Monday Morning Update 10/4/21

Top News

David Feinberg, MD, MBA takes the helm as president and CEO of Cerner.

Predecessor Brent Shafer ends his three years and eight months with CERN shares down 6% versus the Nasdaq’s 101% gain.

Reader Comments

From Hmmm…: “Re: HR, legal, and marketing. Do readers think they aren’t important because women are in those roles? They are major players in our organization and are heard and respected.” It’s not a lack of respect for the person or the position, but those jobs have limited headcount and budget and aren’t usually where CEOs are groomed as compared to sales, product development, and finance. I occasionally look at the executive team composition of big health IT companies, so here’s a few that I randomly chose today. Only two companies didn’t have a female VP of marketing, HR, or legal — one because its sole female executive works in another area, the other because it has no female executives. How does your company stack up?

• Allscripts – 10 men, five women (including female VPs in HR, legal, and marketing)
• Athenahealth – nine men, three women (including female VPs in HR and legal)
• Cerner – nine men, five women (including a female VP of HR)
• Change Healthcare – 10 men, three women (including female VPs of legal, HR, and compliance)
• Definitive Healthcare – nine men, one woman
• Cognizant – 10 men, two women (including a female VP of HR)
• Greenway Health – seven men, six women (including female VPs of legal, HR, marketing, and compliance)
• HCI Group – seven men, zero women
• Health Catalyst – 17 men, 12 women (including female VPs of marketing, HR, diversity, and learning)
• Infor – 12 men, three women (including a female VP of marketing)
• McKesson – three men, three women (including female VPs of HR and legal)
• Nuance – eight men, three women (including female VPs of legal and HR)
• Olive – eight men, three women (including a female VP of marketing)
• Premier – eight men, one woman (including a female VP of HR)
• Teladoc Health – 10 men, four women (including a female VP of marketing)
• Transcarent – seven men, six women (including female VPs of legal and HR)

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A big majority of poll respondents see no value in state-by-state clinician licensing.

New poll to your right or here: Have you faxed something in the past six months, and if so, what was the most recent example?

Thanks to the following companies that recently supported HIStalk. Click a logo for more information.

It bugs me that Googling my name turns up all kinds of sketchy “people finder” data broker sites that list my age, current and previous addresses, family members, and sometimes email address, phone numbers, and voter registration information. I read about Optery and gave it a try and it has automatically found and removed most of the entries (more than 100 of them). It’s free for finding the sites, for which you then request removal manually without paying anything, or $10 per month to have Optery automatically submit removal requests for the top 80 sites (or up to $25 per month for 150 sites). The privacy benefit is obvious, but scammers also use the information displayed by these data brokers for stealing identities and placing fraudulent orders.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Availity. The Jacksonville, FL-based company is where healthcare finds the answers needed to shift focus back to patient care. It works to solve communication challenges in healthcare by creating a richer, more transparent exchange of information among health plans, providers, and technology partners. As one of the nation’s largest health information networks, Availity facilitates billions of clinical, administrative, and financial transactions annually. Its suite of dynamic products, built on a powerful, intelligent platform, enables real-time collaboration for success in a competitive, value-based care environment. Thanks to Availity for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

October 6 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Solving Patient Experience Challenges Through a Strong Digital Front Door.” Sponsor: Avtex. Presenters: Mike Pietig, VP of healthcare experience, Avtex; Jamey Shiels, MBA, VP of consumer experience, Advocate Aurora Health; Chad Thorpe, care ambassador, DispatchHealth. Patients expect healthcare providers to offer them the same digital experience they get when banking, shopping, and traveling. This webinar will describe how two leading healthcare providers created digital front doors that exceed patient expectations, improve patient outcomes, drive loyalty and acquisition, and future-proof their growth strategies in competitive markets.

October 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “A New, Streamlined Approach to Documentation and Problem List Management in Cerner Millennium.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; David Arco, product manager, IMO; Nicole Douglas, senior product marketing manager, IMO. The IMO Core CSmart app, which is available for Cerner Millennium in the Cerner code App Gallery, helps providers document with specificity, make problem lists more meaningful, and improve HCC coding. This webinar will review the challenges and bottlenecks of clinical documentation and problem list management and discuss how streamlined workflows within Cerner Millennium can help reduce clinician HIT burden.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shares in the Global X Telemedicine and Digital Health exchange-traded fund dropped 6% in the past month versus the S&P 500’s 4% loss.

Redox announces that its network grew by 291 new integrations in Q3, with 78 digital health companies going live at 208 provider organizations. It was the first live integration for 22% of those companies.

