News 7/26/23

Top News

A study finds chest x-ray analysis didn’t improve when radiologists were assisted by AI tools that, on their own, outperformed two-thirds of the radiologists involved.

The authors say that the radiologists did not correctly use the AI’s information and instead applied their own biases.

Using AI also increased the per-case time of radiologists, which the report speculates is due to radiologists digesting the information it provided.

The report concludes rather startlingly that “the majority of cases are optimally decided by either the radiologists or the AI alone, but not by the radiologists with access to AI.”

Reader Comments

From HISTalkFan: “Re: Cerner/Oracle Health hospital count gain in the past five years in the KLAS report. Surprising. Are they counting DoD/VA gains?” Yes. I found an old KLAS US hospital market share report that says Cerner added 167 hospitals in 2018 via its VA contract, but it lost 65 hospitals that year. The company had little change from 2019 through 2022, although it lost ground to Epic in the percentage of total hospital beds served (nearly 50% for Epic at the end of 2022 versus less than 30% for Oracle Health). Epic is the only vendor that gained both facilities and beds in 2022.

Webinars

July 26 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Lessons We’ve Learned Since Launching our Cancer Prevention Program.” Sponsor: Volpara Health. Presenter: Albert Bonnema, MD, MPH chief medical information officer, Kettering Health System, and Chris Yuppa, product owner for oncology services and cancer prevention, Kettering Health System. Kettering’s IT department has played a critical role in providing an EHR-driven framework to bring cancer risk assessment and individual prevention plans to more than 90,000 patients. Primary care, OB/GYN, oncology, and imaging providers are now able to assess the hereditary, genetic, and lifestyle factors that affect the risk of developing lung, breast, ovarian, colon, and prostate cancer in any patient encounter. Learn how Kettering brings together people, processes, and technology to be more proactive in the fight against cancer and where its cancer prevention program is headed next.

July 27 (Thursday) noon ET. “Why You Shouldn’t Wait to Use Generative AI.” Sponsor: Orbita. Presenter: Bill Rogers, co-founder, president, and chairman, Orbita. The advent of generative AI tools truly represents a paradigm shift. And while some healthcare leaders embrace the transformation, others are hesitant. Invest 20 minutes to learn why you shouldn’t wait. When combined with natural language processing, workflow automation and conversational dialogs, generative AI can help leaders address a raft of challenges: from over-extended staff, to the rising demand for self-service tools, to delivering secure information to key stakeholders. You will learn where AI delivers the greatest value for providers and life sciences, how it can solve critical challenges faced by healthcare leaders, and how Orbita has integrated generative AI into its conversational platform so healthcare leaders can leverage its full capabilities safely and securely.

July 27 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Denial Prevention 101: How to stop denials from the start.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Crystal Ewing, director of product management, Waystar. There’s a reason denial prevention is prominent everywhere in healthcare RCM. Denials reduce cash flow, drive down revenue, and negatively impact the patient and staff experience. More than half of front-end denials don’t have to happen, but, once they do, that money is gone. It’s a pretty compelling reason to take some time now to do some preventative care on your revenue cycle. This webinar will help you optimize your front end to stop denials at the start. We’ll explore the importance of not only having the right data, but having it right where staff need it, when they need it.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The US Air Force awards IncludeHealth a $1.5 million Tactical Funding Increase, which will enable the physical therapy provider to expand its virtual and in-person MSK care services to additional service members.

Imaging analysis vendor RetinAI and retina care provider Retina Consultants of America will partner to develop a real-world evidence database in ophthalmology.

HealthStream announces Q2 results: revenue up 5%, EPS $0.13 versus $0.10, beating expectations for both. HSTM shares have lost 2% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 20% gain, valuing the company at $688 million.

Sales

• Vanderbilt University Medical Center (TN) selects Nference’s federated clinical analytics software.

People

Amar Desai, MD, MPH (CVS Health) joins Optum Health as CEO.

Clarify Health names Terry Boch (Diameter Health) chief commercial officer.

UCI Health promotes Julie Eastman, RN, MBA to CIO.

Government and Politics

A federal judge sentences Vishal Vasanji, co-founder and CEO of bankrupt telehealth app vendor Relief Telemed, to 28 months in prison for wire fraud involving the embezzlement of $260,000 of investor funds that he used for personal expenses.

The Federal Trade Commission sues to block the acquisition of Propel Media by IQVIA, a Fortune 500 company that sells provider and prescription records databases to drug companies for marketing their drugs to professionals. FTC says that the acquisition would give IQVIA, which has annual revenue of $14 billion, a market-controlling advantage.

Privacy and Security

Fortified Health Security’s mid-year cybersecurity report finds that the number of breaches that were reported to HHS doubled versus the same period last year, affecting 40 million people. Breaches involving business associates jumped from 22 to 82. Most of the breaches originated from attacks on network servers rather than email. The report notes an uptick in hackers using file transfer tools such as FileZilla and Windows Secure Copy – some of which don’t require administrative privileges to install or to run from flash drives – to move PHI and other information to cloud storage sites such as Dropbox. The report indicates increased health system use of risk-based identity alerting, in which unexpected user activities trigger multi-factor authentication, system lockouts, or IT alerts.

Other

A new paper by researchers Dean Sittig, PhD and Adam Wright, PhD looks at the use of EHR audit logs in malpractice cases, listing best practices for healthcare organizations to minimize risk. Some of those include monitoring who is looking at VIP records, identifying those EHR elements that will be produced for a plaintiff’s attorney who asks for the “complete medical record,” and reviewing the EHR function to print a patient’s record to a file to make sure it matches the policy of what will be provided in response to a subpoena.

Don’t try this at home. Cricket fans – many of them from the US — who are finding that hotel rooms are expensive or fully booked for the India-Pakistan World Cup match in India on October 15 are instead scheduling overnight-stay checkups in Ahmedabad hospitals that are near Modi Stadium. A night in the hospital, which includes medical costs and meals, costs as little as $37 versus $900 in some hotels that have raised rates 20-fold for the match.

Sponsor Updates

• Nordic releases a new Making Rounds Podcast, “The hopes and promises of AI.”
• Biofourmis marks its one year post-Series D with major milestones and a focused go-forward growth strategy.
• CHIME releases a new Trailblazers Podcast, “The Future of Data and Applications with Stacey Johnston.”
• Visage Imaging publishes a new white paper, “Visage 7 CloudPACS Value Realization.”
• Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust transitions to Meditech Expanse.

Blog Posts

• How the Airline Industry Sets an Example for Healthcare in Adapting to Consumer Demand (Access)
• Embrace Code Changes and Improve Coder Productivity with CAC (AGS Health)
• How year-round engagement closes risk gaps and improves care (Arcadia)
• SIIM 2023 | Visage’s Top Five (Visage Imaging)
• Why Health Plans Need Automation to Get ROI from Clinical Data (Availity)
• Providers still dealing with coronavirus side-effects as they negotiate with managed care payers (Baker Tilly)
• In Their Own Words: 4 HIT Experts Advise CIOs (CereCore)
• Evolving Healthcare Cybersecurity Practices: The 2023 Updates to 405(d) HICP (Clearwater)
• From Inpatient to Outpatient: How the Current Health Platform Provides Hope for More Convenient CAR-T Therapy (Current Health)
• SIIM 2023 | Visage’s Top Five (Visage Imaging)

Contacts

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