Monday Morning Update 6/21/21

Top News

Physician network operator Doximity files documents for an IPO that will value the company at $4 billion.

The company reported $207 million in revenue in its most recent year, with $50 million in net income.

CEO and co-founder Jeffrey Tangney, MBA, who also co-founded Epocrates, controls 60% of company shares, a stake that will likely be valued at over $2 billion.

Reader Comments

From Joel Klein: “Re: University of Maryland Capital Region Medical Center. It opened on June 12, relocating all patients who were at Prince George’s Hospital Center, which will close. Essentially, this was an Epic go live plus a simultaneous hospital move. A week in, things are fairly stable. Thanks as always for doing this blog. Super helpful.” Congratulations to the team there and to Joel, who is SVP/CIO at University of Maryland Medical System and a practicing ED physician. UM Capital Regional Medical Center is in Largo, MD and replaces the 75-year-old Prince George’s Hospital Center in Cheverly, MD, which I believe was running Cerner.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Many poll respondents think technology has improved healthcare mostly in the areas of consumer convenience, accessibility, and safety, but don’t think it has helped in important outcomes areas.

New poll to your right or here: Which action was most responsible for your getting the job you hold now? Poll choices are limited by practicality, so feel free to add a poll comment if your hiring was by other means.

Webinars

June 24 (Thursday) 2 ET: “Peer-to-Peer Panel: Creating a Better Healthcare Experience in the Post-Pandemic Era.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare, Avtex; Matt Durski, director of healthcare patient and member experience, Avtex; Patrick Tuttle, COO, Delta Dental of Kansas; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. The live panel will review the findings of a May 2021 survey about which factors are most important to patients and members who are interacting with healthcare organizations. The panel will provide actionable strategies to improve patient and member engagement and retention, recover revenue, and implement solutions that reduce friction across multiple channels to prioritize care and outreach.

June 30 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “From quantity to quality: The new frontier for clinical data.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; John Lee, MD, CMIO, Allegheny Health Network. EHRs generate more healthcare data than ever, but that data is of low quality for secondary uses such as population health, precision medicine, and pandemic management, and its collection burdens clinicians as data entry clerks. The presenters will review ways to reduce clinician EHR burden; describe the importance of standardized, harmonious data; suggest why quality measures strategy needs to be changed; and make the case that clinical data collection as a whole should be re-evaluated.

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

Sales

• Post-acute care services provider Charter Healthcare chooses Netsmart’s MyUnity EHR along with its solutions for electronic visit verification and referrals. 

People

San Joaquin County, VA promotes Mark Thomas, MBA (San Joaquin General Hospital) to county CIO.

Julie Bastien, MBA (Press Ganey) joins EVideon Health as VP of marketing.

Industry long-timer Mike Ruotolo (Office Practicum) joins prescribing technology vendor TroyRx as VP of sales.

Lisa Wild, MA (Kaiser Permanent) joins Ellkay as VP of payer market sales.

Primary care doctor and physician informatician Kennedy Ganti, MD is installed as president of the Medical Society of New Jersey. He is also president-elect of New Jersey HIMSS.

Announcements and Implementations

California launches its digital COVID-19 vaccination record system, built on the open source SMART Health Card Framework of VCI, whose members include Cerner, Epic, Meditech, Allscripts, HIMSS, and The Sequoia Project.

Sweden’s Region Västernorrland goes live on Sectra imaging.

Government and Politics

A VA OIG report finds that VA’s use of community care staff to scan patient records that are created by non-VA providers introduces errors due to a lack of standardized procedures, insufficient training, and lack of quality checks. The small review of records from seven VA facilities found that 44% of scanned mental health records contained errors that were caused by inaccurate document titles, indexing records to the wrong referral or veteran, and duplicate record entry.

ONC invites colleges and universities to apply for its public health IT workforce program, supported by $80 million in American Rescue Plan funds. ONC expects the program to train 4,000 people from underserved communities over four years.

Delegates at the American Medical Association Special Meeting call for doctors to be given more flexibility if they believe that the release of a patient’s health information – under ONC’s Cures Act information blocking requirements – would cause physical, mental, or emotional harm. They are especially concerned about doctors releasing the reproductive health, mental health, or substance abuse information of adolescents to parents or proxies as the regulation requires.

Privacy and Security

ED doctors at Humber River Hospital in Toronto, Canada urge hospital leadership to close the ED until IT systems are restored from a June 13 ransomware attack. The ED has gone to paper records and patients are experiencing long delays. The hospital opened in 2015 as North America’s first all-digital hospital and upgraded to Meditech Expanse in 2019.

St. Joseph’s / Candler (GA) is hit by a ransomware attack Thursday, with systems not yet recovered.

Other

The local paper profiles Peoria, IL-based OSF OnCall Digital Health, whose 800 employees operate a “hospital without walls” for OSF HealthCare and offer services to other organizations.

Sponsor Updates

• Hillrom posts an interview with SVP and Patient Support Systems President Paul Johnson, MBA on the company’s digital health vision.
• Wolters Kluwer Health offers Ovid users access to OrthoEvidence, an evidence-based summary provider for orthopedic specialists, surgeons, nurses, medical residents, and students.
• OptimizeRx discusses its 2021 strategic operating plan, which has been aligned with the pharma industry’s market-sizing opportunity across fast-growing specialty therapeutic areas.
• Well Health names Marissa Morrison (Foursquare) VP of people.
• PatientPing publishes a new use case spotlight, “How Eleanor Health utilizes PatientPing’s real-time ADT notifications to proactively and promptly engage members and coordinate care.”
• Premier honors with Community Enhancement Collaboration, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting food insecurity, with its annual Monroe E. Trout Premier Cares Award and a $100,000 cash prize.
• Redox releases a new podcast, “Crashing Primary Care and Dialysis with Dr. Andrew Schutzbank.”
• Spirion expands its Sensitive Data Platform portfolio with new SaaS solution offerings that simplify the protection of sensitive data across the enterprise.

Blog Posts

• Decoding Digital Health: Leverage Digital Health to Drive Improved Patient Outcomes and Commercial Success (OptimizeRx)
• Achieving Improved Patient Care Through Adversity: Hospice of Washington County and Care Synergy Discuss Challenge and Solution (Netsmart)
• Primary care is an essential part of a usable healthcare system (Nordic)
• Enhancing Your Find-a-Doc Solution to Increase Patient Volume and Loyalty (PatientBond)
• What are Comparative Billing Reports? (PMD)
• How to Solve Gaps in Care and Recover Patient Volume (Relatient)
• Informed and Unburdened: A Future System That Centers Patients on a Budget (Surescripts)
• How chatbots are changing – and improving – customer service (Talkdesk)
• Lessons from ISPOR 2021: The Increasing Acceptance of Real-World Data and Real-World Evidence in Regulatory Decision Making (TriNetX)
• 3 Top Benefits of Defining ROI for Patient Engagement (Twistle)
• How Video Conferencing is Improving Patient and Family Communication (Vocera)
• What Role Do Key Performance Indicators Play in a Practice, and Which Ones Should PTs Care About? (WebPT)

Contacts

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