News 5/31/23

Top News

Carrum Health, whose platform helps employers manage employee healthcare costs, raises $45 million in a Series B funding round.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents aren’t convinced that the VA will finish its Oracle Cerner implementation.

New poll to your right or here: Did you sell $10,000 or more in products or services from your own company in the past year?

Listening: new from Yes, a 55-year-old band with no original members left whose recent live shows have been innumerable but awful. I walked out on them a couple of years ago because they sounded like a bad tribute band (which they kind of are) in playing their old album cuts slower, lower, and lazier in a seemingly desperate money grab, but this new music is actually pretty good even if a bit wimpy compared to their sweeping epics of yesteryear. I still prefer old concert videos, such as original singer Jon Anderson doing “Awaken” with Iceland-based rock band Todmobile (gets me every time) and the the full band’s symphonic live version of “Soon.” For me, Yes scores high in the all-important “what music would you want played at your funeral” test. It will outlive the many band members who wrote, recorded, and performed it over decades.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health IT and cybersecurity solutions vendor Anatomy IT acquires dental software company Iris Solutions.

Dock Health, which specializes in automated healthcare task management, raises $5 million in funding. The company was created from Boston Children’s Hospital’s innovation department in 2020.

Weight loss app Noom launches a telemedicine service to offer consumers access to prescription weight-loss medications like Ozempic and Wegovy.

A new KLAS report looks at remote patient monitoring technology vendors.

Sales

• Niagra Health in Ontario will implement Sectra One enterprise imaging.
• Corterra Healthcare (KS) chooses Medsphere’s Wellsoft EHR and RCM Cloud for a new behavioral health hospital.

People

Rebecca Manne, RN (Optimum Healthcare IT) joins Continuum Health IT as EVP of EHR Implementation.

Announcements and Implementations

Premier launches SmartPO, digital supply chain procurement and inventory management technology that will enable continuum of care providers to better identify cost savings and use staff resources more effectively.

A University of Michigan national poll of people aged 50-80 finds that 78% have a patient portal (half of those have more than one), 55% used it in the past month, half provided access to family members, and most were comfortable logging in and navigating it. People preferred the portal over the telephone for getting test results, updating personal information, getting medical records copies, and requesting refills, but they liked the telephone better for reporting symptoms, scheduling appointments, and requesting referrals.

The former Cerner Continuous Campus is under purchase contract to be turned into apartments and commercial space, although no companies have expressed interest in the campus’s 660,000 square feet of vacant offices.

A small study finds that smart watches and wristbands do a good job of correctly detecting atrial fibrillation even though they don’t have access to outside algorithms.

Government and Politics

VA Secretary Denis McDonough promises to look into reports that the VA medical center in Spokane will be forced to cut staff due to a budget shortfall caused by the troubled EHR Modernization program. He reiterated that he stands by statements made by VA Under Secretary for Health Shereef Elnahal that budget concerns related to the Oracle Cerner system will not result in layoffs.

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes reports to a Texas prison after her losing her bid to remain free while appealing her conviction for investor fraud, which led to an 11-year sentence.

Privacy and Security

A new Florida law prohibits the state’s providers from storing EHR data outside the US, its territories, or Canada, including those patient records that are hosted in the cloud or by a third party.

Other

The bankrupt, non-profit Idaho Health Data Exchange replaces its executive director. The organization launched in 2009 using federal grants and ongoing funds from the HITECH act that ran out in 2021.

Mayo Clinic and University of California, San Francisco researchers determine that pairing AI imaging and volumetric breast density algorithms can help in predicting long-term risk of breast cancer, particularly invasive diseases. Their study used Volpara Health’s TruDensity algorithm and ScreenPoint Medical’s Transpara image-based risk tool.

In perhaps the first incident of AI leading to professional embarrassment or worse, defense attorneys ask to have a man’s personal injury lawsuit dismissed after noticing that most of the legal citations it included were not real. The plaintiff’s lawyer, who has practiced for 30 years, admitted that he had used ChatGPT for the first time and was not aware that it could generate false information. He even asked ChatGPT if the citations were real and was assured incorrectly that the cases “are real and can be found in reputable legal databases.”

Sponsor Updates

• Wolters Kluwer Health wins the NorthFace ScoreBoard Service Award for the twelfth consecutive year for superior customer service.
• OptimizeRx CEO Will Febbo provides a mid-year strategic update.
• Nordic Consulting names Samara Lattimer (Akkodis) a new client partner in the UK and Ireland.
• Aridhia Informatics Chief Data Officer Amanda Borens, MS is featured in an “Engineering Field of Dreams” podcast titled “Spelunking Adventures in Data.”
• Spok will join the broad-market Russell 3000 Index on June 26.
• West Monroe releases a new podcast, “Why All Companies Should ‘Shift Left’.”

Blog Posts

• COVID-19 Interoperability Alliance Retrospective (Clinical Architecture)
• AONL 2023: Drawing inspiration to fuel the future of nursing (Meditech)
• Amplifying Success: How Integrated Behavioral Health Programs Can Achieve the Quintuple Aim (NeuroFlow)
• How Can Healthcare Providers Improve Their Data Integrity to Achieve Better Insights? (NTT Data)
• 360Dx: Legislation Would Provide Medicare Coverage for Pharmacy-Based Testing (OmniSys)
• Safeguarding security and privacy in the age of generative AI (Orbita)
• Healthcare Coding Series: LOINC Codes (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Partnering with a Revenue Cycle Management Company to Tackle Hospitalist Billing (PMD)
• Young Upstart to Four-Star Admiral: The Chance Events of Dr. Brett Giroir (Surescripts)
• Designing a Comprehensive Caregiver Support Strategy: Empowering the Unsung Heroes of Healthcare (Trualta)
• 4 Signs Your PT Patient is About to Drop Out (WebPT)
• Jump to the Front of the Line for National Network Access (Zen Healthcare IT)
• What is the Focus of a Care Plan? (Zynx Health)
• Healthcare CIOs Talk: How to Navigate AI, Analytics, and Automation (CereCore)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Morning Headlines 5/26/23

Healthcare Triangle, Inc. Announces 1-for-10 Reverse Stock Split as Part of Nasdaq Compliance Plan

Shares of Healthcare Triangle, Inc. drop sharply on the news that it will conduct a 1-for-10 reverse stock split to meet Nasdaq’s share price requirements.

Quovis, a health tech startup in Cleveland, lands $1M investment

Cleveland-based health information exchange startup Quovis raises $1 million.

VA secretary says Spokane VA’s budget won’t suffer as result of flawed records system

VA Secretary Denis McDonough promises to look into reports that the VA medical center in Spokane could be forced to cut staff due to a budget shortfall caused by the troubled EHR Modernization program.

TA Announces Strategic Growth Investment in Alpha II

RCM software vendor Alpha II secures an undisclosed amount of funding from TA Associates.

Dock Health Secures $5M in Funding Led by MassMutual with Participation from DaVita Venture Group and August Capital

Dock Health, which specializes in automated healthcare task management, raises $5 million in a funding round led by MassMutual.

News 5/26/23

Top News

Mobile patient intake form platform vendor Florence acquires Zipnosis, which sells a white label asynchronous telehealth solution that is based on questionnaires.

Florence launched in March 2023 with $20 million in seed funding.

Failing insurer Bright Health acquired Zipnosis in April 2021.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shares of Healthcare Triangle, Inc. drop sharply on the news that it will conduct a 1-for-10 reverse stock split to meet Nasdaq’s share price requirements. HCTI shares are down 50% in the past 12 months to $0.26, valuing the company at $11 million. Shares have lost 93% of their value since the company’s IPO in October 2021.

Vodafone creates Vodafone in Health to accelerate the use of healthcare technology in the UK.

Sales

• Health information sharing non-profit Contexture will implement Verato’s healthcare master data management solution for patient matching.

People

Nicole Kerkenbush, RN, MN, MHA (Monument Health) joins CHIME as VP of education.

Carteret Health (NC) promotes VP of general services / CIO Kyle Marek, MS to president and CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Conduent releases a provider data management solution to help insurers keep their physician directories current.

Synapse Medicine and CompuGroup Medical will partner to offer clinicians prescription support.

In Canada, Meditech will support electronic prescribing for Expanse EHR users by connecting to the PrescribeIT national prescribing service.

UK-based Acurable earns US FDA clearance for its self-applied wearable that diagnoses sleep apnea without a polysomnography study.

Government and Politics

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) demands that the VA avoid reducing headcount or services at its Spokane and Walla Walla facilities to offset a $35 million shortfall caused by its Oracle Cerner implementation. She says the VA should redirect the money that it would have spent to implement the system in other facilities since those go-lives are on hold, and instead move those funds to those hospitals that are already live.

Husband and wife doctors who are charged with sharing the medical records of US military officials with Russia to support its invasion of Ukraine were recorded by FBI agents who were posing as Russian operatives. Johns Hopkins anesthesiologist Anna Gabrielian, MD is accused of sharing her laptop screen containing patient records with the undercover agent. Her spouse, Army Major Jamie Lee Henry, MD – who was one of the first active duty US military officers to come out as transgender in 2015 – reportedly described themselves as a “coward” over potential HIPAA violations, struggled with technology problems in trying to share their screen with the undercover agent, and ending up giving the agent a paper notebook of records. The doctors, who are charged with conspiracy and HIPAA violations, argue that they were entrapped.

The American Hospital Association asks HHS OCR to stop considering the IP addresses of hospital website visitors as protected health information under HIPAA. AHA says pending lawsuits over pixel tracking have pushed website technology providers such as Google to stop supporting hospital websites, making regulation unnecessary, but if HHS OCR disagrees, then IP addresses should only be considered PHI if they are used from within patient portals.

Privacy and Security

Medical practice services vendor Practicefirst will pay $550,000 to the state of New York for failing to protect patient records that were exposed in a 2020 cyberattack. The breach, which involved the records of 1.2 million people of which 428,000 were New Yorkers, happened after the company failed to apply firewall software updates.

Sponsor Updates

• IntegrityCheck, the house band of InterSystems, wins $100,000 for the ALS Foundation in a Boston battle of the bands for charity.
• Healthcare Growth Partners advised Intelligent Medical Objects in its acquisition of Melax Technologies.
• InterSystems launches HealthShare Health Connect Cloud in AWS Marketplace.
• Healthcare Triangle sponsors CalvertHealth’s annual golf tournament in Lothian, MD.
• Indiana Health Centers reduces onboarding errors by using the EClinicalWorks Business Optimizer.
• Tegria CMO Ray Gensinger, MD joins Symplr’s effort to “Advance Healthcare Operations.”
• Nordic releases a new episode of its In Network podcast, “Designing for Health: Dr. John Whalen.”
• Netsmart earns top user satisfaction rankings among home health technology vendors, according to a Black Book survey of 2,285 end-users.
• Dimensional Insight publishes a new case study featuring Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters.
• In Europe, elder care organization Korian Benelux selects AI-powered enterprise solutions from Juniper Networks, including wireless and wired access, to optimize network performance and reliability.
• Konza National Network congratulates over 200 Konza-powered members that have been awarded accreditation through the NCQA Data Aggregator Validation program.
• The Patient Journey Pioneers Podcast features Kyruus CEO Graham Gardner, “Find a Physician & Beyond: Guiding the Digital Patient Journey.”

Blog Posts

• What IT advancements are needed to improve value-based care (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• A Different Point of View: The Age of TEFCA and QHINs Mandate Point-of-Care Diagnostic Filtering and Interoperability (Medicomp Systems)
• 10 Best Interview Questions to Ask Candidates (Direct Recruiters)
• Why Healthcare Needs Organizational Change Management (Divurgent)
• The pros and cons of using ChatGPT in clinical radiology: An open discussion (Elsevier)
• An inch deep and a mile wide (Nordic)
• Does Your Data Analytics Solution Find Patients Missing from Cohorts? (First Databank)
• Single sign-on vs. multi-factor authentication: Do you know the difference? (Fortified Health Security)
• Managed Services: The Case for Externalizing Aspects of Health System IT Operations (HCTec)
• Expanding After-Hours Virtual Care Options for Children (Health Data Movers)
• Am I Information Blocking? (With Examples!) (HealthMark Group)
• Five Key Considerations for a Successful EHR Optimization (HealthTech Resources)
• Does Your Patient Education Experience Pass the Accessibility Test? (Healthwise)
• When to Consider an Oracle Cerner Optimization Assessment (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• From raw to refined: Striving for high quality data in healthcare (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• How AI-Driven User Experience Testing Enhances Digital Health Accessibility (Keysight)
• Patients Need More Than a Better Compass to Navigate Healthcare (Lumeon)
• How EHRs Enhance Care Planning for Nurses (Medhost)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 5/24/23

Top News

Clinical terminology management and data quality vendor Intelligent Medical Objects acquires Melax Technologies, which specializes in data extraction using AI and natural language processing.

