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June 6, 2019 News 4 Comments

Top News

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LabCorp joins the roster of companies impacted by the American Medical Collection Agency breach, notifying nearly 8 million customers that their personal and financial data may have been exposed.

Opko Health’s 422,000 BioReference Lab customers were also caught up in the hack.

The records of nearly 20 million patients are involved in the breach of the medical billing company.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: new from the newly reformed, all-female L7, my favorite 1990s Riot Grrrl group except for maybe Hole. Lead singer, Flying V guitarist, and songwriter Donita Sparks — who is still tough, angry, and foul-mouthed at 56 — is about as far as you can get from “singers” whose “concerts” consist of prancing and lip syncing to pre-recorded songs written by anonymous hit-writing consortia. I’m pretty sure that if some guy in the front row harassed her that she would leap off the stage and punch him out.


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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Pharmacy technology vendor OmniSys acquires Rx-Net and its ProfitMax automated prescription pricing software. The Dallas-based company’s last acquisition was its 2017 purchase of competitor VoiceTech.

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The Riverside Company acquires Champion Healthcare Technologies from Jump Capital for an undisclosed sum. Riverside will combine Champion’s tracking software for implanted medical devices with its HemaTerra Technologies business, which offers supply chain management software for hospitals and blood and plasma collection centers.

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Waystar acquires Paro Decision Support, a predictive analytics vendor that helps hospitals identify patients who are eligible for charity care.

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Industry insiders say Bain Capital, Blackstone Group, KKR, CVC Capital Partners, GIC, and ChrysCapital have advanced to a second round of negotiations for the purchase of health IT consulting, services, and software company CitiusTech. General Atlantic acquired a controlling interest in the company in 2014 with a $111 million investment. A final sale decision is expected next month.


People

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Data archiving company Olah Healthcare Technology hires Wayne Trochmann (Allscripts) as VP of sales.


Announcements and Implementations

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St. Anthony’s Memorial Hospital (IL) will soon switch from Meditech to Epic, wrapping up the Hospital Sisters Health System’s four-year, $112 million implementation project.

Northwell Health (NY) implements DataMotion’s Direct Secure Messaging to improve its HIE capabilities.

British Columbia’s Northern Health system adopts Nuance’s Dragon Medical One and Power Mic Mobile speech-recognition technologies.

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AWS announces GA of Textract, a service that uses machine learning to identify and extract text and data from documents in any format. Extracted data is available via an API that developers can then use to analyze and query for their own analytics projects. Use cases include patient registration forms and scanning medical charts for undocumented diagnoses that lead to referrals.

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In West Virginia, Williamson Memorial Hospital goes live on Meditech.

Black Book names the top client-rated software and services vendors for achieving financial digital transformation, derived from surveying 484 hospitals and 713 practices. Among the 20 winners:

  • Hospital inpatient accounting: Meditech
  • Patient access software: Recondo
  • ERP: Premier
  • Document management: Ciox Health
  • Charge master: NThrive
  • Ambulatory claims management and clearinghouse: Availity
  • Inpatient claims management: Waystar
  • Patient payment technology: Waystar
  • EMPI: Verato

Government and Politics

The VA issues a $140 million task order to Cerner for interface support over the next four years. The order is part of the agency’s original $10 billion EHR modernization contract with Cerner. The VA expects to begin piloting the new software at several sites in the Pacific Northwest early next year.

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The NHS has promised financial incentives to providers who use AI for diagnostics, screenings, and outpatient appointments as part of a system-wide effort to meet productivity targets. The health service agreed to those goals last year in exchange for an extra £20 billion a year.


Other

Politico rehashes stories reported here earlier about Epic implementation problems in the Copenhagen region of Denmark, adding more details:

  • A consultant says the group from Denmark “went to Epic and fell in love” in being overly influenced by its campus.
  • Doctors and nurses dispense medications directly rather than pharmacists and Epic won’t allow nurses to prescribe in emergencies as is done in hospitals there, leading to workflow problems.
  • Medical terminologies had to be translated using Google Translate, creating problems such as when surgeons were offered two choices for the leg they intended to amputate: “left” or “correct.”
  • An anesthesiologist working on the project says the first hospital that went live was in “indescribable, total chaos” as Epic recommended going live with no pilot sites, which he describes as “worse than amateurish” when doctors and nurses were forced to use a system they hadn’t seen, after which they were “weeping openly for days.” The regional health administrator admits that he was overzealous in trying to get Epic implemented quickly to avoid the cost and integration challenges of running it alongside the old system.
  • Epic still isn’t integrated with the national medical record system.
  • Eighty percent of patients in Denmark move casually from hospital to home or other care setting and back over long periods, creating problems for clinicians who are forced to follow the American standard of re-entering diagnoses and medications each time using different screens for inpatient and outpatient.
  • Discharge letters to doctors include “nonsense that’s a copy-paste of everything in the patient record … five pages of gibberish [in which] there are five lines the doctor probably should read but doesn’t.” The government hired a consultant to use AI to extract the useful information.
  • Physician satisfaction with Epic is at 12%, and the country’s physician association said of Epic’s offer to let them run its system free in their offices, “You couldn’t give us enough money to install Epic. We’ve seen how it works.”
  • A leading breast cancer surgeon concludes, “You have exported burnout.”
  • The rest of Denmark decided not to follow the Copenhagen’s region’s lead, selecting Systematic over Epic, leading some politicians to call for Epic’s replacement in Copenhagen, but the Health Ministry’s digital director says Epic is “too big to fail” after they have spent $500 million on it. 

