News 7/24/20

Top News

Clearlake Capital Group considers selling provider management, credentialing, and payer enrollment technology vendor Symplr, which it acquired in 2018 at a $550 million valuation. Reports suggest it hopes to sell at a $2 billion valuation.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

At-home, blood-testing kit startup Tasso will use some of a $17 million Series A funding round to develop a companion app that will help users share their data with providers. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is using Tasso’s devices in a COVID-19 antibody testing study, enabling patients to stay at home instead of traveling to a clinic.

For-profit hospital operator HCA Healthcare made more than $1 billion in Q2 profit, boosted by $822 million in federal stimulus money from the CARES act for pandemic relief. HCA says it received a total of $1.7 billion in CARES act funds.

Insurer software vendor HealthEdge acquires The Burgess Group, which offers a payment integrity system.

Sales

• BJC Healthcare (MO) selects Patientco’s patient payment technology and services.
• DFW Faith Health Collaborative (TX) will implement cloud-based referral and case management software from Pieces.
• University Clinical Health (TN) selects InteliChart’s patient portal, intake, and communications technology.
• Guadalupe Regional Medical Center (TX) will work with Pelitas to develop and deploy virtual patient intake capabilities.
• Oklahoma State University Medicine will work with TeleHealth Solution to staff virtual physicians at five hospitals in rural parts of the state.

People

Central Logic hires Jeanne Rogers (RevSpring) as VP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Cerner announces CommunityWorks Foundations, a fixed-fee, cloud-based version of Millennium for Critical Access Hospitals that can be brought live in six months.

Novant Health (NC) implements Epic test automation with help from Santa Rosa Consulting.

VCU Health (VA) launches a remote patient monitoring program for post-acute care patients using telemedicine software from Dictum Health.

WakeMed (NC) adds MapQuest technology from Comtech Telecommunications to its Epic MyChart app to better enable patients to find and check in to EDs.

Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System (LA) goes live on Kyruus ProviderMatch for Consumers, giving patients a more efficient way to find and schedule appointments with providers that meet their needs.

Allscripts-owned precision medicine software vendor 2bPrecise announces v3.0, which allows oncologists to assess patient risk for secondary cancers as well as family risk.

A new KLAS report on health IT vendor performance in responding to COVID-19 finds that the most relied-on health system solutions are virtual care, acute care EHR, and analytics. Vendors who are outperforming their historical satisfaction ratings during the pandemic are CareCloud, Cerner, IBM Watson Health, Philips, RxStrategies, and WellSky, while the worst-performing vendors are Agfa HealthCare, Allscripts, and EClinicalWorks. Budget-strapped health systems report significant budget cuts, but most say they will continue to invest in new technology as new demands arise. Above is the right upper quadrant (higher overall satisfaction, higher COVID satisfaction – click to enlarge).

Government and Politics

HHS will form the National Testing Implementation Forum to gain private-sector feedback on COVID-19 testing and diagnostic efforts, with a particular focus on supply chain issues.

COVID-19

The COVID Tracking Project reported 70,000 new cases on Wednesday, as hospitalizations neared the all-time peak at 60,000, and 1,126 new deaths were reported for the day. The US now has over 4 million cases, up 1 million in the past 15 days.

The federal government will pay $2 billion to order 100 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine from joint developers Pfizer and BioNTech, with the deal being conditional on the vaccines being proved safe and effective by earning FDA’s approval.

States are looking for alternatives to the two big lab testing companies, especially Quest Diagnostics, that are taking a week or more to deliver results, which at that point are mostly irrelevant for diagnosis or surveillance.  Quest says it is bottlenecked by a global shortage of testing machines and reagents.

Other

Only in America. The father of a University of Colorado Boulder college senior verifies that her hospital, surgeon, and clinic are within his insurer’s network before sending her off for outpatient meniscus repair. The for-profit HCA hospital billed $96,000, for which it accepted $3,200 from the insurance company and $360 from the family as payment in full. Then the father got a $1,170 bill from an out-of-network, independent surgical assistant that the surgeon had brought along. Most interesting is that use of such out-of-network, unlicensed assistants is so profitable that private equity is buying up the companies that provide them, following the playbook of (a) seeking situations where the patient doesn’t have a choice; and (b) making sure not to accept insurance so they can charge the patient directly for whatever amount they want.

Sponsor Updates

• IT and cloud managed services vendor SSI selects Goliath Technologies to support its go-to-market service and strategy.
• Relatient joins post-acute care EHR vendor Casamba’s partner network.

Blog Posts

• Protect medical devices from a cybersecurity threat (Capsule Technologies)
• Why You Should be Archiving Your Legacy EHR Data (Summit Healthcare)
• Hidden Costs of Poor Glycemic Management: Readmissions, LOS & Mortality (Glytec)
• Rethinking application modernization for CIOs (Google Cloud)
• Cloud-Based Clinical Communication Platforms vs. Mobile EHR Texting Modules (Halo Health)
• Achieve Data-Informed Healthcare in Eight Steps (Health Catalyst)
• Clinical NLP Part 4: Taking Predictive Analytics Strategies to the Next Level (Wolters Kluwer Health Language)
• Health Payers Ramping Up COVID-19 Testing (Imat Solutions)
• Enterprise Imaging: Vendor Neutral Archives (Impact Advisors)
• The case for more Mobile in Healthcare (Imprivata)
• Rebuild a safe and compliant workspace: Be ready for changing expectations (Infor)
• Accelerating Access: Expanding Mental Healthcare Virtually (InterSystems)
• The loss of HIT trade shows spur creativity, opportunity online (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Building Brand Confidence Through Physical Therapy Marketing in 2020 (MWTherapy)
• COVID-19 Testing Delays Expose Healthcare’s Patient Matching Problem (NextGate)
• How Post-Acute Leaders are Managing COVID-19 Challenges (Netsmart)
• Reflections on healthcare IT consulting in the midst of COVID-19 (Nordic)

Contacts

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