News 2/10/21

Top News

Nuance acquires Saykara, a developer of automated charting software.

Saykara founder and CEO Harjinder Sandhu, PhD was an executive in Nuance’s healthcare research and development division before co-founding automated patient engagement company Twistle in 2011 and Saykara in 2015.

Nuance will assign Saykara’s 30 employees to its Dragon Ambient Experience (DAX) team. A stock analyst asked Nuance how they would keep Sandhu since “he keeps leaving and developing more stuff you guys are buying” (he was a co-founder of Nuance acquisition MedRemote as well). Nuance CEO Mark Benjamin says the opportunity with the acquisition was to combine the scientists of both companies.

I interviewed Harjinder Sandhu this past October, when I asked him how he would compare Saykara’s Kara to Nuance’s DAX.

Reader Comments

From Equity Management Person: “Re: SPACs. Here are some counterpoints.” Thanks for providing an expert’s point of view in response to my cheap-seats comment about the SPAC phenomenon. EMP makes these points:

• SPACs have two years to consummate a deal per their IPO documents. 
• As a result, It’s a target-rich environment and a lot of SPACS are doing value-creating transactions.
• An inherent backstop exists to prevent SPACs from rushing into bad deals. They have to convince sophisticated institutional sponsors who have veto rights that the deal is a good one. Those investors get their initial investment back if the company fails to close a deal.
• SPACs are technically equivalent to IPOs except that the SPAC sponsor takes a lot of the fees than investment banks would take during a formal IPO underwriting.
• It’s an interesting question why SPACS are suddenly so popular, but target companies are deliberately selecting that route given other options (IPOs, direct listings, and strategic sales), so SPACs offer what those companies think is the most attractive package of valuation, governance, and deal certainty.
• SPACs are unlikely to be stranded because of a lack of follow-on capital and investor interest. The sponsor is a a core institutional block holder who is invested in the success of the company. The company will have greater access to capital and better long-term outcomes than being let go into a market without any backers except investment banks, which offer little credibility to institutional investors by their association and research overage.

From Dry Heat: “Re: Super Bowl commercials. You should have a similar contest for health IT vendor ads.” I’m not sure that companies in our industry have the media savvy or cash to produce jaw-dropping ads given their niche B2B audience, but an ad contest for HIMSS conference week would be fun in the presence of adequate enthusiasm, even in the form of creative video messages rather than “commercials.” My favorite Super Bowl commercial is “Terry Tate: Office Linebacker,“ but it’s also an illustration of entertainment versus commercial success — Reebok ended it fairly quickly despite endless watercooler buzz because the connection to the company was subtle and sales were mostly unaffected. Reebok shoe competitor K-Swiss later produced the most profanely funny and Tate-like video I’ve seen (NSFW and definitely don’t click if you don’t know for sure that you like the always-offensive and profane “Eastside & Down.”) K-Swiss was brave for featuring Kenny Powers, MFCEO, but buzz aside, they sold the money-hemorrhaging company to a Korea-based outfit shortly after.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor ChartSpan. The Greenville, SC-based company is the largest managed service provider of chronic care management (CCM) programs in the United States. It provides turnkey managed care coordination and compliance programs for doctors, clinics, and health systems. ChartSpan manages patient care coordination and value-based programs for more than 100 of the most successful practices and health systems in the United States. In addition, ChartSpan offers a SaaS-based Annual Wellness Visit program that allows practices to maximize their AWV capture rate by simplifying the AWV process. Through these offerings, ChartSpan is able to help practices increase their reimbursements while improving patient outcomes. Thanks to ChartSpan for supporting HIStalk. 

Here’s a good “what we do” intro video from ChartSpan that also defines the value of chronic care management.

I subscribed to the online edition of the AP Stylebook since I refer to it often in choosing to follow most (but not all) of its own standards. Below are some I follow except when I slip up:

