News 8/3/18

Top News

A federal jury convicts self-proclaimed human rights activist and Anonymous member Martin Gottesfeld for masterminding DDoS attacks on Boston Children’s Hospital and Wayside Youth and Family Support Network (MA) in 2014 – both in retaliation for their treatment of a patient who was in the midst of a custody battle between her parents and the state. Gottesfeld triggered the router-borne malicious software during the hospital’s fundraising period, which ended up crippling its network and knocking it and several other area hospitals offline. He was finally arrested in 2016 after a cruise ship rescued him and his wife from a broken down boat off the coast of Cuba.

Rolling Stone published a compelling read on the entire saga last summer.

Reader Comments

From Deficiencies Down Under: “Re: Patient safety risks with Queensland’s new Cerner system. Doctors have been complaining about system bugs and failures, and worries over patient safety. The government has admitted to five major IT outages over the last 12 months.” Queensland Health pledged $1.2 billion to the 20-year IT overhaul in 2015, including the deployment of Cerner to 21 hospitals.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

MDLive raises $50 million in a funding round led by Health Velocity Capital.

Mediware acquires BlueStrata EHR, a St. Louis-based vendor focused on the long-term care market.

MedStar Health’s National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare secures a patent for a system designed to analyze data gleaned from eye-tracking technology, which researchers hope to use in the development of safer and more efficient healthcare software.

Evidation Health raises $30 million and develops new data tools to more efficiently aggregate and analyze large-scale datasets from smartphones, sensors, and traditional sources of health data like medical records, claims, and patient-reported outcomes.

WebMD acquires the Vitals Consumer Services Division of MDx Medical, which includes the provider comparison websites Vitals.com and UCompareHealthcare.com.

A slew of Q2 results:

• Allscripts – revenue up 25 percent, adjusted EPS $0.18 vs. $0.15, meeting earnings expectations, but falling short on revenue.
• Cerner: revenue up 6 percent, adjusted EPS $0.62 vs. $0.61, beating analyst expectations for both.
• IRhythm Technologies: revenue up 55 percent, adjusted EPS -$0.51 vs. -$0.29, beating revenue expectations but falling short on earnings.
• Teladoc: revenue up 112 percent, EPS  -$0.40 vs. -$0.28, beating expectations for both.

People

Howard University Hospital (Washington, DC) names Kevin Dawson, MD (MDx BioAnalytical Laboratory) CIO.

T-System brings on Bob Wilhelm (Adreima) as CEO.

Sales

• PMC Regional Hospital (IN) will implement Meditech Expanse later this year with help from Engage.
• LIS and consulting company Rhodes Group will deploy HealthShare from InterSystems to better manage patient data.
• Allegheny Health Network (PA) selects digital medical image sharing technology from LifeImage.

Announcements and Implementations

Montage Health (CA) goes live on the latest version of Epic. Upgrades include new functionality related to social determinants of health.

DirectTrust says Direct users sent more than 50 million messages in the second quarter of 2018, for a cumulative count of 432 million. The number of DirectTrust addresses jumped 19 percent to 1.7 million. Over 240,000 patients are now using the service.

NIC gives Appriss Health a run for its money with the launch of RxGov, PDMP technology built of of newly acquired software from Leap Orbit. (Leap Orbit partner David Finney laid out the monopolistic state of the PDMP technology market in this Readers Write.)

Privacy and Security

Reddit suffers a breach that leaves its anonymous users worried hackers will threaten to expose the online personas they created to post unsavory content and unpopular opinions. One security analyst likens it to the marriage-shattering repercussions of the Ashley Madison hack in 2015.

Australia’s hotly contested effort to provide every citizen with a PHR suffers another blow, as the Australian Digital Health Agency reveals the My Health Record system has already been breached nine times, though none were by outside parties. Australians have until November 12 to opt out of the initiative. The deadline was pushed back a month after privacy groups expressed concern with the system’s safeguards.

NIST publishes a cybersecurity practice guide to securing electronic records on mobile devices.

Other

A new KLAS report covering go-live support finds that Medasource, Optimum Healthcare IT, and CSI Healthcare IT are top satisfaction scorers, with their respective high-performing areas being avoiding excessive fees, strong relationship-building, and resource vetting. It notes customer satisfaction drop-off for three 2017 high performers: HCI Group (overpromising on involvement and resource expertise); Nuance (poor communications and focus on expanding engagements); and Santa Rosa Consulting (lack of leadership team relationship-building). Customers say their critical success measures are high user adoption, effective training, and meeting timeline and budget expectations.

Delaware Health Information Network CEO Jan Lee, MD recounts her struggle to find affordable, in-network medical care after injuring her hand on a table saw. A week-long search for a PCP and surgery referral left Lee frustrated and dumbfounded at the amount of hoops she had to jump through. “By this time it’s been close to a week that I’ve been wandering around with an open fracture,” she said. “My friends within the healthcare community who have heard about this are going nuts, saying ‘This is preposterous.'” Despite being a Tricare health plan member, Lee is stuck with over $10,000 in medical bills, which she has vowed to fight. Incidentally, DHIN is in the midst of creating a claims database so that consumers can compare treatment costs across the state.

Weird News Andy might ask, “Who moved my cheese?” in covering the $1 million a genetically engineered mouse has brought in for the University of Minnesota. The animal was developed to assist researchers with myeloma cancer treatment. Its antibodies have been sold for the last 15 years per a licensing agreement with Cell Signaling Technology.

Sponsor Updates

• EPSi will host its Western Regional User Conference August 7-8 in San Diego.
• HBI Solutions will present at the Supplemental Health, DI & LTC Conference August 6-8 in San Diego.
• Goliath Technologies achieves record growth in the first half of 2018 with new customers like Genesis Health System.
• Healthgrades announces the recipients of its 2018 Women’s Care Awards.
• Impact Advisors releases its first quarterly newsletter, “The Impact Advisor 3Q18.”
• Intelligent Medical Objects will exhibit at the NextGen Midwest Regional Client User Group Meeting August 9-10 in Dearborn, MI.
• Vocera adds care team alerts from Qventus to its care coordination and communication platform.
• Gartner recognizes Spok and its Care Connect Platform in its 2018 Market Guide for Clinical Communication & Collaboration.
• Securance Consulting gives Parallon Technology Solutions a “Best Practice” rating for its Meditech hosting services.
• PatientSafe Solutions makes its PatientTouch app available in the Epic App Orchard.

Blog Posts

• You too can be a sexy data unicorn – and other lessons from my first DataDive (Elsevier Clinical Solutions)
• Be Wary: Proposed CMS Changes to E/M Codes Don’t Minimize the Need for Vigilant Review and Monitoring (Hayes Management Consulting)
• Healthcare IT Leaders Series: Tanya Townsend (Part Two) (The HCI Group)
• Prevent EHR End User Experience Issues Before They Increase Costs – and Stress (Goliath Technologies)
• Why Colorado? Vibrant Tech Community Offers Innovation at Elevation (Healthgrades)
• Reporting Dashboards: A Fitbit for OnBase 18? (Hyland)
• How the Human Factor Impacts Patient Privacy (Iatric Systems)
• Avoiding common security and compliance workarounds for medical devices (Imprivata)
• Case Studies: Why Healthcare Systems Need CRM (Influence Health)
• Health Systems’ Unique Role in Patient-Provider Matching (Kyruus)
• Need a reason to come and party with Nordic later this month? Here are 6. (Nordic)
• Connected Health Record? It Already Exists! (PMD)
• When Paper Informed Consents Bring Surgeons to a Hard Stop (Access)

Contacts

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