News 6/19/24

Top News

Stat reports that Alphabet’s Verily will pivot – for the second time in two years – by retiring its chronic disease management app Onduo and moving to a new one called Lightpath, which will focus on AI-sprinkled diabetes treatment and issuing prescriptions for GLP-1 drugs.

Stat notes that selling weight loss prescriptions is quite a fall from Verily’s charter mission to “defeat Mother Nature” with moonshot ideas such as cancer detection, public health monitoring, and a smart contact lens.

Verily was launched in 2015 as part of Google X and raised $3.5 billion in funding.

Verily’s chairman, president, and CEO is Stephen Gillett, whose background is cybersecurity and executive stints with Best Buy and Starbucks.

Reader Comments

From Deadbeat Dasher: “Re: medical debt. This editorial says the credit reporting system shouldn’t punish Americans for getting sick.” Allow me to take the counterpoint to the article in asking, why shouldn’t medical debt continue to be included in credit reports?

• A lender should be able to see the total amount of debt that a consumer owes in assessing their ability and willingness to pay the new debt they request.
• Including medical debt on credit reports gives people an incentive to pay what they owe.
• Credit report omission argument is a convenient way to avoid addressing the real issues of out-of-control healthcare costs, provider billing errors, insurer foot-dragging, and lack of pricing transparency and the ability to shop around.
• On top of that, it’s really an indictment of the three credit reporting companies that don’t get paid for accuracy, keeping consumers happy, or responding to consumers who ask to have mistakes on their record fixed.
• My conclusion: omitting medical debt in credit reports is like excluding criminal history from background reporting using the reasoning that it is unfair, prejudiced, perhaps of limited predictive ability, and possibly erroneous without consumer recourse for correction. Hiding either type of information addresses the symptom, not the problems, and places companies at a disadvantage that make significant decisions based on the accuracy and completeness of consumer record. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Capital Rx. ‍Capital Rx is a full-service pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) and pharmacy benefit administrator (PBA), advancing our nation’s electronic healthcare infrastructure to improve drug price visibility and patient outcomes. As a Certified B Corp, Capital Rx is executing its mission through the deployment of JUDI, the company’s cloud-native enterprise health platform, and a Single-Ledger Model, which increases visibility and reduces variability in drug prices. JUDI connects every aspect of the pharmacy ecosystem in one efficient, scalable platform, servicing millions of members for Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial plans. Together with its clients, Capital Rx is reimagining the administration of pharmacy benefits and rebuilding trust in healthcare. Thanks to Capital Rx for supporting HIStalk.

I found this Capital Rx video on YouTube, titled “Meet JUDI — The Enterprise Health Platform For Commercial, Medicare & Medicaid Plans.”

Webinars

June 26 (Wednesday) noon ET. “Population Risk Management in Action: Automating Clinical Workflows to Improve Medication Adherence.” Sponsor: DrFirst. Presenters: Colin Banas, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, DrFirst; Weston Blakeslee, PhD, VP of population health, DrFirst. What if you could measure and manage medication adherence in a way that would eliminate the burdens of medication history collection, patient identification, and prioritization? The presenters will describe how to use MedHx PRM’s new capabilities to harness the most complete medication history data on the market, benefit from near real-time medication data delivered within 24 hours, automatically build rosters of eligible patients, and identify gaps of care in seconds.

June 27 (Thursday) noon ET. “Snackable Summer Series, Session 1: The Intelligent Health Record.” Sponsor: Health Data Analytics Institute. This webinar will describe how HealthVision, HDAI’s Intelligent Health Management System, is transforming care across health systems and value-based care organizations. This 30-minute session will answer the question: what if you could see critical information from hundreds of EHR pages in a one-page patient chart and risk summary that serves the entire care team? We will tour the Spotlight, an easy-to-digest health profile and risk prediction tool. Session 2 will describe HDAI’s Intelligent Analytics solution, while Session 3 will tour HDAI’s Intelligent Workflow solution.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Tempus AI, which specializes in precision medicine and intelligent diagnostics, raises $410 million in its IPO, giving it a valuation of $6 billion. Founder and CEO Eric Lefkofsky co-founded Groupon and remains its chairman.

Home care management solutions vendor HHAeXchange acquires Cashe Software, which offers homecare operations and billing software.

