From HIMSS 4/20/23

Tell me without telling me that today is the last exhibit hall day of HIMSS23.

Today is also when all of the previously defended booth swag is dumped out on the table for anyone to take (even other vendors) to avoid dragging it back home, which is how I ended up with socks from document management vendor Vasion, whose booth person urged me to take one small step to reduce his two suitcases full of them to a manageable number. I also had a nice conversation with folks from Amazon S3 data recovery vendor Clumio, who wanted to hand off one of their bags that I now realize is actually quite nice.

Of course I had to scan the QR code on the HIMSS bus window. It went to a website that described how to get out in an emergency. I think I would find a way out more quickly, approved or my own, than reading a website or watching a video.

It wouldn’t be a HIMSS conference without the always-entertaining Magic Boy in the booth of Hyland, although I don’t think he was involved with the company’s pre-conference magic trick of making 1,000 employees disappear.

I don’t know how many takers Jeron Electronic Systems got for its factory tours, but I thought the offer was smart. The family-run business makes nurse call and other healthcare communications systems right here in the Chicago area, with no supply chain product delays.

I went by the Ellkay booth many times and not only were employees paying heads-up attention, I was greeted every time. I didn’t eat anything but booth snacks all day until late afternoon all this week, so I got through Day 1 purely on their honey-caramel popcorn.

Hybrid infrastructure vendor Element Critical provided a great “Live Lucky” hat and fun conversation. 

Today was goodbye group photo day, or video in the case of Clearsense. They had a sharp-looking booth. The quick video, which popped up on LinkedIn, is a super idea.

This observation is supportive even though it might sound critical, but for folks in the startup area’s mini-booths, HIMSS23 could have been your best chance of the year to find prospects, partners, investors, and employees. I know it’s hard to remain alert, make eye contact, and initiate friendly conversation versus staring at your phone or conversing with your co-worker, but to be here otherwise doesn’t accomplish much. If your space holds two people, one of them should be someone who can confidently and energetically draw people in. I walked through the startup area several times and nobody seemed all that interested in initiating a conversation. If you’re going to be there anyway, take advantage of the foot traffic just to shoot the breeze with whoever walks by if nothing else.

These guys from Rocket.chat didn’t get a great booth location as a first-time exhibitor, but they were friendly and positive. The company’s HIPAA-ready messaging app supports communication with patients, colleagues, and vendors. They offer a free self-hosted team collaboration version.

The reps from digital transformation services vendor Cardinal Integrated earned our “Tiny Booth but Great People” award, as the person on the left admirably worked the perimeter to cheerfully engage passersby and her colleagues were quick to join in.

The rep at first-time exhibitor Solid, which offers public safety communications technology, was outgoing, informative, and energetic despite light foot traffic and reps in neighboring booths being lost in phoneland. The company offers a guide to improving poor cell service to support BYOD and bandwidth for IoT and 5G.

The friendly, sequined folks at Raleigh, NC-based Bandwidth were happy to describe the company’s messaging, voice, and emergency telecom platform.

Doximity provided today’s lunch. Their cupcake bites are like finger-scooping cake batter from the bowl, then repeating with the icing before shoving it home.

Avadin, which sells solutions for senior care agencies, uses AI – and now, apparently, ChatGPT – to listen for “help me” requests, monitor for falls, assess mood, and allow remote check-in.

I was initially a bit put off by HIMSS turning its tweeting over to someone who is actually good at it instead of old-school stuffy, but I’ve grown to like it.

Where have all the vendor puffer vests gone? Gone to Goodwill, all but one.

Conversations Overheard

According to one executive, the respective CEOs of CHIME and HIMSS never got along all that well after Hal Wolf took over at HIMSS, but it was the refusal of HIMSS to cancel the 2020 conference until the last minute that sent CHIME off to form the competing ViVE conference with HLTH.

I overhead high-level executives of two significant companies saying that HIMSS23 has been a good conference for them, but also expressing delighted surprise at how much business they expect to generate from the ViVE conference. Both reported that in both conferences, their booths were packed, their scheduled events were waitlisted, and even casual booth-lookers ended up being significant decision-influencers who will likely result in new business. Both said that the secret is in booking meetings long before the conference starts, guaranteeing that the booth will generate ROI no matter what.

Someone commented that unlike HIMSS, ViVE provided water bottles and food freely to all attendees. However, those water bottles reportedly cost ViVE $500,000.

I overheard from two different executives that unlike HIMSS, repping the company at ViVE didn’t seem like actually working.

Someone described how the HIMSS conference has changed in the last 20 years by citing similarly sized gaudy booths back in the day, but with provocatively clad booth staff, jugglers, and booths that were turned into near restaurants with endless trays of deli food. It was also recalled how once upon a time HIMSS closed the exhibit hall during education sessions. I overheard one person lamenting the demise of HIStalkapalooza, which reminded me that I’m staying near the best place that we ever had it at the House of Blues Chicago. That also reminds me that I have recaps of all HIMSS conferences and HIStalkapaloozas starting at 2008 on the site, and although the earlier ones disappeared with a platform change in 2007, it’s a pretty engrossing memory lane of trends, companies, and people that in some cases are no longer with us.

A rep eating lunch was telling someone how surprised he was that Microsoft has suddenly starting dominating healthcare with Azure, its Nuance acquisition, and now its work with generative AI.

A vendor executive said they personally pledged to remain visible in their booth any time the exhibit hall is open instead of retreating to conference rooms or off-campus lunches.

Folks were speculating whether HIMSS will admit that the “no-carpet HIMSS23” was an mistake that will be corrected next year. I heard more people speculating that HIMSS didn’t want to pay overtime for carpet installation and decided to skip it with an unrelated excuse. One vendor said they were happy to have had their booth setup finished before the weekend, when overtime rates became exorbitant.

News

HCA Healthcare is piloting Augmedix’s ambient medical documentation system and has invested in the company in a $12 million funding round. AUGX shares jumped 90% on the news, valuing the company at $128 million. It went public in a SPAC-like reverse merger in 2020, with shares down 15% since their first day of trading.

From HIMSS 4/19/23

This is how the main aisles look in the exhibit hall, which I’m mentioning again since I heard a lot of complaints today. This is apparently a live electrical line that ends up in a booth, but starts somewhere underground in a McCormick Place tunnel. I’m not saying that I don’t buy Hal Wolf’s “save the environment” excuse for ditching aisle carpet while still requiring exhibitors to rent it for their own areas, but a 10-year-old article I found says that conference supplier Freeman doesn’t automatically trash carpet after a single use even though it is cut to specifications – they “re-seam” it back into a single roll and rent it all over again, up to 4-5 times until it’s too far gone.

I’ll also say that the exhibit hall wasn’t 100% ready for its opening on Tuesday. Freeman people were dodging attendees during show hours as they delivered equipment throughout the hall, and I saw several booths with shipping boxes, electrical gear, and luggage piled up near the main aisle.

I don’t know what a Digital Health Technology Partner is, but I’m sure it involves writing a check.

The puppies were in their play area today, helping raise money for the Anti-Cruelty Society.

Pure Storage and Veritas are offering “HIMSS 2023 Bottoms Up!” each afternoon.

The coat check rooms were stacked high with suitcases on Wednesday, which suggests that quite a few folks are heading home today. Exhibitors are required to staff booths for the shortened exhibit hours Thursday, but it will probably be dead in the hall (and suitcases will be piled up there, too).

NFL player Damar Hamlin, the HIMSS23 Friday morning keynote speaker who nearly died on national TV after suffering cardiac arrest from an on-field collision with another player, is cleared to play and says he will return to the game.

I got bored and bailed early today, enjoying a late lunch / early dinner at Il Porcellino, mostly because it was a short walk from the hotel. It was actually pretty amazing – the grilled calamari in arrabbiata was excellent and the lasagna is the best I’ve had anywhere. It was way too much to finish, but the price was entirely reasonable, especially for the neighborhood. The server said they have seen a bump in business from the HIMSS conference.

News

JTG Consulting Group hires Susan Mize, MBA (Bridgeway Benefit Technologies) as chief services officer.

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles promotes interim CIO Conrad Band to SVP/CIO.

Healthcare AI News 4/19/23

News

OSF HealthCare (IL) selects AI-powered Cortex utilization management technology from Xsolis.

UPMC CTO Chris Carmody says the health system plans to use AI to connect patients with clinical trials based on EHR data analysis, develop digital twins for improved treatment planning, enhance telemedicine offerings, and create automated visit summaries using technology from UPMC Enterprises spinoff Abridge. I interviewed Abridge founder and CEO Shiv Rao, MD earlier this month.

Amazon announces new tools for building with generative AI on AWS. Amazon Bedrock offers foundation models from Amazon and other companies that address use cases such as text generation, chatbots, search, text summarization, image generation, and personalization.

EClinicalWorks will integrate its EHR/PM solutions with ChatGPT, cognitive services, and machine learning models from Azure OpenAI Service.

Microsoft and Epic announce that they will work together to bring generative AI into Epic’s applications via Azure OpenAI Service. UC San Diego Health, UW Health, and Stanford Health Care are already using an initial solution that automatically drafts message responses. Another solution will add natural language queries and interactive data analysis to Epic’s SlicerDicer self-service reporting tool.

A recent Stanford computer science graduate creates HealthGPT, a test case for connecting generative AI to Apple Health data to support answering user questions, such as, “How should I train for a half marathon?”

Research

University of Florida Health researchers are working with Nuance and its Precision Imaging Network to create and fine-tune AI solutions for radiologists, specifically in the areas of interpretation reporting and ensuring that algorithms perform effectively.

Carnegie Mellon researchers develop an Internet-connected OpenAI tool that correctly developed a plan to synthesize ibuprofen, aspirin, and aspartame and to control the lab technology required to manufacture them. They also had the system develop a new cancer drug that was not tested. The authors warn that such a system is promising, but could be used to create illegal drugs or bioweapons. Not surprisingly, they also credit ChatGPT for creating the first draft of the article.

A survey of 1,039 adults finds that 20% have experienced healthcare enhanced by AI, with younger patients making up the bulk of that group. Nearly half believe the use of AI in healthcare to be somewhat or very trustworthy.

Opinion

Headspace Health Chief Product and Design Officer Leslie Witt says AI won’t replace its mental health professionals any time soon, though the company is working to incorporate more AI-powered features into its meditation and mindfulness app. Headspace acquired Sayana, an AI-based competitor, last year.

Other

OpenAI launches a bug bounty program that will pay users between $200 and $20,000 to report vulnerabilities, bugs, or security flaws found in ChatGPT. Users have so far reported 31 vulnerabilities with an average pay out of $650.

Starting July 5, New York City will begin enforcing a law that requires employers to disclose the use of automated employment decision tools to job candidates during the hiring process. Companies that wish to use such AI-based tools must first have them audited for bias by the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.

Elon Musk creates X.AI Corp., a company rumored to be an eventual competitor with OpenAI, which Musk co-founded in 2015 and left three years later to avoid conflicts of interest with Tesla.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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From HIMSS 4/18/23

Tell me anything interesting you’ve seen or heard since I need to plan my Wednesday and possibly Thursday if I don’t skip out.

I was standing outside in the cold barely after sunrise this morning, wondering where the HIMSS shuttle would be stopping since it wasn’t marked on the street. The HIMSS app wasn’t updating the bus status, and when it finally did, it showed a 15-minute wait on top of the 10-15 minutes I had already waited, so the planned 15-minute intervals didn’t actually happen even in light traffic.

I got my badge quickly, took a stroll around (my IPhone says I took 22,000 steps Tuesday by mid-afternoon), and then waited around for the exhibit hall to open at 10 a.m. I realized afterward the apparent extinction of the ball cap girls who used to forcefully thrust the show daily from Healthcare IT News at every passerby, almost defying you not to take a copy that you didn’t really want.

I also noted that the Starbucks line stretched endlessly and never died out completely, even in the late afternoon when I can’t imagine wanting coffee of any temperature.

My first action was to hike what seemed like miles to get a look at the lake and skyline. It was a beautiful, spring-like day that quickly erased memories of yesterday’s snowy gray.

Tell me without telling me that the HIMSS conference is in Chicago this year.

I saw this guy outside the exhibit hall. I saw a couple of other dogs in or near booths and HIMSS had a puppy play area that was being used to solicit donations for The Anti-Cruelty Society, although I disappointingly didn’t time it right to seem them playing in their fenced-in yard.

This is either (a) HIMSS23 attendees right before the exhibit hall doors opened, or (b) runners awaiting the starter’s pistol in the Fairly Well Dressed 5K. I have zero fashion sense or interest, but bright brown shoes and tight suits or blazers over jeans are current looks that look better than the baggy, three-piece charcoal gray suits and mirror-polished black shoes of yesteryear.

This is the first HIMSS conference that felt normal by 2019 standards. People were everywhere, almost nobody wore masks, booths were laid out with slightly wider aisles but normal spacing otherwise, and I didn’t see a single elbow bump in lieu of a handshake. Most of the hygiene theater of the dark ages of 2020 and 2021, which was of questionable scientific merit even then, has since been proven pointless and was quickly abandoned.

HIMSS says attendance is already up hugely over 2021 and nearing 2019 levels, but then again, why wouldn’t they say that when we “trust, but verify” types can’t investigate whatever number they throw out there? Regardless, the increase feels directionally correct. The exhibitor list shows 1,215, although some of those companies bought only meeting rooms rather than booths.

I started out with a packed ClosedLoop.ai session in the north hall. The anchor booths were in the south hall, but a few bigger vendors got the north hall, including Google Health.

Nice color coordination, Orion Health. I like it.

I attended a Sodexho presentation on having hospital staff initiate conversations with patients and then report back through the company’s Experiencia tool, which gives executives a real-time dashboard and alerts of patient issues while they can still be fixed. They said that nobody likes filling out a survey, especially if it’s likely nothing will happen anyway, so they use in-room conversations and text messaging to let staff either resolve or explain a problem, freeing up clinical staff who would otherwise be dealing with the hotel side of being hospitalized.

The exhibit hall was full of bare floors, weird dead ends, and unattractive HIMSS ghost town spaces. Tegria got a terrible location that was nearly impossible to find even when following the hastily erected directional sign, and Ellkay had a “this way” sign several aisles over like a highway exit. That reminded me of a HIMSS conference years ago in Las Vegas, where the downstairs Hall G was drawing so few people that HIMSS was shamed into adding extra signs and offering lunch discounts for enticing visitors to head downstairs into what resembled a poor student’s basement rumpus room.

The Microsoft-Nuance booth was busy.

I overheard several folks lamenting, as was I, the apparent end of an era, as Oracle has apparently expunged the Cerner and Oracle Cerner names in favor of Oracle Health.

I went to a session about the CoMET AI-based patient monitoring solution by Nihon Kohden by the doctor who developed it. He mentioned an interesting fact from a study – training a sepsis model on a hospital’s surgical ICU data had zero predictive value for the same hospital’s medical ICU, and vice versa. Models don’t work if they were trained on data from multiple hospitals or even multiple areas of the same hospital. I’m curious why that would be, so I’ll have to dig up the paper.

I think ChatGPT’s straight vertical growth and endless publicity have HIMSS23 vendors too little time to feature generative AI in their booth materials, other than EClinicalWorks anyway.

Giveaways were interesting this year. I forgot my battery-powered phone charger that I got at a HIMSS conference years ago, but nobody was handing them out. Chapstick and stress balls were in limited supply. I did score some Garrett’s popcorn, however.

