News 9/15/23

Top News

The VA tells the House Appropriations Committee that it hopes to resume its Oracle Health implementations in the summer of 2024.

Go-live at the joint VA-DoD facility Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center remains on track for March 2024.

The VA says that restarting the rollout will require VA success metrics to improve at its live sites and for go-live at the Lovell facility be completed successfully.

In the committee hearing, Oracle EVP Mike Sicilia blamed previous VA problems on Cerner technical issues. He added that the VA’s lack of repeatable process has hampered the implementation as compared to the DoD, although he believes the VA is on track.

In a related item, Rep. Greg Murphy, MD (R-NC) said in a House Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing that it is “inexcusable” to be rebuilding the VA’s Oracle Cerner system five years into the project, adding, “There are other systems out there that are much better.” Murphy is a practicing urologic and renal transplant surgeon at ECU Health (formerly Vidant Health), which uses Epic.

Reader Comments

From HisTalk2Fan: “Re: Larry Ellison’s comments about the Cerner Millennium rewrite made in the earnings call this week. What is your thought?” My reaction to the call in general:

• Blaming the former Cerner’s revenue recognition practices for Oracle’s quarterly financial disappointment seems to throwing the acquired company under the bus, which Oracle has also done in attributing the VA’s implementation problems to Oracle-discovered Cerner technology deficiencies.
• The oft-repeated goal to “drive Cerner profitability to Oracle standards” sounds good to stock analysts, but perhaps less so to customers or prospects who aren’t looking forward to higher bills or reduced service due to cost-cutting layoffs.
• Oracle talks about rewriting Millennium using code generators, but has said nothing about product roadmaps or the layoff-caused lack of clinical resources that would be needed to design, test, implement, and support a rewritten Cerner product. They have stopped talking about Millennium’s weak areas – like not offering a competitive RCM system — and instead talk only about moving the product to the cloud.
• Oracle talked up the development of a hands-free voice interface and increased availability of AI/ML in the December 2021 acquisition announcement, where it also pledged that Oracle would “maintain and grow Cerner’s community presence” in Kansas City.
• The company says it will announce two new contracts worth a combined $1 billion this quarter. My bet is that these are outside the US, where Oracle has said it will expand Cerner sales to create “a huge additional revenue growth engine.”
• I know little about code generators, but the idea that old code or new specs can be fed into a tool that will effortlessly spit out perfect code has never worked. And while customers might (or might not) benefit from a move to Oracle’s cloud, technology changes alone don’t often excite the market. I doubt that the decision of UPMC and Intermountain to move to Epic was driven by Millennium’s infrastructure.
• Oracle has failed to deliver (and now doesn’t mention) the promised rewrite of Millennium Pharmacy for the VA as the first step in Millennium’s transition, which it assured the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs would be finished by April 2023.
• My big-picture takeaway is that the Cerner acquisition was Larry Ellison’s pet project, but now the bean counters are charged with making the healthcare cash register ring, which has been tried by big companies many times with a success rate of 0.0. Meanwhile, Oracle Cerner headlines mostly involve flagship customer attrition and Mike Sicilia slathering corporate concealer to cover its VA black eye.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: Living Colour, whose 40-year history I had missed until a social media mention sent me to Spotify to learn more. The New York City funk metal band has remarkably kept the same lineup since 1984 other than swapping bass players in 1992. They were boxed out of entire genres that should have made them famous due to ever-changing musical tastes, record label pigeonholing, and lack of support for most black artists, but they just keep doing what they do.

A Reader’s Notes from AHIP’s Consumer Experience and Digital Health Conference

• Looks like about 300 attendees, with key themes of AI, member engagement, health equity, bringing digital solutions to the customer experience, and some discussion about analytics and interoperability.
• It’s about as low-key as healthcare conferences get (HLTH will be a shock after this). Quality is good, speakers are specific with evidence and examples, and panelists who are pressed to predict the future seem to have anxiety that no one knows what the payer world will look like in a few years.
• John Halamka says that Mayo is focused on low-risk use cases of generative AI, such as drafting appeals letters and replying to patient messages. They are thinking about use in prior authorization, but haven’t done anything. He says B2C AI tools are too risky because of hallucinations and the risk of giving patients incorrect information. He concludes that when working with AI startups, it is critical to separate fact from fiction.
• A panel says that AI-powered ambient listening and documentation is a big opportunity, but adds that the onslaught of AI tools has been hard to triage.
• California-based Manifest MedEx is using data on 36 million Californians – from EHRs, immunization registries, EMS EHRs, and claims – to promote health equity, although data normalization and consistency across data sources are challenges.
• Oscar has a platform that creates patient interventions and messages based on knowledge about that person, such as recommending that a care manager arrange a specialist referral in response to a chatbot question, while Cambia has an initiative to lower the out-of-pocket medication cost of members. They say the message must be matched to the patient, such as tailoring to the local Spanish dialect used, and sent via the patient’s preferred communication method.
• One presenter expressed concern about trends such as fewer providers accepting Medicaid, wondering if low-income patients will eventually be limited to virtual care only.

Webinars

September 21 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Unlock open enrollment best practices to stop future denials.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Lauren Tungate, solution strategist team lead, Waystar. Nearly half of insured Americans consider changing their insurance coverage each fall, necessitating provider safeguards to stop increased denials, find hidden coverage, and prevent uncompensated care. This webinar will crack open enrollment best practices, such as using different data sources to get an accurate picture of benefit details; leveraging automation to identify hidden coverage, confirm active insurance, and avoid lost revenue; and simplifying eligibility workflows to reduce the financial burden on patients and strain on staff.

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Live Ask Me Anything Webinar: 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 fragmented data impacting your organization and its ability to scale quickly? Our experts will discuss the advantage of having a 360-degree, real-time view of your patients. Access to analytic-ready data supports proactive care by enabling rapid clinical decision-making, stratifying high-risk patients, developing and using personalized treatment plans, lowering cost, and quickly closing care gaps.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

RCM technology vendor Aspirion acquires AI-powered intelligent document processing platform vendor Infinia ML.

Digital therapeutics vendor Akili, which sells a videogame that is an FDA-approved treatment for ADHD, will lay off 40% of its headcount and abandon its business model that involves prescriptions and payers. The company will sell directly to consumers with no prescription required, saying that payers were standing in the way of patients receiving treatment. The company went public via SPAC merger in August 2022, with shares opening at $36 but falling to $4 within a week as another spectacular but highly profitable failure from SPAC king Chamath Palihapitiya. AKLI shares are now at 90 cents, valuing the former unicorn at $70 million. 

Politico reports that private equity acquisition of hospitals and nursing homes, financed with low-interest loans, are at risk for layoffs and bankruptcies as higher interest rates eat into their profits. Federal agencies such as CMS and the SEC are alarmed over the undisclosed debt and the involvement of PE firms like The Blackstone Group – which holds $1 trillion in assets and controls businesses that employ 12 million Americans – that walk away from acquired companies after milking quick profits and management fees.

Sales

• CommonWell Health Alliance names Ellkay as its technical service provider, where it will provide the interoperability infrastructure to support current requirements and CommonWell’s goal of becoming a QHIN under TEFCA.
• Central California Alliance for Health will implement ZeOmega’s care management solution.

People

Rhapsody hires Sagnik Bhattacharya, MS (HealthEdge) as CEO.

Thirty Madison names Gil Shklarski, PhD (Flatiron Health) as CTO.

TeleTracking hires Nigel Ohrenstein, MA (Kaia Health) as president.

Julia Bernstein, MBA (Thirty Madison) joins behavioral telehealth provider Brightside Health as COO.

Bruce Gray, MBA (HIMSS) joins WPS Health Solutions as chief information and digital officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Blue Ridge Medical Center earns Rural Emergency Hospital designation with the assistance of Medhost and its REH package.

UT Health San Antonio and UTSA launch a five-year MD/Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence degree program.

Geisinger goes live on Exo Works, which integrates ultrasound documentation with its EHR and PACS.

The newly announced Apple Watch Series 9 adds the ability to use Siri to request on-device health and fitness information, such as data from connected monitors, and to log health data such as weight and meds.

Aridhia Informatics and Replica Analytics will collaborate to offer an end-to-end research data-sharing platform for research hospitals, pharma, and global consortia.

Other

The government of China cracks down on doctors who accept illegal commissions from drug companies for selling their products to patients, supplementing their “very small” salaries with “red envelope” money that can make up a significant part of their income. A previous study also found that one-third of patients had bribed their own doctor to get better treatment.

The Philadelphia newspaper notes that Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia paid its CEO $7.7 million in 2021, exceeding the amount of charity care the hospital provided in the three previous years combined.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story, “Unlock Healthcare Benefits with Healow.”
• CereCore releases a new podcast, “Liverpool Women’s CIO on the EPR Implementation Journey.”
• Arcadia announces that ACO using Arcadia Analytics outperformed the market in Medicare Shared Savings Program bonuses by nearly 20% on average in 2022.
• Elsevier Health publishes its Clinician of the Future 2023 report, highlighting the new ways in which technology will provide relief for healthcare workers.
• InterSystems will sponsor HackMIT September 16-17 at MIT in Cambridge, MA.

Blog Posts

• How to Reach the CMDB Summit (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• The Secret to Exceptional Customer Support: A Look into Dimensional Insight (Dimensional Insight)
• Connecting Californians: Supporting Medicaid Members via CalAIM (Findhelp)
• What’s the Difference Between a Call Center and a Contact Center? (Five9)
• Stretching your cybersecurity budget: 6 ways to do more with less (Fortified Health Security)
• Why am I going to attend HLTH next month? (Get-to-Market Health)
• The Value of Using the Right Health Education Videos for Patients (Healthwise)
• Three Keys to Unlocking Provider Productivity (Impact Advisors)
• Unleashing the Cure: RPA 2.0’s Impact on Healthcare and Aerospace & Defense (Keysight Technologies)
• Master Denial Management: 4 Essential Techniques for Healthcare Providers (Medhost)

Contacts

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

News 9/13/23

Top News

From the Oracle earnings call, following a Q1 revenue miss, slowed cloud sales, and lowered expectations that sent shares down 13% on Tuesday:

• The company expects to sign two new Cerner contracts that are valued at over $1 billion in total in the current quarter. (Readers: who could this be? New customers, which would suggest an Epic displacement, or a new cloud contract for existing Cerner clients?)
• Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison says that healthcare AI requires vast amounts of training data, including image information, and Oracle’s new vector database will contain anonymized EHR training data that will be good for its database business.
• Ellison answered an analyst’s question about the one-year anniversary of Oracle’s acquisition of Cerner, saying that the move to “a new Millennium” involve rewriting the software one piece at a time using the Apex code generator, with the first step being hardening the system and moving customers to the cloud.
• Ellison says that cloud-based revenue recognition has caused “a bit of a revenue headwind” since Cerner previously recognized a chunk of revenue at contract signing.
• CEO Safra Catz added that Oracle is “always looking to save as much money as we can and spend as little” while modernizing the Cerner system and, as she has repeatedly said, working to “drive Cerner profitability to Oracle standards.”

Reader Comments

From Digital Health CEO: “Re: our news on your site. We get a lot of positive social channel feedback on our mentions on HIStalk, which still has the best reach in healthcare.” Thanks. This is a actual comment from a non-anonymous CEO just in case anyone suspects made-up self promotion. It’s a good audience, skewed hard toward decision-maker careerists.

From Keep Me Anonymous Health System CIO: “Re: the Cerner input you requested. Here’s mine.” A summary:

• Millennium is a decent inpatient EHR that works after expending the effort, while ambulatory has improved and our providers are receptive to using it.
• Millennium Patient Accounting significantly lags Epic in functionality, ease of use, and analytics.
• The Soarian-based RevElate system that is supposed to replace PA is a better product than Millennium PA, but there’s only one GA option to integrate it and that requires interfaces. Integrating workflows is difficult and requires dual maintenance, such as charge masters and providers. It is still being developed with implementation partners, so the expected benefits have yet to be proven.
• I’ve seen no positive improvements since the Oracle acquisition. Oracle Health (or is it Oracle Cerner?) has had multiple rounds of layoffs, going beyond duplicative functions such as HR and marketing in getting rid of the core workforce, which is baffling. They lack the bench strength to executive anything timely and customers find it difficult to get knowledgeable people for supports and projects.
• The last round of layoffs eliminated most, if not all, of their clinical experts, such as physicians and nurses.
• Most of Oracle’s promises to improve the Cerner project involve infrastructure and moving to the cloud, but Cerner’s remote hosting was its most reliable service. Oracle is fixing something that is not broken and that holds little value to customers.
• I’ve seen no roadmap for system development.
• Oracle promises to rewrite the EHR, but I’m not sure who will redesign it given the lack of clinical bench strength.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Notable Health. The San Mateo, CA-based company is the leading automation platform for patient engagement and staff workflows. Deployed at over 3,000 sites of care, Notable automates over a million repetitive workflows every day across scheduling, registration, intake, referrals, and authorizations. The result: personalized, streamlined care for patients, the elimination of burdensome manual work for caregivers, and improved financial health for healthcare providers. Notable is backed by leading investors, including ICONIQ Growth, Greylock Partners, F-Prime, Oak HC/FT, Maverick Ventures, and 8VC. Find out why healthcare providers of all sizes, including Intermountain Health, Medical University of South Carolina, North Kansas City Hospital, and more have partnered with Notable to redefine what’s possible in healthcare. Thanks to Notable Health for supporting HIStalk.

