News 1/10/25

Top News

Transcarent, which offers employee healthcare benefits navigation services, acquires rival Accolade for $621 million in cash.

ACCD shares have lost 78% in the past 12 months and are down 90% since the company’s July 2020 IPO. Transcarent will pay a 110% share premium to take Accolade private.

Analysts suggest that Transcarent got a fire sale deal for Accolade and predict similar M&A in the short term, especially with struggling publicly traded companies that have run out of investor patience.

Reader Comments

From Debaser: “Re: Oracle Health. Have you heard anything about the Cerner Client Connect team being abolished? From what I understand, our client executive was let go last week, along with the entire group. We received no communication about this. Yet more frustrating behavior from a vendor that has been frustrating to deal with for many years now.” Those in the know, can you assist?

From Who Dis?: “Re: Becker’s list of CIOs to know.’ They never list their selection criteria” Becker’s says that their never-ending “to know” C-level lists are based on nominations and editorial research. I take this to mean that youthful staffers just Google, pull biographical information off LinkedIn, and “curate” the results into a click-baity list that is about as meaningful as a first-grader’s gold star. Still, pulling names out of the air  — 133 CIOs are listed on the latest list, which hardly makes it an exclusive club — to bestow awards is a smart, cheap way to turn personal and corporate vanity into free publicity. I’m also puzzled by what “to know” means.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Healthcare AI agent developer Hippocratic AI raises $141 million in Series B financing, valuing the company at $1.6 billion.

Qualified Health, which offers healthcare AI governance infrastructure, raises $30 million in seed funding.

EHR integration technology vendor Red Rover Health raises $4 million in seed funding. CEO John Orosco, who is a former Cerner developer, is also president and CEO of JASE Health, which offers Oracle Health technical consulting.

Warburg Pincus, the private equity owner of specialty EHR vendor Modernizing Medicine, is considering options for the company that could include a sale at a $5 billion valuation.

Population health analytics vendor HealthEC and VirtualHealth, which offers a medical management platform, unite (in an unstated manner) to form Elligint Health. HealthEC Chris Caramanico will be CEO of the new business, so one might assume that HealthEC acquired VirtualHealth. Or perhaps more likely, that the businesses were combined by their shared investor HLM Venture Partners.

Provider data vendor H1 acquires Ribbon Health, which offers a doctor-finding service for consumers.

Caduceus Capital Partners announces Launch, a 12-week pre-seed digital health startup accelerator that will be led by industry long-timer Mitch Morris, MD.

Amwell sells its virtual psychiatric care service to Avel ECare for $21 million in cash. Amwell acquired behavioral digital health startup Aligned Telehealth in November 2019 and then paid $320 million for SilverCloud Health and Conversa Health in July 2021. AMWL shares have lost 71% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $112 million. They are 99% off their all-time high in January 2021, which occurred shortly after the company’s IPO.

Healthcare workforce solutions vendor CSI Companies acquires healthcare IT consulting firm MedSys Group.

In England, the North Somerset Council recommends approval of Epic’s plans for its UK campus, which will include a 3,000-seat auditorium, offices, and a training facility. Epic expects the first office buildings to be completed in 2028, the auditorium in 2033, three more offices in the 2030s, and then project completion in 2041. The 90-acre campus will house up to 2,000 employees.

Sales

• Infusion provider New England Life Care will implement Inovalon’s ScriptMed Infusion cloud-native pharmacy system for specialty and home infusion pharmacies.
• Tidelands Health (NC) and Honor Health (AZ) choose Five9’s contact center as a solution to replace legacy on-premise contact centers
• Duke Health chooses Abridge for ambient documentation in its 150 clinics.

People

Industry long-timer Tim Nash (Aidoc) joins Linus Health as SVP of healthcare.

ClearPoint Health hires Tawfiq Bajjali, MS (Lyric) as CTO / chief product officer and president of its newly launched ClearQuote benefits proposal system vendor.

Scott Nourse (Change Healthcare) joins Accuity as regional VP of sales.

Announcements and Implementations

South Central Regional Medical Center (MS) will implement Epic, with assistance from HCTec and replacing Oracle Health.  

Other

The mayor of a remote small town in Italy orders residents to avoid accidents, travel, and sports activities, hoping to raise awareness that its health center is often closed and doctors are available only during weekday business hours.

Sponsor Updates

• Waystar will present at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference January 13 in San Francisco.
• SmarterDX names Jonathan Wald, MD (InterSystems) solutions architect.
• Black Book Research publishes a free 60-page technical guide to practice management technology.
• Wolters Kluwer Health announces that its Lippincott Ready for NCLEX-RN nursing education resource now features AI-driven remediation with personalized, multi-modal improvement plans.
• Ellkay publishes a new customer success story featuring Lehigh Valley Health Network.
• Findhelp welcomes new customers Essen Health Care (NY), TriWest Healthcare Alliance (AZ), and Rainbow Housing Assistance (AZ).
• Healthmonix announces that MIPSpro and APP Impact have been approved by CMS as a Qualified Registry for the 2025 performance year under the Quality Payment Program.
• Impact Advisors publishes “Building a ‘Smart Hospital’ from the Ground Up.”
• Medicomp Systems releases a new “Tell Me Where IT Hurts” podcast featuring Micky Tripathi, PhD, MPP, Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy.
• Lewis County Health System (NY) implements Meditech Expanse’s Continuing Care Medication Management functionality.

Blog Posts

• Best Practices in Denial Management (FinThrive)
• EHR Implementation is a Big Lift Without Automation (CereCore)
• Ransomware attacks the California Health System with claims of 17 million patient records stolen (AdvancedMD)
• Forget 2025 — Here Are My Top Predictions for CX in 2030 (Five9)
• Beyond the Dose: Past, Present and Future of Specialty Pharmacy (Inovalon)
• Supporting HHS’ Renewed Focus on Cybersecurity in Healthcare (Fortified Health Security)
• Taking a coordinated approach to strengthen rural healthcare systems against cyberattacks (Meditech)
• Five Key Strategies to Protect Healthcare Organizations from Cyberattacks (Med Tech Solutions)
• Why Investing in Internal Auditing Tools is Key to Reducing Coding Risks and Financial Losses (MRO)

Contacts

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

News 1/8/25

Top News

Clinical surveillance and alarm management company AirStrip Technologies acquires Decisio Health, which specializes in clinical decision support and remote patient monitoring software.

Former AirStrip CEO Alan Portela launched Depth Health, which is focused on AI-enabled patient care and traffic flow optimization, last August.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Sanford Health (SD) finalizes its acquisition of Marshfield Clinic Health System (WI), which was announced in July. Hospital leaders expect that pooled resources and access to Sanford’s $350 million virtual care center will enable the combined systems to offer more virtual care services to their rural patient populations. The organizations will invest up to $500 million to transition Marshfield from Cerner to Epic.

CalmWave announces $5.25 million in new funding. The company has developed AI software to help ICUs manage alarm fatigue.

Evidence generation platform vendor Highlander Health acquires Target RWE, which generates real-world datasets. Highlander Health was launched in September 2024 by oncologists Amy Abernethy, MD, PhD and Brad Hirsch, MD.

Teleradiology services company Onrad acquires the 80-radiologist Direct Radiology practice from Philips, making it the largest independent teleradiology vendor in the US.

Health tech venture capital firm Providence Ventures spins off from Providence to form Allumia Ventures.

Sales

• The Illinois Public Health Institute will use 4medica’s data-sharing technology to power its new Chicago Regionwide Community Information Exchange.
• AdventHealth will implement hospital-at-home software and clinical care services from Biofourmis as a part of its new remote patient monitoring program for patients in Central Florida.
• USA Health (AL) selects managed services from Healthcare IT Leaders.

People

Direct Recruiters promotes Stephen Benson and Bradley Morrison to partners.

US Air Force veteran Eric Gardner, MBA (Flagship Health) joins Leidos QTC Health Services as VP of operations. Gardner’s 20-year career in the Air Force included stints as a Medical Service Corps officer and as the CFO and VP of the Air Force Medical Operations Agency.

Topcon Healthcare names Jacques Gilbert (Nuance) chief strategy and business development officer and Christian Odaker, PhD (Smart Reporting) CTO.

Susan Grant, DNP, RN (Wellstar Health System) joins Symplr as chief clinical officer.

Impact Advisors names Wes Arnett (Compassus) as president of its revenue cycle managed services business.

Parkland Health promotes Brett Moran, MD to SVP / chief health officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Six health systems in Southeastern Ontario form the Lumeo Regional Health Information System to implement Oracle Health throughout their enterprises.

A study finds that nearly two-thirds of patients who reviewed a standard prostate pathology report were unable to determine whether they had cancer, whereas nearly all of those who received a plain-language version could easily understand their diagnosis.

Uvalde Memorial Hospital (TX) goes live on Meditech Expanse.

Analysis finds that the claims-based undiagnosed dementia algorithm of Linus Health-owned Together Senior Health can accurately identify high-risk patients.

A review by TrustCommerce, a Sphere Company finds that 96% of surveyed providers accept patient credit cards, 69% offer flexible payment plans, and four of five identify expanding payment options as a key focus area.

Other

People in every other developed nation will struggle to grasp this. A White House rule will ban lenders from factoring medical debt into loan approval decisions (affecting 15 million people owing $49 billion) and prohibit repossessing medical devices, wheelchairs, and prosthetic limbs from those who can’t pay (imagine that repo job). While it protects credit scores from billing errors that are awaiting resolution, a health justice group’s take highlights the wagging tail of medical debt while ignoring the dog: our wildly overpriced healthcare “system” that this change does little to fix:

Nobody, no matter where we live or how much money we have, should be forced to make the impossible choice between getting essential care and going into debt. And they should not have to worry that medical debt could prevent them from buying a house or securing an auto loan because of its impact on their credit.

The Lown Institute names the 2024 winners of its Shkreli Awards, which are named after the notorious price-gouging, ex-con pharma bro CEO Martin Shkreli:

1. Steward Health Care CEO Ralph de la Torre, MD: Collected $250 million in private equity profits while the hospitals under his management declared bankruptcy.
2. UnitedHealth: Boosted Medicare Advantage profits through rushed patient visits and aggressive coding practices.
3. Amgen: Ignored research showing that its cancer drug was effective at lower, safer doses that would have reduced its revenue by $180,000 per patient annually.
4. An oncologist at St. Peter’s Hospital (MT): Administered unnecessary cancer treatments and altered patients’ end-of-life plans without their consent, becoming the hospital’s top earner.
5. Private equity-owned New Mexico Hospital: Denied care to cancer patients, even those with insurance, unless they made upfront payments.
6. Pretty in Pink Boutique: Operated a fraudulent medical supply scheme, one of seven suppliers that billed Medicare $2 billion for questionable urinary catheters in 2023.
7. Cigna: Refused to cover a $98,000 air ambulance bill for an infant who was in respiratory distress, labeling the transport as medically unnecessary.
8. Zynex Medical: Profited from shipping unordered batteries and electronic pads to users of its nerve stimulation devices, with these supplies accounting for 70% of the company’s revenue.
9. Dentist who perform dubious tongue-tie surgeries on babies: One supplier of equipment for the surgeries hosted a “Tequila and Tongue Ties” dentist training session that was followed by shots and margaritas.
10. University of North Texas Health Science Center: Sold body parts from unclaimed bodies to for-profit companies after making minimal efforts to locate relatives.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare IT Leaders partners with Locums Choice and Christmas Tree Santas for its annual Christmas tree giveaway benefiting the Children’s Development Academy.
• CereCore releases a new podcast, “Automating EHR Implementations: A Must-Have for Managing Healthcare Informatics.”
• Uvalde Memorial Hospital (TX) upgrades its Meditech system to Meditech Expanse.
• Inovalon completes its three-year transformation of its analytics platform to the cloud.
• Capital Rx releases a new episode of “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast titled “High-Cost Orphan Drugs, Securing Claims Data, and More, with Dr. Eric Bricker.”
• Censinet releases a new episode of its “Risk Never Sleeps. podcast, “From Stage Fright to Spotlight: Building Presentation Skills That Inspire, with Anthony Lee, partner at the Heroic Voice Academy.”
• DrFirst publishes a new guide, “Unlocking Faster Access to Specialty Medications With Prior Authorization Automation.”

Blog Posts

• Introducing Pharmafusion’s Patient Wellness Dashboard – The S’MORE of AdvancedMD data! (AdvancedMD)
• Denial Remediation: The Road to Revenue Recovery (AGS Health)
• Streamline Clinical Workflows with Meditech Expanse 2.2: A How-to Guide (CereCore)
• Maximizing Revenue Through Efficient A/R Management: Best Practices for Hospitals (FinThrive)
• Use Cases for Automated Messaging in Healthcare (Artera)
• What to Expect in Healthcare in 2025 (Dimensional Insight)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 1/6/25

Top News

The Wall Street Journal reports that UnitedHealth Group has significantly increased its Medicare Advantage payments by electronically prompting its employed and affiliated doctors to add new diagnoses.

Patient sickness scores rose by 55% among those patients who switched from traditional Medicare to UHG’s Medicare Advantage plan, boosting UnitedHealth’s revenue by $5 billion over three years.

UnitedHealth disputes the findings, asserting that it complies with Medicare payment rules and that its patients are sicker. Doctors have pointed out that the company’s motivations are likely non-clinical since it does not suggest additional diagnoses for traditional Medicare patients, as doing so would raise its costs without increasing revenue.

A previous WSJ analysis revealed that Medicare Advantage insurers collected $50 billion over three years by adding diagnoses for which doctors performed no treatment. One example is a bruising condition that generated an additional $1,900 per year per patient, which was diagnosed 28 times more often in MA patients versus traditional Medicare, with one doctor saying that the diagnosis is pointless since all she can do is tell affected patients, “Wear some sunscreen. Maybe stop bumping the wall.”

