Monday Morning Update 2/14/22

Top News

Medical social network operator Doximity announces Q3 results: revenue up 67%, adjusted EPS $0.29 versus $0.07, beating Wall Street expectations for both. Shares jumped up sharply on the news, up 14% in the past 12 months versus the Dow’s 2% increase. The company’s valuation is at $16 billion, with co-founder and CEO Jeff Tangney holding 33% of shares. From the earnings call:

• Doximity is acquiring physician on-call scheduling app vendor Amion for up to $83 million and will integrate its offering with Doximity’s secure messaging, CV, referral, and telehealth tools.
• Chief Commercial Officer Joe Kleine will retire this fall, to be replaced with Paul Jorgensen.
• Continuing medical education credits issued are up 25% quarter over quarter as in-person education is being increasingly replaced with online programs.
• Job postings quadrupled year on year as physicians sought new opportunities.
• The company’s video telehealth platform earned Best in KLAS over Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and other services.
• Drug companies whose sales reps can’t visit doctors in person are moving to digital marketing programs and eliminating sales positions. The company says that the count of drug reps has doubled since the mid-1990s to 81,000, but it expects 10% of those reps to lose their jobs in the next couple of years.
• CEO Jeff Tangney says that Fortune 500 companies spend 70% of their marketing budget on digital channels, while healthcare is at 23%.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The fortunes that conference exhibitors spend on fancy booths, catering, glossy presentations, and tchotchkes generate a lower return than the free options – choosing and coaching your booth reps carefully and letting people know ahead of time what you’ll be doing in your expensive patch of carpet. My #1 recommendation is, as always, to confiscate the phones of those who are working the booth – humans seeking information are an irritating intrusion into their cyber-bliss.

New poll to your right or here: Does your business card or email signature list a certification or fellowship credential? I’ve stopped listing both since in my case, their value seems to accrue more to issuers who are looking for recurring revenue than for holders to prove their competence or ethics. Some are still hard to earn and maintain (CPA or PMP, for example) and I would use those if directly relevant to a current or desired job. I also don’t understand listing questionably rigorous, non-selective “executive education” on LinkedIn, especially in lieu of having earned an actual degree from an accredited school. Business card alphabet soup and sitting in front of “I love me” walls plastered with framed, yellowing certificates is a fascinating study in occupational vanity. I’m always intrigued that sales executives, CEOs, and startup founders are often light on formal education, having set a path while young in which formal education would have been a multi-year distraction from their destined accomplishments. I should run a poll asking respondents if they report to someone with less-impressive education credentials.

If your HIStalk sponsor company is spending money to participate in ViVE and HIMSS22, why not boost attention to your involvement with a free entry in my conference guides? Those links lead to forms where you tell me about what you’re doing, which I need to know in the next couple of weeks since said conferencing is imminent.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Biofourmis. The fast-growing, Boston-based global health technology company is focused on leveraging software and data science to deliver virtual care and develop novel digital therapies. Its robust care management platform, Care@Home, enables remote disease management across a range of medical conditions for acute, post-acute, and chronic care. The solution utilizes medical-grade wearables to continuously collect patient data, which is analyzed by Biovitals, Biofourmis’ highly sophisticated, clinically validated AI-powered predictive analytics engine. With support from Biofourmis’ in-house clinical care team, payers and providers can leverage the solution to predict clinical deterioration in advance of a critical event, which enables earlier interventions for better outcomes and cost savings. Likewise, the company discovers, develops, and delivers clinically validated digital therapeutics. These monotherapies or “pill plus” prescription therapeutics support payers and providers in improving patients’ lives while reducing healthcare utilization and associated costs. Thanks to Biofourmis 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

Vocera announces Q4 results: revenue up 16%, adjusted EPS $0.29 versus $0.28, beating analyst expectations for both. Stryker’s $3 billion acquisition of the company remains on track.

Sales

• Northwest Primary Care (OR) implements Deviceless Remote Patient Monitoring from CareSignal, a Lightbeam Health Solutions Company.

