Weekender 4/23/21

Weekly News Recap

• Home monitoring platform vendor Current Health raises $43 million in Series B financing.
• Consumer data aggregation vendor Seqster raises $12 million in a Series A round.
• Hospital operators HCA and Tenet beat Wall Street estimates on quarterly revenue and profit.
• FDA says it will use the term “MIMPS” (medical image management and processing system) instead of PACS in referring to medical imaging systems.
• Cedars-Sinai is using facial recognition software to identify patients with a history of violence or drug fraud.
• FCC will open applications for its $250 million COVID-19 Telehealth Program on April 29.
• FTC warns businesses that using or selling AI algorithms that are racially based or discriminatory – intentionally or not – violates federal law.
• FDA excludes eight software functions that previously invoked its regulation as a medical device.

Best Reader Comments

There are many ways to find out if a supplier/vendor has positive references and can deliver. Just ask for a full list of their clients contracted with during a period of time and randomly call. Don’t let the vendor just give the references as that will prove nothing. Just do some routine homework. (Bigdog3011)

I’m more optimistic about Oscar selling consumer facing software to insurers and doing some outsourced business process for insurers than I am about Oscar as an insurance company. (IANAL)

Watercooler Talk Tidbits

Readers funded the Donors Choose teacher grant request of Coach K, who has been teaching PE at his Arkansas school for 25 years. He asked for a GoPro camera to make exercise videos for his 625 K-6 students whose classes are being held both in-person and online. He reports, “I simply cannot begin to express our gratitude that has resulted from your selfless giving. Oftentimes, our students come from very poor backgrounds and rarely do we have the resources like the GoPro camera to help our students learn. Because of your gift, we were able to use the camera and tools that you sent to make our virtual lessons more clearly to our students. Donors like you are the real champions of public education. You see the need and rise to the occasion time and time again. Our students were thrilled when the box arrived and they knew that we would continue to make Physical Education together because we had the necessary tools that once were lacking. Again, thank you for your kindness and generosity.”

Massachusetts General Hospital will proceed with a delayed $1.9 billion project to build new patient towers that will net the hospital 94 new beds beyond its current 1,043.

Ohio police arrest a nephrologist who physically attacked a cardiologist in St. Elizabeth Boardman Hospital (OH) who had accused him of inappropriately discontinuing a patient’s medication. A nurse and another hospital employee had to break up the fracas.

A federal judge orders a Spokane, WA neonatologist remain in jail on charges of several crimes he tried to arrange on the dark web. Ronald Ilg, MD tried to hire someone to kidnap his wife for a week so he could travel to Mexico with his girlfriend, offering $40,000 in bitcoin for someone to take on a “rush job” that involved giving his wife daily doses of heroin and planting used needles with her DNA so he could frame her. He offered a bonus if the kidnapper could convince her to drop her divorce proceedings, move back in with him, have sex with him at least three times in a two-week period, and promise to keep quiet about the kidnapping. The doctor had allegedly previously tried to hire someone on the dark web to break the hands of a former employee for $2,000. Meanwhile, the girlfriend who accompanied him to Mexico said the doctor forced her to sign a master-slave contract in her own blood and gave police a recording she had made of the doctor beating her. After being questioned, the doctor was found unconscious in his house next to a suicide note, but he was OK. Police obtained evidence of the money transfers from Coinbase and found his dark web name and password written on a sticky note in a search of his house, which they used to read his messages.

In Italy, a 67-year-old hospital employee is being investigated for skipping work for 15 years, having been paid $650,000 despite never having showed up to his newly assigned job. Police say the employee threatened his manager to stop her from disciplining him, and when she retired, nobody noticed his absence. Police are also investigating six managers of the hospital as part of an investigation into absenteeism and fraud in Italy’s public sector, which includes women clocking in their husbands and employees punching in before heading out for a day of shopping or napping.

A Florida nurse inadvertently broadcasts herself giving a patient a gluteal injection while waiting on her Zoom-based grand theft case to begin.

In Case You Missed It

• News 4/23/21
• EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 4/22/21
• Readers Write: Hospitals Shouldn’t Skimp on Meeting May’s ADT Deadline
• News 4/21/21
• Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 4/19/21
• Readers Write: The Disaggregation of Healthcare and Its Implications for Care Coordination
• Monday Morning Update 4/19/21

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