News 5/18/22

Top News

A Venezuelan cardiologist and self-taught programmer is charged with the development, use, and sale of plug-and-play ransomware and creating profit-sharing arrangements with his customers, whom he often persuaded to leave positive online reviews.

The criminal complaint, brought against him by US authorities, claims that “the multi-tasking doctor treated patients, created and named his cyber tool after death, profited from a global ransomware ecosystem in which he sold the tools for conducting ransomware attacks, trained the attackers about how to extort victims, and then boasted about successful attacks.”

The cardiologist’s preferred pseudonyms included “Aesculapius” and “Nosophoros,” Greek words referring to the ancient Greek god of medicine and disease, respectively.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

PatientIQ, an outcomes data and insights vendor, raises $20 million in a Series B funding round. The company gathers its data from 1.4 million patients across more than 200 healthcare organizations.

Sales

• Bon Secours Mercy Health will use Strive Health’s CareMultiplier technology and clinical care teams to improve its care for chronic kidney disease and end stage kidney disease patients across Ohio.

People

CTG names Scott Clark (Ensono) VP of North American sales.

Mikael Öhman (TransformativeMed) joins KMS Healthcare as CEO.

Bakul Patel, former chief digital health officer at the FDA, joins Google as senior director of global digital health strategy.

University Hospital hires Paul Contino, MA (Guthrie) as CIO.

Thynk Health hires Jim Farmer (FYNS) as SVP of sales.

CPSI President and CEO Boyd Douglas will retire from that position and the company’s board on June 30 after 34 years. Replacing him is COO Chris Fowler.

Announcements and Implementations

Novant Health (NC) works with Health Recovery Solutions to launch a remote patient monitoring pilot program for bariatric patients.

In England, The Queen Elizabeth Hospital King’s Lynn NHS Trust implements enterprise imaging software from Agfa HealthCare.

In Norway, Helseplattformen brings Trondheim kommune live on Epic. Epic’s Rachel Kantosky reports on LinkedIn,

On top of the complexities of a ‘typical’ Epic install, the team added enterprise applications into a system live solely on Beaker lab, translated over 4 million system terms into Norwegian, and completed several significant development projects, including SFM ePrescribing integration, eMessaging, and digitizing the Norwegian pregnancy card. Go-live is just the beginning and we are looking forward to further rollouts and optimization! I’m also incredibly proud of the 32 American expats who moved their lives to Norway to support this important work.

Government and Politics

A VA Office of Inspector General report determines that lack of prompt EHR documentation and care coordination between a VA provider and private chiropractic clinic contributed to the spinal and rib fractures of an 87 year-old patient. The nearly century-old Ohio facility is one of 35 that the VA is considering closing within the next several years.

DoD facilities including Naval Branch Health Clinic and the 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade, Hunter Army Airfield, both in Georgia, will transition to MHS Genesis next month.

Other

A lawyer and veteran advocate writes a satirical article on using the VA’s MyHealtheVet to “micro-manage your VA doctor from your sofa.” A snip:

I swear, sometimes, I feel like some VA personnel intentionally dupe us into keeping a request verbal. When the floor falls out on whatever issue you were trying to resolve, when the time comes to “prove it,” the conversation never happened. It will be your word against theirs, and you will lose. Remember, if it’s not written down, it did not happen. This is why tools like My HealtheVet are so great. It can allow you direct access to your care team. It allows you direct access to at least some (but not all) of your health records. It gives you the power to put it in writing even after the appointment, just to be sure everyone is on the same page. What an empowering tool, no? Should your physician refuse a procedure but not write it down, you can send a note about it later that should be added to your records. If you need to appeal the refusal in a clinical appeal, healthcare appeal, or if it comes up in a malpractice matter, the request will be documented.

A nurse and former cardiovascular director sues MercyOne, alleging that she was fired in retaliation after she reported that a cardiothoracic surgeon was not obtaining proper patient consent, was performing too many add-on procedures, lied to patients about likely outcomes, and put patients with poor post-surgical outcomes on ventilators for 30 days so their deaths would not be reported to the Society of Thoracic Surgeons database as being due to surgical complications. She also claims the surgeon screamed at her in a meeting about the issues and referred to her as “this little girl.”

Sponsor Updates

• About releases a new podcast, “US Healthcare: Understanding Challenging Trends for Hospitals and Health Systems with David Burik.”
• Availity makes its Enhanced Claims Status, a multi-payer RESTful API, available to its trading partner network.
• BDO expands its alliance with Microsoft to deliver solutions that create value for its global clients.
• TechVibe radio features ConnectiveRX VP of Product Development Mary Beth Sirio.
• Get-to-Market Health celebrates its five-year anniversary.
• Experity earns 2022 Great Place to Work Certification.
• Sonifi Health integrates the HealthTouch food service system from MCR Technologies into its interactive patient engagement platform.
• Imaging data vendor OneMedNet announces a joint referral partnership agreement with data management company Flywheel for biomedical research and collaboration.

Blog Posts

• RCD: What You Need to Know (Ability Network)
• Stop Making Patients Work So Hard (Orbita)
• Healthcare Claim Denials: How to avoid common medical coding errors (AGS Health)
• It’s a Small World in Clinical Communication and Collaboration (Ascom)
• Peer-Reviewed Study Validates NarxCare as Effective Patient Screening Solution for Opioid Risk (Bamboo Health)
• Pros and cons of centralized vs. decentralized staffing models for value-based care success (Bravado Health)
• Healthcare M&A: Why Clinical Operational Readiness Matters (CereCore)
• A Look at Risk Analysis – 9 Steps to Getting It Right (Clearwater)
• Asembia 2022: Specialty Patient Access, Centricity and Adherence (CoverMyMeds)
• The Benefits of Partnering with the Right Healthcare IT Managed Services Provider (Divurgent)
• HEDIS: Completing the Picture of Patients’ Health (EClinicalWorks)
• 5 Essential Qualities of Front Office Staff (Experity)
• Hiring an Epic Team? Start with a plan. (Healthcare IT Leaders)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 5/16/22

Top News

Remote monitoring and financial incentives had no impact on readmissions or deaths among discharged heart failure patients, a randomized clinical trial finds.

Participants were given a digital scale, a monitored pill bottle for diuretics, and daily “regret lottery” incentives for providing medication and weight measures from the previous day.

The authors conclude that success may require earlier or deeper patient engagement and might need to include unrelated issues that cause HF readmissions.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

These are timely poll results since former Vanderbilt nurse RaDonda Vaught was sentenced Friday to three years of probation (no jail time) following her conviction on negligent homicide charges after killing a patient by giving the wrong medication. Most poll respondents favor open investigations and a review of the work setting rather than charging clinicians with a crime or revoking their license. I spent time reviewing technology-related medical errors in a large academic medical center and the “Swiss cheese effect” is real, where errors were rarely caused by one rogue, incompetent clinician but rather by a series of unusually aligned events, such as systems going down, drug shortages that required substituting an unfamiliar alternative, and lack of coordination in workload-necessitated handoffs among clinicians who weren’t accustomed to working together. It’s not like insurance fraud, where someone takes individual illegal action in return for payment. It’s more like a skilled programmer who makes an honest mistake that affects users because they are overworked or undertrained and the programmer’s employer doesn’t run a competent QA function.

New poll to your right or here: What will be the impact on Epic when CEO Judy Faulkner is no longer involved? She will turn 79 this year and the company’s succession plan will eventually take effect. We saw dramatic changes when Cerner CEO and Chairman Neal Patterson died in 2017, leaving the company without its leader and most visible co-founder for the first time in its 38-year history.

I’m getting more of my “People” updates from LinkedIn since organizations don’t always issue formal announcements. Connect with me and I’ll see and possibly mention your job change. Minimal effort is required and there’s no downside.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

West Monroe will expand its its digital services business in Western Europe, opening new offices and hiring 1,000 employees.

Amwell announces Q1 results: revenue up 11%, EPS –$0.26 versus –$0.16, missing analyst expectations for both. AMWL shares are down 88% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 6.6% gain, valuing the company at $855 million. The company spent most of the earnings call talking about Converge, a technology platform that it says will improve patient connectivity and user experience when interacting with providers and payers.

Sales

• The UK’s Kent NHS trusts choose Sectra’s enterprise imaging system.

People

Community Health Systems promotes Paul Novak to CIO.

Announcements and Implementations

TriNetX enhances its real-world research offerings by launching Follow the Patient, which allows researchers to segment, tag, and monitor de-identified patients over months or years.

Hospitals of Community Health Systems that offer OB services implement PeriGen’s PeriWatch Vigilance for maternal-fetal early warning.

HLTH retools its November conference to push attendees into the exhibit hall (or in its own buzzwords, “focus on audience journeys–tailoring pathways through content, programs, and meetings based on a deeper learning about each population and individual that interacts with us.”) Attendees will be required to sit in the exhibit hall for sessions and meals, the conference will emphasize the “hosted buyer” format in which healthcare buyer attendees earn registration discounts for meeting with vendors, and both HLTH and ViVE will offer a digital health innovation track that is co-sponsored with investment company StartUp Health.

Other

South Korea requires hospitals to install video surveillance cameras in operating rooms to record all surgeries involving general anesthesia, as lawmakers address widespread reports of “ghost surgeries” in which doctors turn procedures over to unsupervised assistants. The problem arose in the 2010s as the government started promoted medical tourism and plastic surgeons took advantage of demand by allowing nurses, assistants, and even medical device technicians to perform procedures. The practice then spread to spinal surgery centers that saw a profitable opportunity when faced with high demand and few available doctors to perform relatively uncomplicated surgeries.

I missed this earlier. Netherlands-based Aimedis creates Aimedis Health City, which it calls “the first hospital chain in the metaverse” in which de-identified data will be exchanged and monetized. It plans to offer provider advertising, virtual consultations, patient and clinician interaction, education, and rehab courses. It will offer space for rent or purchase using its own NFT marketplace.

Sponsor Updates

• Tegria partners with the One Roof Foundation and Duwamish River Community Coalition to provide asthma remediation items to local families.
• OptimizeRx will present at the RBC Healthcare Conference May 17-18 in New York City.
• Olive publishes a new analysis, “Long COVID leads to longer hospital stays, time in OR.”
• HLTH releases a new podcast featuring Optum MedExpress CEO Kristi Henderson, NP.
• Community Health Systems will present encouraging results seen after its implementation of PeriGen’s Vigilance early warning and clinical decision support system at the IHI Patient Safety Congress May 16-18 in Dallas.
• Talkdesk has won 2022 Top Rated Awards for contact center, call center workforce optimization, call recording, and VoIP.
• Twistle will exhibit at the OR Business Management Conference May 16-18 in San Antonio.
• Volpara Health will exhibit at the SBI/ACR Breast Imaging Symposium May 16-19 in Savannah.
• Wolters Kluwer Health publishes a new book, “Coping with COVID-19: The Mental, Medical, and Social Consequences of the Pandemic.”
• Zen Healthcare IT achieves HITRUST risk-based, two-year certification to mitigate risk in third-party privacy and security.

Blog Posts

• Connect with Providers When Their Patients Need to Change Therapies (OptimizeRx)
• Navigating the Medication Journey: How Digital Patient Engagement Tools Help (PatientBond)
• Innovating for Tomorrow (Protenus)
• 3 Reasons Why It’s Time to Switch to a Concurrent Risk Adjustment Review (RCxRules)
• The Role of Price Transparency in Improving Patient Access to Care (RxRevu)
• 6 Questions to Ask When Evaluating Clinical Communication & Collaboration (TigerConnect)
• How to Improve Patient Adherence for Physical Therapy (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 5/13/22

Top News

Bon Secours Mercy Health launches Accrete Health Partners, a digital holding company that will manage its digital health services, investments, and partnerships.

It will be headed up by Chief Digital Officer Jason Szczuka, JD.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Experity.The Machesney Park, IL-based company is the leading software and services company for on-demand healthcare in the US urgent care market, providing an integrated operating system complete with electronic medical record, practice management, patient engagement, billing, teleradiology, business intelligence, and consulting solutions. Nearly 50% of the US urgent care market runs on Experity solutions. With Experity, providers can best meet the demands of the evolving on-demand space and deliver high-quality, high-velocity care by streamlining operations, improving patient experiences, and optimizing revenue. A GTCR portfolio company, Experity’s leadership is comprised of growth-minded urgent care experts and business leaders committed to improving on-demand healthcare for all. Thanks to Experity for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Health Catalyst acquires Armus, which provides clinical registry development and data services.

This is an insightful comment from digital health advisor Marc Sluijs.

Sales

• Mount Sinai Medical Center chooses ActX Genomic Decision Support, integrated with Epic.
• American College of Cardiology chooses the care management platform of Biofourmis as the exclusive virtual platform for its TRANSFORM(3) study.

People

Kermit Randa (Syntellis Performance Solutions) joins recruiting software vendor Symphony Talent as CEO.

Ryan McDaniel (Huron Consulting Group) joins Impact Advisors as VP / ERP service line leader.

Announcements and Implementations

Atrium Health and Advocate Aurora Health announce plans to merge, creating a system that will have 67 hospitals, 150,000 employees, and $27 billion in annual revenue with locations in Illinois, Wisconsin, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. The combined organization will be called Advocate Health, with headquarters in Charlotte, NC and with an academic component in Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Both organizations use Epic. The announcement cited several technology issues as contributing to the decision to merge – healthcare becoming more digital, population health management, and analytics. The health systems pledge to create 20,000 new jobs while making healthcare more affordable.

Microsoft-owned Nuance and The Health Management Academy form The AI Collaborative, which brings together executives of hospitals that are using AI technologies. The big draw for participants is that they get a trip to Microsoft’s headquarters – which always arouses both technical and business geeks – and attend annual summits.

A new KLAS report on go-live support finds that CSI Healthcare IT is busiest, and along with Experis Health, is best at vetting resources.

Government and Politics

Cerner will issue the VA an unspecified credit for failing to meet the minimum system uptime requirements specified in the $10 billion contract.

