News 4/6/22

Top News

Private equity firm Patient Square Capital will acquire acute care telemedicine provider SOC Telemed for $3 per share, for a total of about $300 million.

SOC Telemed went public via a SPAC merger in November 2020 at $10 per share.

TLMD shares traded at a low of $0.58 in late January 2022.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A reader asked whether anyone visited the booth of First Line Software at HIMSS22, thinking that they operate in Russia. I received this response from Anatoly Postilnik, head of the company’s healthcare practice. First Line Software’s healthcare offerings include real-world evidence and data, health data management, AI/ML, systems development and integration, and clinical quality and safety systems. He clarifies:

First Line is a US consulting and custom software development company with a stellar reputation. We are headquartered in Cambridge, MA and have no affiliation with Russia or its government, which is currently waging a horrific war in Ukraine. We have offices on every continent and used to have a presence in Russia, but much like McDonald’s, Microsoft, and other respected US and International companies, we have aggressively pulled out of Russia and severed all ties with this country, relocating our employees to other countries and providing financial assistance to them to alleviate hardship.

Listening: Gilbert Neal, whose tracks I found randomly on Spotify and then played most of the day Monday. It is genre-bending excellence in singing and songwriting, every track highly listenable with smart, clear lyrics (not the usual love-and-lust prattling trying to pass as profound) and musicality that might at any given moment suggest Billy Joel, Steely Dan, Moxy Fruvous, or a 1970s prog rock band. I haven’t heard music this emotionally engaging for a long time. Website. The best phrase I’ve heard lately is Gilbert’s term for a group of his friends that would make a smashing band name– “a cabal of ne’er-do-wells.”

Webinars

April 6 (Wednesday) 1 ET. “19 Massive Best Practices We’ve Learned from 4 Million Telehealth Visits.” Sponsor: Mend. Presenter: Matt McBride, MBA, founder, president, and CEO, Mend. Virtual visits have graduated from a quickly implemented technical novelty to a key healthcare strategy. The challenge now is to define how telehealth can work seamlessly with in-person visits. This webinar will address patient satisfaction, reducing no-show rates to single digits, and using technology to make telehealth easy to use and accessible for all patients. The presenter will share best practices that have been gleaned from millions of telehealth visits and how they have been incorporated into a leading telemedicine and AI-powered patient engagement platform.

On demand: “Cybersecurity Threats Facing Healthcare Today.” Sponsor: Net Health. Presenters: Jason James, MS, CIO, Net Health; Monique Hart, MBA, CISO, Piedmont Healthcare; Jeffrey Rosenthal, , MBA CIO, Reliant Rehabilitation; David Jollow, MBA, CISO, Healogics. The panel of CIO and CISO leaders will discuss the cyberthreats that healthcare faces today. They will review security priorities for the increasingly complex healthcare IT environment that includes cloud-based applications, an increased number of endpoints that include connected devices and patient wearables, and patient portals.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Advocate Aurora Enterprises, the development and commercialization arm of the Illinois-based health system, acquires MobileHelp, which offers remote patient monitoring and personal emergency response systems.

Cloud-based analytics and value-based payments software vendor Clarify Health raises $150 million in a Series D funding round, bringing its total raised to $328 million. The company acquired analytics company Embedded Healthcare last month.

Nurse-1-1, a nurse chat software startup that works with digital health companies, raises $2.3 million in seed funding.

Home-based virtual care company HealtheMed, which focuses its services on Medicaid patients in Minnesota, raises $1.2 million in seed funding.

Sales

• Rady Children’s Hospital – San Diego will offer patients tech-enabled, home-based physical therapy services from Luna Care.
• Desert Oasis Healthcare (CA) will implement Lark Health’s digital cardiovascular coaching program.
• MemorialCare (CA) will integrate TytoCare’s AI-powered remote medical exam technologies with its telehealth services.
• HonorHealth goes live on Loyal’s Symptom Checker.

