News 9/1/23

Top News

Babylon Health sells its UK business, including the GP at Hand app, to US-based in-home test kit vendor EMed Healthcare.

The sale basically marks the end of the company, which has declared insolvency and sold the parts of its business that attracted buyers.

BBLN shares, which went public as one of many disastrous SPAC mergers, are at two-thousandth of one cent, valuing the former high-flyer whose market capitalization reached $4 billion at $5,000.

Webinars

September 21 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Unlock open enrollment best practices to stop future denials.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Lauren Tungate, solution strategist team lead, Waystar. Nearly half of insured Americans consider changing their insurance coverage each fall, necessitating provider safeguards to stop increased denials, find hidden coverage, and prevent uncompensated care. This webinar will crack open enrollment best practices, such as using different data sources to get an accurate picture of benefit details; leveraging automation to identify hidden coverage, confirm active insurance, and avoid lost revenue; and simplifying eligibility workflows to reduce the financial burden on patients and strain on staff.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Wellstar Health System will acquire Augusta University Health System, pledging to complete AU Health’s implementation of Epic. 

Biofourmis CEO Kuldeep Rajput resigns from the remote patient monitoring platform vendor one month after the company laid off 120 employees. Its July 2022 Series D funding round increased its total to $464 million, valuing the company at over $1 billion. Insiders say that key investors were unhappy with the company’s strategy and burn rate.

Non-profit RIP Medical Debt, which purchases discounted patient-owed medical debt and pays it off, will work with RCM software vendor FinThrive to use social determinants of health to identify patients whose debt meets the company’s criteria for payoff.

Sales

• Bethany Children’s Health Center (OK) will implement Meditech Expanse using the Meditech as a Service platform.
• Parkview Health will offer Epic-based virtual urgent care from KeyCare.

People

Jeff Cutler (Ada Health) joins Validic as chief commercial officer.

Adam Seyb (Janus Health) joins ProRank as CEO. 

Announcements and Implementations

GoodRx announces a real-time benefit check for Provider Mode, which gives prescribers access to a patient’s insurance coverage and drug cost.

NeuroFlow announces a tech-enabled approach to psychiatric collaborative care (CoCM) that combines the company’s AI-driven analytics, care collaboration enablement, and enterprise consumer-grade activation for its health system users.

Government and Politics

CMS asks states to review the results of their computer-assisted Medicaid eligibility determination after identifying a software error that incorrectly flags children to be dropped automatically if their family fails to respond or is found to be ineligible.

Privacy and Security

The FBI and its partners shut down the Qakbot bot that was used to perform several recent cyberattacks on US hospitals. The FBI penetrated the system, found that 700,000 systems were compromised globally, and then set up a redirect function to forward incoming traffic to an uninstaller program.

Systems at Singing River Health System (MS) remain down following an August 20 cyberattack.

In Europe, a privacy watchdog sues Google-owned Fitbit in multiple countries for exporting user data outside the EU in violation of GDPR. The suits say that Fitbit includes data-sharing consent in its user agreement, but doesn’t specify how the data will be used and doesn’t give paid users a way to opt out.

A law firm reminds Florida healthcare providers — hospitals, nursing homes, labs, pharmacies, and mental health providers — that a new state law requires them to verify that their EHR data is physically stored in the continental US, US territories, or Canada. The firm says that that the law does not limit the ability of people outside the country to access patient information, but it does specify where the information must be physically stored, whether by the provider itself or third-party vendors.

Other

UNC gastroenterologist, vice chair, and professor of medicine Spencer Dorn, MD, MPH, MHA – who humorously says on his LinkedIn that “I literally work in the belly of the healthcare beast,” lists how managing the physician EHR inbox violates productivity principles:

• Messages arrive all day long and lead the physician reader down rabbit holes, conflicting with the day’s planned activities.
• High-value task prioritization gives way to having to read each message to determine its importance.
• Inbox noise creates distraction.
• Efficiency is sapped by multitasking, as the average PCP switches their attention to the inbox 80 times per day.
• Cognitive load is increased by context-switching among screens and windows.
• Message burden forces managing the inbox evenings and weekends when the physician’s energy and attention are lower.
• Solutions include redesigning the inbox itself, using AI to help manage messages, and provider organizations reducing the number of messages and delegating more of them to non-physicians.

One commenter on the inbox article above mentioned that EHR inboxes could be designing similarly to the Spark email client, which PC Magazine says is a lot cleaner and easier than Gmail, which keeps cramming in non-email features like to-do lists and meeting scheduling. Spark’s $60-per-year individual plan includes offers grouping and prioritization, “send later” and reminders, natural language email search, and an AI-powered email summarization and creation assistant. The team version adds collaboration functions. Twobird offers similar functionality for free.

Epic notes that all of the people who provide services to support its just-concluded UGM – including golf cart tour guides and A/V techs — are its own employees. The company ordered a record-breaking 9,000 doughnuts from a Madison doughnut shop for them.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks offers a new customer success story, “Boosting Patient Satisfaction with Healow Secure Text.”
• First Databank releases a new Faces of Digital Health Podcast, “Bringing EPrescribing to the Next Level: To Patients.”
• Fortified Health Security names Lee Tomlin security analyst.
• Keysight enhances its Eggplant automated software test solution to enable multi-platform mobile app testing.
• Lucem Health releases a new This Week in Clinical AI Podcast.

Blog Posts

• Delivering the Right Information at the Right Time for Optimized Health Outcomes (Availity)
• Pharmacists can increase patient trust through aligned content (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Lifting Up Patrons: How We Partner with Libraries (Findhelp)
• Five9 Advances to Platform Tier in ServiceNow’s Build Partner Program (Five9)
• Help Desk Updates: Your Super Weapon to Boost Clinician Productivity (HCTec)
• Community Partnerships: Empowering People Through Health Education (Healthwise)
• Building Community: Patient Engagement Solutions for Hometown Providers (Medhost)

Contacts

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