News 1/12/24

Top News

Artisight, which offers a smart hospital platform, raises $42 million in a Series B funding round.

Co-founder and CEO Andrew Gostine, MD, MBA formed the company while working in his anesthesiology residency.

Reader Comments

From Video Kills Brain Cells: “Re: vendor videos. I saw Dr. Jayne’s mention that she doesn’t watch them. You should conduct a poll.” I’m with Dr. Jayne in usually declining to spend time consuming vendor videos or podcasts. Skimming text visually is faster than watching even 3x speed video unless the graphics are uncharacteristically vital. My advice to those who create multimedia is to avoid making it an either-or situation – send your video or audio files to an AI-powered transcription service like I use, and for an incremental cost and time of just about zero, you can post the transcript along with the original and satisfy both audiences. Requiring people to sit through your precious AV meanderings is a vanity play that excludes some folks who might be interested. Perhaps my poll will ask whether respondents are decision-makers since I don’t picture many C-suite members using video as their preferred vehicle for gaining industry information.

From Letme Throw: “Re: AI. I”m curious to hear your thoughts about the 2024 strategies that were announced by Oracle Health and Epic.” Oracle’s Larry Ellison talked up AI and voice-powered user interfaces in announcing the Cerner acquisition in December 2021, saying that Oracle would jump-start the business converting to a primarily voice-based UI for Millennium using Oracle’s Digital Assistant (along with creating a national EHR database, rewriting Millennium, getting the VA’s implementation done, etc.) I haven’t seen examples of Oracle Health’s real-life use of AI, not to mention that it won’t really matter if they keep losing customers to Epic. Epic seems to be way ahead, with some of its clients testing or using ambient listening documentation, inbox management, scheduling automation, AI-enhanced Cosmos research inquiries, and enhanced patient communications. Epic’s user base of huge academic health systems also gives it access to on-the-ground innovators who have the resources to design, use, and even develop AI-related tools that have an actual use case that is free of Oracle’s vested interest as a tech company in selling technical products to Cerner users. I would have low expectations of the provider impact of a quick bolt-on of Digital Assistant. I would enjoy hearing directly from Cerner and Epic customers about how they are using, or hoping to use, AI with their respective products. Also note that Meditech has arguably done a lot more with AI in Expanse than Oracle Health in Millennium, and at a friendlier price point.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Something reminded me of one-time high flyer Nant Health, which hit $21 per share on its first day of trading in mid-2016 drug billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, MD launched several Nant-named companies. Those shares are now at $0.06, valuing the company at $12 million. The company’s headquarters address is a UPS store in the tiny town of Winterville, NC, a few steps away from the notable Sam Jones BBQ.

Webinars

January 19 (Friday) 1 ET. “Unlocking Reliable Clinical Data: Real-World Success Stories.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Alistair Erskine, MD, MBA, CIO/CDO, Emory Healthcare; Jason Hill, MD, MMM, associate CMIO, Ochsner Health; Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst. Health system leaders will describe how they are empowering clinicians with reliable patient data while minimizing workflow friction within Epic. They will offer real-world experience and tips on how to deliver the best possible medication history data to clinicians at the point of care, use clinical-grade AI to infer and normalize prescription instructions in Epic, and encourage patient adherence to medication therapies for optimal outcomes.

January 24 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Medication Management Redefined.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Nick Barger, PharmD, VP of product, DrFirst; Caleb Dunn, PharmD, MS, senior product manager, DrFirst. Clinical workflow experts will paint a reimagined vision for e-prescribing that offers enhanced patient adherence, customizable clinical support, intelligent pharmacy logic, and data integrity and safety. Join this first chapter of an ongoing conversation about what medication management should be, how to deliver greater benefits today, and how to prepare for the future. Elevating your solution and customer benefits isn’t as hard, scary, or economically challenging as you may think.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Veradigm lowers its FY2023 revenue and earnings guidance below consensus estimates. MDRX shares have lost 47% of their value in the past 12 months, much of that in a big price drop in early December. The company said in an SEC filing Wednesday that it doesn’t yet know when it will file overdue financial reports for the last three quarters and year-end of FY2023 or convene its annual meeting of shareholders.

Rune Labs, whose FDA-cleared software tracks symptoms of Parkinson’s disease via the Apple Watch, raises a $12 million funding round. CEO Brian Pepin, MSEE founded the company after leaving his senior hardware engineer job at Verily Life Sciences in late 2018.

An Apple share price drop caused by demand doubts makes Microsoft the world’s most valuable company. Had you invested $10,000 in MSFT shares 10 years ago, you would have nearly $102,000 today, or if you are former CEO Steve Ballmer, you would be rolling in $128 billion worth of shares that throw off $1 billion per year in dividends.

Sales

• Spectrum Healthcare (AZ) chooses NextGen Healthcare for EHR/PM.

People

Industry long-timer Jeff Stern (Carium) joins Brado as VP of business development.

Announcements and Implementations

AI medical scribing technology vendor DeepScribe launches integration with Epic’s SmartData elements, allowing users to customize note preferences and standards that are mirrored in Epic.

Clearsense will present Billy Idol live in concert at ViVE 2024 in Los Angeles next month. I saw him a few years ago and he puts on a good show that goes beyond sneering through “Rebel Yell.” I’m predictably skeptical about the relevance of celebrity entertainment to healthcare, but if you are spending your employer’s money to attend ViVE, you might as well happily pump your fist overhead along with the punk rocker, who has been Medicare-aged for several years.

Amazon rolls out its Just Walk Out checkout-free technology to hospitals, allowing employees to pay for food by scanning their badges to create a payroll deduction.

PerfectServe’s Lightning Bolt describes combinatorial optimization, a mathematical process that chooses the best possible solution given a finite set of possibilities. The interesting article describes, with some level of detail, how the company uses that process, rather than the more common heuristic method, to build the best physician schedules. The article wasn’t credited, but someone did a nice job of explaining a useful concept.

Caregility announces its new telehealth edge devices for hospital-based telehealth such as e-sitting, virtual rounding, patient-family communication, and tele-ICU, with OhioHealth and UMass Memorial Health being early adopters.

Palantir and University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus establish the Center for Linkage and Acquisition of Data as part of the NIH’s All of Us research program. The project will integrate claims and mortality data and address the challenges of linking EHR data from health information networks to improve data completeness. The principal investigator of the 18-month, renewable project – which is funded by a $30 million NIH grant —  is Melissa Haendel, PhD, the chief research informatics officer of the medical campus.

Health insurer Elevance will offer people who are covered by its Medicaid health plans a free smartphone with unlimited data, talk, and texting to provide access to digital and virtual healthcare tools, supported by funding through the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program.

Privacy and Security

HHS investigates a 33-year-old Texas surgeon for providing case lists of minors who were undergoing gender-affirming care at Texas Children’s Hospital to a conservative activist, which HHS deems to be a HIPAA violation. Eithan Haim, MD, who completed his residency in 2023, says that he is innocent because he redacted specific information from his Epic screen shots. The hospital said in March 2022 that it was halting provision of the services in response to the state’s interpretation that they constitute child abuse, but his records indicate that treatments continued. I’m thinking that at least from the redacted screenshot provided, he’s correct in that while he disclosed some of the 18 HIPAA identifiers (such as age and diagnosis), redacting patient-identifiable fields such as name or medical record number makes it de-identified PHI, which isn’t protected by HIPAA, although the question remains about whether he accessed and disclosed the data inappropriately if not illegally. I suppose HHS knows best.

Novant Health will pay $6.6 million to settle a lawsuit that was brought by 10 of its patients for the health system’s use of the Meta Pixel website user tracking tool.

Other

Two hospital EDs in Australia will revert to their previous IT system for six months after implementation of InterSystems TrakCare in mid-November caused long patient wait times and user frustration.

Noetik co-founder and CEO Ron Alfa, MD, PhD shares his tab for a single bottle of water at the J.P. Morgan Health Care Conference in San Francisco, where the moneylenders fly private to sit at $100 per hour lobby tables while pondering the mystery of why US healthcare is so expensive.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks announces that McKenzie Health System (MI) is improving operations using its EHR, clinical rules engine, and robotic process automation.
• Net Health launches the next phase of its digital musculoskeletal thought leadership program in partnership with the American Physical Therapy Association.
• First Databank names Kara Zebrowski (Glytec) product manager, Hamman Eltareb (Hearst Health) health data analyst, and Christian Wong software engineer.
• Findhelp launches season two of its American Compassion Podcast about the history of the social safety net in America.
• Meditech recognizes international customers of its Expanse EHR, which include providers in East Africa, Ireland, Australia, UK, and Singapore.
• FinThrive releases a new episode of its Healthy Rethink Podcast, “He’s Here, He’s There … Virtual Care Everywhere.”
• Medicomp Systems releases a new episode of the Tell Me Where It Hurts Podcast featuring Juan Carlos Gallegos, RN senior director of product, Homecare Homebase.

Blog Posts

• A Look Back at 2023: Critical Cyber Threats in Healthcare (Fortified Health Security)
• Keys to Releasing “Hidden Clinical Capacity” (Impact Advisors)
• How Can You Use ChatGPT for Software Testing? (Keysight Technologies)
• Treatable Stage I and Stage II Colon Cancer: Importance of AI-enabled Early Detection (Lucem Health)
• 5 steps to take before embarking on your AI journey (Meditech)
• The Future of Wound Care: 5 Trends for 2024 (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 1/10/24

Top News

Amazon adds Health Conditions Programs to its Health services to help Amazon account holders find and enroll in digital health programs that are covered by their insurance plans.

The online retailer has tapped Omada Health, which offers programs for diabetes prevention, and diabetes and hypertension management, as its launch partner.

The Amazon program will apparently advertise third-party digital health products. It will be interesting to see how insurers react to having their customers pitched to buy digital health services at the insurer’s expense.

Webinars

January 19 (Friday) 1 ET. “Unlocking Reliable Clinical Data: Real-World Success Stories.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Alistair Erskine, MD, MBA, CIO/CDO, Emory Healthcare; Jason Hill, MD, MMM, associate CMIO, Ochsner Health; Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst. Health system leaders will describe how they are empowering clinicians with reliable patient data while minimizing workflow friction within Epic. They will offer real-world experience and tips on how to deliver the best possible medication history data to clinicians at the point of care, use clinical-grade AI to infer and normalize prescription instructions in Epic, and encourage patient adherence to medication therapies for optimal outcomes.

January 24 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Medication Management Redefined.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Nick Barger, PharmD, VP of product, DrFirst; Caleb Dunn, PharmD, MS, senior product manager, DrFirst. Clinical workflow experts will paint a reimagined vision for e-prescribing that offers enhanced patient adherence, customizable clinical support, intelligent pharmacy logic, and data integrity and safety. Join this first chapter of an ongoing conversation about what medication management should be, how to deliver greater benefits today, and how to prepare for the future. Elevating your solution and customer benefits isn’t as hard, scary, or economically challenging as you may think.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Patient navigation software and services vendor Care Continuity raises $10 million.

Impact Advisors acquires payer-focused First Quadrant Advisory.

GE HealthCare will acquire medical imaging analysis software vendor MIM Software.

Medical record retrieval and analysis software startup Credo Health raises $5.25 million. CEO Carm Huntress, founder and former CEO of RxRevu, launched the company nine months ago.

Food and environmental services outsourcer Aramark will offer the hospitalized patients of customers of its clinical nutrition service the ability to connect with its dietitians via the hospital’s preferred telehealth platform. 

Harris acquires the Medstreaming vascular and cardiovascular reporting, practice management, and billing solution of Fivos, which Harris will offer under its Picis brand.

Sales

• Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare selects Ensemble Health Partners for revenue cycle management.
• Premier Orthopaedic and Hand Center (IL) selects EHR and patient engagement software from EClinicalWorks.
• VHC Health in Washington, DC will implement RCM software and services from Med-Metrix. Two hundred VHC RCM staff will transition to employment with Med-Metrix as part of the 15-year contract.
• California-based HIE SacValley MedShare selects Health Catalyst’s data and analytics technology and professional services.

People

NextGen promotes Srinivas Velamoor, MBA to president and COO.

Ingeborg “Inge” Garrison, RN, MSN (RLDatix) and Amanda Heidemann, MD (KeyCare) join EVisit as principals of clinical strategy.

Deb Anderson, MBA (Advocate Health) joins Endeavor Health as CIO.

Caleb Hartman (Gozio) joins Loyal as VP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Hartford Healthcare (CT) begins offering virtual care at select retail and community locations via OnMed health stations.

Government and Politics

ONC’s HTI-1 final rule is published in the Federal Register with an effective date of February 8. The rule covers algorithm transparency, USCDI Version 3 as a baseline certification standard, enhanced information blocking requirements, and new interoperability-focused reporting metrics for Certified Health IT.

Privacy and Security

Refuah Health Center (NY) will pay $450,000 in penalties and costs and will invest $1.2 million in cybersecurity improvements to settle New York State charges that it failed to protect patient information in a May 2021 ransomware attack. The state says that the hackers gained access to the FQHC’s security cameras that was protected by a static, four-digit code; moved from there to its private network; then used the login credentials of one of its IT vendors that had been unused since 2014 to gain access to its systems.

Other

Withings unveils its BeamO “multiscope.” Designed for use during home-based virtual visits, the device acts as a digital thermometer, electrocardiogram, oximeter, and stethoscope. The company anticipates launching the product and its accompanying app in at select retailers in July for $250.

OhioHealth equips its new Pickerington Methodist Hospital with smart room technology from EVideon.

