Monday Morning Update 2/8/21

Top News

Duke University spinout Clinetic, whose software monitors EHR activity to identify patients for clinical trials or to suggest next step sin their care, raises $6.4 million in equity.

CEO Thomas Kaminski was previously SVP of corporate strategy for LabCorp, board chair Allan Kirk, MD, PhD is surgeon-in-chief of Duke University Health System, and board member Rob Califf, MD is former FDA commissioner.

Founder Erich Huang, MD, PhD is Duke Health’s chief data officer and directs its health data science center and data science accelerator.

Reader Comments

From Frumious Bandersnatch: “Re: your HIStalk mug from 2014. I love it! So sorry I missed that HIMSS since it would have been worth the trip. I realized today that I have been following you for many years now – glad you’re still here.” HIMSS conferences blur together, but I have the advantage of being able to refer back to my super-detailed HIStalk write-ups to remember what happened way back then. Memorable events of HIMSS14 (daily details here, here, here, here, and here) include:

• The opening reception was hard to find in the bowels of the Hyatt Regency across the street, signs were wrong, bar lines were long even with drink tickets, and racket in the airplane hangar-like space was deafening.
• Hillary Clinton said nothing interesting in her keynote, which cost HIMSS $200K-plus.
• This was our first year hiring Party on the Moon as the HIStalkapalooza band. They turned it into a dance that brought even wall-hugging IT nerds onto the floor.
• I enjoy irony, so I assigned Lorre to accept HIStalk’s Industry Pioneer Award from Sunquest CEO Richard Atkin, who had recently fired her after her 16-year executive career there. You might enjoy Lorre’s description of how that felt and what she thought of HIMSS14.
• This was our first time exhibiting, where we tried to be upbeat about the tiny, remote space that my $6,000 bought us and its uneasy adjacency to the back-of-hall bathrooms. Still, we had a lot of visitors and celebrity booth-greeters disproportionate to our cemetery plot sized booth.
• Not only was I cranky about lugging mugs around that few folks wanted, I also spent too much on having two designs of lanyard pins made, which were “limited edition” in that: (a) I never did them again; and (b) demand for them was truly limited. I dread running across a box of these in a closet somewhere, although I think I tossed them.

From Carl SPACkler: “Re: SPACS. Good for the industry or no?” It’s hard to say, but a ton of health IT SPACs are out there and they are required by law to spend their money on acquisitions within several months, which means that many of them will end up with subpar, overly expensive dance partners that had little reason to become publicly traded and that will fail to attract ongoing investment afterward. It feels to me like everybody is desperate to get a deal done before the bubble bursts. Having your long-term vendor or employer go public is like having your significant other join a cult. It could be a rough ride for hastily acquired companies that needed more time to prepare for their financial close-ups.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I will urge the significant number of folks who haven’t completed a living will and medical power of attorney to do it right now, then store the papers somewhere they can be easily located in a moment of need. You don’t need to spend money or hire a lawyer if that’s a barrier – you can download free, state-specific forms that you can complete in maybe five minutes and then you are set for life (or death). There’s no reason to put family members through the anguish of what you would want when it’s so easy to just tell them.

New poll to your right or here: What part of your medical record would you be most angry at having disclosed publicly? Some folks will indignantly say they need an “all of the above” option, but that’s not the point – it’s what single part of your chart is most sensitive to you. I guess mine would be credit card information since that’s the only item that would inconvenience me — the rest simply identifies me as boringly mortal like everybody else, should strangers actually care.

Webinars

February 24 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Maximizing the Value of Digital Initiatives with Enterprise Provider Data Management.” Sponsor: Phynd Technologies. Presenters: Tom White, founder and CEO, Phynd Technologies; Adam Cherrington, research director, KLAS Research. Health systems can derive great business value and competitive advantage by centrally managing their provider data. A clear roadmap and management solution can solve problems with fragmented data, workflows, and patient experiences and support operational efficiency and delivery of a remarkable patient experience. The presenters will describe common pitfalls in managing enterprise information and digital strategy in silos, how to align stakeholders to maximize the value of digital initiatives, and how leading health systems are using best-of-breed strategies to evolve provider data management.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

“Voice robotic process automation” vendor Infinitus comes out of stealth mode with a $21 million Series A funding round. The company’s technology asks machine-generated questions in phone calls, such as for public health outreach and insurer inquiries, then tailors further questions based on responses. Most of the folks involved come from Google or Rakuten, but the standout for me is operations guy Brad Holden, who earned a Carnegie Mellon degree in mechanical and biomedical engineering; enlisted in the US Marines as a platoon commander in Operation Enduring Freedom in Helmand, Afghanistan, where his platoon cleared routes of insurgents and IEDs; and then came home to earn a Harvard MBA.

People

Patient engagement platform vendor PatientBond hires Justin Dearborn (ICM Partners) as CEO. He replaces Anurag Juneja, PhD, who will continue as president.

COVID-19

CDC’s vaccination stats: 41 million doses administered of 59 million distributed (69%). COVID-19 tests, cases, and hospitalizations are continuing their sharp trend downward, but deaths haven’t followed yet and are running more than 3,000 per day. COVID-19 cases in nursing homes are dropping off as vaccine rollout continues.

