For several years, I worked doing installs for eCW and I have nothing but negative experiences to report about the software and the company itself. This is wholly unsurprising.
EHR vendor eClinicalWorks to pay $155M to settle whistleblower suit
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Re: EHR vendor eClinicalWorks to pay $155M to settle whistleblower suit
#12It looks like they fined officers of the company, as well as a developer and 2 PMs. Is this standard practice for False Claims Act suits? How much should I worry about this as a developer?
I would say not much. Meaningful Use is/was a unique program. In this case it seems like there was a conspiracy to deliberately cheat the certification only implementing the 16 drug checks that the examiner was going to check.
The end result was CMS paying out large bonuses to health systems using the eCW software when they really shouldn't have.
Re: EHR vendor eClinicalWorks to pay $155M to settle whistleblower suit
#13It looks like they fined officers of the company, as well as a developer and 2 PMs. Is this standard practice for False Claims Act suits? How much should I worry about this as a developer?
> How much should I worry about this as a developer?
It's hard to say without understanding the basis for the claims against the developers, which are separate from the case against the company and its officers. I can find both the complaints and settlement agreement for the action against the company [0], but not those against the developers.
[0] both the whistleblower and government complaints, and the final settlement I agreement, are linked from this article: https://www.emrandhipaa.com/emr-and-hipaa/2017/05/31/ecw-ecl...
Re: EHR vendor eClinicalWorks to pay $155M to settle whistleblower suit
#14It looks like they fined officers of the company, as well as a developer and 2 PMs. Is this standard practice for False Claims Act suits? How much should I worry about this as a developer?
I would say not much. Meaningful Use is/was a unique program. In this case it seems like there was a conspiracy to deliberately cheat the certification only implementing the 16 drug checks that the examiner was going to check. The end result was CMS paying out large bonuses to health systems using the eCW software when they really shouldn't have.
> In this case it seems like there was a conspiracy to deliberately cheat the certification only implementing the 16 drug checks that the examiner was going to check.
There's a lot more than the drug code hardcoding in this case.
Re: EHR vendor eClinicalWorks to pay $155M to settle whistleblower suit
#15For several years, I worked doing installs for eCW and I have nothing but negative experiences to report about the software and the company itself. This is wholly unsurprising.
Do you have any experience with any other EHR software and if so what do you like? Years ago I did installs of Amazing Charts for small offices. And where I initially was optimistic about their growth prospects I was eventually disappointed in their growth after government requirements took effect. At the time eCW and E-MDs were the cool products on the main physician message board and at least one of my former clients eventually migrated. I had thought they were in better hands though perhaps not.
Re: EHR vendor eClinicalWorks to pay $155M to settle whistleblower suit
#16> Navani, along with CMO Rajesh Dharampuriya and COO Mahesh Navani are liable for the payment of $154,920,000, while developer Jagan Vaithilingam is on the hook for $50,000 and two project managers, Bryan Sequeira and Robert Lynes, each owe $15,000, the Vermont DOJ said. Pretty interesting to see a Developer and PM have to pay out as well. I wonder how the judge reached that conclusion.
The developer loaded the hard-coded data to evade detection and the PM oversaw the process where the data was validated against the government's test harness for Meaningful Use. I suppose you could argue that those people would have pushed back on the lack of ethics in the situation and halted the process to prevent their certification.
Re: EHR vendor eClinicalWorks to pay $155M to settle whistleblower suit
#17It looks like they fined officers of the company, as well as a developer and 2 PMs. Is this standard practice for False Claims Act suits? How much should I worry about this as a developer?
IANAL and I can't find the court documents, but probably not much. Not unless you are offering up solutions to intentionally bypass the requirements. Having worked at an EHR, PMs routinely instructed us to build things specifically. I could suggest cosmetic stuff, but couldn't really suggest changes to the underlying business logic of the requirements because it had usually been hammered out by PMs/Nurses/Doctors/May…
> Sounds like they didn't buy the database.
RxNorm (the codes discussed) is wholly open source. You can download weekly and monthly updates for free. Just pure laziness/avarice. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/rxnorm/docs/rxnormfile...
Re: EHR vendor eClinicalWorks to pay $155M to settle whistleblower suit
#18> Navani, along with CMO Rajesh Dharampuriya and COO Mahesh Navani are liable for the payment of $154,920,000, while developer Jagan Vaithilingam is on the hook for $50,000 and two project managers, Bryan Sequeira and Robert Lynes, each owe $15,000, the Vermont DOJ said. Pretty interesting to see a Developer and PM have to pay out as well. I wonder how the judge reached that conclusion.
The developer loaded the hard-coded data to evade detection and the PM oversaw the process where the data was validated against the government's test harness for Meaningful Use. I suppose you could argue that those people would have pushed back on the lack of ethics in the situation and halted the process to prevent their certification.
Thank you for that bit of info. I would say that is quite unethical and worthy of a fine. I wonder why the developer gets it worse than the PMs though given how pressure tends to land on developers rather than the other way around.
Re: EHR vendor eClinicalWorks to pay $155M to settle whistleblower suit
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It should be pretty easy to build that lol. It's not the standard that's hard, it's how every EHR vendor has implemented it. *ehr employee who's worked with CCDA and FHIR
Yeah, the implementation vary quite a bit. FHIR seems like it might actually be nice.
Dig into it a bit. It's not. :/
Maybe 80% of it is nice and sane and then you realize that it also seems to work for animals and you have a wtf moment.
I haven't dug into it in detail since DSTU2 though.
Re: EHR vendor eClinicalWorks to pay $155M to settle whistleblower suit
#20Interestingly, this lawsuit was filed in my home state of Vermont -- because Vermont is "sympathetic" to fraud charges.
Wow I wonder if jurisdiction shopping might have a positive outcome here (a opposed to e.g. East Texas for patent markman findings).