Monday Morning Update 2/24/25

Top News

A short-selling investment firm claims that mental health therapists in Teladoc Health’s BetterHelp business are using ChatGPT to respond to patients during therapy sessions without the patient’s knowledge.

Some BetterHelp therapists who were confronted by their patients admitted that they use AI tools because of heavy workloads and company bonuses that are tied to the number of words that a therapist types.

TDOC shares dropped 9% on Friday. They have lost 24% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $2 billion.

Teladoc Health paid $4.5 million in 2015 to acquire BetterHelp, which generates $1 billion in annual revenue, representing up to 40% of Teladoc Health’s total revenue. However, declining BetterHealth revenue caused Teladoc to take a $790 million impairment charge in mid-2024.

Reader Comments

From Placater: “Re: agentic AI. What does that even mean and why should I care?” AI began as a simple chatbot that answered user questions, sometimes even correctly. Over time, it improved by learning to analyze, correct its mistakes, and respond based on context to please its master. We’re now at agentic AI, which can take keyboard actions like placing an Amazon order or prescribing medication. This is the step that will start killing jobs, although software developers were already ripe for reduction by the last phase. The next short step is AI-powered robots performing human-like tasks, which is really just another output of agentic AI that is limited more by robotics maturity than AI itself. Self-driving cars already showcase AI’s ability to make better decisions than distracted human drivers. With each leap, fewer people benefit — while tools like ChatGPT help the masses, only industry titans and their investors will gain when robots replace human workers.

From Monetary Magnet: “Re: health tech conferences. I’m thinking about attending HIMSS next year as a frustrated patient. Will software vendors listen, or am I wasting my time? Didn’t you sponsor several patient advocates to attend HIMSS years ago?” I did, but that experience didn’t encourage me to repeat it. Reasons:

• Health tech vendors create products that the market wants, and that market isn’t patients. Consumers don’t see 99% of the available software and their complaints usually relate to how it is used, not how it was designed.
• Software vendors can’t fix the problems that are inherent with our dysfunctional US healthcare system. I eat at restaurants occasionally, but I would add zero value by attending a restaurant software convention. That’s a cleaned up version of my initial cynical healthcare thought, which is that having patients at health tech conferences would be like inviting livestock to attend a slaughterhouse software convention (that came to mind because I have a friend who is an executive in exactly that business).
• Healthcare is not a retail market. Patients aren’t the ones paying and often don’t have a say in major decisions that affect them as a result.
• Conferences like HIMSS and ViVE are designed for industry experts, and any patient representation is likely symbolic at best or tokenistic at worst. Their emotional keynote anecdotes get us all worked up, but we walk out of the conference room with nothing actionable.
• It’s easy for patient advocates to become overwhelmed by conference parties and booth giveaways. A lack of relevant education sessions would probably leave them to wander the exhibit hall.
• Healthcare is fragmented by geography, demographics, provider choices, and medical needs. A single patient’s experience and viewpoint don’t necessarily represent that diversity.
• Vendor input on patient needs is more effectively gathered from their provider customers who write the checks. Those providers should be talking with their patients / customers and choosing software that supports whatever strategies the providers choose. Blame providers for bad patient experience.
• The bottom line is that we’re all patients, just not at the same time, but what we think as patients doesn’t necessarily move markets. Change would need to come from providers, politicians, insurers, and life sciences firms that are pretty happy with the profitable status quo. Patients might better invest their time by engaging with people from those organizations.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Three-fourths of poll respondents don’t believe that their job performance can be entirely measured by objective metrics. Question: if that’s the case, what is your boss using instead, especially if you work remotely? I assume subjective criteria such as peer feedback, customer satisfaction, and the maddeningly vague areas of responsiveness, collaboration, problem-solving, and worth ethic, all of which might be heavily influenced by likeability or brown-nosability.

New poll to your right or here: Who is most responsible when a telehealth company regularly prescribes drugs that patients want in the absence of clear medical need? I admit that I don’t understand why companies are punished for fraud, opioid overuse, and prescribing without adequate clinical due diligence, but the clinicians who actually generated those prescriptions for cash aren’t even named, much less punished. Would you as a patient want to know that your doctor has willingly agreed to rent their license to the highest bidder? The concept probably extends to health systems – aren’t doctors supposed to represent the best interest of the patient rather than of their corporate bosses?

I’m testing a weekly, 60-second LinkedIn carousel that lists my picks of the week’s most important health tech news stories for the TL;DR types. I’ll post a new one each Wednesday morning to see how it goes.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Live Webinar: March 20 (Thursday) noon ET. “Enhancing Patient Experience: Digital Accessibility Legal Requirements in Healthcare.” Sponsor: TPGi. Presenters: Mark Miller, director of sales, TPGi; David Sloan, PhD, MSc, chief accessibility officer, TPGi; Kristina Launey, JD, labor and employment litigation and counseling partner, Seyfarth Shaw LLP. For patients with disabilities, inaccessible technology can mean the difference between timely, effective care and unmet healthcare needs. This could include accessible patient portals, telehealth services, and payment platforms. Despite a new presidential administration, requirements for Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have not changed. While enforcement may unclear moving forward, healthcare organizations still have an obligation to their patients for digital accessibility. In our webinar session, TPGi’s accessibility experts and Seyfarth Shaw’s legal professionals will help you understand ACA Section 1557 requirements, its future under the Trump administration, and offer strategies to help you create inclusive experiences.

HIMSS25 Guide: HIStalk sponsors can provide conference participation details by February 24 to be included in my guide.

Survey Opportunity: Healthcare AI Purchasing. Responses from health system and imaging center readers to this short survey will trigger a Donors Choose donation from Volpara Health plus matching funds.  

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Waystar reports Q4 results: revenue up 19%, EPS $0.11 versus –$0.12, beating analyst expectations for both. WAY shares have gained 104% since the company’s June 2024 IPO, valuing the company at $7 billion.

Sales

• Akron Children’s will implement Abridge for ambient documentation.
• Blessing Health System (IL) will implement Epic, replacing Altera Digital Health’s Sunrise.

Announcements and Implementations

Mass General Brigham researchers develop an Epic tool that identifies frail patients who are at risk for higher rates of hospital readmission and death. The tool works even when primary care visit data is not available.

Government and Politics

Website operator Gregory Schreck pleads guilty to federal charges that accused him of tricking Medicare patients into giving up their personal information so they could be sent “free” medically unnecessary items like braces and pain creams that were then billed to federal insurance programs. The scheme led to $1 billion in false Medicare claims, with Medicare and insurers paying out more than $360 million. Schreck was a VP at DMERx, the Internet platform that was used to generate the false prescriptions. He was also VP of HealthSplash, which advertised its service as helping payers, providers, and suppliers share data.

Other

The UK’s medical exam administrator admits to sending incorrect scores to September 2023 test-takers. It mistakenly told 222 internal medicine doctors they had passed when they had actually failed, while 61 who passed were told they had failed. The British Medical Association warns that those who were wrongly told that they passed now face an uncertain future, while some of the 61 who were incorrectly failed may have already left the profession as a result.

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book Research publishes a free report, “2025 Black Book of Rural and Critical Access Healthcare IT Solutions.”
• Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast featuring Doug Turner, MBA.
• Nym names Yaara Libai and Bella Sirota clinical data annotators, Ariela Krumgals VP of HR, Yiftah Sasson product manager, Shiraz Tov junior backend engineer, and Hadar Yehezkeli NLP research engineer.

Blog Posts

• Meditech customers create efficiencies to address emergency department utilization (Meditech)
• IDD Workforce Empowerment: 3 Takeaways from the IDD Summit Expert Panel Discussion (Netsmart)
• Same-day visits: Will you be the leader to make it happen in your organization? (Nordic)
• The New Patient Priority: Why Healthcare Payment Flexibility is No Longer Optional (TrustCommerce, a Sphere Company)
• The role of AI in modern healthcare: Striking the balance between progress and accountability (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

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

News 2/21/25

Top News

Vanity prescription vendor Hims & Hers acquires Trybe Labs, an at-home lab testing provider that process customer self-collected blood samples.

The company says the acquisition will allow it to offer whole-body testing and give it de-identified health data for AI training.

HIMS shares rose on the news are are up 350% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $15 billion.

Reader Comments

From Hal2k: “Re: HIMSS25. Federal employees, including those from ONC / ASTP, have had to drop out. What will be the downstream impact? I heard lower turnout overall – they had to cancel a couple of hotels.” Unverified. I gave the conference website a quick look, with the only surprise being that Hal Wolf will be doing a fireside chat with Oracle Health EVP/GM Seema Verma on improving patient-centered care, which seems questionable for several reasons.

From Tired Sales Gal: “Re: ViVE. My perspective is that its attendance was down from previous years. Not sure if the weather played a part or not. Attached is an attendee list. The majority were vendors versus providers and payer representatives. Fewer investors attended. I question whether the list might not have included those attendees who registered through CHIME, but that might only be another 500 folks.” The list has about 4,000 vendors versus 900 providers, and some of those provider folk don’t have a title that suggests purchasing influence (podcast host, professor, administrative fellow, etc.) I’ve never heard of quite a few of the companies on the list. Maybe if I decide that I care enough I’ll compare the ViVE and HIMSS exhibitor lists.

ViVE Conference Day 3 and 4 Observations from an Attendee

• Tuesday felt like the busiest day; lots of activity across the floor as folks tried to wrap up before the snow.
• Simply based on my perceptions from walking around, it felt like sessions on the four primary stages were sparsely attended. One-on-one and small group meetings seemed to be the dominant activities throughout the conference.
• Nashville got about 1.5″ of snow, so on the low side of expectations. On Wednesday there were lots of flight delays but relatively few cancellations, and major roads were in decent shape.
• I’d estimate only ~2,000 folks were around on Wednesday. Probably one-third of booths had no one, and many started packing up early.
• ViVE should’ve had a scavenger hunt to find all the booths that don’t have AI mentioned somewhere in their display or marketing materials. Practically every company is trying to say they have or use AI, but how real it is is unclear to me.
• I want to give a shout-out to Streamline Flow. They were demoing until the very end, and in an industry of bad software, their product seems attractive, intuitive, clinician-friendly, and easy to use. It’s early, but looking forward to seeing how they progress.
• Now the hard work begins. Companies that had a good conference and generated valuable leads are only on first base; there is a lot remaining to do to get to home plate. We feel good about how ViVE was for us but how we execute in the coming weeks and months will determine whether it was worthwhile.

Sponsored Events and Resources

HIMSS25 Guide: HIStalk sponsors can provide conference participation details by February 24 to be included in my guide.

Survey Opportunity: Healthcare AI Purchasing. Responses from health system and imaging center readers to this short survey will trigger a Donors Choose donation from Volpara Health plus matching funds.  

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A remarkably fine MedCity News investigative piece (it’s well worth clicking over) by Arundhati Parmar looks at Transcarent:

• Founder Glen Tullman had said previously that care navigation companies are as obsolete as travel agents. Transcarent then acquired care navigation company Accolade for $621 million last month at what was seen as a fire sale price.
• Insiders say that Transcarent wildly missed its 2024 sales targets, booking $60 million instead of the expected $175 million, and earned most of its big clients via its acquisitions or from Tullman’s executive connections.
• Another insider says that 70 employer navigation RFPs were issued last year and Transcarent not only failed to win any of them, it wasn’t even considered in any.
• Accolade’s prospects were fading after being dropped by big customers, trading as a penny stock, and being shopped to potential buyers.
• A CEO who has known Tullman for years criticizes the strategy of Transcarent selling directly to executives who tend to perform less due diligence than benefits consultants: “I think Glen preys on the benefits buyers who do not have a ton of resources to understand that there is nothing under the veneer that he is presenting. There is no Transcarent model. They have no NCQA designation, no URAC designation. They have no hard standard accreditation for care management. He invests a lot of money in political connections and in being part of CEO clubs that give him access to board members that don’t know much about benefits.”
• A healthcare CEO who passed on acquiring telemedicine vendor 98point6 after reviewing its financials said of Transcarent’s $100 million acquisition of the company: “They were losing 60 cents for every dollar of revenue they made. Glen has a pattern of taking distressed, low-quality assets and then slapping a bunch of tech together.”

Therapy Brands, which offers EHR/PM software for mental health and therapy providers, expands its Fusion rehab therapy product to the adult market.

Venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners merges two of its population health management technology companies, Azara Healthcare and I2i Population Health. The announcement is coy about what name the combined businesses will use.

Hummingbird Healthcare raises $20 million in a Series B funding round.

Walgreens shares jump Tuesday following a report that its potential acquisition by private equity firm Sycamore Partners could be back on the table.

IRhythm Technologies announces Q4 results: revenue up 24%, EPS –$0.04 versus -$1.26. IRTC shares are down 1% over the past 12 months, valuing the ambulatory ECG solution vendor at $3.5 billion.

Sales

• Cleveland Clinic will roll out ambient documentation from Ambience Healthcare.
• Inspira Health announces that it will replace Oracle Health with Epic, as a reader reported here last September.

Announcements and Implementations

WellSky launches a patient scheduling and workforce management solution for home care agencies. 

Availity launches Rapid Recovery, a solution that is designed to swiftly restore critical healthcare operations after large-scale catastrophic events, including cyberattacks. Key features include a five-day recovery objective, an air-gapped recovery environment, comprehensive backups, and third-party certification.

Epic will expand its 11,400-seat Deep Space underground conference center by 23,000 square feet with a new 750-seat auditorium and a dining facility. The expansion is intended to accommodate the company’s user group meeting and is scheduled to open before UGM 2026 next August.

Government and Politics

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) presses Paul Lawrence, PhD at his confirmation hearing for VA deputy secretary:

EHR started in 2018 under President Trump and in 2020, it deployed to two Washington state VA hospitals. Instead of helping to improve our veterans’ health care, the rollout ending up being a complete disaster, and it endangered veteran patients. Unfortunately, the system still is not working the way that the VA doctors and nurses need, and veterans are continuing  to suffer. Last month, the VA announced that it would be moving forward with pre-deployment activities at the next four sites for this Electronic Health Record. You will oversee the EHR program, so if confirmed, I want to know what you are going to do differently to hold Oracle accountable and to make sure we get this system right for our veterans?” Lawrence responded that he will figure out an accountability plan, to which Murray said, “We have heard that answer from every VA person that’s come before this committee for a number of years now. Everybody’s looked at it, everybody’s considered it, everybody’s talked about it, everybody’s convened panels. It is not working.”

Other

I saw this after reading Dr. Jayne’s piece on tech for seniors and thought it looked interesting. The free version turns an old tablet into a companion device that serves as a smart picture frame, text and photo messaging tool, and task manager. A $10 per month subscription adds auto-answer video calls, auto-join of Zoom meetings, AI activities and check-in, and connection of multiple family members. Onscreen Joy was announced last month at CES.

In the Netherlands, a man buys five 500GB hard drives for $5 each at a flea market and discovers that they contain patient medical records, apparently from the defunct healthcare software vendor Nortade ICT Solutions.

Sponsor Updates

• Capital Rx releases a new episode of “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast” titled “Judi Health: Going Beyond Pharmacy and into Medical Claims, with AJ Loiacono and Dr. Sunil Budhrani.”
• BNH Hospital in Thailand implements the TrakCare EHR from InterSystems.
• A Surescripts analysis projects more than $3.76 billion in healthcare savings could be realized if care managers leverage Surescripts Medication History for Populations technology.
• First Databank publishes a new white paper, “Empowering Consumer Choice with EPrescribing.”
• Findhelp welcomes new customers Cone Health (NC), Help at Home (IL), and Marion County Commission on Youth (IL).
• FinThrive will present at the Idaho HFMA Spring Conference March 3 in Boise.
• Five9 announces its global availability on Google Cloud Marketplace.
• Healthcare Growth Partners advises Insight Partners on its investment in Azara Healthcare and I2I Population Health.
• Inbox Health partners with Lighthouse Lab Services.
• MRO achieves HITRUST CSF certification for its Exchange Services platform.

Blog Posts

• Signs it is time to change your PBM vendor, and how to overcome common hesitations (Capital Rx)
• 5 Healthcare IT Trends Shaping the Industry (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• AI in Enterprise Clinical Imaging: Capitalizing on the Value Proposition (Impact Advisors)
• HEDIS MY 2026 Public Comments: Highlights for Quality Teams (Inovalon)
• Full speed ahead: Interoperability at MEDITECH enters a new era (Meditech)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.

News 2/19/25

Top News

Abridge raises $250 million in a Series D funding round.

The company says that its ambient documentation product is being used by 100 health systems.

Abridge’s valuation has been reported as $2.5 billion.

