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May 14, 2019 News 8 Comments

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AliveCor extends its ECG lead (no pun intended) over Apple with KardiaMobile 6L, which offers a six-lead ECG and expanded detection of arrhythmias including atrial fibrillation, bradycardia, and tachycardia.

The $150 consumer device has earned FDA clearance, works on both Apple and Android devices, and will reach the market in June.


Reader Comments

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From Unconjoined Twin: “Re: Medi-Span. Hit by malware. We can’t do our monthly medical loads to Epic.” Verified, although I missed this when it first came up a week ago. Netherlands-based Wolters Kluwer released a statement Monday saying that it has restored most systems – which include CCH cloud-based tax systems and other applications in addition to healthcare — after it took them offline after discovering “the installation of malware.” Discussion on Reddit says the company’s website was down, along with its Internet access, email, and phones, with one person indicating that two of their employees received emails from a Wolters Kluwer email address that contained malicious links. A Krebs on Security report says file directories that are used to store new versions of its software were found to be writable by anonymous users, at least one of whom apparently uploaded suspicious files.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I’m increasingly annoyed by big health systems that suddenly claim they’re passionate about empathy, post-discharge care coordination, patient engagement, innovation, social determinants of health, and patient experience. Why now? They could have done those things at any time and didn’t. They were fat and happy until threatened by disruption and possible payment changes that threaten their massive bottom lines, so now they are suddenly the self-proclaimed experts and advocates. At least they are providing a good reminder that health systems do only what someone pays them to do, which isn’t necessarily the right thing. Maybe we need a tech innovation that dispenses dollar bills every time a doctor washes their hands or doesn’t prescribe an unnecessary antibiotic.


Webinars

May 21 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “Cloud-Based Data Management: Solving Healthcare’s Provider Data Challenge.” Sponsor: Information Builders. Presenters: Jeremy Kahle, manager of planning and business development, St. Luke’s University Health Network; Shawn Sutherland, patient and member outcomes, Information Builders; Bill Kotraba, VP of healthcare solutions and strategies, Information Builders. Inaccurate provider data negatively impacts revenue cycle, care coordination, customer experience, and keeping information synchronized across systems and functions. SLUHN will describe how it created a single version of provider data from 17 sources, followed by a demonstration of how that data can be used in reports and geospatial analysis. Learn how Omni-HealthData Provider Master Edition provides rapid ROI in overcoming healthcare organization provider data issues.

May 30 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “ONC Data Blocking Proposed Rule: What Health Systems Need to Know.” Sponsor: Philips PHM. Presenter: Greg Fulton, industry and public policy lead, Philips. Proposed data-blocking regulations could specify fines, disincentives, and de-certification of providers who don’t provide an API for patients to extract all of their data. This webinar will describe who is deploying APIs, the scope of data and third-party apps that can be used, the seven costs that do not count as a data-blocking exception, and the health system protections that don’t involve using a vendor. It will also provide examples of data blocking and further exceptions.

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Business Insider looks at startup Sempre Health, which texts patients to offer them cash savings if they fill their new prescription quickly. The discounts are funded by drug companies as an alternative to drug coupon programs. Co-founder and CEO Anurati Mathur was a data scientist at Propeller Health and before that at Practice Fusion.


People

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Greenway Health hires Geeta Nayyar, MD, MBA (Femwell Group Health) as chief medical officer, where she will help guide development of the company’s next-generation, cloud-based EHR/PM known as Project Polaris, which the company says will incorporate the best features of  Intergy, Prime Suite, and SuccessEHS.


Announcements and Implementations

Collective Medical enhances its platform to enhance collaboration among physical and behavioral providers by adding a consent feature that complies with CFR 42 Part 2. The combined efforts of a physician group and community providers in using the system reduced 911 calls by 44%, EMS transport by 47%, ED visits by 36%, and hospital admissions by 42%.

Cerner will connect its systems to state prescription drug monitoring program databases using DrFirst.

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Definitive Healthcare adds prescription drug claims to its all-payer commercial claims platform, allowing users to analyze prescribing patterns, diagnoses, procedures, and referrals.

Storage array vendor Infinidat, whose systems use disk-based storage with memory caching, creates a software-defined flash array called Epic Compatibility Mode that it hopes will allow it to earn Epic certification since Epic does not allow disk-based storage for performance reasons.

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Relatient announces GA of an electronic registration and check-in solution that expands its Digital Front Door strategy and patient engagement platform.

Appriss Health announces a dynamic patient matching solution for its prescription drug monitoring program connectivity system.

CHIME and Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer – Israel’s largest hospital – will create a health innovation lab within the hospital’s innovation center.


Government and Politics

A medical laboratory sales rep receives a 50-month prison sentence for Medicare fraud after he used a sham non-profit group to convince seniors living in low-income housing to submit to genetic testing. He recruited two healthcare providers via Craigslist to provide phony documentation, netting the three co-conspirators $100,000 in commissions from two clinical labs.


