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News 2/17/23

February 16, 2023 News 3 Comments

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Unified communications and collaboration services vendor Avaya, whose healthcare offerings include solutions for virtual care, collaboration, and patient access technology, files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the second time in six years.

The Durham, NC-based company reported lower than expected revenue and earnings last year, blaming accounting problems with its cloud subscription revenue, after which it replaced its CEO.

AVYA share price has dropped 98% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $24 million.


Reader Comments

From Baby Payer: “Re: IVF coverage. In an example of our messed up healthcare system, women are taking Amazon jobs and quitting after one day to get fertility benefits.” Women claim that they took a job working in an Amazon warehouse, were covered immediately by its Progyny fertility benefits, and then quit the next day and paid their own COBRA premiums going forward. The women supposedly prefer warehouse jobs because hiring and quitting are automated processes, with no interview required.

From Lou Sassol: “Re: ViVE. Will you be reporting from there?” Probably not. I can’t justify the $2,400 general admission registration and I don’t know of any easy way to attend undercover as a free media attendee. At other conferences, I have either registered at full price under my own name using a phony company name or used someone’s exhibitor pass. 


HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I was searching for something on HIStalk and ran across my old Time Capsule series, which I think is my best work in mixing snark with occasionally insightful observations, fueled by mania that was induced by working several jobs simultaneously with little sleep way back in the mid-2000s. You don’t see a lot of health IT sites running titles like “In a Capitalist Society, Somebody Will Always Sell a Fat Man a Speedo or an Unprepared Hospital a Clinical System.”

Pondering: are hospitals the only businesses that charge customers and employees to park on the lots that they themselves own?


Webinars

February 28 (Tuesday) 1 ET. “Words Matter: Simplifying Clinical Terms for Patients.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Whitney Mannion, RN, MSN, senior terminologist, IMO; David Bocanegra, RN, nurse informaticist, IMO. The language of medicine can be confusing and contradictory to patients, challenging their ability to prepare for a procedure or pay their bills. This webinar will explore how the words that are used to communicate – online, in print, and in person – must be chosen carefully to allow patients to comprehend their diagnoses, treatments, and care plans. The presenters will also describe how the ONC Final Rule for the 21st Century Cures Act will make clinical and technical language more directly accessible through patient portals.

March 7 (Tuesday) noon ET.  “Prescribe RPA 2.0 to Treat Healthcare Worker Burnout.” Sponsor: Keysight Technologies. Presenters: Anne Foster, MS, technical consultant manager, Eggplant; Emily Yan, MPA, product marketing manager, Keysight Technologies. Half of US health systems plan to invest in robotic process automation by the end of this year, per Gartner. The concept is evolving to help with staff burnout and physician productivity. The presenters will introduce RPA 2.0, explain how to maximize its value, demonstrate how to quickly start on RPA 2.0 and test automation in one platform, and answer questions about healthcare automation.

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


Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

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Spacelabs Healthcare acquires PeraHealth and its Rothman Index patient deterioration software for undisclosed terms.

Primary care EHR vendor Elation Health acquires Lightning MD, which sells billing and payer connectivity systems.

Centura Health, which is operated as a partnership between CommonSpirit Health and AdventHealth, will dissolve as the partners decide to manage their own respective hospitals. CommonSpirit also announces that it will acquire Steward Health Care’s Utah sites, which includes five hospitals and 35 clinics.

Business Insider runs a first-person report of using Amazon’s new RxPass service that covers dozens of commonly prescribed generic drugs for a flat rate of $5 per month, citing these issues as reasons to not use it again:

  • The service isn’t available in eight states and can’t be used by people covered by Medicare and Medicaid. Amazon explains that those programs don’t allow pharmacies to charge cash prices for medications that they cover.
  • The display of available meds lists items multiple times – with insurance, without insurance, or with RxPass – and it’s easy to miss the one that is flagged as available under the program.
  • Transfer of prescriptions from CVS took a long time.
  • One prescription was rejected because it didn’t exactly match Amazon’s inventory, which required starting the process over with the patient’s doctor.

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CPSI announces Q4 results: revenue up 12%, EPS $0.61 versus $0.70, beating Wall Street expectations for both. Shares are up 6% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 15% drop, valuing the company at $447 million.

