News 8/28/19

Top News

Private equity firm Warburg Pincus acquires a majority interest in therapy EHR vendor WebPT from Battery Ventures.

Co-founder and President Heidi Jannenga, PT, DPT will move to chief clinical officer, while industry long-timer Nancy Ham remains as CEO.

Other Warburg Pincus health IT investments include Intelligent Medical Objects, Experity Health, and Modernizing Medicine.

Reader Comments

From Snark Week: “Re: rumors and snark. Less, please – this is a news site.” Not to nitpick, but HIStalk is whatever I want it to be. Things I’ve learned in doing it for 16 years: (a) everybody loves rumor and humor except when it’s about their company, then they get all high and mighty about journalistic integrity; (b) nobody reads sites that just vomit up dull, inexpertly reported straight news; and (c) everybody thinks their opinion as a reader is representative and therefore their sometimes-cranky recommendations are by definition unerringly correct. I write HIStalk for myself, but everyone is welcome to read it with me.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Which would you hate missing most: (a) Epic’s UGM, or (b) the HIMSS conference?

Webinars

September 5 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “Driving 90% Patient Adoption Across Your Network: How US Dermatology Partners is Showing Us The Way.” Sponsor: Relatient. Presenters: Michele Perry, CEO, Relatient; Sara Nguyen, VP of applications and integrations, US Dermatology Partners. US Dermatology Partners is helping its physicians reclaim time they can spend with patients and is turning patient engagement strategies into business results across its 90 locations in eight states. Attendees will learn how US Dermatology Partners defined its patient engagement objectives and physician-optimized strategies. They presenters will provide advice on starting or accelerating  patient engagement goals.

September 19 (Thursday) 2:00 ET. “ICD-10-CM 2020 Code Updates.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, director of terminology mapping, IMO; Theresa Rihanek, MHA, RHIA, classification and intervention mapping lead, IMO; and Julie Glasgow, MD, senior clinical terminologist, IMO. The 2020 regulatory release is right around the corner. Join IMO’s top coding professionals and thought leaders as they discuss new, revised, and deleted codes; highlight revisions to ICD-10-CM index and tabular; discuss changes within Official Coding Guidelines; share potential impacts of the code set update; and review ICD-10-CM modifier changes.

September 26 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Patient Education Data: A Key Ingredient for Improving Quality and Patient Experience.” Sponsor: Healthwise. Presenters: Victoria L. Maisonneuve, MSN, RN, director of the Nursing Center for Excellence and Magnet program, Parkview Health; Marta Sylvia, MPH, senior manager of quality improvement and outcomes research, Healthwise. Healthcare data is everywhere! It’s scattered across various systems and in countless formats, making it difficult to collect and glean actionable information. Knowing where to start depends on what your organization wants to accomplish. Vicki Maisonneuve will share how her team analyzes data around the use of patient education. By combining different data sets, she can easily identify trends, gaps, and opportunities to improve quality and patient experience across Parkview Health.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Hound Labs, which is working on the first marijuana breathalyzer (the device also measures alcohol levels), raises $30 million, increasing its total to $65 million. Fun facts: “Law and Order” creator Dick Wolf is an investor in the company, which was founded by former deputy sheriff, SWAT team member, ED doctor, venture capitalist, and White House fellow Mike Lynn and his wife Jenny, who was a marketing executive and also a White House fellow.

A PE firm and a strategic investment firm acquire Thread, which offers virtual clinical trials tools such as electronic consent, telehealth, sensor integration, surveys, and patient authentication and engagement. Former US Army paratrooper Jeff Frazier founded the company as Definitive Media in 2005.

PeerWell — whose digital health platform addresses workers’ compensation surgery issues such as pain management, surgery avoidance, surgery optimization, and recovery — raises $6.5 million in a Series A funding round.

Sales

• Lehigh Valley Health Network chooses IKS Health’s Scribble for asynchronous virtual scribing.

People

Apervita hires Kevin Hutchinson (MyTaskit) as CEO.

Ontario Systems promotes Jason Harrington to CEO, where he will replace retiring co-founder and CEO Ron Fauquher. New Mountain Capital acquired a majority share of the company last week.

Announcements and Implementations

A new KLAS report on computer-assisted coding finds that 94% of customers would buy their existing product again. 3M and Optum showed improved satisfaction in the past three years, while Dolbey is most consistent at driving outcomes. Up-and-comer EzDI earns good marks for support, but half of respondents report problems with EHR integration.

Black Book names Bluetree Network #1 among 33 Epic consulting firms. More than half of survey respondents say they will increase their consultant-led engagements in 2020 based on needs such as EHR optimization, analytics, revenue cycle transformation, and IT managed services.

