News 4/28/23

Top News

Virtual care platform vendor EVisit acquires Bluestream Health, which offers digital front doors and virtual workflow tools.

Click the image above to enlarge.

I interviewed EVisit CEO Sachin Agrawal a few weeks ago and Bluestream President Brian Yarnell last February.

Reader Comments

From Wormser: “Re: Google’s C4 data set training web sources. Is it good or bad that your site was used?” Probably good, but with an asterisk. I was initially happy to see that HIStalk contributed 3.4 million tokens to the model in being among the top 2,000 of 15 million sites that it scraped, at least triple that of the next-highest health IT site (HIMSS-owned Healthcare IT News). The model also prioritizes the most important and well-regarded sites, so that’s a plus. Negative: that means I’m involuntarily contributing a lot of decades-long work for free, which I rationalize that it’s free to read anyway. The top-used sites were patents.google.com, Wikipedia, Scribd (which is kind of a surprise), the New York Times, and the PLOS open access journals. The real story is that it’s good to question a model’s training sources and to consider the commercialization rights of the owners of that information, which will be especially important in healthcare.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I hate getting names wrong knowing that spellcheck can’t help me, so I was appalled to see that I mistyped the name of RxLightning CEO Julia Regan as “Julie” in our recent interview. I fixed the error, but my self-beratement continues, and I am reminded yet again that everybody needs an editor.

A friend asked for help polishing their resume and creating a cover letter, which of course I pasted into ChatGPT to create documents that left even a persnickety writer like myself with nothing to correct. I was thinking during the process that employers will have a tougher time selecting candidates based on their writing skill as a proxy for intelligence and attention to detail since ChatGPT makes everybody seem smart.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Kaiser Permanente will acquire Geisinger Health in forming Risant Health, an independent, non-profit community hospital operator. Kaiser says it will invest $5 billion in Risant over the next five years, during which Risant will add up to six more health systems. The two organizations, both of which reported operating losses in 2022, say that Risant hospitals will benefit from Kaiser’s ability to invest in technology and preventive care.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions acquires Human API to create a seamless method of delivering health records for life insurance underwriting and care coordination.

People

Scott Sanner (Citra Health Solutions) joins Millennia as CEO.

Patient advocate, journalist, and “comedy health analyst” Casey Quinlan died this week of breast cancer.

Announcements and Implementations

Amazon shuts down its Halo Health wearables division and lays off its employees. The fitness tracker and subscription service was launched in August 2020 and Amazon announced its sleep tracking system Halo Rise in September 2022. The company started another round of layoffs Wednesday in its cloud computing and HR departments, pushing its total in the last few months to 27,000.

PMD – which offers solutions for secure communication, telehealth, charge capture, and RCM — launches a patient demographics management platform for medical practices

Eagle Ridge Hospital goes live on Meditech Expanse.

Rady Children’s Hospital and Sentara Healthcare implement Juniper’s AI-driven network technology to support reliable wi-fi and indoor location services.

AvaSure launches a virtual nursing application and care model, expanding its TeleSitter solution. I interviewed CEO Adam McMullin a few weeks ago.

Amazon Web Services increases its operational database workloads for Epic users by 61%, up to 42 million GRefs/s. 

The Columbus business paper profiles AndHealth, a chronic disease reversal telehealth company that was created by CoverMyMeds co-founder Matt Scantland. The company reports that its migraine patients had 70% fewer missed days of work. I interviewed him in February 2022.

A new KLAS report on health system capacity optimization management finds that LeanTaaS and Epic lead, while Qventus shows positive impact in the perioperative area. Users of Epic’s applications (Grand Central, Cadence, OpTime, MyChart, Cogito, Slicer Dicer, and Cognitive Computing) report strong out-of-the-box functionality that they home will be enhanced with AI/ML, actionable reporting and visualization, and a more consistent mobile experience, especially for Android devices.

