Weekender 1/21/22

Weekly News Recap

• Quest Diagnostics will acquire Pack Health.
• Big funding is announced for Lyra Health, Gale Healthcare Solutions, Big Health, Wheel, and Verana Health.
• Babylon acquires DayToDay Health.
• ONC and The Sequoia Project publish TEFCA.
• CliniSys acquires Horizon, combines with Sunquest to operate under the CliniSys name.
• VA pushes its second Cerner go-live back due to staff shortages.
• MPulse Mobile acquires HealthCrowd.
• CHIME launches the degree-granting CHIME University.

Best Reader Comments

At its core, Blockchain is a database. It is the slowest database ever invented due to the need to write multiple entries for every read or write transaction. Therefore it has no place in a fast paced healthcare environment. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to spend 10 minutes with a busy physician. (Was A Community Hospital CIO)

For almost 20 years, I’ve been promoting a key factor he acknowledges. Rephrased it is “involve the patient in the decision loop through both price transparency and quality scores” so they can re-engage in their total healthcare. Our third-party payer system has kept patients, if not in the dark, at least in the shadows, and an informed patient will make better decisions. (David Wellons)

For all those reasons, the data that is used to train AI is, challenged at best, and crap at worst. You can get through the note and see what you need to see as a human today, but training up AI from that variation is nowhere near being ready. The last 10 years are rife with AI failures, but we keep thinking that without changing the underlying data and data failure causalities, we will get a different result. (J Brody Brodock)

Watercooler Talk Tidbits

Readers funded the Donors Choose teacher grant request of Ms. K, who asked for Kids First Robot Engineering Kits for her STEM class in S. Ozone Park, NY. She reports, “These cute robot engineering kits are a big hit with the little ones! My kindergarten and first-grade students jumped right in with these robot kits. They seemed to know what to do immediately. There is a book that comes with the kit to show what to do, but they were so excited to build their robots themselves, without any help. Thank you so much for making this possible! I am so happy to have new and exciting materials for my students to use and to make coding and engineering so much fun!”

Oregon has 10% of its available hospital beds occupied by patients who are ready to be discharged, but have nowhere to go because long-term care facilities are too short-staffed to accept them.

Minnesota signs a pandemic staffing deal that will pay a private company $275 and more per hour for temporary nurses, $345 per day for living expenses, and 1.5 times the hourly rate for overtime and double for holidays, courtesy of federal taxpayers who are footing the bill. Providing the help is Galveston-based construction company SLS, which has earned billions from post-hurricane cleanup, construction of President Trump’s border wall, and the opening of several expensive COVID-19 field hospitals that saw virtually no patients while their doctors sat around making $900 per hour.

Penn radiologist Saurabh Jha, MD, self-proclaimed as the “first Indian Radiologist-General of the USA,” has good Twitter thoughts and a fun quote from this piece:

It’s tempting to conclude that we’ve lost all f**ing perspective. But lack of perspective isn’t the whole story. The reality is that we’re thoroughly bored – a side effect of affluence. This is why we have revolutions in our heads and fight wars on our devices. We storm the Bastille without moving from our couches. Instead of calling each other Nazis, we could just as well say “whatever,” press the mute button, and roll our eyes.

In Case You Missed It

• News 1/21/22
• EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 1/20/22
• HIStalk Interviews Russ Thomas, CEO, Availity
• News 1/19/22
• Readers Write: Why 2022 Will Be the Year of Wide Adoption of Blockchain Technology in Healthcare
• Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 1/17/22
• Monday Morning Update 1/17/22

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