Monday Morning Update 4/3/23

Top News

Epic CEO Judy Faulkner reportedly tells attendees of AMGA that the company is testing the use of ChatGPT to create draft provider responses to patient emails.

She says ChatGPT is less terse than doctors.

This seems like a great idea since experiments have shown that ChatGPT excels at analyzing a transcript of what a doctor says to offer suggestions of how they can be more empathetic. In other words, the computer advises the doctor on being human.

Reader Comments

From Brisco County: “Re: online services such as WebMD. They must be sweating ChatGPT hard.” Any company whose livelihood is based on sending or receiving web traffic should be worried. Web commerce is driven by search engine discovery and the opportunity to create or steal content and surround it by ads. ChatGPT summarizes the web, so there’s less need for users to look elsewhere. Also worried are publishers, since much of their traffic relies on search engines. Add to the mix that Facebook and Twitter are dying and the web could look very different in a couple of years. I welcome the chance to see content that is personalized and useful rather than driven by an algorithm whose primary purpose is to enrich its owner. Which is another concern about OpenAI and other companies – what will the inevitable monetization of their platform look like?

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents think their health system does a pretty good job using digital tools.

New poll to your right or here: After a weekend car accident out of state, how much of your important health information could ED doctors immediately obtain electronically? Also, let’s assume you are alone and unconscious with only a driver license and insurance card in your possession. Also, that all of your providers don’t use the same EHR. Poll comments are welcome about how you expect that the process would work or what precautions you might take to improve it.

I checked Epic’s site as soon as I woke up Saturday, but perhaps their previous April Fool’s phony news items set the bar too high because this one wasn’t memorable. ONC saved the day with a clever Rickroll tweet.

Webinars

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

People

The Health Care District of Palm County (FL) promotes Daniel Scott, MS (Good Samaritan) to VP/CIO.

Eric Rose, MD (TenSixteen Bio) joins Logos Informatics as CMIO.

Digital Health KC hires Dick Flanigan, MAS (RFJ Advisory) as CEO.

Ardent Health Services promotes Lonnie Garrison, MS to VP of IT.

Announcements and Implementations

Coryell Health begins its rollout of Oracle Cerner, which hopefully isn’t the system shown in the modified stock art stock that features illogically freeform input fields and a misspelling of “widowed.” Something tells me that the touchscreen-poking user wasn’t sitting in the health system’s 25-bed flagship hospital in Gatesville, TX, which is mostly known for its several jails and prisons. They used to hold a Prison Boss Cook-Off there, but it died from lack of participation.

Twitter open sources parts of its platform software, with the most interesting part being the code that chooses the “For You” tweets you see from users you don’t follow, with the most important factor being how likely it is that people will like, retweet, or reply. The blog post doesn’t say how the code artificially boosts Elon Musk’s tweets as he demanded in a recent Twitter tantrum, where he raged that the President’s Super Bowl tweet got more impressions than his own.

Amazon opens its low-power Sidewalk network – powered by connected Ring and Echo devices, courtesy of their owners — and to developers who need an cheap Internet of Things type connection. The coverage map shows that 90% of the US population is in range. Use cases include health trackers, smart pill bottles, smart door locks, dog trackers, soil moisture sensors, and weather stations.

Novant Health lays off 50 employees, including EVP/Chief Transformation and Digital Officer Angela Yochem, MS.

Other

In an unrelated but interesting conference development, the Entertainment Software Associated cancels its June expo that is known as “video game Christmas” in Los Angeles. The event, which drew 66,000 attendees to its final conference in 2019, was cancelled in 2020 due to COVID, changed to an online event in 2021, and then cancelled again in 2022. The organizers say interest wasn’t strong enough to support a big, impressive event and that interested companies couldn’t overcome resource challenges. Participants say that the big game publishers were already moving to running their own events online at a lower cost.

Madison magazine profiles Roots & Wings Foundation, created in 2019 by Epic CEO Judy Faulkner and her husband Gordon – and run by their daughter, Shana Dall’Osto – that offers unrestricted grants for non-profits purely based on trust. It awarded $40 million to Madison-area organizations in 2022. Dall’Osto says that neither she and her parents were raised rich, as Judy attended University of Wisconsin-Madison on scholarships and she and husband (and now pediatrician) Gordon lived in assisted housing and used food stamps before starting a family. She says she wasn’t unhappy that Judy signed The Giving Pledge in 2015, in which the many-billion dollar fortune of her parents will go to charitable causes instead of to their three children, saying that her mom was always clear about her intentions and her concerns about ruining kids by handing them big inheritances.

Sponsor Updates

• Surgical Care Specialists (PA) and Fairview Community Health Center (KY) transition to the EClinicalWorks Cloud.
• Nordic releases a new Making Rounds Podcast, “Modernizing business intelligence for stronger data analysis.”
• Talkdesk publishes a new report, “The promise (and pitfalls) of self-service automation in customer service.”
• Tegria staff partner with One Roof Foundation and take part in a community clean-up in the South Park neighborhood.

Blog Posts

• Continuing the Conversation: Our Commitment to IDD (Netsmart)
• Expanding women’s health: Addressing health disparities with innovations (Nordic)
• Our Culture of Giving: OptimizeRx Supports the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (OptimizeRx)
• Bolder and Brighter: Key Takeaways from the 2023 ACHE Congress (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Unlocking the Potential of Your Answering Service: More Than a Cost Center (PerfectServe)
• Battling Drug Shortages: Novel Ideas for an Unprecedented Challenge (Premier)
• FHIR 5 is here (Redox)
• A Day in the Life of a Contact Center Scheduler (Relatient)
• Keeping Pace with Best Practices is Key to Prescription Safety, Affordability (Surescripts)
• Decoding the fiction: The myths of artificial intelligence (Talkdesk)
• Reimagining Master Data Management for Healthcare Organizations (Verato)
• The Federal Breast Density Inform Rule: Huge Leap Forward, But More to Do (Volpara Health)
• Monday: Medicare Advantage rules change – How much will it really hurt? (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

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