News 7/13/22

Top News

UnitedHealth Group’s Optum Health and Red Ventures form RVO Health, which will include consumer-facing health and wellness websites — such as Healthline, Psych Central, and Healthgrades – along with Optum Store and virtual coaching platforms.

Red Ventures owns internet properties such as CNET, The Points Guy, TV Guide, ZDNet, and Bankrate. It acquired Healthline Media in July 2019 and Healthgrades.com in August 2021.

Optum Health operates a network of primary care, surgery, and urgent care centers.

Webinars

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Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Enterprise performance management software vendor Syntellis Performance Solutions acquires Stratasan, which specializes in healthcare market intelligence and analytics for hospitals and other healthcare organizations.

Clinical data exchange API company Particle Health raises $25 million in a Series B funding round.

Sales

• Northwell Health selects EVideon’s Vibe Health interactive bedside technology, including Engage TV and Insight digital whiteboards.
• TriZetto Provider Solutions will offer its customers Relatient’s Dash suite that includes contact center scheduling, patient self-scheduling, reminders, messaging, and chat and digital patient intake.

People

Sage Health hires Wayne Sass, PhD (Optum) as CTO.

Scott Gildea, MBA (Leidos) joins Nordic as VP of enterprise technology transformation.

TriHealth CIO Cathy French, MS will retire in September after nearly 44 years with the Cincinnati-based health system. She started out as a staff nurse and then became director of IT health system products in 1979.

Announcements and Implementations

Northwest Health (IN) rolls out PeriGen’s PeriWatch Vigilance maternal-fetal early warning system within its Birthing & Family Care Centers.

PrimaryOne Health implements Bluestream Health’s virtual care services across its 11 locations in central Ohio.

Hansen Family Hospital (IA) and affiliates implement mobile check-in technology from Epion Health.

Mass General Brigham will expand its hospital-at-home program and has hired a home-based care president who formerly worked for for-profit Kindred at Home. The program expects to serve 200 remote patients versus today’s 25 and will expand employee headcount from 800 to 1,000.

Wellness app vendor Happify Health renames itself Twill Health and describes its expanded offerings as, “By combining digital therapeutics, well-being products, community-based care, live coaching, and clinician-trained AI, Twill intelligently guides each person to the care they need, when they need it, in the way they want.”

The six-week CHIME Healthcare CIO Boot Camp – Digital will start on August 15, 2022. The program is open clinical informatics leaders or those who work for provider organizations, with CHIME membership not required.

Privacy and Security

Virginia Commonwealth University Health System notifies 4,441 organ donors and recipients of a data breach that enabled their PHI to be viewed by other patients through the health system’s patient portal.

A California newspaper’s opinion piece says that patient privacy will change on January 1, 2024, as a new state law — mostly addressing expanding Medicaid to undocumented immigrants — will give all practitioners access to all of a patient’s data, with no exception for behavior health and abortion visits.

Ransomware groups create a searchable database of all the data they have stolen from hacked companies who haven’t paid their demanded ransom. It gives other hackers access to passwords and confidential information and lets patients know that their information has been exposed, pressuring the hacked companies to pay up.

Other

Amazon’s moonshot project is developing cancer vaccines in partnership with Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and is recruiting patients for an FDA-approved clinical trial of personalized vaccines for breast cancer and melanoma. Amazon says it is contributing scientific and machine learning expertise.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks releases a new customer success story featuring Ninth Street Internal Medicine, “Healow Pay: Improving Collections, Reducing Phone Calls.”
• Diameter Health publishes a new white paper, “The Strategic Role of Clinical Data in Risk Adjustment.”
• Estonia’s Pildipank expands its relationship with Agfa HealthCare by moving the shared PACS to the Enterprise Imaging Platform.
• Dutch care home provider Coloriet renews its service contract for Ascom’s TeleCare IP, smart sensoring, and mobility solutions.
• Bamboo Health joins the Florida Behavioral Health Association as a corporate member.
• Oracle Cerner has increased the total number of beds contracted outside of the US for the second consecutive year.
• CHIME releases a 30^th anniversary podcast, “Innovation with Tim Stettheimer, 2010 Board Chair.”
• Arcadia makes its research data available through AWS Data Exchange.

Blog Posts

• High Quality Clinical Data Increases Risk Score Accuracy for Health Plans (Diameter Health)
• Truth about Browser Extensions with Cloud Applications including AdvancedMD (AdvancedMD)
• Overdose prevention centers and the impact of mental health data (Arcadia)
• Leveraging internal audit to minimize risk of third-party vendors in healthcare (Baker Tilly)
• EHRs are Slowing Health Tech Innovation (Bravado Health)
• Oncology Integrations in Meditech Ambulatory: 7 Focus Areas for Team Collaboration (CereCore)
• The Triple Aim of Health Care (ChartSpan)
• 10 Common Challenges Facing Epic IT Teams (CTG)
• How Health First makes Hospital at Home available to everyone (Current Health)
• Florida is the Perfect Place for Early Birds (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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