Someone asked me, “Do you want a beer” from a booth at barely past noon, which I answered in wondering if the question was rhetorical given the hour. The person at the Silex booth assured me, “You wouldn’t be the first person to say yes,” so I took one from the ice chest to sip as I watched another vendor’s presentation. I’m sure the price they pay the concessionaire for each beer is astronomical, so I made sure to enjoy it.

You pay thousands of dollars to attend a conference, another $20 for a prison-grade lunch, and this as your seating choice if you want to eat, charge your phone, or allow your introversion to be soothed. I really don’t understand why we as attendees tolerate this. It isn’t like Las Vegas, where everything revolves around keeping you in the casinos, so putting out more tables and chairs surely wouldn’t upset the business model. I’m sure McCormick Place has buildings full of unused furniture.

The going-home Red shuttle line was pretty poorly marked in the convention center halls, so I finally found the bus after a few wrong turns and near-constant doubt that I was in the right place.

A Chicago reader agreed with my assessment that deep-dish pizza is awful (not my style, as El Presidente would say) and suggested tavern style instead, a Midwest-only specialty that I unfortunately haven’t found in River North that seems to favor Neapolitan style at steep prices. However, that person also urged me to go to Al’s or Portillo’s for Italian beef, so I left the convention center early, walked over to Al’s Italian Beef on N. Wells, and had a wet beef with sweet peppers and a large side of perfect hand-cut fries. I heard people talking all day about the sumptuous dinners their employers would be underwriting Tuesday evening, making me even happier with my self-paid $15 one that I consumed with gusto away from other badge-wearers. All that was missing was a working man’s ice-cold draft PBR or Heileman’s Old Style.

Conversations Overheard

A lady said she decided not to renew her membership in women’s group Chief because it was going to cost $9,000, which she was paying out of her own pocket, and she felt that the two women who started the organization made an unexpected fortune but didn’t deliver much afterward. She told someone that the organization had done nothing that benefited her in one year of membership.

Someone said that a few CIOs told they they were going to stop attending the HIMSS conference in favor of ViVE, saying that HIMSS didn’t recognize the threat of having its CIO track at HIMSS turned into CHIME’s own conference. The person said that the HIMSS conference would become an event for provider managers and directors who might then report what they learned about vendors and products to the decision-maker back home, to which I responded was often the HIMSS model anyway since CIOs often don’t roam the floor and instead dispatch underlings as scouts.

Most of the common hallways of the exhibit hall were uncarpeted, exposing spray-painted labels, hazard tape covering wires, and metal plates in the floor. Apparently Hal Wolf said in the opening session that it was an environmental decision based on the need to otherwise manufacture, install, and dispose of carpet. Sort of the same argument that hotels use in trying to convince you that re-using your room towels is for the environment’s benefit, not their own.

A top vendor executive emailed me today to say, “I hope you will be writing about the absolutely pathetic bare floors across the halls here at HIMSS. Vendors are required to pay for flooring in our booths (carpet, vinyl, wood, etc.) but HIMSS felt they didn’t have to do it? Ridiculous. We have never exhibited at an event where the exhibit hall felt incomplete until HIMSS23.“ I agree, and the environmental excuse seems iffy given the carbon footprint of endless flights for an in-person event compared to every other conference that somehow manages to lay down carpet. It’s beginning to seem like this was a “recover financially from HIMSS20” year for HIMSS in staying home in Chicago for making the exhibit hall look like a underfunded indoor flea market. I’m curious if anyone has seen other examples of apparent belt-tightening.

A long-time reader checks in: “Judy Faulkner recommended HIStalk to 30 of us in a conference room when she taught us about the ‘Epic culture’ in 2003. I have read every week, nearly 20 years! Thank you for writing.” Thank you for reading. My insistence on remaining anonymous and avoiding self-promotional activities means that HIStalk to me is an empty screen in an empty room, and writing it feels like scrawling in a diary that I don’t intend for anyone else to read. I like it that way, but I appreciate those few times each year when someone shares what their side of my screen looks like since I have no idea.

Someone asked if anyone was hearing anything about HIMSS Accelerate. Negative.

News

The VA’s Oracle Cerner system goes down for five hours on Monday, apparently joined by the same downtime for the DoD’s instance of Oracle Cerner.

Memora Health gets a $30 million investment from investors that include General Catalyst and two big health systems.

A recent Stanford computer science graduate creates HealthGPT, a test case for connecting generative AI to Apple Health data to support answering user questions, such as, “How should I train for a half marathon?”

From HIMSS 4/17/23

I arrived in Chicago in mid-afternoon Monday to lingering snow flurries, whipping wind, temperature in the high 30s, and near chaos in the O’Hare rideshare pickup area that made me glad to have a coat for the wait (unlike several guys wearing shorts and tee shirts featuring understandable but definitely undesirable nipplage). The warm-up starts Tuesday, however, with Thursday topping out in the low 70s, which is likely where weather comparisons to RSNA’s post-Thanksgiving weekend diverge. The view outside looked like six weeks ago in warmer Southern climes, with budding and flowering trees that are surely confused given that Chicago hit a record high of 82 just a couple of days ago.

Many folks on my flight were also headed to HIMSS23, and unlike me, were bubbly and loud in talking shop with their fellow conference travelers. They were all exhibitor people, so maybe they were getting warmed up for glad-handing. I’m staying in a quite nice, and nicely located, River North hotel at excellent HIMSS rates. Dinner was my first time having chicken Vesuvio, which was so fantastic despite its simplicity that I’ll try making it at home. I’m indifferent to Chicago hot dogs compared to Southern chili dogs, I’m not a fan of the underbaked dough lasagna called deep dish pizza, and I’ve yet to try Italian beef although I suspect I would like it a lot. I enjoy Garrett’s and Nuts on Clark popcorn, but not enough to pay the asking price. I also like the Walnut Room and Frango mints from the former Marshall Fields before Macy’s dragged them down a bit, at least from past visits, but I doubt I’ll head down to State Street this time around.

I haven’t even looked at the agenda, but my HIMSS23 plan for the week is simple: get my badge early Tuesday in hoping for shorter lines than last year, wander about the exhibit hall Tuesday and Wednesday, and try to overhear conversations that aren’t intended for me since those are more interesting. I’ll decide Wednesday evening whether it’s worth going again Thursday and then just walk around Chicago if not, heading home Friday.

I need eyes and ears out there because of my slothfulness while all the eager beavers are racing madly from one spot to another and stacking up social events with higher confidence levels than mine that something interesting awaits, so let me know if you hear or see anything important. I’ve been to enough HIMSS conferences to know that other than a few pre-timed announcements early in the week, nothing all that newsworthy happens there, and sites that try to cover it like real news usually end up trying to make lame press releases sound relevant.

I can’t decide: is the HIMSS23 slogan of “Health that Connects + Tech that Cares” calculatedly clever or does it try a bit too hard to deny being a boat show and fall short?

News

Microsoft and Epic announce that they will work together to bring generative AI into Epic’s applications via Azure OpenAI Service. UC San Diego Health, UW Health, and Stanford Health Care are already using an initial solution that automatically drafts message responses. Another solution will add natural language queries and interactive data analysis to Epic’s SlicerDicer self-service reporting tool.

In Japan, investigation of a hospital ransomware attack finds that NEC used the same username and password for thousands of user devices and EHR servers, assuming that front-ending the login process with a user’s smart card would secure the system by hiding the password in what it incorrectly thought was a system that wasn’t connected to the outside world. More than half of the 280 hospitals that are users of that EHR were found to have the same username and password.

Announcements

Medhost announces a Rural Emergency Hospital package.

Intelligent Medical Objects announces IMO Studio, a cloud-based platform for clinical terminologies, code sets, and data quality whose rollout will start with in July Epic customers.

EClinicalWorks will integrate its EHR/PM solutions with ChatGPT, cognitive services, and machine learning models from Azure OpenAI Service.

People

Ellkay promotes Ajay Kapare, MBA to president and chief strategy officer. He replaces co-founder Lior Hod, who will transition to chief culture officer.

Health Data Movers hires Darin Ryder (Continuum Health IT) as VP of client services.

Monday Morning Update 4/17/23

Top News

Arcadia raises $125 million in financing to accelerate its work in aggregating and analyzing healthcare data.  

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents, whether attending HIMSS23 or not, expect to be working harder this week.

I expect to be working harder this week because I will be unexpectedly lugging some kind of coat around airports thanks to HIMSS choosing to stay home in Chicago (Monday: gale warning, snow, high of 39) in abandoning the usual rotation of Las Vegas (sunny and 81) or Orlando (sunny and 82). The conference is in Orlando next year, then two consecutive years in Las Vegas afterward. Some conference folks put Las Vegas, Orlando, and Chicago as within the top five US conference locations, with former HIMSS cities San Diego (sunny and 64) and Atlanta (sunny and 70) rounding out the list.

New poll to your right or here: Are you using ChatGPT or other AI tools at least daily for work-related tasks?

Ramadan and its month of fasting will end Thursday evening as HIMSS23 is winding down. Muslims aren’t allowed to take anything by mouth – food, water, or medicine – from dawn to sunset, so they usually have a significant pre-dawn breakfast (with lots of water since none is allowed for the following 13 hours) and late-evening meal. It must be challenging to travel to a conference during Ramadan in accommodating prayer times and finding halal food, but at least attendees will be home for Eid al-Fitr.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Wisconsin’s Froedtert and ThedaCare will merge by the end of 2023 to create an 18-hospital system with $4 billion in revenue.

Tenet reports that EVP/CIO Paola Arbour’s total compensation in 2022 was $1.7 million, a big drop from the $2.9 million she was paid in 2021.

Sales

• Alaska’s Department of Health awards a new contract to HealthConnect Alaska, the state HIE, to expand its services.

People

Taylor Bockweg (MuleSoft) joins CarePayment as VP of national accounts.

Announcements and Implementations

Amazon announces new tools for building with generative AI on AWS. Amazon Bedrock offers foundation models from Amazon and other companies that address use cases such as text generation, chatbots, search, text summarization, image generation, and personalization.

Other

Industry long-timer Stuart Miller (Craneware) has had his HIMSS23 plans waylaid by an emergency double lung transplant two weeks ago. HIs daughter, Bethany Miller-Urroz (Rhapsody), invites everyone to visit Rhapsody’s Booth 7110 at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday to send their encouragement via a group photo.

Also missing a planned trip to HIMSS23 will be Chilmark Research founder and CEO John Moore, who wrote his moving “Bidding Adieu” from hospice care. 

Sponsor Updates

• Netsmart will exhibit at NATCon23 May 1-3 in Los Angeles.
• Cone Health exceeds quality goals for its sepsis initiative using Premier’s Pinc AI quality enterprise.
• Redox releases a new podcast, “Navigating rapid cardiology practice acquisition with US Heart and Vascular’s Cheryl Rodenfels.”
• Sectra publishes a new case study, “Digital pathology transforms collaboration among pathologists in Greater Manchester.”

Blog Posts

• Doctor, do you mind the interruption? (Nordic)
• This Mission is Possible: Achieving Better Data in Healthcare (ReMedi Health Solutions)
• Unlock the Potential of Your Answering Service: Realizing Enterprise Value (PerfectServe)
• Breaking Down Silos: 4 Ways Premier is Working to Build a Unified Continuum of Care (Premier)
• Conversational AI: What is it and how is it transforming in 2023? (Talkdesk)
• PHE Expiration Implications for PTs, OTs, and SLPs (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 4/14/23

Top News

Carlyle Group abandons its interest in acquiring a 50% stake in payments integrity technology vendor Cotiviti from Veritas Capital.

Veritas reportedly rejected Carlyle’s offer that had been lowered due to market conditions.

Reuters reported in February that Carlyle was interested in acquiring part of Cotiviti at a $15 billion valuation.

Veritas took Cotiviti private in 2018 for around $5 billion and merged it into its Verscend Technologies payer analytics business.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIMSS23 weather goes from near-record high in the upper 70s through Saturday – which only early-arriving exhibitor personnel will get to see – with a big cool-off with 50-ish highs and the possibility of snow showers on Monday.

I’ve noticed that Oracle seems to be retiring the Oracle Cerner name that was used interchangeably with Oracle Health following the acquisition. Press releases after mid-February don’t include the Cerner name other than one reference to Cerner Millennium.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Interoperability platform vendor 1upHealth raises $40 million in a Series C funding round, increasing its total to $76 million. The company says it will use the proceeds to develop products to support CMS regulations, enhance its data cloud infrastructure, and expand its customer and services teams.

Release of information vendor Verisma acquires competitor ScanStat.

Verato’s identity management solutions will be offered with the interoperability products of Redox to provide a 360-degree view of patients, members, providers, and communities.

Sales

• Saint Joseph’s Medical Center will extend its deployment of Oracle Health’s EHR and RevElate patient accounting solution to all locations.
• The Princess Alexandra NHS Trust will implement Oracle Health’s EHR.

People

Ashish Sant, MTech (Bracco) joins Merative as general manager of its Merge imaging solutions.

Aspirion hires Amy Amick, MBA (SPH Analytics) as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Google will offer limited access to its Med-PaLM 2 medical large language model to a select group of Google Cloud customers for testing and use case development.

Carnegie Mellon researchers develop an Internet-connected OpenAI tool that correctly developed a plan to synthesize ibuprofen, aspirin, and aspartame and to control the lab technology required to manufacture them. They also had the system develop a new cancer drug that was not tested. The authors warn that such a system is promising, but could be used to create illegal drugs or bioweapons. Not surprisingly, they also credit ChatGPT for creating the first draft of the article. 

Google Cloud announces an AI-enabled Claims Acceleration Suite for prior authorization review and claims processing. One module is Claims Data Activator, which allows searching patient records to create FHIR-formatted structured data to speed decision-making. The company is also recommended solutions from Myndshft (real-time prior authorization and benefits) and Pega (expedited manual review of prior authorization requests) that run on Google Cloud.

Walgreens expands its year-old clinical trials business by recruiting participants for an Alzheimer’s drug trial. Walgreens launched the business in June 2022, saying that its nationwide footprint and enterprise-wide data capabilities allow it to make clinical trials more accessible, convenient, and equitable, particularly in the nearly half of its locations that are in socially vulnerable areas.

Remote diagnostics and telehealth vendor Medaica will provide free, FDA-cleared digital stethoscopes for in-home use by rural and underserved patients who are undergoing telehealth exams.

Glooko, which offers a home diabetes management system, will integrate Hedia’s bolus insulin dosing advice that can integrate with connected insulin pens.

Microsoft lists new Teams healthcare capabilities and other products that it will demonstrate at HIMSS23:

• Launch Teams virtual visits directly from Epic and Cerner via its EHR connector, which also supports joint and group visits.
• The ability to schedule, brand, and send patient reminders for virtual visits.
• Track virtual visit no-shows, appointment durations, wait times, and number of appointments.
• Integration of Teams with Teladoc Health Solo.
• A new pre-configured home experience for frontline care workers.
• A Walkie Talkie Teams app.
• Support for shared use of Android phones.
• A unified member view and care journey template for payers.
• Previews of new Azure AI Services for Health that include SDoH and ethnicity support from unstructured data, clinical trials matching, and Health Bot integration.

Roche announces Navify Algorithm Suite, which allows clinicians to order certified algorithms from Roche and other companies from within their EHR and laboratory systems.