The acquisition, IMO’s first, will help extend its market reach to payer, life science, and pharmaceutical companies.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Aridhia Informatics. The Glasgow-based company offers the Aridhia Digital Research Environment (DRE), a combination PaaS/SaaS offering that addresses challenges that are associated with the scale and sustainability of biomedical data science. It is used by research hospitals, pharma, and global consortia across nearly 100 countries. Adherence to FAIR data principles gives researchers and innovators the ability to discover and understand data through dataset search, classification, and efficient metadata browsing capabilities. Researchers can request access to datasets, while data owners get access to configurable and orchestrated data governance while making approval decisions within their own specialized pipelines. Principal investigators can invite team members who can securely upload, access, and analyze project data while taking advantage of an audited environment that is furnished with analytical tools, scalable compute resources, and virtual desktops. All of this is underpinned by comprehensive auditing, secure data management, reliable infrastructure that scales to user needs, and world-class analytics capabilities. The company manages high-level security accreditation, leaving the team to focus on the science using a personalized, next-generation research environment. Thanks to Aridhia for supporting HIStalk.

YouTube has an intro video for the Aridhia DRE.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Nuance Communications CEO Mark Benjamin notifies employees of an unspecified number of layoffs as the Microsoft subsidiary adjusts to changing market conditions and a renewed focus on healthcare. Microsoft, which acquired Nuance in early 2022 for $20 billion, announced a separate round of 10,000 layoffs in January.

Sales

• Fifteen-bed Eureka Springs Hospital (AR) selects Oracle Cerner.
• Palouse Specialty Physicians (WA) will implement CureMD Oncology’s EHR and practice management software.
• Tampa General Hospital (FL) will roll out Navina’s AI-powered clinical data summary capabilities for primary care.
• Atlantic Health System selects NeuroFlow’s caseload management software to support behavioral health screenings within its ACO.

People

Zyter|TruCare names Joanne Berrios (Salesforce) VP and chief value officer.

Holly Urban, MD, MBA (Oracle Cerner) joins CliniComp as VP of clinical product design.

CRISP Shared Services promotes practicing pediatrician Marc Rabner, MD, MPH to chief medical officer.

Jordan Bazinsky (Cotiviti) joins Intelerad Medical Systems as CEO, replacing the newly retired Mike Lipps.

Telemetrix promotes Nancy Beale, RN to president.

Cynerio names Rasu B. Shrestha, MD, MBA (Advocate Health) as board chair.

Brooklyn Hospital Center promotes SVP/CMIO Sam Amirfar, MD, MS to chief medical officer.

Avalon Healthcare Solutions hires Pamela Stahl (Sidekick Health) as president.

Tegria hires Jen Morgan (Senta Partners) as CFO and Prasanna Gunjikar (HTC Global Services) as chief growth officer.

Aaron Green(Optum) joins OneMedNet as president.

Lanie Schenkelberg (Spring Health) joins Inovalon as VP of product marketing.

Announcements and Implementations

Gillette Children’s (MN) implements Notable’s automated Registration and Intake Assistant and Scheduling Assistant software across 11 multispecialty clinics.

Garden City Pediatric Associates (MA) implements EClinicalWorks.

Box Butte General Hospital (NE) goes live on Meditech.

Epic lists 26 of its customers that have pledged to join the TEFCA information sharing framework.

A new KLAS report on US EHR market share finds that Oracle Cerner saw its first double-digit net gain in hospitals since 2018, but 49 of its 50 wins were in under-200 bed facilities, giving it the biggest drop in total bed count of all vendors. Meditech gained 120 hospitals in 2022 via net-new sales and migrations, more than any other vendor, but still showed a decrease in total beds and total hospitals. Epic was the only vendor that gained both facilities and beds.

Government and Politics

Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center (WA) Director Robert Fischer says the facility will need to reduce staff by 15% over the next several years to make up for an anticipated $35 million budget deficit it attributes to the rollout and use of its Oracle Cerner system. The software’s well-documented deficiencies have hampered the facility’s ability to keep up with patient demand, resulting in decreased funding, while its billing inefficiencies have delayed payer reimbursements. Surges in staffing for the system and pay raises and bonuses to help with recruitment and retention have also contributed to the budget shortfall.

Privacy and Security

Norton Healthcare in Kentucky works to recover from a cyberattack two weeks ago that is still causing “delays in network-related capabilities” including patient portal messaging; imaging, lab and test results; and prescription fulfillment. Hackers reportedly sent a fax with threats and demands shortly after breaching the hospital network on May 9.

Amazon Pharmacy’s PillPack reports that an unauthorized person logged into its website using individual user credentials that were identical to those shared from other breaches, with 3,600 of those accounts containing prescription information.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD sponsors the Gratitude Gala in Chicago, benefiting The Bette D. Harris Family & Child Clinic.
• Princeton Brain, Spine & Sports Medicine transitions to EClinicalWorks Cloud.
• KeyCare pledges to adopt the TEFCA framework.
• InterSystems launches its HealthShare Health Connect Cloud in the AWS Marketplace.
• KLAS Research recognizes Availity as a co-recipient of the KLAS Points of Light Award.
• AvaSure establishes a chief nursing executive advisory board.
• Azara Healthcare publishes a new case study, “Improving Equity in Healthcare Access through Improved Data Exchange.”
• Nordic publishes a technical paper titled “A New Horizon for IT Strategy: Prioritizing the Patient Experience Through Digital Transformation.”
• Bamboo Health will exhibit at AHIP 2023 June 13-15 in Portland, OR.
• Black Book survey-takers give Xifin top customer and user satisfaction ratings in nine out of 18 RCM KPIs.

Blog Posts

• 2023 CHIME CIO Survey Results: Managed Services Opportunities? (CereCore)
• Documenting to Meet MEAT (AGS Health)
• Behavioral health providers face staffing and reimbursement challenges as demand grows for services (Baker Tilly)
• Workplace Injury Prevention: The Coach in Your Corner (Not the Boss Over Your Shoulder) (Bardavon)
• Advanced, affordable, accessible: Augmenting the patient experience with remote care at home (Biofourmis)
• Improve Your Patient Attribution Rates and Your ACO Performance (ChartSpan)
• What Are CIOs and ITSM Teams Looking For? ROI (Clearsense)
• What Healthcare CISOs Want to Know About Digital Health Technology Security (Clearwater)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 5/22/23

Top News

The assets of bankrupt digital therapeutics vendor Pear Therapeutics fetch $6 million at auction.

The company had raised $409 million in funding. It went public in a SPAC merger in December 2021 in a deal worth $1.5 billion.

The auction proceeds, which must be approved in a court hearing Monday, won’t cover the $32 million that Pear owes to creditors.

Successful bidders were:

• Click Therapeutics, which offered $70,000 for Pear’s patents. That company offers a variety of digital therapeutics products.
• Harvest Bio, which bid $2 million for Pear’s patent licenses. I couldn’t find any online presence for the company.
• Nox Health, which offered to pay $3.9 million for Somryst, which is Pear’s insomnia treatment app. Nox Health offers sleep health solutions.
• Welt, which will pay $50,000 for Pear’s migraine assets. The Korea-based company offers digital biomarkers and digital therapeutics.

Reader Comments

From Oracular Degeneration: “Re: David Feinberg. Will he leave Oracle Cerner at the one-year mark? It’s coming up.” I’m among many who expect him to leave at the earliest date that won’t jeopardize his $22 million reward for serving as Cerner’s CEO for a few pre-acquisition weeks. The one-year closing date is June 8, and other documents reference a 52-day period that would make it July 30. I don’t know why he would stay or why Oracle would want him to.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents have just two real problems with the behavior of their fellow attendees. I’ll side with the person who opines that Q&A pontification is the one item on the list that is insulting rather than just annoying and thus deservers having attendees emulate UK Members of Parliament and shout them down.

New poll to your right or here: Will the VA eventually complete an enterprise-wide rollout of Oracle Cerner?

I thought the once-respected Forbes couldn’t get any more hilariously irrelevant, but they have topped it by tasking a “content creator” (they deem her an “expert”) to compare Cerner to Epic. She helpfully informs us that neither company offers transparent pricing or a free trial, that both offer the “useful feature” of revenue cycle management, and that Epic does not offer third-party integrations. She concludes that in her expert opinion, Cerner is the better choice for “clinical practices and specialties,” while “Epic is our pick for bigger hospitals and care networks.” Should you wish to drink further from her Forbes fountain, check out “How To Make Business Cards At Home” or “How To Get Clients In Release Estate.”

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

RCM vendor Aspirion acquires Firm Revenue Cycle Management Services.

People

Amwell hires Kathy Weiler, MA (Optum) as EVP / chief commercial and growth officer.

Today I (accidentally) learned that Care.AI founder and CEO Chakri Toleti – who previously co-founded Galvanon (sold to NCR) and HealthGrid (sold to Allscripts) – is a former actor and Bollywood film director. His brother Raj Toleti, who was involved with those companies along with others in health IT, such as Cytura and PatientPoint, is now founder, CEO, and chairman of Andor Health.

Announcements and Implementations

Five pharmacies of the Wegmans grocery chain will pilot ScripTalk, an RFID tag for prescription containers that allows the drug’s name, dose, instructions, and warnings to be read out loud on the accompanying audio device or on the patient’s phone.

Privacy and Security

The Harris County, TX attorney calls for privacy violation action against Texas Children’s Hospital after an unnamed person provided screen shots of the medical records of children to a conservative think tank, which published them in an article about the hospital’s gender-affirming care services.

In England, a judge dismisses a hospital patient’s privacy lawsuit against Google, ruling that Royal Free London NHS Trust’s sharing of patient medical records with Google’s DeepMind Technologies in 2015 did not violate reasonable expectations of privacy.

Other

In Canada, a Price Edward Island review finds that 1,700 patient referrals were missed when clinic staff forgot to fax them as required by the Telus EHR.

I found via a LinkedIn mention the “Simple Sabotage Field Manual” that was created by the US’s predecessor to the CIA in 1944 to guide “citizen-saboteurs” of occupied countries as gleaned from European experience. Some that pertain to businesses may still have corporate relevance:

• Insist that everything go through channels and don’t allow shortcuts that could expedite decisions.
• Make long speeches that include anecdotes of personal experience.
• Refer all matters to committees that have at least five members.
• Bring up irrelevant issues.
• Revisit decisions made in previous meetings.
• Recommend caution and emphasize avoiding embarrassment in guiding decision-making.
• Promote employees who don’t deserve it and complain about achievers.
• Add layers of required approval and unneeded paperwork.

Sponsor Updates

• CereCore promotes Bob Gronberg to AVP of Meditech professional services and Clay Posey to AVP of technical services.
• Black Book releases the results of its analysis of population health data activation platforms and data management systems, based on the responses of 2,539 survey respondents.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story featuring Shield Medical Group, “Data-Driven Decisions with Healow Insights.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health releases the results of its second “Pharmacy Next: Consumer Care and Cost Trends” survey.
• Nordic will exhibit at Infor Connect 2023 May 22-25 in St. Paul, MN.
• OmniSys will exhibit at the HCP23 Spring Hospital Pharmacy Conference May 22-24 in Indianapolis.
• Sonifi Health expands its customer engagements with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Essentia Health, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, and Griffin Health.
• Talkdesk earns TrustRadius Awards in the contact center, call center workforce optimization, call recording, and VoIP categories.
• Waystar will exhibit at the EClinicalWorks 2023 Enterprise Summit May 22-24 in Boston.

Blog Posts

• Tired of Missed and Late Appointments? Take These Steps! (Net Health)
• Boost clinician satisfaction and reduce burnout in neurology (Nuance)
• Do your managed services KPIs drive value? (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• With Specialist HCP Engagement, the Devil is in the Details (OptimizeRx)
• The Retail Health Chess Game (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Unlocking the Potential of Your Answering Service: Boosting the Provider Experience (PerfectServe)
• Pinc AI Applied Sciences: Expanding Oncology Research with Real-World Data (Premier)
• How HNI Healthcare Reduced Denials and Achieved a 40% Automation Rate (RCxRules)
• The Hidden Economy: Unraveling the Economic Impact of Caregiving in the US (Trualta)
• 5 Tips for Hybrid PT Clinic Marketing (WebPT)
• Care Plans and Evidence-based Clinical Decision Support (Zynx Health)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 5/19/23

Top News

The VA and Oracle Cerner complete their scheduled five-year contract renegotiation.

The VA’s next five-year renewal period will be changed to five, one-year terms.

The revised contract will also include stiffer financial penalties if the Oracle Cerner system fails to meet specific performance metrics.

Reader Comments

From MmSEC Observer: “Re: Veradigm. This is how private equity firms steal shareholder value in taking public companies private. They are pillaging companies that misstep software accounting rules. See Avaya.” Publicly traded digital communications vendor Avaya filed bankruptcy a few weeks ago in a deal that allowed two private equity firm lenders to take control of the company, leaving Avaya’s shareholders with nothing. The company’s problems came to light after executive changes and delays in filing earnings reports that followed a previous bankruptcy filing in 2018. A bondholder class action lawsuit accuses Avaya’s board of “massive fraud” in misleading investors. MDRX shares have lost 34% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 4% gain, valuing the company at just over $1 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Reminder: if your company sponsors HIStalk and is participating in the MUSE conference, give me details for my conference guide.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

RCM automation vendor Adonis raises $17 million in a Series A funding round.

Virtual care management platform vendor HealthSnap raises $9 million in a Series A funding round.

CVS Health will close the clinical trials business that it launched in May 2021. The service provided technology-drive patient recruitment, real-world data collection, and clinical trial delivery.

