News 11/8/19

Top News

Just one in 10 discharged patients go online to access their medical information, according to a study that looked at data from 2,410 hospitals over a two-year period.

The analysis also found that patients at non-profit hospitals are more likely to take advantage of access than their counterparts at for-profit organizations, as are patients at teaching hospitals.

The authors conclude that “policy efforts have failed to engage a large proportion of patients in the electronic use of their data or to bridge the ‘digital divide’ that accompanies health care disparities.”

Reader Comments

From Being There: “Re: HLTH conference. As a participant and attendee, I found this to be a first-rate event. Other than a couple of HHS speakers who seemed more intent on politics versus real healthcare, the rest were engaging, interesting, and first rate. I especially like the panel discussion format used in the tracks I attended. As an exhibitor, I was disappointed in the value provided for the cost incurred. Activity was low most of the time, including the happy hour which helped a bit, but not enough. My theory is that there is just too many good speakers and sessions which are running concurrently such that, if I didn’t have to be in the exhibit area, I would have been attending tracks and sessions instead. PS: the free Mimosas on Sunday morning were especially nice.”

From Mandibular Process: “Re: HIMS. Why in the world would a company name themselves this?” I took “in the world” part of this question literally, assuming that a company that was started in 2014 would choose this name only if (a) it is clueless, or (b) it is brazenly hiding behind some other country’s less-litigious legal system. Not so. Even though the HIMS website does not list people or places (not uncommon with foreign companies trying to look domestic), I tracked them down to Arizona, where a postal race is probably unfolding to see whether our industry’s HIMSS or from the Viagra-selling website HIMS will land the first cease-and-desist letter.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Reuters reports that CompuGroup Medical is one of two top bidders for the health IT and integrated care parts of Agfa’s European healthcare business.

American Well acquires behavioral telehealth and telepsychiatry service provider Aligned Telehealth.

Lawyers for Elizabeth Holmes contend in a hearing that the FDA destroyed emails that are vital to her defense. The former Theranos CEO and co-defendant Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani –a former Theranos executive and romantic partner of Holmes — face up to nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The FDA has admitted to having only partial emails from the former director of its diagnostics regulatory division, which it blames on a faulty email storage system.

Sales

• The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center will implement Visage Imaging’s Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform in all of its radiology departments, replacing its legacy PACS.
• Boston Health Care for the Homeless will use an addiction treatment-focused EHR from Netsmart to help care for patients with opioid use disorder.
• Prisma Health (SC) selects telehealth technology and services from MDLive.
• Health and human service agency network Innovative Management Solutions (NY) will implement population health analytics and risk management tools from Arcadia.

People

Federal health IT vendor DSS names Christopher Kunney (Coker Group) chief of strategy and business development and Roy Hammar (Cerner) chief of client engagement.

Announcements and Implementations

The National Council for Behavioral Health and disaster relief non-profit Americares pilot a text-based messaging program at eight Texas health clinics that uses patient engagement software from Epharmix to help patients with medication adherence.

California-based HIE Manifest MedEx and HBI Solutions develop MX Analyze, a predictive analytics tool designed to help providers manage high-risk patients and care transitions.

A new KLAS report says that the patient engagement ecosystem is a complex and overwhelming area of health IT that spans 80 capabilities and “a slew of vendors claiming to offer them.” KLAS analysts didn’t interview clients in this case – they compared vendor claims to provider priorities. Among vendor-agnostic products, Allscripts, CiperHealth, and GetWellNetwork offer multiple solutions that align with market priorities. EHR vendor patient portals from Epic, Athenahealth, and NextGen, even though their use is limited, meet the key provider demands for bill payment and self-scheduling. Sonofi Health and PCare lead in the interactive patient systems category, Orca and Luma are notable outreach vendors, and Salesforce and Docent Health perform well in the broad category of CRM, rounding, and wayfinding. KLAS notes that providers reap most of the benefit of these systems, with only 20% of vendors claiming improved clinical outcomes.

Government and Politics

The VA gives all veterans access to their medical records via Apple’s Health Records app following an earlier limited rollout.

Privacy and Security

The Government of Nunavut in northern Canada prioritizes getting its health department’s Meditech system back online after a DoppelPaymer ransomware attack over the weekend crippled digital services across its networks. Officials anticipate returning to normal operations within a week.

Other

Researchers at Emory University in Atlanta find a direct correlation between opioid abuse-related tweets and overdose deaths in several Pennsylvania counties. The researchers hope to further refine their machine-learning algorithm to help public health officials monitor opioid abuse within certain populations.

Kyruus surveys 1,000 consumers for the third year in a row to better understand their healthcare access preferences. A few findings:

• Consumers are relying more heavily on hospital websites than in years past when it comes to searching for healthcare information.
• Scheduling appointments by phone, while still the dominant method, is losing losing ground to online booking.
• Consumers care more about insurance acceptance and clinical expertise than a health system’s reputation or appointment availability.
• Thirty-three percent of respondents say they would switch providers for access to virtual visits.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks and HealthCrowd will exhibit at the TAHP Texas Covered Health Care Conference + Expo November 11-12 in Austin.
• Ensocare will exhibit at the 2019 Leadership and Physician Advisor Conference November 15-17 in Miami.
• EPSi will exhibit at the HFMA Region 9 Annual Conference November 10-12 in New Orleans.
• Formativ Health will sponsor the Wounded Warrior Project Carry Forward 5K November 9 in Jacksonville, FL.
• Patientco celebrates new office space in Atlanta.
• Healthwise, Imprivata, and Intelligent Medical Objects will exhibit at NextGen UGM 2019 November 10-13 in Orlando.
• Hyland names the State of Minnesota Department of Health as the winner of its 2019 Government Innovation Award.
• InterSystems debuts its PulseCast podcast, “John Halamka: Making the Most of Decentralized Data.”
• Definitive Healthcare SVP of Strategy Kate Shamsuddin wins the Worcester Business Journal’s Outstanding Women in Business Award.
• Glytec publishes a new study focused on the “Current State of Inpatient Diabetes Care and Glycemic Management.”

Blog Posts

• Taking Control of Your PCP with CPC+ (EClinicalWorks)
• Connect 19 annual Spok conference recap (Spok)
• Prescriptions for healthcare data management systems on GCP (Google Cloud)
• To achieve true innovation in healthcare, we must work together as an industry (Greenway Health)
• HCI Group at CHIME10 Fall CIO Forum (HCI Group)
• HGP HIT October Insights (Healthcare Growth Partners)
• Piloting a Centralized Prescription Renewal Workflow (Healthfinch)
• The 5 Rights: Expanding Your Definition of Patient Access to Look Beyond Right Care, Place & Time (Kyruus)

Contacts

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