Giving a patient medications in the ER, having them pop positive on a test, and then withholding further medications because…
Monday Morning Update 8/30/21
Top News
Google shuts down its DeepMind-developed Streams app that displays patient information to UK clinicians.
Streams was the only DeepMind app that didn’t use AI, and plans to incorporate the technology were never acted on. It uses algorithms that were developed by the UK’s NHS.
The UK’s data protection office objected to The Royal Free Hospital providing DeepMind with patient data without their consent or knowledge during its development of Streams. Royal Free is the only NHS Trust that is still using Streams.
Google acquired AI startup DeepMind in early 2014 for a reported $500 million. Most of the company’s work involves teaching computers to play games such as Go and Pong. Its DeepMind Health business was moved within Google Health in late 2018, raising privacy objections that DeepMind had promised repeatedly that its data “will never be linked or associated with Google accounts, products, or services.”
Google says it will focus instead on Care Studio, which is being piloted at Ascension and Beth Israel Deaconess.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Cerner’s new CEO hire draws about a two-to-one negative among those who care.
New poll to your right or here: What background would you favor if you were hiring a CEO for your current employer? It’s an awkwardly constructed question, but my interest was piqued by IANAL’s comment last week that growing software companies usually hire CEOs whose background is strong either in sales or technology, and Cerner’s incoming CEO David Feinberg doesn’t fit that mold. I didn’t do a great job of incorporating what probably should have been a separate poll – at what point should a company’s hiring favor comparable CEO experience?
I was thinking about the prediction years ago and digital stethoscopes would replace their low-tech acoustic counterparts for a myriad of logical reasons. I get the feeling that it’s still mostly old-school instruments being used, but maybe someone has stats.
I’m taking a semi-break this week while still doing most of my usual HIStalk work, just from elsewhere and hopefully spending less time.
Webinars
September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Patient Acquisition and Retention: The Future of Omnichannel Virtual Assistants.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenters: Harris Hunt, SVP growth product, Cancer Treatment Centers of America; Patty Riskind, MBA, CEO, Orbita; Nathan Treloar, MSc, co-founder and COO, Orbita. Consumers want the same digital healthcare experience from healthcare that they get in online shopping, banking, and booking reservations, and the pandemic has ramped up the patient and provider need for frictionless access to healthcare resources and services. Health systems can improve patient acquisition and retention with the help of omnichannel virtual assistants that engage and delight. Discover how to open and enhance healthcare’s digital front door to offer care that goes beyond expectations.
September 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2022 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, VP global clinical services, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, mapping manager, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, clinical terminologist, IMO. IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders will discuss the coding changes in the yearly update to allow your organization to prepare for a smooth transition and avoid negative impacts to the bottom line. The presenters will review new, revised, and deleted codes; highlight revisions to ICD-10-CM index and tabular; discuss changes within Official Coding Guidelines, and review modifier changes.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Olive launches an in-house venture studio for startups that are developing solutions for its automation platform.
Sales
- Wolters Kluwer, Health adds six UK customers of UpToDate and Lexicomp.
- Whatley Health Services chooses RCxRules for revenue cycle automation.
People
VitalTech hires Steven Scott (PointRight) as president and CEO.
Clearsense promotes Kimberly Dickason, RN, MBA to COO and hires Pamela Fowler, MBA (University of Washington) as chief marketing officer.
Announcements and Implementations
Mayo Clinic and Verily will collaborate to develop an evidence-based decision support solution, starting with cardiovascular and cardiometabolic conditions. The tool will be driven by Mayo-developed content and de-identified health data and will use open standards to allow integration with commercial EHRs.
Government and Politics
Ascension pays $85,000 to settle Justice Department charges that it violated federal immigration laws because of a software programming error. The error caused Ascension’s custom employee eligibility verification software to send automated emails to all of its non-citizen employees whose documents were set to expire, requesting them to submit proof of continued work authorization. Some of the recipients had presented documents that did not require re-verification, such as permanent residents and refugees. The Justice Department concludes, “Employers are reminded that while software programs may seem efficient, there is still a responsibility to ensure that programming decisions do not result in discrimination.”
COVID-19
China delays its approval of the BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine because of concerns that availability of a more modern, more effective vaccine will undermine confidence in its old-school, made-in-China products that are key to its national vaccination program.
Texas reports that nearly 14,000 people are hospitalized with confirmed coronavirus infection, occupying 21% all all hospital beds, and 300 people died of COVID-19 on Friday. The entire state has 303 ICU beds available versus the nearly 2,500 that were free pre-pandemic. A 46-year-old Houston-area Army combat veteran died of gallstone pancreatitis last week because lack of ICU beds. An ED doctor who treated him says treatment is a 30-minute procedure that is nearly always successful. The doctor says, “We are playing musical chairs with 100 people and 10 chairs. When the music stops, what happens? People from all over the world come to Houston to get medical care and, right now, Houston can’t take care of patients from the next town over.”
CDC describes how an unvaccinated teacher who kept working while experiencing congestion and fatigue and later tested positive for COVID-19 infected 12 of her 22 students after removing her mask to read to the class. The attack rate of the students seated in the front rows of the classroom was 80% versus 28% in the back rows.
Other
A Wisconsin advocacy group for raising taxes on the wealthy says that the net worth of Epic CEO Judy Faulkner rose from $2.5 billion in March 2020 to $6.7 billion in August 2021. Its data source was a web page from Forbes, which has no way of knowing the net worth of anyone beyond their publicly reported stock holdings, but that earns click bait traffic by making its made-up numbers look authoritative.
It seems obvious that the Internet’s robust supply of mean people seek health information online like everybody else, but it turns out that the headline writer misspelled “men.”
