…or you can email me directly at spencer@itpodcast.org.The next podcast will be available on October 4, 2008

PLEASE…I need you to get the information out to your vendors and have them contact me at spencer@itpodcast.org so we can set up a time to talk with them.

If you want to add this link to your Google homepage, please click here:

The following articles are referenced on the “In the News” section of today’s podcast.

Cisco to Phase-Out Linksys Brand

H-1B Visa Quota Met

Testimony to Congress that we need 40,000 more Health IT Professionals

The next podcast will be produced and released on May 3, 2008.

I need you to get the information out to your vendors and have them contact me at spencer@itpodcast.org so we can set up a time to talk with them.

If you want to add this link to your Google homepage, please click here:

Here are the links for the stories mentioned in the news segment of the show:

Alamosa, Colorado Salmonella Outbreak Update

11 Year Old takes school network by the horns

Cautious VoIP Approach

Safari Web Browser Catches Businesses by Surprise

National Institute of Health Division Laptop Stolen

Antioch University Sun Solaris Server Breach

Thank you for listening.  The next show will be released on Saturday, April 19, 2008

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In the news features of this podcast I reference the following articles…

Excel patch causes bad math

iPhone to release enterprise grade features

New high-def DVD player enters the market

Microsoft makes IE 8 beta available

YouTube knocked offline by Pakistan

Network Solutions sued over domain name registration policies

Thank you for listening. Please send information about this podcast onto your current HIS vendors and let them know that I would like them to appear on itpodcast.org. The next show will be released on March 29, 2008.

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In the podcast, I reference numerous articles.  Links to those articles are below.

KLAS Research

Top 10 Places to Take Your Techie on a Date (and other interesting items)

Underwater Cable Cuts

New Google Applications Released that can be used without IT Approval

Huge Microsoft Patch Tuesday

Mozilla Firefox Patches

Checkfree online check deposits

Cisco Unified Communications Manager – Call Manager Heap Flaws and other Vulnerabilities

Juniper Networks dumps DX series gear

Thank you for listening.  Please log into http://itpodcast.org and give me your thoughts and comments…let me know what you would like to hear, and if you disagree with any of my comments.  The next show will be released on March 1, 2008.

READER FEEDBACK

Spencer Hamons Tue, 2008-01-15 17:09

Although I agree with some points made here regarding negotiation position and the relatively small number of large software vendors available, I take issue with just stating that this is the best strategy.

This may well be the best strategy for organizations with mature enought IT departments capable of handling the complexity multiple vendors involves. It is also dependent upon the business of the organization and the risk tolerance and what data integrity means to the specific organization.

For example, I am the CIO of a hospital, and if I encounter a data integration problem that happens to result in some clinical data from one patient being transposed to another patient, I don’t have an upset customer on the end of the support line for an online order they placed. I have the potential for adverse drug interactions, incorrect lab or radiology data, or even death resulting from mistreatment. These are risks that I am not willing to take for the sake of a negotiation advantage. Likewise, if my IT staff were 250 employees capable of monitoring each and every HL7 transaction, my risk tolerance would be different than it is currently with my 10 IT staff members. Additionally, in healthcare, I never have the luxury of taking the entire system down for 24 hours over the weekend…not even a portion of the system. In a 24×7 operation, care must be taken on how do you keep systems active and functioning day and night. If a data integrity problem erupts, for the safety of our patients, we have to take systems off-line. With “one throat to choke”, combined with good contract metrics, the vendor is motivated to resolve our problems quickly rather that point fingers at integration points.

This is a topic that will be discussed on an upcoming podcast at ITPodcast.org for anyone in the healthcare industry (or interested in the healthcare industry) that would like to listen in.

Being that the majority of my experiences have been in the community hospital market, I tend to give a lot of attention to “Integrated” hospital information systems.  When I talk with other CIO’s about these types of systems, I always hear comments about Meditech.  Just so you know, I have used Meditech MAGIC, Meditech C/S and even used the Columbia / HCA variant of Meditech.  At one time, I was a huge proponent of the Meditech system.  Although I never liked the look the software presented to the end user, I found the system reliable and fairly easy to manage.

 I have expanded my horizons a bit in the integrated HIS market over the past few years and there have some really nice developments in the marketplace.  Currently, at San Luis Valley Regional Medical Center (SLVRMC) where I am CIO, we are using McKesson’s Paragon HIS.  This system has impressed me more than just about any of the other systems that I have seen lately.  What is interesting is that when I was recruited to SLV Regional Medical Center, the executive team hired me because of my experience with Meditech C/S and Magic.  The executive team was disenchanted with Paragon and wanted to pull it and install something more “capable”.

What I found was that the system was a poor installation, not poor software.  I was nervous about what I was going to do to get this system working, because my experience with McKesson in the past was limited to Methodist Healthcare, where we were primarily a McKesson HealthQuest and Horizon shop.  The system was so complex that it required approximately 200 IT staff, numerous interface engineers, and we always seemed to be in the middle fixing some sort of interface “emergency”.  And god help you if you needed assistance from McKesson, because they were going to nickle and dime you for everything you were worth.  I never could figure out just what our maintenance dollars covered.

What I learned was that McKesson is like Ford Motor Company.  Ford is a huge company, and you can buy a Ford Festiva, an F150 pickup, a Lincoln Navigator, a Volvo S80, or a Land Rover Range Rover…but regardless of what you buy, you purchase a Ford.  Likewise, the quality of vehicle between the Ford Festiva and the Range Rover is completely different.  When you go for service, chances are you will have a different experience when you take in your F150 versus when you take in your Volvo S80. 

What I learned was that McKesson is the same way.  McKesson Provider Technologies has Healthquest, Series, STAR, and Paragon all as “hospital information systems”, each with its own market target.  Just like with the Ford example, the service experience is quite different between the various products.

McKesson’s Paragon group is completely different than my experiences with HealthQuest and Horizon.  I have a single group to contact for problems, they are responsible for any internal conversations that need to occur, and probably 90% of my issues are covered under my annual maintenance agreement.  I also get a Microsoft based product that runs on Microsoft SQL, only requires 4 servers to run both my test and live environments, and actually has a viable plan on keeping up with technology.