Going to ask again about HealWell - they are on an acquisition tear and seem to be very AI-focused. Has…
News 8/23/23
Top News
Waystar is reportedly considering an IPO that could value the healthcare payments business at $8 billion.
The company, formed in 2017 through the merger of Navicure and ZirMed, was valued at $2.7 billion when EQT and Canada Plan Pension Investment Board acquired a majority stake in the company two years later from Bain Capital.
Reader Comments
From Offline Opie: “Re: UGM 2023. The biggest news item from Day 1 was that the WiFi was down most of the day and Verizon service was similarly spotty.” Attendee attentiveness was likely improved, so that might have been a plus. I would pay extra to visit a theater, performing arts center, or restaurant that has implemented a cone of electronic silence to prevent phone addicts from serving as mood-piercing lighthouses. It baffles me why people take the effort to go somewhere, but then yield to the dopamine call of electronic fantasyland (see: a couple staring down at their respective phones in a restaurant).
From Kirin: “Re: Veradigm. It is not new accounting software that is preventing them from filing SEC reports, it’s that the finance team can’t figure out exactly what products they have, with multiple and sometimes overlapping solutions with multiple names, acronyms, and leadership changes. They also had M&A activity and didn’t really know what they were buying or selling. Executives thought they had 150 products, but it’s closer to 220, and the various lists weren’t reconciled before the divestiture to Harris and prior to moving to new accounting software. The auditors aren’t able to contact the people who know the history. The extension deadline is less than a month a away.” Unverified. Veradigm just announced that it can’t guarantee that it will file its annual report, as well as the two following quarterly reports, by the September 18 deadline for Nasdaq de-listing.
From Tippi: “Re: [company name omitted.] Speculation has it that the president has stepped away from company operations and will leave once terms are agreed on.” Unverified. I’ve omitted specific details that were provided since it’s not fair to name names without an official announcement.
HIStalk Announcements and Requests
Signs that your press release is poorly written and thus likely to be ignored:
- It leads off with the word “today.”
- The headline doesn’t summarize the content that few people will actually read.
- It contains nothing newsworthy, such as the eye-rolling “momentum” announcement that pointlessly recaps (and in some cases rewrites) history.
- It fails to clear the “why you should care” bar, providing information that would interest only company insiders and perhaps existing customers.
- It fails to describe what the company sells in a single sentence, instead vomiting up overwrought, unintelligible corporate gibberish to make its work seem loftier.
- It doesn’t list a press contact, thus simultaneously seeking media attention while discouraging it.
I haven’t seen many photos from Epic UGM (maybe because connectivity there has been limited), but here’s my favorite, as Availity gets into the “Castaway” theme.
Webinars
August 24 (Thursday) 2 ET. “RCM analytics in action: How to use your data to drive decisions + revenue.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Laura Tungate, solution strategist team lead, Waystar. This webinar will describe how to use RCM analytics to take control of your data even if you use outdated or multiple tools. Attendees will learn how to target improvements, describe the KPIs that are key to revenue cycle leaders, prioritize dashboards that spotlight organizational goals and build alignment, and how and when to apply RCM analytics to go from analysis to action faster.
Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.
Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock
Claims payment and editing software company Lyric raises nearly $91 million. The company, formerly known as ClaimsXten, was sold by Change Healthcare to TPG Capital last October for $2.2 billion as a condition of Change’s $13 billion acquisition by UnitedHealth Group’s Optum business.
Five9 will acquire Aceyus, which offers customer experience analytics.
Sales
- HIE San Diego Health Connect will implement 4medica’s enterprise master patient index.
- Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services selects Smile Digital Health’s data exchange and interoperability software.
- The Norfolk and Waveney Acute Hospital Collaborative in the UK will implement Meditech across its three hospitals.
- UAE’s Kanad Hospital chooses InterSystems TrakCare.
People
Kipu Health names Carina Edwards, MBA (Quil) CEO.
Lisa Nelson, MBA, MMI (MaxMD) joins ADVault as SVP of enterprise integrations.
Jefferson County Health Center (IA) names Tim Belec (Owensboro Health) CIO.
Blanchard Valley Health System (OH) hires Gulshan Mehta (Oracle) as chief digital and information officer.
Donna Robinson, MFA (Change Healthcare) joins TeleVox Healthcare as chief commercial officer.
Mark Michalski, MD (Amazon) joins Northwell-created healthcare AI company Ascertain as CEO.
Emory Healthcare promotes Scott Smiser, MBA to CTO.
Digital wound care technology vendor Swift Medical hires Neil Sharma, MBA (Sword Health) as chief commercial officer and Joseph Filippoli, MBA (Tabula Rasa HealthCare) as CIO.
Announcements and Implementations
Moffitt Cancer Center McKinley Hospital (FL) implements Pcare’s interactive patient care and engagement system within its new inpatient surgical facility.
