Imaging and Automation
2015 Best In KLAS: Medical Equipment
Announced Nov. 12, these vendors earned the title of 2015 Best in KLAS – a highly coveted recognition of their efforts to help healthcare professionals deliver better patient care. Created and updated yearly by KLAS Research, this segmented Best in KLAS designation is reserved for vendor solutions that lead two markets, imaging and pharmacy automation equipment, with the broadest operational and clinical impact on healthcare organizations.
The KLAS performance ratings were gathered over the past 12 months for medical equipment vendors in 15 market segments. Each segment includes a listing of vendor products ranked according to their KLAS performance scores (shown in parentheses below), which have been compiled from the feedback of thousands of healthcare providers at physician offices, clinics, imaging centers, hospitals, and integrated delivery networks throughout the United States and Canada.
Imaging Equipment
COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY
Siemens CT (86.8)
MAMMOGRAPHY
Hologic Mammography (91.4)
MAGNETIC RESONANCE
Siemens MR (85.8)
RADIATION THERAPY
Elekta Radiation Therapy (86.5)
ULTRASOUND
Toshiba Ultrasound (86.7)
X-RAY
Shimadzu X-ray (87.0)
Pharmacy Automation Equipment
AUTOMATED MEDICATION DISPENSING UNITS
Omnicell OmniRx
(86.4)
SMART PUMPS
CareFusion Alaris
(85.2)
Document Management
‘Supertank’ printer wins big-time design distinction
The creators of the laser-quality Epson WorkForce ET-4550 EcoTank All-in-One color printer solved the problem of dealing with empty ink cartridges in an ingenious way: They got rid of them.
Instead, the “Supertank” printer comes loaded and ready with up to two years of ink in its refillable container, so users can print up to 11,000 black/8,500 color pages – equivalent to about 50 ink cartridge sets – without changing anything.
Another big bonus is that the high-capacity tank takes low-cost replacement inks. Genius.
Auto two-sided printing, a 30-page auto-document feeder, fax and scan capabilities, and wireless printing (even without a network) from tablets and smartphones round out the features set.
This under-$500 design is so impressive that it was recently named a CES 2016 Innovation Awards Honoree and was featured in the special Innovation Awards Showcase at the huge International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this January. Last year’s event catered to a whopping 170,000 attendees from across the globe checking out all the latest next-gen business and personal tech tools.
Payor Trust Index
Survey uncovers insurers least trusted by doctors
Results from a new poll of more than 600 primary care and specialist physicians across the country indicate that physicians broadly mistrust health insurance companies and say insurers can interfere with their ability to provide high-quality patient care.
The ReviveHealth Payor Trust Index measured trust based on parameters such as physicians’ perspectives on a health plan’s efforts to honor its commitments, to honestly and accurately represent itself and its intentions, and to not routinely take advantage of physicians. The No. 1 factor cited by physicians as influencing their opinions about whether health plans help or hurt the delivery of high-quality care: more coverage and fewer claims denials versus poor coverage and more claims denials.
Physicians said they have the least trust in UnitedHealthcare and Humana. They have the most trust in local Blue Cross Blue Shield Plans (BCBS) and deemed them best at enabling the delivery of high-quality care; United was pegged as the worst.
Unfortunately, physician mistrust of health plans will likely only get worse with the mega-mergers of the nation’s largest health plans now under review by the Department of Justice (DOJ), said ReviveHealth Sounding Board member Nathan S. Kaufman, Managing Director of Kaufman Strategic Advisors and an expert in payor-provider relationships. Those deals include Anthem’s proposed takeover of Cigna and Aetna’s acquisition of Humana.
The Payor Trust Index was established last year by ReviveHealth and research partner Catalyst Healthcare Research as part of the healthcare marketing communication firm’s nine-year annual survey of health system executives’ opinions of what it’s like to do business with the nation’s largest health plans. The agency this year extended the Trust Index to physicians. The Index asks a series of questions examining various issues related to trust and assigns a numeric score from one to 100.
