Morning Headlines 11/6/15

Allscripts Announces Third Quarter 2015 Results

Allscripts reports Q3 results: revenue increased three percent to $355 million, adjusted EPS $0.13 vs. –$0.06.

Walgreens Healthcare Clinics to Implement Epic Electronic Health Record Platform

Walgreens will implement Epic across all of its health clinics, citing access to Epic’s Care Everywhere network as a key benefit. The rollout will begin in early 2016.

The November HIT Standards Committee

John Halamka, MD and CIO of BIDMC, recaps the November HIT Standards Committee meeting while advocating for an end to the Meaningful Use program and a consolidation of Stage 3 requirements within upcoming Merit-Based Incentive Programs.

Medivo Forms Agreement with Quest Diagnostics to Analyze Laboratory Data to Help Pharmaceutical Companies Match Caregivers with Therapies

Quest Diagnostics will begin selling de-identified lab results to Medivo, an analytics company that will use the information to help drug makers run targeted marketing campaigns aimed at individual providers.

Morning Headlines 11/5/15

Cerner Reports Third Quarter 2015 Results

Cerner stock closed down 6.75 percent today after missing revenue expectations in its Q3 financial results and projecting lower Q4 earnings than analysts had forecasted. Quarterly revenue rose 34 percent to $1.1 billion, adjusted EPS $0.54 vs. $0.42.

Prestigious medical journals rejected stunning study on deaths among middle-aged whites

Two Princeton economists, one a recent Nobel Laureate, have discovered that mortality rates for whites in the US between the ages of 45 and 54 rose dramatically from 1999 to 2013. The findings, which are unseen elsewhere in the developed world, were rejected for publication by both JAMA and NEJM, before being accepted by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Better Together: High Tech and High Touch

A new study conducted by Nielsen Strategic Health Perspectives surveyed 5,000 patients and 630 providers on consumer attitudes toward a wide variety of technologies used in healthcare, including EHRs in the exam room, telehealth services, and text-based appointment reminders.

Many patients ok linking social media to medical records

In a study published in BMJ Quality and Safety, researchers ask adult ED patients if they would be willing to link their social media accounts to their EHR for medical research purposes, to which 71 percent of the patients agreed.

Morning Headlines 11/4/15

$2.7 billion MedAssets sale shakes up healthcare group-purchasing market

Private equity firm Pamplona Capital Management acquires MedAssets for $2.7 billion, absorbing its revenue cycle management business and selling its group purchasing and consulting business to the VHA-UHC Alliance.

VA team blasts Phoenix personnel office

A task force sent by the VA’s headquarters to help reform the Phoenix VA medical center, which was at the center of the patient wait-time scandal last year, was sent back to Washington DC by the hospital’s director. The team reports that the Phoenix VA is being run by “a leadership team that displayed obstructionist attitudes, and clearly lacked integrity.”

Medical Information Technology, Inc. Form 10-Q

Meditech reports Q3 results: revenue down 3.5 percent to $119 million, EPS $0.37 vs. $0.50. Net income dropped 26 percent to $13.5 million.

Teladoc Announces Third Quarter 2015 Results

Telehealth vendor Teladoc announces Q3 results: revenue is up 83 percent to $20 million, EPS –$0.37 vs. –$2.68, meeting expectations on both. The company booked a quarterly net loss of $13.2 million. Share prices fell 10 percent in trading Tuesday.

Morning Headlines 11/3/15

Geisinger study: Access to doctors’ notes increases med adherence

Researchers working with the Open Notes project at Geisinger Health System report a small improvement in medication adherence among patients with access to their doctors notes. Lead investigator Eric Wright, PharmD and MPH, explains “Providing patients access to their doctors’ notes and reminding them to read them before visiting their doctor is key to reinforcing the doctors’ rationale for prescribing specific medications and dosage."

Combining Search, Social Media, and Traditional Data Sources to Improve Influenza Surveillance

Researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard University have combined data from Twitter, Google, Athenahealth, and Boston Children’s Hospital’s HealthMap project to create a machine learning algorithm capable of tracking national flu trends with a 90 percent accuracy compared to CDC reports of actual flu activity.

Medicare Program; Revisions to Payment Policies under the Physician Fee Schedule

CMS released its final Physician Fee Schedule rule, which adds several new telehealth billing codes and limits CQM performance data from being published to the Physician Compare website until each metric is proven to be reliable and appropriately risk adjusted.

Morning Headlines 11/2/15

Francisco Partners to Sell Medication Management Company Aesynt to Omnicell

Omnicell acquires Aesynt, a company making medication robots and pharmacy automation systems, for $275 million.

