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Cerner CEO Neal Patterson dies at 67

Neal Patterson in 2009 (Cerner photo)

Neal Patterson, co-founder, CEO and chairman of health IT heavyweight Cerner, died today at the age of 67. According to the company, Patterson had “unexpected complications” from a recurrence of the soft-tissue cancer that caused him to take a yearlong leave starting in January 2016.

As the “unexpected” explanation suggests, the news comes as a bit of a surprise, since Patterson returned to work early this year. He had made a surprise appearance at the Cerner annual users’ meeting in November.

In another unexpected development, the North Kansas City, Missouri-based EHR vendor named Co-founder and Vice Chairman Cliff Illig to serve as chairman and interim CEO. During Patterson’s leave, President Zane Burke was the public face of the company. Burke gave me a long interview at CHIME last fall.

However, Cerner said in a statement that there has been a “longstanding succession plan” and that “the process to select a new CEO is nearing a conclusion,” suggesting that Patterson had intended to step down fairly soon.

“One of Neal’s enduring ambitions for Cerner was to build a visionary company, not just a company with a visionary,” Illig said in the statement. “He has done that. We have what I believe is the best management team in health IT, and we have associates who think as much about the future as they do the present. As a result, Cerner is well-positioned to have a pioneering impact on the provision of health care in the years to come.”

Patterson, Illig and Paul Gorup founded Cerner as PGI & Associates in 1979 to develop laboratory information systems. They changed the name to Cerner in 1984 and took the company public in 1986.

Cerner is now worth $21.7 billion, based on Friday’s closing price of $65.74 per share. It has become the largest private employer in the Kansas City area, the Kansas City Star reported.

 

July 9, 2017 I Written By

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Glaser to focus on interoperability as Cerner SVP

A big question surrounding Cerner’s $1.3 billion acquisition of Siemens Health Services has been answered: John Glaser, head of the health IT division of Siemens AG, will join Cerner as a senior vice president, concentrating on  “driving technology and product strategies, interoperability and government policy development,” according to a post on the Cerner blog.

Glaser wrote about his experience at the recent Cerner Health Conference in Kansas City, Mo. “For me, the conference, its energy and vision of patient-centered care and health, cemented my decision to become part of the Cerner organization once the transition is effective,” he said.

“At CHC, the message that resounded most clearly was, “It’s all about the patient.” When our industry talks about the HITECH Act, the drive toward electronic health records (EHR), and about greater efficiency and effectiveness, it’s usually from the perspective of helping the clinician and the organization. But, in the end, those clinicians, those organizations and those of us in the industry, know that it is about the patient,” Glaser continued [emphasis in original].

As Cerner President Zane Burke told me a few weeks ago, the acquisition is still on track to close in late winter or early spring. Still unknown is the fate of other Siemens Health Services executives and thousands of employees.

November 18, 2014 I Written By

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Cerner to buy Siemens health IT business for $1.3B

The next round of health IT consolidation is on. Today, Cerner confirmed the rumor that had been swirling for a couple of weeks, that it will acquire Siemens Health Services, the health IT business of Siemens AG, for $1.3 billion in cash.

Cerner and Siemens also announced a strategic alliance to, according to the press release, ” jointly invest in innovative projects that integrate health IT with medical technologies for the purpose of enhancing workflows and improving clinical outcomes.” Each company will commit as much as $50 million to the alliance over the next three years, with an initial focus on integrating images and medical devices with EHR data in cardiology, Cerner says.

The device integration should come as no surprise. In healthcare, Siemens has always been, first and foremost, a medical device company. Health IT came later, by virtue of Siemens’ acquisition of Shared Medical Systems in 2000 for 2.1 billion. (Adjusting for inflation, that deal would cost $2.9 billion today, meaning that either Siemens overpaid in 2000 or the health IT assets lost more than half their value in the past 14 years.) Cerner has been selling medical devices for integration with its EHR products for several years, but nobody has confused Cerner for a device company. The two companies should complement each other well in this regard.

