Monday Morning Update 11/14/22

Top News

Telehealth company Wheel acquires GoodRx Care’s back-end virtual care technology, which includes an EHR, clinical management tools, and patient experience software.

Wheel was already providing GoodRx with technology and clinicians. It will license the technology back to GoodRx for use on its GoodRx Care website and app.

GoodRx share price has dropped 87% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $2 billion versus $23 billion in February 2021.

The company’s share price took a hit in August when grocery chain Kroger stopped accepting GoodRx coupons in its pharmacies, which cost GoodRx 25% of its business.  

Reader Comments

From Not-Football SEC Fan: “Re: Datavant. Other tidbits: (a) Roivant still holds a minority stake; (b) Ciox’s main investor New Mountain Capital seems to be the majority owner; and (c) Datavant has acquired companies such as Mirador and Convenet to expand internationally.” Datavant acquired HIPAA expert determination firm Mirador Analytics in late 2021, then added UK-based Convenet in September 2022 to offer clinical trials tokenization in the UK. Datavant had previously acquired Health Data Link in 2019, which offered health systems linkage to researchers, and de-identification services vendor Universal Patient Key in 2018, both before Datavant merged in 2021 with Ciox Health, which New Mountain Capital formed in 2016 by rolling up four of its acquisitions. Datavant has raised $81 million in funding through a Series B round.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents may not love the fact that conferences sell their registration lists to facilitate vendor spamming, but it’s apparently a pretty minor inconvenience since only a few folks would be willing to pay to eliminate the practice.

New poll to your right or here: What kind of headshot do you use on your LinkedIn profile? A reader told me that she has seen pictures that are more than 10 years old, which must be as awkward as creating an “optimized” online dating profile that leads to an awkward in-person moment. I trawl LinkedIn regularly for People updates and have seen awful headshots that are unusable – tiny or low-resolution ones and shots that include adjacent body parts from people who were amateurishly cropped out of a group photo. Most puzzling to me is why someone would bother to create a LinkedIn profile without adding a headshot unless they are technically challenged, struggling with appearance issues, or hiding from the mob. 

Lorre has published a children’s book and will send a copy to anyone who donates $20 or more to the non-profit animal sanctuary where she volunteers. She is personally covering the printing and shipping costs, so the entire tax-deductible donation goes toward taking care of the animals.

Serving in the military involves sacrifices – career, family, and sometimes life and limb. Thanks to those who made them.

I’m pondering the takeaways from rich CEOs who are grandstanding their sorrow about laying off their employees. Many of these are wunderkinds who seem shocked by the concept of business cycles. My second reaction is more cynical — investors rewarded them for irrational growth, questionable strategies, and overpriced acquisitions and probably will do so again down the economic road, so their handwringing over dumping human ballast overboard reeks more of all-about-me embarrassment than personal remorse. It was inevitable that the “talent wars” power that was begrudgingly granted to galley-rowers was temporary and that the Great Resignation would eventually toggle to the second definition of that word  — unhappily accepting something that you can’t change, like taking a job because you need the money and realizing that “work from anywhere” and “take all the vacation you want” policies can disappear faster than crypto billions.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

An article by Andreessen Horowitz, a tech-heavy venture capital firm that manages $35 billion in assets, says that the biggest company in the world will be in consumer health technology. Snips:

• Healthcare is a $4 trillion industry in the US alone that consumes 20% of GDP, five times the size of the entire world’s advertising industry.
• The consumer health giant won’t be a big tech firm or an healthcare incumbent. It will be “a consumer-obsessed, healthcare-native tech company that reimagines what care can look like.”
• The company’s core competency will be the ability to engage and retain patients, which healthcare companies have done poorly.
• The vertical path to creating that largest company in the world would be to create a payvider firm that can demonstrate value, such as if “UnitedHealth Group and Apple had a baby.” The challenge is that consumers don’t pay directly for healthcare and the system is optimized for insurers and self-insured employers, so companies have little incentive to care about the consumer experience.
• The horizontal path would be for a company to become the Amazon or Visa of healthcare, offering a marketplace of healthcare reviews, quality metrics, and price transparency or simplified bill-paying in return for a tiny percentage of the revenue, which given massive healthcare spending could still make that company one of the world’s largest.
• Companies must plug into the health industry to succeed, using health systems and providers as channel partners who can help drive transactions.

Sales

• William Osler Health System chooses Sectra’s enterprise imaging, including radiology imaging, breast imaging, and vendor-neutral archive.
• Pivot Point Consulting deploys OCHIN’s Epic EHR at San Francisco Community Health Center.

People

Tower Health names surgeon Eugene Reilly, MD, MHCI as VP/CMIO.

Andrew Burchett, DO (Avera) joins Meditech as executive director of medical informatics.