A Deloitte survey of 30 US health system leaders looks at digital health tools:

• Three-fourths of respondents say their organizations are rethinking their business models from delivering treatments to maintaining health, with most of them supporting the change with digital technologies but conceding that much work remains.
• Health systems are successfully meeting consumer and care needs within their four walls, but fall short in preventive and continuing care. Adoption remains low for integrating wearables data, care plans, and clinician messaging.
• The executives say that integrating digital technologies also requires addressing revenue, fragmented ownership of digital projects, changing workflows. and lack of skilled workers.
• One interviewee noted that technology could help bridge the gap between what consumers do for their own health and wellness versus the entirely separate activities that they do for healthcare

Government and Politics

HHS OCR issues a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would extend HIPAA to prohibit the use of disclosure of PHI for identifying, investigating, suing, or prosecuting someone for seeking, obtaining, providing, or facilitating lawful reproductive healthcare. The unpublished document is here.

Other

Bay Area Hospital (OR) is threatened with closure after losing $61 million in its most recent fiscal year, which auditors blame on several problems that include a problematic implementation of Epic that resulted in $18 million of lost billings. Auditors also noted that the hospital spent $15 million more in contract labor in 2022 than in 2021, some of that due to Epic go-live support needs, and also spent $3.6 million to help local medical practices with their Epic installation.

The University of Virginia newspaper profiles 2016 graduate Aajash Shah, who with his ENT surgeon cousin started home allergy treatment company Wyndly in 2021. The company sells a $249 home finger-stick allergy test whose results are reviewed by a doctor to prescribe under-the-tongue tablets as an alternative to allergy shots. The service, which includes unlimited doctor time and treatments, costs $99 per month.

KFF Health News profiles Horizon Therapeutics, which is about to be acquired by Amgen for $27.8 billion even though it has never developed a drug that has reached the market. The Shkreli-like company buys old drugs, raises their prices, markets them aggressively to physicians who sometimes are paid honoraria, offers concierge-like services to patients to whom it markets directly, and makes sure that insurers rather than patients bear the financial burden via its patient assistance programs. It spent $120 million to acquire a last-resort gout drug that has many cheap alternatives, then marketed it aggressively to drive sales to $1 billion annually after increasing its price tenfold. The company, which saved a fortune in US taxes by moving its headquarters to Ireland, paid $93.4 million in 2015 to its CEO, who will reap a reported $135 million from the acquisition.

In India, authorities raid an unlicensed hospital that was being run by a high school dropout who was posing as a doctor, following reports that the illegal 16-bed Mediversal Hospital included a lab, ICU, emergency room, and surgery suite.

Sponsor Updates

• Women’s Health Associates realizes a 40% increase in revenue cycle payment processing with Healow Payment Services from EClinicalWorks.
• Surescripts launches the second season of its There’s a Better Way: Smart Talk on Healthcare and Technology Podcast.
• BayCare Health System expands its use of Oracle Health technologies to include its RevElate patient accounting software.
• Vyne Medical will sponsor and present at NAHAM’s annual conference May 2-5 in Orlando.
• Fortified Health Security names Matthew Prater service desk technician.
• Health Data Movers publishes a new case study, “Data Conversion for a Growing Health System.)
• Net Health publishes a new e-book, “10 Practical Tips for Taking Your Physical Therapy Clinic Management to the Next Level.”

Blog Posts

• How Predictive Data Improves Outcomes, Cuts Costs (Enlace Health)
• Five9 Knows Healthcare: Improving Patient Care in Times of Calm and Crisis (Five9)
• Increase Margins and Eliminate Access Barriers with Meaningful Automation (Impact Advisors)
• How Well Do You Track Your Provider ‘Inventory?’ (InterSystems)
• Clearsense at HIMSS 2023 (Clearsense)
• How to buy back your clinical informaticists’ time (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Marble’s Data Connections – Kaiser Permanente (Marble)
• Everything You Need to Know About Rural Emergency Hospitals (REH) (Medhost)
• ViVE: The Trending Health Conference for Healthcare Tech Professionals (Healthjump)
• Seizing the moment at Meditech’s 2023 Home Care Symposium (Meditech)
• Quick Wins: 5 Service Lines that Make the Most Sense for Prior Authorization Software (Myndshft)
• How Brightside Health Supports At-Risk Populations Who Would Otherwise Fall Through the Cracks (NeuroFlow)
• The impact of technological advancements in healthcare (Nuance)

Contacts

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

News 4/12/23

Top News

A federal jury convicts three former executives of waiting room advertising company Outcome Health, which was valued at one time at over $5 billion, of several fraud charges involving inflating the number of ad impressions to advertisers and investors from 2011 to 2017.

Convicted are former executives Rishi Shah (CEO), Shradha Agarwal (president), and Brad Purdy (CFO), none of whom testified.

SEC charges are pending against the executives, along with Ashik Desai, who testified against his former bosses in the criminal trial.

Shah and Agarwal stepped down following a Wall Street Journal investigative report in 2017. They were 31 and 32 at the time. Shah owned 80% of the company, giving him a net worth of nearly $4 billion. PatientPoint acquired Outcome Health  in March 2021.

Shah and Agarwal founded JumpStart Ventures in 2011, whose investments include MedCity News, CoverMyMeds, and Medpilot.

Reader Comments

From Nikki: “Re: Oracle. I bet whoever made this proclamation is regretting it.” Oracle EVP Mike Sicilia told the US Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs on July 20, 2022 that the company would move the VA’s Oracle Cerner implementation to the cloud and rewrite its pharmacy module within 6-9 months. We’re at the nine-month mark and I’ve heard nothing. Maybe they’re saving the announcement for HIMSS23.

From Asclepi Us: “Re: health systems. I’ve heard that the term health system may be replaced as they get bigger and offer broader lines of business. One has said the future is ‘health platform.’” The trendy name progression has included hospital, medical center, regional medical center, health system (which patients generally dislike intensely), and health (particularly questionable given how hospitals make money). My prediction is that because the business of health is so broad and brand-obsessed that it will be like Northwell, Providence, Ascension, and others that simply choose a one-word name  — sometimes by making up an eye-rolling word or painfully conjoining two actual words into one — that they hope age well. The names with the shortest shelf lives will be those where two merging entities can’t bear to see either old name disappear and settle on squeezing both names into one. Assuming I am right that one-word names will prevail, ChatGPT suggests DynaCare, Vitalia, MediVista, Zenitha, Nuviva, or Aurelia.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’ve added a couple of HIStalk sponsors to my HIMSS guide.

Someone on LinkedIn reference this 2017 article, in which two reporters coined the term “broetry” to describe those overly cutesy LinkedIn posts that — with one pithy sentence per paragraph — try to pass off trite personal or business observations as being inspiring or insightful. They say the broems “read like employee handbook haikus or an E.E.  Cummings motivational poster” that always finish with “some closing fortune cookie-esque takeaway.” One user speculates that the widely scorned format caters to an ADD mentality of get-to-the-point writing or perhaps is popular because it can be easily read on mobile devices. ChatGPT has since made the broet’s work easier and even more mindless.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor CenterX. The Madison, WI-based company delivers reliable, patient-specific pharmacy benefit data and a fully integrated prior authorization solution, allowing providers to start cost-effective therapy faster. It delivers full benefit transparency at the point of care, including up-to-date pricing information and offering alternatives to medications that require prior authorization. Its electronic prior authorization tools are integrated into the EHR and keep users in the same system, regardless of the payer or plan, without faxing, re-entering, or phone calls. More than 120,000 Epic providers have had the CenterX network added alongside their existing network or alone at no additional cost to the health system. Providers who use prescription benefit information from CenterX made changes 25% of the time to either save their patients money or avoid a PA. Also, prior authorizations dropped by 38% after CenterX ePA was implemented. Thanks to CenterX 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

Confirming earlier rumors of a sale, healthcare automation vendor Olive AI sells its payer-facing prior authorization business to health information network Availity. The acquisition includes existing Utilization Management customer contracts and an agreement to hire around 100 key Olive personnel. Olive sold off its population health management and 340b solutions in 2021, and has laid off nearly 700 employees within the last year. According to its website, Olive now focuses solely on autonomous revenue cycle services.

Twitter legally ceases to exist under that name as Elon Musk merges it into another of this companies that is called X Corp. Musk has previously tweeted his intention to turn Twitter into the “everything” X app that includes social networking, messaging, and payments. Musk and his co-founders launched the company that eventually became PayPal by merging their security software company with online financial services company X.com in 2000.

Ellkay releases LKOrbit, an end-to-end, cloud-based connectivity platform that supports laboratory ordering, results, connectivity, and access to billing information.

Sales

• Contexture, an HIE serving organizations in Arizona and Colorado, will unify its technology platforms into a single system with assistance from Health Catalyst.
• McLaren Health Care’s Karmanos Cancer Institute (MI) selects Volpara Health’s Risk Pathways risk assessment and patient management software.
• Pria will implement Health Connect Cloud technology from InterSystems, which is also an investor in the chronic care management company.
• Dayton Children’s Hospital will implement Bio-key’s PortalGuard IDaaS biometric authentication in its migration from Epic’s Hyperspace to Hyperdrive.

People

Ben Hilmes, MHA (Adventist Health) joins Healthcare IT Leaders as president.

Nate Kelly, MBA (Hospital IQ) joins ChartSwap as president.

Greenway Health hires Don Kleoppel (Cerner) as CISO.

Announcements and Implementations

WellSky announces GA of WellSky Patient, giving patients the ability to communicate with providers between visits, access virtual care, and take part in condition management programs.

Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion remove medical debt of under $500 from US consumer credit reports, adding to previous actions that removed paid-in-full medical debt immediately and that gave people 12 months instead of six to pay a medical bill before it appears on their credit report.

Moffitt Cancer Center profiles CIO Joyce Oh, who joined the organization in September 2022.

Government and Politics

HHS and ONC issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking  with changes to the Cures Act and ONC’s certification program. Participation in the Electronic Health Record Reporting Program would become a new Condition of Certification for certified health IT developers and several certification criteria would be revised. The unpublished version is here.

HHS OCR issues a reminder that its HIPAA and HITECH enforcement discretion ends with the expiration of the public health emergency on May 11, 2023. A significant change is that providers will no longer be able to use non-compliant technologies to conduct telehealth sessions.

Cerner Enviza and John Snow Labs will work with the FDA as part of its Sentinel drug safety initiative to develop AI solutions that extract relevant data from clinical notes within EHRs so that the agency can better understand the effects of medications on large populations. Cerner launched the Enviza business in 2020, eventually combining its provider network data with that of health data vendor Kantar Health, which it acquired for $375 million in 2021.

The Defense Health Agency begins researching a support contract for MHS Genesis as its original 10-year, $5.5 billion agreement ends in July 2025. Leidos was the prime contractor for the July 2015 contract, joined by Cerner, Accenture, and Henry Schein.

Privacy and Security

The Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center within HHS alerts healthcare organizations to a growing number of distributed denial-of-service attacks. HC3 warns that the volume of invalid requests will not only slow servers down, but prevent valid requests from being processed.

Other

Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Center for Knowledge Management develops MyKnowledgeHub, an online database of curated clinical evidence, drug information, and patient education resources for VUMC providers.

Former Propeller Health executive Chris Hogg — who left the company and started virtual primary care company Marley Medical in 2021 — analyzes the apparent demise of digital therapeutics vendor Pear Therapeutics following its filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy:

• The early idea that software could impact clinical outcomes evolved into focusing individual market segments, with companies such as Omada, Ginger, and WellDoc.
• Implementation and delivery turned out to be the hard part. The underlying technology is only a small part of the solution.
• The grind of distribution and payment is hard and expensive.
• Companies were trying to identify their services business as technology businesses with their P&L showed otherwise.
• Commodity software was being offered a high prices – up to $500 per patient per month in Pear’s case — based on a limited number of studies, with spotty payment and questionable value of a limited service. Care delivery can’t be sold like a consumer product.
• Studies proving that tech can improve outcomes are necessary but not sufficient. Healthcare innovation usually fails to succeed due to patient acquisition, payment, and distribution.
• The path forward is to build a new care model around software to deliver end-to-end-care to produce the outcomes that create value.

Another insightful comment about Pear comes from Eric Gastfriend, founder and CEO of competitor DynamiCare Health, who calls out product cost, lack of payer coverage, and this great summary:

Unrealistic expectations. They went public last year via a SPAC at a >$1B valuation, with just $4M in revenue. Raising too much money at too high a valuation forces companies to take big risks, spending the money they’ve raised to try to quickly drive revenue / milestones in order to justify the valuation. In fact, the SPAC was largely driven by previous rounds that raised too much at too high valuations. In total, the company raised >$400M, 25% of which was in the form of debt. Once you’ve taken on debt, leases, regulatory compliance burdens (FDA for being a prescription product; SEC for being a public company), and other unavoidable costs, it makes it harder to turn the company profitable, and therefore a better strategy is to try to grow as quickly as possible to be able to raise more money. That can work until the macroeconomic / fundraising environment dries up, which is what happened for tech in late 2022.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD publishes a new e-guide, “Private Practice KPIs: 12 Data Points That Impact Revenue.”
• Agfa HealthCare publishes a new case study, “Region Midtjylland (Region Midt) celebrates their Agfa HealthCare Enterprise Imaging Go Live.”
• Nordic publishes a new episode of DocTalk, “Using data wisely: Telling the insight story.”
• Bamboo Health will exhibit at the ACMA National Conference April 21-24 in Washington, DC.
• Care.ai makes its AI-driven Smart Care Facility Platform available on Google Marketplace.
• CarePort Health publishes a new customer success snapshot featuring Legacy Health Services, “Successfully managing patient populations with help from real-time data.”
• CHIME congratulates members Cook Children’s Health Care System SVP and CIO Theresa Meadows, CHIME VP David Finn, and Intermountain Healthcare VP and CISO Erik Decker upon receiving their respective Leadership Excellence in Cybersecurity Awards from The Baldridge Foundation.
• Current Health publishes a new study, “Temporal trends in virtual care data may influence program staffing and design.”

Blog Posts

• How to manage ‘relentless’ payment denial codes (AdvancedMD)
• Part Two: Blizzards, Heat Waves, and Health Outcomes – Using Data in Response to Natural Disasters (Azara Healthcare)
• Can a Good Network Management Partnership Give Your Healthcare IT Organization New Focus? (CereCore)
• MEDHOST Invites Attendees to Learn More About Innovative Services and Solutions at HIMSS23 (Medhost)
• 10 Security Priorities for HIPAA Compliance Success (Clearwater)
• The Growing Use of ChatGPT by Hospital Staff Leads to the Inadvertent Disclosure of Patient and Technical Information (CloudWave)
• Our Top 4 ViVE 2023 Conference Takeaways (Divurgent)
• Consensus Cloud Solutions at HIMSS23 (Consensus Cloud Solutions)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 4/10/23

Top News

Pear Health, which offers prescription-based digital therapeutics, files Chapter 11 bankruptcy, lays off nearly all of its employees, and seeks buyers for the business or its assets.

The publicly traded company has halted the filling of new and refill prescriptions for its PDTs for treating substance use disorder, opioid use disorder, and chronic insomnia.

Pear was formed in 2013 and went public in December 2021 via a SPAC merger that valued it at more than $1 billion for several months before PEAR shares began their slide.

