Hard agree with "actionless figure" - I realize that LinkedIn is the only mostly-non political form of social media we…
Monday Morning Update 4/7/25
Top News
Hinge Health is reportedly considering postponing its much-anticipated IPO due to stock market volatility.
The company filed IPO plans last month. Its most recent funding round in October 2021 valued the company at $6 billion.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Respondents see little patient benefit to cloud migration. Some might argue that it’s not intended to impact patients directly, but others could reasonably ask, then what’s the point?
New poll to your right or here: What most limits your long-term career satisfaction in health system IT?
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Sponsored Events and Resources
Live Webinar: April 15 (Tuesday) 1 ET. “Navigating ACO Quality in 2025: Lessons Learned and Future Directions.” Sponsor: Healthmonix. Presenters: Michael Lewis, VP of customer success, Healthmonix; Steven Tyson, senior account executive, Healthmonix. Accountable care organizations (ACOs) must stay ahead of evolving quality requirements and reporting changes. Join us for an in-depth discussion on lessons learned from past ACO implementation, key areas for improvement, and the impact of Medicare Clinical Quality Measures (CQMs).
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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Rite Aid is reportedly considering another bankruptcy filing less than a year after the drugstore chain exited Chapter 11, retreating from markets where it trails Walgreens and CVS to focus on regions where it’s the second-largest player.
Sales
- Good Shepherd Health System chooses Mednition’s Kate AI.
People
Door County Medical Center promotes Erick Schrier, MBA from CIO / compliance officer to chief administrative officer.
Government and Politics
The federal government files a False Claims Act complaint against Vohra Wound Physicians, alleging that it built an EHR system that automatically billed routine wound care as surgical debridement regardless of clinical justification. The company is also accused of setting revenue-driven debridement quotas and hiring inexperienced physicians who were misled during training about Medicare billing rules.
Hospital price transparency data remains mostly inaccessible and unhelpful to consumers due to complexity and inconsistent reporting, a KFF Health News report concludes. The White House plans to step up enforcement of a mostly ignored executive order from six years ago even though consumers haven’t found the cost data to be immediately useful – since it doesn’t reflect their actual out-of-pocket costs – and could encourage hospitals to raise prices if they learn that competitors charge more.
Other
Penn Medicine News profiles SVP of Data and Technology Solutions Mitchell Schnall, MD, PhD.
Sponsor Updates
- Capital Rx releases a new episode of “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast” titled “Healthcare Sector Update & Outlook, with Bloomberg Intelligence’s Jonathan Palmer.”
- Ellkay offers a new success story featuring WakeMed Health.
- Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast featuring Mark Mabus, MD.
- Nym names Tal Shmuel junior backend engineer, Rashad Kanaaneh and Mark Kapilyan software engineers, Idan Bressler NLP research engineer, and Roee Mey-Tal and Hadar Dikstein medical data analysts.
- Praia Health celebrates its first anniversary.
- The AONL Foundation for Nursing Research and Education recognizes Symplr as its 2025 Friend of the Year Award honoree.
- Tegria will present at the IPMI Healthcare Finance Institute April 7 in Orlando.
- Wolters Kluwer Health adds conversational AI to vrClinicals for Nursing.
Blog Posts
- The Nurse Scheduling Dilemma: Why Open Shifts Stay Open (And What We Can Do About It) (Inovalon)
- A Smarter Path to Care: How Outreach Unified Telehealth, AI and Analytics to Improve Outcomes (Netsmart)
- The question every health system leader should be asking when it comes to cybersecurity (Nordic)
- How IT Service Management Drives Healthcare’s Digital Transformation (Optimum Healthcare IT)
- ICYMI: Heard at HIMSS25 (Surescripts)
- Implementing AI in healthcare RCM: How 1 organization built a structure for success (Waystar)
- Five ways long-term care administrators can foster healthy stress management (WellSky)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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The primary point of using the Cloud is using operating expenses vs limited capital ones and avoiding having to update existing hardware (and software that is obsolete before it even goes in. There are a plethora of other advantages but few impact the patient except maybe using a patient portal which in the long run does more harm than good and can be done with an on prem solution as well.
Will any of the people who dislike this comment please provide an explanation for what they disagree with in the comment?
Do you believe moving to the cloud does indeed improve anything related to the patient experience or care?
I’m over simplifying it, but you are basically just renting equipment and services from a company that stays closer to the current technology, presumably has more expertise, and so forth. It’s not cheaper. It doesn’t really serve the patient, unless you zoom out to the abstraction that stuff is more likely to be stable in the cloud and therefore patients will get more reliable care (not the most compelling benefit profile when you consider that on premise hosting is not materially different in terms of stability than cloud). But migrating to cloud does make for a significantly simplified way to manage and scale technology operations.
By all means, prove me wrong and post here about real clinical or patient related benefits to being in the cloud versus on prem. And if you work for a cloud company, like I do, own up to it.
The problem with the operating vs. capital expenses argument is that it is a purely financial argument. What is persistently missing is any sort of justification outside of finance.
Similarly, the problem with the ease of upgrades argument is that it is a purely IT argument. Again, what is the linkage to larger organizational goals?
In a healthcare organization, you’d think the patient would be viewed as the customer. Are they really though? A lot of healthcare organizations act like the insurance industry is the customer, or a PE firm, or the bond market.
I’m wondering whether this Cloud architecture is just another form of control. It corrals us towards large commercial cloud providers who make it very difficult to migrate to another provider. Then, when they have that customer lock-in, they raise their prices.
At a professional level? Ever since we were migrated to the cloud, I get mysterious 3-5 second delays on any file-related activities. There are times when unexpected large-scale replications happen at problematic moments. Most of this is difficult to control because “don’t worry, it’s all automatic and it all Just Works, there is no control switch”.
And I notice that every time I propose an internal cloud, I get a defeatist attitude from people who should know better. They’ve bought into the Cloud ideology whole-heartedly. Meaning, they can’t see beyond the massive commercial cloud providers.