Monday Morning Update 10/30/23

Top News

TT Capital Partners acquires a majority share of Cantata Health Solutions, which offers health technology for providers of behavioral health, human services, acute care, and post-acute care.

Healthcare Growth Partners advised Cantata in the transaction, which is its sixth deal in five months. 

Cantata was formerly Keane, then a division of NTT Data.

Reader Comments

From Breathe In and Hold: “Re: Epic. I’m a Epic-experienced physician and would love to get involved in a new customer’s build instead of fixing someone else’s setup. Wondering if you know about any possible Epic signings coming up?” I responded privately with a rumored deal that would be huge while also noting that Epic’s momentum outside the US is growing, but otherwise I’ll ask readers.

From Go Noles: “Re: Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare. Replacing Cerner with Epic, it seems.” Unverified, but they just posted several Epic-related jobs and some are for inpatient.

From Very Peeved: “Re: use of the word ‘very.’ Annoying to me. To you, too?” It is, and is among the words that I excise most often from interviews and reader-submitted articles where everything is “very good” or “really efficient.” 

From HIT Sleuth: “Re: [company name omitted.’’] Rumored to be making [industry CEO’s name omitted] to improve the company’s scale and stability.” Unverified, so I felt ethically bound to render this comment nearly useless by anonymizing it. The company is (or once was) valued at billions, while everybody knows the CEO.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Health IT folks don’t believe their wares have done much to influence quality, clinician satisfaction, cost, or equality, but instead of made it easier for consumers to engage with our high-cost, low-quality health systems.

New poll to your right or here: Which social media tools are you using more frequently now than two years ago for job-related tasks? I probably lurk more on LinkedIn than before, I have found YouTube to be surprisingly useful although mostly for non-work purposes and mindless entertainment, and Twitter/X to be less important than before.

It feels heretical to say out loud, but I’m contemplating skipping my first HIMSS conference (or is it the Informa conference?) in many years, disrupting my spring migratory pattern. I had already tapered off my HIMSS conference dosage by shortening my stay and my onsite wandering range, with that and my nagging dread leading me to question the value. I’m open to arguments either way. I’m pretty sure that if I break the habit by skipping Orlando, then I’m certainly unlikely to go to Las Vegas the next two years since I don’t like visiting there.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Revuud. The Charlotte, NC-based company – its name is pronounced as “reviewed” — is a leading healthcare IT staffing marketplace that helps healthcare organizations connect with top talent. Its mission is to revolutionize the way healthcare organizations hire IT talent by providing a faster, more efficient, and cost-effective solution. Streamline your hiring process by leveraging Revuud to find, hire, onboard, manage, and pay your IT contractors, all in a single platform at a fraction of the cost. Thanks to Revuud for supporting HIStalk.

I’m always happy to find a new sponsor’s explainer video, so here’s the one from Revuud.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Spok reports Q3 results: revenue up 5%, EPS $0.22 versus $0.15. SPOK shares are up 78% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 17% rise, valuing the company at $302 million.

The $1.5 billion acquisition of England-based healthcare software vendor Emis Group by UnitedHealth Group’s Optum Health Systems UK closes.

Sales

• VHC Health chooses Vyne Medical’s Refyne Cloud Fax and Trace platforms to automate management of electronic records and images.
• NYC Health + Hospitals and Montefiore choose Findhelp to connect community members with social care services.  

Announcements and Implementations

A new KLAS report on financial improvement consulting finds that the most common engagement is for financial performance improvement, while the most common outcome is improved efficiency. Impact Advisors, which was 2023 Best in KLAS for financial performance consulting, topped the performance score list, while already high satisfaction with Guidehouse jumped dramatically since 2020.

Sponsor Updates

• Pivot Point Consulting sponsors the annual UVA Community Health Friends of the Foundation Golf Classic.
• NeuroFlow releases a new Bridging the Gap Podcast, “Making the Financial Case for Digital Health Innovation.”
• Nordic releases a new Making Rounds Podcast, “Lab information, at your service.”
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a new case study, “Sentara: Strategic Portfolio Management with ServiceNow.”
• Spok publishes “The 2023 State of Healthcare Communications Report.”
• Waystar will exhibit at the HFMA Region 9 Annual Conference in New Orleans October 29-31.
• West Monroe will co-sponsor the HIMSS Washington Chapter’s Unleash the Future of Healthcare with Microsoft Technologies event November 2 in Redmond, WA.

Blog Posts

• Intelligent patient experiences, part 2: How easily can your patients manage their appointments and prescriptions? (Nuance)
• Securing healthcare data: The critical need for cyber resilience (Nordic)
• Reducing Burden on Your Maxed-Out Healthcare Technology Team (CereCore)
• Hot 7 with Larry King: A Listicle on Future-Forward Pharmacy (Surescripts)
• The Value of Time in Nursing: Maximizing Patient Care and Outcomes (Symplr)
• Sandwich Generation Caregiver Caring for Her Father with Parkinson’s (Trualta)

Contacts

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

News 10/27/23

Top News

Abridge, whose software converts patient-clinician conversations into clinical documentation, raises $30 million in a Series B funding round.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Jump on Lorre’s year-end, cherry-on-top deal and you’ll be among several smart new HIStalk sponsors who snagged the rest of 2023 free, shifted the expense to 2024 if they wanted, and will be outshining the competition as HIMSS approaches. In an industry that is rebounding, marketing prowess earns visibility and opportunity. HIStalk’s sponsor roster is second to none in digital health. I admit that my website is primitive and thrice-weekly industry news posts are so necessarily long at times that they send short attention-spanners to flee for time-wasting TikTok videos, but a lot of decision-makers get their news here and 94% of them say that doing so helps them do their job better.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Sage, which offers technology for caring for older adults, raises $15 million in Series A funding. Its care coordination platform for senior living residents, which allows users to report urgent issues and to communicate with their care team. The company says use of its system reduces resident and family complaints by up to 90%.

Sales

• Colorado’s public health department chooses Findhelp to create a Drug User Health Hub to reduce the transmission and consequences of viral hepatitis.
• Midwest Surgical Hospital selects the Simplifi 797 and Pharmacy Compliance suites of Wolters Kluwer Health to support sterile compounding.
• University Health Network, UVA Health, and Boston Children’s Hospital will implement Fujifilm’s Synapse digital pathology technology.

People

HCTec hires Peter Reynolds (Jeomise) as VP of strategic sales.

Niki Hall (Contentsquare) rejoins Five9 as chief marketing officer.

The Permanente Federation promotes Brian Hoberman, MD, MBA to EVP/CIO and national IT leader. He also services as CIO of The Permanente Medical Group and led Kaiser Permanente’s implementation of Epic in the early 2000s.

Announcements and Implementations

Data scientists at Bardavon provide a rare under-the-hood look at the predictive models they developed for optimizing care for physical and occupational therapy patients. Therapy providers, claims examiners, and case managers use the results to manage workers’ compensation cases.

AI-enabled workforce solutions vendor SnapNurse renames itself to SnapCare. The company offers healthcare organizations a less-expensive alternative to traveling and agency clinicians for managing float pools, PRN staffing, and permanent placement recruiting.

Advisory Board warns of “pharmacy deserts” as drug chains close hundreds of unprofitable stores in low-income areas.

A survey of healthcare finance professionals by AGS Health and HFMA finds that those who use or plan to use autonomous coding trust trust it, but 52% don’t know what it is.

Privacy and Security

Advocate Aurora Health will pay $12 million to settle a lawsuit over its use of user tracking tools from Meta and Google on its website and MyChart patient portal,

Other

Baystate Health implements a cashless policy that even covers its retail pharmacies and cafeterias, saying that card-only payment streamlines the payment process and reduces the risk of theft. The hospital says its policy is consistent with Massachusetts law that prohibits retailers from discriminating against a cash buyer. It’s interesting that some business offer customers a discount for paying in cash to avoid card processing fees, while others implement card-only policies.

Not healthcare specific, but pretty funny, is this “Last Week Tonight” skit about McKinsey. I haven’t watched broadcast TV in many years, so I don’t know anything about the show.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks announces that Integrated Medical Health (PA) has grown its multi-specialty practice using its EHR and Healow patient engagement solutions.
• Health Data Movers releases a new episode of its Quick HITs Podcast featuring Ganesh Persad.
• Nordic publishes new Healthcare Chronicles video titled “Maximizing your investment in the EHR | Aligning the EHR to enterprise strategy.”
• Lumeon announces that its Lumeon Conductor care orchestration platform has earned HITRUST certification.

Blog Posts

• AI Technology Takes Center Stage (EClinicalWorks)
• 5 Tips for a Successful Workday HR Implementation in Healthcare (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Human-centered design for Canadian healthcare technology (Nordic)
• Colorectal Cancer Screening Improvement by the Numbers (Lucem Health)
• YourCare Community: Bridging the Gap Between Patients and Providers (Medhost)
• ACOs prepare for ECQM quality reporting (MRO)

Contacts

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

News 10/25/23

Top News

Digital consulting firm Perficient acquires San Diego-based healthcare software development company Smedix.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Q&A: What’s new with the NSA? A No Surprises Act update.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenters: Joseph Mercer, JD, managing director, Marwood Group; Heather Kawamoto, VP of product strategy, Waystar. The No Surprises Act created a lot of change,  and those changes are still coming. A panel of revenue cycle experts answer frequently asked questions and offer a concise update on the NSA, including legislative developments, FAQs, and tips for navigating changes.

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

PicnicHealth, which uses patient-reported data to build datasets for research, acquires rare disease data aggregator and research firm AllStripes.

Akumin, a national outpatient radiology and oncology care services provider, announces a financial restructuring plan that includes filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and reverting to a privately-held company. Akumin experienced a ransomware attack in late September that is still impacting its ability to see patients at numerous locations.

HealthStream announces Q3 results: revenue up 5%, EPS $0.13 versus $0.12, beating earnings expectations but falling short on revenue.

Sales

• Delaware’s Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health will work with Bamboo Health to develop and implement behavioral healthcare coordination software.
• East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust in England will implement Epic.

People

Eskenazi Health promotes Randall Grout, MD to chief health informatics officer.

HealthEC names Chris Caramanico (JJCAL) CEO.

Karen Mellin (DrFirst) joins CTS Connected Technology Solutions as VP of sales and business development.

Announcements and Implementations

Northern Health in Melbourne, Australia, goes live on Agfa HealthCare’s enterprise imaging through its new Northern Imaging Victoria service.

Netsmart develops an AI Data Lab that is built on Amazon Web Services, which will allow the company to develop new technologies for its CareFabric platform. Missouri Behavioral Health Council will contribute predictive analytics for population health and provision of care functions.

Privacy and Security

MultiCare recovers from a service outage that caused it to suspend surgeries and procedures at several facilities within its system. The Washington-based provider has attributed the outage, which affected multiple systems including its EHR, to an interruption in service from one of its vendors.

In Canada, the IT systems of five hospitals that formed their own IT provider organization go offline due to a cyberattack.

Other

Increased enrollment in Medicare Advantage plans has hurt critical access hospitals, which are paid lower, negotiated rates than those of traditional Medicare. Hospital executives say insurers are “slow pay or no pay” with their Medicare Advantage contracts. They also report that patients must drive long distances to find nursing homes and rehabilitation facilities that accept MA plans versus nearly universal acceptance of Medicare.

Sponsor Updates

• ConnectiveRx employees assemble several bikes for children in need as part of the company’s Customer Service Week events.
• Frost & Sullivan recognizes Wolters Kluwer Health with the 2023 Global Competitive Strategy Leadership Award for its work with conversational AI in healthcare.
• EClinicalWorks integrates with Sunoh.ai, an AI-powered ambient listening technology that generates clinical documentation during appointments.
• Dimensional Insight and Health Matrix partner to offer an intelligence and data analytics platform to the Middle East healthcare market.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Empowering healthcare leaders with data-driven decision-making.”
• Nordic publishes a new episode of its In Network podcast, “Making Rounds: Lab information, at your service.”
• Black Book Research recognizes vendors exhibiting at MGMA’s Leaders Conference who’ve received its 2023 awards for highest customer experience and user satisfaction in practice management, including HIStalk sponsors Availity, Dimensional Insight, EClinicalWorks, and Nuance.
• Bamboo Health will exhibit at the TAHP Conference November 6-8 in Houston.
• Censinet releases a new Risk Never Sleeps Podcast, “In the Trenches of Healthcare Cybersecurity.”
• Consensus Cloud Solutions sponsors the annual Cognosante Charity Golf Tournament benefiting Final Salute.