Lorre is offering three companies a sweet deal – sign up as a Platinum sponsor and she will include the rest of 2023 for no extra charge. Contact her to see if three other folks beat you to it.

A mostly forgotten memory for DoD-Cerner watchers, which I recalled while fondly re-reading the DoD series written for HIStalk by the mystical Dim-Sum. Part of the ultimately successful Leidos proposal to DoD was the involvement of Intermountain Healthcare.

Webinars

September 21 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Unlock open enrollment best practices to stop future denials.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Lauren Tungate, solution strategist team lead, Waystar. Nearly half of insured Americans consider changing their insurance coverage each fall, necessitating provider safeguards to stop increased denials, find hidden coverage, and prevent uncompensated care. This webinar will crack open enrollment best practices, such as using different data sources to get an accurate picture of benefit details; leveraging automation to identify hidden coverage, confirm active insurance, and avoid lost revenue; and simplifying eligibility workflows to reduce the financial burden on patients and strain on staff.

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Live Ask Me Anything Webinar: 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 fragmented data impacting your organization and its ability to scale quickly? Our experts will discuss the advantage of having a 360-degree, real-time view of your patients. Access to analytic-ready data supports proactive care by enabling rapid clinical decision-making, stratifying high-risk patients, developing and using personalized treatment plans, lowering cost, and quickly closing care gaps.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Online Medicare Advantage insurance sales firm Health IQ, which raised $200 million from big-name investors, files Chapter 7 bankruptcy with $1.3 million in assets and $257 million in debt. Co-founder Munjal Shah and some of Health IQ’s leadership are now involved with Hippocratic AI, which has raised $65 million from Andreessen Horowitz and which lost big on Health IQ.

Sales

• Infirmary Health (AL) selects chronic care management and virtual care software and services from Wellbox.
• Community Health Systems (TN) will use Mindoula’s virtual behavioral healthcare service as a part of its primary care offerings.
• In England, Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust will implement Oracle Cerner in a $55 million project.

People

CereCore names James Lobban (Meditech) regional VP of business development.

Edifecs names practicing VA staff physician Summerpal Kahlon, MD, MS (Change Healthcare) chief medical officer.

Julia Goebel (Symplr) joins Komodo Health as head of marketing.

Surescripts hires Lynne Nowak, MD (Lark Health) as its first chief data and analytics officer.

Kristen Lalowski, RN (VillageMD) joins LetsGetChecked as EVP of product.

Fivos Health promotes Eric Nilsson to CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Geisinger will expand its in-home chronic care management program, which includes equipment setup by Best Buy’s Geek Squad and data collection and monitoring by Best Buy-owned Current Health.

Broadmeadows Hospital and Northern Hospital in Melbourne, Australia go live on Oracle Health as part of Northern Health’s systemwide implementation, first announced in late 2020.

In Oregon, Blue Mountain Hospital and its Strawberry Wilderness Community Clinic implement Oracle Health’s CommunityWorks EHR.

A study of 200 provider executives by Bain & Company and KLAS Research finds that most health systems increased their spending on software and IT significantly in the past year, with revenue cycle management and clinical workflow optimization being the top investment areas while patient engagement has moved up the list. Two-thirds of the respondents say they will look first at their existing vendors, especially their EHR supplier, when looking for new functionality. Few organizations have an AI strategy, but 50% are either developing one or will do so soon.

Government and Politics

The Senate confirms Army veteran and VA Chief of Staff Tanya Bradsher as deputy secretary, where she will be responsible for the VA’s Oracle Cerner implementation.

Privacy and Security

Prospect Medical Holdings works to determine if patient information within its 16 hospitals was breached in a reportedly $1.3 million ransomware attack by the Rhysida group nearly six weeks ago. Prospect is also still working to bring all of its hospital systems back online.

Hospital Sisters Health System (IL) restores its Epic system after a cyberattack forced it to downtime procedures two weeks ago. Affiliate Prevea Health (WI), which was also a part of the attack, has yet to bring its systems fully back online.

Other

HealtheLink, an HIE serving Western New York, will use a $1 million grant from ONC to gather advance care planning documents and make them digitally available to providers within its network.

University of Utah Health research finds that poor EHR user experience strongly correlates with EHR-related patient safety concerns, particularly in the areas of medication alerts related to drug-drug interactions, patient allergies, duplicate orders, and excessive dosing.

Sponsor Updates

• Artera names Nicole Ossey (Knock) VP of people.
• DePaul Community Health Centers reduces days in accounts receivable by more than 50% with RCM solutions from EClinicalWorks.
• The Agile Giants Podcast features Arcadia CEO Michael Meucci.
• Nordic releases a new episode of its In Network podcast in partnership with Amazon Web Services, “Making Rounds: Emerging opportunities with cloud-based EHRs.”
• Ascom Americas will sponsor the Hack the Building 2.0 Hospital Edition September 18-22 in Columbia, MD.
• Bamboo Health will exhibit at NAACOS 2023 September 20-22 in Washington, DC.
• CloudWave will exhibit at the Torch Fall Conference September 25-28 in Round Rock, TX.

Blog Posts

• Five key features telehealth patients want: Insights for healthcare developers (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• The Next Big Thing for Healthcare IT Service Desks – Support with Clinical Context (CereCore)
• Leveraging Analytics in the Revenue Cycle Management Maturity Journey (AGS Health)
• Optimum’s ServiceNow Store Opens (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• How Arrive Health is Creating a Better Prescribing Experience, Including Eliminating 87% of RTPB Noise (Arrive Health)
• Decreasing falls and cutting costs in the LTACH setting (AvaSure)
• Driving Operational Efficiency + Patient Outcomes: Clearsense 20/20 (Clearsense)
• 7 Ways to Ensure Your Incident Response Plan is Incident-Ready (Clearwater)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 9/11/23

Top News

Walmart is reportedly considering acquiring a majority stake in ChenMed, which operates 100 Medicare Advantage primary care clinics in 15 states.

The family-owned ChenMed has made significant executive team changes this year, replacing five of six family members who held C-level roles. My quick eyeball of the leadership team web page changes since February show that only four of the 12 leaders remain.

If the deal goes through, it will likely be Walmart’s biggest healthcare investment, at several billion dollars.

Reader Comments

From Pure Envy: “Re: Epic. Why didn’t DoD and VA choose them in the first place? Will they switch from Cerner like everyone else seems to be doing?” Cerner paired up for the DoD bid with prime contractor Leidos, a skilled lapper at the federal trough, while Epic linked up with comparative federal lightweight IBM. Either that or the feds saw more promise in Cerner and the other companies that were part of the Leidos bid. The DoD has no reason to replace Cerner because its implementation is nearly finished and is free of the drama that has plagued the VA, which may be stuck with VistA forever given the embarrassment, cost, and likely similar outcomes of dumping Cerner for Epic under pressure from Congress. The one thing that is sure, given that the federal government is in charge, is that contractors will profit obscenely and indefinitely no matter which systems the DoD and VA are using, as the VA’s 40-year-old VistA is reportedly costing taxpayers nearly $1 billion per year to keep running. The VA rarely completes IT projects successfully and technology is seldom the problem – VA regions resist any form of central oversight and thus love their custom instances of VistA.

From Bemis Comfy: “Re: Cerner to Epic switches. Two big Cerner losses in one week. The trend will continue.” Probably, for these reasons: (1) Cerner sites that implemented its systems more than 7-8 years ago now have the money and fortitude to switch to the obvious market leader, while the Epic-to-Cerner migration history is minimal; (2) FOMO; (3) to the victor go the IT spoils, as acquisition-happy big health systems seem to have lost their temporary appetite for running multiple systems to avoid rip-and-replace in acquired hospitals and are now looking to reduce vendor complexity; and (4) the disastrous Brent Shafer Cerner years seeded frustration that is just now showing up as defections. Oracle’s interest in Cerner seemed to mostly be driven by the personal fascination of 79-year-old Larry Ellison, the opportunity to increase Cerner margins, and the chance to buy into a massive federal business, none of which necessarily boost the satisfaction of Cerner customers. However, Oracle executives are probably more worried about competing in cloud and AI than counting Cerner hospitals or strategizing how to compete more effectively with Epic. Maybe they will say more at next week’s Oracle Health Conference. If you’re a CIO with recent experience as a customer of both Epic and Cerner, what do you think?

From Pop Smoke: “Re: HIStalk. Have you considered changing the name to something that makes sense?” When I started HIStalk 20 years ago, hospital technology was referred to as “hospital information systems” and the department that operated those systems was “management information systems,” so HIS and MIS were universally understood industry terms that have since faded into obscurity. Readers can probably provide more examples (CPOE comes to mind). The name HIStalk does not refer to possessiveness, gender, religion, or anything else you’ve imagined. I’m too lazy and set in my ways to worry about anything except the content, so I’m not contemplating a rebrand, including canning the satirical smokin’ doc.

From Electric Eel: “Re: subscribing. How does one subscribe to HIStalk nowadays?” There’s a “Subscribe to Updates” menu drop-down under Contact, which takes you to this page. It ignores duplicates, so if you’ve stopped getting updates, just stick your email in there again. It is shocking how often emails aren’t delivered due to being rejected by an overzealous email system on the receiver’s end, and signing up again can’t hurt and might fix it.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Quite a few poll respondents have had a rocky employment year so far in 2023.

New poll to your right or here, as suggested by a reader: In your most recent change to a new medical practice for an ongoing relationship, how did they obtain your medical records? My guess is that a surprising number of practices don’t really care about the laboriously collected and maintained information from other providers, preferring to start over with patient-provided basics such as demographics, meds, allergies, family history, known conditions, and immunizations that their new customer is expected to scrawl onto poorly designed clipboard forms. 

Thanks to the following companies that recently supported HIStalk. Click a logo for more information.

Webinars

September 21 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Unlock open enrollment best practices to stop future denials.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Lauren Tungate, solution strategist team lead, Waystar. Nearly half of insured Americans consider changing their insurance coverage each fall, necessitating provider safeguards to stop increased denials, find hidden coverage, and prevent uncompensated care. This webinar will crack open enrollment best practices, such as using different data sources to get an accurate picture of benefit details; leveraging automation to identify hidden coverage, confirm active insurance, and avoid lost revenue; and simplifying eligibility workflows to reduce the financial burden on patients and strain on staff.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Merative, the former IBM Watson Health, will lay off 100 of its 400 employees who work in Ireland, moving their jobs to India. 

A study finds that when PCPs enter into vertical relationships with health systems – by selling out to them, affiliating, or entering joint contracting deals – specialist visits, total patient spending, ED visits, and hospitalizations within the health system all increase. In other words, health systems get exactly what they hope for when they use their large piles of cash to buy independent doctors who are then “encouraged” to steer business their way.

Calibrate, which sells weight loss drugs online to people who sign up for its $1,749-per-year coaching package (which doesn’t include drug cost), is paying out big chunks of its revenue as refunds to address BBB complaints from customers for whom the company can’t provide them with high-demand drugs such as Wegovy. Insiders say the company’s layoffs have left too few employees to manage insurance company authorizations and to respond to customer questions. Its newly released app has earned a 1.1 rating out of five stars on Apple’s App Store as a skeleton crew of engineers can’t keep up with bug fixes. The company says it will pivot to working with employers and health plans, although insiders question whether it has the people and the focus to launch a new business given its low staffing and the competitive environment.

Sales

• Clalit Health Services, Israel’s largest healthcare provider, will implement Sectra’s digital pathology solution.

People

Industry long-timer Bill Carmichael, whose held IT roles at Franciscan Alliance, Information Resource Associates, and Eskenazi Health, died August 26. He was 71.

Georgia-based family practice doctor Jim Morrow, MD, MS, who held health IT executive and advisory roles in his career of nearly 40 years, died August 31 at 69.

Announcements and Implementations

The Healthtech Leader 3.0 conference – put on by CHIME, AEHIS, AEHADA, and AEHIT — will be held September 27-29 in Cleveland, OH, with CHIME members getting a discounted registration fee of $295 that includes breakfasts, lunches, and receptions. The Cleveland Clinic-connected InterContinental’s conference rate of $189 makes this a pretty inexpensive event, depending on your transportation cost.

