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ICD-10 Premiere Training Program Includes CODESMART UNIVERSITY and IBM Watson

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by Susan Eustis

The ICD-10 premiere training program includes CODESMART UNIVERSITY. This is used to train current and future medical personnel on how to utilize the ICD-10 medical coding system. ICD-10, the tenth revision of the International Classification of Diseases is a World Health Organization-approved designation. It includes all the aspects of disease treatment that have categories of diseases and treatment modalities for them, broken down in to more than 141,000 designations.

The previous ICD had 17,000 codes, diagnoses and procedures. To go from 17,000 to 141,000 requires some effort. The Department of Health and Human Services has mandated that all medical practices, hospitals and other medical record keeping organization be trained and ICD-10 compliant by October 1, 2014. This is essential as the Center for Medicare and Medicaid services will also be adopting the ICD-10 standard and will require proper medical coding in order to provide reimbursement.

First Independence Corp. (OTCBB: FICF) with its subsidiary, The Codesmart™ Group, is the premiere national subject matter expert for ICD-10 education and compliance in the United States. Its premiere product, CODESMART™ UNIVERSITY is an on-line program of study for existing coders, new coders, clinicians, and healthcare roles of all types.

IBM Watson is the technology of care systems of engagement, permitting clinicians and patients to connect directly. The ability to establish a connected, self-managed membership will be facilitated by implementing eEffective Systems of Engagement and Utilizing IBM Watson to Achieve Remote Care management.

American Telemedicine Association Remote Care Management Using IBM Watson

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by Susan Eustis

Remote delivery of health care for chronic conditions addresses 90% of the cast of healthcare delivery in the U.S. Remote care management is an aspect of tale-medicine that has been embraced by the American Telemedicine Association. Remote care management plans improve care delivery efficiency. Medicare Advantage plans are more proactive in connecting members with care, especially those with chronic conditions. Deploying a remote care management program delivered by a clinician and facilitated by the GE Care Innovations™ Guide has been shown to vastly improve the cost of care delivery to people with chronic conditions.

The telemedicine growth curve has accelerated dramatically in the past few years. The introduction of new technologies, new applications and the introduction of wireless devices provides a newfound familiarity and acceptance of technology by the medical profession.

Telemedicine is gaining acceptance by the general populace faster than by the medical professionals because of the rapid adoption of smart phones, the Internet, and apps. As the United Nations reported earlier this year, more than 6 billion people worldwide now have access to cell phones (compared to only 4.5 billion with access to toilets), and these cell phones are all poised to turn into smart phones within 5 years.

In the year ahead, the interests of providers, health organizations, vendors, policy makers and the public all become uniquely aligned to make this a year of exponential growth for telemedicine. What is interesting and subtle is the how and why of this growth trajectory.

Big themes that will dominate telemedicine in the coming year:

Big Data and Healthcare Analytics Forum June 4-5 Washington

Telemedicine is a key enabler for health system transformation. Healthcare planners realize telemedicine must be fundamental. Telemedicine anywhere to telemedicine everywhere are key aspects of the healthcare industry. Telemedicine is delivered with hardware-based videoconferencing systems, private networks and telephone call centers.

In the last decade, advances in technology have enabled new channels for telemedicine. The Internet, tablets, smart phones, remote monitoring, wireless applications and devices – even an ICU in a band-aid or wrist watch represent new telemedicine technology. Software enables patients to connect with their providers using many different channels. Decision support and analytics supplement human interaction.

IBM Watson is poised to transform healthcare delivery. Smartphones act as endpoints, Watson is the base system. Facilities are truly capable of delivering telemedicine services anywhere.