Reader Comments

From Dr. Anon: “Re: Oracle Health. We keep hearing about the ‘excitement’ of Oracle shifting ‘to the cloud,’ but I’ve still not been able to get a straight answer on what will happen to all of our custom build when that occurs. And we have tons of custom build based on the old PowerForm / PowerNotes features that supports all of our regulatory reporting requirements. Unfortunately the workflow mPages and dynamic documentation features, on which the cloud implementation will be based, has yet to include key features despite a decade of Cerner / Oracle knowing what is needed.”

From Aca-Doc: “Re: work metrics for physician productivity. My prior chairman was big on metrics for bonuses. As the CMIO, I had to develop reports to show who was at 75th percentile or above on RVUs. Because we’d had problems with people submitting charges without writing a note, the metrics also incorporated a requirement that 95% of notes had to be completed within seven days of the visit. People figured out workarounds. They would sign a blank note on the day of the visit and then go back later and fill in the details. On the other hand, patient satisfaction and outcomes are not necessarily a good indicator of work effort or quality, so it’s not really fair to hold clinicians accountable for these variables over which they have no control.” 

From ViveRant: “Re: ViVE. Now there’s wristband for ‘additional security.’ This is required wear in addition to the badges that now include a picture of the attendee. As when airlines started requiring picture ID, the point was to remove the thriving secondhand market for unused plane tickets. Like CES, ViVE realized that badge pictures are suboptimal since scanning thousands of people is impossible. Adding a wristband that cannot be removed without breaking is possibly easier to spot, but for most, it remains invisible and adds the frustration of unnecessary lines each morning to get a new wristband unless you like wearing a post-shower, now-sodden cloth wristband.” Being cynical, I would wonder what kind of attendee tracking the badge enables, like the RFID that HIMSS planned to use at HIMS11 (also RSNA) so that exhibitors could “derive a more accurate score of a visitor’s buying potential and send a booth alert when a key prospect approaches.” As if that wasn’t creepy enough, the tech company that HIMSS hired for that attendee tracking later incorporated facial recognition and also added a feature that HIMSS didn’t use — value-based booth pricing, so getting stuck in exhibit hall Siberia at least cost less. Also, did the ViVE wristbands have ads?

ViVE Conference Day 1 and 2 Observations from an Attendee

• 10,000 attendees (2,500 more than ViVE 2023 in Nashville), 30% are C-Suite-level. 725 provider and payer organizations represented. 5,000 scheduled meetings over the course of the conference.
• Nashville has not been spared from the latest Arctic blast. There were snow flurries falling during the (partially outdoor) opening night reception.
• The show floor feels both active and quiet; there’s definitely a lot of people and a lot of activity, yet nothing feels frenetic or chaotic. It feels like everything flows and runs smoothly.
• The layout of the show floor is different in notable ways from two years ago. There is less empty space. Every inch is used in a way that’s compact but doesn’t feel cramped.
• It feels like there are a lot more vendor booths, and they’ve cut back on some of the free space as a result. Also, the primary stages at each corner of the show floor have much less seating compared to two years ago.
• 99% of the booths seem to be taken. I’ve only seen three booths and one meeting cube on the floor plan showing as unfilled.
• AI is definitely a core focus and some of the biggest booths are heavily AI-oriented.
• Vendors I’ve noticed who have a diminished or no presence (smaller booth, much fewer attendees): Health Gorilla, Graphite Health, Moxe, eClinicalWorks, Interfaceware, Quest Diagnostics. I’m sure there are others.
• I continue to question how valuable a booth is. If you have a catchy brand or offering that’s likely to attract the attention of a wanderer, I can see it helping. If you’re meeting- and one-on-one-focused, I feel like a meeting area is a better investment.
• The Provider and Payer Connect Lounge, where vendors have scheduled meetings with provider and payer orgs, is huge this time around, with at least 170 small tables for meetings. The Investor Connect Lounge feels smaller and anecdotally, I haven’t run into nearly as many investors.
• Being a repeat ViVE attendee, I feel my organization has a much better game plan for the conference. I’m clearer on who to meet with and how to make connections happen. I’m more realistic about who actually attends and how to find them. I think vendors coming to ViVE need to understand that it is focused on doing business with investors and health system/health plan prospects. The days are heavily structured around meetings and more curated interactions with providers, payer, and investors. Some folks are here to learn or explore, but many are on a mission and will treat everything tangential to that mission as a distraction. If you are a B2B company, like a professional services org, you need to hit every aisle of booths and seek out partnerships or prospects. You have to have the right strategy to make the conference worthwhile, and for some it probably isn’t the right fit.
• Nashville is expecting one to four inches of snow starting late Tuesday night, so there is a lot of chatter about folks changing flights and abandoning town. I’m expecting Wednesday to be dead, and I’m surprised the ViVE organizers haven’t addressed the elephant in the room and given guidance on whether they’ll even keep Day 4. I feel bad for those slated to hold key meetings or to present on the final day. Though the weather’s unusual, it isn’t unheard of in Nashville in February. ViVE should really stick to March.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Instant Access Webinar: “How AI Addresses Resource Constraints Within Identity Data Management.” Sponsor: Rhapsody. Presenters: Lynn Stoltz, MS, director of product management, Rhapsody; Drew Ivan, MS, chief architect, Rhapsody; Michelle Blackmer, chief marketing officer, Rhapsody. Discover how to overcome the toughest challenge in identity data management: resource constraints.  The presenters will cover how Rhapsody EMPI with Autopilot solves resource challenges like limitations in time, talent, and budget; Reduces costs and risks associated with inaccurate data; and boosts identity data accuracy through 98% decision-making precision.

HIMSS25 Guide: HIStalk sponsors can provide conference participation details by February 24 to be included in my guide.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Keebler Health raises $6 million in seed funding. The Durham, NC-based company’s software performs medical records review to help providers assess and adjust risk under value-based care contracts.

I missed this from mid-January. A private equity firm acquires ComplexCare Solutions, a carve-out from Inovalon. The company offers an independent health assessment and member engagement platform.

Avandra, which operates a medical imaging data network, raises $17.75 million in funding.

Sales

• Community Hospital Corporation will deploy CarePilot’s AI scribe solution. Founder and CEO Joseph Tutera, Jr. ran unsuccessfully for governor of Kansas in 2017 at age 16, then started a business early in the pandemic buying respirator masks and COVID tests from Asia and reselling them to US customers.
• MultiCare Connected Care will use Tuva Health’s open-source technology to manage and analyze data for 375,000 patients and has taken an ownership stake in the company through its investment arm.
• Montefiore Health System selects Amazon Web Services as its cloud provider and will transition Epic to AWS.

People

Germany-based medical inhaler digital therapy vendor VisionHealth promotes Peter Shadday to CEO. He replaces founder Sabine Häussermann, PhD, who will move to chief scientific officer.

Oncology software vendor OncoHealth hires Jon Maack, MBA (Definitive Healthcare) as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Innovaccer launches telephone-based AI voice agents for patient scheduling, protocol intake, referral, authorization, care gap closure, HCC coding, and patient access.

DrFirst enhances its IPrescribe electronic prescribing app with a feature that lets providers call patients from their personal phones while displaying their practice’s name as the caller ID.

Healthcare accreditor URAC announces plans to release a healthcare AI accreditation program later this year and seeks advisory committee members to help develop standards.

DirectTrust opens a 60-day public comment period for draft criteria for its new Identity Provider and UDAP Identity Provider programs.

Arcadia launches new solutions for modeling care networks, managing value-based care contracts, identifying care gaps, and developing AI models to identify disease progression and risk.

Symplr announces an AWS-powered platform that integrates 28 applications in a unified user experience.

MultiPlan changes it name to Claritev and announces its intentions to broaden its product lines beyond reducing payments for out-of-network provider claims.

Clarigent Health, a Cincinnati Children’s startup that developed an AI-driven tool for schools to analyze counseling session recordings for suicide risk, shuts down. The company had received $1 million in NIH funding, but a 2023 newspaper investigation found no evidence supporting its claims and raised accuracy concerns due to the AI being trained on recordings from a majority-white population.

Government and Politics

HHS appoints Clark Minor, a software executive at Palantir, as CIO. The intelligence data firm won a contested $415 million NHS contract in 2023, drawing criticism over sole-source awarding and full NHS data access. HHS, a Palantir client, has paid the company $300 million over four years.

Stat reports that FDA has laid off many AI and digital health employees who were involved in AI regulation.

A new Ohio law forces hospitals to comply with the widely ignored federal price transparency rule by prohibiting non-compliant hospitals from collecting patient medical debt.

Sponsor Updates

• Cordea Consulting introduces its Innovation Lab video series.
• Clinical Architecture joins the CHIME Foundation to collaborate on healthcare IT innovation.
• Optimum Healthcare IT achieves Amazon Web Services Healthcare Competency status.
• CloudWave will present at the North Carolina Healthcare Association Winter Meeting February 20 in Raleigh.

Blog Posts

• AI and healthcare: What clinicians need to know (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• How Cybersecurity Ambassador Programs Strengthen Your First Line of Defense (CereCore)
• Navigating the Current State of AI and Automation in Revenue Cycle Management (AGS Health)
• Looking toward the future of healthcare: Altera leaders’ predictions for 2025 and beyond (Altera Digital Health)
• Seven Habits of Client-Focused Companies (Clearsense)
• Powering Pharmacogenomics: Clinical Architecture’s Role in Advancing Personalized Medicine in the NHS (Clinical Architecture)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 2/17/25

Top News

A JAMA commentary piece notes that patients don’t trust how health systems will use AI, but then again, they don’t trust health systems in general.

A cited study found a mean health system overall trust score of 5.23 on a 12-point scale. Only 40% of respondents expressed high trust, down from 72% pre-pandemic.

The author, Vanderbilt informatics professor Jessica Ancker, MD, MPH, recommends that health systems clearly disclose AI interactions, specify who can access AI-generated data, and inform patients when AI is used to influence clinical decisions.

She also notes that people tend to be wary of technology they haven’t personally experienced, such as self-driving cars, but usually warm up to it once they see it for themselves.

Reader Comments

From Peds MD: “Re: Epic’s Care Everywhere. Responding to the HIStalk post last fall where Care Everywhere failed to match a critical newborn, Epic relaxed its requirements to make matches if you have the patient’s Care Everywhere number (from the place you are querying) and two other matching demographics. Today we had a patient who had “some kind of heart surgery” as a child in 2001, and it was medically important to know exactly what was done. Because they had moved across the country, I couldn’t match the patient using regular demographics — everything had changed except their name, sex, and date of birth — but when I obtained and entered the Care Everywhere number from the other hospital’s HIM department, the match came back immediately. We are still working with Epic on improving matching, but I think it’s important to recognize progress, as it made a big difference in this patient’s care. Kudos to HIStalk for helping in this.” I posted the reader’s original problem description last year. Thanks for the update and thanks to Epic, which I can say always responds quickly and personally to address issues that readers have reported here.

From Silken: “Re: Epic and SaaS. I’ve seen online commentary about the benefit of Epic moving to SaaS model. What do you and your readers think?” For me, I see the possible customer advantages of running a SaaS versus on-premise and cloud-hosted products. However, technical punditry and wishful thinking aside, you have to assume that Epic is like all companies in being most likely to take whatever path benefits it most. Thoughts:

• Big, Epic-using health systems aren’t visibly demanding a SaaS model, at least when it comes to voting with their dollars, which is the only vote that counts. They have already invested in Epic-driven infrastructure, IT expertise, and long-term budgets. These are sunk costs that shouldn’t influence future decisions, but hospitals are generally risk-averse and don’t relish major disruptions like retraining and workflow changes, especially in the absence of a clear business benefit.
• Even though Epic’s maintenance costs are high, SaaS wouldn’t necessarily be cheaper over time since it’s still up to Epic to set prices.
• Many health systems already operate a de facto SaaS model by hosting Epic for affiliated hospitals and clinics. This may be more cost-effective than Epic offering SaaS directly to an ever-decreasing number of unaffiliated small hospitals and practices.
• SaaS benefits include scalability and faster onboarding of acquisitions, but drawbacks include a reduced ability for customization, forced upgrades on Epic’s schedule, and tighter vendor lock-in.
• The Change Healthcare breach heightened concerns about reliance on a single vendor, possibly making CIOs skeptical that Epic SaaS would be more secure or resilient than their own IT capabilities.
• SaaS would increase health system dependence on Epic, with unknowns about what a post-Judy Epic looks like.
• Oracle Health talks up cloud-native ambitions but lacks market momentum, industry focus, and credibility to provide much of a medium-term threat. Health systems care less about technology compared to business results, proven ROI, and vendor responsiveness and stability. Oracle’s commitment, performance, and retention of internal healthcare expertise remains unproven, and customers have been historically burned by big tech outsiders who barged into (and then out of) healthcare. 
• A full Epic rewrite is unlikely unless the reward to Epic clearly outweighs the risk. Few vendors have pulled this off. Meditech did it seemingly effortlessly with Expanse and Cerner (as a publicly traded company) sweated through many bad years until Millennium was fully baked. Otherwise a lot of vendor-touted technology improvement is pig lipstickery, and sometimes that’s all customers care about anyway.
• Epic dominates the market and will eventually run out of deep-pockets health systems to sell to. It doesn’t need to chase new customers by teasing their CTOs into an advanced state of technical arousal.
• Potential drivers for change are Oracle Health rebounding as a serious competitor; a demand for cloud-native AI and analytics; and regulatory pressures around interoperability and cybersecurity (which seem to be lessening by the day).

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents book their medical appointments by telephone or patient portal. Some say they do it at the check-out desk at the end of their visit, which I’ve seen almost universally with dentists but commonly with doctors, although that experience probably involves routine chronic condition management.

New poll to your right or here: How much of your job performance can be measured using objective metrics?This came to mind while reading an article about how much of a pay cut office employees would take to work fully remotely. The article noted that managers who oppose WFH often oversee employees whose performance isn’t easily quantified by output metrics, which forces them to rely on in-office proxies such as hours worked, enthusiasm, and the perceptions of colleagues and customers. Another question might be that if your job performance isn’t being mostly measured by metrics, then why not? Is your work inherently unquantifiable, or is it that managers haven’t created the right metrics and instead rely on direct observation?

HIStalk sponsors: fill out this form to tell me about your HIMSS25 plans by February 24 and I will include you in my guide, which will look like the one above from last year..

Readers provided microphones and speakers for students in Ms. B’s elementary school classes in Kinston, NC. She reports:

You would not believe how student engagement has changed in our classroom!!! We faithfully use the devices during our math lessons. Students love when they are able to clearly share their thinking, using the microphone, as they give explanations while solving rigorous word problems. Being in the spotlight, they aren’t shy to speak out for all to hear. The Bluetooth speaker sits stationary in the center of the room so all voices are projected throughout. I love the range and how I’m able to walk around freely without even realizing that it’s still on. The students are able to hear me no matter if I’m in the front of the room or in the back of the room.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Instant Access Webinar: “How AI Addresses Resource Constraints Within Identity Data Management.” Sponsor: Rhapsody. Presenters: Lynn Stoltz, MS, director of product management, Rhapsody; Drew Ivan, MS, chief architect, Rhapsody; Michelle Blackmer, chief marketing officer, Rhapsody. Discover how to overcome the toughest challenge in identity data management: resource constraints.  The presenters will cover how Rhapsody EMPI with Autopilot solves resource challenges like limitations in time, talent, and budget; Reduces costs and risks associated with inaccurate data; and boosts identity data accuracy through 98% decision-making precision.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

ProPublica examines the history of Zolgensma, a taxpayer- and charity-funded gene therapy for a rare nerve disease in infants whose rights were acquired by a startup. The chief scientist gained partial ownership, the startup went public, and Novartis later bought it for $8.7 billion, netting the scientist $400 million, an investor $315 million, and the CEO $190 million. Novartis then priced the drug at a record $2 million per dose. Medicaid spent $309 million on it over four years, while Novartis made $6.4 billion. The article notes that 10 gene therapy products now cost more than $2 million per dose once Novartis set the price bar so high.

People

WellSpan Health SVP/CIO Hal Baker, MD announces that he will retire in July. He encourages those who might want to succeed him to apply for the York, PA-based job, telling me that “We have a fantastic team, are doing some very cool cutting edge stuff in AI, and I think my 30 years working for a single employer says about as much as one can about how good the opportunity is.”

Announcements and Implementations

Meditech signs its 100th Meditech as a Service client.

Epic integrates organ donation registration capabilities into MyChart in collaboration with the non-profit Donate Life America.

Mayo Clinic will pilot VoiceCare AI’s voice AI agent in three areas for pre-authorization and benefit confirmation.

Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence deploys the first batch of 200 tablets to Air Assault Forces medics, who will use them to document frontline care in the military’s self-developed Electronic Primary Medical Records system. The tablets were donated by the Come Back Alive foundation, which supports members of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Other

In England, a trade union raises concerns about a hospital’s plan to use license plate recognition software to impose fees and fines. The website of technology provider ParkingEye says that the advantages are to “increase parking revenue, reduce car park abuse, and improve customer satisfaction,” also noting that 30 NHS trusts already use its systems. Complaints abound, mostly about being erroneously told by someone on site that it was free to park or to get validated, having their credit card hit with a huge charge with no response to appeals, and angry excuses of the “I was only a little over the time limit and it wasn’t my fault” variety.

Sponsor Updates

• Health Data Movers hires Andrew O’Hara as a health IT recruiter.
• TruBridge announces its selection as a preferred partner to healthcare services company Cibolo Health.
• Visage Imaging General Manager, North America Brad Levin recaps the first Sharp HealthCare Spatial Computing Health Care Summit in San Diego.
• Contessa Health (TN) works with Netsmart to develop and configure the first application in a suite of tools that is its new population health management platform for palliative care at home.
• Nym publishes a new case study, “Transforming Medical Coding at Inova.”
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a new white paper, “Improving Efficiency & Meeting User Demand with ITSM Practices in Healthcare.”
• Praia Health announces it has been granted a second patent for its account and experience orchestration technology.
• QGenda offers a new case study, “North American Partners in Anesthesia Achieves Faster, More Accurate Payroll with QGenda’s Schedule-Driven Time and Attendance Solution.”
• Waystar earns top rankings for its payment solutions in eight categories, according to Black Book Research’s latest analysis of AI-powered RCM software platforms.
• WellSky publishes an EHR checklist for behavioral health facilities.

Blog Posts

• Best Practices for Collaborating with Payers (FinThrive)
• CMS TEAM is coming: Why CIOs must act now on EHR optimization (Nordic)
• Top Physician Communication Frustrations (PerfectServe)
• The Cost of Doing Nothing (Praia Health)
• How Redox and Databricks are transforming prior authorization through interoperability (Redox)
• Powering the Prior Authorization Transformation (Surescripts)
• How a Healthcare Platform Transforms Patient Care & Operations (Symplr)
• How to Align Operations + Technology to Improve Patient Access (Tegria)
• Value-based care requires creativity and technology partnerships (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.

News 2/14/25

Top News

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, JD, LLM is sworn in as HHS secretary.

He will manage a $2 trillion budget and will oversee CMS, CDC, FDA, NIH, the Public Health Service, HHS OIG, AHRQ, Office for Civil Rights, and ASTP.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Inbox Health. Inbox Health directly addresses one of the fastest-growing problems in healthcare — the challenge of patient A/R. Built for healthcare revenue cycle leaders, Inbox Health automates patient billing and patient payments and modernizes the patient support experience. Inbox Health improves patient engagement by providing clear medical bills immediately after service; choice of payment methods and communication channels; and fast, empathetic support through the phone and live chat. By improving the patient experience, practices see an increase in profitability, cash flow, and collection speeds. With Inbox Health, customers report a 60% increase in collection speeds in the first 60 days. Inbox Health provides an automated, streamlined platform that increases revenue, saves time, and reduces costs. Inbox Health serves over 3,000 healthcare practices and more than 2 million patients a year. Headquartered in New Haven, CT, Inbox Health was recently named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America. Thanks to Inbox Health for supporting HIStalk.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Instant Access Webinar: “How AI Addresses Resource Constraints Within Identity Data Management.” Sponsor: Rhapsody. Presenters: Lynn Stoltz, MS, director of product management, Rhapsody; Drew Ivan, MS, chief architect, Rhapsody; Michelle Blackmer, chief marketing officer, Rhapsody. Discover how to overcome the toughest challenge in identity data management: resource constraints.  The presenters will cover how Rhapsody EMPI with Autopilot solves resource challenges like limitations in time, talent, and budget; Reduces costs and risks associated with inaccurate data; and boosts identity data accuracy through 98% decision-making precision.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

CVS Health reports Q4 results: revenue up 4%, EPS $1.30 versus $1.58, beating expectations for both and sending battered shares up 15%. Executives emphasized plans to boost margins in its Aetna insurance unit, which was hit by high utilization costs, and refine drug pricing models.

Revenue cycle automation vendor Candid Health raises $52.5 million in a Series C funding round.

No-code healthcare workflow automation and integration platform vendor Keragon raises $7.5 million in seed funding.

Vitalchat, which offers an AI-powered inpatient virtual nursing and procedural telehealth platform, raises $6 million in a Series A funding round. CEO Michael Raymer, Chief Marketing Officer Jennifer Haas, and board member Peter Neupert spent time at Sentillion / Microsoft and the executive team has deep health tech experience in general.

Half-year results of Pro Medicus, Visage Imaging’s Australia-based parent, report a 35% jump in revenue from North America.

Oracle EVP and lobbyist Ken Glueck fires off another unhinged rant against Epic and CEO Judy Faulkner after his initial diatribe last spring. Snips:

• “We set on a path to build a modern EHR Cloud, focused on innovation while Epic built a yellow brick road to nowhere. At Epic, product demos were replaced by campus tour.”
• He spends most of his 21 paragraphs accusing Epic of favorably editing its own Wikipedia page, although he (a) admitted that it’s possible that nobody associated with Epic actually did this; and (b) didn’t elaborate on why Epic would find Wikipedia pages important enough to justify “a more sophisticated, coordinated, and sustained effort.” 
• Glueck says that Epic has run a smear campaign against Oracle EVP/GM Seema Verma, who he says riled Judy by pushing interoperability in her former role as CMS administrator. (note: Verma’s Wikipedia page is certainly an interesting read without any Epic embellishment).

Oracle Health employees reacted negatively on Reddit:

• “Childish and stupid. Truly embarrassing.”
• “Who the hell is Ken Glueck and is this external for clients to read? That’s totally embarrassing. Also, Feinberg said Epic isn’t our competitor anyway, so what’s the problem?”
• “I am not sure I have witnessed a more profound ass kissing. How the hell does a professional organization let a piece like that out the door?”
• “To paraphrase Steve Jobs, real wizards ship.”

Sales

• Cordea Consulting brings Jupiter Medical Center (FL) live on Epic on Amazon Web Services.

People

RWJBarnabas Health hires Roshan Hussain, MBA, MPH (UK HealthCare) as SVP/chief data and analytics officer.

Mark Amey, MBA (Alameda Health System) joins Ellit Groups as COO.

CloudWave promotes Tina Brown, MBA to VP of cloud operations; Tony Rienzo to VP of service delivery; and John Duffy to VP of cloud infrastructure.

Evidently hires Kai Romero, MD (By The Bay Health) as head of clinical success.

Jay Volk, JD, LLM, MA (EtherFax) joins Weave Cloud Solutions as CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Medicomp System announces support for USCDI Version 3 and Version 4 for its Quippe platform, which gives its partners access to SDOH screening tools and export capability to FHIR.

Surescripts announces Touchless Prior Authorization.

Apple adds heart rate monitoring to its new $250 Powerbeats Pro 2 earbuds.

Meditech renames its patient portal to MyHealthHub.

.

Apple launches the Apple Health Study in collaboration with Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which will use the Research app to explore how data from Apple devices relates to health.

In England, Fordcombe Hospital goes live on Altera Digital Health’s Sunrise EPR.

Government and Politics

Politico reports that three HHS / ASTP technology executives who were hired into newly created positions four weeks ago appear to no longer work for the organization – Meghan Dierks, MD (chief AI officer); Alicia Rouault (CTO); and Kristen Honey PhD, MA (chief data officer).

Other

Former Theranos CEO and federal inmate Elizabeth Holmes tells People that she is still filing patents and plans to re-enter healthcare technology after her scheduled release in 2032. Critics say that the article might indicate that she is angling for a sentence reduction or possibly a White House pardon by creating sympathy for her children, ages 2 and 3, who were born during her fraud trial. She says that her newfound passion is to become an advocate for reforming the US criminal justice system.

Sponsor Updates

• Digital Health New York inducts Capital Rx into its inaugural Hall of Fame as part of a cohort of companies that have built the foundation of New York’s Digital Health ecosystem.
• Black Book Research publishes its first comprehensive industry review of AI applications in revenue cycle management.
• TruBridge names Jerry Canada and Dris Upitis to its board as a part of cooperation agreements with Pinetree Capital and Ocho Investments.
• Clearsense announces a strategic rebrand, the relocation of its headquarters to Nashville, and the addition of new features to its 1Clearsense data-enablement platform.
• Jack Squires (WellSky) joins Healthmonix as sales executive.
• Riverside University Health System – Behavioral Health (CA) adds Netsmart’s CareRouter mobile dispatch tool to improve the efficiency of its Mobile Crisis Response Program.
• WellSky launches a new patient panel, available in the WellSky CarePort Connect solution, that will equip providers with critical and holistic knowledge of their patient population.
• Health Data Movers hires Andrew O’Hara as a health IT recruiter.
• Inovalon releases an eight-episode podcast, “INOvators 2025 Forecast.”

Blog Posts

• 5 Tips for Achieving 2025 Readiness in the IDD Industry (Netsmart)
• 211 Day: Celebrating Innovation Meeting Impact (Findhelp)
• Healthcare Insurance Discovery: How It Works and Why Providers Need It (FinThrive)
• Riding the Wave Into 2025: Top 5 Highlights From Five9 SKO (Five9)
• The Importance of Migrating from Your Legacy ERP to a Modern Cloud-Based Solution: Doing Nothing is Not a Strategy (Impact Advisors)
• How MyHealthHub elevates the patient experience (Meditech)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.

News 2/12/25

Top News

Doximity reports Q3 results: revenue up 25%, EPS $0.40 versus $0.26, beating analyst expectations for both and sending shares up nearly 40% on the news.

DOCS  shares have gained 170% in the past 12 months, valuing the physician professional network company at $14 billion.

Co-founder and CEO Jeff Tangney holds shares worth nearly $5 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Check out what HIStalk sponsors will be doing at the ViVE conference in Nashville next week. 

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Symplr. Symplr is a leader in enterprise healthcare operations software and services with a first-of-its-kind operations platform. Trusted in nine of 10 US hospitals and 400+ US health plans, Symplr optimizes operations and maximizes care powered by its cloud-based workforce, quality, provider data management, and spend solutions. Gain efficiencies, reduce complexity, and improve outcomes where it matters most. Thanks to Symplr for supporting HIStalk.

I found this Symplr explainer video on YouTube.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Instant Access Webinar: “Successfully Navigating Post-Acute Rev Cycle Challenges.” Sponsors: Inovalon and KanTime. Presenters: David Swenson, senior manager of sales engineering, Inovalon; Lucy Lopez, VP of product management, KanTime. Learn how to speed up your revenue cycle processes and avoid the common RCM and eligibility errors that cause delays and denials. Discover strategies to boost your bottom line: streamline eligibility verification, simplify complex processes, and optimize denial management for improved cash flow.

Instant Access Webinar: “How AI Addresses Resource Constraints Within Identity Data Management.” Sponsor: Rhapsody. Presenters: Lynn Stoltz, MS, director of product management, Rhapsody; Drew Ivan, MS, chief architect, Rhapsody; Michelle Blackmer, chief marketing officer, Rhapsody. Discover how to overcome the toughest challenge in identity data management: resource constraints.  The presenters will cover how Rhapsody EMPI with Autopilot solves resource challenges like limitations in time, talent, and budget; Reduces costs and risks associated with inaccurate data; and boosts identity data accuracy through 98% decision-making precision.

Survey: “Data Quality Survey 2025.” Sponsor: Clinical Architecture. This annual survey measures the perceived quality of the data in healthcare, the impact of data quality on individual and collective objectives, and the factors contributing to poor quality. We do this across different healthcare market segments since each segment creates, collects, uses, and disseminates the data differently. Responses are welcome and appreciated from those who are associated with providers, payers, life sciences, public health, academia, value-based care, analytics vendors, EHR vendors, and consultants.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Sales

• Columbus Community Hospital (NE), Pipeline Health System (CA), Sioux Falls Specialty Hospital (SD), and West Calcasieu Cameron Hospital (LA) will roll out Altera Digital Health’s Paragon Denali EHR.
• Vizient selects Andor Health’s ThinkAndor virtual care collaboration software.
• Southern Illinois Healthcare will implement Counterpart Health’s AI-powered physician enablement and patient insights software.
• The VA awards Planned Systems International a contract to support the EHR Modernization Integration Office’s software testing and evaluation as Oracle Health is rolled out to additional facilities.
• AdventHealth will implement care coordination software from Aidin at its hospitals in nine states.
• Door County Medical Center (WI) will replace Meditech with Epic in February 2026.
• Doctors Hospital (FL) selects virtual care technology from CareView Communications.
• Virtua Health (NJ) will use Unite Us software to standardize its Health-Related Social Needs referral process.

People

LeanTaaS promotes Tim Vasil, MS, MBA to CTO.

Episcopal Health Services (NY) names John Rossi (Stamford Health) VP and chief digital information officer.

Upfront Healthcare promotes Lisa Rhind, MA to SVP of client services.

Industry long-timer Tom Griga (The HCI Group) joins Divurgent as SVP of client service. 

OncoHealth names Jon Maack, MBA (Definitive Healthcare) as CEO.

Todd Dunn, MBA (The Innovators Journey) joins Accuryn Medical as chief transformation officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Lincata introduces LincTV, an HDMI plug-in device that enables Epic MyChart Bedside to run on existing TVs. The device supports virtual nursing and patient monitoring by connecting to cameras, microphones, and motion sensors. Chairman and CEO Tom White, MBA is an industry veteran who previously co-founded Vocada and Phynd, which were acquired by Nuance and Symplr, respectively.

AdvancedMD releases its first major enhancements to its EHR, PM, and patient engagement platform since the company was acquired by Francisco Partners last fall. Updates include redesigned Patient and Responsible Party cards, a population health reporting system, and clinical notes auto-save.

Backline by DrFirst, Five Wishes, and MyDirectives launch ACP Complete, an advance care planning solution that guides patients via virtual consultations.

A new Black Book Market Research report names Clearwater as the leading healthcare cybersecurity firm.

KLAS’s inaugural report on revenue cycle optimization ranks Guidehouse, Chartis, and Tegria as top performers for Epic users; Signature Performance for Oracle Health; and Huron for Meditech. Huron, Chartis, Healthrise, and Impact Advisors lead in identifying high-value optimization opportunities.

Other

Saudi Arabia’s deputy minister for e-health and digital transformation says that Seha Virtual Hospitals is using advanced AI to analyze images and screen people for chronic conditions. It is connected to 200 hospitals via the country’s HIE.

Three Germany-based university hospitals saw no significant change in inappropriate imaging ordering following their implementation of a clinical decision support system. Those orders made up  5% to 8% of the total.

Sponsor Updates

• Availity sponsors the Wolfson Children’s Challenge to support Wolfson Children’s Hospital (FL).
• Healthcare IT Leaders appoints CEO Ben Hilmes, MHA to its board.
• Nordic releases a new episode of its “Designing for Health” podcast, “Interview with Aaron Neinstein, MD.”
• Vyne Medical announces that its hosted Trace Platform and Refyne Denials Management solutions have earned certified status by HITRUST for information security.
• Capital Rx releases a new episode of “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast,: “Selling Pharmacy Benefits: Relationships, Rebates, GLP-1s, and More, with Bridget Mulvenna.”
• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a new white paper titled “Improving Efficiency & Meeting User Demand with ITSM Practices in Healthcare.”
• Clearwater will present at the University of Louisville’s ISACA Kentuckiana Chapter’s Secure Digital Conference February 14.

Blog Posts

• Denial Remediation: Preventing Denials (AGS Health)
• The journey toward better healthcare is underway: A look at Sunrise (Altera Digital Health)
• CIO Insights: Seizing Big Tech Opportunities for Greater Impact (CereCore)
• Extreme Usability in Post-Acute Care: Technology That Works the Way You Do (Netsmart)
• “This is how I do it”: uncovering gaps in data-driven clinical workflows (Philips Capsule)
• Overcoming Capacity Management Challenges in Patient Access (Tegria)
• Our 11th Best in KLAS: Leading the Future of Healthcare Analytics (Dimensional Insight)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 2/10/25

Top News

The FDA warns users of diabetes devices — including continuous glucose monitors, insulin pumps, and automated insulin dosing systems — that critical alerts may be missed due to their phone settings.

Reported issues include misconfigured app permissions, use of “Do Not Disturb” or focus modes, apps going to sleep from inactivity, Bluetooth connections altering volume settings, and OS updates that are incompatible with the device’s app.

