Monday Morning Update 2/25/19

Top News

Allscripts shares closed down 11 percent Friday following its quarterly revenue and earnings miss.

A $10,000 investment in Allscripts on the day Paul Black was hired as CEO in 2012 would be worth $9,925 today vs. around $13,200 if you had instead bought a Nasdaq index fund.

From the investor call:

• The company in Q4 signed three new Sunrise clients, one Paragon expansion, six FollowMy Health sales, and six new 2BPrecise clients.
• The revenue and earnings problems were spread equally between the now-divested Netsmart and the rest of the Allscripts business, the latter primarily driven by delayed upgrades.
• Black says the company will continue to look for “strategic assets” to acquire, as “the marketplace is littered with undersized companies, some of which have some pretty good technology.”
• President Rick Poulton said that the company has spent a net zero amount on its acquisition winners and losers, including the turnaround acquisition of McKesson’s business and the “very speculative investment” the company made in NantHealth. He added that it’s frustrating to watch MDRX share price performance and further commented that the company needs to “balance why we buy somebody else’s earnings at a big premium when ours are trading so cheap.”
• Poulton said that Allscripts will exploit its access to capital to bring technology to market faster, as opposed to “some of our larger competitors who have shunned acquisitions and have a model where they tend to want to do everything on a native, integrated basis.”
• Poulton said that providers have stopped “spending money like drunken sailors” and it’s tough to assume that provider spending can drive revenue scaling, which is why the company is focusing on the faster revenue growth offered by payers and life sciences.
• The Avenel EHR was not mentioned.

Reader Comments

From Clippy: “Re: site. You love sites deceptively pretending to be American that clearly are not. Here is one you may have missed.” Thanks, it’s a gem – reading Healthcare Herald’s attempts to explain medical and technology issues in its comically fractured English (obviously written by folks whose origins lie in India) makes it a must-read for all the wrong reasons. The “Our Team” page lists several fake employees with their credentials. The photo of the chief content writer was lifted from news story, while that of her PhD co-editor is a widely used stock art JPG that they didn’t even bother to rename from “mature model man.” But the write-ups are pure poetry – the editor’s bio says, “I have been working in this company for seven long years. Since my day of joining till now, I have seen the company going through many thorns and pebbles.” The “About Us” proclaims, “The field of healthcare is also not an exception. There has been mass upgradation in this sector. Thorough research and in-depth studies have made it possible to even fight with disastrous chronic diseases. There is large-scale use of Artificial Intelligence and IoT in treatments which make it easier and more comfortable and hence also quite useful in most of the cases.” I like the word “upgradation,” which experts say is used only by India-based outsourced technologists, so I will try to work that into casual conversation, such as asking a server, “May I request an upgradation to the Caesar salad?”  

From Bone Apatit: “Re: HIMSS19. I am questioning the value.” I’ll recap what my survey respondents said soon, but my working thesis is this. Some people obviously want to spend a week away from work socializing, attending parties, and feeling important, so they at least fool themselves into thinking that their employer benefits so they can keep coming back. Others, especially vendor employees, attend because their employer requires them to, thinking that sales will result. Still others say they receive actual value, most likely in meeting with their vendors and fellow customers rather than sitting in educational sessions. HIMSS justifiably assumes that a heavy registration count (growing, at least until the last couple of years) is evidence that they don’t need to change much, especially in the exhibit hall that drives the entire trade show. Complaining after attending doesn’t reverse your already-cast vote for the status quo – you would have to do that by skipping HIMSS20.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A majority of poll respondents like the draft of the federal government’s new interoperability policies. Recovering CIO says they will end up being toothless, however, unless the feds are willing to de-certify non-compliant EHRs and to eliminate the existing economic incentives for hoarding patient data. Nick says it’s an incremental first step,  especially the part that would prevent providers for charging to deliver care and then charging the patient again to provide a record of that care. George is happy that the proposed rules are patient-focused, force payers to the table, and include post-acute care.

New poll to your right or here: have you sent or received information via fax in the past year?

I rented “Bohemian Rhapsody” this weekend, and Oscar recognition aside, it failed to meet my low expectations. It’s a shame that Freddy Mercury’s extraordinary life, his unfortunate death, and Queen’s musical contributions were dumbed down to a sing-along cartoon in which nearly every important detail was either fictionalized or omitted, especially since dim moviegoers will think they have seen an authoritative, objective documentary.

Webinars

March 6 (Wednesday) 1:00 ET. “Pairing a High-Tech Clinical Logistics Center with a Communication Platform for Quick Patient Response.” Sponsored by Voalte. Presenters: James Schnatterer, MBA, clinical applications manager, Nemours Children’s Health; Mark Chamberlain, clinical applications analyst, Nemours Children’s Health. Medics at Nemours Children’s Health track vital signs of patients in Florida and Delaware from one central hub, acting as eyes and ears when a nurse is away from the bedside. Close monitoring 24 hours a day integrates data from the electronic health record, such as critical lab results, and routes physiological monitor and nurse call alerts directly to the appropriate caregiver’s smartphone. This session explores how the Clinical Logistics Center and more than 1,600 Zebra TC51-HC Touch Computers running Voalte Platform connect care teams at two geographically dispersed sites for better patient safety and the best possible outcomes.

