News 1/27/21

Top News

Provider management, credentialing, and payer enrollment technology vendor Symplr acquires Phynd Technologies, which offers provider data management software.

The acquisition price was not disclosed. Phynd had raised $11.4 million in funding through a year-ago Series B round.

Symplr parent company Clearlake Capital Group had considered selling the company last July at a valuation of up to $2 billion.

The Phynd acquisition is Symplr’s sixth since Clearlake took ownership in 2018.

Reader Comments

From Long-Time Fan: “Re: Olive. I’ve been bombarded with ads for the company in news feeds, social media, and now a giant billboard. I’m astounded by the scale of their customer and recruitment campaigns and their ability to attract venture capital, but the company seems kind of fluffy and ambiguous. The most specific service I can understand is a claims scrubber, which is nothing earth-shattering. I thought you might jump on the case with an interview or something.” I suspect that an interview would not be fruitful, although I’m willing to talk with CEO Sean Lane, who has a stellar military background but no healthcare experience that I can find. They list a bunch of healthcare customers like Yale New Haven, Centura, and MedStar, so if you work there and have personally seen Olive’s impact and potential whether good or bad, tell me and I’ll keep both you and your employer anonymous.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor LexisNexis Health Care. The Alpharetta, GA-based company helps providers meet interoperability goals and gives patients more control of their health data. It offers the most robust and accurate provider, patient, and member data in the industry. It helps improve patient engagement and outcomes through proprietary linking, claims analytics, SDOH data, and predictive science. The company’s identity access management platform helps protect patient identities and prevent fraud. Thanks to LexisNexis Health Care for supporting HIStalk.

I found this LexisNexis Health Care video that explains best practices for creating a Social Determinants of Health program.

I lose thankfully few HIStalk sponsors, and most of those defections involve companies that have been successfully acquired by another sponsor (I admire this even though it’s depressing losing sponsors). I still fret over the others, who sometimes leave for good reasons (“we don’t have any money”) or bad reasons (the new marketing rep assigned to us has zero industry knowledge and has never heard of HIStalk but wants to look decisive by cancelling). Here’s a win-win for these pre-HIMSS21 times where we’re all just making it up as we go — if your company last sponsored more than a year ago, I’ll spiff you some extra months on your first comeback year. Contact me.

Webinars

January 28 (Thursday) 12:30 ET: “In Conversation: Advancing Women Leaders in Health IT.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Tabitha Lieberman, SVP of clinical and revenue cycle applications, Providence St. Joseph Health; Ann Barnes, CEO, IMO; Deanna Towne, MBA, CIO, CORHIO; Amanda Heidemann, MD, CMIO, CMIO Services, LLC. IMO CEO Ann Barnes brings together a panel of female health executives for a results-oriented discussion on how managers and C-suite executives can address diversity and inclusion in their organizations. From STEM education to mentoring and networking, the “COVID effect” on women in the workplace, to matters of equity, there’s no better time to talk openly about these issues to help generate meaningful change in healthcare.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health IT, supply chain, and consulting company Medsphere acquires Marketware, a developer of relationship management software and analytics for healthcare organizations. Marketware CEO Alex Obbard came to the company from patient relationship management vendor Solutionreach.

OptimizeRx, whose communications platform connects life sciences companies, physicians, and patients, expects Q4 revenue to increase 117% to $16 million.

Sales

• RML Specialty Hospital (IL) selects Engage to provide cloud hosting for its upcoming implementation of Meditech Expanse.
• La Rabida Children’s Hospital (IL) will integrate Emerge ChartScout and The Floating Hospital (NY) chooses Emerge’s data conversion services for its EHR implementation.
• The MetroHealth System will implement Montreal-based Tactio Health Group’s CareSimple remote patient monitoring solution, integrated with Epic.

People

Fern Health, which offers employers a digital platform for chronic back and joint pain, hires Brad Lawson, MBA (Marshalsea Health) as CEO. He replaces Travis Bond, who has joined dementia risk prediction technology vendor Altoida as CEO.

The Chartis Group promotes Catharine Wilder to VP of practice operations.

Interlace Health (fka FormFast) promotes Allison Reichenbach to president.

Lumeon names Tom Zajac as executive chair of its board.

Announcements and Implementations

Consulting firm ReMedi Health Solutions assists a Northeastern health system with a virtual Cerner go live across 23 facilities.

Halifax Health (FL) implements Pure Storage’s FlashArray to ensure the stability of its Meditech system during natural disasters.

The AMA’s technology development subsidiary AMA Innovations and Onyx Technology will develop a FHIR-based messaging solution to connect providers and social care networks, which it will enter in an HHS social care referral challenge.

A new CoverMyMeds report finds that 65% of patients have been impacted by the pandemic, 36% skipped medications and treatments to pay other bills, and more than 40% either diverted payments for essential items for prescriptions or stretched their prescriptions by taking fewer or smaller doses than were prescribed. Most asked their provider about price and affordability options and 43% checked a pharmacy price comparison app when a prescription cost more than they expected.

SOC Telemed launches a TelePulmonology consultation service through its Telemed IQ on-demand telemedicine platform..