People

Protenus names Michael Baglio (Codametrix) CTO and Sonal Patel (DataBank) VP of professional services.

Konica Minolta Healthcare Americas promotes Fumihiko Hayashida to president and CEO.

Kelly Ostertag (Pivot Point Consulting) joins Continuum Health IT as VP of operations.

Kyruus hires Gail Airasian, MBA as GM of emerging markets.

Edward T. A. Fry, MD begins his term as president of the American College of Cardiology. He helped launch Ascension-owned data quality management company Navion Healthcare Solutions.

Orbita hires Sara Inman, MA (Press Ganey)  as SVP of sales and Elizabeth Glaser (2bPrecise) as SVP of marketing.

Madaket Health promotes Martin Cody to VP of sales.

Tiffani Misencik (Intelerad Medical Systems) joins Greenway Health as chief revenue officer.

Craig Richardville, MBA (SCL Health) becomes SVP/CIO of Intermountain Healthcare as it completes its acquisition of SCL Health, expanding Intermountain to 33 hospitals, 385 clinics, and 59,000 employees with operations in seven states.

Announcements and Implementations

Amerimed Medical Solutions implements Bamboo Health’s Pings and Spotlights real-time care notification and performance metrics technologies.

A survey of community mental health center executives conducted by Owl and MCHA finds that top priorities are staff training, delivering treatments to the right person at the right time, expanding care access, delivering evidence-based guidelines, and measuring individual outcomes.

A new KLAS report on the EHR market in Europe finds that Dedalus and CompuGroup Medical expanded their market share via acquisitions, with Cerner selling its Selene and Medico products to CGM in shifting its focus to Millennium and I.S.H. Med. Software Medical and Epic had the largest organic growth, while Epic’s performance score topped the list. Low-scoring vendors are ChipSoft and Cambio (Benelux and Northern Europe) and InterSystems and Dedalus (Western Europe), although InterSystems TrakCare has high user satisfaction in Southern Europe, particularly Italy. 

Government and Politics

ONC publishes the agenda for its 2022 Virtual Annual Meeting February 2-3 (education sessions) and April 13-14 (panel sessions, exhibit hall, and networking).

Other

In Germany, a 60-year-old man is arrested for forgery for receiving COVID-19 vaccine injections 90 times to obtain vaccination proof cards to sell. He was caught when he showed up at the same vaccination center on consecutive days.

Sponsor Updates

• The HIT Like a Girl Podcast features Ascom Americas VP of Sales & Business Development Shelly Bond.
• CareMesh publishes a new white paper, “5 Things Hospitals Can Do to Turn Epic into a Powerful Care Coordination Platform.”
• GHX will hold its 2022 Summit May 9-12 at the Diplomat Beach Resort in Hollywood, FL.
• Cerner releases a new podcast, “Breaking down bulk APIs.”
• CHIME and HIMSS pay tribute to health IT visionary David Garets.
• Clearwater publishes a new whitepaper, “The Guide to 405(d) Health Industry Cybersecurity Practices.”
• Diameter Health will present at the virtual NLP Summit April 6.
• Clearsense releases a new Tech Talk video, “The Rise of Clinician Data Scientists.”
• Sonifi Health releases digital whiteboard features that enhance the patient experience in hospital maternity units.

Blog Posts

• Healthcare Leaders Reveal 3 Key Factors in Financial Recovery (Ability Network)
• Top 5 Way Medical Practices Can Combat Inflation (AdvancedMD)
• How Operational Capacity Sensing Enables Successful Always-On Programs (Actium Health)
• It’s 2022. Which Database is Informing Your Real-World Evidence? (Premier)
• An Interview with an Expert on Interoperability in Healthcare (Bamboo Health)
• The great surgical migration: 7 workflows for optimal outpatient procedures (Bravado Health)
• Meditech Expanse: Bringing Ambulatory and Acute Under One EHR (Meditech)
• Ten Tips for a Successful Care-at-Home Program (Current Health)
• Highlights from the HIMSS22 Global Health Conference & Exhibition (Dimensional Insight)
• Honoring All Our Doctors (EClinicalWorks)
• Complex Technology and Its Threat to Healthcare (Enlace Health)

Contacts

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

Morning Headlines 4/5/22

SOC Telemed Stockholders Approve Acquisition by Patient Square Capital

SOC Telemed shareholders approve its sale to healthcare investment firm Patient Square Capital for nearly $300 million.

