Going to ask again about HealWell - they are on an acquisition tear and seem to be very AI-focused. Has…
News 12/22/23
Top News
Medical genetics company Invitae divests its Ciitizen patient-controlled health data business to that company’s leadership team and a group of investors who will operate it as an independent company. Terms were not disclosed.
The divestiture is part of an Invitae cost-cutting effort, which includes a 15% headcount reduction, following a $1.3 billion loss in the first three quarters of 2023.
Invitae bought Ciitizen in September 2021 for $325 million. NVTA shares have lost 98% of their value in the past three years. They are down 63% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $192 million.
Reader Comments
From Cernam: “Re: Oracle Health. GM Travis Dalton is leaving the company.” Unverified, but reported by several employees on social media.
From MD L: “Re: primary care training. It might be better for specialists to go straight into specialist training. Does an endocrinologist or cardiologist really need a full internal medicine residency before specializing? The hardest, least-appreciated, and most-important hallmark of a well-trained physician is the ability to think critically, synthesize disparate information, and eliminate the red herrings. You learn it by seeing patients under appropriate supervision. Students who are in abbreviated MD programs have trouble with this since they start clinical rotations without a good knowledge base. The idea that you can look up what you need is bogus – you need to know what you’re looking for and then understand it. Another concern I have about shortened medical training is that mine involved thinking for ourselves much earlier, where as a student I was doing medical and surgical procedures that are done by senior residents now, and by my second week of internship, I was the only ‘psychiatrist’ in the building at night for the unit and ED, where now attendings are in house 24×7 to see patients and sign them out. This is like kind of knowing a foreign language and trying out your skills with a native speaker who takes over the conversation at the first sign of struggle. For these reasons, I would be concerned about shortening training.”
From Data Holmes, PhD: “Re: AI-driven CDS. This JAMA paper disputes the idea that clinical decision support and AI don’t need to be all that accurate since doctors are making the final decision. That makes me nervous because I think people can turn their brains off too easily and place too much trust in the computer.” Researchers found that clinicians who are analyzing medical images get a slight bump in diagnostic accuracy with AI’s help as long as the AI wasn’t confused by the presence of case-irrelevant information. However, their diagnosis accuracy dropped by 11% when they used AI models that are systemically biased (meaning that the model used irrelevant information). The most important finding is that doctors didn’t read the explanation where the model showed its faulty work, so they assumed that the model’s conclusion was sound. An accompanying opinion piece concludes that the use of AI, even when limited to assistive purposes, should be evaluated before rolling it out widely.
From Jabroni: “Re: HIMSS24. Looks like they have removed the exhibitor count after you reported a rather low number.” That appears to be the case. I’m not interested enough to display the exhibitor list and count them manually.
From Glytec Employee: “Re: Glytec. The insulin titration software company is in turmoil with the departure of its CEO, CEO, CMO, and other leaders. The company is being run by investors and two-thirds of the staff have been laid off after the company failed to get funding after a multi-million dollar offer in October 2022.” Unverified, other than the leadership changes. Of the 11 executives who were listed on its webpage in July 2023, five remain. The CEO and CFO started in October 2023.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
It is December 21 as I write this, the official beginning of winter and the day with the fewest hours of daylight. Happy Yalda Night — which anyone in the Northern Hemisphere can celebrate regardless of religious beliefs or human-drawn borders – or your choice of Christmas, Hanukkah, Three Kings Day, Advent, Kwanzaa, Las Posadas, or a belated Diwali or St. Nicholas Day (I learned about the latter from the Ukraine person I’m helping learn English over Skype). Hopefully the folks in Svalbard, Norway are in a festive mood during their polar night, where it stays dark from mid-November until the end of January (webcam here to prove it). Whatever you celebrate, even if it’s just another day above ground, enjoy.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Business Insider reports that Commure laid off staff in November shortly after its owner combined it with another of its holdings to create a $6 billion company. Commure (data exchange) and Athelas (revenue cycle management) said the combined companies would hire aggressively and even bring on health tech people who had been laid off elsewhere. Commure CEO Tanay Tandon, who came from the Athelas side of the combination, says the company will likely go public in the next two or three years.
Arcadia sells its MSO and value-based care service division to Guidehealth, which offers value-based care software.
People
Brian Bircher, MSEd (Tegria) joins DrFirst as VP of enterprise solutions.
Announcements and Implementations
Children’s Hospital of Orange County and Rady Children’s Hospital – San Diego sign an agreement to merge to form Rady Children’s Health. The name suggests the dominant party, although in a show of collegiality and bad business judgment, the CEOs of both hospitals will serve as co-CEOs of the new one, at least for a few months until it becomes clear – as it always does – that the buck (literally) can only stop with one person.
Government and Politics
England’s health and secondary care minister says that its newly contracted, Palantir-provided Federated Data Platform of shared patient data will be more secure than any NHS system. He adds that Palantir won’t be allowed to control or use the data and the system will use patient anonymization technology from IQvia, the Durham, NC-based pharma data vendor that was previously known as IMS Health and Quintiles.
Seattle Children’s Hospital sues the Texas attorney general for requesting documents related any gender transition care that it provided to Texas children, in which the AG cited a Texas consumer protection act. The hospital says that the AG lacks jurisdiction for the request, the hospital has no ties to Texas, and that Washington providers are protected by state law from being required to provide information about gender-affirming care from states that restrict or criminalize the practice. The AG’s demand included all prescriptions, diagnoses, lab tests, and protocols that involve Texas children. The hospital also provided affidavits from its IT directors that its email and EHR servers are based in Seattle.