Implementing Effective Systems of Engagement and Utilizing IBM Watson to Achieve Remote Care Management

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by Susan Eustis

Remote care management is an aspect of tale-medicine that is supported by the American Telemedicine Association (ATA). Remote delivery of health care for chronic conditions addresses 90% of the cast of healthcare delivery in the U.S. Remote care management plans improve care delivery efficiency. Medicare Advantage plans are more proactive in connecting members with care, especially those with chronic conditions. Deploying a remote care management program delivered by a clinician and facilitated by the GE Care Innovations™ Guide has been shown to:

Positively impact patients’ knowledge of their health condition
Increase awareness leading to improved self-management behaviors
Improve medication adherence
Drive appropriate utilization of resources
Improve quality of life

Bosch Health Buddy and Intel-GE Care Innovations™ are among tele-medicine approaches used to establish a connected, self-managed membership. Remote care management helps improve the overall quality of care delivery in every instance where it is administered in a manner that is supported by an approach based on integrity.

Medicare Advantage plans seek to be proactive in incenting members with chronic conditions to take responsibility for their own care improvements. Deploying a remote care management program delivered by a clinician and facilitated by Bosch Health Buddy and the Intel-GE Care Innovations™ systems has been shown to:

Positively impact patient knowledge of health condition
Increase awareness as a prelude to improving self-management behaviors
Improve medication adherence
Drive appropriate utilization of resources
Improve quality of life

If this is not done in the right way, expending the resources needed to maintain and improve member care results in higher medical expenses. Intel-GE Care Innovations™ is a system that facilitates improvement of quality in care delivery while lowering costs. Lowering cost of care delivery for chronic conditions is essential.

Managing medical utilization effectively does not work, higher administrative expenses and lower quality of care are not particularly unacceptable care delivery modalities that tend to result from attempts to directly control utilization. Member engagement in improving the health of the patients with chronic conditions depends on utilizing systems that work.

As the population grows older and less healthy, any success increasingly depends on driving behavior change among members. This can only be done through a tele-medicine strategy. The ability to facilitate efficient, proactive care away from the physician’s office or a hospital depends on implementing effective systems of engagement and utilizing IBM Watson. To meet these cost reduction objectives, MA plans need to aim to create a base of connected, self-managed members using data collected daily, analyzed, and delivered back to the member with high frequency and in the right context by really really nice people.

The ability to establish a connected, self-managed membership will be facilitated by implementing eEffective Systems of Engagement and Utilizing IBM Watson to Achieve Remote Care management.

IBM® Rational® Rhapsody® Modeling Software Best Practice Models for Variants

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by Susan Eustis

Product design for variants is achieved by IBM which is recognizing the need to design for product variation. In the IBM tradition of supporting best practice, it has developed methods to manage variants for product development. Variant management automates the process of organizing the list of features to be managed. With new product development projects, planning for future variants is not typically done at the beginning.

Eaton Corporation’s experience in developing variants of transmissions for heavy-duty hybrid vehicles gives a strong customer example of the value of the IBM technology. Various Rational software products can help isolate project aspects that need to be managed.

To manage design variants of products the points of difference are identified. Two different models of a truck, have a dozen differentiating features. As a product gets customer feedback, requests for multiple variations of the initial product start to come in. If the product variants are not developed using automated process to track and mange them effective response is difficult.

This is breakthrough technology from IBM to support maintaining and improving each product version simultaneously in an efficient and time-saving manner that prevents duplicative work. The ROI is very compelling and adoption of this product is anticipated to be strong worldwide.

Design for variants requires more work than independent products, meaning that implementation of automated process in this arena is significant. Designing for variants is an efficient practice in the long run. Determining when, why, and how to design for variants helps manage a product portfolio so that managers more tightly align products with what customers want.

Massachusetts General Hospital Referral Portal

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by Susan Eustis

Massachusetts General Hospital has implemented a referral portal From eHealth Technologies. It is a implementing a streamlined process for new patient referrals. The aim is to improve service to referring physicians. By providing referring physicians easier access to the MGH facility it is positioning to extend its market leading presence in healthcare delivery. The technology provides a clear, single process to submit referrals. The site allows the referring provider to receive key updates about patient appointments and the results.

eHealth Connect® Referral Portal provides two-way communication and streamlined collection of all required patient information. Incoming data can be interfaced directly into existing systems eliminating manual entry. The portal is customizable.

