Well that's a bad look as the Senators contemplate filling in the House gaps in the VA Bill
News 9/2/20
Top News
PicnicHealth — which assembles a user’s health history from the medical records of their providers using phone and fax, packages them into a personal health record, and then allows the user to send their anonymized data to drug companies as real-world evidence for research — raises $35 million in Series A and B funding rounds.
It’s not a free or even inexpensive service. Users pay $299 upfront to have their information gathered from their providers and then $39 per month to keep it current. They can choose the research studies to which they want their information released, but receive no compensation.
It seems unlikely that large numbers of people will pay that much. CareSync had a similar service with more user benefits and charged a fraction of this cost before the company shut down in June 2018.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Cerner. Cerner Corporation’s health technologies connect people and information systems in thousands of contracted provider facilities worldwide, dedicated to creating smarter and better care for individuals and communities. Recognized globally for innovation, Cerner assists clinicians in making care decisions and assists organizations in managing the health of their populations. The company also offers an integrated clinical and financial system to help manage day-to-day revenue functions, as well as a wide range of services to support clinical, financial, and operational needs, all focused on people. Healthcare is too important to stay the same. Thanks to Cerner for supporting HIStalk.
I found this YouTube video that describes how Great Lakes Health System is creating a single patient record using Cerner.
Webinars
September 3 (Thursday) 2 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.
September 17 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2021 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.“ Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP of global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will review additions, deletions, and other revisions to the 2020 ICD-10-CM code set that will be critical in coding accurately for proper reimbursement.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
TigerConnect acquires Adjuvant’s physician scheduling tool, which it will release as TigerSchedule in combining physician scheduling with clinical collaboration.
Germany-based Semalytix — which analyzes patient-generated treatment experience information from their posts on blogs, forums, and social media and sells the insights to drug companies – raises $5 million in a Series A funding round.
Sales
- Oregon Health & Science University will implement Bright.md’s automated telehealth platform as part of its Virtual Care Hub, which will guide patients through an online interview whose results are combined from their EHR information to display a chart-ready SOAP note to the provider.
People
Chris Bayham, MBA (Brookdale Senior Living) joins payer-provider precision medicine technology vendor Xsolis as COO.
SignalPath hires Andy Corts (Sarah Cannon Research Institute) as as SVP of sponsor and CRO solutions.
Announcements and Implementations
Collective Medical releases an infection control reporting solution for skilled nursing facilities that allows them to meet federal requirements for reporting COVID-19 cases to the federal government.
The American Medical Association releases the 2021 CPT code set, which includes the proposed CMS changes that take effect January 1, 2021.
Boston startup Statum Systems announces a mobile communication and collaboration system that communicates with traditional paging systems as a backup to WiFi and cell connections. Users add a smart card to their ID badge or smartphone case to allow their phone to connect via Bluetooth to a pager receiver, after which the system will choose from the best available communications network even during outages or when in areas with low signal penetration.
Government and Politics
The VA awards Cerner a $161 million contract to implement an enterprise health services network at four of its Ohio facilities. I assume, but haven’t confirmed, that this is a milestone payment for the VA’s general implementation of Cerner.
COVID-19
HHS bids out a $250 million contract for a public relations firm to “defeat despair and inspire hope” related to COVID-19 and to encourage businesses to reopen to restart the economy, with most of the money to be spent by the end of the year.
New White House medical adviser neuroradiologist Scott Atlas, MD is urging the White House to embrace a herd immunity strategy for COVID-19, calling for lifting restrictions so that the virus will spread through healthy populations while the government focuses on protecting high-risk people. Sweden’s use of that strategy yielded infection and death rates that are among the highest in the world and failed to prevent economic problems. Epidemiologists, of which Atlas is not one, project that reaching 65% herd immunity in the US would require over 2 million deaths.
Wesleyan University is testing every student and on-campus employee twice per week for COVID-19, arranging for a 10-day isolation period for those who test positive, and performing contact tracing. Students, faculty, and staff members bring their ID to a tent, where they are given a nasal swab kit, perform their own swab, and return their sample to testing staff. The school has reported four positive results in nearly 5,000 tests.
