Margaritas, in a room of MDs? What would the Surgeon General say? Oh, I see they were Virgen Margaritas!
News 12/13/24
Top News
ASTP publishes a slimmed-down version of the TEFCA HTI-2 final rule. Some parts that were unrelated to TEFCA, such as those related to public health data exchange and payer API standards, were moved to another final rule that is being reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Teacher Mr. F in New York City sent over photos of his middle school students using the STEM kits that were provided by a reader’s donation.
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 Particle Health, which recently filed a lawsuit against Epic for antitrust behavior, raises $10 million from existing investors. Insiders say the money won’t be used to fund the lawsuit’s expenses.
CoachCare,which offers tools for remote patient monitoring and virtual care, raises $11 million in funding.
Patient engagement software vendor SpinSci raises $53 million in growth equity funding.
Health system risk analytics vendor 1m raises $10 million in Series A funding, most of it from large health systems. The two co-founders are former Goldman Sachs VPs.
Business Insider profiles Claimable, which offers patients an AI-powered platform to help them appeal their health insurer’s medication coverage denials. The company says that its $40 service has an 85% success rate in getting denials overturned.
Microsoft hires several former employees of Google’s DeepMind to run its new London-based AI consumer health team.
Sales
- University of Cincinnati Health chooses Laudio’s workflow hub for hospital frontline leaders.
- Gibson Area Hospital and Health Services, the country’s fifth-largest Critical Access Hospital, will implement Meditech Expanse under the Meditech-as-a-Service cloud delivery model.
Announcements and Implementations
The first participants in Meditech’s Traverse Exchange — the company’s nationwide private, FHIR-first network that went live in the US in August following its launch in Canada — begin exchanging health data. The service includes connections to CommonWell and Carequality and offers an embedded record locator service.
The Sequoia Project publishes the Data Usability Implementation Guide Version 2 that was created by its Interoperability Matters Data Usability Workgroup.
Ellkay seeks nominations for its Women in Health IT digital health series.
Atropos Health, which provides evidence-based clinical insights by analyzing real-world data, offers access to its Atropos Evidence Network to developers and health systems for AI training.
Privacy and Security
Puerto Rico-based clearinghouse Immediata Health Group pays $250,000 to settle charges that it stored the information of 1.5 million patients unsecured on the internet, allowing it to be found via Google searches. The company previously paid $2.5 million in civil settlements that were related to the misconfigured server.
A report finds that hospitals are administering pain and epidural medications to pregnant women during their C-sections, then reporting the women to child welfare authorities when their newborns test positive for the same drugs. Hospitals often file the reports without checking the mother’s medical records, frequently placing the responsibility on social workers who have little drug testing experience or authority. At least 27 states require reporting a baby’s positive test, but none of them require hospitals to confirm the results before doing so.
A UK court dismisses an appeal that would have reactivated a privacy case that involves the transfer of patient data from The Royal Free London NHS Trust to Google-owned DeepMind to use in a kidney injury detection app.
Sponsor Updates
- A new EClinicalWorks survey finds that AI is a catalyst to transform the healthcare industry, with 90% of respondents reporting favorable views of AI.
- Ellkay publishes a new success story featuring Delta Pathology + Omega Diagnostics, “Optimizing Efficiency for Independent Labs.”
- Findhelp offers a new case study, “NYC Health + Hospitals Supports 100,000+ Patients in Six Months Using Automated Epic-Findhelp Social Determinants of Health Assessment Integration.”
- Five9 announces that it has won the 2024 Aragon Research Innovation Award for AI Contact Centers and been named a Leader in two Aragon Research Globe reports, “AI Agent Platforms in the ICC, 2025,” and “Intelligent Contact Center, 2025.”
- Goliath Technologies releases a new case study, “Leading not-for-profit health system isolates and resolves speed & reliability of Citrix related Epic and ChromeOS device issues .”
- Modern Healthcare recognizes Clearwater and Laudio as two of the Best in Business of 2024.
- Impact Advisors releases a new Impactful AI podcast titled “Inside the ‘Minds’ of LLMs: Behavioral Capabilities & Quirks.”
- Linus Health names former Providence president Mike Butler as an independent board director.
- KLAS Arch Collaborative features Meditech customer Ozarks Healthcare’s enhanced physician user experience in two case studies.
Blog Posts
- AI and the Age of Intelligence Has Arrived (EClinicalWorks)
- Healthcare Cybersecurity Threats: November 2024 (Fortified Health Security)
- Transforming Patient Access: Epic Optimization Drives Scheduling Efficiency and Revenue Growth (Health Data Movers)
- Release of Information and Audits: Birds of a Feather (And They Should Stick Together!) (HealthMark Group)
- How to Use Epic Gold Stars to Maximize Your EHR Investment (Healthcare IT Leaders)
- Is Your ACO Prepared to Report Promoting Interoperability Measures for All ACO Participants? (Impact Advisors)
Contacts
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“Healthcare startup Particle Health has been battling electronic health records giant Epic Systems all year. Now, the startup just raised some extra cash to add fuel to the fire.”
Insiders say money is not fungible.
Giving a patient medications in the ER, having them pop positive on a test, and then withholding further medications because the patient is a “drug seeker” happens quite a bit. I’ve had at least two friends go through that misery, of course made worse by the righteous attitudes of the ER nurses.
I read about that last week and it was really one of the most evil-on-a-personal-level things I’ve seen in a long time. I simply cannot fathom the malevolence required to do such a thing, and not for nothing I’m also really interested to know the racial makeup of the doctors/nurses/social workers and patients involved. I’ll bet that I would not be surprised by the findings.