Morning Headlines 5/26/20

With an ex-Uber exec as its new CEO, digital mental health service Mindstrong raises $100 million

Mindstrong. a Silicon Valley-based startup that has developed a teletherapy app for patients with severe mental illnesses, raises $100 million in a Series C funding round.

Castlight Health Launches New Solution For Safely Navigating Workforce Health and Re-entry Strategies Addressing COVID-19

Employee health management software company Castlight Health will introduce a COVID-19 screening, assessment, symptom management, and contact tracing app for employers next month.

Oregon’s Tracking Of Hospital Safety Equipment Rife With Holes

Healthcare workers in Oregon claim hospitals are neglecting to accurately document their PPE needs via the state’s HOSCAP reporting system, leaving some facilities without adequate supplies.

Morning Headlines 5/25/20

Digital health stocks are surging because ‘suddenly now we’re in the future’

Digital health companies experience record utilization, revenue, investment, and stock market surges as healthcare organizations have quickly pivoted to telemedicine and remote monitoring.

TriNetX & Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute Partner on FDA Sentinel System to Monitor COVID-19 Drug Usage

FDA’s Sentinel Operations Center at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute is working with TriNetX’s global health research network to monitor priority drugs that are being used for treating hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

Private equity group nears $100m-plus deal for Central Logic

PE Hub reports that health system logistics and patient transfer software vendor Central Logic may be sold in a $100 million-plus deal.

Morning Headlines 5/22/20

Flagler Health+ and Healthfully Offer Back-to-Work Solution for Employers

Flagler Health (FL) and consumer digital health company Healthfully develop a COVID-19 screening and monitoring app for employers that includes virtual visit capabilities.

Aetion launches research collaboration with FDA to advance understanding of COVID-19

The FDA launches a research project into the origin, treatment, and diagnostic patterns of COVID-19 using Aetion’s Evidence Platform, which aggregates data from EHRs, claims, registries, and clinical trials.

HHS Proposes ‘IT Control Tower’ to Manage Strategic National Stockpile

HHS issues an RFI on re-developing the IT strategy behind its Strategic National Stockpile of items associated with coronavirus-like pandemics.

Morning Headlines 5/21/20

Amwell Raises $194 Million, Committing to Expand the Best and Largest Digital Health Platform

Amwell will use a $194 million Series C funding round to further scale its telemedicine technology and services, which have seen record utilization during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Exclusive: NaviHealth sells to health care giant

UnitedHealth subsidiary OptumHealth acquires NaviHealth, a vendor of post-acute care management software, for an undisclosed sum.

Three states will use Apple-Google contact tracing technology for virus tracking apps

Alabama, North Dakota, and South Carolina become the first states to publicly commit to using contract-tracing technology developed by Google and Apple in their respective COVID-19 exposure notification apps.

Morning Headlines 5/20/20

Deliver better experiences, insights, and care with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Microsoft announces Cloud for Healthcare, its first industry-specific cloud offering.

Francisco’s QGenda, a scheduling-software company for docs, heads to market

Francisco Partners seeks a buyer for medical practice scheduling platform vendor QGenda.

Omada Health scores $57 million as coronavirus pandemic sparks investor interest in health tech

Employer-focused, chronic disease management company Omada Health acquires digital physical therapy solution vendor Physera for a rumored $30 million.

Carequality Reaches New Milestone of One Billion Clinical Documents Exchanged

Carequality announces that 1 billion clinical documents have been exchanged via its interoperability framework since it launched in 2016.

HHS To Award $5 Million for Health Services Research Related to COVID-19

HHS will award $5 million to support research into the ways healthcare organizations are responding to COVID-19, including the impact of expanded telemedicine services and digital tools. 

Morning Headlines 5/19/20

Holmusk Announces Closing of US$21.5 Million Series A Funding Round, Led by Optum Ventures & Health Catalyst Capital

Behavioral health and chronic disease-focused technology and analytics company Holmusk raises $21.5 million.

MTBC Reports Record First Quarter 2020 Revenue

The health IT company attributes record Q1 revenue of $22 million, a 45% increase over the year before, to its CareCloud acquisition in January.

Cerner joins the Fortune 500

Cerner breaks into the Fortune 500, a ranking of companies with collective revenue representing two-thirds of the country’s economy, at 498.

Amazon extends telemedicine pilot to warehouse employees in Seattle area

Amazon expands its Amazon Care telemedicine service initially offered to its Seattle office workers to nearby warehouse employees.

BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee to make telehealth coverage permanent after expansion amid COVID-19 crisis

Insurer BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee announces that it will continue to cover expanded telemedicine services after the pandemic ends.

Morning Headlines 5/18/20

Cerner, Hallmark, H&R Block: when Kansas City’s big employers plan to return to office

Cerner will begin moving employees back on campus Monday, starting with 10% of its workforce and aiming for no more than 50%.

UnitedHealth Group and Microsoft collaborate to launch ProtectWell™ protocol and app to support return-to-workplace planning and COVID-19 symptom screening

Microsoft and UnitedHealth Group offer their self-developed ProtectWell coronavirus symptom screening app, which they will use for their own employees, to all US companies at no charge.

Software problems thwart patient consultations with NHS specialists

The NHS and its remote consult vendor, Attend Anywhere, attempt to get the health service’s telemedicine software up and running reliably after several outages last week.

House and Senate Democrats Introduce Public Health Emergency Privacy Act

Lawmakers introduce the Public Health Emergency Privacy Act, which would require individuals to opt in and that data collected for pandemic efforts be deleted afterward, and would prohibit using the data for purposes outside of public health.

Morning Headlines 5/15/20

Donation to Akron Children’s establishes new chair that may be first in nation

Akron Children’s Hospital (OH) will use a $1 million donation to endow the country’s first chair in telehealth, to be held by CMIO and oncologist Sarah Rush, MD.

Utah has rejected the Apple-Google approach to tracing coronavirus, and is using an app made by a social media start-up instead

The state of Utah opts for contact-tracing app technology from Twenty, a social media startup that pivoted from developing a meet-up app to the Healthy Together app in just three weeks.

23andMe study to recruit sickest Covid-19 patients in bid to unravel role of genetics in disease

In an effort to find out if genetics plays a role in COVID-19 symptoms, 23andMe enlists hospitals to help it recruit severely ill patients for an expanded study.

Morning Headlines 5/14/20

Cerner moves its annual conference online, canceling one of KC’s largest gatherings

Cerner announces that its annual conference, originally scheduled for October 12-14, will become a virtual event.

Health Catalyst Reports First Quarter 2020 Results

Health Catalyst reports Q1 results: revenue up 28%; EPS -$0.06 vs. -$0.23, beating analyst expectations for both.

RxSense Announces Investment From Parthenon Capital

Parthenon Capital makes an undisclosed investment in prescription savings and analytics vendor RxSense.

HHS Awards $15 Million to Support Telehealth Providers During the COVID-19 Pandemic

HHS grants $15 million to 159 organizations for telemedicine training.

Dr. Atul Gawande Assumes New Leadership Role at Haven

Atul Gawande, MD confirms that he will transition from Haven Healthcare’s CEO to chairman of its Board of Directors.

Morning Headlines 5/13/20

App Shows Promise in Tracking New Coronavirus Cases, Study Finds

Researchers find that a symptom checking app being used by people in the US, UK, and Sweden can determine with 80% accuracy whether a user has COVID-19 based on just their age, sex, and presence or absence of four symptoms.

Stellar Health Secures $10 Million in Series A Funding Led by Point72 Ventures

Value-based primary care care improvement company Stellar Health raises $10 million in a Series A investment round.

CNBC’s Bertha Coombs Interviews Epic Founder and CEO Judy Faulkner from CNBC’s Health Returns Summit Today

Epic CEO Judy Faulkner says the company won’t pursue incorporating COVID-19 tracking and tracing into its software based on consumer privacy concerns.

Morning Headlines 5/12/20

Carbon Health Lands $26M, Triples Headcount

Primary and urgent care company Carbon Health adds $26 million to its Series B round with additional funding from investor DCVC.

New York City partners with Salesforce on coronavirus contact tracing program, mayor says

Mayor Bill de Blasio taps Salesforce to develop a customer relationship and case management system for the city’s contact tracing program, an arrangement similar to the one the company has entered into with the state of California.

Mount Sinai deploys Google Nest cameras for COVID-19 patient monitoring and communication

Mount Sinai Hospital (NY) pilots Google Nest cameras in 100 rooms to remotely monitor COVID-19 patients as the company prepares to donate 10,000 cameras and software to hospitals across the country.

AMA issues new principles to restore trust in data privacy

The American Medical Association develops new privacy principles to help guide consumers on how they can control, access, and delete personal health data collected about them by third parties.

