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Ransomware attack had locked out administrators unless they agreed to the demand of 40 Bitcoins.

With more than 70 sessions on tap at HIMSS16 concentrating on value-based care, it promises to be among the hottest topics in this year’s show. HIMSS Quality, Cost, and Safety Committee leaders Shelley DiGiacomo, RN, vice president of consulting services at the Quammen Group and Pauline Byom, regional quality administrator at the Mayo Clinic, in fact, will share recommendations for quality reporting and performance requirements within the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System. [Also: 11 essential quotes from notable HIMSS keynotes] Last November, HIMSS warned the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services of the administrative burdens on providers, and now the tension continues. On Jan. 14, 31 major healthcare organizations, including Intermountain Healthcare and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center wrote to CMS calling for the federal government to back down off of Meaningful Use 3. It’s not meeting the ultimate objective, the organizations said. At HIMSS16, DiGiacomo and Byom will explain the HIMSS committee’s core mission to promote the use of health IT to improve the quality of healthcare delivery while ensuring that data collection is not an overly burdensome part of workflow. See all of our HIMSS16 previews The speakers will also share insights about the policies that are driving value-based care and tips for recognizing current barriers to e-reporting in quality programs and advice on developing principles for feedback on CMS programs. What’s more, DiGiacomo and Byom intend to help attendees know how best to identify opportunities to participate in the development of CMS policy outside of regulatory public comments. Come to the keynote, “Making Payment for Value Work: HIMSS Recommendations,” and find out HIMSS’ predictions on Monday, Feb. 29 from 3:15 - 4:15 p.m. at the Sands Expo Convention Center, Lando, Room 4301. Twitter: @HealthITNews This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

Apple chief defies government demands to unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino terrorists, creating a backdoor into the system’s software.

Have you heard of the #HIMSS16 MixTape? Well, Colin Hung is the man who put that together. He also founded and moderates the Healthcare Leadership (#hlcdr) and serves as a healthcare marketing executive at Stericycle Communications Solutions in Toronto. And at HIMSS16 he’ll be among the Social Media Ambassadors credentialed to cover the conference via multiple channels. See all of our HIMSS16 previews Hung answered our questions leading up to HIMSS16. Q: What’s your top health IT prediction for 2016? A: There will still be more talk about interoperability in 2016 than action. On a more optimistic side, I think that the conversation will shift from compliance to innovation in 2016.  Q: What are you most looking forward to learning about at HIMSS16. A: I'm really excited about the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence for healthcare. I think IBM Watson and other related technologies have the potential to revolutionize the way healthcare is delivered. I'm definitely hoping to learn more about the practical applications for that Big Data + AI combination. I'm also looking forward to seeing what's next for the EHR vendors. Now that the meaningful use program is in its twilight, I'm really curious to see if one of the players decides it's time to "break-the-mold" and take their system in a completely new direction. I certainly hope someone will seize this opportunity once the meaningful use shackles come off.  Q: What inspired you to apply for the SMA program? A: Since the program started, I've made it a point to follow the SMAs during HIMSS and I have always found their tweets, posts and comments to be extremely valuable. At a conference the size of HIMSS there is a lot of noise. I find that the SMAs help cut through the babble and they somehow find a way to highlight undercurrents that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. It's exciting to be part of the SMA team doing that at #HIMSS16. Q: What in your mind are the untold benefits of social media in healthcare today? A: I think one of the most untapped uses of social media in healthcare is crowdsourcing feedback. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are amazing platforms to test ideas. There isn't another place where you can go and tap into a community of people who are passionate about improving healthcare for feedback. I'm constantly pinging friends I've met online for their opinion on ideas that I have, to clarify my understanding of a particular topic or to ask for reference materials. If I were involved in product development I'd tap into social media to solicit feedback on UX/UI designs and vet approaches to developing products. That to me is the one of the greatest uses of social media that very few are realizing.  Q: What's something that even your devout followers likely don't know about you? A: Oh this is a tough one. I think most people know about my love of all things SciFi and how I first met John Lynn (@techguy) while tweeting/texting using a phone in each hand at HIMSS12. But what people probably don't know is that I love sushi. Can't get enough of it.  Twitter: @SullyHIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