Healthcare think tank The Lown Institute announces the winners of its 2023 Shkreli Awards:

1. Columbia University, for failing to stop the sexual assaults of one of its OB-GYNs despite complaints from 250 patients, with the resulting lawsuit costing it $235 million to settle.
2. Non-profit Catholic hospital operator CommonSpirit Health, which paid its CEO $36 million in 2021.
3. Drug companies that are challenging a new law that allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices with manufacturers for the first time, which they claim violates their constitutional rights.
4. Hospitals that have partnered with private equity firms to offer high-interest medical credit cards.
5. A doctor who has been disciplined by 12 state medical boards and settled Medicare fraud allegations related to performing unnecessary procedures who failed a mandated ethics course twice and is still practicing medicine.
6. Drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, which hid evidence that its Zantac heartburn drug caused cancer.
7. An Indiana cardiologist who catheterized a single patient 44 times to implant 41 stents.
8. Hospitals who were caught dumping homeless patients onto the street.
9. A surgeon who implanted two expensive, experimental Medtronic devices into a patient of a hospital that serves mostly low-income patients, after which the patient had a stroke that caused with long-term damage.
10. A Pennsylvania hospital that gave the family of an undocumented immigrant 48 hours to pay $500 per day for at-home medical equipment, find a hospital that would accept her transfer, or consent to be medically deported to the Dominican Republic.

Sponsor Updates

• Arcadia joins Atropos Health’s Evidence Network.
• The Thriving Practice Podcast features Arrive Health CEO Kyle Kiser, “On a Mission for Affordable Medications.”
• Clearwater Executive Chairman Bob Chaput releases a new book, “Enterprise Cyber Risk Management as a Value Creator.”

Blog Posts

• Understanding the Changes in the CMS-HCC Model V28 (AGS Health)
• Navigating the Future: Trends Shaping the Recruiting Industry in 2024 (Direct Recruiters)
• Maximizing Efficiency: The Role of AI in Healthcare (DrFirst)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 1/9/24

Amazon introduces new Health Condition Programs—here’s what you need to know and how to enroll

Amazon launches Health Conditions Programs, an online service that helps Amazon account holders find and enroll in digital health programs covered by their insurance plans.

Care Continuity Secures $10M in Funding to Fuel Growth in Patient Navigation

Patient navigation software and services vendor Care Continuity raises $10 million.

GE HealthCare announces agreement to acquire MIM Software

GE HealthCare will acquire medical imaging analysis and AI-enabled workflow software vendor MIM Software.

Ventra Health and Advocate RCM Combine Forces

RCM and advisory services company Ventra Health acquires Advocate RCM, which specializes in RCM software and services for certain specialties.

Monday Morning Update 1/8/24

Top News

Walgreens Boots Alliance is struggling with the performance of primary care chain VillageMD, in which it is the majority shareholder.

Walgreens has closed 27 of the 60 underperforming locations that it previously announced and will focus on marketing the practices in hopes of boosting patient panels that are lower than expected.

Walgreens said in last week’s earnings call that it will take advantage of its strong neighborhood presence “to help payers, providers, and pharma achieve their goals.” The company is freeing up pharmacist time to allow more meaningful patient interaction via health screenings, immunizations, diagnostic testing, and treatment and has contracted with 25 drug companies to recruit clinical trials participants.

The CEO concludes, “We are going to be a major community-based, neighborhood point of engagement for patients with human beings touching human beings, which I believe in the long term is how how healthcare in this country is going to evolve.”

Reader Comments

From Conferencius: “Re: conferences. Is your skipping the HIMSS conference for the first time in years an early indicator of a trend? I find myself being less interested in attending conferences in general.” I’m not sure a trend exists, although the newer, glitzier conferences may spread the attendance and exhibitor wealth around. Attending conferences without employer expectations can be fun, but I question the ROI for the patients who foot the bill for days of socializing, expensive meals, and splashy entertainment under the guise of “networking” that at least in my experience, never paid off for my employer. However, I learned early as a health system IT executive to grudgingly approve the cost of sending high-value employees to conferences without expectation of ROI beyond stroking their egos and leaving them vaguely “inspired.”It’s funny that as an industry, we assure patients that we can deliver life-affecting health services via telehealth and remote patient monitoring, but we can’t do our paper-pushing jobs without expensively traveling with the herd to a publicly traded company’s equivalent of a destination wedding. The COVID-era failure of virtual conferences proves that it was never about education. Your question inspired a poll (below).

From KC Masterpiece: “Re: David Feinberg. Finally found another company who needs a selfie-taker.” Feinberg isn’t leaving Oracle Health as chairman, at least not at the moment. He has taken an additional paying job as an advisor to a VC firm. People still ponder how it came to be that he took over as Cerner president and CEO (but not board chair) on October 1, 2021 and the board agreed to sell the company to Oracle 80 days later, netting him dozens of millions for having done nothing except choose office furniture. We don’t know if the acquisition was sealed by his hiring and if he knew in advance that it would swell his pockets mightily. I’m not clear on what his day job as “chairman” of a company’s single operating division even means since as far as I know, Oracle Health doesn’t have its own board for Feinberg to chair and I’m not sure he even has direct reports.

From Rascule: “Re: HIMSS Accelerate. The HIMSS VP who ran it is now the head of marketing at HLTH.” Verified from LinkedIn. HIMSS launched the Accelerate online discussion platform in mid-2021, the seemingly ideal time to provide an alternative for COVID-halted conferences, but it never caught on. HIMSS also created the similarly timed and named HIMSS Accelerate Health, whose purpose wasn’t clear but seemed to involve conference tracks and a podcast, but that seems defunct as former links go to 404 pages or to HIMSS TV. I sure would like to see a current HIMSS 990 form that tax-exempts are required to post publicly to get a better idea of the business structure, but they haven’t filed one since FY2020.

From Pivoteer: “Re: consulting. You should do a poll on how many readers lost or quit jobs and tried to morph themselves into a consulting firm until finding a job.” I’ll do that poll next time. I try not to be cynical about folks whose career goes from a seat at the table in the board room to one in the dining room, with intentions ranging from lofty “this is my new passion and life’s work” to the more realistic “this will hopefully pay the bills while I try to get someone to hire me.” I’m only critical when corporate-fueled ego spills over into gig work (I’m thinking about my former boss, who fled back to a health system job before the paint on his consulting company shingle had dried) in the form of of prestigious-sounding company names, splashy websites, and a CEO title for their one-person contract work, and then when the contracts don’t materialize, redirect their unplanned free time into social media and podcast punditry. Still, we all have bills to pay and people to support, so if hanging out a consulting shingle for the short or long term does the job, then be proud of taking the shot with humility, which is required since the phone doesn’t ring nearly as often when you’re a seller instead of a buyer.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I ran a similar poll to this one nearly a year ago and only the finishing order has changed – the top vote-getters then and now were AI, precision medicine, and remote patient monitoring. Respondents back then showed insight in ranking AI high long before ChatGPTback triggered a now-obvious AI ubiquity.

New poll to your right or here: Provider employees: did your employer see a hard-dollar ROI within a year of funding your attendance at a national conference?

Thanks to these companies for recently supporting HIStalk. Click a logo for more information.

Webinars

January 19 (Friday) 1 ET. “Unlocking Reliable Clinical Data: Real-World Success Stories.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Alistair Erskine, MD, MBA, CIO/CDO, Emory Healthcare; Jason Hill, MD, MMM, associate CMIO, Ochsner Health; Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst. Health system leaders will describe how they are empowering clinicians with reliable patient data while minimizing workflow friction within Epic. They will offer real-world experience and tips on how to deliver the best possible medication history data to clinicians at the point of care, use clinical-grade AI to infer and normalize prescription instructions in Epic, and encourage patient adherence to medication therapies for optimal outcomes.

January 24 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Medication Management Redefined.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Nick Barger, PharmD, VP of product, DrFirst; Caleb Dunn, PharmD, MS, senior product manager, DrFirst. Clinical workflow experts will paint a reimagined vision for e-prescribing that offers enhanced patient adherence, customizable clinical support, intelligent pharmacy logic, and data integrity and safety. Join this first chapter of an ongoing conversation about what medication management should be, how to deliver greater benefits today, and how to prepare for the future. Elevating your solution and customer benefits isn’t as hard, scary, or economically challenging as you may think.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

France-based GPT clinical note generator Nabla raises $24 million in a Series B funding round that values the company at $180 million.

Marshfield Clinic and Essentia Health cancel their planned merger.

Doctors express wariness about drug maker Lilly’s announcement that it will sell some of its drugs directly to consumers using third-party providers of telehealth and pharmacy fulfillment services. The CEO says LillyDirect will make it easier for patients to obtain prescriptions without resorting to compounded or counterfeit versions of products such as its $1,000-per-month weight loss drug Zepbound, but an expert says that LillyDirect is the next step in direct-to-consumer advertising where patients may not learn about treatment options that don’t involve Lilly’s products, also predicting that other drug companies will follow Lilly’s lead. The American College of Physicians responded to the announcement on Friday, expressing its concerns about patients ordering drugs directly from their manufacturer and the approach of “primarily oriented around the use of telehealth services to prescribe a drugmaker’s products.”

Sales

• Brant Community Healthcare System signs up as the first Canadian user of Meditech Expanse as a cloud-based subscription.

People

Kidney testing app vendor Health.io hires Geoff Martin, MBA (Olive AI) as CEO. He takes over from founder and former CEO Yonatan Adiri, who will move to president.

Government and Politics

A home health agency pays $10 million to settle Department of Justice charges that it fraudulently billed the federal government for in-home nursing care that actually involved telephone calls. The cost was billed to a Department of Energy compensation program for people and their survivors who were exposed to radiation from the government’s building of nuclear weapons in the 1940s and 1950s, including employees and nearby residents, that caused long-undetected cancers and birth defects. The program, which was created in 2001, has paid out $23 billion to 137,000 people.

NHS England is reviewing the planned use of social media influencers by Palantir, to which it recently awarded a $415 million contract to develop and operate a national NHS data-sharing platform. The US company says it explored but didn’t actually launch a campaign with New Zealand-based digital agency Topham Guerin, which previously ran Conservative Party campaigns. Palantir’s contract prohibits using NHS’s name without approval. The company planned to pay for posting videos and tweets to correct what it thinks is misinformation about the project, with specific instructions to influencers to not mention Palantir by name or hashtag. The legal non-profit Good Law Project says Palantir is “possibly the dodgiest company ever to gain access to our medical records.”

Online mental health provider Cerebral will pay $540,000 in refunds to New York patients in a settlement with the state’s attorney general, who says the company intentionally made it hard for patients to cancel the subscriptions and instructed its employees to submit fake positive reviews. The AG says the company told subscribers they could cancel via email, but required completion of a survey and then put the cancellation on a multi-day hold while sending them retention offers in hopes of changing their mind. The company also charged customers when it had no providers available to treat them.

Other

In England, a nurse’s hospital employer calls her in for emergency floor coverage, then writes her an $89 parking ticket because her car didn’t have a $50-per-month employee parking pass. She had applied for the sticker, but the hospital admits that it is backlogged on sending them and suggests that employees instead take public transportation.

Sponsor Updates

• Netsmart staff volunteer at the Cornerstones of Care gift gallery to help distribute and wrap gifts for children within the organization.
• CereCore releases a new podcast, “Fostering a Culture of Innovation and Growth.”
• Nym achieves excellent customer satisfaction scores for the second consecutive year.
• Nordic releases a new podcast, “Designing for Health: Interview with Kevin Dufendach, MD and Andy Spooner, MD.”
• The “That’s Derm Good!” podcast features RxLightning founder and CEO Julia Regan.
• Symplr expands its golf sponsorship program with the addition of four-time PGA Tour winner Russell Henley.

Blog Posts

• How to succeed in value-based care without really trying (Nordic)
• Centralizing On-Call: A Q&A with Qgenda’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Patrick Hunt (Qgenda)
• RCxRules HCC Coding Engine Updates for the V28 Transition (RCxRules)
• Redox unwraps interoperability in 2024 (Redox)
• 2024 Predictions: Technology and Collaboration Needed to Improve Patient Care (Surescripts)
• Streamlining OPPE and Improving Outliers (Symplr)
• Reflecting on Trualta’s Transformative 2023 (Trualta)
• Revenue cycle 101: What is denial management in healthcare? (Waystar)
• The Future of Healthcare Interoperability: Looking ahead to 2024 (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

News 1/5/24

Top News

Oracle Health General Manager Travis Dalton will leave the company to join MultiPlan as president and CEO on March 1. Dalton was previously chief client and services officer of Cerner, as well as president of its government business, when Oracle acquired the company for $28 billion in June 2022.

MultiPlan offers payer cost management services that include analytics and revenue integrity.

MPLN shares have risen 26% in the past 12 months, slightly outperforming the S&P 500 and valuing the company at $850 million. They dropped 7% Thursday in a flat market following the announcement that Dalton will replace Dale White, who will move to executive board chair.

Dalton is the fifth of Cerner’s 10-member executive team to leave the company following its acquisition.

SEC filings indicate that Dalton will be paid a signing bonus of $500,000, a starting annual salary of $825,000, an annual bonus of $1 million, shares worth $8 million, and another $5 million in stock options.

Reader Comments

From Dowser: “Re: HIMSS and Informa. The takeover of the annual conference has been quiet. Wonder if the deal didn’t pan out.” HIMSS24 isn’t listed on the events page of Informa Markets and a search for HIMSS on Informa’s website turns up nothing. However, online conference materials now reference Informa, including headers and footers on the conference home page and an Informa copyright notice. The organizations were maddeningly vague about their business arrangement, with HIMSS calling it a partnership, while Informa characterized it as an acquisition. Still, it’s none of my business since my loyalty to HIMSS as a long-time member, chapter officer, and conference attendee has waned with its new leadership, to the point I rarely give the organization a thought. The boat show will likely improve with the addition of Informa and the subtraction of me.