Two owners of a “purported” telemedicine company plead guilty to participating in an elaborate scheme of bribes, kickbacks, and fraudulent prescriptions for drugs and medical equipment that netted them $32 million and cost insurers $64 million.

Other

The BMJ reports that drug companies and universities that were found in NHS Digital audits to have breached patient data-sharing agreements – repeatedly, in some cases — have not had their access to that data revoked. The article notes that clinical commissioners authorized the release of patient data to Virgin Care without patient permission and the company then refused to allow NHS Digital to audit their compliance while also refusing to delete the information.

US hospitals are rationing the use of contrast media after a GE Healthcare facility in Shanghai, China temporarily closes due to COVID-19 lockdowns. Experts say not only does most of our contrast supply comes from a single country, hospitals sign preferred vendor contracts that give them no alternative source.

A NordPass review of user passwords finds, not surprisingly, that number-formed combinations starting with “12345” represent seven of the top 10 most common. but a common one I hadn’t thought of us “1Q2W3E,” which alternates top and bottom row keys at the left of the keyboard. A similarly digitally lazy choice at #33 is “ZXCVBNM,” which is the first six bottom-row keys left to right. Several of the commonly used passwords include f-bomb variants, which would make an interesting analysis to see if unrestrained anger toward passwords is linked to even more bitter interaction with online humans.

Sponsor Updates

• Bamboo Health announces record company growth and the opening of its office in Boston.
• CereCore joins the ServiceNow Partner Program.
• Get Well will offer medically-endorsed guided imagery and meditation audio programs from Health Journeys to its customers and their veteran patients.
• GHX makes Exchange Advantage, a unified platform that automates end-to-end digital transactions, available to all suppliers in North America.
• Interbit Data publishes a new white paper, “The value of 24/7 access to critical patient data – a nurse’s perspective.”
• InterSystems will relocate its Boston headquarters, taking up the top 14 floors of a new building at One Congress.
• Diameter Health publishes a new brief, “Why Upcycling Data Matters.”

Blog Posts

• Best Practices for Fielding a Project Team (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Using “SMART” Reference IDs for Workday (ERP) Data Conversion (Impact Advisors)
• 3 Ways to Increase Telehealth ROI (EVisit)
• 4 digital enhancements to improve patient access (Experian Health)
• 5 Elements of a Superior Solution for Health Systems That Need to Grow Margins (Gyant)
• Honoring the Role of Nurses in Empowering Patients (Healthwise)
• Did Your IT Project Fail? Here are 4 Ways Change Management Could Change the Outcome (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Using “SMART” Reference IDs for Workday (ERP) Data Conversion (Impact Advisors)
• AI in healthcare: A wicked problem and needed solution (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Why Upcycling Data Matters (Diameter Health)
• Hospital Week 2022: Celebrating Healthcare Systems and Healthcare Workers (Loyal)
• Medhost University: Multiple Options for Optimizing Medhost Product Knowledge (Medhost)
• How to Make Coordination of Benefits More Transparent and Truly Coordinated (Myndshft)
• Avoid Information Overload: Making Business Intelligence Data Actionable for SNF Rehab Therapy (Net Health)
• National Nurses Week: How can we better support the nurses that work so hard to care for us? (Nuance)
• Achieving Interoperability in the Real World (Netsmart)

Contacts

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

News 5/11/22

Top News

Harris rebrands the hospital and large physician practice software business it acquired from Allscripts to Altera Digital Health.

The business’s president will be Marcus Perez, MS, MBA, senior EVP of Harris Healthcare.

The $700 million acquisition, which closed May 2, included Sunrise, Paragon, TouchWorks, Opal, Star, HealthQuest, and DbMotion.

Allscripts has not removed the divested products from its website or announced how its developer program and App Expo will work post-acquisition.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Pondering: is intelligence deficit disorder, as evidenced by Facebook postings, a pandemic? Or, does Facebook attract a disproportionate number of users who can’t express a cohesive thought, use the Internet without help, or resist adding opinions even when they are irrelevant or poorly considered?

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

RCM solutions vendor Med-Metrix acquires PatientPal, which offers patient engagement and front-end RCM software.

Mental health EHR and research startup Osmind raises $40 million in a Series B round that brings its total funding to $57 million.

Sales

• Novant Health (NC) will implement Infor’s cloud-based healthcare ERP software with consulting help from Grant Thornton.
• ScionHealth selects R1 RCM’s software and services for its 61 long-term acute care hospitals.
• In the UK, NHS Lancashire and South Cumbria will implement Citadel Health’s laboratory information management system in $12 million project.
• Cleveland Clinic chooses Medically Home Group to develop a program to care for acute and post-acute patients at home via a virtual command center.

People

Martin Spence (Fujifilm Medical Systems) joins Clearwater as virtual CISO and principal consultant.

Telstra hires Monica Trujillo, MBBS, MPH (Cerner) as chief health officer.

Instamed, a J.P. Morgan Company hires Steve Sewell (Optum) as executive director of product management.

Brett MacLaren, MBA (Providence) joins Kaiser Permanente as SVP of data and analytics.

B.well Connected Health hires Nathan Weems, MBA (VitalConnect) as CFO.

Announcements and Implementations

Patient engagement software vendor PatientTrak announces GA of digital patient intake forms for outpatient facilities.

IatricSystems launches DetectRx drug diversion and automated evidence-based response software. Iatric was acquired by Harris in 2018.

Interbit Data launches Beacon, an enterprise care continuity solution that addresses downtime, including cybersecurity incidents.

Advance care planning organization Five Wishes creates a lifetime digital version of its advance directive, which will be stored on Vynca’s advance care planning platform.

Government and Politics

A survey of 701 DoD providers finds that 58% have identified inaccurate or incomplete data in the agency’s Cerner-powered MHS Genesis system, leading to inaccurate, delayed, or incomplete diagnoses; multiple patient visits to complete care; and longer patient visit times. Medical device integration with MHS Genesis was also found to be problematic, with respondents noting that “…eye care devices are not connected to the system and this creates significant delays and repeat imaging,” and “the process to get medical devices connected is CONTRARY to 21st century healthcare delivery. We just choose to ignore that equipment isn’t connected.”

Government-run psychiatric treatment provider directories — such as SAMHSA’s FindTreatment.gov that was intended to give patients a better option than having their Google searches exposed to marketers — contain outdated and incorrect provider information. Patients report reaching disconnected numbers, contacting facilities that aren’t accepting new patients, or finding that clinicians have retired or moved. The directory does not vet submissions beyond verifying licensure and does not include quality indicators.

Other

Apple retires my once-beloved IPod Touch, marking the end of the 20-year-old IPod line. Other IPod models along the that have been largely forgotten – I think I’ve had and/or gifted them all multiple times — were the Mini, Nano, and Shuffle. The Touch, ownership of which I bragged on starting in 2010, was basically an inexpensive IPhone without the “phone” part and free of ongoing cost, capable of just about anything as long as a WiFi connection was available.

Sponsor Updates

• AGS Health leaders work with United Way to create handmade educational kits for underprivileged students.
• Agfa HealthCare profiles a new customer success story, “Enterprise Imaging supports successful major transformation at Ziekenhuis Oost-Limburg (ZOL), Belgium.”
• The First Coast Worksite Wellness Council recognizes Availity with its Healthiest Companies Platinum Level Award for the eighth year in a row. 
• Baker Tilly releases a new episode of its Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Key factors and trends impacting M&A activity in the healthcare industry.”
• Delaware documents 100,000 referrals in the third year of its use of Bamboo Health’s OpenBeds referral network.
• CareMesh names Martin Armitage (NaviHealth) director of strategic accounts.
• CHIME and more than 100 additional healthcare organizations sign a letter urging Congress to removal the ban on funding for a national patient health identifier standard.
• Interbit Data launches the next generation of its Beacon Platform, designed to help hospitals with communications and care continuity during downtimes.
• Ellkay will exhibit at the NEHIMSS Spring Conference May 12 in Norwood, MA.
• PerfectServe honors over 130 exceptional nurses in its second annual Nurses of Note Awards program.
• Wolters Kluwer Health adds diversity, equity, and inclusion content to its Ovid medical research platform.
• WebPT adds PVerify’s Advanced Eligibility solution to its EHR for physical therapists.

Blog Posts

• From Risky Business to Data-Backed Decision (Arcadia)
• Celebrating National Nurses Week with Bamboo Health’s Alycia Sepe, BSN, RN (Bamboo Health)
• 5 ways to improve patient satisfaction scores to prepare for OAS CAHPS reimbursements (Bravado Health)
• Meditech Expanse: Customizable Features that Improve Clinician Satisfaction (CereCore)
• How do you balance understaffing during the pandemic? By turning data into knowledge (Cerner)
• Did Your IT Project Fail? Here are 4 Ways Change Management Could Change the Outcome (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• 5 Key Questions You Should Ask Your IT Provider Annually (ChartLogic)
• The Evolution of Chronic Care Management (ChartSpan)
• Introducing A New Category of Technology for Innovation in Healthcare: the Healthtech Operating System. (Commure)
• Asembia 2022: Specialty Patient Access, Centricity, and Adherence (CoverMyMeds)
• How EClinicalWorks RCM Service Boosts Efficiency (EClinicalWorks)
• No Surprises Act Part 1: A Surprise for Providers (Enlace Health)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 5/9/22

Top News

From the Allscripts earnings call:

• CEO Paul Black resigned Friday, effective immediately, saying that a new generation of leaders is needed now that the company’s focus is its Veradigm business.
• President and CFO Rick Poulton, who has been with the company for 10 years and is 56 years old, took over as CEO on Saturday.
• Black will leave the company’s board when his term expires this year.
• SVP/GM Thomas Langan has been promoted to president, while SVP/GM Leah Jones has been named CEO.
• Poulton said that selling the company’s hospital and large practice software business to Constellation Software will leave Allscripts more focused and with 5,000 fewer employees.
• With the sale, Veradigm represents 95% of Allscripts revenue, along with a “small unrelated product line” that makes up the remaining 5%.

Allscripts shares dropped 6% Friday after the earnings announcement after Thursday’s market close. They are up 22% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 12% loss, valuing the company at $2.2 billion. They are up 68% in Paul Black’s 10-year tenure as CEO versus the Nasdaq’s 309% gain.

Reader Comments

From Door Shower: “Re: HIMSS. Recently laid off several dozen folks. As usual when that happens, many others are leaving voluntarily.” Unverified, although I’ve heard this from former employees.

From Awardee: “Re: MedTech Breakthrough awards. Who runs this?” Parent company Tech Breakthrough, which runs dozens of cloned awards sites, apparently would rather you didn’t know who’s in charge since they provide no contact information or employee names and hide their domain registration information. They are equally protective of their awards criteria and how much companies pay the marketing company to tout their “wins” in press releases. I’ll speculate from experience given the company’s lack of forthrightness – it’s a handful of India-based tech people who are banking rupees for giving companies awards whose validity is questionable but rarely actually questioned. I’m happy to update with specifics should the company be interested in providing them.

From Punjab Pete: “Re: Ascension. Lost $884 million in Q1. CIO Gerry Lewis is out, HCL outsourcing contract is axed.” The loss is verified, the other items are not, although being discussed on layoff sites.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

One-third of poll respondents have recently struggled to pay a medical bill. Northerner slyly expresses bafflement about the question because they live in Canada.

New poll to your right or here: What action should be taken when a clinician’s mistake kills a patient?

Thanks to the following companies that recently supported HIStalk. Click a logo for more information.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Shares in the Global X Telemedicine & Digital Health exchange-traded fund were down 20% in the past month versus the Nasdaq’s 13% loss. They’re down 26% since the fund’s inception in July 2020 versus the Nasdaq’s 15% gain.

Sales

• A Leidos-led consortium that includes MediRecords, Coviu, and Nous Group wins a $230 million contract to implement an EHR for the Australia Defence Force. The system will replace EMIS-powered DeHS, which went live in 2014 at a cost of $94 million versus an initial budget of $16 million.
• Three-hospital Appalachian Regional Healthcare System signs a management service agreement with UNC Health, under which ARHS will implement Epic. The health system went live on Allscripts Sunrise in 2013.

People

Consulting firm Avia hires Daniel Clark, MBA, RN (Optum) as SVP of its Center for Care Transformation.

South Georgia Medical Center promotes Chuck Marshburn, MBA to CIO.

Adam Landman, MD, MHS, MS, MIS (Brigham and Women’s Hospital) joins Mass General Brigham as CIO/SVP of digital. 

Definitive Healthcare promotes Robert Musslewhite, JD to CEO as of August 1. Founder and CEO Jason Krantz, MBA will move to executive chair.

Government and Politics

An OIG joint audit of efforts by the DoD and the VA to make their Cerner systems interoperable notes that migration of legacy data into Cerner could have been more consistent, that medical device integration could be improved, and that user access should be limited to information needed to perform job duties.

The VA confirms that Cerner was unavailable 50 times for at least some users singe going live in its Pacific Northwest sites, but the outages were not widespread. The VA’s Oregon and Idaho sites will go live next in June.

Sponsor Updates

• TigerConnect publishes a report titled “It’s Time To Modernize How Health Systems Connect.”
• Arcadia partners with Datavant to accelerate biopharma research.
• Optum partners with the Dallas Cowboys to host a mental health awareness event in Frisco May 9.
• Vocera publishes a report titled “Reimagining Nursing for the Future” by Chief Nursing Officer Rhonda Collins, RNP, RN.
• Quil publishes a new case study, “Penn Medicine Improves Discharge to Home Rates, Expands Partnership Systemwide with the Help of Quil.”
• TMC awards Talkdesk’s AI Trainer with its 2022 Customer Product of the Year award.
• Interbit Data will participate on MUSE in Dallas the week of May 15.
• TigerConnect sponsors the Nurses at the Heart of Healthcare Contest to recognize nursing professionals who have shown an unwavering commitment to their profession.
• TriNetX appoints Launch Therapeutics CEO Anshul Thakral to its Board of Directors.
• Healthcare Growth Partners publishes research titled “Seeking Balance in the Hyperactive Mental Health Tech Market.”
• Kyruus ProviderMatch for Consumers is named “Best Patient Registration & Scheduling Solution” by an independent marketing group.
• Twistle publishes a new case study featuring Ashley Clinic, “Controlling Blood Pressure with Remote Physiologic Monitoring.”
• WebPT has been certified as a Great Place to Work for 2022.
• Relatient, Change Healthcare, Experian Health, Myndshft, Well Health, and Vyne Medical will exhibit at NAHAM 2022 May 10-13 in San Diego.
• West Monroe hires Rissa Reddan (Equifax) as chief marketing officer.
• Wolters Kluwer Health will exhibit at the RISE Risk Adjustment Forum May 9-11 in Chicago.
• Zen Healthcare IT’s Gemini platform receives HITRUST CSF r2 Certification.