Kiosk maker CTS Healthcare Services will start targeting mid-size and smaller provider organizations when it introduces at HIMSS16 new middleware dubbed Kwerk. Since it launched its first kiosks in 2005, CTS Healthcare Services has racked up more than 200 million patient check-ins on its kiosks, the vendor said. More than 95 percent of healthcare organizations using the Welcome patient check-in component of Epic’s electronic health record system use CTS Healthcare Services kiosks, CTS Healthcare Services said. This is because Epic was very early to the patient check-in game, enabling the critical integration component. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT But there is a whole healthcare world beyond Epic, said Sandy Nix, president and CEO of CTS Healthcare Services. “We’ve found a lot of potential customers with an interest in deploying check-in solutions but without the appropriate middleware piece that allows kiosks to talk to their EHRs,” Nix said. “So we developed Kwerk, which will talk to not only the EHRs in larger facilities but also serve as a bundled product we can offer the mid-market so potential customers at that level can have healthcare-proven hardware and high-quality patient check-in software solutions in an affordable package.” Kwerk will connect with EHRs in any size facility, but will also enable smaller organizations that simply want a standalone check-in solution to have one. In addition to patient check-in, the kiosks can accept co-pays and bill payments, be used for patient scheduling, secure consent to treatment signatures, issue privacy notices, change demographic information, and more. CTS Healthcare Services will offer Kwerk on a subscription basis, Nix said. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

SA Ignite plans to launch PQRS Assistant, a system that provides an automated way for provider organizations to track the various levels and scores for Medicare Part B payments, at HIMSS16. The Physician Quality Reporting System is a quality reporting program from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that encourages individual eligible professionals and group practices to report information on the quality of care to Medicare. PQRS gives participating professionals and group practices the opportunity to assess the quality of care they provide to their patients, helping to ensure that patients get the right care at the right time, CMS said. SA Ignite’s meaningful use system is used to automate attestation, the vendor said, and the company now is adapting meaningful use lessons learned to help providers respond to the increasing number of pay-for-performance models in healthcare, said Tom Lee, founder and CEO of SA Ignite. See all of our HIMSS16 previews “PQRS is a longstanding program and set of measures, but in recent years CMS has used PQRS to turn from pay-for-reporting to pay-for-performance in Medicare Part B,” Lee said. “In pay-for-reporting, providers just submit a number of measures and regardless of those values are incentivized in the same amount or avoid the same penalty. In Medicare Part B, the game has changed, and these measures now are used for pay-for-performance. Providers measure values and are rated against other peers across the country, and then are placed in different quality tiers, which directly affects their reimbursement.” Currently, the CMS report card for Medicare Part B is not communicated to a provider organization until nine months after a performance year has concluded, Lee said. As such, there is no real-time monitoring of quality scores during a performance year. “Our new PQRS Assistant system enables a provider organization to predict during a performance year what its CMS quality score will be based on, and as a result, the organization can make changes to its workflows to maximize its score while it still has a chance to make a difference,” Lee said. “The ultimate vision is combining our MU Assistant with our PQRS Assistant and have their predictive analytics focused on back-office score optimization.” The CMS Merit-Based Incentive Payments System, or MIPS, for Medicare Part B starts in 2017, appears to bring together meaningful use and PQRS in a value-based payment model where providers will have a MIPS score. Under MIPS, every provider organization will earn up to 100 points on a competitive scale to be able to gain up to a 27 percent bonus or lose up to a 9 percent penalty. Lee said provider organizations can calculate the return on investment of this technology based on the new reality in healthcare. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] “These value-based rules are very complicated and change all the time, and in the absence of automation it’s very difficult to fulfill the new business processes,” he said. “You are left with people using very primitive tools like spreadsheets to try to manipulate data to try and comply with a payer’s requirements. Further, provider organizations now are forced to do even more with even less. Because of the complexity on the value-based side of payments, including population health efforts, things simply are getting more complicated with more money attached.” When it comes to provider organization staff trying to cope with the new reality of value-based payments, the supply of qualified professionals, such as data analysts and compliance experts, who know how to optimize for value is getting out of balance with the demand, Lee said. “So you need technology that allows fewer people to do more,” he said. Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the HIMSS16 conference. Follow our live blog for real-time updates, and visit Destination HIMSS16 for a full rundown of our reporting from the show. For a selection of some of the best social media posts of the show, visit our Trending at #HIMSS16 hub.

Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology says the feds should do more than just suggest safeguards.