Webinars

January 19 (Friday) 1 ET. “Unlocking Reliable Clinical Data: Real-World Success Stories.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Alistair Erskine, MD, MBA, CIO/CDO, Emory Healthcare; Jason Hill, MD, MMM, associate CMIO, Ochsner Health; Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst. Health system leaders will describe how they are empowering clinicians with reliable patient data while minimizing workflow friction within Epic. They will offer real-world experience and tips on how to deliver the best possible medication history data to clinicians at the point of care, use clinical-grade AI to infer and normalize prescription instructions in Epic, and encourage patient adherence to medication therapies for optimal outcomes.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Drug maker Lilly launches LillyDirect, which will offer home delivery of its drugs for obesity, migraine, and diabetes directly to patients via the Truepill pharmacy service. The service will offer a provider search tool and access to independent telehealth providers. The website indicates that Lilly will offer cash discounts on high-price drugs to patients whose insurance doesn’t cover them, such as weight loss drug Zepbound for $550 per month, about half its list price. The telehealth providers are 9amHealth (diabetes), Cove (migraine), and FORM (obesity). The interesting aspect is that Lilly is eliminating unrelated middlemen, such as pharmacies and pharmacy benefit managers, by creating its own package of independent virtual providers and a pharmacy and consolidating its patient discount programs under its own roof.

Mercy completes its acquisition of SoutheastHealth (MO), whose CEO says the hospital needed help because of a big jump in spending on outside labor, the loss of several providers in money-making services, and the cost of upgrading its EHR. The hospital will replace Cerner with Epic.

Walgreens announces Q1 results: revenue up 10%, EPS –$0.08 versus –$4.31, beating Wall Street expectations for both. The company will cut its dividend by nearly 50% to increase cash flow.

Newly formed Arbital Health, which offers technology and third-party adjudicator services to assess whether value-based care outcomes were received, acquires Santa Barbara Actuaries and completes a $10 million Series A funding round. The company also offers value assessments to vendors of healthcare point solutions.

Cigna is reportedly negotiating to sell its Medicare Advantage business to Health Care Service Corp, which operates BCBS plans in five states. for up to $4 billion. The move follows Cigna’s failed attempt to acquire Medicare Advantage insurer Humana less than four weeks ago.

At-home remote diagnostics provider Nanowear receives FDA 510(k) clearance for SimpleSense-BP, a non-invasive, cuffless blood pressure monitor. SimpleSense is an AI-enabled wearable that captures 85 data points to monitor heart rate and sounds, respiration rate, lung volume, and physical activity.

People

Patric Cua (HSG Partners) joins Glytec as president and CEO.

Best Buy Health hires Benjamin Zaniello, MD, MPH (PointClickCare) as chief medical officer.

Wisconsin Statewide Health Information Network promotes Steven Rottmann, Jr. to CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

DirectTrust publishes updated criteria for 19 of its accreditation programs.

Government and Politics

National Coordinator Micky Tripathi, PhD, MPP explores the need for a FHIR API to allow patients to electronically request their insurer’s notes about denied claims.

Privacy and Security

23andMe blames its users for a breach of its systems that exposed the genetic and ancestry data of 6.9 million people. The company says that a hacker’s brute force password attack gave them access to 14,000 user accounts, but the breach expanded because users had activated the DNA Relatives feature that allows 23andMe users to share data with others to whom they appear to be related. The company also says the breach wasn’t its fault because users didn’t change their passwords after they were exposed in security incidents involving other sites.

Other

In the UK, the local paper questions why Princess Alexandra Hospital spent $75,000 to send employees to the Oracle Health Conference in Las Vegas. CIO Phil Holland says other NHS also attended using funding from NHS England’s digital strategy program. The hospital is implementing Oracle Health Millennium.

Sponsor Updates

• Optimum Healthcare IT names Matt Divenere (Optum) director of content development.
• Healthwise employees collect toys for 64 children through the Boys & Girls Club of Ada County in Idaho.
• Healthcare IT Leaders releases a new Leader to Leader Podcast, “Innovation Through Simplification: Minimizing IT Complexity to Drive Results.”
• Gartner recognizes InterSystems as a Challenger in its Magic Quadrant for cloud database management systems.
• KONZA National Network reports that 333 KONZA-powered sites have earned and/or maintained validated data stream designation in NCQA’s Data Aggregator Validation program.
• Meditech staff have contributed gifts to 35 local families over the holiday season through its Adopt-A-Family initiative.

Blog Posts

• Looking Back: Five Key Success Stories from 2023 (EClinicalWorks)
• Health Equity Quality Measures: Supporting Accreditations, Regulations, & Policy (Findhelp)
• How to Create a Contact Center Scorecard (Five9)
• Advisory Services for an Educational Partner (Health Data Movers)
• The 3 Most Popular Patient Data Blogs of 2023 (HealthMark Group)
• Putting the “E” Back in ERP: How to Realize True Enterprise-Level Benefits (Impact Advisors)
• Understanding the Critical Connection Between AFib and Stroke (Lucem Health)
• How to Get the Most Out of CMS Price Transparency Rules (Medhost)
• From App to Powerhouse Platform: Wrapping Up 2023 (Mobile Heartbeat)
• 10 Critical Questions to Ask About Wound Care EHR Software (Net Health)

Contacts

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

News 1/3/24

Top News

Veradigm acquires Koha Health, a full-service revenue cycle management company for orthopedic practices and ambulatory surgery centers.

Koha Health, which was known until mid-2022 as Physicians Resources Ltd, is a 40-year-old family business with headquarters in Merrimack, NH.

Reader Comments

From Ipanema: “Re: AI-powered chatbots and online tools. Will organizations gain strategic advantage by not using them?” They might. Oligopolies such as utility providers, banks, streamers, and Amazon can get away with barricading their knowledgeable and helpful employees behind walls of technology and offshore workers that add little except to prevent their “valued customer” from receiving valued service. Chasing scale unfortunately means removing humans from the process wherever possible, no different than companies of yore that programmed their phone trees to ignore desperate customers who pressed “0” or “#” trying to get out of endless loops and poorly designed options. The high-cost, low-service, tech-heavy business model doesn’t always work when you have competitors and low switching costs. I can call my direct primary care doctor directly on her cell, but otherwise I find the typical medical practice’s telephone and online options frustrating because they are often designed by the same cranky front desk people who post scolding signs about turning off cell phones, filling out forms, and not leaning on their precious glass.

From Todd Castor: “Re: podcasts. It has become so common among self appointed experts that they’re now interviewing each other.” I’ve seen a few recent examples among podcast pontificators who must believe that they’re smarter than the people doing actual frontlines work.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Half of poll respondents received a holiday gift from their employer, although 40% of those say that it wasn’t memorable.

New poll to your right or here: Which technology will have the greatest impact on health outcomes and costs over the next five years?

You can support HIStalk by:

• Signing up for email updates when I post something new.
• Connecting and following on LinkedIn and joining Dann’s HIStalk Fan Club.
• Mentioning HIStalk to your colleagues and vendors.
• Sharing news, rumors, and intriguing insights.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cano Health receives a second de-listing warning from the NYSE, this time pertaining to its inability to sustain a $50 million total market capitalization over a 30-day trading period. The primary care company is in the midst of an overhaul, with plans to sell certain assets and lay off employees in an effort to cut costs by $290 million over the next 12 months.

CIOs say that they will control IT costs in 2024 to find room in flat budgets to work on new technologies such as generative AI. Tactics include reducing cloud usage, consolidating vendors, and negotiating discounts. Projects with high ROI will take priority, and global companies will cut back in their investment in startups unless they are likely to provide immediate benefit.

Sales

• North Memorial Health (MN) will replace 14 business systems with Oracle’s Fusion Cloud Applications Suite.
• RCM vendor Advantum Health selects AI-powered medical coding and billing software from Aidéo Technologies.
• The VA awards Iron Bow Technologies a $1.4 billion contract for connected care technologies and support.

People

Verily Chief Medical Officer and VP of product development Amy Abernethy, MD, PhD says in a LinkedIn post that she will leave the company to start a non-profit that will focus on the collection of health data.

James Crawford, PhD, MA (AMI Expeditionary Healthcare) joins Nordic Consulting as president of Nordic Federal.

Propeller Health co-founder Greg Tracy, MS (ResMed) joins Wondr Health as CTO.

David Stewart (Gerent) joins Divurgent as VP of client services.

Announcements and Implementations

UCHealth’s Sterling Ranch Medical Center (CO) implements Epic.

Trinity Health Grand Rapids (MI) launches virtual nursing care at its Lacks Cancer Center using technology from Teladoc Health. The health system has implemented Virtual Connected Care in 19 hospitals since launching the program in 2022.

An Artera Health survey finds that nearly half of patients experience communications issues with their providers, leading to unpaid bills, the inability to schedule appointments, and the willingness of 60% of them to switch providers because of poor communication. Eighty percent want to be able to initiate text-based conversations with providers on any topic, not just to reply to text messages with “Y” or “N.

Privacy and Security

Anna Jaques Hospital, part of Beth Israel Lahey Health (MA), recovers from a Christmas Day cyberattack that forced it to divert ambulances and revert to downtime procedures.

Liberty Hospital continues to rely on paper charts as it works to get IT systems up and running after a December 19 cyberattack.

Other

BayCare SVP/CIO William Walders, MHA – whose healthcare experience includes a 22-year stint in the US Navy through 2018 – posts an insightful comment on LinkedIn:

The soundbite is that the old CIO role is dead. The role of SOLELY keeping the network secure and resilient, applications available and up to date, and support functions consumer centric is dead. However, the responsibility persists and is understood by your peers to be the bulk of the CIO’s role. While it varies by organization, the “new role of the CIO” is now, more than ever, a strategic business leader aiding in decision making on ALL healthcare decisions, many of which aren’t glamorous, innovative, or require digital evangelism. Looking back at 2023, my year was 70% being brilliant at the IT basics, 20% healthcare strategist and thought partner with the C-suite on non-IT specific topics, and 10% innovative.

A USA Today opinion piece by Harvard’s Marie Plaisime, PhD, MPH describes her disappointment at receiving an Apple Watch for Christmas that, like many medical wearables, don’t work for people whose skin is dark. The author notes that soap dispensers, pulse oximeters, and forehead thermometers can’t register darker skin tones. She also bristles that the Apple Watch leaves the consumer to figure out how to use blood oxygen readings since the company has not earned FDA clearance to market the Watch for medical uses.

Mayo Clinic’s new hospital in La Crosse, WI, which will open in September, will feature wireless remote patient monitoring technology across all of its 94 beds. Patient rooms will also feature infotainment systems that offer access to medical records and virtual consultations.

Sponsor Updates

• Skin Solutions Dermatology (TN) reports a significant increase in monthly online appointments after implementing the Healow Open Access online appointment booking solution from EClinicalWorks.
• Wolters Kluwer Health predicts the top four impact-drivers for generative AI in 2024.
• Amenities Health announces that its digital front door platform is now available in the Panda Health Marketplace.
• CereCore releases a new podcast, “Fostering a Culture of Innovation and Growth.”
• Arrive Health sponsors holiday gifts for residents of one of WellPower’s resident treatment locations.
• Clearwater releases a new podcast, “Navigating Information Blocking Regulations in Healthcare Transactions.”

Blog Posts

• How Technology Can Reshape Communication and Efficiency in Healthcare (Vyne Medical)
• Recapping the Best Blog Posts and Resources of 2023 (CereCore)
• The Future of Medical Coding and the Vital Role of Autonomous Coding Technology (AGS Health)
• Tips for success post go-live: Strategic approaches for healthcare data analytics platforms (Arcadia)
• Southern Ohio Medical Center Reduces Unnecessary Urine Culture Orders by 29% With MEDITECH’s Clinical Decision Support (Meditech)
• Back to Basics: Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management 101 (Availity)
• Industry Experts Share Insights on Improving Behavioral Health and Physical Health Integration (Bamboo Health)
• Reflecting on Progress: A Review of the Healthcare Technology Industry in 2023 (Direct Recruiters)

Contacts

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

News 12/29/23

Top News

Apple restarts sales of the advanced models of its Watch Thursday after an appeals court temporarily pauses an import ban. The halt was related to Apple’s ongoing pulse oximetry patent dispute with Masimo and AliveCor.

Apple also says that it has submitted design changes to the Watch to the US International Trade Commission that could make the ban unnecessary.

Reader Comments

From Upshot: “Re: Harris / Constellation acquisition of Medhost. What is Constellation’s business model and what health technology company will be next?” Company founder and billionaire Mark Leonard is like Warren Buffett, with a simple, steady, and ingenious formula that has worked consistently. Constellation has acquired several hundred companies and has sold only one (Leonard still kicks himself for that one exception). A $10,000 investment in CNSWF five years ago would be worth $40,000 today as the company’s market cap has reached $53 billion. Leonard – who is 6’5” tall and sports a ZZ Top-like gray beard — is either “intensely private” or “bizarrely reclusive,” depending on who you ask. He took a rare step into the public eye with a podcast interview in 2020 that I may transcribe and post here for posterity. The company’s acquisition strategy is based on these ideas:

• Focus on companies that sell mission-critical software to a vertical market whose customers will keep paying recurring fees to avoid replacing the incumbent software. These are often in the public sector.
• Choose from potential acquisitions using the First Chicago Method of valuation: set scenarios for best, worst, and average cases; set a valuation for each scenario using the net present value of future cash flows; and weight the likelihood of each scenario to arrive at a hurdle number.
• Acquire companies that are profitable and that have consistent earnings and growth.
• Acquire 100% of the company rather than a partial share.
• Do not use hostile takeovers or unsolicited bids. Companies will often volunteer to be considered for acquisition for a variety of reasons.
• Look for acquisitions that have a lower growth rate and thus command a modest price, reportedly 1 to 1.5 times revenue.
• Leave the acquired company’s management and employees in place and let them run the business.
• Improve the acquired company through coaching, sharing best practices with Constellation’s other companies, and management training and mentoring.
• Use the cash flow to fund more acquisitions instead of trying to fuel growth.
• Minimize corporate involvement except for data analysis.
• Incent business unit leaders based on return on invested capital and organic revenue growth and treat them as owners.

