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October 22, 2020 News 4 Comments

Top News

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Analytics vendor Tibco Software will acquire competitor Information Builders for an undisclosed price.

The healthcare offerings of Information Builders include Omni-HealthData data analytics.


Reader Comments

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From Morris the Cat: “Re: HIMSS IT Exec Community. What do you make of this email? It’s the second one from Hal Wolf in as many weeks and reeks of desperation to keep HIMSS relevant to CIOs.” Hal’s VIP-only invitation to become a free member of the new group pitches year-round programming, thought leadership opportunities, and peer-to-peer exchanges. I bristle when I see that “luminary-level” folks get perks that we underachievers don’t, even though I know they indirectly pay the bills in the “ladies drink free” arbitrage model in which high-paying vendors buy access to low-paying prospects. Still, I pay as much or more in member dues and registration fees, so why am I made to feel less important by HIMSS itself? Meanwhile, if HIMSS21 actually happens, you can find the CIOs and apparently now vendor C-levelers segregated in their luminary-only area whose air is lightly tinged with the intoxicating scent of thought leadership, where attentive service teams keep their onsite meals and snacks refreshed to fuel their higher-level creative energies while we lesser mortals charge down to the food court mosh pits seeking a day-old, $15 Caesar salad to eat sitting on the floor.

From I’m Onedering: “Re: One Brooklyn Health. They named Ron Goldman CIO and I can’t find information about his experience or qualifications. Anyone know where he came from?” His name is on a bid from March, so he must have been there awhile, maybe as interim. I found two dormant, skeletal LinkedIn IT manager / director profiles for that name under Brookdale Hospital and Medical Center and Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, both of which are part of One Brooklyn Health. Neither listed education or job history.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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I’ve had at least three CEO interview subjects miss our scheduled call because Gmail inserted a unhelpfully presumptuous calendar link to its own Google Meet, which my recipient then clicked instead of following the less-pushy conference line dial-in instructions.


Webinars

October 27 (Tuesday) noon ET. “Don’t Waste This Pandemic (From a Former Healthcare CEO).” Sponsor: Relatient. Presenter: Monica Reed, MD, MSc, former CEO, Celebration Health. Some healthcare organizations are trying to get back to the normalcy of 2019, but tomorrow’s leaders are accelerating even faster in 2020. Two- or three-year roadmaps were accomplished in six months, so what’s next? The presenter will describe how technology was changing before COVID-19, how the pandemic accelerated plans, what we can expect to see as a result, how leaders and providers can adapt, and what healthcare’s digital front door looks like going forward and how it can be leveraged.

October 28 (Wednesday) noon ET: “How to Build a Data-Driven Organization.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Chris Donovan, CEO and founder, Adaptive Product Consulting; Harvard Pan, CTO, Diameter Health; Jason Sroka, chief analytics officer, SmartSense by Digi; Jaya Plmanabhan, data scientist and senior advisor, Newfire Global Partners; Nicole Hale, head of marketing services, Newfire Global Partners. The panel of data experts will discuss the opportunities that data can unlock and the challenges involved with becoming a data-driven organization. Attendees will learn why having a data strategy is important; how to collect, manage, and share data with internal and external audiences; and how to combat internal resistance to create a data-driven culture.

October 29 (Thursday) 1 ET. “How Presbyterian Healthcare Services Is Preparing for a Post-Pandemic Future Using Digital Care Tools.” Sponsor: Bright.md. Presenters: Ries Robinson, MD, SVP/chief innovation officer, Presbyterian Healthcare Services; Ray Costantini, MD, MBA, co-founder and CEO, Bright.md. Presbyterian Healthcare Services changed the way New Mexico patients access healthcare with its pres.today digital front door, which has given patients easy access to care during a global crisis. The health system’s digital care strategy goes beyond simply offering virtual visits and instead makes every episode of care — regardless of where it is delivered — better by streamlining clinical workflows and by directing patients to the most appropriate venue of care. The presenters will describe how Presbyterian has continued to meet patient needs during the pandemic, how it is deploying digital tools to tackle the combined COVID-19 and flu seasons, and how the health system is innovating care delivery to prepare for a post-pandemic future.