R1 RCM announces Q4 results: revenue up 35%, EPS –$0.09 versus $0.11, beating revenue expectations but falling short on earnings. RCM shares are down 46% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 15% loss, valuing the company at $6.6 billion.

CommonSpirit Health blames its $474 million quarterly loss on the pandemic, labor shortages, staffing costs, inflation, and its October 2022 ransomware attack. Its financial report says the month-long outage in October has cost $150 million so far.


Sales

  • Mosaic Life Care (MO) will start its Epic go-live on March 4, replacing Cerner.
  • Care Choice Family Clinic will implement EClinicalWorks.

People

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Vanderbilt University Medical Center promotes Dara Mize, MD, MS to CMIO.

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Joshua Newman, MD, MSHS, SVP of healthcare and life sciences at Salesforce, will leave the company.

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Hongfang Liu, PhD (Mayo Clinic) joins UTHealth Houston as director of the Center for Translational Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and VP for Learning Health Systems.

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Lumeon hires Matt Duffy (NextGen Healthcare) as VP of product and Kathy Ruggiero (Commure) as VP of marketing.

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Clement Chen, MBA (Leidos Health Group) joins DSFederal as CEO.

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Ochsner Health SVP/CIO Laura Wilt, MBA has resigned.


Announcements and Implementations

WebPT enhances its rehab therapy platform with upgraded single sign-on capabilities, enterprise identity management, in-app history reporting, and a Snowflake-powered data warehouse solution.

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Purdue-connected HemaChrome wins an NIH challenge for its smartphone app that measures blood hemoglobin non-invasively using phone pictures or screenshots from video calls.

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NeuroFlow’s behavioral health platform is named one of the Phase 2 winners of the VA’s Mission Daybreak for suicide prevention solutions. I interviewed co-founder and CEO Molara – a West Point graduate and former Army captain and field artillery officer who served as a platoon leader in Iraq — last year.

Newly spun off GE HealthCare announces plans to develop hospital software to help guide care and assign resources.

Four hospitals in Ontario go live on a centralized patient portal as part of their shared deployment of Meditech Expanse.


Government and Politics

The State Department approves Oracle Cerner’s $250 million contract to implement military health IT systems for Kuwait’s Military Medical Command.


Sponsor Updates

  • Healthjump Interoperability Platform is featured in a new KLAS First Look report.
  • Elsevier launches the Reproductive Health Hub to support healthcare professionals with trusted information about reproductive health topics.
  • Health Data Movers promotes Karla Christopher, Brandon Camp, and Michael Martin.
  • Black Book Research surveys of a combined 10,000-plus end users rate Surgical Information Systems the top ambulatory surgical center technology vendor and ModMed the top health IT vendor for integrated practice management, RCM, and EHR solutions.
  • CTG publishes a new case study, “CTG Helps Contract Research Organizations Leader Create Business Alignment.”
  • Fortified Health Security names Robert Clark (Code42) regional director.
  • The HCI Group launches its Epic Center of Excellence in Jacksonville, FL.
  • Health Data Movers promotes Michael Martin to senior director of delivery.
  • InterSystems releases a new Healthy Data Podcast, “Transitions of Care: Data Integration, Standardization, featuring BJ Evans, Stonerise Healthcare.”
  • Kyruus publishes a new whitepaper, “Five Ways to Prioritize Provider Data Management.”
  • The Care4 project in Ontario has launched a patient portal shared across four hospitals and ambulatory clinics using Meditech Expanse.
  • Net Health will exhibit at APTA CSM 2023 February 23-25 in San Diego.

Blog Posts


Contacts

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Currently there are "3 comments" on this Article:

    • Yes… and students (their customers) are made to park in the back 40, whereas the faculty and staff get the premium spots. Those were the days!

  1. I think it’s too simplistic to ask if hospitals are the only ones that charge employees for parking. You have to first ask the question which employers offer parking. My healthcare employer offered subsided parking. Others in the office building next door paid a higher rate to park in city/private owned lots. So it was in fact a benefit. They also offered free commuter benefits to those that took public transit.

    Others that I’ve worked at in suburban campuses charge nothing.

    Everywhere I’ve worked that had paid parking also had a free (though less convenient) option.







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