News 3/6/24

Top News

Cybersecurity analysts surmise from underground forum chatter and evidence of a Bitcoin deposit that Change Healthcare may have paid a $24 million ransom to the BlackCat ransomware group on March 1.

They also point out that the ransomware group has made a remarkable comeback, given that the FBI took down its dark websites and issued decryption keys to victims last December.

HHS says that it has made clear that Change Healthcare owner UnitedHealth Group needs to do everything it can to ensure provider continuity of operations. It says it “is taking direct action” to support providers who are experiencing cash flow problems as a result of the downtime, including accelerated payments on a case-by-case basis.

HHS lists flexibilities that include help in switching claims clearinghouses; encouraging Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, and CHIP organizations to remove or relax prior authorization; and reminding Medicare Administrative Contractors that they must process paper claims from providers who need to file them.

Practice owner Christine Meyer, MD has provided commendable visibility into the outage’s provider impact:

• Optum claimed it would offer provider loans for 80% of historical claim submissions, but her practice was offered just $4,000 per month, or less than 1%.
• Banks are cold-calling to offer large lines of credit that include “ridiculous terms and strings.”
• Three RCM companies have offered to “take the pressure off” for fees ranging from 7% to 10%.
• One offered a not-free trial of an AI tool.
• A VC she had previously declined to sell her practice to is trying again.
• Asked if she would decline to accept UnitedHealth Group patients, she says she would consider it, but doesn’t want to abandon patients based on their insurer.

Reader Comments

From Mambo: “Re: Change Healthcare breach. Not widely reported is that healthcare entities have an obligation to inform patients of a breach, but have little idea how to determine which patients may have had data compromised. No one is sure where the line is.”

From HITGirl: “Re: Nuance. A bunch of layoffs today.” Unverified, but parent company Microsoft has been cutting headcount in some areas.

From HIMSS Question: “Re: HIMSS. How does it handle ethical breaches on their Davies awards? Do they have a way to report an ethical breach? Have any previous Davies award winners had to return their award due to fraud, lies, or fake data or reporting fake data? Anything similar for presenters at the HIMSS conference?”

Webinars

March 7 (Thursday) 1 ET. “Live Q&A: Waystar leaders answer provider questions on implementation, solutions + more” (this session will focus on ambulatory and other providers – a session specific to hospitals and health systems will be offered at 3 ET). Sponsor: Waystar. Presenters: Chris Schremser, CTO, Waystar; Laura Canzano, EVP provider and partner client experience, Waystar. Waystar leaders will explore how our secure, mission-critical software yields powerful results, like a 33% increase in staff productivity, while integrating with 530+ EHR/PM systems. We’ll talk through our smooth implementation process, which has earned us a 94% client satisfaction rate and a 74+ client NPS. And we’ll offer details about our hands-on support, which clients can reach in less than 11 seconds and which satisfies 96% of users. We’ll also explore how Waystar can accelerate implementation to alleviate disruption to your revenue cycle, all while helping you increase revenue and decrease manual efforts. For a limited time, Waystar is offering accelerated implementation for those experiencing disruptions due to data security.

March 27 (Wednesday) 3 ET. “Houston Methodist: Deploying clinical AI at scale for improved outcomes.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. Presenters: Khurram Nasir, MD, MPH, chief of cardiovascular disease prevention and wellness, Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center; Brenda Campbell, RN, senior consultant, HM Health System Innovations; Nassib Chamoun, MS, founder and CEO, HDAI. The presenters  will share how an interdisciplinary team collaborated to successfully use predictive models and a novel AI-driven approach to address post-discharge mortality. They will also describe how they expanded use of the platform to reduce clinician time spent digging through the EHR with a one-page risk profile, including codes extracted from notes using generative AI, and targeting their highest risk patients for extra attention. They will speak to how they overcame barriers to bringing AI at scale to support clinicians across the care continuum.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Starfish Partners companies Direct Recruiters and Innova People will merge their healthcare and technology staffing divisions to create Innova Healthcare and Innova Tech staffing practices.

Kaiser Foundation Hospitals will lay off several dozen IT workers in California’s Bay Area, following a December 2023 layoff of 115 IT employees.

Scotland-based Craneware reports six-month results: revenue up 8% adjusted EPS $0.43 versus $0.41. CRW shares are up 37% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $740 million.

Oracle Health reportedly laid off some number of employees this week, with insiders listing scrum masters, project managers, developers, and testers as affected.

