Monday Morning Update 10/22/18

Top News

Stat reports that Deborah DiSanzo, general manager of IBM Watson Health for the past three years, will leave her role.

DiSanzo will be replaced by SVP John Kelly III, PhD, who wrote a defense of Watson Health in an August 2018 blog post in which he refuted an unflattering article by The Wall Street Journal.

DiSanzo will take a demotion to the strategy team of IBM Cognitive Solutions.

IBM announced last week that earnings from its cognitive offerings were down 6 percent year over year, although it said Watson Health is growing.

Reader Comments

From Vaporware?: “Re: VA’s Cerner contract. Kudos to them for transparency in listing what they bought, but it looks like they and the VA will be running different systems. Also, DoD didn’t purchase CommonWell even though 60 percent of care happens outside MHS.” The VA’s list of which Cerner systems it and the DoD bought in their respective contracts reveals quite a few differences, some of them understandable due to the types of services offered. DoD skipped quite a few modules that while not useful in battlefield hospitals, would seem to have a place in the dependent care that makes up much of its volume. The DoD passed on modules for cardiology, gastroenterology, CommonWell, most of population health management, integrated radiology dictation, and all transaction services except for automated messaging. I didn’t realize that CommonWell is something you have to buy as an upfront cost, although its documentation says that health IT vendors may charge “commodity-like” fees. Cerner previously pledged not to charge users until at least through the end of 2019.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most of us might make our living advocating medical standardization, use of technology, and applying patient care experience to our own situation, but poll respondents don’t find those to be positives when choosing our own doctor, instead valuing participative decision-making. Debtor concludes, “Here is the problem with the concept of socialized medicine in the United States. Even among an informed group, we put personal patient ‘concerns’ and ‘decisions’ ahead of evidence-based guidelines and vetted treatment protocols. I fully support your right to have concerns and make decisions about your own health,  but I’d prefer not to pay for them if they’re not supported by science.” Matt says, “We get a ton of policy push in healthcare, which we’ve seen create its own echo-chamber to the detriment (in some very real cases) of beneficial practice. It runs its course until the downstream consequences create push back and the the policy is pulled back, which creates a difficult environment for real and helpful innovation.”

New poll to your right or here: where do you keep locally stored copies of your medical information?

Only 20 percent of providers are using biometric patient identification, with most of the remaining 80 percent saying either there’s no business case for it or because they haven’t really thought about it. They aren’t really worried about patient perception or hacker concerns. Industry Analyst Supporter of Biometrics approves “perception deception” in using phones as the biometric reader, adding, “Most folks don’t blink about their biometrics being the vehicle to access their iPads and phones, but feel that their privacy and security regulated healthcare provider asking is too invasive.” Ed A warns of potential lawsuits for providers that fail to follow laws like the Illinois Biometric Privacy Act that require obtaining patient consent and following requirements for biometric use and retention. XCIO’s health system employer biometrically verifies identity in registration areas to reduce duplicate records, insurance fraud, and inaccurate patient billing. 

Webinars

October 30 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “How One Pediatric CIN Aligned Culture, Technology and the Community to Transform Care.” Presenters: Lisa Henderson, executive director, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Shehzad Saeed, MD, associate chief medical officer, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Mason Beard, solutions strategy leader, Philips PHM; Gabe Orthous, value-based care consultant, Himformatics. Sponsor: Philips PHM. Dayton Children’s Health Partners, a pediatric clinically integrated network, will describe how it aligned its internal culture, technology partners, and the community around its goal of streamlining care delivery and improving outcomes. Presenters will describe how it recruited network members, negotiated value-based contracts, and implemented a data-driven care management process.

November 7 (Wednesday) 3:00 ET. “Opioid Crisis: What One Health Plan is Doing About It.” Presenter: Samuel DiCapua, DO, chief medical director, New Hampshire Health Families; and chief medical officer, Casenet. Sponsor: Casenet. This webinar will describe how managed care organization NH Health Families is using innovative programs to manage patients who are struggling with addiction and to help prevent opioid abuse.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Decisions

• Lavaca Medical Center (TX) went live on Cerner in April 2018
• Pershing Memorial Hospital (MO) will go live on Cerner in June 2019
• Kennedy Health System (NJ) will replace Cerner with Epic in 2019
• Hutchinson Health Hospital (MN) will replace Microsoft Dynamics GP with Infor for financial and supply chain management in October 2018

These provider-reported updates are supplied by Definitive Healthcare, which offers a free trial of its powerful intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and healthcare providers.

People

GetWellNetwork hires Sameer Siraj (Optum) as chief product officer.

Announcements and Implementations

A new Black Book report on HIM-related technologies names these winners:

• Nuance (end-to-end coding, clinical documentation improvement, and health information management solutions in both inpatient and ambulatory settings; CDI software)
• Optum360 (coding and CAC outsourcing)
• MModal (document capture and transcription)
• 3M (coding consulting, document imaging)
• Dolbey (medical speech recognition)
• Revspring (patient communications and financial satisfaction)
• Recondo (patient identification and tracking)

Other

Patients who are involved in “non-emergent” ED visits exhibit the same symptoms as ED-appropriate visits 88 percent of the time, an analysis concludes, so it’s probably not reasonable for insurers to demand that patients make an accurate ED-or-not decision. One in six ED visits could be avoided by warning patients that their insurance won’t pay for a non-emergent visits, but such a policy would also discourage the 40 percent of those patients who have ED-appropriate symptoms from going there.

A study finds that hospitals accredited by Joint Commission deliver no better patient outcomes than those certified by other private groups, while hospitals with only a state survey accreditation perform just as well as any of them.

Sponsor Updates

• Lightbeam Health Solutions publishes a new white paper, “Data-Driven Solutions Providers and Payers Need for Value-Based Care Alignment.”
• LiveProcess will exhibit at the Health Care Association of New Jersey event October 23-25 in Atlantic City.
• Meditech releases a new video, “Palo Pinto Mobile Clinic Uses Meditech Ambulatory to Bridge Care Gaps.”
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, will exhibit at the HMHB Annual Meeting & Conference October 22-23 in Atlanta.
• OmniSys will exhibit at the McKesson Pharmacy Systems Chain & Health System User Conference October 23-24 in Pittsburgh.
• The SSI Group will exhibit at the MAPAM Annual Fall Conference October 22-23 in South Yarmouth, MA.
• Surescripts and ZeOmega will exhibit at the 2018 CAHP Annual Conference October 22-24 in San Diego.

Blog Posts

• The State of CMS Emergency Preparedness Readiness in Long-Term Care Facilities (LiveProcess)
• Strengthening Patient-Provider Relationships and Minimizing Physician Attrition (Loyale Healthcare)
• Talking Cost with Patients – An Organization Effort (Vyne Medical)
• Finite vs. Infinite: Learning Gameplay at MGMA18 (Meditech)
• How to Make or Break the Bedside Patient Experience (Access)
• How Phoenix Children’s Patient-Centered Strategy is Driving Better Care and Improving Productivity (MediComp Systems)
• Get Excited for MHUG 2018! (Mobile Heartbeat)
• How Stigma Stunts Mental Health Care (Netsmart)
• Meditech Web Ambulatory Implementation: 3 Things to Consider (Parallon Technology Solutions)
• 4 ways to secure patient portals (Experian Health)
• Climate Change in the Healthcare Environment (PatientKeeper)
• What Works – Patient Census Dashboard Drives Workflow and Documentation Improvements (Huntzinger Management Group)
• 5 Keys Takeaways from SHSMD Connections (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Improving Care for Chronically Ill, Older Patients (PreparedHealth)
• Time, Money and Resources: Emissary Saves You All Three, and Enhances Innovation (Sansoro Health)
• Precision medicine enablement is critical to today’s enterprise laboratory information solution (Sunquest)
• VUE18 recap: Why care team communication is critical. (Voalte)
• Hospital Communication: How Many Apps Does It Take to Make a Phone Call? (Vocera)
• Denied but Not Dead: How to Submit a Medicare Appeal (WebPT)
• KLAS debuts remote monitoring report; Philips assessed by customers (Wellcentive)

Contacts

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

News 10/19/18

Top News

The FDA updates draft guidance on managing cybersecurity issues for the premarket submission of medical devices. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD says the document, initially penned in 2014, offers “recommendations for manufacturers on how they can better protect their products against different cybersecurity risks, from ransomware to a catastrophic attack on a health system.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I don’t pay much attention to the “Like” button at the bottom of each HIStalk post, but did happen to notice that Alexander Scarlat’s first Readers Write installment on machine learning had already garnered several dozen clicks. It hasn’t quite gained the notoriety of the most popular post in recent memory, which deals with remedying poor clinician engagement with health IT. Both tap into several pieces of advice I give those interested in submitting editorial:

1. Readers will give your content more credence if you write from a place of experience. Both authors of the aforementioned posts have MDs, and other in-the-trenches educational and professional experience to back up their right to editorialize. Vendor authors – unless they too have immense clinical chops – will never quite escape the subconscious bias of readers who see a company name in the byline and immediately worry their time is being wasted by someone trying to sell them something.

2. Of-the-moment topics written for an audience with significant experience working in the health IT trenches are key to a good read, and will often sustain relevance for some time. Submissions that offer a 1,000-foot view rather than diving into the nitty gritty will attract critics who aren’t afraid to lambast authors. (Granted, I try to filter those out, but some slip through.)

3. Pop culture and humor are always good bets, provided they are in good taste. (I’m still shaking my head at the submission sent over with a curse word in the headline.) I often point interested parties to the “All I Needed to Know to Disrupt Healthcare I Learned from ‘Seinfeld’” series penned in 2015 by Bruce Bandes as a great example of original, humorous content that speaks to a timely topic.

Webinars

October 30 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “How One Pediatric CIN Aligned Culture, Technology and the Community to Transform Care.” Presenters: Lisa Henderson, executive director, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Shehzad Saeed, MD, associate chief medical officer, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Mason Beard, solutions strategy leader, Philips PHM; Gabe Orthous, value-based care consultant, Himformatics. Sponsor: Philips PHM. Dayton Children’s Health Partners, a pediatric clinically integrated network, will describe how it aligned its internal culture, technology partners, and the community around its goal of streamlining care delivery and improving outcomes. Presenters will describe how it recruited network members, negotiated value-based contracts, and implemented a data-driven care management process.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Gauss Surgical raises $20 million in a Series C funding round led by Northwell Health (NY) and SoftBank Ventures Korea, with help from seven other health systems. Funding thus far comes to $52 million. The company has developed tablet-based software that uses machine learning and digital imaging to monitor maternal surgical blood loss in real time.

Digital prescription savings company OptimizeRx acquires interactive patient messaging vendor CareSpeak Communications for an undisclosed amount.

Muscular dystrophy nonprofit CureDuchenne invests in ZappRx, and will help the vendor optimize its e-prescribing and electronic prior authorization software for Duchenne patients.

23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki tells Rock Health conference attendees that she hopes to soon roll out a test that will help consumers better understand how their bodies react to certain antidepressants. Price points for similar services offered by Color Genomics and Albertsons grocery store pharmacists range from $250 to $750. The FDA shut down 23andMe’s first attempt at such a test in 2013 based on the fear that consumers could misinterpret the results as medical advice.

People

Patrick Flavin (Outcome Health) joins Arches Technology as president.

HCTec names Salome Isbell (MedHOK) CFO, Victor Ayers (Infor) VP of professional services, and Heather Espino (Centura Health) VP of clinical solutions.

Announcements and Implementations

Bassett Medical Center (NY) adopts Masimo’s Patient SafetyNet and Root with Vital Signs Check across its 54-bed med-surg unit.

Massachusetts EHealth Collaborative and Cognizant will provide technical and financial consulting services to the MassHealth Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment technical assistance program’s ACOs and community partners.

Partners Connected Health adds a mobile app to its PGHDConnect program, giving users the ability to securely share health data with their providers from 250 devices.

Government and Politics

The FDA and Department of Homeland Security announce they will work together to share information on cybersecurity vulnerabilities in medical devices so that threats to patient safety can be addressed more quickly.

Privacy and Security

Following a similar GDPR-induced move in Europe, Apple gives US users the ability to view, edit, and delete data it has collected on them using a new tool on its privacy website. The tool does not apply to data collected by and stored on Apple devices, including biometric data like fingerprints and heart rates.

Other

The Sequoia Project creates the Interoperability Matters Advisory Group and solicits nominations for workgroup members who will provide feedback and recommendations on interoperability endeavors. I was not aware that Sequoia relinquished Carequality earlier this month to operate as a standalone entity.

In Dublin, St. James’s Hospital goes live on expanded Cerner functionality, making it the largest EHR implementation in Ireland’s history. The three-year project was dubbed “Project Oak” as an homage to the paper the Millenium conversion will save.

Vermont Information Technology Leaders struggles to pare down the number of duplicate patient records in the state’s HIE. An audit last year found 1.7 million unique records for 624,000 residents and patients from out of town. VITL staff have deemed at least 35 percent of those to be duplicates, and hope to have that number down to 21 percent by the end of the year. The struggle for a unique patient identifier in the Green Mountain State is real.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at CHCANYS18 Annual Conference and Clinical Forum October 21-23 in Tarrytown, NY.
• FormFast will host virtual user group meetings October 23 and 24.
• Healthwise will exhibit at the 2018 PNEG Conference October 19-21 in Fort Wayne, IN.
• Foundations Health Solutions wins an Excellence in Technology Award from McKnight’s for its use of Hyland OnBase.
• Formativ Health adds Conversa Health’s AI-powered chatbot messaging tool to its line of patient engagement services.
• Imprivata completes the Zebra Technologies Validated Program for its Mobile Device Access.
• Casenet becomes a founding member of the private-sector Da Vinci project, which aims to leverage FHIR to improve data-sharing in value-based care arrangements.
• ZeOmega adds MCG Health’s Cite AutoAuth prior authorization software to its Jiva population health management technology.
• HCTec publishes a new case study featuring Montefiore Health System.
• NHS approves Elsevier as a supplier for its NHS England Health Systems Support Framework.

Blog Posts

• How telehealth helps to improve compliance among ADHD patients (EClinicalWorks)
• Automatically Map, Visualize and Troubleshoot Your Citrix Infrastructure with Topology View (Goliath Technologies)
• Thoughts on mentoring (Hyland)
• New ‘Reference Architecture’ Guide Helps Customers Implement Imprivata OneSign Single Sign-On with Epic Systems (Imprivata)
• Streamline Healthcare CRM Implementation with a Cross-Functional Team (Influence Health)
• Northwell Health: Unifying Patient Records as Our Organization Expands (InterSystems)
• How Hospital for Special Surgery Positions its Referral Center to Unlock Access & Boost Patient Satisfaction (Kyruus)
• Reducing Errors from Look-Alike, Sound-Alike Medication Names: The Role of Indications (FDB)

Contacts

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

News 10/17/18

Top News

Radiation oncology and software vendor Varian Medical acquires Finland-based Noona Healthcare, whose software captures patient-reported outcomes and supports symptom management.

Reader Comments

From Managing Director, Otium cum Dignitate: “Re: HIMSS Form 990. Here’s the latest from Guidestar.” I should have been more specific in saying that I couldn’t find what I assume should be the latest HIMSS Form 990. I saw this one, which covers the year ending 6/30/16. HIMSS should have filed one last year and is due to file another one this year, but they haven’t responded to my request. More interesting is the title used by this semi-retired reader, who says he just likes the title “Managing Director” and the Latin from Cicero translates to “leisure with dignity,” which is about as cool a goal as someone could set for themselves (although the occasional episode of leisure with dishonor might keep it interesting).

From No Mas: “Re: Athenahealth’s partnership with U of Toledo. The new product for academic medical centers was supposed to be complete by now, three years after you interviewed CMIO Bryan Hinch, MD. Maybe you can reach out for an update.” I’ve emailed Bryan to see what happened since our interview about the co-development of an inpatient EHR as University of Toledo Medical Center tried desperately to unload its problematic and expiration-dated McKesson systems.

From Robert D. Lafsky, MD: “Re: this article. I think a big reason there’s so much lately about physician ‘burnout’ is that medical training teaches you to ask ‘why’ about everything. Even if it’s wrong, there has to be a theory. But when the EMR came along, it urged doctors to not ask so many questions, just do what it says. It’s remarkable that it took this long for a major medical journal to run a piece on the theoretical basis for computerized medical information.”  The NEJM article reviews the need for ontologies (controlled, descriptive terminology that describes the semantic relationships among concepts) to overcome the limitations of incomplete, incorrect, or unsourced EHR data since those systems were designed for billing, thus having no convenient way to store behavioral phenotypes, environmental exposure, genomic sequencing data, and information collected from mobile health sensors. It notes that use of ontologies on huge data sets can discover association and even causation to create new diagnostic and therapeutic insight. The authors also suggest that clinician data entry is not a good use of their time and advocates instead collecting device information and patient-entered information electronically and greater use of speech recognition.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Need consulting services? Fill out my minimally intrusive “RFI Blaster” online form (which I just rebuilt) with details about your needs and then choose one or all HIStalk consulting firm sponsors you’d like to hear from. It doesn’t get much easier.

I had another moment of music-driven cognitive dissonance in the senior citizen-filled grocery store the other day when in between sappy, buy-more-stuff music (Beach Boys, Pilot) was inserted “Break On Through (To the Other Side)” from the magnificent 1967 debut album of The Doors. I smugly felt rebellious as I noted no reaction from the older shoppers, but then I realized they were probably just suppressing the fist pumps since they were likely in their mid-20s peak rebellion years when the song charted 51 years ago. Mr. Mojo Risin’ himself would be 74 if he hadn’t broken on through to the other side at 27 in 1971. As I often say, nursing homes are now occupied by those who want to hear Pink Floyd rather than Lawrence Welk.

Webinars

October 30 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “How One Pediatric CIN Aligned Culture, Technology and the Community to Transform Care.” Presenters: Lisa Henderson, executive director, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Shehzad Saeed, MD, associate chief medical officer, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Mason Beard, solutions strategy leader, Philips PHM; Gabe Orthous, value-based care consultant, Himformatics. Sponsor: Philips PHM. Dayton Children’s Health Partners, a pediatric clinically integrated network, will describe how it aligned its internal culture, technology partners, and the community around its goal of streamlining care delivery and improving outcomes. Presenters will describe how it recruited network members, negotiated value-based contracts, and implemented a data-driven care management process.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Medicare Advantage insurer Devoted Health raises $300 million in a Series B round, increasing its total to $362 million. The founders are Todd Park (Athenahealth, Castlight Health, White House), his brother Ed Park (Athenahealth), and some VCs. Also on the team are former Athenahealth CTO Jeremy Delinsky and  former US Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil.

Sales

• Oregon will integrate its prescription drug monitoring program database with EHRs and pharmacy systems using Appriss Health’s PMP Gateway.
• Legacy Health (OR) goes live on Vynca for capturing, storing, and accessing advance care planning documents.

People

AAFP promotes Steven Waldren, MD, MS to VP/CMIO, where he will focus on the potential impact of AI and machine learning on family medicine and continue work on reducing EHR burden.

Announcements and Implementations

A KLAS report finds that two-thirds of health systems are just beginning to implement opioid stewardship programs, with the less-advanced ones considering best-of-breed technologies (such as drug dispensing systems that detect or prevent drug diversion) while more advanced health systems expect their EHR vendor to deliver tools to prevent and treat opioid misuse. Epic is the most-used of all technologies used in opioid stewardship programs, while Cerner is least-used.  Customers expect their EHR to integrate with prescription drug monitoring program databases, to offer opioid-specific clinical decision support and toolsets, and to include opioid stewardship capabilities in population health management.

This is smart approach: personal health record vendor HealthLynked publishes a plug-in that allows embedding its appointment-booking function in any of the 60 million websites that run WordPress. The screenshots suggest areas of needed improvement, however, since the dates run together and displaying appointment times down to the second seems silly.

A Reaction Data report says that only 15 percent of radiology departments still use dictation and transcription, with speech recognition dominating (although not growing) and 81 percent of respondents using Nuance and basically none of them thinking about switching to another vendor. Just over half of respondents say their speech recognition is integrated with PACS, but integration with RIS and EHR is much lower even though user satisfaction with the integration of all three is high.

Hospital grading organization Leapfrog Group will launch safety and quality surveys of the country’s 5,600 outpatient surgery centers, noting the need as evidenced by the Kaiser Health News/USA Today Network investigation that revealed poor oversight and substandard clinical practices. Let’s hope they call out the likely majority of those centers that refuse to participate (since until competitors start publicizing their good results, there’s no incentive). The organization issues grades for 2,000 US hospitals, just over one-third of the total.

A hospital in eastern China goes live with facial recognition check-in on a system developed by Alibaba’s healthcare group. Anyone with health insurance and a mobile payment account can register without their ID cards or phones once they have linked their accounts to the Alipay mobile payment app. The system’s 3-D cameras link to Alipay’s biometrics and the Ministry of Public Security’s photo database, which is also used by police to identify the faces of fugitives in large crowds. 

A Philips study finds that the US healthcare system captures a lot of data compared to other countries, but suffers from lack of a universal health record and low consumer satisfaction and trust.

Government and Politics

Telemedicine vendor HealthRight and its CEO Scott Roix plead guilty to healthcare fraud and fraudulent marketing of dietary supplements, skin creams, and testosterone that its doctors prescribed without realizing how massively the company was marking up the prices. A total of four men and seven compounding pharmacies were named in charges of running a billion-dollar telemedicine fraud scheme.

Other

Another healthcare information challenge – a person’s genetic test results could change from “normal” to “abnormal” or vice versa based on new research findings, but nobody has thought about the challenges in contacting those patients or their doctors to let them know or to have them retested. A recent study found that of 1.45 million patients tested from 2006 to 2016, reclassification of mutations would have changed the reports of 60,000 of them.

UMass Memorial Health Care lays off 17 IT employees two weeks after going live with its $700 million Epic implementation. 