Blog Posts

• Navigating the Challenges of Transcription: Finding a Solution That is Accurate, Timely & Secure (AdvancedMD)
• How Machine Learning Can Enhance the Healthcare Revenue Cycle (AGS Health)
• Make a good first impression: Keys to achieve long-term success in healthcare data analytics (Arcadia)
• HLTH 2023 Takeaways (Arrive Health)
• Meet Alexandra Ricciardiello – OCP Analyst (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Unlocking Patient Engagement: The Power of Advanced Communication Approaches (Artera)
• Securing healthcare data: The critical need for cyber resilience. (Nordic)
• Meet the Clinician – Julia Greer, VP, Clinical Strategy, Ascom Americas (Ascom)
• Fuel Your FHIR with Better-Quality Data (Availity)
• The Bardavon Index: How Does it Inform Better Treatment Decisions? (Bardavon)
• What CIOs Want ITSM Providers to Know (Clearsense)
• How Geek Squad Supports Care at Home (Current Health)
• Crafting Effective Job Postings (Direct Recruiters)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/23/23

Top News

Medication management company Cureatr shuts down without notice, blaming a lack of financing and a failed acquisition.

The company acquired SinfoniaRx in March.

Reader Comments

From Tolstoy: “Re: startups. The wave of shutdowns and fire sales is just starting as former stars run out of cash.” Agreed. Companies that ran big early-round raises in a go-go market are just now seeing the invisible investor strings that were attached – the moneyed folk are demanding profitability, growth, and proof that the company’s moat exists and is not drying up. Inexperienced operators, especially first-time founders, are new to a market that values being cash-stingy to ride out the storm. Some will attempt to pivot, which rarely works. The lowest-quality startups will shut down, but most will come hat-in-hand to established companies hoping to sell the business, its IP, or its office furniture at a dismal fraction of now-laughable historic valuation. Meanwhile, the valuation premium for startups versus publicly traded companies is narrowing and founders are packing up their rosy pitch decks being forcefully relocated from the CEO chair to the boardroom. The upside is that the cream floats to the top when irrational exuberance meets reality, so winners will emerge stronger.

From Belzer: “Re: Waystar IPO. Good timing?” It’s hard to say given the long IPO drought and SPAC distraction. The PE-owned company’s string of acquisitions has piled up quite a bit of debt, with the S-1 showing interest payments of $149 million in 2022 on $704 million in revenue, resulting in a $66 million pretax loss. The company was valued at around $3 billion in 2019 when a majority stake was sold. Rumors of an $8 billion valuation floated around last summer when the IPO plans leaked.

From Plowboy: “Re: Henry Schein. We are placing orders by phone while the company keeps its site offline.” The medical and dental supply vendor took its systems offline on October 14 due to a cybersecurity incident, although its practice management software was not affected.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents who quit because of non-job issues cite management ethics by far as their most common issue.

New poll to your right or here: Looking back five years, which aspects of healthcare have been significantly improved by technology? I ran this a few years ago, so let’s see how the responses differ.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Q&A: What’s new with the NSA? A No Surprises Act update.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenters: Joseph Mercer, JD, managing director, Marwood Group; Heather Kawamoto, VP of product strategy, Waystar. The No Surprises Act created a lot of change,  and those changes are still coming. A panel of revenue cycle experts answer frequently asked questions and offer a concise update on the NSA, including legislative developments, FAQs, and tips for navigating changes.

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

EClinicalWorks announces that it expects to generate $900 million in revenue in 2023, up from the previous year’s $800 million. The company will continue to invest in AI, including ChatGPT integration, an AI-based image model for document management, and RCM improvement.

Weight loss drug startup Calibrate will sell itself to a private equity firm and restructure the business, which recently pivoted from selling prescriptions directly to consumers to having employers offer its services as an employee benefit. The company has struggled with refund-demanding customers who couldn’t get their prescriptions filled due to short supplies, as well as those who found that their insurance wouldn’t cover the high cost of GLP-1 drugs.

Nomad, whose app connects travel nurses with hospitals, lays off employees for the second time this year as budget-challenged health systems reduce their use of expensive travel nurses. 

Sales

• The US Defense Health Agency awards Amwell and Leidos a contract valued at up to $180 million to provide a hybrid care platform that will replace MHS Video Connect.

People

Tony Ambrozie, MBA, MIM (Baptist Health South Florida) joins CVS Health as chief digital and technology officer, pharmacy and consumer wellness.

Net Health hires Ron Books (ECI Software Solutions) as CEO.

Matter Communications promotes Paul Berthiaume to SVP.

Privacy and Security

HealthAlliance Hospital (NY) discharges or transfers all of its inpatients and diverts ambulances following a cyberattack. Owner Westchester Medical Health Network says the incident also affected Margaretville Hospital and Mountainside Residential Care Center.

Other

Cedars-Sinai researchers develop an AI tool that can detect atrial fibrillation in people who don’t have symptoms, including in diverse settings and patient populations.

Sponsor Updates

• Inovalon partners with HealthVerity as part of its new Preferred Data Partner Program to advance the use of real-world evidence in research.
• NeuroFlow publishes a new case study, “Prudential Helps High-Risk Disability Claimants Access Support Through Population-Wide Suicide Risk Assessment & Prevention.”
• Surescripts shares a new podcast, “A Recap of NACDS Total Store Expo 2023.”
• Wolters Kluwer announces that its Emmi patient engagement and education solution has received a 2023 Black Book award for highest client/user satisfaction from managed care providers.
• InterSystems partners with Indonesian EHR vendor Zi.Care to provide expert services via the InterSystems Iris for Health – Indonesia Edition data platform.

Blog Posts

• What’s top of mind for healthcare executives now? (Notable)
• Intelligent patient experiences, part 1: How easy it is to use your patient portal? (Nuance)
• Healthcare workforce: Burnout, compensation, and strikes with Elizabeth Ojo on Diagnosing Healthtech (Redox)
• Supporting Med Access by Collecting Digital Patient Consent (RxLightning)
• 4 Reasons to Skip Paper and Switch to Online Incident Reporting Software (Symplr)
• Rev cycle 101 – Healthcare revenue cycle terminology: Denial prevention glossary (Waystar)
• A Provider’s POV: Can Technology Help Us Be Better Patient Advocates? (CereCore

Contacts

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

News 10/20/23

Top News

OptumInsight CEO Neil de Crescenzo leaves the company a year after it acquired Change Healthcare in a $13 billion deal, according to a LinkedIn post. He had been CEO of Change since 2013.

OptumInsight’s new CEO is Roger Connor, who will also continue his role as EVP of enterprise operations and services for parent company UnitedHealth Group.

A reader tipped me off to de Crescenzo’s s departure in mid-September, but the company did not respond to my inquiries.

OptumInsight offers transaction processing, technology, analytics, and revenue cycle management. Its annual revenue is nearly $5 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor FinThrive. The Plano, TX-based company helps 3,200 healthcare organizations increase revenue, reduce costs, improve patients financial experience, and ensure regulatory compliance across their entire revenue cycle continuum. Its SaaS-based RCM Platform delivers the industry’s widest breadth of capabilities, including integrated workflows supporting patient access, revenue integrity, claims management, contract management, and collections management teams within a centralized work environment. The company helps its customers bring modern digital experiences to their patients, including self-scheduling, virtual check-in, price estimations, patient payments and payment plans, and ongoing SMS-based secure communications – with no app downloads required. Its platform also leverages machine learning, robotic process automation, end-to-end RCM analytics, and billing and coding education resources to increase efficiency and drive sustained ROI. Thanks to FinThrive for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a FinThrive explainer that I found on YouTube.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Q&A: What’s new with the NSA? A No Surprises Act update.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenters: Joseph Mercer, JD, managing director, Marwood Group; Heather Kawamoto, VP of product strategy, Waystar. The No Surprises Act created a lot of change,  and those changes are still coming. A panel of revenue cycle experts answer frequently asked questions and offer a concise update on the NSA, including legislative developments, FAQs, and tips for navigating changes.

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Audience engagement platform vendor Uniquest acquires PCare, which offers interactive patient systems.

Henry Ford Health and Ascension Michigan form a joint venture to combine their Detroit-area operations, with the combined $10.5 billion business giving them 44% of the Detroit area hospital market by revenue. 

Private equity firm Ardian will increase its stake in Europe-focused healthcare software vendor Dedalus to 92%. Board member Albert Calcagno, who has no healthcare or software experience, has been appointed CEO, with Andrea Fiumicelli moved to board chair.

Sales

• Medicare Advantage insurer EternalHealth will implement Inovalon’s Converged suite for quality measurement and risk scoring.
• USA Health Children’s and Women’s Hospital goes live on AdaptX’s Obstetric Advisor to improve maternal health equity.
• Culbertson Memorial Hospital will go live on Oracle Health CommunityWorks next month.
• Virtua Health will allow its doctors to prescribe Woebot Health’s mental health support app to people who are waiting for behavioral health provider appointments.

People

Bamboo Health hires Jeff Smith, MBA (Lumeris) as CEO. He replaces interim CEO Jay Desai, MBA, who will continue as executive board chair. Former CEO Rob Cohen, MBA left the company in July 2023 to join Livara as CEO.

Adrian Agostini (Booster) joins Experity as chief revenue officer.

Industry long-timer Rob Titemore, most recently with Sonifi Health, died August 13 in a motorcycle accident. He was 52. Visitation will be November 18 in Burlington, MA.

Announcements and Implementations

Insurer Oscar Health describes in an excellent “Continuous Hackathon” website how it is using large language models in pursuit of three goals: creating better client experiences, impacting behavior to generate better outcomes, and automating processes to reduce cost. Some of its ideas for using AI to move care delivery outside of the medical office:

• Assign members to virtual primary care doctors.
• Use AI to interpret EHR lab results as an initial draft for the virtual care provider. Co-founder and CTO Mario Schlosser says in an X post that the response of providers is binary – either they delete the summary immediately or they accept it with minimal changes.
• Automate the creation of care summaries. Schlosser says that providers modify the AI-written summary often, adding their own personal style or adding context.
• Collect patient information before starting a virtual patient visit.

In Japan, Fujitsu and Toppan Holdings will collaborate to create research databases from de-identified EHR data and apply analytics to improve the efficiency of drug development and care delivery.

Ronin and MD Anderson experts describe the development of an AI-powered digital tool that identifies cancer patients who are likely to require an unscheduled ED visit within 30 days due to treatment side effects, concluding that 50% of those visits as well as 19% of hospitalizations are avoidable.

Prudential’s implementation of NeuroFlow’s technology for conducting remote clinical assessments of disability claimants triggered 4,200 self-harm or suicide alerts from 24% of the monitored population, enabling the insurer to promptly connect them with mental wellness resources and resulting in a 34% reduction in their symptoms of depression.

Government and Politics

HHS OCR publishes a checklist covering “Telehealth Privacy and Security Tips for Patients.”

Other

A survey of employers finds that health insurance premiums increased 7% in 2023, outpacing worker wage increases and inflation as family coverage averaged $23,968 per year. Employers paid an average of 71% of the cost, although 65% of workers were enrolled in self-funded plans in which the employer pays for health services directly. Employers say that the key health benefits concerns of their employees involve the high cost-sharing that they bear, their ability to schedule timely appointments, and the complexity of prior authorization. More than half of employers think that telemedicine will be important or very important for providing access to behavioral health services and primary care.

An interesting series of tweets from Science.io co-founder and CEO Will Manidis makes these observations in predicting healthcare’s “top deck of the Titanic” moment as consumers abandon the existing system and create their own:

• The status quo is that costs have increased constantly and clinic waitlists remained full because: (a) clinicians are in limited supply; (b) insurers pay rather than patients; (c) demand is inelastic and trust is high; and (d) regulatory capture.
• He says that all four factors are shifting as (a) LLM-assisted doctors will gain technology leverage; (b) the payer-PCP model will shift to online services that treat individual conditions; (c) patients who are disillusioned by the opioid epidemic and by poor treatment at physician offices will exit the system instead of calling for it to be improved; and (d) FDA’s healthcare regulation doesn’t reflect patient desires and instead rewards incumbents.
• Technology will allow new companies to be more efficient than incumbents as vendor overpromising fades.
• Amazon, Walmart, and CVS are building a cash-pay, free-market parallel care system.
• Margins on low-acuity care will increase due to telemedicine and consumerization, which will also offer cross-selling opportunities for high-margin lifestyle management plans.

A fascinating and potentially HIT-adjacent article in The Atlantic ponders the “failed experiment” of retail self-checkout, which mentions but does not primarily blame customer dishonesty as its main challenge. The initial promise of quick checkout and the ability to deploy freed-up cashiers to offer more customer assistance never materialized, as finicky technology, purchases such as alcohol that require employee review, and assigning a single staff member to oversee the enter kiosk area have diminished the technology’s potential. Snips:

• Self-checkout allows cutting back on low-wage cashiers, but the problem-prone technology requires a lot of expensive IT resources to keep running.
• It hasn’t been proven to be faster or more convenient, but customers are fooled because instead of just waiting in line, they fumble through the scanning and bagging process in doing the cashier’s job with a small fraction of their efficiency.
• Retail store owners used self-checkout as a reason to cut staff in general, resulting in messier stores, poorly stocked shelves, and lack of employees to assist customers.
• Retailers aren’t likely to abandon the concept because they spent fortunes installing the technology, but they will likely need to provide more human assistance.
• The article concludes, “A familiar limitation of many grand tech-industry promises endures: At the bottom of all the supposed convenience, you do actually just need a lot of people to operate a store.”

