Giving a patient medications in the ER, having them pop positive on a test, and then withholding further medications because…
Monday Morning Update 11/25/24
Top News
Executives of Forward — the CarePods and medical office company — have moved on to start a new venture just one week after Forward shut down after raising $650 million.
Forward founder and former CEO Adrian Aoun says that one of Forward’s biggest investors called him the day the company closed with an offer to back his next startup, which amazed him:
We just burned not quite half a billion dollars on an idea. A lot of people’s reaction is, what are you doing next? Let’s do it again. What sort of special ass culture did we create in Silicon Valley where this is reality? This is absurd.
Reader Comments
From Slipknot: “Re: Oracle. When Cerner Millennium was new, I watched it get thrown out by a big health system when Cerner couldn’t deliver anything that worked, not to mention that the salespeople were like stereotypical used car salesmen. I’ve been mortified watching the VA implementations go as I expected they would. Now Congress has decided not to keep monitoring them. I wanted to believe that they would do better or that Oracle would force changes to their business model.” The new administration will have to decide whether to continue the flailing project in a cost-cutting environment and amid Congressional criticism. Larry Ellison has strong connections to Elon Musk and Oracle commands a formidable army of lobbyists, so that may be a factor. Hacking away at the sprawling, plodding VA bureaucracy might improve the project’s chance of success. Saber-rattling politicians may or may not realize that the VA has only two unsavory alternatives – attempt to move to Epic (knowing that the company probably wouldn’t deal with the VA’s VISN fiefdoms and political meddling) or stick with its wildly expensive, endlessly customized VistA dinosaur. I would probably bet on VistA at this point since it’s the only option that does not require the VA to change.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Forty percent of poll respondents who have taken a DNA test received results that surprised them. I should probably have asked whether that surprise was good or bad.
New poll to your right or here: What would concern you most about receiving hospital-at-home treatment?
I strayed onto the IPhone / IPad automation feature Shortcuts. I used it immediately to create an icon that shuts the phone down, another that opens the camera app ready to take a photo, and one that opens the Amazon app and displays my orders. You can also create an icon to turn on Do Not Disturb until you change locations, speed dial a given contact, open a ChatGPT session, turn on low power mode when the charge reaches a given percentage, and text someone the ETA from your current location to your destination using Apple Maps. Other than tapping an icon, you can also tell Siri to run a shortcut by name.
In further technical exploration, I decided to try Bluesky as an X alternative. I was initially dismayed at the lack of a native IPad app, but the webpage works great. Hopefully it can get enough network effect users to avoid becoming another Clubhouse or Mastodon. Unlike certain similar services, it is ad-free, gives users instead of its owner control of their feeds, and has sane moderation practices. Follow me there if you like since I’ll probably post HIStalk updates there along with X.
My Anonymous Vendor Executive topped off my supply of Donors Choose matching money. Does anybody have ideas for encouraging corporate donations so that I have something to match with? Teachers have a lot of classroom needs and I can usually match a donation at least 3x from various sources. About all I can offer in return, other than the satisfaction of supporting a good cause, is company exposure for a job well done.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Change Healthcare restores its clearinghouse services, nine months after they went offline in a February ransomware attack.
Three hundred academic primary care doctors at Mass General Brigham petition the National Labor Relations Board to unionize with an affiliate of SEIU. MGB medical fellows and residents voted to unionize in 2023 but are still negotiating their first contract.
People
Brian Dixon, PhD, MPA is named director of the Regenstrief Institute’s Clem McDonald Center for Biomedical Informatics after serving as interim since June 2022.
MetroHealth promotes Nabil Chehade, MD, MSBS to senior EVP / chief clinical transformation, innovation, and strategy officer.
Brian Gildea (FinThrive) joins Simple Health as chief sales officer.
JoAnn Ploen (Optum) joins DexCare as VP of enterprise sales.
Government and Politics
The VA posts an RFI for a cloud-based human capital management system that its 6,300 HR employees will use to process one million personnel actions per year, including 487,000 mass pay adjustments. One might speculate that Oracle will pitch its Fusion Cloud HCM.
Today I learned that Hopkins surgeon and FDA commissioner nominee Marty Makary, MD, MPH is chief medical officer for weight loss telehealth vendor Sesame, which can legally sell compounded GLP-1 drugs because of an FDA-declared shortage of the brand name products.
Other
A Texas ED patient’s TikTok video goes viral in which staff at Houston Methodist Hospital questioned her about citizenship status and assigned sex at birth as required by Governor Gregg Abbott’s executive order from August. The employee asked the questions in a public waiting room that offered no privacy barriers. The hospital responded that they are legally required to ask the questions and record the responses in Epic, but the law doesn’t require patients to answer.
