This document provides a summary of news and events from the healthcare IT industry in January 1988, as reported in two industry publications. It describes the formation of SMS's turnkey division to offer in-house systems in response to competitors. A pioneering hospital is highlighted for being an early adopter of barcoding for medication verification. A LIS vendor offers an unprecedented uptime guarantee. The name changes of two vendors, AIC and HMS, are noted. Several early healthcare IT companies and their original names/acronyms are identified.

1. 30 Years Ago In H.I.S.-tory
by Vince Ciotti
© 2018 H.I.S. Professionals, LLC, all rights reserved
News
from
January
1988 with
relevanc
e for
today

2. December 1987 Episode Feedback
• Last month I challenged readers to guess what this building at
Cedar Hospital in Miami which was built way back in the 60s was
built to look like. Several veteran HIStalk readers got it right:
Stephanie Reel – SVP & CIO at Johns Hopkins:
- “Easy… punch card!”
Lynn Witherspoon – CMIO at Ochsner Health:
- “But of course! I get blank stares when I
mention punched 80 column cards today…”
Mike Peterson – mike@rxpeterson.com
- “Your latest HIStory with the picture of the
building in Florida reminded me of the new
TD Ameritrade Headquarters building in
Omaha. Occupied in 2012, the window
design was to mimic a punch card. Dejavu!”

3. 1988: SMS Goes Inhouse…
• The January issue of Bill Child’s Healthcare
Computing & Communications gave the news
of Shared Medical System forming a turnkey
system division. Back then SMS & McAuto
dominated the HIS market with their shared
systems, but both acquired and/or developed
turnkey systems to keep up with vendors like
HBO, Meditech, IHC, etc., who were rapidly
gaining market share with their inhouse minis.
• SMS’ turnkey division was comprised at first
of the “Spirit” HIS, which they acquired from
Computer Synergy in 1985, augmented by
their ACTIon self-developed system. Spirit was
later renamed as Allegra and was running in
175 hospitals before Y2K when it was sunset.

4. Today’s Vendors Are Going Back!
• How ironic that today most leading vendors of what were
originally inhouse systems are now offering remote hosting (aka
SaaS, cloud, etc. ), the modern equivalent of shared systems:
– Cerner – had the wise business sense to make the shift to
remote processing of Millennium early in the 2000s due to
the much larger ongoing revenue stream that hosting offers.
– Epic – just announced in 2016 the option of clients hosting
their system remotely from a huge data center in Verona.
– Meditech – almost all clients ran inhouse at first; today there
are a number of 3rd party hosters: Dell, Teknicor, Parallon…
– Allscripts – remote hosts through a large data center in NJ.
• “Cloud” may be where buyers’ heads are if they think it’s much
different than a shared system where the vendor has the
servers, charges the max, blames any outages on your local
network/devices, and may give you the data when you convert…

5. BMV Pioneer
• A feature story in the January 1988 of HC&C was this pioneering
hospital serving as a pilot for bar-code scanning for Bedside
Medication Verification, or BMV. Today we take it for granted as
key part of every vendors’ EMR and one of CMS’ key Meaningful
Use criteria, but back then it was a daring new tech concept.
• The vendor was CliniCom
whose founder Peter
Gombrich had an
amazing vision of how a
modern technology that
was becoming common
in other industries (such
as check-out counters at
stores) could prevent
drug mis-administration.

6. Bedside Pioneer
• An interesting quote from St. Francis’ VP of Patient care Services
summed up why such a small hand-held device was attractive:
- “One thing I definitely did not want was a nurse working at a
full-size PC in the room mainly because of the disruption to the
patient. Nurses also disliked bottlenecking at the nurses’ station
where there were too few terminals...”
• Instead of a bulky PC, CliniCom ran on the
small hand-held device pictured on the right
used to scan the nurse’s ID badge, the
patient’s wrist-band, and the label on the
drug unit dose. The data was sent via
telecom to a large microcomputer in the
data center which sent back a signal that
the data was either correct or not. Pretty
hot for 1988 when most PCs still ran DOS!

