Monday Morning Update 4/10/23

Top News

Pear Health, which offers prescription-based digital therapeutics, files Chapter 11 bankruptcy, lays off nearly all of its employees, and seeks buyers for the business or its assets.

The publicly traded company has halted the filling of new and refill prescriptions for its PDTs for treating substance use disorder, opioid use disorder, and chronic insomnia.

Pear was formed in 2013 and went public in December 2021 via a SPAC merger that valued it at more than $1 billion for several months before PEAR shares began their slide.

President and CEO Corey McCann, MD, PhD announced “a reduction in force, including me” on LinkedIn, blaming the company’s failure on insurers and unfavorable market conditions.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Polarity is evident in the results of last week’s poll, where respondents are either (a) confident that most of their medical record would be accessible in a random ED visit, or (b) have no idea. Thanks for the insightful comments, which aren’t encouraging given that we all work around healthcare technology. Maybe we should all carry around a medical alert card that contains ID details and instructions for three scenarios: (a) the ED uses the same EHR as a provider you trust to have complete information, with your card identifying who that provider is and which EHR they use; (b) an ED that uses a different EHR; and (c) HIE details, including national networks, if relevant. Or, and I shudder to say it since it sounds so 2005-ish, maybe we should maintain our own personal health record on our phone, a website, or a thumb drive and carry instructions for accessing it.

New poll to your right or here, which I’ve run annually for many years: what will you be doing during HIMSS23?

Speaking as Mr. Obvious, HIMSS23 will unveil the new conference normal for HIMSS. On the plus side, COVID’s impact is much reduced since the skip year / failed virtual conference attempt of 2020 and the “mask-wearing summer in Las Vegas” unsuccessful recovery in 2021. On the negative, providers and vendors are dealing with iffy economic conditions; new conference competitors and the refocus of CHIME away from HMISS have probably poached some of the decision-makers whose attendance subsidized the cost for the rest of us; and the HIMSS brand hasn’t regained its pre-COVID luster. HIMSS22 went fairly well, so I’m thinking that HIMSS23 will be a modest hit from and attendance and exhibitor count perspective, although the most important metric is exhibitor perception of ROI in deciding whether to follow along to Orlando in 2024. Industry news is slow so far this holiday week, which might mean vendors are holding their announcements for next week in recognition that the HIMSS conference is still an important event.

The Chicago weather forecast shows plenty of warm spring days and no snow, but with a drastic cool-off just as HIMSS23 gets underway, with clouds and highs in the mid-50s. Chicago is the only city where it snowed during a HIMSS conference, so I’ll take this weather.

Also cool is the activity of HIStalk’s sponsors at HIMSS23, my summary of which might influence (or “inform,” as linguistic fad-followers might say) your exhibit hall navigation plan.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor SmartSense by Digi. The company, which is a business unit of Digi International (NASDAQ: DGII), is a leading global provider of temperature and environmental monitoring solutions that deliver dynamic and personalized asset monitoring, process digitization, and digital decisioning across healthcare. Its enterprise-wide critical asset monitoring and management solution for pharmacies, labs, clinics, blood banks, and more ensures compliance with centralized reporting, NIST-calibrated temperature monitoring, and logs that provide proof-of-temperature performance. The solutions deploy quickly and are wire-free, eliminating the need for IT support or HIPAA concerns. They help directors of lab, pharmacy, facilities, and biomed with governance over compliance, temperature, and humidity monitoring, and any other product safety concern, relieving pain points around product loss, regulatory compliance, automation, and temperature logging automation.Thanks to SmartSense by Digit for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Virtual substance abuse disorder provider Workit Health will lay off 100 employees, anticipating that the DEA will reinstate a pandemic-relaxed rule that requires patients to undergo an in-person visit before having controlled substances prescribed via telehealth.

Erica Jain, MBA, co-founder and CEO of Virtual care tools vendor Healthie, lists lessons learned in its seven-year history:

1. The company over-invested in sales and marketing without a corresponding scale-up in technology and product teams.
2. It realized that success takes years regardless of how much money a company raises, and suggests that companies wait as long as possible between their seed and Series A rounds to focus on the business and make mistakes on a small scale before they jump on the VC treadmill.
3. The company wasted money on social media, ads, and team culture, which the founders rationalized as being first-timers trying to learn.
4. It hired sales reps without having training and management in place, which failed to deliver results and left customers feeling that the company was “sales-y.”
5. Lack of technical discipline and a rush to ship code quickly required a product rewrite that was painful to the company and customers.
6. The founders waited too long to bring in a head of product, causing bottlenecks and difficulty in prioritizing customer requests.
7. It learned the responsibility of being a healthcare infrastructure company, where customers could not get through a work day with anything less than full functionality.

Privacy and Security

A researcher questions why Phreesia’s clinic check-in app requires patients to check a box that authorizes the company to use their information to serve targeted ads. She starting choosing the subtle “no consent” option, then contacted Phreesia to confirm that they had no consent form on file for her. The company said it would revoke her authorization, seemingly confirming that it possessed one against her intentions, which Phreesia blames on a staff member who used its system to check the patient in manually. She notes that Phreesia’s SEC filing boasts that patients who are served its ads are 4.5 times more likely to end up with a prescription for the promoted drug, meaning it might not be in her best interest that her provider would not have prescribed the drug until asked.

Other

A randomized controlled trial finds that restricting EHR users to opening just one chart at a time doesn’t seem to reduce their efficiency, as measured by daily EHR usage time. On the other hand, the authors mentioned a previous study in which the single-patient limitation was not associated with a lower rate of wrong-patient errors compared to allowing up to four charts to be open simultaneously.

According to a study conducted by Cedars-Sinai, ChatGPT is effective at translating medical information about cirrhosis and liver cancer in a way that patients and caregivers can comprehend. However, the authors found that ChatGPT’s responses to frequently asked questions are often insufficient and may contain errors up to 50% of the time. They conclude that it’s a good adjunct for clinicians rather than a replacement for them.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare Triangle announces a multi-year subscription agreement with customer CalvertHealth for its medical document automation solution Readabl.ai.
• Oracle Health helps University of Missouri Health Care clinicians incorporate external data for more comprehensive patient histories and informed treatment plans.
• Clark Health (FL) sees a 200% growth in services since investing in EClinicalWorks technology over a decade ago.
• Optimum Healthcare IT names Michele Haag (MaineHealth) business intelligence developer.
• Sectra publishes a new case study, “From crisis to solution: Sky Lake Medical Center’s rapid restoration of radiology after ransomware attack.”
• Trualta introduces virtual caregiver support groups, webinars, and care coaching programs to support more caregivers across the country.

Blog Posts

• Expanding Access to Care for Better Public Health (Netsmart)
• Key Takeaways from ViVE 2023: Digital Health Turns a Corner from Hype to Value (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Healthcare Call Center Trends: What Leaders Need to Know (PerfectServe)
• The End is Near: Are Providers Ready for the Unwinding of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency? (Premier)
• Use Cases for AI in Healthcare (RCxRules)
• What’s the problem with ChatGPT in the contact center? (Talkdesk)
• Hybridization is the Future: Can Your Practice Model Support It? (WebPT)

Contacts

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