Government and Politics

Nigeria’s federal government announces plans for a National Electronic Medical Record Platform that will unify the records of primary and federal medical centers. The newly appointed Minister of State for Health and Social Welfare, Tunji Alausa, MD – a nephrologist who founded and runs the Illinois-based Kidney Care Center and Dialysis Care Center – says:

We will embark on the digitalization of our healthcare system, because in this age,if you don’t have data, validated data, it’s just like still being in the dark. We need to make sure that the data we collect are accurate, they are validated,they can be trusted internally and locally. That will be used to deliver healthcare to our people. When we have validated data that we can trust,we can begin to see the indices where you are getting better,where you are doing well and where you are not doing well and then,you can direct your interventions to improving those outcomes.

HELP Committee ranking member Senator Bill Cassidy, MD (R-LA) solicits solutions to protecting patient privacy related to wearables, smart devices, and apps, none of which are covered by HIPAA. He seeks input on expanding HIPAA beyond covered entities and traditional health data; whether safeguards that address disclosure to law enforcement officials are sufficient; if organizations that aren’t covered entities should be required to delete consumer data at their request as GDPR mandates; and whether location data should be considered health data. He also asks questions about safeguarding genetic and biometric data, whether HIPAA should address claims data, and the extent to which consumers can opt out of having their data used for AI training. Responses are due September 28.

Other

Odd: the fired CEO of Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Hamilton sues the hospital, claiming that he was fired because the hospital foundation’s “Under the Italian Sky” fundraising soiree included naked body painting.

An interesting VCU medical school poster notes that traditional physician clothes and accessories can spread bacteria. On the not-to-wear list: white coats (which are not laundered frequently), stethoscopes (unless they are disinfected between patients), watches, shirts that don’t allow “bare below the elbow,” ties (rarely cleaned), and cell phones. If white coats are required, providers should be given at least two of them with free on-site laundering and coat hooks should be available outside of areas where patients are seen so the coats can be removed. It recommends wearing sleeveless vests instead of white coats, although I wouldn’t want to be the person trying to rip traditional medical regalia from the cold, dead hands of doctors who aren’t about to hold court wearing an egalitarian vest.

Sponsor Updates

• Lucem Health releases a new “This Week in Clinical AI” podcast.
• Aga Khan Health Services in East Africa will implement Meditech Expanse.
• Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with CT Lin, MD, Liz Salmi, and Bryan Steitz, PhD.”
• Optimum Healthcare IT’s ServiceNow offering, Clinician Connect, is now available in the ServiceNow Store.
• Verato will exhibit at the ISM + PHSA Conference September 10-13 in Kissimmee, FL.
• West Monroe launches the third season of its This is Digital Podcast.
• Wolters Kluwer Health will sponsor the 2023 Patient Experience Summit September 11-12 in Nashville.
• Ellkay, Nuance, Healthwise, Fortified Health Security, Ronin, Ascom, Elsevier, First Databank, Impact Advisors, Linus Health, Loyal, Nordic, Optum, ReMedi Health Solutions, HCI Group, Wolters Kluwer Health, Net Health, Surescripts, and Waystar will exhibit at the Oracle Health Conference September 18-20 in Las Vegas.

Blog Posts

• EMR Consultants: Breaking Down Short-Term, Long-Term, and Permanent Placements (HealthTech Resources)
• The Benefits of Having Your Healthcare HCM, ERP, and SCM in One System (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Navigating Change Management: Fostering Organizational Engagement (Impact Advisors)
• Living Fearlessly: Reflecting on Fear and Overcoming It (JTG Consulting Group)
• AI Deployment Success: Improving Adaptability Over Time (Lucem Health)
• Automated “risk stratification” is key to improving patient satisfaction and care team efficiency (Lumeon)
• Revamp Your Revenue Cycle: Billing Flow (Medhost)
• Attainable innovation: How trends shape the healthcare industry and its future success (Meditech)
• 5 Benefits of Offering Digital MSK at Your Outpatient Rehab Therapy Practice (Net Health)
• New Reports Show Health Plans Must Innovate Behavioral Health Risk Management Strategy (NeuroFlow)
• Preparing for the 2024 ICD-10-CM Code Updates (Nym Health)
• It’s Time to End Multi-Trigger Targeting for EHR-based HCP Engagement (OptimizeRx)
• Nurses of Note 2023: The Acute Neurovascular Advanced Practitioner (PerfectServe)
• An Expert’s Take on HCC Coding (RCxRules)
• Respite Care 101: From History to Modern Resources (Trualta)

Contacts

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

News 9/8/23

Top News

Private equity firm Thoma Bravo will acquire NextGen Healthcare in a $1.5 billion take-private transaction, paying a 46% premium to the unaffected share price.

NextGen offers solutions for EHR/PM and interoperability.

The private equity firm’s portfolio includes Imprivata, Hyland, Qlik, and Bluesight.

NXGN shares had lost 8% in the 12 months before the acquisition rumors surfaced. They were down 20% over the previous five years.

Reader Comments

From DJ: “Re: Intermountain. Rumor is that it told caregivers this week that it will move from Cerner / Oracle Health to Epic.” Verified by an Intermountain media contact in response to my inquiry. Oracle Health losing former Cerner poster children Intermountain and UPMC in the same week is significant. A Redditor posted the internal Intermountain email announcement to caregivers, with these snips:

We are excited to announce that we will align to a single Electronic Health Record (EHR) across Intermountain Health, and all regions will begin moving toward using Epic … Epic will be the single EHR for the organization due to strong functional offerings and significantly higher physician and APP EHR satisfaction scores. For example, Epic EHR satisfaction scores at Intermountain are .49 points above the national average on a 5-point scale and the Cerner score is .52 points below the national average … Epic is currently being used by Intermountain care sites in Colorado and Montana. The renewal deadline for our Cerner contract, which supports the iCentra EHR across the Canyons Region and parts of the Desert Region, is coming up in November. Given this timeline, it’s the right time to take action. We have an urgent need to find an EHR solution that can best support operations in Idaho and Nevada, where our legacy EHR solutions are antiquated and in need of replacement. Our finance team completed a detailed review of our annual EHR operating costs, and moving to a single platform will help us achieve significant cost savings over time. Today we are simply announcing this transition. We have a lot of planning work ahead of us to go-live with Epic across the system by the fourth quarter of 2025. As we plan for the transition, we will be sunsetting EHR contracts with other EHR vendors (e.g., Cerner, Allscripts, etc.).

Meanwhile, another Redditor says that while Neal Patterson built Cerner, losing customers such as Intermountain was more his fault than that of his often-blamed successors Brent Shafer and David Feinberg:

• Patterson didn’t leave a succession plan when he died in 2017.
• A primary driver of Cerner clients moving to Epic was that Cerner didn’t develop a competent RCM system and continued selling both its own system as well as Siemens Soarian
• Cerner allowed clients to customize their system to the point that they couldn’t upgrade.
• CCL was the go-to reporting system instead of a robust reporting solution.
• Cerner didn’t develop a competitive offering to Epic’s MyChart.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Symplr. Symplr is building the bridge to enterprise healthcare operations and beyond. Together with its customers, it is creating the blueprint for how to not just survive, but thrive, by maximally using staff
and technology in tandem to bridge the gaps and increase efficiencies in healthcare operations. For more than 30 years and with deployments in nine of 10 US hospitals, Symplr has been committed to improving healthcare operations through its cloud-based solutions. Its provider data management; workforce management; compliance, quality, and safety; and contract, supplier, and spend management solutions improve the efficiency and efficacy of healthcare operations, enabling caregivers to quickly handle administrative tasks so they have more time to do what they do best: provide high-quality patient care. Thanks to Symplr for supporting HIStalk.

The HLTH conference is October 8-11, so I’ll post a list of participating HIStalk sponsors and their activities the week before. Watch for a data collection form link next weekend.

Webinars

September 21 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Unlock open enrollment best practices to stop future denials.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Lauren Tungate, solution strategist team lead, Waystar. Nearly half of insured Americans consider changing their insurance coverage each fall, necessitating provider safeguards to stop increased denials, find hidden coverage, and prevent uncompensated care. This webinar will crack open enrollment best practices, such as using different data sources to get an accurate picture of benefit details; leveraging automation to identify hidden coverage, confirm active insurance, and avoid lost revenue; and simplifying eligibility workflows to reduce the financial burden on patients and strain on staff.

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

Sales

• South Dakota’s Department of Health chooses Findhelp to built its statewide social care referral system.
• Aga Khan Health Services, East Africa will implement Meditech Expanse in Tanzania and Kenya.
• Intermountain Healthcare will implement Epic throughout its system, replacing Cerner and other products.

People

Industry long-timer Mark Hefner died Saturday of cancer. He was 64.

Announcements and Implementations

AvaSure adds video AI support to its TeleSitter solution to reduce elopement and falls.

Withings earns FDA clearance for its Body Scan smart scale, a $400 device with a retractable grab bar that detects atrial fibrillation along with monitoring body composition, heart rate, and vascular age.

Government and Politics

The VA will review its online disability systems after discovering that technical issues delayed disability claims for veterans who tried to update their dependency status or to file appeals online. The VA found that some disability-related cases going back to 2011 have not been addressed.

Other

A woman says that her brother died alone in a Las Vegas hospital because of the way the hospital assigns names to unidentified patients. Clifford Allen collapsed in a retail area on a 115-degree Las Vegas day and was lying in the full sun for eight hours with no help from bystanders, during which time someone stole his wallet and oxygen tank. His sister repeatedly called every hospital in Las Vegas asking about patients admitted under his name or John Doe, with no success. He died 10 days later as an inpatient of MountainView Hospital, which says that while it admits unidentified patients under the last name Doe, it assigns different first names to avoid merging the medical records of multiple patients named John or Jane Doe.

Sponsor Updates

• Direct Recruiters, Inc. hires Dave Emma (Teladoc Health) as practice leader of technology for digital health.
• Concord Health Partners makes an unspecified investment in NeuroFlow.
• Experity will accept nominations for its annual Industry Limelight Awards, to be presented at its 2024 Urgent Care Connect Conference, through October 27.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Unlocking Reporting Capabilities in EBO.”
• Ascom launches its new Myco 4 smartphone for clinical institutions and enterprises.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Exploring aspects of leadership, management, innovation, and technology in healthcare organizations.”
• Censinet partners with Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center to provide free third-party risk management services to Health-ISAC members through its Community Services Program.
• CloudWave will co-sponsor the Meditech Live Welcome Reception on September 19 in Foxborough, MA.
• Five9 will be at the CCW Patient Experience Exchange in Atlanta October 17-19.
• Nordic releases another episode of its In Network podcast, “Designing for Health: Interview with CT Lin, MD, Liz Salmi, and Bryan Steitz, PhD.”
• Divurgent releases a new episode of The Vurge Podcast, “Bridging the Gap Between Operations & Technology.”
• Ellkay will exhibit at Oracle CloudWorld September 18-20 in Las Vegas.
• Everbridge publishes a new case study, “Improving patient communications with Everbridge: Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.”

Blog Posts

• Liverpool Women’s CIO Perspective: Digital Maturity One EPR Milestone at a Time (CereCore)
• Mitigating the Risks Involved with High-Risk Diagnosis Groups (AGS Health)
• Bridging gaps: Data-driven approaches to patient outreach (Arcadia)
• What Hospitals Can Do To Move From Digital Tools to Digital Transformation in Healthcare (Ascom)
• An Expert’s Take on HCC Coding (RCxRules)
• Availity Expert Q&A: Unleashing Efficiency to Revolutionize Prior Authorizations (Availity)
• How a Security Controls Validation Assessment Optimizes Cybersecurity Investments (Clearwater)
• How Continuous Safety Monitoring Can Reduce Hospital Stays for High-Risk Oncology Patients (Current Health)
• Bridging the Gender Gap in Health Tech (Dimensional Insight)
• Increased Prevalence of Alpha-Gal Syndrome Impacts More Clinical Decisions (First Databank)
• Living Off the Land attacks: Unveiling the illusion (Fortified Health Security)

Contacts

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

News 9/6/23

Top News

UPMC will replace Oracle Health / Cerner and eight other EHRs with Epic. Implementation in the 40-hospital system will begin in Q4 and be completed by mid-2026.

UPMC was already using Epic in some areas, notably for ambulatory services.

Reader Comments

From SPAC Cadet: “Re: HIStalk. Have you thought about taking it public via a SPAC? Everybody is doing it!” Everybody was indeed doing it until the government cracked down on unproven companies that could not have passed the scrutiny involved in an actual IPO and instead “merged,” which left them free to pump shares via media promotion. Nothing says USA like celebrities, grifters, and the ever-present money people collaborating to pick the pockets of the little guy. SPAC king Chamath Palihapitiya used Twitter and CNBC shilling to earn himself a billion dollars in fees while shares in his average SPAC company were tanking 90%. His Clover Health, which he bragged was a surefire 10x win over 10 years, started trading at a $7 billion valuation that is now down to $650 million, so the 10x is looking accurate though directionally incorrect.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Health IT people may be professionally embarrassed by being the last holdout of fax machines, but most poll respondents wouldn’t walk out on a practice upon seeing one at the check-in desk (I purposely described it that way to indicate the presence of the lowest form of faxing, as opposed to the slightly sexier digital fax). One commenter astutely noted that not seeing a fax machine out front just means that they are using e-fax or have placed the machine out of sight. Another said it’s a lot more offensive shove a multi-page paper form at patients for whom the information is already in the clinic’s EHR. Bethany notes that even all-digital clinics needs a fax machine because they can’t receive referrals from other practices that insist on using them.