Blog Posts

• “Clickbusters” can bust more than clicks (Nordic)
• 5 Tips for Hiring and Retaining Top Talent (Olive)
• The Top 5 Reasons Why Hospitals Should Optimize Patient Engagement (PatientBond)
• The Great Resignation: Key Takeaways (Pivot Point Consulting)
• Focus on Access Management for Safety in Healthcare (Symplr)
• 10 Years of MSSP: 2012 Fears Versus 2022 Realities (Part 2 of 2) (Premier)
• Three Qualities to Consider When Selecting a Healthcare Technology Partner (Protenus)
• Nurses are Calling for Innovation. Let’s Listen. (Vocera)
• Takeaways from the MTMI breast cancer risk assessment webinar (Volpara Health)
• It’s All Up from Here: Advancing Our Profession Through Next-Level Data Intelligence (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 5/6/22

Top News

Allscripts reports Q1 results: revenue up 7%, adjusted EPS $0.13 vs. $0.08. Expectations are muddied, as the company has carved out Veradigms’s financials separately.

CEO Paul Black will reportedly step down, with President Rick Poulton taking on the role effective immediately.

Allscripts finalized the sale of its hospital and large practice software business to Constellation Software subsidiary N. Harris earlier this week.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

OptimizeRx reports Q1 results: revenue up 22%, adjusted EPS $0.01 vs. $0.04, beating revenue expectations and meeting those for earnings.

Sales

• Oklahoma’s MyHealth HIE selects Orion Health’s Amadeus population health management software, and consulting services from HealthTech Solutions.
• Cardiac monitoring vendor MediLynx selects EHR integration capabilities from Redox.
• The Capital Region in Denmark will implement cloud-based enterprise imaging from Sectra at its hospitals.

People

South Georgia Medical Center promotes Chuck Marshburn to CIO and HIPAA privacy officer.

Announcements and Implementations

HCTec announces GA of staffing and consulting support for Epic Hyperdrive.

Magellan Federal integrates NeuroFlow’s digital behavioral healthcare assessment, triage, and management capabilities into its Military & Family Life Counseling program.

Mankato Clinic will implement virtual care software and services from Bluestream Health at its 13 facilities in Minnesota.

Other

Pivot Point Consulting’s latest report on healthcare IT trends suggests that hospital leaders should:

• Adjust staffing models to accommodate hybrid and remote workers.
• Evaluate supply chains and legacy applications in light of cyber risks from third-party risk management and managed services vendors.
• Carefully evaluate proposed remote patient monitoring technologies and services.
• Prepare to work with TEFCA-enabled Qualified Health Information Networks.
• Consider the ways in which ERP and business systems can be successfully adopted to enhance workflow efficiencies.

Sponsor Updates

• Myndshft joins enterprise automation software company UiPath’s Tech Alliance Program.
• Lyniate publishes a new case study, “Clinify Health helps improve financial stability for FQHCs with Lyniate Envoy.”
• Meditech recaps its virtual Home Care Symposium, which brought 275 attendees together to network and collaborate on strategies for the future.
• Nuance joins Athenahealth’s Marketplace to broaden physician access to the Nuance Dragon Ambient EXperience for automated clinical documentation.
• HCTec celebrates the opening of its expanded office space in Winston-Salem, NC.
• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story featuring Innova Primary Care, “How Healow Payment Services Transforms Collections.”
• CloudWave will implement Tausight’s situational PHI awareness platform and deliver turnkey PHI monitoring, management, and response to healthcare providers.
• Cerner will offer its customers access to Akasa’s AI-based Unified Automation platform for healthcare revenue cycles.

The following HIStalk sponsors have won MedTech Breakthrough Awards:

• WebPT – Best patient registration and scheduling solution
• Kyruus – Best online search and scheduling solution
• GHX – Compliance management innovation
• Nym – Health administration innovation
• Talkdesk – Best patient relationship management solution
• Elsevier – Best patient education solution
• LexisNexis Risk Solutions – Best HIE solution
• Fortified Health Security – Best overall healthcare cybersecurity company
• Current Health – Best hospital technology implementation

Blog Posts

• Reduce Patient Leakage with More Care Options, Part 2 (EVisit)
• Better claims management: faster patient payments and reduced denials (Experian Health)
• How CISOs Can Guard Against Evolving Physical and Digital Corporate Security Threats (Everbridge)
• 10 reasons why hackers think your HDO is an easy target (Imprivata)
• How to Improve Patient Experience with Data Management (InterSystems)
• Data normalization: Working toward a common clinical terminology (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• 4 Key Steps to Creating a Holistic Find Care Experience (Kyruus)
• 4 Ways to Measure Chatbot ROI (Loyal)
• Healthcare Interoperability – How can Medhost help you comply? (Medhost)
• Physical Therapy Core Values for PTs & PTAs at Your Practice (MWTherapy)
• Why Automation is the Key to Fixing Prior Authorization (Myndshft)
• A Look at Current Unmasking Initiatives in OccMed (Net Health)
• How interoperability can support value-based care (Nordic)

Contacts

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

News 5/4/22

Top News

Allscripts closes the sale of its hospital and large practice software business to Constellation Software’s subsidiary N. Harris.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Global Healthcare Exchange. Founded in 2000, GHX pioneered healthcare’s largest cloud-based supply chain network, which today connects tens of thousands of healthcare organizations across the globe. The network represents healthcare providers operating more than 80% of licensed beds in the US and suppliers representing more than 85% of the medical-surgical products used in healthcare delivery. With the support of GHX, healthcare organizations have removed billions of dollars of wasteful healthcare spend. Over the last two decades, GHX has continued innovating alongside a passionate community of healthcare providers, suppliers, distributors, and other industry stakeholders, all united around a common purpose: to simplify the patient-centered business of healthcare to improve outcomes. The company’s passion for uniting the best of healthcare is driven by a powerful vision: create a viable and sustainable future for healthcare by arming organizations with the data, insights, and technology they need to thrive in healthcare’s value-based future, where patients are at the heart of every decision. GHX believes that by empowering organizations to move beyond process efficiency, and toward efficiency of outcomes, organizations will thrive and the vision of a viable and sustainable future for healthcare will become a reality. Thanks to GHX for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cerner reports Q1 results: revenue up 4%, adjusted EPS $0.93 versus $0.78, meeting earnings expectations but falling short on revenue.

Configo Health, a startup that has developed benchmarking analytics for pediatric hospitals, raises $2 million in a seed funding round.

Plug-and-play virtual care software developer Capable Health raises $6 million in seed funding. Its technology allows developers to launch digital clinics.

Kidney care-focused analytics and population health management vendor Healthmap Solutions raises $35 million, bringing its total funding to $136 million.

Online pharmacy Truepill stops filling Adderall and Vyanse prescriptions as online mental health companies such as Cerebral and Don Health raise concerns about overprescribing. Major drug chains such as Walmart and CVS have also reportedly delayed or declined to fill such prescriptions.

The American College of Physicians and the American Telemedicine Association will develop a framework for assessing digital health technologies that are used by providers and consumers. The US-focused framework covers privacy and security, clinical assurance and safety, and usability.

Sales

• Rochester Regional Health (NY) will incorporate TytoCare’s telemedicine software and hardware into its virtual care services.
• University of Michigan Health will use analytics from Loopback Analytics to improve its specialty pharmacy program.

People

OncoHealth promotes Jennifer Haas to chief marketing officer.

Divurgent names Ed Marx (The HCI Group) CEO. He replaces founder Colin Konschak, who will become executive chairman.

Lynne Nowak, MD (Evernorth) joins Lark Health as chief medical officer.

IKS Health hires Ben Crocker, MD (Massachusetts General Hospital) as SVP of care design and innovation.

Stan Opstad, MBA (Inovalon) joins Zipari as chief product officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Audubon County Memorial Hospital & Clinics (IA) staff will implement Epic this week.

Jefferson Radiology goes live on Philips Collaboration Live for diagnostic tele-ultrasound, allowing remote radiologists to connect virtually with patients during their imaging appointments to provide a diagnosis, answer questions, or request additional imaging from the sonographer.

Consumer-focused healthcare wearables company Withings launches enterprise remote patient monitoring devices and software for patients and providers.

Personal ECG app vendor AliveCor launches KardiaComplete, a remote personal monitoring and virtual cardiologist service for people with hypertension and arrhythmias, sold through employers and payers.

Government and Politics

Winn Army Community Hospital at Fort Stewart in Georgia will go live on Cerner next month as part of the DoD’s continued wave of MHS Genesis roll-outs.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough says the agency will continue rolling out its new Cerner software despite five recent outages that have caused some lawmakers to call for a halt to implementations. The VA’s Central Ohio Healthcare System in Columbus went live on the EHR over the weekend. McDonough said he is “very concerned about the execution of the program to date” and added that the first of the downtimes was so “egregious” that Cerner CEO David Feinberg, MD, MDA issued a signed apology.

Privacy and Security

Virtual chronic care management and remote patient monitoring startup MyNurse notifies users of a March data breach, adding that it will cease operations at the end of the month for unrelated reasons.

Good Samaritan Medical Center Director Amy Travland reminds staff to print their names and avoid abbreviations when paper charting during downtime, referring to a cybersecurity incident last week. Good Samaritan was one of two Tenet Healthcare facilities in Florida that took systems offline as a result of the breach.

Other

Cardiologists express concern that tens of millions of consumer devices that can issue atrial fibrillation warnings will consume doctor time and healthcare expense to confirm or rule out a diagnosis, all for uncertain benefit. Symptom-free patients will have medical-grade monitors attached for days and then potentially have expensive anticoagulants prescribed that can cause side effects. One cardiologist said that tech companies introduced such alerting “because they could” and said that doctors are trying to catch up to the “test doctors didn’t order.”

Mozilla finds that of 32 mental health and prayer apps it reviewed, 28 raise strong data management concerns and 25 fail to meet minimum security standards. Mozilla’s lead privacy expert called the apps “exceptionally creepy” and that the companies that offer them are “negligent and craven.” The biggest offers named are Better Help, Youper, Woebot, Better Stop Suicide, Pray.com, and Talkspace.

Authorities in Venezuela arrest Jose Lopez for working at several healthcare facilities with fake medical credentials. His crime came to light after several women became pregnant after he had supposedly implanted them with subdermal contraceptive coils. He had, in fact, implanted lollipop sticks.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD Director of Sales Operations Carla Huggard wins a Utah Women in Sales Award.
• Actium Health publishes a new report, “State of Patient Engagement in 2022.”
• Baker Tilly will sponsor the Maryland HIMSS 10^th Annual Golf Tournament May 9 in Valley.
• Bamboo Health will exhibit at the Skilled Nursing Clinical Executive Conference May 5 in Chicago.
• CHIME posts a podcast titled “Filling the Talent Pipeline” with guest Geoff Blanding, EVP of Optimum Healthcare IT.
• Cerner releases a new podcast, “Combatting clinician burnout.”
• GHX names 80 provider and supplier organizations to its Millennium Club that have achieved the highest levels of supply chain automation through the GHX Exchange.
• CTG will sponsor the AWS Summit Atlanta May 18-19.
• Divurgent names Andrew Wells (McCormack Plastic Surgery) senior director of business development.
• Change Healthcare will work with Luma Health to develop new patient engagement solutions that unify clinical, operational, and financial touchpoints.
• The Iowa Hospital Association will offer its members access to ChartSpan’s chronic care management services.
• Experian Health, PatientKeeper, ManpowerGroup, CereCore, Change Healthcare, CloudWave, Dimensional Insight, Ellkay, Elsevier, FDB, Healthcare Triangle, Intelligent Medical Objects, Interbit Data, Intrado, Nuance, OBIX Perinatal Data Systems by Clinical Computer Systems, Sphere, Tegria, and Meditech will exhibit at the MUSE Inspire Conference May 15-18 in Dallas.

Blog Posts

• Three Pillars of Single-Path Coding (AGS Health)
• More meaningful care through data (Arcadia)
• Healthcare Technology Can Drive the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Ascom)
• How Azara DRVS Supports Behavioral Health Services (Azara Healthcare)
• GHX Announces Upcoming GHX Summit 2022 Highlights (GHX)
• Leadership – What Does it Really Mean? (CHIME)
• Tips to Effectively Fund Your Enterprise Cyber Risk Management Program (ECRM) (Clearwater)
• The Link Between EHR Satisfaction and Clinician Burnout (Dimensional Insight)
• Managing Post-Acute Care: A Critical Success Factor for ACOs (Dina)
• Insights and Takeaways from the 2022 Internet 2.0 Conference (Divurgent)
• Who are the 29 Million Americans Who Use Health Centers? (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 5/2/22

Top News

Walmart rolls out a diabetes telehealth program for employers that includes diabetes education, behavioral health analysis and counseling, and discounts on insulin, diabetes medications, and test kits.

The program was developed with the American Diabetes Association.

The service is provided through MeMD, a Phoenix-based multi-specialty telehealth provider that Walmart acquired in May 2021.

Walmart will sell the program as a standalone offering or as part of a comprehensive telehealth program.