Aledade CEO and former National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari, MD, MSc observes that Constellation had a rare (and large) misfire in paying $700 million in 2022 for the hospital and large practice business of Allscripts that it renamed Altera, only to have its biggest customer Northwell announce soon afterward that it was moving to Epic. Constellation highlighted Altera’s dramatic revenue slide in its most recent quarterly report. Mostashari adds that healthcare software is a good fit for Constellation and the total addressable market is huge – he notes that the Allscripts business that they didn’t buy, which is ambulatory and Veradigm, is worth just $1.1 billion but will generate $100 million of free cash flow this year – but EHRs require more product development to keep up with regulatory changes.

He also added an insightful HIStalk comment from a reader and Altera customer who expressed disbelief at another reader’s report that Altera declined to renew their health system’s maintenance contract (click the image to enlarge).

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Stat reports that UnitedHealth Group has denied rehabilitation care for Medicare Advantage patients who live in nursing homes or have cognitive impairment by changing its guidelines for clinicians.

Walgreens needs to rebuild its IT department to support the company’s business plan, The Wall Street Journal reports, following CIO and IT management turnover, cutbacks on the use of contractors, low employee morale, and the company’s plan to make big cuts in operating and capital expense. Walgreens is dealing with legacy systems and technologies used by its acquired companies even as it plans to implement AI and supply chain technology.

Best Buy Health recaps its 2023 accomplishments that include partnering with providers, enhancing its cell phones and alerts for seniors, and launching its sale of continuous glucose monitoring systems.

Sales of over-the-counter hearing aids are lower than expected, given that one in five US adults struggle with hearing and those problems often precede cognitive decline. Possible reasons for the lagging sales include physician inattention to adult hearing issues, lack of insurance coverage, and the stigma of wearing hearing aids. Experts also note that unlike vision problems, people who have hearing deficiencies often aren’t aware of their diminished hearing. FDA approved direct-to-consumer sales of hearing aids last year for mild to moderate hearing loss. Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a standard at-home hearing test for consumers that may spur awareness.

Sales

• HSS Sports Medicine Institute will implement Kemtai’s computer vision exercise guidance technology for home training of athletes to avoid ACL injuries.

Announcements and Implementations

Preventable, serious medical complications increased significantly among Medicare patients after hospitals were acquired by private equity firms, a JAMA-published study finds. Staffing cutbacks, which have been anecdotally blamed for clinical quality issues, were not reviewed in the study.

Government and Politics

A chiropractic clinic wins a lawsuit that it brought against McKesson for faxing unsolicited ads for medical billing software to the practice. The court rejected McKesson’s defense that the clinic consented to receiving ads by listing its fax number on licensing forms, ruling that providing a fax number doesn’t imply consent to receive ads. The court denied class action status, however, citing a precedent that sending faxes through an online fax service falls outside the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

Privacy and Security

Corewell Health (MI) reports its second patient data breach in a month to patients, both involving its vendors (HealthEC and Welltok).

Poland’s data protection agency fines the health ministry for disclosing a doctor’s medical information on social media. The former health minister looked up the records of a doctor who had publicly criticized new regulations that limit doctors to issuing 300 electronic prescriptions each day, then posted on social media that the doctor had prescribed psychotropic drugs for himself. That health minister resigned in August after his actions came to light.

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 12/27/23

Constellation Software’s Harris Operating Group Acquires MEDHOST, Inc.

Medhost will be operated as a standalone business within Constellation’s Harris software group.

Mercy medical record transition heats up in bankruptcy court

Mercy Iowa City and Harris-owned Altera Digital Health argue the terms of continued EHR support as the hospital awaits its acquisition by University of Iowa.

Apple files appeal after Biden administration allows U.S. ban on watch imports

Apple stops selling its smart watches that offer pulse oximetry after losing a patent infringement dispute with medical device maker Masimo.

Why do doctors still use pagers?

NPR talks to doctors whose project to replace ED pagers with smart devices failed.

News 12/27/23

Top News

Constellation Software acquires EHR provider Medhost. Terms were not disclosed.

Medhost will be operated as a standalone business under Constellation’s Harris software group, where it joins Altera Digital Health, Amazing Charts, QuadraMed, Iatric Systems, Picis, and several other acquired health IT companies. 

Reader Comments

From Oracular Degeneration: “Re: Oracle Health. The former Cerner was blamed for missing revenue expectations. Expect license audits to follow.” Oracle is somewhat famous for turning innocent-sounding “license audits” into a sales channel, where the company collects customer usage information (voluntarily or otherwise) in coordination with a sales rep and then demands that the customer buy more licenses to avoid legal action. Palisade Compliance describes how the city of Denver was rushed into paying Oracle $4 million under an Oracle program that Palisade calls ABC audits (audit, bargain, cloud) in which the company forced the city to buy cloud services to avoid legal actions. NASA recently bought $15 million in unneeded Oracle software in fear that the company would find something amiss. Former clients of Cerner may be running under old contracts or those that weren’t prescriptive about M&A, hardware upgrades, virtualization, or moving services to the cloud, so it might be prudent – especially for any contracts that involve processor-based metrics – to assess your situation before Oracle does.

From Adapt or Die: “Re: changes at my primary care practice. They will now require holding a credit card on file, charge a $15 annual cash fee for services that insurance does not cover, and limit annual physicals to health screenings and risk management with no review of specific medical issues.” These changes seem entirely reasonable, although I would be nervous about leaving a credit card number on file given the unpredictable nature of the amounts and timing of physician billing. This practice says that the patient usually receives the EOB first and has time to resolve problems with their insurer. When the practice’s business office receives their copy of the EOB, the patient’s balance will be billed via InstaMed. Leaving a credit card on file is dangerous for the many or most Americans who can’t afford to pay unexpected (or even expected) medical bills, but patients who can’t afford to pay their legitimate healthcare expenses aren’t the practice’s problem. This state of affairs must be puzzling to the rest of the developed world that can’t understand how we allow every profitable aspect of healthcare to be milked financially by publicly traded companies, zillion-dollar health systems, and private equity firms. The status quo remains in place only because we peasants aren’t all sick at once and thus haven’t charged the healthcare castle carrying torches.

From VTViper: “Re: ModMed. Huge layoff last week. The entire podiatry team was let go.” Unverified.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Only 10% of poll respondents expect Oracle Health to be the owner of an improved former Cerner business in five years, with more than half expecting the company to sell or close most of it. Commenters note that Oracle will milk the business solely to keep VA/DoD taxpayer dollars flowing and ponder why David Feinberg is still pocketing millions with few signs of serious job responsibilities.

New poll to your right or here: Did you receive a holiday gift from your employer? My theory is that big-employer gifts are rarely more than a check-the-box effort (company-branded merchandise, a low-value gift card, or a box of candy), although individual bosses may go above and beyond to recognize their employees more personally. My experience is almost entirely within health systems, where the number and diversity of employees ensured low-effort corporate swag like a mug or tote bag. I have mixed feelings about the alternative of department pizza parties, which are tacky on the surface but often slightly fun for those whose schedule and location allows them to attend.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Harris Healthcare-operated Altera Digital Health petitions the bankruptcy court of Mercy Iowa City over the hospital’s planned transition to a new EHR upon completion of its acquisition by University of Iowa. The hospital, which partly blames the former Allscripts software for its poor financial condition as its AR jumped 40% after implementation, told Altera that it will be cancelling its agreement but requires access to company support through early 2025. Altera wants the court to either force the hospital to honor its existing agreement that runs through 2031 or declare it void. The company says the $8 million “cure amount” of the existing contract is insufficient and wants $12 million plus damages that are accruing at $207,000 per week.

Apple stops selling its Series 9 and Ultra 2 smart watches due a US International Trade Commission decision that the Watch’s pulse oximetry technology infringes on patents held by medical device maker Masimo. Apple has filed an appeal.

People

Baylor Scott & White Health promotes Nathan Winn, MPA to VP of IT.

Announcements and Implementations

NPR addresses the “why do doctors still use pagers” question, with these observations from doctors who led a failed hospital project to replace them in the ED:

• Pagers, as a 1980s relic from the Sir Mix-a-Lot days that even drug dealers have abandoned, should be easy to displace. Doctors don’t like receiving pages that contain only a phone number with no hint as to who they’re calling or what that person wants. Pages also can’t be verified as received. On-call residents are handed a pile of team-specific pagers for their “Rambo belt” and need to track down which one is beeping.
• However, pagers are “the cockroaches of communication” because they are cheap, nearly impossible to damage, run forever on a single AA battery, and are more reliable with fewer dead spots since they don’t use cellular networks.
• Doctors worry that patients will think they are screwing around if they look at their phones during a visit to read a message, but with a pager, “they know you’re doing doctor work.”
• Smart apps make communication among doctors too easy, where the sender doesn’t worry about bothering a colleague or phrasing a request succinctly
• Pagers provide control, or at least the illusion of it, as even junior residents can decide when and how to respond without the sender knowing if they have seen the message.
• A management professor says that technology isn’t just about the tools and instead is a project that involves RHIP (pronounced “rip”) – risk, habit, identity, and power. Doctors were being asked to change their routines, the change made them feel differently about their jobs, and it shifted power.
• The result was that the pager replacement system failed to reduce patient time in the ED, partly because the existing system was already efficient and also because many doctors had stopped using the new devices.

Other

A small, single-hospital study finds that inpatient satisfaction scores increased if their room’s guest chair was placed near the patient’s bed to encourage doctors to sit while visiting, which the authors call a “chair nudge.”

Contacts

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

News 12/22/23

Top News

Medical genetics company Invitae divests its Ciitizen patient-controlled health data business to that company’s leadership team and a group of investors who will operate it as an independent company. Terms were not disclosed.

The divestiture is part of an Invitae cost-cutting effort, which includes a 15% headcount reduction, following a $1.3 billion loss in the first three quarters of 2023.

Invitae bought Ciitizen in September 2021 for $325 million. NVTA shares have lost 98% of their value in the past three years. They are down 63% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $192 million.

Reader Comments

From Cernam: “Re: Oracle Health. GM Travis Dalton is leaving the company.” Unverified, but reported by several employees on social media.

From MD L: “Re: primary care training. It might be better for specialists to go straight into specialist training. Does an endocrinologist or cardiologist really need a full internal medicine residency before specializing? The hardest, least-appreciated, and most-important hallmark of a well-trained physician is the ability to think critically, synthesize disparate information, and eliminate the red herrings. You learn it by seeing patients under appropriate supervision. Students who are in abbreviated MD programs have trouble with this since they start clinical rotations without a good knowledge base. The idea that you can look up what you need is bogus – you need to know what you’re looking for and then understand it. Another concern I have about shortened medical training is that mine involved thinking for ourselves much earlier, where as a student I was doing medical and surgical procedures that are done by senior residents now, and by my second week of internship, I was the only ‘psychiatrist’ in the building at night for the unit and ED, where now attendings are in house 24×7 to see patients and sign them out. This is like kind of knowing a foreign language and trying out your skills with a native speaker who takes over the conversation at the first sign of struggle. For these reasons, I would be concerned about shortening training.”

From Data Holmes, PhD: “Re: AI-driven CDS. This JAMA paper disputes the idea that clinical decision support and AI don’t need to be all that accurate since doctors are making the final decision. That makes me nervous because I think people can turn their brains off too easily and place too much trust in the computer.” Researchers found that clinicians who are analyzing medical images get a slight bump in diagnostic accuracy with AI’s help as long as the AI wasn’t confused by the presence of case-irrelevant information. However, their diagnosis accuracy dropped by 11% when they used AI models that are systemically biased (meaning that the model used irrelevant information). The most important finding is that doctors didn’t read the explanation where the model showed its faulty work, so they assumed that the model’s conclusion was sound. An accompanying opinion piece concludes that the use of AI, even when limited to assistive purposes, should be evaluated before rolling it out widely.

From Jabroni: “Re: HIMSS24. Looks like they have removed the exhibitor count after you reported a rather low number.” That appears to be the case. I’m not interested enough to display the exhibitor list and count them manually.

From Glytec Employee: “Re: Glytec. The insulin titration software company is in turmoil with the departure of its CEO, CEO, CMO, and other leaders. The company is being run by investors and two-thirds of the staff have been laid off after the company failed to get funding after a multi-million dollar offer in October 2022.” Unverified, other than the leadership changes. Of the 11 executives who were listed on its webpage in July 2023, five remain. The CEO and CFO started in October 2023.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It is December 21 as I write this, the official beginning of winter and the day with the fewest hours of daylight. Happy Yalda Night — which anyone in the Northern Hemisphere can celebrate regardless of religious beliefs or human-drawn borders – or your choice of Christmas, Hanukkah, Three Kings Day, Advent, Kwanzaa, Las Posadas, or a belated Diwali or St. Nicholas Day (I learned about the latter from the Ukraine person I’m helping learn English over Skype). Hopefully the folks in Svalbard, Norway are in a festive mood during their polar night, where it stays dark from mid-November until the end of January (webcam here to prove it). Whatever you celebrate, even if it’s just another day above ground, enjoy.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Business Insider reports that Commure laid off staff in November shortly after its owner combined it with another of its holdings to create a $6 billion company. Commure (data exchange) and Athelas (revenue cycle management) said the combined companies would hire aggressively and even bring on health tech people who had been laid off elsewhere. Commure CEO Tanay Tandon, who came from the Athelas side of the combination, says the company will likely go public in the next two or three years.

