News 11/9/22

Top News

Primary care company VillageMD will acquire provider Summit Health for $9 billion.

Walgreens owns a majority stake in VillageMD, having invested over $5.2 billion in the company to co-locate its clinics with Walgreens retail pharmacies. It said earlier this year that 200 of the co-branded practices would open in 2022.

VillageMD will operate nearly 700 primary, specialty, and urgent care facilities in 26 markets once the deal is done.

Summit Health was formed in 2019 by the merger of multispecialty medical group Summit Medical Group and CityMD, which operated urgent care centers in the New York City metro area.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Latest LinkedIn peeve — congratulating someone who announces their new job with the ungrammatical “You got this!” that seems to question competence in the manner of “I like you no matter what anyone says.” I can identify, however, since even though I crank out millions of words per year, I still get writer’s block when Mrs. H slides a greeting card my way and expects me to awkwardly dash off heartfelt thoughts, at least until I pester her to just dictate what I should say.

Webinars

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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

ChristianaCare (DE) launches a Business Health Solutions unit to offer employers direct virtual primary and behavioral health services, destination surgery programs, and COVID-19 vaccination and symptom-monitoring capabilities.

Legacy data archiving company MediQuant acquires Knowledge Based Systems, which offers data access and retrieval solutions for several industries.

NantHealth announces Q3 results: revenue up 16%, adjusted EPS –$0.12 versus –$0.10. NH shares are down 81% over the past 12 months and have shed 98% of their value since their first-day close in June 2016, valuing Patrick Soon-Shiong’s company at $39 million.

Sales

• Thirty-year Meditech customer HCA Healthcare will upgrade its hospitals to Meditech Expanse as its go-forward EHR.
• MedStar Health in Washington, DC will implement and train Zephyr AI’s predictive analytics Insights software using its T2D de-identified data sets.
• PainChek, an Australian pain assessment and monitoring app, will use TrakCare HIS and Iris for Health EHR integration software from InterSystems.

People

Scott Van Houten (Philips) joins Lyniate as VP of sales.

Matt D’Errico, MBA (Joslin Diabetes Center) joins Lawrence General Hospital as CIO.

Extrico Health hires Kevin Dawson, MS (Howard University Hospital) as CIO.

Hiteks Solutions names Judy Cassetty, RN (Iodine Software) as chief clinical officer.

Direct Recruiters promotes Jordan Freireich and Jaimie Bailey to partner.

Aetion hires Dorothee Bartels, PhD (UCB) as chief digital officer, Jade Cusick (Cerner Enviza) as chief commercial officer, and Jeremy Brody, MS (Cerner Enviza) as chief strategy officer.

Polly Israni, MBA (Google) joins CoverMyMeds as chief marketing officer.

Paul Roscoe (Trinda Health) joins CLEW as CEO.

Definitive Healthcare hires Jon Maack, MBA (Athenahealth) as president.

HCTec promotes Mike Linville to president.

Kathy Ruggiero (Commure) joins Lumeon as VP of marketing.

Lee Rivas, MBA will become CEO of R1 RCM on January 1, 2023, replacing Joe Flanagan. John Sparby will replace Rivas as president. Rivas is a West Point graduate and former US Army captain.

Chris Baker (Experian Health) joins Doceree as VP of business development for health systems.

Announcements and Implementations

Censinet, the American Hospital Association, and KLAS Research launch a healthcare cybersecurity benchmarking study that will allow health systems to compare cybersecurity investments, resources, performance, and maturity versus peers.

In Alberta, Canada, Foothills Medical Centre and its associated clinics go live on Epic as part of a province-wide Connect Care rollout set to conclude in 2024.

Healthcare AI and voice vendor Care Angel will partner with senior living company Upside to offer insurers a social determinants of health risk assessment and housing intervention solution.

CCS, which offers clinical solutions and home-delivered medical supplies for people with chronic conditions, adds a gestational diabetes management program that includes remote blood glucose monitoring and clinical coaching.

Epic announces that the country’s six largest health plans, along with 250 health systems, are participating in its Payer Platform.