“We continuously strive to improve our service and coordination of care for our patients and referring physicians,” said Alexa Kimball, MD, Senior Vice President, Massachusetts General Physicians Organization. “Facilitating patient referrals can be further streamlined by an online mechanism that offers referring physicians a way to initiate referrals quickly and ensure they are triaged to the appropriate provider.”

This initiative represent a continuation of market leading technology adoption by Massachusetts General Hospital.

Meg Whitman Leads Hewlett Packard

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Meg Whitman Leads Hewlett Packard

by Susan Eustis

Meg Whitman has put her leadership stamp on Hewlett Packard. She firmly believes a large company like HP needs a leader. Whitman has said it needs someone who can be the face of the company. She is working hard to be personable and to make an impact on an organization that is challenged in many ways. Meg has embraced cloud computing, betting that in the cloud Hewlett Packard can find a way too bring together many of the disparate assets and resources of the company.

The HP enterprise Group provides servers, storage, networking, technology services and, when combined with HP’s Cloud Service Automation software suite, the company is able to offer an HP CloudSystem. The CloudSystem enables infrastructure, platform and software-as-a-service in private, public or hybrid environments.

Meg seeks to lead HP to continue to be a leading global provider of products, technologies, software, solutions and services. It has a broad customer base of individual consumers, small and medium-sized businesses, and large enterprises. Customers are in the government, health and education sectors. HP’s offerings span personal computing and other access devices; imaging and printing-related products and services; multi-vendor customer services, including infrastructure technology and business process outsourcing, application development and support services and consulting and integration services; enterprise information technology (“IT”) infrastructure, including enterprise storage and server technology, networking products and solutions, technology support and maintenance; and IT management software, information management solutions and security intelligence/risk management solutions.

HP is a hardware and infrastructure company. Meg Whitman has embraced cloud computing, security, and tools that help businesses better manage their data. In this regard Meg Whitman appears to be garnering a winning strategy for HP long term, leveraging the marketing spend of HP, but also of other companies including IBM that have embraced cloud computing.

Marie Wieck, IBM General Manager, at Impact 2013 Talks about Process Improvement In The Cloud

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By Susan Eustis

Marie Wieck, IBM General Manager, at Impact 2013 Talks about Process Improvement In The Cloud

Highly skilled knowledge workers are looking for process improvement in the cloud according to Marie Wieck. Business process as a service is able to permit businesses that implement modern IBM business process management systems to achieve 47% growth. Growth comes because the businesses build new systems that connect to mobile devices, and leverage connections to customer smart phones and tablets. All these devices create a lot of data, so called big data.

Big data is a part of the modernization of knowledge workers. This modernization is able to occur because of the many business process improvements implemented modularly in the cloud. The cloud supports highly skilled knowledge workers. With the appropriate tools, these knowledge workers are anticipated to have an impact on delivery of more efficient services, permitting businesses to leverage analytics in ways that have never been possible before.

Marie L Wieck is general manager for the Application and Integration Middleware business unit in IBM Software. In this role, she leads an organization of more than 7,000 software development, marketing, services, and sales professionals. She has oversight for IBM’s WebSphere software portfolio including web application servers, transaction and messaging systems, integration, and business process management solutions. Marie also plays a leadership role in key strategic initiatives for IBM, including cloud and enterprise mobile technologies.

Smarter business process software from IBM includes social flexible and dynamic building of business models. Mobile first strategies represent a revolution in how business process is delivered. No existing systems are built to implement “Systems of Engagement”, “Systems of Interaction”. Developers and managers working together are working to take business operations process into new places and extend the existing processes to make them into Systems of Interaction.

The effort is to achieve a reinvention of end-to-end process. The aim is to bring data to a place where it is able to provide more insight into how to improve services to customers. Systems enable a customer centric approach. One place we see the Systems of Interaction being implemented is in healthcare.

With new technology, doctors can access information at the point of care. Marie gave the example of how In Ottawa the teaching hospital has deployed 3,000 tablet devices. It has implemented sophisticated business process management systems (BPM) that are used to create a circle of care. The organization shifted its vision and purpose from being a teaching hospital to a hospital centered on putting the patient first and taking the best care of patients that they possibly can.