MIT will spend $1 billion to create an artificial intelligence college that will begin instruction in the fall of 2019. MIT says the intentionally used term “college” reinforces that the new organization will work across all five of its existing schools (architecture, engineering, humanities, management, and science) rather than being a school itself. It adds that the college will emphasize ethical guidelines of how AI can be used for human good.

Amazon posts job listings for data scientists with health benefits experience to work with partners – “including the new healthcare venture” – to create healthcare and population health management solutions. Most interesting is the responsibility to “leverage big data to explore and introduce areas of healthcare analytics and technologies” and preferred experience that includes working with claims, EHR, and patient-reported data. I have a strong feeling that if Amazon ever meets high expectations for healthcare disruption that this Atul Gawande-led group won’t be its weapon of choice – while the company will learn a lot about how healthcare works, the goal is to reduce its own costs, with no guarantee that those efforts will extend outside its four walls. The company’s real disruption opportunity likely lies elsewhere and that are more easily penetrated, such as in supply chain management.

A jarringly moving obituary written by the parents of a 30-year-old mother who died of a drug overdose last week provides a sad reminder of the toll of drug addiction on families. Some excerpts (but you should read the whole thing):

It is impossible to capture a person in an obituary, and especially someone whose adult life was largely defined by drug addiction. To some, Maddie was just a junkie — when they saw her addiction, they stopped seeing her. And what a loss for them … During the past two years especially, her disease brought her to places of incredible darkness, and this darkness compounded on itself, as each unspeakable thing that happened to her and each horrible thing she did in the name of her disease exponentially increased her pain and shame. For 12 days this summer, she was home, and for most of that time she was sober. For those 12 wonderful days, full of swimming and Disney movies and family dinners, we believed as we always did that she would overcome her disease and make the life for herself we knew she deserved. We believed this until the moment she took her last breath. But her addiction stalked her and stole her once again. Though we would have paid any ransom to have her back, any price in the world, this disease would not let her go until she was gone.

If you are reading this with judgment, educate yourself about this disease, because that is what it is. It is not a choice or a weakness. And chances are very good that someone you know is struggling with it, and that person needs and deserves your empathy and support. If you work in one of the many institutions through which addicts often pass — rehabs, hospitals, jails, courts — and treat them with the compassion and respect they deserve, thank you. If instead you see a junkie or thief or liar in front of you rather than a human being in need of help, consider a new profession.

Bizarre: Sacramento police can’t figure out what charges to file against two high school students who handed out cookies at school that contained a secret ingredient – the cremation ashes of one of their grandparents.

Weird News Andy call’s “Rocky’s Revenge” as a New York State hunter dies of a brain disorder after eating the brain of a squirrel he shot. WNA says the incidence of the variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is high around Rochester, NY, which is a long way from Frostbite Falls, MN.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD will exhibit at the American Medical Billing Association National Conference October 18-19 in Las Vegas.
• CompuGroup Medical will exhibit at the Arizona MGMA Annual Conference October 17-19 in Chandler.
• Collective Medical partners with the Kentucky Hospital Association.
• Imprivata’s Mobile Device Access completes validation for use with select Zebra devices.
• CoverMyMeds will exhibit at the CBI Real-Time Benefit Check and ePrior Authorization Summit October 17-18 in San Francisco.
• CTG will exhibit at the 2018 Northwest Arkansas Technology Summit October 22-23 in Rogers.
• Cumberland Consulting Group will exhibit at the CBI Value-Based Oncology Management Forum October 23-24 in Scottsdale, AZ.
• Direct Consulting Associates will exhibit at the Western PA Healthcare Summit October 19 in Cranberry Township.
• Dimensional Insight will exhibit at the Value-Based Care Summit October 17 in Boston.
• DocuTap is accepting nominations for its student scholarship program.
• Redox will host its Healthcare Interoperability Summit November 13-14 in Denver.

Blog Posts

• Onboarding Remote Employees with Speed and Ease (Access)
• 6 ways providers are revolutionizing mental health care through new technology (Advisory Board)
• Safety matters: Keeping patient safety in mind (Agfa Healthcare)
• Points to Consider for EHR Optimization (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Help Me Alexa, I’m in Pain (Spok)
• Patients want doctors to talk to them about more than just physical symptoms, medications (AssessURHealth)
• HIPAA Compliant Server for a Client Portal Solution (Atlantic.net)
• Bluetree’s take on the new Epic release cycles (Bluetree)
• AWS re:Invent Healthcare Developer’s Conference Guide (Datica)
• Fall Events Recap: Reporting back from IM Symposium, NAACOS, and AHCA (CarePort Health)
• How Payers and HIT Analytics Can Help Primary Care Physicians Improve Care Quality (Change Healthcare)
• 7 Recruiting Trends That Will Continue into 2019 (Direct Consulting Associates)
• Navigating the Path to Value-Based Care (Dimensional Insight)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/15/18

Top News

Pathology image detection support system vendor Deep Lens announces $3.2 million in seed funding and availability of its free VIPER service for pathologists.

Co-founders of the Columbus, OH-based company are CEO Dave Billiter, MBA (Cardinal Health) and President Simon Arkell, MBA (Predixion Systems).

The company is based on work first performed at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus.

I like an uncredited quote in a company blog post that says you can’t rely too much on company experts whose user experience still makes them “FORMER experts in the field.” It also notes that product feedback from anyone other than a customer should be politely answered with, “Your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant.”

Reader Comments

From Biometric Believer: “Re: biometric ID. Would you mind asking your readers why, with advances in technology and increased fraud, hospitals aren’t deploying more iris scanning to patient care locations?” Good question, although I would expand your question to include palm vein scanning, facial recognition, voice recognition, and other less-used forms of biometric ID that hold equally promising potential without the need to approach someone’s eyeball with a scanner. There’s no question that all of these technologies work, only that consumer perception isn’t always great and healthcare and other industries (even banking) have resisted accordingly despite its obvious utility in fraud prevention. Some problems I see:

• Cost. Although technology costs are going down, deploying biometric readers broadly is a big expense and requires a coordination effort that you don’t want repeat often as those technologies change.
• Workflow integration, which has been mostly solved, I expect.
• The creep factor. Years ago I got the job of convincing nurses that our newly implemented fingerprint scanning for drug dispensing machines did not mean we were storing their fingerprints or checking them for criminal history.
• If hackers breach your system or someone grabs a patient’s fingerprints or takes a picture of their face, your patient is screwed because unlike passwords, they can’t change their biometrics.

My conclusion is that perhaps all of these problems could be solved by using the patient’s own phone as the biometric reader. People are happily using fingerprint recognition, voice recognition, and in some cases with higher-end phones, facial recognition to identify themselves for their own security. You would think that the hospital’s reader could connect via Bluetooth, although that’s a minor patient setup issue as well. Or, to address that issue as well as the fact that not everyone has a cell phone, maybe the hospital could use its own cell phones, handing one over temporarily to the patient to provide a less-threatening biometric ID process using a familiar consumer device.

For Biometric Believer, I created a poll for providers to say if they’re using biometric patient ID or why they don’t. Vote and then add a comment to elaborate.

From Arthur Allen: “Re: HIStalk. I spotted a rare error in Friday’s update. The VA’s assignment of Paul Tibbits to executive director for the Office of Electronic Health Record Modernization is not a direct replacement of Genevieve Morris. Title-wise at least, Tibbits and Morris differ. She was CHIO, but was also ostensibly in charge of OEHRM. Tibbits is the exec director and they described his job a little differently as well,  more of a liaison with OIT, leaving Captain Windom in charge of OEHRM.” Good point, thanks. John Windom, III led the Cerner selection and rollout by the DoD. Arthur is Politico’s e-health editor who made me beam with his “rare” adjective.

From Kermit: “Re: pre-existing conditions. NPR has a good analysis of the nuances.” The article notes that Republican leaders recognize that it’s politically unwise to take a stand against pre-existing conditions since at least 25 percent of us have them, yet their continued efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and to encourage junk insurance plans as an alternative are making them legal once again after several years. Medicare and Medicaid don’t have pre-existing condition limitations, so claims by Democrats that everyone would be impacted by ACA changes isn’t accurate. HIPAA is a factor since most Americans get health insurance through their employer and HIPAA doesn’t allow those insurers to deny coverage or price premiums based on medical history, but even that’s complicated since some HIPAA protections were moved into the ACA and might die along with it if ACA doesn’t survive legal challenges given the White House’s strategy of not defending it vigorously. TL; DR: everybody hates pre-existing conditions except politicians, who will throw those who have them under the bus if it helps their party.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I ran this poll to encourage folks who are struggling with an involuntary career change. Respondents who were fired, laid off, or relocated a few years back overwhelmingly say it turned out to be a positive development.

Marketing Guy was let go the same week he and his newly pregnant wife bought a new house, but he eventually got two job offers, took one that allowed him to move his family to Europe, and rose within that company’s ranks over 10 years. His advice is to keep working hard (even if that work involves job-hunting), keep learning, and stay positive. Hermanator was fired due to office politics from a company he had helped start, but he says it was the best thing that could have happened because he then started an even better company. He advises that folks take a break, reflect, learn from any mistakes they made, focus on their strengths, and find a new opportunity they can get passionate about.

New poll to your right or here: which would you value most highly in your personal doctor? You don’t get an “other” or intellectually lazy “all of the above” option because it’s my poll and I know what I’m trying to assess, but those who feel deprived that they weren’t given an essay question can click the “Comments” link after voting and opine away.

Old friend of HIStalk Alex Scarlat, MD (we first corresponded sometime before 2011, I found by searching my old emails) is doing fun work on his own with machine learning. Check out his DogBreed.io, which can identify a dog breed from a photo with 97 percent accuracy (giving you some idea of the excitement behind using ML for diagnostic imaging analysis). He says he wrote it in under 50 lines of Python code. Alex has also done some work with weather prediction that is showing high accuracy. I have suggested that he consider writing a primer series on machine learning for clinicians for HIStalk, a non-technical review of what’s inside the black box and where it might be good (or not so good) for healthcare applications.

I realized that my ancient Yahoo Mail account is a treasure trove of 80,000 emails going back to August 2004, 14 months after I started HIStalk (I don’t recall which email provider I used before then). Reading the names of defunct companies, seeing email from now-retired or deceased industry people, and marveling at my energy and exuberance in my emails way back then made me nostalgic. Yahoo Mail is still the best service I’ve used and its search is excellent, so let me know if there’s something fun I should search for (people, companies, unflattering terms, etc.) I found my first-ever interview from late 2004 that I thought was lost forever (with Meditech’s Howard Messing); planning emails from the first HIStalkapalooza in 2008; and threats from an industry magazine’s publisher who was unhappy that I ridiculed a newly assigned health IT reporter who was hired from a pastry magazine.

Webinars

October 30 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “How One Pediatric CIN Aligned Culture, Technology and the Community to Transform Care.” Presenters: Lisa Henderson, executive director, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Shehzad Saeed, MD, associate chief medical officer, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Mason Beard, solutions strategy leader, Philips PHM; Gabe Orthous, value-based care consultant, Himformatics. Sponsor: Philips PHM. Dayton Children’s Health Partners, a pediatric clinically integrated network, will describe how it aligned its internal culture, technology partners, and the community around its goal of streamlining care delivery and improving outcomes. Presenters will describe how it recruited network members, negotiated value-based contracts, and implemented a data-driven care management process.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Four private equity firms and activist investor Elliott Management are considering placing a bid to acquire Athenahealth, sources suggest. Pamplona Capital, which was previously rumored to be interested in acquiring the company and merging it with its NThrive holding, is not listed in the latest round of rumored potential acquirers but is presumably still in the hunt. ATHN will announce earnings on Thursday. Somehow you get the feeling that Elliott’s malicious manipulation isn’t going to be good for Athenahealth, its customers, or the health IT industry, but I’m sure some money guys will figure out how to enrich themselves while creating nothing more than mayhem.

Valley Presbyterian Hospital (CA) tries to ride the coattails of the new Neil Armstrong movie “First Man” by reminding everyone that it was the first hospital to use telemetry-based patient monitoring back in 1966, when Spacelabs took NASA’s astronaut monitoring product into healthcare.

Sales

• Drug maker Allergan joins TriNetX’s global health research network to analyze patient cohorts, choose study sites, and determine drug study protocol feasibility.
• The Kentucky Hospital Association joins Collective Medical’s care collaboration network to allow state hospitals to identify patients with a history of substance abuse or treats to ED staff safety as well as to identify and support complex patients.

Decisions

• Select Specialty Hospital-Johnstown (PA) will replace Medhost with Epic in 2019.
• Maury Regional Health System (TN) will implement Cerner in November 2018, replacing Meditech.
• Mercy Medical Center (MA) went live with Epic in September 2018.
• Washington County Regional Medical Center (GA) will go live with Evident financial management on November 1, 2018.

These provider-reported updates are supplied by Definitive Healthcare, which offers a free trial of its powerful intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and healthcare providers.

People

Wayne, PA-based behavioral health solution vendor Tridiuum hireshttps://tridiuum.com/tridiuum-expands-executive-team-with-cro/ Chris Salvatore, MBA (Halo Communications) as chief revenue officer.

Intelligent Medical Objects promotes Eric Rose, MD to VP of clinical informatics.

Announcements and Implementations

Mayo Clinic has been going live with the Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform along with its Epic go-lives, finishing up last week at its Jacksonville and Scottsdale campuses. Mayo now has a single enterprise imaging platform and diagnostic viewer along with Epic-driven interpretation workflow across its national network.

Maitland, FL-based Therigy, which sells specialty pharmacy software for therapy support and patient assessment, says it has reached 100 million patient engagement activity and assessment responses. The company offers care plans and assessments for 20 conditions, with 900 assessments covering 400 medications.

Government and Politics

A tweet by CMS Administrator Seema Verma implies that EHR vendors are responsible for the lack of interoperability adoption (which I’m wording intentionally as a combined technical and business problem as opposed to “lack of interoperability capability” as a purely technical issue). She says “doctors should be able to seamlessly exchange data between EHRs,” failing to note that many of them who are properly motivated already do in proving the product’s capability, while those using the very same EHR often remain as information silos.

The government of China expands its e-healthcare regulations:

• Commercial companies can collaborate with providers to offer electronic diagnosis, telemedicine, or e-hospitals, but they can’t provide those services on their own.
• Only licensed professionals with at least three years of clinical practice experience can offer online diagnostic services.
• Patients can use online clinical services only for follow-up visits. Physicians must refer patients to traditional channels otherwise.
• Remote consultation and prescribing is allowed as an adjunct to a hospital visit.
• Controlled substances may not be prescribed as part of a telemedicine visit.

Other

You won’t like this if you think HIMSS already has too much influence by running its own conference, media, and advertising empire and absorbing competitors by acquisition. HIMSS will help health services research organization AcademyHealth run Health Datapalooza 2019, which used to be a rather quiet conference targeting mostly federal government leaders and data wonks. You may take it to the bank (and HIMSS will) that the exhibit hall is going to get a lot bigger.

HIMSS haters might not like this, either. HHS will work with Healthbox (acquired by HIMSS a few months ago) to convene quarterly Deputy Secretary’s Innovation and Investment Summit meetings to ask investors which policies are standing in the way of innovation. Healthbox is a business accelerator that HIMSS acquired to expand its consulting, investment fund management, and startup assistance programs in uncovering yet another way to compete with its paying members.

Speaking of HIMSS, they’ve yet to respond to my October 2 request for their non-profit Form 990 federal filing, which they are required by law to provide (but maybe not promptly), even though I notice that I fawningly and mistakenly said “please” twice in the same sentence. I’m always interested in its salaries, revenue by segment, and the occasional buried information about its acquisitions.

The American Nurses Association’s journal celebrates National Health Information Technology Week with observations about EHR nurse documentation:

• Data models do not accurately capture nurse assessment and interventions, focusing instead on patient demographics, diagnoses, and procedures instead of the actions that nurses take.
• All care team members should be able to add to the electronic care plan documentation, including non-clinical information such as social determinants of health, and that documentation should be supported by health IT standards.
• A study has found that the EHR requires 593 clicks for a nurse to complete the nursing admission assessment and that 31 percent of the required items were already documented elsewhere, motivating Vanderbilt University Medical Center to create a “click gatekeeper” team that must approve requests to add items to the nurse documentation record.

Several prominent Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center researchers update their conflict-of-interest disclosures in previously published journal articles, adding previously undisclosed financial ties to drug companies. One doctor added 31 company affiliations, while another’s updated long list of company ties includes being paid consulting fees, owning stock options, and co-founding a company. MSKCC says each journal has its own disclosure requirements and some require authors to disclose relationships unrelated to the study being published, complicating the issue.

Weird News Andy titles this story as “CO and Old Lace.” In China, an anesthesiologist who was having an affair with the tutor of his children is sentenced to life in prison for killing his wife who refused to divorce him (his 16-year-old daughter also died as unintended collateral damage) by filling a yoga ball with carbon monoxide, removing the stopper, and placing it the trunk of his wife’s car. The deflated ball raised the suspicions of police, who then found that the doctor had ordered the carbon monoxide from his university employer claiming he needed it to perform animal tests.

Sponsor Updates

• Intelligent Medical Objects chairman, chief innovator, and co-founder Frank Naeymi-Rad, PhD, MS, MBA will be inducted into the American College of Medical Informatics at AMIA’s annual symposium in San Francisco November 3-7.
• InterSystems makes its IRIS Data Platform available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
• Waystar will exhibit at HFMA Region 2 Conference October 17-19 in Verona, NY.
• Nordic will exhibit at the Georgia HIMSS Annual Conference October 16 in Atlanta.
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, will exhibit at the AWHONN Iowa Section Conference October 16 in Des Moines.
• Recondo Technology will present at the Health Management Academy’s CFO Forum 2018 Meeting October 17-21 in Deer Valley, UT.
• Experian Health will host its 2018 Financial Performance Summit October 22-24 in Dallas.
• Redox partners with Smart Health Innovation Lab to help innovative healthcare startups accelerate time to integration.
• Sunquest will exhibit at ASHG 2018 October 16-20 in San Diego.
• Surescripts CEO Tom Skelton will keynote the Value-Based Care Summit October 17-19 in Boston.
• T-System offers disaster relief sheets free of charge to hospitals in the path of Hurricane Michael.
• Voalte will exhibit at the 2018 Michigan Nursing Summit October 18-19 in Lansing.
• FormFast joins the Zen Healthcare IT Interoperability Community.
• ZeOmega will exhibit at the 2018 CAHP Annual Conference October 22-24 in San Diego.

Blog Posts

• Getting Unstuck from Your Legacy Integration Technology (Liaison Technologies)
• Communication Plan, Collaboration & Continuity: CMS Emergency Preparedness Rule (LiveProcess)
• MDLive will provide online medical consultations at no cost to patients affected by Hurricane Michael.
• Celebrating Health IT, Industry Collaboration and EHR Optimization (Medicomp Systems)
• Building a Mobility Team (With a Little Help From Mobile Heartbeat) (Mobile Heartbeat)
• Finding the Right EHR to Bring Your Strategy to Life (Netsmart)
• Expanding Access to Quality Home Healthcare Through Mobile Innovation (NVoq)
• Are You Prepared for an Epic Foundation System Refuel Project? (Parallon Technology Solutions)
• Why Are We in Healthcare; Raison D’etre, not D’etat (CloudWave)
• Match, manage, and protect patient data (Experian Health)
• Don’t Touch My Data!! (PatientSafe Solutions)
• 6 tips to improve the patient financial experience (Patientco)
• Let’s Set Our Sights on Advancing Healthcare (PatientKeeper)
• The Unsung Heroes – Case Management Week 2018 (PreparedHealth)
• Pharmacists Want to Play a Bigger Part in Patient Care Yet Are Hamstrung by Poor Access to Patient Data (Surescripts)
• Reducing alarm fatigue requires planning and education. (Voalte)
• Transforming Healthcare Communication to Improve Patient Care (Vocera)
• 7 Things to Do When Medicare Requests Your Patient Records (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 10/12/18

Top News

Bay Medical Sacred Heart and Gulf Coast Regional Medical Center evacuate a combined 330 patients after suffering extensive damage during Hurricane Michael’s destructive trek through Panama City in the Florida panhandle. Damage to the facilities included a collapsed roof, cracked walls, blown-out windows, and in the case of Bay Medical, cooling and plumbing issues and loss of its information systems.

Bay Medical cardiologist Sam Patel, MD told the local news Michael’s winds were, in his experience, worse than Katrina’s: “The wind damage was pretty phenomenal. Windows were being blown in and water was coming in. Luckily, none of our patients had any injuries due to the storm. It was about two to three hours of pure hell.”

The category 4 storm, which achieved wind speeds of up to 155 mph, caused the closure of four hospitals and 11 nursing homes in Florida.

Webinars

October 30 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “How One Pediatric CIN Aligned Culture, Technology and the Community to Transform Care.” Presenters: Lisa Henderson, executive director, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Shehzad Saeed, MD, associate chief medical officer, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Mason Beard, solutions strategy leader, Philips PHM; Gabe Orthous, value-based care consultant, Himformatics. Sponsor: Philips PHM. Dayton Children’s Health Partners, a pediatric clinically integrated network, will describe how it aligned its internal culture, technology partners, and the community around its goal of streamlining care delivery and improving outcomes. Presenters will describe how it recruited network members, negotiated value-based contracts, and implemented a data-driven care management process.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

TransUnion acquires revenue cycle vendor Rubixis in an effort to strengthen its post-discharge revenue recovery services.

Amazon patents speech analysis technology that may give Alexa the ability to detect illness and mood in a user’s voice, and then recommend and order products from Amazon’s marketplace. The patent filing also suggests that products and services from advertisers would be the first of Alexa’s suggestions.

The DoJ clears CVS Health to proceed with its $69 billion merger with Aetna, which will operate as a standalone business once the deal closes at the end of Q4. First proposed late last year, the deal gained steam after Aetna sold off Medicity in May, and is now contingent on the payer selling off its Medicare prescription drug Part D plans. It has gotten pushback from trade associations like the AMA, which believes the merger will negatively affect patients by offering them fewer choices and, ultimately, higher prices.

