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Monday Morning Update 6/10/24
Top News
An internal VA report finds that less than 20% of its Oracle Health users believe that the system helps them deliver high-quality care and just 13% believe that it helps keep their patients safe.
The survey of 2,000 VA users was conducted in March and April by KLAS, which told VA officials that their scores were the worst they have ever seen.
The Bloomberg article also notes that while Oracle is touting the DoD’s implementation, it fared only slightly better, with 30% of its surveyed users saying that the system helps them deliver high-quality care.
Another VA report says that while it hopes to raise user satisfaction scores to be comparable with those in non-VA hospitals, the $16 billion Oracle Health system – which has gone live in just six VA facilities since its first in October 2020 — may never reach the satisfaction levels of the VA’s homegrown VistA product.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
The ratio of poll respondents who have a worsened opinion of Oracle Health compared to those with an improved opinion is 10 to 1.
New poll to your right or here: Do you agree with an Oracle exec’s claim that Epic’s Judy Faulkner is the biggest obstacle to interoperability? EVP Ken Glueck wrote that “everyone in the industry” understands that this is the case, so I’m interested in the poll results and any comments you would care to add.
I’ll soon announce new sponsors who responded to my suggestion to wangle some freebies out of Lorre during the usual slow summer. She is also reaching out to a few companies that we had to cancel after they went radio silent due to staff changes or other internal disarray. Note: the only thing you can buy from me is a sponsorship — I don’t sell video interviews or sponsored content, although marketing people seem shocked to hear that since many sites do.
Webinars
June 26 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Population Risk Management in Action: Automating Clinical Workflows to Improve Medication Adherence.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst; Weston Blakeslee, PhD, VP of population health, DrFirst. What if you could measure and manage medication adherence in a way that would eliminate the burdens of medication history collection, patient identification, and prioritization? The presenters will describe how to use MedHx PRM’s new capabilities to harness the most complete medication history data on the market, benefit from near real-time medication data delivered within 24 hours, automatically build rosters of eligible patients, and identify gaps of care in seconds.
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, and Stock
Waystar raises $968 million in its IPO, which values the company at $3.7 billion. Nasdaq-traded WAY shares opened Friday morning at $21.50 and closed at $20.70. Waystar lost $50 million in each of the past two years.
OHSU will lay off at least 500 of its 21,000 employees. The health system is pursuing an acquisition of Legacy Health, touting its own financial strength and its intention to use $1 billion in bond offerings over 10 years to improve infrastructure.
People
Specialty EHR/PM vendor Nextech hires Rusty Frantz, MS (NextGen Healthcare) as CEO.
Announcements and Implementations
Mount Sinai Health System wins the 2024 Hearst Health Prize for its NutriScan AI application that identifies malnutrition in hospitalized patients by analyzing EHR data.
A McKinsey survey finds that most health system executives see digital transformation as a high, but underfunded, priority. They named virtual health and digital front doors as potentially offering the biggest benefit. Top challenges are the limitations of their legacy systems, lack of budget, and workforce readiness. Satisfaction with digital investments is high, but the self-assessed lack of rollout progress leads McKinsey to question whether they are scaling their digital programs effectively.
Government and Politics
The VA completes its rollout of VA Health Chat in all VISNs, offering VA health services by chat as powered by CirrusMD.
Idaho ends its contract with the Idaho Health Data Exchange, citing its lack of financial transparency and previous bankruptcy. State watchdogs found that the non-profit had spent $94 million, most of it from federal grants, but the state’s creation of it as a private, non-profit corporation allowed it to operate with minimal state oversight.
Privacy and Security
Ascension’s cybersecurity event update indicates that it has restored EHR access to six of its markets and remains on track to complete all of them by June 14. It warns patients that their patient portal may not show medical record data after May 8 – the date its systems went offline – since the information that was collected on paper must now be entered into the EHR.
Sponsor Updates
- Healthcare IT Leaders staff stock shelves and help shoppers at The Our Neighbors’ Table Market in Amesbury, MA.
- Visage Imaging will exhibit at the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM 2024) Annual Meeting in National Harbor, MD, June 27-29.
- CereCore publishes the latest edition of its “Partnership Perspectives” digital magazine.
- Wolters Kluwer Health partners with the Black Nurse Collaborative to increase focus on improving advocacy for underrepresented groups in nursing.
- Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast titled “Interview with Kit Delgado, MD.”