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Two-thirds of poll respondents think that health AI has reached Gartner’s Peak of Inflated Expectations, which is defined as generating a lot of excitement and widespread adoption attempts that fizzle when the technology’s limitations are discovered.

New poll to your right or here: Which of your local care providers has earned your most positive brand perception? I ran this poll a few years ago and a hospital / health system was the winner, but that outcome may have been influenced by respondent demographics.

I’ve played so much R.E.M. during the slow last week that I created a playlist of similar bands from all eras (mostly old by definition) that play alternative, guitar-heavy, melodic indy pop. My research turned up these and a bunch of others, all of which I’m enjoying: The Lemonheads, Bob Mould (I notice that the video includes former Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster), The Connells, Michael Penn, Matthew Sweet, Teenage Fanclub, The Posies (I recognized co-founder Ken Stringfellow because he played keyboards and bass on several R.E.M. tours), Urge Overkill, and The Auteurs. I pasted the list into ChatGPT and asked for similar bands, which gave me another few dozen to investigate.

Pundits are cranking out their annual attention-seeking lists of safely vague predictions for 2025, which hopefully will prove to be more accurate than the ones from previous years. Here is my one and only: the new administration and its replacement of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, JD will allow private equity firms and big companies (including big health systems and their vendors) more leeway in acquiring, merging, and engaging in potentially anti-consumer behavior. Beyond that, FTC has been directly involved in the Health Breach Notification Rule, the proposed (but failed so far) banning of non-compete clauses, the requirement to disclose pay-for-play social media product reviews, the distribution of potentially biased AI algorithms, the use of consumer data by health app vendors, drug company and pharmacy benefits manager pricing, healthcare price transparency, and health-related advertising.

If I was forced to make a second prediction, it would be that major health systems will turn over some of their specialty-specific chronic care management and care coordination functions to AI tools, which will test FDA’s willingness to give its OK to such systems under the new administration. The good news is that (a) even mediocre AI is probably better than the best current efforts; (b) those new systems don’t need to connect to external data that could cause hallucinations; and (c) the scope of this work focuses on specific conditions and clinical rules. The unknown is the extent of payer willingness to give hospitals money for performing those functions, whether AI or manual.

OK, one more. My aspirational #3 prediction is that doctors will finally reassert their autonomy and push back against their undervalued role as compliant rubber stampers of patient-unfriendly corporate decisions that are imposed by insurers, health systems, and private equity owners. However, I doubt that disunited physicians can effectively challenge the status quo, as they fail to recognize the collective power they could wield if they overcame divisions based on specialty, employer type, geography, and fears of being displaced by non-physician clinical providers. The lack of cohesive leadership compounds the issue, particularly given that so few practicing physicians—especially younger ones—are AMA members and don’t agree with its business-friendly, revenue-generating positions, which leaves basically no other group or individual to lead the charge.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Censinet. The company is the leading collaborative risk network for healthcare organizations and vendors. Censinet RiskOps is the first and only cloud-based integrated platform that consolidates enterprise risk management and operations capabilities across critical business areas: clinical, regulatory, cybersecurity, research, and supply chain. This includes the company’s foundational success with third-party risk management (TPRM) for healthcare and transforms enterprise risk by making data and insight actionable. Thanks to Censinet for supporting HIStalk.

I found this video that describes how Northwell Health converted its TPRM programs and processes to Censinet.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Siemens questions whether its 75% ownership of Siemens Healthineers justifies its $47 billion investment, advising investors that it will make a decision about its involvement by the end of the year.

A Financial Times opinion piece says that investors aren’t realizing a substantial return on the $100 billion they put into digital health companies from 2020 to 2022. Factors include stiff competition, low consumer switching costs, high user acquisition costs, and the introduction of competing products from big tech companies such as Amazon.

Veradigm extends the six-month contract of interim CFO Leland Westerfield for the second time. The company fired its CEO and CFO in December 2023 for failing to comply with financial reporting. Original interim CEO Shih-Yin Ho, MD, MBA stepped down in May 2024 and was replaced as interim by Tom Langan, who remains in that role. MDRX was delisted from the Nasdaq in February 2024 for not filing its annual report for 2022.

People

ChristianaCare hires Rob Hartmann, MBA (Tegria) as VP of EHR transformation, where he will oversee its Oracle Health to Epic project.

Justin Mooneyhan, MBA (Amsurg) joins IVX Health as VP of IT / CISO.

Charlie Gibbs, who founded early hospital IT software companies Gibbs Computer Systems and First Coast Systems, died December 30. He was 84. Long-timers may want to search Vince Ciotti’s HIS-tory for his name to get a fuller picture of Jacksonville-based FCS.

Announcements and Implementations

A Department of Defense crowdsourced test identifies 800 vulnerabilities in using AI to summarize clinical notes and for powering a consumer medical chatbot. DoD will use its findings to evaluate future vendors and to develops its best practices and policies. The study was conducted by the non-profit Humane Intelligence, which gives AI model evaluators a platform for auditing and performing impact assessments. Co-founder and CEO Rumman Chowdhury PhD, MS has done similar work at Twitter and Parity, the latter of which she founded.

Black Book reports its top EHRs for specialty practices for 2025, also naming as top innovation leaders ModMed, NextGen Healthcare, Netsmart, ClinicMind, Epic, and RXNT.

DirectTrust announces updated versions of its 26 accreditation programs that took effect on January 1.

Sponsor Updates

• HCTec offers holiday support to an elderly care facility in Hohenwald, TN, and Operation Stand Down Tennessee.
• First Databank will present at the ASAP 2025 Annual Conference January 16 at Amelia Island, FL.
• Goliath Technologies publishes a new client success story, “Maimonides Medical Center Quickly Troubleshoots ‘Citrix is Slow’ Complaints.”
• Black Book Research highlights Australia’s digital health transformation in its “2025 Global Healthcare IT Rankings” report.
• QGenda publishes a new case study, “Children’s Nebraska Improves Clinical Capacity Management.”
• The “DGTL Voices with Ed Marx” pPodcast features SmartSense by Digi President Guy Yehiav, “SmartSense Disruption in Healthcare & Simple Hacks to Become a CEO.”
• TruBridge names Merideth Wilson (Experian) financial health general manager.
• Clearwater releases a new “Clear Perspective” podcast, “The Truth About EDR Killers.”
• The Philadelphia Business Journal recognizes Crossings Healthcare Solutions parent company UHS CEO Marc Miller as one of the region’s Most Admired CEOs.
• Direct Recruiters recognizes its Healthcare IT Team as a top producing team in 2024.
• EClinicalWorks announces that Indiana University Student Health Center has integrated Sunoh.ai’s AI-powered ambient listening solution with its EHR.
• Ellkay supports the Pajama Program, an initiative providing children with new pajamas and storybooks to foster a comforting and safe bedtime routine.

Blog Posts

• Transforming primary care: Inside the Making Care Primary (MCP) model (Healthmonix)
• CMS 2026 Proposed Rules: Key Takeaways for Quality and Stars Managers (Inovalon)
• Meditech Expanse: It’s Electric (Meditech)
• MRO is Advancing Quality Control Solutions for Release of Information (MRO)
• 2025 Healthcare Forecast: The Convergence of Behavioral Health, Technology, and Measurable Impact (NeuroFlow)
• 5 Ways AI is Revolutionizing IDD Care (Netsmart)
• The Power of More Data: AI’s Wheelhouse (Rhapsody)
• The Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Right QHIN: 5 Questions Every Healthcare Leader Should Ask Themselves (Surescripts)
• Key Insights From 2024: Our Experts Share Their Best Takeaways From Leading Healthcare Events (Tegria)
• Nearly 70% of the Private Practices We Surveyed Lack a Comprehensive Patient Engagement Strategy (AdvancedMD)
• Current Procedural Terminology® 2025: Key Changes and Updates (AGS Health)
• Future-forward healthcare data platform considerations (Arcadia)
• RCM Strategies: Shift Left to Prevent Denials Before They Start (Availity)
• Top 5 Ways IT and Clinical Leaders Can Collaborate on Virtual Care Programs (AvaSure)
• Pharmacy Benefits 101: The Importance of the Network (Capital Rx)
• Predictions and Prerequisites for Healthcare IT in 2025 and After (CereCore)
• How Electronic Prior Authorizations Cut Through Complexities of Specialty Medication Access (DrFirst)
• 2025 – The Year of AI Validation and Human-Centered Innovation (Medicomp Systems)
• The Unbeatable eClinicalWorks Experience (EClinicalWorks)
• Gundersen Health System Makes 15,000 Referrals in 3 Years (Findhelp)
• Why is Revenue Cycle Management Important in Healthcare? (FinThrive)
• Forget 2025 — Here Are My Top Predictions for CX in 2030 (Five9)
• A Legacy of Connection: Transforming Healthcare Through Innovation and Care (Fortified Health Security)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/30/24

Top News

HHS OCR issues a proposed update to the HIPAA security rule, which hasn’t been changed since 2013, to modernize the required cybersecurity practices of covered entities and their business associates.

Reader Comments

From Opus Two: “Re: VA salary cuts. A friend who is a VISN executive is about to finish reclassification of 4,000 lower-level, non-clinical jobs, which will result in sharp pay cuts. The reclassification was recommended in 2012, but the VA was able to avoid cuts by arguing that the jobs are critical. The VA also plans to reduce its workforce by 10,000 FTEs, primarily within medical facilities, during FY2025.” The American Federal of Government Employees union is pressing the VA to stop considering all position downgrades, arguing that they will hurt hiring and retention. Like all federal agencies, the VA claims that that it is understaffed (at 471,000 employees) and disputes the characterization that it never fires underperformers.

From E: “Re: Philips. More ‘silent layoffs’ that avoid drawing attention to their stock dropping.” The company has reportedly laid off around 10,000 employees in the past year or two. PHG shares are up 10% over the past 12 months, but are off nearly 60% from their five-year high in April 2021.

From Ken: “Re: VA EHRM. Is nobody noticing that the plan is now to have no implementations in 2025?” The VA says that its next Oracle Health go-live has been moved back again, this time until mid-2026. Its most recent of its six live VA Medical Centers was in March 2024, although that’s with an asterisk because it was at Lovell FHCC, which is jointly operated between the VA and DoD. Oracle Health is live in three of the VA’s 18 VISNs (Veterans Integrated Services Networks), with the planned Michigan go-lives in 2026 adding no new ones since VISN 10 is already live in Columbus, OH. The VA originally said that all of its deployments would be completed by 2028, 10 years after it signed a $10 billion no-bid contract with Cerner. A VA-commissioned  independent life cycle cost estimate in 2022 said the project will cost more than $50 billion.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It’s Christmas or nothing for the most important winter holiday, most poll respondents said.

New poll to your right or here: Where does today’s health AI fall on the Gartner Hype Cycle?

I usually throw out an invitation for companies whose marketing budget resets on January 1 to contact me about becoming an HIStalk sponsor, which unlike conference booths or pay-for-play video interviews, offers benefits for a full year. I’ll even add a spiff or two for startups (the definition of which is beneficially vague to such prospects) or former sponsors who come back.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Telemedicine provider Avel ECare acquires Hospital Pharmacy Management, which offers remote pharmacy order verification and hospital pharmacy management.

William Febbo, CEO of drug company marketing technology firm OptimizeRx, leaves the company

Sales

• Duly Health will implement Pro Medicus’s Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform in a 10-year, $19 million contract.

People

Workforce management technology vendor Hallmark hires Michelle Lichte (Nordic Consulting Partners) as chief client success officer and promotes Brandon Chamberland to chief strategy and partnerships officer.

Haffty Consulting promotes Mark Valutkevich to VP of client services.

Announcements and Implementations

Critics warn that Health New Zealand’s planned layoff of 1,100 digital and data jobs will impact patient care and increase the risk of cyberattacks. Health NZ said two weeks ago that it will cancel or defer 136 IT projects in hopes of saving $62 million following government budget cuts. It had previously diverted funds from its widely touted Patient Summary data sharing system to stabilize its aging, unstable payroll system.

A new study finds that telehealth visits are not reliable for diagnosis tonsillitis due to the lack of ability to remotely assess all of the CENTOR diagnostic criteria (fever, tonsillar exudates, lymph node tenderness, and absence of cough) to determine if antibiotics are indicated.

Other

It’s probably more true now than ever, due to declining reading comprehension and pervasive clickbait, that the headline writer is more influential than the reporter. Shame on NPR for making TL;DR types think that Y2K was an IT cry-wolf overreaction or meme-to-be, while the actual story acknowledges that January 1, 2000 was uneventful only because an army of programmers — many of them gray-haired COBOL coders who were brought out of retirement — reviewed and fixed billions of lines of legacy code by the hard-stop due date.

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/23/24

Top News

Ascension tells Maine’s attorney general that its May 8 ransomware attack exposed the medical and insurance information of 5.6 million people.

The 140-hospital system’s EHR was down for more than a month.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Not making the list above from last week’s poll – entering health tracking information, viewing OpenNotes, and using an app that a clinician prescribed or recommended.

New poll to your right or here: Which winter holiday is most important to you?

A Reader’s Notes from the Joint Annual Meeting of The Sequoia Project and Carequality

The meeting was held December 11-12 in Nashville.

Micky Tripathi

• Nothing groundbreaking or new. Mostly rehashed stats and updates that have been shared in other forums.
• HTI-2 final rule published that morning is a very lightweight set of changes related to TEFCA, mainly codifying terminology and procedures.
• Picture shows some TEFCA stats. Unclear why the number of participants per category doesn’t quite add up to the total of 10k.