Sponsor Updates
- EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “Saving Summer with Kiosk, the Patient Portal, and More at MedRite.”
- Symplr publishes a new whitepaper, “Workforce Management Strategies in Times of Uncertainty.”
- Pure Storage’s FlashArray helps to improve the performance of Korea’s COVID-19 vaccine reservation system operated by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency.
- Quil Chief Customer Officer Roelf Kuitse will speak at the American Cancer Society’s Changemakers virtual series, Achieving Equity in the Telehealth Age September 21.
- The MatrixCare podcast features Surescripts Manager of Product Innovation Rachel Petersen and Surescripts Key Account Executive Jill Lytwyn.
- Visage Imaging parent company ProMedicus names Alice Williams a director.
- Azara Healthcare and Luma Health form a technology partnership for their population health data reporting and patient journey platform, respectively.
- Vocera will present at the Wells Fargo Healthcare Conference September 9, the Baird Healthcare Conference September 14, and the Morgan Stanley Healthcare Conference September 15.
- West Monroe publishes a new report, “What’s Driving the Current Wave of Healthcare M&A and Investment?”
Blog Posts
- Five reasons why chatbots fail. (And how to make yours a runaway success.) (Nuance)
- How Health Plans Can Reduce Readmissions (PatientBond)
- 3 Ways to Increase Medical Practice Revenue (PMD)
- Data Delivered: Collaborating with Pharma to Study Anticoagulant Use in COVID-19 Patients (Premier)
- Get the Support You Need: Privacy Professional Services Elevate Resource-Strapped Teams (Protenus)
- How to Realize Revenue Earlier by Offering Patients More Flexible Payment Options (Sphere)
- The guide to pagers for hospitals (Spok)
- Talkdesk integration with Zoom unifies contact center collaboration (Talkdesk)
- Why Providence is Making the Switch to Cloud-Based Data Management for EHR (Tegria)
- Unlocking the Value of Genotypic and Phenotypic Data for Translational Research (TriNetX)
- Can Postpartum Contraceptive Care be Enhanced with Technology? (Twistle)
- Revenue cycle 101: charity care screening (Waystar)
- FAQ: The 2022 Medicare Proposed Rule and Other Perplexing Payer Regulations (WebPT)
- Well Health HIMSS 2021 Recap (Well Health)
The following HIStalk sponsors have achieved top client satisfaction and user experience rankings in Black Book’s latest survey on coding, transcription, CDI, and clinical information management software and services vendors:
- Nuance – comprehensive mid-RCM coding, CDI, and compliance solutions; CDI software; medical speech recognition and AI solutions.
- Infor – clinical data interoperability solutions.
- Symplr – provider credentialing.
- Agfa Healthcare – vendor neutral archive.
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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The Justice Department concludes, “Employers are reminded that while software programs may seem efficient, there is still a responsibility to ensure that programming decisions do not result in discrimination.”
I don’t know where to go with that last sentence, but scrap every AI program you’ve ever seen.
Agreed. Isn’t data mining the ultimate form of discrimination? You mine the data to discriminate the indicators from the non-indicators. And since the data is simply the numeric representation of people’s activity… ergo illegal discrimination!
If you read the article it says that Ascension sent notifications telling people their (non-expiring) documents were about to expire and then actually required them to resubmit new ones. If it was just an email followed by an “oops, please disregard” it would not have been a matter for the DoJ. The problem was that “the system” said the employees needed to resubmit, so HR said “the system says…”, so inappropriate burdens were placed on people due to citizenship status.
But to the core point here – that AI / ML usage runs the risk of discrimination – this is a well established fact. Imagine a ML model intended to analyze a photo of a mole and determine if it’s cancerous, but the training set was predominantly photos with light skin tones. You end up with (without any *intentional* discrimination) a tool that will give useful answers for light skinned people and misleadingly-confident-but-random answers for people with dark skin. AI / ML has a very real danger of further ingraining existing biases into the status quo.
Health systems should be asking questions like “what steps did the data scientists take to avoid bias” before the implementation of any of these tools. A health system that doesn’t do this due diligence and ends up harming their population? I’m ok with such an organization having action taken against it.
Yes, scrap every AI program out there where the developers don’t take responsibility for the consequences of their development. “It’s not my fault, it’s the AI” is the ultimate deflection and shouldn’t be tolerated.
Or, I guess we’re just supposed to accept it when Facebook algorithms spread propaganda that leads to genocidal mob violence. Between the blameless software developers and the unforeseeable emergent properties of their programs, it’s all just a fact of life that we’re powerless to change.
Re: Cerner CEO hire. Unfortunately Neil’s passing occurred unexpectedly and left a void. Cliff didn’t aspire to be a CEO and Neil let some talent leave or forced them out that probably should have been the air apparent. Alas, they now have a board that really has no clue what and who Cerner is to healthcare. I bet something is up internally with this hire. If not, it’s going to be a long next couple of years.
So, instead of an “air” apparent they now have a vacuum… 😉
Dad joke quality = 10/10
Re the CEO/background question: For me it depends on what your employer does. If Healthcare System or Software Dev, I like an engineering background b/c it does not matter how good your management or sales skills are if you cannot implement/create a smoothly-functioning system.
It has always been my understanding that the background of the CEO? The company tries to hire based upon where they want the company to go. It’s all about the future, in other words.
If the Board/Executive Search Committee thinks that Revenue & Sales are the issue, then they try to hire someone with a Marketing background. If the Company thinks that they face a challenging technical transition, they might go for someone with an Engineering or IT background. If the issue is industry consolidation, they look for an MBA with an M&A history.
However. Sometimes they have a preferred candidate, for whatever reason. If that preferred candidate is smart enough to speak directly to those future challenges? And why would they not? Then their background recedes in importance.