Well that's a bad look as the Senators contemplate filling in the House gaps in the VA Bill
News 9/22/21
Top News
Former Teladoc executive David Sides joins NextGen Healthcare as president and CEO. Sides spent 17 years as SVP of worldwide consulting at Cerner, and had a shorter, more recent stint as president and CEO of Streamline Health.
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.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
RCM vendor AGS Health acquires EZDI, a clinical documentation improvement, computer-assisted coding, and auditing business based in Louisville, KY.
Xealth raises $24 million in a Series B funding round led by Advocate Aurora Enterprises, bringing its total raised to $53 million. The Providence Health & Services spin-off has developed software to help providers find and prescribe digital health apps and programs.
Clearlake Capital Group launches the Vive Collective, a program to help foster and potentially invest in digital health companies. Clearlake’s portfolio includes Bamboo Health (the newly merged and rebranded PatientPing/Appriss Health), NThrive, and Symplr.
Pager secures $70 million in financing. The company has developed virtual care navigation and collaboration software that it markets to providers, payers, and employers.
Surgical data analytics vendor Caresyntax adds $30 million to its $100 million Series C investment round, bringing the company’s total funding to $208 million.
Flywheel, a medical research data management company, raises $22 million in a Series C funding round led by 8VC. It has also acquired Radiologics, an imaging research data management and analytics business based in St. Louis.
Enterprise virtual care vendor EVisit raises $45 million in a Series B funding round. The Arizona-based company plans to nearly double its workforce in the coming months.
People
Jeff Gartland (Anthem) joins Relatient as CEO. He takes over from Michele Perry, who will become vice chairwoman.
Sales
- The VA Puget Sound Health System’s Seattle Division will implement TransformativeMed’s Core Work Manager clinical decision support tools and diabetes module.
- Dignity Health’s Yavapai Regional Medical Center (AZ) selects digital front door technology from Phunware.
- Nicklaus Children’s Health System (FL) will deploy wayfinding technology from Gozio Health.
Announcements and Implementations
InterSystems announces GA of its Iris FHIR Accelerator Service for storing and retrieving FHIR data.
Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare (TN) develops a remote patient monitoring program for COVID-19 patients using MD Revolution’s clinical experts and RevUp technology.
SCL Health implements Nuance Dragon Ambient Experience automated clinical documentation software for its telehealth and in-person exams for cardiology, orthopedics, and primary care across its facilities in Colorado and Montana.
COVID-19
Ellkay resolves a software programming glitch that mistakenly inflated the state of Vermont’s COVID-19 case count by 109 and delayed the reporting of positive test results to 237 patients. Ellkay’s analysis also determined that the slow-down may have impacted reporting in several other states.
COVID-19 has overtaken the 1918 Spanish flu as the deadliest disease event in US history, with 675,400 Americans succumbing to the disease.
Pfizer reports favorable results in its trial of a COVID-19 vaccine for 5 to 11 year-old children.
Other
Apple’s latest operating system gives Health app users the ability to share health data with their providers through EHRs. Six vendors are participating in the initial launch of the feature, first announced this summer, including Cerner and Allscripts. Pilots with several provider groups have shown the data-sharing feature to be well received by patients monitoring their blood pressure from home.
Sponsor Updates
- Arcadia CMO Rich Park, MD and VP of Enterprise Partnerships Anna Basevich will present at the NAACOS Fall 2021 Conference October 1.
- CereCore has been recognized by Securance Consulting as a Best Practice Meditech Infrastructure as a Service provider for more than five years running.
- Cerner releases a new podcast, “Moving from data connectivity to real provider usability.”
- CHIME releases a new Digital Health Leaders Podcast, “A Conversation with William Hudson, SVP and CIO, John Muir Health.”
- Bluetree, Cerner, Clearwater, Divurgent, Optimum Healthcare IT, Imprivata, Clearsense, and the HCI Group will sponsor CHIME Fall Forum October 27-30 in San Diego.
- CloudWave Director of Sales Engineering Mike Donahue will present at the Meditech Users Network Conference September 23.
- CEO Magazine features Meditech International CEO Charlotte Jackson.
- Chris O’Brien Lifehouse has become the first hospital in Australia to upgrade to Meditech Expanse.
- CarePort parent company WellSky announces that former CMS administrator Seema Verma has joined its Board of Directors.
Blog Posts
- Enterprise Imaging supports connected care in Moscow (AdvancedMD)
- Top Telemedicine Problems to Avoid (Bluestream)
- Ambulatory providers: Achieving TCM success (CarePort)
- 5 Ways to Use Epic Flowsheet SmartForms to Capture Regulatory Data (CereCore)
- Navigating Today’s Rapidly Evolving Cyber Insurance Market (Clearwater)
- Where Are They Now? An Update On 2020’s CoverMyQuest Winners (CoverMyMeds)
- What Healthcare C-Suite Leaders Need to Know About Analytics (Dimensional Insight)
- Innovating with Health Plans: Working Together to Drive Outcomes (Dina)
- The Power of Search in Healthcare and Beyond (EClinicalWorks)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.
Regarding the observation on COVID vs. Spanish Flu, something very important is not expressed in the headlines that bears mention. The US population during the Spanish Flu was less than a third of our current size. For us to have just pulled even with the death toll of the Spanish Flu does not convey the true level of burden, which is so much better expressed when you consider these kinds of metrics on a per capita basis.
We need to keep that in perspective, not least because these were both respiratory viruses. They would have spread in very similar fashions. In fact, COVID is more contagious than the Spanish Flu was – possibly three times as contagious with Delta. The real story that this tells me is that the masking and distancing, to the degree that Americans actually did them, has paid off so far if we have < 1/3 the deaths per capita. We can't trivialize that if 1+ million additional people had died of COVID right now, and all the several times more that would be dealing with long COVID, that would be a large hit to our economy, our tax base, and so many other things that keep society humming.
I feel strongly the headlines should be focused on the per capita numbers, because the story I see is different from the headlines. It's that the advances we have in understanding masking, distance, and using our technological advancement to help people work remotely have all combined to make the human cost of this so much less than the Spanish Flu.
The other important story that tells is that the deaths we have experienced have been attributable to the people who haven't learned from the last 100 years, who can't be troubled to get vaccines, who can't be troubled to take preventive measures, and who failed to protect their children, students, and workforces. The real story is that we'd be in an even better position today, especially in relation to other countries, if there wasn't a dedicated movement of people here who took sides with COVID in this fight.
Everyone, please keep up with getting vaccinated, masking, and keeping distance. Encourage family and friends to do the same. Encourage them to encourage their families and friends to do the same. We actually have done so much better than we could have when you compare Spanish Flu to COVID. We can do far better, still, and come out ahead of our competitors. Uncle Sam wants YOU!
“COVID-19 has overtaken the 1918 Spanish flu as the deadliest disease event in US history, …”
This is historic. For all my life, the Spanish Flu was the benchmark. It was how people gained perspective on how bad a pandemic could be in modern times.
The Black Death was certainly worse, but that was a time when medicine was really primitive. It predated any systematic idea of vaccines, antibiotics, antivirals, the entire Germ Theory of Disease, all of that. Even basic anatomy was poorly understood.
The best physicians of the 14th century could be rather enlightened. Unfortunately, the average physician was hamstrung by primitive ideas, primitive technology, and an outsized reliance upon outdated ideas from many centuries previous.
These comments apply to European physicians of course. I believe that the Islamic physicians had better knowledge and practice, because this was during the Islamic golden age.