News 5/8/20

Top News

Allscripts announces Q1 results: revenue down 3%, adjusted EPS $0.09 vs. $0.16, missing Wall Street expectations for both.

MDRX shares dropped 6% in after-hours trading immediately following the announcement after closing up 6.5% on the day. The company’s market capitalization is $952 million.

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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shares of embedded communications technology vendor Twilio, which Epic recently chose to power its telehealth offering, rose 25% Wednesday after  the company reported a Q1 revenue increase of 57% to $365 million. The company also raised Q2 revenue guidance by another 35%. Twilio is valued at $22 billion.

The US Court of Appeals upholds a district court’s dismissal of a class action lawsuit against EClinicalWorks in which the estates of two deceased patients claimed that errors in ECW’s system displayed incomplete or inaccurate patient data to providers. The appeals court says the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue because they provided no proof that anyone was harmed.

CVS Health announces Q1 results: revenue up 8%, EPS $1.91 vs. $1.63, beating analyst expectations for both. The retailer saw a 600% jump in telemedicine visits through its MinuteClinics, part of an overall spike in its digital services that helped the essential business realize first-quarter sales of $67 billion.

Sales

• Perry Community Hospital will use remote cardiac and respiratory monitoring software from Coala Life to launch a remote monitoring program for its patients in rural Tennessee.

Announcements and Implementations

CarePort Health releases an interoperability solution that meets CMS’s Conditions of Participation requirement that hospitals send ADT notifications to primary care physicians and post-acute care providers.

Premier adds perinatal quality analytics to its QualityAdvisor improvement software.

LogMeIn releases a healthcare edition of its GoToMeeting videoconferencing platform that meets HIPAA requirements by offering a Business Associate Agreement, with a cost of $16 per user per month for unlimited sessions and minutes.

Intelligent Medical Objects releases an open source standardized terminology package for COVID-19 that allows aggregating and sharing patient problems, procedures, and labs information.

People

Experity names Callan Young (Anaplan) SVP of marketing.

Wil Lukens (CenTrak) joins Critical Alert as VP of sales.

Wolters Kluwer Health hires Frank Jackson (Prognos Health) as VP/GM of its Health Language business.

Government and Politics

HHS awards $583 million to 1,400 federally-funded health centers to help them expand COVID-19 testing.

HHS publishes a list of the 142,000 healthcare providers that received money from the $50 billion HRSA Provider Relief Fund, in which money was paid based on their Medicare net patient revenue. The median payment was $9,600, the average $142,000. The top 10 recipients are:

1. Dignity Health ($180 million)
2. Cleveland Clinic ($103 miliion)
3. Stanford Health Care $(102 million)
4. Memorial Hermann Health System ($92 million)
5. NYU Langone Health ($92 million)
6. County of Los Angeles ($81 million)
7. HMH Hospitals $(77 million)
8. Florida Cancer Specialists and Research Institute ($67 million)
9. Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases ($64 million)
10. Massachusetts General Hospital ($58 million)

HHS OIG creates freely available statistical tools for analyzing prescription claims data to identify patients who are at risk of opioid misuse or overdose.

COVID-19

The White House rejects CDC’s recommendations — which it commissioned — on when and how state and local officials should allow business owners, restaurants, schools, and churches to reopen. “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework” was supposed to have been published Friday, but the public health agency’s scientists were told it “would never see the light of day.” The White House repeated in a Wednesday briefing that states are responsible for their own COVID-19 response.

A Premier survey finds that hospitals will need to expand their COVID-19 testing capacity by more than 200% to even partially resume full services. The hospitals say they are constrained by lack of testing reagents (41%) and swabs (40%). Most hospitals hope to screen employees for coronavirus symptoms before resuming non-emergency procedures, but just 32% say they have enough COVID-19 tests for frontline workers, so most will limit testing to those employees who exhibit symptoms.

Government officials in the UK consider rolling out “immunity passports” to qualifying individuals as part of forthcoming plans to ease the country’s lockdown. The digital certificate would incorporate facial biometrics and antibody test results into an app that employees could use to gain entry into their workplaces.

NIH launches a study to determine whether the low number of reported cases in children is due to natural immunity or infection without symptoms.

