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Monday Morning Update 12/13/21

December 12, 2021 News 2 Comments

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CVS Health says in its yearly investor meeting that the company will add primary care centers to several hundred of its locations and open more HealthHubs.

The primary care centers will employ doctors, nurses, and pharmacists who will offer both in-person and telehealth services.

CVS says it will expand its nurse practitioner-staffed MinuteClinic model by acquiring physician practices and clinics.

“We are closer to the consumer than anyone else,” the CEO said.

CVS owns the country’s biggest pharmacy benefit manager, Caremark, and Aetna, the country’s third-largest health insurer.


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

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Over 40% of poll respondents either changed employers in 2021 or plan to do so in 2022.

New poll to your right or here, piggybacking on last week’s poll: Which factor would most influence your decision to take a new job? Most or all of them are important to a given person, but few folks would change jobs unless their #1 factor was satisfied.


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Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor MedAware. The Avon, CT-based company’s medication safety monitoring platform lives within existing technology systems, EHRs, and devices to identify dangerous medication-related risks throughout the entire patient journey. Built using longitudinal and real-time patient data, advanced machine learning algorithms identify medication errors, opioid dependency risk, evolving adverse drug events, and more. Due to the high clinical relevancy of its medication alerts, providers have been shown to change their prescribing behavior significantly more often than with traditional systems alone. Founded in 2012, MedAware has offices in the United States and Israel. Thanks to MedAware for supporting HIStalk.


Webinars

December 14 (Tuesday) 1 ET.  “Using Cloud to Boost AI and Enterprise Imaging.” Sponsor: CloudWave. Presenters: Larry Sitka, MS, VP/CSIO of enterprise applications, Canon Medical Informatics; Jacob Wheeler, MBA, senior product manager, CloudWave. Enterprise imaging has remained a holdout of data center complexity despite the benefits the cloud offers. The presenters will discuss innovative ways to reduce complexity and lead with disruptive technology using AI, enterprise imaging, and the cloud.

December 15 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Improve Efficiency, Reduce Burnout: Leveraging Smart Clinical Communications.” Sponsor: Spok. Presenters: Matt Mesnik, MD, chief medical officer, Spok; Kiley Black, MSN, APRN, director of clinical innovation, Spok. The presenters will identify the technologies that most often contribute to clinician burnout, then explain how improving common clinical workflows can help care teams collaborate better and focus on what they do best—taking care of patients. They will describe how a clinical communication and collaboration platform can automate clinical consults and code calls to alleviate burnout.

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health plan member and provider analytics vendor Reveleer raises $65 million in a venture funding round. 

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Patient prescription support and access platform vendor ConnectiveRx acquires Rx Savings Assistant from Medicom Digital, which finds prescriptions savings offers and embeds them into the EHR, including Epic.

Payments vendor Bottomline Technologies hires an investment bank to review strategic options, including a potential sale of some or all of the company. Its healthcare offerings include user surveillance for privacy visibility, signature capture, electronic forms, and print automation.


Sales

Lehigh Valley Health Network implements Sonifi Health’s in-room technology for service recovery, entertainment, and patient education.


Announcements and Implementations

TriNetX adds Diversity Lens to its real-world research platform to improve clinical trials access for underrepresented patient populations.

Petersburg Medical Center goes live with Cerner, with the Cares Act for COVID-19 relief helping cover the $1.3 million cost of CommunityWorks. The hospital vowed to replace its EHR in March 2021 following discovery that an employee had viewed patient records inappropriately.

Baxter International studies the use of MedAware’s AI-powered medication safety monitoring platform for smart infusion pump programming, concluding that the system can help build and maintain smart infusion drug libraries that can issue real-time warning of possible infusion errors to improve patient safety and reduce clinician alert fatigue. Such warnings are traditionally driven by hospital-developed rules that cover drug dose and rate, unusual concentrations, and uncommon patient weights. 