People

Salesforce promotes David Cousins, MS to SVP of healthcare and life sciences.

ReMedi Health Solutions hires Scott Collins (Futura Mobility) as chief revenue officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Virtual care and digital therapeutics company Biofourmis launches Biofourmis Care, a chronic condition management system and virtual care team for heart failure, hypertension, diabetes, lipid management, and atrial fibrillation. The service includes automated medication management for optimizing therapy.

HIMSS22 in-person attendees who plan to voluntarily provide proof of COVID vaccination have until March 11 to use the pre-show online process of Safe Expo, which will send confirmation that allows picking up a conference badge. Attendees who used Safe Expo for HIMSS21 can use last year’s verification based on their email address, which took me a grand total of perhaps 10 seconds today (good job on that, HIMSS). The alternative is to show vaccination proof or a negative result no older than from the previous day at the onsite verification desk, which is ideal for folks who want to kick off their HIMSS22 experience by waiting in line (or “on line” for you New Yorkers).

For those who were annoyed by the HIMSS21 virtual program ambassadors (Dr. Jayne was, emphatically) they will be back for HIMSS22, adding nearly zero value with their chirpy omnipresence.

Other

In Netherlands, the government’s National Coordination Center for Patient Spreading – which hoped to address COVID-19 admission surges by distributing patients across multiple hospitals – paid $1.4 million for a real-time hospital capacity tracking system that was developed by two of the organization’s advisors. The manually updated system proved to be unreliable, to the point that seriously ill patients were being taken to hospitals that showed available beds even though they were full. The government eventually bought the software company itself in a no-bid deal.

Sponsor Updates

• The local paper profiles Cooper University Health Care’s implementation of Nuance’s Dax ambient clinical intelligence solution.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Handling Hospital Notifications with Direct Messaging.”
• AGS Health will exhibit at the ACDIS Virtual Summit February 16-17.
• OptimizeRx CEO William Febbo will speak at the Bank of America Annual HCIT and Digital Health Conference February 23.
• Nordic releases a new podcast, “How interoperability and cloud transformations can support healthcare organizations.”
• Commitment to customer success drives growth at RCxRules in 2021.
• Surescripts congratulates DAW Systems, winner of the 2021 Surescripts White Coat Award for highest e-prescribing accuracy.
• SyTrue caps off a year of tremendous growth in its client base, number of employees, and transaction volume.
• Verato publishes a new report, “Achieving a 360 Degree View of the Patient: Why Accurate Patient Identity is Critical to Health System Success.”

Blog Posts

• Why value-based purchasing matters now to home health agencies (Ability Network)
• Where Will “Homeless Data” Live? (Nordic)
• 5 questions for identifying candidate processes for automation in healthcare (Olive)
• Healthcare Trends in 2022: Top 6 Needs to Consider for Medical Groups (PerfectServe)
• Accelerate the Healthcare Provider Onboarding Process (Symplr)
• Two Healthcare Supply Chain Technologies to Get Excited About (Premier)
• From surviving to thriving – how health plans can drive change and improve healthcare (Redox)
• 4 Prescribing Flags in the EHR – And How Real-Time Prescription Benefit Solves Them (RxRevu)
• Top health technology hazards (and how to address them) (Spok)
• NLP Solutions Can Drive Payer Efficiencies – But They Are Not All Equal (SyTrue)
• The 5 pros and cons of contact center BPO (Talkdesk)
• An Update from our CEO: Another Strong Year for RCxRules and Our Clients (RCx Rules)
• Healthcare Can’t Go Backward When the Pandemic Ends (Tegria)
• EMR or Claims? Here’s Why You Need Both. (TriNetX)
• Patient Engagement Best Practices for Life Science Companies (Twistle)
• Simplify Clinical Communication with Vocera Cloud-Based Solutions (Vocera)
• Today the world, tomorrow the moon (Volpara Health)
• You’ve Landed a New Patient: Now What? (WebPT)
• A 2022 Guide to Choosing a Patient Engagement Platform (Well Health)

Contacts

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