An article in The Atlantic explains why contact tracing works everywhere in the world except the US:
- The US didn’t start early before case numbers became unmanageable.
- People often don’t answer their phone when called by someone they don’t know.
- Test results often take several days to arrive and people don’t always self-isolate while waiting for them.
- A significant number of Americans don’t trust the government or believe in conspiracy theories.
- The US doesn’t provide much social support, so those who test positive are expected to isolate away from work and family at their own expense and in what could be space-limited living quarters.
NIH announces that a Phase 3 trial of an investigational COVID-19 vaccine that was developed by Oxford University has begun and will ultimately include 30,000 adult volunteers in 30 states. AstraZeneca has purchased the rights to the vaccine.
ProPublica notes that the US has no overall strategy for testing symptom-free people for COVID-19 because of the different needs involved with clinical versus public health use. Symptom-free testing offers no clinical value since treatment would be the same whether positive or negative, but public health departments want to be able to identify those silent carriers to assess the overall severity and source of the infection’s spread and to perform contact tracing to ask people to isolate themselves.
The National Institutes of Health concludes says the data used by the FDA to support its Emergency Use Authorization for convalescent plasma treatment is not adequate to recommend the treatment or to make it a standard of care. NIH says no conclusions can be drawn in the absence of randomized clinical trials even though FDA, HHS, and the White House publicly announced the EUA as a historic breakthrough that will save 35 of 100 hospitalized patients in misinterpreting the study’s results.
The US will not participate in the World Health Organization’s 170-country Covax effort to develop, manufacture, and equitably distribute a coronavirus vaccine. A White House spokesperson announced that “we will not be constrained by multilateral organizations influenced by the corrupt World Health Organization and China.” Experts say the downside of the “America first” policy is that if none of the vaccines being tested here work, then Americans won’t have access to successful ones that other countries are testing. The global concern is that the US will hoard doses and vaccinate even low-risk people while other countries are left without.
Florida’s health department cuts ties with Quest Diagnostics after it discovers that the company failed to submit 75,000 COVID-19 positive results going back to April. Quest apologized, saying that a technical issue prevented it from reporting 75,000 test results of the 1.4 million tests it performed, and notes that individual patients and providers received their results in a timely manner even though the state did not.
Studies find that proper ventilation can help reduce coronavirus spread indoors, as researchers recommend that schools and business upgrade their air circulation systems and open windows when possible.
Apple and Google will include COVID-19 exposure notification in the next updates of IOS and Android that begin rollout immediately, eliminating the need for users to install them as a separate app. Users will receive a push notification of the public health options that are available in their area should they choose to opt in.
Sponsor Updates
- Arcadia makes its Outreach module available for free to payer and provider partners so that they can communicate with patients about pediatric vaccination needs and other gaps in care.
- Impact Advisors publishes a white paper titled “EHR Hostring Strategies and Options.”
- The Chartis Group hires James Green as a director of its revenue cycle practice.
- CereCore wins ClearlyRated’s 2020 Best of Staffing client and talent awards for service excellence.
- Public sector technology vendor Tyler Technologies and Cerner will help state health departments comply with Medicaid reporting requirements using Tyler’s Entellitrak and Cerner’s HealthIntent.
- Clinical Architecture releases a new episode of The Informonster Podcast, “The COVID-19 Interoperability Alliance.”
- Dresner Advisory Services names Dimensional Insight an overall leader in business intelligence in its annual Industry Excellence awards.
- Everbridge and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children celebrate six years of successful collaboration.
Blog Posts
- Top 6 Problems with Paper Consent Forms (Access)
- 3 Steps to Ensure Smooth Medical Billing with Every Patient (AdvancedMD)
- The Immunization Gateway Portfolio: Preparing for COVID-19 Mass Vaccination (Audacious Inquiry)
- Maximizing Staff Scope of Practice (Bluetree)
- Interoperability e-Notification CoPs: Why a National Network is Critical (CarePort Health)
- Millions are Uninsured Due to COVID-19: What This Means for Payers (Collective Medical)
- CoverMyQuest: Updates from Our 2019 Winners (CoverMyMeds)
- Virtual Healthcare IT Projects Webinar Recording (Optimum Healthcare IT)
- What is FHIR and Why it Matters (Diameter Health)
- Going Big for Their Go-Live (EClinicalWorks)
- Tearing Down SDoH Barriers to Discharge During a Pandemic (Ensocare)
- Optimizing Data for Revenue Recovery in Your Health System (ESolutions)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
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Contact us.
