News 5/29/24

Top News

Veradigm will seek strategic alternatives for the company, which could include its sale.

The company has named President and Chief Commercial Officer Tom Langan as interim CEO, starting June 7. He will replace interim CEO Yin Ho, MD, MBA, who will leave the company and resign from its board now that her term of service has expired.

Veradigm dismissed CEO Richard Poulton and CFO Leah Jones in December 2023 as the company struggled to address overdue financial reports that threatened its stock listing.

MDRX shares are down 37% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $812 million. They closed up 16% Tuesday on the news.

Veradigm acquired AI company ScienceIO in March 2024 for $140 million in cash.

SEC filings indicate that Veradigm’s board has approved stock awards of $1 million to $3 million for each of its top four officers, with accelerated vesting following a change of control.

Reader Comments

From Bombast: “Re: Ascension outages. My elderly mother, who is being treated at a Florida Ascension facility, found that the results of her CT scan can’t be shared digitally with her care team. That leaves her anxiously waiting to see if she really has a suspected blood clot near her heart, and if so, how her respective providers plan to treat it. ARPA-H’s UPGRADE effort is too little, too late.” Media sites are offering superficial coverage of Ascension hospital wait times, ambulance diversions, and patient inconvenience that are driven by its downtime, which is at 21 days and counting. Soothing corporate reassurances aside, you can bet that it’s chaos and patient harm in the uncarpeted areas of its hospitals. Health systems always justify their gazillion-dollar implementation of Epic or Cerner by touting its patient care benefit, but when that system goes offline for an extended period, they always claim that patient care is unchanged.

From Benevolence: “Re: the Business Insider article on Oracle Health. Living in KC, this felt like a giant pile-on to current and former Cernerites, deserved or not. Morale is already pretty low after rounds of layoffs and bad press.” The article was a mishmash in trying to tie together previous incursions of Big Business into healthcare IT, the VA’s stalled rollout of Oracle Health, and the legacy Cerner problems that Oracle claims that its pre-acquisition due diligence didn’t uncover. I didn’t see much new or insightful in the article other than some quotes from insiders. Oracle Health should be more worried that the industry learned nearly simultaneously – via a KLAS report that went live three days before the Business Insider article – that it lost 71 hospitals and 15,000 beds in 2023 while Epic gained 153 and 29,000, respectively. My takeaways: (a) the bandwagon effect, if nothing else, will send more Cerner clients into the arms of Epic; and (b) Oracle is already griping about low Cerner margins that are likely to worsen as customer count drops. Larry Ellison’s plans to use customer data for medical advancement won’t fly if health systems walk that data over to Epic. The article’s focus was on the VA, which is a bit harsh to Oracle Health since the VA has a long history of botching technology implementations via the disconnect between its officials who see the need for change versus civil service employees who are threatened by it. My conclusion is that the former Cerner business continues to be a nagging distraction to the otherwise surging Oracle except in Larry Ellison’s mind, and if he loses interest or dies in the saddle, a fire sale seems inevitable. Meanwhile, Oracle’s next earnings report is due June 18.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Two-thirds of poll respondents who hold certification or fellowship credentials don’t list them on their business cards or email signatures.

New poll to your right or here: Should the federal government fund the development of cybersecurity tools for health systems? Argument for: it’s arguably critical national infrastructure. Argument against: health systems are private businesses that are raking in huge profits that could fund their own security instead of waiting for taxpayers to foot the bill.

Webinars

June 6 (Thursday) noon ET. “From Data to Decisions: The Vital Combination of AI and Human Expertise in Patient Care.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: David Wetherhold, MD, CMIO of ambulatory systems, Scripps Health; Dana Darger, RPh, director of pharmacy, Monument Health Rapid City Hospital; Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst. In this Epic Med Management Fireside Chat, two health system leaders will share real-world examples of how AI is working in concert with their clinicians to streamline medication management by populating medication histories into Epic. generating initial drafts of patient conversations, and summarizing complex information. The presenters will also cover the latest developments on the critical and expanding role of pharmacists in patient care.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

CVS Health is reportedly looking for a private equity partner to provide capital to expand its primary care chain Oak Street Health, which it acquired for $10 billion last year.

Sales

• Community Action Association of Pennsylvania will use Findhelp’s closed loop referral platform and network to develop PA Navigate, a statewide community information network that will connect people with community services.

Announcements and Implementations

Waystar says that tests of its Google Cloud-powered AI solutions show that the time that is needed needed to generate procedure pre-authorization was reduced by 99.9% by extracting requirements from payer datasets.

Government and Politics

The VA announces the winners of its AI Tech Sprint, which had use case categories of ambient dictation and outside medical record summarization:

• Ambient dictation – Nuance, Abridge, Knowtex, Althea Health, and TranscribeMD.
• Outside medical record summarization: Palantir, Althea Health, Abstractive Health, Commure, and TranscribeMD.

Privacy and Security

Ascension’s most recent cybersecurity event update from May 24 says that it hopes that patients and clinicians “will see progress across our points of care” this week. It adds that vendors and partners are reconnecting to its network.

Other

“South Park” brilliantly skewers the US healthcare system in a widely shared clip from its “The End of Obesity” episode, in which Cartman’s insurer refuses to cover Ozempic. It includes typewriters, fax machines, paper forms on clipboards, and line printers churning perforated paper. The insurance company’s refusal to pay is summarized as, “The medical director’s job is just to say no.” 

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD supports The Family Institute at Northwestern University during its Gratitude Gala fundraiser benefiting the Bette D. Harris Clinic.
• EClinicalWorks customer Rocky Mountain Women’s Clinic reports its integration of AI medical scribe software Sunoh.ai has helped its clinicians save at least two hours a day on clinical documentation.
• Nordic releases a new Designing for Health Podcast, “Interview with Diana Anderson, MD.”
• TruBridge earns “Peer Reviewed by HFMA” designation for its medical coding services, the company’s third solution to earn the honor.
• Mayo Clinic expands its partnership with QGenda and will implement QGenda Advanced Scheduling and On-Call for its clinicians at all campuses.
• RLDatix launches the RLDatix Safety Institute, an approved Patient Safety Organization that will research safety design and care delivery risk reduction best practices.
• Sectra publishes a new whitepaper, “Navigating the challenges of radiography – from student attrition to workforce shortages.”
• Symplr is a proud sponsor of the Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation.
• Tegria will sponsor the 2024 Cognizant Health Sciences Conference June 10-13 in Orlando.
• Verato will exhibit at the CSTE Annual Conference June 10-12 in Pittsburgh.
• CereCore publishes a new edition of its magazine, “Partnership Perspectives.”

Blog Posts

• How to Think About Healthcare Data During AI Integration Planning (CereCore)
• Organizational Change Management Challenges (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• How to Prep Your Medical Practice for the Holidays (PerfectServe)
• Your Next Innovation Opportunity: Disrupting the Status Quo in Specialty Pharmacy (RxLightning)
• 4 healthcare data challenges and their impacts (Spok)
• AI & Healthcare: Let’s Keep the Human in the Loop (Surescripts)
• How to Enhance Your Clinical Communications Improvement Project (Symplr)
• How AI is Revolutionizing RCM Analytics (TruBridge)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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