New poll to your right or here: Were you laid off, terminated, demoted, or forced to relocate so far in 2023?

Lorre always offers incentives for new sponsors to sign up in the last quarter when leftover marketing budgets need a home, so contact her to get on board.

Webinars

September 21 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Unlock open enrollment best practices to stop future denials.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Lauren Tungate, solution strategist team lead, Waystar. Nearly half of insured Americans consider changing their insurance coverage each fall, necessitating provider safeguards to stop increased denials, find hidden coverage, and prevent uncompensated care. This webinar will crack open enrollment best practices, such as using different data sources to get an accurate picture of benefit details; leveraging automation to identify hidden coverage, confirm active insurance, and avoid lost revenue; and simplifying eligibility workflows to reduce the financial burden on patients and strain on staff.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Private equity firm Thoma Bravo is reportedly in advanced stages of negotiation to acquire NextGen Healthcare.

The CEOs of Walgreens and Amazon-owned One Medical resign. The latter is less surprising since the CEOs of Amazon’s acquisitions rarely stick around beyond the kick-in of their golden parachutes, while the former looks like impatience that the ambitious plans to turn Walgreens into a a full-service healthcare provider via acquisitions involves too much risk and time.

Mercy Iowa City files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing the poor implementation of a new Allscripts EHR in 2022 that has since contributed to problems with coding, billing, and collecting for $189 million in patient services. The hospital has filed a lawsuit against Allscripts, now known as Altera Digital Health, to which it still owes $1.8 million. It is considering a “below-market” acquisition offer of $20 million from the University of Iowa, the value of which has left some bondholders seeking an official investigation into the hospital’s downfall.

Patient engagement technology vendor TeleVox acquires the Odeza patient engagement business of RCM company Ensemble Health Partners.

Sales

• Tennessee’s TennCare Medicaid agency will use Findhelp’s social services assessment and Closed Loop Referral System as a part of its Health Starts initiative.
• Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System will use Masimo’s remote patient monitoring hardware and software across its 10 hospitals in Louisiana and Mississippi.
• Blackrock Health Group in Ireland will implement Meditech Expanse at an additional three clinics as part of a three-year, $27 million digital transformation program.

People

Prairie Lakes Healthcare System hires Tim Pugsley, MBA (Mankato Clinic) as CIO.

The National Library of Medicine announces the retirement of Director Patti Brennan, RN, MSN, PhD on September 30. She is an informatics nurse and earned a PhD in industrial engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Government and Politics

Air Force doctors say in a town hall meeting in Japan that DoD’s Oracle Health system — whose final go-lives are in the Indo-Pacific bases — is better than its predecessor, but has a quirk in which the records of children aged 13-17 won’t be available online and the children themselves can’t create a patient portal account until they reach 18.

The US Air Force Research Laboratory says that several military medic groups are interested in the EHR smartphone app that it created in 2019. The Battlefield Assisted Trauma Distributed Observation Kit (BATDOK) captures medical documentation at the point of injury and during transport

Privacy and Security

Carthage Area Hospital in New York gets phone systems up and running as it recovers from a cyberattack discovered last Thursday. The breach also impacted nearby Claxton Hepburn Medical Center, though its phone lines were not affected.

Other

A former physician employee of Babylon, who left the company six years ago after just 12 months, describes what it was like to work at “the most expensive failed experiment on digitizing primary care to date”:

• He was shown the company’s “groundbreaking AI system” that was just some Excel worksheets containing decision trees that had been written by junior doctors. Attempts to improve the system failed.
• Employed clinicians were told to assign the probabilities of various combinations of diseases and symptoms, leading to illogical questions such as the likelihood that someone with abdominal pain has allergies.
• The company’s chatbot didn’t work and didn’t earn FDA approval.
• Babylon claimed that its product’s performance was better than that of doctors, then backtracked on that claim when doctors cut ties with the company.
• The company hired “slimy sales people” to push deals that almost always ended up failing, pushing whatever AI craze was making headlines, such as facial recognition and voice-to-text.
• The GP at Hand telehealth service was convenient for patients, but the service was not cost effective and its expense damaged the NHS services it replaced.

Sponsor Updates

• Wolters Kluwer Health announces that its drug diversion monitoring software received exceptional recognition from KLAS in its Drug Diversion Monitoring 2023 report.
• A new KLAS white paper shows that Nordic has one of the industry’s most robust selections of services aimed at streamlining the EHR experience.
• Ronin publishes a new white paper, “Clinician Experience: The Missing Link Between High-Efficiency and High-Tech Healthcare.”
• KLAS recognizes Vyne Medical in its latest Advanced User Insights report on next-generation digital fax management.
• The SaaS Fuel podcast features Zen Healthcare IT President Marilee Benson in “SaaS Founder Insights.”

Blog Posts

• How Meditech’s Critical Care solution can elevate your organization (Meditech)
• 5 Benefits of Offering Digital MSK at Your Outpatient Rehab Therapy Practice (Net Health)
• Speech recognition adoption made simple with Dragon Medical One (Nuance)
• Extreme Usability II: Enhancing the Client Experience (Netsmart)
• Automation in Revenue Cycle Management: Healthcare Providers Share Their Experiences with Autonomous Medical Coding (Nym Health)
• How to Reach the CMDB Summit (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Real Results from RCxRules Users (RCxRules)
• Message Queue Service Oils the Engine Driving E-Prescriptions (Surescripts)
• How to Empower Family Caregivers During Hospital Discharge (Trualta)

Contacts

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

News 9/1/23

Top News

Babylon Health sells its UK business, including the GP at Hand app, to US-based in-home test kit vendor EMed Healthcare.

The sale basically marks the end of the company, which has declared insolvency and sold the parts of its business that attracted buyers.

BBLN shares, which went public as one of many disastrous SPAC mergers, are at two-thousandth of one cent, valuing the former high-flyer whose market capitalization reached $4 billion at $5,000.

Webinars

September 21 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Unlock open enrollment best practices to stop future denials.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Lauren Tungate, solution strategist team lead, Waystar. Nearly half of insured Americans consider changing their insurance coverage each fall, necessitating provider safeguards to stop increased denials, find hidden coverage, and prevent uncompensated care. This webinar will crack open enrollment best practices, such as using different data sources to get an accurate picture of benefit details; leveraging automation to identify hidden coverage, confirm active insurance, and avoid lost revenue; and simplifying eligibility workflows to reduce the financial burden on patients and strain on staff.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Wellstar Health System will acquire Augusta University Health System, pledging to complete AU Health’s implementation of Epic. 

Biofourmis CEO Kuldeep Rajput resigns from the remote patient monitoring platform vendor one month after the company laid off 120 employees. Its July 2022 Series D funding round increased its total to $464 million, valuing the company at over $1 billion. Insiders say that key investors were unhappy with the company’s strategy and burn rate.

Non-profit RIP Medical Debt, which purchases discounted patient-owed medical debt and pays it off, will work with RCM software vendor FinThrive to use social determinants of health to identify patients whose debt meets the company’s criteria for payoff.

Sales

• Bethany Children’s Health Center (OK) will implement Meditech Expanse using the Meditech as a Service platform.
• Parkview Health will offer Epic-based virtual urgent care from KeyCare.

People

Jeff Cutler (Ada Health) joins Validic as chief commercial officer.

Adam Seyb (Janus Health) joins ProRank as CEO. 

Announcements and Implementations

GoodRx announces a real-time benefit check for Provider Mode, which gives prescribers access to a patient’s insurance coverage and drug cost.

NeuroFlow announces a tech-enabled approach to psychiatric collaborative care (CoCM) that combines the company’s AI-driven analytics, care collaboration enablement, and enterprise consumer-grade activation for its health system users.

Government and Politics

CMS asks states to review the results of their computer-assisted Medicaid eligibility determination after identifying a software error that incorrectly flags children to be dropped automatically if their family fails to respond or is found to be ineligible.

Privacy and Security

The FBI and its partners shut down the Qakbot bot that was used to perform several recent cyberattacks on US hospitals. The FBI penetrated the system, found that 700,000 systems were compromised globally, and then set up a redirect function to forward incoming traffic to an uninstaller program.

Systems at Singing River Health System (MS) remain down following an August 20 cyberattack.

In Europe, a privacy watchdog sues Google-owned Fitbit in multiple countries for exporting user data outside the EU in violation of GDPR. The suits say that Fitbit includes data-sharing consent in its user agreement, but doesn’t specify how the data will be used and doesn’t give paid users a way to opt out.

A law firm reminds Florida healthcare providers — hospitals, nursing homes, labs, pharmacies, and mental health providers — that a new state law requires them to verify that their EHR data is physically stored in the continental US, US territories, or Canada. The firm says that that the law does not limit the ability of people outside the country to access patient information, but it does specify where the information must be physically stored, whether by the provider itself or third-party vendors.

Other

UNC gastroenterologist, vice chair, and professor of medicine Spencer Dorn, MD, MPH, MHA – who humorously says on his LinkedIn that “I literally work in the belly of the healthcare beast,” lists how managing the physician EHR inbox violates productivity principles:

• Messages arrive all day long and lead the physician reader down rabbit holes, conflicting with the day’s planned activities.
• High-value task prioritization gives way to having to read each message to determine its importance.
• Inbox noise creates distraction.
• Efficiency is sapped by multitasking, as the average PCP switches their attention to the inbox 80 times per day.
• Cognitive load is increased by context-switching among screens and windows.
• Message burden forces managing the inbox evenings and weekends when the physician’s energy and attention are lower.
• Solutions include redesigning the inbox itself, using AI to help manage messages, and provider organizations reducing the number of messages and delegating more of them to non-physicians.

One commenter on the inbox article above mentioned that EHR inboxes could be designing similarly to the Spark email client, which PC Magazine says is a lot cleaner and easier than Gmail, which keeps cramming in non-email features like to-do lists and meeting scheduling. Spark’s $60-per-year individual plan includes offers grouping and prioritization, “send later” and reminders, natural language email search, and an AI-powered email summarization and creation assistant. The team version adds collaboration functions. Twobird offers similar functionality for free.

Epic notes that all of the people who provide services to support its just-concluded UGM – including golf cart tour guides and A/V techs — are its own employees. The company ordered a record-breaking 9,000 doughnuts from a Madison doughnut shop for them.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks offers a new customer success story, “Boosting Patient Satisfaction with Healow Secure Text.”
• First Databank releases a new Faces of Digital Health Podcast, “Bringing EPrescribing to the Next Level: To Patients.”
• Fortified Health Security names Lee Tomlin security analyst.
• Keysight enhances its Eggplant automated software test solution to enable multi-platform mobile app testing.
• Lucem Health releases a new This Week in Clinical AI Podcast.

Blog Posts

• Delivering the Right Information at the Right Time for Optimized Health Outcomes (Availity)
• Pharmacists can increase patient trust through aligned content (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Lifting Up Patrons: How We Partner with Libraries (Findhelp)
• Five9 Advances to Platform Tier in ServiceNow’s Build Partner Program (Five9)
• Help Desk Updates: Your Super Weapon to Boost Clinician Productivity (HCTec)
• Community Partnerships: Empowering People Through Health Education (Healthwise)
• Building Community: Patient Engagement Solutions for Hometown Providers (Medhost)

Contacts

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

News 8/30/23

Top News

ONC renews The Sequoia Project’s TEFCA management contract for another five years.

The non-profit will also continue to oversee the development of Qualified Health Information Networks, with seven of them underway.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare market intelligence startup Bonfire Analytics raises $1 million in a pre-seed funding round.

Sales

• Zyter|TruCare integrates Findhelp’s care and social services referral software with its Connected Health data-sharing technology.

People

Chris Betz (Brightside Health) joins Aptihealth as CTO.

Ascom Americas hires Chris LaFratta, MBA (VieCure) as VP and head of strategic service innovation.

Adam Farren, MBA (Osmind) joins Canvas Medical as president and COO.

Virtual care and remote patient monitoring solution provider TimeDoc Health hires Brian Esterly, MBA (Centria Healhcare) as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

IBM trains a Watson large language model to convert legacy COBOL applications to Java, noting that enterprise systems around the world execute 800 billion lines of COBOL code every day.

Government and Politics

A federal judge orders COVID-19 testing firm Nomi Health to pay $7 million to Texas software developer OSGHD, who sued Nomi for licensing its product only long enough to copy its design to create its own system. The state of Utah has paid $84 million to Nomi for COVID testing and vaccination, which it originally attempted to run on a system from Qualtrics that it claims couldn’t handle the required volume.

