Going to ask again about HealWell - they are on an acquisition tear and seem to be very AI-focused. Has…
News 1/24/24
Top News
Top researchers at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, including its CEO and COO, are accused of falsifying published research articles by Photoshopping scientific graphics.
Research integrity experts identified 57 studies that appear to have been manipulated, with the organization acknowledging 37 of them and moving to retract six of those studies.
Some journals are using AI tools that can identify image tampering, which is apparently common among researchers.
Reader Comments
From Summa Cum Lotta: “Re: Summa. I am surprised how loss-making hospitals with high debt are still making huge investments in technology. How long would it have taken money-losing Summa to break even on an $850 million implementation of Epic? Executives making such decisions should be let go.” The cost seemed high to me, even though I got that number directly from Summa’s website in a transcript of an interview with the CIO and CMIO. Replaying the audio, CIO Elbridge Locklear, MBA actually said “eight fifty million dollars,” which sounds more like a verbal stumble rather than an odd way of intentionally saying “$850 million,” so I’m sure he misspoke. I went through Summa’s federal tax filings, which say they spent $50 million overall on the project. They paid Epic $12 million in 2022 versus paying their Epic host Mercy Health $13 million the year before, when they also paid Cerner $5 million. I’m surprised that Summa hasn’t corrected their own podcast transcription.
From GR_Buckeye: “Re: Epic. Has publicly published their Clarity data dictionary. Do you know why? They closely guard their IP and I can only assume that this was done as the result of some type of legal matter.” Epic published its EHI expert schema on its Open Epic interoperability information website. It was crawled by Internet Archive in February 2023, so it has apparently been there for some time.
From Watching Wins: “Re: learning from videos. You concluded that it shouldn’t be an either-or option between text and video since each have their audience. Why not use AI to create an HIStalk video of daily or weekly health tech news summary that you are already posting as text?” I could certainly do that pretty easily since I’ve researched available tools, but would anyone really watch or listen to a daily or weekly talking (AI) head video news digest?
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
A reminder to HIStalk sponsors: complete my information form for ViVE and/or HIMSS if you are participating and I’ll include you in my online guide
Dear everyone: please stop expressing your work history as “over” X years of experience. If you say “over eight,” then we know it’s not nine, and every person’s tenure is “over” the exact number, even if just by minutes. Trust me that nobody cares about your fractional years, but if your vanity requires, simply round up after the six-month mark to nine years. Related to that is expressing numbers in general — instead of “over 400 hospitals,” either give the actual number or just go with 400 since the distinction is not important.
Webinars
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
Healthcare pricing transparency company Turquoise Health raises $30 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total raised to $55 million since launching in 2021.
The annual health IT market review of Healthcare Growth Partners finds that:
- M&A and buyout deal volume returned to pre-COVID levels in 2023 from their low in Q4 2022.
- Although valuations did not catch up, EBITDA-based valuations have held steady throughout
- Investment activity continued to fall through 2023, dropping to $9 billion from its all-time high of $29 billion in 2021.
- HGP’s HIT Index gained 3% last year versus 25% for the S&P 500 and 45% for the Nasdaq.
- HIT Index stocks whose returns were worse than negative 60% for the year include Streamline Health, Invitae, Pear Therapeutics, GeneDx Holding, NantHealth, Bright Health Group, Cue Health, and UpHealth.
In Wisconsin’s Chippewa Valley, HSHS Sacred Heart, St. Joseph’s, and Prevea clinics will close, with HSHS blaming “a mismatch in the supply of and demand for local healthcare services” and its failure to find a partner.
Sales
- The CDC will use de-identified EHR data from health system collective Truveta for respiratory virus surveillance and research projects involving maternal and pediatric healthcare.
- South Carolina-based specialty pharmacy Palmetto Pharm selects Inovalon’s ScriptMed Specialty pharmacy management software.
- Innovaccer incorporates Wolters Kluwer Health’s Health Language terminology software into its data-based offerings.
People
Ryan Royal (Interviewstream) joins Upfront Healthcare as CTO.
Definitive Healthcare names founder, former CEO, and current Executive Chairman Jason Krantz, MBA as interim CEO upon the departure of Robert Musselwhite.
AMC Health names Zebadiah Kimmel, MD, MBA (Medically Home) chief product officer and promotes Jon Shankman, MBA, MPH to chief analytics officer.
Anatomy IT names Patrik Vagenius (Flywire) chief commercial officer.
Mount Sinai Health System (NY) names Bruce Darrow, MD, PhD interim chief digital and information officer upon the departure of Kristin Myers, MPH, who has joined Northwell Health (NY) as chief digital officer.
1upHealth hires Andrea Kowalski, MBA (Tebra) as chief product officer.
Kyruus hires Harshit Shah, MS (Spring Health) as CTO.
Announcements and Implementations
Amazon reportedly offers One Medical providers access to virtual consults with Amazon Pharmacy pharmacists as part of a pilot project geared towards improving outcomes for high-risk patients, particularly seniors.
The Liver Cancer Collaborative in Australia uses Aridhia’s Digital Research Environment technology to help researchers share data and collaborate on projects.
UCSD Health researchers find that a real-time alert that is powered by the Composer deep learning training library accurately predicted patient sepsis in the ED and reduced mortality significantly. The nursing alert was presented as an Epic Best Practice Advisory, but the authors note that the Epic’s own Sepsis Score has not demonstrated comparable results.
A new KLAS report finds that physician and nurse burnout has stabilized, but remain higher than pre-pandemic levels. Both groups suggest improving staffing and getting executives to listen to the concerns of clinicians and patients. Coming in at #3 for doctors is improving EHR efficiency, while for nurses, it is increasing pay.
