Weekender 10/11/19

Weekly News Recap

• Mednax will sell its MedData business to private equity firm Frasier Healthcare Partners for between $250 million and $300 million.
• DCH Health System (AL) agrees to pay Russian hackers after an October 1 ransomware attack forced it to divert patients and revert to paper processes.
• Membership-based primary care company One Medical hires several banks to help it prepare for an IPO.
• Patient engagement vendor Relatient acquires patient self-scheduling and waitlist software developer Everseat.
• Cerner reveals details about “Project Apollo,” new cloud-based technology that will leverage the company’s previously announced partnership with AWS.
• Researchers determine that 25% of healthcare spending – between $760 billion and $935 billion per year – is wasteful.

Best Reader Comments

Re: Putting off health care for financial reasons. According to GoFundMe’s CEO, one third of all campaigns are for medical expenses. Folks are literally begging strangers for money to help them pay their medical bills. (Kermit)

My “great expectation” would be that every time someone makes an entry into my medical record, that I would get a notification say that “X just entered something into your medical record. If this is appropriate, do nothing. If this is an error, please call us”. I feel this way because I was a victim of an identity mix-up with inappropriate merging of my record with someone else’s. Patient awareness like what happens with my credit care/bank might go a long way to reducing errors – and maybe it might make patients feel more responsible for their records at the same time. (Joe Schneider)

Sucks about athena but it is a hard market at a hard time. It looks like everybody will be stuck with CPSI until Allscripts buys them out and puts Evident out to pasture. (2Bad)

re: NextGen acquiring Topaz. The ‘agnostic’ market that NextGen has attempted to build (Eagle Dream Analytics, Entrada Mobile etc) continues to struggle with execution, two to three years in for analytics and mobile. If they could fix that problem, NextGen could be a different company. I don’t know if Topaz is another agnostic unicorn attempt but if the company doesn’t figure out how to execute, it will still be the same old NextGen regardless of the shade of lipstick on the pig. (ellemennopee)

Watercooler Talk Tidbits

Ghanian teenager Mustapha Haqq develops a predictive analytics model that uses AI to diagnose breast cancer. Because of poor Internet access in his area, Haqq walked several miles to an Internet café, where he taught himself to code and develop the model using resources from UC Irvine. “Internet access is expensive,” he says, “but thanks to the generous support of my parents – who made some sacrifices to give me a chance to complete a few online courses – I built sufficient coding skills to start developing solutions to some of the problems affecting our community.” Haqq has gone on to launch several coding clubs for students of all ages.

CNN profiles Olawale Sulaiman, MD a professor of neurosurgery and spinal surgery at Ochsner (LA) and founder of RNZ Global, which provides spinal surgeries and medical training in the US and his homeland of Nigeria. Sulaiman has taken a 25% pay cut to spend time – up to 12 days every month – caring for patients in Nigeria at little to no cost. “I believe that happiness doesn’t come from what you get, rather, it comes from what you give,” he said. “There is always room to give; you don’t need to be a millionaire to give.”

National Library of Medicine researchers call for “no-selfie zones” after determining that 259 people died attempting to take death-defying pictures of themselves between 2011 and 2017.

Restaurant franchise company Chanticleer Holdings decides to spin off its dining assets, which include the Hooters chain, so that it can merge with cancer drug maker Sonnet BioTherapeutics. @VentureValkyrie has started a tweet thread to crowdsource names for the newly combined company.

In Case You Missed It

• News 10/11/19
• EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 10/10/19
• News 10/9/19
• Curbside Consul with Dr. Jayne 10/7/19
• Monday Morning Update 10/7/19

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