I'd never heard of Healwell before and took a look over their offerings. Has anyone used the products? Beyond the…
News 8/18/21
Top News
Streamline Health Solutions, developer of pre-bill coding audit technology, acquires RCM software and consulting firm Avelead for $20 million.
Avelead President and CEO Jawad Shaikh will remain in those roles, reporting to his Streamline counterpart Tee Green, co-founder and former head of Greenway
Reader Comments
From Borlander: “Re: HIMSS21. A vendor rep I was supposed to meet with after HIMSS just tested positive for COVID. Who could have predicted that?” I was relieved that my antigen test was negative while simultaneously wondering if other attendees are getting less-cheery news.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
HIMSS tells me that total HIMSS21 in-person attendance was 19,000, a lot more than it seemed on the ground.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
ClosedLoop.ai raises $34 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total raised to $45 million. The startup, which has developed AI-powered predictive data modeling software, won the CMS AI Health Outcomes Challenge earlier this year.
Care coordination and social services referral company Unite Us acquires analytics vendor Carrot Health.
The Washington Post describes what can happen when non-profit hospitals “experiment as venture capitalists” via technology investment, describing the $12 million spent by Cone Health (NC) to successfully develop diabetes management app Wellsmith. The health system shut the startup company down because its product wasn’t competitive and its success at keeping people healthy would have jeopardized the health system’s predominantly fee-for-service revenue. Former Wellsmith CEO Jeanne Teshler lists problems with having a health system as its key investor:
- Cone was not willing to be a customer of Wellsmith because only a minority of its patients were covered by value-based care such as Medicare Advantage and ACOs and thus Cone could not bill insurers for the service.
- Patients had to purchase home devices that weren’t covered by insurance.
- Wellsmith released a software update that was a “dismal failure.”
- Cone was considering an ultimately failed merger and its financial commitment to Wellsmith was uncertain.
- Health systems that have venture funds won’t buy products that are funded by other health systems.
Sales
- UnityPoint Health (IA) will implement Premier’s PINC AI technology, supply chain services, and service line analytics, and will join its GPO.
- Ellis Medicine (NY) offers patients access to virtual mental healthcare using technology from AptiHealth.
- ChristianaCare (DE) joins Premier’s supply chain service network.
- In the UAE, Medcare Hospitals & Medical Centres will implement InterSystems TrakCare as a Service in its four hospitals and 16 medical centers. Its first hospital is already live in Sharjah.
People
Cerner hires Lisa Collins, MBA (Accenture) as SVP of global services and Nithya Narasimhan (ADP) as SVP of client relationships in the East region.
L. Hayley Burgess, PharmD, MBA (HCA Healthcare) joins clinical surveillance company VigiLanz as chief clinical officer.
Robert Millette, MBA (Lee Health) joins Integrated Care Solutions as VP of delivery innovation.
Cantata Health Solutions names Scott Anderson, MBA (Netsmart) SVP and GM of managed services and Adam Feldman (Qualifacts) SVP of sales.
Symplr hires Kristin Russel, MBA, MPA as chief marketing officer.
Announcements and Implementations
Qardio launches QardioDirect, a remote patient monitoring and telemedicine service for patients with chronic conditions.
Ciitizen announces GA of its Cures Gateway, software designed to help HIEs comply with medical records requests initiated by patients.
Children’s National Hospital (DC) earns URAC’s first pediatric hospital telehealth accreditation.
UnitedHealth’s Optum subsidiary revamps its Optum Store to add direct-to-consumer services such as virtual care and prescriptions for people without insurance, including offerings that will compete with investor-funded storefronts such as Ro and Hims.
Government and Politics
CMS has sent warning letters to 165 hospitals that haven’t posted their negotiated prices, although it has not issued fines. A patient advocacy group’s study found that 94% of hospitals haven’t complied and are theoretically liable for a fine of $300 per day, although CMS has suggested that the penalty isn’t enough and wants to increase it to $10 per bed per day for larger hospitals.
COVID-19
CDC numbers suggest that the predicted plateau in new COVID-19 cases has likely occurred and cases are beginning to trend down, although hospitalizations and deaths lag by weeks.
Texas orders five refrigerated mortuary trailers that will be staged from San Antonio. The state has 12,000 COVID-19 patients in hospitals which also contain the most pediatric COVID-19 patients of any state at 239.
A public health study in Canada finds that while teens are more likely than babies and toddlers to carry coronavirus into their homes, it’s the younger children who are more likely to spread it to other household members, probably because those children require more hands-on attention and cannot be isolated when they exhibit symptoms.