This shift in vision, though seemingly obvious, has had a dramatic impact on patient care. Making the patient the center of the care delivery system has been achieved by leveraging new technology. Physicians are able to speed up diagnoses. They are able to gain significantly more transparency into complex medical conditions, even conditions that may not appear to be complex initially. Systems are able to give teams insight into therapeutic alternatives that were not available earlier.

The banking industry is using these new Systems of Interaction to achieve account opening in 5 minutes. Reinvention of account opening, taking the process down to minutes instead of hours or days, is providing an 88% reduction in the times it takes to perform this operation. Systems of Interaction promise enormous economic growth because of the increased efficiency. Systems of Interaction are about getting people to be participating in using their technology to achieve more efficient process.

Systems of Interaction are about providing instant results for what the client needs, linking everyone to their businesses through the cloud. Systems of Interaction make personalized offers available to potential customers or to patients in a way that makes a difference.

Robert LeBlanc IBM Senior Vice President Comes on Stage with a Ford Fusion at Impact 2013

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by Susan Eustis

Robert LeBlanc IBM Senior Vice President Comes on Stage with a Ford Fusion at Impact 2013

Robert LeBlanc came on stage with a Ford Fusion, a very fancy car. He liked the car, he appeared to be very comfortable on stage talking about the car and the technology the car has. Robert talked about the Ford Fusion having 16 million lines of code. The Ford Fusion is a data center he said. He was illustrating that software is everywhere.

Robert said that the Ford Fusion car has 70 microprocessors and 1,000s of sensors. Software is able to support adaptive parallel parking assist among other features. Ford is supporting significant growth in off board connectivity as well as building out its internal data center inside the car.

Robert challenged each person in the Impact conference audience to think about how to change their businesses in the same way that Ford has done. The competitive challenge was tremendous for Ford, and Robert made the point that Ford had addressed the challenge head on and is doing great competitively.

Robert LeBlanc is Senior Vice President, Middleware Software, for IBM Software Group. He has global responsibility for the strategy and management of IBM’s industry-leading middleware portfolio. This includes Application and Integration Middleware, Information Management, Rational, Tivoli, and the newly-formed IBM Security Systems Division. Mr. LeBlanc also chairs IBM’s Technology Team, a senior executive team responsible for setting IBM’s technology agenda.

Product design features depend on software. Products have an ability to interact with end points. The impact of design is profound. Design and engineering include technology as interface software that promises to change the automobile industry. And the auto industry is the same as every other industry, software and sensors are changing designs. End points and tablets, smart phones and systems of engagement are among the core themes we hear from IBM.

This is a change; the markets are changing at an unbelievable pace. The expectation of customers is for interactions with their apps and their smart phones. With the prospect of 6 billion smart phones out there by 2018, there are lots of challenges to be met. The eco systems are being put in place to improve customer service delivery. Customer expectations are expanding. Product design and features depend on software implementation.

Ford has integrated technology into the vehicle. Technology plays a role for product modernization. Ford was able to take its voice activated platform that started out as a way to provide basic speech capability needed to place a cellphone call, or to support the ability to connect to 911. This basic functionality became a platform on which to build more advanced features.

Ford was able to take that basic voice platform and extend it to solicit vehicle help using voice activated requests. Ford implemented streaming music, voice activated navigation, and smart phone apps. IBM is to be strongly commended for “really getting it”. IBM understands apps, it understands tablets, and it understands the new paradigm systems of engagement. IBM understands customers; it understands its customers and it understands its client customer needs.

Technology is key, technology is driving this rapidly changing world that we label systems of engagement.

Marie Wieck IBM General Manager Describes Platform Systems of Engagement at IBM Impact 2013 Conference

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Marie Wieck IBM General Manager Describes Platform Systems of Engagement

by Susan Eustis

IBM is implementing automated process in a manner that is taking a customer centric view. Customer facing technology is available in a way that it never has been before using smarter technology. Marie Wieck noted that the differences between what can be achieved between old technology and new technology is significant. The new systems are being noted by industry leaders because the new systems deliver results. In the banking industry, loans are a process that can be compacted to 2 days from 70 days. Loan approvals can be achieved in 15 minutes, the time to approve up by a factor of 15 in some cases.

