Weekender 3/11/22

Weekly News Recap

• Symplr acquires GreenLight Medical.
• Oracle shares drop after earnings miss, questions about its healthcare ambitions tied to acquiring Cerner for $28 billion.
• EU will publish a governance framework for health data that will support cross-border health information exchange.
• Epic announces Garden Plot, an Epic version for independent medical groups.
• Former Livongo executives launch Homeward Health.
• Consensus Cloud Solutions acquires Summit Healthcare.
• Microsoft closes its $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance.

Best Reader Comments

I don’t think [telehealth] payment parity is a good idea. Payment parity is just going to drive more money to big regional health systems. They can manage physician recruitment to address supply, they can afford to buy the technology to do the visits and they can afford to buy the marketing to find those existing high spending consumers. Pairing telehealth visits with marketing materials makes a lot of sense, which is why you see health systems talk about telehealth in the same sentence as digital front door aka the health systems website. If you make telehealth pay less than in person visits, you’ll keep it cheaper and drive the organizations doing telehealth national. (IANAL)

My guess is large independents want an EHR that is a simple, cost efficient billing machine. They don’t want to take on a lot of overhead and their providers want a UI that they can use very quickly … I’ve watched some long-time users chart in the green screen Meditech. They’re so fast. They don’t lift their hands off the keyboard and they have the exact timing of when Meditech loads the next screen. I think of them every time I’m working on some feature that I know is going to get ingrained in business users’ hands. If I can get it to no clicks, then they’ll be able to work as fast as I can load the next screen, so it better be fast. (IANAL)

Frankly I’d rather Epic do more to help independents remain independent (but with fluid chart exchange through Care Everywhere). AFAIK Consolidation in the healthcare industry has not produced measurable benefits for health outcomes or patient costs, but it has certainly helped with profits for the large systems. (Elizabeth H. H. Holmes)

Watercooler Talk Tidbits

HIMSS22 attendees – mask-wearing is now optional per revised CDC guidance. I would add that stiff business dress is also optional, so please bring some of that ViVE beach spirit to Orlando by dressing down a little and wearing comfortable shoes in testing your long-dormant conference muscles cautiously.

ViVE moves to Nashville’s downtown Music City Center next spring. Here’s my advice for HIMSS – if HIMSS22 attendance is as low as many predict, add the smaller, cooler, and more authentic cities back into the rotation instead of just tourist-overrun Orlando and Las Vegas (with the more interesting Chicago snuck in occasionally). A conference half the size of HIMSS at its peak has choices.

Lost in the nether regions that lie between ViVE and HIMSS is SXSW, which runs today through next Sunday in Austin. The health and medtech track is today through Tuesday. SXSW once seemed to be the up-and coming digital health conference, but I suspect it will be outflanked by ViVE, if for no other reason than health system executives don’t spend their own money to attend conferences and expensing ViVE sounds more justifiable than SXSW.

Meanwhile, HIMSS acquired the Health 2.0 conference in 2017 and said it would continue operating under that name, but I’m thinking HIMSS sold that name (or else Indian trademark law is opportunistically loose) because a Health 2.0 Conference website suggests no HIMSS involvement, an all-India based staff, and a home office in an Alabama outlet mall that is shared by similar conferences. They’re showing a US conference April 11-13 in Las Vegas, listing no speakers and a handful of exhibitors I’ve never heard of, claiming they expect over 1,000 attendees at $2,000 a head. The last HIMSS-owned Health 2.0 conference seems to have been in late 2020 and hasn’t been heard from since.

I wrote this week about the investor-backed Chief private network for C-suite women. I heard the next day from someone who had just received a response to her five-question application to join. She was first told that the company has a backlog of thousands of membership requests and wouldn’t be able to schedule the mandatory interview for many months. She almost immediately got another email saying that her qualifications were sound and the interview would be fast-tracked to the next few days. Right after that, the company sent her an email advising her that her job title wasn’t high enough to join (she’s an executive director with no “C” or “VP” in her title) and they wouldn’t waste time interviewing her. I think she expected more polish from a membership group whose dues start at $6,000 per year.

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Two teenaged Harvard students, one of whom developed a COVID-19 tracking site two years ago, create an “Airbnb lite” type site that matches refugees from Ukraine with people in neighboring countries who are offering places to stay. They say government-run sites are too hard to use and feature little more than a text box entry form and a display of those entries.

In Case You Missed It

• News 3/11/22
• EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 3/10/22
• HIStalk’s Guide to HIMSS22
• Readers Write: Reimagining Healthcare in 2022 with Personal Emergency Response Services
• HIStalk Interviews Sanjula Jain, PhD, SVP, Trilliant Health
• News 3/9/22
• Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 3/7/22
• HIStalk Interviews Anjum Ahmed, MBBS, Chief Medical Officer, Agfa HealthCare
• Monday Morning Update 3/7/22

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