News 5/28/21

Top News

McKesson will combine four of its business units – RelayHealth, McKesson Prescription Automation, CoverMyMeds, and RxCrossroads by McKesson – under a single business operating as CoverMyMeds. The business segment was previously known as Prescription Technology Solutions, but each company operated under its own name.

The president of the 5,000-employee unit is McKesson long-timer Nathan Mott, MBA.

Reader Comments

From Mario: “Re: Nuance Escription. New owners DeliverHealth Solutions just experienced a multi-day outage during a routine maintenance window. Very little mention of this on news or social media.” Unverified, but Mario forwarded an email that DeliverHealth sent to customers indicating that the system was down from Sunday night until Tuesday evening. Nuance is a minority shareholder in the company, which bought Nuance’s HIM transcription and EHR go-live services businesses in November 2020.

From MC: “Re: PHS Frontline episode on safety net hospitals. I would love your thoughts.” I was going to take just a quick look at the 53-minute program that’s free to watch on YouTube, but it was too compelling to turn off. It describes how big hospitals use their marketing clout and cash to skim off profitable patients, leaving safety net hospitals with low-paying Medicaid, Medicare, and charity care. The section toward the end about how private equity firms are looting the healthcare system will make your blood boil – they buy safety net hospitals on the cheap and then cut staffing and supplies to allow paying themselves huge bonuses. Example: PE-backed Prospect loaded its Rhode Island hospitals with $1 billion in debt, immediately paid itself and its investors $457 million, has a huge debt payment due in 2022 with no obvious way to pay it, and the PE company owner (Leonard Green) is now threatening to shut down the hospitals because the state wants it to escrow $120 million to make sure the hospitals can survive.

From Mark: “Re: Base. Unnecessary testing?” Looks like it. Base is following the vanity prescription drug model in offering continuous tests and tracking to medical system-averse 30-somethings (based on the fake sample patients pictured) without concern for value received or how they will use the results, using a slick website, Apple-like physical packaging, and a coaching app with subscription-based pricing. Labs are grouped into sleep, stress, energy, sex drive, and diet, all the areas that are bothersome, hard to measure, and even harder to address. The disclaimer makes it clear that they aren’t offering medical advice, which is good since the founder quit medical school to work as an Amazon engineer, and I saw no mention of a physician’s order. It’s the usual lessons learned: (a) companies can make money selling unnecessary but desirable medical services; and (b) young folks are so turned off by the healthcare system that they will impulse-buy lab tests and drugs from websites like they would sneakers from Amazon, failing to see the value of a medical home or foreseeing their eventual need to address chronic conditions with something more than a cute app that pushes navel-gazing analytics masquerading as health management. I actually think this is good since nobody has managed to disrupt an entrenched, unhealthy healthcare non-system so far, so this kind of “buy whatever you want and see what happens” approach may open some eyes about access, skepticism, and unimpressive outcomes despite horrendous cost. I doubt anyone’s health will be improved much over the life of a subscription (which I would guess will be short), but it probably won’t hurt anything, so caveat emptor.

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

Press Ganey acquires health insurance member experience measurement firm SPH Analytics.

Change Healthcare reports Q4 results as it prepares to be acquired by OptumInsight: revenue flat, adjusted EPS $0.42 versus $0.42.

Sales

• HCA Healthcare chooses Google Cloud for workflow tools and analytics.
• EHR vendor Oasis will deploy Canada-based Think Research’s clinical decision support tools to its 41 hospital customers in Saudi Arabia.
• UCSF will use Philips HealthSuite for interoperability and to develop navigation tools.
• Bassett Healthcare Network (NY) outsources revenue cycle management, analytics, and IT to Optum, which will take on 500 of the health system’s employees.

People

Brian Norris, RN, MBA (Marathon Health) joins Indiana University Health as CNIO.

Optum expands the role of Kristi Henderson, DNP, RN – who is SVP of its Center for Digital Health – to include CEO of its MedExpress urgent care center business.

Industry long-timer Chuck Duncan (CJD Healthcare IT Enterprises) joins consulting firm CPeople as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Six hospitals in Ontario, Canada go live on Cerner Millennium, which will provide a common patient chart across the four groups involved. Some of the hospitals went live without onsite help last fall since Cerner’s US employees were not allowed to enter Canada because of COVID-19.

Imprivata announces a mobile facial recognition solution that will initially allow clinicians to electronically prescribe controlled substances.

Blue Shield of California has saved $20 million over two years by using Gemini Health’s medication cost transparency system for prescribers and pharmacists.

Microsoft opens up the Teams APIs, store, and tools to allow third-party app developers to create apps that integrate with the meeting canvas, offer in-app purchases or subscriptions, and access Teams real-time video and audio.

