News 3/11/22

Top News

Symplr acquires GreenLight Medical, which offers healthcare supply management software.

The deal is Symplr’s 11th acquisition since November 2018, when it was acquired by private equity firm Clearlake Capital.

The company’s previous acquisitions include Conduent’s Midas solutions (a $340 million deal in January 2022), Halo Health, SpinFusion, HealthcareSource, Phynd, TractManager, ComplyTrack, The Patient Safety Co., IntelliSoft Group, and API Healthcare.

Clearlake provided Symplr with $1.6 billion of equity capital in January 2022 to purse its organic growth and acquisitions.

Reader Comments

From Hyaline Tissue: “Re: ViVE. It was entirely vendors – I don’t think any of the CHIME CIOs were on the exhibit floor, although I saw some floating around the events. It was focused on startups and people working on big problems, like interoperability, and trying to move the needle. Food, drinks, and events were incredible and Miami is a much cooler and fun location than Orlando. ViVE is clearly the replacement for Health 2.0 and its venture capital money and there’s a LOT of that floating in right now. HLTH obviously knows how to make an event that VC money wants to hang around. They were intentional about doing well those things that HIMSS has done poorly and I think they will get bigger very quickly.” Thanks for the report. I would enjoy hearing feedback from others and I’ll keep you anonymous. I will also ask for similar feedback after next week for folks who attended both ViVE and HIMSS22 – either as exhibitors or regular attendees — and thus can offer the inevitable comparison. The big marketing win for ViVE, other than HLTH and CHIME themselves, goes to Clearsense, which sponsored the apparently amazing performance of Wyclef Jean. It’s going to be tough for attendees of either or both conferences to return to staring at screens looking out windows at wintry monochrome. Maybe you can recreate the conference vibe at home by wearing a Hawaiian shirt with shorts, putting a box of sand underfoot, and standing in front of your coffeemaker for 20 minutes before pouring.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The impending presence of a bomb cyclone in the Northeast makes me think of previous HIMSS conferences, where the frazzled Meditech folks would show up a day or two late waiting for Boston to dig out. Orlando weather calls for mid-70s with clouds and occasional rain Monday through Thursday.

Here’s what my sponsors told me they will be doing at HIMSS22.

I see on LinkedIn that Hyland will once again feature “corporate magician” David Harris, aka Magic Boy, aptly described as “a skilled marketer in the body of an entertainer.” He’s my second-favorite HIMSS entertainer after the amazing magician, psychic, and comic Bob Garner, who I see from his Instagram has lost 69 pounds and a visual 30 years by moving to a vegan diet, embracing meditation, and exercising like a madman.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor TigerConnect. The Santa Monica, CA-based company offers the healthcare industry’s most widely adopted and integrated communication platform, bringing together all aspects of care collaboration, physician and resident scheduling, patient engagement, and alarm management into a single, scalable, and mobile solution. TigerConnect modernizes the way doctors, nurses, care teams, staff, and patients communicate – inside a facility, across multiple locations, and throughout the healthcare ecosystem. A cornerstone for digital transformation, the TigerConnect platform integrates with EHRs, nurse call, scheduling, and other systems to unify communication, streamline workflows, reduce costs, and improve patient outcomes. HIPAA-compliant and HITRUST-certified, TigerConnect delivers 99.99% verifiable uptime and is trusted by more than 7,000 healthcare organizations across the US and Canada. Thanks to TigerConnect for supporting HIStalk.

I found this new TigerConnect overview on YouTube.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Bravado Health of West Palm Beach, FL. Bravado Health’s award-winning designers created the dynamic patient engagement platform, Ayva, to simplify the care journey from preparation to recovery across the entire spectrum of surgeries, procedures, and disease management. Ayva packages care plans, educational videos, messaging, remote patient monitoring, and more into an accessible web-based experience that’s proven to engage patients, improve outcomes, and increase patient satisfaction. Ayva shares engagement data with the patient’s care team, helping clinicians make more well-informed decisions. Say hello to them next week at HIMSS22 in Booth 5349. Thanks to Bravado Health for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

April 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “19 Massive Best Practices We’ve Learned from 4 Million Telehealth Visits.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, founder, president, and CEO, Mend. Virtual visits have graduated from a quickly implemented technical novelty to a key healthcare strategy. The challenge now is to define how telehealth can work seamlessly with in-person visits. This webinar will address patient satisfaction, reducing no-show rates to single digits, and using technology to make telehealth easy to use and accessible for all patients. The presenter will share best practices that have been gleaned from millions of telehealth visits and how they have been incorporated into a leading telemedicine and AI-powered patient engagement platform.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Oracle shares were down 6% in early after-hours trading Thursday as the company announced Q3 results that beat revenue expectations but fells short on earnings. Some analysts noted before the announcement that the company’s pending acquisition of Cerner has caused investor consternation and urged the company to explain its healthcare vision.