CPSI Announces Third Quarter 2015 Results

CPS reports Q3 results: revenue is down 16 percent at $44.6 million, EPS $0.31 vs. $0.83. Stock prices fell 15 percent after the results were published.

Quality Systems, Inc. Announces Agreement to Acquire HealthFusion Holdings, Inc.

Quality Systems, which sold off its NextGen hospital EHR business last week, will acquire the cloud-based HealthFusion EHR for up to $190 million.

Healthcare IT Trends in England | 2015

Peer60 publishes a report on the UK EHR market, finding that Epic, Cerner, and Allscripts have replacement vendor mindshare among hospital executives, with Epic leading among the three. Epic’s only live customer in the UK is Cambridge University Hospital, where its $300 million implementation resulted in the resignation of the hospital’s CEO and CFO, and an investigation from the NHS Monitor.

Morning Headlines 10/30/15

Lawmaker Hits DoD Over Failure to Merge Defense, VA Records Systems

The Government Reform and Oversight Committee met alongside the House Veterans Affairs Committee to hear the testimony from DHMSM and GAO representatives on why the VA and DoD has failed to integrate its EHR systems, despite having spent billions in taxpayer dollars.

McKesson Raises Outlook, Unveils Buyback, Profit Rises 32%

McKesson repots Q2 results: revenue up 10 percent to $49 billion, adjusted EPS $3.31 vs. $2.79, beating analyst expectations on both.  McKesson also announces that its board has approved a $2 billion stock buy back plan.

ICD-10 Transition Moves Forward

CMS reports that the total claims submitted and total claims rejected since the ICD-10 transition are trending in line with historical ICD-9 averages.

Theranos, Facing Criticism, Says It Has Changed Board Structure

Theranos announces a restructuring of its board of directors, reducing it from 12 to just five members and establishing a supplementary board of counselors and another board that will give medical advice.

Morning Headlines 10/29/15

Senate passes cybersecurity information sharing bill despite privacy fears

The Senate passes the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, a bill designed to curb cyberattacks by providing US companies legal immunity for sharing protected information with the federal government. CHIME published a statement of support just after the bill cleared the Senate.

EHR User-Centered Design Evaluation Framework

AMA publishes findings from its EHR user-centered design study, with McKesson and Allscripts finishing at the top with perfect scores, and Epic falling behind both Cerner and Meditech’s legacy system. AMA evaluated 20 EHRs in the study, choosing a mix of inpatient, ambulatory, current, and legacy systems.

HealthTap wants to provide hospitals with their own ‘operating system’

HealthTap launches an all-in-one patient engagement platform designed to help health systems roll out telehealth, secure messaging, online appointment booking, appointment reminders, and a population health analytics system.

Morning Headlines 10/28/15

FDA Inspectors Call Theranos Blood Vial ‘Uncleared Medical Device’

The FDA releases the findings from its unannounced inspection of the Theranos laboratory, concluding that the proprietary blood draw container used by Theranos is an “uncleared medical device” that will require a full review.

Chinese hackers target Anthem for healthcare know-how

US investigators conclude that Chinese hackers targeted Anthem to learn how medical coverage is setup in the US, as the country struggles to deliver on a promise of providing universal healthcare to its aging population by 2020.

Walgreens, Rite Aid Unite to Create Drugstore Giant

Walgreens will reportedly acquire Rite Aid for $9.4 billion, offering $9 per share, a 48 percent premium to Rite Aids closing price Monday. The acquisition will also transfer Rite Aid’s $7.4 billion in debt to Walgreens. An announcement is expected as early as Wednesday.

Sunquest Announces Roper Technologies’ Acquisition of CliniSys and Atlas Medical

Roper Technologies, the parent company of Sunquest Information Systems, acquires CliniSys Group, a European laboratory information systems vendor, and Atlas Medical, which connects diagnostic testing facilities with patients.

Morning Headlines 10/27/15

Medication errors found in 1 out of 2 surgeries

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital analyze records from 277 operations and observed that 124 of the operations included at least one medication error, one-third of which resulted in harm to patients.

Two KC health care giants team up for ‘living lab’

Truman Medical Center (MO) expands its partnership with Cerner, a fellow Kansas City organization. Under the new partnership, Truman’s IT staff will become Cerner employees and TMC will provide Cerner with a nearby “living lab” to research new solutions.

UMass Memorial to relocate 500-person IT team to downtown Worcester

In preparation for its Epic implementation, UMass Memorial Health Care (MA) will relocate its 250 employee IT staff to a new 94,000 square foot office space in Worcester, MA that will provide enough room to expand the department to 500 people.