The US — unlike Italy, Spain and China —has not seen a significant decrease in daily new cases following the infection’s peak, which occurred here on April 26, causing former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD to warn that the virus could continue as a “slow burn of infection across the country … we still have a lot of infection.”

Axios reports that some White House officials believe that COVID-19 death counts are being inflated because hospitals get paid more for treating coronavirus patients. Other insiders believe the actual number is lower because presumptive cases are not being verified by autopsy, also noting that data reporting standards are not uniform.

An MIT Technology Review article says epidemiologists and public health experts struggle to draw population-level conclusions from COVID-19 testing results, as each state sets its own standards for data collection and reporting. Some states still accept provider reporting via fax and Excel. The results of at-home tests won’t necessarily be reported to the state at all, and those tests have varying accuracy. The authors recommend using CDC’s FHIR-based tool to report directly from EHRs and non-profit Logica has developed an open source interoperability platform for health system COVID-19 reporting. Experts say that it would be ideal if the federal government took the lead on public health data efforts, but that isn’t likely to happen.

Johns Hopkins University updates its COVID Control study app, in which volunteers submit their temperatures and any symptoms daily to detect outbreaks.

In England, Imperial College epidemiologist Neil Ferguson — whose group’s prediction of massive numbers of COVID-19 deaths in the absence of mitigation strategies led the UK and US governments to implement drastic measures — quits his UK government advisory role after a newspaper reports that he broke the stay-at-home rules he advocated by allowing his girlfriend to visit him. Complicating the issue is that both Ferguson (called “Professor Lockdown” there) and his girlfriend are married to other people, each of them have children at home, Ferguson has tested positive for coronavirus, and the woman says her husband is showing symptoms.

Other

Germany-based hospital and dialysis center operator Fresenius is hit with a ransomware attack. US and UK government cybersecurity centers warned Tuesday that state-sponsored hacking teams are targeting organizations that are involved in COVID-19 response.

A JAMIA-published study looks at how Mayo Clinic’s move from Cerner to Epic affected its patient satisfaction scores, concluding that the scores dropped significantly and didn’t return to previous levels for 9-15 months. Areas most affected were access, wait time, and receiving information about delays. Satisfaction dropped before go-live, which the authors hypothesize was due to schedulers using two systems and implementing new processes as well as pulling team members offline for training.

In England, anonymous artist Banksy creates a painting for Southampton General Hospital depicting a child replacing his superhero dolls with one of a nurse.

Good tweet.

Sponsor Updates

• Goliath Technologies releases a new video, “How to Reduce Barriers to Clinician Satisfaction with Cerner.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health launches a Rapid Onboarding module in Lippincott Procedures to help hospitals prepare nurses for COVID-19 care.
• Impact Advisors hires James McHugh (Guidehouse) as managing director.
• Intelligent Medical Objects releases a new e-book, “Leveraging the EHR for effective clinical workflows.”
• InterSystems releases a new PulseCast podcast, “Don Woodlock: Capturing Cleaner Data Across the Care Continuum.”
• Spok supports and honors nurses during Nurses Week.
• The local paper profiles the Western PA Home & Community Task Force’s use of CarePort Health’s Guide technology, which helps connect hospitals with best-fit, post-acute care facilities for their patients.

Blog Posts

• Remedying the Financial Impact of COVID-19 with a Measured Return to Financial Security (Engage)
• Sustaining Medical Practice During COVID-19 (EClinicalWorks)
• Adapting Your Health Technology Business to a Post-COVID-19 World (Get-to-Market Health)
• 14 Innovations in Insulin to Mark Glytec’s 14th Birthday (Glytec)
• Maintaining Cash Flow in the Wake of COVID-19 (Greenway Health)
• How blockchain can prevent the next global pandemic (The HCI Group)
• COVID-19: Telemedicine’s Catalyst (Healthcare Growth Partners)
• Patient Education can Eliminate Three of Your Biggest Challenges (Healthwise)
• Imat Solutions Featured in KLAS COVID-19 Technology Solutions Guide (Imat Solutions)
• Video Teleconference Security Tips for Zoom (Impact Advisors)
• Let healthcare information technology help – we have a lot to offer (Imprivata)
• Improving Nurse Retention and Driving Value-Based Care (Capsule)

Contacts

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