Sponsor Updates

• Divurgent releases a new The Vurge Podcast, “From Operations to IT: An Inside Look.”
• Ellkay will present at the CommonWell Health Alliance 2023 Annual Meeting and Fall Summit November 6-8 in Kansas City, MO.
• HealthMark Group employees volunteer at Operation Kindness.
• Optimum Healthcare IT posts a case study titled “Sentara: Strategic Portfolio Management with ServiceNow.”
• Censinet and First Health Advisory will partner to offer cybersecurity risk assurance solutions, including the Censinet RiskOps platform for managing and mitigating third-party and enterprise risk.
• Nordic releases a video titled “The Download | Restart, refuel, or hang tight: The EHR dilemma.”
• Inovalon collaborates with Amazon Web Services to develop software to support better healthcare outcomes and economics.
• MRO will exhibit at the NCQA Health Innovation Summit October 23-25 in Orlando.
• Heart of Florida Health Center realizes a 21% increase in payment collections with EHR and Healow Payment Services software from EClinicalWorks.
• Redox partners with healthcare-focused digital transformation consultancy Productive Edge to offer the Healthcare Data Strategy Accelerator and Healthcare Data Integration Accelerator programs.

Blog Posts

• Using Data to Champion Hospital Workers and Prevent Strikes (Dimensional Insight)
• The Role of Emotional Intelligence in the Hiring Process (Direct Recruiters)
• How Healow Self-Scheduling Helped a New Practice Fill 400 Appointment Slots (EClinicalWorks)
• Creating Effective Warnings for All (Everbridge)
• Supporting Colorado’s Drug User Health Hub (Findhelp)
• Navigating the Future with Contact Center AI Solutions (Five9)
• How to make cybersecurity training part of your healthcare culture (Fortified Health Security)
• The future is now: Healthcare IT needs a rapid evolution (HCTec)
• 4 time-saving features of an integrated RCM solution (Inovalon)
• Bridging a Legacy LIS to Epic Beaker: JTG Consulting Group’s Collaborative Effort with Atrium Health (JTG Consulting Group)
• Healthcare Orchestration Needs a Conductor (Lumeon)
• How to Deal with Angry Patients in Urgent Care (Experity)
• 3 Ways Hospitals Can Foster Exceptional Patient Experiences in the ED (Medhost)
• How an EHR partnership can improve efficiency, person-centered care and outcomes (Meditech)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
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News 10/18/23

Top News

Waystar announces that it filed IPO documents in August that reportedly value the company at up to $8 billion.

Waystar says it booked $196 million in sales for the quarter ending June 30 versus $173 million for the same quarter last year.

The revenue cycle management company was formed in 2017 with the merger of Navicure and ZirMed. Waystar has since acquired Connance, HealthPay24, Patientco, PARO, Digitize,AI, and ESolutions. 

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Q&A: What’s new with the NSA? A No Surprises Act update.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenters: Joseph Mercer, JD, managing director, Marwood Group; Heather Kawamoto, VP of product strategy, Waystar. The No Surprises Act created a lot of change,  and those changes are still coming. A panel of revenue cycle experts answer frequently asked questions and offer a concise update on the NSA, including legislative developments, FAQs, and tips for navigating changes.

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The loss of a legacy customer and associated $4.5 million in annual revenue prompts RCM vendor Streamline Health Solutions to move forward with a corporate restructuring plan that includes a 24% reduction in its workforce and the promotion of Benjamin Stilwill to CEO. Former CEO Wyche “Tee” Green will transition to executive chairman. STRM shares have lost 40% of their value in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 31% gain, closing Tuesday at $0.30 and valuing the company at $18 million.

Aspirus Health will acquire St. Luke’s in signing a definitive agreement that has been unanimously approved by the boards of both health systems. The agreement calls for Aspirus to implement Epic and its other standard systems at St. Luke’s within 24 months of closing, which is expected in the spring of 2024. St. Luke’s went live on Meditech Expanse in mid-2019. The combined organization will operate 19 hospitals and 130 outpatient locations with 14,000 employees.

Drug chain Rite Aid files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and hires a new CEO as it struggles with slowing sales, debt, and a Department of Justice opioid lawsuit.

Sales

• AdventHealth will use tech-enabled clinical support from Wellvana to improve access and outcomes within its network of primary care clinics in Florida.

People

Samir Shah, MD (Envision Healthcare) joins Qure.ai as chief medical officer.

Cordea Consulting names Travis Earlywine (Lowes) regional VP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Highmark Health (PA) will implement Google’s new Vertex AI Search technology across its enterprise. It is initially using the generative AI tool as a part of an automated, post-visit medical documentation workflow pilot project.

King’s Daughters Medical Center (MS) implements BridgeHead Software’s HealthStore clinical data repository as a part of decommissioning its legacy Meditech Magic EHR. KDMC went live on Meditech Expanse last December.

Guelph General Hospital in Ontario goes live with Sectra’s cloud-based enterprise imaging technology.

Government and Politics

The VA will establish four AI centers to test and apply new AI solutions at partner VA medical centers. The centers support the VA’s recently announced AI strategy, which includes using AI to improve care outcomes and experiences for veterans.

Privacy and Security

Mt. Graham Regional Medical Center (AZ) works to restore computer systems after a September 27 ransomware attack.

University of Vermont Medical Center President and COO Stephen Leffler, MD tells lawmakers at a joint subcommittee hearing in Washington, DC that more federal grants should be made available to help health systems purchase stronger cybersecurity software. Leffler also shared the details of the hospital’s recovery from a 2020 ransomware attack, which led to 28 days of downtime and $65 million in costs.

Other

Epic employees complain on Reddit that the company has announced that it will no longer allow them to work from home during heavy snow days. Some of them note that Epic’s new hires often have never driven in snow and therefore are prone to creating automotive mayhem.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthwise posts a case study of how Duke Health used its health education to increase the success rate of its smoking cessation program.
• Availity offers RevSpring’s staff-assisted payment and merchant services as part of its Availity Essentials multi-payer platform.
• AvaSure will host its 2023 Symposium October 25-26 in Grand Rapids, MI.
• Inovalon’s Claims Management Pro solution is offered on the PointClickCare Marketplace.
• Baker Tilly publishes a new case study, “Handled with care: UT Health San Antonio’s Oracle HCM journey towards one cloud.”
• Nordic publishes another episode of its In Network podcast, “Designing for Health: Bre Loughlin.”
• Bamboo Health publishes a new case study, “Revolutionizing Nevada’s Behavioral Health Referrals: A Leap Forward for 988 Suicide Prevention and Crisis Lifeline Services.”
• Censinet releases a new Risk Never Sleeps Podcast featuring cybersecurity expert Frank Riccardi.

Blog Posts

• Navigating the Challenges of Transcription: Finding a Solution that is Accurate, Timely & Secure (AdvancedMD)
• From Pain to Progress: Streamlining LIS Upgrades with JTG Consulting Group (JTG Consulting Group)
• Coding and Documentation Synergies: The Power of CAC and CDI Integration (AGS Health)
• How to create a trusted and consistent data foundation for healthcare (Arcadia)
• Building a Pan-European Paediatric Data Collaboration Network (Aridhia)
• Leveraging High-Quality Clinical Data to Safeguard HEDIS Quality Bonus (Availity)
• Why Injury Prevention Technology Used by Athletes is so Effective in the Workplace (Bardavon)
• Copay Adjustment Programs: What Brand and Hub Teams Need to Know (ConnectiveRx)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/16/23

Top News

Walgreens will close 60 of its drugstore-attached VillageMD clinics as it pursues $1 billion in cost reductions following a Q4 loss that is the first in its 122-year history.

Walgreens paid $5.2 billion in late 2021 to increase its stake in VillageMD. The Walgreens interim CFO insisted in Thursday’s earnings call that the company will “unlock the embedded profits at Village” by cutting costs, improving execution, and “right-sizing the footprint” in focusing on the highest-opportunity markets and expanding integration of the company’s digital assets.

Walgreens also says it will reduce retail inventory and optimize product mix, which might make one wonder why the highly-compensated executives waited for a crappy quarterly earnings report to do so. Actually, maybe the company agrees since they have already canned the CEO, CFO, and CIO.

Worth a read is the analysis by AI company founder Sergei Polevikov, who says half of the company’s 2023 loss of $3 billion is due to money-losing VillageMD while the remainder is because of “kitchen sinking,” where all of the company’s problems are blamed on previous management in an opportunity to clean up the ugly books. He previously wrote a brilliant piece titled “Why did I say No to 100 SPAC offers? Because SPACs are Ponzi schemes” in which SPAC salespeople pushed him to take his AI company public, but didn’t bother to ask questions about profits or ROI since their interest was pumping and dumping, fueled by insiders hyping the company to unload shares to retail investors who shortly after took it in the shorts.

Reader Comments

From Boyd Blender: “Re: PE firm acquiring a health system. That would be an unwelcome intrusion.” The intrusion has already occurred, as private equity firms already own health systems, physician practices, clinics, ambulance services, hospices, insurers, drug companies, ED staffing firms, health IT software vendors, pharmacy chains, dental and vision offices, and funeral homes. Meanwhile, ever-larger health systems are exhibiting PE-like behavior in closing less-profitable sites, running investment firms, and strong-arming patients to pay balances due while generously enriching their executives. Patient expectations of empathy, customer focus, and an emphasis of quality over revenue – even when the patient is an executive of the same health system — usually lead to disillusionment.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Many poll attendees wouldn’t attend any conferences if they had to pay their own way, but some say they would self-fund trips to a vendor’s user group meeting, HIMSS, or ViVE. I’ve long held that at least on the provider side, conferences are bestowed as paid vacations for executives with little expectation of ROI. I say that from experience, having enjoyed the budget and paid time off to traipse off to conferences about which my health system employer asked little and for which I held minimal expectation of benefit to my employer.

New poll to your right or here: Which of the following non-job issues were the main reason you left an employer? Everybody understands quitting over better opportunities, boss conflicts, or lack of challenge or inspiration, so I’m looking for broader, company-wide issues.

I’m never going to trust Google to lead AI innovation until it improves Gmail. I use it in the most basic ways possible, but still marvel that (a) selecting all items in Promotions and then clicking Delete All runs what looks like a primitive macro that leaves many emails undeleted; and (b) deleting emails on mobile brings up a pointless and unmovable “Conversation moved to trash” message that hides the next email. Only a UI-indifferent engineer could find Gmail easy to love. I’ve used it since mid-2005 and its appearance and sometimes frustrating behavior hasn’t changed much, like Google is reluctant to mess with it.

Sign up as a new HIStalk sponsor and Lorre will give you the rest of this year for free, a deal that rewards action rather than indecision.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Q&A: What’s new with the NSA? A No Surprises Act update.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenters: Joseph Mercer, JD, managing director, Marwood Group; Heather Kawamoto, VP of product strategy, Waystar. The No Surprises Act created a lot of change,  and those changes are still coming. A panel of revenue cycle experts answer frequently asked questions and offer a concise update on the NSA, including legislative developments, FAQs, and tips for navigating changes.

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Sphere will sell its Commercial Division to commercial enablement company NMI as a non-core business. UPDATE and correcting an earlier version of this item: the company is retaining the healthcare offerings as part of its specialized integrated verticals, selling only the Commercial Division that serves non-integrated SMB retail customers. Sphere says the sale will allow it to focus on fully integrated payment and software experiences, which in healthcare includes its TrustCommerce healthcare gateway and Health IPass patient engagement solutions.

UnityPoint Health and Presbyterian Healthcare Services end their plans to merge.

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz provides vendor advice from health system digital health leaders on selling AI products:

• Frame the problem instead of assuming that buyers seek AI for AI’s sake.
• Identify the person who is charged with fixing the problem, not the one who is most excited about AI.
• Understand the buyer’s roadmap to solving problems, their buy versus build framework, and their value proposition for choosing a startup versus an incumbent vendor.
• Define the ROI case and KPIs to avoid “death by pilot.”
• Focus on user workflow since organizations aren’t interested in standalone solutions and those that add steps the clinician’s work.
• Be transparent about why you need data and how it will be managed.
• Pricing methods include mirroring the cost of an existing solution that will be replaced, API-based pricing that allow customers to build their own applications, a straight SaaS subscription, and charging based on what employees would be paid to achieve similar results.
• Raise investor funds based on the high cost of compute resources that are needed to develop products. Those funds are one form of product moat, along with hiring skilled AI people, gaining access to proprietary data, and achieving market lock-in where health system customers are reluctant to replace incumbent vendors.

Announcements and Implementations

A Kerala, India-based startup creates user-friendly scheduling software that updates the assigned appointment time with a prediction of when the visit will actually begin based on the doctor’s real-time schedule. The system also allows doctors to transfer their appointments.

