News 6/5/24

Top News

Ascension says in a June 4 cyberattack update that it has restored EHR access in its Florida, Alabama, and Austin markets. It hopes to use that experience to make the EHR available to the entire organization by next Friday, June 14.

The health system adds that its retail pharmacy, home delivery, and specialty pharmacy sites have reopened and can once again receive prescriptions electronically.

Ascension’s systems have been offline for four weeks.

Ascension warns that remediation of its other systems is ongoing and will require time to complete.

Reader Comments

From Janky: “Re: conferences. How do companies justify the ROI of exhibiting? It’s not like every exhibitor goes home with a fistful of hot leads or commitments for on-site follow-up.” I don’t run conferences, but I’ll describe how I position the value of sponsoring my site that goes beyond lead generation or immediate pipeline building.

• Everything a company does, including making sales, happens because someone has heard of them, probably repeatedly. One-shot exposure, regardless of the medium, will rarely be enough to seal a deal.
• Exposure isn’t just to prospects, but also potential partners, acquirers, acquisition targets, investors, executive hires, and consultants who may influence prospects. Most of the sponsors I lose is because a company — very often another of my sponsors –buys them.
• Our industry has quite a few competitive niches with specific audiences, and conferences and sponsorships will probably reach some who are outside traditional marketing channels.
• Prospects often make buying decisions based on an early recommendation by a non-C level employee who tips their boss off to a possible solution to their specific problems. You can’t just cold call C-level employees hoping for magic. Don’t ignore the influence that is wielded by attendees and readers who are at the mid-executive level or who are clinicians.
• It’s impossible to tell which kind of exposure, and to which people, will provide a pathway to success until after the fact.
• My conclusion is that companies that expect dramatic, short-term, easily-measurable ROI from conference participation or being a sponsor will do a one-and-done because they don’t see that result. Those who see it as patiently building a foundation and making industry connections in often intangible ways will end up reaping the benefit over the longer term.

Webinars

June 6 (Thursday) noon ET. “From Data to Decisions: The Vital Combination of AI and Human Expertise in Patient Care.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: David Wetherhold, MD, CMIO of ambulatory systems, Scripps Health; Dana Darger, RPh, director of pharmacy, Monument Health Rapid City Hospital; Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst. In this Epic Med Management Fireside Chat, two health system leaders will share real-world examples of how AI is working in concert with their clinicians to streamline medication management by populating medication histories into Epic. generating initial drafts of patient conversations, and summarizing complex information. The presenters will also cover the latest developments on the critical and expanding role of pharmacists in patient care.

June 27 (Thursday) noon ET. “Snackable Summer Series, Session 1: The Intelligent Health Record.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. This webinar will describe how HealthVision, HDAI’s Intelligent Health Management System, is transforming care across health systems and value-based care organizations. This 30-minute session will answer the question: what if you could see critical information from hundreds of EHR pages in a one-page patient chart and risk summary that serves the entire care team? We will tour the Spotlight, an easy-to-digest health profile and risk prediction tool. Session 2 will describe HDAI’s Intelligent Analytics solution, while Session 3 will tour HDAI’s Intelligent Workflow solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business & Stock

Waste Management will acquire Stericycle for $7.2 billion. Stericycle specializes in medical waste disposal, compliance training, and secure information destruction. It sold off its patient engagement solutions business to Carenet Health in 2022. I remember the Stericycle team always having fun, candy-filled booths during the heyday of HIMSS.

UPMC acquires Washington Health System (PA), which includes two hospitals and 18 practices. Washington Health will presumably move its Veradigm inpatient and EClinicalWorks outpatient EHRs to UPMC’s new Epic system.

Healthcare workflow automation software startup Keragon launches with $3 million in funding. The company specializes in using AI to synchronize patient data across different apps in real time.

Sword Health, which offers AI-powered digital support solutions for issues related to musculoskeletal problems, physical therapy, and pelvic therapy, raises $130 million in financing that increases its valuation to $3 billion. The company also announces a conversational AI tool called Phoenix that conducts natural conversations with patients, provides them with verbal feedback, and summarizes their performance for their clinician.

Sales

• Visage Imaging signs new customers Consulting Radiology, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, Moffitt Cancer Center, and US Radiology Specialists.
• WellSpan Health (PA) will enhance primary care delivery with wraparound behavioral healthcare services and technology from Concert Health.
• Johns Hopkins Health Plans launches a multi-payer portal powered by Availity Essentials to help providers manage benefits, claims, and authorizations.

People

Adam Hameed, MBA (GrandPad) joins Glooko as president of connected care.

Baptist Health South Florida promotes Sha Edathumparampil to chief digital and information officer.

Eagle Telemedicine names Kat Thousand, RN, MHA (Envision Healthcare) VP of clinical services.

Sherman Sanchez, MHA (BN Consulting) joins Dina as president.

SSM Health (IL) hires Saad Chaudhry, MPP, MS (Luminis Health) as chief digital officer.