A new KLAS report on PACS finds that 30% of organizations could replace their vendor due to vendor acquisitions and replacement of legacy systems. Sectra continues to lead the market despite a customer-observed slippage in its high support quality, while Fujifilm and Merative are showing signs of overall improvement in bucking the industry trend. Intelerad customers note worsening support as the vendor makes acquisitions, while Change Healthcare’s are unsure of the product’s future following the company’s acquisition by UnitedHealth Group. GE Healthcare has the most vulnerable customer base because of disengaged relationships.

Government and Politics

Clinical and IT staff at Fox Army Health Center (AL) are working through several issues that are associated with the facility’s September rollout of MHS Genesis, including intermittent access to the cloud-based messaging system and eventual online appointment booking and a backlog of medication requests that have put prescription fulfillment at 72-plus hours.

Attendees of ViVE 2023, March 26-29 in Nashville, can save 35% by registering before Friday at midnight. CHIME and HLTH are expecting the conference to draw 7,500 attendees and 450 exhibitors.

In Canada, the Saskatchewan Health Authority takes its Administrative Information Management System offline after numerous complaints from users related to scheduling and leave requests. AIMS went live last week to replace 82 payroll, human resources, scheduling, and finance systems. Deloitte, Kronos, and Oracle have contributed to the decade-long, $138 million project.

A federal judge denies the three motions filed by former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes in which she requested a new trial, ruling that she was offering no new evidence for her fraud conviction and that a new trial was not likely to lead to her acquittal. She is scheduled for sentencing on November 18.

Other

Ninety-eight percent of hospital management leaders say they have ramped up efforts to employ more outsourcing vendors, according to a Black Book survey of 775 provider organizations. Less than 5% of respondents reported extreme dissatisfaction with current third-party companies.

An AMA survey finds that more physicians are using telehealth and most think it provides patient care advantages, but they have four requirements:

• The technology must work.
• They have to be paid properly.
• Liability insurance coverage and assurances of data privacy and security must be provided.
• The process must work within existing practice workflows.

Sponsor Updates

• Bamboo Health will exhibit at the National Association of Medicaid Directors conference November 14-17 in Washington, DC.
• Oracle Cerner publishes a new client achievement, “Henry Community Health delivers a personalized patient experience with HealtheCRM.”
• ChartSpan names Askia Sultan sales development representative.
• Nordic posts a video titled “The Download: Optimizing Performance to Address Labor Shortages.”
• CHIME awards 18 providers with its Digital Health Most Wired Survey level 10 certification.
• Ellkay will exhibit at ModMed’s Momentum 2022 conference November 18-20 in Orlando.
• Sphere company Health IPass joins Azalea Health’s API Marketplace.

Blog Posts

• The Case for Data Minimalism (Curation Health)
• Healthcare’s Historic Kiosk Failure & How Smartphones Prevailed (Access)
• 3 tips to manage the front office staffing shortage (AdvancedMD)
• Healthcare in Crisis: Resource Constraints Add Mounting Pressure (AGS Health)
• How to measure care management’s impact (Arcadia)
• Inaccurate Provider Directories Create Barriers to Care (Availity)
• Think Pink – Using DRVS Tools to Improve Breast Cancer Screening Rates (Azara Healthcare)
• How to minimize risk in the charge capture process of telehealth services (Baker Tilly)
• Tired: Help desk. Wired: How desk! (Nordic)
• Achieving Epic Gold Star Levels: The Journey from an Analyst’s Perspective (CereCore)
• Data Literacy: A Transformational Outcome of Data Governance (Clearsense)
• Tech-Enabling Evidence Generation: Four Types of Insights Gleaned from Unstructured Narratives (Premier)
• From the Ground Up: The Most Useful Tool for Building a HIPAA Compliance Program (Clearwater)
• Throwing Banner Ads on Websites is so Basic; Instead, Get Your Client’s Savings Offer in Front of HCPs While They’re Prescribing in the EHR (ConnectiveRx)
• 5 Key Points for Optimizing Your IoT Testing Strategy (CTG)
• The Burden of Choice Along the EHR Journey  (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• 3 Potential Life-Saving Uses of Data (Dimensional Insight)
• Quiet Quitting: Separating the Symptom from the Cause (Direct Recruiters)
• How to Strengthen Your Cybersecurity Posture in Healthcare (Divurgent)
• The Answer for Today’s Multidimensional Healthcare (EClinicalWorks)
• The HCI Group Supports Healthcare Organizations Moving EHR to AWS (The HCI Group)

Contacts

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