VA: Wilkie watch ending

With help from Arthur Allen (@arthurallen202) and Mohana Ravindranath (@ravindranize)

VA — WILKIE WATCH ENDING: Wilkie watch will be ending soon. The Senate Veterans Affairs Committee announced Tuesday that it would be holding a panel vote on July 10 to consider the Department of Defense official’s nomination for the secretary’s job. It’s not expected to be terribly dramatic, as committee leadership has given its collective thumbs-up to Wilkie’s nomination.

If Wilkie gets the committee’s imprimatur — followed by the approval of the full Senate — it would mark an end to a period of turbulence at the department. The first secretary in the Trump administration, David Shulkin, began negotiations with Cerner for a new EHR. But Shulkin was stalked by allegations of ethical misconduct on trips to Europe and spent large portions of his tenure feuding with other political appointees and the White House over the ultimate direction of veterans’ policy in the country. It was a clash that ended with Shulkin’s dismissal.

The first try to replace Shulkin didn’t go well, as President Trump nominated his personal physician, Ronnie Jackson, to fill the role. Jackson faced allegations of on-the-job misconduct that eventually prompted his withdrawal from consideration.

Third time’s the charm, apparently, as Wilkie appears on track for Senate confirmation. Meanwhile, the Cerner project keeps on keeping on.

— Some helpful kibitzing…: As Wilkie attempts to implement the Cerner EHR, he’ll be overseen by a IT oversight subcommittee, newly created in the House Veterans Affairs Committee. There’ll be a couple of kibitzers in the subcommittee: a bipartisan pair, former Reps. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) and James Moran (D-Va.), both with McDermott Will & Emery, registered to lobby on behalf of Cerner May 17. That’s a noteworthy date: it was the same day the contract was signed.

Miller is perhaps particularly high-powered, as he served as chair of the House Veterans Affairs Committee during his time in Congress. He also had a place in the rumor mill as a potential replacement for Shulkin. Moran, a bipartisan type who served 14 years in Congress, will be handy for Cerner if the House flips to Democrats.

eHealth tweet of the day: Jan Oldenburg @janoldenburg “What’s wrong with this picture? It’s 2018. I need to get records from my Idaho pulmonologist to @VCU. I have to call Idaho to have the records faxed to Virginia, turning them from digital data in an @Epic system to blob data in a @Cerner system. Is this efficient? Safe? Useful?”

THURSDAY: Hello there all — hope we had a nice independence day full of grilled meats and/or vegetables plus some safe recreational fireworks. Don’t be Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and film an awesome advertisement for explosions and claim it’s a warning. (See tweet here.) Do send any excellent videos of stuff blowin’ up real good at [email protected]. Share socially at @arthurallen202, @dariustahir,@ravindranize, @POLITICOPro, @Morning_eHealth.

CYBER DOINGS: Here’s what’s percolating on the cybersecurity front of late:

— OCR newsletter: The Office for Civil Rights tweeted out its June 2018 newsletter Tuesday. The document gives guidance on patching software, noting that while patching software across a (potentially) large organization can be a “major undertaking,” several recent malware attacks have crippled institutions. Therefore it’s certainly necessary for organizations to have a process to look for relevant patches and install them when appropriate.

— ICYMI…DOJ indictment: In case you missed it, the Department of Justice announced criminal charges against a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center employee last week. Allegedly, the employee in question — Linda Kalina — wrongly obtained more than a hundred patients’ medical data and disclosed information on three of those individuals, with the intent to cause harm. The employee faces a maximum sentence of 11 years in prison.

STUDY — BAD EHR IMPLEMENTATIONS RISK LIVES: It’s a well-known saw that EHRs can vary a lot between different hospital and practice sites, due to the custom implementations of the software. But those implementations might risk lives, a new JAMIA paper suggests, as the rate of errors when entering orders can vary extremely widely — sometimes reaching as high as 50 percent.

Lead author Raj Ratwani, scientific director of Medstar Health’s National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare, told eHealth’s Mohana Ravindranath that the findings demonstrate a need for better EHR usability guidelines and assessments. Industry groups should develop those assessments, he said.

“We can’t have error rates at something like 50 percent,” he said. That was the highest error rate researchers observed for ordering an oral prednisone taper.

I SPY WITH MY LITTLE EYE: Apple’s Ricky Bloomfield — formerly a Duke doc — is letting the world know the news: Apple Health engineers are big FHIR fans. There are apparently multiple vanity plates with variations on “FHIR” in the company’s parking lot.

In more serious news, six more systems are added to Apple Health’s record service this week, Bloomfield tweeted, including Kaiser Permanente in Oregon and Washington, as well as Lehigh Valley Health Network in Pennsylvania.

CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT OFFERS YELP JUDGMENT: Online review site Yelp doesn’t need to remove reviews, even if defamatory, from its website, the California Supreme Court ruled this week. On occasion, health care providers have gotten majestically wroth at (allegedly) inaccurate or defamatory patient reviews. But it seems at least one avenue for addressing those reviews is closed.

WHAT WE’RE CLICKING ON:

—In JAMA, top FDA officials in medical devices discuss pre-certification and other digital health regulation.

—Post-PillPack purchase, Amazon could move quickly to sell medications.

—Opioid deaths continued to rise in Missouri between 2016 and 2017 despite its nascent efforts to institute a PDMP.

—Is an online gene test wrong?