News 5/20/22

Top News

The board of online mental health provider Cerebral fires co-founder and CEO Kyle Robertson and shakes up the remaining management team. The company is facing a federal probe into whether it took advantage of pandemic-relaxed mental telehealth regulations to issue excessive numbers of Adderall and Xanax prescriptions to drug-seeking customers.

Cerebral says it will stop prescribing most controlled substances, starting with new patients this week and to existing patients by October.

Cerebral was valued by its most recent investment at nearly $5 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I sometimes include a click counter on links that I run, for two reasons: (a) It helps me fine-tune the kinds of news items I write about based on reader interest; and (b) I’m curious about which companies readers follow. I took a rare look today at the results over time:

• The top four most-clicked items were the links that I included in a new sponsor announcement, which ranged from 4,100 to 5,800.
• A company’s top-of-page banner got 4,000 clicks, while the one before that drew 3,700.
• The highest-drawing webinar link has received 3,600 clicks.
• My favorite write-up about the Valcom guys and their post-HIMSS18 adventures with the Smokin’ Doc in Las Vegas drew 3,400 clicks to Valcom’s website.

I just started playing around with no-code web builder Bubble, which seems pretty cool. The fully functional demo allows editing a copy of Bubble’s home page, which of course was developed with its own product. An alternative for developers who need to use an existing SQL database (instead of creating a database within Bubble) is WeWeb. Both would be useful for developing prototypes or minimum viable products or quickly creating internal company tools. Stacker is even simpler in using Airtable or Google Sheets as a source database. 

I had personal experience with the hotel equivalent of a digital front door this week when I visited a surgery-recovering relative and spent a single night in a cheap chain hotel I had booked through Expedia, which I allow to send me text messages. I received a reservation reminder with contact information a couple of days ahead of time; received check-in messages containing the wifi password, a link to local restaurants, and inviting me to respond to management with my first-impression room experience and to let them know if I need anything; and got a message at checkout thanking me and wishing me safe travels. My lesson learned – hotels and restaurants always lament that customers should alert management to problems in real time instead of ripping them in online reviews later when it’s too late to address the problem, so the hotel’s texts let them detect improvement opportunities as they occur. Hospitals and practices have ample such opportunities, but I’m not sure they are as eager or incented as a budget hotel to hear what customers think about excessive waits or surly personnel.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Multi-specialty national telehealth provider MeMD, acquired by Walmart in May 2021, changes its name to Walmart Health Virtual Care. The service, which includes a diabetes program, will expand beyond Florida in the next several months.

Physician social network and pharma marketing vendor Doximity reports Q4 results: revenue up 40%, adjusted EPS $0.21 versus $0.09, providing lowered guidance that sent shares to all-time lows in after-hours trading Tuesday. DOXM shares began trading in June 2021 at $26, then closed their first day at $53. They rebounded Thursday to $32.39, down 43% in the past 12 months in valuing the company at $6.2 billion. Doximity is promoting digital-first drug marketing campaigns, noting that drug companies are cutting back on salespeople and moving money to digital advertising. The company said in the earnings call that pharma is recession-resilient and that physician resignations are good for its business because Doximity sells job-seeking doctors 30-day temporary phone numbers that they can give to recruiters who then can’t “keep calling and texting you for years.”

Harris acquires workers’ compensation EHR/PM/RCM vendor Innovative Medical Management and MedBill IQ, which will become part of the company’s Resolve Healthcare revenue cycle business unit.

Amwell launches a behavioral health program that includes virtual therapy, psychiatry, and coaching. The program incorporates the digital behavioral health programs of SilverCloud Health, which Amwell acquired in July 2021 along with virtual care company Conversa Health for $320 million.

Transcarent adds a behavioral care offering that will connect its self-insured employer members with virtual or in-person mental health providers.

Sales

• Charlotte Radiology will implement Volpara Health’s breast density assessment, mammography reporting, and patient communication software, expanding its use of the Volpara Analytics mammography quality assurance system.
• Zing Health selects Availity’s real-time health information network to allow providers to share information to close clinical care gaps.
• The Wyoming Board of Pharmacy chooses Bamboo Health for its prescription drug monitoring program.

People

John Kelly (PatientKeeper) joins Xifin as CIO.

Divurgent promotes Brittany Williams to VP of marketing and communications.

Adam Seyb (West Monroe) joins Janus Health as chief customer officer.

