News 3/12/21

Top News

Sponsored point-of-care patient education vendor PatientPoint acquires one-time high flyer Outcome Health to form PatientPoint Health Technologies.

The acquisition was rumored in October 2020, when the value of the combined companies was estimated at $600 million.

Outcome Health was valued at $5 billion until November 2019, when its two founders and two of its executives were charged with $1 billion in fraud for overstating revenue and inflating ad performance to overcharge drug company advertising clients.

Outcome Health’s founders, former CEO Rishi Shah and former president Shradha Agarwal, along with the two other executives, have pleaded not guilty to fraud and are scheduled to stand trial in February 2022.

Reader Comments

From Digital Dragoon: “Re: technology and insurers. Some of these tools will be threats to individual hospitals and practices, probably the smaller ones.” Maybe, but the bigger threat is those providers staying relatively small, which means they can’t compete effectively in many areas. Small banks were a good example of limited-scale operations that may or may not have jumped on ATMs and online services, but they were going to be toast regardless because they were being circled by competitors who were committed to change – not just semi-accepting of it – in a quest to gain economy of scale. Also note that those small banks didn’t usually fail and instead sold out profitably to the better-funded and more intense regional chains that were rapidly on their way to becoming national powerhouses, courtesy of altered anti-competitive laws (changing regulations is another thing that big companies can do that smaller ones can’t). Most of those small banks were probably not unhappy about being bought out and may have conducted themselves all along knowing that they were likely to enjoy a financially successful outcome. Takeaway: technology doesn’t necessarily drive success, but it is often competitively used by successful companies who pair it with ambition and skilled execution.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Dear PR people: I almost never read a press release that starts with the word “today” given that (a) every announcement pertains to “today” (it being an announcement and all); and (b) the date of the announcement’s already defines “today” better than the word, which won’t be “today” when someone reads it tomorrow.

Reader Mark’s generous donation, with matching funds applied from my Anonymous Vendor Executive and other sources, fully funded these Donors Choose teacher grant requests:

• Headphones for virtual learners of Ms. B’s elementary school class in Houston, TX.
• A mobile whiteboard for math lessons for Ms. C’s first grade class in Fresno, CA.
• A document camera for Ms. M’s kindergarten class in Sharon, WI.
• Mobile carts and storage bins for simultaneous in-person and virtual class of Ms. A in Dallas, TX.
• Math manipulatives for Ms. M’s elementary school class in Detroit, MI.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Germany-based imaging workflow vendor Brainlab acquires Mint Medical, which provides a structured workflow for analyzing medical images.

Forward Health, which offers direct primary care at a flat fee of $149 per month in eight US cities, raises $225 million in a Series D funding round. 

Vancouver-based Well Health will acquire Intrahealth, a New Zealand EHR vendor, for $15 million.

Sales

• Walgreens uses Nuance’s Intelligent Engagement conversational chatbot to help customers schedule their COVID-19 vaccinations by telephone.
• Northeast Georgia Health System chooses Kyruus ProviderMatch to create a system-wide provider directory and power patient-provider matching for consumer search.
• CareMount Medical will deploy RCxRules Revenue Cycle Rules Engine for claims scrubbing and submission.
• Northeast Ohio Medical University licenses VisualDx to teach observational clinical reasoning and differential diagnosis, especially in patients with dark skin, which represent 28% of the VisualDx images versus 19.5% in common medical education resources.
• Michigan Medicine contracts for 3M’s speech recognition, coding, and clinical documentation products. 3M acquired MModal’s technology business, which included most of the products involved in this sale, in early 2019 for $1 billion.
• Healthcare Outcomes Performance Company selects Emerge to convert data from its legacy EHRs to Athenahealth, normalize the data sets, and create a searchable database.
• Leon Medical Centers (FL) will implement Bluestream Health’s telehealth platform.

People

Lauren Verdery (EY) joins Nordic as SVP of brand, marketing, and communications.

Health Data Movers hires Monte Hess (Quest Diagnostics) as VP of sales and recruiting.

Industry long-timer Jeff Litterst, who was most recently director of enterprise sales at NThrive, died Monday at 57.

Announcements and Implementations

PeriGen’s Vigilance continuous labor monitoring system goes live in Area 25 Health Centre in Malawi in a project with Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital. Facebook posts about the center by Mr. Omar of Child Legacy International show a patient meal (all products were harvested from the health center’s own garden except the rice) and a local artisan teaching expectant mothers how to weave.