It’s no surprise that Siemens wanted out of the health IT business, either. Cerner and Epic have been dominating the enterprise EHR market in recent years, winning all kinds of replacement and upgrade business from health systems that previously had used Siemens, GE Healthcare, Meditech and Eclipsys technology.

Eclipsys, of course, merged with Allscripts in 2010, in a deal also worth $1.3 billion, and the combined company struggled to the point that the board forced out several top executives two years later. That was the last major acquisition in enterprise health IT until today. I don’t expect it to be the last, though I won’t predict anything other than that Epic will continue its strategy of growing organically and that many companies, particularly ambulatory vendors, will drop out rather than pursuing federal certification to the 2014 standards.

The market has been shaping up to be a battle between Cerner and Epic for a while, though the formation of the CommonWell Health Alliance a year and a half ago — now including Cerner, Allscripts, Athenahealth, Greenway Health, McKesson, Sunquest and CPSI — shows that Epic is everybody else’s No. 1 competitor.

Cerner and Siemens say the deal should close early next year.

 

August 5, 2014 I Written By

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IBM acquiring Epic or Cerner? I dunno

The “unconfirmed rumor of a huge acquisition” that HIStalk (a.k.a. the National Inquirer of health IT) tweeted about on Wednesday apparently is that IBM was going to acquire Epic Systems. Mr. HIStalk on Thursday expressed some reservations.

 

 

So am I. The announcement was supposed to happen Friday morning, which is right now (10 am EDT as I write this). IBM is in the Eastern time zone and Epic is in the Central time zone; for that matter, Cerner also is on Central time, and when you think “huge” in health IT, really only Epic and Cerner come to mind. If there were to be an announcement not involving anyone on the west coast, it probably would have happened already.

In any case, I’m told that IBM has been rather quiet with analysts of late. I actually haven’t been able to find the ages of Epic honchos Judy Faulkner and Carl Dvorak, but they’ve been at this for some 35 years. Cerner CEO Neal Patterson is 65 and has an ownership interest in the Sporting KC soccer team. He’s also been in the health IT business for 35 years.You’d think any or all of the three have to be thinking of retirement, or, in Patterson’s case, moving on to the hobby of running a pro sports franchise. Except that Faulkner seems to love what she does.

Cerner’s stock price has dipped a bit in the last couple of months, but it has risen by 259 percent in the past five years, according to Yahoo! Finance. It still seems as if the health IT business has plenty of room to grow, especially among the biggest players, who promise to be the biggest beneficiaries of consolidation on the lower end of the market.

Until I hear something more substantive, I am not buying the IBM-Epic rumor. IBM-Cerner seems a tad more likely, but I still need to hear more.

May 2, 2014 I Written By

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Athenahealth-EHRA news significant only that it shakes up the status quo

By now, you’ve likely heard the news that Athenahealth has decided to quit the HIMSS EHR Association. As Athenahealth’s Dan Haley put it in a blog post: “At the end of the day, athenahealth left the EHRA because we never really belonged there in the first place. The EHRA was founded in 2004 by a group of EHR software vendors. Today, a decade into the age of cloud technology, the EHRA is still dominated and governed by a group of EHR software vendors.”

Athenahealth long has billed itself as a services company, not a software vendor, going so far as to hold a jazz funeral for the “death of software” at HIMSS13 in New Orleans. Athenahealth didn’t join the EHRA until 2011 anyway. It sounded like a bad fit.

I contacted Athenahealth, and was told that the company remains “fully committed” to the CommonWell Health Alliance, a coalition of health IT companies — also including Allscripts, Cerner, CPSI, Greenway Health, McKesson and Sunquest Information Systems — that came together for the stated purpose of “developing, deploying and promoting interoperability for the common good.” (There’s also the unstated purpose of fighting the dominance of Epic Systems.)