A new CHIME-KLAS white paper on EHR interoperability finds that deep interoperability is progressing but still too low and most vendors have improved their ability to connect with outside EHRs. However, cost remains the most frequently identified provider barrier, especially in smaller health systems. The highest-valued interoperability method is public HIE, but that is followed closely by national networks and direct messaging. Use of FHIR APIs still lags proprietary APIs and mostly involves customers of big EHR vendors using them to exchange patient records and to support clinician and patient tools. Respondents identified deeper patient-record exchange and population health as the most-needed use cases in the next 2-3 years.

COVID-19

HHS seeks approval make its July switchover in hospital COVID-19 reporting systems permanent, which would make the TeleTracking-developed system the standard in replacing CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network.

Several industries and companies are developing vaccination passport apps without national or international coordination, leading to the possibility that an individual might need to install and maintain several for specific purposes. Questions are also coming up about how to get electronic vaccination information into those systems without the possibility of fraud since the only official patient record in the US is a handwritten paper card.

Philadelphia’s health department ends its partnership with Philly Fighting COVID, the overseer of its largest vaccination site, after discovering that its registration website is operated by a recently formed for-profit arm whose privacy policy does not precluded disclosing the information of those who sign up. The site says the information entered by users – 60,000 of them so far – is shared with the city’s Health Department, which denies involvement with the site. Philly Fighting Covid originally performed COVID-19 testing, but quickly shut those locations down and cancelled appointments when it was chosen to administer vaccine. The organization was reported to have given shots to anyone who signed up regardless of their assigned priority.  A nurse claims that the CEO of both organizations, 22-year-old Drexel graduate student Andrei Doroshin who has no healthcare experience, took vaccine vials offsite to administer to private individuals, while a vaccination site volunteer said teenaged students were vaccinating each other and taking photos as the clinic ended. Doroshin also lists himself a filmmaker, an executive with a cell therapy company, a resort developer, and manager of an investment company.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH says that the federal government doesn’t know many doses of COVID-19 vaccine it has on hand, leaving state health officials to work blind in setting up vaccination sites, scheduling staff coverage, and issuing appointments without knowing how many doses they will receive.

A VA study finds that the mortality rate of COVID-19 patients in the ICU doubled when the unit was overloaded with coronavirus patients.

Google will donate $150 million to help promote COVID-19 vaccine education and equitable distribution, and will incorporate vaccination clinic locations and details in its Search and Maps tools starting with Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

The CEO of casino operator Great Canadian Gaming Corp. resigns after he and his wife were caught flying to Yukon Territory, skipping the mandatory self-isolation, and posing as motel workers so they could jump the COVID-19 vaccine line.

Other

A longtime resident of Tiny Township in Ontario makes a $5 million donation to its Georgian Bay Hospital, $1 million of which will be used to upgrade the hospital’s record-keeping to Meditech Expanse.

Corporate therapists say that remote workers who use social media-resembling tools like Slack all day exhibit the same “mix of hyper-engagement and lack of empathy” as they might on Facebook. Company cultures are being lost as remote workers use company time and tools to argue politics, bully each other, ignore requirements to turn on their webcams during video calls, confront management, and spend their day chatting constantly in ways that might alienate older workers who were not raised sharing their whole lives electronically. Employment lawyers urge employers not to let use of online tools get out of hand to avoid lawsuits, offended co-workers, or unfair performance reviews.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare Growth Partners advises Symplr in its acquisition of Phynd Technologies.
• The UpTech Report features Saykara CEO Harjinder Sandhu.
• Agfa HealthCare releases a new case study focused on enterprise imaging’s role in personalized, end-to-end care for cancer patients at IFO in Rome, Italy.
• CereCore recognizes 13 team members with its annual Rock Solid Award.
• NEJM Catalyst features the Arizona Surge Line and its innovative use of Central Logic technology to coordinate public health services across the state.
• Cerner donates 100 laptops to Kansas City students.
• Change Healthcare releases a new podcast, “The Policy Connection: Healthcare Policy and the Road Ahead for States.”
• Clinical Architecture names Morgan Johnson to its Team Services group.
• Hunt Scanlon includes Direct Recruiters on its list of “Top 40 Cyber Technology Search Firms.”
• Divurgent releases a new podcast, “The Integration of Music Therapy in Biotechnology.”
• Former health IT executive Tom Zajac joins Lumeon’s Board of Directors as executive chairman.
• SOC Telemed adds tele-pulmonology consulting services to its Telemed IQ platform.
• CoverMyMeds publishes the “2021 Medication Access Report.”
• Wolters Kluwer Health launches Lippincott Connect, an interactive digital medical textbook.

Blog Posts

• Leveraging Health IT Offshore Services for 24/7 Customer Support (314e)
• Are you on track to comply with CMS’ new Conditions of Participation (CoP) requirements? (Audacious Inquiry)
• CMS’ Geo Model – The New Disruptor in Value-Based Care? (Bluetree)
• Healthcare Data Privacy: We Have Met the Enemy and They are Us. (CloudWave)
• The Evolution of EHRs and Patient Price Transparency (CoverMyMeds)
• 5 Healthcare Trends to Look Out for in 2021 (Dimensional Insight)
• 3 Ways Health Plans Can Open the Door to In-Home Care (Dina)
• 3 ways AI is shaping the future of clinical research (Elsevier Clinical Solutions)
• Optimization Services: Make a Difference in 2021! (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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