Hillsborough County, FL reports that 5,600 students and 300 employees were in isolation or quarantine as of Monday morning after just four days of school.
Other
Memorial Health System works to recover from a ransomware attack early Sunday morning that caused it to shut down its IT systems, divert emergency patients, and cancel surgeries and radiology exams at its facilities in Ohio and West Virginia.
Johns Hopkins Medicine clinicians and IT staffers develop a Video Visit Technical Risk Score in Epic to determine which patients might be in need of technical support ahead of their virtual care appointments. The score, automatically calculated using EHR data, can be displayed as part of a user’s schedule view.
Weird News Andy challenges readers to come up with the most inappropriate healthcare acronyms and will judge submissions to select a winner. He kicks it off with HAPI (hospital-acquired pressure injury).
Sponsor Updates
- Elsevier adds new features to its ClinicalKey medical resource search engine, including a new user interface, improved search functionality, and significant point-of-care content.
- AdvancedMD publishes the 2021 edition of its “MACRAnyms” e-book.
- The Empowered Patient Podcast features Capsule’s head of clinical informatics, John Zaleski.
- Cerner releases a new podcast, “Supporting digital innovation in children’s healthcare.”
- OptimizeRx partners with Demandbase to expand its direct-to-physician, account-based digital touchpoints for life sciences.
- CHIME’s latest podcast features CHIME board member, boot camp faculty member, and healthcare leader George “Buddy” Hickman.
- Dina will exhibit at the Rise West Medical Advantage Senior Leadership Conference August 30-September 2 in Colorado Springs.
- EClinicalWorks releases a series of podcasts focused on “How Health Centers Nationwide are Improving Access to Care.”
- Ellkay will exhibit at Epic UGM August 23-25 in Verona, WI.
Blog Posts
- A Day in the Future of Healthcare (Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise)
- Top Three Takeaways from the 2022 Quality Payment Program Proposed Rule (Azara Healthcare)
- What the data tells us: the pandemic’s impact on acute and post-acute care (CarePort)
- CIOs: Is Now the Time to Implement Meditech Expanse? (CereCore)
- Healthcare’s Blind Spot in 2021 (Optimum Healthcare IT)
- Value-based care strategies for financial resiliency (Cerner)
- HIMSS21: A snapshot of themes and ideas from the live event in Las Vegas (ConnectiveRx)
- Using hello2healow for Patient Outreach in Florida (EClinicalWorks)
- Crack the Code: Simplify Your CPT and E/M coding processes with Computed Assisted Professional Coding Software (EZDI)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.
@WNA – CCHIT
@WNA:
HIM – Health Information Management (not PC enough these days)
BS – Building Services
CLI✞ – Not healthcare, but recent. Christian Leadership Institute, plus a cross.
Not healthcare and not recent, but infamous in my part of the world:
CRAP – Canadian Reform-Alliance Party (first effort)
CARP – Canadian Alliance-Reform Party (second effort, and somewhat better, I guess?)
This was the product of a union of 2 political parties. For political reasons (hah!), both parties HAD to be acknowledged in the name. Yet including them led to all sorts of amused commentary. It was perfect because the price of their pride, was a sound mocking and bruised egos all around.
The old Siemens Healthcare IT comes to mind. The Healthineers site still refers to “Siemens healthcare IT solution Soarian” and recruiter sites talk about “Siemens Healthcare IT jobs,” which practically beg for witty acronymic variants.
A former colleague and friend who worked at GE Medical Systems spoke of a (mercifully) short period in Europe where a department was named Health Information Technology division. As you can imagine, the acronym for GE Medical Systems Health Information Technology was problematic.
CDC numbers suggest that the predicted plateau in new COVID-19 cases has likely occurred and cases are beginning to trend down, although hospitalizations and deaths lag by weeks.
Can you link your source, please?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
Sort by 14-day change in new cases. Nevada is down, Missouri and Arkansas relatively flat. Total new US cases (seven-day average) dropped a tiny bit Tuesday, the first time in awhile that it has decreased, but it’s still a high number with a lot of hotspots. Hospitalizations also dropped a bit nationally, but not as significantly as other countries such as Israel have seen.
School sans masks is just starting in the states you mentioned and the unvaccinated populace is just gearing up for ongoing outrage on restrictions. The motorcycle superspreaders will be heading home from Sturgis and bringing COVID with them. And those are just a few examples. Somehow it seems doubtful that our numbers are going to follow the same trends as have been seen in other countries where people and government actually behave logically.
