Delaware Valley Healthcare Council of HAP released facts showing that during 2011, hospitals and health systems in southeastern Pennsylvania supported nearly one in eight of the region’s jobs, contributed $28.7 billion to the economy, and providing more than $2.2 billion in uncompensated or subsidized health care, community improvement, medical education, and research—known collectively as community benefit.
For the first time, the council’s release of regional hospital contributions incorporates newly available Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Schedule H data about the community benefit provided by not-for-profit hospitals.
“We now have a more complete picture of the resources that hospitals dedicate to caring for all who come through their doors, to improving communities, and to developing the health care professionals and medical treatments of tomorrow,” said Curt Schroder, the council’s regional executive. Schroder noted that investor-owned hospitals also provide community benefits, but these are not publicly reported in a uniform way that could be captured for the fact sheets.
The $2.2-billion in community benefit provided in fiscal year 2011 by the region’s not-for-profit hospitals included:
More than $447 million in charity care, financial assistance, subsidies for crucial health care services, and other uncompensated care.
About $620 million in Medical Assistance and Medicare subsidies, to cover the gap between the cost of the care provided to these patients and what hospitals are reimbursed.
$54 million for community improvement.
Nearly $243 million for hospital-based education programs to train highly skilled health care professionals.
Nearly $850 million in research to cure illnesses and advance medical treatments and services.
In 2011 not-for-profit and investor-owned hospitals in southeastern Pennsylvania contributed $28.7 billion to the region’s economy. Hospitals directly employed 97,830 and indirectly supported the employment of an additional 114,150, accounting for nearly 212,000 jobs or almost 12 percent of the region’s employment. Hospitals spent nearly $13 billion on wages, services, technology, equipment, supplies, construction, and other costs of operation. This direct spending generated nearly $16 billion more in indirect economic stimulus.
Community benefit information for the fact sheets was compiled from 2010-IRS 990, Schedule H submitted by the region’s not-for-profit hospitals and health systems. Economic impact information is based on analysis of hospital Medicare cost reports, employment information from the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis’s employment and final demand output multipliers.
“Hospitals sustain the health and economic vitality of southeastern Pennsylvania,” said Schroder. “In all five counties, they are among the top five employers, providing stable, family-sustaining jobs and high quality health care. Our internationally recognized academic medical centers draw patients and students from around the world, are among the nation’s top recipients of National Institutes of Health funding, and conduct research and education that support the region’s life sciences sector. But hospitals simply cannot absorb any more cuts or mandates without jeopardizing the services their communities rely on, now more than ever.”
Over the next 10 years, federal Medicare and Medicaid payments for the region’s hospitals and health systems have already been cut by $3.4 billion as a result of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (health reform), the Budget Control Act of 2011 (sequestration), and other federal legislation. In addition, Pennsylvania’s not-for-profit hospitals may face threats to their charitable missions as a result of the recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision undermining Act 55 of 1997, the state law defining institutions of purely public charity.
CompTIA, the non-profit association for the IT industry announced the members of its board of directors for 2013-14.
The new board, which includes a new chairman and five new directors took office earlier this month.
MJ Shoer, president and virtual CTO of Jenaly Technology Group, is chairman of CompTIA’s board of directors for 2013-14. An active member in the association for more than a decade, Shoer served a previous term as a CompTIA director and board secretary and has held other membership leadership positions in the association.
“The pace of innovation continues unabated, changing the way we live, work and interact,” Shoer said. “This presents the IT industry with both great opportunities and great challenges. I’m confident that our board, in cooperation with CompTIA’s executive team, will address these challenges head-on and chart a course that elevates the industry to even greater heights.”
“MJ Shoer has filled many roles in the IT channel with distinction – small business owner, technology entrepreneur, industry advocate and compassionate philanthropist,” said Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO of CompTIA. “His commitment to our industry is unparalleled and his leadership as chairman will be invaluable.”
For the second consecutive year Bob Stegner, senior vice president, marketing, SYNNEX is vice chairman. Stegner has more than 23 years of management, marketing and sales experience in the IT industry.
Mike Brogan, president and CEO of Erb’s Technology Solutions, chairs the board’s Audit Committee. Brogan’s career with Erb’s dates to 1978 and he has held a number of sales and executive positions with the company.
