News 3/24/21

Top News

Providence Digital Innovation Group alum DexCare raises $20 million in a Series A financing round.

DexCare, which originally developed software for Providence’s ambulatory care sites, offers a platform to allow patients to self-schedule across multiple locations in dynamically routing them to the most appropriate care access point.

Co-founders Derek Streat and Sean O’Connor, who will run the company, came from University of Washington spinout C-SATS, which sold technology to make OR recordings of surgeries to allow outside experts to evaluate the skill of surgeons. That company was sold to Johnson & Johnson in 2019.

DexCare’s customers include Providence, Community Health Network, Houston Methodist, and Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Reader Comments

From Bedazzled: “Re: HIMSS21. I’m wondering if you will repeat your 1/29 poll about attendee plans? I’m sure many organizations are thinking through what their level of involvement will be.” I probably won’t run another poll for a while since I expect little has changed in less than two months, and at some point, everybody needs to just decide to either go or not instead of worrying until the last minute who else will be there. Two-thirds of HIMSS20 registrants said in that last poll I ran that they won’t attend HIMSS21, although I might be skeptical about generalizability. I figure I should be on hand to write it up whether it’s a success or a bust (maybe even more importantly if it’s the latter), so I booked the Palazzo at a great rate of $229 with no resort fee through HIMSS / OnPeak after wasting a ton of time trying to decipher their refund policy, which I think is that your card gets charged one night’s stay three weeks before the August 9 start date, then if HIMSS21 is cancelled afterward, that’s all you lose. I ordinarily would Airbnb a condo or house, but I’m not bringing a crew this time since there’s no HIStalkaplaooza or booth, so I’ll just Lyft from the airport and then everything will be just an elevator ride away.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Appriss, known in healthcare for its prescription drug monitoring program interface capabilities, acquires patient event notification vendor PatientPing for a reported $500 million.

After raising $44 million in January, health data and analytics company Komodo Health announces a $220 million Series E funding round.

Ro raises $500 million in a Series D funding round that brings its total to $876 million, and valuation to $5 billion. The company, which now markets itself as a digital health clinic, offers telemedicine, online prescription delivery, in-home lab and nursing services, and smoking cessation programs. Hemant Taneja, managing partner at Ro investor General Catalyst, has also invested in the new Glen Tullman-led Transcarent, which helps self-insured employers guide employees to more cost-effective care.

Data aggregation and analytics company Evidation Health will use a Series E funding round of $153 million to offer more virtual health programs as part of its digital health research network.

AppliedVR, which offers virtual reality-based chronic pain treatments, raises $29 million in a Series A funding round.

Sales

• Mercy Iowa City (IA) will implement Allscripts Sunrise, delivered by Microsoft Azure.

People

Patty Lavely, MBA (CIO Consulting, LLC) joins Health Care District of Palm Beach County as VP/CIO/CDO.

Jennifer Anderson (North Carolina Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance) joins Intellect Resources as VP of client services delivery.

Divurgent names Bob Farrar (Cognizant) as principal of payer services.

Announcements and Implementations

Meditech works with Code, Dryrain Technologies, and ACS MediHealth to develop a mobile barcode scanning app that is compatible with its Expanse EHR.

Cone Health (NC) implements the Loopback Analytics platform to improve value-based care and specialty pharmacy initiatives.

Hinchingbrooke Hospital in England goes live on enterprise imaging and Xero universal viewer technology from Agfa HealthCare.

Lumeon adds patient self-scheduling to its care journey orchestration platform.

Government and Politics

Hospitals that have published their confidential prices to comply with the new CMS requirement have some cases intentionally coded their websites to hide those pages from web searches.

FDA’s second-highest ranking official — Principal Deputy Commissioner and acting CIO Amy Abernethy, MD, PhD — will leave the agency next month. Abernethy, a hematologist-oncologist who was formerly a professor at Duke University School of Medicine and chief medical and scientific officer with Flatiron Health, said in a tweet, “If COVID has taught us anything, it’s that we need to rethink US digital health infrastructure. This transformation will require new ways of working across traditional silos in government & business/tech, ensuring we always put patients first.”

COVID-19

AstraZeneca issues a press release saying that US trials of its COVID-19 vaccine that is being used in Europe show a 79% efficacy against symptomatic infection and 100% protection against hospitalization and severe disease, but the independent review board that advises NIH says the company may have used outdated information from its trials and should enlist that board’s help to review the findings. The AstraZeneca vaccine is important globally because it costs just $4 per dose to manufacture and can be stored for up to six months under normal refrigeration. Observers say the vaccine is fine, but the drug company is not inspiring much confidence with its questionable communication and coordination with US regulators.

China’s efforts to enhance its global influence by offering countries its domestically produced COVID-19 vaccines are being hindered because the manufacturers of the two products — Sinovac and state-owned Sinopharm – still haven’t published data from their clinical trials from early 2020, raising questions about whether the efficacy of the vaccine is competitive with those made elsewhere. Sinopharm’s UAE distributor has suggested that some recipients take a third shot due to insufficient antibody response, while Sinovac’s studied efficacy rate has varied from 50% to 80%. The vaccines have been approved for use by 60 countries, many of which are unable to get the Pfizer and Moderna products that wealthier countries have bought up.

Texas Roadhouse founder and CEO Kent Taylor dies by suicide at 65 after experience debilitating long-term COVID symptoms that included severe tinnitus. 

Sponsor Updates

• PatientPing achieves full certification status under the state of Massachusetts’ Mass HIway Event Notification Service initiative.
• Cerner releases a new podcast, “A tale of two crises and the value of health data interoperability.”
• Change Healthcare will exhibit and sponsor at Rise National 2021 March 26, 29, and 30.
• CloudWave’s OpSus Live cloud hosting for healthcare service achieves a “Best Practice” rating after successful completion of the Meditech Infrastructure and Supporting IT Process Audit with Securance Consulting.
• Wolters Kluwer Health releases Lippincott TelemedInsights to help providers implement sustainable virtual care models.

Blog Posts

• The Pandemic Fallout of Buying Multiple Patient E-Signature Vendors (Access)
• Discharge Planning During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Year in Review (CarePort)
• Will Remote Implementations be the New Normal? (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Strategic IT Alignment for Health System CIOs: Tools and Takeaways (CereCore)
• 7 Factors Extending Patient Length of Stay at Your Hospital (Central Logic)
• Benefits of a CCM Service Provider Versus CCM Software (ChartSpan)
• A Look at Grassroots Sustainability at CoverMyMeds (CoverMyMeds)
• Creating a FHIR MVP: Lessons Learned (Diameter Health)
• 5 Data Trends that Will Make an Impact in 2021 (Dimensional Insight)
• How Automated Self-Scheduling Benefits Patients (Lumeon)
• HAFNIUM Targeting Exchange Servers with 0-Day Exploits (Divurgent)
• Looking Back at a Year of COVID-19 (Cerner)
• 5 Reasons Why You Should Move Your EHR to the Cloud (Engage)
• A Partner for Reinventing Your Practice (EClinicalWorks)
• 3 ways to improve the patient experience with online scheduling (Experian Health)

Contacts

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