President and CEO Corey McCann, MD, PhD announced “a reduction in force, including me” on LinkedIn, blaming the company’s failure on insurers and unfavorable market conditions.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Polarity is evident in the results of last week’s poll, where respondents are either (a) confident that most of their medical record would be accessible in a random ED visit, or (b) have no idea. Thanks for the insightful comments, which aren’t encouraging given that we all work around healthcare technology. Maybe we should all carry around a medical alert card that contains ID details and instructions for three scenarios: (a) the ED uses the same EHR as a provider you trust to have complete information, with your card identifying who that provider is and which EHR they use; (b) an ED that uses a different EHR; and (c) HIE details, including national networks, if relevant. Or, and I shudder to say it since it sounds so 2005-ish, maybe we should maintain our own personal health record on our phone, a website, or a thumb drive and carry instructions for accessing it.

New poll to your right or here, which I’ve run annually for many years: what will you be doing during HIMSS23?

Speaking as Mr. Obvious, HIMSS23 will unveil the new conference normal for HIMSS. On the plus side, COVID’s impact is much reduced since the skip year / failed virtual conference attempt of 2020 and the “mask-wearing summer in Las Vegas” unsuccessful recovery in 2021. On the negative, providers and vendors are dealing with iffy economic conditions; new conference competitors and the refocus of CHIME away from HMISS have probably poached some of the decision-makers whose attendance subsidized the cost for the rest of us; and the HIMSS brand hasn’t regained its pre-COVID luster. HIMSS22 went fairly well, so I’m thinking that HIMSS23 will be a modest hit from and attendance and exhibitor count perspective, although the most important metric is exhibitor perception of ROI in deciding whether to follow along to Orlando in 2024. Industry news is slow so far this holiday week, which might mean vendors are holding their announcements for next week in recognition that the HIMSS conference is still an important event.

The Chicago weather forecast shows plenty of warm spring days and no snow, but with a drastic cool-off just as HIMSS23 gets underway, with clouds and highs in the mid-50s. Chicago is the only city where it snowed during a HIMSS conference, so I’ll take this weather.

Also cool is the activity of HIStalk’s sponsors at HIMSS23, my summary of which might influence (or “inform,” as linguistic fad-followers might say) your exhibit hall navigation plan.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor SmartSense by Digi. The company, which is a business unit of Digi International (NASDAQ: DGII), is a leading global provider of temperature and environmental monitoring solutions that deliver dynamic and personalized asset monitoring, process digitization, and digital decisioning across healthcare. Its enterprise-wide critical asset monitoring and management solution for pharmacies, labs, clinics, blood banks, and more ensures compliance with centralized reporting, NIST-calibrated temperature monitoring, and logs that provide proof-of-temperature performance. The solutions deploy quickly and are wire-free, eliminating the need for IT support or HIPAA concerns. They help directors of lab, pharmacy, facilities, and biomed with governance over compliance, temperature, and humidity monitoring, and any other product safety concern, relieving pain points around product loss, regulatory compliance, automation, and temperature logging automation.Thanks to SmartSense by Digit 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

Virtual substance abuse disorder provider Workit Health will lay off 100 employees, anticipating that the DEA will reinstate a pandemic-relaxed rule that requires patients to undergo an in-person visit before having controlled substances prescribed via telehealth.

Erica Jain, MBA, co-founder and CEO of Virtual care tools vendor Healthie, lists lessons learned in its seven-year history:

1. The company over-invested in sales and marketing without a corresponding scale-up in technology and product teams.
2. It realized that success takes years regardless of how much money a company raises, and suggests that companies wait as long as possible between their seed and Series A rounds to focus on the business and make mistakes on a small scale before they jump on the VC treadmill.
3. The company wasted money on social media, ads, and team culture, which the founders rationalized as being first-timers trying to learn.
4. It hired sales reps without having training and management in place, which failed to deliver results and left customers feeling that the company was “sales-y.”
5. Lack of technical discipline and a rush to ship code quickly required a product rewrite that was painful to the company and customers.
6. The founders waited too long to bring in a head of product, causing bottlenecks and difficulty in prioritizing customer requests.
7. It learned the responsibility of being a healthcare infrastructure company, where customers could not get through a work day with anything less than full functionality.

Privacy and Security

A researcher questions why Phreesia’s clinic check-in app requires patients to check a box that authorizes the company to use their information to serve targeted ads. She starting choosing the subtle “no consent” option, then contacted Phreesia to confirm that they had no consent form on file for her. The company said it would revoke her authorization, seemingly confirming that it possessed one against her intentions, which Phreesia blames on a staff member who used its system to check the patient in manually. She notes that Phreesia’s SEC filing boasts that patients who are served its ads are 4.5 times more likely to end up with a prescription for the promoted drug, meaning it might not be in her best interest that her provider would not have prescribed the drug until asked.

Other

A randomized controlled trial finds that restricting EHR users to opening just one chart at a time doesn’t seem to reduce their efficiency, as measured by daily EHR usage time. On the other hand, the authors mentioned a previous study in which the single-patient limitation was not associated with a lower rate of wrong-patient errors compared to allowing up to four charts to be open simultaneously.

According to a study conducted by Cedars-Sinai, ChatGPT is effective at translating medical information about cirrhosis and liver cancer in a way that patients and caregivers can comprehend. However, the authors found that ChatGPT’s responses to frequently asked questions are often insufficient and may contain errors up to 50% of the time. They conclude that it’s a good adjunct for clinicians rather than a replacement for them.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare Triangle announces a multi-year subscription agreement with customer CalvertHealth for its medical document automation solution Readabl.ai.
• Oracle Health helps University of Missouri Health Care clinicians incorporate external data for more comprehensive patient histories and informed treatment plans.
• Clark Health (FL) sees a 200% growth in services since investing in EClinicalWorks technology over a decade ago.
• Optimum Healthcare IT names Michele Haag (MaineHealth) business intelligence developer.
• Sectra publishes a new case study, “From crisis to solution: Sky Lake Medical Center’s rapid restoration of radiology after ransomware attack.”
• Trualta introduces virtual caregiver support groups, webinars, and care coaching programs to support more caregivers across the country.

Blog Posts

• Expanding Access to Care for Better Public Health (Netsmart)
• Key Takeaways from ViVE 2023: Digital Health Turns a Corner from Hype to Value (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Healthcare Call Center Trends: What Leaders Need to Know (PerfectServe)
• The End is Near: Are Providers Ready for the Unwinding of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency? (Premier)
• Use Cases for AI in Healthcare (RCxRules)
• What’s the problem with ChatGPT in the contact center? (Talkdesk)
• Hybridization is the Future: Can Your Practice Model Support It? (WebPT)

Contacts

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

HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS23

These are the HIStalk sponsors that provided responses. Send me yours if you missed out. Click a logo for general company information.

Availity

Booth 8336

Contact: Matt Schlossberg, director, public relations
matt.schlossberg@availity.com
630.935.9136

Availity will highlight how its Upcycled Data addresses the critical issues affecting healthcare data interoperability at HIMSS23. Members of the Clinical Solutions team will be on hand to discuss Availity’s clinical data gateway capabilities and strategy, work to create an advanced data interoperability exchange platform and advocate for national standards, and efforts to establish a single connection point for payer-to-payer transactions. Availity’s team will also participate in the following sessions:

• Implementing Da Vinci Standards for Prior Authorization: A Story Untold
  Wednesday, April 19 | 11:45 AM – 12:05 PM CT | Da Vinci Project Kiosk at the Interoperability Showcase
  Susan Bellile, Availity, Amy Mattingly, Humana, and Michael Palantoni, Athenahealth
• How HL7 FHIR is Transforming Healthcare: AI, Analytics
  Tuesday, April 18 | 5:10 – 5:45 PM CT | HL7 Booth Theatre #138
  Sam Schiffman, Availity, and Vivian Neilley, Google
• Developing Scalable Infrastructure for Clinical Data Interoperability and Patient Access
  Wednesday, April 19 | 1:00 – 2:00 PM CT | South Building, Level 5, S504
  Ashley Basile, PhD, Availity, and Rob Low, Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC)

To learn more about Availity and our participation at HIMSS23, please visit www.availity.com and schedule a meeting with our team!

Baker Tilly

Booth 452

Contact: Charlie Cook, principal, healthcare consulting
charlie.cook@bakertilly.com
772.919.1555

Baker Tilly is excited to exhibit at HIMSS23! Join us at our booth, #452 (near Epic), on Tuesday and Wednesday from 1 – 2 p.m. for a discussion on alleviating staffing shortages in hospitals with technology. Baker Tilly’s Ed Ricks, MHA, CHCIO will be joined by Artisight’s president, Stephanie Lahr, MC, CHCIO for a live discussion. Can’t make that time work? Connect with us anytime at the booth and stop by for some fun putt putt on our green!

Baker Tilly is a leading advisory CPA firm, providing healthcare clients with a genuine coast-to-coast and global advantage in major regions of the US and in many of the world’s leading financial centers – New York, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago. We guide healthcare clients in the provider, payer, and life sciences sectors through complex financial and operational challenges, including system selection, implementation and optimization. Connect with us to discuss where you want to go.

Best Buy Health

Booth 7506

Contact: Patrick Muse, senior director of client engagement
patrick.muse@bestbuy.com
603.506.9982

Best Buy isn’t just the place where you buy big-screen TVs and computers. We also provide technology that might one day help take care of you or a loved one at home. Our Best Buy Health business enables care at home for everyone by focusing on three key areas: wellness at home, aging at home, and care at home. Building its strategy on the strengths of Best Buy, Best Buy Health utilizes its Lively brand to offer a suite of devices, health and safety services, and Caring Centers to help adults age independently. Best Buy Health also connects patients and providers through its Current Health platform to improve the care-at-home experience and ensure better outcomes. Stop by our big blue and yellow booth to learn more and get the chance to win an Apple Watch.

Censinet

Booth – Cybersecurity Command Center 4309-39

Contact: Ed Gaudet, founder and CEO
egaudet@censinet.com
855.866.6001

Censinet will be demonstrating Censinet RiskOps, healthcare’s choice for enterprise cyber and third-party risk management. Censinet and KLAS Research executives will also be recognizing leading digital health IT vendors with the KLAS Research / Censinet “Cybersecurity Transparent” award throughout HIMSS. Censinet CISO and Healthcare Industry Veteran Chris Logan will deliver “Insights from the Healthcare Cybersecurity Benchmarking Study” on Thursday, April 20 at 10:45 a.m. – 11:05 a.m. CT, in South Building, Level 2 | Hall A | Booth 4309-4333 | Cybersecurity Command Center – Theater B. Learn key insights from the industry’s first Healthcare Cybersecurity Benchmarking Study, co-led by Censinet, KLAS Research, and AHA, and sponsored by leading health systems.

Stop by the Censinet booth and pick up a Censinet VIVE2023-coveted solar wireless charger and experience the power of Censinet RiskOps and scan to win a VR Headset.

Clearsense

Booth 7527

Contact: Leann Williams, marketing manager
lwilliams@clearsense.com
904.334.7500

Clearsense is ready to show you our brand-new 1Clearsense data management and delivery platform, along with a full suite of applications. Our team will be available for live demos at booth #7527, and you can get an exclusive Lunch and Learn on Data Literacy with our resident data governance expert, Terri Mikol. Be sure to follow us on social for promos and giveaways and check out our website for a full agenda.

Clearwater

Booth 7320, Cybersecurity Command Center Booth 4309-40

Contact: John Howlett, SVP and chief marketing officer
john.howlett@clearwatercompliance.com
773.636.6449

Clearwater helps organizations across the healthcare ecosystem move to a more secure, compliant, and resilient state so they can successfully accomplish their missions. We do this by providing a deep pool of experts across a broad range of cybersecurity, privacy, and compliance domains, purpose-built software that enables efficient identification and management of cybersecurity and compliance risks, and a tech-enabled, 24x7x365 Security Operations Center with managed threat detection and response capabilities. Join us on Tuesday, April 18, at 12:15 p.m. in the Cybersecurity Command Center as Clearwater CEO Steve Cagle and Renown Health CISO Steven Ramirez discuss how Renown has gone about implementing a cyber risk management program and what the organization has learned along the way.

CloudWave

Booth 3417

Contact: Christine Mellyn
cmellyn@gocloudwave.com
781.636.8169

CloudWave, the expert in healthcare data security, provides cloud, cybersecurity, and managed services using a multi-cloud approach. CloudWave is 100% focused on healthcare and delivers enterprise cloud services to nearly 300 hospitals and healthcare organizations, supporting 140+ EHR, clinical, and enterprise applications.

Drop by the CloudWave booth for an interactive, informative experience. Visit us at Booth 3417 to hear CloudWave experts talk about important technology topics ranging from cybersecurity to cloud, and earn a chance to win a pair of Apple AirPod Pros at the end of each presentation! Managing the Edge – New Ways of Looking at Your Data Center Infrastructure – Tues. 4/18 @1pm, Wed. 4/19 @1pm    Hear How ArchCare Health Services Tested Their Cybersecurity Response Readiness – Tues. 4/18 @3pm, Wed. 4/19 @3pm    Take Healthcare IT Security to the Next Level – Go Beyond the Status Quo – Wed 4/19 @11am    What Scares Attackers the Most and How They Are Using ChatGPT – Thurs. 4/20 @11am    How to Build Your Secure Cloud Offering – A Guide for ISVs – Thurs. 4/20 @1pm.

For more information about CloudWave at HIMSS, or to add any of these presentations to your calendar, visit www.gocloudwave.com/himss23/.

Consensus Cloud Solutions

Booth 1876

Contact: Christine Duval, director of content and communications strategy
christine.duval@consensus.com
781.519.8539

Stop by our booth at HIMSS to learn how we’re building a more connected future in healthcare at the highest levels of privacy and security. Helping organizations access meaningful patient data to get the most comprehensive information and make the most informed decisions. We’re also giving away a Nintendo Switch every day! Without the proper interoperability solutions in healthcare, you may feel like you’re playing a game of Drawful! You’re limited in the ways you can communicate, there is a lack of time, a lack of continuity, and your message may not be received the way you intended. Stop by the booth to see if you can beat our communication-exchange experts at a game of Drawful. All Drawful players will be entered in our daily raffle to win the best-selling game console, Nintendo Switch.

Dimensional Insight

Booth 2809

Contact: Lindsay Goldfarb, Director of Healthcare Marketing
LGoldfarb@dimins.com
781.419.2190

Dimensional Insight, an award-winning enterprise analytics provider, is excited to showcase its new approach to self-service analytics at HIMSS23 in booth #2809. The new improvements to Diver Platform focus on empowering users to take ownership of their analytics, resulting in increased usage and faster time to insight. Stop by our booth to see how Dimensional Insight can help you optimize patient care, support staff productivity, and improve financial KPIs.

Schedule a meeting with Dimensional Insight on the HIMSS23 show floor and get a sneak preview of these latest advancements.

Ellkay

Booth 213

Learn how ELLKAY can declutter your data strategy while streamlining interoperability efficiencies and building a patient-centric digital ecosystem. Visit booth #213 to discuss how ELLKAY’s newest solution can do just that… delivering a speedier, scalable solution to improve your ROI. Everyone knows ELLKAY is the place to be, so join the ELLKAY booth buzz during HIMSS 2023:

Tuesday, April 18

• Coffee Hour at Booth #213 | 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
• Women in HIT Happy Hour at Booth #213 |  4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
• Champagne at Sunset | Level 33 at Marriott Marquis Chicago | 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. RSVP today.