A Business Insider piece says that Oracle is “crushing morale” among former Cerner employees since its $28 billion acquisition of the company by these actions:

• Laying off 3,000 of 28,000 employees.
• Freezing raises and promotions.
• Vacating Cerner’s former buildings in Kansas City.
• Sidelining former Cerner CEO David Feinberg to a “ceremonial” role as chairman of Oracle Health.

Doximity reports Q4 results: revenue up 18%, adjusted EPS $0.20 versus $0.21, beating expectations for both. Shares dropped 6% on the news to their year-ago price, valuing the physician networking company at $6 billion.

NextGen Healthcare reports Q4 results: revenue up 18%, adjusted EPS $0.31 versus $0.19, beating analyst expectations for both but sending shares down on the news. NXGN shares have lost 16% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 4% gain, valuing the company at $1 billion.

Sales

• Gundersen Health System will implement cloud-based Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform in its seven hospitals and 65 clinics.
• SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University will implement Memora Health’s care delivery platform.

Announcements and Implementations

Executives for Health Innovation, which was known as EHealth Initiative through 2021, will shut down, 22 years after it was founded.

UF Health will acquire Flagler Health+ (FL), with one of Flagler’s goals being to upgrade its IT systems. Flagler chose Allscripts Sunrise in 2011, while UF Health uses Epic.

UnitedHealthcare takes heat for its decision to require prior authorization for colonoscopies starting June 1, a move that left the American Gastroenterological Association “profoundly alarmed and disappointed.” The insurer says approval will be immediate for procedures that follow evidence-based guidelines and within two days otherwise.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for the IPhone on the Apple App Store.

Government and Politics

A judge orders Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes to report to prison to begin serving her 11-year sentence for investor fraud, rejecting her last-minute bid to remain free while she appeals. Holmes and former Theranos COO Sunny Balwani, who is serving a 13-year sentence, were also ordered to pay $452 million in restitution to 12 defrauded investors and former partners Walgreens and Safeway.

An Oklahoma doctor and pharmacist are charged with manslaughter in the death of a 75-year-old rehabilitation center patient from a methotrexate overdose. The physician admitted that he didn’t order correctly, while an investigation found that the pharmacist ignored the computer’s red-letter warning that the prescribed dose of 20 mg of methotrexate daily for seven days – instead of the intended 20 mg every seven days – was excessive.

Privacy and Security

A proposed Federal Trade Commission order would bar ovulation tracking app Premom from sharing user health data in charging the company with making unauthorized disclosures to third parties when its privacy policies claimed it doesn’t. The company will also pay $200,000 in federal and state fines.

Related to the Premom order, FTC seeks comments on its intention to extend the Health Breach Notification Rule to cover health apps.

An Oklahoma allergy clinic shuts down permanently following a cyberattack. The clinic’s physician owner says all of the practice’s technology was impacted when she and her husband downloaded an unspecified IPhone app, locking them out of all of its systems even as patients were receiving appointment reminder text messages. The owner says that the FBI, Department of Justice, and Department of Defense are investigating, but the FBI says it has received no reports about the issue. Social media comments claim that the same doctor abruptly shut down other clinics, including a medical spa, for reasons unrelated to technology.

Sponsor Updates

• Divurgent releases a new episode of The Vurge Podcast, “Digital Mental Health Insights: Breaking the Stigma with Data.”
• Fortified Health Security names Candace Manning (Lifeway) client success manager.
• Loyal wins Best Patient Registration and Scheduling Solution in the MedTech Breakthrough Awards.
• Consensus Cloud Solutions partners with Hyland Software to offer a digital cloud fax solution that integrates with OnBase.
• AvaSure, which offers acute virtual care and remote safety monitoring solutions, establishes a chief nursing executive advisory board with 10 inaugural members.
• CereCore will recruit and train hundreds of EHR and clinical informatics staff over the next one to three years to support HCA Healthcare’s deployment of Meditech Expanse.
• Nordic releases a video titled “The Download: Valuing IT as an Asset to Improve Patient Care.”

Blog Posts

• What does Consensus CTO, Jeffrey Sullivan, have to say about Generative AI? (Consensus Cloud Solutions)
• Can AI Replace Your Doctor? (Dimensional Insight)
• HIPAA: 4 Enforcement Discretions Expire with End of PHE (Experity)
• The key to better, faster innovation: Healthcare data standardization (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Demystifying Compliance: How Interoperability Solutions Can Simplify Healthcare Regulations (Medhost)
• In Healthcare, an AI Pause Isn’t Feasible. But, an AI Strategy Is. (Lucem Health)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 5/17/23

Top News

Connected health company Validic acquires Cox Communications subsidiary Trapollo, which offers technology and services that help healthcare organizations care for patients at home.

The companies had previously partnered to support a West Coast IDN’s personalized care program.

Cox will become an investor in Validic as part of the acquisition.

Reader Comments

From Vera Dime-a-Dozen: “Re: MDRX, formerly Allscripts and now Veradigm. Were supposed to restate their 10K on May 8, but it has been postponed to mid-June as the internal audit continues to identify issues.” The company says in a recent SEC filing that it hopes to file the 10-K by June 14, but can’t guarantee it. The company announced on March 22 that the year-end audit and 10-K filing would be extended because of “internal control deficiencies related to revenue recognition.” Veradigm expects the audit to have a revenue impact of $40 million that will require restating its 2021 financials.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Gmail suddenly started sending legitimate incoming emails to  spam a few weeks ago, I noticed yesterday, including entries from the Rumor Report and Contact forms. I added some inbox rules that should fix that, but let me know if you didn’t receive a reply that you expected.

Attention HIStalk sponsors that are participating in the MUSE Inspire conference June 7-10 in Aurora, CO — send me your details and I’ll include them in my online list of sponsor activities there. I see some sponsor names sprinkled among those companies that have booths in the sold-out exhibit hall of the conference’s 40th anniversary.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisition, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare pricing transparency startup Cascade Health raises $1.7 million in venture funding. It has developed healthcare pricing APIs and an AI-powered chatbot that answers patient questions about procedure pricing and insurance coverage. Co-founders Ana-Maria Constantin and Pulak Goyal hail from Microsoft.

People

Divurgent CEO Ed Marx announces on LinkedIn that he has left the company after one year and will work as an independent consultant. The company made no announcement, but its leadership page shows that founder Colin Konschak, RPh, MBA, who stepped down from the CEO job in May 2022 but remained board chair, is again serving in both roles.

Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer of Intelligent Medical Objects, resigns to take a one-year professional break.

CereCore promotes Peyman Zand, MBA to chief strategy officer.

HCTec hires Bill Lewkowski (Lewkowski Associates) as VP of strategic client services.

Rhapsody names Jeff Chiumiento (Rocket Software) as CFO.

Jason Prestinario, MS (Komodo Health) joins Particle Health as CEO.

Jane Casey, RN, MS (Humber River Hospital) joins Tampa General Hospital as VP of CareComm Operations, its clinical command center.

Zyter|TruCare names Kevin Riley, MBA (Salesforce) as  president and CEO.

John George (Validic) joins Gozio Health as chief sales officer.

Sales

• Piedmont Healthcare (GA) will launch a remote patient monitoring program using RPM software from Telemetrix and devices, care management, and coaching from Remote Care Partners.
• The University of Mississippi Medical Center selects remote patient monitoring software, services, and resources from AMC Health.

Announcements and Implementations

CHIME opens registration for its Fall Forum November 9-12 in Phoenix, AZ for its provider members.

The West Hawaiʻi Region of Hawaiʻi Health Systems will go live on Epic June 1 through a Community Connect partnership with The Queen’s Health System.

Hendrick Health (TX) launches a wayfinding app developed by Gozio Health.

A Connected Health Initiative survey finds that 89 million Americans use a wearable device, with fitness tracking being the most common use followed by sleep and weight monitoring. Nearly all of the users are sharing data with their healthcare provider or are willing to, while 40% of those with a chronic condition say that the device has simplified their health management. More than half of HSA/FSA participants who don’t have a wearable say they would be more likely to buy one if they could fund the purchase from those accounts.

Government and Politics

Minnesota lawmakers are planning make a single exception to the state’s proposed patient-to-nurse hospital staffing ratio regulation for Mayo Clinic, which threatened to pull billions of dollars worth of investments out of the state in protest over the bill and another involving price transparency. House Speaker Melissa Hortmann says the exception is justified because “Mayo is different” and “an asset that is known all over the world.” Draft legislation would exempt hospitals that aren’t in the Twin Cities, that use an electronic nurse acuity system, and that have 40% of patients coming from out of state, requirements that only Mayo in Rochester meets.

Other

Netsmart earns top user satisfaction rankings among behavioral health technology vendors, according to a Black Book survey of 2,847 end-users.

UF Health launches tele-pharmacy kiosks from MedAvail Technologies at three of its ERs. Newly discharged patients can virtually consult with a pharmacist and pick up medications within about five minutes.

A Black Book survey of health system IT leaders finds that Care.ai is the top emerging ambient intelligence solution. The company has deployed AI solutions for infection prevention and control, patient and protocol monitoring, workforce optimization, and virtual care in 1,500 organizations.

A researcher warns that companies are rolling out AI-powered search tools for academic databases and research journals without understanding the opportunities and limitations of those tools. The author calls for evidence-based groups to audit individual search tools and publish their suitable uses so that research projects aren’t skewed.

Sponsor Updates

• Ellkay, which participates annually in the Go the Distance for Autism biking event, seeks donations to help it meet its fundraising goal of $35,000.
• Artera expands its online learning center, Artera Academy, to include an improved user dashboard, integrated events hub, and more accessible learning resources.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “The current state of cybersecurity in the healthcare industry.”
• Nordic publishes a podcast titled “Designing for Health: Dr. Adam Wright.”
• Bamboo Health will exhibit at the Medicare Star Ratings, HEDIS, Quality Assurance & Risk Conference June 5-7 in Chicago.
• Biofourmis will sponsor the Hospital @ Home Leadership Summit June 5-6 in Boston.
• CloudWave will exhibit at the NRHA Annual Rural Health Conference through May 19 in San Diego.

Blog Posts

• Specialty Pharmacists Get a Seat at the Table (Surescripts)
• Happy Birthday to Advanced Reporting & Analytics! (AdvancedMD)
• Revenue Integrity: Healthcare’s Growing Need (AGS Health)
• The Modern Odyssey: How do I find a ‘good doctor?’ (Amenities)
• Looming crisis: managing Medicaid redetermination as the PHE ends (Arcadia)
• Three Lessons for Optimizing Corporate Events (Ascom)
• The Butterfly Effect: Azara 2023 Annual User Conference Highlights (Azara Healthcare)
• How high-fidelity data could drive better predictive care and research insights (Philips Capsule)
• Creative Staffing Coordination for Budget-Friendly Epic Implementations (CereCore)
• How CCM Can Help Your Urology Practice (ChartSpan)
• Connecting to Greater Possibilities and Providing Care Anywhere (CHIME)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 5/15/23

Top News

Real-world healthcare data marketplace operator Prognos Health raises $23 million in growth equity.

The company offers life sciences customers access to the integrated lab and health record data of 325 million de-identified patients.

The co-founders are Sundeep Bhan and Jason Bhan, MD.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents say their employers haven’t dialed back remote work options.

New poll to your right or here, inspired by Dr. Jayne’s XGM recap: What behavior of fellow conference education session attendees do you find most annoying? I am most bugged by those who charge the microphone during Q&A to deliver pontification that is poorly disguised as a question, which clears the room like someone yelling “fire” in a theater. If your insecurity doesn’t allow you to sit quietly while someone else holds the audience’s attention, then sign up as a presenter next time.

My best HIMSS23 takeaway was an first-timer’s appreciation for Chicago’s chicken Vesuvio, which I made at home this weekend with great success. It sounds unexciting on paper, but is brilliant.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Lucem Health. The Raleigh, NC-based company transforms the science of clinical AI into trusted point-of-care solutions that scale. With its comprehensive, AI-agnostic platform for building, operationalizing, and improving clinical AI solutions, Lucem Health brings the full power and potential of clinical AI from the lab to the front lines of healthcare, where it can help clinicians deliver better care, improve patient outcomes, and lower costs. The company envisions a world in which clinicians detect problems before they become life-threatening and patients get world class care, everywhere. Thanks to Lucem Health for supporting HIStalk.

I found this overview of Lucem Health on YouTube.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Digital Health KC launches to encourage health technology people, especially those who worked for Cerner or other KC-based companies, to return to the area. The CEO is former Cerner executive Dick Flanigan.

Sales

• Emory Healthcare will implement NeuroFlow to provide behavioral services in a collaborative care model with its primary care clinics.

Announcements and Implementations

Victoria, BC-based Island Health celebrates Canada’s National Nurse Week by honoring the nurses who are working to implement its Oracle Cerner EHR.

The senior director of the Collaboration to Harmonize Antimicrobial Registry Measures (CHARM), which analyzes the EHRs of participating organizations for current prescribing practices, says that up to 80% of outpatient antibiotic use is inappropriate, either because the drug isn’t needed or is ordered incorrectly.

Epic updates its Epic Research Data Tracker to publish every-other-week metric updates on respiratory illnesses and other topics using data from Cosmos, allowing continuous monitoring that is often beyond the capability of public health organizations.

John Snow Labs posts demos of AI-powered models that can summarize clinical text, medical journal articles, consumer medical questions, and radiology reports.

