News 11/12/21

Top News

LifeScience Technologies sues Mercy, which it claims disclosed trade secrets about LST’s M.Care virtual care platform to telehealth competitor Myia Health.

The lawsuit claims that LST customer Mercy shared its system log-in credentials to Myia Health’s developers, allowing the company to develop a “derivative product” that Mercy then implemented to replace LST.

LST also says that Mercy invested $5 million in Myia Health. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Current Health. The Boston-based company, which was acquired by Best Buy in November 2021, offers an enterprise care-at-home platform that enables healthcare organizations to deliver high-quality, patient-centric care at a lower cost. It integrates patient-reported data with data from biosensors – including its own continuous monitoring wearable device – to provide healthcare organizations with actionable, real-time insights into the patient’s condition. Leveraging clinical algorithms that can be tailored to the individual patient, it identifies when a patient needs clinical attention, allowing organizations to manage patient care remotely or to coordinate in-home care via the company’s integrated service partners. Its platform brings together telehealth capabilities, patient engagement tools, and cellular connectivity to provide a single solution to manage all care in the home. It has designed evidence-based care pathways that can be tailored to the needs of the individual patient, supporting a wide range of clinical conditions and acuity levels. To help its partners scale their care-at-home delivery, it also provides comprehensive logistics management, a Clinical Command Center, and integrations with in-home ancillary service providers, all serving as an extension of your team to help transform how healthcare is delivered at home. Thanks to Current Health for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Definitive Healthcare, which went public in mid-September and finished its first week of trading with shares up 81%, announces Q3 results: revenue up 43%, adjusted EBITDA flat. The company’s market value is just under $4 billion. Founder and CEO Jason Krantz described the company’s business in the earnings call: “I founded Definitive Healthcare to help companies analyze, navigate, and sell into the complex healthcare ecosystem. We bring clarity and in-depth knowledge of the entire market that we have a deep understanding of the interconnected relationships between physicians, hospitals, providers, insurance companies, government regulators, and the patients themselves.”

Remote patient monitoring startup HealthSnap raises $5 million.

Sales

• SoftWriters will integrate First Databank’s Meducation medication adherence solution with its FrameworkLTC pharmacy management platform.
• Flagler Health+ (FL) will implement Halo Health’s clinical collaboration technology.

People

Surescripts CEO Tom Skelton will leave his role at the end of 2022 in a planned transition.

Former National Coordinator Don Rucker, MD joins interoperability startup 1upHealth as chief strategy officer.

Virtual nurse assistant software vendor Care Angel names Nick Martin (DuPage Medical Group) CIO.

Brad Rennick (Modernizing Medicine) joins NThrive as chief client officer.

Wolters Kluwer Health promotes Gregory Samios to president and CEO of Clinical Effectiveness and Peter Bonis, MD to chief medical officer of Clinical Effectiveness.

Announcements and Implementations

PeriGen announces GA of Vigilance Mobile, giving end users remote access to its AI-based early warning system and clinical decision support tools.

Government and Politics

Representative Kim Schrier, MD (D-WA), a former pediatrician and Cerner end user, shares her concerns with VA Secretary Denis McDonough about EHR usability and its impact on patient care after she toured a clinic that is connected to the VA’s first live Cerner site of Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center (WA). She notes that employees have told her the system frequently crashes, forcing them to re-type lost notes; and that its self-scheduling and prescription management features are so buggy that patients have resorted to calling the clinic, resulting in overwhelmed phone lines. “If they have to scrap this version of Cerner,” she says, “it’s probably better to do that and use something that’s tried and true than to try to fix a system that is just broken from within.”

A VA OIG review of its implementation of Cerner’s patient scheduling system finds that while many schedulers prefer the more user-friendly Cerner system over that of the replaced Vista system, they didn’t receive adequate training on complex scheduling scenarios and weren’t given enough time for practice. The VA also went live without resolving significant lapses in functionality, such as Cerner’s inability to automatically mail appointment reminder letters and to switch a scheduled visit between telehealth and in-person. Scheduling supervisors also reported confusion over measuring wait times, a nationally critical problem that the Cerner scheduling system was supposed to help resolve. After going live, care was delayed as permissions issues limited the ability of schedulers to book certain types of appointments, data migration problems required some information to be manually deleted, and reminder calls had to be turned off because patients were being told to check in at the front desk for visits in which on-site care was not available.

Privacy & Security

Southern Ohio Medical Center reverts to downtime procedures and diverts ambulances as it deals with a cyberattack that occurred early Thursday morning.

Sponsor Updates

• DirectTrust recognizes Cerner Director Greg Meyer as an Interoperability Hero during the third quarter.
• Vocera Communications signs a reseller agreement with MDI Medical in Ireland.
• Vyne Medical releases a new podcast, “How Patient Experience is Leading Hospitals Toward Digital Transformation.”
• Olive adds ClosedLoop to its marketplace for healthcare solutions.
• Fortified Health Security hires Joe Anderson (Geodis) as solutions architect.
• Goliath Technologies rolls out enhancements to Goliath Performance Monitor.
• For World Diabetes Day, Meditech shares stories of access to care.

Blog Posts

• Halo Health acquisition highlights benefits for customers (Halo Health)
• Get Your Head in the Cloud: Managed Cloud Services Help Healthcare Organizations Attain Digital Transformation (Healthcare Triangle)
• The Healthcare Research Network: 5 Modernizing Features (Health Catalyst)
• Engaging Our Community with Event-Based Vaccine Information and Advocacy (Healthwise)
• Why You Should Plan Your EHR Post Go Live Support Before You Go Live (Impact Advisors)
• Talent & the IT Skills Gap – Opportunities to Change the Way we Hire (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Clinicians on the move: Is there more to the healthcare exodus than COVID-19? (Imprivata)
• Infor Cloverleaf continues to outperform the competition in the latest Black Book survey (Infor)
• The Right Tools for the Job: Here’s What Health IT Developers are Telling Us (InterSystems)
• Meds 101: Challenges for interoperability in healthcare (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• The Evolution of SDOH and Health Data Exchange (LexisNexis Health)
• Autonomous Care Journeys – Who Is Driving Your Care? (Lumeon)
• Best Practices for Reducing Supply and Inventory Waste in Your OR (Medhost)
• Anderson Hospital’s strategy to remain independent affords better community care (Meditech)
• What Could the SMART Act Mean for PT Practices? (MWTherapy)
• From Fragmented to Frictionless: The Next Stage of the Health Tech Revolution (NextGate)

Contacts

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