News 5/14/21

Top News

Patient payments platform vendor Cedar will acquire competitor OODA Health for $425 million.

OODA’s co-founder, chairman, and co-CEO is Giovanni Colella, MD, who also co-founded Castlight Health and founded RelayHealth.

Colella founded OODA with two other former Castlight executives in 2017.

Reader Comments

From Notinda House: “Re: Salesforce. Sad to see them let go another leader of their healthcare vertical, Ashwini Zenooz. Like a few of her predecessors, she was only there two years. Not sure her VA experience is a good fit for a sales focused organization. Do you think SF has a hiring problem in that they hire the wrong leader consistently? Or maybe they do a good job because they are consistent?” The LinkedIn of radiologist Ash Zenooz, MD says she left her Salesforce job as chief medical officer / GM in April and is now president and chief medical officer of Commure.

From Gladhander: “Re: HIMSS21. Predictions on attendance? Time to run another poll about who’s going?” No and no. All I can say is that I’ll be there to recap whatever happens. I won’t have a booth, but I’ll do my usual guide to what HIStalk sponsors will be doing there, cover everything I hear in the exhibit hall and hallways, run photos of what it looks like, and share any big announcements (if indeed companies are holding any back for the conference’s first day). As I wrote the other day, unlike previous years, many registrants are just carrying over their use-it-or-lose-it HIMSS20 registration, plus hotels can be cancelled up until right before the conference starts with minimal penalty (zero if by July 12, one night’s stay after that), so no amount of data will predict who will actually show up. The good news is that COVID-19, as it relates to both infection risk and hospital workload, should not be a factor. I don’t have any sage wisdom for companies that are trying to decide whether paying full price to participate in a potentially scaled-back conference is worth it, although perhaps the potential competitive penalty for sitting out is light since the full, normal HIMSS22 will be just six months later.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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

• A document camera for Ms. C’s sixth grade class in Provo, UT.
• Science kits for Mr. C’s elementary school class in Westminster, CA.
• Science mystery kits for Ms. L’s eight grade class in El Paso, TX.

Listening: Who bass player John Entwistle, in this remarkable video that isolates his work on “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in a live performance. He looks entirely bored while flawlessly and apparently effortlessly playing the most complex and musically rich bass lines imaginable, surely later inspiring Rush’s Geddy Lee to forget just laying down root notes and instead rip it like a lead guitarist. The song is simple and I would not have suspected that so much bass artistry was happening underneath, especially since I don’t particularly like the song. He died in 2002 at 57.

Webinars

June 3 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Diagnosing the Cures Act – Practical Prescriptions for Your Success.” Sponsor: Secure Exchange Solutions. Presenters: William E. Golden, MD, MACP, medical director, Arkansas Medicaid; Anne Santifer, executive director, Arkansas Department of Health – Office of Health Information Technology; Kyle Meadors, principal, Chart Lux Consulting. A panel of leading experts will provide practical guidance on how to prepare for the Cures Act. Will it upend your business model? What is information blocking? How can standardized technologies be applied to meet Cures Act requirements? What must I do now as well as in the next five years?

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

“Hospital at home” and decentralized clinical trials platform vendor Huma raises $130 million in a Series C funding round, increasing its total to $200 million. The London-based company, which changed its name from Medopad a year ago, will use the money to expand its platform to the US, Asia, and Middle East.

Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente make an unspecified investment in Medically Home, which offers technology and services to support delivering acute care and recovery services at home. The company had previously raised $65 million.

Regulators in England block Imprivata’s planned acquisition of Manchester-based digital identity vendor Isosec, which has 120 NHS customers. The Competitions and Markets Authority said that the companies are rivals in the digital identity verification business and removal of a competitive threat to Imprivata would negatively impact taxpayer value.

New York City-based digital cancer care organization platform vendor Jasper Health launches with $7 million in seed funding, naming as its top executives two veteran leaders of CVS Health and Walgreens.

Amwell reports Q1 results: revenue up 7%, EPS –$0.16 versus –$0.58, beating earnings estimates but falling short on revenue. Shares dropped nearly 25% Thursday following the report and have shed nearly 60% of their value in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $2.4 billion.

DrFirst closes a $50 million equity investment that increases its total raised to $118 million.

CPSI acquires encoder solutions provider TruCode.

Sales

• Penn Highlands Healthcare (PA) selects Infor CloudSuite Healthcare and Cloverleaf Cloud.

