I like much of what you wrote, with one exception: AI. I'd make AI a marketing highlight of the new…
News 9/20/24
Top News
Care enablement vendor Fabric acquires TeamHealth’s 50-state virtual care service.
Fabric’s other three acquisitions in the past 18 months include Walmart-owned virtual care provider MeMD, conversational AI solution vendor Gyant, and asynchronous virtual care solution vendor Zipnosis.
Reader Comments
From Another Oracle Bytes the Dust: “Re: Inspira Health. Dropping Oracle Health in favor of Epic. Announcement called out attrition rate post-Cerner-acquisition as one of the reasons.” Unverified since they haven’t posted Epic jobs and aren’t yet listed on UserWeb.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Mrs. H had a miserable (and ultimately final) experience with Walgreens this week. They were out of her thyroid med, they capitulated after she pressed them by telling her that they had arranged for her to pick up an emergency supply at another Walgreens the next day, and of course it wasn’t ready when she got there and the pharmacy people were equally balanced between cluelessness and indifference in telling her to sit there for an hour while they tried to figure it out. She called a mom-and-pop independent pharmacy whose folks were friendly, efficient, and on the ball as far as getting the prescription transferred and her insurance set up nearly instantly. My direct primary care doctor emailed all of her patients that Walgreens and CVS regularly tell patients that she didn’t send the prescription even though she has the electronic receipt proving that they received it up to half a dozen times. I’m not shocked that shares of these two chains have tanked. Independent pharmacies need to tell their story better. In fact, independent everything in healthcare needs to tell their story better.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Analytics platform vendor MedeAnalytics acquires healthcare procurement marketplace company SubPop Health.
Healthcare governance, risk, and compliance solutions company RLDatix acquires SocialClimb, which specializes in provider reputation management and patient satisfaction data.
Reuters reports that providers who temporarily signed contracts with Waystar, Availity, and Inovalon during Change Healthcare’s February downtime are extending their agreements with those smaller competitors, suggesting that providers see the benefit of using multiple claims processing companies to avoid a single point of failure.
People
Elsevier Health hires Omry Bigger, MBA (LexisNexis) as president of clinical solutions.
Nias Puthenveettil, MBA, MS (Litmos) joins Azra AI as CTO.
Announcements and Implementations
DirectTrust will deploy public key infrastructure that will support TEFCA Facilitated HL7 FHIR.
A Portland, OR TV station profiles the patient monitoring command center of Oregon Health & Science University, which monitors patients in 61 Oregon hospitals.
This is a great story. InterSystems founder and owner Phillip “Terry” Ragon and his wife Susan donate $400 million for a “Manhattan Project on HIV” that will fund early-stage HIV vaccine research. The 74-year-old billionaire said in a rare interview that he hoped to become a rock star following his graduation from MIT, and when it became obvious that Cream wouldn’t be calling him to replace Clapton any time soon, he took a job with Meditech even though he knew next to nothing about computers. He learned the MUMPS programming language, left Meditech a year and half later to co-found a MUMPS-based medical billing company, then launched what became InterSystems in 1978. The database company grew slowly in serving its two largest customers the VA and Epic, finally hitting $1 billion in annual revenue in 2023. The Ragons have signed The Giving Pledge to donate the majority of their wealth to charity upon their deaths.
Government and Politics
Healthcare AI company Pieces Technologies settles State of Texas charges that it deceptively marketed its patient summary products to Texas hospitals by making misleading statements about their accuracy and safety. The company agreed to increase customer transparency about how its data models work, the areas in which they are not as reliable, and how its metric for system hallucinations is determined.
CVS Health-owned primary care clinic operator Oak Street Health will pay $60 million to resolve federal False Claim Act accusations that it paid kickbacks to insurance agents to recruit Medicare Advantage patients.
Veterans will resume paying prescription co-pays at the five VA facilities that are live on Oracle Health / Cerner after a two-year suspension that was implemented due to software problems.
Privacy and Security
Microsoft warns that a ransomware-as-a-service hacker group called Vanilla Tempest is using a new ransomware strain to target the healthcare sector.
