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October 28, 2021 News 9 Comments

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Northwell Health and Aegis Ventures form a joint venture that will invest at least $100 million in seed-stage AI-driven healthcare companies.

The companies say they expect the JV to become a multi-billion dollar program that will address healthcare challenges such as quality, equity, and cost.

Aegis committed to the $100 million investment, while Northwell will invest in individual solutions within the program.

Northwell says the JV-launched companies will be able to train their AI-based systems on its extensive and diverse database of patient clinical records, which will allow them to avoid bias.


Reader Comments

From Swing Lube: “Re: health IT executive conferences. Why do they always include golf outings?” Beats me. I always felt left out when attending small-group executive meetings where I was one of few people who don’t play golf. I suppose golf is the default group activity because it’s quiet for networking (unlike, say, a 5K or axe-throwing), it’s expensive and thus a sponsor-supported treat for participants, and those playing are held captive for many hours. Golf outings may incorporate some gender bias, however, since I’ve read that nearly 80% of people who played a round in the past year were male, although I would guess that health IT executive meetings are also male dominated.

From Mark Trade: “Re: product names. Please add the copyright symbol to ours that you mentioned.” This came from a marketing person, who incorrectly believes that any use of a name that has a trademark, copyright, or service mark always needs to be flagged with the corresponding symbol wherever that name is used. Nobody should use those symbols except the company itself, which does so to prevent a competitor from hijacking their name.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Bamboo Health. The Louisville, KY-based company — formerly known as Appriss Health plus Patient Ping – focuses on fostering care collaboration and providing information and actionable insights across the entire continuum of care. As one of the largest, most diverse care collaboration networks in the country, its technology solutions equip healthcare providers and payers with software, information, and insights to facilitate whole-person care across the physical and behavioral health spectrums. By serving 2,500 hospitals, 7,800 post-acute facilities, 25,000 pharmacies, 37 health plans, 45 state governments, and over one million acute and ambulatory providers through more than 500 clinical information systems electronically, the company impacts over 1 billion patient encounters annually in provider workflow. Health systems, payers, providers, pharmacies, governments, individuals, and other organizations rely on Bamboo Health to improve care and reduce cost. See the explainer video on YouTube. Thanks to Bamboo Health for supporting HIStalk.


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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Online pharmacy Truepill raises $142 million a Series D funding round, increasing its total investment to $256 million at a valuation of $1.6 billion. The company, which offers its white-labeled platform to health brands and pharma, is expanding into telehealth, diagnostics, and COVID-19 wellness.

Healthcare shift-filling app vendor ShiftMed raises $45 million in a venture funding round.


Sales

  • In England, West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust chooses Zivver for sharing data securely via email and file transfer as it moves from NHS Mail to Microsoft 365 Outlook for email.

People

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Office Practicum hires Mark Richards (Optimize.health) as chief revenue officer.

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Quil names Dwight Raum (Johns Hopkins Medicine) as chief digital officer.


Announcements and Implementations

University Medical Center of El Paso implements advanced clinical documentation improvement, audit, and analytics from EZDI, which was recently acquired by AGS Health.

Premier chooses Glytec as its sole supplier of glycemic management software for its members.

The VA expands its rollout of VA Health Chat to two VISNs that make the chat tool – provided by CirrusMD and now including video capability – available to 2.5 million veterans.

Greenway Health expands its care coordination services to offer remote patient monitoring to its ambulatory care clients in partnership with MD Revolution.

LexisNexis Healthcare’s identity management platform is listed on Epic App Orchard.

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Finland-based Navigil launches its wellness watch for seniors in the US on AT&T’s LTE-M network, offering alarm call routing, notification services, and wellness trend analytics. The company intentionally designed the product to look like a traditional analog watch, explaining in a blog post, “No one, especially my mom, wants to wear a device that screams ‘I’m old.’”

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A new KLAS report looks at Meditech implementation services. Tegria-owned Engage scores highest although all validated engagements involved under-100 bed hospitals, while Tegria-owned Navin Haffty, Huron, and MedSR (the merged MedMatica and Santa Rosa Staffing) scored high in broader settings. Meditech’s recently launched implementation services also score above average.


Privacy and Security

Security researchers find an unsecured database containing nearly 900 million patient records that belong to Deep6.ai, whose platform queries EHRs to match patients to clinical trials. UPDATE: Deep6.ai says no patient information was exposed – the database contained only dummy data from MIT’s Medical Information Mart of Intensive Care system that was being used as a proof of concept. 


