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News 3/4/15

March 3, 2015 News 3 Comments

Top News

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Reuters reports that Truven Health Analytics is planning an IPO that will value the company at $3 billion. Veritas Capital Fund Management LLC bought the company from Thomson Reuters in 2012 for $1.25 billion.


Reader Comments

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From DejaVuAllOverAgain: “Re: Leidos Health. Laid off over 50 people last Friday, the third round of layoffs since Q3 2014. SAIC bought two $400M consulting companies (Vitalize Consulting and maxIT Healthcare) thinking they’d get $800M annually. Revenues now less than $300M. The typical acquisition story.” Unverified.

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From LL Cool J: “Re: Allscripts and NantHealth partnership = desperate.” The wordy announcement wasn’t very clear on who’s doing what, but NantHealth seems to be signing up a bunch of partners and Patrick Soon-Shiong is drawn to TV cameras like a mosquito to a bug zapper.

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From RutRoh: “Re: CareCloud. It was announced at the CloudUp corporate meeting that CEO Albert Santalo has been asked to step down.” Unverified. He’s still listed on the executive page and I assume that even if the rumor is true that he’ll remain as board chair. Update: CareCloud says Santalo will remain chairman and CEO but will be focusing his time over the next several months on advancing products, with emphasis on optimizing operations for larger practices.  

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From Dysf(n): “Re: microbiology interfaces. CAP Today puts out an annual review of laboratory middleware. New version is due in June 2015, I think. Here’s last year’s in PDF format. Data Innovations is in there, along with another six or seven. If that doesn’t cover the specific instruments / systems you’re looking to integrate, it may be a good start — search elsewhere through CAP Today online.”


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Here’s a fun fact that everybody who orders HIMSS-related giveaways already knows: China-based manufacturing shuts down for two weeks each February for Chinese New Year. Last year we had to settle for inferior quality lapel pins because the factories where the good ones are made were closed.

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Divurgent is offering all HIStalk readers the chance to attend summitHIT15 in Chicago’s best rooftop lounge on the 27th floor of theWit hotel on Sunday, April 12. RSVP here.

Thanks to the following sponsors, new and renewing, that recently supported HIStalk, HIStalk Practice, and HIStalk Connect. Click a logo for more information.

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Webinars

March 4 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “5 Steps to Improving Patient Safety & Clinical Communications with Collaborative-Based Care.” Sponsored by Imprivata. Presenters: Robert Gumbardo, MD, chief of staff, Saint Mary’s Health System; Tom Calo, technical solutions engineer, Saint Mary’s Health System; Christopher McKay, chief nursing officer, Imprivata. For healthcare IT and clinical leadership, the ability to satisfy the clinical need for better, faster communication must be balanced with safeguarding protected health information to meet compliance and security requirements.

March 5 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “Care Team Coordination: How People, Process, and Technology Impact Patient Transitions.” Sponsored by Zynx Health. Presenters: Grant Campbell, MSN, RN, senior director of nursing strategy and informatics, Zynx Health; Siva Subramanian, PhD, senior VP of mobile products, Zynx Health. This webinar will explore the ways in which people, process, and technology influence patient care and how organizations can optimize these areas to enhance communication, increase operational efficiency, and improve care coordination across the continuum.

March 12 (Thursday) 1:00 ET.  “Turn Your Contact Center Into A Patient-Centered Access Center.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenter: Brian Cooper, SVP, West Interactive. A patient-centered access center can extend population health management efforts and scale up care coordination programs with the right approach, technology, and performance metrics. Implementing a patient-centered access center is a journey and this program will provide the roadmap.


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Becton Dickinson acquires CRISI Medical Systems, with which it co-developed a wireless, EHR-integrated electronic checking system for drug identification, dose, and allergies for drugs given by IV push.


Sales

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Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center will use PeraHealth’s Rothman Index health scoring system throughout its system to provide an early warning for patients whose conditions are deteriorating.

Cornerstone Health Enablement Strategic Solutions (NC) chooses Lightbeam Health Solutions for population health management.


People

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T-System names Janie Schumaker, RN, MBA (Heartland Regional Medical Center) as chief nursing officer.

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Rick Toren (Qpid) joins healthcare analytics vendor Atigeo as president of its healthcare division.


Announcements and Implementations

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ScImage updates its PICOM365 systems to support the new ASA 2015 echocardiography cardiac chamber standards that were released in January.

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NantHealth and Allscripts announce their collaboration on development of precision medicine solutions for cancer patients.

Spectrum Equity makes an unspecified investment in healthcare database vendor Definitive Healthcare.


Government and Politics

A Connecticut bill would require insurance-related companies to encrypt consumer information, introduced in response to the Anthem breach by politicians who clearly don’t understand that encryption is rendered instantly worthless once hackers obtain administrator account information by phishing (as they did in Anthem’s case).

The VA’s Office of Inspector General finds that the VA’s chief business office knowingly violated appropriations law by using $93 million in medical support and compliance money to help pay for development of a claims processing system to avoid going through the VA’s IT process.


Privacy and Security

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ProPublica plans another article in its series about medical privacy and invites readers to contribute stories about problems they’ve had.

The New York Times runs pro-con arguments about genetic testing data. Negative arguments: drug companies are paying 23andMe big money to get their hands on test results, genetic testing is a minor disease predictor compared to lifestyle choices, DNA information could be hacked for manipulating crime scenes or medical records, and laws against genetic discrimination need to be strengthened. Positive arguments: shared data speeds up healthcare research, technology can protect the data, companies making millions from selling data should buy insurance of $500,000 per user since they claim the breach likelihood is low and if that’s true the insurance should be inexpensive.