Privacy and Security

HHS’s cybersecurity center warns that Veeam Backup and Replication software contains a vulnerability that hackers are exploiting.

Other

In England, the mother of a 19-year-old patient whose hand was bruised significantly during a blood draw shows the hospital a photo of the nurse watching soccer on his phone as he stuck her. The trust says the nurse was on break and decided to treat the patient anyway, which the mother says isn’t true. However, the trust adds that it will be more diligent about staff members using phones at work.

Sponsor Updates

• Netsmart customers celebrate key milestones at the company’s CONNECTIONS2023 conference in Washington, DC.
• Meditech recognizes the Institute for Health Metrics as their data collaborator to support and accelerate health equity at hospitals across the country.
• Surescripts releases a new episode of its There’s a Better Way Podcast, “Getting to Interoperability 2.0 with ONC’s Micky Tripathi.”
• Netsmart will integrate Findhelp’s closed-loop referral solution with its CareFabric platform.
• Magellan Healthcare details the success it has seen with NeuroFlow’s integrated behavioral healthcare solutions.
• Nordic will present at the AMIA 2023 Clinical Informatics Conference May 24 in Chicago.
• PerfectServe honors over 200 outstanding nurses in its third annual Nurses of Note Awards program.
• Tegria will exhibit at the MUSE Inspire Conference June 7-10 in Denver.
• Zynx Health parent company Hearst Health names Stanford Medicine the winner of the Hearst Health Prize in partnership with the UCLA Center for SMART Health.

Blog Posts

• Healthcare Hinges on Interoperability and Exchanging Quality Information (Surescripts)
• Why a 4K video about Meditech’s Might? Because it’s a once in a generation story we can all learn from (Meditech)
• Healthcare Compliance Risk Management Strategies for Effective Implementation (Net Health)
• The future of ambulatory care, part 3: The practical benefits of Dragon Medical One for ambulatory care clinicians (Nuance)
• The Top 6 Things That Pharmacies Need to Know About the Ending of the PHE (OmniSys)
• AI Interventions to Quench Burnout (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Nurses of Note Awards 2023: The Nursing Team at Blue Mountain Hospital, a Critical Access Facility (PerfectServe)
• Optimizing Front-End Revenue Cycle Management: The Power of Prior Authorization (PMD)
• Five Ways AP Automation Can Ease Burnout, Turnover in a Healthcare Organization’s Finance Department (Premier)
• The Unique Challenges Facing Caregivers of Veterans (Trualta)
• We must do better: alignment, evidence & clear care pathways are available now (Volpara Health)
• Develop a data-rich dashboard: Which medical billing metrics matter? (Waystar)
• How to Make a Hybrid PT Practice Work (WebPT)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 5/12/23

Top News

London-based, digital-first primary care operator Babylon Health will take itself private, 18 months after it went public in a SPAC merger that the CEO says was a “big mistake.”

The company just reported Q1 results: revenue up 17%, EPS –$2.53 versus –$1.71, with shares falling 84% in the past two days on the news.

BBLN shares have lost more than 99% of their value since trading began on October 22, 2001, with the market capitalization of the one-time high flyer sliding from $4 billion to $30 million.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Amenities. The Dallas-based company helps health systems grow top-line revenues and earn scalable ROI. Its Digital Membership Platform is a suite of e-commerce tools designed explicitly to: (1) Acquire new patients: Verify identity and register new patients with full EMR and patient portal accounts in under 30 seconds, with just one question. That means zero data entry, photo uploads, or duplicate accounts. (2) Upgrade tools (i.e., MyChart). Improve the design, usability, and conversion rate of critical revenue drivers like provider search, provider profiles, appointment scheduling, and proxy management. Additionally, aggregate and promote same-day care options in one simple place and maximize the visibility and usage of all access options.(3) Win patient loyalty. Create memberships designed explicitly to help keep patients in network. Build personalized experiences for members (i.e., health plan, ACO, D2E, MA, or other VBC groups) with custom networks, care options, vendor services, pricing, and more. Or, better yet, offer highly unique and market-tested features like a financial package that includes “no surprise billing” guarantee, transparent pricing, affordability scores on providers, and more. You may well know CEO Aasim Saeed, MD, MPA, who launched the company in 2021 after serving as VP of digital health for Baylor Scott & White Health. Thanks to Amenities for supporting HIStalk.

A wise company has taken advantage of my “Small Booth Special” first-year sponsorship discount for non-sponsors that occupied a 10×20 or smaller HIMSS23 booth. Get with Lorre by June 1 to shed the small-booth stigma and enjoy the same ad size as everyone else, a prime location that isn’t just a waypoint on the way to the bathrooms, and a 365-day audience of heavy hitters instead of those looking for a quiet part of the exhibit hall to make phone calls.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

National medical group Envision Healthcare is planning to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy as it struggles with $7 billion in debt, high labor costs, and federal legislation that has limited the company’s key business model element of surprise medical billing. KKR, which took the company private in 2018 in a $10 billion deal, will likely lose its entire investment.

Amino Health, whose platform guides members to cost-effective providers, raises $80 million in financing. The company previously pivoted from direct-to-consumer sales to focus on self-insured employers, health plans, and third-party administrators.

Lavita, whose health data marketplace platform allows people to control and monetize their digital health information for purposes such as clinical trials recruitment, raises $5 million in seed funding.

Business Insider lists the digital health market predictions of several healthcare bankers, which include:

• Behavioral health care companies will consolidate by merging.
• Companies that sell to employers will need to consolidate to improve their clinical models in an environment where companies are reducing their vendor count.
• Companies that will address healthcare labor shortages with AI will be attractive to buyers if they can prove ROI.
• Companies that address value-based care will continue to draw funding and interest.
• Startups that are struggling to reduce costs or raise money will need to consolidate to find a path to profitability, and private equity firms will sell some of their holdings even at less-attractive valuations.
• M&A, rather than IPOs or funding rounds, will dominate digital health.
• The digital health market will make a comeback within a year and well-capitalized firms are already targeting acquisitions, especially of companies that can use data to reduce waste and administrative complexity, automate standard protocols, and increase health system productivity.

Sales

• Center for Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery chooses EClinicalWorks and Healow.
• Victoria, Australia’s health department will implement Altera Digital Health’s DbMotion for a statewide HIE.

People

Henry Archibong, MS (Inovalon) joins HealthMark Group as head of interoperability and innovation.

Scott Jones, MBA (ConnectiveRx) joins Equiva Health as COO.

Athenahealth hires George Hamilton, MBA (UnitedHealth Group) as chief corporate strategy and development officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Medhost launches an interoperability solution that meets ONC’s expanded requirements with an AWS data store, FHIR APIs, and common interfaces.

A small study finds that radiologists of all experience levels who use AI-supported mammography systems are prone to “automation bias,” in which they accept the technology’s assessment even when it is wrong.

A group of 21 Ontario hospitals launches the Ontario EHub HIE with technology and services from Oracle Health.

Government and Politics

The COVID-19 Public Health Emergency officially ended at end of day Thursday. US COVID-19 deaths are at 1.1 million and continue increasing at more than 1,000 per week.

CHIME asks people to email and tweet members of Congress asking them to repeal the Section 510 funding ban on creating a unique patient identifier.

Privacy and Security

Meta files a motion to dismiss a class action lawsuit that accuses the company of privacy violations for sharing the medical data of users with advertisers via its Facebook Pixel website tracking tool. Meta says it’s the website developer’s job to understand how the technology works and to decide which information to send to advertisers.

Other

ProPublica notes that federal law requires insurers to share claims-related documents with the insured person and offers a form for requesting the information. The file can include notes, phone call audio, and internal correspondence that was involved with deciding whether to pay a claim.

In Canada’s Prince Edward Island, a family physician is closing his practice because of burnout that he says was caused by the province’s dysfunctional EHR. Thor Christensen, MD touts the value of electronic records, but says the Telus system is inefficient, is unconnected to the systems other providers, and has forced him to take on technology and billing tasks that eat up his evening hours. The 39-year-old doctor says that issuing a prescription takes up to five minutes versus 15 seconds on paper. PEI chose the Telus Health system in February 2021 as the island’s single EHR.

Bizarre: a 23-year-old Snapchat influencer expects to make $5 million per month from her $1-per-minute “digital girlfriend” voice chatbot, which was created from her YouTube videos and ChatGPT.

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book Research announces the top comprehensive RCM solutions for laboratories and ancillaries based on the feedback of 2,663 healthcare and medical users.
• Care.ai joins The Leapfrog Group’s Innovators for Leapfrog collaborative as a charter member.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Experience a More Efficient EMR with V12.”
• Technology executive Philip Pead joins WebPT’s board.
• Surescripts publishes a new podcast titled “Talking the Future of Pharmacy with Rina Shah.”
• Direct Recruiters Inc. promotes Aaron Kutz, Shayla Jastrzebski, and Kim Jaber to partner.
• Divurgent partners with HIMSS as a preferred digital health technology partner.
• Healthcare Triangle will present at the 2023 MUSE Inspire Conference June 9-10 in Denver.
• Konza National Network will present at WEDI’s virtual Annual Spring Conference May 24.
• Nordic posts Episode 205 of its DocTalk podcast titled “Decentralized care supports the health of older adults,”
• Jon Lauck joins Rhapsody’s board as chair.

Blog Posts

• 3 Takeaways from the HIMSS 2023 Global Health Conference (Divurgent)
• Medicaid Updates: How Eligibility and PHE Changes Impact Urgent Care (Experity)
• Creating Education That Helps People Advocate for Their Health (Healthwise)
• UKG Dimensions Latest Release (R9 U3): What’s In It for Healthcare Clients? (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• How Value IQ + EQ Creates Sustainable Improvements (Impact Advisors)
• Building long-term ROI with BI modernization (Nordic)
• Innovating a Better Future (InterSystems)
• Surescripts Calls on the Industry to Make Pharmacists a Permanent Part of Patient Care Teams (Surescripts)
• Looking inward: How your tech stack can help improve data quality (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Reasons to Transform Your Current Software Test Approach (Keysight)
• Demystifying Compliance: How Interoperability Solutions Can Simplify Healthcare Regulations (Medhost)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 5/10/23

Top News

Hackers breach the systems of NextGen Healthcare and access the information of one million patients, according to a filed breach report.

The company says that its cloud-based NextGen Office EHR/PM was accessed using stolen credentials between March 29 and April 14, 2023.

NextGen was also breached in a ransomware attack in January 2023.

Reader Comments

From Sundowner: “Re: Oracle Cerner’s Helix molecular diagnostics platform. I hear that they are sunsetting it. Can you confirm?” I’ve heard this from multiple readers. I’ve asked an Oracle media contact to clarify, but haven’t heard back.

From Tootie: “Re: Sentara. Another $1M down the drain. They must have used the same firm Intermountain did. Perhaps health systems should rethink adding to their already bloated C-suites. I mean how many marketing, digital, experience, etc., ‘leaders’ do they really need to come up with this stuff? I have interns who can crank out better options than this in an hour. Maybe hospitals really do need ChatGPT.” Sentara claims to possess a newfound focus on overall health in renaming itself to Sentara Health, also announcing plans to rename its health plans under Sentara Health Plans. The president and CEO claims that the slightly new name will make healthcare simple, seamless, personal, and more affordable, apparently anxious to break free of being held back all these years by the omission of “health” in its name. Oddly, the organization says people should just keep calling it “Sentara” when talking about it. Interestingly, Sentara’s first hospital under its old name was called Retreat for the Sick, which seems most accurate and least gimmicky. The ever-growing health system chose the Sentara name in 1987 following a consultant’s recommendation to pick a meaningless name that it could copyright. It has since (expensively) gone through the usual hospital evolution of trendy names – Sentara Health System, Sentara Healthcare, Sentara, and now Sentara Health. Despite their emphasis on “health,” they still make most of their money from “healthcare.” I consulted with ChatGPT, which opines that spending all that money when Sentara is already well known as a healthcare organization might be silly, not to mention that business name changes usually involve shortening a name rather than making it longer.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

That big banner spot at the top of every HIStalk page is available after years of being fully booked, so get in touch if your company is interested.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Waystar. Healthcare payments are too complex for providers and patients. It’s time to simplify. Waystar’s technology is the way to make healthcare payments more human, helping your team prioritize care, improve margins, and give patients more clarity and trust. Waystar provides market-leading technology that simplifies and unifies healthcare payments. Its cloud-based platform streamlines workflows and improves financials for healthcare providers of all kinds, and brings more transparency to the patient financial experience. The Waystar platform is used by more than 450,000 providers, 750 health systems and hospitals, and 5,000 health plans and integrates with all major HIS and practice management systems. Thanks to Waystar for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Premier Inc. is evaluating strategic alternatives that could involve selling some or all of the company. PINC shares – which rose 6% on the announcement — are down 28% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 1% gain, valuing the company at $3 billion. The company said in its most recent earnings call in February 2023 that it would realign its Remitra invoice and payment platform business due to slower-than-expected adoption. It noted that its group purchasing business was being affected by lower provider utilization, reduced pricing and demand for pandemic-related categories, and provider use of previously stockpiled supplies. Premier has implemented a cost savings plan that included layoffs.

