News 6/26/24

Top News

HHS releases a final rule that establishes “disincentives” for healthcare providers who are found by HHS OIG to have committed information blocking. It will take effect 30 days after it is published in the Federal Register.

Hospitals will be penalized via the Medicare Promoting Interoperability Program, MIPS-eligible clinicians will sit out a calendar year, and ACOs who participate in the Medicare Shared Savings Program will be made ineligible for at least one year. Health IT developers, HIEs, and health information networks can be penalized up to $1 million per occurrence, as previously announced.

OIG will use four priorities for enforcement: the potential to cause patient harm, the potential to impact a provider’s ability to care for patients, issues of longstanding duration, and practices that have caused financial loss to federal healthcare programs.

HHS plans to eventually impose disincentives on all healthcare providers rather than just those who provide services under Medicare. It also says that other agencies could establish their own disincentives.

Reader Comments

From Troy: “Re: UAB Birmingham. Reportedly purchased all five Ascension hospitals in the Birmingham area.” Verified following board approval Tuesday. UAB Health System will pay $450 million for five-hospital Ascension St. Vincent’s, whose flagship is 400-bed St. Vincent’s Hospital. The health system has 5,000 employees.

From Thusly Honored: “Re: CIO Times Magazine. I COULD be an important person if I just paid a nominal fee of $1,800.” The India-based magazine – one of several that focus on specific verticals — is selling a spot among “Top 5 HealthTech Leaders Moving Towards Bright Future,” whose odd wording confirms authorship by non-native speakers. The $1,800 deal offers a profile write-up, advertising, and “collaboration” in publishing press releases and guest articles (honestly, this isn’t all that different from my pay-for-play competitors who will run just about any interview, guest post, or company puff piece once the check clears). Respectable companies surely don’t want their names involved, so most “winners” are one-person companies like real estate agents, consulting firms, personal coaches, and self-proclaimed spiritual leaders. The healthcare list publishes in July, when I’ll be like a viewer of “To Catch a Predator” to see which industry blowhards get caught paying to have their vanity stroked.

From AT: “Re: ‘Death of a Salesman.’ Your thoughts on the future of sales as a profession, both for health IT and at large.” It’s natural that you would ask me given my experience in sales (zero) and my occasional contempt for the process (glad-handing hired guns with limited product knowledge who will push iron for whoever pays the highest commission). Still, I begrudgingly acknowledge that “nothing happens until someone sells something” and that prospects often need prodding and education to reach a purchase decision that might be in their organization’s best interest. My conclusions, which could use some help from people who actually know sales:

• Every company will continue to need salespeople, probably even more of them, and people who excel at selling will never be unemployed. AI is not a threat.
• Unlike many professions, everyone in a company knows who the best salespeople are. They often are the best at building relationships that span employers.
• Automation, analytics, and AI won’t make mid-pack salespeople automatically better, but they will amplify the effectiveness of the best salespeople by letting them focus on relationships and help them identify the prospects that are most likely to buy.
• Remote and virtual selling are newly valued competencies, especially for lower-margin products or those that can be explained in a straightforward way.
• Getting people to sign on the line which is dotted remains the highest-valued skill in most companies.
• Maybe the biggest question is how prospects will do research (AI, the recommendations of colleagues, etc.), whether products offer demonstrable ROI that support sales, and whether the role of sales-killers (often the prospect’s IT department or CFO) is changing.
• If sales were easy, companies wouldn’t hire the best people to do it.

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

EVisit acquires inpatient tele-consult technology that was developed by UPMC Enterprises and secures investments from UPMC and MedStar Health (MD).

Health and social care navigation software vendor Pear Suite receives $1 million in funding.

University Hospitals (OH) will eliminate 300 non-clinical positions and reorganize its leadership structure in an effort to overcome financial challenges. It attributes its nearly half billion dollars in operating losses over the last two years to inflation, rising employee costs, and expenses associated with its Epic implementation last fall.