A new KLAS report on payer care management finds that ZeOmega leads the category, 60% of interviewed Medecision customers are dissatisfied, and Casenet has struggled with a painful HTML5 rewrite.

Another new KLAs report on application management and help desk services says that Nordic, Tegria-owned Cumberland, and HCTec execute strongly and communicate well in the “expansive” offerings category. NTT Data is transitioning to larger customers with a sharp drop in satisfaction due to staff quality and low executive involvement, while Cerner satisfaction has improved. Strong performers in the “broad” category include Ettain Health, GuideIT, and Pivot Point Consulting, while in the “niche” category, the top performers are Talon Healthy IT Services (Epic help desk), ROI Healthcare Solutions (ERP), Tegria-owned Bluetree Network, and Avaap (Infor). 

Government and Politics

A VA OIG review says the VA underestimated the $16 billion budget for its Cerner implementation by $1 billion to $2.6 billion by failing to account for physical infrastructure costs, such as for electrical work and cabling. OIG also noted that the VA did not obtain the required independent cost estimate that would have allowed the omission to be identified.

Other

The CEO of Children’s Hospital Colorado declares a state of emergency in youth mental health, saying that it is overwhelmed with children who have attempted suicide or show symptoms of mental illness. The hospital’s chief medical officer says that in many weeks of 2021, the #1 reason for ED visits has been attempted suicide.

Ireland’s health service asks employees to turn on their 80,000 computers to automatically install a ransomware decryption key that a cyberattacker reportedly provided at no cost, but says it will still take weeks to return systems to normal. The May 14 attack has limited lab capacity to 20% and forced some cancer patients to travel to other cities for treatment.

Sponsor Updates

• Redox co-founder and CTO James Lloyd joins Vericred’s board.
• PatientBond announces several accolades, including an A grade from KLAS for customer peer recommendations and executive involvement with 95% overall customer satisfaction, high-performer status on the G2 vendor review website, and inclusion in the top 20% of the Financial Times’ 2021 list of the fastest-growing companies in the Americas.
• Newfire Global Partners publishes a digital cookbook to celebrate its five-year anniversary.
• Change Health publishes an e-book titled “Wired for Transformation: The State of Healthcare APIs.”
• EClinicalWorks posts a video case study titled “Neuro2Go + healow: Expertise Is Just a Click Away.”
• OptimizeRx CEO Will Febbo will present at the William Blair Annual Growth Stock Conference June 2.
• Spirion wins four Global InfoSec Awards from Cyber Defense Magazine for privacy management software, digital footprint security, compliance, and cybersecurity analytics.
• Talkdesk makes its CX Cloud available in Epic’s App Orchard.
• Vocera announces a distribution agreement with Wavelink in Australia.

Blog Posts

• Making the Complex Simple with a Data Analytics Solution for Investigating Real-time Medical Device Data (Part 1 of 2) (Capsule)
• A Clinical Perspective on Large-Scale Healthcare IT Implementations (Medhost)
• How one physician’s experience helped define Cambridge Memorial’s approach to COVID-19 (Meditech)
• Creating a Financial Forecast for Your Practice 101 (MWTherapy)
• Gartner Innovation Case Study Spotlight: A Look Inside NTT Data’s Commitment to Disruption (NTT Data)
• OptimizeRx Specialty Solutions: Technology That Optimizes Your Access Support Ecosystem (OptimizeRx)
• What Job Will Providers Do Today? (PatientKeeper)
• 5 Steps to Guard Patient Data When Using Virtual Care (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Is Your Revenue Cycle Vendor a True Strategic Partner? They Should Be … (PMD)
• Premier Data: Gap Analysis of Annual Patient Contact Hours in Primary Care (Premier)
• Insider-Related Breaches Spike After 4-Year Decline, Potentially Costing Hospitals Millions (Protenus)
• Lessons Learned from a Cerner TIP Beta Project (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Everyone’s Looking Toward the Future, but What Does Virtual Care Need Right Now? (Redox)
• 5 Health Campaign Ideas That Really Work (Relatient)
• Positive Distraction: Pediatric entertainment ideas to ease anxiety (Sonifi Health)
• Bringing Patient Insights into Focus (Surescripts)
• PatientBond Recognized by KLAS & G2 for High Customer Satisfaction (PatientBond)
• Integrating EHRs with your healthcare contact center platform for seamless patient experiences (Talkdesk)
• Remove Barriers to Medication Adherence with Step-by-Step Support (Twistle)
• 4 Things Every PT Must Do to Deliver an Excellent Patient Experience (WebPT)
• Helping Rehabilitation Facilities Succeed in 2021 (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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