Government and Politics

The VA, DoD, and Coast Guard experience another Oracle Cerner EHR downtime Tuesday, with the cause of the four-hour outage attributed to a failed database process.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) calls for the VA to terminate its contract with Oracle Cerner, calling it a “complete failure” that has harmed patients and employee morale. She says that “there is no coming back from the mess that the Department of Veterans Affairs has made with this deeply broken system.”

Privacy and Security

Six people, five of them former employees of Methodist Hospital in Memphis, plead guilty to HIPAA violations for selling the names of patients who were involved in car accidents to personal injury lawyers and chiropractors.

Other

Apple provides updates to its Hearing Study, which uses its Noise app for the Apple Watch to warn users of potentially harmful noise levels. It has found the one in three US adults are exposed to excessive noise levels, often involving traffic, machinery, and public transportation. I would imagine that many restaurants and bars would be embarrassed by their quantified noise levels, where one loud table can create a sonic escalation in which everyone is suddenly shouting. Surveys have show that while bad service tops the annoyance list of restaurant diners, noise levels are ahead of bad food, which is ironic given that some restaurants pride themselves on creating a noisy environment that conveys energy and hipness (65 dB is the maximum for comfortable conversation).

Sponsor Updates

• Flagstaff Surgical Associates (AZ) upgrades its EClinicalWorks software and implements Healow Pay and Healow Check-In.
• Elsevier launches an enhanced version of its ClinicalKey decision support tool, which includes an extensive drug compendium, mobile app, and deeper EHR integration.
• Consensus Cloud Solutions joins the AWS Independent Software Vendor Accelerate Program.
• GHX names 87 healthcare provider and supplier organizations to the 2022 GHX Millennium Club.
• HCTec will invest in expanding its operations in Hohenwald, TN, creating 100 jobs over the next five years.
• Clinical Architecture posts Episode 26, Discussing Data Quality, of “The Informonster Podcast.”
• Specialty medication technology company RxLightning wins a Disruptor of the Year Mira Award.
• Healthjump will exhibit at the NAACOS Spring Conference May 3-5 in Baltimore.
• Meditech congratulates 44 customers included among The Chartis Group’s Top 100 Critical Access Hospitals and Top 100 Rural Community Hospitals.
• Mobile Heartbeat’s MH-Cure clinical communication platform now integrates with Akkadian Provisioning Manager, enabling zero-touch provisioning for users.
• Google Cloud’s new Claims Acceleration Suite uses Myndshft prior authorization software to enable quick and seamless submission of PA requests.

Blog Posts

• Creating the Triple-Win of Healthcare (Enlace Health)
• Reduce Medication Alert Fatigue with Patient-Focused Clinical Decision Support (First Databank)
• Hospitals Suffer Financially Post-COVID: What That Could Mean For The Future (HealthTECH Resources)
• Healthcare Burnout: Impact, Consequences & Administrative Burden (GHX)
• Harnessing the Power of Healthcare Data Sharing to Improve Patient Care (Healthcare Triangle)
• HIMSS23 Recap: The HIMSSanity is Back! (HealthMark Group)
• What Does Nuvolo’s Sweden Release Mean for You? (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Saved by the Lab: Medical Laboratory Professionals Week 2023 (JTG Consulting Group)
• Investing in Centralized Provider Data Management to Power Digital Health Initiatives (Kyruus)
• Beyond RPA, AI, and Machine Learning: The Promise of Care Orchestration in Healthcare (Lumeon)
• Health Equity Hinges on Healthy Data (Rhapsody)
• Hospital Performance Monitoring: Navigating Revenue Margins and Improving Metrics (Medhost)
• Catch up on Meditech’s solutions at the 2023 Clinical Informatics Symposium (Meditech)
• Revolutionize Home Health Care with Wound Digital Imaging Benefits (Net Health)
• The future of ambulatory care documentation, part 2: How speech recognition helps ambulatory clinicians focus on what matters most (Nuance)

Contacts

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