In Australia, the Illawarra Shoalhaven and Sydney Local Health Districts deploy Sectra’s enterprise imaging software.
A new KLAS report looks at how advanced users of next-generation digital fax solutions are moving toward extracting discrete clinical data from faxes using NLP or OCR. Most of the users say that digital fax is a key part of their interoperability strategy since they use it to ingest data, order, and bills. They say that “faxing is here to stay” and predict that even paper-based faxing will see increased use because of its ease of use and inherent security.
Sponsor Updates
- Findhelp publishes a new whitepaper, “Consumer Privacy and Consent: Implications for Social Care and Social Drivers of Health in the United States.”
- The Connecticut Institute for Communities deploys population health solutions from EClinicalWorks.
- Ascom releases a new report, “Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS), A Clinical Safety Net, Drives Tomorrow’s Brighter Healthcare Outlook.”
- Bamboo Health will host a Headshot Studio at the NACHC CHI & Expo August 27-29 in San Diego.
- CHIME releases a new Opioid Action Center Podcast, “Interoperability & Data Sharing at the Speed of Trust.”
- Clinical Architecture celebrates its sixteenth anniversary.
- Nordic posts a new episode of its podcast, “Designing for Health: Interview with Matt Sakumoto, MD.”
- Current Health publishes a new case study, “Keeping High-Risk Heart Failure Patients Out of the Hospital.”
Blog Posts
- Privacy, Policy, and Personal Data (Findhelp)
- 5 Ways Small Hospitals and Rural Health Systems Can Compete with Big Business (Access)
- Pioneering Healthcare Interoperability: Unveiling Key Technologies and Integrations (AdvancedMD)
- Outpatient CDI: Ensuring Accurate and Complete Documentation (AGS Health)
- Building successful risk and quality teams in healthcare: Strategies and best practices (Arcadia)
- The Road to Conversational Messaging & Conversational Engagement: A Heartbeat Panel Recap (Artera)
- Top 5 eligibility mistakes to avoid for a healthy revenue cycle (Availity)
- Five9 named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service (Five9)
- Best practices for virtual monitoring patients at risk of suicide (AvaSure)
- Putting the Humanity Back into the Workers’ Compensation Physical Rehabilitation Journey (Bardavon)
- CIO Cohort: Advice on Cloud Migration Trends and Challenges (CereCore)
- The Power of Healthcare Analytics: Unleashing the Potential of Payvider Partnerships for Enhanced Care (Clearsense)
- Privacy Investigations and User Access Monitoring: 5 Things Healthcare Leaders May Not Be Thinking About (Clearwater)
Contacts
Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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UGM 2023 – Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, interviewed by Sumit Rana. I found Sumit to be the more interesting of the two. Didn’t seem like Satya did much prep and only talked in high level boilerplate responses. Sumit was great. I would rather have heard him talk more about the use and perils of AI in healthcare. He was more concrete.
I had a contractor at my house all day and had to keep in touch with him, so that’s why I at least needed to have some communication method. So that’s why I was an idiot as you describe.
Re: the KLAS report on faxing – what exactly is the “inherent security” of paper-based faxing? Maybe I’m missing something but I see several security risks:
1. It’s easy to fax medical info to the wrong person, whether through fat-fingering a number or simply not having the right one. And once you send it, you can’t retract it.
2. You’re at the mercy of anyone with physical access to the fax machine being able to take or copy the papers, and barring some kind of security footage, there won’t be an audit trail to identify that person like there would be through logging into a digital solution.
3. If the paper records aren’t properly disposed of, someone from outside the healthcare facility could get their hands on the docs.
No digital solution is perfectly secure either, but something doesn’t compute here.
There is also the concern that they seem to be talking about internet faxing, which comes with all the security issues that come from a non hard-wired line.
Instead of OCR based NLP from an electronically transmitted fax page, maybe we should focus on the solutions that are required for interoperability like CCDA and FHIR.
Oh, and if you don’t have the back end encoding, how are you going to align that data with the original source system?
KLAS could be referring to the old ‘eavesdropping’ scenario.
In the old days, the police (or the Mob, or the CIA, or whomever) could install a phone tap and listen in on the line. Those taps are completely undetectable to the parties on the line.
However for anyone eavesdropping on a fax call, all you’d get are a long stream of meaningless tones. You need another fax machine to decode the tones.
It’s a concern from another era.
Is Carl at UGM? All I have read is about Judy and Sumit.
Yes, he did a short, somewhat nostalgic, presentation. He was his usual dry wit self, but it seemed like he was stepping aside to let others like Sumit shine.
And shine they did. Sumit and his crew were amazing.
I think Epic is a good example of letting the next generation lead. Judy did it with Carl, Carl did it with Sumit and you’ll notice a few other young leaders making routine appearances if you watch closely.
If a company doesn’t let its future leaders lead, some other company will.