Sales

• Watertown Regional Medical Center (WI) will implement MSK-related care protocols, analytics, and patient engagement software from Healthcare Outcomes Performance Company.
• Unity Health in Toronto will go live on Epic in November.
• A health system in Ohio will roll out Augmedix’s Go ED generative AI clinical documentation technology with help from Emergency Services Inc.
• Children’s National Hospital expands its use of Laudio for prioritizing and automating the key responsibilities of frontline leaders.
• Preferred Management Corporation will deploy Meditech Expanse via the Meditech as a Service platform to its seven hospitals and nine clinics in Texas.

People

Optimum Healthcare IT names Rick Shepardson (Clearsense) EVP of enterprise application services.

Antonio Cueto, MBA, LLM, MS (Eden Health) joins Capital Rx as CFO.

Valley Health System (NJ) hires K. Nadeem Ahmed, MD (The Aga Khan University) as CMIO.

Firasat Hussain (Arrivia) joins SnapCare as CTO.

John Evans (Evergreen Health Partners) joins Sutter Health as VP of digital care.

Michael O’Toole, MS (Nordic Global) joins Coker as SVP.

Announcements and Implementations

Researchers publish their lessons learned about using patient-generated data to fuel clinical decision support, which they conclude isn’t as easy as it sounds and requires new policies processes, technologies, and expertise.

FinThrive announces GA of Standby Claims and Standby Eligibility, backup solutions that are designed to help providers maintain financial stability during revenue cycle interruptions.

Regional HIE and health IT consulting firm Centralis Health uses Zen Healthcare IT’s Gemini Integration capabilities to connect to the EHealth Exchange network and Carequality framework.

FDA clears AliveCor’s AI-powered, single-cable ECG system that can detect 14 arrhythmias and 21 morphologies, including acute MI.

Orlando Health launches Arthur, a self-developed IPad app that allows non-verbal inpatients to communicate by typing or choosing graphics.

Oracle announces GA of the voice-first Oracle Clinical Digital Assistant for ambulatory clinics.

Government and Politics

A KFF Health News investigation finds that error-prone Medicaid eligibility systems that were developed by Deloitte have caused eligible people to be turned down. The company has been award eligibility systems contracts by 25 states that are worth at least $5 billion.

Privacy and Security

Greenwood Leflore Hospital and Sharkey Issaquena Community Hospital, both in Mississippi, will implement cybersecurity software from Microsoft through a recently announced White House initiative that offers rural hospitals cybersecurity resources at free and reduced rates.

Vikas Singla will serve two years of home detention after being found guilty of hacking into several Gwinnett Medical Center (GA) systems in 2018 in an effort to create business for Securolytics, where he was employed as COO. He has already paid $800,000 in restitution.

Sponsor Updates

• Consensus Cloud Solutions matches MUSE Inspire Conference attendee contributions to donate $3,700 to pediatric medical transport charity AeroAngel.
• FinThrive VP of Health Insights Jonathan Wiik authors a new book, “The RCM Advantage: Transformative Revenue Management for Healthcare.”
• Vyne Medical publishes a new customer success story, “Efficiency Elevated: A Hospital’s Success Story with Customized Healthcare Solutions.”
• AdvancedMD announces a new integration partnership with Mental Health Technologies.
• Artera adds patient self-scheduling appointment capabilities to its Harmony patient engagement platform.
• Care.ai announces that it has been recognized as a 2024 Top Company in Smart Rooms by Avia Marketplace.
• Visage Imaging publishes a new video titled “Visage 7 CloudPACS – Five Things You Need to Know.”

Blog Posts

• Customer Exclusive: My life in flow – Part 2 (Agfa HealthCare)
• Applying Technology to Mid-Cycle Operations (AGS Health)
• Collaboration between hospitals will get NHS back on its feet (Altera Digital Health)
• Impact and challenges of large language models in healthcare (Arcadia)

Contacts

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