Government and Politics

The VA promotes financial management exec Paul Tibbits to executive director for the Office of Electronic Health Record Modernization. Tibbits takes over the role from Genevieve Morris, who resigned in August over differences with leadership in project direction.

NASA pilots Wolters Kluwer Health’s UpToDate clinical decision support software aboard the International Space Station. To work around spotty Internet connectivity, astronauts are using the MobileComplete version, which gives them the ability to download content for offline access.

Sales

• Sovah Health (VA) will implement lung cancer screening software from Eon at its Martinsville and Danville campuses.
• Cornerstone Hospice and Palliative Care selects Netsmart’s MyUnity EHR for post-acute providers.

People

AMIA will honor National Library of Medicine Director Patricia Brennan, RN with the 2018 Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence at its annual symposium next month.

William Turner (GovernmentCIO) joins Healthcare Management Solutions as chief strategy officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Penn Highlands DuBois (PA) goes live with tele-ICU capabilities from Advanced ICU Care that will connect its providers with specialists at UPMC.

Avera Health will use an $8 million grant to develop a behavioral health team at its ECare telemedicine hub in South Dakota. Virtual services will initially cater to ED and psychiatric hospital patients, then expand to first responders.

Urgent Care Group implements DocuTap’s EHR and practice management software at its MedCare Urgent Care facilities in South Carolina.

Surescripts sees utilization of its Record Locator & Exchange service jump 40 percent since launching last year thanks to increased adoption amongst Epic, NextGen, and EClinicalWorks users.

Northern Light Health’s A.R. Gould Hospital (ME) transitions to Cerner as part of what seems to be a nearly system-wide roll out that coincides with a rebranding from Eastern Maine Health System.

Good Shepherd Health Care System (OR) will go live on Epic next month through a $3 million sharing agreement with Legacy Health.

Other

Penn Medicine launches an internal EHR campaign that it hopes will get its Epic end users thinking about how to use the software more for care delivery than documentation. The transformation project will include an innovation tournament that will pair IT staff, data scientists, and clinical educators with clinicians to create software improvements.

Public hospitals in Melbourne, Australia rake in $45 million in car parking fees thanks to daily rates as high as $35, and government officials who don’t mind turning a blind eye despite promising to lower prices. The public’s outrage has also extended to Sydney, where its Eye Hospital has earned the dubious honor of charging the highest parking rate in the country – $64 for six hours.

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia researchers use EHR data from its Epic system to develop an automated malnutrition screening tool that alerts providers to at-risk patients.

Cerner CEO Brent Shafer shows off his musical chops at the company’s closing night conference bash.

Military Makeover host Montel Williams credits the use of telemedicine by NYC paramedics with helping to save his life after suffering a rare type of stroke while working out in a hotel gym.

Sponsor Updates

• Primus Capital’s growth investment in Hayes will support continued development of its MDaudit Enterprise revenue integrity software.
• Elsevier provides point-of-care tools to NHS Wales in the UK.
• The EClinicalWorks National Conference attracts over 5,000 attendees.
• FormFast will exhibit at Health Connect Partners Hospital & Healthcare IT Conference October 15-17 in Chicago.
• Glytec publishes a new e-book, “Hypoglycemia in the hospital: Why is it costing you millions and what can you do?”
• Hayes will exhibit at the 2018 Revenue Integrity Symposium October 16-18 in Phoenix, AZ.
• Iatric Systems will exhibit at the HIMSS Healthcare Security Forum October 15-16 in Boston.
• InterSystems will exhibit at Healthcare Providers Transformation October 16-17 in Denver.
• The American Medical Informatics Association will induct Intelligent Medical Objects CEO Frank Naeymi-Rad, PhD, MBA into the American College of Medical Informatics.
• Kyruus will host the Annual Thought Leadership on Access Symposium October 15-17 in Boston.
• Meditech will host the 2018 Physician and CIO Forum October 17-18 in Foxborough, MA.
• AxialHealthcare will incorporate medication history from Surescripts into its analytics-based pain management software.
• Diameter Health earns ONC 2015 Edition Health IT Module Certification from the Drummond Group.
• PatientPing congratulates its national network of ACOs on generating shared savings of $270 million.

Blog Posts

• Bright Medical Horizons in Nashville (EClinicalWorks)
• User Story: Hospital IT Fixes 100’s of Citrix Print Issues (Goliath Technologies)
• Specialty-Specific Conferences: Food, Fun, and Face-to-Face (PMD)
• Four Ways Data is Disrupting the Healthcare Industry (Healthgrades)
• New Book from Next Wave’s Lynn Vogel Provides an Inside Look into the Complexity of American Health Care (Huntzinger Management Group)
• CRM for Healthcare Marketing (Influence Health)
• 4 ways integrated technologies are improving cancer care in Australia (Meditech)
• Examining Mergers and Acquisitions in Healthcare – Don’t Forget About the Patient (Loyale Healthcare)

Contacts

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

News 10/10/18

Top News

GE Healthcare’s former Value-Based Care Solutions Group, sold to private equity firm Veritas Capital in April 2018 for $1.05 billion in cash, renames itself Virence Health Technologies.

The GE Healthcare products that were included in the acquisition are revenue cycle, ambulatory, and workforce management systems previously sold under the Centricity and API Healthcare brands.

Virence Chairman and CEO Bob Segert, appointed in mid-September, has zero healthcare experience. Former GE VP/GM and industry long-timer Jon Zimmerman will report to Segert as president.

Reader Comments

From Red Red Wine: “Re: careers. Why would you say that co-workers aren’t your friends? I socialize quite a bit with my work family at [vendor name omitted].” The people who might give you a ride to work from your oil change since they might need you to return the favor won’t be nearly as willing to serve as emergency overnight dog-sitters, listen patiently as you tearily describe your mother’s dementia, or know when and how to reach out supportively when you miss a few work days without explanation. I should probably take my own “work is not life” advice by not holding a grudge against former co-workers who I think wronged me in some way – it probably wasn’t personal that they were back-stabbing opportunists who were forged in an ugly corporate health system crucible that resembled one of those psychology experiments where a test subject will apply deadly electric shocks to an innocent victim when an authority figure insists. I guarantee that within minutes of your also-friendly employer marching you off their property in a layoff, your “work family” members are going to be unemotionally circling like vultures to get first dibs on your cubicle stuff.

From Conference Liner: “Re: Cerner naming social media influencers for CHC. Is that a thing now that HIMSS has been doing it?” Beats me. I don’t really get the point of naming “social media influencers” unless it’s to give them free registration in return for the free advertising they theoretically offer in return. It’s not as though tweeting is so hard that only Twitter experts can figure it out, or that those folks possess industry influence that correlates to their Twitter stats (since those stats don’t indicate exactly who they are influencing beyond each other). At least the Cerner-named influencers are mostly accomplished people who hold responsible jobs as recognizable subject matter experts.

Webinars

October 30 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “How One Pediatric CIN Aligned Culture, Technology and the Community to Transform Care.” Presenters: Lisa Henderson, executive director, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Shehzad Saeed, MD, associate chief medical officer, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Mason Beard, solutions strategy leader, Philips PHM; Gabe Orthous, value-based care consultant, Himformatics. Sponsor: Philips PHM. Dayton Children’s Health Partners, a pediatric clinically integrated network, will describe how it aligned its internal culture, technology partners, and the community around its goal of streamlining care delivery and improving outcomes. Presenters will describe how it recruited network members, negotiated value-based contracts, and implemented a data-driven care management process.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Odd: the soon-to-be-renamed Adventist Health System / Florida Hospital signs up as a multi-year sponsor of Nascar’s Speedweeks, heretofore to be reverently referred to as “Daytona Speedweeks Presented by AdventHealth.” Nascar, which must be happy to have signed a new sponsor as its attendance, TV ratings, and sponsorships continue their sharp slide, declares that “the Daytona Speedweeks brand will provide another platform for Florida Hospital to amplify their new name.” Hopefully the terms did not include requiring Florida Hospital’s doctors to wear ads on their scrubs or surgical teams to swoop in with their instruments like a pit crew to complete an appendectomy in less than 20 minutes.

People

The National Library of Medicine promotes Clem McDonald, MD, MS to the newly created position of chief health data standards officer.

Announcements and Implementations

China-based Tencent – which developed the globally popular (except in the US) WeChat app — will work with England-based Medopad to assess the condition of Parkinson’s disease patients by analyzing video of their movements and to alert their doctors of any deterioration. Tencent is working on other AI-related healthcare projects.

Office Depot-owned CompuCom launches Self Healing Healthcare, a service that monitors end user devices for problems, outages, and failures.

Blockchain-focused, UK-based health data rights organization Hu-manity.co launches in Europe to push for patients to control and manage their own healthcare data under the #My31 movement that advocates making such ownership the 31st Human Right. They’re also launching a US-only app to allow users to specify such control.

Privacy and Security

Startup LunaDNA, backed by a DNA sequencing company, seeks SEC approval for its business plan to pay consumers for the right to sell their genetic information, the opposite of companies like 23andMe that charge people to sequence their DNA and then profitably sell their information on the sly. Donors earn shares in the “biobroker” company and post their de-identified information up for bid on its marketplace to keep a share of the proceeds.

Google shuts down its spectacularly failed would-be Facebook competitor Google+ after deciding not to alert users that a security hole allowed their data to be hacked over several years. A Google committee advised executives that owning up to the breach would damage the company’s reputation and trigger a regulatory response a la Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, so it decided to close Google+ instead. A splendid Twitter review by former US Digital Service Administrator (and former Google employee) Mikey Dickerson says Google+’s self-proclaimed “social spine” infected the company’s other products, such as YouTube’s shared log-in and the termination of Google Reader. He concluded with a brilliant observation above. We science types appreciate Mikey’s LinkedIn tagline of “Free Radical.”

DataBreaches.net reports that virtual visit vendor MedCall Advisors has, for the second time in a month, been caught storing patient data in an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket. CEO Randy Baker did not acknowledge the courtesy notifications that were sent to him or ask those who alerted him about the exposure to delete any PHI they accessed.

Other

Researchers advocate that EHR-powered electronic trigger tools be used to detect possible diagnostic errors and to identify patients who are at high risk of adverse events. The most obvious immediate benefit would seem to be to identify gaps in care cause by poor coordination, such as when nobody seems to have followed up on critical diagnostic results. The most limiting factor is the extent of clinical information stored as free text.

A BMJ opinion piece says the industry needs to do a better job of reducing the number of unwanted EHR alerts that consume physician time. Here’s the dilemma – we don’t let doctors individually decide based on their own practice which alerts to turn off because those “unwanted” alerts are often important, at least in the opinion of the non-doctors who maintain them. That brings up the never-ending dilemma of the purpose of the EHR – is it intended to help doctors, or instead to force administrative policies and concerns on them? I’ve worked a lot on those alerts and found these challenges:

• Alerts are not always personalized (or cannot be personalized). A warning about a specific drug for a patient with kidney disease might be useful to a surgeon, but not a nephrologist.
• An overridden alert, where the intended action is completed as an order, means the user, rightly or wrongly, didn’t find that alert useful.
• On the other hand, doctors routinely fail to read EHR screens (due to alert overload, poor UI, or sloppy behavior) and will happily override a warning that prescribing 1,000 Tylenol tablets might be unwise and leave their error for someone else to catch.
• My most important conclusion is that the quest to apply alerts universally is an illogical reflection of the collective nature of how hospitals see doctors. They know which ones have marginal skills or a record of causing patient mayhem, but they punish all doctors instead of just those who clearly need more than an average amount of electronic help to avoid screw-ups. Doctors should be regularly graded on their clinical track record, experience levels, malpractice and discipline history, and history of alert compliance, with the sensitivity of clinical alerts tuned to prevent them from making mistakes while not hindering those who rarely do so.

A review of virtual online consultation platforms, aka virtual second opinions – specifically Medscape Consult – concludes that medical crowdsourcing can reduce diagnostic errors and increase global reach. The most valuable takeaway is that most of the doctors presenting cases were young, but most of the expert responses came from doctors over 60 years of age, suggesting that: (a) younger doctors can benefit from asking more experienced ones to weigh in; and (b) older doctors are technically comfortable enough to provide such wisdom. The authors note that they don’t have any way to determine whether those second opinions improved diagnostic accuracy, but it doesn’t matter – even if the original doctor’s conclusion was correct, having experienced peer validation provides confidence and perhaps reduces further expensive diagnostic work. Having face-to-face contact with patients is important, but this is an example of where armchair quarterbacking can provide real patient value and an opportunity for older doctors to contribute purely as an intellectual challenge without dealing with reimbursement, the limitations of a 15-minute encounter, practicing defensive medicine, or managing a patient’s entire medical life instead of just recognizing what’s wrong with them and then moving on.

A fascinating New York Times article covers the MD-PhD co-founder of drug maker Regeneron, whose cholesterol-lowering drug is so widely useful yet so expensive ($14,000 per year) that insurers often won’t pay for it. The kicker: that co-founder is the guy who invented the drug and yet he pays full list price for his own prescription (so he claims, anyway) since the company’s insurance doesn’t cover it. He says Regeneron spent $2.6 billion to get the drug on the market and annual sales are less than $200 million.

Pediatrics professor and New York Times contributor Aaron Carroll says the Apple Watch’s new EKG capability has quite a few negatives – few people have undiagnosed arrhythmias that don’t have symptoms, false positives and negatives can be worrisome and expensive, a Stanford study found that most of the Watch’s EKG warnings were wrong, previous large-scale studies found little value in mass population EKG screening, and that the device’s cost (which isn’t covered by insurance) means that people who would benefit most from it won’t get it. He advises, “But I’m under no illusion [Apple Watch’s activity monitoring] will help me lose weight or exercise more or improve my heart health. I own one because I want it, not because I need it.”

A Washington Post review finds that millennials often don’t have a primary care provider and don’t want one, favoring the convenience, speed, and upfront pricing of walk-in clinics and urgent care centers to meet their infrequent needs instead of PCP practices that require making appointments well in advance, cover limited hours, and send patients to the ED on evenings and weekends. The dilemma is that patients have to give up the benefits of longitudinal care because they value it less than convenience.

Cerner Chairman and CEO Brent Shafer provides Monday’s opening keynote at the Cerner Health Conference in Kansas City, MO.

I enjoyed this recap of the beginnings of Flatiron Health by co-founder Nat Turner, who with his also-under-30 co-founder had previously sold their ad business to Google for $80 million. They  decided to do something about cancer, figuring Flatiron would be a non-profit until they realized that “great engineers don’t work at non-profits. They tend to go to places like Facebook.” Flatiron bought oncology EHR vendor Altos Solutions with Google investment money barely after not even knowing what an EHR is, but quickly figured out how to mine EHR data to assess cancer drug effectiveness. Drug maker Roche bought the company six years after its founding in April 2018 at a $2.1 billion valuation. Cancer has made a lot of people poor, but a few people rich.

Anxious healthcare startups love to compare themselves to Uber or Facebook, but here’s a legal case where Uber can call itself the Epic of ride-sharing services. A court rules that Uber’s driver arbitration agreements are legal based on the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, which found that such employer-mandated terms preclude employees from undertaking actions as a class to address labor disputes.

Tuesday was Ada Lovelace Day, honoring the mathematician – and arguably the world’s first computer programmer — who recognized the potential of the Analytical Engine theorized by Charles Babbage. She died at 36 in 1852 after doctors treated her uterine cancer with bloodletting. Her father was Lord Byron, although he bailed on Lady Byron early on and his daughter never knew him.

Sponsor Updates

• Ellkay is exhibiting this week at the Cerner Health Conference, where it will demonstrate its LKArchive data archiving solution for accessing information from decommissioned legacy systems. 
• Spok’s Connect 18 annual conference attracts 150 attendees to Scottsdale, AZ this week.
• Smart Health Innovation Lab will offer Redox’s integration platform to companies that have graduated from its market accelerator program.
• Howard Medical will offer Imprivata Medical Device Access on some of its medical storage carts.
• AdvancedMD will exhibit at the American Society of Dermatologic Surgeons Annual Meeting October 11-14 in Phoenix, AZ.
• Aprima and CompuGroup Medical will exhibit at the AAFP Annual Meeting October 10-12 in New Orleans.
• Audacious Inquiry hires Christina Caraballo (Get Real Health) as director.
• Arcadia will exhibit and present at the SRHO 2018 annual conference October 11-12 in Dallas.
• Bluetree and Direct Consulting Associates will exhibit at the Health Connect Partners Hospital & Healthcare IT Conference October 15-17 in Chicago.
• Bernoulli Health will present at the Connected Health Conference – Immersion Day October 17 in Boston.
• Datica will present at the Cloud Native PDX meeting October 12 in Madison, WI.
• CarePort Health will exhibit at ACMA North Carolina October 12 in Asheville, NC.
• Diameter Health will speak at the HIMSS NE Health IT Advocacy and HIE Day October 10 in Worcester, MA.

Blog Posts

• Healthcare IT Impacts Us All, Some More Than Others (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Shifting Gears: 6 Ways Clinicians Can Transition Into Health IT (Spok)
• How Electronic Patient Signature Solutions Can Demolish Patient Satisfaction in Registration (Access)
• 3 assumptions hospital executives must shed to achieve high value care (Advisory Board)
• Radiology: front and center! (Agfa Healthcare)
• Can Drupal Websites Be HIPAA-Compliant? (Atlantic.net)
• Configuring Popular Managed Database Services To Comply with HITRUST CSF (Datica)
• Five Tactical Must-Reads for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (Burwood Group)
• Transparency in Health Care – Moving Beyond Buzzwords to Solutions (Change Healthcare)
• National Health IT Week: How Analytics Contributes to Healthier Communities (Dimensional Insight)
• Delivering Primary Care on Demand (DocuTap)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/8/18

Top News

An study of 83 mostly top-rated hospitals finds that patients still struggle to get copies of their medical information (matching my appalling experience):

• 89 percent do not allow patients to request a specific category of information to be released
• 47 percent don’t offer an option to request the entire medical record even though all of them claim to offer that option
• Medical records release form instructions often differ from what employees tell patients by telephone
• Many hospitals ignore the federal requirement that they provide information in whatever format the patient wants
• More than half of hospitals charge patients more than OCR guidelines and 8 percent say they routinely don’t meet state-mandated release timeframes
• Trying to get to the right person by telephone is made difficult by complex phone trees and, in the case of two hospitals, no option was offered to speak with a human or to leave a message

Reader Comments

From Kenny Powers: “Re: the all-new Allscripts Avenel EHR. I haven’t heard anything about it since it was announced in March. Is it being sold yet?” I haven’t heard a peep since the buzzword-heavy announcement seven months ago. The product isn’t listed on the company’s EHR page and Googling turns up nothing. It wasn’t mentioned in the company’s August earnings call. Allscripts said it’s being used by Carlinville Area Hospital (IL), which didn’t respond to my inquiry.

From Pure Prairie: “Re: GE. I can’t figure out how they took such a hard fall.” Chasing business and technology fads; poor strategic and operational performance by Jeff Immelt; a smothering bureaucracy that stifled innovation and encouraged executive backstabbing; unfocused acquisitions under both Jack Welch and Immelt whose interesting aspects were digested away in GE’s sluggish colon; incestuously moving the same old executives around in wildly unrelated divisions per the “GE way;” and a conglomerate strategy that left it vulnerable to big downturns in oil and financial services. GE Healthcare IT was best known for buying vendors with top-ranked products and then diving straight to the bottom as the poster child for “first to worst.”

From Amatriciana: “Re: careers. I was laid off and could use advice.” I’ve had my share of career missteps (being demoted, boss conflicts, regretting taking a promotion after belatedly realizing that the last thing I wanted was more responsibility) and my general conclusions are these:

• It doesn’t matter whether the seemingly undesirable change is your fault or the company’s.
• Your self-worth or identity is not defined by what you do for money and the people you worked for or with are not your real friends. You are a vendor (of your own services) who lost a key account and life goes on.
• Always be managing your career and your network so you aren’t caught off guard when you need to make a change quickly (OK, I’ve never done that, but I wish I had when the layoff axe began swinging and we were all scrambling simultaneously hoping to find local jobs with similar skill sets).
• Never stop learning, even if on your own (cue my pitch for reading HIStalk as well as my original incentive for writing it).
• The dotted lines of your career changes make sense only after the fact, when the pattern becomes clear. You never know where you’ll end up or how to get there. Serendipity is often your friend.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents aren’t heavy users of smart speakers at home. The most common uses are setting hands-free timers, playing music or mood sounds, keeping shopping lists, checking the weather, and controlling smart plugs to turn specific items on and off. There’s apparently also an intercom feature on Echos that I didn’t know about and some folks play games on their devices. 

New poll to your right or here: for those whose company, more than five years ago, terminated you, demoted you, or forced you to move — did that turn out to be positive overall?

Thanks to these companies that recently supported HIStalk. Click a few logos to learn more about companies you don’t know much about and to thank them for making what I do possible.

I didn’t realize what a mess I’d gotten into when a friend asked for help buying a replacement set of wired earbuds for her Phone 7, a shining example of Apple’s recent cluelessness and crappy accessory quality. That model eliminated the headphone jack for no user-benefitting reason; Apple’s Earpods (as well as the Lightning-to-3.5mm connector) are pure junk that last weeks at best, according to reviews; you can’t listen and charge simultaneously; and because of the market opportunity offered by Apple’s misstep, every product listing on Amazon is obviously fake since the reviews don’t match the product. Bluetooth is an option, but it’s pain having to charge earbuds as well as the phone itself. I finally gave up and spent $30 on the EarPods from Best Buy plus $10 for the converter cable since I was getting free shipping anyway, so at least the option is there to ditch Apple’s earbuds in favor of decent ones, at least for the few days the converter cable is likely to last before falling apart.