Morning Headlines 10/26/15

Athenahealth (ATHN) Jonathan S. Bush on Q3 2015 Results – Earnings Call Transcript

Athenahealth stocks jumped 28 percent on Friday after reporting better than excepted quarterly results. The company added 4,800 new physicians to its platform this quarter, a 40 percent increase. It also now has three critical access hospitals billing inpatient claims through AthenaNet.

AMA’s Christine Sinsky, MD, Explains EHR’s Contribution to Physician Burnout

AMA vice president of professional satisfaction Christine Sinsky, MD reports that EHRs are cited as the biggest driver of physician job dissatisfaction. She suggests utilizing scribes and medical students to reduce the amount of data entry required of physicians.

Walgreens Scrutinizes Theranos Testing

Walgreens announces that it will halt the roll out of Theranos blood testing centers within its stores until the startup resolves questions about its technology. Walgreens, which has an equity stake in Theranos, clarifies “We’re trying to figure out where we are and what we do going forward. We need to understand the truth.”

Health Law’s Revamped Site, HealthCare.gov, to Debut on Sunday

A revamped Healthcare.gov goes live Sunday, with updates expected to increase speeds by 40 percent and add features to help consumers compare the cost vs. benefit of each insurance plan.

Morning Headlines 10/23/15

Quality Systems, Inc. Board of Directors Approves Sale of NextGen Healthcare Hospital Solutions Division

NextGen’s hospital business is sold by its parent company Quality Systems to QuadraMed. Financial terms were not disclosed.

athenahealth, Inc. Reports Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2015 Results

Athenahealth reports Q3 results: revenue for the quarter was $236 million, up 24 percent, adjusted EPS $0.36 vs. $0.27, beating analyst projections on both.

New Research Finds Significant Number of Americans Not Getting Care at Right Hospitals

Healthgrades publishes a report concluding that patients treated in a 5-star rated hospital have “a 71 percent lower risk of dying or a 65 percent lower risk of experiencing complications” as compared to patients treated in a 1-star hospital.

Drug compounder offers cheap version of costly Turing drug

San Diego-based Imprimis Pharmaceuticals will begin selling a generic version of Daraprim for $1 per pill, down from its current price of $750 per pill, after national attention was drawn to the drug’s current manufacturer Turing Pharmaceuticals and its business model of buying the rights to rare but necessary medications with no generic equivalent and raising the price astronomically.

Morning Headlines 10/22/15

Genetic Testing Company 23andMe Returns to Market

After a two-year hiatus, personal genome testing vendor 23andMe resumes offering direct-to-consumer reports on DNA-based risk for diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer. 23andMe was shut down by the FDA in 2013 for marketing the service to consumers without approval.

Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes Attempts To Clear Up The Bad Blood With WSJ

Theranos CEO and Founder Elizabeth Holmes follows last week’s very public feuding with the Wall Street Journal by attending the WSJ Live conference this week, where she sat for an on-stage interview about the allegations being made about her company.

Sasse Will Block All HHS Nominees Until Feds Provide CO-OP Answers

Karen DeSalvo, MD will likely have to wait for her assistant secretary for health at HHS nomination to be confirmed, as US Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) promises to block consideration until the administration addresses the high rate of failure for co-op insurance plans established under the ACA.

Former ONC policy chief Jodi Daniel heads to D.C. law firm

Jodi Daniel, JD, MPH has joined Washington DC law firm Crowell & Moring. She left her position as ONC’s policy director last month.

Morning Headlines 10/21/15

IBM Reports 2015 Third-Quarter Results

IBM reports Q3 results: total revenue was $19.3 billion, down one percent from 2014, EPS $3.34 vs. $3.68. Q3 marks IBM’s 14 straight quarter in which revenue fell. Stock price dropped 5.7 percent on the news.

KLAS publishes inaugural interoperability study

KLAS publishes its first interoperability report, concluding that private vendor HIEs are the best value-to-effort interoperability option, and reporting that Athenahealth is the easiest system to connect with, followed by Epic and Cerner.

UCHealth-Aspen hospital partnership improves record system

11-bed Aspen Valley Hospital (CO) will partner with the University of Colorado Health to implement Epic within its facility.

Jack Adcock death: Accused doctor ‘called off resuscitation’

In England, a doctor at Leicester Royal Infirmary is fighting manslaughter charges after missing abnormal lab results for a pediatric patient in part because the hospital’s computers system had failed. As the patient deteriorated a Code Blue was called, which the doctor halted because he mistakenly believed there was a DNR order in place.

Morning Headlines 10/20/15

Healthcare Vendors Agree To Interoperability Metric During KLAS Keystone Summit

12 EHR vendor executives met in Utah last week to establish a vendor-neutral set of metrics that KLAS will use to evaluate vendor interoperability performance moving forward. Participating EHR vendors included: Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, eClinicalWorks, Epic Systems, GE Healthcare, Greenway Health, Healthland, McKesson, Meditech, Medhost, and NextGen Healthcare.

