With help from Darius Tahir

EPIC SCHEDULING SOFTWARE FOR VA?: The VA appears to have decided to scrap a $624 million project to provide Epic patient scheduling software, although a pilot has been successful and the contractors say they can roll the software out nationwide for half the original cost and three years early.

— It’s the latest turn in a grueling IT saga that began with the 2014 patient scheduling scandal at the Phoenix VA. The VA at present has five different scheduling systems in place in various locales.

— The original contract for Epic’s Medical Appointment Scheduling System was signed in 2015 but delayed until last year while VA officials considered homegrown updates—which also have continued. The VA has spent $23 million on the Epic project so far and expects it to cost $28 million total, VA spokesman Curt Cashour said. VA will run the pilot through April 2019 “to collect and capture change management lessons learned,” he said in an email to POLITICO. The Epic contract’s long-term fate is still undecided, he said today.

— Under the $10 billion, 10-year Cerner contract signed in May, work orders are parceled out piece by piece. That means that in theory, the VA could complete the Epic contract and plug Epic’s scheduler into the Cerner EHR. There have also been proposals to let Epic install scheduling on one side of the country and Cerner on the other, in order to get a new system up and running quicker. But acquisition leaders fear that would end up being too complicated, sources tell us.

Pros can read more about it here.

VIOLENCE IS GROWING IN AMERICAN ERS: It’s being fed by patient anger over their inability to get painkillers and rising health care bills, as well as the proliferation of gangs and untreated mental illness, physicians told us for a story running this morning.

— Emergency rooms are a door into the underside of American life, and the growing number of violent incidents speaks to the nation’s unresolved health care ills — from people in the grip of addiction to opioids and powerful new substances like artificial marijuana, to the growing financial burdens on patients for their medical care. Gang violence, psychosis and various forms of rage spill into the emergency room, too.

— Unable to address the bigger issues, state and federal lawmakers and emergency department employees have pressed hospitals to beef up security -- a step that lowers risks to staff even as it piles on another expense. Hospitals spent $1.1 billion in 2016 on increased security, on top of $439 million in medical care, staffing, insurance and other costs as a result of violence against their employees, according to an American Hospital Association study.

— But many say that without a concerted response to address the underlying mental health care issues, drug treatment and other ills, the eruptions of violence will continue.

— While it is difficult to find specific data on violence in emergency departments, Bureau of Labor Statistics show the rate of attacks on registered nurses more than doubled from 2008 to 2016, and those numbers could be extrapolated to emergency nurses, said Lisa Wolf, director of the Institute for Emergency Nursing Research in Des Plaines, Ill. Pro’s can read the whole story here.

Tweet of the Day: Genevieve Morris @HITpolicywonk I used to feel naked if I forgot my phone, now I feel naked having left my to do list at the office, which I won’t be back at this week. My how priorities change. #Adulting

Welcome to Monday Morning eHealth, where we visited with a cousin’s one-month-old and watched the Fred Rogers biopic “Won’t you be my neighbor?” this weekend. Both experiences provoked powerful memories of our children’s infancies and early childhood — as well as a nightmare in which we unintentionally kidnapped a toddler. Send waking-life news to [email protected] or point your beak at any of us, for example @arthurallen202, @ravindranize, @dariustahir, @POLITICOPro, @Morning_eHealth.

FROM POLITICO MAGAZINE: Toronto’s eastern waterfront is bleak enough that Guillermo del Toro’s gothic film The Shape of Water used it as a plausible stand-in for Baltimore circa 1962. Now, Google is building a city of the future there, reports Pro Nancy Scola in today’s magazine. But will anyone want to live there?

YOUR MIPS SCORE IS READY: The data submission period for the 2017 Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) closed on April 3, and CMS has promised that clinician scores and feedback will be available as of today on the Quality Payment Program website. We’re awaiting responses from doctors and medical groups to see how they fared. AMA, the Medical Group Management Association and others have been working on proposals to simplify the MIPS scoring methodology.

CMS ADVANCES MIPS CARVE-OUT FOR SOME MEDICARE CLINICIANS — CMS is moving ahead with a demonstration program letting clinicians opt out of Medicare’s new physician payment program if they already participate in certain Medicare Advantage plans that involve taking on risk for their patients’ health care spending. The program, which is awaiting formal approval, would gauge whether such exemptions incentivize more doctors to participate in Medicare Advantage plans. See the full announcement here.

AMA GIVES PRIZES FOR INNOVATION: The group has announced the winners of a Health Care Interoperability and Innovation Challenge sponsored by Google Cloud. Florida-based HealthSteps won $25,000 in Google Cloud credits for a mobile health platform that focuses on the delivery of information between patient and provider. Second place finisher I-deal Health, from Tel Aviv, got $15,000 for an app that empowers patients to visualize their personal risk for multiple diseases. FUTUREASSURE LLC, based in Omaha, got $10,000 in credits for a project to automate surgical intuition through mobile technology.

MHS GENESIS CLINIC GETS HIGH MARKS: Naval Health Clinic Oak Harbor has become the first MHS Genesis site to pass a Primary Care Medical Home survey. The clinic on June 22 successfully completed a Joint Commission and Navy Medicine Medical Inspection General accreditation survey and inspection process. The surveyors found no significant problems with areas such as leadership, infection control, emergency management and provision of high quality care, according to the base commander, Capt. Christine Sears. More from the Pentagon release here.

OPEN PAYMENTS NEWS: Drug and device companies made $8.4 billion in payments to physicians and teaching hospitals in 2017, slightly less than the $8.8 billion in 2016, according to new data released Friday from CMS’s Open Payment system. More than half of the payments were for research, with another $2.8 billion categorized as “general” payments, which includes consulting, speaking fees, medical education, travel and lodging and royalty and licensing fees, gifts and entertainment. More details here.

CERNER SETTLES LAWSUIT OVER OVERTIME: Cerner settled a lawsuit in which workers complained they were denied overtime pay, according to the Kansas City Star. The settlement agreement would cap more than three years of litigation in a 2015 case brought in Jackson County Circuit Court by Cerner employee Laura Scott, the Star reports. Court records show that Cerner appears to have kept the terms of the settlement under seal.

DOXIMITY DATA PREDICTS OB-GYN SHORTAGES: A study released by the medical social network Doximity predicts a growing shortage of obstetricians and gynecologists due to a maturing workforce and coming retirement wave. The study predicts that Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando and Riverside, Calif. will be most affected. It found the average age of U.S. ob-gyns is 51 — and only 16 percent are 40 or younger. Doximity claims to have about 70 percent of U.S. doctors as members.

WHAT WE’RE CLICKING:

—WSJ: Amazon knows all about your shopping. Now it will know everything about your health, too

—Palm Beach Post: Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Sen. Marco Rubio to blame for failure to pursue “pill mills”

—STAT: Study questions conventional wisdom about end-of-life care’s part in health care waste

—CNBC: Why telemedicine is a bust, sort of

—The Hill: Addicted patients will have to surrender their privacy

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