News 7/20/18

Top News

A Deloitte physician survey finds that while both consumers and doctors recognize the benefits of virtual care, most consumers haven’t experienced a virtual visit and only 14 percent of doctors offer them.

The most commonly implemented virtual care technologies are email / patient portal consultations, physician-to-physician consultations, and virtual visits. Adoption was in the single digits for remote care management and coaching, remote patient monitoring at home or in other facilities, and integration of wearables.

The factors listed above do not include the big ones that doctors can’t control — reimbursement and licensing. You can bet that they would be quick to offer those services if adequately paid to do so or if per-visit fees were eliminated under value-based care payments and an in-person visit actually cost the practice money.

Reader Comments

From DisCerner: “Re: Banner Health. CIO Ryan Smith has tendered his resignation and a posting is up for SVP/CIO on Banner’s site.” The job is posted here, although Ryan is still listed as CIO on the company’s executive page. His career was with Intermountain until he joined Banner in October 2013. He was paid $900K in the most recent year. The tax filings also indicate that Cerner was Banner’s third-highest paid independent contractor at $47 million. 

From Email Privilege: “Re: HIPAA. I was emailed a receipt after paying online that included my name, account number, date of birth, and telephone number. Should they not just have the account number and amount paid because of HIPAA?” All of those fields, as well as your email address itself, are elements of PHI. However, your use of the provider’s portal probably could be taken to indicate your consent for communicating by email (I bet that was listed in its terms of service). It’s also not illegal to send PHI by email – HHS’s only requirement is that the provider “apply reasonable safeguards,” of which encryption would be one even though the rule doesn’t specifically require it as far as I know.

From Avuncular Robert: “Re: McKesson’s outpatient pharmacy point-of-sale system. It’s been down for over 24 hours and their service desk is blaming Amazon Web Services. It is a huge headache – we’ve had to go back to the old cash box process.” I reached out to McKesson, which provided this response:

We are aware of the situation that affected a subset of our customers and impacted their operations for the past 24 hours. Though point-of-sale services were impacted, the dispensing of medication was not affected. We have resolved the issue and have informed customers of next steps. As always, we appreciate our customers’ support and thank them for their patience and cooperation.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor EPSi. The Allscripts-owned, Chesterfield, MO-based company is the industry leader in health system integrated financial decision support, budgeting, and planning. More than 900 US hospitals — including nine of the top 10-rated hospitals, 128 IDNs, and 40 global academic facilities — rely on EPSi for data-driven insight into managing costs and improving their long-range financial performance, as well as addressing requirements created by value-based care, bundled payments, accountable care, and continuum of care. The company’s just-launched, cloud-based RealCost financial decision support and analytics system allows health systems to quickly gain deeper cost insights and empower informed decision-making. Check out case studies from Texas Children’s Hospital, University of Kentucky Healthcare, and UMC Health System. Thanks to EPSi for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

July 26 (Thursday) 1:00 ET. “The Patient’s Power in Improving Health and Care.” Sponsor: Health Catalyst. Presenter: Maureen Bisognano, president emerita and senior fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Patients, even those with chronic diseases, only spend a few hours each year with a doctor or a nurse, while they spend thousands of hours making personal choices around eating, exercise, and other activities that impact their health. How can we get patients to be more engaged in their care, and help physicians, nurses, and healthcare providers transition from a paradigm of “what’s the matter” to “what matters to you?” This webinar will present stories of patients and healthcare organizations that are partnering together with tools, processes, data, and systems of accountability to move from dis-ease to health-ease.

July 31 (Tuesday) 12:30 ET. “How to Proactively Troubleshoot End User Experience Issues in Healthcare IT.” Sponsor: Goliath Technologies. Presenter: Goliath Technologies engineering staff. An early warning system for EHR access problems helps prevent downtime and user access problems before they impacts patients and collects objective technical evidence of the issue’s root cause. This webinar will describe how hospitals protect their investment in Allscripts, Cerner, Epic, and Meditech EHRs by anticipating, troubleshooting, and preventing end user experience issues and collecting the technical data needed to collaborate with their vendors on a solution.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Stat reports that Atul Gawande, MD — head of the still-unnamed healthcare joint venture of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase — will embark on a cross-country listening tour to gauge the healthcare concerns of employees at the three companies. Those conversations will likely fuel the nonprofit’s business plan, which could include a digital primary care solution, according to Mount Sinai Health System Chief Population Health Officer Niyum Gandhi. “I wouldn’t put it past them to … test it on all their employees first before they go broadly to market. I mean, if anybody could do it, it would be them. But they’re going to have to do things that are at national scale, which there just aren’t quick wins on.”