Reader Comments

From Enumerator of Beans: “Re: Teladoc’s share price. Stupendously bad, but take a look at Amwell’s enterprise value, which is less-famously awful.” Refresher: enterprise value (EV) looks beyond a publicly traded market capitalization to also include the company’s debt and cash, which is how a potential acquirer would evaluate it. Amwell’s market capitalization is around $900 million as Teladoc’s woes dragged AMWL shares to record lows, but even worse, Amwell’s EV has tanked from $3 billion a year ago to $150 million now, which seemingly provides a buying opportunity for the strong-stomached investor or down-trending competitor. Teladoc’s market cap has shed more than 80% in that same year as EV slid from $29 billion to $6 billion even as management was hyping the company’s business prospects (I can’t imagine that won’t trigger a bunch of lawsuits). The smartest person in the telehealth room turns out to have been invited visitor Glen Tullman, who found a buyer-in-heat in Teladoc who was willing to massively overpay for largely untested Livongo in that brief pandemic moment where telehealth looked unstoppable, insatiable investors were wildly overfunding digital health companies, and companies sought acquisitions that would arouse or confuse investors (or both). No wonder Glenn is ubiquitous as a conference keynoter, with the sometimes comical train wreck that was Allscripts under his watch being long forgotten.

From Curious from Across the Pond: “Re: American healthcare. Has all the money spent my vendors and the federal government actually improved patient care compared to Europe? It seems that most of the money is to make sure that health systems can bill and collect for ‘patient care’ and that it’s all about growing market share and preserving monopolies and patient care is the last thing on their mind.” US healthcare is bureaucracy-powered big business, not a social obligation, but governments love it because it creates high employment, big political donors, the illusion of economic growth, and shiny new buildings where politicians can pose cutting ribbons. Technology and policies that claim to have the power to improve outcomes and cost can only be as effective as the underlying healthcare system they support, and ours is a mess with no political will to change it given that the wealthy like it just fine. As far as health IT claims, vendors and fawning press cheer every announcement but fail to mention the frequent failure that follows or the user missteps that contributed.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents say that the factors that are most important to AI’s eventual success in healthcare are maturation of the technology, proven outcomes, and building trust. Commenters noted the need for better-quality EHR data and the alignment of economic incentives.

New poll to your right or here: Within the past two years, have you had to pay a medically related bill that created at least a modest degree of financial hardship?

I received a brilliant spam email this week – Bitdefender warned me that the “unsubscribe” link pointed to a phishing page.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Weight loss app vendor Noom lays off 180 coaches and will part ways with 315 more employees in the next few days, according to a Business Insider report. The company is trying to pivot to scheduled video-based coaching instead of immediate text-based engagement that often involved canned messages and lessons. At least the company is loyal to the video-based model – the employees who were laid off were notified in group video calls.

Spok announces Q1 results: revenue down 6%, EPS –$0.37 versus –$0.12. The company says its strategic alternatives review resulted in no options to sell the company, so it will continue to operate as a standalone business.

Ambulatory surgery software vendor HST Pathways acquires competitor Simplify ASC.

People

Renee Emmer, RN, MS joins VCU Health as associate VP of clinical informatics.

Ann Baty (OmniSys) joins HealthMark Group as VP of marketing.

Announcements and Implementations

Olive releases Care Campaigns, an automated patient communication and outreach solution whose first user is Gundersen Health System.

Canada’s seven-hospital Hamilton Health Sciences will go live on Epic on June 4 in a rare move straight from paper charts that are scanned into CGI Sovera.

Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center (WI) joins a clinical trial of UltraSight Echocardiographic Guidance, a machine learning app that helps medical professionals who don’t have advanced echocardiography training to position the transducer.

Rochelle Community Hospital (IL) goes live on Epic, replacing Meditech and Athenahealth. 

Oxford University Press launches Oxford Open Digital Health, an open access journal that will focus on digital health interventions in low- and middle-income countries. The editor-in-chief is Alain Labrique, PhD, MHS, MS, professor and founder of the Johns Hopkins University Global MHealth Initiative and chair of the WHO Digital Health Guidelines Development Group. 

In Norway, St. Olav’s Hospital trains volunteers from the local senior center on HelsaMi, its patient portal that is powered by Epic MyChart, so they can help other seniors.

Government and Politics

Interesting from Politico: a historical graph of how many years Medicare’s Part A fund for hospital expenses has left before running out of money. Today’s number is four years, as in 2026 the fund will go broke because the number of enrollees and their expenses has risen faster than funding from payroll taxes, and that doesn’t even account for pandemic-related impact. The long-term fix would be to shift to value-based care, which would require not only a lot of legwork, but rare political unity. The “gimmick fix” would be to shift some Part A services to Part B, which is funded by premiums and other taxes.

Other

Neonatologist Ross Sommers, MD, who recently founded NICU-at-home monitoring software company Firstday Healthcare, posted this on LinkedIn. I found it interesting given the cost and family disruption involved with NICU babies. The company offers continuous vital signs monitoring monitored by board-certified neonatologists, AI-powered deterioration prediction, a parent app that includes medical records, and care coordination.

A small University of Colorado survey of patients who were given online access to their radiology images and reports finds that most said it was helpful in understanding their condition and few reported being worried or confused. One-third of them saved a copy, one-fourth shared them with a doctor, 15% used them to get a second opinion, and 3% posted them on social media.

Sam Johnson, fired last year as CEO of telehealth vendor VisuWell after he was caught on video telling high school senior Dalton Stevens that they “look like an idiot” for wearing a dress on their way to the prom, sues comedian Kathy Griffin for making fun of him. He says the ridicule triggered a backlash against him and his family. Johnson says he is suing “to stand up against the woke social mob that wants to strip of us of our livelihoods and careers.” He says his issue wasn’t the student’s attire, but rather that the group was being obnoxious and profane in one of his favorite restaurants. Johnson says that he will never again sign an employment agreement that doesn’t contain a “slow action cause” that subjects employment actions resulting from a news story, social media post, or boycott demand to a 30-day cooling-off period. Johnson says that VisuWell and “several health systems” made false statements that were published and urges followers to read the coverage on Fox News. Two months ago, he accused the Nashville Business Journal, VisuWell, and LinkedIn of flagging one of his LinkedIn posts as harmful, which he summarizes as “scared pansies.”

The metaverse quickly got creepy. Bored Carnegie Mellon researchers fit haptic sensors into an Oculus Quest 2 headset that transmits kissing sensations to the wearer’s lips, teeth, and tongue. They describe mundane game-playing uses such as brushing teeth, smoking, and drinking coffee, either naively or coyly overlooking more lucrative integration. SecondLife perverts have a new home.

Sponsor Updates

• KLAS research ranks Meditech among the top two EHR vendors market share growth.
• EClinicalWorks releases a new podcast, “How EClinicalWorks RCM Service Boosts Efficiency.”
• OptimizeRx will exhibit at MedDev 2022 June 7-9 in San Diego.
• Optum donates COVID-10 test kits to increase access to free testing among underserved communities in Chicago.
• PatientBond will exhibit at the UCA/CUCM 2022 Annual Convention through May 4 in Las Vegas.
• PerfectServe will present at the Powderkeg Unvalley virtual conference May 11-12.
• Premier’s S2S Global donates urgently needed medical supplies to Ukraine via United Help Ukraine.
• The HIT Like a Girl Podcast features Tegria Director of Patient Access and Technology Rodina Bizri-Baryak.

Blog Posts

• Stop Making Patients Work So Hard (Orbita)
• Preventing Violence Against Healthcare Workers: Perspective From a Former CEO (Commure)
• How the Pandemic Changed Patient Experience, and Why It Matters (Symplr)
• X12 got you down? Light it on FHIR with Redox. (Redox)
• 10 interesting facts about nurses (Spok)
• Innovation Allows for Swifter, Smarter Specialty Prescribing & Fulfillment (Surescripts)
• How payers can improve member experience with modern contact centers (Talkdesk)
• Improving Healthcare Communication and Collaboration within Doctors’ Offices and Beyond (TigerConnect)
• Top Things to Know About Patient Engagement Technology (Twistle)
• Filler Words to Avoid in PT Treatment Notes (and Other Documentation Missteps) (WebPT)

Contacts

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

News 4/29/22

Top News

Teladoc Health reports Q1 results: revenue up 25%, EPS -$41.58 versus -$1.31. The loss was driven by a $6.6 billion impairment charge from its $18.5 billion acquisition of Livongo in 2020. Teladoc had warned in early March 2022 that it would write down up to $4 billion of the Livongo acquisition.

Teladoc also cut its full-year revenue and earnings outlook.

TDOC shares dropped 40% on Thursday. They are down 82% in the past 12 months versus the Nasdaq’s 9% loss. The company’s market cap is $5 billion, with Teladoc having lost $39 billion of shareholder value in 14 months.

From the earnings call:

• The company says it remains confident in its whole-person care strategy, which it describes as “the future of digital health.”
• Performance of its BetterHelp direct-to-consumer mental health service was less than expected, which the company believes is due to smaller competitors going after potential customers and taking advantage of pandemic-relaxed controlled substance prescribing regulations. Three-fourths of the company’s projected revenue reduction is attributed to BetterHelp.
• Sales to employers slowed as companies focused on COVID and return to offices. Teladoc also blames “noise in the marketplace” from smaller point solutions.
• Teladoc reports 54 million paying members, with 731,000 of those enrolled in chronic care programs.
• CEO Jason Gorevic says that increased customer acquisition cost, mostly due the cost to buy advertising in search results and social media,  was caused by smaller private competitors that have been “recently well funded with a rash of venture capital money” that are making “economically irrational decisions.”

Reader Comments

From Down Underware: “Re: Australian Medical Association. Wants hospitals to eliminate fax machines to improve communication and patient safety.” Banning fax machines would most likely cause communication and patient safety to tank in the absence of solid interoperability. The market will gratefully accept a substitute that checks these boxes and is documented to improve cost and outcomes:

• Faxes are universal. You only need someone’s fax number, not their permission or prearranged terms, to send them something and then walk away.
• They are cheap, easily maintained, and never go down.
• They can be used anywhere there’s a copper telephone wire even in the absence of broadband or cell coverage.
• Issues of sending and reading protocols don’t exist – the piece of paper on one end pops out as piece of paper on the other end that doesn’t need to be printed as an extra step. What is sent is exactly what is received, with no chance of misinterpretation or sender technology changes that render the information unreadable.
• Delivery is immediate and verifiable.
• The recipient is more likely to notice a new paper popping out of the fax machine than an on-screen alert.
• Fax machines don’t host viruses, there’s not much hacking risk, a malicious fax can’t take your network down, and incoming faxes are as secure as the physical location they are sitting in.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

A report says that a European antitrust review of Oracle’s planned acquisition of Cerner is likely to surface no concerns.

A former engineering VP of mental telahealth vendor Cerebral sues the company, saying that they fired him after he complained about its plan to prescribe stimulants to 100% of its ADHD patients. Matthew Truebe says he told the company that patients were setting up multiple accounts to buy extra drugs, as evidenced by 2,000 duplicate addresses in the shipping database. He also says the company ignored his concerns about thousands of patient records that were exposed in a breach.

Syllable, which sells intelligent voice systems for health system call centers and practices, raises $40 million in a Series C funding round.

Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella says in the company’s earnings call that its Nuance acquisition gives it a platform layer for AI-driven applications in healthcare and contact centers. He says the company will aggressively innovate with Nuance and expects to increase its impact on healthcare, specifically with physician burden.

Sales

• Prisma Health (SC) chooses Philips for patient monitoring, enterprising imaging, and analytics.

People

Intelerad hires A. J. Watson (Doubleclick) as chief product officer and Paul Johnson (Amwell) as chief delivery officer.

Well Health hires Sarah Shillington, MS (TigerConnect) as SVP of customer experience and Ashu Agte, MS (Autodesk) as SVP of engineering.

Susan Worthy (Optum) joins Amwell as chief marketing officer.

Adventist Health promotes Jennifer Stemmler to chief digital officer.

Salesforce hires Maura King, MBA (Workday) as RVP of enterprise healthcare providers.

Bruce “Skip” Lemon joins Impact Advisors as VP.

Announcements and Implementations

A Panda Health survey of 100 C-level health system executives finds that more than half of them get more than 11 calls and emails each week from digital health vendors, leading 95% of them to conclude that it’s hard to decide which products are worth investigating. Half of the health systems don’t have a strong digital health strategy, and three-fourths of those that have bought digital health solutions are not confident that they chose wisely. Two-thirds say that it takes them at least six months to get to contract signing, with most of the time spent vetting integration capabilities and comparing product functionality.

Tenet Healthcare admits that its recent computer downtime was caused by a cybersecurity incident. The for-profit hospital operator scolded a South Florida TV station early this week for interviewing a patient who worried about the possibility of downtime-caused medication errors, calling it “preposterous” to suggest that paper-based downtime procedures are less safe.

1upHealth announces SQL on FHIR, which allows organizations to make decisions using SQL tools such as Microsoft Power BI and Tableau without coding in FHIR.

Privately insured patients who receive a new diagnosis from a telehealth visit are no more likely than their in-house visit counterparts to visit the ED or be hospitalized within 14 days, a study finds. However, three of 21 conditions were exceptions – upper respiratory infections, bronchitis, and pharyngitis, which researchers think is because those patients required COVID-19 evaluation.

A CoverMyMeds survey of 400 nurses identifies these medication-related technology needs:

1. A centralized location for medication information.
2. Knowing the medications that a patient’s insurance covers.
3. A seamless way to provide medication information to prescribers, such as prior authorization requirements, symptoms, allergies, medication history, and plan formulary.
4. A better way to perform prior authorization requests proactively instead of waiting for pharmacy rejection.
5. Ways to reduce pharmacy telephone time, ideally with solutions that provide information at the point of prescribing.
6. Easy access to a patient’s medication history, including the active meds list that less than half of patients remember, as well as a list of medications that have been tried unsuccessfully as needed for prior authorization requests.
7. Real-time formulary and benefit updates.
8. Efficient ways to identify covered alternative medications.
9. Clearer job expectations, with one option being creating a centralized team to manage prior authorization and insurance interactions.
10. Moving tasks to EHR workflow, as half use non-EHR applications at least once per day and 20% use their smartphones after the patient leaves.