November 11 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Beyond the Firewall: Securing Patients, Staff, and the Healthcare Internet of Things.” Sponsor: Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. Presenter: Daniel Faurlin, head of network solutions for healthcare, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. The biggest cybersecurity risk for healthcare IoT isn’t the objects themselves, but rather the network door they can open. This webinar will address meeting the challenges of security, management, and monitoring using ALE’s Digital Age Networking, a single service platform for the network infrastructure that includes an autonomous network, onboarding and managing IoT, and creating business innovation with automated workflows. Specific use cases will be described, including COVID-19 quarantine management, locating equipment and people, and ensuring the security of patients.

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Teladoc Health announces the team that will run the company following the completion of its acquisition of Livongo, all but one of them coming from the Teladoc side of the “merger.” Livongo’s Michelle Bucaria, Zane Burke, Jennifer Schneider, Lee Shapiro, and Steve Schwartz will wriggle happily on their newly acquired mountains of cash instead of joining Teladoc Health, which will be run by this group:

  • Jason Gorevic, CEO (Teladoc)
  • Arnnon Geshuri, chief human resources officer (Livongo)
  • Mala Murthy, CFO (Teladoc)
  • David Sides, COO (Teladoc)
  • Dan Trencher, SVP of corporate strategy (Teladoc)
  • Drew Turitz, SVP of corporate development (Teladoc)
  • Adam Vandervoort, chief legal officer (Teladoc)
  • Stephany Verstraete, chief marketing and engagement officer (Teladoc)
  • Yulan Wang, interim R&D (Teladoc)

Patient safety solutions vendor RLDatix acquires credentialing Verge Health.

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Cohere Health raises $10 million in a Series A funding extension, increasing its total to $20 million. Its website is unhelpful in describing exactly what the company does beyond slinging lofty buzzwords like “paradigm shift” and “collaboration,” but it seems to primarily offer prior authorization of treatment plans, peer review, provider quality analytics, and optimizing value-based payment. I truly don’t understand why companies feel that it is limiting or demeaning to just say what they’re selling.

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Chatbot and provider search technology vendor Loyal raises $12.5 million in a Series A funding round.


Sales

  • Humana chooses Cohere Health’s collaboration platform for managing prior authorization for musculoskeletal treatments.
  • Telemedicine platform vendor Bluestream Health will implement EHR integration from Redox.

People

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Dan Nigrin, MD, MS (Boston Children’s Hospital) will join MaineHealth as CIO in January. He has been at Boston Children’s for 25 years, including SVP/CIO for 19 of those. His Defective Records electronic music label will survive the relocation, Dan says, and you can check out its latest retrospective release, which to me would make a fine playlist for doing focused work or exercising.

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Conversational AI vendor Gyant hires Justin Graham, MD, MS (Anthem) as chief medical officer.


Announcements and Implementations

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T-System, a CorroHealth company, launches an app store for solutions that complement its EDIS.

Edwards County Medical Center (KS) goes live on CPSI Evident’s clinical and financial systems and RCM solutions from sister company TruBridge.

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A new KLAS report finds that Epic is steadily improving its pharmacy offerings to the point that customers are considering replacing third-party software, although hospitals get less hand-holding from Epic and more of the initiative must be taken by the health system’s Willow analysts. Willow performs well out of the box in medication inventory, but customers report having to do more work to implement wholesaler integration, waste and expiration tracking, and medication shortage management. Basic integration with third-party systems is good, but customers would like to see improvements (both from Epic and from those vendors) for order returns, controlled substance inventories, sizing conversions, purchase tracking, 340B ordering, and drug pricing. Users of IV Dispense Prep for barcode scanning, remote verification, and photo capture verification report above-average satisfaction, but would like to push further with gravimetric verification, guided workflows, hard stops, recommended substitutions, and custom reporting, all of which are challenging because Epic doesn’t manufacture clean room hardware. KLAS concludes that Epic’s pharmacy functionality offers breadth but not depth, as solutions and the customer base’s usage have not yet reached maturity


COVID-19

CDC expands its “close contact” definition of coronavirus exposure, from a continuous 15 minutes within six feet of someone infected to a cumulative 15 minutes over a 24-hour period, which will have a significant impact on schools, workplaces, and other group settings where multiple brief encounters with a COVID-positive individual are more likely.

Politico reports that HHS Secretary Alex Azar is seeking White House permission to fire FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, MD, angered that his high safety standards for COVID-19 vaccines will prevent President Trump from delivering on his promise to have a vaccine available before Election Day.