Johns Hopkins and Microsoft Collaborate to Redesign Health Information Technology for the ICU

The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine partners with Microsoft will co-develop an ICU surveillance system that integrates information from various medical devices and monitors for key trends and complications.

Technology Must Let Doctors Be Doctors

Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush pens an op-ed calling for a push to improve the user experience for doctors working in EHRs. The op-ed coincides with the launch of a new Athena-hosted public forum on the subject, and a Jay-Z inspired music video from ZDoggMD.

Digital Health Consumer Adoption: 2015

Rock Health publishes findings from its first survey on consumer adoption of digital health technologies, finding that less than 20 percent of the general public engages with any digital health tools beyond online searches for medical conditions and online doctor review sites. Interestingly, the survey found no correlation between adoption rates and age, gender, income, or education.

Morning Headlines 10/19/15

Hot Startup Theranos Dials Back Lab Tests at FDA’s Behest

The Wall Street Journal publishes a second piece on Theranos, this time reporting that the FDA views its “nanotainer,” a small capsule that it uses to collect samples, as an unapproved medical device. In response, Theranos quietly stopped using its finger-stick testing process on all but one test, and now instead uses traditional methods to collect and process the hundreds of other tests it offers.

SAP’s CEO gets personal in Palo Alto about his own recent health ordeal, delivers a call to action

During a visit to the company’s Palo Alto campus, SAP CEO Bill McDermott discusses a recent accident that left him blind in one eye, using the story to point out health IT inefficiencies he noticed from the perspective of a patient, explaining “In every single meeting, you have to repeat the entire story all over again, because there’s no one electronic medical record that comes before you — or follows you — throughout a case.” He calls the doctors who treated him amazing, though “unstructured in their behavior.”

Nordic accused of sexual harassment, retaliation

A local Madison, WI paper covers a sexual harassment complaint filed by the former Nordic VP of Marketing against the company president, Drew Madden. The complaint, which will be heard this week before the city’s Equal Opportunities Division, alleges that the former VP was “sexually harassed by her supervisor, the president and co-owner of Nordic, and then discharged in retaliation for reporting the harassment.”

Alberta Medical Record Breaches Hit ‘Epidemic’ Levels, Says Privacy Watchdog

In Canada,  Alberta’s Privacy Commission calls data breaches an epidemic after discovering that 48 employees at Calgary’s South Health Campus were inappropriately accessing a patient’s record.

Morning Headlines 10/16/15

Cyberattacks Will Cost U.S. Health Systems $305 Billion Over Five Years, Accenture Forecasts

Accenture publishes a report predicting that the five-year cost of cyber attacks on US healthcare system will be $305 billion, resulting in six million cases of medical identity theft.

Statement from Theranos

Theranos responds to a critical story published in the Wall Street Journal this week that claims Theranos only processes 15 of the 240 tests it offers on its own instruments, while the rest are performed with industry standard lab analyzers.

Cheap Solar Comes to Wisconsin

Epic is profiled by a local paper for having the largest solar energy system in Wisconsin, bringing 2.2 megawats of energy to the Verona campus.

DrFirst Secures $25 Million in Financing from Goldman Sachs

E-prescribing vendor DrFirst closes $25 million in equity financing from Goldman Sachs.

Morning Headlines 10/15/15

How Jeb Bush’s health plan overhauls IT: 5 things to know

Jeb Bush, cousin of Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush, publishes his alternative to Obamacare this week, calling for an end to the Meaningful Use program, or as the proposal states “eliminating government mandates and penalties for healthcare providers who do not use government-approved electronic health records."

Statewide Patient Engagement Campaign Underway

Louisiana launches a statewide patient engagement campaign to teach its residents about the health IT tools at their disposal, such as patient portals and the state’s HIE.

AAFP Letter To Karen DeSalvo, MD

The American Academy of Family Physicians argues that ONC’s recent Interoperability Roadmap is not aggressive enough and fails to hold parties accountable for future delays or failures, noting “The AAFP helped create a standard for the exchange of clinical summaries in 2007 – the Continuity of Care Record. Eight years and billions of dollars later, our members and their practices continue to experience the dismal failure with the current certified EHR technology in supporting clinical summary exchange.”

23andMe Raises $115 Million in Series E Financing Led by Fidelity Management & Research Company

Personal genome testing vendor 23andMe raises a $115 million Series E on a $1.1 billion valuation. 23andMe nearly shut down in 2013, after the FDA shut its direct-to-consumer sales and marketing efforts down, but the company has pivoted and now generates its revenue supporting drug discovery.