Tenet Healthcare considers selling its Conifer Health Solutions business to UnitedHealth Group in a deal that could be worth $2 billion. Tenet hired Goldman Sachs last December to help it divest Conifer as part of a $250 million cost-reduction initiative that it aims to wrap up by year’s end.

Vyera Pharmaceuticals, known as Turing Pharmaceuticals under the infamous leadership of now-incarcerated pharma bro Martin Shkreli, reports Q1 losses of over $1 million thanks to declining sales of Daraprim, the drug Shkreli infamously raised the price of by over 5,000 percent when he acquired it in 2015. Vyera is considering changing its name to Phoenixus, no doubt in an effort to shed its former association with Shkreli and revitalize slumping sales.

Announcements and Implementations

NYU Langone Health (NY) implements Omnicell’s automated medication management software and dispensing cabinets at its new inpatient hospital.

Northwestern Memorial Healthcare (IL) selects HealthSource release-of-information technology from Ciox.

AdvancedMD releases a redesigned version of its AdvancedInsight financial reporting suite for private medical practices.

People

Adam Boehler, director of the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation, takes on the additional HHS role of senior advisor for value-based transformation and innovation.

Sales

• Methodist Hospital (KY) selects cloud-based backup and recovery software and services from CloudWave.

Other

A Health Catalyst survey on patient safety efforts across care settings finds that ineffective IT combined with a lack of real-time alerts is the biggest impediment to reducing medical errors. A lack of adequate staffing and budget is a close second.

Sponsor Updates

• Formativ Health is recognized as the Gold Winner in the startup categories of both the CEO World Awards and the Globee Awards
• RxBenefit Clarity, a prescribing decision support solution developed by CoverMyMeds and RelayHealth Pharmacy Solutions, will be adopted by a dozen health systems that use Epic, Allscripts, and other EHRs.
• EClinicalWorks Director of Interoperability Strategy and Business Development Tushar Malhotra joins the CommonWell Health Alliance Board of Directors.
• FormFast and Kyruus will exhibit at the AHA Leadership Summit July 26-28 in San Diego.
• The Jacksonville Business Journal recognizes The HCI Group as one of the city’s fastest growing companies for the sixth year in a row.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes an infographic ttitled “3 Keys to Change Success.”
• Impact Advisors promotes April Smith to principal.
• InterSystems will exhibit at the Defense HIT Symposium July 24-26 in Orlando.
• CoverMyMeds announces that its RxBenefit Clarity prescribing decision support tool, developed with RelayHealth Pharmacy Solutions, will soon be used by 250,000 providers via new integrations with a dozen EHRs and Epic health systems.

Blog Posts

• A ‘reverse’ chatbot helps med students hone their diagnostic skills (Elsevier Clinical Solutions)
• Revenue Integrity: A Unifying Force Overcoming Compliance Challenges (Hayes Management Consulting)
• Healthcare IT Leaders Series: Tanya Townsend (Part One) (The HCI Group)
• Huntzinger Earns High KLAS Rankings in the HIT Assessment & Strategic Planning 2018 Report (Huntzinger Management Group)
• Transition to Change Readiness (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Simplify Troubleshooting your IT Healthcare Virtual Architecture with Goliath Technologies (Goliath Technologies)
• Did You Know? 6 Ways to Make Physicians’ Lives Easier (Spok)
• Top Go-Live Blogs You May Have Missed (Leidos Health)
• You’ve Detailed Your Last Wishes, and Only Your Care Navigator Knows Them (PMD)
• QPP Proposed Rule for 2019: An Overview (Impact Advisors)
• Applying content services to complete your EHR (Hyland)
• Find Hidden Patterns with Role-Based Behavioral Analysis (Iatric Systems)
• Palm vein biometrics solution ensures positive patient identification and reduces duplicate medical records at University of Utah Health (Imprivata)
• Speaking Up: Healthcare Marketing in the Age of Voice Search (Influence Health)
• Making the Care Connections That Matter Most in Rhode Island (InterSystems)

Contacts

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