Webinars

October 30 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “How One Pediatric CIN Aligned Culture, Technology and the Community to Transform Care.” Presenters: Lisa Henderson, executive director, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Shehzad Saeed, MD, associate chief medical officer, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Mason Beard, solutions strategy leader, Philips PHM; Gabe Orthous, value-based care consultant, Himformatics. Sponsor: Philips PHM. Dayton Children’s Health Partners, a pediatric clinically integrated network, will describe how it aligned its internal culture, technology partners, and the community around its goal of streamlining care delivery and improving outcomes. Presenters will describe how it recruited network members, negotiated value-based contracts, and implemented a data-driven care management process.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Gastroenterology EHR vendor GMed, acquired in mid-2015 by Modernizing Medicine, renames itself to Modernizing Medicine Gastroenterology. 

Sales

• Hackensack Meridian Health (NJ) implements Vocera Rounds at JFK Medical Center, the health system’s 10th deployed hospital.
• Berkshire Health Systems selects Santa Rosa Consulting to lead its Meditech Expanse implementation.

Decisions

• Kessler Institution for Rehabilitation (NJ) switched from Medhost to Epic in March 2018
• University of Mississippi Healthcare (MS) will replace Infor with Workday human resources software by January 2019
• Yalobusha General Hospital (MS) implement Athenahealth in December 2017, replacing Medhost
• Memorial Hospital (IL) will replace Evident financial management with Infor
• Olmstead Medical Center (MN) will implement Epic in September 2018, replacing Cerner

These provider-reported updates are supplied by Definitive Healthcare, which offers a free trial of its powerful intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and healthcare providers.

People

Tim Knoll (Healthgrades) joins PatientSafe Solutions as regional VP.

Announcements and Implementations

A KLAS report on medical device security — created with CHIME and its security group AEHIS — finds that few CIOs and CISOs are confident that those devices are protected, mostly because of poor manufacturer support or due to their own lack of a device inventory. The confident respondents give credit to good policies and procedures, strong technology, and interdepartmental collaboration, although it’s anybody’s guess as to whether they are truly more secure rather than naive. Respondents say it’s tough to protect legacy devices due to outdated operating systems, lack of patching capability due to technology limitations or warranty policy, hardcoded passwords, and lack of encryption. They also say manufacturers use FDA policies as their excuse for not patching their devices, yet FDA rarely holds the device-makers responsible when their systems are breached.

A new Reaction Data report on clinical decision support finds that 55 percent of mostly hospital-based respondents use multiple CDS solutions, with most of those provided by their EHR vendor. Caveat: I would question the accuracy of the 25 percent of respondents who say their hospital doesn’t use any form of CDS, the non-appearance of Meditech on the list among its EHR competitors, and the inclusion of Allscripts EPSi even though it offers only financial (not clinical) decision support. Non-EHR vendors with the largest presence are Stanson Health and National Decision Support Company. A 2017 study found that the imaging CDS of NDSC, which was acquired by Change Healthcare in January 2018,  holds 70 percent of that market.

EClinicalWorks will integrate its Healow mobile app with the WellWatch smart watch being developed by UK-based Care UK.

Government and Politics

The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics employment report finds that healthcare employment increased by 26,000 in September, nearly evenly split between hospitals and ambulatory services. Healthcare employment has increased by 302,000 in the past year. In other words, we’re turning the entire country into one giant hospital and then complaining that insurance costs too much and our taxes are too high.

Other

CNBC profiles Heartbeat, a cardiology practice startup that is opening offices in New York City that will offer online tests, virtual care, and treatment plans that include exercise and nutrition components. The “fully digitized boutique cardiology practice” accepts Medicare, commercial insurance, and cash ($200 for a visit or $299 for an annual membership).

Aprima sales executive Lance Allen donates a kidney to allow his peer Mike Alfieri — who he met two years ago at a company sales meeting — to receive a transplant in a 13-person paired exchange.

Just in case watching a single shark jumping isn’t enough, BlackBerry (are they still in business, and if so, why?) announces a blockchain solution for health data storage, an operating system for secure medical devices, and a skin cancer data sharing service for researchers. The company has chased healthcare tech fads before — I haven’t heard a thing about BlackBerry’s work with (and investment in) NantHealth in early 2014.

The Montivideo, MN paper apparently confused the local hospital’s incumbent vendor (Meditech) with its new one (Epic). I assume it’s a Community Connect implementation at a price of just $1.5 million. It’s also odd that the hospital says its existing system is “outdated” when it was supposed to have upgraded to Meditech 6.1, although maybe that never happened.

Sponsor Updates

• Liaison Technologies will accept applications for its $5,000 Spring Semester 2019 Data-Inspired Future Scholarship through October 31.
• LiveProcess will exhibit at the Iowa Hospital Association Annual Meeting 2019 October 9-11 in Des Moines.
• Vyne Medical, Experian Health, The SSI Group, Surescripts, and National Decision Support Co. will exhibit at the Cerner Health Conference October 8-11 in Kansas City, MO.
• Netsmart will exhibit at the Michigan Premier Public Health Conference October 10 in Bay City, MI.
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, will exhibit at the AWHONN conference October 11 in Freeport, ME.
• TransUnion wins an “Outstanding Company Culture” award from the Illinois Technology Association.
• TriNetX will exhibit at the MedImmune California Translational Science Forum October 9 in San Francisco.
• Voalte names Candice Friestad, RN of Avera Health the 2018 Voalte Innovator of the Year.
• Wellsoft will exhibit at the Urgent Care Association Fall Conference October 12-14 in Houston.

Blog Posts

• Make the Business Case for Real-Time Healthcare Technology (LiveProcess)
• How healthcare executives can forge a stronger chain against cyberattacks (Meditech)
• Bringing Ovation’s technology into the Waystar family as we keep dreaming bigger (Waystar)
• How Social Determinants of Health Support the Value-Based Care Reimbursement Model (Netsmart)
• Meditech Expanse & the Network (CloudWave)
• Winning the Battle: Hospital Patient Access Best Practices (The SSI Group)
• Reimagine healthcare communication at VUE18. (Voalte)
• Real-Time Healthcare Analytics: Monitor, Predict, Nudge, Act (Vocera)
• Why the Future of the Profession Depends on Collaborating with Stakeholders (WebPT)
• How telehealth will grow: payments and usage (Philips Wellcentive)
• 2019 IPPS Final Rule: What You Need to Know (Wellsoft)

Contacts

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

News 10/5/18

Top News

Cerner announces its VA EHR modernization team, with Leidos, Accenture, and Henry Schein taking on prominent roles as expected.

In announcing the 23 members, the company stressed that it will leverage investments already made by the DoD for its nearly concurrent Cerner-powered EHR revamp. VA Secretary Robert Wilkie and Defense Secretary James Mattis have said their departments will work together to ensure their new EHR systems are implemented on a unified schedule and are capable of seamlessly sharing data with civilian and government providers.

Cerner has promised to unveil a project timeline at its user conference next week.

I reviewed the list of companies Cerner has chosen as partners for its VA implementation. These are also working on the DoD’s Cerner implementation:

• Accenture
• Leidos
• Henry Schein
• Holland Square Group (Cerner-focused implementation consultants — acquired by Alku in December 2017)
• MedSys Group (EHR consulting)
• ProSource360 (government consulting)

These are the VA-only partners just announced:

• AbleVets (government consulting)
• ACI Federal  (government IT contractor)
• B3 Group  (government consulting)
• Blue Sky Innovative Solutions (government consulting
• Clarus Group (a Salesforce-focused consulting firm that offers government technology services)
• Forward Thinking Innovations (government health IT — seems to be a two-person consulting firm)
• Guidehouse (the former PwC Public Sector consulting group)
• HCTec (health IT and revenue cycle consulting)
• HRG Technologies (revenue cycle services)
• KRM Associates (government contract health IT contractor, a small husband and wife business)
• Liberty IT Solutions (government technology contractor)
• MedicaSoft (sells an EHR, PHR, and Direct messaging services with a founder who a lot of VA work with FHIR and is founder and board chair at the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance)
• MicroHealth (government analytics, engineering, integration)
• PM Solutions (project management)
• Point Solutions Group (consultant staffing)
• Sharpe Medical Consulting  (health IT consulting, medical staffing)
• Signature Performance (revenue cycle consulting)
• ThomasRiley Strategies (consulting)

Reader Comments

From Plenary Session: “Re: UMass’s financial struggles. Isn’t this the kind of organization that has no business putting $700 million into Epic? Negative operating margins, historically financially strained … makes no sense.” The health system’s operating income has been all over the place, with capital renovation temporarily eating up some of its capacity. While I will defend my contention that a new EHR will amplify a provider’s existing levels of excellence (rarely moving a poor hospital to good), the mere act of choosing, buying, and implementing such a pervasive system (which requires more consensus and focus than many hospitals can muster) may either signal or create its resolve make overdue improvements. Epic also pushes its customers, steamrolling over incompetent or inertia-crippled hospital middle management with the full support of the hospital’s C-level, so don’t underestimate the motivational impact of your CEO demanding that you deliver $700 million worth of value in a rare example of holding executives accountable for true change and coordination across departments. In that regard, improved operational management and visibility may be a byproduct of implementing Epic, although it’s a shame that a software vendor that really doesn’t offer “management consulting” has to lead the charge against mediocrity. Still, hospitals happily pay to have consulting firms tell them what everybody else is doing, so at least an Epic implementation binds the organization to deliver measurable results. As much as we cheap-seaters might smirk about a health system spending hundreds of millions of dollars on software (and oh, I do), the fact is many of them are happy about their decision afterward and show improved results whether it’s Epic, Cerner, or Meditech.

From Expat Investor: “Re: Cornerstone Advisors. Allegations are that officials of its corporate owner 8K Miles forged auditor documents to move money to a sister company mostly owned by the CFO, who resigned.” The India-listed company’s external auditor also quit over the transfers between the companies, which share a CEO.  8K Miles acquired healthcare IT consulting and implementation vendor Cornerstone Advisors Group in late 2016.

From Zeke Avarice: “Re: webinars. Why would someone watch a recording, such as on your YouTube channel?” Live webinars have just one advantage, and that’s being able to ask the presenter questions. The disadvantage is that you have to be available at the designated time, you have to pay attention at what might be an inopportune moment, and you can’t fast-forward or rewind. That’s why we archive the recording  — those get more views than the live sessions due to the long tail of people discovering them after the fact. Still, we get a lot of interest in webinars (example click counts above), although the quality of the program and the speakers drive whether people actually sign up after reading the description and not everyone who signs up is able to attend (which is why we send absentees a link to the video and a PDF of the slides).

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Atlantic.net. The Orlando-based secure hosting solutions vendor provides HIPAA-compliant, PCI-ready, and cloud hosting from its state-of-the-art data centers in New York, London, Toronto, San Francisco, Northern Virginia, and Dallas. The company just won a “Best IoT Healthcare Platform” awards. Organizations choose the company – founded in 1994 in Gainesville, FL — for its 100 percent uptime SLA, its emphasis on security and compliance, and its award-winning service backed by support engineers with decades of experience, all at competitive prices. It offers the eight items required to deliver HIPAA-compliant hosting – firewall, encrypted VPN, offsite backups, multi-factor authentication, private hosted environment, SSL certificates, SSAE 18 certification, and a signed business associate agreement. Thanks to Atlantic.net for supporting HIStalk. 

Webinars

October 30 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “How One Pediatric CIN Aligned Culture, Technology and the Community to Transform Care.” Presenters: Lisa Henderson, executive director, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Shehzad Saeed, MD, associate chief medical officer, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Mason Beard, solutions strategy leader, Philips PHM; Gabe Orthous, value-based care consultant, Himformatics. Sponsor: Philips PHM. Dayton Children’s Health Partners, a pediatric clinically integrated network, will describe how it aligned its internal culture, technology partners, and the community around its goal of streamlining care delivery and improving outcomes. Presenters will describe how it recruited network members, negotiated value-based contracts, and implemented a data-driven care management process.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Change Healthcare hires underwriters for an IPO that could value the company at up to $12 billion. The prep work comes nearly a year after McKesson CEO John Hammergren said he wanted to take the company public. McKesson owns a 70 percent stake of Change, which was formed last year through the merger of its IT business and the former Emdeon.

People

The MacArthur Foundation awards Deborah Estrin a fellowship, including a $625,000 “genius grant,” for her work on determining how data generated by smartphones, wearables, and online interactions can be used for mobile health while still maintaining user privacy. Estrin is a professor of computer science at Cornell Tech and of healthcare policy and research at Weill Cornell Medicine. She directs Cornell Tech’s Small Data Lab; and founded the Health Tech Hub at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, as well as the nonprofit, open-source software architecture startup Open mHealth.

Announcements and Implementations

Frost & Sullvan names Medicomp Systems the winner of its 2018 North America EHR Optimization Technology Leadership Award for its Quippe productivity enhancement solutions for reducing documentation burden.

Datica announces GA of its Cloud Compliance Management System for developers.

Collective Medical will deliver its real-time event notification and care collaboration tools through Appriss Health’s PMP Gateway integration software, used by the prescription drug monitoring programs of 43 states.

A new KLAS report says behavioral health EHRs are one of the lowest-performing segments it measures due to slow development, vendor over commitment, and state-specific reporting needs. Still, frustrated customers are likely to keep their existing systems due to lack of money and competitive alternatives. Valeant would have topped the list (over Credible and Cerner, which has two offerings in Millennium and its acquired Anasazi) had it generated enough responses. No vendor scored above a 7 in “keeps all promises.”

Buoy Health, which offers an AI-powered chatbot, wins the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s AU Challenge Award for patient education. I’m not really a fan of the many available online symptom checkers and I’d like to see their results validated against a an actual visit with a clinician, but this one seems OK if you like them. Startups obsess over the problem they think exists in misdiagnosis or underdiagnosis, packing PCP offices and EDs with people who need more information, have been given bad information by the computer, or who can’t afford further diagnostic work or treatments anyway. We have endless problems with our healthcare services delivery and social policies, but not diagnosing enough symptom-free problems doesn’t top the list.

Privacy and Security

Scripps Health patient Danielle Sullivan tells the local news the health system has sent her the medical records of other patients three times in the last seven months. She has filed an HHS complaint but expects no change since Scripps hasn’t apologized and she thinks they just treat mistakes as a cost of doing business.

Other

Healthcare celebrity Atul Gawande, MD will keynote HIMSS19 on Tuesday, February 12 in Orlando.

Stat digs into the business case behind Mindstrong, a predictive mental health app that’s high on hype but low on clinically valid results. Founded by Paul Dagum, MD, the Silicon Valley startup has raised $30 million in funding and secured implementation agreements with a dozen California mental health departments, but has yet to publish peer-reviewed data that back up its claims. With the Theranos fallout barely out of the headlines, industry analysts have been quick to pump the brakes on panacea-like expectations and the company itself has said the app will be rolled out with caution.

Police in San Jose, CA use a combination of video surveillance footage and Fitbit data to charge Anthony Aiello with the murder of his stepdaughter. Investigators say her Fitbit shows her heart rate spiking, rapidly slowing down, and then ceasing at the same time neighbors say Aiello was visiting. After being confronted with the data, Aiello said, “I’m done.”

Sponsor Updates

• Frost & Sullivan honors Medicomp Systems with the EHR Optimization Technology Leadership Award for its Quippe suite of solutions.
• FDB and PetIQ develop the industry’s first veterinary medications database that will deliver codified, up-to-date information on pet medications, structured for integration into pharmacy systems.
• Elsevier Clinical Solutions will exhibit at the College of American Pathologists meeting October 8 in Chicago.
• EClinicalWorks will host its 2018 National Conference October 5-7 in Nashville.
• Healthwise and Imprivata will exhibit at the Cerner Health Conference October 8-11 in Kansas City, MO.
• Lutheran Senior Services (MO) becomes the first Netsmart customer to exchange health data with its local health system through the Carequality framework.
• EClinicalWorks and Healthfinch will exhibit at the AAFP Family Medicine Experience October 10-12 in New Orleans.
• EPSi will host its Visis National Summit October 10-12 in Amelia Island, FL.
• FormFast will exhibit at ASHRM 2018 October 7-10 in Nashville.
• CHIME interviews The HCI Group CEO Ricky Caplin.
• Hyland will exhibit at AHCA/NCAL 2018 October 7-10 in San Diego.
• InterSystems will exhibit at the DoD/VA Gov Health IT Summit October 10-11 in Alexandria, VA.
• Kyruus will exhibit at SHSMD Connections 2018 October 7-10 in Seattle.
• Surescripts honors five EHR vendors with its 2018 White Coat Award for improving e-prescribing accuracy.
• Pivot Point Consulting parent company Vaco hires Phillip Noe (The Adecco Group) as CIO.

Blog Posts

• Enhancing the User Experience with Encrypted Push Notifications (PMD)
• The Impact of Informed Consent – Part 2: Satisfaction (FormFast)
• Want to Ensure Greater Compliance? Look at Things from a Provider’s Point of View (Hayes Management Consulting)
• Top 5 Nonprofit Healthcare Organization Troubleshoots and Resolves Issue Impacting Meditech Users with Goliath Performance Monitor (Goliath Technologies)
• Clarity on Artificial Intelligence and Patient Privacy (Iatric Systems)
• 5 Keys to a Successful Healthcare IT RFP (Influence Health)
• Innovating Our Way to High-Resolution Healthcare (InterSystems)
• A Series on Chatbots: Leveraging Technology to Meet Consumer Expectations (Kyruus)

Contacts

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

News 10/3/18

Top News

A new Pew Charitable Trusts report on patient matching offers these potential approaches:

• Implement a unique patient identifier, but given the challenges experienced with this approach in other countries, consider powering it with biometrics
• Give patients a more active role in verifying their identity by sending text verification messages sent to to their phones
• Standardize the data elements that are used to predict a patient match, such as making email address one of the match criteria
• Use referential matching that goes beyond name spelling and potentially outdated addresses using third-party data sources such as the US Postal Service

Reader Comments

From Barely Constrained Capitalist: “Re: David Bradshaw of Memorial Hermann. Now working as a contractor for Cerner. Did we ever learn why he was fired from MH?” David’s LinkedIn says he’s working with a “large EMR solution provider” as a population health management advisor, which must pay a lot less than the $1.3 million he made last year. Memorial Hermann just announced plans to merge with Baylor Scott & White to form a massive health system that employs 73,000 people running 68 hospitals from the Gulf to the Oklahoma border. Most of the newco’s named executives are from BSW, so maybe he saw the CIO writing on the wall. Regardless, parting ways at that level is often the result of leadership or strategic changes that are not indicative of personal performance and certainly we don’t know (or need to know) the details of his departure. I think MH uses Cerner and BSW is mostly Epic and Allscripts, not that I would expect them to standardize IT systems. The footnote here might be that big-name CIO jobs are declining in number as their employers frantically merge and affiliate to flex their market power for self-enrichment. Oh, sorry, to deliver the efficiency improvements, reduced costs, and improved care that such mega-mergers always create in their maniacal pursuit of patient-focused excellence.

From Brangelina: “Re: HIMSS. You haven’t commented on their IRS tax filings recently.” I haven’t been able to locate their most recent reports, so I’ve emailed a request for them to send their Form 990 my way.

From Standard Spiel: “Re: clinical mobility poll. Check out these results.” The HIMSS-owned publication writes lengthy analyses of its online polls down to the fractional percentage point, but those typically generate only 100 or so anonymous responses that make any conclusions questionable. I usually get 200-400 poll responses to each week’s HIStalk question and even then I don’t spend a lot of time dissecting the statistically questionable results – it’s just a fun snapshot of what readers think that merits no further analysis.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: new from The Sea Within, a new prog supergroup led by Roine Stolt and other members of The Flower Kings.

Webinars

October 30 (Tuesday) 2:00 ET. “How one pediatric CIN aligned culture, technology and the community to transform care.” Presenters: Lisa Henderson, executive director, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Shehzad Saeed, MD, associate chief medical officer, Dayton Children’s Health Partners; Mason Beard, solutions strategy leader, Philips PHM; Gabe Orthous, value-based care consultant, Himformatics. Dayton Children’s Health Partners, a pediatric clinically integrated network, will describe how it aligned its internal culture, technology partners, and the community around its goal of streamlining care delivery and improving outcomes. Presenters will describe how it recruited network members, negotiated value-based contracts, and implemented a data-driven care management process.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

At least GE’s alarming levels of suckitude weren’t limited to its now-abandoned GE Healthcare IT efforts. GE’s board fires Chairman and CEO John Flannery after just over a year on the job, seemingly shocked that he couldn’t dump ballast quickly enough to save the sinking ship he had just inherited. GE names outsider Larry Culp (who?) to replace him as CEO and board chair. Flannery shared GE Healthcare heritage with predecessor and fellow oustee Jeff Immelt, so maybe that’s not the best group to tap for leadership talent. The new guy comes from Danaher, which sells an odd mix of bioscience products (Beckman Coulter, HemoCue, Molecular Devices) and unrelated stuff like the Pantone color matching system. Above is the definitely ugly five-year GE share performance chart, in which it shed 51 percent of value while the Dow was rising 75 percent. The company’s market cap has declined to barely over $100 billion, so hopefully your employer didn’t spend a lot of cash in gifting budding executives with the how-to business books written by Neutron Jack Welch that were all the rage in the 1990s when people still admired the company. GE was among the 12 industrial giants that made up the first Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896 and was the last of those to drop off the 30-company list in 2018. GE waved goodbye to health IT through the rear window of its submerging dump truck in April of this year, handing that business off to Veritas Capital for $1 billion. It would still like to spin off GE Healthcare, one of its few bright spots, but acquirers and investors don’t love company turmoil.

Sales

• Thirteen-hospital ProMedica will deploy PeriGen’s PeriWatch Vigilance AI-based maternal-fetal early warning system in all of its hospitals that offer labor and delivery services.
• Cleveland Area Hospital (OK) chooses Cerner Millennium under the CommunityWorks deployment model.

