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.
Contact us.

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.

News 8/9/23

Top News

Roper Technologies acquires enterprise performance management software vendor Syntellis from its private equity owners for $1.4 billion in cash.

Roper will combine the acquired company with its Strata Decision Technology business. 

Syntellis was spun off from Kaufman Hall in 2020.

Reader Comments

From Locus: “Re: ResMed CPAP and MyAir app. Delayed data updates aren’t a patient safety issue, but CPAP compliance is all about timely feedback to user and physician.” ResMed confirms that an error in its over-the-air firmware update inadvertently caused its AirSense 11 PAP devices to send huge amounts of data to the online service’s cloud server, leading to week-long delays in data updates.

From Easy Feesy: “Re: credit card fees. Curious how many physician practices are passing them on to patients who pay their bills with HSA cards.” A few states prohibit sticking the customer for credit card fees that range from 2% to 4%, although a creative workaround is to post the fee-added price and then offer a cash discount. Mrs. H and I had dinner at a cheap Mexican restaurant recently that did this, and while it’s logical since customers have a choice of how to pay, it doesn’t seem worth surcharging a few percentage points on a per-person average tab of maybe $15 when customers truly hate that practice. At least half of that restaurant’s reviews are bad as keyboard warriors lashed out at the clearly stated policy that cost them maybe 50 cents extra, especially since people keep using food delivery services without complaint even as they pile on fees that can end up doubling the in-restaurant price for the honor of having your Dasher steal  some of your chips.

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

Bright Health Group secures additional financing while it completes the sale of its California Medicare Advantage business to Molina Healthcare and shores up its remaining provider network. The company has been in free fall for some time, having sold off its Zipnosis telehealth business in May and closed its insurance offerings in a dozen other markets. It raised $1.6 billion in a 2021 IPO.

London-based digital health company Babylon announces that its take-private merger with brain technology vendor MindMaze will no longer take place. In a somewhat garbled press release, the company says it will explore strategic alternatives so that it can secure additional financing and sell numerous UK- and US-based assets in order to avoid bankruptcy.

Sales

• Prime Healthcare (CA) selects Steer Health’s Concierge personalized patient communication software.
• MUSC Health (SC) will use Andor Health’s ThinkAndor Virtual Command Center as a part of its virtual care program.
• University Hospitals (OH) will use patient data integrity services and software from Harris Data Integrity Solutions to clean up UH Lake Health’s master patient index ahead of its Epic implementation.

People

Peter Schoch, MD (AdventHealth) joins Kno2 as chief health officer.

Cleveland Clinic hires Albert Marinez, MBA (Intermountain) as its first chief analytics officer.

Configo Health names David Bertoch, MHA (Children’s Hospital Association) EVP of pediatric analytics and research programs.

Truepill promotes Paul Greenall to CEO.

Steve Shi (Vault Health) joins Pager as CTO.

Providence hires Ray Chung, MPH (Strategy&) as VP of clinical IT solution delivery.

Announcements and Implementations

Get Well announces GA of its emergency department and inpatient care engagement technology.

Deaconess Health Care (IN) launches a virtual patient flow command center using technology from GE Healthcare.

In an effort to gain firmer financial footing, Campbell County Health (WY) postpones its 2023 Epic go live and severs ties with its RCM vendor Ensemble Health Partners. CCH, which had begun the implementation process in 2021 through a partnership with UCHealth, will roll Epic out next summer.

Government and Politics

Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) asks Google for specific information about the inner workings of Med-PaLM 2 medical large language model, expressing concern that Google’s testing of the product in hospitals constitutes “premature deployment of unproven technology.” He cites his previously expressed concern that Google’s race for AI market share involved “secret partnerships” with hospitals that may threaten patient privacy.

Privacy and Security

Zoom updates its terms of service to require customers to consent (with no opt-out) to having their meeting content used by Zoom for AI training, raising concerns about proprietary content and healthcare privacy. In unrelated news, Zoom – which became a household word in supporting work-from-home programs during the pandemic – will require employees to return to the office for at least two days per week.

Sponsor Updates

• NYSE Floor Talk features Arrive Health CEO Kyle Kiser.
• The Millenium Live Podcast features Ascom Americas Managing Director Kelly Feist, “The Toolbox for Digitizing Clinical Workflows.”
• AvaSure publishes a new whitepaper, “Behavioral health needs in hospitals are rising, are you prepared to keep your patients safer?”
• Baker Tilly publishes a new case study, “Sole community hospital reshapes financial outlook through service line analysis.”
• Bamboo Health publishes a new case study, “How Eagle Physicians & Associates Uses Pings to Improve Its Transitional Care Management Services.”
• Black Book Market Research publishes a list of top client-rated healthcare supply chain solutions exhibiting at the AHRMM23 Annual Meeting.

