News 11/10/23

Top News

Indian Health Service chooses General Dynamics Information Technology and Oracle Health for its new EHR, which will replace its VistA-based RPMS.

The 10-year contract is valued at up to $2.5 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: London-based all-female Hawxx, whose chaotic, cathartic punk-tinged alt-metal music addresses themes such as mental health struggles, societal norms regarding appearance and femininity, and why metal needs marginalized voices on stage and in the audience. The music is loud but smart, sometimes resembling Rage Against the Machine and at other times Nightwish. 

Webinars

November 16 (Thursday) 1 ET. “How Scheduling Helped Streamline Memorial Hermann’s Communication.” Sponsor: PerfectServe. Presenter: Amee Amin, MD, hospitalist, Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. Dr. Amin will discuss the challenges she experienced in creating schedules for her team of hospitalists, and how an optimized solution transformed her workflow. Attendees will learn now TMC gleans crucial data and analytics from their scheduling system, the impact of real-time schedules being pushed out to other applications, and how Lightning Bolt’s optimized, auto-generated schedules improve provider satisfaction and work-life balance.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Amazon launches One Medical for Prime, which offers access to its One Medical primary care business for $99 per year, which covers all virtual care visits. It offers little benefit for in-person primary care visits at the 24 One Medical locations since those will continue to be billed to insurance or as out-of-pocket costs. Non-Prime members can continue to sign up for $199 per person for an annual membership, so the Prime offer is really just a $100 annual discount. This would be a good time to remind folks of the difference between direct primary care (you pay your doctor a flat monthly fee that includes most services, easy access, and no use of insurance) versus concierge medicine (you pay to skip the line to see doctors who still bill your insurance or you personally at their usual rates). I have the former and question the value of the latter.

Eleos Health, which offers behavioral healthcare providers AI-powered clinical documentation and insights software, raises $40 million in a Series B funding round.

Former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg and other high-profile investors launch Cercle, whose platform organizes unstructured medical data into a standard format to help clinicians develop personalized treatment plans for women’s health, especially fertility care.

CPSI announces Q3 results: revenue flat, EPS –$0.24 versus $0.15, beating earnings expectations but falling short on revenue. CPSI shares have lost 52% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 29% gain, valuing the company at $164 million.

Sales

• Delaware Department of Health and Social Services chooses Findhelp to help residents find substance use disorder and mental health services.
• Resilience Healthcare will implement Altera Digital Health’s Paragon EHR and its Ventus contract management, compliance, and coding solutions.
• Mass General Brigham chooses Best Buy Health to support its hospital at home program with its Current Health care-at-home platform, coordination services, and personal emergency response solutions. 

People

Jeff Park (WellDyneRx) joins Waltz Health as president.

Announcements and Implementations

Enterprise Health announces the Wellby AI assistant to its occupational and employee health solutions, providing clinicians with a concise medical records summary, preparation of standard referral and return-to-work letters, and a proposed care plan based on encounter details.

Health system owned Truveta announces availability of 57 million clinical observations from 2.7 million ECG reports and 1.7 million de-identified patients

KLAS takes its first look at Epic Payer Platform, which extracts clinical data from providers and sends it to payers, finding that all six interviewed customers are satisfied and would buy the solution again.

Privacy and Security

US Radiology pays $450,000 to settle New York State charges that outdated computer hardware allowed a ransomware attack that exposed the information of 92,000 state residents.

Cook County Health notifies 1.2 million patients that their information was compromised in a data theft incident involving its transcription vendor Perry Johnson & Associates. The health system has terminated its relationship with the company.

Five Ontario hospitals whose IT shared services organization was taken offline in a ransomware attack on October 23 say they won’t have systems fully restored until late December. The hospital declined to pay the ransom demanded by the hackers, who have been publishing their patient data online.

Sponsor Updates

• Fortified Health Security and Nordic sponsor Valley Presbyterian Hospital’s golf tournament.
• Inovalon expands its Schedule Management software to include management of third-party agency staff.
• Ampla Health (CA) optimizes operational workflows using EClinicalWorks V12.
• Everbridge secures a new patient in the field of AI, relevant to technology used in analytics dashboards for critical event management software.
• Medical history platform vendor Hona will use Particle Health’s API for medical record retrieval outside of the provider’s EHR.
• First Databank names Andrew Anderson integration specialist, Sarah Callis technical writer, and Pranav Acharya advanced software engineer.
• Clinical Architecture publishes a new episode of its “The Informonster” podcast titled “Documentation in the OR with AORN.”
• Ushur’s Customer Experience Automation solution is listed on the Five9 CX Marketplace.

Blog Posts

• Understanding Nurse-to-Patient Ratios and How They Affect Quality of Care (SnapCare)
• Visage Soars with CloudPACS at RSNA 2023 (Visage Imaging)
• Embracing Technology for Startup Weight Loss and Medical Spa Clinics (EClinicalWorks)
• Addressing Medicare Bad Debt Reimbursement Issues in Healthcare (FinThrive)
• EHR Essentials: 5 Proven Steps for a Successful Epic Implementation (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Considering Cashless Check-Ins for Your Front Desk? (Impact Advisors)
• Can Software Testing Deliver ROI? (Keysight Technologies)
• What to Ask When Choosing a Healthcare Interoperability Partner (Medhost)
• Giving nurses a voice in EHR launch at Boone Health (Meditech)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.