Financial Times-backed European startup publication Sifted asks investors which digital health companies they like, although the investors don’t indicate any financial interest in the companies they name:

• Abtrace (UK) – preventive care monitoring.
• Floy (Germany) – radiology image analysis.
• Lighthearted.AI (UK) – wearables for heart condition detection.
• Lindus Health (UK) – clinical trial platform.
• Nabla (France) – ambient documentation.
• Nebu-Flow (UK) – smart nebulizers.
• Nelly Solutions (Germany)  – digital signatures and credit.
• Nyra Health (Austria) – digital stroke rehabilitation.
• Phare Health (UK) – medical coding.
• Sohar Health (UK) – insurance eligibility.
• Tortus.ai (UK) – EHR task automation for physicians.
• Upheal (Czech Republic) – note-taking for mental health professionals.
• Verisian (UK) – clinical data analysis.

Atrium Health surveys primary care users of Nuance’s DAX Copilot. Almost all report ease of use and an improved documentation experience, while two-thirds think it has improved their care delivery experience.

A LinkedIn post describes Northwestern Medicine’s pilot project for IT Locker, in which employees who forget their laptops at home can submit a quick form to receive a PIN that allows them to withdraw a loader.

Other

Doctors, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants at Allina Health System’s clinics vote to unionize and will be represented by Service Employees International Union. Physicians who were involved in the organizing campaign complained that understaffing at the clinics is swamping them with managing refill requests, patient messages, and lab results.

The parents of 28-year-old Ohio hospital ED nurse Tristin Kate Smith, who died by suicide in August, discover and publish “A Letter to My Abuser,” which they found on her laptop. The abuser she references is profit-driven health systems, which she said compromise patient care by laying off staff, ignoring nurse input, and failing to supply security to protect workers, all while providing gratuitous pizza parties and “healthcare heroes” pens. She blames health systems for exploiting nurses who are constantly being asked to do more with less while lining their pockets delivering overpriced healthcare. She concludes, “If I stay, I will lose my sanity – and possibly my life – forever.”

Sponsor Updates

• NTT Data sponsors the US Marshals Golf Classic, supporting the families of fallen officers.
• The 2023 Surescripts White Coat Award recognizes 11 healthcare industry leaders in performance, innovation, and accuracy.
• Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya implements Meditech Expanse.
• Spok releases the 2023 State of Healthcare Communications Report.
• The Dermatology Specialists realizes a 50% reduction in claim submission lab and a 33% reduction in payer rejections after implement RCM optimization services from EClinicalWorks.
• Atrium Health reports that Nuance’s DAX Copilot solution has improved the documentation experience for almost 85% of physicians.
• Netsmart will exhibit at the National Association for Home Care and Hospice Conference and Expo October 15-17 in Washington, DC.
• PerfectServe will exhibit at the American Association of Physician Leadership Fall Institute October 26-29 in Scottsdale, AZ.
• Sectra releases a new podcast, “The power of remote reading – why radiologists should never settle for less.”
• Symplr partners with the Daisy Foundation to celebrate nursing excellence with the Moments that Matter video series.
• Artera, Availity, Consensus Cloud Solutions, Dimensional Insight, EClinicalWorks, HealthMark Group, Linus Health, Meditech, MRO, and Nuance will exhibit at MGMA’s Leaders Conference October 22-25 in Nashville.

Blog Posts

• What Meditech’s top podcasts reveal about healthcare drivers (Meditech)
• The 5 Biggest Takeaways from ‘Bridging the Gap,’ Our First Ever user Summit (NeuroFlow)
• Burnout’s triple threat: Compromising care, clinicians, and cash flow (Nordic)
• Top 3 Considerations for an EHR Upgrade (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Highly Trained, Under-Utilized: Advocating for a Shift in Pharmacy Care (OmniSys)
• The healthcare executive’s guide to AI (Redox)
• NASP Recap: How Tech is Closing Info Gaps in Specialty Medication Fulfillment (Surescripts)
• For Epic Implementations the Right Project Manager is Crucial (CereCore)
• Revenue cycle 101: Referral status, authorizations vs. referrals + more (Waystar)
• The $150K Email (VisiQuate)

Contacts

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

News 10/13/23

Top News

FDA creates a nine-member Digital Health Advisory Committee that will advise it on topics such as AI, augmented and virtual reality, digital therapeutics, wearables, and remote patient monitoring technology.

Nominations will be accepted through December 11 online.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I have never listened to an industry podcast and don’t expect to, but chatty health IT celebrity-seekers are sure cranking out a ton of them. I don’t see how the pool of skilled hosts and expert guests is sufficient to fuel all of the amateur broadcasting that fills my X and LinkedIn feeds, but surely they wouldn’t bother if no one was listening. I can’t see spending 30 minutes listening to a conversation that could be distilled into a couple of sentences, especially if there’s a lot of self-promotion or vendor-paid endorsing going on.

Listening: Eloy, which turned up on a YouTube channel that covers rare progressive rock albums. That led me to happily discover that the band’s catalog is on Spotify. It’s fascinating to listen to music of the wildly creative and diverse 1970s, when bands focused on music rather than choreography, computer trickery, and marketing. The musical groups usually faded quickly into obscurity and unrelated day jobs, with their deepest and most creative thoughts from their teens and early 20s preserved on seldom-heard and rare LPs like insects in amber. The music can be wistfully naive and sometimes primitively executed, but it’s moving to hear knowing that their youthful creators have either died or are into their 70s and 80s.

Just about every social media post I’ve seen about HLTH involves parties, group hugs, and selfies. I’m wondering if anyone found solid business value from attending in lieu of doing actual employer work? It sits well down the list of “conferences I would pay out of my own pocket to attend” in my active poll. Conference attendees apparently set the ROI bar a lot lower than they would for a software purchase, requiring little beyond a target-rich networking environment.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cigna’s Evernorth Health Services acquires the asynchronous virtual care assets of Bright.md, which it will incorporate into its MDLive virtual care service that it acquired in April 2021 for a reported $1 billion.

RCM vendor Access Healthcare acquires Envera Health, which offers patient engagement solutions.

Yale New Haven Health asks the state of Connecticut to provide financing for its acquisition of three hospitals that are owned by cyberattack victim Prospect Medical Holdings. YNHH also wants Prospect to lower the $435 million acquisition price of the hospitals, whose financial condition is dire to the point of not being able to buy supplies and pay physicians.

Epic offers SmartUser, the renamed Power User program whose website allows any provider to register for 17 free virtual efficiency classes that offer 1 CME credit. Epic says that attendees report that each course attended saves them one hour per week.

WellSky acquires Corridor, which offers coding and RCM services to post-acute care organizations.

People

Rick LeMay, MS (Clearwater) joins First Health Advisory as EVP of enterprise security and technology.

Announcements and Implementations

Lumeon announces Conductor for clinical workflow automation, which includes command center orchestration, digital rounding, and a campaign builder.

Wolters Kluwer Health announces Health Language Platform, a FHIR terminology server that works with Microsoft Azure’s FHIR service.

Sutter Health will create an innovation center by early 2024, for which it is seeking a San Francisco location.

Philips announces interoperability between its Capsule Medical Device Information Platform and its Patient Information Center IX.

Israel’s Soroka Medical Center is using facial recognition to match trauma victims that it is treating to photos that have been sent to a hospital-created email address by concerned family members. Tele Aviv-based Corsight AI provided the technology at no charge.

Microsoft introduces new healthcare-related tools to its Fabric analytics platform that can assemble and standardize data from multiple sources – such as EHRs, imaging systems, lab systems, medical devices, and claims data – and present it in a single view. The company also announced Azure AI Health Bot, which can answer staff questions about treatments and protocols and patient portal queries about symptoms and medical terms. Microsoft also announced a text analytics solution, along with generative AI models that create a patient history, simply medical reports into patient-friendly language, and help radiologists identify possible radiology report errors.

Government and Politics

California’s Delete Act is signed into law, requiring data brokers to delete all information they have on file pertaining to the person who makes the request. The state is required to create a single webpage that routes the individual’s request to all data brokers. It also requires companies to delete all information on file, not just the data they collected about the requester themselves.

Other

A Nature comment article says that use of AI in clinical practice may be limited because developers focus on population-level predictive accuracy while failing to take individual patient differences into account, causing the tools to sometimes offer unreliable advice in failing to answer the “are you sure” question. That leaves clinicians to assess factors that may be misleading the technology.

Sponsor Updates

• Valley ENT reaches 10,000 patients with its first Text2Pay campaign using Healow Payment Services from EClinicalWorks.
• InterSystems welcomes eight new companies to its Startup Program, bringing the total number of participants to 35.
• MRO announces that it has been recognized as the top-performing company for release-of-information digital technology and vendor efficiency in the latest KLAS Release of Information Performance Report.

Blog Posts

• Burnout’s triple threat: Compromising care, clinicians, and cash flow (Nordic)
• Funding Social Care: Streamline Payments to Community-Based Organizations (Findhelp)
• Customer Experience in the New Health Economy (Five9)
• Creating Effective Health Education Content at Scale (Healthwise)
• A No-Fail Guide to Minimizing No-Shows (Medhost)

Contacts

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

News 10/11/23

Top News

Private equity firm General Catalyst launches Health Assurance Transformation Corp., which will work with the firm’s 20-plus health system partners to test new care delivery and workflow optimization technologies developed by companies within its portfolio.

HATco will also eventually seek to purchase a health system through which it can pilot additional concepts.

General Catalyst’s portfolio includes Athelas, which recently acquired Commure; Aidoc; Imprivata; and Transcarent.

Former Intermountain Health CEO Marc Harrison, MD, MMM will serve as CEO of HATco.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The cycle of de-listing warnings, extensions, and appeals for failing to file financial reports continues for Veradigm, for which Nasdaq has granted a temporary de-listing stay pending a November 16 hearing.

Walmart will offer no-charge virtual primary care from Included Health to 1 million people who are covered by its employee health insurance plan. Walmart’s pilot project with the company saw an 11% reduction in total cost with only 10% of those treated moving to an in-person care setting. One-third of the visits related to chronic or preventative care.

Commons Clinic, which offers value-based specialty care for orthopedics from two Los Angeles area clinics, raises $19.5 million in a Series A round. The company vows to disrupt the “stagnant hospital-centric model” in favor of conservative treatment, digital-first services, and use of surgery centers for procedures.

Sales

• Citizens Medical Center (TX) will implement Meditech Expanse.
• Clemson Rural Health (SC) selects health information exchange and storage capabilities from Sync.MD.
• Intermountain Health will use Clearsense’s 1Clearsense data archival service to consolidate data from its legacy systems.

People

Ashlee DesJardins (StayWell) joins Cordea Consulting as regional VP of sales.

University of Cincinnati College of Medicine names biomedical informatics professor Rodrigo Deliberato, MD, PhD chief research information officer.

Munson Healthcare (MI) names Michael Saad, MBA (University of Tennessee Medical Center) CIO.

Mike Heckman, MBA (Rockcreek Way) joins Beterra Health as president.

Announcements and Implementations

Healthwise announces GA of Health Compass, a service that delivers educational healthcare content in any format to any digital channel.

In England, King’s College Hospital and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trusts go live on Epic, which Epic says is the largest single go-live in the world with 51,000 users involved.

Cedars-Sinai launches a virtual healthcare app for patients in California using technology from K Health.

Care.ai equips its Smart Care Facility Platform with Google Cloud’s generative AI and data analytics.

Northern California HIE SacValley MedShare works with Konza National Network to develop behavioral health analytics dashboards.

Orlando Health rolls out AndorHealth’s ThinkAndor Virtual Hospital technology.

Verato will incorporate Clear’s consumer-facing identity verification technology into its healthcare master data management solution.

Main Street Health, which provides an in-house care coordination navigator in each of its 900 mostly small and rural practices in 18 states to support value-based care, raises $315 million in new capital. Investors in the round include the five largest Medicare Advantage plans in the US. One of the company’s investors and builders is Russell Street Ventures, which also backs CareBridge, a provider of remote care to Medicaid patients who prefer at-home care to nursing home admission. That company is named as the fastest-growing in the US by Inc. 5000, with a 157,000% revenue increase last year to $873 million.

Government and Politics

The DEA extends a COVID-initiated rule allowing providers to prescribe select controlled substances via telemedicine through the end of 2024.

The Oklahoma Fraternal Order of Police sues Oklahoma Health Care Authority, claiming that its HIE is unconstitutional because it requires providers who treat Medicaid patients to submit details about the encounter. The plaintiff’s lawyer says the HIE is “the most dangerous attack on Oklahomans’ privacy in the history of the state” and questions its authority to mandate participation or to impose fees that should instead be appropriated by the legislature.