Blog Posts

• From a CEO: What Makes a Meditech Expanse Implementation Successful (CereCore)
• The Cost Savings of Going Digital with Patient EForms (Access)
• We Surveyed Our Customers on Mental Health Issues. Here’s What We Learned. (AdvancedMD)
• Preparing Now for Coding Impacts of CMS IPPS Final Rule (AGS Health)
• The power of healthcare data analytics in end-of-life care programs (Arcadia)
• Authorizations … in Seconds (Availity)
• 4 Key Insights from AvaSure’s First Digital Summit (AvaSure)
• Disease Registries: How the Right Data Drives Principal Investigators, Researchers, and Informatics Teams Forward(Clearsense)
• Business Impact Analysis: The Critical Starting Point to Resiliency Planning (Clearwater)
• Great Communication Begins with Connection (ConnectiveRx)
• To Strengthen Post-Acute Referrals, Healthcare Must Take a Fresh Look at Data Exchange (Consensus Cloud Solutions)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 8/7/23

Top News

A ransomware attack on Prospect Medical Holdings disrupts or shuts down its 16 hospitals and 165 outpatient locations across five states.

The company’s hospitals are in Southern California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. They include those of health systems Crozer-Keystone, Eastern Connecticut Health Network, and Waterbury Hospital.

Prospect Medical Holdings, which serves mostly low-income patients who are on Medicare or Medicaid, made headlines in 2020 as investigative reports detailed its operational challenges under private equity owners who made hundreds of millions of dollars by loading the acquired hospitals with debt and selling their real estate. Chairman and CEO Sam Lee made $128 million.

The FBI is investigating the cyberattack.

Reader Comments

From Indecent Explosure: “Re: HIMSS annual conference. I think that not only was the timing right for HIMSS to lighten its load and rebuild its finances, the conference will improve under outside expertise.” I agree. HIMSS did an admirable job, at least through 2019, of running a logistically complex conference that generated most of its revenue. However, it tarnished the HIMSS brand as an out-of-control boat show with few actual buyers as its CIO audience was poached and some attendees shifted to hipper, glitzier conferences that were more fun, held in more interesting cities, and that blurred the line between education and vendor prospecting. Informa, like HIMSS conference competitor HLTH, won’t have to strike a balance between commercialism and thought leadership and can instead focus on attendee and exhibitor satisfaction that is measured purely by attendance, exhibitor count, and event profit. HIMSS will need to figure out its new, somewhat diminished role, especially since the educational components were among the conference’s most obvious weaknesses. What I expect we’ll eventually see:

• More conference-sponsored social events, lunches, and entertainment.
• A better conference app that is geared around connecting exhibitors and attendees before, during, and after the conference.
• Better marketing and lead retrieval tools for exhibitors.
• Better support for live-streaming.
• A stronger emphasis on one-on-one vendor meetings in the hosted buyer format to give exhibitors more bang for the buck. Informa’s mission across its many conferences is to connect people to do business.
• The triumphant return of carpet to the exhibit hall aisles.

From Get ‘er Done: “Re: HIMSS and Informa. Did you notice in the HIMSS video interview that the terms of the conference sale haven’t been finalized?” I did notice that. Ken McAvoy, president of Informa’s South Florida Ventures division that will oversee the HIMSS annual conference, said this about a potential conference name change in a HIMSS interview last week: “Hal said we may tweak the name. We’re not changing any name. That ain’t happenin’ … I probably would normally say that only after the negotiations are over, for a number of different reasons.” Informa’s July 27 financial report lists the HIMSS conference under acquisitions, but refers to it as “exclusivity to acquire.” HIMSS coyly refers to the deal as a “strategic partnership” while providing no specifics. I don’t know why Informa was so anxious to publicly refer to an acquisition that has not been consummated and why HIMSS wasn’t better prepared to spin the news more quickly.