Arcadia sells its MSO and value-based care service division to Guidehealth, which offers value-based care software.

People

Brian Bircher, MSEd (Tegria) joins DrFirst as VP of enterprise solutions.

Announcements and Implementations

Children’s Hospital of Orange County and Rady Children’s Hospital – San Diego sign an agreement to merge to form Rady Children’s Health. The name suggests the dominant party, although in a show of collegiality and bad business judgment, the CEOs of both hospitals will serve as co-CEOs of the new one, at least for a few months until it becomes clear – as it always does – that the buck (literally) can only stop with one person.

Government and Politics

England’s health and secondary care minister says that its newly contracted, Palantir-provided Federated Data Platform of shared patient data will be more secure than any NHS system. He adds that Palantir won’t be allowed to control or use the data and the system will use patient anonymization technology from IQvia, the Durham, NC-based pharma data vendor that was previously known as IMS Health and Quintiles.

Seattle Children’s Hospital sues the Texas attorney general for requesting documents related any gender transition care that it provided to Texas children, in which the AG cited a Texas consumer protection act. The hospital says that the AG lacks jurisdiction for the request, the hospital has no ties to Texas, and that Washington providers are protected by state law from being required to provide information about gender-affirming care from states that restrict or criminalize the practice. The AG’s demand included all prescriptions, diagnoses, lab tests, and protocols that involve Texas children. The hospital also provided affidavits from its IT directors that its email and EHR servers are based in Seattle.

Privacy and Security

First responder software vendor ESO Solutions notifies 2.7 million people that their information – which ESO obtains from the healthcare organizations that use its software — was accessed by ransomware hackers in late September.

Drug chain Rite Aid settles FTC charges that it unfairly used facial recognition surveillance systems to subject shoppers to unreasonable searches and humiliation. FTC says Rite Aid scanned the faces of customers who entered its stores and matched them against a database of confirmed and suspected shoplifters to trigger closer observation. FTC says the system often mismatched images due to low quality CCTV and cell phone originals. Rite Aid says it only used the technology in a limited pilot project that it ended three years ago. Customer theft or “shrink” is starting to kill off self check-out and the displaying high-theft items on unlocked shelves, so maybe our societal dishonesty will lead us back to the days of Service Merchandise and its “pay first, then wait for your order at the conveyor belt” approach.

Liberty Hospital (MO) transfers some patients to other hospitals as it deals with an unspecified IT event that occurred Tuesday. A local TV station obtained a message that was sent to the hospital by an apparent hacker who gave the hospital 72 hours to pay an unspecified ransom.

Other

An NBC News investigation titled “Vital Signs vs. Dollar Signs” looks at HCA’s use of telemetry technicians who remotely monitor the vital signs of hospitalized patients. They found that the techs are assigned up to 80 patients, monitoring systems have gone down for as long as 26 hours, tech communication with nurses on the floor is slow or erratic, and monitoring stations are sometimes unstaffed due to scheduling problems or staff breaks.

A hospital patient is shot in the butt by a pistol that she had smuggled into her MRI exam after denying that she was packing any metal objects that the machine’s magnet would affect. The bullet did little damage, unlike the example from Brazil earlier this year in which a gun advocate who was undergoing an MRI hid a pistol in his waistband that went off during his procedure and killed him.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new set of podcasts focusing on “Transforming Patient Care with EClinicalWorks and Healow.”
• Symplr congratulates nearly 20 customers on achieving the highest status on CHIME’s 2023 Digital Health Most Wired list.
• Meditech announces its commitment to the HHS/ONC Cancer Moonshot initiative.
• Nym achieves excellent customer satisfaction scores for the second consecutive year.
• Verato earns HITRUST certification for information security.

Blog Posts

• Review, Revise, Resolve – A look at the 2024 updates for CPT (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• 5 Truths About AI-Driven Software Testing (Keysight)
• 40 Years of Community: A Retrospective (Medhost)
• Watch Meditech customers share how they are driving transformational change (Meditech)
• Reducing clinicians’ cognitive load to focus on their well-being (Nuance)
• 12 Ways to Keep Your Spirit Merry and Bright This Holiday Season (Netsmart)
• How a Pediatric Health System Leverages Technology to Combat Claim Denials (Vyne Medical)
• 20 years of Medicare Advantage with MA author Tom Scully on Diagnosing Healthtech (Redox)
• The Care Transition: A Crucial Time for Patient Safety (Surescripts)
• Reflecting on Trualta’s Transformative 2023 (Trualta)
• Revenue cycle 101: What is denial management in healthcare? (Waystar)

Contacts

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

News 12/20/23

Top News

Apple will stop selling its Ultra 2 and Series 9 Watches at least temporarily due to an International Trade Commission ruling related to a blood oxygen sensor technology patent dispute with medical device manufacturer Masimo.

Masimo accuses Apple of meeting for partnership talks with the intention of obtaining competitive information for developing its own technology, after which it paid huge money to poach several Masimo inventors and executives.

Masimo’s pulse oximetry technology earned FDA clearance, but Apple was able to bring its sensor to market without it by claiming that it provides information but doesn’t diagnose.

Reader Comments

From Sunny Daylight: “Re: healthcare AI experts. Who are the thinkers and researchers who are doing the best work? If you wanted to build the world’s greatest network of healthcare AI experts, who would be on that list?” I don’t usually think in terms of individual experts, with the exception of Eric Topol, MD, but I’ll open it up to readers. It likely depends on the area in which the person works – as a clinician with AI interest, an AI researcher who focuses on healthcare, or armchair experts who speak and write confidently on the topic without a relevant work history.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Remote patient monitoring and virtual care company CoachCare acquires RPM vendor Verustat, its fourth RPM acquisition within the last 12 months.

Molina Healthcare will acquire Bright Health Group’s California Medicare Advantage business for $500 million, rather than the originally proposed $600 million, in a previously announced deal expected to close January 1.

Lehigh Valley Health Network and Jefferson Health announce plans to merge to create a 30-hospital, 62,000-employee health system with annual revenue of $14 billion.

Sales

• In England, Birmingham and Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust will implement Epic in 2024, with expected go-live in 2025.
• CoxHealth (MO) will implement Epic, replacing Oracle Health.
• Wilbarger General Hospital (TX) selects operational and financial analytics from Sixth Sense Intelligence.

People

Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare (TN) hires interim SVP/CIO Tina Smith, MBA (Seattle Children’s) to the full-time position.

Physician compensation and contract management software vendor Ludi promotes Danielle O’Rourke to CEO.

Lisa Morella, MBA (Mass General Brigham) joins CodaMetrix as VP of data and analytics.

Amino Health promotes John Asalone, MS to CEO. He takes over from David Vivero, who has taken on the role of chairman.

Announcements and Implementations

Avera launches virtual nursing pilot programs at McKennan Hospital & University Center and St. Mary’s Hospital in South Dakota.

Multi-state Mercy health system launches a patient-facing chatbot dubbed Toni in memory of Mercy’s first CEO, a Sister of Mercy for 65 years who died in 2022.

A Wolters Kluwer Health study finds that nearly nine out of 10 Americans worry that generative AI is not transparent about where it gets the information that it presents or that it uses unvetted Internet data.

Adventist Health ends its ITWorks contract with Oracle Health, which will lay off 65 employees at Adventist’s Roseville, CA headquarters as the health system brings the services back in-house.

Other

The “Bill of the Month” of KFF Health News involves a patient of Mount Sinai (NY), which booked her a telehealth visit when she called in asking about sinus symptoms. Her five-minute visit yielded prescriptions for a nasal spray and an antibiotic along with a bill for $660, which her insurance declined to cover because the doctor – whose name and employer she could not determine – was out of network despite being affiliated with Mount Sinai, which had provided a pre-visit estimate of $60. She was billed for a moderate-level visit. The doctor’s office would not respond to her inquiries and the hospital told her they could send her a copy of the consent form that she had signed only by fax. Payment for the September 2022 visit remains unresolved.

The correct Jeopardy answer: “What company’s far-from-reality marketing claims made the term Watson synonymous with healthcare AI failure?”

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom Americas helps to raise $7,500 for Duke Children’s Hospital during a local radiothon.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “Healow Enables Seamless Interoperability for Foster Children’s Medical Records.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health and The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists launch the O&G Open journal.
• AvaSure publishes a new case spotlight, “A proven approach to reducing patient falls while driving staffing efficiencies.”
• Censinet releases a new Risk Never Sleeps Podcast, “The Vital Partnership Between CISA and Healthcare.”
• Cegeka successfully completes its tender offer for CTG.
• HIMSS New England honors Divurgent VP Dana Locke with its Volunteer of the Year award, and Divurgent SVP Rebecca Woods with its Heyman Lifetime HIT Achievement award.
• FinThrive publishes a new guide, “How to Maximize Medicare and Medicaid Reimbursements.”
• Fortified Health Security names Jeff Brown regional director.

Blog Posts

• 2024 Healthcare Technology Industry Trends: Top Challenges for CIOs (CereCore)
• Underpayments in Healthcare: Causes and Implications (AGS Health)
• Leverage technology to reshape healthcare economics: A path to improved patient outcomes (Arcadia)
• Healthcare Communication Trends: Nearly 70% of Patients Prefer Conversational Messaging Over Basic Texting (Artera)
• Information Management: Digital Empathy, Bad Data, and More (Clinical Architecture)
• Urgent Care Conference 2024: How to Make the Most of Urgent Care Connect (Experity)
• Welcome Home: Helping Immigrant and Refugee Families Thrive (Findhelp)
• 5 Key Questions When Choosing a Digital Health Education Vendor (Healthwise)
• Buy or build? 4 crucial considerations for risk adjustment software decisions (Inovalon)
• The Year Ahead: Costs of Prescriptions, Treating Obesity, and AI in Healthcare (DrFirst)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/18/23

Top News

England’s Health Services Safety Investigations Body says that IT problems are among the most pressing in hospitals, noting that some of the reports it has reviewed involved patient deaths.

It gives examples of a patient who was found unresponsive and died being misidentified as DNR, a patient with cancer who died after IT problems prevented follow up, and a woman who died 18 days after she was given the wrong meds because of an electronic chart mix-up.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Few poll respondents have padded their resume with questionable recognition. After thinking about it, I am an outlier in viewing Chief membership as being in that category since its acceptance criteria involves the same items that already appear on resumes ((job title, reporting structure, and size of team managed). The only thing Chief membership proves is that your employer thinks highly enough of you to pay for vanity credential (only 30% of its members pay their own way and its unstated membership retention rate is reportedly unimpressive). It’s like buying the “certified CIO” credential in which applicants must already be a CIO, meaning the certification is pointless duplication unless employers are retaining dangerously unqualified CIOs and need them to pass a test to prove otherwise.

New poll to your right or here: What will Oracle Health look like in five years? Perhaps nuanced options exist, but basically Oracle will either still own the business (making it either better or worse over time) or it will sell or close it. Industry precedent is that the acquirer’s brash gate-crashing usually gives way to its embarrassing lack of healthcare knowledge, and after a few years of corporate incompetence and impatience, the business is sold entirely or piecemeal once enough time has passed to be able to blame the previous regime. I’m thinking Misys, Sage, GE Healthcare, Siemens, IBM, and even Microsoft and Google as as examples of companies whose desperation to prop up slowing growth illustrated Mike Tyson’s point that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.

What people do to support my work on HIStalk:

• Join my spam-free mailing list.
• Connect on LinkedIn and join Dann’s HIStalk Fan Club,.
• Tell people in the industry that you get your news here.
• Share news and rumors that I might not know.

For your winter holiday reading pleasure, kindly refer back to 2022’s “Netflix and Reed Hastings: Ghost of Christmas Past,” a Readers Write by Chuck Dickens. Also, remember to stock up on pomegranates for Thursday night’s Yalda celebration, which I’m designating as the official winter holiday of HIStalk since it doesn’t exclude anyone. I’m not a Festivus guy since I’m also not a “Seinfeld” guy and thus haven’t seen that episode, but it’s apparently equally inclusive in its celebration on December 23.  

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Weight loss app vendor Noom, which labels itself as “the leading digital healthcare company helping people live longer, better lives,” replaces much if its C-suite following its hiring of a new CEO in July 2023. The company is pivoting into GLP-1 weight loss and selling services to employers.

Healthcare payment integrity solution vendor Trend Health Partners acquires Advent Health Partners, which offers technology for reviewing medical records for revenue cycle processes.

Certainly Health, which runs an online marketplace for booking medical and cosmetic procedures with guaranteed out-of-pocket pricing, raises $2.3 million in funding.

Medical University of South Carolina profiles the success of QuicksortRX, which was founded as an internal project by a MUSC network engineer and one of its pharmacists to bring drug pricing transparency to hospital pharmacies. The founders licensed the system from MUSC for commercialization and have sold it to 25 health system customers so far. The company is hiring around 40 new employees.

A former burn center director sues HCA for firing her after she notified her supervisors that 90 trauma nurses who were working in a newly opened burn unit were not named in state filings as required because they hadn’t earned the required credentials. Previous media investigations found that HCA sometimes charge fees in the tens of thousands of dollars for trauma center visits, making trauma care an important revenue center that encourages hospitals to seek Level 1 trauma center status. The lawsuit also claims that HCA was attempting a hostile takeover of profitable private burn centers by hiring their employees.

Sales

• NHS Services Scotland will implement Sectra’s cloud-based enterprise imaging solution.

Announcements and Implementations

Researchers find that the UK ranks 21st of 38 countries in key patient safety indicators, suggesting that thousands of patients die unnecessarily each year, but at least they finished well ahead of the US, which places 33rd in beating only Latvia, Costa Rica, Turkey, Colombia, and Mexico.

