Monday Morning Update 9/23/24

Top News

Drugmaker Eli Lilly sends letters to people who have taken compounding pharmacy versions of its Zepbound and Mounjaro weight loss drugs. It asks the patients to authorize release of their medical records to the company so it can “obtain more details from the treating physician around your experience.”

The company did not say how it obtained the patient names and contact information.

Lilly CEO Dave Ricks said in an interview, “We’re going after this with our legal tools. We send letters to people and threaten them. We can challenge the physicians who are doing the prescribing.”

Bankers say that compounding pharmacies have sold up to $1 billion of GLP-1 drugs, which they can legally make and sell as long as the brand name drugs remain under an FDA-declared shortage.

I must have been subconsciously considering the source of the letter when I misread “patient safety” as “patent safety.”

Reader Comments

From Long-Time Reader: “Re: companies to consider. I’m a mid-career sales health IT lifer, with experience in both large and niche vendors as a generalist and with clinical applications. I’m looking for a new sales position. What companies have you seen that are solving important problems, have differentiated themselves, and can execute?” I will seek the counsel of readers who have a better viewpoint than I. Can you help me respond with what companies this person — who has an extensive track record as a C-level sales exec – might want to have on their radar? A short reply with just a company name is fine, or you can add some color to explain why. I will send Long-Time Reader a summary of de-identified responses so that everybody stays anonymous. Thanks for your help. If I get enough interesting responses, I may list the companies here for everybody’s benefit, even those who aren’t job hunting. UPDATE: I started receiving great responses from star-level readers within 10 minutes of posting this and I really appreciate that.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I guess we should be pleased that just 6% of poll respondents were asked by a provider to bring in their paper medical records.

New poll to your right or here, as suggested by a reader who was interested in the rather depressing Commonwealth Fund report: Which action would be most effective in improving the health and welfare of US citizens?

I took some heat for writing this in mid-2022 in response to a reader said that remote work in healthcare gave employees power and would remain the standard, but I think it mostly played out as I predicted now that Amazon is ending remote work:

I think that moment was fleeting. Economic and industry conditions have put bosses back in charge and they know that they need to manage costs while fretting less that their employees might flee to greener pastures. I never understood the “great resignation,” assuming (perhaps naively) that the same number of people still need to work and the total number of available jobs hasn’t changed much even though job mix has shifted. Some jobs can be performed remotely (and always could have been), but work-from-home was, like telemedicine, a temporary compromise whose adoption will settle at numbers higher than pre-pandemic but much lower than in 2020-21. I bet many executives agree with me that you can’t build and maintain a great company when employees are doing task work in their living rooms and communicating via Slack and Zoom while missing face-to-face meetings, chance encounters, personal relationships, and exposure to broader company work. I expect companies to compromise by offering a hybrid model of 1-2 offsite work days per week or maybe going with a permanent four-day workweek, which adds flexibility and reduces commute headaches but without conferring geographic freedom. Employee threats to sell their services elsewhere if they are required to show up at the office are ringing pretty hollow now versus a year ago.

Attention HIStalk sponsors that will participate in the HLTH 2024 event next month: send me your details to be included in my online guide, which will go up the week before the conference.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Ferrum Health, which offers a secure platform for health systems to deploy AI, raises $16 million in a Series A funding round.

CorroHealth — the parent brand of TrustHCS, T-System, RevCycle+, Visionary RCM, and Versalus Health — closes its acquisition of Navient’s Xtend RCM business.

Healthcare AI call agent developer Hippocratic AI adds $17 million to its Series A funding round, increasing its total raised to $137 million.

Sales

• Logan Health (MT) will implement Oracle Health , replacing Meditech, following its merger with Oracle Health customer Billings Clinic in September 2023.

People

Industry long-timer Mark Crockett, MD (TeleDaas) joins Phigenics as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Sentara will buy 6,000 smartphones to replace basic phones, pagers, and computer carts with Epic-connected devices.

Government and Politics

The Indian Health System will go live on Oracle Health’s EHR at three Oklahoma pilot sites in 2025.

Pieces Technology says that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton misrepresented the nature of the company’s settlement of deceptive claims charges that were related to its AI-powered products. The company says that the AG’s press release about the agreement it signed us a “disappointing and damaging misrepresentation of this agreement” that includes these errors:

• It does not mention that the settlement does not include any financial terms or penalty payments.
• The agreement raises no issues related to the safety of the company’s products and does not suggest that the public interest has ever been at risk.
• Pieces agreed to report its hallucination rates via and independently developed risk classification system given that no standard classification system is available for clinical summarization.
• The company will avoid making misleading claims and will give customers more information about the model’s training, its intended use, and areas where the provider might create patient risk by misusing it.

FDA issues the final version of its recommendations to drug companies that plan to submit EHR and claims data related to a drug’s safety or effectiveness.

Privacy and Security

A new Federal Trade Commission report addresses the “vast surveillance” of social media users by nine companies, including Meta, YouTube, and TikTok. It specifically calls out the sharing of tracking pixels among health-related apps and social media platforms for ad targeting.

Other

A study finds that malicious actors can use AI to generate deceptive medical texts that earn higher ranking in biomedical knowledge graphs (medical KG), which summarize the medical literature and are used by downstream applications. The human-undetectable papers “poisoned” the medical KGs by suggesting that a promoted drug has a stronger connection to a particular targeted disease, which sounds a lot like SEO and other Google-fooling word tricks.

Medical professor and immunologist Derya Unutmaz, MD reports on X how he used OpenAI’s new Strawberry (the ChatGPT o1 preview) to develop a cancer treatment project. He predicts that only the top 10-20% most skilled and dedicated physicians will continue to hold fulfilling jobs as AI limits the number needed, especially in diagnostics and routine treatments, and says it is becoming unethical to not consult AI in medical practice given the 12 million people who are misdiagnosed in the US each year.

In Australia, a coroner rules that a hospital’s electronic charting process contributed to the death of a Canberra Hospital inpatient from liver failure that was caused by an acetaminophen overdose. The attending doctor reduced the ordered amount of 1,000 mg IV four times per day to 600 mg on a paper chart, but another doctor who transcribed the order into the EHR re-entered the original dose.

Sponsor Updates

• Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast, “Interview with Joel Klein, MD.”
• QGenda and RLDatix will exhibit at NAMSS 2024 September 29-October 2 in Denver.
• SnapCare co-founder and COO Jeff Richards joins the Lewis College Advisory Board.
• Verato will present at Reuter’s Total Health Conference October 8-9 in Chicago.
• Waystar will exhibit at the HFMA Region 6 Conference September 25-27 in Columbus, OH.

Blog Posts

• 5 Ways to Drive Meaningful Innovation Through Collaboration (Netsmart)
• From anxiety to action: Human-centered solutions to increase follow-up after false positives (Nordic)
• Nurses of Note 2024: The Clinical Excellence Project Manager (PerfectServe)
• Focusing on whole-person care to build resilient telehealth strategies (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Contact us.