A Strategic Year for Acmeware and OneView Product Development

This is a special time in Healthcare and at Acmeware. As Vice President for Acmeware I serve many roles including product development. I’m responsible for the architecture and operations of our software products, ensuring scalability, affordability and reliability.

This past year was a strategic year for Acmeware and OneView product development. We embarked on a series of strategic initiatives that will offer organizations an opportunity to consolidate quality reporting and reduce costs, allowing organizations to use OneView as a single unified solution for Hospital Quality and Physician Quality reporting - all aspects of clinical quality reporting. This strategy highlights our commitment to providing a single reporting platform that organizations can leverage for all CMS quality reporting programs, helping reduce reporting burden and improve on quality, outcomes and wellness.

CMS is moving rapidly to unify and align its quality reporting programs around electronic clinical quality measures (eCQM) and plans to use this data for performance based reimbursement and public reporting. In addition, The Joint Commission (TJC) has closely align its quality reporting requirement with CMS and is providing hospitals with greater flexibility in meeting their ORYX performance measure requirements with electronic clinical quality measures reporting.

The role for Acmeware is to be recognized as the leader in MEDITECH Data Repository reporting including clinical quality measure reporting. Acmeware has taken some important strategic actions with OneView product development to achieve this role.

In order to implement this product line development strategy we focused on 3 things.

The first has been major increases in research and development to accelerate the implementation of the new product line development. We have developed an amazing new software architecture that runs 100 times faster and is easier to maintain.

The second, develop a comprehensive business strategy with marketing and content distribution. We are doing incredible things with online search and social media.

The third, hire staff who are MEDITECH content experts for clinical quality reporting and value set mapping. We are adding to our team specialist that are experts in Clinical Informatics, Nursing Informatics and Quality Reporting who can help us to become leaders in the MEDITECH market space. None of this would be possible without the OneView development team, working on this amazing architecture and producing incredible product code.

We are focusing the OneView product around three (3) Packages; Hospital Quality, Physician Quality and Custom Reporting. The OneView development team has developed an incredible new software architecture in OneView that everyone will be able to utilize for reporting.

The Hospital Quality Package focuses product development and support on the following CMS programs: Meaningful Use, Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR), Joint Commission (ORYX), Readmissions Reduction, Hospital-Acquired Condition (HAC), Outpatient Quality Reporting (OQR), ACO, Value-Based Purchasing (HVBP) Program, Mortality Reporting, Surgical site infections (SSI) and Patient Safety Indicators (PSI).

The Physician Quality Package focuses product development and support on the following CMS programs: Meaningful Use, Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), PQRS Acute care, PQRS Ambulatory, ACO and Value-Based Modifier (VBM).

Acmeware continues to lead the way in clinical quality measure reporting. Our OneView Hospital Quality package supports all 29 Inpatient clinical quality measures. We recently earned ONC-HIT Certification from Drummond Group certifying all 64 Ambulatory clinical quality measures in our OneView Physician Quality package. This accomplishment demonstrates our long term commitment to quality reporting and why healthcare organizations are partnering with Acmeware to improve care quality and outcomes by using OneView as a single integrated quality reporting platform.

The Major Themes of MUSE 2015 and the Human Genome!

The Major Themes of MUSE 2015 and the Human Genome!

This past week I was at the 2015 International MUSE conference in Nashville Tennessee and this is the first time I have left this conference with so much energy and excitement.

This year I was selected to present at two sessions, one was a Tuesday training workshop and Thursday was an education session. It was 8 years since the last time I presented at MUSE. In 2008, I presented a Medication Reconciliation Journey at an education session. When I presented Medication Reconciliation, the Joint Commission was starting to focus their site visits on ensuring the accuracy of medication lists at every transition of care, leading to patient safety and betting quality and outcomes. I picked up where I left off 8 years ago discussing patient quality and outcomes.

Stacy and I co-presented on a Tuesday training workshop titled the Alphabet Soup that is Clinical Quality Measure Reporting Initiatives. This Tuesday training was very well attended. This class had the highest attendance across all training session with a total of 36 people registered. I would like to congratulate Stacy for a great job with the presentation and help with the content development (we added a little Lord of the Rings theme). The treats were well received.

Acmeware was selected to present a total of seven session and all of them were very successful. Congrats Acmeware!

For those of you who like to study market trends. If we compare some of the themes from MUSE 2015 to 2008 we can get a sense of how the market is trending. Below is chart of the total number of training and education sessions by topics and year.

This year's big theme? Integration & interoperability, as evidence by the number of sessions and vendors. The topics range from Health Information Exchange (HIE), patient portal integration, CCD data exchange and FHIR (pronounced “fire”).

Meaningful Use was still relevant but the sessions focused more on specific functional requirements. Meaningful Use audit compliance education sessions have increased over the past couple years as more hospitals are concerned about audits and CMS recouping payments. CPOE adoption is still a big topic as hospitals struggle to incorporate electronic laboratory and radiology orders. Summary of care integration with HISPs using XDR/SOAP is still a big topic as hospital transition to Stage 2. Even though MEDITECH XDR/SOAP functionality is built into their product, hospitals are still finding it difficult to implement. Patient portal rounds out the Meaningful Use topics as hospitals desperately try to meet the patient portal threshold requirements.

There was a lot of discussion around population health management and clinical quality measure reporting. As CMS starts to align quality reporting initiatives with a unified electronic reporting specification (eCQM), hospital quality and IT departments are starting to work closer together to define eCQM reporting strategies. Acmeware has an incredible opportunity to leverage our quality reporting expertise and OneView to gain significant market share.

The Thursday keynote speaker was MEDITECH’s Executive Vice President Hoda Sayed-Friel.  I was very impressed with Hoda’s presentation and MEDITECH product roadmap. She presented screenshots of the new MEDITECH Web Ambulatory product which looked very nice. They have put a lot of time and money into the UI and UX of the product. The product is completely web-based and has a nice clean look and feel. They have adopted industry standards and will support a number of browsers and platforms. They will also be offering cloud-based hosted services in the future. Maybe they partner with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to offer a low cost cloud solution with a zero IT infrastructure footprint.

MEDITECH as a platform (MaaP)! Hoda mentioned they will be offering MEDITECH as a platform by allowing vendors to develop and manage applications that are built on top of MEDITECH infrastructure. Hospitals would be able to purchase from a list of vendor apps, similarly to the App Store, software to download and install directly into the hospital MEDITECH system. Let say for example your hospital would like to purchase a vendor clinical quality reporting application to run on their MEDITECH EHR. They would go to the MaaP Store, click install and just like magic it’s up and running. Just like installing and app from your iPhone.

Hoda covered a number of product initiatives but the one that impressed me the most was the human genome genetic integration features. MEDITECH is currently researching ways to integrate human genome sequencing findings into clinical practice and patient care.

They are collaborating with genomic laboratories to integrate health data from genomics into MEDITECH clinical workflows to improve treatment, outcomes, disease management, wellness, patient safety and so much more. The ability to integrate genomic information into MEDITECH could prove invaluable for patient care. This capability is definitely not in the near term but it is nice to see product innovation in the roadmap.

To summarize, Acmeware has an incredible opportunity to leverage our reporting expertise and OneView reporting platform as healthcare organizations look to improve patient quality, outcomes and wellness. Acmeware has an incredibly diversified team who will help us take advantage of these opportunities.