Government and Politics

Patients file a federal lawsuit that challenges New Jersey’s return to pre-COVID telehealth restrictions, noting that 10% of interstate telehealth visits involve cancer care. The plaintiffs say that they were denied follow-up care from their doctors in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania when New Jersey reinstated its rule that telehealth doctors who provide services to state residents must be licensed in New Jersey. At least 30 states either ban or restrict telehealth sessions with out-of-state doctors. The law firm also notes with wry cynicism the exception that exists for the doctors of sports teams, who are allowed to treat the athletes across state lines via in-person or telehealth consultations without licensure concerns. Utah also has an interesting exception in that doctors in any state can practice telehealth on its residents as long as they don’t charge them.

Other

A patient dies at HCA Florida Bayonet Point Hospital when a remote monitoring technician calls a code blue due to a displaced sensor, but responders couldn’t find the patient because an incorrect room number had been entered into its computer system. A state investigation found that the hospital was understaffed and failed to conduct remote vital signs monitoring appropriately. The review also noted that another patient was transferred for remote monitoring but wasn’t hooked up to the equipment until seven hours later. HCA responded to the findings by saying that it had replaced the CEO and chief medical and nursing officers.

The Seattle paper predicts that nurse shortages will worsen as 10,000 internationally hired nurses can’t enter the country because of delays and caps in obtaining a US visa. Green card processing takes several years even for employer-sponsored applicants and costs start at $10,000 before adding transportation and housing expenses. Sanford Health is waiting for the 160 nurses it has hired to enter the country, but has had to use travel nurses at triple the usual hourly wage due to the immigration delays. The health system is also running virtual sitting solutions and using AI to predict staffing needs.

Politico observes that mining companies offer their employees good health insurance that they then lose when mines close. Local hospitals and other providers thrive during mining boom times to the point that they may turn away people with lower-paying insurance such as Medicare and Medicaid, forcing them to travel long distances to receive care if they lose their mining jobs. The article observes that Williamson Memorial Hospital in the “heart of the billion-dollar coalfields” of southern West Virginia made major expansions in the mid-1990s as a medical showcase, but closed – along with most of the previously thriving town – when the mines closed, leaving locals with little access to care.

Sponsor Updates

• The National Health Insurance Authority in the Bahamas reports a significant uptick in cancer screenings since the implementation of its EClinicalWorks EHR and associated population health tools.
• Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Lalita Abhyankar, MD.”
• Waystar publishes a new e-book, “A 4-step plan for denial prevention.”

Blog Posts

• A Look at HITRUST Version 11: Everything You Need to Know (Clearwater)
• How Emory Healthcare Built an Integrated Behavioral Health Program From the Ground Up (NeuroFlow)
• How to build an AI-powered digital front door (Notable Health)
• The Importance of Program Management When Moving Your EHR to the Cloud (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• 2024 Outlook: The Future of Healthcare IT (Pivot Point Consulting)
• The Digital Front Door: Obstacles, strategies, and better patient access with Dr. Namrata Rastogi on Diagnosing Healthtech (Redox)
• The Vital Role of Patient Engagement in Specialty Medication Enrollment (RxLightning)
• How digital transformation impacts care team collaboration (Spok)
• Myth Busters: Pharmacists as Clinical Care Providers, Part 2 (Surescripts)
• Top 4 Quality Areas to Improve Health Outcomes in 2024 (Symplr)

Contacts

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

News 12/15/23

Top News

HHS and ONC approve the final HTI-1 rule that addresses:

• Algorithm transparency.
• Designation of USCDI v3 as the baseline certification standard.
• An enhanced information blocking requirement.
• A requirement that developers of certified health IT report interoperability-focused metrics.

Reader Comments

From Tax Bro: “Re: tech and health IT layoffs. Check out IRS Section 174 changes and ask executives if this has changed their company’s business.” An IRS change that took effect for the 2022 tax year no longer allows employers to expense their R&D costs in the same year in which they were incurred. Instead, companies must now amortize those expenses over five years, which triggers an immediately higher tax liability. Example: previously, a tech-heavy startup with $1 million in revenue and $750,000 in R&D costs (which is everything related to software development, including allocated overhead such as rent) would have paid taxes that year on $250,000. Now, that company will face an immediate IRS bill for taxes owed on $850,000, which creates a cash flow squeeze and a suddenly ugly balance sheet. It’s worse when paying offshore costs, where the deduction is spread over 15 years instead of five. In addition, companies must also amortize the capitalized cost of retiring or cancelling a software project over that same period. Folks in the know, how has that change affected your business, and has it triggered layoffs or hiring cutbacks?

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Dear CEOs whose companies are laying people off right before Christmas. You speak confidently of right-sizing, becoming more corporately nimble, offsetting slowing growth, focusing on what matters to customers, and creating synergy from financial cuts. My question: shouldn’t you also lay off your executives, and perhaps yourself, for failing to predict and fix these problems back when you were wrong-sizing? Why drop a lump of coal into the stockings of your previously valued “associates” by pink-slipping them home for a miserable holiday? November and December layoffs are a strong indicator of executive incompetence or poorly masked corporate desperation.

Ah, the cliché but slightly seasonally fun hospital door decorating contest. It’s too late to vote, unfortunately, for the “Welcome to Whoville” door of the IT department of 171-bed McAlester Regional Health Center (OK), as requested by Interface Specialist Anthony Master who asked nicely on LinkedIn. Still, I wish them luck in the vote tally, although my inner teen also likes the lab department’s “12 Days of Christmas: Lab Edition” that includes five golden pees, seven swimmers swimming (snicker), and eight stools a-stinking. You will probably not understand the sentimentality of such a competition unless you’ve spent a lot of years working for a small, non-profit hospital, where the money isn’t great, but your patients are your neighbors, someone’s always bringing in food, and random employees give you a hug without being asked when they sense you need one.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The hearings panel of Nasdaq extends the continued listing of Veradigm shares until February 27, 2024. The company blames an accounting software problem for missing its annual SEC filing for 2022 and three quarterly filings so far in 2023.

AI-powered cancer imaging analysis system vendor Lunit will acquire New Zealand-based Volpara, which offers breast cancer detection software, for $198 million in cash. Volpara’s CEO and managing director is industry long-timer Teri Thomas, RN, MSN, who spent 21 years as an Epic VP through 2016.

Telemedicine addiction treatment provider PursueCare raises $20 million in a Series B funding round and acquire the software-based therapeutic for substance use disorder that were developed by the now-defunct Pear Therapeutics.

An 86-year-old woman and another plaintiff file a class action lawsuit against for Humana, claiming that the insurer used AI to deny care to Medicare Advantage patients. The lawsuit says that Humana uses the same NaviHealth algorithm as UnitedHealth Group, which owns the algorithm and was named in a similar lawsuit last month.

Smartcare Software, which sells EHR and ERP systems for mobile care in the home, renames itself to Aaniie, a name it calls “unique and forward-thinking” that better represents its vision (and, it adds, is “a brand we could trademark.”) The company says it’s easy to remember the name and spelling because it stands for “An All-inclusive Network for Improving Insights & Engagement,” which creates a race to aabsurditiie between the chicken and the egg.

People

Clinical trials technology company Slope hires Terry Edwards (PerfectServe) as COO.

Industry long-timer Jerry McKenzie — whose 40-year health IT career included executive roles with Accu-Med, Apex, QuadraMed, T-System, and MedAssist — died December 9. He was 73.

Announcements and Implementations

An AMA survey of physicians finds that two-thirds believe AI offers advantage, especially for documentation and prior authorization, but worry about its potential impact on the patient-physician relationship and patient privacy. One-third of them are using AI in practice, most commonly for documentation, translation, or diagnosis assistance. Their five-year plans include using AI to generate summaries of patient messages and chart information and predicting patient demand to support employee scheduling.

Lucem Health releases Reveal for Stroke, which analyzes ECG and clinical data to identify patients who have undocumented atrial fibrillation. The solution was developed with ECG diagnostic company AccurKardia.

Government and Politics

The Illinois Supreme Court rules that hospitals can collect the biometric information of their workers, specifically their fingerprints for accessing drug dispensing machines, without being held accountable to the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) that requires that the individual be notified in advance and prevents disclosure of their information without their consent. The court ruled that employing fingerprint access to retrieve patient drugs and supplies falls under HIPAA, but warns that its decision does not broadly excuse hospitals from compliance with BIPA.

The White House announces that 28 provider and payer organizations have pledged their commitment to the safe, secure , and trustworthy purchase and use of AI in healthcare based on the principle of FAVES – seeking outcomes that are fair, appropriate, valid, effective, and safe.

Privacy and Security

In China, a hospital employee is fired and faces legal charges after sharing screen shots on social media of the hospital electronic medical records of a 57-year-old actress who died in the ED this week.

Other

Houston Methodist Cypress Hospital CEO Trent Fulin lays out his “future bets” on becoming a smart hospital.

A jury awards a former Kaiser NICU charge nurse $41 million in her lawsuit over being fired for placing her bare feet in a NICU isolette. She claimed that Kaiser’s real reason for terminating her as a 30-year employee of the hospital was that she had raised repeated concerns about understaffing.

Awell Health Partnership Manager Rik Renard describes the company’s hiring of a highly credentialed account executive who they fired three weeks later after his poor performance led them to dig deeper into his background, where he was found to be holding another similar full-time job. He similarly held two full-time jobs at same time on three previous occasions, claiming that he was such a superstar that he only needed to work half-time to deliver full-time results. The company’s lessons learned:

• Don’t skip calling the current employer for references. It turns out that his claimed six-year stint at another vendor was actually two since they fired him in 2020.
• Trust your instincts if something seems off.
• A slow start is a major red flag.
• Sales pros are good at selling themselves.

A liquidation trustee sues the former board chair, CEO, and CFO of Watsonville Community Hospital (CA), claiming that they forced the hospital into bankruptcy by pocketing $4 million of its dwindling reserves. The executives were appointed by the hospital’s for-profit acquirer as its only executives and board members, after which they allegedly paid $2 million to themselves and family members in consulting fees and reimbursed themselves for cars, restaurant expenses, and a beach house. They hired out IT management to a company with no experience that was owned by an executive’s friend, which the lawsuit says caused billing and medical records problems due to poor Internet access and the implementation of a problematic and “untested” cloud-based EHR. The executives amended their employment contracts just before the hospital filed bankruptcy to pay themselves $3 million in severance if the hospital changed hands. The local health district bought the hospital’s assets out of bankruptcy in September 2022, where it continues to struggle.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare IT Leaders hosts its annual Christmas tree giveaway that benefits families at Cristo Rey Atlanta Jesuit High School.
• The “Interop Now” podcast features Ellkay VP of Interoperability Solutions G.P. Singh.
• NCPDP’s Raising the Standard Podcast features First Databank VP of Editorial Content Julie Suko.
• Meditech announces that Healthcare Policy Program Manager Philip Alcaidinho has been named co-chair of TechNation’s Health Advocacy Committee.

Blog Posts

• Social Care Without Stigma: How Findhelp Supports People Living with HIV/AIDS (Findhelp)
• How Does AI Transform Business Customer Experiences? (Five9)
• Healthcare cybersecurity threats: November 2023 (Fortified Health Security)
• Leading the way in data-driven healthcare innovation (Inovalon)
• A Christmas Miracle: The Story of Lakeland Community Hospital (Medhost)
• How Sault Area Hospital uses technology to improve care by engaging patients before, during, and after their stay (Meditech)

Contacts

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

News 12/13/23

Top News

Oracle announces Q2 results: revenue up 5%, adjusted EPS $1.34 versus $1.21, beating earnings expectations but falling short on revenue. CEO Safra Catz said the former Cerner business, acquired for $28 billion in June 2022, produced “a drag on Oracle growth.”

Shares dropped 12% on Tuesday as investors became concerned about the company’s two straight quarters of disappointing cloud revenue.

From the earnings call:

• Total revenue for the quarter grew 4%, but would have increased 6% excluding the contribution of the former Cerner.
• Catz once again mentioned the imperative to “drive Cerner profitability to Oracle standards.” She says that Cerner’s impact on Oracle’s growth will be “sort of negative one to two points” this fiscal year, then it will end.
• Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison says that half of Cerner Millennium customers will move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure by February. He adds that a rewrite of Millennium will be completed next year and that HealtheIntent is now full SaaS.
  Ellison says that all Millennium applications will be moved to OCI and will switch to subscription pricing.
• He adds that Millennium is being upgraded and modernized “one piece at a time” and will be extended via applications for public health, pharma, and hospital inventory and workforce management as Oracle goes after a bigger piece of the healthcare ecosystem.
• Ellison says in responding to an analyst’s question about generative AI that it can create a patient visit summary from the conversation without using a human scribe, which he says “has shocked a great many people.”

Reader Comments

From Oracool Not: “Re: Oracle. The earnings report is not good news for whatever is left of Cerner.” I said a week ago that it would get ugly if ORCL shares reacted negatively to financial news that could be attributed in any way to the former Cerner business. The CEO’s reaction to Tuesday’s revenue miss was even more direct than I would have expected, where she threw Cerner under the bus for being an underperforming drag on company revenue. Given Wall Street’s quarter-by-quarter fixation and Oracle’s competitive AI and cloud battles with powerhouse tech companies, the obvious answer would seem to be cutting Cerner costs even more, and about the only ways that companies can do that is to reduce headcount, sell real estate, discontinue or sell lower-margin business, and reduce R&D. All of these actions are good for investors and bad for customers.

From Slambob: “Re: Health Gorilla. Co-founder and Chief Strategist Sergio H. Wagner has been relieved of his position and board seat following layoffs of 44% of the workforce and missing two consecutive quarters by more than 80%.” Wagner’s LinkedIn shows that he left the company this month. Health Gorilla was just named as one of the five initial QHINs.