Wednesday, April 19

• International Coffee/Tea Hour at Booth | 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
• Interoperability Happy Hour at Booth | 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Thursday, April 20

• Coffee Hour at Booth | 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

Elsevier

Booth 1236

Contact: Mary Ann Abbruzzo-White, SVP of clinical solutions global marketing
m.abbruzzo-white@elsevier.com
215.275.9091

Elsevier is committed to supporting clinicians, health leaders, educators, and students to overcome the challenges they face every day. We support healthcare professionals throughout their career journey from education to clinical practice and believe providing current, credible, accessible, evidence–based information can help empower clinicians to provide the best healthcare possible. Stop by our booth to learn how to advance your EHR with knowledge and celebrate the launch of the reimagined ClinicalKey; our clinical decision support tool that delivers quick, credible answers at the point-of-care alongside trusted, comprehensive medical evidence to support practitioners’ clinical information needs.

Healthjump

Booth 7006

Contact: Mary Kay Bergan, senior sales manager
mbergan@healthjump.com

Healthjump allows you to get standardized EHR data across practices without the limitations and complex set-up of traditional interface engines. If we’re lucky, we’ll see you in Chicago this April for HIMSS23! You can find us at Booth #7006. We record in-person interviews with some of the most influential thought leaders in the industry! The series is called “Leaders in Leveraging Health Data.” If you are interested in joining the video series and becoming a leader, feel free to reach out.

KeyCare

Booth 3482

Contact: Sarah Inman, VP of health system partnerships
sarah@keycare.org
404.851.4678

KeyCare is an Epic-based virtual care platform designed to help forward-thinking health systems improve access and quality by expanding their virtual care options for patients. KeyCare offers health systems access to a network of independent virtual care providers working on KeyCare’s Epic-based platform. Health systems can start with nationwide virtual urgent care coverage, and then may add other virtual health services based on their virtual care initiatives. To learn more about KeyCare, visit www.keycare.org.

Kyruus

Booth 3663

Contact: Ashley Nyland, director of growth marketing
anyland@kyruus.com
617.419.2060

Join our team for the Kyruus Block Party at Booth #3663 on Wednesday, April 19! [during exhibit hall social] Kyruus is the leader in provider data management and provider search and scheduling for healthcare organizations, dedicated to a vision to make healthcare work better for everyone by connecting people to the care they need. Physician-founded and led, we saw that a systemic misalignment of supply and demand was causing people to wait too long for care and too often end up with the wrong providers. Inspired by baseball’s Moneyball concept, Kyruus delivers a better, data-driven approach to patient-provider matching and scheduling. Today, Kyruus powers the patient access initiatives of top healthcare organizations across the US, transforming how people find and book care through our multi-channel platform.

Looking to transform care navigation even more, Kyruus has acquired Healthsparq and Epion Health. With the addition of Healthsparq, a leader in healthcare guidance and transparency, the combined company is enabling unprecedented payer-provider connectivity to make it easier for people to navigate and schedule care across access channels. Epion Health is a leader in digital patient engagement solutions, and the collaboration offers healthcare organizations and providers a one-stop shop for patient access and engagement solutions.

MEDHOST

Contact inquiries@medhost.com or schedule a meeting with a representative at the conference to learn more.

MEDHOST, a leading EHR and healthcare IT solutions provider, will be at HIMSS23 in Chicago from April 17-21 for you to learn about their integrated EHR and their products and services that improve hospital operations and clinical care workflows. This includes a physician-focused mobile app, integrated anesthesia documentation, and a robust analytics solution. Additionally, MEDHOST offers a Rural Emergency Hospital solution packaging leading emergency department technology with IT, security, and application experts. Learn about MEDHOST’s MEDTEAM Services, outsourced services driven by a core mission to enhance how providers approach revenue cycle management, security, managed IT, and integration.

MEDITECH

Booth 2848

Contact: Anthony Filleti, marketing supervisor
afilleti@meditech.com
781.821.3000

MEDITECH empowers healthcare organizations everywhere to expand their vision of what’s possible with Expanse, the world’s most intuitive and interoperable EHR. Join MEDITECH in booth #2848 to see how MEDITECH Expanse can elevate the healthcare experience, and get a first-hand look at the platform’s cloud-based design – a solid foundation for safer, more sustainable care both today and in the future. MEDITECH executives, clinician experts, and team will be there to share customer successes, and demonstrate the company’s latest innovations, including mobile apps for physicians and nurses, the Traverse interoperability solution, Expanse Patient Connect secure texting, and more. Learn how Expanse helps drive better outcomes and provides mobile, personalized solutions to improve efficiency for an overburdened workforce.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, visitors can attend scheduled in-booth demonstrations on MEDITECH’s latest solutions, including Expanse Now, Genomics, Care Compass, Population Insight, and the embedding of Google Health’s search and summarization capabilities into clinician workflow. On Thursday at 10:00 a.m. visitors can learn more about MEDITECH’s Greenfield Workspace and MEDITECH Alliance programs. At the Interoperability Showcase MEDITECH will be featured in three use case scenarios; Record Locator Service: Powering Data Access in the Continuum of Care (CommonWell Health Alliance), 360X and Multimodality Technology to Support Care Transitions, and Leveraging Carequality and 360X transitions. MEDITECH customers will be presenting at several sessions throughout the conference, including HCA Healthcare, Avera Health, Frederick Health, and Lawrence General Hospital, covering topics such as data governance, usability, interoperability, precision medicine, and physician efficiency and optimization.

Nuance Communications

Booth 912

Contact: Caitlyn Keating, senior communications manager
Caitlyn.Keating@nuance.com
781.565.8926

Nuance, the global leader in conversational AI, will showcase the first-ever automated documentation workflow solution, DAX Express – powered by ChatGPT-4 — in an interactive, experiential demo at HIMSS23. Nuance will also preview an additional set of advanced generative AI-enabled capabilities that deliver more automation and intelligence-infused experiences across the patient journey. These future workflow-integrated capabilities – built on proven AI solutions that have consistently delivered value and outcomes for physicians, nurses, radiologists, and patients for decades – further automate complex workflows and mundane tasks, surface key details, and identify missing information to support patient care. Visit Nuance’s Booth #912 at HIMSS to learn more about how Nuance is ushering in the new era of intelligent healthcare experiences.

Philips Capsule

Booth 901, Cybersecurity Command Center 4309-03, Interoperability Showcase 7946-52

Philips is a health technology company focused on improving people’s lives through meaningful innovation across the health continuum – from healthy living and prevention to diagnosis, treatment, and home care. The company is a leader in diagnostic imaging, image-guided therapy, patient monitoring and health informatics, as well as in consumer health and home care. Applying advanced technologies and deep clinical and consumer insights, Philips partners with customers to deliver integrated solutions that address the Quadruple Aim: improved patient experience, better health outcomes, improved staff experience, and lower cost of care.

Attend our HIMSS speaking sessions:

• Executive summit: “A Cry for Help – Relieving Patient Care Pressure Through Innovation.” Monday, April 17 at 1:15 p.m. – 1:50 p.m., Marriott Marquis Chicago, Level 4, Grand Horizon Ballroom. Moderator: Nick Patel, founder and chief executive officer, Stealth Consulting .Speakers: Becky Fox, chief clinical Information officer, Intermountain Healthcare; Roy Jakobs, chief executive officer, Royal Phillips; Stephanie Lahr, president, Artisight.
• Industry solution session: “How can automation and predictive insights help improve patient care at lower cost?” Speakers: Gretchen Brown, MSN, RN, chief nursing informatics officer, Stanford Health Care; Adam Alkhato, administrative director of biomedical engineering and technology, Stanford Health Care; Mike Seagraves, PhD, digital transformation partner, Philips. Wednesday April 19, 2023, 2:30 – 3:30 p.m., South Building S402, Room 2.
• Cybersecurity presentation: “Get secure, stay secure.” Speaker: Dirk de Wit, head of product security, Philips. Tuesday, April 18, 2023, 12:15 -12:35 p.m., South hall Theatre A.

ReMedi Health Solutions

We won’t have a booth, but many of our leadership team will be in attendance. Contact GP at g.hyare@remedihs.com to get in touch with ReMedi.

ReMedi Health Solutions is a nationally recognized, physician-led healthcare IT consulting firm specializing in peer-to-peer, physician-centric EHR implementation and training. Our core service lines include System Selection Advisory, System Optimization, Personalization & Physician Efficiency Sessions, Integration and Testing, Go-Live support, and Clinical Chart Abstraction. From the outside looking in, ReMedi Physician Informaticists inform clinicians how to better use the EHR. On the inside, however, we are passionate “Clinician Whisperers” that believe understanding the “why” behind each EHR decision is as important as the “what” or “how”. We listen to physicians, nurses, and healthcare leaders in order to understand their biggest challenges, and we leverage our decades of experience to develop efficient solutions that greatly impact the delivery of care. We will be at HIMSS connecting and sharing our learnings with health IT leaders, friends, and meeting new ones.

Rhapsody

Booth 7110

Contact: Michelle Blackmer, chief marketing officer
Michelle.blackmer@rhapsody.health
312.520.1873

Rhapsody is eager to meet and discuss your greatest challenges when it comes to data integration and data enrichment across your organization’s healthcare ecosystem. We’ll have a robust team of subject matter experts on-hand to speak to all things interoperability, including how Rhapsody health solutions can help your organization accelerate healthier outcomes with healthier data! Visit our booth #7110 or schedule a meeting with us.

Sphere, Powered by TrustCommerce

Booth 3757

Contact: Ryne Natzke, chief revenue officer
rynen@spherecommerce.com
657.383.7967

Visit Sphere at Booth #3757! Sphere’s TrustCommerce platform provides a comprehensive payment platform that has earned the trust of the country’s largest healthcare organizations for their patient payments. Here are three reasons to make a visit:

• Integrate payments directly into your patient and staff workflows with TrustCommerce.
• Experience secure and compliant payment processing, anytime and anywhere, with pre-built integrations to leading EHRs like Epic, Veradigm, and athenaIDX and an extensible API platform that can be built into existing workflows,
• Bring transparency to the patient financial experience and boost payment yield with Sphere’s Health iPASS platform.

Meet our talented team, win exciting prizes, catch a demo, and join the fun at booth #3757.

Surescripts

Booth 1851

Contact: Kate Giaquinto, corporate communications manager
kate.giaquinto@surescripts.com
603.548.5273

Pop by Surescripts booth #1851 during the day or visit us between 4:30 and 6 p.m. on Tuesday, April 18 for a bite to eat and a bit to drink. We’ll toast all that we’ve accomplished in the past year and make plans for the future.

Whenever you stop by, we look forward to talking with you about how we can help your organization fulfill its goals related to simplifying access to patient information across health systems, pharmacies, and payers, receiving critical clinical and medication intelligence in existing workflows—when and where it’s needed most and making decisions that improve outcomes while lowering costs.

Join Surescripts for two speaking sessions at the Interoperability Showcase Spotlight Theater: Tuesday, April 18 at 11:15 a.m.: Interoperability At Scale: Volume, Value Beyond Prescribing  Wednesday, April 19 at 9:45 a.m.: The “What’s Next” In Interoperability is Happening Now. Breakfast Briefing with Frank Harvey, CEO, Surescripts Network Alliance partners and industry leaders: Opportunities for Evolving Care Teams to Expand Access & Fill Gaps in Primary Care on Tuesday, April 18, 7-8 a.m. at the Marriott Marquis, Level 2, Shedd A & B.

Tegria

Booth 1481

Contact: Kevin Kutz, VP of external relations
kevin.kutz@tegria.com
608.621.5296

Tegria provides consulting and technology services to help healthcare organizations maximize technology, transform operations, improve financials, and optimize care. To learn more, visit www.tegria.com.

Visage Imaging

Booth 4308

Contact: Brad Levin, general manager, North America, and global head of marketing
blevin@visageimaging.com
540.454.9670

Visage is trailblazing Imaging’s SaaS move to the cloud with an Open Cloud philosophy based on industry standards and multi-cloud support, delivering ultrafast sub-second image display based on object-based cloud storage, while propelling cloud adoption at a fraction of the storage cost of on-premise solutions. Experience Visage 7 CloudPACS at both Visage Imaging Booth 4308 and AWS Booth 2056. While you meet with our experts and experience a demonstration, enjoy some delicious, futuristic, nitrogen (“Nitro Cream”) ice cream with all the fixins. Experience the Platform For The Future – Powered by Speed with Visage at HIMSS 2023, Chicago, IL More details.

News 4/7/23

Top News

The VA postpones its Oracle Cerner go-live at VA Saginaw Health Care that was planned for June, saying that the software isn’t ready for the next wave of deployments.

The VA had placed go-lives on hold in October 2022, saying it needed until June 2023 to resolve system challenges. Officials also expressed concern about the system’s ability to support the VA’s medical research.

VA officials said recently that they will seek changes in its Oracle Cerner contract, which is under review now at the five-year mark as specified in the VA’s contract. The VA declined to say whether the new delay is related to those negotiations.

Oracle Cerner is live at VA sites in Spokane, WA; Walla Walla, WA; Columbus, OH; Roseburg, OR; and White City, OR. Its most recent go-live was in June 2022.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Trualta. The St. Joseph, MO-based company supports families who are managing care for loved ones at home via an online learning platform. In partnership with innovative healthcare payers and providers, as well as social service organizations, Trualta supports better care at lower cost. Each partner organization is equipped with a  customized and co-branded learning portal through which healthcare professionals can deliver an innovative and skills-based training session to help caregivers better care for their aging loved ones. Trualta’s program includes an online learning management system that is accessible via desktop, tablet, or smartphone with companion print material, personalized for each family’s care situation. Topics include personal care, safety and injury prevention, cognitive decline and brain health, and caregiver wellness. Trualta is engaging in research partnerships and clinical validation trials with leading health organizations to demonstrate that capable and confident caregivers lead to improved patient outcomes. Thanks to Trualta for supporting HIStalk.

Googling #HIMMS23 turns up a bunch of companies who are spending big bucks on a conference whose acronym their social media kids can’t spell. Grammatical pedantry that might get you either a free drink or a punch to the nose, depending on your tone and audience: it’s an acronym if you say the letters as a word (HIMSS) and an initialism if you say the individual letters (FBI). I don’t know how to qualify terms like HIPAA or the previous JCAHO, which were illogically sounded out as “hippa” and “jayco,” although I could get behind calling MGMA “magma.”

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Physician staffing company Envision Physician Services will lay off 90 doctors and staff who work in its Clearwater, FL office. Parent company Envision Healthcare sold its ambulance business for $2.4 billion in 2017, was acquired by a private equity firm for $9.9 billion in 2018, and was near bankruptcy in September 2022 as it struggled with ongoing losses, $5.3 billion of debt, bad press over out-of-network billing practices, and a lawsuit from UnitedHealthcare that the company forced it to overpay for services by upcoding its out-of-network charges.

Sales

• Bergen New Bridge Medical Center extends its use of Altera Digital Health’s Paragon for another five years and will implement its ambulatory care EHR, physician app, claims management, DbMotion Connect, and Ventus Compliance Advisor. It will also move to remote hosting on Microsoft Azure.

