News 6/24/16

Top News

The Justice Department charges 301 people (including 61 doctors, nurses, and other licensed professionals) with $900 million worth of Medicare fraud, with many of the cases involving prescription fraud and compounding pharmacies. HHS OIG credits its use of real-time billing data and analytics to identify outliers to investigate.

Reader Comments

From Caboodler: “Re: Epic. Just announced that their data warehouse product will be renamed from Star to Caboodle. This has got to be a new low in their ‘cute and clever’ naming convention.” Unverified, but I’ll be on the lookout for an accompanying product named Kit.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Mrs. Hendrickson says her Ohio middle school students are using the voice recorders we provided in funding her DonorsChoose grant request during “read to self” improvement time. She’s also sending the recordings home for the parents to review. She adds, “My students who struggled most seem to have made the most growth with the recorders.”

This week on HIStalk Practice: HHS announces $100 million in funding to help small practices with MACRA. Doctors Care becomes the first urgent care chain in South Carolina to offer telemedicine. American Well expands, welcomes new executive. PediaQ raises $4.5 million. FQHCs in West Virginia partner with Aledade to form a first-of-its-kind ACO. Eye Care Leaders Group gets into consulting. The Maryland Health Care Commission awards telemedicine grants to independent practices. Yard work inspires Dr. Gregg to coin the phrase “EHR litter.”

This week on HIStalk Connect: Samsung unveils its vision for Human-Centered IoT. Digital health insurance startup League raises $25 million. MassChallenge announces the $25.8 million Massachusetts Innovation Catalyst Fund. Online therapy provider Talkspace raises $15 million. Burner unveils a witty break-up app.

Webinars

June 28 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Your Call Is Very Important.” Sponsored by West Healthcare Practice. Presenters: Cyndy Orrys, contact center director, Henry Ford Health System; Brian Cooper, SVP, West Interactive. The contact center is a key hub of patient engagement and a strategic lever for driving competitive advantage. Cyndy will share how her organization’s call center is using technologies and approaches that create effortless patient experiences in connecting them to the right information or resource. Brian will describe five key characteristics of a modern call center and suggest how to get started.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel. Ask Lorre about her “Summer Doldrums Special” sale.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Reflexion Health, which offers Microsoft Kinect-powered tele-rehabilitation software, raises $18 million in a Series B funding round, increasing its total to $30 million. It seems pretty cool, although basing a company on a consumer electronics gadget is risky, as those startups that built their business around Google Glass can attest.

Shares in Quality Systems (NextGen) hit their five-year low this week. Above is the one-year share price chart for QSII (blue, down 73 percent) vs. the Nasdaq (red, up 73 percent), with the company’s market cap at $726 million.

Sales

Eos Healthcare chooses the iTraycer medical device inventory management system from Jacksonville, FL-based Medical Tracking Solutions.

People

American Well promotes Jon Freshman to CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

Vital Images launches Version 7 of its Vitrea advanced visualization software that includes scalable deployment options, personalization, and standardized user interface across all modalities. Vitrea can also turn patient scans into 3D printing-ready files.

Visage Imaging releases new versions of its mobile apps for its enterprise imaging platform with enhancements that include barcode scanning, Touch ID fingerprint authentication, and multitasking views.

Six Sutter Health and Alameda Health hospitals in Northern California implement PreManage ED from Collective Medical Technologies to flag ED frequent flyer patients across their facilities. The Salt Lake City-based company’s real-time EDIE (Emergency Department Information Exchange) system has also been used in Oregon and Washington to reduce unnecessary ED visits.

Cedars-Sinai will offer discharged patients a ride home via HomeHero, a startup in the Cedars technology accelerator that claims to be “the #1 rated healthcare startup in the country.” HomeHero offers non-medical transportation and home assessments for $22 per hour, offering a customer app that allows choosing a provider and booking services in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. The CEO’s failed previous venture was Flowtab, an app that connected bar patrons with the bartender for ordering and paying for drinks.

Experian Health announces new products that include Denials Workflow Manager, Compliance Manager, and Patient Financial Clearance.