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Analysis by Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness says 130,000 to 210,000 US deaths from COVID-19 could have been prevented with better leadership and earlier response from the federal government, specifically in lagging the world in testing, reporting of inconsistent state data, inadequate contact tracing, delayed interventions and lockdowns, lack of mask-wearing guidance or mandates, and the White House’s open hostility toward CDC and WHO and mocking of basic mitigation strategies.

Drug companies, public health officials, and hospitals are preparing to hide and secure COVID-19 vaccine shipments to prevent theft, to the point that the manufacturers will track shipments by GPS and will send out dummy trucks to confuse would-be thieves.

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Two new studies find that deaths of hospitalized COVID-19 patients have dropped sharply as clinicians have learned how to treat them more effectively and to recognize problems faster. Mortality has dropped from 25.6% of those hospitalized to 7.6% even after adjusting for risk, which is important since older, frailer patients were hard hit early but hospitalization of younger patients has increased since. Authors add that survival rates are higher when hospitals aren’t fighting a surge, making mitigation strategies even more important.

Puerto Rico closes its 911 call centers when employees at both locations test positive for coronavirus.

CDC says the government will issue “vaccine cards” on which people who get the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine will bring the completed card back to make sure they get the correct second dose. It’s low tech, but probably the best anybody can do given urgently short timelines and the need to support people who don’t go back to the same location for their second shot.

The Washington Post looks at the increasing number of nursing home COVID-19 deaths one month after the on-campus return of partying students to the three colleges in La Crosse, WI. City nursing homes went from never having lost a resident to COVID-19 to 19 deaths, aided by successful county-level blocking of state orders that closed bars and required wearing masks. Public health officials can’t say for sure how the virus is spreading since few patient samples have been genetically sequenced, but they suspect that it moves from nursing home employees to residents who otherwise have minimal outside contact.


Other

Southeast Health (MO) went back to paper for two days last week when its network was taken down in response to a high load of external Internet traffic that was apparently caused by a hacking attempt, preventing access to its remotely hosted Cerner system. The hospital also went on ED diversion.

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London-based virtual visit provider Vala Health urges competitors to join it in ending their Facebook advertising until the company improves its protections for the mental health of young people. The action was triggered by the late 2017 suicide of a seemingly stable 14-year-old girl who committed suicide after looking at disturbing suicide images and videos on Facebook-owned Instagram.

Doulas are using Facebook to warn each other about people who falsely claim to be pregnant to engage their services, either because they are role-playing a parental fantasy or acting out what one calls “a creepy fetish.”

In England, a patient dies of a raptured aortic aneurysm after being discharged by an ED doctor who was unknowingly looking at another patient’s CT scan. The coroner says doctors at the hospital seem to be confused by its “unwieldy” computer systems, which are scheduled to be replaced next year, Meanwhile, the hospital’s radiology department will now call doctors directly for a discussion when a scan is abnormal instead of just letting them know that a patient’s report is available.


Sponsor Updates

  • Everbridge featured President George W. Bush speaking on leadership and critical event management, as well as CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta as keynoters during its COVID-19: Road to Recovery Symposium.
  • RxCap’s patient-facing mobile app will feature educational content from First Databank’s Meducation solution.
  • Halo Health publishes a new case study, “Mobile Clinical Communication Ecosystem Supports Asante’s Award-Winning Patient Care.”
  • Hayes achieves HITRUST CSF Certification to manage risk, improve security posture, and meet compliance requirements.
  • Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a case study titled “Leading a Virtual International Epic Go-Live Through a Pandemic.”
  • HIStalk sponsors exhibiting at the HIMSS Prioritizing Healthcare Information Technology for an Unpredictable Tomorrow virtual conference November 12 include Dimensional Insight, Healthcare Triangle, InterSystems, 314e, Arcadia, Bluetree, CloudWave, and Nuance.
  • Impact Advisors receives high marks in the latest KLAS implementation leadership report.

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Currently there are "4 comments" on this Article:

  1. I know your Google Meet problem well. Although, it turns out it’s easy to fix. If you go in your Google Admin, there’s a setting in google meet that allows you to make it so that it doesn’t automatically add a Google Meet link. Only downside is one more click when you want the Google Meet link, but that’s definitely worth it to avoid confusion.

  2. Anyone else hearing that Emory is leaving Cerner? There’s some chatter on the Cerner Reddit. That seems like a pretty big loss.

  3. OMG – the google meet thing! I just had that happen to me and thought it was me 🙂 2 of 6 participants logged in to google meet while the rest of us waited on zoom. So so annoying!

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