News 11/3/21

Top News

Medical practice software vendor Kareo merges with PatientPop, which offers practice growth technology. The combined companies will operate under the name Tebra.

Reader Comments

From Pipette: “Re: Jonathan Bush. He scorns the HIMSS conference ‘boat show’ in an article, but I seem to recall that Athenahealth docked its own figurative craft out there on the show floor with all those other vendors.” JB has always expressed amusing scorn for the show that his then-company supported as a sponsor and exhibitor. His latest piece from his new seat at Zus Health compares the HIMSS conference to HLTH, observing that while HIMSS feels outdated, mainstream companies are required to attend because 95% of doctor visits are still powered by code written by HIMSS members (he misspells Neal Patterson’s name as “Neil,” but so do a lot of people who probably confuse it with Neil Pappalardo). He says HLTH is like a prom of on-the-rise attendees that is more focused on care than technology, with few geeks in attendance and a lot of premature pomp from companies that will probably fail and “provide critical compost for the winners’ crops.” Here’s his introductory paragraph:

​I think I’ve been to HIMSS roughly a thousand times. It was almost comical to walk into that giant convention center and see the booths two and three stories tall, like giant ships at a boats how. Esteemed patrons would climb up gilded, spiraling stairwells for bottled water and espresso shots, while down on the floor, consultants and competitor employees were shooed away by stiff-smiled booth attendants. These booths, massive and imposing, increasingly looked like something a defense contractor might make, until they literally were made by defense contractors. It was a world where technology was starkly separate from care, where vendors would hawk their wares, distanced from the reality of the very institutions they were selling to. Sure, there were some doctors at HIMSS — the “CMIOs” and whatnot — but they were akin to Afghan translators embedded with our troops — good people, feeling a little bit out of place and a little bit worried that they may be viewed negatively by their people.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Question: does it bug you when someone writes “y’all” in an email or social media update? I’ve always liked hearing it said by actual Southerners — kind of like “holler, “howdy,” or “reckon” – but not as much in writing. Blame the English language for not offering a separate plural form of “you”  — other than the outdated “ye” as a plural or “thou” as the singular with “you” as its plural — and thus spawning the workarounds “yinz,” “youse,” and the grating server salutation “you guys.”

Webinars

November 10 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Too Important to Fail: How to Bring Better AI to Healthcare.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO; Marc d. Paradis, VP of data strategy, Northwell Health. It’s relatively easy to obtain healthcare data and build an AI demo, but getting AI to perform reliably and with meaningful impact is much harder. However, strategies exist for delivering AI products to commercial markets. This fireside chat will review the status of AI in healthcare; discuss the vital importance of data quality, methodological rigor, and product focus; and explore what this means to the startup and investor world.

November 11 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Increasing OR Profitability: It May Be Easier than you Think.” Sponsor: Copient Health. Presenters: Michael Burke, co-founder and CEO, Copient Health; David Berger, MD, MHCM, CEO, University Hospital of Brooklyn at State University of New York Downstate Health Sciences University. The OR is a hospital’s biggest source of revenue and its costliest resource, yet it often sits idle because of unfilled block time even as providers with cases ready to book lack access. AI-powered emerging technologies can help fill unused OR time and provide decision support to structure workflows and optimize block allocation. This webinar explores the biggest challenges to profitability faced in the OR and the fastest, most impactful changes a hospital can make to address them.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Digital social services referral company Aunt Bertha rebrands to Findhelp.

Sales

• Christus Santa Rosa Hospital – New Braunfels (TX) selects Care Continuity’s care logistics software to facilitate patient transitions from its ED to primary care physicians and specialists.
• Pipeline Health System selects Premier’s supply chain technology and services.

People

WebPT hires Ashley Glover, MBA (RealPage) as CEO. She replaces the retiring Nancy Ham, who will move to board chair.

Hinge Health names Lalith Vadlamannati, PhD (Amazon) as CTO.

HIPAAtrek promotes Amy Coulter to CEO. She co-founded Ability Network, which was sold to Inovalon in 2018 for $1.2 billion.

Southwestern Health Resources (TX) names Mac Marlow, MBA (Lehigh Valley Health Network) CIO and Shashi Vangala, MS (Baylor Scott & White Health) chief data and value creation officer.

Medication management technology vendor Arine hires Todd Christiansen, RPh, MBA (Leidos Health) as chief growth officer, Thomas Cooke (Leidos) (not pictured) as VP of business development, and Amy Mosher-Garvey, MSSW, MBA (Leidos) as VP of client success.

Avia names Anjani Shah, MBA (McKinsey & Co.) SVP of transformation and Dhiraj Patkar, MS (HRGi Holdings) SVP of product for Avia Connect.

Agathos, which sends hospital physicians action-level insights on their practice patterns, hires John Pollard (Nordic) as head of marketing,

Announcements and Implementations

Soma Medical Center has deployed EHR and health information search engine technologies from EClinicalWorks across its 25 facilities in Florida.

A new KLAS report reviews risk adjustment solutions.

Privacy and Security

In Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador struggles to recover from a weekend ransomware attack on its health IT systems that has forced its facilities to revert to downtime procedures and cancel appointments.

Other

Seattle Children’s Hospital electronically replaces allergy reaction descriptions in Epic that contain the the formerly common term “red man syndrome” – which it says is racist language — with “vancomycin flushing syndrome.” The hospital also implemented autocorrect functionality to prevent use of the term. The phenomenon in which IV vancomycin causes a red rash was first documented in 1959 as “Red Man’s Syndrome,” which was the subject of a 1985 proposal to instead call it “Red-neck Syndrome” to recognize that it occurs equally in men and women.

Sponsor Updates

• The Health Innovation Matters Podcast features AdvancedMD Chief Marketing Officer Jim Elliott.
• A newly published peer-reviewed study concludes that Bamboo Health’s NarxCare solution is effective as an “initial universal prescription opioid-risk screener.”
• Philips Capsule Medical Device Information Platform has exceeded the milestone of integrating with more than 1,000 unique medical device models.
• Cerner publishes a white paper, “Unlocking the power of data with the Cerner Learning Health Network.”
• Dina will exhibit at the FirstLight Home Care conference November 4-5 in Salt Lake City.
• Engage, a Tegria company, maintains its position as one of the top firms in a new KLAS Research Performance Insights report, “Meditech Implementations Services 2021: Which Firms are Driving Successful Implementations?”
• Emerge publishes a case study, “Emerge Improved Revenue and Quality for Multi-Specialty Group Using Natural Language Processing.”

Blog Posts

• COVID-19 vaccine requirements: 4 facts SNFs need to know (Ability Network)
• Join Us at RSNA 2021 (Agfa HealthCare)
• Three Key Takeaways from HLTH 2021: Driving Change through Care Coordination to Transform Whole Person Care (Bamboo Health)
• Virtual Telemedicine: Innovative Care Delivery Models (Bluestream)
• The Information Advantage: How Esse Health Reduced High-Risk ED Visits and Drove $3.6M in Savings (CareSignal)
• MEDITECH Customers Named to CHIME’s Most Wired 2021 (Meditech)
• Power in the Portals: How to Get Patients at the Center of Care (CereCore)
• Wrap up on CBI’s Coupon and Copay Conference: TL;DR Takeaways (ConnectiveRx)
• The Power of Teamwork, Training, and Trust (Diameter Health)
• 2021 National Conference: Opening a New Chapter in Healthcare IT (EClinicalWorks)
• Single-Path Coding: Doing Away with Disparate Coding Practices (EZDI)

Contacts

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