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June 24, 2014 News 1 Comment

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Emdeon will acquire Capario for $115 million in cash from its private equity owner Marlin Equity Partners, with Emdeon announcing plans to incorporate the CaparioOne revenue cycle management product into its Intelligent Health Network.


Upcoming Webinars

June 25 (Wednesday) 2:00 p.m. ET. Cloud Is Not (Always) The Answer. Sponsored by Logicworks. Presenter: Jason Deck, VP of strategic development, Logicworks. No healthcare organization needs a cloud – they need compliant, highly available solutions that help them deploy and grow key applications. This webinar will explain why public clouds, private clouds, and bare metal infrastructure are all good options, just for different circumstances. We’ll review the best practices we’ve learned from building infrastructure for clinical applications, HIEs, HIXs, and analytics platforms. We will also review the benefit of DevOps in improving reliability and security.

June 26 (Thursday) 1:00 p.m. ET. The Role of Identity Management in Protecting Patient Health Information. Sponsored by Caradigm. Presenter: Mac McMillan, FHIMSS, CISM, co-founder and CEO of CynergisTek. Identity and access management challenges will increase as environments become more complex, users create and manage larger amounts of sensitive information, and providers become more mobile. Learn how an identity and access management program can support regulatory compliance, aid in conducting audits and investigations, and help meet user workflow requirements.

July 2 (Wednesday) noon ET. The CIO’s Role in Consumer Health. Sponsored by HIStalk. Presenter: David Chou, CIO, University Of Mississippi Medical Center. We are moving towards an era where the consumer is searching for value. Healthcare is finally catching up with other industries and this is forcing health care providers and health plans to rethink their "business model" as consumers test new decision-making skills and demand higher quality and better value. Technology can provide value in this space as we move towards a digital healthcare.


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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KPMG acquires Cincinnati-based Zanett Commercial Solutions, an Oracle partner and health IT consulting firm.

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A new $152 million funding round for doctor-finding site ZocDoc values the company at $1.6 billion.

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Second medical opinion site Grand Rounds raises $40 million in funding. The company charges $7,500 for an online review by a nationally recognized physician, while arranging an appointment with a specialist costs $200. The company says that its second opinion finds the original doctor wrong 60 percent of the time, giving employers more than a threefold benefit to their investment, which for companies of fewer than 1,000 employees is $10 each per month. The company also offers physician-to-physician consultation for hospitalized patients who demand a review by a recognized expert. It would be interesting to know how they choose the “top 3 percent of specialists in the nation.”   

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IMS Health will acquire some product lines of Cegedim, which sell life sciences marketing solutions, for $520 million in cash. Cegedim’s Pulse Systems products for medical practices (PM/EHR, RCM, patient portal, patient kiosk) weren’t mentioned as being part of the deal.


Sales

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St. Luke’s (MN) chooses Strata Decision’s StrataJazz for Decision Support.

Cerner signs a 10-year deal with existing customer Mission Health (NC) to work on unspecified innovation and population health projects.

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University Health Shreveport (LA), UMass Memorial Medical Group (MA) and Baptist Memorial Health Care (TN) select Infor Healthcare financial solutions.

RegionalCare Hospital Partners (TN) will deploy Agilum Healthcare Intelligence’s BI solutions and services across its eight hospitals in seven states.

Verizon will provide AirWatch by VMware to its US enterprise clients.


People

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M. Bridget Duffy, MD (Vocera) joins the board of scribe and EHR consulting vendor Essia Health, formerly known as Scribes STAT.

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Athenahealth names Kristi Matus (Aetna) to the newly created role of EVP/chief financial and administrative officer.


Announcements and Implementations

Premier, Inc. launches PremierConnect Price Lookup, which will allow members and vendors look up pricing information for nearly 7 million contract items.

CSC will partner with Allscripts and HP in vying for the DoD’s $11 billion EHR replacement. CSC wastes no time in playing the card of Robert Wah, MD, its chief medical officer and newly installed AMA president.

The newly merged Great Lakes HIE and Michigan Health Connect choose Great Lakes Health Connect as their new name.


Government and Politics

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Janet Woodcock, MD, director of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, says the agency’s Mini-Sentinel drug surveillance system that’s being piloted combines claims and EHR dispensing data from 18 large healthcare organizations in a common data model that its safety scientists can query with drug safety questions. It covers 153 million people, 4 billion drug dispensing episodes, and 4 billion patient encounters.

A South Dakota newspaper points out that small claims collection lawsuits for medical expenses often violate patient privacy since they list the services for which the patient owes the provider. One collections agency requests that each of its lawsuits be sealed to prevent casual electronic observers from prying into a given patient’s procedure codes.