Government and Politics
A federal appeals court upholds Martin Shkreli’s lifetime ban from the drug industry and a requirement that he pay $65 million in restitution. His company bought a decades-old drug for treating a rare condition, immediately raised the price 4,000%, and prevented other companies from obtaining samples of the drug that would have allowed them to sell generics. His lawyer had argued that while the “pharma bro” has since served prison time for financial crimes, those weren’t related to the drug industry, suggesting that the courts “should encourage real geniuses like Mr. Shkreli to work in the industry.” Shrekli responded via X that he is the only person in the US to ever be sued as a monopolist, says he followed the same playbook as AbbVie and many other drug manufacturers, and warned every executive that they can be held jointly and severally liable for antitrust actions that are levied against their companies.
Other
CMS reports that telehealth usage by Medicare users has dropped nearly back to pre-pandemic levels through mid-2023.
In Bangladesh, a private hospital director is arrested after demanding that parents of a newborn pay their $365 bill, and upon hearing that they didn’t have the money, sold the baby.
Sponsor Updates
- Pinnacle Family Care (NC) improves efficiency using the EClinicalWorks AI assistant for Prisma.
- Censinet releases a new Risk Never Sleeps Podcast, “Future-Forward Healthcare with Sherri Douville, CEO & Board, Medigram.”
- CloudWave will sponsor the MUSE Social (Southern California) Community Peer Group Event February 1 in Covina.
Blog Posts
- Understanding Prospective, Concurrent, and Retrospective Reviews (AGS Health)
- Data-driven tools and strategies for self-service healthcare analytics (Arcadia)
- Building a Greener Healthcare System with Data Analytics (Dimensional Insight)
- Bridging Healthcare Data Gaps with Clinical-Grade AI (DrFirst)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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Re: “[Shrekli] warned every executive that they can be held jointly and severally liable for antitrust actions that are levied against their companies.”
See, here’s the thing Martin. You say that like accountability is a bad thing.
Further, from the unnamed lawyer for Shkreli, “real geniuses like Mr. Shkreli…”.
Yes, a genius. A genius who went to jail, is universally reviled by everyone not cartoonishly evil, and now has a lifetime ban from the industry where all his experience applies. Who were your role models in life? Cruella deVille? The Marquis de Sade? Dr. Evil?
A little less “genius” from this man, please. In fact I’d vote for less of the man entirely.
Hey ! We still have the Shkreli Awards
https://lowninstitute.org/projects/shkreli-awards/
Some of the 2023 gems must be world records in greed, like #7:
“One patient received 41 stents during 44 heart catheterizations–including some stents placed inside existing stents that had become clogged with scar tissue.”
Truveta – now peddling data to the CDC, part of the Government that is supposed to protect our rights and data!?!? HIPAA Deidentification guidance is ridiculously out of date, especially with today’s AI/ML capabilities. Deidentified data was exposed before new capabilities existed. Everyone should have the option to OPT-OUT of having their data shared. It is unconscionable that this occurs today.
Re: the Epic Clarity data dictionary –
These tables are made available to support the ONC’s requirement for EHI export. All certified EHRs had to, by the end of last year, provide functionality that allows users to export the full scope of EHI for one or more patients. [1] This requirement was first established in the ONC’s Cures Act rule, which is the same rule that established the info blocking provisions. [2]
To be clear, though, what’s publicly available is not the full set of Clarity tables, just a subset that Epic has assessed falls under the scope of EHI. For example, you’ll notice that tables CLARITY_EAP, CLARITY_EAP_3, and CLARITY_EAP_5 are present, but #2 and #4 have apparently been skipped. And in certain tables that are available, not all available columns are shown.
References:
1. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-45/part-170#p-170.315(b)(10)
2. https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2020-07419/p-227 (mandated date was later pushed back due to the pandemic – see https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2020-24376/p-89)
Re: work history as “over” X years of experience
What if you’re trying to avoid ageism? Over 10 years experience can be interpreted differently than 34 years of experience.
It probably only gets to that point by omitting dates for education and jobs, and I expect that employers can read between the lines by what’s missing. If they can’t and they don’t want to hire older workers, they’ll find out soon enough in the interview and background verification anyway. But I think you are correct in not stating exact years, although I would skip the idea of experience entirely and talk about an accomplishments and business results instead of elapsed time.
I sometimes use the “over X years of experience”. My career is at the point where I have loads of experience and the fractions don’t matter. At all! And using the “over X years” phrasing saves me from needing to update these lines, which is just pointless busywork and introduces the possibility of errors. Errors on your resumé/work history are a far worse problem as they make you look unprofessional.
However I would not use “10+ years experience” when the real number was 34. I would use “30+ years experience”.
Ageism is definitely real in this industry (IT). Unfortunately there are numerous ways for a discriminatory employer to find this out and you are going to have to face the issue eventually. Therefore I don’t really believe that “over X years experience” is an effective defense against ageism. It might delay the problem a little but that’s about it.
I’m in my mid-thirties but still get mistaken for an intern, so I throw in phrases like “more than 10 years of X” when introducing myself to give people a clue. It’s an attempt to be breezy, though I can’t be sure if it reads that way.
Interesting how the media are saying CMS is reporting Medicare patient telehealth utilization is back to pre-pandemic levels.
I’m seeing two errors in that headline
First, the comparison is with Q1 of 2020 (when COVID had started… although things didn’t really shut down till March 14… but in those last 2 weeks- essentially all healthcare was online). I’d be a lot more interested if they showed average TH usage in 2019. My guess is that 2019 was likely under 1%, compared to the 7% they have for Q1, 2020.
Second, the Q1 usage was 7%, and the latest 2023 stats they showed was 13%… which is a 2X or 100% increase. How is that “nearly the same”?
I know Mr. HISTalk loves to jump on that type of sloppy statistic coverage!