From JD: “Re: Optum and UHC. Massive layoff Thursday.” Unverified, but widely reported on TheLayoff.com by folks who say that more cuts are coming through August 10. Specifically named was OptumRx, which simultaneously brought over Patrick Conway, MD as CEO from Optum Care Solutions. His LinkedIn indicates that the prescription benefit manager has 30,000 employees and generates $110 billion in annual revenue.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Few poll respondents predict an increased HIMSS relevance following the sale of its annual conference. Art Vandelay expressed some slightly contrarian ideas about how getting out of the conference business might end up making HIMSS more relevant and useful:

• Provide educational sessions that aren’t vendor commercials or that feature minor achievements that can’t scale to the industry as a whole.
• Use the research community connections of Informa’s Taylor and Francis, which publishes books and academic journals.
• Create less obtrusive policies.
• Consider other conference host cities.
• Provide executive and leadership tracks that would entice decision makers to attend.

New poll to your right or here: Will AI-powered systems diagnose and treat patients without direct, real-time physician involvement? See Scott Gottlieb, MD’s recent op-ed piece to learn why he thinks that will happen sooner rather than later. I specifically say “physician” since use of such a system might be supervised by PAs, nurse practitioners, or other non-physician clinicians.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Virtual primary care technology vendor TytoCare raises $49 million in growth funding, which it will use to further integrate AI into its Home Smart Clinic for diagnostic support and remote exam assistance for chronic care management.

People

Glenn Yarbrough, MBA (CommonSpirit Health) joins field care solutions vendor Coordinista as chief information and technology officer. 

Announcements and Implementations

Google rolls out a new dashboard to alert users when their personal information – including medical records – appears in search results links. The enhanced  “results about you” tool also allows clicking a link to remove results that contain an email address, phone number, or home address, although the company notes that the information is only removed from Google searches, not the source website or other search engines.

Government and Politics

The Drug Enforcement Administration will conduct listening sessions on September 12-13 to gain input about prescribing controlled substances via telemedicine without requiring an in-person evaluation.

Privacy and Security

Brigham and Women’s Hospital alerts 1,000 research study participants that someone used the free, online Tableau Public visualization tool to create and share graphs, which were later found to have included a publicly accessible link that displayed patient names, addresses, diagnoses, lab results, medications, and procedures.

Other

Lexington Regional Health Center (NE) decides to review rather than fire its CEO for failing to disclose to its board “a matter of potential litigation, negotiation, and resulting six-figure settlement” involving IT, which was described as “not stable.” The board secretary and treasurer referred to a recently implemented unnamed computer system and cybersecurity issues that have caused outages of computer and telephone systems. LRHC signed a contract with Cerner in October 2019

Sponsor Updates

• West Monroe employees volunteer at the Downtown Women’s Center in Los Angeles.
• Surescripts Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer Melanie Marcus joins the Exceptional Women Alliance.
• NeuroFlow releases a new Bridging the Gap Podcast, “Child Psychologist and Drexel Department Head Dr. Brian Daly Explores the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis.”
• KLAS Research recognizes Nym Health’s medical coding engine with a 100% customer satisfaction score in its latest Emerging Solutions Spotlight report.
• Waystar will exhibit at the HFMA Region 8 Mid-Summer America Institute August 7-9 in Minneapolis.

Blog Posts

• 3 Stats Highlighting the Impact of Healthcare Analytics on Providers (Clearsense)
• Meeting people where they are: Opioid management in the heartland (Meditech)
• The fog of more: Price transparency will increase health systems’ competition for patients (Nordic)
• Success with Specialists Training Specialists (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• From Staffing to Billing: Is Your Pharmacy Ready to Expand its Clinical Services? (OmniSys)
• Nurses of Note 2023: The District School Nurse (PerfectServe)
• Becoming great: 5 common characteristics of the best hospitals (Spok)
• Visage Breast Density AI Classifier – From Conception to Routine Use (Visage Imaging)
• Rapid Cycle Improvement Programs Deliver Speedy Results, Require Significant Effort (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 8/4/23

Top News

HIMSS announces that it has sold the exhibit portion of its Global Health Conference & Exhibition to London-based B2B events and publishing company Informa. HIMSS will continue to manage the educational aspects of the annual conference. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The organizations say that the 2024 conference in Orlando will offer improved digital features, enhanced registration, and better marketing and product discovery tools. Informa’s conference approach is to connect buyers to sellers in specialist markets. Informa said in a joint interview that it will not change the name of the conference.

The conference will be managed by Informa’s South Florida Ventures, which runs Florida luxury lifestyle shows in art, beauty, boating, and yachting. The organizations did not say how that oversight might affect the HIMSS 2025 and 2026 conferences, which are set for Las Vegas, or if the conference’s Orlando and Las Vegas rotation will change.