Epic celebrates #UGM19 (notably, the first year it has endorsed a conference hashtag) with its top 10 most-read customer successes on Epic.com so far in 2019. Among them:

• Henry Ford’s ED triage protocol that identifies possible human trafficking victims.
• MyChart price estimates.
• Mackenzie Health’s patient check-in via MyChart and kiosks.
• Mona Hanna-Attisha, MD’s use of Epic to discover of Flint, Michigan’s water crisis.
• Nebraska Medicine’s standardized hand-off.
• University of Utah Health’s neonatal weight gain program.
• Piedmont Healthcare’s work on hospital-acquired infections.
• Centura Health’s OR supply program.
• Epic’s Happy Together unified, patient-centered view of MyChart.
• Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust’s atrial fibrillation screening.

Baptist Health South Florida goes live on Kyruus ProviderMatch for Consumers as well as the Spanish language version, allowing consumers to search for providers and schedule appointments from its website.

Other

An @EricTopol find: researchers find that AI can accurately predict age and sex from ECGs. The value of this study isn’t related to sex – it’s that ECGs are now known to contain information that we humans don’t fully understand that might be useful in diagnosis.

Hat tip to @Cascadia, who noticed an EHR integration manager job posting from BCBS insurer Premera. Its analytics team will use InterSytems HealthShare to review EHR and claims data for “enabling the translation of real-time clinical data from medical service providers into data models and dashboards in support of data science” to improve outcomes and reduce cost.

A Japan-based business unit of contract research organization PPD (Pharmaceutical Product Development) will offer research services to clients in Japan, including development of EHR-enabled clinical trials. North Carolina-based PPD, started by pharmacist Fred Eshelman, PharmD in 1985 as a one-person consulting firm, was sold to an asset management company and a private equity firm in 2011 for $3.9 billion. It has since grown from 1,500 employees to 21,000, with offices in 48 countries. It recapitalized in 2017 with investment by the governments of Abu Dhabi and Singapore, valuing the company at $9 billion. Eshelman also started Furiex Pharmaceuticals, sold in 2014 to another drug company for $1.1 billion. Eshelman has donated at least $140 million to his alma mater, University of North Carolina’s School of Pharmacy, now named after him.

A dermatologist’s op-ed piece in the Philadelphia newspaper observes that even with interconnected EHRs, doctors don’t usually know how their patients are doing or even when they have died. He was going through his patient list when an EHR pop-up told him that one of them had passed away six months before, making him sorry that he had missed the chance to console the family or even to send a card, but then wondered whether the family members, who he had never met, would find that appropriate anyway.  

Clickbait headline of the day, from Forbes. The story is about a hospital in Egypt (not Oracle itself) that is using Oracle ERP, analytics, and workforce management for purely business functions. I’m sure the hospital will let us know when their payroll package cures cancer.

Sponsor Updates

• Contract therapy EHR vendor Casamba chooses NVoq as its preferred speech recognition provider.
• Dresner Advisory Services names Dimensional Insight an Overall Leader in its 2019 Industry Excellence Awards.
• Williamson Memorial Hospital implements paperless registration using Access EForms following its go-live on Meditech as a Service.

Blog Posts

• Alleviate billing drama (AdvancedMD)
• How Ardent Health Services used ‘social listening’ to improve the patient experience (Advisory Board)
• Do you enable a collaborative patient-first environment? #The Imaging Data Management Strategy Series (Agfa Healthcare)
• Working Toward More Meaningful Quality Measures with AI (Apixio)
• 10 Things You Should Know About Immunization Information Systems (Audacious Inquiry)
• The Rise and Importance of Telemedicine (EClinicalWorks)
• Kick Off Your Data Archiving Project Right (Impact Advisors)
• A Sample HIPAA WordPress Setup (Atlantic.Net)
• Bluetree ranked #1 Epic Systems Strategy, Support, and Implementation firm in Black Book report (Bluetree Network)
• What are the HIPAA Cloud Compliance Options for Healthcare? (Datica)
• Purchasing New Medical Technology? Take These 4 Steps First to Keep Them Secure (Fortified Health Security)
• EHRs Reduce Physician Burnout and Increase Physician Satisfaction (ChartLogic)
• A Visual Representation of Workplace Violence (Collective Medical)
• How Besa Uses Civic Engagement to Bridge the Gap Between Community and Individuals (CoverMyMeds)
• Eating Healthy on the Road: Healthy Food Options from 5 Popular Places (Divurgent)

Contacts

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