Athenahealth is staying on the interoperability path, but as is befitting the corporate culture, is going rogue when it comes to EHRs. It’s not the first time. It won’t be the last time, because it’s not like most of the other vendors/service providers, if for no other reason than CEO Jonathan Bush doesn’t fit the buttoned-down model of an executive. For that matter, neither did his co-founder, Todd Park, whom I often called an “anti-bureaucrat” during his time with the federal government. Park’s brother, Ed, is COO of Athenahealth, and also has unconventional tendencies.

I can relate to this mentality in a way. I quit the Association of Health Care Journalists years ago because it didn’t feel like a good fit for me. That group tried to include health IT in its programming, but it really was an organization for consumer and scientific reporters, not those of us in the business and trade press. Eight years later, I still don’t think the national media are doing such a great job covering health policy or explaining the nuances of this complicated industry. And, as I’ve said many times before about healthcare, the status quo is unacceptable.

 

April 23, 2014 I Written By

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Breaking: Allscripts fires Tullman, hires former Cerner exec Black as CEO

Allscripts Healthcare Solutions today gave into considerable investor pressure and fired CEO Glen Tullman. Former Cerner COO Paul M. Black has been named CEO. Lee Shapiro has been removed from his position as company president, but will stay on as a consultant to Black for as long as six months, the company says.

Allscripts also said that this decision ends the company’s “evaluation of strategic alternatives.” This means there will be no sale or merger.

Here is the text of the press release:

Glen Tullman Steps Down as CEO and Board Member
Board of Directors Concludes Evaluation of Strategic Alternatives

CHICAGO, Dec. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ – Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:MDRX) today announced that it has named Paul M. Black as its President and Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately.  Mr. Black is the former Chief Operating Officer of Cerner Corporation and is currently an Allscripts board member.  He replaces Glen Tullman, who will step down from his positions as Chief Executive Officer and board member.  Lee Shapiro also will step down as President, effective immediately, and will serve as a consultant to Mr. Black for up to six months.  In addition, the Company announced that the Board has formally concluded its evaluation of strategic alternatives.

“We want to thank Glen Tullman for building Allscripts into one of the leaders in the evolving healthcare IT industry,” said Dennis Chookaszian, Allscripts Chairman of the Board. “Glen began at the Company in 1997 when it was unprofitable, turned Allscripts around and achieved record revenues and profits in 2011.  Along the way, Glen also grew the workforce to more than 7,000 employees. I also want to thank Lee Shapiro for his many important contributions to Allscripts, particularly with respect to our M&A strategy and international expansion.”

Commenting on the selection of Paul M. Black as President and CEO, Mr. Chookaszian said: “Paul possesses a unique blend of operational, healthcare and IT sector expertise, and we are pleased that he has agreed to lead the Company at this critical juncture. Paul’s deep domain expertise in healthcare technology, industry relationships, and understanding of Allscripts’ solutions and client base make him the ideal choice.  Together with our recently appointed Chief Financial Officer Rick Poulton, we are confident that we have a leadership team in place that can execute on our strategic initiatives, capitalize on the many global opportunities that lie ahead, and lead Allscripts through its next phase of growth.”

Commenting on the strategic alternatives process, Mr. Chookaszian stated: “The Board conducted a thorough and rigorous review of strategic alternatives.  The Board concluded, however, that the best course at this time is to develop Allscripts’ long-term potential under the direction of our new management team.”

Incoming Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Black said, “I look forward to building on the many successes achieved by the Allscripts team.  Without underestimating the challenges ahead, we have compelling open-platform solutions, an impressive global client base, and a very dedicated and talented team.  We will improve the execution of our strategic vision, deliver on our worldwide client commitments, and continue to innovate. Our focus will be on creating long-term value for our shareholders.”

Glen Tullman added, “It’s always been Allscripts’ goal to revolutionize healthcare and I am proud that Allscripts’ employees have moved this industry forward in both the US and abroad – enabling more people to access our healthcare systems, adding thousands of jobs, and developing an industry that will be one of the biggest

future growth engines of the U.S. economy. Allscripts’ team has shown great resilience and dedication, and I appreciate their hard work to build Allscripts into a leading provider of clinical software, connectivity and information solutions. I am confident that Allscripts is in good hands and has a bright future ahead.”