The New York Times looks at the rapid pace at which big corporations such as CVS Health and Amazon are acquiring primary care practices, especially those that serve Medicare Advantage patients. Seven in 10 doctors are employed by either a health system or a corporation, and while those owners tout cost savings and care coordination, experts warn that profit-seeking behavior will increase overall costs and frustrate patients and providers with gatekeeping functions such as prior authorization. The at-risk shared cost saving structure of Medicare Advantage allows primary care doctors to be paid up to $14,000 per year to manage a single patient instead of a few hundred dollars per visit.

Sales

• Australia’s Northern Health contracts for Agfa’s enterprise imaging solution for radiology.
• Weirton Medical Center (WV) will implement Oracle Cerner in a $65 million project. The hospital sued Cerner in 2017 over problems with its $30 million implementation in 2013 of Siemens Health Services Soarian. Cerner acquired that company in early 2015. The hospital said Cerner executives told them that they had inherited an unprofitable deal, after which Cerner failed to keep the promises Siemens had made.
• Nashville General Hospital (TN) will implement RLDatix solutions for governance, risk, compliance, and workforce management.

People

Jackson Healthcare promotes Brad Chason to SVP of IT.

Edifecs hires Chris Lance, MBA (Evolent Health) as chief product officer.

Medicus promotes Tony Niemotka to EVP of community health.

Announcements and Implementations

Medhost’s Medteam Solutions services business launches a managed IT services program that includes infrastructure management, network administration, and desktop support.

Harrison County Community Hospital (MO) goes live on Meditech Expanse’s patient portal, while Pinckneyville Community Hospital implements the full Meditech Expanse system.

Northwell Health provides $500,000 in funding each of to two employee-proposed innovation projects: (a) an AI-enabled solution to navigate cancer patients to care and clinical trials; and (b) a trigeminal nerve stimulator to help in recovery of acute ischemic stroke.

Australia will spend $290 million in a two-year project to modernize its My Health Record system, which will include a new national repository and increased connection to GPs and pharmacies. The health minister describes the system, which was implemented as a personally controlled EHR in 2012, as “a pretty outdated, clunky, PDF format system.”

A new KLAS report on interactive patient systems – which include patient care coordination, BYOD integration, non-clinical service requests, room controls, feedback surveys digital door signs, digital whiteboards, and in-room telehealth – finds that PCare earns the top performance score of 93.2. Vibe Health by EVideon is broadly evaluated in all areas except BYOD integration, while Epic, Sonifi Health, and Oneview Healthcare are rarely seen as complete solutions.

Government and Politics

The VA tells the technology modernization committee of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs that while Oracle Cerner is improving its pharmacy software, the changes are “small and incremental”and need to be sped up. Oracle EVP Mike Sicilia says that Cerner had provided the VA with an “unacceptable” timeline of three years to fix problems involving integration of Medication Manager Retail to PowerChart to support the VA’s role as both prescriber and prescription filler. Sicilia did not mention his previous commitment for Oracle to rewrite the pharmacy system by April 2023. Committee chair Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) closed the hearing by saying that, “The worst thing the VA could do is  to continue down this dead-end road perpetuating the same failed strategy” and says that he expects to see the VA “disentangle itself from this monopoly” by next week’s contract renegotiation deadline, urging the VA to “cut their losses and move on” because Oracle is unlikely to be able to resolve existing problems quickly enough to meet the VA’s needs.

Privacy and Security

A study finds that one hospital’s ransomware attack disrupts other local EDs, leading the authors to recommend that cyberattacks be treated as disasters with coordinated planning and response efforts. The authors found that the EDs of hospitals that were not part of the cyberattack saw resulting jumps in patient census, ambulance arrivals, waiting room times, patients who left without being seen, and length of stay as the affected hospital recovered its systems.

Other

Northwell Health sues a former Long Island Jewish Medical Center morgue attendant who allegedly posted autopsy videos on her Instagram and TikTok accounts under the name “Autopsy Bae.” Hospital administrators confronted Quantaise Sharpton, who expressed no remorse for being an “influencer” with 20,000 followers who monetizes morgue “content.” She also claimed that her intention was to inspire her followers to pursue mortician and autopsy careers.

Sponsor Updates

• Clinical Architecture releases its “2023 Healthcare Data Quality Report,” highlighting the impact that data quality has on patient care and organization performance.
• Black Book Research announces that Netsmart has swept the post-acute health technology platform ratings for highest customer satisfaction in its annual client experience polling of 20 top vendors.
• Access publishes a new patient e-signature case study, “Northern Regional Hospital: Creating a Better Experience for Healthcare Workers and Patients.”
• AdvancedMD publishes a new e-book, “The Current State of Telehealth in Ambulatory Care.”
• Arrive Health publishes a new white paper, “The Terrifying Truth About America’s Healthcare Affordability Crisis.”
• Availity wins the platinum-level Healthiest Companies Award from the First Coast Worksite Wellness Council.
• Baker Tilly publishes a new case study, “Medical products provider undergoes PMO assessment to prioritize initiatives and improve technology landscape.”
• ChartSpan and Illinois Primary Health Care Association partner for better health outcomes in Illinois.
• CTG releases a new episode of its This Week Health Podcast featuring Managing Director of Health Solutions in North America Tanya Johnson.

Blog Posts

• Setting the Stage for Investing in Revenue Cycle AI and Automation (AGS Health)
• Accelerating Your Data Innovation Journey in the Healthcare Industry (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Top 10 Leading Healthcare Analytics Companies to Watch (Arcadia)
• Data in the past fuels the future (Oracle Health)
• 2023 CHIME CIO Survey Results Are In (Part 1) (CereCore)
• What Do AI, Data Quality, EHR Issues, and Resources All Have in Common? (Clearsense)
• Clearwater’s Brand Evolution and Steadfast Healthcare Focus (Clearwater)
• Will AI help healthcare systems fight against disintermediation? (Nordic)
• The Cloud Revolution’s Talent Demand (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Highlights from HIMSS23 – Interoperability is No Longer a Buzzword (Consensus Cloud Solutions)
• Asembia 2023: Payers, Pharma and Pharmacy Discuss Patient Access (CoverMyMeds)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 5/8/23

Top News

UC San Diego Health will use a $22 million donation to create a mission control center for digital medical data.

The health system notes that many systems issue constant streams of potentially useful data, which requires experts and AI to isolate the elements and trends that would be immediately useful to caregivers.

The donation and the plan to develop the center were announced in February 2023. They were explained further in last week’s Innovation in Digital Health symposium.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’m relieved that poll results suggest that I’m not the only one who has zero interest in sitting through videos and podcasts that were made at HIMSS23. I’m feigning anticipation of the educational session recordings, but I know from past years that my interest drops off quickly in the weeks it takes for them to be posted.

New poll to your right or here: Has your employer cut back on remote work in the past year? I drew the ire of several readers in July 2022 when I said this:

Economic and industry conditions have put bosses back in charge and they know that they need to manage costs while fretting less that their employees might flee to greener pastures … I bet many executives agree with me that you can’t build and maintain a great company when employees are doing task work in their living rooms … I expect companies to compromise by offering a hybrid model of 1-2 offsite work days per week or maybe going with a permanent four-day workweek.

GLP-1 weight loss drugs such as Wegovy and Ozempic are fascinating, especially as they negatively affect the work of physicians. Insurers don’t want to pay for them, so they are adding bureaucratic measures to impede demand, such as prior authorization and documentation proving that less expensive alternatives were tried and failed. Second, patients who cannot afford to pay $800 to $1,500 per month will pressure their doctors to falsely diagnose them with diabetes so their insurance will pay, which could land the doctors in trouble in the absence of supporting clinical documentation. The US is a weight loss drug dream market of overweight people (two-thirds of the population), lobbyist-friendly politicians, and unregulated drug pricing, and while these drugs might improve an individual’s health, our system of frequent job and insurance changes doesn’t reward employers and insurers who spend money today to save someone else on healthcare expenses years from now. And we like drugs better than behavioral changes, as the now-shuttered Jenny Craig can attest.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shares of the Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health ETF were unchanged over the past month versus the SP& 500’s 1% gain. They are down 25% since inception in July 2020 versus the S&P’s 26% gain. Top holdings are Masimo, Doximity, Alibaba, JD Health, and DexCom. 

Minnesota’s largest employer, Mayo Clinic, threatens to redirect billions of its investment dollars to other states in protest of two bills that would: (a) set a maximum patient-to-nurse staffing ratio; and (b) create a Health Care Affordability Board that would set healthcare spending growth targets, enhance provider transparency, and explore alternative payment programs.

People

Nym promotes Or Peles to CEO. He replaces co-founder Amihai Neiderman, who will remain on the company’s board.

Announcements and Implementations

Redox announces its reimagined product portfolio: Nexus (integration); Nexus Lite (a lightweight, self-service offering); Access (connection to Carequality and DirectTrust); Chroma (a Verato-powered EMPI); and Nova (transform legacy standards to FHIR using existing provider integrations and libraries).

Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital incorporates Indigenous healing and wellness practices into Epic.

A new KLAS report on hospice software finds that MatrixCare and WellSky are ranked highest for independent hospices, while Epic Comfort is top ranked overall by its hospital-owned hospice users.

Government and Politics

The Senate Finance Committee wants to hold health plans accountable for “ghost networks,” citing a secret shopper study by Senate staffers in which only 18% could get an appointment with a mental health provider that was listed by 12 Medicare Advantage plans. Another audit of MA plans found that 73% of dermatologists who were listed as in-network providers could not be booked for an appointment due to duplicate entries or a change in plans they accept. 

Kell West Regional Hospital, which was one of just four hospitals that CMS fined for failing to comply with its price transparency rule, will appeal the $117,000 fine because it has successfully met CMS requirements after a company it had hired failed to deliver.

Privacy and Security

The ALPHV group of ransomware hackers say they have breached Constellation Software, whose software groups include healthcare-focused Harris Computer, and are threatening to publicly post 1 TB of its data if it fails to pay the ransom. Constellation, which has acquired 500 software companies since 1995, says it has restored its infrastructure and none of the IT systems of its companies was affected. An ALPHV ransomware attack took down the Colonial Pipeline in May 2021, triggering panic buying that caused gasoline shortages in the eastern US even though the company paid the demanded $4.4 million almost immediately. 

Other

Don Detmer, MD, MA and Andrew Gettinger, MD list essential EHR reforms for the this decade in a JAMA viewpoint article in which they also advocate use of technology such as ambient voice recognition, AI, and cloud-based medication and allergy lists.:

• Develop a national patient identifier as HIPAA originally mandated.
• Remove administrative and regulatory content from clinical time. CMS should replace check-the-box documentation by deriving quality measures from existing documentation.
• Include patient-entered information in the EHR.
• Reinvent the clinical note to become prospective and to encourage less documentation instead of more. Ban copy-paste and copy-forward functions.

Scan Health President and CEO Sachin Jain, MD, MBA says in a Forbes opinion piece that health systems have “an epidemic of inauthenticity and superficial execution” as much-publicized projects are never scaled beyond pilots or limited deployment, broken care processes are hidden, and regression to the mean is presented as evidence of impact. He adds that we have normalized inauthenticity as being good salesmanship, as people are selling their ideas and building their brands despite lack of real impact, which will eventually breed cynicism and burnout. 

Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD observes “The Curious Side Effects of Medical Transparency” in a New Yorker essay, where she ponders how her practice has changed due to Cures Act requirements that patients be given access to clinician documentation:

• She worries that patients will become alarmed if she records her differential diagnosis correctly and they see serious but unlikely possible diagnoses that she is ruling out.
• She cites experts who question whether transparency should be its own ideal or whether it should be compared with other ways to deliver the same end result.
• Seniors whose technology is managed by their adult children have asked her to keep some prescriptions private, and having multiple family members accessing the patient’s portal can make it hard to determine whether communications are going to them directly or to detect when patient records are being accessed by people who are harming them.
• The use of multi-test lab panels almost ensures that every patient will get a slightly out-of-range result that will be highlighted as abnormal, or the results of tests whose result can’t be expressed as a simple yes or no.
• She spends time every day managing a flood of patient questions about new test results and is forced to try to answer urgent questions quickly without having completed basic legwork.

Sponsor Updates

• Wolters Kluwer Health staff in Waltham, MA clean up the banks of the Charles River as part of its Green is Green initiative.
• Drug Store News recognizes OmniSys XiFin Pharmacy Solutions for the second time with its annual Retail Excellence Award – Technology and Automation.
• An OptimizeRx physician survey finds that they are receiving life sciences product information from a variety of channels, but with gaps, and with a need for more information about treatment eligibility, affordability, and access.
• Sectra releases a new episode of its Let’s Talk Enterprise Imaging Podcast, “Beyond the technology – how Sectra provides end-to-end SaaS security.”
• Black Book Research names Andor Health to the top spot in virtual care collaboration solutions based on a survey of nearly 1,000 health system executives.
• KLAS awards Ellkay its Points of Light award, recognizing the company’s payer-provider collaboration efforts via bi-directional connectivity. 
• National Medical Care Company in Saudi Arabia selects Wolters Kluwer Health’s UpToDate, UpToDate Advanced, and Medi-Span solutions.
• First Databank VP of Clinical Network Services Lathe Bigler will present at the NCPDP 2023 Annual Technology & Business Conference May 9 in Scottsdale, AZ.