Sales

• Morehouse School of Medicine (GA) selects ThinkAndor AI-powered remote patient monitoring technology from Andor Health.
• WebMD Ignite will integrate First Databank’s Meducation personalized medication instruction software with its Krames on FHIR patient education technology for prescribers.
• Amwell adds Suki’s voice-enabled digital assistant technology to its Converge virtual care software.
• Millennium Physician Group will implement WellSky’s technology and clinical services to improve patient outcomes.
• Intermountain Health will use Memora Health’s intelligent care enablement platform to implement new care delivery programs, initially focusing on cancer care.

People

David Finn, MA (CHIME) joins First Health Advisory as EVP of governance, risk, and compliance.

Bardavon Health Innovations promotes Alex Benson, MPA to CEO.

Geisinger names Terry Gilliland, MD, MS (Cogitativo) as president of Geisinger Health and its next CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Christus Health (TX) implements Epic at six of its hospitals.

UVA Health Prince William Medical Center implements telehealth capabilities within its Level III NICU, enabling providers to virtually consult with pediatric specialists at UVA Health Children’s and families to stay connected with their newborns and care teams.

Orchid Wellness in Texas implements EHR, online appointment scheduling, and text-to-pay software from EClinicalWorks.

Government and Politics

A whistleblower lawsuit accuses primary care practice network Aledade of rigging its coding software to overbill Medicare by inflating diagnoses, such as coding anxiety as depression, to earn higher payments. The lawsuit claims that Medicare Advantage patients who were overweight were diagnosed with the higher-paying “morbid obesity” codes at 10 times the national average using coding guidance that was referred to as “Aledade gospel.” The suit was filed by Kushwinder Singh, MD, MHA, who served for a few months as a senior medical director for Aledade until he says the company fired him for raising fraud concerns. The investor-backed Aledade, which was recently valued at $3.5 billion, was co-founded in 2014 by former National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari, MD. Aledade EVP Mandy Cohen, MD, MPH left the company in last year after two years to become CDC director. The federal government has declined to join the case.

Lawmakers propose a fiscal year 2024 budget package that includes $1.3 billion for the VA’s continued rollout of its Oracle Health EHR, with a contingency that 25% of that funding be tied to transparency with Congress about efforts to address ongoing performance issues.

NASA’s Johnson Space Center issues an RFI for and EHR for its clinic, which serves astronaut, employees, and contractors. The clinic notes that its current EHR is housed on-premises and has significant dependencies on Microsoft BizTalk for interfacing.

The White House and the Biden Cancer Moonshot tout adoption of USCDI + Cancer to allow providers to share EHR information about cancer patients. Epic, Oracle, Ontada, Meditech, Flatiron, and ThymeCare have committed to adopting the core elements, while CVS Health and Athenahealth are working on it.

Privacy and Security

Lurie Children’s Hospital (IL) announces that it has restored its Epic EHR and other key systems. The hospital experienced a ransomware attack on January 31.

Other

Elliot Hospital (NH) launches a virtual ER service to help patients determine and receive an appropriate level of care and to alleviate capacity strain on its emergency room.

Guam Memorial Hospital Authority concludes that its clinicians have struggled to use its $5 million Medsphere CareVue EHR since it was purchased in October 2022 because the system was built for behavioral health rather than for use by acute care hospitals. GMH will issue an RFP for a replacement system that could cost $20 million to $60 million. 

Privacy advocates call for a review of Verilogue, a medical research firm that pays doctors to record conversations with their patients that de-identified and then provided to drug companies to fine tune drug marketing in working around clinician and patient objections. Verilogue, which is part of Publicis Groupe, paid doctors up to $2,500 per month to make the recordings with patient consent, and leaked records suggest that the company charged $135,000 for 50 visit recordings to drug companies that wanted to increase opioid sales.

Sponsor Updates

• TruBridge staff ring the Nasdaq opening bell in celebration of its corporate rebrand.
• Serviam Care Network will leverage Netsmart’s population health technology and expertise as part of its Higher Path Operating System for senior living operators.
• Leeds Teaching Hospital NHS Trust and Agfa HealthCare announce the launch of the real-world evaluation of Agfa’s Enterprise Imaging Rubee AI Package for Mammography.

Blog Posts

• Future-Proofing Healthcare: Long-Term Vision for EHR Optimization and Beyond (CereCore)
• Best Practices for Effective Patient Access Services (AGS Health)
• EHR usability: Critical failure in the industry, and the urgent need to respond (Altera Digital Health)
• How to balance high-quality care with rising costs (Arcadia)
• Working with LLMs Securely and Safely (Aridhia Informatics)
• From Crisis to Innovation: Unlocking the Path to True Digital Transformation (Divurgent)
• Prisma AI: Pioneering Value-based Care Through Advanced Interoperability (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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