I’m wondering why people even think that herd immunity is a thing? Like it is with the other coronavirii? (how many people grasp the subtle difference between “herd immunity” and “endemic”, and why do we depend on R0 approaching zero when for all the other virii we know, R0 converges to 1?
)
I’m not an epidemiologist, but if the disease stabilizes it’ll be with R=1. R converges to 1 in the long term because that’s the only steady state possibility. Exponential growth (i.e. R>1) runs out of hosts. Exponential decay (R<1) dies off. We don't need it to approach 0, we just need it to stabilize below 1 and the virus goes away with enough time.
Note that it's not necessary for it to actually stabilize. Highly contagious diseases like measles have higher infection rates naturally but policy and herd immunity drive them down. Seasonal diseases like flu spike and wane.
“HHS bids out a $250 million contract for a public relations firm to ‘defeat despair and inspire hope'”. Can you say Hatch Act?
the Washington Post article saying Dr. Atlas advocated a herd approach was denied by Dr. Atlas on Tucker Carlson this evening. Atlas claimed that the Post lied, which is typical of the ideologically left non-journalists at WAPO.
DL Dieterich,
Except, he has been saying the same thing since March to multiple organizations — in video — so his words are recorded. Let the young get sick, open up the economy, develop herd immunity. And, as recently as Monday Trump reiterated the same themes. If you want to believe Tucker Carlson that is on you, but Atlas is obviously part of the problem with the administration’s response to CV-19 — and by the way, what is his qualification for being on the task force other than asking for the economy to be opened up?
Herd immunity is not going to happen for quite a while, having 65-80% of the population immune is going to take years, and in the meantime we will have more variants of the disease that will require their own immunity. I have read research suggesting that, like other coronaviruses, we may develop natural immunity over time but it isn’t going to happen in the timeframe we need.
The herd immunity strategy isn’t even close to some kind of economic cure-all either. Turns out budgeting for 2 million deaths, many of whom are still productive workers, isn’t very good for the economy.
Not sure why Picnic Health was able to raise that kind of round as their pricing model is anything but sound. Maybe for the most worried well, Silicon Valley parents types (eg those w $$$ to spare) but for the vast populace, that pricing is a non-starter.
Sadly, for the first time ever, I’ve had to question a bias in your editorial input regarding the $250M HHS PR contract. The Politico article states the majority of the money will be spent between now and January. It says nothing about timing it before the election. Your wording makes that sound factual when it is not, at least from my reading of the linked article (which itself provides no reference material). Were you able to find some other reference to make such an assertion?
In reading about the contract I can definitely smell the political undertones of the contract but can also completely understand the need for such an effort regardless of if there were an election in the middle of the delivery timeline.
I agree with you that I applied some degree of skepticism of politics versus public health and also made a mostly irrelevant extrapolation that spending most of the money by the end of the year (as Politico says is specified in the documents they reviewed) would probably mean by early November given the holidays. HHS is looking to get the project going immediately, but most of the funding is for ad buys that won’t necessarily mean all the ads will run quickly. I’ve changed that item to reflect what Politico found in the document instead of my between-the-lines interpretation. I admit that I’m wary of giving former Trump campaign adviser and now HHS assistant secretary Michael Caputo $250 million to spend on public relations right before an election, especially when a key component of the project is to convince businesses to reopen and to “inspire hope.”
You are right to be skeptical. Go look at the vanity billboard Whitehouse.gov has become. You’d be a fool if you think these ads will be anything less than glorifying the president’s leadership on vaccine research, regardless of the language that’s actually in the RFP itself.
What is the need for this 250M contract? I don’t really understand what the money will be spent on, and how it would have any specific impact…
If there’s nothing better to spend money on, the crisis is over. (anyone buy that?)