Panel discussion on what qualifies as treatment

• Lively conversation and one of the most refreshing panels I’ve seen at a conference, if only because everyone didn’t get up there and agree with one another and pat each other on the back.
• Unstated but obvious was that the motivation for the session was the Epic-Particle dispute.
• Panel went through a few nuanced scenarios and debated whether they fit the definition of treatment (specifically, HIPAA treatment…TEFCA treatment has a slightly narrower definition). Example: provider group is part of an ACO and a physician wishes to query an HIE for records on their attributed patients to identify gaps in care, so that the provider can focus on closing those gaps. Deven McGraw (former HHS OCR Deputy Director for Health Information Privacy): once you start asking for patient information in bulk, you shift from a Treatment purpose to an Operations purpose. This led to an interesting debate on whether sending a bulk transaction (e.g., bulk FHIR) would count as Operations but writing a script to send many individual transactions patient-by-patient would count as Treatment.
• Tripathi: key thing to remember is that under HIPAA, the data responder has the prerogative to identify whether the request is for treatment or not.

Interoperability for public health

• Electronic case reporting was still a proof of concept by the end of 2019 but suddenly had to go big bang and scale due to COVID.
• Michelle Meigs (APHL): Public health has a business problem. The funding is piecemeal and focused on specific cases or reportable diseases, so it is challenging to build a comprehensive technology and interoperability framework. The fragmentation doesn’t help. Because public health is mostly handled at the state and local levels, there are 50+ sets of rules to follow.
• Craig Behm (CRISP HIE): data usability and alert fatigue are major issues for providers. They piloted public health data exchange through TEFCA with three provider organizations, .but they didn’t get any responses to their TEFCA queries in the first few months.

The theme of trust came up several times and was the focus of multiple sessions. That said, it would be more accurate to say “verification” as the main changes seem to be HIEs/QHINs introducing tighter guardrails and stronger vetting processes to prevent misuse of data.

Panel on the Carequality dispute process

• Purposefully avoided commenting on the Epic-Particle dispute, though everyone knows that’s the impetus for the discussion.
• Dispute process intentionally errs on the side of “minimum necessary” when it comes to sharing information with the public, to prevent sharing any sensitive info.
• Panelists (members of the Carequality board and steering committee) generally felt the timelines defined for the formal dispute are OK, given the time needed for the responding party to build a defense against the complaint. It also takes time to establish a dispute panel who will hear the arguments from both sides. These are all volunteers at the end of the day. Goal is that formal disputes are rarely or never needed since parties should work things out informally first.

Fireside chat with Daniel Polk (Special Agent, FBI Atlanta field office) on cybersecurity

1. Broke down the various types of malicious actors (picture attached).
2. Discussed common infiltration and deception tactics.
3. 2FA is critically important to good security, but it can be defeated. A common tactic today: hackers send you a phishing email with a malicious link. You click on it and are taken to a fake login page where you enter your username and password. Hacker receives a real-time notification and logins into the real account with your credentials. This triggers a 2FA code or push notification, which you enter or acknowledge, allowing the hacker to access your real account.
4. As soon as you believe you are the victim of ransomware, reach out to the FBI. They generally don’t publicize this, but they may have a decryption key that will work in your situation.
5. Polk highlighted the fines OCR has been leveraging on organizations who do not have good cyber hygiene and who have suffered from unauthorized disclosures.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Commure acquires Memora Health, which offers a care navigation platform.

Norway-based healthcare software vendor Omda AS acquires Aweria, which offers a best-of-breed emergency department information system.

Streamline Health reports Q3 results: revenue down 28%, EPS –$0.61 versus –$3.15. STRM shares have lost 32% in the past 12 months, valuing the company at $15 million. CEO Ben Stillwel says that the company may need to seek additional non-equity capital resources to fuel growth and that he “needs to live and breathe sales.”

People

Mouneer Odeh, MA (Inova Health System) joins Cedars-Sinai as VP/chief data and AI officer.

Haffty Consulting promotes Erin Mueller to VP of client services.

Announcements and Implementations

The UT Health San Antonio School of Dentistry combines the dental and medical health records of its patients by integrating Epic’s Wisdom dental module with its EHR. Patients can view all their records and make appointments through MyChart. Epic replaces Exan’s AxiUm dental system for academic practices, which is owned by Henry Schein One.

Government and Politics

Epic asks a federal district court to dismiss the antitrust lawsuit that was brought against the company by Particle Health in September. Epic says the lawsuit fails to prove that Epic engaged in anticompetitive behavior. It adds that Particle filed the suit as revenge for Epic’s revelation that some of Particle’s customers were obtaining confidential patient information under false pretenses.

The Department of Justice sues CVS Pharmacy for knowingly filling prescriptions for controlled substances that lacked legitimate medical purpose or were invalid, many of them generated by known pill mill doctors. DOJ says CVS ignored internal data and information from its own pharmacists to keep filling the prescriptions so the company could meet corporate performance metrics that triggered field manager bonuses. CVS is also accused of preventing its pharmacists from warning each other about certain prescribers and setting pharmacist staffing levels so low that they couldn’t perform due diligence or even pay attention to computer safety alerts. One pain management doctor in Hawaii wrote prescriptions for specific patients, then picked them up himself and charged them to his own credit card, generating 60% of the prescriptions that the CVS store filled.

The VA will restart restart Oracle Health go-lives in mid-2026 at its Michigan facilities in Ann Arbor, Battle Creek, Detroit, and Saginaw.

In Canada, a former employee of Alberta Health Services is fined $12,000 for falsifying the COVID-19 records of 200 people in Meditech, which sends data to the province’s immunization system.

US healthcare spending rose 7.5% in 2023 to nearly $5 trillion, with prescription drugs showing the biggest increase due to GLP-1 drugs. Hospital services consumed $1.5 trillion of the total, rising by 10.4% in their highest growth in three decades. The US finished in near last place among 38 OECD countries in infant mortality and life expectancy despite spending four times the average dollars per capita.

Other

Doctors in Scotland voice concerns over the bankruptcy filing of In Practice Systems Limited, the provider of the Vision system widely used by the country’s GP practices, citing potential risks to system availability and access to medical records. The company is owned by Cegedim Group. NHS National Services Scotland has set up an incident response team.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare IT Leaders partners with Jackson Health System’s IT group to bring holiday cheer to children.
• CTG announces the retirement of long-time manager and director Christine Blanchard.
• Indiana University Student Health Center successfully uses AI-powered ambient listening solution Sunoh.ai, integrated with eClinicalWorks, to streamline clinical documentation.
• Nordic names Amy Ferro marketing content manager.
• Black Book Research releases the results of a survey highlighting how nations are leveraging advanced digital solutions to revolutionize population health management and address critical healthcare challenges.
• Nordic releases a new episode of its “Designing for Health” podcast, “Interview with Brian Urban.”
• RLDatix releases a new episode of “The Connection” podcast, “Technology + Humanity in Healthcare: Insights from Dan Michelson, CEO of RLDatix.”
• Sectra will provide its platform for medical education, Sectra Education Portal, to the University of Hartford in Connecticut.
• SnapCare co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Jeff Richards receives the 2024 Georgia Titan 100 award.

Blog Posts

• From Compliance to Care: The Expanding Role of EVV in Personal Care Services (Netsmart)
• 3 top benefits of AI for the IT support desk (Nordic)
• CHIME’s Fall Forum: Shaping the Future of Healthcare with AI and Data Modernization (Prominence Advisors)
• Streamline Clinical Workflows with MEDITECH Expanse 2.2: A How-to Guide (CereCore)
• From Complexity to Simplicity: One Clinic’s Journey to Corepoint (Rhapsody Health)
• How to use QR codes in patient rooms (Sonifi Health)
• On the Same (Sheet of Music) in Healthcare (Surescripts)
• Key Insights From the 10th Annual NGPX Healthcare Experience Conference (Tegria)
• RSNA 2024: Visage’s Top Five (Visage Imaging)
• Year in review: 6 key milestones that advanced Waystar’s mission in 2024 (Waystar)

Contacts

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

News 12/20/24

Top News

Alphabet’s Verily will reportedly shift focus in 2025 to offering AI tools, data aggregation, and privacy systems for healthcare providers and startups.

The company plans to relaunch Lightpath, its diabetes and hypertension app with AI and human coaching, in 2026.

The most profitable business of Verily, which is often criticized for its unfocused life sciences projects, is Granular Insurance, which helps employers cut healthcare costs.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Long-time HIStalk Founding Sponsor Healthwise (they first signed up in 2011) is leaving the fold due to its acquisition by WebMD. That leaves a rare opening in the two ad positions at the top of the page, so if your company would like to join Medicomp up there in the HIStalk stratosphere, contact Lorre. Could be a new sponsor, could be an upgrading one … we usually go with whoever commits first.

Ms. G from Texas sent over some photos of her fourth graders using the headphones that were provided by a reader’s donation and matching funds from my Anonymous Vendor Executive. She says, “These students are more engaged and confident, showing improved focus during lessons and taking more ownership of their learning. The headphones have also encouraged collaboration, as students can now listen to different parts of a lesson at their own pace while sharing insights with classmates.”

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Finland-based smart ring maker Oura raises $200 million in a Series D funding round that values the company at $5 billion, with glucose biosensing company Dexcom participating in the round.

Confido Health raises $3 million in funding to continue rollout of its no-code AI agents for appointment management, insurance verification, and care coordination in specialty practices. It provides the “AI workers” to customers at an hourly rate.

Sales

• Safety net, 150-bed Nashville General Hospital will implement Oracle Health CommunityWorks.
• Johns Hopkins Medicine will implement Abridge’s ambient documentation solution across its six hospitals and 40 care centers.
• Arisa Health selects Netsmart’s CareFabric.

People

Symplr names Steve Filler, MHA, MPH (Boston Consulting Group) as COO and Matt Grill (UKG) as chief delivery officer.

Advantus Health Partners hires Rick Roycroft, MBA (Huron Consulting Group) as chief commercial officer.

Amwell adds COO to the role of CFO Mark Hirschornm who joined the company in October 2024.

Announcements and Implementations

Doc.com will expand its AI-powered healthcare platform to provide initially free hospital tools for telemedicine and online pharmacy services. The company received $300 million in equity financing a year ago. The Mexico-based company has faced skepticism for making questionable product claims and its active involvement in the cryptocurrency market.

Agilon Health will integrate Navina’s AI engine with its value-based care platform.

Mesh Health Solutions and KONZA will partner to stream the prior authorization process.

Government and Politics

The VA will resume its implementation of Oracle Health this fiscal year after placing rollouts on hold in April 2023 due to problems in its first five live sites. The VA says that system crashes and performance issues dropped 50% after its latest round of software updates, also noting that it discovered that many users were logging in via VPN even while connected to its internal network, which caused performance lags. VA officials downplayed the possible impact of having the new administration’s political appointees taking VA leadership roles.

Sponsor Updates

• Five hundred Meditech employees donate a variety of items to support 32 households during the company’s annual Holiday Giving initiative.
• Black Book Market Research publishes its survey findings on population health applications in emerging markets.
• Wolters Kluwer’s new “25 for ‘25” report predicts key healthcare technology trends driving momentum amid dramatic change in 2025.
• EClinicalWorks announces that customer Fairfax Medical Facilities (OK) was recognized by HRSA with a ‘Health Center Quality Leader – Gold’ badge for its 2023 Uniform Data System submissions.
• RLDatix supports The Leapfrog Group’s Proposed Changes to the 2025 Leapfrog Hospital Survey, specifically revisions calling for greater specification in the collection of data related to ICU staffing and the nursing workforce.
• Black Book Research identifies top vendors of FHIR-based prior authorization interoperability solutions, including Availity, Redox, and Rhapsody.
• First Databank will present at the American Society for Automation in Pharmacy 2025 Annual Conference January 16 in Amelia Island, FL.
• Findhelp welcomes the Appalachian Children Coalition, Community Foundation of Elkhart County, Hospital Sisters Health System, and Nassau County Department of Health to its network.
• CTG announces the retirement of Managing Director Christine Blanchard after 27 years with the company and the national search for her replacement.
• Fortified Health Security launches its inaugural advisory board.
• Goliath Technologies publishes a new case study, “Leading not-for-profit health system isolates and resolves speed & reliability of Citrix related Epic and ChromeOS device issues.”
• Healthcare IT Leaders releases a new Leader to Leader Podcast, “From the Gift Shop to the C-Suite.”
• Impact Advisors releases a new Impactful AI Podcast, “The Ethics of Human Autonomy in AI.”
• Inovalon releases a new “Inovators” podcast, “AI in Healthcare: The Value of Innovative Technology, Paired with Clinical Expertise.”

Blog Posts

• 2025 – The Year of AI Validation and Human-Centered Innovation (Medicomp Systems)
• Driving momentum in healthcare technology amid dramatic change (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Boost Staff Productivity and Cut Costs with RPA in Healthcare (FinThrive)
• 5 Common Examples of Unintentional HIPAA Violations (HealthMark Group)
• Essential Customer Service Skills Every Contact Center Agent Should Master (Five9)
• 5 Ways an IT Partner Can Cure Physician Headaches and Boost Practice Efficiency (Med Tech Solutions)
• Essential strategies for value-based success in 2025 (Navina)
• How MUSC Leverages Telehealth to Reimagine Rural Healthcare (NeuroFlow)

Contacts

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

News 12/18/24

Top News

ASTP publishes the HTI-3 final rule, which addresses information blocking.

The rule adds a definition of “reproductive health care” and protects patients from legal action where an actor limits the sharing of their electronic health information that may relate to reproductive healthcare.

