Weekender 12/18/20

Weekly News Recap

• Verily announces a $700 million funding round.
• Diameter Health raises $18 million.
• Kyruus acquires HealthSparq.
• Report: Amazon will expand its employee-only telehealth program to other companies.
• Cerner acquires Kantar Health.
• KLAS finds patient accounting from Epic and Meditech to be strong, Cerner and Allscripts less so.
• Sonoma Valley Hospital notifies 67,000 patients of an October 11 ransomware attack.
• CMS announces a rule that requires Medicaid managed care and insurers that sell products on the Exchanges to facilitate the exchange of patient data between payers.

Best Reader Comments

Where were the quality monitors and guardrails to catch unreported results within a reasonable timeframe? And incomplete and/or incorrect reports? I am very familiar with Epic configurations, so I know that the tools exist to provide this information internally to lab management from receipt of specimens through final reporting. No patient should have to rely on the repeated intervention of friends and/or surgeons to move the pathology process along (I experienced this myself many years ago, when a biopsy was not read for more than 2 weeks time, and it turned out to be positive for cancer; a physician friend had to intervene to get the final report released). (Witty)

I worked with an org recently that has their own application, completely over MyChart. Nothing that you see is Epic-designed and it’s missing lots of standard Epic features, but plenty of people still refer to it as MyChart. Drives the Epic team nuts, especially since it’s meant a ton of work on COVID features that could have been plugged in straight from Epic. (B)

Healthcare organizations have some structural problems to work through. There is a worker caste system in healthcare. An exceptional manager who happens to be an MA cannot manage mid level providers or doctors. Also, healthcare organizations have only recently grown to require management; much of healthcare used to be delivered by the owner-operator model and a major portion of the workforce still has not matured out of that mindset. This type of thing won’t change for at least another decade or two. The system as it exists is inefficient but can’t be changed. It will consolidate to avoid pressure until it can’t. Then competition and innovation will be able to start. (IANAL)

An issue I see here is, where is the incentive for the health system to improve? Yes, when I worked in HIT for 25 years we frequently reminded ourselves that it could be our loved ones being affected by what we do. But that never seemed to stick at some of the organizations we worked with. What other incentive is there? The biggest incentive is to keep the revenue coming in, which explains why the bills came through electronically just fine. Some good old competition in this space would go a long way. The question is how to effectively do that without compromising essential services (such as ED services and indigent care) that can’t be improved through a competitive process. When I got quotes on an MRI a couple years ago, the local academic center quoted me $6,000. I got it at a retail site for $600. Service was wonderful. (Bob)

[On COVID-19 passport-style apps] So how do you ID the right person? This will work well in countries that have unique person IDs (like China) , but we can’t have that in US. So will they use SSN? Some made up number? and what if it gets hacked and the hacker sells your ID number to a person not vaccinated? Or maybe the government is going to send you a ‘all clear’ text that you can display on your smart phone? But what if you don’t have a smart phone? I am curious to hear how all this will be worked out w/o an unique ID. (Frank Poggio)

Watercooler Talk Tidbits

Marvel and Allegheny Health Network develop a “True Nurse Stories” superhero comic book.

A Vanderbilt study of EHR data finds that musicians are more likely to have vocal cord problems, hearing loss, anxiety, and depression, but are less likely to have heart disease, possibly due to the physical effort involved with performing.

The president of the American Veterinary Medical Association assures anxious children that he has performed telemedicine checkups of Santa’s reindeer (noting that 30% of veterinarians are now using telemedicine versus 10% before the pandemic) and has cleared them for their Christmas Eve flight.

In Case You Missed It

• News 12/18/20
• EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 12/17/20
• News 12/16/20
• Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 12/14/20
• HIStalk Interviews Luke Bonney, CEO, Redox
• Monday Morning Update 12/14/20
• Katie the Intern 12/11/20

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