Going to ask again about HealWell - they are on an acquisition tear and seem to be very AI-focused. Has…
News 7/17/24
Top News
Healthcare governance, risk, and compliance solutions company RLDatix acquires London-based digital social care planning and management software vendor Carebeans.
Webinars
July 18 (Thursday) noon ET. “New CMS Final Rule: Strategies to Get EHR and IT Vendors Up to Speed.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Nick Barger, PharmD, VP of product, DrFirst; Tyler Higgins, senior director of product management, DrFirst. The new final rule that was issued by CMS on June 13, 2024, goes beyond a basic upgrade of SCRIPT standards and improves care connections among doctors, pharmacies, and patients. The presenters will lead EHR and IT vendors through the final rule, provide details on key provisions and compliance deadlines, offer tactics to tackle roadmap development, and provide direction on where and how partners can best leverage the requirements for the benefit of their customers.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.
Sales
- Beebe Healthcare (DE) will implement Epic across its system next year.
- In New Mexico, the City of Albuquerque and Bernalillo County will roll out social care screening and referral technology from Unite Us later this summer.
- CentraCare (MN) will offer virtual urgent care visits using technology from KeyCare.
People
Alok Chaudhary, MBA (Ballad Health) joins VCU Health (VA) as VP and chief data and AI officer.
Acentra Health names Ryan Bosch, MD, MBA (Inova Health) EVP and chief health and informatics officer.
Medicomp Systems founder, chairman, and president Peter Goltra died last month at 84.
Announcements and Implementations
The VA will pilot ambient clinical documentation software from Nuance and Abridge, which won the first phase of the VA’s AI Tech Sprint. It will integrate the AI-powered technologies with its EHR and workflows. The locations and duration of the pilots have yet to be announced.
After a four-month pilot, UVM Health Network (VT) will implement Abridge’s generative AI software for clinical documentation across its enterprise.
In New Jersey, Premier Health Associates will go live on parent organization Atlantic Health’s Epic system early next year.
Government and Politics
Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says that FDA should regulate medical AI using the same firm-based approach as it does for medical devices, in which it reviews the developer’s design approach and the product’s results rather than dissecting its underlying hardware and software. He says the VALID Act, which codifies the firm-based regulatory approach, is more appropriate for products such as AI that go through rapid cycles of innovation. He also notes that AI processing is not easily defined by tracing every possible input to its output. He urges Congress to facilitate the creation of large, reliable databases that can be used used for consistent AI development, training, validation, and post-market monitoring.
The Kansas Court of Appeals rules that healthcare providers are not required to keep patient medical records confidential, dismissing a University of Kansas Medical Center lawsuit in which a doctor took pictures during the plaintiff’s pelvic exam and sent them to two medical students whom the patient had approved to be present. The court concurred with a lower court’s decision that the state does not recognize a provider’s duty to protect patient confidentiality.
Other
St. Joseph’s Hospital (FL) implements Amazon’s Just Walk Out checkout-free payment technology at its Seasons Cafe. The new shopping workflows have enabled the cafe to stay open longer, and have not caused any employee layoffs.
A Dallas magazine profiles the leadership and funding crises that have sent White Rock Medical Center spiraling into financial and clinical chaos. The hospital has:
- Reverted to paper charting due to an inability to finance a new contract with its EHR vendor.
- Laid off employees with the only warning being a midnight email, which prompted former employees to file a class-action lawsuit against owner Heights Healthcare.
- Left vendors unpaid, causing it to scramble to borrow supplies from neighboring facilities and buy patient food from the local grocery store.
Sponsor Updates
- Clinical Architecture sponsors the The ALS Association Indiana Chapter and the Bob Kravitz ALS Golf Classic.
- SingHealth in Singapore implements Agfa HealthCare’s enterprise imaging 8.3 platform.
- Arcadia announces that it has been named as a Leader in the IDC Marketscape:US Value-based Health Analytics 2023 Vendor Assessment.
- Impact Advisors is named to Consulting Magazine’s “Best Large Firms to Work For” list.
- Artera publishes a new case study, “Wheeler Health Lowers Call Volume and Enhances Staff Efficiency with Artera.”
- Capital Rx releases a new episode of The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast, “The Power of APIs in Healthcare, with Alfonso Martinez.”
- CloudWave will exhibit at the 2024 NCHA Summer Meeting July 17-19 in Asheville, NC.
Blog Posts
- Navigating Recovery: Helping Patients Who Struggle with Substance Abuse & Addiction (AdvancedMD)
- Agfa Insights: SIIM 2024 Key Takeaways (Agfa HealthCare)
- Obstetrics Coding: Insights and Guidelines (AGS Health)
- HCTC: Connection, and client-first collaboration (Altera Digital Health)
- Strategic provider attribution: Enhancing patient-to-provider alignment in population health (Arcadia)
- The future of clinical data: building an intelligence engine with Augmedix & Google Cloud (Augmedix)
- Achieving Powerful Post-Service Claims Management (Availity)
- Incident Response Plans: Your Key to Successfully Mitigate Breach Damage and Expenses (Clearwater)
- The Secret to a Successful Epic Implementation: An Interconnected Implementation Team (Cordea Consulting)
- 12 Ways to Engage Your Stakeholders and Ensure Adoption for Your Next Digital Health Transformation (Divurgent)
- Keeping a Human in the Loop – AI for Medication Management Requires Clinical Safety Check (DrFirst)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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Send news or rumors.
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“healthcare providers are not required to keep patient medical records confidential”
I’m not a lawyer so I need help understaning this. Does this make Kansas a HIPAA free zone?
AnotherDave: I read the article and I have the same question(s) as you. The patient agreed to have medical students as part of the service – but it appears the provider did not seek permission to take the picture(s) and/or text the pictures to the medical students. As a patient I’d be concerned the provider took the pictures on his/her device/cell phone and then texted the picture(s) to the medical students to their device/cell phone.
However, my overall concern is the KS court statement Mr. H. referenced in todays news – i.e. ” The district court correctly found that Kansas does not recognize a duty by a healthcare provider to safeguard, protect, and maintain the confidentiality of a patient’s medical records.”
In my opinion that statement seems to be in direct conflict the main purpose of HIPAA.
Looking forward to seeing other opinions on this topic.
I am not a lawyer, but it may very well be that this is an accurate interpretation of Kansas state law. There may in fact be no law at the Kansas state level that requires medical providers to maintain confidentiality. Ethics and legality do not overlap completely.
This doesn’t make Kansas a HIPAA free zone, only that a patient who has their confidentially violated does not have a cause of action against the provider at the state level. The patient here needs to make a federal case out of it, as HIPAA may be the only way to enforce confidentiality in Kansas.
This is why clear, specific, and enforceable (and *actually enforced*) federal protections for things are so very important.
What about the whole thing learned in medical school: “do no harm”? We are so quick to save information for “later” when all it really means is that we are saving information that is vulnerable to unintended release. Bottom line: save and store ONLY what is needed to provide the best care, delete as soon as possible.