Privacy and Security

The state insurer of the Philippines, which has warned its 36 million members that a ransomware attacked has exposed their information, admits that it didn’t renew its antivirus software agreement in May before the incident because of new government procurement rules. PhilHealth has since asked the antivirus vendor for a 30-day trial of new software.

Other

Advocate Health will send 100 of its Epic experts to England, where they will help seven London hospitals transition to Epic.

Best Buy will partner with virtual care provider Wheel and pharmacy technology vendor HealthDyne to sell prescription continuous glucose monitors from its website. The retailer plans to allow customers to upload CGM prescriptions from their own physicians to their Best Buy health profile.

Sponsor Updates

• Ascom staffers raise $5,000 by riding 10,000 miles in the Great Cycle Challenge to help fight pediatric cancer.
• Nym expands its suite of outpatient solutions for RCM automation to include outpatient surgery and visits.
• Veradigm becomes the first major EHR to join FDB’s Vela e-prescribing network.
• Nuance ranks as the leading vendor for mid-RCM healthcare providers, according to a recent Black Book Research survey.
• Baker Tilly publishes its “Healthcare M&A Update: H1 2023.”
• Censinet releases a new Risk Never Sleep Podcast featuring Skip Sorrels.
• CloudWave wins the Managed Security Solution of the Year Award in the 2023 Cybersecurity Breakthrough Awards program.
• CereCore releases a new podcast, “Vision and Value-Driven EHR Optimization: A Leadership Interview.”
• Current Health publishes a new case study, “The Geek Squad Effect.”
• Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust in England roll out Sectra’s enterprise imaging technology to a sixth trust.

Blog Posts

• Implementing a Revenue Cycle Maturity Framework: Best Practices (AGS Health)
• Data on FHIR: Interoperability standards for whole-person care (Arcadia)
• Are You Struggling with Interoperability Challenges? You’re Not Alone (AdvancedMD)
• Screen, stream, support: The tech-driven future of mental health (Nordic)
• Best Practices for Centralized Virtual Sitting (AvaSure)
• Building New Data Connections Helps Brands Lower Adherence Barriers (ConnectiveRx)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/9/23

Top News

The VA and 13 health systems pledge to share data to improve veteran healthcare via three objectives:

• Accurately identify veterans when they seek care from community providers.
• Connect veterans with resources that promote health and healthcare, especially with those VA services that lower their out-of-pocket expenses.
• Coordinate care and exchange information about care requested and provided, regardless whether they are enrolled in VA health benefits.

Reader Comments

From Supplicant: “Re: health system announcement forthcoming. Don’t run this until you hear it from another source because it might out me.” Sorry to be vague in avoiding exposing the reader’s identity. If you’re privy to details of an upcoming health system’s product switch that I haven’t mentioned, which includes some interesting hosting choices, email me. I’ll keep everyone anonymous while making sure it’s not just easily identified insiders who know.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents attribute different factors to the success of Epic. Some offered other choices:

• A demonstrated, take-charge implementation process.
• Software architecture that allows Epic to enhance and develop faster.
• Trying to do the right thing, even in the absence of financial reward.
• Connectivity among Epic sites.
• Being led by a founder instead of flipping owners or going public.
• Hiring smart people and motivating them to work hard for customers.
• Being the safe choice for health system C-level executives.
• Marketing in the “invite your friends” sort of way, like an exclusive club where clients want to connect to each other.

New poll to your right or here, featuring a question I ask every few years: Which annual conference would you attend if limited to one and paying your own way?

Topping my current list of annoying business terms: “unlock,” when vendors offer to sell the “key” to snatching some elusive business benefit if you just sign on the line which is dotted. Honorable mention goes to replacing the single-syllable and perfectly descriptive “use” with the bloviatory “utilize” or “leverage.” I’ll also nominate “currently” for superfluity – “I am currently working” adds nothing except three syllables to “I am working,” although maybe it’s an improvement over “at this point in time.”

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Canada-based health IT solutions provider LGI Healthcare Solutions acquires healthcare automation solutions vendor Boston Software Systems. 

Virtual rheumatology provider Remission Medical will offer services through KeyCare and coordinating patient care with Epic-using health systems.

Investment firm SAIGroup funds and launches RhythmX AI, which analyzes longitudinal data to make recommendations to doctors.

Announcements and Implementations

Black Book announces the top-performing vendors among HIM users surveyed in the areas of computer-assisted coding, clinical documentation improvement, speech recognition, transcription, and outsourced coding services.

Government and Politics

Cigna will pay $172 million to settle False Claims Act charges that it assigned diagnosis coders review patient medical records to find additional billable codes after its Medicare Advantage plan had already been paid. The Department of Justice says Cigna hired third-party vendors to send nurse practitioners into member homes to find additional billing opportunities, but did not allow them to perform diagnostic tests to support their conclusions or to treat the conditions they supposedly found. DoJ says Cigna inappropriately assigned diagnosis codes for morbid obesity, congestive heart failure, chronic kidney disease, and other chronic conditions without supporting documentation and failed to refund taxpayer money when it was caught.

Doctors push back on CMS’s Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) as quality standards toughen as was originally designed, pushing more doctors into penalties rather than rewards.

Privacy and Security

Hackers claim to have acquired user data from the 23andMe genetic service and are selling it online. This data was accessed through the website’s feature that allows users to share information with potential DNA-matched relatives. The hacker alleges that CEO Anne Wojcicki was aware of the breach two months prior and chose not to disclose it, claiming that her family members were shorting company shares in anticipation of a stock price slide.

Other

KFF Health News looks at Dollar General’s test of offering mobile healthcare services from the parking lots of its small-town stores. The company is partnering with New York-based DocGo, which is is being investigated by the New York attorney general after complaints about its treatment of asylum-seekers under a $432 million no-bid contract under which it providers housing and busing. DocGo CEO Anthony Capone resigned last month after a New York newspaper found that he lied about earning a graduate a degree in computational learning theory in pursuing a multi-billion dollar contract with US Customers and Border Protection. Publicly traded DocGo’s market cap is $623 million after shares dropped 44% in the past 12 months. I’m wondering if the van has a restroom for the nurse (and potentially patients) and how safe it is for a nurse to be sitting in the parking lot of stores whose headlines often involve OSHA fines and customer violence. I would not be comfortable welcoming some parking lot rando into the van for an exam.

Central Maine Medical Center settles a malpractice lawsuit that was brought by a patient who claimed that doctors ignored his elevated PSA results, allowing his prostate cancer to spread untreated. The lawsuit says that a computer system upgrade failed to import some lab results into the dashboard of the new system.

Stanford’s medical school dean says that AI will be medicine’s most important development since antibiotics, predicting that it will break down access barriers, improve quality and consistency, increase the efficiency and speed of clinical trials, and reduce rote memorization in medical education. He predicts that responsible AI deployment will create societal benefits and earn patient acceptance in 10 years.

California regulators find that Adventist Health Simi Valley’s administration of two doses of the blood thinner Lovenox within two hours probably caused the brain bleed death of an 81-year-old patient 18 hours later. The original Lovenox order was discontinued after one dose, causing it to disappear from the active profile and to be missed by a second doctor who ordered another dose. The orders were approved by separate pharmacies that didn’t communicate with each other, an Adventist corporate pharmacy and another that is local to the hospital.

The VA finds that a four-hour VistA downtime at the Kansas City VA was caused by a network technician’s keyboard-surfing cat, whose keystrokes deleted a server cluster configuration.

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book’s survey of VC and tech investors reveals the top 50 rising stars in healthcare IT’s ecosystem of startups.
• MRO will present and exhibit at AHIMA 2023 October 8-10 in Nashville.
• Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Evan Heigert.”
• Wolters Kluwer will add generative AI capabilities to UpToDate.

Blog Posts

• Introducing two new Conversation AI Services (Nuance)
• 6 Communication Channels for EHR Implementations (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Pharmacists, You Are Appreciated. (OmniSys)
• Nurses of Note 2023: The Regional Practice Administrator Celebrates 30 Years in the Field (PerfectServe)
• The State of Play: What Prescribing Trends Say About the Future of Primary Care (Surescripts)
• Do Family Caregiving Benefits Exist for Employees? (Trualta)
• Revenue cycle 101: prior authorization + referrals (Waystar)
• October 2023 Interoperability Monthly Update: TEFCA, QHINs, ONC’s Latest News (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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

News 10/6/23

Top News

Workflow automation vendor Athelas acquires Commure and announces a $70 million investment from General Catalyst that values the combined company at $6 billion. The business will operate under the Commure name.

Commure offers analytics workflow tools and the PatientKeeper EHR, which it bought from HCA two years ago.

Athelas co-founder and CEO Tanay Tandon will continue as CEO of Commure. The 25-year-old started Athelas when he was 17, offering a malaria test kit for smartphones.

Commure CEO Ashwini Zenooz, MD will move to a non-executive role on the company’s board. The acquisition brings together 300 employees from Commure and 500 from Athelas.

Reader Comments

From Winky: “Re: insurance company IT issues. Anybody having lick getting them to fix their problems? Things are pretty bleak at just one insurer, just as the healthcare industry tries to automate revenue cycle.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Going to HLTH? So are my sponsors Best Buy Health, Biofourmis, Five9, Get-to-Market Health, Healthcare Growth Partners, Medicomp Systems, and Trust Commerce. They describe their activities in my HLTH 2023 guide.

I hadn’t use Skype for years, but it was the best choice for my video-tutoring a Ukraine woman in conversational English as a volunteer with ENGin (Ukraine has one of the lowest rates of speaking English in all of Europe, which limits its post-war market participation). Using the free, Microsoft-owned Skype was a better experience than I expected.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

RCM technology vendor Alpha II acquires RCxRules, which provides revenue cycle automation.

Autism provider company Cortica raises $40 million in a Series D extension, completing the round at $115 million.

A Black Book survey of venture capital and technology investors finds the 50 top-rated emerging health IT vendors for 2023.

The $217 million growth and opportunity fund of 7wireVentures – whose founders and managing partners are industry long-timers Glen Tullman and Lee Shapiro – closes its capital raise and will use its assets to move the firm’s high-potential investments to later states and to invest in other Series B and C companies. The fund has already invested in NOCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), Folx Health (a virtual healthcare platform for LGBTQUA+),  and Parsley Health (virtual chronic care).

Headway, which connects patients to in-network therapists, raises $125 million a Series C round that values the company at $1 billion.

Sales

• Four-hospital Wisconsin health system ProHealth Care outsources revenue cycle management, IT, informatics, analytics, and inpatient care management to Optum, which will take on the 800 employees who are involved.
• Fraser chooses Netsmart CareFabric to support its transition to a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic.

Announcements and Implementations

Medicomp Systems announces that its MEDCIN clinical relevancy engine features mapping of 10 million clinical codes and concepts across 12 terminologies.

PayZen offers PayZen Care Card with partners Geisinger and UTMB, which offers patients a zero-interest payment plan for outstanding balances in the form of an upfront debit card that pays providers immediately on use.

Elation Health announces GA of a unified EHR and billing solution for high-value primary care.

University Hospitals of Cleveland completes its transition from the former Allscripts Sunrise suite to Epic.

ChatGPT can now analyze images, as evidenced by this inquiry I made by posting a HIMSS conference exhibit hall photo. It proved to be more irony-aware than many humans, and more capable of explaining than I, when I asked why the HIStalk logo features a doctor who is smoking:

The image portrays a stylized and somewhat whimsical character. The pipe-smoking doctor might be an artistic choice to evoke a certain image, possibly hinting at an older, “classic” or “traditional” stereotype of a learned or scholarly individual. In literature and older media, a pipe has often been associated with contemplation, wisdom, or intellect. However, given the modern understanding of the health risks of smoking, such a depiction in a healthcare-related setting is likely intended to be ironic or tongue-in-cheek. It’s a design decision by the creators of the image and may be intended to make the character more memorable or to convey a specific tone or mood.

Government and Politics

CMS will restrict the use of predictive AI tools by Medicare Advantage plans to make coverage decisions. Patients and providers complained that MA plan operator UnitedHealthcare – which uses an algorithm developed by NavHealth, which it acquired in 2020 for a reported $2.5 billion – was using its predicted discharge date to cut off coverage without considering individual patient needs as traditional Medicare would have done. NaviHealth says its algorithm was designed to personalize post-acute charge discharge planning, not to drive coverage decisions. The new federal rules, which take effect in January, will allow such software to be used only if it takes individual patient circumstances into consideration.

HHS’s ARPA-H designates up to $50 million for funding for six contract awards for developing advanced technologies to secure healthcare data. The DIGIHEALS awardees submitted these projects:

• Develop an automated medical device patching system.
• Create a cognitive health assistant.
• Develop clinician-focused tools and techniques for use during ransomware attacks.
• Identify legacy medical device vulnerabilities.
• Discover and report parsing bugs in EHRs.
• Automate cybersecurity risk assessment for medical devices.

Other

UVM Medical Center’s tells a US House cyberthreat committee that managing its 2020 ransomware attack was “much harder than the pandemic by far” as the hospital lost internet, phones, and access to the EHR for 28 days at a cost of $65 million.

