News 2/2/22

Top News

Post-acute care software vendor PointClickCare will acquire Audacious Inquiry, a Baltimore-based care notification and coordination technology company. Terms were not disclosed.

Canada-based PointClickCare acquired care coordination platform operator Collective Medical in December 2020 for $650 million. Its earlier acquisitions include Co-Pilot Analytics and QuickMar.

A year-ago minority investment reportedly valued PointClickCare at $4 billion.

Webinars

February 9 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “2022 – Industry Predictions and Medicomp Roadmap.” Sponsor: Medicomp Systems. Presenters: David Lareau, CEO, Medicomp Systems; Jay Anders, MD, chief medical officer, Medicomp Systems; Dan Gainer, CTO, Medicomp Systems. The presenters will provide an update on the health IT industry and a review of the company’s milestones and insights that it gained over the past two years. Topics will include Cures Act implications, interoperability, AI, ambient listening, telehealth-first primary care, chronic care management, and new Quippe functionality and roadmap.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Advanced care planning and virtual palliative care company Vynca raises $30 million. Vynca, which counts Intermountain, Ochsner, and Sutter health systems among its customers, acquired palliative care provider ResolutionCare last summer.

Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital will acquire Citrix for $16.5 billion. They will take the company private and merge it with Tibco Software, an enterprise data management company that includes healthcare providers and payers among its customers.

Seattle-based remote patient monitoring startup Measure Labs raises $4.7 million. CEO Jamien McCullum, CSO Matt Whitehill and CTO Eric Chen are entrepreneurs-in-residence at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which the company lists as an investor.

Cancer care navigation and experience platform vendor Jasper Health raises $25 million in a Series A funding round.

Digital diabetes management company Glooko acquires Xbird, a Berlin-based company that offers diabetes-focused predictive analytics and care management.

Healthcare consumer experiences platform vendor League raises a $95 million funding round. I can’t decipher exactly what it sells, but it has implemented an impressive array of buzzwords. The three co-founders, none of whom have healthcare experience, came from Kobo, a company that sold a e-reader that attempted to compete with Amazon’s Kindle.

Sales

• The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center will use WellSky’s care coordination software and home health service to care for heart failure patients after discharge.
• Cone Health (NC) will implement RadAI’s Continuity care coordination technology to ensure timely, appropriate care is delivered based on radiology reports.
• Walmart will offer its health plan enrollees personalized provider recommendations from Health at Scale, which covers 25 specialties and 34 procedures and imaging with “next best action.”

People

Nathalie McCaughley, MBA, MS (Cigna) joins Agfa HealthCare as president.

RapidAI names Karim Karti (IRhythm Technologies) as CEO.

Andrew Resnick, MD (Mass General Brigham) joins The Chartis Group as chief medical and quality officer.

Quantum Health names Veronica Knuth (CoverMyMeds) as chief people officer.

Pager names Simon Mathews, MD (Vivante Health) chief medical officer, Bulent Ugurlu (Optum) VP of engineering, and Max Anfilofyev (SOC Telemed) VP of product; and promotes Joe Martinez, RN to VP of virtual care and Alison Thomas (not pictured) to VP of partner solutions.

Jessica Beegle, JD — who has worked in healthcare business development for GE, Amazon Web Services, Google, and Walgreens Health – joins for-profit hospital operator LifePoint Health as SVP/chief innovation officer. 

Allscripts promotes Salman Naqvi, MBBS, MPH to VP of professional services.

ResMed hires Urvashi Tyagi, MS, MBA (ADP) as CTO, where she will lead the company’s digital health technology team and investments. She replaces Bobby Ghoshal, MBA, who was previously promoted to president of the company’s SaaS business unit.

Announcements and Implementations

Hackensack Meridian Health (NJ) implements data integration, quality, and management capabilities from Informatica.

Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula says its use of the care management platform of Force Therapeutics helped reduce 90-day admissions following total joint arthroplasty procedures by 26%.

Azara Healthcare launches Care Connect, a care coordination application that draws data from its analytics platform and integrates it with health plan data to support outreach teams.

AliveCor launches the FDA-cleared KardiaMobile Card, a $149 credit card-sized personal ECG device that pairs with smartphones using Bluetooth to detect six common types of arrhythmias. Purchase requires signing up for a $99, automatically renewing annual membership.

Government and Politics

A GAO report finds that the VA did not establish performance measures and goals for migrating data from VistA to Cerner Millennium and HealteIntent before initial go-live in October 2020. The VA concurred with GAO’s recommendation that it establish and use data performance measures and use a stakeholder register make sure reporting needs are addressed. The VA notes that any VistA data can be extracted, packaged, and sent to Cerner automatically even in the absence of a database model, 80% of critical reports are now using Cerner-generated data, and its data migration team is monitoring VistA for changes and patches that may require regenerating extraction code to keep data flowing.

ONC will convene the virtual education sessions of its annual meeting Wednesday and Thursday. Topics include information blocking, TEFCA/QHIN, public health IT coordination, Lantern FHIR tool update, and USCDI expansion.

Other

A Stat special report recaps the 40-year history of what is now IBM Watson Health’s MarketScan, soon to be owned by private equity firm Francisco Partners. The business that was originally known as Medstat holds the employer-provided, de-identified records of 270 million Americans, but Medstat founder Ernie Luder expresses fears that instead of creating disruptive healthcare change in the insurance industry as he had hoped in the pre-Internet era, consumers are losing control of information about them as companies profit from it without their express permission. An attorney and bioethics professor says that the federal government has allowed big businesses “to run amok without almost any regulation whatsoever,” to the point that it’s easier for academic researchers to buy their data from private companies. 

Sponsor Updates

• Cerner distributes 120 gently used laptops and 49 phones to eight charitable partners.
• Agfa HealthCare becomes certified under the Service Capability & Performance Standards.
• Azara Healthcare publishes a new report, “The Future of Population Health 2022.”
• Netsmart becomes the first post-acute technology vendor with its MyUnity EHR to achieve ONC-Health IT 2015 Edition Health IT Certification.
• CHIME releases speaker highlights for ViVE, which will take place March 6-9 in Miami Beach.
• Clinical Architecture releases a new episode of its Informonster Podcast featuring Lyniate Chief Strategy Officer Drew Ivan.
• OBIX Perinatal Data System, developed by Clinical Computer Systems, launches The Perinatal Heartbeat Newsletter.
• Bamboo Health becomes a preferred vendor of the Association for Community Affiliated Plans.

Blog Posts

• 2022 CPT Code Updates: Part Three (AGS Health)
• Three Predictions for Healthcare IT in 2022 (Ascom)
• Healthcare CRM Software: What Health Systems Really Need (Actium Health)
• A Summary of Our 2021 Annual Impact Report (Bamboo Health)
• The Power of Diligence on Data Privacy (CereCore)
• Improving the Patient Experience for Better Outcomes (Change Healthcare)
• Optimum Healthcare IT Completes 200th Training & Go-Live Project (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• IT and Digital Healthcare Trends to Expect in 2022 (ChartLogic)
• Four Big Implications for Patients and the Prescription Journey in 2022 (ConnectiveRx)
• Highlights from 2022 Drug Formulary Updates (CoverMyMeds)
• Proof in the Numbers: How Divurgent Supported MultiCare to Meaningfully Move the Needle on Their Epic Adoption (Divurgent)
• The Right Tools During Challenging Times (EClinicalWorks)
• How Novant Health automated healthcare collections (Experian Health)

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