Mount Sinai Health Partners -- a network made up of the Mount Sinai Health System and a voluntary provider group -- has created an accountable care organization with Aetna, the companies announced on Tuesday. The three-year agreement will allow Aetna commercial plan members who receive care at Mount Sinai to benefit from quality and cost efficiency improvements from the program and establishes a new payment model that will reward physicians for meeting established  quality measures. The partnership is just another step in Mount Sinai's strategy to improve care delivery from traditional fee-for-service models into population health management, by working with health plans like Aetna to improve care value for both the patients and providers. [Also: Healthcare providers weigh pros, cons of Merit-Based Incentive Payment System] "As a health system, we're moving aggressively toward population health," Niyum Gandhi, chief population health officer, Mount Sinai Health System, said. "Our strategy is toward moving into savings for all. When the opportunity came about that aligned incentives around keeping patients healthier - we jumped on it." Currently, Mount Sinai has ACO arrangements with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Healthfirst and Empire, as well as similar contracts in the works that will be made official throughout the coming year. Mount Sinai hopes to have these arrangements with every insurer in its system. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] "Our goal here is align our incentives across all payers," Gandhi said. "We're arranging resources to keep patients healthy and out of the hospital. This allows us to align the reward model to reap the benefits."  The agreement includes the more than 3,100 Mount Sinai employees and affiliated physicians. Aetna provides benefits to more than 1.1 million members in New York. "Our new agreement with Mount Sinai puts consumers at the center of a health care system that promotes wellness, provides better care for chronic conditions and uses economic incentives to reward positive health outcomes,” David Kobus, Aetna senior vice president, New York market, said in a statement. Twitter: @JessiefDavis

For the first time, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and America's Health Insurance Plans have announced standard quality measures among payers, a move designed to reduce confusion and complexity for reporting providers. On Tuesday, CMS and AHIP released seven sets of clinical quality measures to help get insurers on the same page. This is the first set that will be used as basis for quality-based payments. They were developed by a Core Quality Measures Collaborative, made up of CMS, major commercial health plans, physician groups and other stakeholders. [Also: CMS, ONC seek feedback on quality measures reporting] These measures create a set of core standards for all payers primarily for physician quality programs. They are in the following seven sets: accountable care organizations, patient centered medical homes and primary care; cardiology; gastroenterology; HIV and Hepatitis C; medical oncology; obstetrics and gynecology; and orthopedics. The measures will be rolled out in several stages, said CMS, which is already using measures from each of the core sets. CMS also said it will apply the core measures to Medicare quality programs, eliminating repetitive measures. Partners in the collaborative recognized that physicians and other clinicians must currently report multiple quality measures to different entities, CMS said. [Also: NQF CEO urges better quality measures] CMS worked with commercial plans, Medicare and Medicaid managed care plans, purchasers, physicians and other care provider organizations, as well as consumers to identify core sets of quality measures that payers have committed to using for reporting. The Core Quality Measures Collaborative, led by AHIP and its member plans' chief medical officers, leaders from CMS and the National Quality Forum, established the broadly agreed upon core measure sets that could be used for both commercial and government payers. More measure sets will be added and updated over time. "In the U.S. healthcare system, where we are moving to measure and pay for quality, patients and care providers deserve a uniform approach to measure quality," said CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt. "This agreement today will reduce unnecessary burden for physicians and accelerate the country's movement to better quality." "This agreement on a set of core measures for primary care and the PCMH represents a big step toward the goal of administrative simplification for family physicians and improved quality of care," said Douglas E. Henley, MD, executive vice president and CEO of the American Academy of Family Physicians. Commercial health plans will use these core sets of measures when contracts come up for renewal, or if existing contracts allow changes in the performance measure set. CMS is also working with federal partners including the Office of Personnel Management, Department of Defense, and Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as state Medicaid plans to align quality measures where appropriate. The Core Quality Measures Collaborative views the upcoming year as a transitional period, as it begins to work with the new measures and affected organizations. They plan to monitor progress, invite broader participation, and possibly add additional measures and measure sets. Patient groups were a vital part of the collaborative. [Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook] "What we released today is a start at achieving consensus on the best measures, but we need to continue pushing for even better ones," said Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families. "We need measurement that works for clinicians and helps them improve care, while also providing information that is meaningful and actionable for patients and families." This work will influence CMS's implementation of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015. It is part of CMS's commitment to ensuring programs work for providers while keeping the focus on improved quality of care for patients, CMS said. CMS has also developed a draft Quality Measure Development plan, fueled by the development of the core measure sets as well as the discovery of gaps in the measures.  Twitter: @SusanJMorse

A leading topic or two seem to have emerged at every HIMSS Annual Conference. What do you think will lead this year?