Reader Comments

From P.S. “Re: MyChart. A friend was looking for results for her daughter from a hospital that went live on MyChart in February. MyChart pulled up another patient’s records with their name, birthdate, and medical record number. Has anyone seen this or is it a one-off? I am interested because we are moving to Epic soon at my hospital.” I’m guessing that it’s a problem with the source system that sent the results to Epic rather than Epic itself. I say that because Googling “mychart wrong patient” brings up a few examples, most commonly attributed to an outside lab or practice and a hospital error in patient matching. Readers, have you ever seen someone else’s information in your MyChart?

From Adhesion: “Re: Oracle Health non-compliance with Section 508 disability requirements. How did the VA miss that federal requirement?” The VA should have been aware of Section 508 compliance given its long history with its previous patient portal My HealtheVet, which it boasted was fully compliant. However, federal software accessibility compliance is often more aspirational than fully realized because it’s a lot of work to retrofit support for assistive technologies and keyboard-only operation. Supposedly around 75% of software that is used by the federal government isn’t fully compliant. Related: Epic was sued a few years ago by a blind advocacy group who said that disabled people could no longer perform their jobs when their employer went live with Epic, but the case was dismissed and it addressed only employees, not outside users. Epic demonstrated Nuance-powered voice navigation at HIMSS17 that it said would meet the requirements for Section 508 compliant self-scheduling, but that was part of the VA’s MASS scheduling system that the VA walked away from in choosing Cerner.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Sore throat probably wasn’t a great choice for a treatment venue preference poll given the strep swab confounder, not to mention that self-managing symptoms is also an option.

New poll to your right or here: How did you schedule your most recent non-emergency, in-person medical encounter? I listed the options that I could think of, but it’s likely I missed some.

A long-term sponsor will soon be vacating the stratospheric ad aerie way up there at the top of the column because they’ve been acquired. New or upgrading sponsors, get in touch with Lorre to move up there to the penthouse, even in time for the HIMSS conference if you are ready.

Dr. H from Bronx, NY provided an update to a reader’s donation that funded his Donor’s Choose request for help covering the $150 cost of having a PBS documentary filmmaker conduct a virtual workshop and screening for his early college class. He says, “The presentation and workshop have made an incredible impact in the classroom. The students have been working on short films of their own creation and direction. Students have also been composing their own film music on keyboards. Students computer literacy has improved with greater exposure to the workshop. We will have a screening in May where every student screens their film shorts for the entire school and local community.” Health system executives, technologists, and radiologists can help fund similar projects by completing this quick AI purchasing survey, which triggers a donation from Volpara Health.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Instant Access Webinar: “Successfully Navigating Post-Acute Rev Cycle Challenges.” Sponsors: Inovalon and KanTime. Presenters: David Swenson, senior manager of sales engineering, Inovalon; Lucy Lopez, VP of product management, KanTime. Learn how to speed up your revenue cycle processes and avoid the common RCM and eligibility errors that cause delays and denials. Discover strategies to boost your bottom line: streamline eligibility verification, simplify complex processes, and optimize denial management for improved cash flow.

Instant Access Webinar: “How AI Addresses Resource Constraints Within Identity Data Management.” Sponsor: Rhapsody. Presenters: Lynn Stoltz, MS, director of product management, Rhapsody; Drew Ivan, MS, chief architect, Rhapsody; Michelle Blackmer, chief marketing officer, Rhapsody. Discover how to overcome the toughest challenge in identity data management: resource constraints.  The presenters will cover how Rhapsody EMPI with Autopilot solves resource challenges like limitations in time, talent, and budget; Reduces costs and risks associated with inaccurate data; and boosts identity data accuracy through 98% decision-making precision.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed. 

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Teladoc Health shares popped on Thursday and Friday after an analyst gave it a glowing recommendation as a back door AI play, noting that shares have shed 96% of their 2021 value because of lower growth but the company still enjoys high margins and cash flow. I was surprised to learn that Teladoc has 5,600 employees.

Sales

• Tanner Health will implement Abridge’s ambient documentation.

People

Bamboo Health hires Ross Armstrong, MSHA, MBA (Biofourmis) as chief commercial officer.

Stephen Fischer, MD, who developed the SpringCharts primary care EHR 25 years ago, died last week at 68.

Government and Politics

Health tech is represented on Elon Musk’s DOGE team. Industry long-timer Amy Gleason most recently worked for primary care operator Main Street Health and the White House’s US Digital Service. Brad Smith is chairman and CEO of Main Street Health, co-founder and former CEO of Aspire Health (sold to Anthem / Elevance in 2018), and co-founder and former executive chair of CareBridge (sold to Elevance in October 2024 for $2.7 billion). Smith also ran CMS’s Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation from 2020 to  2021.

Sponsor Updates

• Vyne Medical announces the expansion of its cloud fax services and email-to-fax technology in a major academic medical center.
• Nordic celebrates its 15th anniversary.
• Hearst Health-owned care and membership management software vendor MHK will integrate its CareProminence platform with Findhelp’s closed-loop social services referral system.
• Nym publishes a new guide, “10 Questions to Ask Autonomous Medical Coding Vendors.”
• Prominence Advisors will sponsor CDO Healthcare Exchange 2025 February 11-13 in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
• Redox prepares to launch its Shut the Backdoor Podcast about healthcare security.
• Sectra releases a new episode of its “Let’s Talk Enterprise Imaging” podcast, “Greater Manchester’s path to AI in chest x-ray imaging.”
• Primary Venture Partners recognize SmarterDx co-founders Michael Gao, MD and Josh Geleris, MD as startup honorees at the NYC Tech Awards.
• Waystar will exhibit at the EClinicalWorks Day Show February 12 in Dallas.
• The Overland Park Chamber of Commerce honors WellSky Chairman and CEO Bill Miller with its Nova Award for fast-growing and innovative companies.

Blog Posts

• 2025 Readiness: 8 Enhancement Considerations for Human Services & Post Acute Teams (Netsmart)
• Addressing cybersecurity challenges in rural healthcare (Nordic)
• Top 2025 Healthcare Trends and Predictions (PerfectServe)
• Should You Build or Buy Your Consumer Experience Orchestration Platform? (Praia Health)
• Building Better Community Care with Tailored Solutions (TruBridge)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.

News 2/7/25

Top News

Teladoc Health will acquire Catapult Health, a virtual checkup provider that sells to employers and health plans, for $65 million in cash, valuing the company at 2x annual revenue.

Teladoc plans to apply its technology to identify at-risk individuals and encourage them to enroll in its chronic condition management programs.

TDOC shares, which have lost 42% in the past 12 months, rose slightly on the news, valuing the company at just under $2 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Nym. Nym is the leader in transforming clinical language into actionable information, which can remove inefficiencies that add billions to the cost of care. By combining industry-leading technology with clinical expertise and a deep understanding of medical language, Nym is able to accurately decode medical charts in a way that is fast, explainable, and compliant across multiple specialties in both outpatient and inpatient care settings. Nym’s autonomous medical coding engine translates provider notes within patient charts into diagnostic and billing charge codes in a matter of seconds, with over 95% accuracy and absolutely zero human intervention. Nym’s engine also delivers audit-ready, traceable documentation for every code it generates, ensuring total visibility into coding rationale. The solution can be quickly deployed and scaled based on volume and workflow needs, easing administrative burdens and allowing clinical teams to spend more time focused on patient care. This autonomous approach to medical coding enables healthcare organizations to optimize their revenue cycle operations while maintaining the highest levels of compliance and accuracy. Based in New York City with R&D capabilities in Tel Aviv, Nym is building an interdisciplinary team of specialists including technologists, physicians, mathematicians, computational linguists, engineers, and medical coders. The company’s innovative approach to autonomous medical coding has attracted investment from leading healthcare and technology investors, including PSG, Addition, GV, Bessemer Venture Partners, Dynamic Loop Capital, and Tiger Global. Thanks to Nym for supporting HIStalk.

Health system executives, technologists, and radiologists — Volpara Health will make a significant donation to Donors Choose for your response to this quick survey. You will be supporting teachers as readers did for Ms. H in Yonkers, NY, who reported this week along with the photo above, “With the new headphones, our students are now able to engage with the AI-powered curriculum in a focused, distraction-free environment. The built-in microphones allow them to interact with the program, practicing pronunciation, fluency, and comprehension in real time, tailoring lessons to their individual needs. This technology is making a huge difference by adapting to each student’s pace, providing immediate feedback, and allowing them to work independently. Our students, many of whom come from diverse backgrounds, are now building confidence and critical literacy skills, thanks to the opportunity to engage deeply with the curriculum.”

Sponsored Events and Resources

Instant Access Webinar: “Successfully Navigating Post-Acute Rev Cycle Challenges.” Sponsors: Inovalon and KanTime. Presenters: David Swenson, senior manager of sales engineering, Inovalon; Lucy Lopez, VP of product management, KanTime. Learn how to speed up your revenue cycle processes and avoid the common RCM and eligibility errors that cause delays and denials. Discover strategies to boost your bottom line: streamline eligibility verification, simplify complex processes, and optimize denial management for improved cash flow.

Instant Access Webinar: “How AI Addresses Resource Constraints Within Identity Data Management.” Sponsor: Rhapsody. Presenters: Lynn Stoltz, MS, director of product management, Rhapsody; Drew Ivan, MS, chief architect, Rhapsody; Michelle Blackmer, chief marketing officer, Rhapsody. Discover how to overcome the toughest challenge in identity data management: resource constraints.  The presenters will cover how Rhapsody EMPI with Autopilot solves resource challenges like limitations in time, talent, and budget; Reduces costs and risks associated with inaccurate data; and boosts identity data accuracy through 98% decision-making precision.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed. 

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Germany-based Avelios Medical raises $31 million in a Series A funding round, the proceeds of which it plans to use to market its hospital information system to users of SAP’s patient management product, which will be retired by 2030.

Health insurer software vendor EnGen, which is a subsidiary of HIghmark Health, lays off 207 employees.

Virtual family mental health provider Little Otter raises a $9.5 million funding round.

People

Goliath Technologies hires Ryan Oliver (KLAS Research) as SVP of healthcare solutions.

Care coordination technology vendor Watershed Health promotes Effie Carlson to CEO, replacing founder Chip Grant, MD.

Pat Henson, MBA (The HCI Group) joins IMethods as EVP of healthcare solutions.

Avia Health hires Clay Holderman, MBA (UnityPoint Health) as CEO.

Aaron Fenton, MBA (Fenton Consulting) joins Equum Medical as chief growth officer.

Access TeleCare hires Kris Kistler, MS as CISO.

Announcements and Implementations

AMA launches a $12 million program to apply AI and other technologies to the educational programs of medical schools, residency programs, and CME to personalize content and goals to learners. 

Oracle Health EVP/GM Seema Verma lists some general features of the company’s newly developed EHR:

• Conversion of Millennium is not needed and customizations and configurations will remain in place.
• It will offer conversational search and voice-driven navigation.
• It will present clinicians with real-time information about medication options, evidence-based protocols, and research study results.
• AI-supported summaries will organize patient information by condition, role, and care setting to provide quick chart review.
• It will integrate with Oracle Clinical AI Agent and Clinical Data Exchange to manage prior authorization.
• It will feature a new patient portal.

KLAS posts its Best in KLAS 2025 report, which contains a few interesting nuggets:

• Epic beat Oracle Health with a performance score of 89 versus 65 in the Overall Health System Suite category.
• Athenahealth handily topped NextGen Healthcare and Greenway Health in the Independent Physician Practice Suite category.
• Chartis topped the Overall IT Services Firm and Healthcare Management Consulting Firm lists, but its competitors were close behind.
• Earning Most Improved were Agfa HealthCare, Inovalon, Nimble, and Clearwater.

Bloomberg’s editorial board says that the US has spent $35 billion on immature EHRs that doctors and patients hate. They say this about the Meaningful Use program:

Anxious to meet the subsidy deadlines and avoid penalties, providers adopted what software was available. Inferior products — developed hastily, with little thought for patient safety and user experience — became an entrenched and detested feature of medical practice. Lawmakers, once dazzled by the notion of data beaming between nodes of an interconnected health-care system, eventually realized they’d overlooked the industry’s disincentives to share lucrative patient information with their competitors.

Canada’s CAN Health Network of health system operators and health tech vendors urges Canadians to commercialize and adopt Canada-built health technologies as a response to threatened US tariffs.

This is for Dr. Jayne, since she has provided medical services to some Boy Scout camps. CampDoc, which sells an EHR for camps, will collaborate with Scouting America (formerly the Boy Scouts) software provider CouncilWare.

Government and Politics

The VA restarts its Oracle Health implementation by making a $330 million payment to Oracle to support planned 2026 deployments at four Michigan sites.

Meanwhile, the VA acknowledges that disabled veterans can’t access their own medical records because the patient portal does not meet Section 508 federal accessibility requirements. The VA’s initial contract with Cerner called for its system to be Section 508 compliant, but the VA didn’t test its accessibility and later requested an exemption.

Elon Musk says that his DOGE group is analyzing data in CMS’s payment and contracting systems, looking for fraud and waste.

Other

UnitedHealth Group’s defamation litigation attorney demands that breast reconstruction plastic surgeon Elisabeth Potter, MD take down her social media posts that described how UHG denied her cancer patient a post-surgical overnight stay. A United rep called her during surgery even though they had already approved the procedure, demanding patient information that the insurer already had. United denied the stay anyway. The law firm’s letter claimed that the doctor had made an error in her patient orders and demanded that she delete the posts and issue a public apology, both of which she declined to do.

Sponsor Updates

• Sonifi Health names Michelle Allen (Ametek) general manager.
• Black Book develops 18 enhanced key performance indicators to evaluate client satisfaction, return on investment, and overall experience with healthcare IT consulting firms.
• Vyne Medical publishes a new case study, “How a Tennessee Health System Leveraged Automation for Success.”
• First Databank parent company Hearst Health announces that submissions for the 2025 Hearst Health Prize will accepted via the online application portal through February 14.
• Healthcare Growth Partners advises Envision Technology Partners on its sale to InductiveHealth.
• Healthmonix names Jake Parlow sales development representative.
• Impact Advisors releases a new “Impactful AI” podcast, “Generative AI in Healthcare: Promise Unfulfilled?”
• NeuroFlow releases a new podcast, “How the Consolidated Appropriations Act is Reshaping Healthcare Benefits and Employer Responsibilities.”

Blog Posts

• 5 Ways AI is Revolutionizing IDD Care (Netsmart)
• From Errors to Efficiency: Transform Your Charge Capture Process (FinThrive)
• Embrace the future of health IT and the power of MEDITECH Expanse at HIMSS25 (Meditech)
• The New CX: Redefining What’s Possible (Five9)
• Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)Security: Why Healthcare Must Act Now (Fortified Health Security)
• 4 Key Enhancements to Plan for in the New Oracle Health EHR (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• AI Isn’t Taking Your Job – It’s Changing It (Inovalon)
• Building EHR user confidence with robust training resources (Meditech)
• HEDIS Preparation Guide: 3 Essential Steps (MRO)

HIStalk Sponsors Named Best in KLAS

• Agfa HealthCare – universal viewer; vendor neutral archive; most improved software product.
• Clearwater – most improved services solution.
• Dimensional Insight – data and analytics platforms.
• Findhelp – social determinants of health networks.
• FinThrive – insurance discovery.
• Fortified Health Security – security and privacy managed services.
• Impact Advisors – financial/clinical improvement consulting.
• Inovalon – most improved software product.
• Meditech – acute care EHR and patient accounting: small.
• MRO – release of information.
• Navina Technologies – clinician digital workflow.
• Nordic – clinical optimization.
• Optimum Healthcare IT – IT planning and assessment.
• PerfectServe – clinical communications: ambulatory / post–acute care; scheduling: physician.
• Rhapsody – integration engines.
• Sectra – PACS large; PACS small.
• Tegria – IT consulting services (payer).
• Waystar – claims management and clearinghouse; patient access.
• WellSky – homecare / personal care services and private-duty nursing.
• Wolters Kluwer – infection control and monitoring; patient-driven care management; patient education.

Contacts

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

News 2/5/25

Top News

Affineon Health, which offers AI-powered physician inbox management software, raises $5 million in seed funding.

