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September 5, 2019 News 4 Comments

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Cerner will lay off 255 workers across roles and offices by November 5 as part of a cost reduction program that is intended to boost the company’s profitability.

Cerner announced a hiring freeze this past April and pledged to achieve operating margin targets of 20% for Q4 2019 and 22.5% for Q4 2020. This came in response to Cerner’s April 2019 “cooperation agreement” with activist investor Starboard Capital, which despite holding just 1.2% of outstanding CERN shares, was given four board seats and promises to improve profits. Starboard has since started selling off some of its CERN shares as their price increased.

Rumors suggest that separated employees will received eight weeks’ salary plus and additional two weeks of pay for each year of service. They will also be paid for unused paid time off.

The company says it will hire hundreds more employees by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, the Kansas City Business Journal reports that the company continues to pay former president Zane Burke $112,000 a month as part of a $2.7 million severance package.


Webinars

September 19 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2020 Code Updates.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, director of terminology mapping, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, classification and intervention mapping lead, IMO; and Julie Glasgow, MD, senior clinical terminologist, IMO. The 2020 regulatory release is right around the corner. Join IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders as they discuss new, revised, and deleted codes; highlight revisions to ICD-10-CM index and tabular; discuss changes within Official Coding Guidelines; share potential impacts of the code set update; and review ICD-10-CM modifier changes.

September 26 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Patient Education Data: A Key Ingredient for Improving Quality and Patient Experience.” Sponsor: Healthwise. Presenters: Victoria L. Maisonneuve, MSN, RN, director of the Nursing Center for Excellence and Magnet program, Parkview Health; Marta Sylvia, MPH, senior manager of quality improvement and outcomes research, Healthwise. Healthcare data is everywhere! It’s scattered across various systems and in countless formats, making it difficult to collect and glean actionable information. Knowing where to start depends on what your organization wants to accomplish. Vicki Maisonneuve will share how her team analyzes data around the use of patient education. By combining different data sets, she can easily identify trends, gaps, and opportunities to improve quality and patient experience across Parkview Health.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Digital prescription savings and patient engagement company OptimizeRx will acquire cloud-based digital therapeutics vendor RMDY Health for $16 million.

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PCare, a Lake Success, NY-based interactive patient experience software vendor, acquires digital rounding and real-time patient feedback technology company TruthPoint.

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Health Recovery Solutions raises $10 million in a Series B funding round led by Edison Partners. The Hoboken, NJ-based remote patient monitoring company has grown to 80 employees and raised $16 million since launching seven years ago.

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Lab-testing startup UBiome files for bankruptcy, inspiring a plethora of excrement-inspired jokes and Theranos comparisons on Twitter. The San Francisco-based business — which placed its co-CEOs on administrative leave and  laid off staff earlier this summer amidst an FBI investigation into its billing practices, among other purportedly bad business dealings — will use an $8 million bankruptcy loan to stay afloat until it can find a buyer. CVS has reportedly put a halt to sales of the company’s at-home gut health testing kits.


Sales

  • The AsOne Healthcare Independent Practice Association in New York City selects Netsmart’s CareManager population health management technology and services.
  • Guthrie will implement POC Advisor from Wolters Kluwer Health to better enable the detection and treatment of sepsis at its four hospitals in New York and Pennsylvania.
  • In North Carolina, Cone Health and the Triad Health Network of community physicians will implement advance care planning technology from Vynca.

People

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Former PatientKeeper CEO Paul Brient joins Athenahealth as chief product officer.

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In Australia, EHealth Queensland names hospital executive Damian Green CEO and CIO. Green takes over from Richard Ashby, who resigned eight months ago amidst continued provider pushback against the statewide IEMR rollout and accusations of improper conduct with a staff member. Green will oversee the continued rollout of the Cerner software, a project that has been put on hold until 2021 as the agency sorts out patient safety and budgeting issues.

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Life sciences compliance software vendor MediSpend hires Craig Hauben (Ciox Health) as CEO.


Announcements and Implementations

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WellSky develops predictive analytics for home healthcare providers that combines population health with patient-specific data.

CNBC reports that Verily is working with wearable heart monitoring company IRhythm to develop a wearable for people at risk of atrial fibrillation. Verily Head of Clinical Science and Neurology William Marks, MD has said the device will be developed with physicians – and their aversion to unnecessary data – in mind

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Elsevier will use a rare disease database created by NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences in its development of a Web-based diagnostic tool.that will take into account patient symptoms, medical histories, and predilection to certain rare diseases.

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Datica announces GA of Integrate, new API integration software that ensures secure compliance with interoperability standards.

