Early HIMSS news

HIMSS09 doesn’t officially start until Sunday, but the announcements already are starting to come fast and furious:

First off, you may have already heard the news that Pamela Pure is out as president of McKesson‘s Technology Solutions division. The company’s planned media briefing at HIMSS on Monday now will be led by Sunny Sanyal, chief operating officer of the IT division.

In other executive news, the recently re-named Surescripts—formerly SureScripts-RxHub—has hired Harry Totonis as president and CEO. Totonis previously led the analytics division of MasterCard Worldwide and was a senior partner at Booz Allen Hamilton.

I expect that this experience running an analytics operation might give pause to the privacy and anti-data-mining camps. Surescripts and the rest of the e-prescribing industry may have to completely overhaul some of their policies in light of the forthcoming new HIPAA regulations called for in the stimulus legislation.

By the way, Surescripts says previous co-CEOs JP Little and Rick Ratliff will remain with the company in undisclosed roles.

Medsphere announced that it will debut OV Meds, the first of a series of modular upgrades to the OpenVista 2.0 EHR. OV Meds includes medication reconciliation technology, a pharmacy dashboard, a drug-pricing engine and a patient drug information library.

I don’t want to get bogged down in contract “wins” for vendors because I’ll never get anything else done, but I’ll mention that Allscripts announced its first end-to-end sale of technology for a hospital, physician offices, emergency department and home care. The customer is 118-bed Ottawa (Ill.) Regional Hospital and Healthcare Center.