News 4/7/23

Top News

The VA postpones its Oracle Cerner go-live at VA Saginaw Health Care that was planned for June, saying that the software isn’t ready for the next wave of deployments.

The VA had placed go-lives on hold in October 2022, saying it needed until June 2023 to resolve system challenges. Officials also expressed concern about the system’s ability to support the VA’s medical research.

VA officials said recently that they will seek changes in its Oracle Cerner contract, which is under review now at the five-year mark as specified in the VA’s contract. The VA declined to say whether the new delay is related to those negotiations.

Oracle Cerner is live at VA sites in Spokane, WA; Walla Walla, WA; Columbus, OH; Roseburg, OR; and White City, OR. Its most recent go-live was in June 2022.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Trualta. The St. Joseph, MO-based company supports families who are managing care for loved ones at home via an online learning platform. In partnership with innovative healthcare payers and providers, as well as social service organizations, Trualta supports better care at lower cost. Each partner organization is equipped with a  customized and co-branded learning portal through which healthcare professionals can deliver an innovative and skills-based training session to help caregivers better care for their aging loved ones. Trualta’s program includes an online learning management system that is accessible via desktop, tablet, or smartphone with companion print material, personalized for each family’s care situation. Topics include personal care, safety and injury prevention, cognitive decline and brain health, and caregiver wellness. Trualta is engaging in research partnerships and clinical validation trials with leading health organizations to demonstrate that capable and confident caregivers lead to improved patient outcomes. Thanks to Trualta for supporting HIStalk.

Googling #HIMMS23 turns up a bunch of companies who are spending big bucks on a conference whose acronym their social media kids can’t spell. Grammatical pedantry that might get you either a free drink or a punch to the nose, depending on your tone and audience: it’s an acronym if you say the letters as a word (HIMSS) and an initialism if you say the individual letters (FBI). I don’t know how to qualify terms like HIPAA or the previous JCAHO, which were illogically sounded out as “hippa” and “jayco,” although I could get behind calling MGMA “magma.”

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Physician staffing company Envision Physician Services will lay off 90 doctors and staff who work in its Clearwater, FL office. Parent company Envision Healthcare sold its ambulance business for $2.4 billion in 2017, was acquired by a private equity firm for $9.9 billion in 2018, and was near bankruptcy in September 2022 as it struggled with ongoing losses, $5.3 billion of debt, bad press over out-of-network billing practices, and a lawsuit from UnitedHealthcare that the company forced it to overpay for services by upcoding its out-of-network charges.

Sales

• Bergen New Bridge Medical Center extends its use of Altera Digital Health’s Paragon for another five years and will implement its ambulatory care EHR, physician app, claims management, DbMotion Connect, and Ventus Compliance Advisor. It will also move to remote hosting on Microsoft Azure.

People

Provation CEO Daniel Hamburger, MS, MBA retires and is replaced by Ankush Kaul, who has held executive roles in other companies that are owned by Fortive, which acquired Provation for $1.4 billion in late 2021

Announcements and Implementations

Nordic Consulting adds a managed services organization and announces new clients Roper St. Francis Healthcare and Bon Secours Mercy Health, the latter of which acquired Nordic from its fund manager owner in June 2022 via BSMH’s holding company Accrete Health Partners.

Cognizant expands its agreement with Microsoft to integrate its TriZetto products with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and to use Azure for its cloud offerings.

Government and Politics

The Wisconsin Supreme Court rules that Ciox inappropriately billed a UW Health patient $110 for giving her an electronic copy of her medical records. UW Health argued that while patients can get their own records at no charge from MyChart, it charges law firms and other third parties that have copies sent directly to them.

Other

MIcrosoft, the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center, and software firm Fortra obtain a court order that allows Microsoft to seize the Internet infrastructure that Russia-based ransomware hackers use to launch healthcare attacks.

Sponsor Updates

• A study published by Elsevier finds that the initial phases of telemedicine implementation for children’s mental health services during COVID may have exacerbated existing racial and ethnic disparities in access to care.
• First Databank names Anitha Sankar senior quality assurance automation engineer, Sunil Boddapati lead software engineer, and Johnny Ma customer success consultant.
• Fortified Health Security hires Dave Phillips as regional director.
• Healthcare Triangle announces a $3 million cloud DevOps managed services agreement with a life sciences company.
• Meditech’s Greenfield Workspace better enables Phelps Memorial’s deployment of patient scheduling tools.
• Myndshft achieves HITRUST risk-based, two-year certification demonstrating the highest level of information protection assurance.
• Net Health’s PointRight analytics solution receives two endorsements from the National Quality Forum.

Blog Posts

• Focusing on Public Health: Staying Connected with the Community (EClinicalWorks)
• How Insights from Payer Data Improve Patient Care (Enlace Health)
• Occupational Medicine EMR Software (Experity)
• Break Down Data Silos and Drive Fluid Customer Experiences with Five9 Workflow Automation (Five9)
• Supply Chain Issues in Healthcare and How to Mitigate Them (GHX)
• Unlocking the Benefits of Cloud Migration for Healthcare and Life Sciences (Healthcare Triangle)
• How Get Well Uses Healthwise Content as a Service to Deliver Education in Their Digital Care Platform (Healthwise)
• The Rule of S’s: Evaluating new tech for clinical workflows (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Marble’s Data Connections – Access Hundreds of Millions of Records from Our Network (Marble)
• Advancing Interoperability in the Age of TEFCA: An Interview with CommonWell’s Executive Director, Paul Wilder: Part 3 (Medhost)
• How King’s Daughters Medical Center gave time back to nurses (Meditech)

Contacts

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