- Redox publishes a new case study, “Ambience Healthcare selects Redox to integrate their AI Operating System – reducing clinician documentation time by 80%.”
- Rhapsody publishes a case study, “OU Health standardizes on Epic & Corepoint Integration Engine amidst M&A activity.”
- RLDatix launches the RLDatix Safety Institute to research safety design and care delivery risk reduction best practices.
- Sectra launches a new diagnostic IT module for genomics within molecular pathology, developed in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Health System.
- Surescripts publishes the “QHIN Use Case Guide: 17 Clinical & Business Scenarios.”
- Tegria will present at the International Performance Management Institute Healthcare IT Institute June 10 in Orlando.
Blog Posts
- How to Think About Healthcare Data During AI Integration Planning (CereCore)
- Integrated Care: Uniting Physical and Behavioral Health with One Vision (Netsmart)
- From burnout to balance: The untapped power of medical assistants in healthcare (Nordic)
- How GenAI is Humanizing the Healthcare Employee Experience (Optimum Healthcare IT)
- 4 Best Smartphones for Nurse Communication (PerfectServe)
- Credentialing in Healthcare: Understanding the History, Hurdles, and Opportunities (QGenda)
- Empowering Healthcare IT Leaders in the Tech-Driven Staffing Landscape (Revuud)
- Transforming Specialty Medication Access: Spotlight on Allergy, Oncology, and Dermatology (RxLightning)
- Leadership Spotlight: Meghan Seus, Vice President of Product Management (Sonifi Health)
- How to Address Social Determinants of Health Factors Impacting Patient Payment Experience (TrustCommerce)
- Proof in the Pudding: More Pharmacists are Prescribing (Surescripts)
- Leadership Insights to Inspire Teams & Drive Innovation (Symplr)
- Innovating Rural Healthcare: Insights from the 2024 TruBridge National Customer Conference (TruBridge)
- Breast cancer screenings have been dialed back to age 40; plan ahead to tackle emerging care gaps (Upfront Healthcare)
- Need to improve revenue capture? Start with charge capture + DRG accuracy (Waystar)
- AI and Healthcare Data Interoperability: Opportunities and Challenges Ahead (Zen Healthcare IT)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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I don’t know how you’re going to get a survey worth anything at all with a readership so heavily dependent on Epic being successful and practically infallible.
That’s another underappreciated part of Epic’s brilliance. Health system executives have aligned interests to make it work — including to further their own careers —- and organizations have so much at stake that they wouldn’t be smart tangling with Epic given the lack of an alternative.
I think before we can really ask this question we need to decide on a definition for Interoperability nowadays. It seems like nowadays between CareEverywhere, Carequality, and CommonWell we do actually have something like a nationwide health information sharing network. Yeah, it may not share as much as we want, but it’s getting better, and I’m pretty sure Epic is leading the way in terms of the different types of information that can be shared across this network. To my understanding, this meets the definition of “interoperability” as many understood it ~20 years ago, and I’m pretty sure all of the lobbying and such that gave Epic such a bad name in the area was focused on this definition.
Of course, time has marched on, and now so much of the Interoperability discussion seems to be about whether 3rd party apps or add-ons can work directly with the EHR, as everyone and their mother wants to strap an LLM onto the dataset. There definitely is a lot of talk about Epic’s walled garden making it difficult for these apps to connect, and I’m sure it’s not a cakewalk; however, you can also find plenty of commenters mentioning that they had just as much (or more) trouble connecting to a Oracle Cerner deployment. If Epic were the biggest problem, you shouldn’t be encountering so many anonymous complaints like that.
In the end, I think declaring Judy the #1 roadblock is an unhelpful statement that was only served up as a potential distraction to the repeating punches Oracle is taking in the press. They should focus on getting their own house in order and then maybe propose a national schema or two that would address whatever they then Epic is blocking. A vague complaint helps no one.
I’m not sure it could have gone otherwise, for a nationwide health information sharing network.
My experience has been, if you create the conceptually perfect massive system? It takes too long. Bystanders complain that they weren’t consulted (which can be true and helpful, true and unhelpful, false but it flags some not-PC actions, etc.). Also, if you present a massive, conceptually perfect plan? You often get reflexive resistance due to NIH syndrome, suspicion over the principles and their motives, and on it goes.
What I’m saying is, de-facto information sharing systems and standards might have been the ONLY practical way of achieving information sharing at a national level.
Corrrection: *principals*
Oops!