People

Provation, fresh off its sale by Wolters Kluwer to a private equity firm, hires Tom Monteleone (Ancile Solutions) as CFO and Jim Mullen (Nextech Systems) as SVP of global sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Australia’s Royal Adelaide Hospital will spend $7.8 million to extend its offsite paper records storage and delivery service for three years, with the failure of its over-budget, behind-schedule Allscripts implementation forcing it to store records offsite since the new hospital’s floors weren’t designed to handle that much weight. The health minister said this week that an independent committee has ruled out continuing the EPAS rollout, so it will either be overhauled or scrapped. Allscripts was supposed to have gone live four years ago at a cost of $158 million, but costs have swelled to $340 million and the rollout stalled as doctors complained that it was unsafe. The hospital might want to investigate the circumstances leading to the approval of its questionable architectural design, which looks like someone sprayed machine gun fire into an ugly airport terminal.

InterSystems announces IRIS for Health, which provides a FHIR application development framework, support for every national and regional interoperability standard, and a normalized and extensible data model. Its capability will be added to HealthShare and TrakCare products next year.

A new KLAS report covering in-home patient monitoring, released in partnership with the American Telemedicine Association, finds that of the small number of organizations surveyed (24) and the small number of patients being monitored, most are happy with their programs despite most of them not achieving key outcomes. The report notes that the line between vendor monitoring and provider outreach is blurred and that most organizations say their program pays its own way under existing capitated and bundled payment models. Legacy vendors include Honeywell Life Care Solutions, Medtronic, and Philips, while more flexible upstarts are Health Recovery Solutions and Vivify Health.

Researchers find that laws requiring prescribers or their delegates to check state prescribing databases caused a 7.2 percent reduction in patients with three or more opiate prescribers, but EHR integration is the holy grail. The authors note that interstate data sharing isn’t really necessary since doctor-shopping across state lines seems to be rare.

Mitre publishes a guide to medical device cybersecurity incident response that recommends incorporating cybersecurity standards in product selection, creating an asset inventory, defining how incident command systems can support cybersecurity issues, and creating an incident response communications plan that includes external stakeholders. I admit that I glazed over pretty early on, so let me know if you see any buried pearls.

Citrus Valley Health Partners (CA) goes live on Meditech Expanse in its hospice and home care locations, with a full system go-live planed for March 2019.

Ciox launches Smart Chart, an expansion of its HealthSource clinical data exchange and aggregation platform that uses AI and NLP to extract clinical data elements from unstructured sources.

Children’s Hospital Colorado, whose IT team is led by friend of HIStalk SVP/CIO Dana Moore, earns an Enterprise HIMSS Davies award.

Government and Politics

VA OIG is reviewing last year’s manual cancellation of 250,000 radiology orders across eight hospitals during a push to remove duplicate and outdated requests, raising concern that some of the studies might have been medically necessary or had been entered as future orders that had not expired. As an example, as many as 10 people under the direction of the radiology managers at the Tampa VA cancelled orders without consulting doctors or patients. The Columbia, SC VA topped the leaderboard with nearly 30,000 outstanding radiology orders, with public outcry pushing VA brass to vow they would clear the backlog (although maybe not in the smartest way).

Privacy and Security

The DEA is installing license plate readers on the back of those highway signs that tell you how fast you’re going, an extension of the 2008 program in which all levels of law enforcement share data from license plate readers and surveillance cameras, some of them using facial recognition technology to identify the driver and passengers. Privacy advocates (shouldn’t that be all of us?) worry that the government could be applying algorithms to the huge database for less-transparent purposes. Genetec, the company that manufactures the license plate readers, has healthcare offerings – video surveillance, access control, and license plate tracking cameras for parking lots that can be installed in access gates or on top of security vehicles to track people parking where they shouldn’t.

Other

Members of Connecticut’s Health IT Advisory Council – charged as the exclusive creator of a state HIE – are stunned to learn from a presentation at its September meeting that the Department of Social Services is continuing its previously failed efforts from 2007 to build a similar system that would not cover the whole state. Both organizations have received CMS funding. 

An Annals of Internal Medicine article offers ideas to balance under-diagnosis with wasteful, harmful over-diagnosis:

1. Don’t rely excessively on lab tests, imaging, and specialist referrals to arrive at a diagnosis. Listen to the patient and trust the physical exam.
2. Acknowledge that precision medicine increases the extent of uncertainty and should not drive less-conservative practices.
3. Stop chasing symptoms that often defy a medical diagnosis or are self-limiting and instead watch for the usually-missed symptoms of problems caused by mental state, such as depression or anxiety.
4. Maximize patient-provider trust and continuity.
5. Make time to listen, observe, discuss, and reflect, which can be supported by practicing top-of-license and redesigning EHRs to support “watchful waiting.”
6. Link treatments to diagnosis, but be careful about diagnosing a condition that isn’t treatable, whose treatment can be safely deferred, or that involves a treatment that the patient declines.
7. Consider the potential harm in ordering diagnostic tests and the lack of rigor required to develop and use those tests wisely.
8. Recognize that ordering more tests may seem like a good idea for reducing diagnostic errors, but it doesn’t always provide the answers that patients and providers are seeking.
9. Don’t overemphasize early cancer detection through extensive testing that may raise false positives or result in harmful treatment by over-diagnosis.
10. Recruit specialists and ED doctors to take a stewardship role in reducing overreliance on their services.

Health economist Zack Cooper notes that both the newly installed president of the American College of Emergency Physicians and its president-elect work for companies that profit by charging patients for out-of-network services (physician staffing firms TeamHealth and Envision Healthcare, respectively). The key issue of new President Vidor Friedman, MD is to make insurers pay for ED visits as long as the patient thinks it’s an emergency, even if they are wrong. His employer paid $60 million last year to settle a whistleblower lawsuit involving an upcoding scheme and he was previously known for creating a lobbying group for “emergency medicine advocacy” that mostly involved protecting ED doctor payments under ACA.

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center President and CEO Craig Thompson announces that he will give up his board positions at cancer drug maker Merck and drug research company Charles River. A 2015 report found that Thompson was making more than $750,000 annually from the companies and presumably was also granted stock options. That article also observed that while it’s easy to look up which doctors had their $15 lunch paid for by a drug company rep, it’s harder to find such board-level relationships. A 2013 analysis found that 279 university-affiliated employees served on the boards of 442 companies, earning $55 million in compensation and owning 60 million shares of stock. Thompson was sued in 2011 by previous employer University of Pennsylvania, which claimed he used intellectual property from his Penn research to start Agios Pharmaceuticals as a Penn employee in 2007 before he left for MSKCC. Apparently the many millions MSKCC pays him isn’t enough and Big Cancer is happy to use its coffers to make it rain for him and other academic researchers who help them make obscene profits on the backs of people with cancer.  

Sponsor Updates

• Redox offers access to its interoperability platform to healthcare non-profits and public health organizations that provide access to at-risk populations through its Redox Gives program, with the first beneficiary being the Wisconsin Women’s Health Foundation, which provides free health education and support programs to women and their families and will use Redox integration to streamline referrals to the state’s First Breath stop-smoking program.
• DocuTap and InstaMed partner to improve the patient and provider experience for urgent care centers across the US
• The National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization will offer its members software and services from Audacious Inquiry.
• Nordic wins a work-life balance award based on anonymous employee submissions in the large-employer category.
• Kyruus adds Stephen Kahane, MD, MS to its board.
• AdvancedMD will host its annual user conference, Evo18, October 3-5 in Salt Lake City.
• The Advisory Board publishes a new briefing, “5 insights to help you address burnout.”
• The Business Intelligence Group awards Apixio its 2018 Stratus award for AI.
• Aprima and CompuGroup Medical will exhibit at AAFP’s annual meeting October 10-12 in New Orleans.
• Arcadia congratulates its ACO customers on achieving $90 million in MSSP savings in 2017.
• Greenway Health features AssessURHealth on its podcast, “Putting Possibility into Practice.”
• Bernoulli Health will present at the Spok Connect annual conference October 9 in Scottsdale, AZ.
• Datica will present at Techstars Startup Week Seattle October 10.
• Burwood Group will present at the 2018 Healthcare Facilities Symposium & Expo October 8 in Austin, TX.
• CarePort Health will exhibit at the AHCA National Convention October 7-10 in San Diego.
• Providence Ventures Radio features Collective Medical CMO Benjamin Zaniello, MD.
• CoverMyMeds will exhibit at the Allscripts Client Experience October 3-5 in St. Louis.
• Crossings Healthcare Solutions and Culbert Healthcare Solutions will exhibit at the Cerner Health Conference October 8-12 in Kansas City, MO.
• HealthShare Exchange wins the SHIEC 2018 Achievement Award for Quality and Quality Data for its work with Diameter Health to standardize member CCDs.

Blog Posts

• Apple Improving Health, Care (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Sleep Well: 5 Ways to Quiet Hospitals, Promote Rest, and Improve Patient Satisfaction (Spok)
• How healthcare executives can forge a stronger chain against cyberattacks (Meditech)
• Medical System Overutilization (Arcadia)
• Culture: It’s all about the people (Bluetree)
• What Really is Compliance? The Answer has Evolved (Datica)
• The cloud is ready for you – but is your security strategy ready for the cloud? (Burwood Group)
• Has the Pendulum Swung Back in Favor of Recruits in the IT Talent Market? (CTG)
• How to Implement a Successful Work From Home Program (Direct Consulting Associates)
• Dimensional Insight Book Club: Reverse Innovation in Healthcare (Dimensional Insight)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 10/1/18

Top News

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center tells technology commercialization VP Gregory Raskin, MD to turn over $1.4 million worth of biotech company shares that he personally owns to MSKCC.

MSKCC had invested in the cancer drug company — which just went public at a share price that values the health system’s stake at $73 million — and had assigned Raskin as its representative on the board of Y-mAbs Therapeutics, for which the company gave him stock options.

MSKCC says it will change its policies so that it will retain any proceeds accruing from the involvement of its executives instead of enriching those executives.

The new policy will not be retroactively applied to MSKCC’s high-profile involvement with Paige.AI. In addition, MSKCC’s CEO will be allowed (at least for now) to continue serving on the board of cancer drug maker Merck.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

The vast majority of poll respondents don’t want researchers or insurers monitoring their social media activities, no matter how pure their intentions. Also noted in the poll’s comments is that our approval as consumers isn’t really necessary anyway – once you’ve posted your data online, anyone can buy and sell it.

New poll to your right or here: to what extent do you use a smart speaker (such as Amazon Echo or Google Home) at home? I like the Google Home Mini that I bought for $20 last Christmas, but I admit that I haven’t done much with it beyond asking it for the weather and setting timers for cooking (it’s totally worth it for just those two things, however). Add your comment after voting to inspire me with ideas of how I can use my gadget more productively.

I’m improbably penning this from the sparse plains of Thackerville, OK. Mrs. HIStalk mysteriously announced last week, “We’re flying to DFW Saturday morning. Pack casual clothes for two days and don’t Google to figure out where we’re going because it’s a surprise for you.” Our destination turned out to be front-row seats at The Roots concert at WinStar Casino. It was as stunning as you might expect – I’m convinced that they’re the most talented, hardest-working band in the US and Black Thought and Questlove are geniuses in several disciplines. I’ll be playing their back catalog and revisiting Black Thought’s epically poetic 10-minute freestyle rap – imagine the talent required to throw out off-the-cuff, rhythmically resonant lines such as, “As babies we went from Similac and Enfamil to Internet and fentanyl.” Kudos for them for increasing the number of things I can stand about Jimmy Fallon to one. Trivia: Questlove’s father was Lee Andrews, singer for the great 1950s doo-wop group Lee Andrews & The Hearts (“Long Lonely Nights.”)

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

In New Zealand, Orion Health shareholders unenthusiastically (given the lack of better options) approve the company’s plan to sell its only profitable division, which offers the Rhapsody integration engine, to a private equity firm that will run it as a private company. Orion’s other divisions (population health management and hospital software) are big money-losers and did not attract buyer interest. Orion blames its poor results on cash-strapped US hospitals cancelling orders before the company could develop a cloud-based version of Rhapsody. It also says the former Amalga HIS and RIS/PACS it acquired from Microsoft in 2011, developed by another company at Thailand’s Bumrungrad International Hospital, were more of a mess than it thought.  

The New York Post says revenue cycle technology vendor NThrive (the former MedAssets and Precyse) is the previously unnamed strategic bidder that has offered to buy Athenahealth. NThrive CEO Joel Hackney is a former GE colleague of Athenahealth board chair Jeff Immelt and NThrive owner Pamplona Capital Management could fund the deal by taking on debt.

People

Konica Minolta Business Solutions USA promotes Joe Cisna, MBA, MHA to global director of vertical solutions and digital marketplace.

Announcements and Implementations

National Decision Support Company expands its CareSelect solutions for Cerner users to include decision support for laboratory, blood management, and the ABIM Foundation’s Choosing Wisely. Cerner customers were already widely using its image stewardship program to support Medicare’s upcoming imaging appropriate use criteria.

TriNetX announces self-service precision medicine capabilities for its researcher users, adding Patient Journey Analytics, the ability for researchers to apply their own predictive model to patient data, and giving them the capability to create and monitor de-identified patient cohorts.

UNC-affiliated Nash UNC Health Care (NC) goes live on Epic, replacing Cerner to run the same system used by UNC, Duke, and Vidant. The president and CEO says the upfront costs are straining the hospital’s bottom line, but annual costs after Year Three will be the same as it was spending on Cerner.  

Privacy and Security

Michigan Medicine notifies 3,700 patients that a fundraising mailing mistake contained one patient’s name on the label but a different patient’s name on the enclosed letter. The fundraising office says it will begin using windowed envelopes to avoid future mishaps.

Other

The former CEO of SingHealth’s IT services organization IHIS, testifying in hearings about its recent massive IT breach, says she immediately fired an employee who in 2014 discovered a security vulnerability in Allscripts Sunrise Clinical Manager and then emailed Epic to suggest using his information to increase market share. IHIS did not, however, follow up on the vulnerability the employee had discovered, assuming that it was no longer a problem since Sunrise had been upgraded. An Allscripts executive complained to the CEO, who then dismissed the employee who had warned that the SCM flaw “could lead to a serious medical leak or even a national security threat.”

Las Vegas’s University Medical Center has still not changed its practices for using an “internal disaster” alert that tells first responders to send patients elsewhere a year after the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting, where at least two shooting victims were taken to another hospital instead of UMC, which is the state’s only Level 1 trauma center. The county designed the alert so that hospitals can notify first responders about flooding or power issues, but it has no power to insist that hospitals stop using it when their EDs are at capacity.

The New York Times notes that nursing homes are closing at a rapid rate, plagued with low occupancy, changes in Medicare payment policies that favor home care, and the problem of offering a service that nobody wants until their other options have been exhausted. Medicaid’s long-term care payments have shifted from 90 percent going to nursing homes 30 years ago to 43 percent today. Aging baby boomers may reverse the trend, however, and nursing homes are retooling to chase the higher payments offered by Medicare for short-term rehab.

CB Insights perceptively covers the impact of “The Wellness Economy” in which the vague idea of healthy, holistic, experience-driven lifestyles is driving many industries other than healthcare. It predicts the waning of gyms as people (especially Millennials) purse at-home fitness, an increased focus on smart cities, repositioning of nutrition and beauty brands, and an increase in corporate wellness services, providing as evidence the funding and strategic changes companies are adopting to capture new markets.

In India, family members of a man who died during an inpatient stay accuse the private hospital of storing his body for three days afterward so it could bill them for more services.

Sponsor Updates

• The Vocera Communications Team builds bikes for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley.
• Lightbeam Health Solutions, Experian Health, Surescripts, and Philips Wellcentive will exhibit at NAACOS Fall 2018 Conference October 3-5 in Washington, DC.
• LogicStream Health will exhibit at the 2018 Fall Hospital Pharmacy Conference October 1-3 in Los Angeles.
• MedData, T-System, and Wellsoft will exhibit at ACEP18 October 1-4 in San Diego.
• News: National Decision Support Co. announces expanded Cerner capabilities
• Mobile Heartbeat will exhibit at the Annual PONL Leadership Conference October 4-5 in Lancaster, PA.
• WayStar will exhibit at the DocuTap User Conference October 3-4 in Denver.
• Netsmart will exhibit at the RCPA Annual Conference October 2 in Hershey, PA.
• PatientSafe Solutions will exhibit at 2018 IntegraTe South Florida HIMSS October 2 in Davie, FL.
• ShareableForms forms adds PatientKeeper’s Charge Capture tool to its tablet-based EHR.
• Pivot Point Consulting will exhibit at the 2018 CPCA Annual Conference October 4-5 in Sacramento.
• MarketWatch features Qventus CEO Mudit Garg in a profile on the future of AI in healthcare.
• ZappRx will exhibit at the Annual Pulmonary Hypertension Symposium October 3 in Oak Lawn, IL.
• ZeOmega will exhibit at Inspire 2018 – the Change Healthcare Solutions Conference October 1-4 in Phoenix.

Blog Posts

• In the Glamorous World of Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI, What Matters Most is the Data Itself (Liaison Technologies)
• CMS Emergency Preparedness: Training & Testing (LiveProcess)
• How API environments like Meditech Greenfield promote innovation and drive interoperability (Meditech)
• How providers can innovate to combat physician burnout (Medicomp Systems)
• Automated Indication Selection? (National Decision Support Co.)
• Finding the Courage to Ask (Netsmart)
• Highlights from Epic’s 2018 Users Group Meeting (Parallon Technology Solutions)
• A Practical Approach to Interoperability: Base the Solution on the Problem (PatientPing)
• “Where’s my nurse?”: How to empower nurses to spend more time with patients (PerfectServe)
• Apple Watch Series 4: Who Will Watch the Watch? (Sansoro Health)
• Actionable Intelligence at the Point of Care can Help Prevent Physician Burnout (Surescripts)
• Transforming Primary Care with HealthOS, A Perspective from Dr. Matthew Poffenroth (SymphonyRM)
• Bad Debt Blues: How to Keep Your Clinic Out of the Red (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 9/28/18

Top News

Shares of Athenahealth rise slightly after CNBC reports that two private equity firms and one strategic buyer have expressed interest in acquiring the company for close to $131 a share.

The company’s board members are reportedly “motivated to get a deal done.”

Reader Comments

From Former Road Warrior: “Re: HCTec Partners. Checks went out this week to 2,271 current and former consultants who were not paid overtime for working more than 40 hours in one week. The total settlement was $4.5 million.” Unverified since court documents are now almost always unavailable without cost, but I can at least see that the case was settled in July.

From Fall Out Boy: “Re: hackers at Lutheran Hospital. Owner Community Health Systems provides the IT network for spinoff Quorum Health and was infected by malware via QHC’s network. CHS still has several thousand unpatched Windows 2003 servers that include McKesson Horizon applications used at Lutheran. CHS had to shut down those Windows 2003 servers to contain the malware. The upgrade project has been going on for three years now without any results.” Unverified.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It’s officially fall. Soon it will be the winter holidays and then HIMSS19. That means it’s time for my usual end-of-year deals for new HIStalk sponsors and webinar presenters, whereupon I look away demurely as Lorre offers inducements like a car salesperson anxious to make quota (and to re-stroke my fragile ego with such markers of industry relevance). See what it’s like being one of the cool kids who get a figurative leg up on their less-hip competitors. Now is better since it will get crazy in the less than six weeks between New Year’s Day and HIMSS19.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Adventist Health Bakersfield (CA) will do away with 60 financial services jobs early next year as part of a billing and collections outsourcing deal with Cerner that has already impacted 175 employees over the last six months. The majority of those were re-hired by Cerner and stayed on at the hospital. Cerner has said it will invite the next wave of laid-off staffers to apply for positions at its Missouri headquarters, though as one angry ex-Adventist employee notes, they’ll be competing with former Adventist employees from other parts of the country.

Los Angeles-based Aiva Health, which has developed virtual assistant-based patient engagement and care coordination software, secures funding from the Google Assistant Investment Program and Amazon’s Alexa Fund.

Women’s virtual health company Maven raises $27 million, increasing its total to $42 million.

Cerner will move into 38,000 square feet of office space in Rosslyn, VA to house employees working on the company’s contracts with the VA and DoD.

Jawbone founder and CEO Hosain Rahman tells ReCode that the company has pivoted from fitness trackers to a device-agnostic remote patient monitoring business that will act as a health check-engine light for monthly subscribers. The new Jawbone Health will use Salesforce’s Health Cloud to securely share customer data with providers, who it seems will then weigh in with treatment advice. The company, which has shrunk from 600 to 110 employees, sputtered out in mid-2017 after mounting financial pressures and competition, including a lengthy patent infringement lawsuit against Fitbit.

Signify Research describes four ways EHR vendors can continue their growth as the EHR market matures:

• Diversify into related areas such as population health management, RCM solutions, and IT outsourcing (Cerner, for example, drives 40 percent of revenue from non-core EHR business)
• Expand the basic EHR offerings
• Sell outside the US (only Cerner, Epic, Allscripts, and Meditech have done much of this and even they are having challenges) although it’s hard to displace local vendors, making acquisition attractive
• Pursue acquisitions that drive market share expansion

Cerner expects its Cerner Health Conference to bring 14,000 attendees to KCMO October 8-11, with the conference theme being “Smarter Care.” CHC will also serve as the coming-out party for Chairman and CEO Brent Shafer as well as the resigned Zane Burke’s semi-replacement, Chief Client Officer John Peterzalek.

Virtual coaching vendor Virta Health hired some new executives this week, which wasn’t as interesting as a review of the components of its type 2 diabetes program – physician supervision, an individualized treatment plan, a personal diet and health coach available by chat, and digital health devices that collect readings in an app  (a digital scale, blood pressure cuff, and glucose testing supplies).

People

Mandira Singh (Athenahealth) joins Collective Medical as head of product.