Government and Politics

Medicare spent $4.1 billion last year to provide 12 million of its beneficiaries (one-third of Medicare recipients) with opioids such as OxyContin and fentanyl, with those patients averaging five such prescriptions filled. The AMA’s righteous indignation toward “digital snake oil” should perhaps be refocused on the free-wheeling prescribing of its members that is addicting and killing a lot more people than lame consumer apps.

Department of Veterans Affairs Under Secretary for Health David Shulkin MD says Wednesday in testimony to the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs that the VA’s proposed digital health platform “is not dependent on any particular EHR” and that its VistA Evolution funding will deliver value “regardless of whether our path forward is to continue with VistA, a shift to a commercial EHR platform as DoD is doing, or some combination of both.” He adds that the Joint Legacy Viewer is a read-only connection between the VA and DoD systems, but eHMP (Enterprise Health Management Platform) will replace the 20-year-old CPRS as a provider point-of-care tool in 2017.

Other

An study finds that state-run prescription drug monitoring programs reduce opioid-related overdose deaths by 1.12 per 100,000 population. The authors note that West Virginia is the nation’s major outlier – despite implementing such a program in 2002, its overdose death rate is nearly twice as high as the next-highest state.

An interesting article by Mike Klag, MD, MPH, dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, observes the correlation between the decline in health of US citizens with their stagnant incomes in which the top 1 percent of earners have increased their annual wages 138 percent since 1979 while the bottom 90 percent had only a 15 percent increase in those 37 years, which is associated with an alarming disparity in survival. As is the case with most health measures, the US lags pitifully behind other high-income countries, coming in #43 in deaths of children under 5.

The European Union considers a law that would require companies to pay “electronic persons” social security taxes for robots they use. Governments are worried that such automation will raise unemployment, increase wealth inequality, and undermine employment-based social security programs.

The new president of the AMA says his orthopedic hand surgery practice doesn’t use an EHR, explaining that “I just take the [Meaningful Use] penalties.” I don’t see a website for his practice, either. As an orthopod, he’s probably not amused by the hilarious video above, although I shouldn’t generalize since the orthopedic surgeons I’ve known are among the most prolific jokesters about their profession. 

Sponsor Updates

• Ingenious Med, Leidos Health, and Navicure will exhibit at the HFMA ANI Conference June 26-29 in Las Vegas.
• PDR’s Jeffrey Wiltrout is recognized as a PM360 Elite Disrupter.
• LifeImage and National Decision Support Company will exhibit at SIIM 2016 June 29-July 1 in Portland.
• MedData is named a 2016 Top Workplaces, Workplace Achiever by The Cleveland Plain Dealer.
• T-System celebrates its 20-year anniversary as a leading provider of health IT solutions for episodic and emergency care this week.
• Meditech will exhibit at the Michigan Health & Hospital Association Annual Meeting June 29-July 1 on Mackinac Island, MI.
• Netsmart shares takeaways from its first annual Public Health Summit.
• Recondo Technology, Experian Health, Patientco, PatientMatters, Relay Health, and The SSI Group will exhibit at the HFMA ANI Conference June 26-29 in Las Vegas.
• Point-of-Care Partners expands its e-prescribing state law review resource to include new state mandates.
• Summit Healthcare supports Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Florida, this year’s recipient of the Heart of MUSE charity.

Blog Posts

• Medical Identity Theft: a Deadly Side Effect of Healthcare Data Breaches (ID Experts)
• Influencer Perspective: Slack Adoption (Influence Health)
• Why Time and Place Still Matter in a Connected World (InterSystems)
• Lunch with the Accountable Care Learning Collaborative (Medecision)
• Relieving the data and analytics pressure: 3 Nordic solutions (Nordic)
• Transparency: Shouldn’t Healthcare Consumers Enjoy It the Way Amazon Customers Do? (Orion Health)
• Sum-Sum-Summertime (PatientKeeper)
• Can the NHS go Paperless by 2020? (Lexmark)
• Single Sign-on Increases Security in Healthcare IT (Phynd Technologies)
• Why Analytics Training Should be Higher on Your Priority List (Sagacious Consultants)
• Operating at Peak Efficiency (Streamline Healthcare)

Contacts

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