A ProPublica investigation finds that pharma giant GSK developed a vaccine for TB – which kills 1.6 million mostly poor people each year – then put it on the back burner to focus on the world’s most profitable market of the US, where higher incomes and insurers can afford products such as the company’s Shingrix vaccine that has generated $14 billion in five years. The TB vaccine was developed under contract with the US Army, after which GSK patented the active ingredient, took charge of the global ingredient supply, and accepted government and non-profit funding to develop the commercial product that won’t be widely available until 2028, 10 years after it was developed, and only then because the Gates Foundation is funding it. The vaccine’s co-inventor, who originally took his idea to GSK in hopes of getting the injections to people who desperately need them, says in criticizing how Big Pharma co-opts public health research, “You get a big company to take it forward? Bullshit. That model is gone. It’s failed. It’s dead. We have to create a new one.”

The problem-plagued EClinicalWorks EHR of Hawaii’s prison system may cause a deceased inmate’s malpractice lawsuit to be dropped because the state hasn’t been able to produce his medical records 18 months into the allowed 24 month discovery period. Hawaii’s Department of Public Safety admits that the system was down for two months in one stretch, broke down again two weeks after it was restored, and is still plagued by bugs and corrupted tables. The state says it is looking for a replacement system.

Marginally health IT related, but fascinating to me, is this description of Epic’s new audio production system. Epic uses an SSL C100 HD digital audio console to broadcast software introductions – including sound effects and musical cues — to 15 countries, also producing related media in an attached “live room.” Audio engineer Paul Micksch is a former musician who started with Epic in 2006 as a software trainer. You just know that Epic Deep Space Auditorium is loaded with cool behind-the-scenes stuff.

Sponsor Updates

• Surescripts publishes a new data brief, “Pharmacy Availability & Prescribing Patterns Hint at the Future of Primary Care.”
• Robbins Dermatology experiences streamlined payment collections and processing using Healow Payment Services from EClinicalWorks.
• Medicomp Systems directly maps over 10 million clinical codes and concepts across more than 12 terminologies to its Medcin clinical relevancy engine.
• First Databank names Steve Fite regional manager, Jessica Landis commercial operations manager, and Courtney Kessler digital customer success manager.
• Rhapsody announces the availability of Corepoint Integration Engine version 7.6.
• Nordic releases a new episode of DocTalk, “DocTalk Ep. 210 | Optimizing value from EHR investments.”

Blog Posts

• How to Deal with Angry Patients in Urgent Care (Experity)
• Data’s Crucial Role in Combatting the “Tripledemic” (Dimensional Insight)
• Navigating AI Adoption: Insights from UNC Health’s Chief Analytics Officer (Divurgent)
• Essential Checklist for Starting a Weight Loss Clinic or Medical Spa (EClinicalWorks)
• Meeting the Social Care Needs of Medicaid Beneficiaries (Findhelp)
• The Current Healthcare Landscape: A Paradigm Shift Driven by Technology (InterSystems)
• From brain injury to dementia: the evolution of the clock drawing test (Linus Health)
• Trending Cybersecurity Topics for 2024 (Medhost)

Contacts

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

News 10/4/23

Top News

Providence launches Praia Health, which uses identity-driven personalization of consumer profiles for “digital flywheel” ongoing engagement between care episodes.

Leading the company is Justin Dearborn, who previously ran Merge Healthcare, Tribune Publishing, and PatientBond.

Reader Comments

From Barney Ruble: “Re: 3M Health Information Systems. Laid off 100-120 people as part of a corporate cutback. The HIS group that is being spun off is cutting back some teams and products due to slow sales.” Unverified.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I don’t use Twitter much and rarely venture from the useful “Following” feed to the crazy “For you” clickbait version, but I can say that despite my endless muting and flagging of posts as “not interested,” I’m stilled buried in tweets about (and by) Elon Musk, TSLA stock pumpers, and fanboys salivating about the still-unreleased Cybertruck. Musk had complained that the algorithms weren’t giving him the audience he deserved, so programmers have obviously devised an ego-stroking enhancement.

Listening: Scotland-based rockers Stiltskin, which hit pretty hard in grunge circles 30 years ago. Trivia: the band’s singer Ray Wilson was selected in 1996 at the age of 27 to lead Genesis, the former five-member group that was down to Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks following the departure of Phil Collins. They gave Wilson limited creative influence over their lackluster “Calling All Stations” album, which largely resembled Rutherford’s Mike and the Mechanics trying to sound progressive. Audiences snoozed and Genesis had to downsize and then cancel a planned US tour in a major hit to their egos. Years later, Rutherford, Banks, and Collins erased Wilson from their revisionist history books, omitting him from a BBC Genesis documentary and on streaming platforms. Wilson finally got to attend his first Genesis concert as an audience member later, where he watched Collins cover the songs he had recorded.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health Data Analytics Institute raises $31 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised to nearly $50 million. The company offers AI-powered predictive risk and care optimization software.

Heywood Healthcare (MA) files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, citing operational and business challenges that have included a “costly and lengthy” EHR implementation and low reimbursement rates, as well as economic reverberations from the pandemic. The two-hospital system went live on Meditech Expanse in 2021.

Walgreens CIO Hsiao Wang leaves the company after a year on the job. Walgreens continues recruiting for a new CEO and CFO as well.

Sales

• HealtHIE Nevada selects health data aggregation and sharing software from Holon Solutions.
• La Paz Regional Hospital (AZ), Russell Medical Center (AL), and Memorial Hospital and Manor (GA) select CareCloud’s MedSR division as their Meditech implementation partner.

People

Emtelligent hires Jennifer Canfield, MBA (Kantar) as EVP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Doctors Hospital Health System in the Bahamas implements Meditech Expanse with assistance from CareCloud’s MedSR division.

OCHIN offers EpicCare Inpatient software and implementation services to rural hospitals.

A Symplr survey of health system IT leaders finds that working with disparate IT systems is their top challenge, while clinicians name their top issues as nurse retention and satisfaction, optimizing technology efficiency, and the need to streamline workflows.

I interviewed Trilliant Health healthcare economist Sanjula Jain, PhD 18 months ago and found her really interesting, so I perked up at the company’s new trends report when I saw her name on it. It is brilliant, and names 10 trends:

1. The number of commercially insured Americans is declining steadily as declining birth rate fails to offset the aging into Medicare, and migration to Florida, Texas, and Utah will shift healthcare demand.
2. The physical and mental health of Americans has taken a hard turn downward, with higher under-40 mortality, rising cancer mortality, and rates of forgone care rise due to cost.
3. Most newly approved drugs target genetic diseases and cancer.
4. Utilization of care in all settings declined except for the ED, with the 2021 rebound mostly caused by testing and treatment of COVID-19. The relationship between the number of comoribidities and consumption of healthcare services is not linear.
5. The public’s dissatisfaction with healthcare is growing and younger patients are behaving more like consumers in seeking care from retail pharmacies and other non-traditional sources. Virtual care is being offered more widely, but demand is tapering, half of telehealth users have used it just once, and physicians perceive its quality as inferior to in-person care.
6. More consumers are using transactional delivery models such as urgent care, retail, and ambulatory surgery centers. Retailers are using low-acuity care as a loss leader.
7. Physician supply is constrained, as “payviders” Optum and Kaiser Permanente employee nearly 10% of US doctors and organizations compete to hire more doctors as supply drops. Nursing supply rebounded in 2022 and the number of allied health providers is increasing to help meet physician shortages. The number of primary care providers would need to increase by 218,000.
8. Some healthcare markets have a price problem, but all have a cost problem. Rates are often lower in monopoly markets. Spending on lobbying is increasing to influence federal policy on M&A. The federal measure of market concentration is limited to inpatient usage, which may not be reflective, and market concentration is not a clear driver of quality or price.
9. Employers are paying more for less as costs rise, with a growing rate of self-insurance. Employer-sponsored insurance leaves employees being financially responsible for 10% and more of their overall incomes.
10. US healthcare spending is unsustainable and value-based payments don’t equal value for money. Site-neutral payments could reduce Medicare payments by over $1 billion for one office procedure alone – lumbar epidurals. Procedures cost multiples when performed in hospitals rather than in an outpatient setting.

Government and Politics

An analysis of NHS Trusts in England finds that the government has spent over $1 billion on storing paper records over the last five years. NHS England digital lead Joe Harrison says that while some hospitals have become digital health trailblazers, others are working with “carrier pigeons and pen and paper.”

CMS says that 500,000 people in 29 states have regained Medicaid benefits after state computer systems failed to automatically re-enroll them once pandemic-related restrictions on terminating coverage were lifted.

Privacy and Security

McLaren Health Care (MI) confirms that it was the victim of a ransomware attack several weeks ago. It is now working to determine if any stolen data has been posted to the dark web, as the Black Cat/AlphV ransomware group claims. The attack impacted billing and EHR functionality at 14 facilities for nearly six weeks.

Other

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center uses $10 million in state funding to launch the Institute of Telehealth and Digital Innovation, which aims to serve rural patients by improving access to telehealth and remote patient monitoring services through community and academic partnerships.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD staff volunteer at The Green Urban Lunchbox, Encircle, St. Vincent De Paul Dining Hall, and The Road Home during the company’s day of service.
• The Toledo Clinic in Ohio successfully leverages RCM optimization services from EClinicalWorks.
• CrossWinds Counseling & Wellness (KS) adds NetSmart’s CareFabric technology, including the MyEvolv EHR.
• Symplr publishes its 2023 Compass Report, “From Imminent to Urgent: Aligning Clinicians & IT is Critical to Streamlining Healthcare Operations.”
• Aridhia publishes a new case study, “Leveraging Aridhia TRE for Identifying Pupils at Risk of Being Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET).”
• The AWS Health Innovation Podcast features Artera co-founder and CEO Guillaume de Zwirek.
• SteadPoint Insurance will offer its clients Bardavon’s Injury Prevention suite of products.
• Care.ai releases a new Smart from the Start Podcast featuring Houston Methodist EVP and Chief Innovation Officer Roberta Schwartz.
• Nordic publishes a new episode of its “In Network” podcast titled “Designing for Health: Interview with Evan Heigert.”
• Censinet releases a new Risk Never Sleeps Podcast featuring Paul Connelly.
• CloudWave announces its commitment to cybersecurity education by participating in the 20^th Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

Blog Posts

• Realizing the Opportunities for a Clinical Service Desk (CereCore)
• RSNA 2023 – See imaging without barriers from Agfa HealthCare (Agfa HealthCare)
• Preparing for the FY2024 ICD-10-CM Code Updates (AGS Health)
• How data platforms help healthcare organizations leverage their massive data asset (Arcadia)
• Ascom Workflow Solutions Tested Hack-Proof at MISI Cybersecurity Conference (Ascom)
• Five Things to Consider when Selecting a Musculoskeletal Injury Prevention Partner (Bardavon)
• How Data + Research Will Drive Healthcare Forward (Clearsense)

Contacts

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

HIStalk’s Guide to HLTH 2023

Best Buy Health

Booth 4230

Contact: Donna Breault, senior manager of event marketing
donna.breault@bestbuy.com
You may pre-book a meeting with our team.

Best Buy Health is on a mission to enable care at home for everyone. Learn how we’re combining best-in-class retail strengths with an enterprise care-at-home platform to transform patient experiences and outcomes. Come meet our team and experience live demonstrations of our solution at our booth. Also, don’t miss, “Retail and Health, Sitting in a Tree” on Sunday, October 8, at 2:40 p.m. PT. Best Buy Health’s COO, Chemu Lang’at, joins a panel discussing how healthcare is embracing consumerization, mirroring disruptive models like Airbnb and Uber. This shift prioritizes personalization, convenience, transparency, and user experience, meeting the expectations of today’s digital-savvy consumer.

Biofourmis

Booth 3035

Contact: Tara Stultz, chief strategy officer, Amendola Communications
tstultz@acmarketingpr.com

Did you check out the coolest booth with the best coffee at ViVE? Biofourmis is at HLTH, showcasing their tech-enabled care delivery solutions and demonstrating how data to outpace disease for care at home solutions and clinical trials. Come for the coffee and stay for the experience – new solutions for Care in the Home, Digital Clinical Trials, and Remote Care Coordination.

Five9

Booth V-2943

Contact: Roni Jamesmeyer, senior healthcare marketing manager
roni.jamesmeyer@five9.com
972.768.6554

If you are moving your old, on-premise call center to the cloud, you want to visit the Five9 booth!  Five9 offers a HIPAA-compliant healthcare cloud contact center solution that empowers you to seamlessly monitor and report call volumes in real-time across critical areas such as patient access, scheduling, prescription refills, and revenue cycle management, enhancing your staff’s efficiency. The Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Center seamlessly integrates with various back-end systems, including electronic health records, serving as a central hub to facilitate digital engagement, provide comprehensive analytics, optimize workforce performance, and leverage AI for improved outcomes and measurable business success. Come see us!