Urgent care clinics within St. Mary’s Health Network (NV) implement Carbon Health’s patient engagement and virtual care software.

Politico reports that the Florida HIE has turned on the state’s Emergency Census Service, developed by Audacious Inquiry, to help public health officials locate people displaced by Hurricane Dorian.

AMA releases 2020 CPT, which includes 248 new codes, 71 deletions, and 75 revisions. Several of the new codes cover digital communications, such as patient portals.


Government and Politics

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Montana Governor Steve Bullock signs an executive order allocating $19 million towards the funding and development of the Big Sky Care Connect HIE. The nonprofit will hire a vendor to manage its data network later this month. While Big Sky is now the state’s official HIE, it’s not its first. HealthShare Montana was established with HITECH funding, but later shut down over governance and technology issues.


Privacy and Security

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European advocacy group Privacy International discovers that Web-based mental health services in the UK, France, and Germany have been selling user data to third parties for ad targeting without permission. Google, Facebook, and, to some extent Amazon Web Services were top purveyors of data.


Other

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The Commons Project, UCSF Health, Open MHealth, and other groups will develop CommonHealth, an Android alternative of IOS-only Apple Health Records. It will be the first project of non-profit Commons Project Foundation, which will build public-benefitting digital projects that are free of third-party financial interests. The organization’s leaders have healthcare experience in companies such as Wellpass, Sapiens Data Science, and Surescripts.

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Healthcare investor Garen Sarafian isn’t impressed with an American Hospital Association-commissioned article that claims hospital mergers decrease costs and increase quality. He notes that the piece was not peer-reviewed, the authors chose which hospitals to study, and data used consisted entirely of responses to interview questions posed to executives of those same hospitals. He summarizes, “Look at the appendix survey questions starting from the title in the full report and you’ll be appalled.” (see above sample).


Sponsor Updates

  • EClinicalWorks and Greenway Health will exhibit at ASCENT 2019 September 8-11 in Austin, TX.
  • Ensocare will exhibit at the ACMA Illinois Chapter Conference September 17 in Rosemont.
  • HealthCrowd will exhibit at the NASP 2019 September 9-11 in Washington, DC.
  • Healthcare Growth Partners publishes its “Health IT August Insights.”
  • Healthfinch publishes a new case study featuring The Guthrie Clinic, “Improving Efficiencies and Reducing Provider Burnout with Refill Technology.”
  • Healthwise will exhibit at the Medicaid Managed Care Summit September 9-10 in Scottsdale, AZ.
  • Kyruus will exhibit at SHSMD Connections September 8-11 in Nashville.
  • Prepared Health will exhibit at Health Catalyst’s Healthcare Analytics Summit September 10-11 in Salt Lake City.
  • Spok publishes a new infographic, “Cloud Computing in Healthcare.”
  • Intermountain Healthcare (UT) expands its use of SymphonyRM’s AI-powered HealthOS Platform to its new kidney services program and clinic.
  • DrChrono adds Relatient’s patient engagement technology to its tablet-based EHR and practice management software.

Blog Posts


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Contacts

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Currently there are "4 comments" on this Article:

  1. “Cerner will lay off 255 workers across roles and offices by November 5 as part of a cost reduction program that is intended to boost the company’s profitability.”

    –and–

    “The company says it will hire hundreds more employees by the end of the year.”

    So what am I missing here????

    • You’re missing every corporate layoff announcement these days, which reads about the same as Cerner’s. Companies don’t like being examined for downsizing their way to success or accused of chasing quarterly numbers, so they temper layoff acknowledgements with the cheery counterpoint that they will be hiring new people in other areas and that those laid off represent a tiny percentage of their workforce. That makes sense on the one hand, pruning back where needs have lessened while bringing on specific skills in new areas. But it does emphasize that the company hires for specific skills and fires when those skills are no longer needed instead of retraining a good employee. It’s a double whammy to lose your job while also being told that the company is simultaneously rolling the dice by hiring someone new, but my experience is that layoffs (not Cerner’s specifically) are the chance to part ways with folks who are less productive, less deferential to management, getting old enough to consume more of the benefits they were promised, or who work from an office the company wants to close. In other words, it’s just business American style.

      • Agreed! I’ve seen it first-hand, as I’m sure many of your readers have. My former employer habitually used mass layoffs as an opportunity to get rid of anyone who had developed cancer as well as people who had chosen to take maternity leave, bereavement leave, etc. I started to keep notes when they laid off my friend the day after his cancer surgery (while he was in a hospital bed!) – he had been a loyal company man for around 12 years. The company probably figured it was a low-risk practice because most of these people are in no position to sue, and usually can’t prove anything. We had a really young, happy, healthy workforce… after a while.

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