Reader Comments

From Victor Spoils: “Re: Transcarent. Have they pulled the plug on 98point6?” Allegheny College reports that the text-based virtual care technology vendor informed them it ceased operations as of January 1. The company transitioned to a software-only model in 2023 after selling its virtual care platform and affiliated provider group to Transcarent for $100 million. Former employees stated in April 2024 that most staff had been laid off. While the company’s website remains active and its app is still available on the App Store, the app has not been updated since June 2024.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Praia Health. Praia Health is the first consumer experience orchestration platform for healthcare, revolutionizing the way health systems engage and retain patients. Incubated at Providence, Praia Health has been instrumental in transforming how consumers interact with a health system’s digital channels, spanning web, mobile, a chat-bot solution, and the patient portal. Praia orchestrates digital interactions and disconnected point solutions, creating a cohesive experience for consumers spanning both clinical and nonclinical interactions that influence health outcomes. These experiences can be accessed through a single set of account credentials tied to an authenticated user’s personalized profile. Following in the footsteps of other consumer-driven industries, Praia unlocks digital transformation for health systems by managing the heavy lifting and custom integrations required for a frictionless consumer experience. Praia provides health systems with a platform to connect disparate digital programs, services, and tools, allowing them to deliver a more personalized experience, increase conversion rates, and drive system loyalty. The company’s founder and CEO is industry long-timer Justin Dearborn. Thanks to Praia Health for supporting HIStalk.

Thanks to these companies that recently supported HIStalk. Click a logo for more information and contact Lorre to join them.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Instant Access Webinar: “Successfully Navigating Post-Acute Rev Cycle Challenges.” Sponsors: Inovalon and KanTime. Presenters: David Swenson, senior manager of sales engineering, Inovalon; Lucy Lopez, VP of product management, KanTime. Learn how to speed up your revenue cycle processes and avoid the common RCM and eligibility errors that cause delays and denials. Discover strategies to boost your bottom line: streamline eligibility verification, simplify complex processes, and optimize denial management for improved cash flow.

Instant Access Webinar: “How AI Addresses Resource Constraints Within Identity Data Management.” Sponsor: Rhapsody. Presenters: Lynn Stoltz, MS, director of product management, Rhapsody; Drew Ivan, MS, chief architect, Rhapsody; Michelle Blackmer, chief marketing officer, Rhapsody. Discover how to overcome the toughest challenge in identity data management: resource constraints.  The presenters will cover how Rhapsody EMPI with Autopilot solves resource challenges like limitations in time, talent, and budget; Reduces costs and risks associated with inaccurate data; and boosts identity data accuracy through 98% decision-making precision.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed. 

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare AI company Suki announces $3 million in funding from Zoom Ventures, bringing its total amount raised to $168 million. Zoom’s video communications business announced in November that it would add Suki’s ambient clinical documentation capabilities to its healthcare offering for virtual and in-person visits.

The new owners of Massachusetts hospitals that were previously owned by the now-bankrupt Steward Health Care claim that Steward is demanding millions more than the agreed-upon amount for transitional medical record and billing services.

Stat reports that digital physical therapy company Sword Health will retool itself as an AI care company that will address all labor-intensive care delivery models. 

Sales

• BayCare (FL) selects Visage Imaging’s Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform.
• Mercy will implement Aidoc’s AiOS technology for diagnostic imaging in a phased rollout at facilities in Arkansas and Oklahoma.
• St. Joseph’s Medical Center’s multispecialty physician practice (NY) will adopt Retrieve Medical’s clinical documentation software.
• UNC Health selects Abridge’s AI-powered ambient speech-recognition and documentation technology.
• UK HealthCare (KY) will implement Epic at King’s Daughters Medical Center and St. Claire Regional Medical Center in the summer of 2026.
• Gunnison Valley Health (CO) will roll out Epic this May via UC Health and the Epic Community Connect program.

People

CloudWave promotes Mike Donahue to COO.

Steve Motil (Optum) joins Valley Health (VA) as chief data and analytics officer.

Westchester Medical Center Health Network (NY) names Leo Bodden, MBA (NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital) SVP/CIO.

Sanjeev Kumar, PhD (Gainwell Technologies) joins NextGen Healthcare as chief data and analytics officer.

Cedars-Sinai Health System (CA) promotes Shaun Miller, MD, MBA to chief health informatics officer and Yaron Elad, MD to CMIO, and names Lisa Stephenson, RN (Houston Methodist) CNIO.

Industry long-timer Mitch Mitchell (Amwell) joins Hippocratic AI as chief growth officer, government sector.

Announcements and Implementations

A new KLAS report on ambient documentation finds that adoption is growing rapidly as organizations address clinician burden and burnout. Respondents emphasize that physicians should not be expected to use their time savings to see more patients. Abridge leads in overall performance, with customers valuing its outcomes, cost effectiveness, multilingual support, and evidence linking. Microsoft’s DAX Copilot is frequently chosen by providers with existing Nuance relationships, though some say that it is more expensive than competing options.

Other

In Canada, doctors in British Columbia call on the provincial government to end the requirement that employees get a doctor’s sick note to return to work. They say it’s a waste of time, especially since the EHRs of individual practices don’t communicate with each other.

California farm workers are using MiSalud, an app-based, bilingual telehealth service that connects them to doctors in Mexico. Providers who aren’t licensed in the US can’t prescribe, but can perform health coaching.

Biomedical researcher Derya Unutmaz, MD uses ChatGPT’s new Deep Research tool to review two cancer cases. He reports, “Both reports were simply impeccable, like something only a specialist MD could write. There’s a reason I said this is a game-changer.” He has previously said that AI will be a standard, required tool in medical practice within two years, and electing not to use it might be considered malpractice.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD adds Mental Health Technologies to its integration partner marketplace.
• Vyne Medical releases a new podcast, “Healthcare AI Automation by Vyne Medical Improves Accuracy and Trust.”
• Arcadia ranks first in healthcare data governance and analytics, according to 2025 Black Book client ratings.
• Agfa HealthCare announces that it has been named a Leader in IDC MarketScape’s US Enterprise Medical Imaging 2024-2025 Vendor Assessment.
• Capital Rx releases a new episode of The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast, “ERISA Insights: Challenges & Compliance in Modern Healthcare, with Nick Welle.”
• Consensus Cloud Solutions offers a new whitepaper, “3 Reasons Healthcare Systems Should Invest in AI Technology Now.”

Blog Posts

• Advancing Addiction Treatment: 6 Ways Technology is the Catalyst (Netsmart)
• Here’s Our Comprehensive Guide on How to Get Into Travel Nursing (SnapCare)
• The dangers of disparate systems (Altera Digital Health)
• Four Hidden Pitfalls of In-House Provider Portals (Availity)
• Ensuring successful EHR implementations: A holistic approach to people, data, and technology (Cardamom Health)
• CloudWave’s Predictions for Healthcare IT in 2025 Part 5: A Resurgence of the Public Cloud in Healthcare (CloudWave)
• Amazon Lex: A Lifeline for Healthcare Organizations in the Post-Nuance Era (CTG)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 2/3/25

Top News

Veradigm’s strategic review fails to attract acquisition bids from the five organizations that had expressed interest, reportedly among them McKesson and Oracle. The company says it will refocus on making operational improvements and working to get its shares re-listed.

The company says it will provide an updated FY2023 and preliminary 2024 report in March. Tom Langan remains interim CEO after eight months.

Veradigm also announced that board member Beth Altman, who served as chair of its audit committee, has resigned due to health reasons.

MDRX shares dropped 32% on the news, valuing the company at $588 million. They are down 54% from their 52-week high.

Reader Comments

From Color Me Skeptical: “Re: Oracle Health. I’m skeptical of its claims about its next-generation EHR, since Cerner under Oracle has over-promised and under-delivered. I’m also befuddled by the promotion by company spokespeople about the EHR being voice driven. Is anyone really asking for that?” David Feinberg says that Oracle will rebuild the EHR with clinicians and patients in mind, integrating it with the company’s other systems, such as ERP and human capital management. Oracle emphasizes voice navigation, which might draw interest if it doesn’t slow clinicians down. He claims that the new EHR is now generally available, which I hadn’t heard before (anybody know the live sites?) He agrees that Cerner had a reputation for slow-motion fumbling but insists that Oracle ownership has fixed everything.

We have a customer base that has been patient with us as we haven’t really executed. In saying “we,” I’m really talking about Cerner, which did not execute fast enough. We became Oracle. I think we have literally leapfrogged the competition. We have executed and hit on every timeline. Now it’s 2025, it is time for us to deliver and delight our customer base.

From Aye I: “Re: AI training. As an AI dabbler, what training or certification do you recommend?” None. The technology and approach changes every five minutes, so whatever you learn today will be worthless tomorrow. Just get your hands dirty. The value of most certifications and online courses accrues to the seller, not the buyer.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Nearly all respondents from last week’s poll have had recent experience with a chain drugstore, of whom two-thirds report an OK or better experience.

New poll to your right or here: What type of visit would you choose for a sore throat? Bonus points for adding a post-vote comment that explains your choice. I’m probably an outlier since I’ve never had a virtual visit, a trip to urgent care, or an ED visit except a long time ago when I had an out-of-the-blue episode of laryngospasm, a terrifying but harmless choking-like moment when your throat decides to rage quit breathing (pro tip: relax, breathe slowly, make a sound such as humming, and don’t bother going to the ED because they can’t do anything).

DeepSeek can generate fun trivia quizzes, so I gave it the link to Vince Ciotti’s HIS-tory series.

Health system executives, technologists, and radiologists — Volpara Health will make a significant donation to Donors Choose for your response to this quick survey.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Instant Access Webinar: “Successfully Navigating Post-Acute Rev Cycle Challenges.” Sponsors: Inovalon and KanTime. Presenters: David Swenson, senior manager of sales engineering, Inovalon; Lucy Lopez, VP of product management, KanTime. Learn how to speed up your revenue cycle processes and avoid the common RCM and eligibility errors that cause delays and denials. Discover strategies to boost your bottom line: streamline eligibility verification, simplify complex processes, and optimize denial management for improved cash flow.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The latest Health IT Market Review from Healthcare Growth Partners reports a narrowing bid-ask spread in company acquisitions as buyers show greater risk tolerance. Investors are seeking portfolio liquidity, while sellers are offering higher-quality opportunities. Key takeaways:

• M&A valuations rebounded to pre-pandemic levels in 2024, with private equity buyouts hitting a record high.
• Distressed asset sales may not yield the apparent proceeds. Truepill, once valued at $1.6 billion with $250 million in annual revenue, sold for $525 million, but just $25 million was paid in cash. Upfront Healthcare’s $86 million acquisition by Health Catalyst fell short of its total raised funding.
• Take-private deals saw steep discounts from pandemic highs: R1 (-54%), CompuGroup (-74%), and Accolade (-89%).
• Early-stage fundraising is picking up, reflecting broader market confidence.
• AI investment accounted for 25% of total funding, with investor interest shifting almost entirely from clinical AI tools to workflow automation.
• Investors view AI as an operational enhancer for a company’s existing business rather than a primary investment focus.

People

Keith Dowling, MBA (Cleveland Clinic) joins Catholic Health as VP/CISO.

RxLogic hires Paige Zimmer, MHSA (First Databank)  as EVP of business development.

Andrea Kowalski, MBA (1upHealth) joins Datavant as SVP of product, provider solutions.

Announcements and Implementations

HIMSS conference owner Informa launches WHX Tech, a healthcare events brand that will hold its first conference later this year in Dubai with the involvement of HIMSS.

Government and Politics

The White House fires VA Inspector General Mike Missal, whose VA OIG report that highlighted patient harm that was linked to its Oracle Health rollout led to the project being temporarily halted.

FDA Digital Health Center of Excellence Director Troy Tazbaz, who guided the agency’s policy related to AI and software as a medical device, resigns.

Sponsor Updates

• SmarterDx staff assemble 250 patient comfort kits for UC Irvine.
• Wolters Kluwer Health announces that six of its book publications have won Book of the Year awards from the American Journal of Nursing.
• Vyne Medical releases a new case study, “How a Tennessee Health System Leveraged Automation for Success.”
• CereCore releases a new podcast, “CIO Insights: How to Pursue Big Technology Opportunities and Satisfaction.”
• Black Book Research publishes a new digital book, “The 2025 Black Book of Global Healthcare IT.”
• Tegria will sponsor and exhibit at the AHA Rural Health Care Leadership Conference February 23-26 in San Antonio.

Blog Posts

• 5 Reasons Why AI is a Platform, Not Just a Solution (Netsmart)
• The case for bundled de-implementation: Could doing less deliver better patient care? (Nordic)
• 8 questions product leaders should ask when evaluating EMPI solutions (Rhapsody)
• The Role of Per Diem Nurses in Addressing Seasonal Patient Surges (SnapCare)
• Large Academic Medical Center Expands Adoption of Vyne Medical Solutions, Adding Cloud Fax Services (Vyne Medical)
• Unlocking Hidden Gems: Leveraging RCMTAM for Revenue Cycle Excellence (CereCore)
• Revolutionize Healthcare Payments with TrustCommerce: Meet Us at ViVE, HIMSS, and CORE 2025 (TrustCommerce)
• The cost-benefit of data quality and strategy in healthcare (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.

News 1/31/25

Top News

Behavioral health technology company NeuroFlow acquires Quartet Health, which offers a free mental health provider search tool.

In a simultaneous transaction, Quartet sold its InnovaTel telepsychiatry staffing service to Iris Telehealth, a provider of telepsychiatry services for health systems and community clinics.

Quartet, which was founded in 2014, has raised $266 million, while the eight-year-old NeuroFlow has secured $58 million in funding.

Reader Comments

From You’re Soaking In It: “Re: OnMed. Auburn University’s Rural Health Initiative is helping to place OnMed CareStations in rural locations, with one local paper claiming that one in Chambers County, Alabama is ‘the nation’s most active location for healthcare services.’” OnMed gets great patient reviews there, but the newspaper article is unclear on its statement about volumes, noting just 100 consultations per month. Maybe that makes it the busiest OnMed location, which would be a solid number. Companies seem obsessed at the idea of a medical telephone booth, but its only real advantages over standard telehealth are: (a) it’s in a fixed location, though that means patients have to go there instead of connecting from anywhere; (b) it provides instant access using someone else’s internet; and (c) it offers diagnostic tools that aren’t available in patient homes. Early product literature said that the booths dispensed medications, but I don’t see that mentioned now. Summary: it seems like an innovative idea that has failed before (like the now-defunct Forward, which  blew through $500 million of investor cash before augering in). Attribute that to the usual challenges of massive upfront investment, securing locations, uncertain demand, staffing the units to keep them running and clean, and finding ROI without trying to sell memberships or services that patients are expected to pay for with their own money. It’s Redbox versus streaming — you know how that ended.

From Bifstek: “Re: HIMSS. They’re offering a $799 add-on VIP pass for the annual conference.” I also received the email about Priority Pass Upgrade, which is limited to 100 buyers. It includes daily breakfast and lunch, concierge service, access to a private lounge, and front-row keynote seating. Not worth it to me, but I’m sure some elbow-rubbers will flex their expense account. Meanwhile, Freeman’s site says that Bistro HIMSS is back —$5,000 gets a reserved 10-top table for the week, 60 lunch tickets, and two conference badges. I did it years ago and liked having tickets to offer hungry-looking visitors to our booth and to host a CMIO lunch there. Bistro HIMSS, just off the show floor, offered a decent buffet with healthy options, plus you could enjoy real food at real tables and chairs (any HIMSS attendee will tell you that real tables and chairs are the most coveted items in the convention center). It’s depressing to wait in line forever to buy wildly marked up boring food, find no available seats, and then give up and sit on the dirty convention center hallway floor. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I was wandering around my local vinyl record shop when I noticed in the bins the one and only 1969 record by Tallahassee-based psychedelic band After All. I did a deep dive into that bit of music ephemera here four years ago, so of course I had to bond with the record geek owner about it. I also tried to get him worked up that SNL left Neil Young’s amazing “Rockin’ in the Free World” out of the show’s Questlove-created musical history that I just watched on Netflix, although Rage Against the Machine was a good choice in the “angry” category.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Instant Access Webinar: “Successfully Navigating Post-Acute Rev Cycle Challenges.” Sponsors: Inovalon and KanTime. Presenters: David Swenson, senior manager of sales engineering, Inovalon; Lucy Lopez, VP of product management, KanTime. Learn how to speed up your revenue cycle processes and avoid the common RCM and eligibility errors that cause delays and denials. Discover strategies to boost your bottom line: streamline eligibility verification, simplify complex processes, and optimize denial management for improved cash flow.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Khosla Ventures invests $8 million in UK-based startup C the Signs, which uses routinely collected EHR data to help primary care doctors detect 50 types of early-stage cancer. The company participated in the White House’s Cancer Moonshot accelerator last year and aims to enter the US market. Co-founder and CEO Dea Bakshi, MBBS, is a former NHS primary care physician.

Genetic testing company 23andMe says that it is running out of cash and will try to find a buyer for the second time. There’s not much left of the company that was once valued at $6 billion – its market cap is down to $90 million.

Digital ultrasound vendor Butterfly Network will issue a follow-on offering that it expects to yield $76 million. BFL shares jumped sharply on the news, valuing the company at $900 million. They are up over 300% in the past 12 months.

Kode Health, which operates a gig matching service for HIM coders and hospitals, raises $27 million in a Series B funding round. 

