News 3/19/21

Top News

Social services referral platform vendor Unite Us raises $150 million in Series C financing, increasing its total to $195 million and valuing the company at $1.6 billion.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Amazon will expand its employee-only Amazon Care virtual health pilot project to its workers in all 50 states, then will offer the program to other companies later this year. The company says in its explainer video that it will bring care to the person instead of vice versa in “reimagining the practice of medicine” and “we’re rebuilding the whole delivery system around the human at the center.” The full program includes 24×7 virtual visits, at-home tests and treatments, prescription delivery, and a dedicated care team.

Healthcare analytics vendor Clarify Health raises $115 million in a Series C funding round, increasing its total to $178 million. The company says its database of claims, EHR information, prescription records, and behavioral health data spans 300 million unique patient lives.

Data management and analytics vendor Clearsense raises $30 million in funding.

Sales

• Kuwait’s Health Assurance Hospitals Company chooses the InterSystems TrakCare EHR.
• Citizens Memorial Healthcare will use cloud disaster recovery services from Healthcare Triangle.
• Ochsner Health chooses CarePort’s care transition solution.
• Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health will deploy Netsmart’s My Avatar EHR and CareFabric platform.
• Muscogee (Creek) Nation Health System of Oklahoma will use Everbridge’s vaccine distribution system to manage registration, scheduling, administration, tracking, and reporting.
• Speare Memorial Hospital (NH) will implement Meditech’s Expanse EHR using Meditech as a Service. 
• Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health will implement digital fingerprinting health information protection from Terbium Labs and will invest in the company.

People

Glen Tullman (Livongo) joins Transcarent as CEO, expanding on his role as executive chair. The company helps self-insured employers guide employees to more cost effective care and takes a percentage of their savings. Tullman and Hemant Taneja are investors in the company as they were in Livongo, which they sold to Teladoc Health for $18.5 billion last fall.

AGS Health announces several executive hires: Proneet Sharma, MBA (Sutherland) as COO; Cheryl Cruver, MPA (Sonifi Health) as chief revenue officer; Ashish Mohan as CFO; Ekta Singh. MBA as chief human resources officer; and Phillip Park, MBA as VP of corporate development and finance.

Announcements and Implementations

Sphere launches an expanded patient payment platform that includes a mobile check-in, intake, and payment experience and the ability for patients to leave a card-on-file token for automatic payment of billing plan balances.

Remote patient monitoring solution vendor CareSimple incorporates health education material from Healthwise.

InterSystems offers its IRIS data platform as a managed service via Amazon Web Services.

Medhost announces YourCare Continuum, an enhanced care coordination solution.

IllumiCare will add the Epic-integrated WHIRL user customization app that was developed by Wake Forest Baptist Health to its Smart Ribbon. WHIRL compresses the Epic information of 10 patients per printed page to create a customizable rounding list.

Greenway Health launches GRS Select, a customizable RCM offering.

Government and Politics

The Senate confirms Xavier Becerra, JD – who served as California’s attorney general and as a member of Congress — as HHS secretary.

COVID-19

CDC reports that 113 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered in the US, with 28.5% of adults having had at least one shot and 12% being fully immunized.

Epic will offer its 10,000 employees COVID-19 vaccination on its still-closed Verona campus as approved by Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services, which has deemed the company’s software and its employees as critical. The program will be run by Mequon, WI-based flu shot clinic provider VaxPro.

Researchers will study the effects of COVID-19 vaccination on people with long COVID following anecdotal reports that their symptoms improved or disappeared shortly after injection.

Other

A Vanderbilt University Medical Center study finds that an EHR-based, real-time suicide risk model performed well in non-psychiatric clinical settings, using EHR demographics, diagnoses, medications, previous healthcare utilization, and Area Deprivation Indices that are driven by ZIP code. The authors note, however, that the model can’t capture potentially important information that is stored in free text or outside the institution’s EHR.

A review of the 100 largest US hospitals by bed count finds that two-thirds are not in compliance with CMS’s price transparency rule, either by failing to post the files at all or not included payer-specific negotiated rates.

Sponsor Updates

• The local paper profiles Redox’s recent growth, including new funding; and expansion plans.
• OptimizeRx’s recurring revenue grows as it secures 19 new enterprise-level engagements in Q1 2021.
• PatientPing publishes a new white paper, “The COVID Rebound: How Real-Time Alerts Can Help SNFs Solve Three Key Challenges.”
• Diameter Health summarizes the research it published with KONZA that demonstrates that quality score calculation is more accurate when using data from an HIE rather than a single EHR.
• Pure Storage announces the GA of its Pure Cloud Block Store on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
• Spirion publishes a new report, “Deliver Effective Sensitive Data Protection with 3 Must-Have Standards.”
• Hospital Alemao Oswaldo Cruz joins the TriNetX network to expand its clinical research capabilities in Brazil and Latin America.
• Zen Healthcare IT publishes a new case study, “Zen Healthcare IT Fast Tracks EHealth Exchange Onboarding for AdVault.”
• WEDI features Fortified Health Security CEO Dan Dodson on its podcast.
• Forbes includes Impact Advisors on its annual list of “America’s Best Management Consulting Firms” for the fifth consecutive year.

Blog Posts

• Top 3 Unexpected Benefits of Managed Healthcare Reporting (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Radiology Productivity: Beyond the RVU (PerfectServe)
• Why Medicare Advantage Organizations Do Retrospective Chart Reviews (and What Medical Groups Can Learn from Them) (RCxRules)
• Physician’s Corner: Answering Common Billing & Documentation Questions (PMD)
• How Health Systems are Navigating Rollout of the J&J COVID-19 Vaccine (Premier)
• Patient Safety Awareness Week: Annual Reminder to Advance Quality Healthcare Initiatives (Capsule)
• How Crozer Health Improved Efficiency and Reduced Denials (RCxRules)
• The Secret to Winning the Battle Against Claim Denials (Vyne Medical)
• II: What We Learned in 2020 & What We’re Expecting This Year (Redox)
• Successful Proning via teleICU: Coaching a Care Team Requires Communication (SOC Telemed)
• Automating COVID-19 Vaccine Reporting (Summit Healthcare)
• Minimizing the Barriers Between Pharmacists and Patients (Surescripts)
• Optimum Healthcare IT & University of Rhode Island Partner for Optimum CareerPath Program (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Preserving Quick Access to Communication During COVID-19 (Vocera)
• 6 Simple Rules for Advertising Your PT Clinic Online (WebPT)
• Ensuring Patient Safety Through Care Plans (Zynx Health)
• Administering Medications by Wrong Route Impacts Patient Safety (First Databank)
• CNOs, Role-Based Communication Critical for Clinical Teamwork (Halo Health)
• Interoperability – Building a Roadmap (Healthcare Triangle)
• The unprecedented acceleration of health innovation (The HCI Group)
• Five Steps for Better Patient Access to Healthcare (Health Catalyst)
• Top Challenges Facing the New CMS Administrator (Wolters Kluwer Health Language)
• The SPAC Boom: A Look at Health IT SPACs and their Sponsors (Healthcare Growth Partners)
• Health Education: The Golden Key to Successful Care Transitions (Healthwise)
• Using data to drive down cost and support consumer-centric care: A thought leadership roundtable (Lumeon)
• Innovation in times of crisis: Delivering healthcare at home to your acute patients (Meditech)
• PT Website: 7 Things You Should Have (MWTherapy)
• Immediate Steps to Strengthen Your Data Security (Newfire Global Partners)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.