HIMSS President and CEO Hal Wolf said that HIMSS had been looking for a partner to take over the logistics of running the conference for about a year, allowing HIMSS to focus on membership activities and programming. It will continue to run its media operation, certification programs, and several smaller conferences. Wolf says 30 HIMSS employees will move to Informa.

HIMSS announced the news to members Wednesday in an email from Wolf, who framed the deal as a “landmark partnership” without mentioning the word “acquisition” as Informa did in its financial report last week. He assured members that they will continue to receive Global Conference registration discounts, noted the “unparalleled thought leadership” of HIMSS, and referred to the conference as “the esteemed industry-leading event that members, attendees, exhibitors, and sponsors know and love.”

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Reed Jobs, the 31-year-old son of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, launches a venture capital firm that will focus on cancer treatments. The firm, named Yosemite, has raised $200 million from investors that include Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. It will run a for-profit business, but will also operate a foundation that will provide grants to scientists. Jobs majored in pre-med at Stanford, but ended up earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history after his father died in 2011.

Sales

• WVU Medicine chooses QGenda Provider Cloud for physician and nurse scheduling, time tracking, and compensation management across its 23 hospitals.
• Imprivata and its regional partner will provide Ireland’s Health Service Executive with Imprivata’s OneSign enterprise access management solution.
• The Richmond Behavioral Health Authority chooses Netsmart CareFabric and MyAvatar for its services and treatment programs.

Government and Politics

New SEC rules will require publicly traded companies to disclose material cybersecurity incidents within four business days.

Other

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says in a CNBC op-ed piece that it won’t be long before autonomous AI systems will diagnosis and treat patients without physician involvement, assuming that federal regulators approve such use. He adds that AI can’t reduce healthcare costs unless it replaces doctors since in healthcare since “the labor itself is the product.”

In Thailand, a hospital that turned away patients when its hospital information system crashed blames a hospital employee for sabotaging the system to convince the hospital to buy backup software. Meanwhile, several procurement employees at three hospitals in Taiwan are fired and indicted for accepting a computer supplier’s bribes of cash, cell phones, and “drinks with female escorts” to win business.

Sponsor Updates

• Clinical Architecture sponsors the 11th Annual Bob Kravitz Golf Outing to Defeat ALS.
• Symplr Chief Nursing Officer Karlene Kerfoot, RN, PhD receives the DAISY Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence and compassion in her 40-year nursing career.
• CereCore International announces that it is a certified hardware integrator for Meditech in the UK and Ireland.
• Ellkay will host its virtual user group meeting August 8-10.
• Get Well will integrate Care.ai’s Smart Care Facility Platform with its in-room interactive TV solution.
• Dresner Advisory Services recognizes Dimensional Insight as an overall leader in business intelligence for the eighth consecutive year.
• Fortified Health Security names Yakov Leonov security compliance advisor.
• Lucem Health releases a new episode of its This Week in Clinical AI Podcast.

Blog Posts

• Most Common EHR Workflow Inefficiencies (HealthTech Resources)
• Meditech Rules: How to Start Optimizing and Solving Pain Points (CereCore)
• 5 EHR Go-Live Tips for a Successful Implementation (Divurgent)
• Update! Information Blocking Penalties Released (HealthMark Group)
• Most Common EHR Workflow Inefficiencies (HealthTech Resources)
• UKG Dimensions Migration: What Customers Should Know (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Outgrown IBM Initiate or another legacy EMPI? Time for a next-generation solution. (Rhapsody)
• The Truth About AI in Healthcare: Separating Fact from Science Fiction (Medhost)

Contacts

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

News 8/2/23

Top News

Amazon Clinic expands its telemedicine service to all 50 states and Washington, DC.

The company had postponed the expansion by several weeks due to lawmaker concerns about its method of collecting and sharing customer health data.