Privacy and Security

The Rhysida ransomware group claims responsibility for the cyberattack on Prospect Medical Holdings. The group has put the stolen legal and financial documents of 500,000 Prospect employees up for sale on the dark web. Prospect has been struggling to get networks at its 16 hospitals back up and running since the attack occurred on August 3. Crozer Health, a Prospect hospital in Pennsylvania, announced last Friday that all of its computer systems were again operational.

Hospital Sisters Health System (IL) and affiliate Prevea Health (WI) revert to downtime procedures after an unidentified outage forces their systems offline. All systems are unavailable at 15-hospital HSHS. Pediatric hospitalist Maddie Mier, MD reports on X that she’s not the “Improvise, Adapt, Overcome” kind of doctor and needs Epic for “my chart stalking routines & easy access to things like.. VITAL SIGNS.”

Other

Oracle Health Chairman David Feinberg, MD, MBA purchases The Weeknd’s furnished Los Angeles penthouse for a cool $19 million. Dubbed “The Mogul” by building management, the 8,000 square-foot pad includes four bedrooms, six bathrooms, a gym, wine vault, and views from four balconies.

Sponsor Updates

• CloudWave sponsors the Firelands Health “Caddyshack” Open Golf Outing.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Empowering Communities, Analytics for Better Patient Care.”
• Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Matt Sakumoto, MD.”
• CereCore publishes a new case study, “Next Generation EHR Meets Surgery Partners.”
• Healthcare IT Leaders refreshes its board.
• Constellation Research names Artera to its Shortlist for top vendors in the healthcare clinical communication category.
• A new KLAS report recognizes AvaSure as a complete virtual care platform that improves patient safety while reducing costs and staff workloads.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Exploring home and community-based services: Insights and considerations for healthcare organizations.”
• CHIME releases a new Leader 2 Leader Podcast, “Workforce Issues in Healthcare Today: Top Challenges and How to Solve Them.”
• Clearwater enhances its managed security services capabilities, establishing a new partnership, hiring new experts, and signing on new customers.
• Clinical Architecture publishes a white paper, “Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Enable Real-time Semantic Interoperability.”

Blog Posts

• An Operation Leader’s Take on Partnering for Meditech Expanse Projects (CereCore)
• Advancing Revenue Cycle Management Maturity Through Technology and Interoperability (AGS Health)
• Success in transitional care management (TCM): The first 30 days (Arcadia)
• How Arrive Health is Creating a Better Prescribing Experience, Including Eliminating 87% of RTPB Noise (Arrive Health)
• Top 5 eligibility mistakes to avoid for a healthy revenue cycle (Availity)
• Key strategies for healthcare providers implementing the No Surprises Act (Baker Tilly)
• The True ROI (and Cost) of Legacy Data in Healthcare (Clearsense)
• CMMC 2.0 Compliance is Around the Corner: Is Healthcare Ready? (Clearwater)
• Role of Epic Consultants in Epic Upgrades (HealthTech Resources)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/28/23

Top News

In Canada, Quebec chooses Epic for its $2.2 billion USD digital health record project.

The contract, which is in the final stages of negotiation, comes less than three years after Epic completed its first French language deployment in Belgium.

Six suppliers submitted bids, with Cerner Canada finishing second.

The government expects the first two sites to be live in 2024 and the rollout to be completed within five years.

Quebec has spent a reported $1.5 billion USD over the past 30 years unsuccessfully attempting to computerize its hospitals. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents, especially those responding in their role as a consumer, aren’t fans of hospital consolidation.

New poll to your right or here: Would you walk out of a medical practice without being seen if you saw a fax machine sitting at the check-in desk? I ask because I suspect that even philosophically passionate anti-faxxers don’t choose or exclude doctors based on their technologies.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Truepill, whose pharmacy fulfillment business led it to a multi-billion dollar valuation as it expanded into diagnostic testing and telehealth, will seek additional funding at up to a 90% reduction in valuation as it struggles with the departure of its co-founders and a DEA investigation into its Adderall dispensing related to its mental health partner Cerebral.

Per diem nurse staffing platform vendor Nursa raises $80 million in a Series B funding round.

People

Colusa Medical Center (CA) names Steve Stark, MS, MSHA as CEO. He previously worked his way up through it IT ranks at other hospitals, from IT director to CIO.

Niall Brennan (Clarify Health Solutions) joins the CDC as senior advisor for its data modernization plan.

Announcements and Implementations

A Baltimore TV station profiles Bowie State University’s new program in public health informatics and technology. The program, funded by a $10 million HHS grant, will offer boot camps, a bachelor’s degree, and a graduate certificate.

Trilliant Health offers developers free API access to its national directory of 2.7 million providers.

Government and Politics

VA CIO Kurt DelBene says that he is “cautiously optimistic” about its Oracle Cerner implementation, as the VA has learned from its first five go-lives and has tightened service level agreements in a recent contract renegotiation with Oracle.

Sponsor Updates

• AGS Health adds AI-powered Intelligent Authorization to its AI Platform.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “How Healow Self-Scheduling Helped a New Practice Fill 400 Appointment Slots.”
• OptimizeRx signs multi-year partnerships with two EHR vendors and one telehealth vendor.
• NTT Data announces that Everest Group has named the company as a Leader in its 2023 Healthcare Data and Analytics Services Peak Matrix Assessment.
• PMD unveils new branding to improve transparency and value for customers.
• Nordic adds enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources from Workday to its portfolio of ERP Services.
• PerfectServe is positioned highest in ability to execute in the first Gartner Magic Quadrant for clinical communication and collaboration.
• Verato will exhibit at E-Solutions Exchange August 27-30 in in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho.
• Waystar will exhibit at the Texas Association for Home Care & Hospice Annual Meeting August 30-31 in San Antonio.
• Wolters Kluwer Health will exhibit at Rise West August 28-30 in Dallas.

Blog Posts

• Driving healthcare organizations to get the most out of their EHR (Meditech)
• Psych Hub Provides Evidence-based Education to Empower the Entire Behavioral Health Ecosystem (NeuroFlow)
• The dream of patient access and flow (Nordic)
• Realizing Point-of-Care Opportunities: E-Book Insights from EHR Experts (OptimizeRx)
• EHR Super Users: Making Life Easier for Medical Professionals (HealthTech Resources)
• 8 Essentials for Transfer Center Operations in Healthcare (PerfectServe)
• Dr. Stephane Doyne – 12 plagues of AI in healthcare (Redox)
• Sensing-as-a-Service Empowers Data Analysis in Healthcare and Commerce with Integrated Data Exchange (SmartSense by Digi)
• Navigating vendor consolidation in healthcare: Key considerations (Spok)
• My Not-so-Secret Diary on Electronic Prior Authorization in Austin (Surescripts)
• The Benefits of Telemedicine for Older Adults: How Remote Medical Care is Making Aging in Place Easier (Trualta)
• Everything You Need to Know About Evidence-Based Practice (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 8/25/23

Top News

NextGen Healthcare is reportedly exploring options that could include selling the company.

NXGN shares lost 6% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 11% gain, valuing the company at $1.2 billion.

Reader Comments

From UGM Attendee: “Re: Epic. Moving into the documentation management systems area with the announcement of Gallery at UGM.” Unverified.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The assets of AireHealth, which offers a platform-connected nebulizer for monitoring chronic respiratory conditions, will be liquidated in an online auction.

WellSky acquires Experience Care, which offers an EHR and other software for post-acute and long-term care providers.

Hospital shared services vendor Ovation Healthcare acquires 3D Technology, which offers professional and managed services.

Sales

• Ireland’s Bon Secours Health System will implement Meditech Expanse.

People

Kurt Hammond, MBA (EMed Digital Healthcare) joins Exo as chief commercial officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Delta Air Lines is upgrading its onboard medical technologies to include app-powered direct access to doctors on the ground and enhanced diagnostic equipment, such as an automatic blood pressure cuff and pulse oximeter. Delta says it will be adding telemedicine and remote monitoring technologies.

Australia’s Queensland Health creates a clinical staff credentialing and training system using SAP, which will support the movement of clinicians among its 16 hospitals and health services.

A new KLAS report looks at Epic’s initiatives to improve EHR efficiency and satisfaction. Providers report increased satisfaction after participating in the company’s Physician Power User and Physician Builders programs. Features that are correlated with improved clinician efficiency are Rover (mobile documentation and notification), Brain (inpatient nurse planning), Secure Chat (staff collaboration), and Hey Epic! (voice assistant and reminders).

Privacy and Security

Hackers who breached a hospital in Israel are contacting its high-profile patients to demand that they pay a ransom to avoid having their medical records published. Among those messaged was Health Minister Moshe Arbel, who released his own medical information rather than be extorted.

Other

I seldom retweet (or re-X), but this is good. Will Manidis is founder and CEO of Science.io, which offers an AI-powered patient cohorting solution for patient screening and research.

Sponsor Updates

• KeyCare caps a successful year of fundraising, health system collaborations, and high-quality telehealth delivery.
• Fast Company names Linus Health’s DCTclock a winner in its 2023 Innovation by Design Awards.
• Lucem Health releases a new episode of the This Week in Clinical AI Podcast.
• Wolters Kluwer Health announces that 15 of its Lippincott healthcare titles received 28 wins in the 35th annual Awards for Publication Excellence competition.
• Healthcare Growth Partners advises Experience Care in its acquisition by WellSky.
• CereCore wins ClearlyRated’s 2023 Best of Staffing Client and Talent Awards for service excellence.

Blog Posts

• A Healthy Healthcare Supply Chain Could Save Lives (Dimensional Insight)
• Adapting Recruitment Strategies for Success in the Gig Economy and Contingent Workforce (Direct Recruiters)
• Assessing Digital Capacity with Tools and Benchmarks (Divurgent)
• The evolution and impact of NIST CSF 2.0 (Fortified Health Security)
• Help Desk Updates: Your Super Weapon to Boost Clinician Productivity (HCTec)
• 5 Key Benefits of Hiring an Epic Consultant for Your EHR Implementation (HealthTech Resources)
• How Application Managed Services (AMS) Can Elevate Your Entire Healthcare Organization (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Development & Implementation of Enterprise Imaging (Impact Advisors)
• Leveraging a Platform Approach for AI: Driving Innovation in Healthcare (Lucem Health)
• Enhancing Care Coordination: Bridging the Gap Between Metropolitan and Community Hospitals (Medhost)

Sponsor Spotlight

Dimensional Insight is a leading provider of analytics, data management, and performance management solutions, offering a complete portfolio of capabilities ranging from data integration and modeling to sophisticated reporting, analytics, and dashboards. Founded in 1989, Dimensional Insight has thousands of customer organizations worldwide and consistently ranks as a top-performing analytics organization. The company is an eight-time Best in KLAS winner in healthcare business intelligence and analytics between 2010 and 2021. (Sponsor Spotlight is free for HIStalk Platinum sponsors).

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
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Morning Headlines 8/24/23

Healthcare software vendor NextGen explores sale

NextGen Healthcare shares rise on the news that the company is considering putting itself up for sale.

Fisher Auction Company will handle the Sale of the Assets of AireHealth, Inc., a Remote Patient Respiratory Care Platform

AireHealth will liquidate its respiratory remote patient monitoring assets including patents, software, hardware, and intellectual property in an online auction September 13.

WellSky Acquires Experience Care to Enhance Long-term Care Providers’ Ability to Operate Efficiently, Advance Resident Care

WellSky acquires Experience Care, which offers health IT for post-acute and long-term care.

U of U server outage brings down hospital, campus, UTA systems

A University of Utah heat-related server outage forces its affiliated health system to revert to downtime procedures and divert emergency patients.

Book Review: “The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond”

Review by Tyler Smith, CEO, Health Data Movers.

Reading a paperback in the age of AI feels (and is) anachronistic. But until Neuralink pumps the information into our brains, such combinations of societal shattering technology breakthroughs and pre-AI workflows remain. In reading “The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond,” it becomes evident that a combination of new technology and old processes will prevail in medicine over the next phase of technological advancement.

Given an early glimpse of GPT-4, authors Peter Lee, PhD, Carey Goldberg, and Isaac Kohane, MD penned distinctive chapters focused on their areas of expertise and the potential they have experienced or can imagine with the application of GPT-4 to medicine. They explain the basics of the incoming technology — including the fundamentals of LLM and machine learning, along with platforms like Nuance DAX — and contemplate the potential ethical pitfalls and opportunities of AI, including non-medical capabilities such as writing poetry.

Although presented as an academic text, the co-authors’ diverse backgrounds: computer scientist (Lee), physician (Kohane), and journalist / patient advocate (Goldberg) bring variety and thus life to case studies. Endowed with an introduction by the present king of AI, Sam Altman, and closed with a piece by Microsoft’s CTO, Kevin Scott, the work has all the makings of AI thought leadership star power.

Coming fresh off a viewing of “The Terminator,” the ethically positive potential of AI was a pleasant surprise, underscored by the authors’ assertion that GPT-4’s tone is more empathetic and caring than human doctors, a viewpoint reiterated recently in this post by Chris Longhurst, MD.