In addition to currently serving as an Allscripts board member, Mr. Black has served on the Board of The Truman Medical Centers for 12 years, most recently as Chairman, and as a director of Haemonetics Corporation (NYSE:HAE), a global healthcare company dedicated to providing innovative blood-management solutions.

Mr. Black spent more than 12 years with Cerner Corporation and retired as its Chief Operating Officer in 2007.  He helped build Cerner into a market leader in healthcare information technology solutions with more than $1.5 billion of annual revenues. For most of his career at Cerner, Mr. Black was Chief Sales Officer, playing an instrumental role in the company’s double-digit organic growth.  Prior to Cerner, Mr. Black was with IBM from 1982 to 1994, in a number of senior sales, marketing and professional services leadership positions. Since 2007, he has been a Senior Advisor with New Mountain Capital in New York and served as a Director with several New Mountain portfolio companies.  Mr. Black recently has served as an operating executive with Genstar Capital, responsible for expanding Genstar’s healthcare and software practices, with specific focus on healthcare technology.

He received a B.S. from Iowa State University and an MBA from the University of Iowa.

Conference Call

Allscripts will conduct a conference call tomorrow, Thursday, December 20, 2012, at 8:30 AM Eastern Time to discuss today’s announcement.   Investors can access the conference via the Internet at http://investor.allscripts.com.  Participants also may access the conference call by dialing (877) 303-0543 (toll free in the US) or (973) 935-8787 (international) and requesting Conference ID #83012880.

A replay of the call will be available two hours after the conclusion of the call, for a period of four weeks, at http://www.allscripts.com or by calling (855) 859-2056 or (404) 537-3406 – Conference ID #83012880.

About Allscripts

Allscripts (NASDAQ: MDRX) delivers the insights that healthcare providers require to generate world-class outcomes. The company’s Electronic Health Record, practice management and other clinical, revenue cycle, connectivity and information solutions create a Connected Community of Health™ for physicians, hospitals and post-acute organizations.  To learn more about Allscripts, please visit www.allscripts.com, Twitter, YouTube and It Takes A Community: The Allscripts Blog.

 

Full disclosure: I serve on the advisory board of Health eVillages with Tullman. I have had no contact with him regarding his fate at Allscripts or the company’s recent troubles.

 

December 19, 2012 I Written By

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Mark Versel, 1944-2012

My father passed away late last Friday night from a most insidious disease called multiple system atrophy (MSA). It’s a rare, progressive, neurodegenerative condition that presents itself with symptoms similar to those of Parkinson’s disease, but it is far more aggressive and debilitating. Essentially, muscles stop working until the disease kills you. In my dad’s case, he ultimately lost the ability to breathe.

Nobody knows the cause of MSA and there is no cure. There really aren’t even any effective treatments. You can only treat the symptoms with medications designed for Parkinson’s to address muscle stiffness, balance and such, and with physical and speech therapy, but that’s like standing in front a speeding train with a stop sign. It’s a futile battle.

My dad never had any real health issues other than sciatica until he was diagnosed with what was thought to be Parkinson’s less than five years ago (MSA didn’t really come into the picture until maybe a year and a half ago). He ate well, exercised somewhat regularly and generally took pretty good care of himself before the disease came along. Now he’s dead at the relatively young age of 68 after an excruciatingly fast decline that kept him hospitalized for his final month.

He fought the disease valiantly and courageously, but he never got the chance to retire. He was forced to stop working because he was physically unable to continue. He never even got to come home to die. The end came so fast that we didn’t get past the first hospice discussion.

As sad as it is to lose my dad in the way that I did, I want something positive to come out of his ordeal. He was selfless, kind and generous in life, and my family intends to carry on his legacy in some way that we haven’t had time to figure out just yet. I want to use his memory and my little corner of the Internet to help educate people about MSA and about patient safety.