Blog Posts

• Will AI help healthcare systems fight against disintermediation? (Nordic)
• Managing Alert Fatigue – an Alarming Problem! (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Next-Best Action: Elevating the Future of Omnichannel HCP Marketing (OptimizeRx)
• Healthcare Coding Series: SNOMED CT (Pivot Point Consulting)
• How Better Communication Management Ensures Top of License Practice (PerfectServe)
• The Complexities of Behavioral Health Billing (PMD)
• AI’s stretch towards the last mile (Nordic)
• Missouri Health System Increases Provider Engagement with PINC AI Stanson (Premier)
• HCC Model v28 Proposed Changes: Opposing Viewpoints (RCxRules)
• Post-pandemic HIMSS v1.0 – 2023’s event unwrapped (Redox)
• Reaching Peak Healthcare Interoperability Together One Step at a Time (Surescripts)
• All about the people: Transforming care with the UVM Health Network (Tegria)
• Is healthcare home to the next wave of AI innovation? What to consider as the industry weighs the potential impact of AI on the patient experience. (Upfront Healthcare)
• The Federal Breast Density Inform Rule: Huge Leap Forward, But More to Do (Volpara Health)
• 11 Google Business Profile Tips to Dominate Local SEO (WebPT)
• Tackling Rising Denial Rates in 2023 (Vyne Medical)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 5/5/23

Top News

The Drug Enforcement Administration, reacting to the record 38,000 comments it received about its intention to reinstate pre-COVID telehealth prescribing limitations for controlled drugs with the end of the public health emergency, will leave the flexibilities intact as it reexamines the issue.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A reader previously asked me for financial highlights from HIMSS. The organization hasn’t filed a federal Form 990 since May 2021, after which it changed its fiscal year-end to December 31, so records are current only through June 2020. That wasn’t a good year for HIMSS, when it had to cancel its cash cow annual conference. I’ve reported the numbers previously (they are two years old, after all), but here again are the highlights:

• Total revenue dropped 74% to $29 million.
• Profit slid from $21 million to a loss of $54 million, which swung net assets from $33 million to negative $24 million.
• Top-earning executives were President and CEO Hal Wolf ($1.4 million), former EVP Carla Smith ($1.3 million, of which $375,000 was severance), and 11 others who earned from $250,000 to $666,000.
• HIMSS reported a revenue breakout of $12 million from membership, $10 million from advertising, $1.9 million from conferences, $1.9 million from its maturity model business, and $1.6 million from corporate sponsors. Recall however that this is in a year when the conference was cancelled and revenue dropped by $83 million compared to the year before.

Happy Cinco de Cuatro to my fellow Cornballers (iykyk).

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Keysight Technologies. The Santa Rosa, CA-based company’s Keysight Eggplant is recognized by Forrester as a leader in software test automation. Healthcare providers and medical device manufacturers can experience enhanced healthcare software testing in three areas: (1) non-invasive EMR testing at DevOps speed; (2) streamlined medical device software testing; and (3) test automation and RPA in one toolset. Keysight’s Eggplant Test Automation Software helps healthcare providers design, schedule, and execute test cases that improve their user’s experience. Its solutions are tailored to simplify the complexities of continuous integration, deployment, and testing, enabling healthcare providers to analyze high-fidelity models of complex systems and ensure the best possible outcomes for patients. Thanks to Keysight Technologies for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Centene will sell healthcare analytics vendor Apixio, which it acquired in December 2020, to private equity firm New Mountain Capital. The private equity firm’s active holdings include Datavant, EMIDS, Cloudmed, and Signify Health.

Virtual youth and family mental health provider Brightline lays off 20% of its employees on top of the 20% that it let go in November 2022.

Home diagnostics vendor Cue Health will lay off 325 employees, or 26% of its workforce. The company, which was best known for its over-the-counter COVID-19 test that was used by the NBA, went public in 2021 at a $3 billion valuation. HLTH shares have since lost 97%, valuing the company at $105 million. CEO Ayub Khattak said in the March earnings call that the company sold $1 billion worth of tests in the last two years and has added a virtual care delivery solution. The company was awarded a $481 million Department of Defense contract in October 2020 for its rapid COVID-19 test, which uses swabs and a cartridge-based reader that delivers results to smartphones.

People

DataLink hires Eric Hedrick (Advantmed) as VP of clinical transformation.

Remote patient monitoring platform vendor Health Recovery Solutions hires Alan Bugos, MS (Medminder) as CTO.

Wi-fi sensing solution provider Origin AI hires Joseph Gwin, PhD (Best Buy Health) as chief innovation officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Apree Health, created in September 2022 by the merger of Vera Whole Health and Castlight Health, launches a cloud-based member analytics platform for health plans and large employers. Former Cerner President Don Trigg is CEO.

UCSD Health demonstrates scannable health insurance cards that use the SMART Health Code QR standard.

Government and Politics

The VA chooses four companies to submit task orders under an eight-year, $1 billion contract for home telehealth for remote patient monitoring: Cognosante, DrKumo, Medtronic Care Management Services, and Valor Healthcare.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warns consumers that high-interest medical credit cards and financing – often advertised in the waiting rooms of physicians, dentists, and hospitals that previously offered their patients no-interest payment plans – can inflate medical bills by up to 25%.

Privacy and Security

A lawsuit that was filed by a woman against Lehigh Valley Health Network, in an attempt to force the health system to pay ransomware hackers to remove her nude patient examination photos from the dark web, has been dropped. The federal judge questioned whether the court has the authority to force a party to comply with an illegal act, leading the plaintiff to drop her proposed class action lawsuit. 

NationBenefits says that the information of three million of its members was exposed in an April mass ransomware attack that exploited a flaw in cybersecurity vendor Fortra’s file transfer system. The attack involved other healthcare organizations such as hospital operator Community Health Systems, which said in February that the Fortra-vector attack exposed the information of at least one million of its patients. Fortra has determined that a zero-day flaw in its software allowed a ransomware group to steal data from at least 100 companies starting in January 2023.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare Triangle will exhibit at the 2023 MUSE Inspire Conference June 7-10 in Denver.
• EClinicalWorks kicks off its summit for FQHCs, rural health clinics, Indian health centers, and community health centers.
• Volpara Health wil donate 5% of sales of its breast density assessment software to educational website DenseBreast-info.org.
• Health Data Movers will sponsor a breakfast at the UNOS Transplant Management Forum on May 18 in Denver.
• Meditech congratulates HCA Healthcare for its top ranking in Fortune’s list of 2023 Most Admired Companies in the medical facility category.
• Five9 publishes a new case study, “Healthcare Technology Provider Delivers Personalized Member Services.”
• NTT Data announces it has been named a Leader in all four quadrants of the ISG Provider Lens 2022 – Healthcare Digital Services report.

Blog Posts

• Creating the Triple-Win of Healthcare (Enlace Health)
• Cures Act Moves Certification Goal Posts for Health IT (First Databank)
• Take control of your healthcare security with threat hunting (Fortified Health Security)
• Is Your Healthcare Organization Ready to Make the Move to Epic Hyperdrive? (HealthTECH Resources)
• Helping Healthcare Supply Chain Adapt for a Modern World (GHX)
• 10 Healthcare IT Leaders You Should Know: Recap of HIMSS23 (Healthjump)
• Hospitals Suffer Financially Post-COVID: What That Could Mean for the Future (HealthTech Resources)
• HIMSS23 Reflections: It Comes Down to Patient Experience (Healthwise)
• Determining the Value-on-Investment of Provider-to-Provider Virtual Consultation for Cancer Care (Impact Advisors)
• How specialized terminologies improve clinical documentation (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Wrapping Up Medical Laboratory Professionals Week 2023 (JTG Consulting Group)
• Staying Ahead of Healthcare Tech Trends: Managed IT Services (Medhost)
• Connecting with My Physical Therapist Between Visits Helped Me Finish My Treatment Plan (Net Health)
• How Midtown Medical Imaging demonstrates the value of high-quality imaging (Nuance)

The following HIStalk Sponsors win 2023 MedTech Breakthrough Awards:

• Loyal – best patient registration and scheduling solution
• Kyruus – best online search and scheduling solution
• Elsevier Clinical Path – best computerized decision support solution
• Nym Health – best overall health administration software
• Availity – health administration innovation award
• Lumeon – best care orchestration platform
• Bamboo Health – best care management solution provider
• ConnectiveRx – best overall patient engagement service
• Experity – best EHR solution
• Arrive Health – best EHR service

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 5/3/23

Top News

The trade secrets lawsuit that medical technology vendor Masimo brought against Apple ends in a mistrial.

Masimo claims that Apple had expressed interest in working with the company on pulse oximeter technology, then instead started poaching Masimo’s employees, including its chief medical officer, to develop competing technology.

Apple later sued Masimo, accusing the company of copying the design of the Apple Watch.

Masimo says that even though six of the seven jurors believe that Apple did not steal its trade secrets, it will file for a retrial.

The US International Trade Commission will rule later this month on Masimo’s demand that Apple Watch imports be banned because they infringe on its patents.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The JAMA Internal Medicine article that found that reviewers preferred the answers of ChatGPT over those of clinicians in response to patient questions has been widely reported, leading me to offer these points about the methodology:

• The 195 randomly chosen questions and the clinician answers were extracted from a Reddit forum rather than real-life examples, due to HIPAA concerns.
• The Subreddit moderators are responsible for verifying the credentials of participants who claim to be healthcare professionals.
• The longer answers generated by ChatGPT likely provided the illusion of empathy.
• The authors had no way to determine if the publicly posted messages are similar to real-life patient questions. Most of the example questions that they posted are of the “do I need to see a doctor” variety.
• The publicly responding physicians did not know the patients they responded to, did not have their medical history, and haven’t treated them. They were voluntarily responding on their own time as strangers, among responses by multiple users, and thus had no incentive to spend more time on message quality and empathy.
• The reviewers used measures of empathy and quality that had not been tested or validated. They did not assess ChatGPT’s responses for accuracy. The “which response is better” evaluation is subjective.
• Some of the lower-scoring physician answers from examples provided were more logistical than clinical and were thus less likely to exhibit or require empathy (you are considering an ED visit but that wouldn’t accomplish much, you’ll be fine without intervention, you should contact your PCP or urgent care).
• Actual patients did not review the responses, obviously including the person who actually asked the question.
• The five reviewers, all of whom were co-authors, included one nurse practitioner and four MDs who primarily work in research and/or informatics. Three of the five reviewed each response.
• The influence of perceived message quality or empathy on eventual patient outcomes or satisfaction is not known.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

CVS Health closes its all-cash, $10.6 billion acquisition of Medicare primary care chain Oak Street Health.

Clubhouse, the live chat social media platform that was wildly popular for about 15 minutes during the pandemic’s early days when people first got bored sitting at home and were still fawning over every word spoken by technology executives in a soaring stock market, lays off half its employees as people tire of the novelty of listening to real-time audio conversations. I could never understand the appeal, so I was not on the waitlist of 10 million people. 

Sales

• Good Samaritan Hospital (CA) will implement Nest Collaborative’s virtual breastfeeding support services.
• Virginia Hospital Center will use Unite Us care coordination and social services referral capabilities via the Unite Virginia network.

People

Kyruus names Peter Boumenot (B.well) as chief product officer.

Das Health promotes Michelle Jaeger to president and CEO.

Retired US Navy commander William Walders, MHA (Health First) joins BayCare (FL) as CIO.

Brad Wensel, MBA (AWS) joins Iodine Software as chief customer officer.

Brian Parrish (Craneware) joins CVS Health’s ActiveHealth and Health Data & Management Solutions as chief marketing officer.

Tenet Healthcare promotes Christopher Waldren, RN, MHA to VP of information technology.

Jason Aranda, RN, MBA joins Providence as VP of clinical IT solution delivery, south division.

Blue Shield of California promotes Krishna Ramachandran, MS, MBA to SVP of health transformation and provider adoption. He spent several years in technical roles at Epic through 2010 and was chief information and transformation officer at Duly Health and Care for three years.

Announcements and Implementations

St. Joseph’s Health (NJ) rolls out clinical communications software from CareMesh, including Connect messaging and Search provider directory services.

Litchfield Hills Orthopedic Associates (CT) implements EClinicalWorks across its surgery center and offices.

Government and Politics

NPR’s “All Things Considered” runs a story on the VA’s struggles to implement Oracle Cerner, interviewing veterans who were negatively impacted by the rollout. It concludes that “many in Congress are suggesting the VA should walk away,” although it does not quantify the number, whose those members are, or what they propose as an alternative. It gives a good bit of airtime to Ed Meagher, a former VA IT executive (he left 17 years ago and has been a contractor consultant for most of the time since), who says that patients at the five VA sites that are live on Oracle Cerner are “guinea pigs” and advocates updating the VA’s 45-year-old VistA system.

Privacy and Security

Ottawa’s Queensway Carleton Hospital notifies 100,000 patients that their data was exposed when a test server of Aetonix Systems, the hospital’s cloud-based communication platform vendor, was breached.