HTI-3 will likely require review by the new administration, which may have motivated the publication of the HTI-2 rule and its reproductive healthcare section separately to avoid delaying HCI-2’s USCDI standard version, certification program standards, and TEFCA standards. ASTP said that HTI-2, whose draft version was slimmed down by 85% for the final version, will be spread over several separate rules.

Reader Comments

From Bexley: “Re: charges for insurance appeals. See this BCBS notice to clients in which the company has decided to charge $205 for second-level appeals. I have never seen anything like this and am frankly appalled that insurance would put such an onerous demand on rural and CAH markets. My fear is that there will be more to come that will tilt the deck against financially struggling facilities. My suspicion is that they are doing this because automated appeals have broken their revenue models, which depend on a majority of claims never been appealed by hospitals and other providers.”

From Elucidate: “Re: conferences. HLTH was always for-profit and investor-backed, and now the HIMSS conference is, too. Is that the new standard?” Apparently. Member non-profits have done a good job in creating and managing their conferences, but it takes a lot of expertise and focus to scale them up and to extract the maximum all-important revenue from corporate supporters. For member groups, conferences are the core revenue generator but not the core business. One might speculate that the Big Daddy of healthcare conferences, RSNA and its 40,000 attendees, has had options for its future extended. Here’s a fun fact to know and tell: with the HIMSS conference and HLTH/ViVE acquired in just over 12 months, both conferences are now operated by London-based companies, where the sun never sets on the British conference empire.

This item made me think of my previous areas of uncertainty about HIMSS:

• IRS Form 990 — still hasn’t filed one since FY2021 that I’ve seen. I’m still wondering if they converted to for-profit since IRS requires yearly reporting for non-profits.
• Listed as a non-profit on the IRS website — no.
• HIMSS Accelerate — seems to have been finally shut down as the previous link now redirects to the HIMSS membership page and former Accelerate Managing Director Dennis Upah’s LinkedIn says that “much of the functionality was ultimately reorganized within HIMSS itself” as he gave up his Accelerate managing director role in September.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor Navina. Navina is the market-leading clinical intelligence platform, leveraging AI to transform fragmented patient data into a concise patient profile with actionable clinical insights. Designed for and loved by physicians, Navina enables proactive and empathic patient care, increasing clinician satisfaction, reducing burden, and improving value-based care outcomes. Privia Health, Agilon Health, and Millennium Physician Group are among some of the leading value-based care organizations leveraging Navina’s AI platform to transform clinical workflows and improve quality performance. The company won recognition in the 2024 MedTech Breakthrough Awards, KLAS Emerging Solutions Top 20 report, and the CB Insights Digital Health 50 list. Founded in 2019, Navina is used daily by over 7,000 clinicians across the United States, impacting the lives of more than two million patients. Thanks to Navina for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Toronto-based Healwell AI will acquire global healthcare technology company Orion Health, based in New Zealand, for $116 million. Healwell acquired a majority stake in Mutuo Health Solutions earlier this month, and acquired Canadian healthcare data software vendor VeroSource for $24.5 million in June.

Tuva Health, an open-source healthcare data and analytics startup, raises $5 million in seed funding. Co-founders Aaron Neiderhiser and Jorge Zuloaga spent time in executive roles at Health Catalyst and Strive Health, respectively, before launching Tuva in 2021.

Enterprise identity security company SailPoint Technologies acquires Imprivata’s identity governance and administration business.

Kahuna Workforce Solutions, which offers skills and competency management solutions, receives an unspecified investment from Memorial Hermann Health System.

Sales

• Mid and South Essex Foundation Trust and Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust in England will implement Oracle Health in 2026-27.
• Rural healthcare cooperative Cibolo Health selects population health management software from The Garage.

People

Mari Spung, MBA (Clinical Computer Systems) joins Medhost as SVP of research and development.

Adele Merritt, PhD (Office of the Director of National Intelligence), joins the National Institutes of Health as CIO.

HealthEdge hires Julie Coviello (E4health) as VP of professional services – delivery executive.

Aptarro, formerly Alpha II, hires Lori Jones (Agiliti) as chief growth officer and promotes Dave Douglas, MBA to COO.

Announcements and Implementations

MultiPlan announces GA of CompleteVue healthcare pricing analytics.

Black Book Research offers free access to the 2025 edition of “The Black Book of Global Healthcare Information Technology,” a 540-page guide to healthcare IT adoption worldwide. The company also releases its ratings of 175 EHR vendors across 110 countries, based on 18 critical performance indicators. 

Epic announces that its Nexus QHIN has connected 625 hospitals since it joined the framework in December 2023.

Government and Politics

Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers sues Change Healthcare, UnitedHealth Group, and Optum for allegedly violating the state’s consumer protection and data security laws during and after the ransomware attack on Change in February 2024 that exposed the information of 575,000 residents. Hilgers says that while Nebraska is the first state to file such a lawsuit, it likely won’t be the last.

Privacy and Security

An unidentified ransomware group threatens via fax to publish data stolen from PIH Health (CA) during a December 1 ransomware attack that continues to impact the provider’s IT systems. PIH staff are “scrambling,” according to one employee. “It’s a day-to-day thing. The majority of locations have not used paper in 15 years. It’s a stark awakening.”

Watsonville Community Hospital (CA) restores its EHR after a ransomware attack the day after Thanksgiving forced its staff to move to paper-based documentation.

A new federal breach report from Phreesia indicates that 900,000 people that their personal health data was exposed in a May breach of its ConnectOnCall telehealth and on-call answering platform, which it acquired in October 2023.

Other

Houston Methodist and Rice University establish the Digital Health Institute to develop new AI-enhanced solutions for telehealth, patient self-management, medical devices and wearables, predictive analytics, and early detection and diagnosis of conditions.

Nebraska Medicine opens the 17-room Innovation Design Unit at University of Nebraska Medical Center. The patient care unit will allow clinical staff and researchers to design, test, and validate advanced care models, new technologies, and facility designs.

Sponsor Updates

• CereCore releases a new podcast, “Physician CIO on the Value of Clinical IT Support.”
• Linus Health announces that its Core Cognitive Evaluation solution has earned European Union Medical Device Regulation Class IIa certification. 
• Artera offers a new customer success story, “Jane Pauley Community Health Center Increases Access to Care Across Community-Based Populations in Central Indiana with Artera.”
• Ascom launches the Myco 4 DECT-WiFi smartphone, combining DECT and WiFi capabilities.
• AvaSure becomes a founding sponsor of the American Telemedicine Association’s new Center of Digital Excellence.
• Capital Rx releases a new episode of The Astonishing Healthcare podcast, “What Project 2025, RFK Jr., and Dr. Oz Could Mean for the Business of Healthcare Under Trump.”
• DrFirst offers a new whitepaper, “The Perils and the Promise of AI in Healthcare.”

Blog Posts

• How Outside Partners are Changing Epic Implementations for the Better (CereCore)
• Agfa Insights: RSNA 2024 Key Takeaways (Agfa HealthCare)
• State of Patient Access: Survey Results and Insights Centralization, Analytics, and Automation (AGS Health)
• Extending your reach: How outsourcing your revenue cycle drives better financials (Altera Digital Health)
• Risk adjustment in healthcare: The ultimate guide for payers (Arcadia)
• Embracing Diversity and Inclusion in Recruitment: Building a More Inclusive Workforce (Direct Recruiters)

Contacts

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

Readers Write: The Path To Getting Value From AI In Healthcare

The Path To Getting Value From AI In Healthcare
By Vikas Chowdhry

Vikas Chowdhry, MS, MBA is founder and CEO of  TraumaCare.AI.

What are the three most critical elements for deriving value from AI in healthcare? In my view, it comes down to: Workflow! Workflow! Workflow!

What does workflow mean in practical terms? It means a deep understanding of:

1. The jobs that your users are doing.
2. The constraints in which they are doing those jobs.

And then figuring out how (if) AI can be used precisely to help them with those jobs.

Here, I use “jobs” in the sense of Clayton Christensen’s “jobs to be done” framework, which focuses on the core tasks users need to accomplish.

In healthcare, workflows vary widely. A surgeon’s daily routine differs drastically from that of a critical care nurse or a radiologist. Even within the same specialty, factors like location — an urban hospital versus a suburban health system — further shape how work is done.

A scene from the movie “Shocktrauma,” which portrays the life of Dr. R Adams Cowley (often called the father of trauma medicine), captures this point well. In this scene, William Conrad, playing Dr. Cowley, discusses trauma care with a skeptical hospitalist, Dr. “Tex” Goodnight:

Conrad: “Shock! Think of it as a pause in the act of dying.”

Tex: “So what do you do about it? What’s different here?”

Conrad: “You tell me, a patient comes to see you, what do you do? What’s the first thing?”

Tex: “Well, I first take history.”

Conrad: “OK, so you tell him to sit down, you sit in your chair, and you smile at him, and then you say very slowly and very quietly – have you ever had a heart attack sir, are you a diabetic, is there cancer in your family?”

Tex: “That’s right”

Conrad: “And then what?”

Tex: “Then I examine him.”

Conrad: “Which prompts more questions. Where does that scar come from, does this hurt, have you always had those bumps? All right. Now that the history and examination have been done, now what you do?”

Tex: “I make a diagnosis.”

Conrad: “And then you can start to treat, is that right?”

Tex: Nods.

Conrad: “Except by then, our kind of patient is dead. We’ve got to get them fast.”

This conversation highlights how a clinician’s workflow — what steps they take, in what order, and under what time constraints — defines what information they need and when.

More recently, our potential users have expressed similar sentiments. During a brainstorming session to redesign our user interface, a trauma surgeon we closely collaborate with said, “I think the differentiator now is not just ‘Give me data.’ Don’t just hand me a number from your predictive mode Give me information I can act on. I need something that helps me do something next, right? Give me information so I can make a decision in a very short period of time.”

That’s workflow!

If you’re providing AI software to trauma surgeons, you must deliver actionable insights to them within seconds. If you’re providing solutions for a clinician like Dr. Tex, the functionality and interface need to reflect his more measured diagnostic process. That takes research, effort, and a deep commitment.

In the health tech ecosystem, workflow-oriented solutions are sometimes trivialized as point solutions and the goal often is to become a platform, for two reasons:

1. Platforms suggest a larger total addressable market and lofty growth projections, which investors love.
2. Healthcare organizations often prefer fewer vendors to manage, which makes a single platform appealing.

But to truly realize value from AI, we need to see platforms and workflow solutions as complementary rather than competing approaches. Think of it this way: a strong foundation and solid structure are essential for any house. But designing a home that people actually want to live in demands attention to how they will use each space. Healthcare workflows, if anything, are infinitely more complex and variable than day-to-day needs of people living in a house. So, a healthcare AI platform might provide the technical backbone, but truly valuable solutions require deep understanding of the day-to-day workflows of the people who rely on it.

By prioritizing workflow-oriented AI solutions, we ensure that healthcare professionals get the support they need, in the form they need it. That’s the key to driving adoption, improving the quality of care, and ultimately realizing meaningful value from AI in healthcare.

Monday Morning Update 12/16/24

Top News

The American Telemedicine Association launches the ATA Center of Digital Excellence, whose big-name health system members will work to advance the integration of digital care pathways.

Reader Comments

From Sparky: “Re: Payer EDI systems. I hear they are having major volume and congestion issues, particularly eligibility.” Readers, what say you?

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

It’s 2:1 IPhones to Android phones among poll respondents.

New poll to your right or here: Which health activities have you performed on a mobile device in the past year? (multiple answers OK)

Friday will mark the most universal, logical, and non-contentious winter holiday of Yalda, an ancient celebration of the longest night of the year (although not the earliest sunset, which was December 7 for astronomically complicated reasons). Here’s the definition I run every year:

Yalda celebrants, most of them in Iran and nearby countries, observe the winter solstice, the last day of autumn and the longest night of the year, after which hours of daylight start increasing again. People stay up all night, eat watermelon and pomegranates (their glowing colors symbolize dawn and life), read poetry, and dance and play drums when the sun rises in a triumph of light over dark. Yalda means “birth.” I like it even beyond my personal obsession with changing hours of daylight — nobody is excluded or favored since the same sun shines down on us all, although I suppose folks in the Southern Hemisphere would need to buy their Yalda pomegranates in June.

Long-time reader Bill made a generous donation to Donors Choose, which after applying some nice matching money from various sources that include my Anonymous Vendor Executive, fully funded these teacher grant requests:

• Math flashcards and formula reference sheets for the Honors Algebra and Geometry middle school classes of Ms. W in Oklahoma City, OK (she sent the above note within a few minutes of the project’s funding Sunday afternoon).
• Whiteboard markers and erasers for Ms. B’s middle school class in Tarboro, NC.
• Math posters and learning games for first-year teacher Mr. P’s bilingual middle school classes in Chicago, IL.
• Headphones for Dr. H’s high school class in New Orleans, LA.
• Cell models for Ms. A’s middle school class in Dallas, TX.
• A document camera for Ms. H’s middle school class in Yonkers, NY.
• Microscopes, human body models, and STEM building kits for Ms. P’s elementary school class in Dallas, TX.

Meanwhile, here’s a photo from Ms. J in San Diego that shows her students using the reader-funded Ozobot coding tools in her elementary school class. She also sent a note: “The students have loved our new Ozobot coding center which has come to life thanks to this project. Thanks to the child friendly way that Ozobot is able to operate, I was able to quickly explain how the Ozobots work with the color code magnets, then leave the students to create pathways and code by themselves. My students are enamored with creating their own instructions for the Ozobots, and then watching the Ozobots go around their custom made paths. I wish I was able to send video through Donors Choose, because the way they interact with each other while building their own paths is heartwarming.”