Reader Comments

From First Time Rumor Reporter: “Re: HIMSS. You should look into HIMSS salaries, how the now-dead Accelerate project was funded (maybe by not giving refunds to 2020 exhibitors?), and C-level executives paid not to work who knew the CEO prior to his appointment at HIMSS. Freedom of Information Act requires them to respond to you on the 990 forms.” My responses:

• HIMSS has always paid its CEO in the top percentile range among comparably sized membership non-profits. Its most recent IRS filing (from 2020) shows its top earners as President and CEO Hal Wolf ($1.52 million); HIMSS International Managing Director Bruce Steinberg ($586,000); CTO/CIO Stephen Wretling ($633,000); Chief Americas Officer Denise Hines ($402,000); and HIMSS Media sales VP Frank Bilich ($306,000). Wretling and Hines have since left the organization.
• The HIMSS press contact did not respond to my inquiries about why I can’t log into HIMSS Accelerate any more, so I can’t say for sure that it is dead (or at least deader than usual). I’m not sure how that relates to HIMSS Accelerate Health, which it describes as a support community for vendors, which hasn’t posted “latest news” for years.
• The laborious FOIA process should not be necessary to obtain an organization’s Form 990 filings since they are required by the IRS to provide them on request. They haven’t responded to my inquiries, which most recently involved another try this week with Morgan Searles, senior strategic communications manager.

From Bombastic: “Re: HIMSS IRS forms. My understanding is that at least for one subsidiary, the individual who was responsible for filing them failed to do so for several years (!). It was caught after that person left the organization. Make-up filings are underway.” Unverified. That would certainly be embarrassing if it’s true.

From Kevin: “Re: Solutionreach. The small HIT company that does good work in the mobile and patient engagement solution space lays off 75 employees.” Unverified. I’ve emailed the company and will update if they respond. I noticed while looking at their webpage that founder and CEO Jim Higgins has been recently replaced by Ken Ernsting, whose LinkedIn still shows him as COO of HHAeXchange.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Marathon Health, which offers direct primary care to employers, acquires Cerner Workforce Health Solutions, which runs clinics for 21 clients in 35 health centers.

Personalized medication management technology vendor FeelBetter raises $6 million.

Fitch Ratings downgrades the bonds of Regional West Health Services due to lower profits that it attributes to issues that still persist from its Cerner implementation five years ago.

Sales

• CoxHealth (MO) selects ECareManager enterprise telehealth and Capsule Surveillance software from Philips for its new virtual care delivery program.
• Rush University System for Health (IL) will implement Cadence’s remote patient monitoring technology.
• In Massachusetts, the Executive Office of Health and Human Services opts for PointClickCare’s behavioral health treatment and referral solution.
• Memorial Hermann Health System (TX) will offer in-home, around-the-clock cancer care using technology and clinical services from Reimagine Care.
• Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center will implement Deep 6 AI to match patients to available clinical trials.
• Banner Health will expand its use of Charge Infusion from Medaptus to 22 facilities.

People

Recuro Health promotes Phil Fasano, MBA to chairman and CEO.

RadNet names Sham Sokka, PhD (Philips) chief operating and technology officer of digital health and Sanjog Misra (Philips) chief commercial officer of digital health.

Verily hires Andrew Trister, MD, PhD (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) as chief scientific officer.

Acmeware names Joel Benware (Samaritan Medical Center) as president.

Bryce Olson, global marketing director for Intel’s health and life sciences group and an advocate for precision medicine, died July 13 after a long struggle with cancer.

Sponsor Updates

• Clearsense publishes a new case study, “Higher Physician Efficiency and Lower Costs to Patients.”
• Nym announces that its medical coding engine has received a 100% customer satisfaction score in a recent KLAS report on emerging solutions.
• Artera will exhibit at NACHC CHI & Expo August 27-29 in San Diego.
• Baker Tilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Navigating the No Surprises Act: Opportunities and challenges for provider and payer organizations.”
• Bamboo Health releases a case study, “How Pioneer Valley Accountable Care uses Pings to Lower Costs and Improve Care Coordination.”
• CarePort Health parent company WellSky publishes its second annual Evolution of Care report based on proprietary data from CarePort solutions.
• ConnectiveRx launches a new podcast, “The Science of Medication Access: Is it Working?”

Blog Posts

• Questions for Key Stages of Your Epic System Journey (CereCore)
• Managing and Preventing Denials (AGS Health)
• How text messaging can power year-round patient engagement (Arcadia)
• The fog of more: Price transparency will increase health systems’ competition for patients (Nordic)
• Harnessing Data for a Healthier Future: Overcoming Fragmentation to Improve Health Equity and Care Outcomes (Availity)
• 4 Key Insights from AvaSure’s First Digital Summit (AvaSure)
• Key strategies for healthcare providers implementing the No Surprises Act (Baker Tilly)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 7/31/23

Top News

Surescripts settles Federal Trade Commission charges from 2019 that accused the company of anti-competitive practices in the electronic prescribing and eligibility markets.