Connected systems are resetting expectations of customers. Delivering the difference in customer experience is a result of core competencies in evolving advanced systems offered by IBM, leveraging apps from cloud providers of every description. Marie emphasized that open systems provide the base for improved customer facing systems implementation. Partnerships between business and IT are needed to achieve improvements in customer service delivery. Cooperation between business and systems engineers is needed to deliver end-to-end business capability.

Marie L Wieck is general manager for the Application and Integration Middleware business unit in IBM Software. In this role, she leads an organization of more than 7,000 software development, marketing, services, and sales professionals. She has oversight for IBM’s WebSphere software portfolio including web application servers, transaction and messaging systems, integration, and business process management solutions. Marie also plays a leadership role in key strategic initiatives for IBM, including cloud and enterprise mobile technologies.

Customer centric systems go beyond traditional back-end transactional systems. Integration of systems of record with mobile customer systems creates the opportunity to transform release of content to customers, making processes more transparent. This is not an individual task, it is implemented through technology, through automated process.

Operational decision making is supported by IBM WebSphere Systems. Rules go directly from mobile devices to systems and web sites both. IBM systems permit their customers to build software that is able to deliver apps in the smart cloud. Apps are used for access and speed. key services and methodologies available from IBM help customers know what best practices really are out there and let managers get most out of them.

Marie interjected some humor into her IBM Impact 2013 presentation giving us pictures of a really good looking red sports car (she said it was hers) that had then tangled with a barbed wire fence (she said because of distracted driving trying to get to this presentation). She then demonstrated how the smart phone insurance app can eliminate one half of the processes that are usually necessary after an accident in a straight through traditional insurance claim process. By connecting to the back end of the insurance company records to the smart phone to begin to create a record of the accident from the information transmitted by the smart phone, significant efficiencies are gained. The audience could see and really participate in the new systems that are being rolled out. This was truly impressive and gave all the attendees a vision of the future. Mobile connectivity is where it is at.

Marie showed how the driver record of the accident situation is created using pictures from the scene of the accident, the app can order a tow truck, send someone to pick her up, get a cab if necessary, and work with the back end system to initiate the claims process automatically. Process rules and process integration are illustrated in this example; the tow service and car service are initiated through rules or by contact with the insurance company. The taxi service can be called if necessary, Marie illustrated she can be with her clients as she needs to be in spite of the accident because of the new systems being put in place.

The app demonstrated by Marie will document where the car is, what happened, what activity took place, all with notifications to the driver that are automatic. The core processes implemented by the app are made smarter by the systems of engagement. The systems can instantly respond to a situation. There is built in collaboration that leverages outside data sources. The app makes it seamless to include information about a policy.

Marie talked about how the new systems of engagement are new approaches to computing. They are not add ons to existing process management, the systems of engagement start with the mobile device and seek to leverage connectivity and implement good customer services using the new capabilities originating at the end point, the smart phone.

Rules evolve – how did the situation posed by Marie get resolved? How did insight about the accident get communicated? This whole process was illustrated onstage, it showed that the traditional ways of coping and filing an insurance claim have changed because the smart phone app is able to create more streamlined automated process and in turn a happy insurance customer.

Marie was very clear in her explanations that describe how systems of engagement based on smart phones can transform the entire business processes. The many many IBM Impact customer presentations from the conference illustrated the power of the IBM integration technology and mobile systems implementation value.

On stage as well with Marie Wieck of IBM was a COO who had a role in transforming healthcare delivery in an insurance practice He was from HCF in Australia. Steve Nugent is a general manager of operations at the hospital group. HFC was able to dramatically improve healthcare delivery using end point smart phone and tablet technology.

Customer interaction is instantiated by IBM WebSphere with smarter processes. Smarter processes are used to engage clients. In the case of healthcare, clients are patients. The healthcare organizations are positioning to provide services delivery to patients who have become customers demanding good customer service.