People

Provation CEO Daniel Hamburger, MS, MBA retires and is replaced by Ankush Kaul, who has held executive roles in other companies that are owned by Fortive, which acquired Provation for $1.4 billion in late 2021

Announcements and Implementations

Nordic Consulting adds a managed services organization and announces new clients Roper St. Francis Healthcare and Bon Secours Mercy Health, the latter of which acquired Nordic from its fund manager owner in June 2022 via BSMH’s holding company Accrete Health Partners.

Cognizant expands its agreement with Microsoft to integrate its TriZetto products with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and to use Azure for its cloud offerings.

Government and Politics

The Wisconsin Supreme Court rules that Ciox inappropriately billed a UW Health patient $110 for giving her an electronic copy of her medical records. UW Health argued that while patients can get their own records at no charge from MyChart, it charges law firms and other third parties that have copies sent directly to them.

Other

MIcrosoft, the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center, and software firm Fortra obtain a court order that allows Microsoft to seize the Internet infrastructure that Russia-based ransomware hackers use to launch healthcare attacks.

Sponsor Updates

• A study published by Elsevier finds that the initial phases of telemedicine implementation for children’s mental health services during COVID may have exacerbated existing racial and ethnic disparities in access to care.
• First Databank names Anitha Sankar senior quality assurance automation engineer, Sunil Boddapati lead software engineer, and Johnny Ma customer success consultant.
• Fortified Health Security hires Dave Phillips as regional director.
• Healthcare Triangle announces a $3 million cloud DevOps managed services agreement with a life sciences company.
• Meditech’s Greenfield Workspace better enables Phelps Memorial’s deployment of patient scheduling tools.
• Myndshft achieves HITRUST risk-based, two-year certification demonstrating the highest level of information protection assurance.
• Net Health’s PointRight analytics solution receives two endorsements from the National Quality Forum.

Blog Posts

• Focusing on Public Health: Staying Connected with the Community (EClinicalWorks)
• How Insights from Payer Data Improve Patient Care (Enlace Health)
• Occupational Medicine EMR Software (Experity)
• Break Down Data Silos and Drive Fluid Customer Experiences with Five9 Workflow Automation (Five9)
• Supply Chain Issues in Healthcare and How to Mitigate Them (GHX)
• Unlocking the Benefits of Cloud Migration for Healthcare and Life Sciences (Healthcare Triangle)
• How Get Well Uses Healthwise Content as a Service to Deliver Education in Their Digital Care Platform (Healthwise)
• The Rule of S’s: Evaluating new tech for clinical workflows (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Marble’s Data Connections – Access Hundreds of Millions of Records from Our Network (Marble)
• Advancing Interoperability in the Age of TEFCA: An Interview with CommonWell’s Executive Director, Paul Wilder: Part 3 (Medhost)
• How King’s Daughters Medical Center gave time back to nurses (Meditech)

Contacts

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

News 4/5/23

Top News

Content services platform vendor Hyland Software lays off 1,000 employees, 20% of its workforce.

The company blames the layoff on economic conditions and the unexpectedly high cost of moving to a cloud-based system.

Private equity firm Thoma Bravo acquired a majority stake in Hyland in 2007 for a reported $265 million and has led it through a long string of acquisitions, which in healthcare includes Valco Data Systems, EWebHealth, and Lexmark’s Perceptive business. 

Reader Comments

From Dr. Jacoby: “Re: Novant Health. It’s interesting to look at the jobs of the three top executives who were among its recent 50 layoffs.” Novant’s announcement suggests that it has scaled back some departments along with the executives who ran them, so it’s probably more than just these folks in their respective areas:

• Jesse Cureton, MBA, EVP/chief consumer officer. He had held the job for 10 years, which focused on strategic planning and marketing and public relations.
• Angela Yochem, MS, EVP/chief transformation and digital officer.She took the job in 2020 and served for nearly three years before that as CTO. She was Novant’s top technology executive, with the CIO, CTO, CMIO, and CISO reporting to her, and also served as GM of NH Enterprises.
• Paula Kranz, MA, MPA, VP of innovation development. She was executive director of Novant’s innovation lab for the past 15 months, which it closed last week with all employees laid off.

From Stiletto: “Re: podcasts. Trough of disillusionment.” Media forms that lower the participation bar — web pages, online communities, blogs, video channels – can become fading fads when audiences realize that the lowered barrier to entry encourages lesser talents. Newly launched podcasts dropped sharply in 2023, several were eliminated by NPR, Spotify is laying people off from the podcast platforms it acquired, and advertisers are questioning ROI due to low audience numbers and unfavorable demographics. Content that draws a loyal audience will do OK, maybe even better once Darwinism weeds out the AV club types (of which I would be one, which is why I haven’t dabbled). I like the idea of podcasts for commuters or travelers, but otherwise they don’t seem to align with the TL;DR skimmer attention span.

From Flapjacks: “Re: HIMSS Accelerate. Dr. Jayne said she hasn’t heard it mentioned. Have you?” No, other than I think I recall the HIMSS conference registration form trying to get me to opt in to Accelerate. It was Hal Wolf’s pet project and even he leaves no trace there. I clicked Events and HIMSS23 wasn’t among the three that were listed.

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 data exchange vendor Lyniate changes its name back to Rhapsody, the original moniker of the company before it merged with Corepoint Health in 2019.

Wellth raises $20 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total raised to $40 million since launching in 2014. Its behavior-change app incentivizes users to build and maintain healthy habits. Investor Frank Williams, co-founder and former CEO of Evolent Health, joins the company as chairman of the board.

A Rock Health analysis finds that six Q1 digital health funding founds accounted for 40% of the quarter’s total, although its definition of “digital health” covers a lot of ground:

• Monograph Health, $375 million (in-home dialysis).
• ShiftKey, $300 million (shift bidding).
• Paradigm, $203 million (drug trials technology).
• ShiftMed, $200 million (on-demand workforce management).
• Gravie, $179 million (health benefits management).
• Vytalize Health, $100 million (Medicare ACO).

Billionaire investor Barry Sternlicht resigns from Cano Health’s board, citing poor governance and a questionable collaboration with MSP Recovery. He and two other board members who also resigned control 36% of the company and will push for asset sales and removal of the CEO. The company was valued at $4.4 billion when it went public on the NYSE via SPAC merger in June 2021, but shares have since lost 90% of their value.

Fujifilm sells its Japan-only EHR to Wemex, which is owned by PHC Group.

CHIME will convene its members-only Healthcare CISO Boot Camp April 12-15 in Salt Lake City.

Sales

• UC Davis Health (CA) will offer Propeller Health’s remote monitoring program to high-risk patients with asthma and COPD. 
• Transcarent will use CareJourney’s provider cost and quality insights data.
• Northwell Health (NY) selects patient monitoring technology and services from Philips.

People

Andrew Miller (Engooden Health) joins Elucid as CTO.

Caregility promotes Wendy Deibert, RN, MBA to CNO.

CitiusTech names Rajan Kohli (Wipro) as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Morris Hospital & Healthcare Centers (IL) goes live on Meditech Expanse.

Kittitas Valley Healthcare (WA) goes live on AdaptX’s OR Advisor, ED Advisor, and Clinic Advisor.

The Coalition for Health AI releases its “Blueprint for Trustworthy AI Implementation Guidance and Assurance for Healthcare.” The PDF is here.  Among the founding members are Duke Health, Google, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, MITRE, Stanford Medicine, UCSF, and several CMS groups including ONC.  

Uber Health adds same-day prescription delivery to its patient transportation app for providers.

Government and Politics

The FDA publishes proposed guidance that will enable developers of AI-reliant medical devices to automatically update products that are already being used in clinical settings.

Privacy and Security

Northwest Texas Healthcare System and Doctors Hospital of Laredo (TX), both subsidiaries of Universal Health Services, notify patients that a November 2021 phishing incident at Adelanto Healthcare Ventures, a consulting firm with ties to one of their mutual business associates, may have exposed sensitive patient information. Interestingly, CommonSpirit Health affiliate St. Luke’s Health (TX) notified its patients about the same incident last November, making sure to stress that the breach was not related to CommonSpirit’s ransomware attack the month before.

Other

A small study finds that GPT-4 can accurately turn free-text radiology reports into structured templates, although that tool raises privacy concerns in sharing data with third parties. 

A gated University of Pennsylvania study in Health Affairs determines that 98.6% of hospital websites use computer code that enables data transfers to third-parties that include tech companies, social media platforms, advertising firms, and data brokers.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD releases 31 updates with enhancements to telehealth, medication cards, claims status, and mobile prescription drug monitoring program features.
• Ascom will provide UniHA, a cooperative purchasing network for French public hospitals, with its medical alarm management systems including software, mobility solutions, and services.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Mergers and acquisitions in the senior services sector.”
• Bamboo Health will exhibit at Rx Summit April 10-12 in Atlanta.
• Nordic releases another episode of its In Network podcast feature, Designing for Health: “Designing for Health: Interview with Dr. Archana Tedone.”
• Biofourmis and Current Health will participate in the Digital Medicine Society’s and Moffitt Cancer Center’s CancerX project to accelerate innovations for cancer prevention and treatment.
• CoverMyMeds issues a clarification regarding its recently announced layoffs, as well as the impact on its Columbus facility.
• CTG publishes a new case study, “CTG Helps Leading Medical Lab Improve Donor Insight and Client Service.”

Blog Posts

• Factors for Successful Offshoring of Revenue Cycle Management Services (AGS Health)
• How to improve your population health using SDoH data (Arcadia)
• Preventing Workplace Injuries is Best for Your Workers (and Your Budget) (Bardavon)
• Big and Small Ways Healthcare IT Can Address Technical Debt (CereCore)
• Putting Power in the Hands of Patients: The Human Side of Pharmaceutical Marketing (ConnectiveRx)
• What We’re Looking Forward to at HIMSS23 (Dimensional Insight)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 4/3/23

Top News

Epic CEO Judy Faulkner reportedly tells attendees of AMGA that the company is testing the use of ChatGPT to create draft provider responses to patient emails.

She says ChatGPT is less terse than doctors.

This seems like a great idea since experiments have shown that ChatGPT excels at analyzing a transcript of what a doctor says to offer suggestions of how they can be more empathetic. In other words, the computer advises the doctor on being human.

Reader Comments

From Brisco County: “Re: online services such as WebMD. They must be sweating ChatGPT hard.” Any company whose livelihood is based on sending or receiving web traffic should be worried. Web commerce is driven by search engine discovery and the opportunity to create or steal content and surround it by ads. ChatGPT summarizes the web, so there’s less need for users to look elsewhere. Also worried are publishers, since much of their traffic relies on search engines. Add to the mix that Facebook and Twitter are dying and the web could look very different in a couple of years. I welcome the chance to see content that is personalized and useful rather than driven by an algorithm whose primary purpose is to enrich its owner. Which is another concern about OpenAI and other companies – what will the inevitable monetization of their platform look like?

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents think their health system does a pretty good job using digital tools.

New poll to your right or here: After a weekend car accident out of state, how much of your important health information could ED doctors immediately obtain electronically? Also, let’s assume you are alone and unconscious with only a driver license and insurance card in your possession. Also, that all of your providers don’t use the same EHR. Poll comments are welcome about how you expect that the process would work or what precautions you might take to improve it.

I checked Epic’s site as soon as I woke up Saturday, but perhaps their previous April Fool’s phony news items set the bar too high because this one wasn’t memorable. ONC saved the day with a clever Rickroll tweet.

Webinars

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

People

The Health Care District of Palm County (FL) promotes Daniel Scott, MS (Good Samaritan) to VP/CIO.

Eric Rose, MD (TenSixteen Bio) joins Logos Informatics as CMIO.

Digital Health KC hires Dick Flanigan, MAS (RFJ Advisory) as CEO.

Ardent Health Services promotes Lonnie Garrison, MS to VP of IT.

Announcements and Implementations

Coryell Health begins its rollout of Oracle Cerner, which hopefully isn’t the system shown in the modified stock art stock that features illogically freeform input fields and a misspelling of “widowed.” Something tells me that the touchscreen-poking user wasn’t sitting in the health system’s 25-bed flagship hospital in Gatesville, TX, which is mostly known for its several jails and prisons. They used to hold a Prison Boss Cook-Off there, but it died from lack of participation.

Twitter open sources parts of its platform software, with the most interesting part being the code that chooses the “For You” tweets you see from users you don’t follow, with the most important factor being how likely it is that people will like, retweet, or reply. The blog post doesn’t say how the code artificially boosts Elon Musk’s tweets as he demanded in a recent Twitter tantrum, where he raged that the President’s Super Bowl tweet got more impressions than his own.

Amazon opens its low-power Sidewalk network – powered by connected Ring and Echo devices, courtesy of their owners — and to developers who need an cheap Internet of Things type connection. The coverage map shows that 90% of the US population is in range. Use cases include health trackers, smart pill bottles, smart door locks, dog trackers, soil moisture sensors, and weather stations.

Novant Health lays off 50 employees, including EVP/Chief Transformation and Digital Officer Angela Yochem, MS.

Other

In an unrelated but interesting conference development, the Entertainment Software Associated cancels its June expo that is known as “video game Christmas” in Los Angeles. The event, which drew 66,000 attendees to its final conference in 2019, was cancelled in 2020 due to COVID, changed to an online event in 2021, and then cancelled again in 2022. The organizers say interest wasn’t strong enough to support a big, impressive event and that interested companies couldn’t overcome resource challenges. Participants say that the big game publishers were already moving to running their own events online at a lower cost.

Madison magazine profiles Roots & Wings Foundation, created in 2019 by Epic CEO Judy Faulkner and her husband Gordon – and run by their daughter, Shana Dall’Osto – that offers unrestricted grants for non-profits purely based on trust. It awarded $40 million to Madison-area organizations in 2022. Dall’Osto says that neither she and her parents were raised rich, as Judy attended University of Wisconsin-Madison on scholarships and she and husband (and now pediatrician) Gordon lived in assisted housing and used food stamps before starting a family. She says she wasn’t unhappy that Judy signed The Giving Pledge in 2015, in which the many-billion dollar fortune of her parents will go to charitable causes instead of to their three children, saying that her mom was always clear about her intentions and her concerns about ruining kids by handing them big inheritances.

Sponsor Updates

• Surgical Care Specialists (PA) and Fairview Community Health Center (KY) transition to the EClinicalWorks Cloud.
• Nordic releases a new Making Rounds Podcast, “Modernizing business intelligence for stronger data analysis.”
• Talkdesk publishes a new report, “The promise (and pitfalls) of self-service automation in customer service.”
• Tegria staff partner with One Roof Foundation and take part in a community clean-up in the South Park neighborhood.

Blog Posts

• Continuing the Conversation: Our Commitment to IDD (Netsmart)
• Expanding women’s health: Addressing health disparities with innovations (Nordic)
• Our Culture of Giving: OptimizeRx Supports the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (OptimizeRx)
• Bolder and Brighter: Key Takeaways from the 2023 ACHE Congress (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Unlocking the Potential of Your Answering Service: More Than a Cost Center (PerfectServe)
• Battling Drug Shortages: Novel Ideas for an Unprecedented Challenge (Premier)
• FHIR 5 is here (Redox)
• A Day in the Life of a Contact Center Scheduler (Relatient)
• Keeping Pace with Best Practices is Key to Prescription Safety, Affordability (Surescripts)
• Decoding the fiction: The myths of artificial intelligence (Talkdesk)
• Reimagining Master Data Management for Healthcare Organizations (Verato)
• The Federal Breast Density Inform Rule: Huge Leap Forward, But More to Do (Volpara Health)
• Monday: Medicare Advantage rules change – How much will it really hurt? (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

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

News 3/31/23

Top News

Senators Patty Murray (D-WA), Jon Tester (D-MT), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) introduce legislation to overhaul the VA’s Oracle Cerner project, which would require the VA to:

• Develop metrics for deciding when and how new sites are brought live.
• Fix the patient safety issues that were listed in the VA’s March 2023 Sprint Report.
• Place further go-lives on hold until the five facilities that are live show an improvement in performance metrics compared to those they reported while using their previous VistA system.
• Bring in outside experts to renegotiate the Oracle Cerner contract.
• Develop a Plan B strategy in case Oracle Cerner rejects proposed contract terms or VA can’t get the technology to work.
• Reform its technology acquisition process.
• Add outside healthcare experts who have EHR rollout experience to its advisory committee.