Other

A doctor who followed the suggestion of a conference speaker on social media to Google herself is shocked to find 100 negative reviews and comments that had been left on Vitals, Healthgrades, and Google, with none of the reviewers being actual patients but rather anti-vaccine activists who targeted her because of a social media comment she made in support of a colleague who was undergoing vaccine-related cyberbullying. None of the three sites removed the ratings until she got her lawyer involved. I notice that Healthgrades has removed the fake reviews, but the nut jobs have now just thumbs-downed them, while WebMD still has nearly all one-star reviews. A pediatric practice that posted a video recommending the HPV vaccine had its webpage as well as outside ratings websites flooded with 10,000 negative reviews and comments, while the Facebook of an internist who simply mentioned that his office had received its flu vaccine shipment was bombarded with hundreds of comments accusing him of poisoning children. We live in a shaky society when people can muster up so much ignorance and anger over a flu shot.

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Well said. It’s not the job of a business to tell customers how to reconfigure their lives for the convenience of the business. The “problem” isn’t that of patients.

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The Department of Defense profiles eight senior Army nurses who worked together early in their careers at William Beaumont Army Medical Center. Among them is WBAMC CIO/CMIO Lt. Col. Rich Clark (fourth from left in the photo above), who says, “Even though I work in IT, being a nurse helps bridge the gap between the physicians and IT. We look at IT from a clinical perspective now, to support the clinicians. I love coming to work every day, no day is ever the same. For us it feels like yesterday that we were in the operating room and medical ward. It’s not just the camaraderie, but it’s the mission, too. We’re taking care of America’s sons and daughters. It’s not about the money, it’s about the role and the impact that you can make.”


Sponsor Updates

  • AdvancedMD will exhibit at the America Psychiatric Association event May 18-22 in San Francisco.
  • Arcadia CMO Rich Parker, MD will speak at the New England HIMSS Conference May 16 in Foxborough, MA.
  • Artifact Health will exhibit at ACDIS 2019 May 20-23 in Orlando.
  • Avaya will exhibit at the E-Health Conference & Tradeshow May 26-29 in Toronto.
  • Dan Mendelson joins the board of Audacious Inquiry.
  • Datica CEO Travis Good, MD will speak at HITRUST 2019 May 21-23 in Grapevine, TX.
  • CompuGroup Medical will exhibit at the McKesson Sales Meeting May 15-16 in Las Vegas.
  • Impact Advisors VP John Stanley is named as one of Consulting magazine’s top 25 consultants.
  • Collective Medical updates software functionality to include a new consent feature to support better care collaboration between mental and physical health providers.
  • A UCONN computer science and engineering team sponsored by Diameter Health prototypes a new clinical user interface at UCONN’s Senior Design Presentation Day.
  • Cumberland Consulting Group will exhibit at the Medicaid and Government Pricing Congress May 20-22 in Orlando.

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Currently there are "8 comments" on this Article:

  1. Is there any evidence that the anti-vaxxers aren’t all Russian Trolls trolling each other?

    • I like that theory. At least I can cling to the hope that Americans aren’t so obsessed with imaginary conspiracies that they see science as no more relevant than their feelings or whatever Gwyneth Paltrow tells them to believe.

      • I wish that all children were protected from vaccine preventable diseases, an lived in families that believe in science and the importance of healthy communities. Most children do live in those kind of families, and are protected from vaccine preventable disease. Most of the children who are in active treatment for cancer, and others for whom certain vaccines carry more risk or who are unable to respond to vaccines are protected by herd immunity if they live in well vaccinated communities.

        However the families/parents/individuals that believe in conspiracies and fear that their freedom is being stolen from them, speak with loud voices, with passion, and with powerful (and often false) stories. Stories made more powerful by identifying an enemy. The enemy can be the Government, Doctors, Pharmaceutical Companies, Scientists, it really doesn’t matter as long as there is a scary line between us and them.

        I speak with parents on a regular basis who belong to a variety of groups that serve as their primary source of information against vaccination. Sometimes they do not want to hear about my “science” because they already know better, sometimes they cannot escape the fear created by the passionate bearers of false stories, and some times they just don’t believe that vaccine preventable diseases can kill you, or cause permanent harm if you survive the disease. It is true that many people get vaccine preventable diseases and don’t die or suffer permanent harm. But don’t forget that the “Everybody had measles when I was a kid, and we’re all fine” stories are told by the survivors….those survivors who weren’t left with permanent neurologic injury. It is hard to be afraid of a disease you have never seen.

    • Not if you live in Southern California. It is all over the place here. Literally rampant throughout the homeschool and charter school community.

  2. “Storage array vendor Infinidat, whose systems use disk-based storage with memory caching, creates a software-defined flash array called Epic Compatibility Mode that it hopes will allow it to earn Epic certification since Epic does not allow disk-based storage for performance reasons.”

    I’m not speaking for Epic here, but I don’t believe they certify storage vendors, so I don’t know what this article is talking about. Seems more like they’re trying to get some press (and apparently succeeding). Epic does provide a list of vendors and products that they have more experience/comfort with and that their customers use the most. I guess they can take that as “certification,” but it’s really stretching it. Watch them get sued or threatened by Epic for misusing their trademark and take this down. The all flash requirement that they’re mentioning is primarily to meet IOPS, which with spinning disks you’d need so many as to make it too expensive. It’s actually cheaper to meet the IOPS with flash. I’m sure if you really wanted to and could show you can meet the IO requirements with spinning disks you can probably make the case to Epic. I don’t know why you’d want to though as there would be way more downsides than upsides.







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