FTC claimed that Surescripts maintained a 95% market share in both business lines by using “loyalty contracts” in which customers who did not use Surescripts exclusively would pay higher prices, preventing competitors from gaining enough business to become a viable competitor.

FTC also said that Surescripts executives used what they called “nuclear missiles” threats in 2014 against Allscripts, which was considering using Surescripts competitor Emdeon. FTC also claimed that Surescripts inserted a clause in its value-added reseller contract with McKesson’s RelayHealth that locked it out of the routing market for six years.

The company says that FTC’s case was based on significant factual errors.

The FTC’s proposed order would prohibit Surescripts from engaging in exclusionary conduct and from executing or enforcing non-compete agreements with current and former employees.

Reader Comments

From Hospital CIO: “Re: HIMSS. Got an invitation at 10:21 this past Friday morning for a noon Teams call from HIMSS (wonder what that could be about?) Most annoying is that they don’t know about BCC and blasted 600 email addresses to everybody. Probably time to tweak my mail filters.” Did they talk about the sale of the annual conference? Industry reaction has been minimal, so either folks are waiting to hear what HIMSS has to say or don’t really care.

From Mike Teavee: “Re: HIMSS. If they have not filed federal tax forms, is is possible that they have changed their incorporation or non-profit status?” I don’t know, but they also stopped filing Illinois corporate reports in 2020 along with the required IRS forms, at least under their original name as searched on the IRS and Illinois websites where their previous reports appear. It is curious that those reports stopped in the disastrous HIMSS year of 2020. I can’t find anyone listed on the HIMSS website or LinkedIn who serves as CFO, following the departure of the CFO and then the interim who followed. I would be interested in hearing from in-the-know readers since the current HIMSS regime doesn’t usually respond to my inquiries.

Selling the HIMSS Conference

HIMSS hasn’t said anything about the surprising note in Informa’s six-month financial report on Thursday in which the B2B media and events company says that it has obtained the exclusive right to buy the HIMSS Global Health Conference and Exhibition. Thoughts:

• The “announcement of exclusivity” to buy the conference falls short of announcing an actual acquisition. Still, that mention from a huge, publicly traded company in its financial report suggests its confidence that the deal will go through.
• The acquisition, at least as described minimally by Informa, involves only the HIMSS annual conference, not the other conferences HIMSS runs, its membership business, or any of its other offerings.
• HIMSS hasn’t filed an IRS Form 990 for FY 2021 or 2022. The last full-year Form 990 before the 2020 conference’s cancellation showed conference revenue of $40 million, plus what is likely to have been considerably more from tie-in advertising and corporate sponsorships, so the conference was probably directly or indirectly generating close to half of the organization’s $112 million in annual revenue. 
• Informa says is paid around nine times earnings for its four 2023 acquisitions, including the HIMSS conference (note that including this note suggests that the acquisition price has already been set). That might suggest a HIMSS selling price of around $150 million to $250 million based on pre-2020 conference margins, although the numbers since 2020 are less robust. That is my speculation since I haven’t seen its financial forms.
• The sale would leave HIMSS as a membership organization that operates other conferences (such as those outside the US, assuming Informa doesn’t acquire those), its HIMSS Media arm that generates about $13 million in revenue, and a maturity model consulting firm. All might see reduced revenue when tie-ins to the annual conference are eliminated.
• HIMSS has struggled with the last-minute cancellation of the 2020 conference and dissatisfaction with related refunds and communication. Competition from the HLTH and ViVE conferences, the latter of which involves CHIME and its strong CIO participation, is a threat.
• The HIMSS name is on both the organization and the conference, so any separation of ways would need to iron that out, along with any ongoing involvement that HIMSS might have in the conference.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents think that patients should be able to ask providers to not share some of their EHR data elements, with most of those preferring that provider compliance with those wishes be mandatory. Readers provided some thoughtful comments about the issue, which is more complex than it might seem.

New poll to your right or here: How would HIMSS selling its annual conference affect the organization’s industry relevance?

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

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Fairview Health Services and Sanford Health call off their planned merger, their second attempt in 10 years.

Sales

• Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center chooses Visage Imaging’s enterprise imaging system.

