News 6/12/20

Top News

Silicon Valley investment firm Iconiq makes a “significant” investment in healthcare workforce management software vendor QGenda that values the company at just over $1 billion.

Francisco Partners, which considered selling the company in May, will remain Atlanta-based QGenda’s majority owner.

Reader Comments

From Going Live: “Re: EHR go-lives. Are they still happening? What measures are being taken to protect those involved?” The only go-lives I’ve heard about in the past couple of months were done remotely, but perhaps others have been involved in the traditional version and can report. I would be surprised if hospitals that were preparing for COVID overrun and banning patient visitors were simultaneously undertaking a go-live that involved on-site help.

From Confused: “Re: [vendor name omitted.] Announced new funding, but this news is 16 months old, according to former employees.” I reached out to the company, which says it held the announcement “to peg it to exciting company milestones and product capability rollouts.” I’m not listing their name since this could be commonly accepted practice for all I know and there’s no reason to call them out if so. I didn’t find any of the usual investment sources that listed the actual funding date — they all used the recent announcement date instead. Maybe the biggest takeaway here is that while it is impressive that companies are announcing new funding during a pandemic and its associated economic downturn, the funding itself may have occurred before all that happened or when its competitive situation was different than now.

From Doctor Doctor: “Re: COVID-19. I’ve seen a lot of dumb opinions and advice from doctors quoted on news sites and social media.” As have I. People erroneously think that all doctors from every practice setting are science-based, apolitical, free of commerce-related bias, current in their knowledge, and just as qualified as epidemiologists, virologists, and public health experts to speak authoritatively on COVID-19’s transmission, mitigation strategies, and treatment.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Somehow I missed that John Glaser left Cerner back in November 2019, according to his LinkedIn. He’s on the board of health IT-related organizations Press Ganey, EHealth Initiative, InTouch Health, American Telemedicine Association, PatientPing, Relatient, and Scottsdale Institute, also serving as a senior advisor to Brighton Park Capital.

Webinars

June 18 (Thursday) 12:30 ET. “Understanding the ONC’s Final Rule: Using FHIR HL7 for Successful EHR Integrations.” Sponsor: Newfire Global Partners. Presenters: Bob Salitsky, healthcare IT expert, Newfire Global Partners; Jaya Plmanabhan, MS, healthcare data scientist. This fast-paced, 30-minute webinar will provide an overview of the Final Rule and describe how technology vendors, payers, and providers can use FHIR HL7 to deliver true interoperability. Attendees will learn how to define the data, technology, and flows needed for their EHR integration projects; how products can retrieve health information while meeting compliance regulations; and the benefit of adopting quickly to the future of data exchange while simplifying future integration efforts.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Provider search and scheduling software vendor Kyruus raises $30 million in a venture round from Francisco Partners, bringing its total funding to $155 million.

Wellsheet raises $3.8 million in a Series A funding round. The New Jersey-based startup has developed software that uses predictive analytics to optimize provider workflows.

Genetic clinical decision support company ActX secures a patent pertaining to cloud-based storage and real-time distribution of biological information.

Automated virtual care vendor Conversa Health raises $12 million in a Series B funding round.

Sales

• Health and Social Care Northern Ireland signs a $351 million contract with Epic for implementation across five trusts and its ambulance service.

People

Optum promotes former Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation director Patrick Conway, MD to CEO of its Care Solutions group.

Virtual care technology vendor Conversa Health promotes Murray Brozinsky to CEO.

Kevin Lynch (Netgain) joins Datica as CEO. Co-founder and former CEO Jeremy Pierotti takes on the role of president.

Announcements and Implementations

Goliath Technologies helps Maimonides Medical Center (NY) anticipate, troubleshoot, and resolve Citrix slowdown issues.

Nuance Dragon Medical One voice assistant users can now access UpToDate clinical content from Wolters Kluwer Health.

Novant Health (NC) implements iQueue for Operating Rooms from LeanTaas to help its surgical facilities ramp back up to pre-COVID-19 capacities.

Health Catalyst will launch a quality reporting product that combines its Data Operating System with measures, visualizations, and workflows from Able Health, which it acquired earlier this year.

Government and Politics

The VA gives Cerner a $99 million task order for sustainment support of hardware and software associated with its $10 billion EHR modernization project.

COVID-19

Regeneron begins the first clinical trials of antibodies for COVID-19 treatment, which if successful, could be cleared for emergency use by fall assuming production can be ramped up.

Researchers identify 12 malware-distributing Android apps that were disguised to look like COVID-19 contact tracing apps issued by the governments of Brazil, Italy, Russia, Singapore, and other countries.

Business Insider reports that just three states – Alabama, North Dakota, and South Carolina – will use contact tracing apps from Apple and Google. Seventeen states have said they won’t use contact-tracing apps at all, while 19 remain undecided.

None of the 140 customers of a Missouri hair salon whose hair was cut by two stylists who worked for eight days despite having active, symptomatic COVID-19 infection have become infected. Health department officials credit the salon’s insistence on mask-wearing by both customers and employees, its wider spacing of chairs, and its staggered appointment times to reduce group waiting. The stylists have been released from isolation. Experts are increasingly convinced that wearing masks could significantly reduce the spread of COVID-19.

Mount Sinai (NY) uses a grant from Microsoft’s AI for Health program to develop an informatics center dedicated to COVID-19 research.