Meanwhile, a group of Republican senators introduces legislation that would halt further VA go-lives on Oracle Cerner until significant improvements are made from a rigorous list of requirements.

Reader Comments

From Roky Erickson: “Re: Oracle Cerner. Our organization had a project pushed back because the company is having resource issues, and other CIOs tell me they are seeing the same. One even said that Oracle told them that VA issues are taking priority and commercial customer projects are being delayed.” Unverified. Let me know if you’ve experienced this – I won’t use names or specific details, of course.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’ve added a calendar reminder to check Epic’s website Saturday for the usual April 1 shenanigans.

Last call for HIStalk sponsors to be included in my HIMSS23 guide that I’ll run shortly. Send me your details and you are in.

I’ve started tuning out anything that is written in the form of, “I asked ChatGPT to …” It was clever for about five minutes, but now it’s just tedious.

ViVE Observations From An Attendee

An HIStalk reader who is attending the ViVE conference sent these notes:

• Tuesday’s keynote by Micky Tripathi was the most substantive thing I’ve heard all week. He breaks out ONC’s work into three categories: (1) building a digital foundation via standards, IT strategy, and coordinating between federal agencies. He played up USCDI and UCSDI+; (2) making interoperability easier with FHIR APIs and TEFCA. He wants to make sure those required APIs are truly usable rather than vaporware and are extended to CDC connections; (3) encouraging information sharing, with information blocking enforcement provisions coming this year, which I am guessing means a draft rule in September.
• Other Tuesday headliners sounded like talking advertisements.
• Loving the multiple snacks through the day and the music of Chapel Hart.
• Wednesday was a light crowd, maybe 20% of peak attendance. I felt bad for exhibitors that so few buyers were around.
• I thoroughly enjoyed a presentation by Shiv Rao (Abridge) and Joon Lee (UPMC) on generative AI. They advise trusting the technology to assist a human, such as autopilot on a plane, but not to fly the plane unsupervised. UPMC’s evaluation of potential AI partners includes integration with existing workflows and systems, auditable output, a clinician-led organizational structure, a patient-centric solution, and 100% AI driven.
• While the event isn’t as grossly transactional as I feared, there is certainly an undercurrent of deal-making, which is probably intentional.
• Attendee mix will probably evolve. On the provider and payer side, you see more venture investors and innovation teams instead of CIOs and CISOs. EHR vendors are low key and on the periphery. Services-based vendors probably won’t get value from a booth since traditional IT execs aren’t going to be around much for meetings.
• Most presentations were on the ViVE floor and I liked that, with several presentation areas of varying sizes. It never felt noisy to have presentations going on, it was easy to move from one session to another, and you could follow applause to find good sessions. I wonder how the vendors whose booths were near the stages felt, however.
• The CHIME track was mostly separate with several member-only events, but participants participated in some general sessions as well.
• ViVE shoots for a vibe of youth, energy, innovation, and fun in its branding, themes, opening remarks, and evening entertainment. Sounds great until you remember that your ticket cost nearly $3,000.

If you attended or especially if you exhibited, send me your thoughts about the conference and content, which I will share anonymously. Notes from the CHIME track would be interesting to readers, as would comparisons of ViVE to HIMSS.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Amazon brings its Health business to the website’s main menu, I noticed when looking for the new book “The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond” ($15.49 for the Kindle version, which caused a collision between my curiosity and parsimony).

McKesson-owned CoverMyMeds will lay off 815 employees; close its Scottsdale, AZ patient support center; and rent out space in the $240 million Columbus, OH headquarters building that it moved into in May 2021.

Florence, which offers a patient engagement app, emerges from stealth with a $20 million seed funding round.

Sales

• Healthcare Triangle announces a $3 million cloud managed services sale to an unnamed life sciences company.

Announcements and Implementations

ViVE 2024 will be held in Los Angeles February 25-28 at the Los Angeles Convention Center downtown.

National Quality Form endorses nursing home hospitalization and re-hospitalization analytics solutions from Net Health, the first LTPAC EHR or analytics vendor to develop NQF-endorsed quality measures.

UnitedHealthcare will eliminate 20% of prior authorization items in the next few months. The insurer will also implement a Gold Card Program to eliminate most prior authorization requirements for provider groups that have been historically compliant.

Government and Politics

VA Secretary Denis McDonough warns that proposals to cap the agency’s budget at 2022 levels will harm its Oracle Cerner implementation. The VA’s 2024 budget request includes $6.4 billion for infrastructure modernization and $1.9 billion for the EHR project. Meanwhile, McDonough says the VA will review its contract with Oracle Cerner, which it signed in May 2018 with a five-year review built in, which he says will drive scheduling of the next go-live because “this contract may not be what we need.”

DoD will complete its Oracle Cerner deployment in March 2024, with 75% of its hospitals and clinics already live and most of the remaining sites being overseas facilities. A DoD official says the VA is where DoD was in the 2017-2018 timeframe, with challenges in infrastructure, governance, and standardizing workflows.

VA OIG says that a doctor at North Las Vegas VA Medical Center falsified patient blood pressure readings during virtual visits, always entering them as 120/80. The unnamed physician says they thought the virtual visit template required entry of a phony number and added that they had not been given virtual visit training, both of which OIG says are false. OIG also noted that the hospital didn’t report the physician to the state licensing board and falsely claimed that it had reviewed the 120/80 entries as OIG had requested.

New FDA guidance requires medical device manufacturers to submit a cybersecurity plan as part of their new product application, spelling out how they will monitor and fix newly discovered vulnerabilities. The guidance applies to any medical device that is connected to the internet.

A federal judge in Texas rules that an Affordable Care Act requirement that insurers cover some preventive services at no cost to the patient is not valid, a decision that applies nationwide.

Other  

IBM Watson Health doesn’t get mentioned much these days other than as a cautionary tale for overhyping and underdelivering, but I see that IBM is now pitching IBM Watson Assistant for developing virtual agents using its conversational AI.

Walter Reed National Military Medical Center names facility dog and Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Luke as an honorary super user for MHS Genesis, where he has attended training sessions and sign-on fairs.

Sponsor Updates

• King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre expands its use of Oracle Cerner solutions across the Saudi healthcare sector.
• Five9 announces GA of Agent Assist 2.0, which uses OpenAI to summarize customer call transcripts in seconds.
• Fortified Health Security names Brad Arnold (Wellpath) security analyst.
• Healthcare Triangle reports fourth quarter and full year 2022 results.
• Health Data Movers publishes a new case study, “Software Development Advisory for an Integrated Experience Layer (IEL) Solution Discovery.”
• InterSystems releases a new episode of its Healthy Data Podcast, “Standards, Access & Meaningful Use of Data (ft. Zafar Chaudry, Seattle Children’s).”
• Medicomp Systems releases a new Tell Me Where It Hurts Podcast featuring HSBlox COO Lynn Carroll.
• Moving to Meditech Expanse has enabled St. Luke’s Health System to implement Meditech’s Smart Pump Infusion Integration with its Baxter Spectrum IQ infusion system.

Blog Posts

• Reducing No-shows Through Simple Patient Engagement Strategies (EClinicalWorks)
• An Urgent Care Business Plan – How and Why for Startups (Experity)
• Blueprint for the Contact Center: A New Path for IT Professionals (Five9)
• Future of Healthcare Supply Chains: An In-Depth Analysis (GHX)
• 3 Ways to Optimize Your Experience at HIMSS Global Conference (Healthjump)
• Engaging Minority Populations with Health Education (Healthwise)
• The Importance of New Types of Strategic Partnerships to Drive Innovation (Impact Advisors)
• Making bank or bankrolling waste: Why surgical schedulers need healthy dictionaries (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Overcoming Staffing Shortages in the Lab: Finding the Right Fit Consulting Firm (JTG Consulting Group)
• The Many Digital Doors of Patient Access and Engagement (Kyruus)
• Marble Data Connections – Access Hundreds of Millions of Records from Our Network (Marble)
• The Importance of Interoperability in Addressing Healthcare Disparities (Medhost)
• Hate Being Off the Grid? Offline Functionality Provides Vital Wound Care Workflow Continuity for Home Care Providers (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 3/29/23

Top News

HL7 publishes FHIR Release 5.

I will break my journalistic fourth wall in noting once again the industry contributions of “Father of FHIR” Grahame Grieve, who from interviews I’ve done with him always strikes me as an almost painfully humble, accolades-deflecting expert who led the charge that made FHIR a thing and just keeps on quietly doing the work.

Reader Comments

From Peony: “Re: huge health system losses. It’s all about their investments, not necessarily operations.” True in many cases. Health systems made annual fortunes from investing their big profits (which they don’t call that, of course) into investments that ranged from prudent to wildly speculative. Every investor looks smart in a bull market, but health systems are moaning at their investment losses much more loudly they did when bragging about their previous gains. I’m not an accountant, but headlines about shocking losses require further investigation. Did they lose money selling, or are these just paper losses that could be reversed when the market rebounds? How much money did the health system have stashed away that allowed them to play Warren Buffet, and did they buy and sell wisely? If they made money from operations, then should anyone care that their investments generated losses? Sometimes losses are real and critical — such as those in which a health system runs out of cash or sees their bond rating collapse — but I always suspect that it’s like plutocrats who claim crippling losses to the IRS while summering in the Hamptons.  

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: REM, whose early 1980s concert videos started popping up in my YouTube feed. Lots of people know dramatic singer Michael Stipe and arpeggio guitar master Peter Buck, but the subtle contributions of Bill Berry on the drums and Mike Mills with clean bass lines and high harmonies are underappreciated. The onstage energy and “I can’t believe we get to do this” smiling glances at each other are inspiring. Mills looks like an awkwardly shy teen and Stipe had the charm and appearance of a young Elvis. You can forgive the band for “Shiny Happy People” by watching them work the small crowd from a tiny stage in their dues-paying early days, perhaps with extra points for walking away as friends in 2011 with no plans to milk the reunion tour cash cow.

HIMSS guide reminder for sponsors: I’ve received information from four companies, two of which aren’t HIStalk sponsors, so now’s the time to send your information.  And speaking of conferences, sponsor Consensus Cloud Solutions is at ViVE this week, so I’ve added them to my conference guide.

Were a lot of cattle raised on the open ranges of Tennessee, I pondered upon seeing ViVE attendees posing with cowboy hats like citybilly country music crooners whose need for them is equally questionable, especially indoors and/or at night? I’m pretty sure cowboy hats and boots are, like mouse ears in Orlando, a sure way to self-identify as a tourist.  

ViVE Observations From An Attendee

An HIStalk reader who is attending the ViVE conference sent these notes:

• Announced attendance is 7,500, represented by 650 startups, 425 investors, and 330 hosted buyers. (Mr. H note — I’m surprised that only 330 attendees had their registration comped for agreeing to sit through vendor pitches. That means that a ton of people paid the high registration fee, although I then wonder how many are provider decision-makers).
• The conference had an easy start. You could get into town, take in some scenery, network, and have fun. There was enough going on to feel worthwhile but not jam-packed.
• Sessions were heavy on panels instead of individual speakers. That gives more companies a chance at the front of the room, but in losing the ability for someone creative to kill it with a great presentation instead of answering run-of-the mill moderator questions.
• Content is mediocre rather than thought-provoking or bold. As someone said, “everyone is simply tossing out headlines.” I would like to see a contrarian track where people point out where the shiny objects and overhyped solutions have failed to deliver.
• Live music is everywhere, included a performer in the registration area.
• A brief moment of silence was observed for the Nashville school shooting victims.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Value-based care enablement startup Wellvana Health raises $84 million, bringing its total to $140 million.

Sales

• Cone Health (NC) will use Lirio’s Precision Nudging intervention software, initially focusing on patients with hypertension.
• Lee Health (FL) selects B.well’s Connected Health technology to power its forthcoming Lee HealthPass app, which will aggregate patient data into a single interface.
• Catholic Care Center chooses Medsphere’s EHR and PM solutions.
• Netherlands-based Maastricht UMC+ chooses Epic to replace its SAP/Cerner system.

People

Clearsense names Alan Scott (Red Hat) chief enterprise architect.

Scott Cullen, MD (Accenture) joins Avia as EVP of strategic innovation and chief clinical officer.

Louis Raya (Waystar) and Tyler Wells (Waystar) join ADVault as VPs of business development.

Ann Joyal , MS, RD (Wolters Kluwer) joins Symplr as VP of marketing communications.

Announcements and Implementations

Carle Health (IL) implements Scanslated’s AI-powered radiology reporting software, which offers patients easier-to-understand radiology reports accessible through their patient portals.

ConnectiveRx develops a new Enterprise Data Platform that integrates data from every patient and prescriber interaction across its lines of support for enhanced reporting.

Marshfield Clinic Health System implements automated patient registration technology from Notable at its facilities in Wisconsin and Michigan.

UR Medicine (NY) uses DexCare technology to offer on-demand video visits across care settings as part of its Get Care Now program.

Censinet announces GA of Censinet Connect, a service that enables healthcare vendors to digitally share completed security questionnaires and supporting documentation with prospects.

Labette Health (KS) implements chronic care management software and services from ChartSpan.

Philips launches its Virtual Care Management suite of technologies and services for providers, payers, and employers within the US.

Mercy will take over management of county-owned Perry County Memorial Hospital and will invest $6.5 million to transition the facility from Cerner to Epic this fall. Both providers are based in Missouri.

Masimo opens pre-orders for its Freedom smart watch that provides continuous readings of pulse oximetry, ECG, and respiration as well as fall detection. It also features a data privacy switch that can turn off sharing of all data, including location tracking and microphone. A $100 deposit buys a place in line for fall delivery at a $400 discount from a list price that wasn’t mentioned. Masimo, like AliveCor, is fighting Apple over health tracking patents.

Government and Politics

FDA seeks sources for large-scale, de-identified healthcare claims data along with full access to their EHR data for its biologic product surveillance programs. FDA says EHRs provide more granular patient clinical information that is useful for validating claims data, although they won’t serve as the primary data source since they cover smaller populations and aren’t always longitudinal.

Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (MD) goes live on MHS Genesis.

The Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center within HHS publishes a mobile device security checklist.

Carin Alliance publishes a report that describes how patients could provide their identities once to create a credential that could be shared across other systems without using individual portals. It envisions a person-center approach that allows people to interact with various systems in a scalable, low-cost manner.

