Monday Morning Update 8/24/20

Top News

Outset Medical, which offers a portable, cloud-connected home dialysis machine that can integrate with EHRs, files for a $100 million IPO.

The only connection required for the touchscreen-operated, sensor-managed portable machine is a wall outlet and tap water that it uses to create its own dialysate.

The company has raised $450 million, most recently $125 million in a Series E funding round earlier this year.

Reader Comments

From Puzzled PR: “Re: partnership press release. Why didn’t you mention our announcement?” I ignore any announcement that I can’t figure out within 15 seconds, including this infuriatingly imprecise one that has puffed some sort of “partnership” to the point I can’t tell who (if anyone) actually bought something. I doubt it was newsworthy anyway, but I honestly couldn’t tell. Too many PR cooks spoil the announcement broth in rendering simple statements such as “what does this company do” into intentional inflated gibberish in shooting for high-falutin’ prose and instead hitting their own foot. I typically don’t mention partnership announcements (because who cares?) and I also pass on “news” items that affect only existing clients who surely be contacted individually anyway. The folks whose committees ruin clear communication by over-polishing it always seem shocked that the rest of the world doesn’t take notice, either because they couldn’t figure it out or it was of minimal value even before being butchered.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A possibly surprising 60% of provider employees who registered for HIMSS20 say they won’t attend HIMSS21 even if COVID-19 isn’t a factor by then. Most respondents, based on what they know today, have already made plans one way or another, with few of them saying they don’t know yet.

New poll to your right or here, repeating one I did in the pre-COVID days of last summer that seems like years ago: what’s better about your life now compared to a year ago?

Webinars

September 3 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “How Does A Global Pandemic Reshape Health IT? A Panel Discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Rob Wallace, chief product officer, IMO; Andrew S. Kanter, MD, MPH, chief medical officer, IMO; Lori Kevin, VP of enterprise IT and security, IMO; Sahas Subramanian, MCA, enterprise architect, IMO. As COVID-19 continues to spread, regulation changes, code system updates, and an increased reliance on technology are making it hard to stay on top of the many ways the pandemic is altering health IT. What’s more, we’re confronting challenges that rely heavily on technological solutions – like accurate reporting tools or telehealth adaptations – and we need those solutions now. The panel of subject matter experts across the enterprise will share insights on how the global pandemic is reshaping the health IT world.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Handheld ultrasound device manufacturer Exo raises $20 million in a Series B round, increasing its total to $100 million. The company will launch the device and its workflow software over the next few months in the US.

Hyland acquires Germany-based robotic process automation software vendor Another Monday.

A US appeals court reduces the $280 million in punitive damages that Tata Consultancy Services had been ordered to pay Epic in a 2014 trade secrets lawsuit, saying that $140 million is a reasonable figure. Tata continues to fight the lawsuit, arguing that it did not misuse the information that its consultants were accused of copying from Epic’s UserWeb while claiming to be Kaiser Permanente employees. The original jury award was $940 million, which was lowered to $420 million to comply with Wisconsin state caps on punitive damages. Epic accused Tata of stealing its intellectual property to improve its competing product Med Mantra. Tata employee Philippe Guionnet, who managed the company’s contracts with Kaiser, was the whistleblower who conveyed his suspicions to Epic.

People

Vinnie Whibbs (TogetherMD) joins TVR Communications as VP of enterprise solutions.

COVID-19

Updated models predict 227,000 to 300,000 US COVID-19 deaths by November and December. The current US death count is at 176,000.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD warns that a new HHS policy that removes FDA’s authority to oversee lab-developed tests will lead to direct-to-consumer tests that operate without FDA oversight and will leave FDA with no authority to take enforcement action against bad tests. FDA had traditionally not actively regulated such tests anyway, but now will be unable to work with test makers to improve quality in the absence of a process that was working.

FDA will reportedly authorize the use of convalescent plasma from recovered patients for treating COVID-19 under pressure from the White House on the eve of the Republican National Convention’s kickoff, although its Emergency Use Authorization will make it harder to conduct randomized clinical trials, which have never been performed on the procedure.

California’s infectious disease monitoring system recently went down for 20 days, hampering the efforts of local health departments to manage their pandemic response. The state’s backlog of 300,000 lab tests contained 15,000 that were positive for COVID-19, eliminating the possibility for individuals to isolate themselves and for public health officials to perform contact tracing. An outage in the state’s CalREDIE database prevented delivery of electronic lab reports to counties. Mendocino County performed its tracking by telephone and fax machine as usual, leading to its decision to shut down bars in even though the state’s backlogged electronica data showed the county as doing fine.

An August 7 wedding reception at a Maine inn with 65 attendees – 15 more than state law allows – has resulted in 53 known COVID-19 cases that were discovered by contact tracers. A woman who did not attend the reception died after becoming infected by someone who did.

In Ireland, two high-ranking federal government officials resign and others are under pressure after getting caught attending an 80-attendee golf tournament and dinner that was illegal given the country’s 50-person limit. The newly resigned / fired minister of agriculture, who had held the position for just six weeks, had warned citizens three days before that house parties were spreading the virus and that “COVID loves to party.”

Other

A Catholic hospital in Toronto opens up its Internet content filtering system to allow doctors to access the websites of abortion clinics for patient referrals.

Scientists in China say that their AI algorithm can predict coronary artery disease by looking at a person’s photo for signs of thinning or gray hair, wrinkles, and ear lobe creases.

Sponsor Updates

• The RedSail Technologies QCompass podcast features OmniSys Chief Innovation Officer David Pope, PharmD.
• SymphonyRM’s HealthOS: Health AI Powered Patient Engagement is now available on the Salesforce AppExchange.
• Waystar will open an office in Utah, creating up to 70 jobs over the next seven years.

Blog Posts

• New Survey Shows Telehealth Growth (Ingenious Med)
• Speed chart completion with cloud-based speech recognition (Nuance)
• Keeping up the fight on cancer during pandemic (OpenText)
• Telehealth: Any Way You Want It (PMD)
• Inside the Model that Predicts Surges in COVID-19 Cases (Premier)
• How Data Helps Wellsource Combat Chronic Disease (Pure Storage)
• Q3 2020 Product Updates: Integrate More with Less Code (Redox)
• Relatient Powers the Virtual Waiting Room with Contactless Patient Engagement (Relatient)
• How the COVID-19 Pandemic Shifted Prescribing Patterns: A Look at Real-Time Prescription Benefit Transaction Data from the First Half of 2020 (RxRevu)
• Leading with Intention: Integrity (SailPoint)
• Health Care Decision Making: Mobile Access to Financial Data is Helping Hospitals Respond (Strata Decision Technology)
• The Source for Patient Data Prescribers Can’t Go Without (Surescripts)
• Lessons Learned as We Prepare for COVID Wave 2 (Vocera)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.