Newly elected to the CompTIA Board of Directors are:
• Amy Kardel, co-owner and COO, Clever Ducks, the founder of two technology start-ups and with 20 years of industry experience.
• Quy “Q” Nguyen, founder and CEO, Allyance Communications, Inc.,a company now in its 11th year in business.
• Mont Phelps, president and CEO, NWN Corp., a senior executive and entrepreneur in the IT industry.
• Aaron Woods, director, North American Resellers Service Relationship and Partner Programs, Xerox Corp., who has served in various management roles in the IT services industry for more than 25 years.
Continuing on the board as immediate past chair is Robert Godgart, founder and CEO of ChannelEyes and founder and former CEO of Autotask. Godgart served two years as chairman of the CompTIA board.
Also returning to the board in 2013 are Don Bentz, co-founder, Preferred IT Group; Paul Cronin, senior vice president, Atrion Networking Corp.; Janet Schijns, vice president, business solution, Verizon Wireless; Frank Vitagliano, vice president, channel sales, Dell; and Dan Wensley, vice president, partner development and marketing, Level Platforms.
As president of CompTIA, Thibodeaux is also a voting member of the board of directors. Two other CompTIA executives hold non-voting board officer posts. Dan Liutikas, CompTIA’s chief legal officer, serves as board secretary; and David Sommer, CFO, is board treasurer.
Following a request for feedback from Senators in Washington on the status of health IT adoption, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) issued a response asking that a one-year extension of Meaningful Use Stage 2 be granted to “maximize the opportunity of program success.”
Healthcare CIOs said the additional 12-months for meeting Stage 2 “will give providers the opportunity to optimize their EHR technology and achieve the benefits of Stage 1 and Stage 2; it will give vendors the time needed to prepare, develop and deliver needed technology to correspond with Stage 3; and it will give policymakers time to assess and evaluate programmatic trends needed to craft thoughtful Stage 3 rules.”
In calling for an extension to Stage 2, CHIME spoke of the federal incentive program’s progress to date, noting that fundamental shifts in health IT adoption and EHR product capabilities have been made possible through the policy of Meaningful Use.
“While we share some of your concerns with the current state of interoperability, we strongly believe that EHR incentive payments under the policy of Meaningful Use have been essential in moving the nation’s healthcare system into the 21st Century,” the CHIME letter said. “Through the EHR Incentive Payments program, CMS and ONC have begun to mitigate a fractured and incompatible state for EHRs.”
The response comes amid concerns levied by six Senators that the current direction of the HITECH program is flawed. The white paper released on April 16, “REBOOT: Re-examining the Strategies Needed to Successfully Adopt Health IT,” outlines several concerns including increased health care costs, lack of momentum toward interoperability, patient privacy, and long-term program sustainability.
“Your report highlights a number of fair and responsible criticisms of the program and it echoes many of the concerns CHIME has voiced over the last three years,” the CHIME letter notes. “But given the nation’s increased adoption of EHRs, the increased investments in interoperable solutions and the early-stage transformations encountered every day by our members, we remain convinced that the trajectory set by Meaningful Use is the correct one.
“CHIME believes the industry’s guiding principle should be to maximize the opportunity of program success and monitor the timelines needed to do that. For this reason, we formally and strongly recommend a one-year extension to Stage 2 before progressing to Stage 3 of Meaningful Use,” the organization concluded.
CHIME also called on Congress to request an update from ONC on what technologies, architectures and strategies exist to mitigate patient matching errors; seek feedback from the public via congressional hearing or other formal commenting mechanism; and determine how current work at the S&I Framework could be leveraged to address the foundational challenge of patient data-matching.
Responding to a section of the white paper on audits and program integrity, CHIME said healthcare CIOs understand the desire to ensure that incentive payments are going to those who have qualified to receive them, but this intent must not result in unreasonable auditing efforts that are poorly structured, inconsistent or lack uniform criteria. “We ask that Congress ensure CMS audits are efficient and effective without overburdening providers,” the letter notes.