Get-to-Market Health

Contact: Steve Shihadeh, CEO and founder
steve@gettomarkethealth.net
610.613.4074

Get-to-Market Health helps healthcare technology leaders’ market, sell, and create sustainable, long-term relationships with their customers.

Healthcare Growth Partners

Contact: Chris McCord, managing director
chris@hgp.com
713.955.7935

Healthcare Growth Partners is an investment bank exclusively focused on the health IT market. We’ve advised 140 companies across the health IT landscape through M&A and capital transactions since our founding in 2006. We’re intentional, dedicated, and tenacious in all that we do in serving our clients. Excited to get out there and see some long-time contacts and friends and meet some new folks. I (Chris) am attending the show and happy to connect.

Medicomp Systems

Contact: James Aita, director of strategy and business development
jaita@medicomp.com
647.207.0080

Medicomp will showcase innovations in clinical usability and documentation workflow improvement, using clinical intelligence for EHRs to mirror the way clinicians think. Reach out to see how Medicomp is powering AI tools like ChatGPT for healthcare, along with enhanced FHIR/interoperability tools to make sense of incoming data by problem in health systems, breakthroughs in speech and NLP, taking freetext to structured data, and improvements in real-time compliance at the point of care.

We will not have a booth at HLTH, but email James for meetings.

TrustCommerce, a Sphere Company

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

TrustCommerce, a Sphere company, is the leading financial technology company trusted by the nation’s largest health systems. The TrustCommerce integrated payment platform facilitates secure, compliant patient payments. Using TrustCommerce to enhance the patient financial experience and untangle payment workflows, clients can securely process payments anytime, anywhere and be connected with core software including EHRs like Epic, Veradigm, and athenaIDX. Our team is attending HLTH and will be available to meet with you and introduce you to our solutions. You can reach Ryne Natzke and Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships Sunil Shah at HLTH.

Monday Morning Update 10/2/23

Top News

The American Hospital Association asks Congress to withdraw HHS OCR’s December 2022 rule that prohibits hospitals from tracking their website users using third-party technology.

AHA says the rule violates HIPAA, harms patients and public health, and incorrectly extends HIPAA to cover website visitors who aren’t patients.

The organization says that third-party web user tracking tools such as Google Analytics and YouTube give health systems insight into community problems and website navigation issues, allow them to offer of educational videos, and help patients find service locations.

AHA says that Congress should change HIPAA to preempt state requirements as a uniform, nationwide standard, but otherwise shouldn’t make major HIPAA revisions since changes would “create more challenges than benefits.”

Reader Comments

From System CIO: “Re: Altera Digital Health. Like many Paragon customers, we’re switching to Epic. Altera say they won’t renew our maintenance agreement that we need until go-live in many months. I’ve switched EHRs many times in my long career and this is a first.” Unverified. I don’t understand why a vendor would reject another year or more of support revenue, other than just to be petty over being displaced. The upside is that they justified your decision.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents, presumably mostly health technology insiders, aren’t broadly convinced that technology will significantly improve US healthcare, and few of them expect it to reduce healthcare spending. Steve says its better than we think, as “innovation seems to progress glacially when you’re living it,” while Frank says that capital expenditures always increase costs.

New poll to your right or here: What is the single best reason that Epic dominates its markets? I’m not giving you the intellectually relaxed option of choosing more than one answer, so feel free to further elaborate in the poll comments after voting for the one best choice.

I was looking for a lazy way to compare various lists of my sponsors, so I tried ChatGPT instead of trying to remember how to do it in Excel or Word or finding an old source code comparison tool. Of course it works, leading me to consider downloading an archived copy of HIMSS23 exhibitors and comparing it to the HIMSS24 version to see which companies are new or dropping out. I then played around with downloading an AHA list of hospitals and cities in Alabama, pasting it unformatted into ChatGPT, and asked it which ones are in Birmingham, and then which ones are in the northern part of the state. It figured the answers and properly formatted the list with just the hospital names. However, it wasn’t able to tell me which ones are within 50 miles of Gadsden because it doesn’t have access to mapping services.

For the ladies who are optimizing their shoe wardrobe for the conference season, my little AI friend likes Clarks Un Loop Slip-On Shoe, Naturalizer Samantha Pointed Toe Flat, Skechers Cleo Bewitch Ballet Flat, New Balance 877 V1 Walking Shoe, and ECCO Soft 7 Tie Sneaker. However, when pressed to choose a potential winner for conference shoe contests, ChatGPT favors United Nude’s Mobius Hi (above), which seems like a good choice for Orlando and is not wildly expensive at $175 after discounts.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The New York Times reports how analytics firm Palantir is aggressively lobbying to win an NHS patient data system contract that could be worth $590 million. The company has also hired away NHS officials and enlisted the help of politicians to support its selection for the Federated Data Platform. Civil liberties groups have raised concerns about turning over patient data to a for-profit company whose products have been used for government surveillance, also labeling the selection process as a farce because of the company’s existing connections from its previous no-bid contract award and its advantage in a short procurement window. The bid winner is expected to be announced this month.

Biotech firm Biogen shuts down Biogen Digital Health and lays off 150 employees as the company cuts costs and restructures. The business was formed in 2021.

People

Wolters Kluwer Health hires Rafael Sidi, MA (Clarivate) as SVP/GM of its Health Research segment.

Other

A review of “Fragmented: A Doctor’s Quest to Piece Together American Health Care,” a new book by Stanford oncologist Ilana Yurkiewicz, MD, describes how “missing data kills” as patients are repeatedly asked to recite their medical history to new providers who can’t get it using technology. Snips:

• Technology-driven treatments have advanced dramatically, but doctors are still “operating in an era of oral history or as archeologists” in being forced to review CD-ROMs, faxed records, and the patient’s interpretation of important medical details “as though she were piercing together potsherds at a dig site.”
• The families of patients work as “unpaid secretarial assistants” to keep records and coordinate care that providers should be doing.
• Hospitals don’t often notice or report harmful errors that are caused by a lack of provider coordination.
• The doctor takes more time with patients than the insurance-paid 15 minutes “to prepare them to be living medical charts,” estimating that half of the primary care part of her job is unpaid work that happens outside the patient’s room.
• The review notes that Estonia requires use of compatible EHRs gives patient ownership of their chart, where they grant or revoke provider access and share data with family members without paying for copies.

A second  hospital in England reports that large numbers of digital documents weren’t sent to doctors and patients because a computer issue prevented them from being noticed for approval. Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust found 411,000 documents that remained unreviewed after several years, of which 23,000 contained action items for patients or doctors.

A 30-year-old woman sues Disney for negligence, claiming that her trip down a Typhoon Lagoon water slide left her with an “injurious wedgie” that required gynecologic treatment and denied consortium for husband, who is also suing. I am hereby announcing plans to add “injurious wedgie” to common business lexicon for describing layoffs.

Sponsor Updates

• Care.ai sponsors a new podcast series titled “The Smart Care Team Spotlight,” hosted by former Microsoft Chief Nursing Officer Molly K. McCarthy, MBA, RN.
• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story, “Unlock Healthcare Benefits with Healow.”
• A new survey from KeyCare finds that consumers prefer virtual visits over in-office care for several types of visits.
• Meditech announces new AI use cases at a recent customer leadership event.
• NeuroFlow releases a new Bridging the Gap Podcast featuring BCollaborative founder and CEO Lili Brillstein.
• Nordic releases a new Making Rounds Podcast, “Under new (data) management podcast.”
• PMD reaffirms its commitment to health data security by passing the SOC 2 Type II evaluation.
• Ronin Chief Scientific Officer Christine Swisher will keynote the virtual NLP Summit October 4.
• Symplr adds Survey Management capabilities to its Compliance platform.
• Lindsay Zimmerman, PhD VP of Upfront Healthcare’s Bartosch Patient Activation Institute, wins three prestigious industry awards.
• West Monroe releases a new report, “The Digital Disconnect: Linking Vision to Real-World Execution.”
• Ellkay, HealthMark Group, Linus Health, Nuance, Sphere, and Surescripts will exhibit at Athenahealth’s Thrive conference October 9-11 in Austin, TX.

Blog Posts

• Navigating Digital: A Roadmap for Rural Hospitals (ReMedi Health Solutions)
• Look beyond the hype to find responsible AI solutions in healthcare (Meditech)
• Manage the Multi-Platform Dilemma with Fewer and Better Communication Tools (Mobile Heartbeat)
• Successful Value-Based Care Models Require Rich Data Insights into the Care Continuum (NeuroFlow)
• Chatbots vs conversational AI – what’s the difference? (Notable)
• Exploring quality assurance for AI diagnostic decision support technologies: Key takeaways (Nuance)
• 5 Questions for Receiving Community Connect (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• The Compounding Benefits of a Proactive Approach to Denial Management (RCxRules)
• Future-proof your healthcare strategy with a FHIR data store (Redox)
• The Difference a Day Makes: Accelerating Specialty Medication Access for Patients (RxLightning)
• How to Fax Without a Fax Machine (Surescripts)
• 5 Steps to Improve Contract Management in Healthcare Organizations (Symplr)
• 3 achievable strategies from Piedmont for healthcare collection success (Waystar)

Contacts

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

News 9/29/23

Top News

Patient engagement software vendor Tendo will acquire healthcare marketplace operator MDsave for $150 million.

Reader Comments

From Squeamish: “Re: Adventist Health. Heard from someone at the corporate office that they will replace Cerner with Epic in all markets.” Unverified, although reported by readers several times recently.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

From Provider Sider: “Re: ChatGPT Pro. I work in risk management for a large practice group. ChatGPT Pro has saved me lots of time with tasks that would ordinarily take hours. For example, I am able to take bullets from chart review and remove PHI and then construct professionally written, clinically relevant summaries in responses to insurance grievances. The pro feature lets you set a static prompt that applies to every new prompt such as, ‘Write all responses as if written by an expert, with a risk management lens.’ I also use it  to write letters responding to patient complaints in patient-friendly terms using plain English. I’ve read opinions by AI experts that professionals who use AI like generative text will (eventually) outperform and leave behind those that don’t.” I agree. ChatGPT is great at analyzing documents and generating well-composed text from whatever input you throw at it, and for that alone it will have considerable healthcare value. I also agree that if implemented correctly, it should be invisible to patients in making humans better at their jobs.

I’m starting to receive the first HIMSS24 emails that include the name or logo of Informa Markets, which either owns or operates the conference, depending on the undisclosed structure of the deal. I also noticed that the HIMSS24 terms and conditions page references only Informa, not HIMSS, and that quite a few HIMSS folks have updated their LinkedIn profile employer this month to Informa Markets.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor MRO. The Norristown, PA-based company is accelerating the exchange of clinical data throughout the healthcare ecosystem on behalf of providers, payers, and users of clinical data. MRO uses industry-leading solutions and the latest technology to help providers and payers manage and exchange clinical data. The company, which has a 20-year legacy and is a 10-time KLAS winner, connects 200 EHRs, 120,000 providers, 35,000 practices, and 900 hospitals and health systems while extracting 1.3 billion clinical records. Its proprietary Clinical Data Exchange Platform (CDXP) provides a digital front door that enables bi-directional sharing of information and reduces operational costs by streamlining processes, an orchestration and configuration engine to centralize connectivity across clinical data repositories and automate actions previously performed manually, and an infrastructure to light up the network of providers and accelerate interoperability with providers and payers within the MRO network. Thanks to MRO for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Member engagement and wellness app vendor Virgin Pulse will merge with HealthComp, which provides health benefits administration.

Menopause virtual clinic operator Midi Health raises $25 million in a Series A funding round.

Two Connecticut hospitals that are owned by Prospect Medical Holdings urge legislators to approve their February 2022 agreement to sell the facilities to Yale New Haven Health, warning that they don’t have money to buy bed linen or laboratory supplies. Computer systems play a key role, as Prospect says it is still dealing with the financial effects a six-week cyberattack in August 2023 that has also caused Yale New Haven Health to question afterward whether the acquisition is prudent given the old systems the hospitals use. Prospect Medical says they can’t afford to upgrade.

Sales

• Mercy will use Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to provide lab results to patients using conversational language, manage patient calls, and help employees access policy and procedure and HR information via a chatbot.

People

NeuroFlow hires Phil Vecchiolli (Capital Rx) as chief revenue officer and Robert Capobianco, MBA (NOCD) as chief commercial officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Case Western Reserve University goes live on Epic’s Lyceum EHR training system for its first-year medical and nursing students.

MHS Genesis goes live at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and Royal Air Force Lakenheath in the UK.

Darena Solutions announces the launch of MeldRx, a development and deployment platform for apps that use FHIR.

Microsoft-owned Nuance renames DAX Express — which creates clinical documentation using conversational, ambient, and generative AI — to DAX Copilot.

