News 5/15/24

Top News

Ascension’s most recent update from Monday evening reaffirms that it will take some time – no timelines were announced — for it to return to normal operation following its May 8 cyberattack.

The update confirms that the attack involved ransomware.

Ascension also added region-specific updates for its patients. It warns that it is unable to accept credit card payments, wait times will be extended, and that some of its retail pharmacies cannot fill prescriptions.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Specialty care coordination company Switchboard Health raises $6.5 million in seed funding. Health IT veteran Derek Baird co-founded the company in 2022.

A Black Book survey of 30,000 physician office leaders and practitioners about their response to the Change Healthcare outage finds that 92% of medical practices are navigating short-term fixes and long-term vendor solutions. Nearly all complained that they first heard about the cyberattack from sources other than Change Healthcare. Black Book also notes that healthcare organizations that are negotiating new clearinghouse contracts should consider the value of the data that is contained in their claims, rights to which may have been signed over to their vendor in their original contracts. The top-rated competitors to Change Healthcare are Veradigm Payerpath, Waystar, Experian, and Availity.

Sturdy Health (MA) implements Notable Health’s AI-powered patient engagement, intake, and payments software.

Adam Selipsky, MBA, CEO of Amazon Web Services, will leave the company after three years. He will be replaced by AWS sales and marketing SVP Matt Garman, MS, MBA.

CareCloud reports Q1 results: revenue down 13%, EPS –$0.02 versus –$0.28, beating earnings expectations but falling short on revenue, sending shares down sharply and valuing the company at $30 million.

Augmedix reports Q1 results: revenue up 40%, EPS –$0.12 versus –$0.14, beating expectations for both. Shares dropped 51% as the company announced lowered revenue expectations, which it attributed to providers pausing to evaluate competing AI offerings. The company’s market cap is $56 million.

Sales

• Elbert Memorial Hospital (GA) selects telehealth services from Equum Medical.
• Meditech chooses Ellkay to provide interface services, including supporting the technical infrastructure involved in implementing Expanse as Meditech-as-a-Service.

People

Alpha II promotes Ashley Womack to CEO.

Censinet names David Woska, PhD (PHD Consulting Services) CISO.

Justin Jacobson, MBA (Microsoft) joins Symplr as managing director/SVP of its contract and supplier management business.

Suzanne Delbanco, PhD, MPH, founding CEO of The Leapfrog Group and co-founder and executive director of Catalyst for Payment Reform, has died of cancer.

Announcements and Implementations

LG Electronics announces Primefocus Health, which offers digital health solutions for in-home care.

Nuffield Health, the UK’s largest healthcare charity, goes live on a new digital booking experience for health assessments with assistance from Lumeon.

Dandelion Health, which offers a real-world data and clinical AI platform, launches a clinical dataset of 200,000 patients who are taking GLP-1 drugs, as extracted from the systems of its non-academic health system partners.

Researchers that include Eric Topol, MD introduce medical image interpretation dataset MedInterp, which contains 13 million annotated instances across three modalities. It will support the development of the “learnable orchestrator” that they call MedVersa.

Meta will shut down its enterprise communication system Workplace and is recommending Zoom-owned Workvivo as its replacement.

Government and Politics

HHS offers new funding opportunities for projects related to accelerating the adoption of health IT in behavioral healthcare settings, and to developing novel ways to evaluate and improve the quality of health care data used by AI solutions.

The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare will likely end its contract with the bankrupt Idaho HIE unless the exchange improves transparency over security, financials, and employees. The HIE has spent $94 million of mostly federal tax funds, but a watchdog found that the 10-year-old organization has instituted few accountability measures.

Privacy and Security

Johnson Memorial Hospital (IN) President and CEO David Dunkle, MD says that the hospital is still feeling the effects of the ransomware attack that crippled its computer network in 2021: “We are forced to spend millions on cybersecurity, and we’re still suffering from higher insurance rates because of our attack, and we pay more than our peers, our same size peers do, because we had an attack. We see what Ascension is going through. My heart breaks for them because I’ve been there.”

Other

OpenAI’s newly announced GPT4o includes integration with the Be My Eyes app for the vision impaired. The ability for a blind person to hail a taxi as shown at the 0:35 mark is spectacular.

Sponsor Updates

• Availity and Waystar rank highest in physician customer satisfaction with clearinghouses during and after the Change Healthcare ransomware attack.
• CereCore releases a new podcast, “Cybersecurity Expert from Defense Weighs in on Healthcare’s Opportunities.”
• Consensus Cloud Solutions will sponsor the Colorado HIMSS Spring Conference May 15-16 in Denver.
• CloudWave will exhibit at the HIMSS New England Spring Conference May 16 in Norwood, MA.

Blog Posts

• Prior Authorizations as a Use Case for Solving Interoperability (Availity)
• KLAS Research Enterprise Imaging Summit 2024 – Insights from Kyle Souligne (Agfa HealthCare)
• Cutting Through Prior Authorization Headaches: Strategies for Providers (AGS Health)
• Celebrating nurses: The impact of digital nursing (Altera Digital Health)
• From data to decisions: Enhancing healthcare outcomes through strategic data use (Arcadia)
• Aridhia’s Role in Enabling New Alzheimer’s Research (Aridhia Informatics)
• How AI in healthcare could change patient care (AvaSure)
• Surveillance Watchlists: Proactively Monitoring Patients (CereCore)
• Ascension: What We Know & What You Can Do Now (Clearwater)
• AI-Powered Medical Scribe Integration within the EHR is Revolutionizing Clinical Documentation (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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