Healthcare Triangle announces Q4 results: revenue up 2%, EPS –$0.12 versus $0.07. The company went public in October 2021 at an IPO price of $4.00. Share price jumped 13% to $1.03 following the earnings announcement, valuing the company at $36 million.

UPMC makes an unspecified investment in Kyruus and will collaborate in developing the company’s ProviderMatch patient access platform. The company has raised $148 million through a Series D funding round.

Vivante Health, which offers employers a digestive health management program, raises $16 million in a Series A funding round.

Sales

• Axia Women’s Health chooses NextGate’s EMPI. 
• UNC Health will implement Philips Oncology Pathways software that gives oncologists evidence-based treatment suggestions and matches patients to open clinical trials.
• Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare will implement Health Catalyst’s Data Operating System and DOS Marts.

People

LexisNexis Risk Solutions hires Kelly Thompson, JD (Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative) to lead its newly formed Government Health Team.

Wireless ultrasound vendor Clarius Mobile Health names Ohad Arazi, JD (Zebra Medical Vision) as president. He will take over as CEO later this year.

Announcements and Implementations

Google Health previews Conditions, an enhancement to Care Studio that extracts condition information from EHR data and organizes them by acuity with access to related labs, meds, reports, and notes. 

Health Data Movers announces the ACE Team of advisory consulting executives who will offer on-demand services such as interim C-suite, providers, analytics, data integration, and sales and marketing. 

Quil launches Assure, a connected home platform for seniors who are aging in place that monitors routines based on the individual’s privacy choices.

TigerConnect adds resident scheduling to its physician scheduling solution, which helps chief residents efficiently create schedules that comply with rotation time requirements.

Medhost launches a clinician-driven anesthesia management solution that provides medication documentation, vital signs graphing, anesthesia charting, and orders.

Orbic launches SmartWrist, a smart watch for Verizon / Android users that measures pulse oxygen, pulse, body temperature; tracks fitness goals and sleep; and offers SOS and fall detection with auto-dial of emergency contacts or services. It uses geofencing to enable alerts for when the wearer leaves a designated safe zone.

Healthwise announces Advise, which allows Epic customers to provide tailored, evidence-based health education to patients in 19 languages.

Sphere adds digital wallet support for Google Pay and Apple Pay for patient payments in its TrustCommerce platform that is integrated with Epic MyChart.

Anthem will change its name to Elevance Health, noting that its business extends beyond offering Blue Cross health plans to digital health and other services that involve 118 million consumers and 90,000 employees. The company was known as WellPoint before changing its name to Anthem in 2014. ANTM shares are up 39% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s flat performance, valuing the company at $113 billion. President and CEO Gail Boudreaux, MBA, who previously served as CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was an all-American in women’s basketball and shot-put at Dartmouth. 

NTT Data launches a Hospital at Home solution to help US health systems develop home-based care models. It includes a command center, acute rapid response, and support for advanced clinical tools such as virtual reality, remote imaging, and robotics.

Get Well enhances its digital engagement solution for payers to support digital member navigation, member experience and care gap closure, digital care management, and vulnerable population engagement. Sutter Health Aetna reported a 25% increase in member retention and a 10% increase in PCP visits from implementing its member navigation solution.

CareMesh launches a public developer sandbox to allow hospitals, physician groups, payers, and life insurance companies to find and contact providers using its national provider directory. The directory contains 20 million FHIR R4 records from 400 sources that are accessed via configurable APIs.

LG and Amwell will co-develop device-based virtual care solutions, starting with solutions for use in hospitals, where LG is the leading provider of smart TVs for patient rooms.

