News 9/9/22

Top News

Walmart and UnitedHealth Group sign a 10-year deal to jointly offer preventive care for seniors and virtual healthcare for all age groups.

The deal gives Walmart access to new Medicare Advantage members while offering UnitedHealth a retail audience of potential insurance enrollees.

The venture will kick off in January at 15 Walmart Health locations in Georgia and Florida, with a focus on value-based care.

UHG’s Optum will provide analytics and decision support tools to Walmart Health’s clinicians, the companies will launch a co-branded Medicare Advantage plan in Georgia, and Walmart’s virtual care services will be added as an in-network offering of UnitedHealthcare’s Choice Plus PPO plan.

The companies plan to expand the collaboration across more insurers to include access to food, addressing social determinants of health, offering prescriptions and OTC medications, and providing dental and vision services.

Reader Comments

From EpicHiccup: “Re: Epic’s latest quarterly upgrade. Customers are being told to delay due to response time issues.” Verified. The company is telling customers to hold off until some fixes can be incorporated since the upgrade doesn’t contain any urgent regulatory or functionality updates.

From MN Nice: “Re: CMS No Surprises act. Enjoyed seeing my local provider find a good spot for displaying ‘your rights.’” At least the obscuring plant doesn’t seem fake or dead, which is always a discouraging sight in the office of someone you are trusting to help you stay alive and healthy.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Being peevish, I humbly request that work experience not be stated in the form of, “Tom has over 21 years of sales experience.” Just call it 21 with the realization that the world doesn’t care about Tom’s fractional years of employment. Otherwise, every working human would waste space – except on their hiring anniversary — prefacing their years with “over.”

Webinars

September 22 (Thursday) 1 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2023 Updates and Regulatory Readiness.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, marketing director, IMO; Julie Glasgow, MD, marketing manager, IMO. The yearly update to ICD-10-CM is almost here. Prepare your organization for a smooth transition, and avoid any negative impacts to your bottom line, with an in-depth look at the upcoming changes. Listen to IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders discuss the 2023 ICD-10-CM coding changes. This webinar will review additions, deletions, and other revisions to the ICD-10-CM code set and how to make sure you get properly reimbursed.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Vera Whole Health and Castlight Health rename their combined value-based care and navigation company Apree Health and hire former Cerner President Donald Trigg as CEO. Vera acquired Castlight for $370 million in February 2022.

Mental health app and services vendor Headspace Health acquires Shine, which offers a meditation and self-care app.

Investment firm Carlyle forms Atmas Health, which will acquire medical technology and life sciences companies as buy-and-build, carve-out and take-private transactions.

Streamline Health Solutions reports Q1 results: revenue up 109%, EPS –$0.07 versus $0.00. STRM shares are down 6% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 23% loss, valuing the company at $81 million.

Premier-owned Contigo Health pays $178 million in cash to acquire contracts with 900,000 providers and cost containment technology from TRPN, from which it will create a new out-of-network health plan administration product for self-funded employer health plans.

Sales

• Michigan Medicine expands its use of Loyal’s digital experience technology by adding chatbot functionality to answer consumer questions about locations, providers, bills, and COVID support.
• Patient education video company Mytonomy chooses Redox to integrate its video-based patient engagement solution with EHRs.

People

Therapy and rehab EHR/PM vendor Raintree hires Nick Hedges, MBA (MomentFeed) as CEO, Darian Hong, MBA (Act) as CFO, and Rob Rust (Wondr Health) as CTO.

Health Catalyst promotes Kevin Freeman to chief growth officer, Tarah Bryan, MA to chief marketing officer, and Dave Ross to CTO. President Patrick Nelli will transition to advisor.

Cue Health hires David Tsay, MD, PhD (Apple) as chief medical officer.

Announcements and Implementations

CloudWave launches OpSus Cloud Services with seven healthcare clients, bringing its total customer count to 250 in completing the company’s best-ever quarter.

Cipher Skin, which offers a sensor-powered musculoskeletal rehabilitation remote monitoring platform, rolls out biometric extremity sleeves, a chest motion sensor, bill capture for RTM services, and EHR data sharing with Kno2.

Augmedix releases Prep, a service that organizes chart details to allow physicians to quickly prepare for an encounter.

Government and Politics

An HHS OIG report finds that telehealth use by Medicare beneficiaries jumped 88-fold early in the pandemic, which also resulted in flagging 1,714 providers for submitting questionable bills that totaled $128 million. An interesting finding is that more than half of these high-risk providers practice in a medical group that has a least one other high-risk provider, suggesting that certain practices are encouraging questionable billing. OIG also notes that many providers billed questionably but under the threshold of this report, including 18,000 of them who billed the same service to both Medicare and Medicare Advantage and 5,700 who added a facility fee to a telehealth encounter bill.

Other

A new Compliance Today article not only has a fantastic title that references “When A Stranger Calls,” but brings attention to the non-EHR data that providers should consider in preparing for the next round of information blocking requirements that goes into effect on October 6. Examples of what an organization probably needs to be able to provide:

• Radiology images to outside providers.
• The ability to bring in records of outside providers to be used for diagnosis and treatment decisions.
• Data submitted to cancer and tumor registries.
• Pharmacy, case management, and billing data that is stored outside the EHR.
• Information in legacy EHRs and billing systems that wasn’t brought into the current one.

Insider asks several VCs which health tech startups are the most promising. Those that are health IT focused and have no financial connection to the recommender:

• Commure (data exchange tools).
• Flexpa (allows patients to collect and share their health information).
• Infinitus (voice-powered provider-insurer insurance verification).
• Lasso (healthcare marketing).
• Ribbon Health (automatically collects data about providers, insurers, and care quality).
• Truepill (telehealth, at-home lab testing, and mail-order prescription delivery).
• Turquoise Health (consumer healthcare and insurance price comparison).

Sponsor Updates

• Quippe Clinical Lens from Medicomp Systems is added to the Cerner App Gallery.
• First Databank names Kim Hart customer success consultant, Chris Buckley inside sales manager, and Kyle Doneth talent acquisition manager.
• Clearwater will sponsor the AEHiS Healthcare Security Leaders Forum September 26-28 in Lake Buena Vista, FL.
• HCTec publishes a new case study, “HCTec’s Legacy EHR Support Enables Prisma Health’s Epic Transition.”
• CHIME releases a new Leader to Leader Podcast, “Rapid Change, Remote Success, and RPA with Andy Smith,” founder and managing partner of Impact Advisors.

Blog Posts

• How Education Helps with Suicide Prevention (Healthwise)
• Bridging the Digital Divide in Healthcare – No Person Left Behind (InterSystems)
• Clinical interface terminology: Healthcare’s Rosetta Stone (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Diagnosing Rural Health with Beth O’Connor, NRHA President (Part 1) (Medhost)
• Healthcare is not aviation (Nordic)
• 4 ways Berkshire Health System is optimizing Expanse Ambulatory (Meditech)
• Respirator Fit Test and Flu Season for Employee Health: How to Manage it Together (Net Health)
• How to Solve America’s Adolescent Mental Health Crisis (NeuroFlow)
• AI in Radiology, part 3: How can AI’s ‘super-vision’ reduce cognitive load in radiology reporting? (Nuance)

Contacts

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