Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1007936
55 CIO / HEALTH IT ONC's latest challenge offers $80k prize to making EHR safety reporting easier By Julie Spitzer T he latest challenge from HHS' ONC — dubbed Easy EHR Issue Reporting Challenge — asks developers to build tools that help end users easily report potential health IT safety issues. The agency wants developers to create an application that is able to: • Integrate with an EHR's workflow; • Use existing system data and workflow to minimize the time and effort needed to create a report; • Allow the clinician practice, hospital or end user to choose who it submits the reported to; and • Be EHR platform-agnostic. "[W]orkflow disruptions place a large enough burden on many users that they just avoid reporting altogether. As a re- sult, we as an industry have less data about potential health IT safety issues and are ill equipped to determine root caus- es, provide feedback to EHR developers and produce best practice guidance," ONC's Andrew Gettinger, MD, wrote in an agency blog post. "The goal of [the challenge] is to help EHR users identify, document and report a potential health IT safety issue when it happens." Submissions are due Oct. 15, and ONC is offering up to $80,000 in prizes. n Epic, Cerner maintain largest EMR market share among small hospitals By Jessica Kim Cohen E pic and Cerner domi- nated the EMR market for small acute care hospitals in 2017, according to a KLAS Research report released in May. To determine EMR market share, KLAS Research ana- lyzed the vendors in use at 5,278 acute care hospitals in the U.S. with 200 or fewer beds. Here's how major EMR ven- dors stacked up in terms of small hospital market share in 2017. 1. Epic: 26.7 percent 2. Cerner: 24.8 percent 3. Meditech: 17 percent 4. CPSI: 10.3 percent 5. Allscripts: 7.2 6. MedHost: 4.1 percent 7. Athenahealth: 2.1 percent 8. Other: 7.8 percent n 23andMe sues Ancestry.com: 5 things to know By Jessica Kim Cohen 2 3andMe, the second largest direct-to-consumer genetic testing company, filed a lawsuit against its top competi- tor in a California federal district court May 11. Here are five things to know about 23andMe's lawsuit against Ancestry.com, the largest provider of direct-to-consumer ge- nealogy services: 1. 23andMe alleged Ancestry.com infringed on its patented method for identifying a customer's relatives based on a DNA sample. e intellectual property lawsuit focuses on whether Ancestry.com uses 23andMe's methods for returning results — such as the company's confidence in potential relatives — to its customers, according to Wired. "23andMe is a company built on innovation and we have brought this action to defend our intellectual property rights," 23andMe said in a statement to Wired. 2. e 2013 patent cited in the lawsuit — titled "Finding rel- atives in a database" — describes how 23andMe analyzes a customer's genome to determine potential family members. e method leverages a concept dubbed "identical by descent," which matches the percentage of shared DNA between differ- ent people to estimate how related they are to one another. 3. Legal experts cited by Wired hypothesize Ancestry.com will argue 23andMe's patent is invalid, either by claiming the com- pany did not invent the technology or by saying the company's genealogy method is an abstract idea that cannot be patented. e process outlined in 23andMe's patent is widely used among population geneticists, according to a genetics researcher at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass. 4. In its lawsuit, 23andMe accused Ancestry.com of "mislead- ing advertising." 23andMe alleged Ancestry.com advertises that it offers "5x more regions than other DNA tests," only ac- knowledging it does not test for five times more regions than 23andMe in small print. 23andMe also asked the court to nullify Ancestry.com's trade- marked name, "Ancestry," arguing the word is a generic term used by various other companies in the genealogy space, according to Bloomberg. In the past, Ancestry.com has al- leged 23andMe's use of the world "Ancestry" in its products in- fringes on the company's trademark, according to the lawsuit. 5. 23andMe's lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and disgorge- ment of any profits Ancestry.com earned as a result of its al- legedly misleading advertisements. An Ancestry.com spokesperson told Wired the company intends to "vigorously defend ourselves against these claims. n