Advocate Aurora Enterprises acquires leading provider of health monitoring and emergency response solutions

Advocate Aurora Enterprises acquires MobileHelp, which offers remote patient monitoring and personal emergency response systems.

Nurse-1-1 Raises $2.3 Million in Seed Funding, Pioneering “Conversational Marketing for Healthcare”

Nurse-1-1, a nurse chat software startup that works with other digital health companies, raises $2.3 million in seed funding.

Morning Headlines 4/4/22

RE: U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice Request for Information on Merger Enforcement

The American Hospital Association tells federal regulators that hospital mergers, including associated technology benefits, lower costs and create better outcomes, benefiting their patients and communities.

Gozio Health Announces Financial Partnership with Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital

Wayfinding software company Gozio Health secures an undisclosed amount of funding from Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital.

Visante and TRG offer expanded pharmacy informatics and technology

Hospital pharmacy consulting firm Visante acquires The Robertson Group, which offers pharmacy informatics and technology consulting.

Morning Headlines 4/1/22

Thomas H. Lee Partners Acquires Intelligent Medical Objects

Private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners acquires Intelligent Medical Objects for a reported $1.5 billion.

Zephyr AI Raises $18.5 Million in Seed Funding Led by Lerner and M-Cor

Precision medicine and drug discovery analytics vendor Zephyr AI raises $18.5 million in seed funding.

Medical image sharing startup raises $16M

PocketHealth, a medical image-sharing startup based in Toronto, raises $16 million in a Series A funding round led by Questa Capital.

Morning Headlines 3/31/22

The United States and Practice Fusion, Inc. Resolve Allegations of Violations of Practice Fusion’s Deferred Prosecution Agreement

EHR vendor Practice Fusion will pay a $200,000 fine to resolve allegations that it failed to adhere to the terms of its deferred prosecution agreement, initiated to resolve criminal charges for its role in soliciting and receiving kickbacks in return for embedding electronic prompts in its EHR to influence the prescribing of opioid medications.

Ransomware group claims responsibility for cyber-attack on metro healthcare organization

Oklahoma City Indian Clinic announces that it was the victim of a cyberattack earlier this month by the Suncrypt ransomware group, which claims to have stolen 350 gigabytes of data.

Brightside Health Raises $50 Million in Series B Funding to Accelerate Delivery of Life-changing Mental Health Care For All

Mental health-focused online medication and therapy startup Brightside Health raises $50 million in a Series B funding round.

Morning Headlines 3/30/22

Novant Health launches new business division to accelerate clinical, operational and technological advances for the healthcare industry

Novant Health (NC) launches Novant Health Enterprises, an independent business focused on developing, acquiring, and scaling clinical, financial, and patient-oriented solutions.

With tech launches, Epic Systems looks to future of healthcare accessibility

Epic expands its 1,100 acre campus in Verona, WI with the opening of its 350-office Mystery building, the forthcoming opening of its Castaway building, and the addition of three more facilities within the next five years.

Life Sciences and Healthcare Leader ConcertAI Raises $150 Million Series C from Sixth Street at $1.9 Billion Valuation

Enterprise AI and real-world data software vendor ConcertAI raises $150 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised to over $300 million.

Morning Headlines 3/29/22

AmplifyMD snags $23m in F-Prime-led Series A

Specialty telehealth startup AmplifyMD raises $23 million in a Series A funding round.

Clearlake Capital-Backed nThrive Announces Name Change to FinThrive as Part of a Forthcoming Rebrand

Following its acquisition of TransUnion Healthcare late last year, RCM software vendor NThrive will change its name to FinThrive.