Health Catalyst launches an updated Healthcare.AI suite of products and services.

Healthcare Growth Partners advised Bizmatics on its acquisition by Harris Healthcare.

Censinet announces RiskOps, which consolidates enterprise risk management and operations across clinical, regulatory, cybersecurity, research, and supply chain.

Metro Health – University of Michigan Health reports that hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia were reduced by 54% and 40%, respectively, since its implementation of Glytec’s EGlycemic Management System. Metro Health implemented the cloud-based system remotely last year as COVID-19 interrupted its planned rollout.

Google Cloud announces GA of an API that collects and stores the privacy choices of an app’s users, then validates individual data requests to determine if they should be allowed based on those stored user preferences.

COVID-19

WHO declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic on March 11, 2020. I ran reader poll results that day in which 75% of respondents said that cancelling HIMSS20 was the right thing to do. That day’s HIStalk also included warnings about ICU demand and a shortage of ventilators and staff in hospitals in Italy, as well as comments from former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD (just before the pandemic was officially declared) warning that the US was already overrun with coronavirus, public gatherings would need to be curtailed, and businesses should plan to offer teleworking.

One year after the pandemic was declared, CDC reports that 96 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered of 128 million distributed, with the US on track to have 100 million citizens vaccinated by early April. The US has contracted for more than enough supply to vaccinate everyone.

COVID-19 was the US’s third-leading cause of death in 2020 as overall deaths jumped 15%.

Other

In Canada, a doctor who treated a veteran who later committed a triple murder and then killed himself says that a better connection between provincial and military EHRs “would certainly be beneficial.” He said that accessing the patient’s Halifax records required using that province’s buggy SHARE web viewer, but even then, some of the doctors who saw the patient kept only paper notes that weren’t being scanned into Meditech and SHARE, so he didn’t know the patient’s history. The man had been home from residential psychiatric treatment for two months and the doctor still didn’t have access to his chart, leading to confusion over who was supposed to be coordinating his care.

A study of clinical decision support rules in nine Epic-using sites finds that 0.5% of the statements contained errors in Boolean logic, whose nested true-false statements can be hard for people to intuitively understand. The authors recommend that EHR vendors consider adding the open source error-checking tool that they developed for the study. They also note that their method can detect only logic statement errors, not cases in which a statement won’t work as expected, such as a rule that attempts to identify patients outside of normal weight range by selecting BMI < 25 and BMI > 25, where “and” should be “or” since both conditions will never be simultaneously true and thus no patient will ever be selected.

Sponsor Updates

• Everbridge receives a new patent related to its Public Warning system, pertaining to technology focused on hybrid population alerting systems and intelligent sending of messages in public mobile networks.
• Authority Magazine features “Kelly Maggiore of Impact Advisors on The 5 Leadership Lessons She Learned From Her Experience.”
• The Chartis Center for Rural Health honors Mercy Health Lakeshore as a 2021 Top 100 Critical Access Hospital.

Blog Posts

• How IHE HL7 Integration Profiles Take the Drudgery Out of Connecting Medical Devices (Capsule)
• What is PSIM? (Everbridge)
• Smart Applications and Digital Health Interoperability in Healthcare (GetWellNetwork)
• Glytec’s COVID-19 Research Shows 48-72 Hour Opportunity Window to Manage Hospitalized Patient Blood Glucose Levels (Glytec)
• We Listened. Then We Built a Better Website. (Gyant)
• Barriers to Clinical Communication: COVID-19 Drives Increased Connectedness (Halo Health)
• 97 Percent of Vyne Medical Clients Would Invest in the Trace Platform Again (Vyne Medical)
• The Voice of the Patient (The HCI Group)
• Solving Hospital Workforce Shortages with Predictive Analytics (Premier)
• Three Strategies to Deliver Patient-Centered Care in the Next Normal (Health Catalyst)
• In the world of claims processing and COVID-19, reference data management is king (Wolters Kluwer Health Language)
• Hiring Globally in a Zoom World (Imprivata)
• COVID-19 a “Crucible” for Healthcare Innovation in New Zealand (InterSystems)
• What Is Possible When You Bridge the Gap Between Payer and Provider Data (Lyniate)
• Revenue Cycle Practices – Part three: Best Practices in Resolving Denials (Medhost)
• Tips for successfully participating in CHIME’s ‘Digital Health Most Wired’ survey (Meditech)
• Safe Rollout of COVID-19 Immunizations Depends on Patient Identification (NextGate)

Contacts

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