Other
Madison’s weekly paper describes how COVID-19 spurred Epic’s medical research work in offering anonymized health data from participating health system customers. CDC contacted Epic Research to help answer questions about the effectiveness of mpox vaccine, when went from getting the CDC’s call right before Thanksgiving and having a publication-ready manuscript ready by early December.
A Commonwealth Fund report finds that “the US continues to be in a class by itself in the underperformance of its healthcare sector” that differs from comparable countries in failing to meet basic healthcare needs, including universal coverage, despite the highest level of spending.
Sponsor Updates
- Ellkay sponsors the Auxiliary of Emerson Health 25th Annual Golf Tournament in Hudson, MA.
- Health Data Movers posts a new episode of its “QuickHITs” podcast titled “Transforming Healthcare with Data & AI: A Conversation with Dr. Michael Pfeffer.”
- Nordic will partner with Microsoft and CHIME to establish the Rural Health IT Community at the CHIME Fall Forum November 6.
- Consensus Cloud Solutions will offer Olah Healthcare Technology customers its EFAx Corporate cloud fax platform.
- Findhelp welcomes New Jersey Prevention Network, Fairfax County Government, and Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center (CA) to its network.
- Inovalon, Surescripts, and Wellsky will exhibit at NACP 2024 October 6-9 in Nashville.
- Konza National Network will present at the HEDIS & Quality Improvement Summit in Las Vegas September 29-October 1 in Las Vegas.
- Meditech will exhibit at the TORCH Fall Conference & Trade Show September 23-26 in Round Rock, TX.
- The WellSky Foundation donates $100,000 each to five non-profits that offer programs in the Kansas City area.
Blog Posts
- FDB’s Meducation: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for Better Medication Adherence & Patient Outcomes (First Databank)
- Addressing Healthcare Staff Satisfaction through Innovation and Support (FinThrive)
- Four Safe Applications of Generative AI in the Contact Center (Five9)
- AI Regulation in the US and Beyond: What You Need to Know (Fortified Health Security)
- 4 Ways to Detect Changing Patient or Resident Insurance Coverage (Inovalon)
- Diagnosing MASH (Liver Disease): A Meaningful Opportunity for Early Detection (Lucem Health)
- The Med Tech Solutions Family is Growing! (Med Tech Solutions)
- 4 Reasons Why the Adoption of FHIR Brings Immense Value to Medical Record Requesters (MRO)
- The CORE of Your Wound Care Program’s Success: Documentation and ThinkFlow (Net Health)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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Pieces Technologies stuff looks bad because it can reduce overall trust in AI for healthcare (“if these guys were lying, then who else is lying”).
Surprisingly, they had announced a pretty big round of funding ($25M) last week from big names – Children’s Health, Concord Health Partners, OSF HealthCare, and Rittenhouse Ventures (https://www.hcinnovationgroup.com/analytics-ai/generative-ai/news/55139919/childrens-health-among-participants-in-pieces-25m-funding-round). Settlement with Texas AG is dated August 5th. So these investors knew of these charges and settlement and still invested (since it is highly unlikely that Pieces leadership did not inform these investors of the settlement as that would be criminal)? Wow!
Amen re: mom and pop pharmacies. My mother goes to the one down the street from her. She was prescribed tylenol after surgery that cost her $13 out of pocket for 30 (generic) pills, along with 2 other prescriptions that she knew she’d never use. I went back to the pharmacy, they took one look at the name on the prescription and said “Oh, Mrs. H, no problem” and refunded the 3 of them. I cannot imagine anyone at Walgreens/CVS a)knowing and recognizing a name and b) refunding anything without calling a manger, doing paperwork, giving a runaround, etc. It’s a shame that the PBMs are trying to shut down community pharmacies when they are the ones who really deserve our business.
My son-in-law had surgery this past Monday to repair a separated shoulder. The surgeon sent a prescription to CVS. Upon arrival at CVS early evening post discharge, CVS claimed to have no prescription. The hospital could not assist and referred them to call the surgeon’s office. Being after hours, messages were left but no return call was received. The patient was forced to spend an entire overnight using nothing but over-the-counter pain relievers hours after shoulder surgery involving plates and screws.
re: US underperforming healthcare. I wonder what HIStalk readers would see as some solutions to the problems outlined in the Commonwealth Fund report. Perhaps the next HISTalk survey?