Quite a plot twist if the robot’s apparent empathy may force clinicians to improve their own written bedside manner. It has been awhile since I watched “Terminator 2,” but that might be a more appropriate cinematic pairing.

But as the authors take us through the modern reality of endless data capture and regulatory compliance processes (the dreaded prior auth!) that plague our healthcare providers, only a reader devoid of empathy would overlook that physicians are drowning in typing. If AI can lift the clerical burden, maybe a softer touch can find time on a physician’s daily calendar.

As an Epic implementation consultant who came of age during the Meaningful Use era, the hope presented in the book validated days and nights spent in Chronicles and Hyperspace. True the burden of typing was a byproduct of the installs performed across the country. But if the data that was gathered by such typing can now be mined and used to generate insights, and if the initial installs are seen as the first step in the shift to integrating technology into workflows (workflows that begin to substitute vocal cords for fingers), maybe it wasn’t all in vain.

A more radical prognostication of the future applications of AI in medicine would have made the book monumentally more thought-provoking. A scene similar to that contained in Lanier’s “Who Owns the Future,” wherein the reader is presented with an image of our lifestyles after physical activity disappears from the human experience (we simply live in pods) would have distinguished the work. Will AI alter our lives in such a way that medicine will change because our injuries and illnesses of the AI era will be symptoms of habits and a life we can’t even begin to imagine?

Since the authors don’t appear to aspire to thread the needle between Huxley and an academic piece, the book achieves stature as the perfect preface to an optimistic future for AI in medicine. As a fellow optimist, I’m hopeful as well, and will take such sentiment into today, where the real chapters of the story are being written.

News 8/23/23

Top News

Waystar is reportedly considering an IPO that could value the healthcare payments business at $8 billion.

The company, formed in 2017 through the merger of Navicure and ZirMed, was valued at $2.7 billion when EQT and Canada Plan Pension Investment Board acquired a majority stake in the company two years later from Bain Capital.

Reader Comments

From Offline Opie: “Re: UGM 2023. The biggest news item from Day 1 was that the WiFi was down most of the day and Verizon service was similarly spotty.” Attendee attentiveness was likely improved, so that might have been a plus. I would pay extra to visit a theater, performing arts center, or restaurant that has implemented a cone of electronic silence to prevent phone addicts from serving as mood-piercing lighthouses. It baffles me why people take the effort to go somewhere, but then yield to the dopamine call of electronic fantasyland (see: a couple staring down at their respective phones in a restaurant).

From Kirin: “Re: Veradigm. It is not new accounting software that is preventing them from filing SEC reports, it’s that the finance team can’t figure out exactly what products they have, with multiple and sometimes overlapping solutions with multiple names, acronyms, and leadership changes. They also had M&A activity and didn’t really know what they were buying or selling. Executives thought they had 150 products, but it’s closer to 220, and the various lists weren’t reconciled before the divestiture to Harris and prior to moving to new accounting software. The auditors aren’t able to contact the people who know the history. The extension deadline is less than a month a away.” Unverified. Veradigm just announced that it can’t guarantee that it will file its annual report, as well as the two following quarterly reports, by the September 18 deadline for Nasdaq de-listing.

From Tippi: “Re: [company name omitted.] Speculation has it that the president has stepped away from company operations and will leave once terms are agreed on.” Unverified. I’ve omitted specific details that were provided since it’s not fair to name names without an official announcement.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Signs that your press release is poorly written and thus likely to be ignored:

• It leads off with the word “today.”
• The headline doesn’t summarize the content that few people will actually read.
• It contains nothing newsworthy, such as the eye-rolling “momentum” announcement that pointlessly recaps (and in some cases rewrites) history.
• It fails to clear the “why you should care” bar, providing information that would interest only company insiders and perhaps existing customers.
• It fails to describe what the company sells in a single sentence, instead vomiting up overwrought, unintelligible corporate gibberish to make its work seem loftier.
• It doesn’t list a press contact, thus simultaneously seeking media attention while discouraging it.

I haven’t seen many photos from Epic UGM (maybe because connectivity there has been limited), but here’s my favorite, as Availity gets into the “Castaway” theme. 

Webinars

August 24 (Thursday) 2 ET. “RCM analytics in action: How to use your data to drive decisions + revenue.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Laura Tungate, solution strategist team lead, Waystar. This webinar will describe how to use RCM analytics to take control of your data even if you use outdated or multiple tools. Attendees will learn how to target improvements, describe the KPIs that are key to revenue cycle leaders, prioritize dashboards that spotlight organizational goals and build alignment, and how and when to apply RCM analytics to go from analysis to action faster.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Claims payment and editing software company Lyric raises nearly $91 million. The company, formerly known as ClaimsXten, was sold by Change Healthcare to TPG Capital last October for $2.2 billion as a condition of Change’s $13 billion acquisition by UnitedHealth Group’s Optum business.

Five9 will acquire Aceyus, which offers customer experience analytics.

Sales

• HIE San Diego Health Connect will implement 4medica’s enterprise master patient index.
• Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services selects Smile Digital Health’s data exchange and interoperability software.
• The Norfolk and Waveney Acute Hospital Collaborative in the UK will implement Meditech across its three hospitals.
• UAE’s Kanad Hospital chooses InterSystems TrakCare.

People

Kipu Health names Carina Edwards, MBA (Quil) CEO.

Lisa Nelson, MBA, MMI (MaxMD) joins ADVault as SVP of enterprise integrations.

Jefferson County Health Center (IA) names Tim Belec (Owensboro Health) CIO.

Blanchard Valley Health System (OH) hires Gulshan Mehta (Oracle) as chief digital and information officer.

Donna Robinson, MFA (Change Healthcare) joins TeleVox Healthcare as chief commercial officer.

Mark Michalski, MD (Amazon) joins Northwell-created healthcare AI company Ascertain as CEO.

Emory Healthcare promotes Scott Smiser, MBA to CTO.

Digital wound care technology vendor Swift Medical hires Neil Sharma, MBA (Sword Health) as chief commercial officer and Joseph Filippoli, MBA (Tabula Rasa HealthCare) as CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Moffitt Cancer Center McKinley Hospital (FL) implements Pcare’s interactive patient care and engagement system within its new inpatient surgical facility.

In Australia, the Illawarra Shoalhaven and Sydney Local Health Districts deploy Sectra’s enterprise imaging software.

A new KLAS report looks at how advanced users of next-generation digital fax solutions are moving toward extracting discrete clinical data from faxes using NLP or OCR. Most of the users say that digital fax is a key part of their interoperability strategy since they use it to ingest data, order, and bills. They say that “faxing is here to stay” and predict that even paper-based faxing will see increased use because of its ease of use and inherent security.

Sponsor Updates

• Findhelp publishes a new whitepaper, “Consumer Privacy and Consent: Implications for Social Care and Social Drivers of Health in the United States.”
• The Connecticut Institute for Communities deploys population health solutions from EClinicalWorks.
• Ascom releases a new report, “Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS), A Clinical Safety Net, Drives Tomorrow’s Brighter Healthcare Outlook.”
• Bamboo Health will host a Headshot Studio at the NACHC CHI & Expo August 27-29 in San Diego.
• CHIME releases a new Opioid Action Center Podcast, “Interoperability & Data Sharing at the Speed of Trust.”
• Clinical Architecture celebrates its sixteenth anniversary.
• Nordic posts a new episode of its podcast, “Designing for Health: Interview with Matt Sakumoto, MD.”
• Current Health publishes a new case study, “Keeping High-Risk Heart Failure Patients Out of the Hospital.”

Blog Posts

• Privacy, Policy, and Personal Data (Findhelp)
• 5 Ways Small Hospitals and Rural Health Systems Can Compete with Big Business (Access)
• Pioneering Healthcare Interoperability: Unveiling Key Technologies and Integrations (AdvancedMD)
• Outpatient CDI: Ensuring Accurate and Complete Documentation (AGS Health)
• Building successful risk and quality teams in healthcare: Strategies and best practices (Arcadia)
• The Road to Conversational Messaging & Conversational Engagement: A Heartbeat Panel Recap (Artera)
• Top 5 eligibility mistakes to avoid for a healthy revenue cycle (Availity)
• Five9 named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service (Five9)
• Best practices for virtual monitoring patients at risk of suicide (AvaSure)
• Putting the Humanity Back into the Workers’ Compensation Physical Rehabilitation Journey (Bardavon)
• CIO Cohort: Advice on Cloud Migration Trends and Challenges (CereCore)
• The Power of Healthcare Analytics: Unleashing the Potential of Payvider Partnerships for Enhanced Care (Clearsense)
• Privacy Investigations and User Access Monitoring: 5 Things Healthcare Leaders May Not Be Thinking About (Clearwater)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/21/23

Top News

Point32Health, the second-largest insurer in Massachusetts, reports a six-month loss of $103 million that its CFO attributes almost entirely to a security breach at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.

Harvard Pilgrim discovered the ransomware attack on April 17, 2023. Its website and online member accounts were offline for more than two months.

The hackers gained access to the protected health information of 2.5 million people, which was exfiltrated from its systems.

Reader Comments

From Cosmos: “Re: Meditech. Has quietly shut down its professional services division. Their website was just scrubbed of any mention of this service.” Confirmed, at least the “scrubbed from the website” part. The company hasn’t replied to my inquiry from Friday or the one from mid-May when a reader first told me that the service was being eliminated, four years after it was announced. UPDATE: Meditech re-sent a response from my May inquiry that I didn’t receive, with this update:

MEDITECH will continue to offer services for analytics and quality initiatives to further the widespread adoption of these expert-based solutions across our customer base to ensure customer success. We are in the process of defining all of these services and will release more details on our website as they become available. Going forward, customer requests for large-scale, full implementation project work will be directed toward MEDITECH-certified consulting firms. All existing contracts will be honored to ensure customer success.

From Baffle; “Re: HIStalk search. Could you add a function that returns pages with links?” The existing search function at the top of each page does that, although it’s really just a Google site search. Everybody would like to be able to search with sorting or filters by date range, but I’ve spent money several times on custom search engines and WordPress plug-ins that failed to work ideally. A viable company will eventually develop an affordable ChatGPT-powered chatbot search tool that will help catalog the treasure trove of industry information that is contained in the 16 years’ worth of HIStalk content — I didn’t save information from the old site host from the first four years – and I’ll be excited to implement that. Everything here has already cleared the bar of being both newsworthy and concise, so powering that with ChatGPT-type access would be powerful for market research and learning from the past.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents would like having their UTI treated via telehealth, but with a doctor or health system they are familiar with rather than someone from a national telehealth service.

New poll to your right or here: Do you think it’s good that hospitals are consolidating into huge health systems? I set up the poll, the choices of which are admittedly clunky by necessity, to allow you to answer in your multiple roles as a consumer, taxpayer, and health IT employee.

Listening: 90s-style grungy indie rock from Blondshell, which is actually just LA-based Sabrina Teitelbaum under a far more marketable brand along with a backing band that can rock hard. The concept of “band” is fading fast in favor of one-shot collaborations and solo artists hiring other players to retain career flexibility, revenue, and the benefit of independent solo craftsmanship.

The industry seems to be thawing out again and competitors are repositioning themselves after a year of hunkering down, so this is for their marketing folks. Current HIStalk sponsors get free spotlights and text ads, while prospective ones can talk to Lorre about the benefits of full-year exposure. Startups and former sponsors might even get a lagniappe. Lorre also has a single Top Spot banner for companies that are seeking maximal exposure and the satisfaction of always seeing their ad atop those of competitors. Sponsors get zero influence over news and opinion, but that’s to their advantage since decision-makers will bail quickly on thinly veiled pay-for-play and inexpert babbling.

Webinars

August 24 (Thursday) 2 ET. “RCM analytics in action: How to use your data to drive decisions + revenue.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Laura Tungate, solution strategist team lead, Waystar. This webinar will describe how to use RCM analytics to take control of your data even if you use outdated or multiple tools. Attendees will learn how to target improvements, describe the KPIs that are key to revenue cycle leaders, prioritize dashboards that spotlight organizational goals and build alignment, and how and when to apply RCM analytics to go from analysis to action faster.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Nasdaq notifies Veradigm that the company remains non-compliant with its listing requirements and faces de-listing for its failure to file its FY2022 and Q1/Q2 financial reports, which the company blames on software it implemented to meet new accounting standards. Veradigm says it hopes to file the reports before the 180-day exception period ends on September 18, but can’t guarantee it.

A good article in Behavioral Health Business reviews the digital therapeutics market following the bankruptcy of substance abuse app vendor Pear Therapeutics:

• Insurers are reluctant to pay for digital therapeutics products, although state Medicaid plans and the VA have been more active in covering them.
• Those Medicaid programs are concerned that other companies will follow Pear’s example in failing to stick around long enough to deliver value.
• Programs that require provider workflow changes and education are less likely to succeed.
• Companies are trying to establish a foothold with employers instead of treating their offering as a pharmacy benefit.
• Insurers are particularly reluctant to pay for software-only products, so companies are expanding to bundle coaching and clinical oversight as a virtual-first service.

