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.