OptimizeRx enhances its HCP engagement platform with AI and renames it the Dynamic Audience Activation Platform, which activates provider messaging across marketing channels for its life sciences customers.

A new KLAS report on physician scheduling finds that PerfectServe’s Lightning Bolt Scheduling tops the list due to ease of use and strong support.

Other

A 25-year-old man dies of brain cancer after doctors ignored a mass they saw on his CT scan because they thought it was a computer error.

A deceased patient’s family sues Adena Health, claiming that the hospital propped up the dead patient in her hospital bed to hide the fact she had died earlier during a cardiac catheterization procedure in which the cardiologist cut into an artery. The family says that staff urged them to approve turning off life support even though they knew that the patient had died two hours earlier, as documented in records they saw.

Sponsor Updates

• TLC Vascular adds RCM software and services from EClinicalWorks.
• Clinical Architecture releases a new episode of The Informonster Podcast, “How Datapult is Tackling the Challenge of Electronic Lab Reporting.”
• Divurgent will present at the North Carolina HIMSS Annual Conference October 3 in Raleigh.
• Healthcare IT Leaders releases the first episode of its new Leader to Leader Podcast, “Doug Hires on Leadership Perspectives on RCM in Healthcare.”

Blog Posts

• Highlights from the DIUC23 Keynote (Dimensional Insight)
• Next stop: Nashville (EClinicalWorks)
• Is the Drug You’re Dispensing a Controlled Substance or Not? (First Databank)
• Meeting the Needs of New Yorkers (Findhelp)
• Mastering Contact Center Metrics: A Guide for Success (Five9)
• AI Jobs in Healthcare (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• From Red to Black: Optimizing Healthcare Contract Management (Medhost)

Contacts

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

News 9/27/23

Top News

Release of information service provider Datavant acquires Healthjump, which provides health data exchange for value-based care organizations.

Reader Comments

From Lillehammer: “Re: the apparent end of Oracle Health’s code Developer program. I suspect they are taking a similar route to Epic and will pare down their value-added offerings for API integrations and perhaps shut down the Cerner App Gallery. Cerner never seemed to be committed to making interoperability easy, as evidenced by years-ago mentions of non-FHIR APIs that never came to fruition and lack of documentation and support for non-FHIR integration methods, such as HL7v2.”

From Birdie: “Re: Robin Healthcare. Investors pulled $$, doors shut, doctors cut off from service. Just an overnight flameout. Ambient documentation was never really gonna succeed, was it?”

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

People

McKesson-owned oncology real world evidence vendor Ontada hires Christine Davis, MS (Oracle) as president.

Clinical laboratory quality management software vendor MediaLab hires Tom Ormondroyd, MBA (Millennia Patient Services) as CEO.

Artera expands its executive team with promotions — Ashu Agte (CTO), Tom McIntyre, MS, MBA (COO), Adrianna Hosford (SVP of marketing and communications), and Zach Wood, MBA (SVP of product and partner ecosystem) – and hiring Nicole Ossey as VP of people.

Announcements and Implementations

Costco offers its members discounted, $29 primary care video visits from independent virtual provider marketplace Startup Health. Customers can also get a standard lab panel with virtual follow-up for $72 and book online mental health visits for $79. Sesame also offers virtual visits with specialists and a prescription refill service.

Open AI rolls out new ChatGPT capabilities for conducting voice conversations and analyzing photos.

Oncology data vendor COTA announces Vista, an EHR dataset for drug company research.

Tesla announces new capabilities for its Optimus robot, which can precisely locate its own limbs in real time and applies “video in, controls out” learning from its onboard neural network. The implication for industries that rely on an aging workforce that is trained to perform repetitive tasks in fixed environments using show-and-tell methods could be significant, as could the economic implications of relatively inexpensive 24-hour-per day employee replacements that have no geographic limitations. Elon Musk said in May 2023 that he expects the majority of Tesla’s value to come from Optimus, which he says could sell 10 to 20 billion units.

Privacy and Security

CommonSpirit Health, which operates 140 hospitals and 1,000 care sites, reports a $1.4 billion FY2023 loss, of which it attributes $160 million to its October 2022 ransomware attack. The organization acknowledges that it may face class action lawsuits related to the breach and does not yet know whether its insurer will cover some of the costs. CommonSpirit lost $1.2 billion in the previous fiscal year, when it paid its CEO $35 million.

Other

England’s Newcastle Hospitals blames its computer system for failing to send 24,000 letters to patients over several years that included test results, care needs, and discharge instructions that were never delivered. The trust says that drafts of the letters require a second clinician’s signature before sending, but the letters were stored in a computer folder that few doctors knew about. Officials didn’t name the EHR, but the trust is a long-time user of Cerner / Oracle Health.

Patients of hospitals in Pakistan complain that a shortage of X-ray film has forced hospitals to take phone pictures of their radiology computer screens to make copies for patients, which the patients note are still being charged to them at full price.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks supports community health centers with its continued progress towards enabling UDS Patient-Level Submission (UDS+) reporting via FHIR.
• Nova Scotia Health in Canada upgrades to Agfa HealthCare’s Enterprise Imaging Platform.
• Availity CEO Russ Thomas joins the Definitively Speaking Podcast.
• AvaSure publishes a new guide, “Fall Prevention in Hospitals: Key Results from Virtual Monitoring Programs.”
• Nordic releases a new episode of its In Network podcast, “Making Rounds: Under new (data) management.”
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Final Medicare hospital inpatient prospective payment system (IPPS) and proposed outpatient prospective payment system (OPPS) changes for fiscal year 2024.”
• Bamboo Health CEO Jay Desai will present at Health Evolution September 28 in Nashville.
• Clinical Architecture will sponsor SNOMED CT Expo 2023 October 26-27 in Atlanta.

Blog Posts

• Meditech Expanse Pharmacy: Wins and Benefits of Formulary Service Vendor Changes (CereCore)
• Addressing Healthcare Staffing Shortages and Improving Productivity through Technology and Outsourcing (AGS Health)
• Generative AI at point of care (Arcadia)
• RDCA-DAP and the Aridhia DRE – A platform to accelerate rare disease therapy development and regulatory engagement (Aridhia)
• How healthcare providers can implement a denials management program utilizing internal audit (Baker Tilly)
• SNOMED CT Facilitates Public Health IT Initiatives (Clinical Architecture)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 9/25/23

Top News

Nasdaq sends Veradigm a delisting notice for failing to file financial reports, which the company says it expected and will appeal.

Veradigm expects to file the overdue reports by the end of Q4. It blames its failure to file its annual report for 2022 and the two following quarterly reports on accounting software problems. 

Reader Comments

From Former Employee: “Re: ModMed. Acquired Klara last year for $135 million and has laid off 80% of the sales team. It’s an interesting story that unfolds on GlassDoor reviews.” Unverified. Specialty EHR vendor ModMed – formerly known as Modernizing Medicine – acquired the patient outreach messaging vendor Klara in February 2022. Privately held ModMed has raised a reported $400 million, none of it recently, and paid $45 million in November 2022 to resolve federal kickback charges related to referring business to a clinical lab partner.

From Interopguy: “Re: Oracle Health. Mysterious message on the end of code Developer program at Cerner, and uncertain path forward. What does this mean for app developers and for interop with Oracle Health?” The Open Developer Experience was created to help developers build apps for Millennium and HealthIntent that improve interoperability capabilities. Oracle Health developer Aaron McGinn, who appears to have had led the company’s presence with the developer community, has tagged his LinkedIn with “open to work.” Oracle moved its discussion forms to an Oracle site and users report lack of company response along with errors in the developer sandbox.

From Laminar Flow: “Re: Oracle Health. One of their recruiters says on LinkedIn that Adventist Health will end its Cerner ITWorks contract with Oracle in January 2024 and bring the IT function back in house.” The post seeks to hire people for Oracle now who will receive matching offer letters from Adventist Health. Adventist Health signed a big deal with Cerner in January 2018 to take over revenue cycle management and clinical applications, but terminated the RCM contract the following year and brought the 1,700 employees back in house, after which Cerner sold that business to R1 RCM.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A few poll respondents know or suspect that AI was used in a recent medical encounter.

New poll to your right or here: How will technology significantly improve US healthcare in the next five years? (multiple answers OK)

I greatly enjoyed reading Brian Too’s cynically relevant comments about VC folk in general and Epic-bashing Bill Gurley specifically:

You want investor capital and lots of it. There is a pathway to this that involves self promotion, a dynamic speaking style, outrageous theories that are unconventional and controversial, and chutzpah. Above all the chutzpah! When challenged on the facts, you just say something like, “It’s only a theory,” or you cite one fact that supports your story but doesn’t actually prove it. Then you get your skeptic to do all the lengthy, boring investigation. You drive off in your fully expensed Ferrari, confident you can stay ahead of any questions. These folks are fun at parties, but they will never come within a million miles of my money. 

Webinars

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “AMA: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is your healthcare organization looking to drive profitability and scale quickly? Our experts will explore how comprehensive clinical data can revolutionize the health tech landscape. This engaging discussion will cover trending topics such as leveraging AI and data innovation to enhance patient care and outcomes, real-world examples of organizations leading the charge in data-driven healthcare, overcoming challenges in data completeness and interoperability, and visionary perspectives on the future of care delivery.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The Federal Trade Commission sues US Anesthesia Partners and its private equity minority share owner, claiming that the companies executed an anti-competitive scheme to consolidate anesthesiology practices in Texas to drive up prices and profits. Legal experts say the action is notable because FTC included the private equity investor and not just the company itself in its lawsuit, potentially signaling a new type of federal scrutiny of healthcare.

People

Arrowhead Regional Medical Center (CA) hires CMIO consultant John Brill, MD as chief medical officer.

Announcements and Implementations

AMIA announces the winners of its 2023 Signature Awards:

• Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics — Noémie Elhadad, PhD, associate professor and chair of biomedical informatics, Columbia University.
• Don Eugene Detmer Award for Health Policy Contributions in Informatics — Dean Sittig, PhD, professor, UTHealth Health Science Center at Houston.
• William W. Stead Award for Thought Leadership in Informatics — Atul Butte, MD, PhD, director of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute and distinguished professor, University of California, San Francisco.
• Virginia K. Saba Informatics Award — Susan Newbold, PhD, RN, director, Nursing Informatics Boot Camp.
• AMIA New Investigator Award — Yifan Peng, PhD, assistant professor of department of population health sciences, Weill Cornell Medicine.

A Health Affairs article calls for healthcare ownership transparency so that patients will know if their physician practice is owned by – and perhaps likely to have their clinical judgment influence by — a private equity firm, insurer, health system, Amazon, or a conglomerate such as CVS Health or UnitedHealth. They also call for location transparency to support site-neutral payments, ending the practice of hospitals buying practices or ambulatory centers and then billing higher hospital prices using the parent facility’s provider number and thus preventing the payer from determining where services were provided.

CHIME offers a webinar to prepare potential ViVE 2024 speakers for submitting applications. The call for track speakers closes at the end of October.

Other

The Federal Trade Commission cracks down on the deceptive marketing claims of health influencers, one of them “The Liver King,” who claimed $100 million in annual sales of supplements to accompany his raw meat diet, which generated a net worth of $310 million. He later admitted that his ripped appearance was actually due to taking $11,000 worth of steroids each month, which is not exactly shocking since he sounds a lot like ‘roid rager Danny Bonaduce.

Marginally healthcare relevant, but interesting for a slow news day. Wired covers the “obituary pirates” who scrape death details from funeral home websites, create low-quality videos of themselves reading the deceased’s write-up, then use search engine optimization on the person’s name to draw in people who then hear about their death in the cheesiest possible way while being served ads. As has been noted, death is the ultimate total addressable market.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Unlocking Reporting Capabilities in EBO.”
• NeuroFlow publishes a new case study, “Magellan Healthcare Expands Real-World Impact of DCBT, While Improving Member Access & Engagement.”
• Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Tricia Baird, MD.”
• Waystar will exhibit at the NJ & Metro Philadelphia HFMA Annual Institute September 27-29
• Wolters Kluwer nominates NextGen Healthcare President and CEO David Sides to its supervisory board.

Blog Posts

• Meditech’s Traverse Exchange Canada network advances health information sharing (Meditech)
• Conversational AI for healthcare is a significant step beyond the chatbot, here’s why (Notable)
• 10 Questions to Ask Autonomous Medical Coding Vendors (Nym Health)
• Fighting Opioid Addiction – One Life at a Time (Netsmart)
• Want to improve patient safety? Up your EHR’s usability (Nordic)
• Three Ways to Prove ServiceNow ROI (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• PLD Is Not Enough: Next-Best-Action HCP Engagement Needs the Patient (OptimizeRx)
• Solving the Top Healthcare Transfer Center Challenges (PerfectServe)
• 4 best practices for boosting your HCAHPS scores (Spok)
• Is Your Provider Data Getting Lost in Your Master Data Management? (Symplr)
• Your complete guide to Meditech Expanse (Tegria)

Contacts

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