SnapMD hires Deric Frost (Equality Health) as chief revenue officer.

The Chartis Group appoints Mark Krivopal, MD (GE Healthcare Partners) to its Performance Practice leadership team.

Nordic begins looking for a new CEO after Bruce Cerullo announces he will transition from the role to chairman of the board.

Kristi Ebong (Cedars-Sinai) joins Orbita as SVP of strategy and general manager for healthcare providers.

Sales

• Pershing Health System (MO) will install Cerner Millenium via CommunityWorks.
• CHI Franciscan Health (WA) will work with GE Healthcare to develop an AI-powered command center to better coordinate patient stays.
• Signature Healthcare (MA) selects care coordination and communication software from Medarchon.
• Cabell Huntington Hospital (WV) will implement Wolters Kluwer’s POC Advisor for sepsis surveillance.
• Geisinger will deploy Chess Health’s addiction management technology at its Medication Assisted Treatment Centers in Pennsylvania.
• Three DoD facilities will implement Vecna’s patient check-in solution.

Announcements and Implementations

UnityPoint Health–Marshalltown (IA) transitions to Epic as part of a system-wide roll out.

Centric Home Health & Hospice (TX) implements DrFirst’s Backline secure messaging software.

Olmsted Medical Center (MN) will go live on Epic this weekend, replacing Cerner CommunityWorks inpatient and McKesson ambulatory.

Government and Politics

Health Management Associates pays $260 million to settle whistle blower lawsuits related to allegations that HMA coerced its physicians into unnecessarily admitting ED patients to the hospital. One lawsuit contended that HMA set up admission benchmarks driven by cost projections rather than medical necessity, which resulted in CMS footing the bill for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. Community Health Systems bought HMA in 2013 for $7.6 billion and has struggled to adjust to the acquisition, which left it $14 billion in debt. CHS sold off 40 hospitals and laid off 70 corporate IT employees earlier this year.

After 60 days on the job, VA Secretary Robert Wilkie tells the Senate VA Committee that he and representatives at the DoD are working to create a “single point of authority” for their respective EHR projects with Cerner. Wilkie and his team are also preparing an EHR governance report for Congress. “If we don’t get the front-end of a member’s service right with the electronic health record,” he told the committee, “it really doesn’t help us when that veteran comes into our system. One of my goals is to make sure that the DoD end works.”

Other

A survey finds that 72 percent of consumers don’t think insurers should be allowed to use big data to determine insurance policy risk, 55 percent think it’s just as threatening to have insurers accessing private data as Facebook, and 18 percent would allow insurers to test their DNA if they might get lower prices. Startlingly, 8 percent said they would allow a video camera to be installed in their home and 11 percent would be OK with having a biometric tracker installed in their body if it might lower their rates. One in five respondents say no correlation exists between their health and their social and economic situations. As other surveys have found, Americans are strongly pro-privacy until someone offers to pay for their most precious secrets.

Brilliant: a Twitter user describes how she used IOS 12’s scripting-like shortcut creation tool to create a Siri-launched Mayday shortcut that sends an “I’m in trouble” text message to friends that includes her latitude, longitude, altitude, and Wi-Fi network name (to help them find her in, including if she’s in a large building or shopping mall); her phone’s battery level; her IP address; and a warning that the phone will automatically go into “do not disturb” and “low power mode” to avoid alerting whoever is threatening her that help is on they way. She just has to say, “Hey, Siri, Mayday” and her IPhone does the rest.

The Maryland Health Care Commission launches a “Wear the Cost” campaign to get people talking about and comparing the prices of procedures, which can vary wildly between hospitals. Harvard Medical School professor and pricing transparency expert Ateev Mehrotra, MD (who says he’ll gift the shirts to his health policy friends) believes the campaign may wind up being more about hospital price shaming than encouraging patients to shop around. “To date,” he explains, “price transparency initiatives that have been rigorously assessed have had little to no impact on prices in the health care system. The reason so far is few people are using those websites.”

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center quickly ditches the AI-focused “Harnessing Big Data” theme of its annual fund-raising campaign following its Paige.AI equity controversy. The campaign, which usually raises around $1 million, will instead emphasize patient care.

A radiologist who was transported by helicopter to a trauma center in Texas is left holding a $45,000 bill from national air ambulance Air Evac Lifeteam after his insurer agrees to pay just $12,000 since this particular company is not in its network and bystanders who called for help had no way of knowing that. The air ambulance company and several others are owned by private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Their charges are considered aviation rather than healthcare expenses, so they can (and do) charge whatever they want. The radiologist lost his arm in the accident, soon to be followed by his remaining arm and a leg courtesy of KKR. The industry’s trade group claims each flight costs an air transport company $10,200, but they have no choice but to stick insured patients for higher amounts to cover Medicare, Medicaid, and uninsured patients.

Sponsor Updates

• Parallon Technology Solutions publishes an e-book titled “7 Key Epic Optimizations Can Have a Direct Impact on Your Bottom Line.”
• Elsevier Clinical Solutions will exhibit at the American Society Clinical Pathology 2018 Annual Meeting October 3 in Baltimore.
• EClinicalWorks, Ellkay, Healthfinch, Intelligent Medical Objects, and PMD will exhibit at MGMA September 30-October 2 in Boston.
• PatientPing selects Amendola Communications to support its growth initiatives.
• Crossings Healthcare Solution develops Cerner MPage-driven Insulin Management Advisors that provide evidence-based recommendations for IV fluid management, glucose correction, electrolyte replacement, acidosis and anion gap correction, and subcutaneous insulin transition.
• Healthfinch achieves HITRUST CSF Certification.
• Healthwise will exhibit at AdvancedMD’s Evo18 conference October 2-6 in Salt Lake City.
• InterSystems will host its Global Summit 2018 September 30-October 3 in San Antonio.
• Kyruus announces a panel of leading health system CEOs at its upcoming 2018 Annual Thought Leadership on Access Symposium October 15-17 in Boston.

Blog Posts

• Listening and Developing: How Customer Interaction Paves the Way for Valuable Product Development (PMD)
• The Impact of Informed Consent, Part 1: Compliance (FormFast)
• Want to Ensure Greater Compliance? Look at Things from a Provider’s Point of View (Hayes Management Consulting)
• Patient-Risk Surveillance Reduces Disaster in Underserved Populations in Mental Health (HBI Solutions)
• Data Backup Systems: 5 Point Checklist (The HCI Group)
• Extending an Improved Patient Experience Beyond Hospital Walls (Access)
• Monitor and Troubleshoot Virtual Apps and Desktops on Different Clouds with the Goliath Performance Monitor (Goliath Technologies)
• Imprivata for Community Connect offers a cost-saving and secure solution for Great Plains Health (Imprivata)
• From One CMS to Another: Considerations for Content Migration (Influence Health)
• Is Your Healthcare Organization Prepared for the Data Tsunami? (InterSystems)
• ATLAS 2018 Breakout Track – Exploring New Frontiers of Patient Access (Kyruus)
• How API environments like MEDITECH Greenfield promote innovation and drive interoperability (Meditech)
• Exploring Healthcare in America: Which Model is Best for Delivering Quality, Affordable Patient Care? (Loyale Healthcare)
• EnTouch selected as one of the best new ideas in healthcare today (PreparedHealth)

Contacts

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

News 9/26/18

Top News

Several provider organizations develop Health Record Request Wizard, an online tool that walks patients through submitting a request to providers for electronic copies of their medical records. It extends a previous form developed by AHIMA by adding branching logic.

Despite the headline proclaiming that it helps families obtain and share their records, it doesn’t – it addresses the 2 percent of the work involved in providing a standard user interface for such requests while neatly turfing off the 98 percent of technical integration to EHR vendors who may not see the value in supporting someone else’s front end. Only three health systems and no EHR vendors have pledged to support it.

Plus it doesn’t support the most prevalent and essential healthcare technology – the fax machine.

Reader Comments

From HIT Medical Student: “Re: JAMA article. I think your readers will find the author’s conclusion as ridiculous and insulting as his title. How are physicians still using ‘autism’ as a pejorative in professional settings? At what point, if ever, are all physicians going to understand that EMR documentation is a vital part of patient care and population health management?” The JAMA Pediatrics opinion piece titled “The Electronic Health Record and Acquired Physician Autism” was written by Palmetto Health (SC) psychiatrist Peter Loper, Jr., MD. He blames a “fixation on the EHR” for his being “abrupt and crass” with patients, complaining that he had previously refused to use an EHR during encounters and admitting that he was “chronically behind on documentation.” His point is that focus on the EHR during encounters causes doctors to “exhibit the same behaviors that render this disorder so socially incapacitating for those on the autistic spectrum” while failing to note the humanity of the encounter and that the physician-patient relationship is key to disease management. He could have made his point without the autism reference, and had he done that, I would defend him since he’s a child-focused psychiatrist and EHRs (Palmetto uses Cerner) do little to improve his practice over paper other than to get him paid. He also suffers from the ubiquitous misperception that his N-of-one experience is generalizable to the entire medical profession and also fails to consider how his employer chose to configure the EHR and mandate its use, doing as doctors often do in shooting the EHR vendor messenger without realizing that it wasn’t them who made the workflow decisions.  

From Crass is Greener: “Re: Memorial Sloan Kettering and Paige.AI. Your update makes me wonder about its business relationships with IBM and Allscripts looks like, knowing that IBM needs to prove out Watson and Allscripts’ propensity for ‘doing deals’ (see Verity Health).” Hospitals excel at cloaking business deals behind lofty, altruistic proclamations (this is especially common with oncology and pediatrics since everybody is extra empathetic to those patients.) It would be interesting to see MSKCC’s contract with IBM, especially since reports suggest that Watson Oncology is more of a mechanical turk that just sends whatever recommendations MSKCC’s doctors manually offer while disguising it to look like machine-powered insight. I wouldn’t trust any deal involving Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Nant companies, and the apparent enthusiasm with which Allscripts did so suggests desperation on both ends of the transaction, leaving the now-bankrupt Verity in the middle of a Sunrise implementation they didn’t want and their financial Santa Claus moving on to other shiny objects after just one year. My life’s most relevant lesson learned is that people and organizations (including many non-profits and all health systems) do whatever benefits them the most, so follow the money.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Listening: new from Badflower, LA kids who can crank out some hard rock. They are touring tiny venues (like bars) right now – they’ll be in Madison, WI on October 12. I’m enjoying their music along with the best manufactured cookie I’ve had in years, Oreo Thins with pistachio (I expect the coconut to be equally wondrous). 

Webinars

September 26 (Wednesday) 12:30 ET. “How to Ensure Patient Records are Always Available.” Sponsor: Goliath Technologies. Presenter: Goliath Technologies engineering staff. This webinar will discuss how an early warning system can help your organization ensure your EHR systems and patient records are always available. You’ll also learn how to proactively anticipate, troubleshoot, prevent, and resolve end user experience issues before users or patients are impacted.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

CenTrak acquires the security solutions assets of Elpas Solutions, which include infant protection, wireless call, staff duress, man down, and wander management.

People

Akron Children’s Hospital (OH) promotes pediatric hematologist-oncologist Sarah Rush, MD to CMIO.

Intelerad Medical System hires Paul Lepage (Telus Health) as president/CEO.

Announcements and Implementations

Cancer management and patient engagement technology vendor Carevive goes live with its patient care planning software at University of Missouri Health Care’s Ellis Fischel Cancer Center, where it is integrated with Cerner Oncology.

I missed this earlier: a Rand report recommends that patients get involved with provider record-matching challenges, with these suggestions:

• Implement a voluntary universal identifier, managed by an organization that does not store PHI
• Implement a patient-managed public key
• Expand the use of government-issued identifiers such as driver license numbers
• Match records by asking patients to verify their identity by answering “what you know” type security questions
• Use biometrics with demographics
• Verify the identity of patients by sending one-time verification codes to their phones
• Implement consumer-directed exchange
• Use regional health record banks
• Give patients a user interface so they can verify record matches themselves
• Have patients supply their own record location information

In urge-to-merge and marketing provider news, Greenville Health System and Palmetto Health will rename their South Carolina partnership to Prisma Health, while in Florida, Orlando Health and Lakeland Regional will end their affiliation October 1 after just one year due to their “different strategies and distinctive communities served” that were apparently not evident 12 months ago. One might assume it was an uneasy relationship between Orlando and Lakeland since the websites of both systems have been scrubbed of any evidence of the affiliation, including their rosy press releases from last year that predicted improved patient access and clinical quality. And in Maine, Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems (which oddly makes “system” plural) will rename itself Northern Light Health, following the lead of hospitals that have eschewed their confusing “health system” moniker to make a land grab for the “health” label even though hospitals have only a tiny impact on health while taking the lion’s share of healthcare expenditures.

Other

Intermountain precision genomics director Lincoln Nadauld, MD, PhD decries EHR-generated PDFs as a crude form of interoperability, noting that a particular patient’s 143-page record could not be searched, viewing it caused it to re-default to 6-point font with each page flip, it could not display CT scan images, and it contained only the first page of genomic testing results. He advocates a patient-controlled, cloud-based, searchable repository, not surprisingly since he wrote the piece for Ciitizen, a pre-beta vendor that will offer such a sharing platform. It sounds a bit like CareSync, which unfortunately couldn’t make a go of offering a stellar service that also included having humans obtain the subscriber’s medical records (my CareSync experience was excellent). I’m ever-skeptical about a business model that expects patients to obtain and upload their own records since they historically won’t bother.

An Associated Press analysis finds that despite the White House’s claim in May that drug companies would announce “massive” price cuts almost immediately, 2018 has seen 96 price increases for every one price reduction. HHS Secretary Alex Azar — a former executive of a drug company that dramatically increased insulin prices during his tenure — says he’s not counting on “the altruism of pharma companies lowing their prices.” Drug price hikes are often small but frequent and makers of competing products often raise prices in lockstep.

Former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says the US healthcare system, the world’s most expensive by far, is morally wrong in that “nobody would understand why almost 30 million people are not covered by insurance.” He says drug companies, hospitals, and doctors are using their lobbying power to avoid universal healthcare. 

A Michigan jury awards $130 million to the family of a boy who in 2006, as a two-month-old, developed cerebral palsy that the family’s attorneys claim was due to a botched IV start at Beaumont Hospital. The family’s lawyers say the now-12-year-old is a “charming and beautiful boy” who needs help getting in and out of the bathtub.

I’ve lost interest in the heavy-handed and unrealistic medical program “The Resident,” but  its Season 2 premiere this week borrowed an idea from year-old episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” by featuring a cyberhacking story line. The hospital’s drama-filled blackout turns out to be the work of a hacker who got herself admitted to the hospital so she could breach its systems from the inside (Hollywood loves “the call is coming from inside the house” as a shocker) in revenge for high medical bills that forced her to drop out of college. Least believable (and that’s saying a lot for this episode) is that the hacker was admitted for a UTI instead of being streeted with a prescription for antibiotics, and when confronted about the breach, she handed over a thumb drive backup that somehow fixed everything. Not unbelievable is that the hospital fired an uninvolved IT guy over the incident. 

Sponsor Updates

• Crossings Healthcare Solutions will demonstrate its clinical decision support tools for physicians, nurses, and informaticists at the 11th Annual DV/NJHIMSS Fall Event this week in Atlantic City, NJ and at the Cerner Health Conference October 8-11 in Kansas City, MO.
• ROI Healthcare Solutions is featured on the TV program “Newswatch.”
• Kyruus will convene a CEO panel at the Fifth Annual Thought Leadership on Access Symposium in Boston October 15-17.
• MModal and Enjoin will partner to offer a technology-driven clinical documentation improvement advisory solution to address population health.
• The Wisconsin State-Journal profiles Nordic Data & Analytics Services Delivery Manager Eric Pennington.
• Nordic’s managed services division has signed 20 clients and expanded to 100 consultants.
• Healthwise launches its FHIR app in Epic’s App Orchard.
• Aprima will offer HIPAA compliance programs from Abyde.
• Mmodal partners with Enjoin to offer clinical documentation consulting services.
• ZappRx partners with specialty pharmacy Dunn Meadow to speed up prescription access for oncology and pulmonology patients.
• FDB publishes a new case study describing how Health First improved medication adherence with FDB’s Meducation in its Allscripts Sunrise EHR.
• AdvancedMD will exhibit at WebPT’s annual Ascend conference September 28-29 in Phoenix, AZ.
• Aprima, CoverMyMeds, CTG, Culbert Healthcare Solutions, and Direct Consulting Associates will exhibit at MGMA September 30-October 2 in Boston.
• CarePort Health will exhibit at ACMA Maryland September 29 in Baltimore.
• Change Healthcare will host Inspire 2018 September 30 in Phoenix, AZ.
• Cumberland Consulting Group will exhibit at the MDRP Summit 2018 October 1-3 in Chicago.
• Dimensional Insight will exhibit at 2018 IntegraTe October 2 in Davie, FL.

Blog Posts

• 5 Questions with Andy Crowder, Corporate SVP and CIO, Scripps Health (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Extending an Improved Patient Experience Beyond Hospital Walls (Access)
• The Rise of Digital Healthcare (AdvancedMD)
• How Aurora Health Care uses homegrown predictive analytics to reduce employee turnover (Advisory Board)
• Agfa Makes HR Strategic Business Partner with SAP SuccessFactors (Agfa Healthcare)
• Innovative technology to help meet quality measures across multiple value-based programs (AssessURHealth)
• Creating the Foundation for Real-Time Healthcare (Bernoulli Health)
• The Contact Center as a Path to Hospital Transformation (Spok)
• HITRUST 2018 – A Fantastic Event (Datica)
• Significant Changes Ahead for SNFs (CarePort Health)
• Three Things That Can Help Optimize Your Practice’s Workflow (ChartLogic)
• CoverMyQuest Update, Part 2: 2017 Winners Share Their Stories (CoverMyMeds)
• Microhospitals: How a New Healthcare Model Leverages Business Intelligence (Dimensional Insight)
• Creating a Best in Class Pumping Room (Docent Health)
• 10 Ways to Improve Staff Transition to a New Urgent Care EMR (DocuTap)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 9/24/18

Top News

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center leadership defends itself to its employees following reports that it gave for-profit AI startup Paige.AI exclusive access to its 25 million pathology slides in return for an equity stake for itself and several MSKCC executives (in essence, profiting from the work of its pathologists and the property of its patients instead of by creating new intellectual property). The health system explains that:

• It is sharing only de-identified patient data and not actual slides (note: the Paige.AI partnership announcement specifically says it gained “exclusive rights to MSK’s library of 25 million pathology slides” that are “accompanied by de-identified pathologic and clinical annotation”)
• The relationship between its executives and the company was vetted for conflict of interest
• Board members and faculty who received equity won’t participate in company decisions
• They’ll kick back some of the proceeds to the pathology department

MSKCC’s recent bad press – including unreported conflicts of interest by a since-resigned key researcher who was raking in drug company money and skepticism about its relationship with IBM Watson Health – add it to the list of health systems whose high-falutin’ patient care proclamations fail to hide the fact that it often acts like any other self-enriching business whose own interests come first. It paid its CEO $6.7 million (plus he gets a company house), its CIO $1 million, and its chief fundraiser $1.4 million, according to its most recent tax forms.

In case you missed it, sick and frightened cancer patients are a highly profitable widget in this country. As is typical in healthcare, nebulous consent forms allow their data to be sold to any willing buyer without their permission or benefit.

ProPublica notes that its report didn’t create the MSKCC Paige.AI controversy – it was MSKCC’s own pathologists who complained that their work had been taken for the benefit of top MSKCC brass. Surprisingly, they didn’t complain that Paige.AI’s business model requires the company to characterize the work of human pathologists as subjective, error-prone, and inefficient compared to allowing a computer to do their work.

MSKCC’s former pathology department chair Marc Rosenblum, MD wrote the most brilliantly sarcastic internal email I’ve ever seen last month (subject: “Department: Fleece(d)”) in offering suggestions to hold a Paige.AI naming contest with stock options as a prize to “fully embrace the entrepreneurial tenor of our times;” to create a department logo to “trumpet where we’re going” that would look good on a Patagonia fleece; and to create a department fight song. 

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents are skeptical about the population health benefits of the Apple Watch’s EKG recording capability.

New poll to your right or here: would you be OK with having your social media activities monitored for health research or to trigger personalized health improvement suggestions? I admit I’m fascinated by the human aspect of expecting an insurer to cover huge financial risk while denying them relevant information, which then goes back to the argument about universal healthcare, under which such lifestyle forensics would be unnecessary since the entire country would make up the risk pool. Life insurers are allowed to require medical exams, getting auto insurance involves having your pre-existing condition (driving record) examined initially to set premium prices and having that price jacked up (or the policy cancelled) following a paid claim, and all forms of business insurance (malpractice, cybersecurity, etc.) come with the expectation of allowing the insurer to assess their risk by inspecting sensitive records. Only with health insurance are we offended at the idea that insurers need to learn more about our health before agreeing to pay to maintain it, an expectation that has risen due to out-of-control hospital and drug costs in the absence of political will to address the issue.

Webinars

September 26 (Wednesday) 12:30 ET. “How to Ensure Patient Records are Always Available.” Sponsor: Goliath Technologies. Presenter: Goliath Technologies engineering staff. This webinar will discuss how an early warning system can help your organization ensure your EHR systems and patient records are always available. You’ll also learn how to proactively anticipate, troubleshoot, prevent, and resolve end user experience issues before users or patients are impacted.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

People

Mazars USA promotes Gil Enos to leader of its healthcare consulting group.

Announcements and Implementations

Wolters Kluwer Health launches a new version of its Sentri7 clinical surveillance solution.

Other

Researchers question whether it’s a good idea to apply Cambridge Analytica-type social media “digital phenotyping” to target people for population health interventions. They note that such activities incur the risk of public backlash (when social media users realize they’re being monitored and controlled) and having those users go underground by avoiding using words that all out their health-harming practices.