What does patient safety have to do with this, you ask? My dad had pretty terrible care at a poorly run community hospital near his home for more than three weeks before he was transferred to the wonderful Georgetown University Hospital in Washington for what turned out to be his final days. The contrast was striking.

The community hospital was a place of inadequate communication, broken processes, obsolete workflows, neglect and harm. My dad came in with what turned out to be a urinary-tract infection. They treated that with antibiotics, but he developed pneumonia in a matter of days—a condition a doctor admitted he had acquired in the hospital. So he was transferred to intensive care, where the hospital could make a lot more money despite being responsible for the complication. (Perverse incentives rule in American healthcare.) My dad was a Medicare beneficiary, so you and I, as taxpayers, get ripped off by the incompetence.

Meanwhile, the clinicians there, who had been trained to treat the acute symptoms, neglected the MSA for more than a week, even taking him off his regular meds for several days, during which time my dad’s muscles continued to stiffen. Physical therapy was essential to prevent further atrophy. The order went in for him to receive physical and occupational therapy at least three times a week, but the PT and OT were nowhere to be found for a week or more.

Meds that had been ordered didn’t get delivered. One night while I was there, a perky medical assistant or tech or someone of that ilk burst into the room announcing it was time for an AccuCheck test, and nearly went through with taking a small blood sample before I stepped in to ask what was going on. She explained that it was a test for blood sugar (who would know what AccuCheck was if they didn’t have diabetes or some familiarity with the healthcare industry?) only after I enquired, but I stopped her to tell her that my dad did not have diabetes. Because of the MSA, he had difficulty speaking and would not have been able to stop someone acting so quickly. It turned out that the tech had gone to the wrong room. The hospital did require clinicians to scan bar codes before administering tests and meds, but who knows if the system really worked?

Later that evening, the nurse nearly gave my dad an eye drop that had not been ordered. The proper instructions were to administer an ophthalmic drug orally, but only if he had excess saliva. The nurse didn’t see that part of the note, despite the fact that the ICU had a partial EHR (Cerner, for those of you keeping score at home) with electronic medication lists.

The infectious disease specialist at the community hospital was not even familiar with MSA — and he didn’t bother to tell us that for three weeks. It should be his professional duty to call in an experienced neurologist or consult with my dad’s personal physician.

Worst of all, my dad stopped breathing for a few seconds last week under questionable circumstances and was intubated, despite the fact that he had an advance directive on file specifically stating that he did not want to be intubated.

At Georgetown, we saw nothing but compassion and competence. Care was well coordinated. People talked to each other. Clinicians huddled together during shift changes to discuss all the patients on the ward. The medical director of the ICU, a pulmonologist, personally managed my dad’s case. The neurologists at this major teaching hospital had seen MSA before, but that didn’t stop them from talking with my dad’s personal physician. It was too late to save my dad’s life, but he died comfortably and with dignity at Georgetown, without the needless agony he endured at the other place.

I am now vowing to dedicate my own career to educating as many people about MSA as possible and about the danger of uncoordinated care and poorly designed workflows. Interestingly, one of the last stories I wrote before my father passed and before I took leave was a piece in InformationWeek about patient engagement. I love the mantra of the Society for Participatory Medicine that I mentioned in the story: “Nothing about me without me.”

Every patient should live by those words. And every healthcare facility should respect that concept.

Rest in peace, Dad. You have not died in vain.

UPDATE, April 2013: If you would like to make a donation to MSA support and research, please visit our family’s fundraising page, which is helping the Multiple System Atrophy Coalition. Thank you.

May 17, 2012 I Written By

I'm a freelance healthcare journalist, specializing in health IT, mobile health, healthcare quality fast $5000 loans-cash.net with bad credit, hospital/physician practice management and healthcare finance.

Podcast: HIMSS CEO Steve Lieber previews HIMSS12

I’m about to head to the airport for my flight to Las Vegas and HIMSS12. As has become customary before each year’s HIMSS conference, I sat down with H. Stephen Lieber, CEO of HIMSS, this past week to discuss the state of health IT and what to expect at the big event.