Change Healthcare said to announce buyer for ClaimsXten business as soon as next week

Change Healthcare will reportedly sell its claims payment and editing software business to Availity as potential acquirer UnitedHealth tries to work through DoJ antitrust concerns.

Private equity firms back Ensemble Health Partners in $5B+ deal

RCM software and services company Ensemble Health Partners secures funding from Berkshire Partners and Warburg Pincus that pushes its value to $5 billion.

Morning Headlines 3/28/22

DOJ joins whistleblower case against EHR vendor Modernizing Medicine and co-founder

The US Department of Justice joins a whistleblower lawsuit brought against Modernizing Medicine (now ModMed) and its CEO that accuses ModMed of falsely attesting that its EHR met Meaningful Use criteria, which caused users to submit inaccurate reports to CMS in earning MU incentives.

Cloud21 receives major investment from US healthcare technology consultancy, Tegria, to deliver digital transformation at scale

Tegria makes an unspecified “major” investment in England-based digital health consulting firm Cloud21, whose customers include several NHS hospitals.

Chapel Hill startup focusing on healthcare analytics, raises $2.5M, to expand

Quinsite, a healthcare analytics startup that markets its software to radiology practices, raises $2.5 million in seed funding.

Morning Headlines 3/25/22

VA officials ‘looking forward’ to launch of new medical record system in Walla Walla despite problems in Spokane

As the agency faces continued criticism for its initial Cerner roll-out in Washington, VA Deputy Secretary Donald Remy says the agency is ready to launch a new Cerner system at its medical center in Walla Walla, WA this weekend.

Osso VR nets $66 million for surgical training

Virtual reality-based surgical training and assessment company Osso VR raises $66 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised to $109 million.

Kaiser Permanente runs $1.5bn PE secondary sale as it looks to expand strategy

Kaiser Permanente is reportedly selling its $1.5 billion stake in several private equity funds, which includes investments in Ginger.io, Ingenious Med, Nordic, Rock Health, and Validic.

Morning Headlines 3/24/22

Eko expands algorithmic heart problem detection and lands $30M Series C extension

Digital stethoscope company Eko adds $30 million to its $65 million Series C funding round, and announces the launch of clinical decision support software.

Qualifacts + Credible Announces New Company Name

After merging in 2020, EHR vendor Qualifacts + Credible rebrands to Qualifacts.

PursueCare’s Virtual Addiction Treatment Program Adds In-Person Clinics, Continuing Rapid Expansion

Virtual behavioral healthcare provider PursueCare opens its first in-person clinic as part of a service expansion to Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Morning Headlines 3/23/22

Antidote Health Raises $22 Million in Series A Funding

Membership-based telemedicine company Antidote Health will use a new $22 million investment to add primary and chronic care services, and to further develop AI screening and clinical decision support system capabilities.

Recora Announces $20M in Series A Funding and Unveils Cardiac Recovery Program for Health Systems, Medical Groups and Health Plans

Tech-enabled cardiac recovery startup Recora raises $20 million in Series A funding.

VA and Cerner to investigate cause of Spokane electronic health records outage

The VA and Cerner promise to perform a thorough root-cause analysis of the software bug that caused Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center to take its Cerner EHR offline earlier this month.

U.S. Supreme Court rejects Epic Systems’ bid to restore $280 mln jury award

The US Supreme Court will not take up Epic’s challenge to an appeals court’s decision to cut the amount of damages it won in its stolen trade secrets case against Tata Consultancy Services.

Morning Headlines 3/22/22

Fresenius Medical Creates Kidney-Care Business With InterWell, Cricket

Fresenius Medical Care will create a kidney-care business valued at $2.4 billion by combining its US business with InterWell Health’s providers and Cricket Health’s technology.