Health Recovery Solutions promotes Jason Comer, JD to CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

A new KLAS report finds that the move to the cloud for image viewing and/or storage is happening quickly, with Visage Imaging and Sectra generating both high customer confidence and market interest. Customer perception of Intelerad’s cloud strategy is mixed, while users of GE HealthCare question its ability to execute. Visage Imaging, Agfa HealthCare, and Sectra top the list in “confidence in vendor’s strategy for imaging in the cloud.” The biggest concerns about moving to the cloud are cost, privacy and security, the bandwidth and infrastructure that are required, and system performance.

Privacy and Security

Several London hospitals declare a critical incident and cancel procedures due to a ransomware attack on pathology services vendor Synnovis. The company is a partnership between Synlab UK and Ireland, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

A judge rules that CMS inappropriately lowered the 2024 Medicare Advantage star ratings of SCAN Health Plan, which cost the plan hundreds of millions of dollars in reduced federal bonuses. As a result, the government will pay SCAN $250 million, which is likely to encourage other MA plans to seek a recalculation of their bonuses. Experts say that the star system doesn’t accurately reflect quality of care.

Sponsor Updates

• Groups of Availity HR staff work with Challenges Inc. to build and personalize wagons for Nemours Children’s Hospital and Ronald McDonald House Charities.
• Wolters Kluwer Health will offer ConsortiEX’s Assure-Trak IV Workflow Management in its Simplify+ compounding compliance suite.
• Healthcare Growth Partners launches HGP Health IT Momentum Index, which offers a real-time view into health IT M&A, investment value, and valuations.
• Visage Imaging’s Director of Customer Experience Steve Deaton participates in a new video titled “The Imaging Wire Show: Throwing Out the Imaging Playbook with Apple Vision Pro.”
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a new case study titled “EMR Test Management at Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare.”
• Get-to-Market Health founder Steve Shihadeh joins Penn Presbyterian Medical Center’s board of trustees.
• Loyal announces that its consumer health platform is now available on the Oracle Healthcare Marketplace.
• Business Awards UK recognizes Altera Digital Health UK with its IT Product of the Year Award for its Sunrise solution.
• Arcadia publishes a new guide, “3 solutions to master data management.”
• Arrive Health publishes a new whitepaper, “The Crushing Weight of Prior Authorization and What You Can Do About It.”
• AvaSure will integrate CLEW’s advanced clinical surveillance solutions with its virtual care platform.
• Biofourmis will present at the Hospital @ Home Leadership Summit June 5 in Boston.
• Cardamom Health CEO Vivek Swaminathan celebrates the launch of the Wisconsin Investment Fund, a VC initiative that will initially invest $100 million in startups throughout the state.
• Clinical Architecture partners with Ready Computing to offer healthcare organizations an industry-leading solution to consolidate, manage, and improve the quality of clinical data at scale.
• DrFirst announces that its AI-powered SmartRenewal solution earned high ratings from customers in KLAS Research’s latest First Look report.

Black Book announces the 2024 awards for the highest user experience and customer satisfaction in health plan technology and outsourcing, recognizing the following HIStalk sponsors:

• Symplr – end-to-end provider data management and credentialing solutions.
• Inovalon – payer cloud platform.
• Surescripts – payer member safety, PBM, and pharmacy solutions.
• Availity – clearinghouse alternative solutions.

Blog Posts

• MIPS Improvement Activities: What qualifies as a high-weight activity? (AdvancedMD)
• Agfa HealthCare: Leading the Way in Healthcare Innovation at SIIM 2024 (Agfa HealthCare)
• Building Your Digital Workforce: Launching and Sustaining Your Intelligent Automation Journey (AGS Health)
• Budget-friendly ways to improve your cybersecurity (Altera Digital Health)
• What you should know about SDoH and SOGI, the data sources shaping health equity (Arcadia)
• The Impact of Prior Authorizations on Patient Care (Availity)
• Managed Services: A Scalable Solution for Community Connect Support (Cardamom Health)
• Burnout Buster: Prioritizing the “People Piece” During an EHR Replacement (CereCore)
• Capture More Revenue and Save Resources with Artera’s New Intake and Payments Solution (Artera)
• Compliance Matters: User Access Monitoring – 5 Things You May Not Be Thinking About (Clearwater)
• Cybersecurity in Healthcare: Why Response and Recovery Matter (Divurgent)

Sponsor Spotlight

Revuud has launched a new AI matching functionality designed to revolutionize talent acquisition. This advanced matching algorithm swiftly sifts through talent profiles, pinpointing candidates whose skills, experiences, and preferences perfectly align with job requirements. By leveraging continuous learning from user interactions, feedback, and successful matches, the system refines its capabilities over time, delivering increasingly accurate and relevant results. This innovation promises significant time savings, expediting the hiring process by rapidly identifying the most suitable candidates.

Contacts

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