From Banzai Bill: “Re: training doctors. Ask readers how they would shorten the training for primary care doctors.” I’ve asked Dr. Jayne to weigh in and invite physician readers to respond as well. The issues that come to my mind:

• Schools love to collect tuition and the post-graduate donations of physician graduates, but is it really necessary to earn a four-year degree and then attend a four-year medical school before beginning years-long hands-on training?
• Given the speed at which medical knowledge becomes obsolete and how little of it is used by the time a PCP reaches mid-level practice, would it be better to shorten the pre-practice education while moving to continuous learning in a CME-type model?
• Endless amounts of vetted medical data is available electronically and potentially by AI. Is rote memorization of a subset of that same information a waste of time?
• How much could the eight-year classroom time of graduate medical school – before another three or more years of residency – be shortened to create the same outcome?

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Fruit Street files a $25 million lawsuit against former partner Sharecare, claiming that the company violated the terms of their agreement by launching its own diabetes prevention program rather than continuing to offer Fruit Street’s solution to its members. Both companies offer digital health and wellness programs to employers and payers. Sharecare, meanwhile, contends that Fruit Street owes it $3 million. I had a lot to say – none of it good, but all of it fun reading – about Fruit Street in 2014 and 2021.

Private equity firm KKR opens talks to acquire a 50% stake in healthcare payment and analytics software company Cotiviti from Veritas Capital in a deal that would value the business at between $10 billion and $11 billion. Veritas, which took Cotiviti private in 2018 at a $5 billion valuation, rejected a similar deal from Carlyle Group earlier this year. KKR has invested in such healthcare technology companies as Zeus Health, Clarify Health Solutions, and Therapy Brands.

Data and generative AI company ConcertAI will acquire American Society of Clinical Oncology subsidiary CancerLinQ, which offers real-world oncology data and quality-of-care technology services.

Kaiser Permanente lays off 115 IT employees, 65 of them in Northern California.

Sales

• WellSpan Health (PA) will use Arcadia’s data analytics software to enhance its value-based care efforts.
• Nascentia Health (NY) will implement the Biofourmis Care remote monitoring and care management platform as a part of its new care-at-home programs.

People

Tushar Hazra, PhD (EpitomiOne) joins Parker Health as CTO.

UC San Diego Health names Karandeep Singh, MD (Michigan Medicine) as its first chief health AI officer.

Eagle Telemedicine promotes Jason Povio to CEO. He takes over from Talbot “Mac” McCormick, MD who will take on the role of chief physician executive. CFO Timothy Horton will take on the additional title of EVP.

Impact Advisors hires John Lanari (Nordic) and Kristi Lanciotti, MBA (Optimum Healthcare IT) as VPs.

Howard Landa, MD (Sutter Health) joins Adventist Health as CMIO.

VCU Health hires Jeffrey Kim, MD (Loma Linda University Health) as CMIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Riverwood Healthcare Center (MN) will go live on an OCHIN-hosted Epic system next month.

Phelps Health (MO) begins offering virtual urgent care through KeyCare’s Epic-based technology.

Darena Solutions, Leidos, and SLI Compliance launch a verification process for AI applications that use SMART on FHIR to integrate with EHRs. 

Mitre, the independent trusted third party for the FDA’s voluntary Medical Device Information Analysis and Sharing (MDIAS) program, announces that Atrium Health has signed on as its first health system member.

Government and Politics

ONC and The Sequoia Project officially recognize KONZA National Network, EHealth Exchange, Epic Nexus, Health Gorilla, and MedAllies as QHINs.

A Verato-commissioned survey of 197 executives finds that two-thirds of healthcare organizations aren’t ready to meet Cures Act requirements such as sending electronic patient activity notifications, obtaining consent for sharing data, managing infrastructure for secure information exchange, and sharing patient-level information with patients and other healthcare organizations. Nearly all expect to receive more data requests, and more than half expect patient data-matching to be a major problem.

A congressional investigation finds that chain drug stores are handing over patient records to police and government investigators who present a subpoena rather than a judge-approved warrant. Legal experts raise concerns that chain stores share prescriptions across all locations, creating a national “digital trail” that could be used against patients or pharmacies by states such as Texas, which has threatened to file criminal charges related to the mailing of abortion-inducing drugs to state residents.

Other

London Health Science Centre officials come under fire for spending $50,000 to send 13 IT staff to Oracle Health and Oracle CloudWorld conferences in Las Vegas last September. The Canadian healthcare provider, which is in the midst of a staffing shortage and faces a $76 million deficit, is already under government investigation for spending $470,000 to send staff to conferences in Portugal, Australia, and the UAE.

Sponsor Updates

• Frost & Sullivan recognizes Inovalon’s One real-world data and analytics platform with its 2023 North American Product Leadership Award.
• Agfa HealthCare supports Leeds Teaching Hospitals in the UK in its education initiative.
• CereCore releases a new podcast, “Ways to Overcome the Gap Between IT and Physicians.”
• Consensus Cloud Solutions achieves HITRUST risk-based, two-year recertification.
• Konza names Katy Brown director of marketing.
• EClinicalWorks announces its intent to become a QHIN.

Blog Posts

• Ways to Overcome the Gap Between IT and Physicians (CereCore)
• Leveraging Automation to Manage the No Surprises Act Dispute Process (AGS Health)
• Ripe for automation: How generative AI can enhance patient care (Arcadia)
• Meet the Clinician – Tiffany Kibbee (Ascom)
• A proven approach to reducing patient falls while driving staffing efficiencies (AvaSure)
• 1Clearsense Empowers Healthcare Organizations Across Cloud Environments (Clearsense)
• Active Incident Response Planning: Find It, Fix It, and Go Forward (Clearwater)
• You Can Have Both! How to Maintain Your Cybersecurity Framework While Undergoing Digital Transformation (CTG)
• 5 of the Hottest Digital Health Trends Predicted to Skyrocket in 2024 (Dimensional Insight)
• Reflecting on Progress: A Review of the Healthcare Technology Industry in 2023 (Direct Recruiters)
• Happy Culture, Happy M&A: Strategies for a Successful Cultural Merge (Divurgent)
• 3 Ways to Optimize Your Epic EHR (DrFirst)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/11/23

Top News

The board of Veradigm fires the company’s CEO and CFO for failing to comply with financial reporting and disclosure policies, following an investigation by its audit committee. Veradigm hasn’t filed financial reports for a year due to accounting software problems, which caused Nasdaq to repeatedly warn the company about the potential de-listing of MDRX shares.

The terminated executives are Richard Poulton, CEO, who also resigned from the company’s board, and Leah Jones, CFO. The company has named interim executives and has launched a search for their permanent replacements.

MDRX shares dropped 20% on the news Friday. They are down 46% in the past 12 months versus the S&P 500’s 16% gain, valuing the company at $1.1 billion.

Interim CEO Shih-Yin Ho, MD, MBA and interim CFO Leland Westerfield, who are both members of the company’s board, will be paid up to $770,000 and $1 million, respectively, for six months, with the option to extend the agreement. That includes $200,000 for each executive that is contingent on hiring their permanent replacements and filing the overdue SEC financial reports.

Severance for Poulton and Jones will total $2.1 million and $200,000 with accelerated share vesting, respectively, and Jones will provide consulting services for six months for $360,000.

Nasdaq has not announced the results of its November 16 hearing in which the de-listing of Veradigm’s shares was to have been decided.

Reader Comments

From Re-Joyce: “Re: R1 RCM. Quite a turnaround from its days as Accretive Health.” Accretive’s history is spotty – it had to settle FTC charges of poor data security, was banned from doing business in Minnesota for positioning bonus-incented debt collectors inside hospitals to press ED and breast cancer patients for payment while they waited to be seen, and had shares de-listed from NYSE for missing filings. The company renamed itself to R1 RCM in 2017 after getting a $200 million investment from Ascension and an investment firm and went public in March 2018. Shares have lost 60% since their highs in early 2021.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Health IT conferences are a long way from earning an A grade from poll respondents for their presenter diversity.

New poll to your right or here: Has your resume ever included a paid-for award or vanity article? (should membership in Chief count?). Many years ago, I was annoyed at the proliferation of diploma mill degrees being claimed by healthcare folks and ran links to their LinkedIn on HIStalk, which earned me some nasty letters and threats. Interestingly, those people left their phony credentials intact, apparently convinced that their deceit would remain undetected if I didn’t call it out.

I’ve read several health IT “interviews” lately that quoted the subject as magically speaking in bullet lists and parenthetical asides, clearly indicating that the interviewee was responding to questions in writing and probably with the help of a PR team. I don’t give interviewees my questions in advance (because that’s not an actual conversation) and I don’t allow pre-publication review or editing. Interviewees have to trust me and be confident that they can answer without help, but the end result is far more interesting.

My solution for Dr. Jayne’s “one space or two after a period” dilemma is to write like the imitative self-promoters on LinkedIn who waste reader time and patience by making each sentence its own paragraph in their attempt to seem patiently profound (not really — I move on quickly in assuming that a lot of white space in “content” means a lot of white space in the author’s thinking). I will also note that while Dr. Jayne is stricken with existential Gen X angst about unlearning now-illogical habits that she developed while using a machine that has been obsolete for 40 years, she can take comfort that Word removes the extra spaces, so they never showed up in her HIStalk posts anyway. Now do indented first paragraph lines.

John sent me a Donors Choose donation that, with matching funds, provided Mr. C’s middle school class in Pennsylvania with biology and physics hands-on activities.

I was snooping around the HIMSS conference website and noticed that HIMSS27 is now set for Chicago after two years in Las Vegas, so HIMSS24 will be the last stop in Orlando for a while. Exhibitor count is at 514 and most booths are showing as unavailable except the 10x10s that go for $6,000.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Mail order teeth straightening device “teledentistry” vendor SmileDirectClub shuts down, telling customers that they won’t get the treatments remaining in their two-year, $2,000 program (but still have to pay their balance). The company went public in September 2019 at a valuation of $9 billion, with shares tanking 27% on their first day of trading. The company made its two 30-year-old founders billionaires, never turned a profit, and amassed nearly $1 billion in debt before it filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late September and then failed to find a buyer. The founders, whose previous business experience involved running a car detailing service, were financially backed by two private equity fund operators, the father and uncle of one of the founders (the three are pictured above). The father held shares that were worth billions, at least for a short time.

Cigna ends its attempts to acquire insurance rival Humana when the companies fail to agree on a price. Cigna will instead buy back $10 billion of its shares, which the company says are “significantly undervalued,” and will seek bolt-on acquisitions.

People

Clarify Health Solutions promotes Terry Boch to CEO. She replaces founder Jean Druin, MD, who will remain on the board.

Privacy and Security

Cyberextortionists post a “proof pack” of patient information that they obtained from Tri-City Medical Center (CA) following a ransomware attack that took its systems offline for more than two weeks. Such groups often call patients whose information they’ve stolen to suggest that they urge hospital leaders to pay the ransom to avoid public release.

In a similar event, patients of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center are being emailed by hackers who demand payment of $50 to prevent their information from being sold.

Other

The New York Times reports that Bellevue Hospital (NY) is using aggressive marketing techniques and per-procedure surgeon incentive payments to create a bariatric surgery factory in which patients are scheduled for the OR after a single quick visit and little understanding of the risks involved. Some of the patients it recruited are prisoners who lave little chance of following the required post-surgery diet. The hospital is paid at least $11,000 for each surgery, sometimes much more, and expects to do 3,000 cases at an estimated revenue of $34 million. The Times says that the weight loss surgeries often get OR priority over patients with stab wounds and detached fingers.

Sponsor Updates

• Netsmart employees sort food donations at the Manna Food Bank in Asheville, NC.
• Pivot Point Consulting Senior Director Jim Hogan attains CDHE certification from CHIME in digital health.
• QGenda will exhibit at PGA 2023 in New York City through December 11.
• AdvancedMD earns its Electronic Prescribing for Controlled Substances recertification from the Drummond Group.
• Rhapsody publishes a new guide, “How to Reinvent Interoperability.”

Blog Posts

• Culture still eats strategy for breakfast: Insight from our roundtable discussion (NTT Data)
• Intelligent patient experiences, part 5: How strategic is your patient engagement strategy? (Nuance)
• Nurses of Note 2023: The Lead Director for Ambulatory Care Management (PerfectServe)
• A Year in Review: 2023 Trends and Challenges in Healthcare with a Glimpse of What’s to Come (Vyne Medical)
• Gig Economy: Where 9-to-5 is So Last Century (Revuud)
• How Patients Stay Well at StayWell Pharmacy (Surescripts)
• Overcoming Healthcare Staffing Challenges in 2024 (Symplr)
• Interview: Jennifer’s Journey of Caregiving for her Mother (Trualta)

Contacts

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

News 12/8/23

Top News

Providence will sell its Acclara revenue cycle management company to R1 RCM for $675 million in cash, warrants to purchase $135 million worth of R1 shares, and a 10-year contract to receive revenue cycle management services from R1.

R1 shares, which are up 11% in the past 12 months versus the S&P 500’s 16% rise, rose slightly on the news, valuing the company at $4.7 billion.

Reader Comments

From Green Slime: “Re: award. See this LinkedIn post about another vanity award.” Dayton Children’s CIO J.D. Whitlock is tongue-in-cheek proud to be nominated for “Most Pioneering Magnetic Leader Revamping The Healthcare, 2024,” which he can win by paying $2,800. I found a back issue from issuer The CIO World, which is full of grammatical errors and odd wording that makes it obvious that its editorial terroir is not nearby. It describes itself as “an archway that caters to Entrepreneurs’ quench of technology and business updates.” Still, what they are doing is legal and in fact is perhaps the perfect business – selling vanity strokes to folks who crave them, even those who work in The Healthcare. The downside is that you look like a loser when you’re caught bragging on an obvious pay-for-play award.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor SnapCare.SnapCare is an AI-enabled workforce marketplace that serves the entire continuum of care. Its platform offers healthcare facilities complete visibility into the ideal talent mix for their unique needs and associated costs. The company designed its workforce solutions to significantly improve client savings and efficiencies, minimizing the need for intermediate agencies, returning control to healthcare facilities, and ensuring total transparency in pay and pricing. Its pioneering technology and comprehensive staffing services offer a smarter way for facilities to manage their workforce needs and deliver quality patient care. Thanks to SnapCare for supporting HIStalk.

