Monday Morning Update 12/18/23

Top News

England’s Health Services Safety Investigations Body says that IT problems are among the most pressing in hospitals, noting that some of the reports it has reviewed involved patient deaths.

It gives examples of a patient who was found unresponsive and died being misidentified as DNR, a patient with cancer who died after IT problems prevented follow up, and a woman who died 18 days after she was given the wrong meds because of an electronic chart mix-up.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Few poll respondents have padded their resume with questionable recognition. After thinking about it, I am an outlier in viewing Chief membership as being in that category since its acceptance criteria involves the same items that already appear on resumes ((job title, reporting structure, and size of team managed). The only thing Chief membership proves is that your employer thinks highly enough of you to pay for vanity credential (only 30% of its members pay their own way and its unstated membership retention rate is reportedly unimpressive). It’s like buying the “certified CIO” credential in which applicants must already be a CIO, meaning the certification is pointless duplication unless employers are retaining dangerously unqualified CIOs and need them to pass a test to prove otherwise.

New poll to your right or here: What will Oracle Health look like in five years? Perhaps nuanced options exist, but basically Oracle will either still own the business (making it either better or worse over time) or it will sell or close it. Industry precedent is that the acquirer’s brash gate-crashing usually gives way to its embarrassing lack of healthcare knowledge, and after a few years of corporate incompetence and impatience, the business is sold entirely or piecemeal once enough time has passed to be able to blame the previous regime. I’m thinking Misys, Sage, GE Healthcare, Siemens, IBM, and even Microsoft and Google as as examples of companies whose desperation to prop up slowing growth illustrated Mike Tyson’s point that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.

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For your winter holiday reading pleasure, kindly refer back to 2022’s “Netflix and Reed Hastings: Ghost of Christmas Past,” a Readers Write by Chuck Dickens. Also, remember to stock up on pomegranates for Thursday night’s Yalda celebration, which I’m designating as the official winter holiday of HIStalk since it doesn’t exclude anyone. I’m not a Festivus guy since I’m also not a “Seinfeld” guy and thus haven’t seen that episode, but it’s apparently equally inclusive in its celebration on December 23.  

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Weight loss app vendor Noom, which labels itself as “the leading digital healthcare company helping people live longer, better lives,” replaces much if its C-suite following its hiring of a new CEO in July 2023. The company is pivoting into GLP-1 weight loss and selling services to employers.

Healthcare payment integrity solution vendor Trend Health Partners acquires Advent Health Partners, which offers technology for reviewing medical records for revenue cycle processes.

Certainly Health, which runs an online marketplace for booking medical and cosmetic procedures with guaranteed out-of-pocket pricing, raises $2.3 million in funding.

Medical University of South Carolina profiles the success of QuicksortRX, which was founded as an internal project by a MUSC network engineer and one of its pharmacists to bring drug pricing transparency to hospital pharmacies. The founders licensed the system from MUSC for commercialization and have sold it to 25 health system customers so far. The company is hiring around 40 new employees.

A former burn center director sues HCA for firing her after she notified her supervisors that 90 trauma nurses who were working in a newly opened burn unit were not named in state filings as required because they hadn’t earned the required credentials. Previous media investigations found that HCA sometimes charge fees in the tens of thousands of dollars for trauma center visits, making trauma care an important revenue center that encourages hospitals to seek Level 1 trauma center status. The lawsuit also claims that HCA was attempting a hostile takeover of profitable private burn centers by hiring their employees.

Sales

• NHS Services Scotland will implement Sectra’s cloud-based enterprise imaging solution.

Announcements and Implementations

Researchers find that the UK ranks 21st of 38 countries in key patient safety indicators, suggesting that thousands of patients die unnecessarily each year, but at least they finished well ahead of the US, which places 33rd in beating only Latvia, Costa Rica, Turkey, Colombia, and Mexico.

Government and Politics

Patients file a federal lawsuit that challenges New Jersey’s return to pre-COVID telehealth restrictions, noting that 10% of interstate telehealth visits involve cancer care. The plaintiffs say that they were denied follow-up care from their doctors in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania when New Jersey reinstated its rule that telehealth doctors who provide services to state residents must be licensed in New Jersey. At least 30 states either ban or restrict telehealth sessions with out-of-state doctors. The law firm also notes with wry cynicism the exception that exists for the doctors of sports teams, who are allowed to treat the athletes across state lines via in-person or telehealth consultations without licensure concerns. Utah also has an interesting exception in that doctors in any state can practice telehealth on its residents as long as they don’t charge them.

Other

A patient dies at HCA Florida Bayonet Point Hospital when a remote monitoring technician calls a code blue due to a displaced sensor, but responders couldn’t find the patient because an incorrect room number had been entered into its computer system. A state investigation found that the hospital was understaffed and failed to conduct remote vital signs monitoring appropriately. The review also noted that another patient was transferred for remote monitoring but wasn’t hooked up to the equipment until seven hours later. HCA responded to the findings by saying that it had replaced the CEO and chief medical and nursing officers.

The Seattle paper predicts that nurse shortages will worsen as 10,000 internationally hired nurses can’t enter the country because of delays and caps in obtaining a US visa. Green card processing takes several years even for employer-sponsored applicants and costs start at $10,000 before adding transportation and housing expenses. Sanford Health is waiting for the 160 nurses it has hired to enter the country, but has had to use travel nurses at triple the usual hourly wage due to the immigration delays. The health system is also running virtual sitting solutions and using AI to predict staffing needs.

Politico observes that mining companies offer their employees good health insurance that they then lose when mines close. Local hospitals and other providers thrive during mining boom times to the point that they may turn away people with lower-paying insurance such as Medicare and Medicaid, forcing them to travel long distances to receive care if they lose their mining jobs. The article observes that Williamson Memorial Hospital in the “heart of the billion-dollar coalfields” of southern West Virginia made major expansions in the mid-1990s as a medical showcase, but closed – along with most of the previously thriving town – when the mines closed, leaving locals with little access to care.

Sponsor Updates

• The National Health Insurance Authority in the Bahamas reports a significant uptick in cancer screenings since the implementation of its EClinicalWorks EHR and associated population health tools.
• Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Lalita Abhyankar, MD.”
• Waystar publishes a new e-book, “A 4-step plan for denial prevention.”

Blog Posts

• A Look at HITRUST Version 11: Everything You Need to Know (Clearwater)
• How Emory Healthcare Built an Integrated Behavioral Health Program From the Ground Up (NeuroFlow)
• How to build an AI-powered digital front door (Notable Health)
• The Importance of Program Management When Moving Your EHR to the Cloud (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• 2024 Outlook: The Future of Healthcare IT (Pivot Point Consulting)
• The Digital Front Door: Obstacles, strategies, and better patient access with Dr. Namrata Rastogi on Diagnosing Healthtech (Redox)
• The Vital Role of Patient Engagement in Specialty Medication Enrollment (RxLightning)
• How digital transformation impacts care team collaboration (Spok)
• Myth Busters: Pharmacists as Clinical Care Providers, Part 2 (Surescripts)
• Top 4 Quality Areas to Improve Health Outcomes in 2024 (Symplr)

Contacts

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