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A new KLAS report looks at how enterprise EHR vendors meet patient access requirements (address verification, cost estimates, coverage discovery, eligibility verification, medical necessity, prior authorizations, propensity to pay, registration QA, and scheduling). Epic customers reported the highest satisfaction, those of Cerner expressed dissatisfaction with use of integrated third-party partner tools, and Meditech’s customers are very satisfied with what they call a workhorse product.


Government and Politics

AHA and AMA sue the federal government over the method that will be used by arbitrators to decide how much insurers will pay for disputed out-of-network bills under the No Surprises Act.


Other

Analysis finds that Ireland’s national health service was unprepared for a May ransomware attack that crippled its services after an employee clicked a malicious Excel email attachment. The HSE was warned about suspicious activity by two of its hospitals and its antivirus software vendor, but did not take action. The report observed that HSE does not have an official in charge of cybersecurity, relies on a team of 15 inexperienced IT employees (two of whom are students), backs up irregularly to offline tape, and hadn’t set up antivirus software correctly on most of its 70,000 devices. The analysis concluded that HSE was lucky that the hackers didn’t target medical devices, didn’t destroy data, didn’t go after HSE’s cloud-based systems, and provided a ransomware decryption key six days after the attack without requiring a ransom to be paid.

A New York Times article says that telehealth has become a widely used lifeline and enables clinicians to observe patients in their normal surroundings, but it has limits to overcome: (a) patients may still need hands-on care or lab work and some prefer in-person visits for that reason; (b) older Americans are less likely to have and/or actively use computers or mobile devices; (c) Medicare beneficiaries who are black, live in rural areas, are less educated, and who live alone use telehealth less often; and (d) telehealth platforms may need to be designed for simpler use and the mandatory use of a provider’s patient portal may limit telehealth uptake.


Sponsor Updates

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  • Vocera staff volunteer with Second Harvest of Silicon Valley.
  • Austin Health in Melbourne will be the first health service in the Asia Pacific region to implement Cerner’s FHIR service.
  • OptimizeRx earns a silver Digital Health Award for its COVID-19 consumer health communications campaign and a merit award for its TelaRep clinical decision support tool.
  • The Digital Workplace Group honors Nordic Consulting Senior Director Dawn Hancock with its Digital Workplace Leader of the Year Award.
  • Premier releases a new episode of its InsideOut Podcast, “The hidden challenge of the pandemic. Managing surging demand and record-setting staffing shortages.”
  • Redox releases a new podcast episode, “Olive’s Journey to AI through Robotic Process Automation.”
  • Spirion publishes a case study featuring AmerisourceBergen, “Fulfilling healthcare privacy mandates and data protection laws.”
  • Business Intelligence Group honors Talkdesk CEO Tiago Paiva with its 2021 Big Awards for Business Entrepreneurship Award.

Blog Posts


Contacts

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Currently there are "2 comments" on this Article:

  1. What’s wondering me is CVS (owning Aetna) still operating illegally taking patients data for some countries like UAE to hosting outside boarders

  2. The results of the past couple polls are highly concerning. A clear majority of respondents saw turnover as having at least some impact on their business. A large component of those respondents felt that it would have a lot of impact on their business. You publish today that over 40% of respondents have changed jobs, or plan to in the next year. I imagine I’m not the only member of the audience who does not need to take a fiber supplement today after reading that.

    I feel compelled to ask: Is everything okay? I’ve never seen 40% turnover at a company I worked for, but know that it would have devastated the companies I have worked for. This is IT, not entry-level manufacturing. It takes a while to train people in knowledge work, and you lose a lot more than you think when knowledge employees walk out the door.

    If this is the mood for much of the industry, what are others still in the industry saying about how it’s affecting their operations?

    Mr. H – You’ve interviewed many a CIO over the years. It would be very interesting to know if there are CIOs who would be willing to discuss this topic. Or vendor execs. How it’s affecting them. How they’re rising to the challenge. Or even talking with retired CIOs that can speak to what they’re hearing, as I understand executives might not want to talk right now about challenges to their operations.







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