Announcements and Implementations

Salesforce, Oracle Health, and Epic will likely bid to provide Ireland’s proposed patient record system, whose cost could exceed $2 billion over 10 years.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks population health tools help HealthTexas Medical Group achieve a five-star customer rating.
• Meditech announces that EVP and COO Helen Waters has been named an advisor to The Scottsdale Institute.
• The Health is Hard Podcast features Nuance Chief Strategy Officer Peter Durlach.
• Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Dr. A Jay Holmgren.”
• West Monroe employees help with The Journey School’s Intro to Software Engineering Workshop.
• Wolters Kluwer Health and Unbound Medicine release an updated mobile version of Lippincott’s Nursing Drug Handbook.

Blog Posts

• Why UpToDate stands out for infectious disease specialists (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• How Mile Bluff Medical Center thrives as an independent rural healthcare system (Meditech)
• Tissue Analytics, Partners Capture Spotlight at Leading Healthcare Technology Conference (Net Health)
• The Pan-Canadian Interoperability Roadmap: Does it get us where we need to go? (Nordic)
• Four Questions with Optimum CareerPath Analysts (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• From Staffing to Billing: Is Your Pharmacy Ready to Expand its Clinical Services? (OmniSys)
• Bridging the Health Literacy Gap: Improve HCP & Patient Conversations (OptimizeRx)
• How to Enhance Locum Tenens Workflows (PerfectServe)
• Improve Transitional Care Management with Workflow Automation (PMD)
• Interpretable AI in Healthcare: Designing Data Solutions to Build Clinician Trust and Deliver Personalized Care (Ronin)
• The link between the quadruple aim and improved clinical communications (Spok)
• Connecting Beyond Loneliness: Online Opportunities for Older Adults to Foster Meaningful Connections (Trualta)
• ONC Proposed Rule HTI-1 Offers a TEFCA Carrot (Zen Healthcare IT)
• Patient Safety: Embracing Care Plans to Support IHI’s Initiative (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 7/28/23

Top News

Informa Markets will acquire the HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition, the London-based company announced in its six-month financial report.

Informa is a London-based B2B events and publishing company. Its shares are traded on the London Stock Exchange, valuing the company at $11 billion. Some of Informa’s many health-related conferences include Bio-Europe, Pharma Forum, Arab Health, Asia Health, Medlab Asia, Healthcare Innovation Show, and BioMedevice Boston.

HIMSS has not acknowledged the announcement or covered it on its Healthcare IT News site.

HIMSS announced last month that it will move its global headquarters to Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Reader Comments

From Jordan: “Re: HIMSS Accelerate. Seems to be offline.” I tried logging in, resetting my password, and creating a new account over a couple of days, all with no result. I’ve emailed the HIMSS press contact.

From Bean Me Up: “Re: HIMSS. Why haven’t they filed their IRS Form 990 for non-profits? They aren’t saying anything about selling the annual conference despite the news, so their financials would certainly be interesting.” The most recent annual IRS Form 990 for HIMSS covered from July 1, 2020 through December 31, 2020, when it moved its fiscal year end to December 31. I have not seen the filings that were due on May 15, 2022 (for FY2021) and May 15, 2023 (for FY2022), although I seem to recall asking HIMSS for those forms a few months ago.

Webinars

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

Kettering Health’s CMIO and its oncology product owner did an outstanding webinar in which they described how the health system uses Volpara Health’s technology, seamlessly integrated with Epic, to perform cancer risk assessments and create personalized treatment plans. It held my attention throughout, and I enjoyed seeing screenshots of how it works for clinicians and patients. Nice job, Albert Bonnema, MD, MPH (who is a former US Air Force CMIO and USAF genomics research lab chief) and Chris Yuppa.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Remote monitoring and digital therapeutics technology vendor Biofourmis lays off 120 employees, 48 of them based in the US.

Sales

• Student health EHR vendor Medicat announces that an unnamed Major League Baseball team will implement its product to manage its mental health initiatives.

People

Divurgent hires Jeff Fuller, MS (CipherHealth) as VP of analytics delivery.

Recently retired Vanderbilt University Medical Center pediatric informaticist Stuart Weinberg, MD died July 18. He was 63.

Announcements and Implementations

Amazon Web Services announces AWS HealthScribe, an API-powered cloud service that allows developers to create applications that convert audio recordings of doctor-patient discussions into clinical documentation that can be entered into the EHR. The product will focus initially on general medicine and orthopedics. Amazon says that 3M’s MModal, Babylon Health, and ScribeEMR are already using the product.

AWS also announces the rollout of AWS HealthImaging, a developer’s API service for creating medical imaging applications.