Government and Politics

The federal government’s Cerner system – spanning the DoD, VA, and Coast Guard — goes down twice this week, once because of a system update that was delivered at lunchtime and the second due to load imbalance, VA and Cerner officials explain at a congressional hearing. Cerner executives told lawmakers that it may commission an independent review of its system to make sure it is stable enough to deploy further.

The Texas Medical Association says in a comment to ONC that 42 of the proposed USCDI Version 3 data elements are not backed by a standard, which will create a lot of work, limit data transfer, and require rework once standards are developed. It cites an example of a hospital that is blasting out ADT information to meet CMS requirements, but a small primary care practice had to hire people manage the flood of information that is not human-readable or and often isn’t useful.

Other

A NEJM article questions whether the time and money that is spent on hospital quality improvement is worth it, as entire industries are created as soon as a measure’s score is tied to payments. The definition of quality remains hard to pin down, it says. It notes the irony of CMS suspending quality reporting requirements early in the pandemic so that “the healthcare delivery system can direct its time and resources toward caring for patients.” Experts say that QI is a billing-driven, box-checking exercise that still can’t answer basic questions about preventable deaths or overutilization of services. The article says that Medicare Share Savings Programs have been expensive to operate and have done little to reduce costs or improve quality in their patients. It also notes that profitable hospitals can afford to hire teams to optimize coding (averaging 50 to 100 employees who do nothing but support measurements), while safety-net hospitals and those serving the highest-risk patients bear the brunt of financial penalties. The administrative costs of quality measurement cause community doctors to retire and small practices to be acquired by hospitals.

This is not an early draft of Prince’s Love Symbol, but rather parietal art from the scientifically unsound early days of the pandemic, when stores like my local Walgreens above decided that the virus could be stopped dead in its tracks by making aisles one way to prevent masked customers from facing each other for five seconds. The permanently embedded tape marks obviously aren’t the only reason this ratty carpet needs to go. Also featured in this Walgreens is a Pompeii-like abandoned back section whose surviving sign suggests that it was once a health center, now occupied by carelessly parked carts of inventory awaiting displaying or disposal. The pharmacy metal doors were locked down when I dropped by this week, which has happened three times in maybe eight total visits — once because the power was out, once because the employees had locked themselves out of the pharmacy, and this time because the pharmacist had a death in the family and the store couldn’t find coverage. On the other hand, once the garage-like doors were again rolled up, a patron could obtain a COVID shot, frozen White Castle hamburgers, a rectal thermometer, and a Paw Patrol life jacket within a 10-step radius.

Sponsor Updates

• AdvancedMD employees join Catholic Community Services of Utah to serve 2,000 meals to community members.
• The Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust adds Agfa HealthCare’s enterprise imaging solution.
• Healthcare Triangle publishes the results of a new survey, “Acceleration of Blockchain Adoption in Pharma & Life Sciences.”
• Nordic posts a new monthly episode of its “DocTalk” series titled “Cloud Approaches for Modernization.”
• Imprivata secures additional funding from Thoma Bravo to finance its acquisition of SecureLink.
• Wolters Kluwer Health’s Lippincott Nursing Education solutions have been selected as 2022 SIIA CODiE award finalists in seven categories.
• Medhost celebrates Patient Experience Week.
• Texas Association of Community Health Centers offers its members remote patient monitoring from CareSignal.
• Newman Regional Health (KS) uses Meditech to transform sepsis treatment.
• Nordic Consulting joins the ServiceNow Partner Program.

Blog Posts

• Dr. Nishi Rawat presents a personal story about substance use, stigma, and solutions at the 2022 NCQA Quality Talks (Bamboo Health)
• Telehealth’s Role in Emergency Triage (Pt. 2) (EVisit)
• How ACOs can close gaps in care with better patient matching (Experian Health)
• How to take a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Pulse Check (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Why More Visuals and Less Text are Key for Health Education (Healthwise)
• It’s What’s on the Inside That Truly Counts (Impact Advisors)
• While you were sleeping: The crucial, quiet role of anesthesia (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Best Practices for Reducing Waste in Your OR (Medhost)
• 3 blogs on how to improve patient engagement (Meditech)
• Workers’ Compensation Physical Therapy Guidelines for PTs (MWTherapy)
• Net Health’s Newly Launched Waystar Integration to Boost Rehab Therapy, Wound Care Reimbursements (Net Health)
• How to Improve Engagement, Access, and Outcomes with a Personalized Care Platform (NTT Data)
• The antidote to the burnout pandemic (Nuance)

Contacts

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

News 4/27/22

Top News

3M is reportedly seeking a buyer for its Health Information Systems revenue cycle and software business.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Let me get this straight. Health systems claim their big-ticket EHR purchase will improve outcomes and patient safety. When those systems go offline for days or weeks, they declare that going back to paper-based downtime procedures is a non-event that doesn’t put patients at risk. This is where the cynical you wants to speak up. I’ll also add for those without hospital IT experience that the real danger is in the recovery phase, where systems are brought back up with old and missing information and all hands are frantically back-entering orders and hoping they don’t get treated as new ones.

Also for your cynical consideration, the American Telemedicine Association is giddy at the prospect of ditching its virtual conference format and meeting in person next week in Boston.

I was reading about an upcoming White House plan to resettle Ukraine refugees in the US using sponsors who would be responsible for much of the logistics and cost to move a family here. One of many unfortunate barriers is a healthcare one – would you risk your family’s financial security to take on the health insurance premiums and medical costs of a family who is relocating for years to the only developed country that doesn’t offer national health insurance?

Webinars

April 28 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Undercoded and Underpaid: Making It Easier to Document to Optimize Reimbursement.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, senior director of informatics, IMO; Nicole Douglas, sales engineer, IMO. The presenters will discuss how to simplify precise documentation for clinicians; the effects of imprecise coding on reimbursement; why accurate code capture at the point of care can have positive downstream impact on population health initiatives; and how third-party solutions integrated with the EHR can reduce documentation burdens.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Biofourmis secures $300 million in Series D funding, increasing its total raised to $445 million and bringing its valuation to over $1 billion. The company, which specializes in predictive analytics-based remote patient monitoring technology, has named former Medtronic and Intel chairman Omar Ishrak chairman of its board.

UnitedHealth will sell Change Healthcare’s ClaimsXten claims payment and editing software business to TPG Capital for $2.2 billion if its acquisition of Change is finalized.

Imaging real-world data vendor OneMedNet will go public via a SPAC merger at a valuation of $317 million. Paul Casey will remain as CEO.

AirStrip invests in clinical analytics company Fifth Eye as part of a collaboration that will include integration of Fifth Eye’s AHI System with AirStrip’s real-time clinical data platform for inpatient surveillance.

Specialist TeleMed secures unspecified funding from LifePoint Health (TN).

Healthstream announces Q1 results: revenue up 3%, EPS $0.09 versus $0.07. HSTM shares are down 11% in the past year versus the Nasdaq’s similar drop, valuing the company at $600 million.

Microsoft announces Q3 results: revenue up 18%, EPS $2.22 versus $2.03, beating analyst expectations for both. Microsoft Cloud revenue was up 32% to $23.4 billion. 

Sales

• Northwell Health (NY) selects virtual care services from Teladoc Health.

People

Vidya Raman-Tangella, MBBS, MHA (AWS) joins Teladoc Health as chief medical officer.

WellSky hires Dale Zurbay (Nuance) as chief growth officer.

OmniLife names Dyan Bymark (Teladoc Health) chief commercial officer.

Memora Health promotes Omar Nagji to chief commercial officer and names James Colbert, MD (BCBS of Massachusetts) SVP of care delivery.

Chris Regan (Experian Health) joins Salesforce-owned MuleSoft as RVP of healthcare.

Announcements and Implementations

St. Lawrence Health (NY) will go live on Epic this weekend through its affiliation with Rochester Regional Health.

Clinical Architecture renames its Nomad data normalization and enhancement software to Nomentys.

University Health Network in Toronto will go live on Epic in June. The health system incorporated guidance from 80 patient partners in its configuration of the new software.

Ochsner Health (LA) has implemented Nym Health’s automated medical coding technology within its emergency departments.

Monument Health selects CereCore’s ServiceNow consulting services.

Rhodes Group, a laboratory software and consulting business, uses InterSystems Iris for Health to aggregate and normalize hepatitis C data from labs across New Mexico to support sharing with providers through the state’s HIE.

Nicklaus Children’s Health System launches its MyNicklaus app that includes wayfinding from Gozio Health.

In the Netherlands, Amstelland Hospital becomes the first hospital in Europe to implement Epic under the Epic Connect model.

KLAS summarizes US hospital EHR market share activity for 2021 (click the graphic to enlarge):

• Epic gained four new customers representing 28 hospitals and 13,000 beds last year, losing four due to M&A.
• Meditech Expanse was chosen by 74% of the company’s legacy customers that made a replacement decision in 2021, compared to 38% retention in 2020.
• Epic has 33% of hospitals and 44% of beds versus Cerner’s 24% and 27%, respectively.
• Allscripts and CPSI lost ground in 2021.
• Cerner had the largest net decrease in bed count last year, with half of those hospitals choosing Epic as a replacement and the other half switching to Epic after being acquired.
• Cerner hasn’t had a net-new large health system sale since 2013.

Government and Politics

The White House’s plan for expanding access to COVID-19 treatments such as oral antivirals includes working with EHR vendors, with Cerner and Epic specifically mentioned, to incorporate or antiviral treatment content and availability information.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough expresses confidence that the agency has the budget needed to complete its projected 10-year, $16 billion rollout of Cerner, despite a new OIG report that estimates it will need an additional $2 billion for every year that implementations runs behind schedule.

New Hampshire regulators say that the board of the non-profit parent company that owned failed Lakes Regional General Hospital and Franklin Hospital should have reined in hospital executives who undertook an aggressive expansion and a $42 million implementation of Cerner as an aging local population increased the Medicare and Medicaid share of the money-losing hospitals.

Other

A study describes how clinical radiologists at NYU’s medical school create videos explaining a patient’s imaging results in plan language with annotations, then post them to the patient portal for both patients and referring providers. The one-minute videos take the radiologist about four minutes to create using a PACS-integrated reporting tool. On the downside, three-fourths of the videos were never opened and 91% of surveyed patients said they preferred both a written and video report. I’ll also add that the sample video report was full of unnecessary jargon (like bone names) delivered in a monotone.

Maybe this is telehealth’s jump-the-shark moment. A group of doctors who are famous on TikTok and Instagram sells memberships – in the form of NFT cartoon icons — in what one founder hopes will become a metaverse-powered virtual clinic. MetaDocs and its providers, such as Dr. Pimple Popper, is taking heat because the company is not licensed as a telemedicine service and its doctors aren’t licensed in all states, meaning the social media stars can’t legally offer paying customers prescriptions or medical advice. Medical toxicologist Ryan Marino, MD comments commendably drily, “If your child is in respiratory distress in the middle of the night, having a surgeon famous for dancing on TikTok text you might not be that useful.” The company is quickly developing a user waiver that its service is for “informational purposes only” and refocusing its virtual clinics on “third-world countries” that presumably have a short supply of both doctors and lawyers. The company’s website says it plans to act as a connection among doctors, Web3, and healthcare, contributing ideas related to blockchain-powered EHRs, tokenizing services and procedures, and the overall digitization of healthcare.   

One of my favorite booths at the HIMSS conference is always that of the Philippine Delegation, some super-nice folks who describe the advantages of health IT outsourcing to the Philippines and remind us that they provide more US nurses than any other country outside the US. They report a good HIMSS22 exhibit experience, expecting sales of $30-$40 million from 300 leads, 25 deals that have already closed, and four new partnerships.

Sponsor Updates

• Quil employees take part in the company’s fourth annual day of service.
• Agfa HealthCare welcomes four new peregrine falcon chicks at its headquarters in Belgium.
• Cerner announces that it added 71 new clients in 2021 and extended or expanded relationships with 330 others.
• Baker Tilly donates $10,000 to Cray Youth and Family Services and the Washington Township Special Olympics.
• Biofourmis will present at the ATA Telehealth Innovators Challenge during ATA 2022 May 1-3 in Boston.
• Bravado Health publishes a new executive brief, “The high cost of low task adherence for surgical and non-surgical procedures.”
• CarePort will exhibit at ACMA National 2022 May 1-4 in Dallas.
• Cerner releases a new podcast, “How TEFCA impacts the future of healthcare.”
• Change Healthcare releases a new podcast, “Capitol Connection: Post-Pandemic Healthcare Policy.”
• Clearsense publishes a new case study, “Archiving Solution Delivers Rapid ROI.”
• RxRevu announces that three of the top 10 health systems on US News & World Report’s Best Hospitals list for 2021-22 are now part of its prescription cost and coverage network.

Blog Posts

• Overcoming Labor Shortages Through Automation and Outsourced Services: Part One (AGS Health)
• 5 questions to ask before you use predictive algorithms in healthcare (Arcadia)
• How AI Can Generate Ideal Audience Segments in Healthcare (Actium Health)
• Building Tools in DRVS for Family Planning Programs (Azara Healthcare)
• Pings Patient Notification Connects People in Need to Support (Bamboo Health)
• Streamlined referrals and better patient care with technologies for home health (CarePort)
• Community: 3 Examples of How CHIME Brings People Together (CHIME)
• Exploring the implications and infancy of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for labor and delivery (OBIX Perinatal Data System, developed by Clinical Computer Systems)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 4/25/22

Top News

Tenet Health complains to a South Florida TV station that it is “preposterous” to suggest that charting on paper during EHR downtime could cause medication errors.

The TV station’s report on downtime at two of Tenet’s South Florida hospitals included comments from a patient who was being treated at the time. He expressed concern about errors when he noticed that WiFi was down, staff had to go outside to use their phones, nurses were charting on paper, and one nurse dropped a big stack of manual records.

Tenet asked WPTV to remove the story and to “maintain a higher level of integrity when reporting on this topic moving forward.” WPTV told Tenet to take a hike.