Webinars

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

Sales

• Bamboo Health will provide the State of Hawaii with enhanced prescription drug monitoring that is integrated with EHR and pharmacy management system workflows.

People

David Grandy (Kaiser Permanente) joins Risant Health as chief product officer.

Announcements and Implementations

A Black Book survey of 820 UK clinicians, IT staff, and administrators finds that nearly all believe that NHS needs to replace its antiquated system to reduce productivity losses. They also recommend expanding training and engaging clinicians in EHR procurement decisions. The IT leaders identified the need for vendor-neutral, standards-based platforms to foster data sharing.

Orlando Health and the Florida Department of Health go live on CDC-funded Detor, which allows sharing lab test orders and results among providers and public health laboratories. The initial use case is to allow health system clinicians to see the results of newborn screening, which is mostly performed by public health labs. The organizations are Detor’s first users. The system is built on AIMS, the cloud-based healthcare messaging service that was developed by the Association of Public Health Laboratories.

Five-hospital Independence Health System (PA) launches a joint venture with Mitsui & Co. to form healthcare analytics firm AveHealth USA.

Government and Politics

A GAO report notes that the VA’s implementation of Oracle Health was preceded by three EHR modernization projects, all of which were abandoned: HealtheVet, IEHR, and VistA Evolution. GAO made 10 recommendations to the VA in May 2023 to address change management, user satisfaction, trouble ticket resolution, and independent assessments, with the VA concurring with all 10 but having implemented none so far. GAO made several other recommendations related to the VA’s IT governance, software licenses, and cloud computing, none of which have been implemented. The VA has requested $894 million for the Oracle Health project for FY2025 and $6.2 billion for the total budget of its Office of Information and Technology. 

NASA posts an RFI for a possible replacement of its decades-old EHR, which is primarily used at Johnson Space Center. I’m not clear on how that differs from a similar one from March 2024.

The government of Slovakia warns 3,300 hospital physicians who have resigned effective January 1 over poor working conditions that they will be jailed if they don’t keep working. A similar dispute with the medical trade union in 2011 required the government to bring in military doctors from Czechia. Doctors also staged a work protest that year in writing sick notes for each other, which has been banned in the new decree.

Other

Eric Topol, MD summarizes a new journal article that calls for developing personalized lab result reference values instead of the current “one size fits all” population-based ones. He suggests using AI to study an individual’s “setpoints” from the results of multiple CBCs to call out subtle changes that could identify high-risk people.

In China, a pregnant woman is forced to walk to catch a cab ride to a hospital to deliver her baby after her EV car fails to start because it was in the middle of a 51-minute software update that her husband inadvertently approved. Her husband called Li Auto, the car’s manufacturer, and was told that the update could not be stopped. The woman’s unplanned brisk walk elevated the fetal heart rate, requiring an emergency C-section once she reached the hospital, She summarizes, “I have a car, but I had to walk through the agony of a dilated cervix just to hail a taxi. Every step is excruciating.”

Sponsor Updates

• Rhapsody Health offers a new customer story, “From data ingestion to production in less than 30 days: How Zephyr AI uses Rhapsody Semantic to create precise AI models at scale.”

Blog Posts

• Empowering Leadership in the IDD Community: 4 Lessons from Precious Myers-Brown’s Inspiring Keynote (Netsmart)
• Breaking the rules to save lives: Why healthcare needs a policy to override policies (Nordic)
• CHIME’s Fall Forum: Shaping the Future of Healthcare with AI and Data Modernization (Prominence Advisors)
• What to Look for in a Healthcare Staffing Partner: Your Ultimate Guide to Building a Better Workforce (SnapCare)
• 2025 Predictions: Going Places Together—with a Shared Purpose (Surescripts)
• Succeeding in Value-Based Care: Part 3 (Tegria)
• Year in review: 6 key milestones that advanced Waystar’s mission in 2024 (Waystar)

Contacts

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

News 12/13/24

Top News

ASTP publishes a slimmed-down version of the TEFCA HTI-2 final rule. Some parts that were unrelated to TEFCA, such as those related to public health data exchange and payer API standards, were moved to another final rule that is being reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Teacher Mr. F in New York City sent over photos of his middle school students using the STEM kits that were provided by a reader’s donation.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Analytics platform vendor Particle Health, which recently filed a lawsuit against Epic for antitrust behavior, raises $10 million from existing investors. Insiders say the money won’t be used to fund the lawsuit’s expenses.

CoachCare,which offers tools for remote patient monitoring and virtual care, raises $11 million in funding.

Patient engagement software vendor SpinSci raises $53 million in growth equity funding.

Health system risk analytics vendor 1m raises $10 million in Series A funding, most of it from large health systems. The two co-founders are former Goldman Sachs VPs.

Business Insider profiles Claimable, which offers patients an AI-powered platform to help them appeal their health insurer’s medication coverage denials. The company says that its $40 service has an 85% success rate in getting denials overturned.

Microsoft hires several former employees of Google’s DeepMind to run its new London-based AI consumer health team.

Sales

• University of Cincinnati Health chooses Laudio’s workflow hub for hospital frontline leaders.
• Gibson Area Hospital and Health Services, the country’s fifth-largest Critical Access Hospital, will implement Meditech Expanse under the Meditech-as-a-Service cloud delivery model.

Announcements and Implementations

The first participants in Meditech’s Traverse Exchange — the company’s nationwide private, FHIR-first network that went live in the US in August following its launch in Canada — begin exchanging health data. The service includes connections to CommonWell and Carequality and offers an embedded record locator service.

The Sequoia Project publishes the Data Usability Implementation Guide Version 2 that was created by its Interoperability Matters Data Usability Workgroup.

Ellkay seeks nominations for its Women in Health IT digital health series.

Atropos Health, which provides evidence-based clinical insights by analyzing real-world data, offers access to its Atropos Evidence Network to developers and health systems for AI training.

Privacy and Security

Puerto Rico-based clearinghouse Immediata Health Group pays $250,000 to settle charges that it stored the information of 1.5 million patients unsecured on the internet, allowing it to be found via Google searches. The company previously paid $2.5 million in civil settlements that were related to the misconfigured server.

A report finds that hospitals are administering pain and epidural medications to pregnant women during their C-sections, then reporting the women to child welfare authorities when their newborns test positive for the same drugs. Hospitals often file the reports without checking the mother’s medical records, frequently placing the responsibility on social workers who have little drug testing experience or authority. At least 27 states require reporting a baby’s positive test, but none of them require hospitals to confirm the results before doing so.

A UK court dismisses an appeal that would have reactivated a privacy case that involves the transfer of patient data from The Royal Free London NHS Trust to Google-owned DeepMind to use in a kidney injury detection app.

Sponsor Updates

• A new EClinicalWorks survey finds that AI is a catalyst to transform the healthcare industry, with 90% of respondents reporting favorable views of AI.
• Ellkay publishes a new success story featuring Delta Pathology + Omega Diagnostics, “Optimizing Efficiency for Independent Labs.”
• Findhelp offers a new case study, “NYC Health + Hospitals Supports 100,000+ Patients in Six Months Using Automated Epic-Findhelp Social Determinants of Health Assessment Integration.”
• Five9 announces that it has won the 2024 Aragon Research Innovation Award for AI Contact Centers and been named a Leader in two Aragon Research Globe reports, “AI Agent Platforms in the ICC, 2025,” and “Intelligent Contact Center, 2025.”
• Goliath Technologies releases a new case study, “Leading not-for-profit health system isolates and resolves speed & reliability of Citrix related Epic and ChromeOS device issues .”
• Modern Healthcare recognizes Clearwater and Laudio as two of the Best in Business of 2024.
• Impact Advisors releases a new Impactful AI podcast titled “Inside the ‘Minds’ of LLMs: Behavioral Capabilities & Quirks.”
• Linus Health names former Providence president Mike Butler as an independent board director.
• KLAS Arch Collaborative features Meditech customer Ozarks Healthcare’s enhanced physician user experience in two case studies.

Blog Posts

• AI and the Age of Intelligence Has Arrived (EClinicalWorks)
• Healthcare Cybersecurity Threats: November 2024 (Fortified Health Security)
• Transforming Patient Access: Epic Optimization Drives Scheduling Efficiency and Revenue Growth (Health Data Movers)
• Release of Information and Audits: Birds of a Feather (And They Should Stick Together!) (HealthMark Group)
• How to Use Epic Gold Stars to Maximize Your EHR Investment (Healthcare IT Leaders)
• Is Your ACO Prepared to Report Promoting Interoperability Measures for All ACO Participants? (Impact Advisors)

Contacts

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

News 12/11/24

Top News

CVC Capital Partners will likely acquire German health IT company CompuGroup Medical in a take-private deal valued at $1.2 billion. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2025.

CGM acquired EMDs in 2020 in a $240 million deal that included the assets of Aprima Medical Software, which EMDs had acquired the year before. CGM, which has a US office in Austin, also acquired certain European assets of Cerner’s portfolio around the same time for $236 million.

Reader Comments

From Independent Primary Care: “Re: CareMax. Has laid off 530 employees since filing for bankruptcy in November. I think it’s safe to say that the Medicare Gold Rush has ended with the implosion of VillageMD, Walmart Health, Cano Health, Clinical Care Medical Centers, and now CareMex. Who’s next? Amazon’s One Medical, CVS’s Oak Street, or Optum?” CareMax, which is a Medicare Advantage delivery system, hopes to sell its management services organization and care centers to Revere Medical, the private equity-backed recent acquirer of Steward Health Care’s physician group. CMAX shares, which began trading in 2021 via a SPAC merger, are approaching worthlessness. The sustainability of MA value-based care is uncertain due to high labor costs, unexpectedly high demand for services, competition among publicly traded companies, and more complicated payment rules that are tied to quality ratings. The MA business isn’t making anyone happy, as those plans cost taxpayers a lot more money than traditional Medicare, companies use questionable diagnostic and documentation practices to exploit the system, and sicker patients who encounter MA denials or restrictions can move their high costs to traditional Medicare when it benefits them.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Oracle reports Q2 results: revenue up 9%, EPS $1.10 versus $0.89, missing Wall Street expectations for both and sending shares moderately down. The company’s healthcare business wasn’t mentioned except as a use case for its AI agents.

Walgreens is reportedly considering selling itself to private equity firm Sycamore Partners in a take-private transaction. The drugstore operator is struggling with lower prescription payments and front-of-store competition with Walmart and online retailers such as Amazon. It took a $6 billion charge this year for the declining value of its investment in primary care operator VillageMD, its only significant non-drugstore business. Sycamore invests in dying mall retail businesses such as Hot Topic, Belk, and Lane Bryant and, like most PE firms, has a history of loading its acquisitions with debt and pulling out billions of dollars from the already-struggling businesses.

The US Patent and Trademark Office grants TeamBuilder a patent for its predictive staff scheduling technology that incorporates patient volume, workflow, and employee availability and characteristics.

Healthcare workflow AI startup Evidently raises $15 million in a Series A funding round.

A new KLAS report on clinical communications technologies finds that PerfectServe Telmediq is the most broadly adopted and has the most users live on physician scheduling, while users of TigerConnect and Symplr report simple deployments and easy adoption. End user training and integration are the biggest implementation obstacles.

Sales

• Syracuse Area Health (NE) will launch telenephrology services using technology from Teledigm Health.
• Sanford Health (SD) selects Availity’s Essentials Pro RCM software.

People

Wolters Kluwer names Mark Sherwood, MBA (Microsoft) EVP/CIO.

Lori Jones (Agiliti) joins Aptarro as chief growth officer.

C3HIE promotes Jim Hoag, MA, MBA to interim CEO. He takes over from Phil Beckett, who will join Texas Health Services Authority as CEO.

RhythmX AI names Andrei Zudin, PhD (Carequality) head of interoperability and security.

Tyler Turner (Optum) joins Edifecs as RVP of payer sales.

Announcements and Implementations

Broward Health (FL) goes live on Epic.

Privacy and Security

HealthAlliance (NY) will pay a $550,000 fine for its failure to prevent a cyberattack in July 2023 that exposed the information of 243,000 patients. The organization had been made aware of a system vulnerability by one of its vendors, but failed to implement a patch because of technical issues.

Other

Informatics researchers propose adapting the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) model — which allows labs to develop and modify FDA-approved tests without further review — to regulate healthcare AI. The framework could include local oversight, risk stratification, assurance of appropriate staff training, validation of developer claims using local data, a recalibration schedule, ongoing quality control, and a certification program for AI-competent organizations.

Sponsor Updates

• Cardamom Health moves to new offices in downtown Madison, WI.
• The Norwegian healthcare region Helse Nord RHF will expand its use of Sectra’s enterprise imaging solution to include digital pathology.
• Agfa HealthCare recaps its team’s experience at RSNA with daily updates.
• Arcadia publishes a new report, “The current state of healthcare analytics platforms.”
• Availity promotes Sujin Park to senior marketing operations manager.
• Capital Rx releases a new episode of The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast, “What’s Hot In and Around the Pharmacy Supply Chain, with RSM’s Tom Evegan.”
• Cardamom Health moves to new and expanded office space in downtown Madison, WI.
• CTG publishes a new whitepaper, “Optimizing the Epic Journey: Workflow Alignment as the Cornerstone of EHR Success.”
• Divurgent publishes a new success story, “Integrating Project Portfolio and IT Operations Management at the Child Mind Institute (CMI).”