DeliverHealth Acquires PresidioHealth, Expanding its Software Platform to Speed Up Appropriate Reimbursement

Health IT vendor DeliverHealth acquires PresidioHealth, which offers automated coding and revenue workflow capabilities for physician groups, urgent care centers, and freestanding ERs.

TimeDoc clocks in $48 million

Virtual care management company TimeDoc Health raises $48.5 million in a Series B funding round led by Aldrich Capital Partners.

Morning Headlines 3/21/22

Murray, McMorris Rodgers demand VA stop computer system launch in Walla Walla after reports reveal problems persist at Spokane hospital

Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) demands that the VA delay its planned March 26 Cerner go-live at the Walla Walla VA following VA OIG reports of continuing problems at the first live site at Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center in Spokane.

Healthcare tech platform Doctolib reaches $6.4 billion valuation

France-based Doctolib — which offers doctor search, scheduling, virtual visit booking, and document sharing — becomes the country’s highest-valued startup at $6 billion based on a new funding round.

Canopy Launches Out of Stealth With $13 Million to Help Oncology Practices Adopt a Proactive Care Delivery Model

Canopy (formerly Expain Health) launches its EHR-integrated technologies for oncology practices alongside securing a $13 million funding round.

Morning Headlines 3/18/22

$23M in Series B funding to enable Embold’s continued growth​

Healthcare analytics and provider performance transparency company Embold Health increases its Series B funding round to $23 million, bringing its total raised to $53 million.

Serious issues with VA electronic health records system remain unresolved, watchdog says

A new report from the Office of the Inspector General finds ongoing patient safety issues with the VA’s Cerner roll-out, including problems with scheduling appointments, errors in importing medication lists and orders, and missing suicide risk alerts.

Nuance and Cerner Working to Improve Clinician and Patient Experiences

Cerner will integrate Nuance’s Dragon Ambient Experience voice-enabled automated documentation software with its Millennium EHR.

Morning Headlines 3/17/22

House Rx Secures $30 Million in Financing to Improve the Specialty Pharmacy Experience for Patients and Their Care Teams

Specialty practice-focused House Rx, which offers technology that helps prescribers and pharmacists ensure patients have timely access to specialty medications, raises $25 million in a Series A funding round.

Avive Secures $22 Million in Series A Funding to Advance Intelligent AED and Lifesaving Platform for Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest

Avive Solutions, which has developed wirelessly connected automated external defibrillator technology, has raised $22 million in a Series A round of funding.

Startup behind menopause app Stella targets US market

UK-based menopause care app developer Vira Health will use a $12.1 million investment to grow employer adoption in the US, and support clinical trials and the addition of telemedicine.

Morning Headlines 3/16/22

Lyniate and NextGate Announce Merger Agreement, Advancing Healthcare Interoperability Leadership

Health data integration company Lyniate will acquire patient identity management vendor NextGate.

OptimizeRx Acquires EvinceMed, a Specialty Drug Prescription Initiation Platform

OptimizeRx acquires EvinceMed, a Las Vegas-based company that automates specialty pharmacy transactions.

Komodo Health preps summer IPO

De-identified patient data and analytics vendor Komodo Health, valued at $3.3 billion, will reportedly go public this summer.

Morning Headlines 3/15/22

Clarify Health Acquires Embedded Healthcare to Scale Value-Based Care for Health Plans

Healthcare analytics company Clarify Health acquires Embedded Healthcare, an analytics vendor focused on changing provider behavior to encourage high-value care.

Specialty-Driven EHRs Repeat Top 2022 Physician Satisfaction Ratings, 12th Annual Black Book Ambulatory Practice Surveys

Ambulatory end users give ModMed, Cerner, and Allscripts top marks across multiple categories for user satisfaction, according to a Black Book survey of nearly 16,000 specialty practices.

Study: Patients more forthcoming on health issues with electronic assessments

Patients are more likely to disclose symptoms of depression, fall risk, or intimate partner violence when filling out a tablet-based assessment versus an in-person assessment, according to a study conducted at six Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist practices.