Other

The many companies that are supposedly on Epic’s non-compete list are listed here. Epic employees can’t work for a competing company, an Epic customer, or an Epic sales prospect for one year after quitting unless their new job has no connection to software or related services.

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KHN describes how Poudre Valley Hospital (CO) instructed a woman in normal labor to come in through the ED door since it was the hospital’s only unlocked one, then billed her insurance $2,800 for Level 5 ED services that are usually assigned to resource-intensive or life-and-death cases. She had to pay $3,600 out of pocket for her one-night stay after insurance. Several other women reported the same billing surprise. The article cites a white paper by private equity-owned healthcare staffing company TeamHealth that describes how a hospital can increase profit by calling its OB triage area an OB ED, which allows it to “collect facility charges that are otherwise lost in the obstetrical triage setting.” This would be the point where the “blame the game, not the player” debate commences and the non-Americans gasp at the capitalism-driven healthcare system that we accept as normal, at least until we need it.

A jury awards a former marketing SVP of Novant Health $10 million in a reverse discrimination lawsuit in which David Duvall says he was fired without cause in 2018 so the health system could appoint two equally qualified women, one of whom is black, to support its diversity and inclusion program. Duvall says that five other white, male Novant executives were similarly fired, one of them being its CIO (he is presumably referring to Dave Garrett, who left Novant in 2018 after 10 years).

Facebook will change its corporate name to Meta with Facebook as a subsidiary, similar to Google’s creating parent company Alphabet. The company says it has greater ambitions than just being a social media company and will focus on the metaverse that combines virtual and augmented reality. 

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Cerner and Epic CEOs just chillin’ with CHIME21 selfies.


Sponsor Updates

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  • Dina employees participate in World Cleanup Day.
  • Clinical Architecture and Wolters Kluwer Health Language will exhibit at the AMIA annual symposium October 27-30 in San Diego.
  • LexisNexis Risk Solutions makes its Healthcare Identity Management platform available in the Epic App Orchard.
  • Olive announces creation of five partnership programs – Develop, Deploy, Distribute, Alliance, and The Library – that will allow solutions built on Olive to be immediately delivered to health systems, payers, and patients.
  • Henry Schein Medical Systems will integrate the Health Language natural language processing solution of Wolters Kluwer, Health into its MicroMD EHR/PM.
  • Change Healthcare, sponsor of the Health Evolution Forum, signs the forum’s Health Equity Pledge.
  • WEDI’s Collective Voice of Health IT Podcast features Fortified Health Security CEO Dan Dodson.
  • Kyruus will host the 8th Annual Thought Leadership on Access Symposium virtually on November 9-10.
  • France-based medical intelligence platform vendor Synapse Medicine integrates First Databank’s drug database and interoperability module with its medication reconciliation technology.
  • Kyruus will host its 8th annual Thought Leadership on Access Symposium November 9-10 to focus on expanding flexibility around patient access and care.
  • Meditech shares updated guidance on COVID-19 vaccine booster shots

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Currently there are "9 comments" on this Article:

  1. The list of non-compete companies for Epic has a few, but definitely not all, Epic customers. The list isn’t all-inclusive.

  2. I don’t even begin to comprehend how some of those names made it on the Epic non-compete list if that really is the list. It was always governed by who would self-enforce to keep in Epic’s good graces anyway, so if I had a job from one of these employers I’d have no trouble telling them to sue me if they liked.

    • Upcoding will always be a problem in the current payment model. Whatever is in the contract between the healthcare facility and the insurer will always trump short lived media attention. Whether it be state-owned hospitals sicking collections agents on their patients, massive hospital groups gobbling up competitors and driving prices up, or ruthlessly upcoding to extract as much revenue from the patient encounter as possible, the system financially rewards all of these behaviors. The hospitals give some discounts to patients exposed in the media, then quietly go about continuing mostly the same practices.

      • Upcoding sticks out to me because it is fraud-lite. Just like not publicly posting your prices when the government requires it. It is plainly unethical yet practiced by most healthcare providers. It makes clear that healthcare orgs aren’t ethical enough to handle pricing and that the ability to price their services needs to be taken away and given to a more publicly responsible entity.

  3. I’d be smiling if I were Judy in a photo with Feinberg too…. He poses no threat to her and Epic WHATSOEVER!

    She has to be genuinely thrilled at his hiring – a totally authentic smile in that pic.

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