I'd never heard of Healwell before and took a look over their offerings. Has anyone used the products? Beyond the…
News 1/27/23
Top News
Pearl Health, which offers population health analytics software for providers who participate in value-based care for Medicare patients, raises $75 million in a Series B funding round.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Oracle Health EVP and engineering lead Don Johnson, MS reportedly leaves the company after six months in that position and nine years with Oracle.
Fujifilm completes its purchase of the digital pathology assets of Inspirata, placing the former Dynamyx business under its US healthcare division and forming a pathology division of its medical informatics business. Cancer-focused Inspirata is best known in health IT for acquiring the former Caradigm from GE Healthcare 2018.
Elaborate, which uses EHR information to deliver contextualized lab result messages to patients, raises $10 million in seed funding. The company says that sending friendlier, actionable lab results to patients reduces their anxiety and saves providers time.
Sales
- Kansas City University College of Dental Medicine chooses the cloud-based electronic dental record of EClinicalWorks for training future dental professionals.
People
Sonifi Health promotes 27-year employee Kelly Boyd, MBA to general manager.
Todd Mingo, MBA (RLV Digital Health) joins Divurgent as SVP of client services.
Announcements and Implementations
St. Margaret’s Health – Peru (IL) closes, at least temporarily, after its ED services contractor declines to provide services. The hospital’s CEO says that the organization’s finances have deteriorated because of staffing shortages that were caused by COVID-19 as well as a February 2021 cyberattack.
Azara Healthcare will offer healthcare organizations access to AMA’s MAP BP metrics via its DRVS population health reporting and analytics platform.
Researchers develop a wearable, continuous imaging sensor for cardiac ultrasound, which will allow real-time remote monitoring of cardiac function.
A Texas study finds that patients who were seen in a primary care visit within 30 days of hospital discharge had 53% fewer ED visits and and 61% fewer re-hospitalizations when the clinician looked up their records in a community HIE.
CHIME announces its PRIME CHIME CIO Boot Camp Package, which offers members a discount on participating in its CIO Boot Camp when bundled with ViVE conference registration. Other ViVE discount packages are available for those who sit for a CHIME certification exam or register as a hosted buyer.
Government and Politics
VA facilities experience major system slowdowns of its Oracle Cerner system after DoD makes a change to their shared database that interrupts network connectivity. The problem also impacted half of the DoD’s Oracle Cerner users.
Ireland’s health service executive resigns, saying that his efforts to introduce new digital health solutions have been blocked by senior administrators, placing patients at risk for poor outcomes.
HHS OIG coordinates fraud charges against 25 people who it alleges provided fraudulent degrees and transcripts from three accredited, since-closed nursing schools in Florida – which were also involved in the scheme that generated $100 million — to 7,600 people who used them to sit for national RN and LPN exams. The announcement does not indicate how many of the buyers became nurses or whether their employers have been notified.
The Department of Justice says that it has infiltrated and dismantled the Hive international ransomware group, whose victims include at least one hospital that paid the demanded ransom to restore its systems (unnamed, but most likely Memorial Health System). DOJ says the group extorted $100 million in its first year.
Other
The journal Nature lays out its rules for authors who using AI tools such as ChatGPT in writing articles. AI tools can’t be listed as authors and researchers must explain how they used AI tools in the paper itself. Publisher Springer Nature is working on tools that can detect AI-generated text and hopes that AI companies will be able to embed watermarks in their output.
Canada’s Alberta Health Services experiences delays and resorts to paper charting as a network change creates a widespread outage.
The New York Times covers the practice of providers billing patients for answering their email messages. Cleveland Clinic says its patient email volume has doubled since 2019, but it is charging for less than 1% of the 110,000 emails that are sent to its providers each week. The article notes that CMS added Medicare billing codes in 2019 for responding to a patient’s inquiry that requires five minutes or more of time, and some private insurers have followed its lead. Cleveland Clinic says it isn’t charging Medicaid patients, Medicare patients pay a co-pay of $3 to $8, and patients with high-deductible private policies could owe up to $50 per exchange. AMA says the fees are a way to adjust healthcare models to new ways of interacting with patients.
Sponsor Updates
- Bellin Health increases patient self-scheduling following its implementation of Kyruus ProviderMatch on its website.
- Experity will host its Urgent Care Connect Conference February 22-23 in Miami.
- The Passionate Pioneers Podcast features Lumeon CEO Greg Miller.
- Meditech publishes a new case study, “North Country Healthcare implements Meditech Expanse Surgical Services in Three Critical Access Hospitals.”
- Meditech signs nine new clients in Q4 for its Meditech as a Service offering.
Blog Posts
- Stepping onto the health IT platform (Nordic)
- CMSWire: What Should You Do in the First 3 Months as CXO (Get Well)
- What Does Healthcare Disruption Look Like? (Healthwise)
- How to Complete an EHR System Selection (Healthcare IT Leaders)
- Lessons on data quality in healthcare from 5 peer industries (Intelligent Medical Objects)
- How is healthcare automation like making your morning latte? (Lumeon)
- 6 Ways a Clinician-Driven EHR Empowers Your Providers (Medhost)
- How Analytics Can Support SNF Success (Net Health)
- Temple Health improves clinical workflows with tailored Dragon Medical One training (Nuance)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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VIVE – $2300 to register plus T&E. What CHIME is offering is good, however, there are HC IT professionals that do not fit those profiles and still could be valuable to attend. For those that work independently or cannot get their employer to pay the freight, it is an unreasonable price for the value. I know, I know. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to go.
Re: “Pearl Health” and the phrase “value-based care”:
As Iñigo Montoya would say, “I don’t think it means what you think it means”. What people who throw this phrase around are really referring to is is value-based payment, not value-based care. The former refers to arrangements where providers make more or less money based on the value of the care they provide (or more correctly, the alleged value, based mostly on clumsy and flawed quantitative measures). The latter is a meaningless phrase that conveys nothing meaningful whatsoever.