RE: Change HC/RansomHub, now that the data is for sale, what is the federal govt. or DOD doing to protect…
News 11/10/21
Top News
General Electric shares jump on the news that the company will spin off GE Healthcare, GE Aviation, and several other segments into public companies within the next two years.
Former GE Healthcare manager Peter Arduini (Integra LifeSciences) will become president and CEO of GE Healthcare in January. The business is expected to become independent in 2023, focusing on equipment, diagnostics, imaging, therapy planning, life care, and digital.
Readers may remember that Veritas Capital acquired GE Healthcare’s software (financial, ambulatory, and workforce management) business in 2018 for $1 billion, rebranding those assets to Virence Health several months later.
Veritas acquired Athenahealth around that same time for $5.7 billion with help from Evergreen Coast Capital, the private equity subsidiary of Elliott Management Corporation, which was the activist investor that targeted Athenahealth and forced out its co-founder and CEO Jonathan Bush earlier that year.
Virence Health wound up merging the former GE Healthcare’s Centricity business with Athenahealth. Veritas dropped the little-known Virence Health brand in favor of Athenahealth’s branding shortly thereafter.
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
Sirona Medical, a cloud-based radiology operating system software vendor, raises $40 million in a Series B funding round.
Ambulatory health IT vendor CareCloud reports record Q3 revenue of $38.3 million, a 21% increase over Q3 2020. The company attributes the numbers to organic growth and the June acquisitions of Santa Rosa Staffing and MedMatica Consulting – now known as MedSR. MTBC acquired CareCloud in January 2020 for $17 million in cash and $41 million in total consideration.
Sales
- Family Health Centers will transition to EClinicalWorks at its eight facilities in Louisville, KY.
- NorthShore University HealthSystem (IL) selects Carevive’s Patient Reported Outcomes Mobile Platform.
- Baptist Health South Florida will implement Rx Capture software from Loopback Analytics.
People
Protenus names Michelle Del Guercio (Sunquest Information Systems) chief marketing officer.
Doug Duskin (Equality Health) joins Avel ECare as CEO.
Announcements and Implementations
GenieMD announces GA of Continuum, a virtual care platform encompassing telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, and chronic care management capabilities; as well as consumer and medical device integration.
Rochelle Community Hospital (IL) will go live on Epic next May.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions develops a Patient Centric Token to more effectively match de-identified patient records used for clinical research and patient care.
Truveta launches its flagship clinical insights platform, giving researchers access to real-time, de-identified clinical data from care sites across 42 states. The Seattle-based startup was launched in February by numerous health systems to provide its hospital owners, drug companies, and researchers with anonymized patient data for approved research projects.
Privacy and Security
Philips alerts end users to two vulnerabilities within its Tasy EHR that could allow hackers to extract data and potentially launch denial-of-service attacks. Upgrading the EHR software, according to the company, will remove the vulnerabilities.
Health officials in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador say health IT systems, including its Meditech EHR, are slowly being brought back online after last week’s cyberattack.
Other
This is interesting: Bluestream Health co-founder and CEO Matthew Davidge sells Med School Tutors to Blueprint Test Prep for an undisclosed amount. Davidge and business partner Joe Covey purchased the company in 2019. It is one of six they’ve acquired since 2008, including patient instructions and teaching systems vendor Logicare and several in-hospital television channels.
Sponsor Updates
- Bamboo Health applauds its ACO partners for generating over $1 billion in the Medicare Shared Savings Program.
- Cerner shares a new client achievement, “Children’s Mercy Kansas City Project HOPE training helps streamline provider documentation efficiency.”
- Divurgent celebrates its membership with the KLAS Arch Collaborative with a newly released badge.
- EVisit will exhibit and present at the virtual HealthImpact Live Fall Forum November 10-12.
HIStalk Sponsors exhibiting at HFMA include Ability Network, AGS Health, Cerner, Change Healthcare, Experian Health, Health Catalyst, Intrado, InterSystems, Nuance, Olive, and Waystar.
Blog Posts
- Understanding Business Processes and Critical Capabilities: A Closer Look at Business Impact Analysis with US Anesthesia Partners (Clearwater)
- Open enrollment and beyond – how to keep revenue on track all year (Ability Network)
- How to Optimize Texting with Your Patients (AdvancedMD)
- #IDoR2021 (Agfa HealthCare)
- Talent and the IT Skill Gap: Opportunities to Change the Way We Hire (Optimum Healthcare IT)
- CPaaS brings healthcare continuity to the Cantabrian region (Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise)
- What payers and providers need to know about the No Surprises Act (Availity)
- Azara Patient Outreach – Messaging, Metrics, and Milestones (Azara Healthcare)
- Increase Productivity and Improve Outcomes with Adaptive Learning (Bluetree)
- IT Leadership: The Human Side of Disruption (CereCore)
- An Inspiring Leader of Healthcare: Chasm Talks with Angie Franks, CEO of About (About)
- Streamline Acute Transitions of Care: 3 Strategies for Success (Collective Medical)
- Navigating Changes Along the Patient Journey (ConnectiveRx)
- What Providers Want from Biopharma Field Reps Amid COVID-19 Pandemic (CoverMyMeds)
- Why Improving the Quality of Clinical Data is Imperative to Avoid Public Health Reporting Breakdowns (Diameter Health)
- What We can Learn from Healthcare Collaboration During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Dimensional Insight)
- Evolve At-Home Services to Maximize Value-Based Care (Dina)
- Innova Primary Care: The Upside to Downside Risk (EClinicalWorks)
- 3 data-driven denial management strategies for faster claims processing (Experian Health)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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Re: Truveta- they still will not answer questions on their contact page if they will allow individual patients to request to be removed from the to-be-de-identified data set. They have announced they plan to also combine information with omics data that is even more difficult to de-identify. Some call for us to say this is pointless, and if you want to benefit from the research, you need to recognize your data will be used and will contribute to others’ profits. It is difficult for me to understand why they cannot simply give individuals the right to be left out of their data set.
For those interested, read this: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10933-3
“ Using our model, we find that 99.98% of Americans would be correctly re-identified in any dataset using 15 demographic attributes. Our results suggest that even heavily sampled anonymized datasets are unlikely to satisfy the modern standards for anonymization set forth by GDPR and seriously challenge the technical and legal adequacy of the de-identification release-and-forget model.”
“The business is expected to become independent in 2023, focusing on equipment, diagnostics, imaging, therapy planning, life care, and digital.”
What does “focusing on digital” mean?
It’s like focusing on cyber.
It’s hard to know what to say about GE’s plans other than that you can definitely tell it was GE that wrote what they published on their site. That is absolutely certain, and they should receive generous credit for writing and posting something about themselves on their site. I’m still not clear I know what they’ve been doing the past several decades, and I’m not sure I’m any closer to reaching that state of nirvana after reading that piece.