News 9/6/23

Top News

UPMC will replace Oracle Health / Cerner and eight other EHRs with Epic. Implementation in the 40-hospital system will begin in Q4 and be completed by mid-2026.

UPMC was already using Epic in some areas, notably for ambulatory services.

Reader Comments

From SPAC Cadet: “Re: HIStalk. Have you thought about taking it public via a SPAC? Everybody is doing it!” Everybody was indeed doing it until the government cracked down on unproven companies that could not have passed the scrutiny involved in an actual IPO and instead “merged,” which left them free to pump shares via media promotion. Nothing says USA like celebrities, grifters, and the ever-present money people collaborating to pick the pockets of the little guy. SPAC king Chamath Palihapitiya used Twitter and CNBC shilling to earn himself a billion dollars in fees while shares in his average SPAC company were tanking 90%. His Clover Health, which he bragged was a surefire 10x win over 10 years, started trading at a $7 billion valuation that is now down to $650 million, so the 10x is looking accurate though directionally incorrect.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Health IT people may be professionally embarrassed by being the last holdout of fax machines, but most poll respondents wouldn’t walk out on a practice upon seeing one at the check-in desk (I purposely described it that way to indicate the presence of the lowest form of faxing, as opposed to the slightly sexier digital fax). One commenter astutely noted that not seeing a fax machine out front just means that they are using e-fax or have placed the machine out of sight. Another said it’s a lot more offensive shove a multi-page paper form at patients for whom the information is already in the clinic’s EHR. Bethany notes that even all-digital clinics needs a fax machine because they can’t receive referrals from other practices that insist on using them.

New poll to your right or here: Were you laid off, terminated, demoted, or forced to relocate so far in 2023?

Lorre always offers incentives for new sponsors to sign up in the last quarter when leftover marketing budgets need a home, so contact her to get on board.

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

Private equity firm Thoma Bravo is reportedly in advanced stages of negotiation to acquire NextGen Healthcare.

The CEOs of Walgreens and Amazon-owned One Medical resign. The latter is less surprising since the CEOs of Amazon’s acquisitions rarely stick around beyond the kick-in of their golden parachutes, while the former looks like impatience that the ambitious plans to turn Walgreens into a a full-service healthcare provider via acquisitions involves too much risk and time.

Mercy Iowa City files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing the poor implementation of a new Allscripts EHR in 2022 that has since contributed to problems with coding, billing, and collecting for $189 million in patient services. The hospital has filed a lawsuit against Allscripts, now known as Altera Digital Health, to which it still owes $1.8 million. It is considering a “below-market” acquisition offer of $20 million from the University of Iowa, the value of which has left some bondholders seeking an official investigation into the hospital’s downfall.

Patient engagement technology vendor TeleVox acquires the Odeza patient engagement business of RCM company Ensemble Health Partners.

Sales

• Tennessee’s TennCare Medicaid agency will use Findhelp’s social services assessment and Closed Loop Referral System as a part of its Health Starts initiative.
• Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System will use Masimo’s remote patient monitoring hardware and software across its 10 hospitals in Louisiana and Mississippi.
• Blackrock Health Group in Ireland will implement Meditech Expanse at an additional three clinics as part of a three-year, $27 million digital transformation program.

People

Prairie Lakes Healthcare System hires Tim Pugsley, MBA (Mankato Clinic) as CIO.

The National Library of Medicine announces the retirement of Director Patti Brennan, RN, MSN, PhD on September 30. She is an informatics nurse and earned a PhD in industrial engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Government and Politics

Air Force doctors say in a town hall meeting in Japan that DoD’s Oracle Health system — whose final go-lives are in the Indo-Pacific bases — is better than its predecessor, but has a quirk in which the records of children aged 13-17 won’t be available online and the children themselves can’t create a patient portal account until they reach 18.

The US Air Force Research Laboratory says that several military medic groups are interested in the EHR smartphone app that it created in 2019. The Battlefield Assisted Trauma Distributed Observation Kit (BATDOK) captures medical documentation at the point of injury and during transport

Privacy and Security

Carthage Area Hospital in New York gets phone systems up and running as it recovers from a cyberattack discovered last Thursday. The breach also impacted nearby Claxton Hepburn Medical Center, though its phone lines were not affected.

Other

A former physician employee of Babylon, who left the company six years ago after just 12 months, describes what it was like to work at “the most expensive failed experiment on digitizing primary care to date”:

• He was shown the company’s “groundbreaking AI system” that was just some Excel worksheets containing decision trees that had been written by junior doctors. Attempts to improve the system failed.
• Employed clinicians were told to assign the probabilities of various combinations of diseases and symptoms, leading to illogical questions such as the likelihood that someone with abdominal pain has allergies.
• The company’s chatbot didn’t work and didn’t earn FDA approval.
• Babylon claimed that its product’s performance was better than that of doctors, then backtracked on that claim when doctors cut ties with the company.
• The company hired “slimy sales people” to push deals that almost always ended up failing, pushing whatever AI craze was making headlines, such as facial recognition and voice-to-text.
• The GP at Hand telehealth service was convenient for patients, but the service was not cost effective and its expense damaged the NHS services it replaced.

Sponsor Updates

• Wolters Kluwer Health announces that its drug diversion monitoring software received exceptional recognition from KLAS in its Drug Diversion Monitoring 2023 report.
• A new KLAS white paper shows that Nordic has one of the industry’s most robust selections of services aimed at streamlining the EHR experience.
• Ronin publishes a new white paper, “Clinician Experience: The Missing Link Between High-Efficiency and High-Tech Healthcare.”
• KLAS recognizes Vyne Medical in its latest Advanced User Insights report on next-generation digital fax management.
• The SaaS Fuel podcast features Zen Healthcare IT President Marilee Benson in “SaaS Founder Insights.”

Blog Posts

• How Meditech’s Critical Care solution can elevate your organization (Meditech)
• 5 Benefits of Offering Digital MSK at Your Outpatient Rehab Therapy Practice (Net Health)
• Speech recognition adoption made simple with Dragon Medical One (Nuance)
• Extreme Usability II: Enhancing the Client Experience (Netsmart)
• Automation in Revenue Cycle Management: Healthcare Providers Share Their Experiences with Autonomous Medical Coding (Nym Health)
• How to Reach the CMDB Summit (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Real Results from RCxRules Users (RCxRules)
• Message Queue Service Oils the Engine Driving E-Prescriptions (Surescripts)
• How to Empower Family Caregivers During Hospital Discharge (Trualta)

Contacts

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