Above is video from Tuesday’s 21st Century Cures digital health roundtable convened by the US House Energy & Commerce Committee. Among those speaking are Jonathan Bush (athenahealth), Jeff Shuren (FDA), Martin Harris (Cleveland Clinic), and Brian Druker (OHSU).


Other

Seven-bed Reagan Memorial Hospital (TX) says it was unable to pay its vendors after the only employee who knew how to issue checks from Meditech quit. They’re back on track after having Meditech train more people.

Above is Deborah Peel, MD of Patient Privacy Rights at TEDxTraverseCity on “Designing Technology to Restore Privacy” from a few weeks ago. She’s also starting a campaign, #MyHealthDataIsMine.

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Fitch Ratings holds the rating on bonds of Beebe Healthcare (DE) at BBB-, one step above junk status, with EHR implementation contributing to its losses.

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The State of Montana starts notifying 1.3 million people — more than the entire population of the state — that hackers got into a state health department server containing their medical information. A surprising amount of medical information was stored on the server, including “health assessments, diagnoses, treatment, prescriptions, and insurance.” Also on the same server: the bank account information of 3,100 department employees and contractors and 50 years’ of birth and death certificate information.

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Parkview Health (IN) pays $800,000 to settle an OCR HIPAA investigation in which a retiring independent doctor who was transferring her patients to new practices found 71 boxes of medical records dumped in her driveway when she got home. The hospital says it has since replaced its insecure paper records with an EHR.

On Computerworld’s “100 Best Places to Work in IT 2014” in the “Large Organizations” category are Sharp HealthCare (#7), Texas Health Resources (#8), OhioHealth (#10), Carolinas HealthCare System (#20), Cedars-Sinai Health System (#21), Cancer Treatment Centers of America (#27), Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (#33), Cerner (#37), Ascension Health (#39), HCA (#42), Kaiser Permanente (#45), and McKesson (#50). On the “Midsize Organizations” list are Miami Children’s Hospital (#8) and Genesis HealthCare System (#12). UHC takes the #2 spot in the “Small Organizations” category.  

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A small (111 hospitals) AHA-sponsored survey finds that a third of the responding organizations don’t feel they have the right executive team in place to execute their strategy, with their biggest talent shortfall being in creating non-traditional partnerships, managing community and population health, and managing change. Just half have a CIO/CTO on the executive team, and only 20 percent say the CIO is always involved in making decisions. The report predicts the emergence of new executive titles that include chief population health manager, VP of cost containment, chief patient engagement officer, and VP of clinical informatics.

“No Matter Where,” a movie about HIEs in Tennessee, has a limited premiere in Nashville. The executive producer is Kevin Johnson, MD, professor of pediatrics and biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.


Sponsor Updates

  • Black Book Rankings names Streamline Health’s Looking Glass ECM system as #1 in the “Document Improvement” category of “Financial Products and Services.” Also #1 in its category is PatientKeeper in the “Charge Master” and “Charge Capture” categories.
  • Netsmart is providing CareManager to the Early Connections Network in Tennessee.
  • Levi Ray & Shoup announces its MFPsecure pull printing software that enables secure delivery for Ricoh devices.
  • Craneware earns HFMA Peer Review Designation for five products for the tenth consecutive year.
  • Agilum Healthcare Intelligence introduces its new website and BI solutions.
  • Health Catalyst posts a video demonstration of its new Financial Management Explorer.
  • MedAssets introduces the first module of it revenue cycle analytics suite Contract Analytics during the 2014 HFMA National Institute in Las Vegas.
  • Vital Images releases VitreaExtend advanced visualization solution that supports up to three simultaneous users.
  • Navicure launches BillingBetter.com to connect medical billing companies and practices and provide education resources on billing.
  • MedAssets unveils the next generation of Decision Support Costing and Contracting this week at the 2014 HFMA National Institute in Las Vegas.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jennifer, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan, Dr. Travis.

More news: HIStalk Practice, HIStalk Connect.

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Currently there is "1 comment" on this Article:

  1. I get email from HITHIRED.COM and they quoted this:
    “With the Healthcare Industry projected to expand from 17 million jobs to over 22 million by 2020, the competition for already scarce healthcare workers will get even tougher. Companies that develop smart strategies to recruit and keep professionals will have an easier time handling the growth over the next 6 years.” Casey Kelly-Barton, Business Analyst” – do you think this is true? I thought we were contracting a bit after expansion for a number of years? Not sure if they are saying this based on the current situatio changing in the 2-3 year realm…







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