Sponsor Updates
- PerfectServe announces that it has been positioned as a Leader and furthest for Completeness of Vision in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Clinical Communication and Collaboration.
- Notable successfully completes SOC 2 Type 2 compliance.
- Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast titled “Interview with Scott MacDonald, MD.”
- Sectra releases a new episode of its “Let’s Talk Enterprise Imaging” podcast titled “Greater Manchester’s path to AI in chest x-ray imaging.”
- The “AI @ HLTH” podcast features WellSky, “From Data to Care: How WellSky is Revolutionizing Healthcare.”
- Vyne Medical announces the expansion of the company’s cloud fax services and email-to-fax technology in a major academic medical center.
Blog Posts
- Bridging the gap between evidence and practice in healthcare (Wolters Kluwer Health)
- Future-Proofing Your Public Health Programs: Top 5 Things to Consider (Netsmart)
- Is the gold card the golden ticket to fixing prior authorization? (Nordic)
- Hydrate your cloud environment with Redox’s new Cloud Connectivity Tools (Redox)
- Understanding the Role of a Pediatric CNA: A Comprehensive Guide for Clinicians (SnapCare)
- How to improve bedside handoffs with digital whiteboards (Sonifi Health)
- Top Trends in Patient Payments and Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare (TrustCommerce, a Sphere Company)
- Innovating for Impact: Easing Burdens & Increasing Medication Safety (Surescripts)
- Building a Data Culture Helps Hospitals Stay One Step Ahead (Tegria)
- The Link Between Efficient Billing and Positive Patient Experiences (TruBridge)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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Well, this is depressing. It’s painful to read that VCs would rather throw money at someone who burned a massive amount of money, abandoned patients, and doesn’t appear to have learned anything. Here’s a blast from the past from Aoun and two of his contemporaries at the time, Dr. Ajayi from Cityblock, and Eren from Carbon Health – 2021, when money was cheap, and arrogance ran strong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptxJ_tVWyu0&ab_channel=TechCrunch
Aoun sounds like a caricature of an uninformed tech bro who thinks he’s figured out health care. Incredible.
I agree, but raising money is a skill. These founders have demonstrated they possess that skill because Forward raised all the way to a Series E. Early stage investors may sell their shares in a later round, so the A and B round investors might have made a profit on the failed company purely because the founders were able to raise multiple rounds of investment. Therefore, it’s reasonable for a series A or B VC investor to encourage them to try to start another business – they might expect to make a profit again.
There is always an issue with VCs sending money to the “wrong” companies, but I’d rather have VCs burning money in healthcare than burning money in less obviously helpful industries like fintech.
Re: encouraging corporate donations
Maybe HIStalk sponsors could get an incentive in exchange for pitching in? A contribution of $10/month towards Donors Choose this year gets them $10 off per month on their sponsorship renewal next year? I see 85 sponsor links, so that’s $10,200 going towards a good cause.
Is this not just “HIStalk giving their own money, but with extra steps”?
I imagine that many sponsors, such as Microsoft (Nuance), could afford to give $10,000 more easily than a website run by a small team could afford to give $100.
Doctors and nurses are going to be at the forefront of resistance to the new regime’s intent to cause maximum harm to people they deem less-than-fully-human. I wonder how many will have the the fortitude to stand up to it and say “no” and accept the penalty for noncompliance, and how many of them will let themselves be used as agents of the second coming of Goebbels.
More propaganda from Change Healthcare. Lots of stuff still not working.
Re: Cerner Millennium at VA
This is shaping up to be a real popcorn-worthy situation! Possible outcomes:
1). Trump throws Musk under the bus;
2). Musk throws Ellison under the bus;
3). Ellison is no longer involved with Oracle, and Oracle gets thrown under the bus;
4). Oracle makes several big contributions to a Trump/GOP PAC, and coincidentally, Cerner Millennium receives support from the Trump Administration;
5). Trump claims that Cerner Millennium is the “much better and much cheaper” healthcare plan he was working on all along;
6). Oracle announces the expansion of their Cerner Millennium Pharmacy rewrite to be the core of an entire cloud-based EHR. It will be available in a year. A year later Oracle announces full availability of the new EHR, but mysteriously the new EHR has no customers for the next 10 years (exception: VA will be an ‘early adopter Beta customer’ the entire time);
7). Aliens land on Earth in a ‘Mars Attacks’ style scenario, leading to an interplanetary war that ends inconclusively, but the Pentagon declares victory anyway. The VA Cerner Millennium implementation is unaffected.