Thanks, appreciate these insights. I've been contemplating VA's Oracle / Cerner implementation and wondered if implementing the same systems across…
News 1/17/24
Top News
Apple will remove pulse oximetry technology from its Watch to avoid the possibility of having the product banned from importation into the US if Apple loses a pending patent appeal.
The US International Trade Commission ruled in late December that the technology, which is included in the Series 9 and Ultra 2 models, infringes on the patents of medical device manufacturer Masimo. The ban was temporarily paused when Apple appealed the ruling, allowing sales of the Watch to be restarted.
Bloomberg says that Apple has already shipped modified watches to the company’s retail stores, but has yet to approve their sale. Apple has not announced any plans about previously sold Watches that contain the pulse oximetry feature or whether it will be disabled via an update.
Reader Comments
From RIP Cerner: “Re: Oracle Health. Rumor is that former CMS Administrator Seema Verma will replace the departing Travis Dalton as GM/SVP of Oracle Health. She joined Oracle last year as head of Life Sciences and will reportedly add Oracle Health to her responsibilities, reporting to EVP Mike Sicilia.” Unverified, but rumored internally. She raised a lot of controversy during her CMS years, especially related to her taxpayer-funded personal self-promotion.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Listening: Jimmy Fallon, who I can’t stand to watch in his late-night hosting job, but who is amazing beyond belief in his dead-on (no pun intended) impersonation of Jim Morrison and the Doors doing “Reading Rainbow.” I’ve listened to a lot of Doors and he is spot on in capturing style and stage mannerisms of Mr. Mojo Risin’ (minus the indecent exposure). The faux Densmore, Manzarek, and Krieger aren’t actually playing – The Roots are skillfully channeling 1967. I’m sure that Fallon’s celebrity fawning and self-aware attempts at cleverness pay better than fronting a Doors tribute band, but I would vastly prefer watching the latter.
Webinars
January 19 (Friday) 1 ET. “Unlocking Reliable Clinical Data: Real-World Success Stories.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Alistair Erskine, MD, MBA, CIO/CDO, Emory Healthcare; Jason Hill, MD, MMM, associate CMIO, Ochsner Health; Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst. Health system leaders will describe how they are empowering clinicians with reliable patient data while minimizing workflow friction within Epic. They will offer real-world experience and tips on how to deliver the best possible medication history data to clinicians at the point of care, use clinical-grade AI to infer and normalize prescription instructions in Epic, and encourage patient adherence to medication therapies for optimal outcomes.
January 24 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Medication Management Redefined.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Nick Barger, PharmD, VP of product, DrFirst; Caleb Dunn, PharmD, MS, senior product manager, DrFirst. Clinical workflow experts will paint a reimagined vision for e-prescribing that offers enhanced patient adherence, customizable clinical support, intelligent pharmacy logic, and data integrity and safety. Join this first chapter of an ongoing conversation about what medication management should be, how to deliver greater benefits today, and how to prepare for the future. Elevating your solution and customer benefits isn’t as hard, scary, or economically challenging as you may think.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
98point6 acquires Bright.md’s 17 telehealth customers and hires six of its employees. 98point6 announced last year that it would pivot from being a virtual care provider to offering technology, after which it sold off its chatbot, self-insured employer business, and physician group to Transcarent for $100 million. Bright.md, meanwhile, sold its asynchronous virtual care technology to Cigna’s Evernorth Health Services subsidiary last October.
Healthcare analytics vendor Innovaccer acquires Cured, which offers healthcare digital marketing software. Cured’s three co-founders started their careers with Epic.
Per diem staffing provider Aya Healthcare acquires UK-based workforce solutions provider ID Medical, which will make Aya’s platform available to NHS and UK-based clinicians.
Sales
- Bluewater Health in Ontario will replace its Meditech system with Oracle Health by the end of this year. The health system made a similar announcement in 2019, along with several other local hospitals that went on to adopt the then-Cerner software.
People
Sarah Bennight (Carenet Health) joins IKS Health as SVP of marketing.
NCQA names Tricia Elliott, DHA, MBA (Northwestern Medicine) VP of quality implementation within its quality measurement and research group.
Announcements and Implementations
Capital Region Medical Center (MO) will adopt Oracle Health as a part of its now-finalized integration with MU Health Care.