• Spell out numbers from one to nine but use numerals for anything 10 and above. Exceptions: spell out any number used as the first word of a sentence (“Ninety tourists visited”) and if the number precedes a unit of measure that doesn’t refer to time (“he made a 6-foot putt” but “a six-month delay.”)
• Regardless of how a company stylizes its own name, do not use all-capital letters unless they are pronounced individually (“IBM” is correct, “MEDITECH” is not, and “EPIC” is a figment of your imagination because even they can’t understand why people all-caps their name); do not use symbols (“MModal,” not “M*Modal”); and capitalize the first letter (“Athenahealth” rather than “athenahealth.”)
• Periods and commas always go inside quotation marks.
• Capitalize job titles only if they are formally assigned and are included right before the person’s name. It is “Epic President Carl Dvorak,” but “Carl Dvorak, president of Epic.”
• Use “health care” instead of “healthcare” even though the latter is in the dictionary. (I’m an AP outlaw in this issue mostly because of laziness in knowing I have to type it out many times each day).
• Don’t use copyright or trademark symbols — they are just for the company’s marketing materials.
• Plurals of words of any size require adding only an S with no apostrophe (“it will be in the low 20s,” “this is a meeting of CIOs”) except for those of one letter (“he earned four A’s”).
• Use “coronavirus” to refer to the virus and “COVID-19” as the disease it causes. Do not shorten to “COVID” or use “Covid.”

I noticed that the Walgreens website wasn’t working this morning, which from Googling seems to have been the case for a couple of days.

Webinars

February 24 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “Maximizing the Value of Digital Initiatives with Enterprise Provider Data Management.” Sponsor: Phynd Technologies. Presenters: Tom White, founder and CEO, Phynd Technologies; Adam Cherrington, research director, KLAS Research. Health systems can derive great business value and competitive advantage by centrally managing their provider data. A clear roadmap and management solution can solve problems with fragmented data, workflows, and patient experiences and support operational efficiency and delivery of a remarkable patient experience. The presenters will describe common pitfalls in managing enterprise information and digital strategy in silos, how to align stakeholders to maximize the value of digital initiatives, and how leading health systems are using best-of-breed strategies to evolve provider data management.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Talent solutions company Ettain Group acquires INT Technologies, a veteran-owned staffing and consulting company that serves a variety of industries including healthcare.

Sitka raises $14 million in a Series A funding round, increasing its total to $22 million. The company offers PCPs the ability to virtually consult with specialists using its VConsult software.

Paging Weird News Andy: microbial sciences company Seed Health acquires Auggi, whose AI technology analyzes pictures of bowel movements to assess gastrointestinal health. Auggi also offers an app for use in clinical trials, while Seed will launch a consumer app this year.

Nuance announces Q1 results: revenue down 4%, adjusted EPS $0.20 versus $0.22, beating Wall Street expectations for both. The company said in the earnings call that revenue for Dragon Medical and Dragon Ambient Experience (DAX) rose 22% over Q1 of last year, with DAX contributing $10 to 20 million in annual recurring revenue and customers expanding their implementation to additional medical specialties.

Sales

• Bayhealth (DE) will implement Infor’s CloudSuite Healthcare, Clinical Bridge, D/EPM, and True Cost technologies.
• The Center for Human Development (MA) selects Netsmart’s CareFabric software to unify workflows across its 80 programs and services.
• Summit Healthcare announces that nine health systems have contracted for Summit Scripting Toolkit, its robotic process automation platform.

People

Jeff McHugh (R1 RCM) joins Innovaccer as regional VP of sales.

Bret Cottick (Olive) joins Medical Informatics Corp. as national VP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Beauregard Health System (LA) goes live on Meditech Expanse with consulting help from Engage.

Wake Forest Baptist Health (NC) implements RxRevu’s SwiftRx Direct real-time prescription benefit software.

Blessing Health System (IL) develops a home-based care program for COVID-19 patients using remote patient monitoring and telemedicine software from Cloud Dx.

The 377th Medical Group at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico will go live on Cerner Millenium in April as part of the DoD’s continued rollout of MHS Genesis.

True Health (FL) leverages Emerge’s ChartGenie and ChartScout technologies in its conversion to Athenahealth.

COVID-19

All US COVID-19 measures are trending down significantly to early fall 2020 levels, with the hospitalization number slipping to around 80,000. US deaths are at 465,000, 20% of the world’s total. CDC reports that 42 million of 59 million distributed vaccine doses have been administered (71%).

The hottest topic among epidemiologists – should the 90 million Americans who have already had COVID-19 receive just one dose of vaccine? Consensus seems to be yes given the performance of the vaccines in clinical studies and the need to maximize the use of a limited supplies of vaccines.

Another software developer takes it upon themselves to create an easy-to-use COVID-19 vaccination sign-up site. Huge Ma, a 31-year-old Airbnb software engineer, spends five days developing TurboVax, which compiles all available New York City appointments from the several signup systems and locations. Others have developed similar sites in New York and elsewhere. A Manhattan clinical psychologist who realized that none of her elderly relatives could have made their own appointments by finding the sites and booking a time slot online before someone grabs them concludes, “The system is set up to be a technology race between 25-year-olds and 85-year-olds. That’s not a race, that’s elder neglect.”