Axios reports that venture capital firm General Catalyst is seeking buyers for a stake in its holding company, which includes Summa Health owner HATCo. Petershill Partners sold most of its GC stake earlier this month for $726 million, 62% more than it paid in June 2024. GC is one of the most active investors in digital health.

Sales

• Englewood Health chooses Agfa HealthCare’s Enterprise Imaging Cloud solution.
• Johns Hopkins Medicine will implement Caregility’s virtual care platform and inpatient telehealth devices to support its virtual nursing program.
• Lady of the Sea General Hospital (LA) chooses TruBridge for EHR/RCM.

People

Avery Ashby, MS (Accenture) joins Impact Advisors as managing director of its data and AI practice.

Qventus hires Toryn Slater (Redox) as AVP of western US.

Shawn Kearl (Zipari) joins Perspecta as SVP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

The new president of 25-bed Heart of the Rockies Regional Medical Center (CO) identifies the three systems that it is considering to replace TruBridge (CPSI), CorroHealth (T-System), and CompuGroup Medical (Aprima), listing these selection factors as important to an unaffiliated small facility:

• Epic is gaining market share and most doctors have trained at an Epic site, but few Critical Access Hospitals use it and some clinicians say it’s a complex system.
• Meditech use is growing among smaller hospital systems, allows the hospital to customize its implementation, offers a strong revenue cycle solution, and has lower implementation costs.
• Oracle Health is seeing growth in smaller hospitals and offers shared installations, although the CEO says that he has heard anecdotes about substandard reliability, support, and communication.

Abridge announces an ambient AI product for emergency departments that is integrated with Epic ASAP.

HIMSS and AMDIS will partner to offer educational events and awards. AMDIS signed a similar deal with CHIME maybe 10 years ago, but I don’t know if that’s still active, especially since HIMSS and CHIME have consciously uncoupled.

Government and Politics

The White House indefinitely cancels all upcoming meetings of the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee, which is an advisory group under ASTP-ONC.

Privacy and Security

The FDA warns that cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the Contec CMS800 patient monitor could allow unauthorized remote control and data theft. The device’s software also contains a backdoor that could let hackers compromise the connected network. FDA advises IT staff to unplug the monitor entirely if it’s being used for remote monitoring, or if not, to disconnect the ethernet cable and disable its wireless functions.

New York Blood Center Enterprises remains offline with no ETA following a ransomware attack Sunday. Donors are being turned away. The organization provides blood products to 400 hospitals in 17 states.

Other

A review finds that Cleveland-area non-profits paid 56 employees more than $1 million in 2023. Seven of the eight employers that did so are health systems.

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book Research’s latest survey of behavioral healthcare IT end-users finds that Netsmart ranks highest for integrated ambulatory EHR, practice management, and RCM software.
• Impact Advisors names Avery Ashby (Accenture) managing director of its Data & AI practice.
• Findhelp and The LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin will host a live recording of American Compassion: The Safety Net Podcast February 12.
• Five9 announces the winners of its New Era of CX Awards 2024, including US Radiology Specialists for its leadership and innovation using the Five9 Intelligent CX Platform’s ecosystem of partners to up-level customer and employee experiences.
• Healthmonix announces that its Emergency and Acute Care Clinical Registry has been approved as a Qualified Clinical Data Registry by CMS for the 2025 reporting year.
• Healthcare IT Leaders promotes Katie Bacon and Charlie Evans to associate client executives.
• Meditech will present at the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association Annual Meeting January 30 in Boston.
• Navina publishes a new guide, “A fresh start: 10 essential risk adjustment tips for 2025.”

Blog Posts

• Reflecting on the 26th Annual HFMA Western Region Symposium (FinThrive)
• Going Old School in the New Year: Healthcare Phone Spoofing Scams (Fortified Health Security)
• January Recap: New Year, New Momentum at HDM (Health Data Movers)
• Accelerating Clinical Trial Recruitment: Why Speed Matters and How to Achieve It in Patient Recruitment (Inovalon)
• Navigating QPP Reporting in 2025: Finding the Best Path for Your ACO (MRO)

Contacts

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

News 1/29/25

Top News

AI-powered cancer drug discovery startup Manas AI launches with a $25 million seed funding round.

The co-founders are LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman and oncologist-author Siddhartha Mukherjee, DPhil, MD, who wrote Pulitzer non-fiction winner “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.”

Reader Comments

From Steve: “Re: impact of DC happenings on healthcare, Are you planning to cover it, or would you rather dodge the politics of it? I think your readers would be interested.” I will cover any significant health tech-related change in law, regulation, or standard that affects the industry once it has happened. Coverage of legislative sausage-making isn’t my long suit and is amply covered elsewhere.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Instant Access Webinar: “Healthcare Data Security: Aligning Processes with Evolving Threats & Regulations.” Sponsor: Inovalon. Presenters: Anthony Houston, MBA, senior director of security, risk, and compliance, Inovalon; Paul Wilder, MBA, executive director, CommonWell Health Alliance; Luke McNamara, MPA, deputy chief analyst, Google Cloud; Michael Quinn, VP of strategic partner development, Inovalon. Hear leaders in healthcare data security discuss some of the top recent threat evolutions and how organizations can proactively respond by making ongoing improvements to security protocols.

Instant Access Webinar: “Successfully Navigating Post-Acute Rev Cycle Challenges.” Sponsors: Inovalon and KanTime. Presenters: David Swenson, senior manager of sales engineering, Inovalon; Lucy Lopez, VP of product management, KanTime. Learn how to speed up your revenue cycle processes and avoid the common RCM and eligibility errors that cause delays and denials. Discover strategies to boost your bottom line: streamline eligibility verification, simplify complex processes, and optimize denial management for improved cash flow.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Therapy-focused health IT vendor Raintree Systems acquires Yoomi Health, which specializes in digital tools and practice management software for physical therapy.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a potential take-private deal between Walgreens and private equity firm Sycamore Partners, which was first reported in early December, is no longer on the table. Shares of the retail pharmacy dropped on the news, further escalating the stock’s see-sawing as Walgreens investors react to a DoJ lawsuit and better-than-expected quarterly earnings. WBA shares have lost 52% in the past 12 months.

Delfina, which offers an AI-driven pregnancy care platform, raises $17 million in a Series A funding round. Founder and CEO Senan Ebrahim, MD, PhD previously founded and ran Hikma Health, which offers free and open source software for caring for refugee patients.

Equality AI CEO Maia Hightower, MD, MPH, MBA announces that the company, which focused on trustworthy AI in healthcare, has closed after four years. She says that AI standards adoption will be delayed now that the White House has cancelled a 2023 executive order that addressed trustworthy development. She previously held IT leadership roles at University of Iowa Health Care and University of Utah Health and was EVP/chief digital and transformation officer at UChicago Medicine through July 2023.

Sales

• Hartford HealthCare (CT) selects WellStack’s analytics and data integration capabilities.

People

Adam Kansler, JD (S&P Global) will become CEO of Inovalon upon the March 1 retirement of company founder and CEO Keith Dunleavy, MD.

HealtheConnections promotes Elizabeth Amato, MHA to president and CEO.

Linda Janiszewski (UCSF Medical Center) joins CTG as IT strategy and value solutions leader, healthcare.

Announcements and Implementations

The development team that is behind the Opal patient portal for Canada’s McGill University Health Centre shuts down the app due to funding shortfalls, leaving 7,000 patients without access. Opal was developed as a non-commercial alternative to MyChart, part of Quebec’s $2 billion Epic implementation. The seven-year-old app, which was built with a $7 million innovation grant, required $350,000 annually to operate. The hospital stated that Opal failed to meet its expectations as a stable clinical solution and declined to provide further funding.

Duke Health and UNC Health will build North Carolina Children’s, the state’s first standalone children’s hospital. The 500-bed facility, which is expected to cost $2 billion, will receive $320 million in state funding. Groundbreaking is scheduled for 2027, with the hospital opening in the early 2030s and full campus completion by 2033.

Tampa General Hospital (FL) funds the rollout of OnMed’s “clinic in a box” – which offers real-time virtual visits – at a homeless shelter. The station includes diagnostic tools and thermal imaging cameras. I wrote this in October 2019 when TGH installed one of the units in its employee cafeteria:

Even odder: Tampa General Hospital opens an OnMed telemedicine consult and drug dispensing booth in its food court so that its employees — who are inside its walls — can seek medical care from clinicians who aren’t. Maybe this is a Halloween-appropriate “the call is coming from inside the house” type situation. It’s not really an admission that employees don’t have time to deal with their own hospital employer’s bureaucracy as patients – the hospital is in business with the vendor and this first booth is a pilot for a broader rollout. The hospital CEO says millennials won’t wait to see a doctor in person, which if you’re a doctor who actually wants to care for patients, is depressingly accurate. The oldest millennials are now in their late 30s, so it would be interesting to see how those who are doctors run their practices and patient encounters.

Other

The CEO of non-profit Peterson Health Technology Institute, which evaluates digital health technologies using evidence-based assessments, tells Politico why the organization is launching yet another AI task force that involves big health systems. CEO Carolyn Pearson says:

We are not working with the AI evangelists or the AI researchers. It’s a CFO saying: “When I spend X, Y, Z, how is productivity changing in my environment? Or if I’m not pushing productivity changes and I’m doing it for the provider’s well-being and to prevent turnover — how am I measuring that?” A lot of them want to roll out AI medical scribes because it’s good for providers and helps with the long-term sustainability of that job. But as the solutions are coming into their systems, they are very quickly spreading out into cycle management, staffing, prior authorization and a million other service lines these companies offer. If you’re a health system leader and not being very careful and thoughtful about what you are and are not adopting, you can find yourself with big solution costs very quickly.

UMass Memorial Health creates a Digital Hub to unify its patient flow, remote patient monitoring, and in-home care management services. The e-ICU, part of the health system’s RPM division, monitors 150 ICU beds across facilities, with staff members responsible for up to six patients each.

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia develops the Clinical Outcomes Data Archive, incorporating EHR data and manually collected and clinically reviewed data, to improve early interventions, care plans, and pregnancy-related outcomes research within its fetal medicine department.

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book Research publishes a new report, “Innovation for Equity: The Transformative Role of DEI in Healthcare IT Success.”
• AdvancedMD releases “CPT/HCPCS Codes Guide 2025,” a comprehensive resource for ambulatory care providers listing the latest medical billing code updates.
• AGS Health will exhibit at the HFMA Lone Star Winter Conference January 30-31 in Irving, TX.
• Ascom Americas welcomes new project manager Casandra Siefkes.
• Capital Rx releases a new episode of The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast, “Why Drug Prices & Modern Tech Matter in Hospice Care, Too, with Nick Opalich.”
• Clinical Architecture invites healthcare professionals to participate in its 2025 Healthcare Data Quality Survey.

Blog Posts

• Meaningful AI in Post-Acute: Elevating Care and Efficiency with Integrated AI (Netsmart)
• Proposed Changes to the HIPAA Security Rule (AdvancedMD)
• AGFA HealthCare at HIMSS 2025: Revolutionizing Enterprise Imaging with Innovation and Work-Life Balance (Agfa HealthCare)
• Six realities facing CIOs—and a complimentary report on navigating them (Altera Digital Health)
• A CIO’s Advice for Moving All-Digital Hospital to Epic EHR (CereCore)
• Ensuring successful EHR implementations: A holistic approach to people, data, and technology (Cardamom Health)
• OCR’s Proposed HIPAA Security Rule Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Part 1: Overview, Key Takeaways and New Terms Defined (Clearwater)
• EHRs as Engines of Insight (CliniComp)
• CloudWave’s Predictions for Healthcare IT in 2025 Part 4: Broader Adoption of Targeted Use Cases for Healthcare AI (CloudWave)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.

Monday Morning Update 1/27/25

Top News

UnitedHealth Group increases its estimate of individuals impacted by a February 2024 ransomware attack on its Change Healthcare division from 100 million to 190 million, affecting nearly half of all Americans.

The company says that it has no evidence of the stolen data being misused, but is offering two years of free credit monitoring to those who are concerned about potential exposure.

UnitedHealth disclosed this month that the cyberattack has resulted in direct and indirect costs exceeding $3 billion.

UnitedHealth Group acquired Change Healthcare for $13 billion in October 2022 after overcoming a Department of Justice legal challenge. UHG CEO Andrew Witty told the Senate Finance Committee last May that Change Healthcare’s outdated technology, which UHG was in the process of updating, made the breach possible.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Last week’s poll yielded predictable results, but it got me thinking. The challenge with PE-owned healthcare providers is spotting them in the first place, assuming that you have an option to take your business elsewhere if that bothers you. These are often high-profit specialty medical practices and dental offices that were already for-profit, but were at least operated locally with less-aggressive financial motives. To private equity firms, healthcare is just another widget factory that can be squeezed harder to enrich investors. It’s no surprise, then, that even the doctors who benefited financially from PE acquisitions often don’t want to stay under their ownership. The result is a contentious middle ground, caught between the mission of healing and the relentless drive to maximize shareholder value. It’s naïve to design a healthcare system that prioritizes profit and then lament when individuals and corporations pursue it over doing the ill-defined “right thing.”

New poll to your right or here: What is your 12-month satisfaction with chain drugstores? I’ve been pretty happy with my occasional visits to Walgreens, though it’s more for their non-clinical services than anything else. Example: not only can you send FedEx and UPS packages from their stores, but you can also have your incoming packages shipped directly to them at no extra cost and then pick them up at your convenience. This is especially handy for shipments that require a signature or are at risk of porch piracy, such as wine or electronics. It’s free because getting you in the door tempts you to grab an impulse pack of smokes, a Justin Bieber singing toothbrush, or a COVID vaccination.

If you’ve sent email to an histalk.com email address lately and didn’t hear back, please resend. The webhost had to throttle back an overly aggressive spam filter yet again.

I tried the news-dominating, China-developed AI chatbot DeepSeek. For now, I’m using it more than my paid ChatGPT account because it gives thoughtful answers quickly. It’s free and open source, was built in two months, cost only $5 million to train, and runs on cheaper chips, causing Silicon Valley to wet themselves and attempt to reverse engineer DeepSeek. I asked the LLM which health tech companies are at risk for 2025 and received thoughtful, detailed answers that it broke out into public versus private companies.

Five Minutes = Grateful Classroom

Health system executives, technologists, and radiologists — Volpara Health will make a significant donation to Donors Choose for your response to this quick survey. I also have access to matching funds that will probably triple their donation, and you’ll be helping a cancer technology company understand how providers are approaching AI. Disclosure: shameless grifting abounds, but there’s no personal gain here — Volpara isn’t giving me anything, nor are they an HIStalk sponsor, and Donors Choose is 99% rated for financial efficiency, modestly-paid leadership, and transparency. Afterward, I will list the classroom projects that I funded with Volpara’s donation.

Take the survey now.

Sponsored Events and Resources

Note: I’ve updated the title of this section to better reflect increasingly common alternatives to live webinars, such as on-demand presentations.

Instant Access Webinar: “Healthcare Data Security: Aligning Processes with Evolving Threats & Regulations.” Sponsor: Inovalon. Presenters: Anthony Houston, MBA, senior director of security, risk, and compliance, Inovalon; Paul Wilder, MBA, executive director, CommonWell Health Alliance; Luke McNamara, MPA, deputy chief analyst, Google Cloud; Michael Quinn, VP of strategic partner development, Inovalon. Hear leaders in healthcare data security discuss some of the top recent threat evolutions and how organizations can proactively respond by making ongoing improvements to security protocols.

Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Leidos selects transplant software vendor CareDx to fulfill its $235 million federal contract to modernize the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) is being replaced after 40 years due to outdated technology and the company’s conflicting role as both a transplant policy organization and a software vendor.

Rad AI, which offers AI-powered workflow tools for radiologists, raises $73 million in a Series C funding round that values the company at $525 million. Fun fact: Rad AI’s co-founder Jeff Chang became the youngest radiologist in US history after starting medical school straight out of junior high at 16 and completing his radiology residency at 26.

Tokyo-based digital healthcare vendor Doctors will launch its US business in the first half of 2025.

AI startup Retro Biosciences is reportedly raising a $1 billion funding round. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman provided the company’s initial funding of $180 million and will participate in the latest round. The company’s goal is to  add 10 years to the healthy human lifespan by using AI to target and reengineer the cellular drivers of aging.

People

Providence restructures its leadership team, moving Chief Digital Officer Sara Vaezy, MPH, MPA to chief transformation officer, which covers AI, innovation, and digital care and marketing.

LeanTaaS promotes industry long-timer Harwant Sethi to VP of sales.

Health Catalyst promotes Lynne Dossey, MPH to SVP/GM of North America.