The timing of this interview was interesting. We spoke Wednesday morning at the new HIMSS office in downtown Chicago, one day after CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner told a gathering of American Medical Association leaders that federal officials were re-examining the Oct. 1, 2013, deadline for adopting ICD-10 coding, and one day before HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius made it official that there would be a delay.

Also one day after this interview, HIMSS announced that it has taken over the mHealth Summit from the Foundation of the National Institutes of Health. While Lieber talked extensively about mobile healthcare, he gave no hint that this news was coming.

Meanwhile, the whole health IT universe had been expecting HHS to release its proposed rules for Stage 2 of “meaningful use” of electronic health records this past week. That didn’t happen. Monday is a federal holiday, so I don’t think we will hear anything until at least Tuesday, which, coincidentally, happens to be the first day of the HIMSS conference. As if we don’t have enough to keep us occupied in the next few days.

The recording is a little fuzzy. I’m not really sure what created the echo and the background noise, since we were in a dedicated interview room, one of the nice features at the new HIMSS digs. Radio interference perhaps? That happened to me a couple years ago in the old HIMSS office on East Ohio Street. Just pretend you’re listening on AM radio or something.

Podcast details: Interview with HIMSS CEO Steve Lieber, February 15, 2012. MP3, stereo, 128 kbps, 31.9 MB, running time 34:51.

1:00 Logistics of HIMSS12 in Las Vegas after the venue change
2:00 Why the Venetian-Palazzo-Sands might work better than the Las Vegas Convention Center
2:55 Why the conference starts on Tuesday this year
3:25 Massive scale of the conference
5:25 Return of Cerner and Meditech and some first-time exhibitors
7:45 mHIMSS and HIT X.0
10:15 Twitter co-founder Biz Stone keynoting and the state of social media in healthcare
12:00 Accountable care and realignment of incentives
14:15 What might be in proposed rule for Stage 2 of meaningful use
17:20 Preview of HIMSS survey of hospital readiness for meaningful use
20:30 ICD-10 readiness
25:00 Greater public awareness of health IT but continuing difficulties in communicating the finer points of healthcare reform
27:50 Mobile healthcare
31:25 The growing importance of clinical analytics

February 18, 2012 I Written By

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Surrealism at HIMSS

CHICAGO—This picture is on display at the HIMSS conference booth of OpenVista developer Medsphere Systems.

Cerner doesn’t seem to be making many friends here by deciding to skip the exhibition, but still.

April 6, 2009 I Written By

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Meditech to skip HIMSS

I may be a week behind on this, but I just saw a Feb. 6 announcement that Medical Information Technology, better known as MEDITECH, has decided to pull out of April’s HIMSS conference.

According to the company:

Participating in the annual HIMSS conference has proven to be beneficial to MEDITECH and LSS through the years, as we have been able to renew acquaintances, attract new customers, and showcase new product offerings there. Nonetheless, the current economic climate mandates we pay particular attention to spending resources wisely this year. Just as we encourage customers to make HCIS selections based on value, we too must carefully evaluate our expenses and focus on priorities. For this reason, MEDITECH and LSS will not attend the HIMSS conference this year. Instead we will use communication channels such as our extensive program of regional events, annual workshops, Webex demonstrations, and meditech.com to share information. Using this approach, we will be able to continue sharing information on key topics, control our expenses, and minimize everyone’s costs.

Howard Messing
President and COO, MEDITECH

This comes just days after HIMSS itself touted record pre-registration for the annual conference, despite the terrible economy and the unpredictability of Chicago weather in early April.

This makes MEDITECH the second major vendor to pull out of HIMSS’09. It was widely reported around last year’s conference that Cerner would not have its usual mammoth booth in the HIMSS exhibit hall this time around. I’ve not heard of any reversal of this decision.

February 14, 2009 I Written By

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