Other

A security researcher’s analysis of 30 popular health apps (they weren’t named) finds problems:

• 50% of the apps store sensitive patient information.
• 100% of API endpoints were subject to BOLA attacks (broken object-level authorization) that can allow access to full patient records.
• 50% of the apps allowed clinicians to access to records of any patient by changing the URL that is passed in the “GET” command.
• 100% of the apps failed to implement certificate pinning to prevent person-in-the-middle attacks.
• 77% of the apps used hard-coded API keys that never expire and 7% use hard-coded names and passwords.
• 50% of APIs did not authenticate requests with tokens.

Imagine if this were a hospital: a remote hacker gains access to a Florida city’s water treatment system and increases the amount of sodium hydroxide to dangerous levels, which was luckily noticed and quickly reversed by a supervisor who happened to observe the change happening on his computer screen. The city has disabled the remote access function that the hacker used.

Another news item that may bear healthcare lessons, especially about consumer usability and how medical apps are supported. The family of a 20-year-old student sues trading firm Robinhood after he kills himself upon seeing his account balance reach a $730,000 loss. Alex Kearns, who tried unsuccessfully to reach someone at the company several times before taking his own life, didn’t actually owe $730,000 – he didn’t realize that Robinhood’s on-screen balance didn’t include the value of his unexercised options, which would have given him an overall $16,000 profit. The last words of his suicide note, in which he said he had “no clue” about what he was doing, were, “How was a 20-year-old with no income able to get assigned almost $1 million worth of leverage?” The company says it has improved its user interface, added help desk staff, and started asking new users about their finances and trading experience.

Sponsor Updates

• Ettain Group wins ClearlyRated’s Best of Staffing Client and Talent Diamond Awards for the 10^th consecutive year.
• Cerner staffers help vaccinate 2,300 people at its headquarters in Kansas City, MO.
• Spok makes its Spok Go clinical workflow automation tool available in Australia.
• The local paper profiles consulting firm Divurgent and the ways in which it has helped support hospitals during the pandemic.
• AdvancedMD will cover half of the dues for 40 new members of the Association of Independent Doctors.
• Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise hosts its first global virtual conference for partners.
• Central Logic saw record-breaking growth, awareness, and momentum in 2020 as health systems have increased their focus on “operating as one.”
• Collective Medical joins the Healthix Vendor Interoperability Program.
• The State of California-Emergency Medical Services Authority selects Elsevier to deliver a COVID-19 online learning program for nurses.
• Ellkay will present during the virtual HIMSS Central & North Florida Chapter event on February 17.
• Emerge hires Jake Harvey (Salesforce) as customer experience manager.
• Nine Summit Healthcare customers sign on for the company’s Scripting Toolkit and Robotic Process Automation platform.
• CityMD (NY) improves its Net Promoter Score after implementing patient engagement software, including virtual line capabilities, from Experity.
• CarePort customer John Muir Health (CA) adds Connect and Insight capabilities to better track and manage patients across care settings.
• Emanate Health (CA) works with Meditech Professional Services to develop disease investigation and contact tracing dashboards in its Meditech Expanse EHR.

Blog Posts

• Congress Passes Amendment to HIPAA Regulations (AdvancedMD)
• Utilising the Workflow Engine of Enterprise Imaging at King Faisal Specialist Hospital (Agfa HealthCare)
• Marketing’s Pandemic Pivot (Ascom)
• Stolen Patient Records a Hot Commodity on the Dark Web (Capsule)
• Complying with CMS’s Patient Event Notification CoP: Common Pitfalls to Avoid (CarePort)
• Mental Health Key to Bolstering the Post-Pandemic Economy (Medsphere)
• Multi-Team EHR Projects: Three Keys to Cross-Team Communication and Leadership (CereCore)
• EHR-Supplied Timestamp Data Provides Critical Healthcare Insights (ChartLogic)
• 4 Principles of Successful Governance (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Medicare, Medicaid and the Prior Authorization Process (CoverMyMeds)
• 5 Tech Trends That are Ready to Dominate 2021! (Dimensional Insight)
• Osage Led Dina’s Investment Round: Here’s Why They Led (Dina)
• One Key for 2021: Staying Focused on Patients (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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