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom Americas Senior Product Quality Technician Ronald Bullock rappels down 17 floors of the 21C Museum Hotel in Durham, NC as part of a fundraiser to support Duke Children’s Hospital.
• Agfa HealthCare earns Frost & Sullivan’s 2023 Customer Value Leadership Award for its customer-first approach and innovative leadership.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “The senior housing and care sector – challenges and opportunities.”
• WellSky adds new predictive analytics capabilities to its CarePort Connect solution to help providers reduce SNF readmissions and optimize end-of-life care transitions.
• Essentia Health launches a medical financial assistance enrollment program using CenterX’s EHR-integrated system.
• Consensus Cloud Solutions joins the AWS ISV Accelerate Program.
• Nordic releases a new episode of its In Network podcast, “Making Rounds: Leveraging analytics to create efficiencies.”
• Divurgent releases a new episode of it’s The Vurge Podcast, “Translating Business Needs Into Software Solutions, featuring Simple Interact founder and CEO Ravi Kalidindi.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast episode, “Enhanced Telehealth Experience with Healow Solutions.”
• Surescripts publishes a new data brief, “How Are Care Teams Evolving to Fill Primary Care Gaps?”

Blog Posts

• CEOs: Now is the Time for Bold Actions (AGS Health)
• Belong Health leans into complex populations with healthcare analytics (Arcadia)
• Patient No-Shows Are Costing Your Organization More Than You Think. Here’s How to Effectively Reduce Them. (Artera)
• How to Modernize Your EDI Platform (Availity)
• Care at home: How remote programs benefit patient outcomes, access, and reduce costs (Biofourmis)
• Clinical Surveillance – unlock actionable insights and amplify clinical experience to empower acute care teams (Philips Capsule)
• Public Health, Disease Surveillance, and the Opportunity for Master Data Management (CareMesh)
• A Clinical Service Desk for Epic Users: Emphasis on Clinical (CereCore)
• EHR Optimization vs. Replacement: Which Side Is Your Healthcare Facility On? (HealthTECH Resources)
• Why Do So Many Providers Fail to Capture Annual Wellness Visits? (ChartSpan)
• Role of Digital Transformation in Health Equity (CHIME)
• What Happens at Asembia 2023 Will Get Reported On Here (CoverMyMeds)
• Using Amazon Connect to Streamline Your Contact Center Operations (CTG)
• Study: US Military Sees Facility-Level Cost Savings in the First Year of Virtual Care Program (Current Health)
• Key Takeaways from HIMSS23 (Dimensional Insight)
• Methods for Improving Healthcare Quality (Vyne Medical)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 5/1/23

Top News

Researchers find that licensed healthcare professionals preferred ChatGPT 3.5’s responses to patient questions over those that were written by doctors 80% of the time, judging the computer responses to be more empathetic.

A study limitation is that the patient question and the physician response came from public Reddit postings rather than from actual patient interactions.

However, I would also note that the Reddit responses presumably came from doctors who had sufficient time and empathy to respond without personal benefit in the first place, which makes me think real-life responses would exhibit significantly less empathy and thoughtful thoroughness in giving ChatGPT an even wider lead.

Reader Comments

From Zingaro: “Re: collaborative software groups. Have you heard of examples where Meditech Magic standalone clients joined a regional Cerner collaborative?” I’ll invite readers to chime in, and if you are willing to share your experience, provide your contact information offline and I’ll forward to Zingaro.

From Joint Pain: “Re: HIMSS23. Thanks for giving a shout-out to our company as one of the small-boothed folks who nonetheless worked hard at the conference.” I know how it feels to stand in near isolation in a 10×10 booth that is off the beaten track in the exhibit hall’s nether regions, not inexpensively, I might add. I’ll also make this offer – if your company exhibited at HIMSS23 in a booth that was 10×20 or smaller, I’ll give you a first-year HIStalk sponsorship discount that will cover 365 days instead of your three on the show floor. Contact Lorre since I’m just blurting this out without thinking in assuming that she will figure out details.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents who attended HIMSS23 gave it decent scores. Some offered constructive criticism to beef up the health equity track, improve food and beverage options, and book more inspiring keynote speakers. I think that other than the carpet gaffe, they did a good job.

New poll to your right or here: Which HIMSS23-related recordings have you consumed for at least two hours? I’m asking as someone who has spent zero minutes and is questioning whether that makes me an outlier, given that it seemed like half the people at the conference were chasing the other half with cameras or microphones. I just don’t have the attention span to watch or hear self-indulgent interviewers and interviewees saying nothing useful when five seconds of skimming a transcription (had they made one) would have sent me fleeing. I will check out the official session recordings when they come out, although my attention span wanders there, too.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own. I

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Teladoc Health reports Q1 results: revenue up 11%, EPS –$0.37 versus –$0.47, beating analyst expectations for both. TDOC shares have lost 21% of their value in the past 12 months versus the Dow’s 3% gain, valuing the company at $4.3 billion.

Sales

• Parkview Health chooses Sectra’s imaging cloud subscription service.
• North Carolina HHS contracts with Optum for provider enrollment, credentialing, and data management.
• Horizons Mental Health Center will implement Netsmart’s CareFabric platform, including the MyAvatar behavioral health EHR, as it transitions to a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic.

People

Kaiser Permanente promotes Nari Gopala, MBA to chief digital officer for its health plan and hospitals.

Genevieve Morris, MA, formerly of UnitedHealth-acquired Change Healthcare, joins UnitedHealth Group-owned Optum as VP of interoperability strategy, medical network.

Rahul Goyal, MD (Malaffi) joins Elsevier as chief medical officer.

Brian Parrish (Craneware) joins CVS-owned ActiveHealth and HDMS as chief marketing officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Artera launches self-service analytics for creating patient engagement data dashboards.

Centre for Neuro Skills goes live on Meditech Expanse.

A Sphere study finds that two-thirds of providers believe that improving patient payment collections is a top priority, with interests in specific technologies such as text message payments, point-of-service kiosks, card on file processing, and incorporating check-in and payment into digital front doors.

Government and Politics

The Center for US Policy petitions FDA to declare Bamboo Health’s NarxCare software a misbranded medical device that should be recalled, claiming that its opioid risk score for patients – which is calculated from state prescription drug monitoring program data using what CUSP says is non-transparent methodology — is being used inappropriately to prevent pain patients from obtaining appropriate opioids.

Other

A New York Times opinion piece says that private equity is ruining the country by taking advantage of loose regulations to bankrupt acquired companies while making their own executives billionaires. A showcase example is Carlyle Group’s acquisition of nursing home chain ManorCare that was funded by piling debt onto to the chain – not to the private equity firm – then flipping its real estate to allow Carlyle to recover its investment while sticking the chain with paying high rents. Then came layoffs, cost-cutting, and poor resident care that ended up bankrupting the nursing home company, after which Carlyle avoided the resulting wrongful death lawsuits by claiming that it was an advisor, not an owner.

Sponsor Updates

• Nym Health names Hallie Heffington (Summit Medical Billing Solutions) and Chermanda Jackson medical coding and compliance auditors, Omer Bar-Sela (Mobileye) implementation squad lead, Scott Rulkowski (Olive) customer success manager, and Niv Shashoua (HP) junior software engineer.
• Nordic Consulting rebrands Bails & Associates, which it acquired in 2021, Nordic ERP Services.
• Eleanor Health reduces its month-end closing time from 15 days to one day using a customized AI workflow solution from RCxRules.
• Optimum Healthcare IT names Kevin Scahill Epic HIM analyst and Rachel Clemans ServiceNow engagement manager.
• Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare (TN) uses PerfectServe to streamline transfer center communications.
• Specialty medication technology company RxLightning wins a Disruptor of the Year Mira Award.
• SunStone Consulting will offer VisiQuate’s advanced revenue cycle analytics to its clients.
• Pivot Point Consulting, a Vaco company, publishes its Q2 healthcare IT market report.
• South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority expands its enterprise imaging contract with Sectra to include its digital pathology module.
• Surescripts will apply to become a Qualified Health Information Network.
• Upfront Healthcare’s latest psychographics study shows the pandemic’s impact on consumer health behaviors.
• West Monroe celebrates its 21st anniversary.Wolters Kluwer Health will exhibit at AONL 2023 May 1-4 in Anaheim, CA.

Blog Posts

• Freezing the squeeze on the Canadian primary care system (Nordic)
• Physicians Speak: Make Pharma Digital Marketing Clinically Relevant (OptimizeRx)
• Reducing healthcare call volume: Generative AI helps manage and divert routine inquiries (Orbita)
• Digital Health Can Drive Health Equity (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Choosing a Revenue Cycle Services Partner (PMD)
• Five Key Guidelines for Successful Workforce Planning in Healthcare (Premier)
• Buyer mindsets: What you need to know before you pitch your digital solution to a healthcare CFO (Redox)
• Writing a New Ending to the Patient Access-to-Care Story (Surescripts)
• 4 innovative ways to leverage call monitoring for increased customer satisfaction (Talkdesk)
• Addressing President Biden’s Executive Order to Support Caregivers and Improve Care (Trualta)
• Volpara Analytics Providers University of Utah Radiologists Confidence in Mammography Quality Across Locations (Volpara Health)
• Double Your Reach: Marketing Hacks for Inside and Outside Your Practice (WebPT)
• 5 Key Interoperability Insights and News from HIMSS 2023 (Zen Healthcare IT)
• How to Survive a Joint Commission Survey (Zynx Health)
• Productive Health Care Systems Nationwide Need Interoperability (Vyne Medical)
• COVID and public health: Navigating the end of the US federal emergency (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 4/28/23

Top News

Virtual care platform vendor EVisit acquires Bluestream Health, which offers digital front doors and virtual workflow tools.

Click the image above to enlarge.

I interviewed EVisit CEO Sachin Agrawal a few weeks ago and Bluestream President Brian Yarnell last February.

Reader Comments

From Wormser: “Re: Google’s C4 data set training web sources. Is it good or bad that your site was used?” Probably good, but with an asterisk. I was initially happy to see that HIStalk contributed 3.4 million tokens to the model in being among the top 2,000 of 15 million sites that it scraped, at least triple that of the next-highest health IT site (HIMSS-owned Healthcare IT News). The model also prioritizes the most important and well-regarded sites, so that’s a plus. Negative: that means I’m involuntarily contributing a lot of decades-long work for free, which I rationalize that it’s free to read anyway. The top-used sites were patents.google.com, Wikipedia, Scribd (which is kind of a surprise), the New York Times, and the PLOS open access journals. The real story is that it’s good to question a model’s training sources and to consider the commercialization rights of the owners of that information, which will be especially important in healthcare.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I hate getting names wrong knowing that spellcheck can’t help me, so I was appalled to see that I mistyped the name of RxLightning CEO Julia Regan as “Julie” in our recent interview. I fixed the error, but my self-beratement continues, and I am reminded yet again that everybody needs an editor.

A friend asked for help polishing their resume and creating a cover letter, which of course I pasted into ChatGPT to create documents that left even a persnickety writer like myself with nothing to correct. I was thinking during the process that employers will have a tougher time selecting candidates based on their writing skill as a proxy for intelligence and attention to detail since ChatGPT makes everybody seem smart.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Kaiser Permanente will acquire Geisinger Health in forming Risant Health, an independent, non-profit community hospital operator. Kaiser says it will invest $5 billion in Risant over the next five years, during which Risant will add up to six more health systems. The two organizations, both of which reported operating losses in 2022, say that Risant hospitals will benefit from Kaiser’s ability to invest in technology and preventive care.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions acquires Human API to create a seamless method of delivering health records for life insurance underwriting and care coordination.

People

Scott Sanner (Citra Health Solutions) joins Millennia as CEO.

Patient advocate, journalist, and “comedy health analyst” Casey Quinlan died this week of breast cancer.

Announcements and Implementations

Amazon shuts down its Halo Health wearables division and lays off its employees. The fitness tracker and subscription service was launched in August 2020 and Amazon announced its sleep tracking system Halo Rise in September 2022. The company started another round of layoffs Wednesday in its cloud computing and HR departments, pushing its total in the last few months to 27,000.

PMD – which offers solutions for secure communication, telehealth, charge capture, and RCM — launches a patient demographics management platform for medical practices

Eagle Ridge Hospital goes live on Meditech Expanse.

Rady Children’s Hospital and Sentara Healthcare implement Juniper’s AI-driven network technology to support reliable wi-fi and indoor location services.

AvaSure launches a virtual nursing application and care model, expanding its TeleSitter solution. I interviewed CEO Adam McMullin a few weeks ago.

Amazon Web Services increases its operational database workloads for Epic users by 61%, up to 42 million GRefs/s. 

The Columbus business paper profiles AndHealth, a chronic disease reversal telehealth company that was created by CoverMyMeds co-founder Matt Scantland. The company reports that its migraine patients had 70% fewer missed days of work. I interviewed him in February 2022.

A new KLAS report on health system capacity optimization management finds that LeanTaaS and Epic lead, while Qventus shows positive impact in the perioperative area. Users of Epic’s applications (Grand Central, Cadence, OpTime, MyChart, Cogito, Slicer Dicer, and Cognitive Computing) report strong out-of-the-box functionality that they home will be enhanced with AI/ML, actionable reporting and visualization, and a more consistent mobile experience, especially for Android devices.

Government and Politics

The VA, DoD, and Coast Guard experience another Oracle Cerner EHR downtime Tuesday, with the cause of the four-hour outage attributed to a failed database process.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) calls for the VA to terminate its contract with Oracle Cerner, calling it a “complete failure” that has harmed patients and employee morale. She says that “there is no coming back from the mess that the Department of Veterans Affairs has made with this deeply broken system.”

