Monday Morning Update 1/16/23

Top News

The Government Accountability Office rejects bid protests involving the VA’s selection of Booz Allen to continue managing its Oracle Cerner implementation for another five years.

Unsuccessful bidders Cognosante and Pro Sphere Tech said that Booz Allen has an organization conflict of interest because the $860 million contract will allow it to steer work under a different VA task order to its subsidiary Liberty IT Solutions, which it acquired in June 2021 for $725 million.

GAO dismissed a similar year-ago protest by a Liberty IT Solutions competitor, determining that Liberty and Booz Allen are performing different kinds of work that is managed by different VA offices.

Reader Comments

From Cron: “Re: disruptors. Does any company actually disrupt anything?” Rarely in healthcare, since those companies that would be disrupted are usually entrenched, well funded, and politically connected. Expectations are misplaced that scrappy startups will somehow fix our healthcare non-system for us since politicians won’t. The job of a startup is to survive, grow, and make money, and tangling with huge insurers, health systems, and vendors isn’t a great way to do that.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents are mixed on assigning responsibility to the VA’s struggling rollout of Oracle Cerner.

New poll to your right or here: Which social media service have you used in the past seven days?

Several folks have reached out about the death of industry long-timer Frank Pecaitis. His family has started a GoFundMe to establish a scholarship in his name.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor RxLightning. The New Albany, IN-based company enables physicians to accelerate patient access to their preferred specialty therapies. Its MedAccess platform was designed for physicians and their clinical team to re-imagine the entire specialty medication experience without paper forms or fax machines, supporting over 1,200 specialty medications across all therapeutic specialties. Ninety-four percent of patients get access in less than one hour and 99% in less than one day. Its proven approach simplifies the historically cumbersome process of specialty medication access by providing visibility into the entire patient journey through a digital platform, which acts as a single source of truth for all stakeholders. This MedAccess Ecosystem optimizes the patient journey from enrollment to fulfillment and makes the disconnected, connected. Thanks to RxLightning for supporting HIStalk.

Thanks to these companies that recently supported HIStalk. Click a logo for more information.

January 19 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Supercharge Your Clinical Data Searches.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenter: Paul Robbins, MSMBA, VP of product, Particle. Particle’s team will preview the exciting results of Specialty Search, a new condition-specific record locator service. This webinar will review how to collect patient records from top Centers of Excellence across the entire country; how healthcare organizations of all types are benefiting from Specialty Search capabilities, using Particle’s simple API; and why a focused search of chronic condition data — in oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, orthopedics, and more — has an outsized impact on care outcomes.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Not directly healthcare related, but interesting. JP Morgan Chase sues Charlie Javice, the 30-year-old founder of student loan signup platform vendor Frank, which it acquired for $175 million in September 2021 and has since shut down. Executives of Frank allegedly hired a data science professor to create 4.25 million phony user accounts versus its actual 300,000 users who used the service to apply for school loans. The company came under Congressional scrutiny in 2020 on suspicions that it was misleading students and  selling their personal information to advertisers. JP Morgan discovered discrepancies when it asked for a customer list so it could begin marketing its own offerings to students, then found that three-fourths of test emails were undeliverable and only 1% were opened.

Jingyun Fan, MS, founder and CEO of app-based insomnia coaching startup Shuni, lists the lessons she learned that resulted in shutting the company down after three years:

1. Founders must manage their egos in balancing the many naysayers while still listening to legitimate feedback.
2. First-time founders focus on “build it and they will come” instead of the real challenge of distribution. They should learn about marketing and sales and split their time equally between product and growth.
3. Operational excellence is easily copied and just doing something better isn’t enough to provide the returns that venture capital seeks.
4. Startups should not focus on building a services business, which is operational excellence that incumbents can copy given their capital and reputation.
5. Don’t try to sell platform technology into healthcare since better technology is a nice-to-have that may never result in a sale, and it’s hard to disrupt Epic or Oracle Cerner.
6. For behavioral health offerings, focus on direct-to-consumer growth rather than pursuing academia-grade outcomes data that would interest only employers and insurers.
7. Cost-of-acquisition is high in behavioral health and marketing strategies should focus on long-form content written by authentic personalities as brand representatives, making YouTube as the primary channel because you can speak directly to target clients, has good discoverability, and is good for search engine optimization.
8. Make sure as a founder that the problem you are addressing is worth dedicating a major part of your life to.
9. Venture capital isn’t right for every business. Capital comes with timeline expectations and what startups need is time.
10. Ignore these lessons. People do the impossible all the time, doing meaningful work and transforming their own lives.

Sales

• Two hospitals on the border between France and Belgium choose Sectra for digital pathology in a joint project.
• Owensboro Health (KY) outsources revenue cycle management and IT to Optum, which will take on 575 health system employees.

Government and Politics

ONC publishes Draft Version 4 of USCDI.

Sponsor Updates

• Current Health publishes a new case study, “UMass Memorial Health Builds Leading Hospital at Home Program.”
• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “Value-Based Care Achieved Through PCMH and HEDIS.”
• Relatient publishes a new case study featuring One Pediatrics, “Activating Patients Through Targeted Messaging and Segmentation.”
• West Monroe appoints TED Conferences CEO Jay Herratti to its board.

Blog Posts

• Are You Compliant? New CURES Act Rules in Effect (Pivot Point Consulting)
• How Bedside Manner Improves Patient Recovery (PerfectServe)
• How The Bellevue Hospital is Transforming their Supply Chain – and Maximizing Savings (Premier)
• Your guide to the average speed of answer in a call center (Talkdesk)
• 2023 Top Healthcare Cybersecurity Threats (TigerConnect)
• Upfront Healthcare 2022 Year in Review (Upfront Healthcare)
• 4 Tips to Boost Physical Therapy Documentation Training in Your Clinic (WebPT)
• The Cost of Doing Nothing (VisiQuate)
• Carequality & EHealth Exchange Annual Meeting Highlights (Zen Healthcare IT)

Contacts

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