Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to the HIStalk crowd. I wish you the joys of the season!
News 8/8/25
Top News
Epic will launch an ambient scribe tool at UGM, August 18-21, according to insiders who spoke to Politico.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
HIStalk sponsors who are participating in Epic UGM – tell me about what you’re doing by next Wednesday, August 13 and I’ll include it in an online guide.
I was experimenting with some long ChatGPT prompts that were a pain to retype every time but not appropriate for storing in long-term memory. The fix: AText, which lets you create text snippets that can be pasted via keyboard shortcuts. I’ve used Macro Scheduler for years and could have scripted the same result, but you have to be careful because it basically takes over your keyboard and thus requires very careful macro design. I know this because one of my macros deleted an entire HIStalk post years ago because I was unwisely triggering actions based on the location of the cursor and on-screen objects whose consistency I had overestimated.
Sponsored Events and Resources
None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Hinge Health reports Q2 results: revenue up 55%, EPS –$13.10 versus –$0.96, beating Wall Street expectations for revenue but falling short on earnings. The $581 million loss was mostly due to stock-based compensation, but non-GAAP reporting otherwise showed a swing to profitability. Hinge shares jumped sharply on the news and are up 61% since its May 2025 IPO, valuing the digital physical therapy company at nearly $5 billion.
Telehealth vendor LifeMD reports Q2 results: revenue up 23%, EPS –$0.06 versus –$0.19, missing analyst expectations for both and sending shares down 45%. The company’s weight loss guarantee resulted in higher than expected patient refunds in a highly competitive GLP-1 market. The company’s market cap is $294 million.
Sales
- Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre will implement Oracle Health’s EHR, with go-live expected in 2027. I believe their current system is the homegrown SunnyCare, but I don’t know much about it or what they will be implementing from Oracle Health.
- Duke Health will implement growth planning analytics from Trilliant Health.
People
Roche-owned Flatiron Health promotes Nathan Hubbard to CEO. He replaces Carolyn Starrett, who will transition to senior advisor. Drugmaker Roche was rumored last year to be seeking a buyer for the cancer software company, which it acquired in 2018 for $1.9 billion.
UPerform hires Stephanie Lahr, MD (Artisight) as chief medical officer.
Meera Atkins, MD, MBA (Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota) joins Lyric as chief medical officer.
Industry veteran and recruiting firm owner Mark Fidler died on July 29 at age 72.
Announcements and Implementations
OpenAI releases GPT-5 to all users of ChatGPT as its flagship model. The company says that among its broad improvements, GPT-5 provides more accurate answers to health questions and hallucinates less than 2% of the time.
Ascension creates an innovation institute that will vet and implement technologies and innovations that can improve patient care and the clinician experience.
First Databank launches Meducation Bedside Solution, which allows bedside nurses to provide patients with first-dose education using the information in the electronic medication administration record.
Rhapsody announces GA of Envoy, a platform for managing integrations operations.
The AMA approves a new CPT code for body composition analysis, which will allow the US Army’s Armed Forces Wellness Center to record the discrete results of air displacement plethysmography into the EHR to better monitor body composition and prevent obesity-related conditions.
Pieces Technologies debuts a phone-based personal assistant that creates an inpatient EHR note from a physician’s voice memo.
Sponsor Updates
- Netsmart announces that it has been recognized as a Qualified Health Information Network.
- CliniComp expands its EHR Solution Suite at the VA Hampton Health Care System to the MedSurg unit in just one month.
- Hospitals under 50 beds indicate an urgency to transition to next-generation EHR replacements, according to Black Book Research, whose latest study highlights HIStalk sponsors Meditech and Altera Digital Health as top future-ready EHR vendors for smaller facilities.
- The Consulting Report includes Nordic in its “Top Consulting Firms of 2025” list.
- Health Data Movers sponsors the Northern Ohio HIMSS Charity Golf Classic & Collaboration Summit.
- Infinx will present at the Idaho HFMA 2025 Summer Conference August 13-15 in McCall.
- Meditech announces that it has been recognized as a Representative Vendor in the “Gartner Market Guide for Enterprise Electronic Health Records.”
Blog Posts
- Hallucination vs. confabulation: Why the difference matters in healthcare AI (Wolters Kluwer Health)
- Securing ePrescribing: Why Redundancy and Resilience Matter (First Databank)
- AI-Powered Customer Service Is Here, And It’s Changing Everything (Five9)
- In Honor of Kevin Mitnick: What Healthcare Must Learn About Social Engineering (Fortified Health Security)
- What the 2026 PFS Proposed Rule means for MIPS: Impact and opportunities for provider (Healthmonix)
- Don’t Let Your Legacy Systems Jeopardize Your Go-Live (Optimum Healthcare IT)
- Lessons from Sanford Health: How to Create a Scalable Data Strategy that Works (Healthcare IT Leaders)
- 8 Proven Strategies to Optimize Revenue Cycle Workqueues in Healthcare (Impact Advisors)
- Faster Alerts Help PIH Health Transform Infection Prevention (Inovalon)
- Harnessing data to drive precision medicine in South Africa and Namibia (Meditech)
- Why EHR Vendors Must Partner with a CMS-Approved QR/QCDR for MIPS 2025 (MRO)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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Very sad to read of Mark Fidler’s passing. He was the consummate professional at his job. He placed me in the late ‘90s and in the ‘10s, at great companies. He took the time to get to know you and your goals.
From the article on the new CPT code: “Previously this service was being provided by either the AFWC or medical clinic but not captured in the electronic medical record as there was no code for body composition assessment via air displacement technology.”
EMRs can 100% capture documentation from procedures that don’t have dedicated CPT codes; you just can’t *bill* for them directly. Can someone explain this to me like I’m five?
There are a couple of different ways to handle this. On the EHR side, if the system doesn’t have a field for the value, you just create a custom field and capture it there. On the practice management side, you create a “dummy code” so you can report on how many of the nonbillable procedures are done. Should be easy now for organizations that do this and are using a dummy code to map the new CPT code to it and move forward with the CPT. Doesn’t make it any more billable though for payers that won’t pay for the procedure. If the organization wasn’t able to add an EHR field to capture the data they were likely either documenting it as a free text entry somewhere or were scanning something with the data, both of which are less than ideal.