Announcements and Implementations

Samsung is working on a non-invasive optically-based continuous glucose monitor for its Galaxy Watch, a feature that Apple is also reportedly trying to develop.

Black Book Research publishes its free “2025 Black Book of Healthcare Cybersecurity.”

Kaleida Health will partner with Olean General Hospital and Bertrand Chaffee Hospital and also replace Oracle Health with Epic, as a reader predicted here a couple of months ago.

Other

A newborn’s mom who is live-streaming TikTok video from an unnamed hospital’s NICU draws heat from followers who watch her unplug her baby’s monitor to summon a nurse to bring her a sandwich. She claims nurses told her to unplug any time she needs something and that viewers who express astonishment are “annoying.”

SNL hilariously roasts men aged 20 to 45 with Medcast, a visit to One Medical that looks like a podcast where they can “be honest in a way they never would with a normal doctor” and instead “just vibe.”

I haven’t seen this term in a while.

Sponsor Updates

• Capital Rx’s marketing team wins AVA Awards from AMCP for the company’s LinkedIn page and M3P digital marketing campaign.
• Optimum Healthcare IT announces that it is the first ServiceNow partner globally to receive the Validated Practice designation for its Healthcare and Life Science product line.
• Tegria will sponsor the Future of Health Care Conference February 20 in St. Paul, MN.
• Prominence Advisors publishes “ROI in the Fast Lane – Data Harmonization.”
• Black Book Research lists the top 100 healthcare IT advisory services projected to experience the highest demand in 2025, with the following HIStalk sponsors ranking among the top firms: Impact Advisors (enterprise IT infrastructure planning and HIT 0perations), Nordic (EHR implementation and optimization for Epic, Oracle Health, Altera Digital Health, Athenahealth, Veradigm, ModMed systems), Tegria (Meditech EHR implementation and optimization), Optimum Healthcare IT (go-live consultants and staffing), and Clearwater (medical device security strategy, and patient and consumer data privacy and security advisory).

Blog Posts

• How to Protect Provider Endpoints, the Critical Edge of your Network (Med Tech Solutions)
• Caregiver Engagement: 3 Key Takeaways from the IDD Leadership Summit (Netsmart)
• Making the most of your EPR for greater efficiency (Nordic)
• How your TV can support family caregivers (Sonifi Health)
• Cybersecurity in Healthcare Starts with 1 Question (Surescripts)
• 3 top AI + GenAI advancements transforming RCM, denials + more (Waystar)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.

News 1/24/25

Top News

VA secretary nominee Doug Collins tells the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee that he will review the VA’s Oracle Health implementation with a fresh perspective and is optimistic about its completion.

Collins expressed confidence that project rollouts could resume earlier than the recently announced target date of mid-2026.

Reader Comments

From Senor Ortega: “Re: Express Scripts. Its fax service has been down since January 17. The only way to send them new prescriptions is via fax.” Unverified. I’ve emailed the company’s press contact. Meanwhile, my own contacts suggest that it was a brief outage and faxing is back to normal now, but anyone who knows different is welcome to chime in. I had forgotten that Express Scripts (pharmacy benefits manager) is part of Evernorth Health Services, which is owned by Cigna.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Dear conference attendees – while I admire your enthusiasm for spending your employer’s money to attend some conference, my own enthusiasm wanes when faced with a splashy LinkedIn announcement of that attendance (I’m annoyed only if it has a gratuitous graphic to game the LinkedIn algorithm, especially if the conference obviously provided it, but otherwise it’s just fine). For those who have asked me, I don’t know if ViVE is hosting a cash-grabbing nostalgia act for Industry Night this year (the Fergie-free Black Eyed Peas should now be unexpectedly available, prices start at $400,000, and who doesn’t like “Where Is The Love?” even if their newer stuff uses a lot of computer enhancement).

Health system executives, technologists, and radiologists — complete a short, anonymous survey about your organization’s AI purchasing plans and Volpara Health will make a significant donation to teach grant requests through DonorsChoose. Eleven questions, two or three minutes of your time, and a teacher somewhere gets some help with classroom necessities. I bragged on HIStalk reader participation when Volpara suggested the donation, so help me avoid looking bad.

Webinars

Stream on demand. “Healthcare Data Security: Aligning Processes with Evolving Threats & Regulations.” Sponsor: Inovalon. Presenters: Anthony Houston, MBA, senior director of security, risk, and compliance, Inovalon; Paul Wilder, MBA, executive director, CommonWell Health Alliance; Luke McNamara, MPA, deputy chief analyst, Google Cloud; Michael Quinn, VP of strategic partner development, Inovalon. Hear leaders in healthcare data security discuss some of the top recent threat evolutions and how organizations can proactively respond by making ongoing improvements to security protocols.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Behavioral health AI agent developer Eleos raises $60 million in a Series C funding round.

Sweden-based full-body scanner company Neko Health raises $260 million in a Series B funding round, valuing the company at $1.8 billion. Neko, co-founded by Spotify’s billionaire CEO Daniel Ek, has performed 10,000 scans in London and Stockholm, priced at $400 and $250 respectively, and boasts a waitlist of 100,000 people. The scans measure blood pressure, blood oxygen, ECG, heart risk, blood values, BMI, eye pressure, and skin mole assessments. Patients receive consultations with company doctors immediately after their scans. Based on the numbers provided in the announcement, Neko has generated between $2.5 million and $4 million in revenue since its launch in February 2023, which establishes its valuation at a lofty 900 to 1,440 times annual revenue, so they had better start working through that waitlist. Neither of the co-founders have prior healthcare experience.

People

Bethany Miller-Urroz (Zus Health) joins Sownder as SVP and head of sales for North America.

Australia’s EHealth NSW hires Richard Taggart, MBA, MPharm (Calvary Health Care) as chief executive and CIO of NSW Health .

Announcements and Implementations

Meditech releases APIs that are compatible with version 4 of USCDI.

Mayo Clinic and Cerebras Systems will collaborate to develop LLMs that can review the medical records of patients to determine how they will respond to treatments based on their genetic makeup. The models will be trained on the genomic data of 100,000 Mayo patients.

Precision medicine technology company Tempus AI launches a personal health concierge app that collects a patient’s medical records and applies AI to generate insights.

WellSky announces its participation in TEFCA and its selection of Kno2 as its QHIN.

Government and Politics

The UK’s NHS will establish a $250 million fund to help trusts invest an diagnostic and predictive AI tools, with an initial focus on medical image analysis and pathology.

The Department of Justice sues Walgreens, accusing the company of filling millions of opioid prescriptions without medical justification and instructing its pharmacists to process them without verifying their validity. In response, Walgreens has countersued, arguing that the federal government has not clearly outlined the responsibilities of drugstores when handling potentially questionable prescriptions that were issued by licensed prescribers. DOJ sued CVS with similar accusations last month.

The Department of Defense urges patients who want personal copies of their legacy medical records to download them immediately from the TRICARE Online Patient Portal, which will be shut down on April 1 since it has been replaced by MHS Genesis.

Privacy and Security

The Sequoia Project publishes a white paper that reviews managing privacy and consent when sharing PHI, inviting public feedback by February 21.

Other

The Armed Forces of Ukraine will replace its paper medical forms with an electronic Primary Health Record that will be maintained through the Armed Forces Medical Information System. The system will capture information about combat injuries that will be used to create an evidence-based medicine database.

A viral video from India captures a hospital housekeeper running an ECG on a patient. The hospital confirmed the video’s authenticity, adding that while it it is trying to recruit more ECG techs, the machine is so easy to use that anyone can do it.

Sponsor Updates

• Black Book Research publishes a new technical guide, “The 2025 Black Book of Behavioral Health IT.”
• Five9 will present at Customer Contact Week Orlando January 28.
• Fortified Health Security welcomes Lauren Amador as a renewals specialist.
• Health Data Movers releases a new episode of its “Quick HITs” podcast, “Innovating Healthcare IT with Khalid Turk: Equity, Integration, and the Future of Digital Transformation.”
• Inovalon releases a new “Inovators” podcast, “Healthcare Data’s Evolution: New Patient Expectations and Exciting Healthcare Advancements.”
• Meditech customer Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Canada earns HIMSS Stage 7 recognition.
• Healthmonix releases the 2025 Mental and Behavioral Health Registry (MBHR), a specialized Qualified Clinical Data Registry (QCDR).
• MRO releases a new episode of “The MRO Exchange” podcast, “Automated Record Retrieval w/ CHRISTUS Health’s RCS Director, Prudence Budemer.”

Blog Posts

• CMS Health Equity Initiatives in 2025 and Beyond (Findhelp)
• The Role of Analytics in Reducing Denials and Rejections (FinThrive)
• Navigating Legacy EHR Data: How to Prepare for Transitioning to a New EHR System (HCTec)
• 5 Ways to Optimize UKG Pro Workforce Management for Healthcare (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Mastering Denials: Practical Solutions for Improving Appeals Performance (Medhost)
• Optimum Healthcare IT Achieves ServiceNow Validated Practice Badge for HCLS (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Rethinking productivity to enhance revenue cycle performance (Meditech)
• Licking Memorial Health System Proactively Identifies and Resolves Citrix Slowness Issues Before Epic Hyperdrive Speed & Reliability Impacts Users (Goliath Technologies)
• The Successful Road to Epic is Paved with Multiple Stakeholders (Med Tech Solutions)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.

News 1/22/25

Top News

Struggling consumer genetic testing company 23andMe considers selling its Lemonaid telehealth business.

23andMe acquired the business in 2021 for $400 million.

23andMe’s entire board resigned last September over differences in the company’s direction. It  announced a restructuring plan several months later that included laying off 40% of its staff and cutting several therapy programs.

Reader Comments

From ACIO: “Re: Children’s National. If I may, this isn’t a net-new deal against Epic. Children’s National (AKA The Bear Institute) was one of the first Cerner ITWorks clients, where Cerner basically took over all of IT (essentially full IT outsourcing). About the last ITWorks deal out there is University of Missouri (The Tiger Institute) as I believe at this point they pay almost nothing to Cerner and we all know that a university in today’s climate would really have a PR nightmare if they tried to replace an IT system to the tune of several 100s of millions of dollars.”

From What Happens In Vegas: “Re: Epic. It was recently reported that Carl Dvorak is no longer president of Epic. For as long as I can remember, the names ‘Carl and Judy’ were always mentioned together. Judy is getting older, so it seems like news that the person who was assumed to be taking over might not be poised to do so.” Carl recently said that he took a job in Epic’s international business sometime around May 2024. Sumit Rana’s LinkedIn says that he became president in August 2024. Sumit has been at Epic for 26 years and started as a developer, which I think I remember is a board requirement to run the company per Judy’s wishes. Carl has been with the company for 38 years, wrote a lot of Epic’s code at the beginning, and led the company’s architecture decisions. Google stalking suggests that Judy is 81, Carl is 59, and Sumit is 48.

From Matthew: “Re: Color Screens. Pretty sure Glen Tullman was an investor in the company that made the weird computer doors for Walgreens. EWTD (Everything Walgreens Touches Dies), including itself?” The company’s website had a now-archived web page that listed Glen Tullman as co-founder and vice chair. Co-founder and board chair of Chicago-based Cooler Screens (now CoolerX) is Greg Wasson, former president and CEO of Walgreens.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A reader’s donation funded the purchase of a document camera for Ms. H in Yonkers, NY, who provided the view above from her middle school classroom as she projects material onto the screen that all can now see. Students are also using it for collaboration projects. I will say, having directing other people’s money to hundreds of DonorsChoose projects, that the biggest bang for the buck comes from document cameras, headphones for students, Chromebooks, and small PA systems to allow the teacher to be heard without wrecking their voice. In fact, I see that Ms. H is asking for headsets to allow students to interact with AI-tailored reading lessons, the use of which is being piloted by her classroom (OK, I admit that I just fully funded that one since another teacher’s funded project was cancelled, which freed up some money).

Here’s a fantastic opportunity to support frontline teachers through DonorsChoose, courtesy of Volpara Health, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lunit Inc. that provides clinically validated AI-powered software for personalized breast cancer screening and early detection. Teri Thomas, MSN, RN — Volpara’s CEO and an industry long-timer – will make a generous Donors Choose donation for each health system executive, technologist, or radiologist who completes a short, anonymous survey describing their organization’s AI purchasing plans. It’s like a slot machine where you pull the lever once, the money jingles into my teacher bucket, and I choose STEM projects to support. Not only will your participation fund classroom needs, Volpara’s donation will be doubled by matching money that is provided by my Anonymous Vendor Executive. If you work for a provider in administration, technology, or radiology, please answer 11 easy questions and Volpara and I will do the rest.

Webinars

January 23 (Thursday) 11 ET. “Maximizing Revenue With Minimal Resources: Work Smarter, Not Harder in Claims Management.” Sponsor: Inovalon. Presenter: Travis Fawver, senior sales engineer, Inovalon. Navigating the challenge of hitting revenue goals is daunting, but billing doesn’t have to be. The presenter will explore how strategic adoption of new technology can transform claims management processes from reactive to proactive. Learn how to reduce denials while empowering staff to focus on high-value activities, and gain proven strategies to simplify workflows, automate routine tasks, and build a more efficient RCM operation to maximize reimbursement.

Stream on demand. “Healthcare Data Security: Aligning Processes with Evolving Threats & Regulations.” Sponsor: Inovalon. Presenters: Anthony Houston, MBA, senior director of security, risk, and compliance, Inovalon; Paul Wilder, MBA, executive director, CommonWell Health Alliance; Luke McNamara, MPA, deputy chief analyst, Google Cloud; Michael Quinn, VP of strategic partner development, Inovalon. Hear leaders in healthcare data security discuss some of the top recent threat evolutions and how organizations can proactively respond by making ongoing improvements to security protocols.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Percipio Health officially launches with $20 million in Series A funding from investors that include UPMC Enterprises and Labcorp. The company offers app-based population health monitoring and management. Medhost founder and former CTO Eric Rock started the company with David Lucas, a former colleague at Medhost, Vivify Health, and Optum, in 2022.

Inovaccer acquires actuarial software vendor Humbi AI.

Behavioral telehealth vendor Iris Telehealth acquires InnovaTel, which offer telepsychiatry services.

Sales

• University of Kentucky HealthCare will implement Visage Imaging’s Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform.
• University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust and Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust in England will go live on Epic in 2026.

People

CompuGroup Medical US promotes Benedikt Brueckle to CEO, a position he also held between 2017 and 2021.

Qure.ai names Jim Mercadante (RapidAI) chief commercial officer.

Rob Cornelssen (Huron) joins Health Systems Informatics as VP of business development.

Ken Kaufman (Mpaired) joins Sirona Medical as CEO.

Waystar promotes Todd Woods, MBA to chief growth officer, ambulatory.

RevSpring hires Nicole Rogas, MBA (Symplr) as president.

Announcements and Implementations

Arrive Health develops Arrive Accelerate to offer providers AI-generated guidance on medication coverage requirements for improved prior authorization workflows.

In New York, Somos Community Care, Forward Leading IPA, and Western New York Integrated Care Collaborative implement Findhelp’s social care referral software.

OCH Regional Medical Center (MS) will go live on Oracle Health on January 27.

Government and Politics

ASTP/ONC publishes newly updated SAFER guides, which address EHR safety.

Northeast Surgical Group (MI) will pay $10,000 to settle federal allegations that it violated the HIPAA Security Rule by failing to conduct risk analyses on its information system. A ransomware gang attacked the group in 2023, exposing the PHI of 15,300 patients.

Privacy and Security

Allegheny Health Network files a breach report indicating that the information of 294,000 of its home medical equipment and home infusion patients was compromised by a cyberattack on IntraSystems, which manages AHN’s servers.

Sponsor Updates

• Consensus Cloud Solutions offers a free plan of its flagship digital cloud fax solution, eFax, to aid in disaster response.
• Ascom names Tobias Stanelle (Philips Healthcare) managing director for the Ascom Americas region.
• Capital Rx adds more than 80 new partnerships in 2024 and prepares for another year of record growth.
• Gartner recognizes Dimensional Insight in its Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms report with an overall rating of 4.6 out of 5.

Blog Posts

• How verifying insurance eligibility can increase revenue + ease staff burden (Waystar)
• 5 Eye-Opening Reasons to Assess Your Healthcare IT Today (CereCore)
• The Role of AI and Automation in Revenue Cycle (AGS Health)
• Specialty practices: How a tailored system avoids disruption (Altera Digital Health)
• Top 5 Cybersecurity Pitfalls in Operational Technology (OT) (CTG)
• Executive Search for Startup Companies: Building a Leadership Team from Scratch (Direct Recruiters)
• Why Device Readiness is Critical in an EHR Implementation (Divurgent)
• From Prescribing to Adherence: Tackling the Toughest Medication Management Challenges (DrFirst)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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Monday Morning Update 1/20/25

Top News

ASTP / National Coordinator Micky Tripathi, PhD, MPP says his goodbyes after four years.