I found this SnapCare explainer video on YouTube.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Novant Health will outsource some of its IT department’s work to India-based Wipro, but declines to say how many positions will be affected.

People

Industry long-timer Brent Dover (Kalderos) joins AI-powered clinical data management technology vendor Carta Healthcare as CEO.

William O’Toole, JD (O’Toole Law Group) joins DrFirst as counsel.

Fortified Health Security hires Greg Breetz, Jr. (Valera Health) as CFO.

Sarah Jones, MBA (Firefly Health) joins B.well Connected Health as chief outcomes officer.

Announcements and Implementations

InterSystems announces GA of TrakCare Assistant, a search-based navigation tool for its TrakCare EHR. Internal testing shows that Assistant reduces EHR interaction time by up to 66%.

In Canada, Fraser Health will pilot the use of Google Cloud’s generative AI to help create clinical documentation in Meditech Expanse.

Three-fourths of ambulatory care physician leaders who were surveyed by WellSky say that their organizations don’t have relationships with post-acute care providers, and most referrals to them are sent by fax or telephone. Most respondents expect their participation in value-based care programs to increase, while more than half of those surveyed say they don’t participate in Medicare’s Transitional Care Management because of shortages of staff, data, or technology.

A new KLAS report on data and analytics services lists Chartis, CitiusTech, Impact Advisors, and Prominence as being broadly validated across four disciplines – advisory consulting, technology services, operations improvement consulting, and managed services.

Privacy and Security

HHS lays out its plan to improve cybersecurity in healthcare, which includes setting healthcare organization performance goals, providing financial incentives for implementing cybersecurity practices, and enforcing cybersecurity standards within Medicare, Medicaid, and HIPAA.

Epic raises concerns about an ONC proposal that would require EHR vendors and HIEs to remove reproductive health information from data-sharing programs upon patient request. Epic says that the proposal would increase clinician documentation burden and is not technologically feasible, while a family doctor observes, “EHRs have been working so hard to share data automatically that we’re now behind in thinking about how to not share when that data can be used to criminalize a patient.” Proponents say that patients and providers could be charged with felonies in states where abortion is illegal if information from abortion-legal states is shared across state lines.

Washington University (MO) sues the state’s attorney general over his demand for access to patient records from its transgender center, which he is seeking under a consumer protection law that addresses false advertising. The AG’s office says it is entitled to information about treatment, referrals, prescriptions, and compliance with standards of care, while the university says that HIPAA pre-empts state law and allows disclosure of PHI only to a “health oversight agency.”

Security researchers report that a security flaw in the DICOM medical imaging standard has caused millions of patient images and exam notes to be exposed to the Internet. The affected servers, most of them hosted in the cloud either did not have security measures enabled or used weak authorization.

Other

Ardent Health Services restores access to Epic after nearly two weeks of downtime following a November 23 cyberattack.

The local paper profiles Jonathan Hatfield, who graduated college with a degree in bible studies, became a night shift janitor at Klickitat Valley Health (WA), taught himself IT, started the hospital’s IT department, was assigned responsibility over other departments, and then was chosen to be CEO of the hospital. 

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book Research outsourcing services survey respondents recognize Dimensional Insight as the top outsourced analytics solution.
• First Databank’s FDB Vela e-prescribing network earns HITRUST risk-based, two-year certified status.
• Mobile Heartbeat announces that its cloud-based clinical communication and collaboration solution, Banyan, is now available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
• Healthcare Growth Partners publishes a snapshot of the radiology software landscape, 2019-2023.
• KLAS Research recognizes Impact Advisors as a top provider of data and analytics services in its Data & Analytics Services 2023 report.
• Medicomp Systems releases a new “Tell Me Where It Hurts” podcast featuring Bob Taylor, DO, chief product strategies of TouchWorks EHR, Altera Digital Health.
• Meditech Lead Designers Tammy Coutts and Michael Shonty describe their work to advance disability inclusion within EHRs and to update the HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association’s Personas Library to include accessibility in recent HIMSS EHRA blogs.

Blog Posts

• Smart Coverage Detection Equals Better Patient Care + Stronger Bottom Line (EClinicalWorks)
• “Living Positive” Film: a Community of Hope, Brought Together by HIV (Findhelp)
• 3 Ways to Optimize Automation in Revenue Cycle Management (FinThrive)
• Is Data Migration to the Cloud Inevitable? (Five9)
• Navigating incident response: Lessons from a hospital cyber attack (Fortified Health Security)
• 5 Reasons Why Consistent Health Education is Important (Healthwise)
• Leadership Through Service: Our 2023 Social Impact Report (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Empowering maternal and newborn health research with Inovalon data (Inovalon)
• Streamlining EMR Interactions with a Reimagined User Experience (InterSystems)
• Hiding in Plain Sight: Leveraging Existing Patient Data for Early Detection of Diabetes (Lucem Health)
• 3 Tips for Surviving the Holiday Emergency Department Rush (Medhost)
• How Cloud Technology is Changing the Face of Clinical Communication (Mobile Heartbeat)

Contacts

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

News 12/6/23

Top News

CVS Health will use the name CVS Healthspire for its health services business that include Oak Street Health, Signify Health, MinuteClinic, Caremark, and its recently created biosimilar company Cordavis.

The company is following the lead of competitors that offer both health insurance and health services, such as UnitedHealth Group (Optum), Cigna (Evernorth Health Services) and Elevance Health (Carelon).

CVS also announced that its pharmacy pricing formula will change to a more transparent cost-plus model, following the lead of Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs.

Reader Comments

From Joy DiVive: “Re: North Carolina’s NCCARE360. A non-profit human services organization says that that weaknesses in Unite Us’s referral platform is the biggest threat to the $24 million Healthy Opportunities Pilot as funded by federal taxpayers.” Verified, per the communication that HSO Reinvestment Partners sent to the state complaining of poor invoice tracking, deficiencies in protecting confidential patient information, deficient case tracking, and the inability to upload and export data. That’s one organization’s opinion, anyway.

From Ellipse: “Re: CareRev. Another reduction in workforce today, about one-fourth of the company.” Unverified. The nurse shift-bidding platform reportedly laid off 100 employees, about one-third of its headcount, in June. The decreased use of gig clinicians post-COVID was a problem, unnecessarily enhanced by the loose lips of the now-departed co-founder and CEO who told co-workers of his love for microdosing LSD.

From Tick Tock: “Re: Oracle Health. Have they lost interest in the VA or in healthcare in general? None of the promised improvements have been delivered and the company no-shows congressional hearings.” Either they are focusing on basic blocking and tackling with the VA or they have lost interest as the project struggles. Oracle closed its Cerner acquisition in June 2022, and after some initial lofty healthcare pronouncements from Larry Ellison, most of the news since has involved layoffs, an expressed fervor to milk Cerner’s profits harder in a provider climate where that will be difficult, and selling unrelated Oracle products to health systems. They were supposed to rewrite Millennium, deliver a new pharmacy system to the VA by April 2023, and switch to a voice-first user interface. The company also promised to grow Cerner’s community presence in Kansas City, which has gone the other way. It will get ugly if the VA can’t get its implementations going again or if ORCL shares tank for unrelated reasons and all-important investors demand a quick turnaround. Their best hope, given Oracle’s army of lobbyists, would have been federal government, except that not much is left after bagging DoD, VA, Coast Guard, and IHS. Second best hope is overseas sales, although Epic is growing in the most attractive areas. The company promised a couple of big sales this quarter that added up to $1 billion, although much of that may come as subcontractor to General Dynamics for the $2.5 billion Indian Health Service contract.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Generous donations from Michael and Natalie, matched with funds from multiple sources including those from my Anonymous Vendor Executive, fully and anonymously funded these Donors Choose teacher grant requests:

• Headphones for Mr. S’s elementary school class in San Antonio, TX.
• STEM and engineering tools for Ms. T’s elementary school class in Waluku, HI.
• Science materials for Ms. M’s high school class in Homestead, FL.
• Math supplies for Ms. C’s elementary school class in Peoria, IL.
• Books for the computer science lab of Ms. C’s elementary school in Revere, MA.
• Math workbooks for Ms. A’s elementary school class in Spring Valley, CA.
• Headphones for Ms. F’s elementary school class in San Diego, CA.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

KONZA National Network and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment are piloting the use of real-time alerts for incoming or transferred patients who are actively diagnosed with multi-drug resistant organisms. The alerts are delivered directly to a provider’s EHR in less than five minutes using Direct Secure Messaging, allowing immediate isolation and implementation of transmission-based protocols. 

Sales

• UofL Health (KY) will implement Verato’s healthcare master data management software to help improve identity management across its system.
• Emory Healthcare (GA) will use Nference’s Nsights de-identified patient data technology to support its research in several therapeutic areas.

People

Children’s Hospital Colorado promotes Amy Feaster to SVP/CIO and chief digital officer. She replaces Dana Moore, who will retire at the end of the month.

Ric Downs (Veris Health) joins Fuse Oncology as VP of sales.

Amenities Health names Scott Heatherly (Hyro) VP of sales.

Stanford University medical school professor and Stanford Health Care radiology informatics director Curtis Lanlotz, MD, PhD is named president of RSNA. He earned his medical degree, master’s in AI, and doctorate in medical information science from Stanford.

Announcements and Implementations

Ireland’s National Forensic Mental Health Service goes live on InterSystems TrakCare.

Government and Politics

HHS will name the initial group of Qualified Health Information Networks in a livestreamed QHIN Designation Ceremony next Tuesday at 9:00 a.m. ET.

Politico says that members of Congress are concerned that Google is using advanced AI in healthcare before the government has created guidelines for such use, with particular concerns about patient privacy. The article notes that Google is hiring former federal healthcare regulators —  such as former National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc and several former FDA officials — and is raising the concerns of startups that its deep pockets will squeeze smaller companies out.

Privacy and Security

Seattle-based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center announces that it was the victim of a cyberattack just before Thanksgiving.

The Rhysida ransomware gang claims responsibility for a ransomware attack on London’s King Edward VII Hospital. The hackers allege that some of the stolen data, which they’ve threatened to put up for sale online, includes information pertaining to the British royal family. Hospital officials, on the other hand, insist that only a limited amount of “benign hospital systems data” was copied from its IT system.

Other

UCLA Health researchers find that 20% of patients whose electronic medical data showed them as suffering from serious illness were in fact dead. Researchers analyzed the health data of 11,700 patients across 41 UCLA Health clinics over two years, then compared it with data from California’s Department of Public Health Public Use Death File. A state law prohibits death file data from being shared with healthcare institutions, resulting in what the researchers deem “wasteful outreach that strains resources and healthcare workers’ time.” The authors say the problem could be easily solved if the state didn’t restrict death record sharing except for financial institutions.

A fascinating LinkedIn post by Chris Deacon, JD questions how big-brand, non-profit health systems (Cleveland Clinic, Brigham) are allowed to accumulate billions of dollars in hedge funds and overseas investments – generated from US tax breaks, astronomical patient charges, and charitable donations – to build massive medical palaces in London, UAE, and China. She calls for non-profit health systems to account for their international spending given that their local communities are footing the bill even as services to those local communities are curtailed or to overloaded to book. A comment by my favorite curmudgeon Matthew Holt speculates that big health systems hold $250 billion in hedge funds, with another $250 billion owned by non-profit insurers like BCBS and Kaiser Permanente.

Sponsor Updates

• Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Billy Nicolich.”
• Agfa HealthCare recaps its time at RSNA with daily updates.
• AvaSure publishes a new whitepaper, “Roadmap to virtual nursing: How UCHealth scaled its program and saved lives.”
• The HLTH Matters Podcast features Bamboo Health Chief Clinical Innovation Officer Nishi Rawat, MD.
• The Safeopedia Podcast features Bardavon Chief Clinical Officer Dorothy Riviere and VP of Injury Prevention Scott Coleman, “Revolutionizing Workplace Safety: The Power of Tech-Enabled Safety Cultures.”
• Black Book Research’s latest user satisfaction survey ranks MedEvolve as the leading vendor for RCM workflow optimization and automation services.
• Censinet releases a new Risk Never Sleeps Podcast, “The Key to Job Fulfillment: Autonomy, Complexity, and Reward, with Matt Christensen, Senior Director Cybersecurity at Intermountain Health.”
• ConnectiveRx releases a new podcast, “Empowering Communities: Pharmacists’ Crucial Role in Patient Health.”
• Dimensional Insight will sponsor the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association’s Annual Women Leaders in Healthcare Conference December 7 in Waltham.
• Divurgent releases a new episode of The Vurge Podcast, “Coming Together for Women in HIT and Cybersecurity.”
• DrFirst publishes a new case study, “Cone Health Finds Medication History for 93% of Patients by Connecting with Local Pharmacies and Leveraging AI.”

Blog Posts

• Help Your Patients Pay Less for Their Prescriptions (AdvancedMD)
• Underpaid Claims: Navigating the Challenges (AGS Health)
• Future-forward healthcare: Data platform considerations (Arcadia)
• Digitize Medical Billing for Atypical Providers with Quick Claims (Availity)
• Advancing Health Equity: The Role of AI in Healthcare and Clearsense’s Approach to Value-Based Care (Clearsense)
• Why is Documentation Important in Healthcare? (Consensus Cloud Solutions)

Contacts

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