Thanks, appreciate these insights. I've been contemplating VA's Oracle / Cerner implementation and wondered if implementing the same systems across…
Monday Morning Update 11/11/24
Top News
Clinician network and drug marketing operator Doximity reports Q2 results: revenue up 20%, adjusted EPS $0.30 versus $0.22, beating expectations for both and sending DOCS shares up 34% in valuing the company at $11 billion.
The company said in the earnings call that its most profitable business is selling ads in its news feed, while its fastest-growing offering is the AI-powered Doximity GPT workflow assistant, which processed 1 million prompts in Q2.
Reader Comments
From Anonymous: “Re: [vendor executive name omitted]. Removed from a plane intoxicated and arrested.” I’m not naming names per my longstanding policy of not calling out individuals who are involved in off-the-job arrests, lawsuits, or indiscretions. It’s news only if the company makes a statement to distance itself. For example, I wrote about a telehealth CEO who had a work-unrelated public altercation that I wouldn’t have mentioned except that his employer announced that he had been fired as a result, so that made it news. I am Golden Ruling it here — you yourself could get arrested for public intoxication, road rage, or a domestic issue, but I wouldn’t trash your reputation and maybe your career just because I have salacious details. Summon the oracle of Google if you need to know.
From Duopoly: “Re: Kaleida Health. I hear they are replacing Cerner with Epic.” Unverified, but they are listed on Epic’s UserWeb. Their open positions don’t have anything that is specific to Epic, but they have a ton of IT analyst openings. Kaleida spent $125 million to upgrade its Cerner system in early 2019.
From Griswold: “Re: Summa Health. A venture capital firm paying more than $1 billion to acquire a debt-laden, money-losing health system and turn it into a for-profit is one hella expensive technology test bed.” It will also be a public demonstration project for General Catalyst’s technology portfolio companies, which take a black eye if their products fail to improve Summa’s profit and quality. I don’t recall many (any?) cases where a health system gets better under the ownership of an investment firm that portrays itself as a money-indifferent white knight.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Poll respondents say that Oracle’s biggest challenge with its new EHR will be getting former Cerner customers to switch to that system instead of Epic. I signed up for an Oracle Health webinar next week that will provide a sneak peek.
New poll to your right or here: Which city or region has the strongest claim for being the US capital for health tech? How times have changed with the former obvious answers of Malvern and Kansas City don’t make the list and Atlanta is a long shot.
A handful of HIStalk sponsors have left the fold because they were acquired, ran short of money, changed strategy, or lost the only employee who knew anything about their sponsorship. Contact Lorre to replace them, especially if they were your competitor. She will offer some spiffs if you’re a startup or maybe if you are a former sponsor.
I used the image analysis capability of the ChatGPT phone app twice yesterday. I was looking for an unusual, inexpensive wine to serve to a neighbor who is coming over for dinner, so I took pictures of each label that I was considering and asked ChatGPT to tell me about each wine’s quality and whether it would go with what we were serving. Later that day, Mrs. H mentioned wanting to preserve old family recipes that have been handed down to her over the years, so I took a photo of each and had ChatGPT convert the barely readable cursive handwriting into text that I could copy-paste into Word (pro tip: the best recipes have the most smudges). I bet it would have excelled at interpreting old-school handwritten prescriptions.
Thanks to veterans – no matter when, where, or how you served – on Veterans Day. Sunday was the 249th birthday of the US Marine Corps, so thanks to those who always run toward the sounds of chaos.
Webinars
None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Health Catalyst reports Q3 results: revenue up 3%, adjusted EPS $0.07 versus $0.03, meeting revenue expectations but falling short on earnings. HCAT shares are up 37% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $501 million.
TruBridge reports Q3 results: revenue down 1%, adjusted EPS –$0.21 versus $0.45, beating revenue expectations but falling short on earnings. TBRG shares are down 3% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $203 million. COO David Dye, who has been with the company for 34 years, will retire at the end of the year.
Waystar reports Q3 results: revenue up 22%, adjusted EPS $0.14 versus –$0.09, beating expectations for both. WAY shares are up 51% since the company’s IPO on June 7, 2024, valuing the company at $5.4 billion.
Evolent Health reports Q3 results: revenue up 22%, EPS $0.04 versus $0.30, falling short on expectations for both and send shares down 46% in valuing the technology-focused care management company at $1.5 billion. The company blames higher-than-expected medical costs that will require it to renegotiate or exit some of its risk-based contracts with payers.
People
Optimum Healthcare IT promotes Dan Robinson to VP of client services.
Government and Politics
HHS awards Leidos a $235 million contract to modernize the country’s Organ Procurement and Transplant Network (OPTN). The system has been operated since 1986 by the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) and has generated more than 1,000 complaints and accusations of a monopoly.
Privacy and Security
Former organ donation organization employee Trent Russell is sentenced to two years in prison for accessing and screen-shotting the EHR data of then-Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose hospital chart then showed up on 4chan conspiracy theory message board. The prosecutor said that Russell “offered completely implausible excuses with a straight face,” referring to the defendant’s insistence that his cat must have run across his keyboard.