St. Mary’s Medical Center and Good Samaritan Medical Center have been down since Wednesday for reasons that Tenet has declined to share.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Few poll respondents are interested in revisiting HIMSS22 electronically, so I feel vindicated that I’m not the only one to choose the “none of these” option. You would have thought in Orlando that the whole world was breathlessly awaiting the release of conference-related podcasts and videos given the phalanx of A/V warriors armed with microphones and cameras who were pontificating theatrically to each other all over the convention center.

New poll to your right or here: Which factor will most influence whether AI has a significant healthcare influence in five years? I didn’t include every possible factor, so feel free to click the poll’s “comments” link to argue for something I omitted.

Webinars

April 22 (Friday) 1 ET. “CMIO 3.0: What’s Next for the CMIO?” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Becket Mahnke, MD, CMIO and pediatric cardiologist, Confluence Health; Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO. The relatively short history of the CMIO role includes Version 1.0 (EHR implementation, Meaningful Use, and regulatory compliance) and Version 2.0 (quality and efficiency). Version 3.0 is at the forefront of predictive analytics, population health initiatives, and optimization of data-driven tools. The presenters will discuss the digital revolution’s impact on CMIO responsibilities; the connection between clinical informatics, analytics, population health and the CMIO; and how CMIO 3.0 will be involved in the adoption of advanced technologies.

April 28 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Undercoded and Underpaid: Making It Easier to Document to Optimize Reimbursement.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, senior director of informatics, IMO; Nicole Douglas, sales engineer, IMO. The presenters will discuss how to simplify precise documentation for clinicians; the effects of imprecise coding on reimbursement

Sales

• Allied Anesthesia Associates and Clínica Hamburguesa de Anestesiologia will implement PerfectServe’s AnesthesiaGo OR case scheduling solution.

People

Tara Nooteboom, MS (Rush University Medical Center) joins UCI Health as head of consumer digital strategy.

Michael Fenlon (Change Healthcare) joins Relatient as VP of client support.

TigerConnect promotes John Montealegre, MBA to CFO, Harish Panchal to chief sales officer, and Allie Vu to chief people officer.

Government and Politics

Spokane VA officials confirm that a veteran was hospitalized with heart failure in March after his heart medication prescription – which was ordered a year previously, before Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center’s conversion to Cerner  – disappeared off his Cerner active medication list and was not renewed. The incident has been classified as a sentinel event that had the potential to cause significant patient harm, although in this case the veteran was discharged, apparently well, after a five-day inpatient stay. The VA expires all prescriptions after one year and suspects that the heart drug was already discontinued before Cerner was went live, adding that it remained visible on Cerner’s “historical medications” screen. Five Mann-Grandstaff clinicians say they have seen the problem of prescriptions expiring and disappearing from the meds list, but weren’t adequately trained on the process. The VA’s VistA system that Cerner replaced also expired prescriptions after one year, but left them on the active medication list to prompt providers to renew them when appropriate instead of dumping them onto a historical list of inactive meds that could go back years.

Other

Canada’s Newfoundland and Labrador — which is running a 1980s-era Meditech Magic system that is no longer enhanced — hasn’t followed through on recommendations that it upgrade to a new version of Meditech in a $92 million project that auditors say would more than pay for itself.

Quebec’s health ministry apologizes for tweeting a link to COVID-19 statistics that actually pointed to a foot fetish video site. One might reasonably speculate that the government’s social media person had the site open while tweeting and copied the wrong URL, which should raise some interesting internal discussions. 

Sponsor Updates

• Orbita raises $3,000 for charitable causes by sponsoring a 5k in Boston during its first in-person meeting of the year.
• Healthcare Triangle achieves HITRUST risk-based certification to manage risk, improve security posture, and meet compliance requirements.
• CEO Monthly has recognized PatientBond CEO Justin Dearborn as “The Most Influential CEO 2022 – the USA.”
• Clearsense publishes a new case study, “Archiving Solution Delivers Rapid ROI.”
• The HIT Like a Girl Podcast features Pivot Point Consulting CEO Rachel Marano.
• Protenus names Daniel Thompson junior engineer, Nick Strand infrastructure engineer, and Sean Richwine staff infrastructure engineer.
• Netsmart promotes Natalie Caruso to senior communications specialist.
• Redox and Well Health will exhibit at AAOE April 29-May 2 in Chicago.
• RxRevu adds new functionalities to its real-time prescription benefit solution to improve transaction success rates and display additional plan cost data.

Blog Posts

• Mapping the Care Journey for Misdiagnosed Patients with Precision Engagement (OptimizeRx)
• Closing care gaps with context and connectivity (Olive)
• Key Takeaways from NatCon22, the Largest Conference in Mental Health and Substance Use Treatment (Owl Health)
• Patient Experience Best Practices: 4 Examples to Follow (PatientBond)
• How Remote Patient Engagement Solutions Reduce Readmissions (PerfectServe)
• Teamwork and Team Leaders Make the Difference in Retaining, Supporting Nurses (Symplr)
• Fluid Shortages: Current Challenges in Accessing a Staple Supply (Premier)
• Managing HCC Capture During the Great Resignation (RCxRules)
• Make the Switch, Your Patients Will Thank You (RxRevu)
• 10 practical ways to keep text messaging in your hospital safe and secure (Spok)
• The Great Resignation: How to turn it into an opportunity for your contact center (Talkdesk)
• The Importance of Real-Time Communication in Hospice Care (TigerConnect)
• Patient Adherence: Understanding Why We’re All Bad at It (WebPT)
• Nursing Shortage Consequences and What Hospitals Can Do (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 4/22/22

Top News

Clinical trials solutions vendor Reify Health raises $220 million in a Series D funding round that values the company at nearly $5 billion.

The co-founders, who attended the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and served a three-month stint as Rock Health fellows, are Ralph Passarella, MD, PhD and Michael Lin.

Webinars

April 22 (Friday) 1 ET. “CMIO 3.0: What’s Next for the CMIO?” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Becket Mahnke, MD, CMIO and pediatric cardiologist, Confluence Health; Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO. The relatively short history of the CMIO role includes Version 1.0 (EHR implementation, Meaningful Use, and regulatory compliance) and Version 2.0 (quality and efficiency). Version 3.0 is at the forefront of predictive analytics, population health initiatives, and optimization of data-driven tools. The presenters will discuss the digital revolution’s impact on CMIO responsibilities; the connection between clinical informatics, analytics, population health and the CMIO; and how CMIO 3.0 will be involved in the adoption of advanced technologies.

April 28 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Undercoded and Underpaid: Making It Easier to Document to Optimize Reimbursement.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, senior director of informatics, IMO; Nicole Douglas, sales engineer, IMO. The presenters will discuss how to simplify precise documentation for clinicians; the effects of imprecise coding on reimbursement; why accurate code capture at the point of care can have positive downstream impact on population health initiatives; and how third-party solutions integrated with the EHR can reduce documentation burdens.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Amwell expands its virtual services to include musculoskeletal and dermatology.

Remote patient temperature monitoring technology vendor Blue Spark Technologies raises $40 million in growth funding. I interviewed President and CEO John Gannon last May.

Netsmart acquires TheraOffice, an EHR/PM for physical therapy and rehabilitation practices that will be incorporated into Netsmart’s CareFabric platform.

Venture capitalist Aike Ho explains why she doesn’t invest in healthcare AI companies:

• AI doesn’t really exist in healthcare. It is really just machine learning (“glorified big data”) with no deep learning or neural networks.
• It takes months or years, at startup burn rates, to get agreements from health systems and universities to provide data for training models.
• The data is often low quality or in need of cleaning.
• The total addressable market for most AI applications is small because it involves ancillary services such as diagnostic help and workflow automation and most US healthcare revenue involves services.
• Gaining adoption is hard unless you are also delivering care. That’s her preferred model for AI/ML – digital health companies that use AI/ML to improve their own care delivery. No AI/ML company that sells to provider groups has had a breakout so far.
• It’s hard to get risk-averse providers to use a solution without documenting superior clinical outcomes.
• Insurance rarely pays, so that leaves patients and providers to foot the bill. That’s harder if the value proposition is saving money rather than boosting revenue.
• Workflow friction and training costs must be minimal.
• Charging for usage is great, but only if you can figure out adoption, while a flat cost is harder to sell.

People

New Zealand-based breast imaging screening AI vendor Volpara Health promotes advisor Teri Thomas, RN, MSN — who spent 21 years through 2016 as an Epic executive — to CEO. She replaces founder Ralph Highnam, PhD, MSc, who will transition to chief science and innovation officer.

Health system-owned interoperability vendor Graphite Health hires Ted Gaubert, PhD, MBA (Dunn & Bradstreet) as CTO.

Ed Marx resigns as Tech Mahindra’s chief digital officer for health and life sciences.

Announcements and Implementations

A study performed by the Australian New South Wales Health Service finds that use of Net Health’s wound imaging and analysis platform resulted in better documentation, more engaged patients, and improved wound measurement and management.

Golden Valley Memorial Healthcare (MO) goes live as the first site running Meditech Expanse Genomics.

Kyruus and Upfront partner to offer provider search, match, and scheduling with continued personalized and omnichannel engagement.

A new KLAS report looks at health system compliance with CMS’s requirement to post prices for common services, as revenue cycle leaders express doubt that the regulation – which they say was poorly executed, is confusing, and requires extensive labor for compliance — will improve financial outcomes. Respondents say that posting a master list of prices may benefit payer and provider organizations more than patients. Epic was the most-often used vendor to comply with the requirement, while Experian Health, Vitalware, and NThrive/FinThrive led the third-party solutions list. 

Government and Politics

Healthcare waste management company Stericycle – which also owns patient engagement technology vendor Stericycle Communication Solutions — pays $84 million to settle DOJ charges that it bribed officials in Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina to earn waste management contracts.

The VA congratulates Hardeep Singh, MD, MBA of the Houston VA for earning Joint Commission’s patient safety and quality award for safety related to diagnostics and health IT.

Other

Adventist Health Mendocino Coast Chief of Staff William Miller, MD outlines lessons learned from its implementation of Cerner in its clinics in a local newspaper opinion piece:

• Timelines were extended due to COVID-caused staff resignations and shortages.
• System bugs prevented the prescription refill function from communicating with local pharmacies and impeded referrals to specialists.
• The problems increased phone call abandonment and hold time.
• Moving data to Cerner required more time than expected, extending appointment scheduling time from weeks to two months.
• The hospital didn’t do a good job of communicating the transition to patients and the community.

Economist and sociology professor Juliet Schor discusses four-day work weeks at the TED2022 conference, citing her consulting work with non-profit Healthwise last year. She says Healthwise employees are happier and the company is enjoying higher revenue and outstanding customer satisfaction scores after the change. Healthwise CEO Adam Husney says employees picked up the pace to complete a week’s worth of work in four days, shifting personal tasks to their off days and using more time-efficient messaging so they can enjoy their downtime as a whole day off instead of occasional breaks.

The New York Times looks at the use of robots in nursing homes and the development of “virtual assisted living” in which technology – medication reminders, social engagement, fall prevention and response, food delivery, and toilet-powered health analysis – gives seniors an alternative to cash-strapped, understaffed nursing homes. The director of MIT’s AgeLab says Best Buy and Amazon are offering senior-friendly mobile phones that detect falls, connect to hospital systems, access electronic medical records, and give one-touch access to call centers that are prepared to contact doctors, arrange transportation, and notify caregivers.

Redesign Health provides yet another unwanted glimpse into the marketing sausage-making in being “thrilled to share our rebrand, which embodies both our aspirations for the future and the urgency that this moment in healthcare demands.” New logo, new color scheme, got it … but those responsible can’t resist pontificating in violating the “show, don’t tell” principle in mandating an eye-rolling journey through a self-congratulatory backstory (imagine if they had painted the Mona Lisa):

The symbol tells us where we want to go and what we want to be, beyond where we are now. And as the omnipresent fixture in our branding and the world we create, it will be something we use to tell our story forever … Ultimately, we hope our brand becomes a symbol in the world of health. We hope it influences not only how we continue to approach our work, but also the type of people that want to join us and the way our industry tackles big challenges — namely, with more ambition, urgency, and perspectives.

Is this how editors role?

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare Triangle will present at NobleCon18 April 21 in Hollywood, FL.
• LexisNexis Risk Solutions announces that it has been named a leader in the “IDC MarketScape: US Provider Data Management for Payers 2022 Vendor Assessment.”
• InterSystems offers prizes for applications that use its FHIR services as part of MIT Hacking Medicine’s Grand Hack 2022.
• OSIS, which provides NextGen Healthcare technology services to Community Health Centers, chooses Well Health as a preferred vendor of digital patient communications.
• Clearsense publishes a case study of a data archiving project that saved a 93-hospital IDN $23 million in annual cost savings.
• Steve Shihadeh of Get-to-Market Health posts the second part of his conversation with digital health investor Lee Shapiro of 7wireVentures, which includes tips for co-existing with Epic, Cerner, and Meditech.
• Medicomp Systems releases a new episode of its Tell Me Where It Hurts Podcast featuring Greenway Health CMO Michael Blackman, MD.
• Meditech President and CEO Michelle O’Connor and EVP/COO Helen Waters will offer a May 17 keynote at the MUSE conference in Dallas titled “Looking to the Future of Digital Healthcare and MEDITECH.”

Blog Posts

• 7 top healthcare revenue cycle challenges and how to overcome them (Experian Health)
• Improve IT Operations with Response Analytics (Everbridge)
• Minority Health Month Spotlights Need for Expanded Access (Get Well)
• Ethical Considerations of Healthcare’s “Alphabet Soup:” AI, ML, and NLP (Healthcare Triangle)
• Social Determinants of Health (Health Data Movers)
• 5 Mindful Practices for Reducing Stress at Work (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Unlocking the Full Benefits of Healthcare Interoperability: The Next Frontier (InterSystems)
• The risk of scaling back COVID-19 genomic surveillance too soon (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• This Atlanta healthcare startup quadrupled its revenue and employees in a year. Here’s how. (Loyal Health)
• Simplifying Data Integration in Your Healthcare Environment (Medhost)
• 6 Nuance employees share their perspectives on volunteering (Nuance)
• User-centered system design can help save lives (Nordic)

Contacts

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

News 4/20/22

Top News

Clipboard Health, an online marketplace that matches nurses and other healthcare professionals with staffing opportunities, raises $80 million over two previously unannounced funding rounds.