Sales

• West Tennessee Healthcare engages Nordic to support its transition from Oracle Health to Epic.

Announcements and Implementations

London-based virtual hospital startup Doccla, which works with NHS, acquires remote patient monitoring platform vendor Open TeleHealth to expand into nine additional countries in Europe.

MUSC Health Orangeburg will go live on Epic on December 7, replacing Oracle Health.

Other

Epic UGM runs Monday through Wednesday this week. I always appreciate getting attendee reports. Verona is under a heat advisory (isn’t everybody), with highs Sunday through Wednesday of 92, 85, 95, and 95 versus barely 80 degrees last year. Cling to those memories of huddling by the first-night’s campfire in the crisp air, but at least be glad it’s not on Thursday, when the high will hit 100 degrees.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “How healow Self-Scheduling Helped a New Practice Fill 400 Appointment Slots.”
• SeamlessMD’s Digital Patient Podcast features Meditech EVP and COO Helen Waters.
• NTT Data becomes a Microsoft Global System Integrator partner.
• Ronin publishes a new whitepaper, “Clinician Experience: The Missing Link Between High-Efficiency and High-Tech Healthcare.”
• Visage Imaging posts a case study titled “Optimizing Enterprise Imaging in the Cloud Using Visage 7 PACS Platform on AWS with Allina Health.”
• Sectra announces that a US-based health system will expand its use of the company’s technology to include the Sectra One Cloud enterprise imaging cloud subscription service for diagnostic imaging.
• Verato will exhibit at the Civitas 2023 Annual Conference August 21-23 in Maryland.
• Waystar will exhibit at the HFMA North Carolina HFMA Summer Conference August 23-25 in Myrtle Beach, SC.
• Wolters Kluwer Health will present at Rise West 2023 August 29 in Dallas.

Blog Posts

• How Meditech is driving AI innovations in health IT (Meditech)
• Amplifying Success: Integration Drives Positive Patient Experience (NeuroFlow)
• Lights Out: Defeat Digital Darkness (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• How Integrated Is Your Omnichannel Strategy? Here’s a Quick Guide (OptimizeRx)
• How Better Communication Improves Revenue Cycle Management (PMD)
• Leapfrog Rapid Response: Interventions to Improve Your Healthcare Ratings (ReMedi Health Solutions)
• IOT Sensing-as-a-Service Enriches Hospital Food Service (SmartSense by Digi)
• What Is the CMS GUIDE Model: A Paradigm Shift in Dementia Care (Trualta)
• Healthcare Transformation Series: Why Incorporating Digital Mental Health Solutions Makes Sense (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 8/18/23

Top News

Patient intake software vendor Phreesia acquires Access EForms, which specializes in electronic forms management and automation.

Webinars

August 24 (Thursday) 2 ET. “RCM analytics in action: How to use your data to drive decisions + revenue.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Laura Tungate, solution strategist team lead, Waystar. This webinar will describe how to use RCM analytics to take control of your data even if you use outdated or multiple tools. Attendees will learn how to target improvements, describe the KPIs that are key to revenue cycle leaders, prioritize dashboards that spotlight organizational goals and build alignment, and how and when to apply RCM analytics to go from analysis to action faster.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Smart virtual assistant and workflow automation vendor Orbita acquires the assets of Wellbe, which offers patient journey automation software.

Babylon files Chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy in the US, with the COO noting in filings that the company has no money available to pay unsecured creditors. The company, whose market cap peaked at $8 billion shortly after going public via a SPAC merger in 2021, lost $221 million on revenue of $1.1 billion in 2022.

Musculoskeletal health measurement technology vendor Figur8 raises $25 million in a Series A funding round. The company began as a sports medicine technology project of MIT, Mass General, and the Boston Red Sox.

Oregon Health & Science University announces its intention to acquire Legacy Health, creating a 10-hospital, 32,000-employee system in the Pacific Northwest.  

Blue Shield of California will replace its pharmacy provider CVS Health with Amazon, Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs, and other companies, sending shares of pharmacy benefit manager owners CVS, Cigna, and UnitedHealth Group down.

People

Colleen Watson (FinThrive) joins Divurgent as VP of sales management and operations.

Announcements and Implementations

Vanderbilt University Medical Center pilots a virtual nurse program in which dedicated virtual nurses will initially focus on created admitting and discharge documentation.

Abridge, whose app turns doctor-patient conversations into transcripts and visit summaries, becomes the first member of Epic’s Partners and Pals integration program.

Ellkay announces LKOasis, an enterprise-wide data management platform that expands its LKArchive data archive.

Government and Politics

A new Florida law requires Medicaid-accepting hospitals to add an admission form item asking patients if they are a US citizen or lawful visitor and to submit their aggregated information to the state quarterly. Florida is the only state with that requirement.

The Department of Defense and the VA work together to solve IT integration problems at Chicago’s Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center, the only facility that serves both DoD and VA patients. Health center employees have struggled with file sharing, printing, and collaborating using Microsoft Teams, problems that the organizations hope to resolve by the end of the year.

Other

Bondholders of Mercy Iowa City ask a judge to investigate the hospital’s bankruptcy, its acceptance of what critics call a lowball University of Iowa offer to buy it for $20 million, and rumors that UI wants the hospital only to convert it to a behavioral health facility. The bondholders also want an examiner to review the hospital’s EHR migration to Allscripts Sunrise in 2021, which they call an “inferior platform” that caused the hospital to lose millions of dollars.

The American Medical Association examines the myth that all electronic prescriptions require two-factor authentication. It notes that the DEA requires two-factor authentication only when prescribing controlled substances and that Ohio has eliminated previous requirements for non-controlled outpatient orders. AMA recommends checking with the state medical society or board of pharmacy, noting that Cleveland Clinic alone saves 12,000 physician hours per year after AMA worked with Epic to notify Ohio CMIOs.

Non-profit CommonSpirit Health paid its CEO $35 million in its tax year ending in June 2022, as called out by Stat. The company’s federal filings indicate that the organization, which was formed with the 2019 merger of Catholic Health Initiatives and Dignity Health, paid 36 executives more than $1 million that year, including $3 million to its chief information and digital officer. Among its top paid contractors are Conifer Health Solutions ($574 million) and HCL Technologies ($26 million). Two of its executives are lobbyists, one of whom was paid $2.4 million.

The future of Amazon’s Alexa devices is questioned as its top executive leaves the company amidst poor consumer adoption, a shift of interest to ChatGPT, and reported losses by the unit of $5 billion per year with little progress toward the intended goal of boosting Amazon’s overall sales. Bloomberg’s commentary:

For most, Alexa became little more than an overly-sophisticated kitchen timer, or a decent-enough smart speaker for those who were not audiophiles. Amazon’s attempts to remind consumers of different “skills” Alexa had became intrusive and irritating. Developers, initially intrigued by the possibilities of a voice-first platform, came and went when they realized engagement was low. Ambitions of Alexa within cars made way for the more full-featured offerings from Apple’s Car Play and Google’s Android Auto. And then ChatGPT arrived. In the space of a few weeks — maybe even days — ChatGPT wowed more consumers with its intelligence than Alexa has managed in its entire lifetime.

Sponsor Updates

• Findhelp publishes a new case study, “Enhancing Social Care Coordination: How findhelp Partners with 211 & United Way.”
• Healthcare Triangle publishes a new whitepaper, “The Future of Healthcare Infrastructure: An In-Depth Look at the Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC) Landscape.”
• Black Book Market Research behavioral health survey-takers recognize Netsmart for its top-performing technology solutions and services.
• Lucem Health releases a new This Week in Health Podcast.
• Nordic posts a new episode of DocTalk titled “The future of health through widespread precision medicine.”

Blog Posts

• Prisma and Healow – The Miller Family Medicine Group (EClinicalWorks)
• CX Summit: Five9 Partners Showcase the Power of People, Our Partners, and Technology (Five9)
• Change Management Tips for Large-Scale Medical Group Implementations (Impact Advisors)
• The Importance of Support & Training When Choosing an EHR Provider (Medhost)

Contacts

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

News 8/16/23

Top News

Urgent care technology vendor Experity acquires cloud-based, teleradiology-focused OnePACS for an undisclosed sum.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

My five-year-old, 32 GB IPad has been beset with performance problems that are individually quirky and collectively infuriating. I was about to fling it across the room like a Frisbee last night when I noticed that Apple is offering a new 64 GB Generation 9 version from 2021 at just $250 via Amazon. It arrived less than eight hours later, and pairing it up with its older sibling and copying everything over took just a handful of clicks (that ecosystem convenience is why I’m willing to be slightly extorted by Apple). The new one is snappy, with a nice display and a ton of available memory for a non-power user like me. The old one was too, back in its day, when it cost me $329. It feels like I got a decent deal and acceptable annualized cost both times.

Webinars

August 24 (Thursday) 2 ET. “RCM analytics in action: How to use your data to drive decisions + revenue.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Laura Tungate, solution strategist team lead, Waystar. This webinar will describe how to use RCM analytics to take control of your data even if you use outdated or multiple tools. Attendees will learn how to target improvements, describe the KPIs that are key to revenue cycle leaders, prioritize dashboards that spotlight organizational goals and build alignment, and how and when to apply RCM analytics to go from analysis to action faster.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Italian investment firm Exor becomes the biggest investor in Philips, acquiring a 15% stake in the company for $2.8 billion. Shoe aficionados may be interested to know that Exor, run by the powerful Agnelli family, also has a hefty stake in the French footwear house of Christian Louboutin.

Healthcare market intelligence firm Definitive Healthcare acquires provider data and analytics startup Populi.

European IT company Cegeka will acquire Computer Task Group, a global, multi-vertical digital transformation consultancy, in a take-private deal valued at $170 million.

Hospitals are cutting back on their venture capital investing, Stat notes, shutting down or downsizing their splashily announced investment arms.

Sales

• The Veterans Health Administration will offer veterans access to digital educational medical content from Mediflix.
• Nashville General Hospital (TN) will implement Oracle Health’s CommunityWorks EHR.
• SSM Health (MO) selects diagnostic imaging technology and support services from Siemens Healthineers.
• The Health Plan Alliance chooses 1upHealth as its preferred vendor for interoperability solutions and services.

People

Cathy Donohue, MBA (Commure) joins CodaMetrix as SVP of product.

Annexus Health names Sarah Provan (PointClickCare) VP of operations.

Bridget Bell (Nordic) joins Cardamom Health as VP of business development.

David Singer (East Tennessee Children’s Hospital) returns to LCMC Health (LA) as CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

Lakewood Health System (MN) goes live on Epic.

London Northwest University Hospital will go live on Oracle Health later this week.

Williamson Medical Center (TN) implements interactive patient engagement technologies from Sonifi Health throughout its new postpartum unit and renovated emergency department and lobby areas.

Other

A ProPublica report describes how insurance companies used a CMS staffer turned lobbyist to convince the federal government to allow them to charge providers up to 5% to receive electronic payments, in essence charging doctors and hospitals fees to get paid the money that is owed to them. An MGMA poll found that large medical practices pay up to $1 million per year in fees, while AdventHealth says it pays $1.8 million. The report concludes,

The shift from paper to electronic processing, which began in the early 2000s and accelerated after the Affordable Care Act went into effect, was intended to increase efficiency and save money. The story of how a cost-saving initiative ended up benefiting private insurers reveals a lot about what ails the US medical system and why Americans pay more for health care than people in other developed countries. In this case, it took less than a decade for a new industry of middlemen, owned by private equity funds and giant conglomerates like UnitedHealth Group, to cash in.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center describes how it has reduced physician inbox message volume with changes to Epic MyChart. Some of them are:

• Clinicians are no longer notified when a patient hasn’t read a message within 48 hours, which was generating 60,000 notifications per month.
• Patients are told that they can expect a response within two business days and that messages aren’t read on weekends or holidays.
• The “read receipt” timestamp was removed from patient view since it triggered when anyone looked at the message, not just the physician.
• The message character limit was reduced from 1,500 to 1,000.
• Patients are allowed 14 days to reply to an existing message threat instead of the previous 60 days, at which time they must enter a new message.
• A MyChart information banner suggests that patients add common VUMC phone numbers as contacts so they will know to accept those calls.

Cooper University Health Care (NJ) will include an area akin to an Apple Genius Bar within its new facility at Moorestown Mall. Dubbed Cooper Connect, the area will have staff on hand to answer anyone’s questions about the health system’s app, as well as any health and wellness app. The renovated Sears department store is slated to open in November.