Reader Comments

From Granular Argument: “Re: Children’s National. Has chosen Epic to replace Oracle Health, contracting underway.” Unverified. This reader reported in October that the hospital was doing demos of both. I wouldn’t be surprised since Oracle wins few (any?) net-new deals against Epic.

From Deal Kvetcher: “Re: Health Catalyst. SEC filings show that it paid $86 million in cash plus up to $33 million in earnouts to acquire Upfront Healthcare.” Crunchbase shows that Upfront has raised $30.5 million, with the last round being a $10.5 million Series C in September 2022. Meanwhile, Health Catalyst’s JPM presentation this month shows a steadily declining revenue growth since its 2019 IPO (38% to 3%) and consistent losses from operations. HCAT shares have lost 86% of their value since their first day of trading and are down 41% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $334 million.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Pondering: why does a telehealth doctor need to wear scrubs or a white coat? Maybe they are dashing online between in-person visits. I could have asked about a stethoscope, which clearly has zero utility when “seeing” a patient virtually. I also notice that 6% of poll respondents had their most recent encounter in video form. I’ve never had a video visit, but perhaps I’ll buy one of those ill-concealing exam gowns for future use in amusing the online doctor.

New poll to your right or here: What is the patient impact of private equity firms buying healthcare provider organizations? I added an “it depends” option, but I hereby restrict its use to respondents who promise to leave a poll comment that provides an example of when patients benefited from having their provider bought by PE.

Webinars

January 23 (Thursday) 11 ET. “Maximizing Revenue With Minimal Resources: Work Smarter, Not Harder in Claims Management.” Sponsor: Inovalon. Presenter: Travis Fawver, senior sales engineer, Inovalon. Navigating the challenge of hitting revenue goals is daunting, but billing doesn’t have to be. The presenter will explore how strategic adoption of new technology can transform claims management processes from reactive to proactive. Learn how to reduce denials while empowering staff to focus on high-value activities, and gain proven strategies to simplify workflows, automate routine tasks, and build a more efficient RCM operation to maximize reimbursement.

Stream on demand. “Healthcare Data Security: Aligning Processes with Evolving Threats & Regulations.” Sponsor: Inovalon. Presenters: Anthony Houston, MBA, senior director of security, risk, and compliance, Inovalon; Paul Wilder, MBA, executive director, CommonWell Health Alliance; Luke McNamara, MPA, deputy chief analyst, Google Cloud; Michael Quinn, VP of strategic partner development, Inovalon. Hear leaders in healthcare data security discuss some of the top recent threat evolutions and how organizations can proactively respond by making ongoing improvements to security protocols.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Startup Our Expert Doc launches a digital electronic second opinion service that is aimed at connecting non-US patients with US doctors for a flat fee of $350 (and 50% off in January). The principals aren’t listed, but the company’s website address is a nice Raleigh, NC house that is owned by a quadruple-boarded Duke pulmonologist who is also listed as one of the available doctors (the company’s listed phone number is also his own, it appears). I was prepared to launch a snark attack about what seemed at first glance to be a questionable business (especially after viewing their YouTube videos, which feature a computer voice that says medical REE-cord), but I have to say that the providers listed are mostly amazingly well credentialed, and quite a few of them also work for Duke. PR seems to be a bit of a struggle for the company, so I offer to interview Dr. M if he is so inclined (my cred: I recently interviewed The Clinic by Cleveland Clinic CEO Frank McGillin, which also offers virtual second opinions in a joint venture with Amwell).

Chatham Emergency Services (GA) implements ArcGIS software that displays the diversion status of local hospitals and shows EMS crews how long it takes to get patients off the stretcher and inside, which allows them to seek the fastest care for situations such as stroke. The hospital dashboard can also be used by the public, as shown above.

Epic’s plans for a 90-acre, 2,000-employee European headquarters in North Somerset, England are approved despite 700 objections about loss of green belt, a local disapproval rate of 96%, and public gallery observers of the voting shouting “shame.” The project still requires approval by the secretary of state.

People

Surgical coordination software vendor Surgimate hires Kraig Brown (Office Practicum) as CEO. He replaces founder Rebecca Brygel, who will transition to product ambassador.

Announcements and Implementations

WellSky launches WellSky Extract for Home Health, which uses AI to extract information from patient documents and prescription labels to populate its home health EHR. The company says this is the first of a series of modules that it calls SkySense, with the next offerings being an ambient scribing solution and an EHR summarization application.

Government and Politics

The House Budget Committee lists the cost-cutting options it is considering to keep paying for federal tax cuts. Some of the healthcare-related ones:

• Eliminate the non-profit status for hospitals, taxing them as for-profit businesses.
• Eliminate federal healthcare tax credits and Medicaid access for non-citizens.
• Roll back the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid.
• Stop reimbursing hospitals for the unpaid debts of Medicare beneficiaries.
• Implement Medicare site-neutral payments.
• Replace payments to hospitals for uncompensated cares with a new fund that will include care delivered outside of hospitals.
• Reform ACA subsidies.
• Reform graduate medical education payments.
• Eliminate Medicare’s inpatient-only list so that more surgeries can be performed in lower cost outpatient settings.
• Reform the prescription price-setting aspects of the Inflation Reduction Act.
• Reform Medicare physician payments.

Other

A Redditor vows that ChatGPT saved his life after he entered his post-workout symptoms (muscle weakness and pain) and ChatGPT urged him to go to the hospital because it suspected a muscle breakdown condition called rhabdomyolis. The hospital ran lab tests that confirmed the diagnosis, which he knew almost immediately because he ran his results through ChatGPT as well. Redditors understood the takeaway – use ChatGPT to interpret symptoms, then go to a doctor to confirm and treat.

This is only slightly healthcare related, but a good business lesson. Happiest Baby, the maker of the $1,700 “smart bassinet” Snoo that rocks affluent babies to sleep, sparks customer outrage by introducing a $20 monthly subscription fee to use features that were previously free. The company defends the move as a “critical step” to counter losses from the thriving resale market, which they say undercuts new-product sales. Health tech folks will get this — the company’s long-term strategy isn’t to lower prices, but rather to get corporations, insurance companies, and government agencies to subsidize the Snoo’s cost. Customers are complaining to the FTC that a retroactive subscription requirement is a bait-and-switch tactic that should not be allowed.

Walgreens scraps the futuristic “smart doors” it installed on drugstore refrigerators, which were intended to display video ads, track inventory, and dynamically price items. The screens failed to deliver the promised sales boost, and the then-CEO reportedly asked, “Why do our stores look like an effing casino?” Screen vendor Cooler Screens sued Walgreens for $200 million and retaliated by cutting off data feeds, leaving customers — many of whom disliked the opaque screens from the start — staring at blank displays or makeshift printed signs. The failed project left $50 million worth of unusable custom screens gathering dust in a warehouse. This debacle echoes Walgreens’ earlier misstep with Theranos, which cost the company millions in customer lawsuit settlements over faulty in-store blood tests.

Sponsor Updates

• Optimum Healthcare IT publishes a white paper titled “5 Things to Know Before You Invest in ServiceNow”
• Netsmart offers a new case study featuring Amedisys, “Making Major Time-Savings Possible for Collectors.”
• Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast, “Interview with Brendan Keeler.”
• QGenda will exhibit at ASA Advance 2025 January 31-February 2 in Atlanta.
• TruBridge will exhibit at HFMA Western Region Symposium January 19-22 in Las Vegas.

Blog Posts

• CloudWave’s Predictions for Healthcare IT in 2025 Part 3: A Growing Threat of Healthcare Supply Chain Attacks (CloudWave)
• Clinical benefits of medical device connectivity (Philips Capsule)
• The future of healthcare: 5 resolutions you can’t ignore (Nordic)
• How Staff Self-Scheduling Can Boost Retention and Satisfaction (SnapCare)
• Ready for Action: Advancing Pharmacy Interoperability (Surescripts)
• Why Data Analytics Is Driving Healthcare’s Shift to the Cloud (Tegria)
• Coverage Detection 101: How RCM teams find missing or hidden insurance (Waystar)

Sponsor Spotlight

Planning a Workday project? Healthcare IT Leaders has released the ultimate Workday resource planning and staffing guide, including a comprehensive breakdown of the staffing requirements for each phase of a Workday project in healthcare organizations. The whitepaper provides detailed role breakdowns across six critical areas — from legacy system support to post-implementation optimization — so organizations can better plan their resource needs. Download the guide here.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.

News 1/17/25

Top News

Canada’s Nova Scotia Health pauses its two-day-old rollout of medical appointment text reminders after the system sent incorrect information, failed to indicate whether the visit was in-person or virtual, and in some cases referred to a non-existent appointment.

The organization blames integration challenges with the 900 scheduling systems that providers use. A patient provided the above reminder for a 2:45 p.m. appointment that instead indicated 6:45 p.m.

Reader Comments

From Asking for a Friend: “Re: Baxter. Heard through the grapevine that it is discontinuing its DoseEdge product in 2028. Can you confirm? Will it be replaced with another solution?” I have emailed Baxter’s media contact for any news about the pharmacy workflow product, which Baxter acquired with its Baxa acquisition in 2011. UPDATE: Baxter provided this response:

After careful consideration due in part to third-party manufacturing constraints, Baxter will end of life the DoseEdge Pharmacy Workflow Manager after December 31, 2028. We are committed to supporting our customers throughout this transitional period.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

HIStalk sponsors who are participating in the ViVE conference February 16-19: fill out this form with your details by February 7 and I’ll include you in my conference preview.

Dr. Jayne weighs in on the most annoying and overused trendy words, which inspired me to make my own list while not exactly following instructions since I included some phrases.

1. Suss. Somehow we got by with “understand” until recently.
2. Unpack. Did “analyze” or “explain” fail to do the job all of a sudden?
3. Utilize. You don’t look a bit smarter by not just saying “use,” and I would argue the opposite. See: “leverage.”
4. Unlock. A favorite of hack PR writers, they would have you believe that buying a company’s product will allow you to “unlock” something that is tantalizingly just out of reach until you write them that check.
5. Journey. Everything is a journey all of a sudden.
6. Gaslight. I still get confused about what it really means, especially when it seems to be misused often.
7. Curate. Everything that isn’t random has been curated by definition, and you’re no smarter just because you made a list.
8. Disinterested. Not the same as “uninterested,” instead indicating that the person has not been influenced by personal benefit.
9. Build out. Means the same as “build” with twice as many syllables. Press release people embrace it because it sounds decisive and explicitly defined when companies pledge to “build out” one thing or another.
10. LOL and LMAO. Mostly used, strangely enough, to project contempt or aggressive anger against an Internet stranger than to signal amusement.

Webinars

January 23 (Thursday) 11 ET. “Maximizing Revenue With Minimal Resources: Work Smarter, Not Harder in Claims Management.” Sponsor: Inovalon. Presenter: Travis Fawver, senior sales engineer, Inovalon. Navigating the challenge of hitting revenue goals is daunting, but billing doesn’t have to be. The presenter will explore how strategic adoption of new technology can transform claims management processes from reactive to proactive. Learn how to reduce denials while empowering staff to focus on high-value activities, and gain proven strategies to simplify workflows, automate routine tasks, and build a more efficient RCM operation to maximize reimbursement.

Stream on demand. “Healthcare Data Security: Aligning Processes with Evolving Threats & Regulations.” Sponsor: Inovalon. Presenters: Anthony Houston, MBA, senior director of security, risk, and compliance, Inovalon; Paul Wilder, MBA, executive director, CommonWell Health Alliance; Luke McNamara, MPA, deputy chief analyst, Google Cloud; Michael Quinn, VP of strategic partner development, Inovalon. Hear leaders in healthcare data security discuss some of the top recent threat evolutions and how organizations can proactively respond by making ongoing improvements to security protocols.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

UnitedHealth Group reports Q4 results: revenue up 6.8%, EPS $6.81 versus $6.16, beating earnings expectations but falling short on revenue. Investor concern about higher medical costs sent shares down slightly. UHG finished the year with $400 billion in revenue and $32 billion in earnings from operations, with its Optum services business generating $17 billion in earnings on $253 billion in revenue. The company’s market cap is $478 billion.

Medical imaging solution vendor Core Sound Imaging raises a $80 million growth investment and gives the private equity investor the executive chair seat on the board.

Sales

• In Canada, Novia Scotia Health will deploy Novari’s surgery wait list management system in a five-year, $12 million contract.
• Denver Health chooses Nabla for ambient documentation.

People

Larry Adams, RN, MSN, MBA (ShiftMed) joins CareRev as chief nurse executive and SVP of strategy.

Announcements and Implementations

Healthmonix releases its 2025 MIPSpro Enterprise qualified clinical data registry.

Fortified Health Security publishes its healthcare cybersecurity guide for 2025.

Amazon Web Services and investment firm General Catalyst will collaborate to develop and deploy AI solutions. General Catalyst’s portfolio includes Summa Health acquirer Health Assurance Transformation Company, Commure, and Aidoc.

Government and Politics

A New York Times report finds that medication access company Apexus has earned big profits in the 20 years that it has been running the federal government’s 340B drug discount program, which gives hospitals and clinics that serve low-income or uninsured patients mandatory discounts on outpatient drugs. Apexus, a former non-profit that is now a for-profit subsidiary of Vizient, earns a fee for the drugs that are purchased, which gives it an incentive to increase use. The organization has an 80% profit margin in booking an estimated $227 million in annual revenue as the 340B program has grown to $66 billion in annual drug sales involving half the country’s non-profit hospitals.

The Washington Post reports that healthcare entrepreneur Chris Klomp is the choice of nominated CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz to run the $1 trillion Medicare program. The Salt Lake City-based Klomp became chairman and CEO of care notification technology vendor Collective Medical in 2014, which was sold to PointClickCare for $650 million in late 2020. He serves on the board of Nomi Health, Maven Clinic, InnovaCare Health, and HealthJoy.

Privacy and Security

Tech Crunch reports that UnitedHealth-owned Change Healthcare tagged its breach notice webpage with the “noindex” HTML meta tag, which would have hidden it from web searches.

Other

A University of Michigan survey finds that patient portals are the most-used digital health technology among older adults. The authors note that black patients are more reliant on portals because they don’t trust health systems enough to engage with them otherwise.

Gallup’s annual poll finds that Americans rank nurses as the most honest and ethical profession for the 23rd straight year. Pharmacists and physicians finished at #4 and #5, although trust in doctors has fallen from 77% in 2020 to 53% now. Holding the bottom spots are lobbyists, members of Congress, TV reporters, and advertising professionals, all of whom finished below car salespeople.

Sponsor Updates

• Neurogen Biomarking, which offers tools for early detection of cognitive impairment, will integrate the cognitive assessments of Linus Health.
• Black Book Research releases a new report, “The 2025 Black Book of Healthcare IT Consultants and Advisory Firms.”
• QGenda publishes a new report, ““State of Healthcare Digital Transformation: Untapped Strategies to Simplify Healthcare Workforce Management.”
• MRO offers a recap of its 2024 achievements, including recognition of its CEO and new customer partnerships.
• Rachel Pataky joins Nordic as managing director and MEDITECH practice lead.
• CloudWave appoints healthcare cybersecurity expert Lewie Dunsworth to its Board of Directors.
• Real Leaders and Built In recognize Findhelp as, respectively, a top impact company and best place to work.
• Fortified Health Security ranks ninth among leading healthcare cybersecurity vendors, according to the latest KLAS cybersecurity report.
• Goliath Technologies publishes a new case study, “Licking Memorial Health System Proactively Identifies and Resolves Citrix Slowness Issues Before Epic Hyperdrive Speed & Reliability Impacts Users.”

Blog Posts

• CloudWave’s Predictions for Healthcare IT in 2025 Part 2: Shifting from Detection to Prevention in Healthcare Cybersecurity (CloudWave)
• Why medical device connectivity needs a vendor-agnostic approach (Philips Capsule)
• A Dream Realized: It’s Time to Integrate Pharmacists into Pharmacogenomic Medication Decision-Making (First Databank)
• The High Stakes of Hospital Price Transparency Compliance (FinThrive)
• MRO Starts 2025 Strong with Top CEO Award, Major Client Wins, and Record-Breaking Growth (MRO)
• Understanding the CMS MIPS cost measure for Melanoma Resection (Healthmonix)
• The Generative AI Revolution: 9 Trends Reshaping Healthcare in 2025 (Impact Advisors)
• Full speed ahead: Interoperability at MEDITECH enters a new era (Meditech)
• Top Five Predictions for the Healthcare IT Industry for 2025 (Med Tech Solutions)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.