News 3/20/24

Top News

UnitedHealth Group reports in a March 18 status update that it has begun releasing medical claims preparation software as a part of Change Healthcare’s system restoration process. It expects the changes to be made available to “thousands of customers” over the next several days.

The company says it restored Change Healthcare’s electronic payments platform as scheduled on Friday and is proceeding with payer implementations.

UHG says it has advanced $2 billion in financial aid to cash-strapped providers who have been affected by the February 21 cyberattack.

Reader Comments

From Existential Dreadlocks: “Re: HIMSS. For the third year in a row, I have had several peers and clinical friends privately shame me for attending HIMSS and CHIME. Here are some of the emails and text. I never expected such reactions.” I’m wondering if others get comments like those that were sent to ED:

• You and your peers get to work remotely, seldom come to the hospital for meetings, and then find it OK to party while many of the hospital can barely make budget. You’re all out of touch with reality.
• We sent nobody this year. It sends the wrong message when the nurses see nothing but party pics and videos all lover social media. Insensitive. “Mad Men” lives on.
• Why are you still going to HIMSS? What is wrong with you? It is nothing but an excuse to mooch dinners off the vendors and party with hundreds of self-promoters. Loot at me. Look at me. Look at me.
• Bad idea. How do you reconcile attending the boondoggle when every week you see more hospitals failing? All the costs incurred by the vendors are being passed back to us. Not a good look.
• Nice to see your IT friends who never want to come into the office have no trouble hoping a plane to a conference.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Last chance: tell me anonymously what you thought of HIMSS24. Thanks to those who have sent me their impressions, which I’m pretty sure readers will find interesting when I recap them later this week.

Webinars

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

Nvidia invests an unspecified sum in conversational AI system vendor Abridge, which will expand its use of Nvidia’s technologies.

Hippocratic AI raises $53 million in a Series A funding round that values the company at $500 million. It also announced that it is performing safety testing of a healthcare staffing marketplace where AI software agents can be “hired” to perform non-diagnostic, patient-facing tasks.

Mayo Clinic Platform launches Solutions Studio to help digital health startups commercialize their software and services.

Augmedix announces Q4 results: revenue up 45%, EPS –$0.09 versus –$0.15, beating Wall Street expectations for both. AUGX shares rose 15% on the news and are up 137% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $190 million.

Patient intake software vendor Phreesia announces Q4 results: revenue up 23%, EPS –$0.56 versus –$0.72, beating expectations for both. PHR shares are down 25% in the past 12 months versus the S&P 500’s 28% gain, valuing the company at $1.3 billion. CEO Chaim Indig noted the company’s ongoing investment in security and compliance while referencing the Change Healthcare cyberattack:

There’s really no sugar coating that a major part of the healthcare infrastructure was attacked, and it’s pretty terrible.We’re doing everything we can to help our clients just collect dollars and making sure that they can they can keep running their businesses as they were. From what we can tell, almost all of them still are, although it’s really putting a strain on them …  we started moving to our backup and alternate clearinghouses to move the vast majority of our volume … this was a pretty big attack on the American healthcare infrastructure and IT. I think it’s pretty shitty.

Sales

• Texas based FQHC United Medical Centers chooses NextGen Healthcare’s EHR/PM.
• Banner Health will expand its use of Regard’s AI-driven EHR navigation and task automation system to all of its 33 hospitals in 2024.

People

Healthcare Triangle appoints Chief Revenue Officer Anand Kumar, MBA to the additional role of interim CEO.

Optimize Health promotes Ryan Clark to CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital implements AvaSure’s Continuous Video Monitoring System within its Community Living Center for nursing home care and hospice.

Sunoh.ai releases its medical AI scribe app for IOS and Android smartphones and IPads.

Regional Medical Associates (DE) adds Sunoh.ai medical scribe technology to its EClinicalWorks EHR.

DeKalb Regional Medical Center (AL) offers virtual neurology and stroke diagnosis consults with specialists at Erlanger Health (TN).

MyMichigan Medical Center Sault transitions from Meditech to Epic.

An excellent JAMA op-ed piece warns that “humans are terrible at vigilance” in questioning the expectation that clinicians will double-check the output of AI systems that is often correct and always authoritative, especially as organizations push higher productivity to pay for their AI investment. They offer options that have worked in other industries:

• Color-code AI output based on its own assessment of certainty and whether the specific patient is representative of the population that was used to train the model.
• Flag clinicians who accept AI-generated recommendations or text nearly 100% of the time in exhibiting automation bias.
• Reallocate any AI-created time savings to address burnout and increase empathy rather than raising throughput expectations.
• Program the AI system to deliver “deliberate shocks,” similar to TSA airport screening systems that randomly add an image of a firearm to keep operators vigilant.
• Use AI like an after-the-fact spell-checker whose job is to highlight to clinicians when its conclusions differ from theirs.

A new KLAS report on ambulatory EHR/PM mindshare finds that Epic, Athenahealth, and Oracle Health are the leaders, with Epic’s Community Connect system being chosen most often across all practice sizes due to interoperability with hospitals and cost-effectiveness. Most often being considered for replacement are Greenway Health, Athenahealth, and NextGen Healthcare. (click graphic to enlarge)

Privacy and Security

Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago brings its MyChart patient portal back online after a ransomware attack took it and other systems offline six weeks ago.

Other

A Waystar survey of executives from 36 large health systems finds that while 73% work with four or more different RCM software vendors, adoption of end-to-end RCM platforms has increased significantly. All end-to-end technology adopters are already experiencing an ROI, or expect to within one to two years.

A UCLA study finds that sending influenza vaccine reminder messages to patients, using either patient portals or texting, did not improve vaccination rates.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “Boosting Data Analysis in Healthcare.”
• Arcadia leverages Vim’s middleware platform to better enable healthcare organizations to install and reliably operate Arcadia’s Desktop and Inform solutions.
• Altera publishes “Building Success: Grand Lake Health System’s Journey with Sunrise EHR and Altera.”
• Agfa HealthCare receives Censinet’s Cybersecurity Transparent Leader Award for the fourth consecutive year.

Blog Posts

• CIOs Rank Top Healthcare IT Priorities and Pressures for 2024 (Part 1) (CereCore)
• Interoperability in Healthcare: Why It Matters (AdvancedMD)
• Five Steps to an Effective Physician Query Process (AGS Health)
• Announcing Paragon Denali: A true cloud-native SaaS EHR (Altera Digital Health)
• 5 Takeaways from the New York Care Coordination Summit (CarePort Health)
• Unique Risks in Managed Care Compliance (Clearwater)
• Total Experience Strategies for Improving Burnout and Patient Care (Divurgent)
• Revolutionizing Work-Life Balance with a Smart AI-Driven EHR (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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