7. A Daring Move
• The other leading print journal back in 1988 was Computers in
Healthcare (CHC), and their January issue contained a
revolutionary offer by the LIS vendor Community Health
Computing that was so daring one wishes they were still around!
today! • In case you can’t read the small print on the
left, CHC was offering a 100% up-time
warranty. For every hour its fault-tolerant
hardware or LabCare software was down, CHC
would pay 1% of its monthly service fees to a
charity chosen by their client hospitals. Wow,
some guts back then with early hardware!
• Sadly, most vendors today have almost as many
lines of legal gobbledygook in their contracts
protecting them from any downtime fault or
penalties than their software has lines of code
preventing it. Now that’s progress…

8. Name Change
• As this news clipping reveals, it turns out they originally named
their firm Advanced Information Concepts (AIC), and in 1998
were renaming it as Healthcare Management Systems (HMS).
• Ever hear of AIC? Well, I never did
either, even though I interviewed the
two founders of the firm, Tom Givens
and John Doss, a few years back when I
was writing my HIS-tory series for
HIStalk (you can find them on our web
site hispros.com by clicking on the
button for H.I.S.tory). Tom and John
formed their firm back in 1984, the year
DRGs went into effect, and did very well
selling to hospital chains many of whom
were also based in Nashville, TN.

9. What’s In A Name?
• Surprisingly HMS happened to also be the acronym for a vendor
formed in 1974 in NYC that specialized in software for insurance
companies, Medicaid agencies, HMOs, etc. They used the initials
HMS for their NADAQ stock symbol, and today for their web site.
So Givens & Doss’ HMS had a bit of an identity problem…
• Ironically the Nashville-based HMS re-named itself again just a
few years back when they merged with MedHost, a leading EDIS
vendor, whose name was adopted to eliminate any confusion
with the other HMS in New York. Must have been an awful lot of
business cards, brochures, stationary, signs, etc., to be re-printed!
• Have any of today’s leading vendors also changed their names?
Can you recognize any these start-up firm’s acronyms/monikers:
PGI
HSC
BDP
QSI
HSD
NewCo

10. Ever-evolving Acronym-itis
• PGI = the initials of the 3 founders of a 1980 start-up Lab vendor
based in in Kansas City: Patterson, Gorup and Illig. Not sure why
they picked this order of letters since Illig was actually the #2!?
• HSC = Human Services Computing, the name for another 3-FTE
start-up vendor, this one based in Madison WI, a truly Epic tale…
• BDP – Burlington Data Processing, a start-up formed by Rich
Tarrant in VT, later renamed IDS, then IDX, later bought by GE.
• QSI - founded in 1973 by Sheldon Razin as Quality Systems Inc.,
their next generation name adopted in 2000 was… guess what?
• HSD – part of an IT firm started as KeaMed circa 1970, then split
as an HIS division named Keane Health Services Division.
• NewCo – apparently a common acronym for many start-up firms,
it’s what Harvey Wilson called his before coming up with Eclipsys.

11. Vendor Longevity
• How long does the typical HIS vendor last? Here are the
advertiser indexes from the January 1988 issues of HC&C and
IHC magazines – recognize any still in business 30 years later?
• Neal Patterson would be very proud…

12. Another 30th Anniversary
• Here’s a final 30-year-ago event that I forgot to mention last
month; at the end of 1987, three professionals with decades of
experience each in the HIS industry formed a start-up firm:
– Bob Pagnotta – co-founder of Medical Data Systems, General Manager
of Tymshare Medical Systems, and President of Hosplex Systems.
– Karl Sydor – DP Manager at Perth Amboy Hospital, ID Manager and later
Regional Manager at Shared Medical Systems.
– Vince Ciotti – who lost too many jobs in his career to be listed here…
Over the past 30 years, their firm called HIS Pros has provided
consulting to 390 clients in 46 states, with nary a lawsuit.
• Hope you enjoy looking back to these early days of HIS-tory –
glad to share any of your memories or suffer any feedback:
Vince Ciotti HIS Professionals, LLC
505.466.4958 vciotti@hispros.com