Australia’s Queensland Health opens a search for a new EHealth Queensland CEO to replace Richard Ashby, who left in January over a conflict of interest issue.  His replacement will take responsibility for the over-budget Cerner project that has raised concerns from the auditor-general that Queensland Health has little negotiating leverage when contract extensions become due.

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Google Product Manager Prem Ramaswami reflects on the impact the company’s custom executive education program at Harvard Medical School has had on its healthcare endeavors. The 15-day course focuses on understanding the digital hoops patients jumped through to learn about treatments and clinical trials, physician interactions with EHRs, and ethical discussions on how the company could leverage its technology for global healthcare projects. “Taking this course, I felt like our work on health search would not be complete until doctors were prescribing Google to their patients,” he says.

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Here’s more savagely accurate satire from The Onion.


Sponsor Updates

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  • Ellkay sponsors Alpine Learning Group’s Go the Distance for Autism event.
  • EClinicalWorks will exhibit at the Telehealth Summit 2019 June 6-7 in Atlanta.
  • Ensocare will exhibit at the CMSA 2019 Conference June 10-14 in Las Vegas.
  • Hayes Management Consulting hires Paulo Santos as director of business development and Pej Ayandeh as client success manager.
  • HGP publishes “Health IT May Insights.”
  • Healthwise will exhibit at the Epic Michigan User Group Conference June 10 in Ypsilanti.
  • Information Builders showcases innovations for scaling advanced analytics and data management at its Summit 2019 user conference.
  • InterSystems will exhibit at the HL7 FHIR DevDays June 10-12 in Redmond, WA.
  • Intelligent Medical Objects holds a grand opening ceremony for its new headquarters in Rosemont, IL.
  • ConnectiveRx publishes a new white paper, “Communicating with HCPs based on their observed prescribing behavior.”
  • Halifax Health becomes the first member of the Access Million ESignature Club.
  • Greenway Health wins a 2019 Fortress Cyber Security Award in the application security category.
  • Frost & Sullivan awards Medicomp Systems its 2019 Customer Value Leadership Award for Clinical Decision Support for the Quippe suite of solutions.
  • Apixio achieves HITRUST CSF Certification.
  • Black Book announces the top client-rated software and services vendors that have achieved financial digital transformation.

Blog Posts

The Medtech Breakthrough Awards recognize:

  • Kyruus for its ProviderMatch for Consumers in Spanish
  • Vocera’s SmartBadge for “Best Internet-of-Things Healthcare Wearable Device”
  • Patientco’s payment software as the “Best New Healthcare Payments Solution”
  • Sansoro Health’s Emissary Platform as the “Best Healthcare Big Data Solution”

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Currently there are "4 comments" on this Article:

  1. Re: Listening: new from the newly reformed, all-female L7, my favorite 1990s Riot Grrrl group ….and songwriter Donita Sparks — who is still tough, angry, and foul-mouthed at 56….I’m pretty sure that if some guy in the front row harassed her that she would leap off the stage and punch him out.

    Good God! You can correctly call me an old fart from the Make Love Not War days. However, I still prefer to listen to the top-notch, female singer/songwriters (think Joni, Judy, Stevie, Carly…) who remain ANYTHING but tough, angry, and foul-mouthed at 70+ and NEVER pranced and/or lip-synced to pre-recorded songs written by anonymous hit-writing consortia.

  2. Hey I’m Woodstock Generation too but I support Mr. H.’s enthusiasm for 90’s music. But why then is Mr. H. ignoring Veruca Salt? Who, as W.G. may or may not be pleased to find out, deliver their own shout-out back to, of all things, a White Album song in Volcano Girls (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyVSKydUxKk, @2:30).

    • I try not to repeat “Listening” recommendations to expose readers to new musicians, so I last recommended Veruca Salt in July 2012:

      https://histalk2.com/2012/01/07/monday-morning-update-1912/

      The new L7 release also reminded me how much I like Juliette and the Licks, the titular Juliette being the actress Ms. Lewis, who is just as good of a hard-charging singer as an actress. That’s coming from someone who enjoys her work in both art forms.

  3. Hey, I have nothing against 90s or any other music from the circa 50s to the present. And shout-outs to great album music during these years suit me just fine. I am against “tough, angry, and foul-mouthed” men or women who might “leap off the stage … and punch (him) out” (and as a physician, you should be, too,) as well as men or women who “lip(ed)-synch to pre-recorded songs written by anonymous hit-writing consortia.”







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