Imaware promotes Angie Inlow to chief growth officer.

Art Nicholas (Sakon) joins Strata Health US as chief commercial officer.

Mark Grasso (Virtustream) joins Holon Solutions as VP of sales.

SyTrue hires Steven Lang (Apixio) as SVP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

CPSI pilots Medicomp’s Quippe Clinical Lens to enhance the information in its Patient Data Console.

Cerner, Elligo Health Research (in which Cerner is an investor), and Freenome will participate in an early cancer detection clinical trial using Cerner’s Learning Health Network, which sells de-identified patient data from participating health systems.

UTHealth Houston celebrates its March 2021 go-live on Epic that was performed with all members of Epic’s team, its own project team, and many of its end users working remotely. They earned a $550,000 Good Install credit from Epic.

Other

An internal medicine physician sues Indiana University Health, which he claims fired him for complaining about a policy that limits doctor visits to 10 minutes as monitored via the EHR. An IU Health spokesperson responded that the 10-minute EHR time limit doesn’t necessarily include face-to-face time and in fact was intended to encourage more doctor-patient interaction instead of computer work. The doctor, IU School of Medicine Clinical Assistant Professor Brian Leon, MD, was also a medical director and is a pharmacist.

Researchers find that AI can identify a patient’s race from their X-ray images, raising concerns of inadvertent bias. The study authors found that AI can predict a patient’s self-reported race even when image quality is poor and when clinicians cannot.

Cerner will pay an unreported sum to Sweden’s Västra Götaland to settle complaints over Millennium implementation delays that Cerner attributes to the pandemic and to the region itself. Cerner says it is ready to proceed with the project, has 250 employees working in Sweden, and plans to bring up parts of the system this fall. The region was reportedly seeking payment of $50 million to offset its increased costs.

Malaysia’s government-developed COVID-19 app, which has 38 million registered users, sees usage drop 97% as national check-in requirements are dropped and controversy has erupted over the app’s ownership. The government had planned to expand the app’s use beyond COVID and as a key part of public health efforts.

A Tennessee county that was touted as the exception to low vaccination rates among rural, white, and conservative Southern counties drops to mid-pack after a longstanding ZIP code problem is fixed. The state manually corrected cases in which a single ZIP code straddles multiple counties, as incorrectly reported by Arizona-based STChealth, whose immunization information system is used by several states. Meigs County dropped from 65% to 43% vaccinated overnight. The state says STChealth is fixing the problem, but other states avoided the issue in the first place by geocoding the company’s data for correct county attribution.

Sponsor Updates

• First Databank hires Vivian Nguyen (Pine Park Health) as a customer success solution architect.
• GHX has recognized the recipients of its 21st annual GHXcellence Awards during its annual summit.
• Gyant has completed the Service Organization Controls 2 Type II certification.
• Nordic publishes a video titled “Modernizing Healthcare Data Infrastructure with the Cloud.”
• Meditech congratulates DCH Health CIO Billy Helmandollar for receiving the Alabama Chapter ORBIE CIO of the Year Award in the large corporate category.
• RCxRules publishes a free EBook titled “Simplify Your Revenue Cycle Workflow Through Automation.”
• Nuance congratulates Mary Presti, head of Dragon Medical, on her Lillian Sholtis Brunner Alumni Award for Innovation from Penn Nursing.
• Netsmart COO Tom Herzog signs the ESGR Statement of Support to show its dedication to employees who serve in the National Guard and Reserves.
• Nordic transitions the Tasman brand, and its presence in Europe and the Middle East, to the Nordic global brand.

Blog Posts

• Telemedicine for a Post-COVID World (EVisit)
• 4 strategies to find missing insurance coverage as COVID-19 funding ends (Experian Health)
• Behavioral Health Support Drives Whole Health (Get Well)
• Two Ways to Increase Your Patient Engagement (Healthwise)
• Your Business is NOT Data Illiterate! (Clearsense)
• Protect your Healthcare Organization from Third-Party Risks (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Essential ephemera: The sad, over-too-quickly life of a wearable datum (Nordic)
• Payment models and value-based care (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Habilitative vs. Rehabilitative Therapy Billing Differences (MWTherapy)
• Get the FAQs About Automated Prior Authorization (Myndshft)
• Measurement-Based Care is Crucial to Behavioral Health, and It Needs an Upgrade (Neuroflow)

Contacts

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