Blog Posts

• Succeeding in Value-based Care: Part 2 (Tegria)
• Flipping the script: Why nurses stay (Altera Digital Health)
• VA Hospital Fall Prevention: A Pathway to Zero Falls (AvaSure)
• Navigating the HIPAA Privacy Rule for Reproductive Healthcare: Compliance Essentials Before the December 2024 Deadline (Clearwater)
• Physician CIO Advice: Scaling Health IT in Rural America (CereCore)
• Speeding Access to Specialty Meds in Oncology: How Electronic Prior Authorizations Make It Possible (DrFirst)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/9/24

Top News

HHS OCR fines Children’s Hospital Colorado $548,000 for HIPAA breaches involving phishing and cyberattacks.

In the first incident from 2020, an IT help desk technician disabled two-factor authentication for a physician’s account and forgot to turn it back on. The 2020 breaches occurred when two employees accepted phony multi-factor authentication requests.

Multi-factor authentication attacks usually involve sending a user a phishing link to a phony login page that looks like the real thing, using the login credentials that they enter to initiate a password reset, and then getting them to divulge the 2FA code that they receive by text message.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most poll respondents expect HHS to change for the worse under the new administration and leadership. I intentionally didn’t qualify what “better” or “worse” means, allowing respondents to make their own interpretation.

New poll to your right or here:  What OS runs your primary personal cell phone?

Listening: a dazzling remake of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” by Body Count, rapper Ice-T’s 35-year-old heavy metal band. The Tonight Show video shows how good he and his band are at reworking a legendary song after obtaining unlikely permission from the perpetually feuding David Gilmour and Roger Waters. His wall of guitars is searing on Fallon, but the official video features the 80-year-old Gilmour himself – who approved Ice-T’s request and then asked if  he could get involved — reprising the song that he and Waters wrote 50 years ago with a full six minutes of his unmistakable guitar. A lyrical snip:  “You’ve got a TV, a computer, so you don’t care; A roof, some clothes, some food, that’s right, it’s all there; Lock yourself in your house, try to forget about; The millions dyin’ from wars, starvation and drought.” Also deep from life’s experience: new from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (live video here). Cave has pushed through the deaths of two sons to turn grief into hope and reflection on “Wild God,” which takes exuberant advantage of his full band and a choir compared to some sparely accompanied poetry on his last couple of albums.

Pet peeve: websites that won’t let you look at a page until you disable your adblocker, after which it then throws up a paywall lockout.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cardiac imaging Cleerly raises $106 million in a Series C funding extension. The company applies AI to heart CT scans for early detection of coronary artery disease.

Sales

• Four Interim HealthCare agencies will implement Netsmart’s CareFabric EHR in their post-acute care settings.

Announcements and Implementations

Oura enhances its smart rings with Symptom Radar, an “illness warning light” that watches for changes from the wearer’s long-term baseline of pulse, heart rate variability, temperature, and respiratory rate.

OnMed unveils CareStation, a “clinic in a box” system that targets underserved communities. The company says that its product, which offers real-time clinician consultation and tools for measuring vital signs, is being used in five locations. It will be officially introduced next month at CES, where zero attendees have the slightest clue about underserved communities or the systemic health equity problems that a doc-in-a-box can’t overcome.

Other

The Guardian reports that a hospital in Malawi saw stillbirths and neonatal deaths drop by 82% three years after implementing AI-powered fetal monitoring software. Just 10% of the hospital’s delivery doctors have been trained to perform traditional electronic monitoring, so the software automatically alerts them of potential problems. The perinatal solution was donated by PeriGen in collaboration with the global women’s health program of Texas Children’s Hospital.

A HLTH conference expert AI panel unanimously suggests that health systems resist the trend of hiring a chief AI officer. Baptist Health Medical Group CMIO  Brett Oliver, MD believes that organizations need to raise their AI literacy before putting someone in that role, which might send the message that only that person is responsible for AI deployment. His group established a broad AI oversight committee to create a governance structure.

I ran across this magazine cover from 100 years ago, which is even more notably prescient given that TV itself wasn’t invented until a couple of years later. Editor Hugo Gernsback also predicted the next year the use of the “teledactyl,” a feel-at-a-distance device that he described as, “The doctor manipulates his controls, which are then manipulated at the patient’s room in exactly the same manner. The doctor sees what is going on in the patient’s room by means of a television screen.” Gernsback created science fiction as a genre right after this issue ran with his launch of Amazing Stories magazine. Smithsonian Magazine’s 2012 story about him, which features fascinating illustrations, is worth a look for sure.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthcare IT Leaders sponsors the Third Annual Golf Classic benefiting the Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute Foundation.
• PerfectServe integrates Five9’s customer experience platform and Intelligent Virtual Agent technology with its Operator Console for improved contact center operations.
• Tegria publishes a new case study, “Automated Estimates Increase Accuracy and Transparency.”
• King Abdullah Medical City Makkah in Saudi Arabia upgrades its EHR to the latest version of InterSystems TrakCare.
• Nordic and Benevolence Health partner to support healthcare organizations with the new CMS TEAM bundled payment model.
• Rhapsody publishes a new customer story, “Axia Women’s Health saved $300,000, replacing a standalone API engine with Rhapsody Corepoint.”
• Surescripts offers a new whitepaper, “The Current Landscape of Pharmacy Interoperability.”
• Visage hires Victoria Hibbits as executive enterprise sales director.
• WellSky publishes a new case study, “Client value: The story behind $2M in recovered aged receivables.”

Blog Posts

• Lessons learned from operating Medicare Advantage Clinics (MACs) (Notable)
• The Power of AI: Fueling Organizations and Elevating People Part II (Netsmart)
• 3 Ways to Manage Your Data Like an Asset With the ServiceNow Platform (Optimum Healthcare IT)
• Transforming Healthcare with AI: Current Innovations and Future Opportunities (PerfectServe)
• Financial Benefits of Optimized Cardiology Scheduling: Reducing Costs with Efficient Utilization (QGenda)
• Top 6 States for Travel Nursing in 2024 (SnapCare)
• 5 Conversations on QHINs and the National Data Exchange Framework (Surescripts)
• Operations: The Power of Revenue Cycle Management Automation (TruBridge)
• Revenue cycle 101: AI + generative AI in healthcare payments (Waystar)

Contacts

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

News 12/6/24

Top News

Apple CEO Tim Cook repeats his previous assertion that health apps will define the company’s legacy.

Cook says in an excellent Wired interview that enabling AirPods as hearing aids for moderate hearing loss is “the democratization of health.”

He summarizes that Apple is “pouring all of ourselves” into health, such as real-time biometric data analysis.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Two former HIStalk sponsors rejoined the fold this week, in both cases because employee turnover had left them unaware that they had unintentionally departed in the first place. Other potential prodigal sons and potential new sponsors can contact me directly and I’ll either answer your inquiry myself or send you over to Lorre. I can also confirm your sponsorship status if you aren’t sure.

Listening: Teenage Fanclub and 311, both of which having been playing guitar rock for 25 years. I discovered them from my recent infatuation with REM and my request to ChatGPT to find other bands that I would like. I’ve been watching REM concert videos for at least a half hour every night to catch up on their body of work, from which I note the contributions of retired drummer Bill Berry (he played multiple instruments and added another layer of harmony with Mike Mills in addition to orchestral drumming), replacement drummer Bill Rieflin (he died in 2020 at 59), and “fifth member” Scott McCaughey (I can’t get enough of his licks in the live version of one of my favorite REM songs “Supernatural Superserious,” which also has a fine contribution by Rieflin). My favorite concert video is from an appearance in Athens, Greece, although they did a great show at the other Athens in Georgia at the 40-Watt Club. I would choose REM as the best rock band in American history, perhaps nostalgically since now the “band” concept is passé in favor of computers, collaborations, and outsourced songwriting.

If you attended the ASTP annual meeting in person this week, let me know what you thought was important or interesting. They livestreamed it, but the hallway conversations are the good stuff.

Reader Vicki’s generous donation on Giving Tuesday allowed me to stack up a bunch of matching funds, including the matching money that was donated by my Anonymous Vendor Executive, to fully fund these Donors Choose teacher needs:

• Whiteboards and equation solving supplies for Ms. D’s middle school class in Kerens, TX.
• Headphones for Ms. G’s elementary school class in Pharr, TX.
• Math learning tools for Ms. C’s elementary school class in Brooklyn, NY.
• STEM learning kits for Ms. C’s elementary school class in Chino, CA.
• Geometric transformation supplies for Ms. S’s middle school class in Chicago, IL.
• STEM kits for Ms. B’s kindergarten class in Sacramento, CA.
• Headphones for Ms. N’s elementary school class in Greensboro, NC.
• Podcasting equipment for Ms. P’s high school Podcast News class in Santa Rosa, NM.
• Headphones for Ms. J’s elementary school English as a Second Language class in Fridley, MN.
• A printer for college applications for Ms. N’s high school class in Hollywood, FL.
• Motivation awards for Ms. S’s elementary school class in Ontario, CA.
• Research project tools for Ms. P’s middle school class in New York, NY.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Black Book Research lists nine countries that its expert panel says are poised for significant EHR adoption in 2025.

Aya Healthcare, which operates a travel nurse staffing service and job-matching website, will acquire staffing company Cross Country Healthcare for $615 million in cash.

Marketing firm Supreme Group acquires health tech and life sciences PR and marketing agency Amendola Communications. Amendola will keep its name and founder Jodi Amendola will remain as president. I interviewed her a month ago.

Publicly traded Embecta, which earned FDA clearance for its first insulin patch pump in September with plans to add a dosing algorithm, will lay off 118 employees and end that program to focus on its core business of making pen needles and insulin syringes.

Sales

• Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust will implement Meditech Expanse.

People

Frank Forte, MBA (Anatomy_IT) joins EnableComp as CEO.

Chris Paton, DPhil, MBA is named editor in chief of BMJ Digital Health & AI.

Retired Vanderbilt informatics professor and health tech pioneer Edward Shultz, MD, MS died last week at 76.

Announcements and Implementations

ECRI names the use of AI in healthcare as the most significant health technology hazard for 2025. The patient safety non-profit emphasizes the need to balance innovation with privacy and safety.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s IT department goes live on alert tool that can send messages directly to the computer displays of employees who will be affected by upcoming changes. The software is from Lakeside.

University of Central Florida offers students in its Health Informatics and Information Management BS degree program training on Epic, with materials and a simulated environment provided by Orlando Health.

The Joint Commission recognizes Inova as the first health system to earn its voluntary Responsible Use of Health Data certification.

Government and Politics

The Indian Health Service becomes the first federal health agency to go live on TEFCA, selecting EHealth Exchange as it designated QHIN.

FDA publishes recommendations for a smoother process for manufacturers to update their AI-enabled devices.

ASTP issues its first AI contract to Audacious Inquiry, a PointClickCare company, for technology to improve efficiency in its core areas. The reasoning behind using the technology of a care collaboration company to automate back-office government processes wasn’t stated.

Privacy and Security

Mount Nittany Health offers to pay $1.8 million to settle a lawsuit over its use of pixel tracking software on its website and patient portal.

Kevin Holland dives into Meta policy changes that will affect healthcare and health tech advertisers, as the company will restrict tracking of form fills and retargeting based on medical information starting in January. He concludes that condition-specific products or marketing campaigns will face significant restrictions and that direct conversation tracking will disappear as a campaign metric.

The Sequoia Project publishes a free Information Blocking Rule educational toolkit.

Three-hospital PIH Health takes its systems, network, and phone system offline following a ransomware attack Sunday.

In England, two NHS trusts continue their restoration of systems following ransomware attacks.

Other

Only mildly health tech related, but eye-catching as a societal observer. A 22-year-old OnlyFans model earns Internet scorn after sharing a TikTok of herself in the hospital room of her 85-year-old boyfriend, dancing and joking about speeding up her inheritance. She describes their relationship as, “He takes me to Cartier, I take him to pound town.” Meanwhile, a fellow OnlyFans adult content creator has made $43 million so far this year, leading me to ponder society’s valuation of a 20-year-old — who claims that she is a devout Christian and a virgin, which I can see would draw a certain demographic whether accurate or not — as equal to a couple of hundred doctors. She says that one smitten follower has made it rain nearly $5 million for her in the past few months.

Sponsor Updates

• Healthmonix team members support Ann’s Heart in Phoenixville, PA.
• Agfa HealthCare integrates Rad AI’s reporting and FHIRcast solutions with its enterprise imaging platform.
• Meditech Alliance triples its membership to 37 solution members whose products complement, enhance, or extend Expanse.
• FindHelp welcomes CenCal Health, Maryland Physicians Care, BronxCare Health System, and Central Iowa Shelter & Services to its network.
• Commure’s Augmedix achieves Oracle Validated Integration with Industry Healthcare Expertise for its full suite.
• Five9 announces that SVP Jake Butterbaugh has been named a Channel Futures Top UC/Contact Center Leader for 2024.
• Fortified Health Security names William Hicks EOD security engineer.

Blog Posts

• EClinicalWorks: The One-Stop Solution for Cutting-Edge AI Tools (EClinicalWorks)
• Understanding the Claims Lifecycle: A Step-by-Step Guide (FinThrive)
• Congratulations To HCTec’s 2024 Accelerate Graduates (HCTec)
• The Importance of Integrating Workday with Your Hospital or Health System’s EHR (Impact Advisors)
• Harnessing data to address SDOH and improve health equity (Meditech)
• Current State of Healthcare IT Staffing: Navigating Persistent Challenges (Med Tech Solutions)

Contacts

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

News 12/4/24

Top News

The Drug Enforcement Administration says that criminals who have been committing prescription drug fraud are now using EHRs and e-prescribing systems to create bogus prescriptions that are often sent to pharmacies all over the US.

Those involved are generating up to 1,000 prescriptions per day for a given prescriber’s DEA number.