Patient information in Minnesota’s doctor shopper prescription database was accessed hundreds of times by a former insurance company nurse after the state forgot to revoke his credentials when he was reassigned. The nurse was previously disciplined by the state nursing board after admitting to stealing narcotics from two hospitals, a fact the state says they were unaware of even though his record is in a public database. He still works for Blue Cross Blue Shield.


Technology

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Antivirus maker AVG debuts prototype infrared LED privacy-protecting glasses that prevent facial recognition systems from identifying their wearer. The company says “invisibility glasses” are a valuable privacy tool because candid smartphone photos are often posted to Facebook, Google’s StreetView puts identities in the public domain, and Facebook’s DeepFace can match up different photos of the same person with human-like accuracy of greater than 97 percent. 


Other

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Texas Health Resources nurse Nina Pham, who contracted Ebola in the Thomas Duncan case, sues her employer for negligence, claiming lack of training and violations of her privacy that made her “a symbol of corporate neglect – a casualty of a hospital system’s failure to prepare for a known and impending medical crisis.” She says she told THR not to release information about her when she was hospitalized, but a doctor recorded her on video using a GoPro body-worn camera and released it publicly, with her attorney claiming THR “used Nina as a PR pawn.”  She also claims THR announced her condition as “good” while simultaneously counseling her on end-of-life decisions as documented in the EHR. Her attorney has a history of successfully suing THR and other hospitals for her $750 per hour fee and has hit defendants with $675 million worth of settlements and verdicts in the past five years.   

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Named to the Forbes list of 2015 billionaires from healthcare IT are Patrick Soon-Shiong of NantHealth (#96, $12.2 billion, although he made his money from pharma), Judy Faulkner of Epic (#663, $2.8 billion), Neal Patterson of Cerner (#1006, $1.9 billion), and Cliff Illig of Cerner (#1605, $1.2 billion). The list omitted Terry Ragon of InterSystems, who should be worth about the same as Patterson and Illig based on previous reports. Elizabeth Holmes, founder of lab provider Theranos. is the youngest self-made woman at 31 years old (#360, $4.5 billion). Your best chance by far of being one of the world’s richest people is inheriting $40 billion each in Walmart money as did the four Waltons who hold spots in the top 12.

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A note to PR people: they say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but that might not hold true when a press release misspells the company’s name.

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Chuck Denham, MD, the former co-chair of a National Quality Forum patient safety panel charged with taking $11 million in CareFusion bribes to have its product added to national standards, settles with the Department of Justice for $1 million. At least he sold his integrity for a great price, netting $10 million after expenses. Meanwhile, briber CareFusion settled last year for $40 million and it’s still a $12 billion market cap company whose shares have risen 50 percent in the past year. Anyone who says crime doesn’t pay needs to get into healthcare.

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A Wall St. Journal article titled “The Next Marketing Frontier: Your Medical Records” highlights the alerts and reminders sent to patients in Practice Fusion’s EHRs, with some of those messages paid for by drug companies. Practice Fusion’s CEO defends the practice, saying that with regard to the alerts and presumably the company’s free EHR, “someone has to pay for it” and adds that new agreements have been signed to deliver sponsored alerts from Aetna and another drug company. He also states, “For every project we do that drives forth public health or gives data away, we need to make sure it’s balanced out by a monetizable exercise.”

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The Wall Street Journal highlights a Health Affairs-published study that found major inconsistencies in the “best hospitals” lists published by four sources (US News & World Report, Consumer Reports, Leapfrog Group, and Healthgrades). Only 10 percent of the hospitals that were highest rated by one service received an equally high ranking from even one of the other three, while 27 hospitals that were named among the nation’s best by one service were named as among the worst by another (UCLA’s Ronald Reagan Medical Center being an obvious example). Lead author Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD says just about every hospital tops somebody’s list and urges better methods “so it isn’t just a beauty pageant.”


Sponsor Updates

  • Impact Advisors publishes a white paper titled “Selecting a Population Health Management Vendor: Taming the Wave.”
  • PatientSafe Solutions posts “Quality care and Mobility: Case 2.”
  • Caradigm is participating in the iHT2 CHIME & Health IT Summit through March 4 in San Francisco.
  • Aventura and Bottomline Technologies are exhibiting at the Spring Hospital and HealthCare IT Conference through March 4 in Orlando.
  • CareTech will host the New England HIMSS & Social Networking event March 10 in Warwick, RI.
  • AirStrip writes about “Bringing Up Baby: the Value of Remote Monitoring for High-Risk Pregnancies.”
  • AtHoc writes about its work with the Red Cross.
  • Besler Consulting looks at the “State-by-State Impact of Readmissions Penalties for 2015.”

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

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Currently there are "3 comments" on this Article:

  1. Divurgent making a big deal about a rooftop event at HIMSS… in Chicago… in April… bring your mittens and hats!

  2. “Elizabeth Holmes, founder of lab provider Theranos. is the youngest self-made woman at 31 years old (#360, $4.5 billion). ”
    Smoke and Mirrors

  3. CareCloud CEO will remain as CEO, but will focus on large practices(i.e. like an Account Rep, hmm?) Beginning of the end, don’t you think ? It’s hard to make money as a start-up cloud based company, the cash doesn’t flow in fast enough to cover infrastruture initial costs and cover varible operation expenses as you continue to grow.







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