Blue Shield of California will use Microsoft Azure to consolidate member, provider, and payer data into a near-real time view that will allow personalizing services and closing care gaps. Its first use case is creating an integrated digital health record of conditions, labs, medications, ED visits, utilization, and plan coverage, which will support care coordination, transitions of care, and connecting members to social services.

Essentia Health’s new St. Mary’s Medical Center in Duluth, MN will feature Sonifi Health’s engagement platform.

A new KLAS on patient privacy monitoring solutions finds that Protenus tops the four-product performance ranking among its user base of mostly large Epic sites that also report high impact from the company’s use of AI/ML capabilities. Imprivata’s scores initially dropped following acquisitions, but are improving.

I always await the always superbly written and surprisingly engrossing health IT market reports from Healthcare Growth Partners, fidgeting with impatience like a Netflix series viewer who can’t wait for a fresh season to drop. Here are some high points from its new Midyear Market Review:

• HGP says the market is working through the five stages of grief related to inflation and interest rate hikes, noting the “loss” of a 10-year cycle of easy money that created ever-rising valuations and transaction volume that peaked with COVID euphoria.
• Investors have reached the acceptance of the new normal and are anxious to get back in the game, as hope re-emerges.
• Distressed companies are bringing assets to market via carve-outs and divestiture, in some cases involving underperforming acquisitions that were a mistake in the first place. Examples: Pear Therapeutics and Olive completing asset sales and Centene exiting Apixio.
• The lower risk appetite has resulted in more structured deals instead of cash purchases, adding equity consideration and earn-outs.
• Money-losing companies are out of favor, but not dead, even as the market shifts away from growth at all costs and demands a clear path to profitability.
• No health IT companies have gone public via IPO or SPAC merger in 2023, with HGP also noting that none of the 16 health IT companies that took the SPAC route have increased share price and several have resorted to reverse stock splits after tanking share price threatened de-listing.
• COVID euphoria ended in Q1 2022, and while the Nasdaq is a valid indicator of recovery, it is misleading because it is weighted by market cap, with just seven giant companies making up 50% of the index.
• The market is ideal for buyers who are brave enough to acquire on the market’s reset, as even with the possibility of ongoing high interest rates, as “sitting on the sidelines is not an effective strategy.”

Government and Politics

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is investigating Google’s “aggressive” attempts to gain access to data from the military’s Joint Pathology Center for use in building healthcare AI. ProPublica previously reported that Google offered to digitize the military’s 55 million pathology slides in return for exclusive access to the archive.

Privacy and Security

Federal health services technology contractor Maximus confirms via an SEC filing that Russian hackers accessed the protected health information of up to 11 million people by using a known exploit in the MOVEit Transfer secure file transfer program. The MOVEit vulnerability resulted in Harris Health sending letters last week to 325,000 patients whose records were exposed.

Two Vanderbilt University Medical Center patients whose medical records were turned over to Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti in an investigation of billing for services to transgender patients file a class action lawsuit against VUMC. The lawsuit claims that VUMC violated its own privacy policies and HIPAA in failing to push back on the state’s civil investigative demands.

Sponsor Updates

• Wolters Kluwer Health’s Sentri7 clinical surveillance and Simplifi+ pharmacy compliance solutions receive a 2023 Black Book award for highest client satisfaction.
• Netsmart integrates Rethink Behavioral Health’s autism care resources and applied behavior analysis clinical solution with its CareFabric platform.
• Divurgent releases a new Vurge Podcast, “Bridging Healthcare Disparities Through Technology.”
• First Databank names Derrick Oliphant cloud operations manager, Varun Reddy associate product manager, and Matt O’Connor regional manager.
• Healthcare Triangle’s ransomware protection and prevention initiative draws initial support from multiple health system clients.
• InterSystems releases a new Healthy Data Podcast, “Delegation in an Epic Conversion.”
• Medicomp Systems releases a new “Tell Me Where It Hurts” podcast with Grace Cordovano of Unblock Health.

Blog Posts

• Checklist: How Strong is Your Hospital’s Data Strategy? (Dimensional Insight)
• Behind the scenes of a hospital ransomware attack (Fortified Health Security)
• Leveraging Content to Support Virtual Care (Healthwise)
• Generative AI in Healthcare: Looking to the (Near) Future (Impact Advisors)
• The Pan-Canadian Interoperability Roadmap: Does it get us where we need to go? (Nordic)
• Predictive Analytics in Healthcare: An Overview (Lucem Health)
• Building a Digital Support Ecosystem for Chronic Health Conditions (Medhost)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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