News 11/13/20

Top News

Health Catalyst reports Q3 results: revenue up 20%, adjusted EPS –$0.21 versus –$0.27, beating Wall Street expectations for both.

HCAT shares are up 3% in the past year versus the Nasdaq’s 39% gain, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.

Health Catalyst shares began public trading in late July 2019, with a first-day close of $39.17. They are now at $35.55.

The company also announces several promotions: Patrick Nelli to president; Bryan Hunt to CFO; Jason Alger, MS to chief accounting officer; and Adam Brown to SVP of investor relations and financial planning and analysis.

Webinars

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 this week’s webinar titled “Beyond the Firewall: Securing Patients, Staff, and the Healthcare Internet of Things,” sponsored by Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise.

Sales

• UAE’s Mediclinic Middle East joins TriNetX’s global health research network.

People

Angelo Campano (Ogilvy Health) joins OptimizeRx in the newly created position of SVP and principal of agency channels.

Kevin Brubaker (MiHIN) joins Glooko as RVP of enterprise health systems.

Atlantic Health hires Sunil Dadlani, MBA, MS (NYS Department of Health) as VP/CIO.

Rick Howard, MBA (Ascension Technologies) joins Apervita as chief product officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Cerner incorporates Well Health’s app-free clinician-patient interaction capabilities into its HealtheLife patient portal, which will allow provider organizations to deliver health information, reminders, and virtual visit scheduling.

Amazon introduces Care Hub, a free Alexa app feature that allows people to connect to a loved one’s Echo device from an app to view their Alexa activity, set alerts, or answer their call for assistance.

Providence will implement Nuance’s Dragon Ambient Experience for EHR documentation and will co-develop clinical intelligence and revenue cycle solutions.

Amwell announces a fast-track video visit option, IPad software, and a new telemedicine cart.

A new KLAS report finds that connection of post-acute and behavioral health providers to CommonWell and Carequality is in its early phases, but 88% of the early adopters find the connection valuable. Netsmart has connected up to 35% of its MyUnity and MyAvatar customers, who can pull outside information such as medication lists into its EHR and use tools to search incoming CCDs for relevant lab results and progress notes. Users appreciate the time savings in not needing to chase down encounter data, with the next step being to make the process seamless and improve usability with automated queries, patient matching, and inserting external data into the patient record. The early adopters say their vendors made connection easy, but most of those vendors charge setup or licensing fees.

Meanwhile, KLAS updates its previous report on acute and ambulatory interoperability via CommonWell and Carequality, concluding that NextGen Healthcare is the only ambulatory-specific EHR vendor that provides a strong usability experience for all interoperability workflows, including the especially challenging reconciliation of duplicate medication data. Cerner has doubled the number of customers that are connected to CommonWell, while Athenahealth and Epic lead overall adoption in having connected nearly all their customers. Meditech has slow uptake, while CommonWell founding member Allscripts shifted to Carequality and connected its first customer in the second half of this year using DbMotion, which will be required for Sunrise and TouchWorks to connect going forward. Epic’s Happy Together is strong at integrating outside lab data and is working on automatic ingestion of progress notes and lab data, while Cerner has strong capabilities for incorporating outside data into its patient record.

COVID-19

New cases (144,270) and hospitalized patients (65,368) hit new single-day records Wednesday, as another 1,421 Americans died of COVID-19. The Midwest is especially impacted.

Doctors Without Borders sends international aid workers to the US to help with uncontrolled coronavirus spread.

CDC’s updated guidance says that masks protect both the wearer and people around them from coronavirus. It notes that multiple layers of denser cloth work best, also adding that increasing mask use by 15% could help prevent lockdowns and their associated $1 trillion economic loss.

Provider-employed informaticians: has your organization planned for how it will document the administration of coronavirus vaccine doses and send reminders to those who start a two-dose regimen to complete it?

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD warns that unlike New York’s peak pandemic weeks in the spring, hospitals won’t be able to bring in temporary workers from less-ravaged areas now to address their COVID surge because demand is national rather than regional.

HHS announces that several chain pharmacies – representing 60% of US drugstores – will provide coronavirus vaccine at no cost to patients, among them CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, Costco, Albertsons, Kroger, and Publix. The announcement says that HHS expects one or more vaccines to be approved by December 31.

Other

Australia’s SA Health obtains another $145 million to complete its years-overdue rollout of Allscripts Sunrise, a project that was reset in 2018 after an independent review found that SA health failed to get outside help (including from Allscripts), failed to implement a sound governance model, and struggled to make the Allscripts product meet Australian billing needs.

VTDigger says no end is in sight for the malware-induced mayhem at University of Vermont Medical Center, whose two-week computer downtime has left employees working without patient schedules, recording patient information in manila folders, administering medications from hand-transcribed notes with no barcode checks, turning away imaging patients, and using walkie-talkies and fax machines since the phone and email systems are down. The hospital president warns that exhausted employees will need to enter the mass of manually-recorded information in Epic once that system becomes available.

An independent consumer survey commissioned by DocASAP finds:

• 84% of those surveyed plan to get a coronavirus vaccine when it becomes available.
• The doctor’s office is perceived as the safest place to get the vaccine compared to hospitals and pharmacies.
• 44% would prefer to receive medical care via a combination of in-person and telehealth visits.
• People will switch providers to get an earlier appointment or more convenient location.
• Online scheduling was preferred by 48% versus 39% by phone.
• Text messaging is the preferred method of receiving appointment reminders.
• The top healthcare issues all involve cost – loss of insurance, reduced costs, and protecting pre-existing conditions. Access to mental health services was the top issue for 21% of respondents.

Sponsor Updates

• Jvion team members pack food boxes as Emergency Food Aid Volunteers for Urban Recipe.
• Cerner works with state and local officials to help secure $6 million in federal funding to create 5,300 new tech industry apprenticeships.
• Innovaccer leverages the Surescripts nationwide information network, including its Medication History for Populations tool, to help close care gaps and alert users to medication non-adherence.
• The Sales People Podcast features Goliath Technologies CEO Thomas Charlton.
• Halo Health updates its Halo Clinical Collaboration Platform with Halo Link to better enable providers to collaborate across health systems.
• Hayes wins Silver in the Team of the Year During COVID-19 category, and Bronze in the Company Innovation of the Year category in the annual Gold Bridge Business and Innovation Awards.
• Healthwise wins two ClearMark Awards from the Center for Plain Language for its patient education content.

Blog Posts

• How to Better Detect Opioid-Induced Respiratory Depression Without Turning Every Unit Into an ICU (Capsule Technologies)
• CDE Debra Dudley: Evolution of the Nurse in Diabetes Care (World Diabetes Day) (Glytec)
• Highlights of the 2021 Changes to E/M Coding (Hayes)
• Planning, Implementing, and Managing a Community Connect Program (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Networking Methodology: The 7 C’s (The HCI Group)
• How to Run Analytics for More Actionable, Timely Insights: A Healthcare Data Quality Framework (Health Catalyst)
• Leverage These Tips to Improve Revenue Cycle Performance within an EHR (Impact Advisors)
• Interoperability: Healthcare industry making progress with and without Final Rules (Infor)
• Five Revenue Cycle Optimization Tactics for the COVID Surge (InstaMed)
• COVID-19, a New Administration, and a Changing Marketplace. Now What? (Loyale Healthcare)
• Reducing Product and Operational Waste – Electronic Preference Cards (Medhost)
• Protecting against the latest threats to patient data (Meditech)

Contacts

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