Monday Morning Update 3/20/23

Top News

Oracle Cerner has conducted another round of layoffs, according to the social media posts of some employees who were affected. Some say they’ve heard that 10% of the company was let go, but Oracle has not confirmed specifics.

Rumored severance was four weeks plus one week per year of service.

Oracle also told office-based employees who were allowed to work remotely during the pandemic that they will need to return to campus full time. Managers will notify workers within 30 days if their jobs will be in-office, flex office with unassigned space, or remote.

Reader Comments

From Yduj’s Hardest Worker: “Re: Northwell moving to Epic. Confirmed – they played the wedding bells at Epic today.” Northwell has 42 Epic jobs posted, so it’s goodbye to Sunrise and other systems there. The health system renewed its contract with Allscripts in 2020 to extend through 2026 and had announced the year before that it would build its own EHR with Allscripts and its Avenel product. That’s a pretty big customer loss for Harris-owned Altera Digital Health, which acquired Sunrise and other Allscripts products in May 2022.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Today (Monday) is the first day of astronomical spring in the US, although meteorological spring has already sprung as of March 1.

Poll respondents say that the weakest aspect of in-person conferences is the quality of educational sessions, i.e. the predecessor to social media in which companies sell advertising with unpaid, user-generated content as the hook. I don’t bother with conference education sessions because they are usually dull and stale, especially given the alternative of delivering them virtually so I can bail out or fast-forward, so maybe we’ll see conferences deconstruct themselves into just a big exhibit hall by day and parties by night.

New poll to your right or here: Which technology trend will have the biggest healthcare impact in the next five years? I couldn’t list every possible one, so you can always add a poll comment to support one that I missed.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The UK’s merger watchdog raises competitive concerns about the proposed acquisition of healthcare software vendor EMIS Group by a UnitedHealth Group subsidiary.

Pear Therapeutics, which offers prescription-based digital therapeutics, will explore strategic alternatives to avoid reorganizing or liquidating the company. Pear went public via a SPAC transaction in June 2021 at an initial valuation of $1.5 billion. PEAR shares have lost 96% since, valuing the company at $83 million after a 34% drop following Friday’s announcement.

Autism treatment software vendor Spectrum Ai raises $20 million in a Series A funding round.

Stanley Healthcare renames itself to Securitas Healthcare. The company was acquired in July 2022 by security services vendor Securitas.

It’s a sad day for Glassholes everywhere (both of them): Google ends sales of Glass Enterprise Edition, which the company created in 2017 as a pivot from the poor-selling consumer version of Google Glass.

People

Transcarent hires Randy Hawkins, MD (Carrum Health) as chief medical officer. He was formerly a US Navy squadron medical officer, with deployment in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

Announcements and Implementations

The publisher of New England Journal of Medicine launches NEJM AI and names Harvard Medical School informaticist Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD as editor-in-chief.

Orbita’s Blaze care-finding solution for consumers will incorporate triage algorithms from Isabel Healthcare.

Ohio-based The Healthcare Collaborative exits the HIE business and will transfer its customers – 70 hospitals and 18,000 providers — to Ohio Health Information Partnership’s CliniSync service by the end of 2023.

A new KLAS report on ambulatory and enterprise EHR interoperability grades NextGen Healthcare and Athenahealth highest in ambulatory, while Epic tops the enterprise EHR list. The authors say that Altera Digital Health (the former Allscripts Sunrise), EClinicalWorks, and Greenway Health are falling behind in using external data for transitions of care and analytics.

Government and Politics

A GAO report on the VA’s Oracle Cerner rollout finds that the VA needs to improve its change management practices and to assess user satisfaction. Previous surveys found that around 95% of users disagreed that the system enabled quality care and made them efficient. GAO also found that while Oracle Cerner has reduced the number of old trouble tickets that are unresolved, the overall number of open issues has steadily increased since 2020.

Privacy and Security

Peaceful protesters, many of them mental health professionals, assemble at Oklahoma’s state capitol to object to SB 1369, which requires health plans to submit patient data – including mental health records — to a statewide HIE.

Healthcare security executives Scott Dresen (Corewell Health), Kate Piece (Fortified Health Security), Greg Garcia (Healthcare and Public Health Sector Coordinating Council), and Stirling Martin (Epic) testify at a meeting of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee titled “In Need of a Checkup: Examining the Cybersecurity Risks to the Healthcare Sector.”

Other

NHS England orders trusts to start submitting patient information to a system that is provided by Palantir, which the newspaper article calls an American spy-tech firm. A US technology fairness organization CEO says that while NHS needs to make better use of patient data, he questions the fairness of the procurement and whether NHS should be choosing a partner “mainly known for supporting CIA drone attacks, predictive policing, and deportation raids.” Oracle board chair and CTO Larry Ellison suggested in the company’s recent earnings call that it was, as had been rumored, also a bidder for the Federated Data Platform that would expand access to de-identified patient data.

Medical residency match day last week resulted in a 94% success rate for PGY-1 positions, but 554 emergency medicine went unfilled, a huge increase that was driven by fewer applicants. The most competitive specialties were plastic surgery, internal medicine-pediatrics, OB-GYN, and orthopedic surgery. Nearly all of the 2,685 unfilled positions will be placed in the supplemental offer (SOAP) program. Residency preferences fluctuate significantly every few years as medical students try to guess the future earnings potential and job satisfaction of a specialty in which most of them will spend their entire working lives.

Sponsor Updates

• PerfectServe is accepting nominations for its Nurses of Note awards through April 14.
• Surescripts publishes its “2022 National Progress Report.”
• Premier’s Pinc AI and Fortune name the nation’s top 50 cardiovascular hospitals
• .Relatient’s team in India opens a new Global Capability Centre.
• Talkdesk wins several 2023 Stevie Awards for sales and customer service, and congratulates customer Memorial Healthcare System for winning several as well.
• The HLTH Matters Podcast features Tegria Managing Director Theresa Demeter.
• Volpara Health announces that a new US federal regulation requires mammography facilities to inform patients whether their breasts are composed of dense tissue.
• Vyne Medical publishes a new customer success story, “A Productive Manager’s Choice for Increased Patient Satisfaction.”

Blog Posts

• Clearsense at ViVE 2023 (Clearsense)
• Driving Digital Transformation in Healthcare (Nordic)
• Doctors and Social Media: Unlocking New HCP Engagement Approaches (OptimizeRx)
• Can Healthcare Technology Beat Burnout? Not On Its Own. (PerfectServe)
• Medical librarians use their expertise in healthcare technology to improve clinician satisfaction (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Reimagining Master Data Management for Healthcare Organizations (Verato)
• 4 Reasons to Switch Online Scheduling (WebPT)

Contacts

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