Morning Headlines 5/11/20

Gawande in Talks About Leaving Helm of Health-Care Venture Haven

Insiders report that Atul Gawande, MD, MPH will resign as CEO of Haven Healthcare and move to a less-operational role as chairman.

Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, Inc. (MDRX) CEO Paul Black on Q1 2020 Results – Earnings Call Transcript

During its Q1 earnings call, Allscripts representatives say recent layoffs helped to eliminate $75 million in annualized costs, and they are reviewing product lines to see if any non-core businesses should be sold.

Livongo Health EPS beats by $0.07, beats on revenue

Livongo reports Q1 results: revenue up 115%, EPS -$0.06 vs. -$0.79, beating Wall Street expectations for both.

Morning Headlines 5/8/20

Allscripts announces first quarter 2020 results

Allscripts announces Q1 results: revenue down 3%, adjusted EPS $0.09 vs. $0.16, missing Wall Street expectations for both.

HHS OIG Toolkits for Calculating Opioid Levels and Identifying Patients At Risk of Misuse or Overdose

HHS OIG creates freely available statistical tools for analyzing prescription claims data to identify patients who are at risk of opioid misuse or overdose.

Braid Health Raises $9 Million in Seed and Series A Funding Led by Lux Capital

AI-powered digital imaging company Braid Health will use a $9 million funding round to further develop its software and create a virtual network of specialists.

Ballad Health vendor to locate center in region, add 500 jobs

Ensemble Health Partners will build an office to accommodate 500 new employees and 1,100 Ballad Health staffers who will transition to the RCM vendor once the hospital goes live on Epic in June.

Morning Headlines 5/7/20

CVS Health first-quarter revenue rose 8% as customers rushed into stores to buy essentials; shares up

CVS Health sees a 600% jump in telemedicine visits through its chain of Minute Clinics, part of an overall spike in its digital services that helped the essential business realize Q1 sales of $67 billion.

TimeDoc Health Secures $5.7 Million Series A Financing Round

Chronic care management technology and services startup TimeDoc Health raises $5.7 million in Series A round of funding led by Vocap Investment Partners.

Cerner Earns Top Client Satisfaction Ratings for Inpatient EHR Vendor in Large Health Systems and Medical Centers, 2020 Black Book Survey

A Black Book survey names Cerner as the top-rated EHR vendor in large hospitals, and in outsourced tech support for hospital networks.

Morning Headlines 5/6/20

Nashville health care company sells one business, reclaims another in $268 million of deals

Change Healthcare acquires ERx Network for $213 million, and sells its Connected Analytics business to Kaufman Hall for $55 million.

PointClickCare Acquires Co-Pilot Analytics Solution

Long-term and post-acute care health IT vendor PointClickCare acquires Consonus Healthcare’s Co-Pilot analytics software.

Britain’s Billion-Dollar Babylon Health App Set To Launch For ‘Millions’ Of New Yorkers

Mount Sinai Health Partners implements Babylon Health’s app, which includes telemedicine and new COVID-19 Care Assistant capabilities.

Morning Headlines 5/5/20

CareCentrix Acquires Turn-Key Health

Home and post-acute care technology company CareCentrix acquires Turn-Key Health, which offers AI and analytics for palliative care management.

Google and Apple ban location tracking in their contact tracing apps

Apple and Google give developers rules for using their jointly developed contact tracing technology that include bans on the use of location tracking and using the data for targeted advertising or policing.

Cerner’s share of hospital market drops, while rival gains

Cerner loses market share for the first time in 10 years, a decline attributed in part to its loss of nine acute care customers and Epic’s gain of 55 new facilities.

Morning Headlines 5/4/20

Data Interoperability and Exchange to Support COVID-19 Containment

In a new Duke University report, experts recommend that health officials should define a minimum data set for COVID-19 containment as part of participating in clinical data exchanges, among other short-term actions that can be taken to improve interoperability and data exchange for containing the virus.

Spok Reports First-Quarter 2020 Operating Results; Wireless Trends Continue to Improve and Year-Over-Year Improvements in Software Revenue Bookings

Spok reports Q1 results: revenue down 11%, EPS –$0.24 vs. $.04.

Dascena Announces Closing of $50 Million Series B Financing to Support Advancement of Diagnostic Algorithm Development Engine to Inform Patient Care and Improve Outcomes

AI-powered sepsis prediction company Dascena raises $50 million in a funding round led by Frazier Healthcare Partners.

Canada to invest $240M in online health care amid coronavirus, Trudeau says

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announces funding for expanding digital healthcare capabilities and developing new telehealth services for primary and mental healthcare.