DEA says the solution will need to involve doctors, EHR vendors, prescription processing companies, and pharmacies. It recommends that providers check their profile in their state’s prescription drug monitoring program to look for irregularities.

Reader Comments

From Lattice: “Re: Bluesky. I was surprised by your strong endorsement of a platform you mentioned not having fully explored. Are you suggesting that it offers a superior experience compared to X?” I wasn’t endorsing Bluesky, just mentioning that I am using it. I like Bluesky for mostly superficial reasons — the absence of ads, the control I have over what posts I see, and a clubbier vibe that feels like a cool secret society (at least until the trolls and bots on X join me). It’s also open, so people are building apps on top of it whereas X has shut off most of its APIs to wall off its garden. My timing was triggered because of its huge influx of new users, whose reasons aren’t necessarily the same as mine, that give it critical mass. I like that I don’t have to pledge exclusivity since it’s free and easy to use both services, plus I wouldn’t be too smart if I abandoned my 14,000 followers on X versus the 140 I have on Bluesky. My plan:

• I’m not a very active user of X, but I will continue to post on both services, probably a bit more interesting stuff on Bluesky.
• I will spend far less time reading X’s “For You” algorithm-pushed posts that are designed to enrage, silo, and troll to boost engagement.
• I will still check X’s “Following” posts, probably a few times each day. I follow only 109 accounts, so I can zip through those quickly.

From Summoner: “Re: Chromebook. I’ve been meaning to thank you for recommending a ruggedized, small, light and cheap model a number of years ago, which I picked up for $150.” I love my Chromebook, which fills the gap between using my laptop at my desk versus my IPad from a comfy chair when I don’t need a real keyboard or Windows-only tools. I paid $99 in mid-2022 for my low-end Lenovo that has 4 GB of memory and 64 GB of storage. I like the 11.6 inch, 2.4 pound form factor, the automatic updates, and a battery that runs for days.

From Researcher: “Re: Altmetric. The social media citation measurement tool that journals use to measure interest in their article now cites HIStalk as both a news organization and a blog.” Thanks, I didn’t know that. The site calculates a real-time Attention Score for each journal article that is based on media mentions. I read this morning that it just added Bluesky posts. The value of such a service is that the feedback is immediate compared to measuring citations months or years later when new articles finally emerge from the research journal sausage maker.

From Old Aprima: “Re: CompuGroup Medical, which had acquired EMDs and Aprima. Just did its fourth round of layoffs this year, with 15 people let go, including some high tenure employees.” Unverified.

From Spellchequer: “Re: RSNA. Add this to your list of conference misspellings such as HIMMS.” A search of this site – which I won’t name even though I could shame them as an HIStalk competitor — surfaces dozens of examples of RSNA butchering, most often in headlines, going back to 2011.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

A reader’s donations funded the Donors Choose teacher grant request of Mr. M in Dallas, who asked for a wireless voice amplifier and microphone to help his pre-schoolers hear him without straining his voice. He sent a photo, although my face-blurring hides the brand new headset he wanted to show us. Speaking of Donors Choose, a donation from reader Natalie, boosted by some juicy matching funds including those from my Anonymous Vendor Executive, funded these projects:

• A laptop for the seventh grade science class of first-year teacher Ms. E in Grand Island, ME.
• Interactive STEM games for Mr. W’s high school class in Conyers, GA.
• Headphones for the second grade class of Ms. S in Paterson, NJ.
• Mini whiteboards for Mr. S’s English as a Second Language high school class in Chicago, IL.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor SmarterDx. SmarterDx builds clinical AI that empowers hospitals to true the patient record to fully capture the value of care delivered. Founded by physicians in 2020, its proprietary AI platform understands the nuances of clinical reasoning, enabling hospitals to true every patient record. By doing so, hospitals recover millions in earned revenue, enhance care quality metrics, successfully overturn denials, and optimize healthcare operations. Discover how SmarterDx is transforming healthcare.

Here’s a recent SmarterDx explainer video.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Toronto-based AI-enabled decision support vendor Healwell acquires a majority stake in Mutuo Health Solutions, which offers an ambient scribe product.

Healthcare quality organization ECRI acquires The Just Culture Company, which addresses workforce culture.

Soda Health, whose platform helps members use their health insurance benefit dollars to pay for approved goods and services, raises $50 million in a Series B funding round.

Sales

• Great River Health System (IA) will switch from Oracle Health to Epic in 2026.

People

VillageMD names President and COO Jim Murray interim CEO following the departure of co-founder Tim Barry. Parent company Walgreens Boots Alliance, which has invested over $6 billion in the primary care chain, is considering selling all or parts of VillageMD due to struggling profitability.

Cotiviti hires Suvajit Gupta, MS (Appian Corporation) as CTO.

Former Intermountain Health CIO Ryan Smith, MBA (Graphite Health) rejoins the health system as chief digital and information officer.

Announcements and Implementations

Marshfield Clinic Health System (WI) implements Switchboard, MD’s MDAware inbox management technology at three facilities.

Xsolis launches an AI-powered solution for appeals documentation, with MultiCare Health System serving as its pilot site.

Academy Medtech Ventures releases Move PT, a home rehab care system that uses AI, computer vision, and remote therapeutic monitoring.

A new KLAS report on imaging AI reveals that high-volume organizations are leading adoption, with mid-sized ones poised to follow. AI is now more commonly used in neurology and stroke cases than computer-aided detection, with breast and mammography applications ranking second. The most widely used solutions are RapidAI and Viz.ai, while Aidoc and Nuance top the list of those under consideration for purchase.

Government and Politics

HHS secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suggests that CMS, rather than the American Medical Association’s RUC panel of doctors, should be tasked with recommending provider payments amounts for individual CPT codes for Medicare billing. CPT products such as licenses generate $266 million annually, which represents half of AMA’s revenue.

Privacy and Security

HHS OCR levies a $1.19 million fine against Gulf Coast Pain Consultants, who it says violated HIPAA when a former contractor used patient information from its EHR to file 6,500 fraudulent Medicare claims. The contractor was previously indicted but found not guilty.

Holy Redeemer Family Medicine (PA) pays $35,581 to settle federal allegations that it potentially violated HIPAA when it disclosed a patient’s full health record to a prospective employer, including information about reproductive healthcare, rather than the single test result that the patient had authorized.

Other

Unity Health Toronto puts together a fun “Breaking News” video to celebrate its Epic go live across its three hospitals. You can almost smell the typical command center Eau de Parfum (picked-over “I’ll just have a half” everything bagels and congealed pizza).

Sponsor Updates

• Goliath Technologies publishes a case study about Intermountain Healthcare’s use of the company’s solution to identify reliability and response time issues to improve end user EHR experience.
• Agfa HealthCare Rubee AI customers can now access Carpl.ai’s marketplace of 140 AI applications, testing, deployment and monitoring tools.
• TheMuse.com recognizes Arcadia with its 2024 VIBE (Voted in by Employees) Award in the employee health and wellness category.
• Artera offers a new case study, “Jane Pauley Community Health Center Increases Access to Care Across Community-Based Populations in Central Indiana with Artera.”
• AvaSure publishes the results of its “Inpatient Virtual Care Insight Survey.”
• Capital Rx releases a “Best of 2024” episode of “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast.”
• Clinical Architecture will present at the 2024 Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy Annual Meeting December 5 in Washington, DC.
• CliniComp shares insights from recent site optimization visits at VA facilities in Atlanta and Augusta, GA.

Blog Posts

• The Future of Medical Coding: Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and People (AGS Health)
• AMA Coding Overhaul: A New Era for AI Medical Documentation in the ED (Augmedix)
• Experts Predict Increasing Digital Health Investment in 2025: Innovators Can Turn Cybersecurity into Value Creation (Clearwater)
• You’re (Probably) Hiring the Wrong People (Divurgent)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 12/2/24

Top News

Business Insider reports that many digital health startups are cutting their valuations, shutting down, or being quietly acquired for parts after raising no new venture capital since the ZIRP heyday of 2021.

Venture capitalists provided bridge funds in helping their startups reach their next funding round, but have lost patience with those that haven’t performed as expected, choosing instead to put their money into AI startups.

The author says that quite a few health-related business that stalled at seed or Series A rounds have shut their doors with little attention.

Reader Comments

From Whaleback: “Re: HIS-tory. Folks on the former Cerner Reddit are looking for Vince Ciotti’s industry history and how Cerner’s acquisitions may have created a confusing patchwork of Millennium functionality.” Vince’s fascinating HIS-tory that I ran many years ago contains health tech’s early lessons that can be learned the easy way (by reading) or the hard way (by repeating those same mistakes). Vince retired from his 50-year health IT career in 2019 and died in 2021. He said in our 2019 conversation that he hoped to be remembered for his HIS-tory above all else. Click the graphic to see Vince’s recap of Cerner’s acquisitions, and if you open the big HIS-tory file, be aware that some PDF readers work better than others.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Poll respondents overwhelmingly named emergency response time as their biggest fear of hospital-at-home treatment.

New poll to your right or here: How will HHS change under the new administration? I’m not encouraging political conversation, but rather seek predictions of how companies and consumers will fare under expected new priorities and leadership. As a reminder, HHS runs a $2 trillion annual budget and includes CMS (Medicare), CDC, FDA, NIH, the Public Health Service, HHS OIG, AHRQ, Office for Civil Rights, and ASTP. 

Pondering: do RSNA attendees ever get to eat leftover turkey sandwiches?

I’m winding down my use of X in favor of Bluesky (you can follow me here), so as a noob who initially thought Bluesky was an unfamiliar ghost town even though it has 24 million users, I’ll offer some tips on what to do after opening an account. Add your own tips via a comment if you like.

• Choose a few X accounts that you like and follow them on Bluesky if they are there, which trains Bluesky’s algorithm to understand what you like. Commenting, liking, reposting, and quoting helps build your connection list and get more Bluesky participation.
• SkyBridge helps you find and follow your X connections, although I haven’t tried it.
• Click Profile on the menu bar to the left, then click Edit Profile at the top of your feed to add a display name, description, and an image. Otherwise you won’t get followers because nobody will know who you are. Some of my new followers are listed with the default profile of “johnsmith.bsky.social” without a display name or description, so add those to get more followers.
• Create custom feeds by clicking the #Feeds menu item, then look for new feeds that mirror your interests. Click the plus sign to follow them, which will then add them to the top of your feed as clickable options. For example, I added Popular with Friends, Mutuals (posts from fellow users who have followed you back), and News.
• Find another user’s relevant Starter Pack or search the 40,000 available ones. Click a starter pack to connect with all of the users it lists.
• Click the Notifications menu item to see who has recently followed you. Follow them back to expand the network.
• Click the Settings menu item and then Sort Replies to choose oldest, newest, most-liked, or random.
• Click the Settings menu item and then Moderation to filter posts by words, tags, or adult content. I need to figure out if this can be used to hide follower posts that relate to sports, politics, and pets.  
• Click the Settings menu item, then Content and Media to enable media players such as YouTube.
• Enjoy ad-free, bot-limited quiet and thoughtful conversations that aren’t pushed in your face by a profit-driven algorithm while simultaneously lamenting that bot farmers and trolls have discovered Bluesky just like everybody else.
• My wish list for Bluesky includes an easier verification process (fake accounts are already proliferating); and a native IPad app.

Welcome to new HIStalk Platinum Sponsor TeamBuilder. TeamBuilder is the first predictive staff scheduling platform built specifically for ambulatory care. Staffing in ambulatory care is fundamentally complex, with fluctuating patient demand, varying specialty needs, multiple locations, and diverse staff preferences. Yet, 95% of ambulatory organizations still rely on outdated paper or Excel-based scheduling, which makes it difficult to optimize staffing effectively. This results in costly overstaffing, administrative inefficiencies, and a lack of visibility into critical operational metrics, such as cost per visit. TeamBuilder transforms this process by using predictive technology and advanced data science to deliver real-time, optimized schedules that meet both patient demand, clinical workflow and staff availability, ensuring the right staff are always in place. With TeamBuilder, you gain more than just a smarter scheduling tool— you unlock the ability to reduce staffing costs, improve patient access, eliminate administrative inefficiencies, and gain deep visibility into your operations. With TeamBuilder, you’ll always know exactly who you need today, tomorrow, and next month –empowering you to make smarter, more strategic decisions. Let TeamBuilder help you reimagine staff scheduling. Thanks to TeamBuilder for supporting HIStalk.

Here’s a TeamBuilder intro video.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Canada-based practice management software vendor Practice Better raises $13 million in growth capital.

Radiology platform vendor Sirona raises $42 million in a Series C funding round.

The Winston-Salem paper notes the 2023 compensation of top executives of Novant Health, which includes EVP/Chief Digital and Information Officer Onyeka Nchege at $947K in total compensation.

Sales

• Trinity Health will implement the cloud-based Visage 7 enterprise imaging platform in a $215 million, 10-year contract.
• NYU Langone Health, which was the first on-premise customer of Visage Imaging, extends its contract in a $24 million, five-year deal to implement the company’s full stack in the cloud.

People

CTG promotes Chad Alessi, MS, MBA to managing director of cybersecurity. He is a US Marine Corps veteran.

Health Systems Informatics promotes Joe Ranieri to VP of business development.

Brian Roy, MBA (Simplify Healthcare) joins Zyter TruCare as VP of sales.

The Garage In hires Stacy Fox (Acclivity Health Solutions) as SVP of market development and growth.

Announcements and Implementations

LGI Healthcare Solutions launches a healthcare workforce management platform for the Canadian market.