Sales

• Novant Health chooses Visage Imaging to replace multiple legacy PACS in a $30 million contract.
• HNI Healthcare will integrate the RCxRules Revenue Cycle Engine into its VitalsMD mobile charge capture platform.
• L’Institut de Cancérologie de l’Ouest, a leading provincial cancer center in France, joins the TriNetX global health research network.

People

Well Health hires Robin Hackney, MBA (FairWarning) as SVP of marketing.

Ed Stelmakh, MBA (Otsuka Pharmaceutical Companies) joins OptimizeRx as CFO/COO.

COVID-19

Reported US COVID-19 deaths have hit 700,000, as one in 125 Americans aged 65 and older have died of it.

Cerner announces — on new CEO David Feinberg’s first day of work — that it will require all US employees to be vaccinated by December 8, 2021. The company also extended its return-to-office date to January 10, 2022. Cerner had said on August 1 that it would leave vaccination decisions up to individual employees. Meanwhile, Epic reports that less than 0.5% of its headcount – which translates to under 50 employees – left the company instead of being vaccinated by its October 1 deadline.

University of Ottawa Heart Institute researchers withdraw their pre-print article that incorrectly concluded that one in each 1,000 COVID-19 vaccine recipients develops myocarditis. The authors admit that a miscalculation, which was pointed out by readers, overstated the risk by 25-fold. The article was shared widely by anti-vaccine people and groups who, not surprisingly, did not share its retraction.

Merck says its investigational oral antiviral molnupiravir has reduced COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths by half, to the point that the company and FDA agree to suspend the trial and apply for emergency use authorization. Some worry that availability of a $700, five-day oral treatment will convince people to avoid vaccination or to take the medication unnecessarily, some experts note that similar antivirals haven’t proven to be all the useful for COVID-19 when administered to large numbers of patients, and others note that the 50% improvement reflects the study’s less-dramatic drop in hospitalization and death from 14% to 7% among high-risk people with mild to moderate infection.

Scientists in England conclude that people who are vaccinated against COVID-19 are less likely to spread it even if they are infected.

FDA’s vaccine advisory committee will meet several times this month on significant topics – October 14 (Moderna boosters), October 15 (J&J boosters), October 15 (mixing and matching boosters), and October 26 (Pfizer vaccine for children 5-11).

Sponsor Updates

• OptimizeRx publishes a new report, “Addressing Unmet Patient and Provider Needs in Diabetes: New Opportunities Through Pharma through Technology.”
• Netsmart releases a new CareThreads Podcast, “Hospice: It’s Time to Go Back to the Future.”
• Olive will hire an additional 300 employees by the end of 2021, expanding its workforce by 30%.
• The “HIT Like a Girl Podcast” features PatientKeeper VP of Strategy & Innovation Sally Buta.
• Greater Houston Healthconnect uses InterSystems HealthShare to create the largest known COVID-19 outcomes study.
• Symplr releases a new case study, “Mount Nittany Health Embraces Symplr’s Controls & Checks for Peace of Mind.”
• Sectra will be recognized with a Spine Technology Award for its implant movement analysis service at the annual meeting of the North American Spine Society in Boston.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story, “How Healow Retooled the Front Office During COVID-19.”

Blog Posts

• ClariPi’s CT denoising solution uses AI to provide the best image quality possible, even from low-dose or ultra-low-dose CT scans (Nuance)
• 5 Patient-Centric Use Cases for Predictive Analytics in Healthcare (Olive)
• What is Health Coaching: How Providers Can Implement Programs (PatientBond)
• Three Ways Premier Members are Driving Pharmacy Innovation During COVID-19 (Premier)
• Top Children’s Hospital Leaves Legacy Privacy Monitoring in the Past (Protenus)
• Driving Tech Innovation and Capabilities for Medical Practice Contact Centers with AWS and Amazon Connect (Relatient)
• Credentialing by Proxy for Telemedicine: 7 Things to Know (SOC Telemed)
• Why is endpoint data protection so important? (Spirion)
• Re-Envisioning the Future of Specialty Pharmacy (Surescripts)
• Actium Health – A Clear Plan for Every Patient (Actium Health)
• Talkdesk Phone – Calling is cool again (Talkdesk)
• There’s No Place Like (Healing At) Home (Vocera)
• FAQ: How to Get the Best M&A Deal for Your Company – Before the Window Closes (WebPT)
• Why health payers need insight democratization to unlock the value of data (West Monroe)

Contacts

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