Announcements and Implementations

Finland announces Radical Health Festival, a pan-European digital health conference that will be held in Helsinki June 12-15, 2023. It will offer a speed-dating platform, a Solution Match service, a hosted buyer program, and conference app. CHIME will offer its Boot Camp there. Early bird registration opens on December 1 and starts at $200.

Two new KLAS reports look at home-based care technology. Facilities – which name as their top three challenges staffing, regulatory requirements, and COVID-19 – most commonly choose MatrixCare, PointClickCare, and Indeed. Home-based acute care organizations name staffing,regulatory requirements, and reimbursement changes as their top concerns and most commonly deploy MatrixCare, SHP, Netsmart, and WellSky to address them.

Government and Politics

South Africa’s deputy health director says that the country’s universal healthcare system will add a central patient information system within 4-5 years ,

England’s The Guardian reports that a $425 million contract for a national shared patient data system is likely to be issued soon to Palantir. Patients will not be required to provide consent for using their data, which will be used by integrated care boards and then de-identified for use by researchers. 

Privacy and Security

The ransomware hackers behind the breach of Australia-based insurer Medibank post a list of customers who have been treated for mental health and alcohol issues, following its earlier list of those who have had abortions. They are demanding payment of $1 AUD per customer, nearly $10 million USD.

Other

The VA and DoD fund a 12-month surgical fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth School of Medicine that trains surgeons to perform pre-surgical preparation using a patient’s 3D-modeled organs or tumors.

A JAMA Health Form research letter notes that the EHRs of the six vendors that have settled HHS/DOJ charges are being used by 77,000 clinicians, recommending that (a) ONC’s certification process be changed so that vendors don’t know in advance which functions will be tested; and (b) post-market surveillance of EHRs be initiated.

A Gonzaga law professor who studies antitrust, health law, and inequity says that a federal judge should not have approved last month’s $13 billion merger of UnitedHealth Group and Change Healthcare because the insurer can use Change’s EDI clearinghouse data to cherry-pick the most profitable consumer groups to insure, reducing access and allowing the company to unfairly compete with insurers that don’t have access to that data. She says that insurers want to acquire companies that capture health data so they can create a unique digital ID for each person insured, which on the positive side would allow them to apply healthy nudges, but would also allow them to move sicker people to plans that require higher cost-sharing,. She notes a 2014 complaint that insurers in Florida placed all HIV drugs, even cheap generics, in their highest cost-sharing tier to discourage HIV patients from signing up and that UHG could remove specific providers from their network if their claims data shows that they see a lot of expensive patients, such as diabetics. 

The Internet has resurfaced years-old survey data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that shows who people spend time with by age, as visualized by Our World in Data. It isn’t pandemic-adjusted current, but still interesting since I hadn’t seen it until folks starting sending it my way. Tidbits, from which your life-planning takeaways may vary:

• People spend more time with co-workers than family members from ages 21 through 65.
• Time spent alone hums along at fours hour per day until the mid-30s, when it steadily increases to nearly eight hours per day for those in their 70s.
• Time spent with children peaks at 4.5 hours in the mid-30s, then tapers down hard to one hour per day by 60.
• Time spent with friends peaks at more than two hours per day at 18, then trends down do a fairly steady half hour per day at around 40 through 80.
• People spend more time with their partners as they age, increasing from three hours per day with a big jump starting in their late 50s, then tapering until 77 (I assume due to death or a change in living situations).

Sponsor Updates

• Gozio Health and Artera expand their partnership, following their initial launch at UNC Health, to add smart links to Artera patient communications and to launch text messages to providers from the mobile app.
• The Inspiring Women Podcast features Kim McKay, MD PeriGen CMO and clinical VP of OB/GYN at Avera Health (SD).
• The Executive Leaders Radio Podcast features Quil Health CEO Carina Edwards.
• Oracle Cerner releases a new podcast, “Increasing interoperability to connect care for Veterans and service members.”
• Spok publishes a new report, “The state of healthcare communications.”
• Upfront Healthcare CEO and co-founder Ben Albert joins the Day Zero Podcast to share his entrepreneurial journey.
• Wolters Kluwer Health expands its Sentri7 suite of clinical surveillance tools to include Sentri7 Sepsis Monitor.

Blog Posts

• The Burden of Choice Along the EHR Journey (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Outside the wire as a combat medic (Optum)
• Nurses of Note Awards: The Public Health Director (PerfectServe)
• Meet the Future of Value Analysis in Healthcare (Premier)
• What the Click of a Button Can Mean for Patient Access to Medication (Surescripts)
• Techquity Q&A Part 1: Health Equity by Design (Tegria)
• CIO Guide to Contextual Communication (TigerConnect)
• A broad definition of healthcare workplace violence leads to better caregiver safety (Vocera)
• How to Submit Medicare Claims Electronically (WebPT)

Contacts

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