A new KLAS report on healthcare AI finds that previous market share leader Jvion has lost many customers who report financial constraints and lack of outcomes, ClosedLoop.ai scores highly in customer satisfaction, while Health Catalyst has seen satisfaction jump as it offers more analytics-powered prescriptive guidance. Customers of Cerner and Epic report struggles to get their published models up and running, and while Epic customers complain about nickel-and-diming since prebuilt models are priced individually, they are increasingly licensing its Cognitive Computer Developer Platform that allows them to deploy their own models. Respondents provided some tips:

• Start with analytics before jumping into predictive or prescriptive models.
• Identify the problem you are trying to solve, then decide whether AI is the right tool.
• Set clear goals for use cases.
• Don’t obsess with perfecting incoming data. The machine learning should be applied to data in its current form.
• Model testing takes longer than you expect.
• Focus on defining the intervention more than perfecting the model.

Government and Politics

The EU will publish a governance framework for health data that will affect EHRs, medical software products, and wellness apps, according to a news site that reviewed a draft. The goals of the regulation are to increase efficiency, advance scientific research, and foster the development of new digital health services and products. A proposed European Digital Identity Framework would establish cross-border functionality; individuals could restrict or share their data; the allowed secondary use of patient data would be explicitly spelled out; and a European Digital and Health Data Board of experts would foster cooperation among authorities. The proposal would require EHRs to be certified for interoperability and security and a common infrastructure called MyHealth@EU would be used to exchange health data across borders.

The VA says last week’s unplanned, two-day Cerner downtime at its only live site in Spokane – in which admissions were halted because patient screens were showing the information of different patients – was caused by a Cerner programming error . A review has found only a few corrupted records so far, some of those at its Columbus location where Cerner is not yet live. The VA admits that it probably shouldn’t have been making programming changes so close to the system’s next go-live in Walla Walla, WA on March 26.

Sixteen Midwestern defendants who worked for a chain of pain clinics, including 12 doctors, receive prison sentences for a $250 million healthcare fraud scheme in which they refused to prescribe opioids unless patients – which included addicts and drug dealers — agreed to being given high-reimbursing back injections. Their pill mill doctors worked just a few hours each week in hoping to avoid DEA attention, but even then were among Michigan’s highest prescribers of oxycodone at 6.6 million doses. The doctors bought expensive real estate, luxury cars, indoor basketball courts and swimming pools, and gold bars.

Privacy and Security

A TV station notes that The Work Number holds the payroll records of more than half the country’s workforce, as the Equifax-owned company is the payroll outsourcer for two million employers. They will, for $55, verify someone’s employment and provide their pay history. Equifax also provides Social Security number validation, education verification, property ownership verification, and IRS tax records. Chinese military hackers breached Equifax in 2017, compromising 150 million credit reports.

Other

I don’t usually post job openings, but I saw on LinkedIn that Walgreens is looking for a manager of clinical informatics to work remotely, which I though might interest someone. Job responsibilities included working with its Healthcare Clinic providers to optimize system workflow and use, perform release testing, and lead EHR training. Three years of health informatics experience and two years of direct leadership are required, while a graduate informatics degree and clinician experience are preferred.

A hospital in India draws review-bombing after someone claiming to be a surgeon there posts a Twitter video of himself performing surgery, complete with close-ups of the patient’s face and medical records, during which he also argued with gaming fanboys that PlayStation is better than Xbox.

Sponsor Updates

• Mach7 Technologies receives new orders from existing customers Trinity Health and Penn State’s Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.
• KLAS recognizes PatientBond at ViVE for performance.
• Nuance expands AI-powered reporting features in its PowerScribe platform.
• NTT Data and Lirio announce a strategic alliance focused on enabling healthcare providers to deliver more personalized care.

Blog Posts

• How Partnerships can Transform Healthcare (Ft. Josh Sol & Nick Desai) (The HCI Group)
• How FHIR Solutions Do Double Duty for IT Teams and Clinicians (Healthwise)
• Extending an Analytics Program to Support the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) and Improve Outcomes (Impact Advisors)
• Inside the Cyber Insurance Application Process (Imprivata)
• Overcoming Revenue Cycle Management Staffing Challenges (RCx Rules)
• Healthy Databots: The Future of Healthcare Data Quality (InterSystems)
• Ontology’s importance in EHR workflows (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Do doctors really care about interoperability? … and other insights from Day 2 of ViVE2022 (Lyniate)
• Medhost at HIMSS22: Elevating the Digital Health Experience Through Innovation (Medhost)
• Physical Therapy Technology to Improve Your Practice in 2022 (MWTherapy)
• What is patient engagement for a VP of Patient Experience? A guide for CEOs (Nuance)
• Five healthcare interoperability myths debunked (Nordic)

Contacts

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