I’m not skeptical of a current plateau, but with school starting I find it hard to believe any decrease will last. (Though, it might be easier to believe if I lived in a less sociopathic state…)
Mr. H, I use the NY Times site as well, and the same technique you mentioned of sorting by 14-day change. An added check that has been extremely relevant was to look at states with the highest 14-day change, and then draw a line under them if their vaccination rate was particularly low. I started getting concerned about Alabama, Arkansas, and Missouri in late May and we see where they are at now. I was actually pretty surprised that a back of the napkin check like that ended up predicting real world results 2 short months later. Really, the low vaccination, Southern Confederate states (and the fact that they are Southern and Confederate is not a coincidence).with high transmission at that time are now the Rogue’s Gallery we see as the most dangerous COVID spots in the world. The most dangerous COVID spots in the world, again, right here in America, where we have the best vaccines and now N95 masks available for everyone.
I’m going to respectfully support the counterpoint that this is nowhere near over. The first support for my claim was already mentioned by someone else: In the face of research that clearly shows us kids don’t enjoy the protection from Delta that they did from prior strains, we are about to open schools in the middle of this surge, which, put another way, is to say that we have learned absolutely nothing over the past year. Kids are going to infect each other like chicken pox and measles just had a baby, and they are going to infect their households. Further opening of other large event spaces (Lollapalooza, Sturgis, Trump rallies) will hurt us even more .
The transmission is likely much higher than being reported for a number of reasons, but I’ll focus on a big one. We aren’t testing nearly as much. I believe less than a third of our national peak last winter. When we see the percentage of positive tests increasing over the past few weeks, that’s a clear sign that we don’t even know how many cases are actually out there. Delta’s speed may make the degree to which our numbers are off higher than it’s been at any point in the pandemic. If we’re doing a third of the testing as we did at our peak, that doesn’t necessarily the case rate is 3 times as high. But I’ll bet you a lot of money that we’re missing a substantial percentage of cases that are out in the community.
Something that should make both of us nervous is this next point I have. Florida actually has a fairly high vaccination rate. It’s on par with, if not slightly ahead of, the national average last time I checked. Yet they are being hit harder than anyone right now by Delta, well ahead of those other Confederate states I mentioned. Wisconsin, where you and I live, has a similar profile for vaccinations. I’ve been noticing that Wisconsin (and a lot of other states that haven’t been hit as hard by this surge, yet) is starting to see a lot of days where that 14-day change is 100 – 200% increases. Again, we are about to open schools.
One other thing to note about numbers on the NYTimes, and elsewhere, is that the numbers are no longer real-time like they were last year. We now have states reporting their COVID metrics less than once a day. A number of graphs you see out of Florida these days look like staircases with their recent COVID numbers, since several days are all reported together on one day.
I’m sorry to say, but my position is that this is nowhere near over and that we will eventually exceed case counts we saw earlier in the pandemic, potentially by a large margin. And despite my enduring love and respect for you, Mr. H, I believe I am the correct party on this assessment. I say this no matter how much I wish that you were the right one. Vaccination rates have increased a bit, but they are way, way off from their peaks in March, when they became available to the first very large blocks of people. We still have people that can’t be bothered to wear PPE correctly, or at all. Vaccines take 5-6 weeks to even matter, so the laggards we’re still waiting for are sitting ducks. The curve has to come down at some point. I’ll offer, though, that even if you’re right and things are coming down very broadly, we still have huge numbers of unvaccinated people out there. The curve will drop, but still to a substantially high spot. The unvaccinated are dry leaves for this forest fire, and it can take off again at any time. Pretty soon we’ll have that indoor winter weather that contributed to last year’s spike.
Anyone who is reading, please get your shots. Please continue to wear proper, rated masks. Properly wear those masks. I’m talking KN95 or N95 masks. Maintain distance whenever possible. These tools work, and people argue like they should have to use just one of them. When my grandfather, who is still a hero to me, went off to end Nazism in Europe, he didn’t choose between a knife, a pistol, and a rifle. He brought all of them, and he used them well. We’re up against an even more dangerous enemy, and should learn from his example.
Hmm….a HIMSS exec told me that they had 18,000 reg. Maybe 19,000 picked up a badge but that looks high to me. I suspect that’s the number who registered and a good 20% stayed home last minute
Still any number above 15K is not nothing, given August in Vegas in a Covid Surge hotspot