Announcements and Implementations

In the UK, Cognetivity will use InterSystems IRIS for Health to integrate its IPad-based early detection questionnaire for early dementia detection, which it Cognetivity says can identify the condition up to 15 years earlier than conventional methods.

A new KLAS report on revenue cycle outsourcing finds that the mostly mid-sized clients of Ensemble Health Partners are highly satisfied, while R1’s clients tend to be larger and are happy with the company’s direction and technology. Those companies top the “most likely to buy again” list. More than 80% of NThrive’s clients are dissatisfied and the company trails competitors in every segment in which the company is rated by KLAS, while 43% of Conifer Health Solutions clients report dissatisfaction because they say the company is not proactive or innovative.

Government and Politics

ONC will spend $80 million to train public health professionals to modernize the public health data infrastructure, part of the White House’s $7.4 billion in spending under the American Rescue Plan to expand the public health workforce.

ONC invites submissions for outcome statements related to its Health Interoperability Outcomes 2030 project.

COVID-19

New CDC guidance says that fully vaccinated Americans don’t need to wear masks or distance from others under any circumstances, including while indoors or outdoors and in gatherings of any size, except where local regulations or a business’s rule require it or when using public transportation. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH announced, “If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic. We have all longed for this moment when we can get back to some sense of normalcy.”

The seven-day rolling average of US COVID-19 deaths was at 629 Wednesday, the lowest since last July. That’s down more than 80% since the peak in mid-January. US deaths are at 580,000.

Other

A security researcher discovers an unprotected online database that contained the records of 200,000 patients of a national disability evaluation services company based in Jacksonville, NC. United Valor Solutions responded quickly to have its (unnamed) contractors shut down public access, although the researcher also found ransomware-related files on the server.

Ocean City, MD first responders celebrate the heroism of Atlantic General Hospital (MD) CIO Jonathan Bauer, who saw that a two-year-old girl had been ejected – still in her car seat — into the Assawoman Bay during a five-car crash. He dove off the bridge, which was 30 feet above water that is five feet deep, and kept the girl’s head above water until both were rescued by boat. He asked to remain anonymous, but the city wanted to recognize him. The toddler is fine.

Forbes is right – I have never heard of Judy “Falkner.” The accompanying video is as lame as the headline writer’s spelling skills (also botched was writing “women” instead of “woman”).  Was there a time when Forbes had credibility?

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks posts a new episode of its podcast titled “How Software Updates Promote Usability and Patient Safety.”
• Critical event management company Everbridge completes its acquisition of XMatters to accelerate digital transformation for enterprise IT and cyber resilience.
• Healthwise partners with the City of Boise, Idaho to develop and open the Hillside to Hollow Reserve and trailhead.
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a white paper titled “Governance: What’s the Big Deal?”
• Fast Company recognizes Jvion’s COVID Community Vulnerability Map with an honorable mention in its 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards.
• St. Luke’s Health System uses Meditech’s self-scheduling for COVID-19 vaccination.

Blog Posts

• 5 Focus Areas for Cyber Resilience (Everbridge)
• The 7 Worst Urgent Care Billing Mistakes That Could Cost You (Experity)
• Hidden Signs of a Healthcare Data Breach (and How to Detect Them) (Fortified Health Security)
• Honoring Moms Through Personalized Patient Engagement (GetWellNetwork)
• Celebrating National Nurses Month and International Nurses Day Part One: Christine Digan (Glytec)
• Why Googling Symptoms is a Bad Idea (Gyant)
• Nurses Week 2021: Nursing & Clinical Collaboration (Halo Health)
• How Data Can Reduce Length of Stay and Keep the Revenue Stream Flowing (Health Catalyst)
• How Home-Based Care is Helping Health Systems Engage More Patients at Scale (Dina)
• Nurses Week Blog Series: The pandemic, technology, and the enduring need to connect (Infor)
• Big data and interoperability: The keys to better healthcare interactions (Nordic)
• There’s an ICD-10 code for that (somewhat) irrational childhood fear (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• The buck stops here: why providers must take the initiative with patient scheduling (Lumeon)
• Using Rhapsody as a FHIR Façade (Part One) (Lyniate)
• 2021 Hospital National Patient Safety Goal Series: Reducing Anticoagulant-Associated Patient Safety Risks (Medhost)
• How data brought ‘new life and new hope’ amid COVID-19 (Meditech)
• Getting Your Patient Engagement Messaging Right (MWTherapy)

Contacts

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