Overall, physician trust in the nation’s largest insurers is bleak; the average of all combined scores was 58.1 out of 100. This is slightly higher than the 51.8 that hospital leadership gave insurers when they took the survey earlier this year.
Key physician perspectives from the latest Payor Trust Index include:
- BCBS plans were identified as the best partner for enabling delivery of high-quality care (46 percent).
- United was most often mentioned as the worst at enabling delivery of high-quality care (26 percent), followed by Humana (16 percent), Aetna (15 percent), and Anthem/Wellpoint (14 percent).
- When considering the justifications for the “best” ratings, five of the top six criteria listed were relationship driven; the best rankings were based on customer service, administration, and clear guidelines. Only one criterion was financially driven.
- Of the “worst” ratings, all of the top five criteria mentioned were relationship factors; payment rates were brought up as the sixth most important factor (9 percent).
The survey was administered online among 605 physicians (75 percent medical specialists and 25 percent primary care) representing 45 of the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
Source: ReviveHealth
Interoperability: Emergency Department
Dissatisfaction with EDIS usability widespread
A new Black Book survey of 738 emergency department (ED) administrative and nursing managers, and 1,104 ED physicians, found that 89 percent of ED leaders believe their hospitals rushed to purchase new EHRs and ED systems between 2010 and 2013 for Meaningful Use dollars, just to see “productivity fall, liability rise, and connectivity stall.”
Respondents say the lack of emergency department information system (EDIS) usability and interoperability with external providers adds to a burgeoning list of ED concerns, creating a swiftly growing replacement market.
Thirty-five percent of hospitals over 150 beds are currently replacing or plan to replace their EDIS in 2016. The majority of replacements (69 percent) are those that are using enterprise EHR emergency modules but are opting for best-of-breed EDIS systems that can integrate with the hospital’s EHR.
A bright spot is that hospital administrators are including ED physicians and nursing staff in the EDIS decision-making process, something that was rarely done just a few years ago when the original systems were chosen.
The survey, conducted August through October 2015, found hospitals polled using Epic Systems’ enterprise EHR solutions were most dissatisfied with the ability to integrate with best-of-breed EDIS solutions (86 percent) or to provide widespread connectivity to obtain external records (83 percent).
Cerner, Allscripts, Healthland, Evident CPSI, and Meditech enterprise EHR solutions fared much better, all surpassing several long-standing best-of-breed EDIS products in 2015. Seventy-nine percent of collective users of those EHR systems credit substantial enhancements in usability since 2010.
Hospitals employing the EDIS solutions from best-of-breed vendors T System and Optum (Picis) rated their experiences the highest, including usability by ED nurses and order entry by ED physicians.
The three most desirable features in a 2016 replacement EDIS are: interoperability and connectivity (93 percent), physician productivity improvements (89 percent), and tablets/smartphones (87 percent).
Learn more about this study and its results at blackbookmarketresearch.com.
Hospitals
A room of one’s own cuts HAIs
Hospital-acquired infections, which affect one in 25 patients according to the CDC, are the most common complication of hospital care in the United States and lead to extended hospital stays that increase costs and risk of mortality.
A new study from researchers at Cornell University finds that the purported high building costs of private hospital rooms can definitely be offset by the financial benefits of keeping patients safer from infection.
“We showed that although single-patient rooms are more costly to build and operate, they can result in substantial savings compared with open-bay rooms – all of this by avoiding costs associated with hospital-acquired infections,” said Hessam Sadatsafavi, Cornell postdoctoral researcher and lead author of a recent paper in the Journal of Critical Care.
The researchers compared costs of constructing single rooms or converting multi-patient rooms to private rooms, including subsequent annual operational costs, and then looked at the “internal rate of return” to assess the financial feasibility of the investment in private rooms. For investors, the internal rate of return must be acceptable – 10 percent, for example – to consider the project feasible. The researchers discovered that building new private rooms or private-room conversions made economic sense, as the internal rate of return – over a five-year analysis period – was 56.18 percent, considerably higher than any liberal estimates of rate of return acceptable by healthcare organizations.
Source: Cornell University