Midwest Cardiovascular Institute (IL) will implement real-time monitoring, AI-powered diagnostics, and other digital health technologies from Livemed Telehealth.
Baptist Memorial Health Care (MS) finalizes its acquisition of Anderson Regional Health System, which will share Baptist’s Epic system.
Luminis Health (MD) rolls out Teladoc Health virtual nursing technology across its acute care hospitals.
Essentia Health-Mid Dakota Clinics in North Dakota will go live on Epic this month.
Hackensack Meridian Health (NJ) implements Volpara Health’s breast cancer risk assessment and clinical decision support software.
In Canada, Quebec’s implementation of Epic will cost $1.1 billion USD if it is approved for full implementations, with the first go-live expected at the end of 2025. Epic would replace the Quebec Health Record, whose completion ran 10 years late and triple the original budget at $1.3 billion USD. Quebec chose Epic over the other finalist Cerner in September 2023, estimating the project’s cost at up to $2.2 billion.
In vitro diagnostics vendor BioMérieux will acquire Lumed, which offers antibiotic and infection monitoring software to hospitals.
Privacy and Security
A radiology practice in Sydney, Australia, tells patients that a November data breach was caused by an unspecified IT issue, all the while dealing with harassing phone calls and texts from the breach’s perpetrators.
Liberty Hospital in Missouri declares it has “significantly recovered” from a December 19 cyberattack that forced it to temporarily divert ambulances and revert to downtime procedures for several weeks.
Other
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem presents Avel ECare physician Katie DeJong, DO and Casie Hunter, RN along with EMT Ed Konechne with the Governor’s Award for Heroism for their roles in saving the life of a rancher who was critically injured in a bison attack. Konechne used the state-funded ambulance telehealth system to get ED physician instructions from DeJong, who was 140 miles away, and to then alert the hospital that they were en route.
Sponsor Updates
- Bamboo Health will exhibit at the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association Annual Meeting January 25-26 in Boston.
- CereCore honors innovation and collaboration amongst its employees at its annual Connection event.
- Nordic publishes a new episode of its “Designing for Health” podcast titled “Interview with David Butler, MD.”
- Divurgent releases a new episode of The Vurge Podcast, “Change Champions with Amy Horner: Strategies, Leadership, and Personal Growth.”
Blog Posts
- How healthcare will evolve in the next decade (Arcadia)
- Enablement of hospital-based precision dosing with the DRE (Aridhia)
- Meet the Clinician – Calvin Janney (Ascom)
- The Future of Healthcare: AI in Prior Authorizations (Availity)
- The Privacy Impact Assessment: Identifying and Minimizing Risks of PII Exposure (Clearwater)
- CloudWave’s 2024 Predictions Part 2: How AI Will Transform Healthcare in 2024 (And What CIOs Must Do to Prepare) (CloudWave)
- Hospital Finance Predictions for 2024 (Dimensional Insight)
- How Clinical-Grade AI Streamlines Healthcare Workflows (DrFirst)
- Start the Year Off Right: Strategies for Enhancing Revenue Cycle Performance (Vyne Medical)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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Contact us.
RE Seema rumors…I really feel badly for Cerner team members and customers.
Seema was introducing herself as the head of Oracle Health at JPM last week. I have no doubt the taxpayer-funded self-promotion and Oracle-branded word salad about AI will continue. So will the client transitions to Epic.
I dealt with the Cerner Expense Trolls for six years. Seema’s first expense report should be a hoot.
Re: Proposed Quebec Epic Implementation
Pure speculation here. But there’s a pattern present, and politics will have it’s say.
The DSN is supposed to replace the Quebec Health Record. The Quebec Health Record was WAY over time and budget, as was SAGIR, SAAQclic, RENIR, and possibly others too.
Indeed, the Quebec Health Record was only finished in 2021. OK, so here’s my speculation.
What if, the Quebec Health Record was not actually ‘finished’, it was just declared so? And the DSN is being pursued, as the solution to unfinished business? Maybe the Quebec MoH is sick of massive project overruns?
Even governments eventually get tarred over repeated failures. Again, pure speculation on this. But to have the Quebec Health Record so recently finished, then a complete replacement queued up before the proverbial paint is even dry?
It’s suspicious. Quebec OUTGHT to have a 20 year run, reaping the rewards of a late but ultimately successful Quebec Health Record. Instead, they seem to be running away from that system.