News 1/19/22

Top News

ONC and The Sequoia Project publish the Trusted Exchange Framework and the Common Agreement (TEFCA) that will allow entities to apply for designation as Qualified Health Information Networks.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

YouTube has recently been suggesting to me videos related to ASMR — autonomous sensory meridian response — in which the sounds of whispering or nature cause some people to tingle or to relax. Camping, romantic role play, and cooking are common subjects of the audio-emphasized videos. They don’t do much for me, but I’m intrigued to learn that the name — and the attempt to apply science to the phenomenon — originated in 2009 with Jennifer Allen, an interface analyst with Allscripts (she’s now a cybersecurity expert) who thought the initially proposed term “brain-gasm” wasn’t optimal. Quite a few YouTube “personalities” or “ASMRtists” are making as much as $6 million per year each from their cut of ASMR video ad revenue, although you would think that the YouTube-inserted ads would disrupt whatever ASMR experience was in progress.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

England-based ordering communications and laboratory information management systems vendor CliniSys — which was acquired by Sunquest owner Roper Technologies in 2015 — acquires Raleigh, NC-based Horizon Lab Systems. The combined companies will operate as CliniSys, apparently retiring the Sunquest name. CliniSys’s president and CEO is industry long-timer Michael Simpson, who has held executive roles with McKesson, QuadraMed, GE Healthcare, Caradigm, and Sunquest.

Digital mental health company Talkspace faces a class action lawsuit alleging that its proxy statement misled investors before its SPAC merger last year. The suit contends that the company hid its lower margins and higher customer acquisition costs and overvalued its accounts receivable from health plans. Husband and wife co-founders Oren and Roni Frank left the company in November ahead of disappointing third-quarter results. Talkspace found itself in hot water in August 2020 when reports surfaced that the company was mining session transcripts for marketing purposes and asking employees to create fake positive app store reviews. Shares that closed on their first day of trading in June 2021 at $9.19 are now at $1.58, valuing the company at $248 million. The company tried to soothe investors at last week’s JP Morgan Healthcare Conference by saying that it hopes to increase the time users engage with the app, make it easier for cash-paying customers to use their insurance, find a CEO, and bundle its services.

Sales

• Truveta will integrate a new Patient Centric Token from the healthcare business of LexisNexis Risk Solutions with its data platform, giving its 17 health system members access to a wide range of de-identified data sets that can be used for clinical research, and population health and health equity studies.

People

Josh Byrd (Savista) joins Relatient as VP of marketing.

Archana Dubey, MD joins AliveCor as chief clinical officer.

Startup Health promotes Jamey Edwards to COO.

Therapy Brands hires Mary Carol Morrissey, MBA (HMS) as SVP of sales; Jason McNeil (NextGen Healthcare – not pictured) as EVP of revenue cycle management; and Kevin Smith, MBA (Accenture) as EVP of substance abuse recovery solutions.

Announcements and Implementations

The Orlando VA Medical Center implements WellHive’s ION scheduling software, enabling VA providers to more easily schedule patient appointments with non-VA physicians.

Premier leverages its PINC AI technology to develop on-demand, self-service health data analytics, queries, and visualizations.

ECRI lists its “Top 10 Health Technology Hazards for 2022”:

• Cybersecurity incidents.
• Supply chain shortfalls.
• Infusion pumps that are damaged in ways that may not be apparent.
• Emergency stockpile items that may not be ready for use.
• Telehealth solutions that don’t meet patient and provider needs, aren’t easy to use (especially for patients), and create large volumes of irrelevant data.
• Syringe pumps that deliver incorrect doses because of low-volume infusion rates.
• AI reconstruction of images from MRI and CT that may be fooled by anatomic variation, patient movement, and device malfunction.
• Insufficient cleaning and disinfection of duodenoscopes.
• Misuse or mislabeling of disposable isolation, surgical, and cover gowns.
• Wifi dropouts and dead zones that circumvent safety features, interrupt workflow, and don’t allow critical alerts to be delivered.

Government and Politics

HHS signs a $12 million, 12-month extension of its contract with TeleTracking for its hospital bed and supply-tracking database. The database was originally commissioned in April 2020 as part of federal efforts to streamline hospital submission of COVID-related capacity, patient count, and supply information. The company came under Congressional fire several months later for the original no-bid contract, which prohibited it from discussing how it collects and shares data, the nature of its proposal to HHS, and communication it may have had with the White House or other government officials.

Privacy and Security

Jackson Hospital (FL) recovers from a ransomware attack late Sunday night that infected its ER charting system. The 600-employee hospital took all of its systems offline and reverted to downtime procedures. IT Director Jamie Hussey and his 12-person team have since brought nearly everything back online. He expects the charting system, which is maintained by a third party, to be back up and running later this week. Hussey, a 26-year Jackson employee, explained to CNN, “It’s better to be down a day than be down a month. Lock it down and piss people off. It’s what you have to do just to secure your network.”

Other

Security researchers say that the smartphone app that China is requiring athletes to use for COVID tracking during next month’s Olympics exposes health data because of encryption shortcomings. The app also contains a dictionary of political terms that China censors, although it’s not clear that the app uses it. The security flaws theoretically violate China’s personal data protection laws and the app store policies of Google and Apple. The experts assume that the flaws were unintentional, but note that fixing them might interfere with the government’s online surveillance tools.

Topping Gallup’s annual poll of honesty and ethics are nurses, medical doctors, grade school teachers, pharmacists, and military officers. The bottom five are state office holders, advertising practitioners, members of Congress, car salespeople, and lobbyists.

Sponsor Updates

• CloudWave recaps its 2021 achievements, including adding 50 hospitals to its OpSus Cloud, partnering with Vital Images, and expanding its engineering and cloud teams.
• Optimum Healthcare IT celebrates its 10th anniversary and unveils a new company logo.

Blog Posts

• 2022 CPT Code Updates: Part One (AGS Health)
• A Modern Approach to Patient Activation and Engagement (Actium Health)
• How to Reduce Downtime to Keep Data Insights Flowing (Capsule Technologies)
• Vaccine and Testing Directives: What’s Next After the SCOTUS Rulings? (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• 2021 CereCore Awards Recognize Mission Motivated Employees (CereCore)
• What the Data Shows About Omicron (Dimensional Insight)
• What Population Health Is and Why It Matters (EClinicalWorks)
• Reducing claims denials to get paid faster (Experian Health)

Contacts

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