Monday Morning Update 11/2/20

Top News

SOC Telemed completes its merger with the Healthcare Merger Corp. SPAC and will begin trading on the Nasdaq on Monday.  

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A substantial number of poll respondents have had, as patients, experience with a scribe. JO says that most high-functioning teams have someone taking meeting notes and use of scribes should be similar, while JT observes that scribes need to learn to be almost invisible to avoid intruding on the encounter.

New poll to your right or here: Which is the most common way you’ve obtained prescription medications in the past year? Cary Breese said in our interview that chain drugstores force you to walk through shelves full of high-margin merchandise to get to the prescription counter, but that immediately triggered a question – if those drugstores are encouraging impulse sales, why do they have a drive-through window? Similarly, why do gas stations allow customers to pay at the pump without even entering the store where all the high-margin SKUs are piled high? Why does Walmart seem happy about advance ordering and store pickup on a few thousand grocery items when their store is full of other stuff you can’t impulsively buy from the curb? What does that portend for providers who may be giving up an upselling opportunity in offering virtual visits?

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Well Health. The Santa Barbara, CA-based company’s intelligent communications hub is the only two-way digital health solution that engages patients throughout their entire care experience. It enables conversations among patients and their providers through secure, multilingual messaging in the patient’s preferred communications channel: texting, email, telephone, and/or live chat. It facilitates more than 1 billion messages for 31 million patients annually with an EHR-integrated solution that is top rated by KLAS, G2, and Capterra. It reduces provider stress and errors by unifying and automating disjointed communications across healthcare organizations, increasing patient visits and loyalty. Use cases include COVID-19 patient communication, telehealth, appointment automation, care management, patient outreach, payment management, patient reviews and surveys,  and population health. Thanks to Well Health for supporting HIStalk.

I found a really good Well Health video on YouTube that shows examples of COVID-19 communication best practices. The app looks cool, especially the auto translate option for languages other than English.

Thanks to Katie the Intern for bravely writing her first HIStalk piece even though she knows basically nothing about healthcare IT yet. I’m looking to arrange some experiences for her if you want to help out (contact Katie):

• I would like her to  interview someone who has a big-picture view of health IT, like maybe a health system CIO, CMIO, or informaticist. Self-studying enough to ask good questions will help her learn.
• She needs to see the dynamic between vendor marketing / PR and journalism, so it would help her to talk to one of those marketing and PR veterans about what they do. This wouldn’t necessarily have to be a published interview.
• I would like her to talk to a couple of folks who are in their 20s who are working in the industry and had to learn quickly.

Webinars

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 network infrastructure-oriented webinar will address overcoming the challenges of architecting a network to provide security, management, and monitoring for IoT, devices, and users using ALE’s Digital Age Networking blueprint, a single service platform for hospital networks. Digital Age Networking includes an autonomous network, onboarding and managing IoT, and creating business innovation with automated workflows. Specific use cases will describe enabling COVID-19 quarantine management, contact tracing, locating equipment and people, and ensuring the security of patients and more.

November 12 (Thursday) 5 ET: “Getting Surgical Documentation Right: A Fireside Chat.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Alex Dawson, product manager, IMO; Janice Kelly, MS, RN, president, AORN Syntegrity; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO; Lou Ann Montgomery, RN, BSN, nurse informaticist, IMO; Whitney Mannion, RN, clinical terminologist, IMO. The presenters will discuss using checklists, templates, the EHR, and third-party solutions to improve documentation without overburdening clinicians. They will explore the importance of surgical documentation in perioperative patient management, the guidelines and requirements for surgical documentation and operative notes, how refining practices and tools can improve accuracy and efficiency, and the risks and implications of incomplete, inconsistent, and non-compliant documentation.

November 16 (Monday) 1 ET. “COVID-19 and Beyond: A CISO’s Perspective for Staying Ahead of Threats.” Sponsor: Everbridge. Presenter: Sonia Arista, VP and global chief information security officer, Everbridge. While hospitals worldwide work to resume elective care amid COVID-19, they’re quickly adapting and responding to a variety of emerging risks that have tested their resilience, including a surge in cybersecurity and ransomware attacks. This webinar will highlight emerging IT vulnerabilities and best practices designed to help hospitals anticipate and quickly mitigate cybersecurity risks. A former hospital CISO will share her expertise in responding to high-impact IT incidents and mitigating risks during critical events given the “new normal” that COVID-19 has created.

November 18 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Do You Really Have a Telehealth Program, Or Just Videoconferencing?” Sponsor: Mend Family. Presenters: J. D. McFarland, solutions architect, Mend Family; Nick Neral, national account executive, Mend Family.  Healthcare’s new competitive advantage is telehealth, of which a videoconferencing platform is just a small part. This presentation will describe a comprehensive patient journey in which an organization can acquire new patients, reduce check-in time, reduce no-shows, and increase patient satisfaction, all using virtual care. Health systems did a good job in quickly standing up virtual visits in response to COVID, but telehealth and the digital front door are here to stay and now is a good time to re-evaluate tools and processes that support patient scheduling, digital forms, telehealth, and patient engagement as part of a competitive strategy.