Sales

• Sage Memorial Hospital (AZ) will implement Sonifi Health’s interactive patient engagement technology when it opens later this year.
• Children’s Health Ireland selects Ascom’s Alerts and Notification Management System.
• Praia Health will use Clear’s identity verification capabilities within its patient-focused digital experience software for health systems.
• WakeMed (NC) will deploy Bamboo Health’s care coordination solutions.
• Virtual physical therapy provider Hinge Health will offer its members access to Upswing Health’s digital platform for musculoskeletal health.

People

AtlantiCare names Jordan Ruch, MBA (RWJBarnabas Health) as CIO.

Capital Rx hires Antonio Garcia Cueto, MBA (Eden Health) as CFO.

Acentra Health names Heather Adamson, MS (Integra Connect) as SVP of marketing.

Keith Belton (Symplr) joins Fluent Dental Market Insights as SVP of marketing.

Announcements and Implementations

Christus Health (TX) implements Abridge’s AI-powered clinical documentation software.

Health system-collective Truveta adds support for real-world evidence submissions to FDA.

Healthcare wearable safety technology vendor Canopy releases a wearable safety button and safety app for home health providers.

Government and Politics

New data from ONC finds that the number of hospitals that are routinely sharing health data grew from 28% in 2018 to 43% in 2023. Of those, 92% noted they had necessary clinical data available from outside providers at the bedside, improving continuity of care.

CMS will stop accepting new applications on July 12 for the advance payments program it set up in March to help providers impacted by the Change Healthcare ransomware attack. The program has made 4,722 advance payments totaling $717 million, and issued $2.55 billion in accelerated payments.

Healthcare privacy and policy experts Tina Grande, MHS and Deven McGraw, JD, MPH, LLM highlight in a Health Affairs editorial that entities are using interoperability technology and policies to seek patient data for non-treatment purposes. They say that companies are posing as providers or, in the case of law firms seeking malpractice information, as the patient themselves. They recommend these changes:

• Fund health information exchange to prevent participants from adopting business models that are based on selling de-identified data.
• Tighten rules for the business associates of organizations that aren’t their direct customer.
• Penalize data misuse with termination from the network, banning company officers from future health network participation, and imposing FTC fines for unfair trade practices.
• Create a safe harbor for trusted exchange participants which unknowingly provide data to a participant that misstates their intentions.
• Add a FAQ that describes how entities can decline to share data without violating information blocking regulations.
• Issue clearer guidance on non-treatment purposes.
• Extend health data privacy protections to entities that collect health information and share it with patients, which is not covered by HIPAA, and define expectations for obtaining patient consent and ID verification.

Privacy and Security

NHS England reports that London-area hospitals have had to cancel or reschedule 1,500 appointments and surgeries as a result of the June 3 ransomware attack on pathology services vendor Synnovis.

Other

A ProPublica report finds that “life coaches” are mostly unregulated compared to therapists, with no specified training, certification, or ethics pledge required. Anyone can hang out a life coach shingle, and some of those who do so are former therapists who got in professional trouble. A hotbed is Utah, which is known as the “fraud capital of the United States” because many multi-level marketing scammers are Latter-Day Saints who prey on other Mormons who trust them because of their religion.

Interesting: Wells Fargo fires more than a dozen work-from-home employees of its wealth and investment management business after finding that they were using widely available mouse-jiggling software to simulate work. Maybe they should have fired their managers for not being able to notice that they weren’t productive, but in fairness, that’s the case in every business that employs knowledge workers.

Sponsor Updates

• Waystar staff across the country celebrate the company’s Nasdaq debut.

The following HIStalk sponsors will exhibit at the HFMA Annual Conference June 24-27 in Las Vegas:

• AGS Health
• Alpha II
• Altera Digital Health
• Arcadia
• Availity
• CereCore
• FinThrive
• Inovalon
• MRO
• Nordic
• QGenda
• RLDatix
• TruBridge
• TrustCommerce, a Sphere Company
• VisiQuate
• Waystar
• Wolters Kluwer

Blog Posts

• Charge Capture and Reconciliation for Strong Revenue Cycle Management (CereCore)
• Encephalopathy Coding: Challenges and Solutions (AGS Health)
• Supply chain attacks: Understanding one of cybersecurity’s biggest threats (Altera Digital Health)
• What to Expect During an OCR Audit or Investigation and How to Prepare (Clearwater)

Contacts

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