An oncologist’s Wall Street Journal op-ed piece ponders the dilemma in which drug companies charge whatever high prices the market will bear irrespective of their actual research and manufacturing costs and the extent to which the drug improves an individual’s health, noting that the US is the only country that approves marketing of drugs without negotiating the allowed selling price:

The extraordinary cost of these treatments presents a tragic dilemma: We may soon have a miracle drug for cancer whose cost, when multiplied across the population that needs it, could bankrupt the country. Consider what would happen if the new drugs were used to treat 250,000 cancer patients per year—just 40 percent of the Americans who die annually from cancer. At $373,000 per patient, a Kymriah-type immunotherapy treatment would increase drug spending in the US by approximately $93 billion a year. This would mean an almost 20 percent increase in the country’s total annual drug spending—for just one drug. To put that figure in perspective, it amounts to $300 per American, or $500 if we include associated medical services.

Why we should have been lawyers: a Georgia jury awards the family of a baby whose penis was injured during a midwife’s circumcision $30 million.

A fun Bleacher Report profile of Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, MD – who is also a right guard for the Kansas City Chiefs who signed a five-year, $41 million contract extension with $20 million guaranteed last year – reveals interesting facts:

• He made good money at 12 years old selling pesto that he made himself, explaining that it had to be very good since “I wasn’t cute enough to get any sympathy purchases.”
• His parents took the children on year-long sailing trips carrying only rice and canned vegetables to show them that money isn’t all that important.
• The Quebec born Duvernay-Tardif graduated from McGill University’s medical school even though he spoke only French and all his classes were conducted in English, so he played lecture recordings at half speed while looking words up in a dictionary.
• He was on call on NFL draft day, so he gave his phone to a nurse and asked her to say yes to any team that drafted him while he participated in an emergency C-section.
• He is only the 10th player ever drafted by the NFL from a Canadian college and the first active doctor to be on a team’s roster
• The NFL denied his request to add “MD” after his last name on his jersey, which he says is OK since “my name is Duvernay-Tardif, and it’s plenty long enough like that.”
• He explanations the motivation required to master two difficult professions: “My biggest fear is doing nothing. When you start downsizing your expectations of what you can do with your time, it’s hard to go back. If I spend an offseason doing nothing, I don’t know if that drive will come back. That scares me more than anything.”

Sponsor Updates

• Lightbeam Health Solutions launches the Pop Health Podcast with an initial episode on gaining patient buy-in for chronic care management.
• MedData and Experian Health will exhibit at the HFMA Region 7 Conference September 26-28 in South Bend, IN.
• Kansas State University’s College of Engineering names Netsmart its 2018 Company of the Year.
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, will exhibit at the CSO HIMSS Leadership Symposium September 28 in Cincinnati.
• PreparedHealth will exhibit at the Regional DV-NJ Chapters HIMSS Conference September 26-28 in Atlantic City.
• The SSI Group will exhibit at the HFMA South Texas and TAHFA Fall Symposium September 23-25 in San Antonio.
• Surescripts and ZappRx will exhibit at the NASP Annual Meeting & Expo 2018 September 24-26 in Washington, DC.
• TriNetX will host TriNetX Summit18 September 25-26 in Boston.
• Vocera will exhibit at the Illinois Health and Hospital Association Leadership Conference September 25 in Lombard, IL.
• Consulting Magazine names Huron a “Best Firm to Work For” for the second consecutive year.
• Wellsoft will exhibit at Emergency Nursing 2018 September 26-29 in Pittsburgh.

Blog Posts

• Nursing Communication Tools: 5 Benefits of Smartphones (LiveProcess)
• 6 resources for National Recovery Month (Meditech)
• Welcoming Connance to the Waystar Family (Waystar)
• Opioid Addiction: What It Is, Isn’t and Our Impact (Netsmart)
• 7 Key Epic Optimizations That Have a Direct Impact on Your Bottom Line (Parallon Technology Solutions)
• Keeping Up With Payer Alerts (Experian Health)
• When it comes to patient billing, who wants to be #1 for all the wrong reasons? (Patientco)
• Fast-Paced and Fun: Inside the Workplace of Sansoro Health (Sansoro Health)
• Steps to a Successful Interface Engine Migration (Summit Healthcare)
• Four simple steps for reducing third-party service costs (PerfectServe)
• Free like a puppy. (Voalte)
• The Dos and Don’ts of Balance Billing (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 9/21/18

Top News

Pathologists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center object to a deal under which several MSKCC executives and three of its board members received an equity stake in pathology clinical decision support startup Paige.AI after the health system gave the company exclusive access to its archive of 25 million patient tissue slides.

The pathologists say it’s unfair that equity created by their expertise was handed out.

Paige.AI raised $25 million in a February 2018 Series A funding round.

The pathologists also are expressing concern about sending anonymized patient data to the for-profit company.

Reader Comments

From Former Healthx-er: “Re: Healthx. CEO Sean Downs and CFO Jim Meer were replaced a couple of weeks ago with guys who seem to travel together to fix broken companies. The COO and VP of product were released a few months ago. More than half the account management team was let go last week and cutbacks were made in services, sales, marketing, accounting, product development, and the chief people officer. More layoffs are expected this week.” Unverified, except for the newly announced CEO and CFO. New CEO Gene Cattarino has ridden the CEO circuit for SafeOp Surgical, Capsule, Lynx Medical Systems, Landacorp, Medicode, and TDS. Indianapolis-based Healthx offers a provider-member engagement portal to health plans.

Webinars

September 26 (Wednesday) 12:30 ET. “How to Ensure Patient Records are Always Available.” Sponsor: Goliath Technologies. Presenter: Goliath Technologies engineering staff. This webinar will discuss how an early warning system can help your organization ensure your EHR systems and patient records are always available. You’ll also learn how to proactively anticipate, troubleshoot, prevent, and resolve end user experience issues before users or patients are impacted.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Mercy Health (OH) becomes a minority investor in cloud-based medical image management vendor NucleusHealth. The 23-hospital system served as a beta site for company’s cloud-based PACS, eventually developing an image-sharing network across 300 facilities.

Ooda Health raises $40.5 million in a funding round that led it to seek out investment partners with strong female leadership (of which there are few). Oak HC/FT and DFJ led the round. The San Francisco-based startup is working with Blue Shield of California to develop real-time claims payment software that will be piloted at Dignity Health and Hill Physicians. Co-founder and CEO Giovanni Colella, MD founded and led Castlight Health and Relay Health.

Telemedicine vendor SnapMD raises $7.1 million in a Series B round.

InstaMed expands its Philadelphia headquarters with the addition of a 3,200 square-foot Collaboration Center.

Town Hall Ventures closes a $115 million fund and makes unspecified investments in payer Bright Health, home health provider Landmark Health, and chronic kidney disease company Strive Health. Town Hall was launched in May by former CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt, Trevor Price (Docent Health), and David Whelan (Rebel Labs) to invest in companies that cater to underserved populations.

Details finally come to light about Nest’s secretive 2017 acquisition of Senosis Health, an app-based health monitoring startup out of the University of Washington. Parent company Google put strict parameters around publicizing the acquisition, so as to keep Nest’s digital health plans a secret. The company, which is now part of Google’s hardware unit, has yet to release a healthcare product, though it did throw its hat (unsuccessfully) in the Withings acquisition ring. Reports now suggest that Nest is working on devices to help seniors age in place.

People

Emids names Tim McMullen (NTT Data Services) president and Dan Critchley (Optimum Healthcare IT) VP of its provider business. Tom Niehaus, who served as president since the company’s acquisition of Encore Health Resources last year, will retire at the end of September.

Sales

• The Nebraska Health Information Initiative selects patient identity matching technology from 4medica.
• St. Luke’s University Health Network expands its CarePort Care Management implementation to additional facilities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
• La Clinica de Familia will implement EClinicalWorks across its 19 locations in New Mexico.
• Spectrum Health & Human Services (NY) and Reeves County Hospital District (TX) select Cerner’s EHR and RCM technology.
• Cottage Hospital (NH) will expand its use of Summit Healthcare’s interoperability solutions.

Announcements and Implementations

Allina Health (MN) implements Vocera software to better connect its nurse call, patient monitoring, and communications systems.

Provation develops cloud-based procedure documentation software, including automated coding, for ASCs and hospitals. Wolters Kluwer sold the company to Clearlake Capital Group at the beginning of the year for $180 million.

Whitman Hospital & Medical Clinic (WA) goes live on Meditech’s Web Ambulatory EHR with implementation help from Engage.

KLAS ranks WebPT as the #1 ambulatory therapy/rehab EHR vendor in both market share and overall performance, with Clinicient and Raintree also performing well. Casamba and Net Health customers say (75 percent and 46 percent, respectively) they wouldn’t buy the product again.

As part of its continued effort to pivot from a consumer wearable to a medical device, Fitbit creates an app-based virtual care and health coaching program for health systems, payers, and employers.

Privacy and Security

Lutheran Health Network (IN) brings its IT systems back online after an attempted data breach. Lutheran Hospital diverted ER patients to other facilities during the reboot, which took several hours. Hospital administrators were quick to point out the incident was in no way related to known network stability issues. Lutheran is in the midst of a $30 million IT project that will replace outdated McKesson software with Cerner.

Boston Medical Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital collectively pay $999,000 to OCR to settle potential privacy violations related to the taping of TV show “Boston Med” without prior patient approval. New York-Presbyterian Hospital settled for similar reasons several years ago after allowing filming for “NY Med.”

A Springfield, MA gynecologist is sentenced to one year of probation for violating HIPAA by giving a drug company sales rep access to patient files. Rita Luthra, MD lost her medical license upon her arrest in 2015, forcing her to close her practice that served primarily indigent patients.

Other

Intermountain Healthcare (UT) opens a $20 million Healthcare Transformation Center that will house a Healthcare Delivery Institute, Leadership Institute and Simulation Center, and CHIME innovation center.

Hixny’s decision to expand its HIE services into nine new counties in upstate New York prompts HealthlinkNY to cry foul because of overlapping territories. HealthlinkNY Executive Director Staci Romeo believes cannibalizing on service areas will decrease overall data-sharing effectiveness. Both HIEs are part of the Statewide Health Information Network for New York.

Sponsor Updates

• FormFast will exhibit at DreamForce September 25-28 in San Francisco.
• LogicStream Health will exhibit at the MSHP 2018 Midyear Clinical Meeting September 21 in Brooklyn Park, MN.
• Elsevier Clinical Solutions, InterSystems, and Intelligent Medical Objects will exhibit at AHIMA September 22-26 in Miami.
• Meditech will participate in MGMA18 September 30-October 30.
• EPSi will exhibit at the HFMA Arizona Fall Conference September 26-28 in Chandler.
• Glytec customer Honor Health John C. Lincoln Medical Center’s Cardiovascular ICU achieves a silver-level Beacon Award for Excellence from the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses.
• HCTec publishes a new case study on “Delivering Cutting-Edge Coding Solutions.”
• Allscripts features Healthfinch’s Charlie Refill Management app as its Allscripts Developer Program September 2018 App of the Month.
• Madison Magazine includes Nordic on its list of best places to work for the third straight year.

Blog Posts

• The Crucial Transition from Patient Portal to Holistic Digital Patient Channel (Loyale Healthcare)
• Building for Humans: The role of human-centered design in the hospital setting (part 3 of 3) (GetWellNetwork)
• Hurricane Florence Evacuation Response: Imat Solutions Helps EtHIN to Retrieve Medical Records for North Carolina Residents (Imat Solutions)
• How Much Will You Have to Shut Down After a Cyberattack? (The HCI Group)
• Calm During the Storm: Maintaining Communication in the Midst of a Disaster (Spok)
• How to Ensure Good End-User Experience with Proactive Monitoring and Troubleshooting (Goliath Technologies)
• Living the #HylandLife: HIMSS Europe (Hyland Health)
• HIPAA Risk Analysis vs. Gap Analysis – There Is a Difference! (Impact Advisors)
• 6 resources for National Recovery Month (Meditech)
• 10 most common HIPAA violations and solutions (Imprivata)
• How a Healthcare CRM Helps You Stay Secure and Compliant (Influence Health)
• Bottled Up: How Better Information Flow Can Empower Pharmacies and Patients (InterSystems)

Contacts

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

News 9/19/18

Top News

Activist investor Elliott Management — whose criticism of Athenahealth caused the company to fire founder and CEO Jonathan Bush, cut costs, and seek a buyer – joins several other would-be suitors that will pass on acquiring the company at Elliott’s previously offered price of $160 per share.

Elliot says its due diligence has turned up significant Athenahealth problems. ATHN shares dropped sharply on the news.

Athenahealth will extend its bid deadline by 10 days through September 27.

Critics of Elliott’s tactics speculate that the firm is hoping that Athenahealth will accept a fire-sale price to avoid the public embarrassment of eliciting no acceptable offers.

Reader Comments

From NXGN Woes: “Re: Nextgen. Employees were told last week that two C-level executives are leaving the company. Operations employees will report to the CFO.” Unverified. NXGN Woes provided names, although I’ll decline to include them since their LinkedIn entries and the company’s executive page remain unchanged. UPDATE: a reader tells me that marketing SVP Tamra Rushing has been replaced and provides this internal email from CEO Rusty Frantz:

Due to personal reasons and effective immediately, Scott Bostick has made the decision to step down from his position as Chief Operating Officer and into an Individual Contributor role reporting directly to me. Please join me in thanking Scott for his leadership as he transitions into this new role. Further, in the coming weeks, the executive team will work with the senior leaders within the client services organization to ensure a successful transition under the leadership of our Chief Financial Officer, Jamie Arnold. The leaders who will now be reporting to Jamie Arnold include: Mitch Waters –  SVP, Sales, Colleen Edwards – SVP, Marketing, Allen Plunk – SVP, Managed Services, and Ben Clark – SVP, Client Services. At this time, we will not be backfilling the Chief Operating Officer role. We will move forward with a flatter organizational structure to ensure continued success of the commercial client facing organization.

From Jellico: “Re: KLAS. We dropped out of the relationship after they failed to contact any of the dozens of our consulting firm’s clients whose names we provided. All of the four KLAS reps we had been assigned over several years have left the company. I’ve kept in touch with two of those and both say they were uncomfortable collecting money from vendors they were rating. It will be interesting to see if Black Book gains traction. They appear to be more straightforward and they don’t accept monies from vendors they rate.” I’ve found KLAS’s market reports to be informative in how they broadly characterize a particular market segment. I have less confidence that they use enough statistically defensible methodology to rate individual vendors reliably. Still, the company’s business model is propped up by (a) the high-ranked vendors who usually keep paying in hoping of remaining on top, and (b) the also-rans who believe – accurately or not – that maintaining or increasing their KLAS payments will improve their chances of earning KLAS bragging rights. No CIO in their right mind would buy something based on KLAS scores and I suspect that few do, but anxious vendors are always looking for a competitive advantage and hope KLAS can provide it, even if indirectly. In KLAS’s defense, consulting firms (of which they are arguably one) often make recommendations to clients based on laughably subjective factors gleaned from casual conversations that they package up into impressive PowerPoints, so it’s hardly a new concept. I enjoy the Black Book survey results, where they survey huge numbers of people and then slice and dice their responses into a mind-boggling set of reports whose statistical underpinning and transparency seems reasonable. A significant deficiency of many of the survey-type reports I see is that they fail to categorize respondents (do they work for a single hospital, a health system in a corporate role, or a medical practice?) and they often fail to distinguish between a vendor and its multiple products (which Allscripts EHR were the respondents talking about?)

Webinars

September 26 (Wednesday) 12:30 ET. “How to Ensure Patient Records are Always Available.” Sponsor: Goliath Technologies. Presenter: Goliath Technologies engineering staff. This webinar will discuss how an early warning system can help your organization ensure your EHR systems and patient records are always available. You’ll also learn how to proactively anticipate, troubleshoot, prevent, and resolve end user experience issues before users or patients are impacted.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Waystar will acquire workflow and predictive analytics vendor Connance to enhance its revenue cycle management capabilities.

Hospital purchased services technology vendor Valify acquires Lucro, which offers a hospital-vendor marketplace.

Signet Accel, the Ohio State University spinoff that offers the Avec data integration platform, has reportedly downsized and parted ways with CEO John Raden. I also noticed that former EVP of Sales and Marketing Brenda Barry has gone back to her previous employer after one year on the job. Regenstrief President/CEO and AMIA board chair Peter Embi, MD, MS was a Signet Accel co-founder and medical advisor.

Aramark will sell its Charlotte, NC-based hospital medical equipment management and clinical engineering business to Trimedx for $300 million.

Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins will spin off its digital health group – which includes some of its most prominent partners, who have invested in Uber and Stripe – into an independent group. The early-stage team will continue to operate under the Kleiner Perkins name. The firm’s healthcare technology investments include Collective Medical, Livongo, and Mango Health. It previously invested in Teladoc.

The Justice Department approves the $52 billion merger of insurer Cigna and pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts.

Sales

• Beacon Health System will implement MyHealthDirect’s patient self-scheduling system.
• Children’s Health (TX) signs a 15-year, $75 million agreement with Philips for patient monitoring and PACS technologies.
• DCH Health System (AL) chooses Santa Rosa Consulting to lead its Meditech Expanse implementation.
• Cigna will expand its diabetes prevention program in collaboration with Omada Health.

People

GetWellNetwork hires Peter Keating (Advisory Board) as chief people officer.

Jeff Sturman (Cumberland Consulting Group) joins Memorial Healthcare System (FL) as SVP/CIO. He was previously SVP of IT there from 2004 to 2012, where he led its selection and implementation of Epic.

PatientPing hires Sagnik Bhattacharya (Epic) as VP of payer and provider initiatives.

Jesus Delgado (Rush University Medical Center) joins Community Healthcare System’s Community Foundation of Northwest Indiana as VP/CIO.

Healthcare investor and innovator Tom Main, managing partner of 7wire Ventures, died Sunday.

Announcements and Implementations

VisualDx launches Aysa, a consumer app that inspects a user’s skin condition photos, asks relevant questions, and then provides possible causes. 

Meditech announces Greenfield, a third-party app development environment that supports FHIR and will offer a store of approved apps. 

Mercy Technology Solutions launches a cloud-hosted, pay-per-study PACS offering.

EPSi adds Ilerasoft’s medical equipment investment and usage capabilities to its capital budgeting system.

Ciox Health announces HealthSource Gym, a learning environment that will help healthcare organizations assess, train, and develop medical coders.

Government and Politics

HHS publishes a report covering the state of its data sharing among its 29 agencies, noting problems that include a lack of standards for inter-agency data requests; variation in technical formats and approaches; the variety of statues that regulate data collection project; and the increased chance of privacy violations as data availability increases.   

Other

California doctors will be required to consult the state’s prescription drug monitoring program database before prescribing opiates under a law that takes effect October 2. The CURES system was developed in 1997 and updated in 2009 and 2016, but a 2012 newspaper investigation found that less than 10 percent of doctors and pharmacists had even bothered to sign up for access.

Amazon Web Services features Angel MedFlight Worldwide Air Ambulance’s self-development of an IPad charting application that uses AWS and Salesforce

In Africa, the governor of Nairobi makes an unannounced visit to a maternity hospital to follow up on complaints of negligence, orders an employee to open several unlabeled boxes and bags in a storage room. and finds the bodies of 12 infants. Reports suggest that the babies died when the hospital’s incubators lost electrical power. The government will follow up with investigations into rumored child trafficking and giving babies to the wrong families. Kenya’s public hospitals are mismanaged, underfunded, and staffed by doctors and nurses who have gone on strike over low pay and poor working conditions.

A Cincinnati neighborhood creates a Christmas celebration for a two-year-old whose aggressive brain cancer is likely to kill him before December. Six neighbors of Brody Allen’s family put up their Christmas lights early, sent cards, and will have a Christmas parade that includes fire trucks and supporters driving their own cars. He is too weak to walk, so his siblings wheel him around the neighborhood in a Red Flyer wagon covered with blankets.

Sponsor Updates

• CenTrak donates $5,000 to the Kerala Flood Relief Charity Fund.
• ACOs using Lightbeam Health Solutions achieved 1.7 times the savings generated by non-Lightbeam ACOs.
• Cumberland Consulting Group will sponsor and present at the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program Summit October 1-3 in Chicago.
• Formativ Health adds several new features to its Patient Engagement Platform including payment functionality powered by Patientco.
• Wolters Kluwer highlights patients as an underutilized resource in the fight against sepsis.
• AdvancedMD will host its EVO18 annual user conference October 3-5 in Salt Lake City.
• Aprima and Direct Consulting Associates will exhibit at the Ohio MGMA Fall Conference September 19-21 in Columbus.
• Jason Spurck (SOS Tech Group) joins Audacious Inquiry as support engineer.
• TechVibe Radio features Arcadia CTO Jon Cook.
• Datica publishes a new book, “Complete Cloud Compliance: How regulated companies de-risk the cloud and kickstart transformation.”
• Burwood Group will host “Cloud Revolution with Burwood, Citrix, & Google” September 27 in Chesterfield, MO.
• CarePort Health will exhibit at ACMA Kentucky/Tennessee September 24 in Nashville.
• CoverMyMeds will exhibit at the PCMA Annual Conference September 23-25 in Scottsdale, AZ.

Blog Posts

• Using Agile concepts to improve task management (Bluetree)
• 3 Ways Electronic Mental & Behavioral Health Screening Increases Patient Engagement (AssessURHealth)
• Facilitating and Operationalizing Continuous Surveillance (Bernoulli Health)
• The Clinical Side of Case Management (CarePort Health)
• NCPDP Real-Time Prescription Benefit Task Group: Why Stakeholders Need to Take Notice (CoverMyMeds)
• Deduplication of Clinical Data Without Data Loss: Critical to Meeting User Needs (Diameter Health)
• How Analytics Can Help Improve Falls (Dimensional Insight)
• Urgent Care Best Practices for Anti-Kickback Statute Compliance (DocuTap)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 9/17/18

Top News

Paper EHR woes following Hurricane Katrina created the push for EHRs and interoperability in 2005 (and propelled Karen DeSalvo into the National Coordinator role in early 2014), so it’s fitting that Georgia’s GRAChIE HIE is working to connect Southeast providers via the EHealth Exchange to meet care needs that are being challenged by Hurricane Florence.

