5 ms·

EHR vendor eClinicalWorks to pay $155M to settle whistleblower suit

38 points by bm98 9y ago

nobodyorother 9y ago
20% payout to the whistleblower. That's pretty hefty!
beachwood23 9y ago
Interestingly, this lawsuit was filed in my home state of Vermont -- because Vermont is "sympathetic" to fraud charges.
- r00fus 9y ago
  Wow I wonder if jurisdiction shopping might have a positive outcome here (a opposed to e.g. East Texas for patent markman findings).
rubiquity 9y ago
> 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.
- markolschesky 9y ago
  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.
  - rubiquity 9y ago
    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.
pmiller2 9y ago
It 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?
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  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/Maybe-legal. These requirements formed the basis of test cases for QA to run though. ECW was not the vendor I worked for, so it's possible the developer had more influence over business logic or its implementation. These things sound like time or cost-cutting measures: >opted to added the 16 drug codes necessary for certification into its software rather than enable the product to access those from a complete database Sounds like they didn't buy the database. >eClinicalWorks did not satisfy data portability requirements designed to enable doctors to transfer patient data to over vendor’s EHRs This sounds like they didn't want to build something to export to CCDA? These sound like negligence / not enough testing: >failed to accurately record user actions with audit log functionality >did not always accurately record diagnostic imaging orders or conduct drug-drug interaction checks For drug-drug interaction, that is probably another drug database to purchase, so it's possible they simply hadn't bought it. Building your own is obviously out of the question.
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    Yeah DDI check are tricky, and you basically have to buy a solution. As for the CCDA piece, that's interesting. It should be pretty easy to build that, it's a pretty simple standard and I think there are C# and Java libs that basically just do it.
    - ndonnellan 9y ago
      > 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
DominoTree 9y ago
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.
- bnjms 9y ago
  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.

38 points by bm98 9y ago

nobodyorother 9y ago

20% payout to the whistleblower. That's pretty hefty!

beachwood23 9y ago

Interestingly, this lawsuit was filed in my home state of Vermont -- because Vermont is "sympathetic" to fraud charges.

r00fus 9y ago
Wow I wonder if jurisdiction shopping might have a positive outcome here (a opposed to e.g. East Texas for patent markman findings).

rubiquity 9y ago

> 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.

markolschesky 9y ago
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.
- rubiquity 9y ago
  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.

pmiller2 9y ago

It 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?

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
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/Maybe-legal. These requirements formed the basis of test cases for QA to run though. ECW was not the vendor I worked for, so it's possible the developer had more influence over business logic or its implementation. These things sound like time or cost-cutting measures: >opted to added the 16 drug codes necessary for certification into its software rather than enable the product to access those from a complete database Sounds like they didn't buy the database. >eClinicalWorks did not satisfy data portability requirements designed to enable doctors to transfer patient data to over vendor’s EHRs This sounds like they didn't want to build something to export to CCDA? These sound like negligence / not enough testing: >failed to accurately record user actions with audit log functionality >did not always accurately record diagnostic imaging orders or conduct drug-drug interaction checks For drug-drug interaction, that is probably another drug database to purchase, so it's possible they simply hadn't bought it. Building your own is obviously out of the question.
- ch4s3 9y ago
  Yeah DDI check are tricky, and you basically have to buy a solution. As for the CCDA piece, that's interesting. It should be pretty easy to build that, it's a pretty simple standard and I think there are C# and Java libs that basically just do it.
  - ndonnellan 9y ago
    > 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

DominoTree 9y ago

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.

bnjms 9y ago
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.