News 7/29/22

Top News

Teladoc Health reports Q2 results: revenue up 18%, EPS –$19.22 versus –$0.86, missing Wall Street expectations for both.

The loss was driven by a Q2 impairment charge of $3 billion, which followed a $6.3 billion charge in Q1.

Share price dropped 18% Thursday after the announcement, valuing the company at $5.7 billion. Teladoc’s market capitalization was over $40 billion in early 2021. It paid $18.5 billion to acquire Livongo in the fall of 2020.

From the earnings call:

• The company is optimistic about its chronic care business that came from its acquisition of Livongo, but its pipeline is slower than expected due to competition and employer financial uncertainty.
• Its BetterHelp online therapy business grew revenue 40% year over year, which was still on the low end of company expectations as smaller private competitors have priced their services unsustainably low to earn market share.
• The $3 billion impairment charge was driven by an increased discount rate and the decreased market multiples for other digital health companies.
• The company will look at its cost structure to maintain near-term profitability and will market bundles of services to prospects.
• Teladoc is entering into more value-based arrangements, where payment is driven by clinical outcomes or cost savings.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The June 2020 expiration date of my 2016-vintage, seldom-used Asus Chromebook meant it could no longer receive Chrome OS or Chrome browser updates, so I decided to shell out $99 for a comparable Lenovo one from Best Buy. My only requirement was the same 11.6 inch screen, which I like because it’s barely bigger than my standard IPad in a package that weighs just 2.4 pounds. It feels elegant, the keyboard is nice, and when I logged into Chrome OS , everything was right where it was on its predecessor, although that means that the intoxicating new-computer smell was offset by the lack of satisfaction I would have earned from successful setup tinkering. It seems crazy that an entirely usable computer, as theoretically underpowered as it might be, costs less than $100.

Webinars

August 10 (Wednesday) 12:30 ET. “Navigating healthcare’s data quality challenge: An actionable discussion.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Alastair Allen, CTO, Better; Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO. Achieving a consolidated patient record is challenging in an environment of hospital M&A, where EHR rip-and-replace projects are expensive and HIEs and FHIR connectivity haven’t significantly accelerated progress. The underlying problem is that systems don’t speak the same language due to a lack of comprehensive, persistent clinical terminology and data standards adoption. UK-based Better offers a unique, FHIR-based approach to integrating disparate EHR data. The presenters will explore how to improve clinical data quality and how interoperable information can be used to support patient safety, reimbursement, and population health management.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Payment integrity platform vendor ClaimLogiq acquires SyTrue, which offers natural language processing technology for medical claims and coding. ClaimLogiq says NLP will give clinicians and coders the ability to make rapid payment integrity decisions.

NextGen Healthcare reports Q1 results: revenue up 5%, adjusted EPS $0.16 versus $0.25, beating investor expectations for both. NXGN shares are up 15% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 18% loss, valuing the company at $1.2 billion.

BD acquires MedKeeper, which offers cloud-based hospital pharmacy applications for IV verification and medication delivery tracking.

Sales

• Availity is named as the single-source technology partner for California’s provider directory utility.
• Vizient will offer its members digital patient engagement and behavior change programs from PatientBond.

People

Malissa Bennett (Optum) joins Curation Health as chief commercial officer.

Tegria promotes Brian Bircher to RVP of sales.

Austin Awes (Infor) joins Commure as VP of sales – platform.

Optimum Healthcare IT hires Chris Mader (TotalTek) as chief revenue officer.

Announcements and Implementations

AmerisourceBergen launches DTx Connect, which allows patients to access physician-prescribed digital therapeutics and diagnostics via EHR-integrated ordering and patient fulfillment monitoring.

Behavioral health integration vendor NeuroFlow launches a referral network of behavioral health providers, tele-therapy companies, and tele-psychiatry organizations to expand access to care. The company’s technology performs digital, population-wide behavioral health screening, then provides AI-powered “best next step” clinical decision support for care teams. I interviewed co-founder and CEO Chris Molaro in March 2022, marveling at his pre-entrepreneur background as an assistant clerk to the US Supreme Court, graduating from West Point and then earning a Wharton MBA, and serving five years as as US Army platoon leader with deployment to Iraq.

Government and Politics

Rep. Mike Bost (R-IL) warns that the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee may consider “pulling the plug” on the VA’s Oracle Cerner implementation if its larger sites don’t go live successfully early next year as the VA has promised. Bost also told a committee that the VA’s Cerner project is “a bad investment at any price” and that the project’s cost could be as high as $63 billion over 25 years “if everything goes wrong, and I see a lot of things going wrong.”

Sen. Mitt Romney (M-UT) proposes creating the Center for Public Health Data as an independent data subagency of HHS. It would create a single system of community-acquired infectious disease health data, including aggregating de-identified hospital and laboratory that is already being collected for real-time access. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD supports the idea, saying that CDC’s analysis is too slow to assist local officials who are making decisions and it holds the data from outside review until it reaches its own conclusions.

Sponsor Updates

• Ellkay earns NCQA Data Aggregator Validation designation, which allows health plans to gather supplemental data for quality measures and to prove its validity. 
• The specialty medication solution of Surescripts is being used by 24% more prescribers year-over-year who generated 8.2 million prescriptions between January and May, saving patients an average of $535 per prescription.
• RCM solutions vendor Brundage Group will offer its clients integration from Redox to connect to hospital EHRs.
• InterSystems opens an office in Auckland, New Zealand, to better accommodate new TrakCare customers at Auckland City Hospital and Starship Children’s Hospital.
• Juniper Networks will exhibit at Black Hat 2022 August 10-11 in Las Vegas.
• Myndshft celebrates reaching the milestone of 1 million patients served by its prior authorization platform.

Blog Posts

• A Different Point of View: Treating EHR Avoidance Syndrome (Medicomp Systems)
• Understanding the Changing Consumer Experience in Healthcare (Healthwise)
• How Manual Patient Engagement Can Contribute to Staff Burnout (Intrado)
• Allies in opioid stewardship: Fort HealthCare implements high risk alerts to combat epidemic (Oracle Cerner)
• Building Providers’ Digital Presence: Here, There, and Everywhere (Kyruus)
• Look-Alike, Sound-Alike Medications Get an AI-Assist to Improve Patient Safety (MedAware)
• A Risk-Free Approach to Risk Adjustment: A New Managed Service from RCxRules and AAPC (RCx Rules)
• 3 Ways Medhost Supports 2022 National Patient Safety Goals Compliance (Medhost)
• How Meditech supports collaboration and innovation among clinicians (Meditech)
• Cost to Capital: Turn Your Rehab Therapy Department into an SNF Revenue Center (Net Health)
• Meet the patient where they are (At the barber shop!) (Nordic)

Contacts

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