Privacy and Security

Six people, five of them former employees of Methodist Hospital in Memphis, plead guilty to HIPAA violations for selling the names of patients who were involved in car accidents to personal injury lawyers and chiropractors.

Other

Apple provides updates to its Hearing Study, which uses its Noise app for the Apple Watch to warn users of potentially harmful noise levels. It has found the one in three US adults are exposed to excessive noise levels, often involving traffic, machinery, and public transportation. I would imagine that many restaurants and bars would be embarrassed by their quantified noise levels, where one loud table can create a sonic escalation in which everyone is suddenly shouting. Surveys have show that while bad service tops the annoyance list of restaurant diners, noise levels are ahead of bad food, which is ironic given that some restaurants pride themselves on creating a noisy environment that conveys energy and hipness (65 dB is the maximum for comfortable conversation).

Sponsor Updates

• Flagstaff Surgical Associates (AZ) upgrades its EClinicalWorks software and implements Healow Pay and Healow Check-In.
• Elsevier launches an enhanced version of its ClinicalKey decision support tool, which includes an extensive drug compendium, mobile app, and deeper EHR integration.
• Consensus Cloud Solutions joins the AWS Independent Software Vendor Accelerate Program.
• GHX names 87 healthcare provider and supplier organizations to the 2022 GHX Millennium Club.
• HCTec will invest in expanding its operations in Hohenwald, TN, creating 100 jobs over the next five years.
• Clinical Architecture posts Episode 26, Discussing Data Quality, of “The Informonster Podcast.”
• Specialty medication technology company RxLightning wins a Disruptor of the Year Mira Award.
• Healthjump will exhibit at the NAACOS Spring Conference May 3-5 in Baltimore.
• Meditech congratulates 44 customers included among The Chartis Group’s Top 100 Critical Access Hospitals and Top 100 Rural Community Hospitals.
• Mobile Heartbeat’s MH-Cure clinical communication platform now integrates with Akkadian Provisioning Manager, enabling zero-touch provisioning for users.
• Google Cloud’s new Claims Acceleration Suite uses Myndshft prior authorization software to enable quick and seamless submission of PA requests.

Blog Posts

• Creating the Triple-Win of Healthcare (Enlace Health)
• Reduce Medication Alert Fatigue with Patient-Focused Clinical Decision Support (First Databank)
• Hospitals Suffer Financially Post-COVID: What That Could Mean For The Future (HealthTECH Resources)
• Healthcare Burnout: Impact, Consequences & Administrative Burden (GHX)
• Harnessing the Power of Healthcare Data Sharing to Improve Patient Care (Healthcare Triangle)
• HIMSS23 Recap: The HIMSSanity is Back! (HealthMark Group)
• What Does Nuvolo’s Sweden Release Mean for You? (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Saved by the Lab: Medical Laboratory Professionals Week 2023 (JTG Consulting Group)
• Investing in Centralized Provider Data Management to Power Digital Health Initiatives (Kyruus)
• Beyond RPA, AI, and Machine Learning: The Promise of Care Orchestration in Healthcare (Lumeon)
• Health Equity Hinges on Healthy Data (Rhapsody)
• Hospital Performance Monitoring: Navigating Revenue Margins and Improving Metrics (Medhost)
• Catch up on Meditech’s solutions at the 2023 Clinical Informatics Symposium (Meditech)
• Revolutionize Home Health Care with Wound Digital Imaging Benefits (Net Health)
• The future of ambulatory care documentation, part 2: How speech recognition helps ambulatory clinicians focus on what matters most (Nuance)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

News 4/26/23

Top News

Tegria acquires Sisu Healthcare IT Solutions, which offers Meditech-certified hosting and services.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: Amanaz, which was part of the Zambia’s Zamrock movement of the early 1970s. When the country gained its independence in 1964, radio stations were required to play 95% Zambia-originated music, and bands met the sudden musical demand with Western-influenced blends of Afrobeat, garage rock, and psychedelic fuzz. Zamrock faded away with Zambia’s economic problems and massive AIDS devastation that continues today, but the 50-year-old music is enjoying a resurgence. Quality varies, but I like all forms of music that reflect the exuberant, non-commercial spirit of the times, whether it’s doo wop, early gospel, or punk.

I asked conference services vendor Freeman how it handles exhibit hall carpet. They referred me to their corporate sustainability practices page, which only says that they offer carpet that can be repurposed.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

USPTO grants cyber risk management company Clearwater a patent for the Predictive Risk Rating capability within its IRM|Analysis software.

GE HealthCare reports Q1 results: revenue up 8%, adjusted EPS $0.85 versus $0.96, beating expectations for both but sending shares down 9%.

Sales

• Allina Health (MN) will offer patients Epic-based virtual care through KeyCare.
• Lexington Medical Center (SC) will implement healthcare and social services referral software from Unite Us.
• Jefferson Health (PA) selects Ada Health’s symptom assessment and care navigation technology.
• The University of Miami Health System and the Miller School of Medicine will roll out Clear’s identity verification technology for patients and employees.
• OhioHealth will implement EVideon’s Vibe Health smart room technology at its Pickerington Methodist Hospital in December.

People

Tabula Rasa HealthCare promotes Brian Adams to president and CEO.

Adam Mariano (HighPoint Solutions) joins LexisNexis Risk Solutions as president / GM of healthcare.

Artera names Karri Alexion-Tiernan (TigerConnect) VP of product marketing; Joanne Chen, PhD, MS (Strive Health) VP of data; and Mark Thomson, MS (TigerConnect) VP of customer success.

Cancer remote patient monitoring technology vendor Veris Health hires Gary Manning (PhysIQ) as president.

Reperio Health hires Naomi Levinthal, MS, MA (Memora Health) as chief growth officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Children’s Mercy Kansas City opens a 6,000 square-foot Patient Progression Hub, which uses AI-powered technology from GE HealthCare to monitor patient flow, manage staffing, and coordinate care.

Fortified Health Security consolidates its managed security services into the new Fortified Central Command platform.

AvaSure develops a Virtual Nursing application and Care Model to support six current virtual nursing implementations.

WellSky expands the capabilities of its CarePort care transition solutions.

Government and Politics

The VA establishes an Artificial Intelligence Institution Review Board and an AI Oversight Committee for its clinical and research operations.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD employees in Utah volunteer at the St. Vincent De Paul Dining Hall, Utah Food Bank, Clementine Ranch, and Encircle during its day of service.
• Agfa HealthCare joins the AWS Partner Network.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Insights into the credit ratings of hospitals and health systems.”
• Care.ai’s virtual nursing solution is added to Google Cloud Marketplace.
• Surescripts posts a data brief titled “How Are Care Teams Evolving to Fill Primary Care Gaps?”
• Meditech is featured in an episode of HealthData Management’s video series titled “The Journey Beyond: Exploring uncharged territories.”
• Bamboo Health publishes a new case study, “Leveraging Real-Time Patient Data to Keep In-Home Care in Home.”
• KLAS honors CenterX with its 2023 Points of Light Award for improving prior authorization efficiency and easing administration burden for providers and payers.
• Nordic posts a podcast titled “Designing for Health: Interview with Chris McCarthy, Part 2.”
• Clearwater uses the Cyturus Third Party Risk Management module of the Compliance & Risk Tracker as its primary platform to support its Vendor Risk Management managed services program.
• Mubadala Health in Dubai will use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to run its Oracle Cerner EHR.

Blog Posts

• The Power of Personalization & How Smartphones Reflect the Individual in Healthcare (Access)
• Make Your Revenue Cycle Management Vendor a Key Strategic Partner (AGS Health)
• Healthcare dashboard examples: Exploring 5 impactful models (Arcadia)
• Are your Clinical Order Sets built correctly? (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• How to Improve Patient Outcomes and Boost Your Bottom Line ASAP (Yes, in a Matter of Months!) (Artera)
• Empowering FHIR (Availity)
• Struggling with maintaining your Virtual Safety Team? You’re not alone. (AvaSure)
• DRVS & Autism Acceptance Month – This April & Beyond! (Azara Healthcare)
• Moving to the Oracle Cloud readies University of Texas Health Center for future growth (Baker Tilly)
• Future of Telehealth: What’s Next for Patient Care? (ChartLogic)
• A Physician’s Perspective: Bridging the HER, Healthcare IT, and the PAC (Physician Advisory Committee) (CereCore)
• Managing a Deluge of Data: CIO Strategies to Make Information Accessible to Clinicians (CHIME)
• 3 Ways to Achieve ‘Backward Compatibility’ Without Draining Health IT Resources (Consensus Cloud Solutions)
• The Seasonality of Risk: Your Q2 Action Plan (Curation Health)
• 4 Key Strategies to Maximize Value-Based Care with Data and Analytics (Dimensional Insight)
• Recruiting Through Social Media: A Guide to Attracting Top Talent (Direct Recruiters)
• How to Address Operational Debt in Healthcare (Divurgent)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 4/24/23

Top News

The VA pauses its Oracle Cerner implementation indefinitely until issues at its live sites are resolved.

It also says “everything is on the table” as it negotiates the scheduled five-year extension of the original 2018 contract.

Oracle EVP Mike Sicilia indirectly placed blame for the delay on the VA, responding with a statement that Oracle supports the VA’s use of the time to “institute governance, change management, and standardization changes … similar to what DoD did a few years ago.”

Reader Comments

From Bonhomie: “Re: paying your way to HIMSS. Have you considered monetizing your presence by offering vendors the opportunity to purchase booth interviews or social media coverage from you, in order to offset your expenses?” That seems unbelievably slimy to me, although I’ve seen plenty of folks who were clearly taking money for interviewing company executives, hosting events, or shooting out suspiciously laudatory tweets. At least their sites and outlets are not known for covering actual news anyway, so reputational damage is minimal. Still, I would rather pay my own way, remain anonymous, and leave with my soul unsold.

From Phone Waver: “Re: HIMSS23. You didn’t mention booth people staring into their phones.” Two reasons: (a) I don’t think it happens as much as it used to, or maybe I’m so accustomed to it that I no longer notice; and (b) I’m more empathetic to exhibitor staff who have tasks they can accomplish online while waiting for someone to show interest. However, I still maintain that the free time that allows you look at your phone is created by your unapproachability in doing so, and your employer bought an exhibit booth rather than a telephone booth (OK, I admit that’s a dated reference).

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents aren’t using ChatGPT regularly. I’m not a power user, but I stay logged in in case I want it to check my wording, summarize what a company does given its web address (the fact that the website isn’t clear enough to easily tell is its own issue), or suggest interview questions that are not very good. I’ve also used it to plan events and to find obscure bands I might like, while Mrs. HIStalk jumped on it immediately to to help plan a complex vacation to Europe involving drives among several countries. I’ll add that the amazingly fast rise of ChatGPT means that the dabblers who evangelize their experiments are already yesterday’s news, with the new table stakes being actually accomplishing something with it that wasn’t previously possible.

New poll to your right or here: How would you grade your in-person attendance of HIMSS23? I would probably give it an A for the first time since 2019. HIMSS is surely happy that its relevance seemed little diminished, at least based on attendance, exhibitors, and general energy, when situations both within and outside its control had created an opening for competing events. My early read is that the HIMSS and ViVE conferences will co-exist with differing attendee demographics, but with enough business case for both to attract exhibitors.

HIMSS23 was the first opportunity see my Apple AirTag in action as it tracked my checked bag from the plane to the luggage carousel, a pretty slick and multi-use technology for $29. Mrs. H and I use the Find My app and our phones to tell if we’ve left work or the grocery store or whatever, so I’m sure many other AirTag use cases exist that I haven’t thought of.

I was annoyed that the #HIMSS23 Twitter hashtag was hijacked by some would-be “technology influencers” to constantly spout random conference updates and tourism recommendations without actually being at the conference. Blocking them doesn’t seem to hide them from Twitter search results.

I mentioned previously that HIStalk’s searchable history goes back to 2007, so it’s the one place you can find significant news events without the fluff, see what we’ve said about long-ago HIMSS conferences, or ponder the life cycle of companies, technologies, and even people that have gone from fame to forgotten. Suggestions: search for anything of interest or scroll through the very long article archive.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

People

Oracle hires former CMS Administrator Seema Verma, MPH as SVP/GM of life sciences, which includes leading the Oracle Cerner Enviza business.

In England, physician and digital health pioneer Elizabeth Murray, MSc, PhD dies of cancer at 63. She studied the impact of the internet on doctor-patient communication at UCSF in 2001 and set up an e-health unit at University College London in 2003.

Other

Bizarre, as forwarded by a reader. A data scientist at healthcare revenue integrity vendor Multiplan – improbably named Jack McQuestion — is charged with impersonating an FBI agent after trying to lure an OnlyFans adult performer from her house claiming to be an FBI agent with a warrant for her arrest. He left when she called police, but police used his doorbell camera image to find him and his Madison, WI apartment, a search of which turned up phony FBI credentials, pepper spray, and a garrote that he had ordered from Amazon. His job history before his data scientist job includes being an “artistic model” and a Pizza Hut delivery driver. Searching Amazon for “garrote” turns up sellers offering those products for supposed non-strangulation purposes that include cheese slicing and sculpting, but the seller’s choice of search keyword says a lot.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.