Privacy and Security
First responder software vendor ESO Solutions notifies 2.7 million people that their information – which ESO obtains from the healthcare organizations that use its software — was accessed by ransomware hackers in late September.
Drug chain Rite Aid settles FTC charges that it unfairly used facial recognition surveillance systems to subject shoppers to unreasonable searches and humiliation. FTC says Rite Aid scanned the faces of customers who entered its stores and matched them against a database of confirmed and suspected shoplifters to trigger closer observation. FTC says the system often mismatched images due to low quality CCTV and cell phone originals. Rite Aid says it only used the technology in a limited pilot project that it ended three years ago. Customer theft or “shrink” is starting to kill off self check-out and the displaying high-theft items on unlocked shelves, so maybe our societal dishonesty will lead us back to the days of Service Merchandise and its “pay first, then wait for your order at the conveyor belt” approach.
Liberty Hospital (MO) transfers some patients to other hospitals as it deals with an unspecified IT event that occurred Tuesday. A local TV station obtained a message that was sent to the hospital by an apparent hacker who gave the hospital 72 hours to pay an unspecified ransom.
Other
An NBC News investigation titled “Vital Signs vs. Dollar Signs” looks at HCA’s use of telemetry technicians who remotely monitor the vital signs of hospitalized patients. They found that the techs are assigned up to 80 patients, monitoring systems have gone down for as long as 26 hours, tech communication with nurses on the floor is slow or erratic, and monitoring stations are sometimes unstaffed due to scheduling problems or staff breaks.
A hospital patient is shot in the butt by a pistol that she had smuggled into her MRI exam after denying that she was packing any metal objects that the machine’s magnet would affect. The bullet did little damage, unlike the example from Brazil earlier this year in which a gun advocate who was undergoing an MRI hid a pistol in his waistband that went off during his procedure and killed him.
Sponsor Updates
- EClinicalWorks releases a new set of podcasts focusing on “Transforming Patient Care with EClinicalWorks and Healow.”
- Symplr congratulates nearly 20 customers on achieving the highest status on CHIME’s 2023 Digital Health Most Wired list.
- Meditech announces its commitment to the HHS/ONC Cancer Moonshot initiative.
- Nym achieves excellent customer satisfaction scores for the second consecutive year.
- Verato earns HITRUST certification for information security.
Blog Posts
- Review, Revise, Resolve – A look at the 2024 updates for CPT (Wolters Kluwer Health)
- 5 Truths About AI-Driven Software Testing (Keysight)
- 40 Years of Community: A Retrospective (Medhost)
- Watch Meditech customers share how they are driving transformational change (Meditech)
- Reducing clinicians’ cognitive load to focus on their well-being (Nuance)
- 12 Ways to Keep Your Spirit Merry and Bright This Holiday Season (Netsmart)
- How a Pediatric Health System Leverages Technology to Combat Claim Denials (Vyne Medical)
- 20 years of Medicare Advantage with MA author Tom Scully on Diagnosing Healthtech (Redox)
- The Care Transition: A Crucial Time for Patient Safety (Surescripts)
- Reflecting on Trualta’s Transformative 2023 (Trualta)
- Revenue cycle 101: What is denial management in healthcare? (Waystar)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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MD L has some interesting things to say. The problem is that they are contradicted by his first two sentences. Internal medicine subspecialties still involve the rest of the body, and there are general medicine things you simply must know….
I have three clinicians in my life, a research MD, a fourth year looking for residency placement, and a PA candidate. The research MD took an interesting path in that her college and medical school were combined so her BS came with her MD (six years total), then she had residency, fellowship, fellowship, fellowship and a PhD stint — a lot of school and training. The fourth year has her BS, Post Grad and four years in US med school — followed by three years of residency and a fellowship to get to her desired practice.
The PA candidate will start in the fall, and be done in three years — 3 years to BS, plus three years of PA school — a total of six years to practice, probably in ED.
I don’t know which is better, but maybe we could look at the German or Japanese model of training clinicians. We should also be looking at the cost of schools, as well as the income of some specialties. I wouldn’t mind more reciprocity in license recognition either. Is a German or British trained doctor really not sufficient to be a US doctor, or is a Canadian doctors training any better than a Japanese doctor? Once the knowledge and training levels are established (and tested) I think that should more ability to exchange countries of practice.
My comment concerns Higher Education generally, and thus includes Clinical Education peripherally.
I have never seen an industrial sector more in need of global reforms, than Higher Education. The system is ingrown, smug, and entitled. It perpetually resists even simple improvements that would be cheap and easy to implement.
The cost of tuition has risen above the rate of inflation, for many decades. Education is becoming unaffordable for average, middle class citizens. Is this really the system we want?
I could go on, but this should give a taste of what is wrong.
The sad part is, I am a huge believer in education. It disturbs me more than I can say, that Higher Education is failing to adapt to the needs of those who would seek that education.
Interesting that Children’s Hospital of Orange County and Rady Children’s Hospital for Rady Children’s Health. I’m sure on the to-do list will be to replace the Children’s of Orange County’s Cerner EHR with Rady’s Epic EHR. Makes sense. As the saying goes, another one bites the dust!
re: Seattle Children’s Hospital sues the Texas attorney general. What’s going to happen to large west coast systems like Providence that have operations in Texas that the Texas AG could conceivably go after for caring for Texas citizens in the non-TX facilities? I could see other red states with draconian laws impacting women’s health are watching this as well – Kaiser doing business in Idaho comes to mind.Both those systems currently provide services and prescription drugs that are outlawed in those states beyond care for transgender children.