Government and Politics

The CEO of a bar association for Social Security attorneys and Epic’s policy team leader Ladd Wiley, JD describe how Epic’s integration with the Social Security Administration’s IT systems supports timely disability determinations. Epic facilitated the exchange of 2.5 million patient records between its hospital clients and SSA last year. However, the authors note that only 15% of disability claims are reviewed using data obtained via EHR interoperability, with the rest being managed by mail and fax. They recommend that TEFCA be expanded to include use cases involving government benefits determinations.

Privacy and Security

Texas Governor Greg Abbott threatens to end state funding of Texas Children’s Hospital because one of its cardiologists posted a TikTok video advising patients that while the hospital is required to ask their citizenship status based on Abbott’s November 1 executive order, those patients are not required to answer.

Other

Dean Sittig, PhD and Hardeep Singh, MD, MPH publish a JAMA viewpoint piece that makes recommendations for healthcare organizations to ensure the safe implementation and use of AI in clinical care, emphasizing the need for governance, real-world testing, clinician and patient engagement, performance monitoring, and risk mitigation to prevent harm and improve outcomes.

Multiple authorities in Sweden are investigating reported problems with the newly rolled out Oracle Health Millennium in the Västra Götaland region. Clinicians and other users in western Sweden reported significant problems with the $190 million project, some of them reportedly placing patients at risk.

New Mexico jurors award an all-time record $412 million malpractice judgment against a multi-state men’s health clinic. The lawsuit was filed by a 66-year-old man who visited one of the facilities complaining of fatigue and weight loss, for which he says the clinic ordered thrice-weekly penile injections for erectile dysfunction that caused damage. NuMale Medical Center offers hard-sell treatments for ED, premature ejaculation, hair restoration and transplants, testosterone replacement, and weight loss. 

Sponsor Updates

• CereCore releases a new case study, “Oklahoma Heart Hospital: Partnership for Interface Optimization.”
• The Digital Health Hub Foundation names Linus Health the 2024 Longevity Best in Class winner of its Digital Health Awards.
• The CH Béziers hospital in France will adopt Sectra’s digital pathology solution.

Blog Posts

• Use the “Holiday Diet” to Trim Your Clinical Productivity Variances (Impact Advisors)
• Navigating the CMS 2025 Physician Fee Schedule Final Rule (MRO)
• Future-Proofing Your Public Health Programs: Top 5 Things to Consider (Netsmart)
• How to improve bedside handoffs with digital whiteboards (Sonifi Health)
• Striking Gold: How Washington State is Empowering the Care Team Evolution (Surescripts)
• Unlocking Efficiency and Profitability with End-to-End Revenue Cycle Management (TruBridge)

Contacts

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

News 11/27/24

Top News

England’s three-hospital Wirral University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust cancels outpatient appointments due to an unspecified cybersecurity incident. Patients were asked to avoid visiting the emergency department for non-emergencies.

A hospital employee told a newspaper that “everything is down” and records can’t be accessed.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Welcome to new HIStalk Gold Sponsor CTG Health Solutions. With 35+ years of expertise, CTG stands as a beacon in today’s healthcare IT consulting market. The company’s Healthcare Consulting Solutions blend innovative services with cutting-edge technologies to address the unique challenges, requirements, and regulations of the healthcare market. Connect to explore how CTG’s healthcare experts can help transform challenges into opportunities, ensuring that your organization not only succeeds but thrives in a rapidly evolving landscape. Thanks to CTG Health Solutions for supporting HIStalk.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Cofactor AI, which offers AI-powered software to help providers appeal denied claims, launches with $4 million in seed funding.

Medication affordability, access, and adherence software company TailorMed secures $40 million in new financing.

Sales

• Self Regional Healthcare (SC) will adopt Agfa HealthCare’s Enterprise Imaging Cloud.
• Carle Health (IL) selects value-based care software and services from Lumeris.
• The Queen’s Health Systems (HI) will implement remote patient monitoring services from Health Recovery Solutions as a part of a new RPM program offered through the Native Hawaiian Health Department.
• Hartford HealthCare (CT) will use WellStack’s data integration and analytics software to enhance the efficacy of its Google Cloud Platform and overall digital health strategy.
• Cambridge Health Alliance (MA) selects Abridge’s AI-powered speech recognition and clinical documentation technology.

People

Steve McDonald (Nordic Global) joins Pivot Point Consulting as executive partner.

Announcements and Implementations

WVU Medicine goes live on DrFirst’s medication management platform.

Emory Healthcare (GA) implements Switchboard.MD’s MDAware Inbox Management software across four specialty clinics. Switchboard.MD founder, CEO, and CTO Blake Anderson, MD is also an Emory physician.

Teladoc adds AI-powered patient movement detection capabilities to its Virtual Sitter solution that will allow staff to intervene in fall risk situations. 

Other

Mount Sinai Health System opens the Hamilton and Amabel James Center for Artificial Intelligence and Human Health in a repurposed building on the campus of its hospital in Manhattan. The new center will serve as a space for the research, development, and application of new AI solutions.

Industry luminary and friend of HIStalk Ivo Nelson posted a link to this video of the Glaser Society presentation, at which Epic’s Judy Faulkner was named the recipient of the John P. Glaser Health Informatics Innovator Award. Check out the fireside chat with John, Judy, and Ivo at the 25:50 mark of the video that was made by the McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth Houston.

Sponsor Updates

• CereCore publishes a new info sheet, “MEDITECH Regulatory Reporting and Submission Services.”
• EClinicalWorks publishes a new customer success story, “Smarter Patient Care with AI Technology.”
• AGS Health publishes a new e-book, “eBook Medical Necessity in Ambulance Coding.”
• Altera publishes a new client story, “Health New Zealand – Te Whatu Ora Advances Digital Transformation with Provation IPro: Streamlining Elective and Acute Care Pathways at Waikato.”
• CIO Outlook names Ascom Americas Managing Director Kelly Feist one of the year’s most influential female leaders in healthcare technology.
• The American Telemedicine Association Virtual Nursing Insights Summit recognizes AvaSure with its Best Case Study Award.
• Capital Rx releases a new episode of “The Astonishing Healthcare Podcast,” “Pharmacy Benefits 101: Formularies & Formulary Management, with Nisha Bhide, PharmD.”
• Cardamom Health sponsors and hosts the HFMA Colorado Chapter’s Women in Leadership conference.
• DrFirst publishes a new guide, “Navigating the New Norm in a Regulatory Storm.”
• First Databank will present at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists 2024 Midyear Clinical Meeting and Exhibition December 8-12 in New Orleans.
• FinThrive publishes a new “Contract Management Case Study: Midwestern Health Network.”
• Fortified Health Security wins the Healthcare Cybersecurity Solution of the Year Award from CyberSecurity Breakthrough.

Blog Posts

• Empower Clinical Informaticists for Reimbursement Wins in 2025 (CereCore)
• National Rural Health Day: An RN’s POV (Altera)
• Artera’s Approach to AI (Artera)
• Clearwater Cyber Briefing: Key Trends and Takeaways for November 2024 (Clearwater)
• Getting Down to Business with AI: Key Observations from HLTH (Consensus Cloud Solutions)
• Beyond Legacy Systems: Unlocking Operational Efficiency and Cost Savings Through Application Rationalization in Healthcare (Cordea Consulting)
• AI in Healthcare is Only as Effective as the People Using It (Dimensional Insight)
• Redefining Patient Access: The Rise of Intelligent Contact Centers (EClinicalWorks)
• Medicare Bad Debt 101 (FinThrive)
• Modernization and Expansion of an Outpatient Surgery Center (Health Data Movers)
• Elevating data security with HITRUST certification, HIPAA compliance, and employee awareness (Healthmonix)

Contacts

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

Monday Morning Update 11/25/24

Top News

Executives of Forward — the CarePods and medical office company — have moved on to start a new venture just one week after Forward shut down after raising $650 million.

Forward founder and former CEO Adrian Aoun says that one of Forward’s biggest investors called him the day the company closed with an offer to back his next startup, which amazed him:

We just burned not quite half a billion dollars on an idea. A lot of people’s reaction is, what are you doing next? Let’s do it again. What sort of special ass culture did we create in Silicon Valley where this is reality? This is absurd.

Reader Comments

From Slipknot: “Re: Oracle. When Cerner Millennium was new, I watched it get thrown out by a big health system when Cerner couldn’t deliver anything that worked, not to mention that the salespeople were like stereotypical used car salesmen. I’ve been mortified watching the VA implementations go as I expected they would. Now Congress has decided not to keep monitoring them. I wanted to believe that they would do better or that Oracle would force changes to their business model.” The new administration will have to decide whether to continue the flailing project in a cost-cutting environment and amid Congressional criticism. Larry Ellison has strong connections to Elon Musk and Oracle commands a formidable army of lobbyists, so that may be a factor. Hacking away at the sprawling, plodding VA bureaucracy might improve the project’s chance of success. Saber-rattling politicians may or may not realize that the VA has only two unsavory alternatives – attempt to move to Epic (knowing that the company probably wouldn’t deal with the VA’s VISN fiefdoms and political meddling) or stick with its wildly expensive, endlessly customized VistA dinosaur. I would probably bet on VistA at this point since it’s the only option that does not require the VA to change.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Forty percent of poll respondents who have taken a DNA test received results that surprised them. I should probably have asked whether that surprise was good or bad.

New poll to your right or here: What would concern you most about receiving hospital-at-home treatment?

I strayed onto the IPhone / IPad automation feature Shortcuts. I used it immediately to create an icon that shuts the phone down, another that opens the camera app ready to take a photo, and one that opens the Amazon app and displays my orders. You can also create an icon to turn on Do Not Disturb until you change locations, speed dial a given contact, open a ChatGPT session, turn on low power mode when the charge reaches a given percentage, and text someone the ETA from your current location to your destination using Apple Maps. Other than tapping an icon, you can also tell Siri to run a shortcut by name.

In further technical exploration, I decided to try Bluesky as an X alternative. I was initially dismayed at the lack of a native IPad app, but the webpage works great. Hopefully it can get enough network effect users to avoid becoming another Clubhouse or Mastodon. Unlike certain similar services, it is ad-free, gives users instead of its owner control of their feeds, and has sane moderation practices. Follow me there if you like since I’ll probably post HIStalk updates there along with X.

My Anonymous Vendor Executive topped off my supply of Donors Choose matching money. Does anybody have ideas for encouraging corporate donations so that I have something to match with? Teachers have a lot of classroom needs and I can usually match a donation at least 3x from various sources. About all I can offer in return, other than the satisfaction of supporting a good cause, is company exposure for a job well done.

Webinars

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

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Change Healthcare restores its clearinghouse services, nine months after they went offline in a February ransomware attack.

Three hundred academic primary care doctors at Mass General Brigham petition the National Labor Relations Board to unionize with an affiliate of SEIU. MGB medical fellows and residents voted to unionize in 2023 but are still negotiating their first contract.

People

Brian Dixon, PhD, MPA is named director of the Regenstrief Institute’s Clem McDonald Center for Biomedical Informatics after serving as interim since June 2022.

MetroHealth promotes Nabil Chehade, MD, MSBS to senior EVP /  chief clinical transformation, innovation, and strategy officer.

Brian Gildea (FinThrive) joins Simple Health as chief sales officer.

JoAnn Ploen (Optum) joins DexCare as VP of enterprise sales.

Government and Politics

The VA posts an RFI for a cloud-based human capital management system that its 6,300 HR employees will use to process one million personnel actions per year, including 487,000 mass pay adjustments. One might speculate that Oracle will pitch its Fusion Cloud HCM.

Today I learned that Hopkins surgeon and FDA commissioner nominee Marty Makary, MD, MPH is chief medical officer for weight loss telehealth vendor Sesame, which can legally sell compounded GLP-1 drugs because of an FDA-declared shortage of the brand name products. 

Other

A Texas ED patient’s TikTok video goes viral in which staff at Houston Methodist Hospital questioned her about citizenship status and assigned sex at birth as required by Governor Gregg Abbott’s executive order from August. The employee asked the questions in a public waiting room that offered no privacy barriers. The hospital responded that they are legally required to ask the questions and record the responses in Epic, but the law doesn’t require patients to answer.

Sponsor Updates

• PerfectServe announces that it has been positioned as a Leader and furthest for Completeness of Vision in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Clinical Communication and Collaboration.
• Notable successfully completes SOC 2 Type 2 compliance.
• Nordic releases a new “Designing for Health” podcast titled “Interview with Scott MacDonald, MD.”
• Sectra releases a new episode of its “Let’s Talk Enterprise Imaging” podcast titled “Greater Manchester’s path to AI in chest x-ray imaging.”
• The “AI @ HLTH” podcast features WellSky, “From Data to Care: How WellSky is Revolutionizing Healthcare.”
• Vyne Medical announces the expansion of the company’s cloud fax services and email-to-fax technology in a major academic medical center.

Blog Posts

• Bridging the gap between evidence and practice in healthcare (Wolters Kluwer Health)
• Future-Proofing Your Public Health Programs: Top 5 Things to Consider (Netsmart)
• Is the gold card the golden ticket to fixing prior authorization? (Nordic)
• Hydrate your cloud environment with Redox’s new Cloud Connectivity Tools (Redox)
• Understanding the Role of a Pediatric CNA: A Comprehensive Guide for Clinicians (SnapCare)
• How to improve bedside handoffs with digital whiteboards (Sonifi Health)
• Top Trends in Patient Payments and Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare (TrustCommerce, a Sphere Company)
• Innovating for Impact: Easing Burdens & Increasing Medication Safety (Surescripts)
• Building a Data Culture Helps Hospitals Stay One Step Ahead (Tegria)
• The Link Between Efficient Billing and Positive Patient Experiences (TruBridge)

Contacts

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