News 4/22/20

Top News

The VA and DoD jointly launch a health information exchange that will allow clinicians to access patient records that are stored in the EHRs of community partners and health systems.

The HIE will connect to CommonWell later this year.

Both organizations were already able to access information from their own community health partners, but the HIE allow all providers to see data from all community partners.

Most of the 215 partners that are participating in the exchange can both send and receive patient data, although some allow only one-way sharing.

Reader Comments

From Burned by TriZetto: “Re: TriZetto. We installed EClinicalWorks at our practice last year and chose TriZetto from the three revenue cycle vendors ECW offered us. ECW just announced that they are abandoning the company and their integration because of a massive security breach at TriZetto.” Cognizant, which acquired TriZetto for $2.7 billion in cash in 2014, was hit this past weekend by Maze ransomware. ECW has blocked all integration to TriZetto’s clearinghouse and patient statements. The Maze malware not only encrypts computers, it exfiltrates company data to the servers of the attackers, who then demand payment with the threat of publishing the data online. The publicly traded Cognizant, which reports annual revenue of $17 billion, warns in a new SEC filing that the attack could negatively affect its financial results. Meanwhile, Cognizant continues to offer end-to-end security solutions, including threat and vulnerability management and cyber threat defense.

Webinars

April 28 (Tuesday) 1 ET: “COVID-19: Managing an evolving patient population with health information systems.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO; Reeti Chauhan, senior product manager, IMO. IMO recently released new novel coronavirus descriptors to help clinicians accurately record diagnoses and also created free IMO Precision COVID-19 Sets to help identify and analyze patients with potential or documented infection. The presenters will discuss these new tools and describe how to use them optimally.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Analytics vendor Komodo Health lays off 23 employees, representing 9% of its headcount, three months after it raised $50 million in a funding round. The company collects the de-identified data from 15 million patient encounters each day to follow patient journeys and analyze outcomes.

People

Microsoft hires Tom McGuinness (GE Healthcare) as corporate VP of global healthcare.

Announcements and Implementations

Google announces GA of the Google Cloud Healthcare API. The company also highlights its tools for supporting COVID-19 efforts, including Google Meet for virtual care, G Suite for sharing information, a newly launched Rapid Response Virtual Agent for patient interaction, Google Maps Platform for giving directors to patients, and researcher credits for Google Cloud

Nuance launches Dragon Ambient Experience (DAX), which creates clinical notes from the physician-patient conversation in either physical or virtual visits.

Surescripts reports that e-prescribing represented 80% of all prescriptions in 2019, while use of real-time benefit checking and electronic prior authorizations increased significantly.

Lark Health offers its text-based stress and anxiety coaching service to health plans and employers at no charge through July 1.

Redox announces a rapid deployment model that allows telehealth software developers to bring their solutions live with EHR integration in two weeks.

Premier enhances its solutions for COVID-19, including COVID-specific alerts for clinical surveillance, an early warning system for patient volumes, surge prediction, supply use prediction, COVID-19 clinical guidance, intervention effectiveness monitoring, and best practices deployment.

PCare will deliver provider-prescribed patient guidance and education from Quil on its interactive patient system and digital rounding solution, with COVID-19 Care Journey being among the first offerings.

COVID-19

CMS announces that hospitals that are located in areas that have low coronavirus outbreak risk can restart providing non-emergent, non-COVID-19 services. CMS advises hospitals to monitor COVID-19 trends in their area; prioritize by patient need; ensure that providers, staff, and patients wear facemasks at all times; screen staff and patients for symptoms before they enter the facility; and limit volumes so that six-foot distancing can be practiced in areas such as waiting rooms.

Baystate Health executive Andrew Artenstein, MD describes in a NEJM letter the health system’s drama-filled effort to obtain face masks and N95 respirators at five times the normal price from a broker who had a connection in China. The hospital team traveled to an industrial warehouse to meet two trucks that had been marked as food service vehicles to avoid being detained. FBI agents arrived demanded proof that the supplies were not bound for black market resale. The agents were satisfied, but the health system then had to use its political contacts to keep the shipment from being seized by the Department of Homeland Security.