Other
FDA Commissioner Rob Califf, MD urges clinicians to help their patients understand medical misinformation, adding that AI may help by giving them more time for such discussions during encounters.
Sponsor Updates
- Inovalon announces that customers who are using its Converged Quality healthcare quality data analysis and improvement software realized a 5% increase above the national average of 2025 Medicare Advantage Star Ratings.
- WellSky partners with the National Association of State Directors of Developmental Disabilities Services to publish survey results on how state directors plan to comply with the CMS “Ensuring Access to Medicaid Services” rule.
- CereCore releases a new podcast, “Happy Doctors and Technology: A CMIO and Practicing Physician’s POV.”
- RLDatix publishes a new resource, “AdventHealth Reduced Falls by 80% With Scalable, Data-Driven Bootcamp.”
- SmartSense by Digi will exhibit at the ASHP 2024 Midyear Clinical Meeting & Exhibition December 8-12 in New Orleans.
- A new study by WellSky Foundation and Meals on Wheels America reveals meal delivery services significantly reduce senior hospitalizations.
- Clinical Architecture, InterSystems, Wolters Kluwer Health, and Elsevier will sponsor and/or exhibit at AMIA 2024 November 9-13 in San Francisco.
Blog Posts
- What to Expect at UKG Aspire 2024 (Healthcare IT Leaders)
- Succeeding in Value-Based Care: Part 1 (Tegria)
- Streamlining pre-registration: Lessons from Augusta Health’s AI-powered automation journey (Notable)
- Celebrating National Family Caregivers Day: 3 ways to give back to those who give so much (Netsmart)
- Grounded by pilots: why healthcare innovation rarely takes off (Nordic)
- Healthcare Communication Software: History and Future Predictions (PerfectServe)
- Promoting Safety and Awareness: David’s Impactful Community Service with Elgin Fire Department (Prominence Advisors)
- Optimizing Cardiology Scheduling: A Complete Guide to Better Care and Workflow (QGenda)
- The Right Focus for Technology Innovation: CEO Curtis Watkins POV (CereCore)
- Protecting Against the Top Cause of Data Breaches: Human Error (TrustCommerce, a Sphere Company)
- What Came After the Heart Attack (Surescripts)
- Revenue Cycle Outsourcing: How To Optimize Healthcare Financial Operations (TruBridge)
- Embracing Full Cloud Adoption: Why Hybrid Solutions Compromise Security and Efficiency (Visage Imaging)
- Automated prior authorization 101: How to activate staff + exception-based workflows (Waystar)
- What’s on the healthcare horizon: Focusing AI to benefit care teams, harnessing data, consumer-centric care (Wolters Kluwer Health)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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Ok, I have to ask!
That recipe for Sauerbraten. How did ChatGPT do converting this to text?
Does it understand columns?
I can tell you this. Traditional OCR would struggle and likely produce unusable output. As in, so many errors to correct, you’d be better off hand typing the whole thing.
Zeroing in on details. Does ChatGPT know that C=Cups and T=Tablespoons, in the context of a recipe?
ChatGPT seems to have handled it well, including translating the measurement units from abbreviations and reading down both handwritten columns. Its output of the ingredients part is this:
Sauerbraten Recipe
Ingredients:
1 cup red wine vinegar
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1/2 cup burgundy
2 onions, sliced
1 carrot, sliced
1 stalk celery, chopped
Few sprigs parsley
1 bay leaf
2 whole allspice
4 whole cloves
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon pepper
4 lb chuck pot roast
1/3 cup salad oil
6 tablespoons flour
Shortening
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 cup crushed gingersnaps
This could be a significant step forward in computation.
Years ago I read an article on what was required by the postal service, to automatically read addresses. It took exhaustive logic to handle them, including what to do when presented with missing or malformed addresses. This was long before the presence of AI.
A recipe is a bit like an address, in that there is a standard form for the information. Yet any specific recipe or address can deviate from that form. The ideal logic is to approach any decoding/interpreting task looking for the standard forms, yet be able to adjust when the rules aren’t followed (or there is a problematic stain present).
I noticed in that recipe card photo, there were many stains. Some serious enough to completely scramble the writing (was the back side of the card bleeding through to the front? I noticed a backwards ‘P’ on the line listing cloves).
If ChatGPT can handle this kind of input gracefully, that’s impressive.
I recently digitized a bunch of recipes that my dad left behind after he passed – even though many were typed, the text-recognition didn’t like things like 1/4c and it was confused by some of the spacing and formatting of the instructions. I think it still helped cut down on the time it took to digitize them, but I had to be careful and read through the end result so I didn’t end up with instructions like “Add 114c of sugar”
I didn’t think to use AI and now I’m curious if that would have helped.
I’m a little sad that you’re gate-keeping the rest of the Sauerbraten recipe. Are you just trying tease us? 🙂
I’ll get the whole recipe from Mrs. H and post it, including the potato dumplings that really make it special! Not to mention the red cabbage (balsamic vinegar is the secret ingredient) and the homemade applesauce. I’m wearing out the refrigerator door poaching leftovers.