Monday Morning Update 9/20/21

Top News

Definitive Healthcare shares end the week at $48.99, up 81% from their IPO price Wednesday. The company’s valuation is $7 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents value their vendor’s user group meeting more than any other conference, while HIMSS has twice the interest as HLTH. A couple of folks mentioned that they would have chosen CHIME Fall Forum if I had included it as a choice.

New poll to your right or here: Which technology will have the most impact on healthcare in the next five years? My list isn’t exhaustive, but it would have been a long poll otherwise.

Webinars

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET.  “A New, Streamlined Approach to Documentation and Problem List Management in Cerner Millennium.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; David Arco, product manager, IMO; Nicole Douglas, senior product marketing manager, IMO. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Sales

• US Dermatology Partners chooses the RCxRules Revenue Cycle Engine to automate charge import and review.

People

Aaron Miri, MD (Dell Medical School, UT Health Austin) joins Baptist Health (FL) as SVP / chief digital officer / CIO.

Wellbe hires Darcey Nett (DotCom Therapy) as chief growth officer.

David Finn, MA (CynergisTek) joins CHIME as VP of affiliated professional groups.

Christopher Logan (VMware) joins Censinet as SVP / chief security officer.

Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare hires Patrick Woodard, MD, MHA (Renown Health) as VP/ chief digital officer.

Announcements and Implementations

In England, Royal Stoke University Hospital goes live with Vocera Badge in its ED.

Government and Politics

The Department of Justice files criminal charges against 138 defendants, 42 of them licensed medical professionals, for their alleged participation in healthcare fraud schemes that generated $1.4 billion. Telemedicine fraud contributed $1.1 billion of the total.

COVID-19

FDA’s vaccine advisory panel rejects the broad rollout of Pfizer vaccine booster shots, recommending their use only in patients who are over 65 or at high risk for infection. The panel said that despite White House plans to encourage booster shots for most people and Pfizer’s recommendation that they be approved, evidence shows that two shots protect people from hospitalization and death and that the goal should instead be to get more people vaccinated. FDA is not required to follow the committee’s recommendation and will announce its decision this week. The issue has raised opposing public viewpoints among FDA scientists who reviewed contradictory data from CDC, Pfizer, the government of Israel, and independent experts on whether a booster dose is needed.

St. Luke’s Health System (ID) won’t enforce its employee vaccination mandate because the state is under crisis standards of care and the health system can’t afford to lose employees.

The New York Times reports that the “nervous affluent” who can afford concierge medical services are having their COVID-19 antibody levels tested regularly even though experts warn that the number is mostly meaningless and the tests don’t measure the important T cell response. FDA doesn’t recommend such testing because the results may encourage some people to take fewer precautions. The article notes that concierge medicine providers are paid to do whatever the customer wants, even in the absence of medical evidence, while poor people have the opposite incentive in avoiding testing for fear that undesirable results could get them fired.

Other

Guardians accessed more than half the patient portal accounts of patients aged 13-18 years in an study of three children’s hospitals. Natural language processing was used to determine how many outboard portal messages were sent by guardians, as evidenced by referring to the child in the third person or containing phrases such as “my daughter.” The authors note that federal and state regulations require that a mechanism be provided to share information with adolescents without the knowledge of their guardians, but effectiveness is limited by these challenges: (a) institutions may not always configure the portal account correctly; (b) adolescents and their parents may not understand the portal’s design; (c) adolescents may voluntarily share their log-in with guardians; and (d) guardians may coerce the adolescent to provide portal access or may use their credentials without permission. They also note that limitations of NLP analysis, as well as inability to detect access in which guardians didn’t send messages, means that actual numbers are probably higher. They suggest that the perspectives of adolescents and guardians be studied to determine how they impact confidentiality.

A UCSF review of national Epic data finds that patient-to-physician messages jumped as the pandemic began and remained at high levels through the January 2021 review period. Twitter comments pondered whether forced use of MyChart to participate in virtual visits drove the increase or whether virtual visits themselves result in more patient messages. It seems that quite a few interesting studies could be performed – the number of messages that were sent just before virtual visits, the number sent immediately after (suggesting that some need was unmet by the virtual visit), the number sent by first-time portal users, message count compared to the number of active portal users, the number of messages sent by patients of varying acuity or chronic condition levels, and message time of day that might indicate access problems.

Sponsor Updates

• ChartSpan publishes a new white paper, “Follow the Money: Medicare’s New Gold Mine is Chronic Care Management.”
• Nuance launches its AI-powered, cloud-based PowerScribe One radiology reporting platform and MPower Clinical Analytics in Australia and New Zealand.
• OptimizeRx names Andy D’Silva SVP of corporate finance.
• Netsmart has been inducted into the Kansas City Business Journal’s Hall of Champions after being recognized as a Champion of Business for three consecutive years.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Caring is Sharing (Data) at Innova Primary Care.”
• CHIME applauds the FTC’s actions to secure consumer health data.
• Pure Storage appoints Operator Collective founder Mallun Yen to its Board of Directors.
• RxRevu founder Carm Huntress will present “Staying True to Your Values During Massive Growth” on October 6 as part of Den Startup Week.
• SOC Telemed announces that David Fletcher will become interim CFO upon the departure of Chris Knibb at the end of the year.
• Spok Holdings postpones its Investor Day Program due to an ongoing strategic alternatives review process.
• Summit Healthcare publishes a new client success story, “Doctors Community Hospital Continues Partnership with Summit Healthcare Post-Epic Migration.”
• University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers feature their use of the TriNetX Research Network in “Advancing clinical research and population health with real-world data.”
• West Monroe will invest $250 million in the expansion of its digital consulting services.
• Zynx Health celebrates its 25th anniversary.

Blog Posts

• Improving financial performance with the Dragon Ambient EXperience (Nuance)
• Compassion, Community, Caring: National Assisted Living Week 2021 (Netsmart)
• Connecting operational and clinical data for optimum performance (Nordic)
• 4 Reasons Why Providers Struggle to Reduce Readmissions (PatientBond)
• Supply Chain in Post-Pandemic Healthcare (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Why World Patient Safety Day is More Important Than Ever (Symplr)
• 3 More Ways to Increase Medical Practice Revenue (PMD)
• Why One Health System Traded Its Legacy Tool for Advanced Privacy Monitoring (Protenus)
• Healthcare is broken. Electronic prior authorization might be the first step in fixing it. (Redox)
• What COVID-19 Revealed About Optimizing Patient Payments (Sphere)
• Strengthening Our Foundation with Eligibility, Formulary and Benefit Data (Surescripts)
• Actium Health – A Clear Plan for Every Patient (Actium Health)
• How workplace culture affects, and is affected by, all aspects of the patient experience (Talkdesk)
• Why Providence is Making the Switch to Cloud-Based Data Management for EHR (Tegria)
• Developing a More Inclusive Clinical Trial Ecosystem (Twistle)
• Vocera Ease Application vs. NICU Camera System (Vocera)
• Three benefits of switching to electronic claim attachments (Waystar)
• Top 3 Drawbacks to Cash-Based Practice, and How PTs Can Address Them (WebPT)

Contacts

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