The company, launched six years ago, serves 30 US cities. It offers instant payment after shifts, a benefit that sets it apart from competitors like IntelyCare, which recently raised $115 million in a Series C funding round.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Deborah Kohn has been retired from consulting for a few years and finally decided it was time to cancel her HIStalk email updates, so she provided a Donors Choose parting gift that, with matching funds applied, funded these teacher projects:

• A diversity library for Ms. D’s elementary school class in Houston, TX.
• Geography tools for the ninth grade Advanced Placement class of Ms. P in Fresno, CA.

Webinars

April 22 (Friday) 1 ET. “CMIO 3.0: What’s Next for the CMIO?” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Becket Mahnke, MD, CMIO and pediatric cardiologist, Confluence Health; Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO. The relatively short history of the CMIO role includes Version 1.0 (EHR implementation, Meaningful Use, and regulatory compliance) and Version 2.0 (quality and efficiency). Version 3.0 is at the forefront of predictive analytics, population health initiatives, and optimization of data-driven tools. The presenters will discuss the digital revolution’s impact on CMIO responsibilities; the connection between clinical informatics, analytics, population health and the CMIO; and how CMIO 3.0 will be involved in the adoption of advanced technologies.

April 28 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Undercoded and Underpaid: Making It Easier to Document to Optimize Reimbursement.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, senior director of informatics, IMO; Nicole Douglas, sales engineer, IMO. The presenters will discuss how to simplify precise documentation for clinicians; the effects of imprecise coding on reimbursement; why accurate code capture at the point of care can have positive downstream impact on population health initiatives; and how third-party solutions integrated with the EHR can reduce documentation burdens.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

The US Patent Office awards patient privacy monitoring company Protenus a patent for “Methods and Systems for Analyzing Accessing of Drug Dispensing Systems.”

The Chartis Group acquires health equity advisory firm Just Health Collective, whose founder and CEO Duane Reynolds, MHA has worked in inclusion and diversity executive roles with UnitedHealth Group and the American Hospital Association.

Sales

• Scripps Health (CA) and UT Health San Antonio (TX) select Oncora Medical’s oncology patient care and analytics software.
• Medical University of South Carolina will implement Andor Health’s ThinkAndor AI virtual assistant to optimize its virtual health services.

People

Ryan Smith, MBA (Intermountain Healthcare) joins Graphite Health as COO. The non-profit digital health solutions company was formed in October 2021 by Intermountain, Presbyterian Healthcare Services, and SSM Health.

Cedars-Sinai Health System (CA) promotes Craig Kwiatkowski, PharmD to SVP of enterprise information services and CIO.

Providence (WA) promotes Sara Vaezy to EVP and chief digital officer.

Strata CEO Dan Michelson, MBA will leave the company after 10 years to create a for-purpose company that will address divisiveness and isolation. He will be replaced as CEO by COO/CFO John Martino.

Announcements and Implementations

Providence Community Health Center implements Bluestream Health’s virtual care platform-as-a-service to provide telehealth services to its 12 facilities across Providence, RI.

Mankato Clinic (MN) has adopted CareSignal’s deviceless remote patient monitoring technology as part of its chronic care management programs for patients with COPD, congestive heart failure, diabetes, hypertension, and depression.

Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center rolls out digital wayfinding capabilities from Eyedog.US.

The Reactive Emergency Assessment Community Team associated with Ipswitch Hospital in the UK adopts Current Health’s remote patient monitoring technology.

Suki expands the voice capabilities to its digital assist to help physicians retrieve patient information to access it untethered from the EHR.

Riley Children’s Health and Configo Health will co-develop pediatric hospital benchmarking solutions.

Change Healthcare releases InterQual 2022.

Government and Politics

Puget Sound Military Health System, Madigan Army Medical Center, Naval Health Clinic Oak Harbor, the Air Force’s 62nd Medical Squadron, and Naval Hospital Bremerton upgrade their Cerner-powered MHS Genesis EHR software with Revenue Cycle Expansion features. The Washington-based providers were among the initial wave of facilities that went live on MHS Genesis in 2017.

California’s digital vaccination records may not include some shots that were documented on the paper vaccination card. The state says the problem is caused by organizations that administer vaccine without capturing complete recipient information, which leaves its digital system unable to match a patient’s records from multiple providers.

Other

An OptimizeRx medication access survey of 102 specialists finds that 60% of respondents don’t have access to real-time insurance benefits information, a contributing factor to the nearly four hours each day physicians and their staff say they spend on helping patients gain access to prescriptions.

Sponsor Updates

• CereCore staff sort 6,174 pounds of food at Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee to provide 5,122 meals to Nashville families.
• The Slice of Healthcare Podcast features About CEO Angie Franks.
• BakerTilly releases a new Healthy Outcomes Podcast, “Private equity trends within the healthcare provider industry.”
• Bamboo Health will exhibit at the 2022 Blue National Summit May 2-5 in Orlando.
• “IDC MarketScape: U.S. Provider Data Management for Payers 2022 Vendor Assessment” names LexisNexis Risk Solutions as its only market leader.
• Biofourmis will present at the Reuters Digital Health 2022 Conference April 26 in San Diego.
• CHIME releases a new Digital Health Leaders Podcast, “Children, Teens, and the Pandemic with Theresa Meadows.”
• CoverMyMeds will exhibit and present at Asembia22 May 2-5 in Las Vegas.
• Dina will exhibit at the NAACOS Spring 2022 Conference April 27-29 in Baltimore.
• PeriGen names Kimberlee McKay, MD a physician consultant.
• Change Healthcare releases InterQual 2022, the latest edition of its flagship clinical decision support solution.

Blog Posts

• Why You Should Move Out from Legacy Systems for Your Practice (AdvancedMD)
• A Look at the Top Clinical Documentation Integrity Trends from 2021 (AGS Health)
• The empathetic care model: How Beth Israel Lahey stays ahead of the curve in a competitive marketplace (Arcadia)
• 6 Ways to Combat Stress in Healthcare (BDO)
• Empowering Organizational Super Users (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Physician opinion: Who should pay for patient-reported outcomes? (Bravado Health)
• Protecting the Healthcare Industry from Advancements in Phishing Scams (ChartLogic)
• New Requirements Increase Cyber Risk Management and Reporting Expectations for Healthcare Entities (Clearwater)
• How Pacific Cataract and Laser Institute Achieved Their Lowest-Ever Rejection Rates (RCxRules)
• The Story of Tobias – Divurgent’s AI Healthcare Chatbot (Divurgent)
• HCC: More Than Just Letters, They Are Key to Coding and Care (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
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Morning Headlines 4/19/22

Clipboard Health, which matches health workers with facilities, raises $80M

Clipboard Health, an online marketplace that matches nurses and other healthcare professionals with staffing opportunities, has raised $80 million over two funding rounds.

Addiction treatment startup shutters amid pandemic troubles

Online substance use disorder treatment clinic Halcyon Health announces via LinkedIn that it will shut down.

Cedars-Sinai Selects Chief Information Officer

Cedars-Sinai Health System (CA) promotes Craig Kwiatkowski, PharmD to SVP of enterprise information services and CIO.

Monday Morning Update 4/18/22

Top News

A JAMA-published study finds that sending warning emails to professional staff who were detected by monitoring technology inappropriately accessing patient EHR information reduced repeat incidents by 95%.

The study involved sending same-day emails to staff who accessed EHR charts outside of approved work purposes, as identified by Protenus technology.

Two percent of those who received the email warning committed unauthorized access a second time, while 40%  of those who were not warned did so repeatedly over several months.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Health systems and the American Hospital Association claim that hospital mergers and acquisitions should be allowed to flourish because they improve the cost and quality of the care delivered, but only 20% of poll respondents agree. Most say the acquired hospitals have higher costs, reduced services, and lower quality.

New poll to your right or here: What media-related activities have you spent at least an hour on after HIMSS22? I haven’t taken even a casual glance at conference-related audio, video, and HIMSS Accelerate postings, so I’m trying to determine whether I’m among a slothful minority.

Webinars

April 22 (Friday) 1 ET. “CMIO 3.0: What’s Next for the CMIO?” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Becket Mahnke, MD, CMIO and pediatric cardiologist, Confluence Health; Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO. The relatively short history of the CMIO role includes Version 1.0 (EHR implementation, Meaningful Use, and regulatory compliance) and Version 2.0 (quality and efficiency). Version 3.0 is at the forefront of predictive analytics, population health initiatives, and optimization of data-driven tools. The presenters will discuss the digital revolution’s impact on CMIO responsibilities; the connection between clinical informatics, analytics, population health and the CMIO; and how CMIO 3.0 will be involved in the adoption of advanced technologies.

April 28 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Undercoded and Underpaid: Making It Easier to Document to Optimize Reimbursement.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, senior director of informatics, IMO; Nicole Douglas, sales engineer, IMO. The presenters will discuss how to simplify precise documentation for clinicians; the effects of imprecise coding on reimbursement; why accurate code capture at the point of care can have positive downstream impact on population health initiatives; and how third-party solutions integrated with the EHR can reduce documentation burdens.

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

Sales

• Revo Health  implements revenue cycle automation from RCxRules.
• Canada’s Saskatchewan government chooses a virtual care platform from Lumeca Health in a three-year, $3.8 million deal.

People

Michael Dunn (SAS) joins Glytec as AVP of hospital sales.

OmniSYS hires Ann Howard, MBA (GoNoodle) as EVP of product management.

HCA Healthcare promotes Jared Mabry, MS to VP of digital patient experience.

Mike Murray, founder and CEO of healthcare cybersecurity company Scope, died April 6 at 46.

Other

In England, the president of the Royal College of GPs – who holds an ownership stake in a telehealth technology vendor – takes heat for saying in a conference that the most positive development of the pandemic was a huge boost in telehealth. The head of a senior citizens’ group disputed the assertion of Professor Dame Clare Gerada that patients prefer visits by phone or computer to those conducted in person.

Aledade CEO and former National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari, MD, MSc describes on Twitter the challenges he encountered as he and his family members fell ill with COVID-19:

• Confirmatory PCR tests are hard to get scheduled, are often available only from for-profit companies at high prices, and require several days to receive results.
• Paxlovid for treatment is widely available, but his father’s academic medical center PCP was unresponsive to messages sent via the patient portal and telephone answering machine.
• Unable to reach the PCP, he booked a virtual visit to get a Paxlovid prescription, but prescribing it requires a recent renal function test.
• He got the prescription, but the instructions were confusing, involving multiple tablets in two colors that had dosage adjustments listed on an add-on sticker.
• He tried to get bebtelovimab for his mother, and despite being in ample supply, PCPs don’t have access to it. He was able to get the monoclonal antibody infusion through the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
• He does not agree with CDC’s recommendation that people can leave isolation five days after without requiring a negative antigen test. He says that it’s widely misunderstood by professionals that while PCR tests can keep showing positive long after the person is no longer infectious, a positive antigen test almost certainly means the person can still spread COVID-19.
• His mother tested positive a week after his father returned home with a negative antigen test, most likely due to his father’s viral shedding.
• Farzad tested positive until Day 15.
• He concludes that even people who have financial means and the knowledge and persistence to work the system may still not receive adequate treatment.

The Onion resurfaces a fine year-ago item.

Sponsor Updates

• Clearsense releases a new Tech Talk video, “Finding Value in Data by Enterprise Application Rationalization.”
• OptimizeRx will sponsor the MedDev E-Marketing Summit June 7-9 in San Diego.
• Olive, an official sponsor of the Boston Marathon, will donate proceeds from its Boston Marathon Fan Fest activities to Boston’s Children’s Hospital.
• Vocera releases a new podcast, “Leading the Evolving Healthcare Workforce – Rose O. Sherman.”
• Well Health names Istvan Kadar-Toth (Play’n Go) engineering director and Hungary site lead.
• West Monroe releases a new report, “The Future of Due Diligence in Private Equity.”

Blog Posts

• How Healthcare Providers Can Raise Awareness About the Advantages of Integrating Clinical Research into Their Practice (PatientBond)
• Initial Steps for Effective Nurse Manager Succession Planning (Symplr)
• PINC AI Data: CMS Data Underestimates Hospital Labor Spending (Premier)
• Creating a new model of care to enhance the patient experience (Talkdesk)
• 5 Considerations for Choosing a Clinical Collaboration Platform (TigerConnect)
• Innovating with Simple Digital Tools for Sustained Patient Engagement (Twistle)
• Nearly 300,000 new breast cancer cases predicted among US women this year (Volpara Health)
• Get Ready for Ascend 2022: What 10 Speakers are Saying (WebPT)
• Four Factors Contributing to the Nursing Shortage – and How Hospitals Can Help (Zynx Health)

Contacts

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

News 4/15/22

Top News

A CB Insights Q1 digital health report finds that:

• Digital health funding dropped 36% over Q4, a much larger decrease that the financial and retail tech sectors. Funding was down across all global regions.
• Mental health tech funding dropped 60%, while telehealth was down 32%.
• Mega-round funding dropped in contributing to the overall funding decrease.
• Just one company launched an IPO in Q1 versus 23 in the previous quarters, and zero SPAC deals occurred, likely because of poor IPO returns in 2021. IPO activity was the lowest in years.
• Six new companies attained billion-dollar “unicorn” valuation in Q1, less than half of the previous quarter’s number.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

I apologize that several companies sent urgent phone and email messages to Lorre on Tuesday after I mentioned that my top-of-page ad banner is available for the first time in years. I didn’t expect that much interest in committing immediately. The fairest way we could think of was to go with the earliest timestamp.