The more contagious B117 coronavirus variant is spreading in the US exactly as predicted, with cases doubling every 10 days on its way to becoming the dominant strain by March. Its spread makes the dialing back of mitigation measures by several states, such as expanding in-restaurant dining, appear unwise. It also increases the importance of getting people vaccinated quickly.

Johnson & Johnson requests FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine, although FDA’s advisory panel doesn’t meet to review its clinical data until February 26. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says he expects J&J’s vaccine, which requires just a single shot, to be distributed through pharmacies because it does not require special storage other than normal refrigeration, while Pfizer’s vaccine will probably be limited to big distribution centers because it requires ultra-cold freezers.

Experts remind that while some of the available coronavirus vaccines have higher efficacy rates than others, all of them are 100% effective at keeping recipients from becoming seriously ill or dying.

The Multi-State Partnership for Prevention accuses CDC of misrepresenting Deloitte’s employees as their own during a demonstration of MSPP’s PrepMod vaccination software. CDC then gave Deloitte a $44 million, no-bid contract to develop a system that ended up working up much like PrepMod. The owner and only principal of the for-profit affiliate of MSPP that developed PrepMod has filed a cease and desist notice, pending a lawsuit, claiming that Deloitte stole her intellectual property and then tried to hire her to help it copy its functionality. Ten states are using the Deloitte VAMS system, which was free to them, while 28 have bought PrepMod. Another developer of vaccine information systems confirms that his company and his competitors were asked to participate in meetings with CDC and Deloitte, but then were shut out of bidding when Deloitte was contracted directly.

The White House invokes the Defense Production Act to manufacture 61 million at-home or point-of-care coronavirus tests by summer. It will also use DPA to increase the manufacturing of surgical gloves and two components that are used in Pfizer’s vaccine packaging.

Boulder Medical Center (CO) cancels the COVID-19 vaccination appointment of a 72-year-old cancer survivor because of an unpaid $244 hospital balance.

CDC confirms that US flu activity is basically zero, easing fears of a “twindemic.”

Other

Hackers post patient information from Leon Medical Centers (FL) and Nocona General Hospital (TX) on the dark web.

Henry Ford Health System researchers find that the IPhone 12’s charging magnets can disrupt implanted cardiac defibrillators, leading Apple to issue a warning that users should keep the products 6 inches away from medical devices at all times at 12 inches away when the devices are charging.

Olivia Adams, a 28-year-old software developer who is on maternity leave from Athenahealth, develops a COVID-19 vaccination sign-up website for those residents of Massachusetts who are 75 and older. She coded a site that scrapes information from a bunch of individual sites and displays available appointments in a central location. She said it was challenging because nobody asked the developers of the individual sites to make them interoperable.

Sponsor Updates

• Clinical Architecture publishes a new case study, “The Joint Commission Experience with Symedical.”
• Nuance has been recognized for the fourth consecutive year as the highest-rated vendor in Opus Research’s “Decision Maker’s Guide to Enterprise Intelligent Assistants.”
• Nordic, for the third year in a row, is the only firm with a rating higher than 90 across seven or more “Best in KLAS” categories.
• Premier encourages nonprofit community programs that provide healthcare to underserved populations to apply for its $100,000 Monroe E. Trout Premier Cares Award by March 9.
• Pure Storage announces the new FlashBlade for Azure Stack Hub integration that delivers unified fast file and object capabilities for hybrid-cloud architectures.
• Spirion announces that The Tolly Group, an independent testing lab, has benchmarked its effectiveness in discovering personal, sensitive, and regulated data at 98.5% accuracy.

Blog Posts

• 3 Strategies for Doing More with Less in CDI (Nuance)
• Innovate4Outcomes: How to Improve Patient Outcomes (OptimizeRx)
• Rising to the Challenge: VOAGBR’s Story of Strength (Netsmart)
• How to Communicate COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution with Your Patients (PatientBond)
• Resolutions for the Rest of This New Year (PatientKeeper)
• How PatientIQ integrates their patient-reported outcomes platform in just 13 days (Redox)
• Email Appointment Reminder Templates That Will Help Your Patient Engagement (Relatient)
• Defining a comprehensive data strategy to shape the health care of tomorrow (Cerner)
• 2021 Will Be the Year Telemedicine Loses the “Tele” (SOC Telemed)
• Maintain Compliance with HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules in a Remote Work Environment (Sphere)
• Your Quickstart Guide to HIPAA Compliance (Spirion)
• Supporting Veterans’ health with specialized, interactive health education (Krames)
• #Dedicated to Securing the Actionable Intelligence Frontline Workers Need (Surescripts)
• You Can’t Just Say: “Tomorrow, we’re going to be a High Reliability Organization” (TransformativeMed)
• Secure Messaging App Connect Loved Ones, Provides Peace of Mind for NICU Parents (Vocera)
• 3 Keyword Types to Include in Your PT Clinic Website (Plus Examples) (WebPT)
• Thanks to Our Customers, Well Health Earns 2021 Best in KLAS Patient Outreach (Well Health)

Contacts

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