Providers who accept CARES Act relief funds are barred by mandatory acceptance terms in which they pledge to not balance-bill COVID-19 patients for out-of-network charges.

FDA authorizes use of LabCorp’s home self-test for COVID-19, in which a collection kit of nasal swabs and saline is used by the patient to take their own sample, which is then mailed to LabCorp for processing.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD warns that most available serology tests have not been reviewed by the FDA and their quality varies, with some tests potentially being wrong half the time when they tell patients they have coronavirus antibodies. The tests are useful for public health studies, but not worth much for making decisions about individuals.

Influential technology investor Mary Meeker looks at the influence of coronavirus, with these healthcare-related observations:

• COVID-19 research is being published at 20 times the rate of prior infectious diseases at the same stage.
• Clinical research is rapidly mobilizing, with 500 clinical trials underway with 5 million participants.
• The pandemic has exposed healthcare flaws that may be the call to arms to rethink a system that consumes 8% of GDP, $1.2 trillion in 2019 federal spending, and 28% of the federal budget.
• Primary care hasn’t changed much since 1918’s Spanish Flu outbreak, as patients still visit the office (possibly infecting others), the doctor diagnoses based on outward symptoms, the patient is sent home to watch and wait, and the patient either gets better or goes to the ED.
• A lack of connected data, despite decades of EHR investment, have left federal and state healthcare officials using spreadsheets to track hospital utilization and capacity. Prediction models have varied wildly based on the use of assumptions. Providers are too overwhelmed with  workload and high volumes of data to deliver the benefits of digitization.
• Innovation will be driven around telehealth, connected devices for monitoring, rapid point-of-care testing, connecting the “dark pools” of EHR data using interoperability and APIs, using automation to improve data capture quality, and applying AI to EHR data to drive insights to providers at the right time.

Several healthcare companies create COVID-19 Research Database, a secure repository of de-identified, patient-level, longitudinal datasets from claims and EHRs. Researchers will be able to evaluate drug effectiveness, identify demographic and pre-existing condition risk factors, and predict the public health impact of quarantines.

Sponsor Updates

• Bluetree employees across the country make 609 masks for nine organizations in eight states.
• Avaya CEO and President Jim Chirico discusses on Fox Business how the company is donating video services to businesses during the pandemic.
• Clinical Architecture releases a new edition of its Informonster Podcast, “Three Takeaways from the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Importance of Managing Data Quality.”
• Dina wins the 2020 Transition of Care Challenge, sponsored by the New Orleans Business Alliance and Tulane Health System.

Blog Posts

• COVID-19 and the Importance of Health Informatics (Healthcare Growth Partners)
• Enterprise Imaging: Answers to Fundamental Questions (Impact Advisors)
• The New Normal of Healthcare After COVID-19 (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• EHR Go-Live Support from a Distance of Six Feet (314e)
• Norman Regional Health System Implements Zero-Contact Registration Process (Access)
• Learn how to strategically add telemedicine into your practice (AdvancedMD)
• Keeping CDI Teams Productive and Patient Data Accurate During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Artifact Health)
• What I Learned from 10 Years of Competing Against Avaya (Avaya)
• Pandemic Pivot: 5 Ways CareSignal Aligns with Revenue-Generating Telemedicine Codes (CareSignal)
• 7 Things Users Shouldn’t Do While Working From Home (CI Security)
• The Struggles Facing Rural Hospitals (Collective Medical)
• Medication Access During Uncertain Times (CoverMyMeds)
• Tools and Reports to Support Our Clients Impacted by COVID-19 (Crossings Healthcare Solutions)
• How the COVID-19 Pandemic is Affecting Children’s Hospital Operations (Dimensional Insight)

Contacts

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