Acknowledging Our Mentors: Vince Ciotti’s Big Three

Vince Ciotti, Principal, HIS Professionals

I’ve had so many mentors in my career it would be hard to list them all in simple a blog entry, but here goes. If I’ve learned anything in my 40-plus years in the business, it was under the guidance and tutelage of so many people who helped me along the way, most notably Mike Mulhall, SMS’ VP of Installations […]

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Remembering Dick Schopp

Vince Ciotti, Principal, HIS Professionals

We lost a great one last week: Dick Schopp, a 50-year veteran of the HIS industry, who died after a protracted illness. Dick’s career spanned almost our entire industry: • Director of IS at Magee Women’s Hospital in PIttsburgh • Director of R&D at the Indianapolis Hospital Development Association • Regional Sales Manager for McDonnell [...]

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What Does Cerner’s Outage Tell Us About The Cloud?

Vince Ciotti, Principal, HIS Professionals

Dear HIS Pros, After Cerner’s outage last week, I’m not sure if “Cloud Computing” is right for us. Can you break down this issue? How do we decide whether to process in-house versus remotely? What’s the impact on large versus small hospitals? HIS Pros response: Let’s start with the semantics to make sure we are [...]

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What Does The Allscripts Stock Collapse Really Mean for Customers?

Vince Ciotti, Principal, HIS Professionals

The Allscripts stock collapse? It’s sad news for the investors, but the impact on the many former Eclipsys clients is a different story entirely. Just what is the relationship between a company’s stock performance and its products and services? That’s a different matter entirely. Let’s look at just two historical antecedents for brevity’s sake…

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Meeting MU On A Tight Budget

Vince Ciotti, Principal, HIS Professionals

Meeting Meaningful Use (MU) on a tight budget? It’s a challenge, but here are some suggestions: 1. Negotiate Vendor Rates. If you haven’t signed with you’re HIS vendor yet, be sure to negotiate the hourly rate they’re charging for their implementers. Most vendors charge a flat fee for implementation, but give you no idea how [...]

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Why Is Epic The KLASiest Vendor?

Vince Ciotti, Principal, HIS Professionals

The results are in: KLAS just released its “Best In KLAS” vendor scores, and guess who won in almost every category? It’s an “epic” landslide, with the folks from Verona winning in 27 of 23 categories (only weak in Time & Attendance and PACS…) and scoring an amazing 12.7 on KLAS’ 10-point scale… or something [...]

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Tracking Apple’s Healthcare Journey

Apple has been in the news with some amazing ups and down recently: • Surpassing Exxon Mobile to be the largest U.S. company in market cap. For those of you wise enough to avoid the perils of Wall Street, “market cap” = market capitalization, or share price times number of shares, which in Apple & [...]

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Breaking Down an Epic Versus Cerner Selection

Hey Vince & Elise, I read with great interest your excellent article on which acute EMR vendors have the most robust and integrated ambulatory EMR products. I was hoping you could take me on a deeper dive as far as a Epic vs Cerner head-to-head matchup goes. Let’s say I’m a best-of-breed IDN looking to [...]

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