Other

Humbled and honored to be recognized by Nora, who is immensely pleasured (HE-llo!) to tell me I’ve potentially won a “seal of recognition” from an unnamed organization that will recognize me at its unnamed conference, with no contact information provided except for Nora’s Gmail address. I’ll speculate that graduation from “potential honoree” status involves a transfer of funds. I’ll also speculate that given the conference date, the amply pleasured Nora works for Health 2.0, which has somehow started using a once-respected, HIMSS-owned conference name that it operates from India by way of a Las Vegas mail drop and from the Birmingham Bargains store in an Alabama outlet mall. In case you need an ego-stroking, self-nominated award that requires and offers little, they are “now accepting applications from industry stalwarts!” I assume that the industry stalwarts who have proudly posted a photo of their award failed to realize that this isn’t the actual Health 2.0.

Sponsor Updates

• CarePort will exhibit at AMGA March 29-31 in Chicago.
• CHIME releases a new Leader2Leader Podcast featuring Oracle Health Chairman David Feinberg, MD “The Future of Health Equity with Oracle Health.”
• Clinical Architecture releases the results of its “2023 Healthcare Data Quality Survey.”
• Nordic publishes a new episode of its In Network podcast.
• CloudWave will sponsor the MUSE New England Area Community Peer Group event March 29 in Pittsfield, MA.
• Current Health publishes a new case study, “UMass Memorial Health Builds Leading Hospital at Home Program.”
• Censinet and KLAS Research recognize AGS Health, Clearwater, Divurgent, Ellkay, Fortified Health Security, JTG Consulting Group, Nordic, and Upfront Healthcare for achieving and sustaining their KLAS Cybersecurity Transparent designation.

Blog Posts

• Medication Adherence: A simple workflow for improvement (Arcadia)
• The Burning Platform: Healthcare is in Dire Need of Change (CareMesh)
• How L1 Support and Hosting Services Made Customers Happy and More (CereCore)
• 3 Ways Analytics Can Help Fight Burnout in Healthcare (Dimensional Insight)
• Solve Independent Diagnostic Testing Facility Billing Challenges with Practice Management Software (ChartLogic)
• RapidAWV – Now optimized for any device! (ChartSpan)
• How to Track and Measure Provider Support Activities in Real Time (RCx Rules)
• Improve Operational Efficiency and Reduce Costs and Complexity with 1Clearsense (Clearsense)
• Hybrid Resiliency: Managing Healthcare Cyber Risk with the Best of Reactive and Proactive Security (Clearwater)
• Real-time Messaging Options Blows the Door Off Traditional Channels (ConnectiveRx)
• Healthcare Organizations: Electronic Faxing is Better with eFax and Unite (Consensus Cloud Solutions)
• Training Practices to Help Physicians Succeed at Risk-Based Documentation (and Beyond) (Curation Health)
• 5 Soft Skills to Look for in Prospective Employees (Direct Recruiters)
• Top Priorities for Healthcare CIOs Entering New Organizations (Divurgent)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 3/27/23

Top News

ProPublica says that Cigna’s reviewing doctors use “auto-denial” software that allows them to declare a patient’s test as medically unnecessary in an average of 1.2 seconds, without ever looking at the patient’s medical records.

A former Cigna executive says that it’s easier for the company to just deny everything knowing that policyholders will appeal its decision only 5% of the time, not to mention that is saves hundreds of dollars of research time per test by simply rejecting claims using a procedure-to-diagnosis table.

Featured prominently in the article is health IT long-timer Nick van Terheyden, MBBS, who dug into Cigna’s process when they refused to pay for his own test that he knew as a doctor was medically necessary.

Reader Comments

From Ricochet Rabbit: “Re: ambient notes. My doctor asked if I was OK with her using an ambient automated note taker to help her with the progress note. She said it wasn’t as good as Robin, which she has used elsewhere. I can imagine systems identifying key clinical concepts from the discussion and then use ChatGPT to create a progress note.” Accurately summarizing transcribed encounter conversations seems well within even today’s AI capabilities. It would also encourage doctors to communicate their thoughts to the patient, maybe as an intentionally spoken end-of-visit summary. The result could be like a research article’s abstract that tells most readers all they need to know about the article that follows. Robin is a smart assistant for creating clinical documentation for orthopedics, capturing both audio and video from the exam room that are then used by virtual scribes to deliver SOAP notes. The information is collected by a dedicated hardware device and then can be changed or enhanced afterward via the Robin app. I first mentioned Robin when it was released in May 2018.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Results from last week’s poll aren’t surprising, neither for the top vote-getters (above) and the bottom-finisher ones (Internet of Things, blockchain, and virtual reality).

New poll to your right or here: From your most recent patient experience with a health system, how would you grade their use of digital tools? I personally don’t mind manual and/or outdated consumer-facing technology as long as the people themselves are empathetic and friendly. My problem is that the people who shove poorly-designed paperwork at you via a clipboard are often arrogantly uninterested in what you think as a customer. Sometimes I wonder if their candidate pool is made up of people whose customer service skills were insufficient to keep their jobs at DMV.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor JTG Consulting Group. The Miami Shores, FL-based boutique consulting company – which was founded in 2018 by President and CEO Jamel Giuma — specializes in laboratory IT, supporting EHR and laboratory strategies in health systems of all sizes. With  400 years of combined experience, the talented JTG advisory staff has established many longstanding relationships with health systems, providers, and vendors across the industry. It provides vendor-agnostic, patient-centric, and tailored IT services and solutions that help clients maximize interoperability, operational efficiencies, and revenue opportunities. JTG also offers advisory services to help organizations find the optimal path for achieving their strategic vision , helping affect sustainable success through short-term critical turnarounds and instituting long-run foundational changes. The rapidly growing company prides itself on on-time completions, cost effectiveness, and quality of product outcome. It scored 96.1 in an October 2022 report by KLAS Research, with 100% of clients saying they would buy again, and was #7 in Best in KLAS in the HIT Staffing category. Thanks to JTG Consulting Group for supporting HIStalk.

ReMedi Health Solutions will attend ViVE23, so I’ve added them to my sponsor guide for the conference. Ditto Nuance, which should be a fun booth visit given recent DAX and Microsoft ChatGPT-4 announcements.

Speaking of conference guides, sponsors can send me their HIMSS23 participation details for that upcoming guide. It’s easy, it’s free, and you will likely get some booth visitors you would have missed otherwise (especially if your booth features interesting presentations or perhaps site-baked scones).

Webinars

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

People

TriHealth promotes Donna Peters, MBA to SVP/CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

A new KLAS report finds that EHR personalization is the biggest driver of provider satisfaction, although those providers often feel they don’t get much support and that area and resort instead to personal initiative. Nurse aren’t given many options for EHR personalization, so the top success factor for them is being proactive about learning the EHR.

Government and Politics

The federal government will solicit bids to provide services that have been offered by non-profit United Network for Organ Sharing, which has run the country’s transplant program for 40 years. The government’s top priority is replacing the organ-matching computer system in hopes of shortening transplant wait lists and addressing racial inequity.

The National Labor Relations Board clarifies that a February ruling prohibits employers from including non-disparagement or confidentiality clauses in their severance agreement, also noting that the ruling is retroactive and such clauses that are contained in already-signed agreements are nullified by the ruling. The original case involved a Michigan hospital whose severance contracts contained clauses that violated the labor rights of employees.

Sponsor Updates

• Potomac Urology achieves growth with EClinicalWorks EHR and Healow patient engagement solutions.
• Optimum Healthcare IT names Natalie Tollefson HR service delivery director.
• Pivot Point Consulting will sponsor the OCHIN Learning Forum April 2-5 in Las Vegas.
• Volpara Health will exhibit at the National Consortium of Breast Centers conference in Las Vegas through March 27.
• West Monroe Managing Partner Tom Hulsebosch retires to launch the Hulsebosch Hope Foundation, a family foundation that funds public charities that seek to serve the needs of under-resourced communities in Chicago.

Blog Posts

• National Guidelines for Child and Youth Behavioral Health Crisis Care: SAMHSA’s Response (Netsmart)
• Leverage Generative AI to Liberate Information Critical to Patients, Providers (Orbita)
• Medical Answering Services: Urgent Versus Non-Urgent Calls (PerfectServe)
• Accounts Payable Automation in Healthcare: It’s Not Just for Hospitals (Premier)
• How to Track and Measure Provider Support Activities in Real Time (RCxRules)
• Place your bets on data (Redox)
• 3 hospital contact center metrics that indicate the health of your operations (Spok)
• Post-Public Health Emergency Changes to Patient Care (Surescripts)
• Speeding AI implementation in the contact center (Talkdesk)
• Simple Strategies to Boost Online Visibility: A Guide for Rehab Therapists (WebPT)
• From Theory to Reality: Realizing the Elusive Promise of Value-Based Care (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 3/24/23

Top News

ED patient experience software vendor Vital raises $24.7 million in a Series B funding round.

The Atlanta-based company has raised $46 million since its founding in 2019.

Co-founder and CEO Aaron Patzer, MSEE was founder and CEO of money management software vendor Mint, which he sold to Intuit in 2009.

Reader Comments

From Homey D. Clown: “Re: GPT-4. Microsoft’s announcement included a quote from Epic that says the company will be using it.” The Microsoft blog post that announced Azure OpenAI Service quotes Epic SVP of R&D Seth Hain as saying that “we’ll use [GPT-4] to help physicians and nurses spend less time at the keyboard and to help them investigate data in more conversational, easy-to-use ways.” Hain, who joined Epic straight out of college in 2005, has spent the last eight years working on embedding cognitive computing and machine learning into Epic’s software. Health IT software vendors will need to make similar decisions about their financial and technical capabilities to incorporate ChatGPT-like AI into their products as opportunities and user expectations expand.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’ll run my usual online guide of what HIStalk sponsors will be doing at HIMSS23 the week before it kicks off, so send me your details. And since the question comes up every year, we can in fact get a new sponsor onboarded quickly enough to get into the guide, not to mention that they also get 51 more weeks of involvement once we all return home from Chicago. 

I awkwardly put together my first weekly healthcare AI update, not yet confident about content and writing style. Still, I have lined up some good interviews as a result and the more I write, the more I’ll learn.

I have early access to Google’s Bard AI chat tool and found it to be vastly inferior to ChatGPT, even the 3.5 version, as it either gave wildly incorrect responses or declined to answer at all. Its only advantage is that its information is kept current instead of being limited by a training cutoff date, as ChatGPT’s famous knowledge horizon of September 2021. AI will get a lot cooler when it stays current, which may come in the form of merging it with search engines as Microsoft has done with Bing.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Primary care operator Oak Street Health, whose $10.6 billion acquisition by CVS is in progress, launches OakWell in joint venture with kidney care management company Interwell Health. OakWell will offer primary care services to patients with end-stage kidney disease directly in the dialysis center, where ESKD patients spend an average of 12 hours per week.

People

Caregility hires Paul Oliver (Cisco) as chief revenue officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Epic integrates Invitae’s genetic testing into its Orders and Results Anywhere network specialty diagnostics suite.

An Intelligent Medical Objects survey of provider leaders finds that 94% plan to implement software to address clinician burnout and a potential recession, while 98% of respondents acknowledge that they need to use data better to confront challenges. Most respondents think that AI is overhyped, yet are adopting it and reporting improvements in clinical quality and administrative functions as a result.

A new KLAS report ranks Epic Community Connect as the top EHR for FQHCs, closely followed by Athenahealth. NextGen Healthcare is the leader in supporting an integrated care model and treating underserved populations. FQHCs express general dissatisfaction with dental management software integration, although NextGen Healthcare customers are content with its Electronic Dental Record integration.

Government and Politics

The Oklahoma Health Care Authority board unanimously votes to implement a statewide HIE and require providers to contribute data to it except for patients who opt out. Mental health providers had marched on the capitol last week over concerns that the personal information of their patients could be compromised, while other providers are unhappy about the $5,000 signup fee.

Other

Former Microsoft HealthVault GM Sean Nolan takes a nostalgic look back at its acquired Azyxxi, which it later renamed to Amalga. He provides some fun backstory – and potentially startup-relevant lessons learned — to the flashy analytics platform that was the hottest thing going for a short time in the early 2000s:

• Azyxxi thought that ETL pre-work is always wrong and not useful for asking new questions, so they loaded data from source systems and relied on heavy SQL processing to transform it as needed.
• The company’s early culture was that users should be able to ask questions themselves instead of dealing with the IT department.
• The product displayed information in an automatically refreshed kiosk-type display in patient care areas. The company’s experts would optimize performance-hogging queries once they saw them being used, which avoided optimizing low-use functions.
• The Amalga team ran into channel conflict at Microsoft, which had salespeople co-selling with third party developers that used Microsoft technologies, meaning that the salespeople “were best buddies with a whole bunch of healthcare data analytics companies that were in direct competition with Amalga.”
• The product was created at Washington Hospital Center by a dedicated team of 40 employees, but prospect hospitals focused on risk avoidance rather than innovation and weren’t motivated to replace an existing, inferior product with one they had to learn.
• Microsoft narrowed its business lines with the hiring of Satya Nadella as CEO in 2014. Amalga was sold to the Caradigm joint venture of GE HealthCare and Microsoft, Microsoft sold its stake, and the company was split into two parts that were sold to Inspirata and Imprivata. He didn’t mention that Microsoft also used the Amalga name on a Thailand-based EHR and RIS/PACS that it acquired from Global Care Solutions (Microsoft later sold that business to Orion Health).

Epic stages a cook-off of its in-house chefs, with Madison magazine offering interesting facts about the company’s massive food service program:

• Epic serves 9,000 made-from-scratch meals per day from three food service buildings and seven culinary venues (soon to be eight).
• The company’s working farm provides some of the produce it uses.
• Several of its recipes are posted online.
• Culinary employees get the same benefits as everyone else, including paid vacations, bonuses, health insurance, sabbaticals, and normal working hours instead of the usual evenings and weekends.
• Epic’s on-campus soda fountain (above) is named after CEO Judy Faulkner’s father Lou, who owned a pharmacy that had a soda fountain.

Sponsor Updates

• CereCore releases a new podcast, “How L1 Support and Hosting Services Made Customers Happy and More.”
• Everbridge CEO David Wagner presides over the opening of the Nasdaq to celebrate the company’s new brand and 20th anniversary.
• The Association of Health Information Outsourcing Services elects HealthMark Group CEO Bart Howe as its new president.
• InterSystems releases a new Health Data Podcast, “Mitigating the Risk of Innovation (ft. Pothik Chatterjee, Lifebridge Health).”
• Meditech releases a new podcast, “Shaping home care and hospice practices at the national level.”

Blog Posts

• CMS Innovation Center: Specialist Incentives for Value-Based Care (Enlace Health)
• 5 Healthcare cybersecurity tips for apps and mobile devices (Fortified Health Security)
• Ensuring Security and Compliance for Life Sciences Data with HITRUST Certification (Healthcare Triangle)
• Medical chart audits: what you need to know (HealthMark Group)
• How EMR Optimization Empowers Your Healthcare Facility’s Top Talent (HealthTech Resources)
• Capitalizing on Tighter EHR-ERP Integration (Impact Advisors)
• The impending crisis in healthcare: Lessons from SVB’s collapse (Nordic)
• What makes clinical terminology so tough to maintain? (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Communication Breakdown: The Growing Need for Data Integration Services in Community Hospitals (Medhost)
• Preventing Pressure Injuries in Hospitals Takes Best Practices and Technology (Net Health)
• Plans Must Move Upstream to Improve Medicare Advantage Member Outcomes (NeuroFlow)

Contacts

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