I had plans to offset my slacking off at HIMSS22 by watching some recorded education sessions online, but I’m finding that my indifference has transformed from in-person to virtual. I haven’t looked at anything related to the conference since I left Orlando and most likely won’t. Beyond official education sessions being recorded, it seemed like half of the conference attendees were bantering with the other half for their dopey podcasts and video interviews, so I doubt the limited interest in consuming them is increasing as weeks go by.

Speaking of HIMSS, I checked to see if anything was happening on Accelerate (not much that I saw), but I was surprised to see a newly posted pitch for a paid networking group by HITLAB that costs from $99 to $1,999 per year. I’m not sure the industry needs another option “for individuals in healthcare looking to amplify their brand impact” or how that business might compete with that of HIMSS, and if so, why it is being promoted on a HIMSS platform. I don’t know anything about HITLAB except they used to run an innovation contest with AARP.

Webinars

April 22 (Friday) 1 ET. “CMIO 3.0: What’s Next for the CMIO?” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Becket Mahnke, MD, CMIO and pediatric cardiologist, Confluence Health; Dale Sanders, chief strategy officer, IMO. The relatively short history of the CMIO role includes Version 1.0 (EHR implementation, Meaningful Use, and regulatory compliance) and Version 2.0 (quality and efficiency). Version 3.0 is at the forefront of predictive analytics, population health initiatives, and optimization of data-driven tools. The presenters will discuss the digital revolution’s impact on CMIO responsibilities; the connection between clinical informatics, analytics, population health and the CMIO; and how CMIO 3.0 will be involved in the adoption of advanced technologies.

April 28 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Undercoded and Underpaid: Making It Easier to Document to Optimize Reimbursement.” Sponsor: Intelligent Medical Objects. Presenters: Deepak Pillai, MD, physician informaticist, IMO; June Bronnert, MSHI, RHIA, senior director of informatics, IMO; Nicole Douglas, sales engineer, IMO. The presenters will discuss how to simplify precise documentation for clinicians; the effects of imprecise coding on reimbursement; why accurate code capture at the point of care can have positive downstream impact on population health initiatives; and how third-party solutions integrated with the EHR can reduce documentation burdens.

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Biofourmis will reportedly receive an investment from General Atlantic that will value the company at over $1 billion.

Healthcare compliance and learning platform vendor MedTrainer raises $43 million in a Series B funding round.

Virtual mental health company Iris Telehealth raises $40 million in Series B funding.

Virtual diabetes clinic 9am.health raises $16 million in a Series A funding round.

Drugmaker Pfizer offers $74 million to acquire Brisbane, Australia-based ResApp, whose smartphone app analyzes coughing sounds to diagnose COVID-19 with 92% accuracy. The app is already being used to diagnose asthma and pneumonia during telehealth visits.

Sales

• Fraser Health will upgrade its Meditech Client/Server system to Expanse.
• North York General Hospital chooses Sectra’s radiology and breast imaging modules and VNA.
• Howard Brown Health selects Pivot Point Consulting, a Vaco Company, to provide project management, resourcing, and advisory services for its OCHIN Epic implementation.
• Senior care technology support vendor UpStream Healthcare chooses Innovaccer’s Health Cloud, Data Activation Platform, and application suite.

People

Kevin Dias, MS (TransUnion Healthcare) joins Myndshft as chief customer officer.

Laurance Stuntz (Massachusetts EHealth Institute) joins Xealth as SVP of customer success.

Announcements and Implementations

Northwell Health and startup studio Aegis Ventures launch Ascertain, which will develop and commercialize healthcare AI companies. The company will use $100 million in seed funding to develop product ideas, commercialize scientific developments, and partner with foreign companies to bring their offerings to the US.

A large KLAS Arch Collaborative clinician survey looks at turnover and the EHR experience:

• Nurses are the clinicians who are most likely to leave at more than 20%.
• Burnout, the factor most strongly correlated with planned departures, is most often fueled by chaotic work environment, time required to complete bureaucratic tasks, lack of teamwork, no personal control over workload, and lack of shared values with leadership.
• One-third of clinicians who think their organizations perform poorly on EHR implementation training, and support say they are likely to leave within the next two years.
• Suggested EHR actions include reducing after-hours charting, optimizing nurse workflows to reduce duplicative charting, and offering workflow-specific EHR training,

Government and Politics

HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, JD asks ONC to review possible bias in healthcare AI algorithms and its impact on health equity. 

Other

Mayo Clinic launches an observational study to determine if Apple Watch ECG and symptom reporting, as sent to an Epic dashboard, are good enough to support AI-powered diagnosis of cardiovascular problems.

ED doctors diagnose a 20-year-old man with breathing problems and chest pain with a lung air leak problem that is usually caused by violent coughing or strenuous exertion. His etiology was the latter, with an asterisk – he admitted that he was stricken during a vigorous session of self-gratification. He went home four days later, having learned unknown lessons.

Sponsor Updates

• Aleris-Hamlet in Demark implements Agfa HealthCare’s digital radiography technology.
• EVisit becomes a top-level member of the American Telemedicine Association.
• Conversational AI vendor Hyro will offer its healthcare customers provider search, match, and scheduling functionality from Kyruus.
• Wolters Kluwer Health’s Ovid medical research platform now offers access to the Astute Doctor Communicate Program, a collection of interactive and evidence-based online courses.
• LexisNexis Risk Solutions publishes a new customer success story, “Delivering ROI with De-Identified Medical Claims Data.”

Blog Posts

• A Different Point of View: Healthcare IT’s History of Magical Thinking (Medicomp Systems)
• Training Your Practice with Telehealth (EVisit)
• Why patient experience matters to your revenue cycle (Experian Health)
• News Headlines Suggest Heightened Cybersecurity Awareness, IT Practitioners Know the Reality (Fortified Health Security)
• Digital as a Tool, not a Strategy: A Conversation with Christopher Longhurst (The HCI Group)
• Autism Awareness: A Personal Perspective (Healthwise)
• Four Warning Signs You’ve Outgrown Your HCM System (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• We’re expanding the Imprivata family: Welcome, SecureLink! (Imprivata)
• Data quality is the key to semantic interoperability (Intelligent Medical Objects)
• Redefining Patient Intake for the Digital Era: 3 Reasons to Care (Lumeon)
• Memos from the Medhost CISO: Preparing for Potential Cyberwarfare (Medhost)
• Supporting assault survivors and nurse examiners with electronic assessments (Meditech)
• 5 Crucial Components Your PT EMR Needs (MWTherapy)
• Happy 25th Birthday, Dragon! (Nuance)
• Modern love: Why modernizing the enterprise beats an innovation-only focus (Nordic)

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

News 4/13/22

Top News

Oracle extends its Cerner acquisition deadline from April 13 to May 11, with no other changes of terms to the $28 billion deal.

Oracle says that 11.5% of CERN shares have been tendered as of Friday.

Reader Comments

From HIS-Oldimer: “Re: Bon Secours Mercy Health. Is considering outsourcing infrastructure, Epic, Workday, and other platforms. The project, which is valued at $200 million over three years, could affect 350 to 900 employees. who will be rebadged to the winning firm (the usual suspects – Atos, Deloitte, and HCL) and released 6-12 months after training their offshore replacements. It will close Q3 2022.” Unverified.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor Myndshft of Mesa, AZ. Myndshft’s software-as-a-service automates and simplifies time-consuming healthcare patient access tasks associated with prior authorization, eligibility and benefits verification, and patient financial responsibility, freeing providers and payers to concentrate more fully on patient care. Myndshft works with leading providers, payers, and health information exchanges. A company overview is on YouTube. Thanks to Myndshft for supporting HIStalk.

It’s been a long time since the top-of-page banner spot was available. It gets lots of clicks, so contact Lorre to book it long term.

Webinars

None scheduled soon. Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Laboratory systems vendor CliniSys Group acquires ApolloLIMS.

Senior-focused value-based care company Vytalize Health raises $50 million in a Series B funding round. The company has partnered with 280 primary care practices in 16 states to offer their patients virtual and in-home care enabled by its technology. Vytalize acquired patient communication company MedPilot last year.

Moxi hospital delivery robot developer Diligent Robotics raises $30 million in a Series B funding round. The company will use the investment to expand integration capabilities with hospital EHR and clinical communication software.

Imprivata acquires digital identity management vendor SecureLink.

Sales

• Wayne Health (MI) will implement digital health services from Qure4u that include online scheduling and appointment reminders, telehealth, remote patient monitoring, digital health screenings, and patient-to-provider communications.

People

Divurgent promotes Katherine Isaza to VP of client services.

Holon Solutions names Mike Kaminaka (Innovaccer) chief growth officer.

Krister Mattson (Essentia Health) joins Gundersen Health System (WI) as VP of enterprise analytics and data science.

Mukta Nandwani, MS (Epic) joins Findhelp, the social care connection technology vendor formerly known as Aunt Bertha, as CTO.

In England, Tunstall Healthcare hires Emil Peters (Cerner) as group CEO.

Nick Gauen (Greenway Health) joins Innovaccer as area sales VP.

IllumiCare hires Ralph Keiser (EPSi) as chief strategy officer.

Elsevier Clinical Solutions promotes Maryann Abbruzzo-White, MBA to SVP of global marketing.

Pegasystems hires Kikelomo Belizaire, MD, MPH (Anthem) as chief medical officer and Barry Chaiken, MD, MPH as CTO.

Announcements and Implementations

Alice Hyde Medical Center goes live on Epic as part of the University of Vermont Health Network’s third phase of implementation.

New York-based HIE Healthix implements FHIR-based patient record snapshot technology developed by Hixny, an HIE serving New York and Vermont.

Netsmart will integrate Bamboo Health’s OpenBeds resource with its CareManager population health management software to better enable healthcare organizations to respond to demands for crisis-oriented care. The Missouri Behavioral Health Council will implement the new technology as part of its statewide crisis management program.

A new KLAS vendor-only report finds that the company’s own overall performance score, such as Best in KLAS, is not among the strongest predictors of sales among the factors that KLAS measures. Sales volume predictions are most closely correlated to KLAS categories of likely to recommend, supports integration goals, delivery of new technology, and executive involvement. Factors associated with lower sales are money’s worth and median number of years live, both of which are indicative of products that are late in their life cycle and thus at risk of being replaced. KLAS says that Best in KLAS is mostly used by buyers to create short lists and to identify questions to ask, with few organizations mindlessly buying the top-rated product. An unstated possibility is that customers don’t actually use KLAS to make product decisions and that KLAS reports reflect rather than influence vendor performance.

Government and Politics

A VA-sponsored study of veterans with mental health issues living in rural areas finds that 36% of the 13,000 who received a video-enabled tablet during COVID-19 were less likely to make a suicide-related visit to an ER, and that 22% were less likely to show suicidal behavior.

HHS will collect data from more than 2,000 providers on their medical bill collection practices as part of the federal government’s efforts to crack down on consumer medical debt. The data will be used in future grantmaking and policy decisions.

FDA warns providers that imaging software cannot be used to diagnose stroke patients, only to prioritize cases for a radiologist’s review. FDA also tells providers that the devices may be specific to certain arteries only rather than all intracranial vessels and are unable to rule out the presence of large-vessel occlusion.

FDA clears the atrial fibrillation detection algorithm of Google-owned Fitbit, which assesses heart rhythm while the user is passive or sleeping. The algorithm measures heart rhythm via a blood vessel expansion optical sensor that will soon to be incorporated added to Fitbit devices. The company’s ECG app will remain in place so that users can perform a spot-check rhythm screening and ECG capture, while the new technology supports long-term background assessment.

Other

Allscripts and Cerner achieve top customer rankings for their integrated EHR and RCM technologies, according to Black Book’s latest survey of 1,700 community hospital end users.

Sponsor Updates

• Netsmart showcases the power of a digitized platform and Certified Community Behavioral Health Centers leadership at the National Council for Mental Wellbeing 2022 Conference through April 13 in Washington, DC.
• The Incremental Healthcare Podcast features About Healthcare CMO and co-founder Darin Vercillo, MD.
• KLAS Research highlights Agfa HealthCare as one of the most frequently considered vendors in the Middle East.
• Philips Capsule will exhibit at AONL in San Antonio through April 14.
• CareMesh publishes a new case study, “From the Hospital to the Extended Care Team: Tampa General Hospital Notifies, Transitions, and Connects with Any Healthcare Provider in the Country Digitally.”
• Get-to-Market Health’s Steve Shihadeh interviews investor Lee Shapiro of7wire Ventures in Part 1 of  “How Health Tech Companies can Grow and Thrive in Today’s Challenging Environment.”
• CarePort will present at ACMA National 2022 May 3 in Dallas.
• Change Healthcare publishes the “2021 Laboratory Ordering Index.”
• Optimum Healthcare IT posts a video titled “Optimum CareerPath Testimonial: Ben Mensalis, CHIME’s 2021 Innovator of the Year.”
• CHIME releases a new podcast, “Leader to Leader: Getting to Interoperability with Ajay Kapare and Marc Probst.”
• Clearsense has sponsored the Banner Health Children’s Open golf fundraising tournament.
• Crossings Healthcare Solutions names Marjorie Fiorilli (Ascension) project manager, and Shyla Dubois and Lucien DeCecco account executives.
• Dina joins the Florida Association of ACOs.

Blog Posts

• Improve Practice Outcomes by Outsourcing Your Revenue Cycle (AdvancedMD)
• Proactive External Audits and Other Tips for Avoiding OIG Investigation (AGS Health)
• Developing and Engaging Preferred Post-Acute Networks (Bamboo Health)
• 3 conference takeaways: Activating patient data across the care journey (Bravado Health)
• 2022 CHIME CIO Survey Results Are In (CereCore)
• Easing Clinician Burnout, Cybersecurity Fatigue (Cerner)
• 21st Century Cures Act: Interoperability and Information Blocking and What it Means for Healthcare Organizations (Clearwater)
• Hospital-at-Home Patient Testimony: Joy (Current Health)
• How Data Analytics Can Help Advance Your EHR Strategy (Dimensional Insight)
• Focusing on Public Health: Staying Connected with the Community (EClinicalWorks)

Contacts

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