Kristof Klockner Discusses the UrbanCode Acquisition, DevOps Value, and Welcomes the Team As It Joins IBM

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Kristof Klockner Discusses the UrbanCode Acquisition, DevOps Value, and Welcomes the Team As It Joins IBM

By Susan Eustis

Removing waste, turning innovative ideas into business results, enabling cloud-based systems of engagement, and supporting rapid response to engage services for customers particularly notable in the mobile space is the aim of the new IBM acquisition: UrbanCode. In an analyst call this morning, Kristof Klockner talked about DevOps — smart delivery in the context of the new IBM UrbanCode acquisition. UrbanCode DevOps Platform™ has evolved as a premier way for IT to foster cooperation and collaboration among business managers, developers, , and operations. This acquisition represents a big win for IBM in terms of improving the robustness of its DevOps software offerings.

Dr. Kristof Klockner is the General Manager of IBM Rational. He extended this call out to analysts and clients for the apparent purpose of emphasizing the DevOps significance. He described how automation of the development, testing, and deployment process is more and more important for driving end to end, software-driven innovation. UrbanCode provides an attractive combination of entry points into DevOps problems that permits handling the complexity of multi-tier applications and their release after development and changes.

Through automation of key stages of the software development process, IBM’s approach to DevOps – now including UrbanCode for release and deployment – is able to support IT teams, making them more responsive to the business, and more efficient. The new automated process acquisition vastly improves the ROI for customers of IBM software development, testing, and delivery platforms. IBM is positioning to help its customers deliver high quality products in compliance with regulations and separation of duties concerns.

ROI improvements are achieved by lowering collaboration costs, lowering customer services costs, lowering the amount of deployment labor needed, resource wait-time and the attendant costs, and improving SmartCloud provisioning efficiency. IBM with UrbanCode now has the ability to optimize the provisioning of environments and the delivery of software into those environments with tools for automation, visibility and collaboration. UrbanCode is able to accelerate the facilitation of managing the staging environment at many levels.

DevOps is an approach to IT focused on achieving operations and production support for developer code to improve the time to market and lower cost of software innovation. Testers, release managers, and change management teams are challenged in the current IT environment to keep up with the pace of agile development.

Continuous software testing and continuous software delivery are made a part of the same software platform by this enormously important UrbanCode acquisition by IBM. Releasing agile code into testing environments has permitted IBM to provide improved ROI to the software testing team from the Green Hat acquisition. That acquisition gives IBM service virtualization capability for testing agile code. IBM acquisition of UrbanCode extends the testing service virtualization by providing more release and deployment capability.

UrbanCode is interesting to use in mobile software development situations. The mobile channel is a source of much software development effort and UrbanCode supports integration of the testing and the application release automation. Back end systems need to be tested in a virtual way. The UrbanCode acquisition permits IBM to help clients keep up the pace of software development evolution by supporting automation across the DevOps lifeycle. Customers are moving to weekly, daily, hourly software application and software apps deployments creating increased need for automated process to permit IT to keep pace with the competition. Putting together a comprehensive software management and deployment road map for clients is a priority apparently for IBM, standing them in good stead with clients.
DevOps platform architecture is a modular structure.

It provides the ability to support a growing ecosystem. Open structures are very much a part of application initiatives. UrbanCode can handle open systems environments giving IBM broad appeal across the industry. There is the common theme that instant return on investment is achievable and IBM needs the testing service virtualization capabilities from its GreenHat acquisition and the release and deployment capabilities from the new UrbanCode acquisition to achieve credibility with its client base and to extend the client base as SmartCloud and Smarter Computing take hold in the market. UrbanCode DevOps is able to combine functions that SmartCloud has with mobile apps functions to support new releases that are all about cost reduction. ROI for clients is the core issue here.

Dr. Kristof Klockner described opportunity with UrbanCode and DevOps as one of smart delivery, one with a solid reference architecture, and one of supporting continuous delivery release cycles for software and software apps in the world of mobile endpoints.