In related news, HIEs in Tennessee and North Carolina take just 48 hours to connect their respective systems to allow Tennessee providers to pull up records for North Carolina evacuees who require medical care there.

Also, UNC Health Care waives fees for its MDLive-powered virtual visits during the hurricane.

HHS reminds hospitals in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia that it is temporarily waiving several HIPAA Privacy Rule sanctions and penalties:

• The requirement to obtain patient consent to speak with family members and friends about their care
• The requirement to honor patient requests to opt out of the facility directory
• The requirement to provide a notice of privacy practices
• The right of the patient to restrict uses and disclosures and to request alternative forms of confidential communications

I would be interested in hearing from IT folks hurricane-affected hospitals about how they prepared for the storm or responded to its effects.

Reader Comments

From Silver Surfer: “Re: KLAS. We’re a vendor and cancelled our agreement three years ago after KLAS assigned 18 months of feedback from our clients to the wrong vendor. Three years later, anyone searching KLAS for our consulting firm gets a message that our results don’t meet minimum KLAS Konfidence levels, meaning that we might be losing business from prospects who see that as a negative for our company even though it was KLAS’s error.” Unverified. The strongest complaints I get regarding KLAS’s methodology involve (a) how many of a vendor’s clients they survey; (b) how they select those they speak to; and (c) whether that small subset of clients is representative. People also express concern that paying KLAS to survey more clients than they might otherwise contact gives deeper-pockets vendors a chance to gain ground.

From Vishnu: “Re: [vendor name omitted]. Protecting its managers and team leads against internal sexual harassment accusations. Hopefully in time they will do what’s right.” I’ll omit the company’s name in the absence of legal evidence, such as a filed lawsuit.

From Dr. Ross: “Re: Epic in Denmark. I was in southern Europe for a conference and this article seems to be all the talk, even though I haven’t seen it mentioned in the US.” Three doctors in Denmark’s Capital Region refer to its newly implemented system (in a Google-translated page) as “the killing platform,” saying that it’s cumbersome, illogical, and doesn’t easily share data with quality and research databases (they expressed their concerns in a Danish language video that doesn’t include an English translation). The doctors say the Region’s claim that 30 systems have been replaced by one is “fake news,” as departments that previously used 6-7 systems are still running 3-4, and warns that reduced productivity may bankrupt the Region. They conclude that the system was built for private hospitals in the US and isn’t suitable for those in Denmark despite the claims of “US salesmen and lawyers,” urging the Danish Parliament to take over the project instead of “cling[ing] to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.”

From Udon: “Re: ERISA. Would love to see an expose on that statute, which renders most state-level legislative and regulatory actions meaningless because it governs employer-funded health plans. If you are denied a scan or behavioral stay, you have to sue the health plan – which will fight it tooth and nail – and the most you can get is the cost of the denied benefit.” ERISA, which sets standards for private health and pension plans, got a recent spotlight when an HCA hospital assured a heart attack patient that his out-of-network stay would be covered by his insurance, then went after him for the $109,000 balance beyond what Aetna paid because his employer-provided insurance was self-funded (as is true of 60 percent of people), meaning he’s not protected by state-mandated prohibition of balance billing. On the other hand, those state protections are not common anyway and are often not comprehensive. ACA prohibits balance billing for out-of-network ED visits, but still allows out-of-network doctors, hospitals, and ambulance services to demand payment from the patient beyond the negotiated amount their insurance pays. So, Mr. Life-Threatening Emergency Patient, your job before breaching a hospital’s financially (and sometimes clinically)dangerous wall is:

• Study your employer’s insurance ahead of time to see if it’s self-funded.
• Keep a list of which hospitals are in your policy’s ever-narrowing provider network.
• Never travel beyond the immediate vicinity of those in-network hospitals.
• Stay conscious at all times during your medical crisis (or better yet, bring a medical bodyguard) so you can ask every person you see whether they’re in your network since hospitals are notorious for letting people work out of their building who are anxious to bill you separately and who don’t need your approval to do so.
• Remember that you don’t have a choice of ED doctor, surgeon, anesthesiologist, hospitalist, etc. and your condition makes elective transfer unlikely, so wear ear plugs to mute the sound of the ever-ringing cash register.
• Assume that despite paying for what looks like decent insurance, an unplanned medical event could progress quickly into an unplanned medical bankruptcy courtesy of healthcare profiteers and their political lap dogs who like things just the way they are.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents express little interest in paying for expanded consumer genetics testing at a higher price, with the most significant concern being that long-term care insurers could use your personal data against you — the testing companies aren’t covered by HIPAA’s minimal protections and therefore your data can be sold to anyone.

New poll to your right or here: How much impact will Apple Watch’s announced EKG recording capabilities have on overall population health? I admit I’m skeptical about all consumer diagnostic tools for these reasons:

• Our system is already burdened by excessive use and cost, so further clogging up EDs and PCP offices with Apple Watch wearers demanding to have providers interpret their likely meaningless readings isn’t necessarily a good thing
• Many millions of Americans have already been accurately diagnosed with life-affecting conditions they can’t afford to have treated and this further aligns people into have/have not categories
• It reinforces Silicon Valley’s misperception that our poor public health is caused by underdiagnosis or misdiagnosis rather than a screwy system of misaligned incentives and the siphoning off of most of our healthcare spending to episodic care providers rather than toward population and public health
• Such tools also reinforce the inaccurate idea that funneling symptom-free people into a healthcare system that can do more harm than good is in their best interest, especially the largely elderly population likely to experience atrial fibrillation

Thanks to Jenn for covering for me for a few vacation days. I’m happy to have rendered myself at least temporarily redundant so I can take occasional worry-free time off without being chained to a computer all day. You may notice the difference since my writing is grumpier and more wearily skeptical than Jenn, whose forte is admirable journalistic excellence rather than pent-up, post-vacation ranting.

Spam protection has made sending bulk email – such as my HIStalk “we’ve published something new” notices – a crapshoot. People tell me every day they aren’t getting the updates, yet the problem always involves their email server’s settings that I can’t fix. I can only suggest that you enter your email again if you aren’t getting my updates, which is risk-free since you won’t get multiple email copies no matter what.

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor LightSpeed Technology Group. The Chapel Hill, NC-based company’s VeriDOCs revenue cycle solutions offer a secret sauce for professional fee coding and billing in emergency, anesthesia, and hospitalist management services in supporting technical disparity and diverse coding volume across many locations. It offers interfacing (EHR integration, demographics, billing); the VeriCODE quality-driven medical coding application; a web-based coder QA pre-billing audit application; a physician peer review tool; and VeriNET workflow oversight and reporting. The end result is that coders and auditors work from a streamlined, secure platform that drives faster onboarding, more efficient coding, and faster bill turnaround. Thanks to LightSpeed Technology Group for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

September 26 (Wednesday) 12:30 ET. “How to Ensure Patient Records are Always Available.” Sponsor: Goliath Technologies. Presenter: Goliath Technologies engineering staff. This webinar will discuss how an early warning system can help your organization ensure your EHR systems and patient records are always available. You’ll also learn how to proactively anticipate, troubleshoot, prevent, and resolve end user experience issues before users or patients are impacted.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Outgoing Cerner President Zane Burke has sold $52 million worth of CERN shares in the past couple of weeks. I notice. CERN shares are down 6 percent in the past year versus the Nasdaq’s 24 percent gain.

Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph, speaking at Health Catalyst’s Health Analytics Summit, urges attendees to develop optimism, confidence, and a tolerance for risk in describing how the tiny, struggling, two-year-old Netflix practically begged Blockbuster to buy it for $50 million and was quickly shown the door. He advocates “testing it without doing it,” explaining that Netflix “was not about having good ideas. It was about a system and a culture of trying lots of bad ones. What we realized is that the key to this is not the good idea. It was how quickly and easily and cheaply you could try as many ideas as you could think of.”

Sales

• Wyckoff Heights Medical Center (NY) chooses Allscripts Sunrise Abstracting.
• Chicago area home care provider Bowes In Home Care joins PreparedHealth’s EnTouch network that connects hospitals with post-acute providers to improve outcomes.

Decisions

• Stevens Community Medical Center (MN) will replace Cerner and EClinicalWorks with Epic in November 2018.
• Summit Healthcare Regional Medical Center (AZ) will go live with Allscripts Sunrise in 2019, replacing Allscripts Paragon.
• IU Health Jay Hospital (IN) replaced Meditech with Cerner on March 1, 2018.

These provider-reported updates are supplied by Definitive Healthcare, which offers a free trial of its powerful intelligence on hospitals, physicians, and healthcare providers.

People

Industry long-timer Jonathan Niloff, MD, MBA died Saturday of cancer at 64. He was chief medical officer of Diameter Health, a board member of HIMSS North America, and founder of MedVentive (acquired by McKesson in 2012) as well as a former cancer surgeon and ovarian cancer researcher.

Announcements and Implementations

A new Reaction Data survey of 300 providers finds that 62 percent are using speech recognition in their EHRs, with another 15 percent working on it and a stubborn 23 percent saying they’ll never use EHR speech recognition. Not surprisingly, Nuance is the big dog and is gaining ground, while MModal’s much smaller market presence still makes them Nuance’s only real competitor and its user satisfaction is higher. Epic is by far the most commonly used speech-integrated EHR. Only 3 percent of speech recognition users say they might switch vendors.

A new KLAS report on clinical documentation improvement says that Nuance and ChartWise provide the strongest financial ROI, Iodine’s high-satisfaction tools are disruptive in prioritization functionality, and 3M’s offerings are overhyped. Claro Healthcare leads a small pack of services firms that offer CDI optimization and outsourcing.

Other

AMA’s newswire highlights a JAMIA-published comparison of order entry clicks between Cerner and Epic under the title of “62 clicks to order Tylenol? What happens when EHR tweaks go bad.”

An investor in online pharmacy Pillpack — whose value went from zero to more than $1 billion in five years when it was recently acquired by Amazon from its early 30s founders above — lists the company’s lessons learned:

• Relentlessly focus on the end user
• Build a full technology stack that allows the company to control its own destiny (Pillpack spent $10 million building its systems)
• Stand your ground against larger competitors
• Realize that you can’t grow and optimize a business simultaneously – design for scale, don’t code before understanding processes, and don’t industrialize without understanding the problem you’re trying to solve
• Hire executives and board members who have a founder mentality
• Invest in culture, which will be harder to manage as the company grows
• Don’t aim for a people-free business – human touch is essential
• Hire strong operations leaders who have a bias for action
• Hire a strong CFO/COO

In India, the state of Uttarakhand orders the government to provide printers so that every doctor’s prescription can be printed out before signing, addressing a problem in which patients and pharmacists often can’t read the doctor’s writing.

NYU Langone Health’s magazine notes that for the first time, all eight of its surgery chief residents are female.

A jury awards $4.6 million to a cruise ship passenger whose flu symptoms were mismanaged by the ship’s doctor, claiming:

• The Colombia-trained physician (which the lawsuit misstates as “Columbia-trained”) was inexperienced and gave a 25 mg dose of promethazine IV instead of safer, better drugs
• The doctor missed the patient’s cubital vein and instead injected the drug quickly into his ulnar artery
• Staff ignored the patient’s report of a burning sensation, declining to evacuate him by helicopter and instead waiting until the ship’s next port
• The patient developed compartment syndrome, requiring his arm to be amputated at the elbow

Weird News Andy says that despite early examples of scientific hype that turned out to be wrong (“nuclear power will be so cheap it won’t be worth metering usage”) he still likes that we’re getting closer to a Tricorder-like device. University of British Columbia engineers develop a Band-Aid sized ultrasound transducer that could turn a smartphone into an ultrasound machine for $100.

Odd: a Pennsylvania court upholds the prison sentence given to a man who in 2015 dialed 911 while choking. First responders found the 47-year-old passed out on his living room floor, clad only in underwear and socks in front of his computer monitor that was displaying a child pornography chat room. He unsuccessfully claimed that unnamed enemies framed him, with his daughter providing a heartwarming family moment in testifying that her dad isn’t smart enough to know how to download porn.

Internal medicine resident Mike Natter, MD notes that the relationship between the number of things carried and level of medical training is inverse.

Sponsor Updates

• Voalte announces that its VUE user conference, to be held October 3-5 in Sarasota, FL, has sold out for the first time in its history.
• LogicStream Health publishes a new report, “The New Healthcare Imperative.”
• MedData will exhibit at the Ohio American Academy of Pediatrics 2018 Annual Meeting September 21-22 in Dublin.
• Waystar will exhibit at Ohio MGMA September 21 in Dublin.
• The American Heart Association/American Stroke Association names Nordic a “Get with the Guidelines”-compatible vendor.
• Clinical Computer Systems, developer of the Obix Perinatal Data System, will exhibit at the annual Georgia Perinatal Conference September 19-21 in St. Simon’s Island, GA.
• Experian Health and PatientKeeper will exhibit at AHIMA September 22-27 in Miami.
• PerfectServe will co-host the Hospital for Special Surgery Educational and Networking Open House September 21 in New York City.
• Redox will present at Health 2.0 September 16-19 in Grapevine, TX.
• T-System offers disaster relief T Sheets free of charge to hospitals in the path of Hurricane Florence.
• Mazars USA welcomes Chief Human Resource Officer Julie Venkat.

Blog Posts

• A Person-Centered Approach for Success in Intellectual and Developmental Disability Services – Part II (Netsmart)
• Optimize Your Billing Office – Improve Workflows through Consolidation and Automation (Parallon Technology Solutions)
• Wasteful Ordering? Meet Order Manager (Experian Health)
• Four simple steps for reducing third-party service costs (PerfectServe)
• Healthcare communication is catching up. (Voalte)
• Designing Safe and Effective Digital Health Applications (Sansoro Health)
• Four Keys to EHR Go-Live Success (Santa Rosa Consulting)
• The 8-Minute Rule: What it is and How it Works in WebPT (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 9/14/18

Top News

Apple’s latest product announcement regarding the new Watch’s ability to record ECGs and monitor heart rhythm for abnormalities leaves healthcare reporters salivating and clinical experts torn between guarded optimism and healthy skepticism. The device, which can also detect when a user has fallen and alert emergency services, will start at $400 when it debuts later this year.

Industry folks were quick to point out that the device could lead to over treatment, and that its FDA clearance states the new apps are “not intended to replace traditional methods of diagnosis or treatment.” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD also tweeted out amidst his Hurricane Florence PSAs that app clearance is “a significant step forward in FDA policy because we decoupled review of the app from review of the watch itself. The watch isn’t a medical device, just the apps that help consumers detect serious medical conditions.”

Webinars

September 26 (Wednesday) 12:30 ET. “How to Ensure Patient Records are Always Available.” Sponsor: Goliath Technologies. Presenter: Goliath Technologies engineering staff. This webinar will discuss how an early warning system can help your organization ensure your EHR systems and patient records are always available. You’ll also learn how to proactively anticipate, troubleshoot, prevent, and resolve end user experience issues before users or patients are impacted.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre for information.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cigna allocates $250 million for a new corporate venture fund that will target companies working in the areas of care delivery and management, digital health and retail, and insights and analytics. Cigna’s previous health IT investments include MDLive, Omada Health, and Cricket Health.

OneOncology launches with a $200 million investment from General Atlantic and health IT support from Flatiron Health. Created by a partnership between Tennessee Oncology, New York Cancer & Blood Specialists, and West Cancer Center (TN), the company aims to offer oncology patients access to providers, treatments, and clinical trials typically unavailable in smaller, community-based settings. Former CVS Health EVP Tracy Bahl will serve as president and CEO.

MediWare Information Systems rebrands to WellSky in an effort to better unify 30 brands across multiple companies in the US and abroad.

In the UK, Babylon Health will spend $100 million to double its workforce, aiming to hire 500 additional staff within the next nine months. The plan is part of the virtual consult company’s efforts to expand its chat bot symptom assessment technology to include chronic disease management for diabetes and depression. The company is perhaps best known for powering the NHS telemedicine app GP at Hand.

Nuance and ChartWise top the list of CDI vendors driving the most tangible financial outcomes, according to a new KLAS report, while Iodine Software surpasses both when it comes to enabling efficient workflows. Third-party CDI firms like Claro Healthcare, Navigant, PwC, and Huron all score similarly on value and satisfaction. 

People

Mark Amey (UC San Diego Health) joins Alameda Health System as CIO ahead of its $200 million Epic implementation.

Akiri, a health data network spun out of AMA’s Health2047 business development and commercialization arm, names David Watson (The SSI Group) CEO.

Caradigm co-founder Warren Ratliff joins Seattle Children’s Hospital analytics spin-off MDMetrix as CEO.

Kermit Randa (Waystar) joins Kaufman Hall as CEO of its Software Division.

Access appoints Davin Marceau (Success Group) COO and promotes Cody Strate to the new role of VP of strategy and innovation.

Sales

• Bristol Hospital (CT) selects ESO’s Health Data Exchange software for improved data-sharing between its ED and EMS agencies.
• San Luis Valley Health Regional Medical Center (CO) will implement FormFast’s FastPrint Enterprise and ESignature bundle.

Announcements and Implementations

The North Carolina Health Information Exchange Authority rolls out subscription-based clinical event alerts to members of the NC HealthConnex HIE.

Marin General Hospital (CA) will install University of California San Francisco Health’s Epic software as part of a strategic alliance that includes co-branding and designating UCSF as its academic and teaching partner.

Regional West Health Services (NE) prepares to go live on Cerner Millenium this weekend.

Mercy Technology Services develops a cloud-based imaging solution that comprises Visage’s imaging software, workflow technology from Medicalis, and speech recognition and reporting capabilities from Nuance.

Other

FHIR architect and interoperability consultant Grahame Grieve tells the Australian Senate an IT overhaul is needed to assure the success of the My Health Record initiative. The national digital records database, which he has been an advisor on, has come under fire over the last several months thanks to a questionable opt-out policy, and privacy and governance concerns. Grieve, an Australian native, told the Senate ahead of a September 17 inquiry into the program that, “The design of the system and the standards it is based on were state of the art in 2007. Although a more distributed design was initially planned, it is now, unfortunately, a centralised national database of static summary documents. This was an inevitable consequence of the technical standards used at the time, but now constrains the use, extensibility and therefore the value of the system.”

A survey of 109 providers finds that 68 percent have not yet developed a disaster preparedness plan, despite having experienced two such events within the last five years. All bets are off when it comes to securely communicating with hospitals during and after weather events: 25 percent of specialty providers have used unsecured text messaging to reach hospital staff, and 22 percent have used the same method to reach patients and their family members. Hospital-based respondents take secure messaging more seriously, perhaps because they already have resources in place: 44 percent believe secure messaging to be a key component of preparedness plans, surpassed only by the need for backup generators and extra supplies and medication.

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at Health 2.0 September 16-19 in Santa Clara, CA.
• Formativ Health partners with Lyft to help get patients to medical appointments.
• Broadlawns Medical Center adds FormFast’s Go electronic document solution to its existing Capture software.
• The HCI Group publishes a new white paper, “You’ve Signed a New EHR Contract: Now What?”
• Loyale Healthcare explores healthcare CEOs and innovation in a new video, “Who Thrives? Who Survives?”
• Politico features PatientPing in “Connecting your medical data could be the next big payoff.”
• Consulting Magazine ranks Impact Advisors third on its list of best small firms to work for.
• Hyland Healthcare collaborates with Change Healthcare to speed and simplify claim attachments for providers and payers.
• InterSystems adds a mobile, touchscreen-enabled user interface to its TrakCare health information system.
• Intelligent Medical Objects will exhibit at the 2018 OR Manager Conference September 17-19 in Nashville.
• Kyruus will present at the 2018 Tri-State Conference September 19-21 in Wisconsin Dells, WI.
• Join Meditech in signing the World Sepsis Declaration.
• TransUnion Healthcare announces its support of nonprofit RIP Medical Debt.
• Dimensional Insight publishes a new case study featuring Doctors Hospital in Puerto Rico.
• Voalte’s annual Vue user conference, set to take place October 3-5 in in Sarasota, FL, sells out for the first time.
• PatientKeeper and Medhost enter into a reseller agreement.
• Hayes Management Consulting hires Mark Rivero (Athenahealth) as director of client experience.
• EPSi partners with MPA Healthcare Solutions to offer customers risk-adjustment and clinical analytics.

Blog Posts

• Finding the best long-term home for Aries Systems (Elsevier Clinical Solutions)
• Implementing a Plan to Unite Clinicians, Compliance and Revenue Cycle Teams (Hayes Management Consulting)
• Are EHR Companies Difficult to Work With? (Goliath Technologies)
• Digital Disruption in Healthcare: How to Accelerate Innovation and Progress (Healthgrades)
• Ciox Believes Mandate is Necessary to Achieve a Fax-free Future (Ciox Health)
• Four Keys to Frustration-Free Health Education Care Managers Love (Healthwise)
• Kudos to Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children – Named One of the Top-Performing Children’s Hospitals (Huntzinger Management Group)
• Top HIEs Advancing Interoperability, Data Quality and More (Imat Solutions)
• The Broad Impact of Unique Patient Identifiers (Imprivata)
• Getting Buy-In for Healthcare Technology: Winning Over Physicians (Influence Health)
• Sowing the Seeds for EMR Satisfaction (InterSystems)
• Understanding Patients and Providing Personalized Experiences in Healthcare (Kyruus)
• Combating Sepsis: How University of Utah Health Saved Lives and Cut Costs (Spok)
• The Anatomy of a Successful Community Connect Install (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Staying connected: 5 blogs about interoperability (Meditech)
• Keep Patient Satisfaction High at Bedside and Discharge (Access)

Contacts

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