Sponsor Updates

• Clinical Architecture staff sort and label 3,050 cans at Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana.
• Virginia Eye Institute transitions to EClinicalWorks V12.
• Dimensional Insight will co-host a community hike August 29 in Concord, MA with HIT Like a Girl to promote women in health IT.
• Ascom publishes a new report, “Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS), a Clinical Safety Net, Drives Tomorrow’s Brighter Healthcare Outlook.”
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Navigating the 340B Drug Pricing Program for healthcare providers.”
• Clearwater publishes a new case study, “Fortifying At-Home Wellness Screenings: Reperio Health Teams Up with Clearwater to Safeguard Security.”
• Nordic released a video titled “Craig Joseph, MD, and his journey to Verona.”
• Current Health releases a new case study, “Care-at-home program keeps high-risk heart failure patients out of the hospital.”
• Spok announces that 20 of the 22 adult hospitals and seven out of the 10 children’s hospitals named to the latest US News & World Report Best Hospitals Honor Rolls use the company’s secure healthcare communications solutions to facilitate care collaboration and support exceptional patient care.

Blog Posts

• High-Quality Clinical Data Increases Risk Score Accuracy for Health Plans (Availity)
• The Role of Intelligent Automation in Relieving Staffing Burdens in Healthcare (Access)
• Are you tracking how often patients visit your practice? (AdvancedMD)
• Mastering the Revenue Cycle: Navigating a Four-Stage Journey to Transformation and Maturity (AGS Health)
• Identifying the right patients at the right time (Arcadia)
• Automation Saves Thousands for Meditech Expanse Implementation (Time is Money) (CereCore)
• Changes are Coming for the NIST Cybersecurity Framework: What Do They Mean for Healthcare and How Can You Prepare for Compliance? (Clearwater)
• Improving Clinical Documentation: Simplifying Fax Processing for Healthcare Providers (Consensus Cloud Solutions)
• Strengthening Healthcare Security: Moving Beyond Traditional Risk Assessments (CloudWave)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/14/23

Top News

HHS’s Office for Civil Rights launches a federal civil rights investigation of Vanderbilt University Medical Center for providing Tennessee’s attorney general with the fully identified medical records of transgender patients. Patients who were involved have already initiated a class action lawsuit against VUMC for that release, as demanded by the AG.

An attorney who is representing the patients in the lawsuit against VUMC for failing to de-identify the records said, “The more we learn about the breadth of the deeply personal information that VUMC disclosed, the more horrified we are. Our clients are encouraged that the federal government is looking into what happened here.”

The office of Tennessee AG Jonathan Skrmetti said it hasn’t heard about the investigation, but told reporters, “Turning a disagreement about the law into a federal investigation would be plainly retaliatory and would reflect a dangerous politicization of federal law enforcement.”

Reader Comments

From Nicholas S. Desai, MD: “Re: using generative AI. We are using software that develops working clinical summaries or drafts of the patient’s status that display right in the patient list in Epic. Our physicians, nurses, and case managers are using in real-time on the front lines. We recently reached the 1 million mark and I think there are a lot of great lessons on how to deploy AI in clinical workflows from our experience. We are seeing good time savings from the tool, as well as good user reception and adoption. There are not many real world examples of clinical generative AI in actual use and at fairly high scale that I am aware.” Dr. Desai is chief medical officer and chief quality officer at Houston Methodist Health System (Sugar Land). They are using software from Dallas-based Pieces Technologies, which was spun off from Parkland Memorial Hospital several years ago, which notes that its product has autonomously generated 1 million real-time clinical summaries for 72,000 patients in the first seven months after go-live.  

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents don’t expect AI-powered systems to be used to diagnose and treat patients without a doctor’s involvement any time soon. However, some commenters note that doctors have successfully supervised other practitioners for years, allowing EMTs and other clinically trained people to work within established guardrails with the oversight of a physician medical director.

New poll to your right or here: What type of doctor would be your #1 clinical choice for a telehealth visit for a urinary tract infection? I’m eliminating price, insurance coverage, etc. to get an idea of all things being equal, who would you want treating your UTI, and you can say N/A if you would choose an in-person visit if available. I’m also saying “doctor” to simplify voting, but “doctor” could be a different type of clinician if appropriate.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Cardamom Health. With a multidisciplinary, team-based approach, The Madison, WI-based company brings a modern model of delivering low cost EHR data, analytics, and applications services. Cardamom helps healthcare organizations tackle some of today’s toughest challenges – including patient engagement, value-based care, clinical research, and revenue cycle management – with a sharp focus on integrating and harmonizing data to generate meaningful, timely, and actionable insights. Founded by a KLAS award-winning managed services leadership team, the company’s data, analytics, and applications experts have decades of experience serving over 150 healthcare organizations, including some of the most complex health systems in the US. The company empowers its clients to maximize the value of their IT investments by providing results-based services to improve quality, business outcomes, and overall patient experience – all at a much lower cost than traditional consulting. Thanks to Cardamom Health for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

August 24 (Thursday) 2 ET. “RCM analytics in action: How to use your data to drive decisions + revenue.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Laura Tungate, solution strategist team lead, Waystar. This webinar will describe how to use RCM analytics to take control of your data even if you use outdated or multiple tools. Attendees will learn how to target improvements, describe the KPIs that are key to revenue cycle leaders, prioritize dashboards that spotlight organizational goals and build alignment, and how and when to apply RCM analytics to go from analysis to action faster.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority provisionally clears UnitedHealth’s $1.5 billion acquisition of healthcare software vendor EMIS after identifying no anti-competitive concerns.

Sales

• Children’s Health Ireland chooses Oneview Healthcare’s digital patient engagement and education system.
• Ireland-based Bon Secours Health System launches a project to implement Meditech at its five hospitals, with the assistance of Nordic. 

Announcements and Implementations

Mount Sinai Health system will become the first health system to move its Epic instance to Microsoft Azure Large Instances.

Other

Oracle talks up the desirability of Nashville – for which the company received $278 million in government incentives to open a facility there – and says it will move a “national healthcare conference” of Oracle Health there. The invited guests at an Oracle event in Nashville were almost entirely drawn from healthcare.

Sponsor Updates

• NTT Data staff support the AFCEA Educational Foundation’s golf tournament fundraiser.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Empowering Communities, Analytics for Better Patient Care.”
• Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Karim Jessa, MD.”
• Optum and Capella University announce a new nurse practitioner program to address the growing national need for skilled clinicians.
• Surescripts publishes a new data brief, “Prescribers & Pharmacists Look for More Collaboration & New Technologies to Improve Care.”
• Waystar will exhibit at the MedInformatix Summit August 15-17 in Fort Lauderdale, FL.Forrester includes West Monroe in its new report, “The Digital Transformation Services Landscape, Q3 2023.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health announces strong results for the Lippincott portfolio of journals in the 2022 Journal Impact Factor rankings released by Clarivate Analytics.
• Zen Healthcare IT will exhibit at the Civitas conference August 20-23 in National Harbor, MD.

Blog Posts

• Humbitious: Why low-ego and high-drive is the way to lead through healthcare challenges (Meditech)
• Where to Find Mental Health Funding – A Cheat Sheet (NeuroFlow)
• Q&A: How one health system helps radiologists get more done in less time with PowerScribe One (Nuance)
• EHRs or social interactions: Can’t we have both? (Nordic)
• Four Pros for Standardizing the Formulary (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Insights from MedDev: Omnichannel Marketing Solutions for Medtech Brands (OptimizeRx)
• A New Partnership with Databricks (Redox)
• On-call scheduling: 4 ways to boost patient care and satisfaction (Spok)
• The Importance of Focusing on Healthcare Inequalities with SDOH (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 8/11/23

Top News

Doximity reports Q1 results: revenue up 20%, adjusted EPS $0.19 versus $0.14, beating analyst expectations for both.

Shares fell more than 20% on the news, however, as the company lowered sales projections and announced plans to lay off 10% of its headcount.

DOCS shares have lost 31% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 11% gain, valuing the company at $5 billion.  

Webinars

August 24 (Thursday) 2 ET. “RCM analytics in action: How to use your data to drive decisions + revenue.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Laura Tungate, solution strategist team lead, Waystar. This webinar will describe how to use RCM analytics to take control of your data even if you use outdated or multiple tools. Attendees will learn how to target improvements, describe the KPIs that are key to revenue cycle leaders, prioritize dashboards that spotlight organizational goals and build alignment, and how and when to apply RCM analytics to go from analysis to action faster.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

California Heathline questions how Kaiser Permanente can meet its stated goal of reducing healthcare costs by spending $5 billion to create the Risant Health hospital group, whose first acquisition will be Geisinger. The deal doesn’t involve KP’s physician group, whose physicians are paid on a per-member, per-month basis, and the non-profit KP doesn’t own health plans and practice groups in other states, which is one reason that its previous expansion attempts failed. Experts question whether KP is planning an expansion into lucrative fee-for-service operations, or if not, whether Risant Health will distract KP from its core operations and increase costs.

One-time digital health high-flyer Babylon Health swirls further down the drain following the collapse of its planned take-private merger with MindMaze. The company announces the shutdown of its US business, the laying off of its 94 employees, and its hopes to sell its UK operations. BBLN went public via a SPAC merger in 2021 and saw its market cap hit $8 billion shortly after. Shares are now at under $0.02 after losing another 20% on Thursday, valuing the company at $350,000.

The private equity owner of video and voice communications vendor Intermedia Cloud Communications is exploring the company’s options, which could include a sale for up to $1 billion. The company’s healthcare call center is integrated with vendor platforms such as Athenahealth, Veradigm, and Oracle Health.

Startup Hey Jane, whose saw its business of selling abortion drugs by mail limited by state legislation, adds new virtual services to treat UTIs, yeast infections, emergency contraception, and herpes treatment. The new offerings will be limited to customers in the same 11 states where its abortion services remain legal.

Sales

• Cigna’s health benefits group will offer its members Virgin Pulse’s health behavior change app.

People

Alaska’s HIE hires Kendra Sticka, PhD, MS, RDN (University of Alaska Anchorage) as executive director.

Chris Alberto (Change Healthcare) joins Divurgent as VP of client service.

CHIME hires Nicole Kerkenbush, RN, MHA, MN (Monument Health) as VP of education. She previously held IT leadership roles in the Army Office of the Surgeon General and the DoD and was a US Army colonel.

Cathy Donohue, MBA (Commure) joins CodaMetrix as SVP of product.

Mike Doyle (Health Catalyst)  joins Impact Advisors as VP. 

Announcements and Implementations

Digital cloud fax and interoperability solutions Consensus Cloud Solutions announces Clarity Clinical Documentation, which uses AI and ML to extract clinical information from faxes, handwritten notes, and scanned documents and post it to the correct patient’s electronic patient record.

Privacy and Security

Zoom’s founder and CEO says that the company’s recently changed terms of service, which seemed to require users to accept Zoom’s use of their recordings for AI training, was “a process failure internally.” He promises customers that “we will never use any of their audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, and other communications like poll results, whiteboard, and reactions to train our AI models.” Customers had complained, and in some cases left the platform, over concerns that their proprietary company information could be exposed, patient privacy could be compromised, and the opt-in decision was at the administrator level so that meeting participants had no choice except to leave.

Other

A Washington Post report showcases New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital as being among the elite hospitals whose executives are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on AI software and education, while employees are expressing concern about AI mistakes, privacy issues, the possibility of staff cuts, and using software that has not undergone clinical trials. The dean of AI at Sinai’s medical school says that AI vendors are overhyping its capabilities and urges oversight by physicians and the federal government, while its VP of digital experience says the hardest part of introducing AI is the reluctance of doctors and nurses to change their decades-old ways.

Billionaire celebrity and influencer Kim Kardashian draws heat from her fans for pitching a startup’s full-body “preventative” MRI scans for $2,500. She and the company claim that she wasn’t paid for her endorsement. Her followers note that the Prenuvo tests aren’t covered by insurance and are therefor not affordable for most of them.

Sponsor Updates

• Five9 interns volunteer as part of Habitat for Humanity’s Playhouse Program.
• Clearwater launches its Cyber Now Initiative, offering providers educational assistance, assessment of cybersecurity practices, and expert resources to build and manage cybersecurity programs.
• Best Medical Care (NY) upgrades to EClinicalWorks Cloud.
• Meditech will host its Meditech Live leadership summit September 20-22 in Foxborough, MA.
• Arcadia publishes a report titled “The Current State of Healthcare Analytics Platforms.”
• Black Book Market Research survey-takers recognize Netsmart as the top overall client-rated, post-acute technology platform for the ninth year in a row.
• Impact Advisors welcomes 28 new colleagues to the company.
• Lucem Health releases a new episode of its This Week in Clinical AI Podcast.
• Medhost will exhibit at the Mid-South Critical Access Hospital Conference August 15-17 in Point Clear, AL.

Blog Posts

• Using Data to Stay Compliant with Joint Commission Standards (Dimensional Insight)
• Our expanding community of caring (Findhelp)
• Healthcare cybersecurity threats: July 2023 (Fortified Health Security)
• 5 Ways to Get the Most Out of Nuvolo (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Why new Alzheimer’s drugs rely on early diagnosis & screening (Linus Health)
• Securing an Interconnected World: Minimizing the Risks of Vendor Sprawl (Medhost)

Contacts

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