November 18 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Leveraging a Clinical Intelligence Engine to Solve the EHR Usability Crisis.” Sponsor: Medicomp Systems. Presenter: Jay Anders, MD, MS, chief medical officer, Medicomp; David Lareau, CEO, Medicomp. Healthcare is long overdue for a data makeover. Clinician burnout is fueled by inaccurate, inconsistent, and incomplete clinical data, but that can be improved without scrapping existing systems. The presenters will describe the use of tools that work seamlessly with EHR workflows to deliver actionable data, improve interoperability; support the clinician’s thought process; and improve usability for better decision-making and accurate coding.

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

Here’s the recording of last week’s Bright.md webinar titled ““How Presbyterian Healthcare Services Is Preparing for a Post-Pandemic Future Using Digital Care Tools,” featuring PHS SVP/Chief Innovation Officer Ries Robinson, MD as interviewed by Bright.md co-founder CEO Ray Costantini, MD. This is our first webinar that was presented as a video conversation and I have to say that I enjoyed it a lot.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

From the Allscripts earnings call:

• The company sold EPSi for 18.5 times trailing adjusted EBIDTA and CarePort for 21 times trailing adjusted EBITDA, which it says was above the average growth rate and margin for Allscripts but wasn’t being reflected in its valuation, so the decision was made to sell those businesses.
• Allscripts says Veradigm is an example of it “finding adjacencies to grow.”
• CEO Paul Black reiterated that “the market has not rewarded us for smart M&A transactions,” which included enhancing and then selling Netsmart and CarePort.

Vocera announces Q3 results: revenue up 6%, adjusted EPS $0.31 versus $0.23, beating Wall Street expectations for both. 

Sales

• Seattle Indian Health Board will implement order sets and care plans from Zynx Health.

Announcements and Implementations

Arcadia launches Vista, a web-based enterprise business intelligence product for value-based care.

KLAS finds that healthcare users of the videoconferencing platform Zoom are reasonably satisfied, mostly because they were able to implement it quickly during COVID and it connects reliably with high-quality video with minimal IT support, but Zoom falls short for video visits when integration with EHRs and medical devices are needed. A CMIO respondent suggests that the company create a product that is specific for telemedicine that the patient could launch by clicking a link sent to them by the provider.

COVID-19

England reintroduces a national lockdown as new infections and hospital admissions surpassed worst-case expectations, closing pubs, restaurants, and retail stores until December 2 as is already the case in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

President Trump repeats his unproven accusation that hospitals and doctors falsely claim that patients die of COVID-19 to earn an extra $2,000 at a campaign rally, leading to a sharp reaction from AMA President Susan Bailey, MD, who called the President’s statement “malicious, outrageous, and completely misguided.” 

White House Coronavirus Task Force member Scott Atlas, MD appears on the RT network to say that COVID-19 is under control and that it’s lockdowns rather than the virus that that are killing people. He then has to apologize for appearing on RT, claiming he was unaware that it’s a Kremlin-backed propaganda outlet.

Other

Systems at University of Vermont Health Network remain down following a cyberattack Wednesday.

Sponsor Updates

• Santa Rosa Consulting team members raise over $2,000 for breast cancer research during a virtual walkathon.
• Change Healthcare will participate in a virtual fireside chat during the Credit Suisse Healthcare Conference November 11.
• Health Catalyst announces a partnership with the Middle East Healthcare Company to service six Saudi German Hospitals in Saudi Arabia.
• OpenText announces that Enfuse On Air 2020, a security conference focused on the prevention, detection, and investigation of threats, will be held virtually November 10-December 1.
• PMD releases a new video, “This is PMD – Life After Bootcamp.”
• Premier awards Call to Freedom, a nonprofit focused on navigating a healthy path for victims of human trafficking, its annual Premier Cares Award and $100,000.
• Pure Storage enhances its Pure Partner Program to provide partners with increased incentives, marketing, support, and training solutions.
• Spirion launches a Global Alliance Partner Program to provide a structured program for collaborative partner engagement and solution development.
• T-System, a CorroHealth company, launches the App Showcase.
• Medidata, TriNetX, and Datavant partner to enable seamless integration of real-world data in clinical development.

Blog Posts

• Essential IT Considerations as Mergers & Acquisition Activities Heat Up (Pivot Point Consulting, A Vaco Company)
• COVID-19 Hastens America’s Reckoning with Rural Healthcare (Medsphere)
• Healthcare Triangle’s Keys to a Successful Application Support Services Transition (Healthcare Triangle)
• Real View: Testing a partnership under the pressures of a pandemic (Nuance)
• Why you need to start preparing now for the COVID-19 vaccine (OmniSys)
• Health Literacy: Why it Matters and How to do it Right (OptimizeRx)
• Care Transitions and Addiction Recovery: Avoiding Data Gaps and Communication Silos (Netsmart)
• How to find your broken EHR windows (Nordic)
• Essential IT Considerations as Mergers & Acquisitions Activities Heat Up (Pivot Point Consulting)
• 10-Point Checklist: Deploying Shared Devices for Nurses (PerfectServe)
• Are Providers Ready for a Third Wave of COVID-19? (Premier)
• Health Tech Investment in the Third Wave (Redox)
• The Swiss Cheese Model of patient safety errors: Closing the holes with message accountability (Spok)
• Why Getting a Flu Shot Matters Even More This Year (Surescripts)
• Breast Cancer Screening: How to Close the Referral Loop (SymphonyRM)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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