Today’s most successful free health and fitness apps accumulated 5.5 Mio. downloads since their first appearance in the App Store, research2guidance research found. There are significant performance gaps that highlight the importance of choosing the “right” platform, app category and device choice for mHealth publishers.
mHealth’s analysis is part of a new series of benchmarking reports starting with the United States mobile healthcare app market. The report analyses the app market performance of the most successful mHealth apps on the iOS and Android platform. Find out more in our report “US Top 10 mHealth Apps Performance Benchmarking”.
There are three areas of performance gaps that impact the performance of a top mHealth app most.
1. mHealth app category performance gap: The health and fitness app category attracts more iPhone, iPad and Android users than the Medical app category. The top selling apps in health and fitness apps can expect to reach up to 11 times more download numbers than in the medical section for free apps and up to 7 times higher downloads for paid apps.
2. mHealth mobile operating system performance gap: Although Android became No. 1 for free mHealth apps in terms of monthly downloads, there is a performance gap for paid mHealth apps. Successful paid mHealth iPhone apps still generate 5-6 times higher monthly download numbers on average than their counterparts on the Android platform.
3. mHealth device performance gap: Due to still higher penetration rates of smartphones compared to tablets, successful mHealth apps that are optimized for smartphones get 5 times (paid) and 2 times (free) more downloads than apps that are optimized for tablets.
Venture Beat reports that cloud storage startup Box is pushing into the healthcare vertical, regulatory challenges and all.
Box’s team has researched healthcare and ensures its product is HIPAA (Editor’s Note: Corrected from Venture Beat’s report, which had HIPAA misspelled as HIPPA) compliant. Box notes the challenges of reaching its target market — physicians and health administrators who tread carefully when it comes to new cloud-based technologies.
“We want Box to be the cloud solution to manage all content in the health care sector,” Box CEO Aaron Levie told Venture Beat. Levie lists the many uses for Box; physicians can use it to access medical information from iPads, and researchers can use it to collaborate and to share sensitive information.
Over the year, Box sales in the healthcare industry grew 81 percent, the company said. The company claims to have hundreds of customers in healthcare, including Henry Ford Health System, Beaumont Health System, HealthTrust Europe, and Johns Hopkins HealthCare Solutions.
As demand for Big Data technology and services continues to escalate, all levels of the Big Data technology stack will experience significant growth. Storage is a critical piece of the infrastructure component, increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 53% between 2011 and 2016. International Data Corporation (IDC) has just published two in-depth studies – Storage for Big Data: Insight Into Usage Patterns (IDC #240372) and Influencers in Deployment of Storage for Big Data (IDC #240451) – built on findings from its first-ever survey on storage infrastructure for Big Data and analytics (BD&A).
The amount of data generated, processed, and stored by most organizations will continue to grow aggressively for the foreseeable future. “Storage will be one of the biggest areas of infrastructure spending for Big Data and analytics environments over the forecast period,” said Ashish Nadkarni, Research Director, Storage Systems. “Revenue from storage consumed by BD&A environments will increase from a mere $379.9 million in 2011 to nearly $6 billion in 2016. This growth will come largely from capacity-optimized systems (including dense enclosures), however, software-based distributed storage systems with internal disks to store post-processed data will also be embraced by some users.”
Additionally, businesses will continue to tap into newer data sources as they move their analytics efforts from search to discovery. This shift will accelerate spending on Infrastructure and data organization platforms will continue to accelerate
Storage for Big Data: Insight Into Usage Patterns
This IDC study assesses the results of IDC’s Big Data Survey, conducted in the first calendar quarter of 2013, regarding trends in storage. Storage is a tremendously important subsystem that can determine the success of a Big Data and analytics implementation. Capacity growth and application performance continue to be the top challenges facing organizations of all sizes as they relate to how storage is attached to Big Data and analytics environments.
•Performance was cited as the primary driver for selecting storage architecture among 68.6% of respondents. Another 59.5% indicated cost as a primary driver (multiple responses were allowed).
•Just under 31% of respondents said they had no deployment of enterprise storage systems for data analytics infrastructure, but plan to start deploying in the next six months.
•The type of converged infrastructure deployed for Big Data infrastructure was split almost evenly between discrete converged infrastructure (30.1%), Compustorage (29.4%), and Neither, we have done the integration in-house (28.4%).