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

Decisions

• Four Winds Hospitals (NY) will move from an Askesis Development Group EHR to Streamline Healthcare Solutions in March 2020.
• Samaritan Hospital (WA) will replace Meditech with Epic this year.
• Cherokee Medical Center (SC) will replace Allscripts with Epic this year.

These provider-reported updates are supplied by Definitive Healthcare, which offers a free trial of its powerful intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and healthcare providers.

People

Ryan Walsh, MD, MMM (University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston) joins Memorial Hermann Health System as CIO of ambulatory services and population health.

Sumit Nagpal (Accenture) joins Comcast NBCUniversal as SVP/GM of health innovation.

Cambridge Health Alliance (MA) promotes Brian Herrick, MD from CMIO to CIO.

Government and Politics

A judge approves a plan that will take $92,000 from the assets of two closed Arizona hospitals for a 90-day reactivation of their EHR so that patients can get their medical records.

Privacy and Security

UConn Health says that an unauthorized third party access employee email accounts in December 2018, some of which contained patient information, potentially compromising the information of 326,000 people. 

Other

In Japan, an alternative healing group that urged its followers to avoid vaccinations apologizes and recommends that its members adhere to normal vaccination schedules after nearly all of the 49 new cases of measles that were reported in one area involved its unvaccinated members.

Mount Carmel Health System (OH) – where 35 patients received pain medication overdoses under the care of a since-fired ICU intensivist – says five of those patients who died could have lived with proper treatment. The hospital has set maximum pain medication doses in its EHR, implemented an escalation polity for orders that do not follow approved protocols, restricted the ability to bypass pharmacy order review, and increased clinician education.

This is good technology on top of bad policy. In China, Beijing hospitals are using facial recognition technology to identify known scalpers who make hard-to-get outpatient clinic appointments, then sell their tickets to others at inflated prices. The government says it will take legal action against the scalpers, including banning them from high-speed trains. The guy above was arrested for scalping an appointment for Beijing Children’s Hospital during winter vacation, when more parents bring their children for treatment.

Sponsor Updates

• Practice Velocity team members raise $10,000 for Rockford Rescue Mission.
• Medicomp Systems announces a new solution to monitor and present hierarchical condition codes (HCCs) at the point of care.
• Lightbeam Health Solutions releases Version 3.0 of its population health management software.
• Mobile Heartbeat will exhibit at the Texas Organization of Nurse Executives conference February 28- March 1 in Dallas.
• NextGate and IDology partner to mitigate patient identification risks.
• Medhost features Clinical Computers Systems Inc.’s Key Account Manager John Murray in a podcast, “The Future of Healthcare, Worn on Your Wrist.”
• Flywire Health (formerly OnPlanHealth) will exhibit at the 2019 HFMA Region 5 Dixie Institute February 24-27 in Mobile, AL.
• CloudWave and Acmeware partner to offer data repository and SQL support services.
• Experian Health will exhibit at the HFMA MD Beyond the Hospital Walls Conference February 25-26 in Annapolis.
• PatientSafe Solutions adds integrated rounding and patient handoff capabilities, plus enhances user physician user experience on its PatientTouch Platform.
• Sansoro Health adds FHIR support to its Emissary API platform.
• TriNetX adds a Treatment Pathways analytic to its clinical, genomic, and claims data platform.
• Vocera will present at the SVB Leerink Global Healthcare Conference February 27 in New York City.
• NCQA certifies ZeOmega’s Jiva population health management software for 10 HEDIS 2019 measures.

Blog Posts

• Kubernetes: A Data Management Game Changer (Liaison Technologies)
• HIMSS19: That’s a Wrap! (Vyne Medical)
• Change for EHR Success: Parts 1 and 2 (Netsmart)
• 7 signs it’s time for an EHR refresh (Nordic)
• Enterprise-Class Speech API – More Than Great Dictation (NVoq)
• Three Key Areas of a Successful Epic Reporting Strategy (CereCore)
• The top three reasons hospitals fail at collections (Experian Health)
• PatientBond Talks Psychographics and Medication Compliance at the National Health Council (PatientBond)
• Could Better Integrations Improve Your Revenue Cycle Results? Watch for 3 Signs (Patientco)
• The 9 Hot Topics of HIMSS19 (Pivot Point Consulting)
• 4 smartphones for nurses you should have on your mobility shortlist (PerfectServe)
• Interoperability in Healthcare Must Include Patient Data From Home (PreparedHealth)
• Making sense of the recent CMS and ONC proposed rules to improve healthcare data exchange (Redox)
• The 8 Biggest Trends in Healthcare IT for 2019 & Beyond (Sansoro Health)
• Your Patient Access Management Opportunity (The SSI Group)
• 3 ways clinical communication delivers results. (Voalte)
• 5 MIPS Lies You’ve Been Told – But Should Not Believe (WebPT)
• Digital Strategy for the Future of Healthcare Providers (WiserTogether)
• Health Information Exchange Accelerated by Rapidly Growing Integration as a Service (IaaS) Solution (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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