The Department of Justice charges the president of a biotechnology company with submitting $69 million in fraudulent COVID-19 and allergy testing claims to mislead investors. Arrayit’s Mark Schena, PhD allegedly paid kickbacks to doctors for ordering allergy testing regardless of medical need, used the revenue to misrepresent the company’s prospects to investors, then jumped on the COVID-19 bandwagon with diagnostic tests whose accuracy was questionable.

Privacy and Security

StayWell secures the portal it hosts for the State of Kentucky’s health and wellness incentive program after discovering two data breaches that exposed employee email addresses, passwords, and biometric screening and health assessment data. The breach also resulted in fraudulent gift card redemptions.

Other

Bloomberg Businessweek describes the negative effects of private equity firms buying dermatology practices, 10% of which are now owned by PE firms:

• The PE formula of drastically cutting costs and flipping the business for a profit in 3-5 years with a 20-30% annualized return makes it difficult to serve both patients and investors effectively.
• Corporate-owned medical practices are illegal in many states, but lawyers get around that by creating a management company that buys a practice’s non-clinical accesses and bills its doctors for its services, which is supposed to keep medical decisions separate from profit-seeking ones even though PE firms admit that they insert themselves into the clinical side of the practice.
• Doctors in solo practice can sell out for $7-12 million, with some of that paid in equity. Patients are not notified of the practice’s new owner.
• Some of the acquiring firms pay cash bonuses to offices that hit daily and monthly financial goals, encouraging them to perform as many procedures as possible. In some cases, medical assistants earned their bonuses by falsifying documentation and doctors were told to falsely claim that they were supervising PAs.
• PE firms push dermatologists to perform more high-profit procedures such as cosmetic surgery, laser treatments, and Mohs surgeries, the latter of which are sometimes performed by traveling labs that are flown in or that work from temporary parking lot clinics.
• PE firms buy labs and hire their own pathologists to keep revenue in-house, which is legally allowed under Stark laws only for dermatology and a few other specialties.
• Doctors are pushed to see more patients and sometimes are forced to use inferior medical supplies and equipment. One dermatologist says their employer insisted that surgery patients be sent home with open wounds so they would be forced to return the next day for suturing, which allowed the practice to bill them a second time.
• 25% of the dermatologists with the highest biopsy rate work for private equity-backed groups who encourage diagnosing “Pre- pre- pre-cancer” to get patients to have skin blotches removed.
• A dermatologist says that the debt-saddled chains are struggling to find their expected buyers since “there’s a limit to how much money you can make when you’re sticking knives into human skin for profit.” As a result, the PE firms are moving into specialties that perform more invasive procedures, such as urology.

Sponsor Updates

• Banner Health (AZ) expands its use of Spok’s Care Connect communication software.
• Health Catalyst will partner with life sciences company Sprim to use real-world evidence to inform clinical trials for liver disease.
• Gartner includes Imat Solutions in its “US Healthcare Payer CIOs Boost Medicare Advantage Star Ratings Using Engagement Hubs and Insights” report.
• The “HIT Like a Girl” podcast will feature Intelligent Medical Objects CEO Ann Barnes on June 10.
• NextGate’s identity-matching EMPI solution is now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
• Arcadia makes available a COVID-19 Recovery Toolkit to help its customers resume normal operations.
• Wolters Kluwer Health helps to develop and virtually host the American Diabetes Association’s 80th Scientific Sessions June
• Providers from five health systems will present their experience with implementing Glytec’s EGlycemic Management System during the 2020 Diabetes Technology Society Virtual Hospital Poster Session. 12-16.
• PCare adds on-demand movies and television shows from Tubi to its COVID-19 Tablet Configuration Solution.
• Optimum Healthcare IT posts a case study titled “ Virtual Epic Go-Live at Valley Children’s Healthcare.”

Blog Posts

• 5 ways to enhance your cloud storage security and data protection (Google Cloud)
• Tackle your billing backlog to increase cash flow (Greenway Health)
• What is Clinical Communication? (Halo Health)
• Enabling Digital Foundations for the Future (The HCI Group)
• Clinical NLP Part 2: A Better Equation for Calculating Quality Measures (Wolters Kluwer Health Language)
• Why It’s Necessary to Integrate Protocols into Existing Workflows (Healthfinch)
• The Secret to Creating the Most Satisfied Patients (Healthwise)
• The Essential Resource Guide to Hospital-Enabled Virtual Care | Part 1 of 5 (Access)
• Overview of Nordic’s Capacity Simulation and Management Solution (Nordic)
• 2020 health IT trends: Revisited (Hyland)
• A Leading Look at Revenue Integrity (Impact Advisors)
• Are you getting the most from your IT investments? (Imprivata)
• Creating an effective remote workforce strategy (Infor)
• Help simplify nurses’ lives: 5 ways to streamline nursing workflows (Spok)
• MIPS Registry and Reporting: Increase Quality Time with Patients While Maximizing Revenue (Ingenious Med)
• Moving Toward Meaningful Mental Health Data (InterSystems)
• Meeting Your Communities’ Mental Health Needs During and After COVID-19 (Kyruus)
• How COVID-19 is Advancing Healthcare’s Need for a Digital Transformation (Medhost)
• Strategies to Bolster Infection Control and Surveillance Amid COVID-19 (Netsmart)

Contacts

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